by Jim Kelly
She drew herself up on the pillows.
‘It’ll be the Eyetie boy,’ she said.
‘Will it?’ asked Brooke. ‘They’d been going out that long?’
She nodded. ‘The girls will know for sure, and they keep secrets. Perhaps there were other boys, they may know their names; I only hope Peggy did.’
Again, it was a bitter thing to say, and once it was out of her mouth Brooke could see she desperately wanted to take it back, but all she managed was: ‘Can you go now?’
He closed her door, and heard the crimp of pillows, and imagined her turning her face to the wall.
In the front room they were eating slices of cake a well-wisher had left on the step. The simple act of sharing food had transformed the atmosphere. Ollie sat on the floor, a plate balanced on his knees.
Elsie looked stoical, already the senior adult. ‘Have you found the Eyetie? It’s him, isn’t it?’
He told them Zeri had been found and was being brought to Cambridge for interrogation. As the last person to see their sister alive, he was a vital witness. There was no doubt Peggy was murdered, he told them, and Zeri was a suspect: at this moment, nothing more than that.
‘I’ve just told your mother the results of the autopsy. The pathologist asked me to tell you all that her death was swift and painless.’
Brooke left a beat, letting that news sink in.
‘I’m afraid I have to tell you something else …’
The girls, breaking their habit, looked at each other.
‘Peggy was two months pregnant.’
Connie covered her mouth, and reached out for Ollie, while Elsie looked down briefly at her hands, held together on her lap.
‘How long had she been going out with Bruno Zeri?’ asked Brooke.
‘About two months,’ said Elsie.
‘Were there other boyfriends?’
‘Plenty of them pushed their luck,’ said Elsie. ‘It’s the war. All the boys think they’ve got the right. Who knows, eh? We could all be dead tomorrow. So why wait?’ She dabbed at her mouth quickly with a handkerchief. ‘There was Tim – the pilot. She dumped him about that time,’ said Elsie.
‘Tim who?’
‘Tim Vale. He’s just got his wings or whatever they call it. He’ll be flying soon. They went out for a bit before the Eyetie came on the scene. He came round here – even Mum liked him. And he had a few bob. He came round at Christmas with a pair of ice skates for Peggy – brand new. And we all went to the Cricketers one night with Grandma and Granddad and he had a five-pound note in his wallet – I saw it.’
‘And there were other boys, but we didn’t get the names, did we, Else? And there was a secret admirer,’ said Connie.
They all managed a grin, even Ollie.
‘She wouldn’t tell us who he was – but he wanted to run away with her, and start a new life, and he was going to buy her everything she ever wanted. I think she made him up.’
Elsie was shaking her head. ‘I think he was real, alright. She said she couldn’t shake him off. That it had started off as a joke but she was scared now.’
‘She said that, Elsie – that she was scared of him?’ Brooke asked.
Elsie nodded. ‘She said she couldn’t tell us who he was because she didn’t want to hurt anybody. So maybe he was married.’
‘But we don’t know for sure,’ said Connie, as if her sister had gone too far.
‘We’re pretty sure whoever got into Nora’s house knew what he was looking for – the rings, and the hidden cash,’ said Brooke. ‘Did Tim and Bruno go round to Earl Street to see your grandma?’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Elsie. ‘We all went – well, not Mum. Peggy loved showing off the boys. They’d all go down the Cricketers with Granddad too. We had a good time.’
Connie nodded. ‘I was gonna take Ollie, but it’s too late now. It would have been fun.’
‘And there’s no one with anything against the family? No feuds?’ asked Brooke.
‘We’re just an ordinary family,’ said Elsie. ‘The only feud we had was with each other. It was silly, really. Mum’s chapel – cos Dad was – and she doesn’t hold with the pub, or dancing, or courting. Nana liked to kick her heels up. So did Granddad. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t have rubbed along if they’d all tried. It just festered. Take the Eyetie – he wasn’t really welcome here, but Nana thought he was a hoot, so he and Peggy went round loads.’
‘Mum likes Ollie,’ said Connie, proudly, playing with his hair.
‘He’s new. Give her time,’ said Elsie.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
This time Marshall airfield, on the edge of the city, was on full alert. It took them several minutes to get past the barrier in the radio car, despite the fact the Spinning House had rung ahead. An invasion warning had been issued for Eastern England, and a machine-gun nest on the perimeter wire was fully manned. The guards at the gate checked their documents, unsmiling, and Brooke was asked to remove his glasses; gone were the days when the airfield workers came and went in a crowd. Once their paperwork was cleared they were told there had been three separate reports of parachutists landing in Norfolk and then melting away into the Fens. Roadblocks had been set up on all major roads. Raids were expected on coastal defences and airfields inland. The base was busy, or at least affected to look busy. Traffic circled the runway: petrol dowsers, staff cars, REME lorries and army jeeps sped past.
Pilot Officer Tim Vale had been assigned to the night flight and was out on standby at the eastern edge of the runway apron. The police driver set off over the grass, the car bouncing lazily. Brooke counted six Spitfires ahead, all surrounded by mechanics, working in the blinding sunlight.
It was only as they got closer that he realised each of the aircraft was smartly painted in jet black, ready for combat at night and intercepting incoming bombers. There was something un-British about the brutal livery, as if each wing might sport a swastika.
Beyond the aircraft there stood a line of barrack huts. They had been directed by the guardhouse to Mess Hut 8: a wooden pavilion, with a ramshackle veranda. Three pilots were slumped in deckchairs out on the grass listening to a radio broadcast of the Met Office forecast.
Tim Vale was inside on his bunk. A wooden locker sported several magazine pictures of half-naked women, mostly Hollywood starlets. Vale was reading a newspaper, the Express, while smoking, and when he saw Brooke there was a perceptible moment of absolute immobility, the hand holding the cigarette poised an inch from his slightly plump lips.
‘Pilot Officer Vale?’ said Brooke, surveying the dormitory, which was empty except for four men playing cards at a table by the door.
He held out his warrant card.
Vale flushed, fidgeting, stubbing out the cigarette then promptly knocking out a fresh one from a packet, forgetting to offer one to Brooke, while producing a gold lighter.
It occurred to Brooke that the slightly awkward adolescent manners might be a cover. Vale was good-looking in a clean-cut fashion, lightly built, with fair hair and blue eyes. In an RAF flight jacket he would have just about passed as old enough to drink beer in a pub.
‘Sorry,’ he said, sitting up, finally proffering the packet. ‘My first duty shift,’ he added, perhaps feeling the need to explain the nervous energy. ‘If the balloon goes up tonight so do I.’ He smiled at his own joke. ‘They reckon the invasion might be on.’
Another pilot appeared at the door, shutting out the light.
‘So what’s Tim been up to?’ he asked, in a loud voice. ‘Must be serious. Gentleman has his own police driver.’
One of the card players looked up. ‘I reckon he’s done a ton in the MG.’
‘Told me he had one of the barmaids from The Plough the other night – took her out for a spin after closing time,’ said another. ‘It’s not her dad, is it?’
Brooke suggested to Vale that they go outside. The incessant banter was another cover, of course, and one Brooke knew well. Fear, anxiety, loss – all these painful emotio
ns were camouflaged by jokes and innuendo. But he noted that Vale looked pleased with the reference to the pub barmaid.
One table on the grass had been set apart, and they sat in folding chairs, while the loud-mouthed pilot brought them tea by way of making peace.
‘I’m still the new boy,’ said Vale. ‘I get some stick.’
‘It’s about Peggy Wylde,’ said Brooke.
‘I heard. They reckon the Eyetie from the canteen did it. That right?’
Brooke ignored the question, suspicious at the speed with which Vale had sought to misdirect the conversation. ‘You went out with Miss Wylde; that’s right, isn’t it? When did that end?’
‘She dumped me good and proper at the start of the summer – day before my birthday, in fact, 28th June. I went round and tried to patch it up – you know – after she said it was all off. I said I might get posted up country but I’d got the car, I could get back. It’d be fun … Then I heard that I might get on the black Spitfires here. I’d be just up the road. It would have been perfect. But you know, she’d fallen for Rudolph Valentino and that was it, which was a shame.’
‘You said you tried to talk to her. Where was this?’
For a moment Vale hesitated and Brooke knew he was calculating, weighing up the answer.
‘Their house, on Palmer Road.’
‘Ever go to the grandmother’s – Nora’s?’
‘Yes. We all went down the Cricketers. It was a laugh. We had some fun, alright. You’ve got to have some fun …’
‘Did Nora boast about her nest egg – the cash she kept hidden in the house?’
Vale shook his head. ‘Can’t have been much; the house was a bit tatty and Peggy’s granddad drank for England.’
A lone Oxford was overhead, circling for a landing, and for a moment they tracked its flight, although Brooke took the chance to watch Vale. There was something about this moment in a life – the boundary between a child and a man – which was oddly disturbing. He thought Tim Vale was probably growing up very quickly, almost before his eyes.
‘When was the last time you saw Peggy?’
‘To talk to? Like I said, two months ago. I saw her most days up here but she just cut me dead, as if we’d never met or anything, which was a bit rich because she dumped me.’
Brooke took off his hat despite the sunlight and ran a hand back through his hair. ‘So she never told you that she was pregnant?’
Vale’s cheeks reddened, and for the first time Brooke thought he looked afraid.
‘How – you know – how far gone …?’
‘Two months, Tim. So it’s you, or it’s Bruno Zeri. Or someone we don’t know about yet. Did you get lucky? What did you say? That once you started flying you might not come back. Better live life for the day. Why not give a hero something to live for … Have some fun while we can.’
Vale was shaking his head. ‘I never did. We had a kiss and that down by the river but that was it. I walked her home, but that was it, honest to God. It isn’t me – it’s the Eyetie, bound to be.’
He took up his mug of tea and began to blow and sip.
‘You didn’t ask her to marry you, then?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ he said, but he wouldn’t meet Brooke’s shielded eyes.
In the Great War he’d heard the story a hundred times. Men – boys – proposing to girls outside dance halls and pubs, girls they hardly knew, who’d taken pity on them and said yes, they’d wait, so that they’d have a sweetheart to write home to.
‘Where were you the evening she died, Tim, the evening after the air raid on the Kite?’
‘Out in the car for a spin.’ He pointed across the grass to half a dozen neatly parked cars in the lee of a line of poplars.
The blue MG stood out. It looked brand new. Brooke imagined it hurtling down dappled lanes. And sky-blue, of course, Peggy’s favourite colour.
‘You don’t own a bicycle then?’
‘Nope,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Where did you go in the car?’
‘A pub out at Hornsea – the Golden Fleece – then back over the downs at Newmarket. I had the coupons so I thought I’d use ’em up.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yup. I’ve got a girl in town but she works shifts at the Exchange.’ The city’s telephone system was run from a grey Edwardian block directly opposite the Spinning House. Each evening, each morning, young women came and went, keeping the switchboards running.
‘Then what?’ prompted Brooke.
‘I drove home, had tea, and we listened to Haw-Haw.’
‘Who’s “we”?’
‘My mother. She’s a widow; my father was RAF, a squadron leader, but he got shot up over Amiens in ’18, never recovered. He died a few years back. It’s just her at home so I keep her company.’
Brooke took a note. ‘That where the money comes from, is it? I doubt a pilot officer’s wages cover an MG. And the girls said you were generous with presents for Peggy.’
‘Mum says I should have some laughs now, before it gets serious.’
Brooke stood. ‘Let’s hope someone at the Golden Fleece remembers you,’ he said, standing, stretching in the sun. ‘You a regular?’
Vale’s easy smile was back. ‘Used to be. But this lot uses The Plough – you know, at Fen Ditton. So we’ll go there when we’re stood down. It’s all new to me.’
He gave Brooke a boyish grin – a cool pint with his fellow pilots after an aerial gunfight was clearly an idyllic prospect.
‘Right. We’ll check with the Golden Fleece. If they don’t remember you, they’ll remember the car,’ said Brooke. ‘It’s a good job it’s so flashy. You’d never forget it.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Brooke sat in the great lobby of the Fitzwilliam Museum, alone, in the dark, listening to the distant siren at the Guildhall. The mechanical wail, trapped beneath the soaring dome, circled, dying out, only to be pursued by the next identical note. The dome’s architect, a man whose name escaped him, but who’d met his grandfather, had fallen to his death at Ely Cathedral – stepping out unthinkingly across the belfry floor of the West Tower, over an open trapdoor. The idea of that interior fall inspired a sudden bout of vertigo now, so that Brooke had to sit down on the marble bench and take a deep breath.
He had returned to the Spinning House from Marshall in a state of despair. It was extremely unlikely that Bruno Zeri was their double killer. Young Tim Vale seemed equally incapable of such crimes, although Brooke had the strong sense, which had grown since he’d left the airfield, that he was telling lies about something.
But a single phone call had transformed his mood. A sergeant from Norwich police station rang at seven o’clock. The market trader who had spotted stolen goods from Earl Street had given detectives the name of his supplier, and one of the items in question had arrived by motorcycle messenger: a silver-plate salver, engraved to mark the retirement of Arthur Pollard. The market trader said the man was a regular in the trade, and there was an invoice of sorts, with a name, but no address, although he knew he was from Cambridge. The firm’s name was AA Supply.
Footsteps echoed in the stairwell and a guard appeared. ‘Sir. The major will see you in the south gallery – down the stairs but turn left, not right to the BCC.’
Brooke descended, the persistent wail of the siren almost imperceptible once he’d reached the basement. A corridor led away into a large shadowy gallery, where Kohler sat at desk in a pool of amber light. In the shadows Brooke discerned the shattered face of a god, and the torso of a lion.
‘Eden. I thought we could talk here. Fewer flapping ears. There’s a raid on but it looks like a false alarm. Apologies in advance if I have to skedaddle. When I want to get away I come here, although it’s a bit draughty. I can offer warmth …’
He held up a bottle of whisky.
Pouring drinks into tin mugs in the half-light, Kohler’s face was caught in profile. He looked like a pharaoh’s scribe, working deep, perhaps, in the bowels of a pyr
amid. The papers on his desk were held down by a piece of ancient stone sculpture, a scarab beetle, exquisitely carved.
‘I’ve got this,’ said Brooke, producing a satchel, and from within, the silver salver. ‘It’s on the inventory of missing items from Earl Street. It was sold on to a market trader in Norwich. The name of the seller was Joe Miller. All we know is that he’s from Cambridge and he operates under the name of AA Supply. I don’t suppose you’ve made any progress on the lists I asked for, Edmund?’
Kohler had them to hand, in a leather document pouch, which Brooke recognised from the desert campaign. It was an item which seemed to sum up the quartermaster’s careful stewardship.
‘They’re not complete, but they run to hundreds, Eden. It’s a hell of a job. But I’ve got the bare bones – alphabetical lists of all the men drafted in to civil defence.’
There were ten in total, each one allocated to one of the services provided under central control, from auxiliary firemen to motorcycle and bicycle messengers.
They split the lists. Unless Miller was on the electoral roll they’d have to apply to the Home Office to track down his ID card, and given the common nature of his name that might produce dozens of results, and would take months. Brooke’s hunch was still that their thief wore a uniform of some kind.
An hour later they were still scanning columns of typed names and addresses: there were nearly two hundred auxiliary firemen alone, and twice as many ARP wardens – and it was here, on one of the longest lists, that they found Joe Miller at last.
‘Got him!’ said Kohler, triumphant. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he added. ‘Address on Earl Street, Eden. ARP warden since a week before the war. Exempt from military service due to a dodgy heart. Age given as thirty-six. Married. Occupation “trader” – whatever that means.’
Brooke could even recall his face, glimpsed that night as he staggered out of the Wellington Arms after the bomb had hit. Fresh-faced, middle-aged, with an oddly persistent smile. At the time he’d only been really interested in the tin hat marked W. He’d tried, subtly, to discourage Brooke from going into number 36. And the next day he’d sat on the kerb smoking, watching the clear-up operation, running a hand through fair hair.