Fifth Column

by Mike Hollow

  “Good Lord, no. Jago and I were in the Army together in the last war. We haven’t seen each other since 1918, so we’re having a quiet get-together in a local hostelry.”

  “How nice. It’s always good to meet up with old friends, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, indeed, although one doesn’t get much time for that sort of thing these days.”

  “I could see from your uniform that you’re in the RAF. A wing commander’s quite a senior rank, isn’t it?”

  “Fairly senior, I suppose, but I’ve been in the RAF for a good many years – ever since the tail end of the war.”

  “When it was still the Royal Flying Corps?”

  “Yes. You know something about it, then?”

  “Not really. I had a fiancé, you see. He was a pilot in the Royal Naval Air Service.”

  “And was he transferred into the RAF like me, when we were merged in 1918?”

  Her confident voice dropped to a softer, gentler tone.

  “No. He died. In 1917 he was involved in some trials to do with landing aeroplanes on moving ships, in Scapa Flow, and there was an accident.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Dyers.

  “It was a long time ago, and there were many others like me. We just had to carry on.”

  She shook herself and sat up straight, as if to shake off the burden of the past. She smiled at him and continued.

  “Your work must be very interesting, especially at a time like this.”

  “Not as interesting as it was,” said Dyers. “My glamorous flying days are over now, and I work in administration. It’s the young men, the junior officers, who are doing all the important work.”

  “I work in administration too – personnel and administration.”

  “What a coincidence. Of course, it can be very interesting sometimes, can’t it? A chance to make use of the lessons one’s learned and the wisdom one’s gained over the years, to make things run better for the benefit of others – that’s what I like to think.”

  “Oh, absolutely. Keeping the wheels moving quietly in the background while others get the glory.”

  “Yes, but at least with the satisfaction of knowing they wouldn’t have achieved anything without us.”

  “My sentiments entirely.”

  Tompkins arrived with two cups of tea on a small wooden tray.

  “Here we are, sir, madam – with the compliments of the Metropolitan Police Service. Sugar’s in the bowl there.”

  He put the tray on the table and returned to his desk.

  “Thank you,” said Miss Hornby to his back as he left. She smiled at Dyers.

  “I would say ‘Shall I pour?’ but the sergeant seems to have done that already. I couldn’t help noticing the magazine you were reading. It’s Picturegoer and Film Weekly, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Just passing the time, you know.”

  “Do you like films?”

  “Yes, I do. Not as good as the stage, of course – you can’t beat a live production in my book. But these days with all the theatres closed because of the bombing it’s something one can only look forward to as a possible future pleasure. The last time I checked, the only theatrical show in town seemed to be the Revudeville at the Windmill Theatre, which is, er –” He stopped and made a sound as if clearing his throat, in an attempt at an expression of gentlemanly consideration. “Which is perhaps not the first choice of entertainment for a lady such as yourself.”

  “Indeed not,” she said. “I understand the show features young ladies at considerable risk of catching a cold.”

  “Please excuse me. It was most indelicate of me to mention it. I hasten to assure you that I myself don’t –”

  “I’m sure you don’t, Wing Commander. You were saying?”

  “Yes, the theatres closing. A great tragedy. You can’t beat a cracking good live performance with some foot-tapping tunes.”

  “You like musical theatre, then?”

  “I should say so. Before the war, a show in the West End would have been my perfect night out.”

  “Mine too. What was the last thing you saw?”

  “It was Under Your Hat – Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge. I saw it last November. Good plot, and some great musical numbers. Best five bobs’ worth of entertainment I had all year, I should say – reduced wartime prices by then, of course.”

  “Where was it on?”

  “The Palace Theatre, that beautiful pile D’Oyly Carte built on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road. When the show started its first run – the year before I saw it – the BBC showed some of the first act live from the theatre on that television service of theirs. Not that I saw it, of course – I don’t own a television receiver and don’t know anyone who does.”

  “It’s all been closed down anyway, now, hasn’t it?”

  “That’s right – a casualty of war. The government was worried the Germans could use the VHF signal as a beacon to guide their planes to London. Of course, if they had, they might have dropped every bomb they possessed on Alexandra Palace instead of on the rest of us, and that mightn’t have been a bad thing.”

  Miss Hornby gave him a mock-reproachful look.

  “I can’t tell whether you’re joking or not,” she said. “But anyway, it all sounds a bit technical to me. I must confess I don’t really understand things like radio frequencies and beacons. I suppose you have to in your work, though.”

  “Yes, it’s all part of the flying business,” said Dyers.

  “Tell me more about the show. What was the plot?”

  “Well, if memory serves me correctly, some foreign agents have stolen a secret carburettor and Jack Hulbert’s a spy trying to get it back. Cicely’s his wife, of course, as always, and she gets suspicious of Jack, so she starts spying on him too – and so on and so forth. Something like that, anyway. Jolly entertaining.”

  “I suppose for someone in your position that sort of thing’s deadly serious too – I mean, we hear about new secret weapons to beat the Germans, but people like you must have to work hard to keep them secret.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so, but one gets used to it.”

  “We all think you’re wonderful, you know.”

  “Who do?”

  “The public, I mean. The way you’re fighting to drive the enemy from our skies. We think you’re all heroes.”

  “Very kind of you to say so. But it’s the young chaps that are doing all that, not the, er, slightly older ones like me.”

  “I’m sure they learned everything they know from men like you. And for you and your colleagues all this is real life, not just a play on the stage.”

  “That’s certainly true. I must say, though, if you like a musical, that Jack and Cicely show was awfully good. Top-class entertainment.”

  “Yes, it sounds as though it was the kind of show I would have loved to see. But you know how it is – things got extremely busy at work when the war started, and most evenings by the time I’d got back to my flat and cooked myself some tea I was too tired to go out for entertainment. That’s the trouble with the solitary life – it does have the advantage that one can do whatever one wants, but that doesn’t mean one always has the time and energy to do so.”

  “Quite. One’s never alone in the forces, of course, but I know what you mean. Anyway, let’s hope it won’t be too long before the theatres can reopen. Perhaps they’ll put Under Your Hat on again – it was certainly having a great run back then.”

  “And may I ask your taste in films?”

  “I like anything that’s got a strong story and some action, where you know who the goodies and baddies are. I’m not one for weepy introspective stuff. I enjoy thrillers as long as they’re not too violent, and westerns if they’ve got more in them than chaps riding horses and shooting guns at each other.”

  She gave a gentle laugh.

  “Yes, I know what you mean. Something that doesn’t leave you walking out of the cinema feeling depressed. We don’t need that t
hese days – real life is depressing enough. So what’s in your magazine?”

  Dyers flicked through the pages.

  “I haven’t read much of it. There’s something about Paulette Goddard, although I don’t know what she’s in.”

  He found the page he was looking for and stopped.

  “Here we are – this is the one I was thinking about seeing. It’s called The Westerner, with Gary Cooper starring as a drifter in the Wild West. It’s on at the Regal, Marble Arch – last showing at seven-twenty. That’s a bit early if a chap wants to eat beforehand, though.”

  “They all have to finish by nine o’clock now, because of the air raids, don’t they?”

  “Yes, although I believe if you go east of here beyond Ilford they’re allowed to stay open later. I suppose they assume there’ll be fewer bombs that far out, although I can’t say I’m convinced. In any case, Essex cinemas aren’t a patch on the West End.”

  Neither of them spoke for a few moments, then Dyers closed his magazine and put it down on the seat beside him. He cleared his throat.

  “I say, I hope this doesn’t sound terribly forward, but I just wondered: would you possibly like to come with me to see it?”

  “Well, yes,” said Miss Hornby, “as a matter of fact that would be delightful. Thank you very much.”

  “Jolly good. Are you free on Saturday?”

  “I believe I am. I shall look forward to it.”

  A fresh smile began to cross Miss Hornby’s face, but it disappeared in an instant as she saw Detective Inspector Jago return, accompanied by Beatrice Cartwright.

  CHAPTER 22

  Monday morning. Jago tried to picture a million men and women from London’s suburbs crowding into trains to make their way to the metropolis for the start of another working week. These days, of course, they might discover their regular line to Waterloo, Victoria or whatever other destination they had in the city had been bombed overnight. When they finally arrived, there was every chance of finding their familiar workplace obliterated by high explosives. The one thing that would be constant, however, was that when their alarm clock rang it would be Monday morning. They’d have had their day of rest and it would be the start of a new working week.

  Jago wondered what it would be like to be a solicitor’s clerk or an office manager, knowing that every Sunday was a day off. It wasn’t that way in the CID – you simply worked the hours that the case required. True, he hadn’t had to work all day yesterday, but even so, the days all seemed to merge into one. Maybe he’d get a day off next week.

  Going out for the evening with Dyers yesterday had turned out to be a pleasant break from work. They’d spent a couple of hours or so catching up on past times and treated each other, as it now seemed to him in the harsh light of day, to perhaps just one or two more drinks than they should have done. That could have been what helped him sleep, but whatever the reason, today he’d woken a little later than he’d intended. That was his excuse for troubling Rita for nothing more than a cup of tea and a couple of rounds of toast for breakfast today, but he knew he had other reasons for not wanting too much of a conversation.

  He knew the pose well. Rita had positioned the cup of tea carefully on the table before him and then arranged a plate, a rack of toast, a small dish of butter and another of plum jam around it, and placed a knife at right angles to the edge of the table. She’d nudged the sugar bowl a little closer, then taken one step back. Now she stood with her hands folded across her pinny, head cocked slightly to one side and chin drawn back, her eyebrows knitted in the stern, inquisitorial expression she would use with a naughty boy caught red-handed from whom an explanation was due.

  “Well,” she said, as if he should have confessed by now, “what is it?”

  “What’s what?” he said.

  “You’re not yourself. You look down in the mouth. Is something on your mind?”

  “There’s always a lot on my mind, Rita. It’s part of the job.”

  “This doesn’t look like the job to me. I’ve seen you sitting there thinking before, but not with that sad look in your eyes. That’s a look that tells me there’s a woman in it somewhere. You be honest with me: are you sweet on that American girl?”

  “You don’t beat about the bush, do you?”

  “If your friends won’t talk straight with you, who will?”

  “I know, and I appreciate your concern. I’m not sure I can give you an answer, though.”

  “You don’t give much away, do you? Sometimes I think you keep all the doors into your life locked and barred. You don’t want to let anyone in.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “You’ve been hurt, haven’t you? I can tell. People change when they’ve been hurt – whatever it is, they don’t want it to happen again, so they put up all the defences they can. Is that you?”

  “I don’t know, Rita, but it’s kind of you to care.”

  “Of course I care.”

  “I think I’ve just had a bit of a shock – something’s happened that I wasn’t expecting. I can’t tell you the details, but it’s rather taken the wind out of my sails.”

  “That’s all right, dear, you don’t need to give me chapter and verse. I understand. I sometimes think I’ve understood everything everyone suffers in the whole world since I lost my hubby. There’s some shocks nothing can prepare you for, and nothing can help you with.”

  “You know, Rita, I don’t know if your Walter ever told you any stories about France, but I’ll tell you one of mine. We’d been in a reserve area for a while but then we got orders to move up to the front line. This was when I was still a private, and over the previous few weeks I’d palled up with another lad in the same platoon. One morning we were standing in the trench, having a chat and a smoke – I used to in those days – and he was laughing at some joke he’d just cracked. We were waiting for the lieutenant to blow his whistle. Moments later we’re over the top and advancing on the German line. Next thing I know, he’s dropped to the ground just three feet to my left, lying on his back, not moving. I looked down. He was dead: shot in the side of his head.”

  “Walter only got home once on leave before he was killed,” said Rita. “He didn’t talk about it much: not one for stories, was Walter.”

  “Most of the things he saw probably couldn’t be told, Rita,” said Jago. “Do you know what I couldn’t get straight in my head that day? It was that one moment he was a person, talking, laughing, thinking, and the next he was just a piece of dead flesh. He wouldn’t ever do anything again. The thing that was inside him that made him a person had gone, disappeared somewhere, ceased to exist. I didn’t really know much about him, but he was my pal, and I’d lost him.”

  “My mum used to say she sometimes wondered if it was better not to love anyone, then you wouldn’t have to grieve when you lost them.”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t as though I loved him: he was just a friend I’d known for a few weeks. There were plenty of men at the front who lost brothers; some of them more than one. I had none to lose, but I had lost him. And the thing I couldn’t understand was that he was gone, just like that, in the blink of an eye. It happened again lots of times later, but I think after that I never got close to anyone. I made sure I didn’t get too friendly, because I didn’t want the pain of that loss again.”

  Rita looked at him more gently.

  “I know you don’t want to tell me, and I don’t want to intrude, but that American girl – she’s all right, isn’t she? Hasn’t been caught in an air raid or something?”

  Jago looked up and gave her a smile.

  “No, she’s fine. But there’s more than one way of losing someone, isn’t there?”

  CHAPTER 23

  The first face Jago saw on entering West Ham police station was that of Station Sergeant Tompkins.

  “Not you again, Frank?” he said. “Haven’t they got anyone else to do this job? You were here yesterday too. I thought I was the only one who never went home.”

&n
bsp; “Don’t fret, sir,” said Tompkins. “I had Saturday off. I thought I’d put my feet up with a nice bottle of ale to revive the soul and enjoy the last of the sunshine in the back yard.”

  “And did it?”

  “Did it what?”

  “Revive your soul.”

  “Not exactly. In fact I never got the cap off the bottle. It turned out the missus had a few plans of her own for me. Some little jobs that needed doing round the house, like. I came in yesterday to recover. How did you get on with that RAF mate of yours?”

  “We had a very pleasant evening, thanks.”

  “Reviving your souls?”

  “Yes, at the Royal Oak – they’ve got a nice saloon bar there. I always enjoy catching up with an old friend.”

  The side of Tompkins’ mouth twitched into a hint of a grin.

  “Well, in that case I’ve got a nice surprise for you. Another old friend of yours has just dropped in to see you.”

  Jago opened the door and saw the back of a seated man. He was wearing an old jacket that strained tight against his substantial form. The man rose from his chair and turned to face him, clutching a cloth cap in both hands.

  “Well, I never,” said Jago. “This must be a first for you, mustn’t it? Something I thought I’d never see – Harry Parker enters a police station voluntarily.”

  “Come off it, Mr Jago,” said Harry. “Don’t get started. That’s exactly what I’ve done. I’ve come here off my own bat, to support the police in their noble fight to keep crime off the streets.”

  “And off the bomb-sites?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m still wondering whether that dead body was the only fishy thing on that site in Tinto Road.”

  “Well, that’s where you’re wrong, see. I’ve come in because I think I’ve got something to help you with that.”

  Harry put his cap down on the desk and reached into his jacket. He pulled out an object about a foot long in a brown paper bag.

  “I’ve just come off shift with the rescue party and thought I ought to pop in here with this before I go home for a kip.”