The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  “You were fine,” Laura said, trying to inject some enthusiasm into her voice. If the man needed stroking to this extent she supposed she would have to oblige.

  “Have dinner with me tonight?” Blake said. Laura could see Lorelei’s eyes darken with anger although her smile never faltered by so much as a millimetre. “You said you wanted another chat. There’s a new place Keith has been telling me about, out towards Harrogate….”

  “Lakers? It’s booked about six months in advance,” Laura said laughing over her shoulder as she kept a step ahead of him on the flight of steps which led down to the square. Opposite she could see the rain-stained concrete bulk of police headquarters.

  “Oh, Lorelei will get us in, won’t you honey?” Blake said. “A table for two? No problem?”

  “Sure, no problem,” Lorelei said through gritted teeth as Laura smiled at her sweetly.

  “Not too early, though,” Laura said. “I’ve some things to finish first.

  “I’ll pick you up at eight thirty,” Blake offered. “Will that do? Give me your address.”

  “Fine,” Laura said faintly, her attention distracted by a dark car driven by Michael Thackeray which had drawn up at the kerb a few yards away. From the rear widow her grandmother’s face was also clearly visible. Embarrassed, and annoyed with herself for being embarrassed, she scribbled her address on a piece of paper and thrust it into Blake’s outstretched hand but before she could move away he took her by the shoulders and kissed her rapidly on both cheeks.

  “A bientot,” he said.

  “Oh, blast,” Laura said under her breath as she spun on her heel and walked towards the car, aware that two pairs of eyes at least were watching her with the deepest suspicion.

  Michael Thackeray half turned to look with a mixture of affection and exasperation at the two elderly women in the back seat of the unmarked police car in which he had collected Laura from the Town Hall. He had said nothing as she slid into the seat beside him, meeting her raised eyebrows and helpless shrug with a look she could not easily interpret. For his part he had devoted himself exclusively to Joyce Ackroyd and Alice Smith as he drove to Peter Hill.

  He parked the car on the muddy and littered road at Joyce’s peremptory instruction alongside the terrace of tall Victorian houses a hundred yards along from the high wooden fence which concealed the building site where Mariella Bonnetti’s body had been found. There was no sign of the construction workers today. They had been sent off to more profitable sites until the police had finished their routine work here.

  There was little left of Peter Street’s tall houses where Joyce and her son, Laura’s father, had lived briefly when he was a boy. Windows, from semi-basement to attic, were boarded up. They must once have given the street’s shifting population an extensive view over the town in the valley below, where the sun was catching the sheen of recent rain on slate roofs and the town hall tower, its gothic decoration picked out in gold, glittered in the late afternoon light.

  “Right ladies,” Thackeray said. “Is this far enough? Can you see what you need to see from here?”

  Laura got out and opened the car door at Alice Smith’s side. “You stay there, nan,” she said to Joyce but her grandmother shook her head.

  “I can manage,” she said, opening the door at her own side of the car. Thackeray got out quickly and helped her to her feet on the uneven pavement while Laura hurried around the car with the crutches. She saw panic for a second in Joyce’s eyes as she clung to Thackeray’s arm and fumbled with the arm grips before she was able to get her balance, wincing with pain as she put her plastered leg on the ground.

  “We’ll get you back on your feet, nan, I promise. They can do marvellous things now. Tell her Michael. They can do marvellous things.”

  Thackeray looked helplessly at the two women, so alike, with the same oval face and fine hair, in Joyce’s case faded now to snow-white from the vivid copper which was Laura’s glory. He had thought that he could never be torn apart by anyone like this again.

  “If Laura can’t get you on your feet again, no-one can,” he said to Joyce.

  “Do you remember how Fred used to sit on them steps there, Joyce,” Alice Smith said suddenly, pointing to the steep flight which led up to a front door where someone had painted a huge number 6 in fluorescent pink paint. “Number six. That were our house. The whole of the ground floor we had, a bit more space than most, and Fred used to sit out there watching the kiddies playing.”

  “Is that what he was watching?” Joyce asked. There was a silence as Alice seemed to move back in time to consider the question, her eyes distant and her face creased as if in pain.

  “Aye, I think it was,” she said. “Though you could never be sure wi’Fred, when he came back. He said nowt.”

  “Can you tell me about Fred and the children?” Thackeray asked gently.

  “He hated them,” Alice said with unexpected vehemence. “He hated them because they were young and had everything ahead of them and he was dying. He knew that. At night, sometimes, he……” She hesitated and a single tear could be seen glittering at the corner of her eye.

  “At night?” Thackeray prompted, so quietly that Laura, standing a few feet away with a protective arm round Joyce, could barely hear him.

  “At night he used to cuss them,” Alice said firmly. “He cussed the noise they made running up and down t’stairs. There were no carpets on them stairs. You couldn’t get carpet for love nor money. The whole place echoed as they banged about. And he cussed them when they played out late. They’d play till it got dark that summer, nine, ten o’clock at night you’d still hear them running, laughing….living! Shouted for our lad to come in, he did, shouted and cussed and hit him when he came, if he could get close enough. But Keith were quicker, by then, quicker and stronger an’all.”

  “I thought he was called Ken,” Joyce said irritably. “It’s all so long ago.”

  “He was a big lad, by that time. Bigger than his dad. He’d shrunk, had Fred, when he came back from that place. Thin as a lath and shrunken somehow, by what them devils did to him. He didn’t know the lad, of course, when he got home. I hardly knew I was pregnant after that last leave before he was sent out East.”

  “And the Italian girl?” Thackeray murmured.

  “He hated the Italians worst of all, all those children, all that noise, laughing, crying, jabbering - all that foreign noise. And they were Eye-ties, weren’t they? What were them cowardly Eye-ties doing in Bradfield, he asked. Over and over he asked that. He couldn’t understand what they were doing here, in his country, when they’d fought on the other side. I think he thought that if they could come over here then it’d be the Japs next….it made him ill, that did, thinking about that. He was full o’hate, was Fred, full of it, till the day he died.” Alice gazed up at the dilapidated terrace of houses in something like wonderment, as if she was unaware of the effect she was having on her audience.

  “That were your place, Joyce, weren’t it?” she asked, pointing at a first floor window at the end of the block. Joyce nodded.

  “I never knew Fred felt like that,” Joyce said. “He was civil enough when I spoke to him. He wandered a bit in his mind, I thought, but he was civil enough.”

  “Oh, he liked you, love,” Alice said unexpectedly. “That red hair of yours. It reminded him of his sister, Edna, the one who lived in Cleethorpes. I’ve never seen her from the day of Fred’s funeral to this. But he liked to talk about Edna, did Fred. She were his favourite.” Thackeray ran a hand through his hair and caught Laura’s eye. After years of interrogation he was at a loss to know how to ask this old woman the question to which he most urgently wanted an answer. Laura read his mind and guessed that the most direct route to what he wanted to know might be the most circuitous one.

  “How much can you remember of Coronation Day?” she asked, directing her question at Joyce, but including Alice in a sideways smile of encouragement.

  “We were all indoors, pet,” Joyce said
. “We watched the television at Mrs. Parkinson’s and then we had our tea indoors because the weather was so bad.”

  “Was Fred with you?” Thackeray asked.

  “He was for his tea. Then we went home. He wasn’t too good in company,” Alice said. “The children had gone to play out, and I was the next to go. I took Fred home before he got too worked up.”

  “And he stayed at home then, did he? Until you went to bed?”

  Alice looked at Michael Thackeray, her eyes quite clear now and unafraid.

  “He went out of doors later on. It had dried up a bit by then and it was warm inside. He went out and sat on t’step like he always did. He’d not enjoyed the excitement, hadn’t Fred. It had all been a bit too much for him.”

  “So let me get this straight, Mrs. Smith,” Thackeray said. “The kids were out playing. Fred was on the step. But you could see him there?”

  “Not all the time,” Alice said. “I couldn’t see him all the time. He were still outside when our Keith came in from playing and I got the lad a bite of supper in t’kitchen. That were at the back of the house. I couldn’t see Fred while I were in t’kitchen.”

  “Do you think Fred could have….”, Thackeray hesitated. “Do you think Fred could have had anything to do with Mariella’s disappearance?” he asked at last.

  “I’ve thought for forty years he must have killed her,” Alice said simply. “I don’t know how, and I’d have said nowt while he was alive. He deserved to live what was left to him in peace after what he’d been through. And then there were Keith to think of, a life to make for himself. But I’ve thought for forty years Fred must have done it. I don’t know where or when or how he found the strength so you’re wasting your breath asking. But I’ve always thought he must have killed her.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Laura lay rigid in the narrow single bed of her own spare bedroom watching the gray light of dawn creep through the curtains and over the ceiling. She had gone to bed cursing her own stupidity, slept fitfully for a couple of hours, and woken again with a dry mouth and a thumping headache cursing herself even more roundly. Wide awake now as she heard a distant clock chime four, she tried to ignore the throbbing behind her eyes and review objectively the events which had led her to slam the spare room door in Michael Thackeray’s face and go to bed alone.

  It had all begun to go wrong almost as soon as she had joined Michael and the two elderly women in his car that afternoon. She had not expected him to come himself to interview Joyce again, had half expected him to delegate the job to Kevin Mower or to the blonde police-woman she knew only as Val, and she had been incautious enough to express her surprise. Thackeray had reacted with irritation which she guessed stemmed as much from the fleeting kiss he had seen Blake give her as from any serious belief that she was not pleased to see him. She had never suspected him of possessiveness but there was no doubt of the anger in his eyes when she told him a little later that she would be having dinner with Blake again that evening, and at the only restaurant in Yorkshire to have gained two Michelin stars.

  “Is there a quid pro quo?” he had asked, and had turned away when she tried to laugh the question off.

  Then there had been the row with Betty Johns when she had delivered Joyce and Alice Smith back to the nursing home at six o’clock that evening. The matron had advanced down the hallway to the front door when they arrived, her face flushed and her bosom heaving, and had delivered a fierce tirade about irresponsible behaviour amounting to abduction.

  Alice had cowered in the doorway while the Ackroyds, grandmother and daughter, gave as good as they got, but when in the end Joyce had been bundled unceremoniously into her wheelchair, gasping with pain, Laura was left in a frenzy of frustration as the front door was slammed shut. What filled her with torment more than her grandmother’s vigorous protests was the look of stark fear in Alice Smith’s eyes as she too had been pulled inside.

  “I didn’t realise that you hadn’t told them you were taking Alice out,” Thackeray had observed mildly, putting his arm around her as she sat trembling in the front seat of his car again.

  “I’ll have Joyce out of that place tomorrow,” Laura vowed, shrugging him off. “She can’t stay. That woman is a monster.”

  “You said you would call your father.”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll call my bloody father,” Laura said. “He should be here, shouldn’t he? I shouldn’t have to sort all this out alone. But that’s men for you, isn’t it? Never there when you need them.” She knew she was being childish and unfair and that in lashing out she risked hurting Thackeray more than anyone but she was too angry herself to notice the pain in his eyes.

  “We’ll see them both tomorrow to take formal statements about what they can remember of Mariella,” he said evenly. “I’ll get Val Ridley to cast an eye over the place at the same time. If there’s something seriously wrong there she’ll sniff it out.”

  Back home, changing for her dinner date, she found a brown envelope which Joyce had given her earlier and she had pushed into her bag without thinking. She flicked through the contents quickly in between putting up her hair and applying her make-up and was surprised to see a collection of faded black and white snap-shots which must have been taken around the time when Joyce and her own father were living in Peter Street. She left them lying on the bed while she completed her toilet and after glancing in her long mirror and pronouncing herself well-satisfied with what she saw, she took the packet into Thackeray who was watching television.

  “Joyce gave me these for you,” she said, dropping them into his lap.

  Thackeray stubbed out his cigarette and glanced at the photographs and then at Laura. She was wearing a three-quarter length black skirt, an cream silk shirt under a velvet jacket, discreet gold jewellery and with her hair coiled in a copper crown on top of her head she took his breath away.

  “Lucky man,” he had said quietly. “Will you be late?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” she said. “Michael, it’s only work.”

  “Yes,” he had said, and now looking back on what came later she knew he had been right to distrust her. It had been more than a pleasant professional chore from the moment John Blake arrived in the Merc to collect her and settled her into the ready-warmed leather seat with old-fashioned courtesy. She had enjoyed the food and the wine by several glasses too many, had allowed herself to be flattered by the attention of the man who, even at his age, still attracted more glances than most from fellow diners, and when he had pulled into a lay-by on the main road back to Bradfield and put his arm around her, she had not objected. Looking back she knew she had been more drunk than perhaps she realised. But not that drunk. She had known very well what she was doing.

  “You and I could get to know each other a lot better,” he had said, reaching out for a switch which let the seats gently recline and then leaning towards her. “You have that English beauty I’m looking for in my Jane Eyre.” He leaned across her and pulled her hair back from her face. “Very Victorian,” he murmured. “Though I don’t think little Jane was a red-head. Pity.”

  She let him kiss her and told herself that there was nothing wrong with some uncomplicated sex for once, the sort of thing she would not have thought twice about before she shackled herself to the roller-coaster of a relationship with Michael Thackeray. As John Blake’s tongue explored hers she knew that she wanted him as much as he seemed to want her and she did not demur when he began to unbutton her shirt.

  It was only a sharp tap on the window which eventually led her to push him away and press her face against the cold glass of the car window in embarrassment. Blake lowered his window a fraction.

  “Not here, sir, if you don’t mind,” the policeman had said, flashing his torch into the interior of the car. Blake jerked his seat upright sharply with a muttered curse and started the engine.

  “England never changes, does it?” he said. “The same thing happened to me once in a Mini and a damn sight more inconvenient that was.�
� He sighed. “I can’t ask you back,” he said. “Lorelei will be prowling round the suite with a stop-watch counting off the minutes. I can’t tell you how sorry that makes me, Laura.”

  He had driven her home and she had let herself into the flat feeling sick and miserable. Thackeray was still up, with her grandmother’s snapshots spread out on the coffee table in front of him. He glanced up as she came in, evidently preoccupied and oblivious to her disheveled state.

  “Look at this,” he said. She bent over, careful not to get close enough to let him smell the alcohol on her breath, almost afraid he would be able to sense her disloyalty through her skin. He was looking at a faded photograph of half a dozen children and young people evidently taken on the steps outside Alice Smith’s house in Peter Street.

  “Who do you recognise?” he asked. She studied the picture more closely.

  “My father,” she said slowly, pointing to the youngest of the group, a freckled boy in short trousers whose red hair was evident even in black and white. “And is that Mariella? It must be.” The Italian girl sat on the steps in the middle of the group, a mass of dark curly hair around a laughing face, a gold ornament at her neck catching the sunlight which was making most of the youngsters screw up their eyes. She was sitting between the two tallest, fair-haired boys, holding the hand of one and sharing a proprietorial grip on a cricket bat with the slightly younger boy. The picture was faded and cracked with age but even after forty years it was obvious that Mariella was the centre of attention.

  “No-one else there you recognise?” Thackeray persisted, but Laura shook her head.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Should I?” She turned the snapshot over and saw that her grandmother had pencilled in the names of the children on the back.

  “Roy Parkinson,” she said. “That’s Roy Parkinson.”

  “And the blonde boy is Keith Smith. And who’s the younger girl?”