I look at the broken cassette. Scotch tape. I’m pretty sure that’s what I need to fix it, but I’m also pretty sure we don’t have any. I put the cassette to one side and lift out the file entitled ‘Sussex Martyrs’.
Plenty of villages have a dark past. History itself is stained with the blood of the innocent and written by the ruthless. Good does not always triumph over evil. Prayers do not win battles. Sometimes, we need the devil on our side. The problem is, once you have him riding shotgun, he’s hard to get rid of.
I sit and start to plough through the sheets of paper. Some have been printed from the internet. Others seem to have been scanned from books. The text is scholarly, dry and packed with dates and historical references about the reign of Queen Mary and the purge in general. I’m halfway through the folder before I find any specific references to Chapel Croft. A very old article, by the looks of it, perhaps taken from some kind of journal. The print is bad, and the language is archaic, but Fletcher has summarized and made his own notes at the side.
Village stormed, martyrs hauled from beds and rounded up. Those who recanted branded but released. Those who refused convicted of heresy and burnt at the stake. Two young girls, Abigail and Maggie, hidden in the chapel. Betrayed. Dragged out. Girls’ punishment even more barbaric. Maggie’s eyes put out. Abigail dismembered and beheaded before both burnt.
I swallow. Dismembered and beheaded.
‘She had no head or arms.’
There is no way that Flo could have known that. I reach for my coffee. It’s gone cold, but I swig it anyway. Fletcher’s notes here read: ‘Betrayed by whom?’
The next piece of paper is larger, folded several times. I open it and lay it flat on the table. It takes me a moment to work out what I’m looking at. Architectural plans of the chapel, or rather the church that stood here before the chapel was built. Again, old and much faded.
I squint at the drawings. The footprint of the building is the same. I can make out the nave, the vestry. But there are other parts that I can’t configure in my mind. Areas that look like they have changed over time. Another store cupboard? A cellar? I didn’t think the chapel had a cellar. Vaults, perhaps? I stare at it thoughtfully then I carefully put all the pieces of paper back in the folder and close it.
I turn to the second folder. ‘Merry and Joy’. The urge to smoke is now so strong my hands feel twitchy. I open the folder and begin to flick through the printed newspaper stories. There aren’t as many as you would imagine. The disappearances didn’t garner much national interest. Which is unusual. Merry and Joy were young, white and female. Without wanting to sound cold, those are the girls the newspapers and media normally care about. From the off, the police treated the case as that of two runaways. Appeals were made for the girls to come home, to contact their mothers. There never seemed to be any suspicion that they might not be in a position to do so. And the sad fact is – something I know all too well from my work with the homeless – the police are more likely to spend time looking for dead girls than live ones.
The local newspaper seems to have run stories about the girls for a lot longer, but eventually even these progress from the front page to smaller articles to filler pieces.
The same school photos of the girls have been used in all the papers. Not particularly good photos. Blurry, old. Both girls look younger than in the photo I found in Joy’s room. I wonder if that hampered the search.
And then, finally, I find a longer article. This one seems to have been written sometime after the girls’ disappearance. And not for a newspaper. I squint. At the top of the page, in small print, a header reads: Sussex Stories – Local Mysteries and Legends. March 2000. Issue 13.
I start to read:
THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE SUSSEX RUNAWAYS
Merry and Joy were the best of friends. Inseparable, many used to say. They grew up together, went to school together, played together, rode their bikes together. And during one week in the spring of 1990, aged fifteen, they disappeared together.
Oddly, there were no frenetic searches. Villagers did not beat bushes. Divers did not dredge the rivers and streams. It was presumed, almost from the off, that both girls had run away. The police inquiry was perfunctory, to say the least, and the case failed to really catch the attention of the national newspapers. To understand why the girls’ disappearance was given so little heed it’s probably best to start with the village in which they grew up.
Chapel Croft is a small hamlet in East Sussex. Its main features are farming and the church. It’s a religious area; Protestant, with a bloody history of martyrdom.
During the religious persecutions of Queen Mary in 1556, eight villagers were burnt at the stake, including two young girls. A memorial stands in the chapel graveyard. Each year, on the anniversary of the purge, small twig dolls called Burning Girls are set alight to commemorate the martyrs who died.
It would be fair to say, like many small villages, Chapel Croft is an insular place, inward-looking and protective of its church and its traditions.
Both Merry and Joy’s families were religious. Both had lost their fathers at an early age. But there the similarities ended. Joy grew up in a strict but loving household. Doreen was a good mother. Joy was her only child, and her daughter was her life.
Merry, on the other hand, grew up in far more chaotic surroundings. Her mother, Maureen, was devout and yet also an alcoholic. Merry and her brother didn’t always attend school. Their clothes were dirty and second-hand. Often Merry had unexplained bruises.
Nowadays, these would probably be seen as warning signs of abuse and neglect. But in a small village a decade ago, people still believed that you let families take care of their own problems.
Reverend Marsh, the parish priest at the time, later confessed that he regretted not doing more: ‘It was obvious that there was something ill about the household. Perhaps if someone had stepped in, a tragedy could have been avoided.’
Perhaps, indeed. The only respite for Merry from the miseries of home appears to have been her friendship with Joy, and the time that they spent together. However, that too was about to be threatened.
Joy’s mother had never been happy about her daughter’s relationship with Merry. She didn’t think Merry was a ‘suitable’ friend. Both girls already attended Bible lessons with Reverend Marsh. But it was agreed that Joy would take extra lessons as a means to ‘keep her on the right path’.
Joy’s lessons were with a young trainee priest at the chapel, the curate, Benjamin Grady. Grady was young – only twenty-three – and ambitious, a handsome man, outwardly charming. A lot of the village girls developed a crush on him. Did he also catch the eye of Joy?
Joy was a beautiful girl, and there were certainly rumours, unsubstantiated, that she had been seen attending the chapel at night, at times other than the scheduled lessons. However, a few weeks before her disappearance, Joy abruptly stopped attending her classes with Grady.
Could heartache or unrequited love be the reason Joy ran away? Or was it something more sinister? Grady, after all, was an adult, in a position of power.
The police spoke to Grady. But when Joy was last spotted, at a bus stop in Henfield, Grady had an alibi. He was preparing a service with Reverend Marsh.
Joy was never seen again.
The police visited Merry’s house to ask her about her best friend’s disappearance but were informed that she was ‘ill’. For some reason, they never called back.