by Nina Jon
“All we need now is for the coach and horses to appear and we’ll have a Dickensian Christmas card,” Hugh had said, at the precise moment the tractor emerged through the still falling snow, pulling the cart which was to carry them to the wedding. A young collie dog excitedly ran at its side, barking. The young couple could do nothing else but laugh.
Remembering this brought a lump to her throat. Was everything in Failsham about to change, she thought. She hoped not. She looked down at the home-baked rhubarb and plum pie, made with home-grown fruits, which Nellie had insisted in thrusting into her hands minutes earlier. If she didn’t get it home quickly, it would be frozen solid. She turned for home.
CHAPTER FOUR
Pandora’s Box
At just after ten o’clock the following morning, Jane reached the café on a quiet London side street a few blocks away from Camden market, where she’d arranged to meet her new client. She arrived at the café just as a woman with a weatherworn face, sitting alone at one of two outside tables and dressed in a trench coat and a headscarf, stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.
Even though the day was cloudy and overcast, the woman wore sunglasses. She’d even turned her collar up, as though she was the private detective waiting for a client rather than a client waiting to meet a private detective. This woman did not want to be recognized, Jane realised. She approached her.
“Roz?”
The woman got to her feet and they shook hands. A young woman appeared from inside the café to take Jane’s order. A black coffee quickly appeared. As soon as it was placed on the table, the young waitress retreated back inside the café to watch television. This left Jane and Roz alone to talk.
“I chose here because the staff mind their own business,” Roz said, inhaling a cigarette.
Jane couldn’t immediately place the accent. It wasn’t London for sure. Roz offered her a cigarette. She declined. “I gave up when I was pregnant with my daughter. Not a day has gone by since, when I haven’t wanted a cigarette, but I’ve always resisted the temptation.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Nearly thirty-seven.”
Roz laughed out loud. “I think I’d have succumbed.”
“Please tell me about the letters.”
“So’s you’ll understand what’s going on, I need to go back to when I was a nipper,” Roz said, her words punctuated by draws on her cigarette. She inhaled deep into her lungs, only exhaling it while she spoke. “I was always close to my dad, closer than I ever was to my mum. All she ever did was shout at us. When I was eleven, he died of a heart attack without warning. He hadn’t even been ill. No one ever really talked about it. Mum completely fell apart. She started drinking. Whenever I tried to talk about what had happened, my mum would say, ‘He’s dead and you’re going to have to live with it. Think I’m happy about it? Do you?’ then she’d start shouting again or crying. I felt like a freak at school. I had a dead dad and a drunk mum. I started bunking off. Things got worse at home. Mum started drinking more. My brother and I played up. Mum couldn’t cope. More than once, she drank herself unconscious. The house was worse than a pigsty. Our clothes never got washed. Sometimes we had to steal food just to get a meal. Someone must have called social services ‘cause both of us were put into care. It was meant to help, but for me, it just made things worse. From then on in, I was finished. It wasn’t long till the other kids had me sniffing glue and getting pie-eyed on cheap cider. By thirteen, I’d dropped out of school. Someone got me snorting heroin. They said it was a cheaper way of blocking things out than the booze. And it was. I needed a lot less of it to get into such a state I couldn’t remember anything and didn’t care if I did or not. It wasn’t long before I was injecting. When boys need money for drugs, they rob someone or break into a house. But I was a girl. I sold my body. By fifteen, I was a junkie and streetwalker. I can’t tell you how much I hated what I was. I tried to tell myself I could put up with people swearing at me out of car windows, spitting as they drove past or throwing rubbish or dog shit at me, but I couldn’t really. I can’t tell you how bad it made me feel. I used to shout back at them, ‘You pay my kid’s school fees and I’ll give up the game.’ I wanted them to think I was more than some washed-up junkie – a waste of space. God knows why. Pathetic really. Someone even told me I was going to burn in hell – like I cared. I wasn’t worried about hell. I was worried about surviving the night. However much you pretend to yourself it’s going to be okay, you never know. Prostitution is a dirty and dangerous game. Once I was beaten up so bad they thought I was going to die. I don’t know how I didn’t. Wasn’t meant to be, I guess. I tried to give the drugs up, but I couldn’t. I tried methadone. Didn’t work. I went back on drugs and back on the streets so many times, I lost count. I learnt to cut off. I had to. The alternative was life with no drugs and I couldn’t face that. You don’t know what grip the drugs have on you, until they’ve got you. I knew girls from good homes, with kiddies, jobs, throw it all away ‘cos of the drugs. You end up not washing or eating or feeding your own kids. I’ve seen girls flog their kids’ nappies for drugs. For years, my life was spent on the back seat of punters’ cars, earning enough money for one more shot. I had a criminal record as long as my right arm and I don’t know how many abortions. It’s amazing I ever went on to have a kid. One day I woke up in hospital. I’d been found unconscious in a toilet cubicle, a needle by my side. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are to be alive,’ the young medic told me. ‘Don’t care if I’m alive or dead, love,’ I said. ‘You’re only twenty-six. You’ll be lucky if you live to see forty if you don’t stop doing this to your body, and believe me, by then, no one is going to care much,’ she said. Maybe she was trying to use some sort of shock-therapy on me? Shame me into giving up the drugs. It didn’t work. No sooner was I out, then I was back to my old tricks. Then something happened. One of the girls disappeared one night. A mate of mine. No one knew what happened to her. She was last seen getting in a blue car, then nothing. Her body was found months later in a river. Far as I know, no one’s ever been charged. The medic was right. I wasn’t going to make forty if I didn’t stop. I could be the one he got next, and no one but me would care. That’s what did it.
“I stopped the drugs there and then. No more shooting up. Months after I’d stopped, the urge to start again was as strong as ever. I was still getting the sweats, still shaking, still had runs, still couldn’t sleep. It was as bad as when I first stopped. I couldn’t do anything but walk round and round my flat for hour after hour. If it hadn’t have been for my brother bringing me food, sitting up with me night after night, I wouldn’t be here now. I’d be another dead junkie. But somehow I did it. I kicked the habit. I got my life back on track. That was thirty-seven years ago, Jane.”
Now Jane finally knew what Roz had done all those years ago, her only thought on the subject was – is that all?
“I’m so sorry all that happened to you,” Jane said, “and I’m glad you’ve been able to move on.”
“I did move on,” Roz said. “I moved on, changed my name, got married, and had a son. I’m a granny now. The past is the past. I never think about it. I block it out. My hubby and son don’t know anything about it and never will far as I’m concerned. But now I’ve started to get these…” Roz said, putting her smouldering cigarette in the ashtray, and taking some pale blue envelopes out of her handbag, which she handed to Jane. “They’re in the order I got them. I started to get them as soon as I announced I was running as a local councillor.”
Jane removed the first letter from its envelope. The paper inside matched the pale blue envelope. She read the letter.
‘You’re not fit to run for office. There’s only one word for a woman like you. I won’t stoop so low as to use it, but we both know what it is!’
Home computers have certainly improved the quality of hate mail, Jane thought to herself as she read through it. Long gone were the days when the composer of such letters would have to sit at home glue
ing words and letters cut from newspapers onto cheap writing paper. Now it seemed hate mail was typed up in New Courier, spell checked, margined right and left, and printed out on quite high-quality paper. Jane didn’t finish the letter. She folded it up and returned it to its envelope. The second letter was along the same lines.
‘Women like you are not fit to breathe the same air as the rest of us, let alone run for political office. Do you think the public will forgive you your many transgressions, once they learn of them? If so, I fear you are mistaken. Does your own husband know? Would he have married you if he did? I doubt it.’
The third letter was even worse.
‘The good Lord and I know all about your filthy godforsaken ways and if you continue with your campaign, I will ensure the whole community does too!’
This letter ended with a number of pejorative words about prostitution and prostitutes, which Jane declined to read. This last letter she also returned to its envelope. Roz looked at Jane expectantly.
“What an overreaction about something which happened over thirty years ago,” Jane said.
“There are more than just those.” Roz stubbed out a cigarette, and opened a second packet, discarding its cellophane wrapper in the ashtray along with the crunched up empty packet. “When I got the first one, I thought it was some kind of joke and ignored it. But then others came. Luckily, my hubby leaves for work before the post comes. Dunno what I’d tell him, if he read one of these. I have to keep them in my handbag the whole time, to make sure he doesn’t see them.”
“You have no idea who’s sending these to you, I suppose?”
“None. It’s so long ago. I can’t think who’d remember me from back then, I’m so different now. It’s not as if it’s even the same area, for God’s sake.”
“When exactly did these letters begin to arrive?”
“Couple of days after my photo appeared in the paper announcing my candidacy. I didn’t realise running for the local council would open up such a Pandora’s Box.”
“Someone must have recognized your photograph. Someone with a good eye for details and a good memory.”
“Maybe one of the coppers who nicked me, or one of my regular punters from back then,” Roz said.
“Where exactly was back then?” Jane asked.
“Greater Flyborough.”
“Really? That’s just down the road from where I live believe it or not. I presume you’ve decided against dropping out of the election to see if that makes the letters stop?”
“Why should I?” Roz said, indignantly, her eyes blazing. “I want to know who he is. We both know it’s a man, let’s face it.”
Although she knew from statistics that women were just as likely as men to pen malicious letters, on balance, Jane agreed with Roz on this one. There was something about the letters which made her think they had most likely been sent by a man, but on the issue of the gender of the letter writer, as with everything else, she must keep an open mind.
“I want you to find the sanctimonious little git, so I can look him in the eye and ask him who the hell he thinks he is for condemning me for something he can’t begin to understand.”
“I admire your attitude, Roz,” Jane said. “I’ll do everything I can to help you. I believe the key to discovering the sender of these letters lies in the present, not in the past. Tell me all about the life you live now, and a little bit about the place where you now live, if you don’t mind. But first, let’s order some more coffee.”
The ladies talked on for more than an hour, before parting company.
On the coach home, Jane took a window seat and stared out the window, thinking about Roz. Jane’s own childhood had been, on the whole, a sheltered and happy one. Roz and she must be quite close in age, she realised, but when she’d been keeping a scrapbook, Roz had been sniffing glue. That Roz had become a drug addict and prostitute may have been inevitable, but that she was now being persecuted for something that had hurt no one but herself, wasn’t. It was vindictive and spiteful, which made Jane all the more determined to unmask the culprit, and put a stop to it.
Jane glanced behind her. The seat was empty. She tilted her seat back, closed her eyes and fell asleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Rectory
I
The next morning, two handwritten letters arrived in the day’s post, both addressed to Mrs Jane Hetherington, The Pink Cottage, Failsham, Hoven HN 14. She didn’t recognize the handwriting on either of them.
The first contained an invitation to an exhibition of photographs taken by an up and coming photographer (as the invitation put it) at the Beech Hill Art Gallery, in the nearby Cathedral city of Southstoft. Jane thought the invitation, printed on stiff card, with rounded edges embossed with gold and inlaid with gold italic letters, rather formal for a photographic exhibition. She didn’t know the gallery, nor the photographer whose work was being exhibited there – Mandy Tomas – nor the art dealer arranging the exhibition, Graham Burslem. Whilst she found the gallery in the Yellow Pages, the only Graham Burslem she could find was a local art dealer with a gallery in the coastal resort of Sailles, whom she took to be the same person. Mandy Tomas wasn’t listed at all.
She couldn’t help wondering from which database her name had been obtained. On the reverse of the card, below a map showing the location of the gallery, Graham Burslem had hand written,
‘I do so hope you can attend. It would be such a delight if you could.
Graham Burslem’
Jane thought his words rather ebullient, and probably written on the back of every invitation he’d sent out. She read the invitation again. The exhibition was in the evening. It would mean a drive to Southstoft, but it was only twenty-five minutes away and she’d be driving against the traffic. If the invitation was to be trusted, the event would be over by eight o’clock in the evening. She’d go.
The second item of post contained a brief handwritten notelet.
‘Mrs Hetherington,
I wish to engage your services. Please could you visit me? I teach Sunday school and would be pleased if we could meet there. I attach details.
Orla Wilson (Mrs)’
Attached to the note, was an information sheet giving the dates of the next ten Sunday schools and the address of the church hall where they were held.
There wasn’t even a forwarding address. Orla’s letter gave Jane no idea what it was she was being asked to investigate.
While Hugh hadn’t been a rich man, he’d left her comfortably off. She had a good pension, unlike so many unfortunates, she owned a lovely home and had enough money in the bank to run a car, visit her daughter and son-in-law in the United States now and then, and pay for any help she needed in the home and garden. All in all she was lucky. She didn’t rely on the detective agency to keep the rain off her head, and therefore could pick and choose which instructions she’d take. She’d turned down a request from a man who had wanted her to spy on his three girlfriends, in case any of them were being unfaithful to him; and from the owners of a family-run business, who’d wanted Jane to find out what their staff were up to in their spare time. She’d turned down both instructions because she hadn’t liked the clients nor what they wished her to do. They’d come across as unpleasant people, and she’d wanted to have nothing to do with them.
Whilst she would have preferred to have known more about why Orla wished to engage her services, Jane understood that some of her clients had very good reason for needing secrecy, Roz, for example. The sender of this note may well have similarly good reasons for her lack of candour. Orla might be a frightened woman, with nowhere else to turn but a private detective. She would take Orla Wilson up on her invitation and visit her this Sunday. When she’d met her, then she would decide whether or not to take the case on.
II
The church where Hugh was buried was just a short walk from Jane’s cottage and adjourned the rectory where Mirabella and Felix lived. Having Hugh buried so near allowed Jane to visit him whenev
er she wanted to, and she did so that morning. She spent some time at his graveside, laying a bunch of white and purple waterfall pansies on it, and telling him of her day thus far. When it was time for her to go, she kissed her hand and laid it on his gravestone. From the churchyard she made her way to the rectory for lunch.
After her own pink thatched cottage, the rectory was Jane’s favourite property in Failsham. It was a relatively new building, having been built in the 1930s after its predecessor burnt down. Commissioned by a well-known eccentric, it came complete with a pepper pot turret, five spiral chimney stacks and numerous diamond crossed windows, of different shapes and sizes. The property had reminded Hugh of Munster Towers, and whenever they’d approached it, he’d insisted on humming the Munster’s theme tune and clicking his fingers at the end of the chord. Jane however, loved the property. It was straight from a Gothic novel. She knew it to be something of a disappointment to Felix Dawson-Jones that no grisly unsolved murders had ever been committed there, causing him to joke that maybe they should commit one?
Mirabella met Jane at the door effusively and showed her into the rectory’s pretty drawing room, where Felix poured her a large gin and tonic. Drink in hand, she settled down by the roaring wood fire to gaze out on the rectory’s snow-covered garden through the room’s French windows. Felix meanwhile, walked over to stand by the fire, drink in hand.
“I really don’t think you’re going to be able to persuade the Bailey sisters to sell up, Felix,” Jane said. “They’re determined to stay put. To be honest, I know exactly how they feel. People are always telling me the Pink Cottage is far too large for an elderly widow, and suggesting I sell it to them. But as I’ve said many a time, I’ll sell up when I’m good and ready and not before.”