A City of Strangers

by Robert Barnard

“What’s she done since she left teaching?”

  “Don’t ask her that. She’s been on the City Council. It would be like asking Ronald Reagan what he’d been doing since giving up acting.”

  “What has he been doing since giving up acting?”

  “Very funny. She’s been active in all sorts of things—parks, the arts, better buildings. She’s a bit of a do-gooder, and rather likes the publicity, I think.”

  “I just wondered whether time had hung heavy. People can get odd fancies when that happens.”

  “Oh, no, she’s been very busy. I’ve always found her very committed and interested in what I’m doing. I admire her in a lot of ways. She’s made a new life for herself after retirement.”

  After a moment’s thought, Bob said:

  “Do you remember when I first saw these houses I said I smelled fear?”

  “Yes. I’ve remembered that a lot recently.”

  “Thinking about it, I suppose middle-class people are always a bit afraid. They have something to lose, but no great power to protect themselves. Maybe having the Estate next door to them, and the Phelans, has just sharpened the fear. . . . ”

  Later, nestling in the crook of Bob’s arm, Carol suddenly started.

  “I’ve just had a thought.”

  “What?”

  “Whenever Mrs. Bridewell thinks of her husband she grimaces. Isn’t that funny? Perhaps she does have a thing about men.” She giggled. “Odd she should think I ought to share it.”

  Kevin Phelan had been improved in appearance by his stay in the police cells. They had fetched the most presentable of his clothes from the flatlet, and had forced him to have a bath. Now he sat opposite Oddie in jeans and check shirt and looked almost like a normal, undersized teenager—if you ignored the BLACKS OUT tattoo on his neck, his cropped hair, and his vicious expression. And his language, which now was free of all restraints.

  “You’re gonna f- - -ing let me out of here, Copper. You got nothing on me. I got mates and if you don’t f- - -ing let me go you’re gonna be done over so your own mother wouldn’t know you.”

  The language was from bad films, but the voice came out in a low, loaded, vicious stream. Oddie was reminded of a snake—not the big, coily ones the charmers use, but a small, thin, deadly one, that might dart out of the undergrowth at you, kill, and dart back. He sighed.

  “Your mates will count themselves lucky if they don’t find themselves in here with you. And don’t make any mistake: We’ve got plenty on you. Your disgusting little campaign against the small shopkeepers, for instance.”

  “Don’t know what you’re f- - -ing talking about.”

  “We’ve got people who will testify to having paid protection money after you’ve stuffed petrol-soaked rags and threatening notes through their doors.”

  “They’re f- - -ing Paki liars. . . . Anyway you can’t get me for a few rags. It was just a f- - -ing joke.”

  “Don’t try and teach me the law, Phelan. We can get you all right. Was that how you got your hand burned?”

  “No, it f- - -ing wasn’t. It was petrol for Jason’s f- - -ing motorbike. I got some on me hands and then I lit a f- - -ing match for a fag and it caught fire.”

  “Unintelligent even for you. And you went along to the doctor with it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I f- - -ing did.”

  “Interesting . . . ”

  He got up and left the interview room, leaving Kevin kicking his heels and swearing, under the eye of a sergeant twice his size. In his office Oddie got on the phone to the main Burtle group practice.

  “Could I speak to Dr. Pickering, please? Police here. . . . Oh, Pickering—it’s a question about our friend Kevin Phelan. Has he been along to you with a burned hand?”

  “Wait a minute. I’ll get his file. I put the Phelans’ visits out of my mind as quickly as I can. . . . Yes, he came along to the ‘sit and wait’ surgery. That means he didn’t have an appointment but just took his turn and saw whoever was on. It was Evans who saw him, I think, to judge by the handwriting. Was that what you wanted to know?”

  “The date. When was this?”

  “Let’s see . . . damned doctors’ handwriting . . . the twentieth of February this year.”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  It was the day after the fire in Armstead in which an Asian woman and her daughter had died.

  “How did school go today, Michael?” Malcolm Cray asked that evening over high tea. (How fatherly I sound, he thought. Michael is my preparation for fatherhood.)

  “All right. Everybody was very nice. I’m glad I went back. It stops you thinking about it so much.”

  They were in the dining room of the Crays’ postwar semi—a rather spare red-brick house, which they had bought hurriedly when it seemed as if the rise in house prices might drive everything out of their financial reach. Already the furniture was in place in the rooms they had redecorated, and there was a sense of homeliness and order. He and Selena both valued order.

  “We’re still trying to get in touch with your sister June,” he said. “We think she may not know yet about the fire, and your Dad.”

  “She won’t have read it in the papers,” said Michael, considering. “She doesn’t read them. Maybe someone she’s with could have read about it and told her.”

  “Does she have any special friend?” Selena asked casually.

  “I expect she does. . . . She’s on the game.” Michael looked at them quickly, with a sudden access of shyness, to see how they took it, then he added, “Part of the time, anyway.”

  “Yes, we did know that,” Malcolm said. “Do you know of any special man friend?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “Do you think your sister Cilla would know?”

  “She’d know if anybody would.”

  “She wouldn’t tell Superintendent Oddie when he asked her today.”

  “She wouldn’t. She’s silly. She likes . . . knowing things, and not telling people about them. Silly things.”

  He spoke about her as if she were any girl in his class at school. Malcolm was struck again by the air of detachment he had. It was as if he was in the Phelan family but not of it. He remembered Oddie’s remark about self-protection, and wondered whether the detachment was part of Michael’s recipe for survival.

  “Wouldn’t she talk about them even to you?” Selena was asking.

  “I don’t think so. She might. It would depend what mood she was in, really.”

  “Do you think you could talk to her? Find out any men—anyone at all—your sister June might be with.”

  “I could try. I’ll go around when I’ve finished my tea. It’ll be a man,” he said again, with that air of consideration. “If she’s gone a long time it’s always with a man.”

  Later that evening, close to bedtime, he came back triumphant.

  “Cilla was going out,” he said. “Mrs. Mattingley has been going on at her about visiting Mum in hospital and Cilla wouldn’t, made out she hated hospitals, till in the end Mrs. Mattingley had to go along with her—practically dragging her.”

  “So you talked to her friend,” said Selena acutely.

  “That’s right. Gail. She’s silly too, just like Cilla. But she wasn’t so on her guard, like. We just talked, and when it got round to June she said Cilla thought she was with somebody called Waley. That’s all she knew. Somebody called Waley.”

  Later that evening, when Michael had gone to bed, Malcolm phoned through to headquarters and left a message for Mike Oddie: somebody called Waley.

  Chapter

  FIFTEEN

  At ten o’clock next morning Steven Copperwhite stopped toying with a sentence about Muriel Spark which aimed at her lapidary, epigrammatic elegance but kept lapsing into sluggishness and began getting his books together for the day’s tutorials. Lawrence and Auden—neither of them favorites of his. He snapped his briefcase shut, wound a West Yorkshire University scarf around his neck, and was just about to go out to the car
when he realized he had not heard Evie leave.

  He poked his head into the living room and found her at the table, pasting photographs onto a large piece of cardboard. Inevitably, with Evie, he knew that before long there would also be slogans.

  “It’s the Kirkby Development Scheme,” Evie explained, looking up. “There’s a protest meeting tonight. What do you think?”

  There were two pictures with “Before” and “After” written over them. The “After” was a hideous picture of a shopping complex and a theme park side by side, taken in some luckless city that had suffered those twin contemporary depredations. The “Before” picture was a postcard of The Hireling Shepherd.

  “They’re planning a dinosaur theme park and an enormous Foodwise supermarket with acres of parking,” explained Evie. “It’s vandalism under the guise of development.”

  “I know. . . . I think The Hireling Shepherd is a mistake.”

  “Why? I love Pre-Raphaelite pictures.”

  “Hmmm. They’re all right provided you don’t see them in bulk. The trouble with this one is there’s not the faintest whiff of sheep-dip. The shepherd looks like a public schoolboy got up for a rural pageant. Anyway, it’s a hell of a long time since Kirkby saw any sheep.”

  He had her on one of her weak points. Evie came from Essex—the arse-hole of England, she called it—and knew nothing of sheep. If a sheep had made an appearance in her part of Essex it would have had a parking ticket slapped on it. She looked uncharacteristically uncertain.

  “Something else, then?”

  “Yes. And not Lo, the Pretty Baa-lambs either. Why not an Atkinson Grimshaw?”

  “I’ll look for something. You are on our side, though, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I’m on your side. This government is taking decision making clean out of the hands of the local councils. And their policy on the countryside is absolutely diabolical. England will soon be ‘This green and pleasant golf course’ if this lot get their way. They’d turn Saddleworth Moor into a Myra Hindley theme park, given half a chance.”

  “That’s very good,” said Evie. “I might use that at the meeting.” She looked up at him thoughtfully. “But you don’t feel it, do you?”

  “What do you mean? Of course I feel it.”

  “No, you believe it, because it’s in line with what you’ve always believed. And you can coin a good phrase. But you don’t feel it. Essentially, in your bones, you don’t care. Is that because you’re getting old, I wonder? Is that what age does to one? Interesting point for your research.”

  She began collecting her books together for the day.

  “You’re very unfair,” Steven protested. “You really shouldn’t say wounding things like that. You give me the feeling that we’re splitting apart.”

  “What nonsense. We were never together,” said Evie briskly, rummaging in her bag to find her keys and striding out of the house. At the door she paused. “I think it’s great that you’re seeing Margaret again.”

  There were three Waleys in the telephone directory, and one of those was also thrown up by the police computer: William Waley of Waitewood, who had been interviewed at the time of the Carrock child sex scandal—interviewed but not prosecuted. Prosecution had been concentrated on those operating the ring rather than the clients, and even then the police were conscious that the real ringleader had eluded them. With hindsight the clients should probably also have been exposed, but it had seemed at the time that the really important thing was to close down the grubby business. It was at that time, too, that June Phelan had come within the police’s ken. They had sent a policewoman to talk to her family. Apparently Jack Phelan’s reaction was that it was good she was bringing money in.

  “Good thing that the name you got hold of was an unusual one,” Mike Oddie said to Malcolm Cray as he passed him in the corridor on his way from the computer room.

  “Unusual? Waley?”

  “If it had been Walker it would have taken us all week to check. We’re in a bit of a rut with surnames in the North.”

  “Sir,” said Malcolm Cray, putting out a hand to detain him. “I had a thought overnight—lying in bed and thinking things over . . . You remember I said just after the fire that he probably knew that some of the family would be away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what if, in fact, it was the other way around? What if it wasn’t Jack that was aimed at but one of the children who didn’t happen to be there.”

  “Point taken,” said Oddie grimly. “Particularly as I’m on my way, I hope, to interview one of those now.”

  William Waley lived at number 25, Park View Heights, Waitewood, a suburb where standard red-brick semis slotted in among patches of woodland and school playing fields. Waley’s semi was rather superior to most of the other meager specimens—it had a broader frontage, was plastered over and newly repainted, and was probably earlier—thirties rather than postwar. Approaching it casually from where they had left their car, Oddie and Sergeant Stokes saw a good-sized garage, a garden with a few late roses, and a bosomy bay window with heavy velvet curtains pulled across. As they went up the little driveway to the front door, they could hear electronic voices, and through the curtains they caught the flicker of a television screen.

  A couple of seconds after Oddie rang the doorbell, the television was switched off. The house was now totally silent. He rang again. Still only silence. He raised an eyebrow at Sergeant Stokes and bent down to open the letter box.

  “Miss Phelan? June? We know you’re in there. This is the police. We have some important information for you. Will you open the door please?”

  He straightened up. “Seemed worth a try,” he mouthed at Stokes. There was still no movement from inside. He sighed and bent himself down to the letter box again.

  “Miss Phelan, please listen to me. We have something very important to tell you. If you don’t let us in, we shall have to force our way in, so please open the door.”

  This seemed to work. After a pause of a second or two, there were sounds of scurrying footsteps and the door was opened a few inches. Nothing was said and nobody appeared in the gap, so they edged their way into the house.

  “What the hell are you going on about?”

  It took them some moments for their eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom of the hallway. No lights were on, and the figure who had opened and quickly shut the door stood behind it in the gloomiest part. She was wearing a brilliant blue dress of a silky material Mike Oddie could not have described, and high-heeled shoes that, like the dress, seemed rather too big for her. She was very heavily made up—indeed Oddie had the impression that she had been experimenting on her face when the doorbell had rung, for one side of the face was made up on rather different principles from the other, and there was a lopsided dash of mascara around the left eye, where the bell had caused the pencil to slip.

  “Could we go through?” he asked. “This is important.”

  There was a shrug of padded blue shoulder and she led the way. The living room was conventionally furnished, with a heavy padded sofa and chairs, thick fitted carpet, a small bookcase, a large television with video recorder, and a newspaper rack with the local daily paper for the last few days in it. The orderly, middle-class impression of the room was overlaid by another, inimical force: Underclothes and a towel were strewn over the sofa, a mug and a plate were on the television, and a buttery knife had fallen onto the carpet beside it. There was a slum of makeup packs and jars on the mantelpiece, and the contents of them had got over the mirror as well as here and there on surfaces in the room. June Phelan was setting her mark on her space.

  “You are June Phelan?”

  After a second for thought, she nodded.

  “I’m afraid I have bad news for you. There was a fire at your home and your father’s dead.”

  “He’s not!” For a moment surprise made her look the sixteen years that she was, underneath the borrowed grown-upness.

  “I’m afraid he is. Your mot
her has been very sick, but she’s recovering now in hospital.

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  It was the automatic Phelan aggression, an indignant repudiation of the world’s expectations. The emotion had been surprise, not grief, and she had quickly reverted to the patterns of behavior she had always known.

  “That’s for you to decide. We just came because we thought you must not have heard the news.” He gestured toward the newspaper rack. “It’s been in the paper, though.”

  June shrugged. Papers meant nothing to her.

  “The gentleman of the house . . . Mr. Waley . . . he probably read about it.”

  “Didn’t tell me. Cunning old sod.”

  “You see I have to ask you some questions because I’m afraid the fire that destroyed your house wasn’t accidental.”

  She looked at him with avid, foolish curiosity.

  “You mean someone did it deliberate? Someone wanted to fry our Dad?”

  “That’s roughly what I meant. Maybe tried to kill all of you.”

  “Christ!” said June. It was an automatic, almost an admiring response, not a shocked one. She did not seriously think anyone had been aiming at her.

  “So perhaps we could sit down and I could ask you a few questions?”

  She shrugged and pointed at the sofa. They pushed petticoats, tights, and bras up to one end and sat down.

  “How long have you been living here, June?”

  “What f- - -ing business is it of yours?”

  “I’m just trying to find out if whoever started the fire could have thought you would be in the house at the time.”

  “Don’t talk crap. They weren’t aiming to get me. Don’t you know anything at all about my Dad? Right bloody troublemaker he was. Never happy unless he was stirring it up.”

  “I know that. . . . Well, how long have you been here?”

  “Christ Almighty! . . . About ten days.”

  “So—” Oddie calculated roughly in his head—“you must have come here not long after you went with your Dad and Mum to view the house in Wynton Lane.”

  “About three or four days, far as I remember.”