But there was also a small chance she could be here in this house, locked up just as she was.

That image was almost worse than her being dead. She had been taken over ten months ago, and the thought of Petal being terrified and locked up for all that time was terrible. It would surely be better if she had been killed right away. Yet the thought persisted that she was alive, and very close by.

One night when she had been working behind the bar at the George, an elderly gentleman with a very upper-crust accent had started chatting to her. He was a retired lawyer who had been born in Rye, a former captain in the First World War who, when invalided out, went to university and studied law, later returning to his home town to set up his own practice. He was an interesting man, clearly very intelligent and astute about people. Amongst other things he spoke about that night was the high proportion of mentally unstable people living on the marshes with whom he had had contact through the courts.

‘When I was a boy, people talked about “the Marsh Folk”, usually with words like “barmy”, “touched” or “queer”,’ he had said. ‘There were peculiar old women we believed were witches, men who talked to themselves, odd folk who came into town on market day and seemed to be in a world of their own. It was said to be the constant wind on the marshes affecting the inner ear that made them that way. Nothing much has changed since then. There are still some very strange people living in remote places on the marshes, whole families of them. They’re not necessarily bad people, but they’re certainly weird and out of step with the modern world.’

Molly had been amused by this, and she had seen a few people in town on market day that seemed to fit his description. So maybe Christabel Coleman’s strange, reclusive nature was caused by this, too, at least in part. Perhaps Cassie would’ve gone the same way if she hadn’t moved away.

As soon as the first rays of morning light came through the small window Molly dragged herself off the workbench. She felt terrible: cold, stiff and aching all over. She had fallen asleep intermittently during the night, only to wake suddenly and feel even colder than before.

Holding on to the workbench, she tried some ballet exercises to loosen up her stiff limbs. She sensed that hunger and thirst had put her into starvation mode to reserve what little was left in her and that this was why she felt so weak. But she was aware that she had to make more effort to escape, or she would die here.

First she attempted to drag the workbench so that it was under the small window. Although she knew she wouldn’t be able to get through the bars, if she broke the glass, someone might hear her shouting.

The workbench weighed a ton but, inch by inch, she managed to pull it nearer to the window. Finally, it was close enough and she climbed on to it to break the glass. The window was still right above her head so she couldn’t see out but, using her shoe, she thumped the glass as hard as she could until it gave way and shattered. She pushed the remaining shards of glass out, then tried to rattle the bars, hoping against hope they were weak. Sadly, they were rock hard, fixed right into the stone window surround, not just into the wooden window frame. It occurred to her that, with no glass in the window, it would be even colder now, and rain would come in. But slim hope was better than no hope at all, and without the glass she might be able to hear the postman or milkman and raise a hullaballoo.

Next, she got down to examine the wooden crates and apple storage boxes, hoping she might find a long nail to try and unpick the door lock. But she was overcome with exhaustion, the cellar began to swirl and she was forced to lie down again and rest.

As she lay there it flittered across her mind that when people said they were hungry they really didn’t know the meaning of the word. Real hunger was like something gnawing at your insides; it stopped you thinking of anything else. She supposed, as it grew worse, you would eventually hope for death.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

George Walsh put down the phone after speaking to Mrs Bridgenorth and stood for a moment considering what to do.

When he had got Molly’s letter the previous day the only emotion the contents had stirred was amusement. He felt that she’d swallowed a far-fetched yarn, a myth like the one spread around in this village about Enoch Flowers. It was said that his sweetheart had fallen into a threshing machine and he’d picked up her two severed legs and carried them and her down the high street.

It wasn’t true; his sweetheart had died of Spanish ’flu in 1920 but, somehow, this grisly story still circulated. There were even some who claimed that he had let Cassie have Stone Cottage because she looked like his sweetheart.

George knew that Molly was obsessed with Cassie’s death and Petal’s disappearance, so it was hardly surprising that she was willing to believe a story about a nutty widow and her formidable housekeeper who lived in a remote house on the marsh.

Now he knew she was missing, though, he wasn’t quite so ready to scoff at what she’d written to him. Mrs Bridgenorth had spent her whole life in hotels, so she wouldn’t scare easily, yet he had heard real fear in her voice. She had said that Molly was always so conscientious, that she wouldn’t have just gone off to see a friend without telling anyone. And none of her friends lived only a bike ride away.

George knew the correct thing to do was to go into the police station and tell Sarge all he knew, and that Molly had now been missing for nearly forty-eight hours.

He knew that Sergeant Bailey agreed with him that the investigation into Petal’s disappearance had ended far too quickly and hadn’t been very thorough. But he wasn’t going to like it that Molly hadn’t shared any further information about Cassie with the police.

Even if Sergeant Bailey went straight to someone senior to demand that they organize a search for Molly in Brookland, by the time the ball had been passed to the police in Rye, another twenty-four hours would have passed, maybe more.

Mrs Bridgenorth had already contacted all the hospitals in the area to check that Molly hadn’t been knocked off her bike and taken in for treatment. She’d also telephoned Molly’s friend Dilys, who worked at Bourne & Hollingsworth, and left a message for her, just in case Molly had gone to her. But George knew, as did Mrs Bridgenorth, that if by some chance Molly had felt compelled to go off somewhere, she would have telephoned the hotel. So it stood to reason she was in difficulties. And if the local gossip about Christabel Coleman and her housekeeper was true, it was even possible that they had been the ones who killed Cassie and took Petal away.

However, Sergeant Bailey and the rest of the local force weren’t necessarily going to believe any of this. They were likely to delay doing anything while they discussed it with the Rye police. Molly might be dead by the time they made a move, so George felt there was only one solution, and that was that he go down to Rye immediately to find her.

He was on three days’ leave, and he’d planned to spend it refelting the shed roof. But the roof could wait, and he’d write what he knew in a letter to Sergeant Bailey and get his mother to take it in to the police station. By the time Sarge read it, George would be almost in Rye.

Hastily, he grabbed a writing pad and wrote down as much as he knew, and his fears that the two women might have imprisoned Molly because they were afraid she might bring the police in to investigate them. Then he apologized for rushing off down there but pointed out that Molly was one of his oldest friends and that he was on leave.