Heartbreak and Happiness

by Rosie Harris

  Instead, she reached in and pulled the clothes out and held up the blue boiler suit. ‘This is what Cindy always wore when she came to help Dad with the pigs. She put it on over her day clothes to protect them while she was dishing out the feed or mucking out their sty.’

  ‘And the rubber boots?’

  ‘She wore those instead of her shoes because it was often mucky in the pigs’ pen, especially if it had been a hot day and Dad had filled up the big old sink he kept in there with water so they could slosh around and cool off. As you probably know, pigs don’t like getting too hot and they can easily get sunburned when it’s a very hot day.’

  ‘Heavens! You seem to know a great deal about pigs,’ he said admiringly. ‘All I know about them is how to butcher them.’

  ‘I had a very special little pig called Moses,’ Rebecca told him. ‘He was the runt of Molly’s first litter and I raised him and he became a pet.’

  ‘Really!’ Nick gave an amused smile.

  ‘Cindy had a pet lamb called Snowy and we used to take the two of them for walks. After I went to university, either Cindy or her brother Jake came up each evening after finishing work and took Moses for a walk.’

  Nick looked grave. ‘I think we ought to take these clothes back to her family, don’t you?’ He paused and frowned. ‘Unless the police have been told she is missing. In which case we ought to leave them here and inform the police, so they can search the area and inside the bole of that tree to see if there are any other clues.’

  Sixteen

  Sandra Peterson couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw the bundle of clothes that Rebecca brought into the shop and placed on the small desk in the office.

  ‘You say you found them in a hollow tree trunk and they belong to Cindy?’ she said with a frown.

  ‘That’s right, Mum. That old hollow oak up in the woods, the one where Cindy and I used to hide when we played hide-and-seek.’

  ‘I know the one you mean, but why would Cindy leave clothes hidden in there? Are you quite sure they’re hers?’

  ‘Of course they are, they’re the ones she changed into when she came to help with the pigs.’

  Sandra Peterson stared at them more closely. ‘I think you’re right,’ she agreed. ‘What are you going to do with them?’

  ‘I’m not too sure. I thought I’d better take them up to the farm and give them to Mrs Mason.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Her mother sighed heavily. ‘I think this will raise all sorts of questions from Tom and Mavis, though. Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘Would you, Mum? I’d feel happier if you did in case she gets all upset. I wouldn’t know what to say.’

  Sandra hesitated for a moment then she said, ‘Very well, we’ll do it as soon as I close up tonight, before we go home.’

  ‘I’ll lock up for you, Mrs Peterson, if you want to go up there right away,’ Nick offered.

  ‘Would you, Nick? That would be very helpful. Enjoy your weekend at home and I’ll see you again next week.

  ‘By the way,’ she added, ‘I haven’t asked you if you enjoyed your tour of the neighbourhood?’

  ‘I most certainly did. Rebecca made it extremely interesting. There’s far more to see in and around Shelston than I’d imagined.’

  Sandra smiled. ‘Good. Well, if you will put the blind down and lock up I’ll see you bright and early on Monday morning.’

  ‘No problem.’ He turned and held out a hand to Rebecca. ‘Thank you, Rebecca, for a very interesting afternoon. I hope we’ll see each other again some time.’

  As they walked up to the Masons’ farm, Sandra carrying a carrier bag containing the clothes that Rebecca had found in the tree, she commented, ‘Nick Blakemore’s a nice young man, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, very nice,’ Rebecca agreed. ‘How long is he planning to work for you?’

  ‘As far as I know, it will only be until your dad gets home again. Nick has certainly been a great help but I don’t think we could afford to hire him permanently, even if we wanted to. Anyway, I imagine he wants to find himself a better job than we are able to offer him.’

  When they reached the farm, they met Mavis crossing the yard. She greeted them coolly. ‘I can’t stand here talking, I’m just off to help with the milking,’ she announced.

  ‘We won’t keep you a moment, but we thought we ought to bring you these,’ Sandra said as she held the carrier bag out to her.

  Mavis took the bag and her face creased into a frown as she looked inside it. Then she let out a strangled gasp. The colour drained from her face and she asked in an accusing tone, ‘Where did you get these?’

  ‘Rebecca was out for a walk this afternoon and she found them in the old hollow tree in the woods by us. She recognized them as belonging to Cindy.’

  ‘Of course they’re Cindy’s. They’re what she always wore when she came to help your Bill with those damn pigs.’

  ‘That’s what we both thought,’ Sandra agreed.

  ‘You say you found them in the woods?’ she asked, looking directly at Rebecca.

  ‘That’s right. Rolled up and stowed away inside the old hollow tree. You know the one I mean, Mrs Mason. There’s a huge hole in the bole and when Cindy and I were small we used to hide inside it.’

  ‘Oh, I know which one you mean. But how did our Cindy’s clothes get in there?’

  ‘We’ve no idea,’ Sandra said, shaking her head.

  ‘Haven’t you?’ Mavis Mason placed her hands on her hips. Her stocky figure looked as if it was braced for a fight. ‘Are you quite sure you don’t know the answer?’

  ‘We haven’t any idea,’ Sandra repeated.

  ‘I don’t believe you! So you’d better explain, because my Cindy certainly isn’t here to answer, as you well know.’

  Her voice quivered and her shoulders shook, and she looked as if she was going to collapse.

  Sandra stepped forward to put an arm around Mavis’s shoulder, but she pushed her away roughly.

  ‘Don’t you dare touch me!’ she screamed. ‘You know what’s happened to my girl and I want the truth, and I want it right now.’

  The sound of her raised voice carried across the farmyard and Tom Mason appeared from the milking shed to see what all the commotion was about.

  ‘Hello, Sandra. Hello, Rebecca,’ he said quietly. Then looking at his wife and seeing how distraught she was, he asked ‘What’s going on, why the raised voices?’

  Choking with anger, Mavis held out the bag of clothes towards him. ‘Look for yourself!’

  For a moment he peered into the bag as if uncertain about what he was expected to find. Then with a quick intake of breath he pulled out the blue boiler suit.

  ‘That’s our Cindy’s!’ he exclaimed in astonishment. ‘Did she leave it somewhere up at your place?’ he asked, looking from Sandra to Rebecca with a puzzled look on his face.

  ‘No! Rebecca found it, together with her boots, hidden in a hollow tree in the woods.’ Mavis said quickly. ‘How did they get there? That’s what I want to know.’ She looked directly at Sandra. ‘She knows more than she’s saying. I reckon she’s got a guilty conscience, that’s why she’s brought them back up here.’

  ‘Hold on, Mavis, I wasn’t the one who found them!’

  ‘No? I bet you know how they got there, though.’

  Mavis’s voice was strident and accusing, and her lips were pulled back in a sneer that made her normally placid round face look menacing.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ Sandra asked sharply.

  ‘Collusion, that’s what I mean. Collusion between you and your daughter. And probably that fancy man you’ve moved in with you as well, for all I know. You should be ashamed of yourselves, the lot of you. I think we should go to the police and tell them what we suspect, Tom,’ she said, turning to her husband.

  ‘Exactly what do you suspect?’ Sandra asked without raising her voice.

  ‘That you and your lot have done away with our daughter. Murdered her in cold blood and then f
ed her body to the pigs that your Bill sold at market.’

  ‘You’re off your head!’ Sandra protested.

  ‘Then why has your husband scarpered?’ Mavis asked in a shaking voice as the tears coursed down her cheeks.

  ‘Come, come,’ Tom put an arm round his wife’s shoulders. ‘Don’t take on so, my love. We’ve no proof and you shouldn’t be saying such things.’

  ‘Then where is our Cindy and where is Bill Peterson?’ Mavis sobbed. ‘Both of them vanished without a trace. Has she gone away with him as well?’ Her face contorted with anguish, Mavis pointed an accusing finger at Sandra.

  ‘My dad hasn’t vanished, Mrs Mason!’ Rebecca exclaimed. ‘Tell them, Mum. He’s with granny, because she’s dying.’

  ‘What?’ Tom and Mavis both spoke together.

  ‘Bill is at his mother’s bedside. He’s been there for over a week now because she is so ill and not likely to recover. He’s always been very fond of his mother and he wants to spend what time she has left with her.’

  ‘Oh, Sandra, I am very sorry to hear that,’ Tom Mason said contritely. ‘We had no idea.’

  ‘No, and so you not only imagined all sorts of evil things about Bill but spread malicious gossip about me as well. I thought you were our friends!’

  ‘We are, but this business over Cindy going missing has thrown us out of kilter over everything.’

  ‘To straighten out another misconception on your part,’ Sandra went on, ‘Nick Blakemore isn’t my fancy man, as you put it. He’s someone Bill arranged to come and work for us so Bill could be at the hospital with his mother. We needed someone to deal with the butchery side of things because I can’t manage it on my own.’

  ‘So where is our Cindy in all this?’ Mavis demanded. Her face was red and her eyes puffy, but she was still not mollified by Sandra’s explanation.

  ‘We don’t know any more than you do.’

  ‘All this talk and lies about her going to spend the weekend in Cardiff with your Rebecca.’

  ‘That was quite true. I was expecting her to come to Cardiff last weekend—’

  ‘But she didn’t, did she?’ Mavis butted in.

  ‘No she didn’t and I was very worried. I’d planned all sorts of things for us to do and I wanted to show her what a wonderful place Cardiff is.’

  ‘You say she never arrived. That’s all we know too,’ Tom said glumly. ‘Our Jake keeps telling us he left her outside the station in time for her train.’

  ‘I know, and I met every train that came in from Temple Meads until after ten o’clock and went back again first thing on Sunday morning. What’s more, I phoned Jake several times to ask what could possibly have happened and all he could tell me was that he’d taken her to the station in Frome in time for the train she’d said she would be on. And he was sure she went straight on to the platform.’

  ‘No, there must be more to it than that,’ Mavis asserted, shaking her head in a disbelieving way.

  ‘Then tell the police and let them look into things. We have nothing whatsoever to do with her disappearance.’ Sandra said firmly. ‘Come on, we’ve nothing more to tell them,’ she said, taking hold of Rebecca’s arm. ‘Let’s go home.’

  ‘This isn’t the end of it by any means,’ Mavis told her stubbornly. ‘I’m going to the police. It’s something we should have done days ago.’

  ‘Mavis, let’s give this some more thought. There must be some explanation,’ Tom begged.

  ‘I mean it, and you can bet your boots the police will be asking you Petersons some questions. The very first one will be to see if you are telling the truth about your missing husband.’

  ‘Mavis, stop it. Sandra has told us where he is and Rebecca has told us all she knows.’

  ‘Maybe. I still think the Peterson family are involved and they know more than they’re saying. I’ll get to the bottom of it, though. We’re still going to the police,’ Mavis asserted. ‘And I don’t care who gets hurt.’

  Seventeen

  The police treated Cindy’s disappearance as a ‘missing person’ case and wasted no time in commencing their enquiries. They were avid for details. As well as the local policeman, a Sergeant Weathers came to Shelston to conduct interviews with the Petersons and the Masons.

  He was a tall, thin man in his early fifties, with a hooked nose and a thin-lipped mouth. He barked out his questions rather like an army sergeant-major and made no comment in response to the answers, simply writing them down in his notebook.

  When he interviewed the Masons, he listened without comment to Mavis’s theory that Cindy had been killed and fed to the pigs by the Peterson family. Not even a muscle in his face or a change of voice registered his reaction to such a theory.

  Even so, he was extremely thorough. He cross-questioned everything they said and warned them that everything in their statements would be checked after he went back to the station.

  When he came to interview the Petersons, he asked to be taken to see the hollow tree where Cindy’s clothes had been found and recorded exactly how they had been discovered, including the time of day.

  He also noted down Rebecca’s address in Cardiff and mentioned that the Cardiff police might pay her a visit if they needed confirmation of her statement or any further information.

  Sergeant Weathers also asked for details of Bill Peterson’s movements and his mother’s address, even though Sandra told him that Granny Peterson was in hospital and that he had been spending all his time at her bedside because she was dying.

  He then asked for the name and address of the hospital where old Mrs Peterson was, even though Sandra assured him that she knew nothing about Cindy and was too ill to answer any questions. He promised this would be noted, but cautioned her that a fellow officer would be contacting Bill at the hospital for confirmation of what she had said.

  Nick Blakemore was questioned in detail about his movements, although he explained that he had only been in Shelston for a very short time and had never met Cindy Mason.

  On Sunday afternoon, when Rebecca and her mother went to visit Granny Peterson they found Bill looking tense and drawn and both angry and confused.

  The police had already visited him quite early that morning at his mother’s home, where he was staying, and he’d been nonplussed by the things they said and the questions they asked.

  ‘Mavis is accusing us of killing Cindy and feeding her body to the pigs,’ Sandra told him.

  ‘Well, I rather gathered that and she also implied that I’d run away from home and am hiding because I’m the guilty one,’ Bill retorted.

  ‘The police have even interviewed Nick Blakemore. Although how he could have had anything to do with it heaven alone knows. He’s never met Cindy and he hadn’t even met us when Cindy disappeared.’

  ‘I wonder just what has happened to her, though?’ Bill looked from his wife to his daughter and back again. He looked upset and haggard as he ran a hand through his hair. ‘We have enough problems as it is without this as well,’ he added wearily.

  ‘We came to see Granny Peterson. How is she?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘Very low, I’m afraid. I’m going back to the hospital now. Are you two coming with me? They say she has only a matter of hours now. Do you really want to come to the hospital to see her? She’s lying there with her eyes closed and I don’t think she can hear my voice when I speak to her.’

  ‘Well, since we’ve come here to do that, I think we should. Though we can’t stay long because Rebecca has to get back to Cardiff tonight in time for university tomorrow.’

  Rebecca was shocked as they approached her grandmother’s bedside to see her looking so thin and gaunt and weak. One blue-veined hand lay on top of the covers and Rebecca picked it up and held it gently between her own. The old lady barely stirred when she kissed her on the forehead and her skin felt damp and clammy.

  Rebecca sat for a while holding the old lady’s frail hand in hers, but it lay there completely lifeless. When a nurse came in and gently moved their h
ands apart, she didn’t attempt to resist. Blinded by tears, she escaped into the corridor and when her mother joined her a few minutes later she agreed they should leave.

  Rebecca returned to Cardiff feeling despondent. Her weekend had turned out to be very different from what she had anticipated.

  She knew she would never see her grandmother again and she remembered all the lovely times they had spent together when she was small. Granny Peterson had lived in Shelston then, and had only moved away when Rebecca was in her teens.

  Although she had been in her seventies, her grandmother had gone to look after her older sister who lived some twenty miles away and she had stayed on in the tiny cottage after her sister died.

  When they pressed her to come back to Shelston, she had pointed out that she had given up her own cottage and it was unlikely she would find another place to rent. That would mean living with them, and she didn’t want to do that because she valued her independence. But even that had been taken away from her when she became too old to look after herself and had to go into a nursing home, Rebecca thought sadly.

  Rebecca was also more worried than ever about Cindy’s whereabouts. She could imagine how concerned the Masons must be, but couldn’t understand why they hadn’t reported that she was missing to the police long before this.

  Even so, she still felt stunned and angry that Mavis Mason had levelled such outrageous accusations against her family.

  She and Cindy had been lifelong friends, almost like sisters. They had shared friends, toys, lessons and hobbies. They’d gone freely in and out of each other’s homes and Jake had been as close to her as any brother.

  She had no idea how Cindy’s boiler suit and rubber boots had come to be in the hollow of the tree and now almost wished she had said nothing at all about finding them. Taking them up to the Masons had started what was turning out to be a nightmare.

  She tried to concentrate, but her brain seemed woolly and she could do nothing but think of Cindy and wonder where on earth she could be.

  Her concern about Cindy had even pushed the fact that Granny Peterson was dying to the back of her mind, so when a phone call came first thing on Monday morning to tell her that her grandmother had died she accepted it quite calmly.