by Eric Reed
“Looks like she was pulled out of a bombed house, don’t it?” The watchman grimaced, showing his ill-fitting teeth.
“Did you see or hear anything?” Grace asked hopefully.
“I’m only one man, miss. One old man, alone in the dark, to protect all these graves and report any incendiaries or high-explosive bombs that disturb the peace of the dead. T’ain’t time for the graves to give up their dead, though Hitler’s lot are having a good go at adding more stones for them needing burial here, curse him.” He paused and shook a thin fist at the sky. “I only seen this mess when it got light.”
Grace scribbled on her pad. The monument belonged to a man and his wife. An English name. Both had died before the turn of the century. It was unlikely the vandal had anything against them personally. The worst family feuds could last only so long until they eventually died out. Literally.
“Has anything like this happened before? Where the vandals used paint, I mean.”
“Usually they tip the stones over, like I was saying. The police need to patrol the cemetery at night. It isn’t right. What can I do on me own?”
Grace was sure no one could be spared to protect the residents of a cemetery. She pretended to make another note.
“You’ll get after the little buggers, won’t you, Constable?”
“I’ll file my report with my superior. We’ll do what we can.”
In other words, nothing.
Grace and the watchman both knew it. Both pretended they didn’t.
“What’s the world come to? There are times I wish I’d joined all them before the war started.” He gestured at the countless graves surrounding them. “They’re lucky they never had to see this bloody war. But since I’m still here I have to see it out. Once the Germans are put back in their place I can die happy. Now I need to be getting on with my rounds.”
“I can find the way out myself. The police appreciate your efforts,” Grace added, but the man was already moving away, muttering to himself.
Policing city streets promised to be frustrating. In Noddweir such incidents were quickly dealt with. Half the village would have been whispering the perpetrators’ names before Grace’s father received the complaint. No papers were filled out, no arrests made, no trial held. The miscreant would get the sharp side of the constable’s tongue. Then he’d get the sharper side of his father’s razor strop on his backside.
Grace was feeling the effects of her recent travel and lack of sleep. She looked around. The morning sky was relatively clear. Above the Tyne, barrage balloons protecting the Vickers factory caught the feeble sunlight.
She decided to walk around the cemetery before returning to work. She was already tired of city streets. Here the grass underfoot remained green, and glossy vines climbed over grave stones. One stone was entirely overgrown, a leafy hummock.
She kept a brisk pace, eyes down, occasionally stopping to try to make out inscriptions on the more interesting gravestones, many of them blackened, their writing eroded. Lifting her gaze she was surprised to see a solitary figure standing over a flat grave marker. A man, not a boy who might be intent on mischief. His hands were in his coat pockets, his head bowed down. At the sound of Grace’s footstep on the gravel path he looked up and turned, spectacles glinting momentarily.
“Sergeant Baines.”
Baines was not in uniform. His eyes were redder than the morning before, his broad forehead an expanse of polished marble. Grace could smell alcohol on him.
Her superior looked at her sheepishly. “I’ve no doubt you’ve been told my wife and child were killed in an air raid. I visit them here sometimes.”
“No, sir. Nobody said anything.”
“Ah, well…now you know…know what everyone else knows….”
Chapter Six
When the knock at the door came early in the afternoon Cyril Rutherford realized he’d spent the day waiting for it. Still, his heart jumped and his hand froze, sending a blob of ink puddling across the complex geometric shape he was copying from a ponderous tome lying open on the mahogany desk.
He gave a soft, strangled moan and grated his teeth together hard enough to send a flash of pain through his jaw. Veins stood out in his thin neck. He crumpled the sheet of paper. His knuckles whitened and his clenched fist trembled before he dropped the ruined work into his wastebasket.
On reconsideration he retrieved the crumpled ball and smoothed it, setting it aside. Certain research notes were best burnt.
Again came the knocking and then a muffled voice. “Mr. Rutherford, the police would like a word with you.”
The same woman who had come to the door yesterday? Had she seen him peering out? Luckily he kept the curtains drawn day and night. There was nothing he wished to see outside and no one needed to see in, though busybodies no doubt wanted to have a good look.
Had the room’s single gaslight revealed his presence?
He rose, lifting a tabby cat off his lap, and avoided a black cat slinking around his ankles. Rutherford was unnaturally tall and emaciated. Even before the war he had been skeletal. His cats were also skin and bones.
He trod softly in his stockinged feet intending to turn off the light, then decided not to bother. Surely it could not be seen outside?
Another flurry of knocks. “Mr. Rutherford? Are you home? I only need to ask a few questions.”
Only a few questions? Did they think he was a fool?
He stood still, heart thudding. The gaslight illuminated a room full of heavy Victorian furniture. It glittered on the collection of oddly shaped crystals on a round table and shone back eerily from three pairs of cats’ eyes floating amidst shadowy statuettes atop a long table furnished with massive clawed feet. Another cat thumped down from its perch on the miniature sphinx beside the table.
The knocking did not cease. What right did she have to invade his privacy and ruin his work? A constable! But no better than the miserable brats who tormented him on the street, pointed and laughed or ran screaming in mock terror.
Once—the recollection brought a hot rage to his face—once they had left a dead cat on his doorstep.
At last a moment of silence lengthened into several minutes, while he stood still, listening, barely breathing.
Finally she was gone.
He sat back down at his desk, took out a fresh sheet of paper, rubbed his eyes and stared at the symbol he’d been copying. Then he picked up his pen and started over.
***
Grace waited quietly on the doorstep of number sixty for several minutes after she finished knocking. She was hoping the elusive Mr. Rutherford would venture a peek around the curtain again. If she caught him out he might relent and speak to her. Finally she turned away. Did the fact that he was so determined to avoid speaking to the police indicate that he had something to hide?
Her chance meeting with Sergeant Baines in the cemetery weighed on her mind. She had excused herself hastily, seeing his embarrassment, but the damage was done. Her presence at the station already irritated him. How would he react when he saw her again? The answer would have to wait for another day, since it was plain her superior was in no shape to come to work today.
She tried to shove the matter out of her thoughts and concentrate on the job at hand, checking the addresses Wallace had handed her when she’d returned to the station. “Ladies of the night shift,” he’d called them, adding they were “not working the factory type of shift.”
He handed her a photo of the dead woman, taken at the morgue. He also showed her the pictures taken at the temple. The woman’s limbs, Grace thought, were indeed in the rough shape of a left-handed swastika.
“You see,” Wallace told her, “nothing unusual. She fell awkwardly. Now get along and see if anyone recognises our mysterious friend.”
Grace went reluctantly. Dealing with prostitutes was one job the police apparently consid
ered women to be peculiarly suited for, more so even than clerical work. Grace suspected this said something about the male mentality best not dwelt on. However, since the unknown dead woman had possibly been a whore, it meant that Grace was involved in an important part of the investigation so she couldn’t complain.
Or so she told herself.
After a few minutes’ walk she knocked on a door like all the others she’d seen. Except this one sported a sprig of holly tied with a red ribbon. Rapping on these doors was like unwrapping Christmas presents as a child and hoping one contained a new doll rather than socks and underwear.
The afternoon sunlight was bright but gave little warmth. A plain young woman in a dressing gown answered Grace’s knock.
“Yes?” Her dressing gown was a much paler blue than Grace’s uniform.
“I should like to have a few words with you. May I come in?”
“Polite.” Sarcasm tinged the word but the speaker stepped back to allow Grace to enter.
Grace didn’t know what she expected to find in the home of a woman fined a number of times for streetwalking. Red velvet curtains and gilt furniture? In reality the kitchen was almost a mirror image of Mavis’.
“Tea?”
Grace accepted the offer. While she sat and sipped, the young woman smoked.
“Well?”
Grace put down her cup. “It’s about the dead woman discovered at the temple ruins.”
“Aye?”
“Dark-haired, slightly built, about five-feet-four, mid-twenties. She was wearing a green skirt and overcoat, and a white blouse.” Grace held out the photo. “Have you seen her?”
The woman peered at the photo, shuddered, and drew away. “No.”
“And the clothes?”
She shook her head silently.
So much for a woman’s superior ability to deal with other women, Grace thought as she returned to the station.
It was the same story—or lack thereof—with the other women Grace visited. Not only were they unable to recognise the photo she showed them, none knew of any ladies of the pavement missing from their regular spots. If anything, Grace gathered, there was more competition in certain areas, the source of a bitter complaint about amateurs from one of those to whom she spoke.
“They’re not after money so much, though they won’t refuse it. They want booze and makeup and clothing coupons. But don’t we all?”
Grace was surprised to find one of those amateurs on duty in front of the police station. At least she guessed the girl must be an amateur, to pick that location. There was no need to guess what she was doing there. The clumsy scuffed shoes, the fake nylon seams drawn down the backs of her skinny schoolgirl legs, lips reddened with beetroot juice, eyelashes blackened with burnt cork in the absence of mascara, made her business as clear as if she’d been holding a sign saying “Hello, sailor.”
“You’d best move on, miss,” Grace told her. Seeing the perky bow of pink ribbon tied atop the girl’s head, she felt a pang of pity.
The girl pushed a strand of lank, mousy brown hair away from her eyes. “And if I divn’t?”
“Don’t talk back to me, young lady. Be glad I’m giving you a chance to avoid trouble.”
“Arrest me then, why don’t you?”
“I don’t intend to arrest you. I can see very well you’re not a professional. Is this a sort of lark? Somebody dared you, is that it?”
The girl’s lips tightened and she looked as if she was about to stamp her foot. She really was a child. “Arrest me! I’m not moving!”
“Look,” Grace said, “I can’t arrest you. Go home and wash your face.”
“What do you mean you can’t arrest me? You’re a copper.”
“I’m an auxiliary. I’m not empowered to make arrests.”
What am I doing? Grace asked herself, arguing with a young girl pretending to be a prostitute about whether or not I can arrest her?
A man in a pinstriped suit went by, a newspaper tucked under his arm.
The girl offered him a gruesome leer. “Sir, sir, may I help you?”
The man gaped at the strange tableau, the importuning streetwalker and the constable, a woman no less. He tipped his hat nervously, and increased his pace.
“I’m going inside, “Grace said. “I’ll send a constable to arrest you, if you don’t have enough sense to be gone by the time he comes out.”
“I’ll come in with you,” the girl told her.
They were met by Wallace, who grinned at Grace’s companion.
“Lulu! Back again! That is your moniker, isn’t it?”
“Bloody bluebottle,” the girl replied, her eyes filling with tears.
“And you know what I’m going to tell you,” Wallace continued. “We’re not going to charge you. You can do your bit of service like anyone else. Now get along home or we’ll have to get your mam come round for you.”
The girl’s clownish painted lips trembled. She turned to leave. Her attempt to flounce out ended up looking more like an awkward trudge.
“Silly child. Afraid to nick her mother’s makeup but imagines she can pass for a tart.” Wallace gave a weary chuckle. “Thinks she won’t be called up for war service if she has a record of prostitution, you see. Probably hoping she’d find a green new recruit here who’d be taken in and take her in.”
“Like me?”
“One with the power to make arrests.”
Grace stood on tiptoe and looked over the curtain across the bottom half of the station window. “She’s sitting on a doorstep up the street.”
“Doubtless working out how she’s going to sneak back into her house before her mother sees her.”
“I’ll go and speak to her. She could come back here and wash her face in the kitchen.”
“Better you than me.”
“A woman’s job, you mean.”
Wallace shrugged.
As Grace approached the girl looked up. “Young lady, I want a word with you. What’s your name?”
The girl tried a defiant glare. It was no use. She sniveled and blew her nose into a grubby handkerchief. “Lily.”
“Where do you live?”
“Down the street.”
“Aren’t you still at school?”
“Yes, but I’ll be leaving soon and I divn’t want to work in a factory, miss. Everyone in me class is talking about it. There’s only me and me mam, and she’s poorly. What would she do if a bomb dropped where I was working? Vickers got hit this spring, you know.”
“It could as easily have fallen on your own roof,” Grace pointed out. “Don’t you realise how dangerous prostitution can be?”
“I heard the services won’t take tarts, and respectable women in factories always find out and then they won’t work with them or use the same netty or anything, so they can’t be sent there. I’m not really a tart, miss, but I thought if I pretended I was…”
“You haven’t thought this through,” Grace said severely. “Yes, in due course you will be required to do war work. Whatever it is, you might have to leave your mother to go elsewhere to do it. Think of it as an adventure. An opportunity. What gave you this outrageous idea of pretending to be a tart?”
“Well, it was this woman, miss, what used to be our neighbour. She said she done it and it was money for jam and it would keep me out of factories. I didn’t want to do it, I only wanted to have a record.” The girl started to cry.
Grace strove to keep her anger in check. “A fine thing to tell a young girl. She should have had more decency.”
“She was only trying to help. Knew me as a young girl, see. Recognized me when we passed in the town centre one Saturday and took me for a bite to eat. Dressed like a real lady, she was. And when I told her I was scared of being sent away, well…”
“That’s as may be. It was wrong of her to put
such ideas into your head. I hope your mother doesn’t have to hear about this conversation. Mind what I say. She will if you keep trying to get arrested.”
Grace watched the girl trot off. It struck Grace that of all the futile things she’d done during her first couple of days on the job, this conversation would turn out to be the most useless.
Chapter Seven
Grace had noticed the church while on duty and before returning to her lodgings she visited it. Standing within sight of the Roman ruins, the steeple of the Victorian era building rose grandly toward the heavens, a contrast to Noddweir’s Saint Winnoc’s with its humble, squat tower.
Sandbags protected the narrow windows of this church, giving the tall building the appearance of a fortress under siege. She went up stone steps worn into a slight depression toward the center by the passage of its congregations over the decades. A handbill pinned to the notice board on the smoke-blackened wall next to the double doors announced a dance at seven Saturday night. Refreshments would be served and a collection made to benefit the Red Cross. A large painted board attached to the far corner of the church pointed to the air raid shelter in the crypt.
She went into the church, stepping into a dim, icy pool of cold. It was evensong. The vicar, rosy-faced and grey-haired, read by candlelight to empty pews.
No, not quite empty. In a back row a shabby man slept, out of the wind, blanketed by a two-week old Chronicle headlined with the Japanese declaration of war. A pair of women huddled in the shadows far apart from each other.
Grace sat in the back, across the aisle from the sleeping man. She tried to imagine she was in Saint Winnoc’s, tried to feel the certainty and peace sacred words had once given her.
She had grown up a believer. Her mother had told her about God and, if her mother said there was God, that was good enough for little Grace. She did not question Him any more than she questioned wind or sun or rain or the mysterious power of growth. In Noddweir’s small stone church He remained nearby, but where was He in this big cold space? Where was He in city streets where the air itself felt different—not an invisible breath of the eternal perfumed with flowers and growing things or in winter the reassuring smell of earth blanketing the life which drowsed until spring. The gray city was too clearly a product of human endeavour in the material world.