The commonest kind of missing person is the adolescent girl, closely followed by the teen-age boy. The majority in this category come from working-class homes, and almost invariably from those where there is serious parental disturbance. There is another minor peak in the third decade of life, less markedly working-class, and constituted by husbands and wives trying to run out on marriages or domestic situations they have got bored with. The figures dwindle sharply after the age of forty; older cases of genuine and lasting disappearance are extremely rare, and again are confined to the very poor - and even there to those, near vagabond, without close family. When John Marcus Fielding disappeared, he therefore contravened social statistical probability. Fifty-seven years old, rich, happily married, with a son and two daughters; on the board of several City companies (and very much not merely to adorn the letter headings); owner of one of the finest Elizabethan manor houses in East Anglia, with an active interest in the running of his adjoining eighteen-hundred-acre farm; a joint - if somewhat honorary - master of foxhounds, a keen shot ... he was a man who, if there were an -arium of living human stereotypes, would have done, very well as a model of his kind: the successful City man who is also a country land-owner and (in all but name) village squire. It would have been very understandable if he had felt that one or the other side of his life had become too time-consuming ... but the most profoundly anomalous aspect of his case that he was also a Conservative Member of Parliament...
At two thirty on the afternoon of Friday, July 13, 1973, his elderly secretary, a Miss Parsons, watched him get into a taxi outside his London flat in Knightsbridge. He had a board meeting in the City; from there he was going to catch a train, the 5:22, to the market-town headquarters of his constituency. He would arrive soon after half past six, then give a `surgery' for two hours or so. His agent, who was invited to supper, would then drive him the twelve miles or so home to Tetbury Hall. A strong believer in the voting value of the personal contact, Fielding gave such surgeries twice a month. The agenda of that ominously appropriate day and date was perfectly normal.
It was discovered subsequently that he had never appeared at the board meeting. His flat had been telephoned, but Miss Parsons had asked for, and been granted, the rest of the afternoon off - she was weekending .with relatives down in Hastings. The daily help had also gone home. Usually exemplary in attendance or at least in notifying unavoidable absence, Fielding was forgiven his lapse, and the board went to business without him. The first realization that something was wrong was therefore the lot of the constituency agent. His member was not on the train he had gone to meet. He went back to the party offices to ring Fielding's flat - and next, getting no answer there, his country home. At Tetbury Hall Mrs. Fielding was unable to help. She had last spoken to her husband on the Thursday morning; so far as she knew he should be where he wasn't. She thought it possible, however, that he might have decided to drive down with their son, a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics. His son, Peter, had talked earlier in the week of coming down to Tetbury with his girl friend. Perhaps he had spoken to his father in London more recently than she. The agent agreed to telephone Mrs. Fielding again in half an hour's time, if the member had still not arrived by then.
She, of course, also tried the London flat; then failing there, Miss Parsons at home. But the secretary was already in Hastings. Mrs. Fielding next attempted the flat in Islington that her son shared with two other LSE friends. The young man who answered had no idea where Peter was, but he `thought' he was staying in town that weekend. The wife made one last effort - she tried the number of Peter's girl friend, who lived in Hampstead. But here again there was no answer. The lady at this stage was not unduly perturbed. It seemed most likely that her husband had simply missed his train and was catching the next one - and for some reason had failed, or been unable, to let anyone know of this delay. She waited for the agent, Drummond, to call back.
He too had presumed a missed train or an overslept station, and had sent someone to await the arrival of next trains in either direction. Yet when he rang back, as promised, it was to say that his deputy had had no luck. Mrs. Fielding began to feel a definite puzzlement and some alarm; but Marcus always had work with him, plentiful means of identification, even if he had been taken ill or injured beyond speech. Besides, he was in good health, a fit man for his age - no heart trouble, nothing like that. What very tenuous fears Mrs. Fielding had at this point were rather more those of a woman no longer quite so attractive as she had been. She was precisely the sort of wife who had been most shaken by the Lambton-Jellicoe scandal of earlier that year. Yet even in this area she had no grounds for suspicion at all. Her husband's private disgust at the scandal seemed perfectly genuine ... and consonant with his general contempt for the wilder shores of the permissive society.
An hour later Fielding had still appeared neither at the party offices nor Tetbury Hall. The faithful had been sent away, with apologies, little knowing that in three days' time the cause of their disappointment was to be the subject of headlines. Drummond agreed to wait on at his desk; the supper, informal in any case, with no other guests invited, was forgotten. They would ring each other if and as soon as they had news; if not, then at nine. It was now that Mrs. Fielding felt panic. It centred on the flat. She had the exchange check the line. It was in order. She telephoned various London friends, on the forlorn chance that in some fit of absent-mindedness - but he was not that sort of person - Marcus had accepted a dinner or theatre engagement with them. These inquiries also drew a blank; in most cases, a polite explanation from staff that the persons wanted were abroad or themselves in the country. She made another attempt to reach her son; but now even the young man who had answered her previous call had disappeared.