The Dissent of Annie Lang by Ros Franey

Author:Ros Franey [Ros Franey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780995482272
Publisher: Muswell Press
Published: 2018-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

I remained in the dark about the disappeared girls for almost a week. Then it suddenly came up in domestic science, of all places. We were making pastry for our jam tarts. As usual, mine was stuck to my fingers.

‘You know what, Miss, they found those girls, Miss!’ said Edith Jelley.

‘They never,’ corrected Marjorie. ‘They only found the place they’d been kept.’

‘They found the cellar,’ Edith admitted. ‘But the girls must be round there somewhere.’

I was all ears, but Miss Pollard, the domestic science teacher, was having none of it. ‘Edith, you want to concentrate more on the pastry and less on the gossip,’ she remarked. ‘What are you going to do with that, girl? Plaster the kitchen?’

Everyone giggled.

‘Lightly,’ Miss Pollard went on. ‘Use the tips of your fingers lightly, like playing the piano, Grace Wiggins, not like kneading clay.’

‘Is mine all right, Miss?’ Marjorie asked, pausing in mid-air with her elbows sticking out.

‘Just keep at it, Marjorie. And I do have a name you know.’

‘We’ve been doing it for ages, Miss,’ Edith moaned.

‘We’ve been doing it for ages, Miss Pollard,’ Miss P. corrected her. ‘And you can do it for a while longer. Annie, more flour.’

Later, when Miss Pollard left the room for a moment, the tarts in the big hissing ovens and the domestic science room starting to smell all fragrant, I whispered to Marjorie, ‘What cellar?’

‘Cellar in Beeston. Imagine! They found traces.’

‘Traces of what?’ I asked.

‘Of them, of the girls that disappeared.’

‘How did they know it was them?’

‘Search me.’

‘What sort of traces?’ asked Grace Wiggins, who was leaning against the sink.

‘Body parts!’ said Edith, and snorted, trying not to laugh.

‘Don’t be daft! I dunno, maybe bits of clothing or summat. A teddy bear.’

I thought of Little Sid and let out a small cry.

Marjorie turned on me. ‘I don’t know, do I, stupid?’

‘How many girls?’ asked Doreen Noakes.

‘Loads, I should imagine. At least five!’

‘Three!’ chorused Edith and Marjorie, and glared at each other.

‘How did the police know they’d all been down there?’ Grace wondered.

Edith shrugged. ‘Guesswork, I suppose. Fingerprints, maybe?’

I suddenly had an image of my own fingers, slightly greasy and with that smell on them from the coal dust, spread out over the basin of water the morning after my night in the cellar.

‘Whose house was it? Where are the girls now?’

Nobody knew.

‘Beeston?’ I repeated.

‘Aye, “The Black Hole of Beeston”, so it said in the Evening Post.’ We all looked at each other uneasily, not quite knowing whether to find it funny or not. Then the tarts were cooked and Miss Pollard bustled back into the room and I think we were all very pleased to forget about it. But walking home from school through the Oaks, I went over the conversation again and filed it away. A cellar in Beeston. Miss Higgs said she knew where they were. She also knew about cellars. And Beeston was where she’d lived with her sister.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.