The Girl in the Letter

by Emily Gunnis

  She picked up her pace, trying to control her terror. Please, please, she pleaded to the freezing, unrelenting night.

  Suddenly she spotted a light on the other side of the fence and began to run towards it. As she got closer, she saw it was the headlights of a car coming down the track. To her relief, the lights illuminated the break in the fence and she forced herself through it. The dog let out another bark; it could be no more than twenty feet away now. She realised that the car was a black cab and as it pulled to a stop, Sam hammered on the passenger window. The man inside looked up at her in shock, then slowly opened the window.

  ‘You all right, love?’

  ‘No, there’s a dog chasing me. Please can you let me in! Quickly.’

  He unlocked the doors, and she pulled at the handle and leapt inside. As she slammed the door closed, the dog ran round the car barking furiously.

  ‘Jesus Christ, you gave me the fright of my life,’ said the man.

  ‘Thank God you were here.’ Sam was trying to catch her breath.

  As the two of them sat staring at one another, Andy appeared at the fence and started shouting at the dog to come back.

  ‘Blimey, this place is like Piccadilly Circus,’ said the driver as the dog retreated and Andy put him on a lead before walking off into the darkness.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ said Sam, as her breathing calmed.

  ‘I’ve come to collect my fare,’ the cabbie said, looking at his watch. ‘She’s been gone nearly an hour. I brought her down from London, didn’t feel right leaving her out here alone.’ He pulled a polystyrene cup from a take away bag. ‘Speak of the devil . . .’

  Sam looked up to see Kitty Cannon staggering towards the fence. Before she could reach it, her legs went from underneath her and she collapsed.

  Sam opened the door and jumped out, pushing herself back through the hole in the fence and running over to where Kitty lay. She knelt by her side and listened to her breathing, then took her coat off and laid it over her.

  ‘Ivy?’ said Kitty faintly.

  ‘We need an ambulance!’ Sam shouted to the driver.

  ‘No, please, just take me home,’ said Kitty, before she started to cry.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Friday 31 December 1999

  Father Benjamin paused momentarily as he stood in the entrance hall, catching his breath from hurrying through the grounds of St Margaret’s in the darkness. Unable to turn on his torch for fear of being seen by a nosy passer-by, he had tripped twice, only just managing to avoid a fall.

  It had been early evening by the time he had seen the note posted under his door at Gracewell. There had been a New Year’s Eve tea in the dining room, after which he made his way into the lift and along the corridor to his room. He had spotted it as soon as he walked in. Curious, but not remotely concerned, he had picked it up and walked over to the chair by the window to open it.

  As soon as he slid the single sheet of white paper out of the envelope, worry had set in. Two lines, unsigned, in handwriting he did not recognise.

  Meet me in the ironing room at St Margaret’s at midnight tonight to discuss the records you destroyed. If you don’t turn up, I will go to the police. Come alone.

  He had sat for most of the evening looking at the television in his room, his mind far away. He tried to tell Amy about the note when she came to check on him, but the words wouldn’t come. Where would he start?

  By eleven o’clock, he knew he was too anxious to sleep. It would be better to go and meet whoever it was and see what they wanted, rather than lie in his bed worrying. It wasn’t far, just along Preston Lane. He still had his keys to the old house. No one would even notice he was gone. And so he had dressed in his warmest woollen jumper, tucked the note into the pocket of his corduroy trousers and snuck out at twenty minutes to midnight.

  Now, in the safety of the house, he clicked the torch on. It was unnerving to be back after so many years. The place felt familiar yet alien at the same time. The sweeping staircase in the entrance hall was just as he remembered it. But instead of shining with polish, it was dull and covered in broken glass and fallen debris from the high ceiling above it. Dirt and grime coated the black and white tiles that had sparkled and shone in the days of Mother Carlin. The windows he passed as he walked along the corridor towards the laundry were mostly smashed, their frames cracked and split, with paint curling off like claws. The whole building smelt of rotting wood. As he reached the door of the laundry, he shone his torch inside. Once a vast, steam-filled room crammed with girls and their bumps, it was now an empty shell strewn with debris and broken mangles.

  As he walked down the corridor, the light from his torch lit up his reflection in the only window that wasn’t broken. His round face was pale, covered in stubble, and tufts of grey hair stuck out of his head in a wiry mess. He was curled forward in a permanent bow because of a constant ache in his back. From the side he looked as if he had no neck at all, he thought, as his grey eyes stared back at him through his cheap spectacles. Whereas once he would have been freshly shaved every morning, his perfectly pressed vestments laid out for him on his bed, now an oversized grey woollen jumper and baggy cords were his uniform. He was a ruin, he thought as he turned away from the window; just as this mansion had become.

  He let out a heavy sigh at the memory of St Margaret’s in its heyday. With kind donations from the congregation and a hefty loan from the bank, they had managed to buy the former boarding school at auction and open its doors less than six months later. For three decades they had made enough money to keep a roof over their heads, and put something aside for the future.

  But not enough, it seemed, to ensure that he and the Sisters of Mercy were comfortable in their retirement. In the end, the offer from Slade Homes had come just at the right moment. The house had been condemned, and pressure from the council over the whereabouts of records from the home had reached a peak. There was an undercurrent of finger-pointing that made him very uneasy; it troubled him that he and the sisters were not treated with the respect they deserved.

  He stopped and listened to see if he could hear anyone moving about below him. Silence. Perhaps whoever it was had not arrived yet; perhaps their only motive had been to upset him and they wouldn’t come. Only a handful of people knew about the records, and he had no idea why they had asked to meet here rather than discussing the issue with him at Gracewell. He felt a great deal more uncomfortable than he thought he would being back at the house. It had been a tortuous decision to agree to the sale, but at the same time he would be glad when it was gone – as long as Slade stuck to the contract, building inside the agreed perimeters and sealing off the tunnels, which he had insisted be done on signature.

  As he reached the end of the last of the long corridors, he found himself faced with a locked door. He took out a brass key, a tag attached to it saying Back Stairs, and, using the torch to guide him, turned it in the lock. Then he opened the door and flashed the light down the dark stairway below him.

  ‘Hello? Is anyone there?’ he called out. No reply.

  He sighed to himself at the thought of the pain his back was about to give him. His heels clicked on the cold stone steps as his tired hands gripped the rail. Through the silence of the empty house, he thought he could hear the sound of Mother Carlin’s heels as she carried a stillborn baby down the stairs, through the ironing room and out into the tunnels. There had been so many deaths. The births were frequent and often went wrong. It was impossible to give every stillborn child a proper burial; they just didn’t have the money or time.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Father Benjamin was faced with another heavy oak door and reached for his keys again, shining his torch at them until he found the label saying Ironing Room. As he did so, he dropped the torch; its back came off and the batteries fell out onto the dusty floor.

  Without his torch, in the bowels of the house in the middle of the night, it was impossible to see his hand in front of his face. He knelt down
and patted the floor, puffing and panting, growing dizzy and disoriented. Mice scuttled around him as he tried to remain composed. Eventually he found one battery, then the other.

  ‘Blasted thing,’ he muttered, turning the batteries this way and that before eventually clicking them into place and turning the torch back on. At the same moment, the door at the top of the stairs banged shut.

  He was sure he had closed it. He flashed the torch up the stairs into the blackness but could see nothing. ‘Hello,’ he mumbled to the dark. ‘Who’s there?’

  Focusing on his task again, he used the door handle to pull himself up, letting out a loud groan that echoed up the stone stairs behind him. Shaking with exertion, he paused to gather his strength and inserted the key into the lock. It took several tries before it eventually turned.

  It was clear the room hadn’t yet been cleared of all the ironing presses. It was smaller than he remembered, and as he walked through, his feet crackled over broken glass from the two barred windows. The low ceiling was claustrophobic, and down here the damp permeated the walls and the smell of mould was overwhelming. Twice he bumped into the sharp edges of the presses. The floor was black from the build-up of grime and dirt, which stuck to his feet as he shuffled through it. His legs ached from his journey, and he let out heavy breaths that echoed round the room, gripped by an anxiety he was not familiar with. In the dim light, he almost felt he could see the girls watching him through clouds of steam as they worked, wiping away the perspiration on their foreheads with the sleeves of their overalls.

  He looked at his watch: midnight. He trailed his torch beam around the room, but nobody was here waiting for him. It was a hoax, a sick joke by someone who was probably at home now, safe and warm by the fire, toasting the start of a new millennium.

  ‘Where are you?’ he called out one last time. Silence.

  As he turned to go, he heard a noise. It was faint, like the crashing of metal against metal some distance away. He moved forward slowly and shone his torch in the direction it had come from.

  Then he stopped dead. The door that led down to the tunnels was open. He moved closer: he could definitely hear someone down there. It sounded like they were hitting metal with a hammer. But the only thing that could be was the door to the septic tank, and that was impossible. Slade had assured him that the tunnels beyond the perimeter would be blocked off and filled in as soon as he signed the contract.

  Panic surged through him as he shuffled towards the open door. If they had broken their word, he needed to know. The tank had been filled in with rubble and sand by a contractor he had paid himself years ago, but the tunnel leading up to it should have been cemented in by now.

  Father Benjamin stood at the top of the stone steps that led to the tunnel and the septic tank. Once cleaned regularly, and lit with lamps, the walls were now dark green and covered in foul-smelling gunge. Water dripped from the ceiling, its echoes ringing out like bells. He tried to ignore his rising panic at being in such a dark, confined space. The smell hanging in the air – a pungent mix of mould and rotten eggs – was making him nauseous. Using the wall to guide him, he eased his foot to the edge of the top step and began to make his way carefully downwards, knowing that if he fell, no one would find him before morning, if at all. He counted to himself as he moved – one, two, three – as if warning anything below that he was coming.

  The rotting smell began to act like an acid, burning the lining of his nose. The dead air around him was impossibly hard to breathe, and as he reached the bottom of the steps and began to walk down the tunnel towards the tank, he soon became disoriented in the darkness.

  The dripping water had turned the tunnel into a trench. The burning pain in his nose began to travel to his throat and eyes. One more minute, he told himself, one more minute and he would have the proof he needed and could go home to bed. He forced his heavy legs forward, the burning sensations now accompanied by pressure on his chest. As he tried to keep the torch steady in his trembling hand, he heard something behind him, like a brown paper bag rustling in the wind. He stopped and turned, pointing the torch in the direction the noise had come from, but saw only empty space. As he continued, desperate now to reach the tank, the rustling turned into a whisper. First one voice, then two, incomprehensible hushed exchanges. Several times he stopped and turned, listening to his own laboured breathing when no response to his calls came.

  ‘What is he doing?’ whispered a clear voice right next to his ear. Father Benjamin startled and flashed his torch in its direction, but again saw only the black tunnel surrounding him.

  A feeling of suffocation pressed down on him. He must be nearly there. ‘Where is it, where is it?’ he mumbled, feeling in front of him for the stone wall at the end of the tunnel. His head throbbed; the tunnel seemed to narrow, closing in around him as the cold, stinking water dripped onto his head.

  ‘He’s looking for the tank, I think,’ said another voice, deeper this time. Father Benjamin paused, then moved on again. It was the smells and the fumes affecting him, he told himself, as he began to cough violently. He bent over, retching. Stop, please stop, he pleaded to his body. He couldn’t take enough air into his lungs in the stagnant tunnel to stop the dizziness that was overwhelming him.

  Finally his coughing fit ended, but his legs had no strength and he had to lean against the wall to hold himself up.

  ‘It’s the fumes from the tank,’ said the first voice. Father Benjamin looked up to see two girls in brown overalls standing over him. One had a nasty black eye; both had shaved heads and were white as ghosts.

  ‘They are bad,’ said the other girl. ‘I was locked down here all night once. I was sick so many times that my nose bled. It wouldn’t stop, do you remember? Mother Carlin was so angry.’

  ‘I do, I remember it well. Poor Martha, you were very brave,’ said the first girl. They hugged each other.

  Father Benjamin stood up as straight as his back would allow, staggering forward until he finally reached the end of the tunnel. He stopped and sank to the floor, feeling the wall with his hands as if it were an old friend’s face. He had made it. He gasped for breath and felt a wave of nausea rising in his stomach. Leaning forward, he began to vomit. Over and over he retched, unable to catch his breath in between. Finally the sickness abated and he leant his head against the wall, gasping.

  Why were there still fumes coming from the tank? It had been filled in months ago.

  As he struggled to his feet, a loud bang echoed through the tunnel.

  ‘What was that?’ asked one of the girls.

  When Father Benjamin looked up, he saw that the original pair had now become a group of eight or ten. They were standing in a semicircle around him.

  ‘I think it was the door to the tunnel,’ said another. ‘I hope he has a key.’

  Father Benjamin reached down to his pocket: it was empty; the keys were gone. He must have dropped them when he was sick. Slowly squatting down, he felt the ground around him, his hand landing in a pile of warm vomit.

  ‘Oh dear, I think he might have lost them,’ said a third girl, suppressing a smile.

  Father Benjamin was finding it painful to breathe as the crushing feeling in his chest intensified. He began to cough again, his eyes streaming. His lips were parched and his tongue was covered with a thick dry fur. A sudden stabbing pain in his head sent him crashing to the ground, gasping for breath again.

  ‘Ring a ring o’ roses, a pocket full of posies. A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down.’

  As they laughed and skipped around him, the priest lay on the damp ground, his skin growing cold, his pulse racing. He tried to move, but any effort made him gasp in jerky, shallow breaths as his chest grew tighter and tighter. The coughing started again, so painful it was like shards of glass.

  ‘Oh my Jesus, forget and forgive what I have been,’ he mumbled over and over. Every time he tried to move, the girls pushed him down and continued to chant:

  ‘Ring a ring o’ roses, a pocket full of p
osies. A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down.’

  ‘Help me!’ Father Benjamin said, as a sensation of falling began to take hold. He could barely see now, his vision failing and the light from his torch fading.

  ‘Pray for your sins, Father,’ one of the girls said, then they all turned and walked away.

  Father Benjamin crawled along the foul-smelling corridor on his knees. Everything had stopped: the coughing, the sickness, the pain in his head. Finally he reached the door back through to the ironing room, heaving himself up and onto his knees. His eyes stung so much he could barely see, but he felt for the handle and turned it. The door was locked.

  He let out a cry as he twisted and rattled the handle with all his failing strength.

  His eyes grew heavy; eventually he lay down and closed them. He couldn’t move any more now. All he wanted to do was sleep. Sleep until it was over and he was standing at the gates of heaven with the Lord. Just as the girl had told him to, he began to pray.

  Forgive me my sins, O Lord, forgive me my sins; the sins of my youth, the sins of my age, the sins of my soul, the sins of my body; my idle sins, my voluntary sins; the sins I know, the sins I do not know; the sins I have concealed for so long, and which are now hidden from my memory.

  I am truly sorry for every sin, mortal and venal, for all the sins of my childhood up to the present hour. I know my sins have wounded Thy tender heart, O my Saviour; let me be freed from the bonds of evil through the most bitter passion of my Redeemer.

  O my Jesus, forget and forgive what I have been.

  Amen.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Monday 6 February 2017

  As the taxi wove in and out of traffic back to London, Kitty slept, slumped against Sam’s shoulder. Sam looked at her watch: 5 a.m. Nana and Emma would still be fast asleep; she would ring at six and check all was well. She felt anxious at being so far away from Emma, but she could not just let the taxi driver take Kitty Cannon away after she had discovered her in the grounds of St Margaret’s. A buzz of excitement swept through her as she looked down at the face that had been a weekly guest in almost every lounge in the country for two decades. She had been right: Kitty Cannon was connected to St Margaret’s and she was determined to find out how.