One of Inspector Christy Barry’s fishermen friends reckoned that with a body as small as Victoria’s, and the river as high as it was, she had in all probability been washed out to sea and her body would never be recovered. Despite believing him to be right, Christy elected to go through the usual police procedures for the sake of Lady Blackshaw.
By the time he and his young colleague arrived back at the Park at nine the next morning to continue their questioning, the estate was even more crowded with searchers than it had been the previous day. The steward was gratified. With their help they would be able to do in two days what would take weeks if the Park residents alone were the only personnel available.
Around mid-morning, still waiting for a meeting with Lady Blackshaw, the constable suggested they question Charlotte. “Children are so observant,” he said. “They see things an adult would never notice.”
“Imagine a young bachelor like you knowing that,” Christy smiled. “Why don’t we send for Nurse Dixon to escort her here?”
The constable reddened and tried to look indifferent. “Yes, that’s a good idea.”
Fifteen minutes later, Nurse Dixon was holding Charlotte’s hand and speaking to her in a soft, coaxing tone of voice. “Come on, Charlotte dear, answer the nice policeman. When did you last see Teresa?”
Charlotte continued to stare at the two men with frightened eyes and didn’t attempt to open her mouth.
“You’ve nothing to be afraid of, Miss Charlotte. We’re not bogeymen, you know. I have four children of my own, a lot older than you, of course, and this young fellow here has a crowd of brothers and sisters.”
Charlotte wouldn’t be drawn.
Nurse Dixon looked straight at the constable for the first time and visibly reacted to his admiring expression. It was as if she had been running at speed at the end of a rope and was snapped up short when she reached the end of it.
“Excuse me a minute,” she said, standing up in a hurry and leading Charlotte out of the room and down to the end of the corridor where no one could hear her.
“Just listen to me, young lady. And look at me while I’m talking to you.” She gripped the child’s chin and tilted up her head. Charlotte’s eyes swivelled, trying to look anywhere except at Nurse Dixon. “Them policemen in there aren’t the ones who punish naughty children. They’re different ones, do you understand? Good, kind ones.” Dixon squeezed Charlotte’s chin with every word she emphasised. “So will you answer their questions when you’re asked and stop making a show of yourself? Do you understand?”
Charlotte’s eyes were smarting from the effort of avoiding Dixon’s stare.
“Do you?”
Charlotte nodded and Dixon released her grip.
Returning to the room, Dixon placed herself directly opposite the young policeman, rather than at an angle as she had been earlier, with Charlotte on a chair close to her.
“Now, Miss Charlotte, do you mind if we ask you again? Did you see Teresa Kelly yesterday? Or any strangers?”
With pleading eyes, Charlotte looked up at the nanny and then at the two men.
“Now, Charlotte, dear,” said Nurse Dixon, putting an arm around her and tucking her hair behind her ear and stroking it, “I’m with you, so you don’t have to be afraid of anything. Just tell these nice gentlemen what you seen yesterday and the day before.”
Charlotte slumped, stared straight ahead and didn’t speak, even when the silence lengthened and the ticking of the clock on the wall became intrusive.
Nurse Dixon let her hand slip from Charlotte’s shoulders, drew the child’s left arm behind her back, held it in a vice-like grip and dug in her nails. Charlotte’s face registered distress but she didn’t cry out.
A servant entered without knocking to tell the policemen Her Ladyship would receive them now, this minute.
Dixon dropped Charlotte’s arm and the child jumped up and ran out of the room. Nurse Dixon made eye contact with Declan Doyle (‘Look what I have to put up with’), smiled angelically, and left slowly with a slight sway of her hips.
Lady Blackshaw, all in the space of two minutes, exploded with temper at the policemen for not telling her earlier what Peachy the chambermaid had said. She ordered them to circulate Teresa’s description to all police and army barracks in the country, and personally contacted her nearest neighbours to drive to Queenstown in their new motor car to see if the seamstress had set off from there.
“We’ve lost over twelve hours,” she raged. “I should have called in the army in the first place.”
“It’s not too late, ma’am,” said Declan with a feigned mildness in his tone. He had taken a dislike to her and resented being treated as her private investigating agent. Her accent grated on his ear and he found her reaction to the loss of her daughter, whose birth date he suspected she didn’t know, cold and unnatural. If a prize colt had been spirited away, she would have been much more upset than she was now, he believed. Above all that, he couldn’t forget the initial outrage he felt when he saw the magnificent castle with its tower overlooking acres of prime fertile land stretching in all directions as far as the eye could see, and realising that it all belonged to one man, and that man a coloniser. He had read about such places in his history books, but had never seen one at first hand before now, as they were always surrounded by walls and trees and set too far back from public roads to be viewed by ordinary people.
The inspector made placatory noises. As far as he was concerned, Lady Blackshaw’s role as a bereaved mother excused her from all ordinary rules of good behaviour. She could rant and bully as much as she liked – that was her prerogative – and he wouldn’t bat an eye.
“Why do you think she latched on to blaming Teresa Kelly so quickly?” the constable asked the inspector later, before proceeding to answer his own question. “Because she can’t bear the thought of being ridiculed for mislaying her own child the only time she gets to take her out, that’s why. Think of the rank stupidity of leaving the little one unattended beside a flooded river with the door wide open – though of course she didn’t admit that she was responsible for that. If she didn’t have Teresa Kelly to point the finger at she’d come up with some other poor unfortunate to deflect the blame away from herself.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Christy.
Nurse Dixon closed the nursery door behind her and Charlotte backed away.
“Are you happy now? Are you? Making a complete fool of me in front of those nice men?”
Charlotte continued to move backwards until she came up against the end of her iron bedstead and couldn’t move any further.
“Speak. Say something.” Nurse Dixon raised her arm. “Go on. You know you’re just putting it on. You always had plenty to say to Teresa when she were here, didn’t you, so what’s stopping you now? Eh?”
Charlotte cowered against the bed.
“I’m giving you one last chance. If you don’t speak by the time I count to three you’re going to cop it.”
Charlotte braced herself.
“One! Two! Three!”
Dixon placed her hands on Charlotte’s shoulders and shoved with such force that Charlotte’s body arched backwards over the bed and the iron rail dug into her back. When Dixon let go Charlotte slid to the floor.
“Let that be a lesson to you,” she said. “Just because you was born with a silver spoon in your mouth don’t give you the right to treat other people like rubbish! Don’t you ever make a fool of me again in front of other people. Is that clear?”
Breathing heavily, she removed herself to her adjoining room without looking back, slamming the door behind her. From her bedside locker she took out a yellow-haired porcelain doll dressed in sapphire-blue satin. Charlotte’s expensive, beautiful doll. She felt like tearing out its yellow hair and smashing its face against the brass bed-knob and watching its marble eyes roll along the floor – serve Charlotte right, refusing to obey her in front of the policemen, making her look incompetent. She would have destroyed the doll, no question about it, if it hadn’t been a gift from the girls’ maternal grandparents. There was the fear that Lady Blackshaw could enquire about it at any time, especially if she wanted to show what Victoria’s matching red-headed one looked like. So far her ladyship hadn’t mentioned it – perhaps she had forgotten that Charlotte had ever owned one – but she would need to hold on to it, just in case.
It was over a year since it had been confiscated as a punishment for not handing it over when she had been told. Dixon had been forced to wrestle it out of the incorrigible child’s arms. It hadn’t helped her temper when she saw a shocked housemaid in the distance looking on at the distraught Charlotte screaming “Give it back! It’s mine!” and then at the top of her voice “It’s not fair!” After Dixon had bundled the child indoors to silence her unobserved and to give her a lesson in fairness, she pronounced that Charlotte would never see the doll again after a display like that, and if she made so much as a whimper the doll would be smashed into a hundred pieces, and if she so much as touched Victoria’s matching one, there would be hell to pay.
Now Dixon stood on a chair and shoved the doll to the back of the top shelf of her wardrobe where the sly Charlotte wouldn’t be able to reach if she happened to sneak in to search when there was no one about.
Charlotte was never going to get the better of her. All that fuss over a doll when the house was stuffed with antique toys, while poor orphan children never had anything to call their own, not even a clothes-peg doll with wool for hair.