A Lesser Evil

  Martin put his hands under his head and lay looking at the cracks on the ceiling, wondering how he could get Fifi found without dropping himself in it. But there was no way. Trueman was smart and he played his cards close to his chest. Martin and Del were probably the only people who knew about the barn, and if the police raided it after an anonymous call, Trueman would soon realize who’d tipped them off and Martin would be dead meat.

  As he lay there, his gut churning with anxiety, Martin remembered how when he was small, his gran used to make him say his prayers at night. He wondered if praying for a dog walker to go up by that barn and hear the women shouting would count as a proper prayer.

  ‘If you can’t do that, God,’ he murmured, ‘give me some other bright idea that won’t involve me being found dead in the river.’

  Clara and Harry Brown drank the tea Dan had made them as they listened to the latest developments. They were both stiff with tension, their eyes full of anxiety.

  ‘After I saw Roper they came straight round here and got into Yvette’s flat,’ Dan said. ‘They came over to tell me afterwards that they agree her disappearance does look suspicious. She’d left bread and milk on her table and was halfway through washing up her supper things when she left. It turns out Frank saw her with a man on Monday evening, but as there was no sign of a struggle indoors it looks like the bloke told her something plausible to get her out the house. Frank thought the man was cuddling her outside in the street, but in the light of her disappearance, he thinks he could have been wrong and the man may have been restraining her.’

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ Clara burst out. ‘I feel sick with fright.’

  Dan nodded, grim-faced. ‘Me too. But I keep blaming myself. If only I’d been here!’

  Harry cleared his throat. ‘If someone has snatched Fifi, it would have happened whether you’d been here or not,’ he said evenly. ‘She left here quite normally for work, but didn’t arrive. So my guess is that she was abducted somewhere between here and the tube station. The people were probably lying in wait, maybe just along the main road. I’d also guess that they lured her into their car with some appropriate story.’

  Dan was touched that Harry wasn’t attempting to blame him. He’d thought he was a bit of an old duffer when he met him the first time, but he’d been wrong. The man had a sharp, logical mind.

  ‘I can’t see Fifi getting willingly into a car with someone she didn’t know,’ Dan said.

  ‘Not even if they said you’d sent them to get her?’ Harry asked.

  ‘I suppose that might do it,’ Dan agreed reluctantly. ‘But they’d have needed to know me to make it believable.’

  ‘Would they? I suspect if they were dressed like builders and said your name, perhaps even the site you worked on, that would be enough for Fifi,’ Harry rubbed his hands on his face. ‘We all know how impulsive she is.’

  Clara began to cry soundlessly, tears cascading down her cheeks.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Brown,’ Dan said, and impulsively moved over to her, sinking to his knees in front of her and taking her hand. ‘I know you don’t think much of me, and something like this happening to her must just confirm your worst fears about me.’

  She didn’t brush his hand away. ‘I can’t blame you for this,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Fifi was always one for poking her nose into things she shouldn’t. I told her a hundred times or more that her curiosity would get her into trouble one day.’

  There was silence for a few moments. Then Harry cleared his throat again. ‘She’d only been back at work for one day,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘So whoever did it hadn’t had any time to watch her and find out her routine. No one would wait indefinitely in the hope she might come along the road, would they?’

  Dan got off his knees and went back to his chair. ‘Then maybe it was someone from round here, someone that’s known her since before she was off work with her broken arm. They’d know about where I worked too.’ He looked despairingly at his father-in-law. ‘But there’s dozens of people that know all that, Fifi talked to just about everyone. And she’s the kind of girl anyone would notice.’

  ‘Did she tell anyone about your row?’ Harry asked.

  ‘It doesn’t look like it,’ Dan replied. ‘She didn’t even tell Frank downstairs, and none of the girls at her work knew.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Well, I didn’t actually talk about it, but most of the blokes knew I’d stayed with Pete over the weekend. A couple of them were taking the mick on Monday because I was miserable. Why d’you ask that, this hasn’t got anything to do with our row, surely?’

  ‘Well,’ Harry said, and paused. ‘It would be much easier to convince someone to hop in their car to see their husband, if they knew you hadn’t been together just an hour or so before. I mean, if I was walking to work and someone told me Clara was ill or she’d had an accident, I’d say, “Hold on, she was all right when I left.” Do you see what I mean?’

  Dan nodded. ‘So they’d really need to know both things. That we’d fallen out and that Fifi was back at work?’

  ‘I’d say so. Did you tell anyone at work about that?’

  ‘Yeah, I did,’ Dan said. ‘It was at dinnertime in the hut on Monday. I didn’t have any sandwiches and Owen the chippy said I ought to nip home and make it up with Fifi and get some grub while I was there.’

  ‘And you said she would be at work?’ Harry asked.

  Dan nodded.

  ‘How many men heard that?’

  ‘Owen, Pete, Roger, Chas.’ Dan ticked them off on his fingers, his brow furrowed as he tried to remember who had been there. ‘Oh, and Ozzie, five in all.’

  ‘So why don’t we give these five names to the police and get them to check if any of them have got criminal records?’

  Dan looked aghast. ‘I can’t do that! Anyway, it couldn’t have been any of them, they were all there on Tuesday morning.’

  ‘Yes, but they could have passed the information on to someone else,’ Harry said.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Harry,’ Clara said. ‘Why on earth would one of Dan’s workmates want to pass on information about Fifi?’

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t under normal circumstances, but they might if they had some involvement with whoever killed Bolton.’ Harry got up from his chair and went over to the window. He gazed out thoughtfully for some little time, then turned back to look at Dan. ‘I know it’s a long shot, but I still think we should speak to the police about it. We’ll go down there now, and while we’re there I’m going to insist that they issue a press release on Fifi and Yvette being missing.’

  Clara looked up at her husband fearfully. ‘Won’t that make it even more dangerous for Fifi?’ she said in a quivering voice.

  ‘A picture of Fifi in the papers might just jog someone’s memory,’ he said firmly. ‘Without some help we’ll just be looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.’

  Nora Diamond heard Dan and his in-laws’ footsteps going down the stairs and went over to the window to watch them come out of the house. She wished she had gone into work today. She knew only too well that she only felt sick out of guilt, and staying home was making it worse. Especially when she heard Dan’s visitors arrive.

  She guessed who they were by the way they spoke. And she doubted they would have come here to see Dan unless they were frantic with worry about Fifi.

  When Dan came down to her on Wednesday evening and asked when she’d last seen or spoken to Fifi, she had been a little offhand, but then she just assumed Fifi had taken herself off to a friend’s because Dan had left her. Last night, however, she’d heard him telling Frank about all the places he’d been to search for her, and all at once she sensed the girl really was in danger.

  Dan and his in-laws were walking up Dale Street now, and the mother’s strong resemblance to Fifi was remarkable. It wasn’t just the blonde hair, the height and slender figure, they also both walked with the same graceful glide. The woman took her husband’s h
and as they crossed the street, and there was something about the gesture which made Nora’s eyes prickle with tears.

  ‘Stop thinking about yourself and go to the police about Jack Trueman,’ she said to herself.

  But another voice inside her said that was a bad idea. She couldn’t afford to risk her past getting out, and maybe he had nothing to do with this anyway.

  ‘Talk to me, Yvette,’ Fifi whispered in the dark. She was so cold, hungry and thirsty that she wasn’t even sure whether it was Sunday night or Monday, and Yvette hadn’t spoken or even moved for hours.

  ‘What is there to talk about, Fifi?’ Yvette replied, her flat voice reflecting her feelings of utter hopelessness. ‘Except perhaps deciding’ ow much longer we wait before doing it.’

  Fifi had been horrified when Yvette had suggested hanging themselves. While she could see her point that a quick death was far better than a slow one from starvation, she still had some hope it wouldn’t come to that. It worried her too that Yvette had suggested she help Fifi do it first. While she understood that was meant in a kindly way, so Fifi wouldn’t have to see Yvette dying, it still sounded so ghoulish.

  ‘I’ll never be able to do that,’ Fifi said resolutely. ‘Someone will have reported us missing by now. For all we know our pictures may have been in the papers, and someone may have spotted the car driving up here.’

  ‘What is that expression you English are so fond of? “Pigs might fly!”’ Yvette said scornfully. ‘You tell me this place is hidden away and you see no one near!’

  ‘I know, but there’s still hope yet.’

  ‘I’ave no hope. Do you know what starvation is like? We will become too weak to climb those bars, and we will lie ’ere looking at them wishing we did it while we still’ad the strength.’

  Fifi already felt too weak to climb the bars, and even a whole twenty-four hours since Yvette first suggested it, when she was even colder, hungrier and more distressed, she still wouldn’t entertain the idea. But then she still had some absurd faith left that Dan would find her.

  It was so strange that now when she thought of Dan and her family, she could only think of the most endearing and lovely things about each of them. She could see Dan coming home with his wage packet and handing it to her trustingly. As long as he had enough for some cigarettes and the odd snack while at work, he never questioned where the rest of his wages went. She thought about how he wrapped himself around her in the night, how he smiled as soon as he opened his eyes. He didn’t sulk, complain or envy other people. He was a truly happy man.

  She remembered how intuitive and sensitive her father was. He was the one who made the best nurse when one of his children was ill; he got to the kernel of a problem immediately, and knew how to solve it. He was the quiet, calm one in the family, who didn’t shout or rush about and rarely got worked up about anything. He had endless patience and he was never opinionated.

  Robin was far more affectionate than Peter, but then Peter was more dependable. They were both so undemanding, happy to go along with whatever the majority of the family wanted to do.

  Sweet Patty! She would give anything to be able to tell her sister just how much she loved her. All those nights of them giggling in bed, the covering up Patty’d done for Fifi right from a small child. She was a born diplomat, accepting and appreciating that not everyone was as uncomplicated or gentle-natured as she was.

  But the biggest change in Fifi’s opinion about a family member was her view of her mother. The weaker and hungrier she’d become, the more she’d remembered good things about Clara. She’d also thought of all the things she’d done, often purposely, to annoy her.

  When did she ever do as her mother asked? Even the rule about putting her shoes in the hall cupboard when she came in had to be disobeyed. If all six of them had left their shoes in the hall, what a mess it would have been! If her mother cooked chicken, Fifi wanted pork or lamb; she turned up late for meals, never washed the bath round, and when she was asked to put carefully ironed clothes away, she just dumped them on the bedroom chair.

  She’d seen the light about some of these things once she was living with Dan, but it wasn’t until now that she realized she had in fact treated her mother like a housekeeper, never asking how she was, what she’d done during the day, or even just thanking her for ironing and mending her clothes. She never offered to help around the house, get shopping or even cook a meal for her mother.

  Looking back, she really must have tried her mother’s patience. She argued about everything, and when she was younger, she never came home at the time she was told to. She never confided in her mother, never once suggested they went to the pictures or the theatre together. And Fifi was the one who started most of the rows because she would see a mere suggestion as an order or criticism.

  It wasn’t possible to forgive her mother entirely for not accepting Dan, but Fifi could see now that she’d put all those bad ideas into her mother’s head by being so secretive about him in the first place. She was probably scared Fifi would get pregnant, and it would have been easy enough to tell her mother that she understood that fear, and reassure her she intended to wait until she was married. But she never really tried to talk to her mother at all; one sharp remark and she blew up. If she’d just enlisted her father’s help, he might have been able to smooth things over.

  Yesterday she had written all these thoughts about her family and Dan in the diary she kept in her handbag. She’d explained when and how she came to be brought here, and gave a description of Martin and Del. If she was to die here, someone might find the diary one day, and she hoped that it would, if nothing else, show that she valued them all.

  But she wasn’t prepared to die that easily, nor was she going to let Yvette give up.

  ‘Taking your own life is a sin,’ she said firmly. ‘And it’s cowardly. If you could survive all that terrible stuff during the war, you can survive this too.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Yvette whined. ‘I’ave nothing to live for. My life holds nothing but hurt and sorrow.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to,’ Fifi insisted. ‘You could go back to working in a couture house, any one of them would be glad to have someone as talented as you. You’d be happier with other people around you, and you could find somewhere nicer to live. You’re still young.’

  ‘No!’ Yvette cut her short. ‘Don’t you dare say I might meet a man and fall in love. This could never’appen.’

  Fifi hadn’t intended to say that at all. Instead, she was going to suggest Yvette had a change of hairstyle, made herself some fashionable clothes and got out more.

  ‘Life is precious,’ she said instead. ‘When we get out of here you’ll see.’

  Yvette sighed deeply, and Fifi thought she was trying to go to sleep again. But suddenly Yvette sat up, disturbing the blanket around them.

  ‘What is it?’ Fifi asked, thinking perhaps she’d heard something outside.

  ‘It is no good, I theenk I’ave to tell you,’ Yvette said.

  ‘Tell me what?’ Fifi pulled the blanket round her again.

  ‘That I killed Angela.’

  Chapter eighteen

  Late on Sunday evening Dan escorted his in-laws back to their hotel in Paddington.

  ‘Stay and have a nightcap with us?’ Harry suggested.

  Dan really wanted to go home. His nerves were frayed and he could see that the hotel bar was full of foreign tourists. He didn’t think he could stand their jollity, or the cacophony of different languages, but he was afraid he would seem churlish if he refused.

  ‘Just a quick one then,’ he said wearily.

  It had been the worst weekend of his life. Coming face to face with Clara Brown again, with all the unpleasant things she’d said about him at their first meeting still ringing in his ears, was so hard. To be fair to her, she hadn’t said one harsh word this time, even though he was sure she must be secretly blaming him for Fifi’s disappearance, but the fear in her eyes and the tremor in her voice were somehow w
orse.

  Harry had been easier to deal with for he was a logical man and he controlled his emotions. Every time Dan felt himself coming close to breaking down, Harry would put his hand down firmly on his shoulder, a silent message that they were in this together, bound by their love for Fifi.

  They had spent most of Saturday hanging around at the police station, with Dan going through books of mug shots to see if he could pick out any faces he’d seen in Dale Street. In the evening they went into the Rifleman as Dan had the faint hope that by introducing the Browns to some of the regulars, some bit of useful information would surface.

  Even if Dan had always had a close relationship with Harry and Clara, it would still have been difficult to cope with the strain of being constantly in their company. But to all intents and purposes they were strangers, and Dan had to be constantly on his guard. He felt he had to watch what he said, how he behaved, steer Harry and Clara away from alarmist and rough people. And he had to try to keep them optimistic, when he was in the depths of despair himself.

  Today they had been interviewed by several reporters and that had distressed them all even more. At first the reporters had seemed so caring and sympathetic, but Dan had soon become aware that what they really wanted was juicy sensation. When Clara blurted out that Fifi had married Dan in secret, their eyes lit up, guessing at a family estrangement, and Dan had to step in to stop Clara from revealing things she’d be horrified to see in print.