Without a Trace (35 page)

Since Molly had gone off to London, some people had told George that Mary seemed distant and withdrawn, but he hadn’t found this himself, and he’d gone in to see her often to check. He felt that she was happier now than she’d been for a long time, going off to Mothers’ Union meetings or popping in to see friends.

She had told him herself that she didn’t want Molly to come home. ‘She needs to make her own way in life and not worry about me,’ she said. ‘Besides, Jack is a bit better since she’s been gone. So you can stop checking up on me!’

He hadn’t stopped, of course; he just made out he was coming to the shop to buy something.

Brookland was easy enough to find, as the marsh was as flat as a pancake and the old church, with its strange, wooden three-part tower, which reminded him of a child’s stacking toy, stood out like a beacon. He asked a man out walking his dog if he knew where Mrs Coleman and her housekeeper lived.

‘They won’t open the door to you,’ the man said. ‘Completely cuckoo, both of them.’

‘Are they now?’ George said. ‘Well, I’m with the police, so they’ll have to open up for me.’

The dog walker shrugged and gave him directions to Mulberry House. It turned out George had already driven past the house, so he turned his bike round and set back off. He hadn’t gone far when a little girl darted out of a side lane and ran towards him, waving her arms.

He slowed right down, as it was quite clear she was in great distress, and as he got closer, to his shock, he realized it was Petal.

He pulled up and jumped off his bike.

‘Petal, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I’m George, the policeman from back home in Sawbridge. I came to find you and Molly.’

‘She’s in there!’ The child waved her hand towards the high stone wall beside the road. ‘She came and got me, she told me to run for help, but the nasty lady has got her now.’

George took in the neglected dirty state of the girl, the long, far too large dress, and no shoes. However much he wanted to go straight to Molly’s aid, he couldn’t leave the child here unprotected.

‘Jump on behind me and hold on tight,’ he said, getting back on his bike. ‘There’s a shop along here. I’ll take you there and get them to phone for more police. Can you be a brave girl for a little bit longer?’

She nodded and climbed silently up behind him. He looked down at her thin, brown arms clasped around his waist and felt a lump rising in his throat.

It took only a couple of minutes for him to flash his warrant card at the stunned shopkeeper and to ask him to phone 999 and explain that PC George Walsh had left a missing child called Petal with him while he returned to Mulberry House.
He told the shopkeeper to tell them he was assisting Molly Heywood, who was being held captive there. An ambulance might be needed, too.

George roared back to the house, left his motorbike by the gate and ran around to the back door.

There, on a paved area by the back door, he found Molly lying in a pool of blood and a wailing woman crouched a little way off with her head on her knees and an axe lying beside her.

Kneeling beside Molly, he found that she had a pulse but it was very faint. The blood was coming from a wound on the top of her head. He couldn’t tell how deep it was because of her hair.

‘You’re safe now, Molly,’ he said to her, even though she was unconscious. ‘It’s George, and I’ve got Petal safe and sound, too, and I’ll have you in hospital in no time.’

As he waited for assistance, he heard a sound from inside the house. He went in to see what it was and found another woman slumped on the floor. She was older than the first one, and her face was a bloody mess where she’d been hit. She was conscious, but appeared to have taken leave of her senses. She was just making a keening sound and didn’t respond when he asked her name.

The woman outside didn’t appear to have any injuries, but she was still just crouching there, rocking herself to and fro. He removed the axe, just in case she thought of using it again. He guessed that Molly had thrown the big eagle thing he’d seen on the floor in the hall at the other, older woman to escape, and that this younger one had hit her as she came through the kitchen door.

It seemed to take for ever for the emergency services to
arrive, and he sat at Molly’s side, urging her to hold on until help came. Looking at what he could see of the house and thinking of the unbalanced state of the two women who lived here, he felt sick to think that Petal had been kept here for months, and he was astounded that no one had reported seeing her.

But, above everything else, above even his anxiety for Molly and Petal and the need to get the two older women into custody, he felt so proud of Molly. She had said she was going to find Petal, and she had. She’d stuck at it like a dog with a bone, even coming to work down here because she had what he thought was a crazy idea that Cassie had lived here. How wrong was he? It was Molly who should become a detective.

Then, all at once, he heard the clanging of an ambulance bell and a police siren.

‘That’s it now, Molly,’ he said to her. ‘You’ll be in hospital in no time and I’m not leaving you.’

George sensed the detective inspector’s hostility even before he opened his mouth to speak. He was middle-aged with a military-style moustache and had introduced himself as DI Pople.

‘We got the message about this from Somerset. So why did you feel it was necessary to come?’

George gritted his teeth at the man’s arrogance and stupidity.

The ambulance men were getting Molly into the ambulance now and George was ready to follow it on his motorbike. He’d already asked them to pick up Petal as they went past the shop.

‘It was as well I did, or she might have been dead before you got here. But you must excuse me, I’m going with her and Petal.’

‘You are not. You will come back with me to fill me in on
the background,’ DI Pople said briskly. Two other police cars had arrived. The younger woman had been handcuffed and led to one of them, and two policemen were trying to get some sense out of the older, injured woman while waiting for a second ambulance to arrive.

‘Sorry, sir, but my duty is to my friend, who is badly hurt, and to the little girl she risked her life to save from these two madwomen,’ George said. ‘I’ll contact you as soon as I know Molly is going to make it.’

It was midnight before George was finally assured that Molly was out of the woods.

The doctor at Hastings Hospital who came to tell him was elderly but had bright-blue eyes and a warm smile. ‘She’ll be having a few headaches for a while and she’s not going to be amused by how much hair we had to cut away to stitch her scalp, but she’ll be fine after a nice long sleep. She became unconscious not just because of the head wound but through severe dehydration and lack of food. The poor girl must have been through a terrible ordeal.’

‘And Petal?’

‘She isn’t speaking at all, but that isn’t unusual for a child after a long and frightening experience, but apparently she wolfed down scrambled eggs and three glasses of milk after she’d had a bath and then threw a tantrum until we let her go in with Miss Heywood.’

‘You’ve let her stay with Molly?’ George asked.

‘Of course. After what she’s been through, the best place for her is close to someone she trusts. As I understand it, she owes her life to Miss Heywood, so we’ve put a little bed in her room for Petal.’

‘But how is she physically?’ George asked.

The doctor frowned. ‘She’s severely undernourished – her weight’s more appropriate for a four-year-old – she has a rash, possibly an allergy to something she was given in that house, and bruises, which suggest rough handling. But I’m confident that with more food, a good night’s sleep and some loving care, by tomorrow, when she wakes up beside Miss Heywood, she’ll start to open up. Now, where are you staying, young man? I believe you rode up from Somerset on a motorbike?’

‘That’s right, sir,’ George said. ‘I’ve been offered a bed for the night at the hotel where Molly works in Rye. Mr and Mrs Bridgenorth are frantic about her, so I’d better get off there now and give them the good news. But I’ll be back tomorrow. When are visiting hours?’

‘For you, anytime. She’s in a private room, of course. That makes it easier for Petal to be in there, too.’

‘I suppose Petal will have to go into care?’ George asked, his eyes prickled at the memory of those little arms around him earlier in the day. ‘She calls Molly “Auntie” but she isn’t a real aunt unfortunately, just her mother’s closest friend.’

‘Let’s not worry about anything just now. First, both of them need to get over their ordeal. You’ve been something of a hero today, too, and I’m sure you are exhausted. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

George spent the night in Molly’s bed at the hotel.

He was exhausted, but he forced himself to stay awake long enough to savour the smell of her on the sheets, to note the tidiness and the feminine touches that were so much part of what he loved about her.

Before he came to bed he had told Mr and Mrs Bridgenorth
all he knew, and Mr Bridgenorth had told him that he was going to drive up to find Charley the next morning, as he needed to be told what had happened.

It was a real blow to hear that Molly had a boyfriend and that she hadn’t told him. But, to save face, he pretended he had known and nodded as Mr Bridgenorth spoke of him.

‘We kept hoping he’d ring,’ Mrs Bridgenorth said. ‘We did send him a telegram. Clearly, he isn’t at his home or he would have responded.’

George went straight to Rye police station as soon as he’d eaten his breakfast. DI Pople hadn’t come in yet, but Sergeant Wayfield, a tall, thin man with a face like a bloodhound, was there to take his statement.

‘There isn’t much to it, really,’ said George to the sergeant. ‘I was on my way to Mulberry House when Petal ran out of the lane in distress.’ He went on to explain the rest, ending up with him following Molly’s ambulance to Hastings Hospital.

‘So how did Miss Heywood discover the child was being held at Mulberry House? And why didn’t she speak to us before she went off there?’

George went further back in the story to when Molly had found Petal’s mother dead and the child missing last June. ‘She felt the police didn’t do enough,’ he explained. ‘And I have to agree it looked that way. Anyway, Molly got it into her head that she was going to find Petal, and she didn’t divulge the small pieces of evidence she found to anyone, not even me. As far as I know, a Church Army lady who Molly had stayed with in London helped her get the job at the George, but it looks to me as if Molly must have already discovered that Cassie came from somewhere round here.

‘Anyway, a couple of days before Molly disappeared she wrote to me. She said she thought she’d tracked down Cassie’s mother, someone called Christabel Coleman, who had a daughter called Sylvia, who was the same age as Cassie, and it was rumoured she’d had a black baby. She said she was going there in the morning to see her.’

‘And how did you discover that Miss Heywood had gone missing?’

‘Mrs Bridgenorth phoned me; she found my number in Molly’s address book. She said that no one here at the nick had taken her seriously when she reported that Miss Heywood hadn’t come home, so I think she rang me in desperation. As I was on leave I came straight away, asking my mother to inform you.’

‘I sense an implication that you didn’t trust us to act immediately?’

George looked the sergeant in the eye. ‘Wouldn’t you have done the same if you were in my shoes?’

The sergeant scratched his head, but didn’t answer the question. ‘Well, it was very high-handed of you. You might have made the situation very much worse, or put yourself in danger. Thankfully, Miss Heywood was very resourceful. We found the cellar room she was kept in, and the child had been imprisoned in an attic room.’

‘All the time?’ George asked, horrified at the thought.

‘We can’t be sure one way or the other until she’s ready to talk, or one of the women does. There’s an old doctor’s surgery in the house, full of drugs and medicines, so it’s possible they gave the child something to keep her quiet. We found a pair of baby reins in the room, too, so we think they used them to walk her around the garden sometimes. She was fed
sporadically but, judging by her weight, not nearly enough. As for bathing her or washing her hair, that appears not to have been done for some weeks.’

‘But that woman is her grandmother!’ George said angrily. ‘How could she treat a child that way? And just how long was she intending to keep her like that?’

The sergeant shook his head. ‘Mrs Coleman was taken straight to an asylum. She’ll be seen by a psychiatrist and, in due course, we might have a better idea of what her intentions were. Miss Gribble may give us some answers; she is, by all accounts, devoted to Mrs Coleman. She’s something of a dragon but, it appears, not insane. Her injuries are superficial and later today she’ll be taken to Holloway Prison, where she’ll be held on remand while we ascertain the full extent of her crimes.’

‘Then, if I may, I’ll be off to see Molly and Petal. I’ll be staying another night in Rye. I’ll be at the George if you need me.’

‘Before you go, do you have an address for the Church Army lady? We might need to contact her as a character witness.’

‘She died back in winter,’ George said. ‘Just as Molly got the job here. If you need a character witness there are dozens of people back in Sawbridge who’d be happy to tell you what a good, honest person Molly is.’

‘Well, thanks for the statement,’ said Sergeant Wayfield. ‘Please pass on to Miss Heywood that we’re all hoping she’ll get well soon.’

‘I’ll thank her for doing your job for her, too, shall I?’ George asked, unable to resist making a jibe.

Wayfield looked him up and down, his mouth bent into a sneer. ‘If she’d come in here with that photo and explained to us that she felt the girl’s mother lived near here, we would have checked it out. As it happens, we’ve already found the
child’s birth registration, and her name wasn’t Petal March but Pamela Coleman. It was a home birth and the father’s name is marked as unknown, as the mother wasn’t married.’

George decided to quit while he was ahead, and said goodbye. The police here seemed to be annoyed with him for muscling in on their territory. It didn’t seem to have occurred to them that, if he hadn’t acted as he did, Molly and Petal might be dead now.