A Lesser Evil (28 page)

Why was all this happening to her? Cut off from her family just because she chose a man they didn’t approve of, no one to turn to for comfort or advice. She wanted Patty, but she couldn’t even phone her and tell her what had happened without having to go through her mother and she knew she wouldn’t get any sympathy from that quarter.

Once upstairs she flung herself on to her bed and cried bitterly.

She was still lying there sobbing when Dan came home. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘Has something else happened?’

‘Fat lot you’d care if it had,’ she sobbed out. ‘Nobody cares about me.’

‘I’m knackered and hungry, Fifi,’ he said, his voice strained and weary. ‘If you’ve got some grievance, spit it out now. Then I’ll go and get some fish and chips for us both.’

‘Grievance?’ Fifi spat at him. ‘I’ve had a horrible day, everyone’s been mean to me. And all you think about is eating fish and chips!’

‘Can’t you just think about someone else for a change?’ he snapped at her. ‘Look at me, I’m filthy, I’ve been working in eighty degrees for ten hours. I’ll try to be sympathetic when I’ve had a bath, changed and had some food.’

He didn’t wait for her reply but grabbed a bath towel and stomped off down to the bathroom.

Fifi could only cry harder then. If Dan had no time for her, there was no one left.

Chapter Eleven

‘Fer fuck’s sake slow down, Dan, it ain’t a bleedin’ race!’ Chas exclaimed as Dan snatched a brick from the hod before Chas had even had a chance to take the bricks out and stack them.

Dan looked askance at his labourer. He had been so immersed in thinking about Fifi he hadn’t been aware he’d been laying the bricks like a madman.

‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ll stop for a fag.’

Once Dan had sat down on the edge of the scaffolding platform, his legs dangling over the side, he lit up a cigarette. Chas sat down beside him. ‘What’s up with you anyway? You’ve been on another planet for days now. Is the old woman giving you grief?’

Dan didn’t like Chas Bovey. He thought the man was a lazy and dishonest thug who would sell his own grandmother for a few bob. He only did labouring work in the summer because he liked to build up muscle and get a suntan. The rest of the year he probably spent housebreaking or stealing cars. But Dan always did his best to get on with workmates, so he held out a cigarette to him. ‘I wouldn’t say she’s giving me grief,’ he sighed. ‘But she ain’t herself. That kid being killed has knocked her for six.’

A fortnight ago tomorrow, Dan had been looking forward to surprising Fifi by taking her to Brighton. He could remember wondering where she kept her swimsuit, and how he could manage to pack it into a bag with his trunks and two towels without her seeing it. He decided he couldn’t, so instead he’d make out they were going to a swimming pool. He wasn’t going to tell her where they were really going until they were on the tube heading for Victoria.

Two hours later that same day as he had made his way home, he was still trying to dream up a good excuse for setting off so early in the morning. Then he’d turned into Dale Street to be confronted with the sight of police cars and a hysterical horde of neighbours.

As soon as he was told that Angela was dead and Fifi had found her body, his first thought had been that this was way too much for her so soon after losing the baby.

Now, a fortnight later, he just didn’t know what to do for the best. Fifi was either locked into brooding silence or going on and on about the murder to the point where he felt he might scream. Moving away from Dale Street was clearly vital, but it would take time to find another place, and any decent accommodation required a hefty deposit and advance rent. As their savings had taken a hammering in the two weeks he was off work without pay, they just didn’t have that kind of money right now.

The only way to get some extra money was to go back to working all day Saturdays. But as Fifi’s moods were so unpredictable, she might go spare when he told her. Only the other night she’d said that if he’d come home at lunch-time that day as he always used to on Saturdays, she wouldn’t have been the one that found Angela.

He classed the evening of that day as the very worst in his life. On top of all the noise and police activity out in the street, Fifi’s distress and the tension in the air as they waited for the Muckles to come home, he was tormented with guilt.

He should have gone to the police and the NSPCC when Angela was hurt before. But he’d smugly thought that the kid would be safe once he marked Alfie’s card. How could anyone be so stupid as to believe a nutcase like that could be stopped by just the threat of a good kicking?

Alfie and Molly had been charged jointly with the murder and were remanded in Brixton and Holloway prisons respectively. Mike was also in Brixton, charged with being an accessory. No one knew for certain where Dora was, but it was generally thought she had been placed in a mental institution. Dan really hoped that Alfie and Molly would be hanged, but he would always be ashamed of himself for not having done more to protect Angela.

The more Fifi told him about what had happened to her, the angrier he felt with himself. He knew the right thing was to let Fifi talk and talk about it until she’d got it out of her system, but he couldn’t bear to hear it.

‘You two ain’t havin’ much luck lately,’ Chas remarked, breaking Dan’s reverie.

‘You can say that again,’ Dan said with a weary sigh.

Just a few weeks ago in the first spell of hot weather, he could remember sitting up on some scaffolding, just like he and Chas were doing now, smoking a fag and basking in the sunshine. Down below was all the usual chaos of a building site, the churning of cement-mixers, clonking of scaffolding poles, buzz of saws, shouted banter between the men and the occasional wolf whistle when a pretty girl walked past the site. He thought that day that he was the man who had everything. A beautiful wife, a baby on the way, a job he loved, good mates, and he hoped he’d soon have enough money for a deposit on a house of their own.

Then he was attacked, and Fifi lost their baby. Then Angela’s death.

Now it looked as though their marriage was falling apart.

‘If I was you, mate, I’d slap ’er and pack ’er off to her mum’s for a while,’ Chas said with a chuckle. ‘You could come down the pub with us of an evening, pull a few birds, ’ave a laugh.’

Dan bristled. Chas often talked about slapping women and by his own admission he’d abandoned his wife and two children. He was older than Dan, in his mid-thirties, but with his Beatle-style haircut and seemingly innocent-looking blue eyes he looked far younger, and young girls made a beeline for him. ‘I’ve done all the bird-pulling I want to do,’ Dan said sharply. ‘And I’ve never slapped a woman in my life. I despise blokes that do.’

He got up then and went back to the bricklaying, leaving Chas staring at him open-mouthed.

As Dan carried on laying his bricks and mentally calculating how many Saturday afternoons he’d have to work to get the money they needed, Fifi was crying.

She had spent a lot of time crying in the past two weeks. Anything could start it. The frustration of not being able to use her right hand, brooding on something Dan had said or not said. That there was still no letter from her mother, and because she wanted to tell her family about what she was going through, but couldn’t. Sometimes she was afraid she was going mad.

Ray Charles’s ‘Take These Chains from My Heart’ was playing on the radio, and that’s just how she felt, as if she was chained. She might be able to get up and walk about, she could go out if she wanted to, but her mind was chained to this hideous business.

She could actually feel the suspicion, hate and fear in Dale Street. People who had always been gregarious were now scuttling by without so much as a hello or a smile. Those who had always lingered outside their doors gossiping hurried indoors now. Children had stopped playing in the street, and when the pub turned out at night there was no jovial laughter or loud goodbyes.

Malevolence wafted out from number 11, even though it lay empty. Police were still coming and going there, often carrying out boxes or bags which could possibly be evidence. Reporters came to the street frequently, searching for people who would talk to them. Then there were the sightseers, some even taking photographs of the house.

After two weeks there should have been signs that people were recovering from the shock, but the continuing unease and gloom left an impression that the neighbourhood had been permanently shattered.

Part of this was because the police were still questioning anyone with a known grudge against the Muckles. Frank had been carried off to the police station and questioned again for four hours. Stan had been kept even longer. Neither man had revealed what had been said, and that had been further cause for gossip. It appeared, too, that the police were still trying to establish the identity of the card players who had been at Alfie’s on the Friday night before the murder.

As Detective Inspector Roper had stated that Angela was killed on Saturday morning, long after the card players had left, Fifi couldn’t see why they had any importance in the investigation. But she supposed the police had to speak to everyone to try to establish Alfie and Molly’s mood the previous evening.

Fifi and Dan had gone along to the pub last week in an effort to cheer themselves up. But it only made them feel worse, for instead of jollity, all they found was that a great many of the regulars had turned into bar-room lawyers, arguing about whether Alfie would hang or get life imprisonment. There were also those who boasted that they had inside information about the case.

One of these men, Johnny Milkins, a hard case with a big scaffolding company, claimed to have friends in the police force, and he said that the police were not entirely convinced that Alfie or even Molly had killed Angela. Everyone pooh-poohed that, of course; they didn’t even believe Johnny had friends in the force. But Fifi knew he must have, for something he’d said could only have come from one of the officers who attended the scene of the crime.

Johnny’s actual words were, ‘A bloke that’s twisted enough to fuck his own seven-year-old wouldn’t bother getting a clean sheet to cover her. Someone else did that, after they smothered her.’

The facts about the sexual abuse had filtered out very quickly after the event. It was this which had sent everyone into a spin of savage hatred and disgust. But the sheet had never been mentioned.

Fifi had mentally trawled over every last detail of what she saw that day in number 11. The clean sheet was the one thing which didn’t fit in. Every bed in that house was like a filthy rat’s nest, so why would Alfie even think to search out a clean sheet to cover the child? Fifi had considered that it could have been done in a moment of remorse at what he’d done. Or maybe it was just an attempt to conceal Angela should any of his family open the door. But whatever the reason was, it was uncharacteristic behaviour.

Fifi began to fear that if Angela hadn’t been killed by one of her parents, that meant the real killer was still at large. He could be walking around amongst them, drinking in the pub, using the corner shop. Any child in the neighbourhood could be his next victim!

She did her best to suppress this vague fear as it did appear to be entirely groundless, but the more she analysed things Johnny Milkins had said, the more anxious she became.

Johnny certainly seemed to know a great deal about the police investigation. He claimed that in Alfie’s statement he’d said he was so drunk at the card game the night before that he went to bed early, leaving the other men, whom he refused to name, still playing. As the other players often dossed down at his house, Alfie insisted that it was quite possible for one of them to have gone up to the top-floor bedroom and got into bed with the child.

Alfie also said that he’d told Angela the day before that she wouldn’t be going to the seaside with the rest of the family because she’d been naughty. When he heard her crying the following morning he ignored her, and never even looked in her bedroom before leaving the house.

Several people in Dale Street had confirmed that Alfie had four or five men in for the card game the night before. There were also people who had heard some of them leave around two-thirty, but agreed it was possible that one or two of them could have remained in Alfie’s house. It was possible, too, that they might still have been there after Alfie and his family left for the day. Apparently the police had found quite a few different sets of fingerprints in the room where Angela was found, and some didn’t belong to any of the Muckles.

‘No one wants to believe Alfie done it more than me,’ Johnny said, thumping his big fists down on the bar. ‘But it certainly ain’t cut ’n’ dried that ’e did. The Old Bill took fingerprints from all the bleedin’ glasses in the card room, but so far they ain’t matched them up wiv any names. Why’s that? Surely any mate of Alfie’s would ’ave a record? And why would a piece of shit like Alfie shield those geezers? ’E must be scared of ’em, that’s why.’

Fifi didn’t get to hear the rest of Johnny’s thoughts on the investigation because Dan whisked her out of the pub in a hurry. He said he’d heard quite enough on the subject and Fifi was to stop dwelling on it.

But she couldn’t stop dwelling on it. It was on her mind from the moment she woke up in the morning until she fell asleep. She went over and over what she’d seen that day, and analysed it painstakingly. Yet there were still more questions than there were answers, and Johnny had only added to them.

She tried to picture the scene at number 11 that morning. Angela lying in bed crying because she was hurt. The rest of the family calmly getting dressed up in their best clothes to go out for the day.

Alfie was a brute, there was no question about that, but was it humanly possible for him to have gone upstairs just before they left, put a pillow over Angela’s face and smothered her, then gone off for a picnic at the seaside?

Somehow a pillow seemed the most unlikely weapon for a man who normally used fists, pokers or sticks.