I stopped him. ‘I know what I said back then and nothing has changed. Nothing has changed over twenty-five years. There has been nothing new to learn.’
‘Until last night,’ he countered.
I must have given him a stare because he looked away quickly, his eyes landing on the chair by the window with the faded green shawl.
‘I’m sorry, Agnes.’ He nodded and flipped the pocketbook shut.
‘The film has been sent for examination by experts,’ he said, ‘but having watched it again, I am pretty sure that all is as it seems. The scenes of the blacksmith’s yard, the graininess of the picture and the shadows cast on the green all suggest that the film was indeed shot at sunrise on that May Morning.’
I nodded. ‘That is what I thought.’
‘And the man walking with Iris does appear to be Sam Denman.’
But this time I did not answer him. Sam Denman was a distant relative of my late husband and Roy must have known that I would not take the news well.
He looked to the chair by the window again but this time his eyes lingered on it a little longer. ‘You must be bitter over all these years,’ he said.
‘Bitter?’
‘Well, for us at the station, it was always about the missing girls,’ he said, ‘but I know that the press saw it another way: the disappearance of beautiful Iris Caldwell and, as a footnote, her maid, a servant girl, a girl who is rarely even named. Even for the inspector, all the pressure was on finding Iris Caldwell and not a thought for poor—’
‘I do not pay attention to the gutter press,’ I said.
‘Maybe you should!’ He took a newspaper from his bag. ‘This is a late morning edition,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘They had to stop the presses but the story about last night’s screening is already in print.’
I put on my spectacles but my eyes still stumbled over the text, so I handed the paper back to him. ‘I already know what it will say,’ I said. ‘I don’t think that the type of rubbish they print will have changed over the years.’
‘I suppose you are right,’ he said, ‘because yet again it is Iris Caldwell’s murder that will cause the sensation.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘The disappearance of her servant, on the same morning, is forgotten even in her own town’s newspaper.’
‘Nell is not forgotten!’ I spat.
‘Nell,’ he repeated, as if the name had sounded like a confession on my lips. ‘Nell was your daughter, but you never speak of her, even now.’
I looked to the chair in the bay of the window and to Nell’s faded shawl. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I do not speak of her, because whenever I think of her, she…’
And then Nell was there as I knew she would be. She sat on the chair by the window, somehow brighter than she had been before, and I could see the curl of her chestnut hair and even the little scar on her cheek that would crease into a dimple when she smiled – little things about her that I had forgotten for such a long time. I thought that she could sense us because she looked at Roy and leant forward as if to listen, tucking a short strand of dark curls behind her ear, the way she always did when she concentrated.
Roy followed my gaze, his eyes briefly skimming the chair and the shawl before looking out of the window but, when he saw nothing, he looked back to me. ‘I understand it is hard, Agnes,’ he said. ‘You know that you are always welcome round if you ever need to talk to me, or Joyce even. You lent handkerchiefs and arranged funerals for so many of the village women who lost sons and husbands during the Great War. I am sure that has not been forgotten. I know you have tried to stay strong for the past twenty-five years, but it is never too late to ask for help. I know when your husband, Thomas, died it was you and Nell, just the two of you, for a while, but there are others who you can turn to—’
But I could not listen to him spell out my sorry situation anymore. ‘Thank you for the chat,’ I said standing up from my chair, ‘but as I have said before, all this happened a quarter of a century ago. I have nothing more to say.’
He nodded. Then I caught him looking at me and I realised that I had been gazing at the chair by the window once more.
‘I am sorry, Agnes,’ he said and then he folded the little book back into his pocket and left without a farewell.
In the chair by the window, Nell turned her head to watch him leave.
3
On May Day 1912 Iris Caldwell, together with my daughter Nell Ryland, went missing, never to be seen again.
On that morning Iris Caldwell rose before the dawn to prepare for her duties as May Queen. She breakfasted with her father and dressed in the long white gown she would wear for the festivities. When a small fire took hold in the stable of the Caldwells’ estate, her father went to investigate, leaving Iris alone, and when he returned, she was gone. Iris’s petticoat was discovered on Missensham Common by a search party later that morning. The blood-soaked garment was found in a thicket of wych elms where it had been dragged into a foxhole. Iris had met an end so grisly, it seems, that the foxes sensing the blood had disturbed the remains and borne off what was left of her.
Those were the facts as I understood them. It was a story that had been reported widely in the newspapers at the time, but there was much said about that morning that was not fact. Some believed that Iris had been involved in a failed abduction, the fire in the stable started as a deliberate distraction while she was spirited away. Some believed that she had been kidnapped by passing gypsies or had fallen into an old well, but it was Sam Denman who suffered the most blame. Sam was a local stable hand who lodged near the common and had taught Iris to ride. He had been drunk on the morning of the disappearance and unable to account for his whereabouts. The accusation had followed Sam his whole life and, unable to find work in the area, he lived no better than a vagrant.
Now there was a new part of the story. Many had long believed that Iris had died in the dark of the morning, but now it was known that she had crossed the village green with Sam when the sun was almost risen. Sam Denman would be accused once more.
The story of my daughter, Nell, was less well known. Since my husband’s death, Nell and I had lived together in our small cottage on the village green. On that fateful morning I had got up early and not checked Nell’s room. In fact, I had tiptoed about the place and not dared to push on her door. Nell was a light sleeper and I’d feared waking her. It was six o’clock when I’d left the cottage and set off for my duties at the church. When I’d returned home an hour later, I had found Nell’s room empty. Just like Iris Caldwell, Nell was never seen again.
Nell was not an heiress and she was no great beauty – although much of this was down to her own making – and her behaviour had never endeared her to the people of the village. There had been no fire at Oak Cottage and Nell’s blood had not been found. Nell’s story had never interested people the way that Iris’s did and after a while I had tired of telling it.
Although there were some things about Nell that I never dared speak of – things that I could neither admit to myself nor come to forget.
So that was the morning of May Day 1912. The afternoon and the days, weeks and months that followed seemed full of church halls crammed with concerned villagers, lanes bustling with search parties and the yelp of foxhounds. Questions were asked in parliament, church services were held, and the foxholes destroyed. The face of Iris Caldwell was everywhere – her inky outline peered out from the pages of the newspapers, from posters nailed to trees and leaflets handed out by policemen in the street. I could not escape the image of this girl with fair hair that flowed loose about her shoulders and the crown of irises upon her head. Iris was always pictured as the May Queen, some Shakespearean nymph or Pre-Raphaelite beauty, when in fact she had never worn the crown of irises or been seen after sunrise on May Day.