The Shrouded Path

by Sarah Ward

  The man placed her down on the grass. As her eyes cleared, Valerie looked up at her rescuer, desperate to give her thanks and saw, with a start, that he was naked.

  61

  Tuesday, 7 November 2017

  Sadler sat in his office with his head in his hands looking down at the photo. He’d pulled down the blinds, a signal to the few members of his team in the Detective Room that he wasn’t to be disturbed. The five girls were from an age long gone. A time of stronger class distinctions. Where you were segregated into schools according to your ability at the age of eleven and that distinction stuck for the rest of your education. These girls had all been bright. No late starters here. And amongst them, his mother Ginnie. Sadler turned over the photo and looked at the word on the back. GIVEN. He frowned and looked closer.

  His phone rang and he picked it up. A voice he didn’t recognise staffing reception.

  ‘I’ve got a lady by the name of Susan Barr here. She says it’s important. To do with the crash on the Matlock road.’

  ‘Can’t you direct her to whoever’s investigating that?’

  ‘She says she thinks she might have information about the missing girl.’

  ‘Take a statement then.’

  ‘I tried but it’s a complicated story going back to the fifties and—’

  ‘The fifties? I’ll come down and get her.’

  Sadler opened his door. Only Matthews was left at her desk. ‘Where is everyone?’

  ‘Dahl’s attending the PM. He’s not back yet. Connie’s disappeared somewhere. Mayfield’s in labour.’

  ‘Fine. Can you wait in my office? There’s someone who wants to speak to me about the missing girl and I want a word afterwards.’

  Sadler didn’t miss the spark of apprehension in Matthews’s eye. He went down into the reception, and sitting on one of the hard plastic chairs was a woman wearing a short coat with a scarf unsuccessfully covering what looked like recently permed hair.

  ‘Ms Barr.’

  ‘I feel a fool but I had to come.’

  ‘Do you want to come into my office? You’ll be more comfortable there.’

  Matthews, notepad at the ready, was already sitting in the chair Connie normally preferred. She pulled out a chair for Susan who sat down in relief. ‘You’re going to think I’m completely potty but I read about the accident in the newspaper and I had to tell someone. It seems so daft as it’s a story that goes back to when I was a teenager.’

  We all have them, thought Sadler. A moment in time when your life takes one direction when it might have gone a different way. Camilla had once confided to him that, before she drifted off to sleep, she thought of the baby who had died only a few hours old and how life would be with a young teenage daughter.

  Connie had surely had hers in the last case when she’d threatened to resign and spent days languishing in her flat until she’d been spurred to resurrect her career. Surely she too, occasionally, stopped to think what parallel life she might lead outside the force.

  The woman sitting in front of him was telling a story of when the lives of six teenagers, seven if you included Susan Barr, had changed irretrievably. It was a simple enough tale. Six schoolgirls had entered the tunnel at Cutting Lane and only five had emerged. The sixth, who surely must be Valerie, had … what? Come to harm, certainly.

  ‘How meticulously did you look in the tunnel?’

  Susan Barr looked uncomfortable. ‘I went down one side of the tunnel then back along the other. There was lighting. Not brilliant but I could see enough.’

  ‘Did you look in the ventilation shaft?’

  She stared at him in shock. ‘The ventilation shaft?’

  ‘Most tunnels have them, especially the longer ones. It’s somewhere for the fumes to escape.’

  ‘I never saw anything.’

  ‘It can be quite high up or, if it was lower down, there will have been a door that was kept locked. It’s possible one of the girls knew how to open it.’

  ‘Can you check?’

  ‘I think we’re going to need to. And you think it might have happened again?’

  ‘It was in the newspaper. A man and a boy in the car hurrying away from the Cutting. It says the source was from the police.’

  ‘We can double-check. It’s helpful that you’ve told us of this.’

  ‘What do you think happened to the girl?’

  Sadler’s thoughts were on Catherine Hallows and he misunderstood the question. ‘We’re doing everything we can to find Catherine.’

  But Susan was obsessed by an event that had taken place sixty years earlier. ‘I mean to the girl in the fifties. What do you think happened to her?’

  ‘You didn’t recognise any of the girls you saw?’

  Susan shook her head. ‘They were about my age but they were at the grammar school. I didn’t know any of them.’

  ‘Hilary Kemp?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nell Colley? Ingrid Neale?’

  Susan shook her head. Sadler opened his notebook. ‘I have a few more names. Emily Fenn?’

  Susan shook her head.

  ‘A girl named Valerie Hallows?’

  Again a shake of her head.

  Sadler took a deep breath. ‘Ginnie Sadler?’

  Matthews turned to him but Susan was shaking her head once more. ‘These names mean nothing to me. I told you I didn’t recognise them.’

  Sadler pushed the photo towards the woman. ‘Do you think these could be the girls?’

  Susan looked like she was in shock. ‘Good God. These girls have inhabited my nightmares for sixty years but I’d swear it was them.’

  ‘You don’t recognise any of the girls individually?’

  ‘No, but it does look like them.’

  Sadler shut his notebook. ‘Leave it with me. We need, in the first instance, to find Catherine Hallows and check she’s safe. Then—’

  ‘Yes?’ She looked at them eagerly. ‘Do you think that you’ll be able to find out what went on in the tunnel?’

  ‘I’m going to try.’

  Matthews took Susan back to reception then returned to the office and shut the door behind her.

  ‘Sit down, Matthews.’

  She did so, looking resigned.

  ‘I need some help.’

  It wasn’t what she’d expected. Her head shot up. ‘What do you mean, help?’

  ‘I’ve got a conflict of interest in this case that I’ve only recently discovered. I need to speak to Superintendent Llewellyn and my mother in that order.’

  ‘You think she was one of the girls in the tunnel? You mentioned her name just then.’

  Sadler swivelled the photo to Matthews and pointed at a tall figure with long fair hair. ‘This is my mother.’

  Matthews looked at a loss for words. ‘How do you want me to help?’

  ‘I need to do everything by the book. I don’t want any of my personal connections seeping into the case. I want to talk to my mother first, assuming Llewellyn is happy for me to do so. She needs to tell me what she knows about what happened in that tunnel. Afterwards, I want you to take over the case.’

  ‘Me?’ Sadler thought he saw the glint of tears.

  ‘You’re the best person for making sure everything is done properly.’

  Matthews nodded and was about to reply when the door opened without a knock. It was a young uniformed constable. ‘Sir. They’ve found a girl near the Cutting. Initial identification suggests it’s Catherine Hallows.’

  ‘Is she—’

  ‘She’s alive but suffering from exposure and in a critical condition. She’s in the hospital now.’

  ‘Who found her?’

  ‘Connie and a member of the traffic division. Goes by the name of Morgan.’

  So here we are, thought Sadler. All paths lead to the Cutting.

  62

  There were three people behind the desk at the library, none of whom Mina recognised and each engrossed in their tasks. She went over to the noticeboard and checked that th
e replacement card was there. She found it tucked away on the bottom left of the board, the message written in Joseph’s neat capital letters. She moved it to the centre of the board and approached the desk.

  ‘How far do your local papers go back?’

  The group looked at each other. ‘Hold on.’ One woman opened a drawer and took out a file, flicking through the pages.

  ‘Okay, we have the Bampton Express, which goes back to 1971.’ She looked up hopefully.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘That’s the only paper that’s still going. We also hold the records for the Bampton Mercury between 1951 and 1967. I guess it must have shut down around then.’

  ‘They’re on computer?’

  ‘Everything’s been transferred to microfilm but we also have physical copies of some records. Do you want me to check?’

  ‘Would you? Fingers crossed it’s the actual newspapers. I’m not sure if I’ll cope with microfilm.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry too much about that. It’s easy to use. We need to go downstairs to the reference section.’

  The room was partially underground. The full length windows that illuminated the ground floor extended into the lower room and, as Mina looked up, she could see feet walking past on the pavement above. It was a long, narrow room, lined with books with a table stretching down its length dotted with reading lamps. At the far end was a row of computer terminals.

  ‘Let’s have a look.’ The woman traced her finger along a shelf of outsized books. ‘Here we are. You’re in luck. We have the paper copies of the Bampton Mercury. What year were you looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know, exactly. Sometime in the nineteen fifties. Can you leave me to look through?’

  At the retreating sound of the clip of heels on the parquet floor, Mina pulled out 1956. Hilary would have been fourteen then. A little young, perhaps, but already at Bampton Grammar. The Mercury had been a weekly broadsheet and, as she flicked through, Mina began to get a sense of how the paper was laid out. Local news on the front page, national headlines on pages two and three and then back to local news. Letters to the editor took up a whole page in the centre of the paper and local and national sporting achievements jostled for space at the back.

  She made her focus the local news, editorial and readers’ letters. It took her over two hours to get through 1956. In 1957 there was talk about one of the stations on the Bampton line shutting because of poor usage. This was a good ten years before Beeching. Already the railway was proving to be uneconomic. Responses were muted. One reader worried how he would get to Skegness for his annual holiday, and another, who was a nurse in Sheffield, said she’d have to give up a job and take a lower paid one in Bampton. There was no mention of a naked man. The summer of 1957 was a heatwave and Mina found a photo of the train from Bampton station packed with holidaymakers during the wakes weeks, the traditional holidays in the Peaks. Mina heaved the bound volume back onto the shelf and took down the book labelled September to December 1957. There, amongst the readers’ letters, she found what she was looking for.

  Sir, it has come to our attention that a man, divested of any clothing whatsoever, was spotted in the environs of Cutting Lane on the evening of 12 September. Residents of Bampton are advised to take appropriate action to protect their women and children.

  Good God. It sounded like the writer had swallowed a bowl of marbles. Why such convoluted language? It was clearly the style of writing required by the paper even though ordinary residents of the town must have read it. She continued to turn the pages. The next entry came on 10 October, not in the form of a letter but a short article. It reported that the man had been seen by a number of walkers in the fields around the top of the bridge. He’d made no attempt to approach anyone and had continued on his chosen path without looking at those who had spotted him. He had, however, been completely naked.

  The naked man. One of the witnesses had been an eleven-year-old girl with her brother aged around four. Mina thought of Jim and Jean. Had it been them? Jim had been suitably vague but the ages might fit. He said he’d been in short trousers. A young lad. What was interesting was that the man hadn’t approached the children but had kept on his intended path. If he was a predator, surely he would have tried to engage the children in some way. Adults had also spotted him. He’d not tried to hide himself, instead walking on his chosen path.

  It wasn’t the image of a predator that entered Mina’s head but of the ‘Naked Rambler’ she had seen a news item about on TV. He simply liked to walk without any clothes. Was this the same person? In the back of her mind she was trying to remember something. A naked man walking. It wasn’t related to present time. At some point, someone else she had talked to other than Jim had referred to a man and clothes or lack of them. Who had it been? The image of Emily Fenn popped into her head and a man without his clothes she had mentioned when Mina was studying the figure of the Guy.

  63

  ‘She’s only just alive. We’ve not been able to speak to her yet.’ The ICU unit was at the back of the hospital, away from the incident room and the interviews that Sadler’s team were painstakingly conducting. Connie was waiting for him outside the entrance to the unit, slumped like a ragdoll on a chair although his appearance seemed to revive her.

  ‘The mother’s with her?’ asked Sadler, taking the seat next to her.

  ‘She hasn’t left her side. We’d already talked to her before we found Catherine. Your guess was correct this morning. She does work as a district nurse. She’s not connected to the hospital at all. Interesting you thought of that.’

  ‘Catherine said to the volunteer leader that her mother was always out and about, which doesn’t sound like the phrase you’d use about someone going to and from a place of work. I guessed she’d have a role in the community.’

  ‘The thing is, I talked to Lorna about her job while she was sitting next to Catherine. She visits people in their homes. She’s never heard of Nell Colley or Hilary Kemp but she did say she deals with a lot of elderly patients in the course of her work.’ Connie stood up and massaged her calf. ‘I think I pulled a muscle up on the railway bridge.’

  ‘You believed her?’

  ‘She appeared to be telling the truth. She was curious why I was asking, of course, but distracted by her worry over Catherine. She also told me she’s in demand because she took an extra qualification that allows her to prescribe drugs as part of her work.’

  ‘Has she been missing any diamorphine?’

  ‘I couldn’t ask her that. She has a seriously ill daughter. I’d already pushed my luck in terms of informal questions. We’ll need to interview her tomorrow.’

  ‘We also need to know if Catherine had access to any drugs.’

  ‘Yes.’ Connie looked down at him and made a face. ‘Not a pleasant thought, is it?’

  ‘It’s not. You found Catherine at the top of the escarpment? At the Cutting?’

  ‘It looks like she’d been in the ventilation shaft and got into difficulties. She managed to climb out but injured herself in doing so.’

  ‘Inside the ventilation shaft? You think she accessed it from the tunnel below?’

  ‘According to the witness, Patrick Kersey, the man who was killed yesterday in the car accident, he saw the girl entering the tunnel and not emerging. So, yes, we think she accessed it from below.’

  ‘Voluntarily?’

  ‘We’re not going to be sure about this until we speak to her.’

  ‘Are all her injuries consistent with attempts to escape from the shaft?’

  Connie shook her head. ‘I don’t know. One of the paramedics thought he could detect the smell of morphine. It has the scent of vinegar, apparently. But we found her at the top of the shaft. She couldn’t have climbed that ladder if she was drugged.’

  ‘She’d been missing nearly twenty-four hours. She may have looked for a way out when the effects of the drug wore off.’ Sadler looked up as a doctor came towards them but passed without stopping. ‘I’ve b
een speaking to a witness, Susan Barr, about an event that happened sixty years ago.’

  Connie stared at him, puzzled. ‘It’s relevant to now?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure it’s the start of the case. I think that ventilation chimney was used in an attack by a group of schoolgirls in the fifties.’

  ‘You think that’s what Nell Colley was going to write about?’

  ‘I think it was a pivotal point in all the girls’ lives. I’ve been thinking about group dynamics on the way here. I remember studying it as part of my inspector’s exams. How normality becomes distorted when you belong to a gang. I suspect Nell was part of a group of girls who may well have had a set of rituals to create a sense of belonging. It’s a fascinating subject. Rules are created to ensure the group is paramount over individuals. If someone transgresses them, a form of punishment is dished out.’

  ‘So the book would have been about teenage friendship and an act that they had committed to protect it. From what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What happened to the girl who went missing in the tunnel?’

  ‘I don’t know that either. I’ve been talking to Mina, who’s been following the same trail after her mother hinted at what had happened. The victim, Valerie Hallows, appears to have died in her early twenties. She was Catherine’s grandmother.’

  ‘An interesting enough story for a book?’

  ‘Perhaps it was intended to be an act of atonement for what happened.’

  Connie stretched out. ‘This could be it. The link between everything. Nell Colley decides to write a book about the attack and one of the original girls decides to stop her.’

  ‘That would tally with the extract I found on the envelope but—’