Rosie (11 page)

He still had his head in his hands but at that last sentence he jerked up quickly. ‘Whass that? What did the boys do to Heather?’

Something told her then that she’d gone too far, but there was no turning back now. ‘Sexing her,’ she said, not knowing what the right word for it was. ‘I saw them both forcing her. Heather was crying. And Seth scares me most because he’s always touching me here.’ She put her hands on her breast. ‘He says he’s just checking to see if I’m ripe for it yet.’

Cole got up. Rosie thought he was going to hit her again and she was off out the gate and down the road running as fast as she could.

But her bare feet stopped her; the stones hurt and when she paused to look back, fully expecting Cole to be just a few feet behind her, there was no sign of him. The lane was deserted. Reason got the better of her: she couldn’t go to the village without shoes, and Cole couldn’t be that angry with her if he hadn’t chased her, so she went back.

As she crept round the junk she could hear her father shouting, so for safety’s sake she crouched down behind the old tractor and listened.

‘Rosie’s lying, Dad. We never did that to Heather.’ Seth’s voice was high and whining. ‘She’s trying to shift blame on to us because she told on you to the police.’

‘She ain’t lying,’ Cole roared at him. ‘No one would even think of something like that unless they’d seen it. You fuckin’ animals. And what’s this about you touching Rosie up? She’s your sister, for Christ’s sake!’

There was a whistling noise and a crack followed by a yelp. Rosie realized the sound was her father’s leather belt and he was laying into both boys with it.

There was pandemonium up in that room, yells, swearing, thuds and scuffling. She heard something crash, then a part of Alan’s camp bed came hurtling through the window. Rosie had heard enough. She wriggled out of her hiding place and ran for it, down through the junk yard and out on to the moor.

She dangled her feet in a ditch, and wiped away the tears trickling down her cheeks. She felt so small, so alone and scared. She wasn’t sorry she’d sent Alan away; at least he was safe, but without him to cuddle and care for what had she left? Long, lonely days of washing, cleaning and cooking, no trips to the school to break it up, no one to tell stories to, no one to help her feed the chickens or get them back into the henhouse. No purpose in her life other than trying to appease three men who took everything she did for granted.

The grass around her was so long now that her eyes were on a level with the feathery fronds on the top. Looking around her it was almost like being in the middle of an ocean, with the wind creating waves and ripples. In the past this sight had pleased her, but today it made her feel as though she was drowning. And there was no one anywhere to hold out a helping hand.

She guessed by the position of the sun that it was around two when she made for home. There was no point in staying out any longer. She had all the men’s dirty work clothes to wash, she hadn’t even made their beds yet today and they’d only get angrier if she was late starting the evening meal.

The mess she found in the kitchen cheered her a little. It meant they had all gone out in a hurry, probably to Bristol to dispose of the Anderson shelters. She sighed with relief; at least she’d have some peace until tea time and if they got a good price for the shelters they might just forgive her about Alan and all she’d said.

She ran upstairs to collect all the dirty clothes.

There was nothing to warn her she wasn’t alone in the house. Not a sound from anywhere. But as she walked into the boys’ bedroom the door slammed shut behind her.

Seth was there. She smelled him even before he spoke.

‘So you came back then? You little bitch,’ he snarled.

He was standing behind the now shut door, wearing only a pair of trousers. His right eye was red and swollen, he had congealed blood on his lip and there were bright red weals on his shoulders and chest from Cole’s belt. In his hands he held the thin stick he always used to terrorize Alan.

‘I th-thought you’d g-g-gone out with Dad,’ she stammered. As usual the smell of stale urine was overpowering in the small room.

‘How can I go anywhere looking like this?’ he said. ‘And it’s all your fault, so I’m gonna teach you not to tell tales.’

There was nowhere to run to. She backed away from him over a pile of dirty clothes towards the window where the broken remains of Alan’s camp bed lay and, finding herself trapped, she covered her head with her hands protectively.

‘Please don’t hit me, Seth,’ she begged, but such a plea was pointless for Seth was already raising the cane.

He swiped and swiped at her bare arms, first one, then the other, making her hop with the pain.

‘Hurts, don’t it?’ he taunted her, prodding her cheek with the tip, then flicking it back to her side to hit that too. ‘It’s going to get a lot worse before I’ve finished.’

Seth had always been a bully, but now she saw that inflicting pain actually excited him; he was flushed with it, grinning menacingly.

Rosie tried to make a run for it as he raised his arm to bring the cane down harder, but as she tried to dodge him she tripped on the pile of clothes on the floor and fell sideways on to Norman’s unmade bed.

‘I’ll tell Dad!’ she yelled.

‘You won’t be alive to tell him anything,’ Seth yelled back, and as the cane swished through the air Rosie just glimpsed his mouth wet with spittle and his black eyes alight with hate.

There was no counting the strokes, or trying to avoid them. They rained down on her so fast it was just one endless, agonizing explosion of pain.

‘Pleeease,’ she called out.

She felt him roughly pull her dress up and his hands grabbed the back of her knickers and pulled them down. She bucked furiously as her buttocks were exposed, fearing he was now going to repeat what she’d seen him do to Heather.

‘Please what?’ he said sarcastically. ‘Will I “sex” you? That’s what you called it, wasn’t it?’

The cane came down again, harder still on her bare bottom, cutting into her like a knife. She tried to get her hands round to protect herself, screaming now with the pain, but he merely swiped her hands away and slashed at her again.

‘You’ll go to prison for this,’ she screamed.

When the next expected blow didn’t come, she moved her head slightly to see what he was doing. To her absolute horror he had his penis in his hand, and he was rubbing himself, just the way Norman had been doing that day while Seth attacked Heather. Aside from then, she’d never seen an erect male penis, and she’d been too shocked to notice anything about it. But Seth’s looked huge, nothing like the soft, floppy thing she’d observed sometimes when he was bathing. She covered her eyes and screamed again.

‘Scream again,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Go on, scream. I like that.’

Even through the agony of the wounds he’d inflicted upon her, Rosie’s mind assimilated a message. He was mad, dangerously mad, he had no fear of what his father might do to him for this. He was beyond any kind of reason. She knew she must say nothing further to provoke him. Do nothing to encourage him.

She let out one more scream, forcing herself to control it instead of thinking about what he was doing, and closing her eyes tightly so she couldn’t see his jerking wrist or his demented face. Slowly she let the scream die, hoping she was faking losing consciousness effectively.

Rosie heard him make a guttural groan, but she didn’t dare open her eyes to look. She heard the twang of bed-springs as he slumped down beside her, and for a moment there was silence, punctuated only by a long-drawn-out sigh.

When his hand touched her cheek, it was all she could do not to scream again. It was sticky with something and it smelled sour. She braced herself, expecting him to pull her up, or to start beating her again, but instead she heard something which sounded very much like a sob.

Then he went. He just stood up and walked out of the room and down the stairs. Without another word.

It was Monday afternoon, two days since Sergeant Headly had found Rosie, and he was back in the same bedroom at May Cottage, leaning out of the window. It was partly to get a breath of fresh air, as the room still stunk as much as it had on Saturday, but mostly it was to watch the men below attaching chains to an old tractor to move it. They had already cleared much of the area, there were yellow and white bald patches amongst the weeds showing where the heaps of tyres and old machinery had been.

Headly felt as if he hadn’t slept for a month, but then he hadn’t had more than a couple of catnaps since Saturday afternoon when he’d found Rosie up here.

Cole and Norman Parker had been arrested when they arrived back at the cottage late on Saturday night. They were both very drunk and it was just as well that six officers had come along to apprehend them, as both men resisted violently. One officer sustained a black eye and a bloodied nose, Headly a cracked rib.

Cole Parker’s attitude to his arrest was puzzling. He admitted almost immediately that he’d been harsh with Alan, his excuse being that boys needed discipline to toughen them up. But he showed no remorse, or even fear, that he was to be charged with cruelty. Yet when told what Seth had done to Rosie he became almost incoherent with rage, and after ranting and raving about what he’d do to Seth when he got his hands on him, he finally burst into tears, sobbing and claiming that he’d always loved Rosie, and that she was his favourite.

Norman, on the other hand, once in a cell on his own, was docile and even penitent that he’d lashed out at the police. He came across as a simple-minded boy who followed his father’s and older brother’s lead blindly. As he spoke about what they’d been doing in London, he used words like ‘conning’ and ‘leaning on people’ so openly that it was clear he had no real idea that this was wrong or shameful.

Neither did he seem to understand the concept of cruelty to a small child. He just looked vacant and said Alan ‘only got the stick and belt the same as me and Seth did’. Likewise when asked if his father had hit Ruby and Heather, he said, ‘Well, they just got slapped when they needed it.’

Seth still hadn’t been found, and this was creating something of a mystery. He hadn’t been spotted by anyone and he had no transport. Like all the Parkers he knew every nook and cranny out on the moors, so it stood to reason he was holed up somewhere in a makeshift camp. But it had been raining heavily from early Sunday morning until an hour or two ago when it turned to drizzle, and though he may well have taken some provisions with him and a waterproof coat, it was doubtful he could hide out for long. More worrying still, a shotgun was missing from the porch.

Headly walked slowly down the stairs once the tractor had been moved. His rib hurt and he wished he could go home. There was no real reason for him to stay; he’d done his bit and searched the entire cottage for anything which might offer them a lead. But aside from finding a cashbox behind a loose brick in the parlour chimney containing nearly a hundred pounds, an old ration book of Heather Farley’s stuffed down the back of one of the parlour chairs, a pale blue silk scarf caught up on a rough piece of wood at the back of a chest of drawers in Cole’s bedroom, and a thin gold wedding ring among some cheap beads in a trinket box, he’d found little evidence there had even been grown women in the house, let alone anything which might point to murder.

Yet without any evidence Detective Inspector Dunn had organized the search and dig party on Parker’s land, calling in all available men in the area to help. He said Cole couldn’t account for where he was on the days his women disappeared. Neither could he give a plausible answer as to why he didn’t report them missing. Headly was as convinced as Dunn that all the women were dead, but he thought Dunn very brave to play his hunch right up to the hilt and start digging. His career wouldn’t shine so brightly in future if he was wrong about this.

The back yard was muddy now, tramped through by the men after yesterday’s heavy rain. In the mud were various implements the Parkers had used as weapons to resist arrest – fence poles, an axe and a couple of broken bottles. And amongst the debris was Rosie’s ruined garden. Every flower crushed by heavy boots. Even the ones in the old sink were squashed flat as if someone had fallen on them. It was almost symbolic of what had happened to her.

Headly didn’t see how Rosie could recover, any more than those flowers could. The doctors and nurses could treat her external wounds, but he doubted whether any medicine would wipe out the memory of that beating. And there was worse to come, he knew that with utter certainty.

Detective Inspector Dunn stood back from his men and watched them dig.

‘How’s it going, sir?’ Headly asked him. ‘Any sign it’s been dug before?’

Dunn shook his head. ‘That junk has compressed the ground and with three years of snow, frost, rain and sun it all looks the same. But one of the lads has just found the remains of a woman’s shoe down the bottom of the heap of tyres.’

Elsewhere in the Levels the ground was soft and spongy with peat, but May Cottage was built on slightly higher ground which was rock hard. Yesterday’s heavy rain hadn’t softened the soil that much, and it looked as if it would be a long, back-breaking job.

At half past ten that night the drizzle turned once again to heavy rain, forcing the men to retreat into a makeshift tent they’d erected just off the lane. Until now they’d carried on regardless of the wet, slipping and sliding in the mud, but now it was impossible to continue.

The top layer of compressed grass and soil had been removed from the whole area now and as the rain collected on the harder, less porous sub-soil it resembled a large paddling pool in the light of a few hurricane lamps. The senior officer ordered the men who had been on duty since that morning to go home, keeping the six men who’d joined the job in the early evening to stay on as guards.

By first light the rain had stopped, but as the men emerged with their spades to start again, they noticed an interesting phenomenon. In two places, some ten feet apart from one another, the rainwater that had collected was draining away faster than elsewhere, leaving a curiously similar rectangular shape in each case.