“I hear they’ve g—” he began, and then stopped himself again.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry. As a matter of fact, I was going to say ‘I hear they’ve got young Phelan, even if it is for something else.’ Then I thought you’d probably think I was trying to pump you again. Unfortunate choice of topic.”
“No reason why we shouldn’t talk about that,” said Margaret, who saw no other topic on the horizon. “So long as you don’t expect any information I’ve gleaned from my job.”
Steven nodded intelligently.
“I realize now what fools we must have looked,” he said, relaxing. “The middle classes, fighting to defend their patch.”
“It did look rather like that.”
“But I still think it’s a complete red herring.”
“How do you mean?”
“I think that crime has all the hallmarks of a quite different sort of criminal. National Front, bullyboys, terror tactics—that’s what it bears the hallmarks of. And that’s not really our sort of crime at all.”
“Not middle-class crime you mean?”
“Well—if you want to put it in class terms, yes. I see it more politically. You know what our generation was like.”
“Oh, do I?”
“Of course, you remember. All that marching and demonstrating for causes we believed in. Sit-ins and banner waving. At least in those days idealism and liberalism weren’t dirty words.”
“And are the people in Wynton Lane demonstrators and banner wavers?”
“No, no—of course not. What I mean is, all of us there are responsible, thinking individuals, and it just isn’t the sort of thing any of us would do.”
“Of course, I don’t know any of the individuals involved, apart from you,” said Margaret. “And I’d certainly pay you the compliment of saying that I can’t see you trying to incinerate an entire family to preserve your life-style intact.”
Her hand was lying on the table, and he put his own hand affectionately over it.
“Bless you, dear old Meg.”
Fortunately the arrival of the waiter with their wine covered her withdrawal of her hand.
When Adrian Eastlake arrived home from work that evening he found his mother in the kitchen, dressed, and preparing vegetables for dinner. It was something he had half-expected would happen soon, but he could not repress his protests.
“Darling, there’s really no need for you to do that.”
“Adrian, don’t fuss. It’s something I want to do. I feel I’m getting better.”
Adrian too had seen how things were changing. There had been a stunning picture of the Princess of Wales in a red evening gown, one shoulder bare, in his mother’s women’s magazine the previous week. It had not been clipped out, and the magazine had been left out for rubbish. From the garden, where he had been clearing up for winter, he had seen his mother in the spare bedroom, going through the wardrobe to which he had long ago consigned all her old day clothes. He had felt a lump in his throat, and had raked vigorously to hide his emotion. Now he said, “You must just do as you want, my darling,” and turned to leave the kitchen.
That evening at dinner, which they ate after a small glass of sherry each, his mother said:
“Somehow I am going to have to get some new clothes. Everything I have is impossibly dated.”
“Good clothes don’t date, darling. And you always had good clothes.”
“Well, that’s true in a way. But no style lasts forever. And everything smells so musty.”
“I could get hold of some mail order catalogs.”
“Adrian! Have I ever been the sort of person who buys clothes out of catalogs?”
It was a long time since she had rebuked him with such spirit. In her long illness she had become compliant, accepting.
After dinner they played Scrabble, and she played in her old way, with a will to win, chivvying him if he took too long thinking. She did win, and not because he let her.
“I enjoyed that,” she said, standing up. “Now perhaps it is time for bed.”
“You are sure you’re not overdoing things, aren’t you, darling?” asked Adrian anxiously, standing to kiss her goodnight. “So many steps forward, all at once.”
“ ‘I am half sick of shadows,’ ” Rosamund quoted. “That’s one of your favorite poems, isn’t it? Of course, I shall go my own pace. If I find it’s too much I shall ease up.”
At the door she paused, wanting to say something, uncertain for the first time that evening.
“Adrian, you said something the other day that at the time I didn’t understand . . . something about that man who died. Phelan. Adrian, I had never seen that man in my life before the day when he came round to view The Hollies. Do please get that clear in your mind, Adrian.”
That night, in bed, Adrian Eastlake wept a little, and remained long, long hours sleepless. His mother was coming back to life, and he was not rejoicing over it. What kind of person was he, that he should wish her to remain as she had been—invalid, vegetable, cocooned? But he had to admit—to himself only—that he did wish that. He had enjoyed doing everything for her, enjoyed fussing over her, having her to himself. She had been all-in-all to him. As he had been to her.
Now things were changing. Soon she would start going out, perhaps seeing old friends again, going to church, having coffee in town. What was so dreadful about that? Who could be so selfish as to resent that?
But he did. His mother’s emergence into life seemed to make all those long years of her retirement and his selfless love little more than a dream. It made all his devotion, his service, his tender care something a little ridiculous, misplaced. In fact, it made everything he had done for her seem futile.
Chapter
FOURTEEN
The girl sat opposite Mike Oddie in the headmaster’s study, her eyes knowing, secretive, unwise. The headmaster, sitting unobtrusively beside the desk, had told Oddie that she was a strange girl and, seeing her, he knew that he had an uphill, perhaps an impossible task. The girl licked her lips, which somehow she managed to make an oddly unpleasant motion.
“You’re good friends with your sister June, aren’t you, Cilla?”
For a moment he thought she was going to deny it—a common Phelan tactic, applied indiscriminately—but at length, without a change of expression, the girl settled for evasion.
“She’s my sister.”
“That’s right, and I expect you talk a lot to each other, don’t you?”
She drew a finger across her nose.
“Sometimes.”
“You see, we have a problem, because we don’t know where your sister is, and we don’t even know if she’s heard yet that your Dad is dead.”
A suspicion of a shrug came into Cilla’s shoulders, and she kept silent.
“What I wondered was, is there anyone she’s particularly friendly with—a, well, a boyfriend or man friend perhaps? Someone she might be . . . staying with?”
He could have sworn her eyes narrowed slightly, betraying a thought, a name that came into her mind.
“She wouldn’t tell me things like that.”
She was lying, he knew it. That was just the sort of thing her sister June would tell her. He looked toward the headmaster, whose face was interested but neutral. What sort of tactic, he would have liked to ask, might work with this sort of child? Finding no inspiration in the face—for probably the headmaster was as much at sea with her as himself—he added a touch of majesty-of-the-law to his manner, leaning forward impressively and raising his voice.
“Cilla, I don’t think you’re being honest with us. It’s very silly to hold things back—silly, and maybe dangerous.”
He knew at once he had made a mistake. All his own experience of parenthood counted for nothing with this girl. He should have coaxed, not threatened. An expression of obstinacy settled on her face.
“I don’t know anything. I don’t know where she is.”
“I don’t think you do
. But I do think you’ve remembered the name of someone, haven’t you?”
“No.”
“Someone she’s fond of, someone she’s going with?”
Cilla leaned forward, and for a moment the closed mask on her face slipped and something more direct showed.
“If I did I wouldn’t tell you! Fucking cops!”
It was eerie. Mike Oddie knew he had heard the voice of the dead Jack Phelan.
Back at police headquarters, frustrated, and tantalized by the feeling that Cilla Phelan was concealing more than just the name of one of her sister’s men friends, Oddie ran into Malcolm Cray, about to start off on a town beat.
“Bloody Phelans,” he said. “How are you going on with Michael?”
“Michael? Oh, fine. It’s rather odd . . . ”
“Oh?”
“He seems to be a nice, normal, well-adjusted boy.”
“But?”
“There are no buts. That’s what’s odd.”
“Oh, I see—with that family. Well, I’ve seen it happen before. A family of absolute crooks and no-hopers and one of them turns out to be a perfectly normal, nice, law-abiding person. Malcolm, do you know if Michael is close to his sister Cilla?”
“I don’t know. They’re close in age. But it’s funny—I don’t get the impression he’s close to any of them. As if he—I don’t know—holds himself aloof.”
“Maybe that’s part of the process of self-protection. Do you think he could get something out of her?”
“I don’t know about that. Isn’t she rather a secretive child? That’s how she struck me. And remember—they’ve all been trained to see the police as The Enemy, Michael as well.”
“Don’t I know it! I’ve just had a basinful of the unlovely Cilla myself. But this isn’t anything criminal. I just want the name of any man June Phelan might be associating with. When I was talking to Cilla I had the distinct impression that she knew a name but wasn’t going to let on about it to me.”
“I’ll do what I can. I’ll be off duty by the time school is out. I’ll alert Selena and we’ll go at it together.”
“Mike!”
It was a shout from the doorway. Oddie turned and saw the duty sergeant.
“Are you coming in? There’s someone here I think you’ll want to talk to.”
“I hear that you’ve arrested Kevin Phelan.”
Mr. Latif was stocky, of medium height, with a rather handsome dark mustache and a worried expression. In normal circumstances, Oddie would have thought him more than a match physically for Kevin Phelan, but, of course, Kevin always saw to it that circumstances were not normal.
“That’s right,” he said, gesturing toward the other chair in his office. “How did you know? It hasn’t been in the local paper.”
Mr. Latif spread his hands wide.
“There is a small shop down from his place in Market Street. They saw him and his friend being bundled into a police car. We have a good network.”
“Small shopkeepers?”
“That’s right. We each have a small area that we serve, so we are not competitors. Often we have family ties too. And we are all, sometimes, threatened. I was asked to come to you because I have better English than most, but I speak for all of us.”
“Right. Well, tell me what’s been going on. I take it as read, with that boy, that something has been.”
Mr. Latif put his hands on his knees and bent forward, his face suffused with urgency.
“What has been going on is intimidation. I have no evidence of anything worse than that, but what has happened is bad enough. What happens is this. They pick on someone—Moslems, Sikhs, members of any of the minorities—anyone who has moved in to a mainly white area, or who owns a shop there. Someone who’s feeling a bit insecure anyway. Then the first thing that happens is, during the night they put a lot of rags soaked in petrol through the letter box.”
“Ah. . . . When you say they, you mean—?”
“Kevin Phelan and Jason Mattingley. We know their names, you see. We have to inform ourselves, for our own protection. That is the first thing that happens. Then they leave the people alone for a couple of weeks. I tell you, sir, it is very unnerving!”
“You’ve been one of their victims yourself?”
“Yes, indeed! Then the second time, there are the rags again, and this time there is a note. In my case it said: ‘We’ll light it next time.’ Of course, I am very unhappy about this. I have a young family, a boy and a girl, and we live over the shop.”
“Then you’re just the sort of people they would choose. What happens next?”
“They come to the shop, the two of them. They come in, stand in front of the counter, and then they take out a box of matches and they light one. Just that. Not to light a cigarette—they just light the match and stand there watching it burn down. They are smiling—that Phelan has a really horrible smile. Then he comes up to the counter and he says: ‘I’m skint, mate. Could you lend us fifty?’ ”
“I see. It’s pure extortion. And you paid?”
“As I say, I have a family. I paid.”
“You should have come to us.”
Latif shrugged.
“Maybe, maybe. Sometimes the police are very helpful to us—sometimes, you understand, not so much. We talked about it, but in the end. . . . After all, what crime had been committed? And if they were put away, they weren’t alone. They’re members of a party, so-called. If they weren’t around, there would be others to take their places. By paying fifty pounds I got peace for several months. There are plenty of small shopkeepers around to frighten, so it is a long time before they get back to me.”
“Why have you come to us now?”
Latif smiled, self-depreciatingly.
“Maybe it is easier to do the right thing when your enemy is already in the bag. One of us was at the magistrates’ court yesterday, and he said Phelan was up for assaulting a policeman. So his friends will not associate his arrest with us. But if we can get him put away for longer, so much the better. But there is one thing more.” He leaned forward, now even more urgent, his eyes fixed on Oddie. “We want you to remember the family that was burned out earlier this year in Armstead. They lived too over their own shop. We think that was a message to all of us: Pay up, or else. We ask you to remember that family.”
Oddie nodded.
“We’re remembering.”
“The police came to talk to Cilla Phelan this morning,” said Carol Southgate to Bob McEvoy. It was after school, and they were walking up the hill on their way to Carol’s flat and to their first meal together.
“Much good it did them, I imagine.”
“No, I can’t imagine a stranger getting much out of her, when none of the teachers whom she knows quite well can. She’s a strange child—unnerving. That’s why I wondered whether she was being abused.”
Bob McEvoy nodded. For him it was almost a routine question.
“There have certainly been children in the school who have been—still are: Betty Morton, Mandy Hobbs, for instance. The first shows all the signs, and Mandy’s actually with foster parents, who are having a hell of a time with her. But their behavior is open, flagrant. That’s not like Cilla Phelan. Hers is the reverse.”
“The whisper is the police wanted to know where June might be. She wouldn’t even help them with that. I get this feeling all the time that she’s hugging herself, somehow—over something she knows. And that’s not likely to be just where her sister is.”
“Something to do with the fire, you mean?”
“Well, it could be, couldn’t it?”
“Equally it could be just anything. Children of that age don’t have the experience needed to weigh up what they know. She might have seen or heard something that she thinks is wildly interesting and important—and it is, to her. But only to her.”
“What sort of thing do you mean?”
“Something silly about someone in her class, for example.”
“Maybe. I don’t get t
he impression that that’s what Cilla finds interesting.” They had turned into the Estate, and were in sight of the burned-out hulk of the Phelans’ home. Carol shivered. “She seems such a knowing girl. It’s not as though her parents would ever have not talked about anything in front of the kids. She seems to have adult curiosity, adult knowledge. I think she would be able to estimate how much a piece of information was worth—how much it could hurt.”
Bob McEvoy looked skeptical, and they went the rest of the way in silence.
In the front garden of The Laburnums Daphne Bridewell was bending down, presenting her backside to them. She had found nestling under a hedge a trail of ground elder, her pet hate, and she was spraying it with Tumbleweed through a toilet-roll tube. When she heard the gate, she straightened up.
“Oh, hello, Carol.”
Carol was about to introduce Bob to her when she caught directed at him a look of such concentrated disapproval that she just smiled and walked on, down the steps to her basement flat.
Later that evening, after dinner with wine, when they were on the sofa and closer than they had ever been—though not that close, for Carol had still not made her decision—Bob said:
“Your landlady didn’t like my coming here.”
“No, she didn’t! I saw that. Well, she needn’t think I’m going to take any notice. If she disapproves of my having men in the flat, she should have told me when I took it.”
“And you wouldn’t have, I hope?”
“Of course not. It’s none of her business.”
A City of Strangers Page 14