‘When are you seeing George again?’ DI Pople asked. ‘I liked him, he’s got real guts.’

Molly shrugged. ‘He’s not my boyfriend. We’re just friends from school.’

DI Pople raised an eyebrow. ‘I believe he thinks of you as more than that. I’d happily have him in my team down here if he wanted a transfer.’

Molly could only smile. She wished just one of these people who thought her and George were meant for each other would give him a nudge.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

‘They tell me it was you I hit with an axe,’ Christabel said when Molly was shown into a small room at Hellingly to meet her.

Molly agreed that it was, thinking that this was the strangest introduction to anybody she’d ever had.

‘I’m so very sorry,’ Christabel added after a moment or two, as if it had taken that long for her to realize that an apology was necessary. ‘I can’t offer any real excuse other than I wasn’t myself.’

‘That will do,’ Molly said, and held out her hand to the older woman. ‘I was very fond of Cassie – your Sylvia – and Petal, too. My name is Molly Heywood.’

Molly had only had the briefest glimpse of Christabel the day she arrived at Mulberry House, and then again when she escaped from the cellar there. She had formed the idea from the first meeting that she looked similar to Cassie, but she hadn’t had enough time to study Christabel. She had time now, and she was glad of it.

Christabel Coleman and Cassie were about the same height and size, five foot five and of slim build. But Cassie had strength in her face, where in Christabel’s there was weakness. Cassie had a habit of sticking out her chin as if to show the world what she was made of, and she had a voluptuous, almost pin-up girl, appearance. Yet, looking at her mother now, Molly saw that Cassie had inherited her delicate bone structure, baby-blue eyes and wide mouth. Cassie had made herself more noticeable with her dyed hair, and with her unusual dress sense. Christabel had her mousy hair pulled back from her pale face in a single bunch, which did her no favours.

Molly had been told that this woman was forty-six, but she looked older, because she had deep wrinkles around her eyes and her mouth. The beige shirtwaister dress she was wearing aged her even more, but then Molly was fairly certain it wasn’t her own, just something she’d been lent by the hospital.

‘DI Pople thought it would be good for us to have a talk,’ Molly said. ‘And I think he’s right. Cassie never talked about you, and I assumed that was because you’d fallen out when Petal was born. Instead she talked about books, poetry, art, music and mystical things. Was she always like that?’

Christabel half smiled. ‘Yes, she was. She read anything and everything, going off to the library in Rye as soon as she was old enough to catch the bus alone. I think growing up on the marsh makes for artistic leanings. It’s the wildness of the terrain and the weather. I used to walk for miles as a girl and write poetry about what I saw, just as she did.’

‘She was very much a loner, but I always felt it wasn’t really from choice, but necessity. Would you agree with that?’

‘I think so. You see, she was just thirteen when war broke out and, if it hadn’t been for that, she could’ve made it to university. She might have been a teacher; she used to say that’s what she wanted.’

‘She did a good job teaching Petal,’ Molly said. ‘She could read fluently before she started school, and she loves history, too. Her teacher at the school in Rye tells me she’s very clever and eager to learn.’

‘She’s with you, staying at the George, isn’t she? How is she? After everything she’s been through, and so much of it my fault, I don’t feel I’ve even got the right to ask.’

Molly found herself warming to this woman she had thought she would hate and despise. She seemed a very honest woman, as Cassie had been. She might be a weak person who had allowed herself to be manipulated and controlled, but there was goodness at her core.

‘She’s quieter than she used to be. She watches people, as if she’s making sure about them, before speaking. She still has the occasional bad dream, and now and then she has tantrums that we have no real explanation for. I think it’s pent-up anger and frustration because she doesn’t understand what it was all about. Sadly, neither I nor anyone else can fully explain it to her, she’s too young to grasp it all.’

Christabel’s eyes welled up with tears, but she brushed them away as if she’d decided she had no right to cry about a child who was suffering because of her.

‘Will you tell me about her and Sylvia, or Cassie, as you know her? I mean, how their life was before Miss Gribble and I turned up.’

The raw longing and eagerness in her face touched Molly. ‘I will if you promise to tell me about Cassie before she ran away with Petal. How she reacted when you told her you were having a baby, how you both talked about it and how she came to run away. You see, you may be Petal’s real mother, but I’m the only link with the life Petal remembers with Cassie. If you tell me how it was, one day I can sit Petal down and explain the whole thing in a way she can understand.’

Christabel nodded. ‘You are a remarkable young woman,’ she said eventually. ‘I can see why my daughter chose you as a friend. If the dead are able to look down and watch us, I think she would be very proud to have known you, and so grateful that Petal is in your care.’

Molly blushed at the compliment. She’d thought she would be irritated by this woman’s weakness, but she wasn’t anything like the drippy, mad person she’d expected.

‘Okay, so where do I start? Cassie did rather take the village by storm. She not only wore tight sweaters and skirts and made no apologies for being a lone mother, but she had a “Don’t get on my wrong side” attitude. Yet she got round a local farmer who no one else has ever managed to charm, and he let her rent Stone Cottage.’

‘Were people nasty because Petal was mixed race?’

‘I can’t lie to you: they said horrid things behind Cassie’s back. My father, who is the village grocer, was just about the nastiest. But most people were nice to Petal. Of course, she is a little charmer, so bright and sunny natured. And she was a novelty, remember! Some of the villagers had never seen a black person before, and those who did only had memories of GI’s stationed in Somerset for the last couple of years of the war and, as you’ll remember, they didn’t get very good press. But, as I said, Petal’s a little charmer, so you can rest assured she didn’t suffer any real prejudice. Her teacher liked her and the other children played with her. I don’t think they even noticed her skin was a different colour to theirs.’

‘Well, that’s a relief.’ Christabel sighed. ‘Benjamin – that was her father – used to tell me hurtful things that had been said to him, and of course, back in America where he came from, white people’s attitudes to Negros were appalling.’

‘Cassie put her head up and sailed through everything, and if she’d lived she would’ve made Petal do the same. I really admired her for that, and for her intelligence. I loved being with her, she knew so much. She was living in the East End of London before I met her; after her death, I stayed with a lovely old lady who had befriended her while she was there, and everyone who knew her only had good things to say about her.’

Christabel smiled to hear that. ‘How did she live, though? I mean, where did she get money? Did she have a job?’

‘Where she got her money was a bit of a mystery to me,’ Molly admitted. ‘She was very frugal. In Somerset she grew vegetables, made new clothes out of old ones, and she used to go into Bristol once a week on the bus, so she may have had a cleaning job there, or a man friend. But she never said.’