Ridgeway Hospital
Endsbourne

23 June

Dear Violet

I don't know quite how to tell you this - but Chris has vanished. Under most peculiar circumstances. As I'm sure you are aware, it is not at all unusual for Chris to vanish; but on this occasion -
        Well. I shall begin at the beginning.
        Chris had come up to stay with me for an indefinite length of time, as I mentioned in my last letter – a few things he said made me wonder if there was something he was trying to get away from London for some reason. Perhaps there is another unsuitable entanglement (I certainly hope not. They all get silly ideas about getting married and moving to the suburbs, as if you could ever see Chris with a patio and a 4x4 full of screaming brats. Patently ridiculous. Do you remember Michaela? I do. Really, all that drama over what was a perfectly ordinary fling. The first and only time in my life I have ever been in a public fight, but really she should have had more sense than to throw a glass of red wine over my £300 white corset. I can put up with less-than-subtle attempts to inveigle my boyfriend into matrimony, but not permanent stains on Vivienne Westwood)
        Anyway. I digress.
        So Chris came up to stay with me, for whatever reason. As I think I said in my last letter, he mentioned there might be a story connected with Ridgeway, although he didn't give me any details.
        I had taken a couple of days leave, and I spent it with him. I'd forgotten how much I like him. It takes very little time for your memories of someone to fade into a general impression of them; there were some little things that had already slipped my mind, mannerisms, ways of speaking)
        He asked me some questions about Ridgeway, but nothing which seemed to follow any pattern. Nothing confidential either, nothing pointed. The routine of the patients, the characters of the nurses and doctors. The time everything was locked up at night. Visiting hours and who could visit. Things like that.
        So we come to last night. We were in the pub again; I've been staying there with him. We were sitting in the bar on a leather sofa in the corner. I was curled up against him. I was reading and he was on his laptop, working, writing something or other. I wish I had looked at what it was, but we have always had this privacy thing...I didn't look.
        About 10.30pm he said he was going upstairs to put his laptop away and then we would have another drink before bed. And he never came down again.
        After half an hour or so I went up to the room, assuming he had just fallen asleep. His laptop was on the bed in its case and there was no sign of him. About two hours of looking later, it emerged he was nowhere in the building and it is beyond me how he could have left it without being seen by me, as the only staircase to the upper floor was right in front of where I was sitting and directly in my line of sight.
        I know this sounds unbelievable.
        I'll be honest Violet, I'm more than a little worried. I sometimes talk flippantly about Chris, and I'm aware that we have a relationship which some people see as unconventional. But in the end...it works for me and for him. There are not many human beings I find I actively want to spend time with and I am ridiculously fond of him, even if I don't always know why.
        And at this moment I am extremely concerned that he has gone off and got himself in trouble, which means, of course, that I will have to find him.
        It's the laptop that worries me. Leave me? Yes. Leave his laptop, with all his files and stories and hoarded leads on it? Never.
        I wonder if this is connected to the story he is working on. Well, if this is the way it is ,it's time I overcame my scruples and started trying to guess his password.
        Cathy x