The sight of the red brick back yards of Pimlico heralded the train’s arrival into Victoria. Disembarking, Mirabelle coughed as she took her first lungful of sooty, biting London air. At the end of the platform a man with one leg busked on his mouth organ playing ‘We’ll Meet Again’. The lady in the mink coat stalked past him without a glance and slipped into the back of a cab. Mirabelle popped sixpence in his tin.
Outside, hillocks of filthy grey snow melted slowly, seeping into the drains. Passers-by looked like smudges, their dark coats bundled round them and their hats lowered.
Mirabelle cut off the main road for Belgrave Place. The stucco houses in this part of town seemed like greying ice palaces – dank shadows of the era when the streets of Belgravia sported pristine white plasterwork, in the days when there had been money. Panther the office dog was born nearby on Wilton Crescent. Mirabelle looked in the direction of the house as she passed. The puppy was a present two years before from a grateful client. She thought suddenly how different she had felt only that short time ago, when Rose Bellamy Gore had gone missing and Vesta’s friend Lindon Claremont was accused of kidnapping her. Then when she came to London it had meant a painful return to her memories of living with Jack. Now that felt less barbed. She knew if he could see her now he’d laugh at her picking her way past houses where they had been invited to dinner and doorsteps where they had kissed, away from the glare of yellow streetlamps and the not-dark-enough summer skies. Walking through Belgravia no longer felt like betraying his memory.
The skeletal trees on the square were dusted with frost. Above, the clouds sealed a pewter lid over the city. Mirabelle rounded the corner into Grosvenor Crescent to the sound of water dripping onto stone as the sodden snow softened. She smiled when she saw the brass plaque wrapped round a grand column, stamped her feet to remove any ice, and walked through the door of the British Red Cross.
Inside, the hallway smelled of overstewed tea. The reception desk was lit from high above by a single bulb hanging on a wire. A house like this would have had chandeliers in its heyday, but like the wrought-iron balconies that had been scrapped for the war effort the indoor finery had also been stripped away. The buildings that still had their embellishments looked smug somehow – like that woman in the fur coat on the train.
‘May I help you, madam?’ the secretary at the reception desk enquired.
Mirabelle smiled. She had been trained by the Red Cross during the war – not as a nurse but in emergency first aid.
‘I’m enquiring after a displaced person.’
The girl looked too young to remember much about the post-war chaos in which the Red Cross had played such a key part. She couldn’t be much older than Vesta.
‘Displaced?’ The girl checked the word and Mirabelle realised the child was sporting an accent. It was only a slight nuance, but still.
‘Yes. Lost.’
‘Lost? I see.’
Mirabelle smiled. ‘You’re Polish.’
The girl’s forehead wrinkled as if she had been caught out. Then she nodded.
‘Is there someone to whom I might speak? Someone who can help?’
‘Give me a moment.’ The girl disappeared into the room behind her.
Mirabelle looked up. The building seemed hopelessly old-fashioned. Along the cornice the old wires operating the system once used to call servants remained tacked in place. Here and there a vital wire was cut. Mirabelle wondered how the Red Cross’s many activities might be organised from somewhere so close to being domestic. The paintwork was scratched and worn, grubby with a million smudged fingerprints. High above the curl of the grand stairwell, opaque glass had been used to glaze the cupola. It was still taped up in case of a direct hit.
The door opened and Mirabelle felt a wisp of heat from the inner office, or if not exactly heat at least temperate air. If anything the girl who emerged was younger than the Polish secretary but she had an entirely different manner – so fresh that it was as if she had been cut out of a magazine and her Red Cross uniform pasted onto her slim frame. She was wearing make-up – something that wouldn’t have been allowed in the old days.
‘I’m Ann Kettle.’ The girl’s scarlet lips parted to reveal a set of very white teeth. ‘I understand you’re looking for a displaced person?’
‘Yes. One of our soldiers who went missing in wartime France. Can you help?’
‘If you’re looking for British military personnel the best place to start is with the chap’s regiment, Miss …’
‘I’m Mirabelle Bevan.’ Mirabelle held out her hand. Nurse Kettle shook it, her eyes softening in the wake of Mirabelle’s manners. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know his regiment,’ Mirabelle admitted. ‘The man was an escaped POW who went off the radar. The chap he escaped with lost him en route home. It occurred to me that after the war, if the chap was still in France, a Red Cross clearing camp might have been his first stop.’
‘I see.’ Nurse Kettle quizzically tipped her head to one side. ‘Why are you looking for him now, if you don’t mind my asking? It seems rather late.’
‘It is. I’m afraid it was the last request of an acquaintance who recently passed away. He was the other escapee – the one who got out. He never found out what happened to his friend.’
The nurse paused, considering. Mirabelle guessed this was probably not the first time she had heard a story about the derring-do of British troops in wartime. For all her pretty face, the girl had gravitas.
‘Well, if this missing person made it out of France, even after the war, his regiment is still your best port of call,’ she said flatly. ‘But if the chap passed through our hands at any stage, his name will be in our papers. The thing is, the archives are very short staffed. They’ve just been moved, in point of fact. Here.’ She leaned over the reception desk and wrote down an address in Kensington on a scrap of paper. ‘That’s where they’ve gone. If you’re lucky they’ll let you have a look. Though this chap isn’t a relative of yours, is he?’
Mirabelle shook her head.
‘Well, I hope you find him.’
‘Thank you. I’d like to know what happened.’
Nurse Kettle sighed. Her perfect veneer softened a fraction. Knowing what had happened didn’t always help. The women’s eyes met.
‘Anyway, I’ll do my best,’ Mirabelle said and turned back onto the grey London street, in the direction of Sloane Square.
Chapter 4
One who makes no mistakes, makes nothing.
Vesta answered the telephone with gusto. ‘McGuigan & McGuigan,’ she trilled.
With Mirabelle away she had turned up the fire while she sorted through the paperwork. The office smelled of coffee and buttery toast with a sprinkle of cinnamon. Vesta’s fiancé Charlie worked in the kitchens at the Grand. He kept her well supplied with luxuries and on Tuesdays this was her usual mid-morning snack. Now after lunch she found she was ahead of the game. It had taken no time to prepare Bill’s schedule for the next day and get the ledger up to date. She had stopped for ten minutes to make a cup of tea for the poor postman (who was perishing) and have a chat about the volume of mail received by other businesses in the building and indeed in the street. Now she only had the day’s bank deposit to make up.
‘Can I help you?’ she said cheerily into the mouthpiece.
At the other end, Mirabelle’s voice sounded as if she was cold. Vesta immediately pictured her friend bundled up in one of the capital’s red telephone boxes. In fact Mirabelle had availed herself of the well-appointed mahogany telephone booth in the hallway of the Sloane Square Hotel, but although she was not outside in the worst of the chill, the hotel was hardly balmy.
‘Hello, dear, it’s me,’ she said, ‘I need some help.’
Vesta sat bolt upright. Mirabelle was a person who rarely asked for assistance and was more likely to have help thrust upon her. Recently, however, Vesta had noticed small changes in her friend. Lately, Mirabelle had been perusing the menu without deciding what she wanted immediately when th
ey went for lunch at the little café in the Lanes. It was almost as if she had begun to care about what she had to eat, or at least to notice it. Last week she had given up when the cryptic crossword was particularly tricky and she hadn’t seemed in the least perturbed. Vesta was unsure what these changes meant but she instinctively felt they were progress. And here was another change – Mirabelle asking for help.
‘I want you to go to the library. This chap who’s missing – I think he might be more difficult to track down than I expected.’
‘Mmm.’ Vesta took a sip of strong sweet coffee and picked up a pencil to make notes.
‘His name is Philip Caine,’ Mirabelle continued. ‘I want you to check The Times and the Daily Telegraph going back to 1942 when he was captured. See if you can find sight or sound of him – and while you’re at it keep an eye out for our Major Bradley, would you? And have a look at what the library stocks in the way of those frightful war memoirs – escapees who got out through France. You know the sort of thing.’
Vesta grinned. It was exactly the kind of book her father liked. Mr Churchill had been stationed in Yorkshire for the duration of the war. ‘They didn’t think to send a black man into the African desert,’ he often joked, after which Mrs Churchill always nudged her husband furiously. She had been grateful he was somewhere safe. Not every family on their street had been so lucky. Unrepentant, Mr Churchill never took the hint. ‘The war was my chance to see it,’ he would say, smacking his lips with relish. ‘The motherland. And there I was, stationed on Monkton Moor like an idiot. I didn’t see no action at all.’
‘Yeah,’ Vesta said now. ‘My dad likes those stories.’
‘Flick through a few, would you? You never know what might turn up.’
‘What exactly am I looking for?’
There was a pause. Mirabelle didn’t like to say the word.
‘Gossip,’ she spat out at last. ‘If Caine stayed in France perhaps another escapee came across him on their way down the line. Somebody has to remember. A fellow doesn’t just disappear. And as you’ll be out of the office, leave a note for Bill, would you?’
‘Sure thing.’ Vesta stretched one arm towards the coat rack, keeping the phone to her ear.
‘Thank you. I might be a while in town but I’ll call you back.’
Mirabelle put down the telephone. Vesta was the ideal person to search through that kind of material. Before the women had met, Vesta’s place of employment was Halley Insurance, just down the hall from McGuigan & McGuigan. ‘Nothing will ever seem dull again,’ she had sworn after Mr Halley dismissed her and she came to work with Mirabelle. ‘Insurance!’ She cast her eyes to the ceiling.
When the women had taken over the business after the unexpected death of Big Ben McGuigan in 1951, Vesta insisted on understanding what she was getting into and spent her first week in the office reading through crushingly boring ledgers and case files housed in the office’s filing cabinets. By the following Monday, she was addressing clients by name and was conversant with the details of their accounts. If there was anyone who would find Major Bradley’s lost friend in a sea of post-war information, it was Vesta.
Mirabelle checked the slim gold watch on her wrist as she quit the telephone cubicle of the Sloane Square Hotel and approached the reception desk.
‘Might I have a piece of paper and an envelope?’ she asked.
The receptionist rifled in a drawer before carefully handing over stationery with the hotel’s logo emblazoned across the top. Mirabelle took a seat in a comfortable chair not far from the fire. It was too small a blaze for such a grand hallway but, she told herself, perhaps it was all the hotel could run to. Writing the letter was too important to put off any longer.
Dear Mrs Bradley,
I am so very sorry for your loss. Major Bradley was a passing acquaintance of mine during the war. He was a brave man and much admired. I have to admit to being somewhat astonished by his generous bequest and I wanted to assure you that there was no personal connection between your husband and me, and also that the contents of his letter included a request that I should track down one of his wartime colleagues. I am as yet unsure why Major Bradley appears not to have looked for this person himself if the man’s welfare was on his mind. If you ever heard your husband talk of Philip Caine, it would be very helpful to know what he might have said. I am, so far, somewhat at a loss.
I have only just arrived in London on this quest and will not be staying at this hotel. Should you be kind enough to reply, please write to me at my offices: McGuigan & McGuigan, Brills Lane, East Street, Brighton.
My sympathy goes to you at this difficult time.
Yours sincerely,
Mirabelle Bevan
Mirabelle took a postage stamp from her wallet. She stuck it to the envelope, admiring Her Majesty’s glowing complexion as she did so. She hoped Mrs Bradley might be able to help, although asking a recently bereaved widow for assistance was an unreliable strategy. In the weeks after Jack died she herself had barely eaten, unsure what day it was or even what time. She had sat, shocked, in an armchair in her living room and his memory had been everywhere – laughing beside the window, throwing a pillow at her in derision during an imagined discussion, holding her naked as they lay on the floor. The sunshine outside had seemed a betrayal as she willed the ceiling to fall in and end the pain of Jack’s being gone. Once, she had walked outside and, blinkered in grief after three sleepless days and nights, had frantically crossed the busy road repeatedly, hoping to be run down. She had ended up weeping on the pebble beach. A widow’s instinct was not to dive in with helpful information – that much she knew. Not that she and Jack had married.
Outside, considering a walk might help her to think, she turned left along Eaton Gate. A man in a threadbare coat loitered outside the public lavatory. Mirabelle had noticed him there when she arrived at the hotel. He must have nowhere to go, she thought as she lengthened her stride and slipped Mrs Bradley’s letter into the postbox – a sole flash of colour on the corner. In summer this road was leafy but the trees were bare skeletons at this time of year and the grass only intermittent between patches of frozen mud. The railings made the gardens look like prison yards.
A chill wind whipped around her slim ankles as she ran through Bradley’s story again to see if she could deduce anything further. He was a sapper – a Royal Engineer – she suddenly recalled as she held him in her mind’s eye and deciphered the badges on his uniform. Like many men who had been taken prisoner after Dunkirk, he had been sent to a Stalag – a prisoner of war camp. After trying to escape so many times, he must have been on the Germans’ list for a transfer to Posen or even Colditz, where they housed their most troublesome inmates: VIPs and serial escapers. Bradley probably undertook his successful attempt just in time, and having managed to get away with Caine in tow, had made the sensible decision to head into occupied territory. France was their best chance of getting home. There were established exit routes and solid resistance against German forces. The Maquis were adept at smuggling out information, spies and soldiers. It wouldn’t be easy, of course, but elsewhere the odds would have been stacked even higher against them.
Bradley was probably about as ideal an escapee as there could be. The Royal Engineers were practical men, well respected in military circles – there was one, she recalled, who had won a Victoria Cross at Saint-Nazaire. Mirabelle wondered what Major Bradley’s field of expertise had been before he became Bulldog Bradley the famous escaper. His regiment built bridges and dockyards, surveyed enemy territory and specialised in bomb disposal. Many of the troops who got out brought back important military information about supply routes, airfields and defensive structures they had seen on their way. Sappers remembered twice as much as anyone else, simply because they understood how installations were built and what it might take to destroy them. Men like Bradley contributed a great deal to the war effort when they got home.
Mirabelle turned her attention to Philip Caine. Bradley was such a huge fi
gure that she found herself assuming Caine was the second man – as if he was only a shadow. It had almost surprised her to learn that the major had escaped as part of a duo. When he got back Bradley’s story had been told repeatedly in the press, with no mention of a partner – a man left behind. Escaping in such an arrangement was common enough. In many ways small groups stood a better chance than single soldiers. In his letter, Bradley said he had become separated from Caine en route through France, but that didn’t mean the other man had never made it home.
Turning along the back wall of Buckingham Palace Gardens Mirabelle made for St James’s. The area was full of military expertise. As she crossed the road the fellow in the threadbare coat caught her eye again. So many people had been made homeless in the Blitz, she thought. She wondered where he was going.
Her own destination was almost in sight: the Army and Navy Club on Pall Mall. London was a mass of private clubs and libraries – a network for those in the know – and perhaps she’d find someone there who could help. The mysterious Caine could have been from any regiment. There were thousands of men in the military but people knew each other by reputation, especially officers, so the Army and Navy – also known as the Rag – was a good place to start. At least it was bound to have a copy of the Royal Engineers List, so she’d get more information on Bradley under her belt.
The tramp followed as she turned onto Pall Mall and Mirabelle began to feel uneasy. She turned and stared at him. His eyes narrowed and he held back, anticipating her movement. She thought of crossing the road to ask him what he was doing but something held her back – the hint of desperation perhaps. His skin was ingrained with dirt; his fingers smeared with the detritus of sleeping rough.
British Bulldog Page 3
