Truth Dare Kill (9 page)

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 café 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.

A guarded middle-aged woman answered my knock. She fitted the house, but not my idea of the wife of Major Tony Caldwell. She seemed too reserved, sullen almost.

On the other hand, you usually find the extrovert needs someone to lord it over.

Caldwell wasn’t quite a bully, but he certainly liked getting his own way.

Unless her appearance belied her strength of character, Mrs Caldwell would have been no match for our Tone. Which probably explains Kate Graveney. Which reminded me, I would have to watch what I was saying here.

“Mrs Caldwell? Sorry if I’m a little early

” I took my hat off.

“No, no it’s quite all right. You must be Mr McRae. Or is it Captain? It was in your message.” Her voice was tight with nerves. She held the open door for me and tried not to stare too hard at my face, at my scars. She hung my coat in the hall.

“The rank was handed back with the uniform. It’s just plain Mister. Danny, if you’re OK with that?”

“Mister it is, then. Go in.” She pointed into a room off the hall. “Please take a seat. I’ll make us some tea.” She kept touching her mouth and avoiding my eyes. What did she have to feel guilty about? She wore a good dark frock and her brown hair was carefully combed back and pinned up in a style she probably hadn’t changed since she was sixteen.

As she went to the kitchen I looked around. It was a good-sized room in a tall thin house, but a bit stark and smelling of polish and stale air. It was clearly the “best” room, with an outlook on to a back garden with high hedges to keep out the neighbours. The antimacassars sat in perfect regimen on the backs of two brown armchairs and a couch. There was a heavy wood table and chairs, and an upright piano squatting on a plain brown rug. On the piano were photos. I got to my feet and walked smartly over. Sure enough, it was Tony Caldwell, in all his army finery, smiling out at me. There was a black ribbon edging the frame.

Another photo showed Tony and Liza – Mrs Caldwell to me, obviously – smiling and looking several years younger.

“I see you recognise him.” Mrs Caldwell had silently materialised. She was bearing a tray with all the tea accoutrements on it.

“Yes, of course. As I explained

”

“

you used to work together in the SOE.” She began clattering cups around.

“Right. And I was trying to look him up. Someone said

well that he was

”

“Dead?” Her eyes looked accusingly at me, as though I might have something to do with it. Then she was dabbing away at them.

“I’m sorry. That was very clumsy. I

”

She was shaking her head. “No. It’s all right. I still can’t believe it. To go through the whole war and then

a bit ironic, don’t you think Mr McRae?” She was pouring tea as she spoke.

“So Major Caldwell is dead? I’m very sorry.”

“He died, as you may have heard, in a friend’s flat. An unexploded bomb. Which finally did. Explode, I mean. There’s a lot still lying around they say. But that doesn’t seem to make it any less stupid. Do you believe in fate, Mr McRae?”

She went on without waiting for a reply. “I used not to. Now I’m not so sure.

Sugar?”

“Two please. I’m afraid there’s been a lot of fateful events these last few years. We’ve all lost something.”

“What did you lose, Mr McRae?” Her voice was sharper suddenly, and I caught a glimpse of steel beneath the softness. Her eyes seemed brighter, more penetrating.

“My memory.” I pointed to the scar. She’d already noticed it and only glanced briefly at my forehead. “I lost the best part of a year of my life. Only some snatches come back to me. And it’s hard to know what’s memory and what’s imagination.”

“Does it matter? It’s sometimes better not to remember.” Her lips pinched tighter. This woman needed more sugar in her tea.

“You may be right, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d like the chance of choosing what I want to forget. That’s why I wanted to find Tony. He recruited me to SOE and briefed me for my mission. I wondered what other gaps he might have been able to fill in for me.”

“That’s all you remember? Tony sending you off?” She was quite still now, as though this was the most important bit of our conversation. I assumed she was hungry to hear about him, to rub his memory. I thought I should oblige.

Tony organised six months of training at stations, as we called the several country houses scattered around England. I expanded my repertoire of unarmed combat. The Seaforth Highlanders had kept it simple: head first, then the boot.

Glasgow rules. Not cricket, but then we weren’t big on cricket. I learned explosive handling and radio communication, and buffed up my schoolboy French to a level that might fool a deaf German but would be ridiculed by a native speaker. Despite my protestations about the number of red-haired Frenchmen, they made me dye my hair black to look less conspicuous. At the end of my training Tony met me in Baker Street.

He took personal charge of the last session which went on all day, repeating and repeating our instructions and our communications plans till he was satisfied.

He had quite a temper if you got it wrong; his handsome face would go red, his eyes would pinch up, and his voice would rise a few notches till he got control again.

We shook hands and smiled at the end of it, and I set off down Baker Street in the car that was taking me to the airfield and France. My last sight of him was him standing in the doorway, stroking and twisting his moustache with both hands.

“That’s Tony,” Liza was saying. “I kept telling him not to play with his moustache. It looked affected. Like biting your nails. And you can’t remember anything else about him?”

I shook my head. I could have told her that in some of my nightmares I could see his face leering down at me. But I guessed that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

“Mrs Caldwell, I’m sorry about your loss and I’m sorry that I found you too late. The office wouldn’t tell me anything about Tony. As though they were shielding him from me.”

She sized me up for a moment. “I suppose I should tell you.” She took a breath.

“Tony mentioned you. Said you’d been brought home and were in hospital. He said that you had problems and that it might get a bit difficult when you were let out.”

I felt my face colouring. I didn’t ask what sort of problems. “Difficult for whom?”

She studied me. “For him. For us. For the people you worked with.”

“That I might become a nuisance? Is that it?”

She shrugged and said nothing more.

“So your husband told SOE not to talk to me about him? Is that it?”

“I have no idea, Mr McRae,” she lied. “More tea, or do you have to be going?”

As I pulled on my coat, Liza Caldwell watched me as though she had something else to say but wasn’t sure how I’d take it. I gave her a second or two after buttoning my coat to see if the silence would draw her out.

“Did you know he was with a woman the night he died, Mr McRae?”

Now, that was unexpected. My face must have given it away.

She was nodding. “I suppose everyone knows about it.” It wasn’t said as a question. “You can always tell with a man. They can’t help themselves. They have needs that seem to override all sense. Tony was like that.”

She seemed to be summing him up. I stared at her not knowing what to say. She was talking in a flat, calm voice. As though she had been resigned to his ways.

It might explain why she didn’t seem quite as distraught as a woman should be who’d lost her husband barely a month ago. I wondered if she knew Kate.

As I walked back towards the tube I thought about how SOE had blocked me. A word or two planted by Tony would have been all it took, so that when I showed up, I’d be treated like a leper. With my scar it was like walking around with a label saying warning – madman.

The sun had gone in and the afternoon had turned colder. Much colder for me. I caught the tube in the favoured village of Hampstead and surfaced again in dreary London. I looked at the faces and saw the new year celebrations were over. We were back in the real world, and it was colourless and impoverished.

One egg a week and all our clothes like uniforms.

I started walking home along the Walworth Road, watching their faces. No one complained much. We all knew we should be grateful. Even for our ration cards. I turned up my collar against the cutting wind, strangely depressed by what I’d found, depressed by the rubble and grubby houses around me. London was like my mind; a broken landscape with tantalisingly familiar patterns that slipped from my grasp the tighter I gripped. Maybe my eyes had changed. Maybe I had a different vantage point now. But this new year was more than ever like a death than a birth.

NINE

I got in, half expecting, half hoping Val would be there. She wasn’t. So I called Kate Graveney to report. She sounded busy. She cut me short and fixed to meet at my office the next evening. I didn’t know why that should raise my spirits, but it did. Then for one daft moment I felt guilty, as though I was being disloyal to Val. We were just pals, for god’s sake, and Kate was business.

But it was a surprise that Kate wanted to wait to get the news face to face.

Fine by me, given her face. But why hadn’t she wanted to get the gist of my findings on the phone? Why didn’t she just ask me if Caldwell was dead?

And then she was late. It was twenty past six when I recognised the sound of those elegant heels picking their way up the stairs. This time I was on my feet in front of my desk to greet her, jacket on and cardigan well out of sight. I sat nonchalantly on the edge of my desk and let one leg swing free to show how well creased my trousers were. I’d damped down my hair with Brylcreem and a hard brush. The fire was in good shape in the grate. I’d queued for two hours today to get a stone of coal, mainly dross as usual. Half a dollar it cost me. And I had to queue twice. They only let you have seven pounds at a time, but they didn’t mind how often you came back. It was easier if you had a big family or knew someone.

She looked preened and pampered. I wondered what they’d made of the fur stole out on the Walworth Road? I don’t know mink from sable, but whatever it was stood out from the coney coats I see down the pub. I pulled the chair out and pushed it behind her, only just stopping myself from stroking the fur. I took the other side of my desk. She had a cigarette ready and I lit it for her, then one for me. I reached into my bottom drawer and pulled out a bottle of Scotch, a bottle of soda and two glasses.

“Drink?”

She looked thoughtfully at me and sucked in her cheeks. “Why not? It’s past six.

Half and half, please.”

I poured us two big ones. She sipped.

“Well, Mr McRae?” She had lost all her first night nerves. This was the upper class in full sail, unflappable and in control.

I’d rehearsed a dozen different ways of telling it, most of them involving a steady build up to the punch line after some impressive detective work. “In a nutshell, Miss Graveney, I regret to tell you that Mr Caldwell is dead.”

She blew out a plume of smoke. She didn’t seem surprised or much upset for that matter. How would you feel if you learned your lover – albeit a deceitful one –

had been blown to bits in the explosion that you survived? Which reminded me. I reached into my desk drawer.