The Disappearance

by Katherine Webb

Genres: Historical Fiction; Romance; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

From the best-selling author of The Legacy comes an unforgettable novel exploring guilt, love and confronting the truth.

April, 1942. Amid the chaos of a night of bombing in Bath, six-year-old Davy Noyle goes missing. Frances Parry, looking after him at the time, is tortured by guilt and refuses to believe that he's dead.

As quiet falls and the dust begins to settle on the damaged city, a body is found. But it's the body of a little girl, Frances' best friend, Wyn, who has been missing for over 20 years.

As Frances continues her search for Davy, this new discovery leads her back to her childhood and forces her to revisit a crime that has cast a shadow over her life. This time she vows to uncover the truth, however dark it might be.

Release date: May 16, 2019

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 384

Sample

1

Saturday

1942 – First Day of Bombing

That Saturday, the twenty-fifth of April, would have been Wyn’s birthday. Frances was distracted by her memory all day long, and as evening fell she grew even more restless, sitting in the front room with her mother after supper, Davy drowsing in her lap. It was well past the time that his mother, Carys, might be expected to turn up to collect him; she would just leave him with Frances – she’d done so many times before. Davy was small for his six years, but even so his weight pressed down on Frances, and he radiated heat until she began to sweat, and feel suffocated. It was impossible to think, with that and the wireless muttering, and her mother tutting as she struggled to mend a shirt by the light of a single lamp, turned down low. She refused to use the overhead lights during the blackout, even though Frances’s father had made sure of their precautions. The room began to crowd in on Frances; too hot, too close, too populous.

She looked down at Davy’s face, drooping softly in sleep. The skin of his eyelids was pale lilac, with a waxy sheen, and Frances felt a familiar tug of dismay: he always looked so worn out.

‘I might go out for a bit of fresh air,’ she said, shifting her position, trying to ease Davy’s weight against her thighs and ribs. Her mother, Susan, looked up sharply.

‘What, now?’ she said, sounding worried. ‘But it’s almost bedtime.’

‘I’m not tired.’

‘Well, I am. And you know Davy’ll wake up as soon as you move, in spite of his medicine. You can’t just go off and leave him with me, and I bet Carys is in no fit state by now,’ she said. Frances stifled a desperate feeling, the need to escape. She struggled up out of her chair; Davy stirred, rubbing his face against her shoulder.

‘It’s all right, go back to sleep,’ she whispered to him. ‘No, I expect you’re right about Carys; he can’t go home. I’ll take him along to the Landys,’ she told her mother. ‘They’ll be up for hours yet.’ Susan gave her a disapproving look.

‘It’s not right, you know; passing him around, pillar to post.’

‘I just … I can’t breathe. I have to get some air.’



Davy was squirming by the time she got up the hill to the Landys, pressing his knuckles into his eyes. Frances felt his ribs, each no thicker than a pencil, fanning against her own as he yawned. ‘Hush, hush,’ she told him. ‘You’re going to sit with Mr and Mrs Landy for a while. You’ll like that, won’t you? She’ll give you a cup of cocoa, I bet.’ Davy shook his head.

‘Stay with you,’ he said, very quietly, as Mrs Landy opened the door. She was in her housecoat, with her white hair up in rollers, but she smiled when she saw them. She and her husband had no children of their own, no grandchildren.

‘Is it all right? Just for a couple of hours?’ said Frances.

‘Course it’s all right,’ said Mrs Landy. ‘Come on in, my little lamb. You can let him stop here with us if it gets very late, Frances, it’s no bother.’

‘Thank you. He’s had supper, and his dose.’

‘Frances,’ said Davy, still groggy. He didn’t say anything else, but Frances knew it was a protest.

‘There’s a good boy,’ she said, guiltily. As the door closed she caught a final glimpse of his face – pale, bewildered; dark shadows under his eyes as he struggled to focus them on her. Later, she would be tormented by that last look he gave her, and by the ease with which she set her guilt aside. How easily she abandoned him there.

But it was Wyn’s birthday, and Frances needed to breathe. She climbed to the top of Beechen Cliff, high above Bath, and sat on a bench looking down at the dark city. She’d come to love the peace and solitude of the blackout. The way that, if you let your eyes get used to it and didn’t carry a torch, nobody would even know you were there. You could be completely invisible. She wasn’t the only one to make use of it – she was often aware of hushed voices in the park, the furtive movements and snatched breaths of courting couples. Frances liked the silhouettes of things against the gauzy sky, and the way sounds and scents seemed sharper. In daylight she didn’t notice the musky horse chestnut blossoms or the too-sweet lilacs, or the damp smells of grass and earth in the park. So different to the stone, soot and people smells of the streets below. She felt no danger, except perhaps the same faint frisson they all felt, every night: the possibility of a danger that seemed remote. She looked down and imagined how other people were spending their Saturday nights. All those lives, loves and arguments; all that talk, going on and on. It was a relief to step away from it.

She thought about children, and what made a child a child. Sometimes, Davy got a look in his eye like that of an old, old man – a weary resignation to the inevitability of whatever was to come. He was only six; definitely still a child, but somehow old beyond his years. A bit like Wyn had been. Frances had been looking after him for two years, since she’d gone back to live with her parents. He’d been tiny when his mother, Carys Noyle, had first shoved him into Frances’s arms – a scrap of a boy wearing filthy, sagging shorts, scratching at an infected flea bite on his arm and stinking of long-term grime. She hadn’t wanted to look after a child – any child – but Carys was hard to say no to, and harder for Frances than for anyone. So that one-off favour was repeated, and became a routine of three or four times weekly, never with any notice beforehand. Carys took it for granted that Frances would have nothing better to do with her time.

It was a still, clear night, the air just mild enough not to show Frances’s breath. Wyn should have turned thirty-two that day, the same age as Frances. Every year, Frances tried to imagine her as a grown woman, married, with children of her own. She tried to imagine how she would have looked, and all the things she might have done, and she wondered whether they’d have remained friends. Frances hoped so, but they’d been very different people, and friendship seemed to get more complicated for adults. She would never know. Wyn had vanished on an August day twenty-four years before, and hadn’t been seen since. She’d stayed a child of eight years old. On her birthday, Wyn haunted Frances mercilessly, cluttering her mind with echoes and half-remembered things, and a sense of loss like an ache in her bones.

A lone plane flew over, eastwards near Sham Castle, and left a sparkle of light behind. Chandelier flares, falling with slow grace. Frances waited, and sure enough the air raid sirens set up their wailing down below. The first planes usually came over between eleven and midnight; Frances realised with a start that hours must have slipped by without her noticing. She ought to hurry home and go down into the cellar with her mother, to get backache in a deckchair and feel the air turning turgid as the hours crept by. Sleep was impossible down there, and playing I-spy in the dark had stopped being funny months ago. The prospect was as welcome as a wet weekend. Lately, Frances had stopped bothering to move when the sirens went off, and she wasn’t the only one. They’d gone off too many times – hundreds of times – and no bombs had fallen.

Moonlight slid along Holloway, the ancient street at the foot of the hill, and found the roof of St Mary Magdalen Chapel. It lit the roof of the old leper hospital next door to it, too: a narrow box of a cottage, couched in darkness like the rest. In the blackout, there was nothing to show that it was empty. Empty of the living, anyway. It had a rough, stone-tiled roof; small, Gothic windows; and a chimney stack on one side. Frances couldn’t look at it without steeling herself first – almost daring herself; and once she had, it was hard to look away. The sight of it took her back to her childhood, abruptly, painfully. She stared at it, and didn’t notice the sound of the planes at once – they came gradually, gently overwhelming the quiet rustle of the trees. A dog started barking somewhere down on Lyncombe Hill. As the sound grew louder Frances picked out the particular, two-tone throb of German propellers, so different to the smooth roar of British ones. They’d all got used to telling the difference.

Night after night, for months, the people of Bath had hidden away as the planes went over on their way to Bristol, to batter its docks and wharves and warehouses. Frances had watched from Beechen Cliff as the western sky lit up with explosions and anti-aircraft fire; she’d watched as people died in the neighbouring city. The odd stray bomb had been dropped around Bath by nervous pilots unsure of their location, or dumping unshed load on the way back to the continent. A barn on fire here, a crater to be gawped at there. On Good Friday the year before, four bombs had been dropped with random malice by one pilot, killing eleven people down in Dolemeads. It was hard to picture those young German pilots, cold with sweat in their cockpits, delivering death and mayhem. Frances found herself wondering what their favourite food had been when they were growing up, or what they’d wanted to be when they were twelve years old; whether they’d enjoyed their first kisses, or rubbed them away in surprised disgust. She was supposed to hate them; to not hate them was to hate England. You had to hate them, just like before, in the last war. She’d been afraid of that hatred then, and she despised it now.

The racket got louder. It was coming from two directions – from the east, along the River Avon from Box, and from the south, behind Frances. She lit a cigarette, carefully shielding the tiny flame of her match, and thought back, trying to work out when Davy had got his old man’s expression. That first time she’d looked after him she’d been unsure what to do with him. She’d gone back to scrubbing carrots in the lean-to scullery round the back, and had virtually forgotten he was there until she turned and saw him peering at her from around the door jamb. He had light eyes and matted blond hair, and pale skin smudged with dirt. His expression hadn’t been scared, or curious; more dogged. Quietly determined to find something to eat, she soon found out. The look of weary resignation must have come later. Frances wasn’t good with children, and at first she hadn’t known what to say to him. She’d said, ‘You all right, then?’ and, ‘You can go and play in the yard, you know’, and she’d been embarrassed, even a bit put out, when he didn’t reply.

The planes were low, lower than she’d ever seen them; it seemed as though she might reach up and touch them. Their black shapes filled the sky – more numerous than ever before. Frances dropped her cigarette in shock, and clapped her hands over her ears as she looked up. They were like a swarm of giant insects; the sound of them went right through her chest and rattled her heart. They seemed to move too slowly, like they might drop out of the sky, and suddenly Frances realised why it was all different: they weren’t heading for Bristol, they were coming for Bath. Blameless, defenceless Bath. She sat stupefied for a moment, too stunned to move, as the planes began to dive and she heard the tell-tale whistle of incendiaries, and saw the white flashes as they went off – setting buildings on fire, lighting up the city, making a mockery of the blackout. Then came the vast, incredible thump of a high-explosive bomb. The last thought she was able to have, before the noise obliterated everything, was of little Davy Noyle, with his blond hair just like his Aunt Wyn’s.

Frances scrambled forwards off the bench, huddling on the damp grass with her arms wrapped over her head. She couldn’t seem to fill her lungs; the air tore and shrieked around her, the ground shook, and all thought abandoned her. It was a moment of pure fear – fear that made her muscles tremble and turned her weak and stupid. She’d felt it before but not for a long, long time; not since she’d first seen the ghost in the old leper hospital. This was the same debilitating fear – a feeling of free-fall, of having seconds left in which to exist before hitting the ground. Frances shut her eyes tight, clenching her teeth until it hurt as wave after wave of planes went over, swooping low over the city, dropping bomb after bomb. It seemed to go on forever: the roar of engines, the shudder and crump of explosions. The springtime smells of grass and trees vanished into the stink of burning; smoke filled the air, and when Frances finally made herself look up she saw fires all over Bath. The gasworks were an inferno. Holloway was on fire. The road she lived on – the road her parents lived on.

Panic jolted her up; she felt horribly exposed and, with a cry, she ran for the top of Jacob’s Ladder – steep steps that cut down the side of Beechen Cliff to the back of Alexandra Road, where her Aunt Pam lived. It was the nearest place of safety she could think of. She heard the rattle of machine-gun fire – never heard before but somehow instantly recognisable – as she flung herself down the steps, swinging between the railings, desperate for the deeper darkness of the laurels and undergrowth as fire banished the night. Frances ran blindly, out of control, and halfway down she missed a step, lurched and fell hard against the railings, turning her ankle and giving her head a whack that made white spots scud across her eyes. Another bomb dropped, nearby. It fell with a whistle that became a banshee scream, then landed with a noise that sucked in everything else, consuming it utterly, just for a second or two. It was staggering. Frances stayed where she was, gripping the railings as though they might save her, feeling like her head was being crushed. She thought of her mother, down in the cellar, and how frightened she would be; she thought of her father, out in a public shelter somewhere. She thought of ghosts. Then she didn’t think for a while, because there was nothing to do but exist.

Sunday

1942 – Second Day of Bombing

The sun shone, pallid through the lingering smoke. Frances squinted up into the sky. Her head throbbed, and she felt a little drunk; her thoughts were moving with an odd, deliberate slowness, like high clouds on a hot day. She’d cut her forehead when she fell and it had bled all down her face, but she hadn’t done anything about it other than to scratch it when it itched. She had a worrying feeling that she was forgetting something important, and the sequence of the previous night wouldn’t make sense, no matter how hard she tried to order it. She knew from listening to people talk that there’d been a lull of a few hours after the first raid, and then another attack in the small hours of the morning. To Frances, it had seemed as though the bombings had gone on and on, unrelenting, for half a lifetime. She’d woken with the rising sun, still on the steps where she’d fallen, and made her way home slowly.

Now she was helping a civil defence team clear rubble from the house at the end of Magdalen Cottages, the row of three where she and her parents lived, which had taken a direct hit from an incendiary and gone up like tinder. The roof, chimney stack and upper floor had slumped through the ground floor into the cellar; a whole house reduced to a charred heap, hissing gently with steam.

‘Frances! Don’t just stand there like a clot, love,’ said her father, Derek, and she was so relieved to hear his voice that she didn’t mind the reprimand. The Hinckleys, an elderly couple who’d lived there since before Frances was born, were still inside somewhere. They had a Morrison table shelter in their kitchen, Frances knew, but she also knew they were both a bit doddery and had stopped getting out of bed for the air raid warnings. On the other side of the street, Paradise Row was gone – a four-storey Georgian terrace, flattened. Its absence kept drawing her eye – the fascinating, horrifying strangeness of it. Frances could see the whole of Bath through the gap – the river at the foot of the hill, the abbey, the lofty crescents to the north. Smoke was rising everywhere.

Rousing herself, Frances took a piece of a door from her father and passed it to the lad behind her. They were trying to clear the top of the cellar steps. Not many women were digging; they were bringing out tea, or fetching water from the static tank by Magdalen Chapel, wiping their children’s faces or standing about in huddles, looking bewildered. But Frances was tall and wore slacks, and her hair was short, and people sometimes forgot to think of her as a woman.

‘The bastards were shooting at the fire crews while they worked,’ said Derek, to nobody in particular. ‘That’s the filthy Boche for you, isn’t it?’

‘They’ve hit Civil Defence HQ an’ all,’ said the lad behind Frances. ‘It’s bloody chaos.’

‘The cemetery’s been hit, along to Oldfield Park,’ said a woman as she passed, pushing her pram briskly down Holloway. ‘There’s bodies all over the place! Bodies long since buried – I saw them!’ she said, urgently. ‘I saw the bones, and I had to …’ She shook her head and walked past without finishing.

‘Well, we can’t do much to help those ’uns, can we?’ one of the men called after her, with black humour.

‘Shh!’ said the rescuer at the front, up to his knees in the ruins of the house. He crouched down, holding up a hand for silence. ‘I swear I heard something, then,’ he said. ‘Someone’s tapping down there!’ There was a smattering of applause. ‘Come on, lads, put your backs into it.’

But both of the Hinckleys were dead, in fact, when they were dug out an hour or so later. Mrs Hinckley’s face was so white with plaster dust, and her husband’s so black from the fire, that they could have been anybody. Frances stared at them distantly; her ears were ringing, and she kept thinking she could still hear bombs falling. She felt odd and not at all well, as though she might faint.

‘Frances!’ She heard her mother shout. ‘Oh, Frances! Do come away, love.’

‘Who do we report this to, then?’ asked one of the men. ‘The deaths, I mean. Who are we supposed to tell? The police?’ Derek gave him a blank look, then shook his head, confounded.

Frances blinked, and found herself sitting on a kitchen chair at home, with her mother dipping a rag in water and dabbing at the cut on her head.

‘Frances was out in it all night, if you can believe that,’ her mother, Susan, was saying. A breeze nudged through the glassless windows, and the front door was gone. A crack ran from the corner of the jamb to the ceiling; the linoleum floor had been swept but dust was already resettling. The abnormalities were small but nonetheless disturbing, like in a dream where everything was slightly off kilter.

‘Front row seat, eh, Frances?’ said her aunt, Pam.

‘Pam? Are you all right?’ said Frances. Her aunt gave her a quizzical look, and Frances felt a rush of joy at seeing her safe.

‘Am I all right? Course I am. It’ll take more than a few fireworks to finish me off.’ Pam’s thick, grey hair was held back by a yellow scarf, and her jacket was smudged with soot. Frances glanced down at the floor and there was Dog, Pam’s wire-haired mongrel, appearing quite calm. ‘Him, too. Though you should have heard him howl as the bombs fell!’ Pam smiled briefly.

‘I was coming to your house,’ said Frances, frowning as she attempted to marshal her thoughts. ‘I think. I was coming down Jacob’s Ladder, and I fell.’

‘What on earth were you still doing up on Beechen Cliff at that hour, that’s what I’d like to know,’ said Susan. ‘A “bit of fresh air”, you said.’ Pam gave Susan a weary sort of look.

‘Nothing much,’ said Frances. She didn’t dare remind them it had been Wyn’s birthday, not when her mother was already so fraught. ‘Just sitting and thinking. Enjoying the peace and quiet.’ Her mother made a dismissive sound.

‘Well, the top of the cliff’s a good spot for that,’ said Pam.

‘Please don’t encourage her, Pam,’ said Susan. ‘She put herself in terrible danger.’

‘Encourage her? She’s a grown woman, Sue. And besides, were the folk under all the brick and steel any safer? The shelter opposite the Scala on Shaftesbury Road took a direct hit, I heard, and they’re all as dead as you like. Seventeen of them.’

‘Pam!’ said Susan, horrified. She was pale, and looked a bit sick, and Frances wished her head would clear so she would know the right thing to say. She was still certain there was something important she’d forgotten to do.

The three of them were quiet for a while, listening to the drip of water, to shouting voices and the racket of a generator pump. The smell of smoke and wet ash seemed to come from everywhere. Dog growled softly, then sighed and lay down across Pam’s feet. He was black and white, with legs too short for his body and a collie’s flag for a tail; the offspring of an unscheduled coupling up at Topcombe Farm. Frances had given him to Pam when her old fox terrier died, and at first Pam had refused to love him, or even to name him. ‘That dog,’ she’d said, and it had stuck. That had been back when Frances was a married woman, a farmer’s wife, instead of … whatever she was now. An outsized cuckoo, back in her parents’ nest.

She looked around the familiar kitchen, with its flimsy cupboards, tin-topped table and ancient stove. The electricity was off, like the gas and the water. There was a frying pan abandoned on the side, holding three sad-looking slices of bread. The kitchen clock had come off the wall and was lying in pieces on the table. The face, without its hands, looked startled and bare.

‘They’ll be back, folk are saying,’ said Susan, tightly. There was real fear in her voice; her face was pinched, her eyes too bright. The blotting had reopened the cut on Frances’s head, and was making it sting. The water in the bowl had turned pink. Frances shut her eyes, trying to put her finger on what it was she’d forgotten to do. It was maddening. ‘They’ll be back tonight,’ Susan went on, ‘and we’ll get it again. We’ve to get out of the city – they’re emptying the rest centres already; they’ve been taking people in buses. We’ll go as soon as Derek gets off duty – they’re putting people up at the Withyditch Baptist chapel, Marjorie says. We’ll not stay here to face it again, none of us.’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Pam, with a shrug. ‘Buggered if I’ll let a bunch of boys without a chest hair between them drive me out of my own home.’ Susan shot her an incredulous look.

‘Did you hit your head as well? It isn’t a game, Pam – they mean to murder us all! You’d be mad to stay. And there’ll be no more wandering around in the middle of the night all by yourself, Frances … People talk, you know. Could be getting up to all sorts, that’s what they say about you.’ Frances drew breath to retort, but then she noticed that her mother’s hands were shaking. She reached up and took one, meshing their fingers for a moment.

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ she said, gently. ‘Don’t take on.’

‘It’s not all right! If I lost you …’ Susan shook her head, then sighed, and tucked a strand of ashy blond hair behind her ear. ‘Frances. If I lost you …’ She dropped the rag into the bowl and set it down on the table.

Frances needed to think but the ache in her head made it all but impossible; her eyes slid out of focus and she saw the night sky again, lit up orange with fire and swarming with huge black flies. Bombs screamed like injured animals; hands reached down for her and she came to with a jolt, woken by her father plodding into the kitchen, clumsy with fatigue.

‘Derek! You’re trailing the streets in with you!’ said Susan, fussing at his filthy bootprints, the fragments of plaster and ash dropping from his Air Raid Patrol uniform. Derek looked wearily at his wife.

‘Susan, love, if I don’t get a cuppa in the next two minutes you’ll find yourself a widow,’ he said. Frances got up and turned the tap to fill the kettle, forgetting that the water was off, and that the stove was dead.

‘There’s water in the pail,’ said Susan. ‘We’ll be fetching it from the tank up the way for the time being, I suppose.’

‘Well, at least it’s not too far,’ said Frances, absently, feeling for her matches to light the fire, but not finding them. Somewhere halfway up Jacob’s Ladder, no doubt. But there was something else, too – something else she was missing.

‘Are you off duty now, then? Can we leave?’ said Susan. It was not yet noon, but she seemed to expect the planes back at any moment. Derek shook his head.

‘Off duty? No, love, not for a good long while. This is what they trained us for, after all. You girls pack up what you can comfortably carry, and go on ahead. I’ll make the house secure, then I’m to go up to Bear Flat and help guard against looters at the bank. There’s a hole in it wide enough for Ali Baba and his forty thieves, and—’

‘Bear Flat? But … how long for?’

‘I don’t know, love.’

‘Sit down before you fall down, Derek,’ said Pam, giving her brother’s arm a squeeze. He nodded heavily.

‘But they’re coming back! They’ll be coming back!’ Susan cried.

‘And you three’ll be far away when they do,’ said Derek.

‘Well, I won’t be,’ said Pam.

‘What about you, Dad?’ said Frances.

‘I’ll get to a shelter, don’t you worry, but I can’t just abandon my post now I’m actually needed, can I? How’s that head, anyway?’

‘It’s all right, I think,’ said Frances.

‘We’ve been very lucky, all of us. The poor Hinckleys, and that lot up the hill at Springfield …’ He shook his head.

Frances went cold. She tried to speak but her voice got stuck in her throat. She coughed, and tried again.

‘What?’ she said.

‘What do you mean, what?’ said Pam.

‘Oh …’ said Frances, her thoughts coming into sudden, terrible focus. She knew exactly what she’d been forgetting. ‘Davy …’

‘What? Oh! Oh no,’ said Susan.

‘I … I took him up to the Landys!’ Frances cried. She ran out of her doorless home, ignoring the calls that followed her. Pain shot through her head when she moved and she felt nauseous, horrified that she could have forgotten to ask, to check, to go and fetch him. The dreamlike veil disappeared from the day, from the world, and she saw the horrible reality of it for the first time. People were dead; homes were destroyed; more was coming. She ran on, gasping for breath as Springfield Place came into view further up the hill, where Holloway curved up and away to the south. Or at least, what remained of Springfield Place. She slowed, filling with incredulous dread.

There was no smoke, no charred beams or blackened stone. The near end of the row, where the Landys had lived, had simply collapsed like a house of cards. Roof timbers poked up here and there, looking like snapped bones. The damage got lighter towards the far end of the row, but Frances didn’t care. She came to a halt outside number one, and a shiver poured down her spine. The place where she’d left Davy had been obliterated. She could only stare, stunned, until an ARP man with smuts in the creases of his face stopped to see if she was all right.

‘Knew ’em, did you, love?’ he said.

‘Where are they now?’ she asked, numbly. The man shrugged.

‘Dunno, love, sorry. I heard they was planning on using the church crypts as mortuaries, but I don’t know. They was down in the cellar – Mr and Mrs Landy, weren’t it? They survived the blast all right, they was even talking to the rescuers for a while. But the water pipe had split and it flooded the place … drowned ’em before they could be got out, and if that ain’t a cruel twist of fate I don’t know what is. Bad business,’ he said, offering her a cigarette. Frances took it, and couldn’t hold it steady as he lit it. She shut her eyes and steeled herself. Would it be better to know the exact details? The particulars? Or better not to have a clear mental image of it? She decided that knowing was better than imagining, yet she could still hardly bring herself to ask. A terrible chill was creeping through her, and her legs felt weak. She was supposed to have been minding Davy; she was supposed to have kept him safe. Instead she’d abandoned him to go up Beechen Cliff and sit in the dark, alone with her thoughts. Davy had wanted to stay with her.

‘And the little boy?’ she whispered.

‘What’s that?’

‘The little boy … was he in the cellar with Mr and Mrs Landy? Did he … drown too?’

‘Two came out dead, that’s all I know,’ said the ARP man. ‘Are you saying there’s a third?’

‘What?’ Frances turned on him, heart jumping. She grabbed his sleeve. ‘A little boy was in there too – David Noyle? Did they find him? Is he alive? He’s only small – just six.’

‘Steady on …’ The man rubbed at his chin. ‘Hold on. The rescue team went along to Hayesfield Park, I think. Come along with me, and let’s ask ’em.’



The sun was dropping in the west by the time the men decided to give up. Frances’s back was aching, her hands were scraped and bruised. They’d cleared as much rubble from the Landys’ flooded cellar as they could, shoring it up with wooden beams and jacks. Mrs Landy’s pink eiderdown was hooked over the back railings, caked with dirt. Fra