Truth Dare Kill (8 page)

I was still shaky but hungry now, with a great empty place inside my body and head. I made some toast and jam. It filled my stomach but made no impression on my head. But at least I’d added another couple of memories. They were rotten ones but I could cope better knowing than not knowing. Assuming they were real of course.

I put on the wireless. I like the Home Service in the afternoon. I was in time for Music While You Work. Jimmy Dorsey’s big band filled the room, then Dinah Shore sang Cole Porter. Music lifts me. I’m a great reader but I don’t understand classical music. I reckon I could if someone explained it to me; it can’t be that far from something like Moonlight Serenade. I mean they’re all tunes, aren’t they, though they seem to use more violins than Dorsey.

I stepped out the building humming Star Dust, filled with new determination. I had one lead. Kate mentioned a club that Caldwell belonged to over in Jermyn Street. Truth is I’d thought of that, too. But there were simply so many in London that I hadn’t had the heart to trek round them all. To be even more truthful, I don’t like them. I don’t feel comfortable in their plush entrance halls, trying to get past the flunky. I’d been made an officer but I was a long way from feeling like a gentleman.

I hopped on a bus up to the Elephant and then caught another over the new bridge at Waterloo and down the Strand. I watched the young ticket collector swinging from the pole and jumping up and down the stairs. He seemed happy in his work, chatting to the old girls who cheeked him back. Chatting up the young birds who flushed and stammered. Maybe I should try a different profession?

I got off at Trafalgar Square and walked through Admiralty Arch and down the Mall. The Palace was flying the Union flag and looked as if it would be there till Doomsday. God knows how they got away with only one bomb. Unkind folk say it’s because they’re all Germans. You have to admit it’s suspicious. It’s an easy bombing run: follow the Thames upriver until the Houses of Parliament, a smart right, skim over the lake in St James’s Park, and bingo.

The Parthenon looked like every other club in the West End: ponderous, heavy columns and high windows. The doorway was reached up a short flight of steps.

Some lights were on inside and sure enough, there was a flunky waiting to pounce. This time I had my story ready.

“Good afternoon, sir. Can I help?”

He was way too old for the last war but looked like he’d done his part in the Great one. There’s something about an NCO that you can tell a mile off, especially if you’ve been one. Maybe it’s the suspicious eyes and the slight rocking motion on the balls of the feet.

“I hope so. My name’s McRae, Captain Daniel McRae.” His head went a bit higher and I swore his arm twitched in the reflex of a salute. “I’m an old friend of Major Anthony Caldwell. He may sign himself Major Philip Caldwell. Is he in?”

I could see the flunky’s eyes narrow a fraction. But he was good, very good.

“Caldwell, you say, sir? Major Caldwell? I’ll just check our members list. We had so many new members, many of them temporary during the war.” He walked behind his desk and picked up a big book which he carefully shielded from me. He was lying of course. These chaps know all their members by sight, by name and by inside leg measurement. He continued with the pantomime. I continued to smile.

At last he looked up. He adopted a carefully placed frown of concentration suggesting he had some delicate information to impart and wasn’t sure how to do it.

“It would seem, sir, that we did have a Major Caldwell with us. But there is an entry here saying that we can’t divulge details.”

He savoured divulge, as though he’d only just learned it. “Not even to an old friend? We served together. SOE.”

It cut no ice. A sympathetic smile grew on his face. “I understand, sir. But I think it’s possibly because you were both with SOE that we have this instruction. If you see?”

I smiled my “I-quite-understand-but-you-don’t” smile. “Can you even tell me if he’s alive or dead? I know this sounds silly. But it’s been a while.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “The instructions are clear. We can’t say anything at all about the Major.” He closed the book and the conversation.

“Can I leave a message?”

“By all means, sir. But I can’t say if it will be answered or not. If you see?”

“May I borrow some paper and a pen, please?”

I kept it short, just asking Caldwell or his relative or friend to get in touch with me. I left my telephone number. I walked out of the club fully expecting never to hear from anyone, and wondering what other leads I could trace that would earn me Kate Graveney’s up-front fee.

Three months ago I’d tried his old regiment – the Royal Signals – to see if they had an address. It was my first stop after being stonewalled by the document guardians at the SOE. I spent a whole day on the phone being sent from office to office, clerk to clerk. I finally found a corporal in the Signals records unit who was very helpful but ultimately useless.

He explained that one or two officers had been commissioned into this regiment simply as a holding arrangement while they went off and did some skulduggery in occupied Europe or at Bletchley Park. These officers never saw the inside of the mess at their nominal regiment, but it gave them a unit against which they could be paid and draw a uniform. There had been a Major Philip Anthony Caldwell associated with the Signals but he’d been demobbed. They had no forwarding address; why didn’t I try SOE?

I decided to check the hospital, St Thomas’s, just across Lambeth Bridge from Pimlico. That’s where Kate said she’d been taken. I explained my situation at the desk – a version of it anyway; the old pal act. The receptionist was a bit reluctant at first but when I took off my hat and she saw my scars in all their glory, she became more sympathetic. Maybe I should only make passes at nurses?

The girl got up and sifted through the drawers of a filing cabinet. “There’s no record of a Major Caldwell or even a Mister Caldwell, around that date, sir. But there’s lots of hospitals around this area. They could have taken him anywhere.”

“Do you have a record for Miss Kate Graveney, then?”

She searched again and paused at one file. She turned and looked at me queerly.

“Did you say the lady was brought in here with injuries from a bomb explosion?”

“That’s right.”

She became cagey. “We do have a patient coming around that time. But it doesn’t mention that sort of injury.”

Around that time? Maybe Kate got her dates muddled. But wasn’t it her birthday?

“What does it say?”

The girl shoved the folder back in the cabinet and shut the drawer firmly. “I’m sorry. We can’t talk about patient’s conditions with non-medical staff.” She put her professional shutters up and I could see I’d get nowhere on this tack.

“Maybe it’s just a misfiling.”

“Perhaps. These things happen.” Her smile was as bright and diamond-hard as her determination to say nothing more. My scars were getting no more sympathy. I put my hat on and left.

One thing I learned in Glasgow was never take anything for granted. Check everything. If you can’t see it, smell it or hear it for yourself, it doesn’t exist. It took me two days and a lot of shoe leather to get round the rest of the hospitals in the centre. I began with the Royal and the Brompton in Chelsea.

I then did a circular sweep that took in King’s in Camberwell, Guy’s at Westminster, over the river to St Bart’s and a big swing round to St Mary’s.

Nothing. Their records weren’t all they might be and there was a bit of reluctance to tell me anyway.

Then I decided to change tack. I’d been looking for two hospital admissions, one unhurt, one probably dead. Dead people get recorded at Somerset House. My heart sank at the prospect; there had been a lot business coming their way in the last few years. Nevertheless I slogged my way back up the Strand and joined the queue for a day to get in front of a harassed clerk. I could see the hysteria in his eyes when I asked if I could track down a certain Mr Caldwell thought to have died about a month ago.

“We’re a bit behind with the filing.” He tugged at his greasy tie. The knot looked like a boy scout had been practising his sheepshanks on a bit of string.

Knotted once two years ago, slackened off every night and tightened each morning.

“How far?”

“You mean how deep?” Definitely a glint of mania.

“Like that, is it?”

“We’ve caught up to June,” he said promisingly.

“I hope you mean June 1945? So, you’ve got a backlog of six or seven months?”

“We’re in October with births though, and marriages are November.”

“So if the man I’m trying to trace had been born three months ago you could have found him?”

He just grinned. I left him to finger his tie. I wondered how long before he’d use it to hang himself. Soon, I hoped. Post-war, and nothing worked. The machine we’d put together to win it had been broken up. All the soldiers back from the front had been offered their old jobs back, but I guess the better ones had lost some of their enthusiasm for the filing department now they’d had a taste of Paris and Rome; red wine and grateful girls.

This was keeping me fit but getting me nowhere. I holed up in my office and began to wait for either inspiration to strike or the phone to ring with an answer to my message at Caldwell’s club. I made a promise to myself if I heard nothing by the end of the week, I’d phone Kate Graveney and offer her the advance back. Maybe half of it.

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.