Without a Trace

Lesley Pearse

WITHOUT A TRACE

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

FOLLOW PENGUIN

By the same author

Georgia

Charity

Tara

Ellie

Camellia

Rosie

Charlie

Never Look Back

Trust Me

Father Unknown

Till We Meet Again

Remember Me

Secrets

A Lesser Evil

Hope

Faith

Gypsy

Stolen

Belle

The Promise

Forgive Me

Survivor

For Barry Greenwood,
you have enriched my life, dear friend

CHAPTER ONE

2 June 1953

‘Where on earth could Cassie and Petal have got to?’ Molly Heywood was shouting out to Brenda Percy, landlady of the Pied Horse, because the village hall was so noisy.

It was Coronation Day and, due to heavy rain, the long-planned and highly anticipated street party had had to be moved into the hall at the last minute. Molly and Brenda were working their way down the long row of excited seated children, offering sandwiches.

Brenda paused to admonish a little boy who was about to douse the girl sitting next to him in orange squash. ‘Oh, I expect the rain put Cassie off,’ she said, once she’d told the boy he was heading towards getting sent home in disgrace. ‘I don’t think I’d have come to help if I didn’t live right across the road.’

‘But Cassie isn’t like that, and she’d made Petal a super fancy-dress costume,’ Molly shouted back.

Brenda heard the anxiety in the younger woman’s voice, and felt like barking back at her that she should just enjoy herself and stop fretting about other people. But Molly Heywood took everyone’s troubles on board and always tried to help people, which, considering how bleak her own life was, made her almost a saint.

Molly had wanted to go on the village coach trip to London
to see the Coronation procession, but her father hadn’t let her go. Brenda knew most people would say that a young woman of twenty-five should just ignore what her father said and go anyway, but Jack Heywood wasn’t the kind to be disobeyed: he had a vicious temper, and he would make Molly pay dearly for it if she went against his wishes.

Brenda had been the landlady of the Pied Horse for twenty years and, as Jack, the village grocer, came in every single day, she knew just how cantankerous, stubborn and mean-spirited he could be. It was a common knowledge that his older daughter, Emily, had left home after a beating and had never been home since. His wife, Mary, was a sweet-natured woman who was well liked by everyone, but she was a bag of nerves and too weak to stand up to such a bully.

Aside from the men who had been called up in the war, most of the residents of the Somerset village of Sawbridge had never been more than ten miles from their homes in their whole lives. Even going into Bristol or Bath was a challenge for them. So, in the main, they tended to be narrow-minded and insular, making assumptions based on nothing but their own limited experiences.

Their assumption about Molly was that she was as weak as her mother and something of a doormat, but this wasn’t the case. Her fault – if it could be claimed to be one – was that she had a kind heart. She didn’t oppose her father in order to protect her mother from further stress. She liked to help people, to be at the centre of things, so when she couldn’t go on the trip to London she took on the role of street-party organizer. She wanted to make the occasion very special, to ensure that every child in the village remembered Coronation Day for the rest of their lives.

Molly deserved praise for her efforts. The high street was decked out with bunting, much of which she’d run up herself on the sewing machine. Apart from bullying just about every adult in the village to make cakes, sandwiches or jellies, she’d also planned races on the cricket ground, a treasure hunt and the fancy-dress competition. But when the day began with rain and showed no sign of letting up, there was no alternative but to drag all the trestle tables and chairs in from the street and quickly decorate the village hall. There was a suggestion that the bunting put up the previous day should be used for this, but it was dripping wet, and too difficult to get down.

Considering that all the new decorations for the hall were borrowed Christmas ones, and many were past their best, it looked quite jolly. Brenda thought that, after all Molly’s efforts, it was churlish of so many of the adults to stay at home, merely sending their children to the hall for Molly and anyone else who was mug enough to be willing to entertain them.

But those adults were missing out on seeing forty-five children between the ages of two and fourteen staring wide-eyed at the spread before them. After years of deprivation both during and since the war, the government had given everyone a very welcome, bigger sugar ration because of the Coronation. The village women had pulled out all the stops to flaunt their cake-making skills. Most of the younger children here today, born during the war or since, wouldn’t even have known their mothers were capable of baking such wonders.

The fancy-dress competition had created almost as much excitement and competitiveness. Looking around, Brenda could see several queens, King Arthur, the Pope, a Pearly King, and a Queen of Hearts playing card. The latter was finding it hard to reach around her stiff card costume to eat
her sandwiches, and Brenda predicted that the costume would be torn off before long.

There had also been a competition for the best village shop-window display. Molly should have won it for her effort at Heywoods, the grocery shop. But, of course, she wasn’t allowed to win, not when the competition had been her idea.

It was marvellous. The centrepiece was a big plaster-of-Paris cow she’d found in a shed. She’d painted it white, made a crown out of card and tinsel with fruit gums for jewels and draped it with a purple coronation cloak. Then, in straw all around it, she’d invitingly placed various British food items: a large Cheddar cheese, baskets of eggs, punnets of local strawberries, stone flagons of cider and pots of jam, marmalade, chutney and honey.

But, right now, Molly didn’t look a bit happy. She may have been responsible for the glee on the children’s faces but she was worrying about the one child who was missing.

‘Cheer up, Molly,’ Brenda said, slinging her arm around the girl. ‘You know Cassie is a law unto herself – she’ll have taken Petal somewhere else, somewhere more exciting maybe. She’s too good a mother to just sit indoors and look at the rain.’

Brenda had always had a soft spot for Molly. There was something about her sweet, country-girl face, rosy cheeks, soft blue eyes and lovely smile that brightened any day. She was the reason Heywoods grocery shop was always busy; she was warm, funny and a great listener, too. Jack Heywood believed the shop’s success was because of him but, in truth, if Molly ever left, he’d lose most of his customers overnight.

‘She wouldn’t do that, Brenda,’ Molly said with a shake of her head. ‘She spent days making Petal’s costume, and even
if she hadn’t done she would’ve come just to support me, as I organized the party.’

Brenda remembered how everyone had talked when Cassandra March arrived in Sawbridge village two years earlier. They had looked at the voluptuous redhead with deep suspicion. She wore no wedding ring and had a half-caste four-year-old girl in tow. That the child was called Petal only raised more eyebrows. After all, what sort of person would give their child such a name?

‘She’ll be a whore,’ Jack Heywood announced that night in the Pied Horse and, even though Brenda firmly believed that you should never label anyone before getting to know them, she had to admit that the woman’s flaming red hair, pencil skirt, tight sweater, high heels and excessive make-up conformed to the image of a fallen woman.

No one had imagined Cassandra March would want to stay in the village; it was assumed she’d come to see someone here and that, once that was done, she’d leave. But, to everyone’s amazement, she began looking for a place to rent.

It was no real surprise that Molly befriended her – even as a young girl, she’d collected up the kids that everyone else shunned. But, to be fair to Molly, Brenda also found there was a lot to like about this mysterious young woman who didn’t appear to give a fig for what people thought of her. And Petal was a bewitching little girl, with her big eyes, toffee-coloured skin and shiny, curly hair. She was a poppet. Even some of her mother’s most voluble critics passed on outgrown clothes and toys from their own children to Petal.

Somehow, against all the odds, Cassie had managed to persuade cantankerous Enoch Flowers to let her live in an old farm cottage he owned in the woods. A rumour went around
that she’d offered him her body for it, and perhaps she had. But Brenda thought it was more likely the old man let her have it as he found the idea of a city girl living in isolation, cooking on an open fire and using an outdoor privy very amusing, just as most people in the village did.

Yet they were all wrong about how she would cope with country life. She made the little cottage a home and she stayed. The high heels and tight skirts were brought out only for trips into Bristol, but Cassie still managed to look like a pin-up girl in a cotton frock, with a scarf tied around her head and wellington boots.

‘I’m getting really worried now,’ Molly admitted to Brenda. ‘I saw Cassie yesterday when she gave me some bottles of orange squash as her contribution to the party. She promised me she was coming today – she said Petal had had her costume on and off about a hundred times. Cassie had even got a new dress to wear. So why aren’t they here? What if one of them is ill or has had an accident?’