The Trebelzue Gate

by Anna Fitzwilliam

  Monica was billeted on Frenchay Road with the Miss Mawles, two North Oxford spinster sisters. In the Miss Mawles’ red brick villa, every detail of the housekeeping rituals bewitched her. On the first landing there was a vast linen cupboard, warm and powdery fragranced by orris and lavender. The household linen was to be used in strict rotation. The sheets and tablecloths returned from the laundry must only ever be placed at the base of the starched white piles, the piles were some two feet tall. After Sunday evensong the sisters took up the little chamois leather sac of brass keys and wound the house clocks, one by one. ‘Father always used to do this,’ the elder sister explained with her gentle smile into the distance and it seemed that the silver framed image of the elderly watch chained man with white walrus moustache was, like a double exposure, overlaid by the presence of that Father who hovered above the stained glass of St Margaret’s. On warm days the Miss Mawles took tea on the lawn under the willow tree; the edges of the thin bread and butter slices grew hard in the sunlight or were perhaps already so, due to the economies of war time.

  The sisters taught Monica to play bezique and showed her the collection of gilded Chinese ink sticks from the cigar box in father’s desk. They responded with a polite, acute sensitivity to her adolescent gaucheries and anecdotes of home.

  Home by then was a basement flat in Grosvenor Gardens. She had moved frequently during her childhood, sometimes, she confided, it was a moonlight flit because they could not pay the rent. Her father, made invalid by mustard gas during the First War, could not return to duty as a Metropolitan Police sergeant. Because of the damage to his lungs, in damp or foggy winters he was bedbound, he could secure only sporadic employment. In 1940, as the property owners who were able decamped from the capital to escape the Blitz, he was taken on as caretaker of the building in Grosvenor Gardens. The area steps down to their basement flat were covered with small black and white tiles. She imagined them, not long ago, being trodden by the cook and the butler, the maids and the footmen and the boots. The cook standing on a chequerboard step to pick over the wares in a tradesman’s basket, the maids gazing up through the railings with high hopes. In 1940, only Monica’s mother went off up the steps each morning to her work at County Hall. Her father, Thomas, stayed behind with broom and bucket, tincturing his jealousies and resentments with Jamaica rum. Every week or so he would fly into a rage against his wife and his God and the generals and the politicians and the Metropolitan Police, railing at them all for their treatment of him and at her for her imagined infidelities.

  Meanwhile in Oxford Monica saw May morning at Magdalen. In layers in the first chilled air the mist rose up from the river and the hymn rose up from the tower and the people dwelling in between were witnesses, hushed and still. She watched the Dragon’s children saunter back through the Edwardian twilight of Bardwell Road where hollyhocks leaned and seeded at the gateposts. She took to buttoning her cardigan back to front to make it a Bohemian sweater for seeing plays at the New Theatre.

  While in such ways she was entirely entranced by Oxford, nobody, no responsible adult, thought to caution her that lovesick entrancement was not enough to win her entry as a student. And so, instead of homework, she loitered in the golden afternoons, wishing to be noticed by the few and earnest young men. But the young men, haunted by their own thoughts of going or of not going to war, noticed nothing. Instead of revising for her exams, she watched the river’s green rise and fall or went on cycling expeditions with her classmates Isobel and Hilda. The Miss Mawles had obtained for her a second-hand bicycle, they named it Boanerges. Bursting and straining out of their gingham girlhood uniforms they would set off, for Shotover Hill, they thought, but could not be sure for all the signposts had been removed in case of invasion. Resting, lolling back on haystacks, they practised smoking with Passing Clouds and talked of the butcher’s boy who whistled South of the Border and the perceived passion of Miss Anderson for the first Earl of Leicester. Once they watched as a lone Spitfire ascended in the clear air.

  The end came suddenly.

  There is sometimes a courteous, imperative brutality in the way that things happen in Oxford. Monica failed her examinations. Her father Thomas sent a telegram which read ‘Sorry you did not matriculate. Stop.’ There was no leaver’s interview. Miss Burgess and Miss Anderson had expected something more. Monica went not to study at Lady Margaret Hall or Somerville, but to be a filing clerk at the Admiralty.

  She never much discussed her Oxford time with Garth. She believed, at least at first, that he would have understood. Probably this was true, until his drinking was beyond control he understood most things. And, in fonder moods, she believed that his drinking spiralled as it did because he noticed and understood most things but could no longer bear that special ability.

  At the beginning of the 1950s, and almost without meaning to do so, Monica responded to a Metropolitan Police recruitment campaign. Initially she was attached to Rochester Row. Thomas was by turns embittered by his own lost career and proud of his daughter’s achievement. By then her parents had moved to a tin roofed bungalow near Canterbury. In the scraps of letters he wrote to Monica, on GPO forms in the Post Office queue on pension day, he addressed her as ‘Dearest Girl’. As she progressed to CID, Monica recognised that she studied the crime sheets and the witness statements as, in another life, she might have worked on literary or historical texts. And on the days when pragmatic defiance trumped regret, she told herself that such engagement with human nature and its foibles was most apposite, especially if there are truly only seven stories in the world.

  At her desk in the hut Monica scanned PC Sweet’s neat handwriting. He reported that overnight traffic had been light. Some drivers had slowed down to stare at the taped off scene of crime. A mechanic from Cornwall Farmers agricultural contractors, returning from a breakdown call, had stopped briefly to talk. A German couple in a camper van, needing directions to Harlyn Bay, had asked PC Sweet to pencil in the route upon their map. The panda car driver, on his way to patrol St Columb Major, had delivered updates to the hut and had paused to lean at the gate and discuss events. An RAF police patrol passed inside the wire at 22:00 hours and a United States Marines jeep had come by every hour. Just after 23:00 hours the constable recorded that a white Lancia had stopped approximately twenty feet beyond the Trebelzue gate. In brackets PC Sweet had written ‘Beta, two door convertible’. He estimated that the male driver was mid-thirties to early forties. The Lancia had waited with its engine running for two minutes and then driven off again. Afterwards there had been nothing until the milk van with a relief driver. The milk man had also stopped to exchange words with the constable. He explained that the regular driver was still upset by finding the victim and had stayed at home on the insistence of his wife.

  ‘Shakes you up, a thing like that,’ the men had agreed.

  Monica was reading the name of the Lancia’s registered owner as Sergeant Bee arrived.

  She said, ‘Good morning, Sergeant. I think we may have our first coincidence,’

  ‘M’am?’

  She held out the report sheet.

  ‘Here, the Lancia owner, it must be the same Graham Jarvis that the sister in Truro told us about, the man our victim was so fond of.’

  The sergeant had begun to read when they heard a car stop outside the hut and then Peter Goodchild calling cheerily down the corridor.

  ‘Anyone at home? Ah, there you are. Everything satisfactory?’

  ‘It’s fine, thank you,’ Monica replied.

  ‘Jolly good. Well, I’ve got a present for you,’ he handed her a green cardboard registry file. The front cover was stamped ‘Strike Command – Confidential’.

  ‘I got the guard room to copy the list of anyone who had to sign in on Tuesday – that is, anyone without a standard station pass, so there’s details of any outside contractors and delivery drivers who have temporary access.’

  ‘This is very helpful, thank you,’

  ‘Well you know us Air Force, we l
ike to be helpful. Except when we’re being deliberately obstructive, that is.’

  As he finished the sentence the rising wail of an air raid siren began.

  ‘And they’re off,’ he rushed out of the room and they watched from the window as he ran towards his car, clapping a hand to his hat to hold it on his head. The material of the wide blue uniform trousers flapped around his thin thighs, ‘See you in peace time …’ he shouted back.

  ‘We’ll take this stuff through to the duty room,’ said Monica.

  Maureen Jones and Constable Ellery arrived. Jones’ dark hair was cut short in a man’s style, her uniform was well pressed, the shirt crisply white over her well-developed bust. Behind her Ellery was indignant,

  ‘Bloody twice they stopped me on the way up here, I wouldn’t mind, but them lads holding damn great rifles all look about twelve years old.’

  He continued to grumble as he went into the small room with the cleaner’s stoneware sink where he had set up the electric kettle.

  ‘Yes please, I will, if you’re making,’ Sergeant Bee called after him.

  Monica said

  ‘Jones, that lining paper I asked for, I’d like you to start pinning it up on the wall, floor to ceiling lengths, more or less.’

  Jones picked up one of the rolls and climbed onto a chair.

  ‘It’s a trick I got from my old boss if there’s nothing more permanent to hand,’ Monica continued, ‘what we do is we rule off lines, all the way down the sheet, each line represents a one-hour slot, this way we build up a clear timetable for our victim’s last known movement, readily visible for anyone working on the case as they come in and out of the duty room. We want another sheet beside it, recording the name of any person of interest. We already have one of those, by the way.’

  ‘What time do I start from, M’am?’

  ‘Good question. I should say twenty-four hours prior to her death, then if needs be we can tack back with more sheets on the front.’

  Sergeant Bee stepped forward with the folder from Peter Goodchild.

  ‘That’s lucky,’ he said

  They turned to him.

  ‘You can fill in a couple of lines straight off - between 16:48 and 19:55, Miss Amanda Shute was on site attending a class at the station education centre.’

  Monica, watching as Maureen Jones bracketed the timeslots, said ‘What had she signed up for, I wonder, it rather seems to give the lie to what we’ve been told about her attitude to schooling. Jones, I want you and Ellery to divide up the rest of the names on this list and run checks – see if there’s anyone coming onto the site who is known to us.’

  As Ellery entered with a tray of mugs a deafening noise of aircraft engines ripped across the roof. Although startled himself, Sergeant Bee grinned to see the alarm on Ellery’s face. Some of the coffee had spilled on the tray.

  ‘Flaming Nora,’ Ellery complained.

  ‘It looks as if the war games have begun,’

  Monica stood watching at the window. The Vulcan bomber which had roared overhead was streaking away along the coastline. From the chair, WPC Jones, paused in re-fixing a drawing pin at a corner of the lining paper and spoke to Ellery with mock solicitousness.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s not real you know,’ she said.

  ‘Makes you think though, doesn’t it?’ He had set down the tray and was undoing the seal on a packet of shortcake biscuits.

  ‘Now bloody what …’ he exclaimed as a series of explosive retorts shook the windows of the hut. They looked out to see a line of smoke bombs exploding on the runway. Columns of the white smoke rose and curled in the air like the plumes of circus horses.

  ‘Very well, let’s see what we’ve got so far,’ said Monica, as two more detectives arrived and took their places. She was grateful that the low-level noise and disruption outside the hut would deflect attention from her nervousness at addressing them collectively for the first time.

  ‘We’ll have Toy and Farrow out and about on enquiries today, particularly looking for our victim’s car, patrols have confirmed that it’s not at any of the family business sites – it’s a Renault 4, dark green, with distinctive stickers on the boot lid, big flower shapes apparently. I also want one of you to speak to the American marines, we’ve been told that they patrol the boundaries round the clock, if that’s the case, they might well have noticed something relevant. Jones and Ellery and anyone we can borrow from the day shift will be here. Once you’ve been through the list, Ellery, I want you to run the admin side and collate whatever comes in. Jones, I want you on liaison with the RAF, collecting as much background info as you can on any names which might crop up. You can start with this one, our first person of interest. Graham Jarvis, a squadron leader pilot here.'

  Maureen Jones stepped down from the chair and moved to her desk. She consulted the directory of station telephone numbers hanging by a treasury tag on the wall behind her. At the entrance to the room Ellery was arranging his own desk, he had brought with him the small plastic stand in which his name label was inserted. Monica, relieved that the first directions had been issued and received equably, returned to her office. A flock of lapwings had congregated on the grassland beyond the building, seemingly unperturbed by the rumble of engines and smoke bomb retorts which continued in the distance.

  Jones tapped at the open door,

  ‘The American Marines, M’am, we’re not allowed to speak to them direct, it all has to go through the commanding officer, so we’re trying to arrange an appointment. Then Squadron Leader Jarvis, he’s not due back on the station until noon. He supervised a training crew operation yesterday and they have to have a twelve-hour turnaround time in between flights. They reckon he’ll be at home. I’ve got the address, Well Cottage, Trevarrian, that’s a mile or so from here, on the road out towards Holywell Bay.’

  ‘Right then, Sergeant Bee and I will get over there now.’

  Well Cottage was one of a pair of rendered and whitewashed houses. The exterior was adorned with reproductions of old fittings – there were shutters and bulls’ eye window panes, large iron hinges and, on the lawn, an ornamental wishing well. A masthead lantern hung from the wall, inside the glass shade there was a miniature scrapheap of insect remains. The varnished pine front door was of the stable kind. Monica pressed the bell, the bell push was surrounded by a black metal flower shape.

  Graham Jarvis opened the door, he was about six feet tall, wearing a bath robe of blue towelling. His legs were bare and his long feet were pushed into backless leather slippers. He had thick curling brown hair, greying above the ears. His complexion had the sallow cast of a heavy smoker. He was blue eyed with a wide, thick lipped mouth. His features and the curled fringe of his hair reminded the sergeant of film portrayals of ancient Romans.

  ‘Squadron Leader Jarvis? I’m Detective Chief Inspector Guard, this is Detective Sergeant Bee. We seem to have disturbed you. May we come in?’

  ‘Er yes, of course. I’m sorry I’m not dressed yet, we were on ops last night and I have to be back on station fairly soon …’

  ‘For the TACEVAL, yes we know all about that.’

  Slightly he raised his eyebrows, ‘Really? Can I ask why you need to talk to me, Chief Inspector?’

  They had stepped into a long, low beamed living room. The curtains were not yet drawn and the room was lit by several small pottery table lamps.

  ‘We are investigating a suspicious death, sir. A body was found at the edge of the airfield yesterday morning. Perhaps you’ve heard about it?’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, there were rumours on the station last night, but it was late and it didn’t really register ... Why do you think I can help?’

  ‘If you’d like to go and get dressed first, sir, we’ll be happy to wait.’

  He frowned and seemed about to speak again but instead he went to the open tread pine staircase at the end of the room. In place of handrails, lengths of thick, off-white rope had been fixed at either side. As he ascended, the soles of the l
eather slippers slapped against the wood.

  When he had gone they looked around. On top of the television set there was a school photograph of a young boy and girl. They smiled widely, the boy had teeth missing, the girl had spectacles with blue wire frames and her hair was drawn up into choppy bunches. Their school uniform jerseys were bottle green with red crests on the chest. Under the staircase a Scalextric track was set out. A pair of child’s fawn socks were rolled into a ball on the coffee table. There was a dark brown sofa, a rocking chair and a yellow pine dining table and chairs. On the wall there was an Athena poster of the Burlington House Cartoon and more framed photographs - an elderly couple posed awkwardly outside a touring caravan, an air crew in flying suits going towards an aircraft, the squadron leader among a group of men in mess kit at a bar adorned with squadron crest plaques, the men grinning and holding large cigars.

  Graham Jarvis returned, he was wearing a khaki flying suit. At the top of the left breast pocket were the pilot’s wings insignia and his name embroidered in white on black tape. Above the left trouser knee there were stitched slots holding a laminated white card and a chinagraph pencil. Standing in stockinged feet his head reached close to the ceiling beams. A pair of black flying boots stood neatly beside the front door. He bent to pick up an oatmeal coloured pottery mug. His physique, Monica thought, would run to fat if he was not careful.

  ‘Can I get you a coffee?’

  ‘Thank you, sir, no. Shall we sit down?’

  They moved to the ladderback chairs around the dining table.

  ‘We’d like to ask you about Amanda Shute.’

  ‘Amanda?’

  ‘Yes sir, the body of the young woman has been identified as Miss Shute.’