The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said, his stomach clenching in a shock wave to which his scars reacted with angry jabs of pain as he realised what he was looking at. Val Ridley followed his eyes and saw the body lying like a discarded toy between the rails and the head, face up, where it had rolled into the grass at the edge of the cutting a yard away. Even from a distance they could see the crimson blood splashed and streaked across the gravel of the track.

  “O’Meara,” she whispered through dry lips.

  “A dead cert, I’d say,” Mower said. “So much for Gary’s medication. And if that’s O’Meara, where the hell’s his friend?”

  “You mean it may not be suicide?” Val asked. Mower glanced at her, taking in the pallor of her face and her tightly clenched fists which she quickly shoved in the pockets of her jacket. He knew better than to ask if she was all right.

  “Well, if it’s murder that’ll stir the boss up, won’t it? You’ll get your full inquiry into the Italian girl’s death.”

  “About bloody time,” WPC Ridley said. But what filled Kevin Mower with foreboding was the knowledge that he must call Michael Thackeray and ask him to come to Long Moor Hospital, and that he must do it now.

  “Oh, God,” he said to himself as he pulled out his mobile phone. “Haven’t you punished me enough recently, you old bastard? What did I do to deserve this?”

  Fosters’ Mills dominated the steepest of Bradfield’s seven hills, its great stone slab of a classical facade and tapering Italianate chimney visible for tens of miles around. It was years now since the buildings had reverberated to the roar of the looms which had brought a century of prosperity to the narrow terraces of back-to-back cottages which had once lined the steep streets between the mill and the town. The terraces were long gone, replaced by squat blocks of 1960s maisonettes, but the mill had remained, a vast sandstone monument to past glories and a standing rebuke to a generation of Bradfielders who could find no use for it.

  Until, that is, Keith Spencer-Smith erupted onto the scene, appointed by the town council to take its rudimentary tourist industry by the scruff of the neck and shake it into life. John Blake’s Mercedes slid smoothly up the hill towards the mill, which had become the jewel in Spencer-Smith’s heavily self-promoted crown. His enemies, and he had more than a few, reckoned that if Spencer-Smith could find a technology which could bottle the smells of outside privies and smoke-polluted air which had made nineteenth century Bradfield unique he would certainly try. If it moved, local lore had it, then Keith Spencer-Smith would sell it.

  Lorelei Baum had relinquished her seat beside John Blake in the front of the Mercedes to Laura when they met outside the Gazette. She had slammed the rear door so hard that it gave a most un-Germanic crash and the big car trembled slightly.

  “Temper,” Blake had said, turning to give Lorelei the benefit of one of his most toothsome smiles. “Laura, my dear, you will have lunch with us after Keith has shown us round, won’t you?”

  “I doubt if there’ll be time,” Laura said. “I’ll have to write something for tomorrow’s first edition when I get back.” As far as she was concerned, lunch with Lorelei in attendance would be so much wasted time. She could not be bothered enduring Blake’s increasingly unrestrained attentions without hope of reward.

  To get his museum off the ground, on the slightly suspect pretext that an early cinematographer who had made his mark in Hollywood had been born in Broadley just six miles away, Spencer-Smith had twisted every arm of every millionaire with even the remotest connection with the textile industry. That and a windfall from the National Lottery had realised his dream, to the astonishment of a town council who were left wondering where the tourists who might be attracted to such a superficially unpromising destination could be housed. Spencer-Smith, it was rumoured, was now using the same strong-arm tactics on hotel chains who might provide the cineasts with beds and breakfasts and club owners who might drag the town’s night-life out of the lager and vindaloo time-warp in which it was fixed.

  John Blake parked in a cobbled yard at the side of the tall mill wall beneath the hoists where bales of wool had once been lifted into the building. Keith Spencer-Smith was waiting for them on the steps leading to what had been the loading doors, attended by two young women in very short skirts with clip-boards and dazzling smiles at the ready. He was taller than John Blake, as fair as the actor was dark, with a silky beard closely trimmed to the line of his jaw. Wearing a silver gray suit and a red and white polka-dot tie he looked every inch the successful entrepreneur.

  With a look of some disdain Lorelei picked her way in high heels over dustsheets and trailing cables where workmen were putting the finishing touches to the main reception area inside the enormous double doors.

  “If I’d known this was still a construction lot I’d have worn denims” she said petulantly. Laura, in a black trouser suit, aubergine shirt and her favourite laced boots could not suppress the smallest smile of triumph.

  Introductions over, the women followed the men into the bowels of the huge building where the floors which had once housed the machinery had been transformed into closed galleries which followed the history of the film industry through from flickering start to virtual reality finish. There was a full-sized television studio where children could put themselves onto video-tape, a viewing theatre which could handle everything from black and white silent movies to the latest wide-screen extravaganzas, and every kind of gadget and gizmo which had turned museum visiting from a silent pilgrimage into a high-tech adventure.

  “This must have cost a fortune,” Laura said to Keith Spencer-Smith, impressed.

  “It’s taken some time to raise the money,” Spencer-Smith admitted.

  “Something Keith’s always been good at,” Blake said.

  “You’ve known each other a long time, then?” Laura asked, not, she was well aware, for the first time.

  “We bumped into each other again in the States……”

  “I can tell you something about John’s time in the military if you like,” Lorelei broke in. “He could have gone to Korea, you know. Some of his best friends got sent to Korea.”

  “But he didn’t?” Laura countered.

  “Well, no, but that was a real scary time for those young men, isn’t that right, John?”

  “Right,” Blake said shortly. “But you’re here to talk about the museum today, Laura, aren’t you? Let’s not waste time on me.”

  Keith Spencer-Smith took her arm and steered her in the direction of the top floor windows which offered a panoramic view of the town in the valley and the hills beyond.

  “If you look here you can just see Broadly where Les Crossley was born, see there, beyond the church spire?”

  “I have to confess I’ve never heard of him,” Laura said. “How did you come across him.”

  “I’ve always been interested in the cinema,” Spencer-Smith said. “He’s in the history books. Developing something like this has been a dream of mine for years.”

  “There’s nothing else like it north of London,” Blake said proprietorily.

  ““There’ll be big media interest for the opening,” Lorelei put in. “Now can I please see where the photo opportunities are going to be. We can’t have John up against these dark gallery backdrops. Too grim. And he favours his left profile, you know.”

  She stalked off with Spencer-Smith’s assistants to seek a suitably lit frame to set off her employer’s fading charms to best advantage. Laura sensed a tension between the two men which she could not fully understand.

  “Did you stay in Yorkshire, then?” she asked Spencer-Smith.

  “Oh, no, I’ve been around,” he said. “Devon, Scotland, abroad. You know the tourist business. But when this came up…” He shrugged. “It seemed like a challenge I couldn’t turn down.”

  Selling Bradfield as a tourist destination seemed to Laura like a career move from hell for any half-successful promoter, but she contrived to look suitably impressed. With her mind only half on the job
, she dutifully followed their host around the rest of the museum, a ghostly, echoing place without its complement of bright lights and flickering technology which would not be turned on until the opening. As they worked their way back to reception Lorelei caught up with them again, her heels clattering like machine-gun fire down the cast-iron stair-case which had been painted in black and red.

  “Tom Cruise’s people never get treated like this,” she exclaimed angrily to Blake. “These kids don’t know shit from Shinola!”

  “Take it easy,” Blake said. “It’ll be right on the night.”

  “You gotta be joking,” Lorelei said ominously, stalking out of the main entrance and back to the car.

  “Time of the month?” Spencer-Smith asked but Blake shrugged.

  “Far be it from me….,” Blake said glancing at Laura for sympathy and finding none. “She’ll be fine. And you, Laura? Have you got enough for your feature?”

  “I think so,” Laura said. “If I need to check anything I’ll give you or Keith a call.” Though she was sure by now that the things which needed checking about John Blake would need a more wily approach than she had so far brought to bear.

  CHAPTER TEN

  DCI Michael Thackeray walked from the central Police Station to the side entrance of Bradfield Infirmary with his mind in a turmoil that he knew was both extreme and dangerous. It was eight thirty on the sort of chilly morning which brought gusts of sleety rain slanting down from the hills which surrounded the town. The weather was an apt reflection of the icy lump which seemed to have congealed inside him ever since Kevin Mower’s call from Long Moor Hospital the previous afternoon.

  He had instructed the sergeant to set the procedures which surround a suspicious death in motion. By the time Thackeray himself had driven with deep reluctance up the familiar winding lane and walked to the railway embankment, the mutilated body had been removed to the mortuary and Mower was standing on the track, the wind ballooning his jacket and rippling his short dark hair. He was deep in conversation with a couple of uniformed officers. Looking back, Thackeray still could not decide whether the glance Mower had flashed in his direction was simply one of acknowledgment or of a sympathy he had never sought and bitterly resented.

  Thackeray had been shown the place where the body had lain between the tracks, the smear of blood on the rail where the passing train had severed not only Danny O’Meara’s head but also one of his hands, the place where the head had come to rest, the chain-link fence, rusted and sagging, where even a child could have climbed onto the embankment from the hospital grounds.

  It was a quiet, secret place. Trees and shrubs overhung the little-used, neglected track with a curtain of green and the air was damp and heavy with the smell of vegetation and wild flowers. The gables and clock tower of the hospital, Thackeray realised with a sense of relief, were out of sight above them.

  Thackeray had instructed Mower to go back to the hospital and take statements from the nurses who had dealt with O’Meara as a patient. He had accepted the uniformed sergeant’s offer to interview the train driver who had felt it best for the sake of his passengers not to stop his train to investigate the body he had been unable to avoid as he drove his two carriage diesel round the tight Long Moor curve on the way to Arnedale. He had never been in any doubt that the huddled figure on the track which he had glimpsed briefly before it disappeared under his wheels could not have survived. He had reported the incident when he had reached the next station and was now at his home in a state of shock waiting to be interviewed.

  Thackeray had driven immediately back to Bradfield with a sense of relief that he had been so easily able to avoid the clamber up the embankment towards the hospital. But he knew by then that Mower’s sardonically raised eye-brow certainly meant that he had learned what Thackeray had intended that no-one should ever know, that his wife Aileen existed at Long Moor in a state of permanent unknowing.

  He had sat in his office until midnight, fighting down the craving for a drink which he had successfully resisted for so long that its newly sharpened claws threw him off-balance. He had gone back to Laura’s flat tired, morose and unable to talk, thrown himself into bed and turned his back on her. Next morning he woke before it was light, unrefreshed.

  When Laura had turned over and asked sleepily what was wrong he claimed an early appointment and left quickly to shave in the police station washroom, where his gaunt reflection in the mirror shocked him. He had taken a solitary breakfast in the canteen. By eight thirty he was putting on the overall which Amos Atherton’s lab assistant handed to him and gazing with well-controlled disgust at the remains of Danny O’Meara on the pathologist’s table.

  “A messy little beggar, this one,” Atherton said cheerfully as he began his examination. “You’d think if he was already in Long Moor he could have found enough pills to finish himself off without all this gore.”

  “Suicide then?” Thackeray asked. Atherton gave him a flash of slightly bleary blue eyes.

  “Got summat else in mind, have you?” he asked.

  “Straws in the wind, no more,” Thackeray said. “A missing visitor, a nurse who says he was well on the mend.”

  “Well then, we’ll take it right steady then, shall we?”

  Atherton turned back to his table, his concentration intense as he continued his external examination of the corpse, tape-recording his comments as he went along.

  “If he were pushed on to t’track, you’d expect to find some sign of a struggle,” he said, turning to Thackeray at length. “But there’s nowt I can see on the trunk or the arms. Surprisingly unmarked, considering, but that’s because of the way he was lying between the rails.” Thackeray looked away as Atherton turned his attention to the severed head, the neck and hair still dark with blood, the features washed for identification but disfigured by massive lacerations across the nose and cheeks.

  “From the position of the body he was face down when the train hit him,” Atherton said. “Which is what you’d expect if he put himself on the track. It’d be a brave man who watched the train coming round the bend.”

  “The hospital says that the medication might have made him woozy but euphoric, certainly not suicidal,” Thackeray said.

  “Aye, well, we’ll check the level of drugs in his blood,” Atherton said abstractedly as he turned the head and began to peer amongst the matted gray hair. A sharp whistle of breath between his teeth was all the indication he gave that he had found something significant as he examined the scalp minutely.

  “This may be what you’re looking for,” he said at last, glancing at his impassive audience. “Happen you’ll need to examine the train for traces of blood and hair but I can’t see myself how it could have severed his head like this and caught him a blow on the top of the skull which has fractured it an’all.”

  “You mean he was hit by something else?” Thackeray asked quietly.

  “Looks to me as if he was hit by a round object, your proverbial blunt instrument, either attached to the train, or on the track - though I can’t imagine the head rolling with sufficient force to pick up an injury like this on the ground. Look,” Atherton said. Thackeray leaned forward reluctantly to gaze at an indentation in Danny O’Meara’s skull which looked to him like nothing so much as a blow with a golf-ball.

  “A weapon?” Thackeray said.

  “It’d make sense, wouldn’t it?” Atherton said. “Knock him cold then lay him out on t’track and ninety nine to one the train’ll obliterate any evidence of the previous injury. That would explain the nice clean cut across the neck, too. Suicide is generally even more messy. Folk might think they can lay their head on the line and wait but generally they panic at the last minute and get made into mincemeat. Lots of bits.”

  “Thanks, Amos,” Thackeray said in protest.

  “Seriously, lad, you need to get your forensic folk onto this sharpish, especially as its raining. Whatever caused this injury, whether it was part of the train, or summat on the track or your blunt in
strument, whatever, it will carry the evidence for a while. The indentation’s deep and it looks as if it bled, which would indicate that it was done before the poor beggar caught his last train. There’ll be traces of blood and hair somewhere, you can bank on it.”

  “Did it kill him?” Thackeray asked.

  “Possibly,” Atherton said. “But it’s academic if it was caused by the train, isn’t it? A blow on the head seconds before it’s severed is neither here nor there? But if it was minutes before…. “

  Thackeray nodded and forced himself to take a last look at what was left of Danny O’Meara before he moved away to take off his overall. Even before the train had done its brutal work, there had not been much left of the boy who had played with the Italian girl all those years before: a skinny, almost emaciated body, a face seamed and lined beyond its years, a straggle of overlong gray hair. If this was Mariella’s killer, Thackeray thought, he looked as if he had already served a life sentence, as perhaps, in a sense, he had.

  But he was increasingly convinced that his execution, was not self-inflicted. He knew now that he would have to follow the trail of Mariella’s killer more determinedly than either he or Jack Longley had anticipated. He more than half hoped to pin the blame here, on a dead man, where it could do least harm after the passage of so many years. He had seldom felt so unprepared, intellectually and emotionally, to launch a murder inquiry.

  Laura flung herself into the corner of Vicky Mendelson’s seductively deep sofa and allowed her friend’s two small sons to cuddle up beside her. As she read them their story she glanced occasionally over the boys’ curly dark heads to where Vicky was shovelling apricot and rice into her baby daughter’s ever-open mouth. It was a domestic scene which Laura found soothing although she was sharply aware that envy was never far away when she visited this comfortably untidy home. She had met Michael Thackeray for the first time at Vicky and David Mendelson’s dinner table and was still unsure whether this was the best or the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She gave Daniel and Nathan a hug and closed their book.