The Lady Vanished Read Online Free Page B

could challenge her and he was sure she would back off.
    The rain had eased, so Swift walked. He avoided the tube when he could, hating its hot, crammed carriages. He wondered what he should get Joyce for her birthday. Probably, he would fall back on the usual scarf or theatre voucher. His father had remarried just eight months after Swift’s mother died, when he was fifteen. Joyce taught history at the school where his father was deputy head. Swift remembered his tall shadow as he came into the garden on a summer evening and explained that he had proposed to Joyce; it’s just that I feel terribly lonely, you see , he had said, almost apologetically. Joyce was a friendly, boisterous, bossy and well-meaning woman but she tried far too hard and flooded remorselessly around Swift’s life, giving unwanted advice on studies, diet and exercise. She had no children of her own and appeared to regard her stepson as a project to embark on. Swift didn’t want another mother; the one he had lost had meant everything to him and had left him a deep reservoir of all the maternal love he would ever need. He shrank away when Joyce approached him, questioning, prying, poking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted, not comprehending that an adolescent boy needs privacy. He was a perceptive young man and didn’t want to hurt Joyce’s feelings, understanding that she was well intentioned if unbearable.
    He started spending time at Lily’s, where it was peaceful and he could make himself scrambled eggs at any hour instead of having to sit down at six on the dot to three-course meals with loaded questions about how school had been and what his plans were for the future. He employed the excuse that Lily’s house was useful for rowing practice and he thought that his father was relieved that he had it as a bolt hole. He had applied to red-brick universities because Joyce kept telling everyone that he was terribly bright, Oxbridge material and of course he can be in the Boat Rac e ! She failed even to understand that his enjoyment of rowing was as a solitary activity, an escape. His father died just before he graduated from Warwick, leaving him with an uncomfortable sense of having Joyce as an extra, unwanted family member. Florence Davenport’s comment about feeling an obligation towards her stepmother had chimed with him.
    He checked the time. Ed Boyce had indicated he would be leaving a private members’ club called Abode around nine. He worked in TV production for a company called Purple Spark . He had told Swift that Rachel, the stalking ex, was ‘like you know, a major head case,’ and making his life unbearable. He said he’d had odd phone calls and constant emails from her, had seen her loitering regularly near his home and ‘just felt he was being followed as he moved around.’ Swift had a photo of her on his phone; a likeable, average face, dark hair swept up in a topknot, a pleasant smile. Boyce appeared an excitable type, full of himself and good-looking in a smoothly self-conscious way. He seemed used to hobnobbing with low-grade celebrities from TV reality shows. Swift thought he might have been listening to too many of their car-crash life stories and felt the need to inject some drama into his own. To date, he had tracked Boyce on half a dozen occasions, to and from business meetings, restaurants, nightclubs and his gym and had seen no evidence of anyone following him. Still, Boyce maintained that he felt uncomfortable, as if there was a shadow at his back and wanted Swift to continue a while longer. Swift wondered if the shadow was imaginary, the product of guilt or a vivid imagination but he was happy to take payment, so he wandered along a row of shops, looking for the club and finally saw a discreet sign with the name above a fanlight on a door tucked between a designer boutique and a delicatessen.
    Swift crossed the road and stood at the window of an upmarket men’s clothing shop. There was a shirt in the display in a