by Tessa Arlen
“Ten bob? Blimey, that’s a bit steep, ain’t it?” He was laughing as he imitated what he imagined to be a cockney accent. It was so terrible I couldn’t help but smile. He drew the curtain, hooking it against the frame. “I like the way you English say leftenant in spite of the way the French spell it.” He ran his hand along the curtain’s edge at the sill. “There, secured as instructed.” He turned back from the window. “Let’s pretend we didn’t start off on the wrong foot. I introduced myself. Now it’s your turn.”
“I’m Poppy Redfern.”
“Of course you are.” He smiled at me as his gaze swept from the top of my uncovered head to my heavy boots. “Tell me, d’you get sick of everyone saying you look like Katharine Hepburn?”
“Katharine Hepburn?” It took me a moment to realize whom he meant. Wasn’t she the actress always cast in Hollywood as the unfriendly but eccentric English type? “They don’t, actually,” I said. “We don’t blurt out everything we think when we first meet someone.” It was just the sort of thing a prim English snob would say, and I bit my lip to stop myself from saying more.
He obviously agreed with me, because his smile, which had been flashing away at me since we had walked into the house, disappeared. “Nice to meet you, Miss Redfern.” He extended his right hand, and when I shook it he laughed with exaggerated relief and said, “Phew—so I’m forgiven, then?”
If I had been either of the Bradley sisters I would have laughed and said something about how pleased we all were that they had come to help us win the war. But I was feeling awkward, embarrassed, and thoroughly out of my depth, so I ruined it by saying, “So you are the first to arrive?” I sounded just like old Lady Bradley being patronizing at one of her snooty cocktail parties.
He drew in a breath and held it before he replied. “Yup, several squadrons are flying in tomorrow evening; ground crew will drive up here before that. I came on ahead to open up the house after visiting an old friend of my father in Wickham.” He offered no other explanation, nor did he try to continue the conversation.
I turned to walk back to the kitchen. “I’ll just find my helmet and then I’ll be on my way.” I switched on my torch and shone it under the laurel hedge and, after some poking about, found it. He stood in the open scullery doorway without offering to help. I felt miserably unsure how to end this wretched encounter, and to make matters worse, I found myself floundering into my blackout lecture. “Did you know that the glow from your cigarette can be seen quite clearly from above?”
He nodded. “And what about your flashlight?”
“My what?”
He flipped his cigarette onto the cobblestones of the courtyard and crushed it with his heel as he pointed.
“My torch? It’s special issue: the beam points down.”
“Miss Redfern, thank you so much for that very informative talk. I’ll be sure to pass it on to the other guys when they get here.” His face was solemn, but I had the strongest sense that I was being laughed at.
“If you would please,” was all I could think of to say. “Good night, Lieutenant.” And as I stalked off into the night with Bess trailing behind me, the tips of my ears felt hot and red. “That was a disaster,” I said as we crossed the cattle grid. “How could I have had the gall to lecture an air force officer about the importance of blackout, for God’s sake?”
THREE
What can be keeping Mrs. Wantage? Your grandfather will be back at any moment and he doesn’t like it when she hoovers his study late in the morning.” At seventy, my grandmother, Alice Redfern, still has the straight back and upright carriage of a generation of nice girls raised by strict nannies. A lot of people say we look alike. We are both tall and lean, but my grandmother’s once vibrant auburn hair is now completely white, and her clear gray eyes, so like mine in shape and color, are milder in expression. Perhaps that’s because at Granny’s age she has seen her world change so often that she has come to terms with the heartbreak of the past. Whereas my young years still have me fighting for every injustice, a ready champion for a lost cause.
I finished making our midmorning Camp coffee, if you can call what we drink these days coffee.
“I expect everyone will be running late after the party up at the airfield last night. Why didn’t you go, dear? The party was held for the Americans to meet everyone in Little Buffenden.”
The American I had met last week had looked heartily relieved when I had said good night. “ARP patrol,” I reminded her.
“Oh yes, of course. They certainly seem to be nice boys: polite and very friendly.” Mrs. Glossop had told me that Doreen Newcombe and Ivy Wantage have been out every night since they arrived: dancing or to the pictures in Wickham. Of course, she also had a lot to say about Doreen’s seeing someone else so soon after Brian’s death. I put it down to the war: loss, change, and impermanence are the only constants in our lives these days.
“Certainly didn’t take those two pretty girls long to find boyfriends. Though, poor Audrey Wilkes was never one for the boys, was she?” She stirred milk into her coffee as she considered the merits of the unattached girls in our village and their possible chances. Granny’s generation has a one-track mind when it comes to single women.
“Audrey is just more reserved than most,” I said in her defense—not all of us were desperate for boyfriends, even if the gender balance in our village had tipped four to one in a day.
Her eyes sought mine over the rim of her cup, her expression encouraging.
I said nothing.
She cooled her coffee with a gentle outward breath. “I see. Perhaps you’re right. It doesn’t do to be too hasty.”
The door opened from the scullery and my grandfather walked into the kitchen. He is tall too, over six feet. It’s easy to see that Grandad was a very handsome man in his youth—it has to do with the shape of his head and his beautiful blue eyes, though sometimes they can be a bit glacial when he is annoyed. Even in his late seventies he bristles with intention as the commanding officer of the Little Buffenden and Lower Netherton Home Guard. But there was nothing purposeful about him this morning. He stood before us with his head bent, looking uncertain, as if he couldn’t remember where to put the hat he was holding in his hands.
“Down, Bessie—down, girl.” His voice was subdued, his lined face grim as he remembered his hat and hung it on a peg by the door.
“Is something wrong, Jasper?”
He stared at Granny for a moment and then seemed to make up his mind. “Yes, I’m afraid something quite awful has happened; a terrible thing to be sure.” He glanced at me, reluctant to go on, as if I were still ten years old and must be spared the dreadful things that life has a way of dishing up. My grandparents have always been a bit on the overprotective side. “Doreen Newcombe is dead.” He groped for a chair and sat down at the table, shaking his head from side to side, as if trying to rid it of an unpleasant memory.
“Drink this, Jasper; you look all in.” Granny spooned almost a week’s sugar ration into his coffee. “Don’t say a thing until you’ve finished it, my dear.” She used her firm voice and he obediently sipped until his cup was empty. He looked so wretched that I reached across the table and took his large hand in mine. It was cold, and I noticed how splotched with age spots the skin on its back was. I shook it, gently, to bring him back to us. “What happened to Doreen, Grandad?”
He patted my hand as if to reassure me, but his next words did far from that. “Len Smith was trimming the churchyard hedge this morning, and he found Doreen Newcombe’s body underneath it—she was . . . well, she was murdered.”
“Murdered?” Granny’s usually gentle voice was sharp. Grandad nodded; his face seemed to have crumpled in on itself.
“I was driving back from my meeting with Davey Wilkes, and as I came up Water Lane, Len came barreling through the churchyard gate—I practically ran him down. He was shaking like a leaf and his face wa
s a terrible color. I thought for a moment that he was going to have a seizure.” He stared down at the tablecloth, his eyes troubled.
The scullery door opened again, and Mrs. Wantage came into the kitchen. The bright, flowery scarf she always wears, tied turban fashion over her pin curls, looked all wrong against her pale cheeks and reddened eyes. “Such an awful to-do down in the village. Oh . . .” She took in our stunned faces. “So, you have heard . . . about poor little Doreen Newcombe?”
“Major Redfern has just told us. We can’t quite take it in. Did . . . ?” Granny was about to say more, but one look at her husband’s face stopped her: there was to be no gossiping about Doreen’s murder. She stood up from the table. “Jasper, such disturbing news, I think it would do you good to come outside for some fresh air. Come on, Bess, you can get out from underneath everyone’s feet so Mrs. Wantage can get started.”
“Getting some fresh air” was the phrase used in cramped quarters that offered less privacy than Reaches when my grandparents needed to consult in private.
The door was barely closed behind them when Mrs. Wantage said, in the sort of breathless whisper people use when something dreadful has happened, “She was strangled to death.” A hideous image sprang into my mind, and like Grandad, I closed my eyes and shook my head to get rid of it.
Mrs. Wantage fumbled the strings of her apron around her waist and stacked breakfast dishes onto the wooden draining board. “She was strangled with a nylon stocking. The very ones that her new American boyfriend gave her, I should imagine—because no one from around here could get their hands on nylons.” She leaned against the draining board and lifted the hem of her apron to her eyes. “Her body was just left there . . . bundled under the hedge in the churchyard—poor, poor little thing.” She made a gasping sound as she struggled to bring herself under control, gave up, and let the tears flow in a lament for a young woman barely out of her teens, a girl she had known all her life.
I couldn’t bear to see her standing there with her head down, tears splashing onto the breakfast dishes. I got up and put my arm around her heaving shoulders. She leaned against me and rested her head on my shoulder. I could feel her hairpins digging into my skin through her head scarf as she wept. “The doctor had to come for Len, he was that shook up by finding her.” She lifted her pinny to dash her tears away. “Len said that she had been there all night. Her clothes were soaked with dew. It doesn’t bear thinking about.” She pulled a hanky from her apron pocket and blew her nose. To my horror she said, “I think she may have been interfered—”
I lifted my hand to block the dark images her words conjured. “Please, Mrs. Wantage . . . please, don’t think about that. It will only distress you.”
“You’re quite right, Miss Redfern. We must remember Doreen as she was, not how she ended up.” I patted her shoulder until the tears stopped.
“My hubby told our Ivy that that’s the very last time she goes up to the base—or sees that American sergeant.” She nodded in agreement with Mr. Wantage’s decision. “I’m sorry, Miss Redfern, I didn’t mean to upset you.” She put her handkerchief back in her pocket and folded her arms under her bosom. “But after all these years, for as long as I can remember, there has never been a murder in Little Buffenden, nor Lower Netherton neither. Not until those Americans came here. Because it is as clear as morning that Doreen was killed by that new boyfriend of hers, that Sergeant Sand-whatsis.” She lifted her hand, palm out, in defense. “And it’s not just me, by the way. I’m the last to pass judgment. Everyone is saying that it was Doreen’s new American boyfriend what done it.” Her tone became uncertain. “And we all thought they were such nice boys.”
“What did Constable Jones say?”
Mrs. Wantage almost laughed. “Constable Jones? He doesn’t know his backside from his elbow, that one—begging your pardon for the expression. All he’s good for is cautioning people about black-market petrol and diddling their ration books. At least Harold Jones has the sense to know when he is completely out of his depth. First thing he did was to telephone through to Wickham CID. How long does it take to drive from Wickham, do you think?”
“About thirty minutes, maybe less.” I wasn’t wondering about how long it would take the Wickham police to arrive and crouch down underneath the churchyard’s thick laurel hedge to examine the murdered body of Doreen Newcombe. I was doing mental arithmetic. And I was also wondering about Lieutenant Griff O’Neal, who grabbed first and asked questions later.
* * *
—
POLICE INSPECTOR HARGREAVES of Wickham’s Criminal Investigation Department loomed over me as I sat on the edge of my chair. The furniture, brought with us when we had moved from Reaches, was far too large for the lodge’s front parlor, and so was the inspector.
“Thank you for waiting for me, Miss Redfern. I am sorry to be so late getting to you.” He had the careful manners of a considerate man. “Now then, you were walking your ARP patrol last night.” A glance down at his notebook. “Do you know what time it was when you met up with Miss Newcombe, Miss Wantage, and Sergeant . . .” He hesitated over the last name and mispronounced it. “Perrin?”
“I can’t give you the exact time, but I can come close. It would have been between ten twenty and ten forty; something like that.”
“And where was that?”
“Outside the village on the road to Lower Netherton where it junctions with the new road to the main entrance to the airfield.” As I had waited for Detective Hargreaves I had replayed the last time I had spoken to Doreen. I was surprised to realize that when someone you know has been murdered, it colors everything about the last time you saw them, and so I had tried my best to remember our meeting as accurately as I could.
“Hiya, Poppy,” Ivy Wantage had sung out as I walked down the lane toward them. It had taken her less than five days to pick up the slang used by the young men up at the base. Ivy is a happy, outgoing girl, but the village is all she knows, and I had realized just how naïve and impressionable she was. “You should have come to the party up at the base with us! It was ever so much fun, wasn’t it, Doreen?”
Doreen had not answered her friend. She stood apart from Ivy, who was arm in arm with an American in uniform. A three-quarter moon shone through the trees on the edge of the lane, and Doreen’s hair had gleamed white-gold in its light, her carefully lipsticked mouth dark against pale cheeks. She had looked like a doll I had once seen, and desperately wanted to own, in the window of Whiteleys toy shop in London: untouched, perfectly dressed, and self-contained in its glossy white box.
“Poppy, this is Sergeant Joseph Perrone. He’s a flight mechanic with the American Air Force. Miss Redfern is our Air Raid Precautions warden for the village, Joe; that’s why she couldn’t come to the party.” Ivy had completed her introductions and then said, with pride, “Miss Redfern did her air-raid training in London.” Roundly pretty and taller than her best friend, Ivy snuggled closer into the crook of the sergeant’s arm.
The doll came to life: Doreen laughed and shivered her shoulders in pretend fear of night bombings. But Sergeant Perrone automatically extended his right hand. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Redfern. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in London right now.” His tone had been respectful. “Is it still as bad as the newsreels say?”
I had nodded. “Yes, I am afraid it is, but nothing quite as bad as the Blitz last year.” And to make up for my ungracious manner when I had met Lieutenant O’Neal: “We are so glad you are all here . . . you know . . . to help us win this war. I’m sorry I couldn’t come to the party.”
“You weren’t the only one. Bud is still in the sick bay.” Doreen’s laugh was dismissive. “That’s what comes of being daft enough to eat Woolton pie in Wickham.” She waved an unconcerned white hand with darkly lacquered fingernails at the absent Sergeant Bud Sandusky, who had monopolized all her time since he had arrived, and cast a glance under her lashes at P
errone. “I told you boys that stuff was poison. It could have been cat meat.” She had deftly turned the conversation back to an evening that I had not taken part in.
“Certainly wasn’t chicken potpie,” Sergeant Perrone had agreed. “Now, which one of you young ladies do I drop first?”
“Me,” said Doreen. “And then you can walk Ivy all the way down the lane to her house.” A flirtatious laugh as she gave her consent to their continuing on alone.
I related our conversation to Inspector Hargreaves as accurately as I could. Doreen was always so sure of herself, I thought as I waited for him to write down my account in his notebook. Even when she was six it was Doreen who decided what games to play and who should sit next to her in Sunday school. The image of popular and pretty Doreen lying dead in the churchyard flew into my mind again. I had seen dead people being dug out of the rubble of bombed-out buildings and had hoped their end had been quick, but I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like to have your life choked out of you.
“Did everything seem as usual with the two young ladies and the American?” Mr. Hargreaves’s voice cut in on my thoughts. “No arguments or that sort of thing?”
It was the way he said, “American,” as if he were describing a savage from a barely civilized country. After Mrs. Wantage’s observations about how the village was already quite sure that Doreen had been killed by her “American” boyfriend, I found the way he said it distasteful. I was not going to endorse a change in attitude toward the base. “No, they were enjoying each other’s company. I don’t know about ‘as usual’ because it was the first time I had met Sergeant Perrone, but he struck me as a gentleman: thoughtful, polite, and considerate. We said good night and I continued down the lane. I heard the click of the door latch and Doreen’s voice called out something like: ‘Good night, you two—don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’ They all seemed to be having a pretty nice time of it.”