“But you’re a copper, not a thief.”
Banks smiled. “Yes, I’m a copper. So come on downstairs and we’ll see if we can make your mother a bit more forgiving than mine was.”
Adam hesitated, but at last he jumped up from the bed. Banks moved aside and let him go down the narrow staircase first.
Adam’s mother was in the kitchen making tea, and Annie was leaning against the counter talking to her.
“Oh, so you’ve decided to join us, have you, you little devil?” said Mrs. Kelly.
“Sorry, Mum.”
She ruffled his hair. “Get on with you. Just don’t do owt like that again.”
“Can I have a Coke?”
“In the fridge.”
Adam turned to the fridge and Banks winked at him. Adam blushed and grinned.
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.
Toward 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 blond woman held the microphone. She stood in Hobb’s End, where crime-scene searchers in their white boilersuits 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 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, who 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 naivety 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 over 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 northwest. She thrust the most recent Ministry letter toward 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 was 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 anymore. 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.