The girl sat opposite Mike Oddie in the headmaster’s study, her eyes knowing, secretive, unwise. The headmaster, sitting unobtrusively beside the desk, had told Oddie that she was a strange girl and, seeing her, he knew that he had an uphill, perhaps an impossible task. The girl licked her lips, which somehow she managed to make an oddly unpleasant motion.
“You’re good friends with your sister June, aren’t you, Cilla?”
For a moment he thought she was going to deny it—a common Phelan tactic, applied indiscriminately—but at length, without a change of expression, the girl settled for evasion.
“She’s my sister.”
“That’s right, and I expect you talk a lot to each other, don’t you?”
She drew a finger across her nose.
“Sometimes.”
“You see, we have a problem, because we don’t know where your sister is, and we don’t even know if she’s heard yet that your Dad is dead.”
A suspicion of a shrug came into Cilla’s shoulders, and she kept silent.
“What I wondered was, is there anyone she’s particularly friendly with—a, well, a boyfriend or man friend perhaps? Someone she might be . . . staying with?”
He could have sworn her eyes narrowed slightly, betraying a thought, a name that came into her mind.
“She wouldn’t tell me things like that.”
She was lying, he knew it. That was just the sort of thing her sister June would tell her. He looked toward the headmaster, whose face was interested but neutral. What sort of tactic, he would have liked to ask, might work with this sort of child? Finding no inspiration in the face—for probably the headmaster was as much at sea with her as himself—he added a touch of majesty-of-the-law to his manner, leaning forward impressively and raising his voice.
“Cilla, I don’t think you’re being honest with us. It’s very silly to hold things back—silly, and maybe dangerous.”
He knew at once he had made a mistake. All his own experience of parenthood counted for nothing with this girl. He should have coaxed, not threatened. An expression of obstinacy settled on her face.
“I don’t know anything. I don’t know where she is.”
“I don’t think you do. But I do think you’ve remembered the name of someone, haven’t you?”
“No.”
“Someone she’s fond of, someone she’s going with?”
Cilla leaned forward, and for a moment the closed mask on her face slipped and something more direct showed.
“If I did I wouldn’t tell you! Fucking cops!”
It was eerie. Mike Oddie knew he had heard the voice of the dead Jack Phelan.
Back at police headquarters, frustrated, and tantalized by the feeling that Cilla Phelan was concealing more than just the name of one of her sister’s men friends, Oddie ran into Malcolm Cray, about to start off on a town beat.
“Bloody Phelans,” he said. “How are you going on with Michael?”
“Michael? Oh, fine. It’s rather odd . . . ”
“Oh?”
“He seems to be a nice, normal, well-adjusted boy.”
“But?”
“There are no buts. That’s what’s odd.”
“Oh, I see—with that family. Well, I’ve seen it happen before. A family of absolute crooks and no-hopers and one of them turns out to be a perfectly normal, nice, law-abiding person. Malcolm, do you know if Michael is close to his sister Cilla?”
“I don’t know. They’re close in age. But it’s funny—I don’t get the impression he’s close to any of them. As if he—I don’t know—holds himself aloof.”
“Maybe that’s part of the process of self-protection. Do you think he could get something out of her?”
“I don’t know about that. Isn’t she rather a secretive child? That’s how she struck me. And remember—they’ve all been trained to see the police as The Enemy, Michael as well.”
“Don’t I know it! I’ve just had a basinful of the unlovely Cilla myself. But this isn’t anything criminal. I just want the name of any man June Phelan might be associating with. When I was talking to Cilla I had the distinct impression that she knew a name but wasn’t going to let on about it to me.”
“I’ll do what I can. I’ll be off duty by the time school is out. I’ll alert Selena and we’ll go at it together.”
“Mike!”
It was a shout from the doorway. Oddie turned and saw the duty sergeant.
“Are you coming in? There’s someone here I think you’ll want to talk to.”
“I hear that you’ve arrested Kevin Phelan.”
Mr. Latif was stocky, of medium height, with a rather handsome dark mustache and a worried expression. In normal circumstances, Oddie would have thought him more than a match physically for Kevin Phelan, but, of course, Kevin always saw to it that circumstances were not normal.
“That’s right,” he said, gesturing toward the other chair in his office. “How did you know? It hasn’t been in the local paper.”
Mr. Latif spread his hands wide.
“There is a small shop down from his place in Market Street. They saw him and his friend being bundled into a police car. We have a good network.”
“Small shopkeepers?”
“That’s right. We each have a small area that we serve, so we are not competitors. Often we have family ties too. And we are all, sometimes, threatened. I was asked to come to you because I have better English than most, but I speak for all of us.”
“Right. Well, tell me what’s been going on. I take it as read, with that boy, that something has been.”
Mr. Latif put his hands on his knees and bent forward, his face suffused with urgency.
“What has been going on is intimidation. I have no evidence of anything worse than that, but what has happened is bad enough. What happens is this. They pick on someone—Moslems, Sikhs, members of any of the minorities—anyone who has moved in to a mainly white area, or who owns a shop there. Someone who’s feeling a bit insecure anyway. Then the first thing that happens is, during the night they put a lot of rags soaked in petrol through the letter box.”
“Ah. . . . When you say they, you mean—?”
“Kevin Phelan and Jason Mattingley. We know their names, you see. We have to inform ourselves, for our own protection. That is the first thing that happens. Then they leave the people alone for a couple of weeks. I tell you, sir, it is very unnerving!”
“You’ve been one of their victims yourself?”
“Yes, indeed! Then the second time, there are the rags again, and this time there is a note. In my case it said: ‘We’ll light it next time.’ Of course, I am very unhappy about this. I have a young family, a boy and a girl, and we live over the shop.”
“Then you’re just the sort of people they would choose. What happens next?”
“They come to the shop, the two of them. They come in, stand in front of the counter, and then they take out a box of matches and they light one. Just that. Not to light a cigarette—they just light the match and stand there watching it burn down. They are smiling—that Phelan has a really horrible smile. Then he comes up to the counter and he says: ‘I’m skint, mate. Could you lend us fifty?’ ”
“I see. It’s pure extortion. And you paid?”
“As I say, I have a family. I paid.”
“You should have come to us.”
Latif shrugged.
“Maybe, maybe. Sometimes the police are very helpful to us—sometimes, you understand, not so much. We talked about it, but in the end. . . . After all, what crime had been committed? And if they were put away, they weren’t alone. They’re members of a party, so-called. If they weren’t around, there would be others to take their places. By paying fifty pounds I got peace for several months. There are plenty of small shopkeepers around to frighten, so it is a long time before they get back to me.”
“Why have you come to us now?”
Latif smiled, self-depreciatingly.
“Maybe it is easier to do the right thing when your enemy is already in the bag. One of us was at the magistrates’ court yesterday, and he said Phelan was up for assaulting a policeman. So his friends will not associate his arrest with us. But if we can get him put away for longer, so much the better. But there is one thing more.” He leaned forward, now even more urgent, his eyes fixed on Oddie. “We want you to remember the family that was burned out earlier this year in Armstead. They lived too over their own shop. We think that was a message to all of us: Pay up, or else. We ask you to remember that family.”
Oddie nodded.
“We’re remembering.”
“The police came to talk to Cilla Phelan this morning,” said Carol Southgate to Bob McEvoy. It was after school, and they were walking up the hill on their way to Carol’s flat and to their first meal together.
“Much good it did them, I imagine.”
“No, I can’t imagine a stranger getting much out of her, when none of the teachers whom she knows quite well can. She’s a strange child—unnerving. That’s why I wondered whether she was being abused.”
Bob McEvoy nodded. For him it was almost a routine question.
“There have certainly been children in the school who have been—still are: Betty Morton, Mandy Hobbs, for instance. The first shows all the signs, and Mandy’s actually with foster parents, who are having a hell of a time with her. But their behavior is open, flagrant. That’s not like Cilla Phelan. Hers is the reverse.”
“The whisper is the police wanted to know where June might be. She wouldn’t even help them with that. I get this feeling all the time that she’s hugging herself, somehow—over something she knows. And that’s not likely to be just where her sister is.”
“Something to do with the fire, you mean?”
“Well, it could be, couldn’t it?”
“Equally it could be just anything. Children of that age don’t have the experience needed to weigh up what they know. She might have seen or heard something that she thinks is wildly interesting and important—and it is, to her. But only to her.”
“What sort of thing do you mean?”
“Something silly about someone in her class, for example.”
“Maybe. I don’t get the impression that that’s what Cilla finds interesting.” They had turned into the Estate, and were in sight of the burned-out hulk of the Phelans’ home. Carol shivered. “She seems such a knowing girl. It’s not as though her parents would ever have not talked about anything in front of the kids. She seems to have adult curiosity, adult knowledge. I think she would be able to estimate how much a piece of information was worth—how much it could hurt.”
Bob McEvoy looked skeptical, and they went the rest of the way in silence.
In the front garden of The Laburnums Daphne Bridewell was bending down, presenting her backside to them. She had found nestling under a hedge a trail of ground elder, her pet hate, and she was spraying it with Tumbleweed through a toilet-roll tube. When she heard the gate, she straightened up.
“Oh, hello, Carol.”
Carol was about to introduce Bob to her when she caught directed at him a look of such concentrated disapproval that she just smiled and walked on, down the steps to her basement flat.
Later that evening, after dinner with wine, when they were on the sofa and closer than they had ever been—though not that close, for Carol had still not made her decision—Bob said:
“Your landlady didn’t like my coming here.”
“No, she didn’t! I saw that. Well, she needn’t think I’m going to take any notice. If she disapproves of my having men in the flat, she should have told me when I took it.”
“And you wouldn’t have, I hope?”
“Of course not. It’s none of her business.”
“What’s she done since she left teaching?”
“Don’t ask her that. She’s been on the City Council. It would be like asking Ronald Reagan what he’d been doing since giving up acting.”
“What has he been doing since giving up acting?”
“Very funny. She’s been active in all sorts of things—parks, the arts, better buildings. She’s a bit of a do-gooder, and rather likes the publicity, I think.”
“I just wondered whether time had hung heavy. People can get odd fancies when that happens.”
“Oh, no, she’s been very busy. I’ve always found her very committed and interested in what I’m doing. I admire her in a lot of ways. She’s made a new life for herself after retirement.”
After a moment’s thought, Bob said:
“Do you remember when I first saw these houses I said I smelled fear?”
“Yes. I’ve remembered that a lot recently.”
“Thinking about it, I suppose middle-class people are always a bit afraid. They have something to lose, but no great power to protect themselves. Maybe having the Estate next door to them, and the Phelans, has just sharpened the fear. . . . ”
Later, nestling in the crook of Bob’s arm, Carol suddenly started.
“I’ve just had a thought.”
“What?”
“Whenever Mrs. Bridewell thinks of her husband she grimaces. Isn’t that funny? Perhaps she does have a thing about men.” She giggled. “Odd she should think I ought to share it.”
Kevin Phelan had been improved in appearance by his stay in the police cells. They had fetched the most presentable of his clothes from the flatlet, and had forced him to have a bath. Now he sat opposite Oddie in jeans and check shirt and looked almost like a normal, undersized teenager—if you ignored the BLACKS OUT tattoo on his neck, his cropped hair, and his vicious expression. And his language, which now was free of all restraints.
“You’re gonna f- - -ing let me out of here, Copper. You got nothing on me. I got mates and if you don’t f- - -ing let me go you’re gonna be done over so your own mother wouldn’t know you.”
The language was from bad films, but the voice came out in a low, loaded, vicious stream. Oddie was reminded of a snake—not the big, coily ones the charmers use, but a small, thin, deadly one, that might dart out of the undergrowth at you, kill, and dart back. He sighed.
“Your mates will count themselves lucky if they don’t find themselves in here with you. And don’t make any mistake: We’ve got plenty on you. Your disgusting little campaign against the small shopkeepers, for instance.”
“Don’t know what you’re f- - -ing talking about.”
“We’ve got people who will testify to having paid protection money after you’ve stuffed petrol-soaked rags and threatening notes through their doors.”
“They’re f- - -ing Paki liars. . . . Anyway you can’t get me for a few rags. It was just a f- - -ing joke.”
“Don’t try and teach me the law, Phelan. We can get you all right. Was that how you got your hand burned?”
“No, it f- - -ing wasn’t. It was petrol for Jason’s f- - -ing motorbike. I got some on me hands and then I lit a f- - -ing match for a fag and it caught fire.”
“Unintelligent even for you. And you went along to the doctor with it, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I f- - -ing did.”
“Interesting . . . ”
He got up and left the interview room, leaving Kevin kicking his heels and swearing, under the eye of a sergeant twice his size. In his office Oddie got on the phone to the main Burtle group practice.
“Could I speak to Dr. Pickering, please? Police here. . . . Oh, Pickering—it’s a question about our friend Kevin Phelan. Has he been along to you with a burned hand?”
“Wait a minute. I’ll get his file. I put the Phelans’ visits out of my mind as quickly as I can. . . . Yes, he came along to the ‘sit and wait’ surgery. That means he didn’t have an appointment but just took his turn and saw whoever was on. It was Evans who saw him, I think, to judge by the handwriting. Was that what you wanted to know?”
“The date. When was this?”
“Let’s see . . . damned doctors’ handwriting . . . the twentieth of February this year.”
“Thank you. Thank you very much.”
It was the day after the fire in Armstead in which an Asian woman and her daughter had died.
“How did school go today, Michael?” Malcolm Cray asked that evening over high tea. (How fatherly I sound, he thought. Michael is my preparation for fatherhood.)
“All right. Everybody was very nice. I’m glad I went back. It stops you thinking about it so much.”
They were in the dining room of the Crays’ postwar semi—a rather spare red-brick house, which they had bought hurriedly when it seemed as if the rise in house prices might drive everything out of their financial reach. Already the furniture was in place in the rooms they had redecorated, and there was a sense of homeliness and order. He and Selena both valued order.
“We’re still trying to get in touch with your sister June,” he said. “We think she may not know yet about the fire, and your Dad.”
“She won’t have read it in the papers,” said Michael, considering. “She doesn’t read them. Maybe someone she’s with could have read about it and told her.”
“Does she have any special friend?” Selena asked casually.
“I expect she does. . . . She’s on the game.” Michael looked at them quickly, with a sudden access of shyness, to see how they took it, then he added, “Part of the time, anyway.”
“Yes, we did know that,” Malcolm said. “Do you know of any special man friend?”
Michael shook his head.
“Do you think your sister Cilla would know?”
“She’d know if anybody would.”
“She wouldn’t tell Superintendent Oddie when he asked her today.”
“She wouldn’t. She’s silly. She likes . . . knowing things, and not telling people about them. Silly things.”
He spoke about her as if she were any girl in his class at school. Malcolm was struck again by the air of detachment he had. It was as if he was in the Phelan family but not of it. He remembered Oddie’s remark about self-protection, and wondered whether the detachment was part of Michael’s recipe for survival.
“Wouldn’t she talk about them even to you?” Selena was asking.
“I don’t think so. She might. It would depend what mood she was in, really.”
“Do you think you could talk to her? Find out any men—anyone at all—your sister June might be with.”
“I could try. I’ll go around when I’ve finished my tea. It’ll be a man,” he said again, with that air of consideration. “If she’s gone a long time it’s always with a man.”
Later that evening, close to bedtime, he came back triumphant.
“Cilla was going out,” he said. “Mrs. Mattingley has been going on at her about visiting Mum in hospital and Cilla wouldn’t, made out she hated hospitals, till in the end Mrs. Mattingley had to go along with her—practically dragging her.”
“So you talked to her friend,” said Selena acutely.
“That’s right. Gail. She’s silly too, just like Cilla. But she wasn’t so on her guard, like. We just talked, and when it got round to June she said Cilla thought she was with somebody called Waley. That’s all she knew. Somebody called Waley.”
Later that evening, when Michael had gone to bed, Malcolm phoned through to headquarters and left a message for Mike Oddie: somebody called Waley.