Transcription
Page 25
Along with the rest of the Fascist sympathizers, Mrs Scaife had been released at the end of the hostilities and had returned home to Pelham Place with her husband, the Rear Admiral. He died in ’47 and there had been an ambivalent obituary in The Times; he had, after all, been a hero of the first Battle of Heligoland Bight and his subsequent unpalatable beliefs were – it was hoped – consigned to history.
The fog was thick now. The Boy had been right, it was a ‘real pea-souper’, trite description though it might be. Fellow pedestrians loomed out of the murk and then were swallowed up again by it. The fog provided the perfect cover for anyone who might be hounding her.
‘Can I help you?’ A sharp voice interrupted her thoughts. A tight, upper-class kind of accent.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Did you want something?’ A woman was standing on the doorstep of Mrs Scaife’s house, shaking a duster. She was wearing an overall and her greying hair was tied back with a scarf, but her patrician attitude and accent, not to mention her skin, browned and leathered by the sun, indicated that she was not a member of the cleaning class. ‘If you just want to stand and stare there’s no law against it, but I would rather you didn’t. We do get quite a few “vultures” who come to snoop.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Juliet said. ‘I’m not snooping, it’s just that I used to know Mrs Scaife. I wondered how she was doing.’
The woman’s expression softened and there was a little catch in her voice as she said, ‘You knew Mummy?’
Juliet noted the past tense.
‘Oh,’ the woman said, as if suddenly inspired. ‘Are you Nightingale?’
‘Well …’ Juliet said, baffled momentarily.
‘Mummy’s maid.’ (Of course, Nightingale – poor Beatrice Dodds’s pasty replacement. How could she forget?) ‘Mummy spoke very fondly of you, you know. You were one of the few people who visited her when she went … away.’
To jail, Juliet thought. Call a spade a spade. ‘She was very good to me,’ she said humbly, adding another role to her repertoire.
‘Come in for a minute, why don’t you? Out of this dreadful weather. I couldn’t imagine living in this country again. The house is a terrible mess, I’m afraid. I’m getting it ready to put on the market.’
‘Is Mrs Scaife …?’
‘Dead? No, not a bit of it. I’ve had to put her in a nursing home in Maidenhead. She’s a bit frail in the head though. Poor Mummy.’
In the hallway, after a slight hesitation, the woman thrust out her hand. ‘I’m Minerva Scaife, but everyone calls me Minnie.’ She didn’t, Juliet noted, ask if Nightingale was called anything else.
Juliet followed ‘Minnie’ up the stairs, to the lovely drawing room where most things – Mrs Scaife’s ‘better pieces’, Juliet supposed – were shrouded in dust sheets. The salmon damask sofas had already been removed. Most of the paintings had been taken down and stacked against the grand piano. Their pale geometric ghosts remained behind on the walls. The windows were naked, stripped of the hefty curtains that had been thrown into a dusty heap in a corner of the room. The curtain had come down on Mrs Scaife in more than one way, Juliet thought.
No sign of the Sèvres, Juliet was sorry to note. She had rather hoped to reunite her little cup with its saucer, but it seemed they would remain forlornly sundered for eternity.
‘I’m selling everything,’ Minnie Scaife said. ‘House and contents, all going to auction. I live abroad these days – Southern Rhodesia. Fresh start after the war. My fiancé died in Changi and Ivo’s dead, of course. My brother,’ she added, when Juliet looked blank. ‘He was the captain of a Lancaster. KIA over Berlin, the whole crew. But of course you knew that, didn’t you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Mummy never recovered.’
What a strange irony, Juliet thought. Mrs Scaife’s son fighting against the very people she had allied herself with. She remembered Mrs Ambrose saying he was ‘rather left-leaning’.
‘I say, could you give me a hand with the Constable?’ Minerva said. ‘I want to get it off the wall, but it’s a beast.’
Juliet sighed inwardly. Once a maid, always a maid, apparently. But in the role of Nightingale she said, ‘Of course, ma’am.’ The Constable was filthy and weighed a ton.
‘Worth a fortune,’ Minerva said. ‘I’ve decided to buy a farm out in Africa. Cattle.’
‘Cattle? Good idea,’ Juliet said. What would she buy if she had the kind of money that the Constable would bring, she wondered? Not cows, that was for sure. A car, perhaps. A boat or a plane. Something that would carry her away fast.
When they had finished heaving the Constable around the room (‘Shall we put it there? No, wait a minute, over there would be better. No, hang on, over here, out of the light’), Mrs Scaife’s daughter said, ‘Look, why don’t I give you a little memento of Mummy? She would like that. Is there anything in particular that you would like?’ Juliet wondered what would be said if she bagged the Constable, but Minnie Scaife was already offering, ‘A scarf, perhaps? She has some good silk ones.’
‘She did. That’s awfully kind of you.’
Minnie Scaife hurried away and came back a few minutes later with a headsquare. ‘It’s silk,’ she said. ‘Hermès, rather expensive, you know.’ It was the usual kind of gaudy jacquard, but at least it wasn’t birds, exotic or otherwise. Nor had it been wrapped around anyone’s neck to squeeze the life out of them. (Strangled, with a headscarf. Poor forgotten Beatrice.) Or at any rate, Juliet hoped that wasn’t the case. She unfolded the square, releasing Mrs Scaife’s scent – gardenias, Coty face powder and the medicinal odour that she now recognized as some kind of embrocation cream. The cocktail was so strong that Juliet’s memory was jerked back to that afternoon in Pelham Place when she had climbed down the Virginia creeper. The vine was still there – she could see its bare woody branches fringing one of the drawing-room windows. The view beyond was opaque with the fog. The vine would outlast Mrs Scaife.
And Juliet could still conjure up poor Beatrice Dodds’s face, frozen in fear as Mrs Scaife had entered the house. Fee-fi-fo-fum. Juliet stuffed the headscarf in her handbag and after a few deferential ‘thank-you’s and ‘I shouldn’t really, ma’am’s said, ‘I’d better be off, I have to go back to work. It’s not my evening off.’
‘Oh, who do you work for now?’ Minerva Scaife asked.
Yes, who did poor old Nightingale work for these days, Juliet wondered? Some grumbling old dowager in Eaton Square, no doubt. ‘I work in Lord Reith’s house,’ Juliet said. (The truth!)
‘Oh, I don’t think I know him. Mind you, I’m quite out of touch these days.’
Tick, Juliet thought as the magnificent front door closed with a decisive click behind her. Mrs Scaife would not be seeking recompense any time soon. She threw the scarf in the first dustbin that she came to.
A sickly yellow twilight had enveloped the streets while she had been inside. The fog had a greasy, gaseous feel now and it stifled sound so you couldn’t be entirely sure of anything. Juliet could feel it trying to creep into her lungs, into her brain. She picked her way cautiously, knowing there was still a bomb site somewhere around here, strewn with rubble and potholes to trip up the unsuspecting. She thought again of the architect who was rebuilding London. She wished he would get a move on.
Tap-tap-tap. The sinister sound had begun almost as soon as Juliet had left Pelham Place. Perhaps I’m trapped in some awful radio drama, she thought. Jack the Ripper or something histrionic by Poe. The Tell-Tale Heart, perhaps. Tap-tap-tap. She thought she really would go mad if she was followed all the way home by it, so she decided to stop and stand her ground. She turned and steadfastly faced the wall of fog and whatever wretched emanation that was about to make itself manifest.
Tap-tap-tap. A pair of dawdling schoolboys emerged from the miasma. One of them had a wooden ruler in one hand and was percussing the metal railings with it as he walked past them. The boys doffed their caps at Juliet and mumbled, ‘Evening, miss.’
A few yards further on, she grew aware of another sound approaching from behind her, not the tap-tap-tap that was infesting her brain, but a heavy, clomping kind of tread. And then, without the least warning, a kind of shuffling acceleration accompanied by a banshee shriek and then something hard whacked her on the back. The blow was heavy enough to send her flying and she lurched forward, landing awkwardly on all fours on the pavement like a clumsy cat.
It had been a brutal impact with the pavement, a thwack that had sent a jolt through every bone in her body, but Juliet scrambled quickly to her feet, braced to defend herself. Her handbag, with the Mauser inside, had been knocked out of her hand and lost somewhere in the fog. The only weapon available to her was a sock needle but her unseen assailants appeared to have fled.
After much searching she managed to find her handbag in the gutter. While doing so, she nearly tripped over a large black umbrella. It was furled and heavy and she wondered if that was what had been used to strike her. The ferrule was a sturdy metal one. Tap-tap-tap. It looked sharp enough to penetrate flesh. (We must finish her off, I’m afraid.) It looked very like the one that had been in the possession of the man from Moretti’s, but really – didn’t all umbrellas look alike?
Juliet assessed the damage as she hobbled on. Her knees ached – they were going to be horribly bruised tomorrow – and her palms were grazed and sore. Could it have been a mistake? Could someone have simply knocked into her because of the fog? She had been felled in the blackout once by a man who was running for a bus. And yet.
South Kensington Tube station beckoned through the fog, a halo of comforting light. Normally Juliet could have easily walked from Pelham Place to her flat, but the fogbound street seemed too dangerous.
And then, just as she neared the bottom of the steps leading down into the station—
Bam! Pounced on from behind. More monkey than tiger. Her aggressor must have leapt from three or four steps higher to land on her back. Juliet was knocked flat, but was quickly helped up by several horrified bystanders who thought the fall was an accident. The monkey – the woman in the parrot headscarf, no surprise there somehow – was already on her feet and shouting in a foreign language. Hungarian, if Juliet wasn’t mistaken. She recognized it from Moretti’s, where quite a few Hungarians took refuge. ‘Foreigner,’ Juliet heard one of the bystanders mutter.
The woman had the light of madness in her eyes and squared up to Juliet, circling around her as if they were in a boxing ring. ‘Lily,’ she hissed. ‘You killed my Lily.’
Nelly Varga. The mad Hungarian. Alive and well. She had not, after all, gone down on the Lancastria. Juliet experienced a twitch of paranoia. Were there other people who weren’t dead? (I think she’s definitely dead now, Mr Toby. What if she wasn’t? What if the graves really had opened in Kensal Green Cemetery?)
Surely Nelly Varga hadn’t been holding this grudge since the war?
Juliet experienced a sudden fury and yanked Nelly Varga by her coat lapels and shook her as you would a misbehaving doll. She was small, quite light, like straw. Her nose started to bleed and the blood was flung around when Juliet shook her.
The crowd gathered, unwilling to stop the fracas. A policeman arrived and tried to shoo people away. ‘Now, now, ladies,’ he said. ‘What’s all this? Fighting over a gentleman, are we?’ Oh, for heaven’s sake, Juliet thought.
‘She killed my Lily,’ the woman said to the policeman.
‘Someone killed someone?’ the policeman asked, more interested now.
‘A dog,’ Juliet said to the policeman. ‘Lily was a dog. And I didn’t kill her. And it was years ago, for goodness’ sake.’
‘MI5 promised they would take care of her if I spied for them,’ Nelly said to the policeman. ‘And they didn’t.’
‘MI5?’ the policeman said, raising a doubtful eyebrow. ‘Spying?’ He had preferred it when he thought it was murder that was on offer.
‘She is a spy!’ Nelly shouted, pointing a dramatic finger at Juliet. ‘You should arrest her.’
‘Are you, miss?’ the policeman asked mildly.
‘Of course I’m not. What a ridiculous idea. I work at the BBC.’
Juliet glimpsed the man from Moretti’s with the pebble eyes slide out of the crowd and advance towards them. He took Nelly by the arm and said something to her that seemed conciliatory, but she shook him off angrily. ‘My wife,’ the man said, rather sheepishly, to the policeman. The policeman sighed at the idea of wives, or Hungarians, or both. The crowd had lost interest by now and had melted away.
‘Come along, now,’ the policeman said, as if they were children in the playground. ‘This won’t do.’
‘She has to pay for killing my dog,’ Nelly persisted. ‘She has to pay for what she did.’
‘But how do you want me to pay?’ Juliet asked crossly. ‘This is so unreasonable.’
‘Perhaps you could just give the lady a few coins,’ the policeman suggested, ‘and then she might go away.’ Juliet very much doubted that. She knew what Nelly wanted. She didn’t want blood money, or even a pound of flesh, she wanted Juliet to understand the pain of her loss. But I do, Juliet thought.
‘The whole thing is absurd,’ Juliet said to the policeman. ‘It was ten years ago, the dog would be dead of old age by now anyway.’ Oh, how harsh those words sounded. Juliet had loved that little dog with all her heart.
She was relieved when the man with the pebble eyes persuaded a reluctant Nelly to be led away. Over her shoulder she shouted something at Juliet in Hungarian that sounded very much like a curse.
All her paranoia, Juliet thought, all her fears of being watched and followed, her suspicions about the ‘neighbours’, not to mention her confusion over Godfrey’s reappearance in her life, were all baseless. How ridiculous it seemed that of all the people who might want to harm her, it would turn out to be a deranged and vengeful Nelly Varga – a woman Juliet had never even met. And for the one crime that I am entirely innocent of, she thought. No one is entirely innocent, Alleyne had said to her.
I should have been more careful, she thought. It would be the epitaph on her grave, wouldn’t it? Not Beloved Sister, not At Home with God, but She Should Have Been More Careful.
The defences to her flat were still in place. The strand of the Eckersleys’ Aran wool (handy, it turned out) that she had put between the lintel and the front door was still there, but the flat itself remained in darkness when Juliet switched on the light.
Had she forgotten to fill the meter? Surely she had fed several shillings into its greedy mouth only yesterday? She waited a few seconds for her night vision to fire up – a trick from the blackout – and then picked her way across the room to the meter. One meagre shilling was eventually mined from the bottom of her bag. ‘Let there be light,’ Juliet murmured, but although there was a promising clicking and whirring noise from the meter, light there was none.
A small shift in the air. The faintest rustle – a bird settling in a nest. Breathing. A sigh. She could just make out the silhouette of someone sitting at the table.
Stealthily, Juliet retrieved the Mauser from her bag and advanced cautiously towards the figure. It seemed impossible. And yet.
The person who had the greatest claim on her soul. A sudden terror made her heart spasm.
‘Dolly?’ she whispered. ‘Is that you?’
1940
Here’s Dolly
-11-
RECORD 3
20.15
VICTOR produces a map. Tremendous noise of map being unfolded.
V. About five miles east of Basingstoke. Nothing comes through there. War Office order.
G. (several words inaudible) I see.
V. Bloody nuisance.
G. I must thank you for the map and the diagrams of Farnborough.
V.I put it in that note. I think notes are helpful.
G. Yes, yes.
V. And these are a
nti-aircraft placements (evidently pointing)
G. Very helpful. Thank you.
V. (more crackling) You see … (rustling) over there.
G. Yes. What’s this that’s marked?
V. The power station. And these are factories in between.
G. I would like it if you could have it more detailed.
V. Their maps will be out of date now (inaudible) before the War. Factories or hangars. They’re assembling them –
G. In the factories?
V. Yes, and then parking them on this old aerodrome over here.
G. Fighter planes?
V. And some bombers. Wellingtons, I think. Ferry pilots come by to pick them up.
‘Does this seem boring, miss? After all your excitement with Mrs S?’
‘To be honest, I prefer this, Cyril.’
‘But you did a good thing, putting them away, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. Definitely.’
‘Where’ve you got up to?’
‘Oh, hardly anywhere. Victor and his endless maps. I’ve got masses to catch up on.’
It was two days since Mrs Scaife and Chester Vanderkamp had been arrested in the Bloomsbury flat. Juliet had been called to give evidence in camera, as had Giselle and Mrs Ambrose, but she had barely seen Perry in all this time. ‘Mrs Peregrine Gibbons’ she had entertained herself by writing in her notebook while she waited outside the courtroom. It didn’t matter how many times she practised the signature, it didn’t feel as though it could ever belong to her. She was Juliet Armstrong, that was all there was to it. The modest sapphire remained in a drawer in the roll-top desk where it had been placed while Iris made her final appearance in the Bloomsbury flat. Perry seemed to have forgotten all about it and Juliet was trying hard to do the same.