by Mike Hollow
The figure before him was not the one he was looking for.
“Mrs Wilson,” he said. “Detective Inspector Jago. You may recall I visited Major Villiers earlier in the week.”
“Of course, Inspector. I recognize you. Do come in.”
“Thank you, Mrs Wilson, but I won’t beat about the bush: I need to speak to Major Villiers urgently. Can you fetch him, please?”
Mrs Wilson put on a sympathetic face.
“I’m very sorry, Inspector, but he’s not here. He left in the car some time ago, with his sister-in-law. I do hope you haven’t come far.”
CHAPTER 35
Billy sauntered out of Charing Cross tube station and headed for the Victoria Embankment. The war had made a few changes in his life, and one was that the government had adjusted shop opening hours, so that now they had to stay open till seven o’clock in the evening on Saturdays. Today, though, he’d managed to get an hour off, which he felt was a bit of an achievement. For some reason Rob seemed to have it easier in the docks. Billy would have thought they’d have to work harder down there, but his brother seemed to get time off whenever he wanted it. Today, for example, he’d got the whole day off. Probably something to do with the unions, he thought. Anyway, Billy was grateful for his hour, because it meant he had a little time to see the sights. He hadn’t often been up to the West End, except for the odd day out in the school holidays when he was a boy. Then he and Rob would come and spend all day wandering round the city, seeing the famous landmarks and watching the boats go by on the river.
The sign on the street he was walking down said Villiers Street. That’s a coincidence, he thought: that was the name of the bloke Mum worked for – the one who was sitting there dead in that van. Not likely to have been named after him, though, any more than the street Billy knew off Beckton Road called Carson Road was named after himself. The only connection was that Villiers Street looked like a rich street, and Carson Road definitely wasn’t.
At the end of the street he found a short flight of steps leading to the Embankment Gardens. He went in, and stopped to take a look at a grand stone arch, with every possible kind of ornate decoration, that looked as though it had been there for hundreds of years. He paused in front of a small plaque. It said this was the watergate that used to stand on the north bank of the Thames. The river was now more than a hundred yards away, because the Victorians had reclaimed the land by some clever engineering. The plaque said the gate was built in 1626 for George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham. So that was the Villiers the street was named after, thought Billy. He wondered whether Charles Villiers, the one his mum used to clean for, was some relation, a descendant perhaps. He’d certainly been one for putting on airs and graces, by all accounts, and liked to act superior to other people.
Maybe there was something in all that stuff Rob was saying at the pub, he thought. Some people are born rich and stay rich, while everyone else is born poor and stays poor. He’d been brought up by his mum and dad to know his place and respect his betters, but maybe that was just old-fashioned nonsense. Maybe Rob was right, and the world was going to change.
He strolled through the gardens, imagining he owned them. Yes, and pigs might fly, he thought, but then remembered the words Rob was always using: “Come the revolution”. The way he talked about it, when that happened everything would change. It sounded like heaven on earth. Rob might be right, but today didn’t look like a day for that kind of thing. He didn’t know much about revolutions, but he knew they happened in places like France and Russia, not in England.
He emerged from the gardens onto the Embankment and crossed the road to the parapet that ran along the side of the river. He leaned on the cool stone wall and studied the whirls and eddies in the water below. The river looked as though it was more or less at high tide. The water was a dirty brown colour, with a greasy sheen, and here and there bits of wood and other debris floated by. An unpleasant smell of rotten eggs came off it, as if the water itself were putrid. Surely no fish would survive in a river like this, he thought. People talked about the Thames as something majestic, but actually it was filthy.
To his left he could see the nine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and in the distance a glimpse of the dome of St Paul’s rising above the trees that lined the Embankment. He knew the Waterloo crossing was known as “jumpers’ bridge”, but he thought you’d have to be pretty desperate to choose jumping into this disgusting water as a way of ending your life. Then he remembered his mum. In an instant he felt guilty: it wasn’t right to treat something like that lightly, even if it was only inside your own head. He knew now that life could push the best of people, even someone like his mum, to the edge and even over it.
He was due to meet Rob here soon, but there was time to take a little walk. He set off towards the bridge, passing Cleopatra’s Needle. The weathered granite column, covered in baffling Egyptian hieroglyphics, looked completely out of place here on the Thames Embankment in the heart of London – such an ancient relic in such a modern setting. Passing under the bridge he came to Waterloo Pier, the floating police station used by the river police, moored at the side of the river. It consisted of a row of cheap-looking huts mounted on some kind of pontoon. Positioned here below the magnificent eighteenth-century river frontage of Somerset House, it seemed to Billy to look like an obedient dog lying at the feet of its master.
He walked almost as far as HMS President, the old Great War ship that was permanently moored here now and used by the Navy for training. He spent a while watching battered-looking tugboats towing barges quietly downstream on the far side of the river, then crossed the road to sit on an empty bench on the pavement. Across the river he could see a row of dilapidated old warehouses and wharves, and then the solemn splendour of the Oxo Tower, rising like a twentieth-century rival to Cleopatra’s Needle in its uncompromisingly modern art deco style.
Billy ran his eye up and down the solid-looking tower for a moment and wondered what it must have cost to build it and how much money a company like that must have to be able to afford it. That was probably what Rob meant when he talked about the bastions of capitalism, he thought. The things he came out with: anyone would think he’d swallowed a dictionary.
He pulled the folded newspaper out of his jacket pocket. Rob had given it to him this morning and told him to read it before they met up. It was the one Rob was always reading, the Daily Worker: yesterday’s edition. The front page was all about the Communist Party campaigning for better air-raid shelters for Londoners, and there was a report that on Wednesday evening the staff at Holborn tube station had abandoned their rule of turning away people who wanted to shelter in the station. It said two thousand people had turned up with blankets and pillows and spent the night there, and the transport staff had even provided emergency chemical toilets for them. He wondered how many: that was a lot of people to share a toilet. Even so, it showed Rob was right. He’d been going on about it for weeks, saying that the government ought to let people shelter in the tube, and now they’d done it. That was probably why he wanted Billy to read it.
Talking of Rob, he thought, it was time to get back to the Embankment Gardens: that was where they were supposed to be meeting. He didn’t know what they were going to do together, but with Rob it was bound to be fun. As long as they didn’t get caught out in a raid, of course.
CHAPTER 36
Dorothy walked slowly down the wide staircase. After chasing round Essex in Jago’s noisy car she had been glad to return to the opulent tranquillity of the Savoy Hotel in time for a wash and to change her clothes. Compared with some of the accommodation she had experienced on her foreign assignments, the Savoy gave no grounds for complaint. Once you were through the front door, she thought, if it weren’t for the sound of the sirens and the occasional distant thud of a bomb, you would hardly know there was a war on. This no doubt explained the presence of so many obviously wealthy people who had chosen to make it their temporary home, some of whom she now knew by sight. Even
here, though, the intensity of the past week’s bombing seemed to have left many guests feeling vulnerable, especially those on the upper floors. She had witnessed the nightly migration of the well-to-do down to the basement, where guests could shelter in bomb-proof, gas-proof accommodation. Some of them probably reckoned they were having a hard time of it, she thought, obliged to spend the night on camp beds and mattresses, but the freshly laundered bed linen suggested the hotel was not letting its standards slip.
Jago had kept his word and returned her in good time for the press briefing. The elegant meeting room in which it was held had been laid out with comfortably upholstered chairs, and the foreign press corps was well represented, with a particularly large contingent of Americans. Many of them were familiar faces, and some were old and valued friends. She had worked with them in all the hotspots of Europe over the last six years, and now they were together again, sharing old stories and creating new ones.
The briefing was more or less as she had expected it to be: a confident review of how the war was progressing, laced with illustrative stories and facts but strictly controlled. The man from the Ministry of Information did his best, providing figures for the recent air raids, claims of aircraft lost and enemy planes shot down, descriptions of the bombing damage and the morale of the population, but she could not help feeling throughout his talk that there was another story he was not telling. This was no surprise, of course, and nothing new. It was the government’s job to control the news, and hers to read between the lines.
Dorothy finished working on her article just before eight o’clock in the evening and decided to wander down to the hotel’s American Bar for a drink. It was the focus of her expatriate colleagues’ social life, so she was sure to be able to spend a pleasant hour or so there with them. Before she got there, however, the quiet of the corridor was broken by the sound of the air-raid alert. This part of London had experienced nothing like the bombing of the East End yet, but she felt obliged to go down to the shelter. No doubt she would find some of her friends there, and there was a bar quite close to the shelter. She could also pick up an evening paper in the front hall on the way down.
She skipped lightly down the staircase, but as she approached the ground floor she heard something odd.
It was not a sound she had heard before in the hotel. First a single sharp cry reached her, then a harsh clamour of voices. It sounded like a mob of people all talking animatedly at the same time, but it wasn’t like the sound of lively chatter at a party. There was something menacing about it, something angry. It was coming from the front hall. She continued to the bottom of the stairs and positioned herself where she could see what was happening. By now some of her fellow journalists had joined her, drawn, no doubt, by the noise, as she had been.
An extraordinary commotion was taking place just inside the hotel’s revolving entrance doors. Two things surprised her immediately. The first was the appearance of the people. At this time of the evening she was accustomed to seeing men in evening dress and women in fine gowns and fur stoles making their way into or out of the hotel. But the motley crew she could see across the front hall were dressed in the drab, shabby clothes of the working people she had seen all over the East End. The second was their behaviour. It wasn’t the self-possessed, cultured manner of the rich. They were jostling and elbowing their way into the hotel, past the top-hatted doorman, shouting and cursing like costermongers fighting over a pitch.
Dorothy counted several dozen men and women at the heart of the rumpus. Some of the women were carrying blankets and had small children in tow; one or two even had babies in their arms. Once the crowd had established their presence in the front hall, a few began to unfurl banners. It seemed to be some kind of organized protest. She could see that the hotel staff manning the reception desk looked nervous, and the three or four of their colleagues who were exposed on the public side of the desk were looking about anxiously as if in search of help.
One man stepped forward from the mob and began to address the room. His voice had the nasal rasp of the East End accent, which she still found difficult at times, but he seemed to be saying something about shelter – that the sirens had sounded, these people needed shelter, and the hotel had shelters, so they must be allowed in. This had the makings of an interesting confrontation, thought Dorothy, since as far as she knew, people with shelters were legally obliged to take in visitors during an air raid. She supposed it might depend on whether these people constituted visitors.
From the corner of her eye she saw a few police constables quietly entering from the street. Someone must have called them. So far they were simply watching, not intervening. Another figure joined the proceedings: a tall man in a black tailcoat, with the bearing and manner of a person in charge. Someone from the hotel management, she assumed. He spoke to the leader of the group, but Dorothy was too far away to hear what he was saying. She began to move closer, but before she could hear any more the incident seemed to be over as quickly as it had begun. The manager type was leading the mob away in the direction of the stairs to the basement floors. She slipped across the lobby and stopped one of the staff.
“What did he say to them?” she said.
“I think he invited them to come and have a cup of tea,” said the young man, and walked away.
Typical of these British, she thought: you think there’s going to be a riot, but they have a cup of tea instead. The fascinating story she had begun composing in her head seemed to have evaporated before her eyes. She watched the crowd of protesters ambling towards the stairs. Her eye was caught by the back view of one young man who was walking with an exaggerated swagger. Beside him was an even younger man, a boy really, who was casting an anxious glance around the hall, as if fearful that there might yet be some rough handling by the staff or the police. But they had already gone. His swaggering companion turned round to chivvy him along. She saw his face, and was surprised to realize that she had seen him before.
CHAPTER 37
It had rained overnight, and the pavement was still damp. The air had the fresh smell of a September morning, the warmth of summer slipping away and leaving only the prospect of harsher days to come. As Jago stepped out of his house and walked to his car, he felt tired. He had been up half the night in his Anderson shelter, uncomfortable and wishing he were in his own bed. He wondered what it would be like if the raids were still going on when the cold weather came: those shelters would be freezing.
It was Sunday, but it was set to be another working day. Part of his waking hours in the night had been spent turning over in his mind why Muriel Villiers should have taken it into her head to run away. He needed to track her down and find out exactly what was going on. He had phoned the station this morning and found Cradock already at work. He was pleased: it showed initiative. He had told Cradock to contact the neighbouring constabularies in the first instance and ask them to look out for Muriel and Arthur. They had taken Arthur’s car, and the petrol rationing would prevent them travelling too far afield, so they were most likely to be in one of those areas.
Jago would have to go in to the station himself later, but first he needed to pay some calls on a few ARP wardens. He also wanted to speak to Edward Villiers again. His discovery of Muriel’s mysterious departure yesterday had prevented him from asking Edward some important questions, but he needed the answers. He intended to get them today.
He arrived at the Villiers’ house well after eleven o’clock in the morning – late enough, he imagined, for a man like Edward to be up and about on a Sunday. He had assumed Edward did not attend church: the young man hadn’t struck him as the type.
He knocked at the front door, and it was opened by Edward. He was wearing a silk dressing gown and smoking a cigarette, and did not look as though he had been out of bed for long.
“Good morning, Inspector,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”
“Good morning, Mr Villiers. Pardon me for disturbing you, but I just wanted to br
ing you up to date with one or two matters in connection with your father’s death. It won’t take long.”
Edward showed him into the drawing room.
“Take a seat, Detective Inspector. You have my undivided attention.”
“Thank you, but I prefer to stand,” said Jago. “First I must ask whether you’ve heard anything more about the whereabouts of your mother. I checked at your uncle’s house yesterday, and Mrs Wilson the housekeeper told me that she and your uncle had left together.”
Edward gave a low whistle and looked surprised.
“Well I never. The saucy devils,” he said. “Do you think they’ve run off together?”
“All I know is what Mrs Wilson told me.”
“She phoned me last night, you know. My mother, that is. She said she wanted to let me know she was safe, but when I asked her where she was she wouldn’t tell me. I did actually ask her if she was with my uncle, and she said no. But she sounded flustered, so my guess is she wasn’t telling me the whole truth. I wonder what they see in each other.”
Edward was moving around the room as he spoke. It struck Jago that while the young man’s voice sounded calm and self-controlled, his movements suggested that he was on edge.
“I’m anxious to find your mother,” said Jago.
“I’m sure you are,” said Edward. “It doesn’t look very good for her to disappear with her brother-in-law days after her husband is murdered. But there’s nothing more I can tell you about it. Her disappearance is every bit as much of a surprise to me as it is to you.”
