Daughters of Darkness

by Sally Spencer

  Again, absolutely no one.

  Yet she had done just that.

  They were still not out of the woods. She fully realized that. The Germans seemed to be sending over more flying bombs every day, and because there was no precision to the attacks (someone had said it was like an angry blind man firing a pistol into the darkness) you could never guess where they were going to land. All you did know was that you could hear them coming (the drone of their engines growing louder and louder as they approached) and that you could do nothing but stand there and wait for the engine noise to begin to fade again, which meant the bomb had passed over you, and would soon be imperilling someone else.

  But if that didn’t happen – if, instead of fading into the distance, the sound just suddenly stopped – then you knew, as sure as eggs were eggs, that you were about to die.

  Not that that was the only thing she had to worry about.

  The allied forces had landed in Normandy nearly three months earlier, and though it might take time for the Third Reich to finally fall, everyone knew that, to all intents and purposes, Hitler was finished. Yes, the war would be over, but there was no guarantee that Derek – the love of her life, the whole purpose of her existence – would survive.

  He might even be dead already.

  And then there was her unborn baby. The doctor had assured her that everything was going very well, but she still couldn’t help worrying.

  She rubbed her stomach gently, to communicate to the baby that it hadn’t been forgotten.

  ‘This will be my last visit for a while,’ she said to Jane. ‘But Annie will visit you every day, won’t you, Annie?’ she continued, looking towards the girl who was standing quietly in the corner.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Stockton,’ Annie replied.

  She had made the right choice in selecting Annie for this job, Grace thought. The girl wasn’t the brightest of her pupils, and she wouldn’t win any prizes for personality, but she was conscientious and caring, and – perhaps most important of all – her obvious meekness would put Jane at her ease.

  Jane looked far from at ease at that moment.

  ‘Your last visit?’ she repeated.

  ‘For a while.’

  ‘But you can’t … you promised …’

  ‘Would you mind stepping out into the corridor for a moment, Annie?’ Grace asked the girl.

  Annie nodded obediently. ‘Yes, Mrs Stockton.’

  ‘We talked about all this before, didn’t we?’ Grace asked Jane, when Annie had gone.

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘The doctor says if I don’t get more rest, I’ll be putting my baby at risk, and you don’t want that, do you?’

  ‘No, of course I don’t,’ Jane said. ‘It’s just that I get so frightened without you. You’re so strong and I’m so—’

  ‘You’re much stronger than you realize,’ Grace interrupted her. ‘You were a real alcoholic, and managed to stop drinking. In your place, I’m not sure I could have done it.’

  ‘Really?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Really,’ Grace said. ‘Anyway, Annie will be looking after you, but I am relying on you to look after her, too.’

  ‘How could I look after her?’

  ‘Annie hasn’t got much self-confidence. I think that’s her mother’s fault. The bloody woman is deliberately undermining her, so she can keep her tied to her apron strings forever. But if we can show her that she can do things on her own – if we let her know that we value and respect her – well, maybe she’ll learn to stand up for herself.’

  Jane smiled. She couldn’t remember smiling much before, but now she was doing it all the time, and this particular smile was a mixture of amusement and admiration.

  ‘That’s what you do, isn’t it?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Grace said, looking slightly embarrassed.

  ‘You go around trying to change everybody’s life for the better.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Grace said, and she really was sounding flustered. ‘I’d never have enough energy to make everybody’s life better. But I do try to help the people I care about, whenever I can.’

  ‘Like me,’ Jane said with pride.

  ‘Like you, my dear little sister,’ Grace agreed. She reached into her pocket and took out an envelope. ‘The school’s just paid me my last wages, so here’s another pound.’

  ‘But you’ll need it for your baby,’ Jane protested.

  ‘I’ve got everything I need for my baby,’ Grace told her. ‘And when my husband comes back from the war, I’ll have even more.’ She held the envelope out. ‘Go on, have it.’

  Jane took the envelope from her.

  ‘I haven’t spent a penny of the money you’ve given me,’ she said. ‘It’s all for my baby.’

  ‘I know it is,’ Grace said. ‘And I’m so proud of you.’

  ‘You will be coming back, won’t you?’ Jane asked, as a new wave of anxiety hit her.

  ‘Of course I’ll be coming back,’ Grace said. ‘Give me a week or so to get over giving birth and you won’t be able to keep me away.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The woman leaving the offices of Campion, Campion and Blaine (Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths) is somewhere in her mid-forties, and if I were to disguise myself as a solicitor’s secretary during the course of an investigation (and such things have been known to happen!) I would probably dress myself in a tweed suit and sensible shoes similar to the ones she’s wearing now.

  Her face reveals her to be a kindly, sensible person (which only serves to confirm the thumbnail sketch given to me earlier by the admirable Miss Benton), but there is something about the way she moves – a heaviness, a tired acceptance – which also suggests that she is a woman who has been constantly disappointed by what life has had to offer.

  My experience of ambushing people tells me that they tend to get jumpy if your first approach is when they’re walking along, so I stay close to her, but keep silent, until she reaches the pelican crossing and comes to halt, just as the red light instructs her to.

  Then I say, ‘Miss Tobin, my name is Jennie Redhead, and I’m investigating the murder of Grace Stockton.’

  She looks very perplexed. I would have been surprised if she hadn’t, because women like her never get stopped by women like me.

  ‘Are you from the police?’ she asks, tremulously.

  ‘I’m working with them,’ I reply, neatly side-stepping the truth, without actually lying. ‘Do you think you could you spare me a few minutes to answer one or two questions?’

  The crossing light changes to green. Her instinct tells her she should cross the road, but she does not want to appear rude.

  ‘My mother’s expecting me at home,’ she says, keeping her eye firmly on the light.

  She speaks in a dull, flat tone which suggests that though she knows that going home is as inevitable as the sun setting in the evening, it is not a prospect she looks forward to with relish. She would be greatly relieved, I suspect, if I could find a way to talk her out of doing her duty, at least for a little while.

  ‘It really would be most useful to me – and to the murder investigation – if you could spare me a few minutes,’ I say.

  The light has changed to red again, temporarily cutting off her escape.

  ‘Well, I … you see, my mother gets worried if I’m late,’ she says, almost pathetically.

  I want to grab hold of her and shake her till her teeth rattle, while all the time screaming things like, ‘For God’s sake, Annie, you’re not a kid – you’re a middle-aged woman. You’re too old to be rushing home to Mum.’

  I don’t do that, of course, because I’ve learned from experience that such a course of action tends to put a potential witness into a particularly uncooperative frame of mind.

  But I need to do something quickly, because when the light changes again, she’ll be off like a greyhound out of its trap.

  I decide it is time to bring out the big guns.

  �
��Miss Benton was hoping that you could grant me just a few minutes of your time,’ I say.

  Her face lights up, as if I’ve just said the magic word – which, in fact, I probably have.

  ‘You’ve talked to Miss Benton?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she mentioned me?’

  There’s a hint of incredulity in her voice, because she really can’t see why anyone – especially someone as marvellous as Miss Benton – would even bother to mention an insignificant worm like her.

  ‘Miss Benton didn’t just mention you,’ I tell her. ‘She spoke of you very warmly.’

  The light has changed again, but the crisis has been averted.

  ‘Well, I suppose giving you a few minutes would be all right,’ Annie says, trying her best to disguise the fact that she is inordinately pleased.

  ‘I noticed earlier that there was a café just down the road,’ I tell her.

  ‘Yes, there is.’

  ‘I think we’d be much more comfortable having our little talk there, don’t you, Annie?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she says uncertainly.

  The café is called the Cosy Tea (tea cosy – get it!). There is a hand-printed notice on the wall which proclaims that as well as nine different and distinct blends of tea, it also offers scones and cakes.

  I order a pot of Darjeeling from the smiling young waitress, and ask Annie if she would like scones or cakes to go with it. I see her mouth watering, then she shakes her head, regretfully.

  ‘No, thank you. They look very nice, but I don’t want to spoil my appetite. Mother will be cooking dinner, you see, and …’ She looks around her worriedly, as if she expects to see her mother there, censoring her for her recklessness. ‘Are you married?’ she asks me.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I reply.

  ‘Are your parents still alive?’

  ‘My mother is. My father died a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Do you live with her – your mother, I mean?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘But you live close to her, don’t you?’

  ‘Not really. She lives in Lancashire, and I live in Oxford.’

  She looks at me as strangely as she might have done had I announced that I was a transvestite tightrope walker and amateur chicken sexer from Outer Mongolia. I am living a life, it seems, which is not only outside her experience, but beyond any normal person’s experience.

  And then enlightenment dawns – or, at least, she thinks it has.

  ‘You have brothers and sisters in Lancashire who take care of your mother,’ she says.

  I shake my head. ‘I’m an only child.’

  So, it would seem, the world really had gone mad.

  ‘Didn’t your mother want you to move back home when your father died?’ she asks, wonderingly.

  Oh yes, she most certainly did, because it would have been a great comfort to her – in her bereavement – to have made my life thoroughly miserable.

  ‘Yes, she asked me to move back,’ I say aloud. ‘And I made her a counter-offer.’

  ‘A counter-offer?’

  ‘Yes, I said she could come and live with me.’

  The offer had been sincere (honestly it had!), but – thank God – she hadn’t accepted it.

  ‘So what happened then?’ she asks, with a hint of amazement in her voice, as if what I’m telling her could only happen in a Hollywood picture, because it had no place in the real world.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ I say. ‘Neither of us wanted to move, so we both stayed as we were.’ All this is really very depressing. I take a sip of tea and find myself wishing it was gin and tonic. ‘Could you tell me about the old days, when you were Mrs Stockton’s babysitter?’ I continue.

  ‘Yes, of course. What do you want to know?’

  ‘How did you get the job in the first place?’

  Annie giggled. ‘It was silly, really. It all began with the pram.’

  ‘The pram?’

  ‘I was in the park, sitting on a bench. I was feeling a bit miserable that day. To tell you the truth, I might even have been crying a little. Anyway, I looked up, and there was Mrs Stockton standing there. She didn’t ask me what the matter was – that would have been awful.’

  ‘So what did she say?’

  ‘She said she was going to look at a second-hand pram, and, if I could possibly spare her the time, she’d really appreciate a second opinion. So we both went to see the pram.’

  ‘Did she buy it?’

  ‘Yes, she did. It was a blue Silver Cross pram. They were the best, you know. King George VI had ordered one for Princess Elizabeth. This one was in beautiful condition. The chrome gleamed. The rubber on the handle was hardly worn at all. And best of all, it didn’t squeak. A lot of prams do squeak, but this one was as quiet and as smooth as a … well, as a perfect pram.’

  ‘You seem to know a great deal about it,’ I say.

  ‘Oh yes, I used to love prams. I’d spend hours and hours looking at them in the shops.’

  ‘But you don’t do that now?’

  ‘There’s not much point now, is there?’ Annie asks bitterly. She takes a deep breath. ‘Anyway, Mrs Stockton asked me if I’d do her a favour. She was helping this friend of hers on the other side of the river, who’d just had a baby herself, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to do it for a while after her own baby was born, so she wondered if I’d step in and fill the gap. She said she wouldn’t ask just anybody, but she knew how trustworthy and responsible I was.’

  She glows with the memory, and then her face clouds over as she remembers how the story ended.

  Was this the point at which someone learned to hate Grace so much that they would store that hatred for thirty years, I wonder.

  ‘Tell me about this other woman.’

  ‘She lived in Bombay Street in Camden Town, and her name was Jane.’

  ‘What was her surname?’

  ‘I don’t know. She never told me what her surname was, and neither did Mrs Stockton.’ Annie looks anguished. ‘I’m sorry. Maybe I should have asked, but I didn’t really think.’

  Jesus, this is a delicate soul!

  ‘It’s not important,’ I assure her. ‘Tell me some more about this Jane, if you can.’

  She smiles happily, because she knows that this time she is not going to disappoint me.

  ‘She wasn’t very educated,’ Annie says. ‘She asked me once if I could read something to her because her eyes were hurting, but I think that the truth is, she didn’t know how to read. But she was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met and she was very, very fond of Mrs Stockton.’

  She doesn’t sound much like an assassin, I think.

  ‘Was there any other woman in the house?’ I ask Annie.

  ‘No, there was just Jane.’

  ‘And did she have any female visitors apart from you and Mrs Stockton?’

  ‘No, not while I was there. To be honest, I don’t think Jane had any other friends.’

  This is looking increasingly like a dead end, but I’m here now, so I might as well run with it until I hit the wall.

  ‘So after Mrs Stockton’s baby was born, you stopped going to Jane’s house, and looked after Julia instead?’ I ask.

  ‘That’s right. I don’t think Mrs Stockton liked leaving Julia so often, but she knew that Jane really depended on her.’

  ‘I expect that extra pocket money must have come in useful,’ I say.

  Annie looks horrified at the very idea. ‘Oh, I didn’t get any money for it,’ she says. ‘Mrs Stockton tried to pay me, but I wouldn’t accept it.’ She smiles, sadly. ‘If I’d had to, I would have paid to look after Julia. I loved babies. I was going to train to be a nursery nurse.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Mother said training to be a secretary would be much more sensible, and after that night, I just didn’t have the strength to fight her.’

  ‘What night?’

  ‘The 25th of November 1944.’ A single tear
runs down Annie’s cheek. ‘The day before my birthday.’

  ‘What happened?’

  It was a cold dark night, Annie tells me. The wind had been blowing in from the river, and the rain had been coming down in buckets for hours, so it was hardly surprising that there was no one else out on the street as Annie made her way towards the three-storey house where Grace had her flat.

  Once she got there, she rang the bell and waited outside on the pavement for Grace to come downstairs and let her in.

  No one came.

  The rain had found its way under her collar, and she felt its icy fingers crawling slowly down her back.

  She rang again.

  This time, the door opened, but it was not Mrs Stockton, it was Mrs Jurewitz, the Polish refugee who lived on the ground floor.

  The old woman peered into the darkness.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me, Mrs Jurewitz. Annie.’

  ‘Come in, you poor child,’ the old woman said. ‘Come in quickly, before you drown.’

  There was only a dim light in the hallway, but it was bright enough for the Polish woman to examine the new arrival.

  ‘How terrible is your state,’ she said. ‘Come to my room and I will give you a hot blackcurrant drink – with perhaps a little Polish vodka.’

  Annie felt the kind of embarrassment she always experienced when someone was being nice to her.

  ‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I … I have to go and see Mrs Stockton.’

  ‘I ran up the stairs to the top floor, which is where Mrs Stockton lived,’ Annie tells me. ‘I suppose what I was really doing was running away from Mrs Jurewitz. We … I … I wasn’t used to being so intimate with people I hardly knew.’

  ‘What did you do when you reached Mrs Stockton’s door?’

  ‘I knocked. And from inside, I heard the sound of Julia crying. It was terrible. It was much stronger and louder than I’d ever heard her cry before.’ She pauses. ‘I’m not lying.’

  ‘I never thought you were.’

  ‘No one came to the door, but I wasn’t surprised, because I’d no doubt in my mind that Mrs Stockton was comforting the baby, which was much more important than finding out who was outside.’