The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  The Italian Girl (The Ackroyd and Thackeray Mysteries)

  Patricia Hall

  (2012)

  * * *

  Patricia Hall has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Rights Act,1988, to be identified as the author of this book.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Italian Girl was first published in 1998 by Constable and Co Ltd, London,

  ISBN no: 0 09 478640 2 and by St Martin’s Press in 1999.

  The Ackroyd and Thackeray Mysteries

  Death by Election

  Dying Fall

  In the Bleak Midwinter (UK) The Dead of Winter (USA)

  Perils of the Night

  The Italian Girl

  Dead on Arrival

  Skeleton at the Feast

  Deep Freeze

  Death in Dark Waters

  Dead Reckoning

  False Witness

  Sins of the Fathers

  Death in a Far Country

  By Death Divided

  Devil’s Game

  Dust to Dust

  Other Novels

  The Poison Pool

  The Coldness of Killers

  The Masks of Darkness

  Dead Beat

  Death Trap

  THE ITALIAN GIRL

  by

  Patricia Hall

  CHAPTER ONE

  If the skull had not fallen from the maw of the digger and skittered jerkily down the pile of wet rubble to land almost on the toe of Pete O’Halloran’s mud-caked wellington boot, the skeleton might have been buried again beneath the concrete foundations of the new factory and forgotten for good. O’Halloran kicked the spherical object gingerly, turning it over so that the eye sockets, full of drier earth, gaped at him. Their blank gaze dispelled the last faint vestige of doubt he had clung to as the object had tumbled towards him down the heap of wet earth and rock.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, glancing around the site before shrugging wearily and waving to the digger driver to stop his engine. His eye had rested on young Gobbler Clark, tall, broad and muscle-bound in a grubby singlet in spite of the chilly wind which whistled down the valley from the high Pennines bringing the first heavy spots of rain. And it was obvious that Gobbler’s fascinated eyes had fixed on the skull and recognised it for what it was.

  O’Halloran knew that what Gobbler saw Gobbler would trade for pints around the pubs and clubs of the town within hours. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was not yet mid-day. But the skull could not be ignored, penalty clause or no penalty clause, he thought with considerable bile, knowing who would take the blame for the delay.

  “Gobbler,” he said. “Don’t stand there gawping. Go and phone the effing police, lad. There’ll be nowt more done here till we get this little lot looked at. And put t’kettle on while you’re about it. We might as well have a brew while we’re waiting.”

  Within an hour chief inspector Michael Thackeray stood warming his hands around one of the construction workers’ substantial mugs of tea as he watched a team of blue overalled police officers painstakingly trowelling sticky mud away from the patch of earth which the digger had disturbed. He was a burly, broad-shouldered figure, hunched inside his dark trench-coat, his black hair blowing in the wind, his face impassive as he watched the progress of the search several feet below in the waterlogged foundations of the new building. He was joined by a slimmer, slighter man, wearing the same police issue gum-boots with considerably more aplomb as he stepped with fastidious caution through the bog.

  “It’s definitely human remains, then, is it, guv?” sergeant Kevin Mower asked sceptically as they watched their colleagues working like agitated hippos in their baggy overalls at the bottom of the pit, sloppy with mud which ran in yellowish rivulets down the steep sides of the excavation. “Not some kids having us on with a plastic skull?”

  “It’s human,” Thackeray said. He glanced at the sergeant’s stylish suit and jacket and smiled faintly. “You’d better get some overalls on. I want you down there if they find anything else.”

  “Terrific,” Mower said, though without much rancour. Mower’s sharp edge had seemed slightly blunted since he had returned to duty a month ago with nothing but two small scars to show for a knife attack which had almost killed him. “Is Amos on his way?” he asked.

  “He’s been informed,” Thackeray said. “Though there’s not much for him to see yet. We need the rest of the body.” He glanced impassively at the small cordoned off area where the skull still lay, the rain beginning to wash away the mud so that the bone gleamed white here and there through its mantle of earth. “I doubt that a skull alone will get us far with an identification.”

  The police were being watched from beyond the cordon of blue and white tape by a handful construction workers in donkey jackets, collars turned up against the now driving rain, half pleased, half perturbed at their sudden enforced idleness. The site itself, three acres on a plateau half-way up one of the hills which surrounded the manufacturing town of Bradfield, had been ploughed and churned into a sea of dereliction by the diggers and heavy trucks which now stood abandoned close to the entrance. The rain came in great gray gusts from the surrounding hills, obliterating the view of the town below and finding cracks in every waterproof defence which the huddled watchers had devised.

  Thackeray wiped the water from his face with a sodden handkerchief and brushed his drenched hair out of his eyes. He turned in some irritation to Mower as the workmen gave an ironic cheer when one of the officers below raised a hand to indicate that he had found something.

  “Get rid of them, Kevin,” Thackeray said. “Make sure we’ve got names and addresses and keep the foreman, O’Halloran here, and the driver of the JCB, for statements. The rest can go. I’ll see you back at HQ.”

  It was several more hours before the pathologist Amos Atherton eased his considerable bulk down the slippery slope from the firm grip of one police officer above to the waiting arms of another below.

  “By ‘eck,” he said breathlessly as he regained his balance and squelched gingerly through the mud to join Mower in the tent of white plastic sheeting which had by now been erected over the site of the police excavations. He glanced out at the leaden sky and the still pitiless rain. “You’ve chosen a grand afternoon for playing wi’ buckets and spades.” He loosened the fastening on his heavy waterproof, shook back the hood and wiped the dampness from a broad, unfurrowed brow with a large khaki handkerchief before he cast a sharp eye at the collection of fragments which the police had so far assembled in a box on a trestle table. Just feet away a group of officers were still painstakingly scraping in the sticky mud. Atherton poked an impatient finger amongst the bones.

  “Aye, they’re human remains,” he said glumly. “Such as they are. You’re not going to need anyone to certify death, are you?”

  “Can you tell anything from just looking?” Mower asked, with an almost equal lack of enthusiasm.

  “They’re old,” Atherton said. “But God knows how old.”

  “Archeology old or just unsolved murder old?” Mower asked, but Atherton shrugged.

  “You’re going to need a virtuoso performance from the forensic lads to pin that down.” He riffled amongst the muddy fragments in the box with stubby, sensitive fingers, as if they were toys.

  “You’ve not got anywhere near the complete set,” he said. “Though if you pressed me I’d say that bit of pelvis was female.”

  “Surprise me,” Mower said, with just the faintest note of disbelief.

  “It’s too hefty to be a bloke,” Atherton said kindly. “Why do you think girls hav
e big bums, lad? They hang off big bones, don’t they? See here? This is a femur, thigh bone to you, do you see?” Mower fixed his dark eyes almost reluctantly on the long stick-like object Atherton picked up and waved in his direction. “That’s too slight for an adult male, any road. Possibly a young lad, but you wouldn’t get a pelvis like that on a young lad. So if this isn’t some pre-historic relic they’ve disinterred, I reckon you need to look for missing women or girls. Bones survive an amazingly long time, you know, if they’re not disturbed.”

  “But the skeleton’s not complete yet?” Mower said.

  “Nowhere near,” Atherton said cheerfully. He picked over the contents of the box again. “You’re short of most of the spine, the tibia, fibula, small bones of hands and feet. And teeth, if you can find them.”

  “Teeth?” Mower said faintly.

  “That skull up there’s missing most of its teeth. They must have been knocked out when the digger hit. If this is a modern skeleton your best chance of identifying it is probably through dental records. You need to find as many of the teeth as you can.”

  “In this bog?” Mower muttered looking down at the soft, almost liquid earth beneath his boots and at the search team whose blue overalls were now caked with patches of the stuff. Their sergeant looked questioningly in Mower’s direction.

  “Keep going. We need the teeth,” Mower called and turned away with Atherton from the incredulous stare and unspoken discontent the instruction provoked.

  “Where’s your boss then?” Atherton asked after the two men had scrambled back to the higher ground above the workings.

  “Taken himself back to the office,” Mower said bitterly. “How do we know when we’ve collected all the bits, then?”

  “Take what you’ve got back to the mortuary and I’ll do a preliminary assembly, then you can bring the rest in as you work and I’ll let you know when to stop,” Atherton said with cheerful matter-of-factness. “It’s only like a jigsaw puzzle, after all. But unless you come up with more than you’ve got there you’ll never get an identification, or even know whether there’s one body or more. These days they very often come in batches, after all.”

  Mower gave the slightest shudder of distaste at that but Atherton snuggled himself back into his roomy waterproof against the gusting rain and gave the detective sergeant a beaming smile.

  “It’s good to see you back on duty, lad,” he said. “I thought you might have had enough after that last little caper.”

  Mower glanced away at the town in the valley below, where a single shaft of weak sunlight suddenly caught the tower of the Italianate town hall and a curiously shortened stump of a church tower against a backdrop of boxy modern buildings, a flash of golden light which only lasted seconds before the rain swirled in and obliterated the view again. What was left of St. Jude’s church reminded him sharply of the menace which occasionally lurked in this obstinately surviving little town with its heart down in the valley between its seven surrounding steep hills. He was seized with the Londoner’s sense that this was a foreign country and felt a stab of nostalgia for the warm, stale air and self-absorbed crowds of the Underground where the weather was an irrelevance.

  “Being in hospital certainly gave me time to think,” he said bleakly. “Now, if I can get the blasted traumatic stress counsellors out of my hair, I’d quite like to forget it, thanks very much.”

  “Giving you a hard time, are they?”

  “You could say that. As for getting out, I suppose when it comes down to it, I don’t know how to do anything else, so I guess I’m stuck with it. And with bloody Bradfield.” Going back to London as a copper was, he knew, impossible but time seemed to be doing nothing to dim the exile’s sense of injustice at being wrenched from the familiar bustle and glitz, particularly as his departure had been more forced than voluntary.

  “Aye, well, stay long enough, sergeant, and we’ll have you drinking Tetleys and laikin’ cricket like a native,” Atherton said heartily. “Your superintendent Jack Longley, who had the misfortune to be born in Derbyshire, reckons it takes about thirty years to be accepted. You’ve nobbut another twenty eight to go.”

  “God help me,” Mower said under his breath.

  “What’s all this, then?” Ted Grant, the editor of the Bradfield Gazette asked, stopping short on his post-prandial amble around the newsroom and leaning over Laura Ackroyd’s shoulder, breathing heavily and alcoholicly down her neck. Laura inched away from the steamy gust just enough to avoid passive intoxication and not enough to cause offence, cursing herself for her carelessness in opening the bulky package in front of her at her office desk.

  “John Blake,” Grant went on, picking up one of the glossy publicity photographs which Laura had been studying. “Flippin’ ‘eck, I thought he was dead. Local, isn’t he? Born in Bradfield?”

  “He’s not that old,” Laura said mildly, ever aware that after lunch Grant’s always volatile temper was even more uncertain. She pushed her cloud of copper hair away from her face and turned slightly to face her boss, her eyes more or less level with the white shirt front which strained over one of the more substantial beer bellies to grace a profession in which there was still fierce competition away from the health-club obsessed capital. She was wearing an open-necked green shirt which she instantly knew she had unbuttoned one button too far when she saw Grant’s eyes glancing downwards. She took hold of the gold chain around her neck, conveniently blocking off the view Ted evidently appreciated so much.

  “He’s coming back to Bradfield to open this new cinema museum they’re putting into Fosters’ Mills,” she said, willing Grant to move away. “He’s had some part in setting it up, apparently. Part of the Tourism Initiative.”

  “Tourism Initiative!” Grant’s contempt was massive. “I’ve never been able to see who’d want to come touring to Bradfield. What’s it got to offer, for God’s sake, apart from curry restaurants and a Mickey Mouse university?”

  Laura swallowed the first riposte which sprang to mind and counted to ten as, to her relief, Grant stepped slightly to one side and leaned his bulk against the side of her desk, hands in pockets, pale blue eyes in florid face now showing signs of interest as well as antagonism.

  “He’s also planning to look for locations for his new film, according to this PR stuff” she said. “He’s going to play Mr. Rochester in a new version of Jane Eyre and he’s particularly keen to film parts of it in Yorkshire. We should get some good copy out of it.”

  “I thought John Blake’s filming days were long done,” Grant said. “I never liked him, myself. I could never see what all the fuss was about when he made that Western they all raved about. But the ladies seemed to like it. What was it called?”

  “Sierra Farewell, 1961,” Laura said. “Shades of Gary Cooper.” She shuffled through the sheaf of photographs to uncover one of a much younger John Blake in black shirt and stetson, side-burns and sidelong smile. “Before my time, but he was certainly quite a hunk in his day.”

  “Huh. He must be sixty odd, now,” Grant said, putting the black and white picture along-side the more recent colour shot of the actor, a comparison which was not flattering. Blake had all too obviously put on some weight and the eyes, dark and amused in youth, had lost their sparkle in late middle age.

  “That hair’s dyed, and he must have had a couple of face-lifts by the look of him. Sixty if he’s a day.”

  “A bit old to play Mr. Rochester, I’d have thought,” Laura said.

  “Jane Eyre,” Grant said thoughtfully. “Another of these costume sagas they’re so keen on just now, is it?”

  “Charlotte Bronte,” Laura said circumspectly. “You know? Howarth? Wuthering Heights - though that was the other sister.”

  “Aye, I know all about them,” Grant said quickly. “It was Blake I was interested in. Wasn’t there some Hollywood scandal, nearly finished him off? What was it? Drink? Drugs? You’d best look him up in the cuttings. Those publicity people’ll only tell you what they want you to know.�
��

  “You want me to do a feature?” Laura asked carefully, hardly able to believe that she had been so conveniently unhooked from what threatened to be a serious embarrassment.

  “Well, you better had, if he’s coming to town. The prodigal returns and all that stuff. And there’s always a bit of copy about when they make a film – actresses throwing tantrums, actors looking for new wives, backers backing off, that sort of thing. When’s he arriving?”

  “Next week. He’s coming up to do his recce and then the museum opening is on the following Wednesday.”

  “Right, well, pencil summat in for the Tuesday on your feature page and then we’ll give it some news coverage when the museum opens.”

  “Right,” Laura said faintly as Grant levered himself upright again and continued his beady eyed perambulation between the reporters’ desks and into his own office at the other end of the room. Carefully she extracted a letter from the heap of photographs and publicity material which Grant had riffled through and which his sharp eyes had fortunately missed. She folded it and put it into her handbag, before making her way as unobtrusively as she knew how into the library on the floor above. She was well aware, as she usually was, that more than one pair of male eyes followed her progress to the newsroom door, feasting on her long dark-stockinged legs beneath the short black skirt.

  The library file on John Blake was not a bulky one. Recent cuttings spoke of the “former Hollywood star” almost as if he were dead. The explanation came in a bundle of yellowing but more extensive articles which outlined acrimonious divorce proceedings in California in the late 1970s during which Blake’s estranged wife had accused him of an interest in under-age girls. There were a lot of sins the famous could get away with in Tinsel Town, Laura thought, but even in the licentious seventies, that was probably one of the tougher accusations – it never appeared to have been substantiated – to live down.