Dominoes by John Wainwright

Author:John Wainwright [Wainwright, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime
Published: 2012-10-19T21:26:59+00:00

SIX

An open M.G. sports car was no car in which to ride out in search of a missing schoolgirl; not even an open M.G. sports with the personal character of Bertha. We used my car and with the headlights on I drove while Johnny leaned forward in the front passenger seat and peered into the weather.

It could have been worse, I suppose. The snow carried sleet with it and the whiteness wasn’t thickening. Nevertheless, it was some degrees below freezing and the wind was driving the near-blizzard at too many knots for comfort… too many knots for survival without the proper clothes.

Johnny grunted, “The silly young bitch.”

He was right, too, and yet not completely right.

Daisy Arkwright fitted uncomfortably into the general pattern of the other scholars housed at The Ridings. As I recalled she was an only child. Her father held some important post within one of the multi-national oil giants; some technical post which required him to spend most of his life in the oil fields of the Middle East. His wife travelled with him and they left their daughter here in England—at The Ridings—in the pious hope that she’d enjoy a “good education”.

There was (or so I believed) a grandparent somewhere. A grandfather, an elderly man sprightly for his years, who visited the school occasionally at weekends. I’d met him a couple of times—I recalled that his name was Arkwright, therefore if he was her grandfather, his son was her father—and each time I’d met him I’d had the feeling that inside he was seething. At a guess the old man had measured The Ridings for what it was. At a further guess, he thought more about the girl than did her own parents.

“Try there.” Johnny pointed through the mixture of snow and sleet which threatened to prove too much for the wipers. “Up there. That cart-track.”

I fought the wheel and skidded the car right and on to a road which seemed to lead to nowhere. An unsurfaced road where the tyres threatened to lose traction. It was one hell of a way to spend the early hours of a Saturday morning. God knows where we were. We were merely “looking”—“searching”—and the truth was we didn’t know where to “look”.

“What time did she go missing? ” I gasped.

“Sometime after midnight… we think.”

“How come?”

“Eh?”

“Who found she’d gone?”

“One of the other girls in the dormitory. She got up for a pee, found Arkwright’s bed empty. She apparently waited a while—probably thought Arkwright was on a similar mission—then raised the roof.”

“The spice of life,” I remarked bitterly.

“Yeah.” Johnny leaned even more forward in an attempt to see through the weather. “Where the hell does this road go to anyway?”

“Road? You must be joking.”

But it wasn’t a joke and we both knew that.

Daisy Arkwright was a girl old for her years. She lived inside herself; refused to become involved with the stupidities indulged in by the other sixth formers. She was the one “loner” in the pack and because she was different the others could never understand her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.