Harbour Street

Chapter Thirty-Two

When Joe Ashworth arrived at the Haven there was no sign of Susan Coulson. The house seemed quiet and empty. The road through Holypool hadn’t been gritted and he’d skidded turning into the track. Everything was white. Frost on the grass and on every tree and twig. A white mist rising from the low pasture. No tyre tracks marking the frosty drive. Walking to the front door, he saw that there was nobody in the office, but then he noticed a light in the kitchen. Jane and Laurie were at the table, bent towards each other, looking like conspirators. Or lovers. They didn’t notice that he was there. He stood watching for a while and then Jane Cameron looked up and saw him and he felt awkward, like a voyeur.

She opened the kitchen door to let him in. ‘Well, Sergeant Ashworth, you’re becoming a regular visitor.’ She poured him coffee and set it on the table. ‘We’re making a list. Our last shop before Christmas.’

‘How many of you will be here?’ He couldn’t understand how she could bear to spend Christmas Day with these demanding clients. Didn’t she have family of her own? When would she escape?

‘Laurie, Susan and me. And I’ve invited a couple of friends from town. We’ve got lots of space, so they can stay the night. I’m looking forward to it.’ Jane gave an easy smile. ‘No men to get in the way or make demands.’

‘Father Gruskin won’t be here?’

‘Good God, no.’ She seemed horrified by the idea. ‘The old ladies from St Bart’s will be fighting to cook him lunch. We’re planning a proper party.’

‘What do you want?’ Laurie looked at him. ‘If you need to talk to me, be quick, because I want to take the dog for a walk before we go into town.’

‘No,’ he said. He was surprised, but also faintly amused that she was so bossy. An offender had never spoken to him like that before. ‘I don’t need to talk to you.’

Laurie stood up and left. He heard her speak to someone in the hall and a dog barked, and then Susan Coulson walked into the kitchen. She was dressed in the sort of shapeless trousers that Vera wore on a bad day, with a baggy jersey across her swollen belly. Her grey hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She was yawning as if she’d just stumbled out of bed. He wasn’t sure that she’d recognize him, but she nodded as she put on the kettle for tea. He thought she seemed more composed than she had on their previous meeting.

‘There’s been a development,’ he said. ‘A possibility that Margaret’s murder was linked to the way she lived a long time ago. I was hoping that Susan might help me.’ He looked at the woman. ‘Because you knew Margaret then, didn’t you? You both had bedsits in Harbour Street?’

She looked at Jane first, as if she needed her permission to answer, and then she nodded. No words. She squeezed the teabag in her mug, threw it into the bin and sat at the table.

‘I wondered if you’d like to go back to Harbour Street,’ he said. ‘See the house as it is now.’

Still silence. Through the window he saw Laurie in boots and jacket walking with the dog across the grass. Their feet left scuffmarks in the frost. The sun was burning off the mist.

‘Would you like me to come with you?’ It was Jane, talking directly to the older woman. ‘Laurie and I can go shopping later.’

This time Susan shook her head and did speak. ‘I’d like to see where Margaret lived,’ she said. ‘She never offered to take me back there. Perhaps she thought I’d be too upset.’ She paused for a beat. ‘And I’m sure this bonny lad will take care of me.’ For the first time there was a glimmer of a smile. ‘My age, I don’t need a chaperone.’

Joe didn’t talk to her as they drove away from the Haven. He wasn’t sure where to begin and he thought he’d wait until they were there. Susan sat beside him in the front seat, looking around her as if she were a tourist. She seemed to be enjoying the trip out, the low sun on her face. Occasionally she would lean back in her seat and shut her eyes, and he wondered if she was sleeping or thinking about the past. As they approached Mardle she sat up and was more alert.

‘Tell me about Margaret in those days.’ They’d pulled up outside the Harbour Guest House now. Susan was looking around her, but made no move to get out. And at least in the car it was warm and they wouldn’t be overheard. ‘How did she earn her living?’

The woman turned her head sharply to face him. ‘You already know or you wouldn’t be asking.’

He wondered now that he could have thought her stupid or slow. ‘She was a sex worker?’

‘An escort,’ Susan said. ‘High-class. Choosy. She could have made a fortune, but she was never greedy. And she saved the money. I could never save a penny.’

‘Were you in the same business?’

She shook her head. ‘Nah, I never had the nerve for it.’ Another smile. ‘Or the body. I managed on the social. Had a man, until he left me.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Joe wasn’t sure what else to say.

‘I wasn’t. He was a bastard. But I started taking drugs then. Tranquillizers from the doctor, then anything I could get hold of. Never stopped really. They took my baby.’

He didn’t reply. It would have sounded trite to say again that he was sorry.

‘But you’re clean now? At the Haven.’

‘Aye. Still have bad days.’ A brief grin. ‘And I make the most of them when they happen. I don’t want them to get rid of me. If they think I’m well, they might make me leave, set me up in a place all on my own, like they did Dee. I couldn’t live like that.’

‘You like it at the Haven?’

‘Eh, pet, I love it. Always someone about to chat to. A bit like the old days in Harbour Street.’

They sat for a moment in silence. ‘Can I see inside? Where Margaret lived.’

‘I don’t see why not.’ He got out of the car, then went round and opened her door for her. It was still very cold.

She took his hand and pulled herself out, then stood for a moment looking up and down the street. On the pavement opposite, Peter Gruskin let himself into the church.

‘Could we go in there first?’ She nodded towards St Bartholomew’s. ‘For old time’s sake.’

Joe wasn’t sure what the priest would make of them wandering in, but it was a place of worship and it belonged to the community, not to one man. He crooked his arm so that Susan could hold onto it to steady herself as they crossed the icy road.

‘Were you a member of the congregation?’ he asked.

‘I was baptized there,’ she said. ‘And I went there to grieve, when they took the baby.’

‘Was it a boy or a girl?’

‘A little girl,’ she said. ‘I called her Ellen, after my mother. I don’t know what her new parents called her.’

‘You never tried to find out what happened to her?’ Joe tried to imagine what that would be like. To hand over a child when you’d been through the pain of labour and you’d held it in your arms. All those hormones rushing around your body and your mind.

‘Nah,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t have been fair. Besides, they were right. I wouldn’t have been able to give her any sort of life.’

She opened the church door, and Joe let her walk ahead of him. Partly because he’d been brought up to think it was gentlemanly to let the woman walk first, and partly because Peter Gruskin spooked him. He was used to Methodist ministers, who dressed like everyone else, apart from a soft white collar at the neck.

Gruskin wasn’t there. He must be in a back room. They sat for a moment in a pew. Joe looked at Susan and almost expected to see her crying again, those big silent tears that she’d shed when she’d heard about Margaret, but she was just staring towards the altar. After a few minutes she stood up and he followed her out.

‘It brings it all back,’ she said. ‘Not the details – I was off my head most of the time and I can’t remember much – but how I felt.’

‘You said you knew Margaret’s boss,’ Joe said. They were outside now and the light seemed suddenly very bright and they were squinting against it.

‘Did I?’ She still seemed preoccupied by the church and glanced back to look at it.

‘That would have been Malcolm Kerr’s dad, Billy?’

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I expect that you’re right.’

‘Was Billy one of Margaret’s clients?’ It had just come to Joe as a possibility.

‘No, pet, I don’t think anything like that was going on.’

But he could tell that she was thinking about something else and hadn’t put any thought into the answer.

When he knocked on the door of the guest house he wasn’t sure how he’d explain their presence. It was opened by Chloe, Kate’s daughter. She stared out at them, her arms wrapped round her bony body to keep out the cold. She had big fluffy slippers, just like Jessie’s.

‘Mum’s out with Stuart,’ she said. ‘I’m the only one here.’

‘Susan used to live in Harbour Street in the old days.’ Joe found himself talking gently, as if to an invalid. Something about this child was so fragile that he felt she needed careful handling. ‘She’d like to see Margaret’s room. I’ve got a key. Is it okay if we go on up?’

‘Yeah, fine.’ She didn’t seem at all curious about the strange woman turning up on her doorstep. Joe supposed that strangers must turn up there all the time, as they did at the Haven. It must be an odd way to live. He thought of his home as being safe from intrusion. Even Vera knew better than to turn up there unannounced.

Susan climbed the stairs to the attic with some difficulty. She was younger than Margaret, but unfit and heavy. At the top there was a sheen on her skin despite the cold.

‘The house must look very different,’ he said. ‘But Margaret always lived up here, didn’t she?’

‘Aye. She liked to look out to the sea.’ A brief pause, then that old spark of humour. ‘And she said that if a man couldn’t make it up the stairs he was no use to her.’

‘She enjoyed her work then?’ Joe couldn’t get that. A woman as bright and well brought up as Margaret Krukowski enjoying life as a sex worker. Vera always said he should have been born in the nineteenth century, and there was something of the Victorian about him. But deep down he knew that if he’d been around at the time, he’d have been tempted to run up the stairs and knock at her door. He’d probably have paid to spend time with her, to touch her. As he put the key in the lock he almost imagined her inside, ready for him.

Again he stood aside to let Susan in. This time he needed a moment to compose himself. ‘Is this what it was like in your day?’ He’d arrested prostitutes, but they’d been working out of scuzzy massage parlours, or rundown houses in faded seaside towns. Pimps on the pavements watching from a distance, a perpetual threat to their women not to talk. Those girls had been addicts, rattling for a fix, lank-haired and sharp-featured. Nothing soft or inviting about their bodies or their beds.

Susan walked in and sat on the sofa. ‘The kitchen’s been done up,’ she said. ‘But she always had this room nice. I never saw inside the bedroom. She always had the door shut.’

‘Did she enjoy it?’ He repeated the question. Thinking about it again, it wasn’t so much the sex that shocked him, but the fact that it had happened here, in Margaret’s own space. It seemed like a terrible invasion of her privacy, another example of living on the job. He could see why she’d invited so few people into her home once she’d retired.

‘She said it was better than working for a living. And once she’d got herself sorted, her own clients – regulars – I think she did like it. She only ever took on someone new if they were recommended. She never had to advertise.’

‘Not like Dee Robson?’

Susan gave a sad chuckle. ‘Poor Dee. She was an alcoholic and she enjoyed the drink too much to give up. Every couple of quid was important. And she needed the attention. But she was never a real professional. Not like Margaret.’

Joe sat beside her. ‘Did Margaret ever talk to you about her customers?’

‘Clients,’ Susan said. ‘She called them her clients. And no, she never talked about them. She said she was like a doctor or a priest, and what happened in the bedroom stayed secret.’

Joe took another tack. ‘Where was your room?’

‘On the ground floor. Near the front door. Draughty. And I never got it looking like this place.’ She looked wistfully at Margaret’s furniture. ‘Didn’t have the eye.’

‘But you’d have seen people coming in and out from there?’ Because Joe thought Susan would have been curious. Jealous even. He pictured her peering through stained net curtains, catching a glimpse of Margaret’s gentleman callers on the pavement outside.

‘Sometimes.’ Susan snapped her mouth shut, as if she’d just remembered that this pleasant young man was a police officer.

‘It might help us to find out who killed her,’ Joe said. ‘We think it might have started all those years ago.’

‘Nah! That’s just daft. Who’d care what happened then?’

‘Margaret was dying,’ Joe said. ‘Bowel cancer. We think she wanted to talk about what happened back then. And maybe somebody wanted to stop her.’

There was a pause. On the roof outside herring gulls were screaming. ‘I never knew their names. And there were only a few of them.’

‘But you saw them.’

‘All respectable,’ she said. ‘Suits, you know. Shiny shoes.’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘Once there was even a vicar. He was wearing a scarf, but when he was leaving it was open at the neck and I saw that white collar they have.’

But not Peter Gruskin, Joe thought. He’d hardly have been born. He remembered Vera and her manic behaviour at the briefing the day before, her conviction that Pawel Krukowski was dead. ‘Tell me about Margaret’s husband?’

‘What about him?’

‘What was he like?’

It was as if she hadn’t heard him again. He wondered if she was lost in her memories, or if this vacant stare was a technique she’d developed to persuade social workers that she still needed to stay at the Haven.

‘Susan.’

She turned her head slowly. Her eyes were cloudy and it was as if she hardly knew him.

‘Tell me about Margaret’s husband. Pawel. The Polish guy.’

‘I never met him,’ she said. Her head was tilted to one side, as if she was listening to a far-away voice. ‘When I moved into Harbour Street he’d already disappeared.’