Belle - Lesley Pearse [234]
The smell of the place made Belle’s stomach heave. It was the same kind of smell that wafted out of the most squalid tenements: human waste, mice, damp and plain filth. Like downstairs, it was very gloomy, with just a faint glow of light coming from the far end of a big room. She could see broken chairs lying amongst other debris and she thought it must have been a club or a dance hall at some time, but more recently desperate people had been living here.
Kent dropped her to the floor, which jarred every bone in her body, and with that walked away in the direction of the faint glow of light at the end of the room.
As Belle lay there amidst the stinking squalor, her face stinging from Kent’s blow, it occurred to her that she was always regretting things. Why hadn’t she taken notice of Garth’s instructions not to go out? But even bigger than that regret was the horror that her own mother had lured her here. Why would she do that?
That hardly mattered now though, in the face of what Kent was going to do to her. He had nothing to lose and he was an intelligent, cunning man. She couldn’t imagine how he thought she would be his ticket out of London, but he must have a plan.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Jimmy came up from the cellar and went into the bar, expecting Belle still to be cleaning. She had already finished, everything was gleaming and the floor still wet, but she wasn’t there. Assuming she was upstairs with Mog, he ran up, but Mog was alone, gathering up dirty bed linen.
‘Where’s Belle?’ he asked.
‘Cleaning the bar,’ Mog responded.
‘She’s finished that and she’s not in the kitchen,’ Jimmy said, then opened each of the bedroom doors to check she wasn’t in one of them.
‘Out in the yard with Garth?’ Mog suggested.
Jimmy opened the window and called down to his uncle who was sitting on an upturned crate smoking his pipe, ‘Is Belle out there with you?’
His uncle shouted back that she was in the bar.
Jimmy replied that she wasn’t. He was growing worried now.
‘Where else can she be?’ he said to Mog, and ran off downstairs again to check the parlour that they rarely used.
He was standing in the kitchen looking anxious when Mog came down a few minutes later. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said. ‘Do you think she might have gone out, even though we said she mustn’t?’
‘Maybe she needed something urgently.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know, Jimmy,’ Mog said. ‘But girls get ideas into their heads. I expect she thought it was urgent.’
‘At half nine I popped up for some hot water and I could hear her sweeping,’ Jimmy said. ‘Did you see her after that?’
‘Well, I called out that I was going to change the sheets, and she made a joke about me not going back to bed,’ Mog said. ‘That was at ten.’
‘She must’ve gone out the side door,’ Jimmy said. ‘Garth has been in the back yard all along so she didn’t go that way.’
‘Fancy her being so sneaky,’ Mog said. Then, looking at Jimmy’s stricken face, she went over to him and patted his arm. ‘Stop worrying, she probably needed hairpins, or she saw someone she knew out the window and ran out to chat to them. She won’t have gone far.’
‘I don’t like it, Mog,’ he said. ‘Look, she’s taken off her apron, she wouldn’t do that if she’d just popped out to speak to someone. Besides, she’s been gone half an hour now.’
Mog looked round at the apron hanging on the door. Just that it was hanging up was unusual as Belle normally left it on a chair, anywhere but on the hook. She went over to it and felt it – the only time Belle hung it up was when it was wet.
‘It’s bone dry,’ she said. But as her hands skimmed over it she felt something stiff in the pocket. She reached in and pulled the letter out, and as she read the contents her face turned pale.
‘What is it?’ Jimmy asked.
‘A letter from her mother,’ Mog gasped out. ‘Only it isn’t Annie’s writing, and whoever did write it wanted to meet up with Belle.’
Jimmy snatched it out of her hand and read it. ‘But that’s Annie’s address,’ he said. ‘Are you sure it’s not from her?’
‘Of course I’m sure. I saw Annie’s writing every day for