Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

  CHAPTER 3

  Later that evening, at the Carlisles’ town house in Royal Crescent, Willie and Bess Skinner and Howard and Grace Carlisle met to finalize the details. Because they agreed that a record of the arrangement was needed in case of future disagreements or confusion, Edmond Jouvet was also there. A young, newly minted solicitor, Jouvet had earned Carlisle’s trust by performing several legal tasks for the dairies with discretion and integrity. And since they were the very first responsible jobs the young man had been offered, Carlisle had, in turn, earned Edmond’s loyalty.

  The two children, George and Roddy, were also there, both of them asleep in the next room, being watched over by Nuisance, the Carlisles’ springer spaniel. It had been agreed that the children would be exchanged that night, mainly to give Roddy a chance to begin feeling comfortable with the Skinners before the next day’s inevitable stresses and confusion.

  It was after nine when they’d finished. The document was signed by everyone, and the money transferred (£455, more than two years of the average island salary). It was only at the very end, when Roddy was carried off by the Skinners and George left behind in his place, that Grace showed signs of breaking down. She began to tremble. “Oh . . . Howard . . .”

  Carlisle embraced her tenderly. “He’ll be back, my darling, we’ll get him back. This awful business can’t go on forever.”

  Grace nodded, shuddering with the strain of holding back the tears but refusing to give in to them. “I know. I know.”

  “And at least he’ll be safe.”

  Another nod, this time with a brave little smile. “And for that we should thank God.”

  “Amen.”

  An hour later, when they were trying to make friends with George and trying to make themselves call him “Roddy,” Willie was back at their door. With him was a friendly little brown-and-white cocker spaniel puppy on a leash. Willie himself looked utterly used up, at the very end of his rope.

  “Howard . . . Grace . . . I’m sorry . . . Bess, she don’t know I’m here. She wouldn’t let me ask you, but . . .” He gulped. “Could you take Bobbie too?”

  “Take Bobbie?” Carlisle echoed.

  Willie nodded hopefully. “They won’t let us bring pets, you know. On them boats. People are just turning them loose to fend for theirselves. It’s terrible.”

  No, Carlisle hadn’t known, but he should have guessed. With the ships as jammed as they were, and few sanitary facilities, having pets aboard would have been awkward and unhealthy. He remembered now his surprise at seeing a pair of panicky-looking dogs wandering unattached in the street that afternoon and several more in the Parade Gardens. It hadn’t really registered with him, though. His thoughts had been elsewhere.

  “We can’t bring ourselves to do that to him,” Willie went on. “He’s such a friendly little tyke, so used to being around people. And the boy loves him. And he’s only three months; he’d be lost out there, wondering what he done wrong to be thrown out like that. Bess said we must bring him to the animal shelter to be put down. That’s what they told us at the registration too, but—”

  “We’ll take him,” Grace said.

  “You will?”

  “Of course we will,” Howard said. “He’ll be nice company for Nuisance too.”

  Grace bent down and lifted the little dog to her chest. Bobbie was in puppy paradise, his tail wagging—vibrating was more like it—and his tongue was trying to get at Grace’s cheek.

  Willie reached out to scratch behind the dog’s ear one final time. “You little traitor. At least you could have made like you was a little sad.” And to Grace and Howard: “God bless you both for what you done here.” He squeezed their hands in both of his, something he’d never done before, and quickly left.

  Before the door had closed behind him, Grace had buried her face in the puppy’s soft fur, and only then did the tears she’d been holding back all night come pouring out.

  “Oh, Howard, Howard, it’s all so awful . . .”

  By eleven the following morning, over two thousand people, more children than adults, were on the North Quay, about six hundred of them there to board the three old cargo ships waiting to take them across the channel to Weymouth, the rest there to see them off. The sky was a dull gray, the air sticky and oppressive, conditions that suited the grim mood. Occasionally, there were peals of childish laughter that briefly broke through the somber atmosphere. These came from youngsters too young to comprehend what was happening but old enough to know something funny when they saw it.

  And their fellow evacuees did look funny, no doubt about it. Given the rigorous baggage limits, most were dressed in as many layers of clothing as they could stuff themselves into. “Cumberland sausages with arms and legs” was the way a reporter who’d watched the previous days’ departures had described them. Many wore three hats, each one jammed onto the one underneath. Children flopped about in clown shoes five sizes too big for them because they were wearing a parent’s over their own.

  The Carlisles, leaving George with the nanny, had come down with the Skinners to wish them well and to bid farewell to Roddy. They had been standing on the quay for two and a half hours now, and the last two and a quarter of them—once Roddy had been hugged and kissed and doted over—had been painful in the extreme. Carlisle was depressed, Grace was teary, Willie tried visibly but unsuccessfully to find something to say, and Bess couldn’t stop her nervous jabbering.

  “Your attention, please,” crackled over the loudspeakers, and two thousand heads came up. “The Porthmorna is now ready for boarding. Those with family names beginning from A to L are to report to the forward gangway, those from M to Z to the aft gangway. Please be prompt.”

  Carlisle rolled his eyes with relief. At last, thank God!

  “Well, that’s it, then,” Bess chirped. She lifted the child from his baby carriage. “Want to say good-bye to little Roddy?”

  We’ve already said a dozen good-byes, damn it, Carlisle thought. If I have to do it one more time, my heart will break. But Grace accepted the offer and hugged the cross, sleepy child to her. “Good-bye, my darling,” she whispered through her tears. “Be well. I’ll see you soon. Don’t forget me.”

  Bess gently took the child back into her arms. “We’ll take very good care of this little dear, don’t you worry.”

  “And we’ll take good care of George,” Grace said.

  “We’ll wave to you from the deck. Oh, you can have the pram. They won’t let us take it aboard.”

  “Thank you.”

  As if we needed another pram, Carlisle thought. Go, go, go, I can’t stand this misery any longer. “You’d best get going,” he said quietly.

  Another loudspeaker announcement brought home his point. “A Royal Air Force group will arrive here from England in exactly one hour, at eleven forty-five, to escort the Porthmorna safely to Weymouth. The ship must be underway by that time. Those not aboard by eleven fifteen, one half hour from now, will be left behind.”

  That hurried things along. Carlisle was ready to go home right then, but Grace stayed him with a hand on his arm. She needed one last look at Roddy. It took almost the entire half hour for the Skinners to show up on deck and squeeze themselves in among the crowd at the railing, by which time the ship’s horn had sounded three blasts and the water around the propellers had stepped up its churning. The Carlisles spotted them and waved, the Skinners waved back, and Bess waved Roddy’s thin little arm for him. And the Porthmorna, looking like the tired, old coal carrier she was, slowly began to move.

  It was then that the quavery but thrillingly pure soprano of an elderly woman floated down from the deck with the opening words of “Beautiful Jersey,” that most unmartial of patriotic anthems. She sang in Norman French, until a hundred years ago the dominant language of the island, but now remembered by few people other than the old:

  Man bieau p’tit Jèrri, la reine des îles . . .

  The sweetly melancholic melody was known to all, however, and a few at a
time, people began to sing or hum along with her. Before she reached the end of that first chorus, almost everyone, whether looking back from the too-quickly-receding Porthmorna or out from the quay, had joined in, but now it was in English:

  Beautiful Jersey, gem of the sea,

  Ever my heart turns in longing to thee.

  Bright are the mem’ries you waken for me,

  Beautiful Jersey, gem of the sea

  By that time the crowd was swaying to the gentle meter of the song and unashamedly sobbing. Hundreds of handkerchiefs that had been in use all morning for dabbing away at eyes now waved in rhythmic unison.

  Grace was crying and singing along with the others, but Howard looked as if he’d been turned to stone. She reached out and grasped his hand.

  “Remember what you said last night: ‘at least he’ll be safe.’”

  Howard nodded dumbly, then managed to get out a strangled, “Yes, that’s right, he’ll be safe now.” And then, with a harsh, choked sob, he broke down and cried like everyone else.

  CHAPTER 4

  Five years later, May 8, 1945

  Radio broadcast by Prime Minister Winston Churchill:

  Hostilities will end officially at one minute after midnight tonight, but in the interests of saving lives, the “cease-fire” began yesterday to be sounded all along the front, and our dear Channel Islands are also to be freed today.

  So it was “our dear Channel Islands” now, was it—after half a decade of outright, explicit abandonment and neglect? But Winnie was Winnie, God bless him, and was quickly forgiven; he had done what he thought best for the United Kingdom as a whole, and who could blame him for that? And now at long, long last, the Second World War was officially over; the official decree had been read aloud in Saint Helier’s Royal Square, and the Germans, as worn and nearly as starved as the islanders, had all been shipped off to camps in England. Already supplies had begun trickling in to bring Jersey back from the terrible deprivation of the Occupation’s final two years. What was awaited now—awaited with all-consuming anticipation—was the return of those thousands of islanders, especially the beloved children, who had been evacuated at the war’s beginning and lived it out overseas.

  Like the evacuation itself, however, it didn’t take long for the return to run into hitches. First, the ship that had originally been pledged to carry the returnees had shown up war damaged and would be unavailable for two months. When Jersey then requested planes to fly the returnees back, they were turned down in London. Finally, the War Transport Office agreed to divert a ship from the Dieppe–Newhaven run for returning servicemen, for as long as was needed, and it was then that the messages everyone had been waiting for began to arrive.

  The Carlisles’ came on June 24 in the form of a telegram, three white paper strips pasted on a yellow form:

  Arriving St. Helier 27 Jun • All well • Roddy fine • Happy be home • Hope you fine too +++

  Willie Skinner

  It was the first time they’d heard from Willie in five years, the first word about Roddy’s welfare in all this time, and it brought overwhelming relief and gratitude. All communication with England—with anywhere—had been cut off the day the newly arrived German military band first oompahed its way up Broad Street. (How plump and jolly the Germans were that day; if they’d been wearing lederhosen and forest-green fedoras with feathers in them, they would have looked like a band of merry innkeepers on vacation. And no wonder, they’d gotten a peach of an assignment, a quiet, beautiful island with only these pleasant, civilized limeys to worry about, while their brothers and cousins were fighting and dying among the unspeakable Untermenschen of Poland and Czechoslovakia.)

  From that day on, there had been no letters from the outside world, no telegrams, no telephone calls. Residents were ordered to turn in their wireless sets; those found using them were sent off to the Nazis’ notorious concentration camps in Germany or Eastern Europe. After the first few deportations, not many risked it. For the duration of the Occupation, islanders had to depend for their war news on the Nazi newsreels shown in the Forum Cinema in Saint Helier. Thus, it had come as a surprise when the Germans, so valiant and victorious in battle after battle on the silver screen, “suddenly” lost the war. Many of the rank-and-file Wehrmacht soldiers had been equally stunned.

  But all of that, thank God, was over and done. They had their island back. The Germans were gone, never to return. And now, at last, their friends and relatives—their children—were coming home.

  Three days later, June 27, Howard, Grace, and little Georgie were among the eager, impatient crowds on the North Quay who stood watching the battered, old hospital ship Isle of Guernsey glide into its berth, tie up, and let down its gangways. The mood couldn’t have been more different from the one that had pervaded the crowd—many of them the same people—who had stood there five years ago to watch the Porthmorna depart. The good old Porthmorna itself was no longer in existence, having been destroyed by German fighter planes after being converted to a Navy raider.

  Their joy was tempered only a little by reports from the day before—the first day of the transport—when there had been some fretting about the returnees, especially the young ones. They had become foreigners, many said. They spoke in the strange, flat accents of Lancashire, Cornwall, and Yorkshire. But as the returning children saw it, it was Jersey that was the foreign country. Any boys or girls under ten had spent the greater part of their lives in England. Their memories of Jersey were fragmented and confused at best, or more likely nonexistent altogether. To many of them, the rustic speech and manners of the islanders came as a shock that baffled or repelled them.

  Howard was confident that that wouldn’t be a problem with Roddy, who had been such an amiable, malleable baby and would be bound to pick up the ways of his homeland without any trouble. The Carlisles had brought Georgie along with them; they thought it was best for the boys to return to their parents right then and there. And, of course, they didn’t want to wait even one more night to have Roddy back home with them. Over the past week, they had tried to prepare George for this moment, for his return to his own family, and they could only hope that the Skinners had done as much for Roddy.

  “We love you very, very much,” they’d told Georgie, and it was God’s truth. To their surprise and happiness, Georgie had turned into a sweet, eminently lovable little boy, mild and generous. Their hearts had never stopped aching for their own Roddy, but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy giving up Georgie.

  “We’re not really your mum and dad, you see,” they’d explained. “We’re really your Uncle Howard and Auntie Grace, and we’ve been taking care of you until your real mum and dad, who love you even more than we do, could come home. Only we weren’t allowed to tell you that until the Germans went away. Well, now they have gone away, and your mum and dad will be back very soon, and they want you to come back and live with them, and who can blame them for that? And guess what, your name isn’t really Roddy, it’s George, isn’t that a nice name? Isn’t that lovely? You’re named after a king, did you know that?”

  And so on and so forth. The boy had seemed to take it in, but doubts were raised when, after mulling it over for a day, he asked: “But if I’m going to be George, who’s going to be Roddy?” That had required some considerable explication, and they still weren’t sure how much of it had taken.

  Grace suddenly pinched Carlisle’s wrist so hard that it hurt. “There! At the top of the gangplank! Isn’t that Willie?”

  Howard agreed that it was. A second later Bess appeared too, holding the hand of a tow-haired little boy.

  “Roddy!” Grace exclaimed. Her hand went to her throat. “Oh, my God! Howard, look at how brave and straight he stands up there, look—” But she couldn’t say any more before choking up with happiness and tears.

  When they waved, the Skinners spotted them and waved jovially back as they came down the gangway.

  “Are you sure that’s him?” Howard asked when they got closer.
“He looks so . . . so sturdy.”

  All of them did, for that matter. Compared to George and the rest of the skinny, hungry-looking kids waiting on the dock—with their faces mostly turned up and their mouths open, they looked like starving baby robins in the nest, straining for the worm that Mom had brought home—the ones coming down the gangway looked like fat Dutch burghers in an old Frans Hals painting. And the same went for the adults. It had been a hard five years for them here on Jersey, and the last two had brought them to the point of desperation; that was when the cats and dogs had started disappearing. On the other hand, for all the stress and dangers of nighttime bombings and V-2 rockets, the English had never starved, not really starved. The islanders had. Food was coming in now, thank heaven, but it would be a while before it showed on their scrawny frames.

  “It’s him, I’m almost sure,” Grace said, “but we’ll be able to see in a minute.” She put three fingers to her neck, just under her right ear. After a moment, he understood. Their son, Roddy, had a group of three small, flat moles that formed a perfect little isosceles triangle there. When the Skinners got closer, they’d be able to tell for sure whether the child was their Roddy. They watched as the wonderfully well-knit little boy now made his way so assuredly down the gangway, holding Bess’s hand in his own but confidently ignoring the railing on his other side.

  And the moles were there.

  Carlisle’s heart quickened. “Hallo, Son!” he shouted, his excitement getting the better of him. “Welcome home, my boy!”

  “’Ullo,” Roddy called back, his voice barely audible.

  Carlisle suddenly realized that George had been tugging on his hand for a while. He looked down. “Yes, Roddy”—Damn!—“yes, George?”

  “That little boy?” George asked. “Is he me?”

  So much for his having taken things in. “No, George, you’re you, just as you always were. But we weren’t allowed to tell you your real name.”

  “Oh.” Now his hand slipped from Howard’s and crept up to grasp Grace’s.