The Smog (A Jean Clarke Mystery Book 1)

by Timothy Allsop

  His apartment was a little dingy and it did not help that he had packed the living room full of mismatched furniture. There were two low-seated armchairs nestled around the fireplace, upholstered in a grey heavyweight fabric and adorned with a pattern of brown autumnal leaves. Positioned on a small wooden table between the two chairs stood a large twenties lamp with a wooden base carved in the shape of an elegant woman. A solid roll top bureau, Victorian and in excellent condition, dominated the space below the window, while a modern red Formica table jutted out from the wall opposite the fireplace. The table was folded down at one end but it was still large enough to fit three people comfortably around it. There were already plates and bowls laid out for breakfast, which Jean knew Harry must have set out the previous evening before Phyllis and he had gone to the theatre. He was a fastidious creature and the gathering of furniture testified to that fact; everything was too much in its place and had the feeling it was there to be looked at rather than used. The books peered slyly from the shelves; the curtains bulged in their tassel hooks eager to smother anyone who came too close, and the air in the room was as still and deadly as that of a museum.

  ‘Have you eaten anything?’ he asked, directing her to sit in an armchair next to an unlit fire.

  ‘No. Have you?’

  ‘I’m not hungry but I think perhaps I should eat something. If I make you a sandwich I could probably manage a little myself.’

  ‘We shall force each other to eat then,’ she said, still not wanting to give in to her hunger. ‘Do you mind if I light the fire?’

  ‘Yes, go ahead. I’m sorry.’

  Jean started to work on the fireplace, scraping out the ash through the grate with a brush and then used a shovel to gather it up and into a bucket which sat next to the fire. She lifted out some kindling from a wicker basket and then she looked around for some paper. There was nothing except the copy of the Evening News. Being careful to leave the story concerning Phyllis she tore off a couple of sheets, screwed up the paper, and arranged it evenly around the kindling. She took a box of matches from the mantelpiece and lit the paper. The fire took hold quickly and she was worried it would burn itself out but the kindling was dry and burnt well. When it was underway she lifted a log from a pile stacked to the right of the fireplace, positioning it carefully on top of the flames. Satisfied with her work she returned the matches to the mantelpiece but as she did she noticed an elegant blue box sitting at one end. On opening it she found Harry’s officer badge from the Norfolk regiment, which depicted the figure of Britannia.

  Harry had taken part in the Normandy campaigns. He returned, like so many of the men, quieter and more reserved. There was the occasional anecdote, but only when Harry was drunk enough to let down his guard and even then he would often catch himself short half way through a story and fall silent, withdrawing and disappearing in front of his sister into a memory which had become too articulate in his head to be spoken. Jean found out from other male friends snippets of what happened on the continent, of the men who had been shot before they had even touched foot on French soil and of others who had survived by lying under their dead comrades. Equally, there were many who never fired a shot. Whatever her brother’s experiences had been, he had never discussed them with his sister and she was convinced that he never would.

  Jean, for her part, had rather enjoyed the war. She spent much of it working as a Land Girl which was hard but not dangerous work. It had been the only time in her life when she felt independent and she found satisfaction from her body being put to work in new ways. Now that she thought about it, she had relished the uncertainty of that time, but it felt much simpler to the wrangling uncertainty that plagued her now. As she closed the box and returned it to the mantelpiece she wondered how Harry coped with the shift from soldiering to his current work in accounting. He had always shown an aptitude for numbers but exuded no real sense of gratification for it. Perhaps he believed marrying Phyllis was his great rebellion, his answer to the war and the means by which he had given his new life a degree of credence. Still, Jean could hardly bring herself to think of marriage as mutinous and while divorce was perhaps a little better, she had begun to think that never marrying at all was the only way to live. She moved to the curtains and peered out at the smog. The word annulment slipped onto her lips and it was a delicious sound in her head. There was so much of her life she wanted to unmake, so many memories she wished to dissolve and as her eyes strained to see anything it seemed the smog, like a great pool of aspirin over her head, was advocating the dissolution of every painful thing in her life.

  ‘Would you like to give Frank a phone and let him know that you’ve safely arrived?’ Harry said, appearing from the kitchen with two plates of potted beef sandwiches.

  ‘No, it’s fine. He won’t be at home,’ she answered, pulling herself up into one of the armchairs.

  Harry handed her one of the plates and sat down beside her.

  ‘Working late, is he?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, although she had no idea what her husband would be doing. She went on before Harry could speak. ‘What we need to do Harry is check all her known contacts. What was the name of the pub where you both met?’

  ‘The Gun. But she’s not worked there in over a year. She’s been working part time at a café in the east of the city. I told her she didn’t have to. We have enough money for the both of us but she insists on keeping a job.’

  Jean was unimpressed by Harry’s attitude to Phyllis’s employment and Harry sensed it. He made an effort of eating his sandwich and for a while they said nothing.

  ‘Are you going to start back at the solicitor’s?’ he said, finally.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Jean too had followed her mother into the same profession, working as a secretary for a solicitor named Frank Ashton, who she ended up marrying after a great deal of encouragement from her parents and admirable persistence on his part.

  ‘Is Frank all right with your coming down here?’

  ‘He’ll cope just fine. Let’s concentrate on finding Phyllis. I want to make a list of all the places she might go,’ said Jean.

  The siblings finished eating and worked out a list of places worth investigating, Harry writing the addresses on a scrap of paper. Jean was surprised that Harry struggled to come up with only half a dozen possibilities; all he could suggest was the address of a friend, a café called Albert’s in which she worked a few months back and three pubs he had known her to frequent.

  ‘Do the two of you not go out very much?’ Jean asked, thinking that if she were fortunate enough to live in London she would make a much better effort to meet people and see something of the city.

  ‘We keep to ourselves,’ Harry replied, with a half shrug and offered no further explanation.

  ‘We should go check out these places this evening. Do you have a photo of her, other than this one in the paper?’

  ‘I only have two from our wedding day. Just a moment. I have it in a drawer here somewhere in the bureau.’

  ‘You keep your wedding photos in a drawer?’

  Her brother laughed feebly as he removed a key from a small clay pot on the mantelpiece and carefully unlocked the hatch of the bureau. He pulled out one of the drawers almost fully and stood awkwardly looking into it, preoccupied, as if he was looking for something he knew was already lost.

  ‘It’s Phyllis. She doesn’t like seeing pictures of herself. She made me put them away,’ he said, leafing through the papers until he found the two photographs wrapped in tissue paper.

  Jean frowned, thinking that Phyllis was probably the sort of woman who loved looking at herself and that Harry had undoubtedly been taken in by a severe case of false modesty.

  ‘You should make more of an effort with her. Really, the way you men go about things sometimes, it would make any woman despair.’

  ‘I am very attentive. You know me, Jean. I am very conscientious with things of that nature.’

  Je
an felt herself wincing at her brother’s answer, as though Phyllis were some kind of accounts to be balanced. She knew from experience that men were very capable of being attentive about all the wrong kind of things.

  ‘I suppose you were more like mother than father in that respect,’ she said, as he handed her a small photo.

  ‘Just as well.’

  ‘He wasn’t all that bad,’ Jean said.

  ‘Neither was he as good as you remember him.’

  ‘Why do you attack him so?’

  ‘I think he treated mother very badly,’ he said, emphasizing the last four words as though Jean needed to be reminded of a long forgotten fact. He stumbled for some further thoughts but found that he had too much to say and pushed them back down. ‘That is all there is to it really.’

  Jean gave him a weary look. At some point in his teen years her brother had developed this habit of only half speaking, and it annoyed her intensely.

  ‘Well he had his moods, but I think a lot of that was to do with the old metal plate,’ Jean said, tapping the side of her skull.

  Her father nearly died on the first day of the Somme when a bullet ricocheted off the right side of his head, smashing part of his skull. The doctors thought he would be dead within a few days, but her father rallied. A surgeon patched up the hole in his skull with a metal plate and the army sent him back to England, the prognosis still poor, but after six months he was improving and the doctors who continued to care for him simply shrugged and said it was a miracle. He used to rub the plate continuously and no doubt it bothered him, but her brother seemed unwilling to admit that his father’s behaviour was probably due to the fact he had a near permanent headache.

  ‘It doesn’t matter anymore. He’s been dead three years,’ her brother said, coldly before continuing, ‘We should head out soon.’ His mouth turned down at the corners and she could tell Harry considered the matter closed.

  ‘Yes, well you can go and check the public houses and I’ll have a look at this café. Someone must have seen her,’ Jean answered as her brother brought out a half empty bottle of scotch from a cabinet and poured out two fingers’ worth.

  ‘Would you like a little to keep out the cold?’ he said, rocking the bottle in his hand so the orange liquor swirled around the inside of the bottle.

  Jean nodded and watched as her brother poured a glass for her. His hands were shaking and she could tell that he was angry. He looked as though he was about to cry but he knocked back the scotch and the alcohol seemed to have an immediate restorative effect. She drank hers more slowly and hoped too that some sense of healing would pass through her blood and into her bones, but instead the alcohol seemed to sit low in her belly, hard and sharp as flint.

  ‘There’s something else, Jean,’ Harry said.

  ‘What is it?

  ‘I would have told you earlier, but with you being ill and everything else...’

  ‘What is it Harry?’

  ‘Well, we went to see a doctor nearly three months ago now.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She’s expecting.’

  Jean tried to focus on the empty glass in front of her.

  ‘I see,’ she said.

  ‘She seemed so upset about it and I don’t know why.’

  ‘Three months?’

  ‘A little over I think. As far as the doctor told us, everything seems fine.’

  ‘We better find her then.’

  They took the underground train to Moorgate and walked from there. The temperature had dropped and the smog was a thick grey paste across the entire city. They reached Bethnal Green Road or rather they reached the opening to a road with a sign marked Bethnal Green Road because a few feet beyond everything solid was lost in a grey miasma. Jean felt it was an invitation to annihilation, the chance to walk out of existence into a world without limbs. It was a tempting thought.

  ‘I’ll meet you back at the house at ten at the latest,’ she said.

  ‘But I thought we’d meet back at the station in half an hour?’

  ‘I know my way back to the station. Let’s meet back at the house. We’re more likely to get lost waiting for one another in this old soup of a night.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  Harry had written the address of the café on a piece of paper for her with directions from Bethnal Green Road. She walked along quickly, glancing down repeatedly at the paper, for fear the smog might somehow erase the ink, as it had everything else. There was no doubt the weather had created the perfect conditions for someone to disappear, Jean thought, a little too perfect. But had Phyllis left of her own accord or had someone got to her? And why was Harry not at his wits end? It was as though he had been expecting something like this to happen. There was something about the house that troubled Jean too but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  She lost track of where she was going and became disorientated, losing count of how many roads she had passed. She found herself on a street Harry had not marked on the map. She tried to work her way back but then stopped. Something flapped by her head and onto the ground. Something living. She edged towards it but then two circular lights appeared. They seemed to swell and grow. A horn sounded and she moved out of the way just in time as the two lights took shape as part of a car. There was a popping noise. The car moved on and she could have sworn there was no driver behind the wheel. A moment of quiet followed. Then more flapping, but this time frantic. Jean moved towards it.

  A pigeon. In the middle of the road. Half of its body was stuck to the pavement where the wheel of the car had run over it. As she moved closer, it beat its wings ferociously. Tyre markings were visible on the pink flesh which lay flattened on either side of the feathers. Yet the front half of its body was intact and full of life, as were its wings, which arched up and down with such force that it was suddenly clear to her how miraculous it was that any bird was able to fly. It could not understand why it was unable to lift itself free. It stretched its head, revealing a pair of manic red eyes. It was the pigeon which had made the popping sound; its feathery sack burst by the rubber of the wheel, a wheel which was now trailing the beast’s blood across the streets of London. It began to grow tired. All she had to do was stamp on its head. Lift her foot high and then bring it down hard. But she’d already imagined the feel of its skull giving way, the slow twitches of death it would induce and she could not bring herself to go through with it.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She pictured it in flight with its wings stretched out and looked up but there was no sky to be seen, only a dry rain of dust sifting down upon her and everything else. Feeling queasy, she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a handkerchief and pushed it firmly against her mouth. As she did she caught the soft aroma of Frank’s aftershave and her hand instinctively clasped at her stomach in desperation. The empty feeling returned and she felt as sullen as a discarded rag doll that had been left to molder. She stood still for a moment and tried to draw her thoughts on to something else, but then came the rumble of another car. She saw the two lights move towards her and she looked on hopelessly as it approached the bird. Only at the last moment did she turn her head but she could not resist turning back to see that the job had been done. At least it wasn’t in pain anymore, she thought, but there was no comfort in that fact when what lay before her were the violent remains of a random act of chance.

  Jean moved away as fast as she could, the smog pressing down on her like a smothering pillow. She felt her way along a wall until it turned into the glass of shop fronts and her hands pushed at each of the doors but they were locked and all that was visible were the ominous shapes of their wares. She knocked on the doors in the hope that someone would hear but there was no-one about. Her chest tightened and made her breathing shallow. She pushed the handkerchief against her face and started to run again, conscious of the soot in the air, its granular quality, and how it was now settling inside her lungs. It was to
o much to feel this kind of invasion of her anatomy because it made her keenly aware of her body and how she had survived. She was supposed to be dead but for some cruel reason she was still breathing, but what she was supposed to do now, she had no idea. The life she had expected as little as two months ago was now as choked as the city which surrounded her.

  TWO

  Harry never made it to the third pub on his list. When he arrived at The Gun it was busy, busier than he had anticipated on such a grotty night. He half expected to see his wife at one of the tables jabbering away to the other customers, but he was so used to her manners he could tell from a quick glance that she was not there. He asked the landlady and a few of the patrons but no-one had seen Phyllis in at least two months. Out of politeness he ordered a single scotch but as soon as the landlady turned to serve someone else he downed it and moved on to the second place.

  The Ten Bells was a shabby affair with an equally shabby clientele. The curtains which reached from just above the uncarpeted floor up to the high ceiling were thick with dust and frayed at the bottoms, the plastered walls were deeply cracked, the tables scratched and stained like rotten teeth and the men around them looked half dead. The landlord kept the place badly lit so that only the regulars would feel safe to navigate its gloomy terrain, and as Harry entered he felt the patrons eyeing him shiftily from their stools.

  He rarely ventured into any of the east end pubs, and on most of those occasions he had been with Phyllis. When they first courted Phyllis preferred going to the west end and he liked to take her to places she didn’t know. Besides, he felt more at home with the organized street patterns of Mayfair and Bond Street. For him the east of the city was a labyrinthine world and now that it was subsumed in the smog it felt all the more unnerving to him, as though the buildings and alleys were constantly shifting and spiraling around one another, leading people down their own peculiar path to ruin. It brought out a familiar feeling in him of not belonging, which made him remorseful for having not made more of an effort to fit in with Phyllis’s life. Of all the women he had been with, and there had been a fair number, she had always been the most alluring. He could not put his finger on what it was precisely, but she managed to evoke in him some sense of urgency, and when he was in her company, he found it easier to engage his emotions in a way he rarely felt. He liked to hear her talk. She would tell him stories of the drunks and spivs and working men who laughed and squabbled in the bars she frequented. Some of the tales were tragic. She had met dozens of returned soldiers who ended up in grim lodging houses or on the streets because they could find no work. There were occasional brawls and one ghastly incident in which a male lover had knifed a girl in the face for being unfaithful to him. He listened with a mixture of quiet solemnity and delight but he also had half his mind on how gratifying it was to hear because it was like being told an adventure story when one was merely in a state of imagined peril.