Mrs. Valerie Hobbs arrived back at her basement flat at about ten past four. Mike Oddie heard this not from any plainclothesman left on watch (any such would be conspicuous in Wynton Lane, which contained only those six houses, and led nowhere), but from Algy Cartwright on the phone. They had not asked him to keep watch, but he had kept watch.
“The KGB of Suburbia strikes again,” said Mike Oddie to Stokes. “Who needs Neighborhood Watch? We’ll give her half an hour to settle down.”
When they drove up it was five o’clock, and they left the car some doors away, outside Daphne Bridewell’s, though from Mrs. Hobbs’s flat, they guessed, there was no sort of view of the road. As they drew up they took in the painted accusation on Daphne Bridewell’s wall, now fainter but still easily legible. The residents would only be saved from embarrassment by a much more ruthless treatment, or by an arrest. They walked casually to the flat, through an overgrown front garden and down the steps. From the flat itself, as they stood momentarily outside before ringing, there came the sound of music—Radio One—but not voices. Then they rang the bell.
“Yes?”
The woman who opened the door had a practiced social smile. She was wearing a cardigan, that guarantor of respectability. It was a close machine-knitted affair in pink, above a russet-colored skirt and a blouse with a small, decorous frill running down the length of it. She had a capable, attractive body, a carefully made-up face, and the image created was of one who could organize tea at a Women’s Institute meeting or man the Save the Children shop single-handed. As no doubt she could.
“Mrs. Hobbs? We’re police officers.”
She glanced briefly at their identification to hide her eyes, then flashed at them her five-carat smile.
“Oh, yes. Is it that nasty business on the Estate? The house fire? I saw that dreadful slogan on the wall. Would you care to come in?”
The accent was neutral middle-class but practiced, like her smile, and it had an underlay of something less socially acceptable, something that would have prevented her from ever gaining employment with the BBC. She led the way down a poky passage that led to a dark staircase up to the main part of the house. They, however, turned aside into a brightly lit sitting-room-cum-kitchen. It was furnished with assorted sofas and chairs, secondhand furniture-shop stuff, though the general effect was not really seedy. Trouble had been taken, though not much money had been spent. There was no sign of cooking around the little sink and stove, which stood under a high window that gave out onto the back garden and the lane. Mrs. Hobbs lowered the lighting, which was unflattering, and gestured them toward the chairs.
“Not much room, I’m afraid. I’ll be getting out of here soon, when I’ve found a place of my own.”
“Did you know the Phelan family?” began Mike casually.
“The Phelan—? Oh, that’s the family whose house was burned down, is it? No, not that I recall. Of course, it’s not an uncommon name—Irish, isn’t it? And I meet a lot of people. . . . ”
Talking too much, thought Mike. Nervous . . .
“I thought you might have met them through your daughter—”
“Oh—well—”
“—your daughter who is in care.”
Her lips tautened immediately, and Oddie saw that behind the social smile there was a tight, mean mouth.
“That was totally unfair. The Welfare Services people were quite out of order. I’ve got my lawyer onto it, but you know how long anything like that takes.”
Mike Oddie raised his eyebrows and shifted in his seat, still watching her closely.
“Mrs. Hobbs, let’s not beat about the bush. It wasn’t just the Welfare Services people who were involved in that matter, it was the police as well.”
“You lot can make a mistake as well as them, can’t you? It was downright defamation of character.”
“It was a question of belatedly protecting a young child. Your daughter was involved in the Carrock child prostitution racket, and so was June Phelan.”
“She wasn’t taken into care, though, was she? Tell me why that was? Look at the sort of family she has, and then look at the home I was providing for my little girl.”
“Ah, so you do know them.” Oddie gave a grim smile of satisfaction and it was her turn to shift in her chair. “Now, I’ve been looking at the notes on that case. June Phelan was only caught up in it just before we swooped—a matter of weeks, no more. Her involvement was marginal, and she was thirteen going on fourteen at the time. Your daughter had been deeply involved for some time, she was eleven—eleven, Mrs. Hobbs—and she was seriously disturbed. Still, I gather, is.”
She shot him a poisonous look.
“We were a one-parent family. You can’t give a child the sort of twenty-four-hours-a-day mothering these days like they used to in the past.”
“Come off it,” said Mike, letting his dislike briefly show through. “You had no paid job at the time. Your position was hardly different from any other mother’s.”
“Men!” she spat out viciously. “You think we ought to be chained to the kitchen sink every hour of the day, don’t you?”
“We took the view at the time,” Oddie went on, ignoring her, “that since Mandy, your daughter, had been involved for some time—over a year, we were sure—and had been getting more and more unmanageable, so that they were seriously worried at Burtle Middle School, where she went—we took the view that there must have been gross negligence, to say the least, on your part. It never occurred to us that there might be anything worse than that.”
“Why should it? What are you trying to land on me now?”
“I think the investigating officer assumed, since you were living comfortably, that you were getting good alimony payments from your ex-husband. But I’ve made some inquiries of your ex-neighbors. There never was any husband, was there? Nor, as far as we can see, was there any maintenance order against the father of your child.”
“Well, what of it? Are you still living in the nineteenth century or something?”
“Not at all. But the question arises, doesn’t it, Mrs. Hobbs: How come you were living so comfortably?”
“It’s taken me a while to realize, to sort things out in my mind.” Steven Copperwhite was watching his ex-wife as he said it. She gave no sign of a reaction, merely sipped her glass of red wine. He had collected her from work, and they had gone to the Saddle of Mutton in Head Street, which was newly tarted-up Victorian, but quite warm and cozy. He had weighed in with the topic almost at once. “I suppose pride is involved, isn’t it? I think underneath I realized my mistake early on. I expect a lot of people who go into second . . . relationships do. What takes the time is acknowledging it to yourself.”
Margaret nodded neutrally.
“I mean, the fact is we’re miles apart mentally. Evie is so totally committed—really committed, no question of that. But—I don’t know—I find I’m too old or too tired for that sort of all-round commitment. I haven’t got the fire, the energy. These days I take it easier.”
So you want to come back to me as someone you can take it easier with, Margaret thought. She said:
“Of course, one does slow down, at our age.”
“Yes. And you start asking yourself: All this activism and commitment—where does it get you, what good does it ever do? Evie seems like a throwback to the sixties. Remember when we used to laugh at Feiffer and Peanuts, and sing ‘Little Boxes’? And where did it all get us? A decade of Thatcher and the market as God. No, I realize now that Evie and I were never close. It was an illusion. And we’re getting further and further apart all the time. Another red wine?”
Margaret nodded. It would give her time to think.
“The fact is, I made a mistake,” said Steven, coming back with two glasses. “I’m not too proud to acknowledge it. I thought it was a great love, a consuming passion, but it was one of those purely physical things.”
“Itchy prick?” suggested Margaret.
“Well . . . I suppose so.” He threw her a glance and laughed uneasily. “You’ve changed, Meg. I don’t think you’d have used an expression like that when we were married.”
“I suppose not. Working in a male environment you pick up the language. Policemen lead pretty dangerous, unpleasant lives these days. They don’t mince their words. And, of course, there are plenty of men in the Force who are going through that phase.”
“Are there? Yes, I suppose I was suffering from a pretty universal malady. But it is only a temporary thing, Meg. I don’t know what causes it—fantasy, vanity, all sorts of things you can’t disentangle. But I do know now that I made a fool of myself, and I do know that I’ve come through it.”
Margaret nodded slowly.
“Meg, I’m going to ask you to do a big, brave thing.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Let me move back. I know things can never be quite the same—I’m not such a fool as to think they can—but there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be pretty good. We really jogged along very pleasantly in the past, didn’t we? I won’t mention the children, because they’re grown up and moved away now, but they would be happy if we got together again.”
“She wouldn’t suffer. The house is in both our names. I’d just let her have my share. I’d leave the furniture. It’s not much anyway. I could get together my things quite easily—clothes and books is really all it amounts to. It would work this time, Meg dear. I know what a fool I’ve been. I’d sweat to make sure it worked. Please say yes. I could just pile my things into the car and be with you tomorrow night.”
She looked ahead of her, expressionless, thinking. Then silently she dipped her hand into her handbag, took out a key, and handed it over the table to him.
“Sometimes I think Lynn is going off his head,” said Jennifer Packard.
She had come next door with the usual housewife’s excuse of wanting to borrow something. She had intended to ask for baking powder, but one look at the kitchen of Ashdene had convinced her that little baking was likely to go on there. She had compromised on sugar. The sugar Evie rustled up was raw, but it had served its purpose of providing the opening for a heart-to-heart.
“You don’t mean you think he’s involved in all this?”
“Oh no, I’m sure he’s not . . . Quite sure. . . . But he can’t get away from the fact that he masterminded all the opposition to the Phelans, and he knows the police are interested in him just for that reason.”
“So the old line about ‘If you are innocent you have nothing to fear’ doesn’t cut any ice with him? I would have thought he’d be a member of the Aren’t Our Policemen Wonderful brigade.”
“He is, normally. Though he’s also fond of watching Sylvester Stallone dispensing his own brand of justice—pretends he’s hired them for the kids. I think the mere fact that the police are interested in him makes him feel that his respectability is threatened. He’s very insecure socially.”
“Aren’t we all? Steven thinks my mother is an upper-class dragon, but she’s only precariously upper-middle. It’s the precariousness that makes her a dragon. She made sure she caught an elderly knight for a husband, and now she waves the title and puts it on generally to an embarrassing extent.”
“Yes—I suppose anyone who has anything to lose is socially insecure,” said Jennifer thoughtfully.
“That’s what makes the Phelans frightening. They have nothing. Jack Phelan was the new underclass: riotous, savage, with nothing to lose. It frees you from an awful lot of restraints and inhibitions. Like the man in Little Dorrit who said that being in the debtors’ prison gave him freedom, because it was the bottom, and he couldn’t fall any further. What are your feelings about your husband?”
“I don’t know altogether. I was thinking the other day how I not only didn’t love him anymore—that must be common, almost the norm—but I don’t even think I like him. I’ve seen through him, realized there isn’t anything much there.”
“I know the feeling. Why don’t you leave him?”
“The boys, I suppose. It would upset them if we split up, and they’re just the wrong age to face disruption of that kind. Lynn is an awfully nagging kind of father, but in his way he’s fond of them. Then I wonder how I could possibly manage—finding a home for us, getting a job.”
“You don’t have to find a home. These days the wife gets the man out.”
“Well, I’d have to get some kind of a job, that’s for sure. And I genuinely don’t think it’s good for children not to have a parent home in an emergency . . . ”
She trailed off uncertainly.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?”
“Well . . . ” Jennifer screwed up her face in self-dissatisfaction. “I do worry about Lynn. If he shows signs of cracking up now, what’s going to happen to him if we all up and leave? It’s almost as if he won’t exist if he doesn’t have us. He seems just a shell of a man. . . . I suppose what it comes down to is I do feel something for him, and that’s pity.”
“That’s what most women feel for their husbands after a time,” said Evie briskly. “That’s why I shall make damned sure I never have a long-lasting relationship.”
“Well?” said Oddie.
“Well what?”
She had been gazing stubbornly ahead of her, blank as a wall, and saying nothing at all.
“How did it come about that you were maintaining a comfortable lifestyle a couple of years ago when you were not receiving alimony or maintenance for Mandy, your daughter, nor did you have a regular job?”
“Mind your own bleeding business.”
The mask of the upwardly mobile independent woman was beginning to slip badly, and so was the accent. Oddie realized that she had been running her business for years without ever coming into serious conflict with the police, It reflected very poorly on himself and his colleagues.
“Another very interesting question: Why did this comfortable life-style I’ve mentioned begin to collapse about the time we closed in on the Carrock business, bringing you down to this?” He waved his hand round at the poky flatlet, the nondescript furniture.
“You’d taken my daughter away from me, hadn’t you? I didn’t need a whole house when there was only me.”
“Oh, I don’t think a woman like you loses the taste for a little bit of luxury—house and garden, nice furniture, nice clothes. All those things were part of the image. And they hid a very nasty reality, didn’t they?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Oddie leaned forward.
“The reality being that you were running the show.”
“There was no show.”
“Oh, yes, there was. There was a ring, efficiently organized, discreetly run.” He spoke confidently to mask his conviction that the whole business had been badly handled by the police officers concerned at the time. “There were something like twenty children regularly involved, and more drifting in all the time. And there were God knows how many clients—assured of anonymity, at a very high price. We never got to the bottom of who was running the show. As far as we were concerned, you were just a negligent mother. That was our mistake. Or did you manage to slip a hefty bribe to someone in the force?”
She had brought a shutter down over the face, all except that tight, mean little mouth. Now there was an unpleasant smile twitching the corners of it.
“Or was one of our people involved in the trade itself?”
The shutter stayed down.
“Anyway, what really interests me here and now is what’re you doing at the moment?”
“Living my life and keeping myself to myself.”
“I’m sure you’re living your life. In fact, I think you’re quietly going back to your old life, aren’t you?”
“You know very well my daughter’s in care. I’m only allowed to see her once a week, and then that bleeding woman she’s with stands guard like she was a wardress in Holloway Prison. I’ve given up going—it’s not worth the aggro.”
“So you’ve severed all connection with your daughter? Funny, isn’t it, that you’ve been seen coming back to the flat here with children.”
A slight flicker crossed the eyes, the first sign that Oddie had seen of apprehension.
“I said children, not a child. One of your neighbors had seen you even before the night of the fire at the Phelans with a young girl. He wondered at the time whether you had a daughter living with you here. He’s seen you since, also with a girl, but he’s quite sure it was a different child. One was very fair, the other quite dark. He’s also seen you with a young boy.” Oddie thrust a big finger in her face. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? You’re getting a ring together again.”
“God! Can’t I bloody talk to a child now?”
“Well, let’s say you should be damned careful when you do. And this wasn’t just talking: It was bringing them here to the flat, or taking them away again. I’m going to ask you to come along with us in a moment, but I’ve got one more question for you first. There was a child—girl or boy, I don’t know—in this flat on the day the Phelans came with permission to view, wasn’t there?”
Now there was a mulish expression on her face. Her business had been built on secrecy, on complete protection for the client. Even a scrubby little tart like June Phelan had had some idea of the importance of that. Mrs. Hobbs said nothing. Oddie went on:
“I don’t suppose you were here yourself, were you? You procured the child, the client arrived, and you discreetly took yourself off. No doubt that’s usual practice. Spares you any nastiness, doesn’t it, and makes the client feel freer. But I want to know the name of your client that day.”
She stared ahead, her narrow mouth pursed.
“If you keep quiet, you could find yourself accessory to a murder.”
The impenetrability of a palace wall faced him. He leaned forward till their faces were close.
“I bet I could guess the name.”
He spoke the name, and across her face there came a flicker that was incontrovertibly a spasm of fear.