Page 53 of The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
‘That’s fine, then, so long as we don’t frighten each other to death, wandering around late at night!’
‘Once all the dresses are on display I might well take to late-night prowling. And Viv seems quite interested by the whole idea, so maybe she’ll be wafting about at night, too, looking for poetic inspiration.’
‘Perhaps we should all be belled, like cats, to warn each other we’re there!’
‘I think I’d feel too much like a morris man,’ Honey said seriously.
I heaved a happy sigh. ‘I can see what the finished museum will look like now, in my mind’s eye, and it’s going to be such fun working on the dresses! I can’t wait to start opening those boxes and bags in the stockroom to see what’s there.’
I must have sounded wistful, because Honey smiled and said that although we really ought to go back to the house to sort out my terms of employment, we could just do a quick detour first, so she could show me one particular dress.
‘It’s that winter wedding dress I mentioned to you recently, the one that made me think we should open the museum much earlier than I’d originally planned.’
In the staff room, she selected a bag from the rail and unzipped it, pulling out a long, strapless gown with an ominous splatter of what could only be bloodstains across the pristine whiteness of the skirt.
‘There’s afauxswansdown cape thing and a crystal and satin flower headdress in the archive box with the matching number,’ Honey was saying, as I stared, mesmerized, at the dress. ‘The bride’s mother sent loads of information with it, and that’s all in the box, too.’
‘Thatisblood, isn’t it?’ I queried, finding my voice.
‘Yes, that’s blood all right,’ Honey agreed. ‘The dress hasbeen stored for almost a year, so it’s turned dark. Do you remember that story in the papers last November, about the bride who vanished on the eve of her wedding, and all they found was her bloody wedding dress?’
‘I do, vaguely,’ I said. ‘Didn’t they arrest the fiancé … or perhaps I’ve got that wrong?’
‘They questioned him, then let him go, because apart from the few stains on the dress, which were the bride’s blood group, there was no sign that anything had happened to her. She’d just come back to her mother’s house after a hen night at a local restaurant and vanished, taking nothing with her.’
‘That’s mysterious!’
‘You’ll find the whole story written down by her mother in the archive box, including information not in the newspaper reports. Her daughter was – or, I hope,is– Amy Weston and she was twenty-nine and teaching history in a sixth-form college. She lived with her fiancé, but was spending the night before her wedding at her mother’s house. The bridesmaid dropped her off there before eleven that night – and that was the last anyone saw of her.’
She paused. ‘The groom was having his stag night with a few colleagues, and since he was the jealous, possessive type, he’d rung his fiancée several times during the evening to check up on her and wanted to know what time she was going back to her mother’s house.’
‘A bit obsessive and creepy,’ I observed.
‘That’s what I think. Apparently, since they got engaged, he’d managed to cut her off from her old friends and they did everything together, which always sounds smothering to me,’ said Honey. ‘Her hen night didn’t sound like a riot of fun, either, just dinner with a handful of colleagues from the college, though the bridesmaid, who worked there too, was afriend. The mother,’ she added, ‘still thinks the fiancé abducted her, but there was no evidence to prove it.’
I thought it over. ‘Did the bridesmaid actually see her go in the house?’
‘Good point. Yes, she did, and she says she also noticed a car parked at the end of the street that looked very much like the fiancé’s. It would have been like him to check she was where she’d said she was. They found a card from him in Amy’s room that said “After tomorrow, we’ll never be apart again”, but he said he gave it to her before she left their flat.’
‘Even more creepy!’ I said. ‘But if she felt the same way, she didn’t have to marry him, did she?’
‘She might have been scared of him, I suppose,’ Honey said. ‘She sent him a message just after she got in, to say she was home and turning off her phone because she was going straight to bed. Which everyone assumed she had. Her mother had been out, and when she got back she thought Amy was in bed. It wasn’t until she opened the door next morning that she found her missing and the stained dress. She’d gone in the clothes she was wearing that evening and hadn’t even taken her phone or handbag.’
‘It sounds like the start of one of your novels,’ I suggested.
‘I suppose it does a bit. Anyway, there was no sign that the house was a crime scene, or that the fiancé had ever been in there. He tried to reach her by phone a couple of times after she’d told him she was switching it off and the records place him at their flat, several miles away. So, for lack of evidence, the police just had to assume she’d left of her own accord and the investigation fizzled out. But nothing has been heard of her since and her mother naturally wants to know the truth of what happened. She still thinks the fiancé somehow abducted and killed her daughter.’
‘And she sent you the dress, to put on display?’
‘Yes, she’d seen a small piece I did for a women’s magazine about how I’d been inspired by all the dresses from disastrous weddings that had been sent to me to open my own museum displaying them. She wants the dress and the story to have maximum publicity in the hope new evidence will be found. And, of course, the publicity will be great for the museum, too,’ she finished practically.
Then, in her deep, husky voice, she sang something about it being a good day for a white wedding before asking me if I knew that song.
‘No.’
‘Listen to it on YouTube sometime. It’s a good one. I like a bit of rock, or punk – very cathartic when I’ve been committing murders by proxy late into the night.’
‘It sounds as if it would make good background music in the museum, played low,’ I said. ‘But I expect there would be copyright issues.’
