by Eliza Graham
‘How old were you when you left Berlin?’ I asked, curiosity distracting me away from my recollections.
‘About ten. My memories are fond ones. Swimming in a lake. Trips to the Tiergarten. Playing in the garden.’
‘Lilacs in bloom?’
‘There were lilacs, yes. But now when I think about my parents’ friends – the affable baker who’d give me an extra cake with the bread order, the woman who cleaned the house – the memories are tainted. I wonder how much they all closed their eyes.’ He eyed the cigar. ‘And then I wonder about myself. Would I have told myself the same lies they did?’
‘None of us know just how honest we’d be with ourselves,’ I said. Actually, I did know this. I hadn’t even been able to face Patrick one last time. I’d written to him to save myself the pain of letting him see my wrecked looks, to spare myself the anguish of telling him it was over in person. The coward’s way out. I couldn’t place myself in judgement over anyone else. Not even Beattie.
It was growing cooler; the smoke from my cigarette and Beattie’s cigar turned to vapour in the evening air.
‘If I’d stayed in Berlin I know I’d probably have exceeded my own lowest expectations,’ he said. ‘I have no illusions.’ The scent of Beattie’s cigar was weaving its way between me and the hyacinths’ perfume.
‘I have to tell you something. You’ll probably want to fire me.’
He narrowed his eyes.
‘I went through your filing cabinet, found the script where you’d added the details about the red hotel shutters.’
Silence. Something flapped overhead – a bat.
‘Go to bed now, Hall. Long day. And I need you on top form tomorrow.’
‘Is that all you’re going to say?’
‘Thought you were going to tell me you’d been at my whisky.’
He must have walked away after that without me hearing. The garden gate clicked.
‘Don’t go,’ I said. I heard him take a breath.
‘Anna?’ He sounded startled.
‘I want you to stay.’
For a moment there wasn’t a sound. He’d ignored me. I heard the gate click again, his footsteps returning to me.
I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was asking. He’d shown me those chinks, made me feel empathy for him as he’d described his childhood, softened me. But I couldn’t afford to feel soft towards him. I needed to harden myself, embrace the worst in myself, show myself that I could survive in its depths. And a bit of me still wanted to take revenge on Beattie for what had happened today. I’d told him about searching his filing cabinet, something that should have brought about disciplinary action, but he hadn’t responded.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’ The word sounded more certain than I felt.
He put a hand round my waist. ‘Micki—’
‘Dead to the world with her fever and the landlady is probably knitting in bed with the wireless on.’
‘I don’t want to take advantage of you, I—’ He sounded breathless.
‘You’re not,’ I said coldly.
I shook off his hand and led him inside. He removed his shoes at the kitchen door and crept inside in his socks, holding the shoes as he followed me upstairs. I could hear the gentle snoring of the landlady through her door. In my room I switched on the lamp. He gazed at me silently. I stood over him, knowing that for the next hour he was my creature, would do what I wanted, how I wanted. ‘Take off my shirt,’ I told him.
He pulled at it.
‘Carefully, I don’t want any buttons ripped off.’ When he’d removed the shirt, I realised that the blackout was still up and attended to this.
I made him remove my skirt, my thick RAF stockings and my underwear. The latter wasn’t regulation issue, as the surprised expression in his eyes made clear. He put a hand out to touch my breast and I pushed him away again. ‘Not yet.’ I removed my hairpins and shook out my hair, watching him all the time.
‘Anna . . .’
‘Wait,’ I told him. Usually before bed I would have removed my pancake make-up with Ponds cream. I didn’t want Beattie to see me without the pancake. Instead I picked up the little bottle of Vol de Nuit and sprayed myself with a few drops.
He let out a groan. I bent forward and undid his tie. My face might be mangled but my body – apart from that small patch on my upper arm – was as it had been before the fire. It remembered that night in Lisbon.
He tried again to touch me but I brushed him away. Beattie wasn’t going to do anything tonight without my permission. Maintaining my eye contact with him I lay beside him on the bed, running my hands up and down my body, taking time to enjoy the feeling of my own skin around my breasts and between my legs, down to my feet and back up to the sensitive sides of my torso. He made another attempt to grab me. ‘Not yet,’ I told him.
When I’d extracted as much pleasure from myself as I desired I told him to remove his clothes, telling him the exact order in which this was to happen. He obeyed me. I looked at him. His body didn’t have Patrick’s loose-limbed grace, but it was powerful across the shoulders and chest, and trimmer across the waist than I had remembered. In Lisbon I’d been too shy to look at Beattie. Now I made him into an object, my object. His breaths were coming in gasps, but I pushed him down onto the pillow.
‘May I kiss you?’ he asked.
I thought about it. If he kissed me it would make this, whatever it was, intimate and I wasn’t sure I could bear that. I shook my head and straddled him.
The first time didn’t do it for me. The last of my anger still gripped my body. And when I looked down at him I still had the sense that I was staring at the wrong man.
I let him rest briefly and then I taunted him into another, very willing, frenzy. I knew him better by then. The cool air turned the perspiration on my skin to little beads. Anger was blunting into curiosity. I looked up at Beattie and saw him watching me, curious, too, and willing, oh very willing, to continue the exploration.
I looked away.
At the climax I felt my body, my sense of who I was, dissolve. He sank down beside me and kissed me on each eyelid, so softly I could hardly feel his lips. He murmured something under his breath and I could only just make out my name, said over and over again, in a note of wonder. ‘May I kiss you properly now?’
I nodded. The kiss wasn’t a deep one, it was tender, almost protective.
My head sank onto his chest, his heart beating under my scarred cheek. I wanted to move, to push him out of the bed, tell him that I’d finished with him. He was still the wrong man, and I had brought him into my room for the wrong reasons. And yet I found I couldn’t do without that rhythmic heartbeat which seemed to be pulsing its energy into the dead tissues of my face. He kissed me again, this time on the top of my head, and did the same to the scar on my upper arm. I found my lips touching his chest, just once. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘About going through your filing cabinet.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘Just lie here quietly with me.’
I’d failed at what I’d hoped to do with Beattie. I’d wanted to show him I could control him. And to show myself that I was strong. In fact I’d been exposed for what I was. Everything I’d tried to hide was lying in the open. Not just my burnt skin, but the innermost parts of myself, the parts I had hated so much. Beattie had seen me. I’d seen him. We knew one another. The realisation ought to have horrified me, but I could lie here with him completely at peace.
‘My wonderful Anna,’ he said.
Out of habit my mouth opened to tell him he was wrong. The words fell away before I could speak them. My hand reached for his. And then I slept, deeply, peacefully.
18
Morning. Beattie was gone. A slight scent of him lingered on the pillowcase and sheet: bay and lime. I pulled back the curtains and pushed the window fully open to air the room. As I raised an arm to my face I smelled Beattie on my skin. It wasn’t my morning for a bath so in the bathroom I filled t
he basin with warm water and washed myself with my sponge and bar of soap. My mind was somewhere it hadn’t been for almost two years: a watchful yet peaceful place. The tissues of my body felt sated, relaxed, but my skin seemed to glow with energy as I rubbed it with the sponge, as though the blood was flowing through me fully for the first time.
Serene as I felt, I didn’t want to face Micki over the breakfast table. I could hear her getting out of bed, whistling, the floorboards creaking as she carried out her morning stretches.
I crept downstairs to make myself a slice of toast and wrote her a quick note, saying I’d gone for another look at the bluebells and would meet her in the office.
Mulberry House was peaceful when Mrs Haddon let me in. ‘Mr Beattie’s sleeping in this morning,’ she said. ‘Must have forgotten to set his alarm clock.’ I managed not to blush.
Micki joined me in our office at nine.
‘How’s the throat?’
‘How are the bluebells?’ she asked, eyes like flints.
‘Micki—’
Someone knocked on the door. Mrs Haddon was standing outside. ‘Excuse me, sergeant, but Mr Beattie’s coffee and toast are getting cold. I wondered whether he’d come in here?’
‘No. He must be in the garden.’ I looked out of the window but the garden was empty.
‘Perhaps he’s still sleeping in?’ Micki gave an angelic smile. ‘Had a sleepless night, maybe?’
‘He’s not in his room – I’ve just been up and knocked on the door and popped my head round in case he was poorly,’ Mrs Haddon said.
Someone rang the front doorbell. ‘That’ll be Beattie. He’ll have lost his key,’ I said, watching through the office door as Mrs Haddon went to let him in.
But it was William and Father Becker arriving for work. William gave me his usual smile, stopping to check the postbag.
‘Is Mr Beattie in his office?’ Father Becker asked. ‘I would like to use a reference book.’
‘Don’t worry about disturbing him, he’s not here yet,’ I said.
‘Not like him.’ Micki eyed me coolly.
Becker muttered some German endearment at the terrier, who emitted a yap.
‘It’s your dog collar.’ Mrs Haddon laughed. ‘Ironic, isn’t it, father? I think it makes Freddy nervous, though he’s fine with the vicar here in the village. Perhaps he’s not used to Catholics.’
William was still checking the postbag. I knew there was nothing in it apart from a letter for Beattie, which Mrs Haddon would take into his office. A girl, I thought. William definitely had a girl he was desperate to hear from.
We prepared for the usual team meeting at ten, sitting at our desks, writing pads open. ‘He’s not coming,’ Micki said, at quarter past.
William looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He must be held up somewhere.’
‘Held up?’ William blinked.
I went into Beattie’s office and telephoned Sefton Delmer, hands shaking as I feared I was exceeding my brief. Beattie would be furious if I’d put the wind up those in charge of us for no good reason. I was put through to Sefton Delmer’s secretary. ‘Leave this with us, Sergeant Hall. We’ll make the necessary calls.’ Something in her voice implied concern.
Within twenty minutes a black Triumph motorcycle crunched up the drive. Atkins. Once again disobeying the rule about not opening the door, I went to let her in. ‘I need to search his desk,’ Atkins said with a nod.
‘How . . .’ How was she involved with this? She showed me an ID card. I blinked at it. Atkins wasn’t just a driver and courier, she worked for a special intelligence unit.
‘My boss will be along in a moment and he’ll clear everything with you. There are special constables searching for Mr Beattie. Just try to get on with your work in the meantime.’ She gave me a quick smile. ‘He can’t be far away. We know he didn’t catch a train this morning and none of the drivers have taken him anywhere.’
I returned to our office. When a civilian car drew up and disgorged a man in a grey suit, a cold boulder sank inside me at the sight of his stony expression. Mrs Haddon let the man in. I heard him ask her questions. She knocked on the door. ‘Can you come out now, please, sergeant?’
He shook my hand and showed me his ID. Special intelligence, a photograph. ‘Sergeant Hall.’ He led me into Beattie’s office and sat down behind Beattie’s desk. I didn’t like to sit until he waved me to my normal chair. ‘When did you last see Mr Beattie?’
‘He came to see me in my lodgings last night.’
‘Was that usual?’
‘No.’ I looked down at my hands and told the man in the grey suit an abbreviated version of what had happened between Beattie and me.
‘I see.’ His voice was neutral. ‘And you recall Mr Beattie leaving your bedroom?’
‘No. He was gone when I woke up at seven thirty.’ I stared out of the window, not seeing anything.
‘The landlady says Mr Beattie never returned to the house.’
‘Oh.’ It was a pathetic riposte, but I couldn’t think of a reason why Beattie wouldn’t have returned to Mulberry House.
‘Was this the first time you and Mr Beattie had been close, sergeant?’
I shuffled on my chair. I wanted to lie but had no way of being sure what this man might know. ‘Once before, a few months ago when we were abroad, we . . .’ I couldn’t think of how to finish the sentence.
‘In another country, as the saying goes.’ The grey-suited man gave me a dry smile. I knew the rest of that line. He rose. ‘Carry on with your work, Sergeant Hall. Atkins will bring you anything Beattie would see in his absence.’
‘Me?’
‘I don’t think there’s anyone else suitable as a deputy, do you?’ He handed me a card, blank except for a telephone number. ‘If you have security concerns, ask to be put through to this number. Failing that, Atkins can get hold of us. Don’t talk to anyone else. Don’t tell your colleagues anything more than that Beattie is AWOL.’
‘I can’t . . .’
He turned at the door, an eyebrow raised.
‘Nothing.’ I’d been about to say I couldn’t manage things here.
He nodded and was gone.
I went back to our office. Father Becker typed away, seeming calm. William had his writing pad out. He pushed it away. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked.
‘I’m going to look for Beattie myself.’ I remembered something. ‘The bluebells,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he went out there to look at them.’
‘The bluebells?’ William’s face showed puzzlement.
‘You’re right, it doesn’t sound like Beattie, but perhaps he heard Micki and me talking about them.’
Micki looked at me. Was she thinking that Beattie might have made a change to his normal morning schedule, not because of the bluebells but because of what she’d overheard last night?
‘We can be there in fifteen minutes if we step out.’ Micki stood up.
‘The broadcast—’ William said.
‘There’s plenty of time. I just need to look for myself.’ I grabbed my jacket and cap.
‘But Anna—’
‘We won’t be long,’ I told him over my shoulder as I opened the office door.
Micki and I walked as briskly as we could without running until we turned off into the footpath leading into the woods. ‘Last night,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Then don’t say anything.’
I felt as I had that night in London, walking down to Leicester Square, and yesterday afternoon, cycling back from the farm: a sense that there was someone behind me. I wasn’t going to give in to this neurosis when there was something much more important at stake.
We hurried on into the trees, the footpath taking us into the shadows. The track reached a crossing. As we approached, the crows flapped and cawed, landing in the lowest branches of the trees, but not fleeing from us. I remembered the collective noun for them and wished I hadn’t. I shivered, a cold and metallic taste filling m
y mouth, my stomach rolling. The trees blocked off the morning sun. Even the bluebells seemed cowed by the gloom. Beattie might have chosen a brighter morning walk. A cool, sour taste was filling my mouth and my fast walk was turning into a run. We turned right, onto a smaller footpath.
At first it looked as though a very large crow had toppled beak down into the dark waters of the pond. ‘Oh no.’ I put a hand to my mouth, closed my eyes and opened them again. But the same black object was still floating in the water.
Micki splashed in, up to her knees, pulling at his suit jacket. Even now I noted just how strong she was for her small size. I waded in and grabbed Beattie’s arm. Between us we lifted him onto the bank. Micki turned him over.
His face was a chalky white. Micki felt for the pulse in his neck and then each of his wrists. ‘He’s gone,’ she said.
‘We have to try.’ I rolled him onto his chest again and slapped him on the back, hoping that some of the water in his lungs would run out, that he would cough. ‘Come on,’ I shouted.
Micki took my hands in hers. ‘Leave him, Anna,’ she said. ‘He’s been in the water too long. Go for help. I’ll stay here.’
‘No.’ I realised that my cheeks were wet and it wasn’t water from the pond. ‘I have to stay with him.’ I rolled Beattie onto his back. The weight of him was almost too much for me.
‘All right.’ Micki was already running off down the track.
I sandwiched Beattie’s hands between mine. They felt like a marble statue’s. His fingernails were manicured; Beattie had been vain about his hands. He wore a signet ring on his left ring finger. I must have seen it a thousand times without really bothering to look at it. I’d now never know the significance, family or otherwise, of the little crest that looked like some kind of griffin. He must have worn it last night in bed, too, but that already seemed like an age ago. On his wrist the Longines watch appeared to have stopped at half-eight, presumably at the time of its immersion. Would the police use this as evidence? I was falling into amateur sleuth territory again, trying to protect myself from my own emotions. I found myself rubbing Beattie’s hands, attempting to warm them. I forced myself to stop and tried to sit still. But I couldn’t. I straightened Beattie’s navy-and-green tie and tugged down his jacket. He’d always hated being less than perfectly presented.