by Pam Weaver
The door banged downstairs and her mother called. ‘Hello … Rita?’
‘I’m up here,’ Rita called back. Her heart was thumping and her mouth felt dry. Her mother mustn’t see this. She stuffed the letter and the photograph back into the envelope and shut it in the case. She had to hide it. She looked around wildly. If her mother thought her sister had run away with an ex-Nazi it would kill her.
There was a built-in cupboard underneath the window ledge. Years ago Rita had discovered that one of the boards under the window was loose. She had pulled it up using her finger in theknothole. Nobody knew it was there so she had hidden her childish treasures in there. Rita and Bonnie always kept their shoes neatly lined under the window. She tossed her shoes onto the bed and opened it up. The cavity underneath the window was just big enough to wedge the case inside.
Her mother called out again. ‘I’ve put the kettle on. Want a cup of tea?’
‘Thanks, Mum.’
Rita put the board back in place but when she turned around, the coat was still on the bed. She opened it up again and stuffed the coat around the case. Then she heard her mother coming up the stairs.
‘Whatever are you doing up here?’ Grace was asking.
Rita pushed the board back in place and sat on the bed. As Grace walked into the room, Rita held up a shoe. ‘Just look at my shoes, Mum,’ she said casually. ‘I really need a new pair. Have we got enough coupons?’
Fourteen
Bonnie’s waters broke in the middle of the afternoon. An ambulance took her to the hospital where she was left behind a curtained area to ‘get on with it’. Occasionally a nurse, complete with mask and gown, would come to tell her how the labour was progressing. It was done with quiet efficiency but the pain was excruciating.
At one point Bonnie murmured, ‘I never thought it would hurt this much.’
The sister leaned over the bed. ‘You should have thought of that before you opened your legs, shouldn’t you,’ she hissed unkindly.
A tear sprang to Bonnie’s eye but when she had gone another nurse, clearly lower in rank, touched her arm sympathetically. ‘Don’t take any notice of her, the frustrated dried-up old prune.’
Bonnie smiled gratefully and concentrated on coping with the next pain which was on its way. During the long and protracted labour she thought a lot about George. She had loved him so much. He loved children and she’d thought he’d make a great father. How could he have deceived her so well? She also thought a lot about her mother. How she wished Mum were here. Her soothing voice was all Bonnie needed. How was she? It had been almost six months since she’d seen her. Six long and lonely months. Oh Mum, she thought during a short lull, I miss you. I miss you so much. And then another pain took away every other thought in her head.
Shirley came into the world at 10.25 the following morning, April 19th. She weighed in at 7lbs 6oz and she had a lusty cry.
‘Is she keeping it?’ the sister said coldly as she took Shirley from the doctor after her first examination.
‘Yes I am,’ said Bonnie. She would have dearly loved to get off the bed and smack the old cow but it was important to stay calm. She was afraid that if she antagonised the woman she might take it out on her baby. As soon as the afterbirth came away, the sister left and the nurse cleaned her up. After that, Bonnie was moved to the ward in a wooden wheelchair.
The beds were very close to each other and most were occupied. Each woman had a locker and a chair. At the foot of each bed was a cot but Shirley wasn’t in hers. Alarmed, Bonnie spun round.
‘She’s in the nursery,’ said the nurse. ‘We always let baby have a rest until the next feed. She’ll come to you then. You have a sleep, dear. You’ve been working very hard.’
Bonnie lay between the crisp white starched sheets and closed her eyes. She was exhausted but she couldn’t sleep – not until she’d held her baby, her Shirley.
They brought Shirley for the two o’clock feed. Bonnie put her to the breast and Shirley sucked strongly.
‘Ten minutes each side,’ said the nurse. ‘And sit her up in between to bring up her wind.’
The experience was like nothing she’d ever had before. The intimacy, the wonder of her perfectly formed little fingers, the tug of her mouth on her breast, Bonnie was overawed. She loved this little being more than she had ever loved anyone in her whole life. She would move heaven and earth for her, even die for her.
‘Press her chin down with your finger when you want her to come off,’ said the woman in the bed next to her when she saw Bonnie watching the clock. ‘They never told me that, and I ended up with cracked nipples.’
‘Thank you,’ Bonnie smiled.
Winded and full, Shirley gave Bonnie a long unfocused stare. She was so like George. She had his nose and his strong jawline. Bonnie sighed. Perhaps it was just as well that he wasn’t here. He would have been disappointed not to have a son. She cuddled the baby closer and rubbed her lips on the top of Shirley’s downy head, whispering, ‘I wonder where your daddy is now, darling.’
The factory had closed in late autumn of the previous year. Already the frontage was covered in weeds and a quantity of household waste, including an old pram with no wheels, had been dumped at the side of the building. Harold White, estate agent, wrinkled his nose with disapproval. Shifting empty buildings was hard enough in these harsh economic times but letting a place go to rack and ruin would make it doubly difficult. No sensible buyer would want to be lumbered with huge clean-up costs as well. He made a mental note that whatever came out of this viewing, he would have some harsh words to say to the vendor.
The door was stiff to open. Clearly no one had been here since the factory closure. He yanked at the handle and the rotting wood splintered.
‘You may need to make a few improvements,’ he apologised, ‘but I’m sure we can come to some sort of arrangement with the seller.’
His buyer seemed unimpressed. He was a stocky man with a rather military bearing who was looking for premises to set up a second-hand repository and shop. The position on the Tarring Broadway was ideal in Harold’s opinion. The building had a double frontage and a large storage area around the back. Upstairs there were three rooms, one of which had been used as an office, and two other rooms which could be used either for storage or as another area of shop floor.
As the two men walked in off the street they were hit by a rank, musty smell. The floor was littered with bits and pieces left behind from when the previous occupants had moved. Harold tut-tutted to himself. Really this was too bad. He would never have allowed the tenant to leave the building in such an appalling condition. If only he had been here at the time it was vacated. He would have sent in an army of cleaners and billed the tenant before he’d sanctioned this viewing. It was going to be hard work keeping the prospective buyer interested.
‘As you can see,’ he began again, ‘this is a very good floor space and there’s a small kitchen area at the rear.’
A train rumbled by and the ground beneath his feet vibrated. ‘The railway line is very close,’ he said quickly, ‘but I am assured by the other shopkeepers on this parade that it’s really no trouble at all and you soon get used to it.’
In fact Harold had no idea how the other shopkeepers felt. This was his first week as area manager of the Worthing branch of Reynard and Sons. The branch wasn’t up to scratch as far as the figures went, so Harold had been sent there to shake things up a bit. He’d decided to begin by taking a hands-on approach which was why he was doing this viewing rather than leaving it to one of the more junior staff.
His client walked around upstairs looking into each cluttered room. Harold trailed behind him with a bright smile on his face and acting as if the disgusting state of the building was perfectly normal. Inside he was livid. No wonder this place had remained on the books all this time.
At the client’s behest they went outside to examine the small courtyard area between the shop and the beginning of railway property and the line itself. To th
e left of the building, there was an outside toilet complete with nesting bird on the cistern, and then they came to the courtyard itself. It turned out to be very small – hardly a courtyard at all, more like an alleyway – and it was filled with more rotting rubbish.
A distant hum brought them to a rectangular windowless extension to the building which jutted out into the space.
‘What’s this?’
Harold studied the brief he’d picked up from the office. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘this must be the cold storage.’
His client raised an eyebrow.
‘This was once a knitwear factory,’ Harold explained. ‘But I have it on good authority that they also stored fur coats in the summer. Apparently they have to be kept cool to maintain their condition.’ He wasn’t absolutely sure of his facts, but it sounded feasible. He frowned. ‘I can’t think why it’s still switched on.’
‘How do we get in?’ asked the client.
‘The door must be inside,’ said Harold, wishing the minute he’d said it that he’d found a better way of phrasing his comment. Blurting it out like that made him look as if he didn’t know what he was doing.
They found the door behind some boxes piled floor to ceiling in front of it. The door itself looked very heavy, more like the door of a bank vault.
‘They obviously had some valuable furs in store,’ his client remarked as Harold struggled to open it.
With a great deal of effort, they pulled it open together. The cold air and a terrible smell rushed out to meet them. The client cried out, staggered back in horror and pulled his handkerchief over his mouth. He rushed to the front door and only just managed to get outside before he was violently sick.
Harold was paralysed with shock. The room was starkly bare except for the decaying body of a young man curled up in a foetal position.
Fifteen
The first Grace knew of impending trouble was when the police turned up at the factory.
Since Christmas, her life had settled back into a comfortable routine. She and Archie spent at least two or three evenings a week together. Mostly they went to the pictures but there had been the odd concert in the local church hall or the occasional drink in the pub. Usually Snowy and Uncle Charlie Hanson joined them for that.
Output at the factory was good and Norris Finley had just returned from Canada where he had spent four months combining a long holiday with drumming up new business. Grace had taken every minute of overtime on offer and her savings were mounting up. She knew she was being pig-headed and stubborn but there was something in her nature that refused to owe anybody anything. When Michael came across it for the first time soon after they were married, he had laughed and called her ‘Independent Annie’. She’d been grateful for Norris’s unexpected kindness at Christmas but her one and only New Year’s resolution had been to pay the money back as quickly as possible. Even if it took her most of the year, she was determined to do it.
Surprisingly, Rita had settled down quite happily in her job in the fashion department at Hubbard’s. She had made new friends and although she was still a helpful girl around the house, she was out most evenings and she went dancing at the Assembly Hall at the weekends. In February, her sixteenth birthday had come and gone and with it, Grace felt, the last of her childhood.
Rita hardly ever spoke of her sister’s absence. In one respect, Grace was pleased; after all it wasn’t right that her youngest daughter’s life should suffer because of Bonnie’s inconsiderate behaviour. But on the other hand, it hurt that Rita behaved as if Bonnie was a distant memory. Until Archie filled her life with song, Grace found it much harder to deal with. On really dark days she used to sit on Bonnie’s bed, still made up with fresh sheets in case she came home unexpectedly, and fondle her things. Sometimes, after work, Grace would wait on the platform watching the people getting off the London train. It was quite stupid but there was always that faint hope that Bonnie might be getting off the train to come back home. She would fantasise about how they would meet. Bonnie would run down the platform and into her open arms, or she’d walk towards her with a smileand they’d link arms and go across the road to the Railway Café for a cup of tea and one of those Italian pastry thingies before going home. It was becoming an obsession.
Once, Grace went to the station early in the morning and stopped some of the London-bound passengers.
‘Excuse me,’ she began. ‘My daughter is missing. She’s called Bonnie Rogers. If you see a pretty girl, aged 18, oh no, she is 19 now, with long brown hair and cornflower blue eyes, tell her, her mother was asking after her.’
‘London is one hell of a place,’ one man told her. ‘There must be thousands of girls who look like that. Have you got a photograph?’
Grace had shaken her head. That was her one regret, that she didn’t have a camera. It wasn’t the sort of thing she could afford and her only picture of Bonnie was one taken on a Sunday school outing on the beach at Littlehampton, but that was years ago. Bonnie didn’t look remotely like that now. It was very frustrating but Grace wasn’t about to give up. Not yet. As soon as she’d paid Norris back, she’d be compelled to take the train to London and look for Bonnie again. Her trip to Richmond with Archie had proved to be fruitless. While he had conducted his business, she had taken the bus into central London and walked about. Ridiculous really. It was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. The captain (she knew his rank by the two stripes in his epaulette) from The Salvation Army had been kind and taken down a few details, but even as she spoke to him, she could see how hopeless it was.
The only new revelation she’d had came when she was spring-cleaning. The range in the kitchen left sooty deposits on the furniture and walls during the winter months, so at the end of March Grace cleaned the house thoroughly from top to bottom.
It was while she was putting new fresh lining paper in the drawers that she’d noticed that her box of official papers had been tampered with. It contained her insurance policies, old letters, her marriage certificate and things like that. She sat on her bed and went through it carefully and realised with horror that two certificates were missing. Bonnie’s birth certificate and the letter Mr Finley had written to her when she’d had her son. The only person who could have taken them was Bonnie, and although she could understand that Bonnie might need her own birth certificate for some reason, why on earth had she taken the letter? She’d never told her girls about her first-born. There was no need. It was a part of her life which was over and gone, but why should Bonnie take the one link with him that she had left? The anguish of her discovery brought it all back again. No mother should have to lose two children. ‘They’re not dead,’ she told herself crossly, but it did little to ease her pain. She felt as if her scars were constantly being re-opened – but perhaps that wasn’t quite true. They’d never really healed in the first place.
The police car had pulled up right outside the window. Two plainclothes officers got out and when they were actually inside the factory, the driver got out for a cigarette. Cheekily, he winked at the girls, distracted from their work and staring at him from the factory window.
Grace watched the two officers climb the open stairway up to the office. She was beginning to feel anxious. Was this something to do with Kaye Wilcox? Kaye had been accused of stealing a gold watch. She and Snowy could hardly believe it. Kaye had denied it of course, but Norris had dismissed her immediately and without a reference. Grace thought back to Christmas Day and how distant the girl had been. She had most likely been worrying about what was going to happen then. Why did she steal the watch anyway? Grace didn’t have Kaye down as a thief.
A new thought crossed her mind. What if the police weren’t here to talk about Kaye but about Bonnie’s disappearance? Don’t be silly, she told herself. There was no reason to think that their coming had anything to do with Bonnie, but as she worked, Grace couldn’t resist an occasional glance up at the office window. While the men stood by the door, she could see them clearly but when they w
ent right inside and sat down, they were hidden from view. Grace tried to block out her worries and concentrate on her work.
Eventually, Norah tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Mr Finley wants you in the office.’
Grace stared at her uncomprehending. ‘Me?’
Norah nodded.
Grace felt her blood run cold. ‘What for?’
‘I don’t know, do I?’ her supervisor shrugged. ‘I think somebody died.’
Grace clutched at her chest and looked helplessly at Snowy.
‘Now don’t go jumping to conclusions, love,’ said Snowy as if she had read Grace’s mind.
As Grace ran up the wrought iron steps, the girls looked from one to the other.
‘Her daughter went missing, didn’t she?’
‘Oh God, I’d forgotten all about that.’
‘Here, you don’t think …’
‘Everybody get back to work,’ Norah snapped.
Grace knocked on the office door. Her heart was thumping in her chest.
‘Ah,’ said Norris as she opened the door, ‘this is Mrs Rogers.’ He indicated a chair. ‘Sit down.’
‘Thank you, I’d sooner stand,’ said Grace stiffly.
Finley’s secretary, Miss Samuels, who was working on the other side of the room, turned and looked down her nose at Grace. She was holding a bundle of envelopes. ‘I’ll take this opportunity to go to the post, Mr Finley,’ she sniffed as she left the room.
