‘You should have seen it,’ muttered Bert. ‘Rotting sports gear mostly, ’ad to chuck that.’
Damn, thought Todd. But Bert was still talking.
‘Anything that looked as if anybody might claim it we put in the storeroom.’
Todd stood very still. ‘Is it still there?’
‘I should imagine so,’ replied the old man. ‘’Aven’t looked for donkeys’ years meself.’
Todd and his sergeant took the storeroom apart. Todd didn’t even know what he was looking for, but he was quietly certain that if he found it he would recognise it.
There were a number of ancient sports bags in varying degrees of decay. The fourth one Todd opened contained reams of paper, most of it covered with what seemed to be poetry, meticulously handwritten. There were also some letters. At the bottom of the bag was a sealed envelope. It contained a Canadian passport in the name of Claire Pearson. The photograph was of a young woman, probably in her early thirties.
Todd found that his hands were trembling.
‘You must have been here with Marjorie Benson, do you remember her?’ he asked Bert.
The old man nodded.
‘Can you remember what she looked like?’
Bert nodded again. ‘Not likely to forget after what happened to that poor maid.’
Todd showed him the picture in the passport. ‘Is that her?’ he asked.
‘Could be,’ mused Bert. ‘’Er hair’s the wrong colour, but I reckon that’s ’er right enough. Yep, I’m pretty sure of it.’
Todd was on his way back to his office before the old man had finished speaking.
It was an extraordinary night. Todd spent much of it communicating with the Canadian authorities by fax, phone and computer link. He and his sergeant sorted through and read the poems and the letters.
‘This is incredible, you wouldn’t think anybody would put stuff like this in a tatty old locker,’ said the sergeant at one point.
‘Presumably she thought it was a safe hiding place — and as it’s taken us twenty-five years to find it, she was probably right,’ replied Todd wryly.
By dawn a fairly clear picture had emerged. Marjorie Benson was really Claire Pearson, all right.
Several of the letters were from Claire Pearson’s mother, badly spelt, in places difficult to follow, painstakingly hand-printed on lined paper torn from an exercise book. The one which shook Todd and his sergeant rigid was at the bottom of the pile.
‘It’s your 21st birthday, my dear Claire, and I want you to know the whole truth about your past, about who you are,’ it began.
‘I should’ve told you a long time ago, I couldn’t find the words to your face...’
The story the woman told was a horrifying one: it was like something from the darker side of Dickens. She had been a housemaid to Lord Lynmouth. And when Todd checked his records, he found that the housemaid who had claimed Bill Turpin had killed Lynmouth was a woman named Audrey Pearson.
Audrey had indeed always been slow and of below average intelligence, always used by others. When she was just a teenager she became pregnant by Lynmouth, who was already an old man. An old man who should have behaved better.
Her mother sent Audrey away to have the baby.
‘That’s what they did in them days. Me mam went to school with Bill Turpin’s missus. When I began to show, they sent me to stay with the Turpins. They took me at night and I wasn’t allowed out of the cottage, because of the shame. When the baby was born they took the little mite away — I never even knew if it was a boy or a girl...’
‘They didn’t tell His Lordship until it was all over, and he was proper angry. He was never a cruel man. Still didn’t leave me alone, though, and I fell pregnant again — but I was allowed to keep you when you were born just at the start of the war. It was easy then, you see, they called me Mrs Pearson, said I’d wed a soldier killed in action...
‘So you had a proper name, respectable like.’
The letter went on to explain that the Earl of Lynmouth’s wife had been unable to give him children, and the Earl doted on his illegitimate daughter. But appearances had to be kept up at all costs. The wife accepted the situation as long as the truth was never told. Audrey’s parents were the fourth generation of their family to be in service to the Lynmouths. It was feudal. They did what they were told.
‘Then came the night when I saw His Lordship killed and I saw the man who did it and I knew him to be Bill Turpin. I was that frightened — I know he did me wrong, but His Lordship was the only person ever to show me kindness. I wanted them to catch the man who killed him so I told the police — but they didn’t believe I even knew Bill Turpin and I couldn’t tell them how I did. I couldn’t tell them that...’
The Earl’s widow did not trust Audrey to keep quiet, and feared the whole scandal might break. She had a distant relative, a farmer in Canada who needed help on his land. Audrey and little Claire, then six years old, were shipped out there. The old woman and Audrey’s parents died soon afterwards.
‘I wanted you to know the blood you have in your veins,’ wrote Claire Pearson’s mother. ‘Your father wasn’t some unknown soldier, he was an Earl.
‘He’d always have looked after us, he would never have let the bad things happen. If he hadn’t been killed it would all have been different...’
After Todd and his sergeant had both finished reading the letter, there was a moment of total silence in the ops room, shattered only by the shrill ringing of the fax phone. It was the first response from Canada to Todd’s inquiries concerning Audrey and Claire Pearson.
The farmer Audrey Pearson had been sent to work for had married her, but there were no further children. Both of them were now dead. The farmer, Jethro March, had been stabbed to death.
And Claire Pearson had been convicted of his manslaughter.
Todd could not believe what he was reading.
Immediately he reached for the phone and called Canada. Eventually he tracked down the, by-then retired, detective inspector who had worked on the case.
‘One of the saddest cases I ever had,’ said the Canadian D.I. ‘He was a vicious bastard, was Jethro March.
‘He used that poor woman he married like a slave, worked her half to death and knocked her about when he felt like it. But the daughter he put on a pedestal. She had a good education, went to college, the lot.
‘She’d flown the nest too, off doing a degree in Toronto. Then when she was twenty-one, suddenly, she went home to the farm, maybe because she wanted to protect her mother. Not long afterwards she stuck old Jethro in the gut with a bread knife. And once she’d started she couldn’t stop. Carved him to pieces, she did.
‘She might have got away with it altogether but for that — he’d been laying into her mother again and young Claire couldn’t take it any more. As it was she served four years — and a lot of people thought she shouldn’t have done a day.
‘The mother, who’d always been slow-witted, was damn near a vegetable at the end — Jethro’d knocked her about so bad. She died not long after Claire was released and then the girl just disappeared. She was half off her head by then, folk said...’
Todd was stunned.
He shuffled through the poems again. Yes. Here it was, the one he was looking for: