In a Dry Season

by Peter Robinson

  Eight

  Vivian Elmsley sat down with her gin and tonic to watch the news that evening. The drinks were becoming more frequent, she had noticed, since her memories had started disturbing her. Though it was the only chink in her iron discipline, and she only allowed herself to indulge at the end of the day, it was a worrying sign, nonetheless.

  Watching the news had become a sort of grim duty now, a morbid fascination. Tonight, what she saw shook her to the core.

  Towards the end of the broadcast, after the major world news and government scandals had been dealt with, the scene shifted to a familiar sight. A young blonde woman held the microphone. She stood in Hobb’s End, where crime-scene searchers in their white boiler-suits and wellies were still digging up the ruins.

  “Today,” the reporter began, “in a further bizarre twist to a story we have been covering in the north of England, police investigating some skeletal remains found by a local schoolboy are almost certain they have established the identity of the victim. Just over an hour ago, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, who is heading the investigation, talked with our northern office.”

  The scene shifted to a studio background, and the camera settled on a lean, dark-haired man with intense blue eyes.

  “Can you tell us how this discovery was made?” the reporter asked.

  “Yes.” Banks looked straight into the camera as he spoke, she noticed, not letting his eyes flick left or right the way so many amateurs did when they appeared on television. He had clearly done it before. “When we discovered the identity of the people living in the cottage during the Second World War,” he began, “we found that one of them, a woman called Gloria Shackleton, hasn’t shown up on any postwar records so far.”

  “And that made you suspicious?”

  The detective smiled. “Naturally. Of course, there could be a number of reasons for this, and we’re still looking into other possibilities, but one thing we are forced to consider is that she doesn’t show up because she was dead.”

  “How long have the woman’s remains been buried?”

  “It’s hard to be accurate, but we’re estimating between the early forties to mid-forties.”

  “That’s a long time ago, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “Don’t trails go cold, clues go stale?”

  “Indeed they do. But I’m very pleased with the progress we’ve made so far, and I’m confident we can take this investigation forward. The remains were discovered only last Wednesday, and within less than a week we are reasonably certain we have established the identity of the victim. I’d say that’s pretty good going for this sort of case.”

  “And the next step?”

  “The identity of the murderer.”

  “Even though he or she may be dead?”

  “Until we know that one way or the other, we’re still dealing with an open case of murder. As they say in America, there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  “Is there any way the public can help?”

  “Yes, there is.” Banks shifted in his chair. The next moment, the screen was filled with the head and shoulders of a woman. Surely it couldn’t be? But even though it wasn’t a photographic likeness, there was no mistaking who it was: Gloria.

  Vivian gasped and clutched her chest.

  Gloria.

  After all these years.

  It looked like part of a painting. Judging from the odd angle of the head, Vivian guessed that Gloria had been lying down as she posed. Michael Stanhope? It looked like his style. In the background, Banks’s voice went on, “If anyone recognizes this woman, whom we think lived in London between 1921 and 1941 and in Hobb’s End after that, if there is any living relative who knows something about her, would they please get in touch with the North Yorkshire Police.” He gave out a phone number. “There’s still a great deal we need to know,” he went on, “and as the events occurred so long ago, that makes it all the more difficult for us.”

  Vivian tuned out. All she could see was Gloria’s face: Stanhope’s vision of Gloria’s face, with that cunning blend of naïveté and wantonness, that come-hither smile and its promise of secret delights. It both was and wasn’t Gloria.

  Then she thought, with a tremor of fear, if they had already discovered Gloria, how long would it take them to discover her?

  “It only said he’s missing,” Gloria insisted more than two months later, at the height of the summer of 1943. We were standing by one of Mr Kilnsey’s drystone walls drinking Tizer and looking out over the gold-green hills to the north-west. She thrust the most recent Ministry letter towards me and pointed at the words. “See. ‘Missing during severe fighting east of the Irrawaddy River in Burma.’ Wherever that is. When Mr Kilnsey’s son was killed at El Alamein it said he was definitely dead, not just missing.”

  What had kept us going the most since we heard the news of Matthew’s disappearance was our attempt to get as much information as we possibly could about what had happened to him. First we had written letters, then we had even telephoned the Ministry. But they wouldn’t commit themselves. Missing was all they would tell us, and nobody seemed to know anything about the exact circumstances of his disappearance or where he might be if he were still alive. If they did, they weren’t saying.

  The most we could get out of the man on the telephone was that the area in which Matthew had disappeared was now in the hands of the Japanese, so there was no question of going in to search for bodies. Yes, he admitted, an unspecified number of casualties had been confirmed, but Matthew was not among them. While it was still likely he might have been killed, the man concluded, there was also a chance he had been taken prisoner. It was impossible to get anything further out of him. Since the telephone call, Gloria had been brooding over what to do next.

  “I think we should go there,” she said, crumpling the letter into a ball.

  “Where? Burma?”

  “No, silly. London. We should go down there and buttonhole someone. Get some answers.”

  “But they won’t talk to us,” I protested. “Besides, I don’t think they’re in London any more. All the government people have moved out to the country somewhere.”

  “There has to be somebody there,” Gloria argued. “It stands to reason. Even if it’s just a skeleton staff. A government can’t just pack up and leave everything behind. Especially the War Office. Besides, this is London I’m talking about. It’s still the capital of England, you know. If there are answers to be found, you can bet we’ll find them there.”

  There was no arguing with Gloria’s passionate rhetoric. “I don’t know,” I said. “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea where to start.”

  “Whitehall,” she said, nodding. “That’s where we start. Whitehall.”

  She sounded so certain that I didn’t know what to reply. For the rest of that month I tried to talk Gloria out of the London trip, but she was adamant. Once she got like that, I knew there could be no stopping her getting her own way. Even Cynthia and Alice and Michael Stanhope said it would be a waste of time. Mr Stanhope had no time at all for government bureaucrats and assured us they would tell us nothing.

  Gloria insisted that if I didn’t want to come with her, that was fine, she would go by herself. I didn’t have the courage to tell her that I had never been to London, not even in peacetime, and the whole prospect scared me stiff. London seemed about as remote to me as the moon.

  It was finally arranged for September. Gloria decided it would be best if we went and returned by night train. That way she would only have to rearrange her one and a half days off for midweek rather than ask Mr Kilnsey for more time when things were busy. To her surprise, Mr Kilnsey said she could take longer if she wished. Since he had lost Joseph at El Alamein, he had become a more compassionate and sympathetic man, and he understood her grief. We still decided to stick to the original plan because I didn’t want to leave Mother alone for any longer.

  Cynthia Garmen said she would look after Mother and the
shop while we were gone. She said Norma Prentice owed her a day’s work at the NAAFI in exchange for baby-sitting the previous week, so it should be no problem. Mother offered to buy the train tickets and gave Gloria some of her clothes coupons to use down there if we had time to visit the big shops. Though she accepted them gratefully, for once clothes were the last thing on Gloria’s mind.

  It was about ten o’clock when the road crested the hill and Banks could see Edinburgh spread out in the distance in all its hazy glory: the stepped rows of tenements, the dark Gothic spire of the Sir Walter Scott monument; like some alien space rocket, the hump of Arthur’s Seat; the castle on its crag; the glimmer of sea beyond.

  Apart from one or two brief, police-related visits, it was years since Banks had spent any time there, he realized as he coasted down the hill, Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” on the stereo. When he was a student, he used to drive up to see friends quite often and spent most weekends and holidays there. At one time he had a girlfriend, a raven-haired young beauty called Alison, who lived down on St Stephen Street. But as is the nature of such long-distance relationships, “out of sight, out of mind” beats “absence makes the heart grow fonder” any day of the week, and during one visit, she simply turned up at the pub with someone else. Easy come, easy go. By then he had his eye on another woman, called Jo, anyway.

  Banks’s Edinburgh days were all pre-Trainspotting and the place didn’t look quite so romantic when he came down off the hill into the built-up streets of dark stone, the roundabouts and traffic lights, shopping centres and zebra crossings. He got through Dalkeith easily enough, but shortly afterwards he made one simple mistake and found himself heading towards Glasgow on a double-carriageway for about three miles before he found an exit.

  Elizabeth Goodall lived just off Dalkeith Road not far from the city centre. She had given him precise directions on the telephone the previous evening, and after only a couple more wrong turns, he found the narrow street of tall tenements.

  Mrs Goodall lived on the ground floor. She answered Banks’s ring promptly and led him into a high-ceilinged living-room that smelled of lavender and peppermint. All the windows were shut fast, and not the slightest breeze stirred the warm, perfumed air. Only a little daylight managed to steal through. The wallpaper was patterned with sprigs of rosemary and thyme. Parsley and sage, too, for all Banks could tell. Mrs Goodall bade him sit in a sturdy, damask armchair. Like all the other chairs in the room, its arms and back were covered by white lace antimacassars.

  “So you found your way all right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Banks lied. “Nothing to it.”

  “I don’t drive a motor car, myself,” she said, with a trace of her old Yorkshire accent. “I have to rely on buses and trains if I want to go anywhere, which is rare these days.” She rubbed her small, wrinkled hands together. “Well, then, you’re here. Tea?”

  “Please.”

  She disappeared into the kitchen. Banks surveyed the room. It was a nondescript sort of place: clean and tidy, but not much character. A few framed photographs stood on the sideboard, but none of them showed Hobb’s End. One glass-fronted cabinet held a few knick-knacks, including trophies, silverware and crystal. That would be tempting to burglars, Banks thought: old woman in a ground-floor flat with a nice haul of silverware just there for the taking. He hadn’t noticed any signs of a security system.

  Mrs Goodall walked back into the room slowly, carrying a china tea-set on a silver tray. She set it down on a doily on the low table in front of the sofa then sat down, knees together, and smoothed her skirt.

  She was a short, stout woman, dressed in a grey tweed skirt, white blouse and a navy blue cardigan, despite the heat. Her recently permed hair was almost white, and its waves looked frozen, razor-sharp to the touch, Margaret Thatcher style. Her forehead was high and her glaucous, watery eyes pink-rimmed. She had a prissy slit of a mouth that seemed painted on with red lipstick.

  “We’ll just let it mash a few minutes, shall we?” she said. “Then we’ll pour.”

  “Fine,” said Banks, banishing the image of the two of them holding the thin teapot handle and pouring.

  “Now,” she said, hands clasped on her lap, “let us begin. You mentioned Hobb’s End on the telephone, but that was all you saw fit to tell me. What do you wish to know?”

  Banks leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs. A number of general questions came to mind, but he needed something more specific, something to take her memory right back, if possible. “Do you remember Gloria Shackleton?” he asked. “She lived in Bridge Cottage during the war.”

  Mrs Goodall looked as if she had just swallowed a mouthful of vinegar. “Of course I remember her,” she said. “Dreadful girl.”

  “Oh? In what way?”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, Chief Inspector, the girl was a brazen hussy. It was perfectly obvious. The flir-tatious manner, the tilt of her head, the lascivious smile. I knew it the first moment I set eyes on her.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Where? Why, in church, of course. My father was the verger at St Bartholomew’s. Though how such a . . . a painted strumpet would dare to show herself like that in the sight of the Lord is beyond me.”

  “So you first met her in church?”

  “I didn’t say I met her, just that I saw her there first. She was still called Gloria Stringer then.”

  “Was she religious?”

  “No true Christian woman would go about flaunting herself the way she did.”

  “Why did she go to church, then?”

  “Because the Shackletons went, of course. She had her feet firmly under their kitchen table.”

  “She was from London originally, wasn’t she?”

  “So she said.”

  “Did she ever say anything about her background, about her family?”

  “Not to me, though I vaguely remember someone told me her parents were killed in the Blitz.”

  “She’d come to Hobb’s End with the Women’s Land Army, hadn’t she?”

  “Yes. A land-girl. Tea?”

  “Please.”

  Mrs Goodall sat up, back erect, and poured. The teacups—with matching saucers—were tiny, fragile bone china things with pink roses painted inside and out, a gold rim and a handle he couldn’t possibly get a finger through. Not a drop stained the white lace doily. “Milk? Sugar?”

  “Just as it comes, thanks very much.”

  She frowned, as if she didn’t approve of that. Anything other than milk and two sugars was probably unpatriotic in her book. “Of course,” she went on, “one hoped that over time she would make attempts to fit in, to alter her manner and appearance according to the standards of village society, but . . . ”

  “She made no attempt?”

  “She did not. None at all.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  “Chief Inspector, does she sound like the kind of person whose company I would cultivate?”

  “It was a small village. You must have been about the same age.”

  “I was one year older.”

  “Even so.”

  “Alice—that’s Alice Poole—used to spend quite a bit of time with her. Against my advice, I might add. But then Alice always was a bit too free and easy.”

  “Did you have any dealings with Gloria at all?”

  Mrs Goodall paused as if to bring to mind an unpleasant memory. Then she nodded. “Indeed I did. It fell to me to advise her that her behaviour was unacceptable, as was the way she looked.”

  “Looked?”

  “Yes. The sort of clothes she wore, the way she sashayed about, the way she wore her hair, like some sort of cheap American film star. It was not ladylike. Not in the least. As if that weren’t bad enough, she smoked in the street.”

  “You say it fell to you? On what authority? Was there strong general feeling against her?”

  “In my capacity as a member of the Church of England.”

  “I see. Wa
s everyone else in Hobb’s End ladylike?” She pursed her lips again and let him know with a quick daggerglance that she hadn’t missed the insolence in his tone. “I’m not saying that there weren’t lower elements in the village, Chief Inspector. Don’t get me wrong. Of course, there were. As there are in every village society. But even the lowly of birth can aspire to at least a certain level of good manners and decent behaviour. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “How did Gloria react when you rebuked her?”

  Mrs Goodall flushed at the memory. “She laughed. I pointed out that it might do her much good, morally and socially, were she to become active in the Women’s Institute and the Missionary Society.”

  “What was her response to this?”

  “She called me an interfering busybody and indicated that there was only one missionary position she was interested in, and it was not the church’s. Can you believe it? And she used such language as I would not expect from the mouth of the lowest mill girl. Despite her put-on speech, I think she showed her true colours then.”

  “How did she speak?”

  “Oh, she had her airs and graces. She spoke like somone on the wireless. Not the way they do these days, of course, but as they did back then, when people spoke properly on the wireless. But you could tell it was put on. She had clearly been practising the arts of imitation and deception.”

  “She married Matthew Shackleton, didn’t she?”

  Mrs Goodall sucked in her breath with an audible hiss. “Yes. I was at their wedding. And I must say that, although Matthew was only a shopkeeper’s son, he married well beneath himself when he married the Stringer girl. Matthew was an exceptional boy. I expected far better of him than that.”

  “Do you know anything about their relationship?”

  “It wasn’t long after they were married he was sent abroad. He went missing in action, poor Matthew. Missing, presumed dead.”

  Banks frowned. “When was this?”

  “When he went missing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sometime in 1943. He was in the Far East. Captured by the Japanese.” She gave a little shudder.