Vera Stanhope 06 - Harbour Street

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘Tell me about Margaret in those days.’ They’d pulled up outside the Harbour Guest House now. Susan was looking around her, but made no move to get out. And at least in the car it was warm and they wouldn’t be overheard. ‘How did she earn her living?’

  The woman turned her head sharply to face him. ‘You already know or you wouldn’t be asking.’

  He wondered now that he could have thought her stupid or slow. ‘She was a sex worker?’

  ‘An escort,’ Susan said. ‘High-class. Choosy. She could have made a fortune, but she was never greedy. And she saved the money. I could never save a penny.’

  ‘Were you in the same business?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nah, I never had the nerve for it.’ Another smile. ‘Or the body. I managed on the social. Had a man, until he left me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Joe wasn’t sure what else to say.

  ‘I wasn’t. He was a bastard. But I started taking drugs then. Tranquillizers from the doctor, then anything I could get hold of. Never stopped really. They took my baby.’

  He didn’t reply. It would have sounded trite to say again that he was sorry.

  ‘But you’re clean now? At the Haven.’

  ‘Aye. Still have bad days.’ A brief grin. ‘And I make the most of them when they happen. I don’t want them to get rid of me. If they think I’m well, they might make me leave, set me up in a place all on my own, like they did Dee. I couldn’t live like that.’

  ‘You like it at the Haven?’

  ‘Eh, pet, I love it. Always someone about to chat to. A bit like the old days in Harbour Street.’

  They sat for a moment in silence. ‘Can I see inside? Where Margaret lived.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ He got out of the car, then went round and opened her door for her. It was still very cold.

  She took his hand and pulled herself out, then stood for a moment looking up and down the street. On the pavement opposite, Peter Gruskin let himself into the church.

  ‘Could we go in there first?’ She nodded towards St Bartholomew’s. ‘For old time’s sake.’

  Joe wasn’t sure what the priest would make of them wandering in, but it was a place of worship and it belonged to the community, not to one man. He crooked his arm so that Susan could hold onto it to steady herself as they crossed the icy road.

  ‘Were you a member of the congregation?’ he asked.

  ‘I was baptized there,’ she said. ‘And I went there to grieve, when they took the baby.’

  ‘Was it a boy or a girl?’

  ‘A little girl,’ she said. ‘I called her Ellen, after my mother. I don’t know what her new parents called her.’

  ‘You never tried to find out what happened to her?’ Joe tried to imagine what that would be like. To hand over a child when you’d been through the pain of labour and you’d held it in your arms. All those hormones rushing around your body and your mind.

  ‘Nah,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t have been fair. Besides, they were right. I wouldn’t have been able to give her any sort of life.’

  She opened the church door, and Joe let her walk ahead of him. Partly because he’d been brought up to think it was gentlemanly to let the woman walk first, and partly because Peter Gruskin spooked him. He was used to Methodist ministers, who dressed like everyone else, apart from a soft white collar at the neck.

  Gruskin wasn’t there. He must be in a back room. They sat for a moment in a pew. Joe looked at Susan and almost expected to see her crying again, those big silent tears that she’d shed when she’d heard about Margaret, but she was just staring towards the altar. After a few minutes she stood up and he followed her out.

  ‘It brings it all back,’ she said. ‘Not the details – I was off my head most of the time and I can’t remember much – but how I felt.’

  ‘You said you knew Margaret’s boss,’ Joe said. They were outside now and the light seemed suddenly very bright and they were squinting against it.

  ‘Did I?’ She still seemed preoccupied by the church and glanced back to look at it.

  ‘That would have been Malcolm Kerr’s dad, Billy?’

  ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I expect that you’re right.’

  ‘Was Billy one of Margaret’s clients?’ It had just come to Joe as a possibility.

  ‘No, pet, I don’t think anything like that was going on.’

  But he could tell that she was thinking about something else and hadn’t put any thought into the answer.

  When he knocked on the door of the guest house he wasn’t sure how he’d explain their presence. It was opened by Chloe, Kate’s daughter. She stared out at them, her arms wrapped round her bony body to keep out the cold. She had big fluffy slippers, just like Jessie’s.

  ‘Mum’s out with Stuart,’ she said. ‘I’m the only one here.’

  ‘Susan used to live in Harbour Street in the old days.’ Joe found himself talking gently, as if to an invalid. Something about this child was so fragile that he felt she needed careful handling. ‘She’d like to see Margaret’s room. I’ve got a key. Is it okay if we go on up?’

  ‘Yeah, fine.’ She didn’t seem at all curious about the strange woman turning up on her doorstep. Joe supposed that strangers must turn up there all the time, as they did at the Haven. It must be an odd way to live. He thought of his home as being safe from intrusion. Even Vera knew better than to turn up there unannounced.

  Susan climbed the stairs to the attic with some difficulty. She was younger than Margaret, but unfit and heavy. At the top there was a sheen on her skin despite the cold.

  ‘The house must look very different,’ he said. ‘But Margaret always lived up here, didn’t she?’

  ‘Aye. She liked to look out to the sea.’ A brief pause, then that old spark of humour. ‘And she said that if a man couldn’t make it up the stairs he was no use to her.’

  ‘She enjoyed her work then?’ Joe couldn’t get that. A woman as bright and well brought up as Margaret Krukowski enjoying life as a sex worker. Vera always said he should have been born in the nineteenth century, and there was something of the Victorian about him. But deep down he knew that if he’d been around at the time, he’d have been tempted to run up the stairs and knock at her door. He’d probably have paid to spend time with her, to touch her. As he put the key in the lock he almost imagined her inside, ready for him.

  Again he stood aside to let Susan in. This time he needed a moment to compose himself. ‘Is this what it was like in your day?’ He’d arrested prostitutes, but they’d been working out of scuzzy massage parlours, or rundown houses in faded seaside towns. Pimps on the pavements watching from a distance, a perpetual threat to their women not to talk. Those girls had been addicts, rattling for a fix, lank-haired and sharp-featured. Nothing soft or inviting about their bodies or their beds.

  Susan walked in and sat on the sofa. ‘The kitchen’s been done up,’ she said. ‘But she always had this room nice. I never saw inside the bedroom. She always had the door shut.’

  ‘Did she enjoy it?’ He repeated the question. Thinking about it again, it wasn’t so much the sex that shocked him, but the fact that it had happened here, in Margaret’s own space. It seemed like a terrible invasion of her privacy, another example of living on the job. He could see why she’d invited so few people into her home once she’d retired.

  ‘She said it was better than working for a living. And once she’d got herself sorted, her own clients – regulars – I think she did like it. She only ever took on someone new if they were recommended. She never had to advertise.’

  ‘Not like Dee Robson?’

  Susan gave a sad chuckle. ‘Poor Dee. She was an alcoholic and she enjoyed the drink too much to give up. Every couple of quid was important. And she needed the attention. But she was never a real professional. Not like Margaret.’

  Joe sat beside her. ‘Did Margaret ever talk to you about her customers?’

  ‘Clients,’ Susan said. ‘She called them her clients. And no, she ne
ver talked about them. She said she was like a doctor or a priest, and what happened in the bedroom stayed secret.’

  Joe took another tack. ‘Where was your room?’

  ‘On the ground floor. Near the front door. Draughty. And I never got it looking like this place.’ She looked wistfully at Margaret’s furniture. ‘Didn’t have the eye.’

  ‘But you’d have seen people coming in and out from there?’ Because Joe thought Susan would have been curious. Jealous even. He pictured her peering through stained net curtains, catching a glimpse of Margaret’s gentleman callers on the pavement outside.

  ‘Sometimes.’ Susan snapped her mouth shut, as if she’d just remembered that this pleasant young man was a police officer.

  ‘It might help us to find out who killed her,’ Joe said. ‘We think it might have started all those years ago.’

  ‘Nah! That’s just daft. Who’d care what happened then?’

  ‘Margaret was dying,’ Joe said. ‘Bowel cancer. We think she wanted to talk about what happened back then. And maybe somebody wanted to stop her.’

  There was a pause. On the roof outside herring gulls were screaming. ‘I never knew their names. And there were only a few of them.’

  ‘But you saw them.’

  ‘All respectable,’ she said. ‘Suits, you know. Shiny shoes.’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘Once there was even a vicar. He was wearing a scarf, but when he was leaving it was open at the neck and I saw that white collar they have.’

  But not Peter Gruskin, Joe thought. He’d hardly have been born. He remembered Vera and her manic behaviour at the briefing the day before, her conviction that Pawel Krukowski was dead. ‘Tell me about Margaret’s husband?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘What was he like?’

  It was as if she hadn’t heard him again. He wondered if she was lost in her memories, or if this vacant stare was a technique she’d developed to persuade social workers that she still needed to stay at the Haven.

  ‘Susan.’

  She turned her head slowly. Her eyes were cloudy and it was as if she hardly knew him.

  ‘Tell me about Margaret’s husband. Pawel. The Polish guy.’

  ‘I never met him,’ she said. Her head was tilted to one side, as if she was listening to a far-away voice. ‘When I moved into Harbour Street he’d already disappeared.’

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  They had a fish-and-chip lunch in the Mardle Fisheries. Only a few days to Christmas, and the staff wore Santa hats and a crackly version of ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ played on a loop in the background. Joe didn’t think he’d get anything more from Susan, but Vera had told him to buy her lunch and, anyway, he thought it would be a treat for her. He’d started to think of her as a slightly batty aunt.

  ‘Were the fisheries here when you lived in the street?’ He thought Susan went in and out of reception like a badly tuned radio. Sometimes she listened and understood, and at other times she seemed in a world of her own.

  She nodded, her mouth full of chips. ‘But only the wet-fish shop and the takeaway. Not a sit-down restaurant.’

  ‘And the pub was there?’

  ‘Yes.’ She scrunched up her forehead, a parody of someone thinking. ‘The landlady was called Val. She ran the place for years. I don’t know what happened to her. She had a son.’ Again Susan frowned in concentration, as if remembering the man’s name was a sort of test. ‘Rick? It might have been Rick. I never liked him. He was cruel to me. Made fun. There’s nothing clever about making fun.’ She put her hand to her mouth as if she regretted giving so much away and returned to her meal.

  Now Joe’s mind was wandering. He couldn’t see what any of this could have to do with the murder of two women in the twenty-first century, but he imagined the Coble in the 1970s. It would be before all the pits and the shipyards closed. Lads in flared jeans and lasses in hippy skirts. The two small bars filled with smoke and the ceilings brown with nicotine. There would have been more commercial fishing then, and the men would’ve come for a pint straight from the boats, full of talk of their catch and the weather. What would they all have made of Margaret Krukowski? Perhaps the men wouldn’t have cared how she made her living, but some of them would surely have guessed. They’d have seen Margaret’s clients, even if they’d been few in number, out of place in their business suits and clerical collars, knocking at the door of Number One, Harbour Street. They’d have been curious. Would they have wanted some of the action too?

  ‘Do you fancy going in for a drink?’ he asked. ‘For old times’ sake?’

  Susan shook her head immediately. Perhaps she thought that Rick, the landlady’s son, would still be there to jeer at her.

  Joe took out the photo album from his inside pocket. ‘Do you recognize anyone here?’

  She turned the pages slowly, but nothing registered until she came to the photo of Billy Kerr’s birthday party. ‘That’s Margaret! And Billy and Malcolm.’

  ‘Anyone else that you recognize?’

  ‘Val, the landlady.’ She pointed to the big woman.

  Joe waited for her to point to Rick, the landlady’s son, but she shut the album without mentioning him. Again he wondered what exactly the boy had done to upset her. ‘Shall we get you back to the Haven?’ He wasn’t sure what good this was doing. He saw a police van pulling in beside Kerr’s yard and wondered what was going on there.

  ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘But it’s been canny, coming back.’

  ‘Not too many ghosts?’

  She put on her blank, not-understanding face and didn’t reply.

  They arrived at the Haven at the same time as Laurie and Jane, and Joe helped to carry in the carrier bags of food.

  ‘How did it go?’ Jane caught him, just as he was about to get back into the car. There was something complicit in the question, as if they were two professionals comparing notes on a shared case.

  But we’re not, he wanted to say. You’re a suspect as much as Susan is. ‘Fine.’ He gave a bland smile. ‘I think she had a good time.’ Then he did get into his vehicle and drove off before she could pry further.

  Back in the police station he searched out Vera, found her in the canteen staring into space over a mug of tea. He sat down opposite her. ‘What did you get out of Kerr?’

  She looked up. ‘Not a lot. He’s hiding something, but he’s not talking.’ She paused. ‘I’ve got a warrant to search his yard. It still seems as if Pawel Krukowski disappeared into thin air. And I don’t believe in magic.’

  ‘The search team arrived just as I was leaving.’

  She looked across the table at him. ‘Tell me that you got on better with Susan Coulson.’

  ‘I’m not sure. She lived on the ground floor of the house and saw Margaret’s clients coming and going. There weren’t many of them. But all respectable men, she said. Professionals. A vicar even. She claims not to know any names.’

  ‘That doesn’t get us any further then.’ Vera looked up at him and he saw how tired she was. She’d burned herself out with her excitement of the day before. Perhaps she was no longer so convinced by her idea that Margaret had killed her husband.

  ‘Susan mentioned the landlady of the Coble. The woman called Val. And her son, Rick. Val’s probably dead by now, but the man might still be around. Do you know if Charlie ever traced him?’

  ‘He hasn’t said.’ Vera was preoccupied.

  Joe persisted. ‘There’d have been gossip in the neighbourhood about Margaret. Not something you could keep secret in a place like Harbour Street: strangers turning up at her door.’ Joe knew he was throwing Vera these ideas in the hope of cheering her up. ‘I thought it might be useful to talk to people who were around at the time, but not involved in the present case.’

  ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘You’re probably right. See if Charlie has managed to get anything on this Rick. He’s babysitting Kerr in the house in Percy Street.’ But there was no enthusiasm in her words and she got up suddenly and stomped awa
y from him and back to her office. She sat there with her door shut until mid-afternoon, when she left without a word. Joe knew she’d be going back to Harbour Street. The tension of waiting for the search results would be killing her and she couldn’t stop herself from meddling.

  Charlie answered his phone on the first ring and told Joe to hang on until he found somewhere private so that they could talk.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Joe could tell from the first response to the call that Charlie was gloomy.

  ‘Well, I can think of better ways to spend the week before Christmas.’

  ‘Have you tracked down that mother and son who used to run the pub in Harbour Street?’

  Charlie hardly paused for a beat. ‘The Butts? I haven’t got anything on the man, but the mother still lives in Mardle. The address is on my desk.’ And then he was gone.

  Joe got home before the kids were in bed. They had that wild energy that came of being shut in the house all day, too much sugar and too much anticipation of Christmas. Jessie was sulking because Sal had refused to let her go into Newcastle with her friends. ‘I’ve told her that she’s too young to go in without a grown-up. It’s mad this time of year.’ Sal was crotchety and resentful after having to battle the issue all day. He could see that one more push from Jessie and his wife would relent, just for a quiet life. There were times when being a parent was the hardest thing in the world. And being a daughter-in-law too. In a moment of madness Sal had offered to cook Christmas lunch for his parents this year and she was already stressing about it. The fridge was so full of food that it would hardly shut.

  He’d got the kids upstairs and poured Sal a big glass of Pinot when his phone rang. Vera. Just wanting to chat.

  ‘How’s it going?’ He walked into the kitchen so that he wouldn’t disturb Sal – there was a series she liked on the telly. She rolled her eyes when she realized it was Vera on the phone.