The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  “I was going to see the Bonnettis again. In the light of what we’ve found out from Spencer-Smith and the O’Mearas it’s obvious that they were giving us a highly sanitised version of what their daughter got up to that summer,” Thackeray said.

  “If they knew owt about it,” Longley said. “In my experience of daughters they can look as if butter wouldn’t melt and all the while their knickers are round their ankles.” He smiled grimly and Thackeray thought he would not like to have been Longley’s daughter caught in that situation. But his more immediate concern was the similar situation that he had utterly convinced himself that he had found Laura in.

  “Right, talk to Bonnetti if you must,” Longley said grudgingly. “But think on. That family’s a major employer these days and they’ll have friends to match. You’ll need to be one hundred and ten per cent sure of your ground.”

  “And Blake?” Thackeray asked, an obstinate look in his eyes.

  “You can ask Mr. Blake one question and one question only,” Longley said angrily. “You can ask him and what’s-her-name, his PR woman, to confirm that they were with Spencer-Smith when he says they were. But if all three of ‘em vouch for each other, then we’re stuck either way, aren’t we? The only way you’ll crack the alibi is if you can come up with a positive identification - which so far you’ve not got - or some forensic to put one of them in contact with O’Meara.”

  “Right,” Thackeray said. Longley sat looking at him speculatively for a moment before lumbering to his feet.

  “Are you right, Michael?” he asked. “You look like you’ve been run over by a bloody ten ton truck.” Thackeray ran a hand through his hair and shrugged slightly.

  “I’m all right, sir,” he said. But he knew Longley did not believe him.

  The old man, Paolo Bonnetti had not even attempted to speak since DCI Thackeray and WDC Ridley had arrived. He was sitting in a wheelchair in his spacious conservatory, the first curves of intense magenta on the huge bougainvillaea framing his shock of white hair and leonine face. His son sat close by in a cane chair, his head bowed and his hands clasped as if in prayer.

  “Are these really questions we must discuss, inspector?” he asked Thackeray. “After all this time it seems like a desecration of my sister’s memory.” Thackeray had been conscious of the photograph of an angelic-looking Mariella in her white first communion dress as they had come through the living room. A vase of white flowers stood close by it and he guessed that this was how the family had maintained her memory for years.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. “But if we are to have any hope of finding out what happened we need to know the truth about her relationship with the boys in the neighbourhood. Your mother made some terrible allegations last time we were here about the way Mariella was treated by the other children who lived in the road. Now we have a totally contradictory allegation that she was intimate with at least one of the boys she went around with. I need to know whether that is true, and if it is true I need to know whether she was willing – or not.” The old man in the wheelchair suddenly shouted out unintelligibly and Giuseppe Bonnetti took his clenched fist in his.

  “The police have their job to do, papa,” he said. Hoarsely the old man spoke again in Italian and Thackeray waited patiently for his son to translate.

  “My father says his daughter was pure,” Bonnetti said, his voice choking with emotion. ““He says the boys slandered her, that they hated Italians in Bradfield at that time and that all sorts of lies were told.”

  “Can you ask your father if he ever suspected for a moment that Mariella might be involved romantically with Keith Smith or John Parkinson.”

  The old man clutched the arm of his chair with his good hand and the veins in his neck stood out as his colour deepened. It did not need his son to translate the furious denial which he forced from his strangled vocal chords.

  “No,” he said. “No, no, no.”

  “I’m sorry, chief inspector,” Bonnetti said. “You’ve come a long way, I know, but my father’s doctor has advised that emotional upsets are very bad for him. A stroke is seldom the end of it, you know? I do think this line of questioning is not good for him.” Thackeray nodded wearily and Val Ridley wondered whether he or the old man looked most sick.

  “Can I come back and talk to your mother at some convenient time?” she asked.

  Bonnetti shrugged and his father looked agitated again. The younger man waved them back into the living room out of earshot.

  “I suppose so, if you really think it could help.”

  “Do you not recall any of this unpleasant racism yourself?” Thackeray asked.

  “I told you, inspector, I was very young.”

  “There is just one other thing I wanted to ask you, Mr. Bonnetti. You said Danny O’Meara had asked you for help recently.”

  “That’s right,” Bonnetti agreed grudgingly.

  “Did he threaten you in any way?”

  “Threaten, inspector? He was hardly in a position to threaten. He was a kitchen porter, briefly, in my restaurant. A pathetic wreck of a man. How could he threaten me?”

  Thackeray took his time going home that night. The fear which had dogged him all day threatened to choke him as he got into his car and started the engine. What he craved more than anything was a drink, the one thing he knew that he must not have. One day at a time, he thought to himself. But some days lasted infinitely longer than others. He sat for a moment clutching the steering wheel fiercely to steady himself as he stared the prospect of life without Laura in the face.

  She had got back to the flat after seven that morning, apologising tearfully for not contacting him. He had been dozing, fully dressed, in a chair, and had let six hours of pent-up anxiety rip. She had answered him in kind, giving him a garbled account of her night on the moors which he had not believed. She had been in no danger, she said, she was quite capable of looking after herself, but when she kicked off her borrowed shoes and flung herself face down on the bed he shuddered at the state of her bruised and blistered feet.

  He had left her to sleep an exhausted sleep, showered and shaved and gone straight to work, unsure whether he could bear to return. He was still unsure, but eventually turned the car in the direction of the flat, driving slowly, his perceptions leaden as he steered the car through the late rush-hour traffic.

  He found Laura sitting on the sofa in jeans and a tee-shirt, her hair in a loose copper cloud around her head and her bruised feet bare. She had a glass in her hand and a vodka bottle on the floor beside her and he could see a dark bruise on her arm just beneath the edge of the white sleeve. Thackeray stood and looked at her for a moment without speaking, overcome by anger and despair. He needed to take a deep breath before he could say anything at all.

  “You know that’s not the answer”, he said, picking up the bottle which had about an inch of spirit left in it. “How much have you drunk?” Laura shrugged.

  “What the hell’s it matter?” she asked, her voice slurred.

  “It matters,” Thackeray said, going into the kitchen and tipping the rest of the vodka down the sink as much to defy the temptation to drink it himself as to protect Laura, who was already too drunk for it to make much difference. He put the kettle on and went back into the sitting room.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked.

  “Because I don’t know what I want any more,” she said miserably.

  “Be honest, Laura,” he said quietly. “You mean you don’t want me here any more.”

  “Have we ever been honest with each other?” she asked. He glanced away, unable to answer that question.

  “Did you sleep with Blake?” he asked.

  “No, I didn’t. It’s nothing to do with Blake. Not really.” He pounced on her hesitation.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means he tried it on, and just for a moment I fancied him too. I thought, oh, God, I don’t know what I thought. We’d had a great evening. He’s attractive, attentive, f
un! I just fancied him. So what happened wasn’t his fault. Men always claim women lead them on. Well, this time that was right. I did lead him on. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Even in her fuddled state Laura knew that Thackeray sat for a long time without speaking and in the end she turned her head away, burying it in the cushions to hide her tears.

  “Blake is at best a womaniser and child abuser, and at worst a killer,” he said at last.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “You can’t link him to something that happened forty years ago. You’re jealous. In any case, nothing happened.”

  Thackeray got to his feet and went into the kitchen. After a few minutes he brought her a cup of black coffee and put it on the table beside her.

  “I’ll pack my things,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The new cinema museum frothed with a volatile mixture of Bradfield’s solid burghers, its cultural wannabes and a handful of genuine film buffs invited to leaven the mixture. Above the heads of the guests a huge screen endlessly repeated a potted history of the cinema, the climaxes, agonizing and hilarious, of Eisenstein and Chaplin, Fellini and Bergman, Coppola and Spielberg. The throng below ignored it and concentrated seriously on the gossip, the champagne and canapes.

  Laura Ackroyd, who had hobbled to work that morning in the most comfortable shoes she could find, stood at the back of the room with her colleague, Paddy Stanford, a huge bull of a man in his sixties with a shock of gray hair. Paddy spent his life in the semi-darkness of cinemas or the almost equally dim back bar of the Lamb where he composed the Gazette‘s less than searching film reviews with a stubby pencil on the backs of envelopes before persuading a computer-literate secretary at the Gazette to translate his scrawl onto a screen.

  Laura looked pale and there were violet circles under her eyes. She had never discovered a hang-over cure which actually worked and she was fighting off a thumping headache with a brimming glass of Buck’s fizz. Paddy Stanford, at a guess, was on his fourth or fifth. At the far end of the room she spotted John Blake, immaculately dressed and coiffed, surrounded by an admiring coterie of dignitaries and film buffs, the former, she thought, rather more likely to recall his less than illustrious career than the latter.

  Even from a distance she could see the man light up in the warm glow of adulation which surrounded him as he stood framed by a display of blown-up photographs of himself in his most notable roles. A skinny girl in a pastiche of a Busby Berkeley costume waved a tray of canapes in her direction but she shook her head, fighting off her nausea.

  “Does anyone really remember John Blake’s films,” she asked Stanford. He shook his head wonderingly.

  “He was never what you’d call really big,” he said, selected five canapes and balancing them carefully on a paper plate on top of his champagne glass. “He had a certain appeal to women, I think. He made a couple of strong Westerns but we’re not talking the Magnificent Seven. He wasn’t in the Yul Brynner, Clint Eastwood league.”

  “Though he likes to think he was,” Laura said waspishly.

  “Have you finished your profile?” her colleague asked.

  “Pretty well. But I don’t think he’s going to like it,” she said.

  “Ah,” Paddy said thoughtfully. “That he won’t appreciate if he’s trying to get this Bronte scheme off the ground.” He grabbed another selection of canapes from a waitress whose ostrich feather head-dress was beginning to slide over one ear. “And I hear that’s not going to well.”

  “Isn’t it?” Laura asked. “I was told that they had someone big lined up to play Jane.”

  “I’ll believe that when the contracts are signed, darling,” Paddy said. “In the meantime don’t be tempted to put too much faith in that little venture. Or cash. I’ll be very surprised if it gets air-born.” Holding his empty champagne glass in front of him like a votive offering Stanford buffeted away through the crowd towards the bar, leaving Laura to digest that unexpected morsel of intelligence. Above their heads Eisenstein’s pram bumped to perdition down the Odessa Steps for the sixth time in an hour.

  Laura took another gulp of her own champagne, feeling disoriented. She had been determined to go to work that morning as much to avoid another even more miserable day in the flat as because she felt any obligation to attend the museum opening. But she was beginning to think it was a mistake. As she watched Lorelei Baum expertly insinuate herself across the room towards her, too fast for her to extricate herself from her crowded corner quickly enough to avoid her, she knew she was right.

  “Laura, honey,” Lorelei said, throwing a kiss at the air close to each of Laura’s pale cheeks. “Are you enjoying it? Do you have everything you need for your feature? I can let you talk to John for a couple of minutes after he’s done his big number.”

  “I’m fine,” Laura said. The American’s chilly eyes raked her over and evidently found her wanting.

  “Are you?” she said. “You don’t look so fine, honey, I have too say. Do you need to talk to the mayor? I’ve just been trying to sell the mayor to the man from the London Globe but he doesn’t want to know.”

  “I can talk to the mayor any time, thanks,” Laura said. “My grandmother dandled him on her knee, I’m told. Don’t you worry about me. You concentrate on your man from the Globe.”

  “John got back very early from your little visit to his mother the other night,” Lorelei said inconsequentially. “Did that go well for you?”

  “It might be very helpful for my grandmother,” Laura said truthfully.

  “Yeah, right,” Lorelei said thoughtfully. “Do you have my mobile number? We’re back to London tomorrow, but call me if there’s anything else I can help you with. Anything at all.” She pressed a card into Laura’s hand with a list of numbers on both sides of the Atlantic.

  “Thank you,” Laura said wearily.

  Yet as she watched John Blake make his way to the podium at the front of the room a few minutes later, with Keith Spencer-Smith and Lorelei Baum in obsequious attendance, she felt no more inclination to blame him for what had happened than she had the previous night. The fault, she thought bitterly, was all her own and she could see no way of making amends that Thackeray would ever accept.

  She listened to the actor’s elegant, witty little speech in a state of suspended animation. She smiled wanly at the jokes and clapped half-heartedly when he finally declared the Bradfield Cinema Museum officially open. Around her the party sprang instantly into action again. Across the room she could see the spiky figure of Lorelei Baum throw a hostile glance in her direction before turning away to engage a pony-tailed young man in animated conversation beneath the portraits of Blake. Blake himself, with Spencer-Smith smiling ingratiatingly at his shoulder, was soon surrounded by a cohort of civic dignitaries. Laura felt sick. She was astonished when her arm was squeezed and the familiar voice of Kevin Mower spoke into her ear.

  “You’ve got to believe me, Laura,” he said. “I tried to postpone this little pantomime. But your feller’s not listening to anyone this morning.”

  “What do you mean?” Laura asked urgently. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m with the boss,” Mower said, glancing towards the door where through the swirling crush of people Laura caught a glimpse of Michael Thackeray in animated conversation with Keith Spencer-Smith.

  “But why?”

  “We need John Blake to answer some questions, apparently,” Mower said.

  “Now?” Laura said, appalled. With Mower close behind her she pushed her way through the crowd to confront Thackeray. She had to shout to make herself heard above the hubbub of the party.

  “Michael, you can’t be serious,” she said. Thackeray glanced at her and then turned deliberately back to Spencer-Smith who shrugged angrily and signalled to John Blake, who in turn began to push his way towards them from the other side of the room.

  “What in hell’s going on?” the actor demanded angrily.

  “John, this is detec
tive chief inspector Thackeray and with an unbelievably unacceptable sense of timing he says he wants to ask you some questions,” Spencer-Smith said, his own fury only just under control.

  “Can’t it wait until this shindig is over, chief inspector?” Blake asked.

  “I’m afraid not, sir,” Thackeray said.

  “Michael, this is petty,” Laura objected loudly into the lull which followed and she caught Blake’s eye as he glanced from her to Thackeray and, with a mixture of disbelief and anger, made the connection.

  “This is harassment, Mr. Thackeray,” Blake said. “In the States I could sue you for a very great deal of money of money. And I suppose that it was you who sent someone to see my agent in London to ask intrusive questions? Or was it you, Ms. Ackroyd, and your crappy little magazine?”

  Laura shook her head in despair and turned away feeling rather than seeing Blake follow Thackeray and Mower out of the room. Behind her a momentary hush fell over the gathering which instantly turned into a frantic hubbub as those who had seen what had happened at the back of the room made their own lurid interpretation and relayed it to those who had not.

  “What in hell’s going on,” Lorelei whispered fiercely into Laura’s ear, holding her arm in a vice-like grip.

  “I really don’t know,” Laura said wearily. “I think we’ve just witnessed the end of someone’s career. But I wouldn’t put money on whose.”

  Thackeray watched the clock over his office door flick inexorably towards nine. The daylight outside the window had faded to a blue gloom but he had not bothered to switch on the lights. Nor had he paid any regard to Jack Longley’s near instruction, issued irascibly more than three hours ago, to go home and sort himself out.

  Longley had not allowed him to interview John Blake. Some sixth sense seemed to have sent the superintendent hurrying red-faced down the stairs to the interview room as soon as the party from the museum arrived at police headquarters. With a single imperious gesture the superintendent had sent a uniformed sergeant into the room to sit with Blake and Spencer-Smith, who had insisted on accompanying his friend, and waved him and Mower out into the corridor.