Rosie (10 page)

Ernie hadn’t met Sergeant Headly more than three or four times before, but he knew he had a reputation for being highly intelligent and intuitive. Ernie was a bit puzzled now he’d seen him in action. On the way over here he’d given him the impression that this was a very serious inquiry, yet the minute they got in the door of the Parker place, he’d seemed entirely on Cole’s side, chatting as if it was just a social call. When he finally got around to raising the point about suspected cruelty to Alan, and asked why Cole hadn’t reported the two women missing, he’d even sounded embarrassed. Ernie had expected that a senior officer would be much tougher.

‘I think the man’s a –’ Headly paused mid-sentence at a rustle from the back of the car. Both men jerked their heads round.

‘Well I never,’ Headly exclaimed, as he glimpsed Alan crouching down behind the front seats. He pulled over to the side of the road immediately, and leaned over the seat. ‘What on earth are you doing in here, sonny?’

‘Rosie told me to do it,’ Alan squeaked. ‘She said I was to hide in here and tell you things.’

‘A police car is no place for pranks,’ Ernie said in the pompous voice he always kept for small bad boys. He might have cuffed him round the ear too, but before he could move, Headly got out of the car, pulled his seat forward and held out his arms to the boy.

Sergeant Ronald Headly was a family man with five children ranging from fifteen down to three. In over twenty years in the force he’d seen countless frightened children, but he didn’t remember ever having been quite so moved as he was by this small boy’s fear.

Alan cringed back into the car, arms held up to protect his head from the expected blows. His white face was taut with terror and he was quivering.

‘Its okay, sonny,’ Headly reassured him. ‘I’m not cross with you and I don’t smack little children. Come on out a minute.’

Alan moved only slightly, but enough for Headly to see he had a big, dark stain on his grey flannel shorts, and urine was dripping down his skinny legs.

‘Don’t worry about your trousers,’ Headly said. ‘We’ll find something for you down at the station. You are a good boy to do what your sister told you. So come on out here and tell me all about it.’

When Thomas Farley had called in at the police station in Bridgwater almost three weeks earlier and told Headly the story about his sister and her child, the Sergeant’s first reaction was that it wasn’t a police matter, but something social workers could deal with.

During the war a great many young women had come from the big cities to the area for one reason or another. Some of these women had got themselves into trouble and in a few cases they had vanished leaving the baby behind them. As far as Headly could see the only thing separating Heather from these other women was that she hadn’t abandoned the child in a church, field, or shop, but left him with his father.

But there was something very upright and straightforward about Farley. He had an exemplary war record. Headly felt he owed the man a full report.

‘Let’s slip these off,’ Headly said, unbuttoning the boy’s trousers for him there by the side of the road. ‘I expect your shirt will keep you decent.’

As Headly removed the wet shorts and underpants, he saw tell-tale marks of an old beating across the boy’s bony buttocks. He lifted Alan’s shirt and saw that his back was criss-crossed with thick brown scars, probably at least a couple of weeks old now and therefore healing over. But whoever gave him the beating had broken the skin at the time.

‘Who beat you, Alan?’ Headly tried to keep his voice light, even though he was consumed with a fierce anger.

‘My dad.’ Alan’s eyes filled with tears and spilled over. ‘Rosie said I was to tell you so he couldn’t do it again.’

Headly picked him up and held him tightly to his chest. He looked hard at Nutting who was still sitting in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. He thought the constable needed a kick up the pants, but this wasn’t the moment. ‘You drive, Constable,’ he said. ‘The boy can sit on my lap.’

At five that afternoon, Headly once again drove out to Catcott. This time he wasn’t accompanied by PC Nutting, but by Detective Inspector Dunn from CID. Their intention was to inform Cole Parker that Alan was in the care of the local authority and warn him that charges of cruelty to a child were likely to be laid against him. Although Headly was far from happy that a child had to be hurt before he could prevail upon a senior officer to take a more active interest in his investigation into Cole Parker’s activities, he was certainly glad of a good reason to be returning to May Cottage. Detective Inspector Dunn was a hard-headed man, unlikely to be taken in by Parker’s charm. He’d chalked up thirty years with the force and like Headly he followed hunches.

Alan was now safely and quite happily in the care of Miss Pemberton, the local social worker, and on his way to a temporary foster home in Taunton. He had been very upset at first to find himself the focus of so much attention, and he kept asking when he’d see Rosie again. But by the time he’d been washed and found some dry clothes and given some dinner, and realized that he wasn’t about to be punished in any way, he had become quite talkative.

To police officers with children of their own who had never done more than give their offspring the odd clout or smack on the leg, it was horrifying to find such a young child totally unaware that all children were not beaten with sticks for merely wetting the bed or dropping an egg. Again and again Alan’s reports on both his brothers’ and father’s behaviour were slanted as if he thought himself entirely bad and therefore deserving of such treatment. When asked if Rosie was beaten too, he admitted that she was sometimes, but not so often as him because she was a girl and anyway she looked after them all.

‘Have you ever known a man left alone with a child who didn’t report the mother missing, sir?’ Headly asked some minutes into their journey.

Dunn shook his head. He was fifty-seven, but looked younger, with cold grey eyes, thin lips and a full head of dark brown hair. His wife had once commented that the reason he stayed looking so young was because he didn’t have any emotion. She was probably right; he didn’t get worked up like other men. He looked at things calmly and logically.

Since Headly came back this morning with the boy, he’d studied Parker’s record scrupulously. Aside from several fines for poaching and a six-month spell in Shepton Mallet prison for assault, way before the war, Parker had somehow managed to wriggle out of all the many other charges brought against him over the years. He’d been accused of black-marketeering and looting during the war, burglary and innumerable assaults, in many of which the victims were so badly hurt they had needed hospitalization. But all charges had been dropped. All too often the witnesses seemed unable to attend the court, or to make a positive identification, and in two cases the arresting officers backed down from their original statements.

‘Parker certainly isn’t the rough diamond PC Nutting took him for,’ Dunn said scathingly. ‘Damn fool! If he knew three women had disappeared from that house, why the hell didn’t he bring our attention to it?’

Headly thought carefully before speaking. Privately he thought Nutting to be a little dense and extremely unobservant, but at the same time he had a little sympathy for him. It was hard getting anything out of people who lived on the Levels; they were an insular and closed community who did not readily speak out against one of their own.

‘I think you might understand why Nutting overlooked it once you’ve met Parker,’ Headly said. ‘He can be a likeable bloke and on the face of it he is devoted to all his kids.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Dunn said. ‘But I’ve got no intention of pussy-footing around with this family. I want the whole lot of them brought in for questioning. The girl included.’

The ancient pickup truck piled high with Anderson shelters was gone from the grass verge where it had been that morning.

‘Looks like we’re out of luck,’ Headly said as he pulled up in front of the cottage. ‘His truck’s gone.’

‘Or in luck.’ Dunn raised one eyebrow and grinned sardonically. ‘It gives us a chance to poke around.’

Headly led Dunn straight round to the back yard. There was absolute silence, aside from the clucking of hens, but the back door was open.

Headly knocked but when no one came he stepped straight in, stopping in surprise at the mess on the table. A piece of ham lay on a plate, a few flies buzzing round it, and bread, butter, cheese and pots of pickles with the tops off were left there amongst the crumbs. It gave the impression that someone had snatched a meal in haste, before running out. Could they be out looking for Alan?

‘Is there anyone home?’ Dunn bellowed out.

Headly went out again into the back yard and looked thoughtfully at the enamel bowl lying upturned by the gate and the spilt raspberries. He went back inside and pointed it out through the window to Dunn.

‘Rosie had that in her hands when we said goodbye this morning,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand why she would just leave them there if she’d spilt them? Unless of course her father whacked it out of her hands, then gave her a beating.’

He suddenly felt afraid. Not for himself, but for Rosie. She’d organized getting Alan away; it was very likely she’d been punished for it.

Dunn was infected by the Sergeant’s anxiety and opened the narrow door to the stairs. ‘Anyone up there?’ he yelled.

Headly pushed past him. The hunch he’d had even before seeing Alan’s scars was growing stronger. He could feel something very wrong here.

He took the stairs two at a time, Dunn followed closely behind him, their heavy boots falling noisily on the bare wood. He glanced in the first bedroom, but it was empty, a double bed neatly made. In the front main bedroom the bed was unmade, but it too was empty. He rushed to the third one at the back and pushed open the closed door.

His exclamation of horror and that of Dunn, behind him, were simultaneous. Rosie was lying spread-eagled, face down across one of the two unmade beds. Her dress was pulled up over her waist, knickers wrenched down and her small naked buttocks were covered in glistening red weals. The back of her dress was soaked in blood.

There had been a violent struggle in the room. A camp bed lay in pieces on the floor, a dressing table was overturned. There was also a strong smell of urine, worse than a public urinal on a Saturday night.

Headly leapt over to Rosie and took her pulse. ‘She’s alive! Rosie! Can you hear me?’ he asked as he gingerly opened the buttons on the back of her dress. The blood was already congealing so that the material was sticking to her wounds. He felt he was to blame for this terrible beating. He hadn’t given a thought as to what might happen to Rosie when her father found out Alan was gone. But he should have! Why hadn’t he taken Alan to safety, then come right back here immediately?

A low groan proved she was conscious, and her head moved slightly so both men could just glimpse her slit-like eye in a mound of red raw tissue.

She seemed to recognize Headly. ‘Will you take me away too?’ she croaked.

Contrary to everything he’d ever learned about first aid, Headly hauled her up enough to get his shoulder beneath her chest in a fireman’s lift, straightened up and made for the stairs.

‘We should call an ambulance,’ Dunn said, putting a restraining hand on his shoulder.

‘Maybe,’ Headly grunted. ‘But do you want to leave her here another minute?’

Dr Willis stared down at the lacerated back and buttocks of the young girl in cubicle two of the casualty department in Bridgwater Infirmary and winced. Sister had already cleaned the wounds and he’d seen far worse injuries during the war when he was an intern at Bristol Royal Infirmary, yet the knowledge that a father could inflict such a beating on his daughter made his blood run cold.

‘How are you feeling, Rosie?’ he said, patting her bare arm. Sister had already said that the girl hadn’t even whimpered as her dress was eased from her back. She had just lain there face down, hiding her face with her hand.

‘A bit better now,’ she whispered.

‘It’s going to be sore for a few days,’ he said, wondering how anyone so small and young could be so stoic. ‘But I’m going to put a dressing on your back and give you something for the pain, then we’ll take you up to a ward.’

‘It wasn’t my dad that did it,’ she said, lifting her head a little and squinting at him. Both her eyes were buried in puffy flesh; she’d have two shiners by the morning. ‘He hit me so I’d tell him where Alan had gone. But it was Seth who beat me after Dad had gone out.’

Rosie had been aware that the man who carried her downstairs and out to a car was the policeman with the moustache who’d been with Ernie Nutting that morning, but she hurt so much she couldn’t say anything. It was as if she had a red-hot iron on her back and all she could concentrate on was the hope that soon someone would remove it.

She didn’t know or care where they were taking her to, it was all a jumble of shooting pain and being jolted around as she lay across the policeman’s lap. But once she was brought in here and the nurse bathed her back, the pain had retreated enough for her to remember clearly what had happened.

Cole had struck her across the face when she said she didn’t know where Alan had gone. They were still out in the yard and she’d fallen back against the fence with the force of his blow.

‘Tell me where he is!’ Cole shouted at her, pulling her up by the shoulders. ‘Don’t play stupid games with me!’

Something snapped inside Rosie. She didn’t even care if he hit her again. ‘I told him to get in the police car. I told him to tell the police all the things you and the boys do to him so they’ll take him away for good and let him live with his uncle.’

She had wanted to see him frightened, but his reaction to what she’d said floored her. He just backed away from her and slumped down on to the settle, holding his head in his hands.

Rosie couldn’t stop then, everything she’d bottled up for years came out in a torrent. ‘Heather was lovely and you made her run away. You made my mother go too and you lied to me when you said she died in London. All I do is work here, cooking and cleaning. I don’t have any nice clothes, books to read and I haven’t any friends, and I’m scared of Seth and Norman in case they do what they did to Heather, to me.’