The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  Joyce had to concentrate hard to summon up a mental picture of the lively, laughing Italian girl after all these years. It was easier to recall the mother, a heavy woman made heavier by apparently continuous pregnancies as Mariella’s younger brothers and sisters arrived in quick succession. Once or twice the possibility of mentioning contraception had crossed Joyce’s practical Bradfield mind, only to be dismissed not on the grounds of embarrassment as much as an irritated acceptance that she would be wasting her time. The only thing more regular than Signora Bonnetti’s pregnancies, Joyce had thought angrily, was her clockwork departure for Mass, chivvying her brood before her up Peter Hill to the little Catholic Church half a mile away every Sunday morning.

  She was an anxious woman, Joyce recalled, made more anxious by her husband’s inability to keep work and by the niggling daily pinpricks of insult and disdain directed at her and her children by neighbours who resented strangers of any sort and former enemies most of all.

  Communication with Signora Bonnetti had been difficult, and Joyce could remember Mariella, whose English improved rapidly, translating for her as she had tried to explain the intricacies of the post-war rationing system to the bewildered Italian. A pretty girl, dark, vivacious, a bobby dazzler the lads had said - but the exact shape of her face, the map of eyes and nose and mouth, beyond that fuzzy newspaper picture Michael Thackeray had showed her, the sound of her voice, the way she walked and ran brown limbed through the sunshine, had vanished into the mists of memory and try as she might Joyce could not recall them. She was wrenched sharply back to the present by the voice of Betty Johns.

  “Mrs. Ackroyd! You are a naughty girl,” the matron said, spinning Joyce’s wheelchair round so sharply that it tilted dangerously and Joyce only prevented herself from falling sideways by grabbing the armrests tightly. The pain stabbed angrily the length of her thigh again but she gritted her teeth rather than cry out.

  “You’ll catch your death of cold out there in the porch. And my evening paper, too.” Mrs. Johns took the Gazette off Joyce’s lap without ceremony and began to push her at speed along the hall towards the dayroom.

  Joyce bit her lip in vexation, but she did not want a confrontation which would inevitably end in her being wheeled back to her bedroom. There, she knew by now, she might languish for the rest of the day if no-one remembered to fetch her back for the frugal final meal which would be served at six o’clock and cleared away at six fifteen, whether or not the frailer residents had succeeded in consuming anything or not.

  Joyce was becoming very angry, but it was an anger which she was content to let burn deep within herself for the moment. She did not want to leave The Laurels just yet, although she was as determined as ever to get back to her own home eventually. In the meantime she was keeping a mental note of every indignity which Betty Johns and her handful of staff heaped upon her personally but also, more crucially, on some of her companions who were much less able to look out for themselves.

  Amongst those was Alice Smith. Parked unceremoniously in a corner of the day-room by the matron, Joyce turned her chair with difficulty and looked around at the semi-comotose residents sitting in rows around the walls. She spotted Alice slumped in an uncomfortable-looking chair right under the noisy television set, her eyes half closed. Determinedly Joyce wheeled herself across the room and took hold of her arm. Alice’s eyes half opened but her look was vacant and her smile vague.

  “Hello, dear, ” she said faintly. “Have you come to watch Corrie?” Joyce glanced up at the television set which was blasting out canned laughter to accompany one of the almost identical quiz shows which seemed to fill acres of time. She very much doubted whether any of the residents who sat with their eyes fixed on the flickering images actually took in much of what was happening on the screen.

  “It’s not time for Coronation Street,” she said. “That’s later. After tea. Would you like to come out in the conservatory for a little chat, Alice? There’s a few things I want to ask you.”

  “Oh, no, dear,” Alice said. “I’ve got to watch Corrie. I always watch Corrie after we’ve had our tea.” Her eyes flickered up to the television set again but Joyce did not believe that she could see, let alone comprehend what it offered. Joyce drew a sharp breath, on the point of trying to put Alice right on the time of day but she thought better of it. Alice Smith, she thought, grimly, was out to lunch, as Laura would put it, and she would very much like to know why.

  At the Clarendon, John Blake disentangled himself from Lorelei’s somewhat spiky embrace and picked up the telephone beside his bed. She rolled away and wiped her face where she could feel the mascara had been smudged by her tears. The Bradfield Gazette lay scattered on the floor where he had flung it after glancing briefly at the front page.She had been working at the desk on the other side of the room when she became aware of his dissatisfaction, her antennae finely tuned to his body-language.

  “Hon?” she’d said. “Is something wrong, hon? We don’t have anything adverse in that rag, do we, angel? I can’t imagine….”

  “No, nothing adverse,” Blake had come back perhaps a little too promptly. “You’re doing absolutely fine on the Press front, Lorelei. Absolutely fine. Now find me the local phone book, will you? I need to look someone up.”

  Unconvinced she had crossed the room, sat down on the soft edge of the Clarendon’s most extensive king-sized bed and attempted to smooth the all too permanent creases out of Blake’s brow.

  Perversely irritated by her approach he had pulled her onto the bed and stripped off her skirt and panties without ceremony. His attentions were brutal and she could not contain a gasp of pain, which she knew would provoke him to further excesses.

  “Jeeze, you’re hurting me, angel,” she said.

  “Great,” John Blake said, the veins at his temples throbbing as his excitement increased. “I’ll make my phone call later.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sergeant Kevin Mower leaned back in his canteen chair and winced. Cautiously he slid a hand under his shirt and felt the still angry scar just below his ribs where a knife had come perilously close to his heart just months before. They said your life flashed in front of your eyes as you died, he thought, but he knew it was not true. He had felt nothing but an overwhelming sense of panic as he realised the fatal extent of his miscalculation in the couple of seconds between the two blows which had almost killed him and the oblivion which quickly followed.

  It was now, in the quiet aftermath, when he could see that his colleagues were beginnning to forget and to treat him as casually as normal, that the enormity of his brush with death bothered him. For them the memory might be fading already, but for him it was not. He woke occasionally in the night, sweating and gasping for breath as he fought off unknown assailants in the dark. But it was after that, as he lay in bed waiting for his heart to stop pounding, that he wondered what of value he would have left behind if Laura Ackroyd had not been there that day to staunch the bleeding and save his life.

  He noticed WDC Val Ridley watching him from the queue at the canteen counter and straightened his chair. She would not have shed many tears at his funeral, he thought bitterly as he watched her cross the room towards him, neat, blonde, collected and with pale blue eyes which always harboured deep suspicion when she was in his vicinity.

  “What have I done to deserve this?” he asked lightly as she pulled up a chair and sat down beside him.

  “Not a lot, sarge,” she said.

  “You’d go down well with the lads in the Met, Val,” Mower said. “They work on the basis that most people are guilty until they’re proved innocent.”

  “That’s why you left, is it?” she asked.

  “Well, it wasn’t for the talent ‘oop North’”.

  “What about this Italian girl,” she said. “I get the feeling no-one’s falling over themselves about her.”

  “It was a long time ago,” Mower said mildly. “The chances of getting a result must be pretty slim. But you’re wrong as i
t happens. I’ve just persuaded the guv’nor to let me check out the only O’Meara in the phone book. One of the lads who used to hang out with Mariella was a Danny O’Meara. There’s just a chance he’s still around. Do you want to come with me to check it out?”

  The pursuit of Danny O’Meara took the edgy team of Sergeant Mower and Val Ridley further than they had expected. Late that afternoon they found themselves driving up the winding drive of Long Moor Psychiatric Hospital, a sprawling Victorian pile now largely derelict and abandoned as patients had been moved out into the community, which for many meant onto the streets.

  The drive out from Bradfield had been largely silent. Val had stared resolutely out of the window as Mower drove fast up the narrow roads to the hamlet of Long Moor where the hospital had been built a century ago on the edge of the sweeping Pennine moors. After trying and failing to penetrate Ridley’s icy disapproval, Mower had shrugged and decided to get the trip over as quickly as possible. She remained impassive as he swung recklessly round the road’s sharp corners before squealing to a halt at the hospital gates to explain their mission to the uniformed porter.

  Their visit to O’Meara’s home had been brief and emotional. The door had been opened by a young woman, smartly dressed in a gray business suit, dark stockings and heels, who had nodded briefly when they had explained why they were there.

  “My mother’s inside,” she said indicating the front room of the terraced house. Her mother turned out to be a crumpled woman who must, Mower guessed, be in her mid-fifties but looked ten years older, gray straggly hair falling into her eyes and masking an unhealthy looking puffy face. She was sitting close to the gas fire in her dressing gown in a room which looked as if it had been unused and un-dusted for a considerable length of time. She looked up only briefly when her daughter told her who the visitors were and Mower explained what they wanted.

  “She gets very depressed herself when my father’s bad,” the younger women explained. “This time he’s had to go into hospital. It’s been going on for years. It’s not been easy for her.”

  Mower had let Val Ridley coax the dispiriting story of Daniel O’Meara’s life from the two women. He was indeed the boy who had played with Mariella Bonnetti in Peter Street all those years ago. Grown up, he had married Margaret, the woman who now sat hunched over the blue flames. He had fathered four children who had somehow scrambled up and out of Bradfield’s impoverished terraces to make something of themselves in spite of their father’s recurrent illness which had made it almost impossible for him to hold down a job.

  “I’d have left him years ago,” his daughter had said dismissively. She had glanced at her mother. “But of course she listens to the priest, doesn’t she.” The older woman had turned at that and given her daughter a look of pure dislike.

  “He can’t help it,” she said. “He’s not responsible, is he, for being sick, I mean? She’s like all of them. Thinks he can just pull himself together. Isn’t that what you say, Kay? You’re always telling him to pull himself together?”

  “You make excuses for him,” Kay retorted, turning away. Mower felt Ridley’s disapproving eyes follow his as he appraised the shapely legs beneath the short tight skirt.

  “When did he go to hospital?” Val Ridley asked with an edge to her voice which was not entirely justified by the fact that she recognised that the two women were rehearsing old arguments which could go on indefinitely. “Where has he gone?”

  It emerged that O’Meara had taken a turn for the worse three days ago, refusing to get out of bed, neglecting to wash or dress, and threatening suicide before lapsing into a state of paranoia and hiding under the bed-clothes whenever anyone entered his room.

  “Did anything spark this attack off?” Mower had asked, but neither woman could think of any reason why Danny O’Meara had slipped so suddenly back into the depression which had dogged him for years.

  “Did he ever talk about living in Peter Street when he was a lad?” Val Ridley had asked casually but both women had shaken their heads, evidently having made no connection with the discovery there of the Italian girl’s body which had been reported in the Gazette.

  “He lived there, I know that. Our Bridget might know more,” Kay said. “She was the one who was always close to Dad. He used to tell her stories, daft things, all nonsense I used to think.” They had taken down Bridget O’Meara’s address in Leeds in case it was needed. As they had left the dispirited and dispiriting O’Meara household to pursue their quarry to Long Moor they heard the front door open and close again behind them. Kay O’Meara, car keys in her hand, caught them up as Mower opened his car door.

  “I didn’t want to say in front of my mother,” she said. “But I think Dad was being dunned for money. I saw him talking to a bloke at the end of the street the other evening as I drove past. There was definitely an argument going on.”

  “No-one you knew?” Val Ridley asked and the young woman had shaken her head.

  “I only got a glimpse of him,” she said. “He was tall, well dressed, gray haired, I think. Not enough to recognise. He’s a terrible gambler, my dad. It was probably someone from the bookies.”

  “We’ll ask him about it,” Mower had said, not neglecting to watch appreciatively as Kay O’Meara swung her long legs into her car and slammed the door almost as hard as Val Ridley slammed hers. But it looked, Mower thought as he pulled up outside the small section of the hospital which still showed signs of life, like very long odds that they would get anything useful out of the man they had come to see. They were met by a casually dressed nurse, his hair tied back in a pony-tail and an identity badge pinned to his sweatshirt which told them his name was Gary. When they explained their mission he looked vague.

  “He’s got a visitor already. If he’s still here,” he said. “I’ll check for you.”

  He wandered off into the further regions of the entrance hall and disappeared from view, leaving the two officers standing in what had obviously been the hall of the original house around which the hospital had been built. The place had a curiously temporary air about it, the once elegant curving staircase hemmed in by partitions, the original doors replaced by flimsy modern affairs with panels of safety glass at the top, the paintwork chipped, the floor of maroon and white Italianate tiles cracked and stained.

  “I should think this place would give you depression rather than cure it,” Mower said sourly.

  “I think they’ve given up on cures, haven’t they?” Val Ridley offered. “Dump them in the community and leave us to scrape ‘em up when they get out of hand or the cardboard boxes spring a leak. Isn’t that the prescription?” Mower glanced at her reflectively.

  “I didn’t know you felt so strongly,” he said.

  “Well, there’s a lot you don’t know,” Val Ridley said. “And a lot you won’t find out if all you’re interested in is getting a hand inside every pair of knickers that comes within range.”

  “Ouch”, Mower said with a grin. It was not knickers he seemed to be getting under as much as someone’s skin. But before he could make any capital out of that conclusion, Gary strolled back from where-ever he had been making his inquiries.

  “He’s gone for a walk in the grounds with his visitor, apparently,” he said.

  “He’s fit for that, is he?” Mower said sharply. “I thought he was suicidal.” The nurse gave Mower a faintly supercilious smile.

  “Oh, he’s fine now he’s on medication,” he said. “He’ll be going home in a day or two. This episode was just a slight setback. “

  “They can wander in and out of here, then?” Val Ridley asked dubiously.

  “Some can, if they’re not sectioned. Danny’s a voluntary patient. We do have a couple of secure wards. But there’s not much call for that these days,” Gary said complacently. “They don’t rave, you know, like they used to. There’s medication for most conditions. We’ve moved on a bit since One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

  “We might debate that some time,” Val Ridle
y said with some asperity, heading briskly for the door.

  “You’ve come up from Bradfield, have you,” Gary asked Mower inconsequentially. “CID? You must work with Mr. Thackeray.” Mower drew a sharp breath at that, a question springing to mind which he hardly dared ask. But there was no need. Gary was a gossip who did not need encouragement.

  “He still comes up now and again to see his wife. She doesn’t know him of course, but I suppose he feels he must. Poor beggar.”

  “Any idea where Mr. O’Meara might have gone?” Val asked over her shoulder from the doorstep where she had been surveying the extensive grounds. She had evidently not been listening and appeared to be unaware that what the nurse had just said had rendered the sergeant speechless as its implications sank in. Gary shrugged.

  “There’s a couple of acres out there. Great on a nice day like today but a waste of space most of the year. If you follow the paths round the back of the house you get a good view right down to the railway at the bottom. You should be able to see Danny and his friend from there. They won’t have left the grounds. He’s not cleared for outside trips just yet.”

  “Who was the visitor?” Mower asked, trying to gather his scattered thoughts.

  “I’m not sure,” Gary said as he ushered them back to the door. He hesitated as he reached for the security lock. “Just a friend. Tall, well-dressed bloke. Oldish. Gray hair. Nice for him. The family doesn’t visit, you know. Funny how different people’s reactions are to mental illness, isn’t it?”

  Mower and Ridley stood on the overgrown terrace at the back of the house for a moment in the weak sunshine scanning the hospital grounds. There were wooden benches here and there on the rough cut grass and a few people sitting huddled up in coats against the unseasonably cool wind. They made their way down the slope inquiring for Danny O’Meara of everyone they met but without gaining any coherent information. At the bottom of the hill, where a rusting wire fence separated a bedraggled shrubbery from the steep slope of the railway embankment, the view of the Maze valley, with Bradfield a smudge of gray on the horizon, stretched for miles. Mower glanced along the cutting to where the shining rails disappeared around a curve and something caught his eye.