A Woman Unknown (32 page)

‘Why didn’t you call for someone?’

‘Why do you think? I didn’t know what had happened to him, stroke, heart attack, anything. I just wanted to get out of there.’

‘You left your dress and shoes behind.’

‘I know. I’d only worn that dress twice.’

I felt a brief pang of despair. Deirdre had no notion of the seriousness of her situation. Marcus, his sergeant, even Sykes, all of them would put her into the category of no better than she ought to be.

We were only a few months on from the hanging of Edith Thompson, not because she was complicit with her lover in the murder of her husband, but because the jury regarded her as immoral, vain and contradictory.

Part of me wanted to leave Deirdre in the convent, tell her to learn how to make candles, and lie low. But she would have to face the consequences of her actions. And I must tell her about Fitzpatrick’s death.

‘There’s something you must know, about your husband.’

She closed her eyes. ‘I won’t go back to him. I saw that
he’d done something to his foot but I still won’t go back to him.’

‘He had an accident at work, dropped a box of type on his foot. That’s why he was using crutches, and I think he hadn’t quite got used to them.’

Something in my voice gained her attention. She stared at me, waiting.

‘After he saw you at the cemetery, and Eddie stopped him from coming to you, Mr Fitzpatrick hobbled across to his parents’ grave. He fell. I found him there, his head bleeding onto the stone. I’m sorry to say he died from that injury.’

‘Oh God, poor Fitz, poor, pathetic Fitz.’ She rocked back and forth, her arms now crossed over her chest, her eyes closed. ‘Isn’t that just like him? So neat, so proper, goes to a cemetery to die.’

‘Are you allowed brandy in here?’ I took Gerald’s flask from my satchel, unscrewed the top and handed it to her.

She sniffed and shook her head. ‘I can’t drink this stuff straight.’

I poured a good measure into what was left of my lemonade and handed it to her.

As I watched her drink, I thought how convenient it was for Fitzpatrick to be gone, and how easy it would have been for her uncle Jimmy, or her swain Eddie, to have knocked Fitzpatrick’s crutches from under him, and sent him sprawling into eternity.

She drained the earthenware mug and put it down. ‘An annulment would have broken his heart.’

Better a broken heart than a broken head. ‘Come on, Mrs Fitzpatrick. We have a train to catch.’

We travelled back from York in silence. When we disembarked at Leeds, I still did not know where to take Deirdre. An obvious choice was straight to the incident room at the Metropole. That would be better than marching her up to CID headquarters. In the face of indecision, the railway station buffet is always a good idea. We found a table away from the door, so she could not very easily jump up and make a dash for it.

When the waitress came, I ordered a pot of tea for two, and a slap-up meal of egg and chips.

‘Do you have a smoke?’ she asked.

I had two Craven As. A man at a nearby table practically fell over himself to light our cigarettes.

She took a deep drag. ‘What happens now?’

‘That depends on you. If you’ll stay put, I’ll take you home, and telegram that you’ll be at your house, to answer questions. If you’re going to try and hop it, I’ll ask the waitress to fetch the railway police now.’

‘Before I’ve had my egg and chips?’

‘I’m not that heartless.’

‘Anyway, where would I go?’

‘I’m sure you would think of somewhere. If you go back to the Bank, there’ll be a baker’s dozen of friends and relations willing to keep you out of the way. Your old flame Eddie would be top of the list.’

‘I’ve made a pig’s ear of my life as it is, without going back to throw in my lot with people who love me but haven’t two ha’pennies to rub together. I want to go home. I want to sleep in my own bed.’

The tea and bread and butter came first. I left Deirdre to pour, as I spotted a railway policeman on the concourse. I took a business card from my satchel and wrote Marcus’s rank and name, and the message that Mrs F would be ‘at home’ at six o’clock. The officer looked suitably impressed at Marcus’s rank and went immediately to his office to make the call.

Six o’clock would give Deirdre time to get used to the idea that she must start telling the truth. Of course it would also allow her to concoct a clever tale, but I would have to risk that.

Deirdre splashed brown sauce on her chips. ‘Who sent you to look for me?’

‘A question for a question?’

‘All right.’

‘Your husband, brother and Eddie all came to see me. And there’s a police search on for you. I told the chief inspector in charge of the enquiry that I would do my best to find you.’

‘Poor Fitz asked you to look for me.’ She played with a chip, dipping it into the egg. ‘Last Sunday, after Mam died, I couldn’t face seeing him. My life would have been so different if I’d married someone else. I just fell into it. I wanted Mam to come and live with us when we married,
and Fitz said no. He relented when she got ill, but by then she’d taken against him and she wouldn’t come. I was caught between the two of them, pulled apart.’

‘But at least he came with you, last Sunday.’

‘He insisted on coming, to show her that everything was all right between us.’

‘And it wasn’t.’

‘No. I should never have married him. What’s happened to him is a judgement on me, my punishment.’

‘It was an accident, a terrible accident.’ That may not have happened if he had not been so exhausted as to be clumsy enough to drop something on his foot and hobble about on crutches. She would think that soon enough. ‘Why did you marry him?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m not sure any more. By then it was over between me and Eddie. Oh, he was a great dancer, top boxer. Poor lad never had much going on in the attic and he went on boxing long after he should have stopped. When they sent him home from the war, he’d lost his stuffing and the lights went out. He couldn’t see beyond bedtime. If I’d stuck with Eddie, I’d have had a life like Mam, eight or more kids and living in a place where you can’t keep the vermin out, rats down the chimney, bugs in the wall.’

‘Eight? I thought there was just you and your brother.’

‘Two alive, six dead. And they’re the ones I know about. I sometimes think Mam lost count herself.’

We finished our egg and chips. Deirdre wiped round the plate with a crust of bread. ‘Fitz hated me doing this, wiping round my plate. He said it smacked of poverty.’

‘Weren’t you ever happy with him?’

‘He was kind. He wanted the best for me.’

That sounded like a no.

‘Deirdre, how did you meet Mr Lansbury, the solicitor?’

She chewed and swallowed her crust. ‘How do you know about him?’

‘I just do. You went to him, for your assignments I suppose we could call them. Some of them are known about, some not.’

‘Did Fitz know?’

‘No.’

She breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank God for that. I had to do something. I wanted money, for Mam, and for me when I finally plucked up the courage to leave Fitz.’

‘So how did you meet Mr Lansbury?’

‘I was with my friend, Rita, sitting in the Varieties bar, and I overheard him talking to another man. We got to chatting. They tried to pick us up, and then Mr Lansbury gave me his card. There was never anything between us, but I asked his advice about the state of things between me and Fitz. It was such a relief to talk to someone who looked at it all so coolly and thought something could be done. He said I could get an annulment, and him a Protestant. But I knew whatever happened, I’d need money. That’s when he made the suggestion of how I might earn some. But I won’t give the men away. That wouldn’t be fair. And I won’t give Mr Lansbury away either.’

It touched me that she thought in telling me, she was not giving him away.

‘Deirdre, it’s struck me during the time I’ve been looking for you, and talking to people, that there might have been some blackmailing going on.’

‘Blackmailing?’

‘Yes, when someone is fearful about something becoming known and will pay for silence.’

‘I know what blackmail is. Who was doing it?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking. Did you ever get any feeling that someone may have been blackmailing,’ I wanted to say ‘Mr Lansbury’, but held back from putting ideas in her head.

‘If there was anything like that going on, I didn’t know about it.’

The waitress took our plates and cups, leaving an empty wiped-down table and my dilemma of knowing that Deirdre believed she could talk to me and it would go no further, as if I were her friend Rita. Not sure what to do about this, I ordered two cream buns and another pot of tea.

‘Tell me what happened at the Metropole, with Mr Runcie.’

‘I told you.’

‘I meant before, when you met him there.’

She lowered her head and twisted a strand of hair around her finger. ‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it was like somebody else’s dream. First off I took against the man, for his arrogance and for the way he was trying to get me drunk. So I tipped it back anyway, like I told you. Then didn’t he want to call over some chap from the bar to join us for drinks.’

‘Did you see who this man was?’

‘No! I didn’t wait to see him. That was my chance to make a dash for it. I kept my head down and went straight for the stairs. I had my back to him. I concentrated on reaching the banister, and keeping my balance after all I’d drunk. And never again. I felt so sick.’

It was the little touches that made me believe her, keeping her balance, aiming for the banister.

‘In the morning, there he was dead. Well why would I stay? He was nothing to me, and nothing to do with me. For all I knew, he’d died of his own nastiness. I just wanted to be away from there and I thought even Fitz is better than this. We’ll make a go of it, and I went haring back faster than I’d left.’

‘It didn’t last long then, the feeling that you would stick with Fitz.’

‘It lasted till Mammy died. There he was, so neat and trim by the bed in the clinical room, and everything felt so empty. I sent him home, so I could be on my own with her. When you’ve come up with a life that’s messy and noisy and you’re in the hands of cruel fate, there’s something good about dodging and coming through. And with Fitz, there was nothing. Nothing. Poor Fitz.’

She sat very still and composed. In the convent she had seemed desperately sad, but this was something else, something deeper. This was bereavement.

I asked the waitress to have the cream buns wrapped in tissue paper, to take back to Kirkstall.

On the railway concourse, I hesitated. It would not be Marcus who knocked on the Fitzpatricks’ door at six o’clock, but the detective sergeant, bright red hair and a freckled face, Sergeant Wilson, renowned for interviewing females.

I imagined the scene. He would politely identify Mrs Fitzpatrick, offer his condolences, and take her for questioning. Perhaps he would bring one of the shoes from the hotel wardrobe and ask her to try it on like a latter-day Cinderella. He would say, That fits, is it
comfortable? And now that she was in talking mode, she would say, Not very comfortable but it’s mine. Can I have the shoes back, and the frock? Later I would see Marcus, and he would ask me what she had said.

‘What’s the matter?’ Deirdre asked.

I thought of Edith Thompson, so confidently taking the stand to defend herself against a charge of murder. ‘Deirdre, you need a solicitor.’

This was entirely different to Edith’s Thompson’s case. No one had accused Deirdre of murder. Yet.

‘Won’t you sit in with me?’ she asked.

‘That wouldn’t be allowed.’

She groaned. ‘Don’t tell me I have to go through all that again, and telling it to some solicitor.’ She brightened suddenly. ‘It could be Mr Lansbury.’

‘Mr Lansbury would not be the best person. Think about it. What he was doing wasn’t exactly above board. He will be watching his own back.’

Either my words or my manner told her that trouble could be just around the corner.