Ted realized then his wife was very anxious about Molly and got up from his chair to give her a hug. ‘And say what, Evelyn? She’s twenty-six, not fifteen. They only consider someone a missing person when they’ve been gone for forty-eight hours or more. Let it go for now. I’ve got no doubt she’ll come bursting in before long with some perfectly good reason for being late back. You’ll see.’

Evelyn agreed to wait until the next day but, as she passed the narrow staircase which led to the attic rooms, including Molly’s, on an impulse she ran up the flight of stairs to see if there was anything in her room which might indicate where she was.

Molly kept her room very neat and tidy, but the little oak bureau which stood under the window had a writing pad, envelopes and a small diary left out on the drop-down flap, as if she’d been halfway through writing some letters.

Evelyn hesitated before opening it, as it seemed a terrible invasion of her privacy, but she didn’t feel quite so guilty when she discovered Molly had only begun the diary since she had come to work at the George, and only used it to enter the duties she was doing each week and her day off. But, right at the back of the diary, Molly had written a few addresses.

Most of them were back in her home town in Somerset. The name George Walsh caught her eye, and she vaguely remembered overhearing Molly telling Trudy that she’d had a letter from George, an old schoolfriend who was now a policeman.

There were a few addresses in Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, Charley Sanderson’s amongst them. If Molly had put a telephone number down for him, she’d have been tempted to ring him, but there was none. There was an address and a telephone number for Mr and Mrs Heywood but, as worried as she was, she knew she couldn’t ring Molly’s parents, not yet: it would only make them frantic.

Then she saw the name Dilys Porter and remembered Molly asking how much it cost to stay a night in the hotel, as she’d like to invite her friend Dilys down. Evelyn had said if Dilys shared her room there would be no charge, and Molly had lit up like a Christmas tree.

Reluctantly, she put the diary back. Common sense told her she was over-reacting and that she should wait to see if Molly came back later that night before ringing anyone.

Molly wasn’t going to be coming back that evening.

She found herself lying on a stone floor with a pain in the back of her head. She touched it gingerly, and felt a big lump, but she didn’t know how she’d done it, or where she was.

She lay still for a little while, trying to remember, but the last thing she recalled was riding past orchards and seeing pink-and-white blossom. Had she had an accident on her bike? But if she had, where was she now? The room was quite dark, like a cellar, and it smelled musty. All she could see was a small window high up on the wall. If she’d come off the bike, surely she’d be either at the side of a road or in someone’s house?

Trying to sit up, her hands touched her pleated skirt and that triggered a memory of standing in front of a mirror checking to see if she looked mature and sensible.

All at once it came back to her. She had come out to Mulberry House for the second time to see Cassie’s mother. Miss Gribble had been fierce and defensive and Christabel Coleman hadn’t wanted to talk to her.

She had a ghost of a memory of a blow to the back of her head and, presumably, she had been knocked out, as she had no memory of being moved from the kitchen to wherever she was now.

As the last thing she remembered was facing Mrs Coleman, it must have been Miss Gribble who hit her. But why?

It was like reading a book and suddenly finding that a couple of pages had been torn out. She could remember the two women, even what their kitchen looked like, but she couldn’t quite put together what had led up to being hit.

Whether she could remember or not, though, the fact remained that she was in danger. No one knocked you out and put you in a cellar by mistake. Those two women were either stark staring mad or they wanted to shut her up. Or perhaps both.

She got to her feet and nearly keeled over with dizziness, probably a side effect of being hit. She stood still till it passed then made her way to the door. As she expected, it was locked, and she turned, leaned against it and surveyed her prison. How could she get out?

Some meagre daylight came in from a small, barred window high up on the wall, enough to see a collection of empty boxes for storing apples, some wooden crates piled up in the right-hand corner of the room and a workbench along the wall to her left. When the dizziness eased, Molly moved over to the bench, hoping to find a screwdriver or some other tool, but there was nothing, only thick dust, which showed this room was rarely used.

It was also cold and damp, but if the two women could dump someone in here with a head injury, they weren’t going to be concerned about her comfort.

She could feel hysteria welling up inside her; the temptation to scream and bang on the door was almost overwhelming. But she tried to control herself and think things through. Why had the women attacked and imprisoned her?

It was possible they were so batty that they were prepared to do the same to anyone who had the cheek to enter their home uninvited, but she thought that was very unlikely. Shouting, threatening or brandishing a weapon was enough to eject an unwanted visitor. So it had to be to do with Sylvia, or Cassie. But why would Molly informing them she was dead provoke such a reaction?

Christabel obviously didn’t have any normal maternal feelings, not if she felt her daughter had totally disgraced her by producing a mixed race, illegitimate baby and decided to throw her out. Yet although news of her daughter’s death and the child’s disappearance might make her feel guilty, remorseful or ashamed, surely it wouldn’t make her aggressive towards the messenger?

Of course, it could have been a panic reaction on Miss Gribble’s part. Perhaps she had lashed out involuntarily because she was afraid of scandal. The two women might have dragged her into the cellar while they considered what to do with her.

Molly decided she was going to believe that this was the case for the moment, and she turned to the door and started banging on it.

‘Please let me out!’ she shouted. ‘I know you didn’t mean to hurt me, but I have to get back to my work, or they’ll call the police. Just let me go and I’ll forget this ever happened.’

She felt like screaming that the first thing she’d do when she got out would be to get a doctor to certify them and have them put into an asylum. But she knew that wouldn’t help her cause.

There was no reply, and when she put her ear to the door Molly couldn’t hear anything at all. It was possible, of course, that this cellar was just one of several underground rooms, and had such thick walls that sound from here couldn’t penetrate up the stairs into the house.

She took off her shoe and began banging on the door as loudly as she was able. She did this for around five minutes, paused to shout out the same message as before, then returned to banging again.

After repeating this sequence around twenty times, her arm ached and her throat hurt; also, the foot without a shoe had become like a block of ice on the stone floor. She put the shoe back on and, picking up one of the wooden crates, used it to batter the door until it fell apart in her hands. Still no one came.

There were plenty more crates, but Molly’s head hurt and she felt exhausted. She sank down on to the floor and sobbed.

She hadn’t told anyone where she was going, so no one would know where to come looking for her. She’d told George in her letter that she had a lead on Cassie’s mother, who lived in Brookland, and that she was going to see her, but that wouldn’t alarm him, not unless he was told she hadn’t come back. And who was going to tell him that?