by Eric Reed
To her annoyance the site had not been cordoned off, nor had anyone bothered to mark the body’s position. More evidence it was considered an accident. She examined the altars. There were carvings on them. A garland, a pitcher, a knife. She could make out a rusty stain on one corner, the victim’s blood or simply an innocent discoloration? The city air, she had already seen, blackened everything. She gauged the distance from the nearest foundation. Yes, if the victim had taken a misstep in the dark and stumbled forward she might have hit her head on the stained corner, although it would have taken a very bad piece of luck to fall in exactly the right direction.
She surveyed the dismal scene again. This was not how she had envisioned her first day on the job in Newcastle. How had she pictured it? Striding along crowded streets while heads turned in admiration, staring at her uniform? She’d hardly encountered a soul on the short walk to the temple, and the few pedestrians she had seen were hunched over and muffled up, rushing to escape the miserable cold, seeing nothing but their warm destinations. All carried gas masks. The box holding her own hung from a string draped over her shoulder, a constant reminder that death might fall from the skies at any moment.
The rectangular temple outlined by what remained of its walls wasn’t large. About fifteen feet long, Grace estimated. Sweet wrappers lay in the tall grass and under the surrounding hedges. She trudged dutifully around the wet ground, seeing nothing but rubbish, wishing she had a pair of wellingtons. No doubt the spot had already been thoroughly searched.
Wallace was probably right that it was an accident and no one had seen anything. The streetlights had been off. The houses all sat at a distance, windows blocked by the omnipresent blackout curtains.
A rustling in the weeds caught her attention.
It was only a black cat, crossing this tiny piece of wilderness.
A good omen. Black cats meant good luck, just as left-handed swastikas did, according to Grandma.
Grace smiled at the cat, then crossed Chandler Street and started knocking at doors.
***
“Do you think Santa will be able to get to us this year?” Six-year-old Veronica Gibson sought comfort from Jim Charles, a boy in his early teens accompanying a group of several children returning home after school. “Will the Luftwobble catch him? It would be awful if he got killed.” Her voice wavered.
Short and slight, with a solemn face framed by dark wispy hair chopped off at chin level, Veronica was of an age when reindeer-drawn sleighs bearing presents and airplanes loaded with bombs were both shadowy possibilities moving through the vast misty world beyond the concrete reality of her own neighborhood. She had heard her parents talking about the Luftwobble and Hitler and Nasties when they thought her out of earshot. Their tones terrified her. She could not imagine what would scare adults.
“Santa’s clever enough to avoid them Germans,” Jim reassured her. “I’ll bet he’s got a great big machine gun on his sleigh just in case.”
Veronica frowned up at the gangly creature beside her. Jim could be unreliable, mean and teasing at times. At other times he was protective of her and other younger children living in the neighborhood. She walked on, thoughtful as always. An invisible sun infused the fog with a sickly yellow light that made everything look flat and dead.
“Made yer list for Santa and chucked it in the fire?” Jim asked.
Veronica nodded. The ashes still flew up the chimney to Santa like previous years, she hoped, but with the Luftwobble up there, could she be sure?
“What did you ask for?”
“A dolly and sweeties and a book,” came the reply. “And for me mam—” The little girl broke off and stopped walking. “Look. There’s a bobby at the ruins.”
A voice from behind them broke in. “That’s because someone bashed in some tart’s head last night.” The boy, around Jim’s age, expelled his words in gusts of cigarette smoke rather than the misty exhalations issuing from other mouths. His narrow features were set in a sneer.
Jim showed him a doubled-up fist. “Divn’t torment the bairn, Stu.”
“You keep yer gob shut, Jim.”
Veronica felt tears welling up. “Did…did…the lady….?”
“She got killed, Nica.” Stu told her. “Same as you would if somebody smashed you over the head with a big, jagged rock.”
Veronica pressed mittened hands to her mouth. The other children had gathered around Stu. He offered them a wicked smile. “It was me what reported her, see. Huns done it.”
Jim laughed. “Harraway wi’ yer barrer! Who’d be stupid enough to fall for that?”
“Must have been the Huns. They bent her arms and legs so she looked like one of them swastikas they parade about with, the swine.”
The children were wide-eyed.
The bobby Veronica had spotted moved off.
“Look. The copper’s a girl,” Jim said.
“Bloody hell!” Stu tossed his cigarette away. “Like to see some girl stop me in the street and tell me what to do!”
***
A few of Grace’s knocks were answered, many were not. Those who did answer told her about as much as those who didn’t. Grace scribbled in her notebook, mainly to give the impression she was doing her job.
A young woman with a harassed expression and two toddlers clinging to her skirt complained about the lack of moral guidance youngsters had these days. “Hardly any left around here with so many evacuated, but the ones that stayed get up to as much mischief as all the rest put together. What are their parents thinking? Why, the woman at number fifteen caught her next door neighbor’s son shoplifting only last week. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t some of these wild kids did that poor woman in.”
The industrial city and its deafening noise of clock-round war work in factory and shipyard created conditions in which children might be left to their own devices when their mothers were working and their fathers away.
As Grace continued along the street it was always a woman who opened the door, invariably looking her up and down, puzzled and wary. Grace guessed they did not pay her the deference they would have had she been a man, but then, how would she know how city people normally acted?
Questioning her neighbors in Noddweir had been easy. Those who hadn’t known her as Constable Baxter’s daughter from the time she was a child had grown up with her. In Newcastle she was among strangers. Suspicious strangers. And who could blame them? Her accent set her apart, as did her ruddy complexion. The faces in this gloomy city were all ashen. Or was that her own prejudice showing?
Several doors down, a white-haired woman carrying tins in a string shopping bag arrived at her door as Grace approached. She invited her inside because, as she put it, “I don’t want gossip.” She had nothing to offer except a fervent wish the Germans would oblige her and the neighbors by turning the ruins into a pit.
“It’s a natural place of business for loose women. Nobody can see what’s going on over there after dark. Why, only the other day I was telling my friend Ada there’d be trouble sooner or later. A well-placed bomb would solve the problem. I’d be happy to replace a few broken windows. Was the woman one of those…well, you know? Do you think it was a customer killed her? Maybe it was someone from the street. You never know what husbands will get up to.”
Everyone had a theory but no one had seen or heard anything. No commotion, no screams in the night, raised voices or running feet. No reason for anyone to put out the light, push aside a blackout curtain, and peer out, as if it were possible to see anything anyway.
But residents were afraid. They did not share the official assumption that the woman had died by accident. “Until the person responsible is found, I’m asking to change to a day shift,” one woman told her.
Was it the stress of war that caused everyone in the street to assume the worst, or was it some sort of collective instinct?
By t
he time Grace finished her circuit the haze and drizzle had given way to pale sunlight, as weak as the third cup of tea from the same leaves. Her damp feet had stopped stinging long before and gone numb. When she spotted a woman whitening her doorstep with a scouring stone, she was reluctant to stop and question her.
The woman gave a start when she became aware of Grace, ceased rubbing with the stone, and scowled upwards.
“Anything to do with that temple, you need to talk to Rutherford at number sixty,” she replied to Grace’s query. “Old as the hills, he is. Knows all about them ruins. Gives lectures about such things at the church. Them ruins ought to be bulldozed, in my opinion. Magnets for troublemakers, they are.”
The woman stood, sniffed, and adjusted the tartan headsquare covering her curlers. Her wet hands were fiery red from the cold. What kind of weather was this for such a task? “Mind, you’ll be lucky if you can get him to talk. We hardly see him in the daytime. He creeps out after dark every night. I’ve moved my wardrobe to block my front room window so I can’t see that abomination. The ruins, I mean.” Her voice degenerated into a bout of coughing as she wiped her hands on her apron.
“He goes out every night?”
“Aye, hinney. Straight over to them ruins. Only the Almighty knows what he gets up to, or who he meets, or what.” She gave another sniff, drawing her apron tighter about her thin frame.
Grace questioned her further and learned nothing more. “And he lives at number sixty, you say?”
“That’s right. Six six six would be more appropriate.”
“If anything comes back to you, anything strange you saw or heard that night, come round to the police station and let us know.”
The woman offered a noncommittal grunt, picked up her bucket and scouring stone, and went indoors. Grace heard her clumping up uncarpeted stairs.
Number sixty turned out to be a ground-floor maisonette, distinguishing itself from the others in the street by the peeling paint on its door and a dirty window. Grace had tried knocking earlier. She plied the knocker vigorously again. Despite her gloves, the cold from the metal knocker flowed into her hand like an electric current. Her fingers were as numb as her toes.
Finally she decided there would be no answer. Presumably Rutherford worked at night, since he went out every evening. He’d be asleep during the day but the racket she’d made should have awakened him. She would have to come back later.
As she turned to go, disappointed and wondering what Baines would say at her failure to find out anything useful, she glimpsed a slight twitch in the still drawn blackout curtain.
Was the elderly Mr. Rutherford deaf or did he want to avoid opening the door to the police?
She remained in front of the door for a short time, in case he was making up his mind but the curtain fell back into place and the door remained closed.
This was her first impression of Newcastle. Much cold, many locked doors.
Chapter Four
“So they’ve put you on a murder case already, hinney! Good for you. What most of them bluebottles need is a boot in the rear, if y’ask me.”
Mavis, Grace’s landlady, perched on the end of one of two beds shoe-horned into the room, swinging her legs restlessly as she watched Grace empty her suitcases. Grace had arrived late the night before and the two had barely had a chance to speak.
“No one at the station thinks it was a murder or else I wouldn’t be investigating. I’m only an auxiliary.”
“Oh, it’s a murder. Woman’s intuition.” Mavis was a petite brunette dressed in drab overalls a size too large. She picked up Grace’s peaked uniform hat from the bed and settled it on her cropped hair.
Grace looked up from her suitcases. “Pardon? You’ll have to speak slower, Mavis, until I get used to your accent.” It wasn’t just the accent, she thought. Geordie, the local dialect, resembled a foreign language to her Southern ears.
“Shove your knickers in the top drawer there. Is that why they call them drawers, do you think? Afraid we’re a bit short of space here. I’ll make some room for your clothes in the wardrobe. You’ll get used to living in a place with only two rooms, a scullery, and a netty in the backyard.”
“Netty? You mean outdoor privy? I’m already used to those. That’s what I grew up with. I’m a country girl.”
What she wasn’t used to was the cramped layout. The shared bedroom was the first room opening off a short hall leading to the combination kitchen and living room heated by a coal fire in a fireplace fitted with an oven to one side and a well-polished brass fender in front. The kitchen led to a scullery whose claustrophobic space under a slanted ceiling housed a gas cooker. A sink with a cold water tap and wooden draining board stood below the window next to a door opening on to a narrow brick-walled backyard.
“For heaven’s sake!” Mavis cried. “What are you doing with that disgusting thing?” She was staring at the charm in Grace’s hand.
“It’s a keepsake of my grandmother.”
“Your grammy was a Nazi?” Mavis’ legs in the baggy overalls stopped swinging. She sat rigid, as if Hitler himself had goose-stepped into the room.
“No. It’s a charm. Look, the arms are pointed in the opposite direction from the Nazi version. They’re anti-clockwise. Left-handed, see?” Grace held the charm out for closer examination but Mavis put her hands up as if to push it away.
“It’s nothing to do with the Germans, Mavis,” Grace continued. “The swastika has been around for centuries. It’s considered a symbol of good luck, long life, and prosperity. The Germans adopted a certain form of it, made it stand for something it was never meant to represent.”
“If you say so, but I’m not touching it.”
What would Mavis think if Grace told her that the body of the woman found at the temple had been laid out in the form of a left-handed swastika?
She placed the trinket into a drawer. Mavis’ reaction was understandable. Not everyone had grown up with a wise woman for a grandmother. Grace clicked the suitcase shut and slid it under the bed. The last thing she needed was to get into an argument with the woman she was going to be living with, possibly for the war’s duration.
Grandma had always been a troublemaker and she was still causing trouble.
Mavis surveyed the tiny room bleakly. “Here I am, the best years of me life flying by, ruining me hands working at Vickers. It’s good money and I’m helping the war effort but I’m left all alone while me husband fights abroad—not that Ronny wasn’t forever fighting at home. Thank heaven we never had any bairns.”
Upon arriving the previous evening Grace had noted there were no photos of the absent husband serving in the forces. She wasn’t sure how to respond. Luckily Mavis changed the subject.
“What about the rest of your family, Grace? They’re still down south?”
“In a way.”
“Dead, eh? Sorry. Bloody Germans. I do rattle on. Sorry about your grammy’s charm too. Gave me a bit of a start.”
“It’s the sort of thing gives spies away in novels.”
“Is it? I’m not much of a reader myself. Love to dance. I’ve got a gramophone and practice me steps most nights.”
Grace believed her. There were binders of the sort used to store records stacked in the corner. She’d seen others on a kitchen shelf and individual records scattered here and there.
Mavis took off Grace’s hat, which was too large for her, and tossed it down. “I don’t think I have an outfit to match that.”
With her severe haircut, plain face devoid of makeup, and ill-fitting overalls, Mavis didn’t look like a woman who gave any thought to fashion or dancing.
“I’m not much of a dancer,” Grace admitted. “I can muddle through a waltz or a polka, if you call a fast waltz a polka. Did you go dancing with your visitor last night?” A tall man had briefly exchanged words with Mavis on the door step before dep
arting. “I hope I won’t..I mean, I don’t want to intrude.”
“Hans van der Berg? He’s not my fancy man, if that’s what you mean. He’s angled a bit but I do keep in mind I’m married, unlike some. The neighbors already gossip because I like to go out and have fun. Do we have to waste our lives because we had the bad luck to be young when there’s a war on?”
Grace smiled. “If you practice dancing here with Hans, I won’t tell anyone.”
“I wouldn’t want to give him ideas. That reminds me, did I tell you Hans is coming over later?”
***
After their evening meal Grace sat with Mavis in the kitchen.
“Was your sergeant pleased with your efforts?”
“Hard to say.” Grace frowned. “He was gone by the time I returned. When he met me this morning I got the impression that he felt I was offending him simply by being there, being a woman.”
“The men prefer us to stay home. And knit.” Mavis indicated the teddy bear she was making, coloured a bright red never seen in nature. “This is for a little girl down the street. Poor bairn won’t get much for Christmas as it is and as for the others, Santa needs all the coal he would usually leave for bad lads! I’ve knitted her mittens and a pixie hood from the same old sweater. Then I’ve made a paper tooter and one of those twirly things on a string you go cross-eyed looking at. I should have liked to get hold of a bit of coloured chalk.”
“That’s good of you, Mavis.” It pleased Grace to be forming a good impression of this young woman she’d arranged to stay with sight unseen.
“Bairns have no childhood these days. I’ve also got something different for her. It’s a stone with a hole in it. Picked it up at Cullercoats on the coast, years ago. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Grandma told me they’re good for protection. You could plait some wool and make her a necklace with it.”
“It’s a nice idea. She’d like that. Then again, your grammy thought swastikas are lucky! Your family does have strange ideas!”