No Place of Safety

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Was that when the refuge first started?’

  ‘Later,’ said Zak. ‘I bin ’ere from the start, but Jezebel, she cum later.’

  ‘How did you both come to be on the streets?’ Charlie asked. They treated it as the most normal question in the world.

  ‘Me dad died when I were ten,’ said Zak. ‘Pit accident. I loved me dad. Then me mam took up wi’ this bloke, and ’e were no good, an’ before long ’e started knocking ’er about, an’ I tried to ’elp, but she wouldn’t let me – made up silly stories as to ’ow she’d got ’er cuts an’ bruises. ’Fraid she were going to lose ’im, though that’d ’a been the best thing that could ’appen. Eventually I thought “Stuff this”, and o’ course there were no work in the mining villages, so it sempt the only thing I could do was to come to Leeds to look for a job. Didn’t find one.’

  Mike’s eyes shifted to Jezebel.

  ‘Fancied getting away from home. Wanted my freedom. Mum’s OK, but she had all these rules and regulations at home, and they riled me. So I just took off. I knew I could survive – not like some. I give her a bell now and then, and I suppose some day I’ll go back. It’s no big deal.’

  No big deal – except that she had probably incapacitated herself for work, for any kind of settled life.

  ‘Has the hostel made a difference?’ he asked her.

  Jezebel was positively enthusiastic.

  ‘It’s great! It’s like having a bedsitter, without having to pay rent, and without any obligations or sweat. I think Ben’s done a great job – and those kids are good too.’

  ‘There’s several as ’ve found jobs from ’ere,’ said Zak, ‘settled down. Not that ’e puts pressure on anyone to do that, but if that’s what you want, ’aving this place is a big ’elp.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’ Charlie asked him. Zak waited a moment, then shrugged.

  ‘I’ve applied for one or two this past month. No go. Don’t know what I’d do about Pal if I got one.’

  He looked at the dog, who beat his stringy, whiplash tail on the floor, conscious of attention.

  ‘There’s any of us would take him during the day,’ said Jezebel.

  ‘Pal’s me best mate. I don’t know as I’d give ’im to anyone else, even for the daytime.’

  Charlie thought he was half wanting to get a job, half fearful of the changes he would have to make to his life – and maybe feeling in his heart he could never fit into normal society again. All these seemed perfectly normal reactions, in the circumstances.

  ‘Let’s go through what happened today,’ Mike Oddie said.

  Alternating and contradicting each other, they went through the various happenings, some of which they had seen, others they had heard about. Rumour went through the Centre not with the hectic, involved urgency of rumours in an English village, but with the fatalistic retelling appropriate to people who have contracted out of the usual social concerns and relationships, and in whose lives anything may happen. If the Centre were under threat, if it had to close, they would be sadder and poorer and hungrier, but life would go on. Knocks were what they were most used to. Oddie questioned Zak closely about the confrontation on the front doorstep.

  ‘You could see Mr Siddiq, and Mrs Ingram as well?’

  ‘Course I could. Siddiq were real close. ‘E weren’t the sort of bloke for a cracker like Midge.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Too bleedin’ old, wannee? Not very nice, either. Wouldn’t take ’im at ’is word, that’s for sure.’

  ‘And Mrs Ingram you couldn’t see quite so well, I suppose?’

  ‘Well enough. Snooty old git, and pushy with it. Pleased as Punch there was a bit of a barney going on.’

  ‘Have you talked over with Alan what happened while she was standing at the gate?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Standing at the gate? Nothing much ’appened while she were standing at the gate.’

  ‘What she said, then.’

  ‘No. Should I ’ave?’

  ‘No, it’s a good thing you didn’t. Could we have your account of it?’

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know. Like I say, nothing much ’appened.’ Zak looked at Jezebel, uncertain.

  ‘I was back in the hall. I didn’t see anything much, though I could hear her.’

  Zak pondered.

  ‘She sailed up, stood at the gate, saw what was going on, then said one of those phrases they use’ (he could have been talking about a lost tribe of savages) ’you know, something about ’aving come at the wrong time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlie encouragingly.

  ‘Then she said she’d come back when . . . what was it? . . . when things were back to normal.’

  ‘Can you remember how she said it?’

  This flummoxed Zak, and he struggled with his memories.

  ‘Didn’t she pause before she said “normal”, like she was trying to find the right word?’ asked Jezebel. ‘Or maybe the most insulting word.’

  ‘She stopped’, said Zak, ‘before she said the word “normal”. But I don’t know if she were trying to find the right word. It were more as if . . .’ he screwed up his face, and the ring in his nose jiggled, ‘as if she’d been stopped in ’er tracks . . . surprised, like.’

  Charlie would have preferred to wait until he became more specific, but with Zak you could have waited for ever.

  ‘What could she have been surprised at?’ he asked. Zak shrugged.

  ‘Search me. One of us, I suppose. But it weren’t me. I don’t mix wi’ toffs like ’er, an’ I never ’ave done. So it must ’ave been Ben or Alan.’

  Five minutes later, as they got into their car, Mike Oddie said to Charlie, ‘Confirmation! Alan is an observant lad. What’s the odds she recognized Ben Marchant?’

  ‘I’d say it was pretty certain. But it’s odd she hadn’t recognized his voice on the phone.’

  ‘Or hadn’t let on that she had.’

  ‘If she had, she wouldn’t have been surprised when she saw him,’ Charlie pointed out.

  ‘True. It’s late. I’m not thinking straight. But I do know that we’re going to have to face up to the fact that Ben Marchant had a life of – what? – forty years or more before he ever set up the refuge here in Portland Terrace.’

  Charlie nodded.

  ‘And maybe Mrs Ingram is the one to tell us something about it. I think we should go and see her first thing tomorrow.’

  But when they called on her, they found that the bird had flown.

  CHAPTER 11

  Bosom of the Family

  ‘My wife? Oh, I’m afraid you’ve missed her. She made an early start to go on a surprise visit to her mother.’

  Randolph Ingram was of medium height, but seemed taller by reason of his distinguished appearance – broad, courtly, but with an ironic smile that played on his lips even when giving out such mundane information. They had noticed when they flashed their identification at him that there was a contrast between his respectable exterior – he was a bursar at Leeds’ second university, they had discovered in advance – and the relishing sparkle in his eyes. Then again, Charlie thought, perhaps the information he had just given them was not entirely mundane: possibly he had taken care to insert the fact that the visit Alicia was paying to her mother was a ‘surprise’ one.

  ‘Mr Ingram,’ Oddie began, ‘your wife was warned – ’

  He shrugged this aside, still imperturbably urbane.

  ‘Oh, Alicia takes very badly to warnings and prohibitions. They seem to act as challenges. There was a time when I could always get her to do what I wanted by telling her to do the opposite. It was the same with Emily Brontë, I’m told. Unfortunately Alicia has at least got wise to that one over the years.’

  ‘It’s a serious matter, Mr Ingram, to disobey police orders in this way.’

  ‘Well, that’s something you’d best take up with Alicia. She is her own mistress, as I expect you will have guessed.’

  ‘What precisely is her interest in the refuge for the home
less at Portland Terrace, Mr Ingram?’ Charlie asked. Randolph Ingram stood relaxed and elegant against his own doorpost.

  ‘Ah well, it’s an issue, you see. Alicia’s very political at the moment – she’s going all out to get the Conservative nomination for the Bramsey ward. The refuge is an issue, something she can work up indignation about in the party.’

  ‘I see . . . There’s nothing personal in it?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Personal? Not as far as I’m aware. Things aren’t going well for the Tories at the moment. If she doesn’t have an issue it’s very unlikely the seat will stay Conservative. The buzz at the moment in local Conservative circles is that Alicia will get the nomination, which does surprise me a little.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The last thing most people want at the moment is a BMW.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘BMW. Bossy middle-class woman. Hardly the flavour of the post-Thatcher decade. Look how people react to Virginia Bottomley. My guess is that they want to give her the nomination, let her lose the seat, and that will put paid to her political aspirations for good.’

  ‘Very Machiavellian,’ Oddie commented.

  ‘All politicians are, even at the grass-roots level.’

  ‘You know your wife went to the Centre last night?’

  ‘Did she? No, she didn’t actually tell me. Though I knew something was up.’

  ‘Oh? How?’

  ‘I know my wife. And she made this sudden decision to visit her mother and sister, though she’s largely washed her hands of them in recent years.’

  ‘I see. And you’ve no idea of any connection between your wife and anyone at the Centre?’

  ‘None whatsoever. It seems unlikely. Alicia usually only cultivates people who matter.’

  ‘Could you tell me the address of your wife’s mother and sister?’

  ‘Of course. Clematis Cottage, Hartridge, Lincolnshire. It’s a tiny village, and you can’t miss the cottage if you recognize clematis. In that, as in many other respects, Alicia’s mother has overdone things.’

  • • •

  When the policemen had said their thanks and farewells, Randolph Ingram closed the door and went to collect together his papers and briefcase for work, the ironic smile playing more openly on his lips. The policemen must have thought him remarkably loose-tongued – though really there must be many people who would enjoy being similarly honest about their wives or husbands. Alicia had been his main source of amusement for years. He had come to the conclusion some time ago that, if she should die, he would miss her but not regret her. The same would be true if she were to disappear for a long prison sentence.

  But that wasn’t really on the cards, was it? Ruthless as Alicia was in going for what she wanted, Randolph could not see his wife as a murderess. Though in recent months he had begun to see her as someone he had had enough of, the possibility of being shot of her in that way was not one he had ever considered.

  Yet she was ruthless, she was entirely without principle . . .

  • • •

  In the car, on the way back to police headquarters at Millgarth, Oddie said: ‘He wasn’t holding much back, was he?’

  ‘Dobbing her right in,’ said Charlie, nodding. ‘And pleased with himself for doing it.’

  ‘I suppose the why doesn’t concern us. The state of the Ingram marriage can’t have anything to do with the case. The question is, what do we do about his wife?’

  ‘Going just by the voice, she has a talking-down-to-dim-five-year-olds quality that riles me,’ said Charlie.

  ‘But of course we couldn’t possibly accept your being riled as a reason for acting nasty, could we? On the other hand, I don’t like people who are warned to be available for questioning, then deliberately take off. And this was not a long-planned family visit, you notice.’

  ‘As her husband took care to point out,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Why has she gone down to visit her long-neglected mother and sister, when presumably she has plenty of other friends or contacts around the country she could go off visiting?’ asked Oddie.

  ‘Because of something that happened at the Centre last night?’ suggested Charlie. He thought for a bit, and then said: ‘Lincolnshire isn’t the end of the earth.’

  • • •

  It was plain sailing to decide that Charlie should go: Mike Oddie had no liking for long car journeys, whether on business or pleasure. He was also itching to get down to talking to the young people at the refuge.

  ‘Including Alan Coughlan and Katy Bourne,’ he said. ‘You’ve never found out how he made contact with them, have you?’

  ‘No – except I think it must have been out of the blue.’

  ‘Pretty devastating at that age, psychologically speaking, finding you have a father you didn’t know about. And in Alan’s case a father who replaces a father he did know about. We have to remember that both of them were in number twenty-four at the time of the attack. They’re very much in the frame.’

  Charlie accepted this judgement, though he didn’t much like it. His trip down to Hartridge was uneventful, and its freedom from the usual motorway irritations and delays meant that he could think through his approach in the forthcoming encounter. He wished he had thought to press Randolph Ingram on whether his wife had announced her intention to visit her mother before he had phoned to tell her he would want to question her. His own impression was that the home visit was not instantaneously improvised but was an existing intention – though certainly not an unchangeable intention that ruled out an interview with him. Was it, then, a decision made after the visit to the refuge and before his phone call? If so, it seemed almost inevitable that the decision was connected with her visit to the refuge.

  Hartridge was indeed a tiny village of about fifteen houses, one of them a converted pub. No pub, no shop, no bus service as far as Charlie could see. Rural life could only be sustained there these days by constant recourse to the motor car. Clematis Cottage was indeed obvious. Charlie wasn’t hot on botanical niceties, but he trained sometimes in Golden Acre Park, where there was an avenue of various strains of clematis – mostly dead, but enough living to tell him what they looked like. The front and sides of one of the cottages was ablaze with pink, puce and purple flowers, with a particularly large and threatening mauve-and-white striped variety which seemed to stare the visitor in the face and dare him to call it ugly.

  There was a small garage beside the cottage, with an old car inside it and another car, a brick-coloured Volvo, in the drive leading to it. Charlie drew his own car up in the road outside the front door, and left the windows open. The front garden of the cottage was a mere handkerchief, and the windows of the cottage were open. He heard quite distinctly an old woman’s voice – raised because she was going deaf and thought everybody else was. The tone was determined rather than querulous – a strong, individual voice.

  ‘No, Alicia, no, no, no. You come down here once in a blue moon, and when you do you want to boss us all around, tell us how to run our lives, and stick your finger in every pie going. You can’t even make up your mind what you want. Last night it was one thing, today it’s another – ’

  Charlie heard Mrs Ingram’s voice breaking in, but though it was by now familiar – a note or two too high for comfort, with its maddeningly precise articulation – the only word he could distinguish was ‘misunderstanding’.

  ‘Alicia, I may be nearly blind and slightly deaf, but I am not a fool, and I won’t be talked to as if I were one. I understood perfectly what you said on the phone last night. Carol and I talked it over – not that we needed to – and – ’

  But she was interrupted by a cry, a shriek, something that sounded somewhere between a human in pain and a sardonic tropical bird. Charlie closed his window and, as the cry was repeated, sped through the gate and up to the front door.

  The ring silenced the weird, unearthly sound. There was total silence for a few seconds inside. It was Alicia who opened the door
. Charlie recognized the voice, even from her ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mrs Ingram? DC Peace, of the Leeds police.’

  She barely looked at his ID but stared at him with an outraged expression on her face.

  ‘You’re a policeman?’

  It was not said with incredulity, but with distaste.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I spoke to you last night, and warned you we had to talk to you.’

  ‘This is too ridiculous! You expect me to disrupt my carefully arranged schedule for a silly matter like a fracas at a hostel for the homeless. I told you last night I had no intention of doing so. Trouble among people like that must be a daily occurrence.’

  ‘Mrs Ingram, if you do not allow me to interview you for as long as I think necessary, I am authorized to arrest you and take you back to Leeds. I don’t think that would do your political prospects any good, do you? Now, may I come in?’

  Alicia thought, none too quickly, then grudgingly stood aside.

  A door from the tiny hallway led into the main room of the cottage. Three people were sitting there: an old woman with brown wrinkled skin and wild grey hair, peering with avid curiosity in his direction; a heavy, younger woman, her face already lined with worry; and in a wheelchair a fair-haired boy of about twelve, his head permanently twisted sideways and upwards, his mouth open. As Charlie entered he uttered another of those cries.

  ‘Who is it, Alicia?’

  ‘A policeman, Mother. It’s just a little matter he wants a word with me about.’

  ‘A policeman from Spalding, or a policeman from Leeds?’

  ‘I’m from Leeds, Mrs – ’ said Charlie.

  ‘Mrs Boulting. And these are Carol and Jeremy. From Leeds? Then it can hardly be a little matter, can it? Why can’t you be a better liar, Alicia? Practice doesn’t make even moderately competent in your case . . . You’re black, aren’t you, Mr Policeman?’

  ‘DC Peace. That’s right, I’m black.’