by Tessa Arlen
A MOST TERRIBLE TIMING
“If you remember anything at all, however trivial it might seem, please get in touch with Constable Jones.”
He picked up his hat and in two strides was out of the drawing room and into our cramped hall, where he barked his shin on an oak settle. I followed him. There had been one question nagging away at me all morning—I might as well ask it. “Chief Inspector Har—”
“It’s just plain ‘inspector,’ Miss Redfern.”
“Did anyone else see her last night after eleven o’clock . . . I mean apart from her . . . ?” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word.
The deep lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth and his pouchy eyes gave him the look of a tired basset hound, but his expression was kind. “Her murderer? It’s too early in our inquiry to know—we won’t have the time of her death for a day or two.”
The glance he cast my way, as we said good-bye, was thoughtful. I’m certainly on his list of suspects, I thought as I closed the front door.
BERKLEY PRIME CRIME
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2019 by Tessa Arlen
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Arlen, Tessa, author.
Title: Poppy Redfern and the midnight murders / Tessa Arlen.
Description: First Edition. | New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2019. | Series: A woman of World War II mystery; book 1
Identifiers: LCCN 2019022617 (print) | LCCN 2019022618 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984805805 (paperback) | ISBN 9781984805812 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3601.R5445 P67 2019 (print) | LCC PS3601.R5445 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022617
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022618
First Edition: November 2019
Cover art by Robert Rodriguez
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
To Daphne, with love and admiration
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first book of a new series involves thanks to many, but without the generosity and encouragement of my agent, Kevan Lyon, there would be no Poppy Redfern!
I am thrilled to be working with Michelle Vega at Berkley, whose enthusiasm and great insights made the editing process so much fun. Also at Berkley, thank you to Brittanie Black, Jessica Mangicaro, Stacy Edwards, and Jenn Snyder, and of course to Robert Rodriguez for the design of this stunning cover.
This book was written during a very interesting time for our family. We sold our home of nearly twenty-five years on lovely, evergreen Bainbridge Island and moved to the historic city of Santa Fe in the high desert of New Mexico. The change was made simply for the fun of a new adventure, and I think the energy, excitement, and, sometimes, the uncertainty of those fourteen months have contributed in their own inimitable way to the creation of Poppy Redfern and her world.
And with that said, my thanks go always to my children and friends for their kindness and support, but most of all my truly heartfelt thanks go to Chris.
And lastly to my father and grandfather for their stories of World War II. I wish you were both here to enjoy my recycling of your anecdotes and memories of wartime Britain, both sad and funny alike. I am especially grateful for my father’s adolescent worship of the fictional hero Biggles.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Historical Notes
About the Author
ONE
Incoming air raid. Twenty to thirty bombers . . . could be more. You have fifteen . . .” The supervisor’s voice was drowned out by the warbling howl of an air-raid siren. Our response was immediate: mugs of tea were abandoned and half-smoked cigarettes plunged into ashtrays as, tightening our helmet straps, we left the fug of our Air Raid Precautions post for the cool night air outside.
I looked up; it’s the first thing you do when the siren sounds. Searchlights crisscrossed the night sky. Half-ruined buildings, casualties of our last air raid four nights ago, cast skeleton shadows on streets made almost impassable with broken brick and rubble.
“If they’re Dorniers we have less than fifteen minutes.” Our ARP instructor looked us over and singled me out to tell me the words I had longed to hear for the two weeks of my training. “Redfern, you can take Clegg and Clave Streets solo. Humphries: Wapping High and Cinnamon, and Duckworth, you take Plumsom. Keep them calm, keep them moving, and check on as many houses as you can for the elderly and sick. Try to get them to safety in ten minutes and you might manage it in fifteen.” His instructions never varied as he rapidly allotted sections of Wapping’s neighborhoods to our care. Percy turned to include a group of new recruits. “The rest of you come with me.”
I started to sprint toward Clegg Street, but he pulled me back by my arm. “No heroics.” A frown underscored his command. “Your job is to get as many of them to safety as you can.”
I turned into Clegg and went down its center at a brisk trot. Doors opened to the left and the right of me. Families spilled out into the narrow street between face-to-face lines of meanly built East End terraced houses that were home to the families of London’s dockworkers. The gray-white glare of searchlights swung overhead, lighting up tired faces raised briefly heavenward, as we raced for the safety of Wapping’s Underground station.
A gaunt young woman, her raincoat flapping open over pajamas,
shouted instructions to two children. “Daisy, take Jimmy’s hand, and don’t let go of it.” She was carrying a toddler and a couple of blankets. “Evening, Miss Redfern. You’d better check on number twenty-five, her mum-in-law took bad yesterday. She might need help.”
Two doors down an elderly woman was helping an even older one out of the house. “’Course you’ve got to come, lovey,” I heard her say. “She must come, mustn’t she, Warden?”
“Yes, of course. Do you need help with her?”
“No, ’s’orright, I got her. Come on, lovey, you heard what the warden said.”
Ten minutes? I looked at my watch. It was more like eight and I had half the street to go. I picked up the pace.
“Bloomin’ racket.” An old man was shuffling along in his bedroom slippers. “Can’t hear a thing except that ruddy siren.” He stopped and shook his walking stick at the sky.
“No time for that, sir.” I took him by the arm and walked him forward to a young woman with curlers in her hair. “Take him with you to the Underground, please.”
“’Ello there, Mr. Perkins, where’s your daughter?”
“Somewhere ahead with the kiddies.”
“Well, you come along with me, we’ll see you safely there.”
I dodged the corner into Clave Street to urge on the last of the stragglers. “Air raid in five minutes.” I crossed the road to two children: one sitting on the curb with his feet in the gutter, crying, and a little girl standing white-faced with panic on the pavement. “Where is your mum?”
“She went to the pub, with my aunty.” An older girl came out of the house, carrying a baby.
“I’ll carry him.” I picked up the little boy, who buried his face in the collar of my jacket, and I held out my hand to the girl. “Let’s go and find your mummy, shall we?” She put her hand in mine. “Come on,” I said to their sister, who was dithering with a key in her hand. “No time to lock up.”
At the bottom of the street a crowd of people was filing down the steps into Wapping Underground station. Babies cried, children wailed, and mothers shouted out to one another as if they were meeting in the queue at the grocer’s.
“Blimey, doll, you had time to get dressed?”
“Got to look nice for Jerry!”
“We only just got back from the pub!”
“Bloody Krauts, second time in four days.”
“At least it isn’t as bad as it was last year—felt as if I was living in the bloomin’ Underground.”
Now that we were near safety there was a determination among the families who inhabited the dock area of East London to pretend that our race for shelter had been a breeze. As if the danger we faced could be obliterated by their collective camaraderie: a determination not to be intimidated by a bunch of cowardly German pilots who rained down hell on us from the lordly safety of their aircraft.
The crowd had slowed to a shuffle as it made its descent to the shelter of the Underground. “You’re going to have to move more quickly!” I put the little boy down next to his sister on the pavement and pushed my way to the head of the queue, knowing exactly what I would find.
“You can’t make me.” An elderly woman who weighed all of two hundred and fifty pounds had stopped at the top of the steps. “You know I don’t go anywhere by Tube. I always catch the bus.”
“Hullo, Mrs. White. Would you do me a favor? These little ones are scared stiff of the bombs. Would you help this little girl down into the Underground?”
I reached out to a small, skinny little scrap of a thing, clutching a grubby doll in her arms, my eyebrows raised to ask her mother’s permission. She prodded her daughter forward. “Go on, Dottie, help the old lady down the steps.”
The line plodded forward down into the warm, stale air eddying up from the station below. I turned to go back up the steps. “Four minutes. Keep moving. Four minutes . . .”
Clave Street was empty. Running as fast as I could, I covered the distance to the back alley that ran behind the two rows of houses. People often hid in the back alley so they could go back to bed when the all clear sounded. There was no one in sight. The sirens had stopped, but the searchlights continued their dance against the sky.
I blew three sharp blasts on my whistle. “Air raid, two minutes.” My voice echoed across the broken intersection, and two figures emerged from the rubble of what had once been a corner shop and ran across the road toward the Underground.
As I followed them down, I heard the engines of the first squadron. Against everything I had learned in training, I couldn’t help myself. I stopped and looked up. Silhouetted against the lit sky I saw the first planes approaching from the south: heavy black silhouettes, their wingtips almost touching in formation. They were Luftwaffe Dorniers, all right. Twenty? It looked like there were hundreds.
Ack-ack-ack. The antiaircraft guns mounted in concrete down by the docks sent bright bolts of fire up into the sky, and I heard, and then felt, the percussion of the first bombs as they hit the homes of the people who cowered under the pavement below me.
But where were our boys? Poised to race down the steps to the Underground, I looked up again. As if on cue, the cluttered skies were filled with small, fast aircraft, dropping down from above the German Dornier bombers in a shattering hail of machine-gun fire.
I heard myself cheer. It ripped out of me in a full-throated shout of approval and admiration, loud even against the racket of an air battle. Spitfires and the men who fly them are our country’s heroes: their bravery and courage during London’s Blitz last year had earned our absolute gratitude and respect.
I ran down the steps into the fusty protection of the Underground. My heart was racing as I pulled up short at the bottom of the steps to walk with calm authority out onto Platform One. The dull lights overhead illuminated smooth, oily train tracks as they snaked into the dark ellipse of the tunnel. On the platform Wapping’s families were going about the business of bedding down for the night on gritty concrete.
I watched the garrulous efficiency of mothers, aunts, and grandmothers as they organized their children for sleep: their calm stoicism, born of months of practice, and their determined cheerfulness as they helped one another out and gave comfort to neighbors who had lost everything. “Here, Vi, I brought an extra blanket and a pillow just in case, but it’s a warm night. No, love, ’s’orright—don’t mention it.”
The earth above us shuddered and the pale lights flickered, plunging us into a dark so absolute that our silently held breath seemed to echo our fear. A heartbeat later and we were revealed to one another again. Vi moaned and ducked her head. “The West End has such nice, deep Underground stations—miles below the bombs.”
“Come on, love, chin up. Nothing to be afraid of. Here, have a nip of this.” What was it, I wondered, that kept them so unfailingly stalwart night after night?
At the far end of the platform, a group of girls with Veronica Lake hairstyles, wearing their fashionable all-in-one siren suits, sang along to a street musician’s accordion, their eyes on a group of teenage boys whose only thought was to be a part of what was going on upstairs.
“There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover tomorrow, just you wait and see.” Their girlish voices were sweet, their faces perfectly made-up. A couple of boys darted a quick look before returning to swap cigarette trading cards featuring tanks, aircraft, and battleships. I sent the singers silent thanks for their innocent belief that the reality of night bombing could be washed away by the simple melody of a Vera Lynn song.
“Cuppa tea, ducky? Probably need one after all that galloping around.” The woman from number twenty-five held out an enamel mug of milky tea that she had poured from a large green tin thermos.
“Bloody Hitler,” she said without a trace of rancor. “He’ll be laughing on the other side of his face when the Americans get here. When are you going home, dear? Back to your village
, I mean.”
“Tonight’s the last night of training. I leave tomorrow morning.”
“Glad you made it through, then, ducky.” She pulled a blanket up over a sleeping child lying next to her on the platform. “Not everyone does.”
Below London’s battered streets we could feel the bombs shattering our city. I drank tea and waited for the all clear, when I would leave the sleeping families to go back up those steps to what was left of their neighborhood. Then the night would be full of different sounds: the shrill bells of ambulances and the deeper clang of fire engines. That would be when the digging would begin, and when the tally of who had really won and who had lost would be reckoned.
* * *
—
IT WAS REASSURING to walk down Little Buffenden’s quiet, empty High Street the following evening. The soft, country-summer air was exquisitely sweet after London’s thick clinker-dust atmosphere, but the simple stillness of an August evening was not mine to enjoy for long.
“You’re back from your London training, then, are you?” Enid Glossop’s voice, pitched to carry, reached me on the other side of the street. I didn’t quite flinch, but she certainly stopped me mid-stride. “I would have thought the least they could do was have your uniform ready in time for your first patrol.”
“Come on, Bess, let’s get it over with—and remember not to jump up,” I said to the little dog running at my side. We crossed the narrow street to stand before a tiny middle-aged woman wearing a Royal Mail–issue beret pulled down in the front, almost to her eyebrows.
“This is my uniform, Mrs. Glossop,” I said with what I hoped was a face composed to express polite nothingness.
“That’s it?” Disbelieving eyes swept up to my black pudding-basin helmet with W stenciled on it, and down again to heavy lace-up ankle boots. “What does the W stand for?”
“Warden. Air Raid Precautions warden.”
“I see.” She looked like someone who suspected she was being lied to. “I know you say it’s a uniform, but it looks like that outfit Mr. Churchill wears when he’s being photographed on bomb sites.” Her mouth performed a tight imitation of a smile. Mrs. Glossop has a way about her that always manages to convey dissatisfaction.