Without a Trace

‘I’m so glad you came again,’ Molly said, picking up her friend’s overnight bag with one hand and tucking the other through her friend’s arm. ‘There’s so much to catch up on, and I wasn’t really myself last time.’

  ‘Gosh, Rye is pretty!’ Dilys said as they crossed the road into one of the many cobbled streets lined with tiny, ancient cottages leading up to the church. ‘No one ever told me there were nice places outside of Wales. I’ll have to spread the word.’

  Molly giggled. She knew it was a joke, but then, people back home in Sawbridge seemed to believe there was nowhere else in England as lovely as the West Country.

  ‘I’ve got the rest of today off,’ she told her friend. ‘So what would you like to do? Mooch around town? Ride a bike down to Camber Sands? Catch the bus into Hastings? I haven’t even got to pick Petal up from school – Mrs Bridgenorth said she’d do it.’

  ‘Surely she’s old enough to come home on her own?’ Dilys asked.

  ‘Yes, she’s old enough, she’s recently had her seventh birthday, but after all she went through we don’t want some mean kid saying something nasty to her and setting her right back. Every now and then she still gets a bit sad and scared, so we have to keep an eye on her.’

  ‘Poor kid. I think it’s amazing she’s come out of it so well. But speaking of coming out of things well, I’ve got a surprise for you.’

  ‘You’re coming down here to work?’

  Dilys laughed. ‘No, nothing to do with me. It’s good news for you. Miss Stow has been caught handing goods over to a friend.’

  Molly stopped short in shock. ‘Really? She blamed me and she was doing it herself?’

  ‘That’s right! She got transferred to Handbags just recently. There was a bit of a stink when they did a stock check on Gloves, but it was assumed by everyone they’d been stolen by customers – after all, they’re quite small and easy to hide. But then Mr Hardcraft caught her and her friend red-handed. Miss Stow had rung up a cheap plastic handbag but she’d put a really dear leather one in with it. It turned out she’d been doing it for some time.’

  ‘That bitch blamed me!’ Molly exclaimed, her cheeks turning red with anger. ‘They threw me out the night before Christmas Eve. I went through hell.’

  ‘I know. Everyone’s talking about it at Bourne & Hollingsworth. Nobody ever believed you’d done it, anyway, except of course Mr Hardcraft and Miss Jackson. But wait, its gets better, they checked her room and they found all sorts of stuff she’d nicked. She’d been putting it down her girdle to get past security.’

  ‘I bet they don’t even bother to apologize to me,’ Molly said with some bitterness. She had never been able to forget the shame and humiliation of being made to leave the company.

  ‘I think you’re wrong there,’ Dilys grinned. ‘You see, a lot of people saw the story in the newspaper about you rescuing Petal, so when this thing about Miss Stow broke two days ago everyone was up in arms on your behalf. They’re going to have to do something for you. After all, you could go to the newspapers.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that. It was bad enough being accused in the first place, and I certainly don’t want the world and his wife to learn about it now.’

  ‘I so much wanted to phone you and tell you.’ Dilys’s eyes were sparkling with the news. ‘But I wanted to see your face when I told you, so I waited.’

  ‘So what does my face say?’

  ‘It did say you’d like to kill Miss Stow, but that’s gone now, you just look kind of weird.’

  ‘Something like this happened to my dad,’ Molly admitted. ‘He was accused of stealing the takings from the shop he worked at. He and Mum had a terrible time of it. He never got over it. I think it’s what made him such a nasty, sour apology for a man.’

  ‘Whatever Miss Stow put on to you, it hasn’t made you like that,’ Dilys insisted. ‘In fact, if it weren’t for that crabby cow, you’d still be at Bourne & Hollingsworth. You wouldn’t have met Charley, come to work here or found Petal.’

  ‘Remind me to send her a bouquet,’ Molly said sarcastically. ‘That is, instead of cheering as they cart her off to Holloway Prison.’

  Dilys laughed. ‘Let’s forget about that and go to Camber Sands on bikes. I’ve got a new swimming cossie, and I look like a beauty queen in it. I think it’s warm enough to prance about with next to nothing on and get chatted up by a couple of lads.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ Molly said, suddenly aware that what her friend had suggested sounded like a lot of fun. She hadn’t had any of that for quite some time. ‘And tonight we’ll hit the hot spots of Rye and get silly drunk.’

  On the day that Dilys had arrived to visit Molly, unbeknown to them, digging work had started at Mulberry House.

  Two days later, when DI Pople drove into the grounds there, his heart sank. It was pouring with rain for the second day running and the garden was a complete quagmire. It looked as if a family of giant moles had been digging, throwing up small mountains of soil, and in between were huge puddles. His men had tried to fill in each hole they’d dug with the soil from the next one, but it hadn’t really worked. All the trees and shrubs that had been planted pre-war hadn’t been disturbed, but it was still a vast site, and there was still a great deal more ground to cover.

  DI Pople got out of his car and, standing on the gravel drive, put his wellington boots on. He had been expecting complaints about the futility of the search and, before he’d even crammed a sou’wester on his head and buttoned up his raincoat, the first came.

  ‘No one has dug down more than a foot here for donkey’s years,’ the first remark came, from a burly constable called in from Hastings.

  ‘Keep at it!’ Pople yelled back, and surveyed the scene, hoping for inspiration.

  His men had done a thorough job so far, under terrible conditions, and there would be hell to pay about the cost of the search if nothing was discovered. So he looked as he walked, trying to imagine himself having a dead body to dispose of. It would be very heavy for a woman to drag, and she’d need to get it hidden quickly without being seen. She would also need to bury it somewhere where it wouldn’t be dug up accidentally at a later date.

  Putting the body in an outhouse or shed while she dug a grave seemed a likely scenario. Dunkirk, where Reg Coleman was last seen, had been in June, and a body left lying around at that time of year would soon start to smell.

  He walked around the house and noticed that a laundry room complete with an old wood-fired boiler was attached to it. He’d noticed a more up-to-date gas boiler in the kitchen but, although the outhouse was now obsolete, it had probably been in use during the war years.

  There was an old greenhouse, a potting shed and an old chicken house in the back garden, too. At the right-hand side of the house was the garage and not very far from it, with its back to the garden wall, was a summer house.

  He looked from one to the other. The greenhouse he rejected, as anything inside could be seen through the glass. The potting shed was less than five feet long, too short for a grown man to lie on the floor. During the war, people had relied heavily on their chickens, so Miss Gribble was unlikely to have disturbed them by shoving a body in there.

  He went over to the summer house to examine it carefully. The felt on the roof was in good condition and the walls had been repainted pale blue in the last three or four years. The cane furniture inside was probably pre-war, but the cushions were clean and looked newer. There were books on a shelf, a couple of jigsaw puzzles on a table, all signs it had once been a loved place, but, judging by the amount of cobwebs, it hadn’t been used for a few years.

  It seemed a likely spot to put a body: not far to drag it from the house, and not visible from it either, as there was a big oak tree at the side of the house blocking the view from the windows. He noted, too, that there were a few feet of crazy paving in front of the door. No concrete, just stones laid on the grass, and trodden in well over the years. He could understand someone putting down stepping stones, but it was odd to make a recta
ngle with them.

  ‘Over here!’ he yelled to two of his men. ‘I’ve got a strong hunch we might find something under these stones.’

  They put up a tarpaulin to work under and, from the first spade of soil after the paving was removed, the men remarked how much easier it was to dig here than elsewhere in the garden. DI Pople could feel their growing excitement as keenly as his own.

  ‘I reckon she were a professional gravedigger,’ one of the men joked as they went down and down.

  It was just a few minutes after his jovial remark that his spade hit something. ‘Looks like a blanket wrapped round something,’ he shouted from the now four-foot-deep hole. ‘Best pass me down a trowel to scrape away the soil.’

  An hour and a half later, a skeleton was fully exposed and awaiting the pathologist. There were still bits of khaki uniform attached to it which hadn’t rotted away, and brass buttons, belt webbing and a pair of boots.

  ‘No doubt that it’s Reg Coleman,’ DI Pople said as he sheltered under the tarpaulin and gazed down at the skeleton. ‘It will be interesting to discover how she killed him. Anyone want to place a bet on it? Stabbing, shooting or poison?’

  There was a round of speculation on the subject.

  ‘Bet he was over the moon to get back from Dunkirk in one piece.’ The voice of one of the constables rose above the rest. ‘Poor geezer, happy as Larry, thinking only of getting his leg over, and the bloody housekeeper does for him. That’s what you call tragic irony.’

  ‘Makes you wonder who else is buried out here,’ someone else chipped in.

  ‘It does indeed,’ DI Pople murmured to himself. ‘It does indeed.’

  Three days later, armed with the police pathologist’s report, which confirmed that the body in the garden was indeed that of Reginald Coleman, DI Pople went back to Hellingly Hospital to see his widow. He had Sergeant Wayfield with him as a witness because he hoped that, by presenting the poor woman with evidence of just how evil her beloved Miss Gribble was, she might feel able to disclose other things which maybe, out of misplaced loyalty, she had kept to herself.

  Christabel looked even calmer than she had on the previous visit. Her eyes were bright, her smile was warm and there was a glow about her.

  ‘I’ve been feeling very much better,’ she said. ‘I think this is due to finally being able to face up to the folly of allowing Miss Gribble to run my life.’

  DI Pople thought that she might not feel quite so well balanced when he told her about the latest development but, however much sympathy he had for her, he had to press on.

  ‘I am very sorry to tell you but we have found your husband’s body in the garden of Mulberry House,’ he said. He wanted to tell her as gently as possible but whichever way he put it she was going to be distressed. ‘He was stabbed in the chest, and we have no doubt that this was done by Miss Gribble.’

  Christabel’s glow vanished like the sun going behind a cloud. She clamped her hands over her mouth and her eyes filled with tears. ‘She killed my Reg?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said DI Pople. ‘She buried him in front of the summer house.’

  Christabel cried then, a low, keening sound that somehow illustrated how badly she had been betrayed by the woman who professed to love her. DI Pople stood up and put his hand on her shoulder in an effort to comfort her, and the sergeant asked the nurse waiting outside to bring some tea.

  ‘I never had any suspicions about her,’ Christabel said, wiping her eyes. ‘And the awful thing is that I chose to believe the rumour flying around the village that he had bunked off from the army to be with a woman in France. Isn’t it terrible that I believed that of him instead of grieving?’

  ‘If it were me, I would wonder who started that rumour,’ DI Pople said.

  Christabel looked at him in horror. ‘You think it was her?’

  DI Pople shrugged. ‘I think it’s very likely. It would stop you from trying to find out more about his disappearance.’

  ‘Oh God, I’ve been such a fool,’ said Christabel Coleman, holding her head between her hands. ‘I let her guide me because I trusted her implicitly. Why couldn’t I see what she was doing? She even turned Sylvia against me.’

  ‘I don’t think you should blame yourself for that,’ he said, afraid he’d pushed her close to the edge again with his revelations. ‘Most mothers would be upset if their unmarried daughter got herself pregnant.’

  She looked at him with an expression of utter exasperation. ‘For a policeman, you aren’t that quick,’ she said. ‘Sylvia didn’t get pregnant. I did. Petal is my child.’

  For all his years of experience of witnesses telling him the most unexpected and often outrageous things, DI Pople had never expected to be shocked like this, and by this gentle woman.

  ‘She’s your child?’ he said stupidly. ‘But how? I mean, who –’ He broke off, unable to find appropriate words to ask how she could have even met a black man.

  ‘My goodness, you’re shocked,’ she said, and gave a humourless laugh. ‘The lady from the big house having an affair with a black man! Well, I did, and, for your information, he was a good man. I met him towards the end of the war in Ashford. He was an American airman, handsome, charming and fun. I hadn’t had any fun at all since Reg disappeared. I was in no man’s land, neither a confirmed widow nor an abandoned wife. A friend in Ashford talked me into going to a dance with her, and that’s where I met him.’

  ‘What was his name?’ DI Pople asked, trying to overcome his shock and to pull himself back into the role of interrogator.

  ‘Benjamin Hargreaves,’ she said, without any hesitation. ‘Once a fortnight I would meet him in Ashford, just to talk. We didn’t become lovers until just before he had to go home, in 1946. I cared for him a great deal, but we were both very aware of the prejudice there was against black people mixing with white. He came from the South, near Atlanta, and he said if he were to try and take me home with him I’d have a miserable life. Of course, I had Sylvia to think of, too, she was just twenty then, and there was Gribby, who I felt I owed so much to, and I couldn’t tell her.’

  ‘So she didn’t know?’

  ‘No, she didn’t find out until long after Benjamin had gone home, when I was six months pregnant and it began to show. Even then I didn’t tell her who the father was, or that he was black. She went mad as it was. If I hadn’t been so far gone I think she would have forced me to have an abortion. Poor Sylvia was caught up in the middle of it. She listened to Gribby going on about how people would talk about me, and Sylvia argued that it didn’t matter and we could bring the baby up together.’

  ‘She sounds a good, kind girl,’ DI Pople said.

  ‘She was. I even confided in her that the baby would be black, to prepare her. That was when she suggested we could tell people it was her baby. She said she didn’t care what people thought. She was always like that – she didn’t give a damn about what she called small-mindedness. She even suggested that we got rid of Gribby, sold the house and moved to London. I was tempted, I can tell you. But I couldn’t sell the house, because Reg was missing, and it would have taken a bomb to get rid of Gribby.’

  ‘So you agreed that Sylvia would say the baby was hers?’

  ‘Yes, somewhat reluctantly, but once Gribby knew about it, she ganged up with Sylvia. It was probably the first time they were ever in agreement about anything. I wanted a quiet life, and I thought everything would come right once the baby was born. So I stayed in so no one saw me, and waited for the baby.’

  ‘Are you telling me you had Petal at home, with no midwife or nurse?’

  ‘Yes. Well, it wasn’t my first baby. I knew the ropes, and so did Gribby. It was an easy, quick birth, and she was a beautiful baby.’

  ‘And how did Miss Gribble take it?’

  Christabel’s eyes filled with tears again. ‘She went mad because the baby was black. She called me terrible names, she ranted and raved. It was awful, and now I know what she’s capable of, I think she might have killed the ba
by but for Sylvia. She stood up for me. Young as she was, she was as fierce as a tiger, and she never gave Gribby a chance to be alone with Petal. That was why Sylvia ran away with her in the end. She couldn’t stand the strain, and she said to me that Petal deserved a better life than having someone constantly disapproving of her. She said I was pathetic for allowing Gribby to rule me and that no one would ever tell her what to say or do.’

  ‘Did you register Petal’s birth?’ DI Pople asked. He was beginning to have such admiration for Sylvia, and a great deal of sympathy for Christabel, too.

  ‘Sylvia did, as her mother. She slipped out and went on the bus to do it before Gribby could stop her. We had been calling her Squirrel as a pet name, but Sylvia registered her as Pamela Coleman, and of course they put “father unknown” on the birth certificate. I assume Sylvia began calling her Petal March when she ran away with her and, at the same time, she changed her own name to Cassandra March.’

  DI Pople felt that he had everything he needed from Christabel now. A statement would be drawn up and signed by her and, in the meantime, he would try and get a confession from Miss Gribble that she’d murdered Reg Coleman. He hadn’t told Christabel that she had stabbed him repeatedly, as if in a frenzy. Some things were kinder not to mention.

  However, one thing he felt he should do was to encourage young Molly Heywood to go and see Christabel. She needed to know about her dead friend’s mother, and Christabel could do with knowing more about both her daughters.

  As for himself, he felt drained. In his entire career he had only been involved in five murders before this, and all of them had been fairly straightforward cases. This one had been hell, not because it was difficult but because one psychopathic woman had manipulated and destroyed an entire family.

  If Gribble hadn’t killed Reg, he might very well have pushed her out, and he, Christabel and Sylvia could have had a happy life together. Instead, Christabel became a virtual prisoner and Sylvia was forced to take responsibility for her half-sister and hide away, hoping they’d never be found. Her life, too, had been blighted, and then wiped out.