by Winona Kent
“Unfinished,” Wendy confirmed, unwrapping the tissue, and holding the front and back pieces up. A pattern, a page torn from a magazine, fluttered onto the floor. “I believe you, Mr. Deeley. I’m so sorry I doubted you earlier.”
The third object was a mud-stained black leather handbag.
“I’ll be damned,” Nick said.
His heart aching, Shaun carefully unzipped all of the compartments. He found Mrs. Collins’s leather wallet, which held all of her plastic cards. The packet of tablets she had shown him at the breakfast table in Stoneford. Her phone and the cord that plugged into the wall, which could restore its functions when the battery had run out.
“None of these things existed in 1940,” Nick said. “Further proof, as if we needed it.”
At the bottom of the bag was a curious card Shaun had not seen before:
Fenwick Oldbutter. Busker. Musician. Composer. Contemporary Arrangements. Historical Time Pieces. With a telephone number printed at the bottom, and an address where he might be contacted by e-mail.
He turned the card over and saw that Mrs. Collins had written something in pencil on its back.
Call about time travel. Mention Ruby.
He put the card in his pocket.
And there, at last, was the lump of shrapnel.
“Are you all right, Mr. Deeley?” Wendy asked.
“I believe,” Shaun said, “that I am in need of a telephone.”
Chapter Twenty
It was Monday morning, and it was the 14th of October, and something had woken Charlie up.
She reached across the double bed to reassure herself that Mr. Deeley was still there, and not dead.
Still there. Still sound asleep.
She’d climbed over him the night before, and joined him, very chastely. She wore her great-grandmother’s flannel nightgown, leaving him fully dressed and lying on top of the sheets, covered only with the eiderdown. And she’d slept deeply, and contentedly, comforted by the knowledge that the person she loved more than anyone else in the world was beside her, safe and very much alive.
Until the German planes had flown over, the throb of their engines and the blast from their bombs—and the return fire from the ack-acks on Tooting Bec Common—ensuring nobody got any more sleep at all.
But a sound had woken her up now, and she was sure it wasn’t the bombing.
As her mind settled back into consciousness, she realized she knew exactly what the sound was. It was a woman’s voice. It was Betty. She was downstairs.
And she had screamed.
Charlie clambered over Mr. Deeley and listened at the closed bedroom door. She had taken the precaution of locking it the night before, hiding the key under her pillow. She dared not unlock it now.
She heard nothing else. There was silence downstairs.
She rushed to the dressing table and looked out what was left of the bedroom window. Through a gap in the wooden boards she could see that the garden gate was open.
Charlie was positive it had been closed last night.
“Mr. Deeley,” she said, urgently, running back to the bed. “Mr. Deeley—wake up!”
• • •
There was no sign of Betty downstairs.
But she had been there. She’d eaten breakfast—a boiled egg and perhaps toast. The plate sat in the sink, ready for washing up. And she was going to make tea. The tea leaves were in the pot. The kettle was boiling on the stove.
Charlie switched the gas off and removed the kettle from the ring. The handle was burning hot. There was very little water in the bottom.
In the dining room, one of the Blue Willow cups lay smashed on the floor next to its saucer.
And the front door was wide open.
“What’s happened, Mr. Deeley? Where’s she gone?”
Mr. Deeley studied the front door. “I think Betty either ran from the house, or she was made to leave, against her will.”
Charlie shivered. “Silas Ferryman.”
“I agree, Mrs. Collins. And the knowledge of this fills me with a very great fear.”
As they stood in the front garden, Ruby Firth came out of her house, pulling the door shut behind her by its knocker.
“Oh!” she said, spotting Charlie and Mr. Deeley over their common brick wall, which was low and nearly obscured by a hedge. “Hullo! Just on my way to the shops. And then a man’s coming to bang something over my windows. You look unhappy. What’s happened?”
“Did you hear anything, Ruby? Someone screaming? A commotion?”
“Not at all, I’m afraid. I’ve been in the back garden, sorting out the last of the vegs.”
“Betty’s missing. We think she’s been forced to go with someone. She left the kettle boiling on the stove.”
“And the front door wide open,” Mr. Deeley added.
“Oh dear,” Ruby said, her face suddenly looking very grave.
“Was this meant to happen, Ruby? Please tell me you didn’t know this was going to happen.”
Ruby didn’t say anything. And then: “You most definitely must do what you can to bring her back safely.”
And then, she opened her own garden gate, and stepped out onto the pavement, and closed it again behind her.
“Ruby!”
“I trust you will,” she replied. “In fact, I know you will.”
She walked away briskly, carrying her shopping bag.
“That bloody woman,” Charlie said.
“You are here with me now,” Mr. Deeley reasoned. “Therefore, nothing untoward will happen to Betty. She will give birth to your mother, who will, in turn, give birth to you. This stands to reason.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Deeley… something doesn’t feel right.” She shivered again. She was still wearing her great-grandmother’s flannel nightgown, with just her thin winter coat thrown over top. “I’m so cold, Mr. Deeley.”
Inside the house, in the front hall, the phone was ringing.
Charlie rushed to answer it. “Yes? Hello?”
“Is that Charlotte?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Silas Ferryman, Charlotte. Are you surprised to hear from me?”
“What’s happened to Betty?”
“She’s quite safe. Not terribly happy, but unharmed.”
“Why have you taken her? I don’t understand. You told me yesterday that you loved her.”
“I did, didn’t I,” Ferryman mused, after a moment. “I suppose I must, then. What else did I tell you?”
“That you’d stolen Silas Ferryman’s suitcase from his hotel room. I didn’t believe that, either. You knew I’d seen you with it at Strand Underground and you had to come up with an explanation. I looked inside it, by the way. While you were sleeping. I know what you’ve done. I know who you are.”
“This is excellent news,” Ferryman replied. “Well then, if you know so much, perhaps you might help me locate Thaddeus Quinn.”
“Why don’t you try the Bedford Square Hotel in London?”
“Oh, I did, Charlotte. But he was bombed out. The hotel is uninhabitable. He’s taken lodgings elsewhere. And I’ve grown impatient. I’m tired of waiting.”
“If anything happens to Betty, I’m going to the police with what I know about your suitcase. And Mr. Deeley knows, too. So that’s two of us.”
Ferryman laughed. “You aren’t really in any sort of position to be laying down the law to me, Charlotte. I might, for instance, assure you that if you go to the police, something very unfortunate will most definitely happen to Betty.”
“And you’re supposedly in love with her. And the father of her child. You’re despicable. I feel so sorry for Betty. What do you want?”
The man on the other end of the telephone line paused. And then: “I should have thought that was obvious, Charlotte. I want my suitcase back.”
Charlie stared at the telephone.
“But you have it.”
“No,” Ferryman corrected, patiently. “Thaddeus Quinn has it. He removed it from my room whi
le you and I were having lunch. And you met him at Strand, where you’ve just told me you saw what was inside. And you’ve also just told me that you spoke to him yesterday. So… I think you very definitely must know where he is… and therefore, you must know where my suitcase is too.”
“You’re the fair-haired man we had lunch with,” Charlie said slowly.
“Clever clogs,” Ferryman replied. “I must admit I was congratulating myself at having carried it off. I thought I was quite convincing as Thaddeus Quinn. But, needs must. The disappearance of my suitcase has forced me to play my hand. Thank you for confirming who took it. I hope you’ll now assist me in arranging for its return…? Let’s set a meeting time and place. Perhaps… this afternoon? There are two public air raid shelters on the north side of Tooting Bec Common. They’re along Emmanuel Road—you can’t miss them. I shall meet you outside the second one, at the northeastern end, opposite the old Hyde Farm estate, at half past two. I hope you’ll be bringing me good news.”
“But I don’t know where Thaddeus Quinn is,” Charlie said.
“Oh, I don’t think that can be true. I’m sure you know exactly where he is. Goodbye, Charlotte.”
And he rang off.
• • •
“Perhaps,” said Mr. Deeley, “we might telephone Thaddeus at The Slug and Caterpillar, and let him know what has happened. That would be a beginning.”
Charlie looked through her bag for the slip of paper that Betty’s lodger—the genuine Thaddeus—had given her.
“BAT,” she said, frustrated. “That’s how the phone number starts. What’s a BAT?”
Mr. Deeley studied the dial on the front of the telephone.
“228,” he said. “Each hole in this dial has letters and a number. The same as the letters and the numbers on your clever mobile.”
Charlie picked up the receiver and listened. She heard the dial tone—a low-pitched purring sound.
“I’ve never actually used one of these before,” she said. “Not with a dial. I think you do this.”
She inserted her finger in the “2” hole, and dragged the dial around, then released it, then did the same thing again, and then the “8” hole.
She waited.
“I’m getting a high-pitched buzz,” she said.
Mr. Deeley found the little stack of directories stored on a shelf underneath the table that held the telephone. There were two for London—A to K and L to Z. He pulled out one of them and flipped through it until he found a page with dialling instructions.
“You are advised to depress the receiver rest for at least two seconds, again listen for the dialling tone, and then redial your number. If the same continuous buzz is heard once more, the number is unobtainable.”
Charlie dialled once more, and again heard the high-pitched buzz.
She replaced the receiver, defeated.
“What now?”
• • •
There had been an inn on the site of The Slug and Cauliflower for nearly two centuries, although the most recent establishment had really only been in existence for forty years. In the 1880s, trams had terminated at The Slug and Cauliflower, and the horses that drew them were put up in a stable behind it. At the turn of the century, an imposing new building had replaced its derelict predecessor, and had become a destination board on buses travelling south from Central London: Clapham, Slug and Cauliflower.
Charlie recalled that in the time she and Mr. Deeley had come from, the building had met a somewhat ignominious fate: closed down in 2010 in the wave of pub failures that had swept the country, it had emerged, after a restorative facelift, as a mini-supermarket. She’d seen a story about it on Facebook, lamenting its loss as a historical public house.
Here and now, in 1940, the public house was flourishing as it had been designed, with a ground floor constructed of red brick, and an upper floor of white stucco, with black trim around its windows. An imposing sign over the entrance read, in gold Victorian script, Slug and Cauliflower Hotel.
And just down the road was the reason why its telephone number had been unreachable. A bomb had fallen in last night’s air raid, landing squarely in an intersection. The public house, however, was undamaged and open.
Having been summoned by the proprietor, Thaddeus Quinn joined Charlie and Mr. Deeley in the wood-panelled saloon, which was infused with the smell of warm ale and cigarettes.
“I’m very surprised to see you again, sir,” he said, to Mr. Deeley, appropriating a table beneath a row of leaded glass windows, around which were arranged wooden chairs with plush red cushions. “Charlotte told me you were dead!”
“I was dead,” Mr. Deeley replied. “However, as you can happily discern, I am dead no longer. I do not recommend it, as it is uncommonly uncomfortable, and plays merry havoc with one’s internal humours.”
“Silas Ferryman’s kidnapped Betty,” Charlie said. “We don’t know where he’s taken her. But he knows you have his suitcase. And he wants it back.”
A shadow passed across Thaddeus Quinn’s face. He looked momentarily alarmed. And then, his training as a police constable seemed to take over.
“How do you know this?” he asked.
“He rang us. I really thought he was you… I’m so sorry, Thaddeus. I told him everything… Strand, what I saw in the suitcase….”
“Where I’m staying…?”
“No,” Charlie said.
“And he did not follow us here,” Mr. Deeley added. “We made certain.”
“And he wishes to meet?”
“At the public air raid shelter on Emmanuel Road. At half past two.”
“If Ferryman wishes to meet with me at all, it will be for one reason only, and that is to do away with me.”
“But if you give him the suitcase,” Charlie said, “he won’t have any reason to kill you. You won’t have the proof of his guilt anymore. He’ll let Betty go and then he can just…disappear.”
“You’re too generous in your assumptions,” Thaddeus said with a grim smile. “I very much doubt he would just ‘disappear.’ Not while I’m still alive and able to pursue him.”
He paused.
“Here is what I propose.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The parade of shops that Betty had listed in her ration book as the suppliers of her meat and butter, cooking fats and sugar, was at the end of Harris Road. Long queues of women, many with young children in tow, stretched out along the pavement. There was a butcher and a grocery—not the one owned by Betty’s father; that was closer to Balham tube station—and a bakery; a hardware store and a clothing store; and on the corner, a newsagent’s, which offered, as well as the daily papers, glass jars filled with sweets, and cigarettes.
Farther on, Charlie and Mr. Deeley reached the top end of Tooting Bec Common, a triangle of green defined by Emmanuel Road on one side, and the railway line which ran down to Crystal Palace on the other.
There was the first air raid shelter, at the park’s western edge, dug into a trench in the ground and covered over with earth.
The big anti-aircraft guns that they’d heard in the night were not in evidence, but Tooting Bec Common was an immense area, subdivided by more railway tracks and several roads. Charlie suspected they were located in the wider section, farther south, along with the searchlights that sought out the German planes as they flew over the city.
They walked along farther, past an ARP post and then a barrage balloon, looming silver against the afternoon sky. And then red brick and white stone trimmed houses, with steeply pitched roofs and distinctive porches. Two of the houses were fractured and crumbled from a recent bombing, the wood from their interiors splintered and scattered across the ground like tumbled matchsticks. A family of five was retrieving its possessions from the remnants of their home and loading them into a van.
“There were a great many wars fought during my other lifetime,” Mr. Deeley said, thoughtfully, “the most well-known of them being the ones waged against Napoleon. But these were di
stant adventures, and when we received news, it was also distant, like a story narrated from a book, a great excursion abroad. And when the soldiers returned from their battles, some were scarred, others missing arms and legs… and such tales they told of swords and rifles… and launching cannonballs at fortress walls… but nothing, Mrs. Collins, nothing, was like this. I cannot imagine spending years living in terror of certain death arriving from the skies as I sleep. The sight of this poor family fills me with such sadness.”
“And me, Mr. Deeley.”
They had reached the collection of houses which made up the Hyde Farm estate.
“It is not a farm,” Mr. Deeley said, with some disappointment.
“It used to be,” Charlie said. “In fact, it was still a farm in the time you came from… all of this area was very rural. It was made over into houses beginning in the 1890s… and a lot of these homes were set aside for soldiers who’d fought in the Boer War and the First World War.”
“It’s a pity the pilots of the planes which drop the explosives are not mindful of all this careful preservation,” Mr. Deeley observed. “But there is the second air raid shelter, on the corner, and there, I believe, is the gentleman who has summoned us.”
It was indeed the fair-haired gentleman from the Bedford Square Hotel, standing in front of the shelter, under a tree, smoking a cigarette.
“This is one habit I find wholly distasteful,” Mr. Deeley said, within earshot of the man. “It makes the air disagreeably foul. As if the bombings and coal fireplaces of London did not corrupt the atmosphere enough. Good afternoon, sir. “
“Good afternoon,” Ferryman replied. “I do not see my suitcase.”
“You did not request that your suitcase attend this meeting,” Mr. Deeley replied. “You only requested news. We are here to deliver it.”
“Where’s Betty?” Charlie said.
“You did not request that Betty attend this meeting,” Ferryman countered. “She’s safe.”