The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  His attention was caught by a Rolls which had drawn up outside the hotel’s main entrance below and he watched entranced as a tall Arab in snow white traditional robes and a red and white banded head-dress got out followed by two women veiled to the eyes in black. They were welcomed promptly by the uniformed flunkey on the door. He had been too long away, he thought. He had almost forgotten the sheer cosmopolitan elegance of this part of London, the still restrained display of wealth, so unlike the brash extravagance of the California where he had, he thought regretfully, perhaps spent too much of his life.

  Not that he had been able to appreciate these sorts of attractions when he had worked in the city as a young actor. All he could remember almost forty years on were the endless queues of the post-war capital. Queues at the dole office where he signed on most weeks and at the scruffy little employment agency specialising in kitchen skivvy jobs to which he resorted occasionally in financial desperation, queues in the wings at theatres as he waited for one audition or another, never sure whether what was required was a cut-glass accent or his native northern vowels as drama lurched from Rattigan to Osborne.

  There had been queues for buses and queues at underground stations, even queues at his agent’s, more often than not, as he waited impatiently to discuss a career which seemed to have taken the down escalator without ever setting foot on the up.

  The chasm between his chilly, dismal digs in Kentish Town and the Dorchester had been as deep as any he had ever crossed. He might take the Tube back up to Tufnell Park, he thought, just for old times sake, to see if the tall brick house where he had rented a damp top floor room was still there. But then again, he might not. Nostalgia, he reckoned was a dangerous emotion to indulge in, especially on this side of the Pond. Better to leave the past strictly undisturbed. He was taking risk enough in agreeing to go briefly back to Bradfield without tempting fate any further. It was only the chance of publicity for the Bronte project which had persuaded him to ignore the determination of the best part of a life-time never to return to Yorkshire. But Rochester was a part he desperately wanted to play, the tragic romantic lead he felt he deserved after years of dismal “cameo” roles or no roles at all. If Newman and Eastwood had kept going at his age, he saw no reason why he should be any different. But this was his last chance of a come-back, of that he was quite sure. And with the current slightly astonishing surge of interest in costume drama and a writer of the calibre of Brad Bateman with a screenplay already written, it was a chance worth taking a risk for.

  Behind him he heard Lorelei Baum put the phone down. He turned and picked up the tall flute of Buck’s fizz he had left on the breakfast table.

  “Well?” he asked, in the voice, deep and rich and just slightly husky, which had caused thousands, if not the millions he imagined, of feminine hearts to flutter in the early 1960s. He knew his voice at least was surprisingly untouched by the years.

  “Well, not bad, honey,” Lorelei said, glancing down at the clip-board of papers on which she had been making notes. She was perhaps half his age, with the emaciated figure of a model, breasts of silicone voluptuousness and the eyes of a tiger. She wore a skin-tight black mini-skirt and an emerald green silk shirt open to her cleavage, with chunky gold jewellery at the neck and ears and weighing down long slim fingers with nails as red and glossy as her lips. She waved her pen at her notes.

  “The Globe will go for an interview. So will Movie-time. We lunch with them today. The Evening Mail will get back to us. So will the Courier‘s show-biz person. And then when we get up to York-sheer…” She pronounced it as if the syllables were separate words and she knew the meaning of neither. “Up there we’ve got this interview arranged with a local hackette, been commissioned for the Sunday Extra magazine. They want to concentrate on the prodigal returning angle, you know? A bit like that artist going back to his home-town, what’s his name, the one with all the swimming pools and the gays in the shower? Wasn’t that in York-sheer too?”

  “Hockney,” Blake said shortly, flattered by the comparison but still self-aware enough to know that his return to his native turf was not quite in that league. “But you can forget all that prodigal son stuff. As far as my fans are concerned I’m an adopted American. That’s the way I’ve always preferred it.”

  “Right,” Lorelei said dubiously. “So, we’ve the two days here for interviews, then I’ve rented you a limo for the trip to the north and you’ll have a week before the museum opening. That will give you time to do your recce for locations before you need to come back to London to meet the backers the next Friday. And we can fit in the interviews with this local journo - Laura A-ke-royd…”

  “Ackroyd,” Blake said irritably. “You pronounce it Ackroyd.”

  “Sure,” Lorelei said easily. “And you can fix a visit to your aged Ma on the way. That should make a good photo-call for the local Press….”

  “Nope, no pictures of my mother,” Blake said sharply. “She’s very old and she doesn’t like her picture taken. Has always hated it.”

  “But Blake, honey, that a real shame,” Lorelei protested. “That’s a great angle for us. A really great angle.”

  “You can work on a story, but no pictures,” Blake said, the once famous dark blue eyes cold as a winter pool. “What you’ve got to remember Lorelei is how darned depressed and miserable that part of Yorkshire was when I was a kid - dark, dirty, puritanical…. Why do you think I got away as soon as I could and never went back? I hated those grim little towns we lived in - Bradfield, Millfield, Eckersley. Here today and gone tomorrow. Hated them, always did and always will. The last thing we want is someone crawling out of the woodwork to tell the Press how I spent most of my youth working out how I could break loose. It’s not as if I was even born there. I hardly know where I was born, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Gee, I didn’t realise it was as bad as that,” Lorelei said, her lips taking on a faint pout.

  “It’s nothing you can’t handle,” Blake said easily, running a hand through her hair and down the long neck, not stopping at the collar of her shirt. She shuddered as his fingers reached her breasts, although a watcher might have been hard pressed to judge whether in anticipation or fear.

  “Why do you think I brought you with me?” he asked, unbuttoning her deftly.

  “I thought there were other reasons,” she said, letting her clip-board slide to the floor and hitching up her short skirt easily over silky underwear.

  “Those too,” he said, but his voice was muffled as he slid off her French knickers and buried his face between her legs. She closed her fingers tightly on the back of his thick hair, taking care not to disturb his toupee.

  “Cool,” she sighed and shut her eyes. Then she screamed.

  Superintendant Jack Longley walked into Bradfield police headquarters that morning in a mood so dark that it could have extinguished every light in the building. It was another wet morning and on the hill-side building site a mile away a dozen of his officers were still scrabbling in deep mud and occasionally coming up with a relic which could be tentatively identified as human. Up above them Pete O’Halloran watched gloomily, clutching his mobile phone and trying to reassure the main contractor’s office that it would be possible to recommence work some time soon.

  Once back in his office Longley skimmed through the reports on his desk with simmering irritation before picking up the phone and summoning his DCI preremptorily.

  “A good conference, sir?” Thackeray asked cautiously as he responded promptly to the call he had been expecting.

  “Bloody awful,” Longley said shortly. “Those beggars seem to think that if we clock up arrests of a couple of dozen kids with spliffs in their pocket rather than concentrating on banging up the six or seven serious villains we’ve got in this town we’ve done summat useful for society. All they’re bothered about is number-crunching. The sooner I get out of this mad-house the better.”

  Thackeray nodded. He shared Longley’s conviction that much of the management
culture being imposed on the police service from above was profoundly misguided but did not have the option of a swift exit into retirement open to him yet.

  “Any road - you’re my crime manager. How’s crime managing? What’s all this about a body?” Longley asked, flicking a finger at the report which lay on top of the pile. “Recent, is it?”

  “Amos Atherton thinks not,” Thackeray said. “I’ve got a team still working up there and gradually Amos is piecing together a skeleton, though it seems unlikely we’ll find everything he’d like. They’ve not come up with much this morning. And there’s no trace of anything except bones - no remnants of hair, clothing, shoes, anything of that sort, which leads Amos to think she’s been there a long time.”

  “She? It’s definitely she, is it?”

  “Amos reckons so from a quick examination of the remains,” Thackeray said. “Female and relatively young, he says, though he needs more time and specialist tests to be sure. And then there’s the crucifix and chain. It may have nothing to do with the body, may simply have been lost in the area by someone else, but it was found close to the bones, so I’m working on the hypothesis that they belong together.”

  “Any likely missing persons?”

  “Mower’s done a quick run-through and come up with half a dozen names - two prostitutes who’ve not been seen for years, a sixth-form girl who went missing in 1981 and has never turned up, though there were suggestions that an unsuitable boyfriend might have gone away with her, a mother of two who apparently walked out on a sticky marriage in ‘84, and another woman who disappeared in the family car in ‘89 leaving a note saying she’d had enough. But she was in her forties and Amos reckons this is a relatively young girl.”

  “But he can’t tell you how old the remains are? When she was buried, I mean?”

  “No. And it’s not easy to work that out, he says. There are chemical tests the labs can do on the bones and the surrounding soil but they’re not very accurate and they’ll take some time. He’s going to consult some expert forensic anthropologist in Manchester when he’s completed his own examination. He reckons he can give us sex and a rough age but he’s unlikely to come up with a cause of death unless there are obvious injuries like a bullet wound.”

  “Bloody hell,” Longley said. “So what we’ve got is an unknown female who died on an unknown date from an unknown cause. I can’t see that improving our performance indicators much, can you?”

  “I think we should leave it alone until the forensic tests are completed,” Thackeray said slowly.

  “Aye, we’ll play it down with the Press for the time being,” Longley said. “You’ve enough to do without chasing ghosts. Though there is one line you could get that sharp young beggar Mower to follow up. A bit of desk research to keep him out of mischief.”

  “And that is?” Thackeray asked, intrigued in spite of himself.

  “It’s a long shot on the basis of where this lass was found. There was a girl went missing on Coronation Day - when was that? 1953? ‘54? I remember it because I was about the same age myself and desperate to join the Force. I saw the pictures of this pretty Italian lass who went out with a gang of lads when they got bored with watching the crowning on the telly and never came back. She lived there on Peter Hill somewhere. I remember going up there while they were searching for her, mooching about watching the coppers going house to house and thinking what a grand start it’d be if I could find her. One of those daft things lads do. But they never did find her. It’s a long while back and it’d be the devil’s own job to trace anyone who remembers the case, but it’d be worth digging out the file if it still exists.”

  “Do you remember her name?” Thackeray asked, intrigued at the thought of a young Jack Longley smitten by the photograph of a pretty girl.

  “No, I don’t,” Longley snapped, picking up the incautious glint of amusement in Thackeray’s eyes. “But the date sticks in my mind. And the fact that she was Italian. It wasn’t that long after the war, and the notion of an Italian family paying less than total attention to the Coronation didn’t go down too well, I remember. Her father was an ex-PoW who stayed on and brought his family over, as far as I can recall. There was still some prejudice around in the fifties.”

  “I can imagine,” Thackeray said feelingly. Prejudice against in-comers was not something which had faded much over the last few decades in this part of England in his experience, and the opportunity to display it had grown exponentially as a trickle of post-war refugees from Europe had turned into a flood of immigrants from Asia.

  “Italian, therefore Catholic, therefore wearing a gold crucifix,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s a possibility.”

  “Aye, well, a possibility but no more,” Longley said dismissively. “Don’t waste your time on it until you get some forensic evidence. If there’s a chance she’s been there forty months rather than forty years there’s no point it taking the difficult option before you have to. If it is the Italian lass the chances are who-ever buried her’s long dead too. So it’s hardly worth fretting over, is it?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Mariella Bonetti,” Joyce Ackroyd said firmly.

  “What?” her grand-daughter said abstractedly, kneeling down awkwardly to try to fit a pile of books into the small locker beside Joyce’s bed.

  “Mariella,” Joyce repeated sharply. “She disappeared on Coronation Day. They never found her. Your father was always out playing with her.” Laura knelt back on her heels and looked at Joyce in astonishment.

  “Playing with her?” she exclaimed. “Playing what, for God’s sake?”

  “Cricket,” Joyce said, wincing as she tried to move herself inTo a more upright position against her pillows. She had been delivered under protest to The Laurels Nursing Home by ambulance that morning, wheeled into the tiny single room which Laura was presently trying to make a little more home-like, and, complaining loudly, had been put to bed. In spite of her protests Laura had found her asleep soon after lunch, looking frail and every inch the old woman she resolutely refused to admit she was when she was awake. She had clutched the bed-clothes with arthritis-gnarled hands as she woke, and Laura thought she caught her blinking away tears, though more of frustration than self-pity, she was sure. But now Joyce’s eyes were sparkling with glee and her face was alive with interest.

  “Cricket?” Laura said faintly, scrambling to her feet and pulling the room’s single, not very comfortable chair into the narrow space between the bed and the wall. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  Joyce looked at her grand-daughter in triumph, astonished as always at seeing so clearly a resurrected version if herself, slim hipped, green eyed and with that unruly mop of red hair which she guessed attracted as many admirers now as it had done when she had been as young herself. One of the sadnesses of a life almost without vanity had been watching her crowning glory fade away with the years to its present snow white.

  “This skeleton they’ve found at Peter Hill, of course,” Joyce said, aware of a sparkle in Laura’s eyes which matched her own. “It was all over the front page of your newspaper yesterday afternoon. Don’t you read what your colleagues write? Didn’t I ever tell you I lived there for a while after the war? Me and your dad. We had rooms in one of those houses in Peter Street, the ones they’re going to pull down.”

  “Good lord,” Laura said. “I thought you lived up at the Heights, before it was the Heights of course, before they pulled the old terraces down and built the flats…..”

  “That was later,” Joyce said impatiently. “Immediately after the war, you had to take what you could get. When your grandfather was killed I couldn’t afford the house we’d been renting. I was lucky to get the Peter Street place. It wasn’t a palace, but it wasn’t a slum either. Not then any road. Those places got very run down later.”

  “And this girl? What did you call her? Maria?”

  “Mariella,” Joyce said. “There was an Italian family living two houses down, father, mother and a whole
tribe of children. Of course they weren’t very popular, being Italian, so soon after the war.” Her eyes went blank for a moment and Laura let her compose herself. The photograph of her grandfather was as familiar to her as those of her own parents. It stood now on Joyce’s bedside table, and Laura guessed that the young soldier who had left her to go to war was as real now as the day she had married him. Joyce sighed and Laura touched her hand gently.

  “Mariella?” she said softly.

  “Her father had come over here as a PoW - a prisoner of war - and decided to stay. Mariella was the oldest of the children. She’d been born in Italy before the war and came over here afterwards when her father sent for her and her mother. The other children were much younger, born here when the family was together again. Mariella and her mother spoke poor English, spoke Italian to each other most of the time, as far as I can remember. She was fifteen that year, the year of the Coronation, the year she disappeared. A lovely looking lass, very dark, dark eyes, dazzled all the young lads, including your father.”

  “But dad must have been much younger than that,” Laura objected, doing a few quick sums in her head.

  “Oh, yes, he was only twelve or so. He was the baby of that little gang.”

  “Gang?” Laura said faintly.

  “Not a gang in the sense you mean it now, drugs and knives and joy-riding,” Joyce came back sharply. “Playmates, more like. There were four, maybe five lads, teenagers you’d call them these days, and your dad who was younger, and Mariella and her little brothers used to tag along, though they were more hangers-on, really. Not really accepted. But they went around in a group, played cricket in the summer, in the winter too if it was fine, kicked a ball around the street after school if it wasn’t, came begging for extra points to buy sweeties, made a damn nuisance of themselves on Mischief Night. And the Bonfires. You’ve never seen owt like the bonfires they built for Guy Fawkes. They collected wood and rubbish for months ahead. A huge great fire they had, on the allotments, making up for all the ones they’d missed during the black-out, I dare say.”