A Presumption of Death (31 page)

‘I don’t know any Latin. What does it mean?’ said her companion.

‘Seize the day. I think it covers seizing the night,’ said Harriet. ‘Look, if you need any help . . .’

‘Talking to you has helped. I’ll manage.’ And she strode away, leaving Harriet looking after her.

‘I suppose, as a parent, one might feel one had rather dropped the girl in it, being so co-operative about her ruin,’ said Peter musingly. ‘I suppose Mrs Quarley might feel guilty. Perhaps when Captain Quarley reappears . . . I don’t know, I imagine the wives of merchant seamen get used to taking all the decisions themselves. But why would any of all that make her react badly to my card? Or was it my face? I usually fail to impress on first sight, but I don’t usually scare people, do I, Harriet?’

‘It wasn’t your face that upset her, it was your card. Definitely.’

‘She said she had heard of me. So it was my profession. So she has something to hide. But it would hardly be that she had tucked up her unmarried daughter in bed with young Brinklow, would it? I mean you usually need to be married before your behaviour on that front is a matter for a detective.’

‘Well, but as it turned out, Peter, since poor Alan Brinklow died, what she had done had dire effects. Even nowadays the world is savage to young women with a child born out of wedlock, and inclined to smile and wink knowingly at the young men involved. Mightn’t she regret having helped them for that reason?’

‘I suppose she might. But I thought that whole conversation was somehow out of joint. Something was going on that didn’t square with what we knew about it. You know, Harriet, by the pricking of my thumb . . .’

‘Yes, I felt it too. And something else odd, Peter. I really thought that one of the photographs on the mantelpiece was of Mike Newcastle. After all, I had met him in Paggleham, trying to make contact with Alan Brinklow, and just missing him.’

‘Well, it isn’t so very odd, is it? With the whole country uprooted and everyone sent hither and yon, one might look up a friend . . . Oh, I see what you mean, Harriet. One doesn’t come looking for a friend posted missing.’

‘No. But what’s really odd is that when I mentioned Mike Newcastle to Joan she denied all knowledge of him.’

‘A pseudonym. Someone asking for Brinklow under a pseudonym. Harriet, in view of what we have just learned about the Quarley family, how would it play, do you think, if amidst their tears for the dearly loved Alan, they somehow got to hear a rumour that he was alive and well and lurking in Paggleham instead of returning to claim and marry his Joan?’

‘It would play very badly indeed,’ said Harriet. ‘It would be devastating for them all: mother, daughter, brother – they would think he had deserted her. Seduced her under the excuse that there was no time to marry and he was about to die, and then survived and ratted on her.’

‘Don’t you think that might be what Joan Quarley meant; saying in effect, I told you he was dead?’

‘She meant he had to be dead, or he would have come back to her. Yes, I see. Look, Peter, you’re right – it all makes perfect sense; that’s why she wanted to know if there was documentary proof of his death; presumed dead leaves it open!’

‘Let’s go through it one step at a time,’ said Peter. ‘That rather strange conversation we had with mother and daughter. Daughter now makes perfect sense. Someone has been telling her that Alan is alive and has therefore deserted her – and his unit, by the way – and she has refused to believe it. She is one hundred per cent certain that only death would keep him from returning, so in a way she feels vindicated by the news we bring.’

‘Well, that seems understandable enough.’

‘So now let’s try understanding mother. You think she might simply be regretting her human charity to young Romeo?’

‘Well, on reflection I think that’s the sort of act one is rather unlikely to regret. But if one had any reason to fear that Romeo is Don Giovanni; that one has pandered one’s only daughter into the bed of a philanderer . . .’

‘So we think Mrs Quarley must also have heard a rumour about Alan Brinklow in Paggleham. Suppose she did. How would she react?’

‘She’d be very angry, I would think. She’d feel she had been made a fool of, and that would sharpen indignation.’

‘And if she voiced this anger?’

‘Well, Joan would repudiate it and defend her lover. She has perfect trust.’

‘We still haven’t quite got to the point where we know why the appearance of a detective in the drawing-room so scared her.’

‘Unless she knew more than just that Brinklow might be alive in Paggleham; unless she knew that he had met a nasty end . . .’

‘And how could she know that?’

‘By the same rumour machine that let them know about pseudo-Brinklow in the first place?’

‘Perhaps; I wonder what that was. But things are getting clear now, aren’t they? The mists are lifting. It’s time we talked to Miss Quarley’s brother, don’t you think?’ said Peter. ‘Tomorrow morning.’

Talking to Jeff Quarley without further alarming his mother required the consent of his commanding officer. Peter seemed to have an entrée in the form of some kind of document that had the sentries snapping to attention, and secured an interview with Wing-Commander Thompson without delay or ceremony.

Although the Wing-Commander’s den was a corner of a very new Nissen hut, behind a plywood partition, still smelling sweetly of new wood, and spartan in the extreme, Harriet was reminded of Steen Manor. The plywood walls were covered with aerial photographs of the Norwegian and Danish coasts; she noticed Lister on one and Narvik on another. There were also aerial pictures of German warships, captioned with their names.

Through the window the airfield could be seen – a wide open grassy space with rows of planes drawn up on it. Several tents and a caravan were spaced out along the perimeter of the field, and the airmen were sitting around outside them. Harriet saw a game of chess being played on an upturned tea-chest outside the nearest tent, and a gramophone was balanced on an orange box. The window was open a crack, and a bar or two of ‘A Lovely Day Tomorrow’ floated towards her. Beside the gramophone a telephone stood on the grass, at the ready. The whole scene was bathed in a shifting pattern of sunlight and shadow. Harriet felt a sudden constriction of the heart. Very young men, very small aeroplanes, a fragile bulwark made of flesh and bones, made of wood and canvas, against so great a danger. She wrenched her attention away, and turned to the room she was standing in.

The commander was a stiff man, really astonishingly young, it seemed to Harriet, to be in charge of all this. He had a toothbrush moustache, and a rather bad burn scar on his left cheek, still a lurid colour, which made his expressions crooked, half smiling. When Peter asked for Jeff Quarley the commander said, ‘He’s in the air.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Should be back in half an hour. Want to wait? What’s it about then?’

‘Classified,’ said Peter.

‘Hell,’ said Thompson. ‘You’re not going to nobble him, are you? Some son-of-a-bitch down south isn’t pinching him from me? See here, I’ve only ever had three pilots who can fly our kind of mission with better than twenty to one chance of getting back, and I’ve lost one of those already. He can’t keep track of his boots, but I’d trust him more than most not to lose a plane. Look, Wimsey, I’m responsible for something very important here, and if you take one of my best men I’ll have to start raising hell with the High Command and going to the War Office and that sort of thing to get him back.’

‘Calm down, Wing-Commander,’ said Peter. ‘We aren’t going to nobble him, as you put it. Just have a quick word with him.’

‘Only, I swear to God I can’t do without him,’ said Thompson. ‘Nothing you could want to talk to him about is as important as what he’s doing.’

‘I believe you.’

‘It isn’t about a woman, is it? We get that all the time, I’m afraid. If it’s just that you can leave it to me, and I’ll sort it.’

‘I’m sorry, but we can’t leave it up to you. This has repercussions. We’ll wait to speak to the man himself if you don’t mind. What did you mean about his boots?’

‘Oh, just that he lost a pair. Had to get issued with new ones.’

‘You pay attention to details, Wing-Commander,’ said Peter.

‘Came to my notice because he got ribbed about it quite a bit. Chaps pointing out to him that the Duke of Marlborough was famous for not needing to take them off. Various suggestions about whose bed to look under. You can imagine the sort of thing.’

‘Do your men often come home barefoot?’ Peter asked.

‘Barefaced is more like it. I expect he sold them for a bit of ready cash for something. It isn’t important. Take a seat, and I’ll see if anyone can brew up a cuppa.’

Peter and Harriet sat on a pair of wooden chairs, side by side against the wall under the photographs. The commander picked up a winged paper-knife and opened a letter. From next door they could hear voices in little bursts, but the silence in the room grew oppressive.

Suddenly, ‘It’s such an odd sort of war,’ the commander said. ‘I wish they wouldn’t get their private lives all snarled up, but I can’t blame them. It’s so perfectly strange. I mean most wars involve rounding up the troops and marching them off somewhere. The fighting is, you know,
somewhere
. Somewhere else, usually, most of the time. France, Norway, Timbuktu. But at the moment my chaps can be fighting all afternoon, and going down to the local for a pint in the evening. One or two of them can even live at home, we’re so short of billets. It’s happening, as far as they are concerned, right here. And England doesn’t look like a bloody battlefield, does it? It’s just puttering along almost like normal, with people living normal lives as though nothing was happening.’

‘Something happened to you, Commander,’ said Peter quietly.

‘Well, that’s what I mean, in a way,’ the man said. ‘I was having hell; struggling to get the plane down without killing myself, cockpit on fire, nasty cross-wind, although it was blowing the flames off my face most of the way down, and as I came in to land there right in front of me, just nicely framed by trees at the end of the runway, there’s a cricket match. A damn village cricket match. So my ground crew were pulling me clear, and I said, “Complacent swine, I’d like to rub their smug faces in what I’ve just been doing.” And one of my ground crew said, “Beg pardon, sir, but it’s what you’re fighting for.”’

‘And how did you reply?’ Harriet asked him.

‘Not a word,’ he said. ‘Plane blew up behind us. I came round on a stretcher. Funny thing though, I’ve never played the game myself. Cricket, that is.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Let’s see how our man is getting on, shall we?’

He put his head round the door of his room and said to the voices in the next booth, ‘Telephone ops and see how fourteen group is doing, will you?’

Then he returned to his desk. ‘He’s on his way. Do you want to watch them in? I like to watch them in.’

He led the way outside. A group of pilots was standing around, just outside the door, hands in pockets, some of them smoking, one or two with binoculars. Harriet blinked at the warm sunshine. Somewhere overhead a lark was singing, ascending. She could hear its squeaky repetitious trill, but she could not see it. Seeing a lark was always difficult: a tiny backlit vibrating speck against the huge sweep of open sky, it could elude you for many minutes. Scanning for it now she found herself suddenly seeing flashes of silver, shadowy shapes, and hearing beyond the lark-song the sound of engines. At her shoulder she heard a sharp intake of breath from Wing-Commander Thompson. ‘Two missing,’ he said.

‘No, sir, there’s another; coming in low. Damaged, maybe.’

Out of all the tents across the field ground crew were now running forward. Excited voices were raised as the pilots clambered out of the planes. The laggard plane landed awkwardly, and everyone’s attention was on that one. A fire-truck lumbered away towards it. They watched as someone scrambled on to the wing, and began to drag the pilot out of the cockpit.

A group of the pilots was now coming towards them across the field. They looked exhausted, dispirited.

‘Who’s missing?’ the commander asked.

‘Parsons, sir. I saw him go down,’ someone answered.

‘Did you see him bale out?’

‘Afraid not, sir.’

Harriet said to Peter, ‘This isn’t the time, Peter, is it?’

‘I think you’re right, Harriet.’ Peter gave his card to Wing-Commander Thompson, and said, ‘Tell Quarley to come and find us when he’s ready, or else we have to come and find him.’

Thomas Fuller,
Gnomologia
, 1732

 ‘Peter, should we interview Jeff Quarley by ourselves? Is that quite proper?’

‘No, Harriet, it isn’t really. Strictly speaking we should get a police officer, or an RAF policeman to witness, write down, etc. And he should certainly bring a brother officer, or, better, a solicitor. And then the majesty of the law could roll forward on its inexorable path. But I hope he doesn’t bring anyone, and if he doesn’t, we won’t, because until we hear what he has to say I don’t really know what I think we should do about him. I’d like to keep a little freedom of action.’

‘So, no witnesses?’

‘Well, you are my witness, really. But with any luck he won’t see you in that light.’

‘Just his lordship’s little woman? There’s been a very widespread undervaluation of the potential of women going on while you have been abroad, my lord. You should listen to Miss Climpson on the subject.’

‘Far from undervaluing you, my lady, I am proposing to make use of your nimble wits and powers of observation.’

‘Well, I have an observation to make before we start on this interview, which is that I entirely agree with Superintendent Kirk that murder is murder, even in war-time.’