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.’