2003 - A Jarful of Angels (31 page)

Will reached the bridge and stood resting against the parapet waiting for his breathing to slow down. The sun was beginning to rise. Carmel Chapel was washed with a soft pink light. Birds began to sing in the grounds of the Big House.

He slipped in through the gates. Mervyn Prosser had already begun his work. The thick jungle of grass had been hacked away. The statues were all gone. The ground beneath where they had lain for so many years was bare in contrast to the verdant green grass. A concrete mixer stood close to the boarded-up French windows.

He walked swiftly across the garden, his heart beating fast, hoping that Mervyn hadn’t uncovered it first. He knew now that while he’d sat in this garden one hot afternoon drinking tea with Agnes Medlicott, not ten yards away the boy had been hidden.

He found the privet hedge. He guessed it had been planted sometime after the war, to hide the door, and the rockery had been built to cover the unsightly corrugated iron of the air-raid shelter.

He had to breathe in to squeeze behind the privet hedge. His heart beat painfully and he stood and looked at the door for a long time, unsure now whether he wanted to know what he would find on the other side of the door.

Then, he took the bunch of keys from his pocket. He’d kept them from his days on the force; skeleton keys that had never failed to open a multitude of locks. He tried three of them in the rusty lock with no luck. The fourth key turned stiffly and the lock clicked.

He tried unsuccessfully to steady his breathing.

The door opened with the minimum of force. He took a deep breath of cool air before he stepped into the blackness of the shelter.

The air inside was fetid. He covered his nose with his hand. For a few moments he allowed his eyes time to adjust to the darkness which was almost absolute, only a weak shaft of daylight penetrated a foot or so in front of him. With faltering hands he took out his torch and switched it on.

The shelter was filled with cobwebs, curtains of cobwebs from ceiling to floor. He pulled them away in handfuls. The torchlight picked out the bright eyes of a rat. The rat surveyed him for a second and then scurried away.

In one corner lay the rusty frame of a camp bed, the canvas rotted away. A few scattered tins lay in a pile, corroded with rust. A heap of pop bottles. Two rusty candlesticks.

This was where Lawrence Bevan had spent his last hours. Dear God! And he had sat not ten feet away drinking tea with Agnes Medlicott!

There was no sign, as he’d imagined and dreaded of the remains of Lawrence Bevan. No small skeleton among the dusty debris in the shelter.

Then he saw the box. A small metal box covered in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. He stooped forward, picked it up and stepped back out into the fresh morning air, locked the door and crossed the gardens. Gardens lit now with a watery light. A magpie eyed him malevolently and screeched from the chimney top of the house and a cold wind brought a salty whiff of the faraway sea.

As soon as the town came to life he hurried out into the town and bought a tape measure. Coming back to his room at the Firkin, he noticed the sunlight, which slanted through the window and fell in a pool of light at the statue’s feet.

Ekaterina Velasco Olivares

He looked at the left foot of the statue. It was whole. The right one had been chipped at some time. He pulled out the tape measure and measured the left foot across the base of the toes. Eleven centimetres.

He measured the right foot. Eleven centimetres to where it was chipped. It still had five toes, the sixth toe had been broken away.

Ekaterina Velasco Olivares had six toes on her right foot!

He found one of his old notebooks and turned the pages carefully.

There!

Thus…successive generations of human beings may have an excessive number…or a deficiency of fingers and toes.

Fatty Bevan had underlined the words carefully and in the margin he had written: MEASURE BOTH CATS FEET.

Now he knew what had been troubling him. He remembered Iffy Meredith stepping into her daps in the kitchen of the old house in Inkerman Terrace. Her bare brown feet on the linoleum, and one extra toe on her right foot!

The boy had known the truth, had uncovered a closely guarded secret.

Other thoughts raced through Will’s mind: the old Italian reading the book behind the counter of the café; Laurie Lee’s journey down through Spain.

Fatty Bevan had worked it out for himself but had someone wanted to stop him from letting the secret out? Someone who had kept him, against his will, locked in an old air-raid shelter. And then what had happened? He couldn’t bear to contemplate it.

Ideas were coming fast and Will hardly dared pause for fear of losing the train of his thoughts. He scribbled down a few notes, then he visited the town library where he took down the
Yellow Pages
directory from the reference section and flipped through it.

Please God, let it still exist. His heart leapt when he saw the name in black print. He wrote down the address and telephone number, and then rang a cab from the telephone booth in the entrance lobby.

Will walked up the gravel driveway, and stood before the enormous oak door and tugged the bell pull.

A grille in the door opened and dark eyes scrutinised him.

“Will Sloane,” he said.

“Ah. Sister Immaculata is expecting you.”

Sister Immaculata, an ancient-looking nun, sat behind a large table in a bare room, the white wall behind her punctuated only by a stark crucifix, as black as gangrene.

“How may I help you, Mr Sloane?”

“Perhaps you can’t. Sister. I’m trying to trace an ex-pupil of yours, but she was here a very long time ago.”

“Well, the only good thing about old age, Mr Sloane, is the improvement of long-term memory. Try me.”

Will could barely contain his impatience as Sister Immaculata turned the pages of a huge black book the size of an old family Bible.

“Here we are,” she said and beamed up at Will.

He closed his eyes as she spoke.

“Elizabeth Gwendoline Meredith. She won a place here because she was the most outstanding student in her primary school.”

Will’s heart began to race.

“So she was a pupil here?”

“No,” said the old nun.

“But you said – ”

“She was due to start here. She was an orphan, and was going to come here full time. Some of our pupils stay here all the time, we make special provision during the holidays. Her grandparents, who had brought her up, had both recently died.”

“So what happened?”

“She’d been fitted out with the uniform but she never arrived.”

“What?”

“Don’t look so alarmed.”

“But she didn’t arrive. Did she have an accident?”

“No. It says here that there was a last-minute telephone call from someone, a foreign relative of hers. There was a change of plan. She went abroad to live. Her suitcase had already arrived, but we never actually met Elizabeth Meredith.”

Will’s head swam.

Mervyn Prosser had seen Iffy Meredith in her uniform down by the docks talking to a boy. Someone had rung the school to say there was a change of plan! This school was miles from the docks.

“Thank you, Sister,”he said.

“Mr Sloane, do you feel all right? You’ve gone very pale. Can I get you something?”

“No, really. Thank you for the information.”

“There’s just one more thing, Mr Sloane, that might be of help.”

Sister Immaculata rang a small brass handbell that was on her desk and, as though by magic, a young nun appeared in the doorway almost immediately. Sister Immaculata stood up and spoke quietly to her and the young sister scurried away.

Rain had begun to fall as the enormous oak door of St Martha’s Convent closed quietly behind Will Sloane.

“May God bless you, Mr Sloane,” Sister Immaculata called out through the grille.

“He just did, Sister.”

He walked slowly away down the drive. Beneath his feet the gravel crunched as though he was treading on ancient bones. Clutched tightly to his hammering chest was the battered suitcase that Sister Immaculata had given him.