The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  ‘Will you let me?’ Felix had reached into his own coat and withdrawn a shining leather wallet. It looked brand new, the leather giving off warmth from his chest.

  ‘Well, I’d be very embarrassed to but I—’ She reached for her own purse.

  ‘It would be my pleasure. You wouldn’t let me pay for you at the restaurant the other night. Now you’re in a fix it’s the least I can do.’

  The guard took the money from him without looking at her. When he wedged past them his belt purse nudged Honey’s hips closer to Felix. ‘Wait, excuse me. When do we reach Bexworth?’

  The man shrugged without turning. ‘How long is a piece of string? Second stop.’

  She reached to her brow. She felt light-headed, aware she hadn’t eaten any breakfast.

  ‘I should find you a seat.’

  ‘Thank you for the ticket. That was very . . . I don’t know what happened. I swear those boys were up to trickery.’

  ‘No harm done.’ He was looking at her. ‘I say, there are an awful lot of them.’

  She caught his eye. ‘Are you staying at the Park for Christmas?’

  He looked down for a second, then pushed the brim of his hat back. It made his brow look boyish, showing more of his blue eyes. Such exotic eyes, she thought, with their gem shape, gleaming and focused in the irises; lapis lazuli, cobalt, hard precious stones. ‘Yes, I think I will,’ he said.

  ‘What do your family think of that?’

  He shook his head lightly. ‘My whole family were killed in an air raid last year in London. Wiped out, the lot of them. In one go.’ He made a gesture with his hands, palms down, slicing the air. ‘I was on a train home when their shelter took a direct hit. The train was delayed.’

  She thought she must look away but couldn’t help staring. He pulled at his collar behind the knot. ‘It’s awfully hot in here, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She looked down. She had a desperate urge to tell him straight away what had happened to Dickie, to share, but she remembered Beatrix’s words: ‘War isn’t a competition.’ We are all entitled to our grief.

  Felix’s face had changed. He looked pale and stricken. He peered around as if he might be seeking an escape route. An awful shine had come upon his top lip, the rest of his face had drained. She felt as if she had caused it.

  Her fingers reached very slowly out to his; his huge rough husk of a hand leaning on the window rail, which contrasted so sharply with the skin on his face. What had he done at Cambridge to make his hands so rough? Punting? Sculpture? Or was it Oxford he had said? But she was certain Tiver had said Cambridge.

  She closed in on his skin. It was cool; a thick protectant around the blood and muscle. She stroked until she felt a hard line and looked down. His index finger had a welt around it, almost a perfect circle like a ring. ‘What’s this?’ She traced it with her own finger.

  His gaze, which had been flicking round the train, anchored back on her. They both looked at their touching hands. He hesitated. ‘I had my finger blown off by an incendiary. I was trying to reach my mother. The doctor stitched it back on. He says I should still be able to feel, but. . .’ He shook his head lightly. He took in a huge breath and let it out as a sigh.

  They felt the pull of the engine brakes and a slowing as they entered another unnamed station with its signage blacked out. Staring across at her was a brick building and on its wall a poster, the letters blue and white capitals. ‘CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES’. It was impossible to know what to say to a stranger. There were so many minefields to tread, no matter the conversation. Secrets, faux pas, dredged-up memories of horrors no one wanted to talk about. Every blown limb, every pile of rubble, they all led a path to someone in the end. It was all veins and blood and beating hearts, connected, or searching to connect.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ was all she could manage again.

  Carriage doors were cranking open and snapping. Gay laughter and shrieks flew through windows, and in other corners, knotted embraces and tears.

  Suddenly Felix leaned towards her and rested his forehead on the brim of her hat. ‘I have thought often about where I might kiss you first, but never was it on a heaving train.’

  She tilted her chin up. Her right hand still rested on the clasp of the gas mask box. The secrets in it felt suddenly lighter. As the whistle blew and the choke of the steam rose hot and mineral into the bright freezing winter air, as the train began to crawl again, their lips met, and for a blinding blissful moment she was not on a train, not in a war, not in a tangle of deceit and trickery in which she did not quite yet know her part.

  Chapter 17

  They hurried up the station path and found themselves at the edge of a village green, flanked on all sides by red-brick houses and a collection of pubs. The absence of street signs was disorientating, but Felix went into the Old Ostrich to ask for the address.

  He had abandoned Oxford. He had done it for her, and that made her heart beat hard. ‘I’ll make a telephone call from the station,’ he had said. There was no telephone at the station. But he had rushed into the post office and sent a telegram while Honey waited, stamping her feet on the platform. ‘Hang it if it doesn’t reach him in time. Plans are going awry left, right and centre in this war. For all he’ll know the train was sent to Reading instead.’

  He emerged from the Old Ostrich now with a piece of paper and a map drawn in pencil on the back of a beer mat, leading them out of the village towards a farm lane. When they rounded the bend and saw the gate sign they both stopped short.

  ‘Are you sure this is the hospital your friend is in?’

  The building was not what she had expected.

  ‘The name’s right.’

  It was no bigger than a farmhouse, about the same size as a vicarage, with a decent sculpted garden, like a garden in a child’s picture book, and a pond at the end of a silver pebble lane. Though it was cold the sun was out. Some men were wheeling barrows of dead foliage to a compost or bonfire pile beyond a shed in the corner nearest the lane. There were ancient apple and plum trees crowded at the perimeter, and a short red wall marked the boundaries of a small kitchen garden where trunks of Brussels sprouts came knobbling free from the ground. In the pond stood a man in waders, lugging heavy stones from one end to the other. In turn he picked each up and replaced it down onto a different spot without aim or direction. Just outside the front door of the house a woman sat bundled into a wheelchair and furs, swaddled, with a violet felt hat draping the top of her face, so that every bit of her except the nose and cheeks was invisible. She was reading a book in gloved hands. She looked up as they passed but they couldn’t see her eyes. The air had a scent like pigs, and somewhere from round the back of the house a cockerel crowed.

  As soon as they crossed the threshold the telltale signs were there though. The smell was replaced by Caporal and the underlying tang of vomit. Each inner door was braced by heavy fire prevention bars. There was a metal rod pinned to the wall at the bottom of the staircase that could be stretched and clipped across if needed, while a set of regulation sand buckets were placed at intervals in the hall. Gas masks hung on hooks behind a solid reception bench, where a woman in slacks and a tweed jacket sat. She wore curled around her ears a pair of tight and very fine wire spectacles, so tight they looked ready to grow into her head.

  ‘Can I help?’ She spoke while still looking at her ledger, then halfway through the question her gaze snapped up onto Honey. Her eyes were huge and brown, magnified by the circles of the spectacles.

  Honey cleared her throat. ‘Miss Draper. I’m looking to see Miss Draper, a patient.’

  ‘There’s no one of that name here.’

  ‘You didn’t check.’

  ‘I didn’t have to. There’s no one of that name here.’

  ‘No, but I think she must be. At least I’ve been told she must be.’

  ‘Are you family?’

  Honey hesitated. She looked at Felix. ‘Sort of. I’m a good friend.’

  The woman
smiled and put down her pencil. ‘In that case I hope you find your good friend. Sorry not to be of any help.’ She went back to her ledger. A door at the bottom of the stairs opened and a woman in a crisp tweed skirt suit and white coat with a clipboard emerged. She too wore spectacles, horn-rimmed. Her hair was pinned haphazardly to her head.

  ‘Miss Draper.’ Honey tried again with the receptionist, watching the doctor from the corner of her eye as she said the name. ‘The name is Miss Draper.’ She spoke loudly. ‘Moira Draper. Check your records. I’m certain it’s here she came. It’s really very urgent.’

  The woman with the clipboard crept towards them until -Honey found herself startled at her proximity. ‘There are set visiting procedures, Miss—’

  ‘Deschamps.’

  The doctor frowned then continued. ‘Patients here are on strict recovery programmes. Even if your . . . very good friend were here it would be unlikely you could speak to her without an appointment.’

  ‘We telegrammed ahead,’ Felix cut in. ‘Did you not receive it? The telegrams have been terrible. And I think my fiancé wrote a letter too, didn’t you, Miss Deschamps?’

  Honey took up the tale. ‘The post has been terrible. It really has. I can’t fathom why you wouldn’t have—’ She broke off, her nerve failing as the lie embroidered itself.

  ‘We haven’t received any communications,’ the receptionist said.

  ‘We did send ahead.’

  The two women exchanged a glance.

  ‘It’s no good. You’ll have to go,’ the doctor with the clipboard said.

  ‘But she is here.’

  ‘Miss Deschamps, I’m afraid I didn’t introduce myself. Dr Steerpen.’ The doctor smiled and her eyes flashed wide through her thick horn glasses. ‘As you’ll appreciate we’re a small hospital and I do know all my patients. And your friend isn’t one of them. I’m very sorry, have you had far to travel?’

  Honey looked closely at the doctor’s face but her expression was as blank as a queen on a coin. It was funny how easily some people lied while to others the task was like climbing a mountain. She stared and stared and still the doctor wouldn’t break her cool smile.

  ‘Just from . . . London. Not far. Sorry about the mistake.’ Felix tugged her sleeve and they moved back outside into the garden.

  Once in the open air she pulled him towards the lawn. ‘That was a nice way to propose. I never thought it would happen inside an asylum. My mother will be pleased. I’ve made you blush, I’m sorry. I know it was a joke.’

  ‘I just thought—’

  ‘I know. Thank you.’ She looked around.

  Beyond the apple and plum trees the house was enclosed on all sides by a high wooden fence cut at the tops of the slats into spikes. It was a square building, Georgian probably, with large sash windows. She counted along the sides. Nine in total. ‘We’ll have to be very stealthy.’ She lowered her voice.

  ‘What are you – you’re not thinking . . .?’

  ‘I have to see her. There’s no getting around it.’

  ‘But the doctor said—’

  ‘She’s lying. Did you see that smile?’

  ‘Honey, you have to tell me what’s happening. What are you involved in? I thought you wanted to see your friend.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘She’s here all right. They don’t lie on Secret memos.’

  She saw Felix reel. He turned away down the path.

  ‘All right, I stole a memo. Leave if you like. I won’t hold it against you. But I can’t.’ She pulled on the back of his coat. ‘Someone . . .’ One of the garden men looked up and she dropped her voice. ‘Someone killed my brother. Two nights ago. Someone murdered him in Bletchley.’ She waited and watched Felix’s face but he only shook his head slightly then began to reach both hands tenderly towards her. For some reason she found herself batting them away. ‘The police tell me it was thugs but I know it wasn’t. It wasn’t a coincidence. Someone is trying to contact me, and it . . . it was either them, or someone else.’

  ‘Them, who are they?’

  ‘I don’t know. But you see Moira might be able to find out. Moira used to . . .’ She stopped herself. He was Hut 3, he would know anyway, there would be no harm in mentioning the bones of it. ‘She used to work in a different part of the Park. She’s the only person I trust to help me.’

  ‘Except me,’ he said quietly. ‘You can trust me.’

  She looked up at him, searching his eyes. He was staring deep into her. She could see the variation of colours, changing in the light like the sides of a sapphire. The breeze carried across from the pond; the man in the waders was singing softly, a wartime tune, a soldiers’ ditty, up and down, up and down.

  ‘I . . .’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t trust you. Wait here.’

  ‘Honey.’ He hissed her name but she had disappeared round the far side of the house.

  She searched each of the nine windows that looked out over the back lawns. In one corner was a poplar tree but it had been cut back so that there was at least six feet between its branches and the window opposite, and the drop should she fall was more like twenty. She walked the length of the house, staying close to the wall. The fields beyond the fence skated flat all the way to the horizon, chopped up and marked out like a patchwork quilt; green, brown and amber. At the bottom near the fence was a barn, but it was silent now. There were no sounds but the tramp and slap of the gardeners out front and the fluttering of a bird on the poplar’s branch.

  She looked at each window in turn. White-painted bars were braced across some of them, not all. Her eye ran right along to the building’s far side and she saw a plain wooden divide at the end of it, and beyond it an annexe that had been erected off one of the house’s back corners. The masonry was duller and more modern than the rest of the building, concrete and roughcast, grey compared to the stately red brick of the main house. It was only one storey tall and had chubbier bars cross-slatting each of its tiny windows. Its discreet plainness had a forbidding quality. No sounds came from it and the only access seemed to be via the main house.

  She looked back along the downstairs row of windows of the main building. The blinds were still drawn in four of them but in the fifth she found herself looking into a neat parlour. A chintz sofa was covered in patched cushions and throws next to an upright piano scattered in music scores. She was about to test the window sash when a hand clutched her shoulder.

  ‘Are you out of your mind? If they catch you, Honey, the Park will . . . I mean it will go to the Commander . . . really.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s too late for warnings.’ Another voice sounded beyond the annexe. A door opened in the wooden divide and the spindle of a winter morning shadow emerged first, then the shape of a clipboard, sticking from a hand. Finally the tight tweed jacket, crisp white coat and stockinged legs of the doctor appeared.

  ‘Did you say you were a friend of Miss Draper’s, or a colleague?’

  Honey looked at Felix and then at Dr Steerpen.

  ‘It’s not a tricky question.’ She had a calm expression that seemed to Honey fraudulently open, maliciously serene.

  ‘Friend,’ she said firmly. ,

  ‘Can I see your 1250? Your identity card.’

  Honey reached into the pocket of her jacket then stopped. The story about the girl who had shown her papers to the RAF man swam like a pike in her mind. ‘I’d rather not. I don’t know what authority you’re under.’

  ‘A higher one than you.’ The doctor took one hand from the clipboard and extended it. There was a creeping calmness in her movements. Honey felt at that moment a piercing fear, as if someone might be about to reach a pair of bare muscled hands about her throat and strangle her. Her breathing tightened. The doctor waggled her fingers in the air, waiting.

  ‘It’s no use, Miss Deschamps.’ Honey flinched at her name. ‘Captain Tiver knows you’re here. I just spoke to him.’

  Honey turned sharply to look at Felix, then back
to the doctor. She dipped her hand into her pocket, pulled out her identification card, and passed it across.

  The doctor didn’t look at it. She kept her gaze on Honey, but as her fingers touched the paper Honey knew what she was about to say. ‘And the Bletchley Park papers too.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m a Foreign Office typist.’

  The doctor looked at her, indifference behind her spectacled eyes, then down at the ID card. She thrust it back. ‘Come with me.’ Her white coat flared a little as she turned and began striding along the gravel path that ran through the garden back to the front of the house. Honey was still in the shadow of the façade.

  ‘Well, come on, look smart about it. He can stay outside.’ She pointed to Felix.

  ‘No, I won’t come with you.’

  ‘Sorry, but you don’t have much choice.’

  ‘Felix, telephone the police. Go on, find a kiosk in the town, do it.’

  ‘I’m afraid he won’t,’ said the doctor.

  ‘But I can’t—’

  ‘Go with her,’ whispered Felix. ‘I’m here, I’m outside. You’ll be all right.’

  Honey looked at Felix, searching his face again for something; she didn’t know what. But he was as unreadable as the doctor. His hard, gristled cheeks gave nothing away. There was no grimness, no amusement. She felt as if she might be walking towards a guillotine, towards a block.

  They tied one to the bedframe in such places, that much she knew. They tied your arms in cotton so thick that a pair of scissors couldn’t even cut you free. And metal restraints, manacles. She tried not to think of these things. She tried not to think of a long corridor and a line of iron doors, each one thicker and colder than the last. She tried instead to see what was in front of her for what it was. Serenity: gardens in winter time. A robin. She tried not to look at his blood-red breast, which became to her a stab wound as she rounded the corner, his fluttering little cry, an anxious territorial scream.

  The doctor took twenty-three paces to reach the front door of the house. Honey counted as they went. As she turned the corner she looked back over her shoulder at Felix and felt a twist of betrayal. What if this was it? What if he had been part of it? He had served his purpose, used the puzzles to lead her where they wanted her. They had incarcerated Moira, now they had come for her.