Rosie (26 page)

Rosie’s run-in with Matron had moved her up a couple of notches in the other members of staff’s estimation. As they saw it, she’d not only been courageous enough to stand up to Matron, but she hadn’t said a word against Maureen afterwards to anyone and had even managed to persuade the girl to wash at last.

All of them were aware that Matron was out to get Rosie – she didn’t take kindly to one of her staff showing her up – and this bothered them. The only way they had of showing their allegiance to Rosie was by befriending her, sharing tea and cake after work and by encouraging her to tell them about herself.

After being lonely and isolated for so long, Rosie found it wonderful to not only find herself accepted but liked, so when the other girls asked her questions about her home and family, she had to give them something more than just a skeleton story. Without really being aware of it she slipped into describing an almost fairytale childhood in a pretty cottage with a doting father and maiden aunt looking after her. In one or two moments of nostalgia she told true stories about her father, allowing them to glimpse his joviality, strength and charismatic personality. It pleased her to see that they liked the man she portrayed, and it soothed her sense of loss.

But as the trial began, and Seth and Cole Parker became almost as infamous as Jack the Ripper, Rosie was brought down to earth with a bump and forced to see the worst aspects of her family. Everyone at Carrington Hall, from Matron right down to the lowest domestic, was avidly following the trial. They listened to the news on the wireless and read all the newspapers. Each day as some new revelation came to light, it was chewed over at length, and because Rosie came from Somerset and they supposed she might have some inside information, she was often asked for her opinions. Rosie shrugged off their questions with pretended disinterest, but the burden of knowing so much became heavier and more distressing each day.

On Thursday when Ethel Parker was called to the witness stand to give evidence of her husband’s cruelty, Rosie found it almost impossible to keep her views and knowledge to herself.

Ethel was forty-eight now, and the court artist’s sketches captured not only her gaunt face and grey hair, but also the livid scar on her cheek which she claimed was caused by Cole holding a hot flat iron to it. Rosie had looked at this picture in stunned disbelief. The woman bore no resemblance to the raven-haired beauty she’d heard gossiped about in Catcott, and her vitriolic account of her violent and unhappy marriage didn’t match up to the accounts Rosie had heard of the artistic and fun-loving woman from neighbours. Ethel made much of being forced to run away and leave her sons, yet under cross-examination it transpired she had indeed run off with another man, and in eighteen years had made no attempt to discover how her boys were. Even as she stood in the witness box with Seth just feet away from her in the dock, it was reported that she showed no emotion at being confronted by the son she’d abandoned so long ago.

Today the Sunday papers had gone to town on the story, with headlines like ‘The Marsh Murders’ and ‘Satan in Somerset’, and there were background profiles on Ethel, Ruby and Heather, so that inevitably the evening’s conversation turned to them.

Linda took centre stage as she lay on the settee, cigarette in hand, a newspaper on her lap. ‘I reckon both Blackwell and Farley were gold-diggers,’ she said airily, blowing smoke rings towards the ceiling. ‘I don’t mean I think that gave the Parkers a right to kill ‘em for it. But if I was a man and I ‘ad a few bob, I’d be savage when I found out that’s all they were after.’

‘What on earth makes you think that?’ Mary asked incredulously.

‘Well, look at their backgrounds,’ Linda said, pointing to the newspaper. ‘They both came from the East End of London, they ‘ad nothing before they ended up as his ‘ousekeeper. I come from there. I know ‘ow it is. You can’t tell me they thought, “Ah, the poor man needs ‘elp with ‘is motherless children.” They saw it as a way of getting a good, easy life.’

‘If that’s what they wanted,’ Gladys said gently, ‘why didn’t they clear off the moment they discovered it wasn’t going to be like that?’

In the three weeks Rosie had been here she had learned a great deal about the other girls’ characters in discussions like this. Linda had lived through the war in the East End of London, and though her family had been rehoused out in Romford in 1945, she had retained a tough, cynical view on life. Rosie often wondered why she came here to work. She wasn’t a carer by nature, her personality was better-suited to working in a factory than kowtowing to the likes of Matron Barnes. But whenever Rosie had tried to broach the subject Linda had just laughed and claimed it was easy work.

Mary, on the other hand, had been well educated at a convent in Ireland, but she was a romantic dreamer, soft-hearted, lazy and gullible too. She had come here with the intention of filling in time before nursing training, but for one reason or another – it seemed to Rosie to be mainly because of falling in love frequently – she hadn’t moved on.

Nurse Gladys Thorpe was a kindly but dim girl of twenty-six, the oldest in the room. The other girls, perhaps unkindly, said she’d gone into training as a psychiatric nurse because she hadn’t got the brains for general nursing. She was the plodding type who didn’t look ahead any further than her next pay-day. Placid, unimaginative and plain as a pikestaff with a moon-like face and lumpy body, Rosie felt she’d still be here in another twenty years.

‘They stayed because they knew Parker ‘ad money tucked away somewhere,’ Linda argued. ‘They were working out ‘ow to get their ‘ands on it.’

‘You’re daft, Linda,’ Mary piped up indignantly. ‘Women don’t think like that. They must have fallen in love with him. Why else would they both have had a child by him?’

‘Because they were both tarts and I reckon Farley knew ‘e’d killed Blackwell.’

Rosie had distanced herself from this conversation, steeling herself to make no comment whatever the other girls said. But at the insult to Heather her anger rose. ‘Neither of them were tarts, and of course Heather didn’t know what Parker had done to Ruby. She was a simple girl.’ Rosie stopped short, suddenly aware that by using the women’s Christian names and speaking out with such passion, she’d revealed not only her interest but perhaps some secret knowledge of the women.

There was absolute silence for a moment, the other girls looking at one another in surprise.

‘You seem to know a lot,’ Maureen said, looking at her curiously.

‘I don’t,’ Rosie said hastily. She was particularly wary of Maureen, she might be virtually illiterate but she was quick to pick up on intrigue. ‘I just don’t like people speaking ill of the dead.’

‘ ’Ow the ‘ell do you know that Farley was simple?’ Linda asked pointedly, her dark eyes narrowed. ‘I’ve never read that anywhere.’

‘I come from down that way, remember.’ Rosie wished the floor would open up and swallow her. ‘You hear things on the grapevine; everyone was talking about the women when the bodies were found.’

The conversation resumed but Rosie was painfully aware that all the girls were watching for any further reaction from her. She tried to black out what they were saying, but each time she heard something she knew to be untrue, her stomach contracted agonizingly.

She had read every single account of the trial, trying hard to keep an open mind. She doubted the truth of a great deal of the vindictive things that Ethel Parker had said about Cole, and in fact the defence lawyer had argued that the scar on her face was a fairly recent one, certainly not one of eighteen years’ standing. Yet Rosie knew the police evidence to be sound, and who would have killed the two women and buried them on Parker land, other than the Parkers? So she hovered in uncertainty, waiting for something which would finally prove their guilt or innocence.

Meanwhile, however, the press were creating a background to the story which prevented anyone else from being fair-minded. May Cottage had been recreated as a kind of hell-hole, a dark and sinister place where its sub-human residents wallowed in filth and perversion, and imprisoned young women against their will.

Rosie remembered how clean the kitchen had been, the well-scrubbed floor and table, Heather’s bright curtains at the window, Ruby’s crocheted rugs – even Ethel had left behind hand-painted storage jars up on a shelf. Were those the work of unwilling slaves?

She could see in her mind’s eye Cole smiling into Heather’s eyes at the Harvest Home. She could hear their laughter as they repapered the bedrooms that first summer. She could visualize the orchard in springtime when pink and white blossom fluttered down on to the grass like confetti, and Heather running barefoot through it shouting to Rosie how much she loved it. She wished there was some way she could create a few of those prettier images for the jury.

‘I wonder what they’ve done with Parker’s other two children?’ Gladys said thoughtfully some time later. ‘I bet they could tell a few tales!’

‘Stuck them away behind bars somewhere I ‘ope,’ Linda said. ‘They ‘aven’t got an ‘ope in ‘ell of being normal.’

Again Rosie felt anger rising, but she squashed it down firmly.

‘The little boy’s probably too young to be affected that much,’ Mary said with a deep sigh. ‘But the girl must know the whole truth. I wouldn’t be in her shoes, not for all the tea in China. I’d want to top myself with a father and brother like that.’

During the second week of the trial Rosie felt nauseous almost all the time. She went through the days automatically, doing what she was asked to, cleaning, feeding, making beds, wiping up urine and chivvying the patients along. But her heart and mind were in that courtroom a hundred miles away.

Thomas gave his evidence and in the course of it he spoke of his meeting with her at May Cottage. She couldn’t help thinking that, but for her disobeying her father that day by speaking to a stranger, Cole and Seth wouldn’t be in the dock now, and she’d still be in ignorance of the fate that both Ruby and Heather had met. Yet even as she thought it, she felt ashamed of trying to bury her head in the sand. Maybe they weren’t proved to be murderers yet, but they had been cruel to Alan and she ought to be glad that through her one act of disobedience he’d been rescued.

The newspapers maximized on Thomas, with a photograph of him when he first joined the army and then another taken soon after his camp in Burma was liberated. She was struck by his similarity to Heather in the first picture, the thick fair hair, the wide smiling mouth and plump cheeks. In the second picture taken just five years later, he was unrecognizable, almost skeletal, a lined and weary face, leaning on crutches with his amputated leg bound in bandages, old before his time.

Rosie guessed that Thomas must be cruelly embarrassed by this tug on people’s emotions, and it brought it home to her that long, long after this trial was over, people would still remember his part in it. She was certain their friendship was now over. She wondered if he could even bear to still see Alan.

It was the court artist’s sketches of Cole and Seth, however, which demonstrated to her just how confused she was. Seth’s true character showed in the insolent way he lolled in the dock. The events of that last day at May Cottage came back with such force she trembled from head to foot. She could believe every last thing he was suspected of. She wanted him found guilty.

But the sketches of her father made her melt inside. There was dignity in the upright way he sat, not insolence. His dark eyes seemed to say to her that whatever other bad things he’d done in his life, he hadn’t bludgeoned her mother and Heather to death as the police said he had.

It was hard to resist cutting out just one of these pictures, a keepsake to hold on to for old times’ sake, but even that was denied her because of Matron’s prying. She wished too that she could see him one last time, to put aside what was happening now and just be father and daughter again.

On the Friday evening of that same week Rosie went into Linda’s and Mary’s room. Mary was lying on her bed reading the
Evening News,
dressed and made up to go out dancing in a pale blue satin sheath dress, but with her hair still in curlers. Linda was standing in front of the mirror wearing an off-the-shoulder ‘Goosegirl’ blouse and a red circular skirt, straining to reach behind her to dab some angry-looking spots on her upper back with Pan Stik make-up.

‘Do this for me?’ she pleaded, pushing the stick into Rosie’s hands. ‘I can’t reach. But mind you don’t get any on me blouse.’

Rosie complied, but as she glanced over to Mary she noticed she was reading something about the trial. ‘What’s the latest?’ she asked, hoping she sounded casual enough.

‘It looks like the son couldn’t have been in on it,’ Mary said without looking up. ‘Some farmer gave evidence that he was working for him ‘til gone seven on the day Ruby Blackwell went missing. I’m beginning to feel sorry for him. It sounds like he had a terrible childhood.’

Rosie’s hands shook.

‘Watch what you’re doing!’ Linda screeched as she saw Rosie behind her in the mirror waving the Pan Stik dangerously near her blouse.

Rosie pulled herself together and apologized. She wished she could grab the paper from Mary’s hands and read it herself, but she knew she’d have to wait until they’d gone out.

‘She’d say Jack the Ripper was a good sort really, if she ‘eard his mother drank and went with men,’ Linda said, checking over her shoulder in the mirror to see Rosie had done her job properly. ‘But for once I’m going along with her. The son was too young, for a start; you can’t tell me a sixteen-year-old boy could ‘elp his dad with something like that and never let it slip to anyone.’

Rosie felt a cold chill running down her spine. She knew Seth was perfectly capable of doing just that. He might be many things, but he’d never been a blabbermouth; none of the Parkers was, herself included. ‘Can I read it when you’ve finished?’ she asked Mary.

Mary made a disapproving face. ‘You should be coming out with us, not staying in and reading papers,’ she said. ‘What’s the point in working in London if you never go out the door?’