Charlie Read online

  From Charlie’s viewpoint, her mother was partially obscured by one of the men crouching over her. It seemed to her, although she couldn’t see properly, that he was holding her by the shoulders. The other man’s back was also towards her, and he was bending over Sylvia as if questioning her. Both men wore dark blue overalls, like mechanics, and their stance appeared rather threatening.

  Curious as to what was going on, and a little concerned, Charlie snatched up her discarded jeans from the floor and jumped into them, but as she struggled to pull up the zip, she heard her mother scream. Yet even before she got back to the window the scream was abruptly cut off.

  What she saw made her gasp with horror and her blood run cold. The man who she had felt was holding her mother before, was now forcing her back on to the grass and had one hand over her mouth. The other was holding a thick stick or rod across her knees, at first glance as if just to stop them thrashing about, but as Charlie watched, to her consternation he jumped heavily on to either end of it, clearly with the intention of breaking both her knees.

  Charlie’s frenzied yell was involuntary. Much later she wished she’d kept silent and merely run to telephone the police, then found a safe place where she could view the men for identification purposes and take the car number or anything which might have helped in their capture. But her reaction was instinctively protective.

  Both men turned in her direction. As they were some twenty-five yards away from the house, and the sun was in her eyes, Charlie couldn’t see them clearly enough to note their features, only that they were similar to each other, with close-cropped dark hair. Her mother was screaming again, this time in pure agony, and with that the men let her go and ran towards the house as if they were coming after Charlie.

  She snatched up her top, raced along the landing and into her father’s study, locked herself in and dialled 999. Her heart was thumping like a steam-hammer, as she expected that any minute the men would break down the door and grab her too. Although it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before her call was answered, it seemed like forever.

  ‘There’s two men hurting my mother,’ she managed to get out. But even as the woman on the other end of the line was asking her to give her name and address, she heard the car engine revving up outside and the sound of tyres spinning on the gravel, and she dropped the phone and ran to the spare bedroom which had a view of the road. She was too late to get the number or make of car, all she saw was its rear end shooting down narrow Beacon Road at high speed.

  Going back to the phone, she hastily explained the situation and where she was. Then she fled down the stairs and out into the garden to her mother.

  For one brief moment she thought the whole terrible scene had been the work of her imagination. Sylvia was lying there on the rug as silent and still as she had been thirty minutes earlier when Charlie arrived home. Her blue towelling turban was still in place, her sun-glasses and packet of cigarettes were lying untouched on the blanket beside her. Birds were still singing in the woods on the cliff at the side of the house. Only the iron rod lying abandoned on the lush green grass proved that what she’d seen had really happened.

  Sylvia must have slipped into unconsciousness with the pain, but as Charlie knelt down beside her, so she opened her eyes and groaned. ‘My legs,’ she croaked out, ‘my legs.’

  ‘Who were those men, Mum?’ Charlie asked frantically, tears streaming down her face. ‘Why did they do this to you?’

  Sylvia writhed with pain, clutching at her daughter’s arm, but didn’t appear to be able to answer the question. Charlie could see an angry red weal, seeping with blood, across her knees. Unaccustomed as she was to seeing serious injuries, she could feel by the strange jutting of bone in the kneecaps that they were crushed. She could only guess at how painful it must be and she didn’t know what to do to help.

  She hoped the police and ambulance would get there quickly. Kingswear was not easily accessible because the roads were so narrow and winding, and their house was at the far end of it.

  ‘Stay very still,’ she ordered her mother. ‘I’ll just go into the house to get you some water and something to put over you. Don’t try to move, the police will be here any minute.’

  To Charlie’s amazement, Sylvia’s eyes opened wide with a look of terror and she struggled to sit up. ‘You called the police?’

  Charlie pushed her mother back down. ‘Of course I did. I dialled 999. They’ll send an ambulance too.’

  When Sylvia didn’t answer, just turned her head away from her daughter and lay there sobbing, Charlie was totally baffled by her reaction. But assuming Sylvia was in deep shock, and too badly hurt to be rational, she ran back to the house.

  After the heat of the garden, the kitchen felt very cool. Charlie splashed her own face with water, filled a glass, and seeing the long cotton shirt her mother usually put on after sunbathing hanging over a chair, snatched it up. The shock of what she’d witnessed was making her shake, but struggling to control herself, she went back outside.

  Her mother had moved. She was now half sitting, leaning back on her elbows, looking at her knees in stunned horror, tears rolling down her face and staining it with mascara. Charlie knelt beside her and supporting her with one arm, held the glass to her lips for her to sip it. ‘Do you think you could manage to put your shirt on?’ she asked gently as she put the glass down.

  To her surprise her mother silently lifted one arm and allowed Charlie to slip the shirt on. This was heartening, suggesting her injuries were not quite as serious as she first thought. But as the second arm went into the shirt Sylvia screamed out again in agony, so Charlie laid her down gently, buttoning up the shirt round her.

  ‘Don’t try to move again,’ she said. She could hear the siren of a police car in the distance and hoped it was coming here. ‘The ambulance men will give you something for the pain, just hold on.’

  ‘What did you tell the police?’ Sylvia asked in a strangled tone, clutching Charlie’s hand so tightly it hurt.

  ‘Only what I saw from the window, the two men hurting you. Who were they, Mum?’ she repeated. ‘Were they something to do with Dad?’

  Sylvia groaned again. Charlie could see by the way her forehead was furrowed with lines that she was struggling not to scream aloud with the pain and her heart went out to her. ‘I love you, Mummy,’ she whispered. ‘Try to tell me what this was about.’

  Her mother looked at her, her eyes bleak and agonized. ‘I can’t. I don’t understand it all myself,’ she said in a whisper. ‘All I can say is that your father is in bad trouble. It’s been coming for years and now it’s finally caught up with him. But you must say nothing about him to the police, Charlie. Promise me?’

  *

  The police and ambulance arrived simultaneously just a few minutes later, and as their first priority was to get Sylvia into the ambulance and off to hospital, Charlie wasn’t questioned in any depth. She related only what she had seen through the bedroom window, and as her mother lost consciousness while she was being lifted on to a stretcher, she couldn’t be asked anything.

  But once at Dartmouth Hospital, after Sylvia was first x-rayed and then taken away to the operating theatre, a policeman who introduced himself as Detective Inspector Willows took Charlie into a small office to talk to her. Although he was a local man, judging by his strong Devonshire accent, Charlie had never seen him before. He was a very big man, at least six foot, with the kind of powerful physique she associated with rugby players. He had a red face, shiny with perspiration which he kept mopping up, and he seemed puzzled rather than angry that something like this had happened on his territory.

  ‘You say the men didn’t ring the front-door bell but came straight through the gate and round the side of the house to the garden. That suggests to me that they had been to the house before and knew your mother and her routine well. Are you sure you haven’t seen them before?’

  Charlie shook her head. She had been very shaky and frightened back at the hous
e, but now, mostly because of her mother’s plea for her to say nothing about her father, she felt even more frightened and menaced. She began to cry again.

  ‘There, there.’ The policeman patted her shoulder comfortingly. ‘I know this has been a terrible shock to you, Charlie, but it’s important we catch these men as quickly as possible and we can’t do that unless you give us some detail. Now, how tall were they, were they fat, thin? Did they have a beard or moustache? How long was their hair?’

  She felt so foolish being unable to describe them in any detail. ‘Burly men in dark blue overalls’ could be absolutely anyone. When she said she thought they were tall, Willows asked her how she could judge that if she was looking down at them. When she said they looked alike, both with very short dark hair, he pulled her up again and asked if she was sure about that.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Charlie sobbed. ‘I couldn’t see them that clearly, the sun was in my eyes.’ She said she guessed them to be in their thirties, and they were both clean-shaven.

  ‘They weren’t Chinese then?’ he asked.

  ‘No, of course not.’ She was surprised by such a question. Apart from her father she didn’t know any Chinese people.

  The man shrugged. ‘That’s a shame, they might have been easier to trace. Where is your father, Charlie?’

  Charlie faltered. ‘I don’t know exactly, he’s away on business.’

  ‘When are you expecting him home?’

  She had no choice but to say she didn’t know that either, and by the time she had admitted she had no contact telephone number for him, or even an address, and he had been gone for some weeks, she knew it was as obvious to this policeman as it was to her that Jin’s long absence and the attack on her mother were inextricably linked.

  ‘Has he ever been away before and failed to contact you and your mother?’

  ‘Yes,’ Charlie said weakly. This wasn’t strictly true, a week was the longest they’d ever gone without contact, but in the circumstances she thought it better to lie. ‘He goes to places it’s difficult to phone from.’

  ‘Did he take his car with him?’

  ‘Yes, he always does.’

  ‘Well, where does he leave it when he goes abroad? At the airport, a friend’s home, or does he drive it across to the Continent?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. She’d never thought of that before, all she ever saw was him driving off in it, and coming back in it. His navy-blue Rover was as much part of her father as his dark suits and briefcase. ‘I think he takes it on the car ferry sometimes, but I don’t know for certain.’

  The questions went on and on and most she had no answer for. Did her father have an office in London? What shipping company did he use for his imports? Did he have any business partners? Who was his closest friend?

  ‘You are sixteen, Charlie,’ the policeman said at length, looking at her intently. ‘I find it very strange that you know so little about your father’s business. Can you tell me why this is?’

  ‘Dad doesn’t talk about business when he gets home,’ she said indignantly. She felt the man was suggesting she was stupid as well as a liar. ‘Sometimes he talks about the things he has bought, like a new batch of rugs, or where he’s been, but that’s all. There are so many other things to talk about.’

  *

  By eight o’clock that evening Charlie was beside herself with anxiety, fluctuating between bouts of pacing up and down the small waiting room and sinking into a chair and sobbing hysterically. Her mother was still in the operating theatre and the nursing staff were unable to make any predictions about whether she would ever be able to walk again unaided because all the bones in her knees had been shattered.

  Would she be able to stay alone at ‘Windways’ while her mother was in hospital? Would she still be able to be the Carnival Queen?

  Detective Inspector Willows had gone away, but before he left he said he would return in the morning to question Sylvia and get her permission to go through her husband’s private papers to find out more about his business interests. Charlie had a sickening feeling this would bring even more trouble.

  On her own, with nothing else to do to distract her from thoughts of what she’d seen for herself and heard from her own mother’s lips that afternoon, she knew those two men were almost certainly trying to find out from her where Jin was. As their attack on her was so brutal, it followed that Jin must have done something nasty to them.

  Adding that to all the questions she had been unable to answer adequately for the police, her mother’s dark moods, her fear of the police, and the rows between her parents, it became increasingly obvious to Charlie that her father couldn’t possibly be the respectable businessman she’d always believed him to be.

  That thought hurt her the most because she loved him. She supposed she loved her mother too, but she never felt it the way she did with her father. He was the one she ran to, the one she confided in, played with, laughed with, who provided the sunshine and warmth which were lacking in her mother.

  He was her rock, unfailingly good-humoured, comforting, stable and dependable. He spoke often of honour, he despised liars, bullies and thugs, in fact to her mind he had all the virtues gentlemen were supposed to have.

  It was as if she was standing on the edge of a cliff, and the ground was slowly slipping away beneath her feet. As she tried to pull herself back by clutching on to good memories of her father, so they seemed to shrink and slip through her hands. All at once she sensed that everything she had taken for granted in her life was under threat.

  Just before ten the ward sister opened the door of the waiting room and beckoned for Charlie to come with her. ‘You may see your mother now, just for a few minutes,’ she said.

  ‘Is she better?’ Charlie was still enough of a child to imagine nurses and doctors could accomplish miracles.

  Sister half smiled. She had a worn-looking face, and a soft Welsh lilt to her voice. ‘Well, she’s conscious again, that’s something. She won’t be up to talking much until tomorrow, but she’ll feel better for seeing you.’

  The sister led Charlie along a corridor, explaining her mother was in a room on her own. Charlie had never been inside Dartmouth Hospital until today, even though it was situated right on the quay and as familiar a building as the post office and bank. Other people had said hospitals made them feel sick, but she hadn’t felt that way, despite the peculiar smells and the serious business of tending the sick going on all around her; yet as she walked into her mother’s room and saw her lying flat on her back with a drip in her arm, and a sort of cage contraption holding the bedclothes away from her legs, Charlie suddenly felt faint.

  For the first time ever Sylvia looked forty. Her tan seemed to have faded, without lipstick her lips were bloodless, her blonde hair appeared greasy and lank.

  ‘It’s me, Charlie. How are you feeling?’ Charlie whispered as she approached the bed. Sylvia’s eyes were closed; her lashes without the usual thick mascara were thin and very fair.

  Her eyelids fluttered and opened just a crack. ‘Poorly,’ she said as if with great effort. ‘My legs!’

  Charlie glanced at the cage under the covers. Sister’s words earlier about making no predictions for the future still rang in her ears.

  ‘They’ll be fine, Mummy,’ she lied. ‘You’ll be walking and dancing again in no time.’

  Her mother’s eyes opened just a little wider, they looked like cold blue glass. ‘I won’t count on it,’ she said and closed them again as if dismissing her daughter.

  ‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow and bring you a nightie and stuff,’ Charlie said, fighting back tears. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  It struck her as she left the ward that her mother hadn’t said goodbye, or even asked if she had somewhere safe to stay for the night. Maybe it was all part of the effects of the anaesthetic, but it felt like she didn’t care. Tears trickled down Charlie’s cheeks as she made her way along the corridor. She wasn’t used to making decisions for herself,
not about important things. Who was going to look after her?

  Chapter Two

  ‘You poor darling!’ Mrs Melling exclaimed, jumping out of her armchair as her husband led Charlie into her sitting room. ‘Why on earth didn’t you phone us earlier? We saw the ambulance and police car of course, but we never guessed it had come from your house. We would have come straight down to the hospital. But how is Sylvia? Come and sit down and tell me all about it.’

  Charlie’s misery had increased after seeing her mother, with the realization that absolutely no one had considered her needs. The police had been quick enough to take her keys to the house, but hadn’t asked if she had anywhere else to go. She didn’t even have any money for the ferry across the river or a phone call. She had to ask if she could use a hospital phone and then had the acute embarrassment of trying to explain to the Mellings what had happened.

  ‘I’m sorry I had to bother you,’ she said in a small voice, fighting back tears. She was suddenly terribly ashamed. Whatever she said about this attack on her mother, the Mellings were bound to imagine her father was involved in something shady.

  ‘Bother me!’ Mrs Melling’s voice rose to an indignant squeak. ‘We’ve known you since you were a little girl and I’d have been very hurt if you hadn’t come to us for help. Why, this is almost your second home!’

  Such warmth was typical of Diana Melling. Charlie had always thought of her as a proper mother. Although she was no older than Sylvia, she looked more like fifty, comfortably plump, with an old-fashioned wavy hair-style and no more than a faint hint of lipstick. She usually wore an apron over rather shapeless cotton dresses and she seemed entirely content cooking, cleaning and ironing for her family. Mr Melling was a jolly sort too, most of the time, a tall, gangly sort of man with a bushy beard and untidy, too long hair. When the children were younger he organized games of cricket or rounders, fixed dolls’ legs back on bodies and liked to read them stories.

  It was very true that the Mellings’ was a second home. Charlie had spent a great deal of time in it over the last nine years. It was only when she reached adolescence that she realized the Mellings were poor compared with her parents. As a child she had never noticed the decor or furniture, only delighted in the fact that here she was allowed to spread toys on the floor, build tents with the clothes-horse, and make as much noise as she liked with June and her younger sisters Nicola and Susan. She had climbed trees in their garden, played in the sandpit, and made shops in the kitchen using the entire contents of Mrs Melling’s cupboards.