Rosie (27 page)

‘I do go out the door,’ Rosie protested. ‘I just can’t dance and I’d only show you up.’

‘Then we’ll teach you on Sunday night,’ Linda said, fixing a wide black belt round her middle and pulling it in tight. ‘You only need to know the waltz and the cha-cha, none of the blokes can do anything else. Now, ‘ow do I look?’

Rosie smiled. Linda looked plain by day, but after setting her dark hair in pin curls and putting on some make-up she was suddenly transformed into a voluptuous glamour girl.

‘Like a beauty queen,’ she said. ‘Now can I have the paper?’

Mary threw it at her. ‘So you’re just as hooked on it as us!’ she said triumphantly.

‘I’m not,’ Rosie insisted. ‘I want to look at Situations Vacant so I can leave this madhouse.’

‘Then pick out a job for all three of us,’ Mary laughed. ‘Somewhere with good pay, little work and lots of men!’

It was absolutely silent on the staff landing once Linda and Mary had gone out. Maureen and Gladys were down in the staff room listening to the wireless, and if Staff Nurse Aylwood was in her room further along the landing she was as quiet as always. Rosie stretched out on her bed and read the report on Seth’s defence, relieved that she was unlikely to be interrupted.

Earlier in the trial the prosecution had made much of Seth’s reputation as a fighter, troublemaker and bully, driving home the point that he idolized his father and emulated his behaviour. The barrister defending Rosie’s half-brother didn’t seek to deny these charges, but set out to show that Seth had another gentler side which he chose to hide because he was afraid of his father.

He questioned Seth at length about the two years after Ethel Parker had left May Cottage, when he and his younger brother had been left to fend for themselves, often hungry, always neglected. By the time he got to the point where Ruby arrived, Seth’s answers implied that the nine-year-old boy saw her as a longed-for replacement mother. He spoke of her cooking meals, knitting him warm jumpers and making the house a real home again, including the addition to their family of a new baby sister.

A tear ran down Rosie’s cheek as she heard Seth’s fond words about her mother. She believed it all because it struck a chord about the joy she’d experienced when Heather came into her life. As the barrister probed ever more deeply into the years when she was a small child, she was chastened to hear Seth’s affectionate references to both her mother and herself and she felt she may have misjudged him. She certainly didn’t think he could have killed the woman he obviously had such a high regard for.

As Mary had already said, there was a testimony from the farmer in Bridgwater that Seth had worked on his barn all that week in which Ruby disappeared, and his farm accounts in which Seth’s wages had been paid to Cole were submitted as evidence. The barrister played on this for some time, showing that between fourteen and eighteen, Seth worked long hours out in all weathers, but yet was paid no wages by his father for his efforts, only a scant amount of pocket money. He then went on to draw attention to Seth’s excellent National Service record, suggesting that but for the boy’s fear of displeasing his father, he would have become a mechanic in civilian life and moved away to the city to become self-sufficient.

Moving on to the time of Heather’s death, he laboured heavily on the point that Seth was in Bristol working all that week, and that he stood to gain nothing by killing the woman, only becoming more firmly entrenched in helping his father run his business and taking more responsibility for the younger children.

As the prosecution had previously brought up Seth’s alleged cruelty to Alan and Rosie, the defence had no choice but to come back to it. To her surprise Seth didn’t attempt to deny it, but somehow the carefully worded questions on the subject created the image that her brother was merely acting on his father’s behalf, endeavouring to instil some order in a household where all sense of discipline and orderliness had flown. He sounded severe, but caring.

Rosie lay on her bed for a long time after reading the newspaper, her head and heart reeling with conflicting emotions. She didn’t think Seth could have killed her mother or even known about her death. He was the same age then as she was now, too young for such things. But she wasn’t so sure of his innocence in Heather’s death. Looking back she recalled Heather often saying he bitterly resented her, and Rosie remembered so well how much happier all of them had been once he went into the army.

In that moment she suddenly saw how wrong she was not to tell Sergeant Headly or even Miss Pemberton everything about Seth. Maybe that scene she’d witnessed in her father’s bedroom did not prove he helped her father to murder Heather, but it showed quite clearly what kind of a man he had grown into. The police still believed that the beating Rosie received from her brother was merely for making Alan run away. If they’d known the whole story the prosecution might have taken on a whole new turn, and Seth’s barrister wouldn’t be able to sway the jury into believing he was just a simple-minded country boy who lived in fear of his father’s displeasure.

But what could she do now? Miss Pemberton had gone to great lengths to keep her out of the trial. And Thomas too! What would it do to him to hear that both Seth and Norman had raped his sister?

Rosie awoke in the night from a terrible nightmare. She was walking down a dark street towards some brightly lit shops at the end, when suddenly Seth came up behind her. She ran and ran, but instead of reaching the safety of the shops, they seemed to move further and further away, and Seth was closing in on her. He grabbed her round the waist and flung her down to the ground; she saw his grinning face looming above her and his mouth coming down on her throat as if to tear it out like a mad dog. Just as his teeth sunk into her flesh, she woke up.

As she lay awake, too frightened to close her eyes again for fear the dream would continue, she remembered that her father knew about Seth and Norman. It was up to him to reveal it, and if he then asked that she be called to the witness stand she would go.

But however much she wanted to believe in her father’s innocence, and however distressed she was that he hadn’t yet given his lawyer anything substantial to fight his cause with, she had to face the unpalatable truth that he must have murdered both women and that Seth was almost certainly involved too. There was no escaping that.

It made her realize it was time that she thought of herself. As Sister Dowd and Thomas had pointed out, she wasn’t responsible for anyone’s deeds but her own. She would be sixteen very soon, old enough to decide on her own future. Perhaps then she should make a clean break with the past, forget her disreputable family and move on somewhere else, leaving everyone, even those who had sought to help her, behind.

The next morning as she got up, Rosie discovered her periods had started. But as she looked at her blood-smeared nightdress, she felt no dismay, just a kind of confirmation that her thoughts during the night had been rational, adult ones. For the first time ever she felt as if she was in control of her life. And she had no intention of letting anyone take that control from her.

Chapter Seven

Freda Barnes was not a very intelligent woman, but what she lacked in brain power, she made up for in guile and determination. Her father had been a doctor with a country practice in Herefordshire. Until she was fourteen and the First World War broke out, her childhood had been a very pleasant one. Although her father wasn’t rich and their home was a little shabby, they had a maid, and a governess who came in daily to teach herself and her three sisters. Because of her father’s position all five girls were often invited to many of the wealthier neighbours’ homes for parties, picnics, dances and tennis. Freda had always assumed that in the fullness of time she would turn into a beauty like her two older sisters and that one of the sons from these rather grand houses would ask to marry her.

But the war changed everything. Her father felt compelled to offer his services for the good of his country, and one by one she saw all the young men in the neighbourhood join up too as patriotic fever swept through the small villages. Her mother upbraided her many times for being far more distressed by the lack of parties or tennis partners than by the casualty lists posted weekly in the village. She said it was high time Freda thought about someone other than herself and ordered her to roll up her sleeves and give a hand at the surgery, helping out old Dr Mayhew who’d come out of retirement to take her father’s place.

Freda grudgingly complied with her mother’s wishes, and waited for the war to end so everything would get back to normal. But her father didn’t come back from France, he contracted cholera and died in 1917 while helping the wounded in the trenches.

She was eighteen when the war finally ended, but to her dismay she saw that life was never going to return to how it had been before, and she felt bitter and resentful. She hadn’t even turned into a beauty. Her hair was lank, straight and mousy; she had a plain face with thin lips and close-set eyes. While her sisters had hourglass figures and shapely legs, she was as hefty as a carthorse. Fewer than a quarter of the young men returned and many of them were mere shadows of the gallant gentlemen who’d joined up in 1914.

The maid and the governess left soon after her father went to France, but on his death her mother could no longer afford to live in such a big house, and made plans to move into a small cottage. Rachel and Hester, her two older sisters, both went off to London and found jobs. Grace, the sister a year younger than Freda, married the son of a local farmer and her mother made it plain that Freda must pay her own way too.

Dr Mayhew pulled some strings to get her trained as a nurse in Whittington Hospital in London. Freda had no desire to be a nurse, but it was better than being a shop girl or governess, and it was the only thing she had any experience of. She fully believed too it would be only a matter of time before she found a doctor to marry her so she could be the envy of her more attractive sisters.

She barely scraped through her exams, but she had the kind of authority, breeding and poise that were admired by her matron. The years passed and slowly she worked her way up to becoming a staff nurse and finally sister. Freda loathed the children’s wards, and midwifery, though she spent a year specializing in each, still hoping for that elusive doctor to sweep her off her feet. She wasn’t keen on surgery either, and a spell in the theatre made her want to run away from nursing for good. She felt that life had cheated her; she didn’t see why her life was only work, with no hope of anything better. She wanted money and position, and she believed she deserved them.

She had been on the point of moving into district nursing in 1931, when she attended a lecture on mental illness and saw the opportunities there.

All the mental asylums were grossly overcrowded and badly run. The war had swelled the numbers of patients and there were few nurses of Freda Barnes’s background anxious to enter into such a gloomy and unglamorous field. Freda had no desire to improve the lives of the mentally incompetent – as far as she was concerned they deserved to be locked away out of sight. But she thought there would be real possibilities to shoot up the ladder, even to the post of matron in a few short years.

Freda was then thirty-one. She had come to realize that there was little chance now of making a good marriage; she was too plain and she had no fortune either. On top of that the country was in the grips of a depression. If she stayed in general nursing, it might be another twenty years before she saw herself rise higher than ward sister. So she applied for posts in several large mental hospitals, and settled for Stoke Park in Bristol because it seemed more civilized than any of the others.

Hope turned to bitterness when she discovered that Stoke Park was a pioneering mental hospital, intent on breaking away from the barbaric image asylums had acquired. They were looking for dedicated and compassionate people in the senior positions, and hard, domineering women like Barnes were purposely overlooked in promotion. She hated everything about Stoke Park. The deranged patients, the common untrained women she had to work alongside, but most of all the young doctors hardly out of medical school who looked down their noses when she tried to instil some discipline into the place.

Freda had been at Stoke Park for seven long, miserable years, when a chance meeting there with Lionel Brace-Coombes changed her life. He owned a small private mental home in London with the kind of genteel patients Freda could identify with. He appreciated her experience and background, and she charmed him into offering her a post of sister, a spacious flat of her own and excellent wages.

Lionel Brace-Coombes was the kind of man she would have liked as a husband. Ten years older than herself, with inherited wealth, unfortunately he already had a wife, Ayleen, who had been diagnosed as being schizophrenic some five years into their marriage. He had tried so hard to keep her at home at Foxhill, but the many nurses he’d employed just wouldn’t stay, not once they found how difficult Ayleen was. He couldn’t bear the thought of committing his beautiful wife to any of the terrible asylums he visited and as time went on opening a private home seemed to be the only alternative.

The old house at Woodside Park had been lying empty since the early Thirties. It was near enough to his home for him to visit regularly and its owner was glad to have it taken off his hands. Lionel converted it with great care, landscaping the gardens and installing the best equipment available. Originally he had intended to have no more than five or six women patients only, imagining them all to be distressed gentlewomen like his wife. But the cost of providing a doctor and nurses to look after so few patients proved prohibitive and by the time Freda joined him, the numbers had swelled to twelve.

Sadly Ayleen died of pneumonia in 1940, two years after Freda arrived. What with the war and other more pressing business interests, Lionel distanced himself from the place then. When his matron left he gave the vacant post to Freda, with the full control she’d worked so hard for.