While she was on her third cup of tea of the morning, Graham gave the three-ring signal that he wanted her. By then she thought even a chat about fishing might be better than being alone.
‘Hello, Miss White, a friend of yours wanted to see you,’ he said, as she opened the door. ‘I said I’d ask first.’
Amelia looked past him and saw Kat hovering with a bunch of daffodils in her hand. She looked like a gift from Heaven.
‘Come on in, Kat,’ she said excitedly. ‘I’ve never been so pleased to see anyone.’
‘It’s okay, then?’ Graham asked.
‘Certainly is,’ Amelia replied.
Amelia put the daffodils in a vase while she was waiting for the kettle to boil. She thought Kat looked good: she’d had her hair cut shorter with a fringe and it suited her better. She was wearing jeans and a three-quarter length camel coat with a deep brown fur collar.
‘Daffs are just the best flowers, coming right when you most need them on dark, chilly days. Thank you. And what a joy to see you. I’m stuck in here, can’t go out.’
‘Surely you can if you’re with someone,’ Kat said. ‘Max is banged up.’
‘Not any more.’ Amelia explained that they hadn’t been able to find proof for the murders, but they were hoping to get him on other charges.
‘How scary for you,’ Kat said, in sympathy. ‘But he’ll have been warned not to come near you, so he won’t dare.’
‘Well, yes, but we both know that doesn’t mean much to some men. My dad used to beat the daylights out of Mum, the police would take him away and he’d be back indoors the next day.’
‘So you’ve lived through things like this before? And history has repeated itself?’ Kat pulled a sad face that made Amelia smile.
‘More fool me for being so gullible. I’m really ashamed that once again I was taken in by a man. But let’s not dwell on that. I hate being stuck in here and I’m desperate to go out, even if just to the shops.’
‘Well, get your coat on, girl,’ Kat said, with a big grin. ‘We could go to the market, maybe get a snack for lunch in the pub. We’ll tell your guard dog outside as we leave.’
The market always lifted Amelia’s spirits, the crowds, the stallholders’ banter, music coming from several different sources, the smell of fruit and flowers, mixed with bacon frying and hamburgers. But even walking down the road felt good, to see the sky properly, not through a car window, to be close to people and hear talking and laughter.
Amelia bought fruit, cheese, bread and some vegetables in the market. Kat bought a china teapot; she said she’d dropped hers a couple of days before.
The rest of the shops in Shepherd’s Bush were poor, but to Amelia, having been indoors for so long, they were exciting. Kat laughed at her and said she was nuts.
They had fish and chips in a café, after a couple of halves of cider.
Amelia said she ought to go home then as the police couldn’t monitor her when she hadn’t told them exactly where she was or when she’d be back.
‘Let’s go somewhere tomorrow,’ Kat suggested. ‘If you tell the police in advance they won’t need to stay. We could go to Chislehurst, and maybe the caves. It feels like real countryside there – there’s a big pond, too.’
‘How do we get there?’ Amelia didn’t know south of the Thames.
‘The tube to Charing Cross, then a train. It’s less than half an hour.’
Kat also proposed that they went to the pictures later, but Amelia knew the police wouldn’t want her out in the dark. Besides, she felt she’d had enough company for one day, and was happy to go home and watch television.
‘I’ll come for you at ten thirty tomorrow,’ Kat reminded her, as they said goodbye at Amelia’s house.
It was only as she watched Kat walk away that she realized Sam was in the police car. She walked up to it and he wound down the window.
‘Have you been here all day?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘Graham came back to the nick and said you’d gone out with your friend. I thought I’d come before it got dark. Have you had a nice day?’
‘Yes, it was lovely. I’ve only known Kat for a few months, but she’s good company. It was great to be out today, going to the market. I was getting cabin fever. We’re going out for the day tomorrow, too. She suggested we went to Chislehurst.’
‘It’s nice there, not so far from where I grew up. But do make sure you’re back before dark, Amelia. Even when someone’s with you, it’s still dangerous while the Creeper’s on the loose.’
‘Would you like to come in for a cup of tea, maybe a sandwich or something?’ she asked.
‘I won’t, thank you. I’ve got a book I want to read, and it’s against the rules to be inside. I had a good excuse last time, but not now.’
‘Fair enough,’ she said, but she was a little disappointed. ‘By the way, have any of the police seen Max since he came out of the nick?’
‘I don’t think so – at least, no one’s mentioned it. But a couple of detectives went to Chiswick yesterday to see if they could find out anything about the fourth girl, Hilary. I think they did, but I haven’t been told what.’
‘I’d better go, it’s getting cold,’ she said but her real reason was that she felt his conversation was a bit stilted, as if he’d been told off for being too friendly with her.
‘Good night,’ he said. ‘Someone’s relieving me at ten but I’ll probably be back late afternoon tomorrow for when you come home.’
As she walked up the steps to the house, she wondered if he’d decided she was too much trouble. Perhaps she was.
17
‘I feel like I’m going on holiday.’ Amelia laughed breathlessly, as they almost fell into the train at Charing Cross station the next morning. They had got to the barrier just as the guard was about to close the gate, but they’d winked at him and wriggled through. Then they had to run to jump onto the train. ‘Not that I’ve ever been on holiday,’ she added.
The train was pulling away and it felt like an adventure.
‘Never had a holiday?’ Kat sounded shocked. ‘What – not even when you were a kid?’
‘Especially not as a kid. Our family never went anywhere. I’m continuing the tradition. Here I am at twenty-six, still living a few miles from where I was born. I’ve got the idea that’s my destiny.’
Kat laughed. ‘Don’t be daft. We could go together to Spain or somewhere this summer. But, to be truthful, I haven’t had a holiday abroad, only business trips. It’s not the same.’
‘When I was a hippie chick,’ Amelia said, ‘we talked endlessly about going to India, Afghanistan and Morocco. I used to believe that one day I’d wake up in one of those places, as if I’d travelled on a magic carpet. We were awfully naive then, weren’t we? All daydreams about changing the world, but really doing nothing at all. What about you, Kat, were you changing the world?’
‘Hardly,’ she said, with a sniff. ‘I spent a lot of time and energy on buttering up senior staff at Harrods, who spent their time telling me how fortunate I was to work there. I did go to a couple of those hippie clubs, though – the Middle Earth in Covent Garden was one. I’ve never seen so many bizarre people in my entire life as I saw there.’
‘It was all make-believe really. I was there one night when the police raided it. Once they put the big lights on, everyone looked ordinary. Most were scared, too, as they’d taken LSD and they were afraid they’d be arrested.’
‘Did you take drugs?’
‘Occasionally,’ Amelia admitted. ‘I was guilty of wanting to be like everyone else. I liked speed, that was fun, but LSD could be beautiful one minute and terrifying the next. What about you?’
‘A few pills, that’s all. I wasn’t always with people I trusted, and that makes you cautious.’
Amelia put her feet on the seat opposite. ‘What about men? Was there anyone special?’
‘A big romance when I was seventeen. Joey was a real dish, but he was killed on his brother’s mo
torbike. He crashed into a wall at speed. I spent a long time mourning him, but when I began to recover, I felt I didn’t want to get so deeply involved ever again. So then there were short, often passionate romances, which fizzled out quickly. I suppose I’m not the kind of girl men want to marry and keep for ever.’
‘You often put yourself down, Kat,’ Amelia said. ‘Why is that? It worries me.’
Kat looked down at her lap. ‘I’m too tall, too plain, maybe a bit odd.’
‘You’re not odd, you’re intriguing. And you should be proud of your height – you’re majestic. Models are tall, and they don’t worry about it.’
‘But they’ve got slinky lovely bodies. I’m built like a carthorse.’
‘You are not,’ Amelia said firmly. ‘Statuesque is how I’d describe you. I shall work on you, Kat, and make you believe in yourself. I think the new haircut is great. You’ve got good legs, and you aren’t fat. Men may have been put off because you can be a bit intense. Be fun, smiley and excited, like you were yesterday, and all will be well.’
Amelia wished she was brave enough to tell Kat that the coat she normally wore might be expensive cashmere but such a big block of black was overpowering. Today in her camel coat, with her blue jeans and that bright scarf at her neck, she looked good. She remembered that even when they’d first met in summer Kat was wearing all black. She probably had to wear it for work, and maybe she thought it was slimming and sophisticated, but it drained the colour from her face. However, she needed to be a bit closer to Kat before she started being critical. She’d say nothing more today.
Amelia had always imagined that south of the river was composed of endless housing estates. When the Royal Festival Hall was new, her class at school was taken to see it. She thought it must have been around the same time as the Coronation in 1953. She remembered one teacher saying to another, ‘I wonder when they’ll clear the bomb site and the slums away. Not much point in having a concert hall on the edge of a wasteland.’
Ever since then whenever she went to the Embankment and looked across the Thames to the South Bank and the Royal Festival Hall, she imagined the wasteland behind it.
As the train went through Bermondsey it was still grim. New Cross and Hither Green didn’t look much better either, but then, all at once, they were in an area where the houses had big gardens and there were tree-lined roads and parks.
Chislehurst seemed like the heart of the country as they got off the train. The station had primroses and daffodils planted in tubs, and there were even tiny green buds on the trees as they came out onto the station forecourt.
With the sun shining, feeling quite warm on their faces, and little traffic noise, it seemed hard to believe they were less than half an hour from the centre of London.
‘How lovely this is,’ Amelia said, as Kat led her up a hill away from the station. There was dainty blossom on trees, birds were singing, and the unpleasantness of the last couple of weeks seemed like something she’d dreamed.
As they walked around the big pond, Kat said she’d lived there when she was small. ‘We used to come up here with our fishing nets to catch tiddlers and sticklebacks. We’d put them in a jam jar and take them home, but they were always dead by the next day. We got frog spawn too, and sometimes the tadpoles survived long enough to become little frogs. In the summer we often spent all day up here.’
‘Who’s we?’ Amelia ventured. ‘A brother, sister or friend?’
Yesterday, and on the way to Chislehurst, Kat had asked her so many questions: about her family, her work and her involvement in finding the Chiswick Creeper, yet she hadn’t volunteered anything about herself until now.
‘My younger sister Angela,’ she said.
‘Where is she now? Married, got kids?’
‘No, she died in a fire,’ Kat said. ‘With my parents.’
Amelia stopped dead in her tracks, dumbfounded. ‘Oh, Kat,’ she managed to say. ‘I’m so sorry. When was this?’
‘Twelve years ago. I managed to get out of a window, but they were trapped. I don’t want to spoil our day by talking about anything so dreadful.’
Amelia didn’t know how anyone could drop a bombshell like that, then carry on as if nothing had been said. But that was just what Kat did. So many times on previous meetings she’d evaded questions, or changed the subject, even when it was something mundane, like people she worked with. Amelia could understand her not wanting to talk about something as tragic as her family being killed. And, indeed, Kat went on to say she knew a little café where they could get some lunch, but it was quite a way further on.
Buttoning her lip so that she didn’t ask any more questions was a tall order for Amelia. She had always loved stories, and a house burning down with three people in it, her friend the only survivor, made this a story she had to hear. She had so many questions bubbling in her head. Kat had said she’d lived here. Where would that have been? She must have been fourteen, maybe a bit younger, as she wasn’t sure of Kat’s age. How had the fire started and what had happened to Kat afterwards?
But Kat was pointing out primroses on a bank, and the sound of a woodpecker, and then she started to talk about two of the male staff in her bathroom department at Harrods who had been caught kissing.
‘They weren’t even discreet about it,’ she said, laughing as she told the story. ‘They were in one of the show bathrooms. The floor manager who caught them joked that they should’ve shut the door! Like they have doors in showrooms! Mr Healy, the older of the two, is married, and no one ever suspected he was like that. Mr Simmons, the younger man, is rather camp. He’s got lots of boyfriends, but we all like him – he’s a real scream.’
‘So what’s going to happen to them?’ Amelia didn’t really care: her mind was still on the fire.
‘They were both sacked. Awful, really, for Mr Healy – he’s been working there since the end of the war. John Simmons will be fine. I was told he went straight to a job in Carnaby Street.’
It was quite a walk to the café, but it was a pretty place with flowers on the tables and snowy white tablecloths. They ordered steak and kidney pudding, the dish of the day.
‘I’d like to have a café like this,’ Kat said, looking around her gleefully. ‘What could be better than feeding people? To feel appreciated.’
‘I bet running a café is a lot harder than it looks,’ Amelia said. ‘Do you like cooking? Are you good at it?’
‘Not so good.’ Kat grimaced. ‘I always like to imagine someone else doing all the boring work. I’d just be arranging the flowers, popping cherries on buns, and buying the pretty china.’
Amelia burst into laughter at that. ‘You are funny, Kat! There’d be a whole lot more you had to do than that, the cooking being the main thing.’
‘Don’t be so practical,’ Kat said, with a wide smile. ‘There must be something you fancy doing or being that you know you’ve no real aptitude for.’
‘Figure skating and being a ballerina. I can’t even stand up on ice.’
They talked for a while about all the things they’d failed at, some silly unimportant things, like doing leapfrog, and it made them giggle helplessly. Amelia even managed to forget her questions about the fire.
The lunch was delicious and very filling, yet they managed apple pie and custard too.
‘That long walk back to the station isn’t looking so inviting now,’ Amelia said, as they divided the bill into two and paid it. ‘Ideally I’d like to lie down and snooze.’
‘I’ve got somewhere you can sit down,’ Kat said. ‘Somewhere I want to show you.’
‘Mysterious.’ Amelia raised an eyebrow.
‘Don’t ask any questions till we get there.’ Kat chuckled. ‘My Magical Mystery Tour.’
They sang the Beatles song as they walked arm in arm away from the café, down a tree-lined lane where the houses were set well back from the road. Amelia thought how great it was to have a girlfriend to go out with. So far it had been the best of days and she liked Kat even m
ore now.
The houses seemed to peter out, but then Kat led her to a narrow muddy lane, overhung with bushes.
‘I’m really curious now,’ Amelia said, as she swept back branches and brambles to get through. ‘I bet you can’t get along here in summer.’
‘It doesn’t go anywhere, except to the place I’m showing you,’ Kat said.
Amelia glanced at her friend. She was flushed with excitement. Clearly this place meant a great deal to her.
They went through a rusting iron gate, which had come off its hinges, and just a few yards further on Amelia saw the burned-out house.
It must have been beautiful once, a mellow red-brick Victorian villa with pointed eaves and a portico at the front door. But only the left-hand side of the house was still intact: the right-hand side of the roof was totally gone, along with the ceilings, walls and windows on the upper floor. On the ground floor the windows had been boarded up, but some of the boards had been wrenched off and through the missing and broken panes in the front door Amelia could see the staircase beyond, black like charcoal and on the verge of collapse.
‘This was your house?’ she asked, tears welling at the thought of such a tragedy.
‘Yes – see that window?’ Kat pointed to the one on the far left upstairs. ‘That was my room. I heard Daddy yelling, “Fire!” and when I opened my bedroom door the whole landing by the stairs was ablaze. I thought he had got Angela out and Mummy. They were on the right side of house. So I closed my door and climbed out of the window.’
She pointed to a downpipe hanging off the wall. ‘That’s how I got down. But then I realized Mummy, Daddy and Angela must still be inside. I could see the staircase through the glass panels on the front door and no one could get through the flames. I ran to the nearest neighbours and they must’ve rung the fire brigade. But my memory of all that is hazy. Come with me?’
She took Amelia’s hand and led her round the left-hand side of the burned house. There was a narrow pathway made by someone, perhaps Kat forcing her way through, but bramble bushes looked intent on smothering it.
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