‘Better now?’ asked Dundee.
‘Much,’ said Jane, not meaning it at all. Their drinks appeared, a scotch and soda for each of them. Jane tasted hers. Watery, the liquor itself as rough as diesel fuel. ‘How’s your drink?’ she said.
‘Awful,’ said Dundee, making a face. ‘Yours?’
‘Awful.’ Jane laughed. ‘And on a train going to Scotland. Doesn’t seem proper somehow.’
‘No,’ said Dundee. He twisted the small glass between his fingers, staring down into it as though looking for answers to difficult questions. He finally looked up, opened his mouth to speak then closed it again.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ said Jane.
‘I ran a check on you while we were in Shepton Mallet,’ he said flatly. ‘It didn’t take long. I’ve got some friends in Scotland Yard and I mentioned this friend Morris Black, the one you told Occleshaw about. Turns out he’s in the Strategic Operations Executive now in Cairo, the British version of Donovan’s bunch in Washington, who, it turns out, Black was also working for. And so were you. Now you turn up in my backyard just in time for this mess.’ He stared at her, tiny circles of angry white appearing on the hard line of his jaw. ‘Anything to say? I don’t much like being spied on, Jane, or the people who do the spying. Are they your people following us, Jane? Just what the hell is going on? Who the hell are you?’ He kept his voice low, the tone harsh.
Jane stared at him, wondering at his intensity and at her own reaction: anger. ‘I’m exactly who I said I was, Major – nothing more, nothing less. I was assigned to you by your superior, Brigadier General Lawrence H. Hedrick, and before that I’d never even heard your name. My friendship with Morris Black is none of your goddamn business and neither is anything else I did before we met.’ She got up from the table, picked up her drink and downed it in a single toss. The man with the bowler hat looked at her over the top of his newspaper then raised it again. Jane turned on her heel and stalked out of the carriage, pulling open the door and stepping out onto the jerking plates of the adjoining platform, horrified to feel the sting of salt tears in her eyes, telling herself that it was the steam or the smoke or a bit of clinker from the engine blown up by the wind that whirled around the platform. She pushed open the door to the next car and headed down the gloomy corridor, biting her lip and praying that no one would see her in this condition.
She reached her bedroom, opened the door and went inside, the bad scotch sour in her stomach now. Her head aching with a tangle of conflicting emotions, she threw off her uniform, letting it fall in a mess on the floor, switched off the overhead light using the control panel by the sink and then stumbled into bed, pulling the covers up to her chin and reaching up to switch off the reading light over her crisply starched, pale green pillow, monogrammed with the rail line’s complex and old-fashioned logo of intertwined letters.
‘To hell with him!’ she muttered, punching the pillow hard. ‘To hell with them all!’
Chapter Thirteen
She awoke sometime later in the night, heart pounding. It was pitch-dark and silent in the tiny bedroom. She had no idea where the train was. Jane brought her wrist up to her face and read the illuminated dial of the men’s Hamilton that Rusty Birdwell from the Daily News had bought her as a going away present when she left New York. She was always complaining that ladies’ watches were too small to read and were a waste of money. Birdwell had taken her at her word. The watch had caused a few raised eyebrows since but it was worth it; at least she wasn’t going to go blind trying to tell what time it was in the dark.
According to the Hamilton it was two minutes past midnight. She listened hard but heard nothing except the sighing wheeze of brake couplings and the faint creaking of expanding metal. They had stopped somewhere. Risking an unlikely fine from the air-raid warden she rolled over, leaned out of the bed and poked a finger between the glass of the window and the blackout curtain covering it. She was rewarded with a tiny sliver of window looking out onto what appeared to be the platform of a major station. She could see a man in a blue smock and a greasy old felt hat closing and shuttering a news kiosk and a fat old woman dispensing tea in brown mugs from behind a counter farther down the platform. Stopping for passengers perhaps or to take on new crew the way they used to at New Haven on the New York–Boston run. The ordinariness of the scene was somehow comforting, even if it was a foreign land, and Jane smiled.
She yawned, trying to recall the schedule, wondering exactly where they were. Not that it would make a lot of difference to her since her grasp of the geography of Great Britain wasn’t the best. A second or two later she had the answer to her question when a baggage cart rattled by with G&SWR/YORK stencilled on the side. She couldn’t remember exactly but she seemed to recall that York was about midway between London and their destination, which made sense given the time of night and the length of the trip. She yawned again, wondering if Dundee was snugged into his bed, an inch or so away from her, or still sitting in the lounge staring moodily into his Scotch. She told herself she didn’t really give a damn, closed her eyes and went back to sleep.
The second time she awoke it was three thirty in the morning and it was with the sound of what she could have sworn was a gunshot echoing dully in her ears. She sat up in bed, eyes wide in the darkness. She turned, flicked on the night light and threw her legs over the side of the bed. She stopped there, listening, not sure now whether she’d dreamed the sound or if it had been real.
She strained, turning left and right, but heard nothing; the train was in motion, clearly going around a series of curves the way it was jolting and jerking, and there didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary going on except the muffled sound of voices in the corridor. They moved off and there was only silence again. She flipped on the overhead light, fully awake now. She reached down, dug into her uniform jacket, still lying crumpled on the floor where she’d left it, came out with her cigarettes and lit up. She frowned. She hadn’t thought to bring a dressing gown with her and she wasn’t about to go into the corridor in her unmentionables.
She pulled her suitcase out from under the bed, hefted it onto the chair next to the window and undid the straps. She threw it open, rummaged around inside and came out with a pair of corduroy trousers and a roll-neck sweater she’d picked up at a Macy’s sale a year ago. She slipped her feet into her favourite pair of Wigwams without bothering to put on her socks and opened the door a crack. She peered into the corridor and looked in both directions. Empty. Feeling like a bit of a fool, she slipped out into the corridor and tapped lightly on Dundee’s door, wondering just what she was going to say to him; hearing a gunshot in her dreams wasn’t much of an excuse for waking him up at three thirty in the morning.
After a full minute of waiting there was still no answer and for a few seconds she thought of simply turning around and going back to her own bedroom but instead she knocked again; there were sounds heard in dreams and real ones and this particular shot had seemed all too real. Another minute passed and she rapped again.
‘Dundee?’ She paused. Maybe he was a heavy sleeper. She grimaced. She certainly hadn’t had any cause to find out, one way or the other. She knocked a fourth time, firmly.
Nothing.
Taking a deep breath and holding it, she reached out, took the door handle and twisted it gently. The door opened and she stared inside. If anyone came down the corridor right now it was going to look pretty bad. It was too dark in the room to see anything. She opened the door wider, letting the dim light from outside wash into the room. The bed was empty and neatly made up. There wasn’t even an impression in the top blanket as though somebody had lain there for a moment. Odder still was the fact that Dundee’s luggage was nowhere to be seen.
Rather than remain in the passage, Jane stepped into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. She turned on the overhead light and looked under the bed, which was the only place big enough to conceal anything. Nothing. She sat down on the bed and took a pull on the cigarette. Where
the hell was he?
She let her eyes roam over the interior of the room, apprehension growing with her confusion. At first glance she couldn’t see anything suspicious; no splintered woodwork, no neat little hole in the blackout curtain and corresponding hole in the window, no bloodstain on the worn green carpeting on the floor. Nothing out of place at all. This wasn’t like that movie she’d seen, The Lady Vanishes, and she was no halfwit who’d been hit on the head with a teapot.
She got up and checked the ashtray set into the arm of his chair – empty and gleaming, looking freshly cleaned. Maybe it was The Lady Vanishes after all because there sure was no sign that anyone had ever been here. What was the name of the vanished woman? Foy? Froy? That was it, Miss Froy, and her name had been written in the condensation on the inside of the window. Her eyes flickered to the blacked-out window in the bedroom, almost as though she expected to see Dundee’s name. She made a little grunting sound of disgust at her foolishness and stubbed out her cigarette in Dundee’s pristine ashtray. She sat down on the edge of the bed again, trying to think it out, going through the alternatives.
Dundee could have gotten off the train in York; maybe it was his leaving that woke her up the first time. He was mad enough at her to just up and leave, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing he’d do, and it was more likely that he’d tell her to get off the train, not get off himself. It was his case after all; she was just along for the ride. Then there was the question of whether they were being followed or not; if they were, and he figured out who was doing the following, he could well have turned the tables and followed them, once again getting off the train at York or some other stop between here and London. But in that case, would he have had time to collect his luggage?
Her head was beginning to hurt. The most likely solution to the mystery was that there was no mystery at all. Dundee’s luggage had been misplaced in London and he hadn’t bothered to mention it and he was sitting in the lounge car right now, drunk as a skunk. She climbed to her feet and took a last look around. Still no bloodstains. She let herself out of the bedroom and headed up the corridor. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d poured a colleague into bed.
She reached the lounge car without meeting another soul, passenger or crew. On every train she’d travelled on in the States there’d always been someone up and about; a porter shining shoes; one of the conductors, like her father, methodically ‘walking the train’ as he’d called it, checking that everything was in order; or somebody drinking or playing cards in the bar car long after everyone else had gone to bed. At the earliest hours of the new day, like now, the first of the morning crew would be getting up and preparing for the early breakfast call at five thirty for the staff and six for the first of the morning passengers.
On the Robbie Burns it was as quiet as death and Jane felt a little strange, the only thing alive on a ghost train. She shivered with the feeling; having Dundee vanish like something in a magic act was bad enough without scaring herself with superstitious nightmares like that. This was a perfectly ordinary train going through a perfectly ordered and ordinary landscape that in peacetime would be the kind of thing you saw on postcards and the pages of Picture Post. The kind of pictures that, in peacetime, she took to make her living.
She reached the door of the lounge car and pulled it open. The steward was still awake, seated at one of the empty tables, reading a newspaper and eating something greasy on a pale blue plate. He had a tall glass beside him full of something that sent tiny, silver bubbles up the side of the glass. He looked up as she stepped into the car.
‘We’re closed, miss.’
She looked around. There was no sign of Dundee at the spot she’d left him in or anywhere else for that matter.
The steward cleared his throat. ‘Anything I can do for you, miss?’
She moved down the car to the man’s table, steadying herself as the train gave a sudden lurch and slowed. The steward gave an instinctive glance towards the window to see what the train was doing, then turned back to Jane. ‘Now that’s a little odd,’ he said conversationally. ‘Never stopped around here before. Good rate of speed from here to the Tweed, then over we go and Scots w’a hay as they say.’ He stared up at Jane and smiled, showing off a gleaming set of profoundly false teeth. ‘Name’s Pieman, miss, like as what Simple Simon met on the way to the fair, ’cept my name’s Arthur, miss. Arthur Pieman.’
‘Do you remember the man I came in with earlier this evening, Arthur?’ said Jane. She dropped down into the seat opposite the steward. The meal on his plate appeared to be some kind of pressed meat covered with a glutinous gravy that didn’t look quite real. A small green blob of very wizened peas sat shoulder to shoulder with some too-orange carrots and tiny, slightly translucent canned potatoes. Thank God they weren’t rationing food back home, she thought. She glanced at the man’s glass and he wrapped a protective hand around it.
‘Quinine,’ Arthur said. ‘Served in India between the wars. Malaria.’ Jane wasn’t quite sure you could get malaria in India and she didn’t really care if it was quinine or whether Arthur was sipping the stock.
‘A major,’ she said.
‘’Course I remember. Been a barman on English trains for twenty-nine years and I swear I remember everyone I’ve ever served. Now take you, f’rinstance; last time I seen you, you was wearing a uniform. War correspondent, wasn’t it?’
‘Right.’ The train lurched again, even more roughly this time. Jane gripped the edge of the table to keep herself from hitting it.
‘Stopping,’ said Arthur. His hand went out to pull back the curtains a little and then withdrew. He threw a quick, guilty look at Jane.
‘The major,’ said Jane. ‘What happened to him?’
‘What do you mean, “what happened to him?” Nothing happened to him. He finished his drink and then Mr Mallinson bought him another and they had a talk like.’
‘Who’s Mr Mallinson?’
‘Fellow sitting reading the paper.’ He rattled the newspaper in front of him. ‘This paper as a matter of fact. Had a bowler hat, if I recall correctly.’
Jane vaguely remembered the man. ‘How long did they talk?’
‘Till York or thereabouts. Midnight.’
‘Then what?’
‘A military policeman came and fetched him away, didn’t he like?’ said Arthur with a long-suffering sigh. ‘Which I’m about to do in a minute, by your leave, miss. Must get my beauty sleep, you know.’
‘They left together?’ asked Jane. She sat back in her chair as the train wheels ratcheted to a slow, grinding halt.
The steward finally gave in to his curiosity and peeked out the window exactly as Jane had done in York. ‘Well, bugger me!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s bleeding Selkirk! Now why on earth would we be stopping there?’
Jane followed Arthur as he climbed to his feet and headed for the exit door between the cars. The steward pushed out through the lounge car door, then turned and unbolted the top half of the Dutch door leading out to the small platform of the little station they were stopped in. Arthur looked out, peering up the train through the clouds of steam rising from under the train. It was chilly; even with her sweater on Jane could feel the cold biting at her lungs. Early morning in the Scots Border Counties apparently wasn’t the most inviting of times, at least as far as the weather was concerned. Jane paused in the vestibule between the cars, wrapping her arms around herself.
‘What is it?’ she asked Arthur.
He turned and shrugged. ‘Can’t tell yet, ma’am. Seems to be a bunch of coppers at the station. Arguing with Campbell, the chief train man.’ The steward let out a crowing laugh. ‘That won’t do them much good, I can tell you. Andrew Campbell would argue with God himself, given the opportunity, and win, likely.’ He ducked his head out the opening and checked again. ‘Looks like they’re getting on board.’
Why would the police be getting on the Glasgow express at this hour of the morning unless there was something seriously wrong? thought Jan
e. She paled. Something seriously wrong, like one vanished major.
She squeezed in beside the steward and looked out into the darkness, lit only by the chief train man’s shrouded lantern and the small amount of light leaking out around the roughly covered windows of the station; clearly the blackout rules applied here as well.
Three cars back, appearing and disappearing in the bursts of steam that puffed out over the narrow platform between the train and the tiny Victorian brick station, three uniformed constables stood like mute sentries around a tall, lean plain-clothes officer in heated discussion with Campbell, the chief train man. Several other constables scurried along the platform, boarding at various points along the length of the train. The steam hissed around the plain-clothes man and then cleared, a sudden silence following. The man’s voice came to her as though he was standing no more than a foot away, bullying and imperious.
‘I’ll wake up every last soul on this train if I’ve a mind to, Mr Campbell, whether you care for it or not.’ Jane recognised the voice instantly. The last time she’d heard it had been in the Pottingers’ sitting room at Strathmere in Swan Hill.
It was Occleshaw.
Chapter Fourteen
The Special Branch officer looked up suddenly, peering through the steam, almost as though he’d sensed Jane’s presence. She ducked her head back inside the train and flattened herself against the side of the vestibule. What the hell was she supposed to do now?
‘Something wrong, miss?’ asked Arthur Pieman.
‘No, nothing,’ said Jane hurriedly. She took a deep, ragged breath, trying to think straight. Occleshaw was boarding the train in the middle of the night and his only possible objective was Dundee; anything else was too much of a coincidence. The trouble was, Occleshaw wasn’t going to find him and she had no plausible explanation for his disappearance. Chances were the weasel-faced gunsel would pull her off the train and hold her in custody until she told him where Dundee was, which could be a long time since she didn’t have the faintest idea.
An American Spy Page 13