Rosie Read online

  ‘I’ll tell Dad!’ she yelled.

  ‘You won’t be alive to tell him anything,’ Seth yelled back, and as the cane swished through the air Rosie just glimpsed his mouth wet with spittle and his black eyes alight with hate.

  There was no counting the strokes, or trying to avoid them. They rained down on her so fast it was just one endless, agonizing explosion of pain.

  ‘Pleeease,’ she called out.

  She felt him roughly pull her dress up and his hands grabbed the back of her knickers and pulled them down. She bucked furiously as her buttocks were exposed, fearing he was now going to repeat what she’d seen him do to Heather.

  ‘Please what?’ he said sarcastically. ‘Will I “sex” you? That’s what you called it, wasn’t it?’

  The cane came down again, harder still on her bare bottom, cutting into her like a knife. She tried to get her hands round to protect herself, screaming now with the pain, but he merely swiped her hands away and slashed at her again.

  ‘You’ll go to prison for this,’ she screamed.

  When the next expected blow didn’t come, she moved her head slightly to see what he was doing. To her absolute horror he had his penis in his hand, and he was rubbing himself, just the way Norman had been doing that day while Seth attacked Heather. Aside from then, she’d never seen an erect male penis, and she’d been too shocked to notice anything about it. But Seth’s looked huge, nothing like the soft, floppy thing she’d observed sometimes when he was bathing. She covered her eyes and screamed again.

  ‘Scream again,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Go on, scream. I like that.’

  Even through the agony of the wounds he’d inflicted upon her, Rosie’s mind assimilated a message. He was mad, dangerously mad, he had no fear of what his father might do to him for this. He was beyond any kind of reason. She knew she must say nothing further to provoke him. Do nothing to encourage him.

  She let out one more scream, forcing herself to control it instead of thinking about what he was doing, and closing her eyes tightly so she couldn’t see his jerking wrist or his demented face. Slowly she let the scream die, hoping she was faking losing consciousness effectively.

  Rosie heard him make a guttural groan, but she didn’t dare open her eyes to look. She heard the twang of bed-springs as he slumped down beside her, and for a moment there was silence, punctuated only by a long-drawn-out sigh.

  When his hand touched her cheek, it was all she could do not to scream again. It was sticky with something and it smelled sour. She braced herself, expecting him to pull her up, or to start beating her again, but instead she heard something which sounded very much like a sob.

  Then he went. He just stood up and walked out of the room and down the stairs. Without another word.

  *

  It was Monday afternoon, two days since Sergeant Headly had found Rosie, and he was back in the same bedroom at May Cottage, leaning out of the window. It was partly to get a breath of fresh air, as the room still stunk as much as it had on Saturday, but mostly it was to watch the men below attaching chains to an old tractor to move it. They had already cleared much of the area, there were yellow and white bald patches amongst the weeds showing where the heaps of tyres and old machinery had been.

  Headly felt as if he hadn’t slept for a month, but then he hadn’t had more than a couple of catnaps since Saturday afternoon when he’d found Rosie up here.

  Cole and Norman Parker had been arrested when they arrived back at the cottage late on Saturday night. They were both very drunk and it was just as well that six officers had come along to apprehend them, as both men resisted violently. One officer sustained a black eye and a bloodied nose, Headly a cracked rib.

  Cole Parker’s attitude to his arrest was puzzling. He admitted almost immediately that he’d been harsh with Alan, his excuse being that boys needed discipline to toughen them up. But he showed no remorse, or even fear, that he was to be charged with cruelty. Yet when told what Seth had done to Rosie he became almost incoherent with rage, and after ranting and raving about what he’d do to Seth when he got his hands on him, he finally burst into tears, sobbing and claiming that he’d always loved Rosie, and that she was his favourite.

  Norman, on the other hand, once in a cell on his own, was docile and even penitent that he’d lashed out at the police. He came across as a simple-minded boy who followed his father’s and older brother’s lead blindly. As he spoke about what they’d been doing in London, he used words like ‘conning’ and ‘leaning on people’ so openly that it was clear he had no real idea that this was wrong or shameful.

  Neither did he seem to understand the concept of cruelty to a small child. He just looked vacant and said Alan ‘only got the stick and belt the same as me and Seth did’. Likewise when asked if his father had hit Ruby and Heather, he said, ‘Well, they just got slapped when they needed it.’

  Seth still hadn’t been found, and this was creating something of a mystery. He hadn’t been spotted by anyone and he had no transport. Like all the Parkers he knew every nook and cranny out on the moors, so it stood to reason he was holed up somewhere in a makeshift camp. But it had been raining heavily from early Sunday morning until an hour or two ago when it turned to drizzle, and though he may well have taken some provisions with him and a waterproof coat, it was doubtful he could hide out for long. More worrying still, a shotgun was missing from the porch.

  Headly walked slowly down the stairs once the tractor had been moved. His rib hurt and he wished he could go home. There was no real reason for him to stay; he’d done his bit and searched the entire cottage for anything which might offer them a lead. But aside from finding a cashbox behind a loose brick in the parlour chimney containing nearly a hundred pounds, an old ration book of Heather Farley’s stuffed down the back of one of the parlour chairs, a pale blue silk scarf caught up on a rough piece of wood at the back of a chest of drawers in Cole’s bedroom, and a thin gold wedding ring among some cheap beads in a trinket box, he’d found little evidence there had even been grown women in the house, let alone anything which might point to murder.

  Yet without any evidence Detective Inspector Dunn had organized the search and dig party on Parker’s land, calling in all available men in the area to help. He said Cole couldn’t account for where he was on the days his women disappeared. Neither could he give a plausible answer as to why he didn’t report them missing. Headly was as convinced as Dunn that all the women were dead, but he thought Dunn very brave to play his hunch right up to the hilt and start digging. His career wouldn’t shine so brightly in future if he was wrong about this.

  The back yard was muddy now, tramped through by the men after yesterday’s heavy rain. In the mud were various implements the Parkers had used as weapons to resist arrest – fence poles, an axe and a couple of broken bottles. And amongst the debris was Rosie’s ruined garden. Every flower crushed by heavy boots. Even the ones in the old sink were squashed flat as if someone had fallen on them. It was almost symbolic of what had happened to her.

  Headly didn’t see how Rosie could recover, any more than those flowers could. The doctors and nurses could treat her external wounds, but he doubted whether any medicine would wipe out the memory of that beating. And there was worse to come, he knew that with utter certainty.

  Detective Inspector Dunn stood back from his men and watched them dig.

  ‘How’s it going, sir?’ Headly asked him. ‘Any sign it’s been dug before?’

  Dunn shook his head. ‘That junk has compressed the ground and with three years of snow, frost, rain and sun it all looks the same. But one of the lads has just found the remains of a woman’s shoe down the bottom of the heap of tyres.’

  Elsewhere in the Levels the ground was soft and spongy with peat, but May Cottage was built on slightly higher ground which was rock hard. Yesterday’s heavy rain hadn’t softened the soil that much, and it looked as if it would be a long, back-breaking job.

  At half past ten that night the drizzle turned o
nce again to heavy rain, forcing the men to retreat into a makeshift tent they’d erected just off the lane. Until now they’d carried on regardless of the wet, slipping and sliding in the mud, but now it was impossible to continue.

  The top layer of compressed grass and soil had been removed from the whole area now and as the rain collected on the harder, less porous sub-soil it resembled a large paddling pool in the light of a few hurricane lamps. The senior officer ordered the men who had been on duty since that morning to go home, keeping the six men who’d joined the job in the early evening to stay on as guards.

  By first light the rain had stopped, but as the men emerged with their spades to start again, they noticed an interesting phenomenon. In two places, some ten feet apart from one another, the rainwater that had collected was draining away faster than elsewhere, leaving a curiously similar rectangular shape in each case.

  ‘Well, I’ll be buggered.’ PC Sam Kenting, who came from Bristol, had been amusing the men during the night with tales of a job he’d once had in a sewage works. ‘If that ain’t the spot where she’m laying, then I’ll go back to shovelling shite tomorrow.’

  When reinforcements arrived soon after six o’clock, amongst them Headly, who’d found it impossible to stay in bed, they found the six men digging furiously, three at each spot. They were already down some four feet, caked with mud from head to foot.

  It was just on seven when Sam Kenting struck on a bone. He was alone in the hole, as it had become too cramped for more than one man to dig. He had been told to go off duty, but he’d ignored the order and as his yell rang out, all spades were dropped, cigarettes hastily stubbed out and everyone rushed to see what he had found.

  ‘Don’t say it ain’t human,’ he said, bending over and scraping away the heavy clay with his hands. ‘If that ain’t a bleedin’ femur, then my name’s Dr Crippen.’

  The men circled the hole, watching as Kenting carefully edged the soil away further with a trowel. Slowly they could all see a human thigh bone taking shape.

  ‘Come on out, now,’ said Headly, the first to come to his senses, holding out a hand to Sam Kenting to help him. Judging by the small size it was a woman’s thigh bone, and that was enough for him now. ‘I’ll have to get hold of the DI and he’ll want to get hold of the top brass at Taunton and the forensic boys. But well done, Sam, and all of you. I’ll stand you all a pint later.’

  Sister Dowd guessed the girl was crying as she made her way round the ward just after eleven-thirty in the evening of the same day. There was no sound, but her sixth sense told her what the slight quivering of the bedcovers meant. Everyone except the old lady in the bed at the far end of the ward was asleep, and her first thought was that she should allow the girl the dignity of crying alone.

  But Sister Dowd was Irish, with six brothers and sisters – a warm, poor family where they shared each other’s sorrows and joys. Since the news had broken at six this evening that two women’s bodies had been found buried out at Catcott, a whisper had gone round the entire hospital that the young girl who’d been brought in here so badly beaten was also the daughter of the murderer. Sister Dowd was horrified that people should make such quick assumptions without any real proof to back it up. She was even more disgusted when one uncharitable soul suggested the girl should be taken somewhere else. In Sister Dowd’s opinion, young Rosie was entitled to sympathy and understanding. She’d have enough to face when her father was tried.

  ‘There now, Rosie,’ she murmured, lifting back the bedclothes from the girl’s face. ‘Would you like to tell me about it, rather than crying all on your own?’

  ‘I’m not crying,’ Rosie insisted, her hands coming up to cover her swollen eyes. The ward was dimly lit by just a green shaded lamp over Sister’s desk in the middle of the ward. ‘I just can’t sleep.’

  ‘You don’t fool me,’ Sister said. ‘I’ve got eyes in the back of my head and hidden antennae under my apron that tell me when someone’s in pain, whether it’s their injuries or their heart breaking.’

  Rosie didn’t answer immediately. Being in hospital was a strange and entirely new experience for her. For the first time in her life she was the centre of attention, waited on and fussed over. She had been in terrible pain for the first twenty-four hours, but even so all that caring eased it.

  On Monday, she had begun to feel a little better, even hopeful for the future. A policewoman who had come in to see her said that when she was well enough to leave hospital, a social worker would help her to find somewhere else to live and, in time, a job. She said too that Alan was settling down well in his new home and that his foster parents might be able to bring him up to see her.

  Sergeant Headly had been in to see her too. He brought her a pretty nightdress and a big bar of chocolate, and they talked about his children and Alan. He said that her father and Norman had been arrested on Saturday night, but Seth had disappeared. He asked Rosie to suggest places or people she thought he might have gone to. Yet he didn’t once hint that he suspected Cole or her brothers of anything worse than cruelty.

  Then earlier today he had returned to say that they had found two women’s bodies under the junk at the side of the house which they believed to be Ruby’s and Heather’s, and they were charging her father with murder.

  She couldn’t believe it was true. She said it must be a mistake. Then she began to cry and she was so cold the policeman had to get her another blanket.

  All the afternoon after he’d gone she just lay there on her tummy wishing she was dead too. It was like one of those nightmares that comes back again even after you’ve woken up, turned over and told yourself it isn’t real. She could see the junk yard so clearly in her mind’s eye, playing hide and seek with Alan there, climbing on the piles of tyres, sitting on the tractor, making camps with bits of timber and old blankets.

  And all the while she had believed her mother and Heather to be living in London, they’d been there. Worms crawling over them, maggots eating their flesh. She and Alan had been playing on their mothers’ graves.

  Sister Dowd sat on the edge of Rosie’s bed, even though she was always admonishing the nurses for doing so. ‘What your father has done is his sin, not yours,’ she said. ‘You must keep that firmly in your mind at all times.’

  ‘But I sat on his lap, I hugged and kissed him,’ Rosie whispered. ‘I loved him. How could I love a murderer?’

  Sister Dowd didn’t know how to answer that one and she guessed that it would be a question that would trouble the child for the rest of her life. Hate was a far easier emotion to deal with sometimes. It burned fiercely and eventually died. Love stayed.

  Chapter Four

  As Miss Violet Pemberton drove towards Bristol she glanced sideways at Rosie sitting in the passenger seat, concerned by her silence. The girl hadn’t said a word since they left Bridgwater Infirmary almost an hour ago.

  Violet was the social worker who had found a home for Alan, and now two weeks after placing him in Taunton she was taking Rosie to one too. The physical wounds she’d suffered from the beating were healed now, but Violet was afraid that the invisible, mental scars might be too deep to ever heal.

  ‘Have you been to Bristol before, Rosie?’ she asked.

  Rosie wanted to reply; she knew she must appear very rude, perhaps even stupid too, just sitting here staring out the window. She didn’t know why she couldn’t speak; she had enough questions milling around in her head to keep her talking for days, yet she couldn’t seem to articulate them. She took a deep breath. ‘Once, Miss, but it was a long time ago,’ she managed to get out. ‘Heather took me there once on the bus, to see Father Christmas.’

  Violet almost wished she hadn’t asked. But then in the three previous meetings with this poor child almost every question she’d posed seemed to involve one of those people Rosie had loved and now lost.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll recognize it then,’ she said. ‘Central Bristol took such a hammering during the Blitz, and now they’re beginning to r
ebuild it. But it’s a very beautiful city with some fine, big shops. I always find it an exciting place.’

  Violet didn’t suppose a fifteen-year-old girl who had spent her entire life tucked away in the country would share her excitement at seeing a war-damaged city resurrected, or understand that the Fifties might very well prove to be the era when momentous changes took place. Violet could feel it starting already, despite continuing rationing and austerity. The new National Health Service, the concept of a society which cared for one from the cradle to the grave, and the influences from across the Atlantic – big cars and modern labour-saving homes – were going to change traditional British working-class ethics. Before long, she felt, any man would be able to rise above that which he’d been born to. There was work for all, vast new housing estates cropping up overnight like mushrooms, and the government was delivering messages that family life was all-important, encouraging those same women who’d worked so hard in factories during the war to stay at home now and focus their undivided attention on their children and husbands. It was becoming the idealists’ era.

  Violet was something of an idealist herself. A short, stout woman of forty-five, she didn’t do herself any favours by having her straight brown hair cut in a severe Eton crop, or choosing to wear tweed suits which advertised her stoutness, as they both created an image of an unapproachable, rather masculine woman. Yet in point of fact Violet was kind-hearted, sensitive, with a lively mind and a handsome face. Her skin was as clear and unlined as a girl’s, with pretty hazel eyes and clearly defined cheekbones. But Violet Pemberton had little interest in her own appearance. She put all her energies into helping others.

  Finding a home for Rosie had been extremely difficult. Setting aside most people’s objections to taking in the daughter of a possible murderer, she was too old at fifteen for a regular foster home, and yet too young to fend for herself.

  When a social worker colleague in Bristol suggested the Bentleys, who she knew through her church, Violet was relieved. She would have preferred to place Rosie with someone known to her personally, but time had run out, the hospital wanted her bed, and it was important to get her right away from the Somerset Levels as feelings were running high there about the Parkers. Until something more suitable turned up, Rosie was to help Mr and Mrs Bentley around their house in Kingsdown, Bristol, in return for her board and lodging.