Fell Purpose (6 page)

‘And you,’ Connolly suggested.

Her eyes became bleak, and she said, in a different voice from any she’d yet used, a plain, sad, matter-of-fact voice, ‘No, I don’t think he ever really cared about me. He thought I’d trapped him into marriage, you see. Well, we both lost out. I don’t know which of us lost more. Until now.’ Her lips trembled. ‘My Zellah. You’ve got to find who did this. And then let me have ten minutes alone with him.’

Wilding had to take a few turns about the room to deal with his emotions before he could speak with a semblance of calmness.

‘I had two other children,’ he said at last. ‘Two boys. I don’t see them – haven’t seen them for years. The divorce was acrimonious, you see. Pam is my second wife.’ He stopped pacing and looked at Atherton, who nodded receptively. ‘You probably noticed she’s a lot younger than me.’ He gave a snort of non-laughter. ‘Well, I suppose I wasn’t the first fool to go that way and I won’t be the last. I threw away everything. I had my own engineering company, with a combined office and factory on the Brunel Estate.’

This was a small industrial park at the back side of East Acton, about half a mile from the Scrubs, in an otherwise unlovely area defined on all sides by railway lines and bisected by the Grand Union Canal. The Wildings’ lives had certainly been local, Atherton thought.

‘Pam came to work there,’ he went on. ‘She was young, beautiful – you’ve only got to look at Zellah to see how beautiful – and I . . . well, I don’t need to spell it out for you. It’s a common-enough story. There was a divorce, I lost my boys, my house; ultimately I lost my business, everything. You see me here with all I have left. How are the mighty fallen. I don’t blame anyone but myself. But it was a disappointment to Pam. She feels I let her down. She’s always cared more for the . . . the outward signs of success. If she spoke harshly just now – well, I wanted you to understand.’

‘Of course,’ Atherton said.

‘I think that’s why she wants Zellah to have those things – why she’s always trying to get her into a more exalted social set. Don’t mistake me; I want Zellah to have everything, too. She deserves it. But Zellah’s not just a beauty. She got Pam’s looks, but she inherited my brains. She could do anything, be anything. I don’t want her to think that marriage to some rich idiot is her only goal.’

‘What school does she go to?’ Atherton slipped it in.

‘St Margaret’s. You know it?’

It was the all-girls school at the far end of the Scrubs – next to where the fairground was presently set up. ‘I know it,’ Atherton said. ‘It has a good academic reputation.’

‘One of the best in the country,’ Wilding said. ‘It used to be a grammar school, but when the government abolished them it went private. But it’s also a church school – Anglo-Catholic. Fortunately we’re in the church’s catchment area. It’s one of the reasons I bought this house.’

‘You’re Anglo-Catholic?’

‘I am, and Pam was willing to be, in a good cause. We’ve brought Zellah up as one. I always had my eye on St Margaret’s for her because of the academic excellence, but you had to be regular communicants. We couldn’t have afforded the fees, but Zellah won a bursary, and it’s been wonderful for her. The standard of scholarship is as high as in any public school. The downside,’ his expression soured, ‘is the kind of girls she’s had to mix with. Empty-headed rich kids like Sophy Cooper-Hutchinson and Chloë Paulson, who poison her mind with trash and trivia – boys and make-up and pop music and all that rubbish.’

‘What school did Zellah go to?’ Connolly was asking upstairs.

‘St Margaret’s,’ Mrs Wilding said, and pulled a face. ‘All
he
cares about is exam results. He doesn’t give a damn about her getting on and meeting the right people. With her looks she could be anything – a model, an actress, anything. The sky’s the limit, but these days it all depends on having the right contacts.
He
just wants her to be a bookworm and ruin her eyes with reading and have no social life and end up a sour spinster with four cats. Fortunately, a lot of very nice girls go to St Margaret’s, so it’s sucks to him. Girls from well-off families, whose fathers can afford the fees,’ she added acidly. ‘Zellah’s clever, but she’s also got a bit of common sense. She wants to have fun, same as anyone else. She wants to be a normal girl, not a freak of nature.’

‘Does she have a boyfriend?’

‘
He
won’t allow it,’ she said, making another face. ‘Says she’s too young. Well, it’s hard for her when she can’t go out whenever she wants to, like the others. Never on a school night, and at weekends it’s questions, questions, questions, and where are you going and what time will you be back? I mean, the poor girl’s watched like a criminal. And she couldn’t bring a boy back here. There was one boy, Mike Carmichael, brought her home on his motorbike once, very good-looking lad, and the ructions! Derek caught them kissing in the porch. Made them come in and – well, talk about the Spanish inquisition! Poor Zellah was mortified. And nothing the boy could say would satisfy Derek. They ended up having a row, and Zellah was forbidden to see him any more. She was in floods. Well, so was I. I mean, how’s she ever going to get married if he chases off every boy that looks at her?’

‘I suppose he’d be being protective,’ Connolly said.

‘Protective? He’s a . . .’ Her voice cut off as she remembered again.

Connolly felt a pang of sympathy. It must be one of the worst things, the way you kept forgetting, and then remembering again. Every remembering must be like having it happen all over again for the first time.

‘It didn’t do her any good, did it?’ Mrs Wilding resumed bitterly. ‘Maybe if he’d let her go out more, she’d have been a bit more streetwise, known a bit more how to protect herself. What was she
doing
out there at that time of night? That’s what I want to know. She’d have known better than to go there with a strange man if only he’d treated her like a normal teenager.’

‘Did Zellah have a boyfriend?’ Atherton was asking.

‘No,’ Wilding said. ‘I didn’t allow it. She was too young, and I didn’t want her distracted. She had her whole life for that sort of nonsense, but you only get one chance at schooling.’

‘It must have been hard, though. I mean, girls of sixteen and seventeen naturally want to go out with boys.’

‘She understood. Despite her mother trying to fill her head with rubbish, she knew what her own best interests were.’ His face hardened. ‘There was a boy who came sniffing round her. I sent him away with a flea in his ear. I told you I know who you should be talking to: a yob by the name of Michael Carmichael. A greasy Lothario with a motorbike. A boy from a sink estate in Reading, whose father’s a jailbird! And he thought he was good enough to lay his dirty paws on my daughter! He brought her home once on his damn motorbike, and I caught him fumbling with her outside the front door. I brought him in and read him the riot act. Of course, Pam took his side against me, and there was a row. Poor Zellah ended up in tears. He stormed off, uttering threats against me. The only reason I didn’t report him to the police at the time was because I didn’t want to embarrass her any further.’

‘What sort of threats?’

‘Oh, nothing specific. Just that he’d get his own back on me and that I’d be sorry, that sort of thing. And two days later someone broke our front window in the middle of the night. I’ve no doubt at all that it was him.’

‘Did you see him?’ Atherton asked.

‘No. I told you, it was the middle of the night. I was asleep until the noise woke me up. By the time I looked out, there was no one there. And a couple of weeks later both the wing mirrors were ripped off my car. Pam said it could have been anyone, but I knew who did it. Bad blood will out.’

‘How did you know his father was in jail?’

‘He told me so himself, that night he brought her home. Practically boasted about it.’

‘It’s an odd way to introduce yourself to a girl’s father.’

‘He
said
he didn’t want me to find out and think he’d kept it from him. I asked why he should think I was interested, because he was never getting within a mile of Zellah ever again. Then he started calling me names; Pam started shouting and Zellah burst into tears.’ He stared morosely at the carpet.

‘So when did all this happen?’

‘A couple of months ago.’ He looked up, remembering the point they had reached, and his face hardened again. ‘You go and interview Mr Michael Carmichael of the Woodley South Estate.’

‘We’ll certainly do that,’ Atherton said, his interest quickening. Everyone had heard of Woodley South, the bane of the Thames Valley Police: one of those bare and ugly estates, cheaply run up in the sixties to get families out of central London, which had degenerated into far worse slums than the evacuees had come from, a place of blowing rubbish, burned-out cars, unemployment, boarded-up windows, late night joy-riders, and hooded drug dealers.

Lately the Reading police had undertaken a ‘clampdown’ to try to make a dent in the crime figures in advance of an application for central funds for a regeneration project. Their methods and results had been widely written up for, and discussed in, the Job, which was why the name resonated with him.

It always amazed Atherton that anyone managed to live even a near-normal life in such circumstances, and yet from his own experience there were always some decent families among the low-lifers in these places, desperately clinging on to standards, doing their best and getting precious little help from the authorities. It was possible young Mr Carmichael was one of the good guys, and his outburst in the Wildings’ front parlour was from frustration at being judged on his appearance and postcode. On the other hand, there was a better than even chance he was one of the bad hats, and there was nothing more attractive at this stage of an investigation than a bad hat. It gave you something to follow up, a mote in the otherwise clear eye of all the unknowns.

‘Reading’s a long way,’ Connolly said. ‘What was Mike Carmichael doing over this way?’

‘Well, he had this motorbike,’ Mrs Wilding said, drying her eyes again. ‘He could get about on that all right.’

‘What I meant was, how did Zellah come to meet him?’

‘Oh, I see. Well, he had some friends who shared a house in Notting Hill, and one of them was Chloë Paulson’s brother. That time he brought Zellah home, they’d all been out together, a whole crowd of boys and girls. You know how they do. It wasn’t that way when I was young,’ she added in a complaining voice. ‘You went out in couples, or maybe a foursome, none of this all hanging around together in a gang. It just makes it harder to know what’s going on, to my mind. I mean, it isn’t natural for boys and girls to be friends like that, is it? They’re supposed to date and fall in love. You don’t marry someone you’re friendly with. But I suppose it was better for Zellah, in a way, because her father would only let her go out in a crowd, so she wouldn’t have met any boys at all otherwise.’

‘Did she see this boy more than once?’

‘No, Daddy forbade it. But she seemed to go off him anyway. She didn’t mention him ever again.’

If it was me
, Connolly thought,
I wouldn’t have mentioned him, even if I was seeing him
. A girl had to learn to manipulate in order to get her way. Anyway, from what the doc said it was obvious that Miss Zellah had been getting the ride off some fella or other, whatever her parents thought. ‘Do you think you could find me that photograph now?’ she said. She would have a quick look round the bedroom while the oul’ one was getting it; see if there was a diary or any letters.

‘What a life,’ Atherton said, when they had given Slider their various accounts. ‘I wouldn’t blame her for cutting a rip with biker boy.’

‘It’s the devil when parents try to relive their lives through their children,’ Slider mused. ‘There’s father wanting her to be an academic success and probably end up with her own business, while mother just wants to relive her youth and beauty vicariously, and probably hopes her daughter will be a model and marry a film star. Impossible expectations.’

‘And what about being forbidden to go out with boys?’ Connolly said indignantly. ‘Janey Mac, she was
seventeen
.’

‘Right,’ Atherton said. ‘You can’t keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree. What would you have done?’ he asked Connolly.

‘Pretend to go along with it and run mad behind their backs,’ Connolly answered. ‘If they want to carry on like Ignatius Loyola, what can they expect?’

‘Tyrants make liars,’ Atherton said.

‘Well, that’s one way to look at it,’ Slider said, from the point of view of a father. ‘But was that what Zellah was doing?’

‘She
was
out on the Scrubs late at night when she should have been somewhere else,’ Connolly pointed out.

‘We know she was rebelling,’ Atherton said, ‘because of what Freddie Cameron said about her having had a lot of sex. And I must say she must have had considerable moxie to defy her dad like that. I wouldn’t like to try it.’

‘Moxie?’ Slider queried vaguely, out of a train of thought.

‘Balls. Spunk. Chutzpah.’

‘I know what it
means
. I just don’t know why you’re using it.’