The Sculptress (19 page)

“Till he went home, that is. She had him back on the thieving quicker than you can say knife.”

Roz thought for a moment.

“Did Olive tell you she was going out with one of them?”

“Not inso many words.” She tapped her forehead.

“Put two and two together, didn’t I? She was that pleased with herself, lost some weight, bought some pretty dresses from that boutique her sister went to work in, dabbed some colour on her face.

Made herself look quite bonny, didn’t she? Stood to reason there was a man behind it somewhere. Asked her once who it was and she just smiled and said, “No names no pack drill, Flower, because Mummy would have a fit if she ever found out.” And then, two or three days later, I came across her with one of the O’Brien boys. Her face gave her away, as sunny as the day is long it was. That was him all right the one she was soppy over but he turned away as I passed, and I never did know exactly which O’Brien he was.”

“But what made you think it was an O’Brien anyway?”

“The uniform,” said Lily.

“They all wore the same uniform.”

“They were in the Army?” asked Roz in surprise.

“Leathers, they call them.”

“Oh, I see. You mean they’re bikers, they ride motorbikes.”

“That’s it. Hell’s Angels.”

Roz drew her brows together in a perplexed frown. She had told Hal with absolute conviction that Olive was not the rebellious type. But Hell’s Angels, for God’s sake! Could a convent girl get more rebellious than that?

“Are you sure about this, Lily?”

“Well, as to being sure, I don’t know as I’m sure about anything any more. There was a time when I was sure that governments knew better how to run things than I did. Can’t say as I do these days. There was a time when I was sure that if God was in his heaven all would be right with the world. Can’t say as I think that now. If God’s there, dear, He’s blind, deaf, and dumb, far as I’m concerned. But, yes, I am sure my poor Dumpling had fallen for one of the O’Briens. You’d only to look at her to see she was head over heels in love with the lad.”

She compressed her lips.

“Bad business. Bad business.”

Roz sipped the bitter tea.

“And you think it was the O’Brien lad who murdered Olive’s mother and sister?”

“Must have been, mustn’t it? As I said, dear, bad apples.”

“Did you tell the police any of this?” asked Roz curiously.

“I might have done if they’d asked, but I didn’t see no point in volunteering the information. If Dumpling wanted them kept out, then that was her affair. And, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t that keen to run up against them. Stick together, they do, and my Frank had passed on not many months before. Wouldn’t have stood a chance if they’d come looking, would I?”

“Where do they live?”

“The Barrow Estate, back of the High Street. Council likes to keep ‘em together, under their eye so to speak. It’s a shocking place. Not an honest family there, and they’re not all O’Briens neither. Den of thieves, that’s what it is.”

Roz took another thoughtful sip from her cup.

“Are you prepared to let me use this information, Lily? You do realise that if there’s anything in it it could help Olive.”

“Course I do, dear. Why would I tell you otherwise?”

“The police would become involved. They’d want to talk to you.”

“I know that.”

“In which case your name would be out, and the O’Briens could still come looking for you.”

The old eyes appraised her shrewdly.

“You’re only a slip of a thing, dear, but you’ve survived a beating by the look of it.

Reckon I can too. In any case,” she went on stoutly, “I’ve spent six years feeling bad about not speaking up, and I was that glad when young Mick phoned and said you was coming, you wouldn’t believe. You go ahead, dear, and don’t mind about me.

It’s safer here, anyway, than my old place. They could have set the whole thing alight and I’d have been dead long before anyone’d have thought of phoning for help.”

If Roz had expected to see a chapter of Hell’s Angels rampaging about the Barrow Estate she was disappointed. At lunchtime on a Friday it was an unexceptional place, where only the odd dog barked and young women, in ones and twos, pushed babies in prams piled high with shopping for the weekend. Like too many council estates there was a naked and un cared for look about it, a recognition that what it offered was not what its tenants wanted. If individuality was present in these dull uniform walls then it was inside, away from view. But Roz doubted its existence. She had a sense of empty spaces marking time where people waited for somebody else to offer them something better.

Like her, she thought. Like her flat.

As she drove away she passed a large school, advertising itself with a tired sign beside the gate. Parkway Comprehensive.

Children milled about the tarmac, the sound of their voices loud in the warm air. Roz slowed the car to watch them for a moment. Groups of children played the same games whichever school they went to, but she could see why Gwen had turned her nose up at Parkway and had sent her girls to the convent. Its close proximity to the Barrow Estate would worry even the most liberal of parents, and Gwen certainly wasn’t that.

But it was ironic, if what Lily and Mr. Hayes had said was true, that both Gwen’s daughters had succumbed to the attractions of this other world. Was that in spite of or because of their mother? she wondered.

She told herself she needed a tame policeman to give her the low-down on the O’Briens, and her road led inevitably to the Poacher. Being lunchtime the door to the restaurant was unlocked, but the tables were as empty as ever. She selected one well away from the window and sat down, her dark glasses firmly in place.

“You won’t need those,” said Hawksley’s amused voice from the kitchen doorway.

“I don’t intend to put the lights on.”

She smiled, but did not remove the glasses.

“I’d like to order some lunch.”

“OK.” He held the door wide.

“Come into the kitchen. It’s more comfortable in there.”

“No, I’ll have it in here.” She stood up.

“At the table in the window. I’d like the door open and’ she looked for amplifiers and found them ‘some loud music, preferably jazz. Let’s liven the place up a bit. Nobody wants to eat in a morgue, for God’s sake.” She seated herself in the window.

“No,” he said, an odd inflexion in his voice.

“If you want lunch, you eat it in here with me. Otherwise, you go somewhere else.”

She studied him thoughtfully.

“This has nothing to do with the recession, has it?”

“What hasn’t?”

“Your non-existent customers.”

He gestured towards the kitchen.

“Are you going or staying?”

“Staying,” she said, standing up. What was this all about? she wondered.

“It’s really none of your concern, Miss Leigh,” he murmured, reading her mind.

“I suggest you stick to what you know and leave me to deal with my affairs in my own way.” Geof had phoned through the results of his check the previous Monday.

“She’s kosher,” he had said.

“A London-based author. Divorced.

Had a daughter who died in a car accident. No previous connections with anyone in the area. Sorry, Hal.”

“OK,” Roz said mildly, ‘but you must admit it’s very intriguing. I was effectively warned off eating here by a police man when I went to the station to find out where you were. I’ve been wondering why ever since. With friends like that you don’t really need enemies, do you?”

His smile didn’t reach his eyes.

“Then you’re very brave to accept my hospitality a second time.” He held the door wide.

She walked past him into the kitchen.

“Just greedy,” she said.

“You’re a better cook than I am. In any case, I intend to pay for what I eat unless, of course’ her smile didn’t reach her eyes either ‘this isn’t a restaurant at all, but a front for something else.”

That amused him.

“You’ve an overactive imagination.” He pulled out a chair for her.

“Maybe,” she said, sitting down.

“But I’ve never met a restaurateur before who barricades himself behind bars, presides over empty tables, has no staff, and looms up in the dark looking like something that’s been fed through a mincing machine.”

She arched her eyebrows.

“If you didn’t cook so well, I’d be even more inclined to think this wasn’t a restaurant.”

He leaned forward abruptly and removed her dark glasses, folding them and laying them on the table.

“And what should I deduce from this?” he said, unexpectedly moved by the damage done to her beautiful eyes.

“That you’re not a writer because someone’s left his handprints all over your face?” He frowned suddenly.

“It wasn’t Olive, was it?”

She looked surprised.

“Of course not.”

“Who was it, then?”

She dropped her gaze.

“No one. It’s not important.”

He waited for a moment.

“Is it someone you care about?”

“No.” She da sped her hands loosely on the table top.

“Rather the reverse. It’s someone I don’t care about.” She looked up with a half smile.

“Who beat you up, Sergeant? Someone you care about?”

He pulled open a fudge door and examined its contents.

“One of these days your passion for poking your nose into other people’s business is going to get you into trouble. What do you fancy?

Lamb?”

“I really came to see you for some more information,” she told him over coffee.

Humour creased his eyes. He really was extraordinarily attractive, she thought, wistfully aware that the attraction was all one way. Lunch had been a friendly but distant meal, with a large sign between them saying: so far and no further.

“Go on, then.”

“Do you know the O’Brien family? They live on the Barrow Estate.”

“Everyone knows the O’Briens.” He frowned at her.

“But if there’s a connection between them and Olive I’ll eat my hat.”

“You’re going to have galloping indigestion then,” she said acidly.

“I’ve been told she was going out with one of the sons at the time of the murders. Probably Gary, the youngest. What’s he like? Have you met him?”

He linked his hands behind his head.

“Someone’s winding you up,” he murmured.

“Gary is marginally brighter than the rest of them, but I’d guess his educational level is still about fourteen years old. They are the most useless, inadequate bunch I’ve ever come across. The only thing they know how to do is petty thieving and they don’t even do that very well.

There’s Ma O’Brien and about nine children, mostly boys, all grown up now, and, when they’re not in prison, they play box and cox in a three-bed roomed house on the estate.”

“Aren’t any of them married?”

“Not for long. Divorce is more prevalent in that family than marriage.

The wives usually make other arrangements while their men are inside.”

He flexed his laced fingers.

“They produce a lot of babies, though, if the fact that a third generation of O’Briens has started appearing regularly in the juvenile courts is anything to go by.” He shook his head.

“Someone’s winding you up,” he said again.

“For all her sins Olive wasn’t stupid and she’d have to have been brain-dead to fall for a jerk like Gary O’Brien.”

“Are they really as bad as that?” she asked him curiously.

“Or is this police animosity?”

He smiled.

“I’m not police, remember? But they’re that bad,” he assured her.

“Every patch has families like the O’Briens.

Sometimes, if you’re really unlucky, you get an estateful of them, like the Barrow Estate, when the council decides to lump all its bad apples into one basket and then expects the wretched police to throw a cordon round it.” He gave a humourless laugh.

“It’s one of the reasons I left the Force. I got sick to death of being sent out to sweep up society’s messes. It’s not the police who create these ghettos, it’s the councils and the governments, and ultimately society itself.”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” she said.

“In that case why do you despise the O’Briens so much? They sound as if they need help and support rather than condemnation.”

He shrugged.

“I suppose it’s because they’ve already had more help and support than you or I will ever be offered. They take everything society gives them and then demand more.

There’s no quid pro quo with people like that. They put nothing in to compensate for what they’ve had out. Society owes them a living and, by God, they make sure society pays, usually in the shape of some poor old woman who has all her savings stolen.”

His lips thinned.

“If you’d arrested those worthless shits as often as I have, you’d despise them, too. I don’t deny they represent an underdass of society’s making, but I resent their unwillingness to try and rise above it.” He saw her frown.

“You look very disapproving. Have I offended your liberal sensibilities?”

“No,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.

“I was just thinking how like Mr. Hayes you sound. Remember him?

“What shall I say?” she mimicked the old man’s soft burr ‘“They should all be strung up from the nearest lamppost and shot.” She smiled when he laughed.

“My sympathies with the criminal classes are a trifle frayed at the moment,” he said after a moment.

“More accurately, my sympathies in general are frayed.”

“Classic symptoms of stress,” she said lightly, watching him.

“Under pressure we always reserve our compassion for ourselves.”

He didn’t answer.

“You said the O’Briens are inadequate,” Roz prompted.

“Perhaps they can’t rise above their situation.”

“I believed that once,” he admitted, toying with his empty wine glass, ‘when I first joined the police force, but you have to be very naY ve to go on believing it. They’re professional thieves who simply don’t subscribe to the same values as the rest of us hold. It’s not a case of can’t, but more a case of won’t. Different ball game entirely.” He smiled at her.

“And if you’re a policeman who wants to hold on to the few drops of human kindness that remain to you, you get out quick the minute you realise that. Otherwise you end up as unprincipled as the people you’re arresting.”