21. A Mourning Mother

REMEMBERING REBECCA, Part 21

Detective Constable Sheila Robinson decided, on her way home from the police station where she had been all day and because she felt that she needed a little peace from talk of murder and mayhem, to take a walk through the Church cemetery. She did this often when life seemed to press uncomfortably on her, and she was feeling like that now.

Her problem was with the one-legged ex-teacher and his long feeling of guilt after he accidentally injured a boy in a simple cricket lesson. Once, and not so many years earlier, she had been in a similar position.

She had been on a course, self-defence it was, and during an attempt at disarming an attacker she had injured the teacher who had played the part of a bag-snatcher. That teacher had been a young and vibrant woman who had been on the brink of an Olympic career before her arm got broken as Sheila, following instructions, to the tee she thought, cause the damage.

The damage was soon repaired and the tutor’s arm healed perfectly well so her career was hardly lost as a consequence, but for a time Sheila felt guilty because, despite the fact that she was following that tutor’s instructions, she had done the damage and risked the woman’s career.

And the story by Samuel Styles brought it all back to her.

The cemetery was a peaceful place, its only inhabitants normally being either the dead or people grieving for the dead. But there was none of the exuberance that can disturb life in the world outside its gates, no youthful play by children and youths with less than nothing to occupy their minds, just the weathering headstones and a heavy silence.

She came to the grave of the child at the heart of her present work, Rebecca Rowbotham, aged eleven when she had died, and would have paused for a moment out of respect but for the fact that an elderly lady in a wheelchair attended by a young woman in the uniform of a nurse were already there.

Sheila paused a few paces away, not wishing to intrude, but the elderly woman, much older than the witnesses in the case of the child they were saluting in quiet solemnity, looked round at her.

“My daughter,” she said, her whisper caught up in an emotional stammer, “it would have been her birthday today. Seventy-one she would have been, and she’s lain in peace here this past sixty-one years.”

“I’m sorry,” murmured Sheila, not sure how to react.

“Not your fault, my dear,” replied Rebecca’s mother with a warm smile, “I come here every year. She was only a child, you see, a lovely child. But then I’m her mother and would say she was lovely, wouldn’t I?”

“I know of her,” Sheila said, “and everyone I’ve met says how lovely she was. Her friends, you know, the children she played with. I’m with the police and the case was never solved, when she died that awful way…”

“And you’re still working on it all these years later?” murmured the wheel-chair bound woman, “it seems, I don’t know, sixty years is a long time to worry about a single child’s death.”

“Anyway, I’ll leave you,” said Sheila.

“It was him, you know, who did it,” called Mrs Rowbotham as she turned to go, “that priest when he was in short pants.”

“Pardon?” asked Sheila.

“Man of God he says he was, but he had blood on his hands once upon a time, but you lot couldn’t prove it!”

“Oh dear,” replied Sheila, “I’m really very, very sorry…”

“It was before your time, dear.”

“Yes. Goodbye, and I’m sorry again,” whispered Sheila, and she scurried off.

She had a strange night once she was at home and in the arms of her boyfriend, who could tell that something had disturbed her.

“It was only a dead girl sixty years ago,” she said, “but I think I’ll have a glass of red…”

She had three glasses before it was time for bed.

Next day she arrived at the police station slightly, but only slightly, bleary eyed.

“Have a good night?” asked Sergeant Bob Short with a grin when he noticed.

“I took a stroll through the graveyard and met Rebecca’s mother,” she said, “it was her birthday, Rebecca’s that is, seventy-first.”

“And her mum is still alive?” asked Bob, “she’s having a good innings, then.”

“Maybe,” said Sheila looking at him critically, “but every one of the past sixty years she’s gone to that cemetery and every one of them she’s remembered the girl she bore in her womb and then cared for until she was murdered. And for every one of those sixty years she’s known who killed her daughter. That priest, she said, that priest…”

“What’s this?” asked Rosie Baur, last to arrive.

“Mrs Rowbotham, Rebecca’s mum,” explained Sheila, “I was in the cemetery last night, and saw her. It would have been the girl’s birthday…”

The door to Superintendent Knott’s office opened, which in itself was unusual. It was his habit to arrive in the morning and stay confined within his office until it was time for him to return, as late as possible, home and to his wife and a kind of domestic disharmony. His work consisted almost entirely of sheets of paper and the telephone, but what he did he did conscientiously and well.

“Inspector Baur!” he called.

She went to the open door. Her superior office looked far from pleased. Something, she thought, had rattled him.

“I see you’re properly dressed today,” he began. She was, in a smart knee-length sober charcoal skirt.

She nodded.

“I’ve had the Archdeacon on the phone this morning,” he said when the door was closed and she was standing in front of his desk feeling very much like a naughty schoolgirl, a feeling that momentarily took her back to when she might have occasionally been that naughty schoolgirl.

“It’s good of him to show interest,” she murmured.

“Er, quite. But he seems to think you are intent on sullying the name of the poor clergyman who was shot dead,” continued the Superintendent, “he seems to think you are still pursuing a ridiculous suspicion that the poor man has something to do with the other murders you’re failing to solve! And I warned you off! The church is influential in this town and I don’t want it’s dirty linen, so to speak, to be aired in public!”

“So, sir, you want me to sweep it under the carpet? “ she asked, looking him straight in the eyes. “Sir, Rebecca Rowbotham’s mother is still in the land of the living and she knows who killed her daughter. And so do we, sir, it was the Reverend Richard Roper, and if he wasn’t in the morgue he’d be in one of our cells right now, praying for divine forgiveness for his manifold sins!”

© Peter Rogerson 26.01.21

Reviews

[Wild Rose]

Enthralling story
I have come across this sort of situation before. Stop what you are doing it will cause more problems than it solves > The truth is immaterial now