Ambulance Girls

by Deborah Burrows

  On the road in front of us, the air raid warden waved us forward. We set off, and the world pitched alarmingly as the Monster dipped into a pothole and up again. Through the windscreen, the sky glowed with a fierce redness and tiny, momentary flashes, like a faraway Guy Fawkes celebration, followed by the faint crump of explosions.

  ‘I suppose it’s a defence,’ I said, once we were on less bumpy ground. ‘It makes sense not to show emotions when you’re always surrounded by servants.’

  She laughed. It was a brittle sound. Unconvincing.

  ‘That’s not why we live that way,’ she said, her voice again competing with the sound of the engine and now also the roar of aircraft above us and the crump of falling bombs. ‘We prefer it. It simplifies things. And there is nothing quite so elegant as discretion.’

  ‘It sounds horrendous to me,’ I said. The Monster was forced to halt again, this time to allow a fire truck access to a bomb site in one of the streets to our left. I turned to look at Celia, who was regarding me with a slight smile.

  ‘It’s how polite society works, Brennan. Ask Jim how we do things.’

  ‘You tell me.’

  She addressed her words to her clasped hands lying on her lap. ‘One simply pretends that any unpleasantness is not occurring and conceals all untoward emotions behind – oh I suppose you’d describe it as a manner of fey brilliance. Silliness – of the juvenile kind – is perfectly acceptable, even welcomed, but one must at all costs avoid intimacy in important dealings, social and personal.’

  ‘It must involve a lot of lying,’ I said.

  Her head jerked up and she looked at me, unblinking, for a moment. ‘That’s one word for it.’

  We were waved on again and the Monster bumped off towards the City.

  ‘I know I’m too forthright,’ I said. ‘Maybe it is regrettably gauche, the way I show my emotions. But I hate lying. And anyway, I simply don’t care what any of you lot think of me.’

  ‘Stupid girl. It matters.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I was rude,’ I said, to the road ahead. ‘I’m upset because – because they found Levy’s body on Saturday.’

  ‘Oh?’ Celia sounded merely politely interested. ‘Where?’

  ‘In Caroline Place.’

  ‘I wonder what was he doing there. It’s been more than two weeks. He must have been in a terrible state. I’ve always suspected that rescue crews don’t properly search the ruins.’

  Again I was furious with her, at her insensitive dismissal of something that was so dreadful to me. We finished the journey in silence.

  At the incident site the raid was in full swing and the warden in charge refused to allow us to drive through it to the hospital, so we ended up huddled in a surface shelter with other emergency workers and our four injured patients. Outside, a seemingly constant rain of bombs was falling.

  The noise of it all was appalling and I prayed it would end soon. To my horror, Celia suddenly stood up and walked out of the shelter into the fury of the raid.

  ‘She’s barking mad,’ shouted the ARP warden next to me. I agreed with him. He must have supposed that I was mad, too, when a moment later I rose and ran after her.

  Celia was standing just outside the shelter, her face turned up to the sky, backlit by a multitude of explosions. I grabbed her arm and tried to drag her back, but she resisted.

  ‘Look,’ she cried out. ‘Just look at it. It’s perfectly marvellous.’

  Clusters of bombs screamed down and exploded with a thunderous roar, throwing up spectacular displays of flashes and sparks as they set their targets ablaze. The inevitable pieces of shrapnel, red hot and lethal, fell like tinkling rain around us. She was right, of course, it was indeed beautiful. It was also terrifying.

  ‘I’ve looked,’ I cried. ‘It’s Götterdämmerung. Come back inside. Or at least lie down for protection from blast.’

  She let me drag her down so that we ended up crouched on the ground by the shelter. It gave us some protection from shrapnel and from blast, but not from the noise, which was incredible. The guttural galumph of an oil bomb travelling drunkenly through the air, the staccato bolero of incendiaries and the earth-shattering explosions of nearby guns were rounded off by the drone of massed aeroplanes that seemed only a few hundred feet above us.

  Gradually the bombers retreated and the clamour began to die down. The guns became intermittent and then stopped completely. We stood up as the rescue workers came out of the shelter, eyeing Celia warily, as if she were an unpredictable animal. She froze them with a look.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said to me, ‘let’s get our patients to hospital.’ She smiled then, and her face blazed with vitality. And yet, it was also a little frightening, that smile, because it seemed so removed from real feeling.

  Celia really was a superb creature, I thought, slim and straight, beautiful and fearless. Impetuous, confident and yet so very vulnerable. For the first time, I pitied her.

  The coroner’s jury sat on Tuesday to consider Levy’s death. Jim attended the inquest and had promised to tell me about it when we had dinner that night at a restaurant near his new flat.

  We walked together in the blacked-out streets of Fitzrovia on our way to the restaurant. Jim shone the slim light of his pencil torch on the broken pavement just ahead of our feet, so we could navigate its obstacles. He made a small sound of triumph as the torch lit up a doorway set between the usual boarded-up windows.

  ‘Here it is.’

  Over dinner, Jim told me that the verdict of the coroner’s jury was that Levy’s death was due to ‘misadventure caused by enemy action’.

  ‘The police pathologist said most of the injuries to David’s body occurred post-mortem.’

  ‘They were caused by the air raid?’

  ‘Yes, probably when the building was bombed and the ceiling came down on him.’

  ‘If most of the injuries were post-mortem, what actually caused his death? Could the pathologist say?’

  ‘A blow to the back of his head. The pathologist suspects he was struck by a falling beam when the place was bombed, or he tried to escape, but fell and hit his head. He died then or soon after and suffered further injury as the raid continued.’

  ‘The pathologist suspects! How could they give a verdict of misadventure when so much is unknown?’

  ‘The evidence supported the verdict, Lily. The fatal injury was consistent with David falling or being struck when the ceiling caved in.’

  ‘That’s all very well, but why was Levy in the flat in the first place? That’s still a mystery.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a mystery, but nothing was found to indicate that it is sinister.’

  ‘Did they say who owned or leased the flat?’

  ‘It belongs to a woman who left England for Canada when war was declared. She was contacted and she telegraphed to say she has no idea why David would have been there. The place had been left empty.’ He gave me a stern look. ‘Don’t go thinking you’ll be doing any investigating, Lily. It’s over.’

  I made my voice light, the intonation as flippant as Celia’s. ‘But what about the anonymous telephone call to the police about where to find his body? That’s unusual, isn’t it?’

  Jim’s chest rose and fell in a sigh. ‘Let David rest in peace, Lily. There’s nothing to indicate foul play. You’ve been reading too many books by Agatha Christie.’

  ‘I just want the truth. There are too many people who hated him, or had a grudge against him, to let it go so easily.’

  ‘Lily, the coroner has handed down his finding. The evidence supported it. There is nothing whatsoever to indicate that David’s death wasn’t due to the raid. The flat was bombed, beams fell, and one hit David. Or, as David was trying to get out, he fell and struck his head and was trapped. End of story.’

  We glared at each other. I put my glass down on the table in a jerky movement and some wine spilled on to the white linen. It was as if drops of blood lay between us.

  ‘At least Mrs Levy has a body to
bury now,’ said Jim, in a placating tone.

  ‘Yes, there is that.’ I wished I could let that be an end to it, but I couldn’t. I said, quietly, ‘I’m sorry to harp on this, but I just can’t see why Levy was in the flat in the first place. It makes no sense.’

  Jim sighed. ‘Use your brain, Lily. Why would a man go to an empty, furnished apartment? To meet a girl. The raid started, she ran off in fear and David stayed. The ceiling fell on him and he died. That’s it.’

  I had been an idiot; of course that was the likeliest explanation, except . . .

  ‘Then why didn’t she tell the authorities?’

  ‘Scared? Married? Perhaps she thought his body would be found by the rescue crews and there was no need to be involved. Perhaps she simply didn’t care. Very likely she felt remorseful when weeks went by without his body being found, and it was she who telephoned the police. Lily, there’s no mystery here.’

  What he said made sense, and I acknowledged that. But I wondered why he was unable to see the logic of my fears. They felt very real and reasonable to me.

  We went to Jim’s flat after dinner. He had moved in the day before and it was the first time I had seen it. It was in a rather grand building in Riding House Street, just around the corner from Portland Place and Broadcasting House. The curtains were a rich burgundy velvet, the carpet thick, the armchairs deep and the bed enormous. It was a very comfortable flat. I was anticipating I would spend the night with him and had brought a discreet holdall with me.

  He turned on the phonograph, placed the needle on a record and we settled down on his couch to listen to music. Jim leaned back and held me close. I felt his body relax as a trickle of Mozart’s golden notes filled the flat, but I scarcely heard the music because my thoughts were still feverishly considering the possibilities of Levy’s death. What if his head wound was not an accident, but had been intentionally inflicted? Caroline Place was only a short walk away from the ambulance station, where he had enemies, or at the very least, where some people intensely disliked him.

  Anyone could have sent Levy a letter, purporting to come from Maisie or from me, asking him to meet us in the deserted flat. Levy had been investigating Mrs Coke’s fraudulent activities. Perhaps she had lured him to the flat in that way and hit him over the head, or arranged for someone to do it for her. She had always been awfully pally with the spivs.

  And yet, although Mrs Coke was venial and annoying, I could not see her as a murderer; she had too fine a sense of self-preservation to risk being caught out, and she had landed on her feet after being dismissed from the service. As I’d concluded before, she was unlikely to jeopardise her new job to get revenge.

  The spivs? Knaggs had sworn vengeance on Levy for assisting in his arrest. He and Sadler easily could have overpowered Levy. They might only have wanted to teach him a lesson, but things got out of hand. Sadler had behaved so oddly on the first evening Levy failed to turn up for work, as if he knew something about it all. Why had Sadler mentioned Soho at all that night, if Levy had been killed in Bloomsbury? To put me off the scent?

  Moray and Fripp? They hated Jews on principle. I was inclined to suspect Moray simply because I disliked him and he disliked Jews. But why would Moray want Levy dead? Had Levy found out something incriminating about him? That he frequented brothels, for instance? And how did Fripp and Moray know whether bombs had fallen in Soho on the night Levy went missing? It was entirely feasible that Moray might have been visiting a brothel in Soho that night, as he had been that day Pam and I saw him. But Fripp? I still thought that Moray’s conversation with Fripp about attending a meeting with someone who had read the book in German was suspicious. Were the suspicious meetings taking place in Soho? What if Levy had discovered—

  ‘I can hear your brain whirling around,’ said Jim in a tone that brooked no nonsense. ‘Lily, there’s no mystery here and you’re no Sherlock Ho—’

  At that I whirled myself around, and shut him up by the simple expedient of kissing him. There was no more talk of Levy again that night.

  The raiders came later in waves, crashing down on London and receding into the darkness, giving just enough respite to allow us to hope they had departed before returning in full force. I slept badly, tossing and turning to the sound of bombs, guns and fire-engine bells.

  And I woke to the sound of Jim fiddling with the radio, which was emitting high-pitched squeaks rather than the morning news.

  He’d made tea. I poured myself a cup and investigated his pantry. To my delight I found that Jim’s weekly ration of bacon was untouched. Two rashers went into the frying pan and as I sniffed hungrily at the scent of the frying bacon I discovered a loaf in the bread bin. A couple of slices went into the pan with the bacon, and two more under the griller, and in my mind I sent thanks to Lord Woolton for not putting bread under the ration. When I discovered a small pot of raspberry jam, my joy was complete.

  ‘There’s a gremlin in the damn thing,’ Jim called out.

  I removed the toast from under the griller, placed the rashers on top and the fried bread beside them and opened the pot of jam.

  ‘Breakfast is ready,’ I called out.

  ‘A veritable feast,’ Jim said, as he sat down.

  ‘Tell me about whatever it was you said was in the wireless,’ I said as we ate.

  ‘A gremlin? It’s an imp. A sprite. They’re to blame when things go wrong in your plane. I know for a fact that one of the blighters lived in my kite’s centre of gravity because it used to hurl itself forward whenever I was about to land, which made the plane nose-heavy at the worst possible moment.’

  I gave him a sceptical look over my sandwich.

  ‘I’ll have you know that all pilots believe implicitly in gremlins,’ he assured me. ‘They stiffen the controls. They jam the rudder or the ailerons. Gremlins even go so far as to dispel cloud cover when we need it the most.’

  ‘Do the German planes have gremlins too?’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’ He smiled and took a sip of tea. ‘The obnoxious little devils live in aircraft of all nationalities and wreak their havoc without regard to race, age or political persuasion.’

  ‘I’m fairly sure they live in ambulances, too, then.’

  He laughed. ‘Probably.’

  It had been easy to wake up with Jim, have breakfast with him, spend time with him. Celia might believe we were unsuited, but it didn’t feel like it that morning. In fact, it felt quite the opposite.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  In the station the following day I had just finished my first cup of tea for the morning when Moray opened the window into the office and called out that he needed an ambulance for a delivery of supplies to Great Ormond Street Hospital. Celia went to collect the chit, exchanging a few words with Moray as she did so. Moray nodded at her and looked up to address the room.

  ‘Does anybody else want to attend Levy’s funeral on Friday?’ he asked.

  ‘Will there be grog?’ asked Sadler.

  ‘You’re not going,’ said Moray. ‘I’ve got Brennan, Ashwin, Halliday and Squire down for leave.’

  ‘I think it’s the right thing to do,’ Celia told me as we headed off on the supply run.

  It was a chilly morning and there was no wind. By the time we set off to return to the station after our delivery, the morning’s mist was rapidly turning into fog.

  ‘Looks like we’re in for a genuine pea-souper of rich and ripe vintage,’ said Celia.

  She was right. Before long the Monster was engulfed in thick, reeking, khaki-coloured fog. It blotted out my vision, it closed my nose and caught in my throat. All sounds outside the ambulance were muffled and around us the ghostly traffic crept soundlessly. I slowed to walking pace and tried to use the white-painted kerb as a reference.

  ‘I can’t see a thing,’ I said, groaning. ‘You’ll need to walk in front of the ambulance and warn me of obstacles.’

  ‘I can’t guide you that way,’ she replied brusquely. ‘It’s dangerous to continue driving.’
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  So I turned into a narrow street, pulled up to the kerb and switched off the engine. We were now stranded in the noxious gloom. Although the windows were wound up tightly, even the small amount of polluted air that seeped into the cab was enough to make me cough and my eyes sting.

  We were silent for a while as the fog swirled around the ambulance. My thoughts turned to Sadler’s cruel stories on the night Levy failed to turn up. Perhaps he had been trying to confuse me with tall tales, when he knew all along that Levy was lying dead in Caroline Place.

  ‘Ashwin,’ I blurted out, ‘do you know if Sadler has ever been investigated for black-marketeering or looting?’

  ‘Yes. He was questioned by the police after Knaggs was caught looting, but nothing came of it. Moray told me. Why do you ask?’

  I couldn’t tell her the truth. ‘I was wondering why he hadn’t been hawking his French perfumes lately.’

  ‘The perfumes he sells aren’t really French. You do know Sadler is a wide boy.’

  ‘Yes, of course I do. I’ve never bought anything from him, or from Knaggs.’

  ‘If you want French perfume, I’d be glad to give you a bottle.’

  My cheeks were on fire. ‘That’s very kind, but I—’

  ‘Not at all. My pleasure. I’ll drop it off at your flat.’

  ‘No, really. I couldn’t.’

  ‘I’ve noticed that you like Je Reviens. I have a bottle I’ve barely touched.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said weakly. What else could I do?

  ‘I suppose Jim likes Je Reviens,’ she said.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Lily . . .’

  Her use of my first name surprised me. We all used surnames when on duty.

  ‘I know you Australians think our class system is a load of old hat and your country is a democratic meritocracy. I’m not sure that is so, as I suspect a form of class system exists everywhere, but I do know that it’s utterly rigid in this country.’