flowerbeds.
Bank holidays, agricultural shows, festivals and carnivals. Children danced round maypoles. Grown men dressed up as Cavaliers and Roundheads and fought pitched battles over stretches of harmless countryside. The cuckoo was in full voice.
In the DIY stores staff worked overtime. Gallons of paint, acres of wallpaper, were loaded into the boots of cars. Householders erected scaffolding and climbed up ladders.
Sergeant Lambert’s landlady was afflicted, as every year, by her own variety of spring fever. With her it took the form of prodigious exertions in the garden, a sustained attack upon the contents of cupboards and drawers: sorting, discarding, cramming into cardboard boxes to be piled outside the back door and borne off by the dustmen.
At the end of May a nasty virus made its stealthy appearance, insinuating its way into the country from abroad by means of the aeroplane, cutting a swathe through the population and certainly not minded to spare the main Cannonbridge police station.
Sergeant Lambert endured an attack of average ferocity but Detective Chief Inspector Kelsey was very unwell indeed. He struggled back to work earlier than he should, unable to endure any longer the tedium of an invalid existence alone in his flat – he had lived on his own since his divorce years ago.
He dragged himself up the station steps. A big, solidly built man with craggy features, green eyes normally bright and sharp but heavy now and lacklustre; a head of thick, carroty hair, devoid today of its usual shine and spring.
Outside the windows the season swept joyfully on but the Chief knew none of it, huddled glumly in his office, wheezing, reeking of liniment, sucking lozenges powerfully fragrant with menthol and eucalyptus.
One morning in the middle of June Sergeant Lambert ventured to suggest to the Chief that what he needed was a holiday. The sergeant was still not in top form himself. He had already booked his own holiday for September – he was going to Greece with friends – but he had a couple of weeks in hand. If the Chief decided to take himself off for a break, Lambert wouldn’t at all mind fixing himself some leave at the same time, very convenient all round. He could go and stay with his sister and her family in Sussex or with married friends in Wales.
The Chief didn’t bother to give him any kind of rational reply, he merely dismissed the notion with a shake of his head. He had so far made no plans for any leave; he was never attracted by the vision of long days of leisure; holidays always served to emphasize his aloneness.
A day or two went by and still the Chief felt no better. What I need is a really good, strong tonic, he decided. Something stronger than he could buy over the counter. He went reluctantly back to the doctor who came up with precisely the same remedy that Sergeant Lambert had proposed: ‘What you need is a holiday.’
The Chief shook his head stubbornly. ‘All I need is something to make me feel a bit livelier.’
But the doctor could be equally stubborn. ‘I am giving you something,’ he countered. ‘I’m giving you sound advice. Instructions, if that makes it any easier for you to swallow. Take a holiday. Now.’
As he closed the door behind him, Kelsey shook his head slowly and with determination. On his way back to the station he went into a health-food shop and bought himself a large bottle of a fiendishly expensive herbal elixir, brewed in the back yard of some monastery in the Balkans. The moment he got back into his car he took a long swig from the bottle. He immediately felt so hideously unwell that he knew beyond doubt it must be doing him good.
He said nothing of all this to Sergeant Lambert.
On June 21st the Chief awoke in a sourly irritable frame of mind. He felt no better. If he must be honest, he felt worse.
Sergeant Lambert greeted him at the office with a reminder that it was the first day of summer, a remark that did nothing to lift the Chief’s spirits. He tackled without enthusiasm the pile of mail awaiting him.
Before long he came upon a letter written in a slow, shaking hand. It was from a Mr Eardlow, with an address in a hamlet a few miles from Cannonbridge.
Eardlow apologized for writing instead of coming over to the police station in person, but his circumstances made a visit difficult. He and his wife were advanced in years and suffered from various health problems. They no longer owned a car and public transport in the area was very limited.
They were worried about a young relative. They had been trying to get in touch with her for some time but hadn’t been able to make any contact, nor, indeed, to discover her present whereabouts. They would be most grateful if an officer could call on them; they would supply him with full details.
Kelsey sighed and shook his head. Eardlow hadn’t even given the name of the missing relative. No doubt it was another case of an inconsiderate, harebrained youngster taking it into her head to abscond temporarily for the most trifling of reasons, sometimes for no reason at all, never giving a thought to the anxieties of family and friends.
He tossed the letter across to Sergeant Lambert. ‘Better get over there and have a word with these folk,’ he instructed. ‘I doubt if there’s anything in it.’
In the afternoon Sergeant Lambert drove over to the hamlet, having first phoned the Eardlows to fix a time. They were nervously awaiting him in the spotlessly clean parlour of their little cottage. The furniture gleamed, the brass shone. A table was set with an elaborate lace cloth and what were undoubtedly their best china cups.
Mrs Eardlow had the kettle already on and she brewed the tea right away. She moved slowly and with difficulty. Her husband walked with the aid of a stick, his hands were swollen and knobbed. In Lambert’s estimation neither of them would see eighty again. He felt a pang at the thought of all the painful domestic activity on the part of this frail old couple that must have taken place in the little dwelling after his phone call.
He didn’t ask questions to start with, he didn’t press them in any way. Over an excellent tea they began to relax. They stopped treating him as if he were minor visiting royalty and began to unload their worries.
The missing relative was a girl of twenty. As soon as they told him her name, Julie Dawson, bells began to ring in Lambert’s brain. By the time they added her address, Honeysuckle Cottage, near Millbourne, he was almost certain. He asked if he might see a photograph.
They couldn’t produce anything very recent but showed him some snapshots taken during Julie’s last visit two years ago. Lambert looked down at the pretty face, the impish smile, the beautiful hair.
‘I’ve met this girl,’ he told them. They looked startled. He gave them a brief sketch of his encounter with Julie by the roadside near Calcott House. After a burst of astonishment the Eardlows took up their story again.
It seemed that Julie was an only child, born late in her parents’ marriage. Her father – fifteen years older than her mother – had been a first cousin of Mrs Eardlow. Both Julie’s parents were now dead and the Eardlows were her only living relatives. Julie worked for the Millbourne Advertiser as a telephone sales clerk; she had been there three years.
During her first year in Millbourne she had visited the Eardlows two or three times. Two years ago she had moved into lodgings at Honeysuckle Cottage. Since then she had written a few lines occasionally and had sent cards at Christmas and on their birthdays, but she had never once visited them.
They had replied without fail to her letters and cards, giving her their bits of news, repeating the invitation to come for a visit, a weekend,
