Footsteps in the Park Page 8

  ‘From the looks of that sky it’s going to rain,’ he said. ‘Shines before seven, rain by eleven. It never fails.’

  He glanced sideways at his daughter. Her eyes and the tip of her nose were red, but she seemed to have regained some of her composure. He said impulsively, wanting to comfort, ‘He seems a nice lad, that Stanley. I’ll talk it out with your mother, chuck . . . we . . . we’ve been playing it all wrong it seems to me. From now on he can come to the house whenever he wants to. I don’t want you hanging about in the park on your own waiting for him, and besides, things is different from when I was a lad. Then, if a young man came to call, it meant but one thing, that wedding bells were in the offing. There were no such thing as having a member of the opposite sex as a friend.’ He looked at her hopefully, but she said nothing. ‘Aye, we’ve got to move with the times.’

  ‘Mother will never see it that way.’ Dorothy’s tone was bitter. ‘And it had to take his sister’s murder before you could feel that way.’ She knew she was being more than unfair, but she couldn’t help it. It was a dramatic statement, and high drama seemed to be the order of the day.

  Gerald Tomlin came to the door of the office to greet them. Shining with importance, Dorothy told herself.

  He fingered his tie as he spoke. ‘They’ve only just left – the police that is, Mr Bolton. I told them you’d be back within the hour, but they couldn’t wait.’ He raised a hand and smoothed back his already smooth hair. ‘They’ve got a chappie over, a detective sergeant, and he says they’re going to start a door-to-door enquiry, checking on every single man in the town. Wanting to know his whereabouts on the night in question.’

  Matthew was already shrugging himself out of his overcoat. ‘Good. That shows they mean business then. I reckon they’ll have him within the week.’ Then he sat down at his desk and pulled a sheaf of papers towards him, his mind on the busy day ahead. ‘That rain? Aye, I thought as much; tha’ll have to get used to the sun being a bit shy up here, Gerald, it doesn’t hang about for long.’ He read the first letter on top of the pile. ‘Seen this one, Gerald? Is this all they can say in answer to the stinker we sent them last week?’ He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. ‘Bless my soul, we’ve got to get you home some way, love. I promised your mother I’d send you back with Philips.’

  Dorothy walked over to the window, and watched the rain as it bounced up from the greasy cobbles. She could hear the noise of the looms from the weaving sheds. A sort of muffled banging and clattering. Tolerable at that distance, but to the weavers standing at their looms? A hissing jet of steam came from the side of one of the tall chimneys. At twelve o’clock the loud hoarse hooter would go, and the mill workers would stream out, going home for their dinner, the girl weavers arm in arm, the cotton fluff thick in their hair and on their clothes, and the men walking quickly, avoiding the little groups of men standing idle on the street corners. To have a job was to set a man apart. Stanley had said that. She wrote her initial on the dirty window pane. How filthy everything was, filthy and noisy, the grime was in the very air. No wonder the women, at the first sign of sunshine, had feverishly tried to clean the outside of their houses. No wonder Ruby Armstrong had deceived her mother to meet a man who had perhaps told her that he loved her, promised her he would take her away from all this . . . She’d never had a holiday, Stanley had said. Never, as Dorothy did once a year, in the July wakes week, travelled first class down to Eastbourne and walked across the springy turf of Beachy Head, feeling the wind whipping the colour into her cheeks as she stared down at the sea pounding the rocks far below. And now, at sixteen, Ruby was dead . . . Dorothy crossed out her initial with a fierce and steady cross, the unfairness, the bitter injustice of it choking her throat again with tears.

  ‘It’s only a cloudburst,’ she said without turning round. ‘There’s a patch of blue in the sky over there. I’ll wait a while, then walk.’ She bent her head, unconscious of her father’s pitying glance, and the way he shook his head at Gerald Tomlin. ‘I’d go straight to school if I’d thought to put my uniform on, but I’d rather wait till Monday really before I go back. They . . . the girls in my form will be talking about it, and asking me things, and I couldn’t bear it. I wouldn’t know what to say.’

  ‘I’ll run her home, Mr Bolton.’

  Gerald was behind her, his hand on her shoulder; she could smell the lavender tang of the brilliantine on his hair. ‘I can be back in half an hour,’ he said.

  There wouldn’t have been any point in arguing, Dorothy told herself, as she lowered herself into the passenger seat of the red sports car, keeping a tight hold on her skirt. It would have been impossible to explain that she would have liked nothing better than to have walked all the way home alone in the rain. Feeling it beating down on her head, soaking through her blazer, and ruining her new patent-leather shoes. The last thing in the world she wanted was Gerald Tomlin’s company; being shut in like this with him, in close and intimate proximity was making her flesh crawl. I must be allergic to him, she thought hysterically.

  No, if she’d refused, her father would have thought she was mad, as well as rude, and Gerald, sitting beside her, hands resting lightly on the steering wheel, would have interpreted it as another snub. Before starting the car he had lit a cigarette, holding it lightly between his fingers. Without asking her did she mind, as Stanley would have done.

  And Mother thinks he’s perfect, she thought childishly.

  There was one thing you had to admit, and that was his expertise in driving his car. Even with the cigarette in his hand he drove swiftly and smoothly, almost as if the car was an extension of himself. Already the rain was slackening off; umbrellas were being lowered, headscarves untied, and women on their way back from the shops were telling each other that they never knew what to wear these days, what with the weather being the way it was.

  ‘See, the rain’s stopped. I could have walked after all,’ Dorothy said, and was slightly ashamed at the reproachful look Gerald gave her.

  ‘Be honest now, you don’t give him a chance,’ she told herself silently, then felt even more ashamed as a woman holding a small child by the hand stepped off the pavement without looking. Jamming on the brakes, Gerald put out his left arm in an instinctive gesture of protection to prevent her from being thrown forward against the windscreen.

  ‘You have to be prepared for that,’ he told her. ‘Sorry if it startled you, love.’

  The unexpected endearment, coupled with his genuine concern for her made her feel more ashamed than ever, and his next words made her actually squirm in the low seat with embarrassment.

  ‘You and me seem to have got off on the wrong foot somehow, Dorothy. I wish there was something I could do about it.’ Stopping to allow a small group of women board a tram, he turned to her and smiled. ‘Am I such a terrible fellow?’

  There was nothing she could say to that, and when, turning off the main road, he stopped the car, pulling into the kerb and switching off the engine, she found she could not meet his eyes.

  ‘Perhaps it’s time we had a little talk,’ he said, winding down the window and throwing the cigarette stub into the road. He put a hand lightly over her own. ‘Maybe this is the wrong time . . .’ He squeezed her hand gently. ‘It must have been simply ghastly for you this morning. It was a very brave thing to do, going to see Stanley and his mother.’ Another pat on the hand. ‘Have the police come up with anything fresh? They seem to be baffled by the total absence of clues.’

  ‘There’s to be a post-mortem this afternoon,’ she said in a low voice.

  Letting go of her hand he reached for another cigarette. ‘Ah, well, I suppose that was inevitable.’ He busied himself with his lighter. ‘Did you know the . . . the dead girl personally, Dorothy? What I mean is, would you have said she was the confiding type? Likely to tell her brother anything that might help the police?’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t remember ever having spoken to her, and no, that’s the awful thing, s
he must have kept her meetings with whoever did this dreadful thing quite private.’

  He blew out a stream of smoke, then wafted it away from her face, apologizing. ‘But you know the brother very well?’

  There was a teasing quality in his voice now, and she blushed. ‘Margaret must have told you.’

  ‘Margaret tells me everything. That’s how it should be.’ He smiled at her. ‘I love your sister very much, you know that, don’t you? And I intend to love and cherish her for ever. You know that too, don’t you?’

  Dorothy nodded, wishing that he would start the car again and drive on.

  ‘And because I feel that way, I find the fact that her little sister doesn’t like me, very hard to bear.’

  ‘But I don’t . . .’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re surprised that a bloke like me who comes from south of the Wash should be so outspoken. You think that you and your fellow Lancastrians have the monopoly in calling a spade a spade. That I, because of my public school background, should be all stiff upper lip. But you could be wrong, Dorothy Bolton, with your bright gold hair, and those blue eyes that look at me and find me wanting.’

  She stretched out her legs and studied her shoes. He had the most beautiful voice, she would say that for him, and perhaps, maybe she hadn’t really been fair to him? But he was holding her hand again, and she wished he would take it away. There were little tufts of ginger hair sprouting from between the knuckles, and something about his touch that repelled her. How could Margaret find him so fascinating? She forced herself to meet his eyes, and was immediately thrown into confusion by the wealth of sadness she saw reflected there.

  This man, this red-haired stranger who had come into their lives, was unsure of himself. He was pleading with her to like him, as if it mattered a great deal, as if he couldn’t bear her rejection of him. She began to pleat her skirt with her free hand.

  ‘Has it ever occurred to you that I am not the overconfident type you obviously think I am, Dorothy? That coming up here and finding Margaret, and being accepted into your family gives me such happiness that I am afraid? Yes. Afraid, positively scared.’ Dorothy smoothed out the pleats she had made, then started again.

  ‘My father was a colonel in the Indian Army, and when I was a small child, I was left in the care of an aunt and uncle who gave me everything but love. Then, as soon as I was old enough, I was sent away to school, and because my aunt was by then an invalid – nerves mostly, which didn’t help – I spent the shorter hols in the charge of school matrons.’ His eyes, surely the palest of blue she had ever seen, twinkled at her. ‘Why do all school matrons have busts like upholstered shelves and fierce moustaches, I wonder?’ He closed his eyes for a moment, then went on: ‘When my parents were killed I was told of their deaths so casually that the person who told me might have been passing the time of day. And from then on it was nothing but a lonely determination to pass my accountancy exams; a constant fight against the temptation to give it all up and get a job which would help me to live at a decent standard.’ He puffed vigorously at the cigarette. ‘I don’t want to bore you with a description of what the past ten years have been like, but all I can say is that coming up here and falling in love with Margaret, and being accepted as part of your family has shown me that my own personal barometer is rising at last.’ He touched the tip of her nose lightly with his finger.

  ‘And the only fly in the ointment is me?’ Dorothy Whispered, but she was half smiling, and did not cringe away as he leaned forward and kissed her cheek.

  ‘You frightened me,’ he said, ‘with your way of looking at me with those lovely eyes narrowed into suspicious slits, as if you were determined to think the worst of me. And I’ve been a bit of a bounder in my time, I admit. Girls and booze you know, but nothing serious . . .’

  He knows that I saw him flirting in the mill yard, Dorothy thought, and he’s trying to tell me that all that’s past. . . .

  ‘But as soon as I fell in love with Margaret and she with me, the slate was wiped clean,’ he was saying now. ‘So do you think we could start again, Dorothy, so soon to be my sister? From this very moment?’

  Then, without waiting for a reply he switched on the engine and pulled swiftly and smoothly away from the kerb.

  And then they were driving up the road which ran at the side of the park, and he was putting his foot down hard on the accelerator.

  And for some unknown unearthly reason Dorothy found that she was thinking about her much loved Grandfather Bolton, with his waxed moustache and the wrapped sweet in his top pocket waiting there for her childish fingers to find. At his death she had been desolate, but her father had taken her on his knee, big as she was.

  ‘Grandpa hasn’t gone, lovey,’ he’d said. ‘The ones we love never die, not really. The things they’ve said come back to us, at the right times, to comfort us, and to guide us . . . tha’ll see.’

  And what Grandpa Bolton was saying was as clear as if he’d been there beside her. He was twiddling with the pointed ends of his glorious moustache and smiling.

  ‘A man what touts for sympathy never deserves it,’ she remembered him saying. ‘It’s the chap what says nowt that we come to admire.’

  Now when and where had the old man said that, and why should she remember it just at this moment? Of one thing she was quite sure. Gerald Tomlin wouldn’t have been Grandpa Bolton’s cup of tea either.

  Seven

  DOROTHY WAS NO more surprised to find that her Auntie Ethel had called round than her mother had been when the door-bell rang before ten o’clock that morning. What was in the papers was far too interesting to discuss over the telephone. And a murder almost in the family so to speak! The sister of the boy her niece Dorothy was supposed to be so friendly with! Well, that would be one in the eye, however kindly meant of course, for her sister who had always got the biggest plums since they were little girls. There’d been no doing with her since Margaret had got herself engaged. Ethel could just see her at the wedding. Perfectly dressed as usual, Phyllis always seemed to get the right thing, whereas she, Ethel, no matter how much she paid, never seemed to add up all of a piece somehow. She wasn’t jealous, of course she wasn’t, but it wouldn’t do Phyllis any harm to be taken down a peg or two, and she’d said as much to Raymond that morning after Gerald had left the house, driving his car out of the drive as if he were on his way to his own funeral, and late at that.

  ‘But there’s nothing serious between Dorothy and that boy,’ Raymond had said, looking at her over the top of his spectacles. ‘They’re still at school, the both of them. It’s only a boy and girl friendship, and what can you expect when they’re still at school at their age?’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ Ethel had said, signifying that she knew a lot more than she was prepared to say, and regretting from the bottom of her heart that she didn’t.

  No, Dorothy wasn’t in the least surprised to see her Auntie Ethel sitting there, with the inevitable hat skewered to her greying hair. But she was surprised to see her cousin Beryl sitting dead centre of the big chintz-covered chesterfield, the red blazer and skirt of the private school at the bottom of West Road doing less than nothing for her sallow complexion.

  ‘Seems like you’re both playing truant this morning,’ Ethel said, munching on a Marie biscuit. ‘Beryl’s got a bad period, haven’t you, love? What she goes through every month is nobody’s business, though it was just the same with me at her age. Do you rememer, Phyllis? Worse than labour pains my cramps were.’

  Dorothy saw her mother flinch, and accepting a cup of coffee gratefully, wondered, not for the first time, how two sisters could have had the same mother and father, been brought up in the same house, and yet turn out so entirely different? Periods at Appleroyd were things to be endured, never spoken of, a feminine nuisance, along with childbirth, and what her mother called that side of marriage.

  ‘I well remember the agonies I went through on the day I was confirmed,’ Auntie Ethel was saying. ‘Mother had had our w
hite dresses made at Madge Gardener’s little place round the back of the Emporium, do you remember? Nice little woman who skenned like a basket of whelks, never knew which eye to talk to. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yes. There I was in that white dress, sure that when I walked up the aisle there’d be a patch . . .’

  Phyllis could take no more. She actually put up a hand as if to stop the traffic, and turned to Dorothy. ‘That sounded like Gerald’s car turning round in the drive, dear? What happened to Philips? I wanted him to get the blind down from the attic for the front door. We don’t want the new paint coming up in blisters.’

  Dorothy sat down next to Beryl and smiled at her. ‘The car broke down,’ she explained, ‘and Father sent Philips to the garage to see if they could send someone out to it straight away. We weren’t far from the mill, so we walked, then Gerald offered to bring me home.’

  ‘Lovely manners,’ Ethel said, reaching for another biscuit. ‘A public school gives a boy something you can’t get anywhere else. Raymond says it’s because they train them to be leaders. Do you know that, even though he’s been staying with us all this time, he still stands up when I go out of the room? And he won’t touch a thing on his plate till I’ve picked my spoon up – or my fork. Lovely.’

  Then, as if suddenly remembering what she’d come for, she turned to Dorothy. ‘I hope it wasn’t too harrowing for you this morning, love, going down Inkerman Street. Your mother told me how you felt you had to go, and I will say this for you, Dorothy, you’ve always stuck by your friends, no matter what they’ve done.’

  Dorothy bowed her head. Oh, God, it was awful. They were all sitting there like vultures, waiting to pounce. Waiting for her to tell them something that the papers hadn’t managed to get hold of. Even her mother, sitting there with her knees pressed close together, hoping she wouldn’t say too much, but fascinated just the same. And Auntie Ethel with her round eyes starting from her head like chapel hat pegs, as Grandpa Bolton would have said . . . Why did he keep coming into her mind. Why?