Three

It was an uninspiring book which looked like standard police fodder, entitled Patterson’s Guide to Smuggling and Tax Evasion: History and Legal Precedents.

Dull as ditch water!

Posie hadn’t bothered to read it straight away, had concentrated instead on putting some make-up and nightwear into her duffle bag, throwing on top the usual travel bits and pieces: a rope of pearls; a travel clock; a Penhaligon’s bluebell-scented candle in a silver tin; a framed picture of her gorgeous children.

The brown leather book had been thrown on top too.

She’d grabbed up her new teal woollen coat which enveloped her like a cosy gauzy blanket and had skittered through to the kitchen where Mrs Juniper was wiping jam from Phyllis’ face and tying her hair in neat pigtails.

Masha was clearing up what looked like a snowstorm of porridge, with Katie firmly on her hip, and Kit, ignored, had outstretched his chubby little arms to Posie, bawling loudly from his high-chair.

‘Oh, lovey. Don’t cry so, Kit. Mama’s got to go, dearie. But I’ll be back tomorrow. I promise!’

Had she imagined it or had Mrs Juniper’s heavy, straggly eyebrow shot up suddenly in an arch of something like disapproval as Posie picked Kit up, covering him as she did so in a frenzy of kisses?

‘Will you be all right here, Mrs Juniper? To help out with the babies, and Phyllis? I’m afraid the Chief Commissioner and myself need to leave: something’s come up; a case. If you need us, we’ll be at the Mermaid Inn in Rye. We do appreciate it. Overtime will be paid, naturally.’

A slight nod, a smile, the clipped Scottish accent deferential but knowing best: ‘’Course, Madam. We’ll get along just fine now, so don’t you worry. I’m about to take wee Phyllis to school. She’ll be there nice and early, won’t you, lassie?’

Mrs Juniper then nodded over to the corner of the kitchen, where a small brown dog with a red velvet bow in its hair was curled cosily in a basket with an immaculate tartan coverlet.

‘But what about the wee doggie, Madam? Babies and bairns are one thing, but I’m no a real fan of doggies.’

‘Oh!’

Posie blushed, ashamed. In the sudden ruckus she’d forgotten all about Patsy, her Yorkshire terrier.

‘I’ll take her with me. Of course!’

Posie hoped against hope that one small dog wouldn’t be frowned upon or get in the way too much at the Mermaid.

And so, an hour later, Posie, with Patsy beside her on the plush seat, found herself the sole occupant of her first-class Southern Railway train carriage: the lamps burning cheerily overhead; the heater working. They were hurtling southward-bound, destined for Rye in East Sussex.

She’d spent the first minutes of the journey picking off the dried-in porridge on her coat, Kit’s goodbye offering to her, and now she turned her attention to the Patterson’s Guide which Richard had given her.

Richard himself was cloistered outside the carriage, beyond the glass doors and windows, standing in the corridor.

He was wearing a relatively smart but low-key Harris Tweed grey suit and matching felt homburg with a thick woollen black overcoat. He was speaking in hushed undertones to Sergeant Fox, who had become rather a favourite.

Fox, in contrast to his boss, looked very scruffy.

His shorn blonde hair was mussed and he was hatless, and he was sporting a rather bobbled navy duffle coat which looked suspiciously like Richard’s old one from before the Great War. Fox had added what looked like a college scarf over the top – a felted creation in stinging tones of burgundy and waspish yellow – and slung on a satchel which was obviously not his own. Fox had clearly been told to dig deep in the Scotland Yard props box.

Some disguise , Posie thought to herself.

She was still uppity at having been accompanied at all on this trip, let alone by a team of detectives.

She had the nagging suspicion that Fox wasn’t the only extra detective her husband had contacted today. There had been a flurry of telephone calls before they had left home, and hurried telegrams sent from Victoria Station, and Posie had a feeling he was organising something big.

Posie broke off several chunks of milk chocolate, purchased from a machine at Victoria Station. She shook her head rather crossly and attended to the book, eating at the same time.

The section Richard had indicated was very much in the ‘HISTORY’ part.

She frowned a little as she read:

HAWKHURST GANG AT ‘THE MERMAID’

The Hawkhurst gang are probably the most famous smuggling gang in English history. Certainly the bloodiest.

Working mainly between the years 1735–1749, they terrorised a good swathe of the south coast of England, and they were based at ‘Hawkhurst’ in Kent.

But for a good part of their active years, it was actually another property, this time in the thriving port town of Rye, which became their main hideout and headquarters.

This was ‘The Mermaid Inn’, a mysterious and legend-fuelled place located on the most important street of the town, ‘Mermaid Street’, a bustling thoroughfare of mainly Tudor houses which led steeply downwards to the main harbour at the bottom of the hill.

An ancient building, ‘The Mermaid’ was a warren of carefully-constructed hidden passageways, secret doors and trapdoors (leading to tunnels stretching out across the town of Rye) which enabled the Hawkhurst gang members to use the place freely and with a degree of brazen authority and swagger, confident they would always escape capture if Customs Commissioners ever came after them.

And while the currency of this gang were the usual commodities of smuggled tea, coffee, rum and brandy, it was the dreadful violence which accompanied their smuggling which made the Hawkhurst men so notorious.

This included bloody duels, frequent grisly murders and horrendous punishments meted out for apparent ‘disobedience’, such as the wholesale ransacking and setting on fire of entire villages and towns.

The leader of the Hawkhurst gang was Mr Thomas Kingsmill, and he was thankfully brought to justice and executed (by hanging) in 1749 in London.

Posie snapped the book shut.

Well, that was all very nice, wasn’t it? A bit of a history lesson.

She stared out of the window, at the morning which had never really got light.

The harmonious rolling fields of Kent gave way to flatland, then merged into the watery marshes of Sussex outside, the one county indistinguishable from the next.

Flocks of black birds, ominous somehow, sat in every bare tree which whizzed past, too cold to fly perhaps. Occasionally a village, with smoke unfurling from peg-tiled cottage roofs would be glimpsed, and in the distance, sometimes, a flock of white Christmas geese could be spied, bright against the dark green of the grass, with a lone goose-girl or boy moving about among the snowy throng.

Posie picked up her next book, a mint copy of the navy-covered Highways & Byways in Sussex which she’d just had time to grab at a newsstand in Victoria, while Richard was sending a telegram.

She leafed through it, and found Rye quickly, right at the back.

As Patsy snored beside her, Posie read through the guide.

A mystical, romantically-unreal town was sketched out for her, its heart beating with history. The author conjured up a vision of a citadel on a fairy-tale rocky hillock, topped by a magnificent grey church, rising up splendidly from a vast, marshy, treacherous flatland, with the sea and harbour directly off to one side.

Posie read that the town had always been a haven for smugglers who would come across the marshes at night to receive contraband cargos from the ships tethered at the busy port at the bottom of the fairy-tale hill.

But there was no mention in Highways & Byways in Sussex of the Mermaid Inn, or of those past, bloody smugglers.

No Thomas Kingsmill graced the pages here.

Instead, the author focused on the glories of the main church of Rye, St Mary’s, with its unusual blue, cherub-decorated clock, a present from Queen Elizabeth, back in the 1500s. There was a description of the cobbled streets with their press of Tudor houses and ancient charm, and mention of the ancient Ypres Tower, which had once stood guard over the harbour.

What Posie had not appreciated was that Rye was no longer a town on the sea.

The sea was now at least a mile away, the original waterways having silted up over time, leaving Rye in all her glory trapped inconveniently inland.

Rye had lost its purpose.

Quite suddenly the door of the carriage was pulled back sharply, and a blast of cold air entered, along with Fox, who threw himself down opposite Posie. They always treated each other as if they knew each other of old.

‘Wotcha, Miss!’

He got something out of his beaten-up, borrowed satchel.

‘Nice coat you’ve got on there, Sergeant.’

‘Isn’t it a beauty, Miss?’

Out of the corner of her eye Posie could see Fox was rustling about with what looked like a very old book.

Posie looked quickly away and out of the window.

She could see groups of children moving in the distance, blurs in the greenish light of the watery flooded marshes. The children were heaving something along between themselves, something huge and awkward. It seemed to be an enormous freshly-felled fir tree, but it must already have been dragged a long way, for the landscape here was bleak and treeless, devoid of much life.

A Christmas tree, that symbol of hope .

Posie pressed her face against the cold window.

Christmas . That old time of wonder and renewal.

So far this year she hadn’t given much thought to it at all, although Posie had noticed that the ever-efficient Mrs Juniper had put a toy catalogue from Gamages on High Holborn on top of Posie’s duffle bag, presumably for perusal on her journey, and it was now stuffed, crumpled, inside the bag, as yet unread.

Posie wiped away the condensation which had formed on the glass pane, and saw the reflection of her own face looking back at her.

She got a shock.

‘Oh! I say!’

‘Miss?’ Fox was looking over, concerned.

‘Sorry, nothing at all. Don’t let me disturb you, Sergeant.’

‘Fine.’

The bright carriage lights behind her had thrown her face into shadows, and Posie hadn’t recognised herself.

Didn’t recognise herself.

Someone else was looking back at her in the glass.

Someone she had spent her whole adult life trying to forget, to blot out.

Funny really, how all these threads were coming together just now .

Posie turned abruptly from the image in the window; an image of a missing woman; a woman lost to the swirling, shifting passages of time.

Another missing woman.

But unlike Dolly, this was a woman Posie had never wanted to look for, or enquire after; even when she had been offered clues, a good lead.

A lead, funnily enough, which had specifically mentioned the Mermaid Inn, in Rye, as being a location of interest.

What a coincidence .

The lead had been given to Posie almost two years ago. But Posie hadn’t wanted to pursue it.

The whole thing had been too painful to think about. Let alone address.

Rosa Parker .

Of course, this was all about Posie’s mother.

A woman whom Posie had, if that reflection just now was accurate, grown to look like; the years playing a calm, cruel trick on her. It was uncanny, haunting almost.

Posie bit her lip, thoughts of her mother suddenly flooding her mind, unbidden and unasked for.

Rosa Parker, the thoroughly exotic, wholly unsuitable, half-Italian vicar’s wife, who had disappeared out of Posie’s life in strange circumstances on Christmas Eve, 1903. When Posie had been just eleven years old.

Rosa Parker had run away, never to return.

In all the years which followed, Rosa had never once made contact with her husband, the Reverend Parker, up in Norfolk. Nor with her son, nor with Posie.

Posie had had to navigate womanhood, and the terrors and the triumphs this brought, all by herself.

She’d never been able to forgive her mother for the desertion, but had chosen to believe, because it was easiest, that her mother was dead.

And somehow, when Posie had found out, two years back, that her mother, Rosa, might actually be alive, and had lived out a wholly-happy life with another, second family in the intervening years, it had been like a terrible slap in the face.

Posie had been glad that her brother, dead in the Great War, and her father, dead soon after from the shock of losing his only son, had not been alive to share the pain and what seemed like yet another, very fresh, stinging betrayal.

She had never spoken of Rosa Parker, of her mother – except to explain the bare bones of her disappearance – to Richard, and had never once mentioned the Mermaid in Rye as having been a place where her mother might be found.

But her evasion had been foolish: there had been a certain inevitability about the whole thing being brought out into the open as time went by, and Posie had always felt sure she would be forced to address the issue of her ‘missing’ mother before long.

In fact, Posie had been certain that the telephone call today, when she’d heard the caller’s location, would have been to do with that unfollowed-up lead, catching up with her at last.

A point of no return .

It had been the reason her heart had thudded so loudly and painfully against her ribcage as she’d picked up the receiver; why she’d felt so awfully apprehensive as she’d started to speak. Had she actually been expecting to speak to her mother? To hear her voice, after twenty-two years?

Well, yes: probably.

What on earth would she have said?

It had actually been a relief when it had only been the Proprietress, wanting to put Rufus on the line.

And yet still, here Posie was, hurtling through Sussex to get to Rufus.

The result, even though it hadn’t been Rosa Parker on the end of the telephone, was the same.

She was heading to the Mermaid, anyhow .

Would she find her mother now, without having actually ever planned to?

Two birds, one stone.

Posie hadn’t thought through the implications of finding her mother. She’d spent so many years hating – which wasn’t good for anyone, was it? – that the dawning realisation she might actually feel able to sit down and talk to Rosa now surprised her.

A calm, certain feeling of reconciliation seemed to sweep through Posie.

Was it actually forgiveness?

She was certain it had to do with having become a mother herself, and the understanding that goes alongside that.

The understanding that there are so many different types of mothers, no two could ever be alike.

And Posie herself was hardly the most conventional of mothers, was she? Why, she hadn’t even managed to think for two seconds about what to buy her children for Christmas! And she was sure that she’d end up getting her secretary, Prudence, to organise it all in the end.

But that didn’t make Posie a bad mother, did it? It was just her way: Posie saw that now.

Every woman had her own ways and reasons.

And so here she was; looking for Dolly, and, at the same time, looking for Rosa.

Posie realised suddenly that a lot of her career so far as a Private Detective, since she’d set up her small bureau in 1921, had been spent looking for lost men. Mainly men lost on the fields of battle during the Great War.

Now she only seemed to be looking for lost women.

Her thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a bell ringing and then the guard’s clipped voice rang out clearly:

‘NEXT STOP RYE! End of the line. Rye, next stop! Everyone change, please. All change.’

She turned quickly and saw Sergeant Fox watching her intently.

Fox nodded towards the window, where roads and cars and fields were still flying past but in a weird kind of slow, dragging blur.

‘Cold December this one, isn’t it, Miss? You were watching the snow, were you? You can’t beat a bit of fresh snow. Maybe it’ll be a white Christmas, eh?’

Posie turned, shocked.

She’d been so caught up in her thoughts, and that wretched blurry image of herself, that she hadn’t even realised it was snowing outside. That the weird light, the smudges of scenery were due to the whirl of thick snowflakes abounding.

The snow seemed to be dancing lightly as they pulled into Rye station and harsh whistles sounded, and while the smoke from the engine cleared, outside on the platform Posie could already see her husband dismounting.

He was shaking hands in the snow with a large middle-aged man with an important-looking white walrus-like moustache, dressed in a black waterproof cape, a group of plain-clothed policemen flanked right behind him.

The man with the white moustache was handing something to Richard, looking serious.

What on earth was Richard up to? What was going on here?

Posie stood, shifting Patsy into the warmth of her carpet bag. Fox stood too, courteous, patient.

‘The boss told me to help you, Miss. I’ll carry your luggage, eh? Pass it over. Oh, what’s this?’

Fox had spied the brown book about smuggling.

‘That looks a dry old read, Miss. You should have asked and I’d have given you my book. It’s a guide to haunted Kent and Sussex; the seller at the bookstall in London swore by it. Maybe he thought that’s what down-at-heel students like me enjoy reading, eh?’

Fox shunted Posie’s duffle bag easily.

‘We’re in for a treat, Miss. Turns out this ‘Mermaid’ place we’re going to is one of the most haunted spots in the British Isles. Exciting, isn’t it? At Christmas, too! There’s always something very satisfying about a ghost story at Christmas, don’t you think, Miss?’

‘Fan of M. R. James, are you, Sergeant?’

Fox laughed and nodded, and they headed down the corridor.

‘The Mermaid is more than a story though, Miss. It’s downright creepy. There’s a glass bauble in every single room in that place, with the intention of reflecting ghosts’ reflections back at themselves and thus scaring them off. So, in addition to hunting for the Countess of Cardigeon, and looking out for the Earl’s well-being, we’ll have some proper spooky company at our lodgings.’

Fox made a slight ‘woo-hoo!’ noise and mock-shivered.

‘So we can’t get too comfy, eh, Miss? In fact, the book at Victoria Station was a bit of luck: the boss told me to come undercover – any cover – and I came as a student but I think I’ll pretend to be a ghost-hunter instead. It seems more convincing. The place is apparently chock-full of ghosts.’

Posie snorted in disbelief.

‘Where isn’t these days?’ she retorted tartly.

Ghosts, not that she believed in them, had never bothered her.

No: it was the living who could, and did , inflict real pain, which sometimes, and inconveniently, threw long shadows back through the past and on into the future.

****