2003 - A Jarful of Angels Read online

  Iffy and Billy ran. Ran and ran and banged on Morrissey’s shop door. Hammered, screeching for him to open up.

  On Thursday afternoon Will walked to Gladys’s Gowns. True to her word Gladys Baker had asked Marlene to leave the door on the latch and he called out as he entered the back entrance of the shop.

  “Straight up the stairs and the room in front of you,” she called out cheerfully.

  Gladys Baker sat in a high-backed chair near the window. Will looked around him and he felt as though he had stepped back into a bygone age. The room was like a set from an old-fashioned stage play. Arsenic and Old Lace sprang to Will’s mind.

  Will was in seventh heaven as he went against doctor’s orders and indulged himself in three slices of wimberry tart and cream, served up on beautiful old china. He didn’t see the point in worrying any more about his cholesterol levels, his allotted time was running out fast.

  “Does your wife make pastry?” Gladys asked.

  “My wife has been dead for years. She’s buried up in the Catholic cemetery.”

  Gladys Baker nodded, smiled sadly and said no more on the subject and Will was glad.

  The old woman was fascinating company. She’d opened her gown shop before the Second World War. Her daughter Marlene had worked there from the day she left school. Never married, see, the old woman said, got let down badly.

  “Now, what is it that you really wanted to know? Not the price of hats, I’m sure.”

  Will smiled and blushed, there were no flies on Gladys Baker.

  “Yes, well,” he said. “Actually, the old aunt story was rather a ruse,” and he told her about his quest.

  She listened, her eyes closing from time to time as though she was dropping off to sleep, but Will knew she was listening intently.

  “And it’s been bothering me subconsciously all these years,” he finished.

  “And you have to know before you…a heart problem, I suppose?”

  Will was taken aback, he nodded.

  “I have a problem like that. Had it for years. I take herbal stuff for it, kept me going well past the time limit the doctors gave me. I got the herbal cure from an old Irish woman, long dead now. Marlene makes it up for me. I’ll give you a bottle of it sometime.”

  “Thank you. What I can’t understand,” said Will, “is that from that day to this there’s never been any sign of him. No sightings. No news. No body. It’s as if he vanished into thin air.”

  “There was another case like that back in the thirties. A toddler disappeared from a farm up Worcester way. Terrible thing. It was said that the gypsies had taken him. Never found him until years later when they were doing some improvements on an old farm worker’s cottage. Found his skeleton down an old disused well…Most things have a rational answer.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you’re right. I read about a similar case in Spain. I suppose sometime, tomorrow, next year, maybe in a hundred years the skeleton will be found. Long after anyone will remember the case of Lawrence Bevan.”

  “There was a skeleton found a few years ago further down the valley,” said Gladys.

  Will stiffened with interest.

  She smiled sadly.

  “Not your boy, I’m afraid. It caused quite a stir, though. They reckoned it was about forty years old. They couldn’t match it with anyone reported missing from around that time. Besides, it had no head.”

  Will sighed. “Do you remember Lawrence Bevan, Mrs Baker?”

  “Call me Gladys. Oh yes! A hard boy to forget. He was well-known around here. A bugger of a boy he was. Bright lad, he would have done well for himself if he’d had a chance. Course a lot of people had a downer on him.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Well, the family was rough and ready. The boy got blamed for things he never did. Then again he never got caught for a lot of things he did do!” Gladys Baker laughed.

  “You liked him?”

  “Couldn’t help but like him. I used to feed him up a bit. He used to come round here and I always gave him chocolate or sweets if I saw him about the place. He never asked for anything, mind. Very well-mannered he was.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Oh a handsome-looking boy he was, the most beautiful eyes you’ve ever seen. Dark, dark blue. I felt for him. A lot of people pick on kids like that, make a scapegoat of them, makes them feel better about their own devious offspring. I would have been proud to have had him for a son.”

  “What was his family like? I met the father briefly when we eventually found him. Drunk over in the next valley. He’d been on a bender, didn’t even know the kid had gone missing.”

  “He was a good for nothing waster. He was in the army for years; a big bully of a man.”

  “The mother killed herself, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. Threw herself in the Leaky Pool just down from the bridge. Got fished out, but it was too late. Very sad affair that.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Fine, until she married that old thing. A beautiful girl she was. She used to do a bit of acting in the thespians. She was good too. I remember her playing Ophelia. I think I’ve still got some old programmes somewhere, with her photograph. She was trained as a midwife, but something went wrong. The drink got to her. Picked up with the wrong sort of man. She went to pieces after her old man came out of the army. There was talk that she’d had the boy by someone else. He certainly didn’t look like he was out of the same bloodline as his no-good father.”

  “We had the father down as a suspect but he was well out of the way at the time, out of his head on drink. We checked, and he was where he said he was.”

  “My guess is, Will, that if the boy didn’t drown, then he ran away. He was a resourceful little bugger, streetwise as they say nowadays. He was used to fending for himself. He had to be.”

  “He didn’t have any other relatives who would have taken him in?”

  “No. They would have put him in Bethlehem House with the Sisters Without Mercy and that would have finished him off!”

  “I took a walk round where he disappeared the other day. It’s changed beyond all recognition.”

  “Yes, well, they pulled down all the old ironworkers’ houses in the sixties. Built them horrible council-box things. Not the same at all. All the old neighbourliness went when they did away with the baileys. They were great them old baileys, everybody out having a chat, sitting out on a summer’s night keeping their eye on the kids. It’s all gone now.”

  “It was a better place in the old days?” said Will.

  “In some ways, in other ways it was worse.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, I don’t agree with all these young women having babies outside of marriage like they do today. It’s not the marriage bit that bothers me. That’s not always all it’s cracked up to be. I just think it’s better if a kiddie has two parents, but I wouldn’t want to go back to the way it was.”

  “In what way?” Will asked again.

  “There used to be a home for unmarried girls further down the valley. For the poor little buggers who got pregnant. They were carted off there, whisked away out of sight, then they took their babies away. It caused a lot of unnecessary misery. Misery that still goes on today for those it happened to.”

  Will didn’t want to talk about the home for bad girls. He changed the subject, but he was sure that Gladys Baker knew he’d done it deliberately. “I met a chap called Prosser and his wife the other day.”

  “Oh! Mervyn Prosser. Bloody horrible child he was. Nasty, sneaky thing. He married that peculiar little girl, all ringlets and dull as a Toc H lamp. Done well for himself moneywise. A bit of a wheeler-dealer by all accounts. He’s bought the Big House, hasn’t he? You watch, he’ll ruin that place.”

  “It’s pretty ruined now.”

  “Ay, I know, but damn, in its day it was beautiful. I knew Mrs Medlicott, you know. Nice woman she was. We did a lot of trade with her and the girls from the school she ran.”

/>   “Did you know Dr Medlicott?”

  “Knew him as much as I wanted to. He was a queer old thing. We used to call him the Horse Doctor. Never let him near me or mine. I never liked him. Wandering hands he had. A friend of mine, Esther Jones, worked as a maid there in the war. She had to spend a night in the air-raid shelter on her own with him and she had to fight him off all night!”

  Will stayed talking to Gladys until Marlene came back, then he took his leave.

  “Come back another time,” said Gladys. “It’s done me a power of good talking about the old days.”

  Bessie was kept at home with her dad, but Iffy and Billy watched the funeral from the bridge.

  Someone had lent Fatty a suit, an old-fashioned suit, the sort posh boys wore to make their first Holy Communion, and shiny lace-up shoes. He looked strange and awkward and too grown up. They’d never seen him in any clothes other than the khaki shorts and blue T-shirt. They wanted to wave at him but he never once looked up, he kept his eyes on the ground.

  Billy turned away as the coffin was lowered into the grave.

  Iffy watched in horrified fascination. She flinched as the first handful of black soil was thrown onto the coffin. Through her tears Fatty was a wobbling figure at the graveside. A hand came out of the suit and dropped a bunch of yellow poppies into the gaping grave.

  Fatty took a step backwards and as he did he seemed to fold into his clothes until he was just a crumpled suit on the grass. A woman stepped forward from the crowd, then another. Iffy’s nan and a woman from Sebastopol, another woman she didn’t know. They scooped Fatty up and he was lost from sight.

  Fatty’s father stood very still and made no move to go to Fatty. The mourners split ranks and began to drift away. Fatty’s father walked away from the grave and out of the gates. He stopped, cupped his hand to light a cigarette and then walked off in the direction of the Mechanics.

  On Friday afternoon Will took a leisurely walk up from town, pausing on the hump-backed bridge. The sun was dipping behind Carmel Chapel and the windows were lit with an eerie orange-red glow. An early moon rose over Blagdon’s Tump and somewhere on a hill farm a dog began to bark.

  He was always drawn back to the bridge. He looked down again at the spot where the boy’s clothes had been found. In the old photograph taken outside the Limp they had been black and white, but Will still remembered the colours vividly. The stained khaki shorts, the faded blue of the ripped T-shirt. The lingering smell of Fairy soap and lavender.

  A pile of clothes left neatly on the river bank.

  Will’s mind was full of jumbled half-memories. Disjointed thoughts flashed through his tired brain. And he could make no sense of any of them.

  Random thoughts that surely had no significance: the old Italian reading his book at the counter; a child stepping into a pair of shoes. But there had been no shoes left on the river bank. And yet…

  He thought of the sleeping child in his mother’s arms. Brand-new trainers that cost a fortune.

  Damn! Something didn’t add up. He couldn’t make any sense of it at all.

  Looking down at Carmel Chapel he remembered the morning when he and Rodwell had taken a walk in the graveyard and come across the grave of the boy’s mother.

  The newly dug grave was close against the walls of the chapel. There had been a mound of damp, black earth. The funeral flowers had been cleared away, but a few stray curling petals were embedded in the soil.

  A simple, cheap wooden cross bore the words: Ellen Jennifer Bevan. He remembered that as he’d stood there he’d felt as though someone had been watching him and he’d swivelled round, but the graveyard was empty. A piece of card, the type attached to wreaths had been trodden into the damp earth. He had prised it from the ground and turned it over. The ink had smudged and the black soil had stained its whiteness.

  “To Mam. Love…” but the rest of the childlike script had been obliterated into an inky stain. Will had slipped the card into the pocket of his trousers and had walked away through grass that was still wet with the early dew.

  It was all such a long time ago. He wondered what temporary madness had made him think that after all this time he could solve the mystery. The case had been closed for years and yet for some inexplicable reason he’d never really been able to let it go.

  Now, forty odd years later he pressed the doorbell of Coronation House and jumped in alarm at the racket that ensued. A loud rendering of ‘Que Sera, Sera’ emanated from somewhere close by. Elizabeth Tranter opened the door and Will stepped across the threshold of the house feeling the strange sensation of the past mingling with the present.

  “Well, Mr Sloane, come in do. Tea? With sugar or without?”

  “Please. No sugar, thanks.”

  Elizabeth Tranter showed him into the sitting room and left him alone while she busied herself in the kitchen. Will looked round the immaculately tidy room. Large ornately framed photographs of two children adorned the walls. One was of a boy with a swede-shaped head, dressed in a boy scout uniform, a boy with a small mean mouth, sly eyes and, by the look of him, a bit of a bully, Will guessed.

  There was a picture of a girl about the same age as Bessie had been when he’d first met her, she was wearing a pale-pink ballet tutu and clutching a silver cup. This child had no ringlets but a fussy hairstyle, adorned with scrunchies, slides and other such paraphernalia. The expression ‘done up like a dog’s dinner’ came to mind. Another picture of the same girl was of her wearing a fussy Bo-Peep style wedding dress with a crowd of Bo-Peep bridesmaids, and one of the boy dressed in a morning suit.

  Elizabeth Tranter came back into the room with a tray of tea.

  “Course they’re grown up a bit now. Derek we called him, after my brother, he’s doing very well for himself, lecturing in woodwork in the Tech, and our Leanne is a nursery nurse. Last year she got married to a boy from a nice chapel family down the valley. Mervyn was telling me that I’ve met you before, but I’ve got a terrible memory!”

  “It was a long time ago when we met, Elizabeth. You were only a little girl.”

  “I really don’t remember.”

  “I interviewed you and your friend, another Elizabeth as I recall.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes clouded over and she screwed up her nose in an effort to remember.

  “Elizabeth? Elizabeth. Oh, you must mean Iffy!”

  “That’s right. Iffy Meredith.”

  “Sounds daft now, doesn’t it? Iffy! They called me Bessie, as you know. Quite revolting! That was years ago. Why were you interviewing us?”

  “About a boy who disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Lawrence Bevan.”

  Elizabeth Prosser bit her lip in another effort to conjure up memory.

  “Oh yes! I’d forgotten all about that. Well, I didn’t know him that well. We called him Fatty. You haven’t found him, have you?”

  “No. The police stopped looking for him years ago. I was just in town on some business and it reminded me of the case. Policemen are notorious for remembering cases they fatted to solve. As I say, I was just passing through and I met your husband in the garden of the Big House, I always liked that house.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t keen on Mervyn buying it at first. I found it a bit scary and gloomy you know, but it’s the biggest house around here. Mervyn’s done very well for himself and he’s fancied that house since he was a boy. It’ll be nice when it’s modernised, I suppose. More cake?”

  Will accepted.

  “It was sad about the boy, Fatty. But he was probably better off. His father was a dreadful man and as for his mother, well, she was no sort of mother at all.”

  “What do you think happened to him, Elizabeth?”

  “Fatty? Drowned, I suppose. He was always off swimming in the river, or up the ponds. He had a screw loose, I fancy.”

  Will nodded and said, “There was never any sign of a body, though. We’d have found him if he’d drowned.”

  “I s’pose so. Well, I expec
t he ran off somewhere and got done in.”

  “Perhaps he was grieving for his mam,” said Will.

  “Oh, I don’t think so! She was always drunk. I think he was afraid of being put with the nuns, they’d have made him wash!”

  The front door opened and Mervyn came into the room.

  “Talking about that Bevan lad who disappeared? I know he’s dead and you shouldn’t speak ill, but I couldn’t stand him. Cocky little git, he was!”

  “Tea, Mervyn?”

  “Please. Always up to something he was. They reckon it was him who set fire to Dai Full Pelt’s bloody – ”

  Bessie coughed loudly, and blushed.

  “Beg pardon. My wife is averse to bad language, but I picked a lot up on the buildings over the years. Started at the bottom. Hard work got me where I am today.”

  That and a bit of arm twisting, thought Will.

  “Does the other Elizabeth…er…Iffy, still live round here?”

  “No. She disappeared.”

  Will felt his heart leap.

  “Disappeared?”

  “Oh, not like Fatty did. She got a scholarship to a convent down the valley.”

  “St Martha’s, that was,” said Mervyn. “I seen her once in her uniform down by the docks in Cardiff. She was talking to a boy. She looked the other way quick and pretended she hadn’t seen me. Stuck up little bug – madam! Thought she was better than us with her fancy clothes and her posh school.”

  “I lost touch with her after primary school. Our houses were pulled down and we all moved.”

  “You must have missed her,” Will said.

  “No, not really. She wasn’t my type. I made new friends at secondary modern school. It’s odd looking back, isn’t it? I mean you don’t notice things when you’re little, but I think Iffy was…er…was illegitimate.”

  Mervyn interrupted. “Obvious really, wasn’t it? She was very dark-skinned.”

  “She showed me a picture of her mam, once,” said Bessie. “A newspaper picture. She said it was the only one she had. She said her nan didn’t like her showing it to anyone. Then, years later I saw her mam, recognised her from her photo.”