The Night Gate - Enzo MacLeod Investigation Series 07 (2021)

by Peter May

‘So she’s married and he’s not. If the lack of a ring is anything to go by.’

  He glanced at her, surprised. ‘You noticed.’

  ‘He clearly has a thing for her.’

  ‘Unrequited love.’

  ‘Or not.’

  This time he raised one eyebrow. ‘Hadn’t thought of that.’

  She slipped her arm through his. ‘That’s because you’re not a woman, Enzo.’

  ‘Thank God!’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The old lady has been silent for a long time, and he has been reluctant to prompt her in case somehow the spell of her story is broken and she draws a line under the telling of it.

  ‘Shall I make myself a coffee?’ he asks at length.

  She looks up suddenly. ‘I can do that.’ She places her hands on the arms of her chair to raise herself to her feet. But he gets quickly to his.

  ‘No, no, I’m sure I can find everything for myself.’ He was quite familiar now with her kitchen. ‘Can I make you tea while I’m at it?’

  She shakes her head, sinking back in her rocker, clearly happy to let him get his coffee for himself. And he notices that she has barely drunk the tea she had made herself earlier. It would be stone cold by now, despite its proximity to the fire. The logs he threw on earlier have reduced themselves to embers, and are radiating a heat that he

  imagines must be burning her legs. He remembers how his grandmother’s legs had become mottled from sitting too close to the fire. Corned-beef legs, she had called them. ‘Shall I add another log?’

  ‘Please.’

  When he returns with his coffee the wood is well alight and she has not moved a muscle. As he settles once again in his chair she swings her head slowly in his direction. ‘Have you ever been to the Isle of Lewis, monsieur? It’s in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.’

  ‘I know of it, but I have never been.’

  ‘A brutal place, by all accounts. It is first in line to welcome the gales that have gathered their strength across five thousand kilometres of Atlantic Ocean. A windbreak for the mainland beyond.’

  He wonders where on earth this can be leading, but forces himself to contain his impatience as he waits for her to resume her story. Which, at length, she does . . .

  Poor Georgette was as sick as a dog during her six-hour ferry crossing from Mallaig to the Isle of Lewis. It was the furthest north, and west, she had ever been, and she was not enjoying it. The rail journey from London to Fort William the previous day had been long and tedious. Poor weather had denied her any sight of the magnificent views afforded by the west coastline of the Highlands of Scotland. The remainder of the journey from Fort William to Mallaig had passed almost entirely in cloud, mist descending from the heavens, and she spent an uncomfortable night in a basic lodging house in the town.

  The blackout was still in force when the ferry left at first light, cleaving a difficult passage around the Isle of Skye and across a stormy Minch. In spite of the rain and the sea spray she had spent most of the journey on deck, her coat flapping furiously around her legs, back to the wind as she retched into the brine.

  The wind died a little as they sailed, finally, into the lee of the island’s east coast, and the fishing port of Stornoway emerged from the mist. Headlands to north and south took dark shape before vanishing into the featureless bog of the hinterland beyond. And it was with shaking legs that Georgette stumbled down the gangplank on to the dock and felt the world still moving. Even though the concrete beneath her feet was sunk in solid bedrock.

  Sea-weary fellow passengers pushed past her, greeted by loved ones, friends or family, and were quickly swallowed by the smirr that drifted across the town like a mist. She heard idling engines rev, then accelerate into the gloom of the day, and it seemed that only a few minutes had passed before she was left standing on her own, a wet and forlorn figure clutching a sodden cardboard suitcase. The road that ran off around the southern flank of the town was lined by houses and shops that seemed painted on gauze, insubstantial, almost transparent, and she watched for the lights of the vehicle she had been told would pick her up.

  It was nearly fifteen minutes before finally she heard the distant rumble of a heavy motor, then saw the lights of a canvas-covered military truck taking shape as it rumbled on to the quay. A cheery, ruddy-faced young soldier flung open the passenger door and leaned out an arm to give her a hand up.

  ‘You look a bit wet, love,’ he said.

  ‘So would you if you’d stood for six hours on the deck of a ferry emptying your stomach into a storm, then waited twenty minutes in the rain for your lift.’ She hauled herself up into the passenger seat and hefted her suitcase into her lap. She glared at the driver. ‘You’re late.’

  His grin widened. ‘Feisty one, aren’t you? They can be a bit rough, them crossings. Never know when the ferry’s going to arrive.’

  He crunched into first gear, manoeuvred his truck through a three-point turn, and pulled out on to the road, turning hard left and over the narrow spit of land dividing inner and outer harbours. The inner harbour was packed with trawlers and small fishing vessels sitting cheek by jowl on a high tide and towering over the quayside. Beyond water that reflected a pewtery sky, a hill rose darkly into darker trees, and the lights of a forbidding-looking building emerged from the shadow of the hillside, fighting to penetrate the murk.

  The driver lowered his head to look up at it. ‘Lews Castle,’ he said. ‘That’s where you’re staying.’

  ‘Is that where you’re stationed?’

  ‘No, we’re at the RAF base out towards Point.’ And he flicked his head vaguely to the west. Then he snuck a glance in her direction. ‘I thought you was French. They said you was. And here’s me practising my parlez-vous anglais.’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint.’

  He grinned. ‘Not disappointed at all, love. Whatever nationality you is.’

  And in spite of herself she blushed. ‘So what’s at the castle?’ she said quickly to cover her embarrassment.

  ‘They got wounded soldiers convalescing in one wing of it. Some of them off the beaches at Dunkirk. Nurses live in, apparently. Some RAF brass based up there, too, and a training school of some kind. Though they don’t tell us nothing about that.’

  They rumbled through the deserted town, following the curve of the inner harbour, past feebly lit shop windows below a skyline broken by church spires. ‘Where is everybody?’ Georgette asked.

  Her driver said, ‘Would you go out on a day like this if you didn’t have to?’ He half turned and responded to her glare with a wink. ‘Mind you, I been here three months and the weather don’t ever get much better than this.’

  They left the inner harbour behind them then before turning left, and climbing a narrow road through trees that delivered them eventually to the back of the castle. The driver brought his truck to a shuddering halt and he leaned on his horn for a good three seconds.

  ‘That’s you, love.’ He reached past her to push open the passenger door. ‘See you around.’

  Not if I see you first, Georgette thought.

  As he accelerated noisily away, a young soldier who clearly didn’t relish being out in the rain emerged from a back door. Yellow electric light fell feebly from ground-floor windows to be snuffed out by even feebler daylight.

  ‘Miss Pig Nall?’ he called.

  ‘Peenyaall,’ she corrected him phonetically.

  ‘You follow me, miss.’ And he turned abruptly back inside. No formalities, not even an offer to carry her case.

  She sighed and hurried after him, through vast kitchens, where white-aproned staff flitted from steaming pot to steaming pot, appetising smells issuing forth to fill the air with delicious condensation that ran down the windows. Georgette’s stomach growled. It had been empty for a long time now but was not, she feared, destined to be satisfied any time soon.

  She follow
ed the soldier out into a long hallway that ran the length of the building. She dripped rainwater on to its shiny floor and hurried through elaborately corniced archways, trying to keep up. He turned on to a broad staircase that took them then through several floors to a labyrinthine attic. At the end of a narrow corridor he stopped and opened a door into a tiny room with a sloping ceiling and small dormer window. ‘This is yours. Toilet’s at the other end of the hall. Briefing downstairs in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Wait a minute, I’m soaked to the skin. I need to wash and get changed. I can’t possibly do it in fifteen minutes.’

  He was unmoved. ‘Fifteen minutes, miss.’ And he brushed past her to head back along the way they had come.

  She turned to gaze with sinking heart into the room that was to be hers for who knew how long. Drab, colourless, utilitarian furniture. Cold green linoleum, and a wallpaper whose pattern was so faded and dull it was barely a memory. Her window looked out across a flat roof to crenellations beyond, the inner harbour almost lost in the mist a long way below. She threw her suitcase on to the bed and sat down beside it, hands clutched miserably in her lap. Rusted springs groaned beneath a lumpy mattress and she wondered what the hell she was doing here.

  The same private who had taken her to her room showed Georgette into a small salon off the main ballroom which, he told her, was now being used as a dining room. Their evening meal would be served at five.

  The salon was arranged with half a dozen chairs grouped around a blackboard on a tripod, two windows along one side giving out on to a view of the town below. Four young women, seated around a burly non-commissioned officer standing at the blackboard, turned curious heads in her direction as the door opened. The women gazed at her with unglazed interest. As the door closed behind her again, the NCO cocked his head to one side, a sarcastic smile playing around pale lips. ‘The late Miss Pig Nall, I take it.’ His sarcasm was very nearly lost in an almost unintelligible Geordie accent.

  ‘Pignal,’ she corrected him. ‘And if I hadn’t been left standing in the rain for half an hour I wouldn’t have been late.’ Which elicited some stifled giggles from the others.

  The NCO silenced them with a look and folded his arms. ‘Is that so? And I suppose you just had to change, and repair your make-up?’

  ‘I’m here now,’ she said sullenly.

  ‘Yes, you are. Though God knows why.’ He cast his gaze over the other women. ‘These young ladies all know why they’re here. And so do I. But I haven’t the first fucking idea who you are, or why you’re at my castle. Perhaps you’d like to enlighten us, mam’selle. If your English is up to it, that is.’

  Georgette felt her hackles rise. ‘I think you’ll find . . .’ She looked pointedly at the three stripes on the arm of his khaki green pullover, assessing him as a man in his forties who had long ago achieved a certain rank and never surpassed it. ‘Sergeant, is it?’

  ‘Connolley,’ he growled.

  ‘Well, I think, Sergeant Connolley, you’ll find that I speak English a great deal better than you do. And as to why I’m at your castle, if your superiors haven’t enlightened you, then I’m not about to. Information above your pay grade, I imagine.’

  There was an almost collective intake of breath in the room.

  The sergeant was fuming. But he kept a lid on it. He would get his revenge in his own good time. ‘Well, Pig Nall,’ he said, ‘we’ll just have to train you up for any eventuality, won’t we? Which means you’re going to have to work twice as hard as anyone else.’ He smiled ominously. ‘That’ll be fun.’ He paused. ‘Sit down.’

  Georgette, flushed with anger and humiliation in equal measure, dropped herself into an empty seat, and felt the eyes of the other women upon her. Sergeant Connolley turned towards the blackboard and began to scrawl on it with a piece of chalk.

  ‘You are all, at some point, going to be dropped behind enemy lines, or in the case of the frog among us, home. And primarily we’ll be working on fitness. But I’ll also be making you familiar with this little beauty.’ He turned around and they saw that he had written Westland Lysander on the board. ‘She’s a single-

  engined light aircraft capable of short take-off and landing in moonlit conditions. There is a ladder attached to the fuselage below the cockpit behind the pilot. You’re going to learn to get down that ladder faster than you ever thought possible. Speed is the key. The plane simply can’t remain on the ground for more than a few minutes. You have to get off fast.’

  Georgette frowned. ‘I thought I was to be parachuted into France.’

  Connolley’s face folded itself into a genuine smile. ‘You? Parachute? Who told you that?’

  And Georgette realised de Gaulle had been having his little joke with her. But in spite of having made a fool of herself, she was really rather relieved.

  The polished wooden floor of the one-time ballroom was crammed with tables filled with men in uniform, nurses, soldiers with arms in slings and legs in plaster, a man with a horribly burned face that drew everyone’s eye. Not out of curiosity, but out of fear. Sometimes, in war, a fate worse than death awaits.

  Georgette and the other women in her group sat around a table by one of the tall rain-streaked windows that flooded the room with light. The sky had cleared a little, and although now early evening, the sun was still high in the late summer sky, sprinkling broken light across the hillside and the town and inner harbour below. A spectacular panorama stretched away to the Minch beyond, where burnished patches of sunlight scalded the surface of the sea.

  But none of the women was looking at the view. It was the first time they had been alone together, away from the watchful eye of Sergeant Connolley. They were excited to get to know their fellow travellers on this demanding road. Eager to forge friendships and share of themselves in the hope of dispelling inner fears and finding the courage in comradeship they would need to face an uncertain future.

  ‘Are you really French?’ one of them asked Georgette.

  ‘Half and half. But I grew up in France.’ She shook everyone’s hand around the table. ‘Georgette. But my English friends just call me George.’

  It turned out that all the girls spoke French and were anxious to try it out on Georgette. So introductions were made in her native language. It gave the women an instant and conspiratorial sense of sisterhood. No one else would know what they were saying.

  Alice was a pretty girl with blond curls and a Home Counties accent that seemed both alien and intimidating to the others. She told them that she came from London, and that her father held a rank high up in the Admiralty. Though exactly what she couldn’t say. Georgette thought she was possibly twenty-two or twenty-three, and was impressed by her accent when she spoke French.

  Joan was a middle-class girl from Manchester who looked to be barely out of her teens. Her straight dark hair was cut in a fringe above a plain face. But she had an attractive smile and an infectious laugh that endeared her to everyone. A plain-speaking Mancunian whose grasp of pejorative French slang had Georgette in fits of laughter. ‘Real bastard that sergeant,’ she said. ‘Bet he’s only like that in front of us women cos he’s got such a tiny tadger.’

  ‘How would you know?’ Georgette twinkled. She was warming to the company.

  ‘Tiny feet, George. Didn’t you notice? It’s a sure sign.’ They all laughed and felt a release of tension.

  Another of the women, a striking girl with shoulder-length black hair and cobalt blue eyes, raised both of her hands. ‘He’ll love me then,’ she said. ‘My brother says men adore women with small hands.’ Her ruddy-complexioned face broke into a broad grin. ‘For obvious reasons.’

  This time the laughter at their table brought looks from around the room, and they instantly drew closer and lowered their voices.

  ‘I’m Mairi,’ said the girl with the small hands speaking English now, and Georgette was struggling to place her accent. ‘I live just u
p the road at Ness, the north end of the island. And I love the way that God-almighty Sergeant Connolley seems to think that this is his castle, when it’s my bloody island.’

  They stifled their laughter to avoid further frowns from the other tables.

  Georgette understood the origins of the accent now and said, ‘Are you a Gaelic speaker?’

  ‘Didn’t speak English till I went to school, George.’

  ‘So you live here?’ There was an element of incredulity in Joan’s voice.

  ‘Born and bred,’ Mairi said. ‘Grew up in Ness. Then my parents sent me to school here in Stornoway. The Nicolson Institute. The worst years of my life. Living away from home in digs.’ A look of unhappy recollection was replaced by a smile. ‘Didn’t stop me being school dux, though.’

  The others frowned. ‘What’s that?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Only the smartest girl in the school.’ Mairi grinned. ‘Amazing how easy it is to fool folk.’

  Then they all found themselves turning their heads towards the only member of their group who had not yet introduced herself. She blushed.

  ‘Rebecca,’ she said. She was older than the others, by a good ten years, and there was a weariness in her face.

  ‘Where you from, Becky?’ Joan asked.

  ‘Abergavenny.’ And her face broke into a rare smile when she saw their bewilderment. ‘It’s a couple of hours from Cardiff, at the foot of the Black Mountains.’

  ‘Oh, Welsh,’ Alice said. ‘I was wondering about that accent.’ She glanced at Rebecca’s left hand. ‘I see you took your wedding ring off.’ There was the faintest band of white around the root of her third finger. ‘Was that to increase your chances with the sergeant?’

  The others laughed, but Rebecca’s face grew even paler, and her eyes dipped towards her hands clasped on the table in front of her. She spoke very quietly. ‘I took it off because my husband is dead.’ A cringing hush fell on the table. ‘He went to France with the British Expeditionary Force in September last year.’ She paused momentarily to bite her lip. ‘One of the first killed in the Battle of France three months ago.’