The Murderess

by Jennifer Wells

  He turned his head to the sound of the oncoming train and craned his neck towards the noise, his body now tense and quivering, and I remembered how the stationmaster had described this – the ghosts that he saw each year when he returned. I realised that the moment of our connection had passed for he no longer saw the grown woman who stood on the opposite platform but the fifteen-year-old girl in her new school blouse.

  The train drew closer, the hand of the platform clock ticking to the half hour. I saw his legs shake as the rush of air hit the platform. Then the train was between us, a blur of glass and steel, and he was gone. All I could sense was the clatter of carriages and the rush of air.

  I searched for him but caught only glimpses of light and colour until the blur started to slow and at last I could make out the shapes of people standing in the carriages. Coats and hats and carriage doors sailed past me and anything on the opposite platform was obscured by the bodies of people standing in the aisles.

  As the train jolted to a halt and the doors slid open, people spilled out on to the platform, jostling past me, chattering and whistling, their shoes clattering on the concrete, and I was left waiting and watching.

  Then a woman stepped out of the carriage in front of me. She was wearing a faded tweed suit that seemed to swallow her small frame, driving gloves and a hat with a skeletal feather. She had nothing with her but for a small paper bag which she clutched with both hands.

  I smiled and stepped forward. ‘Hello, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’ve come to bring you home. Welcome back.’

  Millicent

  Chapter 50

  May 1941

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ she said. ‘I’ve come to bring you home. Welcome back.’

  A woman stood on the platform in front of me, but I did not know her face. She held out her hand and, when I did not offer mine, she took it and squeezed it gently. ‘You must feel as if you have fallen back down the rabbit hole,’ she said and I saw that her eyes were green, like mine, and it wasn’t until I saw the necklace with the jade stones that I knew it was her, my Kate.

  She did not let go of my hand, just drew me towards her and into an embrace. Suddenly we were together, connected, as if we always had been. She was mine once more.

  When she pulled away from me I felt that my face was wet, with her tears or mine, I did not know.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We need to go.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Where is your trunk?’

  ‘My trunk?’ She stopped for just a moment, a slight crease in her brow, but then she smiled. ‘Do you mean your things, Mum? You dropped your bag when you saw me. They are all in this little paper bag from the prison.’ She picked up a bag from the platform and put it in my hands.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t need these things. I am not going anywhere. And what has happened to your uniform? Where are your blazer and hat?’ It was a hot day, I thought she must have taken them off but, when I looked along the platform, it was still full of people and I could see neither trunk nor hat and blazer. ‘You cannot have lost them already, Kate,’ I said. ‘You will need to look smart for the mistresses at Tower Vale!’

  Her eyes looked watery. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘sit down with me for a moment, we should get away from all these people,’ and she took my hand and led me to a bench on the platform and we sat facing each other.

  ‘It is just this place,’ she said to herself, then she gave a little sob and rubbed her nose on her sleeve and I couldn’t help pull her hand back down again, it was a dirty little habit she’d always had.

  ‘Oh Mum,’ she said. ‘It’s all my fault. You see, I kept the letter that came from the parole board, I was too scared to read it and then, by the time I did, it was too late. It was only yesterday that I finally read the letter and found out your release date was today. I would have set off for you yesterday evening but Missensham Station was already closed and then I knew that I would have to come here and wait for the first train from London. On today of all days.’

  ‘Today of all days,’ I repeated. She had said it was like it was important, although I did not know why.

  ‘I wish the parole board had thought about it properly,’ she said. ‘They wanted you to serve a round number of years in prison. They wanted to release you on the very day you committed the crime, they saw some kind of justice in it. When I saw your release time in the letter, I feared that you would be on this train, but by then it was too late for me to stop them. Oh, why did they not realise the time that the train would arrive in Missensham?’

  ‘Yes, the train,’ I said. I looked at the station clock. ‘It is half past ten, your train to Oxfordshire is late already. It should be here soon.’

  ‘No,’ she said and stood up quickly. ‘I won’t have this. Get up, we have to leave now, we have to be quick. As soon as we get out of here everything will be fine. You will feel much better, more like your old self. Come on, please!’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere, young lady,’ I said. ‘I know you don’t want to leave Missensham but it is for your own good.’

  She sat back down again and put her head in her hands. ‘How could they send you out like this?’ she muttered, but I felt that she wasn’t really saying it to me. Then she turned to me and brushed the hair from my eyes as if I was a child. ‘You are so changed,’ she whispered. ‘Your hair has quite lost its colour and you are wringing your hands.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I snapped but when I looked in my lap I saw that I had torn the paper bag to shreds, spilling my toothbrush and flannel on to the platform. ‘I suppose I do feel a little strange,’ I said. ‘I have a memory of feeling like this before. It is something about this place. I am not sure what.’

  ‘Oh Mum,’ she whispered. ‘Deep down I could never believe what I saw on that day. Maybe you never meant to do it, or perhaps you did not understand what you were doing. Even when I was a child you were troubled. You are sick now and maybe you were back then, on that day ten years ago.’ She had started to cry again but now her shoulders were shaking as if something she had been fighting was finally taking hold of her and she could no longer control it.

  I put a hand out and touched her gently on the shoulder. I was about to tell her not to worry because I was her mother and would always protect her but I was cut short by the tinny voice of the tannoy announcing the next service.

  ‘Listen! Your train is arriving at last,’ I said.

  ‘No Mum,’ she said. ‘It is only the fast service. It is a through train, it will not stop here.’

  ‘No this is the one,’ I said. ‘It is your train to Oxfordshire. I will call the porter for your trunk. We must…’

  It was then that I saw him on the other platform, watching us, a bunch of red peonies hanging limply from his wrist. He was wearing his smart red army jacket and stood tall, as if to attention, but I could still see the cruelty in him and I remembered the force that he had used to rip my necklace from my throat. I got up slowly and walked to the edge of the platform to show him that I was not scared. He had come for my Kate, to take her away from me and live with him and that harlot and I would be abandoned again. She would leave me, just as all the others had, and I would be alone.

  He would not have her. He would not. I would keep her away from him. I would keep her safe.

  ‘Mum, don’t look at him,’ I heard her call. ‘You need to keep back from the edge for when the train comes through.’ Then she said, ‘It is not safe,’ and I knew that he was scaring her, just as he had done those weeks ago when he had intruded in the walled garden.

  ‘I am with you again now,’ I called back to her. ‘He wants to take you from me, but I will not let him.’

  ‘No, Mum,’ she said, and suddenly she was beside me, her hand on my arm as she tried to pull me away from the edge. ‘He did not come here for me. He came to pay his respects to the housemaid who died. We can leave now, the two of us. He is only here to mourn Rosalie.’

  Rosalie. It was a name that I recognised, but one which seemed to make
everything darker, and I had heard it from the lips of my innocent daughter.

  ‘You have to board the train before she gets here,’ I said quickly. ‘I know that she is on her way because those flowers that he carries are always for her, for she is a harlot and he knows that she will spread her legs for him at the mere sight of a red peony.’

  Her mouth dropped open a little and I fancied that I had shocked her with my language, for I had forgotten that she was just a child. Then she bit into her lip and I saw the ripple of tears in her eyes and I realised that I had said something to upset her, although I was not sure what.

  ‘You did it,’ she said quietly. ‘You knew what you were doing. It was no accident. You are the murderess that they all said you were. I see that now,’ but she was not speaking to me, just staring at a spot on the rails where the wispy grasses grew between the sleepers just like any other part of the line and I fancied that she must be lost in one of her childish daydreams.

  Then Kate wiped her eyes on her sleeve and stood tall again.

  ‘That was all very long ago,’ she said firmly. ‘We need not worry about Rosalie any more. I promise you that she will not be here today because she is gone.’

  ‘If he is here, then she will come,’ I said. ‘He is here to meet her and then together they will try to—’

  ‘Remember you were his wife, Mum,’ she said sternly. ‘After the war, he did not return to his home, nor his wife. She may have spread her legs for him, as you say, but she was still just a housemaid. If he did not return to his wife, he would not return for the sake of a housemaid.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and you must always remember that Rosalie is just a housemaid. She has no breeding, no money, no morals, and she has nothing to give you. I did everything for you – I fed you and clothed you, educated you and brought you up in my house – and, no matter what she says, you got nothing from her, not even your eyes.’

  ‘My eyes?’ The crease returned to her brow. ‘How could she have given me my eyes?’ She raised a hand to her face, her fingertips brushing the skin beneath her lashes as if to understand what I spoke of. ‘Oh!’ she whispered, ‘but you cannot mean…’ Her eyes returned to the same part of the track that seemed to fascinate her and she stood for several minutes, staring at this spot, quite still but for a tremble in her lip.

  ‘Do you remember my blanket?’ she said at last. ‘The one that we used to take to the garden when we read together, the one that you said you wrapped me in after my birth?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I often thought it thin, as if it should have been worn by someone, like a shawl perhaps. The colour was faded but I could tell that is had once been purple, mauve maybe. She was dressed in mauve on that day, from head to toe. The stain on the blanket was from my birth, but it was her blood that had seeped into the material, just like it is her blood that I still see on the track.’ She looked back to the track again but I could see no blood, only the grasses twitching in the breeze. ‘In all those years I had no way of finding out the truth from either her or you,’ she said, ‘but there was one other who knew for sure – the other woman who had been present at my birth.’ She turned to face me once more, her hand falling away from my shoulder and I realised that I had not been aware of her touch until I felt its absence. ‘The midwife told me the truth in her own way,’ she said quietly. ‘She told me to give her love to my mother, to sweet Rosalie.’

  ‘Now it is you that makes no sense.’ I laughed, but she no longer heard me for her face had become quite white and she had raised her head to look across the tracks and, on the opposite platform, the man with the flowers looked back at her. Their eyes met and I sensed a connection between them, something that I was not part of.

  ‘I want to go home now,’ she said shakily.

  ‘No!’ I grabbed her wrist. ‘You must wait for your train.’

  She pulled away from me and I saw tiny red crescents of blood on her skin where my fingernails had grasped at her flesh.

  On the opposite platform, the man cried out and stepped forward as if he wanted to leap the tracks which separated us and it was only then that I remembered their connection, one that I did not share because it was borne of blood and I realised that I could not keep father and daughter apart forever.

  She turned towards him and opened her mouth but the word that she spoke was silent, for it was meant for him only, for him to see formed on her lips. Yet I saw the slight curl of her tongue and the drop of her jaw and the pursing of her lips. I did not need to hear the word for I could see the fear in her eyes.

  ‘Help!’

  And at that moment I knew that she was lost to me once more.

  The track started to clunk and fizz with electricity for the approaching train. I could sense people moving away from us – a blur of hats and coats as they stepped back into the shadows, away from the rails. I heard a couple of whistles and then some shouts but I could not make out the words as the train was now close and the tannoy crackled urgently.

  I looked back to the opposite platform but he was no longer there. I paced up and down looking for where he might have gone, but now the spot where he had stood was empty and a lone figure in red crossed the footbridge. She had called for him, he was coming to her and I was forgotten. I would be left alone again.

  Then I remembered that he had tried to take her from me before – he had tried to steal her from the station, from this place, and now he had come to try again but he would not have her.

  ‘You will get on this train!’ I yelled.

  ‘No, Mum,’ she said firmly. ‘We need to get away from the edge of the platform. This is not my train. It will not stop here.’

  ‘You don’t want to get on the train because you want to go with him!’ I said. ‘Just admit it. Don’t think that I didn’t see you calling to him!’

  ‘It’s not like that, Mum,’ I said. ‘You are very confused, I still love you but…’ She was looking over my shoulder, down towards the footbridge and I saw a flash of red amongst the grey business suits of the passengers crowding at the far end of the platform. He was getting nearer and I was certain that he was coming for her, to take her from me. ‘You still have time,’ I said. ‘You need to board this train as soon as it gets in.’

  Kate looked round desperately, ‘Please,’ she said to the people at the back of the platform, ‘won’t you help?’ But none of them moved and I knew that I was all she had to rely on. It was just her and me – the way that it had always been.

  I looked along the track and at last I saw the train in the distance, the square head of the driver’s cab and the carriages snaking round the bend. ‘It is almost here, Kate,’ I said. ‘There is still time.’

  ‘It is not safe here,’ she said it more breathlessly this time and I saw that her eyes were wide. She knew that he was coming for her and she was scared again.

  I looked down the platform and caught sight of him. He was closer now, pushing through the throng of passengers on the platform. He was shouting something, but his words were lost in frantic blasts from the tannoy and the hiss of the rails.

  ‘I am your mother,’ I said, ‘and I will keep you from him. He shall not have you.’

  ‘No, Mum,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand, you must—’

  But it was too late, for he was upon us. He lunged forward and I thought he might grab her and pull her back with him.

  ‘No!’ I screamed. ‘You shall not have her. I am her mother, the only one that she ever needed. She is mine.’

  The tracks shuddered with the force of the train, the grasses between the sleepers bent flat in the surge of warm air.

  I reached out to protect her, to keep her safe, just as I had promised, but my arms did not circle her in an embrace, they pushed against her. She stumbled backwards towards the track but I took a step after her, forcing myself against her. I saw my hands flat against her chest and felt my arms push against her with all the strength that they could manage.

  Her eyes became rou
nd and her mouth fell open. Then she seemed to slip backwards, her body buckling where I had pushed her, and then she screamed.

  Then a rush of wind, a clatter of iron, a screech of metal.

  ‘Now you will be safe from him at last, my Kate,’ I cried as her face fell away from me. ‘If I cannot have you, then no one can.’

  I can still see the blood.

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  The next novel from Jennifer Wells will be released in winter 2018

  More addictive fiction from Aria:

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Find out more

  About Jennifer Wells

  Also by Jennifer Wells

  Become an Aria Addict

  Sign up to our newsletter

  About Jennifer Wells

  JENNIFER WELLS works in Market Research when not writing. She lives in Devon with her young family and cat. The Murderess is her second novel.

  Find me on Twitter

  Also by Jennifer Wells

  Find out more

  Find out more

  Visit Aria now

  Become an Aria Addict

  Aria is the new digital-first fiction imprint from Head of Zeus.

  It’s Aria’s ambition to discover and publish tomorrow’s superstars, targeting fiction addicts and readers keen to discover new and exciting authors.

  Aria will publish a variety of genres under the commercial fiction umbrella such as women’s fiction, crime, thrillers, historical fiction, saga and erotica.

  So, whether you’re a budding writer looking for a publisher or an avid reader looking for something to escape with – Aria will have something for you.