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The Four Marys
Part 1 The Four Marys
Part 2 The
Four Marys Part 3 The
Four Marys Part 4 The Four Marys Part 5 The Four Marys Part 6 The Four Marys Part 7 The Four Marys Part 8
The Four Marys - A Murder Mystery
By
Paul Norman
Part
Two (You can access the other parts from the main menu).
Chapter
Three
Student
Nurse Martha Baker’s shift finished at seven on the evening of
Monday 16th
May 1966. It had been long and difficult, and she was tired, and
desperately wanted a drink, but knew she mustn’t, even though she
had a small bottle of brandy hidden away in her locker. She never
drank during her shift, it was there for emergencies only. She did
like a drink in the evening, though.
Her
shift had started reasonably well, but then old David Farmer had been
brought in with a broken ankle and a fractured elbow from a fall the
previous evening. Being ninety-one years old and not too good on his
feet at the best of times, he needed help with going to the toilet,
and during the course of her shift, Martha had emptied ten bottles
and two bedpans for the old boy. All
the shit jobs, it seemed, came her way, because she was a lowly
student nurse…
Then
there was Peter Downing, twenty-three years old, from the East End of
London, a flyboy, cocksure and full of himself. Recovering from an
appendectomy, he insisted on removing most of his lower clothing
whenever Martha was asked to check and dress his wound, and he would
take the opportunity to make sure she saw his bits. At the tender age
of nearly eighteen, she was worldly wise, she knew about men’s bits
and where they went in relation to her own bits, but what she had to
put up with from Peter Downing she considered to be above and beyond
the call of duty, and Staff Nurse Young always seemed to have her in
mind for this task. Complaining wouldn’t have done any good, it was
par for the course on men’s surgical. The nurses, particularly the
young trainees, were expected to put up with this kind of thing, it
was part of their training. How to deal with awkward patients, how to
mollify disgruntled patients, jolly them along, how to ignore
patients who pushed their luck.
It
didn’t help that Martha was far and away the most attractive nurse
on the ward, possibly in the entire hospital. She had lost count of
the number of patients and staff who told her she looked like a cross
between Sandra Dee and June Thorburn, or even Marilyn Monroe. She was
easily the most popular nurse on the ward, too, at least with the
patients, probably some of that popularity having to do with how
attractive she was, particularly to the men, but today had been a
particularly difficult and onerous shift; she couldn’t wait to get
on the bus, get home, make herself a sandwich and a cup of tea, or
something stronger, plonk herself in her favourite chair and curl up
with her latest book, Young
Rennie
by Mazo de la Roche. She was reading the Whiteoaks chronicles out of
order, because that was how the Pan Giant paperbacks came into her
possession, courtesy of her aunt Joyce, in whose house she was
living. Actually the house was rented in the name of her adoptive
father, but he was away on the North Sea on one of the trawlers
operating out of Aberdeen, and so for the time being, it was to all
intents and purposes Aunt Joyce’s house. It was Joyce who paid the
rent, albeit with a small contribution from Martha, although it was
she who took the rent card and the cash to the corporation office at
the Hyde each week. Rent, rates and water rates. One simple payment
took care of everything. There was a two-bob meter for the
electricity, and the same for the gas.
Joyce
Baker worked nights at the Hawker Siddeley factory in Gunnelswood
Road North, where they made the enormous Blue Streak rockets which
would one day take men to the moon and the stars, if the newspapers
were to be believed. Space City, they called Stevenage, because the
other end of Gunnelswood Road had the British Aircraft Corporation
factory, three quarters of a mile of it. Ironically, the Hawker
Siddeley site was less than a third of the size, but produced far and
away the larger product, the Blue Streak rocket system. When a
completed Blue Streak left the factory to travel along Gunnelswood
Road towards the Knebworth turn off onto the A1M, it seemed like half
the town turned out to watch. But Stevenage wasn’t a city, it was a
new town, and of the two giant factories, only Hawker Siddeley
Dynamics was involved in the space industry. British Aircraft
Corporation made missiles. Swingfire, Milan, Merlin, Seawolf, Sea
Skua and the very latest, the Rapier anti-aircraft missile system.
Still very high-tech., still products that screamed up into the sky,
but nothing whatsoever to do with space exploration.
Every
now and then a completed Blue Streak rocket would leave the factory,
and the people of Stevenage would gather in their hundreds, sometimes
their thousands, to see the iconic cylinder on its trailer, on its
way to the next stage in its life, the comparatively short trip to
Spadeadam in Cumbria. It was mind-blowing and inspirational, but it
was short-lived. In just a few years a short-sighted British
government would call time on the project, and all that technology
that could have seen Britain take its rightful place in the
exploration of space was lost to the archives. The boyhood dreams of
Britain taking a leading role in the Space Race, inspired by Eagle
comic, of putting a man on the moon and maybe sending men to Mars
were dashed overnight. Hawker Siddeley Dynamics diverged into
satellite technology, and British Aircraft Corporation continued to
make missiles for the u;timate protection of the British people.
Stevenage continued to
be known as Space City, at least through the 1960s.
Martha
stole a look at the ward clock and saw that she had just five minutes
to go, unless Staff Nurse Young saw her and asked her to do one last
task, which would probably stretch her shift well beyond seven
o’clock. But no, today she was lucky, and at a minute past seven
she opened her locker to get out her coat, a thin cotton bolero-type
jacket in a pale blue colour. Her hand rested briefly on the bottle,
but instead of taking it out, unscrewing the cap and taking a swig
from it, she put it further in, right at the back, and covered it
with the fawn cardigan she kept in there for when the days and the
nights were cold, too cold to go outside behind the boiler house for
a smoke without it.
The
ride from Hitchin to Stevenage on the bus was uneventful, and her
arrival at the bus station coincided with a bus home immediately, a
green Routemaster to the Hyde. It was still light when she got off
the bus, thanking the conductor as she stepped down onto the concrete
car park, where the bus turned round in preparation for its return
journey to the town centre, via Longmeadow and the Roebuck, but the
sun was very low. She crossed to the left hand side of the car park
and onto the pavement where the Fold Public House stood. It was her
local pub, but she was not in the mood for a drink this evening, the
shift had been bad, but not that bad, really. She walked past the
shops, Martin’s Bank on the corner, Raymond Leslie’s
hairdressers, then to the main parade: Furr’s Fish and Chip Shop,
Pearce’s Baker’s, the TV shop, Rediffusion, Fox’s supermarket
and the butchers on the right, the Coop supermarket on the left, then
the chemist, then the little haberdashery where she had her first
ever job after coming to live with aunt Joyce. There was nothing in
the windows of these shops to interest her right now, and they were
all shut anyway.
The
other end of the parade had Radio Rentals, then Simmonds the
furniture shop, then West’s hardware store, which sold just about
everything imaginable, crockery, ironmongery, paint, wallpaper,
gifts, paraffin etc., then the Galleon Wine Company’s off-licence,
finally Martin’s the newsagents and the Corporation office where
she went to pay the rent every week. Had it been a more difficult
shift, she might have gone into the offy and picked up a bottle of
wine, or another bottle of gin to replace the one at home in the
sideboard, which she had almost, but not quite, finished. Aunt Joyce,
who was of the Methodist persuasion, didn’t approve of Martha’s
drinking, and told her on more than one occasion that sooner or later
it would get her into trouble. Serious trouble. Martha hadn’t the
heart to tell her aunt that she had already been in trouble through
excessive drinking quite a few times during the past year. Thankfully
for Martha, each of those times had been when her aunt was on nights,
and she had managed to slink home in the early hours of the morning
with just a caution, pretending to be getting up and getting her
breakfast prior to doing another shift at the hospital. Often, on
those mornings following a night in the police cells, she felt more
like collapsing into her bed than travelling to work and doing a
long, long shift, but she hated to let her aunt Joyce down. Joyce
Baker was more like a mother to Martha than her own mother could ever
be. Even if she ever found her real mother and discovered that she
was a Saint, she could not compete with Aunt Joyce, who was angelic,
the perfect role model for her. On the subject of strong drink they
held completely opposite opinions, though Martha was careful never to
drink in front of Aunt Joyce.
Martha
had some idea of who her real parents were, but she didn’t want to
hear from them, ever. All she knew was that they had wasted their
money on an expensive boarding school education for her in Bristol,
to which she never really took, although she did turn out with quite
a good education in the end, and also that there was a trust fund set
up for her when she reached the age of twenty-one. If she ever did
touch that money, she would spend it on drink, for which she had
developed a taste during her brief time in the sixth form before her
expulsion. All of it on drink. And she never, ever, wanted to meet
her real parents, they might as well be dead to her. Nearly two years
ago she had been expelled from the school in Bristol for trying to
organise some kind of brothel in the gym, having gone to the trouble
of arranging a meeting between the girls in the sixth form and boys
of a similar age from their boarding school a couple of miles across
the city.
She
had never intended to become involved in the actual sexual
activities, her determination to preserve herself for the one man she
would truly love was born of her romantic nature coupled with a
natural shyness and reluctance to make friends easily with boys.
However, her experiences as a young girl right up until her
thirteenth year, when she had been abruptly sent off to boarding
school, had put paid to her ever being a virgin bride. In her
sixteenth year, her brothel plans had been thrown into disarray when
one of the girls had blabbed to the headmistress, and Martha had been
sent packing. At her parting interview the facts had come out about
her newly found obsession with alcohol, and as she had been drinking
brandy on the morning of the interview, the headmistress had little
choice in the matter. Martha was naturally gifted in languages, and
knew everything she needed to know about English literature and
history, and had an extremely good knowledge of classical music,
which was her passion, although she did quite like some of the modern
groups such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Jazz was never her
thing, though, she just didn’t understand it. Luckily, her formal
education had just about been completed by the time she had left the
school, and it had been sufficiently robust for her to get a job as a
trainee nurse in the hospital in Hitchin, with her cache of six GCE O
Levels. She looked no more than her sixteen years, and she did indeed
have the innocent, girl-next-door features that likened her to both
Sandra Dee and June Thorburn, and yet she had never had any problem
buying bottles of drink from the off licence. Had she been
questioned, she would have said that she was buying it for her
adoptive father, but whenever she had gone into the Galleon, the
proprietor’s daughter, Jenny, had served her, no questions asked.
Martha
lived in Hydean Way. She was within sight of her aunt’s house when
she became aware of someone walking along behind her, about a hundred
yards away. As she crossed the road to her house, the house where she
lived, she glanced back, and saw a man in a leather jacket, also
crossing, and she knew intuitively that he was following her. Her
heart quickened, and with it, her pace. Her house was just a few more
yards away, but he was gaining on her. Her mind flashed back to last
week’s Comet newspaper, and the headline: STEVENAGE RAPIST STRIKES
AGAIN, and she just knew that this man was following her, knew that
he was the rapist, knew that he was going to grab her from behind,
drag her into one of the alleys between the terraced houses, and do
to her what he had done to three, or maybe four other women during
the last six months. She should have screamed. There were lights on
in most of the houses, but although Martha knew some of the residents
by sight, she didn’t know many of them to talk to, and they
probably didn’t know her. Had it been her aunt Joyce who was being
pursued by the Stevenage rapist, they would have rushed to her
defence. Joyce was a stalwart of the local community, and her brother
Edwin was also a staunch member of the Methodist Church, when he was
at home and not riding the waves as a merchant seaman.
Martha
hadn’t gone to church for two years, not since she had been chucked
out of her boarding school in Bristol for gross misconduct, which
involved getting blind drunk and trying to arrange a mass assignation
between the sixth form of her own school and that of the nearby boys’
boarding school for the purposes of sexual experimentation. Nothing
had come of it, and she was never even sure she would have gone along
with any sexual exploration even if the planned meeting had taken
place. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on your point of view, a nosy
prefect had intercepted the note intended for one of the lads at the
boys’ school and the whole thing had been nipped in the bud.
Perfect timing. Martha had planned everything down to the last
detail, had even turned the gym into a kind of bordello with a table
lamp purloined from the headmistress’s office, cushions from the
prefects’ room, and sheets and blankets from the store cupboard in
the sick room.
The
plan was for a number of lads with money to burn to cycle Martha’s
School, where they would hand over their money in return for sexual
favours from a hand-picked selection of girls. It was to be five
shillings for a grope, ten shillings for a grope below the waist, a
whole pound for full sexual intercourse. Martha had confessed to
dreaming up the whole money-making scheme, and it was she who had
been asked to leave, while the other girls who had signed up to her
scheme were all given a severe dressing down. Martha didn’t know if
she would have gone through with any of the items on offer in her
tariff. She had convinced herself that she was desperate to know the
real joys of sex, but although she had personally vetted the girls who
were going to partake, none of the boys appealed to her, and she
honestly believed that if the opportunity had presented itself, she
would have cried off. Martha Baker was not a virgin. Years of abuse
at the hands of her father had put paid to that. She was nearly
seventeen years old, and the Swinging Sixties looked all set to pass
her by. Most of the girls her age that she knocked about with, many
of them nurses but by no means all, had done it.
One thing was certain, though – she did not wish to experience the
joy of sex by being raped. Although she didn’t realise it at the
time, that was exactly what her father had done to her - raped her.
It had begun when she was just seven years old, when, after reading
her a bedtime story, her father had climbed into bed with her and
done things to her he should not have done. Her mother, downstairs on
the sofa almost unconscious from the amount of wine she had drunk,
was oblivious to what was going on in Martha’s bedroom. Martha
tried not to think of her father, who had raped her, or her mother,
who should have protected her from him. It was a period of her life,
six years long, that she had somehow managed to shut out of her head.
But now she was being pursued by the Stevenage rapist, it all came
flooding back.
All of
which random thoughts piled through her head as she broke into a run.
She wasn’t fit, not for the purposes of running. She did plenty of
walking during the course of her shifts at the hospital, plus to and
from the bus stop, and she was reasonably strong, for she had to be
able to help lift the patients on her ward, of course, but she could
count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d had to
run since moving to Stevenage, and one of those times had been to
catch the bus home, a matter of a few yards, and not enough to raise
her heartbeat. Right now, she wished she had taken part in the gym
lessons at Badminton school, and not taken refuge in the library or
the sick room on the pretext of a painful period or a bout of nausea.
Now
she ran as though her life depended on it, and she supposed, in a
way, that it could. Two of the rapist’s victims had ended up in her
own hospital with broken limbs. One of those, a forty year-old woman,
had also suffered a heart attack at the scene and had nearly died.
Panting
heavily. Four more yards to the front garden, two yards to the front
door, and then she realised that she didn’t have her key out ready.
She reached the front door and frantically plunged her hand into her
handbag to pull out her key, and at the same time saw out of the
corner of her eye, that the man who had been following her had also
stopped, perhaps twenty yards further back along the road. He didn’t
look out of breath, and she got a good look at him for the first
time. Five feet ten, perhaps, quite well built, sandy hair and beard,
glasses, leather jacket, corduroy trousers, green, Oxford brogues,
black. He wasn’t wearing a tie, because he wore a polo shirt, red.
She
finally found her door key and turned it in the lock, pushing open
the door in one fluid movement. ‘Leave me alone!’ she screamed.
‘Stop!
Wait, please…’ the man called, but then she was inside, she was
closing the door, she was sliding across the security bolt, and at
last she was sitting on the stairs, trembling. She expected any
moment that the man in the leather jacket would start pounding on the
door, but when she plucked up the courage to look out of the front
room window, there was no one in the street. No one at all. Now she
didn’t hesitate. Martha opened the sideboard, the right hand side
of the dark brown utility sideboard the Baker family had purchased
from the little furniture shop, Kenneth Phillip, in Market Place in
the town centre. This was the side where Edwin Baker kept his
spirits. She took out a bottle of whiskey and poured herself a half
inch of the golden liquid, downed it in one.
When
Joyce Baker came home at six o’clock the following morning, she had
to pound on the door to get Martha to slide back the bolt and let her
in. Her aunt knew that Martha had spent the night drinking, finally
falling asleep around two o’clock, because her glass had slipped
from her fingers onto the carpet, and she was still wearing her
clothes rather than her winceyette pyjamas. Luckily for Martha the
glass had been empty. Joyce Baker reckoned that her adopted niece had
consumed in the region of a third of a bottle of whiskey. She didn’t
ask why, she simply packed Martha off to bed for a couple of hours,
quietly cleaned up after her, and made herself a cup of tea.
She
woke a protesting Martha at ten o’clock and made her shower and
clean her teeth before coming downstairs to eat the scrambled egg and
toast she had prepared for her.
‘What
happened, Martha?’
Without
hesitation, and in between mouthfuls of the delicious breakfast her
aunt had prepared for her, Martha told her.
‘A
man followed me home off the bus last night. I thought he was going
to rape me!’
Joyce
Baker’s eyes were as round as saucers. ‘Did you call the police?’
she demanded. Martha shook her head. ‘Then do it now!’
‘Nothing
happened. He must have turned around and gone away.’
‘That
doesn’t matter. It is important that you give a description of this
man to the police because it might help in the apprehension of the
rapist. Do you want another young girl or a woman to suffer at his
hands because you omitted to do your duty?’
‘No.
Sorry. I’ll call them now.’
‘Better
than that. Drop in at the police station on your way to work.’ It’s
not on my way to work
was the rejoinder that was on the tip of Martha’s tongue. But Joyce
Baker, Aunt Joyce, was a forceful woman who knew what was right and
what was wrong, and she insisted that Martha do the right thing.
‘Tell
them about this man, describe him in full detail as you did to me.
Then catch the bus to the hospital and do your shift. If you see him
again, get somewhere there are lots of people, somewhere you are
safe. Get someone to come home with you on the bus tonight. Do that
for me and God will protect you. You are a good girl. He will see
that no harm will come to you if you do the right thing.’
‘Yes
aunt,’ Martha said.
‘Finish
your breakfast and get the earlier bus into town, and stop
off at the police station.’
Martha
nodded. Five minutes later she was walking down to the Hyde where she
would wait for the bus, ten minutes earlier than her usual one. On
her way into the police station, she heard someone give out a wolf
whistle, and turned her head to see a blue and white police car
driving around the back to the station car park. There was no one
else in sight. She carried on into the station and told the officer
behind the desk about last night’s incident, but it was frantically
busy in there that morning, so he took down her name and where she
worked and promised that someone would be in touch later today to
take a statement. Then, with a slight headache, but otherwise none
the worse for wear after her drinking bout last night, she made her
way along Danestrete to the bus station and arrived at the hospital
in time to get a cup of coffee and a biscuit before her shift
started.
Chapter
Four
Tuesday
Sergeant
Trevor Wilson was briefing his team of bobbies before they set off on
their various beats. He motioned for Mike Thompson to remain behind
when the others had left.
‘You
come highly recommended, Thompson.’ He said it with something
approaching a sneer, as though it was something bad rather than
something good. Mike had met most of the other force members
stationed at Stevenage New Town Police Station and although they were
not idiots, their intelligence was not quite up to the standard of a
“Grammar School Boy” with seven “O Levels and three “A”
levels under his belt. A boy who could have had a place at Oxbridge
had he wanted it. It was not snobbishness on his part, just something
he was aware of, that his general knowledge was mostly better and
more far-reaching than theirs, and so he took care not to rub it in.
He was not sure about Sergeant Trevor Wilson, and there were one or
two detectives he had not yet met. By and large, it took a measure of
superior intelligence to make the transfer from uniformed bobby to
CID officer. Mike was fully aware that he would be on probation as a
uniformed constable for at least a couple of years before Sergeant
Wilson would endorse any attempt to make such a transfer. He had
heard that when CID was at full stretch, a senior officer might
commandeer a bobby to help with a particular investigation, but he
knew that wasn’t going to happen to him just yet, because there
were plenty of long-serving constables who would be chosen before him
for such a task. No, he was happy enough in uniform – for now.
‘Sarge?’
Wilson
was not quite as tall as Mike, but he was powerfully built, and had
graduated to the police force after a spell in the army. Probably ten
years older than Mike, he sported a thick black moustache and his
short back and sides betokened a throwback to his army days. He
rarely smiled, and if he did, it was likely to be accompanied by an
outburst of bullying sarcasm that had been known to reduce some
younger, greener recruits to tears. Mike didn’t particularly like
him, but the word in the nick was that he was a good copper, he did a
good job and got results. What Mike could not forgive Wilson for was
his attitude to the female officers, but thankfully, he had not so
far witnessed for himself the senior officer abusing them verbally,
or physically for that matter. But Wilson had a reputation, and if it
came to it, Mike would not be able to just stand by and watch it
happen. Naturally, the two WPCs were considered fair game by most of
the men, but Mike always treated them with respect, and the girls
responded to him favourably. Both were married with young families.
‘I
just need to tell you that recommendations mean nothing to me. You’re
here because there’s a slot for you, not because some high-ranking
detective
wants you molly-coddled. While you’re under my command you do as I
say, you do it at the double and I’ll be the judge of whether or
not you’re worthy of anyone’s recommendation. I don’t care if
you’re the chief constable’s favourite nephew. I judge all my men
on their performance. Got it?’
‘Yes,
Sarge.’
‘Right,
we’ll get off on the right foot, then. Get yourself over to the
hospital. There’s a nurse there who claims she was followed home
off the bus last night. Martha Baker, her name is, she’s nearly as
young as you are, so she could be considered jail bait in some
circles. Might be our resident rapist that followed her. I want you
to take a statement from her, get a description of the man who followed
her. She came
in this morning on her way to work, Bob Seeley was on the desk and
there was a lot going on, so he told her he’d send someone to talk
to her. This is your chance to shine, lad. Don’t let me down! And
when you’ve done that, there’s a pile of paperwork for you to go
through, see if any of it can be signed off. Cases closed, that kind
of thing. Jump to it!’
The
hospital in question was the North Hertfordshire and South
Bedfordshire Hospital, first opened in 1823 in Cock Street, Hitchin
to look after the sick and the lame. In 1948 it became part of the
newly formed NHS and now served Hitchin, Stevenage and the
surrounding villages while plans for the new Lister Hospital in
Stevenage were being considered. Mike left Wilson’s briefing room
and went to the canteen, where he knew he would find someone who
might be willing to give him a lift to the hospital in Hitchin. He
had been warned in advance that Sergeant Wilson expected his officers
to act on their own initative. There were plenty of buses a few
minutes’ walk away that would get him to Hitchin in about a quarter
of an hour, but a Panda car would be that much quicker. PC Bob Seeley
beckoned him over to his table, where he was just finishing a round
of toast and coffee. He didn’t particularly like Seeley, for they
had nothing whatsoever in common, but a lift was a lift.
‘After
a lift, Tiger?’ The school nickname had followed Mike, probably
because of something Maxwell had written in his file about Mike’s
favourite weekly comic being the Tiger,
and the reference had made its way across country to the
Hertfordshire force. Some of the bobbies referred to him as “Tiger”,
but those of them who were closer to Sergeant Wilson tended to call
him “Posh” because of his grammar school background. Stevenage
Old Town was home to Alleyne’s School for boys, which had
previously been a grammar school, though it was not as old and
venerated as the Crypt Grammar School, in Gloucester, which Mike had
proudly attended until 1963; as far as he was aware, none of the
officers or constables at the nick were grammar school boys.
‘How
did you guess?’
‘Where
to? I’m just out on my rounds. Little Wymondley, Hitchin…’
‘Stroke
of luck! Wilson wants me to interview some nurse at the hospital. You
saw her first thing this morning?’
‘Jammy
sod! She was a cracker, I can tell you! I can just picture her in her
nurse’s uniform!’ His eyes took on a dreamy, lustful look.
‘Nurses, eh? They love a man in uniform, and we love ‘em back!
Come on, then. Countryside ride, is it, or up the motorway?’
The
alternative was the A1M, running from Hatfield to Stevenage, opened
in 1962, soulless but quick. People called it the motorway, though it
was only two lanes wide, and didn’t really qualify. ‘He didn’t
give me a timetable, so let’s take the countryside route. You can
do your Little Wymondley patrol on the way…’
Bob
grinned and picked up his peaked cap from the table. ‘Thanks,
Doris!’ he called, and carried his tray over to the counter. Doris,
the canteen manager, beamed her appreciation of his thanks. For some
reason, women like Doris seemed easily taken in by Seeley’s broad
cockney charm. Outside, in the car park, they made their way to a
pale blue and white MkI Ford Escort police car. The police station
was situated at the western end of the town, within easy reach of the
Old Town, in quiet, classic contrast to the modern estates of the new
town. They made their way out into the countryside, through the
village of Little Wymondley, where absolutely nothing seemed to be
happening, and fifteen minutes later Seeley pulled up outside the
North Herts and South Beds Hospital.
‘Want
a lift back, mate?’
Mike
considered for a moment. ‘Give me a quarter of an hour to find this
nurse. If I’m not out by then, leave it, I’ll get the bus back or
hitch a lift with a civilian or something. Thanks for the ride. I’ll
see you later.’
Mike
made his way into the dark, green-painted corridors of the Victorian
hospital and looked for someone to ask. Eventually, a janitor in navy
blue overalls directed him to the men’s surgical ward, and there he
found a couple of nurses at their station.
‘Excuse
me.’
‘Yes,
officer?’
Mike
flushed quietly. He was still getting used to the respect his uniform
brought with it. ‘I’m Police Constable Thompson from Stevenage
Police Station. I’m looking for a nurse, Martha Baker, who says she
was followed home off the bus last night.’
The
nurses looked at each other. ‘She’s in the staff room, making tea
for the patients. Follow me, Constable.’ Neither nurse questioned
why they hadn’t sent someone from Hitchin Police Station to speak
to the nurse who had been followed home. The nurse led him through
the ward to a room tucked away in the corner and held open the door
for him. If the first nurse had struck him as pretty, the girl
wearing a pale blue nurse’s uniform who was standing at the sink
pouring boiling water into a large teapot had to be one of the most
beautiful girls he had ever seen in his life.
Mike
loved the cinema, and he worshipped Sandra Dee, the little blonde
starlet of The
Reluctant Debutante, A Summer Place, Portrait in Black and
Romanoff
and Juliet and
thought she was maybe the most beautiful girl in the world, with a
quiet, girl-next-door look about her. Mike persuaded himself that he
would have loved those films even if Sandra Dee had not starred in
them, but the truth was, he loved them simply because of Sandra Dee.
He had one favourite photograph of her in his possession, her head
tilted on one side, her blonde hair cascading about one side of her
face, her lips slightly parted and a light smile that had always
melted his heart. She was, in his eyes, the perfect girl, someone to
worship, someone to die for. Now, studying Nurse Baker’s face, he
found himself thinking that hers was the most perfect face he had
ever seen in his life, and he would gladly swap all the photos of
Sandra Dee he owned for just one of Martha Baker. Her hair was what
you might call ash blonde, with strands of beautiful gold which
caught the light from the huge lamps which hung from the ceiling. Her
eyes were a pale hazel colour, she had a snub nose and a generous
mouth, but as far as he could tell, she wore little or no make-up.
That could have been due to a hospital rule, of course, but for the
moment, he was lost in the wonder of her beauty. He put her at about
sixteen or at most seventeen years old. Of course, she could be
married, he
thought, even at that young age, because that was what most young
girls did at the time, they got married, had children, cared for
their little families, and he came crashing back to Earth with a bump
as the nurse who had left him there introduced them.
‘Nurse
Baker, this policeman wishes to speak with you.’
‘Yes,
Staff.’
The
older staff nurse went back to her duties, leaving Student Nurse
Baker and Mike alone in the staff room. He produced his warrant card
with as steady a hand as he could muster.
‘I’m
PC Mike Thompson. I understand you reported someone following you
home last night?’
‘Would
you care to sit down? The tea has to brew for four and a half
minutes,’ the beautiful young nurse, who looked as if she should
still be at school, said, and pointed to a chair that would not have
looked out of place in Mike’s old school hall. Serviceable but
decidedly uncomfortable and in dire need of a coat of paint.
‘No,
I’m fine, thanks. Can you tell me what happened?’ Tell
me you’re not married, tell me you’re available, and tell me
you’ll go out with me, because I have just met you and I am head
over heels in love with you and I can’t think straight…
‘My
shift finished at seven. I got the seven thirty to Stevenage, then my
local bus to the Hyde. When I got off the bus and walked up Hydean
Way to where I live, I caught sight of someone wearing a leather
jacket. He was following me. When I stopped, he stopped. Thankfully,
my house, my father’s house is only a short walk from the Hyde, but
the house is empty because my aunt, with whom I live, is on nights.
The man stopped under a lamppost and watched whilst I pulled the
curtains. He was looking the other way, but I’m sure that was
because he didn’t want me to suspect he was after me. When I went
upstairs to change out of my uniform, I peeped out through the
curtain and he had gone. I’m not a qualified nurse, by the way. Not
yet. I’m a student, I’m on probation.’ A
bit like me, Mike
thought, followed by: you
didn’t need to tell me that.
The
first thing that struck Mike about the way Nurse Baker spoke, was
that she was very well spoken, not BBC announcer-English, but there
was no trace of a London or Essex accent. He wondered if she had
attended the local grammar school. In that he could not have been
more wrong.
‘Okay,
then. A couple of background questions, then I’ll make a few notes
and we’ll decide what to do next. Apart from the leather jacket,
did you notice anything else about him? Hair colour, short or tall,
that sort of thing? His age, for example?’
‘Not
as tall as you. Around five feet nine or ten, I would have said. He
had sandy-coloured hair, and he had a very neat beard and moustache,
I think. His trousers were green corduroy, and his shoes were black.
He wasn’t terribly old. He looked about his mid-twenties, or even
younger, if you want the truth. He didn’t really look threatening,
you know. He looked sort of, I don’t know, frightened.’
Mike
guessed straight away that the person she was describing couldn’t
be the rapist they were looking for – at least three victims and
witnesses had put the rapist at between forty and fifty years old.
The nurse was describing a much younger man. He breathed a sigh of
relief, but said nothing. Right now his mind was working furiously on
how he could get to know this angelic looking girl. What was it about
her that appealed to him so much? Was it the uniform? He had quite
liked seeing the girls of Denmark Road School and Ribston Hall School
in their school uniforms when their choirs and that of his own school
had performed in the Three Choirs Festival each year, in either
Gloucester, Hereford or Worcester Cathedral. And WPC Matthews, the
eighteen-year-old WPC back at the station always looked very fetching
in her uniform… But there was something about Nurse Baker that was
sending his pulse into overdrive right now. Images of Sandra Dee and
June Thorburn, his other favourite actress, and who had very similar
in looks to Sandra Dee, flashed through his mind. He dragged himself
back to the task in hand.
‘Right.
How long have you lived in Stevenage?’
‘I
came to stay with them, my aunt and uncle, two years ago, after
school.’ Boarding
school, then. ‘My
mother died a few years ago. My Aunt Joyce takes care of me, we live
in a house in Hydean Way. They used to live in London, the Elephant
and Castle, I think, but I’m not sure. Is that relevant? She works
on the production line for the Blue Streak missile. My uncle works on
the trawlers out of Aberdeen and isn’t at home right now, so I’m
living with my Aunt Joyce in their house but she’s on nights, as I
said.’ As
I said,
not like
I said. Well educated, then.
She used to work at their headquarters, in London, Charteris House and
Welkin House, I think,
but where she lived was condemned and she came here to Stevenage to
live with my father after he and Aunt Joyce moved here in 1958. He’s
not my real father, and she’s not my real aunt, by the way. I don’t
know why I’m telling you that, but I was adopted. I don’t know
anything about my birth parents. Just their name, which I don’t
use. They abandoned me, after all.’ You
didn’t need to tell me that either,
he thought, but it was he who had asked her how long she had lived in
Stevenage, and he wasn’t sure why he had asked the question, unless
it was simply to prolong the time he had with her. He was held in
thrall by her beautiful voice and her soft, penetrating hazel eyes.
She could have read out the weekend football results for all he
cared. He did not want this interview to end, ever.
‘You’re
a Londoner?’
‘No,
we’re originally from Kent. Margate. At least, they were, I think.
I’m not sure where I was born. It’s all I remember, though, from
when I was a kiddie. Ramsgate, Margate, Broadstairs. Long walks along
the cliffs, endless summer days on the beach, then months and months
at boarding school, paid for by my real parents. You know how it is.
I guess most people would love to live at the seaside all year
round.’ ...and every
night my father raped me, starting when I was seven years old...
Mike
nodded, although he got the impression that the young nurse’s
childhood may not have been as idyllic as his own. He’d spent many
happy childhood holidays in Ramsgate, migrating along the coast to
the larger, brasher resort of Margate and the quieter, more refined
streets of Broadstairs. He might even have seen Nurse Baker, the
breathtakingly beautiful Student Nurse Baker during his annual
two-week holiday at the Kent resorts. She would have been a year or
so younger than him, and he might not have taken any notice of her
whatsoever, but it was a nice, comforting fantasy, that it was such a
small world and they might both have been in the same place at the
same time in the past.
‘They
paid for your education but you don’t know who they are?’
‘No,’
she said candidly, and the smile on her face vanished momentarily.
‘Guilty conscience on their part, I suppose. I could find out who
they were – are, if I wanted to, but who would? They abandoned me
when I was born, why should I want to know them?’ Of
course she knew who her real parents were but her life with them was
over, and it was a chapter of her life she preferred to forget about.
‘Small
world,’ he muttered, referring to the Margate connection, which
was, at best, tenuous.
‘Is
it all right if I pour the patients’ teas?’ Nurse Baker asked,
ignoring his comment. The angelic smile was back, and his heart
melted. The four and a half minutes needed for the tea to brew
properly had apparently passed.
‘Yes,
of course, please carry on. You didn’t recognise this man?’
She
shook her head emphatically.
‘Right,
then. I think I have a plan. What time does your shift finish
tonight?’
‘The
same as last night. Seven.’
‘If
you’re amenable, I’ll wait for you at the bus station in
Stevenage, I’ll get on the same bus and go to the Hyde with you, though
I'll sit separately from you. Around
seven fifteen to seven thirty? I won’t sit with you, or anything
like that, because if he’s there again, he might be put off
following you if he sees you with me. Not that we want him to follow
you, but I can’t really apprehend him just for being at the Hyde. I
want to see him follow you, then I’ll collar him and have a word
with him.’
‘Could
he be the rapist, do you think?’
Mike
shuffled his feet uncomfortably. Obviously, she probably read the
local papers, or her Aunt did and had told her. Why hadn’t her aunt
gone to meet her down at the Hyde, where the bus turned round and
went back to the bus station? Wouldn’t that be what any
self-respecting adult should do? But Nurse Baker had said that her
aunt worked a night shift, which was a pretty good reason for not
being around to collect her from the bus stop. On the other hand,
apart from the rapes, the last of which had occurred almost a month
ago, there was very little recorded crime against the person except
at closing time around the various neighbourhood pubs at the
weekends. The vast majority of young women living in Stevenage were
under no threat whatsoever when they walked home after a long day at
work. But with three rapes during the last six months, nerves were
understandably stretched and no one wanted to take any chances.
‘I
sincerely hope not! I don’t think so, no. The man you’re
describing is far too young for my liking. I won’t be able to rule
him out till I’ve spoken to him, of course, but no, I don’t
believe he is the rapist. Right, then, I’ll see you at seven
thirty-ish.’
‘Thank
you. I shall feel safer knowing you’re on the bus. He gave me the
creeps.’
‘You’ll
be quite safe with me. I’ll see you tonight. If he doesn’t turn
up tonight, we’ll repeat the process until he does.’
Mike
turned to go, then stopped in the doorway. ‘By the way, you didn’t
tell me your first name.’ I
know it, I just want to hear you say it…
The
nurse smiled softly. ‘You didn’t ask. It’s Martha. Martha
Baker.’ It's
actually Martha Cole, Martha Cottingholme-Cole, daughter of Alistair
Cole - you'll have heard of him, I'm sure...
Mike’s
heart skipped a beat. He knew that he was blushing fiercely, and he
stumbled awkwardly out of the door and into the corridor.
‘You
need to turn left at the ward entrance,’ Martha Baker said, and
Mike should have turned and said “thank you”, but all he could
think of was how, in his last term at the Crypt Grammar School, he
and his schoolmates had been playing with an Ouija board in the
little room they had been allocated for a common room. Everyone asked
questions about football, and cricket, who was going to win the first
division title, who was going to win the test match series. Except
for Mike. He had just come out of a stormy relationship with Lynda
Bamber, who had turned out to the murderess of his childhood friend,
Brenda McLaren. Mike had asked the name of the girl he was destined
to marry, and the Ouija board had spelt out the name “Martha”. He
didn’t know anyone called Martha, at the time, but he instantly
fell in love with the name. He had forgotten all about “Martha”
until now. It hadn’t even registered when Sergeant Wilson had asked
him to interview her. But now that he had met her, he was utterly
convinced that one way or another, Martha Baker was the girl he was
destined to marry.
The
small print: Books
Monthly, now well into its 24th
year on the web,
is published on or slightly before the first day of each month by Paul
Norman. You can contact me here.
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remind you there is no payment as I don't make any money from this
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