Vera Stanhope 06 - Harbour Street (31 page)

He looked at her. Part pity and part derision. ‘Nothing.’ He was a Scouser and it sounded as though he was spitting the word. ‘No clothing dating back to the time in question. Nothing that could have belonged to your man. No sign that anything’s been buried, or that the concrete’s been disturbed anywhere in the yard.’

‘Except in here.’ Coffee, sugar and a flash of the new idea made her almost light-headed. No hangover now. ‘There was a wooden temporary office here before the shed. Smart; linked to mains services. It was burned down. There was a suspicion that it was an insurance scam. But maybe Kerr wanted to hide a body, hide the evidence of a murder. A fire would give him an excuse to replace the floor. The shed appeared on the same site soon after. Nobody would have noticed, would they? Customers coming into the yard would have thought any work was connected to the fire damage.’

‘You want us to dig up the floor in here?’ He looked at her as if she was crazy.

‘Aye, I do.’ She smiled, knowing that she seemed manic, unhinged. ‘Humour a mad old woman, eh? All those fit men out there, it won’t take more than a few minutes.’

She walked away from him across the yard, her coat flapping behind her. As she emerged from the screen onto the pavement there was the click of a camera. The press were there already then. More predators. She walked up the street to her vehicle and drove back to Kimmerston. Partly because she couldn’t stand the stress of watching them: the men with their picks and shovels and wheelbarrows of debris, calling her all sorts under their breath. The waiting would send her blood pressure sky-high. But there was another reason too. She didn’t need to hang around because she knew she was right. She was sure of it. Because she felt it in her bones, just as she felt Margaret’s guilt – and because nothing else made sense. It would be better for her to be in the office when the news came through, ready to brief the rest of the team.

The call came sooner than she’d expected it. She’d made tea, wandered over to Holly’s desk to see how she was getting on and back into her office. She left the door open. Some days it felt like a cell and she needed to let in some air. So the team saw her raise her fist, a sign of triumph and vindication. They saw her beam. And when she strode out to greet them, they had all turned to face her.

‘The search team has just found a body under the shed in Malcolm Kerr’s yard.’ She was fizzing, but tried to keep her voice calm and factual. ‘The concrete there is as thin as eggshell apparently. Replaced after the fire in the original building. No details yet. Paul Keating and Billy Wainwright are on their way. But the team leader reckons the skeleton of a male.’ Now she allowed herself to look out at them, to bask in their glory. ‘A young male.’

There was a round of applause, a few cheers.

‘Time to bring in Malcolm Kerr, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘See to it, Charlie.’ A moment’s pause. She knew that in a performance timing was everything. ‘Didn’t I tell you this would all be over by Christmas?’

It turned out that Val Butt wasn’t as old or as frail as Joe had expected. Prof. Craggs’s photograph of the group outside the Coble had been taken in 1975; the date was written faintly on the back in pencil. Margaret would have been thirty-two. Val Butt, large and ungainly, would have been just in her forties, already looking tired and middle-aged, and her son Rick in his mid-twenties. Val would have been hardly more than a child herself when she’d had him, and it would have been hard to be a teenage mother then. Joe tried to take the imaginative leap back to Harbour Street in the year before he was born, but the effort was too much for him. Better to find Val and talk to her.

The woman lived on her own in a single-storeyed miners’ welfare cottage in a small estate on the outskirts of Mardle. It astonished him how many of the players in the case still lived in the town, or had connections with the place. It was as if they’d had no ambition, or lacked the confidence to uproot themselves and try life elsewhere. He wondered if Kate Dewar would move away now, whether she and Stuart and the kids would set up home in a new town, make a fresh start. He hoped they would. He wasn’t given to strange thoughts, but it occurred to him suddenly that Mardle was toxic. There was something unhealthy in the air.

He hadn’t made an appointment and it took the woman so long to get to the door that he was about to turn away. Then he heard a painful wheezing and the door opened slowly. Val Butt was huge. She was still in her nightclothes, and the pink candlewick dressing gown hardly met around her waist. She walked with the aid of a Zimmer frame and, before speaking, she let go of it with one hand and flicked ash from her cigarette onto the path beyond him. ‘Who are you?’ Eyes narrowed.
The same look
, he thought,
she would have given the underage drinkers in the Coble, before serving them anyway.

He introduced himself and showed his warrant card.

‘You’re here about Maggie Krukowski.’ There was a rattle in her voice and she gasped for breath again.

‘And Dee Robson.’

‘Aye, well. I never knew her.’ She backed herself carefully into the corridor. ‘You’d better come in. Dee was after my time. I’d have left the Coble before she was a regular there.’

He made a pot of tea on her instruction. ‘I’m never my best in the mornings.’ She installed herself on the sofa that took up most of the tiny front room, hauling her legs onto a padded stool in front of her. ‘The carers are supposed to get here at eight to dress me, but they’re always bloody late. Most of them don’t speak English anyway.’

‘You knew Margaret in the Seventies and Eighties?’

She ignored the tea and biscuits he put beside her and lit another cigarette. The room stank of smoke and the ceiling was brown with nicotine stain.

Joe put the photo on the arm of the sofa so that she could see it without moving. She picked it up and stared at it.

‘That was 1975,’ she said, without turning it over to look at the date. ‘Billy Kerr’s birthday.’

‘Nothing wrong with your memory then.’ He was genuinely impressed.

‘It was the year I took on the licence.’ She paused. ‘We’d had a place in the West End of Newcastle before that, but it wasn’t easy. There was always trouble. It was tough, especially for a woman. The Coble was a step up. A bit more respectable.’

‘You were on your own with your son?’

She gave a sudden quick grin and the ghost of a wink. ‘On and off. There was the occasional bloke.’ She stubbed out the cigarette in her saucer and gulped the tea. ‘But always my name over the door. I stayed there until I retired.’

‘Margaret Krukowski,’ he said. It was time to get to the point.

‘Aye, the gorgeous Margaret. She could stop a conversation in the bar just by walking through the door.’ There was a niggle of resentment in her voice, which he realized was probably jealousy. Most women would have been jealous of Margaret Krukowski in her heyday.

‘You didn’t like her?’

‘I didn’t trust her.’

‘Tell me,’ he said, remembering advice given by Vera, one night at her house.
Get them to tell you a story. It’s all about stories. It might be a pack of lies, of course. But that’ll tell you something useful too.

Val settled back on the sofa and her eyes were half-closed. ‘Maggie thought she was better than the rest of us. She hated being called Maggie, and I only did it to spite her. She had a fancy accent and fancy clothes. I said to her once: “We’re alike, you and me. Both left by our men to fend for ourselves.” The look that she gave me! As if I wasn’t fit to clean her boots.’

‘Had you seen her recently?’ Joe wondered where this story was taking him. He still wasn’t convinced that something that had happened almost forty years ago could have any relevance to the present investigation. He didn’t believe in the body under the boatyard.

‘Nah! I didn’t see her much after that photo was taken. There was a falling-out.’ She paused, drank more of the tea. ‘Things were never really the same after that.’

‘What do you mean?’ Outside, the postman walked down the street. The last delivery before Christmas, his bag fat and heavy. Val saw him too and watched. A moment of hope or anticipation. But he walked straight past her door.

Val lifted her shoulders, an attempt at a shrug. ‘Nothing. Just that she never came into the pub again.’

‘What sort of falling-out?’

‘How would I remember after all this time?’ She glared at him, challenging him to contradict her.

Joe thought she remembered perfectly. ‘Did something happen the night of Billy Kerr’s birthday party?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She shut her mouth like a toddler refusing to eat her vegetables and they sat for a moment in silence.

‘Did you ever meet Margaret’s husband, Pawel?’

She shook her head. Her hair was very fine and she was bald in places. ‘He’d long gone by the time we moved to Harbour Street.’

Joe thought that in that case Vera couldn’t be right. If Pawel was buried under Malcolm Kerr’s yard, he must have been in Harbour Street the night of the fire. ‘Are you sure? Our information is that he was still in the region then.’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe he was, but he wasn’t living with Maggie Krukowski.’

‘Was Margaret working for Billy and Malcolm Kerr when this photo was taken?’ Joe thought it was hard work, prising information from the woman, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. He was wondering now why he’d come. He wished he was at Kerr’s yard watching the search team. He’d trained with a couple of the lads and it would have been good to catch up.

Val made a strange choking sound that was half-cough and half-chuckle. ‘By the time I knew her she was what you’d call freelance. A professional working woman.’ Each word came out as a separate sneer.

‘What do you mean?’ Joe pretended ignorance.

‘She was a high-class slag. Playing with fire. No man to keep a lookout for her. No protection. If she’d been murdered
then
, I wouldn’t have been surprised.’

He was surprised by the vehemence of her words. ‘You were a woman without a man to look out for you too.’

‘I had my Rick. He was a good son.’

But he’s left you
, Joe thought. A sudden flash of insight.
And he doesn’t even send you a Christmas card.

‘Around the time of Billy Kerr’s birthday there was a fire at his yard,’ Joe said. ‘His office burned down.’

She looked at the clock on the windowsill. ‘Those bloody carers. They get later every day.’

‘You must remember the fire. It would have been a big deal round here then. There was a rumour that it was all an insurance scam.’

‘Was there?’ She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘I never heard that.’ Another pause while she fidgeted with a packet of cigarettes. ‘It happened the night of the birthday party. Or early morning the next day. Though I think there was talk in the bar about arson, I never believed it. People always like a drama, don’t they?’

‘You can’t help in any way with our investigation then?’ Joe Ashworth was losing patience and he wanted to be out of the house before she lit another cigarette. He hated the way the smell got into his hair and his clothes. It made him retch.

‘I’ve never been one for helping the police,’ she said. ‘Never trusted them, and they do nothing for the likes of me.’

A car with a council logo pulled up outside and two women in pink overalls got out. ‘You’d best go,’ Val said. ‘Unless you fancy helping them to get me into the bath.’

Joe left the house before the carers had their key in the lock.

In the car his phone rang. Vera Stanhope, her voice chirpy. ‘How’s it going, bonny lad?’ She only ever called him that when she was in a particularly good mood or when she was being sarcastic.

‘I haven’t got much from the ex-landlady of the Coble.’ But he knew Vera wasn’t listening. She’d phoned to share information, not to get it.

‘We’ve found the body.’ Her voice was high-pitched with excitement. ‘It was under Malcolm’s shed. I think he set the office fire not for the insurance money, but to hide evidence of Pawel’s murder.’

Joe didn’t say anything. He was thinking that Val Butt had been lying to him. Pawel had still been around in Harbour Street in 1975, when Malcolm Kerr’s office had burned down, and she would have known that. Joe thought she’d have known everything that was going on in her patch. She’d have been that kind of landlady. And what had actually happened the night of Billy Kerr’s birthday party to trigger a murder? A fight that had got out of hand? Two young men scrapping over Margaret, like dogs over a bone.

‘Well?’ Vera was indignant. She’d been expecting congratulations. ‘Now we have everything: motive, opportunity and a skeleton in the cupboard. Or under the concrete. I’ve sent them to bring in Malcolm Kerr. He’ll talk. No reason not to, when he’ll be forced to plead guilty to one murder. We’ll have it all wrapped up by teatime, and the drinks are on me.’

‘What do you want me to do now?’ Joe looked through the window, wondering if he should go back and talk to the woman inside. He didn’t like inconsistencies, and why would Val Butt lie about Margaret’s husband? What could she have to hide at her time of life? But the carers were already helping her to her feet and leading her towards the bathroom. Her nightdress and dressing gown were caught in the waistband of her knickers and a huge bare thigh was exposed. He decided that old people often got confused and there was nothing to be gained by talking to her again.

‘Come back here,’ Vera was saying. ‘You can sit in on the interview.’

Joe switched off his phone and stood for a moment in the street outside the old folks’ bungalows. He had a second crisis of conscience. Perhaps he should knock at the door and talk to Val Butt again, ask her if she knew anything about the body buried in Malcolm Kerr’s yard.

But the moment soon passed and then he found himself smiling. When Vera was happy, her good humour was infectious. Why not be a part of the celebrations? He started the engine and set off for Kimmerston. Arriving into the station expecting a party atmosphere, laughter and the inevitable release of tension after an investigation, he found instead that Vera was furious. He could hear her swearing from the bottom of the stairs. She was so caught up in her rant about the incompetent scum that made up the police service these days that she didn’t notice him entering the room. He slid in beside Charlie.