Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘There are so many of them.’

  ‘There are.’ He shrugged. She didn’t like the shrug.

  ‘And Nelly Varga, sir?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lily’s owner. The dog,’ she said, indicating Lily beneath her desk. He looked at the dog blankly for a second and then said, ‘Oh, that. No, nothing.’ It had been very important and now it wasn’t, but that was war, Juliet supposed.

  Alleyne glanced around the room – he was a study in how to be casual – and said, ‘Is there something missing? Didn’t there used to be a rug here?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It’s gone to be cleaned. I spilt ink on it.’ The men in siren suits had disposed of the rug for them, along with the bloodied candlewick bedspread.

  Beethoven had been subdued and was back in his accustomed place on the roll-top. Alleyne patted his flowing locks and said, ‘Is this taken from the life, do you suppose? Or death?’

  ‘I have no idea, sir.’

  ‘Well, I must be off.’ He paused at the door, an artifice he had that was particularly irritating. ‘I hear you were at a funeral this morning.’

  ‘Yes. Beatrice Dodds, Mrs Scaife’s maid. She was buried under a false name. Ivy Wilson. I pretended to be her sister.’

  ‘Mm,’ Alleyne said, not even bothering to feign interest in what she was saying.

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone’s been apprehended – for her murder, sir?’

  ‘No, and I doubt they ever will. It was a small part of something much larger. We are at war.’

  ‘Yes, sir. You said that.’

  ‘Well,’ Alleyne said. ‘Keep me informed.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Everything, Miss Armstrong. Everything.’

  ‘Miss?’

  ‘Cyril. Hello.’

  ‘Who was that I crossed on the stairs, miss?’

  ‘Oliver Alleyne. Perry’s boss.’

  ‘Mr Gibbons’s boss, miss? I think of him as the boss.’

  ‘I suspect there are many ranks above Mr Gibbons, Cyril. MI5 is like the hierarchy of angels. I doubt we would ever meet the ones at the top – cherubim and seraphim and so on.’

  ‘Yes, but does Mr Alleyne suspect something, miss? About … you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. We mustn’t worry.’

  She returned to the transcript with an even heavier heart than before.

  (contd.) Voices died away. Technical hitch, two minutes unaccounted for.

  G. (Several words inaudible) What was it – something about Jew hatred?

  D. The buses are full of them. I think she was in Golders Green, which is where they congregate (three or four words inaudible). En masse (? three words inaudible due to DIB). This woman I know told me that she’d been on a bus and there was this Jew on the platform talking to someone on the pavement and he was taking up all the room and this big girl got on, the hefty sort, and she pushed him off!

  (Laughter)

  G. Off the bus?

  (Biscuit interval)

  It was all a counterfeit, of course. Dolly’s words had actually been spoken by Betty. It was the minutes from the meeting that had taken place directly after the Grand Guignol of Dolly’s murder. Betty had simply been erased from this particular record and Dolly substituted in her place. Juliet had put Dib in for authenticity. (It’s in the details.) In this new afterlife, Juliet had also afforded him capital letters.

  Perhaps it could serve as an alibi. But how could we possibly have murdered Dolly Roberts when she was alive and well that evening, talking about Jews and invisible ink? She should destroy the recording so that only the written transcript remained, in case anyone listened and questioned why Dolly had suddenly taken on an Essex accent. But then the only person who ever listened to the recordings was Juliet. Still, it would do no harm to eradicate the evidence.

  Juliet suggested to Cyril that they ate lunch in the restaurant downstairs. They were both listless in the aftermath of so much drama. ‘And they have that mutton pie you like today,’ she said to him. ‘Although I don’t know how they can call it mutton. It’s not a meat that’s ever seen a sheep.’

  It was after two by the time they returned to the flat. Victor was due at five. ‘We really are carrying on as normal then?’ Cyril said.

  ‘What else can we do?’

  They had just got settled again – Juliet to the transcript, while Cyril had volunteered to scrutinize the flat for any remaining blood – when there was a knock on the door, a loud businesslike knock. Juliet opened it to be confronted by two Special Branch officers, the same ones who had come to see Perry a few days ago. Two uniformed constables stood behind them. One of the detectives had an official-looking piece of paper in his hand. Juliet recognized it as a warrant. The game was up. They knew about Dolly and they were here to arrest them. Juliet’s legs started to tremble, so much so that she feared they might give way.

  ‘We’re looking for Mr Gibbons,’ one of the detectives said.

  ‘Perry?’ Juliet croaked.

  ‘Peregrine Gibbons, yes.’

  They were here for Perry, not her and Cyril. ‘I don’t know where he is.’ She was so relieved she happily gave up Perry. ‘He could be anywhere – Whitehall, the Scrubs. He has a place in Petty France. I’ll give you the address.’

  They left, unsatisfied. Cyril said, ‘I thought I was going to be sick. I thought they’d come for us. Why do you think they wanted Mr Gibbons? They seemed serious.’

  ‘They had an arrest warrant.’

  ‘Bloody hell, miss. For Mr Gibbons? Why? Do you think he was caught up in the Right Club thing? Do you think he’s one of them?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know, Cyril.’

  There was more knocking at the door and Juliet thought that her nerves couldn’t take any more, but then she realized it was the familiar rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat-TAT of Godfrey.

  ‘I’m hovering,’ he said when Juliet opened the door. ‘Victor is due.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I was just checking that you and Cyril were all right.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Toby. We are.’ What other answer was there? Really?

  ‘Has something happened to Perry?’ Juliet asked Hartley.

  ‘Happened?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him for days. I thought it was something to do with Operation Dynamo, but Special Branch were looking for him. I think they had an arrest warrant. You’ve got friends in Special Branch, haven’t you?’

  ‘I’ve got friends everywhere,’ he said glumly. ‘You don’t know, do you? No, of course you don’t. You’re very naïve about some things. He was arrested for cottaging.’ Cottaging? What on earth was that? It sounded rather charming. Juliet could easily imagine Perry, with his liking for expeditions, visiting cottages, cataloguing and assessing their virtues – thatching, timber framing, the arch of roses around the door, the scarlet flowers on the runner beans in the gardens, the—

  ‘It’s nothing like that,’ Hartley said.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘“Importuning men for immoral purposes”, that’s the charge. Going into public lavatories and – you know … Do I have to spell it out?’

  He did.

  Hartley said, ‘He’s in disgrace with the powers-that-be, although, of course, half of them are inverts or deviants, one way or another. I, personally, don’t give a fig about who does what to whom. And everyone knew.’

  ‘Everyone but me.’

  ‘Did you know?’ she asked Clarissa.

  ‘Oh, sweetie, everyone knows Perry Gibbons is a fairy. I thought you understood. Half the men I know are. They can be such good fun – well, perhaps not Perry, but you know. And it’s just that Perry – in his position it makes him vulnerable. Blackmail and so on. The trick is not to get caught, of course. And he did.’

  He came to Dolphin Square to say goodbye. ‘I shall be leaving you, I’m afraid, Miss Armstrong,’ he said. She was on her own in the flat, but neither of them spoke about his ‘disgrace’. Juliet was in no mood to forgive him – he ha
d used her as his disguise, the accessory on his arm. She was still in shock from Dolly’s death and she supposed it made her unsympathetic to him, although really it should have made her more sympathetic. It wasn’t as if she herself was innocent of harm.

  He wasn’t going to jail, or to trial – the charges against him were discreetly dropped. He knew a lot of people and they all had secrets and he knew them. He was going to the Ministry of Information. ‘Banished,’ he said, ‘to the outer circle of hell.’

  Nominally, Oliver Alleyne became Godfrey’s case officer, but they rarely saw him and they continued to work without any real oversight. Alleyne had lost interest in the fifth column, and in Godfrey’s doings, too. He had bigger fish to fry.

  Two weeks after Dunkirk, Alleyne sent a messenger boy with a note. Nelly Varga had managed to board one of the ships taking part in Operation Ariel that was evacuating the troops and a number of civilians left behind further south. Nelly had died along with thousands of others when the Lancastria was attacked off Saint-Nazaire. ‘So the damned dog is yours,’ he wrote, ‘unless you want me to get rid of it.’

  They carried on. The informants came to Dolphin Square. Godfrey talked to them. Cyril recorded them. Juliet transcribed their conversations. She wondered if anyone read the transcriptions any more. Godfrey told those informants who knew her that Dolly had moved to Ireland, but she lingered on, ghost-like, in the transcripts, because somehow or other Juliet couldn’t let her go and continued to invent words for her, inaudible and otherwise. Dib continued to bark in his spectral existence. Godfrey, too, kept Dolly alive, mentioning her in his reports. Cyril pencilled her in to the weekly timetable. She went to Coventry after the bombing and reported morale was ‘very low’. She recruited several ‘people’ and drew many maps which were of little use. A façade. Fiction and fact became one. There was really very little difference between Dolly being alive and Dolly being dead. Except for Dolly, of course.

  The horror was not over, it was all yet to come. Time passes quickly during a war. On the heels of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain took place above the summer fields of Kent and within weeks the Blitz had begun.

  The Russian Tea Room, Mrs Ambrose, Mrs Scaife, even Beatrice and Dolly, all fast faded into memory, overcome by greater events. Survival trumped memory. There was a greater slaughter than Dolly’s to deal with.

  Iris, too, was largely forgotten, although Juliet spared a thought for her alter ego’s fiancé, Ian, when the battlecruiser HMS Hood was attacked in the May of ’41. Nearly fifteen hundred men died when the ship sank. Only three survived; Ian wasn’t one of them. Nonetheless, Juliet felt sure he had been heroic.

  MI5 was bombed out of the Scrubs and most of the girls in clerical moved to Blenheim Palace, but Operation Godfrey remained in Dolphin Square. They all three suspected they had been overlooked, forgotten about, even. In Dolphin Square they had their own shelters and ARP and first-aid post. There was an admirable self-sufficiency about the place. It was bombed many times. Juliet had been on fire-watching duties during the first raid on Pimlico in the September of 1940, which was lucky as one of the shelters took a direct hit and many people were buried. It was the closest she ever came to a bomb. It was a terrifying thing.

  Clarissa died in the Café de Paris bomb. Miss Dicker came to Dolphin Square to tell Juliet personally. ‘I’m so sorry – she was a friend of yours, wasn’t she, Miss Armstrong? Will you identify her for us?’ And so Juliet returned to the Westminster Public Mortuary where she had identified Beatrice’s body. It had been so quiet then and now it was bloodily over-run.

  ‘You’re lucky, she’s in one piece,’ an assistant carelessly said as he pulled back the sheet. ‘There’ve been limbs and heads everywhere in here.’

  When no one was looking, Juliet removed the pearls from Clarissa’s perfect swan neck, and when she got home she washed the blood off them and placed them round her own neck. They sat quite high – an executioner could have used them as a guideline for slicing her head off. She felt no remorse. She was sure it was a gift that would have been given gladly.

  Cyril and his redoubtable Gran survived the awful days of the Blitz in the East End but were killed in March ’45 – cruelly near the end of the war – by the V2 rocket attack on Smithfield’s. His Gran had asked him to go with her, she’d heard they had a fresh supply of rabbits. The Dolphin Square operation had been wound up by then, of course, in November 1944. Godfrey was moved to Paris to interview captured German officers. Someone said he was at Nuremberg; after that he seemed to disappear. Juliet herself was reassigned. Miles Merton claimed her for his secretary and she worked for him for the rest of the war, and then, like so many others, she was summarily dismissed from the Service. She found refuge in Manchester and the BBC.

  Giselle was never heard from again. Once, years later, Juliet thought she saw her walking on the Via Veneto. She was very smartly dressed, in the company of two children, but Juliet didn’t follow her because it seemed so unlikely, and anyway she didn’t want to be disappointed by the truth.

  Lily ran away during the Blitz, terrified by the noise. Juliet had been in Hyde Park with her when the sirens had sounded, unexpectedly early. They had been swiftly followed by the horrid noise of the ack-ack guns, something that always terrified the poor dog. She had been off the lead and before Juliet could stop her she had bolted and disappeared.

  Cyril and Juliet spent a good deal of time imagining the life she had run away to – a big house in Sussex, lots of meaty butcher’s bones, children to play games with. They refused to believe her little body was crushed by rubble somewhere or that she was wandering the streets, lost and frightened. After Cyril died, Juliet had to continue the game of make-believe on her own, only now Lily and Cyril were reunited, playing throw and fetch in a perfect green field before walking home, tired but happy, to a huge supper cooked by Gran. Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Miss Armstrong. But why would you not when the reality was so awful?

  And that was that. Juliet’s war.

  The tall detective had turned up at her door one evening a week or two after she had encountered him in Kensal Green Cemetery. She hadn’t given him her address, but she supposed it was in the nature of his job to know things.

  ‘Miss Armstrong?’ he said. ‘I thought you might like to have a drink.’

  She presumed he meant for them to go out to a pub, but he produced a large bottle of beer and said, ‘We’d have it here, I thought.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘So shall I come in?’ the tall detective prompted. (‘I’m not that tall, by the way,’ he said. ‘Six foot one, actually.’) He had a name, too – Harry, a good patriotic name. ‘Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George,’ she said, and he laughed and said, ‘Once more into the breach, Miss Armstrong?’ and she thought, Thank goodness he has some Shakespeare.

  Then the tall detective – or Harry, as she supposed she must learn to call him – pulled her into his strong detective arms and in a surprisingly short time he was stripping off his clothes, in the eager fashion of a swimmer about to plunge into the sea, before going about the deed as if it were a sport. He demystified the sex act, giving her a thoroughly English translation of the éducation sexuelle. It turned out that it was indeed a pursuit like hockey or the piano, and that if you practised enough you could become surprisingly proficient.

  Of course, it only lasted a few weeks. He volunteered for the Army, and although she received a couple of letters from him the feelings between them petered out. After the fall of France, the Free French had moved in to Dolphin Square and made it their HQ, and by the time she received her final missive from the tall detective, Juliet was having an affair with one of the French officers billeted on their doorstep.

  ‘Ooh la la, miss,’ Cyril said.

  1950

  Regnum Defende

  JULIET HAD SPENT a stultifying morning reading teachers’ reports on Tracing History Backwards. (How else could you, Juliet wondered, unless you were a
Cassandra?) It was another of Joan Timpson’s series that had fallen into her lap. She was relieved when Fräulein Rosenfeld, her Langenscheidt clasped to her chest like a breastplate, scuttled into Juliet’s office and said that she was ‘looking for Bernard’.

  ‘Bernard?’ Juliet puzzled politely.

  ‘Mr Prendergast.’

  Juliet never thought of Prendergast having a first name. ‘No, I haven’t seen him at all today,’ she said. ‘Can I help, or did you want him for something particular?’

  ‘Oh, nothing in particular,’ Fräulein Rosenfeld said, blushing. Crikey, Juliet thought – Fräulein Rosenfeld and Prendergast. Who’d have thought it?

  Juliet walked to the National Gallery and ate her lunchtime sandwich sitting on the steps, while half-heartedly attempting the crossword in The Times. The sandwich contained a depressing fish-paste filling that would probably have horrified Elizabeth David – quite rightly, too. The Gallery’s steps provided a good vantage point for keeping a weather-eye out for mad Hungarians.

  Still, the fog had lifted overnight and now Juliet could see the beginning of buds on the trees, and, even above the noise of London traffic, she could hear that the birds were singing their tiny hearts out, getting ready for spring. They are all feathers, she thought.

  She checked her watch and then folded up her newspaper, fed her crusts to the Trafalgar Square pigeons and went inside the building.

  Proceeding through the hushed galleries, she remained unmoved by the walls of religious suffering, the bleeding wounds and the eyes raised in beseeching agony. Implacable eighteenth-century England with its horses and dogs and fashionable costumes passed her by too, as did all the pretty French aristocrats blithely unaware of the Terror coming their way. Juliet walked determinedly past them all. She had a different goal.

  The Night Watch. There was a seat in front of the painting, allowing Juliet to meditate on what seemed to her to be an exercise in gloom – although perhaps the painting, like everything else after the war, simply needed cleaning.