The Girl by the River

by Sheila Jeffries

  Returning to the black mill pool seemed to be her only option. Shivering violently, she turned round again.

  And there, leering at her from the bank of the pool, was a man who looked like a troll.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ muttered Ivor Stape. ‘God has sent me a water baby.’ And he rubbed his fleshy red hands together and smiled.

  As the sun mellowed towards evening and bars of saffron light stretched across the water meadows, the search for Tessa became ominous. The people of Monterose gathered at the iron gates of the school, grim-faced, a few helmeted policemen among them. Some carried torches or had dogs on leads, the women in dresses and wellies, the men in caps and work-worn jackets. They set off in silence, fanning out across the fields and woods, their eyes searching the ground, as instructed by the police, for any small sign of Tessa; a piece of ribbon, or a hanky, or a footstep, or a thread ripped from the blue and white cotton dress she’d been wearing.

  Annie had never seen Kate in such a state, her lovely rosy face pale as marble and covered in tears. Kate and Lexi had walked miles through the woods and fields, searching hay barns and hedges, and places where Tessa and Lucy had played. The railway embankment was a favourite haunt of theirs, a wonderland of wild strawberries and tall pink fireweed growing in the beds of cinder from years of steam trains.

  Kate had told them never to go on the railway lines, and she believed they wouldn’t. Yet this afternoon she and Lexi had climbed up there and stood looking hopelessly at the long cold curve of the rails. It was too awful to contemplate.

  Neither of them had a watch, but relied on the chimes of the church clock. When it struck six, Kate felt they should go home. They’d no way of knowing if Tessa had been found. She might be there, waiting for her mum. With that thought, Kate had hurried home through the hot afternoon, feeling giddy and light-headed. She’d had nothing to eat or drink for hours and her delicious tea was untouched on the table. Lexi had turned out to be a good and sensible friend in a time of trouble. She’d sent Susan and the children home with Tarquin to sort out the horses. Lexi had insisted on staying. She’d stuck with Kate, searching and shouting Tessa’s name, trying to reassure her that all would be well. ‘She’ll be there waiting for us, you’ll see,’ she’d said repeatedly.

  The worst moment had been arriving home and finding no Tessa, and no Freddie either. Kate was surprised. She knew Freddie wanted to avoid the tea party, but he hadn’t said anything about working late. She clung to the idea that Tessa might have gone to find her daddy. Even now he might be bringing her home.

  It was Lexi who insisted on telling the police. They came to the house and interviewed the distraught Kate. It was horribly familiar. The police interview. The beginning of the search. The aching, empty hours of waiting. Just as it had been when Ethie went missing.

  ‘You MUST remain here, Mrs Barcussy,’ the police had insisted. ‘It’s important for Tessa. When she is found – and we WILL find her – she’ll want her mum waiting at home.’

  So Kate stood in the garden in the rose-scented evening, watching the road until the welcome sight of Freddie’s lorry came into view. She watched him swing his long legs down from the cab. Then he turned and reached inside, backing out again with a bouquet of red roses. He came to her smiling, his blue eyes twinkling. ‘Happy anniversary, dear.’

  ‘Oh Freddie –’ Kate collapsed into his arms and wept. She couldn’t speak.

  Shocked, Freddie held her tightly, stroking her hair. It felt hot and sweaty, and she was trembling. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ he asked, but Kate just shook her head and cried against the steady beat of his heart. ‘Don’t cry on our anniversary,’ he said, taking her over to the wooden garden seat. ‘Come on, you sit down, sit quiet with me and tell me what’s wrong. Kate – I’ve never seen you like this,’ he added in alarm as her face looked up at him with desperate eyes.

  ‘It – it’s Tessa,’ she whispered in a voice hoarse and defeated.

  ‘Tessa?’ Freddie stiffened. The cry. He’d heard it. And he hadn’t listened. He had a terrible feeling of impending doom.

  ‘She – she ran away from school at half past ten this morning and – and –’ Kate blurted out the whole story, her words tumbling in an avalanche of pain. ‘The police and – and half the village are out there searching for her. Where is she, Freddie? Where’s my little girl?’ A fresh burst of crying overwhelmed her. ‘I’m sorry, Freddie,’ she sobbed, trying to get a hold on herself. ‘I’m sorry to make such a fuss.’

  Kate was grateful for Freddie’s quiet strength. But when she looked at him he was staring rigidly into the distance, his mouth twitching a little as it did when he was deep in thought. They were both glad to see Lucy come running into the garden. Annie stood at the door. ‘Any news?’ she asked.

  Kate shook her head. For once she was glad of Annie’s solid presence. She held out her arms to Lucy, but as usual Lucy wanted her daddy at this time of day. She climbed onto his lap, her clear eyes shining, ‘Where’s Tessa?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh she’ll be back soon,’ Kate said in her bright, everything’s all right voice.

  ‘Tessa was naughty,’ Lucy told Freddie. ‘She ran away when Miss O’Grady asked her a question.’

  ‘What was the question?’ Freddie asked.

  ‘About – if she liked a poem.’

  ‘And what poem was that?’

  ‘It was ‘The Brook’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson,’ said Lucy clearly.

  ‘Ah – I know it,’ Freddie said. ‘I used to learn that in school.’

  ‘So what did Tessa say?’ asked Kate.

  ‘She didn’t answer. She just ran away.’

  Annie was standing there, looking worried. ‘Tell Daddy what happened before that,’ she prompted.

  ‘Well,’ Lucy sat up straight and waved her fingers expressively. Her eyes sparkled, enjoying the attention. ‘Miss O’Grady called Tessa a liar. She was really cross with her.’

  ‘A liar?’ Freddie’s heart gave a jolt. ‘Why? What did Tessa say?’

  ‘Well,’ Lucy said in her musical voice, ‘Miss O’Grady showed us a picture of Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Tessa said he was there in the classroom. She said he was standing by the blackboard.’

  Annie and Freddie looked at one another, both remembering something they’d tried to forget.

  ‘And then . . .’ continued Lucy dramatically, ‘Tessa answered back and said she wasn’t a liar and said she could see Alfred Lord Tennyson and that he’d got a book in his hand. And Miss O’Grady dragged Tessa out to the front and made her stand on a chair and told everyone she was a liar. Well –’ Lucy rolled her eyes, ‘you KNOW what Tessa’s like. She won’t stand on a chair because she gets giddy. So I told Miss O’Grady that and she let her get down, and she called her a liar again and said she was nothing but trouble.’ Lucy’s eyes widened as she looked up at Freddie. ‘Miss O’Grady hates Tessa.’

  ‘Serve her right,’ said Annie. ‘Petulant little madam.’

  ‘You WOULD say that,’ Kate glared at Annie.

  ‘Well ’tis time.’ Annie lifted her imperious bust and glared back at Kate. ‘That child . . .’

  ‘Mother!’ said Freddie in a warning voice. ‘Hold your tongue, will you.’

  Annie snorted. Kate didn’t usually confront her, and Freddie was mostly tolerant of what he called her ‘doom and gloom’. Privately, Annie thought Tessa should be sent away to one of those ‘reform schools’. Well, perhaps it would happen now, she thought, satisfied. ‘I’ll get Lucy to bed,’ she said. ‘’Tis a good thing you’ve got one decent child.’

  Kate couldn’t sit still. She needed to be watching the road for a sign that Tessa had been found. So she and Freddie sat up on the blue-lias wall under the three pine trees.

  ‘It’s getting dark,’ Kate said desperately. ‘What if they don’t find her?’

  The question hung in the air. A peach-coloured moon was rising over the hills. Barn owls glided low over the meadows and from the distant woods came the first
unearthy bark of a vixen.

  Freddie jumped down from the wall. ‘You promise me you’ll stay here,’ he said. ‘Don’t you go off searching in the dark. But I’m going, Kate. I think – I know where our Tessa might be.’

  ‘Where?’

  Freddie wouldn’t tell her. Kate knew better than to fuss. She trusted Freddie, and he knew the landscape like the back of his hand, he often said. She let him go, watching his rangy silhouette padding down the street in the moonlight. She stood up on the wall to see which way he would go, and caught the gleam of moonlight on his cap as he climbed the stile and headed down the footpath towards the mill.

  Kate could see the lights down at the station and the puffs of white steam from the late train coming in, its windows glowing with light. She heard the doors slamming and the footsteps of people on their way home from work in Taunton. Then the guard’s whistle and the shunting of the engine as it set off through the cutting, over the viaduct and away into the hills. She remembered how hard Freddie had worked as a child, carrying luggage at the station, how he had saved every penny tied up in old socks and hankies and hidden them under a floorboard in his bedroom. On his sixteenth birthday, he had spent his savings on a lorry and started his own haulage business. He’d taught himself stone carving and was soon earning a second income from his hard work and talent.

  Kate admired him enormously for what he’d achieved. Yet there was a mystery about Freddie that she’d never quite fathomed. How did he know where Tessa was? It wasn’t the first time he’d made uncannily accurate prophecies with the minimum amount of fuss. He was often silent for long intervals, staring into space, and Kate could easily have felt shunned and excluded from his very private world. But she chose just to love him and let him be, knowing he needed her bright spirit more than life itself.

  He might find Tessa. But what if she was injured or sick? Would he know what to do? Kate was a trained nurse, an SRN, and now her thoughts ran along that scenario. What if Tessa was seriously hurt? She, Kate, should be there.

  Kate got down from the wall and walked up and down on the road, clutching her cardigan tightly around her, worrying that wherever Tessa was she had only a cotton dress.

  Freddie padded silently down the footpath, glad of the pale moonlight and the friendly shelter of the elm trees. Beeches and hazels grew along there too, and he knew each and every tree from his boyhood. He knew where he was by the scent of honeysuckle or the pong of the foxes’ earth. He knew the sloping field where the turf was honeycombed with a vast rabbit warren, and saw them now, sitting totally still, listening to his footsteps, their erect ears rimmed silver in the moonlight. In a flash, they vanished underground as the shadow of a fox brushed through the grass.

  Freddie paused at the crest of the hill, looking down at the haze over the water meadows. The gabled roof of the school was silhouetted against the night sky, its windows splashed with moonlight. Tonight the countryside wasn’t peaceful. It bubbled with voices and the shadows of the search party moving through sweet-scented hay meadows, along the hedges, the torch beams probing into ditches and corners.

  ‘Tessa. T E S S A . . .’ The way they were calling his daughter’s name was chilling to Freddie. Voices he knew, Lexi’s ringing tones, Joan Jarvis, Gladys, and some of the men from the quarry. There was a hopelessness about the sound of the searching. Tessa would not respond. She’d stay in hiding, frightened, worrying about the trouble she was in. To her, those well-meaning voices would sound like the howling of wolves, the red-eyed dogs of storyland.

  Only Freddie could rescue her from the place she had locked herself into. He knew her mindset. She was like him, frighteningly so.

  It was obvious to Freddie that Tessa would have headed down to the mill stream, especially after hearing that poem. The words must have gone deep into her soul, the way he’d been affected all his life by a poem he’d learned in school – The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W. B. Yeats. With a new sense of urgency, Freddie lengthened his stride and was soon on the bank of the mill stream. He picked his way through the marshy ground, using his torch in the deepening darkness. The beam of yellow light attracted moths and maybugs, and bats twisted to and fro around Freddie, never touching him. And, like Tessa, he felt the wild creatures were leading him.

  He almost lost his shoe in the deep mud and had to pull it out with a loud sucking noise. No wonder no one was searching there. The only way was to walk in the stream, and then he moved along quickly in the ice-cold burbling water. When he came to the hummocky place with the willows and poplars, Freddie began to feel Tessa was close. The sound of his huge footsteps splashing through the water would alarm her. So he paused to listen.

  The leaves of the poplar tree chattered like shingle. He listened deeper, and heard the roar of the weir in the mill gardens, and the chug-chug of the water wheel. Then he sensed the fear, the aura of panic that twined its freezing tendrils over the water, hooking into his heart. He shone his torch down at the stream, and there, trapped in a tiny pool were the yellow heads of cowslips. Freddie’s heart leapt. He’d found her. Tessa had been there. He reached down and tenderly picked one of the flower heads out of the water. It was fresh and unspoilt. Touching it, he could feel Tessa’s unique energy on the fat pink stem. Her little hands had held that flower. So why was it in the stream? Had she fallen? Had she been swept into the dark mill pool?

  Freddie’s pulse roared in his ears and he began to shake with dread at what he might find. He tucked the wet cowslip into his top pocket, a small memento, he thought, if needed. Paddling cautiously, he approached the road where the stream poured through the tunnel into the mill. He’d have to go to the house and knock on the door. Freddie had never encountered Ivor Stape; he’d heard the rumours but reserved his opinion. Maybe the man wasn’t so bad.

  He stood by the tunnel, his hand on the stone wall which was still warm from the sun. The clink of glass came from the mill garden, and the faint whiff of alcohol, and the baying of the two basset hounds, muffled as if they were in the house. Shut in, he hoped.

  Freddie vaulted up the wall onto the road. Opposite him was a wooden door set into an archway in the high boundary wall, the moonlight flaking on the cracked paint. Freddie turned the iron handle and pushed. It was locked. He’d have to go round to the main gate. He looked up at the high wall, and gasped. The round dark eyes of a tawny owl looked down at him. He saw the sheen of its brindled feathers and the sharp hook of its beak. The owl stared into his eyes in a meaningful way. It waited for Freddie to move and when he turned to walk on, it flew past him with a whoosh of ghostly wings. The tip of its wing brushed Freddie’s cheek as the owl wheeled down towards the stream. It perched on a post close to the tunnel and hooted mournfully, its eyes watching him, calling him.

  Annie hated owls. Birds of death, she called them. Old, ingrained folklore that haunted her soul. Freddie had managed not to be influenced by her attitude; he’d studied owls and had once picked up a baby one that had fallen from a tree. Owls were wise messengers to him. There was a reason for this owl’s behaviour. He turned again, to walk away, and immediately the owl repeated its silent curving flight. Again the firm soft wing feathers brushed his face as it circled around him and returned to its post by the tunnel.

  Freddie stood in the road, undecided, holding his breath, listening. And then he heard it. A small, weak, desperate voice coming out of the darkness. ‘Daddy. Daddy.’

  Chapter Eight

  THE IRON GATES

  Kate was still pacing up and down the road when she saw Freddie silhouetted against the moonlight. He was carrying Tessa, wrapped in his coat, her bare feet hanging limply, her head nestled against his shoulder.

  Kate ran to meet them, her heart pounding with hope and fear. ‘You’ve found her! Oh well done – thank you, Freddie. Is she all right?’ She touched his shirt. ‘You’re soaking wet. Where was she? Oh dear God – she’s cold as ice.’

  Freddie was breathing hard, from shock and from the long walk home carrying Tessa. />
  ‘It’s bad,’ he said, his voice trembling. ‘Very bad. Let’s get her inside, Kate. She’s fast asleep.’

  ‘Well that’s a good thing,’ Kate said soothingly. ‘Where did you find her?’

  ‘She was curled up in a ball at the foot of that big ash tree, the one that hangs over the road where the stream goes under. And she was stark naked, not a stitch on her, Kate. I looked around for her clothes, and she said they were inside the mill house.’

  ‘INSIDE the mill house?’ Kate look horrified.

  ‘That’s all she could tell me,’ Freddie said. ‘She was shivering – and absolutely terrified. As soon as I wrapped her in my jacket, she went to sleep.’

  ‘That Ivor Stape is up to no good,’ Annie said, following them into the house. ‘Living like a hermit in that gloomy old place. They say ’tis haunted.’

  ‘Will you go and make some cocoa, Mother?’ Freddie said bluntly. ‘And a hot water bottle. Then will you phone the police station and say Tessa’s been found.’

  ‘I don’t like that telephone. Wretched new-fangled contraption,’ Annie chuntered, but she dragged herself into the kitchen and gingerly plugged in the new electric kettle.

  Freddie carried Tessa upstairs and put her on the bed.

  ‘She’s so COLD,’ Kate said, alarmed as thoughts of hypothermia raced through her mind. ‘And she ought to have a bath – but not until she’s warm and awake. There’s only one way to warm her, Freddie. I must get in and lie beside her.’ She took off her shoes and pulled the eiderdown open to get in next to Tessa’s small naked body. Then she noticed something that made her heart turn over. ‘She’s got bruises at the tops of her legs,’ she said. ‘Freddie, she’s only seven. Something awful has happened to her, I know it – and it’s too terrible to tell anyone, Freddie – especially don’t say anything to your mother.’

  Freddie nodded. Priority was to get Tessa warm and safe. He pushed his rising anger deep down into the dungeons of his mind. ‘What can I do to help?’ he asked.