together, they do, and my Frank had passed on not many months before. Wouldn’t have stood a chance if they’d come looking, would I?”
“Where do they live?”
“The Barrow Estate, back of the High Street. Council likes to keep ‘em together, under their eye so to speak. It’s a shocking place. Not an honest family there, and they’re not all O’Briens neither. Den of thieves, that’s what it is.”
Roz took another thoughtful sip from her cup.
“Are you prepared to let me use this information, Lily? You do realise that if there’s anything in it it could help Olive.”
“Course I do, dear. Why would I tell you otherwise?”
“The police would become involved. They’d want to talk to you.”
“I know that.”
“In which case your name would be out, and the O’Briens could still come looking for you.”
The old eyes appraised her shrewdly.
“You’re only a slip of a thing, dear, but you’ve survived a beating by the look of it.
Reckon I can too. In any case,” she went on stoutly, “I’ve spent six years feeling bad about not speaking up, and I was that glad when young Mick phoned and said you was coming, you wouldn’t believe. You go ahead, dear, and don’t mind about me.
It’s safer here, anyway, than my old place. They could have set the whole thing alight and I’d have been dead long before anyone’d have thought of phoning for help.”
If Roz had expected to see a chapter of Hell’s Angels rampaging about the Barrow Estate she was disappointed. At lunchtime on a Friday it was an unexceptional place, where only the odd dog barked and young women, in ones and twos, pushed babies in prams piled high with shopping for the weekend. Like too many council estates there was a naked and un cared for look about it, a recognition that what it offered was not what its tenants wanted. If individuality was present in these dull uniform walls then it was inside, away from view. But Roz doubted its existence. She had a sense of empty spaces marking time where people waited for somebody else to offer them something better.
Like her, she thought. Like her flat.
As she drove away she passed a large school, advertising itself with a tired sign beside the gate. Parkway Comprehensive.
Children milled about the tarmac, the sound of their voices loud in the warm air. Roz slowed the car to watch them for a moment. Groups of children played the same games whichever school they went to, but she could see why Gwen had turned her nose up at Parkway and had sent her girls to the convent. Its close proximity to the Barrow Estate would worry even the most liberal of parents, and Gwen certainly wasn’t that.
But it was ironic, if what Lily and Mr. Hayes had said was true, that both Gwen’s daughters had succumbed to the attractions of this other world. Was that in spite of or because of their mother? she wondered.
She told herself she needed a tame policeman to give her the low-down on the O’Briens, and her road led inevitably to the Poacher. Being lunchtime the door to the restaurant was unlocked, but the tables were as empty as ever. She selected one well away from the window and sat down, her dark glasses firmly in place.
“You won’t need those,” said Hawksley’s amused voice from the kitchen doorway.
“I don’t intend to put the lights on.”
She smiled, but did not remove the glasses.
“I’d like to order some lunch.”
“OK.” He held the door wide.
“Come into the kitchen. It’s more comfortable in there.”
“No, I’ll have it in here.” She stood up.
“At the table in the window. I’d like the door open and’ she looked for amplifiers and found them ‘some loud music, preferably jazz. Let’s liven the place up a bit. Nobody wants to eat in a morgue, for God’s sake.” She seated herself in the window.
“No,” he said, an odd inflexion in his voice.
“If you want lunch, you eat it in here with me. Otherwise, you go somewhere else.”
She studied him thoughtfully.
“This has nothing to do with the recession, has it?”
“What hasn’t?”
“Your non-existent customers.”
He gestured towards the kitchen.
“Are you going or staying?”
“Staying,” she said, standing up. What was this all about? she wondered.
“It’s really none of your concern, Miss Leigh,” he murmured, reading her mind.
“I suggest you stick to what you know and leave me to deal with my affairs in my own way.” Geof had phoned through the results of his check the previous Monday.
