The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  “Don’t move,” he said. “I promise I’ll kill you before they get here if you try anything stupid. I’m going to move the car out of sight.”

  Laura believed him and although the buzz of the approaching aircraft filled her with hope she knew that the moment to run had not yet arrived. Blake came back very quickly, with the car keys in one hand. But it was what he held in the other which filled Laura with horror. He waved a petrol can and a cigarette lighter in her direction and gave her a wolfish smile.

  “I don’t think they saw me,” he said. “I’ve put the car in the barn. But I brought this just in case. I’m not waiting here for your boy-friend. If they come mob handed, we’ll go together, you and I, just like Rochester nearly did with his crazy woman in the attic.”

  Deliberately he unscrewed the cap of the petrol can and began to sprinkle it liberally around the room and then in the hallway outside as far as the front door. Laura choked as the fumes filled her nostrils and throat.

  “You’re mad,” she said but she did not think he heard her. Outside the noise of the helicopter seemed to be fading away. Desperately she looked around the room. The cap of the petrol can lay on the window sill where Blake had left it and beside it was the cigarette lighter. Barely thinking about what she was doing, she pushed at the rotting window frame, which fell out with a crash as she scrambled onto the sill and out into the overgrown garden beyond. She heard Blake’s angry yell somewhere in the house as she turned, flicked the lighter, tossed it into the room behind her and ran from the explosive roar of flames at her back.

  From the helicopter above Kevin Mower, who was sitting beside the pilot, spotted the sudden eruption of smoke from a huddle of farm buildings a mile or so away and peered anxiously out of the window as the machine swung round in a tight arc to come in low over the fire. The pilot skimmed over the burning farm-house and then turned sharply again, gesturing down-wards to the track where he had spotted a silver car bumping down the hill towards the valley. They gave chase, but the driver ignored their loudspeaker instructions to stop and accelerated even faster down the rutted lane, cornering wildly.

  “The tractor,” the pilot said, gesturing further down the lane to a farm vehicle with a trailer which was climbing laboriously up the hill.

  “He’ll not be able to see him,” Mower said. In a final desperate effort to persuade the Mercedes to stop the pilot swooped low in front of the speeding car. But they were too late. As the Mercedes met the tractor head-on the driver swerved wildly for the last time, lost control and careered down a steep bank into a rocky gulley where it overturned and came to rest on its roof, wheels spinning, until eventually even that movement ceased and the Mercedes lay like a broken toy amongst the jagged boulders.

  When Kevin Mower eventually scrambled down to the wreck from the flat patch of moorland half a mile away where the chopper had landed, the distraught farm-worker who had been driving the tractor had pushed the car onto its side and John Blake had almost clawed his way out through the shattered windscreen. He lay doubled up across the bonnet, the lower half of his body still inside the car, his eyes half closed, his hair missing, his face ashen, and his shirt and jacket sodden with blood. He glanced at Mower with the faintest flicker of recognition before he lost consciousness, a trickle of blood leaking from his mouth. Mower could never be completely sure, and could make no sense of it, but he thought that the last word the actor uttered was “Jane.”

  “Is he the only one in there?” he asked the tractor driver, who looked at him uncomprehendingly and shook his head. “Is there anyone else in the bloody car?”

  Mower did not wait for an answer. Regardless of the damage he might do Blake or anyone else, he put all his weight against the roof of the vehicle and rocked it until it tipped back over onto its wheels so that he could see into the crumpled passenger compartment. His relief that there was not another body inside was quickly overwhelmed with a new fear.

  “Stay there till the ambulance comes,” he said to the bemused tractor driver before he scrambled back up the rocky incline to where the chopper was waiting, rotors idling.

  “Laura Ackroyd wasn’t in the car,” he said to the pilot as he hastily strapped himself back into his seat. “Come on, move it. We’ve got to find her.” And he pointed his companion back towards the clouds of black smoke which were still drifting from the farm-house into the clear upland air. As the chopper flew in low again over the moor, he did not think he had ever seen a more welcome sight than Laura standing on a rocky outcrop above the smoking ruin waving wildly to attract their attention, her red hair streaming out behind her and catching the dying rays of the sun like a banner in the wind.

  “Thank Christ for that,” Mower said to the pilot. “Tell them we’ve found her alive and well, would you. I’m not sure I can manage it.”

  Thackeray slowed his car at the summit of the M62 motorway and let it roll gently enough along the slow lane for them both to take in the glory of the high Pennines which spread for miles on either side. Beneath them, the waters of a man-made lake glittered like beaten gold in the late afternoon sunshine while beyond the water-filled valley the hills rolled away to a faint purple horizon. The drive back from Manchester airport, where they had seen Jack Ackroyd off to Portugal with his mother, had so far been silent. He had not wanted to break into Laura’s evident melancholy, but now she looked at him and flashed one of the brilliant smiles which was guaranteed to clutch at his heart.

  “I’m all right, you know,” she said, although the dark shadows under her eyes gave the lie to her words. “I’ll go home tonight.” Since she had been brought back to Bradfield for a medical check and the taking of detailed statements at police headquarters, she had been staying at the Clarendon with her father.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. Laura nodded again.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “Really.”

  “Did that bastard…” Thackeray stopped, not able to finish the question.

  “He hit me, he tied me up, he humiliated me and I hated it,” Laura said quietly. “But he didn’t rape me, Michael. You’ve read my statement. And even if I’d left it out of that, do you think I wouldn’t have told you?” Thackeray glanced away, no longer sure what Laura was prepared to tell him.

  “I think Lorelei’s death was probably an accident,” Thackeray said. “She shopped him with the backers in America, of course. Faxed them to say he would be involved in a police investigation here within days. She went along with his alibi for O’Meara’s death until he threatened to sack her.”

  “He as good as offered me her job in Los Angeles,” Laura said. Thackeray glanced at her, horrified.

  “She was black and blue,” he said. “But she probably slipped on the bathroom floor…” Laura pushed up the sleeve of her cream shirt to display the blue and yellow bruise above her elbow.

  “I’ve had more than one taste of John Blake’s efforts at persuasion,” she said. “But how did poor Lorelei discover what Blake had been up to?”

  “She met the nurse from Long Moor at the museum opening and he told her what a joke it was that Danny’s visitor was the spitting image of Blake made up for a character part in some 1970s Western. She must have guessed then that he had killed O’Meara to cover up what had been going on here all those years ago and decided that was something she didn’t want to be involved in. When the American backers for the film faxed back to say they were withdrawing their support – we found that fax - Blake must have gone crazy and Lorelei ended up dead.”

  “I guessed he must be Roy Parkinson,” Laura said. “His mother called me Pamela and I remembered Joyce saying that she thought his sister was called Pam.”

  “Yes, we’ve traced the sister. She’s been living a blameless life in York for years. Took her mother out to California regularly to see her brother, but was too young to remember what went on that Coronation summer.”

  “So who killed the Italian girl?” Laura said.

  “Keith Spencer-Smith thought Blake did,
and it’s quite possible that Blake thought Smith did. Either way they both had too much to lose to risk having people in Bradfield recognise them when they found themselves back in the town. And their mutual cover-up became even more crucial to them both when Mariella’s body turned up.”

  “But you don’t think either of them did it?”

  “Spencer-Smith insists your father’s version of events that day is right. Mariella went home that afternoon and none of them saw her again. I’m convinced Mariella was killed by her father. Her mother is saying nothing and it’s impossible to know whether or not she knew what had happened. I think probably not. But Guiseppe Bonnetti admits now that the old man often called Mariella a whore when her name came up. But there was no way any of the family was going to tell us that while the old man was alive and insisting publicly that Mariella was innocence itself.

  “Of course, I was completely wrong about Guiseppe Bonnetti and O’Meara. It was Blake O’Meara’s daughter saw talking to her father in the street. Blake with the same gray wig he used when he went up to the hospital to visit O’Meara. What I always left out of account was the fact that Blake was an actor”.

  “The last thing he could have tolerated when he was about to star in Jane Eyre with a much younger actress was a revival of allegations that he preyed on little girls,” Laura said. “He said as much. O’Meara threatened him so he killed him.”

  “And he persuaded Lorelei Baum and Keith Spencer-Smith to cover for him,” Thackeray said. “They both knew how much they had to lose if Blake’s project collapsed. Blake went up to the hospital with his hair grayed up and a bloody great spanner in his pocket intent on shutting O’Meara up for good. The spanner comes from a set we found in the boot of the Mercedes.” Laura shuddered.

  “I’m sorry, Michael,” she said. “I should have listened to you. But you didn’t seem to me to be very rational about Blake. I just thought you were jealous.”

  “I wasn’t rational and I was jealous,” Thackeray said, with a faint smile. “I had no evidence at all to link him with Mariella and her friends. It was just a feeling.”

  “Intuition,” Laura said with a grin. “It’s a women’s thing.”

  Thackeray let the car drift down the steep incline from Lancashire into Yorkshire as the sun dropped slowly behind them and they slipped out of its golden light into the gathering dusk. As he accelerated Laura reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Michael, I’m sorry I hurt you. I do try,” Laura said, suddenly anguished. “But you must know how I am. Sometimes I feel my independence slipping away from me and I panic.”

  “I’ve never tried to tie you down,” Thackeray said quietly. “I have no right.”

  “Come home with me,” she said. “Let’s try again.” Thackeray did not reply for a moment and then not directly.

  “You asked me the other day if we had ever been honest with each other,” he said. Unexpectedly he swung the car off the motorway and away from Bradfield onto a country road she did not recognise.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, suddenly afraid.

  “To Long Moor Hospital,” he said. “I want you to meet Aileen, my wife.”

  Table of Contents

  The Ackroyd and Thackeray Mysteries

  THE ITALIAN GIRL

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Oh, no, I’ve been around,” he said. “Devon, Scotland,&n…