The Unquiet Heart (11 page)

“
I’m
crazy? What’s happened to you? We had it all. We were good.
Are
good. But you’re in trouble. Don’t you see it? I know what I’m doing. This
is my job, Eve! Trust me!”

“Stop it! Stop it! There’s nothing!”

We were shouting at each other. Tears were running down her face. I scraped them from mine. I knew I had to shut up or lose her. But all I could do was go on and on about how I needed her and
how I feared for her. Every word I said was killing us, sending me further from her. Her eyes were full of pity. I rambled to a halt, my chest heaving and my tears blinding me.

She spoke softly now. “Danny, we need a break. From each other. Just let it go.”

“No, oh no. Please…”

“We must…”

“We mustn’t. Don’t do this.” I gripped her arms. I couldn’t let her go. If we parted now, it was for good.

“I have to. I have to go. Just give it a few weeks. Don’t call. Don’t come round. Just give us time.” She pulled free and was already turning away. I should have held
her, hugged her to me till the madness left us. But all I could do was stand like a dummy, watching her go. Watching the best thing in my life walk away from me.

I don’t know how I got home, but I picked up a bottle of Red Label on the way. I threw my jacket off and loosened my shirt. I got a jug of water and a glass and sat them
beside my chair. I took the first gulp without water and felt it rip my throat. I gazed at my bed and saw us, saw her, tumbled and lovely on the cover. I couldn’t accept this was the end.
I’d find a way. I’d drop all this shit about followers. She thought I was mad. Maybe I was. Maybe this was one of the side effects of the head wound. Prof Haggarty would know.
That’s it; I’d call him and ask his advice. But that would be tomorrow. Right now there was nothing more I could do than wait to get drunk.

TEN

Either I hadn’t drunk enough or drank too much, but it didn’t make me happy. And for a guy who once had problems with his memory, I found it pretty hard to forget
every turn of her body and every shift and shadow of her mobile face. I slept, but the dreams were bad; some of the old camp ones crept in and scared the shit out of me. I felt the big boulders
piling up all round me and I couldn’t get past them and they kept moving slowly on top of me to hem me in and smother me. I kept waking up gasping for air, and retrieving the quilt that
seemed to be having nightmares of its own.

I was glad of daylight, though it brought a mighty headache. I had a raging thirst and gulped at the water pouring from the tap. I threw more water on my face and fought back the nausea. I
needed to do something, anything, but it was too early to try Haggarty. I made a big bowl of my father’s patented hangover cure: porridge. Still in my singlet and pants, I cleaned the flat
from top to bottom, realising as I did how long it had been since the linoleum had seen a mop. I played the wireless as loud as it could go until the pips went for nine o’clock, then walked
through to my office on the still-damp lino to place a call to Professor Haggarty.

“Vivienne, it’s Danny McRae. I need to talk to the Prof. It’s important.”

I could hear her sucking her teeth at my use of her first name. “Professor Haggarty is with a client. He couldn’t possibly be interrupted. You have an appointment next week.
I’m sure it can wait.”

“Viv. I said it was important. Can you please get your boss to call me back? I must talk to him.”

I swear she sniffed. “I can’t promise. It’s most unusual. I will speak to the Professor when he has a moment and see what he says. But his diary is very full.”

Full of more important people than me. I retreated to my bedroom. It was tidy but it still held after-images of her. I scrubbed myself raw over the sink, using the nail brush like a scourge as
though I could rub her impression off my skin. I banged around making tea and toast, though I had no appetite for either after the porridge. I went hunting for the cat with a slopping bowl of milk,
but even she had abandoned me.

Finally Haggarty called back. The lovely Vivienne put me through, but she sounded as though it was costing her blood.

“Right, man. How the hell are you? Are you in bother, now? Tell me about it. Do you want to come in? I can fit you in, no bother.” There was a side comment in a strained female
voice, then, “Sure we can, Vivienne.”

“Prof, thanks. Maybe we can do this on the phone. I just wanted to know…” I began to feel stupid. What the hell was I going to ask him? “Look… there’s this
girl I’ve been seeing.”

“And you want to know if you really have been
seeing
her, Daniel?” He said it with a bit of a laugh but I didn’t see the funny side.

He meant Valerie, the girl my beat-up brain had conjured to help me through the Caldwell case. “Others have seen us, talked with us. I’ve touched her. She’s real enough, Prof.
But here’s the thing; I think Eve’s being followed. In fact I know she is. They’re pros. Four of them. They aren’t easy to spot but I know what I’m looking for.”
Just as I had been certain about my ghostly helper.

“Go on.” There was no hint of scepticism, so I pressed on.

“She’s a reporter. A crime reporter. She’s upset some people.”

“Why doesn’t she call the police?”

“She doesn’t believe me. She says… she says I’m crazy. That I’m seeing things. That’s what I wanted to talk about. Is it possible? I mean with my history.
Could I be imagining these men?”

“I see. Well, you know I’ve always said what a mysterious thing the mind is…”

“Spare me the philosophy, Prof. You’re the expert. What’s your opinion? Am I having a relapse?”

His voice firmed up. “Based on what I’ve seen of you, Daniel, I would say no. The Valerie figure is explainable. She was your inner mind trying to get through to the damaged surface.
As your brain mended, so Valerie appeared and helped you to solve the crime. But I don’t see your current mind
needs
to conjure up these… these stalkers or whatever you might
call them. Unless they’re figures from your past. When you were an SOE agent, a spy. Are any of them familiar?”

“No. And one of them… I confronted one of them in the street this week… that’s why I’m calling… Eve thought I had completely flipped. One of them had an
American accent. It sounded genuine enough, but so what?”

“An American, you say? Wasn’t it the Americans who liberated Dachau? Who saved you?”

Shit. I hadn’t thought of that. Was that the connection? Was I getting my past all mixed up with my present? Was this my subconscious trying to make sense of more buried memories? Or was I
just mad as a hatter?

“Is it time for the straitjacket again?”

“You know, man, it’s a blooming miracle there’s a sane mind left in this country after what we’ve gone through. And you fellas working behind the lines, in disguise and
cut off from home, had it harder than anyone. It does dreadful damage to the psyche.”

“So I
am
nuts. But it’s OK, ’cos everybody else is?”

“Not a bit, Daniel. Not a bit. You show none of the signs of delusion. Your girlfriend saw this man you tackled, didn’t she? It’s not as if he was imaginary. And you
haven’t been having conversations with yourself, now have you?”

“No. And she did see him. She dragged me off him.”

“Well, fine. I suppose. But all the same I’d avoid tackling strangers in the street for a while. Is there no way you can get some corroboration on these chaps following your lady
friend?”

“Not from Eve, that’s for sure. That’s why she’s called it off. But you’ve given me an idea, Prof. Look, you’ve set my mind at rest. A wee bit, anyway. Let me
see if I can get a second opinion on this.”

We hung up and I had the operator make another call, to Finchley this time. It rang for a long time.

“Hello.” It was a suspicious voice, high pitched, nasal and calculated to make your ears bleed unless you too had grown up in Birmingham and were immune.

“Mrs Witherham? Is that you? And how are you this fine morning? Could I speak to Midge, please?”

“Oh it’s yow again. I’ve told yow before, I don’t run a telephone service for my lodgers.” She made Glaswegians sound couth.

“It’s an emergency, Mrs Witherham. Honest. I need to speak to Midge urgently. It’s about some money I owe him. I need to give it to him.”

I knew that would get her. She bellowed up the stairs. “Mr Cummins? It’s that Scotch man again. Something about money. Maybe yow can pay my rent now!”

It took a while. Midge wasn’t an early starter. He took the phone from her grumbling hands, “And a pleasant morning to you too, Mrs Witherham.” There was a pause.
“She’s gone. I need to move. Danny? What’s happening?”

“I need you and the lads to do some tailing for me. It’s my own money. Ten bob a day. A week at most.”

I explained what I wanted and overcame his objections by explaining that it wasn’t
her
I wanted followed but the blokes that were tailing her. I hung up and looked round my bare
office. But all I could see was the image of her marching through the door on that first day like Miriam Hopkins in
Lady with Red Hair.

I met them exactly seven days later in the George. By then I was a wreck. There were more bottles in my bin than in the backyard of the pub itself. This girl had got under my skin. Every morning
I woke hoping it was a bad dream, and every morning I felt the world drop away at the thought I wouldn’t see her again. I picked up the phone a dozen times and replaced it without calling
her. Once I couldn’t help myself and got put through to her number. She answered: “Hello? Hello? Who’s there? Danny, is that you?…” But I had nothing to say. I
replaced the phone in the cradle as her voice trailed away.

I even sloped down to Fleet Street to see if I could spot her. Then I realised I might run into the lads, and that I would just be swelling the ranks of the spies on her tail. It was getting to
be a circus.

I had three pints of beer sitting waiting for them in the cubby-hole. They arrived in dribs and drabs. When they were all settled I looked round their faces trying to judge what they’d
found. It didn’t look good.

“OK, what have you got?”

They looked bashful. Then Midge spoke up. “Nothing, Danny. We saw nothing. Maybe you scared them off. You know, when you grabbed that Yank?”

He was throwing me crumbs, and he knew that I knew it. “Nothing? Not a sniff? How many times did you spot her? Sure you didn’t lose her?”

I looked at them. They hadn’t lost her. The followers – if they ever existed – had gone. I hadn’t the heart for a session with the boys. I was bored with getting drunk. I
left my beer unfinished on the table together with the money I owed them, and headed for home carrying my delusions with me like a pack of Furies. I’d lost the girl I loved, for nothing.

I needed to get hold of myself. I wasn’t the first bloke to get chucked, though it felt like it. I was weary, as though someone had drained my blood. Or replaced it with
Scotch. So I laid off the booze for a couple of days and began to feel a little saner, if not happier. There was a thin trickle of enquiries coming in so I threw myself at them, even the
adulterers.

Usually I find no joy in setting up the evidence to let two poor saps get a divorce. But I was positively enthusiastic in booking the hotel, getting one of Mama Mary’s girls to pretend to
be the
femme fatale
, and bursting in on them to catch them
in flagrante delicto
. My enthusiasm left me when I found this small adulterer sitting on the end of the bed looking sad and
embarrassed, as though his world was ending. Maybe it was; I had the impression it was the wife who wanted rid of him.

I had to encourage the bloke to show a little more interest for the photograph. I even thought of suggesting he availed himself of the opportunity of one of Mama’s kindest and cutest,
though he was closer to tears than seduction. But I got enough material to lay before the judge. It was a messy way of getting out of a loveless marriage, but if these were the rules, I was ready
to play by them.

In between cases that week I kept fingering my phone. She hadn’t said never, had she? I’d let things cool off. And now I’d got over my obsession about her being followed, what
was the problem? It had been a fool’s logic, or a kid’s. But I never got the chance to test my flimsy theory. The phone call from Eve’s boss threw my world upside down.

“Danny McRae? Is that you? It’s Jim Hutcheson here. The
Trumpet
.” His soft Inverness accents trilled down the line, and I could see his great eyebrows twitching at me
from afar. My heart picked up pace. Was Jim interceding for her?

“Hello, Jim. How are things?” I wanted to shout,
How is she? Does she still love me? Does she want me back?
But I thought that might make him hang up.

“Look, Danny, I’ll come straight to it. Is Eve with you? Have you seen her lately?”

I felt the blood congeal in my veins. “No. Not for a week or so. We had a bit of a tiff…”

“Damn. Look, she hasn’t come in all week, and her landlady says she hasn’t seen her. She said she might try you. Has she moved in with you, then?”

“No. No of course not.”

“I think I’d better get the police.”

“Jim, could you wait a wee while? I’ll come straight round. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

I grabbed my jacket and was out the door in two, fear clawing at my belly like a tiger. I kept telling myself there was no connection. Nothing to link my sightings of men following her with her
disappearance. No follow-up revenge by Gambatti. She was off visiting some friend. Or she was chasing a lead and would pop up any time.

But after I’d talked to Jim Hutcheson, I knew something had happened. I asked if he’d let me look around before calling the coppers. There might be something I’d spot before a
bunch of clodhoppers started throwing everything up in the air. He led me to her corner and left me to pick at the papers.

I sit at her scruffy little desk and stroke the arms of her chair. Her typewriter has a sheet of paper in it, ready for her blizzard of thoughts. Scraps of newspaper clippings
stud the facing wall. All her own articles, the best of her war years. Several are topped with her face in that cheesy smile I used to tease her about. I smile back and feel a stone lodge in my
chest. A further pile of cuttings and draft articles spill from an in-tray. It’s like she’s just stepped out to make a cup of tea; she’ll be back in a minute.