The Outcast Girls

by Alys Clare

  ‘Sister? Wife?’ he says, and he can’t quite disguise his eagerness.

  You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Felix thinks. You’d like to write your piece for tomorrow’s paper, that the grieving relative sought you out because of your article; that, purely thanks to you, he found out at last what happened to his lost loved one.

  ‘Has anything been discovered concerning the victim?’ he says instead of answering the question. ‘How she died, for example, since you seem to be implying she didn’t drown? Or some clue to her identity, perhaps through a personal object found close by?’

  Nicholls looks as if he’d love to answer in the affirmative but after a moment he shakes his head. ‘Not that I’ve heard. Mind,’ he adds ruefully, scratching his thinning hair, ‘the police wouldn’t tell me even if they did find out something.’

  ‘Still furious with you over police baffled?’ Felix suggests.

  The grin widens. ‘Something like that.’ He meets Felix’s eyes. ‘Look, I’m sorry if that poor girl meant something to you.’ He is still fishing, Felix thinks, and he doesn’t respond. ‘Believe it or not, I did feel sorry for her, she was that pretty,’ Nicholls says with a sigh.

  ‘You felt sorry for her,’ Felix replies softly. ‘Because she was pretty? God knows what you’d have come up with if she’d been old and ugly, eh?’

  ‘Now look here,’ Nicholls begins, ‘I have my job to do and that job is providing the public with information, and I do it conscientiously and to the best of my ability and I—’

  Felix has heard enough. He leans in close – Nicholls flinches again – and murmurs, ‘Fuck you.’

  Then he strides out through the door and shuts it gently behind him.

  His anger has cooled by the time he reaches the sea front and he is already regretting having been so aggressive. He clambers down on to the beach. The new pier juts proudly out into the sea like a pointing finger, and Felix stares morosely up at it and wishes it was a warm summer’s day and he had time and inclination for frivolity.

  He picks up a handful of pebbles and starts trying to spin them, but the sea is rough and the best he can manage is three bounces. Presently he becomes aware that someone has come up to stand beside him.

  ‘Sea’s too restless,’ says a cracked old voice.

  Turning, Felix sees an old man in a heavy coat, a sou’wester pulled down low over his eyes, a beard covering the remainder of the flesh on his face. ‘Yes,’ he agrees.

  He turns back, sensing the old man’s narrowed blue eyes on him.

  ‘Visitor?’ the man says presently.

  ‘Yes,’ Felix says again.

  Another pause. Then: ‘It was over there they found her.’

  Now Felix turns to face the old man so quickly that he feels his neck crack. ‘What? How did you know that’s why I’m—’ He stops himself before the admission is out.

  The old face is smiling sadly. ‘For one, not many folks venture on to the beach when it’s as cold as today. For another, you look pensive. For a third, you’re the latest in a very long line, son, although there haven’t been so many recently. Interest wanes, and there’s always another sensation to feed the prurient appetites of the masses.’

  Felix, feeling vaguely that he might just have been insulted, reaches into an inner pocket for a World’s End Bureau card. ‘I’m investigating a missing girl,’ he says. ‘I heard about the body that was found here and I wondered if it could be her.’

  The old man studies the card for some time. ‘You this Raynor fellow?’

  ‘This Raynor fellow is in fact a woman. I’m Felix Wilbraham.’ He removes his right glove and holds out his hand.

  The old man takes it in a hard grip. ‘Walter Nelson,’ he responds.

  ‘Good name for a sailor,’ Felix remarks. He has spotted the base of an anchor tattooed on the man’s forearm.

  ‘Now nobody’s ever pointed that out before,’ Walter Nelson says with a poker face.

  ‘Sorry.’

  There is a brief pause. Then Walter Nelson says, ‘There’s a place up there where they do a decent pot of tea and a tasty toast and dripping slice. If you’d like to treat me, I’ll tell you what I know.’ He leans closer and Felix catches a strong smell of alcohol. ‘A darn sight more than I told either the police or that blasted reporter, but then I didn’t take to them.’

  Does that mean he’s taken to me? Felix wonders silently as he follows the old man up the beach and across the road to the tea room. If so, it is surely something of a mixed blessing …

  ‘Beginning of November, it was,’ Walter Nelson says, having satisfied the worst of his hunger and thirst with a mug and a half of very dark brown tea and a thick slice of toast and dripping, liberally salted. ‘We’d had a spell of sunny weather back end of October, then November came in with a shout and there was a series of bad storms driven in on the south-westerlies, and the eastward-bound Channel flood down round the bottom of that out there’ – he waves the hand holding the last corner of his toast in the direction of the Isle of Wight – ‘was piling water up the East Solent, so the tides here along the shoreline had to be seen to be believed, specially when the moon was around the full.’ He shakes his head, pale blue eyes wide with wonder at nature in the raw.

  ‘Some wild nights, then,’ Felix observes.

  The wrinkled face cracks into a hundred wrinkles as the old man grins. ‘Aye, I’ve had my share of them,’ he says with a chuckle.

  ‘A girl in every port?’

  ‘Aye. You’ll know the toast: “To wives and sweethearts, and may they never meet”.’

  They share a moment’s reflection. Walter Nelson, Felix guesses, is thinking back to the days of his prime; Felix is wondering how soon he can introduce the subject he’s here to find out about.

  Walter, however, pre-empts him. ‘It was very early one morning,’ he says presently in an altogether different tone. ‘I don’t sleep so much nowadays, specially when I’ve put back a few, and this particular day I was up around dawn, walking along above the high water watching the sun come up. Clouds had cleared, see, and although the wind was still strong at my back, I knew it’d be a fine day.’ He stops, looking down at his dirty hands folded on the table top. ‘She was in the water from her knees down, up under the pier like I showed you. She’d have been deposited there at high water, and the tide was falling by then.’ He pauses, takes a wobbly breath and then continues. ‘Now I’ve seen sights I’d far rather wipe from my memory, only I’ve not yet found a way, but that girl, that poor little girl …’ He shakes his head.

  ‘Little girl?’ Felix asks softly.

  ‘Well, she was – er, she was maybe sixteen, seventeen and a woman in body.’ For all his sailor’s talk of wild nights, to Felix’s surprise Walter Nelson blushes slightly. ‘I couldn’t help but look, see, because I needed to check if there was any life left in her. I knew there wasn’t any hope, really, soon as I set eyes on her, but I had to make sure.’

  He is staring hard at Felix now, as if desperate for his understanding.

  ‘Of course,’ Felix says.

  ‘Well, she was dead as dead,’ Walter says matter-of-factly. ‘She’d taken a battering in the water, and some sea creature had taken one of her eyes’ – he gulps and wipes a hand across his mouth – ‘but the other one was open, and looking up at me, and blue like the eyes of my little sister’s china-faced doll.’

  ‘Do you think she drowned?’ Felix asks.

  Walter gives him an assessing look. ‘I can’t answer that,’ he says. ‘Like I say, there were marks of violence on her, but she’d been in the sea with a storm raging, and there’s no violence on God’s earth like the power of the sea.’ He goes on staring at Felix, who senses there is something more.

  ‘Go on,’ he says neutrally.

  Walter leans forward, his voice dropping to a mutter. ‘Now I’ve told nobody else this, mark you, because, like I said earlier, I didn’t take to the police and saw no reason I should do their work for them.’ Felix suspects
Walter has had his share of rough encounters with the forces of law and order over the years. ‘And as for that rat-faced reporter … Did you see what he wrote about that poor girl’s flesh and her naked body?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Dirty sod ought to be flogged,’ mutters Walter. ‘I knew it, soon as he came sniffing round asking me for my story. I recognize the type. I didn’t tell him she was naked, and I didn’t utter a word about pretty blue eyes and splayed limbs. It must have been one of the mutton-shunters.’

  ‘One of the police?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘So what was it you didn’t tell them?’

  There is a very long pause. Walter stares down at his empty plate, pushing toast crumbs into a neat little mountain. Then he says, and Felix can detect the reluctance, ‘She had a long strand of that lovely fair hair wrapped around her neck, and I couldn’t bear it, I felt it was hurting her still, choking her, for all I knew full well she was dead. So I knelt down beside her and said a prayer, like the padre used to do when we lost a shipmate at sea, and while I did that I looked down into her pretty face, and that wide eye was criss-crossed with red lines and little red spots, and I know, because I once had to give evidence about the death of a whore in Port Said, that this means someone’s been burked.’

  ‘Burked?’ Felix isn’t familiar with the word.

  ‘Asphyxiated. Face covered with a blanket. Like Burke and Hare did,’ Walter says succinctly.

  ‘Ah. But the police must have seen this too,’ Felix says. Didn’t police surgeons look at dead bodies?

  Walter shrugs. ‘Maybe. Probably. If they bothered to look, that is,’ he adds in a low, disapproving mumble.

  ‘Could those red marks not result from drowning?’ Felix persists. ‘You die from lack of air when you drown, surely, so in a way it’s like being suffocated?’

  Walter shrugs again. ‘Dunno,’ he mutters. He shoots Felix a quick glance. ‘I’m only telling you what I saw.’

  ‘And I’m very grateful,’ Felix says. He hesitates, not wanting to cause offence, then thinks, offence be buggered, and reaches inside his pocket. Extracting a couple of coins, he slides them across and places them under the rim of Walter’s empty plate. ‘Raise a glass to that poor young woman,’ he murmurs, and, quick as a flash, a dirty hand shoots out and the coins vanish.

  ‘So perhaps,’ Felix speculates aloud, ‘she was dead when she was put in the water. Somewhere along Portsmouth’s long shoreline and not necessarily here at Southsea, if like you say there was a storm?’ He looks up at Walter.

  Walter smiles grimly. ‘Not necessarily anywhere in Portsmouth either,’ he says. ‘Even when there isn’t a storm, and no more than a strong sea running, there’s funny old currents out there, what with the Solent and the way the Island sits like a rock in a stream.’

  ‘So – so you’re saying she could have been swept along from anywhere? From Brighton, say?’ But no, he thinks instantly, Esme Sullivan – if this girl was she – had left Brighton and come to Portsmouth.

  Walter Nelson is shaking his head. ‘Not Brighton, no, nor anywhere east of here. Use your wits, lad! I told you there was a south-westerly blowing, and objects don’t get borne along against the run of wind and sea!’

  ‘But anywhere west of here?’

  Walter just stares at him.

  When finally he speaks, it isn’t to answer Felix’s question. Instead he says, very quietly, ‘One last thing.’

  ‘Yes?’ Felix says.

  ‘I covered her with my coat, see, while I waited for someone else to come along,’ Walter whispers. ‘Seemed only decent. And I couldn’t help but notice the bruises.’

  ‘Bruises? From the sea, like you said earlier and—’

  ‘No.’ The single word is harsh. ‘Five little oval bruises, on the top of her arm, like a big hand had caught hold of her and squeezed tight.’

  A chill floods through Felix.

  And he hears Ethel Shove’s voice in his head.

  Nearly caused a mishap, because she was just ahead of him on the stairs and the suitcase caught her shoulder and he had to grab her arm to stop her falling.

  Oh, dear God, he thinks. I have found Esme Sullivan.

  NINE

  On Thursday, two communications arrive for Nurse Leonora Henry. The first is a letter from her sister-in-law Felicia, which arrives by the noon post. Lily reads it with avid interest, interpreting the words to reveal that Felix has hared off to Portsmouth in the footsteps of Esme Sullivan.

  She spends a busy hour or two with a succession of girls appearing in the sick bay. The weather is even colder today, there has been a sharp overnight frost, and many girls have developed sniffles, aches and pains and, in one case, a troubling cough. Three girls have slipped on the ice and hurt themselves. Lily very much wants some time alone to think about what Felix might or might not be in the very act of discovering in Portsmouth, but she is fully occupied.

  Then in the early afternoon there is a telegram.

  Continuing with the subterfuge of the mystery novel and its resolution, ‘Felicia’ writes: Finished novel and know what became of her. Poor girl drowned and washed up Southsea beach. Still puzzling out full plot details. Felicia.

  Lily sits perfectly still, the telegram spread out on her lap.

  So Esme Sullivan is dead.

  She wonders how Felix can be so certain, but then she realizes first, that he would not have sent the message unless he was, and second, that she trusts him and believes him.

  That poor, poor girl.

  Lily understands now that she has been telling herself that Esme will be found; that whatever mission took her from Brighton to Portsmouth was fulfilled, that any day now she will return in triumph to Shardlowes and reveal why she left and what she has achieved.

  It is not to be, Lily thinks sadly, instead there has been a tragedy, and—

  But another thought interrupts that one.

  Whatever mission took her from Brighton …

  Suddenly Lily sits up very straight.

  What if the same mission took her to Brighton in the first place, because Brighton is on the south coast and it was there that Esme wanted to go? What if the travelling salesman was a means to an end and not an end in himself?

  Lily sinks back again. No, she tells herself, I must not let myself be carried away by speculation. Esme was bored with school, hungry for excitement, and carried away by the thrill of a handsome face – always assuming Wilfred Anderson was handsome – and the chance of an adventure. Of a week in Brighton posing as a wife, with all that it entailed.

  So why, Lily wonders, did Esme travel on to Portsmouth when the days with her travelling salesman ended so abruptly?

  Her thoughts fly round inside her head until she cannot determine which suspicions are likely or even possible and which are no more than extravagant speculations.

  The sick bay is quiet. Matron, having got out of bed for an hour this morning, has exhausted herself with the effort and is now fast asleep; Lily suspects she is running a temperature.

  And out of nowhere the thought bursts into Lily’s head: I must write to Felix, simultaneously hoping that Felicia has done as she said she would and provided her friend Mariella with her address in Portsmouth. There is nothing she can do about that; without giving it another thought, she finds her leather writing case, her pen and her little ink well and, sitting down at the small table in the treatment room facing the open door so that she will not be taken by surprise, she begins to write, systematically recording everything that has happened and a great deal of what she has been thinking ever since arriving at Shardlowes.

  Writing to Felix isn’t the same as talking to him, naturally, since he is making no contribution, but nevertheless, as Lily folds the five closely written pages and seals the envelope, her mind is suddenly a great deal clearer. One or two conclusions that she has tentatively drawn appear to have been wrong, and she needs to think them through again. First, however, she must put her l
etter in the post; it is a little after two o’clock, and if she hurries, it will very likely be delivered to Kinver Street this evening and be on its way to Felix in the morning.

  Striding back across the hall on her return from the post box at the end of the drive, she spots Georgiana Long halfway up the stairs, Miss Dickie a few steps ahead. Miss Long turns and catches Lily’s eye, a smile beginning on her round face. I need to talk to you, Lily thinks, and, eyes still on Miss Long’s, she inclines her head a couple of times in the direction of the sick bay, silently urging Miss Long to understand the message. Almost imperceptibly Miss Long nods, then hurries on up the stairs after her companion.

  Not wanting to be engaged in conversation by Miss Dickie just now (or indeed ever), Lily ducks out of sight and returns to the sick bay via the servants’ quarters and the back stairs.

  She looks in on Matron, whose forehead is slightly sweaty above flushed cheeks. Lily reaches down her hand for the softest of touches, and Matron feels hot. Resolving to return presently to check again, Lily crosses to the treatment room and extracts the ledger from its hiding place. She sits down at the little table and opens it, no longer worried that Miss Dickie, or anyone else for that matter, will sneak up on her and demand an explanation.

  Because, although virtually everything else remains a mystery, Lily now knows who hid the ledger.

  It wasn’t Miss Dickie. She is sure of this for two reasons: first, if Miss Dickie had hidden the ledger she would have selected a hiding place within her own area of Shardlowes in order to keep an eye on it; and second, because in all likelihood the deputy headmistress doesn’t even know the space beneath the bottom shelf in the supplies cupboard exists.

  Miss Dickie may not even know the ledger exists, come to that.

  It is almost certain that one of the sick bay staff hid it, and since Lily has ruled out Matron, who alerted her to the ledger’s existence, then it can only have been Nurse Evans. Following that line of reasoning, Lily has concluded that Nurse Evans must have suspected something, or discovered something, or even verified something, immediately before she was called away so abruptly to tend her ailing mother, and that, not wanting anybody else to do the same, hid the ledger before she left. And in that case—