by Ros Franey
‘Doesn’t he, now?’ Marjorie’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Unless my memory’s playing tricks on me, Annie, that was your father walking down the road with Miss Blessing the other week, just before she disappeared, wasn’t it? Why, I believe you went and spoke to them, you even introduced me to them, and to my way of seeing things, they weren’t very happy about being caught together!’
‘They weren’t “caught together” – that’s nonsense,’ I told her, but I didn’t like the catch in my voice. ‘I told you, Marjorie, he was trying to help her brother get a place at Roebuck’s.’
‘And we know why,’ Marjorie sneered.
I ignored this. ‘He told us: that night at tea, he said it. He told Mother and Beatrice and me. He wouldn’t have done that if it wasn’t true, would he?’
‘Course he had to explain it,’ said Marjorie. ‘He had to say something, didn’t he, because he knew you’d seen them together! You might have told on him.’ She looked at me for a moment. ‘Maybe you wouldn’t of, though. Because maybe you knew there was something fishy about it and you didn’t want to get him into trouble!’ And without waiting for an answer, she turned on her heel and stalked out of the cloakroom. This disturbed me very much and I spent the next few days feeling sick every time I saw a policeman, wondering if he was on the way to arrest Daddy.
Of course, it was no big event in our household that Miss Blessing had gone: why should it be? She was just another member of Grandfather’s congregation. Mr Wilkinson continued to play the harmonium and made a mess of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, but otherwise it was never mentioned, because it wouldn’t be Christian to indulge in gossip. So life went on as before.
Or did it? After Marjorie’s accusations, I couldn’t get it out of my head that although I was sure Daddy hadn’t been involved, Mother might have been, and I was still pondering this suspicion when something happened that seemed to confirm it.
The week after my conversation with Marjorie, sometime after ten at night, I was tiptoeing past the kitchen window on my way to collect Nana as usual, when a dim light fell across the yard – a motorcar stopping on St Ann’s Hill below our house. I hesitated, wondering whether to creep back upstairs in case it was Daddy home late again, though why he should come in the back way was a mystery. As I watched, a shadowy figure emerged at the top of the steps and before I could escape, I heard the clack of the old lock in the scullery door. Without a moment’s thought, I dived under the table, thankful for the long oilcloth that hung down from it, silently tweaking my dressing-gown cord out of view and breathing as quietly as I could, though I suddenly seemed to be out of breath and gasping.
But this time, the feet that entered the scullery and came through into the kitchen were not Daddy’s; it was a woman’s step. My first thought was that it must be Maisie, who had forgotten something so urgent that she needed to fetch it before tomorrow morning. Instead of switching on the electric light, which would have flooded the room with brightness, the person turned up the lamp, which had been left burning low, and to my alarm approached the table under which I was crouching. Something heavy seemed to be heaved on to the oil-cloth, and as the light intensified I saw with horror that the shoes, just inches from my own clenched toes, were not Maisie’s but Mother’s. If I’d been half a minute earlier we’d have bumped into each other on the doorstep, and this thought alone made my heart beat so loudly I thought she must hear it. The feet then retreated, moving around the kitchen, and I could hear cupboards being opened and closed. Then I heard things being shifted around in the large cupboard where they kept dustpans and brooms and the Hoover. After a few moments of this, the feet returned to the table and I heard the heavy thing above my head being dragged off and dumped down, and there was more jostling and bumping, presumably to make room for it. I was shuddering now, hot and cold with terror. If she found me, it would be the cellar again; and besides, what deadly secret would she think I had uncovered? – for certainly, whatever she was doing had an air of being furtive in the half-light.
After an age, but it was probably no more than a minute or two, I heard the cupboard door close. The feet crossed and re-crossed the room a couple of times, as if she were uncertain of her hiding place. I prayed she would not change her mind and start moving whatever it was again, but after another few moments she turned down the lamp and went out into the hall. I could picture her removing her hatpin and coat by the pegs opposite the front door, but when I peered out from under the table I could see that she had not switched on the hall light and must be feeling her way upstairs in the darkness, just as I did when I climbed up each night with Nana. This was extremely odd. What reason had she, a grown-up, to tiptoe around her own house in the dark, if not to deceive us, who were supposed to be her family? Whatever she was up to in the kitchen must have been a secret deed, and therefore very likely an evil one. I sat on, under the table, hugging my cold knees, considering this. Long after the house was quiet again, I crept out, standing up gingerly for the pins and needles. By this time I had decided it would be too dangerous to go for Nana tonight and wished for nothing more than to be safely in bed; but I also knew that here, at last, lay a possible clue to the Mystery of Mother. I had to investigate the Heavy Thing.
I turned up the lamp a little and opened the tall cupboard, with excitement and dread at what I might find. There on the floor, barely concealed by the ironing board, was a large bag I had never seen before. This must be what she had hidden. It was fastened with straps like a Gladstone bag and by heaving it just half way out of the cupboard I was able to undo them. On top, there was a garment of some kind in which was wrapped a hard object – I lifted it out carefully and set it on the floor; the object was a cut-glass vase. Beneath, there were books. With extreme care, stopping every few seconds to listen for sounds from upstairs, I picked out each in turn: The Complete Works of Shakespeare, a rather beautiful one in a leather cover printed on India paper; Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (a different binding from the one in our book case); a novel by Mrs Gaskell, but not Cranford which we were reading at school; a book with a long title that I can’t remember but something to do with the Rights of Women; and lastly a book called The Gardener’s Friend. And that seemed to be all. I wish I could say these mysterious titles and the vase revealed a dark secret but truly, if they did, I had no idea what it was or why Mother should be creeping about at night hiding them in a cupboard. Disappointed, and suddenly anxious again that she might return, I started to repack the bag.
But as I replaced the first book, my fingers caught at something else at the bottom: a paper folder. I lifted it out: it was the cover of a mounted photograph from a photographer’s studio, like the ones Auntie Vera had insisted Daddy must take of us a few years ago, and inside it there were two other loose photos. I carried them carefully over to the light: the first was of a man in army uniform, very upright; the second was of two little girls in party frocks; and the third, the mounted photograph, larger than the other two, was a posed portrait of a young woman who I did not know, but who looked slightly familiar. And then with a lurch of my stomach I realised, although I had met her only once, that I did know exactly who she was. I snatched up the other photo again, the one of the two little girls, and held it tilted towards the lamplight for a better view. The girls were about six and eleven, the eleven-year-old almost certainly the same as the young woman in the portrait, and although I had not known them as children it was perfectly clear who they were: sitting on a wide bench in their party frocks with the Nottingham lace, just like mine – Edwina and Millie Blessing.
*
I couldn’t bear to keep this discovery to myself and the very next day wrote to Fred and told him about Mother and the mysterious bag. All his letters to and from school are read by the teachers, so I wrote in the code he had taught me, the one based on noughts and crosses. It took me ages, and I bet everyone knows that code anyway, but I thought they probably couldn’t be bothered to decipher it all since they must have trillions of letters to rea
d every day. Fred wrote back (in code) and said this was an important clue and I must keep a careful watch and if possible follow Mother if she went out again with the bag, to discover where she took it, or who she gave it to.
For the next two days, I made frequent visits to the cupboard to see if the bag was still there. I wanted to tell Beatrice about it, but I didn’t want to have to explain what I was doing sneaking down to the kitchen at the dead of night, for Fred and I had still never told her of our nightly ritual with Nana. By the afternoon of the second day, I had thought of a way around this and planned to show the bag to Beatrice as soon as the grown-ups had gone to the sitting room after tea. But when I got home from school and checked the cupboard again, it had gone – just as mysteriously as it had arrived.
This worried me greatly. I realised I might now be the only witness to the misdemeanours of Mrs Agnes Lang the Second, a terrible responsibility to bear. Marjorie Bagshaw’s words had also left their mark and, for the sake of justice and Miss Blessing, I started to think I must go to the police. I imagined a long scene, played out over and over in my head, which began with me entering the police station, just as I had with Mrs Bagshaw after her purse had been stolen at Goose Fair, and having to wait a long time because they’d have lots of crimes to deal with. Then it’d be my turn to see the Sergeant and I’d say, ‘I’ve come about the missing person, Miss Mildred Blessing, and maybe the others,’ and the Sergeant would say, ‘Step this way please, Miss,’ as they said to Mrs Bagshaw. And we’d go into a room, a small room with no window. Or maybe it would have a window, but it’d be high up in the wall, with bars across it like a prison cell, and this would make me very nervous. I always got stuck at this point because in my imagination I was back in the cellar again and the window was the grille through which I had seen the blue shoes … If I managed to get on to the next bit, the Sergeant would be writing notes in his notebook and I would give him my name and address and my age, and he would say, ‘Does your father know you’re here?’ And I’d reply, ‘No, because it’s a secret.’ And the sergeant would say, ‘So what have you come to tell me?’ And before I could answer he’d say, ‘And this is a warning, young lady, that if you’re wasting our time there will be serious consequences for you,’ and he’d stare at me very hard, without smiling. And quite often when I got to that point I couldn’t continue, so I’d get up and run out of the room and go home. Occasionally, I’d force myself to go further. I’d tell him: ‘Well I believe my mother, who used to be Miss Agnes Higgs but is now my father’s wife, Mrs Harry Lang – that is Mrs Harry Lang the Second, because she is not our mother. Our Own Mother died.’ And the Sergeant would say, ‘Get on with it, Miss.’ So next I’d tell him, ‘Well I believe my stepmother knows something about the missing young women.’ And he’d look very fierce and say, ‘This is a most serious accusation for a child to make against her mother, even if she is her stepmother. Tell me why you think this.’ And I’d start to count the reasons on my fingers: 1) She locked me in our cellar – same as the kidnapped girls; 2) She has a sister who lives in Beeston, which is where the first girls were kept; 3) I heard her tell the Verger at our chapel that she knew where the missing girls were; 4) She came home late one night with some possessions that must belong to one of the missing girls, Miss Mildred Blessing. It was rare for me to get this far in the scene, counting on my fingers, but every time I did – before I had uttered a word to the Sergeant – I had to come out of it, because even though I knew it to be true, I could see that this was not going to get Miss Higgs locked up; especially when I have a reputation for being a troublemaker and even my own dear sister Beatrice, who loves me, thinks I am mad for believing it.
So after playing this encounter through many times, in which it always came out the same, I decided I would not go to the police station and accuse Mother of kidnap. But I resolved that if the police came to our house to question Daddy, I would inform them that they were making a mistake and it was Mother they ought to be suspecting. But the days passed and no policemen turned up, and although I continued to sneak a look at the newspaper every day when Maisie threw it on to the pile for wrapping the ashes to go down to the ash-pit, there was never any mention of Miss Blessing.
But I knew I must tell Beatrice what I had discovered. One evening, about ten days after the incident of the Bag, we were reading in the sitting room in front of a big, bright fire. Our parents were out. I was desperate to hang on to the new Beatrice, the Beatrice that had taken me into her confidence, my partner in crime over the saving of Nana but who, since the failure of that adventure and the disappearance of Miss Blessing, seemed to have retreated into the old Beatrice who still regarded me as an irritating little sister.
‘Can I talk to you?’ I began.
‘Not really.’ Beatrice was engrossed in The Youngest Girl in the Fifth. She didn’t look up from her book.
‘Ple-ease, Bea. It’s important.’
‘Is it, Annie?’ She glanced at me over her spectacles with that slightly misty, short-sighted look.
‘It’s about what’s happened,’ I hissed.
‘About Nana?’
‘No. You know. Miss Blessing … missing.’
‘Annie, there’s no point wasting time on that. We don’t know.’
I closed the book on my knee carefully and studied my black stockings, one of which had sprouted a hole in the toe. ‘A peculiar thing happened a few nights ago,’ I told her.
Beatrice sighed. She closed her book and reached over to the coal scuttle for the poker.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Mother came home really late, in the middle of the night, and she had this bag which she hid in the broom cupboard—’ The words came tumbling out in a rush. ‘And after she’d gone, I looked inside and there were some books and things, and some photos.’ I stared at her anxiously. She was listening now, the poker in mid-air. ‘One of the photos,’ I took a deep breath and paused.
‘Go on,’ she prompted.
‘One of the photos was of Miss Blessing’s sister, Edwina. Another was of her as a little girl, my age sort of, with Miss Blessing – Mildred.’
‘What are you suggesting?’ asked Beatrice with a menacing calmness.
I shrugged and stared at her. ‘Well,’ I said. Did I have to explain? ‘Don’t you think it’s odd?’
‘In what way?’
‘Beatrice, Miss Blessing disappears; the family does some kind of midnight flit’ – I was counting the oddities on my fingers again – ‘everyone’s wondering what’s happened, and our mother turns up at midnight with a bag of things and a photo of the missing girl!’
‘You think she knows where they’ve gone?’ Beatrice was frowning.
I sighed heavily. ‘Come on, Bea. She must know! She must have had a hand in it!’
Beatrice prodded at the fire, shattering a lump of coal in a shower of sparks. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘I don’t know, do I? But in some way … like, she could be keeping her!’
‘Keeping who, what?’ Beatrice put the poker back in the coal scuttle with a clatter. She had her I’m finding this really annoying expression on.
‘You know … keeping her …’ I dropped my voice to a whisper: ‘prisoner.’
‘What?’ She sat back on her heels on the hearthrug and glared at me.
‘Locked up. If you were keeping someone prisoner.’
‘Annie, you’re being ridiculous!’
‘Beatrice, I swear.’
‘Where were you, anyway? How d’you know about this bag?’
I took a deep breath and tested out my story. ‘I – I couldn’t sleep and I went down for a drink of water. When she’d gone, I opened the cupboard to see what she’d been doing and it was there.’
‘Well, she was probably looking after it for Mrs Blessing, or something.’
‘In the middle of the night? The Blessings aren’t parishioners. Why would she? She doesn’t even know them. And why’ – I remembered something else – ‘why didn’t she put the elec
tric light on, Bea? She turned up the lamp, then turned it down again and crept upstairs in the dark! It was … furtive. She didn’t want anyone to see.’
‘And where is it now?’
‘It’s gone! Two days later.’
‘So you’re saying Mother has been abducting girls and keeping them prisoner in some dungeon somewhere. Is that it?’
I hung my head. Put like that, it did sound preposterous. ‘But where did she get those things? They must belong to the Blessings and if she’s got the bag, she must know where they’ve gone!’ Then I remembered something else I hadn’t told my sister: ‘And I heard Mother tell Mr Wilkinson she knew where the kidnapped girls were. I heard her say it, Bea, ages and ages ago, before Miss Blessing even disappeared!’ I enumerated the other suspicious circumstances, which I knew by heart now, from having repeated them so often (in my imagination) to the police.
But Beatrice is too down to earth for any of this. She just shook her head and said seriously, ‘Annie, I’m with you all the way over Nana and I try and stick up for you with the grown-ups. But when you come to me with these insane fantasies you make it very difficult.’
‘But I—’
‘Be quiet and listen,’ she went on fiercely. ‘If this is some idiotic scheme in your head to somehow get Mother removed from our house so that Nana will be safe, then you can forget it, Annie. It’s just plain wrong for a start. It’s also immoral. And it’ll get you into so much trouble that you won’t care about Miss Blessing or Nana or any of it. D’you understand?’
I can honestly say that until that moment it hadn’t dawned on me that if we couldn’t find Nana a new home, the other solution would be to remove Mother. Even to me, this sounded mad and I was ashamed that Beatrice should think it of me – ashamed, too, to have to write it here. But then, a couple of days after that, I didn’t have to wonder any more about whether Mother really could be the abductor, or whether I ought to report what I knew to the authorities – because the police made an arrest.