A City of Strangers (23 page)

It took them some moments for their eyes to accustom themselves to the
gloom of the hallway. No lights were on, and the figure who had opened and quickly shut the door stood behind it in the gloomiest part. She was wearing a brilliant blue dress of a silky material Mike Oddie could not have described, and high-heeled shoes that, like the dress, seemed rather too big for her. She was very heavily made up—indeed Oddie had the impression that she had been experimenting on her face when the doorbell had rung, for one side of the face was made up on rather different principles from the other, and there was a lopsided dash of mascara around the left eye, where the bell had caused the pencil to slip.

“Could we go through?” he asked. “This is important.”

There was a shrug of padded blue shoulder and she led the way. The living room was conventionally furnished, with a heavy padded sofa and chairs, thick fitted carpet, a small bookcase, a large television with video recorder, and a newspaper rack with the local daily paper for the last few days in it. The orderly, middle-class impression of the room was overlaid by another, inimical force: Underclothes and a towel were strewn over the sofa, a mug and a plate were on the television, and a buttery knife had fallen onto the carpet beside it. There was a slum of makeup packs and jars on the mantelpiece, and the contents of them had got over the mirror as well as here and there on surfaces in the room. June Phelan was setting her mark on her space.

“You are June Phelan?”

After a second for thought, she nodded.

“I'm afraid I have bad news for you. There was a fire at your home and your father's dead.”

“He's not!” For a moment surprise made her look the sixteen years that she was, underneath the borrowed grown-upness.

“I'm afraid he is. Your mother has been very sick, but she's recovering now in hospital.

“What do you expect me to do?”

It was the automatic Phelan aggression, an indignant repudiation of the world's expectations. The emotion had been surprise, not grief, and she had quickly reverted to the patterns of behavior she had always known.

“That's for you to decide. We just came because we thought you must not have heard the news.” He gestured toward the newspaper rack. “It's been in the paper, though.”

June shrugged. Papers meant nothing to her.

“The gentleman of the house . . . Mr. Waley . . . he probably read about it.”

“Didn't tell me. Cunning old sod.”

“You see I have to ask you some questions because I'm afraid the fire that destroyed your house wasn't accidental.”

She looked at him with avid, foolish curiosity.

“You mean someone did it deliberate? Someone wanted to fry our Dad?”

“That's roughly what I meant. Maybe tried to kill all of you.”

“Christ!” said June. It was an automatic, almost an admiring response, not a shocked one. She did not seriously think anyone had been aiming at her.

“So perhaps we could sit down and I could ask you a few questions?”

She shrugged and pointed at the sofa. They pushed petticoats, tights, and bras up to one end and sat down.

“How long have you been living here, June?”

“What f- - -ing business is it of yours?”

“I'm just trying to find out if whoever started the fire could have thought you would be in the house at the time.”

“Don't talk crap. They weren't aiming to get me. Don't you know anything at all about my Dad? Right bloody troublemaker he was. Never happy unless he was stirring it up.”

“I know that. . . . Well, how long have you been here?”

“Christ Almighty! . . . About ten days.”

“So—” Oddie calculated roughly in his head—“you must have come here not long after you went with your Dad and Mum to view the house in Wynton Lane.”

“About three or four days, far as I remember.”

“Did your Dad ever tell you how much he'd won on the pools?”

“No.” Her face assumed an expression of scorn. “I knew it must be chicken feed.”

“How did you know?”

“I knew my Dad. Right bloody joker he was. If he'd really won a tidy sum on the pools he wouldn't have bought a house with it. I tell you, the first thing he'd 'a' done was go out and buy a car. Loved cars, my Dad, and he hadn't had one for ever so many years. Since he'd last had a job. It was the only thing he never managed to get out of Social Security.”

“I see. So you've been here since then. How did you come to know Mr. Waley?”

“Oh, I've known him years.” She said it airily, as if she were a middle-aged woman, not a teenaged small-time tart.

“But how did you get to know him?”

“Met him, di'n't I?”

“Where?”

“Oh—here and there.”

“He's a customer of yours?”

She shrugged. “You could say that if you liked.”

“You were involved in the Carrock business three years ago, weren't you? Did you meet him then?”

“May have done.”

“Likes little girls, does he?”

She giggled. The subject of men and their sexual habits made her more communicative.

“I take all this off before he comes home. Put on a skinny nightdress, suck me thumb.” She perched herself on the arm of her chair and acted it out for them. Neither of them felt greatly aroused. “Silly old bugger. Playing games like that at his age.”

She talked of sex—like many prostitutes—as if it were a lot of silly nonsense with which she had nothing to do.

“Has he got a wife?” Oddie asked.

“Had to fly to New Zealand, didn't she? Father died. I moved in soon as the old cat went. Some of her clothes are brilliant, though. Do you think this suits me?”

She was about to get up to parade her slinky finery when the telephone rang. June sank back in her armchair and stayed put.

“I never answer it. He told me not to. It might be her.”

Oddie watched her as she waited for it to stop. She exuded something that was not sexuality, merely availability.

“Are you still . . . working in the Carrock area?” he asked when the ringing stopped.

“On and off. When it suits me. Got a girlfriend there with a flat. We use it alternate nights. She goes out with her boyfriend and I take them back there.”

“Your customers?”

“Yeah. That was before old Waley with the limp willy got me to come back here. Cost him a packet, it did. . . . Poor old bugger, he's terrified of the neighbors finding out. Tells me I mustn't have the telly on while he's out, mustn't have the radio on, mustn't go out in the garden. F- - - him.”

“You must have met a lot of interesting people in your work. Important people.”

“May have done.” It was said with another shrug. It had been the wrong approach. June was not interested in important people, only in June.

“Anybody spring to mind?”

“We don't talk about the men we go with.”

“Professional ethics?”

“Yer what?”

“Never mind. . . . Are they all a bit kinky, like your Mr. Waley?”

“Varies. Some of them like it straight, some of them like a bit of dressing up, and that. There's plenty like the little girl stuff, but I'm getting a bit past that.” She giggled and pushed her breasts forward at them. “I'm a big girl. Old Waley wouldn't be so keen if he could get anybody younger.”

“Not so easy now, I suppose, since the police got wise to what was going on in Carrock.”

“F- - -ing police! Always poking their bloody noses in! What's it to you how I earn my bloody money?”

It was the voice of the dreadful, dead Jack Phelan again, this time the voice of the right-of-Thatcher libertarian. Oddie didn't pursue the argument.

“We never got who was really behind the Carrock business, did we?”

June was not to be caught like that. She smiled unappetizingly and said nothing.

“How did you come to get in with that game?”

“Friend at school. Said there was money to be made out of these old kinks. . . . Didn't even know the word then. Innocent, warn't I? . . . Anyway I was interested so she took me along, and—well, that was that.”

“Who was the friend?”

“Mind yer own business.”

“And what sort of thing did you do?”

“What the f- - - do you think I did? Had sex with men. Want me to spell it out? They put their—”

“Didn't your Mum or Dad try to stop you?”

“They didn't bloody know, did they? Wouldn't have done much if they had. My Dad never stopped me doing anything in his life, 'cept if it was annoying him.”

“And this went on until we stepped in?”

“Bloody filth! What's it to you? You should have seen my Dad with that policewoman who came round, though. She practically went purple.”

“And you've been on the game again—how long?”

“Since I left school. Since July. I must have been off my rocker, giving it to boys for free.”

“So recently you've been sometimes at home and sometimes—well, at Carrock and around, on the game?”

June nodded.

“So anyone who did this to your home couldn't have expected that you'd be inside?”

“You're bleeding daft, you know that? There's no one'd want to get me. Think of all those bloody backs my Dad put up, and then you say they weren't out to get him at all. No wonder it took you years to catch the f- - -ing Yorkshire Ripper!”

She was stopped short by a sound. There was a key being put in the front door. Her eyes widened into something like a genuine emotion: fear. Oddie jumped up and darted out into the hall.

“What's going on? I rang from the station—”

It was a smart, tough-looking woman, weary and travel-stained. As Oddie went toward her she caught a flash of blue from inside the living room.

“Oh, I get it. He's been up to his tricks again, has he? And in my bloody clothes—I'll teach you, you—”

She charged in, and for the next five minutes Oddie and Stokes were busy practicing the techniques learned long ago in their uniform days—the techniques for breaking up a “domestic.”

S
ince Algy Cartwright had become a widower he had fetched his newspaper each morning from the newsagent's on the other side of the Belfield Grove Estate. This gave to his mornings an element of choice (though he always did choose to get his newspaper, for otherwise what would he read?) as well as a ten-minute walk. So on the morning when Mike Oddie finally caught up with June Phelan, Algy, after a breakfast of poached eggs—which had failed to solve the problem of why, when they looked right, they always turned out to be nearly solid—fetched his copy of the
Daily Express
and walked back past the blackened Phelan house and down the slope toward Wynton Lane.

He spotted her at once, the Jehovah's Witness. Well—Peculiar Person, Mormon, British Israelite, one of those. Algy hated all kinds of canvasser. Badgerers, he called them. He seldom swore, but people who phoned to ask whether he had thought of double-glazing were told to piss off, and canvassers from political parties were told in no uncertain terms that the ballot was supposed to be secret. Religious badgerers were in his opinion the worst of all, for there was no certain way of getting rid of them. Algy's usual tactic of telling them he was a Roman Catholic had once unleashed a passionate diatribe against the Pope as Anti-Christ.

This religious canvasser—her drab clothes and earnest, intense expression gave her away, as well as her handful of leaflets—was being dealt with firmly but politely by Daphne Bridewell. Algy skulked past them to Rosetree Cottage, locked the door, turned off the lights, and retreated upstairs. He went into the spare bedroom from which he had watched the Phelans leaving after their visit to The Hollies and watched the progress of the proselytizer. He had done a lot of watching from that window since the Phelan visitation, a
lot of watching and wondering. The murder had certainly given a zest to his drab existence. Mrs. Packard was very short with the woman, ten seconds maybe from door opening to door closing. Evie Soames—she came out of the door, so he could see her—took longer: Perhaps she was doing a bit of proselytizing of her own. Algy had her down in his mind as a good-cause lady. The two had a conversation lasting all of three minutes. Mrs. Eastlake (Algy couldn't see her, but he had seen Adrian go off to work) did open the door, but, like Mrs. Packard, she was brief and decisive. Lovers of the Royal Family tended to be Anglican in sympathy if not in attendance. Nobody much, after all, was Anglican in attendance.

Then the woman went next door to The Hollies. Dr. Pickering had left old curtains up in the windows of the house, to suggest occupancy and discourage squatters. The canvasser went up to the door, rang the bell, then rang again. Algy could see her skirt and legs from beneath the overhanging lintel above the door. After the second ring she disappeared, doubtless down the steps to the basement flat.

Something stirred in Algy's mind. Something Mrs. Eastlake had said when she had first rung him that day of the Phelan visit . . . What was it? . . . The woman had emerged now and was going down to the gate, Christian fortitude in disappointment visible in the set of her shoulders. Algy retreated from his window and went out onto the darkened landing. His doorbell rang, then after a few seconds rang again. A conscientious seeker of souls, this one. A few moments later, he heard the doorbell ring in the basement flat. She wouldn't find
him
in, not his graceless tenant. Out reading gas meters. Cautiously he went back into the bedroom and watched the canvasser retrace her steps, then go up the slope toward the Belfield Grove Estate. Perhaps she would find more fertile ground there. Algy went downstairs, his mind still working, and put on the kettle for a cup of Nescafé.

When the cup was half drunk he went into his hall and got on the phone to Rosamund Eastlake.