Why Aren't They Screaming? (26 page)

‘All right,' Loretta said impatiently, feeling she could do without the lecture. ‘What do I have to do? I'm still none the wiser. How did she get in touch with you, for a start? Is she all right?'

‘The police came up here on Tuesday night asking if we'd
seen her. We said we hadn't. That was true. She turned up here a while later, quite a long time after they'd been and gone. She was in a state, it was hard to understand what she was saying. She said she'd been at the house when it happened and she was so frightened she ran away. She wouldn't go to the police – yes, I did suggest it, they have their uses – and she wouldn't say why. She just said she couldn't and she cried a lot.'

‘Did she mention Mick? Her husband?'

‘She didn't mention any names. She stayed the night here, in the caravan. Karen drove her down to the A40 on Wednesday morning, first thing. She said she was going to hitch to London.'

‘And you let her go?' Loretta was incredulous.

‘Are you saying we should have kept her here? With the police after her?'

‘But – the poor kid! She'd just witnessed a murder!'

‘That's her business. This camp, what we're struggling for, is more important than individuals. You've got to understand that. We're here for a purpose, to save the human race. We can't jeopardize the future of the camp for one person.'

Loretta bit her lip, wanting to argue but afraid of further antagonizing Elspeth before she'd found out where Peggy was.

‘Did she actually
see
the murder? Do you know that?'

‘I don't
know.
Look, d'you want to help or not?'

‘Of course I do! Just tell me – what am I supposed to do?' Loretta thought she'd be here all day at this rate.

Elspeth got up and went to the small built-in table at the far end of the caravan. Several empty mugs and a Japanese tea-caddy were standing on it. Elspeth took the lid off the caddy and felt inside.

‘Here y'are,' she said, holding out a crumpled piece of paper with tea-leaves sticking to it. ‘That's where she's staying. She wants you to go there as quick as you can. Today if you can manage it. And to make sure you're not followed.'

Loretta took the piece of paper, wondering who might go to the trouble of following her and, if she happened to notice, how she'd shake them off.

‘How did you get this?'

Elspeth sighed. ‘There's a woman who takes messages for us in emergencies, we give her number to everyone who stays at the camp. Someone rang her. OK?'

‘Not Peggy herself?'

‘A friend of hers. Listen, I must get back to the meeting. I've done what I can. I don't want the peace camp –'

‘ – jeopardized. I've got the picture.'

Loretta folded up the paper, put it in her skirt pocket, and went to the head of the steps.

‘I'm sorry about your friend, Clara. She was a good woman.'

Loretta turned and smiled awkwardly. ‘Well – thanks for the address.' She went down the steps, skirted the group round the fire, and returned to her car. Once she was inside she unfolded the piece of paper and looked at the address for the first time: 11, Ernie Bevin House, Forman Park Estate, London E9. A council block, Loretta thought, probably one of those crumbling tower blocks built by Labour local authorities in the sixties and named after their political heroes. She had no idea where the estate was, apart from the fact that the postcode suggested Clapton or Hackney. Feeling on the parcel shelf for her
A–Z,
she discovered it under a library book she'd forgotten to return before leaving London. She looked up the name of the estate in the index, discovered it was situated off Well Street in Hackney. She glanced at her watch: eleven twenty-five. With a bit of luck she'd be there in a couple of hours. She looked at the piece of paper again, checking there wasn't a phone number, then fastened her seat-belt and got ready for the drive to London.

As the car passed Keeper's Cottage Loretta slowed, wondering whether she should stop and pick up her things. Then she remembered the cat; he had sauntered off across the lawn as she left for the police station and she didn't want to waste time luring him into his basket. In any case, she'd have to come back – she had a half-formed plan of persuading Peggy to talk to John Tracey, after which all three of them would drive to Oxford to confront Chief Inspector Bailey. Peggy must be made to see that, even though Mick was her husband and the father of her child, she was putting her own future at risk by protecting him. A perverted sense of duty, that was the only way Loretta could account for Peggy's behaviour. Or had she quit the scene in a blind panic, stunned by the horror of seeing her new friend shot down by Mick in cold blood? But if that were the case, why on earth hadn't she come to the cottage, where she'd have got a damn sight more help than she was offered by those women from the peace camp?

Loretta had reached the junction with the A40 and flicked on her left indicator. Perhaps she was being unfair; the peace women had given Peggy shelter for the night and a lift to the London road. She pulled out into a small gap in the traffic, picking up speed as a large dark car roared up behind her and flashed its lights. How had Peggy got away from Mick? Maybe he, too, had been horrified by what he'd done. Presumably there'd been a struggle – Loretta remembered the overturned chair in the drawing room which had alerted her to the fact that something was wrong. The scene was beginning to form in her mind: Mick struggling to wrest the gun
from Clara, succeeding, then rapidly firing two shots ... a cry from Clara, maybe one from Peggy, then the blonde girl running full tilt from the room, across the hall and into the garden...

A fierce hooting from behind brought Loretta out of this day-dream; she realized her speed had fallen to just over thirty. She pressed down the accelerator, telling herself it wasn't safe to indulge in such speculation as she approached the motorway section of the road. She put out a hand and turned on the radio, hoping Radio Four would provide something to distract her. She was just in time for the midday news, which led on the death in a car crash early that morning of a junior minister at the Department of Trade. Loretta pulled a face as she listened to a brief interview with Mrs Thatcher, in which the prime minister expressed her deep regret at the untimely loss of so
promising
a member of the government; it was followed by another with the Secretary of State, Paul Channon.

The next item caught her by surprise – she hadn't expected Bailey's news conference to be reported so promptly. It was a carefully worded account of what the police had said, including a recording of Bailey reading out full descriptions of Mick and Peggy. Their names were given, as well as the name of the road they'd lived in in Whitechapel. The report also revealed that a man resembling Mick had stopped a passer-by in Flitwell on the day of the murder and asked for directions to Clara's house.

The newsreader moved on to a non-fatal shooting in Belfast and Loretta realized she was clenching her teeth. She took a deep breath, cursing Bailey for making her task even more difficult. How was she to coax Peggy into going to the police when they had all but pronounced her guilty to the media? She started pulling out to overtake a slow lorry when the sound of Jeremy Frere's name riveted her attention back to the radio.

‘... wife was murdered at their Oxfordshire home on Tuesday evening, is to face several charges in connection with a multi-million-pound art fraud,' the newsreader said. ‘Mr Frere is expected to be charged in Oxford some time this afternoon. Police are not revealing details at this stage, but a
Thames Valley spokesman said their inquiries are expected to continue for some weeks. Detectives from Oxford are thought to be working closely with police in London, where Mr Frere owns a gallery, and New York.'

Loretta fell back into the slow lane, taking in this new development. So Jeremy's gallery
was
in trouble, she thought – no wonder he had looked so haggard at the police station that morning. But how had the police got on to him? She remembered the pictures he'd brought to Baldwin's on the morning after her own arrival in Flitwell – the paintings he said he'd assembled for a posthumous show by an American artist she'd never heard of. Did this news mean he'd acquired them illegally? Or perhaps they were forgeries? But wouldn't Clara have known that? Loretta recalled the scene in the kitchen when Jeremy had displayed one of the pictures. Imo had suggested it looked like a Hopper, a comment which had provoked a vehement rebuttal from Jeremy. Loretta couldn't remember Clara expressing any reservations at the time. But then, the man was supposed to be a hitherto unknown painter. But had Clara stumbled on something later, evidence that the pictures were fakes? And had Jeremy – no, there'd been no hint in the radio report that the police were interested in Jeremy Frere for any reason other than the alleged art fraud. And, if Peggy had seen Jeremy murder his wife, why had she stayed silent? She had no reason to protect Jeremy. It was rather bad luck on him, Loretta thought, that the police had stumbled on whatever he was up to in the course of investigating his wife's killing. For a second, she felt a twinge of pity. Then, recalling his callous remarks about dumping Clara's cat on the RSPCA, she allowed it to evaporate. Deciding that she'd never get to Hackney if she carried on at this rate, she turned off the radio, pushed in a Grace Jones tape, and forced herself to concentrate on her driving.

She knew the route as far as St Paul's Road in Islington, and she'd tried to memorize the rest of it from the
A–Z
which lay open on the passenger seat beside her. In spite of its proximity to the part of London in which she lived, Hackney was unknown territory to her and she wasn't sure she could get to
Well Street without getting lost. In the event it was easier than she'd anticipated; instead of the No-Right-Turn sign she'd feared, she was able to turn south into Mare Street when she got to the end of Graham Road. She drove past shops; a magnificent white town hall with a banner across its entrance proclaiming the borough's unemployment figures; terraces of decaying town houses, interspersed with ugly modern buildings, which hinted at the area's more prosperous past. The place was grubbier and more down at heel than Islington, a fact that seemed to be reflected in the faces of the people in the streets. Here and there the anarchist symbol, a letter A in a circle, had been spray-painted on walls, sometimes accompanied by the name of an anarchist group, Class War. At bus stops, men and women leaned resignedly against walls and railings as though they'd long ago given up hope of achieving even a temporary escape from the shabby streets.

Loretta slowed for a set of traffic lights, noticing a cinema that had been converted into a billiard hall just beyond the junction. The lights changed and she was about to carry straight on when she spotted a sign to the left saying Well Street. She moved abruptly into the left-turn lane, provoking a passenger in the car behind to lean through an open window and shout something unintelligible at her. Well Street was narrow at first, flanked by small shops, and the smell of cooking fat floated into the car from the Greasy Spoons to right and left. Then it opened out into a broad road which, to judge by the few remaining houses, had once been flanked by tall, attractive terraces. She came to what looked like a churchyard on her left, although there was no sign of a church, and saw, on the opposite side of the road, a small group of Asian women in saris going into a dingy modern factory with mesh screens over its windows. Then she caught her first glimpse of the Forman Park Estate; it was on the left-hand side of the road and consisted not of the tower blocks she'd expected but thirties mansion blocks.

She turned left into the narrow street that flanked the estate, passing the anonymous sixties pub on the corner. She drove slowly until she came to a wooden board with a map of the estate painted on it; checking there were no yellow lines
in the road, she parked and got out of the car. The map was difficult to read: someone had sprayed the letters ‘SWP' in red across the middle, and these in turn were partially obscured by the word ‘SHIT' in silver metallic paint. Loretta eventually established that Ernie Bevin House was the third block on her right, lying behind others named after Hugh Dalton and Stafford Cripps. When had they been renamed, she wondered, and what had they been called in the thirties?

A narrow path ran along the side of Hugh Dalton House at its far end; she walked along the road, turned into the path, and made her way between the end of the flats and a group of Portakabins to her left. The first of these buildings had a makeshift sign in the window proclaiming it a Neighbourhood Centre; a poster pasted on to the main door explained the place was closed due to industrial action. The next bore the curious title of South Hackney Unemployment Fightback Centre. It, too, was closed although there was no sign saying why or giving its opening hours. Its dusty air suggested to Loretta that it didn't have any.

Oppressed by the sheer misery of her surroundings – she was beginning to think life in a peace camp wasn't so unbearable after all – Loretta carried on past Stafford Cripps House and finally arrived at her goal, the block named after Ernie Bevin. She turned right and paused in front of it, observing it to get an idea of the numbering system. It was a deck-access block with a central arch which presumably concealed staircases to each floor. The flats on the ground floor to the left of the arch bore odd numbers from one to nine and she carried on, wondering if number eleven was the first flat on the far side of the arch. It wasn't; these were the even numbers. Loretta peered back into the dark archway and hesitated, unwilling to move out of the relative brightness of the overcast day. As she stood there, irresolute, three boys clattered down the stairs and ran whooping past her, one of them reaching out to punch her in the chest as he went by. Loretta gasped, and turned in time to see them disappear through the rear entrance of Stafford Cripps House. Then she took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and walked purposefully into the shadows of Ernie Bevin House.