The visitor was wearing a dark brown suit made of cheap material. On her feet, a pair of scuffed sandals matched the outfit and a brittle-looking straw hat topped it off. Even in the half-light it was clear the woman had been crying.
‘You’ve got to help me, doctor,’ she said, twisting a white cotton handkerchief clumsily between her fingers.
‘Oh. I’m not …’ Mirabelle’s voice trailed as the woman pushed past her into the hallway, shoulders heaving.
‘Please,’ she gasped. ‘I’m desperate.’
‘What is it?’
‘We’ve got six already and I can’t even manage that.’
Mirabelle glanced at the thin gold band around the fourth finger of the woman’s hand.
‘They don’t do that here, surely. Not at home.’ The words slipped from her lips as she remembered the last few days in snippets – the blood on the side of the lavatory in the children’s home, the clouds of clary sage and pennyroyal in the back garden, Frida’s mother’s insistence that her daughter had worked the ‘woman’s ward’ and not with children, and then, Nurse Uma disappearing into the back of the blue Jaguar, unwilling but doing her duty – a duty she couldn’t bear.
The woman began to beg. ‘I’ll go anywhere, doctor,’ she said. ‘I have money.’ She thrust her hand into her bag and pulled out two crumpled five-pound notes – a fortune for someone like her, someone whose clothes were so cheap and worn. ‘I can get more.’
‘Sundays,’ Mirabelle realised. ‘At the children’s convalescent home.’
Suddenly it made sense. Sister Taylor’s distress and Father Grogan’s fury. The nurses had been giving women abortions. The mob had got involved – they’d have their own uses for that kind of procedure. She wondered what Jinty did about taking care of herself. Girls like Jinty. Girls like Mary Needle, she realised, making the connection.
‘Thank you,’ she said to the woman, touching her arm lightly.
‘But where do I go, doctor? Where?’
‘I’m sorry for your trouble,’ Mirabelle said. ‘But they’re not here any more. They went away.’
The woman gasped, clearly horrified. ‘You’re not the doctor then?’
‘No.’
‘Oh God. Are you with the police?’
‘No.’
Mirabelle tried to sound reassuring but, having merely conjured up the idea of police involvement, the woman panicked. She clutched her handbag to her chest and began to back away. Mirabelle wished Vesta was here – she was much better at dealing with people who were upset.
‘Look,’ said Mirabelle, ‘perhaps …’
‘Don’t worry. I’m sorry to have troubled you,’ the woman gulped, and disappeared back through the front door.
Mirabelle sank on to the chair in the hallway. She’d been such a fool. So naïve. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know such things went on. The woman’s face seemed imprinted on her mind’s eye and she couldn’t think straight. She got to her feet and stumbled back into the fresh air. Outside she checked left and right but the woman was gone – Mirabelle couldn’t even say in which direction she’d gone. At least now it began to hang together. The nurses offered their services on a Sunday – the day Father Grogan didn’t come to the home, when the children were out all morning at church. But Sister Taylor hadn’t known. When she found out she fetched the father. The nurses couldn’t risk being uncovered. They called in the mob – the men with the brown hats for whom they were probably working, at least some of the time. Father Grogan was poisoned and who knew what had happened to poor Sister Taylor? It was, she supposed, possible the sister was still alive. Mirabelle banged the front door of Uma’s house closed and turned towards town.
She knew she had been lucky – both Jack and McGregor had been the kind of men who took precautions. But there were plenty of women in the service who had been caught short – shotgun weddings or rushed adoptions – right through the war. Women disappearing for months on a ‘rest cure’ or ‘compassionate leave’. One girl Mirabelle knew had slipped on a ring, moved away, and just pretended that her husband had been killed in the fighting. She wanted to keep the child. Why not? There were so many more important things during wartime – the truth was she’d never given more than a passing thought to the absences. They were just another set of casualties. Why, if those women had been able to take the train to Brighton and get help – real, medical help – it would have been perfect. She remembered reading somewhere about hot baths, horse riding, raspberry-leaf tea with strong spirits – that’s how you got rid of it. But she knew that wasn’t the only way. She hoped the woman who had come to Uma’s front door didn’t harm herself, because that was the alternative. Mirabelle felt her whole body tighten. The back room in the children’s home and that bed with the tiling behind it made sense now. However awful, it seemed so much more civilised than the half-blind, haphazard, desperate panic of trying to get rid of what had happened.
Closer to the front, the breeze off the sea was chill. Mirabelle shivered. Somewhere far off there was the sound of church bells – half past the hour – nine, or was it ten?
So, she thought, if the mob were leaving town tonight – rats off a sinking ship as McGregor closed in, they would try to take as much as they could with them. They’d failed with Jinty. Betty Brownlee would try to warn Rene and the others. Mirabelle just hoped Uma and Ellen had got away. Poor Uma – it had been too much for her. And that made sense now too. Mirabelle remembered her fierce assertion about wanting to help people. That’s what she had been doing, of course, and Father Grogan had died for it. ‘Disposal,’ Mirabelle whispered under her breath. Of course. What did you do with the body of a prostitute, or just some poor woman like the one at the door? What did you do when it went wrong?
Striding out, she realised how far she’d come. Passing Lali’s bench, dripping in the rain, she kept walking. It was strange; there hadn’t been a single beat bobby all the way along the front – not for over a mile. She cut up towards the home. Her clothes were drenched now but she ignored the discomfort, instead slipping her lock picks out of her handbag and smoothly opening the gate at the cricket ground. There would be no policeman tonight at Sister Taylor’s bedsit to oversee her. There were no policemen anywhere because there were bigger fish to fry – all hands on deck.
Across the cricket pitch, the roller was where she’d left it next to the wall and she slipped over the top easily – it was always easier when you’d done it before. The lights at the back of the home were out and the curtains drawn upstairs. Mirabelle switched on her torch. The beam seemed fragile. The batteries must be fading. She hurried towards the compost heap on the other side of the lawn. This was what Uma had been doing, she realised – disposing of the detritus. The girl’s anger at the cats was proof of a sort, though she couldn’t take that to McGregor. She looked around for something to dig with.
Frida’s mother had assumed Mirabelle hadn’t seen a field hospital when they had spoken. That wasn’t true. It had only been for a few hours, but it had been awful. She remembered feeling guilty that she was glad to get away. Some people were superstitious about white and red together after the war. They said it reminded them of blood on bandages. To Mirabelle, it was blood in soil that was more horrifying – the smell of it. Limbs left behind. As she poked at the compost heap she smelled it again – the stench of human decay. The thin light from her torch seemed blue but she could just about make out thick clots of blood and something else. Something more terrible and unidentifiable and sad. She put her hand over her mouth and tried not to sob. The torch faded to a thin yellow trickle.
It was distress that stopped her seeing Frida approach. The first she knew was a hand on her arm, clamped insistently in place. A trickle of cold rain slid down Mirabelle’s back. Her hair was soaking.
‘What are you doing here?’ the nurse said as she pulled Mirabelle away.
Mirabelle turned. She snatched her arm free of Frida’s solid grip. ‘I know what you’ve been up to. What’s been going
on.’
‘Well, that’s a shame,’ said Frida, ‘I wondered if you’d be on our side.’
‘Murdering people?’
‘It’s not murder. The women are desperate, most of them.’
‘I mean Father Grogan.’
‘There was nothing for it. The priest wouldn’t agree to just taking the money again. We couldn’t pay him off.’
‘Money?’
‘Oh yes. He’d had five hundred pounds only a couple of months before. It practically cleaned us out – we were trying to do the right thing, you see. He and Rita Taylor had found out. We promised both of them we’d stop, but of course we couldn’t. They weren’t supposed to find out and then Rita copped it – a smear of blood in the toilet and she knew.’
The roof, thought Mirabelle. The church roof. The father must have been beside himself making that decision. She remembered the phrase he’d written in his notebook. Crooked logs make straight fires. Yes, and taking money, explained why he had come to deal with the matter himself, rather than just contacting the police. It explained why Sister Taylor had gone to him. They had made some kind of pact and they thought they could sort it out themselves.
‘Father Grogan spoke German.’
Frida sounded surprised. ‘A little. He had taken confession in a prisoner-of-war camp during the war. How did you know about that?’
Mirabelle ignored the question. ‘What about Mary Needle?’
The nurse’s head cocked to the side. ‘You’re well informed. Poor girl. It was a haemorrhage. There was nothing any of us could do.’
‘If there’d been a doctor present …’
The nurse paused, almost smiling. Her lips moved outwards and her eyes took on a knowing expression. ‘Ah, you don’t know that, then. Not so clever, after all. Our little Uma is a doctor. Trained in India. She took the Hippocratic oath and everything.’
‘And you?’
‘Nurses don’t take the Hippocratic oath. We take the Nightingale pledge – to stay pure. To help. The doctor’s promise – that’s the bloody problem.’
‘What do you mean?’
Frida sighed. ‘They promise not to give abortive care. But it’s nonsense. Abortive care is exactly what the patients need. If they don’t get it, they just get rid of the baby themselves and that’s a bloody mess. If you’re looking for dead bodies that’s a good place to start. At the start we did it just for the locals. Some pennyroyal and mugwort and the babies bled away easy. The women were desperate, you know. Then Uma started taking later-stage pregnancies. D and C. It’s a small procedure. Uma and her girlfriend had a clinic in India. They’d been doing the same but they got caught. Nobody anywhere in the damn world wants women to be allowed to take the decision of whether they do or don’t want a child. Me – I’d been working up north in a women’s hospital during the war. We helped girls out if they needed it. Anyway, when they were found out in India, Uma took responsibility for what had been going on. Ellen kept her doctor’s qualification but Uma was struck off. She and Ellen got away – she’d have gone to jail otherwise. Uma became a nurse – she did a qualification here, you see, under Ellen’s name. I don’t suppose a woman like you would understand.’ Frida tugged Mirabelle’s arm, pulling her towards the back door of the home.
‘But it’s dangerous,’ Mirabelle held her ground. ‘It’s a dangerous thing to do.’
Frida rounded. Even in the dark, Mirabelle could see her eyes flash. ‘Yes it is. Just like childbirth is dangerous. Look, these women deserved better. It’s all right for people like you – women with education! Women brought up properly. Fancy clothes and nice manners. But everyone deserves a choice, and we give it to our patients – whether they come from Patcham or Rottingdean or wherever. Whether they’re on their first child or their tenth. Whether they’re married or not. Whether they wanted it or whether they were raped. And it was all fine until the men got involved. They heard about us and started bringing down women from London. The poor things hardly knew what was happening. They’d arrive exhausted or drugged up or just being told it was an away day. A jolly! Can you imagine? Some of them were OK with it, but for those who weren’t, there was nothing we could do. They had us. They could turn us all in – and that would mean jail for me and Uma and Berenice. So we decided we’d do their damn jobs, we’d take the money, and we’d use it to get what we wanted.’
‘You did it for money?’
‘Not for us. Money to help the kids. To help local women. To educate them. You’d think it hadn’t been going on since the beginning of time. Lots of women come to us and they know hardly anything. These are married women. They’ve got kids. But they don’t know what they can and can’t do. It’s medieval.’
‘And if it went wrong, Gerry Bone got rid of the body.’
‘Yes.’ Frida sounded furious. She tugged Mirabelle’s arm, but whether on instinct or by training, Mirabelle broke away. The advice was always to get off as quickly as you could – Jinty had taken it and so would she. She dropped the torch and set off, making for the back wall where she began to scramble up the brickwork. Frida followed, trying to pull her down. Mirabelle kicked, her heel catching the nurse’s cheek, slashing the skin. Frida let out a cry. She grabbed Mirabelle’s calf and pulled hard and Mirabelle fell on to the lawn on top of the nurse. Her leg ached. There would be a bruise, she thought, but she turned immediately and tried once more to climb over the wall. ‘They’re leaving town – the men are leaving town,’ she gasped. ‘Don’t you know? The police are on to them. There’s no need for this.’
Frida gripped the skirt of Mirabelle’s dress. The material ripped as Mirabelle pulled away and managed to pull herself over the top, finding her feet on the grass roller on the other side. She turned back. Blood was dripping down the nurse’s cheek.
‘It’s time to stop, Frida,’ she said. ‘The men are going. They’re probably gone by now. But the police are on to something with Mary Needle. I think Uma and Ellen have left.’
Frida put her hand to the wound.
‘Fuck you,’ she said, ‘with your fancy clothes. You never have to worry about anything.’
Mirabelle stared over the wall, taken aback. Frida, she realised, was trapped. She’d lost her husband, she’d been bullied into something she didn’t want to do, and she couldn’t leave because of her mother. If the police tracked her down, she’d be here. ‘I’ll speak to the superintendent,’ Mirabelle said. ‘I know him.’
‘Fancy friends too.’
‘If he knows, I’ll urge clemency. And, for the record, I do know what it is to worry.’
With that, Mirabelle climbed down on to the cricket pitch and hurried towards the gate. It seemed odd, when she glanced over her shoulder, that Frida hadn’t followed.
Chapter Thirty
A crime is a matter of law
It was almost eleven by the time Mirabelle got to Bartholomew Square. The station was always open twenty-four hours a day, but at this time of night there were usually only a couple of sullen men charged with being drunk and disorderly in the system, even on a Friday. By ten the front desk generally had a sleepy, seaside air, no more than mild misdemeanours being expected – a couple of drunken brawls. Tonight every light in the place was on, there were four Marias parked outside and the reception area was buzzing. Sergeant Belton stood behind the desk like a conductor poised before his audience.
‘Good evening Miss Bevan,’ he said, more kindly than she might have expected. ‘Are you all right?’
Mirabelle looked down at the long rip in her skirt. Now she was in the light she could see her hands were dirty and that a smear of compost ran up her leg, which, more importantly, was aching where she had fallen and sported a long, blood-flecked graze. She reeled a little but remained upright. A small puddle of water was gathering at her feet.
‘I’ll be fine, thank you,’ she said.
A gale of laughter emanated from the back office. Belton closed the door.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’
/> ‘I need to speak to Superintendent McGregor.’
The sergeant had one of those faces that seldom showed any expression and now was no different. ‘The superintendent is busy,’ he said.
‘It’s personal,’ Mirabelle lied, thinking on her feet. Belton was often difficult but she had to find a way in. There was no way forward, she thought, without some help from McGregor – she didn’t want to report what had been going on to anybody else, but he needed to know what she knew, if he didn’t already. She gave a weak smile. ‘As you can see I have got into a spot of bother. Actually, I feel a little shaky.’
She tried to look vulnerable. Belton thought for a moment, then he bought it.
‘Would you like me to get one of the WPCs to help you clean up?’ he offered.
‘Yes please,’ she said. ‘That would be very kind.’
‘I’ll fetch you a towel.’
Mirabelle didn’t know the officer Belton finally managed to track down ten minutes later. She was a tidy, faun-haired woman with freckles, a toothy grin and a small first-aid kit. She led Mirabelle to the female toilet, which had only been installed a couple of years before, carved out of two storage cupboards when it became apparent that the first WPCs at the station required their own amenities. The room was tucked behind reception and it was tiny. There wasn’t enough space for two people, but the two of them got in somehow, rammed between the sink and the toilet bowl. The WPC’s wide flannel skirt seemed to fold itself round the rim. Having dried herself as much as she could, Mirabelle wrapped her hair in the towel. At least it stopped it dripping.
‘Busy night,’ she said as she turned on the hot tap and a trickle of tepid water flowed half-heartedly into the sink.
‘They told me not to tell you anything,’ the WPC said, ‘so there’s no point trying.’
‘You sound as if you’re from London.’
‘Yes. I’ve been seconded.’
‘For the operation, you mean?’
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