The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  “Bridget O’Meara,” Thackeray said. “Next to her brother Danny.”

  “The man who’s just died?” Laura asked. “Is there a connection? Seriously?”

  “I don’t know,” Thackeray said. “It’s all a long time ago so we may never know. But I think I might have a chat with your John Blake.”

  “Blake?” Laura said, her mouth suddenly dry. “Why would you want to talk to him?”

  “He says he lived here as a child,” Thackeray said. “You know he does. He might have been at school with some of these kids.”

  “Do you think so?” Laura said, trying not to let too much scepticism creep into her voice while wanting to find any excuse to keep Thackeray as far away from Blake as it was possible to get.

  “Why not? In any case, he’s being very cagey about his past, isn’t he? Have you found anything out about the man? Really? Or is he just stringing you along, buttering you up with treats like a trip to Laker’s so he can get the sort of profile he wants?”

  “That’s ridiculous, Michael,” Laura said. “He lived in the old part of town, towards Wuthering, where they pulled all the slum terraces down.”

  “Which street, Laura,” Thackeray persisted. “Exactly where? What’s happened to investigative journalism here?” The realisation that she had no answers to these questions hit Laura too hard for comfort. She flung the photograph onto the pile on the table.

  “You’re just annoyed because I went out to dinner with him again tonight,” she said. “You’re being very childish. What did you think I was going to do? Fall into bed with him?” Thackeray leaned back in his chair and looked at her soberly.

  “If I’d seriously thought that I might not have been here when you came home,” he said.

  “But it crossed your mind,” she said with all the bitterness she could muster. She left him staring obsessively at the photograph of the children and shut herself in the spare bedroom, leaning her head against the door and letting the tears flow unchecked down her cheeks and onto her favourite silk shirt which she had encouraged John Blake to unbutton.

  Thackeray did not knock at the door and in the end she fell into bed and slept. Now as a chilly morning dawned, she knew with dreadful clarity what she had risked last night. She also knew that some of Thackeray’s angry allegations were only too justified. She had allowed John Blake to charm her off her perch and she guessed that his passion last night was probably as contrived as any of his performances on the screen. She had allowed herself to be manipulated and she did not know was how she could ever tell Michael Thackeray what a fool she had been.

  Detective sergeant Kevin Mower was surprised to find Michael Thackeray in the office before him the next morning. It had not been unusual for the DCI to appear early when Mower had first known him. In fact there had been many mornings when he had wondered whether his boss had bothered to go home at all. But since he had moved in with Laura Ackroyd his habits seemed to have become more regular and his morning demeanour a shade less forbidding than it used to be.

  But not this today, Mower realised, his antennae well-tuned to the moods of superior officers. The atmosphere in the office was positively arctic, he felt, as he hung the jacket of his suit carefully over the back of his chair, loosened his Italian silk tie and the top button of his shirt and took stock of the pile of files and messages on his desk. He could think of no particular reason that he could have provoked Thackeray’s displeasure personally and with the wisdom of long experience immediately put it down to woman trouble. Had Laura Ackroyd, he wondered, also stumbled on the item of information which he was still concealing in the murkiest recesses of his mind, tentatively bringing it out now and again to assess its potential for advantage or harm.

  “Coffee, guv?” he asked, but was rewarded only by a dismissive shake of the head as Thackeray continued to pore over a thick file in front of him. Mower shrugged and settled to his own work until they were interrupted by a uniformed officer who handed a fresh file to Thackeray.

  “The PM report from Mr Atherton, sir,” he said. Thackeray flicked though it almost impatiently.

  “Right,” he said to Mower. “Amos reckons that it’s almost impossible for all O’Meara’s injuries to have been self-inflicted. He thinks he was either already dead or unconscious when the train hit him. And as forensics can’t find any evidence of anything except the wheels of the train touching him, nothing else which could have inflicted the blow on the back of the head, it looks as if it’s definitely murder.”

  “Well at least with this one there’s a chance we’re looking for a live suspect instead of some guy who’s been dead and buried for forty years,” Mower said. He had just been reading Thackeray’s notes on his conversation with Alice Smith the previous day.

  “Maybe,” Thackeray said non-commitally.

  “You don’t go for Alice’s story then?” Mower asked, surprised.

  “I don’t go for anything until I see some evidence,” Thackeray said. “What Alice Smith suspected is neither here nor there. If you accept that, you have to accept that Danny O’Meara’s suspicious death is just a coincidence and I don’t go for coincidences either.” Thackeray hesitated for a moment and then came to a decision.

  “As far as that’s concerned see what you can dig out on John Blake’s background will you?”

  “John Blake? The film actor?” Mower could not disguise his surprise but Thackeray avoided his eye..

  “The film actor,” he said. “The one doing the returned prodigal performance. He’s been all over the Gazette. But he seems to be remarkably reticent about his background in Bradfield. He must be around the same age as some of Danny O’Meara’s friends in Peter Street. See if you can find out where he went to school, where he lived, when he went to RADA - I think that’s where he trained.”

  “So we carry on with that inquiry too, guv? We assume they’re connected?” Mower felt slightly bemused by the new tack Thackeray seemed to be taking but he kept his thoughts strictly to himself as his quick brain tried to make some connections between the film actor, his recent appearance in the Gazette, for which Mower knew he had been interviewed by Laura Ackroyd, and his boss’s unexpected interest in his past.

  “Like the superintendent says, Kevin, we don’t need to break our necks over it. But we’ll bear it in mind when we go and see Mrs. O’Meara, shall we?”

  “Right, guv,” Mower said.

  “And while we’re doing that, I want whoever saw O’Meara’s visitor at Long Moor to help with a computer generated portrait - the man on the gate, the nurse who saw them go into the grounds. They’re saying he arrived at the gates on foot, which is unusual out there. But maybe he parked a car outside somewhere. Check that out. And I want everyone who was at the hospital on Monday afternoon interviewed. Someone must have seen something unusual if O’Meara was taken down that railway embankment against his will.”

  “Everyone, guv?” Mower ventured.

  “Everyone who is medically fit to give a statement,” Thackeray said very quietly, the sudden tension in his jaw warning Mower that he was treading on very thin ice indeed. The sergeant got up quickly and put on his jacket.

  “Consider it done, guv,” he said.

  A whole clan of O’Meara’s had gathered at Danny’s home by the time Thackeray and Mower arrived later that morning and were let in by Kay, the dead man’s daughter, who offered no more than a nod of recognition as she waved them into the living room. The centre of attention was Margaret O’Meara who was sitting close to the television with a heavy cardigan round her shoulders, her hair even more unkempt than the last time Mower had seen her, her face blotched and puffy and her eyes blood-shot with tears.

  She was surrounded by a litter of empty tea-cups and glasses and used plates which balanced precariously on top of piles of newspapers and magazines, on the corners of shelves and completely covered the coffee table in front of her. The room was awash with flowers in vases and jam jars, filling the air with a sickly sweetness, and sympathy ca
rds were already beginning to fill the mantel-shelf above the elaborate gas log-fire in the old-fashioned tiled grate. Thackeray and Mower had to edge their way into the room through a crowd of middle-aged women who glanced at them curiously for only seconds before they resumed their animated conversation.

  “Mum, it’s the police again,” Kay said loudly enough to attract everyone’s attention for a moment. Danny O’Meara’s widow looked up briefly from the card she was reading and dug the hefty young women who was sitting next to her in the ribs.

  “Make a bit of space, then,” she said. “Let the sergeant through, can’t you?”

  “This is chief inspector Thackeray who’s in charge of the investigation,” Mower said. The two men had the attention of the whole room now, and Thackeray glanced around at the audience of friends and neighbours and sighed.

  “I’d like a private word with Mrs. O’Meara and her daughter, if I may,” he said. Very reluctantly the visitors edged their way out of the room into the crowded hall and kitchen and Mower closed the door behind them with rather more force than was strictly necessary. Mrs. O’Meara put down the cards she was holding and turned pale eyes on Thackeray but it was Kay who realised the significance of his arrival.

  “What’s happened?” she said sharply. “You don’t get the top brass investigating suicides. It’s not as if he hadn’t tried before.” Mower flashed her an appreciative look, again noting the short black skirt above not to be under-estimated legs, and the firm breasts under her plain white shirt. And brains as well, he thought, before catching Thackeray’s interrogative eye and realising that the chief inspector was waiting for him.

  “How many times did your father try to kill himself?” he asked Kay.

  “Oh, God, I don’t know,” she said. “How many times, mother? Four? Five?”

  Her mother evidently made an heroic effort to focus her mind but did not speak and the effort was more than she could cope with. Huge tears coursed down her flabby cheeks again and she buried her face in a paper tissue and blew her nose noisily. Kay turned away in irritation and, perhaps, disgust.

  “It was too many,” she said. “Too many for any of us to put up with.”

  “Has he ever tried to kill himself on the railway before?” Mower persisted, concentrating on the girl whose sharp blue eyes always seemed to take in more than was being put into words.

  “No, not that way. Pills mainly, pills and a bottle of Scotch once. Never anything violent. I’d never have thought he’d have the bottle to do that.”

  “Mrs. O’Meara,” Thackeray broke in. “I’m sorry to have to bring more bad news, but we have reason to believe that your husband’s death was not self-inflicted at all.”

  “An accident, you mean?” Mrs. O’Meara said, animated enough at last to take notice of what was going on around her. “You mean it were an accident? I told Father Turner I didn’t believe he’d kill himself….” She hesitated, aware that Thackeray had shaken his head at this outburst.

  “You mean he was killed, don’t you?” Kay said flatly. “Some-one pushed him under that train, didn’t they? Who was it? One of the other patients? Another bloody nut-case? That’s why you’re here, inspector, isn’t it?”

  “We don’t know what happened, but the post-mortem indicates that he was dead or unconscious before the train hit him. He wouldn’t have known anything about it, Mrs. O’Meara, as far as the pathologist can tell.” Thackeray’s voice was flat and expressionless and Mower knew that he was hating every minute of this interview.

  “There are a few questions we’d like to ask you about your husband, Mrs. O’Meara,” Mower said. “If you feel up to answering them.”

  “Kay, get Father Turner on t’phone and tell him what’s happened,” Mrs. O’Meara said to her daughter.

  “In a moment, please,” Thackeray said sharply. “A few questions first.”

  “What can we tell you,” Kay O’Meara asked, taking her mother’s hand in hers.

  “Do you know anyone who hated your father enough to kill him?” Mower asked. Both women shook their heads in astonishment at this.

  “I don’t think you understand what depression does to people,” Kay said impatiently. “He hardly ever went anywhere. He never had a job to speak of. He had no friends, never mind enemies, just family and a lot of them got sick and tired of him in the end. He got into debt wi’the bookies sometimes, but we usually managed to pay them off, one way or another.”

  “You had no more thoughts about the man you saw him talking to before he went into hospital?” Mower asked.

  “I told you. I only caught a glimpse from the car. Not anyone I recognised, gray haired, well-dressed but I didn’t get a good look at his face,” Kay said. “I just thought it was someone dunning him for money again. It wasn’t unusual.”

  “Who needs enemies when he’s stuck up there wi’ a gang of loonies,” Mrs. O’Meara broke in suddenly. “If someone pushed him under a train it’ll be one o’them, won’t it, stands to reason.” Mower glanced at Thackeray who hardly seemed to be breathing, his face like stone.

  “Did any of the family visit him at Long Moor?” Mower asked, quickly. “Mrs. O’Meara?”

  “I can’t get right out there to t’back of bloody beyond on t’bus,” she said. “Any road, it doesn’t do any good, visiting him. If he’s bad he doesn’t hardly know you and if he’s getting better he’ll be home in a couple of days so there’s no point.”

  “Miss O’Meara? Did you go to see your father?” Mower persisted but Kay shook her head dismissively.

  “I’m at work all day,” she said. “And like mum says, there’s no point. He’s never in there long, just a couple of days generally. They don’t like keeping them in you know. Haven’t you heard of care in the community?”

  “Your husband was one of quite a large family, I think,” Thackeray said suddenly, his voice strained. “Where are his brothers and sisters now?” Margaret O’Meara did not seem to think the question strange.

  “There were six on’em,” she said. “Danny were the oldest, his brother Paddy’s in Australia and the other brother Dermot’s in London. We haven’t heard from them for years. His sister Mary lives out Arnedale way and Kitty stayed in Bradfield. She’s here if you want to talk to her. And there was Bridget, of course. We named our Bridget after Danny’s oldest sister. She died years ago.”

  “Tell him everything, mother,” Kay said sharply, but when her mother shook her head dumbly she evidently decided to complete the story herself.

  “My auntie Bridget she would have been, though she was dead long before I was born. She killed herself, didn’t she? Or so my father always said. She must have been about twenty and my dad twenty one or two. Apparently they were at a party up at Wuthering, when them flats were new in the sixties. And she got drunk and jumped off the balcony. They said it was an accident but my father always swore it was deliberate.”

  “Deliberate?” Thackeray said sharply.

  “Suicide, I mean,” Kay said quickly.

  “He never got over that,” her mother said, stuffing a handkerchief against her mouth to smother the spasm of grief which overcame her. “We were walking out, Danny and me, and I married him any road because I thought he’d get over it but he never did. He blamed himself, you see. He thought he should have saved her, though I don’t think he even knew she were on t’balcony so I never saw the sense in that. He loved Bridget…more than any of the others. Always blamed himself that she went the way she did.”

  “Did Bridget have a boy-friend?” Thackeray asked.

  “Not that I remember,” Mrs. O’Meara said. “I don’t think she thought much of lads, kept herself to herself, a miserable little thing she seemed to me. Danny used to say he dragged her to that party to try and cheer her up. So he reckoned it was his fault she fell.” Thackeray stood up abruptly.

  “We’ll do our best to find out who killed your husband, Mrs. O’Meara,” he said. “And if you can think of any reason anyone might have had for attacking him,
let us know. Anyone who might have had a grudge, recently or not.” Thackeray led the way back to the car and sat for a moment in the passenger seat with his eyes closed.

  “Almost forty years,” he said so quietly that Mower could hardly hear him as he started the engine and pulled away from the kerb. “He hadn’t got over it after almost forty years.”

  “Do you really think there’s a connection, guv?” Mower asked dubiously.

  “I don’t know, Kevin,” Thackeray said. “But if O’Meara’s family never visit him when he’s in hospital and he doesn’t have any friends to speak of, who did go up there to see him the day he died? And why? And why was his sister Bridget such a miserable little thing that she went to a party and jumped off a balcony? And who can tell us anyway after all this time?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The bleakly tiled and deserted corridors of The Laurels echoed as Laura Ackroyd marched from the day-room, where the usual residents slumped in their chairs either asleep or with glazed eyes focused on the television set which was blaring out the children’s programme Blue Peter. She headed for the medical wing and her grandmother’s bedroom. She opened the door unceremoniously to find Joyce asleep, her face an unhealthy gray against the pillow, one arm flung above her head almost as if to ward off a blow. Her fingers were curved into a gnarled claw and her other hand clutched the bed-clothes like a life-line, the knuckles white as she stirred uneasily. Laura drew a sharp breath and closed the door behind her and leaned against it for a moment before moving to the bed and putting a hand gently on Joyce’s shoulder.

  “Nan, wake up, darling,” she said. Her grandmother rolled awkwardly onto her side with a groan and her eyelids flickered but did not open. Laura stroked the thin white hair away from her face, feeling the pulse at her temple beneath the paper-thin skin. The old woman’s fragility frightened her more than she dared admit.

  “Nan, wake up,” she said, a little more loudly, but there was no response. Laura bit her lip in frustration and looked around the narrow room. There was a half-empty glass of water on the bedside table but no sign of any medication. Very gently she unclasped Joyce’s hand from the sheets and drew the clothes up over her shoulders and tucked the bedclothes in firmly, before going out into the corridor again in the grip of a blind fury.