The Quality Street Girls, page 21
Ruffian stamped his hooves and flicked his head up for a moment, as though in defiance of the night. He was ready, and if anything stood in the way of his mistress it should be ready for him.
Reenie deftly untied the horse with her left hand, led him out into the yard and leapt onto his back.
‘Reenie! Where are you going?’ Peter was walking towards her, off-balance and dazed. Smoke and perspiration had darkened his straw-coloured hair, and a rivulet of blood ran beneath his right ear and stopped at his torn and soot-stained shirt collar. ‘You need to stay and see a doctor. There’s a doctor.’ He was pointing behind him, towards the doors they’d escaped from, but shook his head and banged his right ear with the palm of his hand as though he could unblock his confusion.
Reenie slid down from her horse and, keeping a hold of the bridle, put her face to Peter’s left ear and placed a hand gently on his shoulder. ‘You’ve burst an eardrum. Now get your bike.’
Like Ruffian, Peter seemed to recover himself quickly at Reenie’s words. Peter moved his head from side to side, as though to recalibrate his balance in light of this new information, and shouted deafly, ‘I’m getting my bike!’
Reenie watched as Peter tried to straighten up and find his feet on his way over to the bike shed. He re-emerged with his dark blue Reyhand racer, and after putting both feet on the pedals and rising to a racing position, he nodded to her that he was ready. Ruffian snorted in response, as though to show his approval of Peter’s stoicism; they’d make a Yorkshireman of this lad yet.
Reenie steered Ruffian towards the Water Lane gate, with Peter following. Reenie knew all about Tommo Cartwright. Those she spoke to told her things about Tommo Cartwright that made her feel sick. He’d have headed over to his mother’s house where Diana lived, and Reenie hadn’t formed any sort of plan beyond getting there and seeing her friend. They wound round a steep street of blackened stone terraces, and over the bridge that led them up in the direction of Gibbet Hill. Everywhere there were cobbles to slow them down, and Reenie had to knock Ruffian’s side with the sole of her plimsoll to remind him that time was of the essence. They didn’t have to travel far to find the grass verge where Tommo had left his girl.
Bess was lying on the cold damp grass without her shoes or coat. Blood stained her doll-like face and Reenie wrapped her coat around her while Peter went to fetch help.
To Sergeant Metcalf the house was unmistakable; the only two-up two-down in Vickerman Street with the front door standing wide open and the lights on. As he approached the doorway in the darkness, he could see and hear an angry exchange within.
‘If they come here say that I was in bed all night and—’
‘But they’ll see the cuts on your face, and they’ll—’
‘I don’t care what they say; if you love me, you’ll do as I tell you.’ Tommo Cartwright was in the galley kitchen at the back of his mother’s house, bleeding profusely from cuts all over his ugly face. His mother was dabbing at them with a wet rag, and sobbing with fear. Tommo himself was throwing off his jacket and trying to unbutton his shirt cuffs ready to burn the clothes that might give him away. ‘Give me that sodding rag and do something useful for once in your life!’ Tommo snatched the rag from his mother and pressed it to his eyes while thrusting his other wrist in her direction for her to undress him. ‘Where’s Diana? Why doesn’t she come down here and make herself useful?’
‘She had to go out.’ Ethel told her son through her sobs. ‘She had to go to the police station. She saw a fire at the factory from her bedroom window.’
‘She’s done what?’ Tommo was enraged.
Sergeant Metcalf knocked at the wide-open door.
Chapter Nineteen
Diana sat up in bed beside her sleeping daughter; she was nursing a cup of tea to calm her nerves and trying to think through solutions to the myriad of problems that now presented themselves to her, but the situation seemed hopeless. Gracie was sleeping so peacefully it was as though nothing had changed, clutching her red ribbon that was now as creased as her sleep-stained cheek.
In the small hours of that morning, Diana had seen a bright light streak up from the windows of the Mackintosh’s factory all the way down in the valley. She may have been a long way off in her attic bedroom, but even from a distance on Gibbet Hill, she had known immediately that what she could see were fire and an explosion. Diana feared that at that time of the morning there would be so few people around that the alarm wouldn’t be raised fast enough. Not only that, that the whole place would be destroyed, or – even worse – someone might be trapped inside and come to harm. Diana had thrown on some warm clothes and left her sleeping daughter, knowing that her stepmother was still in the house to keep her safe. She had run heedlessly through the ice and frozen mud, skidding dangerously and often, until she reached the police sub-station at the Burnley road junction just minutes away.
The satellite station had been closed when she’d arrived, and above the door of the squat little Edwardian building was a warning carved in stone in a language she didn’t speak: ignorantia legis excusat neminem, ignorance of the law excuses no-one.
Diana hammered on the door with her fists, too exhausted to run all the way into town to the main police station. It was with a sigh of relief that she felt the bolts being lifted on the inside of the door as the duty sergeant opened up to let her in. She hadn’t realised then that her troubles were only just beginning.
From then it was only a matter of seconds before the fire engines were out on the road because Sergeant Metcalfe had access to a precious telephone and he could summon the brigade to the aid of the toffee factory. The sleeping police sub-station had sprung into life shortly afterwards, as word reached them that the fire had been started by a car. Diana had accepted a cup of tea as she had sat in the warm of the sub-station parlour waiting for the lift home that Sergeant Metcalfe had offered her.
It was only a few streets back to her own home, but her bare legs were spattered with black mud and she was shivering in the thin jacket and tired old headscarf that she’d pulled on as she had run out of the house.
However, Diana began to regret ever leaving her bed as revelation after revelation brought the fire closer to home. A woman police Sergeant came and told her that they had reason to believe that her stepbrother had been a passenger in a stolen car that had hit the side of the Mackintosh’s, and did Diana know if he had returned home? For a moment Diana had hesitated; perhaps there was still a chance to keep this all at a distance. She briefly toyed with the idea of saying that she didn’t know, but then she thought about all the suspicious crates that Tommo was hiding in the house and all the wrong things she’d seen, and she realised that she had no choice but to cooperate and to take the police back to the house herself before they went there of their own accord and tarred Diana with the same brush as they were bound to tar her stepbrother.
Diana nodded to the WPC and simply asked. ‘Can I take my baby sister to the neighbours’ before you go in? I don’t want her to be frightened by police in the house.’
Diana had feared this day for so long; the day when all of Tommo’s lies and threats and thieving would catch up with him. She had always assumed that the police would turn up at the door one day with a warrant and she would have to tell them that it was all Tommo’s doing, and it would be her word against his. Despite all the threats she’d made to him over the years she had never imagined that when the time came, she would be the betrayer and he the betrayed. Not for one moment did she think that she would be the one willingly leading the police into their home and revealing their awful secrets.
They had driven her, for convenience sake, in the back of a police waggon where she rubbed shoulders with four other Sergeants in their dark blue wool tunics who had tried not to look her in the eye.
Sergeant Metcalfe had thought of his own young children and when the waggon arrived in Vickerman Street. He offered Diana a few minutes to carry the sleepy little girl into the house of a startled and slippered Mrs Royd before he and his men knocked politely at the open front door and went in.
It was all over now, and as Diana surveyed the damage to the furniture in her bedroom in the weak morning light, she wondered what the police had found in their search, and how much her stepmother had known that Tommo was hiding in their creaking, dirty house. Ethel Cartwright was still at the police station with her darling boy ‘The Blade’, so the police inspector must think that she knew something. It was with bitter amusement that she found that Gracie’s cresolene lamp was one of the few things not knocked over or damaged in their chaotic search.
She didn’t know what she thought about what had happened to Stewart. She’d heard the police officers at the station discussing his death with one another in matter-of-fact terms, but none of them realised what he was to her. There was some talk about not revealing his identity to the press until they’d informed his family, but Diana thought that could take until next Christmas; his mother was dead, and his father was at sea.
She wondered if she was heartless to feel so little at the death of the father of her child, but she told herself that perhaps she’d feel something later when she’d had time to make that child safe.
Diana drained her tea-stained cup; in the short-term, she needed to find a neighbour who would look after Gracie so that she could go back to work while Ethel was being interviewed. Once her stepmother was back they would resume her usual childcare arrangement, but Diana was beginning to feel that her stepmother’s house had just become too hot to handle, and in the longer-term, she needed a better plan.
It was the same old formless plan that Diana had always had: get somewhere else where we can be together and I can be her mam. But that wasn’t so easy; Diana needed to work, and even when she was working flat-out at the factory as she had been this run-up to Christmas, it was barely enough. Besides, the moment she acknowledged Gracie as her daughter she’d lose her position; it was an impossible situation. And then she had Frances Roth breathing down her neck, and she didn’t even know yet if the fire reached her floor? Would her job still exist?
Everything, Diana thought, had just become too much, and she felt like she had no back up in life. Everything had just become utterly terrifying and she missed her father so very much.
Diana pulled herself out of bed and went to wash up her teacup, telling herself that things were about to get better, but little did she know that they were about to get so much worse.
Gracie woke with a sniff and rubbed her face. ‘Where’s my ribbon gone?’ Gracie looked into her open hand and saw that it was empty; the ribbon that she had been clutching when she went to sleep was missing, but it couldn’t have gone far, Diana had seen it in her hand only a few moments ago.
‘It will be somewhere in the bed; we’ll find it later.’ Diana tried not to let the sound of her fears into her voice, but it was hard.
‘Uncle Stewie gave it me,’ Gracie said this as a passing comment; a matter of no moment.
‘When did he give it to you?’ Diana couldn’t think of a time when Stewart would have had the opportunity. The only times he saw Gracie were the infrequent occasions when Diana herself forced him to spend an hour or two with them, on an outing she had contrived. Gracie must have been wishful thinking, the ribbon was, Diana had assumed, a leftover from her stepmother’s mending basket.
‘He took me to the ribbon shop to choose it when he got me from school.’
‘Your Uncle Stewart doesn’t get collect you from school; Ethel – I mean Ma always collects you. And the haberdashers is miles out of the way.’
‘She doesn’t always collect me. Her knees are too bad to go all over town collecting kids and collecting mending and fetching basin meals.’ Gracie’s little impersonation of the woman that she had been told was her mother was uncannily accurate. ‘Uncle Stewie sometimes gets me from school, but I’m not meant to tell you because Ma says you’ll be angry with her for letting bad knees get the better of her. But I don’t think you’d be angry with her for having bad knees. No one can help it if their knees turn bad.’ Gracie clambered above over the top the bed clothes. ‘He takes me to the ribbon hashers on the trolley bus if I’ve been a good girl for you.’ Gracie smiled, proud that she had been good enough to be bought her own soft satin piece of ribbon. ‘Uncle Stewie’s going to buy me a ribbon shop when I’m grown up so that I can be a ribbon hasher like the lady at the counter.’
Diana looked at her daughter’s long caramel coloured eyelashes that framed cornflower blue eyes so like her father’s. Stewart had never mentioned that he’d done this for Gracie; there’d never been so much as a hint, and even if there had it wouldn’t have changed how she felt about him as a father. He’d shown an inconsistent interest in his daughter at best, and at worst he’d helped to bring real trouble to their door, but he’d been a part of her life for so many years and it was natural to feel emotion at his loss. She had put thoughts of his death out of her mind until that moment, but at Gracie’s words something broke in her; she covered her mouth tightly with her hand, and for the first time in many years, she burst into uncontrollable tears.
Chester ‘Sleepless’ Parvin, the most diligent reporter on the Halifax Courier, was wiping tears from his cheeks with the sleeve of his old brown raincoat while he tried to make notes on what he was seeing. Whenever people asked Sleepless how he managed to do his job and not become emotionally involved, he would tell them, proudly, ‘because I’ve seen it all, and I’ve seen it all twice.’ Parvin had been to America and seen the poverty of its cardboard city in Central Park. He’d seen the soldiers in London and Paris who had lost limbs for their country but had no work and no money to keep them warm; but this was the sight that finally reached his heart.
News had reached his office late the night before that a fire had broken out in London, and the Crystal Palace was burning. His colleagues listened anxiously to the wireless as news came through that 400 firemen were fighting the blaze while 100,000 spectators watched the end of an era; the end of an age. The glow of the blaze could be seen, according to reporters, across eight counties, and famous men said that the world would mourn its loss. It was only a building, but the news announcer said that to people all over the world it was the symbol of something very important and that it could never be replaced. The Empire was thrown into a kind of mourning for a building that Sleepless couldn’t pretend to understand. That was until the call came in from the King Cross police sub-station: Mackintosh’s was ablaze.
When the night porter woke him up at his desk to tell him that there was a telephone call for him he thought it was a prank. Perhaps his colleagues had been so put out that he had not understood their feelings of loss for a glass building in London that they’d arranged a phoney message about a fire in a Halifax institution to see if he would react the same way. It was not the case; Mackintosh’s factory really had been ablaze.
It was now after six o’clock in the morning, and it was starting to get light. From beside the watchman’s cabin at the Albion Mills gate, Sleepless could see the tear in the side of the toffee factory where a car had ripped through the fourth floor. On the ground, he could see the pile of rubble and tangled window frames that had poured down the side of the building to land on a waggon that was just visible beneath it, all but obliterated. He could see the tell-tale streaks of soot blackening, some above the hole where smoke and flames had billowed up in a cloud, and some below that ran in rivulets down the exterior wall where water from the sprinklers had carried it.
The toffee factory had an extensive sprinkler system, and when the night watchman had triggered it from the control box, the water had worked immediately to control the blaze. Even so, there would be no lines running in the main toffee factory that day; the fire had burned long enough for the smoke to spread everywhere and damage everything in the Albion Mills wing. The building would need engineers and surveyors to check it before it would be safe for anyone to return; and then the builders would have to replace the walls, the windows; everything. This would be devastating for the business.
Sleepless was surrounded by workers who were arriving for the early shift and who didn’t understand what was going on but had followed the smell of burnt brick dust to the factory gates. Grown men were looking up at the side of the building in shock, shedding tears as though an old friend had died. That was when it had hit Sleepless; it was the way that these people cared about the place they worked in. Mack’s was more than just a care for their own livelihoods, it was an attachment that ran bone-deep.
‘Are you the reporter from the Courier?’ the night watchman at the gate had spotted Sleepless scribbling away at his ink-stained notepad as he took in the scene.
‘Aye.’
‘They want you, come on through.’ The watchman lifted the gate for Sleepless but called back through to the workers who were jostling to follow. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t let anyone else through just yet. If you could just wait there.’
‘And what are we supposed to do? We’ve got a shift starting in ten minutes.’
The watchman pointed Sleepless in the direction of the doors to the main office block below the railway embankment and then turned back to the throng of people who had endless questions. As Sleepless walked away, he could hear men voicing worries about pay, late production rates, and a host of questions that the watchman couldn’t be expected to answer.
Outside the doors to the main office, a group of suited men were standing and talking with the Chief Constable. The Fire Chief stood with and a man whom Sleepless recognised as Sir Harold Mackintosh himself; his pointed, owl-like eyebrows drawn together in heartfelt concern as he listened intently to the other men.
