“And what am I supposed to do while yer off telling yer lies?”
“Careful, Stanley.” A hand fell on my shoulder, like the weight o’ the world. “Think of that hangman’s rope squashing your throat. Cutting off your air.”
“So, what do I do?”
“Like I said, it’s our duty. It’d be quick and quiet. Only you and me would ever know. Besides, you need money. All yours was stolen, wasn’t it?”
“True enough. But where am I to do this work? How? I don’t understand.”
“Never mind that now. But realise this, they’d be happy to see you swing. Every last one.”
The forest had become too dark, too choking. Its trees too close together. Me queasy gut were pushing stuff up me neck. Me throat. Sour, stinging.
Panic.
“Not Mollie though?”
“Sorry?”
“She’s only twelve.”
“Thirteen, to be exact.”
How did he know that?
“There’s nothing wrong with ‘er. I can prove it.”
“I see.”
“What do that mean?”
‘E eyed me like Lord Helvin eyed warmin.
“I saw you two together with the brother. You couldn’t take your lecherous eyes off her. Nor she off you. Well,” he added, pushing ‘is way back to the police van, “if you behave yourself, she can be your little reward. How about that?”
“And Ma and Pa?”
“You seen their eyes? Their noses? He can hardly breathe. So yes, why not?”
Just the way ‘e said that made me realise what I’d sensed before. This giant of a man, although without the red stubble and thatch of light-coloured hair I’d first seen, were the same one whose five florins was filched from me at Felixstowe. Payment for me betrayal.
Don’t let him know…
“Let’s get going, then,” he said.
“Where to?”
“You’ll soon find out.”
61. SARAH.
Tuesday 14th December 1920. 5.30 p.m.
With a subdued and anxious Buck safely tucked up in bed in the room named ‘Summer’ at the back of Vesper House, I lay back on a metal bed used for examinations in another less warm room marked STRICTLY PRIVATE. The inside of the door bore a list of intructions on hygene, signed by the Reverend Henry Beecham and Dr. Lovell himself. I had wondered why there’d been no matron’s signature or why no-one in that role had yet appeared, but other, more important matters were afoot.
Namely, the shot of painkiller in the small of my back.
“You shouldn’t feel much at all after a minute or two,” Dr. Lovell said, withdrawing the needle, leaving the faint whiff of something like chloroform in the air. “Possibly a faint sucking sensation during the procedure, and when it’s over, I’ll wheel you into the room next to your son to recover. Nobody will need to know what’s happened. I’m doing this for your sake, Sarah, and dare I say it, for your unborn child whatever its origins.” He pushed his thin, gold specatcles further up his nose. “You’re under a death sentence. You cannot fight this pernicious disease if you are pregnant, and should you become well again, as I pray you will, any lingering guilt on your part should be allayed by knowing that your womb was never a safe place.”
Never a safe place.
I shivered, pulling up the thin blanket to cover my breasts, aware that the coal fire which at first had given off some warmth, was now on the wane.
“Thank you,” was all I could say. My religion and upbringing had been excluded from this decision, and while recent months had passed, found no-one to offer the smallest hope that one day our family might be as one.
*
The doctor lowered the blinds on the wintry darkness outside, where snow had begun to fall, and checked again that the door was locked. “Relax now, Sarah,” he said, lifting that same blanket to expose what lay between the tops of my thighs. “Just let your knees fall apart.”
Our Father which art in Heaven…
His fingers were soon inside me and both he and and his plain surroundings began to blur. I was back again in that winter of 1912, in the barn behind Oak Leaf Cottage. A secret place while the village children were at school and Will was out somewhere all the hours God gave, doing what he liked the best, with rarely a spare moment to talk to me or even touch me like he’d done when we’d been at Iwerne Minster.
Nevertheless, he was still to me then, the most handsome man in Hampshire, often turning other women’s heads on market days or at the Forest stock sales. And I always felt things would improve once we’d had a child. A common bond. Perhaps keeping him closer to the hearth. Perhaps…
Those fingers slipped out of me and I heard the tug and squeak of rubber from skin. Dr. Lovell’s gloves coming off.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. “Any discomfort?”
“Only in my conscience.”
“There seems to be some damage to the entrance to your cervix. You’ve not been trying to get rid yourself, have you?”
“He raped me. Remember?”
“Who?”
I turned away.”
“Can I trust you?”
“With your life. But have you forgotten what you told me about him?” The doctor’s tone had changed. He stood over me, coal shovel in his ungloved hand as I closed my legs. “How he could destroy your family. Even take Mollie away because as her father, he has certain rights.”
Why did I feel nothing as he said that? Just a complete hollowness.
“No,” was all I could say.
*
“It’s time,” he said, several minutes later. “Are you ready?”
“Is Buck alright?”
“Sleeping like a lamb. I’ve given him a soupçon of laudanum to relax his lungs. So, don’t worry. His last words before falling asleep were, ‘I do so love my Mummy.’
With that, he slid his fingers into a new pair of gloves and unravelled a coil of rubber hose with what appeared to be a shiny metal scoop at one end. “Keep your legs apart, and again relax. The more relaxed you are, the quicker this will be. Deep breaths now…”
Hallowed be they Name, thine Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven…
I was a murderess, and yes, what if Matthew Crane should discover Mollie was his and that I’d fallen pregnant a second time? I prayed Doctor Lovell was able to keep our terrible secret.
“After ten seconds, all will be over,” he said, placing a grey metal canister on the bed and gently kept my knees apart.
Deliver us from evil, for thine is the Kingdom…
“This shouldn’t hurt,” he said, easing that hard, cold metal inside me, which seemed to expand until a dull ache took hold, intensifying then lessening with a gentle ‘pop.’
Father forgive me.
And at that very moment, when Matthew Crane’s second daughter - yes, Doctor Lovell recognised my bloodied leavings as being those of a girl - was being consigned to oblivion, there came an impatient knock at the door.
*
Buck.
Still knocking and repeating his question. “Can I go out and make a snowman now? Please!”
“Indeed not! Go back to bed.” Snapped the doctor, busy washing the instruments he’d used in the sink.
“What harm can it do?” I whispered, aware of a sudden flow of lumpy blood leaving my body. “He’s just a little lad.”
Doctor Lovell dried his hands and went over to the door. Without unlocking it, said to Buck, “your mother says yes. But I have my doubts.”
“You can go out only on condition you get yourself properly dressed,” I said with a feeble voice, “and stay near the house where we can see you from this window. Promise?”
“I will.”
“But how can we see him?” complained the doctor. “We must keep these curtains drawn.”
“I’ll keep a look out through a tiny chink. Will that be alright?”
But by then, almost immediately, a looming sense of another loss seemed
to follow those eager, fading footsteps.
*
I tried sitting up but couldn’t, whereupon the doctor urged me to lie still.
“I did say I might move you next to his room, but you could bleed even more, and we need you to recover quickly. If the Bishop discovered what I’d done, there’d be serious repercussions for not only myself but you and your whole family.”
A deep cold reached my bones.
“What do you mean?”
“Abortions are illegal. Worse, that your foetus was five months old and just one month short of its ability to survive unaided. As for your leprosy, the Reverend Beecham would never let you and Buck stay here to receive the medication you both need. The Church has admitted it’s struggling daily to keep its few specialist hospitals open. As for me, I could be struck off the British Medical Association, with no means of earning a living or receiving a pension. Not that this would matter, given my condition…”
“I’m terribly sorry.”
“My choice, so let’s forget it. But I could try to get you and Buck seen to somewhere else. The three remaining hospitals aren’t full and many war survivors who brought back diseases such as malaria, bilharzia, the tapeworm, even leprosy, have since died.”
“Thank you.”
“Trust me.”
“I will. By the way, did Stanley Bulling ever receive any kind of treatment?”
The doctor shook his head, looking suddenly older. His mouth twitching as if on words he couldn’t utter.
“No, the murderer. Every time I tried, he got away.”
A bolt of fear made me rear up. This time he didn’t stop me. Blood or no blood.
“Not only has he deliberately infected all of you and his parents…”
I blinked.
“His parents?”
“Didn’t you see their runny noses, their half-closed eyes earlier on?”
“No. They were too far away.”
“I’m sure he wants Wombwell Farm once they’re dead. But he could go first. At the end of a rope.”
“Where s he now?”
“Maybe still in Holland, as all Mrs. Myers’ savings which the police believe he stole before killing her, have just surfaced in a village near Amsterdam. But there’s also evidence that the liberty button you so helpfully gave me, has traces of a particular pig’s faeces beneath the remains of a thread left in the middle. Traces which match a sample of dried human faeces found in Wombwell Farm’s outside lavatory. This suggests a particular pig had been consumed by…”
Bessie…
“Stop, please!” I pleaded. “This is too terrible.”
“Indeed. And Susan Deakins was a lovely child. Only thirteen years old.”
Mollie, too…
Her face a blur, yet still a part of me, drifting away like her newly-dead sister.
*
“Why her?” I then asked but didn’t need to. Half-dressed, I tried to stand and failed. The third time, Doctor Lovell took my arms to steady me, but instead of guiding me towards the chair for the rest of my clothes and my coat, brought me closer. Trembling, his breath came in short gasps as he buried his face in my neck. Pressed his body so close his desire hardened against my thigh.
“Sarah, listen, I’ve loved you from the moment I first saw you. But everything I’ve ever loved in my life has been taken away. Which is why I often feel as if I’m cursed. And I am, thanks to Stanley Bulling. But perhaps we could, you know, make something of the time we have left? What do you think?”
Through misted-up spectacle lenses, he looked into my eyes. That intense moment had so taken me aback I could only nod, seeing how at the same time, the large clock on the wall showed six o’clock. Buck should be coming indoors soon. Only then did I remember my promise to check on him through the curtain.
62. JOHN.
Wednesday 16th November 1988. 2.30 a.m.
Not Wenhaston, then. Perhaps never. Instead, accompanied by my beery companion I headed west into worsening weather towards Wombwell Farm. A place mentioned in one of Doctor Lovell’s begging letters that I should have visited earlier, despite Rosemary Harding’s dismissal of it as a burnt-out ruin.
“Feeling a bit more chipper?” asked my passenger, who’d spent the past half hour re-living the worst bits of his short-lived marriage and fretting that vandals would target his cherished but abandoned Cortina.
“I am, and hopefully, this won’t take long. Don’t worry about your wheels. They’re right out of fashion, but as for your wife, try and meet her halfway.”
Morris wasn’t impressed.
“I think I prefer you comatose. But seriously, that was some hit you took.”
“Not the first, and hopefully the last.” I then recounted Stephen Vickers’ crazed moment at Tidswell station.
“Professor Vickers? You are joking?”
“I’m not.” Seeing my wipers in a losing battle and trying to ignore my pulsing headache. “I suspect Chisholm was breathing down his neck.”
“Why?”
“That black box file. Why else did Catherine take it, if not for him? I’m still kicking myself for entrusting her with it.”
“Show me a cop who’s nor fucked up at some point.”
“At least I kept one of those threats, so forensics can take a look.”
“Good man. Look, meant to say, the moment you’d mentioned Pajeros, I got hold of a DVLC contact on the night shift there, to confirm a George Frederick Chisholm of Braythorne, Suffolk, had registered a new model six months ago. Talk about pulling bloody teeth, mind. Avril Lockley was up for me doing it, but not her Supertwat Elliot. I’m persona non grata at HQ, remember?”
“Why I chucked my job in.” I glanced his way. Saw raw bitterness in his eyes. “Anything else?”
“Nothing to lose, so I did some more side-stepping. Jeff Ridley from the ARU - you met him at that church - he’s got two other guys on board. I was hoping for a radio until he reminded me he’d got a wife and kids. Anyway, I passed on your hunch about a possible knees-up at Wombwell Farm, so, bring it on.”
The rain had become a thick veil across the windscreen. I slowed to a crawl, sensing the tyres drifting on the wet tarmac.
“My shout when this is all over. OK?” he added.
“Not when. If.” I glanced at the one who, despite his own problems, hadn’t let me down. “We’ve still too many unanswered questions.”
*
Sudden spray from a truck in front, blanked my windscreen, while a buffeting gale force wind made it hard to steer. For a second, I envisaged my new fireplace and grate, complete with its impressively realistic looking coals, waiting to be switched on. Then guiltily, Stephen Vickers. Where in God’s name was he in all this? Threatened by his superior? Scared enough to put me off my stride? Scared even of his own wife?
Nicholas Beecham, certain never to be canonized, had ended his own life in a most dreadful way, and she’d not seemed too concerned about that. Had she even played a part? And what about Melanie Cox’s sighting of her and Piotr at Braythorne? Also, George Chisholm’s forceful ‘ask her in the car’ response when the going had got a bit too tough?
At least while in Catherine’s unpredictable company, I’d kept my doubts about her to myself. Whether that would pay off remained to be seen, but all this, and our recent visit to the hospital afterwards, was what Morris and I discussed while facing nature’s onslaught along a straight, hedgeless road that sliced through the flattest, bleakest landscape I’d ever seen.
“Apart from ‘King George’s’ other antics, his performance in Spinney Close and before you came to the rescue, could bang him up good and proper,” I said finally.
“Double figures if the judge is feeling generous.”
“Here’s to that, and by the way, I’ve been putting two and two together, plus a hunch.”
“Go on?
“May be worth checking his back story more thoroughly. Why he’s ended up here in the middle of bloody nowhere.”
A sign for Diss
came and went, but I barely noticed.
“So? I’m not with you.”
“Where was he before the move? Catherine Vickers wouldn’t say. And what’s this?”
I slowed down, clicked on the interior light again to let my companion who was marginally more compos mentis, see the back of that young woman’s photograph. His nose almost touched it.
“Kings College, London,” I said. “1980.”
“Bugger me.” Morris checked his watch and frowned. “Who might be there at this time of night?”
“Damn! See that?”
I braked hard. The truck in front of us suddenly turned off to the right into an unmarked lane and immediately something struck the windscreen. At first, I thought stone, but not when blood appeared from a black, feathered shape half-trapped by my wipers.
I pulled over, kept the engine running while I tried to free the creature’s legs. A crow, still alive with eyes half-closed, but clearly beyond rescue. Nothing else for it but to consign it to the verge where its pitiful last croaks soon faded to nothing. Seeing its open beak lit up by my nearside headlight, I suddenly sensed the chilling significance of what was to come.
“I couldn’t have done that,” said Morris, “but then you never were squeamish.”
Normally, I’d have smiled.
“I need to toughen up. Stop letting Mrs. Bitch mess with my head.”
“You’re a good bloke, Connor. Just hang on in there. And if we nail this case, that’ll be a big feather in your cap.”
“Thanks, but…”
“No buts.”
Before driving off, I extracted my cell phone from my glove box, dialled Directory Enquiries and asked for that university’s main number.
“Good luck,” Morris muttered. “But don’t hold your breath.”
I didn’t but was surprised when a man’s voice - possibly African - answered on the second ring and asked my business.
“Ex-DI John Lyon from Nottingham CID calling, “I said. “And sorry it’s so late, but I’m dealing with an urgent situation regarding a Doctor George Chisholm. Does that name ring any bells?”
“Sure. He was my tutor here,” said the man proudly. “Head of the History Department till 1985. Good bloke. Used to bring a glass of wine to our lectures. And a few bottles for us at the end of term. What’s up?”
Ghosts from the Past Page 110
