When Beggars Dye

by Peter Hey

  Jane walked away without looking up. Her car was soon pulling out of the car park and onto the road. Only an insistent ringing from the dashboard reminded her to clip her seat belt into place. She drove like a automaton, unconsciously steering and changing gears as if programmed by clockwork discs and cams. Her mind was consumed by dark, repetitive thoughts that took hold and refused to let go. Once again, she reproached herself for her fixation with the father who had abandoned her so many years previously, sailing off on that huge ship to a far-flung land, never to return. Once again, she seethed with bitterness towards her mother, the woman who had driven him away. Once again, she questioned her own role in her father’s desertion and sought the blame and guilt that must surely be hers. Once again, she hated herself for her own weakness and her inability to let childhood wounds heal.

  When she reached her home in Nottingham she had no recollection of the journey. She blankly left her car unlocked, walked up the steps into her house, fumbled with her key and then shut the door behind her. She didn’t open it again for three days.

  Nottingham

  Jane was lying on the sofa under a duvet. The TV was tuned to a bland daytime channel, but the volume was turned down. Her hair was unkempt and matted, and she was still wearing pyjamas despite it being mid afternoon. The curtains were slightly pulled back, but grey skies and a north-facing aspect meant the room was gloomy and dark.

  The doorbell was ringing, but Jane seemed oblivious. Then she heard a familiar voice through the letterbox.

  ‘Jane, it’s me. Are you in there? Let me in, please.’

  She pulled the duvet over her head for a moment but then relented. She lifted herself heavily onto her feet and trudged down the hall towards the front door.

  She pulled it open a few inches and standing nervously on the doorstep was Tommy. When he saw her dishevelled appearance he knew his instincts had been right.

  ‘Hi, Jane. Is it okay if I come in?’ he asked gently.

  Jane nodded and retraced her steps back to her living room. Tommy pushed the door open fully and followed.

  As they passed the kitchen, Jane turned slightly. ‘Do you want a coffee or something?’ she said limply.

  Tommy didn’t, but said yes anyway. He felt any kind of activity, no matter how small, might help drag her from her stupor. She shuffled into the kitchen, lifted the kettle to check its weight and then turned it on.

  A look of puzzlement crossed her face. ‘I didn’t know you knew my address, Tommy.’

  He grinned apologetically. ‘I hope you don’t mind. It was something in your emails. I got worried when you didn’t update me on the trip to Dowley and you just dropped off the net. Normally, you always reply to messages without fail. You could be laid low with flu, or the Black Death, and you’d have your phone or your laptop by your side. When you didn’t respond, I feared the worst. That you’d slipped back again. Looks like I was right.’

  Jane shrugged her shoulders and he continued his explanation. ‘I knew you’d moved into your grandparents’ old house in Nottingham. I do genealogy. It wasn’t exactly hard getting your grandparents’ names and then finding their address on the electoral register. So I got on a train and here I am.’

  Jane felt a pang of guilt for what seemed like self-indulgent weakness. ‘Oh, Tommy, that’s ever so sweet of you. Thank you. I know it doesn’t look it, but I was starting to get it back together again. I’d moved out of my bedroom into the living room. I was building myself up to have a shower.’

  Tommy appeared encouraged. ‘Why don’t you have that shower now and I’ll finish off making the coffee?’

  Half an hour later they were sitting outside on the patio at the back of the house. Two half-empty cups were on the table in front of them. The sun had come out and its warmth was drying Jane’s damp hair and raising her spirits. Talking Tommy through her encounter outside the pub helped her accept what she already knew. The man had borne a resemblance to a mental image that was probably distorted by decades of Chinese whispers in her mind. She didn’t really know what her father might look like now, assuming he was even still alive. And why would he be stalking her? He had shown no inclination to seek her out in the past.

  Tommy told her that the episode could be a blessing. Maybe its drama would lodge in her mind and prevent her succumbing to such irrationality in the future. It was a script she desperately wanted to believe. She made herself agree but knew her conviction was as fragile as sugar glass.

  There was one positive she could not deny. Apart from grabbing a large, angry man by the shoulder, she hadn’t done anything silly. No-one had got hurt.

  When he sensed Jane had begun talking herself out of her darkness, Tommy tentatively steered her towards the case of the Dye family and their irrevocable split. He judged that an alternative focus might prevent her crawling back into the easy refuge of despair.

  Jane led him through Dean Smith’s revelation that his grandmother, the fourth sister at Margaret Stothard’s mother’s wedding, was still alive. Tommy shook his head out of disappointment at his own failure rather than disbelief. He’d played the odds and got it wrong. He knew that he’d never found a record of Mary Smith’s death, but statistically a woman born in the early 1920s was likely to be deceased. The commonality of her name and the chance she might have remarried had seemed valid reasons for not trying harder to pin down the actual date and place. However, the fact that her two children had passed on might have clouded his judgement and made him assume their mother was dead too. He thought himself a slave to method and detail and didn’t like it when he made lazy mistakes.

  It was Jane’s turn to be reassuring. ‘I assumed she was dead too. She was called Mary Smith, for goodness sake. It must be the most common woman’s name in the country. You wouldn’t expect to find anything. I wouldn’t have got anywhere on this thing without you. And we’re almost there now. And Tommy…’

  His eyes were in their habitual position, looking downwards at the table. She leaned across and gently lifted his chin to raise his gaze towards her face. ‘Tommy, I know it’s a struggle for you to leave your own flat sometimes. For you to get on a train and come all the way to Nottingham, to travel across a town you don’t know and knock on a strange front door… Well I think that’s the bravest thing anyone’s ever done for me. I’ve told you before, you’re a really good friend and I’m very lucky to have you. I don’t deserve you.’

  Tommy smiled but couldn’t hold eye contact for long. He mumbled something about normal people thinking nothing of getting on a train. Jane didn’t want to embarrass him further so reached for her phone to check the texts and emails she had been ignoring for three days.

  In amongst several messages from Tommy, one email stood out. It was from Herb Jensen.

  Dear Ms Madden,

  Thank you again for tracking down Christopher Aimson. He has sent me a brief email introducing himself and to which I am yet to reply. Unfortunately, a good friend of mine is an attorney and he has advised me that, given the situation, I must take the precaution of getting a DNA sample before proceeding with any further communication. I am writing to ask if you would be prepared to act as my agent in this matter.

  I look forward to your reply,

  Herb Jensen

  PS Please find attached a photograph of my brother. He’s at the back, second from the left.

  Jane read and reread the first paragraph trying to understand its motivation. Whilst his family had always harboured doubts about the parentage of Chris Aimson’s mother, Herb Jensen had said he was prepared to respect his brother’s acceptance of her. Now he seemed to be getting cold feet and introducing barriers. What had happened to change his mind? Had Chris revealed personal circumstances that had discomforted the old man such that he was looking for excuses to back out? Whatever the reason, Jane didn’t yet feel strong enough to make anything resembling a decision. She typed a brief message saying she was away for a few days and would reply properly on her return. She then turned to Tommy.
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  ‘Thompson Ferdinand. I’ve just told someone I’m on holiday for day or two. I hate lying, so why don’t you and I go somewhere? We might be justified claiming it on the project’s expenses. If not, it’s my treat. How about a nice country inn? Have you ever been to Norfolk?’

  No longer East

  Tommy made excuses about not having a change of clothes. Jane, fired by the irrepressible enthusiasm of a depressive whose mood has suddenly lifted, responded by taking him shopping to the nearest Primark. 90 minutes later, they were driving at speed down the A17 as it cut across the fenlands of South Holland, where Lincolnshire curved round the southern Wash.

  The sun was losing its battle with the clouds, but Jane had the Mazda’s top down and its heater up. Tommy sat huddled in the passenger seat, only the frame of the windscreen breaking his 360 degree view across endless acres of flat, fertile farmland, which had been stolen from the sea by generations of engineers and their ditches, dykes and pumps. Islands of high ground were as rare as in the open ocean, but the skyline was interrupted by walls of trees standing tall against the cutting wind. Also fighting the horizontal monotony were the irregular platoons of wind turbines, which seemed to be marching across the alien terrain like giant three-armed robots, scything their way through any and all resistance.

  Tommy allowed himself an occasional look across at Jane. She was wearing superfluous sunglasses and her hair pulled back in a ponytail against the buffeting slipstream. She was enjoying the drive and looked strong and happy and beautiful.

  They entered Norfolk and crossed the Great Ouse, as wide as the Danube at this point, but a waterway whose suspiciously straight banks betrayed man’s dominance over its course and flow. Over the bridge, the A17 became the A47 and the scenery changed with it, gentle contours once more returning to the map and rendering a more familiar landscape.

  It was early evening and cold by the time they arrived in the small market town of Dereham, and Tommy was grateful that Jane had relented and raised the Mazda’s roof just outside King’s Lynn. At such short notice, there’d been limited choice on the hotel websites, but she’d been excited to find availability in an 18th-century coaching inn just outside the town centre. The car park was in the old stabling area and was accessed through a narrow archway, whose brickwork was striped by the paint off numerous wing mirrors and bumpers. Fortunately, the little sports car slipped through easily. There was no reception, so Jane and Tommy checked in at the bar and were shown to rooms in a modern annexe. Whilst clean and functional, they lacked the beams and sloping floors of those in the original building, and which featured in the online photographs. Nonetheless, Jane was happy. The location seemed ideal.

  Tommy would normally have liked to spend time carefully unpacking, but his luggage comprised a carrier bag with only the barest essentials, and Jane was keen to walk through the town before it got dark. The signs as you entered Dereham pronounced it the ‘Heart of Norfolk’, a claim that seemed to derive from its geographic location rather than any emotional bond. Its own heart was the keyhole-shaped market place, elongated but pinched inwards below the modern roundabout at its northern end, where previously cattle had been bought and sold for hundreds of years. Despite origins dating back to the Saxons and beyond, the central architecture was predominantly red-brick Georgian interspersed with more recent construction, most of it sympathetic, but some clashing with 1960s concrete arrogance. Throughout, modern shopfronts imposed conformity. The town had grown rapidly in recent years, promoting itself from East Dereham to Dereham, and had the standard complement of chain stores, supermarkets and pound shops, making its character blur with anywhere and everywhere else in the country.

  And yet Jane was trying not to see 21st-century Dereham, but the East Dereham of 70 years before, a time of blackouts and rationing and individual little businesses, with hand-painted signs bearing local names of local shopkeepers: butchers, bakers, grocers, tobacconists, haberdashers and milliners, some struggling to fill their shelves in the face of wartime shortages, others benefiting from the proximity of nearby farms for their eggs, butter, meat and vegetables.

  It was also a time of invasion, albeit friendly. Jane had read that there were tens of thousands of US airman stationed in Norfolk, its position on England’s eastern bulge shortening the flight time to occupied Europe and Nazi Germany. Sergeant Woodrow Jensen was one of those men, based on an airfield only five miles north, putting East Dereham in easy reach by bicycle or jeep. It was in East Dereham that he died, shot in an unidentified cottage by his fellow countryman and assumed lover.

  Jane had wanted a break, a night or two away, but Woody had determined where she’d put the pin in her map. Whilst she didn’t yet know why Mary Dye had been ostracised by her family, the death of her first husband would have been a pivotal point in the young woman’s life. As Jane walked Dereham’s narrow mediaeval streets, she was looking for the ghosts of the past, visualising a Pathé-newsreel monochrome world of brave young men in American uniform, far from home and brashly living each day like it could be their last. Farm boys and city slickers, considered ‘oversexed, overpaid and over here’ by those they alienated, but charming the local girls with movie-star accents, nylons and chocolate. Jane pulled her phone from her bag and called up Herb Jensen’s email. When she’d first opened it earlier that day, she’d concentrated on the words and his request for a DNA sample. This time she looked more closely at the file he’d attached, the photograph of his brother, Woody.

  The crisp black-and-white image showed a group of ten men in front of large propeller driven aeroplane painted in a dull matt colour that could have been brown or green. They were in their smartest uniforms and smiling broadly. There was no obvious sign of the battle fatigue that led to Woody Jensen’s ‘weakness of character’ suggested in the newspaper article reporting his death. The plane itself seemed surprisingly low to the ground, the cockpit section resting on a single small wheel. On the slab-sided nose, painted in a large cursive script, were the words: ‘Mary Mine’. Precisely who Mary belonged to was unclear, but Jane allowed herself to imagine Woody’s nine comrades naming the machine in honour of his new bride as a present for the couple’s wartime wedding. The four men in the front row were kneeling and wearing peaked caps that Jane assumed marked them out as officers, though none of them looked older than 25. Standing behind them were the rest of the bomber’s crew. Amongst them, second from the left, was Woody. Even if Herb Jensen’s email hadn’t identified him, Jane knew she would have singled him out from the line-up. She wasn’t sure if it was his stature, he was a head shorter than the others and she remembered that his position in the cramped ball turret was the preserve of smaller men, or whether there was something about his face she recognised. His eyes in particular seemed familiar, but she couldn’t place where she’d seen them before. One thing was certain: Chris Aimson’s dark good looks were not inherited from the diminutive airman with awkward features and blond hair.

  After their tour of the town, Jane and Tommy returned to their hotel. They ate well in its restaurant and then adjourned to the bar. Tommy reluctantly let Jane order him a pint of cider, and she continued with the Sauvignon Blanc that had accompanied her meal. They sat at a table with a hammered copper top and she looked around the room, trying to judge if the decor and fittings had genuine age or were more recent approximations of features that had been ripped out in times past for the sake of fashionable modernity.

  ‘I think the bar itself, you know the bar counter and its wooden frame, are original. If not original, then pretty old,’ she suggested.

  Tommy nodded. ‘It’s got a few war wounds where it’s been knocked about a bit. It’s been there quite a while, I’d say.’

  ‘I reckon he must have drunk in here. Propped up that bar with his crewmates between missions. Probably came in here with the guy who shot him. What was his name?’

  Jane looked expectantly at Tommy, trusting the reliability of his memory. He didn’t fail her.

  ‘C
orporal Henry Abrams. He was a clerk rather than airborne, if you remember. Presumably worked in the base HQ, sorting out logistics, parts, crew movements. That kind of thing.’

  ‘That’s it, and that newspaper article said he had a certain reputation amongst locals, or words to effect. I don’t know if that means he was a bit camp or put himself around a lot. Either way, it must have been really tough being gay in those days.’

  Jane looked at Tommy and tried to read his expression. Finding it inconclusive, she hesitantly asked a direct question.

  ‘Tommy, I’m sure you’re not, but someone asked me a few days ago and... I guess I realised I’m not 100% sure. It’s not as if it matters these days, but you’re not gay are you?’

  ‘Who asked you?’

  ‘My old friend Sarah. We were at the tennis club, and I was talking about what I was doing now and mentioned you. And she asked if you were gay. I said no, but then…’

  Tommy shook his head. ‘No, I’m not gay, Jane.’

  Jane was beginning to redden. ‘I don’t know why I asked. It doesn’t matter, does it? I’m sorry. And I’d forgotten about your online friend in South America. What’s she called again? Gabby something.’

  ‘Gabi1701.’

  ‘That’s it. So describe her to me again. What does Gabi1701 look like?’

  ‘She’s a really nice girl. Kind. And she likes the stuff I do. A bit of programming, computer games.’

  Jane could tell she was pushing Tommy in a direction he didn’t want to go and relented. ‘Okay, I’ll shut up and get us another drink.’

  As she stood waiting to be served, Tommy stared at her in profile, hoping her peripheral vision didn’t detect his gaze.

  When she returned to the table, they chatted about the case they were researching and their plans for the following day. As always when they got together, Jane did most of the talking but Tommy contributed factually and by checking things on the Internet using his phone. Gradually, as the large wines began to have their inevitable impact, Jane began to discuss the person she hoped was sponsoring their trip, Julian Stothard.