The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

It had all seemed such a good idea at the time, she thought sardonically, as the incongruity of her situation, bruised, wet and bitterly cold in the middle of England in early summer and just a couple of miles from human habitation, hit her. She had left the hospital full of the urgency which had seized her as she had watched her grandmother being wheeled away.

  She had remembered John Blake saying that his mother was in an excellent home for the elderly, and suddenly her only priority became not only locating that home but inspecting it before the NHS turned Joyce back out into the careless clutches of the “community” again the next day. What she really needed, she thought, was a solution to Joyce’s problems to present to her father when he eventually turned up.

  When she had called at the Clarendon, Blake had come down from his room and agreed readily enough to drive her there, taking the main road to Ilkley where the rest home he had selected for his mother was housed in a solid four-square Victorian building of blackened stone which, he said, had formerly been an hotel. The contrast with The Laurels could not have been greater, she thought as the door was opened by a neatly uniformed nurse and they were ushered into a comfortable sitting-room with a bay window overlooking well-kept lawns with a view of open moorland beyond. Several elderly women were sitting about drinking tea and chatting. A foursome played bridge at a card-table in the window.

  They had waited only a few minutes until the nurse ushered in a gray-haired woman, smartly dressed in a floral dress but with that vague look in her eyes which Laura had begun to recognise.

  “Your mother was very tired. I was just about to settle her down for the night, but I dare say she can manage a little while longer. She’s always much more cheerful after you’ve been, you know,” the nurse said to Blake. She settled her down in a fireside chair with a rug over her knees.

  “Would you like tea?” she asked, and when Blake refused left them to talk. Blake took his mother’s hand.

  “She doesn’t really know me any more,” he had said. Mrs. Blake smiled enthusiastically at them both.

  “I had such a nice trip to Scarborough,” she said.

  “It must be thirty years since she went to Scarborough,” Blake said impatiently. “I’ve had her out in California half a dozen times since then, but she seems to have forgotten all that.”

  “It’s an awful thing, forgetfulness,” Laura said. “My grandmother’s mind is still as clear as a bell.”

  “You’re lucky then,” Blake said irritably.

  “You shouldn’t spoil me like this, George,” Mrs. Blake said earnestly to her son who dropped her hand as if he had been scalded and turned away.

  “George was my father,” he said to Laura. “He left us when I was a kid and she never had a good word to say for him. Now she doesn’t know the difference.” He looked around the room impatiently and waved at the nurse, who could be seen in conversation just outside the sitting room door. When she did not come he headed towards the door.

  “I’ll fetch someone,” he said. “If we get her put to bed we can have a look round.” The old woman watched Blake go and then leaned foward and patted Laura’s hand.

  “Never mind, Pam,” she said confidentially. “We’ll go to Scarborough again one of these days. We had such good times, didn’t we, dear? And in California?”

  “Now then, Mrs. B, time for bed, is it?” the nurse said, bustling back into the room and helping her charge out of her chair with a firm but not ungentle hand.

  “She’s well away with the fairies today, isn’t she dear?” she said to Blake as she guided his mother towards the door. “She has her good days and her bad days.” Blake shrugged and watched his mother’s departure without emotion.

  “I’m sorry,” Laura said, meaning it. “It’s a cruel disease that leaves a body without the person you knew seeming to inhabit it any more? She seemed to think I was someone else.”

  “I don’t want you writing about her,” Blake said harshly. “You do understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course. It wasn’t because of the profile I wanted to come over here. I explained that.”

  “Yes well, she’s well looked after here,” Blake said dismissively. “And as you can see, if they’ve got all their marbles they can really have quite a pleasant time. It’s not cheap though. Could your grandmother afford it?”

  “No, but my father can,” Laura said.

  Blake had shown her around the ground floor rooms civilly enough and a nurse had taken them upstairs to look at some of the bedrooms. It was getting dark when they left and as they began the long climb out of the town on the road to Broadley, the scenic route back to Bradfield, the cluster of rocks on the summit of the cliffs to the west were silhouetted like the monstrous beasts they were named for against a sky of dove gray streaked with lavender and pink

  Laura had relaxed as Blake steered the car expertly round the sharp bends onto the open moors as darkness fell. It was not until they had left the last signs of human habitation well behind them and he had suddenly stopped the car that she had realised her mistake.

  She must have dozed off eventually with her back to the hard dry-stone wall because the next thing she knew there was a streak of pale gray in the sky to the east and her nostrils were full of the greasy smell of unwashed wool. A shaggy ewe and her lamb had settled themselves in the lee of the wall beside her and were protecting her from the full force of the sharp dawn breeze.

  She did not move for a while, as she watched the streak broaden out into a ragged hand of daylight which perceptibly clawed its way across the sky, casting a chilly gray light across the miles of rugged moorland which surrounded her.

  Before long she could make out the ribbon of road which led down from the heights where Blake had stopped the car the night before to the first low stone cottages of Broadley.

  “So near yet so far,” she muttered as eventually she staggered to her feet and began to pick her way through rocks and patches of boggy ground. The mud squelched through the toes of her bare foot and soon filled her other shoe. She took it off impatiently and threw it away. Never again, she promised herself, would she venture beyond the paved streets of Bradfield without her walking boots.

  It was five thirty by the time she reached Broadley’s single main street. She had passed no-one except the driver of an almost ghostly milk-float who had glanced at her bare feet and tattered tights and given her a knowing grin as he purred past.

  “Good party, worr’it, love?” he shouted, not waiting to hear what she snarled in response. The single telephone box was outside the post-office in the centre of the village and Laura took shelter there, leaning her head against the glass in an agony of indecision. She knew that Thackeray would be beside himself with worry. She could only guess who else he had told if he thought she was in some sort of trouble.

  Even so she felt an intense reluctance to let him see her return home in her present filthy and tattered state which she reckoned was as much her own fault as Blake’s. Thackeray’s reaction, she knew, would be personally unpredictable at best, professionally dangerous at worst.

  Deliberately she punched in the number of the taxi firm which had pinned its card to the board above the phone. She would go, she had decided, to Vicky Mendelson’s, where she could shower and borrow some clothes before she faced Thackeray and attempted to make as light as she could of her unexpected night on the moors. But as she stood waiting for her cab to climb the steep hill from the Maze valley, chilled again by the wind now she had stopped walking, she felt as if hundreds of tiny feet were dancing on her grave.

  “You take risks,” Michael had once said to her angrily and she knew he was right. But what frightened her was the knowledge that now, if she took risks, she was not the only one who might get hurt. And although she loved Michael with a desperation which overwhelmed her at times, right now, numb with cold, bruised and angry, but safe, she was not sure that responsibility was what she wanted.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  For perhaps the first t
ime in his life, Sergeant Kevin Mower was at a loss. He sat in a corner of the canteen gazing into a cup of cold coffee, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, ignoring the curious stares of colleagues who knew nothing of his dilemma.

  All Mower’s instincts told him to obey orders regardless, even apparently absurd orders, because in an unforgiving service to do anything less meant endless and quite possibly terminal trouble. If senior officers wanted to make fools of themselves that was their funeral, canteen wisdom told him. The best course, indeed the only course, for a detective sergeant who nursed ambitions was to keep his head down and hope to ride the inevitable waves which would follow a shipwreck.

  But it was Michael Thackeray, Mower reckoned, who was heading for the rocks, and in spite of himself he felt an overwhelming compulsion to launch a life-boat. Lying in a hospital bed knowing that too many pints of your life blood has drained out of you has a remarkable power to concentrate the mind on what is important, he thought wryly. And waking up in intensive care reveals just who is committed enough to be there waiting for you to surface. Thackeray’s had been the first face he recognised as the mists cleared and he would never forget that.

  But today he had known there was going to be trouble as soon as he got to the office and learned that Alice Smith had died in the night. Thackeray was already at his desk, dark circles under his eyes and a face so haggard that Mower winced to look at him. The ashtray on his desk was already half full.

  “Is Laura all right, guv?” he asked, although he guessed the question would not be welcome. Thackeray had sent him home to his own flat at two o’clock that morning, still with no news on Laura’s whereabouts, and he had slept uneasily, although obviously not as uneasily as Thackeray had.

  “She’s fine,” Thackeray said shortly. “I panicked unnecessarily. I’m sorry I dragged you into it. It was just a misunderstanding.”

  And my name’s Reggie Kray, Mower thought to himself.

  “And Kevin..”

  “Yes, guv?”

  “I’d rather it didn’t get all round the nick.”

  “Right, guv,” Mower said.

  “Right, now, I want to pin Keith Spencer-Smith to the floor over these deaths,” Thackeray went on. “And to do that we need to talk to John Blake and his PR woman about his alibi. But first I want to know everything there is to know about Blake. Val Ridley doesn’t seem to have got very far so I want you to go down to London and talk to his agent, find out about his career before he went to America, where he worked, where he trained, the lot.”

  “Can’t the Met…?” Mower began before realising his mistake. Val Ridley had not got far, he knew, because he had not pressed her to.

  “The Met will take weeks, I want answers tomorrow,” Thackeray snapped. “And before you go, organise pictures of Spencer-Smith and Blake, and Bonnetti as well if you like. They’ve all been in the Gazette over the last week or so. Ask Ted Grant for prints and get them up to the hospital and see if we can get a positive identification of Danny O’Meara’s last visitor. If that fails, get the people who saw him down here to construct a computer impression.”

  “None of them are much like the description we’ve got,” Mower objected. “The man sounds much older. Older even than Blake.”

  “Just do it, Kevin.”

  “You’ve got new evidence of a link between Blake and O’Meara’s death, guv, have you?” Mower ventured uncertainly. “Not yet I haven’t,” Thackeray said flatly. “That’s what you’re going to find in London.”

  “Yes, guv,” Mower said unhappily.

  He was no more cheerful half an hour later as he sipped his coffee in the canteen to pass the time before he needed to leave on what he was firmly convinced was a wild goose chase. He could only marvel at the certainty with which a man who had always dismissed hunches as a wild distraction to solid police procedure could ride one so determinedly when his judgment was swayed by emotion. And he was sure that emotion was at the root of Thackeray’s irrational obsession with Blake.

  Mower was unhappy enough to have toyed with the idea of somehow bringing his London excursion to superintendent Longley’s attention in the hope that he would call it off. But that seemed to risk stabbing Thackeray in the back. He glanced at his watch. There was just time to do what he now had in mind. He left the police station and walked the couple of hundred yards to Bradfield’s rail station, a prefabricated sixties replacement for the solid Victorian structure which had once housed a railway terminus of some grandeur. He bought his ticket to Kings Cross and then made his way to the glass and scaffolding shanty which served as a waiting room and pulled out his mobile phone. At the second attempt he located a sleepy Laura Ackroyd at her flat.

  “How’s your grandmother?” he asked.

  “She’s fine,” Laura said, obviously surprised at this unexpected concern. “They’re keeping her in until they’ve finished their tests - a day or two at most.”

  “And how are you?” Mower said. “I hear you had a late night last night.” This inquiry was greeted with total silence for a moment and when Laura spoke again she sounded strained.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “But off work?”

  “I twisted my ankle last night and couldn’t get to a phone. A stupid thing to do.” She was obviously not going to expand further and Mower was afraid she would hang up.

  “Listen to me, Laura,” he said urgently. “I’m just about to get on a train for London and you need to know this. Michael’s taken it into his head to investigate John Blake, without any justification at all, as far as I can see. I just thought you might know what’s behind it. And believe me, if you do, and can think of any way to stop him before he gets in too deep, I think you should do that.”

  “I don’t think Michael’s going to listen to anything I say about John Blake at the moment,” Laura said helplessly. “Can’t you stop him?”

  “It’s not easy to stop your boss doing something he wants to do in the police-force,” Mower said. “I’m putting my job on the line already talking to you like this.”

  “This is all so stupid and unnecessary,” Laura said and Mower could tell she was close to tears. “He’s behaving like an adolescent.”

  “Tell me about it,” Mower said bitterly. “My train’s in, Laura, I’ve got to go. Take care.”

  The atmosphere in the CID room was tense when WDC Val Ridley got back from Long Moor Hospital clutching a folder of glossy photographs. She glanced up the corridor at the DCI’s door.

  “Is he in?” she asked. A colleague raised an eye-brow.

  “He is,” he said. “But not in a good mood. I reckon he’s falling off the wagon at last, is the sainted Thackeray. I’m not sure he’s up for an idle chat. “

  “Nor am I,” Val said, turning sharply on her heel, knocking on Thackeray’s door, putting her head inside and instantly wishing she hadn’t. Thackeray was sitting at his desk with the look of a volcano about to erupt. He was facing superintendent Longley, whose red neck, bulging over his collar, gave the clearest signal possible that the detonation factor in the room was at least double what she could see face to face .Longley spun round in his chair to see who had interrupted the meeting.

  “Ah,” he said ominously. “Just the person we need. Come in, Val, and tell us how you got on.”

  “Sir,” Val said neutrally, edging into the room and standing as close to the door as she decently could. “I got no-where really, sir.” Longley eyed the folder she was carrying and held out a hand for it.

  “Let’s have a look at our line-up, shall we?” he said, opening the folder and spreading the three photographs inside across Thackeray’s desk.

  “No-one seemed familiar, then?” he asked Val and she shook her head.

  “I’ve asked the man on the gate to come in, and the two nurses who saw O’Meara’s visitor, when they finish work at five. Then we can see what sort of a picture we get with the computer people.”

  “Good,” Longley said. “That’ll be all, Val, th
ank you.” He waited until she had closed the door behind her before he turned back to Thackeray angrily.

  “What did I tell you? You’re all over the place on this one, Michael.”

  “It seemed a reasonable sample of pictures at the time,” Thackeray said, his face an impassive mask. Longley shook his head in disbelief.

  “Spencer-Smith, certainly. Bonnetti possibly, if you think O’Meara had something on him. But Blake? What the hell has he got to do with any of this? He’s a guest here, invited to a prestigious do, considering a major investment in the area, and all of a sudden you’ve got him lined up as a murder suspect.”

  “He’s thicker with Smith than the film museum thing would indicate. He’s was here in Bradfield at the relevant time…” Thackeray shrugged wearily as Longley waved a dismissive hand at him.

  “So were a couple of thousand other teenaged boys, I’ve no doubt. But we’re not hawking their photographs round the district. What the hell did the Gazette make of it when you asked for his picture?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Thackeray said. “Val got hold of them.”

  “Well you can bet your life Ted Grant’s busy putting two and two together and making a hundred and eighty,” Longley said. “And what about your own personal investigative reporter. Does she know about this?”

  “No, sir,” Thackeray said icily.

  “Aye, well, she’d better not, an’all,” Longley said flatly. “Right, now, let’s see what we can rescue from this mess. Fetch Mower back, for a start. He’s wasting his time and my bloody budget swanning around down there. If I know that beggar, he’ll be having a night out clubbing in Soho at our expense if we don’t watch him. Concentrate on the murder weapon. I know there’s no finger-prints so the beggar must have been wearing gloves. But see if you can trace where the spanner came from. And get your folk from the hospital to come up with some sort of likeness that we can give to the Press tomorrow morning to keep their busy little minds occupied. I’ll get the Press office to do a release about the mysterious visitor we want to interview about O’Meara’s death. What else had you got planned for today?”