Vera Stanhope 06 - Harbour Street (33 page)

‘Boss?’

Vera waved her in.

‘I’ve tracked down Pawel Krukowski.’ Holly sat on the chair on the other side of the desk.

‘What do you mean you’ve tracked him down? He’s in a hole in the ground in Mardle. Unless Paul Keating has authorized removal of the remains to the mortuary.’

‘No, boss, he’s not.’ Holly paused. ‘He’s running a tour company in Krakow, arranging travel to the UK for students and workers. He lives with a Polish woman and they have three kids and five grandkids.’

Vera’s mind went blank with panic. ‘It could be some other Krukowski.’ Knowing that she was clutching at straws and that her whole case was falling apart.

Holly shook her head. ‘I’ve talked to him. He speaks good English. He left the country in 1970. He married Margaret because he thought she was rich. When he found out she didn’t have any of her own money, he waited for a couple of years to see if her parents would relent and welcome them back into the bosom of the family. When they didn’t, he pissed off home.’

‘What was the date of the office fire in Kerr’s yard?’ Vera kept the panic at bay by demanding facts.

‘The fifteenth of July 1975.’ Holly could do facts like nobody else in the team.

‘The same day as Billy Kerr’s birthday.’ This was Joe, still in his coat, leaning in through the open door.

‘And that’s relevant why?’ Vera was shouting now. Knowing she’d cocked up and needing to vent her anger.

‘Because they were all there, at the Coble to celebrate.’ Joe brought a tattered photograph from his pocket and laid it on the desk so that they could all see it. He leaned across and stuck his finger on each of the characters in turn. ‘This is Val Butt, landlady. She took over the licence that year, moved to Mardle after some bother with gangs in the West End. That was what she implied, at least.’

‘You’ve spoken to her?’

‘I told you I did. I was there this morning.’

Vera sensed the impatience in Joe’s voice. Did he think she was losing her grip? Perhaps he was right. ‘Of course you did, pet. Go on.’

‘That’s Billy Kerr.’ And Vera could see the resemblance to Malcolm. Billy was more squat, bluff and robust, but the family resemblance was there in the face. ‘Mike Craggs, now Professor Craggs, then a postdoctoral student; Malcolm Kerr; Margaret of course. And that’s Val’s son Rick.’

Vera looked up. ‘Have you told me about him before?’

Joe nodded. ‘Susan Coulson mentioned him. She said he used to make fun of her.’ He paused. ‘I had the impression that she was scared of him. I’ve just checked out his record. He was in lots of trouble as a lad, hanging around with the West End hard men. No convictions since 1974.’

‘How old would he be now?’

‘Sixty-six.’

‘And where’s he living?’ Vera looked at him.

‘No record that he’s living anywhere. And no record that he’s lived anywhere since the mid-Seventies.’

Silence. In the open-plan office outside there was the murmur of voices.

‘And you think maybe he’s that pile of bones under Malcolm Kerr’s shed.’ Vera leaned back against her desk and tried to picture how that would work. Why would Malcolm Kerr have killed the landlady’s son. A drunken scrap at his father’s birthday party? And what relevance could that have to Margaret Krukowski, forty years later?

Joe Ashworth shrugged. ‘Well, we know it’s not Pawel Krukowski.’

Suddenly Vera thought that she couldn’t stay in the building any longer. She’d start climbing the walls or screaming like a lunatic. ‘I’m going to talk to the mother.’ She struggled into her jacket and headed for the door. ‘You hold the fort here. Let me know if they manage to track down Malcolm.’ The last sentence was shouted back over her shoulder as she ran down the stairs.

Vera saw the woman through the window. She was leaning back on a sofa, with her legs propped in front of her, staring at a television. A piece of tinsel strung along the mantelpiece was the only concession to the season. Vera thought
she’d
better start swimming again and lose a bit of weight. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be old and trapped inside a monstrous body, force-fed crap TV, like Valerie Butt. She rapped on the window to get the woman’s attention. Val waved to her to come in. The door was already unlocked. Perhaps she was waiting for someone.

‘Another cop?’ Val pressed a button and switched the sound off the television. Pictures of smart country houses continued to roll across the screen.

‘We’ve found another body.’ Vera squeezed beside her on the sofa. There was nowhere else to sit.

When Val didn’t respond, she added, ‘Tell me about your lad, Rick.’

This time there was a flicker of interest.

‘When did you last see him?’ The room was very hot and Vera hadn’t bothered to take off her coat. She felt almost faint.

‘Ages ago,’ the woman said. She paused. ‘He had problems. He had to go away.’

‘What sort of problems?’ Vera pulled her arms out of her jacket, but didn’t stand up.

‘He got into a bad crowd,’ Val said. ‘When we lived in the West End. He wanted the excitement. That male-pride thing. He was never one for settling down. That’s why we moved out here. I didn’t think his mates would find him out on the coast.’ She was staring at the television set, at a woman showing off a kitchen the size of her bungalow.

‘And did they?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Val said. ‘Things were going on. Maybe he’d just got the bug and wanted to play the hard man, to get a bit of respect in his own right.’ She paused. ‘Sometimes I think it’s worse for the boys. People expect them to be tough. Rick always wanted to seem tough.’

‘So people didn’t like him.’ Vera thought she was getting to the root of the matter now. An idea fired in her head, bounced around the facts, shifted her perspective. ‘He was cruel and people were scared of him. He always wanted to be top dog.’

‘He was showing off,’ Val said. ‘Hardly more than a lad when he first got into bother.’

‘What happened?’ Vera asked. ‘The night of Billy Kerr’s birthday party? The night of the fire.’

Val lay back in her chair as if she was suddenly exhausted. ‘I don’t know. Rick was wild that night. Drugs, I think. He was into all sorts.’ She looked at Vera. ‘You don’t want to believe that your kids might be bad. Because it’s your fault, isn’t it? Who else can you blame?’

Vera put her hand on the woman’s fat slab of an arm. ‘Tell me.’
Tell me your story.

‘We’d decided to have a bit of a party for Billy Kerr. The boys in the boats organized it. Paid for some food, got one of the wives to make a cake. It was hot. That summer it was hot every day. And from the start of the evening I could tell there would be trouble. There was a kind of tension. You felt there’d be one wrong word and the place would go up.’ The woman turned to look at Vera. ‘That Margaret Krukowski was at the bottom of it. She wound the men up. All of them. I read about her in the paper when she was killed, and I couldn’t recognize her. Some sort of saint. Religious. Spending her time in that place for women with problems. Well, she’d know all about that.’

‘Your Rick fancied her, did he?’

‘No!’ The word rattled like a bullet around the room and then Val continued almost in a whisper, ‘If Rick fancied anyone, it was himself. I wondered if he was into men at one time, but there was no sign of that, either. He was a loner. His interest in Margaret was . . .’ she paused to find the right word ‘. . . professional.’

And then Vera understood. ‘He wanted to be her pimp.’

‘He thought she’d do better with a man to handle things for her.’ Val stared out of the window and her words were defensive. ‘He’d been knocking around with the gangs in town. He knew how they operated and he saw himself running the same sort of schemes out here on the coast.’

‘Did he sell drugs to Susan Coulson?’ Vera pictured the man she’d seen in the photo. Dark hair, long over the ears. Hard grey eyes. It triggered another, more recent memory.

‘He’d sell his own mother,’ Val said. ‘If the price was right.’ Her voice suddenly bitter. Vera blinked and the pictures in her head shifted again and became firmer.

‘But you protected him. You let him operate from your pub.’

‘He’s my son!’ It came out as a wail.

‘So that night, Billy Kerr’s birthday party.’
Let’s get on with the story.

‘That night something was going on. I talked to Rick and told him I didn’t want any bother. But you could smell it. The violence. He was twitchy, angry. I wondered if some of the old crowd had threatened him, if he was expecting them to come and get what he owed them.’ The big woman closed her eyes briefly. Vera could tell that in her head she was standing behind the bar, pulling pints, cracking jokes, and all the time waiting for her son to ruin all that she’d achieved there. It would take a certain kind of courage not to fall apart. ‘Everyone had drunk too much, and it got wild and noisy, folk out in the street. I lost sight of Rick, but I couldn’t go and see what was happening. It was dark by then, but steamy hot, like it was a tropical country. You longed for a thunderstorm to clear the air. Or a bit of a breeze.’

Her attention was caught by the television again for a moment. A middle-aged couple with a dog at their feet, standing arm-in-arm outside their dream cottage. A universe away.

‘Then we saw the fire in the yard. The flames so high that you could see them from inside the Coble. By then it was gone midnight and I’d carried on selling past closing time, because everyone expects a lock-in when it’s somebody’s birthday. And I knew the police would come and I’d be in danger of losing my licence, so all I could think of was getting the place cleared.’

Vera wondered how many times Val had relived that scene. But she would never have talked about it before. The way the words came out, Vera could tell that it was new to express the thoughts out loud, and a kind of relief.

‘I didn’t see Rick again that night,’ Val said. ‘I thought that he’d made himself scarce. He could disappear like a ghost whenever he wanted to. Police, social security, probation – he seemed to know when they were on their way and he’d be nowhere to be seen.’

She looked at Vera with big haunted eyes. She was preparing herself for a confession. ‘I was pleased,’ she said. ‘I thought:
You piss off back to the city with your gangster friends. Leave me here to make a life for myself.
’

‘You thought that was what happened?’ Vera asked. ‘You thought he’d been involved in starting the fire and he’d run away back to Newcastle.’

‘That’s what Billy Kerr told me. He came in the next day. Everything quiet then and stinking of smoke. The ruins of the office black and the yard looking like a bombsite. He said that I wouldn’t see Rick for a while. “Your boy lost it, Val, and torched my place. I can’t have that. I’ve told him to stay away from Harbour Street. No hard feelings to you, but you know what it’s like.” And I just nodded. Was that betraying my son? Inside, part of me was singing, because I wouldn’t have that stress for a bit. All that time since he was a small kid I was wondering what he was going to do next.’

‘Where is Rick now, Val?’ Vera still had her hand on the woman’s arm. Despite the warmth of the room the skin felt cold and clammy.

‘I haven’t got a clue.’ Another confession. ‘I haven’t seen him since that day. At first I didn’t try very hard to find him. I put a few words out. Nobody was talking. And then I stopped trying. If he didn’t want to see me, I didn’t feel like making the effort. And it was so much easier on my own, with no other bugger to worry about. I thought I’d hear if he got into real bother.’

‘And now?’

‘Now he’d be an old man. He might have grand-bairns. He’d have calmed down, wouldn’t he? I’d like to see him again. A bit of company in my old age. Maybe you could help me look.’

‘This body we’ve found,’ Vera said. ‘It’s old. We think our victim died on the night of the fire in Kerr’s yard.’

Val gave an odd little sob. ‘You think it’s Rick?’

‘It’s the body of a young man.’

‘And all this time I thought he didn’t care enough about me to let me know he was okay.’ There were tears on her cheek. ‘Every birthday I looked out for a card. And I thought:
Sod you, then.
But he was here in Harbour Street all the time.’

‘We don’t know for sure,’ Vera said. ‘There’ll be tests to do.’

‘I know.’ Val turned away so that Vera couldn’t see her face.

Vera drove to Harbour Street. No real reason except that she couldn’t face going straight back to the office, and if there’d been news on Malcolm Kerr somebody would have told her. There was also an itch, the start of an idea, and she needed time to organize her thoughts. This was where everything had started, and this was where she’d find the answer. The street was quiet. The Coble was open for lunchtime drinkers, but the fish shop had already closed for Christmas. There was still activity on the crime scene at Malcolm’s yard, but you couldn’t see much because of the screens they’d put up to stop ghoulish gawpers. Through the guest-house window she saw Kate Dewar and Stuart Booth in the residents’ lounge. She was at the piano and he was leaning over her shoulder pointing at some sheet music. He scribbled on it with a pencil and she turned and ran her finger down his cheek. Vera had parked right outside, but they didn’t notice her.

Still sitting in the vehicle, she phoned Holly. ‘I need you to check one of the Krukowski witness statements.’ And then she called Joe, because she had a question for him too. But he was in a dreadful state and wouldn’t listen, almost shouted at her to get off the line because he was hoping for a call. His lass Jessie had got separated from her friends in town, and she’d left her mobile at home and nobody knew where she was.

Malcom Kerr was still on a mission, but he’d never liked the city and he was almost ready to give up. What business was it of his? He thought he’d just get the Metro back to Partington and pick up his car and drive to the police station in Kimmerston. There was something pleasant in thinking that he might find the fat detective there waiting for him; she’d be glad to see him. He pictured her smiling. She’d make him tea, and might even have a drop of Scotch to put into it. And he’d tell her what had happened. He’d let her take the responsibility. He pulled up his collar against the cold and stood still, so that the crowd eddied round him, like the tide around a rock. All around him was noise. Buskers with amplified music and yelling children and pedlars in his face, trying to persuade him to buy tinsel and cheap plastic toys.