A Late Phoenix

by Catherine Aird

  “You don’t say.” The book Sloan had open now was comparing bombed London with Pompeii. Most of them did that. Craters, debris, blackened rubbish, and a few charred walls …

  In the end they got the most practical information out of Air Raid Precautions—An Album Containing a Series of Cigarette Cards of National Importance. Price One Penny.

  It was after that that Detective Constable Crosby set out to visit every dental surgery in the city.

  And to chat up every dental receptionist in sight.

  Some of them were formal and businesslike. Some of them giggled. None of them was old. They were all helpful.

  No less than three of them were altogether too helpful. They started off on quite the wrong tack. They thought he’d come about making an appointment for filling the cavity in his eyetooth.

  Crosby, who didn’t like to hear what he thought of as a small hole described as a cavity, disabused them quickly.

  What he had come about, he said to them all, was an old patient. The police, he said, knew her teeth but not her name.

  A little matter of identification.

  Before their time, of course.

  About twenty-five years ago.

  Dusty, yellowing records, their edges curling up, came out of all sorts of unlikely places. He was required to stand on chairs to reach the top of old cupboards, to crawl into odd holes under staircases and—in one case—to scramble up into a loft.

  In between various distractions and extractions a series of very pretty girls flipped over what he had retrieved, comparing their records with Dr. Dabbe’s report.

  None of the records tallied with the teeth of the lady in Lamb Lane.

  They were uniformly regretful that they hadn’t been able to be of more assistance to—er—Detective Constable … er …

  Crosby.

  But if they could help him in any other way at any time he wasn’t to hesitate to let them know. Now, about his eyetooth …

  Crosby fled.

  He went to a part of the town that the guide books didn’t mention. The only medieval touch about this area of the town was the nearness of each house to its neighbor—touching on either side and nearly touching fore and aft. The ease with which people could converse across the street from their doorsteps was simply demonstrated by the fact that two women were doing so when he arrived.

  He would have steered the police car into Aspen Close but espied difficulties in getting it out again. True, there was a banjo turning at the far end but one half of this was already occupied by an old car. It looked as if it had been there for a very long time and—unless given considerable mechanical aid—was going to go on staying there. A child’s tricycle had been abandoned in the middle of the road.

  He walked down to number seventeen.

  “It’s no use your knocking on that door, young man,” said one of the conversing women. “She’s next door with Mrs. Smith and the old lady’s as deaf as a post.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And diddle-o with it,” supplemented the woman from across the road. “So if she does hear you, you still don’t get any sense out of her. You try next door. She’s just got back from doing her offices. She’ll be having a cup of tea with Mrs. Smith.”

  Crosby obediently knocked on the door of number nineteen.

  It opened with the speed of light. He was conscious of a head covered in curlers and the flash of equally ferocious teeth. “If you’ve come about the installments on the motor bike …”

  “I haven’t,” said Crosby with dignity. “I want a word with a Mrs. Murgatroyd.”

  “The old lady? You won’t get a sensible word out of her, young fellow.” The ferocious teeth snapped open and the curlers rippled like jelly as their owner shouted, “Hilda! Hilda! There’s a man here wants to see your mother.”

  A tired-looking woman came hurrying through from the back. “Is he from the Welfare?”

  “No,” said Crosby a trifle distantly.

  “You’d better come in home,” said the woman called Hilda, looking him up and down. She led the way in to number seventeen, carefully shutting the door against the neighbors before she said, “Well, what is it?”

  She leaned back against the hall wall as she spoke as if to cushion herself against what he had to say.

  “I’m from the police.”

  The lines on the woman’s face sunk in more deeply, and her mouth tightened. Even Crosby was experienced enough to know that they could not have been totally unfamiliar words.

  “What is it this time?” she said. “Which one is it and what have they done?”

  “It’s not that.” He felt clumsy. “We’re just making a few enquiries about a young girl who Mrs. Murgatroyd reported as missing from this address in 1942 …”

  “That was me,” said the woman tonelessly.

  “Hilda Murgatroyd? But …” Crosby floundered. The woman he was looking at now could have passed for sixty.

  Easily.

  “Hilda Murgatroyd that was. Hilda Marshall now, if you must know. What’s it all about, eh?”

  “We just wanted to make sure you were alive. Someone’s been found …”

  “Huh.” Mrs. Marshall gave a bitter laugh. “If you can call it living.”

  “You ran away to Gretna Green …”

  “Daftest thing I ever did,” she said. “Talk about love’s young dream.”

  “You came back?”

  “Of course I came back. Back to everything I ran away from. There wasn’t anywhere else to go. He hadn’t got anywhere to take me.”

  “I see.”

  “Married woman that I was,” she went on, “me dad belted me and here I am now looking after me mother who’s out of her mind, and six kids and all their problems.” She looked at Crosby with the grand tolerance of the old for the young, “and, in case you don’t like to ask, love’s young dream …”

  “Mr. Marshall …”

  “Mr. Marshall”—she invested the name with curious overtones—“slipped off just after our youngest was born.”

  “I see,” said Crosby uneasily.

  “Kept on calling him Tail End Charlie, he did,” she said, “and I think he wanted to make sure. He always was afraid of responsibility. That was his trouble.”

  Dr. William Latimer stirred his coffee, took another aspirin and reflected that lines of thought exhibited just as many rules of behavior as did their mathematical counterparts.

  It was just that they did not behave with the same precision.

  Miss Tyrell’s train of thought was showing every sign of Newton’s First Law of Motion—moving forever in a straight line until deflected. The straight line led to Dr. Tarde.

  “Doctor …”

  “Yes?”

  “If anyone—any of the patients, I mean,—should ever give you any sort of hint that they knew what made Dr. Tarde do it”—she twisted and untwisted her bony fingers—“would you tell me?”

  “Certainly.” He hesitated. “You’ve no idea yourself?”

  She shook her head.

  “Doctors,” he observed in a detached way, “are funny people. They tend to get odd ideas about themselves when they’re ill … They think they’re going to die when they’re not. They decide everyone’s conspiring to keep the truth from them. You know how it goes. They think the X-ray report’s a fake and that the path lab people have been got at.”

  “He wasn’t ill …”

  “He may have thought he was. You can’t really examine your own signs and symptoms properly, you know. And you make it worse by dashing to your own old textbooks. There’s no comfort there.” This was not the distillation of a lifetime’s experience but another well-remembered lecture. They had been very thorough at William’s medical school. “I expect he was just afraid he’d got something nasty and took the easy way out.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that at all.”

  “They go to their medical friends—not necessarily in the right speciality,” went on William, warming to his theme, �
�and ask them to tell them the worst and when they don’t …”

  “He was never ill,” persisted Miss Tyrell. “Getting older, of course, but I’m sure he hadn’t anything wrong with him.”

  “They’re usually the worst when they think there is,” said William. “There’s no one like a neurotic for living on and on. They never die.”

  “That day,” said Miss Tyrell flatly, “he’d been talking about his holiday and looking over his fishing tackle. His only problem that I know of was that he’d put on weight since he last wore his fishing trousers … and,” said Miss Tyrell distantly, “I only knew that because he asked me to make an appointment for him with his tailor.”

  “Something must have disturbed him,” said William.

  “I know that,” she agreed wearily, “but it wasn’t fear of illness.”

  “Money?”

  “He had all he needed, Doctor. Not too little—or too much, for that matter—to be a nuisance.”

  “And just a second cousin somewhere by way of family?”

  She nodded. “He came to the funeral.”

  He might have been the only member of the family at the funeral, decided William privately, taking in Miss Tyrell’s patent anxiety, but he certainly wasn’t the only mourner.

  “There was nothing,” he said guardedly, “in the practice?”

  “The practice, Doctor?”

  “He hadn’t dropped a terrible clanger with a patient? Someone young dying who shouldn’t have done? You know, a mistake in diagnosis … or perhaps the wrong treatment?”

  “No, no, there was nothing like that.” She dismissed the suggestion impatiently.

  “One might get ideas of atonement …”

  “I should have known,” Miss Tyrell said simply. “Besides, he would have said. He wasn’t one of those doctors who think they’re God or anything.”

  “His last day,” suggested William. “Can you remember anything about it?”

  “Everything,” she said wretchedly. “Don’t you think I haven’t gone over it again and again?”

  “I know he saw Mrs. Lepton and Mr. Hodge …”

  “And about forty other people. There was nothing out of the ordinary about anyone at either surgery that day. I’m sure about that. No one was with him inordinately long either or anything like that …”

  “His visiting list?”

  “I’d thought of that, too. I’ve kept a copy. All just ordinary patients who were ill.”

  “New calls?”

  “Only four. I’d thought about that, too.” Miss Tyrell didn’t seem to need anything to remind her who they were. “Mrs. Appleby in Park Street. She’d got gastritis. A man called Collins with shingles. Old Bert Jackson with his chest and Mrs. Reddley with her old trouble …”

  William grinned. “She’s neurotic all right. Sticks out a mile.”

  “No children, too much money and social connections,” said Miss Tyrell tersely, “but Dr. Tarde knew how to handle her.”

  “Letters then,” suggested William. If it wasn’t a patient who disturbed the balance of Dr. Tarde’s mind perhaps something had come by post. “Or a telephone message?”

  Miss Tyrell shook her head. “No,” she said firmly, “I open the post and answer the telephone. Unless it’s obviously a personal letter—but there weren’t any of those that morning. I remember particularly …”

  At that moment the surgery bell pealed through the house. Not once but again and again like some dreadful tocsin.

  Miss Tyrell hurried to the door.

  Gilbert Hodge was standing on the step, his hand on the bell.

  “Can the doctor come over quickly, miss? To the bomb site.” Hodge was so breathless he could hardly get the words out quickly enough. “There’s a man there. I think he’s dead.”

  Dr. Latimer scooped up his black bag and strode down the steps. Gilbert Hodge scurried along beside him.

  “I was only taking a look round,” he said defensively. “After all, I do own the place and there were no police or anybody there today so I thought I’d take a look.”

  “Quite.” William stepped onto the rubble for the second time in search of a body. “Whereabouts?”

  “The same place as the other one. I was just looking round,” repeated Hodge in whom the need for speech was clearly pressing, “when I saw him. Look. There.”

  He looked.

  In the space that until lately had been the resting place of the mortal remains of the unknown lady lay the huddled figure of a man. He was of medium build with a close-cropped Army hairstyle. William got down beside him. He had asked Miss Tyrell to send for an ambulance but it was patently too late for any ambulance save for a black one without windows. He had to stoop to confirm that the man was dead—had been dead for some time now. He turned his head until he could see his pupils, noting as he did so a small hedge-tear scar which ran down the corner of his left forehead.

  “Anyone know who he is?”

  Gilbert Hodge stirred at his side. “I know him, Doctor,” he said thickly. His own color had turned quite green. “I know who that is all right though I haven’t seen him in years. He’s called Harold Waite.”

  Season and reheat

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  While Crosby interviewed the dental receptionists, Sloan made for the local planning department offices. The man he saw there was as helpful as all the dental receptionists had been—but much more positive too.

  “Lamb Lane?” The planning officer grinned cheerfully. “One of the biggest files we’ve got here.”

  “Really?”

  “Only one factor missing over the years.”

  “What was that?”

  “The preservationists.” The man rolled his eyes expressively. “Once they get the bit between their teeth I can tell you …”

  “There’s nothing to preserve in Lamb Lane,” said Sloan. Hitler had seen to that. It was rather the reverse, if anything. An eyesore.

  The man gave a short laugh. “You don’t suppose they’d let a little thing like that put them off, do you, Inspector?”

  “Like that, are they?”

  “Some of them. If they had a mind to, I daresay it wouldn’t take them long to find a peg to hang something on.” He twisted his lips. “Like saying the area was rich in German associations.”

  Sloan thought for a moment, entering into the spirit of the thing. “‘An increasingly rare memento of historic and stirring times.’”

  The man grinned. “That’s the idea. They haven’t tried it on Lamb Lane yet but you never know.” He opened the file. “Whereabouts do you want to begin?”

  “The beginning.”

  “That would be before the war. There was a bit of talk about slum clearance that way but it didn’t come to anything. Then we got the clearance done for us by the bomb in a manner of speaking.”

  “So they weren’t beautiful, those houses …”

  “Calleshire vernacular architecture,” said the planner. “Good of their kind.” He turned a page. “After the bombing the council slapped a specified area notice on it pursuant to Section 7 (2) of the War Damage Act 1941.”

  Sloan struggled to write down the far from plain words. “Would that mean anything?”

  “I’ll say,” responded the planner vigorously. “If you want chapter and verse …” He changed his tone to a chant and recited: “This course would prohibit any person making good war damage (other than temporary works) to hereditaments in the specified area, and would impose on such persons an obligation to inform the War Damage Commission of any proposed works.”

  Sloan sat up. “Then why did Gilbert Hodge buy it?”

  “Search me,” said the man equably. “Running a high risk of a C.P.O.”

  “That wouldn’t be a Chief Petty Officer, by any chance, would it?”

  “Sorry. Compulsory Purchase Order to the uninitiated. Nasty things, C.P.O.s, Inspector. Don’t ever let one of them get you. Brings on apoplexy quicker than anything I know.”

  “And did t
hey have one of those in Lamb Lane?”

  “Nearly. Very nearly. Earlier this year.” He ruffled through the pages. “Looks as if they had no end of schemes for this and that after the war …”

  “Homes fit for heroes anyway,” said Sloan.

  “The first application to build was turned down very early on. The council had taken against just in-filling bomb damage.” He put his finger on a line of print and read aloud: “They wanted each bomb site developed to its full potential with regard to the future not the past.”

  “I see. What happened next?”

  “Someone in the planning department dreamed up a new road complex for the whole area. Before my time here, of course, but that put a stopper on any development for years and years while they fought it out.”

  “Then what?”

  “All quiet until 1960 when an outline application by Mark Reddley (Developers) Ltd., on behalf of G. Hodge, Esquire, was accepted but turned down on detailed plans being submitted.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Things went dormant again after that and then three years ago.…”

  “Yes?”

  “The council shook the dust off their slum clearance plans from before the war. That stirred things up and Reddley put in another design for this G. Hodge.” He frowned at the paper in front of him. “Seems as if it was a toss-up who developed.”

  “The council or Hodge?”

  “That’s right. The council would have powers if they had wanted to use them.”

  “They were thinking of clearing the area?”

  “Looks like it. That side of the road anyway. That would have meant compulsory purchase orders, compensation, and so forth.”

  “And somebody not the owner doing the developing,” observed Sloan thoughtfully.

  “True. In the event, though, it didn’t come to that.”

  “No …”

  “A couple of months ago Reddley submitted another set of detailed plans …”

  Somewhere at the back of Sloan’s mind was someone else’s remark about something else changing a couple of months ago, too. He couldn’t pin it down and it teased him for a moment or two before he decided it probably wasn’t important.

  The planning officer was still talking. “These new plans were more conventional from the look of things. Anyway they must have been all right because they got the go-ahead from the council fairly pronto. It looks as if they went straight ahead quite quickly and started work.”