The War Widow

by Tara Moss

  In anticipation of this late visit, Billie had changed out of her ripped ensemble of the afternoon – yet more mending to be done – and donned dark blue cotton pants, an ivory silk blouse, a navy driving coat and old over-ankle leather-soled boots which could be easily cleaned. She usually preferred the quieter crepe or fabric soles, so the sharp sound of her feet on the stones in the dark had come as a surprise.

  Another thought pulled at her, one she couldn’t let go of. Was there corrupt police interference in this affair? If so, why?

  As death took a rest for no one, the death house operated day and night, but apart from the necessary police identifications made by relatives of the deceased, it didn’t welcome living civilian visitors. Billie, however, was an exception. She knocked at the door and was let in, her arrival met with the unabashedly delighted smile of the young man who had been stationed at the desk. Billie had known whom to expect. She’d cultivated a warm welcome in this cold place. Despite the silent company, it could be a lonely sort of place, she imagined, most of all at night.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Benny,’ Billie said.

  ‘Oh, call me Donald, Ms Walker. It’s such a pleasure to see you.’ He did indeed look pleased.

  ‘Or perhaps I should say good morning?’ She looked at her delicate watch.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, it’s quite late.’

  Donald Benny was a slim, bent fellow with a complexion nearly as waxen as that of the clients he guarded. He was about Sam’s age, twenty-four, but there the similarity ended. Bookish in appearance, he wore round spectacles for his vision, a white collared shirt and a dark tie visible above a collarless white lab coat. On this occasion it had no noticeable blood stains or unidentifiable marks on it, which Billie took as a good sign. As usual, Benny appeared entranced by Billie’s presence. She smiled warmly at him, having no intention of letting her hold on him go until she was ready to leave.

  ‘I brought you a book,’ Billie said and reached into her satchel to reveal a paperback detective novel. ‘A Georgette Heyer.’ Heyer was better known for her historical romance novels set in the Regency and Georgian eras, but she’d written some fine detective books.

  Benny’s cheeks had coloured, she noticed. With his anaemic complexion his every private emotion sat on the surface. His eyes went to the book, then wandered to her hand and its long, elegant fingers, and wandered further up to her neck, which was exposed on one side with her dark hair cascading down the other. ‘Death in the Stocks,’ he said, reading the title of the book aloud once he was able to bring his eyes back to it.

  ‘You haven’t read it, have you?’ she inquired.

  ‘Oh, no, I haven’t. How do you always seem to know which ones I haven’t read?’

  She simply smiled again. ‘I was wondering if I might have a little look in at your guests tonight? Is there anyone unidentified at the moment?’

  His face became serious, a show of professionalism against the almost giddy welcome. ‘Two unidentified,’ he said, avoiding the word stiffs, though Billie could see it was on the tip of his tongue.

  ‘May I . . . ?’ she ventured, looking at the open door to the morgue’s main room.

  Benny tore his attention from her to look around at the quiet office, as he always did, then nodded, as he always did. Billie didn’t know what he expected to find when he silently questioned the room each time, but as the dead did not protest, he led her quietly through the door into the main morgue. She followed close behind him, hands in her coat pockets.

  ‘Have you a handkerchief?’ he asked.

  She nodded and pulled one from her pocket. In a quick motion she soaked the cloth with tea-tree oil from a small vial she kept for this purpose. Though Billie knew what to expect, the room still had a most unpleasant smell – the same smell that had greeted her upon waking. Something like rotten leaves, or animal meat, but not exactly the same as either. The tea-tree oil reduced the pungency, but could not stop that distinctive smell from taking hold somewhere deep within her. She hoped that when it came her time, she’d be bathed in French perfume and buried fast, before too many people had taken a gander or a whiff. Billie did not fear death, but she did have some unsettling feelings about how her body might be handled once she could no longer protect it. Death could be terribly undignified, she knew. It was something to come to terms with, she supposed.

  ‘You haven’t had an Adin Brown through here? A boy of about seventeen? Five foot nine, curly hair, no identifying marks?’ she inquired, sweeping her eyes across the room, and bringing the handkerchief to her face.

  It’s too late. The words kept cycling in her mind. Too late.

  Billie’s eyes stung a little from the sharp waft of tea-tree. There were about a dozen deceased guests, of a variety of ages, sexes and shapes – slim, plump, male, female, old as the hills and as young as Adin. Death did not appear picky tonight.

  Benny stopped by the first of the corpses and thought for a moment, bringing a thin finger to his lips. ‘No. I’m sure no one of that name has been through recently, and neither of the unidentified men has been of that age.’

  That was a small relief. Benny’s memory was good, and Adin would have been a quite recent arrival. There wasn’t much risk he’d been here. That didn’t mean, of course, he was still alive.

  Her guide began to move again, and Billie took a step forward to follow her host, then realised with horror that she was looking down at the skinny doorman, Con Zervos, his face but inches from her right hip. A chill went up her spine as if he’d reached up and touched her. His eyes were mercifully closed now, but somehow he was still looking at her as he had in his hotel room, strangled by his own necktie.

  She gasped.

  ‘Ms Walker?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I ate the wrong thing for dinner. Seafood. It’s unsettled my tummy.’

  ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she assured him. She tried to smile again, but it wouldn’t form.

  This was hardly the first dead body she’d seen – the war had taken care of that, as had multiple trips to the morgue – but it was the first she’d woken up with, the first violently taken civilian in peacetime that she’d walked in on unawares, and as such the death of Con Zervos had shaken her. Her guard had not been up when she’d walked into room 305. She hoped the grisly discovery would be an isolated incident. She blinked and brought her body back into line, doing her best to remain calm. Con Zervos was no longer a man but a hollow, human-shaped cast, as lifeless as a dressmaker’s dummy. The face was shrinking back, eyes falling deeper into the skull, the whole of his flesh abandoned utterly by the life force that had filled it at The Dancers. The sight of it, of what had been him – so wiry and nervous and alive – made her heart thud beneath her blouse, despite the fact that she’d expected to find him here already, if Sam had done his job well. In fact, this was what she had hoped. Nothing could be done to breathe life back into him, but now he had been collected, he would be cared for by Benny, and his family could be informed of his fate.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Benny asked suddenly. She must have paled.

  ‘What’s his story?’ Billie managed, running a hand over her hair.

  ‘Sorry, it’s a bit gruesome, this one.’

  ‘You know I can handle it.’ She tried another smile, and this time her cheeks worked, and his confidence in her appeared to return. She hoped he hadn’t heard the story of her claiming to have found his body in room 305.

  ‘You are one of a kind, Ms Walker,’ he told her admiringly, then turned and regarded the corpse. ‘This poor fellow was found out the back of the People’s Palace tonight. Strangled, he was. They do get some rough trade. The night watchman identified him. Some Greek immigrant who came out here for a new life, and this is what he got for his troubles.’

  She swallowed. The night watchman. She wondered what he thought of all the confusion with the police on Saturday night, and now this.

  ‘Isn’t that a temperance hotel?’ she asked, tr
ying to strike a normal conversational note.

  ‘Fat lot of good it did this fellow,’ Benny remarked.

  ‘Indeed.’

  Billie told herself to resist the urge to chat. It was easy to begin talking needlessly when you were nervous and keeping secrets, and then those secrets had a way of tangling you up. It wasn’t every day you woke with a corpse. If the police did find out, it would do her no favours. Had the force been less corrupt, she might have trusted them with her innocence, but her father had taught her better than that. Silence was best. Silence or brevity. ‘Reg’, the city coroner, would likely give young Con Zervos an autopsy the next day, if budgets allowed. How long would it take his family back in Greece to find out his fate? She walked on, fighting the impulse to look back at Zervos or ask further questions about him.

  ‘Sorry your kid isn’t here,’ Benny said, a welcome change of topic.

  ‘I’m not sorry,’ she said, and was sincere. ‘I still hope to find him alive.’

  It’s too late. Too late . . .

  ‘Of course,’ Benny said. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘I’m reading one of those American detective novels where they go out and bury the body in the desert,’ Billie said, changing the subject as they returned to the front desk. ‘The desert around Vegas is full of bodies, apparently.’ She noted his interest. ‘I was wondering, where would someone do something like that around here? Hide a body, I mean?’

  ‘Why, the Blue Mountains of course.’ His answer was immediate.

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘If you don’t have time to drive all the way into the outback – and that’s risky, you know, the longer you have the body with you. I mean, you could be pulled over, your automobile could break down, all kinds of things could go wrong. So if you don’t go all the way to the outback, you go to the Blue Mountains. It happens all the time. Better than the country where the locals and their dogs pick things up and know what’s about. No, you’d settle for the mountains and all those wild areas. It’s hard to tell a murder from an accident after a couple of weeks under a cliff,’ he added, matter-of-factly. ‘Or a suicide. The roads must be backed up with all the poor souls heading up there to take a walk off the Blue Mountains escarpments. It’s a damned shame.’

  ‘I never thought of that,’ she said. He had given her an idea.

  ‘Otherwise it’s the harbour.’

  She had thought of that. ‘Then they would end up here, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Eventually,’ he said. ‘If they were found at all.’

  * * *

  When Billie arrived home she walked through her rooms with her Colt drawn and, once satisfied, double-checked the lock on her door, and closed and locked her windows. She undressed, pulled the freshly washed sheets on her bed back and sat on the edge. After a moment she rose again, walked to the kitchen and pulled some old newspapers from the lower cupboard. She padded back to her bedroom and closed the door behind her. One by one she pulled the newspaper sheets out, crumpling them in her hands and scattering them in a large arc around her bedroom floor, like a circle of protection in some novel about the occult.

  No one, but no one, was going to creep up on her again.

  She did not sleep well, but she did sleep. And that was something.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was just past nine-thirty, the pen-pushers already well into their work day, when Billie strode into Daking House in a cinched rayon dress of navy blue printed with flights of delicate white birds, her little loaded Colt holstered beneath her slip, its outline only visible to those with the most keen and suspicious eye.

  She could really have used more sleep, but there was, as her father used to say, plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead. Today there was much to do.

  Billie wore her trusty, fabric-soled oxfords – those of the satisfyingly soundless soles she’d so missed the night before – her dark navy driving coat slung over one arm and her hair wrapped neatly in a shining silk scarf of navy patterned with the soft shapes of cherry-red and white abstract flowers. A small tilt hat in navy completed her ensemble, her sunglasses round and impenetrable, her smile steady and painted as always with her last stick of Fighting Red. She felt optimistic, determined, wrapped in her clothes as if in armour. Her mind had been ticking over, and she had a plan.

  Straight-backed and quiet, she was delivered to the sixth floor by John Wilson, who seemed, as always, enlivened by her presence. He looked sidelong at her finely sculpted profile without seeming to realise she could see him doing so, fooled as he was by her smoked glasses and the effect of her wrapped hair and hat, which made her look somehow like a fashion mannequin come to life. She slipped him a shilling, flashed him a wide ivory smile and told him she should require him again presently.

  Let this be the day, she thought, stepping into her office.

  ‘Good morning, Ms Walker.’ Her assistant stood at attention behind his desk as she entered, looking slightly surprised by the relatively early hour of her arrival. Sam’s trench coat was already hanging on the coat rack; the newspapers were open across his desk. Despite the trials of the weekend, he looked no worse for wear. His eyes were clear and bright, his posture not at all that of a man who had been punched by cowardly assailants the afternoon before. He had probably expected that Billie would sleep in, and it was gratifying for her to know that he still got to work on time regardless of the strong likelihood she would not walk in until close to eleven.

  ‘Good morning, Sam,’ Billie replied. She pulled off her round sun cheaters and ignored his move to help her with her coat. The waiting room was again empty, the magazines and journals untouched. No clients. But if she played this right, that might change – and many other things besides.

  ‘There was a note slipped into the mail this morning,’ Sam said. ‘Just a piece of paper among the letters slid under the door. I thought you might want to take a look right away. It could be something important.’

  Billie wrinkled her brow. A note? She didn’t know whether to expect a death threat or invitation to tea, such was her professional life at the moment. She accepted the plain piece of notepaper. ‘Did you go okay last night?’ she asked, and watched his expression carefully.

  Sam nodded. ‘Yes. No one could have seen me. It’s done.’

  ‘You did well, Sam,’ she reassured him. ‘Con has been identified and his family in Greece are possibly by now being informed so they can make arrangements and grieve. It was a rotten thing, what was done to him. Rotten and unfair and I hope to make someone pay very dearly for it.’

  Sam looked relieved, though the corners of his mouth were turned down. ‘It was hard leaving him there.’

  He didn’t seem to want to talk about it. Fair enough. An ugly business, it was. Billie unfolded the piece of paper, revealing a short series of numbers and letters: XR-001.

  She recognised Shyla’s distinctive hand. ‘A licence plate number,’ she declared, pleased. It was for a recently registered car, she noted, which fitted with what Shyla had told her about the man Frank being new to the country. Since Saturday the clever young woman had elicited the information and delivered it on a page with no other clues, so only Billie was likely to know the significance. Perhaps a trip to Upper Colo was in order, once other pressing matters were resolved? But it would have to wait at least another day. For now, she had a boy to find, and she wanted a hell of a lot of answers.

  ‘Another matter,’ she said to Sam, pocketing the piece of paper. ‘I made it to the morgue,’ she went on. ‘That’s how I know about Zervos. But our boy Adin wasn’t there, and no one of his description has been through. One piece of good news, at least.’ She checked his expression and saw that he still looked a touch glum, brows pinched. Billie changed the subject. ‘On another note, how was the rest of your night? Did your date with Eunice work out? You were feeling up for it?’

  Sam flinched and a strange look came over him.

  ‘I mean . . . up for a night out, after the incident in the alley,�
�� she clarified, wondering about his sensitivity.

  ‘We went to the late session of The Bells of St Mary’s, thank you, Ms Walker,’ Sam said rather stiffly.

  Something about his night had not worked out well, but she decided it was best not to inquire further. ‘Are you up for a trip?’ she asked. ‘A drive to the Blue Mountains?’

  ‘Always,’ he said, brightening. ‘I’ve only been there once . . . saw the Three Sisters. I’m parked not far away, unless you want the train?’

  ‘No need,’ Billie said to him, smiling. ‘It’s now December. A new month with new petrol coupons. I’ve brought out the roadster and filled her up already.’ The opportunity to cruise the open road for a few hours was not one she would pass up. Following her chat with Donald Benny at the morgue, she had hopes for the case, which she didn’t yet want to reveal to Sam, in case they fell through, but even if things led nowhere on this Monday, at least they would enjoy a scenic drive and some mountain air. They deserved that, at least, after their record-breakingly awful weekend. ‘Let’s lock up here and hit the road.’

  Her two-seater Willys 77 roadster was waiting near the entrance of Daking House, its top down, black paint gleaming in the morning sun and red leather interior beckoning. Billie thought she saw Sam actually lick his lips when he spotted the automobile. It gave the impression of being as much animal as machine, part black steed, or perhaps panther. It had few miles on the clock for its age, as it had waited patiently for its mistress while she was away reporting in Europe. The roadster had been a twenty-first birthday present from Baroness von Hooft, who had so far given her only child a fast sewing machine, a faster motor car and a small Colt, in that order. All three appeared to have been chosen because the baroness recognised the power of the skills associated with them, even if she was not adept at those skills herself, and probably never would be – having no ability to sew or drive or shoot or, for that matter, cook. At least that Billie was aware of. Ella had been a modern woman for her time and her station, but her daughter, Billie, was of an altogether different era, and thanks to those gifts she could go anywhere, make anything she needed to wear and could protect herself in the unique line of work she had chosen.