by Winona Kent
“I’m going.”
And he went.
Charlie sent herself an e-mail. Call English Heritage tomorrow. Urgent.
Then she sent herself another one. Arrange to have Reg Ferryman disembowelled. First display for the Hampshire House of Horrors.
There was no way that man was going to be allowed to dismantle the Stoneford Village Museum, with or without his distant connection to the Middlehurst Slasher.
• • •
“We’re in luck, Mr. Deeley,” Charlie said. “Josephine Quinn has put the entire family tree online.”
Mr. Deeley had paused his afternoon’s labours in the coach house and was now sitting in the comfy armchair beside the vicarage’s huge kitchen fireplace, drinking a cup of tea and reading the Sunday papers on Charlie’s iPad. After an initial reticence, followed by absolute wonder, and then, finally and very rapidly, rampant curiosity, he’d taught himself the basics of internetting.
Not bad, Charlie thought, for someone who’d arrived only a few months earlier from a time when the steam engine was just being explored as a method of transportation. And when useful electricity wouldn’t be invented for another sixty years.
“Who is Josephine Quinn?” Mr. Deeley inquired.
“She’s the wife of Samuel Quinn. Quinn Motor Services. On the High Street.”
She clicked through the pages of familial links.
“Here we are. Jemima Beckford and Cornelius Quinn. Married in January 1816 in Stoneford. And there’s Thaddeus Oliver Quinn, born on June 11th of that year. Oh.”
Mr. Deeley got up to look over Charlie’s shoulder. “What is, ‘oh’?” he inquired.
“After they moved to Middlehurst, they had three more children. Matilda, Robert, and Maurice. But Jemima died. June, 1825. Giving birth to Maurice. Look.”
Mr. Deeley looked, and the expression on his face became genuinely sad. “Oh,” he said, softly. “Indeed. Then she had been gone for only a little time, when you and I met. And I had not known.”
“How could you know?” Charlie asked, gently. “They lived in another village, eight miles away.”
“Her father might have said. William Beckford. He and I often had cause to converse. He would have attended her burial. And yet he said nothing to me.”
“Who knows why people act the way they do?” Charlie said. “Perhaps he felt it was a kindness not to. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing, to spare another’s feelings, than to say something and cause further hurt.”
Mr. Deeley didn’t reply. He walked back to the armchair, and sat for a little while, silent.
Charlie continued hunting through Josephine Quinn’s family tree. It was Maurice Quinn from whom her husband, Samuel Quinn, had descended, down through the generations.
What then of Thaddeus?
Josephine Quinn seemed to have lost interest in him, preferring instead to focus on Maurice’s family line.
Charlie went back to the website’s genealogy area and consulted the census records. A census was taken every ten years in England, starting in 1841, and the information those lists provided was invaluable for tracking elusive family members. Yes, there he was. Thaddeus, Robert, and Maurice, all still living with Cornelius in Middlehurst in 1841, although Matilda had disappeared. Married and moved away, most probably. She’d look into that later. She could see that by the time of the next census, ten years later, Robert and Maurice had also left the family home…and so had Thaddeus. Cornelius was living alone.
Charlie searched all of 1851 for a mention of Thaddeus Oliver Quinn.
Nothing.
And in 1861?
Nothing there either.
Charlie checked every census up to 1911, the last that had been released for public perusal.
There were no records of him at all.
Perhaps he’d simply wanted to avoid being counted. People could be peculiar that way. One of her own cousins had successfully avoided every census in his lifetime, yet he’d lived, quietly and happily, in splendid bachelorhood, with only his birth and death noted in official records.
Perhaps Thaddeus had died. Or left the country.
Or run away to sea.
Charlie did a worldwide search for Thaddeus Oliver Quinn, and discovered… nothing.
No marriage or death records, no passenger lists or seamanship papers. No portraits or old photographs. Nothing at all.
Charlie let her breath out.
It wasn’t as if he’d had an ordinary name. There seemed to be only one Thaddeus Oliver Quinn in existence. And, sometime between 1841 and 1851, he had disappeared from the face of the earth.
She looked up as the front door to the vicarage opened again and a woman came into the entry hall. She was dressed in a hat and coat that looked as though they’d come straight out of wartime England. She had a round, full-moon sort of face, and very red cheeks, and a haircut that made Charlie think that a hairdresser had upended a bowl on her head, and snipped all around its rim. Her expression was one of diligent inquiry.
“Hello,” Charlie said, warmly, going out to greet her. “Welcome to our little museum.”
The woman’s face burst into a smile. “Oh! Jolly good! Glad I’ve found you open. I heard all about your World War Two Blitz display and I thought to myself, ‘I must have a go.’ Any possibility of a look round?”
Charlie had to stop herself from laughing. The only adjective she could think of to describe this woman was exuberant. Her words were positively bursting from her. And, in spite of looking no more than forty, she seemed delightfully old-fashioned.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Please come this way.”
Charlie led the woman into the Blitz Room. There were displays showing the damage done by Luftwaffe bombers who’d sometimes included Stoneford in their demolition runs to nearby Southampton. Before and after photos, and what the bomb sites looked like today. Pictures and stories from the evacuees that Stoneford had taken in at the start of the war, in 1939 and 1940. Fragmented bricks, blackened by fire, and a small mound of 1940s coins, fused together by the heat of an explosion.
Next to the melted coins, by way of comparison, was a saucer filled with the real things: several little silver sixpences, a chunky thrup’nny bit, a handful of giant copper pennies and a couple of one-shilling pieces.
In one corner of the room, she’d mocked up a kitchen and furnished it with some of the things one might find in a 1940s home: a vintage gas cooker, pantry shelves, a washing-up sink, a broom and dustpan. The pantry was filled with boxes and jars and tins of food: National Dried Milk, Bird’s Custard, OXO. Cocoa and dried eggs. All of them looked quite new, largely because Charlie had created them from scratch. She’d collected empty tins and boxes and replaced their labels with ones she’d found online and run off on the museum’s colour printer.
The woman seemed very taken with Charlie’s kitchen.
“My word,” she exclaimed, examining the National Dried Milk box, “this does look familiar.”
“Really?” Charlie said.
“Oh yes. I’ve seen photos. From my grandmother’s kitchen.”
She leaned over, as if to share a very big secret.
“My grandfather was a very keen photographer, you see. Insisted on documenting everything. Including their house. And their garden. And the road they lived on. He took masses of pictures, every year of the war. I ought to donate them to something. I’m sure they’d be useful.”
“He must have been a very lucky man,” Charlie said. “I understand it was extremely difficult to get film for cameras during the war.”
The woman tapped the side of her nose.
“Black market,” she said. “Easy when you know how.”
She walked across to the other corner of the display, where Charlie had installed a bedroom. She’d created it using her own grandmother’s recollections and, indeed, some of her grandmother’s things. Charlie’s Nana Betty was notorious for never throwing anything away.
There was a double bed covered
with a deep red satin eiderdown, and a dressing table with three mirrors, and on top of the dressing table were bottles of violet scent, a silver brush and comb set, face powder and lipstick, and a pearl necklace.
Beside the bed was a big old oak wardrobe that she’d scrounged from Edwin Watts, who owned the antiques shop near the Village Green. Nana Betty had allowed Charlie to take away some skirts and blouses and a dress that she’d worn during the war. But she’d been extremely reluctant to lend her any of Charlie’s grandfather’s clothing. Pete Lewis had died in 1970 and Charlie understood Nana Betty’s feelings completely. She’d held onto all of Jeff’s things, too… his shirts and trousers, his favourite suits and ties. His two guitars—a Gretsch and a battered old Fender Strat—both stowed in their hard travelling cases and kept safe, in the spare bedroom, with his collection of CDs and his playlists… as if he might wander back one day, and want to go out gigging again.
But Nana Betty had surprised Charlie in the end and had relented, giving her a beautiful hand-knitted V-neck pullover with a Fair Isle pattern of rust, brown, yellow, green and blue: “Keep it safe, my darling. It’s one-of-a-kind. And it belonged to a man who was one-of-a-kind.”
Charlie had hung it with care in the wardrobe, supplementing it with some vintage men’s shirts and trousers and a suit jacket she’d found online.
The exuberant little woman who had come to visit the museum seemed particularly drawn to the pullover.
“My Nana donated that,” Charlie said. “She knitted it herself, during the war. Amazing to think it was all those years ago.”
“How extraordinary!” the woman exclaimed. “It is absolutely marvellous. Is she still alive?”
“Oh yes, very much so. Quite ancient, in her nineties. But my Auntie Wendy pops in to see her every day, and takes her out for a walk. Would you like to see the Anderson shelter we’ve got in the back garden? Sandbags and everything.”
“Yes, please!”
They went outside. At the bottom of the garden, Mr. Deeley, having finished his cup of tea and his perusal of the Sunday papers, had taken up his paintbrush once again and was busily coating the coach house’s nondescript grey doors with quite a lovely shade of Drawing Room Blue.
The shelter was just to the left of the coach house, dug into the earth with its back up against the garden’s brick wall. The woman observed the careful arrangement of sandbags around its entrance and admired the vegetable garden growing on its roof. And then she clambered inside to have a look at the wooden slat bunk beds.
“I must say, this is all terribly realistic-looking,” she said, climbing back out. “Kudos to whoever’s the genius responsible.”
“That would be me,” Mr. Deeley volunteered modestly.
“Well done you, then!”
“He researched it all online,” Charlie said, “and found an old abandoned shelter in someone’s back garden in Totton. We drove over in my cousin’s van and took it apart and brought it back here. Mr. Deeley dug a hole and put it all back together again using the original wartime instructions.”
“Well, it’s absolutely authentic,” the woman said.
Mr. Deeley gave a little bow. “Your kind words are most appreciated.”
“My Nana’s got one just like this in her back garden in London,” Charlie added. “She wouldn’t dig it up after the war. I think she’s quite attached to it, really. Reminds her of my grandfather. He was a pilot in the RAF.”
“Ah yes, the brave fighters up in the sky. What did he fly? A Spitfire?”
“A Spitfire,” Charlie confirmed.
“Bravo him. I’m much more fond of the Spitfires than the Hurricanes. Though they were both the absolute heroes of the war.”
She took out an old-fashioned pocket watch, the sort that Charlie had seen in photographs, and opened it.
“Gosh, look at the time. I must, with utmost apologies, take my leave. Thank you so much for the tour.”
“My pleasure,” Charlie replied.
“And mine,” Mr. Deeley added. “Please do come again.”
“I shall make every effort,” the woman promised, letting herself out through the garden gate.
• • •
After the museum had closed for the day, and while Mr. Deeley was scrubbing away the remnants of Drawing Room Blue in the shower, Charlie continued her research into Thaddeus Oliver Quinn. She’d had an idea that perhaps he’d committed some heinous crime and had, as a result, been transported.
She scanned the trial records at the Old Bailey, the prison registers, the lists of convicts packed onto ships bound for Australia.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
A tapping on her kitchen door interrupted her research. She got up to see who it was.
“Nick!”
Nick Weller was her first cousin, Auntie Wendy’s son, a physicist who lectured at Wandsworth University in London, but who spent his summers—and his term-time weekends the rest of the year—in Stoneford, where he’d grown up.
“Come in,” she said. “What brings you round at this hour?”
Nick limped into the kitchen. His right leg had been mangled in the same car accident that had killed Jeff and, as a result, he relied on a cane to help him walk.
“I’ve just had a call from Mum,” he said. “Sorry, Charlie… it’s Nana. Mum found her in bed this afternoon when she went to check on her. She’d passed away in the night.”
Charlie felt dizzy. She was prevented from falling by Mr. Deeley, who, coming downstairs after his shower, saw her legs buckle and rushed to catch her.
“It’s Nana Betty,” she said, hanging onto him. “She’s died.”
“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Deeley whispered, into her hair, as he helped her into the sitting room, and sat her down in the comfy armchair by the fire.
Nick followed, leaning on his cane.
“Was it her heart?” Charlie asked, trying not to cry.
“Very likely. Mum said she looked peaceful. As if she’d just fallen asleep and not woken up.”
“That’s all right then,” Charlie said.
Nana Betty had been physically frail, but in full possession of all her faculties, her mind still brilliant. She’d lived alone in Balham, in the little terraced house where she’d grown up.
And now, she was no more.
Her passing was not entirely unexpected. But still, it was like a punch to the stomach. You expected your Nana to live forever. You didn’t dare think about a time when she might not be there.
Charlie’s mind was racing with last memories. The last time she’d visited. The last present Nana Betty had sent her, for her birthday, a month earlier—a card-stock kit that you assembled, a perfect replica of Balham Underground Station. It was still sitting on top of the AGA, waiting to be cut out and glued together. Along with the kit, Nana had included something that had made Charlie smile. It was a fragment of white glazed pottery tile, the sort that lined the station tunnels on the Northern Line, where Balham was located. Where she’d got it from, Charlie had no idea. But it was a perfect gift, something that her Nana had known she would treasure.
The last time she’d spoken to her had been the day before yesterday, on the phone. She’d rung out of the blue, and at the end of their chat, had signed off with, “Bye-bye, my darling. God bless.”
As if she’d had a feeling. As if she’d known.
“Let me know what her doctor says?”
“I will,” Nick said. “And I’d think her funeral would be in about a week’s time. You OK?”
“Just sad,” Charlie said with a sniff. She couldn’t hold the tears off for much longer, and she was beginning to go numb. She’d felt this way before, but much, much worse, after the police had told her about Jeff.
“Perhaps I ought to put the kettle on,” Mr. Deeley offered. Charlie was still clinging to his hand.
“Yes, please,” Nick said. “I could do with a strong cup of tea myself.”
Chapter Four
Mr. Deeley had never been on a
train.
The world was just becoming aware of steam locomotion when Charlie had made his acquaintance in 1825. Railways had yet to be built. And Stoneford was never destined to be included on a main line to London, or on a branch line to anywhere else.
The nearest station to Stoneford was Middlehurst, the same Middlehurst where Jemima had gone to live with Cornelius Quinn and Thaddeus. It was a ten-minute drive north along a country road that meandered past woods and copses, golf courses and farmers’ fields, and ended just inside the southern boundary of the New Forest.
Once, encampments of gypsies had inhabited the New Forest. To both Charlie and Mr. Deeley, it had always been a mystical, magical sort of place. There were woodlands and heathlands, grassy meadows and scrubby bogs. And there were witches and fairies and ghosts, the tales of which had peppered each of their childhoods.
The railway station at Middlehurst seemed to have been painted from a picture book. Built in 1886, it featured a red brick station house with white and dark blue trim. The Victorian decorations were repeated on Platform 1, which accommodated the through services to Southampton and beyond. A scalloped wooden canopy, supported by blue and white cast iron pillars, sheltered passengers from the weather.
“Don’t go too near the edge,” Charlie warned as Mr. Deeley studied the tracks, and then the view from the platform along the tracks, first east and then west.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because you might topple over,” she said.
“And what if I should topple over, what then?” Mr. Deeley replied, teasing her. “It is a short journey down. I would not suffer an injury.”
“You would if the train was coming,” Charlie said. “You’d be run over. Or electrocuted. And then you’d be dead.”
She kept an eye on him as he wandered along the platform, fascinated by what it had to offer: a machine for dispensing tickets; another containing sweets and cold drinks; a round white passenger Help Point; bench seats and storage sheds for bicycles.
He was on his way back to where Charlie was standing when she recognized the round-faced woman who had come to the museum to look at the Blitz display. She was carrying something wrapped in what looked like a piece of old sacking, tied up with string, and she was hurrying towards Charlie.
