by Marie Joseph
He heard her retching and vomiting out in the back scullery, an abandoned sound, terrible in its lack of dignity, awesome in its total despair.
The boy standing by the table turned to follow her.
‘I’ll just go . . .’ he said over his shoulder, and the policeman took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the rain and perspiration from his face.
‘If she wants . . .’ he began, but Stanley was already by his mother’s side, watching helplessly as she vomited, then in between the bouts of vomiting, banged her head again and again on the stone slopstone.
To the end of his days he was never to forget the terrible sound of her forehead being dashed over and over on the unyielding stone. Banging, banging away in a frenzy of disbelief, as if she would knock the truth out of her mind, her active brain a riot of confusion.
‘Mum . . .’ he said, and tried to put his arms round her, but she knocked him away with a force that made him stagger back and clutch at the gas-stove to keep his balance.
‘Mum! You’ll hurt yourself.’
‘No!’ she was shouting. ‘I’ll not believe it. I’ll not. Tell him to go away with his lies. Ruby’s not dead. She’ll come back home. I’ll not listen to him. I’ll not listen.’
Then she straightened up, turned around, and put both hands over her face, and as Stanley reached for her, he saw the blood running down between her fingers.
Dazed, moaning with a dreadful whimpering sound, his mother swayed, temporarily out of her mind with grief. Making no further protest when the policeman came and led her gently back to her chair by the fire. Kneeling by her side and wiping the blood from her head with his white handkerchief.
‘Is there a neighbour, lad? A woman who could come in and be with her?’ He spoke softly over his shoulder to Stanley.
‘Mrs Crawley. I’ll go and fetch her . . . It’s only across the street, only a minute. I’ll not be a minute . . .’
And reaching the front door, Stanley almost pulled it off its hinges with the force he used to get it open quickly enough.
‘What can Mrs Crawley do?’ a voice in his head seemed to be screaming over and over. He was not and never had been a swearer, his father having instilled in him the belief that there were enough words in the English language without needing to curse, but now the voice was shouting: ‘What can bloody Mrs Crawley do? What can anyone do?’
And they’d gone to bed. He could see the light on upstairs. What right had they being in bed when his mother needed, when his mother . . .? Stanley banged on the door as if the very hounds of hell were hard on his heels.
‘Mrs Crawley! Mrs Crawley . . .’
But it was Mr Crawley who answered the door. Undersized, shrivelled little Mr Crawley, with his indefinite features set anonymously in his forgettable face; a man so dominated by his wife that he hardly seemed to exist. He blinked at Stanley, and screwed up his face as if trying to place him. Half way through undressing for bed, he was trying to pull his dangling braces back over his shoulders, making ineffectual little grabs at them.
‘’Old on, lad. There’s no call for thee to try to break door down.’ Then he saw Stanley’s face. ‘Eh, lad, I didn’t know it were thee. Come in with ee. I’ll get ‘er.’ He went to the foot of the stairs, and shouted with surprising strength in his voice. ‘Nellie! It’s yon lad from across street.’ He turned back to Stanley. ‘Nay, lad. Come in out of the wet. It’s a nasty neet all right.’
And moving like a machine, Stanley stepped inside.
Within minutes Mrs Crawley was there, the saviour of Inkerman Street, clattering her way down the uncarpeted stairs, with a coat thrown over a grey and trailing nightdress, her hair a-bristle with curling pins, and her sunken mouth proclaiming that her teeth were reposing elsewhere for the night.
‘They’ve found her,’ Stanley heard himself say. ‘In the park. Me mum . . . oh, Mrs Crawley, can you come? I’ve got to go with the policeman, and she can’t be left by herself.’
‘Aye,’ Nellie Crawley said, and started off down the lobby just as she was, leaving her husband hovering silently and uncertainly in the background.
‘She might do herself an injury,’ Stanley told her, as they crossed the darkened street together. He looked up in apparent surprise to feel the rain on his face. ‘But it’s Ruby all right. They had a description of the clothes she was wearing.’
Mrs Crawley tripped over the kerb, and as Stanley put out an arm to support her he caught the smell of spirits on her breath.
‘Poor bloody little sod,’ she said, and he felt that his father would have understood.
‘Aye, there’s some bad buggers, there are ’n all,’ Nellie said, pushing open the door of number twenty-seven, and stepping inside.
Apart from the deep purple bruises on her throat, Ruby Armstrong might have been sleeping. Her face had a waxen quality about it, and there was a leaf caught up in her dark curly hair.
Still moving as if in a dream, Stanley gently picked it out and let it fall to the ground.
‘This is your sister? Ruby Armstrong?’ The police sergeant’s voice was quiet and filled with compassion. Nay, God damn it, he had a daughter at home about the same age as this poor lass. His fingers trembled as he held the sheet aloft. It didn’t bear thinking about.
Stanley nodded. ‘It’s her all right.’ Then, before the sheet fell into place over that still face, he touched the pale face gently.
‘Goodbye, Ruby,’ he said foolishly, and turned away.
And when it was over the police sergeant said they would see him home, but Stanley shook his head.
‘It’s not far.’
And the trams were still running, lumbering and rocking along the lines, dropping passengers in the middle of the road beneath their spider’s web of wires. People were going home from the second-house pictures, peering through the steamed-up windows, rubbing at the glass with their hands. The same people who would read of Ruby’s death in the papers the next morning, gloat over the details, shudder when they thought for a tingling moment that it might have been them; might have been their daughter.
Stanley walked on, shoulders hunched, hands thrust deep in his pockets, slouching along, like one of the great army of unemployed, with all hope gone. But now his despair was even more terrible than theirs. Heedless of the rain soaking his dark hair, flattening it to his skull, thinking of his father, and remembering how Ruby had run down the street to meet him when he came home from work every evening at half-past five.
Thinking what his dad would have done to the man who had done this unbelievable, terrible thing.
Harry Armstrong had been a quiet man, not given to rages or violent turn of speech, but it seemed to Stanley as if he was there, walking beside him now, his thin face blazing with murderous anger.
‘I’ll swing for him that did it, so help me God,’ he was saying, and his words found an ache in his son’s heart and mind.
‘Mum,’ he promised, muttering to himself as he turned the corner into Inkerman Street, ‘I’ll not rest until they find him. I’ll give up the scholarship, and work and stay with you. I’ll find work somewhere. Anywhere. Just so long as I’m with you. It was all a bit too much like a dream anyway, me going to Oxford. You’ll have to forget it, Mum It just wasn’t meant to be . . . that’s all.’
Matthew stayed with Dorothy until she slept, a twitching sleep induced by weeping, and a subconscious desire, he guessed, to escape from the realization of what had happened. Tomorrow she would be as calm as a canal on a summer’s day. That had always been Dorothy’s way. Flying into storms of crying, getting it all over and done with, then settling down to the inevitable. He sighed and made his way downstairs to where his wife and Margaret were sitting over a dying fire, the sherry decanter on the coffee table between them.
‘Gerald’s gone,’ Margaret said, looking at her father with a hurt look on her face, remembering what he’d said upstairs, but making allowances for him.
‘He talked very sensibly,’ Phyllis said, �
�and he’s coming to pick Margaret up in the morning, because he thought you would most likely be wanting to go down and see that poor girl’s mother. He can’t get over it,’ she added, staring down at the glass in her hands. ‘We were going to make a pot of tea, but we felt like something stronger, didn’t we, Margaret?’
‘You never think a thing like this could happen in your own circle.’
Phyllis gave her elder daughter a swift glance. ‘Well, not exactly in our own circle, dear, but I know what you mean. I expect you will haye to go down there in the morning, Matthew?’
Matthew sat down in his chair, and rubbed his receding forehead wearily with the back of his hand. ‘Aye, I’ll be going down first thing. It’s the least I can do.’ He looked his wife straight in the eye. ‘And I’ll be taking Dorothy with me. Seems she’s been seeing a lot more of that lad than we realized, and telling us lies all along the line.’ Like that poor dead lass was telling her mother lies, he thought, shaking his head. ‘From what she’s told me I gather she’s pretty fond of him – they met and talked this afternoon, not more than a few yards away from where they found the body. Now you know why she was so upset.’ He sighed. ‘Our Dorothy’s a bit too young and a sight too vulnerable to cope with a situation like that. She’s going to need all our understanding for the next few days; you know how she takes things too much to heart, always has.’
Phyllis exchanged a glance with Margaret, but before she could say anything, Matthew went on: ‘Now lass, this isn’t the time to quibble. The right or wrongs of whether she should have been meeting him on the sly don’t seem to matter. Quibble now, make an issue out of it now and she’s not likely to forgive us. Ever.’
His wife took a dainty sip from the sherry glass. ‘All I was going to say, Matthew, when you give me a chance to speak, was that I feel sure you don’t want Dorothy involved in this dreadful affair any more than I do.’ She took another sip. ‘I agree with you that she takes things very much to heart, coupled with this intense loyalty she has towards her friends, but I feel strongly that this time she needs protecting against herself.’
Margaret nodded, and Matthew knew that they had been discussing ways and means of making him see what they thought was sound sense. ‘I never meant it that way,’ he thought, ‘but here we are, here we’ve always been, two sides. Me and Dorothy on the one side, and Margaret and her mother on the other.’
‘There’ll be reporters, Father, and you know what they can be like. You’re involved already with the poor girl working at the mill, but once they find out that Dorothy is friendly with the brother, can’t you imagine what they’ll make out of it? There hasn’t been a murder case they could get their teeth into for ages, apart from the two unsolved ones out Barnoldswick way.’
‘Four years ago,’ Phyllis said, ‘there was a woman in Agincourt Street who killed her husband with the coal shovel when he came home from the public house one night. Too drunk to defend himself, they said.’ She sniffed. ‘Agincourt Street’s round the corner from Inkerman Street, isn’t it?’
The inference was deliberate, and Matthew felt his throat contract with a kind of pain. All right then, he was allowing himself to get emotionally involved already; he was caring too much, but if the alternative was to sit there sipping sherry and calmly thinking out ways and means of disconnecting yourself from what had happened – well, he knew the way he’d choose to be. God damn it, people were people, weren’t they, regardless of whether they come from Agincourt Street or Buckingham Palace? He found he was clenching his fists so that the nails dug into the palms of his hands. . . .
‘This is a young and decent girl who has been brutally murdered,’ he said, trying to control the pitch of his voice. Phyllis was always accusing him of talking too loud. ‘It could have been you, Margaret. Or Dorothy. Aye, it might well have been our Dorothy as it seems she’s been meeting this lad in the park every day after school.’ He gave up the attempt to speak quietly. ‘And do you know why she’s been meeting him in the park, in a secluded place, on the sly, then? Because she knew she couldn’t bring him back to this house. Because every time she tried to mention his name her mother’s nose wrinkled as if there were a bad smell under it. Because she wasn’t prepared to face the schemozzle of bringing her friendship out into the open. That’s why.’
Phyllis put her glass down on the low table, saw that it had left a ring, and took it up again to wipe the rounded base with her handkerchief. ‘I expect, Matthew,’ she said, obviously determined to keep her own voice low to show the difference, ‘I expect you have conveniently forgotten that if this poor young girl’s mother had been more concerned about the company her daughter had been keeping, this ghastly thing might never have happened? At least Dorothy knows that we disapprove of her meeting this young man, and this, this dreadful thing that’s happened, may show her that we could have been right.’
‘You mean that murders don’t happen in the best of circles?’
‘I mean, Matthew, that the young girl in question probably had a far different set of values from the ones we’ve set our two girls. They think differently, and you know that’s true. They live in these hard times by a system of a communal pooling of their wages, no planning, no system. Why, during the General Strike a friend of mine told me that the miner’s wives were dressed like middle-class women.’
Now Matthew really lost his temper. ‘What in the name of thunder are you talking about woman? No wonder there’s bloody revolutions! What the hell have the miners’ wives in the Strike got to do with what we’re talking about?’
Phyllis was quite unruffled. ‘Then there’s the wedding to think about.’ She smiled a small tight smile. ‘It wouldn’t look good now, would it, if the chief bridesmaid was pointed out as the girl who was friendly with that boy whose sister was murdered in the Corporation Park? You have a certain position to keep in the town, Matthew, and things get twisted. People exaggerate.’
Matthew could take no more. Going over to the sideboard, he took out a bottle of whisky. He got to the door and came back for a glass. ‘I’m going to bed, lass. Otherwise I might be tempted to say something I might be sorry for.’ He turned, the bottle swinging from his podgy fingers. ‘And in the morning, Dorothy’s coming with me when I go to see that poor widow woman.’ More telling words failed him . . . ‘So put that in your pipe and smoke it,’ he said, closing the door none too gently behind him.
But when Phyllis came up to bed ten minutes later, the whisky he’d drunk had done no more than soften his mood. Made him see both sides of the pictures, the way he always did when confronted with a problem at the mill. It had been this quality, recognized by his influential friends years ago, that had made them try to persuade him to let his name go forward as a potential magistrate, and perhaps paradoxically it had been this very quality that had made him refuse.
‘Nay, but I’d be no good at playing God,’ he’d said. ‘And besides I haven’t the time to spend sitting on my backside on the Bench. Nay, leave that to them what’ve got themselves sorted out better than what I have.’
And in somebody’s book, Phyllis was a good woman, a marvellous hostess and a conscientious mother. No doubt about that. So, seeing her set face, and sensing her air of injured martyrdom, he put his arm round her when she got into bed beside him. ‘I know you mean well, lass. You always do, especially when it comes to thinking what’s best for the girls. But this is something far more important than worrying what folks might think. And even a local murder’s a nine days’ wonder, don’t forget. Come June and the wedding, and it will all be a thing of the past. The police will catch the man who did it, and that will be that. But our Dorothy will find it hard to forgive you if you try to stop her standing by a friend at a time like this. Other folks might forget the murder, but she’ll never forget your attitude.’ He tried to pull her closer to him, and kissed her clumsily on her cheek.
‘The smell of whisky makes me feel sick,’ Phyllis said, but she didn’t turn over, and he knew that for the time bei
ng he had won. For the time being at least. . . .
There was only a tiny mention of the murder in the Manchester Guardian when he picked it up off the mat early the next morning, but the Daily Mail had spent a hectic night scrapping its first page, and had printed the details in banner headlines.
YOUNG MILL GIRL BRUTALLY MURDERED, it said, and Matthew sighed. This would put the cat among the pigeons all right. Heavens knew what the News of the World would make of it on Sunday when more details had been released by the police. He could see it now, with a photograph of Ruby Armstrong’s three looms in the weaving shed, and on-the-spot interviews with her mates. He imagined the excitement it would bring into their drab lives, with every one of them claiming to be the dead girl’s best pal.
He took the papers up into the bathroom with him whilst he shaved, in what he knew was a vain attempt to prevent Phyllis seeing them. He wished, not for the first time since he had married, that his wife was the kind of woman who stayed in bed till he’d got off to work. But that wasn’t Phyllis’s way at all.
The routine never varied. He had the use of the bathroom first, whilst she washed at the wash-stand in the bathroom. Then Margaret and Dorothy took turns in the bathroom, and by the time they got downstairs, Phyllis was there, fully dressed in tweed skirt and jumper, pearl earrings screwed into the lobes of her ears, and her immaculate hair and the red mark across her forehead proclaiming to the discerning that she had slept the night securely enmeshed in a hair-net.
It was orderly, organized, and calculated to send a man off to his work with the feeling that, whatever the day in front of him might bring, the start to his day had been as devoid of stress as a paddle in the sea at Blackpool.
But this was no ordinary day. He winced as the razor slipped and nicked a piece out of his chin, then with a strip of lavatory paper sticking to the small cut, he walked back along the wide landing to his room, with the bed already turned down ready for Mrs Wilkinson’s ministrations, and the bottle of whisky, and the glass he’d used, taken away, so that it could never be said that Mr Bolton drank in bed. . . .