Stolen by Lesley Pearse Page B

year was much worse, or her mind wouldn’t have blocked it out. How would she deal with it when her memory came back?
    DI Bryan rang later in the afternoon to tell Dale that Lotte wasn’t well enough for any more visitors that day. ‘I took two old friends of hers over there this afternoon,’ he explained. ‘They’d come forward after reading about her in the paper. Lotte worked with one of them and she shared his flat with him and his partner for some time.’
    ‘Are they hairdressers?’ Dale asked. She remembered Lotte mentioning a gay man she worked with who had become a close friend.
    ‘One of them is, though Lotte didn’t recognize either of them,’ Bryan said. ‘But she had regained a memory of a day on the beach with her parents and sister when she was five.’
    ‘That’s a start,’ Dale said with some excitement.
    ‘Yes, but I think the strain of it was too much for her,’ he replied. ‘These guys Simon and Adam were chatting away to her about some of their friends, people she used to work with, and she suddenly had a sort of fit. She couldn’t get her breath, it seemed it was a panic attack. We had to call a nurse and we were asked to leave.’
    ‘Is she OK now?’ Dale asked.
    ‘Yes, when I rang back a short while ago they said she was resting quietly.’
    ‘Couldn’t she be transferred to a hospital near here?’ Dale asked. ‘It’s such a long way for anyone from Brighton to go and visit her.’
    ‘That suggestion was put forward today by the psychiatrist,’ Bryan said. ‘I think he was thinking mostly of Lotte’s parents, though they haven’t bothered to ring the ward at St Richard’s today to see how she is, so they don’t even know she recovered memory about them.’
    ‘I can’t see them wanting to take her home with them when she’s well enough to leave the hospital. Even if they offered I don’t think it would be good for her,’ Dale said.
    ‘Simon and Adam suggested she could go to them,’ Bryan said.
    ‘Did they now!’ Dale said, feeling something ridiculously like jealousy.
    ‘She won’t be able to do that unless she regains memories of them,’ Bryan said. ‘Anyway, tomorrow’s another day, maybe we’ll have another breakthrough. And the national press and the television companies are running the story about her tomorrow morning, so we should get some more leads.’
    Some little while after Dale had put the phone down, she found herself pondering about these friends of Lotte’s. Unable to remember the name of the salon where Lotte said they met, she went to ask April, Sharon and Guy who all lived locally if they had any suggestions which one it might be.
    ‘If she said it was the best salon in Brighton, then it would be Kutz,’ April said after a moment’s thought. ‘I trained there. Do you know the name of her friend?’
    ‘Simon or Adam,’ Dale replied.
    ‘Oh, that will be Simon Langford! He’s a real sweet guy. And he’s still there. I spoke to him just last week.’
    April was a small, bouncy brunette who often had them in stitches with her tales of working in a hairdressing salon in London’s West End. She’d come back to her family in Brighton, as Guy had too, with the intention of saving enough to open her own salon.
    ‘I’ll ring there and try and get hold of him,’ Dale said. ‘I’d really like to meet him.’
    At just after eight Dale left Marchwood Manor in a taxi to call on Simon and Adam. She had spoken to Simon briefly on the phone and he said he’d been terribly shocked to see Lotte’s picture in the paper and was still totally mystified as to why she hadn’t contacted him when she left the cruise ship. He was clearly upset that she hadn’t remembered him and his friend Adam that afternoon, and even more so because they’d caused her to have a panic attack. He invited Dale over immediately because he said he was desperate for more information about Lotte.
    Simon and Adam’s flat was above an antique shop in Meeting House