by Chloe Mayer
I wondered if Mother had seen the hole too, and finally realised what had happened to Hansel. Was that why she lay down in the snow? But that didn’t quite make sense. Because she’d have wanted to lie closer to him, wouldn’t she? And that thick snow would have probably made it hard to see the mineshaft, unless she’d been right on top of it – and then she’d have fallen down herself.
Daddy made a couple more mild noises of surprise, then thanked the constable again and said goodbye.
From the window I watched the policeman walk down the path, get into his car and drive away. Daddy came to stand behind me and I felt his hands on my shoulders. He probably felt me shaking.
‘There was nothing you could have done. It was nobody’s fault. Not even Mother’s.’
I nodded, but couldn’t stop looking at the empty road that led towards the forest. She nearly found the woodcutter. She nearly found her prince again.
39
Little Kai was blue – indeed, almost black – from the cold; but he did not feel it, for the Snow Queen had kissed all feeling of coldness out of him, and his heart had almost turned into a lump of ice.
From The Snow Queen
Not long before Mother’s funeral – which had been delayed for weeks so the ground could thaw – there was another knock at the door. Two policemen stood on our doorstep. Both wore similar brown suits and trilby hats.
I wouldn’t have known they were policemen, but Daddy could tell, because he told me who they were when he looked out of the window after hearing the knock. I came to look and saw something in their faces that made me think Daddy was probably right.
I felt very, very calm.
Daddy went to open the door and they came into the sitting room, holding their hats in their hands.
‘Am I being arrested?’ I asked.
‘What?’ One of the men, the older of the two, laughed. ‘Arrested? No, son, you’re not being arrested.’
He looked at Daddy, who smiled and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. It’s been a difficult time. The last time a policeman came here, he told us about my wife …’ Both the men nodded at this; yes, they knew all about it. ‘And I’m afraid Daniel seems to be blaming himself.’
‘Oh!’ The policemen said together as they both looked over at me.
‘No, no, no,’ the older the one said.
‘You mustn’t,’ the younger one said.
‘Look,’ said the one with grey hair. ‘My name’s DDI Stephen Taylor. DDI means I’m the divisional detective inspector. It’s true I’m here because I have to ask you a couple of questions, but you haven’t done anything wrong!’ He gave a little laugh. The other one nodded.
‘Is it about my wife?’ Daddy asked. ‘Why do you need to speak to Daniel?’
‘Perhaps we could have a word with you first, sir? In private?’
‘Of course. Daniel, will you—’
‘No – do you know what?’ the detective said. ‘I’ve had a better idea. Let’s all go and have a chat somewhere else. Would that be better? I don’t want to bring back memories of the last visit. Would you like to go to see the police station, son? See the cells? Oh dear! Your face! No, no, we don’t have to. Not at all. Is there a little cafe round here? We could go and have a ginger beer? Or a hot drink?’
Daddy nodded uncertainly. ‘Um, there’s the pub.’
‘Even better! Why don’t you go and sit in the police car, son, and we’ll all come out in a minute and go to the pub. See? Nothing to worry about. Nothing whatsoever.’
I pulled on my coat and went outside like I was told and then after a few minutes Daddy and the policemen walked to the car and we drove down the High Street to the Royal Oak.
‘A beer garden, fantastic,’ Detective Taylor said when he saw the sign outside. ‘I know it’s a bit chilly, but let’s sit in the fresh air, shall we? I expect we’ll have it all to ourselves as well which will be a bonus.’
We were well into spring now, but there were still traces of that strange, terrible winter in the air. A breeze on my face felt like it could have tiny specks of ice in it, and the sky was grey and gloomy.
He wasn’t how I would have imagined a detective to be. I’d probably have pictured a smooth private eye like Sam Spade. But this man was jokey and chunky, his grey hair thin and wispy. And he had an accent, northern or Welsh, I wasn’t sure.
He and Daddy had been talking about PoWs in the car, and as we walked around the back of the pub to the beer garden, he said: ‘It’s amazing how many of them are still here – they don’t want to leave! It’s the same up and down the country. They made friends while they were here. I know a chap – not from these parts – whose family had two of them round for Christmas Day. During the war this was! Everyone in his village all had one or two prisoners for the day so the PoWs could have a proper family Christmas! Have you ever heard the like?!’
My eyes watered. If Hansel hadn’t escaped, would that idea have been floated in Bambury, too? Would we have been able to have him spend the day with us, me and Mother, in our little cottage? It seemed unlikely, now I thought about it; many of the villagers were already turning against the PoWs, even before Hansel ran away.
We sat down at a wrought-iron table and Detective Taylor sent the other policeman inside to order our drinks.
‘All right,’ the policeman said, finally. ‘I expect you’re wondering what all of this is about.’
He folded his hands on the table and leaned towards me, looking serious all of a sudden.
‘Now, I don’t know if you know about this, but a PoW escaped a few years ago. Not long before the end of the war – about eight months before VE Day.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I meant: Yes, it was me. Yes, I helped him escape. Yes, I killed him. But my throat strangled my words before they could come out.
He nodded. ‘Good. Now …’ He pulled out a large rolled-up envelope from his jacket pocket and smoothed it flat on the table.
‘I want to show you a photograph of this PoW. His name was Johannes Müller. I want you to tell me if you’ve ever seen him before.’
The policeman started to fiddle with the envelope, which I could see was filled with some papers. He glanced up at Daddy. ‘They went to all the camps and took lots of photographs of the PoWs,’ he said. ‘Documenting it all. Magazines and newspapers, but government and Red Cross photographers too. They keep everything in the archives at the Imperial War Museum – it’s not just about the Great War any more – so I went there and found this. It’s fascinating really – photographs of PoWs watching concerts in barns, and working in factories, the men in their camps and—’
‘There’s a photograph? Of Hans?’
Daddy and the policeman both looked at me in surprise.
‘Sounds like you did know him then,’ the detective said, and he pulled out a stiff piece of paper from his envelope. ‘See for yourself.’
The sheet began trembling as soon as it passed from his hand to mine across the iron table top. Perhaps he thought I was just shaking because of the cold.
I gazed down at the blurry black-and-white image. Two men stood side by side. A little hut just visible behind them.
‘One’s the PoW, but I’m not sure who the other—’
‘It’s Farmer Dawson!’ I let out a funny little noise not unlike a laugh. I hadn’t seen Hans’s face for years, and of course the farmer was dead too now, but here they both were.
Neither was smiling, because of the formality of having their photograph taken. But Farmer Dawson looked relaxed, as though he’d been laughing just before the shutter snapped. And Hans. My woodchopper-prince. His handsome face was stiff, turned slightly away from the camera’s eye.
They were standing quite close to each other, their hands by their sides. Hans’s hands were tight little fists. He hadn’t wanted his photograph taken. Perhaps that was why Farmer Dawson had been laughing. Perhaps he and the photographer had been teasing him.
They were both in short-sleeved shirts, so it must have been a warm
day. I never heard Hans mention that a photographer had come, so perhaps it was not long after he arrived in Bambury, before his life became tangled with mine and my mother’s.
‘Thank you,’ I said, as though he had given me the photograph to keep. It felt like a gift.
I felt a strange pang that I couldn’t show the photograph to Mother.
I ran my finger over his stern-looking expression.
‘Ah, yes, I thought that might be the farmer. He’s passed away now, hasn’t he? The prisoner’s name and his PoW number were in the caption, although Mr Dawson didn’t get a mention!’ He looked at Daddy and chuckled. ‘Shame, really. I could’ve done with speaking to him.’
He turned to me. ‘So I take it you knew this PoW? Hans, you called him?’
I looked back down at his face in the photograph. ‘Yes.’
‘Daniel,’ Daddy nudged me slightly in the shoulder, ‘tell the detective how you knew him; where you met him.’
Just then, the younger policeman came out with a tray. He had a cup of cocoa for me, and beers for everyone else.
Daddy nudged me again.
‘Mother and I … We … Hans was a woodchopper. He sold wood for Farmer Dawson.’
‘Ah, yes, we knew he sold wood. But we didn’t know your mother was one of his customers. Were you always with your mother, or did she sometimes go alone?’
I nodded.
‘Sometimes alone?’
I nodded again. I couldn’t look Daddy in the eye. It felt terrible to be speaking about Mother and Hans with him right next to me. But I wouldn’t tell any more lies. I wouldn’t tell any more stories. That’s what I’d just decided. If someone asked me for the truth, I’d tell it to them.
‘Was she frightened of him, son? Did she ever say anything about it? Did she suddenly stop going? Did she make a complaint against him to the farmer? Or maybe she saw him the day he disappeared – do you remember?’
I looked up in shock. ‘Frightened?’
‘I’m sorry to upset you, son. I think your mum must’ve not mentioned it so as not to worry you.’ He gave me a funny, sad little smile and then gave the same look to Daddy, who patted my back. ‘We think he robbed your mother. Grabbed a necklace from around her neck. Maybe he stole it before he ran away – he was probably going to sell it. We found it on him, you see. A necklace, a silver locket, with your mum’s name and birthday engraved on the back.’
‘Oh, no!’ I shook my head.
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this. Did he seem dangerous, violent? Were you frightened of him?’
‘No! No!’ I was aware I was almost shouting.
‘All right, Daniel,’ Daddy said. ‘We’ll get all this straightened out, and they’re going to give us Mother’s necklace back. No need to get upset. Look, calm down. Why don’t you have some of your drink before it gets cold?’
So I sipped from my cup, careful not to spill any on the photograph I was still holding in my other hand, and the chocolate was dark and bitter and scalded my tongue.
‘You’ve got him all wrong,’ I said.
‘Maybe she lost the necklace?’ the younger policeman said. ‘It could have fallen off when she was in the orchard, and the PoW saw it come off, or maybe he just found it afterwards, and stole it then?’
I looked away.
‘Did she lose the necklace?’ the older man asked. ‘Do you remember? Did she ever mention it?’
I looked down into the cup as if there were answers in the thick brown drink. I didn’t want to lie any more. But I didn’t want to hurt Daddy.
‘He was … Hansel – I mean Hans – Hans was our friend.’ It was the best I could do. ‘He would never hurt her.’ I stopped because I realised that wasn’t quite true. He was going to hurt her by leaving.
‘Ah, well then,’ said the detective. ‘That clears that up. We didn’t know she was one of his customers – the farmer’s office is a bit of a tip and we haven’t gone through all his records yet. She must have dropped the necklace there.’ He took a long, satisfied drink from his beer. ‘Good lad.’
‘Well done, Daniel,’ Daddy said. ‘We’ll finish our drinks and walk home.’ He looked at the policeman. ‘I’m relieved she wasn’t robbed. You worried me when you said that!’
And they all carried on, drinking and chatting, because they thought everything was fine. All the answers added up.
‘As I said, she never mentioned this prisoner in her letters,’ Daddy said.
‘Well, she wouldn’t, would she? If he was just some PoW she bought wood from every now and then.’
I was glad they didn’t think Hans was a violent robber. But they still thought he was a thief. And hearing them talk about him now, as if he was nobody to her, to us, was almost worse.
Like all adults did sooner or later, they began chatting about how they’d spent the war. I looked at Daddy. He was trying so hard to be well. He managed a joke about his service. ‘Not a scratch on me!’ he said. ‘I was one of the lucky ones.’ But it wasn’t true. Not really. He did get hurt in the war. Only no one could see it now because he knew how to hide it. I knew Daddy didn’t like talking about the war, and it seemed Detective Taylor realised that too because he started talking about his investigation again.
‘Knew we’d find out where the bugger went in the end. It was one of those cases that everyone kept thinking about, you know? It was as if he’d just disappeared into thin air.’
‘Well, case solved!’ Daddy said.
‘I’ll drink to that!’ the younger policeman said, and took a glug of his beer.
‘There was still quite a bit of work to do, though. Even when we established it was definitely him that had fallen down the mine – it’s not an easy business tracing PoWs. The German army is obviously dismantled now, so we had to find his family, to inform them what happened. On a form he filled out when he got here, he said he was from a place called Mittenwald. But we couldn’t find an address and the records on PoWs are sporadic, to say the least, and files sometimes got lost and so on.’
Daddy nodded.
‘Not sure if I should show you this, but … well, it’ll be common knowledge soon enough.’ And he picked up the manila envelope again.
My heart began to thump at the sight of it in his hands. He’d found out something else! Something about Hans. He’d tracked down his family.
‘The Red Cross was in charge of, sort of, overseeing PoWs were treated all right. And each country compiled their own records of the PoWs they held, and those records are now all held centrally by a department at the Red Cross in Switzerland. On index cards, would you believe – millions and millions and millions of index cards.’
Daddy was just nodding politely, but I was hanging on every word; and I wanted him to get to the point. I wanted to grab the envelope.
‘Well, they’re obviously sensitive and personal documents and so they’re not available to Joe Public. Not yet, anyway; might be one day, I suppose.’
‘But you managed to access them?’
‘Yes. We got one of their archivists to do a search for us. What with all those index cards you can imagine how long it takes. They have all the Great War prisoners’ files there too.’
I couldn’t stop staring at the envelope. Information about Hans’s family, his life before Bambury, must be lying just beneath the brown paper.
‘I also had a look at the local records in Densford and contacted the ‘Deutsche Dienststelle’ – if I’m saying that right – which has records on German PoWs and—’
‘What did you find?’
‘Daniel!’ Daddy looked shocked at my interruption.
‘Sorry,’ I said immediately to the policeman.
‘Oh that’s all right. Young boys love all the investigation stuff, I know! It’s exciting to them, isn’t it? And your lad had met this PoW, so it’s only natural he wants to know more about him.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘Well,’ he said, addressing me now, ‘I found a couple of references to the fact Johannes Müller was indeed a
PoW held in England from April 1944, but of course I couldn’t find a record of him ever being released or returning home to Germany.’
I nodded.
‘But what about his family? Did you find them?’
‘Well, I’m sorry to break it to you, son. But the long and the short of it is this: I hit a bit of a dead end. I couldn’t find any records relating to your Hans Müller who was born in Mittenwald.’
‘So there’s nothing?’
‘A-ha! I didn’t say that now, did I?’ He gave me a grin and I could tell I was supposed to be enjoying the game. Probably, he was used to telling stories about his investigations, and people loved the slow revealing of facts, like watching individual brushstrokes painted on a piece of paper until at last a whole picture suddenly jumped out at them. But I had to stop myself from screaming at him to stop speaking in riddles.
‘I was at a complete dead end trying to find out more about our Herr Müller, but I didn’t let that stop me! I had more than I usually have to go on because I had a photograph of him.’
He pointed at the picture I was still holding in my hand.
‘I had an idea. Well, not so much an idea, more what we call in the trade “a hunch”.’
I laid the picture down flat on the table, and placed my hand on top of it so it couldn’t flutter away.
‘I got my superiors to agree to me contacting the British army, well the military police to be precise, in Germany. That was no easy task, I tell you. It’s not exactly our job to go to these lengths to track down relatives of a dead PoW. But like I said, this was one of those cases that had been gnawing at me since he escaped. So I sent that photograph to the military police because I wanted someone to search the archives out there for me. I wanted to find another picture of him.’
