The matron’s office was at the end of the corridor and she knocked on the door peremptorily before walking in uninvited. Betty Johns was sitting at her desk with her phone in her hand.
“Excuse me, I seem to have an unexpected visitor here,” she said to her caller before hanging up and standing up to meet Laura with an expression on her broad face which could only be described as a snarl.
“Miss Ackroyd,” she said. “I’m surprised you have the gall to show your face here again after yesterday.”
“While my grandmother is here, I’ll show my face whenever I choose, Mrs. Johns,” Laura said. “And right now I’d like you to tell me why she’s in bed so soundly asleep that I can’t wake her? What have you given her to knock her out like that? And why?”
“Well!” Mrs. Johns said, smoothing her dress down over her buttocks and advancing around the desk with the determination of a battleship about to commence a bombardment. “Do you really think all that excitement yesterday did either of those old ladies any good? They are patients, Miss Ackroyd, patients under my care, and if they are reduced to a state of nervous exhaustion by interfering young women like you then of course the doctor is likely to prescribe sedatives.”
“My grandmother enjoyed every minute of her outing yesterday,” Laura said. “She’s only broken her leg, for God’s sake. She’s not senile.”
“Well, that’s what you say,” Betty Johns came back triumphantly. “But you know, when you observe her closely - and I’m sure as a busy woman you won’t have been able to do that yourself recently - when you have her under observation I’m not so sure about her mental condition.”
“What do you mean?” Laura asked sharply.
“She’s increasingly vague, like so many of them are,” Betty Johns said, her voice softening into soothing professional tones. “And so over-optimistic about going home and what she’ll be able to do for herself in future. I keep trying to break it to her gently that I think she’ll be with us for some considerable time, but she won’t have it, you know. So sad. And so difficult for you to come to terms with, dear, I do understand that.” Laura swallowed hard and met Betty John’s eyes, like small hard diamonds in her bland pink and white face.
“I intend to take my grandmother away from here just as soon as I’ve made alternative arrangements for her,” she said coldly.
“Well, that’s your privilege, dear,” the matron said. “It’ll cost you, of course, and don’t imagine you’ll get a different diagnosis anywhere else, because you won’t. In the meantime I think it would be better if you didn’t visit. Mrs. Smith’s son is very angry indeed that you included her in your little jaunt yesterday. Very angry. And Alice is quite exhausted and confused, poor pet. Right out of it. It’ll take her days to recover.”
“You mean you’ll make sure it does,” Laura said.
“I don’t know what you mean, Miss Ackroyd.” Laura shrugged and turned away, her desperation threatening to overwhelm her self-control. She opened the office door.
“I’ll let you know when I’m coming to pick Joyce up,” she said.
“Such a shame when these independent old ladies lose it,” Mrs. Johns said, following close behind her to the front door and holding it open for her. “The beginning of the end, of course, but not a nice way to go.”
“Bitch!” Laura said as she slammed her car into gear and swung it sharply out of the gate onto the road, unaware until it was far too late that another car was turning almost as sharply into the entrance. She hit the brakes hard and the two vehicles avoided each other by the thickness of a coat of paint leaving her to pull over to the kerb trembling with fright and pent up despair.
She glanced back at The Laurels where the front door was just closing behind an indistinguishable male figure who had left his offending silver BMW parked carelessly across the fore-court. She wondered if he was a doctor and whether she should go back at once and challenge Betty John’s cruel prognosis for Joyce but could not summon up the strength to renew the battle now.
Once home she raced up all three flights of stairs in an effort to dissipate the panic which had seized her. The flat was empty and there were no messages on the answer-phone. She poured herself a large vodka and tonic and picked up the phone. The ringing tone at the other end went on for a long time before eventually she heard a familiar voice respond.
“Dad,” she said. “Can you come over? Nan’s worse and I’m not happy with the place she’s in and I can’t get her out of there without some help.” The words poured out so quickly that she wondered if she had made any sort of sense when a lengthy silence followed.
For an agonizing moment she thought her father would prevaricate as he had always prevaricated on the rare occasions when she had asked for help during the years he and her mother had lived in Portugal. But this time the panic she felt must have communicated itself down the line clearly enough to gain a slight purchase on his self-centred soul.
“Book me a room at The Clarendon,” Jack Ackroyd said. “A single’ll do. Your mother’ll not come. You know how she hates flying.”
“Tomorrow?” Laura said.
“Aye, if I can get on a flight,” Jack said. “I’ll let you know.”
Several vodka and tonics later, Laura woke to find herself huddled uncomfortably in the corner of her sofa with the television flickering silently and no other light except for a faint glow from the street below. She got up and stretched stiff limbs before going to the window and looking out. There was no sign of Thackeray’s car and her own was parked at a careless angle to the kerb where she had abandoned it in her hurry to get home. She wondered bleakly if he would come back or whether she had fatally destabilised his fragile hold on the life they were leading together. She drew the curtains with a sigh and put on the lights. Her head was muzzy and her stomach sick and empty. It seemed a life-time since she had eaten a hurried lunch at her desk.
As she picked at some scrambled eggs and buttered some toast in the kitchen she heard the front door open and close quietly. She turned as Michael Thackeray came into the room behind her and saw the anxiety in his eyes.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said wildly. “I shouldn’t have shut you out last night.”
“And I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone out this morning without talking to you,” Thackeray said quietly. “You look exhausted. What’s wrong?”
“Oh, Michael, Joyce is so ill and frail and I’ve sent for my father and I’m so afraid of losing her,” Laura said. Everything that had happened at The Laurels came tumbling out in such a jumble of words that Thackeray could barely take it all in. As he listened and took in her distress his own anger grew.
“She admitted Joyce had been drugged?” he asked.
“For her own good,” Laura said contemptuously. “And I didn’t even get to see Alice Smith. She’s probably in just the same situation. Do you think her son knows what’s going on?”
“It figures,” Thackeray said slowly. “I sent Val Ridley down there to take statements from them and the matron said that they were both unwell today. I wanted to ask Alice about her son. She talked a lot about Fred but very little about Keith when we had them up at Peter Hill yesterday.”
“Betty Johns said that he was furious that we’d taken her out without permission,” Laura said thoughtfully.
“So he’s around then?” Thackeray said sharply. “I got the impression from Alice that he’d moved away somewhere.”
“Alice can be a bit vague, even without her pills,” Laura said. “Don’t you believe her when she says that Fred probably killed Mariella?”
“Not without some corroboration,” Thackeray said. “Which may simply not be there after all this time. But if her son is here, I want to talk to him. I’ll go to The Laurels myself tomorrow if only to let your matron know that she’s attracting some attention. Why have you taken the Italian girl to heart so? It was all a very long time ago.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Laura said dismissively, although she did. Sh
e had dreamed about school the previous night, as she had tossed around alone in her narrow bed, reliving a time she had almost forgotten when small blonde savages with cut-glass accents and cold blue eyes had tormented a red-headed stranger whose vowels did not fit. How much worse had it been, she wondered, for the Italian girl dumped not only into a strange school but a strange country full of little xenophobes still obsessed with the hatreds of war? She shook herself back to her present discontents.
“Look in on Joyce,” Laura said. “Please.”
“Of course,” Thackeray said readily enough. “Though I don’t think she approves of me, does she? She wants me to make an honest woman of you.”
“And you don’t,” Laura said, knowing she was pushing her luck. Thackeray looked away, as he always did, his eyes suddenly remote.
“Not yet, Laura,” he said.
“And perhaps not ever,” she finished the sentence for him silently. Damn you, she thought.
“Bed, then?” she asked cheerfully, knowing it was an invitation he could not refuse, especially after the previous night, and that there at least he was unequivocally hers. But deep inside the gnawing anxiety about Joyce, which had eased slightly with the knowledge that her father was reluctantly coming to her rescue, had only fuelled her more long-lasting fears about her own future. There’s no certainty in life or death, she told herself firmly, but she knew that was what she craved all the same.
DCI Thackeray and sergeant Mower caught up with Giuseppe Bonnetti the next day in the cramped office behind the second floor dining room of the Santa Lucia restaurant in Leeds. This was no ordinary spaghetti house, that much was obvious as the two officers were shown upstairs. The walls were snow white, the carpets thick, the table-ware gleaming and the aroma of food enticing enough to remind Mower forcefully that it was long past his lunch-time and his boss had, as usual, shown no sign of suffering from the normal appetites which assailed the sergeant with such great regularity and force. But of raffia-wrapped Chianti bottles and the strains of O Sole Mio there was no hint at all at Santa Lucia, and the chance of a quick spagg. Bol. looked remote.
Bonnetti peered slightly impatiently over gold-rimmed glasses with hooded eyes as they were shown in, closed his ledger and switched off his computer with a sigh.
“What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asked.“Have you made any progress on my sister’s death?”
“I’m afraid not,” Thackeray said taking the room’s only available free chair, which had not been offered. Mower glanced around before perching himself against the window-sill which was cluttered with ledgers and files. Whatever the Bonnetti’s had been prepared to pay a designer for the public parts of the restaurant had not been extended to this cluttered little back room.
“I tried to contact you in Harrogate…”, Thackeray began only to be interrupted brusquely by the restaurateur.
“This is our newest venture,” he said dismissively, as if the police should have understood his priorities. “I’m spending a great deal of my time here just now. Leeds is very competitive environment, you know? There’s money about again and they want good value and high quality.”
“I’m sure they would in Leeds,” Thackeray said drily. Bonnetti stared at the chief inspector for long enough to make Mower feel uncomfortable. He broke the silence first, raising his open hands in the archetypal Italian gesture of interrogation.
“So how can I help you, chief inspector?”
“Do you remember the O’Meara family from when you were a child, Mr. Bonnetti?” Thackeray asked. “Bridget, Daniel and several younger children.” Bonnetti shrugged expansively.
“Danny,” he said. “I think I recall Danny with my sister Mariella. At Mass, maybe. We were all Catholics, of course. Do you think…?”
“We have absolutely no evidence to link Daniel O’Meara with your sister’s death,” Thackeray said. “What I was much more interested in was whether you had come across him later, as adults?”
“This is the man you have just found dead on a railway-line?” Bonnetti said. “I read it in the Yorkshire Post. I did wonder….”
“You recognised the name?”
“I recognised it,” Bonnetti said sombrely. “And the photograph they published. I have seen him much more recently than when we were children. He worked for a little while as a kitchen porter in our Bradfield restaurant. He made himself known to me. I think he thought I could help him in some way with his problems.”
“And could you, Mr. Bonnetti?” Thackeray asked quietly. Bonnetti ran a hand across his thick, graying hair and shook his head firmly.
“It was a bad time for the family,” he said. “My father had just had his stroke. And my manager in Bradfield was not satisfied with O’Meara’s work. He sacked him quite quickly. My own impression when I saw him was that he was sick - you know, in the head? Very sick. Did he kill himself on this railway line? That would not surprise me.”
“I think it wouldn’t surprise anyone who knew him, Mr. Bonnetti,” Thackeray said. “But we’re still inquiring into the circumstances of his death. It’s too early to tell exactly what happened.”
“So when would be the last time you saw Danny O’Meara?” Mower asked suddenly. “Exactly?”
Bonnetti gave another of his extensive shrugs.
“It must be six months ago. We relaunched the Bradfield restaurant before Christmas. It was my father’s first small trattoria, too small really for a top class establishment for the 90s, but he hung on to it for sentimental reasons. We all got our training there, waiting on table, commis chef, papa believed in us starting at the bottom. But last year the premises next door fell vacant so we decided to expand and refurbish. Danny O’Meara must have been there for a few weeks after that. He approached me one evening when I was visiting, reminded me who he was, told me his troubles. I could not truly say I remembered him in Peter Street. I was too young to go around with those older boys.”
“And what exactly were his troubles?” Thackeray asked.
“Oh, money mainly, as far as I can remember. As I said, I turned him away. I felt no obligation…”
“Of course, why should you?” Thackeray said. “And you haven’t seem him since?”
“No,” Bonnetti said flatly. “I have to confess that he has not even crossed my mind from that day to this, until I saw the paragraph in the newspaper, that is.”
“It didn’t cross your mind when you met him again that he might know something about your sister’s disappearance?”
“Mariella died many years ago, chief inspector,” Bonnetti said. “I was a small boy. I can’t even remember her very clearly, as I’ve told you already. If you think I have had either time or inclination to harbour thoughts of finding her killer over all those years - if indeed I’d thought she had been killed - you can have no idea how all-absorbing it is to set up a successful business as my father and I have done. There was a sadness in the family about Mariella. Thoughts of a vendetta, no. That is not the way anyone behaves these days. And in any case, we thought she had run away.”
“Guiseppe might not have harboured thoughts of revenge,” Mower said thoughtfully. “He’s too much wedded to la dolce vita, maybe. But I wouldn’t put it past the old boy. It’d be interesting to know where he got his capital to launch himself into the restaurant business so successfully. Who backed impoverished ex-POWs in Bradfield in the 1950s?” Back in the CID offices, Mower was carefully positioning his jacket on the back of his chair. Thackeray allowed himself a faint smile.
“You watch too many films, Kevin,” he said. “If there’s one thing you can be sure about Danny O’Meara’s death, it’s the fact that he wasn’t hit over the head by a half-paralysed elderly man who can hardly get out of his chair.”
“The godfather doesn’t do the deed himself, guv,” Mower said scornfully.
“Well, check out what happened when Bonnetti met O’Meara in the restaurant kitchen if you like,” Thackeray said. “But I don’t think you’ll get much joy. In the meantime, l
et’s catch up on what’s been happening while we’ve been in Leeds, shall we?”
Mower turned his attention to his desk where, buried beneath a pile of reports waiting to be read, he found a bulky envelope inside which was a plastic packet.
“Well, well,” he said crossing the room and dropping the packet onto Thackeray’s desk with a clatter.“It looks as though we’ve got our weapon after all.”
Inside the packet was a heavy chrome spanner with a rounded head. And on the head were distinct traces of a brown substance which could only be dried blood. Thackeray picked the package up delicately and held it up to the light while Mower read the note which had been attached.
“They found it under bushes close to the hospital gates,” he said. “Presumably chucked from the car our lad drove up in.”
“Get onto the security man on the gate,” Thackeray said. “He must know what vehicles went in and out that afternoon. And give him a description of Bonnetti, just in case our friend was being economical with the truth. And find out what sort of car he drives.”
“Now you’re talking,” Mower said happily. “He’s got a look of Al Pacino, has our Giuseppe…”
“I’m not sure Hollywood’s my favourite place just at the moment,” Thackeray said dismissively. “So let’s keep our feet on the ground, shall we? Did you get anywhere with your inquiries on John Blake?”
“Nothing known, guv,” Mower said quickly, his antennae picking up unexpectedly bad vibes. “I’ve asked Val to dig around into his history - school, college, that sort of thing. Don’t worry, I’ll keep him in mind.”
With Thackeray this prickly, he thought, he would need to watch himself. When push came to shove, he thought Thackeray could be as ruthless as anyone he knew and the unacknowledged secret they now shared sat like a lead weight on his chest.
The Italian Girl Page 14