Of course, it could have been a panic reaction on Miss Gribble’s part. Perhaps she had lashed out involuntarily because she was afraid of scandal. The two women might have dragged her into the cellar while they considered what to do with her.
Molly decided she was going to believe that this was the case for the moment, and she turned to the door and started banging on it.
‘Please let me out!’ she shouted. ‘I know you didn’t mean to hurt me, but I have to get back to my work, or they’ll call the police. Just let me go and I’ll forget this ever happened.’
She felt like screaming that the first thing she’d do when she got out would be to get a doctor to certify them and have them put into an asylum. But she knew that wouldn’t help her cause.
There was no reply, and when she put her ear to the door Molly couldn’t hear anything at all. It was possible, of course, that this cellar was just one of several underground rooms, and had such thick walls that sound from here couldn’t penetrate up the stairs into the house.
She took off her shoe and began banging on the door as loudly as she was able. She did this for around five minutes, paused to shout out the same message as before, then returned to banging again.
After repeating this sequence around twenty times, her arm ached and her throat hurt; also, the foot without a shoe had become like a block of ice on the stone floor. She put the shoe back on and, picking up one of the wooden crates, used it to batter the door until it fell apart in her hands. Still no one came.
There were plenty more crates, but Molly’s head hurt and she felt exhausted. She sank down on to the floor and sobbed.
She hadn’t told anyone where she was going, so no one would know where to come looking for her. She’d told George in her letter that she had a lead on Cassie’s mother, who lived in Brookland, and that she was going to see her, but that wouldn’t alarm him, not unless he was told she hadn’t come back. And who was going to tell him that?
Eventually, if she didn’t turn up, Mrs Bridgenorth would alert the police. They would contact Charley, and when he told them she’d been determined to find Cassie’s mother and thought she lived in a nearby village, the police might end up here.
But how long would that take? At the very least, it would be days. The thought of spending even one night in such a cold, damp place without food, water or a blanket was terrifying.
The cold floor was striking up through her skirt to her bottom now, and the light coming through the small window was fading. She had to make a plan for when total darkness fell.
Getting to her feet, she went over to the workbench. The top of it was wood – far warmer to sit or lie on than the floor. She pushed the apple boxes to one side and found a piece of rag. She wiped the dust off the bench, then pushed all the crates away, hoping to find anything – rags or sacks – to keep her a bit warmer, or a tool to pick at the door lock. But there was nothing.
She prowled round the cellar then, looking for anything useful, but there was nothing other than cobwebs.
She picked up a crate, intending to start banging on the door again, and something dropped to the floor with a slight tinkle. She couldn’t see what it was, as the light was so bad, but she groped around with her hand and eventually found it.
It was a hair slide – just a little red circle like a Polo mint, with a metal clasp across the back. It looked familiar, but maybe that was just because she had worn such hair slides when she was little.
Grabbing a box, she began to bang and shout again. It made her feel warmer, even if it did no good. She thought she would do it in the middle of the night, too; with luck, it might annoy them so much they would come down.
Once complete darkness fell, Molly was unable to maintain her calm. She wanted to relieve herself; she was cold, hungry and thirsty, and very frightened. It seemed to her as she lay hunched up on the workbench that if a person could knock you out and drag you to a cellar, they were capable of leaving you there for ever. Compared with that, her fear of spiders seemed silly, but still she kept imagining them creeping towards her in the dark.
She couldn’t see her wristwatch now, but it couldn’t be more than nine at night, as it hadn’t been dark for that long. She wished she could fall asleep, but it was too cold for that.
She thought of Constance and how much she’d believed in the power of prayer.
‘Not a sparrow can fall from its nest without Him knowing,’ she’d said, on many an occasion.
‘If you know about the sparrows, what about me?’ Molly asked God. ‘I haven’t done anything bad, I was trying to put things right, so please help me. Make someone work out where I am.’
All at once, almost as if God had heard her prayer, she remembered why the red hair slide looked familiar. Petal had always worn two of them in her hair, one on either side.
It could, of course, be pure coincidence that a hair slide like Petal’s had been dropped here. But she didn’t believe it was. She just knew Petal had been here.
At four o’clock in the morning, while Molly was shivering uncontrollably and thinking she just might die of it, Evelyn Bridgenorth was lying awake, worrying. She had stayed up till after twelve in the hope that Molly would turn up or telephone, then, as all the guests were now in bed, she finally locked the hotel door and went up herself.
Ted was already asleep, and she didn’t want to disturb him by putting the light on and reading. So she just lay there, waiting for sleep to overtake her, but it didn’t; her mind was racing too fast.
She heard the church clock strike four and wondered how she was going to run the hotel when she’d had no sleep. If Molly did come breezing in the next morning, she’d get a real tongue-lashing for putting her through this.
At ten o’clock Evelyn Bridgenorth rang the police station to report Molly missing.
‘It’s not unusual for young women to just take off,’ the sergeant said, clearly not having taken on board what she’d just said about Molly being a reliable and conscientious girl. ‘It’ll be a man, I expect. He’ll have sweet-talked her into dropping everything and, when she comes back, she’ll tell you a cock-and-bull story that she was on an errand of mercy.’
‘Miss Heywood left on a bicycle. She took no clothes or overnight things. She didn’t even have a coat with her,’ Evelyn said crisply.
‘Oh, we’ve had plenty of women go missing when they said they were just out to buy a pint of milk and still wearing their pinny. No accounting for what goes on in women’s minds.’
Evelyn was tempted to tell him that she was imagining going down to the police station and throwing the contents of a chip pan over him. ‘I want you to look into it,’ she said through gritted teeth.
‘Tell you what, Mrs Bridgenorth, as it’s you, if she isn’t back in two days, I’ll see what I can do.’
‘You don’t suppose Molly’s disappearance has got anything to do with her looking for her friend’s family?’ Ernest asked Mrs Bridgenorth that evening when he opened the bar. ‘She hadn’t given up on finding them. I’ve heard she’s been asking around the town about the family quite recently.’
‘Yes, I know about that. Ted told me. But I can’t see that there’d be any connection between that and her disappearance. I mean, her friend was killed back in Somerset.’
‘Maybe so, but if the dead girl’s family live around here, Molly may have stumbled into something they want kept hidden,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to call the police.’
‘But I thought they wouldn’t do anything.’
‘Not the Rye police – they’re a bunch of disbelieving idiots. If she isn’t back tonight, I’m going to call Molly’s policeman friend in Somerset and hear what he has to say. I’m also going to ring her friend Dilys and see if she knows anything.’