‘My heart stopped, Bess. I couldn’t breathe.’
A glance had been all it took her to see that her house had disappeared: the slate roof and the chimney that leaned to one side and the window boxes she had bought that spring and filled with geraniums. All had vanished. In their place was a pile of smoking rubble, and as she’d stood there unable to move, an icy calm had descended on her like a shroud.
‘Then I saw them, Freddy and Evie. They were standing on the pavement hand in hand looking at this awful heap of bricks and plaster.’
Later she had learned that his nanny had taken her son out for a walk only minutes before the bomb had landed. They had gone down to the canal to feed the ducks and had seen the cigar-shaped craft, its tail glowing brightly, pass by overhead.
‘Only minutes, Bess …’
Although it had been days before Mary had been able to think clearly, their move to Hampshire had been inevitable in the circumstances and dictated by logic. Short of looking for a flat in London to rent, the Grange had offered the only roof immediately available to her. An old stone mansion situated a mile or two from the village of Liphook, it had belonged to a bachelor uncle of hers and been left to her in his will when he died at the end of 1938. Something of a white elephant — it was too big for a weekend retreat — the house had remained empty during the war apart from a brief spell in 1942 when it had been occupied by a company of sappers on a training exercise. All but settled on the idea of selling it, Mary and her husband had put off a final decision until after the war and in the meantime had arranged with an estate agent in Petersfield to keep an eye on the property, which was left in the day-to-day care of an elderly couple named Hodge who had worked for Mary’s uncle for many years and had a cottage nearby.
A week after losing her home, Mary had taken the train down to Liphook with Freddy and his nanny. Weighed down by suitcases — she and Evie had spent hours picking through the rubble salvaging what they could — they had clambered off the train to find Liphook’s only taxi already commandeered and were sitting in the station waiting for it to return, Freddy growing more fractious by the minute, when the door had opened and a large woman wearing an old army greatcoat and a fur-lined cap with earflaps had put her head in.
‘I’m told you want to go to the Grange,’ she had growled at them. Her heavy frown had seemed to dispel any idea that she might be doing them a favour. ‘I’m headed that way myself. Can I give you a lift?’
Only later had Mary realized that Bess had not been going in their direction at all. She’d finished her round for the day and was about to return home in her trap when she’d heard from the station-master, Mr Walton, that a party from London was camped in the waiting room looking lost.
‘I thought for a moment you were refugees,’ she’d confessed long afterwards, weeks later. ‘You looked so forlorn sitting there with your suitcases.’
15
‘Come now, Angus. It’s no use getting upset. These things take time. We must be patient.’
Bennett removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
‘Paris was an occupied city until a few months ago. Heaven only knows what the police are having to deal with there. Apart from anything else there’s the matter of wartime collaborators. From what I hear, a lot of private justice is being exacted. It’s not something they can turn a blind eye to. I’m sure they’ll get around to our problem in due course.’
‘No doubt they will, sir. But it matters how long they take. It’s vital to know who we’re chasing, and time isn’t on our side. It’s already been a week since the Wapping shooting and we’ve had ample evidence that he’s bent on covering his tracks. I only hope by the time we hear from Paris there’s still a trail left to follow.’
Sinclair sat scowling. He knew he was being unreasonable: barely four days had passed since his message had been dispatched to the Surete. But his gout had chosen that morning to return with particular venom and he sat shifting miserably in his chair, his toe throbbing.
‘Is there anything more we can do from this side now? Have we exhausted all avenues?’
Fully cognizant of his colleague’s discomfort — and equally aware that he would not wish it referred to — the assistant commissioner sought to be sympathetic.
‘For the time being, yes. What we’re doing now is waiting on Paris, hoping they can tell us first whether or not this is Marko we’re dealing with and if so, what they know about his movements before the outbreak of war. They would surely have stayed on his trail as long as they could.’
The chief inspector sought to control his impatience. While awaiting a reply from Paris he had used the time to pursue what few leads seemed to offer any prospect of progress, and it was their failure to produce even a gleam of light that he’d been recounting to Bennett that morning, and which had contributed to his gloomy mood.
‘There were two areas I wanted covered,’ he’d declared. ‘The first was to do with Alfie Meeks. We’re still faced with the mystery of how he came into contact with this man, and I’ve had detectives scouring the market at Southwark trying to find someone who might know — or have spotted — something that would be of use to us. Styles and Grace have been organizing that with the help of the Southwark police, and between them they must have talked to every stallholder there as well as a lot of the customers. But all to no effect: it was the same story wherever they went. One day he simply packed up and disappeared. His stall was only a folding table and his goods fitted into a suitcase. He asked one of the other traders to look after them for him and she put them with her stuff in a shed she uses for storage. They’ve been lying there ever since.’
Sinclair had ground his teeth in frustration.
‘His landlady was no help, either, other than telling us that Meeks had been able to pay the rent he owed her and seemed pleased with himself. It’s clear this man put money in his pocket. But he doesn’t seem to have had any friends, not close ones, anyway. Just people he would chat to when he went to the pub. We asked there, naturally, but no one could tell us anything; nor at the cafe he frequented. Just that he hadn’t been in for a while. He’d vanished.’
Bennett had listened to him in silence. Then he, too, had shrugged.
‘That sounds like a dead end. Two areas, you said?’
Sinclair nodded. ‘I decided to approach Mrs Laski again. She rang up a week ago to say she had read through Rosa Nowak’s diaries and there was nothing in them that would help us. As she’d suspected they weren’t a record of Rosa’s life, as such, or of the people she’d met. Just a young girl’s thoughts and dreams. Upsetting for her aunt, poor woman, but she did it, and I thought we might ask for her help again.’
The chief inspector had paused, frowning.
‘Unfortunately, we learned yesterday she’d been admitted into University College Hospital with severe bronchitis. She can’t clear her lungs. It’s a common cause of death among the old at this time of year, and according to the hospital she’s in poor health anyway and unlikely to recover. I don’t want to bother her again, particularly with a subject that’s bound to upset her.’
‘What did you want to ask her exactly?’
‘Whether she knows anything about the time Rosa spent in France. This is all very speculative, but it springs from John Madden’s idea that there might have been some prior encounter between Rosa and this man — something that prompted him to kill her — and in view of what we now know about him we wondered whether that might have occurred in France. At present our only information on that score comes from a conversation Helen had with the girl. Rosa told her she’d got there shortly before the war started and stayed with a friend of her father’s in Tours. However, she did visit Paris shortly before the Germans invaded France and it was from there that she left to go to England.’