by Roberta Kray
The waitress, middle-aged and harassed, came over to take their order. Annie asked for a pot of tea for two.
‘Anything else?’
‘No thanks.’
When she’d gone, Annie said, ‘I’ll do it if you like. I’ll go in. I don’t mind.’
But Judith shook her head. She didn’t want Annie getting into trouble. This was something she had to do herself. ‘What if there’s someone in there?’ she hissed.
‘Then just say sorry, you were looking for the ladies’. Say you haven’t got your glasses or something.’
Five minutes later, the waitress returned with a tray and the bill. Annie gave the teapot a stir, put milk into the cups and poured the tea. ‘Don’t worry, nothing terrible is going to happen.’
Judith, who seemed to have been head to head with trouble for the past couple of weeks, wasn’t so sure. She looked over at the man behind the counter. John Connolly, she thought his name was. ‘What about him?’
‘I’ve been watching. He’s in and out to the kitchen. We’ll just have to time it properly.’
Judith sorted out the bill, putting the money in a saucer. She could barely drink the tea. Every sip took her closer to the moment when she’d walk over to that door and open it. She could still change her mind. It wasn’t too late. Except she knew she wouldn’t. Having come this far, she might as well see it through.
A group of women at the table next to them finished their drinks and went to pay at the counter. While they crowded round the till, keeping John Connolly occupied, Judith had a quick glance round to see where the waitress was. The woman was across the other side of the café with her back to them, chatting to an elderly gent.
‘Now,’ Annie urged. ‘And don’t walk too fast.’
Judith got to her feet. ‘Wish me luck.’
‘You don’t need it, love. You’ll be fine. Just look confident, like you’re supposed to be going in there.’
Judith straightened her spine, pushed back her shoulders and made a beeline for the door. With every step she took, she kept expecting to be challenged; for a voice – John Connolly’s, the waitress’s – to ask her where she thought she was going. Her heart was beating hard, her pulse racing. As she pushed open the door, she prayed there wouldn’t be anyone inside.
God, on this occasion, was kind to her. The staffroom was empty. It was a smallish room, with a table and four chairs in the middle. And behind the table, against the far wall, was a bank of six tall lockers with their numbers emblazoned across the front: 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25. Judith sucked in a breath. Annie had been right. Still she waited for a moment, her back to the door, until she was sure that no one was going to follow her in.
When a few seconds had passed, she grabbed the key from her pocket and dashed across the room. The key slid smoothly into the lock of 22, giving a tiny click as it turned. Quickly she pulled the locker door open, bracing herself for whatever she might find.
Her gaze scanned the space inside, top to bottom, and disappointment swelled in her. Nothing. Dammit! She stood on her toes and checked the high shelf. This time she was rewarded. Right at the back, pushed against the rear panel, was something dark. Her heart skipped a beat.
She reached in and grabbed the object. It was heavy, and swathed in a piece of grey rag. She held it in her left hand and unwrapped it with her right, and her eyes widened as she realised what it was. A gun, a goddam gun. It was black, and smattered with brown stains. Rust, or blood? Lennie Hull’s blood, perhaps. The horror of it made her recoil, and she almost dropped the weapon on the ground. She felt sick, light-headed, as if she might be about to faint.
Pull yourself together.
Being careful not to touch it, she quickly wrapped up the gun again and slipped it into her bag. She was just in time. At that very moment, the door opened and Maud Bishop walked in. On seeing Judith, she gave a start, shock instantly registering on her face. Her voice was sharp and accusatory.
‘What are you doing? You’re not allowed in here.’
Judith felt her mind go blank. She had a couple of seconds of blind panic before the answer came to her. She forced a smile. ‘Oh, there you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I just wanted to say sorry, you know, if I upset you trying to talk about Elsa the other day. It was insensitive of me. I just … er … I just wanted to apologise before I left. I’m going home soon, you see.’
Maud didn’t look convinced by this explanation. Her gaze took in the room and settled on the open door of the locker. She frowned as she stared at it, then opened her mouth, but before she had the chance to say anything more, Annie barrelled through the door.
Judith took the opportunity to shore up her story. ‘Look, I found her,’ she said to Annie. ‘Here she is. This is Maud, Elsa’s friend.’
‘Hello,’ Annie said, all sweetness and light. ‘I’m so sorry about your loss. It must have been a terrible shock.’
Maud’s gaze jumped between the two of them and then returned to the locker. ‘You’ve taken something,’ she said, glaring at Judith. ‘You’re a bloody thief. I’m going to get John.’
As she turned, Annie blocked her path. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
Maud tried to push her out of the way and a brief, ungainly struggle followed.
Judith was starting to panic. She had to do something radical before the police were called. Trying to explain why she had a gun in her bag – probably a murder weapon – wasn’t going to be the most comfortable of conversations. She said, loud enough to be heard above the fracas, ‘You know about Lennie Hull, don’t you?’
It was a shot in the dark, but as though she’d been slapped in the face, Maud stopped dead. There was a short pause before she turned her head to look at Judith. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Yes you do. There’s no point in pretending. Elsa told me everything.’
The colour drained from Maud’s sallow cheeks. ‘I don’t know nothin’,’ she said, but the fight had gone out of her and the denial was soft and whiny, as though she didn’t have much confidence in it.
Judith saw her weakness and pounced. ‘I don’t suppose Pat Hull will be too happy if he finds out you’ve known all along who killed Lennie. Or your husband. He works for Pat, doesn’t he?’
Maud swallowed hard, her Adam’s apple bobbing in her throat. ‘What do you want?’
Judith assumed a more conciliatory tone. ‘I’m not here to cause trouble, not for Nell, not for anyone. I promise. We’ll just walk out of here and pretend this never happened. You won’t ever see us again.’
‘You’ve got the gun, haven’t you?’
Judith resisted the urge to glance down towards her bag. She could feel Annie’s eyes on her but didn’t meet her gaze. ‘I’m not going to the police if that’s what you’re worried about. Or Pat,’ she added, sensing that this might be a greater concern.
Maud lurched a few steps towards the table, slumped down into a chair and covered her face with her hands. ‘She said she’d got rid of it. She swore.’
‘Elsa didn’t always tell the truth.’
‘She said—’
But Judith never got the chance to hear the rest of what Elsa had said, because at that very moment the door swung open and John Connolly strode in. He stopped, stared at the three women and frowned.
‘What’s going on here? Maud?’
Maud uncovered her face and looked up, but seemed incapable of offering an explanation.
Judith stepped in to try and save the situation. ‘We’re friends of Elsa’s. We just came to … you know, to offer our condolences. After what happened. It’s all been such a shock, so …’
‘Terrible,’ Annie chipped in, taking a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbing at her eyes in an overly dramatic way. ‘Poor Elsa.’
John Connolly shifted from one foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable at this display of female emotion. ‘Oh, right. Yes, it’s an awful business. Very sad. We’re all very … Yes, indeed. Terr
ible.’
‘We should be going,’ Judith said. ‘I know you have work to do. We don’t want to disturb you any longer.’
Maud stood up, using the edge of the table to steady herself. She glanced again towards the lockers, her brow furrowed, her mouth partly open. There was a terrible moment when Judith thought she was about to point the finger. Annie was already edging towards the door.
‘Well, we’ll be off,’ Judith said to Maud. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.’ She nodded towards Connolly, trying to resist the urge to exit at speed.
As they walked out of the staffroom, no one spoke. Judith held her breath as she negotiated the narrow aisles of the café, barely able to believe they’d got away with it. But had they? Maud could already be making accusations, John Connolly heading for the phone. The gun felt like a dead weight in her bag.
Even when they were outside, when she had released her breath into the damp summer’s air, Judith still didn’t feel safe. She wanted to run, to sprint away like a frightened thief. Her scared eyes scanned the street for Pat Hull. Her ears were pricked for the siren of a police car.
‘Well, that didn’t go too badly,’ Annie said.
‘Apart from the heart attack I’m currently having.’
‘You were brilliant. It was a gun, then, was it?’
Judith nodded, her eyes still searching, her heart beating wildly.
‘God, what are you going to do with it?’
Judith had no idea. All she knew was that she had to get away from Kellston. A black cab went past on the other side of the high street and she lifted a hand to hail it. The driver did a U-turn and pulled up beside them.
‘Oxford Street, please,’ Judith said as they climbed into the back.
50
Maud slumped back down after the two women had left, her legs too weak to hold her. Her head was swimming and she had palpitations in her chest. She could have stopped them, or at least tried harder, and now it was too late. The redhead had walked off with the gun, and God alone knew what was going to happen next. Tears of anger and frustration rose to her eyes and she wiped them away with the back of her hand.
‘You take a minute, Maud. I mean, take as long as you need.’
‘Ta, Mr Connolly,’ she gulped.
After her boss had withdrawn, she couldn’t stop staring at the open locker. The key had been missing for ages, taken by mistake – or so everyone had thought – by Pauline Baynes when she’d left to get married. Ever since then, no one had been able to use number 22. The perfect hiding place: in clear sight but somehow invisible. The law, although they’d searched Elsa’s locker, hadn’t even thought to look through the others. Why would they?
Now everything was under threat, all Maud’s plans for the future. Mick would knock her into the middle of next Sunday if any of this came out. It would be just her luck to end up in the bleedin’ morgue at the very time there was actually some hope of escape. Sod’s law. A small whimper escaped from the back of her throat.
She tried to recall exactly what the redhead had said: something about not causing any trouble. But of course she’d say that; the thieving bitch was hardly going to say any different. If it had just been the redhead, she might have stood a chance, but she’d been outnumbered, two to one. By the time John Connolly had arrived, the stakes had been too high to start throwing accusations around.
Maud stood up with care, pausing for a moment to test her legs before walking over to the locker. For a while she stared at the emptiness inside, and then she slowly closed the door. ‘God help us,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘God help me.’ There was nothing she could do now but hope and pray.
She headed back towards the kitchen, where a pile of dirty dishes would be waiting. As she passed through the café, she cursed her own stupidity. She should have guessed that Elsa wouldn’t get rid of the revolver. That girl – God rest her dark, lying soul – couldn’t be trusted further than you could throw her. Regrets were pointless, useless, but she couldn’t keep them at bay; she would always rue the day she had handed over that gun.
Jimmy Taylor couldn’t help himself. He had to keep going back to make sure the hammer hadn’t been found yet. Time and again he crossed the green, pausing to examine the ground under the bushes, the place where he had made a shallow trench with his hands. He would wake up in a cold sweat at night, imagining a dog had dug up the hammer, or that an eagle-eyed copper had noticed some disturbance. It was in those dark, scary moments that he vowed to hide it somewhere safer, but then when he returned to the spot in daylight, he always changed his mind. The fear of being caught in the act outweighed the fear of discovery.
He had wiped the hammer clean with the handkerchief in his pocket – but was it clean enough? It had been done quickly, frantically, and maybe he had missed a print or two. This fear was with him constantly. He had become sullen and irritable, prone to snapping at everyone.
‘Cheer up, son. It might never happen,’ his dad kept saying.
But it had already bloody happened. How was he supposed to carry on as normal when his life was hanging in the balance? He had thought of going to Alf Tombs, spilling his guts, telling him everything, but was afraid the confidence might not be kept. And once the truth was out, it was out; there was no taking it back. It was partly Tombs’s fault that he’d ended up in this situation in the first place. If he hadn’t asked him to find out where the redhead was living, he’d never have approached Elsa Keep.
Jimmy had started to drink more, finding escape in oblivion. Drowning his sorrows – wasn’t that what they called it? Although they weren’t sorrows exactly, more regrets. If only he hadn’t followed Elsa, if only he hadn’t gone back to the flat … But he couldn’t turn back time no matter how much he wanted to. Her dead face haunted him, her glassy eyes angry and accusing.
Nell had an odd fizzing sensation in her head, like a lit fuse burning down. Sometimes, once things started, they couldn’t be stopped. She ran a fingertip along the window ledge, leaving a thin stripe in the dust. Ivor was on edge too – did he know she’d been to see his wife? – and the pair of them were tiptoeing round each other like wary cats.
Judith. Nell could remember the lounge with its dark furniture and cold fireplace, could remember Judith’s red hair, but couldn’t quite recall the details of the conversation. Elsa Keep, the murdered woman, had come into it somewhere. Alf had talked about her too. Judith. The name hung on her lips. What did the woman want? Not Ivor, or so she said. Had she actually said that? There was a reason for her being here, there had to be, but no one seemed to know exactly what it was.
Nell moved away from the window and went over to the bed, where she had laid out four dresses on the coverlet. Today was Alf’s birthday, and tonight they would be expected to attend a gathering at the Montevideo. She didn’t want to go, and neither did Ivor – social occasions were a strain for both of them – but their absence would be noted. Which dress to wear? She touched each in turn, indifferent to their charms. She had to choose, but the effort was too much. Later. She would do it later.
She took one of Ivor’s suits out of the wardrobe and laid it down beside the dresses. She felt faintly puzzled by it, the same way she felt when she looked at Ivor himself. He’d been a different man since coming back from the war, still kind, but distant. What she saw in his eyes was pity and guilt. But it was not his fault. How many times had she told him? It was Lennie Hull who’d done the damage, venting his anger on her. It was Lennie, and Lennie alone, who bore the responsibility.
Nell flinched. Usually the pills helped to blank out the worst horrors of the past, but she had stopped taking them a couple of days ago. They made the bad thoughts go away but left her listless and vague, as if her head was stuffed with cotton wool. She needed to think clearly at the moment. Things were changing, shifting, tilting. History was rising up in waves, scenes rolling through her mind, so clear it could all have happened yesterday. That song was in her head again: ‘Don’t know why there�
�s no sun up in the sky … Stormy weather …’
She squeezed her eyes shut, saw again the soft mink coat and the girl who had held it up before draping it around her shoulders. She wanted to pull the young girl close, to stroke her hair, to tell her everything would be all right, but it was too late: she was broken, damaged beyond repair, not just on the outside but on the inside too. She was clinging on by her fingertips, too afraid to let go.
Peace was all she wanted, an escape from the guilt and the pain. She wanted to lie down and drift away, but she couldn’t take that final step. It was not death she feared but what came after. What she had done was a mortal sin and she’d be punished for it. God would not forgive her, and she could not forgive herself.
51
It should have been a thrill walking through Selfridges, viewing the colourful displays and the vast array of clothes and cosmetics, but the experience was tainted by the presence of the gun. While Annie rushed from counter to counter, eyes like saucers, all Judith could think about was the fact that she had a murder weapon in her bag. It was surreal, crazy. She had to get rid of it, but how? The temptation was to chuck it in the Thames and hope it sank to the bottom, never to be found again, but there were no guarantees. Stuff probably found its way to the riverbanks every day, or was dredged up by the barges. Could fingerprints survive water? She had no idea.
Annie was examining the silk scarves now, her fingers running over the material, her mouth turning down at the corners as she checked out the prices. She glanced over at Judith. ‘Which one, the blue or the red?’
‘They’re both nice. The red, maybe. I don’t know. The blue?’
Annie frowned at her. ‘Stop worrying. It’ll be fine.’
‘I’m not worried.’
‘So why are you clutching that handbag like your life depends on it? Come on, let’s go and get some food. I’m starving.’
