The Unquiet Heart

by Gordon, Ferris,

  “An American, you say? Wasn’t it the Americans who liberated Dachau? Who saved you?”

  Shit. I hadn’t thought of that. Was that the connection? Was I getting my past all mixed up with my present? Was this my subconscious trying to make sense of more buried memories? Or was I just mad as a hatter?

  “Is it time for the straitjacket again?”

  “You know, man, it’s a blooming miracle there’s a sane mind left in this country after what we’ve gone through. And you fellas working behind the lines, in disguise and cut off from home, had it harder than anyone. It does dreadful damage to the psyche.”

  “So I am nuts. But it’s OK, ’cos everybody else is?”

  “Not a bit, Daniel. Not a bit. You show none of the signs of delusion. Your girlfriend saw this man you tackled, didn’t she? It’s not as if he was imaginary. And you haven’t been having conversations with yourself, now have you?”

  “No. And she did see him. She dragged me off him.”

  “Well, fine. I suppose. But all the same I’d avoid tackling strangers in the street for a while. Is there no way you can get some corroboration on these chaps following your lady friend?”

  “Not from Eve, that’s for sure. That’s why she’s called it off. But you’ve given me an idea, Prof. Look, you’ve set my mind at rest. A wee bit, anyway. Let me see if I can get a second opinion on this.”

  We hung up and I had the operator make another call, to Finchley this time. It rang for a long time.

  “Hello.” It was a suspicious voice, high pitched, nasal and calculated to make your ears bleed unless you too had grown up in Birmingham and were immune.

  “Mrs Witherham? Is that you? And how are you this fine morning? Could I speak to Midge, please?”

  “Oh it’s yow again. I’ve told yow before, I don’t run a telephone service for my lodgers.” She made Glaswegians sound couth.

  “It’s an emergency, Mrs Witherham. Honest. I need to speak to Midge urgently. It’s about some money I owe him. I need to give it to him.”

  I knew that would get her. She bellowed up the stairs. “Mr Cummins? It’s that Scotch man again. Something about money. Maybe yow can pay my rent now!”

  It took a while. Midge wasn’t an early starter. He took the phone from her grumbling hands, “And a pleasant morning to you too, Mrs Witherham.” There was a pause. “She’s gone. I need to move. Danny? What’s happening?”

  “I need you and the lads to do some tailing for me. It’s my own money. Ten bob a day. A week at most.”

  I explained what I wanted and overcame his objections by explaining that it wasn’t her I wanted followed but the blokes that were tailing her. I hung up and looked round my bare office. But all I could see was the image of her marching through the door on that first day like Miriam Hopkins in Lady with Red Hair.

  I met them exactly seven days later in the George. By then I was a wreck. There were more bottles in my bin than in the backyard of the pub itself. This girl had got under my skin. Every morning I woke hoping it was a bad dream, and every morning I felt the world drop away at the thought I wouldn’t see her again. I picked up the phone a dozen times and replaced it without calling her. Once I couldn’t help myself and got put through to her number. She answered: “Hello? Hello? Who’s there? Danny, is that you?…” But I had nothing to say. I replaced the phone in the cradle as her voice trailed away.

  I even sloped down to Fleet Street to see if I could spot her. Then I realised I might run into the lads, and that I would just be swelling the ranks of the spies on her tail. It was getting to be a circus.

  I had three pints of beer sitting waiting for them in the cubby-hole. They arrived in dribs and drabs. When they were all settled I looked round their faces trying to judge what they’d found. It didn’t look good.

  “OK, what have you got?”

  They looked bashful. Then Midge spoke up. “Nothing, Danny. We saw nothing. Maybe you scared them off. You know, when you grabbed that Yank?”

  He was throwing me crumbs, and he knew that I knew it. “Nothing? Not a sniff? How many times did you spot her? Sure you didn’t lose her?”

  I looked at them. They hadn’t lost her. The followers – if they ever existed – had gone. I hadn’t the heart for a session with the boys. I was bored with getting drunk. I left my beer unfinished on the table together with the money I owed them, and headed for home carrying my delusions with me like a pack of Furies. I’d lost the girl I loved, for nothing.

  I needed to get hold of myself. I wasn’t the first bloke to get chucked, though it felt like it. I was weary, as though someone had drained my blood. Or replaced it with Scotch. So I laid off the booze for a couple of days and began to feel a little saner, if not happier. There was a thin trickle of enquiries coming in so I threw myself at them, even the adulterers.

  Usually I find no joy in setting up the evidence to let two poor saps get a divorce. But I was positively enthusiastic in booking the hotel, getting one of Mama Mary’s girls to pretend to be the femme fatale, and bursting in on them to catch them in flagrante delicto. My enthusiasm left me when I found this small adulterer sitting on the end of the bed looking sad and embarrassed, as though his world was ending. Maybe it was; I had the impression it was the wife who wanted rid of him.

  I had to encourage the bloke to show a little more interest for the photograph. I even thought of suggesting he availed himself of the opportunity of one of Mama’s kindest and cutest, though he was closer to tears than seduction. But I got enough material to lay before the judge. It was a messy way of getting out of a loveless marriage, but if these were the rules, I was ready to play by them.

  In between cases that week I kept fingering my phone. She hadn’t said never, had she? I’d let things cool off. And now I’d got over my obsession about her being followed, what was the problem? It had been a fool’s logic, or a kid’s. But I never got the chance to test my flimsy theory. The phone call from Eve’s boss threw my world upside down.

  “Danny McRae? Is that you? It’s Jim Hutcheson here. The Trumpet.” His soft Inverness accents trilled down the line, and I could see his great eyebrows twitching at me from afar. My heart picked up pace. Was Jim interceding for her?

  “Hello, Jim. How are things?” I wanted to shout, How is she? Does she still love me? Does she want me back? But I thought that might make him hang up.

  “Look, Danny, I’ll come straight to it. Is Eve with you? Have you seen her lately?”

  I felt the blood congeal in my veins. “No. Not for a week or so. We had a bit of a tiff…”

  “Damn. Look, she hasn’t come in all week, and her landlady says she hasn’t seen her. She said she might try you. Has she moved in with you, then?”

  “No. No of course not.”

  “I think I’d better get the police.”

  “Jim, could you wait a wee while? I’ll come straight round. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  I grabbed my jacket and was out the door in two, fear clawing at my belly like a tiger. I kept telling myself there was no connection. Nothing to link my sightings of men following her with her disappearance. No follow-up revenge by Gambatti. She was off visiting some friend. Or she was chasing a lead and would pop up any time.

  But after I’d talked to Jim Hutcheson, I knew something had happened. I asked if he’d let me look around before calling the coppers. There might be something I’d spot before a bunch of clodhoppers started throwing everything up in the air. He led me to her corner and left me to pick at the papers.

  I sit at her scruffy little desk and stroke the arms of her chair. Her typewriter has a sheet of paper in it, ready for her blizzard of thoughts. Scraps of newspaper clippings stud the facing wall. All her own articles, the best of her war years. Several are topped with her face in that cheesy smile I used to tease her about. I smile back and feel a stone lodge in my chest. A further pile of cuttings and draft articles spill from an in-tray. It’s like she’s just stepped out to make a cup of tea; she’ll be
back in a minute.

  I pull open her drawer and rifle through the bric-a-brac. Something solid comes to hand: the black notepad she always carries. Now I know it’s bad. She went nowhere without it. It was her life. I heft it and run my finger round the edges. No one is looking, so I hold it up to my nose to see if I can catch a whiff of her, that particular scent that she said was cheap and anyone could buy from Woolworth but smells only of her. There is something. A hint. A distillation of the past hectic two months. I can’t be sure. I put the notepad back on the desk, ready to open it. Ready to see if something in it could be a clue about how to find her. Dead or alive.

  I open it and find a journal, part written in English but mostly in hieroglyphs. Shorthand of some sort that I couldn’t decode. I flick to the end – her last entries. Some are in code, some in clear. Clear enough. She’d been lying to me.

  ELEVEN

  What I learned convinced me I didn’t want the police trampling over her life – or mine. Not yet. I slipped the notebook into my pocket and gave my farewells to Jim. He eyed me suspiciously from under those great grey brows but didn’t probe. I left the building just as a squad car drew up. I pulled my hat down and walked up Fleet Street and into the Strand with the book burning a hole in my pocket. I crossed Waterloo Bridge, not pausing as I normally do to watch the coal barges trundling up and down river. I should have got a bus. My leg was aching. But I needed to walk. And the physical pain was oddly comforting. It took my mind off the one fact: She knew she was being followed. Why did she keep it from me?

  I reached home in a lather. I threw off my jacket, undid my tie and made myself comfortable at my desk. I guessed it wouldn’t take long before I had visitors, and I needed to read enough to decide if I was keeping the notebook or handing it over.

  The inside page had her name on it: Eve Copeland. She’d underlined her first name and written her office address underneath. The ink was black and was already fading to brown in the early entries. I had seen the fountain pen she used: a gold-nibbed, green lacquered tube, capable of producing elegant calligraphy in the right hand. A present, she said.

  She seemed to be using three different scripts: plain English, some kind of jagged scrawl which included some English lettering, and a type of shorthand.

  In the early pages – the pages in clear – Eve had jotted her thoughts down in a fine script, all leaning neatly to the right in flowing loops. My old teacher would have given her five gold stars. It was a feat beyond my talents; somewhere between dipping my nib in the inkwell and transferring it to the page, my hand would be taken over by the school poltergeist. Even the threat of the belt across my trembling palms was never enough to stop the inky havoc.

  Eve’s pages were lined but unnumbered. She’d turned it into a kind of diary by putting dates at the start of every new item no matter where it began on the page. The entries began in mid ’45. Some pages had several short notes; some in plain English, some in “squiggle” as I called the indecipherable scrawl, and then the coded shorthand. Some items went on for several pages as she drafted a column or took down notes of a long interview. It also seemed to serve as an appointments book, with follow-up observations about some event or person she’d met: no doubt he’s a con man… mind like a sewer (I hoped she wasn’t talking about me!); sweet gentle lady… love to be friends; big disappointment compared to voice; great picture… wish I had legs like Cyd Charisse!!

  It was uncomfortable; like dipping into her mind. But how else was I going to find out what happened to her? That’s how I’d explain it when we next met. When. If had no room in my thinking. I was chewing my nails as I got to the later stuff covering the last few weeks, our weeks. What would I find about me? My anxiety rose when I identified the dates, but found the comments themselves in squiggle or shorthand.

  I should have been able to read some of the shorthand, albeit slowly; it had been part of our SOE training. There were many forms but usually enough of an overlap to get the gist. But I was stymied by hers. The secret of Pitman is it’s phonetic; there are hundreds of symbols each with its own sound. The thickness of the strokes distinguishes vowels and consonants. All you have to do is memorise them and put them together in your head to make words. With daily practice you can become competent – in a year or two.

  I tried saying some of the shorthand out loud, the ones that bore a vague resemblance to what I’d learned. Nothing. Gibberish. In fact with the ochs and achs I was making they sounded a bit like the Ayrshire dialect – Lallan Scots, the language of Burns.

  The idea hit me. I grabbed the notebook and a pad and a pencil from my drawer. I ripped my jacket from its peg and ran down the stairs. The cat exploded at my feet.

  I was out and running, gammy leg forgotten. A double-decker was trundling away from the stop. I sprinted and caught the pole and hauled myself inside, vowing to give up the fags sometime soon. A change at Elephant and I was in Bloomsbury within half an hour.

  I’d never been inside the British Library but had once stood outside peering through the glass doors. To me it was a sort of shrine. Kilpatrick’s old Victorian library and museum, with its stuffed lion guarding the top of the stairs, held what I thought of as the world’s biggest collection of books. I would raid its shelves every week. But the British Library! Where Marx and Dickens sat. Too much for me before. Now, I needed to get in.

  I explained my errand to the girl behind the desk. She said that it was impossible. I said I was a private detective. She said she shouldn’t. I said my girlfriend had been kidnapped. She said only if you’re quick and don’t let the Super see you. She led me to a little seat in front of a long brown desk. High overhead soared the great dome, and under it the wooden gallery that followed its curve. Around me and above me were miles of aisles holding books from every corner of the English speaking world. It was better than the echoing vacuum of St Paul’s. This was religion enough. A few minutes later the girl came back with a small heap of books. She laid them on my desk, gave me a stern look from behind her glasses and then a wink. I blew her a kiss and she shot off, red as a tomato.

  I took the first book; it was Pitman’s standard shorthand dictionary. That was my benchmark. I then set out in front of me the other three books: versions of shorthand dictionaries for the German language. In the Lallan Scots and north of England dialects you can hear the last throaty vestiges of the language roots. I placed Eve’s notebook alongside and opened it at the first page of hieroglyphs. I propped up the three German dictionaries in front of me and began to scribble on my pad. It took me five minutes to be certain: Eve hadn’t been writing in English shorthand. It was Gabelsberger’s system, which looked a little like proper writing with its flowing cursive style. Simple. But why?

  Then I noticed something else. In the appendix of one of the dictionaries, was a set of squiggles that looked remarkably like the third form of entry Eve had used. The heading explained that I was looking at Suetterlin script, the standard form of German handwriting taught in all their schools until just before the start of the war. How did my ace reporter come to be able to write like a German and use a German shorthand? I put the obvious conclusion to one side while I grappled with the problem of turning both scripts into English.

  I decided to tackle the shorthand first. It was closer to what I’d learned in spy school. The trouble was that the shorthand would translate into German words. Prof Haggarty had tricked me into revealing that I’d picked up some of the language while I was sunning myself in Dachau. The language student in me had learned enough to obtain a workaday if specialised vocabulary. The camp held some pretty bright people – doctors, engineers, teachers, musicians – and conversations sprawled across culture and philosophy as well as the mundane details of living and dying behind the barbed wire. But I never saw written material except on official signs. Arbeit Macht Frei for example. It wasn’t the sort of place to order your copy of Die Zeitung to be served with breakfast.

  At the rate I was going it would take me a month to transl
ate all her codes. But it didn’t take me long to spot the sign that meant Danny, a sort of lower case d with a tail and circle. So I confined myself to the last two months and wherever I saw my name.

  Translating shorthand is an inexact science at the best of times. But now I was having to rely on getting a set of sounds and symbols on the page then listening in my head for the German word to pop up that most closely resembled it. I couldn’t write down the word because I didn’t know how it was spelled in German. I had to make the leap straight to English, and see if some meaning emerged from the jumble.

  As I struggled with my silent battle the receptionist came over looking anxious. She asked me in a whisper if I was all right as someone had complained about me making faces. I pointed at the dictionaries and made some mouth shapes. She seemed to get the message but gave me a frown to keep my funny faces to myself. Like other women in my life, she was already regretting her kindness.

  I worked away for an hour or two until I had a page of jottings. Some of it was guesses, some inspired analysis, but sitting back and taking it from the top, I could get the gist of recent events from the day she invaded my office and my life:

  22 May: d very red very scot, funny sarcastic, hates my paper, bastard, d needs money, hook?

  23 May: d called, caught fish!!!!

  25 May: mary prostitute, d very close ???? , first mention PG, d offer more?/deeper? action for me, d interest me/him?

  28/29 May: tommy chandler warehouse job, big thrill, big time, big risk, showed?/ revealed??? gun, no choice, PG upset?,

  29 May: d bed, tired lonely excuse? not love just warmth, stupid stupid

  3 June: love? D soft hard, funny sarcastic, why not? Stupid time

  There were several more entries along these lines, each a seeming debate with herself about how to avoid falling in love. In three of them the word watcher or follower appeared with a query after my name. She knew, didn’t she? Then…