The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  “Why did he think it was his fault?” Thackeray asked quietly. “Did he say?”

  “It was nothing to do with him actually,” Bridget said angrily. “It was the usual story. Some beggar got her pregnant. And in those days that was all hushed up, especially in a good Catholic family like ours. He said she went away to one of those mother and baby homes the nuns had and the baby was adopted. She never saw it again. I suppose dad thought he should have protected her better. He was the oldest and he seems to have been right soppy about her.”

  “When was this? Do you know? What year?” Thackeray asked.

  “She was thirteen, he said. Only bloody thirteen. Can you believe it? In those days, an’all. My mam’ll know which year it was.”

  “1953 at a guess,” Thackeray said quietly. “Did your father say who was responsible?”

  “I don’t think anyone knew for sure. But he thought it was an older lad who went away soon after.”

  “John Parkinson?”

  “Yes, I think that was the name. But no-one bothered about him, apparently. He wasn’t a Catholic and anyway she was too young to marry. They just got her out o’t’way as quick as they could and hushed everything up.” Bridget Tate shook her head angrily. “Priests,” she said.

  “And your father believed this was why your aunt died?”

  “He said she grieved for that baby. And she never would look at another lad. The night she died he’d seen her earlier at the party a bit sozzled and crying in a corner and he’d not taken any notice. The next thing he knows there’s all this shouting and screaming and she’s gone over the balcony.”

  “Did she jump or was she pushed? Did he say?” Thackeray pressed.

  “She jumped,” Bridget said flatly. “I think the inquest decided it was an accident, but then the family would want that any road. They’d push for that. But my dad was always sure she jumped. All because they couldn’t bear to let her keep her baby. Poor kid. I can imagine how she felt, can’t you?”

  “I can imagine,” Thackeray agreed so quietly that Kevin Mower could barely hear him.

  “There was another tragedy around that time,” Mower said quickly. “Did your father ever talk to you about the Italian girl who disappeared? They were neighbours in Peter Street.”

  “Mariella,” Bridget said, with a shudder. “That’s the body you’ve just found, isn’t it? After all those years, it hardly seems possible she could turn up like that.”

  “Did he mention Mariella?” Mower asked.

  “Just in passing, like,” Bridget said. “When he was talking about Bridie, and how they used to all play together wi’ the lad who got her into trouble. I think he fancied Mariella, but he’d be too young to do owt about it. With the older lads around, I don’t think my dad got a look in.”

  “Keith Smith and John Parkinson?” Thackeray said.

  “Yes, summat like that. They used to play cricket, the girls as well as the lads. And sometimes, he said, on days when it was too hot to run around, they used to go into the garden of this big empty house on the hill behind Peter Street. It was all overgrown and shady and my dad and Bridie used to pick flowers, he said. Columbines and roses. And she was frightened of the bees buzzing about. Bridie would take them home and put them in a jam-jar for her mam. He reckoned that was where John took her when…you know.”

  “Did your father ever say what happened to John Parkinson?” Thackeray asked, but Bridget shook her head.

  “He said he’d gone away by the time they found out about the baby. I dare say she waited as long as she could before she let on. And as I say, no-one wanted a fuss. They just wanted rid of it.”

  “He never mentioned Coronation Day?”

  “Not that I remember, not specially,” Bridget said. “Was that the day Mariella disappeared?”

  “They all got bored watching the television, and went off together,” Thackeray said. “John and Keith, your father and his sister, Mariella, and Jack Ackroyd. Now three of them are dead, one we can’t trace and the other two have not been much help so far.”

  “It’s like a judgement, isn’t it, the body coming back to haunt them after all this time? Do you believe in fate, inspector? I do.” Thackeray shook his head dismissively.

  “If you think of anything else you think might help us, Mrs. Tate, you will let us know,” he said. She looked at him, her eyes sad.

  “They must have been very alike, Bridget and my dad,” she said. “Given to depression, you know? The rest of us must take after my mam, I suppose. We don’t seem to get so down.”

  By the time he got back to Laura’s flat, Thackeray had to admit that he felt pretty down himself. Bridget Tate’s retelling of a familiar old story had touched chords which he had rather it had not. He parked under the trees outside the house, immediately aware that Laura’s car was not in its usual place and glancing upwards he could see that none of the lights were on in the flat. It was gone eleven but was still very early for Laura to have gone to bed.

  The disappointment at knowing she was not there to welcome him was as sharp as a knife between his ribs. It brought all the tensions of the last few days rushing back into his tired mind and he knew that if he and Laura did not resolve the strains in their relationship soon it would disintegrate. He did not think it could last much longer on the sexual chemistry which gave them both so much pleasure. He could not be certain that either truth or lies would save him, but he knew with absolute conviction that he would not be able to bear a return to his previous solitary state. The prisoner who had been given a glimpse of freedom, he thought, could be driven quickly mad when the cell door clanged shut again. After ten years of virtual exile from the human race he had taken a chance he did not think he was capable of on Laura. If he lost her, he lost everything again, and he did not think this time he would survive.

  He climbed the stairs quickly and let himself in, switched on the lights and looked around in vain for any indication that she had left him a note to say where she had gone. The ingredients for their meal still lay in their supermarket carrier bag on the kitchen work-bench, a damp towel and swimming costume close by ready to go into the washing machine.

  The flat had an abandoned air and he began to grow anxious. He listened in growing alarm to his own message to her on the answer-phone but there was nothing else except a hissing silence although he played the tape to its end. She had obviously not been home since she had left hurriedly to go to the hospital to see Joyce.

  “Why the hell doesn’t that blasted paper get her a mobile phone?” he asked himself fruitlessly. Ted Grant’s penny-pinching rationale was that reporters needed mobiles, feature writers didn’t. For half an hour Thackeray sat smoking, lighting cigarette after cigarette and stubbing them out before they were half finished. He tried to put Laura out of his mind as he went over the two deaths he was investigating, separated by so many years but increasingly linked, it seemed to him, by skeins of powerful emotion.

  He and Mower had sent Bridget Tate home to her husband and children in a taxi, both of them subdued by what they had learned about events in Coronation Year. Thackeray knew only too well how long grief could last but if Mower understood how painfully he had been reminded of that by Bridget, he was circumspect enough to keep his thoughts to himself.

  But as the clock moved inexorably past midnight, Thackeray could sit it out no longer. He rang first Ted Grant and then Vicky Mendelson to see if either of them knew where Laura might be. Ted blustered and Vicky complained sleepily but they knew nothing. Then he rang Mower.

  It took the sergeant ten minutes to arrive at the flat, slim in jeans and a black designer polo shirt, his hair dishevelled and a hint of anxiety in his eyes. He found Thackeray in shirt-sleeves, a well-filled ash-tray on the coffee table, his face haggard and as close to panic as Mower had ever seen him.

  “Guv?” he said.

  “Get onto John Blake,” Thackeray said. “She’s been spending a lot of time with him for this profile she’s writing.”

&nb
sp; “If you say so,” Mower said doubtfully. “All she said when she left me at the hospital was that she had something to check out. Nothing about Blake.”

  “Do it, Kevin,” Thackeray said. “If I speak to that bastard I’ll say something I regret.” Mower shrugged, picked up the phone and made a brief call.

  “John Blake and Lorelei Baum are both in their suite, according to reception at the Clarendon,” he said. “I’ll check casualty.” He felt Thackeray’s eyes boring into the back of his neck as he checked the accident reports at the hospital and the control room at police headquarters, without result.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Do you want me to put out a call for her car?”

  “I don’t know,” Thackeray said. “D’you think I’m being a fool?” Mower hesitated, knowing he was moving into uncharted territory.

  “You know her better than I do, guv,” he said. “If it’s really out of character…” He shrugged.

  “You spoke to her at the hospital,” Thackeray said. “Did she seem OK then? Or did you give her any reason …?” He stopped, although Mower had no doubt what he was asking and that on his answer hung his own future as well as Thackeray’s. He ran his hand lightly over the still sensitive scar tissue on his shoulder, avoiding the accusation in Thackeray’s eyes.

  “I didn’t…wouldn’t do anything to hurt Laura,” he said slowly. “You should know that. Even though I know - you know I know, for fuck’s sake - she’s going to get hurt one day.”

  “And you don’t like that,” Thackeray said bitterly.

  “No, I bloody well don’t like that,” Mower came back quickly. “She saved my life, remember?”

  “But you didn’t show her the cause and just impediment? Like in blasted Jane Eyre?”

  “Never read it, guv,” Mower said lightly. “Just as well, maybe.”

  Thackeray slumped back into his chair and closed his eyes, looking utterly defeated.

  “So where the hell is she?” he said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Laura wriggled her back in what must have been her twentieth attempt to adjust her spine to the sharp contours of a wall made of unyielding lumps of millstone grit. And for the twentieth time she knew she had not succeeded and she cursed the impetuosity which had led her into her current plight. She was cold, damp, tired, lost and had twisted her ankle when the heel on her shoe, designed for city streets not rough moorland, had tipped her from a tussock of grass into a boggy pool.

  Laura realised she had made a serious mistake when John Blake had pulled the Mercedes off the high and winding moorland road on the way back from Ilkley. When he switched off the head-lights and the engine, the darkness enfolded the car like a thick blanket. It was a narrow, little used road and tonight it seemed to be deserted. Tiny points of light on the far horizon gave the only hint that there was anyone but the two of them on the planet.

  She could see Blake’s face dimly in the fluorescent lights he had left on behind the dashboard. In profile he looked forbidding enough but when he turned towards her his eyes glittered in the darkness and she knew she would need all her wits to deny him what he had obviously stopped the car for.

  “You and I have some unfinished business”, he said, switching on a cassette tape of Sinatra and reaching an arm out towards her.

  “My generation,” he said, nodding towards the radio. “Do you like him?”

  “I’ve no strong feelings,” she said dismissively. “And there’s nothing unfinished I can think of, John.” She leaned away from his embrace. “It was good of you to take me out to see your mother’s place, but I need to get back now. Anyway, Lorelei will be worried about you.” She deliberately tried to keep her tone light but Blake snorted angrily at the mention of Lorelei Baum’s name.

  “I thought I told you,” he said. “Lorelei is definitively on the way out, finito-ed. She is one unattractive young woman in bed.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Laura said. “But I’m afraid I’m not seeking to take her place - professionally or in bed.”

  Blake leaned across and put a hand on her knee, and held her a little too tightly for comfort. She took hold of his hand equally firmly and replaced it on his own side of the car.

  “I’d like to go home now, please,” Laura said. “I’m late and people will be wondering where I am.”

  “You’re not married, are you?” Blake asked suddenly. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I’m not married,” Laura said. “I did tell you that. But I live with someone.”

  “We all live with someone, so what’s the problem, honey? You were eager enough the other night.”

  “Not really,” Laura said.

  “Oh, yes, really,” Blake said. “D’you think I can’t tell? I’ve spent most of my life fending off women who’ve got the hots for me.”

  “Well, that’s great for you, but I’m afraid this one hasn’t, so you’re not going to need to do any fending,” Laura said, cursing herself for imagining that John Blake might have provided her or any other woman with a night’s guilt-free amusement.

  “You are a sharp little cookie, aren’t you?” Blake said. “You could run rings round Lorelei, you know that?” And this time when he reached across the car to put an arm round her his grip was like iron. His other hand clamped itself just as tightly across her legs where she felt his thumb insinuate itself between her thighs.

  “Come on Laura, relax,” he said as his mouth closed over hers and his tongue met the resistance of her clenched teeth.

  “I said no, damn you,” she said, trying desperately to squirm out of his grip.

  “We’re a long way from home, honey,” Blake said. “You’ll not find any friendly policemen up here at this time of night.”

  “The last time someone tried something like this on with me it was a bloody policeman,” she said bitterly. “And he got away with it.” The urgency of the situation seemed suddenly to throw her mind into top gear.

  “But you won’t,” she said. “You are an arrogant bastard, and a bully, and vain with it.” And it was his vanity which would defeat him, she though grimly as with her left hand she reached for the door handle and with her right she grabbed hold of John Blake’s hair, much of which, as she expected, came away in her hand. As she flung open the door on her side of the car she threw the hair-piece as far as she could into the darkness outside.

  “What have you done, you stupid bitch,” Blake screamed. As she rolled out of the car he caught her a furious blow on her arm. She hit the ground running and she did not stop until she had scaled the stone wall which she could dimly make out at one side of the road and put a hundred yards of tussocky moorland between herself and the car, scattering sleepy sheep as she went.

  Blake did not follow. As she stood in the darkness trying to get her breath back, she could see him in the faint light from inside the car searching for his lost property in the long grass which bordered the parking place where he had stopped. More circumspectly she set off again, wishing that she had stopped off at home to change out of her tight short skirt into trousers before embarking on her impetuous trip with Blake. She hardly seemed to have made any distance when Blake switched on the Mercedes’ powerful headlights and swung them in an arc like a searchlight across the treeless moor, catching her for an instant in the full beam. Cursing and feeling as if she had been stripped naked by the light, she headed for a slight rise in the ground which she guessed would shield her from the road.

  As she breasted the rise, she heard Blake shout out behind her, and glancing back she saw that he was out of the car now, and had clambered on top of the dry-stone wall, evidently to get a better view of where she was heading. Dodging out of the beam of the headlights, she forced her legs up the steep slope to the top of the rise and plunged over the far side and out of sight into total darkness. Where was the moon when you needed it, she thought frantically.

  Her arm was numb and her breath was coming in painful gasps by the time her city shoes gave up the unequal struggle with roc
ks and slippery moorland grass. The heel gave way and pitched her sideways into a patch of semi-bog, where she lay for a moment, with all the breath knocked out of her and aware of the muddy water soaking her to through to her panties. She gazed at a single star mocking her from the dark sky above and she wished she had been born with Jane Eyre’s calm and reflective temperament.

  As she got her breath back she looked around her and realised with a faint feeling of alarm that she had lost her bearings as well as her right shoe, which seemed to have been sucked into the boggy ground where she had fallen. She could still see those tantalizing pinpricks of light on the horizon, signs of civilisation far too far away to reach, but there was no longer any indication in which direction the road lay. She knew she could not be more than three or four miles from the commuter village of Broadley, which itself lay on the edge of the Maze Valley where villages seamlessly ran into the towns and suburbs around Bradfield.

  But for all the good that knowledge could do her, she might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. Because she also knew that the moor she was now lying on was riddled with ancient mine workings and abandoned quarries, whose craggy faces presented unwary walkers with unexpected hazards even in broad daylight. In the dark the moor was a death-trap.

  Feeling gingerly in front of her with her single shod foot, in case another unseen bog or hole should catch her unawares, she found her way to a nearby stone wall and slumped down on a patch of warm and relatively dry grass vacated by a ewe which was as startled by their midnight encounter as she was. She settled herself to sit it out until dawn.