The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  “And Mariella disappeared?”

  Joyce closed her eyes for a moment and lay back against her pillows. Laura watched the flickering of her eyelids and thought for a moment her energy had deserted her after the tense transfer from the infirmary and she was drifting back into sleep. But eventually she opened her eyes again and gave Laura a faint smile.

  “It’s all so long ago, it’s hard to remember what it was like. We were packed into those terraced houses, you know, all higgledy piggledy one family on top of another, all of us refugees of one sort and another. In some ways that made some folk even more anxious to keep themselves to themselves. There were a lot of mothers on their own, single parents they’d call them now but then of course some of us had lost our husbands in the war so that was all right, quite respectable it was, to be a war widow. Though there was always the odd jack the lad who thought we were fair game if we didn’t have a man about. But it wasn’t the sort of cosy community people like to tell you existed in those days. There was a lot of unhappiness. A lot of despair.

  “But on Coronation Day people did get together. Everyone crammed into one of the flats to watch it on telly. The Parkinsons, they were called. Her lad was the oldest I think. Just about ready to leave the grammar school. I’m blowed if I can remember his name. And there was a little lass, Pamela, I think. A big gap between them, because of the war, I suppose. Any road, Mrs. P. was the only one who had a TV, so we all went there. The kids sat on the floor with the adults crammed in behind. Thought she was a cut above, she did, but I persuaded her she should invite the neighbours in.

  “You couldn’t see much, to be perfectly honest. The picture kept disappearing in a snow-storm and the youngsters soon got bored and started whining and got sent out to play. We were supposed to be having a street party at tea time but it was so wet it had to be cancelled. Everyone just took the sandwiches and things home with them to eat there. But Mariella never came home. The parents came round later in the evening looking for her, but the other youngsters said that she’d left them playing in the yard of Brewster’s mill opposite. There was a sort of covered part of the yard where they could play even when it was wet. No-one had seen her since she set off home. They’d been teasing her again, I dare say. They had a go at all the Italian children when the mood took them.”

  “Poor girl,” Laura said softly, recalling a time when she had been an object of derision in a school dormitory because her accent did not fit. Just as she had flattened out her Yorkshire vowels to meet southern expectations she had no doubt that this long-forgotten Italian girl had forced her tongue around English in an attempt to fit in which seemed to have been far less successful than her own eleven-year old efforts. Evidently Joyce shared her lively sense of old injustice. There was no doubt about the tear which crept down her paper-thin cheek this time.

  “They never found her,” she said so softly that Laura could barely hear.

  “And you think this body they’ve found could be her?”

  “Well, it’s in the right place, isn’t it?” Joyce said. She leaned back against the pillows wearily as if talking had tired her out, her eyes taking on a distant look after shifting back forty years to revisit old sorrows. Laura watched and waited, not wanting to press her yet consumed with curiosity about this ancient tragedy in which her own father had apparently been involved.

  “They never found a trace of her, you know. No-one who said they saw her after she left the other children.” Joyce said eventually. “Where they’re digging is where the allotments used to be. You could have hidden a hundred bodies there over the years, I should think, and no-one would have known the difference.”

  “Did the police never arrest anyone?” Laura asked.

  “I don’t think the police were right interested,” Joyce said, not meeting Laura’s eyes. “Reckoned she’d run off. Reckoned she was no better than she ought to be. A little Eye-tie tart, I heard one officer saying when he didn’t know I could hear. Her parents were devastated.”

  “Was she?” Laura asked. “A little tart, I mean.”

  “I’ve no idea, love,” Joyce said wearily. “I shouldn’t think so in those days. Once the war was over they tried to lock sex up in a cupboard again and throw away the key. It didn’t work, of course, but 1953 wasn’t a good year for a young lass to find herself in the family way. And fear’s a good contraceptive.”

  “You’ll have to tell the police, if you think the body could be her’s,” Laura said.

  “Aye, I reckon I will,” Joyce said without enthusiasm, her face pale and strained again, all the suddenly excited interest draining away as quickly as it had come. She lay back against the pillows, her eyes half closed.

  “Shall I bring Michael to see you?” Laura asked gently. “Tomorrow? When you’re feeling stronger?”

  “Aye, leave it till tomorrow, love,” Joyce said. She suddenly clutched the sheets convulsively and half sat up again. “You’re sure you’re not paying owt for me to come to this place,” she said fiercely. “They’re not charging you?”

  “No, no, I promise,” Laura said with literal accuracy although she knew that even though her grandmother had nothing but her pension to live on the social workers who had found her a bed for her convalescence were more than eager to find a relative they could charge for care the hospital had refused to provide.

  “Nye Bevan wouldn’t have put up with any of this nonsense about paying,” Joyce said with a brave attempt at the ferocity of her old political hero. It was her proudest boast that she had once met the charismatic Welshman who had launched the National Health Service. Laura took her hand.

  “Rest and get yourself fit again,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about anything, I promise.”

  “Did we fight all those battles for nothing?” Joyce asked plaintively. “Have those beggars undone it all? Set us back half a century? Can this new lot really not put it right?”

  The door opened before Laura could think of another reassuring reply she only half believed in and a uniformed nurse came into the room, grim-faced and abstracted.

  “You’re still here,” she said to Laura with a note of accusation in her voice. “We like them to rest after lunch, you know. This is the medical ward. You can visit again after five.”

  Laura glanced at Joyce to find that she had closed her eyes. She kissed the paper thin skin of her cheek and gave her hand a final squeeze before turning to leave, suddenly overcome with a desperate fear for her future. She had never heard her normally combative grand-mother so close to despair before.

  Amos Atherton, his green apron stretched tight over his stomach, a surgical mask hanging loosely beneath his several chins, gazed in some satisfaction at his jigsaw of bones. He had arranged them neatly on a white formica work-bench, away from the gleaming steel of the pathology tables under the harsh lights in the centre of the room. This was not a job for his scalpel and kidney dishes or even his hovering blood-splashed assistant who was clearing up after a post-mortem behind him. This was a puzzle Atherton had determined to solve alone.

  There was little enough left of the body which had been unearthed at Peter Hill, and nothing that needed his surgical skills. At one end lay the skull, the cranium intact and washed clean, but missing the jaw bone and most of the teeth. As far as possible in their correct anatomical places he had arranged a collection of vertebrae and a collar bone, two portions of humerus, one for each arm, but only one painfully thin radius with none of the other arm bones or the small bones of the hand to complete the upper limbs. Both wings of the pelvis were in place, if a little jagged round the edges where time and erosion has done their work, and the two strong thigh bones were in place. But again the skeleton was less complete as the bones became smaller and more liable to disintegration under the weight of earth and the scatter effect of having been disturbed by the jaws of a JCB. A small collection of so far unidentified fragments lay to one side.

  Atherton barely glanced up as the door opened and DCI Thackeray came in, to
ok off his coat and jacket, loosened his tie and crossed the room towards him, grim faced. Atherton re-aligned one of the vertebrae to his satisfaction and wiped his hands to clear them of the slight grittiness which adhered to his skin.

  “Well, Amos?” Michael Thackeray surveyed the pathetic remnants of a human being with bleak eyes. “What have we got?”

  “Just the one body,” Atherton said. “There’s no duplicates amongst the bones. And it’s a young lass. The pelvis and the skull give you a good idea of the sex of a skeleton.” He ran a finger lightly over the ridge above the eye sockets. “The pelvis here is not large but it has distinctive female characteristics. The angle between the bones here is too large to be male. And if that wasn’t conclusive then the skull is. Women have a much less prominent ridge of bone here over the eyes and here..” He turned the skull over and ran a finger along the base.

  “But young, you said. How do you know that?” Thackeray asked, fascinated in spite of his distaste.

  “I’ve been studying the text books on this one,” Atherton said, waving a hand towards a pile of books and journals which lay scattered further along the bench. “It’s not a problem you come up against that often. But the crucial thing to remember is that bones change as you get older. You know what a baby’s skull’s like when it’s born, the throbbing gap at the crown which closes up gradually.”

  Thackeray winced slightly. It was not an image he chose to recall, but Atherton ploughed on, oblivious to the policeman’s discomfort, captivated by the problem in hand.

  “Those sutures in the skull fuse by the age of about five. But there are changes in the skull and pelvis, the more marked sexual characteristics, which don’t develop until puberty. And there are other bones which take even longer to reach their full adult shape, well into the teens in fact. A small child has about 300 bones altogether, but an adult only has two hundred. The difference is where they’ve fused, two or three small child’s bones going to make one adult one. The long bones of the limbs take anything up to eighteen years to fuse at each end. This girl had reached puberty but judging by her thigh bone here…” He picked up the humerus and put a finger lightly on the rounded end which was marked off from the stem by what looked like a deep crack. “Judging by this she was not yet fully mature. I would put her age between fourteen and eighteen.”

  “Anything else?” Thackeray asked, casting a professional eye the length of the re-assembled skeleton in an attempt to judge the height from head to toe. Atherton picked up his train of thought easily.

  “Well, there’s research which tells you how to judge a person’s height from the length of some of the bones, the humerus in particular, but I’ll have to do a bit of research myself to find out what the formula is. But you can see from what’s left of her she wasn’t tall. Under five three, at a guess. But it is only a guess at this stage.”

  Atherton stood back from his work-bench and flashed Thackeray a glance of some excitement.

  “There is one identifying feature though,” he said. Thackeray waited. He knew better than to rush Amos’s big moment.

  “Look here,” the pathologist said, picking up the single bone which had survived below the elbow. “This has been broken at some time.” Thackeray squinted at the rough, stained surface and convinced himself that he could see a slight irregularity which could just possibly have been a break.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, aye, quite sure,” Amos said comfortably. “This lass broke her arm at some time and it wasn’t reset that well. There’s a tiny misalignment. There’s no doubt about it. You can feel it. If you get anywhere near identifying her, that might be a crucial bit of evidence. But that’s about as far as I’ll be able to go. To find out how long she’s been there we’ll have to send samples away to the labs. If you want to know what she looked like you’ll have to go in for some pretty expensive facial reconstruction - and even then, unless the jaw turns up, it won’t be easy. Are you still searching the site.”

  “No,” Thackeray said. “I’ve called them off. I’m not sure they’re going to find much else. The place is like a quagmire in this rain. But the contractors have agreed to leave that area undisturbed for a week at least so we have the option of going back if we need to.”

  “Aye, well, unless you’re lucky and come across the rest of the jaw, I’m not sure you’ll find owt which will add much to what we’ve got,” Atherton said. “If nowt in the way of clothes has survived with her you can reckon she’s been there a long while and she’ll be difficult to identify. But she certainly broke her arm at some point.”

  “To be honest I don’t think Jack Longley wants a murder investigation going back years if he can avoid it,” Thackeray said.

  “Cost too much, won’t it,” Atherton said cheerfully. “I dare say I’m running the hospital up a pretty bill just by standing here nattering to you like this. Can’t be cost effective, can it?”

  Sergeant Kevin Mower stood close behind Laura Ackroyd with a feeling of faint regret. She had fastened her hair up today and he particularly admired the curve of her neck, a column of pale cream beneath the copper, which met the dark green of her shirt like the breast of a swan meeting deep water. She continued to ignore him, though hardly unconscious of his closeness and his steady breathing in the dusty recess which the Gazette dignified with the name of an archive. She turned over the pages of yellowing copies of the paper determinedly.

  They had the heavy and dog-eared file out for 1953 and had turned to the month of June. It had been a broadsheet then, not the compact tabloid of recent years, which made it even more difficult to handle. The pages crackled ominously as they were turned and here and there a few flakes detached themselves from the edges and floated down to the dusty floor.

  “They should have put all this on micro-film years ago but they’re too mean,” she said.

  The editions for most of Coronation week were overwhelmingly filled with special features about the royal occasion: page after page of photographs of Westminster Abbey, the processions, Queen Elizabeth and her most extrovert guest, the Queen of Tonga, the crowds in the Mall and the doggedly cheerfull street parties around the country which had mostly been held in the rain. But what they were looking for was there, hidden away at the bottom of a column on page three.

  “Here you are,” Laura said. ““Girl goes missing at Coronation celebration. Fifteen year old Maria Bonetti was reported missing yesterday after leaving a local Coronation party at 32A Peter Street, Bradfield.” No suggestion of foul play, but maybe that’s all they had room for. I think the editions went to press much later in those days but even so that story did well to get into that day’s paper. There should be a fuller story the next day, I should think.”

  She turned to the next edition, handling the fragile newsprint gingerly. She had been surprised to find that the Gazette had kept its files so long when Mower had arrived at the front office asking to look through back copies, but she could only suppose that they had survived intact simply because so few people had ever referred to them in the intervening forty years.

  “Here we are,” she said. “It’s graduated to the front page now. “Fears grow for missing girl”. The police are involved now and Maria’s been amended to Mariella. Your man in charge seems to have been an inspector Jackson. He’s issued a description and asked for anyone who has seen her to contact him urgently. Don’t you have any of this in your own files?”

  “Apparently not,” Mower said. “They say they never close a murder file, but there seems to have been some doubt that this was murder at the time. They never found a body and there was some suggestion from the parents that she’d taken some money. In which case she could have run away.”

  “Well, if she ran, it must have been the shortest run in history, if your skeleton really is Mariella. Do you have any evidence?”

  “Not a lot,” Mower said. “Just a hunch from superintendnt Longley, a man not usually given to hunches. He’s old enough to remember the case, apparently. O
ld enough to retire, if you ask me. We don’t even know yet if the girl’s parents are still alive. This inspector Jackson is long dead, apparently. Killed in a car accident years ago.”

  “You know my grandmother knew the family?” Laura said. “Michael’s going out to talk to her this afternoon.”

  “He said so,” Mower said shortly. He had not been pleased to be excluded from the visit in favour of further inquiries into the series of burglaries which was preoccupying CID. “Can we copy these cuttings?”

  “Yes, of course,” Laura said, realising she was treading on dangerous ground with Mower who, she suspected, resented her relationship with his boss more than he would ever admit. “I’ll get one of the secretaries to do it for you. I’ve got to get on. I’m seeing that old has-been John Blake this afternoon. He was a heart-throb of my mother’s, for God’s sake, and seems to think he can still make a come-back in Jane Eyre. Can you see him as Mr. Rochester?”

  “I’m not even sure I know who John Blake is and I never read Jane Eyre,” Mower said shortly. “I went to a crummy comprehensive, remember?”

  “You’re very twitchy this morning, Kevin,” Laura said, knowing perfectly well that Mower had gone on from his London comprehensive school to take a degree.

  “Let’s just say I don’t like being used as an office junior either, shall we?” Mower said, picking up the heavy bound volume of the Gazette and moving towards the door. Laura looked at her dusty hands and grinned. Serves you right, she thought.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Laura stood at reception at the Clarendon Hotel drumming her fingers slightly impatiently on the polished mahogany counter. She had announced herself some ten minutes earlier, sat for a while in one of the soft arm-chairs arranged around coffee tables in the lounge, rebuffed the attentions of several waiters anxious to bring her coffee or tea, and finally gone back to the young woman at the computer to repeat her request that John Blake should be informed of her arrival.