Without a Trace (23 page)

Molly thanked him and asked him to thank the sergeant, too, for his kindness. Then, as the policeman drove away, she made her way in to see Constance.

‘You poor love,’ the old lady said as soon as she saw Molly. ‘Come and sit down by the fire and tell me all about it.’

Constance was sitting by the fire in her wheelchair. She didn’t get out of it to hug her, she didn’t even hold out a reassuring hand, yet just the way she spoke it felt to Molly as if someone had just wrapped a warm, soft blanket around her. All at once she didn’t care how squalid Whitechapel was, or that she’d have to cope with no bathroom and an outside lavatory here. She felt safe and wanted.

All her other visits here had been on a different footing. She had been, to all intents and purposes, like a distant relative doing her duty in coming to see an old lady, staying just long enough to be polite, then leaving. Yet by one o’clock on Christmas morning, after wheeling Constance home in her wheelchair from the midnight service, Molly felt that fate had smiled on her. It wasn’t just a temporary place of refuge, somewhere she would want to leave as soon as she could. She felt that coming to the East End might actually be a really good thing for her.

All day, people had been dropping into Myrdle Street with food, offers of a shared Christmas dinner, to see if Constance needed any help, or just for a chat. These were nice people. They might be very poor, and often loud and coarse, but they had warm hearts.

Constance wasn’t bound to the wheelchair; she could walk
well enough with a stick to get to the lavatory, to stand up to wash and dress herself and make a cup of tea. But she was frail and her neighbours clearly wanted to show how much they loved her by doing as much as possible for her.

They didn’t see Molly as some kind of interloper but as company for their friend, and when the story was told about her experiences the previous day, they were all in total sympathy with her. In fact, they were all impressed that she had got the better of the fat man in Greek Street.

Molly had spent the day not only meeting all the neighbours but decorating a small Christmas tree someone had brought round, helping wrap some toys for various small children Constance cared about, making up a narrow truckle bed for herself in the corner of the room and stowing her clothes away in a linen press.

Molly had always been involved with the church at home, not just going to services but singing in the choir and flower arranging, but she’d never been to a midnight service before. When Constance asked her to go with her, she agreed out of politeness, but she would rather have gone to bed. So it was a real surprise to find herself uplifted by the service. The carols, candles and flowers played a part, but it was more than that: she felt as if a burden had been taken from her shoulders and that whatever path she took after Christmas would be the right one.

She made some cocoa for her and Constance when they got in.

‘It will work out for you,’ Constance said as she got into her bed. ‘You mustn’t doubt that, dear. For now, you must just settle in here with me, rest and be comfortable. The New Year is the time for making plans.’

‘I had such a cheek throwing myself on you,’ Molly said, shame-faced. ‘But there wasn’t anyone else.’

‘It wasn’t chance,’ Constance said. ‘The whole thing – you finding my address in a book at Cassie’s home, feeling you had to see me – it was all meant to be. The Almighty has a plan here; we just have to wait until He decides to let us know what to do next.’

If Molly had heard anyone else say such a thing, she would have scoffed. But Constance had a way of talking about God as if he was her best friend and she knew he could sort anything. Molly was beginning to believe that, too.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

By mid-January Molly’s life had settled into a gentle routine. She couldn’t claim it was a comfortable one, in a cold, draughty house with no bathroom and so much squalor and poverty all around her. But she was surprisingly happy.

Constance’s belief that ‘the Lord will provide’ had rubbed off on her. Three days after Christmas she was walking by Pat’s Café on Whitechapel Road and she noticed a card in the window saying ‘
PART-TIME HELP WANTED
’. She went in immediately to enquire.

Pat Heady, who owned the café, was a woman in her early fifties, skinny, bedraggled and slovenly, and she was often very rude to her customers. The café was as grubby as its owner.

‘What do you want to work here for?’ Pat had asked Molly, looking at her with deep suspicion.

For two pins Molly would have turned and walked out. But she needed a job and, however grubby Pat and her café were, it was just a three-minute walk from home, and she needed to pay her way.

‘Because I need a job,’ Molly said, tempted to add that only a desperate person would want to work in Pat’s.

‘I only pay sixpence an hour, and it’s hard work.’

‘I’ll take it.’ Molly didn’t think she had any choice.

‘God love you!’ Pat’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. ‘I thought a posh bint like you would sooner put a fork in her eyes than work here.’

‘Desperate times call for desperate measures,’ Molly said with a grin. She quite liked being called a posh bint; she thought she would tell George about it when she eventually got round to writing to him. ‘When can I start and what are the hours?’

‘Start tomorrow if you like. I want you ten till two, but if you’re any good I might stretch that from nine to three,’ Pat said. ‘It’s mostly cooking fry-ups.’

Molly could see that the frying pan on the stove was half full of lard and that there were four eggs floating around in it. She thought she could definitely improve the standard of the cooking by using less fat. But she kept that to herself. ‘I’ll be in at ten then. My name is Molly Heywood.’

She got home to find Constance beaming.

‘The landlord has just been round. He said you could use the little box room on the next floor if you clean it out and give it a coat of paint,’ she said gleefully. ‘He doesn’t even want any rent, because it’s too small to let.’

‘How wonderful!’ Molly exclaimed. ‘And I’ve just got a job, too. I’ll pop up and see the room, because it’ll be dark very soon, then I’ll come back and make some tea and tell you about the job.’

The room was hardly bigger than a cupboard, with no gas light in it, but Molly thought once she’d scrubbed it out it would be fine.

Constance was delighted, too, that Molly had found a job. ‘Pat could do with some lessons in hygiene,’ she said. ‘But the café is close to home – a good thing in the winter months – and it’s a chance to get back on your feet. Now let’s think what we can put in your new room to make it homely.’

Pat required nothing more of Molly than the ability to cook things like bacon and eggs, sausage and chips, or cheese on toast, to wash up and ring up money in the till. It was as different from working at Bourne & Hollingsworth as it was possible to be. Almost all the clientele were male, either market traders or local workmen. They were rough, noisy, many with the table manners of pigs, but they appreciated Molly, the time flew by and she could walk home in five minutes.

She had to wait until Sunday to scrub her room out and give it a coat of whitewash. She slotted the truckle bed and a slender chest of drawers of Constance’s in, and some hooks on the back of the door became her wardrobe. She bought a yard of cheap cotton in the market to make a curtain for the tiny window, and Constance dug out a bright-red blanket for her to cover the bed and create a cosier feel.

‘It’s an old ambulance blanket,’ Constance explained. ‘They used to have red ones to hide the blood. A rescue worker gave it to me during the war when I was bombed out, and I never thought to return it.’

The room was terribly cold, of course, and there was no way of heating it, but Molly put a couple of hot-water bottles in the bed at night, and she slept soundly. She was glad to be able to give her friend back her privacy, as both of them sleeping and living in the same room had been far from ideal.

On her first night in the room, she thought about Cassie having lived next door; in fact, in the room on the other side of her wall. Molly couldn’t help but feel it wasn’t just chance that had brought her here but fate, and that she was right to keep on searching for the truth, because it would surface eventually. She hoped that if someone around here did know
more about Cassie, or even the identity of the person who took Petal, they might make themselves known to her.

She kept the picture of Cassie and the one of Petal on the counter at Pat’s Café, and every time a new face came in she’d ask them if they knew Cassie. Not many of them did, but there was a sprinkling of younger men who had known and liked her. Every one of them was shocked that she’d been murdered, and horrified that Petal hadn’t been found.

That was one thing here in the East End that she really liked: people cared about children. Not just their own, but all children. In the main, they weren’t concerned about colour or whether the mother was married either. But then, the East End had always been a melting pot of colour, culture and religion. Russians, Poles, Chinese, Jews, lascars, Africans and West Indians – many of them had arrived here as seamen and ended up staying. They had heard the evil racism that Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts had tried to rouse the rabble with in the thirties, yet mostly they shut their ears. They had stuck together and helped one another through the Blitz, too. Molly was beginning to understand why Cassie had stayed here for so long, and also to realize how hurt she must have been by some of the narrow-minded people in Sawbridge.

One Sunday morning right at the end of January it had begun to snow while they were in church, and when they came out it was very thick on the ground and it was hard for Molly to push Constance’s wheelchair. Ted Barlow, a neighbour from Myrdle Street, rushed over to help and, with a lot of laughter, as both Ted and Molly kept slipping, they got Constance and the chair home.

Molly had put a half-shoulder of lamb on a low gas to roast
before they went out, and it smelled wonderful. The fire was banked up and, with a little poking, it was soon blazing.

‘I think the snow is going to be around for a while,’ Constance remarked as she looked out the window. ‘It’s a kind of blessing, isn’t it? All the ugliness around us is hidden.’

‘Not much of a blessing for those too poor to buy coal, though,’ Molly said thoughtfully. Since living here, she’d become very aware of what poverty really meant. Back home in Somerset, it wasn’t so clearly defined, as people grew their own vegetables and kept a few chickens. They might have little more than the clothes they stood up in, but they weren’t hungry. She’d seen plenty of people round here who really were; they were gaunt with hollow eyes, stooped and slow with the desperate struggle to get through each day, with no hope things would improve. Hardly a day passed without her reading in the paper about an old person found dead in their home from malnutrition or cold. It preyed on her mind and she wished there was something she could do to help.

‘You are right, my dear.’ Constance sighed deeply. ‘In the bitter winter of 1947 people were burning their furniture to keep warm. Bomb damage had left holes in roofs, and broken windows, and there was no one, or any materials, to fix things. I heard of families who got into one bed together as soon as they got home; it was too cold to do anything else. I was lucky the church provided me with coal. I used to ask people I knew were in a bad way round here for the evening.’

‘I bet you were a tower of strength to people during the war,’ Molly said. Constance always thought of others before herself. She would willingly give away her last crust of bread to someone in need. That was probably the reason people around here did so much for her, now that she needed help.

‘Everyone did their bit during the war. I was nothing special.’ Constance shrugged. ‘But however grim you think it is, Molly, things
are
getting better. There is plenty of work now, the bomb sites are being cleared and new homes built. As for the new Health Service, that’s miraculous. I often wondered how many died in the East End in the past because they didn’t have a shilling for the doctor.’

‘But that’s awful!’ Molly exclaimed.

Constance nodded in agreement. ‘However, we should be looking to the future, not dwelling on the past. I think that, after we’ve had our dinner, we should sit by the fire and have a talk about what you want to do.’

It was nearly dark by the time they’d eaten their dinner. Molly got up from the table, lit the gas light and put another couple of lumps of coal on the fire.

When she looked round, Constance was scraping the last remnants of rice pudding from the dish. She laughed when she realized Molly had seen her.

‘You’re such a good cook it’s hard not to eat every last scrap,’ she said appreciatively. ‘The lamb was so tasty, the roast potatoes perfect. My dear friends around here, although kindness itself, tend to be a bit limited in their culinary skills. Did your mother teach you to cook?’

‘Yes – well, the basics,’ Molly said. ‘But we had a good domestic-science teacher at school who was always urging us to borrow cookery books from the library, and to experiment, too.’