There was a crunch of metal, crumpling like paper. A moment’s silence, before a woman screamed, the tram driver jumped to the ground and ran to the car. It lay upside-down, its wheels still spinning, the cab section invisible under the front end of the tram.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Doctors and nurses kept visitors at bay. The corridors of the infirmary were crowded with stretchers and wheelchairs, with silent, upright young women in starched uniforms and important-looking men with a dozen jobs to do.
They told Rob and Sadie that Walter had been badly injured in a traffic accident, that his case was an emergency, that they would have to sit quiet and wait for news.
Sadie sat with a tight band of fear around her heart as the inexorable hospital machine wheeled an invisible Walter into the operating theatre. His ribs were crushed, there were internal injuries. He had been unconscious when they pulled him from the wreck, and so far no one had been able to establish the cause of the accident.
Rob sat holding Sadie’s hand. Annie had come along with Duke, to help keep an eye on Sadie, who was the most shocked of them all. They all held their silent vigil.
Outside, rain fell once more, and the wind battered against the long windows of the infirmary waiting-room. Duke recalled the time, eleven years earlier, when Rob had been sent home from the front, badly wounded. History had almost repeated itself again, except for the freak chance of it being Walter who had taken Rob’s cab out in the rain.
‘They say he swerved out of the path of a young lad to save his life,’ Sadie told Annie more than once.
She nodded and slipped her hand into Sadie’s. They must be patient and keep hoping. The afternoon ticked by, daylight faded. There was still no news.
‘Mr Parsons?’ A nurse came through, looking for Rob.
He got up.
‘The doctor says you can see Mr Davidson now.’
Instinctively, Sadie jumped to her feet ‘Can I come?’ she asked Rob, clinging to his hand. Rob glanced at the nurse.
‘Just the two of you, then,’ she argued with a curt nod, imagining perhaps that Sadie was the injured man’s girl.
Mechanically, Rob and Sadie followed her through double doors, down a long, polished corridor. The pervading smell of disinfectant momentarily distracted Rob’s attention, brought him out of his state of bewilderment. ‘How is he?’ he asked, walking quickly to keep up with the nurse.
‘Comfortable.’
‘Meaning what? Is he awake?’
‘Not yet, Mr Parsons.’
‘What’s wrong with him, do they know?’
‘You’ll have to ask the doctor. I only know they’ve sent him on to the ward and made him comfortable.’
The nurse paused to swing to the left into a cream room with twenty or so iron beds, a central aisle, and a high ceiling, arched and raftered like a chapel. ‘This way.’ She did her duty coolly, efficiently, in her quaint, nun-like uniform with the starched collar and stiff head-dress. She led them to a bed at the far end of the ward and quietly left them alone with Walter.
Sadie approached the bed while Rob hung back. A wire cage lifted the bedclothes clear of Walter’s injured ribs, obscuring his face. She went down between his bed and the empty neighbouring one, saw his eyes closed, unprepared for stitches in his forehead, the deathly pallor of his skin. She caught her breath.
A doctor approached on the far side of the bed, standing over his patient. He was a stern, sturdy man with slicked, grey hair, immaculately parted, and a dark moustache, and was dressed in an everyday suit, a watch-chain slung neatly across his chest. He studied the wound on Walter’s forehead, lifted the bedclothes to check a catheter tube directly into the chest cavity, which drained fluid from the lungs. He seemed satisfied, and stood back, hands clasped behind his back, rocking on to his heels.
‘He’s gonna be all right, ain’t he?’ Sadie pleaded for the right answer.
‘It’s too soon to say. We’ll do all we can.’ Another cool, professional voice refused to get involved.
‘Why, what’s the matter with him?’
‘Crushed ribs, punctured left lung. Perhaps abdominal injuries. We don’t know yet.’
‘What’s that mean?’ She wanted a plain answer. ‘He ain’t gonna die, is he?’
There was no eye contact with the reply. ‘As I said, it’s too soon to tell. First of all, we must drain the fluid from his lungs, wait for him to regain consciousness, before we can really assesss the damage.’
The answer crushed her. Her head went down, tears came.
The doctor went and called the nurse, who drew up a chair for Sadie at the bedside, told her she could sit for ten minutes and advised Rob to take a seat beside her. Then she went off.
Sadie gazed at Walter through her tears. Only the scar across his forehead, the pale skin made him look different. He could be sleeping, one brown lock of hair falling forwards over his brow, dark lashes fringing his eyes, a small pulse flickering at the corner of his jaw. Soon he would open his eyes and smile to see her there.
‘Walter,’ Sadie whispered. Gently she pushed the stray lock back into place. ‘Don’t leave us, Walt.’ She wanted him back down the court, bringing home the treat for her tea.
She watched the shallow, difficult breaths, glanced with horror at the tube feeding under the bedclothes, between the ribs of the wire cage.
‘Time to go.’ The nurse came back at last. ‘You can come and see him again tomorrow, if you like. But there’s no more you can do here now.’ She took Sadie by the elbow and led her and Rob away, out of the ward, up the long corridor. Without the nurse’s support, Sadie felt she would swoon away into nothingness.
‘Take her home, look after her,’ the nurse told Rob. ‘It’s hit her pretty hard. I wouldn’t leave her by herself tonight if I was you. You can come again tomorrow.’
They left the hospital; Duke and Annie, Rob and Sadie. News went up and down Paradise Court: Walter Davidson was in a bad way. His brakes had failed and he hit a tram. He was unconscious in the infirmary. They reckoned his chances were fifty-fifty.
‘He’s strong and he’s a fighter. He’ll pull through,’ some said.
Others shook their heads. ‘You never saw the cab when they pulled it clear. Crushed like a matchbox, it was.’
Bonfires were lit for Guy Fawkes, the night sky exploded with firecrackers. In the morning, the smell of spent fireworks hung in the damp air. The police called early on Rob Parsons at the depot in Meredith Court.
Rob had spent the night in fitful dozes and sudden, chilly starts into consciousness. Unable to face breakfast, and keen to be on the spot for any news, he kissed Amy an early goodbye, went to work and sat through the grey hour of dawn on 6 November reliving Walter’s parting words, ‘Back by eleven . . . Waterloo.’ It could so easily have been him, he thought. It should have been him; his cab, his accident.
When the police knocked on the yard gates at seven in the morning, he went to greet them with shaking hands.
‘Any news from the hospital?’ He broke the silence, turned on a few lights, invited the two bobbies into the office.
‘Not that we heard.’ It was Grigg, the eager constable from the Wiggin investigation, in charge now of an even younger raw recruit. ‘No, we came to find out if by any chance Richie Palmer’s shown his face.’
‘No, why?’ Rob was surprised they thought he might. Everyone was convinced they’d seen the last of him after the spiteful break-in at the depot. The coppers had all the evidence: Richie’s missing cap and coat, the fact that the thief knew his way around, the clincher of George Mann seeing him sneak down the court. ‘Does that mean you ain’t seen hide nor hair of him neither?’
Constable Grigg shook his head. ‘Bleeding Houdini. Vanished into thin air.’
‘So what brings you down here, if you ain’t got no news?’ Rob lit up a cigarette to steady his nerves.
‘We never said that.’ The copper sat self-importantly in the spare office chair; Walter’s chair.
Rob shot him a glance. ‘What’s going on?’
After much throat-clearing and settling of his helmet on the desk, Grigg went on, ‘We think mere may be a link between the burglary and yesterday’s accident,’ he claimed. ‘According to witnesses, the cab swerved into the path of the oncoming tramcar to avoid a pedestrian, a young lad called Dixie Smethurst. They couldn’t understand why the cab never braked, see. They said his speed never altered. Some of them said they seen sparks fly, and when we took a look, we found loose brake rods lying in the road, some distance from the collison. Then we got an expert in to look at the cab, and he’s sure the brakes had been tampered with.’
Rob sat stunned. ‘You think Richie done that? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘We want you to help us out, sir. According to our bloke, there’s meant to be a pin through a bolt that yokes all the rods together. If the pin comes loose and falls out, sooner or later that bolt, the clevis pin, comes apart, and Bob’s your uncle!’
He nodded. ‘That’s right. And Richie just put a new split-pin in, the afternoon I went and gave him the sack.’ Rob tailed off as he realized the implications. ‘Oh, my God!’
The constable nodded. ‘As far as we can tell, there was no split-pin holding the whole thing in place. What we’re saying is, that cab was a death-trap.’
Rob stared in disbelief. ‘That’s my cab you’re on about!’
‘It seems like your days should’ve been numbered, the minute you gave Richie Palmer his marching orders. Only the plan backfired.’
‘He done it on purpose?’
‘You say he’d worked on the brakes?’ The policeman stood up. As it happened, he didn’t feel as good about delivering the result of the investigation as he expected. There was nothing wrong with the detective work: it was the effect it had on those who were innocent. He watched Rob struggling to hold himself together. ‘So it looks like he made a proper job of getting his own back: breaking in here to nick the cash, and making a little adjustment to the brakes. That’s how it looks. Only, he never guessed Mr Davidson would take the cab out that one time. He got the wrong man, as it turns out.’
Rob nodded. ‘Thanks. I’ll think this through.’
‘We ain’t got no hard and fast evidence, mind. Not till we get our hands on the suspect.’ He put his hat on and pulled the strap under his chin.
Rob showed them out. ‘No evidence. I got that.’ He watched them up the street, two caped, uniformed figures, thinking he would have to go and tell Sadie the latest development. If she felt anything like he did, she’d straight away see Walt’s blood on her own hands for taking Richie back.
Sadie herself had been up since dawn. She tended to Meggie and left her in Edith’s care for five minutes while she popped up the street to see Amy. Rob had already gone to work, Amy said. There was no news from the hospital.
Sadie nodded and returned home. Curtains were still drawn. A lad came down the court delivering milk. Safely upstairs in her own room, she checked the baby and started work on a typing task. When Rob came up and knocked on the door, she answered it quietly.
‘Come in, Rob.’ She was surprised, uneasy. She thought he was busy at work. ‘What is it?’
‘Can I sit down?’ He avoided looking at her and sat at the table. He noticed she had the room tidy. A fire was already lit, small articles of clothing hung to air around the wire-mesh fire-guard.
She steeled herself, drew her own chair towards him. ‘It must be something bad. You look done in.’
He nodded. ‘It’s Richie.’
‘They ain’t found him, have they?’
‘No. There’s no sign. But they think he’s gone and done something terrible.’
‘It couldn’t be worse, surely.’ Presentiments crowded in. She remembered sending him away with scornful, stinging words ringing in his ears.
Rob made a tight fist and thumped the table. ‘Don’t I wish I never told Walter he was in Hoxton!’ he repented bitterly.
Sadie closed her hand over his. ‘You done it for the best. I know that.’
‘I should’ve known better.’
‘So what’s he done now?’ She felt stretched to breaking-point, unless Rob told her soon.
‘They think the accident was his fault. The brakes on my cab; they think he had a go at them. A death-trap, that’s what they said it was. Richie wanted me dead, and that’s a fact.’
Sadie shuddered. ‘You saying he tried to do you in?’ Was Richie capable of this, she wondered. Would he go so far? He was drunk. He hated Rob like poison. He deliberately smashed all he had to smithereens and left her and Meggie in a desperate state. ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘I believe he did.’
‘But poor old Walter got it in the neck instead. I hope he ain’t gonna die,’ Rob pleaded. ‘He’s gonna pull through, ain’t he, Sadie?’
‘He is,’ she breathed.
Rob got shakily to his feet. ‘I wanted to come and tell you for myself, before word got round.’
She nodded. ‘Thanks, Rob.’
‘You’ll be all right?’
Sadie stared back at him, her dark eyes blank. ‘Me? Yes, I’m fine.’ But she was racked by a spasm of bleak, bitter guilt. She put a hand to her mouth, turned deathly pale.
Rob caught her before she could fill. He sat her down, heard her begin to cry. She leaned against the chair. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’ She wept for every one of her mistakes, for Rob’s narrow escape, for Walter. ‘I been as bad as I could be to him, Rob! I ditched him, then I played on his good nature. Why doesn’t he hate me for it?’
‘He loves you,’ Rob said quietly. ‘He always has.’
‘And I treated him rotten.’ She sobbed, as if her heart would finally break. Then she looked up through her tears. ‘I want him to live, Rob. Make him live!’
‘He’s gonna be all right, you see. Walt’s like a brother to me.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she cried, and held on to him. ‘We can’t lose him, not like this, please God!’
On the afternoon of the accident Jess telephoned Maurice in Manchester, and, leaving everything under the charge of his deputy, he took the evening train down.
In spite of his reason for being there, his spirits rose as he stepped off at King’s Cross, glad to be back on home turf. Grey stone instead of red brick, plain classical lines instead of the Victorian scrolls and furbelows of Manchester’s master brickies. Even the Underground seemed familiar and welcoming, inviting cosy purchases of Quaker Oats, Nestlé’s chocolate and Player’s Navy Cut.
At home in Ealing, Jess told him the latest news on Walter. They were to visit the hospital next day, slotting in after Annie and Duke, if all went well. In his own mind, Maurice readily believed that Walter’s toughness of character would see him through; a view which would hold good only until the first hospital visit brought home the frailty of the human condition.
Talking in bed together, after a gentle and loving reunion, Maurice admitted to Jess that he was feeling homesick. ‘It ain’t just you and Mo and Grace,’ he confessed. ‘It’s the whole place I miss. The smell and the feel of it.’
She smiled, luxuriating in the warmth of his body. ‘You ain’t going soft on us, are you?’ She’d never thought of him as nostalgic; only as forward-looking, thrusting into the future, feeding people their impossible celluloid dreams.
He grinned back. ‘A tiny little bit maybe.’
‘You ain’t serious?’ She put her arms around his neck, wondering where this would lead.
‘Why?’ Absence had worked its miracle: to him Jess seemed lovelier than ever. She’d softened into her old ways, and that evening as he’d watched her putting the children to bed, he’d realized what a good mother she was; practical and calm, ready to smile and praise, full of cuddles and goodnight promises.
‘’Cos I been thinking about us, Maurice.’
He unwrapped her arms from around bis neck. ‘Am I gonna like this?’
‘I don’t know. Are you?’ She took a deep breath and lay back
on her pillow. ‘I’ve been thinking, the family needs to be together. I been over and over it: how can I make it happen without giving up the things that mean something to me the shop, designing, taking a pride in all of that.’
He nodded, leaning on one elbow and jutting out his chin. ‘Go on, hit me as hard as you like,’ he invited. ‘I deserve it for dropping the choice in your lap. It weren’t fair.’
‘Is that you saying sorry, Maurice Leigh?’ She turned towards him a smile playing around her lips. ‘Well, it was a hard decision, I don’t mind telling you. But I finally talked it through with Ett earlier this week, and we think we come up with the answer.’ Pulling the sheets around her, she sat up and hugged her knees.
‘Come on then. Spit it out.’
‘Who says Ett and me only have to design and sell clothes here in London? When you think about it, why can’t I do the same thing anywhere I like?’
He caught on. ‘In Manchester, even?’
‘Yes, or in Leeds, or Bradford. The women up there like to dress up in nice things, don’t they?’
‘I should say so,’ he said slowly.
‘Well, then, that’s the idea. I’ll move up to Manchester and open a new branch. Hettie will work from here, but we’ll get together on the designing. We’ll sell up here and buy a house in Manchester if you like, and find Mo and Grace good schools. What do you say?’
‘Is that what you want?’ He held his breath. No more Mrs Walters. Farewell to her travelling gentlemen and her snuffling Pekineses.
Jess smiled at him. ‘You won’t go on at me for opening another shop? We’re not asking you for money, mind. This is something we want to do for ourselves. But I won’t have no time to go to the library for you, or nothing like that. I’m gonna be busy, Maurice, I give you fair warning.’
He put up his hands in surrender. ‘Anything you say, Jess.’
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