Tarnished (32 page)

‘Frank?’ I hear her say. ‘Who are you on the phone to, Frank?’

‘No one, Dolly love,’ he says. ‘It was a wrong number.’

I hear the ding of the phone being replaced on its hook.

‘You’re not looking too good, Frank,’ Nan says. ‘Are you sure you’re all right, dear?’

‘Nan,’ I call down. ‘I can’t sleep.’

‘Hold on a tick, darling.’

And after a couple of minutes she’s there, climbing up the ladder to my attic with a story in her mind and my sniffy blanket in her arms.

I’m not sure about this one. I was ill. I had a fever.

Perhaps I dreamed it.

Perhaps I’m just making it up.

Perhaps I’m making
all
of this up.

Thirty-One

‘It’s so good to be back home, even if it is all empty and bare,’ Doll said the next morning as she lay in her bed. ‘I do wish I could sit up in my chair in the lounge.’

So, surprised at how little she weighed in her arms, Peg carried her through and they sat in front of the gas fire, Doll in her old rocker, Peg nails bared to the settee. They were waiting for the district nurse, who had rung earlier to say she would be round before twelve.

‘This is a lovely biscuit. You’re such a clever girl, Jeanie,’ Doll said as she tucked into the walnut cake Loz had cooked for Jean before she left, but which hadn’t reached her because Peg decided that her aunt neither needed nor deserved something quite so delicious. ‘I feel a bit naughty having this though.’ Doll giggled, nodding to the sweet sherry Peg had poured her. ‘Before the sun’s gone down.’

‘Nan,’ Peg said, wondering if Jean might be listening in to their conversation. ‘Do you remember anything about a girl called Mary Perkins? Lived round here and disappeared?’

‘Mary Perkins? Let me think. Oh yes,’ Doll said, wiping a crumb from her mouth. ‘Her mum lived round the corner, just here. Such a lovely girl. A friend of Jean’s she was.’

‘Wasn’t she a friend of Dad’s?’

‘Raymond? No. No. He never knew no Mary Perkins.’

‘Didn’t she dance in his club, though? Flamingos?’

‘Flamingos. Oh, it’s ever such a nice place, Meggy. We must go there again one day.’

‘So Dad must’ve known her.’

‘I don’t believe he did, dearie.’ Doll patted her hair, her milky-rimmed eyes focused inwards. ‘She got into trouble, that Mary Perkins. Up the spout they said. Well they all did, didn’t they? The floozies. Such a pity what happened to her,’ she said, frowning. ‘Dreadful.’

‘What did happen to her?’

‘She got got, didn’t she? Got cut up into pieces and thrown in the sea. It was in the papers. Didn’t they lock her up first? In some sort of outhouse? And then Frank found out and it all went—’ Doll’s voice drifted off and she clamped her mouth shut.

‘What, Nan? What sort of outhouse? Where?’

‘It was . . . Let me see now . . .’ Doll’s little fingers trembled, brushing her forehead as if trying to pick up the layers of her memory. ‘Oh!’

‘Who found out, Nan?’

‘She were no good, though. She’d have brought shame, you know.’ Doll looked once again at Peg, nodding her head as if this were a complete wonder.

The doorbell rang and, startled by the noise, Doll shrank into herself, balling her hands up and biting her thumbnails.

‘Don’t worry, Nan. It’s only the district nurse,’ Peg said, twitching the net curtain to check on the door.

She had wanted to ask about Anna Thurlow, but it was probably better to leave it for another day.

Doll looked quite upset.

‘Someone’s been having a big clear-out,’ the nurse said as she bustled through the front door. ‘Judging by all those bin bags in the back garden.’

‘It’s probably best we don’t mention all that,’ Peg whispered. ‘She’s not too happy that we’ve got rid of loads of her stuff.’

‘OK,’ the nurse boomed. ‘Mum’s the word.’ Then she moved straight through to the lounge and opened her arms wide. ‘Well then, Mrs Thwaites. How are we doing, then, my love?’

‘Who the fuck are you?’ Doll said. ‘And what bin bags?’

Doll was exhausted after the nurse’s visit, so Peg carried her back to the bedroom, where she immediately fell asleep. Julie was next door with Jean, so Peg asked her to keep half an ear out for Doll while she went out to get some food in.

‘I’m only here for an hour, I’m afraid,’ Julie said. ‘I’ve got to get to my next lady.’

‘If I’m not back before you leave, just go, I won’t be long after you.’

Julie raised her eyebrows, but nodded her head.

Peg decided to go right into Whitstable, trundling Doll’s shopping trolley along the beach route. The fresh air was very welcome after almost twenty-four hours cooped up in the bungalow, but she had to step briskly to keep the cold from pinching into her. The tide was out and the sea completely invisible, shrouded by a freezing fog.

She pulled out her phone and called Loz. She didn’t say anything about the intercom, nor Jean’s strange mobility or Doll’s odd reaction when asked about Mary Perkins. She needed to work out for herself what was going on before she let Loz’s speculation machine loose on it all. She did tell her about her decision not to give Jean the cake, though, and Loz laughed until she choked.

‘Parker rang,’ Loz said when she had recovered.

‘And?’

Loz put on a gruff voice. ‘“Just checking in, girly. Nothing to report. But, in the meantime, would you like to join us for tea again?”’

‘Sweet bloke.’

‘Yes, he is, isn’t he? Here, Peg?’

‘Yep?’

‘You couldn’t ask Mrs Cairns a bit about her son, could you?’

‘What? No way.’

‘Thought you’d say that.’

‘Why’d you even ask?’

‘I want to find out more about Mary Perkins. All I’ve got is that printout from the
Unsolved
website, and old slave driver here won’t let me out of the kitchen. We’re down to five now. Everyone else has got the flu.’

Peg sighed. ‘I could go to the library, I suppose, and look up the local paper archive.’ She felt she needed to provide Loz with some sort of kindness, given that she was concealing so much from her.

‘Would you? It’s just I can’t get it out of my head, and there’s nothing I can do here.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

Peg got the supplies in, then decided to spend some of Raymond’s money on a small plastic Christmas tree which lit up when you plugged it in. She also bought an armful of tinsel and a real holly wreath, to make the place look seasonal. She knew Doll had a box of Christmas decorations – she had always pulled out all the stops when Peg was younger. But they were stored in the shed, and it had only just occurred to Peg that she had put over twenty full boxes of stuff in front of them. As money was no object now, she enjoyed the never-before-tasted freedom of spending a little to make life easier, glad she could treat Doll.

On her laden way back from the shops, Peg stopped in at the library and asked the librarian about the local paper archive. She was guided to a local history reading room, where she parked her shopping and positioned herself at a large, pale wood table. The librarian hauled out a pile of beautifully bound sections, one for each of the six months from February 1992. According to the
Unsolved
website, Loz had said on the phone, Mary went missing on the second of that month, which was a Sunday.

‘We had a very keen local historian working here at the time,’ the librarian said, as she and Peg admired the hardback covers. ‘She made sure they could withstand fire, flood and famine. Now are you sure I can’t get you anything else?’

‘Thank you – I’ve got plenty to be getting on with here.’

‘Just whistle if you need anything.’

The librarian left, leaving a scent of tea and patchouli in her wake, and Peg – aware that, in her eagerness to please Loz, she had taken on a rather lengthy task for someone who had just popped out for an hour or so – set quickly to work.

The first mention was four days after the date Mary went missing. The brief article said that she had last been seen that Sunday night in Flamingos.

‘She seemed upset,’ fellow hostess, Carleen Peters, 29, said. ‘But she kept herself to herself and never opened up to us.’

So Carleen had known Mary. Peg made a quick note of this. She wondered what else she might know. When the time was right, she thought perhaps she would pay her another visit.

Mary’s flatmate, attractive brunette Claire Watkins, 20, said: ‘I haven’t seen her since the Friday before she disappeared, although I didn’t think anything of it over the weekend. She often stayed away overnight.’

‘We haven’t seen her for over a month,’ Mary’s mother, redhead Gina Perkins, 53, said from the family home in Tankerton. ‘But she’s a good girl and always phones home every Monday. When we didn’t hear from her this week, we knew something was wrong. It’s just not like her.’

The alarm was raised when she didn’t turn up for work this Tuesday. ‘We’re always on time.’ Peters said. ‘We’re fined if we’re even a minute late for work.’

The article said that Mary had been twenty-two when she went missing.

The same age as me, Peg thought.

She noted down the details for Loz – apart from the part about Carleen, which she added to the store of things she was keeping to herself for the time being.

Quickly, she worked through the next few volumes. There were a couple of tiny pieces reporting that there had been no more news. Then, when Peg got to Monday twenty-fourth of April 1992, a headline screamed at her.

HAS ANYONE SEEN OUR MARY?

This was two months after she had gone missing. The story, which covered pages two and three of the paper, had been instigated by Mary’s parents, who felt that the police had given up on their only child. There were touching descriptions of what a loyal and hardworking daughter she had been, and a spread of photographs of her – as a heartbreakingly pretty little girl in knee socks and puffy-sleeved dress feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square; as a studious-looking schoolgirl, and as a striking young woman in a bikini by a swimming pool. In all the photos she looked so solid, so alive.

Peg took photographs of the pages with her phone. As she did so, two details caught her eye in the swimming-pool photograph and made her pause. It had been difficult to tell at first glance, because the black and white images looked as if they had been screened through a colander. But on closer inspection, behind the smiling girl in the bikini – was that a bit of a flirt in the way she looked at the camera? – she could just make out the shape of an inflatable killer whale in the pool.

But it wasn’t any inflatable killer whale. Peg knew it had been hers. She could still feel the slippery rubber of its handles as she tried to ride it in that pool. She remembered screaming with laughter as Raymond splashed around beside her, trying to upend her into the water.

For the first time, she remembered being with her father as a child.

Having fun
with him.

She also recognised an enclosed wicker sun lounger in the background. That sun lounger had lived at the side of the swimming pool of the house she spent her first six years in near Farnham. She could remember lying inside it on a hot day, her nose pressed against the sun-cream-scented canvas cushions, the spots of sunlight speckling her through the holes in the wicker.

So here was Mary Perkins standing by her parents’ swimming pool. It was probably Raymond she was smiling at while she posed there all lush and young in her bikini.

Peg allowed herself to breathe for a moment, to let this sink in. Had she been there, too? And where was her mother when this photograph had been taken?

Suzanne. For a second, Peg felt a flush of rage towards the young woman so brazenly flaunting herself in Raymond’s family home, heedless of how she could fuck everything up for herself and her mother.

Bitch,
she thought. And:
you had it coming.
And:
you deserved it.

Shocked at herself, she closed her eyes and calmed her breathing.

Then she had to plough on. Julie would have been long gone, and Doll and Jean would be on their own. Skimming as quickly as possible, she got to the fourth issue of the May volume, which started with a page of headline:

LOCAL BEACHCOMBER MAKES GRUESOME DISCOVERY ON THE STREET

Then, four days later, the same photographs from two weeks earlier were reproduced on the front page, under the banner:

STREET HEAD IS MISSING GIRL MARY

That was it, then, Peg chided herself. No one deserved that ending.

She quickly photographed the final article, a gory description of what poor Colin Cairns had found. Then she grabbed the shopping trolley, tucked the Christmas tree box under her arm and half-ran up the hill to Tankerton, taking the quicker, main-road route. As she panted along the pavement – she was a long way from being anything like a jogger – a maggoty thought burrowed into her brain.

In all the pages she had worked through at the library, not once had Mary’s disappearance been linked with an outhouse, nor had any mention been made of her being in ‘trouble’.

But Doll had been very clear on both points.

Doll knew things that the press didn’t.

How was that, then?

Peg quickened her pace. She needed to get back to Doll and, very gently, find out what else she knew.

And, more importantly, how she knew it.

Thirty-Two

As she turned the corner into Doll’s street, a snowflake fell onto Peg’s eyelashes.

She was glad she had bought the Christmas decorations. They would make the bungalow feel fuller again, and perhaps that would make Doll happier about all her stuff being cleared out, which in turn might make conversations about outhouses and fallen women and lost schoolgirls a little easier.

But she also thought she might give it a rest for a bit. She might ask Loz for a truce on her investigations until December was over. She just wanted to make it lovely for Doll. With her growing dementia, this could, after all, be the last Christmas she would be aware of. To delve into the subjects of Raymond and the girls and all the Jean business could dirty the holiday for the whole family.