Marnie Read Free Page A

so silly. Remember I dreamt that last time before Frank
came home—’
    ‘Hold your tongue,’ said Mother. ‘This is a Christian household and—’
    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘whatever else I came home for it wasn’t to listen to you two rowing. Can I have another scone?’
    The kitchen clock struck five. It was a funny note, loud and toneless, that I’ve never heard from any other clock, and the last note was always flat as if it was running down.
    ‘But while we’re talking of old times,’ I said, ‘why don’t you throw that thing out?’
    ‘What thing, dear?’
    ‘That perishing clock,’ I said, ‘it gives me the creeps every time I hear it.’
    ‘But why, Marnie, why? It was a wedding present to your grannie. It’s got the date on the bottom, 1898. She was real proud of it.’
    ‘Well, I’m not,’ I said. ‘Give it away. I’ll buy you another. Then maybe Lucy’ll stop dreaming.’
    The other girl in the box office of the Roxy Cinema was called Anne Wilson. She was about thirty, tall and skinny, and she was writing a play, hoping I suppose to be another
Shelagh Delaney. We worked overlapping shifts so that there were always two of us in the box office in the busy hours – except Sunday, that was. Only one could take the money but the one not
serving helped behind the scenes.
    The box office was a glass and chromium kiosk in the centre of the marble foyer. The manager’s office was to the left just past the entrance to one of the tunnels leading to the stalls. It
was just out of sight of the box office but Mr King, the manager, prowled about between his office and the box office during the busy hours. He kept his eye on the staff; usually he would go up to
the projection-room at least twice in every performance, and he was always at the doors to say good night to his patrons at the end of the show. Three times every day, at four and at eight and at
nine-thirty, he would come to the kiosk, see we were all right for change and take away the money that had come in.
    Every morning at ten he came to the cinema, unlocked his Chubb safe and carried last night’s takings in a shabby attaché case two doors down the street to the Midland Bank.
    Sometimes, of course, in spite of his care we would run short of change at the wrong moment, and then one of us would go across to his office for more. This happened in October soon after I got
back, because the syndicate made a change in the price of seats and we found we needed a lot more coppers. One day Mr King was at a meeting and we ran short of change.
    ‘Hang on,’ said Anne Wilson, ‘I’ll go and get some.’
    ‘You’ll have to go upstairs,’ I said. ‘Mr King’s in the café with the two directors.’
    ‘I don’t need to bother him,’ Anne said. ‘He keeps a spare key in the top drawer of the filing cabinet.’
    Christmas came on. I wrote home and said I couldn’t get home because Mr Pemberton would need me all through the holiday. In the second week of December we had the record-breaking Santa
Clara booked and we were following the new fashion and running it for three weeks. It was my day on on the second Sunday.
    On the Friday I told my landlady I was going to see my mother in Southport. On the Saturday after I got home from the Roxy I began my usual turn-out, and while I was doing this a strange thing
happened. I was using an old newspaper as an inner wrapping and came across a paragraph about a girl I’d pretty nearly forgotten.
    It was an old Daily Express , dated as far back as 21 February. ‘Police in Birmingham are looking for pretty, mysterious Marion Holland who vanished without trace from her work and
from her flat last Monday evening. They are also looking for one thousand one hundred pounds in cash which vanished at the same time from the safe of Messrs Crombie & Strutt, Turf Accountants,
of Corporation Street, where Marion was employed as confidential clerk. “We didn’t know much about her,” forty-two-year-old