‘I’m sorry, Agnes.’ He nodded and flipped the pocketbook shut.
‘The film has been sent for examination by experts,’ he said, ‘but having watched it again, I am pretty sure that all is as it seems. The scenes of the blacksmith’s yard, the graininess of the picture and the shadows cast on the green all suggest that the film was indeed shot at sunrise on that May Morning.’
I nodded. ‘That is what I thought.’
‘And the man walking with Iris does appear to be Sam Denman.’
But this time I did not answer him. Sam Denman was a distant relative of my late husband and Roy must have known that I would not take the news well.
He looked to the chair by the window again but this time his eyes lingered on it a little longer. ‘You must be bitter over all these years,’ he said.
‘Bitter?’
‘Well, for us at the station, it was always about the missing girls,’ he said, ‘but I know that the press saw it another way: the disappearance of beautiful Iris Caldwell and, as a footnote, her maid, a servant girl, a girl who is rarely even named. Even for the inspector, all the pressure was on finding Iris Caldwell and not a thought for poor—’
‘I do not pay attention to the gutter press,’ I said.
‘Maybe you should!’ He took a newspaper from his bag. ‘This is a late morning edition,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘They had to stop the presses but the story about last night’s screening is already in print.’
I put on my spectacles but my eyes still stumbled over the text, so I handed the paper back to him. ‘I already know what it will say,’ I said. ‘I don’t think that the type of rubbish they print will have changed over the years.’
‘I suppose you are right,’ he said, ‘because yet again it is Iris Caldwell’s murder that will cause the sensation.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘The disappearance of her servant, on the same morning, is forgotten even in her own town’s newspaper.’
‘Nell is not forgotten!’ I spat.
‘Nell,’ he repeated, as if the name had sounded like a confession on my lips. ‘Nell was your daughter, but you never speak of her, even now.’
I looked to the chair in the bay of the window and to Nell’s faded shawl. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I do not speak of her, because whenever I think of her, she…’
And then Nell was there as I knew she would be. She sat on the chair by the window, somehow brighter than she had been before, and I could see the curl of her chestnut hair and even the little scar on her cheek that would crease into a dimple when she smiled – little things about her that I had forgotten for such a long time. I thought that she could sense us because she looked at Roy and leant forward as if to listen, tucking a short strand of dark curls behind her ear, the way she always did when she concentrated.
Roy followed my gaze, his eyes briefly skimming the chair and the shawl before looking out of the window but, when he saw nothing, he looked back to me. ‘I understand it is hard, Agnes,’ he said. ‘You know that you are always welcome round if you ever need to talk to me, or Joyce even. You lent handkerchiefs and arranged funerals for so many of the village women who lost sons and husbands during the Great War. I am sure that has not been forgotten. I know you have tried to stay strong for the past twenty-five years, but it is never too late to ask for help. I know when your husband, Thomas, died it was you and Nell, just the two of you, for a while, but there are others who you can turn to—’
But I could not listen to him spell out my sorry situation anymore. ‘Thank you for the chat,’ I said standing up from my chair, ‘but as I have said before, all this happened a quarter of a century ago. I have nothing more to say.’
He nodded. Then I caught him looking at me and I realised that I had been gazing at the chair by the window once more.
‘I am sorry, Agnes,’ he said and then he folded the little book back into his pocket and left without a farewell.
In the chair by the window, Nell turned her head to watch him leave.
3
On May Day 1912 Iris Caldwell, together with my daughter Nell Ryland, went missing, never to be seen again.
On that morning Iris Caldwell rose before the dawn to prepare for her duties as May Queen. She breakfasted with her father and dressed in the long white gown she would wear for the festivities. When a small fire took hold in the stable of the Caldwells’ estate, her father went to investigate, leaving Iris alone, and when he returned, she was gone. Iris’s petticoat was discovered on Missensham Common by a search party later that morning. The blood-soaked garment was found in a thicket of wych elms where it had been dragged into a foxhole. Iris had met an end so grisly, it seems, that the foxes sensing the blood had disturbed the remains and borne off what was left of her.
Those were the facts as I understood them. It was a story that had been reported widely in the newspapers at the time, but there was much said about that morning that was not fact. Some believed that Iris had been involved in a failed abduction, the fire in the stable started as a deliberate distraction while she was spirited away. Some believed that she had been kidnapped by passing gypsies or had fallen into an old well, but it was Sam Denman who suffered the most blame. Sam was a local stable hand who lodged near the common and had taught Iris to ride. He had been drunk on the morning of the disappearance and unable to account for his whereabouts. The accusation had followed Sam his whole life and, unable to find work in the area, he lived no better than a vagrant.
Now there was a new part of the story. Many had long believed that Iris had died in the dark of the morning, but now it was known that she had crossed the village green with Sam when the sun was almost risen. Sam Denman would be accused once more.
The story of my daughter, Nell, was less well known. Since my husband’s death, Nell and I had lived together in our small cottage on the village green. On that fateful morning I had got up early and not checked Nell’s room. In fact, I had tiptoed about the place and not dared to push on her door. Nell was a light sleeper and I’d feared waking her. It was six o’clock when I’d left the cottage and set off for my duties at the church. When I’d returned home an hour later, I had found Nell’s room empty. Just like Iris Caldwell, Nell was never seen again.
Nell was not an heiress and she was no great beauty – although much of this was down to her own making – and her behaviour had never endeared her to the people of the village. There had been no fire at Oak Cottage and Nell’s blood had not been found. Nell’s story had never interested people the way that Iris’s did and after a while I had tired of telling it.
Although there were some things about Nell that I never dared speak of – things that I could neither admit to myself nor come to forget.
So that was the morning of May Day 1912. The afternoon and the days, weeks and months that followed seemed full of church halls crammed with concerned villagers, lanes bustling with search parties and the yelp of foxhounds. Questions were asked in parliament, church services were held, and the foxholes destroyed. The face of Iris Caldwell was everywhere – her inky outline peered out from the pages of the newspapers, from posters nailed to trees and leaflets handed out by policemen in the street. I could not escape the image of this girl with fair hair that flowed loose about her shoulders and the crown of irises upon her head. Iris was always pictured as the May Queen, some Shakespearean nymph or Pre-Raphaelite beauty, when in fact she had never worn the crown of irises or been seen after sunrise on May Day.
There were no pictures of Nell. No portraits or photographs. I had not even paid tuppence for her to sit for a charcoal sketch at the village fete. I had always considered that kind of thing a vanity, but it was something I came to regret.
Over the years, I had described my daughter’s appearance to the police many times, but there was little I could tell them about Nell. She was a child of average height, with chestnut curls a little looser than my own, but these descriptions made her sound like hundreds of other girls. There were things about Nell that I could not describe,
of course – the little scar on her cheek that would crease into a dimple when she smiled, the strange hooded look that came over her when she was concentrating on one of her cheap novels, or the way her lips wrinkled before she laughed – but these were things that I would only recall briefly before the memory would fade. I think that is why I sometimes saw Nell again – it was my way of reminding myself of what she looked like as I had nothing to put in a silver frame or carry close to me.
There was only one other way I could remember Nell, and that was with the person who shared some of my memories, the one other who shared my pain.
* * *
Roy had left Oak Cottage before midday. Nell and I had watched his portly frame waddle down our short garden path, on to the road that edged the village green, and across the grass to the police station on the other side. I’d then sat for a while thinking of the previous evening’s events and the sleeping memories they had disturbed – the face of Iris and the flicker of the projector, the whispers of ‘murder’ and the accusing finger pointing to the screen – and then of my discussion with Roy, which had reduced them all to a newspaper article and scribbles in a little yellowed pocketbook.
It was well into the afternoon before I scooped up the newspaper that Roy had left on the arm of the chair and stuffed it into my handbag. I knew that Nell would not want it in the house, but she was already starting to fade, her features blurring until she was no more than a shadow, and by the time I put on my coat and slung the bag over my shoulder she had disappeared completely. When I said goodbye, it was to the chair alone and I shut the front door behind me without looking back.
I stepped out on to the road and turned towards St Cuthbert’s, heading for the crossroads with the old war memorial. I followed the road round the edge of the Sunningdale housing estate and away from town past the orchard and lido. I muttered to myself as I walked, cursing my aching joints. The black and white memories that had plagued me that morning had now faded in the sunshine but somehow the feeling remained.
After about half a mile, the road forked, and I turned on to a smaller dirt road that was ridged with tyre tracks and followed the edge of a narrow stream. I continued for a few minutes until the stream became shallower and the tyre tracks were little more than soft furrows in the mud as they veered towards the water’s edge. Here was another fork in the road, the smaller track almost hidden under the gushing waters of the stream, the muddied cobbles of the ford just dark shapes in the water.
On the other side of the water, the smaller road led up to two grand stone pillars, which marked the entrance to Haughten Hall, the smart red bricks and long windows of the house rising above it.
A motorcar was coming down the long driveway and I stepped back so that it would not splash me with the waters. As it drew closer, I saw that it was the old police Wolseley that I had so often seen from my window parked under the blue lamp of the police station. The motorcar slowed when it neared the ford, its engine rumbling as it splashed through the water. I glimpsed a couple of uniformed officers in the back seats, and Roy’s face through the dapple of light on the windscreen. If he saw me, he did not stop.
I took the little beam footbridge that crossed the stream and a bank of mud where the irises grew. It was too early in the year for any flowers but the mud was already thick with new spring growth, the pointed leaves rising from the waters. On the other bank, I followed the long driveway that led up to the grand marble steps of Haughten Hall.
It was Dora, the aged housekeeper, who answered the door and greeted me with the words, ‘Go straight up, Mrs Ryland.’
‘But I have not made an appointment,’ I said.
She looked at me wearily. ‘He has seen this morning’s paper – he is expecting you.’
I crossed the large hallway and climbed the grand staircase stiffly, catching my breath on the landing before lingering outside the open door of the study. Sir Howard sat at his desk, a newspaper spread open on the surface. He had been a tall and well-built man when we first met, but now, as he hunched over the desk, I noticed the bony jut of his shoulders and a patch of pale scalp through his thinning grey hair. His thick spectacles were clasped in a gnarled hand as he held them close to the paper, moving them slowly over the text, his bushy eyebrows drawn low as he squinted through the lenses.
It was the place I usually found him, and where I had first met him all those years ago when I had been summoned to Haughten Hall and interviewed for the post of a tutor, providing religious instruction for his daughter. I had known of Sir Howard Caldwell for many years before that, of course, because I had seen him with his daughter in church, but his family’s pew was only ever occupied at Christmas and Easter and I suspected that he actually cared little for his daughter’s religious instruction. He had been an active Member of Parliament back then and must have thought it some kind of civic duty to offer a little financial support to the local vicar’s widow.
I knocked lightly on the doorframe and he raised his head.
‘Have you seen the local rag, Agnes?’ he said.
I nodded and held up my bag, the newspaper poking from the top. ‘I haven’t read it though,’ I said. ‘I remember the kind of things they wrote all those years ago and I just could not bring myself to do it. After all, all the stories are utter—’
‘Shit!’ he concluded.
‘Well, I…’ But I did not protest at his language for I had known for a long time that it was his godless way.
‘It is as if they have no feeling for those involved,’ he continued, looking back down at the paper. ‘They have included every sordid detail, even about how the bloodied clothes were rent apart by foxes. At least you are spared this, Agnes. At least it was not the undergarments of your Nell which they describe in such detail.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There is never much mention of Nell.’
‘There is not even mention of a story,’ he said. ‘They are just going over old ground; there is only one line about the old film that was shown – it says people fainted in the hall at the sight of her face.’
‘What rot!’ I cried. ‘I was at the screening myself – Roy must have told you that much. I have seen that he has already been round this morning, I saw his car crossing the ford.’
‘He did little more than bring me this rag,’ he said, pushing his spectacles further down his nose.
I crossed the room and sat down on the window seat without waiting for him to invite me because I knew that he would not. Despite Sir Howard’s abrupt manner, over the past twenty-five years we had become close friends. The study was a room I did not care for, but it was the room Sir Howard favoured because it was a place where the eyes of the one he had loved and lost gazed down at him.
Every space on the wall was inhabited by a portrait of the beautiful girl taken in her youth. Each was a formal oil painting in quite an old-fashioned style – the girl with the long golden hair holding the halter of a white horse, gazing down at a vase of yellow irises or peering into the stream, the rolling front lawn and the red brick walls of Haughten Hall rising above her. Her hair was loose in each portrait and styled in quite a childish fashion and she wore long flowing day dresses, which gave her that classical look the upper classes seemed to favour, as she posed with doves, ornate hand mirrors and boughs of apple blossom.
‘Oh yes,’ said Sir Howard suddenly. ‘Here, there is a mention of your daughter.’
‘Don’t!’ I said. ‘I don’t want to know.’
But he continued, ‘“Daughter of former MP Sir Howard Caldwell, the beautiful Iris Caldwell, disappeared from Haughten Hall when Sir Howard went to investigate a small fire in the stable.”’
I leant my forehead on the windowpane, glad of the cold glass, and stared out across to the common.
‘“It was to be a joyous day as Miss Caldwell waited at Haughten Hall for the arrival of May morning. She was due to start the revelry at dawn…”’
I swallowed hard because I knew what was coming next and did not care to hear
it again. I could not bring myself to look at him but he continued talking and I gazed out of the window trying not to listen.
Like all the windows at the back of the house, this one was long with a view over the stable yard and the small kitchen garden. Behind this was a small lawn and then a fence that had been sunk into a ditch so that the unbroken view stretched beyond the grounds of Haughten Hall and drew the eye between small clumps of trees and up on to the tussocks of grass where Missensham Common met the horizon. It was a view that often soothed me, for I thought that if Nell was indeed dead, then she would be out there somewhere among the delicate blooms of gorse and singing birds.
‘“…bloodied petticoat unearthed from the foxholes on Missensham Common”,’ Sir Howard concluded.
‘You said there was mention of Nell,’ I said.
‘Nell?’ He looked up, saying the word as if for the first time, and cleared his throat.
‘Oh, Nell, of course, yes – here we are. “Iris Caldwell’s servant, a local girl called Nell Ryland, also disappeared on that day. Both the girls were fifteen years old, believed murdered”.’
The last word seemed to hang in the air and my view of the common began to shimmer and blur. Then the door opened with a bang and Dora stumbled across the room with a rattling tea tray and started to set out the cups on the coffee table. I could not meet her eyes and I sensed that Sir Howard could not either. She left the room without a thank you or even a glance.
I wiped my eyes on my handkerchief and stuffed it hastily back into my sleeve. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it was indeed all so long ago, and as you say, it is not as if anything new has come of this. We have dwelt too long on this already and moping won’t help.’ I crossed to the table and poured the tea, which was hardly brewed and still watery, the china tinkling in my trembling hand. ‘Custard cream?’
He did not answer, so I put a biscuit in his saucer and took the tea over to his desk.
The Lost Girls Page 2