Lovers Meeting (10 page)

He had no trouble meeting her again. The discipline in the Langley house was easy and Rhoda could usually get out for an hour or two in the evening. Garbutt courted her assiduously. At those meetings and on her half-days he learnt that she had married sisters in Yorkshire and Cumberland and she envied them. He told her his ‘business’ was ‘Gathering bits o’ news for my boss in London. Same as them fellers that watch racehorses training, businessmen watch what the other fellers are up to so they can get one ahead o’ them.’ And when he saw a shadow of doubt cross her face he said softly, ‘All’s fair in love and war.’ And he stroked her cheek.

He plied her with gifts, affection, tenderness and promises. When he eventually asked her to go away with him for a weekend she agreed, knowing it was wrong but by then not caring because one of the promises was of marriage. She was desperately afraid of growing old as a spinster. Rhoda faked a letter from her ‘poorly’ sister in Yorkshire, pleading with her to visit. Maria Langley, James’s wife and the woman of the house, gave her permission – and money for her fare. Rhoda went only as far as Newcastle. Garbutt bought her fine dresses and underwear but warned her, ‘Don’t wear any of them back in Monkwearmouth. They’re for your bottom drawer.’ Wearing a gold ring bought by Garbutt, she passed as his wife in the hotel. He made passionate love to her for two nights and when she went back to the Langley house she was his.

He promised her a good life when they married but insisted that she played her part now and kept their romance secret: ‘… If you love me. All you have to do is to write to me once a week and tell me what’s going on in the house, what the old man and his son are up to, what they’re talking about.’ So she returned to her duties outwardly the same young woman, though she often smiled dreamily, but now she was a spy in the house. Slowly, imperceptibly but surely, she began to change.

It was a month later when Reuben Garbutt sat in his office in London and read the letter from Owen Packer. Then he smiled and burned it, because he kept nothing, either in his house or his office, that could connect him with any criminal activities.

He took a train from King’s Cross and headed north again. The solicitor had said depression in the shipbuilding industry on the north-east coast was appalling and the Langley yard was without an order for a ship or any work at all. Rhoda Wilks had reported an overheard conversation between William and James Langley that had confirmed this. She had also sent some interesting details of the family routine. Her letters were written in a childlike hand, misspelt and rambling, but they held nuggets of information. Garbutt decided his time had come. Now he would exact revenge for the death of his father and his family’s humiliation.

‘I wondered if you were ever going to come back again! It’s been so long!’ Rhoda Wilks cried out, and ran into his arms when he met her in Monkwearmouth that evening. He had not travelled to the North Country for months – during which she had yearned for him. He could read it in her face, knew it from the way she pressed her body against him. Rhoda was expecting a life of dignity and pleasure as Garbutt’s wife, but more than that, she was a slave to his animal attraction.

They stood hidden in the shadows of an alley in the dusk and he kissed her hungrily and asked, though he knew the answer, ‘When is your next half-day off?’ He did not want to advertise how well he knew the details of her life.

‘Tomorrow.’

So the next day he took her to Newcastle, to shop expensively and dine luxuriously, then to a hotel room and its bed. He questioned her gently in the languorous aftermath of their lovemaking. She complained to him, talking of James Langley, ‘His wife keeps on at me. There’s no satisfying her. The only peace I get is when she goes out. First thing every day she walks down the road with him as far as the yard; takes the little lass with her an’ all.’

‘Their daughter?’

‘Aye, Charlotte.’ Rhoda’s whining softened. ‘She’s a bonny little bairn.’

Garbutt had learned all he needed to know.

When he took Rhoda back to the Langley house, stopping the cab two or three streets away, she complained before she got down: ‘How much longer do I have to work here?’

He kissed her. ‘Not long now.’

The next morning Garbutt was in the bar of the Collier Lad, watching the front of the Langley house. James and his wife Maria, with their four-year-old daughter Charlotte, left the house as usual. But this morning and the next the coal lorry arrived late, so that Garbutt did not have time to act. He waited in the pub on the third morning with increasing impatience.

In the house Maria, James Langley’s olive-skinned, dark and attractive young wife, stood in the hall. They had met in Argentina when James was seeking an order for the yard to build a ship. Her parents had opposed the marriage because James was an Englishman, and turned their backs on Maria. But she had clung to her devoted husband. Now she was dressed for outdoors in a long tweed ulster, a wide-brimmed hat on her piled hair. She stooped and wiped the damp nose of her daughter Charlotte. Then she straightened to say to William Langley in her fluent but stilted English, ‘I think she should stay at home today. She has a cold and there is a chill wind. I will ask Rhoda to look after her.’

‘No, she can stay in my office with me.’ William took Charlotte’s hand. He added bitterly, ‘There isn’t much to do.’ He had not long returned from a trip abroad spent in a fruitless search for orders for the yard.

Maria hesitated, still amazed at the way the old man was prepared to give up his time for this child. But then she pulled on her gloves and said, ‘I do not like saying this again, but that girl Rhoda is more and more slipshod and insolent. I have warned her many times but she only gets worse. She cares for Charlotte well enough but the rest of the time—’ She shook her head despairingly. ‘I think I will advertise in the newspaper for a children’s nurse. Charlotte needs someone now who can give her lessons.’

‘It’s true enough there’s little to do,’ said James as he came into the hall. He wore the old suit he kept for working in the yard, though the only toil there was in maintenance. He had heard his father’s remark and now he added quietly, ‘We can’t keep the men on much longer, Father, with no work for them.’

William said heavily, ‘Aye, we’ll have to lay some more of them off, but not yet.’

Maria intervened then, having heard too many of these conversations. ‘We must hope things will improve. Come now, James, or you will be late.’

They were late. The big lorry, loaded with sacks of coal, had been drawn up outside the Collier Lad for a minute or more. Its driver and his mate had got down and gone into the pub where they sat in a corner with their sandwiches and beer.

Reuben Garbutt, standing at the window of the pub, saw James and Maria emerge from the house. He sucked in his breath.
At last
! He left his post by the window and wound through the few idlers still in the bar – the blare of the shipyard sirens had summoned the workers ten minutes ago – and strode across the pavement outside.

The lorry was a big Commer with a chain drive, and Garbutt knew the type. One of his ‘straight’ ventures was a haulage business that used a number of lorries. Some of these were Commers and Garbutt had learned to drive them because he thought the skill might one day prove useful in his criminal activities. Now he swung the starting handle, hearing the beat of the engine, smelling its fumes.

In the bar of the Collier Lad the driver froze with a sandwich halfway to his mouth, then looked at his mate and asked, ‘What was that?’

‘Sounded like the Commer!’ his mate replied. Then they were both running for the door to the street.

Garbutt drove the lumbering lorry down the road that ran to the river and the shipyards which lined its banks. On the left-hand side were the gable ends of the terraced streets which all ran down to the shipyards. On the right were the ranked, blank walls of the yards. The road was almost empty now, just a woman here and there, with her shawl around her shoulders, hurrying up the road towards the little shops in Dundas Street. And a tall, suited figure that was James Langley, his wife on his arm.

In the house William Langley said, ‘Damn!’ He had gone into the room he used as his office and found James’s notebook lying on his desk. He had left it there the previous evening when he had been discussing the yard’s affairs with his father. William took it to the door and looked out into the hall. He was just in time to see Rhoda Wilks come out of the kitchen. William called, ‘Rhoda!’ Then he went on, ‘I’ve just found this and Mr James will be needing it. Take it down to the yard and see that he gets it, please.’

‘Aye, Mr Langley.’ Rhoda took the notebook from him, snatched her shawl from its hook in the kitchen and set off, calling to the cook, ‘I’m away down to the yard on an errand for Mr Langley.’ That was in case Maria returned before she did and started asking for her, the nit-picking cow.

Garbutt began to accelerate, slowly because the Commer was heavy and slow, but steadily it increased in speed. His eyes were fixed on his quarry. He could have paid any of a dozen assassins to carry out this deed – as he had hired them for the purpose before – but this he wanted to execute by his own hand. He had sworn an oath and waited for so long, now he would savour this as his reward.

James and his wife had been only two hundred yards ahead when he started after them. Now he was almost on them; he saw their white faces turn towards him and he swung the wheel to run the lorry into them. They stood between the hammer of the lorry and the anvil of the shipyard wall.

The noise of the approaching engine caused James and Maria to turn together, their heads jerking around as if at the tug of a string. For a moment they saw no danger as the lorry trundled down the road as if to pass them by. But then Maria glimpsed the face of the driver up in the cab, glaring down at her. The malevolence in his expression filled her with an instinctive fear and she screamed and clung to James. He acted as he saw the nose of the lorry swing towards them, leaping to one side and taking Maria with him. But Garbutt was just as quick to twist the wheel.

Rhoda Wilks, coming out into the road, saw it happen, saw the lorry swerve and mount the pavement, swerve again. Then there was the crash and the screams, the grinding of crumpling metal and the rumbling of broken, falling brickwork as the wall gave way. There was the hideous sight that went with the sounds. And then the silence. She stood, petrified with horror, her hands gripping the shawl pressed to her mouth.

Garbutt had been thrown forward on to the steering wheel by the impact and his face barely escaped breaking through the screen. He sat in that silence for some seconds, winded and hugging painful ribs. Then he remembered his situation. The door of the cab had sprung open and he half fell out on to the pavement. He looked at his handiwork and only then realised that the child was not with her parents. He swore, then turned his back on the scene and broke into a run.

At the end of the road a woman stood with her face obscured by a shawl held to her mouth. He almost ran past her, then realised it was Rhoda Wilks. He stopped, panting, and demanded, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

Rhoda was shaking. She stared at him, her eyes wide with shock, and whined, ‘You killed them.’

‘It was an
accident
!’ He turned quickly and stood beside her, looking back the way he had come, as the driver of the lorry and his mate came running up from the Collier Lad.

They paused beside Garbutt for a moment, staring down the road, and asked, ‘What happened?’

Garbutt answered, ‘It just ran into the wall. I thought I saw some people there—’ But the two men were already running again, towards the wreckage.

Garbutt spun Rhoda around. He had to talk to her and he had to get away. He saw that she would serve as cover for him and linked her arm through his. ‘You’re coming with me as far as the station.’ His tone and his grip on her arm, allied to her state of shock, quelled any thought of protest. But his thoughts were for later, when she had recovered from the shock. He had to keep her quiet. So as he hustled her up Charles Street he repeated, ‘It was an accident! I was down this way and thought I might get to see you for a few minutes. Then I spotted the lorry. I just wanted to try my hand at driving one o’ those things, for a bit of a lark. But when I tried to steer clear of them, he jumped in my way! You saw me swerve then?’ It was an instruction as much as a question.

Rhoda had seen the lorry swerve. She sobbed, the tears coming now. ‘I saw that, aye, but—’

‘Never mind “but”! I’ll have no buts!’

‘You’re hurting me!’ Rhoda’s face twisted in pain.

Garbutt did not relax his savage grip on her arm. ‘Just remember that! It was an accident! And keep your trap shut! You hear me?’

Rhoda whispered, ‘Aye.’

Now he loosened his hold on her. As they approached Monkwearmouth station he changed his tone, became softer, cajoling. ‘You don’t want to get me into trouble for something that wasn’t my fault, just a joke that went wrong. And we’re going up in the world, I promise you. It won’t be long till you can hand in your notice there and I’ll come and fetch you away. Just be patient and keep quiet a bit longer. You’ll be glad you waited.’ He stopped outside the station, took her in his arms and lied, ‘You know I love you.’

Rhoda wiped at her tears. ‘Aye.’ She had to believe him now.

In the train racing south, Reuben Garbutt stretched luxuriously in a first-class compartment. ‘You’ve almost finished them,’ he told himself. ‘There’s only the old man left now. When he’s gone the yard will go with him, I’ll see to that.’

When Rhoda Wilks returned to the Langley house she found it in shock and mourning. The old cook and her young assistant were wailing in the kitchen. The cook pulled her head out of her apron to tell Rhoda, ‘Mr James and his missus are deid! It’s awful. Mr Langley’s in his office. He’s been asking for you.’

So Rhoda went to him, apprehensive because of her knowledge, rehearsing the story Garbutt had repeated to her before he boarded his train. When she tapped at the door and entered she found William sitting at his desk with the young Charlotte in his arms. His face was drawn with grief as he looked over the child’s head. ‘There you are, Rhoda. You’ve heard?’