by Anita Waller
‘I do hope Pamela Farrar is alive, when we eventually track her down,’ Doris said. ‘Love for your children is unconditional, and she will want to know what happened to Tom. She was sixteen when she had him, so she’ll only be around sixty now. There’s every possibility she’s still alive, all we need to do is find her. Simple!’
Mouse laughed. ‘Okay, clever clogs. I’m finding no trace of her through any of the normal channels, and I don’t think this one is going to be as easy as we’re all assuming it will be. And what do you know of Robert Thompson?’
‘He carves mice.’ Kat spoke first.
‘Mice are his trademark.’ Doris followed.
Mouse frowned. ‘How come I didn’t know about him then? It’s my name.’
Doris laughed. ‘You need to watch more antiques programmes on television. Then you’d know about him.’
‘Well, Alice Small has a bread board of his. It was lovely.’
‘A discerning lady, then. Look him up online, you’ll be amazed at his stuff. It’s beautiful. And expensive.’
There was a knock at the kitchen door and a tall bearded man opened it and grinned at them. His salt and pepper hair showed him to be in his fifties, a big man with many lines on his face showing his proclivity to laugh a lot.
‘Afternoon, ladies,’ Danny McLoughlin said. ‘As promised, Kat, I’m here to give your lawn its first cut.’
Kat smiled. ‘Things have changed, Danny.’ She patted her stomach. ‘We have a brand new baby in the house, so it would be better if you used the mower when she wasn’t sleeping. Come in, I’ll sort out a rota with you. Thank you so much for this, the garden’s starting to look a bit of a mess.’
‘No worries,’ he said, and stepped inside. ‘I’ll get you in the diary. I suggest once every two weeks for the grass cutting and general tidy up – shall we say two hours maximum? We’ll negotiate any bigger jobs that might crop up.’
‘Perfect,’ Kat said. ‘Can you start tomorrow? I’ll make sure I put the baby in the lounge to sleep, you won’t disturb her then.’
Danny took out his diary. ‘Okay, I can do tomorrow afternoon. Is that good for you?’
‘It is. Thinking about it, I’ll maybe take Martha to my mum’s for the afternoon, so it won’t affect us. Doris and Beth will be working, I imagine, so won’t be here. Best bring a drink with you, though. This house is on lockdown at the moment, and I can’t hand new keys out on pain of death.’
‘No problem, Kat. I usually take a flask with me anyway. Anything I need to be aware of?’ A frown briefly crossed his face. The whole village knew of Leon Rowe’s activities, and had applauded when Brian King was sent down for the rest of his life.
‘Leon’s been back. We have panic buttons and locks that Houdini couldn’t fathom. We also have random police cars driving up and down, keeping an eye on us. Nothing to worry about, although if Leon is still in the area, I imagine they’ll worry him.’
Danny nodded. ‘Let’s hope he comes when I’ve got a spade in my hand.’ The deacon was a very popular lady in the area, and everybody had been upset by what she had been forced to go through. Rowe disappearing had caused uncertainty and more than a little fear in Eyam, but that had slowly settled down when he hadn’t resurfaced.
Now it seemed he had.
Danny closed his diary with two appointments made, and headed for the door. ‘Take care, Kat.’
‘Don’t worry, I will.’
The letter had a little heart drawn on the top. Kat read it for the second time with tears running down her face; her hormones were all over the place, aching for what the young sixteen-year-old had been forced to go through.
My darling boy, my Tommy,
I will always love you, and the pain I am feeling now is killing me. I cannot keep you, my parents cannot bear the shame. I haven’t told them who your father is, even though they have asked so many times, because I don’t know. I was attacked and beaten until I was unconscious, as I walked home from work.
I woke up in the hospital, and had to answer lots of questions but I couldn’t tell the police anything. I didn’t know the man who beat me. Four months later I found out I was pregnant.
I was sent to a mother and baby unit in Chesterfield before I started to show too much, and my parents told everybody I had gone to a cousin’s on the south coast to recuperate after the attack.
I had you, my darling son, and we were together for six weeks, then they took you one day.
I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye, and they made me write you a letter the next day before sending me home to my parents. They never saw you.
But I did, and I pray you will go to a good home, where they will love you as much as I do.
My love, my life, my precious child, my Tommy.
Always know it was not my wish that you be adopted. You are mine and always will be.
Mummy
Xxxx
Beth put her arm around Kat’s shoulders and held her tightly. ‘Hey, come on. Maybe you shouldn’t be involved in this case, it’s a little close to home at the moment, isn’t it?’
‘It’s heartbreaking.’
‘They were such narrow-minded times,’ Doris joined in. ‘I remember them well.’
‘Lots of babies were adopted then?’ Mouse spoke with concern.
‘Definitely, although things were starting to change in the seventies, when Tommy was born. I suspect Pamela’s parents couldn’t handle it because she had been raped. Maybe it would have been different for her if this was a child born of a love relationship and not a brutal one. If babies were conceived in the seventies, the parents of the baby tended to marry. It began to change in the eighties and nineties; marriage lost its popularity, women became more independent and brought babies up on their own, but of course the era that was really to blame for everything was the sixties.’ Doris sat back with a smile on her face.
‘They were good then, the sixties?’ Mouse asked. ‘You enjoyed them?’
‘Mouse, I lived them. Free love, drugs, you name it, it went on. The country had put World War Two behind it, and the post-war babies became teenagers. We thought we ruled the world. No, we knew we ruled the world. Wonderful, amazing years. We didn’t have freedom from parental authority, so we took it. It was the best time of my life, and remember we didn’t have technology, we had music, glorious music that can’t be matched today.’
Kat laughed. ‘Stop it, Nan, you’re making me jealous. Would you go back to those times, give up your technological expertise, your phone, your iPad?’
‘In a heartbeat. I met my Harry in 1964 when I was just fourteen, and we married five years later. We danced the sixties away. The Beatles, the Stones, all the Liverpool groups, Rod Stewart, unbelievable music. And it’s all still played today.’
‘It wasn’t all about music though, surely?’ Mouse asked.
‘’Course it was. It’s what we had. By the mid seventies we were starting to grow up, having families, colour televisions, it was a period of massive change. Which is why it’s so strange that Pamela was forced into giving up her baby. Times were becoming much more liberal, but clearly not liberal enough for this young woman’s parents.’
Kat stood. ‘I hear a baby.’ She headed upstairs, and they could hear her talking to Martha, via the baby monitor. She returned, cradling the baby in her arms.
‘Guess it’s feeding time. I’ll make her a bottle and then she can sleep in her pram.’
Half an hour later they were all rereading everything in the files. Pamela Farrar’s birth certificate showed that she had been born on the fifth of January 1960 in Grindleford, and as Doris filled them in more and more about life in the sixties and seventies, it became clear that although the bigger towns and cities embraced the new freedoms afforded by the end of the war, the small villages retained their insular complexities. People began to move out to the cities where factories needed workers to rebuild the destruction caused by the war, leaving a hard core of villagers to manage their lives, reluctant t
o let the old ideas go.
And it seemed that Pamela Farrar had paid the price for the old-fashioned values of her parents.
Thomas Edward Farrar was born on the twenty-third of April 1976 in Chesterfield, and subsequently adopted on the seventh of June 1976 at Renishaw Magistrates Court. Margot and James Carpenter of Baslow, Derbyshire, were the adoptive parents, and until a couple of days prior, that was the end of the trail as far as the Connection Detective Agency was concerned.
They finished reading everything, then sat back and looked at each other.
‘So,’ Kat began, ‘the adoption pack told us very little. No father, but we know why anyway, and the last known place of residence for Pamela was Grindleford. We have an address there, but I’m presuming you’ve already checked this out online, Mouse?’
‘Yes, a Mr and Mrs Palmer live there now. However, next door at twelve Haddon Row is an elderly lady by the name of Joyce Graham who has lived there all her life. She’s eighty, so I don’t want to just turn up on her doorstep. I think we need to ring her and make an appointment. I’m sure she’ll know the family. She may have some snippets she can pass on to us.’
Doris made a note. ‘I’ll ring her if that becomes necessary. At eighty, I don’t really want to trouble her. Anything else we’ve gleaned from this first foray into it?’
‘I think Alice Small loved Tom very much, but didn’t rate Judy at all.’ Mouse held her hand to her lips. ‘Oops, bear with me a minute.’ She stood and headed outside. They heard the slam of the car door, and she returned carrying a white carrier bag. She handed it to Kat.
‘This is from Alice. She apparently knows you, you take the service at her church occasionally, and she thinks you’re lovely. It’s something for Martha.’
Kat took the bag, and pulled out a pink-wrapped parcel. She carefully opened it to reveal an exquisite crocheted white coat and hat. ‘Oh my word. I must ring her. This is stunning, and I’m going to dress Martha in it when I take her to Mum’s tomorrow.’
Mouse put the paperwork back into the individual folders, and called a halt to work for the day.
‘I may go on the computer later,’ she said, ‘but officially we’re closed. Kat, get your feet up, get some rest. And let’s make sure all these doors are multi-locked and alarms primed.’
‘I’ll find us something to eat,’ Doris said. ‘Us working girls need to keep our strength up. But, Kat, please try to remember you’re on maternity leave.’
5
‘Okay, I’m off now,’ Kat said. ‘It was good the midwife visit being early today, so I’m heading to Mum’s for lunch. You two can stop babysitting me for a couple of hours, and go to work.’
She strapped Martha into her baby seat. ‘I think I’ve got everything, but it’s like packing to go on holiday. I’ll be back around five, so you don’t need to be on tenterhooks thinking I’m on my own.’
Mouse looked up. ‘Text me when you get to your mum’s house. No pissing about, Kat. If you don’t text we’ll come over and find you. Leon can track you on the road just as easily as he can invade your space here.’
‘I know. If I’ve not texted in fifteen minutes, you text me. I’m still a bit woolly headed, I might forget.’
She didn’t forget, and ten minutes after the reassurance that she was alive and well and drinking tea, Mouse and Doris drove down through the village to the office. On their journey they had passed Danny McLoughlin heading in the opposite direction towards Kat’s house, his hand waving at them through his open car window.
‘It’ll be good to get out and sit in the garden again,’ Doris said. ‘I’m always so relieved when winter’s over and we get flowers once more.’
‘He did a cracking job of tidying the garden to get it through the cold months,’ Mouse said. ‘I’m glad Kat’s asked him to come back. I don’t mind pottering, but I’m not into cutting lawns and stuff.’
She parked outside the shop, and pulled on the handbrake. ‘You go in, Nan. I just need to go to the cash machine. There’s no money in my purse, I feel as though I’ve been mugged.’
Mouse waited until Doris opened the shutter and door, then crossed the road towards the small village supermarket, and its ATM.
The sun was in her eyes and at first she didn’t notice the woman slumped on the floor by the side of the machine, the little boy next to her trying to soothe her, unsuccessfully. She was crying harshly, and trying to control it, equally unsuccessfully.
Mouse dropped her purse back into her bag and ran to the woman. ‘Hey, come on. Are you hurt?’
She shook her head, clearly unable to speak for the moment.
‘Then let me help you up.’ Mouse’s arms went around her, and the woman struggled to her feet.
Tissues appeared from Mouse’s bag as if by magic, and she handed them to the woman, who was trying desperately to stifle the sobs. Her little boy was staring up at his mum, a scared look fixed on his face.
‘Has someone attacked you?’ Mouse probed gently.
‘No, they took my money.’
‘Look, Mrs…?’
‘Roy. Keeley Roy. And this is my son, Henry.’
‘Okay, Keeley, my name’s Beth Walters, and I co-own Connection over there.’ She pointed to the shop. ‘Will you and Henry come across with me, let me get you a drink, and tell me what happened?’
She hesitated for a moment and then nodded. ‘Henry hold my hand. We’re going to cross the road.’
‘Let me just get some money,’ Mouse said, ‘and we’ll get over there.’
She quickly made her withdrawal and they walked over to where Doris had already switched on the kettle and coffeemaker. She had been watching the scene play out, conscious that Leon Rowe could be anywhere, and for as long as that was the case, her granddaughter needed to be in her sights. The scar from the last bullet Mouse had taken was still very clearly visible, and Doris was frightened to death there might be a second one on its way. Leon Rowe was a cold-blooded killer.
As the three approached the shop, she opened the door.
‘Nan, this is Keeley and Henry. We’ve come for a drink. Keeley’s had a bit of a shock.’
‘Kettle and coffeemaker already underway,’ Doris said. ‘Milk or cordial, Henry?’
‘Milk, please,’ the little boy said with a shy smile, clearly overawed by being in a building he’d never been in before.
‘Nice manners. A credit to you, Keeley. Would you like tea or coffee?’
‘Tea, please, milk no sugar.’ She took a great heaving sigh, finally losing the emotion that had followed the realisation of the robbery.
‘Okay. You go in Beth’s office, and Henry and I will get to know each other in here. We can draw some pictures. I’ll take care of him,’ she said to the haggard-looking young woman. ‘Go and talk to Beth.’
It wasn’t only Doris who had scrutinised the developing scene from beginning to end. Leon had seen Beth’s large car pull up, and watched both her and Doris climb out. No Kat.
It seemed that Kat could have been left at home to rest; maybe she had even stopped work now until the birth, which couldn’t be far away.
He stared intensely as he saw Beth help up the woman, and briefly wondered why she was on the floor in the first place. His eyes must have been so firmly fixed on Connection that he hadn’t seen what had happened prior to Doris and Beth’s arrival.
The two women and the little boy crossed the road and went into the shop that had been the object of Leon’s surveillance, and his decision was made. He was going to head up the back hidden path, following the brook, and enter his old home by the garden. If he stayed behind the summer house… He didn’t want Kat to see him, he just wanted to see her, to confirm that his eyes hadn’t deceived him when he saw her rounded shape.
On such a beautiful afternoon she was bound to be pottering around the garden; he would look and come away. He was prepared to play the long game until he could decide what to do about the child.
He pulled his hood up and forward so t
hat most of his face was hidden. Letting himself out of the side door, supposedly sealed and padlocked by the police but with a padlock that was so easy to break, Leon closed the door and slipped the huge lock back on, making it look as though it was still secured.
The early May sunshine was warm, but hadn’t yet begun to warm the soil, and digging around the roses in the rose bed was proving to be hard work. Danny stood upright, and wiped the sweat from his brow. He stabbed the fork into the previously dug earth, and headed up to sit on the patio for two minutes.
He sat down and pulled his flask towards him. It was silent, not even a bird seemed to be singing. He poured out his coffee and tentatively sipped at it. He enjoyed working in this garden; it wasn’t hard work as it had always been well maintained, but since Kat had announced her pregnancy, he had been doing the work for her.
This was his first visit of the new gardening season, and already it was looking lovely with spring flowers in evidence. He took out a cigarette, and sat quietly, almost dozing in the unexpected warmth of the sun.
And then there was a noise. He looked down towards the summer house, and Tibby sauntered out, then wandered up onto the lawned area before lying smoothly down in the warmth of the sun.
He smiled; he liked cats, and this one was extra friendly, always twining himself around his feet, eager to be with him.
He stood and moved back towards the rose bed. Another half hour and he would be done. He saw the figure, hood obscuring its face, almost at the same time as the figure saw him. Whoever that bugger was, he’d no place being behind Kat’s summer house, and he was going to make sure he knew it.
‘Oy! Dickhead! What do you think you’re doing? Go on, get out of it, on your way.’
The figure turned at his shout, paused for a moment as if in thought, and then scrambled back down towards the brook path, intent on getting away. A tall climbing rose snagged on his hood, and it fell from his face, such an instantly recognisable face in Eyam. Posters were all over the place still, stuck on every available hoarding, keeping the man in the forefront of everybody’s mind.