Perseverance Street (25 page)

He walked up the
drive, whistling loudly, and knocked on the door. It was the standard cheery knock that usually represented a friend, a neighbour or a sneaky salesman. Lily put down her book and went to the door. Randle was standing with his back to her, checking that no one in the street could witness what he did next. As soon as he heard the door open he spun round, pushed her back into the hallway, strode inside after her and slammed the door behind him.

‘Now then you bitch! What have you been saying about me? What lies have you been telling?’

Lily was frozen with shock. The only dealings she’d ever had with Randle had been amicable, albeit false on his part. This was a different man, totally unbalanced. His teeth were bared and he was snarling like a mad dog. She said nothing. She knew that anything she might say would only make him worse, if that were possible. He put a hand round her throat and squeezed until she couldn’t breathe.

‘Give me a reason why I should let you live, bitch! Have you any idea how much damage your lies have done?’

He let go of her throat just as she was about to pass out. She sank to the floor, coughing and spluttering. He knelt down beside her, with his mouth an inch from her face, spraying spit as he spoke. ‘Your brat of a boy is dead. He wouldn’t behave, so he’s dead, just like you’ll be dead very shortly. No one spreads filthy lies about me and lives. Do you hear me, bitch? I’m going to kill you for what you’ve done!’

Him saying that Michael
was dead filled her with a mixture of despair and rage. She hit out at him with her fists and began screaming. ‘Murderer! You murdered my little boy, you filthy murderer!’

He put his hand over her mouth to stifle her screams and began to laugh at her, enjoying her despair.

‘Like mother like son. He screamed just like you did when I told him he was going to die. Cried his snivelling little eyes out he did. Cried for his mummy. I want my mummy! Snivelling little brat! It was a pleasure choking him to death just to shut him up.’

Lily collapsed to the floor in floods of tears. Her Michael was dead. She didn’t care what this vile man did to her. He could kill her if he wanted to. He put his hands on her throat and began to squeeze, still laughing. She closed her eyes. All she could think of was Michael. There was a roaring sound in her ears. Was this it? Was this the sound of death? The roaring grew louder.

She could breathe again. The pressure on her throat had gone. Her breath was coming in short gasps. She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling. He was gone. The roaring had stopped. Someone else was there: Auntie Dee. Leaning over her; looking down at her; asking what had happened. Lily couldn’t form any words yet. All she could do was cough. Dee could now see red marks on her neck.

‘Lily, who did this? What the hell’s happened?’

It took a full minute before Lily could get out the name, ‘Randle.’

‘Randle? Where?’

‘Here. He was here.’

Lily exploded in a fit
of coughing

‘Take it easy, girl. I’ll get you some water.’

Dee went into the kitchen and saw the back door was open. Randle had gone, but there was time to deal with him. She knew where he lived, so did the police. She took a glass of water to Lily, who had stopped coughing now but was weeping profusely.

‘Lily, it’s OK. He’s gone. We can have him arrested now. We can get Michael back.’

Lily looked up at her with intense despair in her eyes. ‘Auntie Dee, Michael’s dead. He killed him.’

Tom Cleghorn arrived on site
in a firm’s lorry and walked over to where Charlie was using a pneumatic drill to cut a series of holes in the base of a brick railway bridge in preparation for packing them with demolition charges.

‘A woman’s been on the phone back at the yard asking for you. She said it’s urgent.’

He didn’t seem too pleased to be delivering such a message – a message that might take his son away from an important job. Charlie put down the drill.

‘Who was it?’

‘A woman. Calls herself Dee or something. She sounded a bit harassed. She says you know her number.’

‘It’s Lily’s friend. Give me a minute.’

Charlie went up the road to a nearby phone box and dialled Dee’s number. She answered first ring.

‘Dee, it’s Charlie. Is there a problem?’

‘You could say that! Randle’s been round to the house and tried to kill Lily. If I hadn’t come home when I did she’d have been a goner.’

‘You saw him, did you?’

‘No, I think the noise of my motorbike scared him off. The exhaust’s blowing – saved Lily’s life more than likely – and to think I nearly swapped it for a van last week. He tried to strangle her.’

‘Have you told
the police?’

‘I rang DS Bannister in Leeds. He’s been and gone five minutes ago.’

‘To arrest Randle, presumably.’

‘I bloody well hope so.’ She paused before continuing. ‘Charlie, Randle told Lily he’d killed Michael. She’s in a right state. I can’t console her. I think you should come over.’

‘I’m on my way.’

He went back onto the site. His dad knew Lily’s story.

‘Randle’s attacked Lily, tried to kill her. I need to go over there.’

His dad looked less than pleased. ‘It’s a police matter, son. You start interfering, you’ll get your fingers burned.’

‘She’s a friend, Dad. Would you mind finishing off here? I’ve practically done all the prep.’

His dad didn’t look at all pleased.

‘Dad, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

‘Yeah, this job’s important as well.’

‘I need to see her, Dad.’

Tom Cleghorn sighed. He was immensely proud of his son, who done well in the army and was also a highly qualified explosives expert. Much of his training he’d got under his dad’s tuition before he was called up, but the army had put some fine finishing touches to his expertise. Charlie knew more about explosives than his dad ever would.

‘Look, son, I’m going to have to get another licensed explosives man in to replace you. We can’t go on like this.’

‘What? You’re sacking
me?’

‘No, I’m just not relying on you until you’ve sorted your life out. We’ve got plenty of work on, so you can come in, as and when you like, and you’ll get paid for the hours you work.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Charlie, stripping off his boiler suit. ‘I take it I still get use of the van?’

‘For the time being,’ his dad said. ‘But it is a firm’s van. The firm takes precedence over your private life. Better that you use that bike of yours.’

When Charlie arrived Lily was sitting on the settee in the front room, drip-white, arms round her knees, rocking to and fro. He sat down beside her.

‘He’s lying,’ said Charlie. ‘That’s what he does. That’s what he’s good at.’

Lily said nothing for a while, then she asked, in a tiny voice, ‘About M … Michael, you mean?’

‘About everything, Lily. It’s all he’s done since you first clapped eyes on him. Michael’s alive.’ He gave Lily a squeeze. ‘He’ll be lying to the police right now.’ He looked up at Dee. ‘Did anyone other than Lily see him?’

Dee shrugged. ‘Not that I know of.’

‘If they did,’ said Lily, ‘they probably wouldn’t recognise him as Randle. I didn’t myself for a few seconds. He was wearing overalls and a flat cap.’

‘He’ll have an alibi,’ surmised Charlie. ‘No doubt his wife. Once again it’ll be Lily’s word against theirs.’

‘Well, Lily didn’t attack herself,’ said Dee heatedly. ‘Who the hell will the police think did it?’

‘Bannister might well
think it was Randle, but without independent witnesses he won’t be able to prove it,’ said Charlie. He gave Lily another reassuring squeeze. ‘Right now him and his wife’ll be lying their socks off. They’ll have prepared his alibi very carefully just as they prepared the story about them not taking Michael.’

‘Why did he take Michael, do you think?’ Lily asked.

There was an obvious answer which neither Charlie not Dee wanted to contemplate. They both wondered if the same thought was on Lily’s mind.

‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie, ‘but he didn’t take him just to kill him, where’s the sense in that? And he’s got no record of being a man who … likes children. Michael’s alive, Lily. Don’t let him get to you.’

‘I was terrified,’ said Lily. ‘He was like some evil madman.’

‘Jimmy said he was a Jekyll and Hyde character,’ Charlie remembered.

‘Charlie, he’s a monster,’ Lily said. ‘He would have killed me if Auntie Dee hadn’t turned up.’ She turned to look at him. ‘Do you honestly think my boy’s alive?’

There was too much desperation in her voice for him to say anything other than, ‘I most definitely do, Lily, and I know you don’t want me to, but if he gets away with this, as I suspect he will, I’ll get the truth out of him my way.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘Any objections?’

Lily and Dee looked at each other then shook their heads. ‘That’s it, then,’ said Charlie. ‘I’m glad you agree, ladies, because you’re my alibis.’

Later that evening, when Lily was in the bathroom, Dee asked Charlie the truth.

‘Do you honestly think
Michael’s alive?’

‘I honestly think Randle’s an inveterate liar whose word can’t be trusted so I don’t see why we should take his word about anything. More than likely he was just saying it to add to Lily’s misery before he killed her. He probably enjoyed saying it. There are people like that around, you know.’

‘I know, but how certain are you that Michael’s still alive?’

Charlie looked at the doorway into the hall to make sure Lily wasn’t listening. ‘About sixty per cent sure,’ he said quietly. ‘No more.’

‘Me too,’ said Dee.

Charlie had learned from
Jimmy that Randle would be leaving camp at two a.m. having come off duty. He’d be walking back to his quarters. It was three days after the attack on Lily and, as Charlie predicted, Edith had given Randle an alibi and Randle had told the police that he wouldn’t be surprised if all the harm done to Lily was self-inflicted just to frame him.

DI Foster called the sergeant into his office when the complaint was made via the Bradford police.

‘Bradford are trying to pass this one over to us with it being part of an ongoing case. The thing is, do we want to waste time investigating such a matter on their patch?’

‘Apparently, she does bear the marks of an attack, sir.’

‘Didn’t she harm herself when she was in hospital having her baby?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Is there any reason to suppose she couldn’t have done it again simply to get Randle arrested. If he hadn’t got an alibi he’d be in custody by now.’

‘Well, I’m not sure how she could strangle herself, sir. That would take a very determined nutcase, and she doesn’t strike me as being such a person.’

‘With women like that
anything’s possible, John. She could certainly inflict strangulation wounds on herself if she was sufficiently disturbed mentally. Randle claimed he didn’t even know where Robinson lived. I mean, where would he get her address from? She was living in hiding with that Maguire woman.’

Bannister felt a twinge of guilt but said nothing.

‘I’m going to bounce it back to Bradford, John, along with our view on the matter. Is this OK with you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. If Bradford are daft enough to follow it up it’s their problem.’

Brenda had been called into Major Bykers’ office. She’d already started a rumour about there being paedophiles among the ranks and had been tracked down as one of the instigators of the story. Under serious questioning by the major she’d admitted that Lily had asked her to start the rumour.

‘But only because I think she’s right, sir,’ she’d added in mitigation. ‘I never said anything about anyone else doing anything, just him, sir.’

‘Really? Perhaps you should have had the common sense to foresee the repercussions of your foolishness. Corporal Witherspoon, for bringing this camp into disrepute you are now reduced in rank to Private Witherspoon. That is all.’

‘Sir.’

It was now one a.m. Charlie was ten miles from Eden camp and about to go into action for the first time since his last mission in the Lombard province of Northern Italy, which had still been occupied by the Germans in June 1944. He’d spent six months in Allied-occupied Sicily, brushing up his Italian, in particular the Lombard accent. His job was to go up to Porto Valtravaglia on Lake Maggiore and infiltrate the Legione SS Italiana.

His new identity had been
provided for him by Carlo Graziano, a dead fascist from Varese, a young man who wouldn’t be missed. He was the of same age, appearance and build as Charlie and had been killed and buried without trace. Killed to order, purely because of this resemblance. Charlie took Graziano’s identity papers, now altered with Charlie’s photo replacing the dead man’s, and including Graziano’s Republican Fascist Party membership card which was virtually a passport throughout German-occupied Northern Italy.

Charlie’s infiltration into the Italian SS was eased by an Italian SS officer who was working undercover for the partisans. Charlie’s job was to supervise the destruction of two ammunition dumps: one in Porto Valtravaglia and one in neighbouring Laveno-Mombello. His expertise with explosives was well up to the job required, as was his combat training as a soldier of the elite SAS where he’d served first in North Africa and now Italy. It was this expertise plus his language skills which had got him this job. Charlie was one of life’s natural linguists. He’d won a scholarship to a grammar school where he’d struggled with maths and science but excelled at French and Latin with a special gift for accents. Italian came later, as did German.

His fake, but accurate, Lombard accent was never suspected when he joined the Italian SS. He lived, worked, ate and slept with the enemy for four months before he put his skills to good use. It had been the best and worst four months of his life. The worst because of the constant threat of being found out and handed over to the Gestapo; the best because he’d got through it and carried out the job successfully.

For an Englishman to
impersonate an Italian takes more than just language skills. He needed to think like an Italian, act like an Italian and have Italian mannerisms, all of which were alien to his English background. Charlie had proved to be uniquely talented in this field, but the danger to his life was real and constant.