Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘And did you report this theft?’ the short detective asked.

  ‘I keep meaning to, but we’ve been so busy. There’s a war on, after all.’

  She looked at Perry and made a rueful face. ‘Sorry … darling, I didn’t want you to find out. You had warned me to be careful and I knew you’d be cross with me.’

  Perry ruffled her curls fondly and said, ‘You are a silly thing, I wouldn’t be cross with you.’

  They were behaving in a way that was so far removed from their real selves that they may as well have been in a play. Not one that would ever garner critical acclaim.

  ‘Can you describe your handbag for us, Miss Armstrong?’ the tall detective said. Of the two, he seemed more inclined to be pleasant.

  ‘Red leather, shoulder strap, clasp like a buckle. Have you found it?’

  ‘I’m afraid to say,’ the short detective said, ‘that we have. It was with a young lady whose body was found yesterday.’

  ‘Body?’ Perry said. ‘Dead?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir.’

  ‘Some kind of accident?’

  ‘Murdered,’ the short detective said bluntly.

  Beatrice, Juliet thought and gave a little cry of pain, and Perry said, ‘Juliet?’ in a concerned way that was touching. ‘Murdered?’ he puzzled to the detective.

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir,’ the taller, nicer detective said. ‘Would you have any idea who the young lady might be, Miss Armstrong?’ Perry’s hand on her back became a grip, so she supposed she was to say nothing.

  ‘No,’ Juliet whispered. ‘I don’t, I’m afraid. No idea at all.’

  Had Beatrice been trying to return the handbag to her? Had she been murdered because of that? Did one of Mrs Scaife’s thugs follow her and kill her? It was too awful to think about.

  ‘So, naturally, Miss Armstrong,’ the short one said, taking over the double act, ‘we originally presumed the young lady was you as the handbag contained your identity documents.’ Juliet thought that she might be about to be sick.

  ‘So you don’t know who it is? This person? This young lady?’ Perry asked the short detective.

  ‘We don’t. Do you know who she might be, sir?’

  ‘Of course not. I can only suppose she stole Miss Armstrong’s handbag, or a man of her acquaintance did and gave it to her. May I ask how she died?’

  ‘Strangled, with a headscarf,’ the short detective said.

  Juliet moaned quietly. The dog gave her a worried look.

  ‘And she was found where?’ Perry asked. He had a relentlessly forensic nature.

  ‘She was discovered in the coal hole of the Carlton Club.’

  ‘The Carlton Club?’ Perry echoed. He exchanged a glance with Juliet. He had obviously read the transcript of Trude’s conversation with Godfrey.

  ‘Sir?’ the short detective said. ‘Does that mean something to you?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘We think she had been there several days before she was discovered.’

  Three days, Juliet thought. Just three days since she last saw Beatrice in Pelham Place.

  ‘Are you all right, Miss Armstrong?’ the tall detective asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. No, she thought. Not at all.

  ‘Obviously Miss Armstrong had nothing to do with this,’ Perry said.

  ‘Obviously not, sir.’

  The detectives, both tall and short, left eventually, but neither of them seemed entirely satisfied.

  Perry closed the front door and turned to her. ‘What on earth is going on?’

  ‘My handbag wasn’t stolen,’ she said in a rush. ‘I left it in Mrs Scaife’s house, but I didn’t want to tell you because it was my handbag, not Iris’s, and I thought I could get it back. And I thought you’d be annoyed because I was so careless – the diamond earrings were in the handbag, I didn’t have time to return them before I bumped into Mrs Scaife in Garrard’s. The dead girl must be Beatrice Dodds, Mrs Scaife’s maid. I thought she’d run off, but now I think perhaps she was trying to return the bag to me and they found out and killed her.’

  ‘Don’t upset yourself, Miss Armstrong.’ (No longer his darling, then.) ‘Have a seat, why don’t you?

  ‘It was Trude who joked with Godfrey about the coal hole at the Carlton Club,’ he continued thoughtfully, ‘and we know she’s in cahoots with Mrs Scaife. Could it have been Trude who killed Beatrice?’

  ‘It was probably one of Mrs Scaife’s thugs – they often follow people when they leave Pelham Place. And Beatrice knew where the Red Book was. Perhaps she had it in her bag – my bag, rather. Perhaps she was trying to bring it to me.’

  ‘We can’t know anything for sure. In fact, we can’t know for sure it is this maid.’

  ‘Beatrice.’

  ‘We have to be certain. Someone will have to identify her.’

  ‘Mrs Scaife, I suppose,’ Juliet said. ‘Surely we should be telling the police all this?’

  ‘Good God,’ Perry said, ‘we don’t want the police blundering about in Pelham Place, interfering with the operation. The fewer people who know anything, the better. If it is this girl, then she’ll have to be given a different identity. For the present anyway. You’ll have to go to the mortuary.’

  ‘Me?’

  Beatrice Dodds, if it was her, was no more than an insubstantial shape beneath a white sheet in the Westminster Public Mortuary.

  The mortuary assistant was reluctant to display the body to Juliet. ‘Can’t you identify her from her clothes, miss? It’s not the sort of thing a young lady should be looking at.’

  And yet it was the sort of thing that had happened to a young lady, Juliet thought. She had no idea what clothes Beatrice had worn – apart from her black-and-white maid’s dress, which was not, according to the assistant, what she was found in. ‘I have to see her face.’

  ‘Are you sure, miss?’

  ‘Yes.’ For a moment Juliet felt her nerves quail, but then she thought, No, I must. Courage was the watchword.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Beatrice looked as though she had been modelled from clay, rather badly, and the clay had begun to deliquesce slightly. Someone had washed her, but the coal dust was ingrained in her skin and her mousy hair was sooty. Something had already started nibbling at her and Juliet wondered what kind of creatures lived in coal holes waiting for this dreadful food.

  It was, however, undeniably Beatrice Dodds. I will not be sick, Juliet thought. I will not dishonour her with revulsion.

  ‘Miss?’ the mortuary assistant prompted gently. He replaced the sheet, covering Beatrice’s small, tragic face. (Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle.)

  I did this, Juliet thought, Beatrice would probably be alive if I hadn’t asked her for help. And now she’s a rotting corpse.

  ‘Miss Wilson?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is this your sister, Miss Wilson?’ the assistant asked softly. He was used to grief, Juliet supposed. Juliet was posing as ‘Madge Wilson’, although no one at the mortuary had asked her to ‘prove’ herself. It seemed only too easy to become someone else in a war.

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘This is my sister, Ivy. Ivy Wilson.’ Juliet had a birth certificate in the name of ‘Ivy Wilson’, forged by MI5.

  ‘You’re sure, miss? You know there was a bit of a mix-up to begin with?’

  ‘How awful,’ she murmured. ‘No, this is definitely Ivy.’ Juliet felt a sob rising in her chest.

  ‘I’m afraid that there are some forms that have to be filled in,’ the mortuary assistant said. ‘And you know that there’ll have to be an inquest? The police might not release your sister’s body until their investigations are over.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course. We need to know what happened. I don’t know how Mother is going to bear it.’

  The assistant led her next door, to a sparse anteroom where she filled in the forms he brought to her. The room was painted hospital green and the table and chairs were metal. It
was a horrible place to bring the bereaved. She finished the forms and signed at the bottom ‘Madge Wilson’. A counterfeit person, a fakery, signing away the life of another counterfeit person. Juliet was possibly the only person in the world who cared about Beatrice Dodds. And now the poor girl didn’t even have her own name any more, erased from the world as successfully as if she had never existed.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I feel rather faint,’ Juliet murmured. ‘Do you think I might have a cup of tea? It must be the shock, I suppose. Hot, sweet tea – that’s what they say, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, miss, they do. You stay here, I’ll be back in a tick.’ He was a nice man – kind, she thought. She did feel a little faint, she hadn’t expected the sight of Beatrice to be quite so awful.

  What was left of Beatrice’s worldly possessions was in a lumpy brown-paper parcel on a table at the side of the room. Someone had written ‘Juliet Armstrong’ in black ink on the paper and then had crossed it out and written ‘Female – unknown’. The whole of a person’s life, Juliet thought, fitted into one parcel. She thought of Pelham Place, stuffed to the gills with Mrs Scaife’s ‘better pieces’. It would take a lot of brown paper to wrap up Mrs Scaife’s life.

  Juliet picked the parcel up and found it was much heavier and more awkward than she had expected; it could almost have been the burden of Beatrice herself that she was lugging in her arms. She walked out of the room and down the corridor towards the exit. As she turned the corner she heard the voice of the mortuary assistant calling after her, ‘Miss Wilson, Miss Wilson!’

  Back in Dolphin Square, Juliet laid out newspaper on the carpet of the living room and unpacked the bundle of Beatrice’s cheap clothes. Soot and coal dust came cascading off them in filthy showers. Filthiest of all was a headscarf. Was this the murder weapon? The police surely should have held it as evidence? It was silk, Hermès, expensive. The last time Juliet had seen it had been tied around Mrs Scaife’s wattle neck. Was it possible that Mrs Scaife and not one of her thugs had killed Beatrice? It seemed unlikely, but Mrs Scaife had the heft and ballast and Beatrice was a tiny slip of a thing. But then what of the Carlton Club coal hole? Did Mrs Scaife bemoan to Trude over the tea and scones about having an unwanted body on her hands and did Trude say, ‘Oh, I know what you can do with that!’

  The handbag itself was empty – no Red Book. No scrap of paper with ‘clue’ written in bold letters. No diamond earrings, of course.

  ‘Juliet?’ Perry said, appearing in the doorway. ‘My God, you’re filthy. Are these the poor girl’s things?’

  ‘Beatrice. Yes.’

  ‘Is that your handbag? I don’t suppose those earrings turned up?’

  ‘’Fraid not.’

  He shrugged indifferently and said, ‘Garrard’s have them insured. So – we’re using our powers to bypass the usual police procedures. She’s been taken to an undertaker’s in Ladbroke Grove, she’ll be buried in Kensal Green on Friday.’

  ‘She’s an orphan,’ Juliet said. ‘I don’t suppose anyone will care too much.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I really am. But, you know, the greater good and so on.’

  ‘A thought has struck me,’ Perry said. He reached for her hand across the starchy white tablecloth in Simpson’s. He had taken her to dinner to ‘cheer her up’ after the mortuary. He seemed unmoved by Beatrice’s death, as if she were just one more casualty of war. A girl. A nobody. A mouse.

  ‘And, of course, we are celebrating our engagement,’ Perry said. He had bought her a ring – a modest sapphire that had already left a circle of black around her finger. He kept reaching for the hand with the ring and holding it aloft as if he wanted everyone to see that she was his fiancée. Better than being a bit of fluff, she supposed. But, then again, perhaps not.

  The great silver carving trolley approached menacingly. It was arched open by a waiter to reveal a huge joint of beef so raw and bloody that the poor beast’s heart might well have still been beating. So much for rationing. Slices were carved and laid on their plates.

  ‘A thought struck you,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Yes, thank you. I was thinking that if this was a case of mistaken identity, then whoever killed this girl—’

  ‘Beatrice,’ Juliet said wearily.

  ‘Yes, might have thought that they were killing you. She was carrying your handbag, your identity papers. You must be extra careful for the next few days, until these people are safely behind bars.’

  It did seem strange, she thought, that for several days ‘Juliet Armstrong’ had ceased to exist officially. Perhaps she had gone AWOL in order to frolic with cherubs and goats and lambs. In her absence, had Iris been called in to understudy her? Had she made a good job of it? Had Perry noticed the imposter? Did he think that it was—

  ‘Eat up,’ Perry said cheerfully. ‘We won’t be seeing much more of this and you need to put some flesh on your bones.’

  Juliet’s usually strong stomach quailed and she quietly dropped most of the beef (flesh, she thought queasily) into the napkin on her knee.

  She stood up and said, ‘If you’ll excuse me.’ She carried her napkin through to the Ladies, and disposed of its meaty contents in a bin. She wondered what the poor attendant would think if she came across it.

  Think of it as an adventure, Perry had said right at the beginning of all this. And it had seemed like one. A bit of a lark, something from Buchan or Erskine Childers, she had thought. A Girl’s Own adventure. The Russian Tea Room, the stickering, the escape down the Virginia creeper. But it wasn’t an adventure, was it? Someone had died. Beatrice had died. A sparrow. A mouse. An insignificance to everyone except Juliet.

  The Die is Cast

  PERRY SEEMED IN good spirits again. Juliet was relieved to see that the cloud that had been threatening him had passed away. It was becoming harder to keep up with his moods.

  ‘We have this American chap in our sights,’ he told her. ‘He’s called Chester Vanderkamp.’ He said the name with distaste, he had an aversion to Americans. ‘He works at the American Embassy in the cypher department.’

  ‘Cypher?’ Juliet said. ‘Codes, secret cables and so on?’

  ‘Yes, he sees everything – all the correspondence going in and out of the Embassy. He’s fiercely against America joining the war. A tone set by their appeasing Ambassador, of course.’ Perry reserved a particular animosity towards Kennedy. ‘Admires the Germans. Has it in for the Jews, says they run industry, government, Hollywood, et cetera – the usual diatribe. This chap Vanderkamp codes and decodes some of the most sensitive telegrams and apparently he takes copies of them home with him – he has a flat in Reeves Mews, just round the corner from his Embassy.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ Juliet puzzled.

  ‘Mam’selle Bouchier has been “courting” him for us.’

  ‘Giselle?’

  ‘Our own Mata Hari. She excels at pillow talk. Unfortunately for us, a lot of his correspondence is between Churchill and Roosevelt – how Roosevelt can support us. If the isolationists and appeasers in America get hold of it they’ll have a field day. It’ll be the end of Roosevelt. And probably the end of our hopes of getting the Americans into the war. And there’s a great deal of other material which would be extremely injurious to our troops in Europe – military secrets and so on.’

  ‘Crikey.’

  ‘Crikey indeed, Miss Armstrong. The bad news is that this Vanderkamp is considering sharing this information not just with America, but with the Germans as well.’

  ‘And yet you seem egregiously cheerful,’ Juliet said. He smiled his lovely smile. Kiss me, she thought. Some hope.

  ‘Because Mr Vanderkamp wishes to meet Mrs Scaife. He has been told about her contacts abroad. He is entirely sympathetic to her politics. We can catch them both red-handed and stop those bloody telegrams getting out. And thus we shall kill two birds with one stone.’

  ‘What a horrid image,’ Juliet said.

  ‘They will need a go-between,’ Perry said.r />
  ‘Me?’

  ‘You. Exactly.’

  ‘And so,’ Mrs Scaife said, stirring sugar lumps thoughtfully into her tea, ‘this American … Chester Vanderkamp?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He has information he wants to share with us?’

  ‘Yes. Important information. He has copies – decrypts – of a large number of diplomatic telegrams between Roosevelt and Churchill.’ (‘’Undreds of them,’ according to Giselle, who also passed on the unnecessary information that ‘’E is boring in bed.’) ‘Apparently they contain a lot of correspondence about Roosevelt’s support for us.’

  ‘And he’s willing to share them with us?’

  ‘He’s willing to give them to us. To you, Mrs Scaife. He wants to make sure he places them in your hands personally.’

  ‘Well, we have someone who can get them in a diplomatic bag to Belgium, and then on to the German Embassy in Rome. And the Germans will broadcast them to the world, I expect. And if they don’t, then our good friend William Joyce will. The Germans understand propaganda. As do the American isolationists.’

  ‘Two birds with one stone, Mrs Scaife. Two birds with one stone.’

  ‘He can’t come here though – I’m being watched. And perhaps he is being watched too.’

  ‘I’m not being watched, Mrs Scaife,’ Juliet said. ‘Why not meet him at my flat. I can be your go-between. More tea? Shall I be mother?’

  The wheels were set in motion. The day after tomorrow, the meeting between Mrs Scaife and Chester Vanderkamp was to take place at an MI5 flat in Bloomsbury – a dingy place, a hymn to the horrors of brown varnish and grimy windows – that would masquerade as Juliet’s. The flat was wired with microphones and the exchange of the telegrams would be recorded. When the telegrams had changed hands, Juliet would give a signal and the police would arrest both Mrs Scaife and Chester Vanderkamp.

  Eleven o’clock the following morning was the time designated for the arrests. Juliet had stayed the night in Dolphin Square again. She had received the same dry goodnight kiss and had lain in the effigy position once again, while Perry slept what seemed an untroubled sleep next to her. She woke early and made tea and drank it looking out of the living-room window at the garden down below. The early-morning sky was pearlescent. The fountain was playing. The magnolia and lilacs were over but the summer annuals were flushing the beds with colour.