The Lost Girls: a gripping historical fiction page turner

By Jennifer Wells

Everyone remembers the day the girls went missing.
May Day 1912, a day that haunts Missensham. The day two girls disappeared. The day the girls were murdered.

Iris Caldwell and Nell Ryland were never meant to be friends. From two very different backgrounds, one the heir to the Caldwell estate, the other a humble vicar's daughter. Both have their secrets, both have their pasts, but they each find solace with one another and soon their futures become irrevocably intertwined.

Now, many years later, old footage has emerged which shows that Iris Caldwell may not have died on that spring morning. The village must work out what happened the day the girls went missing...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Apr 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781786691101

Jennifer Wells

Jennifer works in Market Research when not writing. She lives in Devon with her young family and cat. The Secret is her third novel in the series set in fictional Missensham in the Home Counties.

Book preview

1937

Prologue

It had been twenty-five years since I had last seen the face of Iris Caldwell. I had never expected to see her again, yet the flickering grey figure that glowed from the whitewashed wall of the church hall that evening was definitely Iris. She wore the long white gown of the May Queen but the paleness of her complexion and her long, fair hair were dulled to grey by the aged cine film, her steps reduced to jerky movements as if she was no more than a marionette controlled by the hand of the projectionist. This was all that was left of Iris – an object captured in light and shadow – but my own memory of Iris had not faded, and at that moment I recalled the girl with the determined spirit and strong will as she had been back in the spring of 1912.

Iris crossed the village green in stockinged feet. Behind her I could just see the dark outline of the maypole, its ribbons still tied, and the long shadow cast by the oak tree. On May Day 1912 Iris should have been Missensham’s May Queen, but she would never walk in the procession or wear the willow crown, and now I watched her twenty-five years later as she walked with just one other – a man in a cloth cap whom she leant against as he led her across the grass.

Yet it was Iris’s face alone that held my gaze. At fifteen years old Iris Caldwell had been young and beautiful, but fifteen she had remained, because after May Day of 1912, Iris Caldwell was never seen again.

Iris’s face gave away nothing of what had happened to her on that morning or what was to come but, for just a second, she raised her head, as if she had heard a noise or could sense something in the air. I felt her eyes connect with mine as though she could see me as I sat on my wooden seat in the cold church hall. I fancied that she could see past my ageing body – my thinning hair and slackened skin – and recognise me as the woman she had once known, even read my thoughts and memories as if she gazed out at me from the afterlife.

At that moment, there was nothing more than Iris. I no longer felt the hard wood of the fold-up seat, the throb of my arthritic fingers or the chill from the old windowpanes. The silhouettes of the people seated in front of me mingled into the wavering light, and the murmurs of the audience and the rhythmic clicking of the projector sank into silence. It was not only me who recognised Iris because, as her face appeared on the screen, the people became still as if the room itself was taking one large breath.

Then a name was whispered, her name – ‘Iris Caldwell’. It was repeated quietly over and over, the words rippling across the room. Heads turned towards me – faces darkened by the glowing screen, wisps of hair caught in the beam of the projector, the grey flicker mirrored in dozens of spectacles. Then another word – ‘Murdered’.

Then a hand was raised in front of the screen, the shadowy finger pointing to the man Iris walked with – the man who would now be accused.

The people shuffled in their seats, chairs grating on the floor. They looked at each other with wide eyes, hands held up to open mouths, and whispered in each other’s ears.

I stood up quickly, the chair falling from under me. I fought my way to the aisle, pushing past knees and handbags and tripping over feet, the leaves of the oak tree quivering across my jacket and the spindles of light almost blinding me. I headed for the door, my legs threatening to buckle beneath me as I tried desperately to blink away the glowing images that lingered like ghosts behind my eyelids.

I should not have seen the face of Iris Caldwell again. She should not have been on that film, because by sunrise on the morning of May Day 1912, Iris Caldwell was believed to be dead.

1

It was an image that haunted me – the expressionless face of the young girl, her eyes reduced to dark pits by the grainy film, as if she held a secret she was not ready to share. When I closed my eyes I could see her again, looking out at me from the screen as if somehow glimpsing her future.

I sat down shakily on the bench outside the church hall, taking deep breaths of the cold night air, pulling my shawl about me and flexing my arthritic fingers.

I was not usually one for such drama. Before my husband’s death I had been a vicar’s wife. I had held hands at funerals and been an ear for all the village’s woes. I had lived through the horrors of the Great War and the epidemic that had followed it. I had learnt how to harden myself, to not get upset by things. After all, I had lived with the memory of what had happened on May Day 1912 for twenty-five years, but seeing the old image flashed across the screen so unexpectedly had caught me off guard.

I had been expecting a nice evening out – a special screening of Missensham’s past by the historical society, a chance to catch up with some of the older parishioners and an evening away from my lonely cottage – and until Iris had appeared on the screen, it had been so. The evening had begun well. The grey faces had jostled with each other onscreen, sending smiles and waves from the past, and the audience had given voices to their silence as they laughed along with them. I’d seen people I had known in my youth, faces forgotten as well as remembered, buildings that had long since decayed, fashions that had waned, and streets that were empty of cars.

There had been chatter all around me: ‘Those were the days!’

‘Hasn’t he changed!’

‘She looks just like her daughter did at that age!’

‘I remember when that teashop was a dressmaker’s!’

Then the film had moved on to the May Day preparations – a willow arch propped up against the wall of the blacksmith’s yard and some little girls running around in frothy white dresses.

Things had changed when Iris Caldwell appeared on the screen. She was no more than shades of grey cast by the tangled beams of the projector, yet she flickered out of the darkness like a spirit. I could even see her with my eyes shut, the image ghosting purple under my eyelids, a single word echoing round my head – ‘Murdered.’

I had never liked that word, for it took me to a lonely place – a thicket of wych elms high up on the common land, foxholes nestling in tangles of bare roots, and low branches shielding all from view. For a moment I fancied that I could feel the winds that chilled that place and smell the dampness of the earth.

‘Excuse me, Mrs Ryland?’

But then the thought was gone.

‘Mrs Ryland?’

A man stood in front of me and, from the sound of his voice, I thought that he must have repeated my name several times before I heard him. When I looked up, I recognised his stocky silhouette and dark moustache. He wore an old brown suit and cap, and not his usual sergeant’s uniform, but the seriousness of his tone told me that he was now on duty.

‘Please call me Agnes,’ I said composing myself. ‘We have been friends long enough, Roy.’

I looked out into the night. The village green was in darkness. The large oak tree, church, pub, tearoom and doctor’s surgery had all faded into the night, the only light coming from the dull blue glow of the police station’s lamp and the bright orbs of the lampposts that marked the road.

The door of the church hall cracked open, a stream of people spilling out on to the pavement. They turned to each other, laughed and whispered but they spoke the same words that I had heard repeated over and over in the hall. A young man in a bow tie and round spectacles sat on the kerb, smoking a cigarette. He held his head in his hands and I fancied that he was the projectionist, only now aware of the meaning of the film he had shown.

We waited in silence until the people had gone, the young projectionist throwing the glowing cinder of his cigarette into the darkness then hurrying after the crowd.

‘I don’t understand what this all means,’ I said. ‘Tell me, what did I just see in there?’

‘It would appear that the film that we just saw was shot on the morning of May Day,’ Roy said. ‘In the late morning, for there was enough light for the cine camera to operate.’

‘So—’ I began.

‘Please don’t get your hopes up, Agnes,’ he said quickly. ‘It is a later sighting of Iris, that’s all. There is still no evidence to suggest that she is alive.’ He put his hand on my arm. ‘Although things don’t look good for Sam Denman now.’

‘You mean that things do not look good for the man walking with Iris,’ I said. ‘The man in the cloth cap, for you surely cannot be certain—’

‘Sam Denman has denied his involvement for so long,’ he said firmly, ‘yet now we see him with our own eyes walking arm in arm with Iris Caldwell on the morning of her murder.’

‘Leave him alone!’ I cried. ‘Surely he has suffered enough. I only wish that the police could have charged him without finding the rest of Iris’s remains, for at least then Sam would have had the chance to clear his name. The people of this town judged him guilty without trial and he has had to live with that sentence for years.’

Roy shook his head slowly.

‘The man on the film may have been dressed like a stable lad but they were ten a penny in those days,’ I persisted.

Roy ignored my protests. ‘Don’t you want the killer caught?’ he asked. ‘It must mean so much to you, what with—’

‘Of course I do,’ I muttered.

‘Maybe it is best if we resume this conversation after we have all slept,’ he said. I was ashamed at how calm his voice sounded compared to my own.

‘Alright,’ I said. ‘I suppose I should come to the station?’

‘I was going to suggest that I call on you at Oak Cottage,’ he said, then added more gently, ‘It is such a long time since I called on you at home. I can bring round some of Joyce’s tea loaf.’

I nodded. ‘Fine.’

He turned to go. ‘You do not mention your daughter,’ he said. ‘It is as if this has all been about Iris Caldwell and you do not even mention Nell by her name.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I do not.’

He hesitated for a moment, tipped his cap and left me alone in the darkness.

2

Roy had the grace not to call until eleven o’clock – it was a Sunday after all – and he arrived dressed in the suit I imagined he had worn for church. Oak Cottage was a respectable house in quite a public spot on the village green and it would not have done for him to call any earlier, in uniform or otherwise. I was a vicar’s widow after all and he knew that I had appearances to consider.

He stood politely in the hallway and then in the lounge as I ushered him through, not sitting until he was bid. We made small talk about the weather and the state of the roads until I had finished pouring the tea and he had handed out his wife’s cake from an old biscuit tin.

‘It was a funny to-do yesterday evening,’ he said.

‘I suppose it was,’ I said, but I did not know what more I could say about it. He had chosen the old rocking chair by the hearth and I remembered that he had sat in the same chair twenty-five years ago when we had discussed the matter for the first painful time.

I remembered how he had entered the cottage that morning – young and inexperienced, a blush of pimples on his face and a lanky body he had not yet grown into. He had seemed fearful of messing up the carpet with his boots, removing his helmet and stooping awkwardly through the doorframe as he entered. When I snapped at him for approaching the chair by the window, he had perched nervously on the rocking chair instead and looked anxiously at the chair I had forbidden him – the one with the emerald-green shawl draped over the back, a shawl that I hoped the owner would soon return for.

The chair by the window had meant little to me before that day, but since then I had always kept it free and never allowed anyone to sit on it. I had not even removed the shawl, although the colour had become quite faded in the sunlight. It was something that I could not bear to do as some days, just like today, I fancied that the chair was occupied by the memory of its owner, the girl who had used it so often, and I would sometimes think that I could see her sat in that spot, watching me silently, even though I knew that she was long gone.

Roy took out an old pocketbook and flipped over the yellowed pages. I thought that it must be something that he had hunted out from a vault deep below the cell, where things went to be forgotten.

‘The projectionist from last night was my nephew, Eric,’ he said.

I nodded politely as I recalled the young man in spectacles who I had seen smoking outside the hall.

‘He is only nineteen years old,’ Roy continued. ‘He found the old Pathéscope and film in the storeroom of the church hall. The reel was labelled as a suffrage march. It was part of a collection donated to the Historical Society by the WSPU so nobody had ever thought to view it in connection with the Caldwell case. The poor lad did not know what he was looking at when he viewed it – he knew nothing of Iris Caldwell – but when he saw what was on the old reel, he thought it fitting to screen it in light of this year’s preparations. After all, May Day was an ancient tradition here until 1912.’

Then he added: ‘In a way it is a shame that we have not had one since,’ but he looked down as soon as the words left his mouth and I was reminded again of the shy, young constable who had said all the wrong things. Then his tone changed. ‘Do you know who might have shot the film, Agnes?’

‘It must have been the heir to the Waldley Court estate,’ I said. ‘I forget the young man’s name as he has since moved away, but he had one of those hand-wound cine cameras when they were still new.’

‘You are speaking of Francis Elliot-Palmer,’ he said, flipping through the yellowed pages of his pocketbook, but then he stopped, his finger tracing down a page. ‘No, it appears that Francis did not mention shooting such a film when he was interviewed back then, although there can be few others around who would have ever seen the like of a cine camera back in those days, let alone had the money to afford one. I will need to speak with him again.’

He took out a pencil and scratched a mark in the pocketbook as if correcting his old scribbles. ‘My nephew did not know what happened here in 1912,’ he said. ‘He had no idea that there had been two May Queens that year – Iris Caldwell and the child brought in to replace her when she—’ he glanced down at the pocketbook ‘—did not show up.’

I nodded to show that I understood the young man was not to blame for the awkwardness.

‘It was a nice idea,’ I said out of the politeness that was expected of a vicar’s widow. ‘I was so looking forward to seeing some of the village’s history.’ My voice sounded flat and he raised his eyebrows, flicking open another page of the book.

‘You say you woke at six o’clock on the morning of the first of May 1912 and left promptly for the church to begin the arrangement of flowers in the chancel. This was something quite ordinary for you to do for an important service, a role you had undertaken since you first moved to the parish with your late husband. You did not enter the back bedroom of the cottage, so you had no knowledge of whether—’

I stopped him. ‘I know what I said back then and nothing has changed. Nothing has changed over twenty-five years. There has been nothing new to learn.’

‘Until last night,’ he countered.

I must have given him a stare because he looked away quickly, his eyes landing on the chair by the window with the faded green shawl.

‘I’m sorry, Agnes.’ He nodded and flipped the pocketbook shut.

‘The film has been sent for examination by experts,’ he said, ‘but having watched it again, I am pretty sure that all is as it seems. The scenes of the blacksmith’s yard, the graininess of the picture and the shadows cast on the green all suggest that the film was indeed shot at sunrise on that May Morning.’

I nodded. ‘That is what I thought.’

‘And the man walking with Iris does appear to be Sam Denman.’

But this time I did not answer him. Sam Denman was a distant relative of my late husband and Roy must have known that I would not take the news well.

He looked to the chair by the window again but this time his eyes lingered on it a little longer. ‘You must be bitter over all these years,’ he said.

‘Bitter?’

‘Well, for us at the station, it was always about the missing girls,’ he said, ‘but I know that the press saw it another way: the disappearance of beautiful Iris Caldwell and, as a footnote, her maid, a servant girl, a girl who is rarely even named. Even for the inspector, all the pressure was on finding Iris Caldwell and not a thought for poor—’

‘I do not pay attention to the gutter press,’ I said.

‘Maybe you should!’ He took a newspaper from his bag. ‘This is a late morning edition,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘They had to stop the presses but the story about last night’s screening is already in print.’

I put on my spectacles but my eyes still stumbled over the text, so I handed the paper back to him. ‘I already know what it will say,’ I said. ‘I don’t think that the type of rubbish they print will have changed over the years.’

‘I suppose you are right,’ he said, ‘because yet again it is Iris Caldwell’s murder that will cause the sensation.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘The disappearance of her servant, on the same morning, is forgotten even in her own town’s newspaper.’

‘Nell is not forgotten!’ I spat.

‘Nell,’ he repeated, as if the name had sounded like a confession on my lips. ‘Nell was your daughter, but you never speak of her, even now.’

I looked to the chair in the bay of the window and to Nell’s faded shawl. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I do not speak of her, because whenever I think of her, she…’

And then Nell was there as I knew she would be. She sat on the chair by the window, somehow brighter than she had been before, and I could see the curl of her chestnut hair and even the little scar on her cheek that would crease into a dimple when she smiled – little things about her that I had forgotten for such a long time. I thought that she could sense us because she looked at Roy and leant forward as if to listen, tucking a short strand of dark curls behind her ear, the way she always did when she concentrated.

Roy followed my gaze, his eyes briefly skimming the chair and the shawl before looking out of the window but, when he saw nothing, he looked back to me. ‘I understand it is hard, Agnes,’ he said. ‘You know that you are always welcome round if you ever need to talk to me, or Joyce even. You lent handkerchiefs and arranged funerals for so many of the village women who lost sons and husbands during the Great War. I am sure that has not been forgotten. I know you have tried to stay strong for the past twenty-five years, but it is never too late to ask for help. I know when your husband, Thomas, died it was you and Nell, just the two of you, for a while, but there are others who you can turn to—’

But I could not listen to him spell out my sorry situation anymore. ‘Thank you for the chat,’ I said standing up from my chair, ‘but as I have said before, all this happened a quarter of a century ago. I have nothing more to say.’

He nodded. Then I caught him looking at me and I realised that I had been gazing at the chair by the window once more.

‘I am sorry, Agnes,’ he said and then he folded the little book back into his pocket and left without a farewell.

In the chair by the window, Nell turned her head to watch him leave.

3

On May Day 1912 Iris Caldwell, together with my daughter Nell Ryland, went missing, never to be seen again.

On that morning Iris Caldwell rose before the dawn to prepare for her duties as May Queen. She breakfasted with her father and dressed in the long white gown she would wear for the festivities. When a small fire took hold in the stable of the Caldwells’ estate, her father went to investigate, leaving Iris alone, and when he returned, she was gone. Iris’s petticoat was discovered on Missensham Common by a search party later that morning. The blood-soaked garment was found in a thicket of wych elms where it had been dragged into a foxhole. Iris had met an end so grisly, it seems, that the foxes sensing the blood had disturbed the remains and borne off what was left of her.

Those were the facts as I understood them. It was a story that had been reported widely in the newspapers at the time, but there was much said about that morning that was not fact. Some believed that Iris had been involved in a failed abduction, the fire in the stable started as a deliberate distraction while she was spirited away. Some believed that she had been kidnapped by passing gypsies or had fallen into an old well, but it was Sam Denman who suffered the most blame. Sam was a local stable hand who lodged near the common and had taught Iris to ride. He had been drunk on the morning of the disappearance and unable to account for his whereabouts. The accusation had followed Sam his whole life and, unable to find work in the area, he lived no better than a vagrant.

Now there was a new part of the story. Many had long believed that Iris had died in the dark of the morning, but now it was known that she had crossed the village green with Sam when the sun was almost risen. Sam Denman would be accused once more.

The story of my daughter, Nell, was less well known. Since my husband’s death, Nell and I had lived together in our small cottage on the village green. On that fateful morning I had got up early and not checked Nell’s room. In fact, I had tiptoed about the place and not dared to push on her door. Nell was a light sleeper and I’d feared waking her. It was six o’clock when I’d left the cottage and set off for my duties at the church. When I’d returned home an hour later, I had found Nell’s room empty. Just like Iris Caldwell, Nell was never seen again.

Nell was not an heiress and she was no great beauty – although much of this was down to her own making – and her behaviour had never endeared her to the people of the village. There had been no fire at Oak Cottage and Nell’s blood had not been found. Nell’s story had never interested people the way that Iris’s did and after a while I had tired of telling it.

Although there were some things about Nell that I never dared speak of – things that I could neither admit to myself nor come to forget.

So that was the morning of May Day 1912. The afternoon and the days, weeks and months that followed seemed full of church halls crammed with concerned villagers, lanes bustling with search parties and the yelp of foxhounds. Questions were asked in parliament, church services were held, and the foxholes destroyed. The face of Iris Caldwell was everywhere – her inky outline peered out from the pages of the newspapers, from posters nailed to trees and leaflets handed out by policemen in the street. I could not escape the image of this girl with fair hair that flowed loose about her shoulders and the crown of irises upon her head. Iris was always pictured as the May Queen, some Shakespearean nymph or Pre-Raphaelite beauty, when in fact she had never worn the crown of irises or been seen after sunrise on May Day.

There were no pictures of Nell. No portraits or photographs. I had not even paid tuppence for her to sit for a charcoal sketch at the village fete. I had always considered that kind of thing a vanity, but it was something I came to regret.

Over the years, I had described my daughter’s appearance to the police many times, but there was little I could tell them about Nell. She was a child of average height, with chestnut curls a little looser than my own, but these descriptions made her sound like hundreds of other girls. There were things about Nell that I could not describe, of course – the little scar on her cheek that would crease into a dimple when she smiled, the strange hooded look that came over her when she was concentrating on one of her cheap novels, or the way her lips wrinkled before she laughed – but these were things that I would only recall briefly before the memory would fade. I think that is why I sometimes saw