‘We couldn’t live with ourselves if we didn’t feel we’d done everything we could,’ Connie said quietly. ‘If you can’t get anywhere either we’ll call it a day.’
Patsy, who’d been briefly absent, came back into the small room wearing a lightweight indigo parka. ‘I’ll see you out, she said. ‘Then I’ll go on to Debbie’s, Mam.’
Crane said his goodbyes and walked with her along the short path. ‘Can I give you a lift?’
‘No, she just lives on the end. Thanks all the same.’
It was in Crane’s direction so they walked together. ‘It’s been a bad business for you all,’ he said.
‘They need to get right away from the Willows,’ she said in a blunt, near aggressive tone. ‘It’s full of awful memories. Dad’s drinking too much. They’ve seen a little bungalow in Wyke. They’d need every penny of the insurance money as a down payment. They don’t earn enough to handle a big mortgage.’
He glanced at her as they passed between the row of identical red-brick houses and the line of kerb-side cars. She was flushed, looking straight ahead. ‘Couldn’t you have talked them out of hiring me then?’
‘Couldn’t you? Told them it was bloody pointless?’ They’d halted at Crane’s Megane, shoehorned between a Lada and an Escort, both years old. ‘You don’t look as if you’re desperate for the money.’ Her glance took in his car.
‘I think you know as well as I do that if I turned them down they’d go to someone else, and there’s no one as experienced as me in the city.’
‘You think no end of yourself, don’t you?’
‘I know I’m good, yes,’ he said shortly.
She flushed again, looked away. ‘You know they’ve fed you a load of crap, don’t you?’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘There’s no point starting the sodding job if you believe anything they say about her.’
‘Get in the car and give me your version then.’
‘I just want you to turn them down,’ she snapped. ‘Let the poor devils buy their bungalow and get away from this dump.’
‘Are you getting in the car or not?’ he said bluntly.
Biting her bottom lip, she got in. Sitting behind the wheel, Crane said, ‘Look, I’d turn them down if I didn’t think they’d go to another PI who’d take the money and do half a job. I can do without this hassle. I’ll do them a no frills job but this kind of work never comes cheap.’
She sat in sullen silence, gazing with unfocused eyes along a street just beginning to edge into twilight. Crane sensed an old envy she couldn’t shake off. She was plain, her sister had been a stunner, even going by the grainy newspaper pictures he remembered. He glanced at her face again. She had decent bone structure, but that was it, beneath the frightful hairdo and thick coating of make-up. Maybe she’d come into her own a bit more when she was older. A mature comeliness. Even if she did he didn’t think it would be much comfort to her, not whenever she thought of her sister. Dying young had meant she’d be a stunner for ever.
‘She asked for it, Frank,’ she said at last in a low voice.
‘You could say that about plenty of young women, provocatively dressed, when the clubs start to empty. It excuses nothing.’
‘You know why Joe Hellewell kept her on at Leaf and Petal? She didn’t know one plant from another, not even when she’d been there six months. I’d have done anything for a chance like that. He kept her on because they fancied her rotten, the old married men the wives trailed round. If they had to go to a bleeding garden centre they’d go to the one Donna was at, with her big come-on smiles. She loved it. That’s why he kept her on through the winter, when no bugger goes. Apart from wanting to get into her knickers himself, nasty creep.’ Her voice rasped with grievance, but Crane had found that that was how the real truth often came wrapped.
‘You’re saying she hadn’t a genuine future there?’
‘She only had a future till Hellewell got his eye on someone else. He wasn’t keeping her on for what she knew about flowers, that’s for sure, as she couldn’t tell a dahlia from a frigging geranium.’
‘This Clive Fletcher—’
‘Well, you know what he’s all about, don’t you? Starts off with glamour pics for the catalogues and magazines and then it’s why not just one or two with your tits showing, darling, and then it’s skinflicks, right?’
‘Go on.’
‘There’s only ever him and the girl there when he tries it on. And if they give him the nod he gets the camcorder going. He pays well, so they keep their traps shut. And he tells them that if anything gets out about it they’d better start worrying about their looks.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘You get it together. You pick up the whispers at the Goose.’
‘You told DS Benson about it?’
She shook her head. ‘Clive’s respectable, what you can see of the evil swine. He does normal things most of the time: babies, weddings, family groups. Mam and Dad were always there when Mr Benson was asking about Donna’s contacts. I didn’t want them to hear any rumours she might be into …’ She let the sentence dangle.
‘Do you think she was? Nude photos, porn videos?’
‘No. I think he wanted to try for the straight stuff first. I honestly think he felt he could get her face going big time. If they’ve already done nudies, the agencies don’t want to know. I think he thought if that didn’t work he could get her into the other stuff later.’
‘But you’re not sure she wasn’t already into the other stuff?’
‘No. She was really, really secretive, even with me, though we always got on all right. She liked the smackeroonies. Clothes, jewellery, the latest mobile. She had a nice little Mini. It wasn’t too old but she was sick for a convertible.’
‘These other blokes that Mahon thought she was two-timing with …’
‘He wasn’t wrong. She liked posh restaurants and Bobby couldn’t afford them. Not with being on the Social and what he could make pushing.’
‘Why bother with a bloke who’d take a swing at her?’
She sighed, shrugged. ‘You tell me, with looks like she had. And Bobby wasn’t all bad. He’d come to the house with flowers now and then, fill her tank, pay for repairs when he had the bread. But Donna could aggravate a bloody saint. Forget what they say. I’ve heard her and Bobby rowing. She could latch on to all those things you didn’t want to hear about yourself, the things that really, really bug you. She’d throw that cruddy family in his face, and how no one would ever give a dork like him a decent job, and what a total arsehole he looked with the pony-tail. And Bobby would take it for long enough, take it for a bloody sight longer than most of the blokes round here, and then she’d go that bit too far and he’d lash out. Funny,’ she said then in an almost musing tone, ‘she seemed to get off on it.’
Crane watched her. She’d summed up the relationship with skill. What woman would have risked Donna’s kind of looks with a man she knew she could provoke to violence unless she was hooked on the dangerous thrill? Perhaps that was how she’d liked to live her life: on the edge, taking chances, tempting fate. Perhaps she really had asked for it, death at Tanglewood.
Tears suddenly began to well along her eyelids. She shook her head irritably. ‘Christ, I’m so sick of it,’ she said, in a low harsh voice. ‘Donna, Donna, bloody Donna! It was always her when she was alive and it’s just the same now she’s dead. She had everything, every mortal thing: looks, blokes, jobs, anything she wanted. And me and Marvin, we could forget it. If they’d given us a bit more attention I know we’d have done better. Know what I’ve been this last four years? A bloody checkout. That’s about all I’m good for. And whoever looked at me when she was around?’