Belle - Lesley Pearse [122]
‘I don’t care about that,’ she said. ‘I only want to be with you.’
Chapter Twenty-one
‘It’s no good, Jimmy, we just have to accept we are never going to find Belle,’ Noah said pleadingly. ‘Too much time has passed, the trail has grown cold and we’ve run out of ideas. I can’t do any more, however much I wish I could.’
It was a hot, airless day in September, and the two young men were sitting in the back yard of the Ram’s Head in the early evening. It had been a hot, dry summer and Mog had gone to great lengths to make the back yard more attractive. She’d persuaded Garth to get rid of all the old crates and other rubbish out there and she’d planted geraniums in tubs and painted an old bench and small table white. For weeks now it had been a much appreciated little refuge from the hurly-burly and heat of the pub.
The prolonged drought and heat were causing problems all over London. People were tetchy, they couldn’t sleep, the drains stank, food went off too fast, the streets were dusty and even the leaves on the trees were falling prematurely. Just last night Garth had said he was in two minds whether to shut the pub for a week so he, Jimmy and Mog could go and stay by the sea for a holiday.
But Jimmy’s response was that his uncle and Mog could go, and he’d stay here in case there was any word from Belle. Garth had said he never knew anyone so stubborn and single-minded that they could still be hoping word would come after a year and a half.
Noah had been back to Paris three times now with James, trying desperately to find the convent the girl in the brothel had spoken of. He believed he’d called at every single one in Paris, over forty in all, yet he had been unable to find one that would admit to having any connection to Madame Sondheim. Several of the convents acted as hospitals and they did say they’d had many patients who were prostitutes, women who’d been attacked and those who had been brought in with complications in childbirth. But they assured Noah and James that these were not English girls and not one of them had ever claimed to have been forced into their career.
Noah couldn’t believe that any of the nuns he spoke to would countenance aiding the exploitation of young women anyway. They had been very open, horrified that anyone would suspect anyone in a religious order of trying to conceal such a crime.
In the light of this he felt that the people behind this trafficking in young girls were probably calling the place they used a convent as a way of deflecting suspicion from it, and that it was just a house where girls were held until they could be sent on somewhere else. But without a single clue as to the whereabouts of this house he now knew he had no hope of finding it.
Jimmy had been just as relentless in searching too. He’d broken into both Kent and Colm’s offices again to check through their papers and he’d cross-examined just about half the population of Seven Dials in the hope that someone would know something. A year ago he had found out something, and that was where Charles Braithwaite, known by the name of ‘Sly’, lived.
Jimmy was only told that the man lived in Aylesford in Kent, and he went down there to find out about him. He was told that Braithwaites had farmed there for three generations, but Charles Braithwaite had been brought up to think he was a gentleman, and ever since he inherited the farm he had spent most of his time in London.
With Garth with him for muscle, Jimmy called at the farm with the intention of forcing Braithwaite to give them some information, but they found only Tad Connor, the farm manager. He said Braithwaite had gone away some three months since, and he hadn’t heard from him or had any wages in all that time. Connor seemed an honest, decent man caught in the trap of being unable to leave because he had a wife and three children