A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [81]
At two o’clock the sun was too hot to stay outside any longer. Fifi locked Frank’s back door and went upstairs, thinking she would go to the shops to get something for their evening meal. It was only when she changed into a dress that she thought about Angela again.
There was still no sight of her at the window, and it worried her to think the little girl might be all alone in the house, upset that she’d been left behind and possibly with nothing to eat. She decided to go across to Yvette and ask if she’d seen or heard her.
Fifi rang Yvette’s bell and tapped on the front window, but there was no reply. She thought the dressmaker must be out at one of her clients’ homes doing a fitting. Only a couple of days earlier she’d said she was close to completing an outfit for a bride’s mother.
By the time Fifi had bought some pork chops, vegetables and a few other items, an hour had passed. Before taking her shopping indoors she rang Yvette’s bell again, but she still hadn’t come home. Along by the coal-yard gates, four boys all aged about nine or ten were idly kicking a football around. Recognizing one of them as Matthew, the son of the red-headed woman from the end house, she walked over to him.
‘Have you seen Angela Muckle today, Matthew?’ she asked him.
‘No, she’s gone to Southend with the rest of them,’ he replied.
‘She wasn’t with them when they left this morning,’ Fifi said. ‘I think they left her at home.’
‘She said she were going with them yesterday,’ Matthew said. ‘All excited she were. But she ain’t been out here today, leastways not since we come back from the park. But if her mum told her she was to stay in, she wouldn’t dare come out.’
Fifi thanked Matthew and gave him sixpence to go and buy himself and his friends ice lollies. But as she walked home she looked back at the Muckles’ house. All the windows were shut, and their coverings in place; she could hear no radio playing and it now seemed extremely odd that Angela wasn’t looking out watching the children playing as she usually did.
Fifi took her shopping in, put the chops in the fridge and glanced out of the window again, willing Angela to look out so she would know she was all right. But there was still no sign of her, the blanket on the window didn’t look as if it had been moved all day, and on an impulse she went back downstairs, crossed over the road and knocked at the door. There was no reply, so Fifi peered through the letterbox. There was a fetid smell, but she could see nothing, as something appeared to be hanging over the inside of the door. ‘Angela,’ she yelled. ‘Can you hear me? It’s Mrs Reynolds from across the road.’
No reply, not even a sound of scurrying feet.
Fifi was worried now. Not just the anxious ‘what if’ kind of worry, but a nasty feeling in the pit of her stomach, almost of foreboding. She stood there in the road looking up at the windows of the Muckles’ house and thought about what she’d heard Alfie say that morning. ‘Serves her bloody well right’ kept coming back to her. Could he have beaten her, or locked her in the bedroom?
‘What’s up, Mrs Reynolds?’
Fifi was startled by the question from young Matthew as she hadn’t heard him come up to her.
She looked down and smiled at the ten-year-old. He was an attractive child with a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of his nose, and periwinkle eyes. He was licking the lolly he’d bought with the money she gave him and his lips had gone green with the colouring.
‘I’m a bit worried Angela might be hurt or ill,’ she said. ‘If Miss Dupré was in, I’d try to get over her fence to take a look, but she’s gone out.’
‘You could go along the wall at the back of our place,’ he suggested.
Fifi smiled. It was common knowledge that Alfie used that wall all the time to spy on people and as an escape route if necessary. ‘I don