[Woman of WWII 02] - Poppy Redfern and the Fatal Flyers

by Tessa Arlen

  “You are such a dreadful little scavenger,” I said to her as I kissed her nose again. “You have to stop stealing food and eating windfalls.” I looked down into her trusting brown eyes staring up at me, and I couldn’t help but laugh at her fat lip.

  Bess may be a short-legged girl, but she has a burly body and I was gasping for breath as we arrived in the inn’s kitchen. “My dog has been stung on her lip,” I said, leaning up against the doorframe of the kitchen. “Do you have any baking . . . ?”

  “Oh, dearie me. Now, what was it, did you see? A bee or a wasp? Different remedies for different insects. I always use . . .” The cook was the conversational type.

  “I pulled out the stinger.”

  “Bee, then. Best thing for beestings is baking soda. Here.” She handed me a box. “Mix a spoonful up into a thick paste.”

  As I mixed baking soda and water together, covered Bess’s wound, and held her muzzle closed so she couldn’t lick it off, the cook watched me closely, her hands on her hips and her head on one side.

  “Lor’, what a puffed-up lip.” She threw back her head and laughed the smoky laugh of a nicotine addict. “By rights I shouldn’t have a dog in my kitchen.” She took a greasy gray dishcloth from the sink and wiped down the area I had used to mix up Bess’s baking soda. “What’s her name?” I told her as I put Bess down and she walked over to say hullo.

  “Nice little mutt, in’t she?” She bent over and made cooing noises as Bess snuffled around on the floor for dropped food. “How do you keep your dog going what with all this food rationing?” she asked. “Most people had their dogs put down at the beginning of the war. Sad, really, when you think that your little dog is getting on quite well with all the shortages.”

  I didn’t want to talk about the horrors of that hideous month at the beginning of what we called the Phony War, when thousands of families all over England voluntarily stood in line at their local veterinarians to have their dogs put to sleep. That was how I had found Bessie, a shivering and terrified puppy hiding in a ditch. How she got there I had no idea; I just knew that if she was found she would be euthanized. I had carried her home under my trench coat and persuaded my grandparents that she would be easy to keep.

  “I share my rations with her,” I explained. “She has practically become a vegetarian, except for the occasional elderly rabbit she manages to catch.”

  She laughed at that. “A vegetarian! Pull the other one, why don’t you? You’re talking about a dog, my girl. Ah well, I suppose they are natural scavengers, aren’t they? And we all have to live.” She tossed Bess a slice of raw potato to test her vegetarianism.

  Bess snapped it down and looked up for more.

  “Well, I’ll be blowed, would you look at that?” She picked up another chip of potato.

  “Perhaps if you have the end of a raw carrot?” I suggested. “She loves carrot.”

  “If she’ll eat raw root vegetables, I am sure she wouldn’t say no to a nice dead rat,” the cook cautioned me. “My advice to you is better keep your eye on that nice little dog of yours. If she eats a dead rat it will be the end of her.”

  My heart stood quite still for a second before it started to thump in my chest.

  “A dead rat . . . what could be the harm . . . ?” I could barely get the words out. In my mind I saw Bess dragging a large rat out from behind a dustbin.

  She picked up an old kitchen knife and began to peel potatoes. “When did you last see a rat in daylight unless it was a goner? This is an old building, of course we have rats, and not just them either: mice, rats, squirrels. Lord, what a battle we have with them.”

  “How do you control them?”

  “Mr. Evans baits traps with poison.”

  I pulled Bess out from under the sink. “Does it work quickly? I mean, how soon after the rat eats the bait does it die?”

  She snorted in derision at the thought. “I don’t have time to go out there and check the bodies of dead vermin. I just know they die.” She looked at me as if I were a fool and then down at Bess.

  “If I were you . . .” She put her knife down and gave me a straight look: the old and wise informing the young and stupid. But I had already clipped Bess’s lead on her and was dragging her reluctant body out of the kitchen.

  * * *

  * * *

  THE INNKEEPER’S WIFE, Mrs. Evans, met me in what she called Reception and what was in fact the area at the bottom of the stairs, where the telephone kiosk was situated.

  “Oh, there you are, Miss Redfern. Two messages for you. Mr. Carrington from Crown Films has called twice in the last hour. He said it was an emergency.” Puffed up with the importance of having a film unit staying at her inn, Mrs. Evans was almost out of breath to give me my most-urgent messages.

  My preoccupied brain focused. “Keith?”

  “That’s right. He asks you to please telephone him right away. Said it was most urgent. Something about a lost can of film?”

  I surrendered a pound note for change for my call, squeezed myself into the very narrow telephone kiosk, and put through a call to Crown Films. As I waited to be put through, I kept a careful eye on Bess through the glass of the box as she sniffed around the skirting boards and corners of the hall. Did they leave baited traps inside the inn too? I must ask Mrs. Evans.

  The operator came back on the line. “Mr. Carrington is not in the editing room, Miss Redfern. He is in a meeting with Mr. Huntley.”

  Mrs. Evans was waiting for me when I came out of the kiosk. “Mr. Carrington was very perturbed when he rang,” she told me. “He asked me to go and look in his room for him. Which I did. There was no can of film there, or any of his or Mr. Huntley’s personal effects. The maid is scrupulous about checking.”

  She followed me up the stairs and unlocked the third door on the right, and we stood together on the threshold of Keith’s room. “He shared with Mr. Huntley,” Mrs. Evans explained. It didn’t take a moment to see that Keith’s can of film wasn’t in this room. All surfaces were bare, all drawers empty. The wardrobe yielded some pink-satin-covered hangers swinging on their rail, and a mothball rolled across its wooden bottom when we pulled open the door.

  “Bedside tables,” I said as I pulled both drawers open. I got down and looked under the bed. No dust balls, no rattraps, and no cans of film. I turned to Mrs. Evans. “Where else could he have left it, do you think?”

  She shook her head; her face crumpled in concern. “Perhaps the bathroom? They used the bathroom across the corridor for developing.”

  “That’s probably where it is!”

  But the large bathroom was empty, except for the smell of chemicals and the heavy blackout curtains still tightly sealing the windows.

  We started toward the stairs and made a thorough search of the bar, the lounge, and the parlor. The dining room stood solemnly empty, its rows of cloth-covered tables set with cutlery and glasses.

  “He probably left it in the van,” I said, feeling dusty and disheveled.

  “The trouble with most men”—Mrs. Evans spoke from decades of married life with Mr. Evans—“is they never look for anything properly. They just open a drawer and glance in it and then accuse you of losing their collar studs.” Her lecture on the impracticalities of men was interrupted by a flash of gleaming red outside the window and the sound of a car pulling up into the gravel of the inn’s drive. Griff had arrived.

  * * *

  * * *

  “SO, YOU SEE, it might have been rat poison. Someone could have put it in their food.” Aware that I was gabbling, I took a breath and slowed down. “The cook told me that they use it at the inn to keep down the vermin. Mr. Evans baits traps all the time.” Griff nodded, his face solemn as he took a long swallow of beer. We had walked down to the pub on his arrival, because at least they had something other than soup or pie to offer us, and the image of the cook’s greasy dishcloth was sti
ll fresh in my mind.

  “But why rat poison?” He put down his fork and finished his beer. “That’s better. You know for a country that makes such incredibly good beer, you would think they would be a bit more creative with their food . . . Sorry, I interrupted you. You were telling me about why someone would use rat poison.”

  “It’s easy to get hold of, for one thing.”

  “Do you know what’s in it?”

  I shrugged. I had no idea.

  “Arsenic, perhaps? Strychnine?” he pursued. “If Edwina had died from either of those it would have been evident when we pulled her from the plane.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I believe death from strychnine or arsenic is pretty . . . involved and painful. She would have been . . . a mess.”

  I shuddered. “Do you mean she would have vomited?”

  “At the very least.”

  Edwina had looked like a rag doll when they lifted her out of the cockpit of her Spitfire. I saw her limp body as she lay in Griff’s arms. Her face was composed; there were no signs of an excruciating death on her peaceful features. I thought of Flaubert’s description of Madame Bovary dying in agony from taking arsenic. Edwina’s hair was not dark and stringy with sweat, neither were her limbs curled up tightly in the death agony of my imagination. And since both strychnine and arsenic apparently racked the digestive organs, there was no bloody vomit all over her flying suit.

  “To be frank, Poppy, I don’t know a thing about strong poisons: how long they take to work, what they do to you, or how much it takes to kill a healthy woman. But I do know about aircraft. We could walk over to the airfield and talk to Mac Wilson, the mechanic in charge at Didcote. Let’s rule out sabotage before we start to dabble in poison.” He was already on his feet. “I need a nice brisk walk along the river.”

  After a lunch of beer and a shepherd’s pie, Griff was, in his own parlance, full of beans. I glanced up at his bright hazel eyes, his laughing mouth, and that sweetness of expression he had when he was pleased with himself. All signs of his earlier fatigue had gone, and he was his usual chipper self. I caught his mood and I felt my earlier gloom beginning to lift. “Perfect day,” he said, as if we had not discussed murders by poison over lunch and Letty Wills’s body was not lying in a morgue somewhere near Elton. “Let’s go and do some sleuthing.”

  TEN

  WHAT I LOVE MOST ABOUT YOUR PICTURESQUE ENGLISH VILlages is how convenient they are. And they all follow a pattern, have you noticed? There is always a pub on the green so people can sit outside and watch cricket in the summer. And sure enough, there is the church on the green’s further side, a respectable distance from the pub, with its comfortably dilapidated old vicarage close by. And then of course there is the village high street. Ever notice how well organized they are?” Griff stopped and waved an appreciative arm up and down Didcote’s admittedly admirable main thoroughfare.

  “Here is the butcher: no meat, of course, but that’s not his fault; then right next to that . . . ah yes, here it is, the greengrocer’s as you call them. He’s certainly cornered the market on cabbage, carrots, and potatoes. A few apples . . .” We walked past both shops. “Next there will be a baker . . . and sure enough.”

  I laughed. “Really? This looks like an ironmonger to me.”

  “Ironmonger? Sometimes I think I am living in medieval England.”

  “What do you call this sort of shop in America?”

  “A hardware store.”

  I didn’t say how much the prosaic and practical name lacked imagination as we stood outside the open door of the shop. I sniffed the wonderful, oily metal smell that we English associate with ironmongery. “What are you doing?” I asked as Griff walked up the steps.

  “Got to get something to control the rats and mice in our mess kitchen.”

  We walked into the dark, narrow shop. A long, high wooden counter ran down one side of its long and narrow interior; dusty oak floorboards were covered in boxes and baskets full of useful things like washers, bolts, and hinges. From the ceiling hung an odd assortment of the necessary: galvanized tin washtubs, buckets, and watering cans predominated. I squinted up at a price tag and gasped. War had made anything made of metal outrageously expensive and notoriously difficult to find. This place was a handyman’s paradise. An assortment of cardboard boxes was stacked behind the counter, with labels proclaiming the length and diameter of the nails and screws they contained.

  And before his horde of metal treasure stood a stooped elderly man wrapped in a heavy brown cloth apron. He put both hands on the counter and glared at us as Griff slowly turned the handle of an old iron clothes mangle.

  “Sir?” he said and frowned at the mangle.

  Griff reluctantly stopped watching the two wooden rollers spin tightly against each other. “Hullo there, do you sell rat poison?”

  A nod.

  “What’s it made with?”

  The man folded his arms and his brows came down. “Strychnine,” he said as if he was talking to the terminally stupid.

  “How quickly does it work, d’you think?”

  The shopkeeper evidently didn’t like this question because he used more than one word in his answer. “What you want to know that for, ay?”

  “I want to know how effective you think it is. Is it more effective than, say, arsenic?”

  “Where are you from?”

  “The States.”

  “We don’t use arsenic in rat poison over here, not anymore.” He looked us over, committing our features to memory, so that when he called the local police constable, he would know exactly how to describe our murderous faces. “We make it very difficult for the public to get its hands on arsenic in this country, my lad, or cyanide, before you ask.”

  If Griff objected to being called “my lad,” he didn’t show it. But it was clear that he intended to get an answer to his question. He put an elbow on the countertop and leaned in.

  “That’s interesting.” He pushed back his cap with a forefinger and gazed into the sour face of the ironmonger. “You see, we use arsenic to kill rats on my dad’s farm. Never heard of strychnine before. But here’s my problem—perhaps you can help me—there are lots of old barns and run-down huts on our airfield here, simply teeming with vermin. I need something that acts fast and does the job properly.”

  Was he talking about my family’s house—pristine, gracious, and beautiful Reaches before it had been turned into an officers’ mess for the American airfield? I asked myself. What a blasted cheek!

  The old man unbent a little and became almost garrulous. “Dangerous poison is arsenic. Illegal in this country. We use strychnine; it’ll do the job all right, and fast. How much of it do you need?” He reached under the counter and produced a large round tin; it had a label with a black skull and crossbones on it. “That’ll be five shilling.”

  “How fast does it kill them: five minutes, ten, longer?”

  A glower. “They start dropping at about ten minutes, less if they are smaller. Takes a bit longer than that for ’em to die. Want this or not?”

  I felt a nervous giggle begin in my throat as I waited for Griff to ask if you could fly a plane after you “dropped,” and before you died would you have lost control of it?

  “No, thank you, not now. I’ll tell our sergeant to get some.” He saluted the old man.

  The cook at the inn’s words came back to me. “If a dog was to eat a rat that had been poisoned by strychnine, would it kill the dog?” I asked the ironmonger.

  He looked over at Bess, who was sitting by the door, patiently waiting for us to leave a place that held no interest for her, not even a polite hello or a pat on the head. “Wouldn’t give much for its chances, and before you ask, I don’t know how long it would take for it to die.”

  We thanked him profusely for his courtesy and stepped out into the street.

 
“I don’t think they could have been poisoned with rat poison: Edwina was flying for only a few minutes before she lost control of her plane. She flew a good two hours or so after lunch, didn’t she? If her Spam sandwich had been poisoned, she would have been dead, or at least showing serious symptoms, long before that. Did you see her eat or drink anything, say, minutes before she flew?”

  I cast my mind back to that pleasant interlude when we had taken a break from filming for lunch. “She ate a lot of sandwiches, someone made a joke about it, and it was a good two hours later that she flew.” I tried to remember what Edwina had been doing after she had finished her lunch. All I could recall was her sulky silence as she stood on the edge of things.

  But I had questions of my own as we turned into the lane that led to Didcote Airfield, and they were about Letty’s crash. “I know I asked you this already, but how long would it take to fly from Didcote to the Supermarine factory at Eastleigh?”

  “What sort of plane?”

  “I don’t know the name of the plane; it’s the one they call the air taxi. They took off at somewhere between half past eight and a quarter to nine.”

  “They use the Anson as their taxi. Let’s see, now. An Anson from Didcote to Eastleigh. Short jaunt: about twenty minutes on a clear day from takeoff to landing.” We were nearly at the airfield, so I stopped and let Bess off her lead. She bounded into the field and rolled in a patch of sunlit grass.

  “Then she would have to check in at Supermarine, do her paperwork, and get to her Walrus. How long would that take?”

  He squinted up at the sky. “Say thirty minutes to cover all the messing about that probably goes on with paperwork.”

  “Good. Then how long to fly from Eastleigh to Elton?”

  “Where’s Elton?”

  I remembered the map. “Elton’s about five miles south of Winchester. She might have been following the railway line from Eastleigh. About forty to fifty miles.”