Gloria got to her feet so fast she bumped the table with her thighs and the remains of her tea spilled onto Arthur Winchester’s lap. But he didn’t stop around to mop it up. Instead, he bolted for the door saying, “Good Lord, is that the time? I must dash.”
And with that, he was out of the door before Gloria could even pick up something to throw at him. She glared after him for a moment, then touched up her curls and sat down again. The serving girl frowned at us, then turned away. I thought we were lucky not to get thrown out.
We dawdled over our tea, Gloria calming down, smoking another cigarette and gazing out through the steamed-up window at the phantoms drifting by outside. In the café, soldiers came and went with their girls. I could smell the rain on their uniforms.
“What did he mean, it’s best that way?” Gloria asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose he meant to say that the Japanese don’t treat their prisoners as well as we do.”
“What do they do? Torture them? Beat them? Starve them?”
“I don’t know, Gloria,” I said, putting my hand over hers. “I just don’t know. All I can say is that it sounded to me as if he was saying Matthew would be better off dead.”
NINE
Annie parked in one of the hilly streets around St. Mary’s, at the back of the castle, and went looking for Alice Poole’s cottage. The sky was bright blue, with only a few wisps of white cloud borne on the sea breeze. Pity she had to work. She could have brought her bucket and spade. As a child she had spent hours amusing herself on the beach. Some of her only memories of her mother took place on the beach in St. Ives: building sand castles together, burying one another in the sand so that only a head showed, or maybe a head and feet, running into the big waves and getting knocked over. In Annie’s memory, her mother was a bright, mercurial figure, mischievous, devil-may-care, always laughing. Though her father, on the surface, was easygoing, bright, funny and caring, there was a darkness in his art that Annie felt excluded her; she didn’t know where it came from or how he reconciled it with the rest of his life. Did he suffer terribly in private and simply put on a public face, even for his own daughter? She hardly knew him at all.
She found the cottage easily enough, according to directions she had received over the telephone. It was in a high, quiet part of town, away from the pubs and shopping centers crowded with holidaymakers from Leeds and Bradford. From the garden she could see a wedge of the North Sea far below, beyond Marine Drive, steely gray-blue today, dotted with small boats. Flocks of gulls gathered, squealing, above a shoal of fish.
The woman who answered the door was tall, with thin, wispy hair like candy floss. She was wearing a long, loose purple dress with gold embroidery around the neck, hem and sleeves, and gold earrings of linked hoops that dangled almost as far as her shoulders. It reminded Annie of the sort of thing hippies used to wear. A pair of black horn-rimmed glasses hung on a chain around her neck.
“Come in, love.” She led the way into a bright, cluttered room. Dust motes spun in the rays of sunlight that lanced through the panes of the mullioned window. “Can I offer you anything?” she asked, having settled Annie in an armchair so soft and deep she wondered how she’d ever get out of it. “Only, I usually have elevenses around this time. Coffee and a Kit Kat. Instant coffee, mind you.”
Annie smiled. “That’ll be fine; thanks, Mrs. Poole.”
“Alice. Call me Alice. And why don’t you have a look through this while I see to things in the kitchen. Your call got me thinking about the old days and I realized I hadn’t had it out in years.”
She handed Annie a thick leather-bound photograph album and headed for the kitchen. Most of the deckle-edged black-and-white photographs were family groups, what Annie took to be Alice and her parents, aunts, brothers and sisters, but several were village scenes: women stopping to chat in the street, baskets over their arms, scarves knotted on their heads; children fishing from the riverbanks. There were also a couple of pictures of the church, which was smaller and prettier than she had imagined from Stanhope’s painting, with a squat, square tower, and of the dark, brooding flax mill, like a skull perched on its promontory.
Alice Poole came back holding a mug of coffee in each hand and a Kit Kat, still in its wrapper, between her teeth. When she had freed her hands, she took the chocolate bar from her mouth and put it on a small coffee table beside her chair. “A little indulgence of mine,” she said. “Would you like one? I should have asked.”
“No,” said Annie. “No, that’s fine.” She accepted her coffee. It was milky and sweet, just the way she liked it.
“What do you think of the photos?”
“Very interesting.”
“You’ve come about poor Gloria, then?”
“You’ve heard?”
“Oh, yes. Your boss was on telly last night. I don’t see very well, but there’s nothing wrong with my ears. I don’t watch a lot of television, but not much local news slips by me. Especially something like that. How horrible. Have you got any suspects yet?”
“Not really,” said Annie. “We’re still trying to find out as much as we can about Gloria. It’s very difficult, what with it all being so long ago.”
“You don’t say. I was seventy-five last birthday. Can you believe it?”
“Quite honestly, Mrs. – sorry, Alice – I can’t.” She really did seem remarkably spry for a woman of that age. Apart from a few liver spots on her hands and wrinkles on her face, the only real indication of the ravages of age was her sparse and lifeless hair, which Annie was now coming to believe had probably fallen victim to chemotherapy and not yet grown back properly.
“Look,” Alice pointed out, “this is Gloria.” She turned to a photograph of four girls standing in front of a Jeep and pointed to the petite blonde with the long curls, the narrow waist and the provocative smile. Without a doubt it was the same girl from Stanhope’s painting. Underneath, in tiny white letters, was written “July 1944.” “This one’s Gwen, her sister-in-law.” Gwen was the tallest of them all. She wasn’t smiling and had half turned away from the camera, as if shy about her looks. “And this one here is Cynthia Garmen. The Four Musketeers, we were. Oh, that one’s me.” Alice had been a svelte blonde, by the look of her. Also in the photograph, standing in the Jeep behind the girls, were four young men in uniform.
“Who are they?” Annie asked.
“Americans. That one’s Charlie, and that’s Brad. We saw quite a lot of them. I don’t remember names of the other two. They just happened to be there.”
“I’d like to make a copy of that photo, if you don’t mind. We’ll send it back to you.”
“Not at all.” Alice detached the photograph from its corners. “Please take care of it, though.”
“I promise.” Annie slipped it in her briefcase. “You knew Gloria well?” she went on.
“Quite well. She married Matthew Shackleton, as you probably know, and while he was away at war, Gloria and Gwen, Matthew’s sister, became inseparable. But quite often the gang of us would do something together. Anyway, I wouldn’t say we were the best of friends, but I did know her. And I liked her.”
“What was she like?”
“Gloria?” Alice unwrapped her Kit Kat and took a bite. When she had swallowed it, she said, “Well, I’d say she was a good sort. Cheerful. Fun to be with. Kind. Generous. She’d give you the shirt off her back. Or make one for you.”
“Pardon?”
“Magic fingers. Gloria was such an expert sewer you could give her rags and she’d turn out a ball gown. Well, I might be exaggerating a little, but I’m sure you get my point. It was a skill in much demand back then, I can tell you. There wasn’t a heck of a lot in the shops, and your clothing coupons didn’t go very far.”