by Laura Powell
It has six pillars that look very grand indeed, even though they could do with a good scrub, and above them is a huge clock that must be very tricky to wind. It is more impressive than every other building on the street, but it is also the meanest, hardest and most angry-looking building she has ever seen. Something about it makes her not want to stand too close, so she watches the entrance from the other side of the street.
Only when she is propped up against a lamppost with her lunchbox at her feet and her focus fixed on the doors, does it hit her: she has made it. She is impatient suddenly. She half considers walking inside and asking for him, then she looks down at her weeping blisters and scuffed-up sandals. They would laugh her straight back out of the building again. She leans harder into the lamppost, her breath quickening as she thinks again of her plan. What if he laughs at her?
Two hours later, he still hasn’t appeared. She doesn’t take her eyes from the door, not even when she leans down to douse her blisters with a handkerchief. A steady stream of men walk out with umbrellas. Rain switches on and off. Betty hardly notices that her hair is soaked and her toes are numb.
Three hours of waiting and the streetlamps flicker on. The seats in the back of the shiny black taxis fill up. She checks her watch. She can’t miss the sleeper train home or she will have to stand on the street all night. Her eyes leave the door for a minute to watch a police car shoot along the street and when she looks back, three men are making their way out of the building and down the steps. The middle one makes Betty look twice. She recognises the long folds of his black coat and his tilted-down hat.
‘Mr Gallagher,’ she shouts.
The car engines drown out her cry and the man doesn’t hear.
‘John Gallagher!’
She picks up her lunchbox, steps into the gutter and is about to run towards him but a taxi honks its horn. She leaps back, just missing it, and looks at the man again. He is still there but his face has turned sideways so she can see his profile and, from the curved hoof shape of his nose, she realises that it is not Gallagher at all. She can’t wait out here any longer. She hurries towards the entrance of the Daily Telegraph and runs up the steps.
At the reception desk, a woman with a black pixie crop and a jewelled blouse looks up.
‘Can I help you?’ she says bemusedly.
Betty feels very small. Her polka dot skirt is garish among all of these dull colours and her hand-me-down coat from Joan swamps her.
‘I’m here to see Mr Gallagher,’ she mutters.
‘Who? Speak up.’
‘Mr John Gallagher, he’s a reporter here.’
The receptionist rummages through a wad of papers.
‘He’s not on my list.’
‘But I need to speak to him.’
She is ready to cry. The receptionist turns over another paper and frowns, touching the tip of her small pointed nose.
‘Ah,’ she says. ‘I can see now. He used to work here, but he doesn’t any more.’
‘Doesn’t work here?’ she squeaks, gripping the reception desk.
‘That’s right.’
‘But he can’t have gone,’ she begins shrilly, then stops herself. ‘When did he leave?’
The receptionist stares at her.
‘I can’t disclose that information.’
Betty opens her lunchbox and pulls out the folded-up photograph of him, scarred with creases and fingerprints. She holds it up.
‘It’s definitely this Mr Gallagher?’
The receptionist gives Betty another funny look but she nods at the photograph.
‘Yes, I remember him,’ she says curtly.
‘I wrote him a letter and sent it to this address about a month ago. Do you know whether he received it?’
‘Do you really think I keep track of every letter that passes through this place?’
‘It was important.’
The receptionist sighs but her expression softens.
‘It says here that they’re forwarding letters to his home address and that he’s currently overseas. That’s all I know.’
‘Overseas?’ she croaks. So he really has left her. ‘Please could you tell me his home address?’
‘I can’t give you that either.’
Betty holds the edge of the reception desk, exhausted. The receptionist looks at her as though she has landed there from the moon but Betty is too tired to mind what anyone thinks of her any more. If the reception desk weren’t covered with folders and pens and paper clips, she might clamber onto it and lie there. Gallagher would come back eventually. He would scoop her up and protect her, the way he said he would. They would marry and tell the police everything; Mr Forbes would be free, St Steele would be safe again and all would be right.
‘Is there anything else?’ says the receptionist.
‘If you see him could you tell him that I came here, please? My name’s Betty Broadbent.’
The receptionist writes it on the corner of her pad.
‘Would you please make sure he knows. It’s very important,’ she adds, but the receptionist has already torn out the sheet and pushed it onto a wire tray on her desk.
Betty staggers into the street and collapses on the pavement. Just five minutes rest. Then she must keep going.
Chapter 13
November 1956
At the brow of the hill, John Gallagher slows the car. From here the road snakes down into St Steele and he has to clutch the steering wheel and pause for a moment before he can continue. He had forgotten what the village looked like, perhaps a deliberate slip for he had never imagined that he would return, but now he is back the streets are so familiar he might never have been away at all. Farmhouses are still stumped on the outskirts and in the centre are three rows of tiny terraces. Their rooftops still crawl with lichen but a layer of frost clings to the village now.
He presses the accelerator and drops down the hill, scanning the streets and the sand for her. The village is dead but he thinks nothing of it. He concentrates on allowing his lungs to fill and empty, fill and empty, because if he doesn’t his mind will whirr and he is sure that it will explode.
On Newl Grove, he pulls over and looks in the wing mirror. He rubs his under-eyes, smooths down his springy curls and notices with embarrassment that his hands are shaking. He has never understood how so small a girl has that effect on him, when no woman ever has before.
He is still surprised that she crept into his thoughts every day he was in France, a comfort somehow, but even then he imagined that he would never see her again. It had been enough to close his eyes and picture her as she was the last time he saw her: she had been holding his handkerchief and looking sadly at him, a tiny fragile thing, a sparrow of a girl, with leaves caught in her hair and a thin dress that rustled in the wind.
As he had looked at her then, he had inwardly scolded himself for being so weak. He had been finding a way to explain that he should never have touched her, but he had heard the movement in the trees. He was certain that he had seen the flash of a blue dress and a stream of golden hair, and he was sickened with panic that someone had seen them together.
He had turned and chased through the woods, searching for whoever it was. His lungs burned, his chest pounded and his slippery-soled shoes skidded on the wet leaves, but he kept running. Half of his brain told him that it was just his imagination or perhaps his conscience, while the other half sizzled: whoever saw them together was probably on their way to tell the police right now. No one would understand. He would be branded a rapist and locked in prison, or hanged even. He would be written about in the newspapers – Reggie would like that. And Father, what would he say?
He had given up looking and retraced his steps back to Betty. She was still standing where he had left her. She looked even tinier, but his insides had steeled over and he had made her recite that awful promise over and over, until he was satisfied that she could never break it. Then he had charged back to the hotel and thrown his sparse belongings into a bag before he co
uld change his mind.
He had circled each roundabout three times on the drive back to London, but he still didn’t turn around. She would be confused, hate him even, but better that than let either of them become more attached. It was always going to end badly, a pair like them.
He had reached London eventually and parked outside his office, where he scrawled a vague resignation letter on the back of a paper napkin. He loathed all of it; the reporters, the editors, the whipping up of stories from misery and trifles. Even reporting on murder grew repetitive. He didn’t wait to see his editor but drove directly to the port and crossed the loading bridge at sunrise.
The ferry ride was long and choppy. The other side of the water he sped to Paris, to his father’s apartment. The closer he got, the more he hungered for his father’s comfort but, in the back of his mind, he braced himself for the terse lecture and the cold handshake that duly came.
Yes, he had almost accepted that he would never see her again, but then he had returned home from Paris yesterday and found her letter, months old, buried in a pile of unopened post on his doormat. It stood out because the lettering was spidery and had been written by what was clearly a wobbly hand. He was exhausted from the drive but after reading it, he necked a whisky, fired up the still-warm engine of his car and sped to St Steele. He had to help.
As he drove, he pieced together what to say to her: he decided to be honest, to admit that he left her out of cowardice but never imagined how painfully he would miss her. She would be angry and upset at him as she should be, but she would forgive him eventually. She will forgive him, won’t she? She must, he reassured himself.
And after he kisses her, they will peel themselves apart to visit Inspector Napier, confessing their own affair before Betty tells him that she saw Miss Hollinghurst by the pond before she was killed. When Forbes is free and the killer is in prison, perhaps Napier will offer Gallagher leniency for the underage matter, especially when he sees how deeply he cares for Betty, and how close she is to sixteen.
Gallagher locks the car and the twist of the key echoes in the street. His hard soles click across the cobbles. The door to Hotel Eden is locked. He raps once, twice and when there is still no answer, he hammers on it.
‘Betty.’
Nothing. He pushes open the letterbox and calls into it.
‘Mrs Broadbent.’
Still nothing.
‘Just give me five minutes!’
He puts his eyes where his lips were and sees that the hall is a shell. The framed pictures have been taken down and the wallpaper is spotted with faded rectangular patches. There are no coats or hats on the pegs and the mats have been taken up. The curtains are drawn so he can’t see into the front room but, when he steps back, he notices a small handwritten sign propped against the window. It says, For Sale.
Gallagher runs to the next house along and bangs on the door. The owner, a peroxide-haired woman with fingertips stained yellow whom he recalls was a friend of Betty’s mother, opens it without smiling and without her usual slash of violent red lipstick.
‘Has the hotel closed down?’ he cries.
She tries to shut the door but he bungs his foot in the gap.
‘Where are they?’ he says.
She glares at him.
‘You might remember me,’ he continues. ‘It’s Joan, isn’t it? I was staying there.’
‘I don’t care who the bloody hell you are or what you want. Get off my doorstep!
‘I just want to know where they are… as a friend. I don’t work for a newspaper any more.’
Joan leans out and looks up and down the street, so close to him he can smell the carbolic soap on her hands.
‘Nice try sonny, but you’re not getting a word from me. Or any of us. And tell the others not to bother coming back either.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘We’ve made a pact – the whole village has – not to speak to you lot any more.’
‘I’m just looking for Betty. Or Mrs Broadbent.’
Joan turns grey.
‘What’s wrong? What happened?’ he says, his mouth dry.
Joan stares at him for a minute longer, her face still ghostly. Then she composes herself.
‘You call yourselves men but what you are is filthy animals, scrounging here at a time like this and trying to trick comments out of me.’
Drops of spit fly out of her mouth. One lands on his cheek.
‘Can’t you let her rest in peace, or is that too much to ask?’
‘Rest in peace?’ he croaks. ‘What are you talking about? Someone else has died?’
‘I’ve said enough.’
‘Look, I know her, she wrote to me,’ and he waves her letter. ‘You can tell me.’
‘Who wrote to you?’ says Joan, narrowing her eyes. ‘Who did you say you are again?’
‘John Gallagher. I’m a friend of Betty. Please, it’s important.’
‘Friend,’ she sneers.
‘I love her,’ he bursts.
Joan arches an eyebrow and looks him up and down, her mouth shrivelled. He can’t tell which of them is more stunned. He wishes he could hook the words and reel them back into his mouth. Joan shoves at the door but his foot still blocks it.
‘Don’t close it,’ he says. ‘Just tell me where she is and I’ll go. She needs my help. Please!’
‘The only one who can help her where she’s gone is the good Lord himself. Now get off my doorstep or I’ll call my Richard.’
His toe is stubbed out of the way and the door slams. He smacks the doorknocker with his balled-up fist.
‘What happened to her?’ he shouts through the letterbox. ‘She is safe, isn’t she?’
But the doors off the hall are shut and the house is silent, as though Joan had never been there at all.
Gallagher knocks on six more houses, ten more, on all twenty-three. No one is home, or they pretend not to be. The cobbler’s shop is shut up and so is the Lamb and Flagg. A sign on the door says, ‘Closed for mourning. Open tomorrow.’ He ambles to the cove but that is dead too. He drops to his knees.
An hour ebbs away. The sun sags and the sand chills. His knees have locked but he doesn’t try to move them, there is nowhere to go anyway. If he stares at the shore and concentrates hard enough, he can almost picture her standing beside him, just as she did on that July afternoon he bumped into her here.
* * *
She had been swinging a mesh bag of carrots and parsnips, and pacing the sand when he saw her. He had wanted to avoid her; the dance was still fresh in his mind and, though he had decided that any feelings he had for her had been one-sided, he had also promised himself that he would stay away from her. She was so young. He had turned to leave but she spotted him and half smiled. He nodded back and grudgingly, manners drew him to her.
Something strange had happened then, as he strode across the sand in her direction. She had stopped laughing. Her bag had stopped swinging too. Her feet had planted themselves in the sand and her back went so rigid, her posture almost mirrored his. He was puzzled. A bit of him had wanted to ask her why she had changed for him and what it was about him that had sucked the zest out of her too but before he could, she had said something about paddling – going for a dip, she called it – and her freer self was back, or almost back.
He had watched her paddle in the shallows and laugh as the waves bit her toes. He would have loved to have stood in the water with her, to have laughed too, but laughter never came easily to him. It sounded unnatural on his lips. Even his schoolmaster had once remarked that when John Gallagher emerged from the womb, he probably offered the midwife a brisk handshake instead of a cry. The other boys had laughed; he had envied them.
He was still rooted there when Betty returned from the shore. He was conscious that she would think him odd for standing so stiffly and for wearing his shoes on the shingle. In a funny way, her opinion of him made him jittery. She was so peculiar yet secure in her bubble of world but she was sharp too and, in her
head, more mature than even he. She made him laugh inwardly and often but she also made him think harder than anyone else ever had, and without even trying.
He had watched her struggle with those flimsy red sandals and let himself bend down to help. He had grazed her ankle with his thumb as he fastened the buckle and burned with shame at how it made him want her. She’s fifteen, he had scolded himself. But he had longed to remove the shoe again, and her dress, and run his fingers in her hair, and hold her there, on that shingle.
When both sandals were back on her feet, when she had refused his invitation for a daytrip and when she had skipped off across the sand, he had promised himself to never invite her anywhere again, certainly never to touch her. Father was right: he was a weak son, a weak man.
Gallagher unlaces his shoes. He pulls off his socks too. The sand is cold and filmy against the soles of his feet. He staggers to the shore, his knees still locked, and he paddles in the icy shallows, the same way she did. His feet sting with cold. He tries to laugh, the way she had, but it sounds pathetic; a defeated sort of roar.
Eventually, he makes his way back to the car and slumps over the steering wheel, unsure what to do next.
‘Where are you, my Betty?’ he whispers and brushes his fingers over her letter that still lies on the front seat next to him.
He knows it by heart – he had re-read it at every fuel stop and every traffic jam and red light on the drive here – but he looks at it again:
8 September 1956
Dear Mr Gallagher,
I desperately need your help. Mr Forbes is about to be sent to prison or worse, the noose, and I’m the only person who can help him. I told you before that I suspected him innocent, but I now know he absolutely is because I saw Miss Hollinghurst by the pond just after you left, the same afternoon she was killed there. She was with the man I believe is the real killer. You might remember him – his name is George Paxon. He’s the biscuit factory owner and the father of the boy (also called George) who mistook you for a police inspector at the dance. He is well respected in the villages and has always seemed a good and honest man, which makes it all the more confusing. I suspect they had a love affair that soured.