A Winter Love Song

by Rita Bradshaw

  His car was still parked outside the Palace and as they walked he took her arm again, tucking it in his, and feeling as giddy as a schoolboy when she seemed content to leave it there. It was nothing, the action of a friend, that was all, but it was more than he had felt able to attempt before and, as such, meant the world.

  Damn it, Art, he thought ruefully as he walked with Bonnie beside him, you’ve got it bad . . .

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Franco.’

  Margarita hadn’t known which way Franco had turned when she emerged from the pub, but she had taken a guess and gone right, running as fast as her arthritic knees permitted. It hadn’t been long before she had seen him in the distance, walking with the slightly hunched-over stance he had these days since the accident. He’d crawled under a cart to mend the wheel and the whole thing had collapsed on him, trapping him by the lower torso and top of his legs and crushing bones in the process. He was in constant pain, she knew that, and sometimes she awoke in the night to hear him snivelling beside her, but she felt not the slightest shred of pity.

  She had caught up with him at the end of a row of shops, dark and deserted at this time of night, pulling him into an empty doorway so violently she’d almost caused him to stumble and fall.

  Now she said again, her eyes slits and her voice venomous, ‘Don’t lie to me. You had her, didn’t you, same as that floozie Nelly and countless others. Sweet-talking them out of their drawers and having your fun, you filthy dirty so-an’-so. I should have castrated you years ago, cut it off when you were asleep and thrown it in the muck where it belongs. But you’ve had your comeuppance an’ not before time. The great lover unable to get it up and peeing himself like a bairn.’ After the accident Franco had seen more than one doctor but none of them had been able to help him.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Shut up,’ she mimicked. ‘Is that all you can say? You’re pathetic, you know that, don’t you? Not a man any more, not anything. You sit around all day, blubbering and carrying on. You disgust me. But you’re going to back me in this, Franco. You owe me that. She’s earning a fortune – she must be, what with being on the television and all – and how would it look to her adoring public if it came out that she had cast off her poor old starving grandma without a penny to her name? Not only that, but she’d stolen from her to get started. No, whatever else she is, Bonnie’s not daft, and neither is that fancy man she’s got with her. They’ll stomp up plenty for us to keep quiet, you mark my words.’

  Franco looked at the woman in front of him and such was his expression that he could have been surveying something putrid. He had disliked her almost as soon as they had been wed, and over the years dislike had turned to loathing and loathing to a deep, dark hatred, but it had been since the accident that he had thought about killing her, his wife. Wife. A bolt of revulsion shot through him. He had thrown his life away the day she had trapped him into marriage, he’d known that soon enough, but since the accident he had realized he was living with something that was pure evil. How else could you explain the glee, the sheer pleasure she took in his misfortune? The first time he had wet himself she had stood and laughed, and then verbally stripped him of anything that remained of his manhood.

  ‘You might find you’ve taken on more than you can chew with Art Franklin.’

  ‘Oh, I expected you to take that tack, that don’t surprise me. But like I said, you’ll back me in this. Since your accident it’s been me that puts food on the table, remember that. If it wasn’t for the bit I get on my stall we’d starve. And there’s that little madam, dressed up to the nines and rolling in money. I’d given up thinking we’d find where she’d scarpered to, and who would have thought it’d be the other end of the country? But though the mills of God might grind slowly, they grind exceedingly fair.’

  She was always doing that, quoting bits of the Bible to suit herself, though he had never met a less religious woman than Madge. But then they said the Devil knew the Bible inside out and could use it better than any parson when it suited, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising. If ever the Devil had an advocate on earth, it was Madge.

  Margarita had paused, waiting for a response, and when none was forthcoming she stepped closer so he could smell her sour breath as she said, ‘I’ll make her squirm, you see if I don’t. She won’t get the better of me. I just thank the good Lord she was brazen enough to go on the television and my cousin saw her.’

  A branch of the Spanish part of the family had worked a fair in the south for as long as Margarita’s had in the north, but in the last few years the fair had been struggling and they had taken the decision to close. The cousin’s husband had always been a shrewd customer and having seen the way the wind was blowing, had made arrangements in advance for his family’s well-being. As they’d had winter quarters in London most of their lives and the fair had moved round the southern end of the country in the summertime, they’d already had a small two-up, two-down terraced house in the East End, and during the winter they’d just about got by living on their summer takings and earning a few bob here and there with manual work. For two or three years before the fair had disbanded, the cousin’s husband, along with his three grown-up sons, had worked at the docks in the winter, getting friendly with one or two of the gaffers who had a sideline in ‘acquiring’ stuff that regularly fell off the backs of lorries, or in this case, ships. By the time the fair had actually folded, the four men were well in with the people who mattered. So much so that the cousin’s husband had been able to move his family to a comfortable semi-detached house in the suburbs complete with an indoor bathroom and modern fitted kitchen, and provide his wife with luxuries like a refrigerator in the kitchen and a television set in the sitting room.

  This must have been on Margarita’s mind, for now she said, ‘There’s Maria, in a house fit for a princess and never really done a hard day’s work in her life, not like me. Even when the fair was going, her Juan never expected her to do anything but cook and clean and look after their bairns. Well, I want a nice place – I don’t intend to end my days trying to scratch in the dirt like a chicken and living hand to mouth. Our fair’s going the same way as Maria’s and it won’t get better, not with all this talk of war with the Germans. And I’ll wait for ever for you to do anything. I learned a long time ago that if I want something doing I have to do it meself. Useless as a sack of spuds, you are, and you can’t even do the job of keeping me warm in bed no more.’

  Always she came back to that, goading him, sticking the knife in. Franco ground his teeth. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘What am I going to do? Go back to Maria’s and have a couple of drinks, and let the wonderful Bonnie May stew for a day or two. Bonnie May! Stupid name. And her and her fancy man are stupid too if they think I’ll let this drop. You, an’ all. I’m not frightened of Art Franklin even if you are.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was frightened of him.’

  ‘No, but you are, aren’t you? When that cart took care of your wedding tackle it took the last of your gumption an’ all. Scared to death back there you were, shaking in your boots. You wait till I tell Maria and Juan what a useless so-an’-so you were. Never so much as opened your mouth. Come on.’

  Margarita turned and stepped out of the doorway, pulling her black felt hat more firmly on her head as an icy gust of wind blew along the street. She began walking and didn’t bother to look back and see if Franco was following. She knew he would be. He did as he was told these days.

  They had caught a bus that dropped them in Alexandra Park Road, so now, as they reached a main thoroughfare and Margarita stepped onto the kerb and hailed a taxi, she was aware of Franco’s look of surprise. ‘We’re going to come into money,’ she said shortly. ‘This is the way I intend to go on from now.’

  He made no reply to this and neither of them spoke on the way to Maria’s house in Enfield. Maria was waiting up for them but Juan had gone to bed. Franco had the feeling that Juan liked Margarita as li
ttle as he did. He left the two women jabbering away over a couple of bottles of stout and went upstairs to the spare room that he and Margarita were sleeping in. As he sat down on his side of the bed he was aware of the canvas tarpaulin under the sheet. Margarita had taken fiendish pleasure in telling Maria and Juan why it was needed after they had first arrived at the house, while he had inwardly writhed with humiliation and shame.

  He got undressed slowly. He did everything slowly these days, the pain that was with him day and night particularly acute after the walking he had done that day. After a while he heard Maria come upstairs and use the bathroom before walking along the landing past their room to the one at the front of the house that she and Juan shared. He knew what Margarita was up to downstairs. No doubt she’d made some excuse to Maria about needing to sit a while before she came to bed, but she would have made sure Maria poured her another stout before her cousin had left her. She had said earlier that the money she earned fed them, but most of it went on drink these days. He used to drink his fair share before the accident, it was true; being three sheets to the wind had helped him endure sharing a bed with Madge if nothing else. He remembered the first night he’d returned home from the hospital when she’d sat supping and he’d asked her to pour him a beer. She had stared at him with disdain and told him that when he was earning again he could have luxuries like that, but not until then. They had both known he’d never work again. Since then he had begged her once or twice, when the pain was nigh unbearable, telling her he needed something to dull the agony that his pills weren’t touching, but he’d quickly come to understand that not only did his pleading do no good but she actually enjoyed it.

  He slid down under the blankets and thick eiderdown and lay waiting for her. He knew exactly what she would do. In the four days since they had been here each night was the same. She would drink Maria’s stout – only that day he had heard Juan mutter to his wife about hiding the bottles from the kitchen cupboard so he was clearly sick of Madge taking liberties – and then come upstairs to the bedroom, whereupon she would get undressed and put her dressing gown on to go to the bathroom for a bath. She’d been pea-green with envy about Maria’s bathroom, using copious amounts of her cousin’s lavender bath salts each night and staying in the bath until the water was all but cold. Juan wasn’t overjoyed about this either, making pointed remarks at breakfast each morning about the lack of hot water in the tank. Not that Madge took any notice.

  Sure enough, a little while later the bedroom door opened and Margarita came in. Wafts of stout-laden breath and the creaking of the bed told him she was getting undressed. He feigned sleep and waited until she had walked along to the bathroom before he sat up, wincing at the gnawing pain in his lower torso as he listened to the sound of the bath being run. Once it stopped, he gave her another five minutes before sliding out of bed. He knew precisely what he was going to do. This had been brewing for weeks, months, years, but it was seeing Bonnie again that told him the time was right. He wasn’t going to let Madge spoil the new life Bonnie had made for herself, and she would. Oh yes, he knew his wife well enough to realize that even if Bonnie gave her all the money she had and kept paying, eventually Madge would find a way to bring her granddaughter down. It was unnatural the way Madge had always been with her; even when Bonnie was a babe in arms, his wife had appeared to dislike her, and once John had gone she had made that child suffer. But then so had he.

  Franco shut his eyes tightly for a moment, shaking his head. He still didn’t know what had come over him that night when he had taken her so brutally, but it had been the cause of him drinking more and more heavily in the years since. When he had woken up the next morning and she’d been gone, the guilt had made him feel for a time as though he was going mad. He had never forced a woman in his life, he’d never had to. Even the ones he’d had to wait for, like Nelly. He wasn’t a bad man, or he hadn’t thought he was.

  It took him a few moments to straighten up and it felt as though little red-hot pokers were piercing his innards. He walked soundlessly across the room, his bare feet making no sound on the carpet either in the bedroom or on the landing outside. That was another thing that had caused Madge to writhe in envy, the fact that Maria had fitted carpets all over the house, even in her kitchen. It didn’t matter that Juan was in effect a villian and counted members of London’s criminal underworld among his friends – Maria had a home to be proud of and that was that.

  The bathroom door was shut, the signal that someone was inside as there was no bolt on the door. As he opened it he said softly, ‘It’s me, Madge, I need the lavatory,’ because the last thing he wanted her to do was to call out.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Can’t I have two minutes to meself? That’s not too much to ask, is it?’

  He shut the door carefully and walked across to the lavatory, but instead of raising the seat he drew the lid down and sat on it as he said, ‘We need to talk.’

  She stared at him, clearly taken aback. She had slid further down in the bath as he had entered and put the flannel across her breasts, for all the world like a shy young bride, but there was nothing virginal about Madge, he thought. She had been over forty when he had married her and certainly her first husband had had the best of her. Now, at sixty-five, she looked ten years older in her face at least, but that was what bitterness and hatred could do. He’d often mused that it was acid running through her veins rather than blood.

  She recovered almost immediately, her voice waspish as she said, ‘Talk? What would I want to talk to you for? I’m not about to change my mind about Bonnie if that’s what you’re after.’

  ‘That’s as may be, but nevertheless, we will talk.’

  Margarita’s eyes narrowed. He was acting different, more like the old Franco who played the big man. Well, she wasn’t having that. She’d got him where she wanted him since the accident and she didn’t intend to go back to the way things had been before. Her lip curling, she mimicked, ‘“Nevertheless, we will talk.” Hark at you. Pity you didn’t show a bit more gumption earlier, that’s all I can say.’

  ‘There’s all kinds of evil in the world. Did you know that, Madge? Oh yes, all kinds. There’s the power sort, like this bloke Hitler and his Nazis, and then there’s folk who just enjoy seeing others in pain, get pleasure from it, you know? And yet again them that twist the truth and gossip and scheme to bring people down so they feel bigger. I could go on. But evil stems from one source when you narrow it down, no matter how it manifests, and that’s a black heart.’

  ‘You gone barmy or something?’

  He carried on in the same quiet, conversational voice as though she hadn’t spoken. ‘And your heart is black, Madge. Black as sin, stinking and fetid and rotten. I should have left you years ago, once I realized what you are, but you’re clever, I give you that. You got a ring on your finger before you showed your true colours. You robbed me of what I thought I was going to have – a proper marriage, bairns – and you’ve gone on robbing me.’

  ‘Oh, give it a rest, you spineless beggar. Feeling sorry for yourself, are you?’

  ‘A bit. Aye, a bit. But if truth be told I feel more sorry for Bonnie and I tell you now, you’re not going to bleed her like you’ve bled me through the years.’

  There was a swoosh of water as Margarita reacted to the name as though she had been prodded with a sharp blade. ‘I’ll do what I want as regards that one and you can’t stop me.’ She glared at him, her dark eyes deadly. ‘And if you don’t want any of the money, that suits me down to the ground.’

  ‘No, it’s not money I want, Madge.’

  He got up. For a moment she thought he was leaving, and by the time she realized his intention it was too late.

  It was an uneven struggle from the start. She was scrawny and thin and Franco weighed twice as much, his powerful shoulders and thick arms holding her under the water without too much trouble. It was over quicker than he had envisaged; in fact, he continued to press the body down for a good thirty secon
ds after she appeared dead, expecting her to rear up or thrash about if he let her go.

  When he straightened, he stood for a minute more looking down at the figure in the water. Her face had been contorted, her eyes wide and desperate as she had died, but now it was smoothed out, a few tendrils of hair from the bun she wore on the top of her head floating lazily as the water became still.

  He left the bathroom as quietly as he had entered it, but once on the landing he paused. How many bottles of stout had Madge consumed? If this could look like an accident because she’d gone to sleep whilst drunk and incapable, all the better. He didn’t care about himself, his life wasn’t worth living anyway, but if the police caught on to the fact that Madge had been murdered the resulting publicity would be bound to embroil Bonnie sooner or later.

  As he walked down the stairs he was aware of not feeling a shred of guilt or remorse about what he had done, and he wondered if that was normal. But then murdering your wife wasn’t normal, was it? He smiled a small smile. In the past when Madge had been particularly obnoxious and he had imagined doing away with her, he had always thought it would give him pleasure, or if not pleasure, then satisfaction. But he had felt nothing as he had drowned her and he still felt nothing. It was a job that had had to be done, that was all.