Without a Trace by Lesley Pearse
As for poor Petal, no court was ever going to give her back to her natural mother, but what would they decide her fate was to be? She was happy now with Molly Heywood and the Bridgenorths, but that was a temporary arrangement. Was she going to spend the rest of her childhood being moved around, haunted by the memory of the cruel woman who snatched her away and locked her up and never fully understanding why the woman she called her mother had died?
Molly was surprised when DI Pople called on her at the George. On the local news the previous evening it had been reported that the body of a man believed to be Private Reginald Coleman had been found in the garden of Mulberry House. She had been shocked to the core and wondered how someone as wicked as Miss Gribble had managed to get away with her crimes.
When she took Petal to school she was aware of people looking at her and that groups of women had their heads together talking but would break off as she came near. No one dared to ask her any questions, which was just as well, because she knew no more than they did. But it was an uncomfortable experience, and she fervently hoped no one would try to talk to Petal about it.
Because this latest development had nothing to do with her, she hadn’t expected a visit from the police and had continued her chambermaid duties as usual. Then she had been called down to see DI Pople.
They sat in the small office behind reception and he told her about Reg Coleman’s body being found and how he’d gone to see Christabel to break the news to her.
‘It was then that she told me that Petal is her daughter, not Sylvia’s,’ he said. And, seeing Molly’s complete shock, he added, ‘And your face reflects how I responded to the news.’
‘Good God!’ Molly exclaimed. ‘That is the absolute last thing I expected to hear.’
He filled her in with a little more detail and then asked if she would consider going to see Christabel at Hellingly. ‘You don’t have to, but I think it will be beneficial to both of you. She really needs to know about both Sylvia and Petal. You might say she doesn’t deserve to, and I wouldn’t blame you after she walloped you with that axe. But I’ve noticed that you’re a compassionate person, and I think talking to her will help you understand how all this came about. In my opinion, she’s been as much a victim of Miss Gribble as Reg Coleman, Sylvia, Petal and you were. She isn’t barmy, she’s been fed drugs which kept her partially sedated, and now she’s free of them she’s articulate, sensible and horrified at her part in all this.’
Molly considered this for a moment or two. ‘I hope she doesn’t think that by getting me on side she can have Petal back?’
‘She doesn’t even know I’m asking you to see her and, besides, no judge on earth would allow Petal to go back to her, even if she’d become a saint. She’s just a woman who has been badly used, and I know you will understand how that can happen.’
It crossed Molly’s mind that George might have told DI Pople a bit about her home life.
‘Okay, I’ll go on my next day off. It can’t hurt me, can it? At least I can make her see what a good mum Cassie was to Petal and, now I know her background, I think Cassie is the one who should be sainted!’ She laughed then, and told DI Pople how much Cassie would’ve hated anyone saying such a thing.
‘When are you seeing George again?’ DI Pople asked. ‘I liked him, he’s got real guts.’
Molly shrugged. ‘He’s not my boyfriend. We’re just friends from school.’
DI Pople raised an eyebrow. ‘I believe he thinks of you as more than that. I’d happily have him in my team down here if he wanted a transfer.’
Molly could only smile. She wished just one of these people who thought her and George were meant for each other would give him a nudge.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
‘They tell me it was you I hit with an axe,’ Christabel said when Molly was shown into a small room at Hellingly to meet her.
Molly agreed that it was, thinking that this was the strangest introduction to anybody she’d ever had.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ Christabel added after a moment or two, as if it had taken that long for her to realize that an apology was necessary. ‘I can’t offer any real excuse other than I wasn’t myself.’
‘That will do,’ Molly said, and held out her hand to the older woman. ‘I was very fond of Cassie – your Sylvia – and Petal, too. My name is Molly Heywood.’
Molly had only had the briefest glimpse of Christabel the day she arrived at Mulberry House, and then again when she escaped from the cellar there. She had formed the idea from the first meeting that she looked similar to Cassie, but she hadn’t had enough time to study Christabel. She had time now, and she was glad of it.
Christabel Coleman and Cassie were about the same height and size, five foot five and of slim build. But Cassie had strength in her face, where in Christabel’s there was weakness. Cassie had a habit of sticking out her chin as if to show the world what she was made of, and she had a voluptuous, almost pin-up girl, appearance. Yet, looking at her mother now, Molly saw that Cassie had inherited her delicate bone structure, baby-blue eyes and wide mouth. Cassie had made herself more noticeable with her dyed hair, and with her unusual dress sense. Christabel had her mousy hair pulled back from her pale face in a single bunch, which did her no favours.
Molly had been told that this woman was forty-six, but she looked older, because she had deep wrinkles around her eyes and her mouth. The beige shirtwaister dress she was wearing aged her even more, but then Molly was fairly certain it wasn’t her own, just something she’d been lent by the hospital.
‘DI Pople thought it would be good for us to have a talk,’ Molly said. ‘And I think he’s right. Cassie never talked about you, and I assumed that was because you’d fallen out when Petal was born. Instead she talked about books, poetry, art, music and mystical things. Was she always like that?’
Christabel half smiled. ‘Yes, she was. She read anything and everything, going off to the library in Rye as soon as she was old enough to catch the bus alone. I think growing up on the marsh makes for artistic leanings. It’s the wildness of the terrain and the weather. I used to walk for miles as a girl and write poetry about what I saw, just as she did.’
‘She was very much a loner, but I always felt it wasn’t really from choice, but necessity. Would you agree with that?’
‘I think so. You see, she was just thirteen when war broke out and, if it hadn’t been for that, she could’ve made it to university. She might have been a teacher; she used to say that’s what she wanted.’
‘She did a good job teaching Petal,’ Molly said. ‘She could read fluently before she started school, and she loves history, too. Her teacher at the school in Rye tells me she’s very clever and eager to learn.’
‘She’s with you, staying at the George, isn’t she? How is she? After everything she’s been through, and so much of it my fault, I don’t feel I’ve even got the right to ask.’
Molly found herself warming to this woman she had thought she would hate and despise. She seemed a very honest woman, as Cassie had been. She might be a weak person who had allowed herself to be manipulated and controlled, but there was goodness at her core.
‘She’s quieter than she used to be. She watches people, as if she’s making sure about them, before speaking. She still has the occasional bad dream, and now and then she has tantrums that we have no real explanation for. I think it’s pent-up anger and frustration because she doesn’t understand what it was all about. Sadly, neither I nor anyone else can fully explain it to her, she’s too young to grasp it all.’
Christabel’s eyes welled up with tears, but she brushed them away as if she’d decided she had no right to cry about a child who was suffering because of her.
‘Will you tell me about her and Sylvia, or Cassie, as you know her? I mean, how their life was before Miss Gribble and I turned up.’
The raw longing and eagerness in her face touched Molly. ‘I will if you promise to tell me about Cassie before she ran away with Petal. How she
Christabel nodded. ‘You are a remarkable young woman,’ she said eventually. ‘I can see why my daughter chose you as a friend. If the dead are able to look down and watch us, I think she would be very proud to have known you, and so grateful that Petal is in your care.’
Molly blushed at the compliment. She’d thought she would be irritated by this woman’s weakness, but she wasn’t anything like the drippy, mad person she’d expected.
‘Okay, so where do I start? Cassie did rather take the village by storm. She not only wore tight sweaters and skirts and made no apologies for being a lone mother, but she had a “Don’t get on my wrong side” attitude. Yet she got round a local farmer who no one else has ever managed to charm, and he let her rent Stone Cottage.’
‘Were people nasty because Petal was mixed race?’
‘I can’t lie to you: they said horrid things behind Cassie’s back. My father, who is the village grocer, was just about the nastiest. But most people were nice to Petal. Of course, she is a little charmer, so bright and sunny natured. And she was a novelty, remember! Some of the villagers had never seen a black person before, and those who did only had memories of GI’s stationed in Somerset for the last couple of years of the war and, as you’ll remember, they didn’t get very good press. But, as I said, Petal’s a little charmer, so you can rest assured she didn’t suffer any real prejudice. Her teacher liked her and the other children played with her. I don’t think they even noticed her skin was a different colour to theirs.’
‘Well, that’s a relief.’ Christabel sighed. ‘Benjamin – that was her father – used to tell me hurtful things that had been said to him, and of course, back in America where he came from, white people’s attitudes to Negros were appalling.’
‘Cassie put her head up and sailed through everything, and if she’d lived she would’ve made Petal do the same. I really admired her for that, and for her intelligence. I loved being with her, she knew so much. She was living in the East End of London before I met her; after her death, I stayed with a lovely old lady who had befriended her while she was there, and everyone who knew her only had good things to say about her.’
Christabel smiled to hear that. ‘How did she live, though? I mean, where did she get money? Did she have a job?’
‘Where she got her money was a bit of a mystery to me,’ Molly admitted. ‘She was very frugal. In Somerset she grew vegetables, made new clothes out of old ones, and she used to go into Bristol once a week on the bus, so she may have had a cleaning job there, or a man friend. But she never said.’
‘Did she talk about men friends?’
‘Yes, but I never met any of them. She liked men; she preferred their company to women’s, in general. She was very ahead of her time in that way.’
‘You mean she slept with them?’
Molly blushed.
‘You can say it. I was a fallen woman myself,’ Christabel said with a light laugh. ‘I worshipped Reg, and we were “carrying on”, as my mother used to call it, well before we got married. I was pregnant on our wedding day, and barely eighteen. I took it very hard when Reg went off to war. We’d been everything to each other – best friends and lovers – and I missed that.’ She paused, as if remembering.
‘We never intended to spend our entire married life in Mulberry House with my parents,’ she went on after a moment or two. ‘But Sylvia came, then the bad times in the thirties. Reg was a carpenter, and we couldn’t have survived on our own.’
‘Your father was a doctor?’
‘Yes, he was, and my grandfather before that. The practice had always been at Mulberry House. Back when I was a little girl, father went out on his rounds in a pony and trap. They had me quite late in life and, being the only child, I sort of felt obliged to stay with them. And, of course, they loved Sylvia. Then they died, a year apart, in 1935 and ’36, and the house became mine. It was our intention to fill it with children and live happily ever after.’
‘But you had Miss Gribble, the Wicked Witch, in the house with you …’
Christabel held her head in her hands as if the thought of everything that woman had done was too much to bear.
‘Reg was always saying I should make her go,’ she said after a few moments. ‘He said she gave him the creeps because she watched every move we made. He was right, of course, but she’d been there my whole life, and even before that with my parents. Where would she go? At her age, she wouldn’t find another job.
‘Then war broke out and Reg joined up and went off to France, so I was glad of her being there. It was a big house to be alone in with a child. But I’m wandering off a bit. You want to know about Sylvia.’
‘It’s all interesting,’ Molly said. ‘Some other time I’d love to hear how it was for you during the war but, for now, tell me about how Sylvia reacted when you got pregnant.’
‘I told her before I told Gribby and swore her to secrecy. Sylvia was always very mature for her age, and I didn’t have to point things out, she just got it. She was excited about having a baby brother or sister, but scared, too.’
‘What of?’
Christabel shrugged. ‘Mostly of what people would say. And of Gribby too – we both knew she wasn’t going to be a bit pleased I’d been with a man. Since Reg had gone missing, she’d become more and more forceful, taking over everything, as if it was her house. I should have put a stop to it, but I was grieving for Reg and it was easier than confrontation. Then, one day, when I was at least six months gone, she noticed.’
Molly observed that Christabel had leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and had begun speaking as if she were reliving that day.
‘We were doing the washing. Gribby was hooking the clothes out of the boiler with the boiler stick into the sink, and I was rinsing them. Sylvia was standing by at the mangle, ready to turn the handle when I fed the rinsed clothes into it.
‘It was early January and a wild, windy day, and when I accidentally sloshed water on to my clothes, I yelled because it was icy cold. Gribby turned to me and, where my wet overall had stuck to me, she saw my tummy sticking out.
‘“You little whore!” she said and leapt forward and slapped my face really hard.
‘“Do that again and I’ll hit you!” Sylvia screamed out. When I glanced at my daughter, she had the copper stick in her hands and was holding it, ready to strike Gribby. I remember, she was wearing a flowery red crossover overall over a dark-green jumper, her face was flushed from the steam in the kitchen and her hair had gone into tight curls.
‘“You’ll never lay a hand on my mother again or you’ll be out on your ear so fast you won’t know what’s hit you,” she snarled.
‘My face was stinging. I was icy cold from my wet clothes, but I was so proud of my daughter being so bold and brave in standing up for me.
‘“Yes, she’s having a baby,” Sylvia carried on, jabbing the copper stick at Gribby. “And we’re going to look after him or her between us. If you don’t like the idea of that, there’s the door,” and she pointed the stick at the back door. “Go and get yourself another job and another home, but just remember no other family will tolerate your interference or your bullying.”
‘“How can you speak to me like that when I’ve given my whole life to you and your family?” Gribby whined. “I’m only worried that everyone in the village will be talking about your mother. She won’t be able to bear that. And I don’t interfere or bully either of you. I don’t know how you can say that.”
‘“You don’t know any other way!” Sylvia shouted. “You bullied Granny and Grandpa, then Mum. But you won’t do it to me. I won’t stand for it.”
‘She didn’t stand for it either.’ Christabel opened h
‘Gribby went mad, saying terrible things I can’t repeat. But Sylvia ordered her out of the room, and took charge. I didn’t think of it at the time, but I came to realize later that she never, ever left Gribby alone with the baby.’
‘You think she was afraid Gribby would smother her or something?’
‘Yes, I think so. I wasn’t doing well with feeding her, and I remember Sylvia told me she thought it was best I put her on a bottle and then she could do the night feeds so I could get strong again.’
‘Was that in preparation for Sylvia taking her away with her?’
‘No, I don’t think so, not then, only so she could take the baby into her room at night. I think she thought Gribby might come into my room and do something while I was asleep. Sylvia locked her door. I know, because I tried to go in there one night.’
‘So Sylvia was looking after Petal right from the start?’
‘Oh yes, she said even before Pamela was born that she’d say the baby was hers so people wouldn’t talk about me. Sylvia never did anything in half measures, so I think she believed if she was going to tell people it was her baby then she must act like its mother.’
‘DI Pople said that she registered Pamela’s birth. Did she tell you she was going to?’
‘Oh yes. She made me promise I would keep a constant eye on the baby that day because she couldn’t take her with her. She also told me I wasn’t to tell Gribby where she’d gone. I’m not sure why that was.’
‘Maybe she was already planning to run off and didn’t want Gribby taking the birth certificate from her?’
‘Perhaps.’ Christabel shrugged. ‘But you must understand that, back then, I didn’t believe Gribby could hurt anyone – well, no more than a slap, like she gave me. But Sylvia did. A couple of days before she left she said, “It’s not safe for Pamela here, I’ve seen the look on Gribby’s face, and she hates her.” I told her she was over-reacting but she just shook her head and said, “You’ve always been blind to her faults.”’