The Ice Cream Parlour: Part 7

Tony Cichella was to discover that there was no off switch for the dark thoughts that would plague him that night, and in the months and years to come. He’d known that he had set off for the church hall a few minutes later than usual. This was due to the kind of random and merciless aberration of fate that often lurks in the heart of violent tragedies. He had simply been delayed. He had been delayed by something utterly banal. There had been problem with the coffee machine and he had stayed to fix it. It was Friday night and the shop was busy. A group of retired pitmen were regulars on the evenings Cichella’s stayed open late. They would drink endless cups of frothy coffee and play chess. They’d teased Tony jovially about the unusually tepid drinks that evening and he hadn’t like to leave Lucia alone to deal with their good-natured ribaldry. Long after, in moments of silence, Tony’s would feel his heart beat and would hear in that rhythm only one repeated word: Why? Why? Why? 

As he hurried up the main street, he glanced at his watch. It was twenty to seven. He was ten minutes late. What rattled him was that the street outside the church hall was deserted, as if all the other little girls had been collected and were now on their way home to baths and bedtime stories. When he reached the dark little path that led to the hall, he noticed something by the side of the road. For some unfathomable reason, the sight of it frightened him. Suddenly, his mouth tasted acrid and metallic and his legs felt as weak and liquoricey as a new born calf’s. He approached the dark object slowly. He saw now what it was. It was the girls’ cookery basket. It was placed neatly and carefully at the very edge of the kerb. It certainly hadn’t been dropped or hastily discarded. Tony picked it up and was immediately swathed in the warm and comforting aroma of butter and cheese and freshly baked dough. Inside the basket, jam jars and Tupperware boxes were tidily stacked. Carefully wrapped in a yellow-checked tea towel, still warm, were 6 golden scones.

‘Caterina, Silvia,’ Tony shouted, looking wildly all around him. Maybe they were hiding. This must be Caterina’s idea of a prank. Please let it be Caterina’s idea of a prank, he thought. He hurried up the path, calling for the girls over and over as he went, but pathway was deserted and the church hall was locked and stood in silence and darkness.

The rest of the evening’s memories for Tony were as disembodied and dizzying as a zoetrope. Somehow, he’d got back to the ice cream parlour, frantically whispering prayers to God that the girls would be there, perched on the high stools at the counter in their brown uniforms like two little sparrows. He remembered Lucia’s face as he burst through the shop door. Her mouth was a perfect O as she looked wordlessly from his pale, terrified face to the wicker basket he was carrying. Then she started to scream. 

Customers were ushered out into the night and the shop was closed. Someone called the police. Tony couldn’t remember who made the call. He went back out into the night with John to check the paths and roads to the church hall again. John strode ahead, his body taut, his whole being seemed to pulse with a ferocious, atavistic energy. Tony found it hard to look at him. His own guilt, his own fear, his own pain was nothing compared to the mute dread radiating from John, which seemed to burn with a metallic coldness.

By the time they returned to the ice cream parlour a crowd of about 50 people had gathered outside. Two police cars were parked in the street, their cold blue lights spiralled and flashed with an aquatic otherworldliness. John pushed his way through the silent throng and went into the shop. His wife was sitting with her head in her hands in one of the booths. Lucia was tightly cuddled into her, holding her in her arms. Opposite them sat a slight, dark pensive looking man. He was leaning forward, trying to understand Stella’s jagged howls. Next to him, a young uniformed police office was taking notes. Lucia stood when she saw Tony and John approach, she searched their faces for the tiniest flicker of hope, but saw only flat grey expressions and fearful eyes.

The small man turned and stood up and offered his hand. 

‘I am Inspector David Winter. I want you to know that we are doing everything we can to find your girls. We will not rest until we have found them.’ 

John stared at him. He was such a little man, he thought. So small and so weak looking. His hand was as delicate and soft as a woman’s, but his eyes were intelligent and open. Is this the man who will find my daughters, he wondered? This ordinary and unremarkable human being, who had cut himself shaving that morning, John could see. Whose shirt was rumpled and was missing a button. Is this man enough, he asked himself? Is he enough for my daughters, for my beloved, perfect daughters?

That night, over one hundred men and women from the colliery searched with flashlights. They looked in back yards, they marched through the Welfare Park and combed the allotments, peering into chicken coops and greenhouses. Police officers sealed off the area around the church hall and searched it with dogs. They visited the home of every little girl who attended Brownies that night. Residents of the colliery would never forget the sense of eeriness and horror that grew and solidified as the night progressed. From behind curtains, an uncomprehending community watched as the shadowy streets flickered with swooping torchlight. ‘Caterina! Silvia!’ the names were shouted over and over again. They echoed round the narrow streets, causing dogs to bark and pace uneasily in their kennels and children to huddle down into the safety of their blankets, understanding that something terrible was happening in the pressing darkness outside their windows.

In the morning, the searches continued. Tony opened the ice cream parlour and served hot coffee and sandwiches to the volunteers. A line of police officers was seen moving slowly, on hands and knees up the church hall path. Others were seen searching the rocky beach and along the grassy, windswept wildness of the headland. The girls were nowhere to be found.

In the coming days, a hush descended on the colliery whenever the news came on the television or the radio. In every household, people stood reverently still to listen for updates about the girls. Newsagents sold out of newspapers by eight o’clock in the morning. The girls' school photographs loomed on the front of papers and from television screens. Caterina was grinning toothily, staring straight at the camera. She appeared to meet the observer’s eye with a bold and righteous spirit. Her long dark hair was braided and tied with the fuchsia ribbons that had been bought especially for the occasion by her grandmother. Silvia however, smiled uncertainly into the distance, as if someone behind the camera she could barely make out had unexpectedly waved at her. Silvia would no more look directly into a camera than she would look directly into the sun. Every photo of her was the same: it would hold her stillness and silence within it, like a spell within a bottle. That the two pictures seemed to capture the girls’ distinct personalities so perfectly was all the more poignant. They seemed to whisper, this is all that we were. This is now all that we will ever be. 

Nights brought disquiet and fear for the people of the colliery. Doors were locked and bolted, checked, and then locked and bolted again in an endless cycle of anxiety and paranoia. For most, sleep was shallow and restless and dreams were webbed with visions of dark, dank places or horrifying pursuits. There was a tentative faith that the morning could bring fresh hope and good news. When dawn broke, with its thin and misleading sunlight, when newspapers were opened and radios were switched on, the situation was the same: the girls were still missing. They had vanished. They had dissolved into the night like sugar into black coffee.

For Stella and John, a single day seemed endless, as if each minute, each hour was a ragged skein of anxiety winding round and round into itself. Yet, in other ways, the days seemed to race by and that was more terrifying, because John knew with each day that passed, hope of the girls being found diminished. He longed to block out the hideous calendar that fluttered perpetually in his mind that counted the days since the girls’ disappearance. The ravaging milestones of time were the worst: when days turned into weeks, when weeks became months. He couldn’t bear to think of how it would feel when months became years. That was like imagining his own personal holocaust: the savagery and cruelty of it was unthinkable.