by Eric Reed
There was a knock on the front door. Mavis got up to answer it and returned followed by a tall, blond man with deep blue eyes and a thin, tanned face, the man Grace had glimpsed speaking to Mavis the night before. “It’s Hans, come to get the old wives gossiping again. This is Grace, Hans, my new lodger.”
The visitor gave a half-bow. “Goedenavond, Miss Grace,” he said, addressing her in Dutch. “Miss Mavis told me you had arrived when I called last night. I did not think I should come in. You must have been very tired from traveling.” Turning to Mavis, he went on, “I have for you a present to honour the season.” Delving into a pocket of his shabby pea coat, he brought out a pair of glass Christmas ornaments carefully wrapped in a handkerchief. “I purchased them from a gentleman in a public house.”
“Very nice, too, Hans. Thanks. I’ll pinch a couple of pine branches from the cemetery—you didn’t hear that, Grace!—stick them in a jam jar, and add a bit of tinsel and these ornaments. And very festive they’ll look too. Now, get snipping!”
Hans hung his coat over a chair back, sat down at the table, and began cutting strips from sheets of painted newspaper Mavis produced from a cupboard. He gave the impression of being very much at home. Grace deduced that decorative paper chains were to be made.
“Tell us about the adventures of a woman police auxiliary then, Grace,” Mavis asked.
“It’s not much of an adventure. Knocking on doors in the cold, mostly. How are we going to stick these paper strips together?”
“I’ve thought of that,” Mavis said, going into the scullery.
“It must have been a very bad thing to see that poor dead lady,” Hans observed.
Grace reached for a strip of paper at the same moment as Hans laid more on the pile and their hands momentarily met. An accident?
Hans pulled his hand away and smiled.
“No, no.” Grace felt flustered. “She had been taken to the morgue by the time I arrived at the station. I’ve only seen a drawing so far. The odd thing was it looked like her arms and legs were arranged in the shape of a left-handed swastika.”
Mavis returned with a basin. “Never mind about that, Grace. Here we are, see? Flour and water paste will hold our paper chain together. Not that Mr. Churchill would approve.”
“It is good for people to have a little joy in their lives,” Hans replied. “So I shall not tell him!”
Mavis resumed knitting. “Tell Grace how you came to be in England, Hans. It’s a good story.”
“I was a fisherman. One night I got into my boat and sailed to England—”
“’Got in his boat,’ he says!” Mavis put in. “He forgot to tell you he had to dodge sentries, brought other refugees with him, and the Germans sank his boat. Luckily they were near to the coast and got rescued. Well, most of them.”
“It was so,” Hans admitted. “Now I work as a translator but I am hoping my friend Mavis will help me get work at the Vickers factory down by the river. I wish to strike back more directly at the Germans.”
“We do a canny bit of war work down there,” Mavis agreed.
Hans nodded vigorously. “Tanks. That is what I want to make. If I could I would gladly drop bombs on the swine.” He grasped the scissors and made stabbing motions.
The gesture startled Grace. The man had struck her as mild-mannered.
Mavis patted Hans’ arm. “Wouldn’t we all like to bomb the Huns? Hans does make fighter planes, though.” She showed Grace the silver brooch pinned to her blouse, the crude but recognizable shape of a Spitfire. “He made it from a sixpence.”
It reminded Grace of one of her grandmother’s many charms. She asked Mavis whether it was such a thing.
“No. It’s not a charm. It’s to show support for the Brylcreem boys. You know, fighter pilots. Not that we aren’t a superstitious lot. There was a girl on this street who got herself into trouble, wouldn’t have her baby christened, refused to have it adopted, and then abandoned it and went off. All the old wives said, ‘What could you expect from a tart who wouldn’t be churched?’”
Grace looked puzzled.
“You’re supposed to have yourself blessed first thing after you get home with the baby before you do anything or go anywhere,” Mavis explained. “Superstition, see.”
By now several piles of newspaper chains adorned the table. Mavis put her knitting needles down and lifted the almost completed teddy bear to her face, examining her work. She scowled. “That poor woman found in the next street. I wonder if she left any bairns behind?”
***
The china clock on the mantelpiece maddeningly ticked off each passing minute that Grace was unable to sleep. She gave it a scolding look. The base was inscribed with a breezy declaration—A Present From Blackpool.
Hans had left long since, sent off by Mavis with a peck on the cheek which made Grace wonder again whether she was in their way. Mavis retired but Grace remained in the kitchen. She couldn’t turn off her thoughts. She kept imagining the remains of the temple, a shadowed body crumpled before the altars, kept going back over the interviews she’d conducted. She leafed through the newspaper Mavis had left on a chair and found a brief story about the unidentified young woman found there. It was believed to be an accident. Police were investigating. Nothing was mentioned about the body’s odd position.
Finally she read a paperback thriller—A Gun For Sale by Graham Greene. Not the best choice, perhaps. Her mother had disapproved of her reading what she termed rubbish. The only books her mother kept in the house were the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress.
The clock’s relentless ticking sounded loud against a backdrop of rumbling industrial equipment, ships’ horns on the Tyne, and a gusty, rising wind rattling a loose drainpipe. And another noise. She glanced at the back window but the blackout curtain was drawn and anyway the backyard would have been a featureless pit.
Probably a rat. She got up and went into the scullery. Biting chill and the odor of fresh washing met her. Mavis’ ghostly underthings hung over the cooker. The air in Newcastle was full of smoke. Soot speckled everything, including any washing hung out on lines crisscrossing the back lanes between each street of terraced houses or pegged out in cramped backyards. Before going to bed Mavis had rinsed a few things in the sink and shown Grace what she described as the most advanced method of drying laundry known to womankind, which turned out to be a rack suspended from the ceiling over the cooker, so heat from cooking or baking carried out the task. The contraption was raised and lowered by means of a thin rope looped round a hook in the wall nearby.
“Make sure you anchor it well, mind,” she warned. “Otherwise it’s liable to fall on your head while you’re cooking. Another thing. If you’re ever in a hurry to get your knickers dried, stick them under the grill. There’s many a nappy been dried that way. Make sure you keep an eye on them so they don’t get scorched.”
Mavis was surprised when Grace mentioned cooking with wood back home. “One thing about that, no fear of gas escaping if the Luftwaffe pay a call,” she had observed. “Who said the old ways are useless?”
The old ways. Returning to the kitchen and picking up her book, Grace thought of her grandmother and her knowledge of charms, herbal remedies, and what she was pleased to call persuasions. The wise woman would surely have enjoyed talking to the study group the woman she had interviewed had mentioned. Such a group would be a likely source of information about the temple, wouldn’t they? What god did the temple honour? What rites had been conducted? Was it possible the unknown woman’s dying there was not accidental? That her death had to do with the temple in some way beyond it being a place to meet?
Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. Your imagination is running away with you. If Grandma hadn’t filled your head up with all her nonsense you’d never have thought of such a thing. Isn’t an accidental death bad enough without inventing worse? Besides, you’re not supposed to be thin
king about police work at this hour.
She lowered the book to her lap and tried to empty her mind.
As she dozed she saw her grandmother. Then her father. Several villagers she had known. Two elderly aunts who had died while she was still a child. All people who had died. She was awake yet unable to control this ghostly slide show. Tick. There was her grandmother. Tick. There was her mother. Was her mother dead, then?
Still half awake, she struggled to add a living person to the display and failed.
What did it mean, this procession of the dead?
Her grandmother smiled at her tiredly, as if to chide her for being so slow.
“Grandma, really!” Grace murmured under the breath. “If you have something to say to me, say it.”
A tinny chime announced one in the morning.
Grace came out of her daze. She had better get to bed or else Mavis would find her asleep in the chair when she got up. She yawned and decided to pay a visit to the netty. As she went into the scullery there was a muffled thud and what sounded like a muttered curse from outside.
She stopped cold, heart jumping, hand on the doorknob, head tilted, listening hard. She heard the sound of rapidly receding footsteps.
Grace flung the door open. An indistinct figure hauled itself up over the backyard wall and vanished. Grace went out into the back lane but saw nothing.
She returned to the backyard, shivering in the cutting wind. Using the netty quickly she started back indoors. With eyes now adjusted to the dark, she could better make out the scullery door.
Painted on it was a red swastika.
Chapter Five
“A swastika on the back door?” Wallace shrugged. Grace realized that was his answer to a lot of things. “We can’t chase down every kid who plays a prank these days.”
Grace had expected her colleague to be more concerned. But then what did she know about him? This Saturday was only her second day on the job. She had reported to Wallace because Sergeant Baines was late arriving. “But surely this sort of thing affects morale, not to mention flouting law and order?”
“You’re right, but in this case the only morale it’s going to affect is our own. Most likely it was aimed at you, being connected with the police. Quite a few of us have had stones through our windows and rude words scrawled on our doors. Not much comfort, I know, but the best I can offer.”
It hadn’t occurred to Grace that she might be the target or that her presence could put Mavis in danger. “Too bad mischief-makers can’t be shipped off to throw stones through Hitler’s windows.”
“They will be if the war continues long enough.”
The young officer manning the counter clacked away at his typewriter, paying their conversation no attention. Already Grace had become less of an object of curiosity. How would her colleagues react when they found she’d never learned to type?
“What should I do about it? It’s upset my landlady.”
“Best thing to do is keep your eyes and ears open. Write a report. Mind, the chances are it was a local kid and the neighbors won’t say a thing.”
“They’re all as close-mouthed as the people living near the temple?”
“I’m afraid so. Then again it’s likely no one saw anything. The blackout, you know.”
Was it always going to come down to that? It was dark and the curtains were drawn. Let’s move on to the next case. That and a shrug?
“I’m afraid I didn’t find out very much yesterday,” Grace began. “Perhaps I wasn’t questioning people the right way? Conversations kept drifting away from the topic.”
“Nonsense! How do you think you should be questioning them? Ask them where were you, missus, on the night of the murder between the hours of six p.m. and three a.m.?” Wallace laughed. “People won’t stand for being interrogated in their own homes or at their favorite pubs. At the station, that’s different…especially if they’re charged with a crime. But in their own surroundings? They’ll clam right up on you.”
“You think so?”
“I know so from years of experience. However, you did find out that odd character Rutherford is over at the ruins every night. He could turn out to be very important. He might well have noticed something useful.”
“Still, it seems as if I talked myself hoarse for nothing.”
“Well, that’s the way it works. If you talk to twenty people and find a single useful piece of information, count yourself lucky. Now go back and see if you can winkle out Rutherford.”
“Now?” Grace was eager to be back out on the street. A dusty sense of futility hung in the air of this corner shop masquerading as a police station.
“Not right away. First I have another assignment for you. We’ve been told vandals have been at work in St John’s Cemetery too. Talk to the watchman. Not that we can do anything but, as you say, we need to keep up civilian morale, look like we’re on the job. Which we are, only not enough of us.”
“Could it be related to the vandalism at my lodgings?”
“It’s possible, I suppose.” From his tone he clearly considered it impossible. He gave her directions. “It will give you a bit of exercise and a chance to see more of the area.”
***
Grace took one of the station’s bicycles. Cars were not used for routine work due to petrol shortages. That disappointed her. Hardly anyone in Noddweir had dreamed of owning a car. One thing Grace had wanted to do when she left the countryside for the city was to learn to drive. Evidently it would have to wait until after the war, like so many other things.
Her thoughts as she pedaled along were decidedly sour. “Exercise and a chance to see more of the area,” Wallace had told her. Was that the real reason he’d sent her? Because it wasn’t an important enough job for anyone else to waste time on? Was Wallace simply a more polite version of Sergeant Baines, convinced women had no business in the police force?
The day before she was congratulating herself on being assigned to conduct interviews involving a mysterious death. This morning it was clear to her that Wallace had concluded the death was accidental. A prostitute had fallen and cracked her skull in the dark. At worst, one of that class of woman had been assaulted by a client. Criminals preying on criminals would not be a high priority. And at any rate it was the kind of crime where the perpetrator was never caught until, eventually, he happened to be hauled in for something else. If anything came of the case it would have to start with checking missing persons reports to discover the dead woman’s identity.
All of which meant that the real reason Wallace had sent her to investigate was to allow her to acclimate herself, to see the locals and be seen by them.
The realization stung her pride.
The watchman’s surly reception did nothing to restore it. “About time you got here,” he growled.
He was waiting for her beside the cemetery’s northern entrance, a dark, forbidding stone archway. He was old, not surprisingly. Much of the country’s work was being done these days by old men as well as women. His coat was too big and so were his dentures. With his rough voice and bristly jowls, he was more Charon than Saint Peter.
Grace produced her pencil and notepad.
“Come and see,” the watchman said. “Come and see what the little buggers done.”
He led her through the archway and down a short, steep drive. The cemetery was huge. Past the open space and its monuments and gravestones she could see over the factories a few blocks distant, then through plumes of smoke across the Tyne to more roofs and beyond rolling hills.
“It’s a disgrace, it is,” the watchman complained. “It’s sacrilege. But what can one man do? I canna be everywhere at once, can I? You’d think there’s enough destruction in the world as it is, wouldn’t you? But no, the little buggers come in at night and turn over the gravestones of them that’s trying to sleep peacefully.”
An unassuming monument caught Grace’s eye, an engraved pedestal topped by a cross decorated in bas relief with a bird perched over a scroll bearing a Latin motto. Stopping to look more closely she saw what had drawn her attention.
“John Hunter Rutherford,” she read the inscription.
“Went to one of his schools when I were a lad,” the watchman said. “He was a great one for founding schools, he was.”
Remembering the mysterious Mr. Rutherford at number sixty, Grace asked whether his descendants remained in the area.
“That I wouldn’t know. They move in different circles than I do, I’m sure.”
In the cemetery’s dismal atmosphere the bird reminded Grace of a popular fortune-telling rhyme her grandmother often recited to her, based on sighting blackbirds.
One for sorrow
Two for mirth
Three for a wedding
Four for a birth.
Although some Shropshire versions substituted “death” for “birth,” which had puzzled Grace. Did spotting a single carved bird foretell sorrow? That would be a safe bet when war brought new sorrows to Newcastle every day. Did it signal worse sorrows to come, perhaps the long delayed mass bombing everyone in the city expected?
“I don’t suppose you know what that means?” Grace said. “I can’t read Latin myself.”
“Neither can I, but the vicar at St Martha’s can. I asked about it when he was here for a funeral. Told me it says ‘by neither chance nor fate,’ whatever that might mean. Everything’s either by chance or fate, isn’t it?”
They continued on, passing fallen stones lying half-propped up against their bases, or flat in the wet grass. Most looked as if they had been that way for many years. In places long rows of stones faced each other, leaning this way and that, none of them vertical.
“Look here, Constable. Look what they done.”
They had come to a monument topped by an angel. Red covered one wing, ran down the frozen folds of her robes, and spattered the hard, blank-eyed face. Was the red paint—the same color as the swastika on Mavis’ door—a coincidence? The maisonette was only a half hour’s walk from the cemetery.