‘You know it’s a knocking shop?’ Maureen dropped it into the conversation casually. She didn’t look up from her knitting.
‘Maureen!’ another woman exclaimed.
‘It’s true, I’ve seen perverts going in and out of there.’ Maureen’s lips were terse: she couldn’t help herself. The poignancy of the topic wasn’t lost on the other women; there was gossip that Maureen’s missing great-niece, Dorinne, had worked in the sex industry, but it was something they never discussed.
‘You haven’t!’
‘So I have. I swear on my mother’s life.’ Now she looked up.
‘Maureen, you are the biggest gossip when you’re bored.’ Another member of the knitting circle stated fact.
‘We’re not called “stitch and bitch” for nothing,’ Maureen quipped. The statement was edged with disgust and they fell silent.
It was indisputable that Maureen loved to generate scandal. Now and again she was proved right, like the time when Kevin Flint had been caught masturbating in the churchyard. The experience had traumatised the local woman who saw him, to the extent that she spent a few nights in the Penrith and Lakes hospital, where she received treatment for shock. The lad was strange; everyone agreed. Why anyone would go to a place of worship and do that was shocking and bordering on the deranged.
It had been at St Oswald’s, a church dating back to the thirteenth century. William and Dorothy Wordsworth were buried there. It was a tiny structure but still operating, under the diocese of Carlisle. Its Gothic style and medieval roots gave it a sinister flavour after dark, but during daylight hours it was a pretty tourist attraction. Christmas was always a highlight of the calendar and Maureen attended the carol services, checking out the local turnout and surveying the state of people’s marriages. Talk about the incident involving Kevin had rumbled on for weeks after and attendance at the church had taken an upturn.
However, afterwards, Maureen had regretted making a meal out of the whole affair, because Kevin had walked around with bruises for a good while. Inflicted by his mother, or so everyone surmised. Maureen had reached out to the lad, asking him if he was all right and if she could do something to help his dad. Apart from buy him a bottle of brandy, that was. Kevin had ignored her and Maureen had taken renewed umbrage, seeing it as reason to criticise the family even further.
She relived the whole episode now.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if Kevin Flint used the place.’
‘Maureen! He’s only a boy,’ one of the women said.
‘No he’s not, he’s a man. He’s nineteen! I’ve seen the way he looks at the young backpackers coming and going, up and down the fells with their tight shorts and big smiles.’
The table fell silent. It was a serious accusation and not one many were willing to follow through. Also, none of the women were happy to venture into the murky details of how Dorinne had disappeared. Maureen was unpredictable and was clearly in a bad mood today.
‘We don’t hear about that missing Chinese woman no more, or my Dorinne,’ Maureen said.
‘She took herself off to the bright lights,’ somebody else suggested gently.
‘Preston? Do me a favour.’ They’d all read about the police investigation in the local paper: it was perfect discussion material for the knitting circle.
‘Are you saying that Kevin Flint had something to do with her going missing?’ the same woman asked.
‘It’s not for me to point the finger. It’s not right going round accusing people. But he hangs around those graveyards and he’s got nothing to do. The devil makes work…’
‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Maureen! Stop with your tittle-tattle. The poor boy has enough on his plate with his pathetic excuse for a father and a monster for a mother. In days gone by, she’d have been dragged away to the infirmary and locked up.’ The woman defended the young man and showed her impatience with Maureen, who looked horrified.
‘Or burned as a witch.’ Another wasn’t so kind, but it dissolved the tension.
‘No one knows what he’s endured, leave the lad alone,’ another chipped in.
With that, the subject was closed, and they moved on to matters of afternoon tea. A certain leeway had been afforded Maureen since the disappearance of her great-niece, but enough was enough. The members discussed their reasons for settling in Grasmere, and they got on with their knitting. However, the subject of a suggested brothel in the sleepy village never quite left the conversation. Next door, Ambleside was one of Cumbria’s oldest villages and had turned into a great tourist hub, full of gastropubs and restaurants, complete with walking shops, as well as trinket and gift offerings. The allure for foreign workers was massive, and keeping a check on them was a huge task, one entrusted to the Home Office but woefully undertaken. There in the sticks, things went unnoticed and unchallenged. As a result, the black market thrived in the Lakes, from booze and cigarettes to OxyContin and sex.
Ambleside was Grasmere’s older sibling, and boasted the same slate and stone walls, drawing in thousands just to pose next to the Bridge House. Traffic and noise were more noticeable, and a young scene had developed, with foreign workers and travellers demanding nightclubs and trendy watering holes. Grasmere, by comparison, had stayed quaint. But gossip that there was a brothel there in full working order had raised eyebrows more than once, and when the police came to ask questions about the missing Chinese woman, several of Grasmere’s residents had flagged it up. No one really knew the exact address, but people were sure it existed. Maureen was convinced that Kevin Flint was a regular.
Maureen had been the one to call the police and lend her theory as well as giving them an address. They’d come and asked questions and even investigated the possibility of the running of a brothel in the town. They hadn’t seemed that interested and it infuriated Maureen. No one seemed to care. Dorinne’s involvement in sex work – and no one in her family denied it – had made her vulnerable and the police less inclined to investigate properly. Or that was what she suspected. Of course, the cops had got off scot-free because of the supposed sighting of Dorinne in Lancaster and the Chinese girl in Preston. But Maureen wasn’t buying it. What if they had never left the Lakes, despite what the police would happily have them believe? She couldn’t let it go.
The proposition had since gone down in urban myth and the police had found nothing (maybe they never looked), stalling the investigation until they all presumed it was shelved, but Maureen tried to keep it alive. Many cars containing one male driver, alone, passed through on the route to Ambleside, and Marvin agreed with her that these men must be getting their kicks somewhere. Maureen had even once propositioned Marvin to take a drive with her, to watch the debauchery unfold in the central square in Ambleside, but they’d chosen the worst night of the year to go and observe the underbelly of Cumbria’s culture: Halloween. They hadn’t even realised the date, with trick or treating and dressing up decades behind them both. On that evening, anything goes and the police weren’t interested. Characters from books, films, stage and fantasy graced the streets, and Maureen and Marvin found themselves immersed in a confusion of ages. They’d given up and gone home, exhausted.
‘Poor lad,’ someone said.
Maureen got up to answer the phone. She still used her landline but only a few relatives, and cold callers, used it. She looked at the little window underneath the receiver and recognised the number. It wasn’t a cold caller; it was her niece, Alice, calling from Wigan. She picked it up and the women around her table stopped what they were doing and looked at her, just as the receiver fell out of her hand and Maureen’s knees gave way. As she went down, she hit her head on the fireplace and grunted. The women rushed to her aid. One called 999.