‘Then the old man told me a story,’ he went on. ‘He said there was a woman living in the village who used to you… you know… with the British soldiers. But she was in love with a German officer, and she passed on any information she could pick up from the British directly to him. One soldier let something slip about some new trench positions they were preparing for a surprise attack, and before anyone knew what had hit them, the trenches were shelled and the Germans swarmed into them. They killed every British soldier in their path. It came to hand to hand combat in the end. Bayonets. And the woman’s German lover was one of the last to die.’
Tommy paused, glanced at his mother and went on, ‘He told me she never recovered. She went mad, and for a while after the armies had moved on she could be heard wailing for her dead German lover in the poppy fields at night. Then nothing more was heard of her. The rumour was that she had gone to England, where they had plenty of other madwomen to keep her company. I thought of Mad Maggie right from the start, of course, and I remembered the way she used to burst into French every now and then. I asked him if he had a photograph, and he said he thought he had an old one. We went back to his house, and he rummaged through his attic and came down with an old album. There she was. The same sort of clothes. That same look about her. Much younger and very beautiful, but it was her. It was Mad Maggie. And she had killed my father. He was in one of those trenches.’
‘What happened next, Tommy?’
‘I don’t remember much of the next couple of months. The Germans got too close and we had to make a hasty departure. That’s when I was wounded. I was lucky to make it to Dunkirk. If it hadn’t been for my mates… They carried me most of the way. Anyway, for a while I didn’t know where I was. In and out of consciousness. To be honest, half the time I preferred to be out of it. I had dreams, nightmares, visions, and I saw myself coming back and avenging my father’s death.’
His eyes shone with pride and righteousness as he spoke. Outside, the bombs were starting to sound alarmingly close. ‘Let’s get down to the shelter,’ Harry suggested.
‘No,’ said Tommy, holding up his hand. ‘Hear me out now. Wait till I’m done.’ He turned to me. ‘You should understand, Mr Bascombe. She killed my dad. He was your best friend. You should understand. I only did what was right.’
I shook my head. ‘There’s no avenging deaths during wartime, Tommy. It’s every man for himself. Some German bullet or bayonet had Larry’s name on it, and that was that. Wrong place, wrong time. It could just as easily have been me.’
Tommy stared at me in disbelief.
‘Besides,’ I went on, getting a little concerned at the explosions outside, ‘are you sure it was her, Tommy? It seems an awful coincidence that she should end up living on our street, don’t you think?’
‘I’m sure. I saw the photograph. I’ve still got it.’
‘Can I have a look?’
Tommy opened his top pocket and handed me a creased photograph. There was no doubt about the superficial resemblance between the woman depicted there, leaning against a farmer’s fence, wearing high buttoned boots, smiling and holding her hand to her forehead to keep the sun out of her eyes. But it wasn’t the same woman whose photograph I had found in Rose Faversham’s shoebox. In fact, it wasn’t any of the three – Midge, Rose or Margaret. There were no dimples, for a start, and the eyes were different. We all have our ways of identifying people, and with me it’s always the eyes. Show me someone at six, sixteen and sixty and I’ll know if it’s the same person or not by the eyes.
Another bomb landed far too close for comfort, and the whole house shook. Then a split second later came a tremendous explosion. Plaster fell off the ceiling. The lights and radio went off. I could hear the drone of the bombers slowly disappearing to the south-east, on their way home again. We were all shaken, but I pulled myself to my feet first and suggested we go outside to see if anyone needed help.
I didn’t really think he’d make a run for it, but I stuck close to Tommy as we all went outside. The smell was awful; the bitter, fiery smell of the explosive and a whiff of gas from a fractured pipe mixed with dust from broken masonry. The sky was lit up like Guy Fawkes night. It was a terrible sight that met our eyes, and the four of us could only stand and stare.
A bomb had taken out about three houses on the other side of the street. The middle one, now nothing but a pile of burning rubble, was Mad Maggie’s.
When the answers to my letters started trickling in a couple of weeks after Tommy’s arrest, I picked up some more leads, one of which eventually led me to Midge Livesey, now a mother of two boys – both in the RAF – who was living only thirty miles away, in the country. I telephoned her, and she seemed pleased to hear from someone who had known Rose, though she was saddened by the news of Rose’s death, and she suggested I be her guest for the weekend.
Though it was late October, the weather was fine when I got off the train at the tiny station. It was a wonderful feeling to be out in the country again. I had been away for so long I had almost forgotten what the autumn leaves looked like and how many different varieties of birdsong there are. The sweet, acrid scent of burning leaves from someone’s garden made a fine change from the stink of the air raids.
Midge and her husband, Arthur, welcomed me at the door of their cottage and told me they had already prepared the spare room. After I had laid out my things on the bed, I opened the window. Directly outside stood an apple tree, and beyond that I could see the landscape undulating to the north, where the large anvil shapes of peaks and fells were visible in the distance. I took in a deep breath of fresh air – as deep as I could manage with my poor lungs – and for once it didn’t make me cough. Perhaps it was time I left the city, I thought. But no, there were police duties to attend to, and I loved my teaching job. After the war, perhaps, I would think about it again, see if I could get a job in a village school.
When I showed Midge the photograph of the three of them over dinner that evening, a sad smile played across her features, and she touched the surface with her fingers, as if it could send out some sort of message to her.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that was Rose. And that was Margaret. Poor Margaret, she died in childbirth ten years ago. The war wasn’t all bad for us. We d id have some good times. But I think the day that photograph was taken marked the beginning of the end. It was the day before the third Ypres battle started, and we were field nurses. We used to go onto the fields and into the trenches to clean up after the battles.’ She shook her head and looked at Arthur, who tenderly put his hand on top of hers. ‘You’ve never… well, I suppose you have.’ She looked at her husband. ‘Arthur understands, too. He was wounded at Arras. I worry about my boys. Just remembering, just thinking about it, makes me fear for them terribly. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
She paused for a moment and poured us all tea. ‘Any -way, Rose was especially sensitive,’ she went on. ‘She wrote poetry and wanted to go to university to study English literature when it was all over. French, too. She spoke French very well and spent a lot of time talking to the poor wounded French soldiers. Often they were with the English, you know, and there was nobody could talk to them. Rose did. She fell in love with a handsome young English lieutenant. Nicholas, his name was.’ She smiled. ‘But we were young. We were always falling in love back then.’
‘What happened to her?’ I asked.