by Nina Jon
Dotty told him they would be delighted. “You must come to tea and bring a friend,” she said.
Jack invited Charity. She was happy to go along, out of curiosity more than anything else. She’d never been inside the famously ‘frozen-in-time’ wool shop, although she’d heard all about it from those who had, including Jane.
When the visitors arrived, the ladies clucked and cooed over them, and ushered them into the parlour, where a jug of lemonade, a pot of tea, a home-made egg and ham pie, bread and butter, pickled onions and the remains of a fruit cake, were spread out on the table, waiting to be served.
“We are flattered that two young people have chosen to pay us old ladies a visit,” Lettice said.
“And honoured that you have chosen our little wool shop for your school project,” Nellie said. “Aren’t we girls?”
Jack was armed with his camera as well as a notebook. If his project was any good, he would put it on his social networking page.
“It’s sort of like television, only you can talk to everyone who’s watching at the same time,” Charity explained, when asked by his sisters what social networking was.
“How wonderful,” Dotty said.
“We don’t really watch television. We only have one to watch the service from the Cenotaph and the Queen’s speech on Christmas Day,” Nellie said, motioning towards the corner of the room. Both Charity and Jack stared in amazement at the enormous 1950s wooden framed television, with a minute screen, which stood there.
“Fooled you!” Lettice said. “That thing hasn’t worked for thirty years, we just haven’t arranged for anyone to call around and collect it. We watch a portable.”
“Maybe I could start by asking you what you know about the history of the shop,” Jack said, turning over the pages of his notebook and licking his pencil, as he’d seen a detective do in an old film, although he didn’t know why the detective did it, as it tasted awful.
“Ask away, dear,” Dotty said.
The questioning took about an hour in total, during which Jack took copious notes. By the time he’d asked all his questions, the tea had gone cold and all the food had been eaten.
“Would you like to look around the rest of the building?” Dotty asked.
Until the tour commenced, Charity hadn’t entirely believed the stories she’d heard about the wool shop’s antiquity, but by the end of it, she was convinced that if she’d walked around it a hundred years earlier, she wouldn’t have been able to see any difference. It certainly hadn’t been redecorated in the last century that she could tell.
The cast-iron beds in the old ladies’ bedrooms were covered in home-patched quilts. Each room contained a dressing table with a mirror. Lace draperies covered both dressing and bedside tables. On each dressing table there was a silverback hairbrush and mirror, tiny cut-glass bottles with silver tops, and a china jug and bowl set, and more dried flowers. Rugs covered the bare floors. The bathroom was no more modern. A copper water heater over the bath provided hot water. The bathroom’s stone basin was old and stained. It’s five-starred taps large and cast-iron. The toilet still had a chain flush. Charity couldn’t see how they still managed to get in and out of the old cast-iron roll-top bath tub, complete with brass legs. They probably couldn’t, she decided, hence the jugs in each room. The tour ended where it began, in the wool shop.
Jack took a photograph of the sisters behind their counter, surrounded by the balls of wool and decided to make the picture his project’s cover page.
“Before you came, I found this,” Nellie said, pushing a faded photograph of the exterior of the shop across the counter towards Jack. “It was taken by our father. You can see how different the shop is today from how it was then.”
Charity and Jack both had the same thought. How was it different?
The sisters had also dug out some of the old leather-bound ledger books, kept by their father and grandfather. These large, heavy, leather bound books, recorded every purchase made. The books were laid out on the counter of the wool shop for Jack to study.
“Listen to this, Charity,” he said, reading an extract out loud. “Wool (assorted colours) six balls. Mrs Lambert 2/-.”
“I can still remember serving Mrs Lambert,” Lettice said. “She came in every first Monday in the month and always purchased six balls of wool in various colours. She had been a widow nigh on forty years by then. We never saw her dressed in anything other than black. Even her handkerchiefs and jewellery were black. We used to be rather frightened of her when we were children, weren’t we girls?” Lettice asked her sisters. “But once she started giving us gobstoppers and Papa told us she was knitting socks for the soldiers at the front line, we realised what a nice lady she was.”
“Did you get all that mate?” Charity asked. “I think that’s a really lovely story. I’m sure lots of people would love to hear it.”
Jack made a quick note of Mrs Lambert’s ledger book wool purchase in his notepad and then turned his camera on the ladies.
“Could you please repeat that story for the camera, Miss Bailey,” he asked.
“And any other stories like that, if you’ve got them,” Charity said.
In the end, it was to be another two and a half hours, plus another jug of lemonade and some homemade biscuits later, when Charity and Jack eventually left the shop. For both, entirely engrossed in the memories shared by the three old ladies, time had flown by.
“Don’t say I said this,” Jack said, on the way home, “but that was really interesting.”
“Think you’ve got enough there for your project?”
“Not half,” Jack said. “I think I’ll go to the library tomorrow and read up on local history, though. I might find something about the shop that happened so long ago even the Bailey sisters don’t know about it. Like what it was like before their parents ran it.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Hilda Lawley
Jane caught the train from Southstoft, for the twenty minute journey to Greater Flyborough, where she was to visit St. Cuthberts, the church once frequented by Roz. As she stared out of the train window she thought about her last visit to Greater Flyborough. Then she’d driven past a man she, and everyone else, had thought dead. When she’d told the police she’d seen him, they hadn’t believed her, until she’d produced the living man and enough information to help them solve a murder. Today’s visit, she hoped, would be much less adventurous.
While the train cut through scenic flat Fenland dotted with the wind pumps, isolated farm cottages, and small groups of cattle huddled together, Jane rehearsed the reasons she’d composed for her interest in St. Cuthberts. If this trip was unsuccessful, she’d have to get hold of the latest census for Marlowe on the Water, and compare it with the census for Greater Flyborough for the years in question, and see if she could compile from them a list of people who were now older than fifty, and whose names appeared on both. However, even this would not bring her much further forward, if a number of similar names appeared on both, particularly as she still didn’t know the gender of the person writing to Roz. The train, she realized, was drawing into Greater Flyborough station.
Less than thirty minutes after stepping on the train, Jane was in the vestry of St. Cuthberts, with its vicar. “I have an interest in family history,” she began. “Through my research I have discovered that one of my relatives faked his own death and reinvented himself by starting a new life elsewhere. I believe he created an entirely new identity for himself, to the extent that he ended up as the vicar of St. Cuthberts sometime in the 1970s.”
“My word!” the vicar said. “What on earth made him go to such trouble?”
“Got a girl in trouble and fled.”
“My word!” the vicar repeated. “I didn’t realise the 1970s was so puritanical. I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you personally. I was born in the 1970s and don’t know anything about what happened at the church before my wife and I were posted here, and that was only about six years ago. I believe I do
know someone who might be able to help you though – Hilda Lawley. She’s the widow of Alfred Lawley, who was the vicar of St. Cuthberts between 1973 and 1978. Alfred Lawley was a local man, so he wasn’t your relative. It may have been his predecessor. If anyone can help you find that out, it will be Hilda. Let me telephone her for you, and see if she might be willing to talk to you. If you’re happy to wait, I could call her now?”
Jane thanked him and said she was more than happy to wait.
“Hilda says she’s more than willing to help,” the vicar informed Jane, once he’d come off the phone from Hilda Lawley. “She suggested you call on her straightaway, if that fits in with your schedule.”
“It certainly does,” Jane said, getting to her feet.
“I thought it would,” the vicar said, smiling. “I’ve written down directions to her bungalow for you. Have you driven?”
“I’m on foot.”
“In that case, it’s only a few minutes down the road. She moved to a small bungalow within walking distance of the church, following her husband’s death.”
Jane took the piece of paper, which contained directions to Hilda’s house, from the vicar and thanked him for his kindness. It took her only a few minutes to walk from the church to the bungalow, where Hilda waited for her at the front door.
Hilda wasn’t at all what Jane had expected. Rather than the starched, blue-rinsed, matronly-type of woman, Jane had expected to meet, Hilda, who was about ten years older than her, was auburn-haired, nicely tanned and stylishly dressed in a colourful, striped dress.
“Thank you so much for agreeing to speak to me, Mrs Lawley. May I say what a lovely tan you have.”
“That’s because I’ve just come back from a fortnight in Turkey.”
As she had many times since she’d become a private detective, Jane found herself invited to sit in someone else’s living room to partake of tea and biscuits.
“How can I help you, my dear?” Hilda asked.
Over a pot of Earl Grey tea and cream puffs, with the afternoon sun pouring through the front window, Jane repeated her story. Although Hilda listened without comment to Jane’s retelling of the relative who’d assumed a new identity, Jane couldn’t help noticing a growing look of disbelief on Hilda’s face as she spoke.
“I think you must be mistaken, my dear,” Hilda said, once Jane had finished her tale. “It couldn’t have been my husband you’re talking about because he had an enormous family, all of whom lived within ten-minutes of each other. It couldn’t have been my husband’s predecessor at St. Cuthberts, either. He too was a local man, who grew up in the area. My husband’s successor after his retirement was our eldest son. I’m afraid that whichever church it was that your relative may have become vicar of, it wasn’t St. Cuthberts. Not at the time you’re talking about anyway. Are you sure it wasn’t St. Marys?” she asked. “They’ve had some right funny ones there, I can tell you.”
Hilda’s husband must have been the vicar of the church of St. Cuthberts at the same time as Roz would have been working as a prostitute in the local area. It would almost certainly have been Hilda who would have been running the soup kitchen which Roz had eaten at. The two must have met. She would have been one of the people that had tried to help Roz and women like her. If Hilda was prepared to help women who she knew to be working as prostitutes, and her husband officiate at their marriages, then the couple can’t have been judgemental. Nor did she live anywhere near Marlowe, although it was possible she had a relative who did. Jane thought it highly unlikely that Hilda was the letter writer, but if she was, that should be clear in her response to the mention of the letters. If she wasn’t, she might have an inkling who was. Jane decided to come clean, making sure she didn’t betray anything which might lead to Roz’s identity.
“Would it surprise you if I told you that I was really a private detective and what I have just told you wasn’t really true?” Jane began.
Hilda daubed biscuit crumbs from her lips with a paper napkin, and said, “I was a vicar’s for wife years. No one and nothing surprises me, love, and you being a private detective is a lot more convincing than that last cock and bull story of yours.”
“I should have come clean straight away, but I was trying to protect my client,” she explained.
Jane produced a copy of part of one of the letters sent to Roz with Roz’s name and address blacked out, as was any reference to Marlowe, Greater Flyborough, or the local elections. Before she handed it to Hilda, she said, “I’m trying to find out who sent this to my client. There are many more like this one. To protect my client’s confidentiality, I can’t let you have too many details, but there is a connection between my client and St. Cuthberts dating to the 1970s. My client has moved on with her life, and no longer leads the type of life she did back then. But, as you will see from these letters, someone doesn’t want to let her bury the past. Is there anyone you knew back then, who no longer lives locally, and who might have come across women living as my client did back then, who might be capable of such vindictive behaviour all these years later?” Jane asked, finally passing the letter over to Hilda Lawley.
Hilda read the letter slowly, smiling and nodding to herself as she did so, in a knowing way. When she’d finished, she left it lying in her lap, and said to Jane, “I’m glad your client has been able to rebuild her life. Surprisingly, a lot do, but they have to go to hell and back first. I do know who wrote these letters, and all the others you say were sent. I knew before I started the first sentence, I’m ashamed to say.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Poison Pen Pal
I
“Henry was Alfred’s and my second son,” explained Hilda Lawley, after informing Jane she believed the letter writer to be her own son, Henry Lawley. “His elder brother succeeded his father as the vicar of St. Cuthberts. Henry followed his elder brother into the church, only to be told in his first year that he would never progress in the church, and maybe he should consider another career. No official reasons were given for his rejection, other than he was considered unsuitable for advancement. He continued to press for a reason and so finally got an explanation – ‘It’s the way you interact with your parishioners. We are here to guide and offer help where possible, not act as Lord high executioner, Henry.’ – Is what he was told.
“He always was obnoxious,” his own mother continued. “He and his brother were like chalk and cheese. His father had to ban him from the soup kitchen in the end, because he kept telling the girls they were going to burn in hell. He runs a printing press in Marlowe-on-the-Water. I don’t have his number, I’m afraid. We don’t talk any more. I’m sure you can get it from directory enquiries.”
Well, well, well, Jane thought to herself. He ran a printing press in Marlowe-on-the-Water. It made sense.
As there wasn’t enough time for Jane to travel from Greater Flyborough to Marlowe that day, she decided to return home to Failsham. Whilst still on the train she obtained Henry Lawley’s number from directory enquiries and telephoned him. His wife answered the phone. Jane asked if she could arrange an appointment call on Mr Lawley to discuss some printing she needed to be done.
“I need some business cards prepared for me,” Jane explained. “Will he be about tomorrow?”
“He’ll be in tomorrow morning, if that’s all right?” Mrs Lawley said. “About eleven?”
As soon as she got home, Jane looked through the list of names she’d collected from both the churches at Marlowe-on-the-Water. From the list of names she’d obtained from St. Magdalene’s, she realised that Henry Lawson was its choirmaster and from his webpage, that he printed literature for the same local council Roz was running for.
II
Henry Lawley met Jane at his front door. He was a tall man with high cheekbones and a pointed nose.
“Good to meet you,” he said, shaking her hand firmly. He spoke very carefully and deliberately and with an accent which suggested an expensive education.
“Likewise,” she
replied.
“Shall we go round to my studio and we can discuss your needs, and I’ll show you my work?” he suggested.
On the way there, Jane said, “I understand you do quite a lot of work for the local council?”
“Quite a lot. For example, I print all the council members’ business cards for them.”
“Really? So you know everyone on the council?”
“I call each member individually after every election, so I get to know who’s who,” he replied, leading her towards a white summerhouse with a red roof, red windowsills, and a covered porch on which wooden chairs and a table rested. How enchanting, Jane thought as they approached the little house on wheels.
“My printing press,” Henry Lawley explained, opening the door of the summerhouse. “Let me show you some examples of my work, Mrs Hetherington. I’m sure I’ll be able to accommodate you.”
Jane followed him inside the small building, which he’d converted into a printing press. Henry Lawley’s work covered the walls from ceiling to roof. P.C towers and monitors stood next to each other and a large printer noiselessly printed out page after page. Piles of plastic covers and ring binders filled a corner of the office. Jane had no doubt that if she opened one of the cabinet’s drawers, she’d find the pale blue paper and matching envelopes, used to compose the letters to Roz.
“My wife tells me you’re interested in business cards? Allow me to show you a selection I’ve printed for other people,” he said, holding out the only chair in the room for her. He handed her a ring binder of his work. She made a play of opening it and studying its contents.
“These are the standard sized business cards, but obviously I can make them bigger or smaller as you wish. If you give me an idea of exactly what you want, I can give you an idea as to costs. We could make up a prototype here and now, if you like,” he suggested helpfully.
Jane looked at him. It never ceased to amaze her how pleasant the most unpleasant people could make themselves appear to be.