Footsteps in the Park Page 5

  Matthew sat down heavily on the side of the double bed, so heavily that the box-spring mattress creaked in protest. Then he eased his feet out of his black shoes and into a pair of tartan house slippers. ‘That’s better, by heck. I try, lass. I try to keep tabs on all my weavers, but it’s not like it were when your grandad ran the mill. He had time to take a fatherly interest in all of them, but it’s as much as I can do to keep up with the administration side these days. As much as I can do to keep the looms running full time.’ He stroked his chin. ‘Aye, things have changed, and not for the better.’ He put up a warning finger, then smiled. ‘Thought I heard your mother coming up, but she’s on the telephone. To your Auntie Ethel I shouldn’t wonder. About this ‘ere wedding.’

  ‘The hat,’ Dorothy said, and they smiled and nodded at each other.

  ‘About this Ruby Armstrong girl, chuck. I can tell you one thing, and that is she’s a good and quick worker. A bit of a different cup of tea from some of the other weavers. Not always shouting and shrieking to her mates all day.’ He undid the top button of his trousers for further comfort. ‘I remember like it were yesterday her mother bringing her to see me about two years ago when she first started in the weaving shed. Aye, she’d be about fourteen, just left school. I can see her now, standing there in the office in her navy-blue school mac, all big-eyed and shy, with her mother doing all the talking. More or less telling me that if I didn’t look after her daughter she’d give me what for. Nice woman though. Just lost her husband. But a bit of a tiger. Wanting the best for her kids all along the line.’

  ‘Stanley’s won a state scholarship to Oxford,’ Dorothy said, the pride in her voice giving her away. ‘He’s really clever, Dad. Special clever. You know?’

  Matthew patted a place beside him on the bed.

  ‘Special to you, love?’

  Dorothy swallowed, hoping to avoid the hated blush. It worked sometimes, but not this time. ‘I think so, Dad. We can talk, you know? Really say things that matter to each other, though we argue a lot of the time. He’s always on the side of the under-dog.’ She smiled. ‘He says you’re a bloated capitalist.’

  Matthew roared with laughter. ‘Does he now? Doesn’t he know that’s what he’ll be when he’s finished at yon university, and got himself a good job? There’s nowt like a bit of education and a few letters behind a man’s name for turning a Bolshie into one of us. You ask him if he’ll be prepared to work along o’ the masses when he can put them letters behind his name? I’ve seen many a man join the ranks of what he had considered to be the privileged, when education lifts him up amongst them.’

  ‘He’s not a Bolshie,’ Dorothy said quickly. ‘He just wants a better deal for everybody, regardless of creed, colour or class.’

  ‘There were a chap called Jesus who wanted that,’ Matthew said with a grim smile. ‘But it don’t work in practice, love. There’ll always be them what comes out of the top drawer, and them what stays in the bottom. I’d like to meet this lad of yours sometime, but your mother worries about you, love. Some day, when you have kids of your own, you’ll understand. That Mrs Armstrong and your mother, they’re both tarred with the same brush, you know, if you think about it. Both wanting the best for their children, be it three looms in a weaving shed, or a place at university, or a husband who’s passed his accountancy exams and talks posh.’

  ‘You like Gerald, don’t you, Dad?’

  Dorothy’s voice was no more than a whisper as she heard the telephone being replaced on its hook downstairs.

  ‘Aye, I like him. He knows his job, I’ll say that for him, though I’ve always felt that chaps who work with figures and the balancing of them are bound to be double dealers in a certain kind of way. All them accounts to make come out right, they’re bound to push them one way or t’other if you think about it. He makes our Margaret happy, and he makes your mother happy, and that’s all that matters it seems to me.’

  Dorothy leaned up against him. ‘You’re a right softie, did you know that, Dad?’

  He dropped a kiss on her hair. ‘Get away with you, love. But think on what I’ve said now, and don’t go getting yourself all involved before you’ve had time to grow up and see what other fish there might be in the sea first. All right?’

  She smiled into his cardigan. ‘And how many times has Mother told me that you and her were childhood sweethearts? That neither of you had ever known anyone else?’

  ‘There were a war on, love, and I was sent to France right at the beginning. Things were different.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Matthew?’ Phyllis’s voice spiralled upstairs with more than a touch of hysteria in it. ‘Can you come down a minute? I’ve just been talking to the man at The Pied Bull about the reception, and he says the room we’ve booked can’t take more than seventy-five.’

  Matthew got to his feet and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Coming love. I’ll nobbut be more than a minute.’

  Then he put a hand on Dorothy’s shoulder. ‘Try and be happy, love. That’s all I want for you in the long run, and your mother too, if you could but realize it. This Ruby girl – she’ll turn up, you’ll see. Things have a way of turning out right, and this boy . . . remember he’s got years of study in front of him, and you don’t want to be missing out on all the fun you could be having by waiting for him or anything daft like that. Take my word for it, he’ll change, and you’ll change.’ He walked towards the door. ‘Let it slide, love. Just let it be till you’re both old enough to know your own minds. You won’t believe me now, but there’s no hurry. No hurry at all.’

  ‘Matthew!’

  ‘Seems like there is!’ he said, winking broadly at his daughter before he left the room.

  Dorothy, alone in her room, with the sound of rain spattering the tall windows, and a wind sighing in the tall elm tree at the bottom of the back garden, tried to care whether Cromwell had been a good leader, and failed. What was the point in swotting for a Higher School Certificate she wasn’t going to take anyway? And how could she possibly concentrate on events that had happened three hundred years ago when what was happening now filled every corner of her mind? If only Stanley was on the telephone, she could ring him and find out. If only she’d asked him to slip out somehow and ring her. ‘Oliver Cromwell was a man of the people,’ she wrote then chewed the end of her pen and stared at the wallpaper until the triangles filled with baskets of flowers went out of focus.

  At twenty past nine she went downstairs and joined her parents in the lounge.

  Matthew turned to her with the smile that always lit his face whenever she came into a room. ‘Want me to keep the wireless on, love? The talk’s finished but it’s Jack Hylton’s band on next. You like him, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said, in such a dispirited way that her mother laid her knitting down in her lap for a moment, and raised her eyes ceilingwards as if searching for patience.

  Dorothy flopped down in a corner of the huge chintz-covered chesterfield. ‘I am an awful worry to her,’ she thought, with a sudden flash of perception. ‘There’s no communication between us at all. I can’t play the part she wants me to play therefore we have nothing of consequence to say to each other. I am driving her mad tonight because I can’t stop wondering what’s going on in Inkerman Street, and I can’t tell her the reason for my restlessness because I couldn’t bear the things she’d say.’

  Matthew hadn’t told his wife about the missing weaver either. He shifted in his chair . . . Was he frightened of his own wife, or summat? Nay, never say that. But what he didn’t want, after the long and tiring day at the mill, was a long discussion on Dorothy’s friendship with yon poor lass’s brother. He knew his Phyllis, and the mystery of the lost girl would be as nothing compared with the fact that Dorothy was involved, even indirectly.

  ‘Love is the sweetest thing,’ the band on the wireless was playing, and he couldn’t resist giving his daughter a wink. Nay, dammit, what was more normal than thinking you were in love
at seventeen? Maybe he was an abnormal father or something? He’d read somewhere that fathers were supposed to be jealous of their daughters’ sweethearts. Well, all he could say was that he would be right glad to see both of them nicely married off. In white, of course, to please Phyllis, with him all dressed up in a top hat and tails like Sunny Jim on a packet of Force cereal, if that was the way she wanted it. . . .

  ‘Sitting like that, slid down in your chair, is giving you a big stomach, Matthew,’ she was saying now, so pretending he hadn’t heard her, he closed his eyes and crossed his hands over the offending part of his anatomy. Dashed if he’d let a woman tell him how to sit in his own chair, his closed and shuttered expression said.

  ‘I think I’ll go up and have a bath,’ Dorothy said, jumping up quickly and leaving the room before her mother could ask her please not to take all the hot water, as she never failed to do.

  ‘What’s the matter with her tonight?’ she heard Phyllis ask before she got to the foot of the wide oak staircase.

  Followed by her father’s answering murmur, ‘Leave her be, love. Just leave her be. . . .’

  And she was lying back in the warm scented water when she heard the telephone ringing in the hall, and her father’s measured tread as he went to answer it. She tried to hear what he was saying, and it was impossible, but he wasn’t on long, and as she climbed out of the bath and started to dry herself, she heard a tap on the bathroom door.

  ‘It’s me, love,’ her father said, and something in the sound of his voice made her wind the big pink towel round her body, tucking it in above her breasts. She opened the door and knew even as she saw his face that what she had been dreading had happened.

  ‘It was the station, love,’ Matthew told her, his red face redder than ever with concern for her. ‘Now I don’t want you going and upsetting yoursen, but I did promise to tell you the minute I heard owt.’

  ‘They’ve found her, haven’t they?’ Dorothy bowed her head and stared down at her bare feet.

  ‘It was Sergeant Bates, chuck. He promised to let me know.’

  ‘Tell me, Dad.’

  Matthew sighed, wanting to spare her, but knowing that he couldn’t. ‘Aye, they’ve found her body, love.’ Then he reached for her and held her close, just as if she were a child again and he’d come up the stairs to rub her dry.

  ‘She were in the Corporation Park. Strangled by the looks of her, the sergeant said. They’ve sent a man round to tell her mother . . . Aye, it’s a bad business all right.’

  Dorothy’s voice came muffled from his shoulder.

  ‘Where in the park, Father?’

  Matthew turned his head and saw his wife coming along the landing. He shook his head at her. ‘Keep out of this, please,’ his expression said.

  ‘By the duck pond, chuck. Hidden beneath a rhododendron bush. Seems a courting couple trying to shelter from the rain stumbled over something . . . Now then, hold up, love. Come on now, let’s get you to your room and into bed.’ He patted her shoulder with small comforting gestures.

  But Dorothy was past comfort, past noticing or even caring that the pink towel was slipping down exposing one rounded breast. Her heart was pounding so loudly she felt she would suffocate with the sound of it.

  ‘Oh, no! Oh no . . . I was talking to Stanley this afternoon in the park. We were sitting on the bench where we always sit, one of the benches near to the duck pond. We could have been sitting right where . . .’ She raised an anguished face. ‘Stanley was late, and then when he came he told me that Ruby hadn’t come home all night. And all the time we were talking she could have been lying not far away. Perhaps not more than a few yards from as. He was actually telling me that she was missing, and all the time . . . Oh God! She might even have been alive. And we just sat there . . .’

  Her voice rose high, wavering on the verge of lost control. Matthew shook her gently.

  ‘She wasn’t alive, lovey. Now step torturing yourself with thoughts like that. You’re letting that imagination of yours run away with itself again.’ He was guiding her slowly along the wide landing as he talked to her in his flat voice, his northern accent becoming more pronounced as his concern for her increased.

  ‘She were dead, chuck. There were nowt you could have done even if you’d found her. Now, come on, be a good girl and get into bed.’

  Dorothy started to whimper, ‘I’ve got to go to Stanley. I’m his friend, and he’ll want to see me. I can’t just go to bed, I can’t. Oh, Dad, how could anyone do that to a girl like Ruby Armstrong? She was so pretty. I’ve seen Gerald and Mr Sowerbutts talking to her down at the mill. Everyone liked her. They did, didn’t they? She was a good girl. She didn’t mess about with boys, Stanley told me. She’d only been out with the boy next door . . . oh . . . her poor mother . . .’

  ‘Into bed, love.’ Matthew motioned to his wife and nodded at the blue nightdress lying over the foot of the bed.

  ‘Help her into that, lass, then go down and make a pot of tea. Strong and with plenty of sugar in it. I’ll stay here.’

  And for once in her life, Phyllis Bolton didn’t argue. . . .

  Matthew tucked his daughter into her bed, and pulled the satin eiderdown up round her shoulders. Her face was the colour of putty, and her eyes were staring at him, trying to make him understand.

  ‘Take me down to Stanley’s house, Dad. Please.’

  He shook his head firmly. ‘It wouldn’t be right, love. Now listen to me. It’s not the time for anyone else to be there, not tonight. This is a private time, both for Stanley and his mother. The police will be as kind as they know how to be, but there’ll be things, unpleasant things to be done.’ He hesitated, then went on: ‘Someone will have to identify the . . . the body, and there’ll be more questions. I doubt if anyone down there will see their beds tonight.’ He knelt down awkwardly and took her hands in his own, squeezing them gently, trying to soothe, at a loss to know what to say, wondering just how far things had gone between his Dorothy and this boy, this special boy who would have to be more than a son to his mother this night.

  ‘I’ll take you in the morning,’ he said, unable to bear the pleading in her eyes. ‘First thing. I’ll want to let Mrs Armstrong know that I’ll help her in any way I can, and you can come with me. First thing.’

  From downstairs came the sound of light voices in the hall, and the sound of Margaret’s laughter, suddenly switched off as Phyllis told them what had happened.

  Dorothy raised herself on one elbow, her blue eyes wide with distress. ‘Don’t let them come upstairs, Dad. Don’t let them come near me. I couldn’t bear to talk to them just now.’

  ‘There’ll nobody come near you, love,’ Matthew said, rising stiffly from his knees and taking a cup of tea from Margaret as she started to walk into the room.

  ‘Gerald wants to know if there’s anything . . .’ she began, and the look on her face turned to one of astonishment as her father turned her round and pushed her none too gently from the room.

  ‘Tell Gerald . . . oh tell him to push off,’ he said firmly and closed the door.

  Five

  THE POLICEMAN STOPPED under a street lamp half way up Inkerman Street. Its yellow beam showed the serious set of his pointed features and the rain glistening on the folds of his cape. ‘No use in stopping, Albert,’ he told himself. ‘What has to be done has to be done,’ Then he walked with a heavy tread further up the street and knocked three times on the door of number twenty-seven.

  By God, did it never do owt else but rain in this damned town? And what was he doing standing here? He ought to be going to bed like all the other occupants of the street. He glanced at the lighted upstairs windows and saw a face appear from behind the drawn curtains of the house directly opposite. Aye, the happenings of the day had given them something to talk about right enough. Something to take their minds off the dole queues and the worry for some of them as to where the next meal was coming from. He knocked again. . . .

  When he heard the footsteps coming down t
he passage towards the door, he wished he could just turn and walk away. Run away, he meant really. Back down the sloping street with its flagstones glistening with rain, back to his own little semi-detached house out on the Manchester side of the town, where his wife would be waiting with a pint pot of cocoa, and the fire burning in the grate, and his new-born son asleep upstairs in his cot. Back to sanity, and back to normality.

  The door opened, and the young man who stood back to let him pass looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. His eyes were bloodshot and sunk deep in his face – two dark holes that looked as if they’d been chiselled out of his flesh. He didn’t speak, just preceded him down the darkened passage into the light of a living-room, where a woman sat by the fire, so still she might have been growing there.

  The policeman took his helmet off and held it underneath his arm. ‘Mrs Armstrong?’

  ‘Aye.’ Her voice was no more than a whisper.

  He had to say it. Quickly too, there being no way of softening a blow like this. No way of leading up to it nicely. . . .

  ‘Mrs Armstrong. I’m afraid I’ve brought bad news. We’ve found your daughter’s body in the Corporation Park. At least her clothes and her description fit.’ He turned to Stanley, the poor woman obviously having failed to take in what he was saying. ‘I’d like you to come with me, lad, to make the necessary indentification.’

  There, it was said, and oh, dear God, who in hell’s name would want to be a policeman? This was a far cry from taking down details of lost cats and dogs, picking up Friday night drunks out of the gutter. They were both staring at him as if they hated his guts, as if it were his fault or something. If one of them didn’t speak he’d have to say it all over again. He put the helmet down on the table. ‘Mrs Armstrong?’

  Then, to his horror, the still brooding statue of the little woman came to life. Making a sound like a kicked-in-the-belly animal, she put a hand over her mouth, got to her feet and ran out of the over-heated room.