by Iona Whishaw
She tried to bring her mind back to the problem at hand—the man in the creek and the fact that the police thought it was she who had killed him. She was allowing her mind to run, undisciplined, along the corridors of absurdity. Where had she heard it? From one of her profs: do not throw anything away, not when you’re writing, not when you’re thinking. Your brain is smarter than you. In the light of this thought, she bundled up all the absurd speculation about Angus and stored it on one of her mental shelves, conceding with some irritation and no little anxiety that it might come in handy. But if this was true, who was the dead man? She scanned his face again in her mind but she was certain she did not know him. Of course, someone in the department might, if he had come for her. She must phone Inspector Darling, she supposed, though on sober reflection, what could she tell him? What could she be permitted to tell him? The Official Secrets Act was a powerful force. This, however, left the real conundrum back in her lap to solve: if he was here for her, who had killed him?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
London, England
THE DIRECTOR PLACED HIS HAT carefully on the rack and shrugged out of his wet raincoat. He resented rain in July, but it was London. What did one expect? He’d come back up to town early, leaving his wife with the job of getting the children—well, really, they were hardly children anymore, Wendel was fourteen and Lorraine was twelve—up to their grandfather’s small estate in Lake Country. Their long-anticipated summer hols. Jane would come down to London and they would take a small holiday together. Maybe even to France. He’d been to Paris a couple of times since it had all ended, and he was amazed by how quickly the city had fallen back into itself and was embracing a new post-war world, almost as if the whole embarrassment and pain of occupation had never happened, or could be quite forgotten.
He sat at his desk and looked nervously at the pile of papers in his inbox. How could he be sure he’d not made a dreadful mistake? And then the miracle. She had renewed her passport and applied to go to Canada. They knew where she was, of course, in case they needed to get her back. Now the irony, that it was he who was in charge of the department that required her return.
The whole struggle of how to go about it had ended when Franks had come to him. They had only to wait. In fact, he’d persuaded himself that there was something almost theatrical and artistic about this approach. She would find it irresistible. Communication with her, or with any personnel they were to bring back, had to be secretive anyway, so this was perfect.
Smithers, his superior, came into his office. Smithers never knocked. It was his view that all offices were his and their occupants as well. “So? Anything?”
“No, sir. Not yet. But she is a professional.”
“It’s not wartime, you know, you can’t compel people to come and go.” He said this apparently completely oblivious to his own penchant for compelling people.
“Yes. Well, if I don’t hear from her in another week, I can always go get her.” He was only half-joking.
Smithers looked suspiciously at the director. “Yes, no doubt you can. A nice long holiday for you. She lives on the other side of the country, don’t forget. Just keep in mind, we haven’t got all year. She’s the best linguist we had, and she’s used to undercover.” Smithers turned to go, and then turned back, “I’m bound to say you shouldn’t have let her go. It’s going to cost the department a lot of money to get her back, if we have to send you swanning off to Canada.”
“Sir.”
LANE SIGHED AND stretched. The silence, save for the water flowing out of the now unimpeded diversion: returning innocence to a place of death, cleaning with the soothing hand of nature, the way she had seen the countryside in France grow green over battlefields and somehow return order to life and life to order. Standing, she brushed the grass off her behind and turned to follow the path out to the road, and then she froze, every part of her alert.
She was in this state almost before she knew it. She scanned the sounds and turned her head slowly, first one way and then another, trying to see what, in the forest or along the banks of the creek, had pushed her into alert. As her mind caught up to her instinct, she felt it had been a sound that did not belong. She waited, her breath slowing, but she heard nothing but the creek and a slight movement of air in the leaves just above her. Now her body caught up fully and, with her heart pounding, she walked firmly and quickly along the path to the road. It surprised her that it took till now to really register that she herself might be in danger. There was a killer somewhere in King’s Cove, and she might want to be careful, especially as the last man he killed had had her name in his pocket.
SHE DIDN’T FEEL like eating that night, but she made a sandwich with Eleanor’s cucumbers and a bit of beef she still had left, and a mug of cocoa to go with it. It felt odd to her, on these long summer nights, to settle in for supper while it was still light outside. She sat with her feet up on the ottoman and a book in her hand, and it was from this position that she awoke some time later with a start. Her mug was still in her hand, empty and tilting madly toward the floor. It was dark. She must have gone right to sleep after eating, she decided, groggily peering at the mantel clock, a gift from her aunt. It was bloody nearly eleven o’clock, she grumbled silently. She peeled herself out of the chair and started toward the kitchen, wondering what had woken her up from such a sound sleep. There was never any traffic here at night and yet . . . she had a vague sense of having heard a car. It was a dream. The sound was the sound of being in France, at night, sitting behind a barn in the dark, waiting, and in the distance, a car, the faint whir of the engine rising and then falling away. Her dreams of France were still increasing. She should be having fewer nightmares, yet the safer she was, physically, with all these thousands of miles and worlds between her and Europe with all its memories, the more it all came back in the night when she was most unguarded. With a sigh, she placed her dishes in the sink and then went properly to bed, where she lay, wide awake, wondering what would happen to them all.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
London, England
“SIR.” THE YOUNG SECRETARY HELD aloft the receiver of a telephone. He looked nervous, as if he could anticipate a bad-tempered reaction to the interruption. He could.
“What? I’ve told you. If it’s my wife, I will call her back just before I leave.” The director was peering at a large map of some obscure part of the eastern Yugoslav frontier through a magnifying glass.
“No, sir. It’s not. It’s that Livingston at the Yard. I think you’d better take it.”
Livingston. Their man at the Yard. Now that was something. They’d not heard from him in weeks. They had almost begun to question the worth of their plant there, designed to give them a quiet word if one of their own fell afoul of the law, either through his own criminal tendencies, or in the service of their nation. The director put down the glass and stretched out his back. Leaning over a map was a young man’s game, he thought, and then remembered with some comfort that as a young man his back had hurt just as much when he hunched over for a long time.
“Yes.”
“Listen,” said Livingston at the other end of the line, “something’s come up. We need to meet, say in an hour at the place in Kensington.”
The director put the receiver back into the cradle. Now what? Livingston would not drag him out on a whim. So no one connected Livingston to the service, they had “a place” in nearly every borough near central London that they switched around, at least theoretically, but they’d rarely had to use them. Forty-five minutes later he was coming out of the tube station and orienting himself. The Clock, he was relieved to see, was a small pub, rather than the dreary teahouse they’d found themselves in the only other time they’d met. It was, for a change, a sunny day in what had been, so far, a soggy summer and the door was open. A number of patrons had wandered outside with their drinks, so he was pleased to see a small booth unused and in a fairly empty part of the room.
Over a bracing pint of bitter, Livin
gston pulled out a photo on the front page of an unfamiliar newspaper and tossed it onto the table between them. “I thought you’d want to see this.”
The director, who had swallowed a mouthful, put his glass down with a thud that made the contents spill. “Where did this come from?” He picked up the newsprint: Mystery Man Found Drowned in King’s Cove Creek.
“It was in a nice manila envelope with some photos of a dead man, all the way from Canada. What have you been up to? Canada is part of the Dominion, you know, yet you seem to have flooded it with spies. Oh, and this with it. I wasn’t able to spirit out the attached letter, but this is the bit I thought you’d really like to look at. They are looking for any information about this woman.” He placed a slip of notepaper on the table on which was written, “Lane Winslow.”
“What’s happened? Did you see the photo of the dead man?”
Like a conjurer, Livingston pulled a photo out of the inside of his jacket and plunked it down. It was a small photo of a photo and was grainy, but it was clearly the face of a dead man. “Do you know him?”
As bad as the image was and as dead its subject, this was undeniably a picture of Jack Franks, whom he had seen less than a month ago.
“Yes, I know him. Knew him. He’s one of the readers, Russian desk mainly, we used at Hartley House.”
“How is he connected to Winslow?”
The director didn’t answer. He had to think through what to say, how much he should reveal to the police, even tame police, and he was struggling to imagine how Franks had ended up dead but could reach only one conclusion, a conclusion that was absolutely unthinkable—that Lane Winslow had killed him. The Lane he knew would have been completely incapable of such an act. He swallowed the last of his pint and stood up, collecting the debris that Livingstone had produced. “Thanks. These are for me, I suppose?”
“Yeah, go on. But—you know who these people are and the Yard don’t. Are we planning to help them out? I imagine Canada is, figuratively speaking, on the line waiting for an answer.”
“I’ll let you know,” was all the director said.
HARRIS WAS PUTTING his tea mug into the basin in his kitchen. The water gushed out of the tap and he held the cup under the flow briefly and upended it on the counter. There was evidence that the cup had once, years ago, been white, but with years of this treatment it had been stained a mottled and cracked brown. He flicked the envelope with its single thin sheet of paper across the table furiously and, collecting a walking stick, pushed open the screen door with it, letting the door bang on his way out. Eleanor hadn’t said a thing when she’d handed him his envelope with its King George British stamp, but she’d been interested. He could see she was. She’d have already asked Kenny what he thought the War Office was writing to Harris about.
“This’ll be about my pension, I expect,” he’d said.
He wasn’t one for going for walks, preferring nowadays to climb onto his tractor and bump up the road to one of his orchards, but today his object was not the orchards. He went onto the path through the forest that led past Old Lady Armstrong’s—he could not think of it as belonging to that girl—and up to the creek.
Reflection was also not one of Harris’s habits. He was a man who lived within the actions he took every moment. It was as if he had abandoned thought in favour of action one day twenty years before, when he finally realized that nothing was to be gained and nothing more of interest was really going to happen to him. Now, what he did was who he was, and what he did followed a solitary, seasonal round of the same daily meals, working his orchard, picking and packing apples, sending them off, and going into town to take care of business as needed. He bought most of his groceries just down the road at the little shop in Balfour. He could not remember the last time he’d felt something like what was churning within him now. During the war, his war, that’s when. He felt a thrum of anxiety at the thought of it.
He swallowed as he walked along the barbed-wire fence that kept his land apart from Old Lady Armstrong’s. His sudden and unusual plunge into thoughts about his war made him realize for the first time the irony of his choosing barbed wire for his fencing. No one else did. Some still had the wood fencing from the previous century and some had upgraded to ordinary wire. He suppressed a grim inner laugh. He must have seen its effectiveness over there. He looked darkly at the unkempt old orchard on the other side of the fence and tried to will himself into his usual state of anger over the orchard being neglected by that girl, but the anxiety pounded on inside him.
He was wearing his heavy black galoshes, perhaps unsuitable for a cross-country walk, but as he wore them every day on his daily rounds, he’d not taken them off. The walk from his house at the bottom of the road out of King’s Cove, where it sat on a corner of land directly overlooking the Nelson road, to the exchange in the creek was a good third of a mile, mostly uphill. The path turned through the woods and was a little overgrown. When he was young, before the war, he’d gone many times on the path to meet John and Kenny. Well, John really. They were more of an age. They were cousins, after all.
He reached the clearing by the exchange and realized he was winded. With his hands on his knees, he stopped and bent over to gasp in air. His feet were hot in the rubber boots and sweat was beaded on his face. The sound of the water gurgling seemed to cool him. Recovering, he stood up and looked around him. Why here? was all he asked himself.
Cornwall, April, 1946
The bus let him off in what looked like a great, grassy moorland. He stood bewildered for a moment, looking about at the landscape of green scrub. He was on the brow of a hill down which the bus was now disappearing. No chance to call it back. A grey pall of cloud hung low and seemed to threaten rain. He could see no village, nor even the sea it was supposed to be nestled next to. When he turned around, he saw the signpost pointing to a narrow road that wound down to what he now realized was the sea, though it bore the same dull grey cast as the sky and so had been camouflaged for a moment. Sighing, he adjusted the grip on his small suitcase and started down the road.
It was a good fifteen minutes before he arrived at the upper reaches of the village, which had the air of a deserted town.
His wristwatch told him it was after four. People would be having tea, especially on a threatening day like this. He hadn’t thought much about what he’d do when he got here. All he had was the name of the town and the name of his mother. He stopped and put his case down, looking down the turning street, which descended steeply to the sea, a cove, a boatyard. A pub, he decided, would be his best bet. He didn’t know what he expected to find, or even why he’d bothered. He told himself that it was just part of his academic approach. Tie all the loose strings. His mother had died in this village giving birth to him. She might have been among relations here. As he neared the bottom of the town, he saw a very small sign swinging overhead with a weathered picture of a wheat sheaf. The Arish Mow. This would be it then. He pulled the door latch down and walked into a subdued, squat room that smelled largely of ale and smoke. A lamp burned dimly at the end of the bar and one or two people sat quietly with drinks before them. Franks assumed the afternoon hours had just started. “Good day,” he said, putting his case down. Two men in a booth under a tiny, deep-set window looked up at him. They were both wearing dark blue woollen caps and seemed infinitely old. The seafaring life, he thought. He wondered if they’d gotten so weathered fishing or mauling through the loot of ships wrecked along this remote shore. He smiled inwardly. These were stories from his childhood Boys’ Own books. Perhaps these two were bankers after all.
One of them nodded at him. Both stared at him, as if expecting him to do something wonderfully foreign like suddenly burst into a dance. “Can we help you?” someone said.
Franks swung around and found he’d been addressed by the publican, who was smiling at him in a friendly manner. “Out here for the fishing?” the man continued, giving the bar a wipe with the cloth he had in his hand.
“No. I mean
no to the fishing. You might be able to tell me something. I’m looking for any relations of an Elizabeth Conally. Is there a Conally family in this village?”
The publican shook his head. “Certainly not in my time. You boys know of a Conally family?”
“You don’t have to shout, mind. No Conally, no. How did you come to think there might be such a people here?” one of the old men asked.
Frank began to feel a slight sense of despair. He wouldn’t be able to leave the town until tomorrow and he quailed at even one night here in what seemed the farthest outpost in the kingdom. “I know that she died here. Her name was Elizabeth. She died in 1917, in November. I thought she might have been here among her own people.” Why would someone come here to have a baby and die if she had no people? What if she’d come here because her baby’s father lived here? The father could be anyone over the age of fifty. It could be one of these two specimens frowning at him now.
“Oh, well. That were a long time ago. Now, just a minute. Remember that lass that came to Rosemary in the war? That would have been right around ’17. Summertime maybe? She were well along, as I recall. Then I heard that she died, poor creature. What happened with that baby? Did it die?”
“Rosemary who?” asked Franks.
“Oh, now, that were Rosemary Trevelyan. She’s in the cottage on Copper Lane. She’s getting on now.”
“Is she on the telephone?” Franks was starting to feel hopeful again. He addressed the question to the publican, who he thought might know and even be able to provide an instrument for him to call her.
“No sir. Not too many of the old-timers are. Why don’t you sit down and have a drink? You look all in. It’s about a twenty-five-minute walk and all uphill. You’d better rest before you attempt it. She won’t be going anywhere. I imagine she could put you up in that great empty house of hers. I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything here. I’ve only got one room and it’s engaged at the moment.”
