Rosie (59 page)

No one in the village was suspicious of him now. They knew he was nicknamed Dopey Donald, but because Rosie pushed him and encouraged him, he had found his niche as a ‘character’ rather than someone to be feared or avoided. His love and appreciation of gardening had endeared him to a great many people, and the fact that he’d proved himself to be reliable and hard-working made people trust him. Yet however steady and confident Donald was now, both his parents knew that when Rosie did finally leave, he would find it hard without her. She was, after all, his one true friend.

‘I suspect Gareth will become overbearing once she’s married to him. He’s very set in his ways and he doesn’t approve of women with minds of their own,’ Frank said with a frown. ‘Do you think we should talk this over with Thomas? Maybe he could influence Rosie. She sets great store by his opinion.’

Norah didn’t answer for a little while. In the two years Rosie had been with them, Thomas had been a regular visitor and he’d become a close friend to the entire family. He was a fascinating man, intelligent, sensitive, warm-hearted and great company. His experience and disability had given him great insight into others, and he had a wonderful sense of humour. Norah often wondered if there was more to the friendship between him and Rosie than just the nasty business at Carrington Hall. She sensed some sort of deep, mysterious and unexplained bond between them. It was almost as if Thomas had known Rosie since she was a small child, though she knew that wasn’t possible.

‘It might be an idea,’ Norah said. ‘But Gareth resents Thomas almost as much as he resents Donald. What a jealous man he’s turned out to be! Rosie is so smart about most things, but she’s blind and deaf where he’s concerned. You say you want to knock some sense into Gareth – well, I wish I could do the same to her.’

While Norah and Frank Cook were caught up in their concern for Rosie, Freda Barnes, former matron of Carrington Hall, was thinking about her too. But her thoughts were entirely malevolent.

Two years on from the humiliating ejection from her job and home, she was still in the same basement flat she’d been forced to take in London’s Camden Town. The severely straitened circumstances she was compelled to live in, the loss of prestige, family and friends, had turned her into a rapidly ageing and bitter woman.

She had two rooms, a kitchen and a lavatory. The bath was in the kitchen, and with a cover on top it doubled as a table. The bedroom walls ran with damp, so she was forced to eat, live and sleep in just one gloomy room that never saw a ray of sunshine.

The neighbours who saw the short, fat woman with iron-grey straggly hair waddling down the street each evening were unlikely to even pass the time of day with her, much less guess that for most of her life she’d been a respected and highly qualified nurse. They had heard that she snarled at the young couple in the flat above her for taking their rubbish down to the dustbins outside her door before ten in the morning and banged on the ceiling with a broom when their baby cried in the night. In Camden Town almost everyone was poor, so they didn’t mind the woman’s shabby, grubby appearance. But in a place where life was tough for everyone, they had no time for disagreeable people with sour faces.

Freda didn’t want anyone to speak to her. She thought her noisy, common neighbours were well beneath her, and for the first few weeks after she moved in at 13A Harmood Street she thought it was only a matter of time before she found a post as housekeeper or lady’s companion and moved to more dignified surroundings. But soon it became clear that no one was going to employ a woman of her age without references. Prospective employers guessed by her manner and speech that she’d once had a position of authority, and their suspicions were aroused when she claimed she had spent the last fourteen years nursing a sick relative. As the weeks turned to months, and she put on a great deal more weight, her slovenly appearance and a certain desperation in her eyes precluded every type of work but office-cleaning.

She fought against this for some time. It was demeaning and poorly paid. But as she began to eat into her savings, she just had to accept it was the only job she was likely to be offered. Worse still, she realized that the dark, damp flat was to become her permanent home.

Apathy set in. At first she intended to paint the flat, buy new curtains and join the local church to meet new people. But as each day passed her will slowly weakened to the point where it became difficult to even take a bath, wash her clothes and maintain a proper diet.

Now, two years on she hadn’t noticed that the black mould had crept right up the walls, that she hadn’t dusted in weeks, or that the newspapers she bought daily were growing into a small mountain in the corner of the room. She stayed in bed until ten, walked to the shops to buy her newspaper, then came home to read it cover to cover. At five she left the flat to walk to Tottenham Court Road to start work. It was usually around eleven when she came home and she went straight to bed. Sometimes a whole week could go by without her speaking to a soul.

Once she’d grown used to the idea of office-cleaning, she did find that it had its advantages. She worked alone in the narrow four-storey office block and it was easy enough to clean. Built in 1947, it had the advantage of being modern with all its floors covered in lino. Besides the small foyer which she had to scrub and polish, she had only to clean the toilets, sweep, dust the desks and filing cabinets, and empty the waste-paper bins. She could easily do the entire job in three hours, but she spun it out to five by reading any newspapers that had been left behind.

Sundays were the worst day of the week because there was no work to go to and all the shops were closed. The empty, lonely hours stretched out in front of her and as she sat by her window, seeing only the feet of people passing by up on the street level, she was always reminded of Carrington Hall. Sundays had been so pleasant there. The vicar would call for a service in the morning and in the afternoon she was frequently invited out to tea; then she would go to church in the evening and quite often there was supper later to round off the day.

There were so many things she missed, not just from the Hall but from her entire nursing career. Her clothes had been washed and ironed in the laundry, meals were cooked for her, her room cleaned. Junior staff had looked up to her, and there had been discussions with doctors and meetings with patients’ relatives who were always so unfailingly grateful.

Lionel Brace-Coombes’s last words to her still rang in her ears. He had called her ‘an affront to the nursing profession. For your own twisted ends you allowed mentally deficient patients to be abused and neglected. You betrayed the trust I had in you by lining your own pocket with money intended to maintain care and safety in Carrington Hall. I have enough evidence against you to have you sent to prison; the only reason I am not pressing criminal charges now is because I believe by doing so that several innocent young women in my employ might be damaged further by being asked to give evidence against you. You will leave here today, but should it ever come to my ears that you have tried to contact any of my staff again, or make trouble for anyone you knew here, I will come down so hard on you that you will live to regret it.’

Yet her acrimony wasn’t directed at Lionel Brace-Coombes. To her mind it was that guttersnipe Rosie Parker who had wrecked her life – a troublemaking sixteen-year-old who knew nothing of nursing! Each long, miserable day the bitterness towards this girl ate away at her like acid. Night after night she lay awake trying to think of some way of exacting her revenge on Rosie Parker. But she had no idea where the girl was, and even less idea of how to go about finding her.

Violet Pemberton was the only person likely to know where she was, but Freda knew she’d get no assistance from that quarter. She thought of hiring a private detective, but with less than six hundred pounds to her name in savings she wasn’t in a position to do that. One of the reasons why she read every newspaper she could get hold of was in the hope that the Parker brothers might one day make an appearance in the tabloids. She doubted very much that they’d stayed in Somerset after Seth was acquitted. It was far more likely they’d come to London to live. They might just come up again one day in the news on criminal charges and that would lead her to finding out where their sister was. It was a long shot, but searching the papers daily was better than twiddling her thumbs.

Today, for the first time since moving to Camden Town, she felt optimistic. She had enough energy to put clean sheets on her bed and to tackle the kitchen. She even intended to have a bath and wash her hair later. All because she was ninety-nine per cent certain she’d tracked Seth Parker down. It had been well over a year ago when she read about a scrap-metal merchant in north London being fined in court for selling lead stolen from churches. It had jogged her memory – hadn’t Cole Parker and both his sons been scrap-metal dealers?

Time was the one thing she had plenty of, so she got herself a map, marked off areas where scrap yards were likely to be found, and two mornings a weeks she went out looking. She didn’t think for one moment that the Parkers would still be using their own names, but she had pictures of them cut from the newspapers at the time of the trial.

It was some time before it dawned on her that the negative responses she was getting to her questions in scrap yards might be due to her appearance and manner. It was only when a burly man threatened to turn his dog loose on her that she realized she was perceived as some kind of professional snoop. After rethinking her strategy, she cleaned up her act and posed as a public health inspector, calling on houses close by yards.

She soon discovered many housewives more than willing to talk. They listed their complaints eagerly, everything from noise, dirt, vermin and fear for their children. Although few of these women knew any employees in the yards by name, they were only too willing to give their views on criminal activity they’d observed. Finally, after some six months, when she had enough useless gossip and hearsay to fill an entire book, one woman in Acton looked at the picture of Seth and said she had seen him at the yard across from her house on several occasions in the past. She said he used to come in a lorry, unload it and then drive away. The reason she remembered him so well was because she hadn’t liked the way he leered at her fifteen-year-old daughter. She said she had written down the name on the side of the lorry – Franklin’s Haulage – because of this.

Freda had traced that name eventually through another haulage company to London Bridge. She didn’t dare go into the office to inquire. The business was situated under a railway arch, a dank filthy place where two rough-looking men were stripping down an engine, and what passed for an office was just a kind of counter and a few shelves.

An inquiry in a nearby café proved helpful but somewhat intimidating. She learned from the woman who ran it that Del Franklin, the owner of Franklin’s Haulage, was ‘a nasty bastard’ who had a finger in many pies, all of them ‘bent’. She was advised to go away and leave well alone. Freda apologized profusely but showed the pictures of the Parkers anyway. To her amazement the woman nodded and agreed Seth had been in for meals now and again. She told Freda he’d once boasted to her that he ran a scrap yard for Del in Lewisham.

Lewisham, Freda discovered, was a big place and there were a great many scrap yards to look at. But finally last Friday, after what seemed like a lifetime of dead ends, Freda found the one in Morley Road. There was nothing about it to build up her hopes. Like so many of them she’d seen, it was an old bomb site, this one tucked away at the end of a terrace of dingy Victorian houses. She peered through the fence but couldn’t see anyone around, so going back to her old routine she knocked on the front door of the tidiest house in the street.

A young woman with frizzy hair and a toddler on her hip answered. Freda smiled ingratiatingly.

‘I’m so very sorry to disturb you. I’m from the public health department and I just wanted to ask you one or two questions about the scrap yard down the street. We have reason to believe it may be a health hazard, particularly to small children. Could you spare me a few moments?’

As she expected, the woman asked her in and even made a pot of tea as she launched into a tirade of complaints.

‘It’s quiet enough now,’ she said, two angry red blotches coming up on her cheeks, ‘but by the middle of the afternoon it’s hell. They break up cars, they come in with load after load of rubbish. They’re there till well after dark, they light stinking fires, and they make so much noise the kids can’t sleep. It’s driving us all mad.’

Freda looked around her as the woman spoke. She thought it was a typical working-class home, a bit dark and poky, cheap furniture, but clean and neat. When the child toddled over to Freda she picked it up and let it play with her bunch of keys.

‘It must be miserable for you,’ she said, smoothing the child’s hair in an affectionate display. ‘Can you tell me anything about the man who owns it? His name? Where he comes from?’

‘There’s several men there, we don’t really know which of them owns it,’ the woman said with a shrug. ‘Most of us around here are too scared of them to even attempt speaking to them.’

‘Do either of these men work there?’ Freda asked, getting her press cutting out of her handbag. ‘Strictly between ourselves, we’ve had a series of complaints about these brothers in other parts of London.’

The woman took the faded newspaper picture. If she wondered why a public health official should produce something so crumpled and unprofessional, she didn’t show it. Instead she gasped.

‘Yes, this is one of them,’ she said pointing to the picture of Seth. ‘Mind you, the other one looks almost the same, so I couldn’t swear which one it is. He never looks smart like that, he’s always dirty and needs a shave. Some of the other women down the street say they’ve seen him squatting down to do his toilet in that yard. It’s disgusting. I hope you can do something about it.’

Freda’s heart leapt with delight and gratitude. ‘Of course we will do all we can to get the yard closed,’ she assured the woman. ‘But I must ask you to keep my visit here today under your hat. To get a successful prosecution, other officials from the public health department will be making undercover visits to the yard in the next few weeks. A leak at this stage could put the whole case in jeopardy. Not only does it give the offenders time to start cleaning up, but we’ve often found they can be very unpleasant towards the people they believe have talked about them. You and your husband have had more than enough to put up with already, without further trouble.’