“You’re singing the same tune as Ruby Fingall, do you realise? It’s not so easy. I can’t let go.”
Jim’s eyes became disapproving slits. “Not thinking of private vengeance, are you? Because if you are, forget it. Down that road, madness lies.”
Getting to his feet, Harry said, “I’ll see you later.”
“Don’t bother. Go home, take a holiday. This place can run without you for a while.” Beneath the brusqueness of the words was an undertow of genuine concern.
At the door, Harry turned. “Maybe. But can I survive without it?”
Stepping into the corridor, he encountered Lucy, who was carrying a mound of letters she had typed for him. “Here you are,” she said. “I was hoping you’d be back. There’s something I have to tell you. I went to buy a loaf of bread from the delicatessen at lunch-time…”
He grinned at her earnestness. “Congratulations.”
“No, you don’t understand. I don’t know how you’ll react, but this is something I’m sure you’d want to know.”
Gently, he took her arm and guided her into his room. “Start again, love.”
“Like I was saying, I called at Beardshall’s. Gillian served me. You must know her? The girl with the carroty hair and the big brown eyes. Reminds me of a red squirrel.”
The accuracy of the comparison made him laugh. “Okay, so that’s Gillian.”
“She was talking about your wife. How terrible it was and everything. And she told me she knew one of her man friends.”
Harry tensed. “Mick Coghlan?”
“No. This chap was involved with her step-sister until recently, that’s how she came across him.”
He cast his mind back to what Dame had told him. “Was his name Tony?”
She said no, the man was called Joe Rourke. Gillian hadn’t said much about him, only that she was glad that Jane Brogan, her step-sister, had seen the last of him. He was a scally.
Harry was intrigued. Another boyfriend? No one had mentioned him before, not Maggie, not Matt. Not Dame. He wondered why. Perhaps Rourke had been a one-night stand, someone Liz had picked up before becoming involved with rich and handsome Tony? Jealousy flamed inside him for a moment, but almost at once it was doused by the urge to find out more, to put together a few more torn scraps from the picture of Liz’s life during the past two years.
“Thanks for telling me.” He pressed her hand.
Simply, she said, “It matters to you, doesn’t it, to understand what happened to her?”
At least Lucy realised what Jim, Maggie and the rest of them seemed unable to grasp. He signed the letters with an illegible scrawl whilst she waited and, when she had returned to her room, checked his watch. Five to four. The deli would still be open. Might as well see what Gillian had to say. He grabbed his coat and hurried out to Beardshall’s.
The food store served the city’s business community, but Fortnum and Mason’s it wasn’t. Busy during the lunch hour, it was quiet at other times and now deserted save for a couple of assistants in drab brown overalls. They were languidly shifting tins from one shelf to another. He walked up to them and touched the shorter girl on the arm. She spun round, her squirrel-features wrinkled in enquiry.
“Gillian?”
Evidently recognising him, she flushed. He was an occasional customer here and the printing of his photograph in Friday’s paper would have put his identity beyond doubt. Apprehensively, she said, “Yeah?”
Harry beckoned and, unwillingly, she approached. When he was satisfied that the other assistant was out of earshot, he said quietly, “Lucy told me you know a man who used to be involved with my wife.”
“Women’s gossip,” she said. “That’s all. She shouldn’t have said nothing.”
“Who is he, this Rourke?”
Lowering her voice to a whisper, she nevertheless managed to pack violence into her reply, “He’s a shit, that’s what he is.”
“Tell me more.”
“He was shacked up with our Jane for the best part of eighteen months. They had a kid, poor little mite, he treated it rotten.”
He stepped over an abandoned wire basket to get closer to her. “Where does your step-sister live?”
Vigorously, the girl shook her head. “I don’t want her messed about. She’s had a lousy time, she’s on her own now after that bugger left her. I shouldn’t have said anything to your secretary, should’ve kept me gob shut.”
Harry gripped her by the wrist. “Gillian, the man who stabbed my wife is still on the loose. I want to find him. Rourke’s a new name to me. I’m not saying he was involved, but he may be able to help, point me in the right direction.”
“You’ll be lucky,” she said, trying to wriggle free. “Anyway, Christ knows where he is.”
“Then it’s Jane I’ll have to see. Tell me where.”
“Let go,” she hissed, “you’re hurting.”
He glanced across to where the other assistant was sweeping the floor aimlessly, displaying no interest in either the job or her colleague’s conversation. Then he realised that the girl was tuned into a personal stereo; her eyes had a faraway look and her lips moved noiselessly to the words of some pop song. Suddenly releasing Gillian, he said, “Please, where do I go?”
The squirrel-faced woman sighed and came to a decision. On a discarded sell-by sticker she wrote in an unformed hand an address in South Liverpool. Harry knew the place as a notorious example of urban blight; these days architects held conferences to discuss how to avoid repeating the design mistakes which had created ghettoes like the Keir Hardie Estate. When he thanked her, Gillian said, “Jane has no idea where he’s slunk off to. Good riddance, I say. But don’t give her any hassle — okay? She’s suffered enough already.”
Harry promised. There was no more to be gleaned here and he returned to the office. Halting by the door of the glassed-in cubby-hole where Lucy did her typing, he said he expected to be out for the rest of the afternoon.
She followed him to his room, ostensibly to finish the day’s filing, but closed the door immediately behind her. “Discover anything?” she asked in a conspiratorial undertone.
“The more I learn, the less I know.”
“You’re like a child picking at a sore tooth, Harry. But I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
He pointed to today’s calendar adage: Persistence is the mother of miracles. “If only I believed it,” he said.
Chapter Fifteen
Aneurin Bevan Heights — the Nye, locals called it — was a thirteen-storey carbuncle in concrete. Had it housed prisoners, they would have mutinied long ago. Harry walked towards it from the main road. After leaving Beardshall’s, he had gone home to change into jeans, an old zip-front jacket and dirty plimsolls before jumping on to a bus at the Pierhead. It wouldn’t be wise to turn up in this part of inner city Liverpool dressed in a pinstripe suit, however shiny at the elbows, and driving an unstolen car on which he wasn’t anxious to have to claim the insurance.
The block of flats loomed above a landscape of despair. Shops that, though open for trade, had their windows boarded or barred. The busiest were the second-hand stores with their black and white signboards proclaiming free social security estimates given. Unlettable maisonettes straggled along the side of streets that lacked pavements. Bent Lowry-women, bare-legged despite the cold, gathered in small nattering groups. You would only come here for a compelling reason, or if you had nowhere else to go. Harry took a short cut through a patch of waste ground, glancing over his shoulder when shouts of glee attracted his attention. A gang of boys was throwing pebbles at the bus as it started up again. Harry’s feet squelched through tufts of muddy grass, treading from time to time on rusted cans and empty packets of condoms. He passed a Ford Cortina, wrecked and burnt out, probably by kids too young to be prosecuted even if they were caught.
He reached the quadrangle of dusty asphalt which passed for a communal garden at the foot of the Heights.
