by Jim Kelly
‘Peggy’s the oldest,’ said Connie, and suddenly burst into tears.
Elsie clung harder to her sister.
‘Can you just tell me what’s happened, in the order in which it has happened?’ Brooke asked. He produced some cigarettes and both girls took one.
Edison fled to get tea. Elsie told the story, but Connie chipped in.
The Wyldes lived on Palmer Road, half a mile from Earl Street, but still in the Kite. The three girls had gone to work early on the morning after the air raid. Their mother was a charlady at some solicitors’ offices in town and had left the house at dawn. It was only when one of the lawyers came in from court that she learnt that there had been casualties on Earl Street. She’d asked for an hour off and rushed back to the Kite to check if all was well at number 36. Brooke had interviewed her in the wreck of the Wellington Arms.
By that time the three girls were at work. Connie had been behind the counter at Robert Sayle, a draper’s and department store a few doors away from the Spinning House along St Andrew’s Street. Elsie worked at a factory along the river which turned out utility items, such as cheap chairs and tables, to meet the growing demand. Peggy had cycled off to work at Marshall airfield, where they trained RAF pilots and patched up the planes. Peggy worked in the ‘fabric’ shed, repairing wear and tear on the aircraft.
The girls always met at four-thirty at a tearoom on Peas Hill, a treat after work. Alice decided to join them and tell them the bad news, although the rumour mill was already buzzing with gossip about casualties in the Kite. Alice arrived late, hoping they’d all be there, but there was no sign of Peggy. She told the two sisters what had happened, then they waited an hour but Peggy still didn’t appear, so they went home.
Edison came back with tea and the girls each took a cup.
‘Peggy never turned up, she’s just vanished – hasn’t she, Con?’ said Elsie. They had an odd sisterly habit of talking to each other without looking at each other.
‘When was the last time she was seen?’ asked Brooke.
‘Harriet, who lives down our street, works in the same shed,’ said Elsie. ‘She says she had lunch with Peggy – well, they sat out on the apron of the airfield and had their sandwiches. She said that by then the gossip was that an elderly couple had died in the Kite. Peggy was really worried it was her nan and grandad, but Harriet told her it was daft to worry because there’s hundreds of houses, and it was just gossip. Peggy told her she’d be seeing us at the tea shop as usual. At clocking off, Harriet saw her ahead in the line and then she disappeared.’
‘Time?’ asked Edison, who’d started making a note.
‘That’s four o’clock,’ said Elsie.
The day was already hot and Edison opened the window, carefully avoiding lifting the blinds, which kept the light levels low. The distant sound of children in the playground at the nearby school flooded in, and it seemed to make everyone relax.
‘How old is Peggy?’ asked Brooke.
‘Twenty-one,’ said Elsie.
‘So she’s old enough to do what she wants. Is there a boyfriend? Maybe she’s upset – maybe she found out what had happened and she’s with friends. Does she ever stay out overnight?’
‘She gets moods,’ said Connie. ‘She’s got friends she doesn’t tell us about. She stays out sometimes with girlfriends, but it sends Mum mad – she says she’s Wylde by name, wild by nature. There’s loads of boyfriends. And she’s talked about running off, leaving home and that, finding a new life that’s not boring. But she’d never do it without telling us.’
‘And there’s been absolutely no word?’ pressed Brooke.
‘Not a thing,’ said Elsie. ‘Mum went round last night to relatives and that. And to neighbours – everyone. She rang the factory from the box on the corner this morning and got the charge hand. She’s not turned up. We share a room and she didn’t come home at all. She’s just gone.’
Brooke took off his glasses and gently massaged his eyes, contemplating the coincidence: Nora Pollard is murdered after the bombing raid, and her granddaughter goes missing the next evening. He was perfectly aware that such chance occurrences happened in real life. It was just that he was, he felt, paid to make sure they were really coincidences. He had a murderer on the loose, and now a missing girl.
‘Where is your mum now?’
‘Out looking. She’s taken her bike and she’s checking round again. Once she’s got the bit between her teeth there’s no stopping our mum.’
Again, the conspiratorial family smile.
Brooke told Edison to take a statement while he got the duty sergeant to put a call into Addenbrooke’s Hospital. ‘That’ll be it, you’ll see. Your sister’s come off her bike and she’ll have had concussion and got her leg up in a sling.’
They all got to their feet.
Brooke reached for his hat. ‘I want you to give my sergeant a description of Peggy – and get a picture from home of your sister too,’ he added. ‘What was she wearing?’
‘A blue dress,’ they said in unison.
‘Sky blue – that was her colour,’ said Elsie. ‘And it had a white belt.’
‘That helps. Anything else of note? Shoes? Gas mask?’
‘She’s a bit of a film star is our Peggy, so she decorated her gas mask with sequins and it had tassels, didn’t it, Elsie?’
Elsie nodded.
‘And her bike?’
‘Red,’ they said in unison.
‘It’s old – it was Mum’s first,’ said Elsie. ‘Is it a BSA or something?’
‘That’s it,’ said Connie. ‘Dad used to say they made rifles in the war.’
‘British Small Arms,’ said Edison, making a fresh note.
‘We’ll get the News to run an item, saying about the dress, and the gas mask, and the red BSA bicycle,’ said Brooke.
‘Why do you need to do that?’ asked Connie.
‘We need to find her as quickly as we can, and make sure she’s not hurt, or upset.’ Brooke opened the door to usher them out. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll find her.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Marshall airfield stood on the eastern edge of the city, a grass plain across which the wind blew straight from the pole in winter, until it tore at the Nissan huts or rocked the frail biplanes which clustered on the apron of the runway. In summer the bleak windswept note was still present, but at least the sun gave the vista a seaside air, as if the far green edge of the horizon might be a cliff edge.
A windsock flew briskly by the entrance gate where Brooke, leaning out of the car, offered his warrant card. After a morning cooped up at the Spinning House, issuing orders for door-to-door enquiries across the Kite and trying to rope in help from County, he was relieved to be outdoors, under an open sky.
The barrier bounced up and Edison drove them past a gaggle of workers – a few young women, but mostly lads in overalls, laid out on the grass for what looked like an impromptu elevenses.
A twin-engined biplane swept over the scene, banking to land into the breeze. The union flag on the art deco ‘airport’ terminal building blew fitfully from the south-west.
A bristling signpost directed them anti-clockwise around the grassy runway towards two large hangars and a small cluster of Nissan huts. They asked an idle young man smoking a cigarette for the way to Fabric.
‘You want the girls, then …’ he said, brightening, and pointed to one of the sheds.
With the doors open, the hangar revealed itself as a single hall, about the size of half a football field. Several aircraft – mostly Oxfords, according to Edison, but at least one Spitfire – stood in various stages of repair, their inner bones revealed, while the ‘girls’ worked to cover them in fabric. Some of the aircraft, finished, had been covered in the ‘dope’ that would dry, stretch and form a lightweight skin. The smell of the chemical was overpowering and left Brooke slightly dizzy.
He sent Edison to ask around in the admin building to see if they had a file on the missing girl, while he sought
out the foreman. He stood by a forklift truck weighed down with barrels of chemicals, and tried to spot someone in charge, juggling a Black Russian out of its pack while searching pockets for his lighter, but was brutally reprimanded by a shout: ‘Oi! Can’t you read?’
A man with white hair, dressed in a set of black overalls, was advancing at pace, pointing to a sign painted on the wall which must have been ten foot tall and fifty yards long:
NO SMOKING
Brooke stashed the lighter and held up a hand in surrender.
‘Sorry – didn’t think you’d use anything flammable on aircraft …’
‘The dangerous stuff is nitrate dope,’ he said. ‘This is butyrate dope. It’s only less flammable. It’ll burn, but slower. And there’s air fuel. That goes up with a bang, so stash the fags, alright …’
Brooke nodded, making a mental note. Something on the air smelt like the sample he’d handed over to Grandcourt: was it the air fuel or the dope? He wondered whether any streams led down from Marshall to the Cam.
The man in black overalls was the foreman. He said he’d already heard that Peggy Wylde was missing, and added that she was a diligent worker, if a bit chatty, and she tended to attract young lads who hung around at tea break.
‘Moths round a flame, eh?’ said Brooke, recalling Aldiss’s nocturnal pollinator, flitting between the evening primroses on the riverbank.
‘Pretty girl,’ said Hatton. ‘And they’re a bit thin on the ground ’ere. Mostly blokes – 1,500 of ’em. So she played the field. And it’s a sodding big field. More like bees round honey. A swarm of the blighters. Any news?’ he asked. ‘Word is she’s gone AWOL, run off with a fancy man, that kind of thing. Not been seen here since she went home yesterday evening.’
‘There’s a night shift, is there?’ asked Brooke.
‘No. Two day shifts. She was seven to four,’ said Hatton, pointing up at the skylights in the curved roof. ‘It’s tricky work and the girls are good at it but you need natural light. If the balloon really goes up, who knows, we might have to work by arc lamps, but it won’t be easy.’
‘Girl was happy, was she? No reason why she’d disappear?’
Hatton shook his head. ‘Ask this lot if you like – this is Peggy’s flight.’
Five girls were working on an Oxford, repairing the tail fins. The picture they outlined for Brooke of Peggy Wylde was more nuanced than that offered by the foreman. Popular certainly, but she thought the boys were a bother. She’d gone out with one or two pilots. They’d taken her out on the river, or for a spin in the country in their cars.
‘Any names?’
They all avoided his eyes.
‘She reckoned the pilots were all after one thing,’ said one. ‘So she ditched them pretty fast. Bruno Zeri, that’s her new beau.’
‘Does he work here?’
‘Canteen – he’s a cook. His dad ran that restaurant by the bus station …’
‘The Roma?’ offered Brooke.
‘That’s it, he’s an Eyetie, but he’s alright. Born here I think, but she said he grew up in Italy with his grandparents and then came back to work here a year ago – so he speaks funny. They carted his mum and dad off to some camp – enemy aliens and all that. But Bruno’s British, although he gets some stick …’
A voice, the speaker unseen on the inside of the fuselage, added, ‘And he’s drop-dead gorgeous.’
The rear gunner’s hood slid back and the owner of the voice appeared. ‘And he was waiting for her yesterday when she went home, just outside the gates. I was cycling behind.’
‘This was clocking-off time?’
‘That’s it. Four o’clock on the dot.’
‘Sure it was him?’ pressed Brooke.
‘Yeah. He stands out cos of the hair: black and shiny.’
Brooke took her name and said she might have to make a formal statement.
Then he walked to the canteen. A Nissan hut again, but newly painted, with clean windows. Inside, trestle tables and chairs were set out for hundreds. Pots and pans clattered from an open kitchen. Trays of what looked like liver and bacon were being slipped into ovens.
The head cook, a thin woman called Val Wright with mousey hair held back by a squadron of hair pins, told Brooke he was out of luck if he was looking for the missing girl’s boyfriend.
‘Bruno’s gone. Found me in the office after his break yesterday and said he had to go, a day or two, a week, maybe more. Emptied his locker and off he went – no reason given, but said he was sorry if he’d left me short. I said the job might not be there when he got back but it didn’t stop him.’
Brooke nodded, perched on a bench, and took out his notebook.
One of the passing cooks stopped beside them. ‘Val’s got a soft spot for the Eyetie. She likes a pretty face.’
‘Which is why I’ve never liked you, Fred. Why not surprise us and do some bleeding work?’
Fred swaggered away, hauling a box of lard.
‘We need to find the missing girl, so we thought we’d start with the boyfriend,’ said Brooke.
‘What’s the panic?’ she asked, snagging a stray hair and tucking it behind her ear. ‘I know Peggy Wylde. She’s a grown-up woman. She certainly knows she’s a looker. Maybe she wasn’t happy at home …’
‘Her grandmother died in the Earl Street bombing,’ said Brooke. ‘She may be upset – frantic. We need to find her. We need to know if she met this boy, what she said, if she’s still with him …’
‘He wouldn’t hurt her if that’s what you’re thinking,’ said Wright. ‘Wish I had twenty like him,’ she added pointedly. ‘They give him a rough time. Fact is he can cook. It’s in the blood.’
Brooke strove for patience. ‘What time did he leave?’
‘It was only an hour early – about three o’clock, three-thirty. He’d cooked lunch, so there was just cleaning up left for the next shift. Then he took his break with the rest of them.’
She’d been walking while talking, carrying a large pan to a set of shelves, beside an open door into what was clearly the staff room. A thin mist of cigarette smoke hung in the air, over a long table strewn with newspapers, comics and several sets of cards, splayed mid-game. Half a dozen men sat around, one of them with his head down on his folded arms, asleep.
Brooke asked the men if any of them remembered Zeri acting strangely the day before, especially during the break. Several of the men simply got up and went back to work, while those who bothered to answer said he’d kept himself to himself and spent most of his time reading newspapers.
Giving up, Brooke walked out with Wright into the kitchen. ‘Friendly bunch,’ he said. ‘Where do the women go?’
‘We’ve got our own room, thank God. This place is a pit. But it’s their little kingdom,’ she added, leading the way to her office. ‘They don’t like outsiders. Not even me – but then I’m a woman, and that seems to unsettle them. It’s just smutty pictures, gossip, fags and cards. Pathetic really.’
‘So he has his break and then comes and says he’s off – just like that?’
‘That’s it. He was upset, you could see that.’
‘How could you see that?’
‘He looked pale, and his eyes were full of tears. I asked – you know – if I could help and he asked to borrow the phone, so I let him.’
‘Who did he call?’
Wright shrugged. ‘I left him to it but I heard him ask the switchboard for a Manchester number. I think they just gave him the line – that’s what they usually do. He had his wallet out and he had a slip of paper ready with a number on it.’
‘How long was he on the line for?’
‘Two or three minutes, then he just came and said thanks, not to worry, that something had come up. He just had to go.’
‘What did you think?’
‘I thought it had all got too much for him – his parents being dragged off to a camp.’ She paused to use one of the myriad pins to deal with a stray lock of hair. ‘We don’t pay much by way of w
ages and I know he was short of cash once the restaurant closed. Odds on he won’t see his parents again if they keep them banged up for the Duration. Can’t have been easy for him. He’s only a lad. I think he just gave up. He’ll be facing a call-up soon anyway. Maybe he took his girl with him. Maybe they’re heading for Gretna Green while they’ve got the chance. That’s what people will think.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Roma restaurant stood on a narrow alleyway close to the city’s bus station, a grimy backstreet of poor shops, cordoned off from the smarter streets on one side by the blind walls of Christ’s College. In the distance, bustling St Andrew’s Street echoed with footsteps as lunchtime prompted an exodus of shop workers. At the other end of the alley a wide vista opened off Christ’s Pieces, a diamond of common land neatly crisscrossed by footpaths, which led into the Kite. The restaurant stood between a cobbler’s shop – the window of which was so oily it was difficult to discern the interior – and a pawnbroker’s, which was open and doing brisk business. A woman clutching a broker’s ticket was just coming out, dragging a small child by the hand.
Brooke tipped his hat but she hurried away, ashamed perhaps that sudden poverty had forced her to part company with a winter coat, or a string of fake pearls, for the price of a meal.
The front window of Roma had been smashed. Whatever had been thrown had failed to penetrate the plate glass beyond a small puncture, but it had left a spider’s web of cracks. A crude swastika had been painted on the door. Churchill’s order to round up Italians, Austrians and Germans – to ‘collar the lot’ – had led to random cases of violence and damage. The Borough, with a skeleton force, had been helpless to provide protection.
Brooke rapped on the door and peered in through the glass. He could see half a dozen small round tables with chequered cloths, and the dull glint of cutlery, and a string of garlic bulbs hanging over a counter. Edison, standing back, examined the single upstairs window, waiting for the curtains to twitch.