The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  “Don’t get the wrong impression,” he said carefully. “But I had a rootless childhood. I’m not a native of Yorkshire. I was born in Manchester, then when war broke out I was evacuated and lived with a family in Wales for three years. I hated that. They were Welsh speakers and it was like being in a foreign country. When I went back to my mother, my father was away in the Forces and she had moved to Bradfield to be near her family.”

  “So you came here when you were what, about eight?”

  “Eight years old, with a Welsh accent - can you can imagine how that went down with the little tykes in a Bradfield council school? It took me about three weeks to learn to speak broad Yorkshire and kick anyone who didn’t instead of being kicked myself. I think that’s when I first realised that you didn’t have to be yourself, you could be anyone you liked. It taught me to act – fast.”

  And he had probably not stopped acting since, Laura thought to herself, as Blake parked the car outside a surprisingly well kept pub to one side of the green at the centre of the huddle of cottages. The village consisted of little more than a single street which wound its way steeply down the hillside to a narrow stone bridge across a rushing stream. He got out of the car and opened the passenger door for her, waiting as the seat belt slid automatically back to allow her out and holding out an a hand to help her.

  They settled at a corner table in the low-ceilinged lounge bar and Blake fussed about to get Laura a drink and the home-made pie and salad which was the dish of the day chalked on the blackboard on the wall. It was a more homely setting than Laura had imagined him choosing but several heads turned to look at the tall actor and he seemed to swell in the warm glow of people’s attention before settling down opposite Laura and opening his hands expansively.

  “So what more can I tell you, my dear?” he asked. Laura placed her small tape-recorder on the table between them.

  “Tell me about your family,” she said. “What did your father do?”

  “He left us,” Blake said flatly, and unexpectedly, the perfectly modulated voice suddenly dropping and becoming almost harsh. “He came back from the Air Force and stayed with us in Bradfield for a while, I can’t remember exactly how long. And then he went. I can remember there being rows, but I was never told exactly why he went, whether there was another woman. My mother simply wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “You were an only child?”

  “That’s right. My mother’s pride and joy, I suppose.”

  “Were you a spoilt child?”

  “Inevitably,” Blake said dryly. “What son of an abandoned mother isn’t spoilt? She was very ambitious for me. Pushed me to pass the grammar school entrance exam, paid for elocution lessons for me because she hated the accent I’d picked up, sent me to dancing and drama lessons when my English teacher told her I had talent, scrimped and saved…. She was a remarkable women, though of course I didn’t know that at the time. Who does?”

  “And she’s still alive, you said?”

  “Yes, I’ll be going to see her before the museum opening. They say she’s developing Alzheimer’s, so I don’t even know if she’ll recognise me….”

  “You were very close?”

  “Yes, we were.” Blake pushed his plate away as if to indicate that he had spoken as much as he intended about his mother. Laura took the hint. There would be other opportunities to discover more about the relationship, she was sure.

  “So you went to the grammar school and then to RADA? Tell me about your education,” she said.

  “It was an education,” Blake said without much enthusiasm. “The usual stuff - Latin and French if you weren’t keen on science. I wasn’t keen on science. I got my School Certificate and stayed on into the sixth form. But the thing which really turned me on was drama.” For a moment those flat dark blue eyes lit up and Laura felt the layers of circumspection begin to peel away a fraction.

  “I played Juliet when I was thirteen - a boys’ school had to do it the way Shakespeare would have done it, of course - Julius Caesar when I was seventeen, and I joined the amateur theatre club at the central library. I couldn’t get enough of it. Though I don’t suppose anyone will remember my efforts now. I learned to smoke a cigarette in a long holder in some romantic comedy when I was about sixteen - totally incongruous, it must have been. I don’t think I’d even started shaving and I was playing the romantic lead. Crazy.”

  “But you haven’t kept in touch with anyone from that time?” Blake gave her another long cool look, the momentary enthusiasm for his own boyish passions fading as quickly as it had arrived. Laura could almost feel him closing down, and could not understand why.

  “I’ve been away so long. Off the record, I think I blotted Bradfield from my mind when I left. I never liked the place, never felt at home, I think my mother felt the same and she moved away at about the same time, so there was never any reason to come back.”

  “No girl friends to visit?”

  “Nothing like that,” Blake said flatly. “And the street where we lived was pulled down long ago. It’s not very fruitful territory for your article for the Gazette, I’m afraid.” He leaned across and switched off the taperecorder.

  “Let’s leave all that and talk about you for a bit, shall we?” he said with a look which she found hard to interpret.

  “I don’t think that will take us very far,” Laura said equally firmly.

  “You’re not married, are you?” he asked. She shook her head.

  “Have you ever been to the States?” he asked. She shook her head, puzzled. He put his hand momentarily over hers.

  “We’ll have to see what we can do about that,” he said. “You’d enjoy it. I could show you a lot in L.A. Introduce you to a lot of people.”

  “Show me a good time?” Laura asked innocently, raising an eyebrow just enough to let him know she was not fooled. To his credit, he threw back his head and laughed, running a hand histrionically through his hair and attracting every eye in the room again as he did so. But his amusement was not feigned. Nor was it unattractive.

  “You’d give Jane Eyre a run for her money in the outraged inocence department, miss,” he said. “OK, OK, let’s keep this purely professional. But if you felt like working in La La Land for a bit, you know where to come.”

  “I’ll give it some thought,” Laura said dryly.

  Laura got home late. Blake had driven her back to Bradfield after showing her round an empty and almost ruined old farm-house which he insisted was perfect for his purposes and had then insisted on buying her a meal at Ahmet’s, the small curry restaurant on the Manchester road with a big reputation. He had heard about in LA, he said, and knew that Lorelei Baum was not a fan of Asian cuisine. He would not allow Laura not to accompany him for a meal, he said, so she didn’t argue, and she could see that he was putting himself out to please her, encouraging her to select her favourite dishes for him and amusing her with an apparently endless supply of anecdotes about life around the pools of white mansions in Beverly Hills.

  He had a theory, he said, about the frantic pace at which life was lived there, with working breakfast followed by working lunch and working dinner followed by pool parties and beach parties and long scented nights under the palms, with Bourbon followed by coke and finished off with a soothing puff of dope, the smoke drifting towards the stars. If you live perched on top of hair-trigger tectonic plates which could swallow you up at any time, he said, it gave an edge to life, a certain brittleness, a determination to enjoy today what might in a very real sense not be there tomorrow.

  “It’s all a fantasy,” she said as she finished her lassi and wiped her hands with the hot rose scented hand-towel that the waiter had left them.

  “I guess you may be right,” he said, and she caught the a momentary sadness in his eyes, quickly veiled as he lifted an imperious finger for the waiter.

  “And hence the desire to see on film a reflection of a more certain age?” she had asked.

  He had looked at her soberly before sig
ning the bill with the flourish of a platinum card. Everything he did was considered, rehearsed even, she thought with irritation. Even the chat up lines. But just sometimes she thought he took her seriously.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Or I just yearn to play the tragic hero one more time.”

  Laura picked up her own car and drove home alone, and when she opened the front door of her flat she was only slightly surprised to be met by the strains of Billie Holiday and a faint smell of burnt toast. Thackeray was sitting with his feet up on the coffee table and his eyes closed but something told her he was not asleep. She hung up her coat and went into the bedroom to unpin her hair which she let cascade down in a copper stream around her face before she began to brush it. She felt rather than heard Thackeray come in behind her before she saw his reflection in the mirror.

  “Hi,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean to wake you.” He slid his arms around her and she leaned back on her stool, feeling the solidity of his body which filled her always with a sense of exultation.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “He wanted to go to Ahmet’s for a curry and I thought it was too good an opportunity to miss out on. The better I can get to know him the better I can write about him.”

  “Within reason, I hope,” Thackeray said. “If I find you’re being pursued by some randy Hollywood cowboy I might have to find some excuse to run him out of town.”

  “That’s not part of the job description, sheriff,” Laura said. “You know good reporters always make an excuse and leave.” He ran his hands under her hair, down her neck and shoulders until he reached her breasts and left them there, massaging them gently until she could not stand it any longer.

  “If that’s all you’ve got to offer, maybe I should have stayed with Blake,” she said. She turned towards him, unbuttoning her blouse, and he picked her up and carried her to the bed. They threw off their clothes and made love hungrily with the bedroom door open and the plaintive heartbreak of Billie Holiday in their ears. Some time later she woke to find herself lying with her head on his chest and his arms still tightly wrapped around her.

  “Michael,” she said quietly, lifting her head slightly to see his face. He was awake, watching her intently.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “You’re lying on my arm,” he said. “It’s gone completely numb.” She shifted her position and he stretched his left arm tentatively, wincing as the blood rushed back.

  “That wasn’t it, was it?” she asked. He stroked her hair gently.

  “Laura, my Laura, ” he said. “Can’t you just take it a day at a time? Please?”

  “Michael..,” she began again, but he had already rolled over and slipped back into sleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next day, a couple of paragraphs of a crime reporter’s speculative prose dropped into the deep waters of Bradfield’s collective memory and sent long slow ripples round the town. At police headquarters superintendent Jack Longley noted the item on the front page with distaste.

  “Who bloody leaked that, then?” he snapped at Thackeray, when the DCI arrived in his office. “This place is like a bloody sieve. Pillow talk, was it.”

  “No, sir,” Thackeray said flatly, knowing his vulnerability in this area and hating it. “It was just a sharp bit of journalism on the crime reporter’s part. After all, we did send Mower to look at their archives. It’s a pity we hadn’t done a better job in keeping the files ourselves. After all, a murder file is never supposed to be closed.”

  “It went down as a missing person in the end,” Longley said. “As far as I know there was never any evidence then that Mariella Bonnetti was killed. And there’s no-one left on the strength around here to ask different, as far as I can discover.”

  “Well, we know they were wrong now,” Thackeray said. “Just like the Gazette says, Mrs. Bonnetti had no doubt that it was her daughter’s crucifix we found. And if this was just a missing girl, she must be the first one in history who succeeded in burying herself under six feet of Bradfield clay.”

  “So that lass of yours had nowt to do with this story?” Longley said, disbelief oozing from every pore.

  “I never even told her I’d been to see the Bonnettis,” Thackeray said angrily. “Let alone what they told us.”

  “Aye, well, you’d best cast your mind over how we set up a murder inquiry forty years on,” Longley said. “I dare say this lass is as entitled to justice as anyone else. And there’s no time limit on murder as far as I know. So if the beggar’s still alive, we’d better see if we can track him down, hadn’t we? I don’t want the overtime bill through the roof, mind”.

  “Low key, then?” Thackeray said sceptically. “The whole thing sounds more like a bit of archeology than a genuine inquiry to me.”

  “Make it look respectable, without giving yourself a hernia, lad,” Longley said. “Make haste slowly. I’m sure a well educated copper like you can get your mind round that.”

  “It’s a pity the bones weren’t left to rest in peace for all the good we’re going to do Mariella,” Thackeray said quietly.

  “How can you say that?” Longley said. “Her mother’ll get her Requiem Mass, won’t she? Doesn’t that count for owt any more.”

  Thackeray looked at the superintendent for a long moment, his eyes blank.

  “It can’t close an account that’s been left open,” Thackeray said at length. “And I doubt very much I’ll be able to close it.”

  At the Gazette, Laura Ackroyd found herself with that same crime reporter breathing heavily down her neck as she tried to put together the opening paragraph of her feature on John Blake’s visit to his native heath.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this Italian girl they’ve found?” Bob Baker asked. He was a recent recruit to the reporting staff and eager as a puppy to make his mark. His attitude to Laura Ackroyd had veered from over-friendly to deeply suspicious within a week after he discovered that her live-in lover was a detective.

  “Ted knew the police were going through the archives,” Laura said irritably. “I thought he would have told you. Anyway, I didn’t know anything definite. It was just speculation.”

  “Yes, well, Ted didn’t tell me,” Baker said, with a note of petulance in his voice which grated on Laura’s nerves. He ran a hand over his thickly gelled hair as if a strand might have wandered out of place and sighed dramatically. “And then he has the cheek to give me a bollocking for not getting the story yesterday when the cops went out to see the family in Harrogate.”

  “So who did tell you?” Laura asked, her curiosity roused in spite of herself now.

  “Ah, wouldn’t you like to know,” Baker sneered. “But if I can’t trust you to tell me what’s going on when you pick up a good story, I’m bloody sure I can’t trust you not to go sneaking back to your boy-friends in the force when there’s a leak, can I? I’ll keep my sources to myself, if you don’t mind.”

  “Suit yourself,” Laura said dismissively. “You seem very sure of your facts, though.”

  “Yes, well, there’s no secret about that, is there? The girl’s mother has identified the body, hasn’t she? There wasn’t much doubt in her mind when I spoke to her, even if her son did butt in and try to take the phone off her. I’m off to Harrogate now to talk to her for a bit more detail. So your boy-friend can lump it. And that smart-arse Cockney sergeant.”

  “Kevin Mower? What’s he done to annoy you?” Laura asked, intrigued.

  “It’s what he’s not done, more like. I bumped into him in the Woolpack and simply asked him how the identification of the body was going and he got on his high horse and told me to talk to the Press office. As if Press offices ever came up with any useful information. When I was in Rochdale I had a really good relationship going with CID. Here they don’t seem to want to know.”

  “It’s not long since an officer was suspended for talking to the tabloids,” Laura said. Baker shrugged non-commitally at that.

  “Mower was the one you rescued w
hen he got stabbed, wasn’t he? You should have saved your energy on that one, love.” Just for a moment a red mist swirled between Laura and the computer screen on which she determinedly kept her eyes and she felt her fingers sticky again with the blood which it had seemed would never stop pumping out of Mower’s limp body.

  “Bastard,” she whispered from between dry lips, but when she turned round her tormentor was already on the other side of the office putting on his coat. She leaned her head against the cold screen for a moment and closed her eyes.

  “Bastard,” she said again.

  At The Laurels, Joyce Ackroyd had wheeled her chair into the main hallway ready to pounce on the copy of the Gazette which she knew was delivered every afternoon at about four. When she had asked the previous day for a morning paper the care assistant had sniffed her disapproval and said that she would have to ask matron. The subject had not been mentioned again.

  But Joyce’s sharp eyes had already registered the fact that the evening paper arrived courtesy of a cheerful boy on a bike who threw it into the outer hall-way without dismounting, and that it usually lay there for anything up to half an hour before anyone bothered to pick it up off the floor.

  She manoeuvred her chair awkwardly so that she could open the glass door into the small outer hall and leaned over precariously to pick the paper up. Her arthritic hip and her plastered leg jangled with pain and made her gasp as her fingers scrabbled for a purchase on the precious newsprint. She had not taken the unfamiliar pills which had been handed out to her again that morning and was suffering for her suspicion.

  The newspaper securely on her lap, Bob Baker’s small contribution to the front page caught her eye immediately and she sighed to see her fears confirmed so promptly. So Signora Bonnetti was still alive after all this time, she thought sadly. Fate might have been kinder if it had not expected her to live to experience the brutal exhumation of her long-dead daughter’s bones.