The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  “It’s very thin, guv. Will it stand up in court?” Mower asked. “Kay O’Meara’s sure of her identification now, this morning, but in seven or eight months time? A good defence brief could shake her. And the computer impression is not that like Bonnetti. Vaguely, perhaps, but hardly a perfect fit.” It had been Kay O’Meara’s identification of Bonnetti which had sent Thackeray to the family’s home that morning only to discover that the old man had suffered another stroke during the night and was not expected to survive.

  They became aware of footsteps on the stairs and Thackeray moved quickly to the door to meet a tall, angular priest who was already half-way across the hall and heading for the front door.

  “A word, please, Father,” he said in a tone which offered no opportunity of denial. He glanced at Mower.

  “Go and make it clear to Mr. Bonnetti that I must speak to him urgently,” he said. The priest, a middle aged man with a thin ascetic face and weary gray eyes, followed Thackeray back into the sitting room and closed the door gently behind himself.

  “Chief inspector Thackeray, I assume,” he said, putting his black leather brief-case on the coffee table and taking a pack of Gaulloise from one of the sagging pockets of his dark suit. He did not offer them to Thackeray. “I am Gerard McVeay from St. Augustine’s. You seem to have chosen a particularly inappropriate moment to call.” Thackeray ignored the criticism.

  “Father McVeay, I think you know what I have to ask you,” he said.

  “And I think you know what the answer will be,” McVeay said with equal formality, drawing deeply on his pungent cigarette. The two men eyed each other through the smoke for a moment, each in his own way implacable and weighing the other’s implacability.

  “There is no risk now that Paolo Bonnetti will ever stand trial for his daughter’s murder,” Thackeray said.

  “No risk at all,” McVeay said. “Paolo Bonnetti died ten minutes ago. But I am still bound by the confidentiality of the confessional. If you were a Catholic you would not even bother to ask a question which cannot be answered.”

  Thackeray smiled grimly as McVeay’s words hurled him back to boyhood hours spent on his knees trying frantically to invent enough venial transgressions to keep his confessor convinced that he was not trying to conceal some mortal sin. But the distraction was momentary and he certainly did not intend to share it with this censorious priest.

  “If I were to speak to your bishop about the waste of public money involved in my continuing an investigation which a word from you could bring to a speedy conclusion…”, he said. Father McVeay smiled a frosty smile, revealing small, crooked, nicotine stained teeth.

  “Then you must feel free to talk to the bishop, chief inspector,” he said.

  “And pursue my questions with the bereaved? Is that really what you want?”

  “This is an unhappy family,” Father McVeay said. “It has been unhappy for a long time. If you feel you must add to that burden at this moment that is something for your conscience, not mine. I suppose it depends how you see your duty.”

  “My duty is to discover who killed a young girl forty years ago and a sick man just a few days ago. I have good reason to think the murders are connected.”

  “Then I wish you well, chief inspector,” McVeay said, picking up his case. “But I can’t help you in the way you think I should. I’m sorry.”

  On the floor above, sergeant Kevin Mower was having rather more success in persuading Guiseppe Bonnetti that his interests lay in cooperating with the police. The gray-haired restaurateur stood with his back against his father’s bedroom door and an expression of disbelief on a face which had become haggard since the last time the two men had met.

  “You wouldn’t dare,” he said hoarsely.

  “Mr. Bonnetti,” Mower said with every expression of sorrow in his dark eyes. “I know how difficult this must be for you. But your mother assaulted a senior police-officer. I know. I was there. I saw her. That is a serious charge.”

  “You wouldn’t charge her,” Bonnetti said.

  “That would be for the duty inspector to decide after she had been interviewed at the police station,” Mower said kindly. “He might opt for a caution or he might not. The magistrates, of course, don’t take kindly to assaults on the police…”

  “My family will not stand for it,” Bonnetti said, glancing over his shoulder to the murmur of voices which came from the room behind him. Mower raised an eyebrow.

  “It would be a pity to have to send for a police van…”

  “Mother of God,” Bonnetti muttered, his confidence palpably ebbing away.

  “And if I come with you, to answer your questions?” he asked.

  “Oh, I think inspector Thackeray would be much more interested in that than he is in your mother’s little temper tantrum,” Mower said, allowing himself the smallest of satisfied smiles as he spun on his heel and allowed Bonnetti to precede him down the stairs to the hallway where Michael Thackeray was waiting.

  Beattie Smith stood for a moment to ease her aching back before she picked up the pile of clean sheets and towels and knocked on the door of the Bronte Suite on the first floor of the Clarendon Hotel. When there was no reply she used her pass key to unlock the door, went into the vestibule and put her burden of clean linen down on the shelf outside the bathroom door.

  She was not surprised to hear water running inside, so she knocked on the sitting room door and went in. Breakfast dishes still stood on the central table and a heap of folders and papers were scattered on a side-table next to a briefcase. It was a lived in room where everything appeared normal except for the fact that the coffee pot had been knocked over and brown liquid with a sprinkling of coffee grounds in it had run off the edge of the table and was soaking into the beige carpet. Clicking her teeth in annoyance Beattie took a cloth from the pocket of her overall, set the pot upright and began to clean up the mess.

  It was not until she had finished clearing the dishes and restoring the table to its normal high sheen that she became uneasy. The water continued running in the bathroom behind her, but with a regularity which did not seem quite normal for someone engaged in a bath or a shower. Apart from that the suite seemed almost eerily silent.

  Moving soundlessly across the thick pile of the carpet she knocked first on one bedroom door and then on the other. There was no reply from either. She wiped her square dark hands on her overall, as anxious not to intrude as she was about the heavy silence which enveloped her. Making up her mind at last she knocked again and opened the first of the bedroom doors, only to find the room empty, the bed in rumpled disarray.

  The second bedroom, when she inched open the door, was similarly deserted, although a suitcase lay open on the bed and various items of female clothing lay scattered about as if someone had been interrupted in the middle of packing. Clicking her teeth again Beattie marched to the bathroom door and knocked more firmly.

  “Good morning,” she called. “Are you all right in there, sir? Madam?”

  There was no reply and the water continued to run unchecked. Thoroughly alarmed now she tried the door handle gently. It was not locked and swung back quickly revealing what Beattie, brought up on Hollywood movies, half feared. A woman’s body lay crumpled on the tiled floor, her towelling robe twisted around her as if she had fallen awkwardly while trying to pull it on as she had stepped out of the shower which was still running behind her. Through the clouds of steam which misted every surface, Beattie could see that her eyes were open and her face unblemished, though distorted in what looked uncannily like a smile. But the unnatural angle at which the head lay against the side of the bath told Beattie all too clearly that Lorelei Baum was dead.

  Sergeant Kevin Mower had learned long ago when to keep his head down and this afternoon was one when he could only wish that the earth would kindly open up and receive him into its bosom. Not that Michael Thackeray’s anger was aimed in his direction specifically. But as the closest member of the bemused CID team at police headquarte
rs to the DCI, he felt more exposed than most.

  “There are times when you should trust your instincts,” Thackeray said flatly to no-one in particular. “I knew that bastard was dangerous.”

  “I’ve put out a call for the Merc,” Mower said tentatively.

  “He could be out of the country by now,” Thackeray said ominously. “If Amos is right about the time of death, he had two or three hours to play with before the chamber-maid found her.”

  “I’ve alerted the ports and airports,” Mower said.

  “And Interpol?”

  “And Interpol,” Mower confirmed, wondering if there was in fact anything he had forgotten. He had been as shaken as Thackeray when they had been called to the Clarendon to examine the crumpled body of Lorelei Baum which, Amos Atherton had assured them, must have been lying there for several hours, long enough for rigor mortis to begin to affect the muscles of her face and jaw, although she was still damply warm from the hot shower water which had cascaded down behind her for hours.

  Beneath the towelling robe which Lorelei had evidently clutched around her as she stepped out of the shower her body was a mottled blue and red around the shoulders and back, as if someone had rained blows down on her from behind. Her neck was broken, whether by a direct blow or through a fall as she tried to escape from her attacker on the wet tiled bathroom floor was impossible to tell.

  Of John Blake there had been no sign. His room was empty, his suitcases and personal belongings gone. The Mercedes which had been parked in the street behind the hotel since the previous evening had also disappeared. The forensic team were still conducting their meticulous search of the suite when Thackeray and Mower left, but so far there had been no indication of why Blake had apparently turned so viciously on his companion and, so it appeared to be generally assumed at the hotel, his lover.

  They had brought Lorelei’s abandoned paper-work back to the office with them and Mower had been meticulously sifting through everything that had been left behind. But it was not until he tipped the contents of a plastic bag, into which the suite’s waste-paper basket contents had been placed, that he smoothed out a crumpled piece of flimsy paper and whistled in surprise. Thackeray glanced across at him bleakly.

  “Something?” he asked

  “A fax from some company in London, guv,” Mower said, scanning quickly. “Dated this morning too, and not good news. It says that the American backers of Jane Eyre have pulled out. The deal is off. The film’s on hold.”

  “That must have been a blow to Blake, after all the hype in the Gazette,” Thackeray said.

  “Surely not enough to blow Lorelei Baum away,” Mower said incredulously. “It was hardly her fault.”

  “We know nothing about this man,” Thackeray said angrily. “We’ve never known anything about him. I said to Laura he was hiding as much as he was revealing in his interviews with her.”

  “You still think he might have been involved with Mariella?”

  Thackeray shrugged dispiritedly and the sick feeling of foreboding which had dogged Mower ever since they had gone to the Clarendon tightened its grip on his stomach. Guiseppe Bonnetti was still languishing in a basement cell waiting for a further round of questioning about his father’s past and his own more recent contacts with Danny O’Meara while his family solicitor pulled every lever of power in West Yorkshire to get his client released. Whether they charged Bonnetti with O’Meara’s murder or eventually had to let him go, Mower could see little joy in the encounter. Bonnetti was steadfastly denying everything and the evidence for his involvement was weak and would get weaker as time passed and memories began to fade. Thackeray and Mower were roused from their separate and unhappy thoughts by Superintendent Longley who burst into the office unannounced.

  “Have you had a call from a lad called Gary, a nurse up at Long Moor?” he asked brusquely. Mower glanced at the chief inspector who seemed to have suddenly turned to stone.

  “No, sir,” the sergeant said quickly. “Should we have?”

  “He came through to me and then the bloody switch-board seems to have lost him,” Longley said irritably. “And he’s throwing several sorts of nasty stuff at the fan.”

  “He was one of the nurses looking after O’Meara,” Mower said.

  “Aye, that’s right, and he reckons we should know by now who O’Meara’s visitor was that day. Says he noticed the resemblance from the photographs at the museum opening. It was just a casual thing, he said. He wasn’t sure. But he mentioned it to Miss Baum, who was standing just by him, almost as a joke, he says, but she promised to pass it on to the police.” Thackeray looked at Longley for a moment before comprehension began to dawn and he realised the full enormity of the mistake he had made.

  “Bloody fool,” he said. “What made him think she’d do that? Lorelei wouldn’t pass it on in a million years.”

  “But she might threaten to, guv, if Blake was giving her grief over the problems the film had run into” Kevin Mower said. “Blake must have been pretty pissed off about that.”

  “Kevin, get hold of all those photographs of Blake that were up on the walls at the museum,” he said. “The man’s an actor, for God’s sake, and we never took on board what that meant.” Longley nodded.

  “Gary says the photograph of Blake made up as an older man, with gray hair, for some film or other, looked familiar,” Longley said. “Very like the man who came to visit O’Meara - though quite what the connection was between the two of them I can’t imagine.”

  “I can,” Thackeray said quietly.

  “Aye, well, some evidence would come in handy, Michael,” Longley said. “But never mind O’Meara. The publicity woman’s enough to be going on with and the chances are Blake’s swanning around the country right now made up much the same way. You’d better get Gary in here P.D.Q. to give us a new description of the beggar. And circulate the picture, if he confirms that’s what he looked like when he visited the hospital. Minus the bloody Stetson, if that’s what he’s wearing. Let’s not make ourselves look completely ridiculous.”

  “Poor Lorelei,” Mower said. “She can’t have had any idea, but if Blake had killed once, perhaps twice, the next time wouldn’t have seemed like a big deal.” He glanced at Thackeray who was still sitting transfixed. Longley followed his gaze and met Thackeray’s dazed blue eyes.

  “You’d best pack Bonnetti back to his grieving family before his solicitor has heart failure,” Longley said. “Tell him we’ve a new lead to follow up. We can always have him back in if we need to.”

  “You told me I was letting emotion cloud my judgement,” Thackeray said quietly to Longley. “And I bloody well listened to you and backed off Blake.”

  “Aye, well, we all make mistakes, Michael,” Longley said and they all three knew that was as close to an apology as Thackeray would get. Mower was about to follow the superintendent out of the room when the telephone rang. Thackeray picked it up and Mower saw his grip on the receiver tighten until his knuckles turned white. Mower picked up his own receiver and punched into Thackeray’s line to pick up on a voice he did not recognise.

  “…where the bloody hell is she. Do you know?”

  “I’ve no idea, Jack,” Thackeray said, his voice tight and controlled. “You’re quite sure about the Mercedes?”

  “Her neighbour seemed sure,” Jack Ackroyd said. “Early on, it was, she said. About nine thirty. But she never arrived here at the hotel - and they haven’t seen her at work.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” Thackeray said, putting the receiver down as if it might explode if it jarred against its rest.

  “Laura?” Mower whispered. Thackeray nodded, unable to speak.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Mower said and he knew that the abyss Thackeray was looking into was deeper than he could ever imagine.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  John Blake kept a firm grip of Laura Ackroyd’s wrists with one hand and swept up her long pony-tail of red hair into a knot on the top of her head with the other. His touch was gent
le enough but it was all she could do to repress a shudder as his hand brushed the nape of her neck.

  “I knew as soon as I saw you that you should be my Jane,” he whispered over her shoulder. “Maybe we’ll have to dye this blonde. A pity really, but I don’t think we can get away with a red-head in the part. You know how devoted people are to the Bronte stories. But you’ve that milky skin, that English look. Perfect.”

  Laura swallowed hard. Her throat was dry and her heart seemed to be beating so fast that it should have been possible to see it fluttering against the light blue sweatshirt she had slipped on over her jeans that morning at breakfast-time. She had arranged to take the day off work so as to spend time with her father and Joyce who was being reluctantly and slowly persuaded to convalesce in Portugal with her son.

  John Blake had intervened, turning up outside the flat in the Merc with an apparently innocuous request that she accompany him down to the movie museum in town to look at some clips from his early films which, he said, would help her with her profile.

  She had not invited him in but had gone downstairs to talk to him in the street, greeting him frostily but allowing herself to be convinced. She had time before she was due to meet Jack at the Clarendon and seeing the films, she thought, might give her some feeling for why this man had set the hearts of her mother’s generation beating so hard.

  “Come on, Laura,” he had said, giving her his most attractive smile. “We had a little misunderstanding last time, but this is business, for both of us. And you’re going on into town anyway. I can drop you at the Clarendon by eleven to see your folks. No problem.”

  It was not until Blake turned left instead of right onto the dual carriageway which linked Bradfield with the smaller towns higher up the valley of the Maze that Laura felt any apprehension.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” she said mildly, not worried yet, but Blake merely glanced at her with a half-smile which she could not interpret and put his foot down hard on the accelerator.