Rosie Page 47

  An inquiry in a nearby café proved helpful but somewhat intimidating. She learned from the woman who ran it that Del Franklin, the owner of Franklin’s Haulage, was ‘a nasty bastard’ who had a finger in many pies, all of them ‘bent’. She was advised to go away and leave well alone. Freda apologized profusely but showed the pictures of the Parkers anyway. To her amazement the woman nodded and agreed Seth had been in for meals now and again. She told Freda he’d once boasted to her that he ran a scrap yard for Del in Lewisham.

  Lewisham, Freda discovered, was a big place and there were a great many scrap yards to look at. But finally last Friday, after what seemed like a lifetime of dead ends, Freda found the one in Morley Road. There was nothing about it to build up her hopes. Like so many of them she’d seen, it was an old bomb site, this one tucked away at the end of a terrace of dingy Victorian houses. She peered through the fence but couldn’t see anyone around, so going back to her old routine she knocked on the front door of the tidiest house in the street.

  A young woman with frizzy hair and a toddler on her hip answered. Freda smiled ingratiatingly.

  ‘I’m so very sorry to disturb you. I’m from the public health department and I just wanted to ask you one or two questions about the scrap yard down the street. We have reason to believe it may be a health hazard, particularly to small children. Could you spare me a few moments?’

  As she expected, the woman asked her in and even made a pot of tea as she launched into a tirade of complaints.

  ‘It’s quiet enough now,’ she said, two angry red blotches coming up on her cheeks, ‘but by the middle of the afternoon it’s hell. They break up cars, they come in with load after load of rubbish. They’re there till well after dark, they light stinking fires, and they make so much noise the kids can’t sleep. It’s driving us all mad.’

  Freda looked around her as the woman spoke. She thought it was a typical working-class home, a bit dark and poky, cheap furniture, but clean and neat. When the child toddled over to Freda she picked it up and let it play with her bunch of keys.

  ‘It must be miserable for you,’ she said, smoothing the child’s hair in an affectionate display. ‘Can you tell me anything about the man who owns it? His name? Where he comes from?’

  ‘There’s several men there, we don’t really know which of them owns it,’ the woman said with a shrug. ‘Most of us around here are too scared of them to even attempt speaking to them.’

  ‘Do either of these men work there?’ Freda asked, getting her press cutting out of her handbag. ‘Strictly between ourselves, we’ve had a series of complaints about these brothers in other parts of London.’

  The woman took the faded newspaper picture. If she wondered why a public health official should produce something so crumpled and unprofessional, she didn’t show it. Instead she gasped.

  ‘Yes, this is one of them,’ she said pointing to the picture of Seth. ‘Mind you, the other one looks almost the same, so I couldn’t swear which one it is. He never looks smart like that, he’s always dirty and needs a shave. Some of the other women down the street say they’ve seen him squatting down to do his toilet in that yard. It’s disgusting. I hope you can do something about it.’

  Freda’s heart leapt with delight and gratitude. ‘Of course we will do all we can to get the yard closed,’ she assured the woman. ‘But I must ask you to keep my visit here today under your hat. To get a successful prosecution, other officials from the public health department will be making undercover visits to the yard in the next few weeks. A leak at this stage could put the whole case in jeopardy. Not only does it give the offenders time to start cleaning up, but we’ve often found they can be very unpleasant towards the people they believe have talked about them. You and your husband have had more than enough to put up with already, without further trouble.’

  The young woman’s anxious expression confirmed she would say nothing.

  ‘One thing more,’ Freda asked as they walked together to the front door. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a young girl over there, have you? She’s about five foot four or so, slim, with coppery-coloured curly hair, around nineteen?’

  The woman shook her frizzy blonde head. ‘No. There’s an older woman, in her thirties, calls sometimes, but that’s all. I don’t think any young girl in her right mind would go in there with those men, they all look so dangerous to me.’

  Freda paused for a moment once back on the pavement outside the house. She hadn’t actually thought beyond the point of finding one of the Parkers, and she knew she should make a proper foolproof plan before approaching them. But her curiosity about Seth Parker was so great that she really wanted to see him for herself, just to make certain that all the long months of searching were finally over.

  As she glanced back down the cul-de-sac, to her surprise she saw a tall young man jump up on to the top of a heap of old cars. He was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, and his bare chest and limbs were tanned a golden brown. Her heart leapt with excitement: even at a distance of some forty feet, she was sure it was Seth Parker just by the insolent way he stared around him. This same insolence was something that had been mentioned several times during the trial and caught so clearly in the artist’s sketches. She didn’t need to go any closer.

  That evening for the first time since she began her office-cleaning job, Freda hurried to finish. In her mind she was preparing a letter to Seth Parker, and she couldn’t wait to get home to write it.

  She had mulled over every plausible reason she could give for needing to find Rosie, and thought long and hard about what would prompt Seth to give her the address. She decided that money was the only likely inducement.

  Seth was whistling ‘Mountain Greenery’, but stopped short in surprise when a postman walked into the scrap yard on Monday morning.

  ‘Got the wrong place, ain’t you?’ he called out from the shed doorway. ‘Since when did we get letters?’

  ‘You don’t know a “Mr S. Parker” then?’ the postman said with a glance at the letter in his hand. ‘It’s addressed to the scrap yard in Morley Road.’

  Seth was so shocked he almost dropped the cup of Camp coffee and condensed milk he’d just made. No one knew his real name, not Del or anyone else. They all knew him as Stan Willmot, though some of the lads called him Tom Pearce because of his West Country accent.

  ‘Let’s have a look at it then.’ Seth almost leapt across the path towards the postman, practically snatching the envelope out of the man’s hand. ‘Maybe it’s for Stan. I dunno his other name.’

  Seth saw it was a woman’s writing and the postmark was Camden Town. He wondered if he’d given his real name to some bint when he was pissed.

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s for Stan,’ he said, hoping postmen weren’t in the habit of checking up who was who. ‘I’ll give it to him when he gets in.’

  Once the postman was out of sight, Seth sat down on a couple of tyres, lit a cigarette and opened the letter. The spidery handwriting was hard to read, and reading wasn’t his strong point anyway.

  ‘Dear Mr Parker,’ he read. ‘I believe you to be the brother of Rosie Parker who was employed at a nursing home in north London where I am a staff nurse. Rosie left us some two years ago without leaving a forwarding address and I am very anxious to trace her as one of our patients died recently leaving her a small bequest. I shall be coming to Lewisham on Friday morning of this week and I hope it will be convenient to pop in to speak to you about this matter. Yours sincerely, J. Marks.’

  It took several readings before Seth worked out what all the words were, and he wasn’t sure what ‘bequest’ meant. He hoped it was money. His first thought was that the woman was coming here to hand it over, which was fine by him. He had absolutely no idea where Rosie was, and if he did he’d be sticking a fist in her face, not passing on cash.

  Seth’s brain was often slow. It was only hours later that he began to wonder how the woman had found out where he worked. He thought he’d covered his tracks so well th
at no one would ever find him.

  Being discovered, and in connection with his sister, brought back the full force of his anger towards her. As Seth saw it, because of Rosie his father was dead and Norman had legged it off up north somewhere. Cole getting hanged was bad enough, but losing his brother hurt far more. Seth had fully expected that after the trial he and Norman would find themselves a little place together, and their life would go on much the way it had been before, but Norman had walked out on him. Even now, getting on for three years later, Norman’s angry words still stung: ‘I hate you, you lying bastard. I never want to see you again. I want to forget I ever had a brother. Don’t try and follow me. You and me are finished.’

  May Cottage, and all that fine furniture in the parlour which he could have sold for a bob or two, had gone, and suddenly everything he’d taken for granted in life was gone too. He’d been someone back in Somerset. He could walk into any pub and he’d be bought a drink; people respected him, they did what he asked. Seth didn’t like big cities, there were too many men tougher and brighter than he was, and he’d found without Norman to back him up he wasn’t quite as fearless as he’d always believed.

  This was why he’d fallen in with Del and his cronies. He didn’t much like being treated like a dumb country boy and called ‘Swede’, their name for anyone who came from out of London. But he got paid a good screw each week because he knew the scrap business inside out, could be relied on to keep his trap shut and was handy with his fists. Most of the time he counted himself lucky.

  Yet just now and then he had attacks of pure fright, usually in the middle of the night, when he woke up to find he’d pissed the bed again. He’d been thrown out of more lodgings than he could count because of it. He blamed it on missing his father and brother, and the moors he’d grown up in and could never go back to. That brought him right back to Rosie, and his hatred for her grew stronger each night it happened.

  He knew he was living on a razor’s edge. These London blokes he worked for were real villains. They might look like a bunch of diddicoys, but they were sharp and dangerous, involved in everything from bank robbery to vice. They had no loyalty except to their own, and Seth was well aware that they wouldn’t think twice about running out and leaving him to carry the can if things got a bit hot. They were jealous too because women fell over themselves for him. The truth of the matter was that Seth had no real interest in women. He liked a quick screw, then he was off. But the lads didn’t know that; they thought he had it made.

  On Friday morning at eleven, Freda walked into the scrap yard and went straight to the shed. It was raining hard and she had great difficulty bypassing the many puddles. She had some sympathy for the people in Morley Road. The yard really was a terrible place: dozens of cars in the process of being stripped of useful parts, old cookers, baths, sinks and water tanks piled up high. It stank, too, of burning rubber, petrol and something even more unpleasant which she recognized as excrement.

  ‘Mr Parker!’ she called out as she tentatively tapped on the half-open door of the shed. ‘It’s Miss Marks. May I come in?’

  She hoped she looked the part. She had put on her old navy blue raincoat and a felt hat, she had her SRN badge pinned to her lapel. She could easily pass for a district nurse.

  She smelled Seth before he came to the door. It was the same smell – sweat and urine – that lingered around patients in Carrington Hall. She immediately knew that he was a bed-wetter and that he was most likely living in the hut. Fighting back her revulsion, she prepared a smile for him.

  He was undeniably an extremely handsome man; the court sketches, press photographs and her view of him last week hadn’t done him full justice. He was wearing a filthy shirt and grease-encrusted trousers, yet the face above them was all she really saw: hair as black and glossy as new tar, dark sparkling eyes, golden skin and white flashing teeth. He was in desperate need of a shave, along with a bath, but considering his background that was hardly surprising.

  ‘It’s a bit rough in here,’ he said, but after looking at the rain he beckoned her in. ‘Sorry about the stink too. I think someone got in here last night.’

  The shed was perhaps twelve feet square. An old table stood near the door, and sacks and boxes spilling over with rags took up much of the rest of the floor space. In a corner were a couple of old car seats with a heap of sacks and blankets on them; a suit and a clean shirt hung on a nail on the wall. As Freda had surmised, he was living here. Remembering what she’d learned from the newspapers about the way he and his family lived, she wondered where Rosie had got her airs and graces.

  ‘You got my letter then?’ she began. ‘I’m so anxious to find Rosie to get this bequest settled.’

  Seth had asked someone what that word meant. He’d been told it could mean money or a gift. He’d also been told it was extremely unlikely to be left with him to pass on.

  ‘I don’t rightly know where she is,’ he said, scratching his head. ‘I ain’t seen her for a couple of years. I could take what you’ve got and pass it on when she turns up. But I can’t say when that’ll be.’

  Seth had discovered soon after arriving in London that sometimes it paid to act like a dumb country boy. He’d purposely hung on to his Somerset accent because he’d found it made people trust him.

  ‘I can’t do that, Mr Parker, much as I’d like to,’ Freda said. ‘It isn’t allowed. I have to give it to her directly, or else it has to go right back to the solicitor’s office and stay there until they can find her.’ She paused long enough for that to sink in.

  ‘But owing to your family circumstances, that might prove embarrassing for Rosie,’ she went on. ‘You see, your sister called herself Smith at our nursing home. I was the only person to whom she confided her true identity.’

  Seth’s mouth fell open. It hadn’t occurred to him that this woman would know about Cole. It was even more surprising to find she was prepared to do something for his daughter when she did. The sort of people he mixed with wouldn’t turn a hair if he told them his father shot a policeman or bludgeoned another villain to death; they would even look up to him. But murderers of women were a different matter. Seth had never confided in anyone about himself. He was amazed that Rosie had.

  ‘How much are we talking about?’ he asked. He felt very uncomfortable knowing she knew so much about him and his family. He wished he’d tidied himself up, met the woman at the gate and taken her to a café for this talk. At least there he could have walked away from her if necessary; here he felt trapped.

  ‘Something in the region of a thousand pounds,’ she said glibly. ‘If you don’t know where she is, perhaps you know someone else who might?’

  Seth shook his head. The thought of Rosie coming into all that money for doing nothing more than being nice to some old codger made him feel green with envy. But at the same time his natural greed was telling him he could overcome his anger at Rosie if he could get a share of it.

  Freda could almost track his thought processes. ‘Do you know a Miss Violet Pemberton?’

  Again Seth shook his head.

  ‘She was the social worker who took your brother and sister away,’ she said gently. ‘I am absolutely certain she knows where Rosie is, but she’s unlikely to pass on the information to me as it was she who shielded Rosie from the press to the time of the trial and gave her a new identity. She is very protective. But as you are Rosie’s brother, she may be prepared to tell you.’

  The name finally rang a bell. He did remember his barrister speaking about her. It was that old biddy who’d talked the police into dropping the lesser charges against him. ‘Do you know where she lives?’ Seth asked.

  ‘I have her address in Somerset. If I could count on you to see her and get Rosie’s new address, I would pay you your expenses out of the bequest.’

  Although Seth was slow, it suddenly dawned on him that this woman couldn’t possibly have kindly reasons for wanting to find his sister. If she meant well, she’d merely have written to this Miss P
emberton, or else instructed a solicitor to do it.

  He perched on the edge of the table and just looked at the woman. The nurse-type coat and hat had detracted from her face at first. Now he saw she had a mean mouth and her eyes were very close-set. He wondered if she really was a nurse, and what Rosie might have done to make her search her out.

  ‘How much “expenses” are we talking about?’ he asked, narrowing his eyes. ‘I’d need to have time off work, petrol money, and maybe a night in a hotel. I don’t much care if I never see my sister again, so I’d have to have something for my trouble.’

  Freda thought for a moment. This man wasn’t as dense as she’d expected. She suspected he was on to her. But she needed his help and she had a strong feeling he’d get Rosie’s address somehow if she made it worth his while.

  ‘Ten pounds straight away. Another ten if you get the address.’

  Seth just laughed at her. ‘Are you loopy? I make ten quid just sitting here all day. Make it twenty-five now and the same again when I get the result, and I might think about it.’

  Fifty pounds was a great deal of money to Freda, but she’d come so far she didn’t see how she could back off now.

  ‘Okay, fifty pounds altogether. But fifteen now and the balance when you get me the address.’

  Seth agreed so willingly that Freda realized she could probably have settled for thirty, but the deal was done and she had to hand over the money and Miss Pemberton’s address.

  ‘Will you see to it quickly?’ she asked. The stench in the shed was making her feel queasy, and even if the man was handsome there was also something repellent and dangerous about him. ‘I must get it all tidied up and I’m sure you want Rosie to get what’s coming to her without any further delay.’

  ‘Aye, I do that,’ he said with a touch of irony in his voice. ‘Now, where do I contact you?’