Without a Trace (32 page)

There were a few addresses in Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, Charley Sanderson’s amongst them. If Molly had put a telephone number down for him, she’d have been tempted to ring him, but there was none. There was an address and a telephone number for Mr and Mrs Heywood but, as worried as she was, she knew she couldn’t ring Molly’s parents, not yet: it would only make them frantic.

Then she saw the name Dilys Porter and remembered Molly asking how much it cost to stay a night in the hotel, as she’d like to invite her friend Dilys down. Evelyn had said if Dilys shared her room there would be no charge, and Molly had lit up like a Christmas tree.

Reluctantly, she put the diary back. Common sense told her she was over-reacting and that she should wait to see if Molly came back later that night before ringing anyone.

Molly wasn’t going to be coming back that evening.

She found herself lying on a stone floor with a pain in the back of her head. She touched it gingerly, and felt a big lump, but she didn’t know how she’d done it, or where she was.

She lay still for a little while, trying to remember, but the last thing she recalled was riding past orchards and seeing pink-and-white blossom. Had she had an accident on her bike? But if she had, where was she now? The room was quite dark, like a cellar, and it smelled musty. All she could see was a small window high up on the wall. If she’d come off the bike, surely she’d be either at the side of a road or in someone’s house?

Trying to sit up, her hands touched her pleated skirt and
that triggered a memory of standing in front of a mirror checking to see if she looked mature and sensible.

All at once it came back to her. She had come out to Mulberry House for the second time to see Cassie’s mother. Miss Gribble had been fierce and defensive and Christabel Coleman hadn’t wanted to talk to her.

She had a ghost of a memory of a blow to the back of her head and, presumably, she had been knocked out, as she had no memory of being moved from the kitchen to wherever she was now.

As the last thing she remembered was facing Mrs Coleman, it must have been Miss Gribble who hit her. But why?

It was like reading a book and suddenly finding that a couple of pages had been torn out. She could remember the two women, even what their kitchen looked like, but she couldn’t quite put together what had led up to being hit.

Whether she could remember or not, though, the fact remained that she was in danger. No one knocked you out and put you in a cellar by mistake. Those two women were either stark staring mad or they wanted to shut her up. Or perhaps both.

She got to her feet and nearly keeled over with dizziness, probably a side effect of being hit. She stood still till it passed then made her way to the door. As she expected, it was locked, and she turned, leaned against it and surveyed her prison. How could she get out?

Some meagre daylight came in from a small, barred window high up on the wall, enough to see a collection of empty boxes for storing apples, some wooden crates piled up in the right-hand corner of the room and a workbench along the wall to her left. When the dizziness eased, Molly moved over
to the bench, hoping to find a screwdriver or some other tool, but there was nothing, only thick dust, which showed this room was rarely used.

It was also cold and damp, but if the two women could dump someone in here with a head injury, they weren’t going to be concerned about her comfort.

She could feel hysteria welling up inside her; the temptation to scream and bang on the door was almost overwhelming. But she tried to control herself and think things through. Why had the women attacked and imprisoned her?

It was possible they were so batty that they were prepared to do the same to anyone who had the cheek to enter their home uninvited, but she thought that was very unlikely. Shouting, threatening or brandishing a weapon was enough to eject an unwanted visitor. So it had to be to do with Sylvia, or Cassie. But why would Molly informing them she was dead provoke such a reaction?

Christabel obviously didn’t have any normal maternal feelings, not if she felt her daughter had totally disgraced her by producing a mixed race, illegitimate baby and decided to throw her out. Yet although news of her daughter’s death and the child’s disappearance might make her feel guilty, remorseful or ashamed, surely it wouldn’t make her aggressive towards the messenger?

Of course, it could have been a panic reaction on Miss Gribble’s part. Perhaps she had lashed out involuntarily because she was afraid of scandal. The two women might have dragged her into the cellar while they considered what to do with her.

Molly decided she was going to believe that this was the case for the moment, and she turned to the door and started banging on it.

‘Please let me out!’ she shouted. ‘I know you didn’t mean to hurt me, but I have to get back to my work, or they’ll call the police. Just let me go and I’ll forget this ever happened.’

She felt like screaming that the first thing she’d do when she got out would be to get a doctor to certify them and have them put into an asylum. But she knew that wouldn’t help her cause.

There was no reply, and when she put her ear to the door Molly couldn’t hear anything at all. It was possible, of course, that this cellar was just one of several underground rooms, and had such thick walls that sound from here couldn’t penetrate up the stairs into the house.

She took off her shoe and began banging on the door as loudly as she was able. She did this for around five minutes, paused to shout out the same message as before, then returned to banging again.

After repeating this sequence around twenty times, her arm ached and her throat hurt; also, the foot without a shoe had become like a block of ice on the stone floor. She put the shoe back on and, picking up one of the wooden crates, used it to batter the door until it fell apart in her hands. Still no one came.

There were plenty more crates, but Molly’s head hurt and she felt exhausted. She sank down on to the floor and sobbed.

She hadn’t told anyone where she was going, so no one would know where to come looking for her. She’d told George in her letter that she had a lead on Cassie’s mother, who lived in Brookland, and that she was going to see her, but that wouldn’t alarm him, not unless he was told she hadn’t come back. And who was going to tell him that?

Eventually, if she didn’t turn up, Mrs Bridgenorth would alert the police. They would contact Charley, and when he
told them she’d been determined to find Cassie’s mother and thought she lived in a nearby village, the police might end up here.

But how long would that take? At the very least, it would be days. The thought of spending even one night in such a cold, damp place without food, water or a blanket was terrifying.

The cold floor was striking up through her skirt to her bottom now, and the light coming through the small window was fading. She had to make a plan for when total darkness fell.

Getting to her feet, she went over to the workbench. The top of it was wood – far warmer to sit or lie on than the floor. She pushed the apple boxes to one side and found a piece of rag. She wiped the dust off the bench, then pushed all the crates away, hoping to find anything – rags or sacks – to keep her a bit warmer, or a tool to pick at the door lock. But there was nothing.

She prowled round the cellar then, looking for anything useful, but there was nothing other than cobwebs.

She picked up a crate, intending to start banging on the door again, and something dropped to the floor with a slight tinkle. She couldn’t see what it was, as the light was so bad, but she groped around with her hand and eventually found it.

It was a hair slide – just a little red circle like a Polo mint, with a metal clasp across the back. It looked familiar, but maybe that was just because she had worn such hair slides when she was little.

Grabbing a box, she began to bang and shout again. It made her feel warmer, even if it did no good. She thought she would do it in the middle of the night, too; with luck, it might annoy them so much they would come down.

Once complete darkness fell, Molly was unable to maintain
her calm. She wanted to relieve herself; she was cold, hungry and thirsty, and very frightened. It seemed to her as she lay hunched up on the workbench that if a person could knock you out and drag you to a cellar, they were capable of leaving you there for ever. Compared with that, her fear of spiders seemed silly, but still she kept imagining them creeping towards her in the dark.

She couldn’t see her wristwatch now, but it couldn’t be more than nine at night, as it hadn’t been dark for that long. She wished she could fall asleep, but it was too cold for that.

She thought of Constance and how much she’d believed in the power of prayer.

‘Not a sparrow can fall from its nest without Him knowing,’ she’d said, on many an occasion.

‘If you know about the sparrows, what about me?’ Molly asked God. ‘I haven’t done anything bad, I was trying to put things right, so please help me. Make someone work out where I am.’

All at once, almost as if God had heard her prayer, she remembered why the red hair slide looked familiar. Petal had always worn two of them in her hair, one on either side.

It could, of course, be pure coincidence that a hair slide like Petal’s had been dropped here. But she didn’t believe it was. She just knew Petal had been here.

At four o’clock in the morning, while Molly was shivering uncontrollably and thinking she just might die of it, Evelyn Bridgenorth was lying awake, worrying. She had stayed up till after twelve in the hope that Molly would turn up or telephone, then, as all the guests were now in bed, she finally locked the hotel door and went up herself.

Ted was already asleep, and she didn’t want to disturb him by putting the light on and reading. So she just lay there, waiting for sleep to overtake her, but it didn’t; her mind was racing too fast.

She heard the church clock strike four and wondered how she was going to run the hotel when she’d had no sleep. If Molly did come breezing in the next morning, she’d get a real tongue-lashing for putting her through this.

At ten o’clock Evelyn Bridgenorth rang the police station to report Molly missing.

‘It’s not unusual for young women to just take off,’ the sergeant said, clearly not having taken on board what she’d just said about Molly being a reliable and conscientious girl. ‘It’ll be a man, I expect. He’ll have sweet-talked her into dropping everything and, when she comes back, she’ll tell you a cock-and-bull story that she was on an errand of mercy.’

‘Miss Heywood left on a bicycle. She took no clothes or overnight things. She didn’t even have a coat with her,’ Evelyn said crisply.

‘Oh, we’ve had plenty of women go missing when they said they were just out to buy a pint of milk and still wearing their pinny. No accounting for what goes on in women’s minds.’

Evelyn was tempted to tell him that she was imagining going down to the police station and throwing the contents of a chip pan over him. ‘I want you to look into it,’ she said through gritted teeth.

‘Tell you what, Mrs Bridgenorth, as it’s you, if she isn’t back in two days, I’ll see what I can do.’

‘You don’t suppose Molly’s disappearance has got anything to do with her looking for her friend’s family?’ Ernest asked Mrs Bridgenorth that evening when he opened the bar. ‘She
hadn’t given up on finding them. I’ve heard she’s been asking around the town about the family quite recently.’

‘Yes, I know about that. Ted told me. But I can’t see that there’d be any connection between that and her disappearance. I mean, her friend was killed back in Somerset.’

‘Maybe so, but if the dead girl’s family live around here, Molly may have stumbled into something they want kept hidden,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to call the police.’

‘But I thought they wouldn’t do anything.’

‘Not the Rye police – they’re a bunch of disbelieving idiots. If she isn’t back tonight, I’m going to call Molly’s policeman friend in Somerset and hear what he has to say. I’m also going to ring her friend Dilys and see if she knows anything.’

Molly was beyond crying now that darkness had fallen for a second night. The previous night had been long and tortuous, and the daylight hours that followed it almost as bad. Every now and then she had banged on the door and screamed, but it was no use. Now she was so hungry and thirsty she could think of little else but food and drink, and the cold made it impossible to fall asleep and forget about it for a few hours.

She now knew without a doubt that she’d been left here to die. Maybe when the two women had dragged her here unconscious, they thought she was already dead. In any case, the fact they hadn’t been back to check on her proved that was what they wanted.

Yet, however utterly miserable she felt, Molly’s mind was still active, and it seemed to her that no one would react quite as aggressively as those two women had unless they
had something very serious to hide. She felt certain now it was they who had attacked Cassie, and taken Petal.

When she’d walked around the back of Mulberry House Molly hadn’t really noticed much beyond the garden being overgrown. Yet out of the corner of her eye she was sure she had seen a black car, an old Austin or something similar. The two women could have found out where Cassie was living and driven to Somerset.

She asked herself what would have made them attack Cassie. Surely a mother would only drive all that way out of love, wanting to be reunited with her daughter? Maybe Cassie hadn’t been able to forgive her for turning her back on her when Petal was born, and had told them to leave. Perhaps a fight had broken out because Cassie had told some home truths, and one of the women had hit her so hard that she had fallen on the hearth. Then, perhaps, realizing Cassie was dead, they had taken Petal with them so she couldn’t tell anyone what had happened.

What had they done with the child? That was the most important question now.

Having seen how they lived, and how irrational and volatile they were, they could well have killed her. With miles and miles of marshland within a stone’s throw of the house, they could have buried her little body anywhere and no one would ever find it. That would explain their panic when she’d arrived.