The Vanishing Act

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

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  Acknowledgements

  Canelo Crime

  About the Author

  Also by Sarah Ward

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  To Vicky Dawson

  1

  Friday

  Elsa drove the car down the rutted road, the suspension on her ancient Fiesta groaning as it was thrown from grassy mound to pothole. She’d been told that old Tom Thomas, the legal owner of the strip of land, was too mean to spend money on getting the road in good nick, which can’t have made the new owners of Tall Pines happy. Jon and Chrissie Morgan bought the place three years earlier, fully aware its access road was owned by another, but confident they could work their magic on him. It hadn’t worked. In desperation, they’d offered to pay for the improvements themselves, as they wanted the holidaying families renting Tall Pines to be able to glide down a tarmacked road in their SUVs filled with booze and Waitrose goodies. Still, Tom had held out. He’d confided to Elsa one winter’s morning that he liked the look of the pitted road with the shaggy green strip of grass down the middle. It had been like that, leading to his own farmhouse at the edge of the forest, for four generations. Why change now?

  Elsa’s car was so old it didn’t have air conditioning, just ineffective blowers that pumped out hot air in the August heat. It would be fine once she was inside the house, as Welsh cottages were built to keep out the worst heat of the day, despite the best efforts of global warming. She wound up her window to keep the music blaring from Nation Radio station from disturbing Tom. Nevertheless, she turned her head towards Dan Y Derw, Tom’s house, to see if he was sitting in his yard. That, at least, was something Jon and Chrissie liked. Tom, with his flat cap and pipe, gave the place a rustic feel – authentic Wales – and he was happy enough to pass the time of day with holidaymakers.

  Elsa drew up outside Tall Pines, glancing up at its grey stone exterior. It was by far the least favourite place to visit on her roster. The remoteness of the location, along with its weird history, gave her the shivers every week when she arrived for her clean. She’d not felt able to say anything, though, to Chrissie when she’d first shown her around. Unusually, Elsa hadn’t got the booking through her cleaning agency but via a contact of her mam’s. Meeting the owner was more daunting than just being given a key, even though Chrissie had been nice enough. She’d suggested Elsa leave her car at the top of the track to spare its suspension but there was no way she was going to do that. The forest, its edge encircling the two houses, gave her the creeps too and she wanted a quick getaway from there if necessary. Whenever she got out of her car, it felt like someone was watching her. The forest did that to you – its uniform trees with the hint of something much darker underneath.

  Elsa came to the house every Friday for the handover and, if guests were staying for more than a week, she would still visit to give the place a clean. It was a clause in the contract that renters signed – Chrissie wanted her investment maintained – but it also meant that Elsa had regular work. Chrissie had already told her the new holidaymakers would be staying for three weeks: a long holiday in a place with little to do. Admittedly, if you liked beaches and outdoor activities there was plenty to do around the coast, but Elsa couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t stay nearer the sea if you were going to spend your time on the sand.

  Unusually, she’d already met the family staying in the house. The previous Friday they’d arrived early – they weren’t supposed to get here until after four but had driven up the track around midday, as Elsa had been stripping the bedding of the previous holidaymakers. Realising the door was locked and the key not under the stone, as per their arrival instructions, they’d stayed by the car, a dark blue jeep. That had been odd. Although the heatwave hadn’t yet started, it was hot enough and most would have rattled the door to ask to unload their gear.

  Elsa, however, had been glad of the peace to finish her tasks. She’d been given strict instructions not to let clients in until she’d finished her clean and taken photos to show how she’d left the property. Nevertheless, she couldn’t resist the occasional glimpse out of the window to see what the family were up to.

  They made for an attractive fivesome. The father, she guessed, was in his forties, his grey hair clipped close to his head so he resembled one of those statues she’d seen on a recent coach trip to Rome with her mam. His wife had been more difficult to make out, as she stayed in the car, reading a magazine, and wide sunglasses obscured her face. She looked glamorous, like a Hollywood star from the Fifties, sporting frosted red lipstick which looked incongruous in this rural setting. It had been the children, though, that had held her attention. Two teenagers, a boy and girl, with the finest spun blonde hair similar to Elsa’s own. They looked alike, although the boy was heftier than the girl. They’d got out of the car but had lacked the curiosity she’d have expected from holidaying teenagers. They’d shuffled around the car, talking in low voices. When they’d got bored, rather than walk around the garden or stray into the forest, they’d taken a blanket from the car and laid it out near the front door, lying on their back and continuing to talk in a murmur.

  There was another child, younger than the teenagers, a girl aged about ten, Elsa guessed, with vibrant ginger hair cut into a short bob. She displayed more curiosity about her surroundings: once or twice she had taken steps towards the woodland, only to be called back by her father, while her mother remained immersed in her magazine. The girl’s gaze kept straying to the edge of Brechfa Forest and resting on the crest of the pine trees that had given this house its new name. It had originally been called Pant Meinog, according to old Tom, but the new owners had foregone a historic Welsh name in favour of one easier for prospective renters to pronounce. At least, that was their story but Elsa suspected differently.

  An attractive family, thought Elsa, who wouldn’t be leaving a mess like the one she was cleaning up after now. The only anomaly was that the man was smoking. She watched in approval as he carefully stubbed the cigarette out on the rough path and deposited the stub into a tin. Elsa didn’t think for a moment there would be the need to apply the deep cleaning fee most properties applied if she found evidence of smoking in the house. When she’d finished, and taken photographs of the gleaming bathroom and tightly made beds, she opened the front door and deposited the key under the hunk of stone. She could feel the eyes of the family on her.

  ‘It’s all yours,’ she called over to them and only the youngest stepped towards her. ‘I’ll be back a week today to give the place a clean.’

  ‘Pippa,’ her father warned and the child halted as if playing musical statues.

  Elsa beamed a smile in their vague direction, conscious of her sweaty clothes, and slid into her car, putting the family out of her mind until she’d arrived back today.

  It had been a week of increasing temperatures; the thermometer in her car recorded twenty-four degrees Celsius this morning. As Elsa drew up outside Tall Pines, she saw that the jeep wasn’t there. She climbed out of the car, rolled over the rock next to the door with her foot and saw the key was missing. She pulled her rucksack off her back, scrabbling around in its depths. She was so used to retrieving the key from under the stone after handovers that she didn’t always carry the spare set on her. With relief, she found the key ring at the bottom of her bag, grateful she didn’t have to call Chrissie to pick up a spare.

  She opened the door, noticing it was unlocked anyway, and put her rucksack on one of the hooks in the hallway. The air smelt of orange squash and boiled ham, as if a children’s birthday party was in the offing. As she pushed open the door to the kitchen, there were the preparations for a picnic on the counter. Cold ham and salami, a carton of tomatoes and a pint jug of prepared orange cordial ready to be poured into a bottle. Someone was in the process of buttering the bread; on one side lay two rounds, the other six still to be prepared. On the Aga, the kettle blew a steady hiss, the water boiling. Elsa lifted off the kettle and closed the hotplate to save the heat, which blew into her sweaty face. Odd. A chair had tipped to one side, and she automatically lifted it and placed it back behind the table.

  ‘Hello…’ she called.

  The house was silent – perhaps one of the parents had gone out with the kids and the other was in the bathroom. She opened the utility room and saw the washing machine was on a cycle, with twenty minutes left to run. Retrieving the bucket of cleaning stuff, she decided to start on the bedrooms to give whoever was making the lunch their privacy. As she climbed the wide staircase, the silence of the house was oppressive. An awareness of total absence.

  ‘Is anyone there?’ she shouted.

  On the landing, she looked out of the window onto the bottom of the drive but saw no one, not even Tom. She opened the door to the master bedroom with the king-sized bed and crossed to the window, looking out onto the patchy lawn. It was thin soil up here on the mountain and even grass struggled to thrive. Again, the lawn was devoid of activity and Elsa’s eyes were once more drawn to the forest. Was it her imagination that the image of a woman stumbling through its undergrowth flashed into her mind? Perhaps it was a vision of the past, as the woman wore a white dress, her feet bare as she plunged on. Her aura pulsated terror, turning the sweat on Elsa’s arms ice-cold. She shivered, pulling herself together. Time to get on with her chores, although she intended to keep an ear out for whoever had been buttering that bread.

  It was sweaty work. She would strip all the beds first, pile up the laundry in front of the machine and then gather the clean bedding. As she went from room to room, she saw each bed was neatly made up. All three children had their own space. The teenage girl had a make-up bag and a novel with a cover of fluorescent lime green on her bedside table. The room had the smell of burnt toast and Elsa searched for the source of the odour. A set of hair straighteners had been left on, the tongs beginning to scorch the wooden tabletop. She switched it off at the plug but didn’t make a move towards the bed, her mind turning over the signs of a hasty departure. She pushed open the adjacent door and saw that the older boy’s room looked hardly touched but had that slightly sweaty smell Elsa associated with her brother’s space. There was little here to cause alarm, only the sense that someone had just popped out.

  The final space was the box room occupied by the child, Pippa. She had lined up a row of Lego ballerinas on the window, one of them holding a candy stick. The sugar fairy. Elsa held it up and smiled, her eyes dropping to the bed. Pippa had been drawing the woods and, once again, the woman flashed into Elsa’s mind, her breath heavy as she pushed her way through the undergrowth. Elsa forced herself back into the present and looked at the girl’s pictures. One drawing was half-completed, a green felt-tip pen resting on the paper, its lid missing. The other pens were neatly placed in a plastic folder, the colours fanning out like a rainbow. This was a child who looked after her things, so why was a pen left to dry out on the paper?

  Back in the kitchen, with the dirty linen waiting to be placed into the machine once the cycle was over, Elsa worried. She opened the front door and shouted into the clearing.

  ‘Hellooo. Is anyone there?’

  Her eyes dropped to the stone. The door had been unlocked when she arrived. Had they all gone out and forgotten about the kettle, sandwiches and hair straighteners? What would make them leave so suddenly? In her haste to solve the mystery, she realised she’d forgotten to take the photos for Chrissie to prove her cleaning had been completed. She found her phone at the bottom of her rucksack and went from room to room, photographing her work. When it came to the kitchen, there was little she could do. The table still had two cups of tea cooling, one nearly full. In the end, she photographed the clean sink and the top of the Aga, which she’d wiped over with a clean cloth. She would have to explain to Chrissie that the family were still using the kitchen when she arrived, although that was hardly the truth.

  Slowly, Elsa closed the door, her mind uneasy over the order of things. It continued to worry her as she deadheaded the blood-red geraniums in the terracotta pot by the front door, turning over things until she came to a decision. She got out her phone and scrolled through her contacts until she found what she was looking for. Elsa pressed the number, which was answered on the second ring.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mallory, it’s me, Elsa. Remember, from Eldey? There’s something really weird going on here and I need your help.’

  2

  That summer, Mallory was embarrassed to find herself technically homeless. The lease on her rented Pembrokeshire flat had expired in April and, as she’d expected, the owners had wanted to rent it on a weekly basis to holidaymakers. What Mallory hadn’t expected was the impossibility of finding anywhere else to rent, not only in St Davids but also elsewhere in the county. Tired of her job at the cathedral, she’d handed in her notice and begun to consider returning to London to look for work suitable for an ex-copper invalided out of the force. Wales, although beautiful, was expensive in the summer and rammed with holidaymakers that she had little in common with. She also really had to make a decision as to what she was going to do with the rest of her life, a not-unusual situation for former police officers to find themselves in.

  It was her son Toby, however, who had forced her to confront the fact she needed to stay where she was. After a difficult school year, he wanted a July holiday in Wales mainly spent on the beach. Mallory had changed tack and decided to take the summer off from gainful employment, hoping her police pension would cover her everyday needs for the short term. She’d managed to find a seasonal let at Golden Sands Caravan Park in a small village called Tresaith in Cardigan Bay: a one-bedroom static caravan with a sofa bed in the living room. Accommodation-wise, Mallory was on a downward spiral and only the thought that this was a temporary solution gave her the resolve to cope with the rest of the summer.

  Mallory was contemplating an afternoon on the beach when Elsa called. Toby had enjoyed two weeks of sunshine with her but had returned to London to spend August with his friends there. She had downloaded an audiobook and was about to put on her headphones to walk to the sands, when Elsa’s number had flashed up on the phone. Just the sight of the girl’s name had given Mallory a momentary jolt. It took her back to the previous September and her fight for survival on the picturesque island of Eldey. She took the call and listened to Elsa, remembering her whimsy and practicality, two characteristics that rarely went together but gave the girl her unique charm.

  The drive down to Tall Pines was slow. Everywhere was packed with holiday traffic, mainly caravans, and it was a relief to turn off the coastal road and head inland. Mallory hadn’t visited this part of Carmarthenshire before and was struck by its greenness, in contrast to the rockiness of the coast. The forest, however, had a regimented feel to it: uniform rows of conifers suggested a government policy of replenishing woodland without much thought to the natural environment. She followed her satnav’s instructions, turning left up a single-track road that had no obvious passing places, so she bloody well hoped she wouldn’t meet a vehicle coming the other way. In her experience, it was usually she who had to do the reversing when she met another car head-on. She took her time, however, keen not to crash her ageing Volkswagen as she mulled over Elsa’s call. She hadn’t been making much sense; something about a family who’d gone out and left the kettle on, and should she call the police? Mallory had tried not to laugh but, realising that Elsa was deadly earnest, she’d offered to come up to the holiday house and see what the issue was. She still felt a residual bond with the brave teenager who, when stuck on Eldey with a poisoner, had come to Mallory’s aid. It was as much wanting to see Elsa again, rather than any sense of unease, that made Mallory agree to meet her in the depths of Brechfa Forest.

  Elsa had given her the postcode to a place in the middle of nowhere, although Mallory passed a gaggle of mountain bikers, so it must be on the tourist trail. The satnav was more confident about its destination, so Mallory gave herself over to the bossy male voice until she reached a rocky clearing, the type she hated driving down. At the bottom of the dead-straight drive, Mallory could see Elsa waiting for her, peering anxiously into the distance. As she inched the car closer, wincing at what the road was doing to her suspension, she could see Elsa had grown since they’d last said their goodbyes, or maybe she’d lost that hunched-up look she’d adopted on the island of Eldey.

  Mallory parked the car and a rush of emotion engulfed her when Elsa approached. She hugged the girl, who tensed, reminding Mallory of her own son, Toby.

  ‘So,’ said Mallory, to alleviate the shared embarrassment. ‘What’s this about leaving the kettle on?’

  ‘Oh Mallory, it’s more than that. The house is like the Mary Celeste. We did it at school – it’s a ship that was found completely abandoned, as if the sailors had just left minutes earlier. It’s the same with this house.’

 

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