At ten o’clock next morning Steven Copperwhite stopped toying with a sentence about Muriel Spark which aimed at her lapidary, epigrammatic elegance but kept lapsing into sluggishness and began getting his books together for the day’s tutorials. Lawrence and Auden—neither of them favorites of his. He snapped his briefcase shut, wound a West Yorkshire University scarf around his neck, and was just about to go out to the car when he realized he had not heard Evie leave.
He poked his head into the living room and found her at the table, pasting photographs onto a large piece of cardboard. Inevitably, with Evie, he knew that before long there would also be slogans.
“It’s the Kirkby Development Scheme,” Evie explained, looking up. “There’s a protest meeting tonight. What do you think?”
There were two pictures with “Before” and “After” written over them. The “After” was a hideous picture of a shopping complex and a theme park side by side, taken in some luckless city that had suffered those twin contemporary depredations. The “Before” picture was a postcard of The Hireling Shepherd.
“They’re planning a dinosaur theme park and an enormous Foodwise supermarket with acres of parking,” explained Evie. “It’s vandalism under the guise of development.”
“I know. . . . I think The Hireling Shepherd is a mistake.”
“Why? I love Pre-Raphaelite pictures.”
“Hmmm. They’re all right provided you don’t see them in bulk. The trouble with this one is there’s not the faintest whiff of sheep-dip. The shepherd looks like a public schoolboy got up for a rural pageant. Anyway, it’s a hell of a long time since Kirkby saw any sheep.”
He had her on one of her weak points. Evie came from Essex—the arse-hole of England, she called it—and knew nothing of sheep. If a sheep had made an appearance in her part of Essex it would have had a parking ticket slapped on it. She looked uncharacteristically uncertain.
“Something else, then?”
“Yes. And not Lo, the Pretty Baa-lambs either. Why not an Atkinson Grimshaw?”
“I’ll look for something. You are on our side, though, aren’t you?”
“Of course I’m on your side. This government is taking decision making clean out of the hands of the local councils. And their policy on the countryside is absolutely diabolical. England will soon be ‘This green and pleasant golf course’ if this lot get their way. They’d turn Saddleworth Moor into a Myra Hindley theme park, given half a chance.”
“That’s very good,” said Evie. “I might use that at the meeting.” She looked up at him thoughtfully. “But you don’t feel it, do you?”
“What do you mean? Of course I feel it.”
“No, you believe it, because it’s in line with what you’ve always believed. And you can coin a good phrase. But you don’t feel it. Essentially, in your bones, you don’t care. Is that because you’re getting old, I wonder? Is that what age does to one? Interesting point for your research.”
She began collecting her books together for the day.
“You’re very unfair,” Steven protested. “You really shouldn’t say wounding things like that. You give me the feeling that we’re splitting apart.”
“What nonsense. We were never together,” said Evie briskly, rummaging in her bag to find her keys and striding out of the house. At the door she paused. “I think it’s great that you’re seeing Margaret again.”
There were three Waleys in the telephone directory, and one of those was also thrown up by the police computer: William Waley of Waitewood, who had been interviewed at the time of the Carrock child sex scandal—interviewed but not prosecuted. Prosecution had been concentrated on those operating the ring rather than the clients, and even then the police were conscious that the real ringleader had eluded them. With hindsight the clients should probably also have been exposed, but it had seemed at the time that the really important thing was to close down the grubby business. It was at that time, too, that June Phelan had come within the police’s ken. They had sent a policewoman to talk to her family. Apparently Jack Phelan’s reaction was that it was good she was bringing money in.
“Good thing that the name you got hold of was an unusual one,” Mike Oddie said to Malcolm Cray as he passed him in the corridor on his way from the computer room.
“Unusual? Waley?”
“If it had been Walker it would have taken us all week to check. We’re in a bit of a rut with surnames in the North.”
“Sir,” said Malcolm Cray, putting out a hand to detain him. “I had a thought overnight—lying in bed and thinking things over . . . You remember I said just after the fire that he probably knew that some of the family would be away?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what if, in fact, it was the other way around? What if it wasn’t Jack that was aimed at but one of the children who didn’t happen to be there.”
“Point taken,” said Oddie grimly. “Particularly as I’m on my way, I hope, to interview one of those now.”
William Waley lived at number 25, Park View Heights, Waitewood, a suburb where standard red-brick semis slotted in among patches of woodland and school playing fields. Waley’s semi was rather superior to most of the other meager specimens—it had a broader frontage, was plastered over and newly repainted, and was probably earlier—thirties rather than postwar. Approaching it casually from where they had left their car, Oddie and Sergeant Stokes saw a good-sized garage, a garden with a few late roses, and a bosomy bay window with heavy velvet curtains pulled across. As they went up the little driveway to the front door, they could hear electronic voices, and through the curtains they caught the flicker of a television screen.
A couple of seconds after Oddie rang the doorbell, the television was switched off. The house was now totally silent. He rang again. Still only silence. He raised an eyebrow at Sergeant Stokes and bent down to open the letter box.
“Miss Phelan? June? We know you’re in there. This is the police. We have some important information for you. Will you open the door please?”
He straightened up. “Seemed worth a try,” he mouthed at Stokes. There was still no movement from inside. He sighed and bent himself down to the letter box again.
“Miss Phelan, please listen to me. We have something very important to tell you. If you don’t let us in, we shall have to force our way in, so please open the door.”
This seemed to work. After a pause of a second or two, there were sounds of scurrying footsteps and the door was opened a few inches. Nothing was said and nobody appeared in the gap, so they edged their way into the house.
“What the hell are you going on about?”
It took them some moments for their eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom of the hallway. No lights were on, and the figure who had opened and quickly shut the door stood behind it in the gloomiest part. She was wearing a brilliant blue dress of a silky material Mike Oddie could not have described, and high-heeled shoes that, like the dress, seemed rather too big for her. She was very heavily made up—indeed Oddie had the impression that she had been experimenting on her face when the doorbell had rung, for one side of the face was made up on rather different principles from the other, and there was a lopsided dash of mascara around the left eye, where the bell had caused the pencil to slip.
“Could we go through?” he asked. “This is important.”
There was a shrug of padded blue shoulder and she led the way. The living room was conventionally furnished, with a heavy padded sofa and chairs, thick fitted carpet, a small bookcase, a large television with video recorder, and a newspaper rack with the local daily paper for the last few days in it. The orderly, middle-class impression of the room was overlaid by another, inimical force: Underclothes and a towel were strewn over the sofa, a mug and a plate were on the television, and a buttery knife had fallen onto the carpet beside it. There was a slum of makeup packs and jars on the mantelpiece, and the contents of them had got over the mirror as well as here and there on surfaces in the room. June Phelan was setting her mark on her space.
“You are June Phelan?”
After a second for thought, she nodded.
“I’m afraid I have bad news for you. There was a fire at your home and your father’s dead.”
“He’s not!” For a moment surprise made her look the sixteen years that she was, underneath the borrowed grown-upness.
“I’m afraid he is. Your mother has been very sick, but she’s recovering now in hospital.
“What do you expect me to do?”
It was the automatic Phelan aggression, an indignant repudiation of the world’s expectations. The emotion had been surprise, not grief, and she had quickly reverted to the patterns of behavior she had always known.
“That’s for you to decide. We just came because we thought you must not have heard the news.” He gestured toward the newspaper rack. “It’s been in the paper, though.”
June shrugged. Papers meant nothing to her.
“The gentleman of the house . . . Mr. Waley . . . he probably read about it.”
“Didn’t tell me. Cunning old sod.”
“You see I have to ask you some questions because I’m afraid the fire that destroyed your house wasn’t accidental.”
She looked at him with avid, foolish curiosity.
“You mean someone did it deliberate? Someone wanted to fry our Dad?”
“That’s roughly what I meant. Maybe tried to kill all of you.”
“Christ!” said June. It was an automatic, almost an admiring response, not a shocked one. She did not seriously think anyone had been aiming at her.
“So perhaps we could sit down and I could ask you a few questions?”
She shrugged and pointed at the sofa. They pushed petticoats, tights, and bras up to one end and sat down.
“How long have you been living here, June?”
“What f- - -ing business is it of yours?”
“I’m just trying to find out if whoever started the fire could have thought you would be in the house at the time.”
“Don’t talk crap. They weren’t aiming to get me. Don’t you know anything at all about my Dad? Right bloody troublemaker he was. Never happy unless he was stirring it up.”
“I know that. . . . Well, how long have you been here?”
“Christ Almighty! . . . About ten days.”
“So—” Oddie calculated roughly in his head—“you must have come here not long after you went with your Dad and Mum to view the house in Wynton Lane.”
“About three or four days, far as I remember.”
“Did your Dad ever tell you how much he’d won on the pools?”
“No.” Her face assumed an expression of scorn. “I knew it must be chicken feed.”
“How did you know?”
“I knew my Dad. Right bloody joker he was. If he’d really won a tidy sum on the pools he wouldn’t have bought a house with it. I tell you, the first thing he’d ’a’ done was go out and buy a car. Loved cars, my Dad, and he hadn’t had one for ever so many years. Since he’d last had a job. It was the only thing he never managed to get out of Social Security.”
“I see. So you’ve been here since then. How did you come to know Mr. Waley?”
“Oh, I’ve known him years.” She said it airily, as if she were a middle-aged woman, not a teenaged small-time tart.
“But how did you get to know him?”
“Met him, di’n’t I?”
“Where?”
“Oh—here and there.”
“He’s a customer of yours?”
She shrugged. “You could say that if you liked.”
“You were involved in the Carrock business three years ago, weren’t you? Did you meet him then?”
“Likes little girls, does he?”
She giggled. The subject of men and their sexual habits made her more communicative.
“I take all this off before he comes home. Put on a skinny nightdress, suck me thumb.” She perched herself on the arm of her chair and acted it out for them. Neither of them felt greatly aroused. “Silly old bugger. Playing games like that at his age.”
She talked of sex—like many prostitutes—as if it were a lot of silly nonsense with which she had nothing to do.
“Has he got a wife?” Oddie asked.
“Had to fly to New Zealand, didn’t she? Father died. I moved in soon as the old cat went. Some of her clothes are brilliant, though. Do you think this suits me?”
She was about to get up to parade her slinky finery when the telephone rang. June sank back in her armchair and stayed put.
“I never answer it. He told me not to. It might be her.”
Oddie watched her as she waited for it to stop. She exuded something that was not sexuality, merely availability.
“Are you still . . . working in the Carrock area?” he asked when the ringing stopped.
“On and off. When it suits me. Got a girlfriend there with a flat. We use it alternate nights. She goes out with her boyfriend and I take them back there.”
“Your customers?”
“Yeah. That was before old Waley with the limp willy got me to come back here. Cost him a packet, it did. . . . Poor old bugger, he’s terrified of the neighbors finding out. Tells me I mustn’t have the telly on while he’s out, mustn’t have the radio on, mustn’t go out in the garden. F- - - him.”
“You must have met a lot of interesting people in your work. Important people.”
“May have done.” It was said with another shrug. It had been the wrong approach. June was not interested in important people, only in June.
“Anybody spring to mind?”
“We don’t talk about the men we go with.”
“Professional ethics?”
“Yer what?”
“Never mind. . . . Are they all a bit kinky, like your Mr. Waley?”
“Varies. Some of them like it straight, some of them like a bit of dressing up, and that. There’s plenty like the little girl stuff, but I’m getting a bit past that.” She giggled and pushed her breasts forward at them. “I’m a big girl. Old Waley wouldn’t be so keen if he could get anybody younger.”
“Not so easy now, I suppose, since the police got wise to what was going on in Carrock.”
“F- - -ing police! Always poking their bloody noses in! What’s it to you how I earn my bloody money?”
It was the voice of the dreadful, dead Jack Phelan again, this time the voice of the right-of-Thatcher libertarian. Oddie didn’t pursue the argument.
“We never got who was really behind the Carrock business, did we?”
June was not to be caught like that. She smiled unappetizingly and said nothing.
“How did you come to get in with that game?”
“Friend at school. Said there was money to be made out of these old kinks. . . . Didn’t even know the word then. Innocent, warn’t I? . . . Anyway I was interested so she took me along, and—well, that was that.”
“Who was the friend?”
“Mind yer own business.”
“And what sort of thing did you do?”
“What the f- - - do you think I did? Had sex with men. Want me to spell it out? They put their—”
“Didn’t your Mum or Dad try to stop you?”
“They didn’t bloody know, did they? Wouldn’t have done much if they had. My Dad never stopped me doing anything in his life, ’cept if it was annoying him.”
“And this went on until we stepped in?”
“Bloody filth! What’s it to you? You should have seen my Dad with that policewoman who came round, though. She practically went purple.”
“And you’ve been on the game again—how long?”
“Since I left school. Since July. I must have been off my rocker, giving it to boys for free.”
“So recently you’ve been sometimes at home and sometimes—well, at Carrock and around, on the game?”
June nodded.
“So anyone who did this to your home couldn’t have expected that you’d be inside?”
“You’re bleeding daft, you know that? There’s no one’d want to get me. Think of all those bloody backs my Dad put up, and then you say they weren’t out to get him at all. No wonder it took you years to catch the f- - -ing Yorkshire Ripper!”
She was stopped short by a sound. There was a key being put in the front door. Her eyes widened into something like a genuine emotion: fear. Oddie jumped up and darted out into the hall.
“What’s going on? I rang from the station—”
It was a smart, tough-looking woman, weary and travel-stained. As Oddie went toward her she caught a flash of blue from inside the living room.
“Oh, I get it. He’s been up to his tricks again, has he? And in my bloody clothes—I’ll teach you, you—”
She charged in, and for the next five minutes Oddie and Stokes were busy practicing the techniques learned long ago in their uniform days—the techniques for breaking up a “domestic.”