Vera Stanhope 06 - Harbour Street (3 page)

Vera had her own memories of Mardle. Hector bribing some boatman to take them out to Coquet Island in the middle of the night. Lights still on in the warden’s house at one end of the island. Music and noise, some party going on there. Her terror that they’d be discovered, while Hector was caught up in the chase for roseate terns’ eggs. He’d always loved the risk. She thought he’d been motivated more by the danger than by the obsession that led him to steal and trade in rare birds’ eggs.

‘Well,’ Joe said. ‘Are we going in? I’ve got a home to go to.’

She nodded and climbed out of the vehicle, trying to remember if the guest house had been here when she’d been a kid. She remembered the street as rundown, almost squalid, but that had been more than forty years ago. She rang the bell.

The woman who answered was about the right age to be the victim’s daughter. Late thirties, early forties. Curly black hair and brown eyes, the colour of conkers, a pleasant, almost professional smile. She reminded Vera of a nurse. When Vera introduced herself, she stood aside to let them in. ‘Is there some problem?’

When the police turned up at the door people felt either guilty or scared. Vera couldn’t work out which the reaction was here. She followed the woman to the back of the house, into a warm lounge furnished with heavy furniture that would have seemed out of place in a smaller room, and they sat down on plush, velvet sofas. There was an upright piano against one wall, music on the stand, and against another a sideboard with decanters and bottles of spirits. Vera thought a tot of malt whisky was just what she needed after hanging around on a cold Metro station, but she knew better than to say anything. The curtains had been drawn and the place decorated for Christmas, with holly and sprayed silver pine cones along the mantelpiece and tall red candles on the occasional tables. It looked like a Victorian drawing room.

The lounge was empty, but there was a tea tray on a small table. The presence of the tray seemed to bother their hostess. She kept glancing towards it apologetically. Joe followed them and took a seat by the gas fire.

‘Nice place,’ he said. ‘Cosy.’

The woman smiled and seemed to relax a little.

‘Could you give us your name, please?’ Joe again.

‘Dewar.’ The woman had her back to Vera now. ‘Kate Dewar.’

The door opened and they were interrupted by a large, bald man with a pleasant smile and an easy manner.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘More guests, Kate? More waifs from the storm?’ He turned so that his smile included Vera and Joe. ‘You’re very welcome.’ It could have been
his
home. ‘Would you like tea? I’m sure there’s plenty in the pot, and Kate will bring more cups.’

‘These aren’t guests, George. These are police officers.’ Was there a warning in the words?
Watch what you say.

‘Ah,’ he said. He stopped for a beat and looked round awkwardly. ‘I’ll be in the way then. Don’t want to intrude. I’ll take the tea to my room, shall I?’ Picking up the tray, he walked out without a backward glance. Vera thought she’d have been too curious to do that. She’d have asked if she could help, found some excuse to hang around and find out what was going on.

‘A guest?’ She nodded towards the door.

‘George Enderby, one of my regulars.’

‘And Margaret Krukowski? Is she one of your regulars? Only she’s given this as her address.’

‘Margaret? Is she ill? Is that why you’re here?’

Vera sensed relief in the voice and wondered what else the woman might have to fear from a visit from the police. ‘Margaret does live here then? A relative, is she?’

‘Not a relative. A friend. And an employee, I suppose. She helps out in the house. We run the place together.’ A flashed smile. ‘I couldn’t manage without her.’

Vera leaned forward and kept her voice gentle. ‘Margaret Krukowski’s dead,’ she said. ‘She was stabbed in the Metro on her way home from town this afternoon. I need you to tell me all about her.’

Vera wondered, as she sat in the hot lounge, if it was still snowing. If it was, she thought she probably wouldn’t get up the steep hill to the house where she’d lived since she was a child, even in the Land Rover. But this would probably be an all-nighter anyway, so there was no point worrying about that.

Kate Dewar was sitting on the edge of one of the heavy sofas, crying. No fuss or noise, but silent tears. Joe Ashworth had provided her with a small packet of tissues. He was like a Boy Scout, Joe. Always prepared.

‘How long have you known Margaret?’ Sometimes Vera thought it was best to start with simple facts. Something for the person to hang on to, to pull their thoughts away from the shock and the grief.

Kate dabbed at her eyes. ‘Ten years,’ she said. ‘The kids were small. My aunt died – she was some sort of distant relative by marriage. I never knew her, and we lived up the coast. But she’d left me this house in her will. It wasn’t a guest house then, but it had been converted into a bunch of bedsits and flats. All tatty. Most empty. Margaret was the only tenant with any sort of lease.’ She paused for breath. ‘I was bored. It wasn’t the best time of my life. My husband worked away a lot. Ryan was already at school, Chloe at playgroup. I thought it would be a project, that Mardle was on its way up and that soon the tourists would arrive. Got that one wrong, didn’t I?’

She shrugged wryly.

‘At first I thought having Margaret here would be a problem – that she’d, sort of, get in the way.’ Kate stopped again and gave a wide and lovely smile. ‘But that couldn’t have been further from the truth. She was wonderful, and it would have been a nightmare without her. She was like a mother and a best friend all rolled into one. We negotiated a deal. She’d keep her little flat in the attic, rent-free, and help out in the house. And I’d pay her when I could. She’s been on a proper salary since the first guests arrived.’

From the corner of her eye Vera saw Joe Ashworth making notes, but she was trying to picture this big house being renovated, the builders in, two women full of plans and ideas for its future, small kids under their feet. That would make you close, and she felt a pang of loss – she’d never had a best friend, no one with whom she could share her dreams. The nearest she had was Joe Ashworth.

‘Margaret Krukowski,’ she said. ‘That’s a Polish name?’

‘Yes, but Margaret wasn’t Polish. North-East born and bred, and from a respectable Newcastle family. She married a Polish seaman when she was very young. Her parents were outraged, but it was the Sixties and she said he was very handsome and a refugee, which made it all the more romantic.’

‘What happened to him?’ Vera liked this victim already, liked the complexity of her. Joe had said Margaret looked more Gosforth than Mardle, but she’d taken up with a Polish asylum-seeker and ended up alone in a scuzzy bedsit. Still keeping up appearances, though. Still smart, with the boots and the red lipstick; the long coat that would have cost a fortune new.

‘He left her only a couple of years after they married. Ran off with a woman with more money than Margaret had. She said she was heartbroken, but too proud to go running back to her parents. She trained as a bookkeeper and worked for a couple of local companies. When I first knew her she’d already retired. Or been made redundant.’ Kate smiled again. ‘She was a whizz with figures and saved me from the VAT man a number of times.’

‘But she kept her husband’s name?’ Vera thought that couldn’t have been easy all those years ago. A single woman with airs and graces, a strange name and aspirations to style.

‘She told me she never stopped loving him,’ Kate replied. ‘Like I said, she was always a romantic.’

‘And your husband?’ Vera asked. ‘Is he still working away?’

There was a moment of silence.

‘No,’ Kate said. ‘He died. An accident at work in the North Sea. The rigs. He drowned. His body was never found.’ And she began to cry again.

Kate led them up the stairs to Margaret’s flat. ‘As she got older, I asked if she’d like to move to one of the downstairs rooms, but she said this felt like home now and the stairs kept her fit.’

‘She was a healthy woman then? Good for her age?’ Despite her new regime and the trips to the pool, Vera was panting, so the words came out in tiny gasps.

‘Oh yes. The business is doing well enough now. We have our regular guests and we do some outside catering, but Margaret said she wouldn’t think of retiring.’ Kate stopped at the door. Joe took out the bunch of keys that the CSIs had found on the body.

‘You don’t have a master key?’ Vera leaned against the wall to catch her breath.

‘For all the other rooms, but not this one. I offered to keep one in case of emergency, but she never seemed keen. The cleaner never went in here, though I’d have been happy for her to service it with all the rest. Mags liked her privacy.’

‘Did she have any visitors?’

‘I was invited in for afternoon tea occasionally,’ Kate said. ‘Lovely. Always something a bit special. Sometimes smoked salmon from the fishery, on little pancakes. Sometimes a fancy cake she’d baked herself. Once a bottle of pink champagne because she said she had something to celebrate. I never saw anyone else come in to see her.’

She hovered on the landing, obviously wondering if she was expected to go into the room with them.

Vera reached out and touched her shoulder. ‘That’s all right, pet. We can take it from here.’

Kate nodded and turned back. Joe Ashworth waited until she was halfway down the stairs before trying a key in the lock. There were three keys. Vera wondered about the other two – one was probably for the front door of the guest house. What about the other? Joe pushed open the door.

The flat was, as Kate had said, very small and built into the roof, so one wall was hardly three feet high and joined a sloping ceiling, with three dormer windows looking out over the harbour. There were two main rooms, with a tiny bathroom carved out of a corner of the bedroom. But still it managed to have style. The kitchen, which was also the living room, had a dark polished wood floor with a rug that glowed with colour – blues and greens. Under one window an old desk and a curve-backed chair. A small chaise longue covered with grey velvet. A sink, oven and fridge, separated from the rest of the room by a scrubbed pine table. Most of the pans hung from hooks in the ceiling, and the wooden spoons and spatulas stood in a green glazed pot on the second windowsill. The full wall was all shelves, with books, neatly arranged, interspersed occasionally with pebbles, pieces of driftwood and shells. It was a dark room, because the windows were so small and the walls were thick, but rich and jewel-like, lit only by a lamp on the desk and a spotlight in the kitchen.

‘No telly,’ Joe said. Vera could tell he was shocked. He opened the door to the bedroom, eager to see if the television was there. They stood in the doorway to look in. This room was carpeted in pale green. There was a three-quarter bed covered by a handmade patchwork quilt, and chests of drawers on each side of it. A narrow wardrobe. All the furniture had been painted white. No clutter, no dirty clothes. The shower room was spotless.

‘No telly,’ he said again. Perhaps that was the only entertainment he and Sal had in the evenings and he couldn’t imagine life without it.

‘We’ll get the search team in first thing.’ Vera walked to the window and looked out. It was still snowing, but the flakes were smaller again. She was glad she wouldn’t be the one to pull open drawers and work through Margaret’s underwear. She was nosy, but this would have seemed like a terrible intrusion.

Joe was looking at the shelves. ‘Only one photo.’ He didn’t pick it up, but pointed to it. The picture was of a couple. A wedding photo. She was in a simple white mini-dress, with fake fur on the hem, white knee-length wet-look boots, a short fur jacket, and she was holding a bouquet of gold and white freesias. The dark-haired man was in a suit with wide lapels, a buttonhole pinned to one of them. In the background, a church door.

‘Is this her?’ Vera asked. ‘Is this Margaret Krukowski and the Polish love of her life?’

‘Oh yes, this is her.’ The answer was immediate and unequivocal. ‘Our victim has the same mouth and the same cheekbones.’ She saw that Joe couldn’t take his eyes off the photograph.

‘A bonny little thing.’ She kept her voice light. Nobody had ever called her bonny.

‘She’s beautiful,’ he said and then he gave a little laugh, as if recognized how silly he was being, because he was drawn to a photograph that was fifty years old. But still he continued, ‘That’s a face that men would kill for.’

On the middle landing Kate took her mobile phone from her pocket and phoned Stuart, her lover. The first real relationship she’d had since Rob had died on the rigs. Stuart was more at home in the hills than in a house, but he could play the sax like a dream, and now she was haunted by thoughts of him. There was no reply and she left a message. ‘Please give me a ring.’ Walking down, Kate wondered how she would tell the kids that Margaret was dead. They’d known her for most of their lives. She’d been their babysitter and they’d treated her like a gran. Ryan still spent a lot of time with her. This year, with Stu on the scene, and with Kate full of new plans, they’d already had to adjust to change. Kate slowed her steps to give herself time to compose the words and realized she had no idea what her children’s reaction would be. They’d grown up and away from her and she could no longer trust her judgement where they were concerned.

George Enderby must have heard her steps, or perhaps he was listening out for her, because the door of his room opened and he stuck out his head.

‘Everything all right, Kate?’ His voice seemed genuinely concerned. Then a little embarrassed. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘Margaret’s dead.’ She felt suddenly light-headed and leaned against the wall.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ He started out into the corridor before realizing that his door would swing shut and lock automatically behind him. Then he made a strange little hop, holding the door open with one foot, but leaning out towards her. ‘I didn’t know her well, but I never thought of her as an old woman. Was it something sudden? A heart attack?’