by Penny Grubb
Annie sprang at the old woman, grabbed the chain at her neck in both hands, pulling it apart with a snap and flinging it on to the grass.
She kicked the cage on to its side, gasping and leaping back as a river of purple fire snaked across the grass. Red embers spilt from the mesh. Tiny fires flared in the grass. As the cage fell, the wad of papers fanned out. Small tongues of flame began to curl their edges.
Turning her head away, Annie took in a deep breath and grabbed them out of the fire, throwing them on to the ground and stamping out the flames. She turned to the grass and trod down on the scorched line of the brandy fire.
Once sure it was no longer alight, she rubbed her hands and pulled the plastic bottle out of the carrier bag to tip water on to her wrist where the flame had bitten. With a stout stick, she hooked the cage upright again and kicked at the grass where the spillage had blackened it.
This would have convinced her, if she hadn’t already been sure, that Eliza’s knowledge of the papers was not recently acquired. She knew them intimately and knew exactly which ones she wanted to hide.
Annie picked up the alarm with its broken chain but did not hand it back to Eliza as she manoeuvred the wheelchair away from the fire.
‘You promised!’ Eliza spat out.
‘So did you. You promised I could scan the papers, see the dates. I’ll keep my promise if you keep yours.’
Chapter 26
Annie sat down again on the low wall with the partly scorched papers in her lap and began to flick through them. These were in Eliza’s hand; the same spidery writing she’d seen yesterday but without the frailty. The words were robust and clear; the comments longer.
Thursday, 15th February 1934. The Jawbone Gang met today and we talked about what we liked.
‘The Jawbone Gang?’ Annie queried. ‘You said you weren’t part of it.’
‘That was the new Jawbone Gang,’ said Eliza. ‘May wrote that on the box when she started the first one. That’s the one you asked about.’
Annie glared at the old woman. She’d tried to cheat on her promise by using a long-ago distinction between two gangs that Annie couldn’t possibly have known about. She carried on looking through the papers, making no secret now that she was reading them, but she kept to her side of the bargain and tossed them into the fire. The comments were longer; the sentences better formed, but there was nothing of interest. Eliza, as minutetaker, made a better job, leaving more to be checked.
We must all go to the Day Out, even if we do not wish to go …
As the diary made its way into June, an entry read:
We two have made a pledge. We used the knife and swore to it in blood. It is agreed that we shall meet every Thursday.
Annie stifled a yawn. She had scanned entries for almost every Thursday and Saturday since 1930. Why this pronouncement now? She had a moment’s hope that the Saturday meetings might have been dropped, but they carried on just as before. Thursday … Saturday … Thursday …
Except that …
For the first time since she’d started on this, she unfolded a page she had already scrunched in readiness for the fire, and read it through again, aware all the time of Eliza’s resentful gaze.
We two have pledged … We two …
‘You and May met without the others, didn’t you? Saturdays, you and May. Thursdays, all five of you. Why?’
Eliza’s answer was a shrug.
Annie retained the papers in her lap now.
‘You promised,’ Eliza growled.
‘Yes, and I will. I– Oh my God!’ Annie stared at the page in front of her.
‘This is what he does,’ she read out.
‘For pity’s sake,’ Eliza shouted. ‘Don’t read it aloud. It’s bad enough that it’s there. I had enough of a job stopping May from reading it. That’s why I promised to take them all away.’
Annie gaped at the diary entry. That was the start of his unspeakable degradations … It went on to describe how he first forced his unwelcome attentions on to her. The acts described were the touching of hands and a foot moving to rub against an ankle. It wasn’t these that horrified Annie. It was the phraseology. That was the start of his unspeakable degradations … the forcing of his unwelcome attentions …
These were exactly the arcane phrases used by Yates in his tirades against Michael Walker.
Quickly, Annie flipped forward through the pages. She barely had to scan them to find what she wanted. The passages describing the abuse of the anonymous her by the anonymous he were easy to spot, because they were back in the original handwriting.
‘May wrote these bits,’ she said.
No doubts now. This was what Donna had heard. This was what Yates had quoted back in court. But how … why?
Eliza said nothing.
‘What was it? Why did she write this? What’s it about?’
‘Go back to the Saturday before the first one,’ Eliza said. ‘If you haven’t burnt it.’
‘May put forward a plan of action,’ Annie read aloud. ‘But the Jawbone Gang decided against it. What plan of action? What does …? Oh, just you and May? May wanted to do something. You disagreed. What did she want you to do?’
‘I wrote the notes, but she kept the box. When we met, she would give me the box and I’d open it. When I had the box back from her that next time, she’d written that, and it was there on the top. I couldn’t have missed it. No, don’t for pity’s sake read it aloud. It was to convince me we had to act. Of course, we could never have spoken openly about that kind of thing.’
‘But who was he?’
‘His name was William Digby. Mr Digby we had to call him. He was in charge at the Sunday-school. Young girls aplenty and forced to attend by their parents.’
‘But how long did this go on? Who were his victims?’
‘Mainly May. She walked out on him when she was thirteen, said she’d never go back, but then she was offered a job by the church. That must have been Digby’s doing.’
‘Yes, you mentioned that before. May wanted to work at the hospital.’
‘Her mother made her work for the church. She never forgave her for that. Not to her dying day.’
‘But didn’t she tell her mother?’
‘Of course not. The shame of it. It would have been the worse for May if she had.’
‘But surely if he really did …’ Annie’s voice tailed away. She hadn’t read beyond the first few of May’s entries, but she recalled the allegations Yates had made against Walker.
‘Don’t say it!’ Eliza’s lips pursed, as though she’d bitten into a lemon.
‘What did she want you to do?’
‘She had a plan for revenge. It couldn’t ever have worked, but it helped her just to plot and plan. She wanted me to tell the rest of them about it – the new Jawbone Gang – so they could help.’
‘And you wouldn’t?’
‘Oh, I did, eventually, when she told me enough of what he’d done. I was very young then. I didn’t understand.’
‘What was the plan?’
‘Childish stuff. May wasn’t very bright.’
‘But what was it?’
When Eliza didn’t answer, Annie turned back to the sheets of paper still in her lap.
‘Oh, all right,’ said Eliza. ‘It’s all in there. May had a plan to kill Mr Digby.’
Annie felt her eyes snap open wide. ‘You killed him?’
Eliza’s lip curled. ‘We were children. All we could do was plot and plan. It made us feel better while we were doing it.’ She threw Annie a look of exasperation. ‘Just look. A dozen pages on. My writing. May dictated: I wrote.’
Annie riffled through the pages and sure enough found a heading, The Plan, underlined twice. It was set out like a recipe. A list of items included a blanket, a pen and a wash bowl. There followed numbered steps in the process beginning with:
1: We five arrive at the room by the back of the hall.
And ending:
20: We five return to our homes i
n good time for supper.
Annie had half expected to see a blueprint for the frenzied knife attack on Michael Walker, but it bore no relation.
It was hard to work out what May’s plan actually meant.
T hands to L the red crested vase and opens the chest for the shoes. T says, now for the books, be quick, and L takes the red crested vase and M tells E for her turn with the pen.
Eliza shook her head. ‘T was code for Digby. You can see he had a speaking part in the plan. She had it all scripted. We rehearsed it, the five of us.’ Eliza paused and laughed coldly. ‘We had some fun with it, back and forth. May would make one of the others play Digby with his lines and his moves. She had us rehearsing till we were bored with it.’
‘But what happened in the end?’
‘We walked away from it one day. All five of us. I think that the plotting gave May the strength to break free. And we all followed where May led. We never went back to the church.’
‘What happened to him? What about the other children who stayed?’
‘It must have scared him, the way we all left. Brought it home to him, you know. He won’t have done anything to anyone else after that.’
Annie said nothing. It was a dreadful memory to have raked up after all these decades. She supposed this Digby person had carried on abusing the girls in his care, unless he’d been caught in later years. She could understand why Eliza, and probably May, made themselves believe their actions had stopped him. She might do a bit of digging and see if he had been caught and sent down. That would be something for Eliza.
And as to Donna Lambit and Michael Walker, how on earth had things untangled the way they had? There was no doubt that Joshua Yates had been quoting May’s diary when he’d spouted his poison about Michael Walker, but how had Donna come to make such a catastrophic error?
‘When you went to see May that last time, you told me she read from the diary. Did she read all of those bits?’
‘She couldn’t see well enough to read it, but she knew it by heart. I tried to shush her, but she would go on. She wanted to make me promise to burn the papers. Well, of course, I said I would. My handwriting was in that box. I should have done it straight away. I should never have left it, but I put it off. Things drift. They were locked away in the attaché case. Safe enough, I thought. Then one thing led to another and I ended up in here. Oh, they’re all right in here, but your life’s not your own. What are you going to do with them? You promised me, you know.’
Annie considered. Logically, she should take the papers away with her, use them to show that Yates had his story upside down, that Michael Walker was innocent of all allegations. And yet, no one was saying any differently apart from Brittany Booth and Donna Lambit. Annie would face both women with the truth and they would have to swallow it. She could see in Eliza’s face how much it would mean to her to have the old secret gone forever.
‘I’ll burn them like I said I would. But this is what I’ve been after: it was Digby’s crimes that were quoted in court.’
Eliza looked up sharply. ‘What do you mean?’
So Annie told her everything. About Michael’s murder, Yates’s allegations, about Nicole and Brittany.
‘The puzzle remains,’ she ended, ‘why May wanted to leave the box to Donna’s daughter.’
‘But are you sure she did? Her mind was going.’
‘May’s daughter, Susan, confirmed it. She remembered her mother being insistent about it.’
‘What was this woman’s daughter called?’
‘Charlotte.’
‘Oh.’
Annie looked sharply across at the tone of the exclamation. Eliza sat immobile, her hands clasping the chair arms as though to make herself rise up. Her face, pale at the best of times, was translucent with shock. Annie felt a bolt of fear that she would witness Eliza’s death right this moment.
‘What? What is it?’
‘Charlotte,’ said Eliza, her voice barely a whisper. ‘After all these years I’d forgotten about Charlotte.’
‘Who was she?’
‘May was getting old at fifteen. He was looking for a new girl to take her place. Charlotte was new to the church. A youngster. From a family of toffs. I didn’t like her, stuck up little madam and younger than all of us. But May took to this newcomer like anything. Wanted to take her under her wing, you know, look after her. But the little madam wouldn’t look twice at the likes of us. I doubt she had a thought for May, but May looked out for her just the same.’
‘And Digby was grooming Charlotte to take May’s place?’
‘Is that what you call it? I think that’s when May started on her plan. She’d stand it for herself, but she wasn’t going to see young Charlotte go the same way.’
‘What happened?’
Eliza tipped her head in a don’t-know gesture. ‘I’ve neither seen nor heard a word of Charlotte since I walked out of that church and swore never to go back.’
‘Did May still keep an eye out for her?’
‘No, we none of us had anything to do with any of them again. We never spoke his name, nor hers. Not until that day I visited May and took the papers away. I don’t recall that she mentioned Mr Digby by name, even then, but she talked about Charlotte. She’d never forgotten.’
Annie sat back. It wasn’t quite a complete story yet, but it appeared to be the link between May Gow and Donna’s daughter. She looked across at Eliza. ‘Do you want a drink?’
Eliza shrugged neither a yes nor a no, so Annie reached for her cup and tipped the brandy bottle.
‘Not so much,’ Eliza rapped out. ‘I don’t want to be drunk. And I’ll have water with it.’
Chapter 27
That evening, Annie strolled to the Whalebone. It was quiet, too early for the Sunday regulars. The city’s history adorned the yellowed walls; facing her were Hull’s glory days on the rugby field, past triumphs more numerous than recent ones. She knew without turning that men in the sturdy oilskins that bespoke life aboard the whalers looked down on her from behind. For decades, the fabric of this room had been steeped in the fog of a thousand cigars, pipes and cigarettes. She imagined William Digby, stinking of stale tobacco, coming in here, an oily obsequious presence in amongst the men who sent their daughters to his Sunday-school.
It had been almost the first thing she’d thought of. Joshua Yates had simply got it wrong. Annie had stayed with Eliza until the whole story was out. Yates had made a stupid mistake. He’d targeted Michael Walker for crimes committed by a stranger six decades ago. A man … a monster … called William Digby.
There was no link. May’s path had never crossed Michael Walker’s, nor his family’s. Yates had taken Donna’s word and never checked. Donna had jumped to conclusions because she was already boiling with resentment against her daughter’s partner. She’d heard references to what was being planned for Charlotte and made the absurd assumption May and Eliza were talking about her daughter.
Annie knew now how circumstances had come together to pander to Donna’s prejudices. She would tell Nicole, but not to Brittany. Annie couldn’t guess which way Brittany would take the news. Would she break down, upset? Would she bluster and refuse to believe it?
If she met incredulity, so be it. The evidence was gone. It would have been easy to take the incriminating pages. What would Eliza have done? She couldn’t demand help from the staff without drawing attention to the secrets she wanted to hide. Indeed, she couldn’t call for help at all until Annie returned her alarm.
But Annie hadn’t kept anything. It wasn’t her place to throw a spotlight on a dead woman’s secret shame. She felt sad that May had seen it that way her whole life. Eliza, too, but there was nothing she could do to change that. The fact was that the tiny wave of interest Brittany Booth had generated had begun to wane almost before Annie took on either side of this case. No one had ever taken Yates’s accusations seriously; nor Brittany Booth’s. Yates would be sentenced next week. Brittany would start a new life without him if she ha
d any sense. Nicole and Charlotte would get their business up and running. Donna must live with what she’d done.
Everyone had childhood secrets, Annie supposed. It was up to them to bring them to light, not other people, not without far better reason than she had found.
Donna had been blinded by her prejudice. At a stretch, Annie could see where she’d snatched at this chance to discredit her precious daughter’s lover. But how on earth had Yates listened to the words quoted to him and not questioned their provenance?
In the end, Annie had given the specific sheets back to Eliza, because otherwise Eliza would never know for sure whether Annie had destroyed them or not. There were nine in all, the pages on which May had written the detail of the abuse she’d suffered.
Much of what May had written had been beyond her comprehension. Her style, abbreviated and mired in misunderstanding, made her descriptions more horrific than if she’d had the insight and vocabulary to be graphic.
Once she had the whole story and understood Donna’s part in it, she had looked out the pages and handed them to Eliza.
‘Are these all of them? There are nine.’
Eliza had clutched her bent fingers round them and flicked through one by one, counting.
‘My glass is in the pocket of the chair.’
Annie had handed across the magnifying glass and Eliza had scrutinized each page.
‘Give me the one with the plan.’
Annie searched out the page where Digby was scripted to co-operate in his own killing and scanned swiftly across the words as she handed it across.
We five arrive … the red crested vase … now for the books … her turn with the pen … we five return in good time for supper.
Then she moved the wheelchair close to the wire basket, and left it to Eliza to reach out with her shaky hands to drop in each of the last ten pages.
After the last one had fallen into the flames, Annie had retrieved the brandy bottle. ‘There’s enough left for one each.’