A Sister's Promise

by Anne Bennett

  ‘What about your family?’

  ‘Me and Mom are taking Sam to some relatives in the Cotswolds for a bit,’ Betty said. ‘They’ve been asking us to go for years.’

  ‘I’ll have to see my commanding officer too,’ Will said. ‘I may lose my job, may even be imprisoned for my part in it. Who knows? But one thing I do know is that I just can’t stand by and condone this any more. The girl’s whole family is distraught. There was a picture of her parents the following day.’

  When Molly looked at the photograph of the saddened couple, beaten down with anguish at the loss of their daughter, she felt guilt flood her being. She knew she had inflicted exactly the same pain on Tom and Nellie, Jack and Cathy, all those who had cared for her, and tears of shame seeped from her eyes and trickled down her cheeks.

  ‘Don’t cry, Molly,’ Will said, ‘I know it’s scary, but—’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Molly said. ‘It’s looking at the girl’s parents and seeing their suffering, because I have done that to my uncle and friends I had in Buncrana.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve not written to them, not once since I arrived in Birmingham.’

  ‘They probably think you are dead then,’ Will said. ‘Killed in a raid or something. You should write to them, Molly. Surely they deserve that?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Mollie said. ‘But for God’s sake, Will, how do I write an account of all that has happened to me?’

  ‘Better you do it that they read about it in the papers.’

  ‘Will this make the papers?’

  ‘It may do. A lot depends on what is happening with the war at the time.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Molly breathed. ‘I can’t risk that. I will have to give them some account of why I have been silent for two years, won’t I?’

  That question didn’t need an answer. Molly looked at Will’s face and said, ‘It will be the hardest letter I have ever written in my life.’ But she knew in her heart of hearts it had to be done.

  Inspector Norton – Molly had insisted that it had to be Norton they told first – listened to the tale Will and Molly told him with open-mouthed incredulity, especially when Will explained how he had rescued Molly and then hid her for some weeks. Norton had known that Molly had kept something back about the attack, and learned now she had done it to protect William Baker and his family, and no wonder after all he had risked on her behalf. He didn’t doubt a word of what either said. Molly’s account was told so matter-of-factly, her eyes fixed on the rain lashing the windows, though Norton saw the terrible memories lurking behind her eyes.

  He knew the man and woman in front of him probably had no idea that they had handed him the golden egg. He had been after the gang for some time, had a dossier already prepared, but he had never found anyone brave enough to speak out before.

  And then, as if Molly had guessed the inspector’s thoughts, she said, ‘We are putting ourselves at great risk telling you these things, and the one I worry about most in all this is my brother, Kevin.’

  ‘Would it be possible for him to live elsewhere for a few weeks?’ the inspector asked.

  ‘Inspector, I have just had him back from the Cottage Homes. I can’t send him away again,’ Molly said emphatically. ‘He would never forgive me, and likely refuse to go anyway.’

  ‘Has he friends?’

  ‘Well, yes, but with me working and all I don’t know who they are, and nothing about their families. Oh,’ she said suddenly, ‘he does go to Scouts. He loves that.’

  ‘Maybe the Scout leader could take him on for a while?’

  ‘I don’t know him either.’

  ‘Leave that to me,’ the inspector said. ‘You just prepare Kevin.’

  ‘I just don’t know where to start telling all this to a young boy.’

  ‘I prefer you not to tell him anything. Nor anyone else either. I would prefer no whisper of this to get out.’

  ‘My commanding officer needed to know,’ Will said.

  ‘Yes, of course, but these people are used to keeping mum about things. Have you told anyone, Miss Maguire?’

  ‘No, not a soul,’ Molly said. ‘I did start writing a letter to my family and friends in Ireland, but gave up. It was just so difficult to explain.’

  ‘Keep it that way,’ Norton advised. ‘Baker, haven’t you a wife and child?’

  ‘Yes, sir, but they are well out of this in the Cotswolds.’

  ‘Good man. As for yourself …?’

  ‘I’m all right, sir. I will keep my wits about me.’

  ‘Wits are little defence against a couple of men jumping you, as they did Miss Maguire, or a gun shot in your chest,’ Norton said. ‘Now, Miss Maguire is to have a police bodyguard and—’

  ‘Am I?’ Molly said in surprise. ‘Is that really necessary?’

  ‘I think so,’ the inspector said grimly. ‘And as for you, Baker, I would like you to stay at the camp for now.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Course you can. I will talk with whoever I need to to get this organised. Look,’ he said to them both, ‘I don’t think you realise the importance and implications of this case. You are star witnesses and without either one of you, the case might fall apart and put the life of the other person on the line.’

  ‘And when it is all over,’ Will said, ‘will you come for me? Will I get into trouble for my part in this?’

  ‘That depends on the chief superintendent,’ Norton said. ‘But I will put in an application that no action is taken. Yes, you should have come forward earlier but you have explained how hard it was to leave the man’s employ once engaged, and you are risking all coming to us now. Then, it would have been your word against his. Because of your rescue of Miss Maguire and co-operating with the police now, as long as the two of you do as you are told and we keep you safe till the trial, we are virtually guaranteed a conviction of this man and his many associates that we have wanted to nail for years. That has got to go in your favour.’

  ‘So you are hopeful that there will be no charge?’ Will asked, hardly daring to hope that he might be able just to walk away from this.

  ‘Hopeful, but I can make no promises,’ Norton said, and with that Will had to be content.

  ‘Why don’t you just go and arrest them all now?’ Will asked Inspector Norton a few days later when he called at the camp to see him and Molly and check how they were.

  ‘All in good time,’ Norton said. ‘And while you know your side of things, there is a big organisation involved here – big money and influence – and we want to catch them all in the one swoop. They are all under surveillance, but we can’t risk moving too soon and alerting the others to disappear. Not only might we fail to take in the ringleaders, but your lives would then be in severe danger.’

  Molly shivered and said, ‘I want to get my life back on track as much as you do, Will, but I can’t bear the thought of anyone involved in this business getting away with it, and to be honest I am fed up to the back teeth with looking over my shoulder every five minutes.’

  ‘How is Kevin bearing up to it?’ Norton asked.

  ‘He is fine,’ Molly said. ‘I don’t know what you said, but both he and the scoutmaster think that I am working undercover for something to do with the war effort, and in a way he is delighted to be associated in any capacity.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Norton said with a smile. ‘I was just very vague and they assumed the rest.’

  ‘Well, whatever you said it worked. Kevin is in this for as long as it takes. In fact, he’s far more patient than I am.’

  However, neither of them had to wait much longer because it was less than a week later that a jubilant inspector came and told them that the swoop had been successful and all the people had been apprehended, charged and were now in police custody. ‘And, what’s more, the girl is safe,’ he said.

  ‘I am glad of that,’ Molly said. ‘It’s more than I hoped for. Can we tell people now? I don’t mean put it over the public a
ddress system or anything, but there are people close to me, namely Daisy, who you will remember, and Lynne, who I was in hospital with, and Helen, her mother, who has been so kind to me. They know that I am hiding something from them and can’t understand why.’

  ‘I don’t see that there should be any problem with that,’ the inspector said. ‘Tell them to keep it all under wraps for now, though.’

  ‘You might even be able to get those letters written to Ireland,’ Will commented when the policeman had gone.

  ‘Maybe,’ Molly answered shortly. ‘But first things first.’

  Molly came into the room with the tray of tea and looked at Daisy, Helen and Lynne, sitting together on the settee as if assembled at the end of a Miss Marple mystery. They were intrigued, not sure why Molly had summoned them, and Molly herself was terribly nervous, for she knew she had to tell them things she would rather not even think about.

  But then she knew she soon would have to do that in a court of law and so she cleared her throat and said, ‘I am sorry that I had to ask you here tonight, but I have something to say that might surprise, shock you even, something that concerns me. I have broken my silence now, partly because of this young girl here.’ She took up the newspaper Will had given her, recounting the story of the missing schoolgirl, Christine Naylor.

  ‘I remember that case,’ Helen said. ‘I remember feeling for her mother.’

  ‘Christine has been found alive and well,’ Molly said, ‘but she might not have been and I might not have been either. I would like to tell you what happened to me when arrived at New Street Station in November two years ago.’

  As she began her tale, a hush fell and the women and girl listened horrified to the terrifying things that had happened to Molly.

  When she got to the incident with Collingsworth, how she had scuppered his plans and rendered him unconscious before tipping him down the stairs, Daisy burst out, ‘Good for you, Molly.’

  ‘I thought I had killed him, Daisy.’

  ‘No loss if you had, I’d say.’

  ‘No court in the land would agree with that.’

  ‘They couldn’t blame you, though,’ Lynne said.

  ‘They could, Lynne,’ Molly said. ‘He was a powerful and influential man. Take it from me, if I had succeeded in killing Collingsworth, I would have hanged for it.’

  That shocked the women into silence again as Molly went on to describe Will Baker’s intervention and then the way he had rescued her and hidden her as Collingsworth had issued a vendetta against her.

  ‘So the attack …’ Daisy began.

  ‘Were thugs employed by Collingsworth, I would imagine, though I didn’t really see their faces any more than you did,’ Molly said. ‘I didn’t tell the police, because it would have implicated Will and his family. I’m sure you understand why I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘I do indeed,’ Helen said. ‘Do you know where this man is now?’

  ‘That’s just it,’ Molly said. ‘He is on the air base. When he was told I had been killed he was sickened and he applied to the army for a desk job, which they had already offered him after he was invalided out of active service following Dunkirk. To be recalled by the Forces was the only safe way to leave Collingsworth’s employ. He was given a desk job at St George’s barracks and just a few weeks ago he was seconded here. It was such a shock seeing him, I’ll tell you.’

  Helen smiled and remembered her son coming to see her to tell her that Molly had got someone special in her life after all.

  Helen had looked at her son’s doleful face. So that’s it, she thought, he is sweet on her after all, and she had said, ‘I don’t think so. She would surely have told me.’

  ‘Mother, she was hugging and kissing this man as if her life depended on it,’ Mark had replied glumly. ‘This is a girl that never lets a man anywhere near her. To tell you the truth, I was plucking up the courage to ask her out myself. Obviously I have dithered too long. Serves me bloody right, I suppose.’

  Now the matter was cleared up Helen thought for she was certain that the man Mark had seen hugging Molly was this Will.

  She was more certain of this when Molly went on, ‘When Christine went missing and we knew that Ray and Charlie were involved with her disappearance because Will’s wife saw them with the girl, we knew we had to go to the police and tell them what we knew.’

  So this Will was married, Helen thought. That puts Molly right out of the frame, I would say, because she appears too honest to begin any sort of relationship with a married man.

  ‘I know you don’t want this shouted from the rooftops, as it were,’ Helen said, ‘but would you mind awfully if I was to tell Mark?’

  Yes, Molly did mind. She particularly didn’t want the one man she cared so much about to hear what had happened to her, dreaded to see the disgust in his eyes. However, she knew she couldn’t protect him from any of it. Inspector Norton said that the trial would be too big to hope to keep it from the papers, and Molly knew they could put any slant they liked on it. Far better, surely, to hear it from Helen.

  So she said, ‘Tell him by all means, if you want to. After all, it will be public knowledge before long.’

  ‘So what comes next?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘A trial to see if we can get them locked up for a good long time, with Will and I as witnesses.’

  ‘Oh, my dear! Won’t you be terribly scared?’

  ‘No, Helen,’ said Molly. ‘I will be bloody terrified, but it is something that has to be done.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The trial was set for Friday 6 November. Molly was surprised at the speed, for in her limited experience anything to do with legal matters went ponderously slowly. When she said this to Inspector Norton, however, he said that though that was usually the case, in this instance they had been collecting data on Collingsworth and his nefarious dealings and those who worked for him for some time. Speed was also essential, he went on to say, when the safety of the witnesses was at stake.

  Molly knew she had to tell Kevin something, but in view of his age, she thought there was plenty of time for him to learn about prostitutes and drugs, and so the version she told him was extremely potted, saying only that she arrived in the middle of an air raid and let him assume that it had been one of the raids in the early part of 1941. She went on to say that she had accepted the offer of accommodation from two strangers who had been so kind to her in the air raid. However, she soon realised they were not good men at all and were up to all sorts of illegal things, and so she had left them and gone to stay with Will’s mother-inlaw, just before she had set out to look for him.

  Kevin, however, was no fool. He said, ‘Was all this anything to do with why you were attacked?’

  Molly nodded. ‘Yes. But I really didn’t see their faces in the blackout, so I would never be able to identify them.

  There seemed little point then in telling the police. I was sort of hiding out at the hotel because I knew they hadn’t wanted me to leave, because they were afraid I would go to the police, but I could never do that, because it might have implicated Will and his family.’

  Kevin remembered the quietly spoken man who had come to Sunday lunch a few weeks before, and his wife and motherin-law and the little baby.

  Molly went on, ‘See, Kevin, these people don’t operate under the same rules as everyone else. They tend to take the law into their own hands as they did with me, and I couldn’t risk any harm coming to the people who had taken a risk to help me. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘Course,’ Kevin said. ‘We have a few bullies at our school who go on like that. They leave me alone, like, but I have seen them in action. But the men who hurt you, the police know who they are now?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Molly said. ‘That’s why I have to go to court.’

  ‘That’s why I was sent to live with the scoutmaster, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Molly said. ‘And I wasn’t able tell you or anyone until all the men had been arrested in case
word slipped out and they were alerted in some way.’

  Molly was glad Kevin seemed satisfied with her answer, but she knew those in Ireland wouldn’t be so easy to fob off. She wondered if Will was right, and they thought her dead. She was glad they now would know she wasn’t, though in her bleaker moments she did wonder if they would prefer her to be dead to behaving in the depraved way she had.

  Because Molly hadn’t been in touch with those in Ireland, she wasn’t aware that Hilda Mason was not dead. In fact, just a few months after Molly had arrived in Birmingham, Hilda had recovered sufficiently from the heart attack to be allowed home, and she joined her husband at her daughter’s place in Perry Common. Shopping in nearby Erdington Village, she met Nancy Hewitt, who had no idea Hilda had survived. Nancy told Hilda that Molly Maguire came a few days before, enquiring about her grandfather and Kevin.

  Hilda’s mouth dropped open. ‘Are you sure it was Molly?’ she asked.

  ‘Course I am,’ Nancy said. ‘D’you think I wouldn’t know Molly? I tell you, she was here, large as life. She hadn’t changed that much, and for all she is older, she isn’t much bigger, and proper cut up about the old man and then finding that Kevin had had to be sent to an orphanage. I told her what I knew, and that Kevin was likely to be sent to Erdington Cottage Homes, if they had room for him, and she said she would try to find him there first, but I haven’t seen hide nor hair of her since.’

  And neither had Hilda, although she had searched high and low. The superintendent at Erdington Cottage Homes wouldn’t even tell her whether they had a Kevin Maguire on their books, never mind let her see him, as she could claim to be no blood relation. She had the same response from the Josiah Mason’s Orphanage on Orphanage Road, and the Princess Alice Home at the end of Jockey Road in Sutton Coldfield.

  In the end, feeling that perhaps Molly had taken the child back to Ireland, Hilda had contacted Tom and Nellie to ask for information, and was horrified to learn Molly had not been in touch with them at all. Those in Ireland were pleased that she had not been killed in the raids as they had thought, but that had been a while ago and there had been raids aplenty after February 1941 that she could have been caught in, because it was as if Molly and Kevin had disappeared into thin air.