Fell Purpose by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Read Free Book Online Page B

with a strange man if only he’d treated her like a normal teenager.’
    ‘Did Zellah have a boyfriend?’ Atherton was asking.
    ‘No,’ Wilding said. ‘I didn’t allow it. She was too young, and I didn’t want her distracted. She had her whole life for that sort of nonsense, but you only get one chance at schooling.’
    ‘It must have been hard, though. I mean, girls of sixteen and seventeen naturally want to go out with boys.’
    ‘She understood. Despite her mother trying to fill her head with rubbish, she knew what her own best interests were.’ His face hardened. ‘There was a boy who came sniffing round her. I sent him away with a flea in his ear. I told you I know who you should be talking to: a yob by the name of Michael Carmichael. A greasy Lothario with a motorbike. A boy from a sink estate in Reading, whose father’s a jailbird! And he thought he was good enough to lay his dirty paws on my daughter! He brought her home once on his damn motorbike, and I caught him fumbling with her outside the front door. I brought him in and read him the riot act. Of course, Pam took his side against me, and there was a row. Poor Zellah ended up in tears. He stormed off, uttering threats against me. The only reason I didn’t report him to the police at the time was because I didn’t want to embarrass her any further.’
    ‘What sort of threats?’
    ‘Oh, nothing specific. Just that he’d get his own back on me and that I’d be sorry, that sort of thing. And two days later someone broke our front window in the middle of the night. I’ve no doubt at all that it was him.’
    ‘Did you see him?’ Atherton asked.
    ‘No. I told you, it was the middle of the night. I was asleep until the noise woke me up. By the time I looked out, there was no one there. And a couple of weeks later both the wing mirrors were ripped off my car. Pam said it could have been anyone, but I knew who did it. Bad blood will out.’
    ‘How did you know his father was in jail?’
    ‘He told me so himself, that night he brought her home. Practically boasted about it.’
    ‘It’s an odd way to introduce yourself to a girl’s father.’
    ‘He said he didn’t want me to find out and think he’d kept it from him. I asked why he should think I was interested, because he was never getting within a mile of Zellah ever again. Then he started calling me names; Pam started shouting and Zellah burst into tears.’ He stared morosely at the carpet.
    ‘So when did all this happen?’
    ‘A couple of months ago.’ He looked up, remembering the point they had reached, and his face hardened again. ‘You go and interview Mr Michael Carmichael of the Woodley South Estate.’
    ‘We’ll certainly do that,’ Atherton said, his interest quickening. Everyone had heard of Woodley South, the bane of the Thames Valley Police: one of those bare and ugly estates, cheaply run up in the sixties to get families out of central London, which had degenerated into far worse slums than the evacuees had come from, a place of blowing rubbish, burned-out cars, unemployment, boarded-up windows, late night joy-riders, and hooded drug dealers.
    Lately the Reading police had undertaken a ‘clampdown’ to try to make a dent in the crime figures in advance of an application for central funds for a regeneration project. Their methods and results had been widely written up for, and discussed in, the Job, which was why the name resonated with him.
    It always amazed Atherton that anyone managed to live even a near-normal life in such circumstances, and yet from his own experience there were always some decent families among the low-lifers in these places, desperately clinging on to standards, doing their best and getting precious little help from the authorities. It was possible young Mr Carmichael was one of the good guys, and his outburst in the Wildings’ front parlour was from frustration at being judged on his appearance and postcode. On the other hand, there was a better