by Laura Powell
‘Wake up, something’s happening outside.’
Mother groans and rolls over. Betty pulls on her bed jacket. She makes for the bedroom door and trips over two empty wine bottles that weren’t there when she went to bed. There is no one on the stairs or in the hall but the men rattle around in their bedrooms. Betty slips through the front door and heads for Joan. Black mascara trails down Joan’s cheeks and her eyes are pink and puffy.
‘What happened?’ says Betty.
‘Everyone’s leaving,’ cries Joan. ‘It’ll be a ghost town, he’s driving them all out.’
She points at Mr Gwavas from number twelve; he is stacking suitcases in the boot of his car while Mrs Gwavas tucks blankets around her twin girls, asleep on the back seat.
‘My Richard wants us to leave too, just until the police find him,’ continues Joan, her teeth chattering. ‘But I told him; no one but the Lord himself will drive me away from my home. Not even the Cornish Cleaver.’
Richard crosses the pavement wearing flannel pyjamas and carrying a steaming teacup. Betty draws her bed jacket tighter around her, blushing.
‘You’re in shock,’ he says, handing Joan the cup. He turns to Betty. ‘Tell your mother I’ll fit an extra lock on her door this afternoon. No charge.’
‘Has something else happened?’ says Betty.
‘These shouldn’t even be up,’ cuts in Joan bitterly, nodding at a poster on the lamppost. ‘It’s disrespectful to the families.’
With her long red fingernail, she picks at the loose corner and peels it off. Newl Grove Residents’ Association Annual Day Trip, it reads. 11 July. Below are lots of words stencilled at skewed angles. Torquay. Pier. Pavilion. Pleasure steamers.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ says Richard softly to Betty.
‘Last night,’ whispers Joan.
‘Not another?’ says Betty, her mouth dry.
Joan nods.
‘Who was she?’
‘The niece of one of the factory workers,’ says Richard. ‘One of Napier’s men found her in the early hours. Pretty little blonde thing, so he said.’
Joan picks the last gluey bits of the poster off the lamppost.
‘Napier was just here,’ continues Richard. ‘He said the constabulary is finally drafting in fifty more troops to patrol, but it’s three murders too late if you ask me.’
‘Stop it,’ hisses Joan. ‘We should stick together, not criticise our own.’
‘Where did they find her?’ says Betty, looking down at her cold bare toes.
The yellow headlights and the wide car flash back to her. She should tell them, but something stops her. What if it was just her brain tricking itself with fear? What if the car didn’t slow down at all? Even if it did, maybe the driver was just lost. She would look silly; they would think her a scared little girl and worse, they would ask why she was in Spoole and with whom.
‘Somewhere on the embankment up by—’ sniffles Joan, mopping her nose.
‘The New Road,’ finishes Richard.
‘Not by the Spoole Picture House?’ mutters Betty, and a cold hand slides down her spine and squeezes.
‘That’s it. The very place.’
Chapter 4
Fifty years later
‘What happened, dear?’ says an elderly lady.
Mary twists away from her and stares harder at the headline stand: CORNISH CLEAVER SPEAKS.
‘She dropped her shopping,’ puffs the nurse girl, reappearing with Mary’s aspirin and asparagus and two salvaged lamb cutlets balanced on top of her wheel-along suitcase. She carries Mary’s full grocery bag in her other hand. ‘Don’t worry, I’m a trainee nurse. I think she’s just in shock. Unless it’s a stroke.’ She turns to Mary and speaks louder, ‘Sugarplum, can you tell me your name?’
Mary realises that her coat is hanging off one shoulder and that she is crouching. A huddle of shins has gathered around her.
‘Can I call someone for you?’ the nurse girl is saying.
Mary shakes her head, confused. She pulls her coat straight, stands and walks on.
‘Your shopping,’ the girl calls after her. ‘Your tart’s a gonner but the veg is OK.’
Inside Star Newsagents, Mary picks up the top newspaper. Sicko Cleaver Speaks, says the red and white front page. She forces herself to read on:
Sick murderer, the Cornish Cleaver, spoke out for the first time ever yesterday, exactly 50 years after he stabbed to death his pregnant ex-girlfriend. Family of the victim branded the newspaper’s decision to print the interview ‘downright disgusting’.
‘Do you want to buy that?’ calls the newsagent in a chalky Indian accent.
Mary blocks him out and tries to read the next sentence but the words swim around the page.
…was imprisoned for 20 years for stabbing pregnant Maureen Cardy in the stomach 14 times. She was found by a fisherman on a blood-spattered beach in St Steele, a village on the south coast of Cornwall. The attack was so savage that the victim’s body was dismembered. Her body parts and internal organs were found across the sand.
‘I’m sorry,’ whispers Mary.
‘There’s something the problem?’ says the newsagent, but gentler.
Mary shakes her head, losing her place again.
Defending her decision to publish the interview, Editor-in-Chief Elaine Riseborough wrote in her editorial comment: ‘Is the freedom to respond not a right to which every human is entitled, no matter how heinous their crime – or alleged crime?’ She added: ‘After all, this man has been painted as the bastion of evil in thousands of articles, books and reports published over the last 50 years, yet he was convicted on a single piece of circumstantial evidence and has quietly but persistently appealed ever since.’
The shopkeeper calls out in a foreign tongue to someone in the backroom and a tissue is pressed into Mary’s hand. The doorbell jangles and the nurse reappears, pulling along the squeaky-wheeled suitcase.
‘There you are,’ she says with a thread of frustration. ‘I’ve brought your groceries. I’d help if I could but I’m going to miss my train and I don’t think you’ve had a stroke anyway.’
Mary’s knees ache. She realises that she is kneeling and that the girl is still talking at her but she doesn’t hear what’s said. The noises have all merged; her ears could be underwater. She turns back to the newspaper, pushing herself to read more.
‘It’s absolutely disgusting,’ said Taylor Cardy, the victim’s nephew. ‘Printing the interview gave that monster the attention he wanted. It’s all very well to talk about his human rights but what about Maureen’s rights? What about her unborn child’s right to live?’
Released in 1976, he was given a new identity and round-the-clock security at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of £350,000 per year. His identity was uncovered in 1990, shortly after he married a woman 15 years his junior. The pair have since been given a second set of new identities and are believed to live in Spain.
‘I did the right thing,’ whispers Mary but her voice doesn’t sound like her own.
It isn’t that she forgot or that she lived easily with her decision. Rather, the memory of it all has been compressed for so long, it takes her a while to unpick it.
Maureen had arranged to meet him on the night she died, apparently to tell him that she was pregnant after their brief affair. He admitted meeting her but denied the affair and killing her.
‘The right thing,’ she repeats firmer. ‘I did, didn’t I?’
He was acquitted of the murders of five other young women, all killed in similar circumstances in the surrounding villages in the summer of 1956. Their killer has never been brought to justice and the victims’ families have repeatedly called for a retrial.
Mary retches again. Vomit spatters the chipped vinyl tiles.
‘Mital!’ calls the shopkeeper, then more foreign words.
Another tissue is placed in Mary’s hand, a warm palm rests on her back, then she is being helped up and steered through a door towards darkness.
<
br /> * * *
Mary sits on a stool in a windowless backroom, stacked with boxes of crisps. The newsagent’s wife hands her a mug of hot milky tea that smells of cloves and cinnamon but tastes acidic. Her mouth is coated with bile and her vision is gluey. It sticks onto anything in front of her, making her seem starey and odd. Her eyes lock onto the round red spot between the newsagent’s wife’s eyebrows. She forces them away.
‘Thank you,’ she says, ashamed, nodding at the tea. ‘I’m not usually like this.’
She should mop herself up and go home but somehow she can’t.
‘No English, my wife speak little English,’ bellows the newsagent, poking his head around the door and waving a mop.
The shop door opens and he disappears again before Mary can say ‘thank you for your help’ and ‘sorry for spoiling your shop floor’. His wife dips her head. She has a long ponytail and wisps of black girlish hair. Only the criss-cross of wrinkles betrays that they are similar in age. What must she think of her; a bedraggled, vomiting old woman?
‘You have done not bad thing,’ says the wife in a jarred way, surprising Mary.
‘But I have.’
‘No, my husband clean floor. He is good man. Not angry.’
Mary manages a watery smile. The woman slides down from her stool, she is surprisingly short – tiny, even – and she reaches for a brown notepad covered with rows of shapes.
As she moves, Mary sees that her groceries have been transferred into new blue polythene bags. Something about the woman’s kindness makes her eyes sting. She is wondering how to show her gratitude – perhaps she should explain the significance of the article – but then she notices several bundles of newspapers, bound up with white tape. A sheet of paper on top of the tallest stack says “old stock” in blue felt tip pen.
On the cover is his mugshot taken fifty years ago. It is the same photograph the newspapers rehashed throughout his trial and when he was released, and even when he was given a second new identity. Even now he is caught in time; still a man of thirty-something in his old age.
Exclusive interview with the Cornish Cleaver, says the headline. On the line beneath it: I am innocent – my only deathbed regret is that I didn’t fight harder to prove it. Mary reaches down and picks up the newspaper. She is about to read it but his eyes bore into her as though he is looking her in the eye again, the way he did that day he knelt on the pavement and pleaded for her help. She rolls him up and stuffs him to the bottom of her handbag so he can’t look at her like that, and she jumps to her feet.
‘Yesterday newspaper. Old newspaper. No good this day,’ says the newsagent’s wife, pointing at Mary’s handbag.
‘I have to go,’ says Mary, picking up her grocery bags.
‘My husband say these word to me when I cry,’ continues the woman tentatively, looking at her notebook. ‘What is the use of crying when the birds ate the whole farm?’
She reaches forward to touch Mary’s hand but Mary pulls back.
‘I’m sorry to be rude,’ stammers Mary. ‘Thank you for – you’re very kind but I need—’
‘No crying when birds ate farm whole,’ repeats the woman firmly.
Mary half nods and smiles vaguely at her, then she turns and hurries out of Star Newsagents.
She steams along Richmond High Street, but in the other direction this time, and is breathless by the time she arrives. She has stood outside this building at least one hundred times before and thought of going in but always changed her mind. Today, without pausing, she heaves open the double doors and steps inside.
The doors clank shut behind her. Her heels clack against the parquet, echoing; bouncing off the stained glass and reverberating against the copper organ pipes. It takes a second for her eyes to adjust to the murkiness. She notices a figure at the far side of the room. He – though it is impossible to be sure – is cloaked in shadow. He holds a candle in his right hand and his left peels back a curtained doorway.
‘Wait,’ she calls, as he steps towards it. ‘Don’t go. There’s something I have to – Could you take my confession?’
Chapter 5
Late June 1956
The day of the dance arrives too soon. Late afternoon, Mother shuffles into the kitchen with purple rings under her eyes. She smells of gin. Betty stiffens.
‘Are you feeling better?’
Mother doesn’t reply. She unfolds a copy of The Cornishman with a plea on the front page from Lord Mayor Oates to the killer himself. ‘Dear Cornish Cleaver,’ it reads. Mother laughs at it in a scraping way.
‘Silly isn’t it,’ agrees Betty. ‘Do they really think he’ll read it and just turn himself in?’
‘I haven’t forgotten the dance tonight,’ cuts in Mother, tossing the paper into the bin.
Betty is surprised that Mother remembers the dance at all. She hasn’t left her bed for five solid days, ever since Betty snuck to the pictures. She won’t tell Mother that another girl died; she is fragile already and another worry might make her crumble again.
‘George’ll be here soon to collect you,’ continues Mother, beaming.
‘I’m not going,’ says Betty. ‘I need to make the breakfast bread and buy in fresh meat. The men can’t live on carrots and parsnips forever.’
She has put off leaving Hotel Eden the whole time Mother has been in bed. She locks the door with a bolt when the men leave after their breakfasts and she only opens it again to let them back in at suppertime, or to bring in the box of vegetables that Richard has taken to collecting for her. She reminds herself that she isn’t scared of going out, just busy.
‘You’re not missing the dance,’ says Mother firmly. ‘You can’t lose George when we’re this close…’
Betty rips the leaves off a cabbage and frowns. Blow to George, she wants to say, but she must care for Mother and that means not upsetting her.
‘Go for me, dance for me,’ continues Mother. ‘God knows I wish it was still my turn.’
She waltzes around the kitchen wearily, her oily hair flicking out, and bangs into a saucepan handle. Wet carrots tumble to the floor. Betty picks them up wordlessly as Mother pours herself a thimble of sherry. She tips back her head and swallows. Betty would like to pull the glass from her hand and straitjacket Mother with a hug.
‘Have another nap if you like. I’ll make supper,’ says Betty softly.
‘You know I won Miss West Country before the War?’ says Mother as she pours another sherry. ‘It’s not your fault you drew the short straw with your father’s looks, but you must compensate. You need to dance well and make the best of yourself, Elizabeth. Marriage proposals don’t come easily, especially ones from a catch like young George.’
‘I’m not going… I don’t think it’s right to dance when those girls have only just died.’
Mother pinches her cheek.
‘You must go,’ she says in a fierce voice that Betty has never heard before.
Betty pulls away but Mother clamps her cheek tighter. The side of her face numbs.
‘You’re hurting me.’
‘You will go and you will have a smashing time. He’s a Paxon,’ says Mother firmly.
She bangs her other hand on the worktop, so hard that Betty is certain her bones will crack.
‘Don’t look at me like that, you know it’s true,’ continues Mother, rubbing her palm. ‘You must seize your moment and snare him before some clever little slut snatches him from under your nose. Do you hear me?’
Mother releases her and tips back a third sherry. Betty rubs her cheek back to life.
‘That’s better,’ sighs Mother when the glass is empty and she sounds like herself again.
She sets down her glass and strokes Betty’s other cheek now but in a tender way, as though Betty is an egg and if she is handled too roughly she will crack.
‘You’ll listen to your old mother, won’t you? She knows best.’
Betty nods, her eyes damp.
‘I knew it. You’re looking forward to having a lit
tle jive, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘Excellent. You’ve made my day.’
An hour later, a car horn toots. Betty pulls closed the front door and steps out into the drizzle, just as Mother appears in the big room window, her red lipstick painted on and hard blocks of rouge on her cheeks. She waves madly and Betty waves back, then realises that Mother isn’t looking at her at all. Her wave is directed at the wide, black car parked on the other side of the street. She seems to be looking at Mr Paxon who sits on the front seat, holding the steering wheel and keeping his eyes in his lap.
Betty crosses the road to the car and wedges herself into the back seat beside Mary. Inside it smells of petroleum and sugar and a familiar perfume.
‘Excited about the dance?’ says Mary shrilly and Betty nods.
‘You’re looking lovely,’ says Gray, leaning around Mary to catch Betty’s eye.
‘I’m not really,’ she stammers.
She ignores Mary’s glare. Mr Paxon starts the car, and Betty turns and waves out of the back window until Mother disappears. George swivels around from the front passenger seat, making the skin on his neck twist around like a helter skelter, and he hands them each a pale biscuit with fluted edges.
‘Try one,’ he cries.
‘What is it?’ says Mary, examining hers.
‘Pa invented it, he’s a genius,’ squeals George.
Mr Paxon half turns in his driving seat and cocks an eyebrow at Betty. She wishes he would concentrate on the road instead. She doesn’t swoon after him like Mary and Miss Hollinghurst and the other girls who all jostle for a space in his church pew every Sunday, ignoring tight-lipped Mrs Paxon. Betty sees that they might like his striking jaw or his thin, reserved smile that probably makes them feel special, but his hair is flecked with silver, as though it has already started to die. Not at all like Gallagher’s hair, which is shiny black and curly. She blushes at the thought.
The concert hall is already full when they arrive. On the opposite side of the dance floor are two doors, flung open onto a grass verge that slopes down to a long, empty beach. Sea air gushes in, flirting with the girls’ hemlines. George and Gray buy orange juice from the bar while Betty and Mary hover near the dance floor.