Fall From Grace (21 page)

‘Can I make you some tea?’ Leonid offered.

‘No, we’re okay,’ said Sara, ‘but thank you.’

The first thing Sara noticed was that there were no photographs on display anywhere. Usually, even people who’d had a fairly lonely time of it had a photograph of someone to show off. Her parents used to have a neighbour called Elsie. She was a widow and she hadn’t seen her only son Trevor and his family for years since they’d emigrated to Australia. But she still had a photo of them in a nice frame. Shame they didn’t get to see how proud she was of them. They hadn’t been home in the twelve years since they left but when she died they came over to ‘sort out the house’ and claim their inheritance. Of course they’d never been able to afford to come over whilst she was alive. But as soon as she’d gone they somehow found the money for the airfare. Funny that Sara had thought. But Leonid had nobody to keep their beady eyes on him and Sara wondered why that was. The room was functional. It had furniture, a TV set in the corner. But it was all cold. Everything was in dark colours except for the walls which were painted a plain off-white.

‘But you’d been with Lady Eleanor a very long time, sir,’ said Tim. ‘Something pretty drastic must’ve happened to question your loyalty to that extent?’

‘Did you witness the death of Ronald and disappearance of Clarissa Harding, sir?’ said Sara.

‘Yes.’

‘But you told detectives at the time that you didn’t,’ said Sara. ‘You told them that you’d been in a different part of the house and that the only thing you were aware of, was that a row had been going on and you heard a gunshot.’

‘Well she lied,’ said Leonid. ‘Ed Foster shot Ronald Harding. I watched him do it. He was a fool but he was in love and nothing could’ve stopped him.’

On the way back to the station, Sara received a call telling her that DNA found on the body of Shona Higgins pointed to Glenn Barber having murdered her.

*

Kelly and Lydia drove over to Blackpool to see Paul’s Dad and were both shocked to see the deterioration in him since the last time they’d been.

Paul’s mother always made herself scarce when any of Paul’s friends came to see his father. They always looked at her as if she was guilty of the most heinous of crimes and of course, as far as Paul was concerned, she was. Kelly and Lydia especially gave her the evils and so she made tea for them and then said she was heading for the shops.

‘How’s our Paul doing?’ asked Ed.

‘He’s alright, Ed,’ said Kelly. They’d decided to abide by Paul’s wishes and not tell his father about how he’d been beaten up and by whom. The bruises on his face wouldn’t be visible in a day or so and then he’d be back to see his Dad. But the girls were worried. Kelly especially was furious with Paul for not telling the police that it was Jake who’d beaten him up and shot Barber. She didn’t mourn the loss of a lowlife like Barber. But she feared what Jake might do on the run and the danger that could put Paul in.

‘Two years into my marriage to Mary I had an affair with a woman called Clarissa,’ said Ed who was so glad to be relieving himself of this terrible burden he’d been carrying around all these years. ‘We had Paul but Clarissa died and I came back to Mary with Paul who was only a tiny baby at the time.’

‘Yes,’ said Ed, ‘when I first became ill I wrote the whole story down in a letter to Paul and I want the two of you to keep it until after I’ve gone. Then you can give it to him.’

‘I haven’t got the strength to deal with it all now, Kelly,’ said Ed. ‘It’s all explained in the letter. When the time comes just tell him that I love him and that I never meant for there to be any trouble.’

The girls watched a tear run down Ed’s face.

‘And tell him that, despite what he might think after he’s read the letter, I did what I thought was best. His mother meant life itself to me and I’ve never forgotten her.’

THIRTEEN

‘Now,’ said Leonid, ‘I will need to put the events of that night into context for you or else you will not be able to comprehend.’

Sara always wondered why it was that foreigners could often sound so much more eloquent in English than many of her fellow countrymen and women.

‘Please do, sir,’ said Tim.

‘Ed Foster was a prominent member of the British fascist movement right throughout the sixties and into the seventies,’ said Leonid. ‘Oh he never did anything violent but like the political wings of various paramilitary groups today, he knew who the perpetrators of violence on behalf of the cause were, and on some occasions he provided the okay for such actions. But he was always there when the movement demonstrated in the streets, usually to protest against a coloured family moving into a street or a neighbourhood becoming overrun with such types of people. The movement went into the white community that were afraid of such influxes and stirred up trouble. They gave them the bullets to fire, Detectives, figuratively speaking of course. They put fire into the will of all the local white thugs.’

‘So you were also a member of this movement?’ said Sara.

‘No, I never joined,’ said Leonid. ‘I went to some meetings which is how I met Ed Foster but I never joined. I sympathised to a certain extent but I think that was more to do with my own experiences in the Ukraine, you know, sides had to be taken and the side that I took led me away from my homeland for the rest of my life. I had nothing against anyone from India or Jamaica. I just wanted to protect my own kind, the white man, the Ukrainian whose country had been snatched away by the Soviets. And you see, lying low these past decades meant that I didn’t really want to join anything that might draw attention to myself.’

‘You didn’t marry, Mr. Sulkov?’ Sara enquired.

‘No,’ said Leonid. ‘Oh there were ladies here and there, I was even engaged once. But I just couldn’t get the family I’d left behind in the Ukraine out of my mind.’

‘Well now,’ said Leonid. ‘You see, everybody talks about the Holocaust as being the event of the Second World War that we’re not allowed to forget. But there were other Holocaust’s, detectives. During the 1930’s Stalin’s actions in the Ukraine led to the deaths of ten million people. Yes, ten million people. The Ukraine was the bread basket of the entire Soviet Union but because we had the courage to want our independence, Stalin punished us. All the wheat we grew was forcibly sent to other parts of the Soviet Union and we were left, literally, to starve. It was known as the Holodomor.’

‘I had no idea,’ said Tim.

‘Me neither,’ said Sara.

‘Not many people do,’ said Leonid. ‘There’s no official recognition internationally and it isn’t taught in schools. But I lost my parents and my older brother and countless members of my extended family. Then when war came I knew that I was on the side of anyone who was fighting Stalin. I ran away and joined the German army. I wasn’t the only one. Many of my compatriots did and none of us were ashamed. We were fighting a system that had wreaked such an evil catastrophe on our brethren. It was an opportunity to fight back and we didn’t care that they were Nazis. They were fighting Stalin and that’s all that mattered to us.’

‘So what happened at the end of the war, sir?’ asked Tim.

‘I couldn’t go back to the Ukraine because my family would all have been murdered by Stalin for my collaboration with the Germans if his secret police had found out,’ Leonid explained. ‘So to protect them I had to stay here and they would assume that I’d been killed in action fighting for the Red army because you see, that’s who I told them I was running away to fight for. However painful it was, it meant that they would be safe, or as safe as they could be living under Stalin.’

‘So,’ said Sara who couldn’t help but have sympathy for Leonid. War was such a fucking complicated business, more complicated than she’d ever thought before and more complicated than any case she’d had to deal with. She was grateful for having been born where she had been and when she had been. She’d known nothing of the struggles Leonid had known. She couldn’t begin to comprehend how lonely life had made him to not be able to go back to his own country. ‘You went to work for Lady Eleanor.’

‘Yes,’ said Leonid. ‘I knew she was sympathetic to the Nazis and naturally, I knew that if I’d made my immediate past well known to most people then I wouldn’t have been too popular. There was a network of fascist thinking people even back then and yet it was so dangerous just after the war.’

‘When Ed and I became friends I was at his house regularly, I knew his wife Mary and when their daughter Denise came along I was honoured when they asked me to be her godfather. Then one night, in a pub near Gatley Hall, Ed and I were drinking when Clarissa Harding came in. They hit it off and fell in love.’

‘How come they hadn’t met before?’ Sara asked. ‘If Lady Eleanor was a member then why hadn’t Ed Foster, who you say was prominent in the organisation, why hadn’t he met Clarissa Harding before?’

‘Because Clarissa was not a fascist,’ said Leonid in a voice like he was the impatient teacher of young dense children. ‘She never had been and so wouldn’t have anything to do with her mother’s activity. Ronald Harding was a right-wing member of the 1922 committee Tory but he wasn’t a fascist and she took after him. She detested fascism. I tended to think that her hatred for her mother was tied up with her abhorrence for fascism but that would’ve been a job for a psychologist. Anyway, what was genuine was the love Clarissa and Ed had for each other. Ed left his wife Mary for her and they set up home in a little flat in Urmston. Because of Clarissa’s distaste for fascism Ed resigned from the movement. He’d have done anything to please her.’

‘Well by then it wasn’t just about their love for each other,’ said Leonid, ‘which Clarissa’s parents wouldn’t entertain at any price. Both Clarissa and Ed really saw red when Clarissa’s parents wouldn’t accept their grandchild.’