Harbour Street

Chapter Thirty-Three

They had a fish-and-chip lunch in the Mardle Fisheries. Only a few days to Christmas, and the staff wore Santa hats and a crackly version of ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ played on a loop in the background. Joe didn’t think he’d get anything more from Susan, but Vera had told him to buy her lunch and, anyway, he thought it would be a treat for her. He’d started to think of her as a slightly batty aunt.

‘Were the fisheries here when you lived in the street?’ He thought Susan went in and out of reception like a badly tuned radio. Sometimes she listened and understood, and at other times she seemed in a world of her own.

She nodded, her mouth full of chips. ‘But only the wet-fish shop and the takeaway. Not a sit-down restaurant.’

‘And the pub was there?’

‘Yes.’ She scrunched up her forehead, a parody of someone thinking. ‘The landlady was called Val. She ran the place for years. I don’t know what happened to her. She had a son.’ Again Susan frowned in concentration, as if remembering the man’s name was a sort of test. ‘Rick? It might have been Rick. I never liked him. He was cruel to me. Made fun. There’s nothing clever about making fun.’ She put her hand to her mouth as if she regretted giving so much away and returned to her meal.

Now Joe’s mind was wandering. He couldn’t see what any of this could have to do with the murder of two women in the twenty-first century, but he imagined the Coble in the 1970s. It would be before all the pits and the shipyards closed. Lads in flared jeans and lasses in hippy skirts. The two small bars filled with smoke and the ceilings brown with nicotine. There would have been more commercial fishing then, and the men would’ve come for a pint straight from the boats, full of talk of their catch and the weather. What would they all have made of Margaret Krukowski? Perhaps the men wouldn’t have cared how she made her living, but some of them would surely have guessed. They’d have seen Margaret’s clients, even if they’d been few in number, out of place in their business suits and clerical collars, knocking at the door of Number One, Harbour Street. They’d have been curious. Would they have wanted some of the action too?

‘Do you fancy going in for a drink?’ he asked. ‘For old times’ sake?’

Susan shook her head immediately. Perhaps she thought that Rick, the landlady’s son, would still be there to jeer at her.

Joe took out the photo album from his inside pocket. ‘Do you recognize anyone here?’

She turned the pages slowly, but nothing registered until she came to the photo of Billy Kerr’s birthday party. ‘That’s Margaret! And Billy and Malcolm.’

‘Anyone else that you recognize?’

‘Val, the landlady.’ She pointed to the big woman.

Joe waited for her to point to Rick, the landlady’s son, but she shut the album without mentioning him. Again he wondered what exactly the boy had done to upset her. ‘Shall we get you back to the Haven?’ He wasn’t sure what good this was doing. He saw a police van pulling in beside Kerr’s yard and wondered what was going on there.

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘But it’s been canny, coming back.’

‘Not too many ghosts?’

She put on her blank, not-understanding face and didn’t reply.

They arrived at the Haven at the same time as Laurie and Jane, and Joe helped to carry in the carrier bags of food.

‘How did it go?’ Jane caught him, just as he was about to get back into the car. There was something complicit in the question, as if they were two professionals comparing notes on a shared case.

But we’re not, he wanted to say. You’re a suspect as much as Susan is. ‘Fine.’ He gave a bland smile. ‘I think she had a good time.’ Then he did get into his vehicle and drove off before she could pry further.

Back in the police station he searched out Vera, found her in the canteen staring into space over a mug of tea. He sat down opposite her. ‘What did you get out of Kerr?’

She looked up. ‘Not a lot. He’s hiding something, but he’s not talking.’ She paused. ‘I’ve got a warrant to search his yard. It still seems as if Pawel Krukowski disappeared into thin air. And I don’t believe in magic.’

‘The search team arrived just as I was leaving.’

She looked across the table at him. ‘Tell me that you got on better with Susan Coulson.’

‘I’m not sure. She lived on the ground floor of the house and saw Margaret’s clients coming and going. There weren’t many of them. But all respectable men, she said. Professionals. A vicar even. She claims not to know any names.’

‘That doesn’t get us any further then.’ Vera looked up at him and he saw how tired she was. She’d burned herself out with her excitement of the day before. Perhaps she was no longer so convinced by her idea that Margaret had killed her husband.

‘Susan mentioned the landlady of the Coble. The woman called Val. And her son, Rick. Val’s probably dead by now, but the man might still be around. Do you know if Charlie ever traced him?’

‘He hasn’t said.’ Vera was preoccupied.

Joe persisted. ‘There’d have been gossip in the neighbourhood about Margaret. Not something you could keep secret in a place like Harbour Street: strangers turning up at her door.’ Joe knew he was throwing Vera these ideas in the hope of cheering her up. ‘I thought it might be useful to talk to people who were around at the time, but not involved in the present case.’

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘You’re probably right. See if Charlie has managed to get anything on this Rick. He’s babysitting Kerr in the house in Percy Street.’ But there was no enthusiasm in her words and she got up suddenly and stomped away from him and back to her office. She sat there with her door shut until mid-afternoon, when she left without a word. Joe knew she’d be going back to Harbour Street. The tension of waiting for the search results would be killing her and she couldn’t stop herself from meddling.

Charlie answered his phone on the first ring and told Joe to hang on until he found somewhere private so that they could talk.

‘How’s it going?’ Joe could tell from the first response to the call that Charlie was gloomy.

‘Well, I can think of better ways to spend the week before Christmas.’

‘Have you tracked down that mother and son who used to run the pub in Harbour Street?’

Charlie hardly paused for a beat. ‘The Butts? I haven’t got anything on the man, but the mother still lives in Mardle. The address is on my desk.’ And then he was gone.

Joe got home before the kids were in bed. They had that wild energy that came of being shut in the house all day, too much sugar and too much anticipation of Christmas. Jessie was sulking because Sal had refused to let her go into Newcastle with her friends. ‘I’ve told her that she’s too young to go in without a grown-up. It’s mad this time of year.’ Sal was crotchety and resentful after having to battle the issue all day. He could see that one more push from Jessie and his wife would relent, just for a quiet life. There were times when being a parent was the hardest thing in the world. And being a daughter-in-law too. In a moment of madness Sal had offered to cook Christmas lunch for his parents this year and she was already stressing about it. The fridge was so full of food that it would hardly shut.

He’d got the kids upstairs and poured Sal a big glass of Pinot when his phone rang. Vera. Just wanting to chat.

‘How’s it going?’ He walked into the kitchen so that he wouldn’t disturb Sal – there was a series she liked on the telly. She rolled her eyes when she realized it was Vera on the phone.

‘They’ve stopped the search for the night. Seems to me it’ll take days to go through all that stuff. And even if there’s anything important among all the crap, I’m not sure we’d recognize it.’ He could tell that she was exhausted and frustrated. She was losing faith in her ability to see the case to an end. He was tempted to offer to meet her. He wouldn’t have minded sitting in her untidy house talking through the strands of the investigation. But as soon as the thought came into his head, he knew it was impossible. Sal would have a fit. The fantasies of Margaret set up in her small oasis of civilization in Harbour Street and receiving her gentleman callers had excited him. Instead he would share a bottle of wine with his wife and they would have an early night. Vera Stanhope could do without him for once.