Licking his lips, Matt said, “Okay. She told me on the day she was murdered. I hadn’t known before.”
“Go on.”
“She came here that day. Around one. She explained about staying at your place, said you’d been chivalrous and surrendered your bed. Apparently, she’d tried to call you on the phone that day, but you always seemed to be busy.” Harry groaned at Liz’s characteristic exaggeration there. “She had meant to have lunch with you, but she thought as you were tied up, she’d wander over and apologise for not coming in to work that week. Tracey was off sick and Liz should have been on duty, so I decided to shut the shop and take her to Mama Reilly’s for a bite to eat. That was when she told me about having made up her mind to break off with Coghlan and move in with her new boyfriend.”
“Did she say anything about him?”
“Only the usual dreamy stuff you would expect from Liz. That he was rich and handsome and had finally agreed to dump his undeserving wife. I asked her if she was certain and that was when she told me about expecting a baby. The idea seemed to delight her. She said she could hardly believe that it was all happening to her at last. The man she wanted and a kid as well. It’s time for me to settle down, she said.”
Matt’s face had darkened as he spoke. Something in his tone, a thinly veiled anger, made Harry say, “And were you happy for her?”
“Happy? I was sick with rage and envy. There she was, prattling away about this bloke who’d stepped out of the pages of a woman’s magazine, and all I wanted to find out was who was the father of the baby.”
Startled by Matt’s outburst, Harry demanded, “Why did it matter so much to you?”
The little man lifted his head defiantly. “If you must know, I wanted to find out if the child was mine.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Harry stared at Matt in bewilderment. “What do you mean?”
“What I say.” The words were blurred and indistinct, as though they were all that remained after tears had been choked away. “Liz and I slept together. Yes, that shocks you, doesn’t it? Yet it’s true. I say “slept”, but we made love for a couple of hours and then she said she had to go. It was last Christmas Eve. You remember, when the snow fell? The shop had closed, the takings were good and we’d been celebrating, with too much to drink. Liz was on the Bacardis. Suddenly she put her arm round me and asked if by any chance I wanted her. I was lost for words, but she simply laughed and told me to hail a cab for a hotel at the other end of town. We had a room the size of a shoebox and a bed that screeched each time we moved, but none of it mattered to me. I had her and it was the moment I’d been waiting for half my life.”
He took a deep breath and continued, “I don’t need to describe how I felt. Let’s just say that all through Christmas I was in a daze. I suppose I’d loved Liz since the day I met her. Even as a kid, her smile could melt an icecap. And she was good to me, too. Teased me about my height, yeah, but never in a cruel way, just as an old mate would do. And she always kept in touch. But I never thought I’d have a chance with her, not when I was only half a man and she was able to pick and choose. On Christmas Day I woke up though and asked myself if I could make it happen after all. Could I offer her enough to make her mine? Stupid, eh? Behaving like a moonstruck teenager.
“Of course, it didn’t last. When she came back to work after New Year, it was as if we’d simply kissed and wished each other goodnight, as if nothing had occurred to change the way we were. I couldn’t fathom it at first. Then one day she said something about my Christmas present and treated me to a grin that ran from ear to ear. I realised that she’d just been doing me a kindness, that was all. To Liz it meant no more than helping a man with a white stick across the road.”
“No need to be bitter, Matt.”
The little man’s face was a fiery red. “When she told me about the baby, I couldn’t help myself. I asked if she was sure it belonged to her latest beau. She curled her lip and said that it certainly wasn’t Coghlan’s. And then, as plainly as if I could read her mind, I saw it dawn on her that I thought I might be the child’s father.”
He made a low moaning noise, like an animal in pain. For a short while neither of them spoke. Eventually he looked up and said, “God help her, she laughed. Not intentionally heartless, that might have been easier to bear. It was the sheer — I dunno — unexpectedness to her of the idea that a dwarf could ever sire a child of hers. She tried to keep her face straight and I realised that for all our times together over the years, the fun we’d had, not just in the shop and going out on the town every now and then, but back in the days when old Ma Wieczarek was alive, she’d never regarded me as a proper man. She’d been able to behave more naturally with me than with any other feller, you included, simply because she didn’t think of me as one of them. I was a midget, a member of a race apart. Then she solemnly said that she was sure I wasn’t the one responsible for putting her in the family way and wasn’t I glad that I wouldn’t have to do the decent thing and marry her? Christ, if only she knew.
“I walked out on her. There was no other option. If I’d stayed a moment longer I would have hurt her. The old red mist had descended, you understand. Believe me, right at that instant I could have murdered her and not have turned a hair.” He barked with mirthless amusement at Harry’s reaction. “Oh, yes, I know what you’re thinking. But I didn’t creep up behind her in Leeming Street. I wouldn’t have killed her in a hole-and-corner way and then slunk off to save my own neck. No, I didn’t re-open the shop that afternoon, but it wasn’t for any nefarious reason. I simply needed to try to flush her out of my system. So I went on the piss. I toured round the pubs — can’t even remember all the ones I supped in. Some kind soul chucked me into a taxi and I spent most of Friday drying out. No, Harry, you’ll have to look elsewhere for your culprit.”
“Why not tell me all this to begin with?” To his dismay he heard himself posing the same question as D.S. Macbeth. “Why did you lie?”
“Would you believe I was ashamed? And scared, but mostly ashamed. People had seen me with her in Mama Reilly’s. I must have caused a bit of a stir when I walked out, though I was fighting back the tears and didn’t take any notice. When it seemed the police hadn’t latched on to the fact that we’d been together, I made up my mind to keep stumm. I couldn’t help them, offer any clues. She was murdered hours later and I had no idea where she went afterwards. No, all I would get for mouthing off would be the third degree from tired scuffers desperate for an arrest. Funny how the mind works, builds up defences. I even convinced myself I was helping by not distracting the cops with my squalid little tale that didn’t have any bearing on Liz’s murder.”
“I wish you’d told me.”
Matt looked sheepish. “Truth is, I felt guilty as far as you were concerned. After all, you were her husband.” He sighed. “I always envied you your time with her. Still do, as a matter of fact. At least it’s there, it happened. All I have is the memory of two stolen hours. It’s more than I ever dreamed of, but it isn’t enough.”
Tracey’s purple head bobbed round the door. “It’s gone time for me break,” she said.
“With you in a minute.” Matt stood up. “Sorry. I should have been franker. I remember you once told me that Crusoe and Devlin make more money out of their clients’ lies than from the times when they forget themselves and tell the truth. But we don’t always do what we should, do we?”
Harry joined him at the door. “You can say that again.”
“Look. It must have been Coghlan. There’s no other explanation.”
“I don’t think it’s as simple as that.”
A fierce look crossed the small man’s face. “Why not? He drove her to despair and then he lost her. He’s not the sort to take that lying down.”
“Maybe not. I’ll see you, Matt.”
Harry walked through the shop and out into the morning drizzle. His head was buzzing and the sense of well-being that his night with Brenda had engendered had ebbed away. Matt’s story had rocked him; he felt more hurt by Liz’s ignorance of the little man’s secret hopes than by the news of her latest adultery.
He picked up a newspaper. Froggy’s death hadn’t even made the front page, which was devoted to ructions within the city council. He found a half-column headed riddle of tip death under Ken Cafferty’s by-line, but there was no hint to link the murder with that of Liz. Ken was too shrewd not to have sniffed out the connection once he learned that the same police team was handling the Evison case, but he had obviously been asked to keep it quiet and the report concentrated on the location of the body. A local politician had already suggested that it was all the fault of cuts in security and manning levels at the Pasture Moss site. Soon someone would be blaming the
