‘Has Cassandra ever said she was troubled by anyone?’ George asked. ‘Someone that turned up there, made a nuisance of themselves – maybe someone from her past?’
‘She never said – well, except about Gerry,’ Molly replied. ‘But she was tough, George! If someone was being a nuisance, she’d see them off. She wouldn’t just put up with it.’ She almost added, ‘Like I would’; after all, she’d put up with her father saying the most horrible things to her for years, and hitting her, too. Cassie had been very blunt about it, saying her father was a brute and her mother almost as bad for letting it happen, so Molly should walk out on the pair of them. ‘Did she tell you where she lived before she came to Sawbridge?’ George asked, breaking across her thoughts.
Molly pondered the question; it was something she’d always been curious about. ‘I can’t give you a straight answer because Cassie never told me, but I think she’d spent most of her life in or near London, because she would mention art galleries and theatres there in a kind of personal, knowledgeable way. I think she was in Bristol, too, for a short while before she came to Sawbridge. She mentioned Devon, Glastonbury, Wells and other places sometimes, but I got the impression she was wandering around the area looking for a permanent place to bring up Petal and, when she got to Sawbridge, she felt this was it. She once told me she’d dreamed of a home like Stone Cottage for years.’
All at once Molly felt exhausted, as if all the energy in her body had drained away. She didn’t want to talk any more and, anyway, she had nothing more to say.
‘Go on home after you’ve signed this,’ George said, as if he’d picked up on how she was feeling. ‘You look all in – not surprising after what you’ve been through – and I know you were up and about at seven o’clock this morning. I saw you carrying an armful of stuff to the village hall as I came on duty.’
‘I’ve got a feeling nothing is ever going to be the same after today,’ said Molly sadly as she got unsteadily to her feet. ‘Is that silly?’
PC Walsh caught hold of her two hands in his and looked down at her. ‘We’ve known each other a long time, Molly,’ he said. ‘Perhaps nothing will be the same again, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be worse than before. Sometimes it takes something bad for us to see where we want to go, and who with.’
Molly smiled weakly. She wanted to think he was expressing an interest in her but, after all that had happened, it wasn’t appropriate to think like that.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Molly,’ he said. ‘If you think of anything else that might be useful to the investigation, jot it down so you don’t forget.’
CHAPTER THREE
It was just after seven and still raining when Molly came out of the police station. Hearing music coming from the Pied Horse, she stopped in the middle of the road. She knew that the Percys had booked a small band to play tonight. If the weather had been good, they’d have played in the street and Molly would be helping to serve drinks.
She was astounded that the Percys hadn’t cancelled the band the minute Sergeant Bailey had informed them at the village hall that Cassie was dead. It wasn’t right to carry on with all the jollity when a young woman had been murdered and her child was missing.
Rage bubbled up inside her at the thought of people laughing, chatting and drinking at such a time, and the tears that welled up in her eyes were scalding. She already had a picture in her head of Petal stumbling around in the woods, hungry, soaked to the skin and too scared to go to anyone because she’d seen her mother being killed.
Yet now there was an even worse picture nudging out the previous one. That of Petal’s small body shoved hastily under a bush to conceal it. Killed purely so she could never identify her mother’s murderer.
Molly’s usual timidity left her, and she marched across to the pub, flung the door open wide and, holding it like that, she launched into a loud and bitter tirade.
‘You should not be in here drinking tonight!’ she shouted out at the top of her lungs.
The band stopped playing and everyone turned to look at her. The blank expressions on their faces incensed her even further.
‘Surely you all know that Cassandra March was found dead today and her six-year-old daughter is missing? Little Petal may have been murdered, too, but just in case she ran away from the man who killed her mother, is there anyone in this pub who feels able to carry on drinking and chatting while a frightened six-year-old is hiding in the woods in this rain?’
She let her question sink in for a few seconds. ‘Right, who is going to come and help me search? It won’t be dark until nearly ten tonight. We’ve got three hours to find her.’
There was a buzz of discussion. Normally, there would’ve been very few women in the pub but, because it was a special day, there were around twenty or so this evening. Yet they, the very ones Molly had expected to urge their husbands to join the search, looked indignant at the request.
‘Come on!’ Molly called out, wondering where on earth this new courage had come from. ‘Imagine if it was your little girl alone in the woods.’
The first two men to make a move were in their fifties: John Sutherland and Alec Carpenter, both farm labourers.
‘Thank you,’ Molly said. ‘You are true gentlemen. Now, who else is coming?’
It took a while, and a great deal of whispered discussion with their pals but, gradually, the men began to come over and join John and Alec. In the end, there were eighteen of them.
Three dropped out as soon as they realized they would have to walk up the hill. Halfway up, another four turned and went back down.
‘So a pint is more important than a child’s life, is it?’ Molly called scornfully after them.
When the remaining eleven reached the track that led down to Stone Cottage, they stopped and looked at the mud in alarm.
‘I’d like to look for her, but I’m not dressed for it,’ Ted Swift admitted, looking down at his highly polished brogues. ‘You need wellingtons to walk in that.’
‘There’s a big police search arranged for the morning, I heard,’ Jim Cready, the local window cleaner, said. ‘We should wait for that, Molly. None of us is dressed for tramping through rain and mud.’
Like sheep, they all turned and followed Jim back down the hill.
‘What’s a bit of rain and mud compared with saving a small child?’ Molly yelled out as they retreated, then burst into tears of frustration.
She stomped down to Stone Cottage and followed the well-worn small track into the woods made by Cassie and Petal. But the track petered out after about two hundred yards; this was clearly as far as mother and daughter were in the habit of going.
Molly had been calling out for Petal as she walked, but it occurred to her that no child would stay so close to home if something had frightened them there; they would run to somewhere they perceived as safe – school, the church or a favourite shop – so there was no sense in staying in a wood where the undergrowth was too thick to walk through.
Reluctantly, she turned round and made her way back to the road. She felt foolish now that she’d tried and failed to organize a search party. She would search the church, look in the schoolyard and along the backs of the shops, but maybe she should wait for the police search tomorrow morning at first light to go further afield. After all, they were pulling in men from both Bath and Bristol.
It was gloomy in the church, and the usual smell of polish and damp had a layer of rose scent added to it from the two very large vases of roses either side of the altar.
She looked around, including in the vestries, calling out Petal’s name, but to no avail.
On an impulse she sank down on to her knees at the altar rail and prayed that Petal would be found unharmed.