At midnight, Amelia was still awake. Max had finally left at about ten o’clock. She was quite staggered by how much she liked him. He wasn’t what she called a Normal Norman at all, and she felt a bit ashamed that until today that was how she’d seen him, without knowing a thing about him.
He was so easy to be with. He didn’t talk about his work, or the people he worked with: he said that was deadly dull. Instead she’d found out that he played cricket and belonged to an amateur dramatic society, so far playing small parts. He also liked singing and rock-climbing.
‘I like the idea of a singing rock-climber. Are the hills alive with the sound of music?’ She giggled.
He had laughed at that but, then, he laughed readily. He said being the youngest of four boys he’d had to learn to laugh at their cruel jokes or be labelled a cry-baby. He had grown up on a moorland farm in Devon, but his parents had sold it the previous year to retire to Sidmouth. They had hoped one of their sons would want to take it on, but two of his brothers had joined the RAF, while the third had just finished his training as a vet and moved to Edinburgh. Max had never wanted to be a farmer, even though he said his childhood spent on the farm had been idyllic. He had started rock-climbing at seven on wild patches of Dartmoor. Now he liked to go to Scotland or North Wales to climb.
They kept coming back to the murdered girl, though – he was as interested as Amelia in who she was and why she’d been killed. He pointed out that narrow Scotts Road, which ran from Goldhawk Road to Uxbridge Road, existed to give access to all the wider roads it crossed and had been chosen to dump her body as garden walls on either side obscured any view. The upper storeys of the houses offered little more because of the tall plane trees that grew along the road.
‘Still, a strange place to dump a body,’ Max remarked. ‘She wasn’t there this morning – I would’ve seen those boots – so she must have been put there during the day. Possibly not long before you passed by. The killer must’ve driven her there, so why didn’t he go further out of London? Unless the rubbish was the attraction. Maybe he saw her as rubbish.’
Now as Amelia lay in bed, turning things round and round in her head, she realized not only was she burning to know about the dead girl, but she also wanted to see Max again.
3
After almost two hours in an airless interview room with a chain-smoking, dour, middle-aged copper, who appeared not to believe her story, Amelia had had enough.
‘I’ve told you absolutely everything that happened,’ she said, glaring at him, ‘and now I want to go to work!’
At eight that morning two officers had arrived at her home and insisted she accompany them immediately to the police station to give her statement.
She was worried she’d be late for work, but they’d waved aside her protests. As she had told them everything on the previous day and had nothing else to add, she couldn’t imagine it taking more than twenty minutes at absolute tops. But she was mistaken.
‘I told you I don’t know her. I’ve never even seen her before,’ she said wearily when, once again, he produced a photograph of the victim. The girl looked very pretty, although the photograph had been taken after her death. ‘Look! I didn’t see anyone put her there. I didn’t see anyone hanging around looking suspicious, either.’ She paused, her irritation rising and threatening to spill over into anger. ‘How many times do you need me to tell you the same thing? I just saw the boots and I wanted them. I didn’t expect them to be on the legs of a dead girl. I thought they’d been thrown away.’
‘You didn’t tell the officer at the scene yesterday that you’d tried to take the boots. Why was that?’
Amelia rolled her eyes in despair. ‘I got a huge shock when I realized they were attached to someone. It frightened the life out of me. I didn’t want to admit the truth, which was that I’ve wanted boots like that for ages and I was just going to look at what size they were.’
‘So you were going to take them?’
Amelia stared hard at him, astounded that he was making such a thing of it. ‘Well, yes, if they’d just been thrown out and were my size.’ She knew she was shrieking but she couldn’t help it. ‘But the moment I realized there was someone under that rubbish I backed away in shock. That was when my neighbour Max came along and he ran to phone 999. Now please may I go to work? I can’t tell you anything else.’
‘Fair enough,’ he agreed. ‘But we’ll need your fingerprints before you leave so we can eliminate those from any others we find on the boots.’
‘Have you found out who the girl is yet?’ Amelia asked, as they left the room. ‘She looks so young and lovely. Her family must be wondering where she is.’
‘That’s our job, not yours,’ he said curtly. ‘Now come with me and I’ll take your prints.’
It was nearly eleven when Amelia finally arrived at her office on Shepherd’s Bush Road. She was furious at what she’d been put through and she went straight into the editor’s room to explain why she was late. To her surprise, he greeted her pleasantly, getting her a cup of tea and inviting her to sit down and tell him the whole story. He agreed that it was wrong for the police to be so aggressive to someone who was guilty of nothing more than reporting a crime.
Jack Myles was not known for being kind. His bad temper, savage character assassinations, and humourless personality were legendary. Amelia described him to friends as a bulldog, with heavy, sagging jowls, brown teeth and a bad case of BO. He ran the newspaper like a military campaign and was hard on anyone who didn’t jump to his commands. So even as Amelia basked in his sympathy, she knew that a wily old fox like him probably sensed the murder as a huge story, and as Amelia had found the body, he could make it a scoop.
‘When the police release the girl’s name and how she was killed, it would be a kind thing for you to call on her family,’ he said, once he’d exhausted his feigned sympathy.
Amelia’s mouth dropped open. She hadn’t expected something as obvious as that. ‘I couldn’t,’ she said in alarm. ‘They’ll be beside themselves with grief.’
‘That’s when people most need to talk,’ he snapped. ‘You found the girl, her mother will feel a bond with you, and she’ll spill it all out.’
Amelia gulped down any further argument. She was horrified by Jack’s lack of sensitivity … but maybe he was right. The girl’s mother would feel something for the person who had found her, just as Amelia felt something for the dead girl. Truth to tell, she wanted to know her background, to put a character and personality to the person who had worn the white boots.
Jack asked her still more questions about the crime scene.
As he listened, he propped his elbow on his desk and supported his head with his right hand. With the left, he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Amelia had seen him sitting like that a hundred times and it was usually followed by his version of the story he’d just been told.
‘The murderer saw her as trash,’ he said, when Amelia had finished. ‘No one waits by a pile of rubbish hoping to kill someone, then tosses them onto it. But he knew that heap was there. He killed the girl elsewhere and drove her there to dump her body. I wouldn’t mind betting he’d been following her for some time too, perhaps some ugly bastard who knew he couldn’t have a girl like her for himself.’
‘She could’ve had a fight with her boyfriend, and he killed and dumped her,’ Amelia suggested. ‘There’s piles of rubbish all over London since they stopped collecting it.’
‘A man who loves a girl doesn’t dump her on rubbish. He’d have buried her in woods or some beauty spot.’
Amelia nodded. That sounded logical. ‘But if the killer was a stranger, how on earth will the police find him?’
‘Because he’ll do it again,’ Jack said. ‘He’ll have got a kick out of killing this one, and he’ll want to repeat it.’
‘He took a huge risk dumping her where he did,’ Amelia said. ‘The houses at either end of the road might not have any view from their back windows because of the trees, but a great many
people walk through that way at any time of day or night.’
‘I expect that added to the excitement,’ Jack said, getting to his feet, clearly dismissing her. ‘I’m going out now to have a chat with a contact at the nick. On your desk there are some leads for firms who might advertise with us. Follow them up.’
Amelia felt hurt that he had terminated their talk so abruptly. Until that moment she’d felt he was engaging with her and understood what a shock she’d had. But remembering that other staff had said he was selfish to the core, she got on with her work and tried hard to stop dwelling on it.
Jack didn’t return until nearly four in the afternoon, stinking of cigarettes and whisky. ‘My office!’ he said, as he lurched past Amelia’s desk.
There was nothing unusual about Jack being drunk: he often was after he’d been meeting a contact. Sometimes he fell asleep on the couch in his office. There was a story, often repeated, that he peed in his wastepaper bin when he was sozzled.
‘Did you find out anything useful?’ Amelia asked. Jack had collapsed onto his couch and she averted her eyes as his flies were open. She just hoped he wasn’t going to do the peeing thing in front of her.
‘Course I did. I’m a ball of fire when I want information,’ he said, slurring his words. He fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. ‘Her address! She was a stripper. Name of Lucy Whelan, age twenty-five. Her killer will be a punter from the strip club – they’re raiding the place tonight. Get around to her folks and butter them up for some background. They’ve been informed their daughter is dead, but there hasn’t been enough info leaked about this yet to get all the newshounds round there. Advise the family not to speak to anyone else.’
Amelia wanted to say he could show some consideration for a bereaved family, but she didn’t dare. She shot off hurriedly, not because she was keen to go to the address in Chiswick but to get away from Jack’s stench.
The combination of cigarettes and whisky was an unwanted reminder of her father, Bill White, or Chalky, as he was known to his pals. Those same pals thought him brave, wise, generous and tough, but the reality was that he was cruel to his wife, Gillian, and their children, kept them short of money, treated them like they were nothing, and they were terrified of him.
He’d joined the army at eighteen in 1929, and very quickly rose to corporal. Within ten years, at the outbreak of war, he was made a sergeant. Bill was possibly the only person in England who was delighted to go to war – he couldn’t wait to get stuck into some real fighting. Amelia had no doubt that her mother was equally delighted to see him go, but as she wasn’t born until 1945, she couldn’t be certain of that. The three children Gillian had had then were evacuated to Norfolk, and she got a job as a clippie on the buses. From the odd things she’d said about that time, it seemed she’d enjoyed it, at least until she’d got pregnant with Peter.
If he was to be believed, Bill was a war hero, though Amelia wasn’t convinced that all his stories were true. He had been decorated for rescuing a severely wounded officer in the withdrawal to Dunkirk, that much was true – he was always showing off the medal – but he certainly couldn’t have been in all the dangerous and faraway places he claimed, not as he had come home on leave and impregnated Gillian, first with Peter and then with Amelia.
Amelia was happy to think he might have been in an Asian PoW camp, as he claimed, for that would mean he couldn’t be her father, and maybe the real one was a kind, decent man.
As the youngest of five, with a sister and three brothers, she hadn’t been knocked about quite as much as the others. But she’d learned at an early age to listen to Bill’s wartime stories with apparent eagerness and excitement, especially when he was drunk.
It was her oldest brother Michael and their mother who took the brunt of his bad temper. Bill blamed Gillian for everything he didn’t like: being invalided out of the army on medical grounds, having five children, being forced to drive a truck to earn a crust, and for living in a council house in White City. By all accounts he had never liked Michael because he was quiet, timid and gentle, characteristics he certainly hadn’t inherited from his father.
When he had been evacuated, Michael was chosen by a childless doctor and his wife in Norfolk. At their comfortable home, he discovered books, learned to play chess and listened to classical music. The doctor and his wife became very fond of him and gave him a first-class education. Christine and James were in the same village, but billeted with a farmer and his wife.
Back in 1960, when Amelia was fifteen, Michael confided in her that he had considered killing himself when the war ended and he’d had to return home. He was just twelve then, and the thought of being forced to live in squalid conditions under the same roof as a violent bully, and to be jeered at for his bookish ways, was too much to bear.
As it turned out Michael’s return home was even worse than he’d expected. He didn’t know four-year-old Peter, his youngest brother, and Amelia was just a baby. The council house in White City was small, damp and cold, with only an outside lavatory. He had to share a bed with his three brothers, there was an acute shortage of food and coal for the fire, and Bill never stopped belittling him. He thought all boys should be out playing football or roaming the streets in gangs as he’d done as a child. Each time he caught Michael with a book he hit him.
Finally Bill was so drunk one night that he beat Michael to within an inch of his life, resulting in a broken arm, cracked ribs and his whole body bruised and battered. Christine ran to the corner shop and begged them to call the police and an ambulance before Bill killed her brother.
Although the police arrested Bill, Gillian knew they wouldn’t be able to hold him for long, so in desperation she rang the doctor and his wife and asked if they would consider taking Michael when he came out of hospital.
They were only too happy to agree – in fact, they came to London immediately and arranged for Michael to be brought to Norfolk in an ambulance. It was said they spoke to Bill while he was still being held in custody, and told him they would have him prosecuted for cruelty to children if he ever came near Michael again. Whether that was true or not, Amelia didn’t know but, thanks to the doctor and his wife, Michael went on to university and eventually became a doctor too. Something that had made their father seethe.
Amelia met up with Michael occasionally. They tried hard to bond, if only because they were both family outcasts, but he’d been almost grown-up when she was born, and they’d spent only a few weeks under the same roof. Now married with two children, Michael was in a practice in Bury St Edmunds and he didn’t get to London often. When Amelia did see him, no matter how hard Michael tried to be a real brother, she sensed he would have preferred no reminders of the past.
Amelia totally understood that. Living in the shadow of Wormwood Scrubs prison in a miserable, cold, damp house was bad enough, but her father was pure evil, and her mother pathetic for not running away the first time he had beaten her.
Amelia left home at eighteen, after a beating from her father, and since then Christine had married a man almost as bad as their father, while James and Peter were in and out of prison constantly for petty crime. Amelia left them to it for good, accepting that her family’s awful behaviour was entrenched, and would never change. She found it hard to rake up any happy memories of them.
The Whelans’ Chiswick address was closer to Acton than Chiswick, quite a long stretch from Turnham Green tube station, not that Amelia minded the walk. She was happy to delay the moment she’d have to knock on the Whelans’ door. She just hoped they wouldn’t slam it in her face.
It was a neat terraced house with a tiny front garden bright with flowers, and she paused with her hand on the gate, trying to summon the courage to go through it and walk up to the door. She imagined Lucy’s mother flying at her in anger, the rest of the family accusing her of being an ambulance chaser. But she knew that if she didn’t give Jack something tomorrow, he’d probably sack her.
With a heavy he
art she walked slowly to the front door and rang the bell.
The woman with the red-rimmed eyes and blotchy skin who answered the door had to be Lucy’s mother. Amelia took a deep breath.
‘Are you Mrs Whelan, Lucy’s mother?’ she asked gently.
‘Yes. What’s it to you?’ she replied, her voice cracking.
‘I’m the person who found Lucy,’ Amelia continued, her fingers tightly crossed that she wouldn’t make a blunder. ‘I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her, and how it must be for you and the rest of her family, so I persuaded one of the policemen to give me your address so I could pay my respects.’
‘You found her?’ Mrs Whelan asked, looking surprised. ‘They said it was a woman, but I expected you to be much older. You’d better come in.’
It was only once she was in the tiny hall that Amelia felt she could breathe again. She was in, and as long as she didn’t sound like a journalist or ask awkward questions it should be all right.
The sitting room was small, no more than ten-foot square, which wasn’t helped by a large maroon three-piece suite, a dining table and chairs all crammed into it. Four women were there – one was about seventy with a wrinkled face, and Amelia assumed she was Lucy’s grandmother. Another woman of similar age to Mrs Whelan might have been her sister, Lucy’s aunt, as they were so alike, and two younger ones turned out to be Lucy’s older sisters.
‘I’m Amelia White. It was me who found Lucy,’ she said nervously. ‘I’m sorry if I’m intruding on your grief but finding her the way I did was such a shock I can’t stop thinking about her. I’ll leave if you don’t want me here.’
‘You sit down, my dear,’ the oldest lady said. ‘I always think when someone dies it’s best to gather in a group, talk about them and share the sadness. So you are welcome.’
‘I’m Nichola, Lucy’s oldest sister,’ one of the younger women said, as she moved up on the sofa to make room for the new arrival. ‘And this is Tracy, our other sister.’ She waved a hand towards the second girl.
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