The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  I didn’t elaborate, but there were also the animals to take into account: birds, foxes, badgers, stray dogs and cats. Admittedly there wouldn’t have been a shortage of bodies for scavengers after Epsom and Jupiter although excepting those blown apart, the bodies were wearing uniforms. Dabs’ face would have been exposed. Easy pickings. Not much of a thought to start a weekend on.

  Jack began clearing his desk and I shuffled a few papers around on mine before ringing the number I had for Rose Kearney again on the off-chance of catching her. She had seen Hendrix and despite Jekyll having dismissed him as irrelevant, I didn’t like loose ends. I thought I might get some sort of description of the elusive major out of her.

  Jack said goodnight while I was listening to the phone in Rose Kearney’s hallway ring. Finally giving up, I went into the other office. Susie had gone and Peter just leaving. Stan was just hanging around. He regarded me with a thoughtful expression that really didn’t suit him.

  ‘What’s all this “tidying it up for Dabs” business?’ Stan said once Peter had left. ‘What can his background have to do with anything?’

  I was about to give him some flannel about covering all eventualities and leaving no stone unturned, despite what Jekyll had said. But in the end I simply shrugged.

  ‘Aren’t you happy pinning this on the SS, boss?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘It’s not so much that I don’t believe they shot Dabs. Kearney too, probably. It’s just I’ve got this feeling there’s something more to it all.’

  ‘Why? Because of this Hendrix bloke asking questions?’

  ‘In part. Jack may be right and Rose Kearney making a nuisance of herself simply meant the file got shuffled along and happened to come to us. Jekyll says he was only passing it on, but he’s keen on it and for us to reach a quick conclusion. I just don’t want to get it in the neck later for not having done the obvious. No harm in making sure we’re covered. After all, it’s not as if we’ve got anything else particularly urgent on at the moment.’

  ‘You’re worrying about it too much,’ Stan said. ‘You ought to put in for some leave. Take a couple of days off. Like you said, we’ve nothing else on and Jack and Peter can handle this business.’

  I was about to ask him if this new-found solicitousness for my mental well-being and eagerness to get me out of the way could have anything to do with Ida being back at my flat. I didn’t though and said instead:

  ‘I’ve just been trying to get hold of Kearney’s sister...,’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Rose met Hendrix. I thought I might at least get a description of him out of her.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Stan, ‘I don’t see there’s any need for Jekyll to know if we dig a bit deeper. After all, if nowt turns up it’s not going to make any difference is it. We can still tell him it was the SS.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said.

  ‘And even if they didn’t shoot Dabs and Kearney, they certainly shot a lot of other poor buggers we don’t know about. If they cop for it, fair enough.’

  ‘Ever thought about joining the police?’ I asked.

  ‘Me?’ he said. ‘Not likely. I can’t wait to get out of this uniform, never mind get into another one. I’ve had a gutful of saying sir to every Tom, Dick and Harry with a pip on his sleeve.’

  I opened the office door and followed him out. ‘I can’t say I remember you ever called this particular Harry anything but boss,’ I said.

  Stan shrugged. ‘Well, you’re different, aren’t you? You’re a ranker at heart, just like me.’

  There wasn’t any ready answer for that so I asked instead what he had planned for the weekend.

  ‘As a matter of fact I thought I’d ride back with you and see how Ida’s settling in. If you’ve no objections, boss.’

  ‘Me?’ I said. ‘Why should I mind? Us enlisted men have got to stick together.’

  *

  Although I hadn’t said so, Ida had made herself quite at home. Rather than wake her that morning I’d left her the door key on the kitchen table so she could get in and out while she got herself organized. I hadn’t told Stan but the evening before I’d made an excuse to go out for an hour and left her to it. When I got home, I found her cooking dinner for me. She said she’d already eaten and while I ate told me she’d acquainted herself with the old girl who lived on the top floor. She’d also met Sam the housebreaker from the floor above.

  Grateful as I was for a decent meal for once, my first reaction was that Ida was going to prove something of a problem. But I was wrong and as soon as she had washed up she took a bucket of water into the room she’d chosen down the hall and spent the rest of the evening cleaning and scrubbing. Feeling guilty, I made a half-hearted offer of help which, fortunately, she turned down.

  Considering the meagre ingredients I’d had to hand in the flat, she’d turned out a surprisingly good meal and I thought if I picked up a few more things in the morning there might be the prospect of finding dinner waiting for me again when I got back that evening. Luckily, though, it had slipped my mind; finding Ida cooking for me was something I didn’t want to have to explain to Stan.

  On the tube to Farringdon, I asked him to find out from Ida if the officer who had visited her in Blackburn saying he was from Arnold Poole’s battalion was our Major Hendrix again. If he could get a description from her, I might be able to tally it with one from Rose.

  Stan, though, had moved on and seemed keener on telling me how he’d already found Ida a mattress and also managed to scrounge some furniture and a stove. He had arranged with a mate of his who had the loan of a lorry to bring them round the following morning. They planned to wrestle the rusted bedstead we’d seen in one of the derelict flats into Ida’s room at the same time.

  Sensing his enthusiasm, I hoped it didn’t squeak.

  *

  In the hall I picked up my mail and left Stan to it. There was a letter from Penny saying that Julia had told her I’d called round on Sunday morning and apologizing for having left early. She said she was sorry to have missed me and was so reasonable about it I found there was nothing I could take exception to. It seemed that we only wanted to argue when face to face. There was little else of note in the letter except Penny’s amusement at the problem Julia was having with her help.

  Reading this, I couldn’t help wondering if Penny’s motive in telling me was because she knew I would also find it funny, or if she was trying to make some more devious point.

  Following her demobilization and move down to Gloucestershire to share the cottage my mother had taken after George was conscripted into the Land Army, Penny had done all her own cleaning and shopping. Something that would never have occurred to her before the war, and something with which Julia still hadn’t come to terms. Whatever Penny’s motive, I noticed she barely mentioned my mother or George, and she ended by saying she would let me know the next time she was coming up to town.

  I propped the letter against the saltcellar on my kitchen table and thought it might be a nice touch if I replied. I did pen a few lines but found I wasn’t in the mood for letter writing. In fact, the mood to write letters rarely came over me. I wasn’t one of the world’s best correspondents and though I’d written to Penny while overseas, of course, I hadn’t written as frequently as I should have. Even when I did, I usually spent most of the letter making excuses for my dilatory response, pleading the situation...the lack of time...and——not so subtlely——the dangers I was experiencing. Not the most intelligent thing to do I realized later, when picturing Penny and Julia sheltering from falling V1s under the kitchen table or wherever it was they took refuge.

  Whether it was the recollection of my own correspondence or something else that had been nagging at the back of my mind, I wasn’t sure, but I started to think about other letters, those Arnold Poole had written to Ida. Susie had read them and had thought them touching, and I supposed Susie was sufficiently well-versed in the form to know what she was talking about. Yet I found this difficult
to square with what else we knew about Poole. Even his father had described his son as a bit flash...

  I dropped onto the settee, suddenly tired. I was over-thinking it. Perhaps Stan was right and I needed a few days away. I felt a sense of déjà vu, Jekyll reminding me of the old superintendent I’d had before the war whose only concern as far as police work went was squaring up the paperwork so the division looked good. I’d always thought it was about the people and now it seemed I was falling into the same trap. Perhaps Jekyll was right after all and the sensible thing to do was simply to lay it all at the door of the SS.

  But if that was the sensible thing to do, why did it make me feel so uncomfortable?

  12

  June 22nd

  Despite it being a Saturday morning, I got up early, put on my uniform and left the flat before anyone was about. Ida hadn’t used the settee, presumably having found a bed elsewhere and if there was a possibility it was one she had shared with Stan, I thought running into him would be embarrassing for both of us. So I went for a walk, bought some cigarettes and a newspaper and found a café where I could sit over a mug of tea until I thought the time respectable enough to make a call on Rose Kearney.

  After an hour or so, I took the tube at Farringdon and changed onto the Bakerloo line, curious to see what the Luftwaffe had done to Kilburn High Street. An age-old thoroughfare and part of what had once been the old Roman Watling Street, I had been fairly familiar with the area before the war. Compared to some parts of London I found it had got off reasonably lightly and, passing the Gaumont State cinema, I was pleased to see that it had survived the Blitz. The place had opened eighteen months or so before war broke out and after I met Penny I’d taken her there several times while courting. It was a big, plush art-deco confection that at the time I thought might impress her. Eight years of the tainted breath of half a million coal fires had stained it black though, and where once it had looked like something out of a Busby Berkley musical it now had more than an air of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. It sometimes seemed that the German air force hadn’t needed to destroy London——the city was quite capable of suffocating under its own famous smog. Something I’d forgotten until I got back.

  By mid-morning I thought it unlikely I’d catch Rose Kearney in her dressing gown and I made my way to Kilburn Lane. Down towards the junction of Carlton Vale and Albert Road I found some bad bomb damage but turning into Claremont Street it wasn’t easy to tell if the German air raids had taken an extra-special toll or whether the place had always been a bit of a dump. Entering the house I caught the tang of someone’s burnt toast, walked up the stairs and knocked on Rose’s door.

  It opened straight away which caught me by surprise——no chain or eye peering through the crack——and instead of Rose I found myself looking at a young man in a stained collarless shirt with his sleeves rolled up high enough to give a good view of a set of impressive biceps. For a second the young man stiffened and I thought I saw a reflex in his right arm. Then he relaxed.

  ‘Patrick, is it?’ I asked.

  ‘No Patrick here, mate,’ he said, accentuating the mate.

  ‘I was looking for Rose. Rose Kearney.’

  His eyebrows lifted a little higher than his arm had but he shook his head.

  ‘No Rose either. If you’re looking for the people who had the place before us, they’ve gone.’

  ‘When?’

  He shrugged. ‘We moved in Thursday. Don’t s’pose it had been empty long, though.’

  ‘Did they leave a forwarding address?’

  ‘All they left was a bloody mess. Me an’ the wife are still trying to clear it up.’

  ‘What about their post?’

  He shrugged again. ‘Maybe they didn’t get any. Friends of yours were they?’

  ‘I’d met her a couple of times.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ He glanced over his shoulder and leaned closer to me, pulling the door to. ‘What was she like?’ he asked, lowering his voice. ‘The woman next door said there was always men in and out of here, all times of day and night. On the game, was she?’

  The thought of the Rose Kearney I’d met entertaining clients seemed absurd; plain and dowdy and a stranger to cosmetics, she hadn’t been my idea of a tart; but perhaps they did things differently in rural Ireland.

  ‘I’m here about her brother,’ I said to put him straight. ‘He went missing in Normandy. What about your landlord? Would he know where they went?’

  ‘Doubt it. They scarpered owing two weeks. That’s how we got the place, paying their back rent.’

  He said he didn’t know who owned the property but gave me the address of the agent who collected the rent every week.

  ‘Been out long?’ I asked him before I left.

  ‘A couple of months. Signal Corps. How’d you know?’

  ‘You started to salute.’

  He laughed. ‘Bad habit, that.’

  ‘You’ll get over it,’ I said.

  Walking back towards Kilburn High Street and the address of the letting agent, I passed the Minstrel Boy, where I’d met Rose the previous Tuesday. The young man said he and his wife had moved into the flat on Thursday and I wondered if Rose had already left when she rang me, and if that was why she arranged to meet in the pub. The place wasn’t open yet although a couple of men were hanging around outside smoking and looking at their watches. Seeing them made me wonder who the men going in and out of the flat had been. This pair looked at me as I passed but they weren’t the ones who had been in the pub when I met Rose Kearney there. I thought about asking if they knew her or her cousin Patrick but didn’t think they’d tell me if they did.

  The letting agent’s office was on the first floor above a greengrocer’s shop. Veg was on display on the pavement outside and although what they stocked wasn’t exactly a cornucopia the shop wasn’t doing bad business. A plaque on a door to the side advertised the letting agency upstairs. I walked up and knocked on the door at the top.

  The room held some filing cabinets, a desk and a couple of chairs and a middle-aged man who was pecking at an elderly typewriter with two indecisive fingers. He looked at me through a pair of rimless glasses and shook his head before I even opened my mouth.

  ‘Nothing, I’m afraid,’ he said through the smoke curling up his face from the cigarette in his mouth. ‘I do my best for you boys coming back but I’ve nothing at the moment. Leave your name and I’ll put you on the waiting list if you like.’

  ‘I’m not looking for somewhere to live,’ I said, and gave him Rose Kearney’s former address and said I was looking for her or her cousin.

  ‘Oh, them,’ he said, giving the typewriter some respite and taking the cigarette out of his mouth.

  ‘The new tenant told me they left owing the rent. If that’s the case I don’t suppose they left a forwarding address.’

  ‘Hardly likely since they did a moonlight. I had a week in lieu but they owed another. And he wasn’t her cousin, either. Leastways I can’t imagine it. Catholic, weren’t they? Told me they were married.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, seeming surprised at my reaction, ‘I didn’t ask to see the certificate. They seemed a decent enough couple at the time. Irish, but there’s a lot of them here now.’

  ‘How long had they been there?’

  He scratched an ear as if it were an aide-mémoire. ‘Four months, maybe a little longer.’

  ‘And they arrived together?’

  ‘Far as I know. I dealt with her to begin with. Saw him when he signed the agreement and once or twice when I called round for the rent. Then they took to dropping it out of hours through the letterbox here. Mind you, if they hadn’t known the man who had the property before them they’d have had to wait. As it was, he was moving out and they were willing to pay a month in advance. Didn’t baulk when I told them the rent was going up, neither. Flats being at a premium like they are.’

  I didn’t expect he’d told the man from the Signals Corps and his wife he’d had
a week in lieu when he asked them to pay the rent arrears before giving them the flat, either, but it was a seller’s market.

  ‘You don’t know where the friend they took the place over from went, I suppose?’ I asked.

  ‘No. He was Irish, too.’

  ‘Did they show you any references?’

  ‘Pay book. The husband had just come out of one of the Irish regiments. And like I told you, I try to do my best for you boys.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember the regiment?’

  I reeled off a few Irish regiments and he said:

  ‘That’s the one. Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Been a sergeant.’

  ‘I don’t suppose his name was Kearney?’

  ‘No, Cochrane. That’s what the pay-book said. Patrick and Rose Cochrane. All above board.’

  I wondered where he’d got it as I didn’t expect for a minute he’d actually been in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Not after everything Rose had said about the British Army. At least his name was Patrick. She hadn’t lied about that.

  ‘What’s your interest, anyway?’

  I gave him the story about Rose’s brother.

  ‘What did Cochrane look like?’

  The agent screwed up his face as if the question was a real poser.

  ‘Nondescript,’ he eventually said, obviously pleased at being able to use the word.

  ‘Tall, short...dark, fair?’

  ‘Dark, I’d say. Not very big either. Ugly fellow, now you mention it, but in a nondescript way, if you follow. Surprised me he’d got a wife like that, to be honest.’