Vera Stanhope 06 - Harbour Street Read Free Page B

waited until he’d finished talking. ‘All good-tempered then? Nothing that could have led to a Christmas moment of madness? The victim hadn’t made a fuss about kids swearing or putting their feet on the seats?’
    ‘Not that I saw or heard. It was packed in there, but if there’d been any sort of row, I’d probably have noticed. Even when the train stopped and we all had to get out, nobody kicked off.’
    ‘What do we know about the victim?’ This was Vera’s favourite moment in an investigation. She was nosy, loved digging around in another person’s private life. Perhaps, she was forced to concede, because she had no personal life of her own.
    ‘Only what we could get from her Metro pensioner’s pass. She was carrying a handbag, but in it there was nothing but a purse, a set of house keys and a hankie.’
    ‘Money in the purse?’
There were druggies
, Vera thought,
who’d stab their granny for the price of a fix. But probably not in the Metro in the late afternoon
.
    ‘Fifty quid and a bit of change.’
    Not robbed then
. ‘So what do we know about her?’
    ‘Her name’s Margaret Krukowski and she’s seventy years old. An address in Mardle. One, Harbour Street.’ Joe had stumbled over the surname.
    ‘What’s that? Russian, Polish?’
    Joe shook his head. What would he know? ‘She was nearly home,’ he said. ‘Only one more stop on the Metro and she’d have been safe.’ Vera thought he was the most sentimental cop she’d ever known.
    ‘Did you see where she got on?’
    ‘Aye, Gosforth.’
    One of Newcastle’s posher suburbs. A long way from Mardle in terms of class and aspiration.
    Joe guessed what she was thinking. ‘More Gosforth than Mardle, from her appearance,’ he said.
    Vera thought about this for a moment and wondered where people would place her in the social order of things, if they saw her. Bag lady? Farmer?
    ‘We’ll go then, shall we?’ she said. ‘See if anyone’s at home waiting for Margaret Krukowski.’
    They sat for a moment in the Land Rover outside the house. The Harbour Guest House. A wooden sign beside the front door, the letters almost obscured by snow.
    ‘We bring the kids here sometimes, to the Mardle Fisheries,’ Joe said. ‘A treat. It’s supposed to be the best fish and chips in the North-East.’
    Vera had her own memories of Mardle. Hector bribing some boatman to take them out to Coquet Island in the middle of the night. Lights still on in the warden’s house at one end of the island. Music and noise, some party going on there. Her terror that they’d be discovered, while Hector was caught up in the chase for roseate terns’ eggs. He’d always loved the risk. She thought he’d been motivated more by the danger than by the obsession that led him to steal and trade in rare birds’ eggs.
    ‘Well,’ Joe said. ‘Are we going in? I’ve got a home to go to.’
    She nodded and climbed out of the vehicle, trying to remember if the guest house had been here when she’d been a kid. She remembered the street as rundown, almost squalid, but that had been more than forty years ago. She rang the bell.
    The woman who answered was about the right age to be the victim’s daughter. Late thirties, early forties. Curly black hair and brown eyes, the colour of conkers, a pleasant, almost professional smile. She reminded Vera of a nurse. When Vera introduced herself, she stood aside to let them in. ‘Is there some problem?’
    When the police turned up at the door people felt either guilty or scared. Vera couldn’t work out which the reaction was here. She followed the woman to the back of the house, into a warm lounge furnished with heavy furniture that would have seemed out of place in a smaller room, and they sat down on plush, velvet sofas. There was an upright piano against one wall, music on the stand, and against another a sideboard with decanters and bottles of spirits. Vera thought a tot of malt whisky was just what she needed after hanging around on a