Frankie's Letter

by Dolores Gordon-Smith

  ‘I reckon we’ll be in the paper ourselves when this gets out,’ said Hawley, rising stiffly to his feet. ‘You’re looking for someone off the Lonnon train, you say?’ He scratched his chin. ‘It’s been a couple of days now. The Lonnon train . . . There weren’t that many on it, as I recall. Peggy Postling and the Sykeses. Young Wilfred Gordon, he’s back on leave, and . . .’ Mr Hawley looked up brightly. ‘There was another man, sir. He slipped my mind for the moment.’

  ‘Can you describe him?’ asked Major Rendall briskly.

  Mr Hawley looked puzzled. ‘I don’t know as I can,’ he said slowly. ‘I didn’t take much notice.’

  ‘What about his clothes?’ Anthony asked, trying to pin the porter down to something concrete.

  Hawley shrugged. ‘Nothing out of the way. He had a dark coat, I think, and a bowler hat. There was nothing special about him.’

  ‘He wasn’t fair-haired, was he?’

  Again Hawley shrugged. ‘I didn’t notice as he was. He was just an ordinary sort of bloke.’

  Something in Hawley’s answer jarred on Anthony. What on earth was it? He looked at Hawley thoughtfully. Like most railway staff he seemed honest and helpful but . . . Bingo! He’d said ‘bloke’.

  There are few men, as Anthony well knew, as socially aware as railway porters. Their livelihood, like taxi-drivers and hotel commissionaires, depends on them being able to sum up a person’s class at a glance, to know that the old lady in the ancient coat is a real lady and good for sixpence, that Flash Harry in his cheap finery will sling a shilling to impress his girlfriend and that a careworn mother or cautious clerk will never part with more than tuppence, however much help they receive. It seemed highly unlikely that Mr Hawley would ever describe a man such as Warren’s killer as a bloke.

  ‘He wasn’t a gentleman, was he? A toff?’ he asked.

  Hawley gave a slow smile. ‘A toff, sir? Not on your life.’ The smile faded. ‘There was nothing to him, sir,’ he added with a touch of irritation. ‘Nothing you could get hold of, I mean.’

  The word ‘nondescript’ formed in Anthony’s mind. He gave a jump. Hawley wasn’t describing Cedric Chapman’s killer but Cedric Chapman himself.

  Anthony picked up Mr Hawley’s discarded newspaper and there, on the front page, was what he was looking for: ‘Kingsway Tram Victim Identified’ together with a photograph of Chapman. Sir Charles had authorized its release to the press.

  Anthony slewed the paper round so Hawley could see it and immediately knew he was right. His face was a picture.

  ‘Well, I’ll be blowed,’ he kept muttering. ‘Who’d have thought it? Him! On my platform!’

  Major Rendall was less impressed. Chapman was dead and therefore the fun of the chase had departed. He stroked his moustache gloomily. ‘So that’s the chappie, is it? Well, he got what was coming to him all right. What was he doing down here, eh?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Anthony honestly enough, for he didn’t. He could guess, but that wasn’t knowledge.

  The major roused himself from his disappointment. ‘It’s a case of tying up loose ends now, eh, Colonel? I suppose we’d better call at Starhanger. Mr and Mrs Sherston need to be officially informed.’

  ‘Yes, we’d better call,’ agreed Anthony. And after that, he thought, he’d better retrieve his bag and leave. He had come to Starhanger to find Veronica O’Bryan and that was exactly what he’d done.

  ‘So how did Sherston take the news?’ asked Sir Charles later that day. They were sitting in Sir Charles’s room, the room that always reminded Anthony of a gentleman’s club.

  ‘He was thunderstruck,’ said Anthony, lighting a cigarette. ‘His reaction seemed absolutely genuine, Talbot.’ He smiled briefly. ‘As a matter of fact he wanted me to investigate.’

  ‘What?’

  Anthony nodded. ‘That’s right. I refused, of course. I told him to wait for the coroner’s inquest. I’ll have to attend that, of course, as I found the body, but they more or less have to bring in a verdict of murder by Cedric Chapman. Sherston realized that, but couldn’t begin to imagine, or so he said, what a crook like Chapman was doing in Ticker’s Wood and he certainly couldn’t imagine what had taken Veronica O’Bryan there. Now whether he was simply meeting trouble head on, I don’t know. After all, he knows exactly who I am, so, if he is involved, he’ll know it’s an odds-on certainty that I’ll investigate Mrs O’Bryan’s death.’

  ‘How did Mrs Sherston react?’ asked Sir Charles curiously.

  Anthony shrugged. ‘Very badly, considering we know Veronica O’Bryan wasn’t one of her bosom chums. When the chief constable told her the news, I thought she was going to faint. That was quite genuine, by the way,’ he added. ‘As the doctor on the spot, I can testify to it.’

  He paused remembering the scene. Josette had been horrified at the news. ‘I knew it,’ she had constantly repeated. ‘I knew she was dead. I just knew it. I knew something dreadful had happened.’

  ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘we got her up to her room and I prescribed a sedative and waited until her own doctor arrived. That got me upstairs,’ he added. ‘So I took advantage of the situation and, when the maid thought I was safely downstairs, had another look in Veronica O’Bryan’s room.’ Sir Charles looked at him alertly. ‘I found this,’ said Anthony, taking an envelope from his briefcase.

  He opened the envelope and carefully shook the contents onto the desk. There were charred scraps of writing paper, browned and burnt, but with the occasional word still visible.

  ‘They were in the grate,’ said Anthony. ‘They’d fallen into the firebox. I should’ve checked the firebox when I searched the first time but after I found the papers in the jewellery box, I didn’t think to examine the fireplace. It struck me afterwards that although Mrs O’Bryan might have thought her letters in the jewellery box were safe enough, she had very little time on Saturday morning to dispose of anything else and the obvious thing to do was burn any incriminating papers. There’s at least one sentence – or part of a sentence anyway – that I recognize.’

  Sir Charles turned on the desk light and examined the scraps closely. ‘“Frankie’s Letter”,’ he said. ‘These are notes for “Frankie’s Letter”.’ He carefully put the scraps of paper back in the envelope. ‘I’ll have these read. There’s probably more that can be gleaned, but the central fact of them being “Frankie’s Letter” is clear enough.’

  He sat down at the desk again. ‘So, what now? I’d give a year of my life to grill Sherston, but that’s not possible, damnit.’ He looked at Anthony squarely. ‘What do you think, Brooke? Is he involved or not?’

  Anthony hesitated. ‘He could be,’ he said eventually. ‘On the one hand, his reaction to Veronica O’Bryan’s death seemed absolutely genuine. On the other hand, if he knew about it, he’d be prepared. When I turned up in company with the chief constable, he’d guess that Veronica O’Bryan’s body had been found.’

  ‘Was he upset?’

  Anthony shook his head slowly. ‘Not excessively so, but he did seem shocked. He told me privately that Veronica had been awkward to live with, particularly since he got married. There’s been a lot of tension between her and Mrs Sherston.’

  ‘So why didn’t he make her an allowance and suggest she live elsewhere? That’s what everyone expected him to do.’

  ‘I asked him that – or, at least, I made it possible for him to volunteer the information. He was concerned for Tara. He thinks the world of her, you know. She’s more like a daughter than a niece to him. Veronica had a very uncertain temper and he thought they were better off living with him where, as he put it, he could help take the burden of motherhood off her shoulders.’ Anthony sighed. ‘That rings true. I simply don’t know about Sherston. He might be stringing me along. He’s clever enough, that’s for sure.’

  Sir Charles put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. ‘That more or less sums up what I think. Let’s say the jury’s still out, as far as he’s concerned.’


  He paused reflectively. ‘“Frankie’s Letter” is finished. That’s something, a great big something. However, our killer’s out there and we still don’t know what atrocity is planned for the fourteenth of June. That’s getting horribly close. If we can’t find out something soon, we’re sunk. We know it’s something to do with this Irish-German alliance. Incidentally, I’ve got confirmation of that from another source. We’ve got a contact in Camden Town who picks up gossip in the Irish clubs. He’s heard a whisper of something big planned.’

  He tilted his chair forward. He looked, thought Anthony, so tired he was haggard. ‘I don’t know what they’re planning, but it’s evil, Brooke. I hoped Veronica O’Bryan would lead us to the truth, but she’s quite literally dead and gone. I wish to God I could work out what to do.’

  Anthony pushed his chair back and, getting to his feet, walked to the window. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said at last. ‘I couldn’t carry it off for long, but it might work for a short time. You’ve been trying to find out what’s planned through the Irish end. What about the German angle? I can be a very convincing German. Let it be known, through your Camden Town man or whoever, that a German agent – me – has landed in Britain and is awaiting further instructions. Even if they guess I’m a phoney, they’ll still want to see who I am, but I think we can pull it off. I’d need a lot more information if I was going to pretend to be a German agent for any length of time, but it should be all right for a couple of hours.’ He looked at Sir Charles. ‘It might give us the break we’ve been looking for.’

  ‘You’re a brave man, Brooke,’ muttered Sir Charles. He swallowed. ‘A damn brave man.’ He drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘You do know this is dangerous?’

  Anthony nodded. ‘Of course I know. You said we were up against something evil. That’s not a word you use lightly.’

  ‘No,’ said Sir Charles. ‘No, it’s not.’ Relief showed in his eyes. ‘It’s a chance. My God, it’s a real chance. We’ll have to think up a credible place for you to stay and a credible character for you to be. It won’t take long to put the word out that you’ve arrived.’ He gave a little grunt of annoyance. ‘What about the inquest?’

  ‘I’ll have to go,’ said Anthony after a few moments’ thought. ‘If I don’t, it’ll be noted, and we might as well tell the enemy I’m engaged elsewhere.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ agreed Sir Charles. ‘Now, what name shall we give you?’

  TWELVE

  Late on Friday evening, John Robinson, a tall, soldierly-looking man with dark hair greying at the temples, disembarked from the Maid Of Orford.

  The Maid Of Orford, a little tub of a boat, regularly plied between the Hook of Holland and Harwich and had, on this trip, been carrying a mixed cargo of lard, chair legs, tallow, stair rods and, as a seeming afterthought, four passengers.

  John Robinson had, as the other passengers knew, been in Holland and the Low Countries, buying pigs’ bristles for artists’ oil brushes. What John Robinson – not so obvious a name as John Smith but still commonplace enough for a German to think of as typically English – knew about artists’ oil brushes he owed to an intensive couple of hours with Nathaniel Burgh of Minsmere and Burgh, Artists’ Requisites, on Wednesday morning. He had been more than happy to share his knowledge with the other passengers on the Maid Of Orford.

  The trip to the Hook of Holland for the express purpose of bouncing back across the North Sea in a wallowing tramp cargo boat had been Anthony’s idea. Not that he thought of himself as Anthony Brooke anymore. He was Günther Hedtke of Kiel, a German explosives expert pretending to be John Robinson of London. If his vowels were slightly too clipped and his manners rather too formal, that was Hedtke’s personality showing through. Anthony had begun to be quite fond of Günther Hedtke in the short time he had known him.

  He booked in the Ocean Hotel and waited.

  The busy Ocean Hotel was, he thought as he drank a glass of watery wartime beer in the bar that evening, a good choice. Most of the men in the bar were in groups of twos and threes but there were a couple of solitary drinkers.

  A thin man in a drab raincoat interested him. There was a pianist in the bar, entertaining the crowd with a selection of sentimental modern songs and ragtime, but the thin man, although he sat near the piano and had the newspaper spread out before him, didn’t seem to be reading or listening to the music. Oddly enough, the newspaper was open at today’s stirring account of an ‘Intrepid Briton’s Adventures in the Heart of the Kaiser’s Empire’. He, thought Anthony, looked promising.

  Waiting until the solitary man had nearly finished his beer, he drained his glass and went to the bar. With a prickle of anticipation he saw the solitary man stand up and, empty glass in hand, come to the bar. The jostle the solitary man gave him seemed reasonably natural in the crowd, but it wasn’t.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said the solitary man.

  Anthony politely – perhaps too politely for an Englishman – said it was of no consequence. Contact established.

  The solitary man looked over his shoulder at the pianist. ‘I wish he’d play some of the old songs,’ said the solitary man, and paused expectantly. His voice had the nasal twang of a Liverpool accent.

  Anthony swore under his breath. That was a cue if he’d ever heard one. Sir Charles had told him the signs and countersigns that were known to be currently in use, but there were no songs among them. The best he could do was pretend not to have twigged and hope for the best.

  The solitary man waited, a slight frown creasing his forehead. ‘You know, something with a real tune to it,’ he prompted.

  Anthony smiled politely.

  ‘An Irish song, perhaps?’

  There were hundreds of Irish songs. Anthony continued to smile.

  ‘Like The Minstrel Boy?’ suggested the solitary man.

  It was as well Anthony’s mind was running on songs and Irish songs, at that. He supplied the next line quickly. ‘To the war has gone, in the ranks of death you’ll find him.’

  The Liverpudlian’s face cleared. ‘I thought you were never going to get it. How about joining me for a drink?’

  ‘My apologies,’ Anthony muttered quietly as they sat down at the table by the piano. ‘It was very natural, very good, the way you introduced yourself. For the moment I did not realize.’

  ‘You’ll have to be a bit quicker off the mark next time,’ said the man in a low voice. ‘It’s lucky I saw you come in on the boat. Otherwise I might just have walked away. You’re for London. The big one. If it comes off,’ he added unexpectedly.

  ‘Wednesday? The fourteenth?’ suggested Anthony.

  ‘That’s the one,’ agreed the man. ‘You’ll be contacted next Tuesday.’

  ‘That is a long time,’ said Anthony, making his disappointment evident. In one way it suited him very well indeed, as the inquest on Veronica O’Bryan was fixed for Monday, but he was conscious of time slipping away.

  The man shrugged. ‘It can’t be helped. The boss has got something else on. We don’t need you till the day itself. We can pull this off alone, but expert help is always welcome, I suppose. Stay in the hotel and make yourself useful. There’s a lot of shipping in and out of the docks but don’t draw attention to yourself.’

  ‘I am here to make things go with a bang, yes?’ said Anthony carefully. ‘That is a good way of putting it?’

  The man grinned. ‘It’s a very good way. But listen, Mr Robinson –’ Anthony had not introduced himself – ‘if you’ll be guided by me, you’ll not talk to too many strangers. You speak English very well but you’ve got a way of saying things that might arouse attention.’

  ‘That is good advice,’ agreed Anthony, enunciating the words carefully.

  The man raised his eyebrows and finished his drink in a few gulps. ‘I’m off. Don’t stand up as I go. It’s not necessary. The chances are you’ll bow and click your heels,’ he added, more to himself than Anthony.

  Anthony looked crestfallen. ‘No, this I will not do. It i
s not the custom here.’

  ‘Just watch who you’re speaking to,’ the man advised. ‘See you, Mr Robinson.’ The man stood up, put on his cap, and left.

  Anthony sat back. He gave an inward sigh of relief but he was careful not to show too much satisfaction. After all, you never knew who was watching.

  The rest of the weekend passed without incident. As Mr Robinson, Anthony stayed quietly at the hotel, ate, slept, walked round the town and noted the shipping in the harbour.

  In the very early hours of Monday morning, he departed for London and his club, from where he emerged as Anthony Brooke, complete with uniform, to catch the train to Swayling to give evidence at Veronica O’Bryan’s inquest.

  The inquest was held at Swayling Assembly Rooms in the middle of the village. To his relief, there were no cameras and precious few reporters. Sherston was in a position to curb the enthusiasm of the gentlemen of Fleet Street.

  It was as he was going up the steps into the Assembly Rooms that Anthony felt a definite sense of unease. He stopped and glanced round the crowd, but they were, as far as he could see, only locals.

  Nevertheless, as the inquest got under way, his unease grew. Maybe, he thought, as he took the stand and, in answer to the coroner’s question, affirmed his identity, it was nothing more than having to declare in public exactly who he was and where he lived. Maybe it was the heart-wrenching sight of Josette, so near and yet so remote, her face strained with nerves. She seemed to be finding the proceedings even more difficult than Tara, whose determined bravery in recounting the discovery of her mother’s body won the immediate sympathy of the coroner, courtroom and jury. Maybe – but he didn’t quite believe it.

  Tara conducted herself with great dignity. The daughter and only child of the deceased. That was how she was described.

  Only child? There was the little girl in the photograph with ‘To Mummy’ written across it. Her solemn eyes tugged a chord of memory. Was she really Tara’s half-sister? Perhaps, thought Anthony, dissatisfied. She looked an engaging sort of kid, the little girl in the photograph. He’d always liked kids. He’d love to see her smile. Maybe then he would see the resemblance that he frustratingly couldn’t sharpen into focus.