The Lost Girls

by Jennifer Wells

  ‘You know we have always been such a great comfort to each other throughout this, Howard. You know there are those who blamed me. I should have checked on Nell that morning before I went to the church. I could have discovered that all was not well so much earlier, but you never blamed me.’ I put my hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I don’t blame you, Agnes,’ he said. ‘You must know that.’ But his shoulder shrank from my touch.

  ‘I know you think that Nell could have had a bad influence on Iris,’ I said. ‘After all, her transgressions were well known in the village.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that, nor have I ever given you cause to think it. I never heard of Nell being trouble to anyone.’

  ‘But the drunkenness,’ I began, ‘and the arrest—’

  ‘You exaggerate, Agnes,’ he said. ‘They are youthful mistakes of little consequence. You must not forget she was your daughter.’

  ‘They might be seen as youthful mistakes now,’ I said, ‘but don’t forget those were different times and she had her father’s memory to uphold. Of course there was also the expulsion from school and the…’ But here he did not need to stop me, because there were things that I could not say out loud, things that even after all these years, I could neither admit to him nor myself.

  ‘You said that you saw the film that was shown in the church hall, Agnes,’ he said quickly, his manner changing.

  I nodded.

  ‘Roy said the image was grainy but that people thought it Iris on the village green at daybreak, with a man.’

  ‘I would say that it was definitely Iris,’ I said, ‘and I think it probably was daybreak on May Day morning because I remember there was some footage of the blacksmith’s yard that was played just before it. They were tying oxeye daisies on to the willow arch and they would not have done that until the morning of May Day. Roy seems to think that the film is grainy because it was shot in the first light of day. The sun is only just coming up because the oak casts a long shadow over the grass at sunrise.’ I spoke quickly because I knew they were details that he was not concerned with, and I waited for his next question, the one I dreaded.

  He did not hesitate. ‘Was it Sam Denman who was walking with Iris on the film?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘I would say that it was him.’ It was something that I was not happy admitting, but I was more comfortable saying it to Sir Howard than to an officer of the law who would record my words in a pocketbook. Then I added, ‘But Roy will interview Francis Elliot-Palmer again. He must be the one who shot the film and so will remember if it was Sam who he saw with Iris that morning.’

  ‘Well, you know that I was never sure about Sam’s involvement,’ he said, ‘but now it would appear that he is guilty after all because the chap has absconded. Roy tells me that the police have already been to Waldley Court today, to that little dump that he has been squatting in.’

  ‘I’m sure they have,’ I said wearily.

  ‘The chap had a lot of fight in him,’ Sir Howard continued. ‘He led them a merry dance. Even managed to spook his horses so that they galloped off over the common before the constables could get out the car. There was a scuffle and he managed to escape from three strong officers, all without his boots on and in his nightclothes. He has not yet returned and I doubt that he intends to.’ He jabbed his finger towards the window, in the direction of Waldley Court on the far side of the common. ‘That is an admission of guilt if ever I saw one.’

  ‘Sam would have run when he saw the constables whether he was guilty or not,’ I persisted.

  He turned away from me and went back to the newspaper on his desk, shaking out the creases vigorously.

  I could not bear hostility between us. ‘Let’s not quarrel,’ I said. Sir Howard was the only one who understood me because he had suffered the same loss, and I had always thought that we felt the same pain, even if he handled it differently. I went to put my hand on his shoulder again, but he leant away from me absentmindedly and turned his gaze back to the newspaper.

  ‘Such a lot of shit in here,’ he muttered.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It even says that both the girls are dead.’

  He did not respond, just glanced at me pityingly.

  4

  I left Haughten Hall with neither the comfort nor understanding I had been hoping for. There had been something about Sir Howard’s manner that morning that had been more sour than usual and, as we had said our brief goodbyes, I had seen a detachment in his eyes, as if his mind was already on other things.

  As I reached the bottom of the driveway, I stopped and looked back at the big old house with its red brick walls and grand columned porch. It was something that I always did after my visits, hoping to see a face in one of the long windows or even the twitch of a curtain but as always there was nothing to see. The curtains were open in every window but the light from the mid-afternoon sun caught the chequers of glass in such a way that the whole place seemed armoured against my stare.

  Nell had never appeared to me at Haughten Hall. Back in 1912 she had always complained of our visits there. In fact, she would sometimes say that she hated Iris but I was sure that this was down to nothing more than childish resentment as Iris was a sweet-natured girl, with never a bad word to say about anyone. Even back then Nell must have sensed the closeness between Howard and myself; she once accused me of being overly familiar with him – something she turned her nose up at.

  I supposed that Nell’s complaints were the reason that she chose to stay away now, and I had never even glimpsed so much as her shadow lingering in a corner or her reflection in a windowpane. I suspected that she knew of my visits to Sir Howard and for this reason, every visit made me feel a little guilty as if I was somehow betraying her.

  It was this guilt that made me hesitate as I crossed back over the little plank bridge. I thought then that I should do what Nell would have wanted so I took the right turn towards Missensham Common instead of heading home. I did not like to take the main track, so I cut across the grass at the first chance I got, and followed a steep trail through the gorse where the grass had been grazed close to the earth by rabbits and sheep.

  After a while my joints began to ache and my breaths quickened from the thin air of the higher ground but I realised that the day was actually a fine one for April – the bracken already a rich green and the exotic smell of the first bloom of gorse catching in the air – and I stopped to look at the view.

  On the far side of the common I could just make out the cart track, which hugged the lower slopes, and then, halfway along it a small thicket known locally as the Blood Elms, but that was a place that I did not like to go. Beyond the thicket, the edge of the common gave way to a view of Missensham: the Oxworth Road winding its way between the new housing estates, a single car crawling silently along the tarmac; the shop-lined high street; the spire of St Cuthbert’s; the small patch of village green. I could even see the round canopy of the oak tree that blocked the morning sun from the windows of my cottage.

  I headed on across the grass towards the far end of the common where there was a cluster of tall fir trees, a group of twisted black chimneys rising among them.

  When I grew closer to the trees, I cut down on to the cart track and followed the long brick wall that encircled the grounds of Waldley Court. It had once been a fine house but a few charred brick walls and the blackened chimneys were all that remained. The house had been empty for over twenty years, the owners choosing to abandon the home they could not afford to repair.

  The gate to the stable yard was open, the wheezy bark of a dog echoing through the emptiness, the air rasping in the creature’s throat as if it had barked itself hoarse.

  Here, I hesitated. This was the home of Sam Denman, the man blamed for the murders of Iris and my Nell, and the place that the police had visited just hours earlier. Sam had escaped but I did not share Sir Howard’s conviction that he would not return.

  Sam had never lived well; he had come from a
poor start but, as a distant relative of Thomas, my late husband, I believed that he must have had some of Thomas’s goodness in him. I had always felt a bit protective towards Sam because, with his slight build and gingery complexion, he reminded me of Thomas in a way that Nell never had. Sam had lived with us in the parsonage for a few months before Thomas became infirm. He had got on well with Nell and been a calming influence in the face of Thomas’s illness. He’d formed a friendship with Nell, which had lasted long after Thomas’s death.

  With no son of our own, I had vowed to Thomas that I would protect Sam, but after Thomas’s death I was left with little means to do so. I was glad when my affection for the boy was shared by a wealthy widow, Mrs Elliot-Palmer, who gave him work and lodgings in the stable block of her estate at Waldley Court. It had been a fine life for a young man of Sam’s background, but just as Iris and Nell’s life had stopped on May Day 1912, so had Sam’s.

  Sam had fought in the Great War but returned almost unnoticed; most people had assumed him dead, and wished it too. When he came back, it was to nothing – a fire at Waldley Court had left the main house beyond repair and the Elliot-Palmers had moved away. The war had broken Sam – he was shell-shocked, a drunkard and distrustful of anyone in a uniform. He took to living in the only way he had ever known – squatting in the run-down tack room of the place he had once worked.

  He lived as he had done when he was a lad but now he was in his mid-forties, a little older than the girls would have been. I thought it a way of life that suited him though and I remembered how he would never dress for dinner when he lived with us at the parsonage, and how he would always eat with his hands – this boy I had once known.

  ‘Sam?’ I walked slowly into the yard, calling softly, for I was not sure if he had returned. ‘You don’t need to worry, Sam, it is me, Agnes Ryland, and I am alone.’ I stopped still and listened but there was no answer, only the bang of a door caught in the wind and the bark of the dog, which I now saw tethered to an iron ring on the stable wall.

  I had not seen Sam for many years. I would sympathise with him and defend him in town, but, as with most people, I too avoided him because the once good-natured boy had changed so much over the years. To Sam, the farmers out shooting rabbits were German snipers, the foxhunt galloping through the fields was the charging cavalry, and the chug of a tractor an advancing tank, yet every day it was he who was accused of bloodshed. Now, faced with an army of uniformed men once more, Sam had fought and fled.

  The stable yard seemed smaller and shabbier than I remembered. The barn was now empty of horses and there were tiles missing from the low-pitched roof. But there were other things that were amiss: tyre tracks swept through the yard, which was still muddy from the weekend’s rain; shirts and trousers were strewn over the fences and dangled from the gate; an old straw mattress lay in a pool of murky water; the bucket had been toppled from under the pump; an old iron brazier lay on its side, some of the coals still coated in powdery white cinder.

  The door to the old tack room where Sam lodged was banging in the breeze, and I hurried to secure it so that it did not distress the dog who now strained on his rope. I wedged the door open with an old horseshoe but the dog did not settle, his barks becoming more frantic.

  I walked over to him slowly, my footprints mingling with those of the constables, and held out my hand.

  ‘Don’t worry, boy,’ I began. ‘Trust in the Lord and…’ But the verse failed on my lips when he cowered at the sound of my voice, and I wondered at what he had witnessed that morning.

  I returned to the tack room and put my head through the door. The room was clean and dry, the lime on the old stone walls still white and not speckled by mildew. An old ladder was propped against a wall, a single vest hung out to dry on the rungs, and I fancied that the shirts and trousers I had seen flung on to the fences had started that morning clean. On the floor was a rectangle edged in dust where the mattress had once lain, and a sodden blanket that trailed towards the door.

  On the small windowsill was a little tin bowl, a milk can with some milk at the bottom that still smelt fresh, a loaf that was only just stale and some kind of herb with frilly green leaves that I took to be parsley planted into an old tin can. By the doorway were Sam’s boots placed neatly side by side, as if waiting to be put on.

  I went back outside to the little plank bench by the pump and sat down heavily, resting my aching joints. None of what I had seen was Sam’s doing and, as I looked at the chaos that the constables had caused, I learnt a little more of what had happened that morning.

  I felt that I could see the police car as it had swept in through the gate, its tyres cutting a crescent in the mud, and the doors flying open as the constables ran across the yard. I imagined the blanket dragged from the bed and then Sam in his nightshirt, pulled up between the constables without even the chance to put on his boots. I looked at the marks left in the mud – the circling footprints and skids – and I fancied that I could understand some of the tussle that must have followed the ambush, one so desperate that a brazier of hot coals had been toppled in the fray. Sam was only a small man but he was strong and wiry and would struggle like a rat in a trap. As Sir Howard had said, he had managed to escape from the clutches of three strong men.

  Yet there were other things in the yard that could not be explained by an arrest attempt that was in any way fair or decent.

  I imagined the mattress tossed between two excitable constables and then slung into a puddle, and the shirts and trousers grabbed from where they aired in the tack room and thrown on to the fences to deter Sam from returning. I knew that Roy could not have taken part in such destruction but it saddened me to think of him standing back and watching silently.

  A second set of tyre tracks crossed the first and I pictured the car reversing, leaving the tack room and yard destroyed and empty, and the boy I had once known scared and alone in the cold of the morning without even any boots on his feet.

  ‘Oh, Sam,’ I said aloud. ‘I am sorry.’

  I picked up the blanket and squeezed the mud from the trampled fabric, hanging it out to air on the stepladder. I fetched a pair of trousers from the fence and wound it round my hands as I righted the brazier, then I lifted the mattress from the mud and wrestled it back inside the tack room, leaning it up against the wall, so that it would get some of the last heat from the brazier. I took the little potted plant under my arm and put it on the bench by the pump, together with the loaf and milk can. Then I shut the doors behind me so that rain would not blow in.

  I tore a couple of pieces from the loaf and put them in the little tin bowl, pouring the milk carefully on top of them. Then I approached the dog, holding the bowl out in front of me and he strained towards it, whimpering, as I set it down in front of him.

  ‘Here, boy,’ I said gently as his tongue lapped the metal so hard that it rattled against the wall. ‘I know what you must have seen here but do not worry.’ I reached up to the metal ring and started to unknot the rope. ‘I have a nice warm cottage not too far from here. You can come and live with me and I can walk you on the green. You shall have so much more than bread and milk – I can make us beef stew and dumplings, with parsley. You can sit with me by the fire and we shall keep each other company and neither of us shall be lonely anymore and…’ But as I loosened the last knot, the rope snapped through the ring and the dog bolted through a hole in the fence.

  My thoughts of the dog with his head in my lap in front of a glowing fireplace had been the first happy thoughts I’d had for a long time. But, as I watched him disappear over the common, the rope trailing behind him, I realised that my plans had been nothing but false hopes. Now I was back in the real world again, and it was cold.

  5

  The rain started just as I left Waldley Court and I regretted my decision to take Sam’s little potted parsley home with me as I feared it would slow my journey. I was sad at how little I had been able to help Sam and, after the dog had bolted, I felt that minding the p
arsley was the least that I could do for him. I hoped that I would be able to give the plant back to Sam when he returned – to a tack room that was warm and tidy with freshly washed clothes airing on the ladder and the dog curled up on the dry mattress – but it was not an easy thing to hope for when I could not get the picture of his ransacked home out of my head.

  I had thought of cutting back across the common on the way home but now I feared the wet fronds of bracken licking at my stockings and mud seeping through my shoe leather. It would be quicker to take the cart track, but that would mean passing by the Blood Elms – a place I did not like to go.

  I turned up my collar and kept my head down, walking along the track as fast as my stiff joints would allow and trying not to think of what I had seen at the stables. I regretted setting out that morning. Such a journey was a foolish thing for a lady of my age to undertake and I feared every breath of damp air bearing pneumonia or bronchitis.

  By the time I approached the elm thicket I was wet through, but the sight of the trees’ low canopies made me hesitate. There were no more than ten stunted elms, nestled together in a little hollow next to the track, their trunks bent by the wind and their branches reaching low across the earth. Their twisted roots clutched at the thin soil, foxholes sunk between the knots of wood. It was the kind of place that you could come upon suddenly, the leafy branches hiding all from sight and casting a deep shadow over the track.

  I forced my tired limbs forward, determined to pass the thicket quickly, but when I glanced up, I saw a figure sheltering among the branches – a woman, her arm extended over the track and her palm facing upward as if she was feeling the weight of the rain.

  When she saw me, she muttered a greeting.

  I nodded back for I feared that I did not have the breath to answer her. I took a few more steps but the woman did not look away and suddenly I realised the reason for her stare – I was an elderly lady who was clearly out of breath, carrying a heavy potted plant, with mud on my stockings, and I thought that if I continued into the rain she might think me insane. I forced a polite smile and took shelter under the trees, sitting down heavily on one of the low branches.