‘I suppose it’s hard to think your own child would do that.’
Miss Dawes shook her head sadly. ‘She became a martyr to that girl. Heaven only knows what else went on behind closed doors. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but Carol was bad through and through.’
It was a shock to hear this sweet-faced, religious woman speak against Carol, but clearly she’d had to spill it out to someone.
‘Terrible.’ Amelia sighed. ‘I’m so sorry you got caught up in it.’
‘My dear, I’ll be fine. Shock wears off, and by tomorrow I’ll be my usual self. But I wonder if Carol had done something wicked to the man who killed her.’
Amelia stayed for an hour. She made Miss Dawes some tea, and let her talk. It transpired she’d often taken care of Carol after school when her mother had had a part-time job in a shop. She said Carol had stolen from her too, and eventually she refused to allow her into the house.
‘She was as hard as nails, even at nine or ten. A beautiful child, but her eyes were cold and calculating.’
‘I noticed that in the pictures of her,’ Amelia said. ‘At the time I thought I was seeing things that weren’t there.’
Miss Dawes sighed and wiped tears from her eyes. ‘Some said she turned bad when her father left, but it began long before that. Is it true about her stealing money from the restaurant?’
‘I’m afraid so. Funny that she ran back to her mother, though.’
‘She always did. Her mother never saw any wrong in her, not when she bullied other children, stole money from the collection box in church, set fire to rubbish in the park or shouted rude things at the neighbours. It was always someone else’s fault. Never Carol’s.’
As she left, Amelia hugged the older woman and gave her the office phone number in case she needed anything.
‘Don’t you worry about me,’ Miss Dawes said, smiling for the first time that afternoon. ‘I shall go to the evening service tonight and pray for Mrs Meadows. In a way I think she’s in the best place. She wouldn’t be able to deal with the truth about her daughter.’
As Amelia walked home, she was crying for the woman who had bred a monster by being too kind, too giving, and for the Whelans who hadn’t in any way deserved to lose their lovely daughter. What was the connection between the two girls? Despite them being poles apart in temperament, and not a scrap of evidence yet that there had been a connection, she had a gut feeling there was. Whatever Max felt about it, she wasn’t going to give up on this.
9
‘Just call me Ant – everyone else does,’ Antonio said, when Amelia sat down with him in the Bistro.
She had telephoned him during the day to arrange a meeting and he’d suggested that she come over and have supper with him.
The Bistro was noticeably quiet, but that was more because it was Monday night, very cold and windy, rather than anything to do with Carol. Antonio had heard that morning about Mrs Meadows’s suicide and, like Amelia, was shocked.
‘Jazz would never take me to meet her mother. She said she was a semi-invalid,’ he remarked glumly, clearly aware now of how many lies he’d been told during their relationship. ‘She wasn’t, was she?’
‘No,’ Amelia said. ‘A sad, bewildered woman, I’d say, but nothing physically wrong with her.’
Antonio recommended a chicken pasta dish, and the house white wine, and as they waited to be served, Amelia told him what Mrs Dawes had said. ‘But I don’t wish to dish the dirt on Jazz,’ she finished. ‘However she lived, whatever she did or didn’t do, she was murdered, and no one deserves that. All I want is to find a connection between her and Lucy. I know there is one.’
‘I don’t know that I can tell you anything useful. There were many men who came in here and flirted with Jazz,’ Antonio said, with a shrug. ‘She was like a flower to bees and she could never resist egging them on, then slamming them down good and hard. A couple wouldn’t take no for an answer – they’d come back again and again to ask her out.’
‘If Lucy had also turned down one of those men, that might have been the connection, but Lucy wasn’t that kind of girl.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Antonio half smiled. ‘One tease is enough. But as your old lady told you, Jazz could be so cruel. She’d flirt and play with men for a while, but once she was bored with them, she could cut them off with a spiteful comment. She always knew the right button to push – some of the other waitresses dissolved into tears with things she’d said to them.’
‘But you didn’t see this at first?’
He shrugged. ‘I fell for her and she could do no wrong. I admit I was a fool, but she bewitched me. I lost two first-class waitresses through her. Happily one has come back to me. She’s going to pop in a bit later to talk to you.’
‘So can you tell me if any of the men she was cruel to still come in here? Could they have followed her and killed her?’
Antonio laughed lightly. ‘No. If those men were guilty of anything, it was of being too soft and not rich enough for her. I did notice when I came to my senses it was the rich ones she really sucked up to. I’d love to know just how many of them she fleeced. When Jane gets here, she’ll tell you that Jazz named her price for going to bed with them. And it wasn’t cheap.’
‘Any of those men angry enough to want to kill her?’
‘Maybe. But Chelsea is like a village. I would’ve heard on the grapevine if she’d seriously pissed anyone off. As for you hoping to find a connection between Jazz and the other girl, it sounds to me that they couldn’t have been further apart in character. The only similarity I can see is the way they looked.’
‘Possibly. But there is something else,’ Amelia said thoughtfully. ‘Not just their appearance but both were physically fit. With Lucy it was dance, and Carol gymnastics. I’m thinking the connection may lie there.’
‘Jazz didn’t keep up her gymnastics,’ Antonio said. ‘She went to a keep-fit class, though. She once smugly told another waitress that her perfect body was her trump card.’
‘She actually said that?’ Amelia winced. ‘I think I would’ve hated her.’
Antonio laughed. ‘Join the queue. There won’t be many people around here who’ll mourn her.’
They had just finished their pasta and were on a second glass of wine when Jane arrived.
Amelia liked her on sight. She had a country-girl pink-and-white complexion and strawberry-blonde curly hair. Her only makeup was mascara. She was wearing a vintage grey fox coat, lace-up knee-high boots and a wide smile.
‘I’m delighted you’re talking to Ant about that vile girl,’ she said. ‘I can’t discuss her with him without getting angry. But I’ll say it now, I’m glad she’s dead. Thank God she can’t hurt anyone ever again.’
Amelia was a little taken aback at such vitriol, but she had to admire Jane for speaking her mind.
Antonio poured Jane a glass of wine, she said she didn’t want any food, and the three of them carried on talking.
‘Let’s not beat around the bush. She was a hooker,’ Jane said bluntly. ‘She told me once she saw no point in going to bed with a man for nothing when she could get a hundred pounds for it. I think she believed that taking money from Ant was her due, for services rendered, not stealing.’
Ant looked hurt. ‘If only I’d managed to keep her here that day, she wouldn’t have been killed,’ he said. ‘Maybe I would’ve found out why she stole from me. Perhaps she was giving money to her mother.’
‘Don’t be a prat,’ Jane said dismissively. ‘She was robbing you blind and putting it into her own pocket. If you’d turned her over to the police, I expect she’d have found something evil to say about you that would’ve got you into trouble. I say we should celebrate her death. So, Amelia, you’re a journalist, hang her out to dry. Don’t pull your punches.’
Amelia was realizing she had some real dynamite. Jack was going to be thrilled. With Mrs Meadows dead, there was no one who would be hurt by the truth. Except, perhaps, Carol’s father, but he�
�d swanned off years ago.
Before she wrote a sensational story, though, she needed to remember that she was trying to find a link between the murdered girls, not just furthering her career.
She asked Jane to look at the picture of Lucy to see if she recognized her.
Jane stared at it for some time. ‘No, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her. And, no, I can’t think of anyone who would chase Jazz over to Hammersmith to bump her off. The people around here she’d pissed off would have tripped her up, thrown paint or dog shit at her, but they wouldn’t have followed her to get their revenge. Besides, from what I’ve read about Lucy, in that article you wrote, she wouldn’t have wanted to live in the same country as Jazz, never mind be friends.’
‘So it seems, but I feel I’m missing something,’ Amelia said. ‘Like, if I just knew the magic word that links these two girls, the whole thing would be solved.’
‘I’m sure the police think that all the time,’ Antonio said.
They moved on then to talk about living in Chelsea and how expensive it was getting.
‘The trouble is all these droves of posh prats,’ Jane said. ‘They get their daddies to pay for a flat for them, which pushes the prices up, and the rest of us poor girls have to make do with a bedsitter in the Fulham Road. Still, they’re an entertainment, thick as bricks most of them, those loud braying voices, and their belief they’re God’s Chosen.’
She regaled Amelia with hysterically funny tales of such girls she knew well. ‘But they’re generous, I’ll admit that,’ she finished up. ‘I had nowhere to live a while ago and Carmella, Queen of King’s Road, let me stay in her spare room. She didn’t even want rent. In return I did the cleaning and, believe me, that flat needed it. She had a cat that crapped anywhere.’
Amelia had to go. She thanked Antonio for the supper and Jane for the entertainment and hurried off. It was disappointing she hadn’t got any leads, but the story she was going to write about Carol would get Jack’s juices flowing.
It took hours to write the piece. It would’ve been easy to write a vindictive muck-spreading article, and perhaps that was all Carol deserved, as Amelia certainly hadn’t heard anything to suggest the girl had a softer, kinder side. But she had been murdered, and she felt she had to find a way of showing why she had been so mercenary and calculating. To do that Amelia had to sheathe her claws and remember this was a girl who wanted to be a gymnast, and latterly a fashion model.
It wasn’t right to look back on her own bleak childhood and think that if she’d had a loving mother, like Mrs Meadows, she might never have spent months alone in a rented room, trying to create a world she wanted to live in. Yet a voice kept yelling that, even with her miserable childhood, she hadn’t stooped to stealing, or making men pay for her company. Why should she paint Carol in a kinder light than she deserved?
She told herself she was a journalist. Let the true gutter press do a complete character assassination: after all, they hadn’t spoken to the woman who had given birth to Carol. They couldn’t imagine what it was to hold your baby in your arms and dream of a golden future for that child. Mrs Meadows might have been a weak woman, maybe she’d let her husband control her, but there was no doubt she’d loved her daughter. Amelia could almost feel the pain the poor woman must have experienced to take her own life. No doubt she had blamed herself for Carol’s faults.
Amelia remembered that when she was about sixteen a neighbour called Beryl Bentley had taken her in for a cup of tea when she’d found her crying, her face swelling and turning purple after a punch from her father.
‘I can’t make your father a kinder man, or your mother strong enough to stand up to him,’ Beryl said, and put a little brandy in her tea to help the pain. ‘But if it’s any consolation to you, Amelia, I’ll bet your mum felt she’d been punched too, knowing what he’d done to you. That’s the curse of being a mother. You think that everything your child does wrong is somehow your fault. You didn’t love them enough, you loved them too much. You failed to notice changes. You hoped that everything would turn out for the best.
‘It’s a bugger, Amelia, but a mother always takes the blame. That’s the reason your mum gets drunk. She needs to make herself numb. If she didn’t, she’d go crazy with her own powerlessness to stand up to your dad, her inability to look after you kids, and the terrible guilt that she allowed herself to be sucked into marriage with that bastard.’
‘What do I do, then?’ Amelia had asked, crying then because it was the first time someone had seriously acknowledged what she was going through, or what a brute her father was.
‘You leave home and you make the kind of life you want,’ Beryl said. ‘That won’t come easy. You’ve grown up used to slaps and punches, and that could turn you into a victim of a sweet-talking bastard offering to “take care” of you. Men like that home in on vulnerable women, and before you know it, they’re bullying and controlling you.’
‘I wouldn’t let that happen,’ Amelia insisted.
‘Yes, you will, because you’ve been so long without love or tenderness that, one kind word, you’ll be putty in their hands. Better to stay alone until you’re stronger. And, believe me, being alone is so much better than being with a cruel or heartless man.’
‘But I don’t want to be alone,’ Amelia cried. Beryl was frightening her and giving her the idea that all her future held was an abusive man, or a life of utter loneliness.
‘You’re too special to be left long on the shelf,’ Beryl said, with a little chuckle. ‘You just need time to find out who you are and what you want. One day when you least expect it, a man will come along and you’ll sense his good soul. He won’t be flash or boastful. He’ll be happy to walk in the park with you or help you in the launderette. He’ll fill your little world, share everything he has. He’ll encourage you to do what’s good for you, and you’ll know he’s Mr Right.’
Remembering Beryl’s wise words made Amelia feel that Max was the man with the good soul. He had filled her world and shared all he had. Even if he did have to go away on rather mysterious jobs, she should trust him.
It was also time that she forgave her mother for being so pathetic, even if she still couldn’t forgive her father. Maybe their brand of child-rearing had given her strengths that girls like Carol Meadows didn’t have.
Jack loved her article. He said half jokingly that he’d have liked three-in-a-bed tales, drug-taking and embezzlement, too, but in a more generous moment he patted her on the back and told her she’d done well.
As the weeks crept by towards Christmas, the police appeared to be no nearer finding the murderer and people stopped talking about it. But otherwise things had got better and better for Amelia. After she’d written about Carol Meadows, Jack gave her a rise of two pounds a week, and she was contacted by Style, a leading glossy magazine for women. They were impressed by the factual yet sensitive way she wrote, and asked if she’d like to interview some ordinary women who had achieved amazing things.
Nothing had ever thrilled her as much as that did. It was acknowledgement that she could write well, and she couldn’t think of anything she’d like better than writing about inspirational women. She read through the profiles she’d been sent and was impressed as most of the women, some of whom had small children, had had only rudimentary education, and no help financially from anyone, but had somehow qualified professionally or started up businesses. Two had gone to night school to get O and A levels so that they could go on to university; one planned to become a doctor, the other a scientist.
Another woman was cutting out dresses on a door balanced on two trestles because she had no table in her tiny flat. She was working around the clock to sew them and had an order from a chain of boutiques for a hundred in all sizes. Once she’d been paid, her plan was to rent a workshop and employ another seamstress to work with her.
The beauty of the job Amelia had been offered was that she could do it in her spare time as they wanted just one story a week. Astoundingly the sum of se
venty pounds for each article had been suggested. She didn’t earn that much in a month at the West London Weekly.
Max was as excited as she was and went out straight away to buy her a second-hand electric typewriter. Amelia felt all her Christmases had come at once.
Christmas was so cosy. Max’s parents had asked him to come home, but he excused himself on the grounds that he was working right up to Christmas Eve. Amelia decorated her room so it looked like Santa’s grotto, with lights and more lights, a Christmas tree and artificial snowflakes on the window.
She had made a stocking for Max, but she thought he must either have been poking about and found it, or just guessed, because he made her one too. She’d put silly joke things in his: a false stick-on moustache, a pig’s snout held on with elastic, a light-up tie-pin and a pair of socks that played ‘While Shepherds Watched’ when pressed.
Max had majored on pretty things for her: tiny soaps, glitzy hair clips, a scarf with robins and a jewelled pen. To Amelia it was wonderful. As a child, her stocking had never held more than an orange and a few sweets. But, then, Christmas had been a time for her father to get crazy drunk: he broke doors down, smashed a window and her mother’s face. It had never been happy or even peaceful.
With Max it was everything she’d ever wanted. A room full of love, warmth, comfort, good things to eat and the promise of the best year ever ahead of them. It crossed Amelia’s mind that she could write a good magazine article on what people hoped for at Christmas set against the reality of what they could expect.
‘To us,’ Max said, raising a glass of sparkling wine to her. ‘Maybe we’ll look back in twenty years’ time and realize that Christmas 1970 was our most magical.’
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