Quell had received a number of phone calls from people he defined as nuts, psychopaths and lunatics, describing the find under Warlock as the result of witchcraft, a butcher practising his craft, and the remains of two visitants from outer space. He had received only one letter, because few people wrote letters any more. It was nearly as crazy as the phone call about the witchcraft but not quite.
‘A bunch of kids playing games in the foundations of a house,’ he said aloud to himself in his office. ‘What sort of games? And bombs falling all around? Do I believe this stuff?’ Nevertheless, he studied this rather fuzzy copy of the children poking their heads out of a muddy hole and decided he had better talk to some of these people, all of them as old as the hills now, of course.
He would shortly have to pay a second visit to Loughton, take a look at the workmen and the supervising archaeologist who were digging away in search of more remains under Warlock. A waste of time, he thought. Who cared after all these years? Pity this Maureen Batchelor didn’t give an email address, though she did offer a phone number. A landline, he noted, not a mobile. But what could you expect of someone her age?
He spoke to George Batchelor. Quell was a man always willing to admit he had been wrong, and he had certainly been wrong about this one-time builder and his wife. They sounded a lot younger than they must be. They gave him the names of some of the other people who had been children in the ‘tunnels’. Having an idea that you should never, if you could help it, speak of death or even ‘passing away’ in the presence of anyone over sixty, Quell didn’t ask how many of them were still alive. He didn’t have to. George Batchelor equally serenely told him of his dead brother Robert (the photographer), his dead sister Moira and the still living Alan Norris, Rosemary Norris, Michael Winwood, Daphne Furness, his brothers Norman and Stanley, and Bill Johnson.
‘I think I should see all of them.’
George was beginning to enjoy this. ‘If you’re coming to see me, shall I ask all the others round at the same time?’
‘If it’s not putting you out,’ said Quell.
‘The ones that are still in the land of the living,’ said George.
He had been bored out of his mind lazing about with his leg up. Now it looked as if he might have a part to play in this investigation, all these old friends round, the police taking a real interest. He would show them his photographs. It would be a tonic for him. Maybe he could find Michael Winwood, or Stanley would. Stanley always kept up with people over the years.
A small crowd had gathered round his car. Spot was sitting in the driving seat with his forepaws on the steering wheel. Sighs of ‘Aah’ and ‘Sweet’ came from the shoppers who had stopped to stare. Unwisely, Stanley had parked outside the police station on a yellow line, thinking he would only be a minute; as he approached the car, a uniformed PC preceded him, observed Spot without a hint of a smile and told Stanley to ‘get that dog down from there’ and move off. He was lucky, added the PC, that he would take no further steps. Stanley put Spot in the back, laid the flowers he had bought for Maureen on the passenger seat and drove off up to York Hill and Carisbrooke.
Stanley always brought women flowers. Like his brother Norman, he was known as a ladies’ man, though according to his friends and neighbours, there was nothing wrong. He bought more flowers for his wife than for any other woman. Stanley always talked to his dogs and he talked to this one, telling him as they got out of the car that he had better behave, as a policeman was coming and a more powerful one than the PC. Spot wagged his tail. Maureen might have had something to say about Spot’s presence but was mollified by the huge bunch of daffodils and narcissi with which Stanley presented her.
‘Daphne here yet?’
‘No one’s here but you and of course Norman,’ said Maureen. ‘George can put his foot to the ground now, so mind you tell him how well he’s doing.’
‘Will do.This is Spot.’
‘So I gathered. He won’t pee on the floor, will he?’
‘Certainly not. He’s already house-trained.’
They were still in the hallway when the doorbell rang. It was the Norrises and Detective Inspector Colin Quell, who had met on the front path. Alan and Rosemary had walked to York Hill. All the way Alan hadn’t said much, because he was anticipating meeting Daphne again after so long and resolving at the same time not to think about it. It would be a long way for her to come at her age. She was two or three years older than he. And how would she come? By tube, perhaps. The District Line and then the Central Line. Perhaps Stanley would drive down to Loughton station to meet her. He wouldn’t ask. They went into the living room, the French windows open to the garden, it was such a fine sunny day. Maureen brought in a large blue bowl full of spring flowers and set them on the table. Spot ran out into the garden, chasing a squirrel.
Because it was nearly lunchtime, George offered Pinot Grigio, which Quell refused. He was driving, he said. Most people think all police officers are traffic cops, and one by one (except for Norman), they also declined, feeling perhaps that Quell would see the drinking of alcohol as somehow offensive and in some way punishable. Food, however, was acceptable, and even Quell took a smoked salmon sandwich.
‘Well, shall we make a start?’ he said. ‘Don’t need to wait for the others, do we?’
George began talking about the tunnels, how he thought he and his brothers – ‘poor’ Robert and Stanley – had been the first to discover them. It wasn’t then but later, when he was in his late teens and went into the building trade, that he realised the tunnels had been the foundations of a house, the building of which was stopped by the war.
‘So these were the foundations of Warlock?’ Quell asked.
‘No, no. Michael Winwood’s father told us not to play there any more. He stood at the opening to the tunnels and shouted at us to come out. Kids were obedient in those days. We did as we were told. We all came out and went home. After that we never went there again and at some point the foundations were filled in. I don’t know who took it upon himself to do that and you’ll never find out now. It was all farmland up there, and as soon as I could, our firm – that is, my brother Stanley and me – we bought as much as we could and one of the houses we built was Warlock. I reckon that was just sort of next door to where our tunnels had been. That would have been nineteen fifty-two or fifty-three.’
‘When you say you were playing there, what did you play? I mean, there can’t have been much to do in underground passages.’
They looked at him pityingly. He spoke from the age of computers and online games, from e-books, DVDs and CDs, Bluetooth and Skype, smartphones and iPads. They spoke from a distant past when everyone read books and most people had hobbies, made things, played cards and chess, dressed up and played charades, sewed and painted and wrote letters and sent postcards.
Alan had begun describing what they did: how they wrapped potatoes in clay and baked them on a fire they made in an old water tank; played sardines, a constant favourite; picnicked on cheese sandwiches; played cards; acted bits of history they liked, Mary, Queen of Scots and Rizzio – the mystified Quell had seen Mary Queen of Shops on TV but never heard of the Scottish queen – Henry the Eighth and his six wives, the death of Nelson. There was a fortune-teller, very popular this, who sat in a candlelit chamber of the tunnels and told everyone’s future, gazing into someone’s mother’s upturned mixing bowl. He faltered a little when he came to the fortune-teller but scarcely heard the doorbell until a low, somehow thrilling voice interrupted and Daphne Furness followed by a man who must be Michael Winwood came into the room.
Had he seen her in the street, he wouldn’t have known her. Of course he wouldn’t after sixty years. He only knew her now because who else could it be? She was elegant in a black suit, white silk shirt and very high-heeled shoes. Rosemary always said that elderly women couldn’t wear high heels, their balance was no longer good enough, but she could. Daphne could. Sometimes he glanced at those Saturday or Sunday supplements the newspapers i
ncluded and it was the trend now to show pictures of grey-haired models in their sixties and seventies along with the young ones. It was one of those graceful elderly women, long-necked and slender, that Daphne reminded him of. He got slowly to his feet.
She and Stanley kissed, on the cheek, quick pecks and no hugs. Alan held out his hand and Daphne took it. Her fingers were thin and cool. All his memories of her were coming back, but it was the least significant of them that he now referred to.
‘I don’t suppose you remember, but you told my fortune.’
She smiled, showing perfect teeth that were probably crowns on implants. ‘And what was your fortune?’
‘You predicted a long and happy life.’
‘It’s been long, obviously. And happy?’
It was Rosemary who answered with a touch of asperity. ‘Very happy, thank you.’
Made impatient by the interruption and subsequent delay, Quell said, ‘I’d like to hear what Mrs Furness and Mr Winwood have to say about these tunnels of yours.’ He turned to Daphne. ‘Were there any grown-ups – adults, I should say – there with you?’
‘They didn’t know we were there. They didn’t know the tunnels were there, as far as we knew.’
‘Until my father kicked us out,’ said Michael Winwood.
Alan said, ‘I remember one grown-up coming. Just the once, I think.’ He looked from one to another of the now old children. ‘It was Lewis Newman’s uncle. I don’t know what he was called. Lewis called him Uncle James.’
‘He was young,’ said Rosemary. ‘I mean, they said he was young. I couldn’t tell whether someone was, say, twenty-three or forty. Lewis said, “Dad says he’s young to be an uncle.” I knew my dad was forty and my mum was thirty-eight, so he must have been a lot younger than that.’ She looked doubtfully at Quell. ‘Maybe it’s not important.’
Quell was looking as if everything he had heard came into that category. Even so, he asked everyone for their memories of the tunnels and one by one they gave him what they remembered. He neither made notes nor recorded what they said. Perhaps he had a good memory. When it was done and he had heard about the air-raid warnings, the bombs they expected but which never came to Loughton, the shrapnel from gunfire that lay in the streets for them to collect, the food they ate and hated but got used to, the sanctuary of the tunnels they called for some reason he never fathomed ‘qanats’, he asked for mobile numbers or addresses from all of them. He might want to get in touch. He said he’d like to know if they knew of anyone going missing when they were children, anyone disappearing. Please to let him know if they could remember. Rosemary wrote down their phone number and Maureen produced from a drawer a compliments slip with the name of George and Stanley’s firm on it.
Stanley had taken Spot out into the garden as he was in danger of having an accident on the carpet. Michael Winwood said that as they lived not far from each other, she in St John’s Wood and he in West Hampstead, Daphne was going to drive him home. Daphne produced a card from her handbag and than a strange thing happened. There must have been two cards stuck together, for as she leant across the table to pass one of them to Quell, its fellow detached itself and fell on the floor. While Rosemary was fetching her coat from the hallway, Alan quickly put his foot over the card. He was pretty sure no one but Daphne saw him. She met his eyes and gave him a tiny smile with closed lips. By the time Rosemary came back, he had retrieved the card by dropping his handkerchief and contriving to pick up card and handkerchief together.
Daphne’s car was not the expensive, subtly coloured high-powered Italian vehicle Michael would have expected but a silver Toyota Prius and by no means new. The road through the forest was much the same as it had been when he was young, but the old names seemed to have gone. Would anyone now have known what he meant by the Wake roundabout or the Epping New Road? Daphne drove them with ease and speed on to the M25 going anticlockwise. He had expected her to change her shoes before getting into the car, but she still wore the high heels, her driving unimpeded.
‘What did you think of all that?’ he said.
‘Pretty useless, I should think.’ They passed smoothly through the Bell Common tunnel, heading for Waltham Abbey. ‘Your mother had just died, hadn’t she? I mean, while we were going to the tunnels. That must have been hard for you.’
Michael hesitated, then said, ‘Everyone thought she’d died. My father put it about that she had, but she hadn’t. She’d gone off with someone. A man, I mean. They’d had an awful marriage. I was only nine, but I remember the way they screamed and shouted at each other like it was yesterday. My dad told me she wasn’t dead but I’d never see her again. It’s stayed with me, what he said, all these years. “She doesn’t want either of us,” he said. “Just wants to see the back of us.”’
‘But you saw her again?’
‘No, I never did. I was left with my father. He had some sort of heart condition so he couldn’t go into the forces. He didn’t want me either. I was sent to live with my aunt Zoe. She wasn’t really my aunt but my dad’s cousin. Mind you, Zoe was a lovely woman, she was very good to me and I was all right there with her. I loved her very much. Still do, she’s still alive.’
Daphne nodded, but said nothing for a while. They were passing into the sort of countryside Michael thought was probably Green Belt, the edge of Hertfordshire, and the signs were coming up for the A1. ‘Were they divorced, your parents?’
‘Grown-ups didn’t tell children things like that. Not then. Don’t you remember?’
‘I suppose I do. What became of your father?’
‘He’s in an old people’s home. A care home. I never lived with him after I went to Zoe. My parents must have divorced because he married again. I didn’t have a happy childhood up to the time we used to go into the tunnels, but I did after that, near perfect after that.’
‘I haven’t any children,’ said Daphne. ‘Have you?’
‘Two. One of them is mostly in America and the other one is usually in Hong Kong.’
There was nothing much to say to that; ‘You must miss them’ was something, but Daphne didn’t go in for truisms and clichés. She turned off the Hendon Way and took Fortune Green Road so that she could turn into Michael’s street, where he lived in a tall, narrow red-brick house.
‘This has been very nice of you, Daphne.’
‘It was on my way,’ she said.
‘Will you come in for a moment?’
‘I don’t think I will. Not this time. But now I know where you live. Doesn’t that sound ominous? I mean that now I know it, we can perhaps keep in touch.’ She handed him a card identical to the one she had given Alan Norris. ‘Goodbye, Michael.’ She waited until he was in the house, then she backed out of his garage drive, drove down the hill until she could turn into Hamilton Terrace. There, obliged to park the car in the street, she walked through the glass-roofed covered way and let herself into the house by the glossy black front door. As she sometimes did when coming home, she stood in the wide hallway and, addressing her generous third husband who had left her all he possessed, said to the walls and the staircase, ‘Thank you for everything, Martin.’
Up the hill in Ingham Road, Michael was also paying a sort of tribute to a dead spouse. This necessitated climbing two quite steep flights of stairs but it seldom made him short of breath. He was used to it and was sure the stairs were good for his heart as he did it every day. Not to sleep in this bedroom that covered the whole second floor – it was years since he had done that – but to sit there for a while in one of the little pink armchairs and check that the room was just as it should be, just as it had been when it was Vivien’s. Mrs Bailey had been in to clean the house while he was in Loughton and it was not unknown for her to disarrange things. The pictures, for instance, were sometimes left hanging not quite straight, the cut-glass scent bottles with their silver stoppers pushed too close together and the pink satin pincushion with the brooches and pins so replaced on the dressing table after the surface had been dusted as to o
verbalance on the edge and threaten to fall on to the carpet.
He sometimes wondered what Mrs Bailey thought of this idiosyncrasy of his, keeping Vivien’s bedroom as it had been when she was alive, but he didn’t really care. For some years now he had thought of himself as too old to bother with how the things he did looked to other people.What did it matter? He could do as he liked at his age. His children probably thought he was senile, but his children were hardly ever here, and when they were, they never went up to the second floor. He didn’t think about his father.
CHAPTER FOUR
COLIN QUELL HAD very little interest in people, what they might think, how they might act in the future. If he had any opinion of those gathered in George and Maureen Batchelor’s living room, it was to marvel that they had lived so long and apparently (with the exception of George) without handicap or disease. Quell proceeded with his inquiry on scientific fact alone and during the week following his visit to Loughton received various reports on what had been discovered as to the age and provenance of the hands.
That one was a woman’s and the other a man’s he already knew. It seemed that the woman had been in her late twenties and the man a few years younger. They had not died at the scene but some distance away, perhaps a hundred yards, a fact established by the soil with which the hands were filled, its content clay rather than loam. This satisfactorily confirmed Quell’s view that the hands’ original burial had been in those tunnels the old people remembered. It was no proof of that, of course, but it made his theory most probable.
The Girl Next Door Page 4