‘I’m afraid so,’ said DI Pople. ‘She buried him in front of the summer house.’
Christabel cried then, a low, keening sound that somehow illustrated how badly she had been betrayed by the woman who professed to love her. DI Pople stood up and put his hand on her shoulder in an effort to comfort her, and the sergeant asked the nurse waiting outside to bring some tea.
‘I never had any suspicions about her,’ Christabel said, wiping her eyes. ‘And the awful thing is that I chose to believe the rumour flying around the village that he had bunked off from the army to be with a woman in France. Isn’t it terrible that I believed that of him instead of grieving?’
‘If it were me, I would wonder who started that rumour,’ DI Pople said.
Christabel looked at him in horror. ‘You think it was her?’
DI Pople shrugged. ‘I think it’s very likely. It would stop you from trying to find out more about his disappearance.’
‘Oh God, I’ve been such a fool,’ said Christabel Coleman, holding her head between her hands. ‘I let her guide me because I trusted her implicitly. Why couldn’t I see what she was doing? She even turned Sylvia against me.’
‘I don’t think you should blame yourself for that,’ he said, afraid he’d pushed her close to the edge again with his revelations. ‘Most mothers would be upset if their unmarried daughter got herself pregnant.’
She looked at him with an expression of utter exasperation. ‘For a policeman, you aren’t that quick,’ she said. ‘Sylvia didn’t get pregnant. I did. Petal is my child.’
For all his years of experience of witnesses telling him the most unexpected and often outrageous things, DI Pople had never expected to be shocked like this, and by this gentle woman.
‘She’s your child?’ he said stupidly. ‘But how? I mean, who –’ He broke off, unable to find appropriate words to ask how she could have even met a black man.
‘My goodness, you’re shocked,’ she said, and gave a humourless laugh. ‘The lady from the big house having an affair with a black man! Well, I did, and, for your information, he was a good man. I met him towards the end of the war in Ashford. He was an American airman, handsome, charming and fun. I hadn’t had any fun at all since Reg disappeared. I was in no man’s land, neither a confirmed widow nor an abandoned wife. A friend in Ashford talked me into going to a dance with her, and that’s where I met him.’
‘What was his name?’ DI Pople asked, trying to overcome his shock and to pull himself back into the role of interrogator.
‘Benjamin Hargreaves,’ she said, without any hesitation. ‘Once a fortnight I would meet him in Ashford, just to talk. We didn’t become lovers until just before he had to go home, in 1946. I cared for him a great deal, but we were both very aware of the prejudice there was against black people mixing with white. He came from the South, near Atlanta, and he said if he were to try and take me home with him I’d have a miserable life. Of course, I had Sylvia to think of, too, she was just twenty then, and there was Gribby, who I felt I owed so much to, and I couldn’t tell her.’
‘So she didn’t know?’
‘No, she didn’t find out until long after Benjamin had gone home, when I was six months pregnant and it began to show. Even then I didn’t tell her who the father was, or that he was black. She went mad as it was. If I hadn’t been so far gone I think she would have forced me to have an abortion. Poor Sylvia was caught up in the middle of it. She listened to Gribby going on about how people would talk about me, and Sylvia argued that it didn’t matter and we could bring the baby up together.’
‘She sounds a good, kind girl,’ DI Pople said.
‘She was. I even confided in her that the baby would be black, to prepare her. That was when she suggested we could tell people it was her baby. She said she didn’t care what people thought. She was always like that – she didn’t give a damn about what she called small-mindedness. She even suggested that we got rid of Gribby, sold the house and moved to London. I was tempted, I can tell you. But I couldn’t sell the house, because Reg was missing, and it would have taken a bomb to get rid of Gribby.’
‘So you agreed that Sylvia would say the baby was hers?’
‘Yes, somewhat reluctantly, but once Gribby knew about it, she ganged up with Sylvia. It was probably the first time they were ever in agreement about anything. I wanted a quiet life, and I thought everything would come right once the baby was born. So I stayed in so no one saw me, and waited for the baby.’
‘Are you telling me you had Petal at home, with no midwife or nurse?’
‘Yes. Well, it wasn’t my first baby. I knew the ropes, and so did Gribby. It was an easy, quick birth, and she was a beautiful baby.’
‘And how did Miss Gribble take it?’
Christabel’s eyes filled with tears again. ‘She went mad because the baby was black. She called me terrible names, she ranted and raved. It was awful, and now I know what she’s capable of, I think she might have killed the baby but for Sylvia. She stood up for me. Young as she was, she was as fierce as a tiger, and she never gave Gribby a chance to be alone with Petal. That was why Sylvia ran away with her in the end. She couldn’t stand the strain, and she said to me that Petal deserved a better life than having someone constantly disapproving of her. She said I was pathetic for allowing Gribby to rule me and that no one would ever tell her what to say or do.’
‘Did you register Petal’s birth?’ DI Pople asked. He was beginning to have such admiration for Sylvia, and a great deal of sympathy for Christabel, too.
‘Sylvia did, as her mother. She slipped out and went on the bus to do it before Gribby could stop her. We had been calling her Squirrel as a pet name, but Sylvia registered her as Pamela Coleman, and of course they put “father unknown” on the birth certificate. I assume Sylvia began calling her Petal March when she ran away with her and, at the same time, she changed her own name to Cassandra March.’
DI Pople felt that he had everything he needed from Christabel now. A statement would be drawn up and signed by her and, in the meantime, he would try and get a confession from Miss Gribble that she’d murdered Reg Coleman. He hadn’t told Christabel that she had stabbed him repeatedly, as if in a frenzy. Some things were kinder not to mention.
However, one thing he felt he should do was to encourage young Molly Heywood to go and see Christabel. She needed to know about her dead friend’s mother, and Christabel could do with knowing more about both her daughters.
As for himself, he felt drained. In his entire career he had only been involved in five murders before this, and all of them had been fairly straightforward cases. This one had been hell, not because it was difficult but because one psychopathic woman had manipulated and destroyed an entire family.
If Gribble hadn’t killed Reg, he might very well have pushed her out, and he, Christabel and Sylvia could have had a happy life together. Instead, Christabel became a virtual prisoner and Sylvia was forced to take responsibility for her half-sister and hide away, hoping they’d never be found. Her life, too, had been blighted, and then wiped out.
As for poor Petal, no court was ever going to give her back to her natural mother, but what would they decide her fate was to be? She was happy now with Molly Heywood and the Bridgenorths, but that was a temporary arrangement. Was she going to spend the rest of her childhood being moved around, haunted by the memory of the cruel woman who snatched her away and locked her up and never fully understanding why the woman she called her mother had died?
Molly was surprised when DI Pople called on her at the George. On the local news the previous evening it had been reported that the body of a man believed to be Private Reginald Coleman had been found in the garden of Mulberry House. She had been shocked to the core and wondered how someone as wicked as Miss Gribble had managed to get away with her crimes.