She gagged again as he thrust it into her mouth, and while she thought of clamping her teeth down on him, she knew if she did he’d make her suffer even more.
‘Just endure,’ she thought to herself as he moved her head backwards and forwards on him. ‘It will soon be over.’
It was mercifully quick. With a loud gasp and his whole body jerking, the fluid shot into her mouth and he let go of her. But as she spat out the disgusting stuff in her mouth and attempted to wriggle away, he kicked her again in the side.
‘Filthy bitch!’ he yelled at her, and in a frenzy he kicked and kicked at her.
The last conscious thought she had was that this time it was the last. He was going to kill her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Ruby was on the underground on the way to Paddington Station when she suddenly got a bad feeling about Verity. She tried to convince herself that she was overreacting, because she knew Archie Wood had hurt her friend in the past, but the closer she got to Paddington the stronger the feeling became that Verity was in difficulties.
On the concourse at Paddington she looked at the departure board for her train and saw the four o’clock was already in on Platform Three. It was due to leave in fifteen minutes. She rushed to a public telephone and rang Wilby, blurting out that she was afraid for Verity and didn’t know what to do.
‘I’m sure you are overreacting,’ Wilby said in her usual calm, measured manner. ‘Why should her father hurt her just for meeting a friend? But obviously you know more about the girl’s situation than you are telling me. But I’d say that if you ignore your fears and it turns out something has happened, you are going to feel terrible.’
‘So you do think I should go back?’
‘Staying in London one more night isn’t the end of the world, not if it puts your mind at rest,’ Wilby said. ‘If you are going to be there, you could pop into Foyles in Charing Cross Road tomorrow morning and see if you can get me a copy of Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier. I haven’t had any luck getting it in Torquay.’
Ruby agreed she would try to get the book. She thought she would go out to Hither Green and, if everything was alright, then come back and stay at the Charing Cross Hotel for the night.
As so often happened since the war had started, the underground train stopped suddenly just before South Kensington, and the lights went out. A gentleman sitting next to Ruby informed her that it often happened on the District and Circle lines, because large sections of the track were in fact above ground.
‘We count ourselves lucky if it stops at a station, at least we can get out and walk the rest of the way, or get a cab. But I haven’t heard anything about a bomb dropping today, so it might just be signal failure or something similar.’
Emergency lighting came on after a few minutes, not bright enough to read, but enough to make it less scary. A guard came through the carriages explaining it was a minor fault on the line, and if they all sat tight it would be put right within half an hour.
In fact it was an hour before the train moved, and by the time Ruby got up to Charing Cross Station it was rush hour and packed with office workers going home. That train too was held up for half an hour at New Cross and as she’d had to stand, because the train was so packed, by the time she got to Hither Green she was wishing she hadn’t been so impulsive.
She was also worried that if she had been wrong about Verity being in trouble, she might actually cause some by calling at the house. It was just after six thirty now, and as she made her way through the dark, icy-cold streets to Weardale Road, she was racking her brain for a plausible excuse to give Archie for calling.
The idea she came up with was to pretend to be doing a survey on what magazines women read. If Archie opened the door, she’d say that she needed to speak to any women in the house.
She had a notebook in her hand luggage in which she jotted down things to remind herself when she wrote her diary at home. She thought holding that would look official enough. But she would have to tuck her hand luggage under a bush in a front garden nearby.
Rapping firmly on the door of number seven, she mentally rehearsed the opening lines of her pitch about the survey. But no one answered the door. She knocked again, louder this time, but still there was no response.
Ruby bent over and peered through the letter box. There was no light anywhere, so she shone her small torch in. The door straight ahead, which she knew led to the kitchen, was closed, and for some reason this sent chills down her spine.
She went to the front-room window and shone her torch in there. To her surprise the blackout curtains hadn’t been drawn, and she could see into the parlour. The only reason anyone didn’t draw their curtains in a small house like this was because they’d gone out before it was dark and hadn’t been back since. She and Verity had parted at around two thirty. It had been dark by four and Verity had said she must get back to make Archie’s tea, because he went out most evenings. She had also mentioned she rarely went out in an evening any more, unless there was an air-raid warning and she went to the shelter.
The prickly feeling down her spine was growing stronger; she felt certain Verity was in some kind of danger. Standing there by the sash window to the parlour, she remembered Verity saying she’d learned how to get into houses from her.
Quickly going back down the road a few yards, she retrieved her hidden overnight bag from under the hedge where she’d left it, and rummaged around in it until she found her nail file.
Back at number seven, she slid the file into the central part of the window frame, where the catch was. She fully anticipated the catch would be stuck down with old paint and dust, and too stiff to move, but to her surprise it did move. She was able to unlock it and slide the bottom window up.
She checked first that no one was coming down the road but it was such a cold night, with frost already glinting on the pavement, that she doubted anyone would venture out unless they had to. Groping inside the room, she moved the small table in front of the window to one side and then climbed in, closing and locking the window behind her.
She tiptoed across the room, her heart going like a steam hammer in case Archie was in the house and caught her. When she reached the kitchen door, she turned the knob very quietly, opening the door cautiously. A strange metallic sort of smell which she didn’t recognize made her fumble for the light switch.
As light flooded the room, she gasped.
Verity was lying in the Morrison shelter, literally soaked in blood.
It was only her blonde hair which really proved it was Verity. She looked for all the world like a huge lump of meat which had been partially covered in some blood-soaked cloth.
Ruby was no stranger to awful injuries at the hospital, but this beat anything she’d ever seen.
‘Sweet Jesus!’ she exclaimed, dropping to her knees to help her friend. But then she saw that a chain and padlock were securing the door on the shelter, and she thought Verity was dead.
Putting her hand through the mesh, she took Verity’s hand to feel for a pulse. To her relief there was one, but it was very weak. And Verity was icy cold, as there was no fire in the kitchen. It looked as if she’d been hit hard on the side of her head with something heavy; her blood had congealed on her hair and neck. It was difficult to see where, or how bad, her other injuries were because of the amount of blood everywhere.
‘Verity, can you hear me?’ she said. ‘I’m going to run to the corner to call an ambulance. If you can hear me, just squeeze my hand.’
There was no movement, not even a flutter of her eyelids.
Leaving the front door on the latch, Ruby tore down the road to the phone box. She knew it was there, because Verity used to say it took twenty-five giant strides to reach it, to ring her. She even remembered the number – Lee Green 3578 – because she used to ring Verity back to save her feeding change into the slot.
‘Police and ambulance,’ she said when the operator answered. Within seconds she was telling the woman that
her friend had been badly beaten, that she was unconscious, losing a great deal of blood and was locked inside a Morrison shelter, so they would need bolt cutters to free her.
After giving the operator the address and her own name, she rushed back up the street to number seven. As a precaution against Archie returning before the police and ambulance arrived, she put the chain on the front door and checked the back door was locked too.
Verity’s eyelids did flutter momentarily but they didn’t open, so Ruby told her help was on its way and that she was getting her out of the house to safety in just a short while.
Ruby darted upstairs and, seeing a suitcase on top of Verity’s wardrobe, she pulled it down and hastily threw in a few of the nicest clothes she could see. There were a bundle of letters in the dressing-table drawer, presumably from Miller, and she packed those too, along with Verity’s cosmetics, some odd bits of jewellery she found, and a green leather box which was full of assorted documents.
There didn’t appear to be anything else of importance, other than Verity’s handbag, so she carried them downstairs and added the blue coat and hat her friend had been wearing earlier in the day to the suitcase, ready for it to be taken when they went in the ambulance.
At the sound of the ambulance bell Ruby felt she could breathe again. She took the chain off the door and went out into the street to flash her little torch with its mere chink of light, all that was allowed in the blackout, so at least she could direct them to the house.
The police arrived just a couple of minutes after the ambulance, just as one of the men was using bolt cutters to slice through the chain on the cage.
All the men looked dumbfounded by what they saw in the kitchen.
‘I’m Sergeant Reilly,’ said a policeman who was well over fifty, with a round, shiny face and pale blue eyes. ‘Can you tell us who did this?’ he asked.
‘I believe it was her stepfather,’ Ruby said, giving him Archie’s name. And then she told him a little of the meeting between her and Verity earlier in the day and how Verity had admitted Archie often hit her. ‘I think he must have suspected she wasn’t at work like she’d told him. I was on my way back to Paddington Station when I got a feeling she was in trouble. Thank God I came back.’
‘I doubt she’d have lasted the night in this cold, if you hadn’t,’ one of the ambulance men said grimly as he unscrewed the side of the cage-like shelter to get Verity out without hurting her further. ‘She can count herself lucky, having a friend like you.’
Sergeant Reilly said he would come down to Lewisham Hospital later that evening to get more details from Ruby.
‘The poor kid,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Fancy living in fear like that. But we’ll get him, have no doubt of it. As if there isn’t enough pain and destruction in this war, without family members turning on one another.’
At Lewisham Hospital the doctor who examined Verity said she had three broken ribs, one of which had punctured her lung, and a broken arm. These injuries, along with the blow to her head, had been inflicted with a length of lead piping. She’d also been punched and kicked repeatedly all over her body. She was whisked off immediately to the theatre for surgery.
Sergeant Reilly arrived to talk to Ruby around an hour later, and he told her the lead pipe used to hit Verity had been found under the next-door neighbour’s front hedge.
‘If he was just trying to get Verity to admit who she had been with earlier in the day, why didn’t she just tell him it was you?’ he asked.
‘I expect because she didn’t want to involve me,’ Ruby said. ‘Maybe she was afraid that he’d search me out and do the same to me. But he didn’t need a reason to hit her, from what she told me he could fly off the handle over anything.’
‘I’ve never seen such injuries on a woman before,’ Reilly said, wincing as if remembering what he’d seen. ‘She was probably still conscious when he bundled her into the Morrison shelter. He wanted to ensure she couldn’t get help.’
‘It’s a wonder she’s still alive,’ Ruby said. ‘If only I’d insisted she came home with me when she told me a little about how he treated her. But I just caved in and let her go back there to him.’
‘You weren’t to know he would react like that,’ Sergeant Reilly sighed. ‘But what I can’t understand is why she’d stay there with him, if he was violent. And why didn’t she come to us for help?’
‘Few policemen are as enlightened as you,’ Ruby said. ‘Most men believe a husband or father has the right to control his wife or daughter however he sees fit. I’ve met at least a dozen women who have asked the police for help in a domestic situation, and they’ve been told to go home and be a good little wife.’
‘Maybe there’s a few in the force like that,’ Reilly agreed, ‘but it is changing.’
Ruby realized then that the police hadn’t yet found out that Archie was once, and perhaps still was, a wanted man. So she told Reilly all she knew about his embezzlement.
‘They lost everything – their house, Verity’s private education – and were forced to throw themselves on her aunt’s mercy,’ she explained. ‘Mrs Wood never accepted the sudden change of fortune, and finally she put her head in the gas oven. Then Verity’s aunt died,’ Ruby said. ‘I was estranged from Verity at that time and I think she must have been very lonely. That’s probably why, when her father turned up, she was willing to forget the past, because she needed someone in her life. You see, back then she thought he was her father, but like so many other cruel things he did to her, he told her he wasn’t, and that his wife had been pregnant by someone else when he married her.’
Sergeant Reilly left then, saying he’d be back the next day when Verity was able to talk to him. He seemed quite disturbed by what Ruby had told him, and she expected he was in a hurry to get back to the police station to check the records.
Ruby stayed the night at the hospital, sitting in a chilly corridor on a hard bench, with Verity’s suitcase and her overnight bag beside her. Verity had come out of theatre just after midnight but the starchy ward sister wouldn’t allow Ruby to see her, or even sit by her bed. All she would say was that Miss Wood was stable.
If nothing else, the long night in that chilly corridor made Ruby understand how it must have been for Verity when she spent the night at Whittington Hospital praying her friend would make it. She knew now that if she thought Verity might die, she’d do absolutely anything to save her, even something she’d promised she would never do.
Her thoughts turned to what would happen when the police found Archie and he decided to spill the beans about how he and Verity burgled houses together. Would Verity be sent to prison?
She wished she could believe the police would be enlightened enough to understand he’d forced her into it. But she couldn’t; her own experiences with the police when she was a girl had left her very wary of them. So her plan was to keep all she knew under her hat, and hope that Archie Wood didn’t admit to burglary with Verity as an accomplice.
‘Miss Taylor!’
Ruby woke with a start at the nurse shaking her shoulder.
She was an older woman, with a heavily lined face. ‘Your friend has regained consciousness,’ she said quietly. ‘I told her you’d found her, come in with her and were still here waiting in the corridor, and she begged me to let you in. Now I’ve got to tell you that it is against the rules. It’s almost six, and we’ll be waking the patients very soon, but I’ll let you in for two minutes, as long as you are very quiet.’
‘Thank you so much,’ Ruby said gratefully. She thought the nurse had kind eyes. ‘But how is she?’
‘She came through the operation on her lung better than was expected, but she is still very poorly. I recommend that after you’ve seen her, you leave the hospital. We can’t have you sleeping in the corridor all day.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Ruby half smiled. She was as stiff as a plank and very cold too. ‘I’ll get out of your way just as soon as I’ve seen her.’
Ruby’s eyes f
illed with tears as she approached Verity’s bed in the corner of the big ward. It was still pitch dark outside, and the only light was a small one above Verity’s bed and another on the ward sister’s desk further down the room. All the other patients appeared to be asleep, faint snoring was coming from a couple of the beds.
Verity’s head was swathed in bandages, but even in the faint light it was possible to see that the exposed part of her face looked like raw liver.
‘Hello,’ Ruby whispered. ‘I’ve had orders I can only stay two minutes. They tell me your operation was a success.’
Verity’s eyes were hidden by swollen, bruised flesh, but her eyelids moved just enough for Ruby to know her friend could see her.
‘I tried willing you to come back. It worked,’ she said, so quietly that Ruby had to bend to hear.
‘So how about that! We don’t need telephones to contact each other,’ Ruby whispered. ‘Don’t try to speak now. You just lie there and rest. I’ve got to go and find somewhere to stay, but I’ll be back for visiting this afternoon. I packed some clothes for you and I’ve got them with me, so when you are well enough I shall be taking you home to Babbacombe. I told the police that Archie was an embezzler. So if he was still on the run, I’m sure they’ll catch him this time.’ Ruby paused, thinking hard.
‘I don’t want you worrying that he’ll tell the police about what you did. I can’t see him doing that without incriminating himself further. Don’t you dare confess anything, either. If push comes to shove you can deny anything Archie tells them. Now concentrate on getting better, and dream about all the fun we’ll have together soon.’
She saw her friend’s lips move into an attempted smile.
‘Bye now.’ Ruby bent and kissed her forehead. ‘Go to sleep, precious one.’
The nurse came out with Ruby. ‘She’ll be better for knowing you are near,’ she said, putting one hand on Ruby’s arm comfortingly. ‘She couldn’t have a more staunch and reliable friend.’
A lump came up in Ruby’s throat, knowing she didn’t deserve such praise. ‘I’ll be back this afternoon,’ she managed to say.