Trust Me (7 page)

Not knowing what else to do, she sat down on the stairs, put her hands together and closed her eyes. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ she began, but then found she couldn’t remember what came next because all she could think of was that Mum was showing all her stocking tops and the lace on her knickers. She wanted to go down and cover her legs up, if the door was open someone passing might see her, but her own legs wouldn’t seem to move.

Dulcie was still sitting there when her father came rushing back in. He stopped stock-still when he saw her.

He was still wild-eyed, as though he’d been crying, but he didn’t look scary any longer. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know, Daddy,’ she said, for a moment thinking this was just a horrible dream and he was going to carry her back to bed. Yet she looked past him and Mum was still lying there. ‘Can you cover Mummy’s legs up?’

She watched as he returned to Mum, observed the tender way he stroked her cheek and pulled her dress down over her knees, and suddenly Dulcie realized.

‘Is she, d-d-dead?’ she stuttered, hardly able to get the word out.

He nodded and came back to her, squatting down before her on the stairs. ‘It was an accident, sweetheart, she fell down the stairs. I just went for help.’

Dulcie began to shiver and Dad took her hands in his. ‘I want you to go back to bed, sweetheart. Any minute now someone will come to help. Will you look after May for me?’

Dulcie nodded.

‘The police may take me away with them,’ he said and his voice sounded shaky. ‘If they do and I don’t get a chance to speak to you again, you must get them to take you to Granny’s.’

‘But why would they take you away?’ she asked. ‘Did you do something bad?’

He leaned forward and rested his forehead on her knees which were tucked up under her nightdress. ‘I didn’t push her, Dulcie, you must believe that even if some people tell you otherwise. We did have a fight, but she fell down there.’

‘I heard you fighting,’ she whispered. She didn’t know whether to say she’d heard him say he’d kill Mum if she didn’t get out.

He lifted his head and looked right into her eyes. ‘I loved her, Dulcie, she made me very angry, but I wouldn’t have hurt her.’

Dulcie didn’t have to say anything more for she heard the sirens coming along the road.

He kissed her on the forehead and lifted her to her feet. ‘Go back to bed now, don’t be scared. Trust me, it will be all right.’

Dulcie tried very hard not to be scared when she heard all the men’s voices drifting up the stairs. May had fallen asleep again by the time she got back into bed, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She felt cold right through to her bones, and her head ached with all the questions she wanted answering.

Someone opened her bedroom door and looked in, but she shut her eyes tight and pretended to be asleep. Then she heard men going into all the rooms, their voices low rumblings in the distance.

‘Of course I didn’t throw her!’ she heard Dad shout out at one point.

There were sounds of doors opening and closing, then she heard a vehicle drive off, but still she could hear Dad’s voice and other men’s, and it seemed to her they were up in the living-room now.

It was then she began to cry, for suddenly it struck home what Mum’s death meant. Who would look after her and May? Surely they couldn’t stay with Granny for long? How would they get to school? And what had Mum meant by
May isn’t your child?

Dulcie was still crying when the bedroom door opened and two policemen came in. She sat up in bed in alarm, putting one arm across May who was still sleeping.

‘It’s all right, don’t be frightened,’ one of the men said, coming closer to the bed. ‘Your mummy has had an accident, and your daddy has asked us to take you to your granny’s.’

‘I want my daddy,’ Dulcie sobbed. ‘Where is he?’

The policeman sat down on the bed. ‘Daddy’s gone down to the police station now to answer a few questions. We can’t leave you here all on your own, can we?’

Dulcie just looked at him in horror.

‘You must be Dulcie, and your sister is called May, Daddy told us,’ he went on, putting one hand on May’s shoulder. ‘Will you help me wake her up and get her dressed? Then we’ll put a few of your things in a bag and go.’

Some ten minutes later they all went downstairs, the policeman carrying the bag they’d packed, their two dolls sticking out of the top. May was unusually quiet, she didn’t even ask any questions, but as Dulcie got to the place where her mother had been lying, and she saw someone had drawn a chalk mark round it, she began crying again.

‘Did you see what happened tonight, Dulcie?’ the policeman asked as they went towards the door.

‘I saw Mummy lying there after I heard the noise,’ she sobbed.

‘Then maybe you can tell me about that once we get to your granny’s house,’ he said, taking her hand.

‘Gawd almighty, what’s happened?’ Granny exclaimed as she opened the door to her house in Akerman Street and saw the two policemen with her grand-daughters.

‘We’re sorry to wake you in the middle of the night, Mrs Taylor,’ one of them said. ‘But it was an emergency.’

The children broke free of the hands holding them and flung themselves at their grandmother. ‘Mummy’s dead,’ Dulcie blurted out. ‘She fell down the stairs. Daddy said we had to come here.’

Maud Taylor was seventy-five, a small but rotund woman with a face so lined she often joked she looked like a dried prune. Laughter was her way of coping with the hard life she’d been dished out with, and her eight children had rarely seen her fazed by trouble or disaster, yet she looked amazed by what Dulcie had just said and clutched the two children to her tighter, looking to the older of the two men for confirmation.

He just nodded, for he hadn’t realized until now that Dulcie was aware of the outcome of her mother’s fall. ‘I’ll explain inside,’ he said, noting the old lady was wearing nothing but a flannel nightgown. He nodded to his younger companion to wait in the car.

PC Hewitt was forty-two, a warm-hearted, stout man with a shock of prematurely white hair. As a father of four himself, and a veteran of hundreds of cases where the news of a sudden and often violent death had to be broken, he was an ideal choice, but added to this he had a reputation for getting at the truth in awkward family situations.

The senior officer who had attended at the scene of Anne Taylor’s death was of the opinion Reg Taylor had hurled his wife to her death following attempted strangulation. His fingermarks showed clearly on her neck, and even though Reg had freely admitted he’d caught her by the throat in anger seconds before he claimed she fell backwards down the stairs, and appeared utterly devastated by her death, he refused to say what had started the fight. Indeed, his only real concern was that his children should be taken to his mother’s as soon as possible.

Hewitt’s brief was to discover if the children had overheard the fight, and to find out whether the Taylors’ marriage had always been a violent one. As Maud Taylor led them into her home, he noted the smell of mildew and mice. He had been stationed briefly at New Cross during the thirties and had been appalled then at the squalid conditions in Deptford. He could remember calling at tiny houses like this one and finding a whole family in each of the three rooms.

Yet once Maud had lit the gas light in the kitchen, he was surprised by its cleanliness – a clean cloth on the table, a dresser crammed with well-dusted china and ornaments, a well-scrubbed draining board and gleaming white sink.

Maud staggered to a chair, sat down and drew both the little girls on to her knee. ‘Where’s my Reg?’ she asked, looking up at Hewitt with tear-filled eyes.

A lump came up in his throat. He’d met her breed of woman so many times, hard as nails because of what life had thrown at them, but fiercely protective of their children, even if they were now grown men. She looked so vulnerable in her nightgown, she hadn’t even realized yet she hadn’t got her teeth in. Judging by the pride she took in her home, she’d be horrified when she did remember.

‘He’s being questioned down at the station,’ Hewitt replied. ‘You can see him tomorrow morning, I expect, but for now we just had to get the children settled.’

Maud looked from one to the other of them, perhaps noting May’s puzzlement and Dulcie’s tense frown. ‘You two go upstairs and get into Granny’s bed,’ she said. ‘As soon as I’ve talked to the policeman I’ll be right up to you.’

May got up off her knee immediately, but Dulcie clung to the old woman. ‘I want to tell you about it,’ she whispered.

‘You can in just a little while. I’ll bring you up some cocoa. Just go on up now, I won’t be long.’ She lit a candle for Dulcie to take with her and nudged her towards the door.

Hewitt noticed the agonized look on the child’s face and guessed she could tell him a great deal. But the fatherly side of him couldn’t bring himself to insist on questioning an eight-year-old at three in the morning. It could wait a few hours.

‘Thank you,’ he said, once Maud had watched the girls go up the stairs. ‘I didn’t want to tell you about it in front of them, it’s been enough of a shock for them already tonight.’

He went on to tell Maud what the police found when they answered the emergency call. ‘I’m afraid your daughter-in-law was dead on our arrival, we won’t of course know the exact cause of death until the post mortem. Your son admitted they’d had a bitter quarrel, but he claimed her fall was an accident.’

‘Well it would be, my Reg ain’t a wife beater,’ Maud said stoutly. ‘Though ‘eaven knows that little floozy was enough to drive any man to it.’

‘Would you know what they might have been quarrelling about?’ he asked gently.

‘She were a slut and a spendthrift,’ Maud spat out. ‘But Reg never slagged ‘er off to me, ‘e adored ‘er. I tried to put ‘er straight many’s the time, but she’d stick ‘er nose in the air and tell me to mind my own business. She thought she was too good for the likes of me, she were from a snotty ‘ome up in Eltham.’

‘Would you have her parents’ address?’ Hewitt asked. ‘We’ll have to inform them of her death.’

‘She ain’t got none now,’ Maud said. ‘’Er ma was killed in the Blitz and ’er dad a few years later. There was an uncle, but she didn’t ’ave no truck wif ’im ’cos her dad left everything to ’im instead of ‘er.’

Hewitt was very relieved he hadn’t got to call on any more relatives, and he was instantly curious as to why Anne’s father should disinherit her. After sitting down and making the customary sympathetic remarks about Maud’s shock, and attempting to reassure her that anything she chose to tell him about her daughter-in-law would be off the record at this stage, he probed deeper.

‘Did she quarrel with her father too?’

‘I dunno. Anne said ‘e cut ‘er off ‘cos she didn’t stay wif ‘im after her ma was killed. I always reckoned there were more to it than that though. Still, we ain’t gonna find out now, are we?’

Hewitt agreed they weren’t and suggested he made them both a cup of tea.

‘I’ll do it,’ Maud said and got up from her chair. As she filled the kettle she explained that Reg was one of eight, the fifth child, and how he’d always been different from the others. ‘I’ll tell you now, because I know you’ll soon find out, all my boys ‘cept Reg ‘ave got themselves in trouble before now. They’re like their dad, boozers, without a brain between them. But Reg was always different. He used to look after me when the old man beat me, supported me and the younger ones once ‘e was dead. See it’s all decorated nice in ‘ere? Reg done that an’ all. ‘E’s always trying to get me to move somewhere nicer, but me old chums and me memories are ‘ere. Reg’s one in a million, ‘ard-working, sober, kind and generous. You can ask who you bleedin’ likes and you’ll ‘ear the same. Right good dad to the girls an’ all. So don’t you go thinking ‘e’s a murderer.’

‘What did he do in the war, Mrs Taylor?’ Hewitt asked.

‘Joined the army, didn’t ‘e? Didn’t even wait for ‘is call-up, ‘e reckoned it was every man’s duty to fight for their country. ‘E saw all the action over in France, ‘e was at Dunkirk and at Normandy, a bloody good soldier too, got made a corporal in no time, and then a sergeant.’

‘Anne must have found it difficult in the war, Dulcie would’ve only been a baby when it started and then May born in 1942,’ Hewitt probed. ‘Anne was very young too.’

‘Yeah, she found it ‘ard,’ Maud agreed. ‘It were tough on ‘er when her ma died. But I was around, I ‘ad Dulcie ‘ere any time she needed a break. But she got matey wif a couple of girls soon after she moved into a place in New Cross, and she told me to piss off once when I went round to see ‘ow she was. We never got on after that, I reckon she was ashamed of me.’

Hewitt thought it sounded as if Anne might have been up to something, but he didn’t say so. ‘How were things when Reg came home after the war?’ he asked. ‘Lots of men I know said their kids were scared of them, and it was difficult for a while.’

Maud chuckled. ‘There was a lot of that round ‘ere too. Specially those who had a new kid which couldn’t ‘ave been the old man’s. But it were all ‘earts and flowers with Reg and Anne. ‘E got that place for them up at ‘Ither Green, did it all up, Dulcie went to the school across the road, they was as ‘appy as sandboys for the first year.’

‘But then it changed?’ Hewitt prompted.

Maud didn’t answer for the moment and turned her back to get some cups and saucers from the dresser. Hewitt thought she was struggling not to cry, but at the same time selecting the best cups.

‘I don’t know what got into Anne,’ she said eventually. ‘She ‘ad bleedin’ everything a woman could want. Reg earned good money, ‘e didn’t drink, ‘e made that place like a palace for ‘er. But she just let it go, never washed up, cleaned or anything. Reg used to do it when ‘e got ‘ome. Always spending money on ‘erself, dresses, shoes, having ‘er ‘air done. Never knew where she got the coupons for the clothes, I got a job to scrape together enough for a new skirt.’

Hewitt weighed this up. ‘Do you think there was another man, Mrs Taylor?’

‘That ain’t fer me to say,’ she snapped at him. ‘That’s their private business. But I do know that once she got the job at the pub she got less inclined to do anything for Reg and the kids.’