Leslie Searle, a Hollywood photographer, vanishes from an English village that is home to many writers and artists.

On the whole Grant found it even more humiliating to be treated as a dead weight than to be treated as if he was no weight at all.“To Love and Be Wise” (1950) revolves around another disappearance. (The Midget came from Lytham St Anne's, and there was no daffodil nonsense about her.) She had large soft hands and large soft cow's eyes and she always looked very sorry for you, but the slightest physical exertion set her breathing like a suction-pump. The Amazon was Nurse Darroll, who came from Gloucestershire and was homesick each daffodil season.

When she was off-duty he was attended to by The Amazon, a goddess with arms She tossed mattresses around with the absent-minded grace of a plate spinner. Weights meant nothing, apparently, to The Midget. It was not only that she told him what he might or might not do, but she dealt with his six-feet-odd with an off-hand ease that Grant found humiliating. Grant called her The Midget to compensate himself for being bossed around by a piece of Dresden china which he could pick up in one hand. The Midget was Nurse Ingham, and she was in sober fact a very nice five- feet two, with everything in just proportion. It's a horrible thought.' 'You sound constipated,' said The Midget. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. 'There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Why didn't he go on reading some of those expensive brand-new novels that his friends kept on bringing him. Anything out of the parallel was hospital profanity. But it seemed that that would spoil the symmetry of the room, and in hospitals symmetry ranked just a short head behind cleanliness and a whole length in front of Godliness. He had suggested to The Midget that she might turn his bed round a little so that he could have a new patch of ceiling to explore. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it.

He had made mathematical calculations of it and re-discovered his childhood theorems, angles, triangles. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects faces, birds, and fishes. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them rivers, islands, and continents. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling.

The daughter of time by josephine tey