Crooked Heart (17 page)

I
t had been a mistake to bring the suitcase. It was half-empty and the ammonite kept rolling from one end to the other, shifting the handle in Noel's grip at every step. It was like walking a badly trained dog.

Since leaving for the station, he'd been waiting for Donald to ask him why he'd brought a large item of luggage on a day trip to London, and had even prepared an answer (‘I'm going to see if I can bring back some shrapnel to sell at school') but the question hadn't been asked, and now they were nearly at their destination.

‘It's those houses there,' said Noel, gesturing to the north side of Exhibition Road. ‘So can I go now?'

‘Hmm?' Donald, mentally lunching at the Ritz with Hilde (consommé followed by salmon, Hilde in a white fur stole,
Oh, Donald, I am so heppy
), glanced down at Noel, with the expression of someone noticing a piece of lint on their trouser leg.

‘Can I go now?' repeated Noel.

‘Go where?'

‘To look around for shrapnel, so I can sell it at school. That's why I've brought the suitcase, you see.'

‘No, stay right here. I'll be out in half a tick and then I'll have to get to somewhere else, a drill hall or something like it. You'll have to find the way.'

‘Why?'

But Donald was already crossing the road, straightening his jacket as he went, smoothing his hair, taking a letter out of his breast pocket. He had spent half the journey sighing and examining his profile in the train window, and the other half cleaning the dirt from under his fingernails with a matchstick. ‘What wine d'you have with salmon?' he'd asked, just outside Watford, and Noel had instantly given Mattie's answer: ‘A good wine. All other considerations are mere pretension.' And for the first time since Mattie had died, the thought of her had actually been
nice
, a simple pleasure – like having the back of his neck stroked – rather than a bone-deep ache.

He set the suitcase down. He'd planned to drop into the Natural History Museum (just to see the diplodocus) before sneaking away through the usual crowds and abandoning Fat Donald, but the road, usually nose-to-tail with taxis and charabancs, was empty, the museums shuttered and sandbagged. The stone walls of the V & A looked as if they'd been attacked by a giant with a pea-shooter.

As Donald mounted the steps of number 40 and pulled the bell-wire, Noel sat gingerly on one end of his suitcase and started to work out how many words he could make from the letters of
diplodocus
:

Did

Dip

Disc

Plod

The door was opened by a seedy-looking man in his fifties, his skin lemon-tinged, his eyes peering wetly between crumpled lids.

‘Yes?' He was wearing a tweed jacket, gone at the elbows, and a maroon paisley scarf, spotted with grease. There was a bicycle with a basket in the hall behind him, and a cold smell of mildew.

Donald glanced again at the number on the door to check he'd got the right house. ‘My name's Sedge, I believe I'm expected.'

‘Yes, yes. Close the door.' As he spoke, a tiny sausage dog skidded out of a side room into the hall and threw itself at Donald's ankles, barking.

‘Don't, Rexy,' said the man, stooping to pick it up, ‘naughty laddie.'

‘I'm supposed to be meeting a Mr JD,' said Donald.

‘In the drawing room,' said the man, setting off back along the hall, the dog peering vindictively over his shoulder. ‘Follow us.'

Donald looked once more at the letter in his hand; the man's voice matched the expensive paper, but if there had once been money in this house, it had long gone. He hesitated, trying to work out how little he'd accept; eighty, he thought – if they offered him less than eighty, he'd leave. He had standards to maintain.

The barking had started again and Donald followed it into the room.

It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. The man who'd answered the door was sitting hunched in a wing chair, knees primly together, the dachshund on his lap. A second man, with a pale, smooth face and a fawn hat, stood beside him, like a guard. A third was silhouetted in front of the window.

‘This him?' asked the one with the hat, and Donald felt fear spike him like a fork to the heart – they were coppers,
coppers
, and he spun round and ran for the entrance, footsteps close behind him, his own hand lunging for the latch. He pulled at it, caught just a breath of outside air, a glimpse of a small figure standing on the pavement and then he was suddenly shoved forward so that his head smacked into the door, slamming it shut.

His right arm was grabbed and dragged behind him, twisting the shoulder muscles like a wrung sheet.

‘Don't scream,' said a voice close to his ear. ‘'Cos if you think that hurts, then you haven't felt
nothing
yet.'

The world slid in and out of focus and Donald tried to catch his thoughts but they were like minnows, dodging out of his grasp. There was only one that strayed within reach; he snatched it and held on.

‘I'm not who you think I am.'

His shoulder heaved in its socket and he found himself being turned and steered back towards the drawing room.

The dog was still barking.

‘Can I take Rexy out to the garden now?' asked Paisley Scarf. ‘Poor little chap's crossing his legs.'

The yelping disappeared out of the door and down a set of stairs.

‘You'll regret this,' said Donald. ‘I'm not the person you want.'

‘Aren't you now?' asked the figure by the window. His voice was an odd snuffle, air spilling through the words.

‘I was visiting a friend, I got the wrong address.'

‘Did you?'

‘My name's de Hannay, I work for the government.'

‘Bollocks you do. I
know
you.'

The figure stepped forward, out of the glare from the window.

‘Oh Christ,' said Donald. Not a policeman but Fielding, the bookie's runner from Leicester – Fielding, changed and ruined. The sharp-featured face had been blunted, the nose-tip a puckered groove, the upper lip bunched and darned, a soft gap where the row of top teeth should have been.

‘You did this,' said Fielding.

‘I didn't.'

‘Two weeks into basic training and some yellow bastard tries
to shoot off his own fucking fingers and misses and gets me right in the fucking face. But
you
did it, you mug. You passed the fucking medical and look what you done to me.'

‘My name's de Hannay, I'm looking for Mr JD.'

‘There's no JD, you arsewipe. The poofter what lives here is a punter who owes us half his bloody house and wrote the letter I told him to write and he won't say nothing when we start on you, he'll mind his own fucking business and play deaf. And blind. And dig the bloody hole afterwards.'

There was another heave on Donald's arm, and the pain was no longer just in his shoulder but everywhere, circling his body like an iron coil.

‘I work for the government,' said Donald, and he sounded like someone else, his voice strangulated but steadfast.

‘Shut
up
.'

‘Hush-hush job. I was watched coming in here. They'll be looking for me if I'm not out in five min—'

The doorbell rang.

‘I told you, I told you they were watching,' and through the swimming red haze he could see Fielding's eyes flicker and there was a tiny loosening of the grip on his arm.

‘He's talking bollocks,' said Fielding. He edged over to the window and peered round the curtains. ‘It's a kid,' he said, disgustedly.

The doorbell rang again, followed by a tattoo on the knocker.

‘Go and tell him to fuck off,' said Fielding to the other man, reaching into his pocket as he spoke and taking out a short blunt object that, with a click, became a long, sharp one. ‘You can leave Fatty Arbuckle here.'

Donald swayed as he was released, his arm dangling like a weighted sack.

‘The boy's just a decoy,' he said.

‘What?'

‘They don't send agents to a front door. They'll be waiting round—'

‘Shut
up
, will you?'

But there was a slender note of doubt in Fielding's voice. He sidled over to the curtain again and – with no plan, no direction, nothing but the memory of Robert Donat jumping from a moving train and the thought of Hilde's feet nestled in their size 3 Oxfords – Donald turned and stumbled from the room, cannoning into Paisley Scarf as he rounded the corner. A small object fell, bounced and barked; Donald staggered on. Ahead of him was a set of stairs leading downward, behind was a confusion of noise: a yelp and a curse, the thud of body on floorboard as Fielding tripped and fell, a tearing scream, a hysterical yodel from the dog.

‘I'm
stabbed
,' shouted Paisley Scarf, ‘oh good
God
!' and Donald was down the steps and through a damp blue scullery and a door that opened on to a nest of brambles that dragged at his trouser legs, so that he had to lift his feet as if walking through waves. There was a garden gate at the end and then he was in a cobbled lane with a row of garages opposite and the certainty that a knife was half a garden behind him and there was one garage door that was open, only one. A white-haired man stood dumbly, cloth in hand, as Donald pushed past him and dived through the open door of the black car that stood on bricks, its paintwork shining like the toe of a squaddie's boot. He lay across the seats, his face pressed into the leather, his mind a roaring blank.

There was a short silence, a crisp footfall and then the garage door slammed shut. A bolt slid home and in the darkness someone cleared his throat.

Noel had just let go of the knocker when the door was answered by a man with a fawn hat and a pale, grave face.

‘What is it, sonny?'

‘I'm collecting for books for servicemen overseas,' said Noel, calculating that anyone living so close to the museums might think that public education was important.

‘You
bastard
!' shouted someone inside the house. Footsteps vibrated.

Wordlessly, the pale man slammed the door, but not before Noel had glimpsed some kind of fight taking place in the hall behind him, an arm arcing blood across the wall, a singing snarl like the whine of a petrol saw.

He crouched and peered through the letter box, looking for Donald. He saw the man in the hat take a flying leap over a tumble of bodies and run for the back of the house and then a dark shape leapt into view, inches from Noel's face. Teeth snapped at his fingers.

He let the flap drop and quickly walked away. His palm was sweaty on the suitcase handle, and his mouth as dry as if he'd been chewing blotting paper. He thought of a wooden puzzle he'd been given for his first Christmas at Mattie's – a street of houses, the façades removable so that you could see cooks in kitchens, children in nurseries, a lady brushing her hair, a gentleman reading a newspaper. It revealed a world of calm and quiet activity, whereas the truth was that you never knew, when you lifted the flap, who you'd find hitting whom, who'd be crying in the corner, who'd be steeling themselves to jump from a window. There were bombs outside, but inside was worse.

‘I don't care in the slightest who you are or what happens to you,' said the voice in the darkness of the garage, ‘but I should like Violetta to remain unharmed.'

There was a clatter of footsteps in the mews, a couple of unintelligible shouts, and then one garage door after another was savagely kicked.

‘Sedge!
Sedge!
I know you're in one of these.'

The hollow crash of foot on wood came nearer, was suddenly, thunderously upon them, and then past again, as the bolt held.

Beneath the lavender smell of leather polish was the reek of Donald's own sweat. He felt peeled by fear, as if there was only the core of him left, a loose swatch of nerves draped across the seats.

‘She's a Type 44 Bugatti, you know. The finest tourer ever built.'

Yards away, a garage door burst open. Something metallic fell over. The shouts were briefly muffled.

‘I bought her from an Italian who had been using her to ferry his mother's dogs between her flat and Hyde Park – I used to see him every day, driving along the Cromwell Road, and it was like watching . . . calligraphy. You wouldn't believe the lines of her, the curves. She flows. She's like a ribbon in the wind.'

‘SEDGE!'

‘I should have moved her somewhere outside London, I suppose, but I wanted to keep her where I could see her every day. I've reinforced the garage roof, though that wouldn't do much good if we were to catch a thousand pounder . . .'

More kicks, and then a baffled roar of rage and a series of loud cracks – cobbles maybe, slung with random fury. Glass smashed; a stone juddered across a corrugated roof.

‘Don't think you're safe,' shouted Fielding, his voice all mush and snuffle. ‘Never think you're safe, because you're not safe, you're a DEAD MAN, Sedge.'

A final rock was lobbed along the road, a gate squealed and slammed.

There was silence for a long while and then the soft squeak of cloth on paintwork.

‘I ought to tell you that she was named after a real Violetta. Someone I once left behind, assuming she'd still be there when I came back. Stupid of me, of course.'

A little solidity had returned to Donald's body, and he struggled to sit up. He sat, swaying, in darkness, hardly able to believe that he was still alive.

‘Violetta,' said the man again, softly.

And Donald knew that urge, that need to hear a name, to feel the lovely shape of it in one's mouth.

‘Hilde,' he said. ‘Hilde.'

N
oel had written his plans lightly in pencil on the endpapers of
The Roman Hat Mystery
. He re-read them on the tube from Kensington and was satisfied by their rhythm and logic, their orderly progression through the imperatives:

Day 1

               
Arrive at Kentish Town library.

               
i)     Return The Roman Hat Mystery (after memorizing and then rubbing out plans).

               
ii)    Research and make list of asylums in North London.

               
iii)   Find telephone box, call asylums and locate Mrs Gifford.

               
iv)   Retrieve Mrs Gifford's items under cover of darkness.

Go home

Day 2

               
i)     Deliver anonymous letter denouncing Ray McIver to Kentish Town police station.

               
ii)    Return items to Mrs Gifford.

Return to St Albans

At Kentish Town station, the platform stank, a compound of sweat and urine left over from the night-time shelterers. Rows of bunk beds had been pushed back against the wall and as Noel made for the exit he passed a warden attempting to wake
a late sleeper whose liquid snore bubbled onward, regardless of shakes and bellows.

Above ground, there was already a queue for the coming evening, pale shabby families with blankets and bundled babies, parcels of food and coughing grandmothers.

‘You was supposed to
share
them blimming chips with Eileen,' a woman was complaining, over the sound of weeping. ‘She won't get nothing now unless them ladies come round with biscuits.'

‘Frankie!' someone else was shouting. ‘Where's Frankie? Anyone seen Frankie?'

No one gave Noel a second glance as he steered his suitcase around a knot of toddlers and into the sunlit High Street. It was balmy for October, the sky cloudless and a pale slice of moon already visible.

He had nearly reached the library when he felt the hand close over his shoulder.

The rattle of the knocker came long after midnight. Vee had been sitting halfway down the stairs, fully clothed, ears straining the darkness; she sprang to open the door and Donald pushed through like a bullock forcing a gate, shouldering her aside, his breathing harsh and rapid.

‘Whatever's the matter?'

He was already taking the stairs, two at a time. Vee hesitated, and then she stepped outside and looked up and down the empty street. Nothing moved in the moonlight; the only sound was the tinny shriek of Mr Clare's gramophone, seeping round the bookshop shutters.

Her son was in the kitchen, sitting hunched in darkness, head on hands.

‘What's the matter, Donny?' she asked again, switching on the light. ‘You're not ill, are you?'

‘Turn it off.'

‘Why?'

‘OFF.'

He had never raised his voice to her before. Her hand trembled as she reached for the switch.

‘They mustn't know I'm here,' he said.

‘Who mustn't?'

‘I'm in danger.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You've got to take a letter round to someone.'

‘Who? Why?'

He was already on his feet, raking through the dresser drawer.

‘Where's Gran's writing paper?'

‘Gran . . .' She had to swallow before she could speak, all the troubles of the day lodged in her throat. ‘She might have taken it with her. She's not here, Donny, she's left. She's gone off and married Cousin Harold. She did a flit when I was out shopping, must have been planning it for . . . for . . .' Her voice tailed off; her son wasn't listening. He had grabbed a torch and a stub of pencil and was busy writing on the back of a bill, his half-lit face all pallor and shadow, like a guiser's mask.

‘Are the police after you, Donny?' Black market, she thought, hams and whisky, his skills as a salesman once again in use.

‘Not the police. Worse. I'll have to leave.'

‘Leave? What do you mean?'

He didn't answer, just carried on with the note, and she caught herself thinking how nice his handwriting was; as neat as any teacher's.

‘Where will you go?'

‘Ireland maybe.'

‘Ireland?
Ireland?
'

She groped for a chair and sat heavily.

It was as if her life was being deliberately unpicked, the seams parting, the whole thing dropping shapelessly to the floor.

‘What will you do there, all on your own?'

‘I shan't be on my own.' He folded the note and slid it into an old envelope, crossing out the address and substituting a single word. ‘She's on shift at six, so you have to get there before she leaves The Beeches. The factory bus goes a half hour earlier.'

He held out the envelope and after a second or two Vee took it and stared at the name. ‘Hilda?'

‘Hilde.'

‘She the German? Mum wrote that you were—'

‘She's not German, she's Austrian. It's the hostel up at Brickett Wood Common and you need to give it right into her hand, not to anyone else, only to her.'

‘How will I know which one she is?'

‘She's smaller than you – dainty, with dark hair, she wears a knitted hat. Don't tell her you're my mother.'

‘Why not?'

He leaned back in the chair, and it creaked in protest.

‘Just don't. Can you get me something to eat? I've had nothing all day, not a scrap.'

‘But what if she asks who I am?'

‘Say I'm your lodger.'

The torch on the table flickered twice and went out. There was a pause and then Vee heard herself speak.

‘Lodgers pay rent,' she said. The gasp that followed was her own; she clapped her hand to her mouth, and her mind slid sideways to her other lodger. ‘Where's Noel?' she asked, between her fingers. ‘Have you seen him?'

And when her son didn't answer, she fumbled her way across the room and snapped on the light.

‘The curtains are up, there's not so much as a chink outside,' she said, over his protest. ‘I asked if you'd seen Noel.'

Donald frowned vaguely. ‘Is he not back?'

‘Back from where?'

‘Kensington.'

‘
Kensington?
'

‘I had an appointment this morning and he knew the place.'

‘You took him to London?'

Donald nodded.

‘You took him to London and you didn't bring him
back
?'

‘I told you, I'm in trouble. I'm on the run. He knows his way around, that's why I took him.'

‘So where is he then?'

‘How should I know?'

‘Because you
should
, you
should
know. Because he's ten, he's only
ten years old
and he's on his own and he could be anywhere and there's been bombers going over all night, I must have counted thirty, and you're sitting there saying, “How should I know?” as if it wasn't any of your fault he was there in the first place when you were the one who took him and you won't even . . .' She ran out of breath, her voice a bare squeak, and her son said nothing, just turned the letter round and round, his face set in its usual impassive lines.

Vee stood and looked at him, this large man in her kitchen who had never learned – never been
taught
– the meaning of obligation, and with a slow surge of despair that was almost like nausea she realized that the calamities of the day, every last one of them, had simply been lying in wait for her; not the actions of cruel fate but a series of tripwires lovingly laid by herself. She'd asked for nothing from her mother and her son and she'd expected nothing from them, either, and now she'd received nothing, not even thanks. She was face down in the mud, and on her own.

‘I'll have to go and get him,' she said, matter-of-factly. ‘I'll deliver your letter, since it means that much to you, and then I'll go and fetch Noel back. Do you need help with packing?'

He lifted his head.

‘Holdall?'

‘Under my bed. The zip's broken.'

‘Shirts?'

‘In your drawer. Six of them, all starched and ironed.' She left the room to get her coat, but her mouth kept moving. ‘I hope your Hilda can iron. I hope your Hilda can cook and sew and wash and queue for half the day and then search every flipping shop in St Albans for razor blades when she's got fifty dozen other things to do . . .'

‘He had a suitcase.'

‘What?'

‘Noel. He had a suitcase with him.'

‘Oh.' She came back into the kitchen. ‘So he meant to stay.' The house on the Heath, she thought, leaping ahead – that's where Noel would be, he'd sneak in there somehow – and she knew in the same instant that she'd never be able to remember how to get back there; it had been tucked away like a crumb in a rug and she had no idea of the address. She stood and thought, and then crossed swiftly to the dresser and grabbed a card that had arrived from Noel's uncle and aunt just a week before. Five minutes more and she was ready, three banknotes from her secret store folded carefully in her purse, her torch and a spare battery in her pocket, her blue plush hat on and her sturdiest shoes, seeing as she was about to walk all the way to bloody Brickett Wood and bloody back again.

‘I'll take that,' she said, twitching the envelope from Donald's fingers and dropping it into her bag. She turned to go, and then found herself swinging round again, like an unlatched gate.

‘You'll be gone when I come back?' she asked.

‘I should think so.'

His head was bent and he was cleaning under one of his nails with a matchstick; Vee gazed at the nape of his neck. It hadn't changed a bit in nineteen years. Not a bit. The skin there was still pale and tender, traced by a line of little soft baby hairs and she could remember exactly what they felt like, the fairy tickle
of them on her fingertips, the weight of his warm head cupped in her hand. She drew in breath. ‘You'll take care, won't—'

‘You ought to hurry,' said Donald. ‘And don't forget to give it straight to her, not anyone else.'

She stamped down the stairs like a four-year-old, and a steaming rage propelled her most of the way to Brickett Wood along lanes blue-striped by moonlight. It wasn't until she was back on a metalled road, houses looming on either side, that she realized she'd been talking out loud to herself the whole way – shouting, probably, judging by the raw tightness in her throat. Her body seemed to thrum like an engine.

She didn't know which of the houses was The Beeches, but it didn't take long to find one with a charabanc waiting outside, the driver asleep behind the wheel, and only a few minutes later the front door opened and a procession of girls began to drift down the path, yawning, pushing hair into turbans, coughing through the first cigarette of the day. Their pale faces were featureless in the darkness, their speech a sleepy jumble of complaints.

‘. . . not what I call a chop. Chip, not a chop . . .'

‘. . . feet are killing me . . .'

‘. . . fourteen and six they were charging, and I said to the woman—'

‘. . . so absolutely
hilarious
!!' The last words were said in heavily accented rising shriek and Vee jerked her gaze towards the speaker, and saw that she was too tall and blonde to be Donald's girl.

‘Was not funny at all,' muttered another voice, also foreign.

‘He was very
very
funny but you have no sense of humour. He pretended to be a man with chust one leg and then we danced the Paul Chones.
Backwards!
'

The volume of the last word seemed to send a shudder along the line.

‘Birgit, I've had three hours' sleep and if you don't shut your
gob I'm going to shut it for you,' called someone from the back.

The blonde laughed merrily. ‘But in these nasty times it's nicer to be cholly than be sad, isn't it?'

‘It'd be even nicer if you'd just shut up and—'

‘I've got a letter for Hilde,' said Vee, interrupting before someone (possibly herself) gave the blonde a well-deserved slap. There was a gasp and a sudden movement in the line and a small figure stepped forward, hand outstretched.

‘My ledder,' she said, peremptorily.

‘All right, all right,' said Vee, rattled. ‘I just need to make sure I've got the right person. You're Hilde . . .' She didn't know the surname, she realized. ‘Hilde who's Austrian.'

‘Yes,
yes
, give it to me now, please.' The girl was still holding out her hand, and now she waggled the fingers impatiently. She was an unimpressive-looking little thing, a small mouth in a small face, hair tucked into an ugly knitted hat.

Reluctantly, Vee took the letter from her bag and the girl snatched it from her and aimed a torch at the envelope. There was a split-second pause and then a cry of obvious disappointment.

‘This is not a
ledder
!'

‘Of course it's a letter.'

‘It's not a ledder with
stamps
, from another
country
.'

‘Sorry, I'm sure.'

Hilde stared at the envelope as if willing it to sprout postmarks.

‘It's from Donald Sedge,' said Vee. ‘My . . . lodger.'

There was a pause, and then a muffled reply. ‘I will read it later.' The torch went out and Vee heard the crackle of paper being carelessly stuffed into a pocket.

‘But it's urgent. I've just walked two miles to deliver that.'

‘I did not ask you to, did I?' Her tone was hateful, but Vee could have sworn the girl was close to tears. There was a toot from the bus, and they both jumped as if jabbed
with a spike. Hilde turned and hurried after the others.