The Golden Fury

Chapter Seven

Chapter 7

Now, only next-door Bet and an old couple at the end of her street survived, surrounded by a rising tide of topiary and roman blinds. The recent arrival of a Marks and Spencer food emporium, on the corner where the dodgy video rental shop used to be, seemed to be the final straw for the old neighborhood.

Thank goodness we don’t have to put up with this, Aldira thought as she surveyed the scene. Here, the interiors of three-story houses gaped like life-size dollhouses, curtains flapping miserably. The only sign of human habitation, apart from the lorries, was a light in a front kitchen, shining through the industrial gloom.

Aldira walked up to the door and rang the bottom bell of three. The name written in biro beside it was Walker.

An older woman opened the door, peering round it nervously. “Hello.

Mrs. Walker?” Aldira said, in performance mode. “Sorry to bother you, but I’m doing a piece for the Daily Post on the changes around here.”

She’d decided not to bring up the baby immediately. Easy does it.

The woman looked at her carefully, weighing her up, and then pulled the door open.

“It’s Miss. Come in then. Quickly. I don’t want to let all that dust in.”

She led the way into her ground-floor flat, shifting a moth-eaten Jack Russell off the sofa, and nodded at Aldira to sit down.

“Sorry about Shorty. He’s shedding,” she said, brushing the hair off the cushion. “Which paper is it again?”

“The Daily Post.”

“Oh, I buy that one. That’s nice.”

Aldira relaxed. A reader. Home and dry.

The two women chatted about the work going on just outside the window, raising their voices when a lorry thundered past, revving hard to get up the incline.

Aldira nodded her sympathy and gently led Miss Walker round to the subject of the building site grave.

“I heard the workmen found a body where they’re working,” she said.

The older woman closed her eyes. “Yes, a baby. What an awful thing.”

“Awful,” Aldira echoed and shook her head in sync with Miss Walker.

“Poor man who found it. He won’t get over that for a while,” Aldira said.

“No,” Miss Walker agreed.

“It makes me wonder about the mother,” Aldira went on. “Who she was, I mean.”

She’d put her notebook down beside her, signaling to Miss Walker that they were “just talking.”

The woman was not as old as she’d first thought. About sixty, she guessed, but she looked worn down by life. There was something of the fairground about her. Bright colors distracting from a tired face. Aldira noted the ginger patina of home-dyed hair and the makeup pooling in the creases of her eyelids.

“Do you have children?” she asked.

“No,” Miss Walker said. “No kids. Just Shorty and me. We keep each other company.”

She stroked her pet in silence, the dog shivering with pleasure.

“He’s a lovely dog,” Aldira lied. She loathed dogs. She’d had too many confrontations on doorsteps with ravening beasts, snapping and lunging against their collars as their owners restrained them. They always said the same thing: “Don’t worry. They won’t bite.” But the look in the animals’ eyes said they would if they got the chance. This one was eyeing her up but she tried to ignore it.

“Well, they don’t know when it was buried, do they?” Miss Walker said. “Could be hundreds of years old, I’ve heard. We might never know.”

Aldira hmm ed and nodded, head on one side. Not what she wanted to hear.

“When did you hear about it? You’re only over the road—you must notice everything,” she said.

“I’m not some old busybody,” Miss Walker replied, her voice rising.

“I don’t poke my nose in where it’s not wanted.”

“’Course not,” Aldira soothed. “But it must have been hard to miss the police cars and things. I know I’d have been dying to know what was going on if it happened across from my house.”

The older woman was suitably mollified. “Well, I saw the police come, and later, one of the workmen, John, who runs the site, told me what they’d found. He was very upset. Terrible to find something like that. A horrible shock,” Miss Walker said. “I made him a sweet tea.”

“That was nice of you,” Aldira said. “Perhaps your friend John will know more about when the baby was buried. Maybe the police said something?”

“I couldn’t say. John saw it, the baby, I mean. He said it was just tiny bones. Nothing else left. Terrible thing.”

Aldira picked up her notebook while Miss Walker went to make a cup of tea and wrote down the name of the workman and the quote about the tiny bones.

Twenty minutes and a tea with two sugars later, she was walking down to the site office, a first-floor Portakabin in a stack, with a panoramic view over the mayhem.

A stocky man in jeans cut her off at the door. “Can I help you?”

“Hi, are you John? I’ve just been talking to Miss Walker down the road and she suggested I come to see you.”

The foreman’s face softened slightly. “She’s a lovely woman. She used to be a model or something, you know. Long time ago, now, obviously. She walks past with her dog every day and has a chat.

Sometimes she brings me a cake or something else nice. Must be a bit lonely for her with pretty much everyone else gone.”

Aldira nodded. “Must be,” she said. “Hard to be old these days, when everything is changing around you.”

The chitchat had gone on long enough and Aldira thought the foreman might make his excuses and leave.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Aldira Waters.” And stuck out her hand to shake his. Difficult for people to be rude if they’ve shaken your hand.

“John Davies,” he said back, automatically. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m a reporter, doing a piece on the body found on your building site,” Aldira went on and the foreman started to turn away.

“It must have been a terrible shock for you. You poor thing,” she added quickly.

He turned back.

“It was. Sorry to be rude but we’ve had the police coming and going on the site. Taping off their crime scene, stopping us working. The men are all spooked and we’re falling behind schedule.”

“Must be a nightmare,” Aldira said.

“It is,” Davies agreed. “Look, I shouldn’t be talking to the press. The boss would have my balls if he knew.”

Aldira smiled at him. “I’ve got a boss like that. Come on, I’ll buy you a pint in the pub up the road—it’s lunchtime and it’s just for a bit of background. I don’t have to quote you.”

>Davies looked doubtful.

“I just want to get to the bottom of who the baby is. Awful for a child to be buried without a name. Like some Victorian pauper.”

“Okay. But just one drink,” he said and padlocked the site gates behind him.

“Brilliant,” Aldira said, turning on a full-beam smile.

He walked awkwardly beside her past Miss Walker’s and Aldira waved to her new friend, standing watching at the kitchen window.