Water Gypsies (26 page)

‘You sound as if you’re getting along perfectly all right without me,’ Joel said, as Maryann laughingly told him stories of Dot’s and Sylvia’s antics.

Hearing his wistful tone, Maryann reached up and kissed him. ‘Not perfectly, no – nothing like! But we’re getting by, keeping ahead all right. You’ve made a boatwoman of me, see? And you’ll be back soon, won’t you?’

‘Doctor says two to three months yet,’ Alice Simons said, eyeing Joel sternly. ‘Don’t you go getting any ideas about taking off, spoiling all that resting up you’ve done.’

Sylvia was lock-wheeling that morning as they headed north away from Banbury. She ran ahead along the towpath, full of frisky energy, and waited on the bridge beyond, her slim, feminine figure silhouetted against the pale sky. She signalled them to slow down: the lock was busy. Maryann slowed the engine.

‘We’re out of bread – and milk!’ she shouted up to Sylvia over the throaty chug of the engine and saw her nod in reply.

Once they were through Cropredy lock, they tied up for a few moments beyond the bridge while Dot hared off with Joley and Sally for supplies. Once she’d seen them climbing back onto the
Theodore
, Maryann and Ezra cast off the
Esther Jane
.

That evening, after tea, Dot said to her, ‘Oh – I picked this up as well when we stopped. Course they were going to use it for wrapping, but I pleaded the cause of us poor, deprived souls.’ She held out a copy of the
Birmingham Post
. ‘I thought you might like a look.’

Maryann thanked her and put the paper aside until she was in bed that night. Sleepily, she reached for it, only half wanting to bother. Sally was pressed up against her in bed, and she feared the crackly paper might wake her. But otherwise there’d be no chance until the next night.

I’ll just look at the first couple of pages
, she thought, yawning, and glancing over the first page. Gingerly she opened the paper, watching Sally as she did so. A moment later she read something which banished her drowsiness completely. She jerked upright, pulse galloping.

MURDERED WOMAN IDENTIFIED the headline said. The details were bad enough: the young woman, now known to be aged twenty-two, with auburn hair and a pale complexion, had been found beaten and strangled on a piece of waste ground. She had been reported missing by her mother two days previously. But it was the names of the woman and her mother, who had identified her, which almost seemed to shudder on the page in front of Maryann’s eyes. The dead woman’s name was Amy Lambert. Her mother was a Mrs Janet Lambert.

In her guts she knew immediately. It couldn’t be anyone else. In those terrible seconds she knew that this Amy Lambert was the same Amy, the sister of Margaret, who had been locked away all those years in the asylum. Amy, the strong one, the older girl, who had tried to protect her sister, who had looked to Maryann for help and friendship as a frightened twelve-year-old.

Maryann’s hand went to her throat, rereading the report. Amy was dead. And she knew with sudden, terrifying instinct who had brought about her end. Her stepfather, Norman Griffin, had also been Amy and Margaret’s stepfather; he had conned his way into Janet Lambert’s family and wreaked his brutal havoc on them. After little Margaret attacked him he had been so badly disfigured that he was barely decent to be seen in the light of day. He’d gone to ground then, festering in obscurity like some foul disease. But now he had crawled out of his hiding place, more twisted than ever before. His was the face she had looked into that night in Pastor James’s church. What he had done in the meantime, why he was pursuing them now, she had no idea. But she knew it was him. And that he was waiting.

Twenty-Six

‘Dot, I need to go to Birmingham.’

Maryann had not said a word to Sylvia and Dot of the turmoil and horror she was feeling. She had been barely able to eat or sleep since seeing the newspaper, but she had held all her feelings inside her during the last leg of the journey. How could she even begin to explain to anyone?

Dot looked nonplussed for a moment. They were back at Sutton Stop and were expecting to spend the day cleaning the boats.

‘Family business,’ Maryann said. She could see Dot thinking,
How on earth has this come about suddenly, with no letters, and barely any contact with anyone else?
But Maryann couldn’t and wouldn’t explain.

‘Just for the day. I’ll go when Sylv goes tomorrow and be back by the night. Sorry, but I’ve got to. We’ll rest up tomorrow and Mr Veater says Bobby should be back in here tomorrow or the next day.’

‘Right-oh,’ Dot said cheerfully, and Maryann was immediately comforted by the sense that she would cope with everything. ‘I’ll get cleaned up tomorrow then. Are you leaving me the children?’

‘If you can manage. I’ll take one of the twins – Ada. She’s the fidget.’

‘We’ll get along famously,’ Dot said. ‘It’ll be a challenge.’

That night, as Sylvia was about to leave, they had a little party. They were tied up at ‘home’ at Sutton Stop again. It helped take Maryann’s mind off things a fraction. Sylvia baked a cake and they fetched the children’s sweet rations and made a nice little high tea, Ada and Esther drooling as they sucked on their highly coloured jelly babies. When Maryann explained to the family that Sylvia had to go away for a while, they were full of questions. Maryann managed a smile, as she listened to them trying to understand that Sylvia’s children lived in a big school with a lot of other children. But little Rose, who was tucked in beside Sylvia as usual, started crying.

‘Oh, darling!’ Sylvia put her arm round her and kissed the top of her head. Maryann was surprised at the pain she saw in her eyes as she did so. ‘I’m not going away for long – just a few weeks and then I’ll be back with you. I’ll bring you a present back, sweetheart, all right? And the rest of you!’ With an effort to look cheerful she smiled round the table.

Later they spent their last night together chatting in the
Theodore
. Sylvia had bought a bottle of whisky.

‘Sorry, Dot – I like my little tipple – I know you don’t go for it.’

‘For rather obvious reasons,’ Dot said, screwing her face up in disgust at the smell. She unlaced her boots and tugged them off, wiggling her toes in their woolly socks and sighing with relief.

‘Well, I like a drink,’ Sylvia said defiantly, giving some to Maryann and pouring herself a generous tot. Maryann watched surprised. She saw an edge of tension, of aggression in Sylvia that was not evident in her normally placid personality. ‘Sometimes it’s the only way to get through, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ Dot insisted. ‘It’s the one thing to avoid getting stuck on, I’d say.’

‘Here – you’re going back to a nice comfy house and a bath!’ Maryann laughed. ‘What’ve
you
got to get through?’

Sipping her drink, Sylvia stared at her over the rim of her cup, as if considering something. She put the cup down. ‘Oh – nothing,’ she said brightly. ‘Don’t be silly, it was just a figure of speech.’

But as the evening wore on and they sat reminiscing about their trips together so far, Sylvia went quiet suddenly and they saw she was fighting back tears. Maryann and Dot immediately tried to comfort her.

‘I know I’m being a soppy old thing,’ Sylvia wept into her hanky. Through all the rush and chaos and often grimy squalor of life on the boat, Sylvia always seemed to have a cotton hanky on her somewhere at the ready. Nasally, she said, ‘I just can’t tell you how much I’ve
loved
being here – this time on the cut has been the best time of my life! I’m longing to see Kay and Dickie, of course, but it’s so hard to leave you all. I wish I could just bring them back here.’

Dot and Maryann exchanged puzzled glances, but they jollied Sylvia along.

‘Oh, you’ll be glad enough when you’re lying in a nice hot bath, thinking about us having a lick and a promise out of the dipper!’

The next morning Maryann set off, with Ada balanced on one hip, to catch the bus to Coventry station with Sylvia and her bundle of clothes. Before they set off, Sylvia hugged Dot and all the children emotionally. On the bus, Maryann saw her looking out at the wreckage of Coventry, a bleak expression on her face.

‘Don’t you want to go home?’ Maryann couldn’t help asking, perplexed by the gloom that seemed to have overcome Sylvia.

‘Umm?’ Sylvia looked round and gave a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. ‘Home? Yes – of course I do.’

They parted at the station and once more Maryann saw tears welling in Sylvia’s eyes. She embraced Maryann and Ada tightly and kissed them both. ‘See you soon, darlings.’ Maryann watched her walk away, her blonde hair bouncing on her shoulders as she went off to find her platform. What a stranger she seemed suddenly, from quite another world. After all, what did she really know about Sylvia?

Her own train drew into New Street before midday.

‘Here we go,’ she said to Ada as they climbed down from the carriage. ‘Back in Brum.’ It was the first time in a long while that she’d been into the middle of Birmingham, and walking along New Street from the station she was shocked by the smashed gaps in long-familiar facades of buildings. It took time for her to orientate herself and find the right bus stop.

Janet Lambert had lived in Handsworth during her marriage to Norman Griffin, who by then was calling himself Albert Lambert. She had long since moved to Erdington, for a fresh start.

I suppose she was trying to get away from the memory of him
, Maryann thought grimly, sitting on the Erdington bus with Ada in her lap. The little girl was looking round, fascinated by all the new sights and people’s faces. But Maryann felt hemmed in by the city, by its greyness, the lines of low, grime-covered houses and by the shreds of memory which it stirred up for her. Was there no end to this? she thought despairingly. To the pain and damage caused by this man, whose presence seemed to echo like an evil chorus in her life?

The closer she came to seeing Janet, the more the emotions she had been trying to suppress came seething to the surface: the rage and sorrow and horror of reading Amy’s name in the
Post. Murdered
. Getting off the bus, she felt crazed, as if she might rage and scream in the street, and by the time she reached Janet’s black front door she was shaking with the effort of holding herself together. It was a help having Ada chattering in her arms. It steadied her. And she had to remain strong, she commanded herself. For Janet. It was she who had lost her daughters – both of them.

It always took Janet Lambert some time to reach her door. She had a tubercular hip and walked awkwardly with a stick. At last the door opened. Maryann barely recognized the woman who appeared. She had faded hair which showed only traces of the fiery rust colour it had been the last time they met, and her face, which had once been that of a serene beauty, was now battered by life, marked with the scars of grief. She looked out with a dazed expression.

‘Janet,’ Maryann said gently, ‘it’s Maryann.’

Janet sagged. Prepared to see a stranger outside, her grief surfaced immediately at the sight of a friend. ‘Oh.’ It was almost a whimper. ‘I didn’t know you for a minute … I’m in that much of a…’ For a moment she seemed quite at a loss, then collected herself. ‘Come in, dear.’

Maryann followed Janet’s painful progress into the parlour at the front. As in her last house, it was a tastefully decorated room in greens and browns and she had trimmed her own curtains. Maryann set Ada down and she immediately headed for the fireplace, where there were brightly polished brass fire tools in the grate. The two women could not contain their emotion any longer.

‘I saw it in the paper,’ Maryann said. She went to Janet and the woman crumpled into her arms. ‘Oh my God, poor Amy – our poor little Amy!’

They clung to one another, pouring out their anguish, both of them trembling and weeping.

‘Why? … why?’ Janet kept crying. ‘Oh, my little girl … my baby girl … my lovely Amy.’ Maryann could feel the force of her sobbing, and she too cried, at last, feeling the pain deep inside herself as if it was being wrung out of her. For a long time neither of them could calm down, but at last, a small portion of emotion spent, they drew back from each other.

‘Let me make you a cup of tea.’ Janet said dully.

‘No – don’t bother with that,’ Maryann tried to protest.

‘It’s no bother, love. It’ll help.’

And Maryann, too, was relieved to go through the ritual of kettle filling and helping to fetch cups and saucers. Janet had always been ladylike in her ways, and even now, out of habit, she laid the cups out nicely on a tray.

‘The funeral’s next Wednesday,’ she said while they waited for the water. ‘They say they should have finished with her by then.’

While they drank their tea in the neat parlour and Ada pottered about exploring, Maryann sat listening as Janet poured out the events of the past days. She kept hold of the handle of one of her walking sticks in her left hand, as if it steadied her.

Amy had gone to work as usual. She had a job in a dress shop in town and went in on the bus. But that Thursday night she hadn’t come home.

‘I didn’t know what to do.’ Janet’s agitated fingers bent and straightened round the handle of the walking stick. With her other hand she worried at the material of her skirt. ‘I suppose I should have gone to the police straight away, but I thought she’d been held up, or she’d gone out with Geoff, her young man, and forgotten to mention it to me. I wasn’t terribly worried to begin with. And then it got late and, well, I waited and waited … I was frightened to go out. It was very dark and it’s a long walk to the telephone box.’ She sobbed again, then spoke through her tears. ‘I thought it’d be all right. I never dreamt … I should have gone! I was up all night and by the morning – then I was afraid something had happened. Amy was always such a good girl – didn’t stop out of a night, nothing like that. But I was frightened to go and tell anyone because then I’d have to find out there’d been an accident. If I just stayed here, I could go on thinking she was all right. But of course I did go, eventually. I never thought of .. … not that she was dead.’ Her face creased and she began to weep again.