In This Grave Hour

by Jacqueline Winspear

  Thomas nodded. “Forgive me, Maisie—I am very tired. There has been much to do in my world, as I am sure you might understand. I begin to speak about the war, and a wash of fatigue seems to drain me.”

  Maisie leaned forward. Such candor was not something she had experienced in her dealings with Thomas. She remembered training with her last year, before her assignment in Munich. Thomas had drilled her until she thought she might scream “No more!”—but the woman had done what she set out to do, which was to make sure Maisie had the tools to ensure her own safety, and that of the man she had been tasked with bringing out of Munich under the noses of the Nazis. Now it was as if this new war was already winning the battle of bringing Thomas down.

  “I want you to do a job of work for me, Maisie. This is what has happened. About a month ago, on August the fourth, a man named Frederick Addens was found dead close to St. Pancras Station. He had been shot—point-blank—through the back of the head. The position in which he was found, together with the postmortem, suggested that he was made to kneel down, hands behind his head, and then he was executed.”

  “So he could well have seen his killer,” said Maisie. “It has all the hallmarks of a professional assassination.”

  “I suspect that is the case.”

  “Tell me about Addens,” said Maisie.

  “Thirty-eight years of age. He worked for the railway as an engineer at the station. He was married to an English woman, and they have two children, both adults now and working. The daughter is a junior librarian—she’s eighteen years of age, and the son—who’s almost twenty—has now, I am informed, joined the army.”

  Maisie nodded. “What does Scotland Yard say?”

  “Nothing. War might have been declared today, but it broke out a long time ago, as you know. Scotland Yard has its hands full—a country on the move provides a lot of work for the police.”

  “But they are investigating, of course.”

  “Yes, Maisie, they are investigating. But the detective in charge says that it is not a priority at the moment—it’s what they call an open-and-shut case because they maintain it was a theft and there were no witnesses, therefore not much to go on—apparently there was no money on Addens when his body was discovered, and no wallet was found among his belongings at the station. And according to Scotland Yard, there are not enough men on the ground to delve into the investigation.”

  “What’s his name?” asked Maisie.

  “Caldwell. Do you know him?”

  “Yes. I know him—though we’ve not crossed paths in a few years.” Maisie paused. “What about Huntley’s department, or the Foreign Office? Surely they must be interested in the outcome of this one.”

  “Chinese walls and too much to do—you know how it is, Maisie.” Francesca Thomas came to her feet and stood by the door, her gaze directed towards the garden. “I want you to investigate for me. I trust you. I trust you to keep a calm head, to be diligent in your work, and to come up with some answers.”

  “I don’t do this kind of work for nothing, Dr. Thomas.” Maisie stepped towards the bureau in the corner, took a sheet of paper and pen, and wrote down a series of numbers. She handed it to Thomas. “These are my fees, plus I will give you a chit to account for costs incurred along the way.”

  Thomas looked at the paper, folded it, and put it in her pocket. “I will issue you with an advance via messenger tomorrow, and I will also send you addresses, employment details, and any other information I have to hand on Addens. I take it you will start immediately.”

  “Of course.” Maisie allowed a few seconds to pass. “Dr. Thomas—Francesca—” She spoke the woman’s name in a quiet voice, so that when Thomas turned it was to look straight into Maisie’s eyes. “Francesca, are you telling me everything?”

  “A Belgian refugee—one of my countrymen—who made England his home and lived in peace here, is dead. The manner of his death begs many questions, and I want to know who killed him. That is the nub of the matter.”

  Maisie nodded. “I will expect your messenger tomorrow—at my office in Fitzroy Square.”

  Francesca Thomas picked up the clutch bag she had set upon the sofa. “Thank you, Maisie. I knew I could depend upon you.” She left by the French doors; seconds later Maisie heard the gate at the side of the house clang shut.

  She stepped into the walled garden. Beyond the brick terrace and lawn, she’d planted a perennial border to provide color from spring to autumn. The hydrangeas admired by Thomas had grown tall and covered the walls, their color reflected in an abundance of Michaelmas daisies. She strolled the perimeter of the garden, deadheading the last of the season’s roses as she went. This was ground she knew well—investigating a death in suspicious circumstances was home turf. But two elements to her brief bothered her. The first was the matter of a designed execution. Such acts were often planned when the perpetrator considered the victim to have committed an unpunished crime—and if not a crime, then an error for which forgiveness could not be bestowed. Or perhaps the man with the bullet in his skull had seen something he was not meant to see. And in those cases, the person who carried out the assassination might not be the person harboring a grudge.

  The second element that gave Maisie pause was that she believed Thomas might not have been as forthcoming as she could have been. In fact, she might have lied when she had told Maisie there was nothing more to tell. I want to know who killed him, that is the nub of the matter. The words seemed to echo in Maisie’s mind. Indeed, she had a distinct feeling that there was much more to the nub of the matter—after all, during the telephone call which Maisie had taken at Priscilla’s house, Thomas had suggested that murder might happen again. And again.

  “Well, the balloon has well and truly gone up now, hasn’t it?” Billy Beale lifted the strap attached to a box containing his gas mask over his head and placed it on the table. “Morning, miss. Sorry I’m a bit late—” He looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. “More than a bit, this morning. The trains were all over the place. Army on the move, that’s what it is—seen it all before, more’s the pity.”

  Maisie had been standing by the floor-to-ceiling window, holding a cup of hot tea in her hand, when her assistant entered. She walked across to his desk. “Not to worry—I’ve not been here long myself, only enough time to make a cup of tea. Sandra’s late too.”

  At that moment the door opened and Sandra Pickering came into the office, placing her handbag, a narrow document case, and her gas mask on her desk.

  “I’m so sorry—you would never believe—”

  “We’ve been in ages, Sandra—what kept you?” asked Billy, a glint in his eye.

  “Take no notice of him,” said Maisie. “We’ve all had the same trouble this morning. There’s the army mobilization, and there are still a good number of children being evacuated.”

  Sandra shook her head. “I’ve had enough of this already—I forget my gas mask half the time, and when you walk down the road there’s those big barrage balloons overhead, and you feel as if it’s the end of the world. Oh, and since the announcement yesterday, they’re adding to the sandbags around the Tube stations too. And they’ve been sandbagged for months now, all ready for this.”

  “Those balloons certainly block out the sun,” said Maisie. She looked at Sandra and Billy in turn. “Get yourselves some tea”—she nodded towards a tray set upon a low table close to the windows overlooking Fitzroy Square—“and then join me in my office. I want to go over work in hand, and we’ve a new case. An important one too.”

  “A murder, by any chance?” asked Billy.

  Maisie nodded as she stepped across the threshold into her office. “Oh yes, Billy—it’s a murder.”

  “Good—something to take my mind off all this war business.”

  When Maisie Dobbs, psychologist and investigator, moved into the first-floor office in Fitzroy Square almost ten years earlier, it had comprised one large room, entered via a door situated to the right at the top of the broad stairc
ase that swept up from the main entrance. The Georgian mansion had originally been home to a family of some wealth, but the conversion of the property to offices on the ground and first floors, with flats above, had taken place some decades earlier, as industry boomed during the reign of Queen Victoria. Billy’s desk had been situated to the right upon entering the office, with Maisie’s alongside the ornate fireplace—though a temperamental gas fire had long since replaced coals. When Sandra began her employment with Maisie to assist with administration of the business, another desk had been squeezed in close to the door.

  A series of events and a crisis of confidence had led Maisie to relinquish her business in 1933. Billy and Sandra had found alternative employment, and Maisie traveled overseas. When she returned to England in late 1937, it was as a widow, a woman who had lost the child she was carrying on the very day her husband was killed in a flying accident in Canada. That he was testing a new fighter aircraft was known by only a few—as far as the press was concerned, Viscount James Compton was an aviator, a wealthy but boyish man indulging his love of flight, looking down at the earth.

  Drawn back to her work as an investigator, Maisie discovered the former office in Fitzroy Square was once more available for lease—but it was not quite the same office. In the intervening years a considerable amount of renovation had been carried out on the instructions of the interim tenant. There were now two rooms—a concertina door dividing the front room from an adjacent room had been installed, so when a visitor entered, Billy’s desk was still to the right of the door, and Sandra’s situated where Maisie’s desk had once been positioned. But to the left, a second spacious room—the office of a solicitor during her first tenancy—was now Maisie’s domain, with the doors drawn back unless privacy was required. Today the doors were wide open. Maisie’s desk was placed to the left of the room, with a long trestle-type table alongside the back window, overlooking a yard where someone—a ground-floor tenant, perhaps—had cleared away a mound of rubbish and was endeavoring to grow all manner of plants in a variety of terra-cotta pots.

  As they stepped into Maisie’s office, Billy took a roll of plain wallpaper from a basket in the corner—a housepainter friend of Billy’s passed on end-of-roll remnants—and pinned a length of about four feet onto the table. Maisie pulled a jar of colored crayons towards her and placed a folder on the table in front of her chair, opening it to a page of notes.

  “‘Frederick Addens, age thirty-eight, a refugee from Belgium during the war.’” She sighed. “The last war, I suppose I should say.” She paused. “He was found dead in a position indicating some sort of ritual assassination—though according to information given to our client by the police, they suspect the murder is a random killing motivated by theft.” She pushed a sheet of paper towards Billy, who leaned in so that Sandra could read at the same time. “As you can see, he was a railway engineer, working at St. Pancras Station.”

  “One of them blokes you see diving onto the lines when the train comes in,” said Billy, his finger on a line of typing. “Blimey, I’ve always thought that was a rotten job, down there where the rats run, all that oil, and that loco must be blimmin’ hot when it’s just reached the buffers. I tell you, I always wondered what would happen if the train started rolling and they hadn’t given the engineer time to get back onto the platform.” He shook his head.

  “I think the guard checks, Billy,” said Sandra.

  “What about our friends at Scotland Yard, miss?” asked Billy. “What have they been doing about the case?”

  “They’ve pretty full hands at the moment—and though our client does not say as much, I suspect she believes there is an attitude of ‘victim not born here, so investigation can wait’ on the part of the police. That might not have been my conclusion, but the fact remains that any investigation is not moving at a pace considered satisfactory by the client, so she has turned to me.”

  “She?” asked Sandra.

  Maisie slid another sheet of paper towards Billy and Sandra. “I’ve worked with Dr. Francesca Thomas in the past—she is a formidable woman, and trustworthy in every regard.”

  “Where do we start?”

  “The first element of the investigation to underline is that we must move with utmost respect for the safety of Dr. Thomas. It is not something she has had to request of me—she assumes our confidence, which of course we accord all our clients. But I would like us to be even more vigilant than usual. Dr. Thomas was a member of La Dame Blanche during the war, and—”

  “La what?” Billy interrupted.

  “La Dame Blanche was a Belgian resistance movement supported by the British government, comprised almost entirely of women—from schoolgirls to grandmothers. But with regard to Dr. Thomas, I should add that she is more than capable of taking care of herself. We can assume she’s not currently sitting on her hands waiting for something to happen.”

  “Best not to get on the wrong side of her, then,” said Billy.

  “Not if you value your throat, I would say.” Maisie reached into the jar of crayons. “Anyway, as I said, I just wanted to mention that we need to be even more careful than ever. Right, let’s get started on the case map, shall we? I’m expecting a packet of additional documents from Dr. Thomas this morning—it should arrive at any moment, I would imagine. That will help.”

  Maisie wrote the name of the deceased on the paper, using a thick red crayon, and drew a circle around the words “Frederick Addens.” There was something childlike in the process, as if they were in primary school, beginning an innocent drawing. She smiled.

  “What is it?” asked Billy.

  Maisie looked up. “I was just thinking of Maurice,” she said. “He always comes to mind when I start work on a new case. Not just because he was my teacher, but almost everything he said contained a lesson.”

  “He taught you about case maps, didn’t he?” said Sandra.

  “Yes, when I first became his assistant. And it’s such a simple thing, really. Putting down every thought, every consideration, on a large sheet of paper to better see threads of connection. But he always used thick wax crayons in many colors—he said color stirs the mind, that work on even the most difficult of cases becomes akin to playing. And because a case map is an act of creation, we bring the full breadth of our curiosity to the task.”

  “Instead of being old and stuck in our ways.”

  “Something like that, Billy.”

  “We’ll have to get used to seeing nothing but stuffy old grown-ups, won’t we?” Sandra reached for a green crayon. “I walked down the street this morning to catch the bus, and it was so quiet—no children playing as I passed the school, no girls out with the long skipping rope, no boys kicking a ball about. It was as if the Pied Piper had been through and taken the lot of them—and the army were moving into the school! But no children in the streets.” She looked at Billy. “What’s happening with yours, Billy?”

  Billy shrugged. “It’s not so much Margaret I’m worried about, but the boys. Our little Billy’s not so little anymore—eighteen soon, he is. And Bobby, he’s sixteen, doing well in his apprenticeship at the garage, and full of himself—I sometimes wish we’d never named him after my brother; he’s all hotheaded and knows everything. And look where that got his uncle.” He turned to face Sandra. “My brother lied about his age to enlist after a girl shoved a white feather in his hand, and he ended up under a few feet of soil in a French field. That’s where it got him—and to think he could have just walked away and ignored the stupid girl.”

  The bell above the door to the office began to ring, cutting into the mood of melancholy seeping into the conversation.

  “Not a moment too soon. Sandra, that will be the messenger we’re waiting for. Would you—”

  “Right away, miss.”

  Sandra stepped out of the office. As her footsteps echoed away to the front door, Maisie reached out to lay her hand on Billy’s arm. “You’re the father to two young men now, Billy. Love them as you’ve always l
oved them, be the good father you’ve always been.”

  “It’s Doreen I worry about more than anything—she’s all right now, been on an even keel for a few years. But if something happens to one of those boys . . . I dread to think of it, really I do, miss. I don’t want her to lose her mind again—terrible thought, that is.”

  Maisie nodded, looking up as Sandra returned to the room, and handed her an envelope. “Here you are, miss. It was all I could do to get him to give this envelope to me—I thought he would just barge up here, but I assured him I worked for you and I wasn’t a spy! I had to sign an official docket for him, to say I’d received the papers. He was very polite though, and nicely turned out—mind you, working for an embassy, you’d expect him to be. And his English was perfect.”

  “I’m sure Dr. Thomas has very high standards for her staff.” Maisie picked up a letter opener, unsealed the envelope, and began to lift out a sheaf of papers. “Sandra, would you have a go at getting the names of some of the associations set up to look after Belgian refugees during the war? Just in London, Kent, and Sussex for now. We’re going to need names, and more background information. And Billy—you’ve been an engineer, so I think you should talk to the staff at St. Pancras in the first instance. Find out about Addens, his work, how he mixed with his fellow workers, that sort of thing. Try to find out if he seemed a little more flush with money than usual. And did he seem in any way different in the weeks before he died? Usual procedure at this point. I’ll go over to speak to his wife, perhaps the local pub landlord, and anyone else—without seeming too curious, I hope. I want us to understand the geography of the man’s life, and then we can start digging deeper. Oh, and I’ll be paying a visit to Detective Chief Inspector Caldwell, if I can see him today.”

  “Detective Chief Inspector? That little gnat’s a chief inspector?” Billy’s eyes had widened.

  “Now then, Billy. Let’s be respectful, shall we?” Maisie paused. “Though I know what you mean—it came as a bit of a shock to me, the ‘chief’ bit. And before we all leave, let’s just go over those cases in hand—we’ll need to keep all the hoops spinning.”