Economists were saying that the government needed to reverse the current trend by introducing new policies to boost the economy but all Abby and her colleagues knew was that whole families were starving to death, and by the time such folk were admitted to the hospitals, it was often too late to save them, especially the very old and the very young.
A killer heatwave towards the end of the month brought more problems for medical staff, and by the time the September crops were ready to be gathered in Britain’s countryside and the first gentle days of autumn had slipped by, Abby and most of her nursing friends hadn’t had even a half-day off in weeks. This made the planning of a social life impossible and had Pam and a few others champing at the bit, but it was Flo, who had found herself a boyfriend in the spring, who was suffering the most. Fortunately her beloved seemed as besotted with Flo as she was with him and took any crumbs she could offer; even an hour or two between shifts standing outside the hospital gates, or a clandestine late-night meeting when Pam charmed the lodgekeeper to look the other way for her friend. It said a lot for the strength of Flo’s feeling for her young man that she was prepared to shimmy up the tree outside their bedroom window, but by the time its leaves were changing to bronze and gold and copper, she had become quite adept at midnight ascents.
The worst thing was when leave was cancelled at the last moment, something which one or two of the more sadistic sisters seemed to take great pleasure in doing, and it was this that had Abby bewailing her lot one Saturday morning at the end of September. She hadn’t placed a foot outside the hospital grounds in weeks, and while they were pleasant enough to walk and sit in and were something of a relief from the smell and endless corridors of the building itself, she longed to go into Galashiels town centre or take a brisk walk somewhere – anywhere. She and Flo had planned to go into the town that afternoon, both having a half-day off – Flo to see her boyfriend and Abby to wander round the shops and perhaps visit the cinema – before they returned together by the ten o’clock deadline. Abby had actually been walking out of Male Medical on her way to lunch when Sister Woodrow had caught her, demanding that she return to the ward once she had eaten.
Bitterly disappointed, Abby had broken the cardinal rule that was above all others and had argued her case, as she was telling Flo who had been waiting for her in the dining room before they went to get changed out of their uniforms.
‘You didn’t!’ Flo’s eyes were like saucers. ‘Not with Woody.’ All the sisters and staff nurses were to be feared but Sister Woodrow was in a class of her own.
‘I just said I’d missed all my time off since I had been on her ward, that’s all.’
‘And what did she say?’
Abby swallowed hard. ‘She wasn’t pleased.’ It was the understatement of the year. Abby had thought the sister was going to burst, she’d worked herself up into such a fury.
‘So you’re not coming?’
Abby shook her head. The way Sister Woodrow had carried on she’d be lucky if she ever got so much as an hour’s leave the rest of the time she was at the hospital. ‘This will go on my report,’ she had hissed at Abby, her face red with fury and her eyes popping out of her head, ‘and believe me I will inform the sisters on other wards about it. I can hardly believe one of my nurses would put her own gallivanting before the welfare of the patients.’ There had been more, much more, and by the time Abby had slunk off Sister Woodrow had looked like a boiling kettle ready to blow its lid.
Flo patted Abby’s arm. ‘She’s a spiteful old cat,’ she whispered comfortingly, ‘but only another couple of days to go before you change wards.’ They were due to change on Monday and it couldn’t come quick enough for Abby.
‘I know.’ Abby took a deep breath. It wasn’t the end of the world. ‘And you have a nice time with Simon.’ Flo was due to meet Simon’s family for the first time for afternoon tea, and she’d been in a tizzy about it for days. On an impulse, she said, ‘Why don’t you wear my hat and coat as I won’t be using them?’ Flo’s coat was an old thing. Like Abby, Flo sent most of her wages back home, but in Flo’s case it was to help support her siblings, all of whom were still at school.
‘Really?’ Flo’s face lit up.
‘Of course. They’ll fit you perfectly – we’re the same build and height. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.’ At least some good would come out of her misfortune. ‘And the colour will suit you so. You’ll look the bee’s knees.’ It would give Flo the confidence she needed to face the Hogarth clan.
As Flo whirled off to get changed, Abby finished her bread and cheese and pickles but without any appetite. She could imagine what her afternoon was going to be like and she wouldn’t have wished it on her worst enemy.
It was twenty to ten that night when Flo got off the bus opposite the long side road which led to the hospital. Simon was working a night shift at the steelworks where he was employed, so they had had to make do with a furtive kiss and cuddle at the bus stop in the town before the bus came and she went one way and Simon another. But it had been a lovely afternoon and evening.
Flo smiled to herself as she set off down the dark lane, her mind full of the meeting with Simon’s family and how well it had gone. His mother especially had been nice, so nice that when she had been getting ready to leave and Mrs Hogarth had commented how bonny she looked in Abby’s hat and coat, she had been able to confide that she had borrowed them from a friend for the afternoon because her coat had seen better days. ‘Ee, lass,’ Simon’s mother had said, her plump face rosy and smiling, ‘you’d look as pretty as a picture to our Simon whatever you wore, you know that, don’t you? Fair gone on you, he is, and having met you I can see why.’
Yes, it had been a lovely afternoon.
Flo was halfway down the road, walking on the pavement that stretched on the hospital side of the unlit lane, when she thought she heard the snap of a twig behind her. The pavement was littered with twigs and leaves from the trees on the perimeter of the hospital grounds on the other side of the high stone wall, and in the darkness she’d had to be careful not to trip, especially with her mind occupied with the events of the previous few hours. Now she turned, looking back, and she could just make out someone a little way behind her, but the night was cloudy and moonless and in the darkness she couldn’t see whether it was a man or a woman. But surely if it was another nurse, she would have called out before this, and there had been no one getting off the bus besides her.
Suddenly the darkness that was almost pitch black became frightening and her footsteps quickened, her stomach turning over.
Joe McHaffie swore softly to himself as he realized Abby had become aware of him and he broke into a run. She wasn’t going to get away from him; this was the chance he had been waiting for all the times he had patrolled the area, countless times lately since she had humiliated him at the wedding. He had been leaving Galashiels to catch the last train home and had been at the end of the side road about to step into the main thoroughfare when he had noticed a girl getting off the bus that had just pulled up; a girl in a deep-plum coat and hat. He had known instantly it was Abby, even though her head had been down and the hat and the dim light had obscured her features. The reddish-purple hat and coat had been unmistakable.
He had slunk into the shadows, his heart beating fit to burst and his hands instantly clammy, unable to believe his good luck. Not a sight of her in months and now here she was, bold as brass. No doubt she was all dressed up because she’d been meeting Jefferson-Price on the quiet, or perhaps she’d moved on to someone else now?
He reached her just as she tried to run, grabbing her from behind with one arm round her neck and the other round her waist. Her scream panicked him, and he pulled her harder against him, his arms tightening as he muttered, ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up,’ as she struggled, her hat tipping forwards as he got both hands round her neck and fell on top of her so that she was face downwards on the ground.
He couldn’t have said afterwards when he first r
ealized it wasn’t Abby; perhaps it was when her hat fell off and her hair was revealed, although the night was black and perhaps it hadn’t dawned on him then? He wasn’t sure, but his overwhelming feeling was that he had gone too far and he couldn’t stop now, he had to stop her screaming before someone heard her. And then she was still. He continued to sit astride her back with his hands round her throat for some moments before he moved, a sickening fear replacing the panic. When he rolled her over and saw the face with its tongue protruding and eyeballs bulging he crawled to the edge of the pavement and was violently sick, retching and retching until there was nothing left in his stomach.
It wasn’t Abby. He didn’t know this girl. He had killed her and he didn’t know her.
He crawled back to the body, praying that there would be something, some flicker of life, the slightest breath, but knowing she was dead. Whimpering to himself, he smoothed down her clothes and then put the hat over her face.
He hadn’t meant to kill her. He sat swaying back and forth, an owl hooting somewhere in the blackness beyond the lane. Not this stranger. Had he had murder on his mind with Abby? He shook his head; perhaps, he didn’t know. He had wanted to talk to her, to warn her to stay away from the farm or else . . . He had wanted to frighten Abby, aye – to get some sort of reaction from her and prove himself a man. She had treated him with such contempt from when she had come to the farm; even Molly had been kinder. This was Abby’s fault. Molly’s daughter had done nothing but goad him since the first day he had set eyes on her.
A sob caught in his throat. And why was this girl wearing the same hat and coat Abby had? What were the chances of that? This wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t. He hadn’t known.
Eventually he stood up, stumbling down the lane in the opposite direction to the main road and heading towards the open countryside. The hospital was built on the edge of Galashiels and he had patrolled the area enough recently to know that there was a dense forest area a few miles up ahead. It was there he made for, falling over several times in the black darkness but picking himself up and continuing on. He didn’t think as he walked, his mind blank now, just the occasional night sound penetrating the stupor like a fox barking or the sudden startled cry of a bird disturbed from its roosting.
He passed through a small hamlet at one point, the cottage windows dark and shuttered against the night and only one small black cat that was sitting on a doorstep watching him with uninterested eyes.
When he reached the edge of the forest he turned off the road, climbing over the dry-stone wall and jumping down into the dense bracken and undergrowth on the other side, before making his way into the trees. Great ferns and tangles of brambles hampered his progress the deeper he went; it was clear few people ever ventured this way, and the further he walked, the more difficult it was to fight his way through. Eventually after some time he came to a kind of clearing under a massive ancient oak tree and here he stopped, sitting down with his back against the great trunk.
He was bleeding from numerous scratches and lacerations but he didn’t feel the pain; he didn’t feel anything.
And hours later, when the beauty of first light touched the dawn sky, the morning dew gleaming on the trees like pearls and the pine-scented air as clean as crystal, the body hanging by its neck from a leather belt swung gently on one of the boughs of the oak and a pair of crows with hungry nestlings to feed, attracted by the scent of dried blood, edged near and nearer . . .
Chapter Eighteen
The horror of Flo’s murder reverberated around the inhabitants of the hospital, patients and staff alike, as though a bomb had been thrown into their midst. It proved useless for Matron Blackett to insist that she didn’t want any of the patients informed of the situation for fear of what the shock would do to their recovery; the hospital grapevine had whispered the news into every ward by noon the next day.
Flo’s body had been discovered shortly after eleven o’clock by two nurses who had missed their ten o’clock deadline after attending a party in the town where they’d had too much to drink. Needless to say, they sobered up very quickly when one of them fell over Flo in the darkness. The screams of both girls and their shaking of the locked gate of the hospital brought the lodgekeeper running to their aid, but nothing could be done for Flo.
On being roused, Matron Blackett – for the first time in living memory less than immaculate, being in her night attire with her hair in pin curls and papers – sent the lodge man off on his motorcycle to notify the police, and called Abby, Pam and Kitty to her sitting room. The three girls broke down and Kitty, who had been particularly close to Flo, all but fainted. And if they had needed proof that they were really awake and not in the middle of a horrific nightmare, it came when Matron Blackett gave each of them a glass containing neat brandy and told them to drink it straight down. ‘For the shock,’ she added in a voice quite unlike her own, her face as white as a sheet under its halo of pin curls.
The next few days were grim for everyone, and even Sister Duffy was subdued and unusually gentle. For Abby, the way her friend had died was almost unbearable, bringing to the surface all the feelings about her mother’s death she kept buried most of the time, feelings that were made worse because she couldn’t tell anyone what had happened when she was a child. She slept little and ate even less, going about her duties in a fog of misery.
At first the police suspected that Flo had had a row with her boyfriend and he’d had some kind of brainstorm and killed her in a fit of rage. Apparently, according to the constable who took statements from Abby, Pam and Kitty, it was often someone close to the victim who committed what the police called a crime of passion.
None of the girls believed for a moment that Flo’s boyfriend was capable of murder, and after Simon’s story that he had seen Flo onto the bus and then gone straight off to work was corroborated by the bus conductor and also his employer, the police were forced to think again.
The fact that Flo hadn’t been interfered with tended to rule out a sexual assault, but as she didn’t have any disgruntled former boyfriends lurking in the background, or anyone else who might wish her harm, the police, along with her family and friends and work colleagues, were at a loss. It was when Abby received her next letter from home, three weeks after the murder, that the first inkling of a terrible possibility reared its head. Her grandfather and Robin were no letter writers and Rachel had volunteered to correspond with Abby while she was at the hospital. Rachel’s letters were always chatty and informative, full of the smallest events that happened at the farm so that often Abby glossed over whole paragraphs at a time about the hens not laying or a quarrel between two of the labourers’ wives, but this time a couple of lines made her stiffen. Maybe if the police hadn’t returned her hat and coat to her that very day, freshly laundered, she might not have linked Joe’s disappearance with the murder of her friend.
‘The strangest thing,’ Rachel wrote in her big childish script, ‘is that Joe McHaffie seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. No one’s seen him for weeks now, but Robin says he’s big enough and ugly enough to look after himself and he’ll turn up when he’s ready. His mam’s worried though – well, you’d expect her to be, wouldn’t you.’
Abby’s blood froze, the letter dropping from her fingers onto her lap. She had picked up the letter from the nurses’ cubbyhole in the big hall during her lunch break and as she had to change her apron before the afternoon shift, she had run up to her room to read it. She sat on the bed, her mind racing, and looked across at the wardrobe where she had hung her hat and coat that morning after the constable had arrived with it first thing. Flo’s funeral had taken place the week before and Flo’s mother’s grief had been harrowing to see and was still fresh in Abby’s mind.
Flo had been wearing her hat and coat when she had been murdered. Could someone – no, not someone, could Joe McHaffie – have mistaken Flo for her in the darkness? In lending Flo her things, had she been the cause of her friend’s death?
No, no, she was putting two and two together here and making ten, she told herself as she began to tremble. Joe McHaffie disliked and resented her because of her mam, but he wouldn’t plan to kill her, would he? Especially now she had left the farm? He was rid of her, that was the way he would think about it, surely? But then look at how he had behaved the night of Robin’s wedding. He hated her.
It was five minutes later when Sister Duffy, on one of her room inspections, poked her head round the bedroom door. The words she had been about to say about one of her nurses sitting on her bed in the middle of the day died on her lips when she saw Abby’s face. Instead, her voice uncharacteristically soft, she said, ‘What’s the matter, child?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Sister.’ Abby jumped up from the bed. ‘I only came to change my apron and then I read a letter from home and . . . and . . .’ To her consternation she couldn’t go on, and when she burst into tears Abby surprised herself as much as Sister Duffy.
It said a lot for Sister Duffy’s genuine concern for the well-being of her nurses – an attribute normally zealously concealed lest it be taken as a sign of weakness – when she sat down beside Abby, regardless of the crumpled counterpane. Again she said, ‘What is it, child?’ before waiting as Abby pulled herself together.
When she could speak amid the occasional hiccuping breath, Abby said, ‘It’s to do with Flo’s death, Sister.’
The sister’s eyes narrowed. ‘You know something about Nurse Kane’s murder?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know . . .’ Abby took a deep gulp of air. She wasn’t making sense. Blowing her nose, she tried again. ‘There’s a man at the farm where I lived after my parents died who bore me a grudge because of my mother – she had been expected to marry him but she ran off with my father instead. And Flo was wearing my hat and coat.’
The sister held up her hand. ‘Collect your thoughts,’ she said in her old, imperious way, ‘and then begin again from the beginning.’
Snowflakes in the Wind Page 20