Tarnished (28 page)

‘We must’ve locked him in,’ Peg said, covering her nose with her hand.

‘Did we? I don’t think we did, though,’ Loz said.

‘So how did he get in then?’

Through the partition, they heard Jean howling angrily at poor Julie’s efforts to care for her.

Peg looked over at Loz, whose eyes were fixed on the wall as if she could see through it, her mind working overtime, spinning connections out of loose strands.

None of this was healthy. None of it at all.

Then

Here’s another:

It’s history and we’re learning about the Great Fire of London. There’s a lot of giggling going on behind me whenever Miss Grey turns her back to write something on the blackboard.

Don’t think I can’t hear it, because I can.

I sit at the front, on my own in a double desk, because it’s safer.

Miss Grey turns to write ‘1666’ on the blackboard, and ‘Thomas Farriner’, which is the name of the baker who left his oven on and caused the Great Fire. We’re supposed to copy it all down in a list of things to remember for a test at the end of the week.

As I curl myself round my exercise book, I feel something light hit my back. This is followed by a snigger, which causes Miss Grey to turn and give the class one of her Looks. I wait for her to turn back to her writing before, without looking anyone in the eye, I turn and reach down to find the thing that hit me.

It is a crumpled-up ball of paper. I put it in my lap, smooth it out and see that it is a drawing of me with no clothes on. In the drawing, I have massive breasts that hang to my waist, long pubic hairs that reach to my knees. I have a puddle of something wet on the ground between my legs and snot hanging from my nose. The artist has also thought to give me a massive Afro and, as a final gesture, I have a bone through my nose, like a cartoon cannibal. Just to avoid any confusion, the picture has been labelled TRUE PORTRAIT OF MARGARET THWAITES.

I try to hold back the coldness it makes me feel by squeezing my shoulders in really tight. But this tiny, tiny movement is still noticed by those behind me, and another ripple of snorts passes back through the room, led by – I can hear her – Anna Thurlow.

‘I WILL NOT HAVE THIS,’ Miss Grey turns and tells the class. Behind me I feel the weight of twenty pairs of lips being pressed tight in against one another as they all turn silent.

I could tell. I could tell Miss Grey what she is doing to me. But I won’t do it. Because that will only make things worse in the long run and I know if I keep my head down and my mouth shut this won’t last forever.

She’ll move off to a new target and I’ll be left on my own, in peace.

I hope.

Twenty-Seven

They cleared and aired the stinking bedroom, then ate what they could of Loz’s paella. In Peg’s case, this wasn’t a great deal: a creeping nausea seemed to be replacing her appetite, and not all of it was down to the cat mess.

She showed Loz the photograph of Anna Thurlow, and told her about the bullying and how it had felt to be on the receiving end.

‘Poor you,’ Loz said.

‘Poor her,’ Peg said, looking at the girl in the photograph. ‘She was only a kid. She probably didn’t even know how much she was hurting me.’

‘Someone thought she deserved to die for it.’

‘We don’t know she’s dead.’

Loz snorted.

‘And what about it being a random abduction?’ Peg went on. ‘Or something completely unconnected to me? Eh? You just have to keep on making up these stories, don’t you?’

‘So why was her photo in the same box as Mary’s?’

‘For God’s sake. It was probably sent to Nan by mistake, instead of that one.’ Peg pointed at the silver-framed school photo of herself on the bookshelf. ‘She must’ve just forgotten to send it back.’

‘Now who’s making up stories?’

While Peg glowered on the settee, Loz sat at the table with her computer printouts and Frank’s old London
A to Z
and worked out that, according to information supplied by the
Unsolved
website, Heyworth Court was about three streets away from where Mary Perkins’s bedsit had been. It was one page after the green-biro-marked Flamingos and, from the address Frank had written under his name on the inside front cover of the
A to Z
, also just four streets in the other direction from the house where he and Doll had brought up Raymond and Jean, and where they had remained until they moved to Tankerton.

‘All quite cosily tucked up together, aren’t they? We can visit the other places too,’ Loz said, poring over the map like a tourist planning a holiday. ‘And then, perhaps next week, we can go to Hampshire and check out Anna Thurlow’s parents’ house.’

Peg tried to object but was faced down by Loz’s own sense of the rightness of her quest.

This turned out to be the warm-up to the row which fully erupted when Peg told Loz that she really couldn’t sleep with her in Doll’s bed. The cat business had made her mind up, as if it were some sort of sign to confirm that she shouldn’t.

‘You’re welcome to come up to my room and share the bed there, though,’ she said.

‘For God’s sake, Peg.’

‘It just doesn’t feel right, not in Nan’s bed.’

‘What? Worried that Aunty Jean might somehow find out?’

‘No—’

‘Is Meggy worried that she might upset her aunty?’

‘Don’t be so fucking nasty, Loz.’

‘I’m not being nasty. You’re putting your aunt’s homophobia before me. What about how I feel?’

‘It’s not like that—’

‘She called me a filthy pervert!’

‘She didn’t mean it. She—’

‘Oh go upstairs and sleep in your little-girl single bed,’ Loz said and, slamming Doll’s bedroom door, barred Peg from any further argument.

So they spent the first two hours of the night apart until, unable to sleep and feeling wretched, Peg tiptoed down the ladder and crept in beside Loz, curling herself against her back.

‘I’m sorry,’ Loz murmured. ‘You have to tell me to shut up sometimes.’

‘Shut up sometimes,’ Peg said, kissing the base of her neck and cupping her small breasts in her hands.

‘But we mustn’t,’ Loz said, turning in her arms to face her. ‘What would Aunty Jean say?’

‘Fuck Aunty Jean,’ Peg said, kissing Loz and pulling her full against her.

‘Naughty Peg. Naughty, naughty Meggy.’

The air of détente had carried them through breakfast and on to the train, where Loz’s manic certainty that they were going to find the lock for the key clashed badly with the sulk that had descended upon Peg when the reality of what they were actually doing hit her.

Half of her was annoyed that Loz was taking them away from the far more important work of clearing the bungalow to engage in what would more than likely be a futile, needle-in-haystack exercise.

The other half hoped that it
would
be a futile, needle-in-haystack exercise.

In her excitement, Loz almost dragged Peg down the slope from the platform at London Bridge Station. Map in hand – this was unfamiliar territory beyond the occasional Loz-led foodie foray into Borough Market – they set off on foot for a mile or so south. They passed through the renovated, Shard, City pied-à-terre areas of Southwark – which, apart from certain bits of Chelsea and Knightsbridge contained some of the highest priced property in London – down into the grittier segments of the borough, which, even with the fat cats to the north, earned it a place among one of the most deprived in London.

This was a London of buildings that look derelict but which, on closer inspection, bear signs of habitation. Of groups of boys hanging with fierce-looking dogs, of sharp-faced, thin women, hurrying along litter-strewn pavements, off to meet some appointment or other to stop the gap between body and soul. Of thirteen-year-old girls pushing buggies containing sticky, dummy-stopped babies, each of them deserving a better start in life.

As they moved through these streets, even Loz modified her customary, I-know-all-this swagger, so that she moved with an energy more like Peg’s.

‘We’re nearly there,’ she said, sneaking a peek at the
A to Z
, which, not wishing to appear like an outsider, she had hidden in her bag. ‘Next street.’

They turned a corner and came to a boarded-off area stretching an entire block. In between impressively wrought graffiti, signs declared that this was the work of Southwark Council, who, with an interminable list of private contractors, was ‘Bringing You a Brighter Future’. A series of obscenely altered developers’ visualisations showed a ‘before’ of a grim tower block replaced by an ‘after’ of low-rise, low-impact housing with happy children enjoying safe-surfaced playgrounds and plentiful, crudely drawn penises.

‘Fucking brilliant. They’ve only knocked Heyworth Court down,’ Loz said, leaning against the hoarding, as if she had walked five thousand miles to discover this.

A wave of relief passed through Peg.

Loz ripped the key out of her pocket and looked at it as if it had slighted her. ‘I suppose if there had been anything incriminating inside the flat, there would have been something in the news about it when they knocked it down. So let’s find out when they did it and look it up in those online archives of yours.’

‘What did you expect to find?’

‘I dunno. Bloodstains? A mummified corpse? Something under the concrete?’

‘You read too much of that crap, you know. Life’s not like that.’

‘It is though, Peg.’ Loz looked at her with immense seriousness. ‘That “crap” is
all about
real life.’

‘You’re too gullible.’

‘Ha! You’re a fine one to talk.’

‘Don’t be cruel.’

‘What a fucking disappointment.’ Loz kicked the ground.

‘What do you want to do now?’ Peg said, leaning back against the hoarding next to Loz and squinting up at the heavy grey sky that loomed over them, threatening snow.

‘Might as well walk round the block,’ Loz said. ‘Then we’ll go and get some lunch up Bermondsey Street. But I’ve lost me enthusiasm now.’

Good
, Peg thought.

They followed the hoarding along the street. Every ten yards or so, peepholes cut at varying heights allowed passers-by to see what was going on inside. All that remained of what had once been the tower block was a big hole in the ground. There were no bricks, no leftover girders, no materials whatsoever to suggest that a building had once stood there full of lives, families and secrets. The machinery that had dismantled it had also been removed, leaving just a void. The only sounds were of distant traffic, an eerie, echoing dog bark and the occasional train rumbling along the tracks criss-crossing the area.

For the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, it was a pretty empty place.

Still following the outline of the site, they turned down a side street until they came to a driveway. Boarded up on either side, it led deep into the centre of where the building had once stood.

‘Let’s go and get lunch,’ Peg said, trying to pull Loz away.

‘No. Let’s investigate.’ Loz shook herself free and set off along the drive. Reluctantly, Peg followed, tripping over the rutted tarmac and trying to avoid the icy puddles of muddy rainwater that lurked in the potholes.

The track led to a long, narrow cul-de-sac lined with rusted garages on one side and a high wall on the other. Defying the season, weeds and saplings sprouted among the buildings, reclaiming territory long lost to council developers.

The garages looked disused except for one right in the middle of the row, where an old dustbin with holes punched in it stood burning rather desolately by an open door. Inside, someone was using a noisy power tool, grinding metal on metal.

There was something about this deserted urban space that made Peg feel uneasy.
Gave her the collywobbles
, as Doll might put it. She put her hand on Loz’s arm. ‘I don’t like it here. Can’t we just go?’

‘Just give me a minute,’ Loz said. She crossed over to the open garage. ‘Hello?’ she called into the darkness inside.

‘Arseholes,’ a voice grumbled from within. Then the grinding noise stopped.

After a couple of moments, a wiry, weather-beaten man came to the garage door. Framed by the filthy earflaps of a Russian army hat, his face was as grimy with engine oil as the overalls that hung from him. A yellow roll-up dangled from his lower lip.

‘What the fuck do you want?’ he said.

‘Hi,’ Loz said. ‘We were just wondering what this place is.’

‘You from the council?’ The man said, narrowing his eyes and drawing on his cigarette so that his cheekbones protruded, skull-like, from his face.

‘Do we look like it?’ Loz said.

The man shrugged and threw his cigarette on the ground.

‘Why are these garages here?’ she asked him.

The man’s lips parted slightly, revealing black gaps between yellowed teeth. ‘Why is anything here?’

‘I mean, why are the garages still standing, if the building’s been knocked down?’

‘Tory bastards sold them off in the eighties. So they’re all privately owned. There’s leases still to run out and the owners want too much money for them. Council don’t have a leg to stand on.’

‘Ah.’ Loz pulled the key from her pocket again and held it out. ‘Do you know if this might fit one of the garages?’

The man took the key and held it far from his eyes to read the label. ‘Looks like it.’

‘We thought it was for a flat.’

‘Nah. That’s not a fucking house key, is it?’ he said, waving it in front of her. ‘Where’d you find it, girls?’

‘We were clearing out her nan’s bungalow,’ Loz said.

‘Did she own the garage, God rest her?’

‘Oh, she’s not . . . She’s only in hospital,’ Peg said quickly, from behind Loz. Something in her still wanted to run away from this place.

‘Sorry, my mistake. What I meant was if she owns it, it might be worth a bob or two to her,’ he said. ‘With the council being desperate and all that.’

‘I don’t know if it’s hers . . .’

‘What’s the lady’s name, then? I’ve had this,’ he gestured to the garage behind him, ‘for forty-odd years. Might be able to find the right one for you.’