Sisters Three

by Jessica Stirling

  She pushed the snout of the respirator over his shoulder, let him lift and carry her and lay her across the bed, let him drive into her as if she were nothing but a sleek, ugly, faceless object. She cried out, choking, and struggled to reach the clasps of the mask, to strip it away but he would not allow it. He smothered her with his body, pinned her hands with his forearms and drove on until she reached a suffocating climax. Then he withdrew.

  She tore off the gas-mask, gasping like a fish, gasped and panted and sank back against the pillow, red-faced and dewed with perspiration.

  He stood by the bed looking down on her.

  She sighed and smiled, and said, ‘Am I good, Tony? Am I not good?’

  ‘The best,’ he answered sourly, and went downstairs to wash.

  * * *

  ‘Never mind Winstock,’ Kenny said, ‘just think of the position this puts me in.’

  ‘It’s entirely your own fault,’ Fiona said, ‘you shouldn’t have gone charging off on your own, following your own leads.’

  ‘It was pure chance, just a hunch,’ Kenny said. ‘How was I to know she’d recognise the bloke? My God, Fiona, it’s over twenty years since she saw him last and look at him – big moustache, a scarred lip. It didn’t seem to make a whit of difference. She took one look at the photograph and nailed him straight away. I even tried to convince her that it wasn’t Frank Conway, that it couldn’t possibly be Frank Conway, but she was adamant, absolutely adamant. It didn’t even occur to her that it might be an old photograph.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t an old photograph so it’s obvious that he isn’t dead.’

  ‘Heck, do you think I don’t know that? That’s the problem.’

  ‘Seems to me,’ Fiona said, crisply, ‘that he escaped the war all in one piece, changed his identity and went to work for Carlo Manone in America. That seems logical, doesn’t it?’

  ‘You mean he’s been in Philadelphia all this time without once trying to contact his wife and children?’

  ‘These people,’ Fiona said, ‘are not like you and me, Kenneth.’

  ‘I’m not going to take the McKerlie woman’s word for it.’

  ‘Then what are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Winstock will insist that you hand over the lead to him, you know.’

  ‘I’m not doing that,’ Kenny said. ‘I’ll have to find another way of confirming Janet McKerlie’s identification.’

  ‘Show the photograph to Lizzie Peabody. If his wife doesn’t recognise him, even with that stupid moustache and the scar, then…’

  ‘His wife: yes, precisely.’

  ‘Ah, I didn’t quite think of that,’ Fiona admitted. ‘Of course, she’s married again. If her first husband turns out to be still alive that may cast doubt on the validity of her present marriage. A court would straighten it out, I imagine, and find her innocent of any charge of bigamy.’

  ‘A court? Do you honestly believe I’d bring this to court for a decision? God, it would be all over the newspapers. See the problem? How am I going to tell Rosie that I’ve found her father, that he’s a crook and possibly a traitor and that we’re hell-bent on laying him by the heels so we can send him to clink?’

  ‘Won’t the McKerlie woman tell her sister even if you don’t?’

  ‘Not her,’ Kenny said. ‘She thinks – wait until you hear this – she thinks that Frank Conway has come back for her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Apparently she was in love with him all those years ago.’

  ‘You mean he was her lover?’

  Kenny shrugged. ‘She didn’t go quite that far, but I think it’s probable. On the other hand perhaps she just imagined it and he’s forgotten she even existed. He certainly hasn’t tried to make contact with her, with any of them, that we know of.’

  ‘Except Dominic Manone.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Kenny asked, ‘if Dominic knows who Harker really is?’

  ‘That’s an interesting question,’ Fiona said.

  ‘What a devious, scheming rat he’d be to keep it from Polly.’

  ‘Perhaps, like you, he’s afraid to tell her the truth. Does the McKerlie woman have any idea where Conway, alias Harker, is at the present moment?’

  ‘Of course not. She’s waiting for me to produce him like a rabbit out of a hat and deliver him on to her doorstep.’

  ‘You could tell her that he’s dead.’

  ‘She’d never believe me, not now.’

  ‘Convince her.’

  ‘Fiona, she isn’t open to reason. Even if I brought her his head on a platter she’d suspect me of trickery. I’ve given her the one thing in life that’s kept her going, a nonsensical belief that Frank Conway would come back from the dead.’

  ‘That’s insane.’

  ‘Do I not know it,’ said Kenny.

  ‘Well, what are you going to do?’

  ‘Find him myself,’ Kenny said.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Get rid of him pretty damned quick.’

  * * *

  Dominic spent longer than usual saying goodnight to the children. Stuart had been nursing one of his interminable colds, nothing too serious, not bad enough to keep him from school, just a stuffy nose and tickling cough that rendered him pale and listless. Even Polly had taken pity on him, had brought him down to the back parlour after supper and had played several hands of Old Maid with him before bath and bedtime while Ishbel, for once, had Patricia all to herself.

  It was after ten o’clock before Dominic returned to the living-room by which time Polly had fortified herself with a couple of Manhattans and was seated on the sofa smoking a cigarette and sipping coffee.

  ‘He doesn’t look well to me,’ Dominic said.

  ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘Perhaps we should keep him in bed for a day or two.’

  ‘If he runs any sort of a temperature,’ Polly said, ‘I will.’

  Dominic poured black coffee from the urn on the sideboard and brought it to the fire. He didn’t sit by her but sank into the deep leather armchair that faced the curtains. He lit a cigar, crossed his legs, sipped coffee too.

  ‘Has Patricia shown him how to put on his gas-mask?’

  ‘Of course. Besides,’ Polly said, ‘they have lessons – drills at school.’

  ‘With that chest of his a whiff of poison gas would kill him.’

  ‘Now you’re just being morbid,’ Polly said. ‘Hitler won’t attack without warning. In addition to which we’re not even at war with Germany.’

  ‘If it comes to it,’ Dominic said, ‘we’ll move them to the country.’

  ‘Move who?’

  ‘The children – and you.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to the country. I might consider the seaside.’

  ‘The coast won’t be much safer than the city.’

  ‘Is that where you were today? Surveying bolt-holes in Ayrshire?’

  ‘The entire Clyde basin will be a target for air attacks,’ Dominic said. ‘And they’re already assembling boom defences to keep submarines out of the Firth.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell me just a few weeks ago that there would be no war.’

  ‘I’ve altered my opinion.’

  ‘Will you serve?’

  ‘Serve?’

  ‘Your country,’ Polly said. ‘Join up.’

  ‘If they’ll have me, of course.’

  ‘You won’t be conscripted?’

  ‘No, not initially. Young men will be first to go, then those without wives and children then, if necessary, anyone who can carry a rifle.’

  ‘Just like the last time.’

  ‘Yes’ Dominic said. ‘Only this one will be much, much worse.’

  ‘What will they make of you, Dominic?’ Polly said. ‘Will you be a quartermaster, or a bombardier, or a naval officer?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘You must have thought about it.’

  ‘I’ve too many other things on my mind to worry about that.�
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  ‘What other things?’ said Polly. ‘The business?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me, what sort of stock do we have in the warehouse right now?’

  ‘You’ve been in the warehouse.’

  ‘Only once, a long time ago,’ Polly said. ‘So tell me, Dominic, is everything in the warehouse bona fide?’

  ‘Bona fide?’

  ‘Legal and legitimate,’ Polly said.

  ‘Never been anything else,’ Dominic said. ‘We’re wholesalers, darling, importers, not receivers of stolen goods. We can produce receipts and licences for every cup and vase and effigy on our shelves.’ He glanced at her out of his solemn jet black eyes to make sure that she was convinced. ‘Eighty per cent of our imports are from Italy, however, and if the war comes that trade will cease immediately and the warehouse will probably be requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence.’

  ‘What will we do for income then?’

  ‘We – you won’t starve.’

  ‘We could go abroad, you know. I’m sure your father would take us in.’

  ‘No,’ Dominic said, sharply, ‘that isn’t an option, Polly.’

  ‘All your other irons, are they liable to melt away too?’

  ‘Some will, inevitably.’

  ‘But not all?’

  ‘No, not all.’

  She carried his empty coffee cup to the sideboard, refilled it and brought it back to him. He had almost finished his cigar. He inhaled a final mouthful of smoke and threw the stub into the fire. He accepted the coffee cup, cradled it on his palm. He had fine soft hands, a little plump now. She couldn’t imagine him ever having hit anyone, having ever struck out in anger or with cruelty.

  ‘Won’t you tell me where our money comes from?’ Polly said. ‘Better yet, Dominic, why don’t you show me how our businesses operate?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you do have to go off to serve King and country…’

  ‘If I do, then it won’t matter,’ he said. ‘It’ll all be going to hell and no one will be able to salvage anything.’

  ‘I’m not sure I believe you.’

  He placed the little cup and saucer on a side table, reached out and took her hands in his. He rubbed the ball of his thumb on her wedding-ring as if it were a good-luck charm.

  ‘Whatever happens,’ he said, ‘you and the children will be taken care of.’

  ‘By whom?’ Polly said. ‘By Tony?’

  ‘If I go,’ Dominic said, ‘Tony will go too. But you won’t want for money, I promise you that. Even in a state of war – especially in a state of war – money can buy almost anything.’

  ‘If you know how to use it properly,’ Polly said. ‘I know nothing, Dominic. I know as little about what you own and where your income comes from as I did the day I married you: less, in fact, because at least I understood how bookmaking worked and – what did you call it? – street insurance. Now it’s all partnerships, seats on the board of this and that, deals written out on paper.’

  ‘Safer,’ Dominic said. ‘Cleaner and more profitable. I thought that’s how you wanted it?’

  ‘Tell me, Dominic. Show me. Teach me.’

  He released her hands abruptly and sat back in the leather chair.

  ‘Please,’ Polly said.

  But Dominic, frowning again, refused.

  * * *

  Bernard was staffing the office while Allan Shakespeare escorted a young married couple out to the site at Blackstone to view one of the modestly priced bungalows. There wasn’t much to see, a half-built framework of bricks and mortar rising from a sea of mud. The site reminded Bernard of a little French township near Bovet that had been bombarded for weeks by heavy artillery and when he passed the foundation trenches on his way up Blackstone Hill he almost expected to see corpses huddled in the mud.

  The villas had sold well – apparently there was still money floating about looking, literally, for a home – but the bungalows were ‘sticky’, and the Bard had not been in the best of moods since Christmas, counting out daily not what he had gained but what he had lost in commission because of the threat of war; a war, incidentally, that he did not believe would ever come to pass.

  The other thing Bernard hated about going out to the Blackstone site was that it took him close to the farmhouse where Dominic had installed his mistress. In spite of Dominic’s denials, Bernard was still inclined to believe that the beautiful, long-legged blonde whom he had met on two or three occasions was sleeping with his stepson-in-law. Stepson-in-law: he found it almost impossible to think of Dominic Manone as a relative. There was something too sharp and sophisticated about Manone, a quality that he, plain Bernard Peabody, could not relate to. Between them – yes, Polly too – the couple evinced a mendacity that was absent in Babs and Rosie and that Lizzie, for all her experience of the streets, could not even recognise as being there at all. He was condemned to remain silent when talk turned to Dom and Polly. He could no longer confide in Rosie, his lovely Rosie, who was so wrapped up in romance that she wouldn’t have known what he was talking about. Never had Bernard been so depressed, not even in the dark, dead days just after the Great War – which he was now beginning to think of as ‘the last war’ – when his mother was grieving for her lost sons and he was shrouded in guilt just because he had managed to survive.

  If it hadn’t been for love of Lizzie he would have gone under before now. The girls might assume stepping up in the world had changed him, that the responsibility of managing an estate office instead of merely collecting rents had altered his character, but Bernard could have told them differently. It was Lizzie, soft and plump and, in her charming way, naïve who had changed him; his unflagging love of Lizzie, his desire to protect her from harm. He could have done it too, could have kept her secure, even with war threatening, if it hadn’t been for the girls and the men the girls had married. And, it seemed, the appearance on the scene of the man that the last of the three sisters would marry, the crafty copper from St Andrew’s Street, so that war and all the drastic changes that war would bring began to seem to poor Bernard like the easy way out.

  Sergeant MacGregor’s visit to Breslin was close to being the last straw and from that day on Bernard was a man on a knife’s edge who, for two pins, would have abandoned everyone, even Lizzie, and gone off to join the army.

  Sandra, the agency’s part-time clerk, was looking after the front office when the detective arrived. Bernard had retired to the glass-walled cubicle at the rear of the office to brood in peace. He was slumped in Allan Shakespeare’s chair smoking a cigarette when Sandra popped her head around the door and told him that he was wanted. In his present frame of mind the word ‘wanted’ had so many negative connotations that Bernard groaned inwardly and, like an arthritic old veteran, forced himself out of the chair. He had no appetite for work, no interest in bonuses and commissions and was unable to raise even the ghost of a smile when he opened the door of the cubicle and saw Detective Sergeant Kenneth MacGregor, Rosie’s sweetheart, loitering shyly by the outer office counter.

  ‘Ah, Mr Peabody, may I have a word with you?’ the sergeant said.

  ‘Do I have a choice?’ said Bernard.

  ‘Won’t take long.’

  ‘When did Breslin become your beat?’

  ‘I don’t have a beat, Mr Peabody.’

  ‘Is this call personal or professional?’

  ‘Bit of both,’ Kenny told him.

  ‘You’d better step inside,’ said Bernard.

  * * *

  Babs said, ‘I’m taking lessons in how to drive.’

  ‘Drive what?’ said Polly, who had been thinking of other things.

  ‘Motorcars,’ Babs said. ‘Dennis is teachin’ me.’

  ‘Dennis? Why not Jackie?’

  ‘I don’t want Jackie to know what I’m doin’,’ Babs said. ‘He’d only scoff. You know what he’s like about motorcars.’

  ‘I know what he’s like about women,’ Polly said. ‘Is it fun?’

  ‘
Aye, once you get used to it,’ Babs said. ‘You should try it some time.’

  ‘Not interested.’

  ‘All right for you, I suppose,’ Babs said, ‘havin’ Tony Lombard to drive you about all over the place. We don’t have that kinda money.’

  ‘I don’t have Tony Lombard, not any more.’

  ‘Really!’ Babs said, as if the absence of the handsome Italian in her sister’s life had totally escaped her notice. ‘Who does for you now?’

  They were taking one of their rare outings together, not in Bellahouston Park which had been given over to the Empire Exhibition, but on a small area of grassland that everyone called The Round.

  The trees were not in bud but snowdrops had struggled out and here and there, where the boys hadn’t trodden on them, daffodil pods were beginning to break through the dank, impacted turf. The Round was claustrophobic, in spite of struggling signs of spring, for the old tenements of Macklin Street and St Patrick’s Road crowded upon it, ugly, not handsome dwellings that reminded the girls – Polly at least – of where Babs and she had come from and what they had left behind.

  The tyres of April’s perambulator hissed on the hard-packed gravel path that followed the park’s perimeter and Babs, ever energetic, thrust into the swan-necked handle as if she and her sister were going somewhere. The baby was fast asleep, flushed by raw January air, and dribbling into her angora wool cap.

  Polly didn’t answer Babs’s question.

  She was here only under sufferance, to fulfil the interminable obligations that family bonds put upon her, bonds that she didn’t have the temerity to shake off. She had loved Babs once, loved her sister with the intense animosity of rivals. She did not love Babs any more, however, did not love Rosie – there was only pity and protection left of that old fondness – and loved her mother with a patronising condescension that even Polly recognised as wrong.

  She had lost herself in love with Dominic Manone and when that love had faded had turned instead to Tony Lombard. She could not help but align herself with handsome, confident males, and the sacrifices she’d made to satisfy her selfish needs hadn’t much bothered her – until now.