Telling Tales (7 page)

“Nah,” she said. “It’s the details we get right. That’s what we remember best.”

Chapter Eight

Peg had been the only other person Michael could have talked to like this, and when he broke off his story occasionally to look at Vera’s face to check that she was listening or judge her reaction to something he’d said he was shocked because he half expected to see his wife’s features. Vera always was listening.

He started right from the beginning. “I was never bothered about kiddies. I thought we were happy as we were, but it mattered to Peg. She’d have liked a big family, I think she was one of five girls. Her father farmed up Hornsea way. When she found out she was pregnant she was thrilled. She’d pretty well given up hope of it happening. I was pleased for her, like, but not so much for myself. I couldn’t see how things could get any better.

“And then Jeanie was born on the night of a big spring tide. She was long and skinny, even as a baby, with thick, black hair.”

“You were living on the Point then?”

“Aye, it was a part of the job. And we didn’t think it’d be a bad place for a child to grow up. There was space to run around. Good fresh air. It’s not a lonely place. There were other kids in the lifeboat houses and when she was bigger, Peg brought her into Elvet for the play group But she never needed company much, even when she was little. It was always books and music with her. Right from the start.”

He looked up. “Peg always said she took after me, but I could never see it myself. I’m not one for books. “Jeanie’s proud and she’s stubborn,” she’d say. “Who do you think she gets that from?”

“I’ve been trying to trace her friends,” Vera said. “I’d like to talk to other people who knew her. There must have been girls at school ..

.”

“There were friends, I suppose. Lasses from school like you said. She’d go to their birthday parties and Peg’d invite them back to the Point for tea.” He remembered those days. The house had seemed full of them pretty little girls in party dresses who giggled and chattered and chased each other around the garden. “But I could tell Jeanie was never close to them. There was something solemn about her. She took life too seriously. I don’t know where she got that from. Peg and I always enjoyed a laugh.”

“What about boyfriends?”

“There was no one while she was at school. She said she was too busy with exams. Peg would tease her about it sometimes, tell her she couldn’t spend all her time working. And she’d say dead serious, “But I like work, Mum.” There might have been lads at the university but we wouldn’t know about that. She went away to Leeds. She kept in touch phoned her mother every week and came home every now and again for her Sunday lunch but she never mentioned a boyfriend.” He paused. “There might have been someone. She might have told Peg and asked her to keep it a secret from me. She thought I was always criticizing and perhaps I was. I should have made more effort to get on with her.”

“And she should have made more effort to get on with you,” Vera said gently.

“No. I thought so at the time. But I was too full of myself.”

“What do you mean?”

He struggled to explain. It was hard without boasting and this wasn’t the time for blowing his own trumpet. “I was someone in this village then. Parish councillor. Coxswain of the launch which takes the pilots out to the ships in the river. You’ll have seen the launches if you’ve been down to the Point. Moored by the long jetty.”

She nodded.

“There’s a buzz about that. An excitement. That’s why you do it, but all the same it’s a worthwhile job and you think you deserve some respect.” He hesitated again. “Peg thought children have no obligation to their parents. She said they don’t ask to be born. The obligation all goes one way. I didn’t see it then but now I think she was right.”

Vera didn’t express an opinion on the question. “I’ve never had any kids myself,” she said.

He would have liked to ask if she’d ever wanted children. He’d assumed that all women got broody as they got older. But although he felt close to the fat woman whose presence seemed to take up half his lounge, he thought the question was a bit personal.

“How did Jeanie meet Keith Mantel?” Vera asked suddenly, and he was glad the interview had moved on to surer ground. He was better with facts.

“Here in Elvet. In the Anchor. She’d worked there part-time since she was at school. Washing up, waitressing a bit of bar work when she got older. They thought the world of her. The most reliable student they’d ever employed, Veronica the landlady said.”

“You must have been proud of her’

“Aye,” he said reluctantly. “I was. And not just about her work at the pub. About the exams and the music and everything. I was too stubborn to tell her. Most people liked me then. Mike Long, life and soul of the party, holding the village together. She didn’t. I couldn’t understand it, couldn’t forgive her for not being taken in by me.” He shot her another look. “Sorry. Just talking daft.”

“Wasn’t Jeanie still at the university when she met Mantel? I don’t understand what she was doing here. She’d hardly have come back to Elvet from Leeds for a Saturday job.”

“She was on study leave before her finals. Home for a couple of weeks before the exams. Peg had persuaded her to come back. She said it would be quieter for her to revise. Really, of course, she wanted to pamper her a bit. Feed her up. Veronica must have heard she was here because she phoned up in a panic. Would Jeanie mind helping out in the Anchor for a couple of evenings? One of the barmaids was off sick and she was rushed off her feet. So Jeanie went in as a favour’

And that’s where she met Keith Mantel?”

“So it seems. Not that she told us at the time, of course.”

“How did she come to move in with him?”

There was a silence. “That was my fault,” he said at last. “Speaking my mind without thinking. As usual.”

Vera didn’t say anything. She wasn’t going to help him out on this one.

“She came home as soon as the exams were finished. We weren’t expecting it. She’d talked about spending the summer travelling. She wanted to go to Italy.”

“On her own?”

“Aye. That was how she preferred to be. Until then at least. Any road, she came back. The story was that she needed to be around in case there were any auditions. It made sense. She’d always wanted to be a professional musician and it’s a competitive business. She said she couldn’t afford to be out of touch all summer. Peg was delighted. And Veronica took her back on in the pub.”

“How did you get on with her when she came home?”

“Better. I thought it was because she’d been away. She didn’t seem so touchy. And maybe I was getting a bit more mellow in my old age.”

“But really it was because she was in love.”

He shot a furious look at her but she wasn’t mocking him. There was nothing amused about her face. She looked very sad.

“I saw them together,” Michael said. “Her and that Mantel. He must have given her a lift home from work after the lunchtime shift. She’d have thought I’d be out. They were sitting in that flash car of his. The roof was down. They were all over each other like a rash. He had his hand up her shirt.” He felt himself blush like a girl. “It was broad daylight.”

“Why did you disapprove so much?” Vera asked. “I mean he was older than her but he wasn’t married.

And you’d wanted her to lighten up a bit. She must have been twenty-one then. Not a child any more.” He didn’t answer and she persisted. “You did recognize him when you saw them in the car together? If he was a regular in the Anchor, you must have known who he was.”

“I knew him all right. He had a reputation, did Keith Mantel. Still does, come to that.”

“What as?” she asked innocently.

As a crook,” he said. “That’s what.”

“I’ve checked his record. He’s never been charged with anything. There’ve been a couple of motoring of fences speeding mostly but nothing serious.”

“He’s never been caught, that’s all. Like I say, he’s a crook.”

And why do you say that, Mr. Long?” She grinned at him and he sensed a challenge in her words, but sympathy too. She had her own ideas about Keith Mantel. “What do you know about our Keith?”

The cramped little room seemed more airless than before. He felt his chest tighten and his breathing was shallow and fast. What was going on here? This woman was bringing him painfully back to life. She was the first real human contact he’d had since Peg had died. The first person to take him seriously.

“He’s a charmer,” Long said. “He had everyone fooled when he first moved here.”

“But not you. You’d have seen through him.”

“I had my suspicions.” He paused, teasing her, making her wait. “There was that house for a start. He wasn’t the first to apply for planning permission to convert the old chapel, but it had always been turned down before. Not just because of the risk of flooding and erosion. There was no access road, see, and this area’s not zoned for housing. Only building for agricultural purpose is allowed. There’s nothing agricultural about that mansion Mantel put up for himself. He must have greased a few palms to get that through the planning committee.”

“There’d have been bad feeling in the village about that…” She was playing straight man to him. Stooge. He knew and he didn’t mind.

“At first maybe. Then there he was in the Anchor, buying drinks all round. A donation to the cricket club to mend the pavilion roof. Another to the village school to buy a couple of computers. He had them eating out of his hand. And he got the sympathy vote for bringing up the little girl on his own. It was soon forgotten he was here under false pretences.”

“But not by you. You didn’t forget.”

Michael knew what she was doing. Making him feel clever. Special. But all the same he loved it. “I never took to him. He got himself elected onto the parish council. We didn’t see eye to eye.”

She let that go for the moment. “You must have had more reason to dislike him than that. He’d not be the first to pull a few strings to get a new house built. Not major league crime.”

“I made a few enquiries.”

“That’s the sort of thing I’d say. Maybe you should have been a detective.”

“I’d have been a good one,” he said seriously. “Not boasting, like.” Then they grinned at each other.

“What did you come up with, then?” She leaned forward so her elbows were resting on her broad knees.

The dress, which his Peg’d not have had in the house as a dish rag, was stretched between them.

Michael leaned back in his chair and half closed his eyes. All this he knew by heart. He’d just never had the chance to share it. “Mantel grew up locally, in Crill, the town up the coast. Father was a schoolmaster. Mother worked in the post office. A nice family by all accounts. But it was never enough for Mantel. He had expensive tastes, even when he was a lad. He was still at school when he started working for an elderly widow who lived close by a bit of gardening, odd jobs, shopping. A companion he called himself.”

“Kind.”

“Aye, you could call it that. When she died she left him all her money in her will.”

“She had no family?”

“A nephew in Surrey. He tried to contest it, but it seemed above board.”

“Mantel had her charmed, then?”

“Or scared her witless.”

They sat for a moment in silence. They could hear the ticking from the fat, round clock on the mantelpiece.

“That’s when he started investing in property. Still not twenty, and he bought a couple of terraced houses in the town. Let them out to students. Bought a few more. One of them burnt down. Probably faulty electrics, but no proof and he collected the insurance anyway. He was lucky no one was trapped inside. The college authorities weren’t happy, though, and by then he’d decided the students weren’t ideal tenants. Too lippy. Too ready to complain. They knew their rights. So, he started taking in families on housing benefit.”

“Lots of scope there for a scam. Especially when the benefit’s paid straight to the landlord.”

“Right. And if money was tight he’d offer his families a bit to tide them over.”

“Like I said,” Vera’s eyes were shining. He could see she was enjoying herself, ‘kind.”

“Not at the rate of interest he was charging.”

They stared at each other.

“I knew some of that,” she said at last. “I’d heard he was into benefit fraud, loans. Not for years of course. Now he’s a respectable businessman. Urban regeneration’s his thing. Working with the community. He has lunch every other week with the Prince of Wales. Almost a saint.” She paused for breath before continuing, “I never knew where he got his money in the first place. It must have taken a bit of digging around to get at that.”

“I’m a stubborn bugger. I don’t give up.”

“It must have been personal though. You must have started checking up on Mantel before he took up with your Jeanie.”

“I’d found out some of it before then. Took it more seriously later.”

“What made you start?”

“He challenged my authority in the village. Made me look a fool. I couldn’t have that. I thought if I told the others where his money had come from, the sort of man he really was, they’d drop him.”

“Did you tell them?”

“I didn’t get the chance. In the beginning I didn’t have the proof. And when Jeanie moved in with him, they’d have thought that that was what it was about. A grudge because he was screwing my daughter. Then his little girl died and it didn’t seem so important any more.”

“But you did try to tell Jeanie?”

He nodded. “That afternoon when I’d seen them together in his car outside my house. I was angry. It all came out wrong. She didn’t believe me. She packed up all her things and stormed out.”

“That was when she moved in with Mantel?”

“Yes. So it was all my fault. The girl’s death. Jeanie’s imprisonment. If I’d kept my temper none of that would have happened.”

“We don’t know that. Not yet. When Mantel asked Jeanie to leave, she came back to you?”

“She didn’t like it, but she had nowhere else to go. She was still infatuated with Mantel. She wouldn’t move away. And we’d mended things a bit between us. That was Peg’s doing. “I know you don’t like it, but we’ll lose her altogether if we don’t make the effort.” Peg invited them round for Sunday lunch Mantel, Jeanie and the daughter. You’d have thought we’d had royalty in the house the effort that went into that meal. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, sitting down at the table with that man. Watching him smiling. Knowing damn well he knew exactly what I was going through.” Michael paused. “I’ve wondered over the years if that was why he took up with Jeanie. Why he stayed with her so long, at least. If he did it just to spite me.”