Shipyard Girls in Love

by Nancy Revell

  Rosie smiled, handed him his tea and carefully sat on the bed next to him so as not to spill any of her own.

  She could not quite believe the joys this day had brought. Like all the women welders, she had been overwhelmed with emotion and so happy for Gloria when Jack had turned up at the christening and taken his baby daughter into his arms. It was quite a surreal moment, and they had all had to hold back the tears as the vicar baptised Hope and told her to go out and bestow light upon the world – something, Rosie thought, Hope had already done.

  And then, a short while later, as she returned home after tea and cake at the Elliots’, dodging puddles left over from the thunder and lightning they’d had earlier on, Peter had stepped out of the shadows and called her name. She’d stood transfixed as he strode towards her, his trilby in one hand, his black woollen coat, as always, flapping open, and when he’d reached her they’d both stood still, looking intently at each other. And then Peter had gently taken her hand in his, and kissed her.

  The past few hours had been magical, but Rosie also knew that they would have to break the spell and talk about the reality of their everyday lives.

  ‘You know,’ Rosie said, her face turning more serious, ‘there’s so much we need to speak about.’

  Peter took a sip of his tea and nodded gravely.

  ‘I know we do. I feel like we’ve chatted so much over the past year – we know all about each other’s jobs, each other’s friends – but there’s so much we don’t know about one another.’

  As he spoke Peter looked at Rosie’s profile and touched the side of her face. The skin on Rosie’s body might be perfectly smooth and unblemished – untouched even by the sun – but her face told a different story. Her face was quite beautiful, but she had been left with a smattering of tiny scars from a weld that had ‘gone wrong’.

  He would never forget meeting her for the very first time when he had gone to inform her as next of kin about her uncle Raymond’s death by drowning. Of course, he had noticed the scars that were then still quite fresh on her face. He had asked her about them and she had told him that she’d had an accident at work. He had believed her, but now, knowing what he knew, he wasn’t quite so sure. Now he needed the truth. About everything.

  ‘Can you remember when I first came to see you?’ Peter asked.

  Rosie could. Seeing him at her door immaculately attired in a smart black suit, starched white shirt and blue tie, she had thought him the epitome of professionalism.

  ‘Like it was yesterday,’ Rosie said. ‘Although,’ she added, ‘it also seems like years ago.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ Peter took hold of Rosie’s hand, ‘but did you know about your uncle’s past? That he’d just been released from prison?’ Peter hesitated, looking at her face for a reaction. ‘About what he had done?’

  As he spoke, Peter could feel Rosie’s body stiffen next to him and he sensed that she was already pulling up the drawbridge to her emotions.

  Rosie put her cup of tea on the bedside table and looked at the man with whom she had just made love. The only man she had ever made love with. She might have lain with many men, but it had not had anything to do with love.

  ‘No, I didn’t know that he had committed those awful crimes,’ Rosie said. ‘How he had raped those poor women. It came as a complete shock to me. I did think it odd that I hadn’t heard from him for years. But, like I told you back then, we had never been close. My mother never mentioned him when we were growing up.’

  Peter looked at Rosie. He had been a copper for too many years not to know when someone was keeping something from him.

  ‘God, Rosie! We’ve just made love. Surely you must know that you can trust me! You have to be honest with me!’

  Rosie swung her legs off the bed and stood up, wrapping her gown tightly around her body as she glared at her lover.

  ‘What’s all this? Some interrogation? Are you being DS Miller now? Or Peter?’ Rosie’s face was flushed and anger sparked in her eyes.

  Peter followed suit and put his cup down on the bedside cabinet. Tea sloshed into the saucer. He pulled himself up so that he sat ramrod straight in the bed.

  ‘No, Rosie, I am not interrogating you, but I am demanding that you be honest with me. Just as I will be honest with you. Is it not enough that I told you I love you? I would never say such a thing were it not totally and utterly true. I have only ever told one other woman that in my life and it was my wife. This is not some passing affair. Surely you must know that? Surely you must know you can trust me?’

  Rosie continued to glare at him. It surprised her that her emotions could go from love to fury as if at the flick of a switch.

  ‘No, I don’t know I can trust you, Peter! I have just spent the past week preparing to spend a good while in jail myself after you told me in no uncertain terms that you knew about Lily’s and that I had put you in an “untenable” situation. I mightn’t have known what “untenable” meant, but I knew enough to guess that you were unsure whether or not to report me, and Lily, and our business, to the authorities – so please forgive me if I’m not falling over myself to trust you.’

  Peter let out a heavy sigh. It was true. He had tossed and turned every night for the past two weeks since he had found out that Rosie part-owned a high-class brothel, and that she had been a working girl there herself not so long ago.

  ‘Come here,’ Peter implored. He threw back the bedcovers next to him.

  ‘Come here,’ he repeated. ‘I want you here next to me. For as long as possible. And as much as possible.’ He stretched out his hand to Rosie, who was still standing statue-like by the side of the bed, although the anger in her eyes appeared to be dwindling.

  She slowly took hold of his hand and allowed herself to be gently drawn back in to the warmth of the bed.

  ‘I’m going to tell you this now,’ Peter gently took Rosie’s face in his hands, ‘and again and again – as many times as I need to for you to believe me when I say that you can trust me. With your life. I will never betray you. And that means I will never tell a living soul about Lily’s. So, let’s get that one straight first of all.’

  Peter saw Rosie’s body wilt slightly and he put his arms around her and held her tightly as if to reiterate his point.

  ‘But,’ he said gently, ‘we need to be totally honest with each other. No more lies. No matter how unpalatable the truth may be.’

  Rosie found Peter’s hand and held it tightly. ‘All right. Agreed.’

  ‘Good,’ Peter said, squeezing her gently.

  Chapter Five

  Over the next hour, Peter and Rosie talked and talked. Peter told Rosie about his life with Sal, a subject they had always steered clear of in the past during their meetings at the café.

  Since his wife’s death Peter had never so much as looked at another woman, never mind wanted to be with one. Until he’d met Rosie.

  It was the first time he had admitted to anyone that those memories of his wife that had stayed resolutely in his head were of when she was dying. Her English-rose looks overtaken by the ravages of the cancer that had relentlessly eaten away at her. He had tried to erase them and replace them with remembrances of the few short years they had been happy together, in love and, moreover, healthy. But, he confessed, it had been hard to keep them at the forefront of his mind and to stop them from being swamped by the memory of the gradual degeneration of his wife’s mind and body as the cancer worked its way through every part of her being.

  ‘I buried her five years ago,’ Peter told Rosie, who was listening intently, feeling both the sadness and the anger that Peter was unable – or did not want – to disguise. ‘I changed after that.’ He turned his head to look Rosie in the eyes, knowing that if he demanded the truth of her, he had to give it in return.

  Rosie sensed there was more. That his wife’s death had affected him in a way he had not disclosed to anyone else.

  ‘In what way?’ she asked.

  ‘Well,’ Peter sa
id, trying to choose his words carefully, ‘I’d always known from a young age that I wanted to be involved in some kind of law enforcement – I was always intrigued by our justice system.’ He sighed, thinking back to the innocent days of youth, when everything seemed so black and white, so clear-cut.

  ‘After I started working for the police and began climbing my way up the career ladder, I couldn’t help but feel a bit let down. Disappointed that justice often wasn’t even seen to be done, never mind actually done.’ There was another pause.

  ‘Am I making sense?’ He looked again at Rosie, who he could see was listening intently.

  ‘Yes,’ Rosie said simply, thinking about the lack of justice not only in her own life, but in the lives of those around her.

  ‘When Sal died,’ he continued, ‘something inside of me changed. It was as if something just switched. Perhaps it was my perspective on life, I’m not sure. Whatever it was, the feeling that sticking to the rules wasn’t always the right thing to do seemed to grow. I tried to ignore the thoughts I was having, rationalising to myself that it was a part of the grieving process and that I’d revert back to the person I’d been before Sal was taken from me, but I didn’t. And after a while I began to realise that the change was permanent. That there was no going back, and that the conviction I felt about the scales of justice needing a little balancing out every now and again was right.’

  Rosie’s interest was now piqued and she sat up straight. Peter sensed her movement and looked at her.

  ‘Go on,’ she urged.

  ‘I suppose,’ Peter said, ‘if I’m honest, I just got fed up with seeing society’s bad apples getting away with infecting those near to them. I was frustrated that the law often could not simply take those rotten apples out of the barrel and stop them destroying perfectly healthy ones.’

  There was a moment’s quiet. Then the sound of a car horn blaring out could be heard on the street outside, followed by a man’s angry shout.

  ‘Are you telling me,’ Rosie said, continuing the analogy, ‘that you sometimes get rid of those rotten apples yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ Peter said simply. ‘But, just so you understand, I don’t permanently dispose of those bad apples. I just try to make sure they don’t somehow find themselves back in the barrel.’

  ‘Like Vinnie?’ Rosie asked, her eyes wide with comprehension. It was something that had puzzled her. She’d had her suspicions. Now it looked like her intuition had been right.

  Peter nodded.

  Rosie’s mind spun back to the end of April that year when she had confided in Peter about the beating Vinnie had given Gloria. They had discussed her going to the police, but it had been clear that they were both of the opinion nothing would have been done because Gloria and Vinnie were married. The general rule of thumb when it came to ‘domestics’ was that what happened behind closed doors stayed behind closed doors.

  Rosie could still remember the way Peter had looked her in the eyes and asked, ‘Is there anything you think I could do?’ She had felt there was more to his question than appeared on the surface, but she had dismissed it. It was when she heard a week or so later that Vinnie had been ‘mugged’ that she began to wonder if Peter had given Vinnie a taste of his own medicine. But when Rosie had mentioned what had happened, Peter had simply said it had sounded like ‘divine intervention’.

  ‘What I do, off the clock as it were,’ Peter said, ‘well, it’s not something I’m proud of, and, obviously, if it ever came out that I occasionally took police matters into my own hands, I’d be for the chop. I’d probably not get done for it – too much of a scandal – but I’d be quietly “let go”. It’d be brushed under the carpet.’

  Rosie nodded again, unsure exactly what to say.

  ‘I do have something, though, that I have to tell you,’ Peter confessed.

  Rosie put her hand over Peter’s.

  ‘You can trust me, you know?’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ Peter said.

  ‘It’s about Vinnie,’ he started to explain. ‘He’s not had the misfortune to be mugged again, but he has found himself behind bars. For a short while at least.’

  ‘Really?’ Rosie was intrigued.

  ‘You see,’ Peter continued, ‘I knew he’d go to the christening. I’ve known enough “Vinnies” to realise that he wouldn’t pass up the chance to go there and cause trouble, and sure enough, I caught him charging down Suffolk Street.’

  Rosie was listening with bated breath, imagining how awful it would have been had Vinnie made it to the church.

  ‘He actually played right into my hands and made very loud and very definite threats against Gloria, so I was perfectly within my rights to arrest him and take him back to the station.’

  ‘Thank God you did!’ Rosie said. ‘I hate to even think what would have happened had he turned up at the church. Especially with Jack there.’ She shivered involuntarily. ‘So, is that where he is now?’ she asked. ‘Locked up in a police cell?’

  Peter nodded. ‘He’ll be kept in overnight. But they’ll probably have to let him go tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, Peter!’ Rosie said, giving him a kiss on the cheek. ‘I think it’s fair to say you saved the day. At least Gloria’s got to enjoy this one day with Hope and Jack without that nutter ruining everything. Shame they couldn’t lock him up for good and throw away the key.’

  ‘I agree,’ Peter said. ‘Unfortunately, it’s just a temporary solution.’

  Rosie sat quietly for a moment and digested everything Peter had just told her.

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Peter.’

  And she didn’t.

  ‘How about another cuppa?’ he suggested, taking her hand and kissing it.

  Rosie smiled.

  ‘Sounds like a good idea.’ She pushed herself out of the bed and put the kettle on.

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got much to offer in the way of food,’ she shouted through to the little box bedroom. ‘I might be able to rustle up a cheese sandwich if you’re hungry?’

  She appeared back in the bedroom doorway.

  ‘Actually, if we’re going to be totally honest with each other …’ A smile played on her lips. ‘I have my own confession to make …’

  Peter looked at Rosie, her blonde curls in disarray around her face; the make-up she’d had on when he had caught her returning home after the christening now just about all gone, bar a few smudges of mascara.

  ‘My confession to you is, I’m a hopeless cook. I barely even shop. And I have absolutely no aspirations to become the perfect housewife.’

  Peter laughed as Rosie turned her back on him and padded back into the kitchen just as the kettle was squealing for attention.

  When she came back with their cups of tea, Peter was wearing his trousers and pulling his shirt on.

  ‘I’m down for Home Guard duty in a little while.’ He reached to take the tea from Rosie, who then sat down next to him on the side of the bed.

  Rosie knew that Peter had shared all this with her not because he felt the need for a confessional, but because he wanted to show her that he trusted her, and that she could trust him.

  ‘Well, now we’re being so open with each other …’ She hesitated. ‘You were right.’

  Peter looked at her in puzzlement.

  ‘About my uncle,’ she explained.

  Peter nodded, took a sip of hot tea and waited for Rosie to continue.

  ‘It’s true what I said about my mother and father not ever mentioning him. I actually thought Mum had been an only child. I only really became aware of his existence after my parents were killed in a hit-and-run accident.’

  Rosie had never talked about her family to Peter during their courtship, although he had found out, almost by chance, about her parents’ death. The police had carried out a half-hearted investigation into who might have been driving the car that ended up orphaning Rosie and her little sister, but it hadn’t even produced any leads, never mind suspects.

  ‘He turned up out of th
e blue, the day before the funeral,’ Rosie continued. ‘At the time, I didn’t think about how he’d got to know about the accident.’ She spoke calmly but also unemotionally, as if relaying something that had happened to someone else.

  Her mind snapped back to when she’d first clapped eyes on her uncle and how he had repulsed her from the off.

  ‘At first he pretended to be full of concern. That was until he found out that my parents had left everything to me. That’s when he showed his true colours.’ Rosie pulled her dressing gown around her body as if suddenly cold.

  Peter listened, letting her speak without interruption.

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘he decided to stay on for another night, said it was to look after me and Charlotte as we had no other family …’ Rosie’s voice trailed off as images of that night flashed across her mind’s eye. She hesitated.

  Peter could feel his fists clench and a surge of fury instantly rose to the surface. He had read the files on Raymond Gallagher. Knew all about his crimes. Knew that the man was a sick and twisted pervert. A rapist who had attacked at least five women.

  He took Rosie’s hand and held it tightly.

  Rosie knew that Peter was well aware of the type of monster her uncle was.

  ‘It was either me or Charlotte,’ she said simply.

  Peter understood that no more words were needed. The few that had been uttered had said it all.

  The thought of her as a fifteen-year-old being violated in such a way, by such a man, was almost too much for Peter to bear. Rosie had been forced to make a deal with the devil in order to save her sister that night. He could not imagine any woman – let alone someone who was still really a child – having to make a more heinous sacrifice. He knew the effect such malevolence had on a person. In his time as a police officer, he had seen many young women who had been forced to endure such perversions because of some man’s twisted needs, and he knew that it was something that never left them.

  ‘And Charlotte?’ Peter asked. ‘Was she all right?’

  ‘Yes, thank God,’ Rosie said, ‘but I knew I had to get her somewhere safe. Somewhere she would be cared for. Somewhere that would give her a future. There was no way I could really look after her. And there was no way she was going to end up in some godforsaken children’s home.’