Rosie (67 page)

There were many times when he was tempted to hurt Rosie badly, but he didn’t dare. Cole was dangerous when he was angry, and he’d be more than angry if he found his precious little girl had been touched. The only way Seth could find to get at the kid was through her mother, and even though he had little bitterness towards Ruby, aside from bringing the kid into his home, he found dozens of ways to distress her. Cole might have idolized his daughter, but he wasn’t as soft with Ruby. If his dinner wasn’t put on the table as he walked through the door, if his best shirt wasn’t ironed and aired when he needed it, or he thought she’d been squandering his money, then he was likely to slap her.

It was easy enough to distract Ruby while cooking the dinner; she wasn’t the smartest woman alive. One favourite trick was to move the clock hands back, then quickly change them when he heard his father’s truck. The best shirt could easily fall off the line into mud out in the orchard. He could take some money out of her housekeeping tin and go to the village shop and buy something frivolous and feminine, then leave it somewhere where his father would see it.

Each time Cole slapped Ruby, Seth hoped that she’d run off like his own mother had done. He didn’t think she would leave Rosie behind. She cared too much for her.

But Ruby didn’t leave. Seth caught her crying often enough. He heard her telling Cole one night that she thought Seth was playing tricks to get her into trouble, which started another row. Soon Cole was sullen towards her and she towards him, but still she stayed.

It was the summer of 1942, when Seth was fifteen, that Cole and Norman went away on an overnight job in Birmingham, leaving him to look after Ruby and Rosie, tidy up the yard and take over his father’s fire-watching duties. Seth bitterly resented being left behind. The chances of Catcott being bombed were extremely remote; the most they ever saw of war were planes overhead and a few distant booms from Weston-super-Mare. He had wanted to see the bomb damage in Birmingham. He’d even hoped to be caught up in an air raid so he’d have something to boast about to his mates. As he toiled in the hot sun, humping timber and shifting piles of tyres, his resentment towards Ruby and Rosie grew even stronger.

After tea, Seth went up to his room to have a snooze before going out for the fire-watching. He knew Ruby was intending to have a bath as she’d lit the boiler in the outhouse earlier in the evening. He heard her fill it, then the squeals of laughter from Rosie as she went in first. Then Ruby brought Rosie upstairs and put her to bed.

As he lay there on his bed, thinking dirty thoughts and idly playing with himself, he heard Ruby go back downstairs and add more water to the bath. He waited for the creak and scrape on the stone flags which meant she had climbed in, then crept downstairs to watch her through a crack in the kitchen door.

He had never thought she was beautiful before. But she was that night. By day she always wore her hair up, and the shape of her body was always concealed under a loose dress and apron. He knew her to be twenty-seven and that seemed very old to him. But as he peeped through the crack in the door she was standing up in the bath soaping herself all over, her chestnut hair cascading down over her breasts.

She was all pink, white and curvy, with a small waist and plump little buttocks. As she soaped over her tits and down into that triangle of reddish hair, Seth’s cock leapt up like a barber’s pole.

She screamed as he came bursting through the door naked, and tried to grab a towel to cover herself. But Seth just leapt on her, tossing her down on to the stone floor of the kitchen, and thrust his hardness inside her.

That all-too-brief, wonderful moment was one he still liked to savour now. She was all wet and slippery. She smelled of soap and her fanny was so hot and tight, so much better than his own hand.

It was like living on a knife’s edge when his father came home. Seth was terrified Ruby would blurt out what he had done, yet at the same time he was determined to have her again at all costs. He bought her silence with little threats towards Rosie. She was five now and followed him about like a little sheep. He had only to turn back towards Ruby as he took the kid out for a walk and mime cutting her throat in order to remind Ruby to keep her trap shut.

He didn’t get to have her very often. Ruby was clever at making sure she was never alone with him in the house, but sometimes he found a way of coming home in the afternoons without Norman and his father, and then he would pounce. Ruby cried and pleaded with him at these times, again and again she insisted she was going to tell Cole. But Seth knew that each time he screwed her she was less likely to. She should have told Cole the first time.

But then one day in the autumn of 1943, just after Seth’s sixteenth birthday, Cole announced he was going up to Birmingham the next day to price a demolition job and he would take Norman with him. He said he would drop Seth off at the farm near Bridgwater to finish off mending a barn roof they’d been working on together, and if they put his bike on the back of the truck, he could ride it home later in the day.

Seth stayed on the job just long enough so the farmer knew he was there, then got on his bike and rode home. It was raining hard and Rosie was at school. He was convinced Ruby would be more amenable knowing Cole was far away, but he was wrong. As soon as he walked in the kitchen, she picked up the carving knife and threatened him.

‘Don’t even think of it,’ she snarled at him, her blue eyes flashing as dangerously as the knife blade. ‘I’ve had enough, Seth. You can threaten me all you like but you won’t be able to hurt Rosie. I guessed you’d come back today and I’ve got someone to pick her up from school and keep her until Cole gets back. I’m going to tell him.’

‘He won’t believe you,’ Seth retorted. He had an erection already just looking at her heaving chest and imagining those pink tits laid bare.

‘He will. He already knows there’s something wrong. He’s been trying to get it out of me for weeks.’

Seth knew this much was true. Cole had asked both boys if they knew why she was so withdrawn.

‘Put that knife down,’ Seth ordered her. His stomach was churning; he wasn’t sure if it was fear or desire. ‘What’s the harm, anyway? You aren’t married to him.’

She gave a tight little laugh and instead of putting the knife down she took a menacing step towards him. ‘I might not have married your father, but I love him,’ she said. ‘If it wasn’t for you, Seth, we’d be the happiest couple in the world. It’s you that causes all the problems. You were a strange kid right from the start, and as the years have gone by you’ve got stranger, crueller and nastier. I was sympathetic at first. I know when your mum ran off it was a terrible shock to you, and I tried to care for you and treat you like you were my son. But you’re out of control now. You steal, cheat and lie, you’re perverted and vicious. I want you out of this house for ever, before you taint Rosie.’

All at once Seth knew she really meant what she was saying. There was strength and determination in her face, her voice was calm and confident. He had badly misjudged her.

Seth had learned at an early age that sometimes when he was in trouble with teachers at school, or his father, it was necessary to back down, to feign remorse while he considered his next move. He did this now, slumping down on to a chair and covering his face with his hands.

‘Please don’t tell Dad,’ he begged her. ‘I’ll go away, get a job somewhere and never come back and bother you. Just don’t tell him.’

She didn’t relent immediately. Still holding the knife threateningly, she launched into a long, bitter attack on him, listing all the unpleasant things he’d done in the past, all the acts of cruelty to Rosie, Norman and other kids in the village she’d found out about. She said she was going to write them all down, along with the times he’d stolen money from her housekeeping purse and his father’s pockets, and complaints from neighbours. Finally she gave him his orders. He was to go up to his room, collect his clothes and be gone. She would make her list and if he ever came back she would give it to Cole immediately.

It didn’t take more than a few minutes to pack his few belongings. He had nothing more than a change of clothes and one pair of Sunday shoes. When he came back down to the kitchen she had put away the knife and was standing by the sink, her arms folded across her chest.

‘Try and make something of your life,’ she said in a much gentler voice. ‘For your father’s sake. He might never tell you he loves you, but he does.’

During her earlier lecture, Seth’s desire for her had flown and been replaced by anger and a need for revenge. But as she spoke of his father loving him, rage swept through him. If it wasn’t for Ruby coming here and changing everything, he and Norman would have their father all to themselves. He hated her.

Ruby turned away from him to reach up to the mantelpiece above the stove for her housekeeping tin. In that second Seth saw the small axe they used for chopping up kindling by the back door. He grabbed it.

‘I can spare two pounds,’ she said without turning back to him. ‘I was trying to save it for Christmas, but you’ll need–’

She didn’t finish the sentence because Seth swung the blunt side of the axe hard across the back of her neck. She toppled sideways, her eyes wide with surprise, and an odd sort of growling noise came from deep inside her.

She may have been killed with that one blow, but Seth couldn’t be sure of that, so he hit her again and again.

Digging a hole for her body was the hardest thing of all. He knew it had to be deep, otherwise foxes would get her out. He moved a pile of timber first; then, hidden behind it from the lane, he dug and dug. The first two feet of soil came out easily, but the deeper he went the more compacted it was. Only terror of his father coming back and catching him kept him going. Finally, at three in the afternoon, soaking wet with the rain, he finally carried Ruby out and laid her in the hole. Then he quickly shovelled the soil back on top of her, jumping up and down on it till it was flat enough to move the timber back to conceal the grave.

He was sweating when he returned to the cottage. He took his muddy clothes off in the porch, washed his hands, then ran upstairs with the clothes he’d packed earlier to put them back in his room and filled the same small bag with Ruby’s things. When he came back down he wiped up her blood and the mud he’d brought into the kitchen when he’d collected her body. He dressed himself again in his wet, muddy clothes, shut the back door, hitched the bag with her belongings on to his back and made off on his bike to Bridgwater to finish the job there, stopping only to add a few stones to the bag and dropping it into the River Parrett.

Luck and the rain were on his side. He passed no one on the road, and back at the farm his absence hadn’t been noticed. In fact at seven that evening when the farmer found Seth hard at work, he complimented him on continuing to work in such weather and asked if it wasn’t time he made for home.

Seth pulled over to the side of the road. Remembering that first killing had given him the shakes. He’d never regretted it, Ruby had had it coming to her. In fact he was proud of being smart enough to commit the perfect murder.

Everything had gone his way. Ruby had told the neighbour she left Rosie with that day that she had to go and see a sick relative. When she didn’t return everyone commiserated with Cole. They went along with his story that she must have been killed in an air raid. Secretly they thought she’d just run out on him, the same as Ethel Parker had done. So no one ever searched for her.

By day Cole had put on a brave face, and often he acted as if he didn’t care that Ruby had left him. But Seth knew better. Sometimes when he heard his father crying at night he felt bad about what he had done. He even tried to make it up to him by working harder.

‘If you’d only found a way of getting rid of Rosie, you wouldn’t be up to your ears in shit now,’ Seth said aloud.

Rosie was like a thorn in his side. Everything came back to her. Norman, Cole and him could have been fine in those days after Ruby was gone, if not for the brat. Cole worried about her being alone in the house after school, about her growing up wild with no one to teach her any manners. He didn’t seem to remember that his two boys had been alone after their mother cleared off, and that he often stayed down the pub until closing time, leaving them alone in the house with nothing to eat. Rosie was his pet, his little princess, no other kid in the world was as special as her.

So he found Heather.

The night he and Norman came home and found her there, Seth was livid. It made no difference that she’d cleaned up the kitchen and that they had their first good meal in years. Heather was only a few months older than him. It was insulting that his father should bring a girl like her into their home and let her take over without consulting them. Ruby had been quiet and docile, but not Heather. She bawled out her instructions to them all, from Cole right down to Rosie, and before Seth could say ‘sheep dip’ they were all taking off their boots in the porch and washing their hands before meals, while Cole was totally taken by her.

Seth was glad to go off to do his National Service. He knew it was only a matter of time before the girl ended up in his father’s bed. But what really irked him was that she won Norman round while he was away. When Seth came home on leave, he was made to feel the outsider, a trouble-making nuisance who spoiled the happy family. Norman painted the kitchen for her, Cole papered the bedrooms; as for Rosie, she stuck to Heather like glue, aping everything she said or did.

Seth saw the first chinks appearing before Alan was born. Heather was tired and cross all the time and they’d been fighting. Over Christmas Cole got drunk and he admitted he felt too old to be responsible for another child. Seth saw his chance and hinted that the child she was carrying might not be Cole’s. His father reared up in indignation, just as Seth knew he would, but he also knew what a jealous man Cole was and that once seeds of suspicion had been sown, trouble and rows would soon follow.

Seth came out of his reverie with a start, surprised to see the first light of dawn coming up over the plain. He must have been sitting here for a couple of hours without realizing. He started the car up and went on, but the shaky feeling was still with him. He knew he needed food and a hot drink to put him right again, and a place to sleep where he wouldn’t be spotted.