The Overlooker

by Fay Sampson

  ‘No! I’m wrong. I had a memory that Hugh Street opened straight on to Canal Street. But it didn’t. Look! That’s it straight ahead. I can read the name plate.’

  He couldn’t explain the uprush of joy. It was silly, really. His grandmother had grown up here, but neither Nick nor his father had ever lived in the north. And yet he felt the fierce loyalty of northernness. He had never seen himself as a southerner. It was something in the blood.

  ‘Better get your camera out, Dad. Take a picture while you’ve got the chance. By the look of it, this lot is for the wreckers’ ball any day now.’

  Millie was right. All along Hugh Street the windows were boarded up. The small, two-bedroomed houses, which had teemed with such large families a century ago, were lifeless. No one would ever live in them again.

  They had passed renovated streets of houses that had once been like this, where the old stone setts of the road had been covered with tarmac. Here, he was walking over the original cobblestones.

  ‘It was on the left-hand side. Number sixteen.’

  He was few houses away when he stopped. ‘That’s funny.’

  ‘Looks like it’s not all shut up.’ Millie said.

  Number sixteen had an uncared-for appearance. The paint was peeling. There was a dark curtain across the sash window beside the door. But here there were no boards over the glass. He looked up. The upper windows were uncovered too.

  Nick stepped back across the road to take a photograph. As he lowered the camera, he had the fleeting impression of a flash of movement at an upstairs window.

  He smiled at the others, trying to sound more confident than he felt. ‘It’s worth a try. I’m going to ring the bell and see if there’s anyone in. With luck, they might even let us see inside.’

  ‘I’m not sure there can be anyone living here,’ Suzie said. ‘The whole street looks due for demolition. And even if there is someone refusing to move, they’re not likely to welcome visitors. Even under normal circumstances, they’d probably like some warning, so they could get the place tidied up a bit. I would.’

  ‘Mum!’ Millie snorted. ‘It’s not as if our house looks like something out of Ideal Homes even when you’ve done the housework.’

  ‘It would look a lot better if you helped with some of it,’ Suzie shot back.

  Nick thought about their four-bedroomed, detached house in its large garden, on the outskirts of the cathedral city. In two generations, the Fewings and the Bootles had come a dizzying long way from a millworker’s two-up-two-down, with a tiny back yard.

  All the more reason to be proud of his roots. The people who had made him.

  He nerved himself to press the bell.

  At first he thought no one was going to answer. Had he been wrong about that movement upstairs?

  After a while, the door opened halfway.

  The man who held it reluctantly ajar peered round it at Nick. He was a short, fleshy figure with dark, greying hair. Protuberant brown eyes stared at Nick suspiciously.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Nick’s eye was caught by a flash of colour at the top of the stairs. For a moment, he saw a young woman dressed somewhat like the one who had passed them in Canal Street, towing her small son. This time, it was a salmon-pink kameez, over dark red shalwar trousers.

  The man followed his eyes and turned sharply. But the landing was empty.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nick said. ‘It’s a bit of a cheek, I know. But my family used to live in this house at the end of the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth. They worked at Lower Clough Mill. The mill’s gone, but you can still see the chimney from the end of the street.’

  ‘Yes? What’s that got to do with me?’

  Suzie tried her most beguiling voice. ‘We were wondering . . . From the look of it, they’re going to pull the street down soon. Would it be too much to ask for Nick to come inside and take a last look? Just one for the memory album?’

  The man’s dark eyes stared back at them. ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘You’re not welcome here.’

  Nick swallowed his disappointment. Over the man’s shoulder he could just glimpse the front room. There was no entrance hall in these houses. He had a childhood memory of an upright piano, which had been the family’s pride. Of lace curtains at the window and an uncomfortably stiff three-piece suite. It had been a room only used on Sundays.

  In the dim light through the curtained window he saw that most of the furniture had been cleared. The floor was bare. A bureau had replaced the piano. In the gloom, he saw it was overflowing with papers and cardboard boxes. Before he could take in more, the door was shutting in his face.

  There was a commotion behind him in the street.

  ‘Please! Excuse me!’ came an unfamiliar woman’s voice. It sounded high, distressed.

  He turned and found the woman they had met before, in the brown cardigan and the indigo scarf. She was trying to press past Millie to reach the door.

  The man’s face changed when he saw her. The blank rejection darkened to thunder.

  ‘Please, Mr Harrison. I’m sorry! My little boy . . . They had a party at his school and he was late coming out. I had to take him to his father . . .’

  She was gabbling in agitation.

  The man looked at her coldly. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, woman. There’s no Mr Harrison here. I’m from the council. I’m checking that all this street is empty and the gas and electricity turned off. Don’t come back here again.’

  The woman gazed back at him in shock. ‘But . . . I know you’ll cut my money for being late . . .’ She wrung her hands.

  The door shut on her protests.

  The woman covered her eyes with her hands and burst into tears.

  Suzie put an arm around her. ‘There! It’s all right. What are you doing here? Who is he?’

  The woman shook her head vehemently. ‘No! It’s nothing. I made a mistake. I don’t know that man. Please let me go!’ She was shaking with sobs.

  She shrugged off Suzie’s sympathetic hands and fled down the street.

  Nick looked back up at the house. The windows were blank. But he had not imagined that other woman at the top of the stairs.

  FIVE

  ‘What was all that about?’ Millie exclaimed.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘She knew him. She was upset about coming late,’ Suzie said. ‘And yet he denied it. He sent her away.’

  ‘Because we were here. That stuff about being from the council was just for our benefit. He didn’t want to let her in while we were watching. He wanted us to think the house was empty.’

  ‘But if she really does work here . . .?’ Suzie’s voice trailed off. She looked back at number sixteen. ‘It doesn’t seem likely. The rest of the street is boarded up. It’s a pretty small house. What sort of work could she have been doing there? Something secretarial?’

  ‘It’s not just her. There was another woman there. Someone dressed like her. I caught sight of her for a moment at the top of the stairs.’

  ‘Perhaps there are loads of them,’ Millie said. ‘I mean, look at it. The rest of the houses are empty. What’s to stop someone knocking a way through all of them? You could have as much space as you liked. Enough for a whole factory.’

  Nick stopped dead on the pavement. He looked along the terrace, trying to take in Millie’s suggestion.

  ‘I suppose it’s possible. The outside’s solid stone, but the partition walls are probably just thin brick.’

  ‘See?’

  ‘What are you suggesting? Some sort of sweatshop?’

  ‘Come on now, guys,’ Suzie protested. ‘Let’s not get melodramatic. Somebody would notice, wouldn’t they? If dozens of women kept turning up for work?’

  ‘Who’d notice?’ Millie asked. She turned slowly, taking in the vast square of open ground where the houses had been demolished, the boarded-up streets surrounding it. ‘Can you see a single person here except us?’

  ‘B
ut they’re obviously intending to knock Hugh Street down, like all the rest,’ Nick argued.

  ‘So? When?’

  ‘She’s right,’ Suzie said. ‘Thelma told us this morning the council have had to cut back on their plans. It could be years now before they redevelop this area. Nobody wants to spend money nowadays.’

  ‘What will happen to that woman?’ Millie wondered. ‘Has she lost her job? Because of us?’

  ‘It may have only earned her a pittance, if it’s what we think it is. But it was all she had.’ Suzie shook her head. ‘There’s no work in this town any more.’

  They walked on in a gloomy silence. Nick’s enjoyment of the working museum, the excitement of their trespass on the derelict mill, his joy at finding his ancestral home at Hugh Street still standing, had evaporated.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back and see if there’s any news of Uncle Martin. I think I know a short cut back to the car.’

  They wove their way diagonally through the streets, back to the textile museum where they had left the car. They only rejoined the canal at the last moment.

  They were still subdued as Nick drove them back to High Bank.

  The first thing they saw was Thelma’s red Nissan parked outside the house. This afternoon, she greeted them with a brighter face.

  ‘He’s conscious, thank the Lord. Pretty tired, though. It’s taken all the sap out of him. And one side of his face is stiff. He had trouble speaking to me. But he can talk, even if I had a job to understand him. He’s still got his wits about him, praise be.’

  ‘I’m so glad.’ Nick hugged her. ‘I’ve been kicking myself that I’ve waited all these years before coming to see you both. Then you see the opportunity slipping away from you, and you think of all the chances you’ve missed.’

  ‘Go on with you, lad,’ Thelma said. ‘You’ve got your own life to live. An architect! We’ve never had anything as grand as that in the family. Your great-uncle was right proud of you.’

  She was leading the way into the living room at the back of the house. It was a small shock to find that Geoffrey Banks was sitting there at the table, a cup of tea in front of him. Nick told himself he should not have been surprised. Geoffrey was a cousin and lived next door. He would have wanted to hear about Thelma’s father.

  The out-of-work chemist turned his pale blue eyes up to Nick. ‘You’ve been seeing the sights, have you? Such as they are. No doubt you’ll have finer places where you come from.’

  ‘We’ve been to Thorncliffe Mill. The textile museum. And after seeing it –’ he turned back to Thelma – ‘I’m proud of your dad. And my grandparents. I’d never really been able to imagine their lives till now. It’s helped me picture all the generations before them. Kids working with those machines as young as eight.’

  ‘One of them was Millie,’ Millie said. ‘Millicent Bootle.’

  ‘I’ve heard my dad mention her,’ Thelma said. ‘One of your grandmother’s family. They were all good friends at chapel, the Fewings and Bootles.’

  ‘Dad crawled under one of the looms to show us what it was like if you were a kid working in the mill.’

  ‘You never! They let you do that? I’d have thought there were all sorts of health-and-safety rules these days.’

  ‘It wasn’t there,’ Nick said, suddenly discomfited. ‘That was later. A different mill. And the loom wasn’t working.’

  He didn’t want to tell his cousin about their adventure at the canalside, the broken grille, their illicit entry.

  But it had not escaped the keen ears of Geoffrey Banks. ‘Where was this, then? You haven’t been getting into places you shouldn’t, have you?’

  Nick decided to pretend he hadn’t heard. ‘Well,’ he said brightly to Thelma. ‘Any news about how soon we might be able to visit Uncle Martin?’

  ‘They said tomorrow, if he doesn’t have another setback. Just for a short while at first. He’ll be glad to see you. It’s a pity he’s not here to show you that suitcase he had me chasing up to the loft for. Look at me! Standing here nattering when you’ll be parched for a cup of tea. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  Reluctantly, Geoffrey Banks got to his feet.

  ‘I’ll see you later, Thelma.’ As he passed Nick he said pointedly, ‘You be careful what you get up to. Their feet run to evil. Wasting and destruction are in their paths.’

  ‘Cheerful character, isn’t he,’ said Nick when he was gone.

  ‘Don’t be too hard on him,’ Thelma told him. ‘He’s got a lot to put up with.’

  Nick and Suzie were sitting on the bench outside Thelma’s house. The early advance of evening shrouded the town below with grey. Lights were pricking out along the roads.

  Suzie got up and strolled over to Thelma’s bed of sunset-coloured dahlias. ‘I’ve been thinking . . . That business in Hugh Street. The Bangladeshi woman, or whatever she was. I’m wondering if we ought to report it to the police. There was something strange going on in that house. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘I know what you mean. I had a bad feeling about it myself. Only Thelma’s good news about Uncle Martin put it out of my head. But it’s not much to go on. It’s true, that man didn’t want me to see past the front door. But there’s no law that says someone can’t refuse to let you into their home.’

  ‘But it can’t be his home. No one should be living in that street. And what about pretending he wasn’t Mr Harrison and that the woman we met didn’t work there? He was obviously lying.’

  ‘And not a very good liar. He made it look a lot more suspicious than it probably was.’

  ‘A sweatshop, if that’s what it is? In a street of boarded-up houses where he probably isn’t even paying rent? And it’ll be a whole lot worse than just not paying them the minimum wage. I shouldn’t think he cares a hoot about health and safety. Goodness knows what conditions those women are working under.’

  Nick’s mind was jolted back to the textile museum. The clatter and whirr of hundreds of looms. The darting machinery hungry to grab a loose fold of clothing or a lock of hair. It hardly bore thinking about. Surely nothing in the twenty-first century could be as bad as that? Or was he trying to reassure himself?

  ‘I don’t like to think about it,’ he said darkly. ‘I wonder what would happen if one of them had an accident? I somehow don’t think our Mr Harrison would be calling 999 and getting the emergency services involved. Imagine it. Police. Medics. Factory inspectors. All wanting to know what happened and how. He wouldn’t want to take the lid off that particular can of worms.’

  ‘But he’d have to, wouldn’t he? What else could he do?’

  Nick got up and began to pace restlessly. ‘I know it sounds a bit melodramatic, but . . . dispose of the evidence?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘How would I know? Drop the body in the canal? Bury it out on the moors?’

  ‘And if she wasn’t dead?’

  There was a long silence.

  Suzie shuddered. ‘We’re letting our imaginations run away with us. There’s probably a quite ordinary explanation. But I still think we should report it and let the police decide.’

  Millie opened the front door behind them. ‘Tea’s up. Thelma let me do fancy decorations with the leftover pastry for the meat-and-potato pie.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ said Nick, jumping to his feet.

  His mobile rang.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he told Millie and Suzie. ‘I’ll join you in a minute. I remember Thelma’s meat-and-potato pies.’

  He glanced down at the phone. Number withheld. That always rang a little alarm bell.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is that Mr Nicholas Fewings, B.Arch., RIBA, AABC?’

  It was strangely put question. The voice was disquieting. Harsh. Demanding.

  Still . . . He shrugged. A potential client?

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Well, Mr Nicholas Fewings. I would strongly advise you not to tell anyone else about what you saw today. It would be particularly foolish to report it to the
police. Accidents can happen. To any of your family.’

  The call ceased abruptly.

  Nick had scarcely had time to take in the startling message, let alone to ask questions. He was left staring stupidly down at the phone in his hand. The screen was normal. There was no trace of the life-threatening message.

  To any of your family.

  His heart was thudding as he made his way back indoors. He saw Millie facing him across the table, the long swing of Suzie’s brown hair from behind. Thelma’s comfortably welcoming face. He hardly remembered to say thank you as she passed him a generously loaded plate.

  The phone was back in his inside jacket pocket. He was aware of its pressure scarily over his heart.

  Nick hardly noticed what he ate. He was aware that he was not joining in the account of their day as enthusiastically as he should. He was grateful to Suzie, who kept up the discussion with Thelma about his mill-working ancestors, as though these older generations of Fewings and Bootles were her family, not his. Once or twice he caught her looking across at him with curiosity. Nick cursed himself that he was not making a better show of hiding his anxiety.

  Mercifully, by the time they had cleared away the meal, it was just past the start of one of Thelma’s favourite television programmes. The conversation came to an abrupt halt. They settled down to watch.

  It was impossible for Nick to concentrate. If he left the room, would Suzie follow? He badly needed to talk to her. But it would look strange if they both absented themselves. He sat through a documentary on Buckingham Palace, hardly taking in what he was seeing.

  ‘Look at this.’ Suzie’s voice called him out of his troubled thoughts.

  Belatedly, he realized that the programme had finished. He looked across at the book in her hand, without real interest.

  ‘I found it on that bookshelf. A Childhood in Belldale.’

  Thelma looked round from the television screen. ‘That old thing! I seem to remember Dad picking it up in a second-hand bookshop when we were off in the dales one day. We’ve got family buried at Briershaw Chapel out that way.’