It sounded like the air-raid warden believed Mildred was a relative, maybe he even took her back to the bomb site to identify him, and that was when he gave her this piece of paper she mentioned. That air-raid warden obviously didn’t realize she wasn’t the full shilling and wouldn’t understand legal requirements or how to arrange a funeral.
In peacetime this would never have happened, but during the Blitz the emergency services, hospitals and all the many voluntary organizations who did their utmost to find family members and offer support to the bereaved, were so overstretched and snowed under by deaths, that it was easily possible for a body to go unclaimed by anyone.
Of course Stephen Lyle’s body must have been held in the morgue waiting to be claimed, but if no one came forward after a time, he supposed there was no choice but to put the person in a mass grave.
‘I tell you what, Mildred,’ he said. ‘I’ll take these papers home and read them properly and I’ll come back and explain them to you in a day or two.’
He fully expected her to agree immediately, but to his shock and surprise she sprang to her feet. ‘Oh no you don’t,’ she said. ‘That’s all I’ve got of ’im. You ain’t takin’ nuffin.’
‘Don’t be silly, Mildred,’ he said, trying not to get angry with her. ‘The light in here is too bad to read them, and it’s late and you need to go to bed. I’ll bring them back.’
‘No, you can’t take them,’ she shouted at him. ‘I don’t know you. You said a gentleman wouldn’t go in a lady’s house at night, but you must’ve followed me ’ere, so you might be going to rob me.’
She was edging towards the door and he was afraid if she got out into the street she’d start shouting. He couldn’t let that happen, he had too much to lose.
‘Oh, Mildred,’ he sighed, as if hurt by her, edging his way towards her, hands outstretched as if pleading for her forgiveness. ‘I didn’t follow you here at all, I took the wrong turning in the dark and all at once I saw you. I was really glad too, because I like you, and I was a bit afraid I’d hurt your feelings by not agreeing to come with you.’
She half smiled, as if she believed him, but as he took a step nearer her, she let out a piercing yell.
Archie couldn’t bear women screaming, it grated on his nerves. Cynthia used to do it, and so did Verity. He reacted instinctively to it, leaping forward and grabbing Mildred by the throat. But the moment his thumbs pressed into her larynx, he had to squeeze. She squirmed to get free, her eyes began to pop and her face turned from red to purple, but he couldn’t let go, he just pressed harder and harder until she was still.
He let her slump down on to the floor, then he reached down and felt her pulse. There was none, she was dead.
‘Why didn’t you just give me the box?’ he said aloud. ‘I didn’t want to kill you for it.’
For a few brief seconds he was stunned by what he’d done, just as he had been with the other women he’d hurt, and when he’d beaten Verity and locked her into the shelter. But remorse wasn’t in his nature. He quickly pulled himself together, opened Mildred’s purse and took the contents. There was only a ten-shilling note and some silver to pocket, but that way it would look like a robbery that had got out of hand.
Then, using an old rag that was lying on the floor, he wiped the purse clean of fingerprints, and dusted the stool he’d sat on in case he’d touched it. Then, picking up the box of papers, he tipped the contents into a canvas shopping bag which was hanging on the door. Still using the rag, he selected several old china ornaments, a couple of hairslides and a picture postcard from Southend. He put them in the box, wiped it down thoroughly and then tucked it under a pile of old newspapers. Stopping only to wipe the outside of the door down for prints, he left.
He hesitated at the back of the houses in Salmon Lane. It was late, he wanted to sleep, but common sense said he must get away from here immediately, as the landlord at the Ropemakers Arms would give a description of the man Mildred had been talking to earlier in the evening. Someone in the pub might know where he lived, so the police would come here.
But they weren’t likely to find her body straight away, so why not climb into his room the way he came out, get his stuff together and leave for good in the morning? To walk the streets around here at night with a suitcase was asking to be stopped by the police. The morning was soon enough.
‘Anything exciting in the paper?’ Ruby asked Wilby.
Wilby looked at Ruby as she poured tea at breakfast and smiled. Ruby’s happiness wafted out of her like the sweet scent of honeysuckle. She was deeply in love with Luke, and it seemed he was equally smitten with her. Wilby had only one nagging fear and that was that when his training was complete, and he began going on bombing raids over Germany, the plane he was in might just be shot down. But she kept that fear to herself, for now it was just a delight to see Ruby so happy.
‘I didn’t read anything about a red-hot romance in Babbacombe,’ she replied to Ruby’s question. ‘Well, at least it’s not on the front page.’
‘It should be,’ Verity chuckled. ‘After all, she’s broadcast it so much it should have reached Fleet Street by now.’
Wilby was also happy to see Verity looking bouncy and joyful. Maybe she wasn’t going to fall in love with Bevan, but having fun with someone she liked and felt safe with was just what she needed.
Wilby turned back to the newspaper. ‘The Germans have captured Sebastopol,’ she said. ‘With luck they’ll march on up to Moscow and freeze when winter comes. That happened to Napoleon’s army, they had to retreat when they had no more food or warm clothes. Russia’s saviour is General Winter.’
Ruby pretended to yawn. ‘What about the society page? Any flamboyant, fabulous weddings? Any scandal?’
‘Thieves broke into a garage in Surrey to find more than they expected; it was stacked to the roof with tinned food. It seems the owners had been stockpiling for years before the war. It took so long for the thieves to load it up, the police came and arrested them.’
‘So were the owners prosecuted for being greedy? Or were they allowed to throw tins at the thieves?’ Verity asked jokingly.
‘It doesn’t say. I bet the police snaffled some of it for themselves,’ Wilby said. ‘I wish I’d had the sense to start stockpiling years ago.’
‘You’d have only given it away to people you felt sorry for,’ Verity said. ‘Isn’t there a good murder in that paper? We never seem to get them any more. Is everyone behaving properly because of the war?’
‘A woman was found strangled in Limehouse,’ Wilby said. ‘They think she’d been dead in her room for over a week before anyone missed her.’
Ruby pulled a face. ‘How awful. Have they arrested anyone for it?’
‘Doesn’t say. Her name was Mildred Find, mid-forties, no family. A neighbour reported she was a little simple. The police think robbery was the motive, and are still making inquiries.’
‘It’s funny how real life carries on all around us, despite the war. Murder, stealing, road accidents, babies being born, and weddings too,’ Verity mused. ‘When the war started, I kind of had the idea that would all stop. Silly of me, but I did.’
‘I certainly never expected to see the glamorous Palace Hotel turned into a hospital, or imagined that I would ever be able to look at an open wound without fainting,’ Ruby said. ‘Tell me, Wilby, are we going to win the war? It would be absolutely terrible if, after all we’ve been through, we lost.’
‘We won’t lose,’ Wilby said firmly. ‘We have Churchill at the helm, and he’ll get us through it. In a couple of years the barbed wire will be taken from the beaches, signposts will be back, lights will go on. And you two will be married and living happily ever after.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
October 1942
‘I wish I hadn’t got to work tomorrow,’ Ruby sighed. She was sitting in an armchair, her legs over the arm.
Verity was busy embroidering some flowers along the edge of a cardigan to try and make it look new.
She looked up at her friend. ‘If Wilby catches you sitting like that, you’ll get a rocket for being unladylike,’ she said. ‘But why don’t you want to go? Luke hasn’t got any leave, tomorrow is likely to be as grey and chilly as today, and you’ve always claimed Sunday is tedious with Wilby insisting we go to church.’
‘I don’t know why I don’t want to go, I’ve just got this weird feeling about it,’ Ruby said, and giggled a little. ‘One of my famous premonitions, like when I got the feeling you were in trouble. Okay, that makes me sound cuckoo, doesn’t it? I usually love working Sundays, the patients are all happy because they get visitors, dinner in the canteen is good, and it’s by far the jolliest day of the week all round. But I just don’t want to go.’
‘Well, you have to,’ Verity said. ‘As you are very fond of telling me, no one else can do your job.’
Ruby threw a cushion at her. ‘It happens to be true, I’ve made myself indispensable.’
Verity snorted derisively. ‘And so modest, as well as beautiful!’
Ruby grinned. ‘Do you ever get these feelings about things that you can’t explain?’
‘Only to wonder why it is I like you,’ Verity said.
‘I’m serious,’ Ruby said.
‘Well, I do get feelings about Archie sometimes,’ Verity admitted a little sheepishly. ‘I feel he’s thinking about me and planning some hideous revenge. But it’s daft to think he’d track me down here, he’ll only get himself in deeper water.’
A local police inspector had called to see her in Devon about a month after she was discharged from Lewisham Hospital. He had been asked by the London police to check that Archie Wood hadn’t tried to contact her. She told them he hadn’t and that, as far as she remembered, she hadn’t told him about her friends in Babbacombe, so it was extremely unlikely he’d turn up here.
The inspector said that all their efforts to find Archie had failed, but that more often than not, men on the run got themselves caught eventually because they returned to their old home or a family member. He said the Lewisham police were keeping an eye on Weardale Road, and if she had any reason to believe he was in Babbacombe, she must contact the police station immediately.
She would, of course, in the blink of an eye. But Archie wasn’t likely to show himself in advance of pouncing on her. But she never admitted that thought to Ruby or Wilby.
‘Too much time has passed now,’ Ruby said comfortingly. ‘He’ll be long gone, either tucked in with some woman daft enough to trust him, or even gone abroad. One of the airmen at the hospital was telling me the other day that men who want to hide, whether that’s from the police or trying to escape their past, are signing on with the merchant navy. All they need is a fairly good false identity. It would be easy enough then to jump ship in another country.’
‘I can’t imagine which country would be good to be in right now, with the war going on almost everywhere,’ Verity said. ‘But I suppose a man like Archie would see a war-torn country as a place of opportunity.’
Colin and Brian came bursting into the room and interrupted the girls’ conversation. With their freckled faces, sticking-up hair and soft brown eyes they were very appealing. ‘Will you play Monopoly with us?’ Brian asked. ‘We helped Wilby make some rock buns, and now she’s told us to clear off out of the kitchen and leave her in peace.’
Both girls laughed. The two boys were bundles of energy. On a grey, miserable day like today, when they couldn’t go out to play, they could be a bit much for Wilby.
‘I think we could do that,’ Verity agreed, packing away her embroidery. ‘And maybe we’ll have some dancing practice later too.’
‘Oh, goody!’ Colin clapped his hands together. ‘I danced with my teacher the other day, and she said if I kept it up I might end up like Fred Astaire.’
Ruby arrived at work the next morning just before nine. Sundays were always calmer than weekdays, because there were far fewer service staff working, and many of the convalescent airmen took exercise around the grounds or went to the church just further down the road in Wellswood.
When the hotel was first converted into a hospital they had only 48 beds, but the number had been gradually increased since then to 249. They hadn’t needed to make huge alterations to the building to turn it into a viable hospital. Four bedrooms on the second floor had been changed into a theatre block, but there were always complaints from the nursing staff about there being too many single rooms scattered about. One of the biggest advantages of the former hotel was the amount of sporting facilities, including a gymnasium and indoor tennis court, all of which were invaluable for rehabilitation.
Most of Ruby’s work that morning was to file any case notes which had been left on the wards for the doctors to see, to chase up copies of any correspondence to do with patients, and file them. She also had to start files for patients who had been brought in on the previous day, which involved typing up the notes made by the doctors both at the time of their injury and on their admittance here. Then there were a few discharge notes to type up for patients going home either today or Monday.
It was around twenty to eleven when Ruby got an internal phone call from the medical quartermaster, who asked her to come over to the east wing and collect some requisitions for drugs and equipment.
She was almost there when she stopped to look out of a window at a group of Home Guard marching off in the direction of Walls Hill. It made her smile, as some of them were quite old men, who had probably done service in the first war and were proud to think they were doing something worthwhile in this one.
Suddenly, without any warning, enemy aircraft came swarming over the cliff from the sea, strafing the hospital grounds with machine-gun fire. The air-raid siren hadn’t gone off.
Shocked to the core, Ruby initially dived to the ground. But as the planes wheeled off, she got up to look out of the window again and was pleased to see the group of Home Guard had run into the woods, and there were no casualties outside that she could detect. She was undecided what to do, whether to run back downstairs and take shelter, or to continue to the quartermaster’s office. But before she could act, there was a massive bang, the whole building shook and she was knocked down by something heavy.
A searing pain shot up her back and she tried to call out for help. Her last thought before darkness blotted out everything was of Luke and that she wouldn’t get a chance to say goodbye.
Wilby and Verity were preparing the vegetables for dinner when they heard the droning noise of aircraft. With no siren warning them of an air raid, they assumed it was English planes. Until they heard machine-gun fire.
‘Boys! Shelter!’ Wilby shouted, running to the sitting room where they were playing.
Verity ran to them too, grabbing each of the boys’ hands, and flew with them to the cellar.
‘Is that the Germans coming?’ Brian asked, brown eyes wide with fright.
‘Not coming to us, just their planes overhead, but let’s get down those stairs quickly,’ Verity said.
Once Wilby was down in the cellar with them, they all listened carefully. ‘It sounds like they are firing closer to Torquay,’ Wilby said. ‘It’s not here in Babbacombe.’
Then came the bombs, and Wilby blanched at the massive bangs.
The boys were excited, not scared. ‘I want to see what they bombed,’ Brian said. ‘When can we go out and look?’
‘You little ghoul,’ Wilby said, but her tone was affectionate rather than cross. ‘People may have been hurt, or even killed. It isn’t something you go and gawp at.’
When the all-clear sounded, they went back upstairs. Verity went up to the bedroom to get her embroidery. When she glanced out of the window, she could see a plume of black smoke or dust rising up to the right. It was in the direction of Torquay, but she didn’t think it was that far away.
All at once she remembered Ruby saying she didn’t want to go to work. As the hospital was the only really big building between here and Torquay, it could have been hit.
/> ‘Oh no,’ she gasped, all at once feeling as if her heart was being squeezed hard.
She ran downstairs. The boys had gone back into the sitting room, and she told Wilby what she feared.
‘They wouldn’t bomb a hospital, surely?’ Wilby said. ‘They painted a huge red cross on the roof!’
‘Since when did they care about niceties like that?’ Verity said with a shrug. ‘I must go down the road and just check. If it wasn’t the hospital, I’ll come straight back.’
‘Make sure you do, dinner will be ready at one thirty.’
Verity leapt on her bicycle and whizzed off down the road. As if in confirmation of what she feared, a truck went past her full of rescue workers. She could hear ambulance sirens too, but they were coming from Torquay towards her.
She was at the RAF hospital within five minutes, and to her horror the spiral of black smoke was coming from the east wing of the building. There was that all too familiar, throat-constricting smell she’d grown so used to in London, of brick dust, plaster and burning. By the time she’d propped her bicycle up against a wall, Babbacombe Road was clogged with rescue workers, air-raid wardens, police, firemen and ambulance men, along with a great many local people.
Verity made her way towards the main entrance, but a burly air-raid warden prevented her going any closer. She told him Ruby worked in reception and that she had red curly hair. She pointed out that Ruby ought to have been first out of the door.
‘I haven’t seen anyone that fits that description,’ he said. ‘But the patients and staff who are unhurt are all coming out now,’ he said.
He waved his hand towards a trickle of people leaving the building. They all looked as if they were in shock, and some of the women were crying. ‘Your friend should be among them. But don’t worry if you don’t see her, she might be helping to get patients out.’
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