In a Dry Season

by Peter Robinson

  “What happened to him?”

  “I have no idea. I presume he was dead.”

  “You lost touch?”

  She fiddled with her wedding ring. “Yes. My husband, William, was engaged in top-secret work for the home front, and he was assigned to Scotland early in 1944. I accompanied him. My parents came to live with us, and we didn’t have anything more to do with Hobb’s End. I still keep in touch with Ruby Kettering and Alice Poole, but they are my only connections. It was all so long ago. We women don’t dwell on the war the way the men do, with their Legions and their regimental reunions.”

  “Do you know if Gloria had affairs with anyone other than Matthew?”

  Mrs Goodall sniffed. “Almost certainly.”

  “Who with?”

  She paused a moment, as if to let him know that she shouldn’t be telling him this, then she uttered just one word. “Soldiers.”

  “What soldiers?”

  “This was wartime, Chief Inspector. Contrary to what you might imagine, not every man in the armed forces was over fighting the Hun or the Nip. Unfortunately. There were soldiers everywhere. Not all of them British, either.”

  “What soldiers were these?”

  For the first time in their conversation, Mrs Goodall let a small smile slip. It endeared her to Banks tremendously. “Oversexed,” she said, “overpaid and over here.”

  “Americans?”

  “Yes. The RAF handed Rowan Woods over to the American Air Force.”

  “Did you see much of these Americans?”

  “Oh, yes. They often used to come and drink in the village pubs, or attend our occasional dances at the church hall. Some even came to the Sunday services. They had their own on the base, of course, but St Bartholomew’s was a beautiful old church. Such a pity it had to be knocked down.”

  “Did Gloria have American boyfriends, then?”

  “Several. And I needn’t tell you about the opportunities for immorality and indiscretion that a wide area of wooded land like Rowan Woods has to offer, need I?”

  Banks wondered if she would take a positive answer as an indication of personal experience. He decided not to risk it. “Was there anyone in particular?” he asked.

  “I have no first-hand knowledge. I kept my distance from them. According to Cynthia Garmen, she had more than one. Not that Cynthia was one to talk. No better than she ought to be, that one.”

  “Why?”

  “She married one of them, didn’t she? Went off to live in Pennsylvania or some such place.”

  “So there was no one serious for Gloria?”

  “Oh, I’ve no doubt her liaisons were every bit as serious as a woman such as Gloria Shackleton was capable of. A married woman.”

  “But you said she thought her husband was dead.”

  “Missing, presumed dead. It’s not quite the same. Besides, that’s no excuse.” Mrs Goodall remained silent for a few moments, then said, “May I ask you a question, Chief Inspector?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why are you asking me about the Shackleton girl after all these years?”

  “Don’t you watch the news?”

  “I prefer to read historical biography.”

  “Newspapers?”

  “On occasion. But only the obituaries. What are you hinting at, Chief Inspector? Am I missing something?”

  Banks told her about the reservoir drying up and the discovery of the body they believed to be Gloria’s. Mrs Goodall paled and clutched at the silver crucifix around her neck. “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead,” she muttered. “You should have told me sooner.”

  “Would that have changed what you said?”

  She paused a moment, then sighed and said, “Probably not. I have always considered telling the truth to be an important virtue. All I can tell you, though, is that Gloria Shackleton was alive and well when William and I left Hobb’s End in May 1944.”

  “Thank you,” said Banks. “That helps us narrow things down a bit. Do you know if she had any enemies?”

  “Not what you’d call enemies. Nobody who would do what you have just described. Many people, like myself, disapproved of her. But that’s quite a different thing. One would hardly murder a person for not joining the Women’s Institute. Might I make a suggestion?”

  “Please.”

  “Given Gloria’s wayward nature, don’t you think you should be looking at this as a crime passionnel?”

  “Perhaps.” Banks shifted in his chair and crossed his legs the other way. Mrs Goodall poured more tea. It was lukewarm. “What about Michael Stanhope?” he asked.

  She raised her eyebrows. “There’s another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Debauched, perverted. I could go on. Birds of a feather, him and Gloria Shackleton. Have you seen any of his so-called paintings?”

  Banks nodded. “One of them seems to be a nude of Gloria. I wonder if you knew anything about that?”

  “I can hardly say it surprises me, but no. Believe me, if such a painting exists, it was not public knowledge in Hobb’s End. At least not while I was there.”

  “Do you think Gloria might have had an affair with Michael Stanhope?”

  “I can’t say. Given that the two of them shared similar natures and views, I wouldn’t rule it out. They did spend a lot of time together. Drinking. As I recollect, though, even Gloria’s tastes weren’t quite so exotic as to extend as far as a tortured, drunken, depraved artist.”

  “Did Gloria and Matthew have any children?”

  “Not that I ever knew of.”

  “And you would have known?”

  “I think so. It’s hard to hide such things in a small village. Why do you ask?”

  “There were certain indications in the post-mortem, that’s all.” Banks scratched the tiny scar beside his right eye. “But nobody seems to know anything about it.”

  “She could have had a child after we left in 1944.”

  “It’s possible. Or perhaps she gave birth before she arrived in Hobb’s End and married Matthew Shackleton. After all, she was nineteen when she came to the village. Perhaps she abandoned the baby and its father in London.”

  “But . . . but that means . . . ”

  “Means what, Mrs Goodall?”

  “Well, I never assumed that Matthew was her first conquest, not a woman like her. But a child . . . ? Surely that would indicate she was already married, and that her marriage to Matthew was bigamous?”

  “Just one more sin to add to her list,” said Banks. “But it wasn’t necessarily so. I imagine even back then, in the good old days, the odd child was born on the wrong side of the blanket.”

  Mrs Goodall’s lips tightened to a single red line for a moment, then she said, “I don’t appreciate your sarcasm, Chief Inspector, or your coarseness. Things were better back then. Simpler. Clearer. Ordered. And the wartime spirit brought people together. People of all classes. Say what you will.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs Goodall. I don’t mean to be sarcastic, really, but I’m trying to get to the bottom of a particularly nasty murder here, one that I probably have hardly any chance of solving because it was committed so long ago. I believe the victim deserves my best efforts, no matter what you may think of her.”

  “Of course she does. I stand corrected. Gloria Shackleton could not possibly have deserved what you say happened to her. But I’m sorry, I don’t think I can help you any further.”

  “Did you know Matthew’s sister, Gwynneth?”

  “Gwen? Oh, yes. Gwen was always rather the quiet one, head buried in a book. I imagined her becoming a teacher or something like that. Perhaps even a university professor. But she worked in the shop throughout the war, taking care of her mother and doing fire-watching at night. She was no shirker, wasn’t Gwen.”

  “Do you know what became of her? Is she still alive?”

  “I’m afraid we lost touch when William and I came to Scotland. We weren’t especially close, though she was a regular churchgoer and wr
ote for the parish magazine.”

  “Were she and Gloria close?”

  “Well, they had to be, to some extent, being family. But they were different as chalk and cheese. There was some talk about Gloria leading Gwen astray. They were always off to dances together in Harkside, or to the pictures. Gwen had generally avoided social intercourse until Gloria arrived on the scene, preferring her own company, or that of books. Gwen was always a rather impressionable girl. Though she took Gloria under her wing at first, so to speak, it was soon quite clear who exactly was under whose wing.”

  “What was their age difference?”

  “Gwen was two or three years younger, perhaps. Believe me, though, it makes a vast difference at that age.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Gwen? She was rather a plain girl, apart from her eyes. Remarkable eyes, almost Oriental the way they slanted. And she was tall. Tall and awkward. A gangly sort of girl.”

  “What about Matthew?”

  “A dashing, handsome fellow. Very mature. Gifted with wisdom beyond his years.” Again, she allowed a little smile to flit across her hard-set features. “If I hadn’t met my William and the Stringer girl hadn’t arrived on the scene, well . . . who knows? Anyway, she got her hands on him, and that was that.”

  Banks let the silence stretch. He could hear a clock ticking in the background.

  “If you’ll excuse me, Chief Inspector,” she said after a few moments, “I’m extremely tired. All those memories.”

  Banks stood up. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry for taking up so much of your time.”

  “Not at all. It seems you’ve come a long way for nothing, or very little.”

  Banks shrugged. “Part of the job. Besides, you’ve been a great help.”

  “If there’s anything else I can help you with, please don’t hesitate to telephone.”

  “Thank you.” Banks looked at his watch. Going on for one. Time for a spot of lunch and a pint before the long drive home.

  We took the night train from Leeds, where the platform was crowded with young soldiers. The train clanked and steamed into the station only an hour late, and we felt ourselves jostled and pushed along by the crowd like corks in a fast-flowing river. I was terrified that we were going to fall between the carriages and be run over by the huge iron wheels, but we clung onto one another for dear life amidst all the shoving and heaving and hissing steam, and we finally managed to get ourselves more or less pushed onto seats in a cramped compartment that soon grew even more cramped.

  Another hour passed before the engine groaned and shuddered out of the station.

  I had loved train journeys ever since I was a little girl, loved the gentle rocking motion, the hypnotic clickety-click of the wheels on the lines and the way the landscape drifts by like images from a dream.

  Not that time.

  A lot of trains had been damaged and most of the railway workshops were being used for munitions production. As a result, many of the engines in use would have been good for nothing but scrap iron if it hadn’t been for the war. The motion was jerky and we never really got going fast enough for a rhythmic clickety-click. Everyone was crushed far too closely together to make sleep possible. At least for me. I couldn’t even read. The blinds were drawn tight and the whole compartment was lit by one ghostly blue pinpoint of light, so dim you could hardly make out the features of the person sitting opposite you. There wasn’t even a restaurant car.

  We talked for a while with two young soldiers, who offered us Woodbine after Woodbine. I think that was when I started to smoke, out of sheer boredom. Even when the first few puffs made me feel sick and dizzy, I persevered. It was something to do.

  The soldiers sympathized and wished us luck when Gloria told them about Matthew. Then people started to fall silent, each drifting into his own world. For me it was a matter of gritting my teeth and enduring the long journey, the constant, unexplained delays, the jerking stops and starts.

  Gloria managed to doze off after a while and her head slid slowly sideways until she was resting her cheek on my shoulder and I could feel her warm breath against my throat. I still couldn’t sleep. I was left with nothing but my own gloomy thoughts and rasping snores from the soldiers. We stopped in the middle of nowhere for nearly two hours at one point. No explanation.

  Because of the double summer time, it didn’t get light as early as it used to, but even so we weren’t more than six or seven hours into the journey before we were able to open the blinds on muted early-morning sunlight slanting across the fields. People had put odd objects like old mangles and broken cars on some of the empty meadows to make obstacles for any enemy planes that might try to land there.

  One field was scattered with country signposts stuck in the ground at strange angles. The signposts had been taken down at the start of the war, along with all the station nameplates, to confuse the enemy in case of invasion, but I was still surprised to see where some of them had ended up.

  All in all, the journey took ten hours, and the last hour or two seemed to take us through endless London suburbs. It was here that I caught my first sight of street after street of bombed-out terraces, shattered lampposts, powdered plaster, twisted girders and jagged walls. Rosebay willow herb and Oxford ragwort grew from the rubble, pushing between the cracks in the bombed masonry and brickwork.

  Packs of children roved through the streets, playing among the derelict houses. One ingenious group had rigged up a rope from a lamppost that was leaning at a precarious angle, like the Tower of Pisa, and they were proceeding to take it in turns to swing back and forth, playing at Tarzan the Ape-Man.

  Some houses were only half-destroyed, split open like a cross-section. You could see wallpaper, framed paintings and photographs on the walls, a bed half hanging over the jagged remains of the floor. Here and there, people had moved damaged items of furniture into the street: a doorless wardrobe, a cracked sideboard and a pram with buckled wheels. I felt like a voyeur at a disaster site, which is what I was, I suppose, but I couldn’t stop looking. I’m not sure that I had any real grasp of the full extent of the war’s devastation until then, despite seeing Leeds after that air raid.

  It seemed that on every area of spare ground not taken up by allotments, a barrageballoon station had been set up. The fat silver balloons glinted in the sun and looked like whales trying to fly. In some of the green areas, rows of anti-aircraft guns pointed at the sky like steel arrows.

  Of course, there were also plenty of buildings left standing and some of these were surrounded by sandbags, often to a height of about ten feet or more. I also noticed a lot of posters, on just about every available hoarding: they told us to grow our own food, save coal, buy war bonds, walk when we could and Lord knows what else.

  I was so lost in the sights that I hardly noticed the time passing until King’s Cross. It was after ten o’clock in the morning when we arrived at the station and I was starving. Gloria wanted to head straight for Whitehall, but I persuaded her to stop and we found a Lyons, where we managed to get a rasher of bacon and an egg.

  After breakfast, we walked back into the street and I was at last able to take in where I was. My first sensation was of being a very small, a tiny, insignificant little creature, lost in an immense and sprawling city. People pressed in on me from all directions; tall buildings towered over me.

  The whole place had a shabby, worn and slightly defeated air about it. Everybody looked pinched and pale, the kind of look you get after years of rationing, bombing and uncertainty. Even so, for a Yorkshire country girl, it might as well have been another planet. I had never been anywhere bigger than Leeds before and I’m sure London would have overwhelmed me even in peacetime.

  It had started to drizzle, though the air was still warm, and the damp sandbags gave off a musky smell. There were so many people rushing about, most of them in uniform, that I began to feel quite panicky and dizzy. I clutched at Gloria’s arm as she led me purposefully towards a bus-stop. Often people smiled o
r said hello as we passed. I saw my first wounded soldiers, sad-looking men with bandaged heads, missing limbs, eye patches, some on crutches or with their arms in slings. All of them lucky ones; they were still alive.

  Gloria was in her element. After only a few moments of dis-orientation at first, something seemed to click, as if the city actually made sense to her, which it certainly didn’t to me. She seemed to have only the slightest doubt over which bus to catch, and a quick word with the clippie, who was trying to look like Joan Crawford, soon set her right on that. We went upstairs, where you could smoke, and then we were off.

  It was a whirlwind journey and more than once I feared the bus would tip over turning a corner. In the east, I fancied I could see the immense dome of St Paul’s in the grey light through the dirty, rain-streaked window. I was overwhelmed by the size of the buildings all around me. White and grey stone darkened by rain: curving Georgian or Edwardian façades five or six stories high, with pediments, gargoyles and pointed gables. Huge Ionic columns. Surely, I thought, this must be a city built by giants.

  At one point my heart jumped into my throat. I saw broken glass and rubble on the pavement and strewn among it all, human body parts: a head, a leg, a torso. But when I looked more closely, I could see no blood, and the limbs all had a hard, unnatural look about them. I realized that a bomb must have hit a dress shop and blown all the mannequins into the street.

  We passed Trafalgar Square, where Nelson’s Column stood, much taller in reality than it had been even in my imagination. You could hardly see poor Lord Nelson up at the top. The base of the column was covered with hoardings asking us to buy National War Savings Bonds. Across the square, near the Insurance Office and the Canadian Pacific building was a huge billboard advertising Famel cough mixture.

  There were a lot of soldiers milling about. I didn’t recognize all the caps and uniforms, in just about every colour you could imagine, from black to bright blue and cherry red. I also saw my first-ever Negro from that bus in Trafalgar Square. I knew they existed, of course—I had read about them—but I had never actually seen a Negro before. I remember being rather disappointed that, apart from being coloured, he didn’t look all that much different from anyone else.