A City of Strangers (12 page)

“Mr. Copperwhite? It's Lynn Packard here. I don't know whether you've heard?—”

“Yes.”

“Right. It's a bit of a stunner, isn't it? Well, I've been talking to Algy Cartwright, who really started all this—”

“Ah.”

“—and we agreed that the best thing we can do is to keep quiet about our little efforts to . . . stop the Phelans moving into The Hollies.”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“It's not, after all, as if we found there was very much that we could do, is it?”

“No. Perhaps fortunately, as it turned out.”

“Right. We
said
some rather silly things at our last meeting—”

“We did.”

“—but we did recognize there was nothing we could do. The question is, how many people know?”

“I was just going to bring that up. There's the estate agents and the building society people, of course. No reason why they should say anything. But then there's Dr. Pickering.”

“Yes, I've been thinking about him.”

“So far as I know he's not the police doctor, but he did tell Adrian Eastlake he was the Phelans' doctor, so it's quite possible the police will talk to him.”

“Yes . . . He wasn't very cooperative . . . ”

“Maybe we expected too much of him. It was his pocket that would have been hit, when all's said and done. It's not a seller's market any longer, with interest rates soaring. But the point is, I have the impression that he's a mite touchy, and if we approached him—”

“To keep quiet?”

“Well, yes—he might well get on his high horse. Could even talk about medical ethics, and so on. My
feeling
—it's no more than that—is that we should let sleeping dogs lie.”

“I think you're right. Of course, there may be others who know. Cartwright's the sort of person who goes to pubs. He may have talked in the Belfield Arms. Then there are the people in the basement flats . . . ”

“Yes. They certainly know. Would they have talked? It hardly concerned them, really. Cartwright's tenant seems to have a padlock on his mouth, I don't know the woman in The Hollies, and then there's the teacher in Daphne Bridewell's basement.”

“I could ask Jennifer to have a word with her. Oh, yes, and I presume you'll have a word with your wife.”

There was silence at the other end.

“Sorry, I meant your good lady.”

“Yes, of course. Well, I'll try.”

“Adrian? Lynn Packard here. I suppose you've heard?”

“Heard?”

“About the Phelans.”

“What about them?”

“There was a fire at their house last night. He's dead.”

“Oh my God! How . . . terrible.”

“The rest of the family were all right, or weren't there, I don't know the details. The mother, though, is in hospital and seems pretty ill, from what I heard.”

“Just him?”

“Just him. We don't know anything about the fire yet, I mean how it started and so on, but we thought it best to be on the safe side—”

“The safe side?”

“About our . . . endeavors to keep him out.”

“I get you. Yes, absolutely.”

“We thought we wouldn't rush into saying anything about those. They've got nothing to do with the matter.”

“Absolutely not!”

“They may come out, of course. It may be that there's more who know than we're reckoning on. And there's Pickering . . . ”

“Yes.”

“Nothing to be done there, we decided. Anyway, all we're saying is, we're not rushing in to talk about it.”

“Right.”

“So keep mum, eh? Absolutely mum.”

“Not a word. . . . It's terrible, but I'm glad he's dead.”

“Absolutely quiet.”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Eastlake, it's Algy Cartwright.”

“Oh, hello, Algy. I'm afraid Adrian is at work, if it's him you're wanting to talk to.”

“No, it's you, Mrs. Eastlake. I don't suppose you'll have heard about the fire at the Phelans'.”

“Oh, yes.”

“You mean you have?”

“Yes. I saw from the window that there'd been a fire on the Estate, and I waited downstairs for the milkman.”

“I see. So you'll know that Jack Phelan is dead.”

“Yes. What a blessing . . . I mean that the others were saved. Though, really, to be absolutely honest, when I think how Adrian hated and feared that man—”

“What I'm ringing about, Mrs. Eastlake, is that we think we should be very careful about what we say.”

“But, of course.”

“We don't know anything about what started the fire as yet, but we don't want it thought that we were in any way involved.”

“Naturally.”

“It's not something we'd have had anything to do with.”

“No . . . though it does seem in a way providential.”

“It's that sort of talk we have to be careful about, Mrs. Eastlake. It's very important you say nothing that could bring this thing back . . . well, to us here in Wynton Lane.”

“Oh, I quite understand. And you know that I don't talk to anyone.”

Except, Algy noted, the milkman.

Thus the phone conversations on the morning after the fire. It was a brave effort, but quite unavailing. For, unseen by Lynn Packard as he drove off that morning, unseen by Algy Cartwright as he came down the slope from the Estate deep in the
Yorkshire Post,
unseen by Adrian Eastlake as he walked up Wynton Lane toward his bus stop, a message had been spray-painted in red on the side wall of Daphne Bridewell's house—the first house in the Lane and the one whose wall faced up toward the Belfield Grove Estate. The message read:

ONE OF THIS LOT KILED MY DAD

M
argaret Copperwhite was busy all Friday morning at the Prosecutions Department of the West Yorkshire Police Headquarters in Sleate. Some big cases were coming before the courts the following week, and the department was more than usually snowed under with paperwork. It was not until twelve that she was able to snatch a break in the police canteen. At the self-service counter she got a pot of tea and an egg mayonnaise sandwich, and added a copy of the
Yorkshire Evening Advertiser.
She saw the headline FAMILY FIRE TRAGEDY as she settled down at her table, and, when she had poured herself a cup of tea and taken a bite at her sandwich, she began reading the story in the lower reaches of the front page. Her interest was immediately aroused.

“Good Lord!”

“What is it?”

She looked up and saw Mike Oddie, a superintendent and a good friend. He it was who had taught her most about liaising with the detective force in those strange first days back in a regular job. Perhaps his natural kindness had been strengthened by fellow feeling; like hers, his children were grown up and moved away; he had lost his wife, not through divorce but cancer. He understood that in her case this time of loss and loneliness was augmented by the strangeness of taking up a job, after years when domesticity had seemed all that she needed. He had been, Margaret acknowledged, a brick—covering up lapses and omissions even as he taught her the work and encouraged her in her special fields of interest. He was comfortably built, with a generous smile and a warm manner, though she was aware that both hid a steely backbone. She gestured to the seat opposite.

“Oh, nothing really. It's just this fire on the Belfield Grove Estate—”

“Yes?”

“It seems to be a family that my ex-husband was talking about the other day when we met for lunch. An appalling slum family, he called them.”

“That would be them. Why was he interested?”

“Said they had got hold of some money and were planning to move into one of the houses in Wynton Lane, where he lives. I expect you can guess the scenario: usual middle-class panic, action groups and all that—we must protect our children, our environment, our house prices.”

“I can guess.”

“I shouldn't be so cynical. I expect I would feel the same if I lived next door.”

“Maybe. Anyway that explains something.”

“What?”

“There was a message spray-painted on the wall of the end house in Wynton Lane this morning: ‘One of this lot killed my Dad.' Couldn't manage to spell ‘killed.' Never took much to education, except street education, young Kevin Phelan.”

Margaret stirred her tea, frowning.

“He got in fast, didn't he?”

“Very fast indeed.”

That was a matter that interested Mike Oddie. A policeman had banged at the door of the flatlet Kevin Phelan shared with a mate at 3
A.M
. the previous night. There had been no problem with the address: Kevin was on their books. At the third bang Kevin had appeared at the door, rubbing sleep from his eyes and opening it no more than a cautious crack. He was wearing only boxer shorts, which flapped around his meager legs and gave him the appearance of something out of L.S. Lowry trying to look like something out of David Hockney. Even as the constable watched, the ratlike expression began creeping through the sleep and forming itself on his face.

“I ain't done nothing.”

It was clearly an automatic response to any encounter with the police. The constable pushed himself inside, feeling his message was unsuitable for delivery on a first-floor landing. The flatlet smelled of sleep, and of much more. Kevin had been sleeping under a rug on the sofa, while his mate had the tiny bedroom. The only decoration the flat had been given was a swastika banner on the wall, and a large poster depicting the army of the Third Reich marching in triumph into some unfortunate foreign capital. For the rest, the room was indescribably—or rather all too describably—dirty.

The constable, eager to escape from the concentrated smell of underclothes, told Kevin Phelan what had happened—quickly, but not without sympathy.

“Christ! Dead?”

Grief or feeling were obviously not within Kevin's range of emotions.

“I'm afraid so. Your mother's very, very sick, but the doctors haven't given up hope that she'll pull through. She's in the Infirmary. The younger children are all all right, but we need to contact your sister June.”

A glint came into Kevin's sharp, rodent eyes.

“I know where she might be. I'll find her myself.”

The policeman had nodded and come away.

“Whether he did manage to find her or not we don't know,” Mike Oddie said to Margaret Copperwhite in the canteen as he finished his account later that day. “What he obviously did do at some time was go over and spray this message on the house in Wynton Lane.”

“Some young people automatically resort to the spray gun at times of emotional crisis,” said Margaret.

“I have yet to be convinced that that young man is capable of emotion,” said Oddie. “Except hate, and anger, and vindictiveness, of course. Remember I've had dealings with him in the past.”