Molly was beyond crying now that darkness had fallen for a second night. The previous night had been long and tortuous, and the daylight hours that followed it almost as bad. Every now and then she had banged on the door and screamed, but it was no use. Now she was so hungry and thirsty she could think of little else but food and drink, and the cold made it impossible to fall asleep and forget about it for a few hours.
She now knew without a doubt that she’d been left here to die. Maybe when the two women had dragged her here unconscious, they thought she was already dead. In any case, the fact they hadn’t been back to check on her proved that was what they wanted.
Yet, however utterly miserable she felt, Molly’s mind was still active, and it seemed to her that no one would react quite as aggressively as those two women had unless they had something very serious to hide. She felt certain now it was they who had attacked Cassie, and taken Petal.
When she’d walked around the back of Mulberry House Molly hadn’t really noticed much beyond the garden being overgrown. Yet out of the corner of her eye she was sure she had seen a black car, an old Austin or something similar. The two women could have found out where Cassie was living and driven to Somerset.
She asked herself what would have made them attack Cassie. Surely a mother would only drive all that way out of love, wanting to be reunited with her daughter? Maybe Cassie hadn’t been able to forgive her for turning her back on her when Petal was born, and had told them to leave. Perhaps a fight had broken out because Cassie had told some home truths, and one of the women had hit her so hard that she had fallen on the hearth. Then, perhaps, realizing Cassie was dead, they had taken Petal with them so she couldn’t tell anyone what had happened.
What had they done with the child? That was the most important question now.
Having seen how they lived, and how irrational and volatile they were, they could well have killed her. With miles and miles of marshland within a stone’s throw of the house, they could have buried her little body anywhere and no one would ever find it. That would explain their panic when she’d arrived.
But there was also a small chance she could be here in this house, locked up just as she was.
That image was almost worse than her being dead. She had been taken over ten months ago, and the thought of Petal being terrified and locked up for all that time was terrible. It would surely be better if she had been killed right away. Yet the thought persisted that she was alive, and very close by.
One night when she had been working behind the bar at the George, an elderly gentleman with a very upper-crust accent had started chatting to her. He was a retired lawyer who had been born in Rye, a former captain in the First World War who, when invalided out, went to university and studied law, later returning to his home town to set up his own practice. He was an interesting man, clearly very intelligent and astute about people. Amongst other things he spoke about that night was the high proportion of mentally unstable people living on the marshes with whom he had had contact through the courts.
‘When I was a boy, people talked about “the Marsh Folk”, usually with words like “barmy”, “touched” or “queer”,’ he had said. ‘There were peculiar old women we believed were witches, men who talked to themselves, odd folk who came into town on market day and seemed to be in a world of their own. It was said to be the constant wind on the marshes affecting the inner ear that made them that way. Nothing much has changed since then. There are still some very strange people living in remote places on the marshes, whole families of them. They’re not necessarily bad people, but they’re certainly weird and out of step with the modern world.’
Molly had been amused by this, and she had seen a few people in town on market day that seemed to fit his description. So maybe Christabel Coleman’s strange, reclusive nature was caused by this, too, at least in part. Perhaps Cassie would’ve gone the same way if she hadn’t moved away.
As soon as the first rays of morning light came through the small window Molly dragged herself off the workbench. She felt terrible: cold, stiff and aching all over. She had fallen asleep intermittently during the night, only to wake suddenly and feel even colder than before.
Holding on to the workbench, she tried some ballet exercises to loosen up her stiff limbs. She sensed that hunger and thirst had put her into starvation mode to reserve what little was left in her and that this was why she felt so weak. But she was aware that she had to make more effort to escape, or she would die here.
First she attempted to drag the workbench so that it was under the small window. Although she knew she wouldn’t be able to get through the bars, if she broke the glass, someone might hear her shouting.
The workbench weighed a ton but, inch by inch, she managed to pull it nearer to the window. Finally, it was close enough and she climbed on to it to break the glass. The window was still right above her head so she couldn’t see out but, using her shoe, she thumped the glass as hard as she could until it gave way and shattered. She pushed the remaining shards of glass out, then tried to rattle the bars, hoping against hope they were weak. Sadly, they were rock hard, fixed right into the stone window surround, not just into the wooden window frame. It occurred to her that, with no glass in the window, it would be even colder now, and rain would come in. But slim hope was better than no hope at all, and without the glass she might be able to hear the postman or milkman and raise a hullaballoo.
Next, she got down to examine the wooden crates and apple storage boxes, hoping she might find a long nail to try and unpick the door lock. But she was overcome with exhaustion, the cellar began to swirl and she was forced to lie down again and rest.
As she lay there it flittered across her mind that when people said they were hungry they really didn’t know the meaning of the word. Real hunger was like something gnawing at your insides; it stopped you thinking of anything else. She supposed, as it grew worse, you would eventually hope for death.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
George Walsh put down the phone after speaking to Mrs Bridgenorth and stood for a moment considering what to do.
When he had got Molly’s letter the previous day the only emotion the contents had stirred was amusement. He felt that she’d swallowed a far-fetched yarn, a myth like the one spread around in this village about Enoch Flowers. It was said that his sweetheart had fallen into a threshing machine and he’d picked up her two severed legs and carried them and her down the high street.
It wasn’t true; his sweetheart had died of Spanish ’flu in 1920 but, somehow, this grisly story still circulated. There were even some who claimed that he had let Cassie have Stone Cottage because she looked like his sweetheart.
George knew that Molly was obsessed with Cassie’s death and Petal’s disappearance, so it was hardly surprising that she was willing to believe a story about a nutty widow and her formidable housekeeper who lived in a remote house on the marsh.
Now he knew she was missing, though, he wasn’t quite so ready to scoff at what she’d written to him. Mrs Bridgenorth had spent her whole life in hotels, so she wouldn’t scare easily, yet he had heard real fear in her voice. She had said that Molly was always so conscientious, that she wouldn’t have just gone off to see a friend without telling anyone. And none of her friends lived only a bike ride away.
George knew the correct thing to do was to go into the police station and tell Sarge all he knew, and that Molly had now been missing for nearly forty-eight hours.
He knew that Sergeant Bailey agreed with him that the investigation into Petal’s disappearance had ended far too quickly and hadn’t been very thorough. But he wasn’t going to like it that Molly hadn’t shared any further information about Cassie with the police.