The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  Whatever the reason, John Blake’s career had begun a downward spiral from that moment on. His last film, given an unenthusiastic review even in the Gazette, whose film critic Paddy Stanford, watched the screen through a permanent alcoholic haze and seldom over-estimated the intelligence or discrimination of his readers, had bombed in 1985. After that, as far as the Gazette‘s record went, John Blake’s Hollywood career had ended.

  Laura took the covering letter which had arrived with the package of publicity material out of her bag and read it through again with some elation. It was from a colour magazine editor for whom she had done some freelance work before, asking her to do a major feature on John Blake’s return to his home town and his attempt at a film come-back in Jane Eyre. The commission looked like being a meatier one than she had at first realised, she thought with satisfaction. And it could just possibly be the one which offered her the key to her cell in Ted Grant’s capricious prison.

  She went back to her desk, picked up the phone and dialled a London number.

  “Is that Lorelei Baum?” she asked when she was connected. “I want to arrange an interview with John Blake when he visits Yorkshire next week. Can you fix that for me? It’s for a profile in the Sunday Extra magazine.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was so long since Michael Thackeray had had anywhere to call home that he had not got used to it yet. He put his key into the front door of the tall Victorian villa, walked slowly up the three flights of stairs to Laura Ackroyd’s top floor flat and let himself in with a mixture of apprehension and delight. But even before he stepped over the threshold he realised that Laura was not there.

  His disappointment at finding the flat empty was piercing. He stood for a moment looking round the small living room, taking in the familiar signs of her presence, the untidy pile of newspapers on the shelf underneath the television, the flamboyant gold silk poppies in the jug on the narrow hearth in front of the small black cast-iron grate which the builders had left as a reminder of these attics’ first incarnation as servants’ quarters at the top of the house, the book left open on the coffee table where Laura had put it down the previous evening when he had enticed her to bed. Gradually he felt soothed by her presence even in her absence.

  He still felt half a stranger here in a home which Laura had created not for him but for herself, but he did not mind that. He had no talent in that direction and less inclination. His only other home since he had left his parents’ farm to go to university had been created for him by another woman whose youthful face he now sometimes had difficulty in recalling. He had never had the heart to try to emulate what he regarded as a uniquely feminine gift. When he had lost its benefits he had simply gone without, camping out in a series of bleak and utilitarian lodgings upon which he made no effort to imprint his personality or taste. It was not until he had moved in with Laura a couple of months before that he had become aware of what he had previously lost and now painfully and tentatively regained.

  He put a Billie Holiday CD, his own, on Laura’s stereo and stood for a moment as the strains of Stormy Blues filled the flat. There were times when he woke in the middle of the night with a sense of shock at finding Laura’s warm body curled in sleep against his own. He could not believe his good fortune and in the dark watches of the night expected it to disappear in the miasma of cruel memories which still haunted him. More than once he had put an arm round her and half wakened her simply for the reassurance of her sleepy voice and the comfort of the arm which she invariably twined around him as she settled herself for sleep again.

  “You are an untidy wretch,” he said softly to himself as he went into the kitchen and began to stack the scattered breakfast crockery in the sink. He turned on the hot water, squeezed washing up liquid into the bowl and contentedly watched the foam rise and sparkle. He had finished drying the dishes and stacked them away methodically in the kitchen cupboards before he heard the front door open and close.

  “You’re late,” he said, helping her off with her wet coat and taking the opportunity to lift her hair and kiss her neck gently just below the ear. She pulled him close and kissed him on the lips.

  “You,” she said tartly, “are bloody early. When did you ever get back at six? Your performance indicators will be through the floor if you’re not careful, chief inspector. Your arrest rate will be bottom of the league. All the little toe-rags up at Wuthering will be laughing all the way to the dealer.”

  She pulled away from him, laughing, knowing that if she didn’t she would need to kiss him again, and then again, and there would only be one end to the encounter.

  “I thought you’d found a brand new skeleton to play with, anyway,” she said. “That’s what Bob Baker, my esteemed crime colleague on the Gazette has been telling the public all afternoon. Isn’t it right?” She dropped a copy of the last edition of the Gazette on the coffee table and indicated its bold black headline: Digger unearths skeleton.

  “He is, and we do,” Thackeray acknowledged. “But for all we know it might be Piltdown woman. It’s just a collection of bones so far. We won’t know any more until the forensic labs have had a good look at them.” Laura shivered slightly although the room was warm.

  “We haven’t got another Fred West at large, have we?”

  “I hope not,” Thackeray said soberly. “There’s coppers in Gloucester who’ll never recover from that.”

  “Reporters too, from what I hear,” Laura said softly. “That’s a trial I’m glad I didn’t have to cover.” Avoiding his eyes, she took off her coat and hung it up. There were aspects of his work, the worst of it, that he resolutely refused to share with her and she did not think this was the moment, as the remnants of some long buried horror were dragged from the grave, to try to exorcise his demons.

  “I went to see Joyce on the way home,” she said.

  “How is she?”

  “Not good,” Laura said, unable to keep a note of deep anxiety out of her voice. Her grandmother, fiercely independent and occasionally obstreperous, had suffered a fall, broken a leg and was languishing in a bed at the Bradfield Infirmary.

  “She’s not seriously ill, is she?” Thackeray said sharply, knowing how hard Laura would take that, but she shook her head.

  “Physically, they say, she’s mending fine for someone her age. Every other way she’s creating merry hell. They need her bed, want her moved, but they say she’s not fit enough to go home unless the council comes up with some care - which they won’t - and she refuses point blank to go into a private nursing home. Says she worked all her life to get a decent health service and she’s bloody well not going private now.” Thackeray smiled. Both in looks and temperament there was more than a touch of Joyce in her grand-daughter and he sympathised with medical and social workers who had come up against that streak of Ackroyd obstinacy which showed no sign of diluting itself down the generations.

  “They suggested I should bring her here,” Laura said. “But I told them that was crazy - three floors up in a wheel-chair and no possibility of her getting out on her own. She’d go bananas stuck up here on her own all day.”

  “This isn’t a sensible place for some-one disabled,” Thackeray said. “I know what it’s like. She wouldn’t be able to get a wheelchair into that tiny kitchen of yours.” Laura glanced at him sharply. He seldom talked about his family or the mother who had spend years in a wheelchair before she died. The fact that he had even mentioned her in passing was, she thought, a good sign, a sign that perhaps their often tense relationship might one day achieve normality.

  “You think I was right to say no to that then?” she asked anxiously. “Joyce backed me up, said it was impossible, because of my job, but I wondered if she was hurt….”

  “You can’t bring her here, Laura,” Thackeray said flatly, putting his arm round her. “You’re right, she’s right, there has to be another solution and it’s their job to find it.”

  “I think I’ll ring my father,” Laura said slowly. “Joyce doesn’t
want me to but I think he should know what’s going on.” She glanced at her watch, casting her mind a thousand miles to her parents’ retirement home in Portugal. “They’ll just be changing ready for an aperitif on the terrace,” she said. “That would be the best place for Joyce to recuperate, you know. A villa all on one floor, a shady terrace to sit out on, a view over the bay to Cascais…..Fat chance. But I’ll tell him just the same.” But before she could pick up the phone, it rang.

  “It’s for you,” she said, handing Thackeray the receiver, unable to resist a small satisfied smile of acknowledgment that he now left her number as his contact. She had recognised sergeant Kevin Mower’s voice at the other end, and the subdued excitement in it. But she watched Thackeray with a sense of foreboding as he listened to Mower without speaking. She saw his jaw tighten. His work consisted almost entirely of news which was more or less bad. There was no reason for her to suppose that this call brought tidings any worse than he handled daily but she was sure it did. He hung up and gave her a rueful smile.

  “I need to go back to the office,” he said. “Not for long, but they’ve found some more remains at the building site, not just bones this time, some bits of jewellery, pretty modern, not old…I need to see.”

  “Not Piltdown woman, then,” Laura said more lightly than she felt.

  “I’m afraid not, no,” Thackeray said. “It looks as though she’s maybe a whole lot younger than that.”

  The plastic evidence bag contained a small gold cross, still attached to a fragment of chain. Thackeray picked it up and felt the shape through the protective film as if to make sure that it was real.

  “Is that it?” he asked sergeant Mower, who was sitting at his desk, shirt-sleeves rolled up and tie loose, his hair still wet from his long muddy stint at the building site.

  “There were some more bones,” he said. “Still not a complete skeleton. They’ve been taken down to the infirmary to help Amos with his jigsaw. I’ve called the team off until the morning now. They’re not going to find anything else unless we can extend the search area and that’s best done in daylight. Whoever she is she’s been buried long and deep. Another few hours isn’t going to make much difference.”

  “No indication of the cause of death?” Thackeray asked.

  “No, nothing obvious. And no remnants of clothing, no shoes,” Mower said sombrely. “That could all have rotted away with the rest of her or she could have been put into the ground naked, Amos says. But my guess is that whoever she is, she’s been there a very long time.”

  “And there are no recent suspicious disappearances which would fit? Murder cases still on file?”

  “Well, nothing since I’ve been here, guv,” said Mower, who had arrived in Bradfield from the Metropolitan Force two years previously. “You know West Yorkshire better than I do. I’ve asked around the station but there’s nothing anyone can recall, nothing that instantly springs to mind. Obviously there’ll be more people here in the morning. We can search the files properly then. And Superintendent Longley’s due back tomorrow, isn’t he? Someone might come up with something.” Thackeray nodded. He had been in the county, though not until recently in Bradfield, for the whole of his career, but he could not remember any case of the suspicious disappearance of a young woman which could easily be identified with the body which had turned up that morning, or the small cruciform piece of gold which he still held in his hand.

  “The super won’t be in a very good mood after three days of management theory down at county HQ,” Thackeray said. “They’ll be wanting to know why he hasn’t completed his policing plan, and I know for a fact he’s got no reason at all except sheer bloody mindedness, so I reckon he’ll have had a rough time. So watch your step if you’re thinking of picking his brains.”

  “Right, guv,” Mower said thoughtfully.

  “How far back do the missing person files go?” Thackeray asked, turning his mind back to the problem in hand.

  “On computer, ten years, guv,” Mower said. “Any further back and you’re into dusty paper in the basement. But there’ll be thousands of names, most of them girls and women who simply decided they wanted to be somewhere else.”

  “Well, this one ended up in a muddy grave and I’ve no doubt she was somebody’s wife or daughter,” Thackeray said. “So we may have to blow the dust off a few files. In the meantime, what about the area where she was found. It’s just a bloody great hole in the ground now, but what used to be there?”

  Mower reached across his desk with a faint smile of self-satisfaction. He had never found Thackeray an easy master to please but reckoned that as he got to know him better he was at least beginning to anticipate his moves. The folded sheets of paper he pulled towards him should earn him a few Brownie points, he reckoned.

  “This is a map of that part of Bradfield before they started the demolition work three or four months ago,” he said. “The site they’re working on used to be allotments at the end of Peter Street, which led off Peter Hill, here look.” Thackeray pulled up a chair and bent over the map following Mower’s finger.

  “This is a derelict clothing factory, went out of business in ‘86,” the sergeant said, pointing to a rectangular site on one side of the narrow street. “And this terrace is boarded up now, empty and waiting for demolition.”

  “The tall Victorian houses we passed on the way into the site?” Thackeray said.

  “That’s right. They’ve been multi-occupied and deteriorating for years, apparently. The houses and the factory are due to come down in the second phase of the redevelopment.”

  “So if the body was local we’d have the devil’s own job finding people who used to live round there?” Thackeray said. “How long have the houses been empty?”

  “Eighteen months, according to the site foreman, O’Halloran. But they weren’t nice stable family homes, in any case. “A right dump”, he called them. Split up into flats and bed-sits with short-term tenants. “Winos and druggies” according to O’Halloran.”

  “The more you tell me, the less I like the sound of this,” Thackeray said gloomily.

  “Do I set up an incident room in the morning?” Mower asked.

  “No, you don’t,” Thackeray said flatly. “Until we know just how old the bones are we’d be wasting our time and sending the overtime budget through the roof for no useful purpose. We’ll just take it a step at a time, wait for some sort of answer from forensics, before we go rushing in. This could be some little Victorian house-maid who got in the family way and was bumped off by her lover. It could be a bomb victim they never found during the war. There were one or two bombs fell on Bradfield, I seem to remember my father saying. Mistook it for Manchester, or something daft.”

  “Or it could be another prostitute knocked off by who-ever’s been knocking them off all over the north for years,” Mower objected. “Or a runaway who never made it out of town… I could start looking through the files, guv. That wouldn’t do any harm.”

  Thackeray put the evidence bag with its bright trinket, undimmed by time or mud, carefully down on Mower’s desk. The sergeant was right, he knew, but that did not prevent him harbouring a deep reluctance to admit it. If he was honest with himself, he hated murder investigations, however satisfactory the conclusion. More than any other crime, he thought, murder damaged the innocent as well as the guilty, casting suspicion on blameless lives which had touched the victim’s, casting a shadow which might never be lifted over families and individuals who were brushed by grief or the slimy finger of suspicion. He had no more idea than Mower how the unknown woman who had been dragged back to the surface of the earth that morning had died. But he harboured an fervent hope that it was so long ago that it need not concern him or anyone else still living.

  “Wait,” he said more sharply than he intended. “There’s nothing we can do but wait. Just concentrate on the burglaries in Southwell tomorrow, and wait for Amos Atherton’s report. Whoever she is, she’s long gone. She’s one woman in your life who really w
on’t mind if you keep her waiting.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  John Blake stood at the window of his suite at the Dorchester gazing at the traffic sweeping down Park Lane and smiled a self-satisfied smile to himself. Across the road the broad expanse of Hyde Park stretched almost as far as the eye could see, acres of undulating green sward dotted with clumps of trees and scattered with deck-chairs where a few early summer sun-worshippers were already stretched out amongst the morning strollers and joggers.

  Blake was a tall figure, his hair still dark and worn slightly longer than was considered fashionable in nineties London, his face showing few signs that his sixtieth birthday was only months away. Only a close examination would have revealed that his classic good looks owed much to the cosmetic surgeon’s skill and trichologist’s art.

  He had kept his body in good shape though. In fact he had made almost a religion of it during the later, fallow years of his career. Not for him the classic Hollywood props of booze or drugs. Working out had kept him lean, the sunshine had kept him tanned, the claret silk dressing gown, which was all he had put on for the late Continental breakfast which was still spread on the mahogany dining table behind him, was cinched in tightly around a still enviable waist with no hint of a belly. The fans who had idolised him as a much younger man would not have had any difficulty in recognising him had he chosen to leave the sybaritic embrace of the hotel and take a stroll through the throngs of West End shoppers just streets away.

  In the park, a pair of glossy chestnut horses trotted past on the sandy shingle bridle-path which followed the curve of the road, their riders immaculate in black jackets and hard hats, bottoms in skin-tight jodphurs rising rythmically in the style you did not often see in America. He liked tight little bottoms, he thought with a faint smile. He liked Lorelei’s bottom encased in its tight Lycra mini-skirt.