The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  Thackeray had taken out a notebook and wrote down the names as Joyce mentioned them. It was an interesting story, but sounded too like ancient history for him to be convinced that he had any realistic chance of tracing these fading memories and discovering flesh and blood.

  “Then there were the Smiths,” Joyce went on. “Alice, she was called. Now she did have a husband, but he’d been in a Japanese camp and though he was there he wasn’t, if you know what I mean. A pale gaunt man, he was. Used to sit out at the front of the house on sunny days just staring into space. Never said much, but sometimes you’d hear him screaming in the night. He had nightmares, she said.” Joyce stopped for a moment, as if transfixed by the sights and sounds she was dragging into the light of day after so many years and a single tear ran slowly down her cheek to be dashed away by an impatient hand.

  “It’s all a long time ago,” she said.

  “The Smiths,” Thackeray prompted quietly.

  “Aye, the Smiths. They had a lad too, Ken I think he was called. He must have been about the same age as Mariella. Just the one child like me. Mr. Smith died eventually, I heard, killed by the war just like Laura’s grand-father. It just took longer. Then there was little Danny O’Meara, of course. A little devil, he was, small for his age, dark, bright eyes, but always into mischief and getting clouted by his dad. And Bridget, she were about 12 or 13, much quieter, a pretty little lass, and there were other O’Meara children but they were younger, a couple of girls and a boy perhaps, but too young to join with the older ones’ games. I didn’t know the parents very well. He worked away a lot of the time, I think, and she was so busy looking after the children she never had time to chat. Deidre, she was called, very Irish, must have been a beautiful girl once, but she was worn out with it all.”

  “How old was Danny,” Thackeray asked.

  “Oh, they were all about the same age, fifteen, sixteen, except for Johnny Parkinson, Parky they called him of course, who was a bit older. He’d left school and was waiting for his call up papers. They had to do National service in those days, you know. Laura’s dad was somewhere in between the big lads and the younger children, trying hard to tag along with the big boys. They played endless cricket matches in the factory yard opposite.”

  “That’s four families, including the Bonetti’s. Is that all?” Thackeray asked.

  “I’m trying to remember, Michael,” Joyce said with a touch of asperity. “Of course, there were others. There were a couple of young mothers with babies, but I’m not sure I can remember their names. And the end of the terrace had been split up between a couple of Polish families, but they spoke very little English and kept themselves to themselves. The ones I recall most clearly are the families with youngsters Jack was friendly with.”

  “But the Bonetti’s didn’t keep themselves to themselves?”

  “He’d been in England for most of the war, you see. His English was very good, though her’s wasn’t. And then Mariella and two of her little brothers used to join in the games, in spite of the teasing and the name-calling. When it came down to it, the lads thought she was the bee’s knees, she was such a pretty lass. They taught her to play cricket. It wasn’t that unusual for the lasses to make up the numbers if there weren’t enough lads to make a team. Cricket was a religion round here then, you know. Len Hutton, the Compton brothers, Locke and Laker. It was like football is now.”

  “Did Mariella have a particular boy-friend?” Thackeray asked, gently steering Joyce back to what interested him.

  “I wouldn’t know, Michael,” Joyce said sadly. “Jack was too young for that sort of thing and I was never aware she favoured any of the others specially. You always saw them in a group, not in twos, and her parents were very particular about her not staying out late, I remember. Good Catholics, of course.”

  “Of course,” Thackeray said drily, having been brought up by good Catholics himself. Not that it had made any difference in the end, he recalled, when the nervous fumbling became too much as he and Aileen had lain in heathery hollows on the moors and tried to reconcile their natural inclinations and their Church’s precepts and failed. It was a miracle, he thought, though not perhaps one of the holy kind, that their son had not been conceived long before the marriage they had made in such haste and repented so bitterly at leisure.

  “So no obvious suspects when she disappeared?” he asked wearily. “The boy-friend is always top of the list.”

  “Isn’t it a bit late to be raking over old ashes,” Joyce asked, not responding directly to his question. “Surely it’s too long ago.”

  “There’s no time limit to a murder investigation,” Thackeray said. “If the body is really Mariella’s we’re bound to make some inquiries.”

  “If murder’s what it was,” Joyce said. “They didn’t treat it like a murder inquiry at the time, not for long any way. In the end it just seemed to be assumed she’d run away.”

  “Did she seem to be unhappy at home?” Thackeray asked.

  “She seemed to me to be a much loved daughter,” Joyce said firmly. “And on the street she certainly had her admirers, my lad amongst them, in spite of the prattling about sending the Eye-ties back where they came from. But I’m sure it was no more than that. When she disappeared we were all upset. It breaks my heart now to think she’s been lying there all these years in an unmarked grave.” Joyce shivered and another tear trickled down her pale cheek. Laura flashed Thackeray a look of desperation.

  “I think,” Joyce said, “I’d best go back to bed.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mower pulled the car into the kerb outside a substantial detached house in a leafy Harrogate avenue and took stock.

  “They didn’t do too badly for themselves then,” he said.

  “He owns about six restaurants,” DCI Thackeray said. “One here, one in Knaresborough, another in York and two or three in Leeds, one in Bradfield. A substantial company, being run now by two of his sons.”

  “Pretty good for a prisoner of war.”

  “He was in the right place at the right time, I suppose,” Thackeray said. “He had the expertise when people were being tempted away from fish and chips and meat and two veg into more exotic foods. He started up in Bradfield, of course, but apparently it didn’t really take off until he moved on to places where people might be a bit more adventurous, not too nervous to try osso bucco and linguine and the rest. You know I think I might have been in his restaurant here in Harrogate years ago. I used to come to listen to jazz in a pub here and we went on for a meal once or twice to some little Italian place.”

  Mower wondered who the “we” might have been but knew better than to ask. Thackeray was a man with whom he had learned not to go beyond a certain point and that point, in time at least, was very firmly established as the moment when he had left his home town of Arnedale, on the edge of the Dales, some ten or eleven years before.

  Thackeray, he knew, had lost a baby son and a wife, but assiduous probing amongst colleagues in Bradfield and Arnedale had not entirely clarified in Mower’s mind what had happened then. But Mower knew a man who had been through hell when he met one, and he treated his boss with greater respect than came naturally because he recognised the well tempered core beneath the somewhat remote and always controlled exterior.

  “Right,” Thackeray said, not concealing the note of reluctance in his tone. “Let’s take these folks the bad news, shall we?”

  “Couldn’t it be a relief,” Mower ventured. “Isn’t it better to know the worst than to always be wondering?”

  “After forty years of hoping she might be alive somewhere? I doubt it,” Thackeray said.

  The gleaming oak door of the elegant stuccoed house was opened promptly by a well-built man in his late forties, his gray hair almost silver at the temples above a prominent nose and the jowls which probably always looked as though they needed a shave. His deep set, slightly hooded brown eyes were opaque, evidently reserving judgement on the visitors, who were expected.

&nb
sp; “Guiseppe Bonetti,” he said, the voice low and precise. “My mother and father are waiting for you, chief inspector. But I thought if I could just have a quiet word before we go in…?”

  “Of course,” Thackeray said. The two police officers followed Bonetti to one side of the broad sunlit hallway, with an intricately tiled floor which no doubt deliberately called to mind a villa in a sunnier climate. He led them into a small sitting-room which was obviously used for watching television.

  “They know that you’ve come to discuss the possibility that you have found the body of my sister Mariella,” Bonetti said. He had taken the phonecall from the police in Bradfield and arranged the meeting on behalf of his family. “Naturally they’re upset about that. But what I didn’t tell you on the telephone, because my mother was listening, is that my father is not well. He’s getting on for eighty, as you must realise, and he had a minor stroke six months ago. He denies that it’s made any difference to him. He’s a very determined man. But in fact he’s not strong, he’s partly paralysed down one side and his speech is sometimes difficult. When he does speak it’s more likely to be in Italian than in English. It’s odd really, because his English was always much better than Mama’s. He’s been offered treatment but he’s not a good patient. He’s a very difficult man to help. I just wanted you to bear all that in mind when you meet him.”

  “Of course,” Thackeray said non-commitally. “You understand that at this stage I’m simply trying to identify a body which has been buried for a very long time? There are one or two indicators which only your parents can comment on.”

  “Yes, of course, I understand,” Bonetti said. “And the whole family would be relieved, I think, if this turns out to be Mariella and she can be given a Christian burial, even after all these years. But you can imagine how distressing this is likely to be for the old people. And distress is not good for my father.”

  “Do you remember your sister at all clearly yourself?” Thackeray asked. He knew Bonetti was considerably younger than the daughter who had been brought to England by her mother when the war ended. Bonetti hesitated and then shrugged.

  “Of course, though I was only seven when she disappeared,” he said. “I was born in this country after my mother joined my father in Bradfield, so there was a big gap between me and Mariella. But naturally I can remember her being there when I was small. I had two younger brothers and a sister and she used to look after me in particular when my mother was busy with the younger ones. I loved her very much.”

  “What were you told when she disappeared?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Bonetti said carefully. “At first, I think, I was told that she had got lost and everyone was searching for her. Then later, though I don’t remember how much later, that maybe she had run away and left us. It’s all very vague in my mind. At that age you’re aware that something is very wrong though you don’t always understand exactly what. I can remember my mother crying a great deal, but in a big family there is always so much going on, so much noise and coming and going, that it can be confusing to a child. But I remember missing her very much. Suddenly a light had gone out of my life.”

  Bonetti ran a hand over his thick, gray hair and sighed, but the pain which they glimpsed momentarily in his eyes was quickly replaced by the expression of guarded caution with which he had greeted them.

  “We’ve come a long way from Peter Street,” he said. “You probably can’t remember what it was like after the war with rationing and so on. My father used to grow tomatoes so that there was something to have with the pasta. I remember going to the allotment with him to pick them and him complaining bitterly that they wouldn’t ripen properly in those cold English summers. I can remember my mama trying to cook Italian dishes without the ingredients…..I always think that’s why papa eventually went into the restaurant business. He wanted to give people what he had missed so much in those early days. And suddenly from being the ex-enemy living in poverty everyone wanted to know Paolo Bonetti, they were flocking in to eat his delicious Italian food. It was quite a transformation.”

  “Could we speak to your parents now?” Thackeray asked.

  “Of course,” Bonetti said and waved them back into the hall and into a large sunny room at the back of the house. Here the tiled floor was warmed by several Persian rugs and the white walls hung with what Thackeray assumed were only copies of some of the Italian masters. Between the sitting room and the flawless lawns of the garden, French windows opened onto a Victorian conservatory vibrant with early geraniums and a bougainvillea just hinting at its full magenta glory. It was, as Mower had said, a long way from the overcrowded terraced houses of Peter Street to this approximation of the Mediterranean in a Yorkshire suburb.

  A heavily built elderly woman with iron gray hair swept back from her face, a tightly fitting black dress and gold-rimmed spectacles was sitting by the fire with an unfinished piece of tapestry work on the settee beside her. In a chair opposite an equally substantial man sat bolt upright in his chair, one hand holding a newspaper awkwardly and the other resting lifelessly on his lap. He let the paper fall to the floor and Giuseppe hurried to pick it up and place it on the coffee table between his parents.

  “My father, Paolo, and my mother Signora Maria Bonetti,” he said formally. “Papa, these are the policemen from Bradfield I told you about.” The older Bonetti stared at Thackeray fiercely with eyes as dark as his son’s but infinitely more unforgiving, while his wife fiddled nervously with a handkerchief on her lap. It was evident from her reddened eyes that she had been crying.

  The two old people listened in silence as Thackeray explained to them exactly what had been discovered on the muddy building site at Peter Hill.

  “With remains of this age identification is extremely difficult,” he said. “But there are two things which might help us make a positive identification. Firstly can you tell me whether Mariella ever broke her arm?”

  Paolo Bonetti shook his head at that, and it was obvious that the movement was difficult. But the question had a different effect on his wife. Her eyes widened in a sallow, creased face and she opened her mouth as if to speak, though nothing came out but a faint moan .

  “Mama?” Giuseppe said putting his arm around her.

  “She did,” the old woman said. “Before we came to England, while we were alone in Napoli, she fell on the stairs one day and broke her left arm.” Bonetti the elder was looking at her now with burning intensity as if this was the first he had ever heard of the accident.

  “I don’t know,” Maria said. “Perhaps I never told Paolo, I don’t remember. We were alone there with my mama for four years. It was a long time. Many things happened. But, si, Mariella did break her arm.” Knowing the answer now, Thackeray slowly took a clear plastic evidence bag out of his inside pocket and passed it to Maria Bonetti.

  “We found that close to the body,” he said. “Did that belong to Mariella.” Maria stared at the tiny gold cross as if transfixed and then crossed herself as tears began to course down her creased cheeks.

  “Her papa bought it for her for her first communion,” she said. “Oh, Paolo, they have found our Mariella after all this time. I told you she did not run away, not my Mariella. After all these years they have found her, thanks be to God. Now justice can be done.” Rigid in his chair at the other side of the fire the old man gave a grunt and slumped back into the cushions. Suddenly anxious his son moved to him and took his hand.

  “It’s all right, papa,” he said. The old man looked at his son with eyes like bottomless pools and seemed to make a supreme effort to speak. What he said was not comprehensible to Thackeray or to Mower but his son seemed to understand. He nodded and squeezed his father’s good hand in reassurance.

  “He says do you know how she died,” he said. Thackeray shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s no indication of that.”

  “So you don’t know whether it was murder?” Guiseppe persisted.

  �
��It’s a very long time ago,” Thackeray said. “We will try to trace the other people who lived in the street that summer, but that may be very difficult after all this time. I think the chances of finding out what happened are very remote.” Behind him Mrs. Bonetti made a noise half-way between a scream and a groan and Thackeray turned sharply to catch the flash of fierce hatred which filled her eyes and distorted her heavy features.

  “Of course it was murder,” she said. “Those people, they hated us, they hated all of us. The boys, they chased after Mariella, but they still hated us. We were the wops, the Eyeties, she was the Eyetie whore, I heard them say it. They thought I couldn’t understand, the ragazzi. They whispered about us all the time, teased the bambini, broke down Paolo’s pomodori - the tomato plants. Of course they murdered her, and then they, how do you say it? covered up for each other that day when she didn’t come home. She had been playing with them, those boys. We told the police then. They killed her, all of them, and now you see how they buried her. I have known all the time, all these years, that she would not run away and leave us. I have known that she was dead.”

  With the tears now streaming down her face she turned to her husband, still slumped awkwardly back against his cushions, his face suffused with colour, and her son, standing transfixed beside his father’s chair.

  “I told you I wanted to go back to Napoli, to go home before we die. And you would not have it. And now there is this to spoil our old age, to break our hearts all over again. My poor daughter, my beautiful daughter, mia figlia, mia Mariella.…”

  “Mama mia!” Kevin Mower exclaimed as he pulled away from the Bonetti’s house and carefully negotiated the speed humps which kept traffic to a respectful crawl the length of the tree-lined avenue. “What did you make of that, guv?” Thackeray sat in the passenger seat his face impassive.

  “I think she has probably been bottling that up for years,” he said. “But the rancour has probably deepened with time. Guiseppe said he didn’t remember being teased particularly for being Italian, no more than kids always get teased, he said. But whichever of them is remembering most accurately, the seven year old who wasn’t even sure what was going on or the mother who was no doubt distraught then and has brooded on the injustice of it all for forty years, it doesn’t take us the smallest step further forward unless we can trace some of the other people who lived there at the time.”