The lights changed. Rose eased from second into third and they started to cross the bridge. ‘Hector told me. Wasn’t I supposed to know?’
Antonia started justifying herself rapidly. ‘It doesn’t matter a damn. I can’t go now. I can’t get married again, not while Hec is officially missing. It takes years and years before the law will admit that a missing person is dead. I can’t marry again, and Vic won’t even talk about living together. I thought this country was the last word in prudishness, but it seems they’re just as narrow-minded in New Jersey.’
Rose drove on without comment.
Antonia only pressed her case more vigorously. ‘Didn’t I tell you about this? Believe me, there wasn’t any question of trying to keep it from you. I mean, why should I, darling? I introduced you to Vic. God, after what you and I have been through together, we don’t need to hide anything from each other.’
Rose had stopped listening. Something bloody underhanded was going on. She’d touched a raw nerve when she mentioned America. Antonia’s pacifying gush was more of a threat than outright hostility. All this reassurance couldn’t paper over the fact that Vic and his job in Princeton were still paramount in Antonia’s plans. It was screamingly obvious that she hadn’t given up the idea. She was resolved to go to America with him. How could she, without marrying him?
Stockwell came up, then Brixton. They swung into the Brixton Road. Not much was moving in either direction. It was tempting to take the Bentley up to higher speeds along the wide highway, but she dared not risk it. This was the time of night when police cars lay in wait in side roads.
Heavier rain than they had been through had saturated the road. Each streetlamp stood over its own reflection and each oncoming car appeared to have four headlamps. The wet tyres rustled and clicked. Don’t let it lull you into quiescence, Rose told herself. This is the most dangerous hour of your life.
The first sign for Croydon came up.
Antonia rubbed at the window with her hand. ‘Journey’s end, my flower.’
Rose drove on. Most of the bombing had been further in, and she had a particular site in mind. A street close to West Croydon Station had been devastated by one of the giant V2 rockets in 1944. The entire area had since been evacuated and fenced round with corrugated iron, but children had ripped down a section of the fence to make their own cycle speedway track where there had been private gardens. Shells of houses stood about waiting for demolition, long since looted of anything worth owning. Clumps of willowherb and yellow ragwort had sprouted where pavements had been.
The turn came up on the left. For a short stretch they drove on the regular road past houses where people slept. The street lighting was sparse. Then the Bentley’s headlamps picked out the gap she had remembered in the fence at the far end. There was space enough for the car to pass through, out of sight of the houses. It swayed and rocked across a pitted surface on to the remains of a road until they were forced to stop where a wall had collapsed.
Antonia flung open the door and got out. ‘Wonderful, darling!’ She stood in the rain with her arms folded, relishing the scene as if it were Epsom Downs on Derby Day. ‘Let’s go prospecting, shall we? There’s a torch on the back seat.’
Rose couldn’t understand this boisterousness. Nerves affected people in unexpected ways, but was this a case of nerves? Was the Benzedrine responsible? She switched off the headlamps and shone the torch across the site. Two years’ growth of weeds had covered the rubble and made the footing awkward. Antonia was already striding indomitably towards the nearest ruined houses, which were — or had been — semi-detached, the sort that aspiring middle-class people owned. Probably they had once been allotted numbers that the owners had replaced with names like Mon Repos. They stood roofless and derelict. Rose shone the torch upwards. Where bits of wall jutted out of the debris were traces of floral wallpaper.
The first two houses were impenetrable. Presumably to keep children out, boards had been hammered across the doorways and window spaces and crisscrossed with taut barbed wire. They picked their way around them with the torch until even Antonia’s optimism faltered.
‘We’re wasting our time if they’re all like this.’
Rose refused to be beaten. This was her show now. She was no longer passive. She had forced her personality out of its straitjacket and she had a liking for liberty. She pointed the torch behind them, across what had once been the garden. ‘What’s that, then?’
The small circle of light had stopped on a dark, raised mass.
‘Just rubbish.’
Certainly when Rose stepped closer she found a collection of rusting and broken objects that must have been heaped there during the salvage operation. A garden roller without its wooden handle, several dented saucepans, a piece of saturated, threadbare carpet, a wheelbarrow, the frame of a deckchair. She stooped to examine something that gleamed. It was a chromium-plated key-plate.
Antonia came over. ‘What have you found?’
‘Somebody’s front door by the look of it. Help me slide it to one side.’
‘What for? Is there something underneath?’
‘I don’t know. There might be.’ Rose had noticed a patch of concrete and a curved piece of corrugated steel that suggested a possibility.
Together they gripped the edge of the door and tried to move it.
‘There’s too much heavy stuff on top.’
They scrabbled among the rubbish and lifted off a few bricks and a coalbucket filled with china fragments. At the second attempt they succeeded in pulling the door about a yard to one side.
Antonia whistled. ‘Nice work, darling!’
They had uncovered three or four steps leading underground to a cavity blocked by more rubbish, the frame of a pushchair and a dustbin lid.
‘Who would have known it?’ said Antonia.
They had found an Anderson shelter, the fortified hole in the ground that millions of families had installed in their gardens in the first years of the war, consisting of a curved arch of corrugated steel sunk three feet and covered with earth. This one had partially collapsed and was so overgrown as to be barely recognizable.
Together they hauled out the objects that were blocking the entrance. Then they used the torch again. The steel walls had become unclamped at the top and now sagged. The space inside was much reduced.
‘It doesn’t look very safe.’
‘Doesn’t need to be,’ said Rose.
She picked up a stone and tossed it in. They heard it bounce across the concrete floor. Antonia grabbed the torch and crouched to peer inside. Her voice had a promising echo. ‘Darling, it’s ideal. His own tomb. We can cover him with rubble and put back the rubbish and no one will ever find him. When they clear the site they’ll just bulldoze this. Let’s fetch him, shall we? Have you got the keys?’
Rose handed them over as if to a servant. She felt elated at having solved the problem of where to deposit the body. She was entitled to some self-congratulation. She alone had thought of this place and found the shelter. Without her, Antonia wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting away with murder. As it was, Hector’s body was most unlikely to be found. He would just be listed as a missing person, one of thousands. And the credit for that belonged to her.
Mustn’t get over complacent, she thought immediately. The night isn’t over yet. She followed Antonia to the car.
Antonia had already turned the key and lifted the boot lid. They reached into the dark interior and hauled out the body and staggered towards the garden containing the shelter. The distance they had to cover was about seventy yards, and the footing was treacherous. Either of them could easily have turned an ankle. As it was, they managed it without a rest, pausing only when they stood by the steps of the shelter. They set the body down with the head and shoulders resting on the door.