Death of an Avid Reader (28 page)

‘That's just what I said.' Castle oozed charm to the extent that I almost disbelieved my own experience.

For a horrible moment, sandwiched between the two men, the thought came that I would never escape.

Then suddenly, the inspector was guiding me back to the stairs. ‘You're safe. Trust me. He won't harm you.'

Did he believe me, or was he protecting Castle?

I ran my tongue around my teeth, feeling sure one had come loose. My cheek burned. It must be bruised. I touched my finger to the sore place and felt blood.

When we were at the top of the stairs, the inspector whispered, ‘I heard Mr Castle say, “Where is it?” What did he want?'

‘Dr Potter's magazine.'

‘Give it to him.'

‘You have it.'

‘I'll put it on the counter.'

‘Didn't you hear me? He attacked me.'

‘I heard you. It would be your word against his.'

Back in the main room, the inspector spoke to his sergeant, who went to the counter.

Mrs Carmichael stared at me with a look of horror. ‘What happened?'

Now was not the time to say, and she not the person to tell. I simply shook my head, not ready to tell the truth and cause consternation.

I picked up the magazine that the sergeant had placed on the counter. ‘I'm returning this. I believe Mr Castle wants it.'

At that moment, he emerged from the basement door, carrying my satchel, moving towards me like someone on roller skates gliding at speed, someone for whom the earth's atmosphere would part as he approached.

Mrs Carmichael looked at me, about to say something else, and then thought better of it.

Castle handed me my satchel.

I raised the magazine in the air. ‘It's here. I told you I'd returned it.'

He smiled, as though nothing untoward had happened. ‘Thank you. I'll borrow this please, Mrs Carmichael.'

She looked surprised. ‘That's unlike you, Mr Castle. You never take anything out.'

At that moment, I liked her.

Castle scowled, ‘Nonsense.'

‘Ah there you're wrong,' Mrs Carmichael said. ‘I know I should have other diversions but it amuses me to check on borrowings. Dr Potter was the most avid reader, and you are far too busy with your legal tomes ever to make use of your personal ticket book.'

Leaving Mrs Carmichael and Mr Castle at the counter, I went to the ladies' room where I splashed my face and then ran cold water over my painful wrist.

When the door opened, I gave a start, but it was only Mrs Carmichael. I saw her in the mirror.

‘Here.' She took the top from a bottle of aspirins and tipped three into my hand, filled a mug with water and gave it to me.

I took the aspirins.

She put a slip of paper in my pocket, saying, ‘Read this later. Not now.'

I took it out and read it.

18 Dorset Avenue, Harehills – front downstairs room – visit me this evening

She turned to leave.

I stopped her. ‘Wait! Walk back with me, to the door.'

She nodded. ‘What will you do?'

‘Go home.'

How did I know if I could trust her, or anyone? She may be in Castle's pocket and have slipped me knock-out pills.

We left the ladies' room. I waited. She went ahead, through the reading room and towards the counter. I walked to the exit door.

Inspector Wallis was waiting at the top of the stairs. ‘My driver is at the entrance. He will take you to the dispensary. You need treatment.'

I opened my mouth to explain that I just wanted to go home. In a quiet voice, he said, ‘You'll be safe in a public place.'

We walked down the stairs. I felt like an old woman, taking one careful step at a time. ‘He attacked me and you are protecting him.'

‘As I said, it would be your word against his.'

‘Why would I lie?'

‘Why would he?'

‘He is important. Next you'll tell me that he plays golf with the chief constable.'

‘As it happens, I believe he does.'

He walked me to the door and opened it for me. ‘I don't suppose there is any point in asking you to leave this investigation to me?'

I ignored him.

*   *   *

Approaching the doors of the dispensary, I glanced up. A pair of carved stone cherubs gazed down, one tearful and anxious, the other smiling, presumably after the careful attention of dispensary staff.

Benches were set against the wall and across the centre of the waiting room, row upon row of people, waiting to see a doctor. Just my luck that I would be here for the rest of the day. I gave my name and details at the reception desk. ‘It's only a sprained wrist.' Now I wished I had gone home and asked Mrs Sugden to bandage it for me.

The receptionist glared at me over her horn-rimmed spectacles. ‘The doctor will decide what is the matter, and what is to be done. And you have a bruise on your face. The cause?'

‘I tripped.'

She gave me a look that told me she had heard that tale before. ‘Take a seat. You will be called.'

There was a little shuffling up to make room for me. I cursed my bad luck and settled in to wait. It was now eight days since I had seen Lady Coulton. I was so near to finding her daughter, yet so far. As I looked at the number of people ahead of me in the queue, I calculated that I would be here for at least another three or four hours. The thought of Castle kept me sitting still, budging along every ten or fifteen minutes as some of those before me were seen.

I knew where Castle lived. He knew where I lived. What was he afraid of? That Dr Potter had told me something, divulged a piece of dangerous information, but what?

A solicitor missing from Castle's legal firm, forty-odd years ago; a ghost appearing about the same time. If my head did not throb so much, I would be able to think more clearly.

I had reached the far end of the third bench when a rheumy-eyed porter with a red nose glanced about and then spoke to me out of the corner of his mouth.

‘Are you the Mrs Shackleton that works with Jim Sykes?'

‘Yes.'

He took the torn top of a cigarette packet from his pocket and handed it to me.

I waited a moment, until he had sidled away and then read what he had written.

Peter Donohue, 9 Danby Court, wound to his leg

This must be my day for having addresses thrust at me.

There were still two and three-quarter benches of people waiting to be seen. I hesitated only for a moment, and then left.

The porter caught up with me in the vestibule. ‘Aren't you going to see the doctor?'

‘No.'

‘Wait on.'

A moment later, he returned and handed me bandages and pushed them into my coat pocket.

‘Thanks.'

‘You should have your wrist and that bruise seen to.'

‘I will. It's all right, I'm a nurse.'

‘Aye, they're the worst.'

‘Tell me about Mr Donohue. What was the treatment?'

‘He was patched up. Said he'd caught his leg on a nail, nasty wound to his calf. His mam dragged him in, fearful it would turn septic.'

So he had removed the bullet himself and kept quiet about being shot. What did Peter Donohue have to hide?

Twenty-Six

The porter had called me a taxi. It was raining when I arrived at Danby Court. The heavy overnight downpour had flooded the drains and a sickening, sour stench filled the air. I stepped carefully through the flooded courtyard but it was impossible to keep my feet dry.

I was conscious of being watched. My outfit marked me out as not belonging in this place where the inhabitants had little enough to shield them from the elements and the vagaries of ill-fortune. Short of tearing my garments to shreds, there was little I could do but press on, and find number nine.

It was at the far end of the courtyard, on the ground floor. Pity the people who lived in the cellar. Rain and filthy water teemed down the steps. Rain had also seeped under the ill-fitting ground floor door. I knocked.

The door was opened by a gaunt, skull-faced man with prominent cheekbones and ears that gave his old face a pixie quality. He stood a few feet from the door, on a pallet that, for now at least, protected his feet against the inch-deep ingress of water.

‘I'm looking for Peter Donohue.'

‘Oh aye, and who are you when you're at home?'

‘I'm a nurse. I have fresh bandages for his leg.' I tapped my satchel, indicating that there was more in there than he could dream of.

‘You best go up then.' He nodded at a staircase.

Glancing behind him, I noticed how crowded this room was, including an old and a younger woman, another man and several children. Perhaps people had come up here from the flooded cellar.

I thanked him, and climbed the stairs.

Unfortunately, the woman who answered my knock was one of the people who had been in the courtyard when I was enquiring after Marian Montague, the thin woman who had taken my card from her companion. Thanks to my occasional visits to Scotland, I do a passable Edinburgh accent, though it is a touch on the posh side for a Leeds courtyard. Keeping my head down, as though my face was still lashed with rain, I watched raindrops from the brim of my hat fall onto the toes of my galoshes. ‘Is Mr Peter Donohue at home?'

‘He is not. Who wants to know?'

‘I'm a nurse. I've brought him dressings, for his leg.' I took the blue wrapped packet from my pocket. ‘When will he be home? I'd like to take a look at his wound, see that it has not turned bad.'

‘He's on the mend.'

‘All the same…'

Someone was staring at me from the corner of the room. I risked a glance. She was lying on a narrow bed covered by an army blanket.

At first we did not recognise each other in these strange surroundings and me with my faux Edinburgh accent.

The person who was quickest on the uptake was the woman who faced me, Peter Donohue's mother I guessed.

‘It's you. You was here a few days ago, asking after…' She stopped and tried to place herself between me and Marian Montague, for now I saw it was she, propped up on a tick pillow, the blanket up to her chin. She looked pale. Her beautiful long hair had been roughly shorn, giving her the look of an urchin. Were things so bad for her that she had sold her hair? Or perhaps this place ran wick with lice.

‘Miss Montague?' I let my accent drop.

‘Mrs Shackleton.'

Since the start of her employment, apart from a long chat at the Christmas social, our encounters had largely consisted of exchanging books across the counter. How had she come to this place after her respectable lodgings? The bump under the blanket gave the answer. She was pregnant.

‘You're not a nurse at all, are you?' the woman said.

‘Oh yes. I'm a nurse all right. I served throughout the war in the Voluntary Aid Detachment.'

‘Didn't anybody tell you the war is over? First you're here asking one lot of questions, then another.'

It was her turn to fire the questions. How did I know where to find Peter? Since when had the dispensary cared enough about its patients to send out emissaries with bandages? Who had sent me and why?

She would have slammed the door in my face, except that I could see she feared I would come back with the police. Perhaps she knew that her son had been shot in the leg and perhaps she did not. But she would know him well enough to realise he had been up to no good.

In the end, after neither of us would answer the other's questions, and when Marian continued to stare at me, Mrs Donohue made to shut the door.

I had no intention of turning tail. Before she had time to shoot a bolt or turn a key, I pushed my way in, rudely stepping across the threshold. A shooting pain ran from my wrist to my shoulder. Perhaps it was a fracture and not a sprain.

‘Miss Montague, you left the library so suddenly. I was worried about you.'

‘There's no need.'

‘There was a terrible misunderstanding. I want to try and put it right.'

‘Do they know where I am?'

‘No.'

‘And I don't want them to, do you understand?'

The woman intervened. ‘The lass doesn't need you. I'm taking care of her now.' She turned to Marian. ‘Don't worry, love. No one's going to harm you.'

What did she mean? I looked from the younger to the older woman. ‘What is going on?'

‘I could ask you the same thing,' Mrs Donohue said sullenly.

‘All right. To stop us going round in circles, I'll tell you why I am here. The first time it was because someone saw Miss Montague coming from this courtyard. I was curious.'

‘And how is it you were snooping about for my son, pretending you want to change his bandage?'

‘I'll gladly change his bandage. If his leg has turned septic he risks losing it. I would like to know what he was doing in the place where the bullet was fired.'

‘Bullet? He cut his leg on a nail.' She turned to Marian Montague. ‘Is she all there? This woman who doesn't know whether she's Sassenach or Scot?'

Marian did not answer. She bit her lip. Her eyes locked on mine, with a silent plea to say nothing.

Mrs Donohue once more filled the silence. ‘The lass is doing well enough. I'm seeing to her, and she's not paying the kind of rent demanded from her at her last place. She's not been well, and unless you can do summat practical for her, I'll ask you to leave now and stop disparaging my lad who is out earning a respectable living this very minute, but he'll be back and he won't be pleased to hear someone accusing him of being shot.'

There was nothing more to be said for the moment. Mrs Donohue had flung open the door and stood with one hand on the knob and the other on her hip, her head tilted back, mouth grim, inviting me to leave.

With some difficulty, using only my good hand, I took a bandage from my pocket.

‘Keep it.' I crossed to the bed, handing it to Marian. ‘Here's my card, too, so you know where I am, should you need me, or need help.'