JOURNAL
I am building up a picture in my mind of both the time and the place, and the group photograph of the mill’s annual day trip to Blackpool has been invaluable to me.
There is Tom Clegg. He has a thin face and a gawky body, but there is something gentle – almost feminine – about him. His eyes are big and round, like those of a frightened doe. All those around him have abandoned their cares for the day – cast aside thoughts of the miserable existence that awaits them at the end of the charabanc (bus) ride home. But not Tom! He cannot forget the hostile world he inhabits because – so his expression in the photograph says – it travels around in his head.
Wilfred and Oswald Hardcastle are wearing top hats and are standing a little apart from the group, because though they are with their workers, they are not of their workers.
It is clear that they are brothers, though they are very, very different.
Wilfred looks stern and unbending – the sort of man who may get satisfaction out of life, but will never know pleasure. His expression says that there are no second chances with him. He does not know – how could he? – that he has only a few days to live, but I know, because I have seen the date on the back of the photograph.
Oswald is – as they say in Lancashire – a different kettle of fish entirely. A photograph is a static thing, and so I cannot claim with any degree of certainty that his eyes are constantly roving across the scene, but I sense that they are.
Wilfred, the down-to-earth businessman is, it seems to me, always on the look-out for opportunities, but Oswald, his dissolute brother, is always searching for chances, which is a different thing altogether.
And then there is John Entwistle – solid, square, with a moustache the size and thickness of a small yard-brush (a yard in Lancashire, I have learned, is not like a yard in the States, but is a small enclosed area at the back of the house, where formerly – and sometimes still – the toilet facilities are located). John has chosen to wear neither the cloth cap of the workers nor a top hat of the bosses, and instead stands bareheaded, close to the charabanc, as if he feels it is his responsibility to see that no one steals it. He looks dependable, and he would have to have been, since both the workers and the bosses do depend on him.
It could be said that this is all conjecture. It could be said that I went into this whole thing with foreknowledge, and that everything I read in the photograph is a result of that foreknowledge.
But I think there’s more to it than that. I feel a connection. These men are not just frozen images in an old faded photograph. To me, they are real people – and I understand them.
SEVEN
Harvey Morgan was sitting in the back of a limo, reading the Washington Post book section and smoking his first cigar of the morning. (Cuban, and hence supposedly unavailable in the USA, but hey, when you knew people, you knew people). He was not aware that though it was only nine-thirty in New York City, it was already early afternoon in Whitebridge, but then he wouldn’t have wanted to be aware, any more than he would have cared what time it was in Moscow or Tokyo, because the only time that really mattered was Manhattan time.
He loved Manhattan Island with what was, for him, a totally uncharacteristic and almost Disney-like fancy, and he sometimes thought of it as a sort of magic kingdom, bounded by a moat called the East River on one side and by a second moat called the Hudson River on the other. On this island, he was King Arthur – or, at least one of many King Arthurs – and his writers were his Knights of the Round Table. For him, the outside world existed only to pay his knights their rightful tribute – in the form of royalties on book sales – a generous percentage of which, as their monarch, he would skim off for himself.
There were two kinds of literary agents, he would tell anyone who asked him for an insight into the business. There were those who discovered brilliant new writers and nurtured them like the delicate flowers they were, and there were those who handled authors who sold books by the truckload. He was one of the latter kind, because he had decided early in his career that while it probably felt great to be lionised by the literati at artistic cocktail parties, it was even better to have a four-bedroom cabin overlooking Lake George, and a car collection that had been featured in enough glossy men’s magazines for him to have lost count of how many it actually was.
Yet though he was in the business for the money, he did genuinely care about his authors, and rarely dropped them from his list when their sales began to dip. He cared about his staff, too (within the limits imposed by the laws of the jungle that was the New York publishing world, naturally), and when, having completed the journey from the limo to his office, he noticed that his secretary, Linda Kaufmann, was crying, he felt a compassion which was only mildly tinged with irritation.
‘Has Jack been at it again?’ he asked. ‘Jeez, why can’t that douche bag of a husband of yours learn to keep it in his pants?’
‘It’s … it’s not Jack,’ Linda told him. ‘It’s this.’
She held a copy of the day’s New York Times to him, opened at page forty-two.
‘Hundreds of dead fish found in the Hudson?’ Morgan asked, scanning the headline.
‘No, not that – below it.’
Morgan looked at the picture of the blonde woman, and read the short text underneath.
‘This is a corpse,’ he said. ‘What’s it got to do with us?’
‘It’s Melissa Evans,’ the secretary sobbed.
‘No, it isn’t,’ Morgan said. ‘Listen, Linda my dear, just because Melissa happens to be in England, it don’t necessarily follow that any corpse that turns up there has to be her.’
‘It is her,’ the secretary said. ‘Look again.’
And because he sometimes allowed his secretary to bully him – or rather, told himself that he allowed it – he did take a second look.
‘I still don’t see it,’ he confessed.
‘That’s because of the way the make-up’s been applied,’ Linda said, addressing him now almost as she would talk to a very young – and not particularly bright – child. ‘Whoever did it—’
‘Did what?’
‘Whoever made up her face after she’d been killed.’
‘Do people really do that to people?’ asked Morgan, looking slightly sick. ‘I mean, do live people really do it to dead people?’
‘Of course they do! Haven’t you ever wondered, when you’ve gone to funerals, why the deceased person looks so good – sometimes even better than he looked in life?’
‘I don’t look at corpses,’ Morgan said. ‘I go to funerals, but I don’t look at corpses. Once they’re gone, they’re dead to me.’
‘The thing is, some faces are so limiting that there’s only one way you can go with them to make them as attractive as they can be. But Melissa had great bone structure. There’s two or three different ways to get her looking good, and whoever made her up chose a different way to the one she herself chose in life. But it’s her. I’m sure of it.’
‘You want me to ring this Captain Mahoney whose number is in the paper, don’t you?’ Morgan asked, ready to bow to the inevitable.
‘Yes, I do,’ the secretary confirmed.
‘And when I’ve done that for you, do you think you might be able to get back to work?’
‘I can try.’
Miss Dobson greeted Jack Crane from the librarian’s desk with a broad – if somewhat pre-programmed – smile, but that quickly faded away when he showed her his warrant card.
‘You’re here about that poor woman’s murder, aren’t you?’ she asked.
‘That’s right,’ Crane agreed, pushing to the back of his mind that she was a very attractive young woman. ‘What can you tell me about the victim?’
‘Surprisingly enough, not a great deal,’ Miss Dobson said regretfully.
‘Why is it surprising?’ Crane wondered.
‘Because normally, I could give you a thumbnail sketch of anyone who spent any amount of time working in the stacks. Would you like
an example of what I mean?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
‘Take this woman who started coming in here a few months ago. I know that her name is Elsie, she’s in her early sixties, and she lives on Sycamore Street. She has two grown-up children – the son’s a motor mechanic and the daughter’s a hairdresser – and she’s a widow. She’d never have thought about tracing her ancestry if her husband hadn’t died, and she only took it up then because she was feeling lost, and knew she had do something. But it’s opened new worlds for her. She’s made tons of friends, and now she’s studying for a certificate in genealogy in the extra-mural department of the University of Mid Lancs.’
‘Most impressive,’ Crane said.
‘Yes, I thought she was, too.’
‘I mean you’re impressive,’ Crane told her. ‘How did you manage to learn all that about Elsie?’
‘Everybody has to take a break from study now and again, and if I was free when she was taking one of hers, she’d come over and chat to me. People find it easy to talk to librarians. I think we’re a bit like priests in that way – except that we’re less imposing and judgmental.’
‘Yes, I can see that most people would find it very easy to talk to you,’ Crane said.
Miss Dobson smiled.
‘You’re not flirting with me, are you?’ she asked.
Damn, Crane thought, that’s exactly what I’m doing.
‘No, I’m not flirting,’ he said seriously. ‘I’m making a professional assessment of your approachability.’
‘Well, that’s all right then,’ Miss Dobson said, still smiling, but now rather mischievously.
‘I take it from what you’ve said that Mary Edwards wasn’t in the habit of chatting to you,’ Crane answered, pumping as much officialdom into his tone as he could muster at that moment.
‘No, she wasn’t,’ Miss Dobson agreed. ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, she was polite enough. She’d say hello when she arrived, and goodbye when she left, but there was no real feeling of human contact. And she never asked for my help, which most of the researchers do. She seemed to have a very professional approach to her research – and that’s a novelty in here, too.’
‘She wanted to study the local papers from 1924, didn’t she?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Are you sure it was 1924?’ Crane asked – because the last thing he wanted to do was plough his way through the wrong year.
‘Yes, I’m certain,’ Miss Dobson said.
‘Is there some special reason you remember?’
Miss Dobson frowned. ‘No, I don’t think so. And there’s no real reason why I should remember it, is there?’
‘Close your eyes,’ Crane said.
‘Why?’
‘Because doing it will help you to drag up memories from your subconscious mind.’
Miss Dobson giggled. ‘That sounds almost kinky,’ she said, but she closed her eyes anyway.
‘You’re standing behind your desk when she walks in,’ Crane said softly. ‘Can you see her?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s she wearing?’
‘A blue dress, like the one I saw in the Marks and Spencer’s window, and thought of buying for myself.’
‘Is she carrying anything?’
‘Yes, she’s got a leather briefcase in her hand. It has brass buckles, and you can tell it must have cost a bomb.’
There was no briefcase listed on the crime scene inventory, so the killer must have taken that, too.
‘So there’s Miss Edwards in her blue Marks and Spencer’s dress,’ Crane said softly. ‘What do you say to her?’
‘I say something like, “Good morning, madam. Is there anything I can do to assist you?”.’
‘And how does she reply?’
‘She says, “Have you got copies of the local newspapers from 1924?” And I say, “We haven’t got the actual papers, but we do have them on microfiche.”’ Miss Dobson opened her eyes. ‘Now I know why I remember the date so clearly – it was the expression on her face!’
‘What about the expression?’
‘Do you remember a couple of minutes ago, when you said you thought most people would find it easy to talk to me, and I asked if you were flirting?’ Miss Dobson asked.
‘Yes,’ Crane replied, uneasily.
‘Well, the expression on your face then was the exact twin of the expression on Miss Edwards’ face when she said she wanted to look at the newspapers from 1924. It was a “Gosh-I-wish-I-hadn’t-said-that-because-now-I’ve-given-the-whole-game-away” face. I think she was wishing she hadn’t been so specific, and had just said “the 1920s”. And I thought, What’s so special about 1924? That’s why it stuck in my mind.’ She smiled again. ‘You are clever, aren’t you – getting that out of me when I didn’t even know it was in there.’
‘I was just employing a standard investigative technique, Miss Dobson,’ Crane said.
‘Sometimes, it doesn’t really matter if you give the game away, you know,’ the librarian said. ‘And by the way, you can call me Janet if you want to.’
Fred Mahoney was on the phone from New York City.
‘I’ve finally got a name for you to fit to that cadaver of yours, Monika,’ he said.
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Hell, yes – sure enough to bet the farm on it. As soon as we got a tentative identification from her agent – and a stone cold certain one from his secretary, Linda – we matched the prints you sent me against the ones in the DMV, and there’s a perfect fit.’
‘What’s this about her agent?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘What did she need an agent for?’
‘Oh yeah, you don’t know about him yet, do you?’ Mahoney said. ‘She needs an agent because her name’s Melissa Evans, and she writes the sort of sensationalist biography that makes my old lady stand in an all-night queue just so she can get her hands on one of the first copies off the press.’
Then what the hell was she doing in Whitebridge – where there really wasn’t anybody famous – Paniatowski wondered.
‘Have you read any of them yourself?’ she asked
‘Shit, Monika, I’m an as-hard-as-nails, old-style Noo York cop,’ Mahoney said. ‘I don’t read anything but the sports pages.’
‘So have you?’ Paniatowski insisted.
‘Yeah, yeah, I may have dipped into one or two of them,’ Mahoney confessed. ‘Hell, if Martha’s gonna squander most of my pay on hardbacked books, I might as well get something out of it.’
‘And what are they like?’
‘Racy and pacy. And if even half the things she says are true … Well, let’s just say I seem to have led a very sheltered life.’
‘What happens next?’
‘I’ll be sending out some of my people in the next hour or so to talk to her family and friends.’
‘Could I go public with the name?’
‘When?’
Paniatowski did a quick calculation. ‘I’d like to hold a press conference at six. That’s about three and a half hours from now.’
‘No problem. By then, it should have been broken gently to everybody close enough to her to need it breaking gently.’
‘Another thing – would it be OK with you if I talked to Mary Edwards’ … I mean Melissa Evans’ … agent?’
‘I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.’
‘Then could you please give me his telephone number?’
‘Sure thing.’
The first editions of the evening papers – with the artist’s impressions of the man who attacked Mary/Melissa prominently displayed on the front page – appeared on the streets at three o’clock, but it was not until a quarter past four that someone rang the incident room to say he recognised the man and the woman.
It was DC Rowley who happened to catch the call.
‘Will there be a reward?’ the caller asked.
‘Before we get onto anything like that, I need to take your name, sir,’ Rowley said.
‘I mea
n, if they’ve done summat wrong and you’re looking for them, there’s got to be a reward. It stands to reason.’
‘This isn’t the Wild West, sir,’ Rowley said, chuckling softly.
‘No,’ his caller agreed, mystified. ‘It’s Whitebridge.’
Well, we’ve certainly got a rocket scientist on our hands here, Rowley thought.
‘What I meant was that in this country, we don’t pay bounties. You’re supposed to do your civic duty as a … well, as a citizen … without any thought of reward,’ he explained.
‘Listen,’ the caller said, ‘I’m not giving up Frankie Flynn unless there’s some money in it for me … oh shit!’
‘Well, since you’ve already given me his name, you might as well give me his address as well,’ Rowley suggested.
‘He’s my next-door neighbour. He lives at 17 Navigation Road.’
‘That’s down by the canal, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I really do need your name, sir,’ Rowley said.
‘Well, you’re not having it.’
‘As you wish,’ Rowley said easily. ‘After all, it shouldn’t be too hard to find you, now that we know you live at either number 15 or number 19 Navigation Road.’
‘Oh shit!’ the caller said, for a second time. ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.’
And then he hung up.
Navigation Road was a row of terrace houses with front doors which opened straight onto the street, and backyards which opened onto the canal towpath. Its glory days had been the 1920s and 30s, when the mills had been working full pelt, and countless barges had delivered raw cotton from the Liverpool docks and taken back the finished products which were destined for the colonies. Back in those days, the end two cottages had served as a public house for the bargees, and the rest of them were occupied by mechanics, boat repairers and prostitutes.
With the decline of the mills and the related industries, the houses had been bought up by slum landlords, and rented out to anyone who couldn’t afford anything better. Now, they were tottering on the edge of terminal dilapidation, and, on hot days, the stink of the canal seeped through every brick and roof tile.
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