Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘But what about …’ Cyril said, gesturing helplessly towards Dolly on the floor.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can – I’ll curtail the meeting, tell them that I have to radio Germany. Then we’ll deal with this … problem. But for now we must to our stations. Cyril – you need to record this meeting. And Miss Armstrong, perhaps you could start cleaning up a little?’ Why was it that the females of the species were always the ones left to tidy up, she wondered? I expect Jesus came out of the tomb, Juliet thought, and said to his mother, ‘Can you tidy it up a bit back there?’

  Godfrey was true to his word. Trude and Betty were dismissed within the hour and he returned to them. Juliet had never thought about it before – hadn’t needed to – but Godfrey was a natural leader, a general, and they were his troops, who implicitly believed in his command.

  Under his instruction, they removed the candlewick cover from Perry’s bed. ‘Now lay her on it.’ Juliet hesitated, but Cyril – a loyal foot soldier – said, ‘Come on, miss. We can do this. You take the head and I’ll take the feet. Mr Toby shouldn’t lift her, not with his shoulder.’ But Godfrey insisted, although he winced with pain when they heaved Dolly’s body on to the bedspread. The small towel-shrouded bundle was tucked in beside her and the two were wrapped up together like a parcel.

  When she looked back to this day, Juliet generally omitted Dib from the narrative that she related to herself. It had seemed the most unpalatable element in the whole story.

  After the business with the sword-stick, Dolly’s dog had gone into a frenzy of snarling and snapping, quite ready to tear them all into pieces. He was a small dog, no bigger than Lily, but he seemed quite dangerous.

  ‘Can you distract him, Cyril?’ Godfrey said, and Cyril threw one of his grandmother’s knitted teddy bears towards Dib. It was ripped to pieces in seconds, but it gave Godfrey the opportunity to sneak up behind the dog and catch him by the back of his collar. The dog yelped when Godfrey picked him up and held him at arm’s length, his small legs paddling uselessly in the air as he hung there, his eyes bulging with surprise. Godfrey carried him to the bathroom, where he paused at the door and said to them, ‘Don’t come in here.’

  There was a good deal of squealing and splashing behind the closed door and then Godfrey emerged with something wrapped in a towel. Later they found Lily cringing and cowering beneath Perry’s bed. It was several days before she entirely trusted them again.

  Heavy-duty string that they found in Perry’s roll-top was utilized to make the parcel neater. The result was a kind of candlewick mummy. They shifted the desks to free the rug that sat in the middle of the room and lifted Dolly and her faithful companion on to it. ‘Rather heavier than she looks, I’m afraid,’ Godfrey said. ‘Lift on my three – one-two-three!’

  ‘Double-wrapped,’ Cyril said as Dolly was rolled in the rug. Cleopatra, Juliet thought. Or a sausage roll. ‘No dignity in death, I’m afraid, Miss Armstrong,’ Godfrey murmured.

  They were all running with sweat by the time they had finished. Cyril had several smears of blood on his face, Juliet noticed. She took out her handkerchief and licked it and said, ‘Come here, Cyril,’ and wiped the blood away.

  ‘Now what, Mr Toby?’ Cyril said. ‘What are we going to do with her?’

  ‘Trude’s coal hole, perhaps?’ Godfrey suggested.

  ‘Wrong time of year,’ Juliet replied, thinking how quickly poor Beatrice had been discovered. Cyril nodded wisely. They were all three silent, contemplating the logistics of disposing of a corpse, but then Juliet said, ‘Why don’t we just give her a funeral and bury her in a cemetery?’

  Hartley’s department was phoned. They were used to requests for transport at all hours. ‘Mr Gibbons requires a car, please,’ Juliet said, ‘Pick-up is at Dolphin Square. I’ll tell the driver the destination when he arrives.’

  A car was duly provided. Juliet went down and waited at the Chichester Street entrance. It was well after midnight when she saw its visored headlights approaching, slits of light in what was a very dark, moonless night.

  When the driver got out, Juliet handed him a generous five pounds (provided by Godfrey), a sum large enough to stifle anyone’s curiosity, and said, ‘Mr Gibbons is on a highly secret mission, he’s going to drive himself.’ The driver was used to the eccentricities of MI5 and when she said, ‘Will you be able to get home all right?’ he pocketed the fiver and, laughing, said, ‘I expect so, miss.’

  They dragged the rug to the lift, too focused on the task in hand to be feeling very much of anything. There was an alarming moment as they were pulling the rug out of the lift on the ground floor when they encountered an elderly resident waiting to get in it. Juliet said a cheery, ‘Good evening, there, we’re just taking this rug to Cyril here’s sister as a wedding present.’ (If you’re going to tell a lie, and so on.) Cyril burst into a fit of rather manic laughing. The woman stepped in the lift, keen to escape them. She probably thought that the three mismatched people were drunk.

  ‘Sorry,’ Cyril apologized to Godfrey, ‘it’s just it’s all a bit much. And Miss Armstrong’s so good at lying, she caught me off-guard.’

  Godfrey patted him on the shoulder and said, ‘Not to worry, my boy.’

  The rug-bound Dolly was propped up in the front seat of the car. It was the only way – and they tried several – that she would fit. Cyril and Juliet sat in the back with Lily between them. She had sniffed nervously at the rug and then would have nothing more to do with it. A dog would know the smell of death, Juliet supposed.

  Godfrey knew how to drive, which was lucky, as neither Cyril nor Juliet did. He started the engine and said, ‘Right then.’

  Every time they went round a corner, Dolly listed slightly as if she might still be alive inside the rug. Again, as in Bloomsbury, Juliet had the feeling that she was taking part in a farce, although not one that was particularly funny – not funny at all, in fact. ‘Where are we going again?’ Cyril asked, holding the rug steady as they rounded the corner at a fast clip into Park Lane. Godfrey was a surprisingly adventurous driver.

  ‘Ladbroke Grove,’ Juliet said.

  Godfrey had made a phone call to someone. Juliet didn’t know who and wondered if it was the man with the astrakhan collar. Whoever it was, they had considerable clout, for two men in siren suits were waiting for them when they arrived at the undertaker’s parlour in Ladbroke Grove, and the undertaker himself let them in to his mortuary. The men in siren suits carried Dolly inside with all the usual admonitions of removal men – ‘Careful, old Sam’, ‘Watch that end, Roy’, and so on. None of them asked any questions or seemed the least surprised at the delivery and it made Juliet question what the men in the siren suits (and the undertaker too, come to that) did the rest of the time. Was this their job – the discreet disposal of murdered bodies?

  Juliet did not want to see poor Beatrice’s coffin being opened or Dolly’s body being placed inside, but she remained, nonetheless, mutely observant. There was something utterly grotesque about the whole enterprise, even though it had been her own idea. Dib was placed in last and Godfrey said, ‘One is reminded of Egyptian pharaohs going into the next life with their grave goods. Mummified cats, and so on.’

  They watched until the lid was placed on the coffin and the final nail was hammered. The funeral was to take place the following morning.

  ‘No one will know anything is untoward,’ Godfrey said. But we shall, Juliet thought.

  They drove Cyril home, all the way to Rotherhithe in the blackout, quite a feat on Godfrey’s part. It was after three in the morning by the time they deposited him outside his grandmother’s house. He took the comfort of Lily with him. Once they had seen him safely inside, Godfrey said, ‘Would you come back to my house in Finchley, Miss Armstrong? I think we should make sure that we are singing from the same hymn sheet, as it were.’

  ‘You mean get our stories straight?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The sky was light with a splendid dawn by the time they
parked outside Godfrey’s house in Finchley. A new day, but really it was still the old day for both of them.

  There was a big hydrangea bush by the gate, not yet in full bloom. ‘If it’s left to its own devices the flowers will be pink,’ Godfrey said – quite conversationally, as if they hadn’t just butchered a woman in cold blood. ‘The trick to making sure the blooms are blue is to add a few pennies to the soil. Grass clippings and coffee grounds help too,’ he added. ‘They like an acid soil.’

  ‘Oh,’ Juliet said. Was he really giving her gardening tips? But then this was what carrying on as normal meant, wasn’t it?

  There was a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head on the front door. The front door was oak. So much solid respectability!

  When Godfrey unlocked the door Juliet could smell Mansion House polish and Brasso. ‘Ah, the woman who does for us has been in,’ Godfrey said, stepping over the threshold and sniffing the air like a delicate dog. He hung Juliet’s coat in a cupboard in the hall. His wife – ‘Annabelle’ – was away, he said, visiting her mother. Annabelle! How intimate it seemed to know her name. Juliet imagined pearls, good shoes, trips up to London to ‘the shops’, followed by lunch in Bourne and Hollingsworth’s restaurant.

  ‘Come through to the drawing room,’ Godfrey said, and Juliet followed him obediently. ‘Do have a seat,’ he said, indicating an immense sofa – no salmon damask here but rather sensible cut moquette. The sofa was the size of a boat. I am adrift, she thought. In Finchley. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea, Miss Armstrong? Would that help? We’ve had rather a shock.’

  ‘Thank you, yes.’

  ‘Do you perhaps need to use the …’ a slight hesitation, ‘facilities, Miss Armstrong?’

  ‘No, no thank you, Mr Godfrey.’

  ‘You have a …’ he indicated her hands. There was still blood on them, turned rusty now. Her cuticles were encrusted with it. ‘First room on the left at the top of the stairs. I’m afraid we have no downstairs cloakroom.’

  In the chilly bathroom the towels were freshly laundered and folded and the hand soap was scented with freesia. Both things seemed to verify the existence of Annabelle. As did the pink satin quilted eiderdown on the bed and the reading lamps with flowered parchment shades that she glimpsed through an open bedroom door. When Juliet washed her hands with the freesia soap the water ran pink with Dolly’s blood.

  Coming downstairs, Juliet could hear Godfrey still moving around in the kitchen. He sounded surprisingly at home in Annabelle’s domain.

  There were no photographs on display in the drawing room and only a couple of innocuous watercolours on the wall. Several ashtrays, a large lighter, a wooden match-holder. A Murphy radio. The Times was spread out on a coffee table. Godfrey must have sat here the previous morning, reading about Dunkirk, smoking his harsh-smelling cigarettes. There was a crushed one in an ashtray next to the newspaper. The woman-who-did did not do very well, Juliet thought.

  Finally he returned, carrying a tray. He poured tea into their cups and handed her one. ‘Two sugars, that’s right, isn’t it, Miss Armstrong?’

  They drank their tea in silence.

  After a long time, just when Juliet feared she might nod off to sleep, Godfrey roused himself and said, ‘I think we should keep her around for a while – before we write her out of the story.’

  ‘Dolly? Yes,’ Juliet said. ‘Good idea.’

  She stayed for what little remained of the night in Finchley, on Godfrey Toby’s living-room sofa, having politely declined his offer of the spare room. It would have felt outlandish to have gone to bed in the room next to his, to imagine him on the other side of the wall in his pyjamas beneath the pink silk eiderdown. He, too, seemed relieved when she opted instead for the cut moquette.

  A couple of hours later, she woke to find Godfrey (fully dressed, thank goodness) standing next to the sofa with another cup and saucer in his hand, like a patient butler. ‘Tea, Miss Armstrong?’ he said, placing the cup and saucer carefully on the coffee table as if afraid of waking someone elsewhere in the house, although he had assured her last night that there was no one else at home.

  ‘Two sugars,’ he smiled, confident now of her saccharine habits. He returned to the kitchen, where she could hear him whistling something that sounded very much like ‘Thanks For The Memory’. Perhaps not the most appropriate of songs for the morning after a murder. He returned with a plate of toast and said cheerfully, ‘Real butter. Annabelle’s sister lives in the country. I’m afraid we finished the last of the marmalade several weeks ago.’

  Afterwards he walked her to the Tube station, from where she caught the Northern line to King’s Cross, then the Metropolitan line to Baker Street, and finally the Bakerloo line. She fell asleep on the third leg of the journey and would have stayed asleep if a man hadn’t woken her at Queen’s Park and said, ‘Excuse me, miss – I was worried you might miss your stop.’ He was avuncular, in big workman’s boots and with oily hands. ‘Coming off a night shift,’ he said, chatty from a long night’s boredom, it seemed. ‘On your way to work?’ he asked when they alighted together from the train at Kensal Green.

  ‘No, to a funeral,’ she said, although this didn’t seem to shake him off and she began to suspect him of having designs on her, but at the gates to the cemetery he doffed his hat respectfully and said, ‘Nice talking to you, miss,’ and carried placidly on his way.

  She had intended to be here anyway for Beatrice, to testify, albeit silently, to her life, and death, but now she could make sure that the little maid’s unholy companions could piggy-back into the afterlife without raising any suspicions.

  MI5 had paid for Beatrice’s funeral, although it was a skimpy kind of affair, not much better than a pauper’s, and the only people in attendance were Juliet and, somewhat to her horror, the tall detective. ‘Miss Armstrong,’ he said, tipping his hat. ‘You do get about for someone who’s dead. I’m surprised to see you here.’

  ‘I felt an odd connection – you know, the way that we were confused with each other.’

  ‘I see our girl has a name now.’

  ‘Yes, Ivy. Ivy Wilson.’

  ‘Identified by her sister, I believe. And yet her sister’s not here. That’s odd, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps.’

  ‘Difficult to be in two places at once, I suppose,’ he said. What did he mean by that? Juliet gave him a sharp look, but he was gazing guilelessly at the sky.

  Despite the buttered toast in Finchley (which had been delicious), Juliet felt light-headed from lack of sleep by the time she was standing at the edge of Beatrice’s overcrowded grave. Beatrice and Dolly and Dib, a cargo large enough to sink the ferryman’s boat, she thought.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the tall detective asked her as they walked away after the briefest of committals. ‘You look rather pale, Miss Armstrong. I was afraid you were going to fall in the grave for a moment there.’

  ‘Oh, no, really, I’m quite well,’ she assured him. She grasped at the nearest excuse she could think of. ‘My fiancé, Ian, you know, he’s in the Navy. On HMS Hood. I worry about him.’ Wrong! She had got herself mixed up with Iris. It had been bound to happen eventually, she supposed. Did it matter? Did anything matter any more?

  It was a beautiful morning though. As they walked away from the graveside, a blossom tree in the cemetery shook its petals free all over Juliet’s hair and the tall policeman brushed them off gently and said, ‘Like a bride,’ and Juliet blushed, despite the unfortunate circumstances. But then that was life, wasn’t it? – flowers amongst the graves. ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’ And so on.

  She was back in Dolphin Square just before lunchtime. The flat was empty. It was three days now since anyone had seen Perry, and Juliet wondered if she should be worried. He was probably tied up one way or another with the evacuation. She wondered what she was going to tell him about the missing shirt and bedspread. The shirt would be easy – lost by the laundry – but the candlewick’s absence might be ha
rder to explain away. Wouldn’t it be better, she had said to Godfrey last night in Finchley, if they just came clean? Dolly had attacked them, they had rallied to each other in self-defence and unfortunately she had died. ‘We still have the rule of law, don’t we? Isn’t that the difference between us and the enemy?’ An inquest in camera and they would all be vindicated. She supposed it wasn’t as straightforward as that, nothing ever was. Godfrey laughed unexpectedly and said, ‘But imagine the paperwork, Miss Armstrong.’

  It was the operation he was protecting, of course. She wondered if in later years, looking back, it would appear to be so crucial that it had necessitated a human sacrifice.

  Alleyne remained, seemingly intent on conversation. ‘And our friend Godfrey?’ he said. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Nothing to report there, sir.’

  ‘And yet a messenger boy handed me a note saying you had something you wanted to “discuss” with me.’

  Oh, good Lord, Juliet thought. She had forgotten about the note, forgotten that she had planned to expose Godfrey’s trysts with the man in the astrakhan collar. She wasn’t about to do so now. They were too complicit in horror – mired in gore – to ever betray each other for lesser sins.

  ‘Tea, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Tea. The quality of the tea we’re being given is shocking.’

  ‘I might remind you that there’s a war on, Miss Armstrong.’

  ‘So everyone keeps telling me, but an operation runs on tea.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. Quid pro quo and so on. Try not to waste my time again, Miss Armstrong.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘By the way, you might like to know that the Cabinet crisis is over. Halifax has been finessed by Churchill. We shall not be making peace. Instead we are to continue our battle for freedom.’ He made it sound quixotic, amusing even.

  ‘Yes, sir, I know. What about our troops?’

  ‘We’re still making a tremendous effort to get them out of France.’