by John Gardner
‘Sounds like you’ve fixed everything.’
‘I do my best.’ She flapped her hands in a gesture that could have meant that she hadn’t really done well enough.
‘Come and have lunch.’
They ate what was on offer in the canteen: boiled bacon with chips and cabbage, followed by the raspberry jelly and cream which was in effect a very rubbery flavoured gelatine covered with sickly sweet Carnation tinned milk that often had to do for cream in these dingy days. The cabbage was disgusting, but the chips and the boiled bacon weren’t half bad. It could only get worse.
Suzie was just starting on the jelly when the dispatch rider — who rode the link with the Yard — came in looking for her. So she had to take him along to the office, unlock her drawer and get his signature after she handed over the papers and her note to Dandy Tom.
‘Hear you took a phone call from our friend Josh Dance,’ she said when she was seated across from Shirley again.
‘Yes. Strange. Seemed to think Emily Baccus wasn’t dead — at least wasn’t at three o’clock yesterday morning.’
‘But we knew she was very dead by then.’
‘I more or less told him but he insisted that she’d been in his office a little before three in the morning.’
‘He talk to her?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Drunk?’
‘Didn’t sound it.’
‘Just sounded irrational, eh?’
‘I got the feeling he believed what he was saying.’
‘I’ll have a word after Christmas. Remind me, Shirl.’
‘I will.’
After another minute. ‘These chums you arrested this morning,’ Suzie began.
‘You want the truth?’
‘If you’d be good enough.’
‘I’ve already told you, Skip.’
‘Tell me again.’
‘I think the boys steal with monotonous regularity from elderly people in the blackout. I believe it totally because they were all far too nonchalant about being banged up. Personally I’m sure they’d prefer to be banged up than go and do their duty for King and country. All three’ve got their call-up papers. I’ve seen them and they’ve to report to the Induction Centre and Infantry School by twelve noon on 3rd January 1941. They’re terrified of it because they know life’s going to be uncomfortable and they could end up being killed. A twelve months sentence they can all do standing on their heads because they have contacts inside. It’ll be unpleasant but they’ll be fine. So I’d hope that we let them go, and then provide an honour guard to the station on 3rd January.’
‘And the girls?’
‘Fitted up. Both of them. Separately they had visits from two of the boys last night and there was plenty of time for the lads to drop the stuff on them. I only say this because I know what I told you earlier. Both the girls’re related to Cathy Watts, and one of them is also related to the Pegler girl. The Balvak boys are so sweet. They never forget do they? And they’re quite content to see those three lads go down the chute, as long as the girls are popped inside as well.’
Don’t let it happen, Suzie told her. If it’s not cast iron, make sure they go home for Christmas, but make certain those boys get their guard of honour to Catterick on 3rd January. ‘Do it,’ she instructed.
Then, ‘Just one thing, Shirley,’ and she told her to watch Pip Magnus; outlined the business with the pistol. ‘Watch him like a bird of prey, Shirl.’
Then she went off to take a listen and look at the interrogations. The boys and the remaining girl were still denying everything, and everyone was telling a different story, singing out of tune, marching to a different drum. Shirley would be able to make short work of it, call a halt and send them all home for Christmas. Bah, humbug.
When she finally went along to the front counter to sign off, there were several Christmas cards waiting for her and a small soft package wrapped in silver paper. She collected everything and opened the cards as she rode back to the Strand on the Tube. All the lads, plus Sergeants Osterley and Lomax, had done cards for her, which was something.
Back at the flat she opened the package. Shirley had put a card with the gift. There you go, Skip. A couple of pairs of those ritzy parapants you fancied — From Mary Christmas and Shirley Cox.
At half-past eight she was thinking about having a bath when the telephone rang.
‘Suzie with a zed,’ Dandy Tom Livermore said. ‘Thank you for your billet-doux. It’s all very interesting, but I think now’s the time to distance yourself from the politics of Camford nick.’
‘I just don’t like pistols being waved around in the CID room, Guv.’
‘Quite right. Leave it alone now unless your DI brings the matter up after Christmas.’
Stay shtum, she thought, so after a count of around ten he said, ‘I’ve just spoken to Ernie Prothero at Acton nick.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Acton — the Barbara Batchelor killing. ‘Bubbles’ Batchelor.
‘The uncle’s coughed. Not a coincidence. Said he’d read about the Cambridge girl and got hold of the piano wire from a shop in the High Street. Bought the insulating tape at Woolworths. Prothero’s confirmed both. Sounds right, so I think we can cross it off our list.’
‘Right, Guv.’ Why did she feel disappointed?
‘So what’ve we got, Suze?’
‘A loony who strangles girls at random?’
‘Yes. Or?’
‘A man who has a grudge against each of these women, and who is mad enough to kill them one at a time.’
‘Or?’
She thought for almost half a minute. ‘Give up, Chief.’
‘Go away and think about it. Where would you hide a car, Suzie? And what would you do with a spider in a bottle? A spider with a deadly toxic bite.’
‘Pour sugar on it? You speak in riddles, O Great One.’
‘Have a nice time with the Brylcreem Boys. Ring me after Christmas.’
*
There had been no warnings and no bombs for a couple of nights. When that happened there were usually enough clients to keep Lavender happy until around eleven o’clock. She rarely worked on a Sunday, but tonight she had arranged to see two old clients. One at ten, the other at ten forty-five, so she left just before midnight. Edith the Maid didn’t come in from Camford just for the two and a half hours, so Lavender made sure that Golly was around, though she told him to stay out of the way as she knew the clients. ‘Don’t want to frighten them, do we, Golly?’
Just after Lavender left, the telephone rang. He wasn’t allowed to pick up the telephone as a rule, but Golly was sitting right next to it looking through the Tatler, left by a client. He automatically stretched his arm out, picked up the telephone and grunted.
‘Golly?’ the voice at the other end said, and he knew straight away that it was the voice he heard at night, in his ear, when he was asleep. ‘Golly, you haven’t forgotten have you? It’s very important. What do you have to do on Christmas Day, Golly?’
He told her and got so excited that, for the first time in ages, he wet himself.
Seventeen
It was a bitter, bright morning and from the front of the car as it swung in through the main gates of Middle Wallop Aerodrome, Suzie Mountford could see a Spitfire turning in on its final approach. The car she sat in was a Humber, painted Air Force blue over all, with a RAF roundel on the offside bumper and its registration number stencilled in white on the nearside. Over the car’s engine noise, she could hear the sweet throb and whine of the Spit’s Rolls-Royce Merlin. The aeroplane’s undercarriage was down, and the big flaps drooped below the trailing edges of the wings as it lined up with the runway.
In the distance leafless trees were hunched together on a skyline of ploughed fields, the brown, corrugated earth curving gently up to a sharp horizon. The car turned right inside the gate, driving along a grey macadam perimeter track, so now the aircraft was in front of them, to the left, flattening out and beginning to drop, nose up, towards the mo
wed and smooth grass strip. She could see the wide runway was not flat, as she’d supposed, but sloped in a shallow fall towards more trees and the airfield’s main buildings behind her.
Over the hedge, the aircraft’s engine pitch suddenly changed as the pilot increased power, lifted the undercarriage, and climbed away to go round the circuit again. She wondered why. Was there a problem? Or had the pilot gone round on a whim?
Suzie had today’s Daily Mail folded on her lap, neatly creased with the murder story upwards. She had opened the paper just as her train was pulling out of Waterloo Station and, turning the page, she bumped straight into Emily Baccus’s face across three columns, with the headline, PROPERTY HEIRESS FOUND STRANGLED.
Good for Dandy Tom, she thought. The story had not got out in time for the national papers on Saturday — though it had squeezed into one of the evening finals. This morning the dailies were trying to catch up.
Yes, well, read all about it. Her eyes went down and focused on the photograph of the late Emily Baccus and immediately saw the likeness that had been so bothering her. That’s who she looks like. Oh yes, of course. Now you see it, now you don’t, and she hadn’t seen it until now. Plain as the nose on your face. She was startlingly like him. Susannah, she thought, you’re a prune not to have seen it before.
Like two peas in a pod, I hear, Dandy Tom had said about Charlotte and herself. She wondered how he would feel about this likeness. When she got back to London, after Christmas, she’d ring Josh Dance and ask him. Might even take up that invitation to have dinner with him. She could put some judicious questions to him between the Woolton Pie and the grilled snoek and chips without making a song and dance about things. ‘What was her lineage, Emily Baccus? Is she related to anyone we know, Josh?’
‘This is it, miss.’ The RAF driver didn’t really know what to call her: ma’am? Miss? Sarge? So he had stuck at miss. ‘609 Squadron, “A” Flight Dispersal, miss.’ It was a long, divided Nissen hut, part communal where the pilots could relax, and part office space for the paperwork. A sergeant came out through the dispersal hut door and didn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know whether he should salute me or paint me, she thought and got out of the car to help him make up his mind.
‘You looking for Squadron Leader O’Dell?’ he asked with a schoolboy grin.
‘Yes. I’ve got an appointment with him.’
‘From London?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re police then.’
‘To see Squadron Leader O’Dell, yes.’ Going around in circles like the Spit she could still hear.
When she had told the driver that she was going to see O’Dell he said. ‘Squadron Leader O’Dell? Lovely man. They’d follow him anywhere, the pilots. Straight as an arrow.’
She stood on the hard, frosted grass, and wrapped her coat around her, hands snug in the pockets, pulling the skirts close, her wrists crossed, just below the junction of her thighs. For a fraction of a second she thought of Jo Benton’s gaffe, ‘winter drawers on’.
A ridiculously young flight lieutenant came out, wearing a Mae West over his jacket, and flying boots carelessly unzipped on his feet. ‘Hey Bas,’ he called to the sergeant. ‘This the lady for Fordy?’ and Bas called back that it was, making the flight lieutenant light up like a Christmas tree — lovely youthful grin and everything. Warmed the cockles, Susannah thought.
‘If you want Fordy at the moment you’ll have to use a sky hook.’ He sounded like a schoolboy as well. Could’ve equally said, ‘O’Dell’s in the San. Matron won’t let him come to morning prayers.’
Blade on the feather
Shade off the trees
She turned to the driver and wondered if she should take her cases out of the Humber’s boot.
‘Don’t you worry about those, miss. I’m to stay close to you. At your service, so to speak, until I drive you back to Andover station.’
‘Oh bother, I wanted to go to Overchurch,’ she said softly.
‘Easier still, miss. I can run you to Overchurch. Be glad to.’
The flight lieutenant came bounding up like a puppy anxious to please. Given half a chance he’d have put his paws on her shoulder, climbed all over her and licked her face. ‘That’s Fordy’s crate coming in now,’ he drawled.
The same Spitfire she had seen from the car was over the hedge again, dropping effortlessly towards the grass. Five more aircraft were parked in what seemed to be a haphazard fashion around the dispersal area, and mechanics were finishing off some work on the nearest one, fitting a panel back over the engine in the nose and loading long belts of ammunition into the wings. In this incomplete state, she thought it looked like a beautiful wounded bird, and she could smell the compelling mixture of oil and aircraft dope that was its particular scent.
‘Simnel,’ the flight lieutenant said, sticking out a hand. ‘Just plain Simnel, one l, as in Lambert, the Pretender chappie. No relative. M’father says we’re descended from scullions and dairymaids. Fordy’s been on an air test.’
Must be glorious here in summer, she thought. The Spitfires buzzing around like big wasps and the scent of hay mingling with oil and cordite.
Jolly flying weather.
And a hay harvest breeze.
And these overgrown children had spent the summer here, lighting and dying in the cramped cockpits, showing a bravery, courage and honour far beyond their years.
The Spitfire touched down: a perfect three-point landing, the canopy open and speed bleeding off as it rolled away from them, downhill and slowing. Already there was another aircraft, a Hurricane this time, in the circuit.
‘You’ve done a lot of fighting from here?’ she asked the young officer regretting her ineptness as soon as she’d spoken.
‘I should say so, yes. Had a few tangles with Jerry from this ’drome. I came here with Fordy. We’re the only two left of the original “A” Flight.’ And she caught just the hint of something else behind his voice and in his eyes as she looked at him. Not fear exactly, but a longing for it all to be over, one way or the other.
The aircraft noise got louder as Fordham O’Dell taxied his Spitfire back to Flight Dispersal. He raised an acknowledging hand as he bumped past and, gunning the engine, turned the aeroplane into place and stood on the brakes as he closed the throttle. The ground crew swarmed out, sticking the chocks under the wheels, a corporal climbing on to the wing root.
Just forward of the canopy, O’Dell s Spitfire had a small painting of Jane, from the Daily Mirror’s strip cartoon. Jane was always loosing her clothes and running around in bra and gossamer-thin pants. She lay below the canopy looking provocative, one elbow resting on the words ‘Orf Again!’ Below the painting were two rows of swastikas. She counted nine as the pilot unfastened his harness, lowered the access hatch on the left of the cockpit and climbed out, helped by the ground-crew corporal.
‘Hello. You’re from London, yes?’ Public-school voice, pleasant smile, looked about eleven. Maybe twelve at a pinch.
‘Yes,’ she called back as he sorted out his cap from inside his battledress blouse and jammed it, slanted, on his head. It was battered and all the stiffness had gone out of it. The story was that the tighter pilots sat on their uniform caps, but obviously O’Dell flew with his tucked inside his jacket.
So here he was. The man who had led Jo Benton down the racy run that had ended in the Coram Cross Road house, sprawled dead in a passage. Of course, if it hadn’t been Fordham O’Dell it would’ve been someone else. Flint had said it though. Her hobby was sex? She’s been like that since Fordham O’Dell first tupped her one Saturday night in Glenbervie Woods. And here was the young Lothario now, and he couldn’t have looked a less likely candidate.
Apart from being such a child, he was rake thin and wiry. He also looked slightly unkempt. Frayed at the edges. She had expected a mature figure, handlebar moustache, florid, maybe even debauched. What she got was the slim young fellow-me-lad who, at first sight, couldn’t say boo to a goose, and seemed slightly hes
itant in his speech, as though he was carefully weighing up the words: putting his brain in gear before committing himself.
‘Been keeping the lady company, Jamie?’ He grinned at Simnel.
‘Ra-ther, Fordy. Wizard popsy, eh?’
Do they really talk like that? she mused, realizing that they did. Schoolboyish and slangy to distance themselves from the fire and turmoil in their natural element, the heavens where they fought and occupied their business in great vastness. These men see the works of the Lord: and his wonders in the air.
‘You watch out for young Jamie,’ O’Dell warned her. ‘You know what they call him? No, not going to tell you. Don’t want to sully the ears of a pure young girl, eh? Been giving you the scullions and dairymaids line-shoot, has he? Yes, well, many a woman’s gone to her doom because of Simnel and the scullions and dairymaids line.’ He slowed and now spoke as though imparting a great confidence. ‘Not true. All a line-shoot. He can’t cook and even has difficulty putting the milk on his cornflakes. Scullions and dairymaids indeed.’
They walked between the aircraft on their way to the dispersal hut. Close up, the aeroplanes were less perfect. In the air, their natural element, they showed off their lines and looked wonderfully clean. Close up you could see exactly what they were for — hurtling out of the sky and pouring bullets into an enemy. Platforms for weapons. Here, walking past them, you were sensitive to the wear and tear, the places where the paint had worn off, revealing silver metal underneath; the marks where the mechanics and armourers had taken off hatches, unscrewed panels, removed plates. Also there were patches hurriedly stuck over defects she didn’t want to enquire about — not too deeply anyway.
