Lionel Brace-Coombes was the kind of man she would have liked as a husband. Ten years older than herself, with inherited wealth, unfortunately he already had a wife, Ayleen, who had been diagnosed as being schizophrenic some five years into their marriage. He had tried so hard to keep her at home at Foxhill, but the many nurses he’d employed just wouldn’t stay, not once they found how difficult Ayleen was. He couldn’t bear the thought of committing his beautiful wife to any of the terrible asylums he visited and as time went on opening a private home seemed to be the only alternative.
The old house at Woodside Park had been lying empty since the early Thirties. It was near enough to his home for him to visit regularly and its owner was glad to have it taken off his hands. Lionel converted it with great care, landscaping the gardens and installing the best equipment available. Originally he had intended to have no more than five or six women patients only, imagining them all to be distressed gentlewomen like his wife. But the cost of providing a doctor and nurses to look after so few patients proved prohibitive and by the time Freda joined him, the numbers had swelled to twelve.
Sadly Ayleen died of pneumonia in 1940, two years after Freda arrived. What with the war and other more pressing business interests, Lionel distanced himself from the place then. When his matron left he gave the vacant post to Freda, with the full control she’d worked so hard for.
‘You look very nice today, Freda,’ Lionel Brace-Coombes said as he poured tea for them both from a silver teapot. His compliment wasn’t truly sincere. He thought Freda looked impressive in her navy Matron’s dress and starched cap – they suited her stern, humourless character and gave her dignity. But in a pale blue costume and lace-trimmed blouse she looked what she was: a fat, plain, middle-aged spinster who was trying to disguise her underlying toughness with a layer of false femininity. He felt however that as she’d gone to such lengths to please him – she’d had her hair washed and set for this visit, and she was even wearing a little lipstick and rouge – the least he could do was show some appreciation.
‘Well thank you, Lionel,’ Freda Barnes simpered. Her new navy blue high-heeled shoes were pinching her corns and her corsets were laced so tightly she couldn’t sit right back in the seat, but the discomfort was worth it if he thought she looked nice.
Lionel Brace-Coombes, her employer and owner of Carrington Hall, was the only person whose opinion she valued, and a visit to his home Foxhill House in Boreham-wood in Hertfordshire was a rare treat. She thought he was still a fine-looking man with his thick white hair and bright blue eyes, even if he was sixty-two. He had put on some weight in the last ten years, yet this had only made him more distinguished-looking. But then Freda Barnes admired everything about her employer: His appearance, impeccable manners and his intelligence. She also envied his gracious home and his adventurous ancestors who had made a fortune in shipping and left it all to him.
The garden beyond the large windows of the drawing-room was glorious, a lawn as smooth and green as a bowling green, the many old trees turning to gold and brown in autumnal splendour.
Lionel’s great-great-grandfather had built Foxhill House two hundred years before when Borehamwood was just a tiny hamlet, surrounded by woodland. It wasn’t a grand place by rich people’s standards in those days, just eight rooms in all, but he was a man with an eye for symmetry and beauty, and the graceful Georgian style was timeless. He had also commissioned craftsmen to make much of the beautiful furniture that still graced each room. Subsequent intrepid Brace-Coombeses had brought back many intriguing artefacts from every corner of the world, the thick-fringed rugs from Persia and India, and a fabulous collection of jade figurines from the Far East.
All the downstairs rooms had been redecorated since Freda’s last visit. The walls had been covered in pale gold watered silk, with new cream and gold soft furnishings.
‘Do you like the new décor?’ Lionel asked, noting the way her close-set eyes scanned the room, missing nothing. He passed her a dainty bone china teacup and saucer.
‘Very much so. It’s so very elegant and tasteful,’ she gushed. Foxhill House had been requisitioned by the Home Office during the war and although Lionel had removed much of his furniture to places of safety, it had become very shabby. She felt it was a good sign that Lionel was asserting his character on his home at last. He was a quiet, genteel man, with a passion for art, music and nature, and she had always considered the previous décor of the drawing-room with its dark Regency stripes too overpowering for a man of his sensitivity.
‘I felt it was high time I took myself in hand,’ he said with a shrug. ‘To be honest, Freda, I’ve let things slide in recent years.’
Freda gulped nervously. He might of course be merely referring to his home at this moment, but she knew his interest in Carrington Hall had waned some years ago. She was afraid he might want to close it down.
Freda had asked for this meeting today on the pretext of discussing some of the more long-term patients whose families were behind with their fees. But her real motive for seeing her employer wasn’t to involve him in things she could handle perfectly well herself, but simply to find out a little more about her newest member of staff, Rosemary Smith.
Rosemary Smith had been at Carrington Hall for a whole month now, and although the Matron could not really fault the girl’s work or behaviour, she found her puzzling to the extent that she intruded on her thoughts almost constantly.
Freda had been at Carrington Hall for fourteen years, twelve of those in the post of Matron, and in that time she had never known a young girl who did not break down in tears on occasion, or one who did not disobey some of the rules. Rosemary Smith had never done either of these things, and it wasn’t normal for a girl of not quite sixteen to be so controlled and conscientious. Even that regrettable incident with the soiled sanitary towels which had made Freda look extremely foolish had passed by without any further repercussions. What girl of that age wouldn’t make a complaint to her family and demand an apology?
Furthermore, Freda did not like the way the girl had gained a certain status amongst the rest of the staff, or how she was always asking questions about aspects of the home which didn’t concern her. At times it felt almost as if she was compiling a dossier on the running of Carrington Hall. Looking at all these things objectively, she was deeply suspicious of Smith. The only explanation seemed to be that the girl had been placed there as a spy.
‘Nothing is sliding at Carrington Hall, I can assure you,’ Freda Barnes said soothingly to her boss. ‘It’s going from strength to strength and is a credit to you. If we do have a weakness it’s merely that we may be just a little too charitable. I know you don’t like to be ruthless, Lionel,’ Freda continued, in the gentle and persuasive voice she kept for him and the relatives of new patients, ‘but these people have entrusted us with their relatives and we can’t do that job properly unless they pay the fees. Patty is a case in point. Since her brother died no one else in the family has visited her, and they are almost a year behind with her fees. They must be made to face up to their responsibilities, Lionel. Either they pay up, or Patty must go into a State institution and leave a bed free for someone who values the kind of care we give at Carrington Hall.’
‘But Patty has been with us right from the start, she was Ayleen’s friend,’ Lionel said quickly.
Freda looked at her employer’s horrified expression and smiled inwardly. In most people she despised sentimentality and weakness, but she found it attractive in Lionel. She knew he could well afford to keep a dozen Pattys without feeling the pinch, but that wasn’t the point.
‘You are such a kind man,’ she said. ‘But Lionel, Patty doesn’t really know where she is, or who is looking after her. If we start keeping one patient for nothing, soon everyone will stop paying, and then where will we be?’
Lionel shrugged. He was ashamed to admit he had toyed with the idea of selling the home. It held too many sad memories of Ayleen and in truth he found mentally defective peo
ple terribly distressing. He was so very glad he had someone like Freda Barnes to look after it for him. It meant he didn’t need to keep going there. ‘What do you suggest we do?’
‘Nothing too unpleasant, just a firm letter stating our position. I’m sure that will do the trick. It isn’t as if her family are short of money, is it?’
Lionel agreed. They moved on to discuss other patients, then slowly Freda brought the subject round to staff.
‘The new girl, Rosemary Smith, is shaping up well,’ she said with a beaming smile. ‘Quite a find on your part, Lionel!’
‘Oh really?’ He raised one eyebrow in surprise. ‘I was a bit concerned about her age. Fifteen is very young.’
‘Is she the daughter of one of your friends?’ Freda said, daintily sipping a second cup of tea.
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘She was recommended by Violet Pemberton, a nurse who once looked after Ayleen for a short while here, long before I opened Carrington Hall. A good woman, and one I would very much have liked to employ when I started the home.’
‘She didn’t want to work for you then?’
‘Unfortunately she was firmly entrenched at that time in St Mary’s in Paddington, and anyway psychiatric nursing wasn’t really her forte. She was a great help to me though, advising me on staff, equipment and other such things. We kept in touch and she was very kind when Ayleen died.’
Freda bristled. It sounded very much as if Lionel had been a little sweet on this woman. ‘Is she still at St Mary’s?’
‘No, she joined the Q A s when war broke out; now she’s a social worker down in Somerset. When she contacted me about this young girl, I was only too happy to give her a trial. I trust Violet’s judgement entirely.’
‘So Smith is one of her cases then?’
For the first time in their long and agreeable association Freda saw Lionel look furtive.
‘Oh no. Of course not.’
Freda changed the subject then. She knew Lionel well enough to know when he had nothing further to say on a subject.
She was just leaving to catch the bus back to Carrington Hall when she had an idea. ‘Could you give me your friend’s address?’ she asked. ‘I’d very much like to drop her a line and tell her how well Smith is getting on. I always think people appreciate hearing that their recommendations have been sound, don’t you?’
Lionel was heartened by Freda’s appreciation of Rosemary Smith. He felt she must be mellowing with age as she hadn’t always been generous with her praise in the past. And Violet Pemberton would be delighted to know her protégée hadn’t let her down.
‘Now that would be a nice gesture,’ he said with a broad smile, and promptly turned to his desk to find Violet’s address. ‘Give her my regards too when you write.’
As Freda waddled down the lane towards the bus stop she looked at the address Lionel had given her again: 1, Chapel Cottages, Chilton Trinity, Near Bridgwater, Somerset. She suspected there was something odd going on as this was the same one that Smith had given as her aunt’s address.
‘Unless the girl’s aunt and this Miss Pemberton share a home,’ she muttered to herself, there’s something very fishy here.’
Rosie heard the news that her father had been found guilty on the wireless in the staff dining-room.
It was Thursday, the 23rd of October, and she and Maureen had just walked in to have their tea when the rich tones of the BBC newsreader rang out with the headlines.
‘Cole Reginald Parker was today found guilty of the murders of Ruby Blackwell and Heather Farley at Bristol Assizes. Judge Draycott said as he passed the death sentence, “You wilfully and cruelly murdered these two defenceless women, and cold-bloodedly buried them on your own land to hide the evil deed you had committed.”’
Rosie gasped involuntarily. The room swum around her, and she blindly reached out for Maureen to cling on to.
‘What’s up?’ she dimly heard Maureen say.
‘Seth Parker, Cole Parker’s son, was found not-guilty by the jury and acquitted,’ the newsreader went on and a humming sound in Rosie’s ears prevented her from hearing anything more. Yet she was aware of Pat Clack staring at her open-mouthed. She knew it was Gladys Thorpe’s hand on her elbow supporting her. And she sensed Maureen’s curious gaze.
‘I just went all dizzy,’ she managed to get out and groped for a chair to sit down.
Gladys pushed Rosie’s head down between her knees. ‘Get her a cup of tea,’ she ordered.
Rosie could only see their legs as she struggled to pull herself together, but the fact that Pat Clack didn’t move towards the kitchen suggested that the three women were all looking at one another.
‘It was that news,’ Pat said. ‘Fair chilled me too.’
Rosie sat up again. ‘I’m okay.’ She tried to smile but her face was too stiff and frozen to move. The news had moved on to the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya. She thought the newsreader might come back to her father’s trial and sentence and she had to divert attention from it. ‘I felt a bit odd earlier this afternoon. Perhaps I’m just hungry.’
Rosie forced herself to eat a ham sandwich even though each mouthful stuck in her throat. Maureen was looking at her very suspiciously and things weren’t helped by Mary and Linda coming in and being regaled with the story, of both her near faint and the death sentence on Cole Parker. She was so close to breaking down. They were all so ghoulish discussing how long it took to die by hanging, and what it must feel like to wait for the moment when the hangman put the hood over your head and the noose around your neck.
‘Do you remember when Timothy Evans was hanged?’ Linda asked. ‘Me mum kept saying ‘e was innocent, and that ‘e was too feeble-minded to kill anyone.’
‘One of the chargehands here, a woman called Lily Stoops, hanged herself just a few weeks after I first came here to work,’ Gladys said. ‘She did it in the treatment room. You know that pulley thing that’s up on the ceiling, for lifting patients into the bath – well, she climbed up on a stool and put the rope through that. Matron found her.’
‘When was this?’ Linda gave Gladys her undivided attention. ‘I’ve never ‘eard that one before.’
‘Five years ago,’ Gladys said. ‘I hadn’t been here long enough to know much about Lily, who was a bit odd by all accounts. The other girls reckoned she’d been jilted and they found she was pregnant at the post-mortem. Don’t let on to Matron I told you though. That’s one of the grisly secrets of Carrington Hall she likes kept quiet. Same as she doesn’t like people talking about that patient who jumped out the window and broke both her legs.’
Rosie forced herself to sip her tea. The girls’ conversation washed around and over her, but she cut it out, concentrating her mind on looking and reacting normally, until the moment she could get up and leave the room without drawing any further attention to herself.
Although she hadn’t read another newspaper since the night she dreamt about Seth chasing her, she’d still heard enough from the other staff to know what was going on.
While Seth had built up a strong defence with his apparent lack of motive and sound alibis and managed to gather some sympathy because of his mother’s neglect and bullying father, Cole’s defence was very weak. His alibis at both murders could not be corroborated by anyone but his sons. In the case of Heather’s death, he had first said he was away in Bristol all week, then later admitted he’d come home for a couple of nights leaving Seth alone in the digs.
Pathologists had found that both women had been struck by a similar weapon, they thought the blunt end of an axe. Ruby appeared to have been hit several times either before or after the fatal blow to the base of the neck. Heather on the other hand appeared to have been hit only twice, again at the base of the neck. Although there was no witness to either murder, or indeed proof that Parker had dug the graves, testimonies from Ethel Parker and other neighbours about his violence towards his women weighed heavily against him. But it was the fact that he had reported neither woman missing which sealed his
fate. Clearly the jury didn’t believe that an innocent man would just accept that his women had run off leaving their children behind, without making some attempt to find them.
‘What’s the matter?’ Maureen said as she got into bed that evening. Rosie had gone to bed early, explaining that she was overtired. Maureen had stayed downstairs in the staff room for a while, but she came up unexpectedly around nine and found Rosie not only wide awake but with eyes swollen from crying. ‘You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone else.’
Rosie would have given anything to have someone to confide in, but she knew there wasn’t anyone she could trust, and least of all Maureen.
‘I’m just homesick,’ she said, trying to smile.
In a way that was true. For the last couple of hours she’d thought of nothing else but home, and precious memories of her father.
Sitting on his shoulders, high above the crowds of people at the Christmas Eve fair at Midsomer Norton, the dozens of stalls lit by hurricane lamps. Hands sticky from toffee apples, tightly clutching a bag full of tangerines, nuts and pomegranates. She could remember loading the goose he always bought at the auction, the new barrel of cider, and a box of vegetables into the truck, and then having a blanket tucked round her while Cole went for one last drink of whisky before he drove her and the Christmas treats home.
Days at Weston-super-Mare in the summer, paddling in the sea, building sandcastles, riding donkeys and eating candyfloss. And the nights by the fire in the winter when the wind howled round the cottage and Cole would tell her of his childhood when the River Parrett burst its banks every winter and turned the moors into one big lake.
‘You aren’t thinking of leaving here?’ Maureen asked, and the anxious look in her eyes made Rosie feel even guiltier because she didn’t trust her. ‘I don’t think I could bear it if you were to go.’
‘No, I’m not thinking of leaving,’ Rosie sighed. She wished she could truthfully say she’d grown as attached to Maureen as Maureen obviously had to her, but she couldn’t. She tolerated Maureen, stuck up for her to the others, but she couldn’t really like her. As Linda had said, Maureen was odd; she might be cleaner now, and too loyal to Rosie to steal anything or get her into trouble, but there was something underhand and sneaky about her.