A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [153]
Yvette’s mama had let those people take her child away to what she thought was safety. If she had been faced with the alternatives of Yvette dying with her on the train to Poland, or going into the brothel, which would she have chosen?
Chapter seventeen
Dan shivered as he walked down Dale Street to the phone box on Saturday morning. There was a distinctly autumnal chill in the air even though it was only just the beginning of September, and that heightened his anxiety about Fifi. He was at his wits’ end now; he had exhausted all possible places to look for her.
When he rang her office on Wednesday morning and found she had failed to turn up for work the previous day, and hadn’t phoned in either, he knew something had happened to her. She liked the job too much not to let them know if she felt unable to work.
He phoned to see if she was at her parents’ house, but she wasn’t there either, and he could tell that Mrs Brown wasn’t covering for her – no one could feign such anxiety.
After that he systematically asked everyone in the street when they’d last seen Fifi, and if she’d said she was going away. The last sighting was by Miss Diamond who’d seen her going off to work on Tuesday morning at eight o’clock. She said she was wearing a blue and white checked jacket and a navy pencil skirt, and she definitely wasn’t carrying anything other than her handbag.
That was when he went to the police, but the minute he admitted that they’d had a row over the weekend, the police seemed to think she had just taken herself off to a friend’s place. Even when Dan said she hadn’t taken any clothes or washing things with her they showed no concern.
On Friday Dan had gone up to Chancery Lane to Fifi’s office. He’d spoken to her boss, Mr Unwin, and to every single girl who worked there, but not one of them knew anything.
The only person he hadn’t been able to talk to yet was Yvette. And now he was getting worried about her too. Mr and Mrs Balstrode, who lived above her, hadn’t seen or heard her since Monday teatime, when she gave them a parcel she’d taken in for them.
He decided he was going back to the police station as soon as he’d telephoned Fifi’s parents. They’d said last night that if they hadn’t heard from her by this morning they were going to come up to London. Despite all the bad feeling in the past, Dan really wanted them here; he thought Mr Brown might be able to persuade the police to act.
As each day passed Dan had grown more frightened. Until John Bolton was found in the river and Fifi disappeared he had been totally convinced that Alfie killed Angela. He had never been able to understand why the police had been hauling in decent, law-abiding men like Frank and Stan who would never have crossed the threshold of that house. To him it had all been cut and dried, a hideous crime carried out by a maniac, and all the police needed to do was find the other card players and clear up the finer points like what time they’d left the house, and whether they’d seen any lead-up to the crime.
But in view of recent events he was now looking at all the many questions Fifi had raised in a different light, and wishing he’d taken her more seriously. While he still believed Alfie was the murderer, it was very clear that some other kind of criminal activity had been going on at number 11, and that John Bolton had known about it. If Bolton had been killed to silence him, maybe his killers believed Fifi knew something too.
The prospect of Fifi being murdered was too terrible to contemplate. She was his love, his life, everything. He’d said that last night to Mrs Brown, and broken down and cried. He wished he hadn’t now; the woman would probably come to view that as yet another weakness. But she’d been surprisingly comforting and even sounded as though she cared about him when she’d asked if