Vera Stanhope 06 - Harbour Street (32 page)

‘What’s going on?’ He whispered, but Vera wouldn’t have heard a five-piece jazz band in the corner of the room.

‘Malcolm Kerr’s gone AWOL. They just had one plod on the front door, and Kerr slipped out of the back first thing this morning. She’s blaming me, because I told her I didn’t think he had any spirit left for the fight.’

‘Nah,’ Joe said. ‘She’s blaming herself.’

The room suddenly went quiet and the silence was more terrifying than the storm of noise. Vera was standing in the middle of the room, looking round at them.

‘So,’ she said. ‘Where do we think Malcolm will be hiding? Ideas, please.’

Joe raised his hand. ‘Do we know that he’s hiding? He’ll know that we’ll get him eventually. This isn’t some gangland boss with a villa in Marbella. Sounds to me like he’s broken and depressed, and a cell won’t be so different from that place in Percy Street.’

‘So what are you saying, Joe?’ Vera’s voice was so quiet that there could have been just the two of them in the room.

‘I’m wondering if there’s some unfinished business.’

‘Explain, please.’

Joe wasn’t sure he
could
explain. He knew that he should have saved this conversation until he’d got Vera on her own. It was never a good idea to question her in front of an audience.

‘I still don’t see Kerr as Margaret’s killer. He loved her, didn’t he? I’m wondering if he’s got his own agenda. He knows who the murderer is and he’s out for revenge.’

‘For Christ’s sake, man, most of the men I’ve nicked for battering their wives claim to love them.’

‘Aye,’ he said. By now he’d lost the train of thought, the faint glimmer of an idea that had made him crazy enough to challenge the boss. ‘You’re probably right.’

There was another brief moment of silence and then she was issuing orders. ‘I want this man caught and brought in within the hour, before we’re slated in the press for incompetence. Again. And if we don’t get him by the end of the day, I’ll be writing the story myself and selling it to the papers. We know he’s in that clapped-out car of his. It’ll be on CCTV somewhere.’ A pause while she glared round the room. ‘Well, clear off, the lot of you!’ Then there was a flurry of activity and a scraping of chairs. Soon Joe was the only one left.

She leaned against his desk. ‘North Mardle beach,’ she said. ‘I want you to go there. It’s where Malcolm goes to think. I’d go myself, but I’ve got to be here to stand between the shit and the fan.’

Joe nodded.

It was midday. Quiet. Not even a dog walker on the long beach. There’d been no sign of Kerr’s old car parked behind the dunes, but Joe had walked through to the shore anyway. Vera had thought the man would be here and usually she was right. But the only figures, right in the distance, were kids chasing a ball.

He phoned Sal from the top of the sand hill, suddenly missing her, thinking that they should bring the children out here sometime over the holidays. They could all do with a blast of fresh air and the sight of the long surf curling onto the beach.

‘How’s it going?’ He knew Sal was wound up about Christmas. She had this dream of how it should be for the family. Everything perfect. And the reality never quite lived up to her expectations. This year she’d be thinking that his parents were judging her too. ‘How are the kids?’

‘Jessie’s gone into town.’ Her voice defiant, knowing that he wouldn’t approve. He thought his little girl was too young to go into Newcastle without an adult. She went on, ‘It’s all right. There’s a gang of them, some older kids too. Sarah’s mother was going to take them in on the Metro and she’ll be in town too. Last-minute shopping to do, and just on the end of the phone if they need her.’

‘Okay.’ Because what else could he say? It had already been decided without him. He stood for a moment watching the low sun on the waves, and then he drove back to Kimmerston.

Malcolm Kerr sat on the Metro, an inside seat, next to a big-boned woman with a squawking toddler on her knee. The train was packed. The last shopping day before Christmas Eve. Nobody took any notice of him. He was a grey man, old and ineffective. Powerless.
But I’ll show them.

He wasn’t sure what he was doing there at first. He’d left the house in Percy Street, not intending to run away, but to get some air. He’d been on North Mardle beach just as it got light, saw the grey dawn in from the top of the dunes and, driving back, he’d had a fancy to re-create Margaret’s last steps. He might get a sense of her sitting in the Metro. He knew it was crazy, but then he could feel his mind being eaten away at the edges. It was like mice nibbling at a piece of rotting carpet, leaving his thoughts ragged and frayed.

He saw a face he recognized as soon as he got onto the train, but he hid in a corner and thought he hadn’t been seen. It seemed like a sign. Was Margaret talking to him from the grave? Did she want him to run and find a new life for himself without her? Or was there something else she needed from him? In the space by the doors a group of kids stood. They were laughing and he felt a terrible resentment.
How dare they?
Then he realized that they were talking about the murders. He took an instant dislike to the first girl to speak. She was too young for make-up, but was wearing it all the same.

‘Your dad’s in the police, Jess.’ Her voice so loud that everyone in the carriage could hear it. ‘Have they caught the killer yet?’ The other passengers stared, and perhaps that was what she’d wanted.

The lass Jess seemed younger than the others. Skinny and unsure of herself, but wanting them to like her. Malcolm knew how that felt.

‘I was there,’ she said with a touch of pride. ‘I found the first body.’

Malcolm looked down the aisle at the prying, curious eyes and in his head he was screaming at the girl:
You shouldn’t have said that. We didn’t need to know.
It was a complication.

All the way into town he peered out into the carriage. Alert. Some sort of hunting dog, aware of every passenger, wondering how he might separate the one he wanted from the crowd.

He thought he was certainly going mad. Lack of sleep. Or forty years of stress. He’d thought he didn’t care any more, that he was dead, like the specimens the professor collected in his lab at Cullercoats. Looking fresh and glossy on the outside, but inside hard and frozen. That he was as good as dead, at least. No feelings. No soul. But now he saw that there was a possibility of escape. Of living again, feeling whole, and he felt a moment of hope. That depended on him parting the group and picking off the individual. He felt a sudden rush of excitement, the same brief, destructive excitement that he’d felt forty years before.

He was a reading a copy of the free newspaper that he’d picked up at Partington station and snatched a look over the top of it. Had his quarry seen him? He couldn’t be certain and he couldn’t take the risk. He shrank back into his corner and his mind slid back, time rewinding, the newspaper a screen between the present and the past.

His father’s birthday party. Fifty. The whole street in the Coble, from the minute he and Billy had come in with the boat. A big cheer as soon as they walked through the door. Billy Kerr had always been a hero in Harbour Street. Valerie had organized a cake from somewhere, but by the time they’d come to cut it most of them had been pissed. Then out onto the pavement to take a photograph. Not everyone, of course. Some had stayed inside. There were always people in Harbour Street who were reluctant to appear in photographs.

He remembered in detail what Margaret was wearing that day. A peasant skirt in Indian cotton and a white cheesecloth blouse. Sandals. The fine leather strap tied round her ankle in a bow. Not her work clothes. She dressed up for work as if she was going to an office. Black underwear and a black suspender belt. Sheer stockings and shoes with pointed toes and heels so high you’d wonder how she balanced. Leather and silk. He’d seen her dressing for work once. When he was out in the boat to lift his creels he’d anchored in the bay and peered through her window, using the professor’s binoculars. She’d thought nobody was watching, thinking that nobody
could
look into her bedroom, because all there was outside was the sea. Her silhouette had been black against the faint artificial light in the room. She’d stood on one foot, poised as a ballerina, and unrolled the sheer stocking along her other leg. Completely balanced and completely relaxed.
Who are you dressing for, Margaret?
He’d watched her turn, imagined her opening the bedroom door to let in her client. But the angle was too steep for him to see who’d come into the room, or to watch what happened next. He’d guessed, though. He’d run the scene through his mind.

The night of his father’s birthday party Margaret had been off duty. She’d made that clear. So it was the peasant skirt and the white blouse, the flat sandals. And she’d been drinking, and he knew she never drank when she was working. She’d let that slip on another of her days off. He’d taken her out to Coquet Island and they’d had a picnic. That day she’d been wearing jeans and a striped cotton jersey, canvas shoes. They’d drunk a bottle of white wine between them and she’d brought sandwiches and homemade cakes. Malcolm had known his father would be furious if he found out – Billy had disapproved of Margaret big-style – but somehow he hadn’t cared. It was enough to be lying in the sun beside her and talking.
No work for me tonight. I never drink when I’m working.
Walking down the path to the boat, she’d taken his hand.

The Metro pulled into a station. Malcolm glanced over the newspaper. They hadn’t reached Newcastle yet and he didn’t think the kids would leave the train until Newcastle. Why would they? What other reason could they have for being here, other than to go into town, last-minute shopping, last-minute fun? And there they were, still laughing and swinging round the pole at the centre of the carriage, behaving like three-year-olds. More people bundled in, but his quarry remained.

He looked out of the window at the flat coastal plain, but in his head he returned to the evening of his father’s birthday. A sunny evening, warm, all the heat of the long day trapped in Harbour Street. The middle of the Seventies had brought years of dry summers, of droughts and empty rivers. The seaweed stinking on the rocks in the fierce sun. And that night Margaret had asked him a favour:

‘Sort him out, Malcolm, would you? Talk to him. Would you do that for me?’

And of course Malcolm had done as she’d wanted. Like he’d told that fat woman detective, he’d have swum naked three times round Coquet, if she’d asked him.

The rest of the evening had been a blur. Too much alcohol. Tension prickly, like static electricity. A series of images clicked through his memory, like the slides Prof. Craggs used to give his lectures, each one dropping into an old-fashioned projector. The show ended with the fire licking along the floor of his father’s office, a bright-orange snake’s tongue, fiercely hot. They’d stood with their backs against the railings, watching the varnish on the wooden walls blister in the heat, black and oozing like charred meat. Then the flames had been so high that they’d stood back to watch in wonder, the sparks soaring into the clear sky.

Had that been the first of his sleepless nights? Certainly he and his father had both been standing in their clothes of the night before, when the police and the fire officer had come to sniff around in the morning. Another hot day.

‘Arson,’ the officer had said. ‘No question.’ He’d looked at them. ‘Any reason why anyone would want to set a fire?’ Accusing them with his eyes, but reluctant to go any further than that. More bother than it was worth, and he was a working man himself. If business was bad, he could understand that they might want to claim on the insurance.

‘No,’ Billy said. ‘Unless one of the lads at the party did it. Thinking it was a joke, like.’ And that was the story they’d put about. Some of the lads at the party had got a bit wild and leery, and thought it would be fun to set the place alight. And the Kerrs wouldn’t make a fuss, because the insurance would come in handy, and they were all mates in Harbour Street, weren’t they? Billy had gone into the Coble at lunchtime as soon as the bar opened, spreading the tale. And Billy was a respected man in the town, so the regulars all listened and shook their heads at the foolishness of youth. Val Butt had nodded too, her hands on her ample hips. She understood how these things worked. ‘Sometimes these kids are out of control.’

That morning, the smoke in his nostrils, Malcolm had watched from a distance, letting his father take charge, as he always did. Malcolm had never been good at keeping secrets. Had he known even then that the knowledge of what had led to the fire would weigh him down like an anchor, dragging him under, drowning him for the rest of his life?

The train pulled into Haymarket station. Malcolm watched the other passengers carefully. None of them had seen him. He thought they just
didn’t
see the middle-aged or the elderly. He’d wondered if the girls might get out here, at this end of Northumberland Street. The young girls in the group by the door were as flighty as moths, restless and unsettled, but they stayed where they were and it was at Monument station that everyone left the train. Malcolm folded his newspaper in his pocket and followed them onto the escalator and out into the heaving streets.

Vera blamed herself for Malcolm’s disappearance. She should have kept the man in custody while they searched the yard, evidence or no. Now she thought that he was dangerous and desperate. She felt trapped in her office in Kimmerston; she would have preferred to be at the crime scene in Kerr’s yard, squeezing early information from Paul Keating and Billy Wainwright. Or out searching for the killer.

Joe Ashworth phoned.

‘Tell me you’ve got something for me.’ In her mind she’d seen Malcolm, hunched, walking along the beach, and now she imagined that Joe had him in his car, ready to bring in, ready to talk.

‘Nothing.’

She slammed her palm so hard onto her desk that the skin stung. As soon as she replaced the receiver there was another call. Kerr’s car had been found at the station car park at Partington. So he’d got onto the Metro and could have taken off from Newcastle Central Station and be anywhere in the country by now. Or he could have taken the Metro to the airport and be anywhere in the world. But Vera didn’t see Malcolm as an international traveller. Did he even have a passport? Vera was back on the phone checking, when Holly knocked at the door. Tentative, but also smug. Vera hated it when Holly was smug.