by Ann Bennett
‘Police officers?’
‘Yes. They need to talk to you about Cedar Lodge.’
Connie pauses as the words sink in. What could it mean?
‘Well did you tell them I don’t own it anymore?’ she replies, ‘They need to speak to Mrs Jennings.’
‘They’ve already spoken to Mrs Jennings. In fact it was her who called them I think. No, they need to speak to you, Connie. It’s about something they’ve found there.’
Connie’s scalp tingles and goosebumps prickle her arms.
‘Found?’ she whispers. ‘What is it?’
‘They wouldn’t tell me, I’m afraid. Now look. Do you want me to help you through to the waiting room, or do you want to see them here?’
‘Show them through here please, Matron,’ she whispers, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.
There were two men and a young woman. They seemed to fill the room with their blue uniforms and their radios and their air of authority. The young woman sits in the armchair, and Matron brings chairs from the dining room for the others and sits on Connie’s other chair herself.
One of the men looks very young; so young in fact Connie wonders if he was old enough to have left school. The other, the more senior of the two, begins to speak.
‘Miss Burroughs. Thank you for seeing us this evening. I’m Sergeant Coxon, this is PC Redmund and this is WPC Kirk. We’re from Weirfield Police station. Now, Miss Burroughs. Something has been found at Cedar Lodge that requires us to investigate. I understand that Cedar Lodge used to be your home?’
She stares at him blankly and blinks. She isn’t going to give anything away.
He clears his throat.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Burroughs. This isn’t easy for any of us. Please prepare yourself for a shock. What has been found under the flagstones in the conservatory is very disturbing.’
She closes her eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
‘When Mrs Jennings and her friend, Matthew Drayton took up the flagstones in the conservatory, they found an old wooden box buried in the floor in there. It looks like a toolbox. It had initials engraved on the top. EJB. Would EJB have been your father?’
Her hands begin to shake and she feels for the filigree necklace for reassurance. What would Father say if she tells them anything? Is he listening to her? Can he see her now?
‘Miss Burroughs. I have to ask you. Were your father’s initials EJB?’
She inclines her head and closes her eyes. Tears ooze from between the lids and roll down her cheeks.
‘What we found inside that box was very upsetting.’ He pauses. She screws her eyes even tighter and waits for the blow.
‘It was the skeleton of a tiny baby.’
Her eyes snap open and she stares at him. It is what she expected, what she has known for over seventy five years, but hearing it spoken out loud is still a shock.
‘Are you alright, Miss Burroughs?’
She nods and swallows.
‘Do you want some water?’
She reaches out a hand and Matron hands her a glass. She takes a couple of sips.
‘Miss Burroughs, do you know anything about that? Anything at all?’
It is wrong to lie. It is against all the teachings of Christ and all her beliefs, but she knows that above all that, she must protect Father. His last words come to her, Don’t let anyone meddle in my business, Constance. I’m counting on you.
‘I know nothing about it,’ she says quietly, her voice trembling. She carries on looking down in her lap at her shaking hands.
‘We have run some tests and have found that the remains are likely to date from the early 1930s. You and your family were living in the house at that time, weren’t you?’
‘I’m not sure. I can’t remember,’ she says, vaguely, giving him another vacant stare. The policemen exchange glances.
‘Now, we know that your father ran the orphanage next door to Cedar Lodge. There must have been many babies there. Do you remember any of those babies dying, Miss Burroughs?’
Again Connie shakes her head. This time she isn’t lying. ‘All the babies in our care were very healthy. There were no deaths in the orphanage. Not one.’
‘Well, we’d like to check the orphanage records if there are any remaining. We’ve asked the County Council, and they have nothing. I wonder… did your father have his own records?’
Connie swallows and doesn’t reply. She thinks about the papers in his desk. The ones she had never dared to look at, not even after Father died. The ones Peter had taken away and stored in his basement. Would they reveal anything Father wouldn’t have wanted known? She doesn’t know, but she isn’t going to take any risks.
‘I don’t think so. I believe they were all destroyed when the orphanage closed,’ she says, still staring down at her hands. Now this is a barefaced lie. Will they suspect? Will they take her at her word?
‘You’re quite sure about that, Miss Burroughs?’
Again she nods, staring at her hands. She can’t look up.
The senior policeman gets up and sighs.
‘I thought as much. Well, Miss Burroughs, thank you for your time. We’ll continue our investigations, and if in the meantime anything occurs to you, anything at all about that time, please do get in touch with the station.’
They all troop out of the room, the young policewoman giving her a sympathetic look and squeeze of her arm on the way out.
Connie puts her face in her hands. She’s trembling all over. She wants to cry properly but the tears won’t come. All she can feel in her throat is a dull, dry ache.
Matron bustles in. She comes up close to Connie and leans towards her.
‘Connie Burroughs!’ she says in a scandalised voice. ‘You weren’t being straight with those policemen, and you know it.’
Connie frowns and purses her lips, but doesn’t respond.
‘I could tell! You might have been able to fool them but you can’t fool me. I know you, Connie. I know you’re not the confused, forgetful old lady you pretended to be to them. Those policemen have gone away thinking you don’t know anything. That you’re a bit dotty. They’re all ready to close their files. To be fair, they do seem to want any excuse to do that. But I know Connie that you know more than you’re letting on.’
Connie looks at Matron with a vacant stare.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Matron.’
‘It’s not good to lie and to keep secrets, Connie. I thought that you, of all people would know that, being religious as you are. I thought you wanted to make your peace with the Lord.’
Connie remains silent, but what Matron has said has struck a chord with her. Matron is right. It’s not good to tell lies or to keep secrets, particularly ones like this. She twists her hands in anguish.
‘I’ll get Erica to bring your supper to you, Connie. But you think about what I’ve said.’
Connie hardly notices Erica arriving with the tray. She’s thinking about Matron’s words. She’s thinking too about her memories. The ones she has buried for years. The ones she has hardly been able to acknowledge. All this time she has been trying to preserve the good side of Father in her memory. His religion, his preaching, his energy, his kindness to the orphans. She’s tried to keep those things in aspic and to put aside the other things, to forget the dark side of him; the long alcohol-fuelled meetings in his office with strange men, the cries from the coach house, the extravagant gifts that used to arrive from India, and Anna. Not forgetting poor Anna.
Connie knows she must force herself to go back there now. Back to that dreadful night. That night when she awoke to the cries coming from the coach house; when she crept to the window and saw Father emerge from the top room carrying that mysterious bundle of rags. She remembers him coming up to the bedroom and standing there at the door, then coming across the room to check that she and Evie were asleep. When those dreadful sounds had started coming from under the window she had blocked her ears and tried to ignore them. She’d t
ried to blot them out. But it had been impossible to do that. How could she just go back to sleep after what she’d heard? She needed to find out. She needed to know.
She crept out of bed and pulled on her dressing gown. She made her way down the stairs. Still the sounds came; the sound of something sharp striking the earth. Thump, thump, thump. She crept across the hall, down the passage and through the kitchen, the tiles were cold on her bare feet. She stood at the glass door shivering, and peered through into the conservatory. What she saw made her blood run cold.
Something inside her snapped at that moment. Something broke, and changed imperceptibly. She knows now that it was this moment that led her to rebel; that it was then that she decided to help Anna.
Connie spends a restless night, turning uncomfortably in her bed, sweat pouring from her body. Her dreams are inhabited by images of her father. He’s walking down the coach house steps in the moonlight, the bundle in his arms. In her dream he stands at her door, here in her room at Fairlawns. She holds her breath, afraid that he would hear it, that any moment he will walk over to her bed, lift her covers and put his face close to hers to check she is asleep. Then she’s watching him in the conservatory, his huge shadow dancing on the wall, lifting the pickaxe and bringing it down with a thud. Thud, thud, thud, the sound goes on all night.
In the morning she feels dreadful.
‘You want to take breakfast in the dining room today, Connie?’ asks Erica.
She’s about to protest, but she remembers Tommy. Suddenly she wants to see his face again, remember how it had once been between them, feel the reassuring touch of his hand on her arm.
Tommy is already sitting at a table when Connie enters the dining room. There’s an empty space beside him. He looks up from his meal, waves and motions to her to come and sit with him. There’s a lively buzz of conversation as she enters the room, but as she makes her way across to where Tommy sits, she can sense a hush descending. Dozens of pairs of eyes are watching her, following her as she moves between the tables.
She settles herself down beside Tommy. He smiles and greets her, but there’s something in his look, some sort of distress that hadn’t been there yesterday.
‘Tommy, is anything wrong?’
‘We saw it on the local news, Connie.’
‘News? What do you mean?’ but that dreadful sick feeling comes back to the pit of her stomach. She can’t meet his eyes.
‘You must know what I’m talking about. The baby, Connie. At Cedar Lodge. It was on the news this morning. On the television.’
‘Oh!’ she isn’t prepared for this. She stares at the cereal in her bowl and nausea floods her mouth. She pushes the bowl aside.
‘I was going to tell you about it,’ she says. ‘That’s why I came.’
‘Do you want to go somewhere quiet to talk? I’ve finished here.’
They make their laborious way along the passage to the dayroom. It’s empty apart from a cleaner working at the far end. They sit in a pair of chairs beside the window. The ones they sat in yesterday.
‘Do you want to tell me all about it?’ he asks gently, his steady eyes looking into her own.
‘The police came yesterday evening,’ she says quietly. ‘They said they’d found something. They said they’d found the bones of a baby under the conservatory. They wanted to know if I knew anything about it.’
‘And do you?’
She shakes her head miserably, but she can’t meet his gaze.
‘Do they think it had something to do with your father?’
Connie nods.
‘And you want to protect his memory? Is that it?’
‘Of course.’
There’s a long silence. Connie’s eyes wander to the window and she looks across the damp garden. She watches one of the gardeners clearing fallen leaves from the grass. He rakes them into small piles, then brings a barrow and loads them in with a fork. He’s very methodical, working his way up and down the large lawn in strips. Several minutes pass. Connie begins to wonder whether Tommy will ever say anything.
But at last he speaks.
‘I wasn’t going to mention this. The past is the past and I was going to let it lie. But it might help you to know this about your precious father.’ He says those last two words bitterly and Connie looks at him sharply.
‘I left Weirfield because your father forced me to leave. And the day I left was the day I lost my faith.’
‘Tommy! Whatever do you mean?’
‘I’ll start at the beginning. When I first came back from the farm to work for him I was no angel, Connie. I found a way of making a bit of money on the side when he asked me to take the car to the garage for petrol, or to run errands. It was the only way I could make ends meet. He’d made me take lodgings in town. He wouldn’t let me stay above the coach house as you know. Said it was his bolt hole. That it was out of bounds and no one was allowed in there. The lodgings were expensive, so I figured I would get him to pay for that somehow.
‘Anyway, he caught me, of course. I got greedy, and he got wise to my requests for petty cash. When he found out he hit the roof. I’d seen him angry before, over things that happened in the orphanage, but this time was different. Boy! I’ve been to war and even then didn’t see such ugly, brutal anger. He got me up against the wall and said he was going to make me pay. That he knew people in high places including the local police and he could make sure I went down for a long stretch. I threw myself at his mercy. I pleaded with him to give me another chance. I hadn’t got anywhere else to go, you see. After a while he calmed down and I could see in his eyes he had a plan. He was thinking that he had one over on me.
‘He made me agree to work for half pay until I’d repaid the debt. He had me over a barrel. Time went on, I paid off the debt in due course but sometimes I got curious and I’d ask him questions. Once I thought I heard voices in his ‘bolt hole’. So I asked him about it. Straight up. He flew into a rage again. Do you remember how his rages used to descend on him from nowhere, Connie? His face would darken, like the sky when a storm was coming and you’d know his anger would soon burst from him, like thunder and lightning?’
Connie nods, her blood runs cold at the memory.
‘He told me to mind my own business, and that if I asked any more questions I’d be out on my ear. So I tried to do that. I tried to mind my own business and not ask questions. But every so often, I got so curious I had to mention things. Like who were the gentlemen I had to collect from the station for a meeting, like where did he get that silk waistcoat from? Things like that. My questions would send him crazy every time.
‘Anyway, things went along like that, until something happened that meant he needed to shut me up. To get me right away from there.’
Connie stares at him, her face screwed up in a frown at the memories.
‘Do you remember, Connie, around the time I left, that a young woman was found dead, floating in the Thames at Henley? The one with red hair?’
‘Yes. Yes I do remember.’ She thinks back to how she pored over the story in the local paper, how her heart had gone out to that poor young woman who was about her own age, but it had happened a few miles away at Henley, so she hadn’t made any connection with Weirfield at all.
‘Well, she wasn’t a local girl. It emerged she came from Manchester, from a good family, but she’d come down to Henley for no apparent reason and thrown herself in the river and drowned herself. No one could work it out, and the police closed it all down pretty quickly and people forgot all about it.
‘The fact is, Connie. That girl didn’t drown herself in the river. No. She was dead well before that. She died at Cedar Lodge and her body was dumped in the river.’
‘Tommy? What on earth do you mean?’ Connie’s hand flies to her mouth. His words make her tremble, but somehow they have the dreadful ring of truth about them.
‘I came to work very early one day. I wanted to make an early start, because I was meeting you later, and I wanted to be able to get ho
me and change. I arrived before sunrise. I had a key to the garage and I unlocked it. When I walked inside and switched on the light, your father was in there. At first I couldn’t see what he was doing. The back door of the car was open and he was leaning inside, hauling something heavy onto the back seat. He turned as I switched on the light, and I saw straight away what he was doing. On the back seat was the body of a young woman. I could tell immediately she was dead. But I remembered her face. She had beautiful red hair. I was appalled.
‘I started to back away, but he came up close to me and grabbed me by the collar. He was strong, he nearly choked me.
‘Tommy Braithwaite, you didn’t see this, he said.
‘I stared at him. When I didn’t reply, he said, ‘If you ever talk about this I’ll ruin you. You’re dismissed as of now. In fact you must leave Weirfield right away. If I ever find out you’ve breathed a word about this to anyone, I’ll tell the police about what you did. And rest assured I’ve kept proof. You’ll go down for a long stretch, believe me.
‘So, off you go. Pack your bags and get out of Weirfield this morning. If I see you here again I won’t hesitate to act on my word. And by the way, don’t ever contact my daughter again. You might have thought you were keeping your smutty little liaison secret, but I’ve known about it all along. Don’t you dare try to see her, or write to her. As far as she’s concerned, after today, you’re a dead man.’
‘I knew what he was capable of. I knew what influence he had in the town. He had everyone from the policemen to the mayor to the doctor in his pocket. So I did what he said, Connie. I went back to my lodgings and I packed my bags with a lead weight in my heart. I had some savings, so I caught the train to London where I checked into a cheap boarding house. Within a few days, I found an army recruitment centre and managed to sign up. A couple of weeks later I was sailing for Singapore. I wanted to get as far away from Ezra Burroughs as I could.
‘But there was one order that I disobeyed. I did try to write to you, Connie. I wrote three letters. I tried to disguise my handwriting, and I typed the envelopes. Did you ever get them?’