It was day two and I was like a squirrel in a cage. I paced the floor and nibbled everything I could find: mouldy cheese, fish paste on toast, and fritters I made from the shavings of gangrenous spuds. I didn’t dare go out in case I missed a call. I checked my phone five times in case it was broken, until the operator began to get cranky. On top of everything, Valerie hadn’t shown again and I didn’t know how to find her. As a detective I was a joke. But I kept that thought to myself during discussions with a prospective client.
She must have been 60 or so. My mother’s age. But she didn’t have my mother’s neat white hair and carefully cleaned and pressed clothes. Mrs Warner was on the grubby side of careless; her hat was bashed on to her head and nailed there with a huge bobby pin as though she slept with it on. Instead of an overcoat she wore a worn Paisley-pattern housecoat over a thick calf-length skirt and misbuttoned cardigan. I was surprised not to see old slippers on her feet, but she’d managed to find a pair of scuffed boots with ankle-high laces. Her ensemble was completed with a sorry string bag containing papers of some sort. She sat quivering in my chair while I made her a cup of tea.
“So, tell me Mrs Warner, what can I do for you?” I was treating her as a potential paying customer but knew from looking at her she hadn’t a bean. Still, age deserves respect. And some of these old dears can hardly get to sleep for the lumps of cash under their mattress.
She fixed me with her watery eyes, both yellow with cataracts.
“I want you to find my son, Charlie.”
I pulled my pad closer and poised my pen. “When did you last see him?”
She thought for a moment then reached into her string bag and pulled out a thin sheaf of blue letters held together with three elastic bands. She rummaged again and came up with a spec case and put on some glasses. She gazed at the envelopes for a bit, trying different distances to find a focus that worked.
“Here. That’s the one.” She handed me a well thumbed forces air mail envelope. I knew what was coming. “Go on, open it,” she said.
“Are you sure, Mrs Warner?”
She waved her hand, and I unfolded the single sheet of thin blue paper. It was dated 12 June 1943. The hand was big and childlike. I could almost see Charlie’s tongue gripped between his teeth as his pencil sprawled across the page. It read: Dear Mum, never felt so hot in my life. But they give us plenty of water and tucker so dont you worry none. Cant tell you nothing really but just wanted to let you know I was ok. Hope you and Deke are ok too. Love Charlie. Xxx “Deke?” I asked, stalling for time.
“His dog. Charlie loved that dog. It’s got fat. I can’t walk it much like I used to. Me legs.” She pulled up her thick skirt and I could see the ridges of varicose veins all round her calf and ankles.
“Mrs Warner, this is the last letter you got from Charlie. But didn’t you get a telegram or a letter from the Army?”
“Oh yes. Yes, I did.” She said eagerly, as though I was on to something. “Said he was missing. That’s why I’m here. I wants you to find him.” She stared at me defiantly. “I can pay, you know. I always pays my way.” She rumbled in her string bag again and pulled out a worn purse.
I didn’t know what to say to her. Couldn’t tell her that I’d seen blokes like her Charlie blown into so many pieces there was nothing to put in a coffin. I was as gentle as I could be. But she needed a padre.
“Mrs Warner, I suspect your son was killed in action somewhere in the desert.
See, he says how hot it was. I know where we were then. If he’d been taken prisoner then he’d have come back by now. You see?”
She saw all right. But she wasn’t going to believe it. She was shaking her old head. “Charlie’s dad died in the last one. He never saw Charlie. They can’t take him too. It’s not fair, you see. It’s not fair.” It was a simple statement of faith, as if fairness had a role in deciding who got shot and who didn’t.
No it wasn’t; it wasn’t bloody fair. I gave her more tea and listened to her stories of Charlie as a boy. Then I helped her out and down the stairs and went back to my desk and took a long drink even though it was only mid-afternoon. A little later, I went out for a walk to clear my head.
So I was more than a little pleased to get back just as the phone was ringing. I galloped up the last flight and skidded across the lino in time to take a call from a woman calling herself Mrs Caldwell, Mrs Liza Caldwell, Tony’s wife.
EIGHT
Next day I made an early start. Too early, as it turned out. The straight run up the Northern Line from Kennington to Hampstead took just 35 minutes. But for all that, I popped up in a different world. It didn’t feel like London. It seemed like I’d jumped down a rabbit hole and emerged in a country town from another century. Hampstead village runs up and down a steep hill. The houses are red brick and three or four storeys high with elaborate peaks and windows. I’m hazy about architecture, but think I can spot the Victorian’s hand when I see it.
These looked older. Who would that be? George? Edward? But which? Why couldn’t they invent a new name for a new king? Good King Danny had a ring to it.
I wandered down the High Street, window shopping and enjoying the outing. I had an hour to kill before my meeting with Mrs Caldwell. A weak sun broke through the clouds and I saw faces lift and turn towards it like daisies. I treated myself to a Times and read it over a pot of Tetley’s in a little tea-shop. I scoured the front page in case there was a job for an ex-cop, ex-soldier, ex-SOE agent with a hole in his head. Nothing sprang out. I then got into the meat of it; it made the Sketch look like a comic. There was talk of the first meeting of the new United Nations Organisation in five days’ time. The big guys who ran the place were flying into London with high hopes for a new and better world order.
The scale of their dreams threw me for a bit. Almost sounded hopeful.
I sat up and looked around me. Nice folk were doing ordinary things, like eating jammy doughnuts and talking about the weather. And here I was, ensconced in a cosy cafй with a couple of quid in my pocket and most of my faculties in working order. Life wasn’t so bad, was it? How had I let it get so narrow? I should just kiss the past goodbye and get on with the present. As my dad used to say, the future never comes. I resolved there and then that whether Caldwell was alive or dead, I’d let it all go. There were a thousand stories more tragic than mine out there. Maybe I’d go back to Glasgow. Why should I be afraid to go home? Or maybe I’d stay in London. It was ten degrees warmer down here.
But first I had some business to finish. I stuffed the paper in my pocket and walked back up the hill with my raincoat slung over my shoulder and my hat tipped back like Sinatra’s sailor cap in Anchors Aweigh. I was whistling I Fall in Love too Easily as I turned down Willoughby Road, but the trees and tall houses and solemn gentility soon shut me up. I turned right into Willow Road.
More quiet elegance. It wasn’t the sort of area I would have picked for Caldwell. Too neat and placid somehow. Caldwell was a city bloke, a clubbish sort of chap who liked to be at the heart of things.
Willow Road runs at an acute angle from Willoughby and gently downhill. For the first 50 yards the tall terraces face off against each other. Then suddenly there is only the one side, the right side, as the street runs into a broader road coming in from the left. Then the heath starts and rolls up a grassy slope and into dense thickets of shrub and trees. I carefully noted the lines of sight.
The Caldwell house was one of the first batch. It was tall enough – four storeys – for four Kilpatrick families. A short path and a little flight of steps led up to the front door which was capped by a wooden porch painted green. I saw a curtain flick in the first level window as the gate swung closed behind me and thwacked into its socket.