A City of Strangers (16 page)

“I still wish—” said Malcolm.

“What?”

“Difficult to find a way of putting it: I wish I could have found it in me to want to save him, regret not being able to . . . ”

“He'd not have thanked you,” said Selena, and they looked at each other and laughed.

“No, I don't think thanks were in his repertoire.”

When they had collected up the smallest things, Malcolm sent Selena off to talk to the neighbors.

“I'm going to collect up the heavier stuff close to the doors, and I don't want you helping—”

“In my condition?”

“Exactly.”

Selena raised her eyebrows, but went. Malcolm went about his shiftings quietly and methodically. They had little enough left in the upstairs rooms, and only the bed was really awkward. In the bedroom he paused. He had always thought these houses should have a built-in neon sign over the bed: MAKE LOVE QUIETLY. But in fact the senior Phelans' bedroom had not shared a common wall with theirs, and the noises Malcolm remembered from their early days there were from the older girls, June and Cilla: vacuous laughter, quarrels about items of makeup, silly giggles leading to hushed confidences. Odd to think that the pleasant, quiet boy now living with them had grown up with Cilla, June, and Kevin, had shared all their experiences.

When Malcolm had got the few big pieces of furniture they possessed
ready for the removal van, he decided to go in and beg a cup of tea from Mrs. Makepeace.

“I've got both Jackie and Dale,” said the neighbor who had stood on the street with Selena on the night of the fire. She ushered her through the poky hallway into the living room, which was cheerful and pleasantly untidy, in the way that rooms that children use ought to be. The neighbor's name was Jean Bryson, and she had two children of her own. “There didn't seem to be anyone else willing to take them on,” she explained. “At the moment they're a bit subdued, so they're not much trouble. I wouldn't want it to go on too long.”

They stood at the window, looking out at the back garden, in which the four children were playing, happily enough.

“Have you heard how their mother is?” Selena asked.

“No—I was just going to ask you. I thought your bloke might have heard.”

“Nothing since yesterday morning. She was pretty bad then. I suppose you're anxious to get rid of them?”

Mrs. Bryson grinned conspiratorially.

“Like I said, I wouldn't want it to go on too long. They're Phelans, and they won't be subdued forever. You don't get the full flavor, having Michael. He's a changeling.”

“I got the full flavor living next door. What about grandparents? Couldn't they take them?”

“There aren't any that I know of—unless old Mrs. Coppins is still alive, and she'll be in a home somewhere if she is. Last time she was round here—Christmastime it was, three or four years ago—she came out into the street after Christmas dinner and started dancing around and undressing herself. Jack stood at the gate egging her on, if you'll believe it. Mary did at least have the decency to go and take her inside.”

The two women sat down in armchairs, intent on a good natter.

“No Phelans left alive then?” Selena asked.

“No. Beer and fags buried them years ago.”

“Were both the Phelans from round here?”

“He was from The Wattles—council estate on t'other side of Burtle Park—but he went to school at Burtle Middle when it was still the Secondary Modern. I know because I was there ten years later and he was still a legend. Teachers used to throw his name around, to prove that however rowdy and
mean we might get, they'd had Jack Phelan in their time and they weren't impressed. Mary was five or six years younger than Jack, so they wouldn't have overlapped in Burtle Secondary. It was quite a bit later when he knocked her up and they had to get married.”

“A bit uncharacteristic that, I'd have thought.”

“Getting married because the lass was pregnant? No, you did in them days.”

“What, in the permissive sixties?”

“I think permissiveness took a hell of a time filtering down to Sleate. . . . But, of course, you're right: If it hadn't suited Jack he wouldn't have married her. The fact was, his parents were getting past it, and he could see the time coming when they'd be beyond cooking and providing for him. He just had the occasional laboring job and was generally an encumbrance, so the cooking and providing were getting more and more reluctant as he grew older. So he and Mary teamed up—one as bad as the other, but at least he got his clothes washed now and again, I suppose, and a meal cooked.”

“Is that when they moved here?”

“Not quite. They came from a high-rise round Whateley way somewhere. That was a year or two later, when Kevin was a toddler and June was on the way.”

“I always thought Kevin was the worst thing about them,” said Selena, shivering.

“He is that. When he was small he was like some malicious imp from a fairy story, and it's developed year by year since then. If you want to find out about Kevin—you are asking questions for Malcolm, aren't you?—”

Selena felt embarrassed.

“Well, in a way. The police are anxious to get a bit of background. Not everyone around the Estate is willing to talk to the police. I can understand. I used to feel like that myself—probably still would, if I hadn't married Malcolm.”

“Well, I'll tell you who you could talk to. It's Mrs. Thornton, down on the corner with Grange Street. The little girl next door to her, Gail Mattingley, she's Cilla Phelan's best friend. Cilla's been staying there since the night of the fire. And Gail's elder brother is Kevin Phelan's best mate—partner in crime—call it what you like. In fact, I think the two of them are sharing a flat at the moment. The mother's thick as two planks, and silly with it—no use talking to her. But the next-door neighbor, Betty Thornton, she knows all there is to know about the Phelan kids. Had 'em up to
here,
one way or another, over the years. If it's background to the Phelans you want, it's her you should go and have a word with.”

As Malcolm Cray went out the front door of his old home, the acrid smell from next door overwhelmed him. The police constable who was standing sentry at and around the Phelan home, bored out of his mind as men are doing such necessary jobs, strolled down to the gate as Malcolm passed.

“It was you as saved them last night, wasn't it, Malcolm?”

“Yes. Those that were saved.”

“You'd never have got the father out. It's incredible in there. Want to have a look round?”

Impelled by he knew not what unhealthy curiosity, Malcolm nodded.

The hallway inside the front door was a charred ruin, with heaps of what probably had once been clothing, now quite unrecognizable, lying around on the floor. The kitchen was nearly as bad: There had been a chip-pan full of oil on the stove, no doubt a permanent feature, and this had rendered that corner an inferno which now held skeletal shapes of stove and cupboard only. Scattered around were burned food packages, tins twisted out of shape, blackened plates with charred scraps of food on them. There was a little box room off from the hall which had apparently served as a bedroom: The shape of an old mattress could be made out on the floor, and the charred remnants of clothes, a few books, and toys.

“The middle girl slept here,” said the constable. “You can tell by the size of the clothes.”

“I thought I hadn't heard her and her sister recently,” said Malcolm.

Inside the living room the mess was indescribable. Being further from the source of the fire, the flames had taken less firm hold here, though the chair in front of the television set was a collapsed ruin.

“They say he'd've been dead well before that happened,” said the constable, who seemed to get a ghoulish pleasure from acting as tour guide. “Fumes. In fact, the firemen got to him just as the chair was going up. Foam filling. That old sofa's horsehair, so it's not so bad.”

Around the room, on every surface and scattered all over the floor, were the detritus of family living, grotesquely blackened: baby clothes, disposable nappies, toy trains, a skateboard, a picture book, an old wooden jigsaw, cans of beer and soft drinks, a melted chocolate bar. Just getting around this room must have been hazardous, so that one would have thought it simpler and more labor-saving to do a quick cleanup now and again. That had not been Mary Phelan's view, apparently.

“Want to see upstairs?” asked the constable.

“No, thanks,” said Malcolm, escaping. “I've seen upstairs.”

Lottie Makepeace, back in her home, but still feeling a bit groggy and upset, was very pleased to see him. “You're a hero round here, that's what you are,” she said, happy to participate in his local fame. She had the partiality of a woman of her generation for a well-set-up young male. In no time he was sitting at her kitchen table, where his wife had sat not two weeks before. Lottie loved her kitchen, and Malcolm could see her point: The little room seemed to hold the essence of bakings and fryings stretching far back into the past. But there was a present smell as well—that of a sponge cake, currently sitting in the oven. Malcolm was still stirring his tea and enjoying the warmth and the smell when Lottie looked at him and said:

“And are you on duty or off, young man?”

He looked at her sharply, then shifted in his chair and smiled.

“Off. But I wouldn't want you to think that anything you say will be off the record.”

“That's what I thought. You can't put one over on me, young man. You didn't come here because you didn't have the makings of a cup of tea in your old home, and you didn't even come to see how I was. You came to pick my old brains about Jack Phelan.”

“That's right. All the Phelans. And the Estate.”

“Ah—you're looking for a motive. But you've got a problem there, Selena's man, and you don't need me to tell you what it is. There was no one round here could stand him, nor his family.”

“I know that. So does the officer in charge. Too many motives, that's the problem. But are they really motives? I know all about the general dislike and distrust—couldn't help knowing, living next door to him. But what I'm after is something special, something worth killing for. Tell me, were you living in this house when they moved in next door?”

“Oh, aye. My Tom was working at the Sleate Infirmary, and I did odd mornings at the newsagent's in Battersby Road. In fact, our Linda would still have been at school.”

“So you wouldn't have welcomed the Phelans as neighbors?”

She looked straight at him.

“Worst thing that ever happened to this Estate. We'd all jogged along quite happily till then.”

“That must have been fifteen or twenty years ago. What was he like then?”

“Same as he was when you knew him. He never changed, only . . . ripened, you might say. He'd got everybody's back up first week they were here, and things only went downhill after that. He just enjoyed the hostility—flourished on it.”

“You're not trying to paint a rosy picture, anyway.”

“Why should I? We'd all lived with him for years. You'd best be asking yourself why someone on the Estate should want to kill him
now
.”

“We are, we are,” said Malcolm. He frowned. “Why do you think he so loved putting people's backs up?”

Lottie Makepeace pondered.

“I think it was pure mischief. Or impure mischief, malicious mischief. What's that word that teachers use about kids? Disruptive, that's it. I think he was naturally disruptive. He couldn't stand things being peaceful and pleasant and jogging along nicely. He loved fights, slanging matches, noise, breaking furniture—and he really liked hurting people too. He was like a football hooligan grown up—a nasty schoolboy all his life. If he'd been alone that would have been his business, but he had a family . . . ”