The War Widow

by Lorna Gray

  I felt his smile. An affirmative touch against my hair. And then after a moment or two more, while I fought a hard battle to regain control of my breathing and nearly slipped into giddy giggling, he added in a rather more serious undertone, “Hush. You’re fine now and I’m fine too, you see?”

  Then suddenly Jim’s voice made me jump. He was very close by. “Has she spoken yet?”

  I felt the nod of Adam’s quiet reply.

  “And?”

  Through the residual bubbles of mirth, I caught the hesitation as Adam considered just how much to say; and the private conversation that would be kept just for me. I felt his hand move in my hair, smoothing it a little where it tickled his jaw and quietly establishing that I was in the process of regaining control. Then he stunned me by lifting his head and telling Jim in an odd voice, “We’re very lucky, you and I. It’ll be a long while before I forgive myself for this even if she apparently has.”

  I heard Jim reply dryly, “Because you didn’t catch her before she entered that kitchen? If that’s your guilt, what’s mine? I suspect the inspector’ll have me back in uniform for this fine bit of chaos and that’s the least of it. But she’s done it, Adam. She’s really done it. She found proof of what Black took away with him. She delivered it to the inspector. Gregory Scott is our man. And we’ve got him now.”

  I found my voice. “Is your injured policeman all right?”

  Jim paused while I rejoined them and sat up once more. He discreetly ignored me while I got myself into some kind of order and pushed the ragged tangles of my hair back from my face. He told Adam, and me too without directing the information at me, “He’ll be fine. He’s got a bit of a hole in the flesh of his arm and is enjoying making a great deal of fuss about it.”

  I squinted up at Jim. He was hard to see against the uniform grey of the afternoon sky. “You guessed from the first that it was Gregory, didn’t you?”

  Jim smiled down at me. He might be set for a sound telling off from his superiors but he looked elated. He also looked entirely unruffled by the day’s adventures. He still had his coat and he looked crisp and clean. I knew Adam and I looked utterly ragged. He told me, “It seemed pretty convenient that Mr Gregory Scott should be there today. I thought he was hoping you’d find Black’s evidence and he’d get a chance to destroy it or adulterate it, or even capitalise on the tangle your husband, sorry, ex-husband got himself into while he was working us up towards entrapping Adam. I thought we only needed to apply a touch more pressure and we’d have our man in the bag. It was just unfortunate I didn’t make any allowance for the insane logic of a man like Gregory Scott. I still can’t quite believe he was operating solely on the fantasy that he could stage irrefutable evidence that would put him in the clear.”

  Beside me, Adam said accusingly, “I actually believed you, you know, when you all but placed me under arrest.”

  Jim laughed. He looked gratified. “So did Mr Williams. And now,” he added with satisfied smirk, “he’s going to tell us precisely who else has been coming to that office to pay special visits to Mr Scott. And Mr Scott is going to have a fine time explaining precisely what did happen to my friend Detective Constable Black. And this time I won’t be playing along with anybody’s charade, or giving anyone’s ex-wife the nudge to play weak and stupid either.”

  Then, with alarming abruptness, Jim grew very serious indeed. He dropped into a crouch before us. He said gravely to me, “Thank you.” His brown eyes were steady on my face. “I’d already thought you’d made our man desperate, Kate. I should have gauged more seriously just how desperate. The terrifying thing is that he might have actually achieved at least part of his plan if Adam hadn’t shaken off his guard and come and found me.”

  I felt Adam shift uneasily beside me. Jim’s mouth briefly fixed into a rueful line. “We broke for cover when we heard you were going to come out. We were there in the exhibition room when you came hurrying in. We were there right up to the moment that Gregory Scott started brandishing his screwdriver. I gave PC Downe the cue to distract him as much as he could and dragged Adam away to slip round by way of the courtyard to intercept your procession outside. Adam didn’t want to leave you, you know.”

  He adjusted his position as his knees complained from the prolonged crouch. “I didn’t mean to either. I hadn’t, you know, left Gregory Scott unguarded for a moment, not even when the excitement of Reed’s appearance proved too tempting a lure. PC Downe and his fellow were there. When Clarke stepped in and I heard my name being screamed from the rooftops, I was already in the process of pounding back in with a handful of fellows.” Jim looked decidedly uncomfortable at the memory. Then his gaze returned to my face. He smiled. He told me, “This sounds terribly like I’m trying to escape accusations of negligence but I want you to understand that when the inspector arrived with the full team from the Cirencester station, they took charge of everything upstairs. I thought Scott must have slipped away while my lowly Gloucester constables were being relegated to crowd control. All the time that our man was waiting to find you on your own, I was chasing about trying to fill the gaps in our search. It’s not an excuse for leaving you unguarded, but it is what happened. I’m sorry. And,” he added on a rather darker note, “I have to tell you that I’m still blindingly grateful you came today, and it’s not as you might think because I’m willing to sacrifice everything just for the sake of catching my man.”

  I must have looked disbelieving because he smiled. “It’s true, you know. If you hadn’t been there today, I don’t believe he would have been satisfied with the collapse of our investigation. He still would have come for you. He would always have come for you. I don’t think he knew until today precisely what form the evidence against him took but as soon as your name was thrust into his mind he knew you weren’t the sort to be bribed or bullied into silence, and he certainly believed you really were the woman who could undo him. I don’t think he was ever going to bear it.”

  And if Gregory hadn’t attempted to finish this with the full benefit of witnesses, he wouldn’t have done it in the presence of the only policeman determined enough to be capable of putting a stop to it. It seemed I too had to be thankful for some parts of today.

  Needless to say, Jim left a little hard chill behind when he climbed to his feet again. He shook his own regrets off abruptly. With his customary cheerfulness that meant that it was impossible to know whether he agreed with the next part of his inspector’s actions or was just too well disciplined to contradict them, he said bracingly, “Enough of that. What I really came over to say is that the inspector’s already tasked someone with telephoning your sister. Apparently she’s just got to ask the neighbour to manage the children and then she’ll be here to pick you up. Her husband’s away so she said it’s not too much trouble to put you up for a few days while your parents travel back from Paris, then she supposed you’ll be keen to head back north as soon as possible. Time to leave this accursed town behind once and for all wouldn’t you say, Mrs … Miss …” A pause while he stumbled between the choice of titles he had for me and forgot that ‘Kate’ would have done perfectly well, and then finished inconclusively with a lame, “eh?”

  I saw his gaze flicker between me and Adam. I know the policeman saw my brittle smile. By way of a tactful exit, he abandoned the effort of saying farewell to me and instead put out his hand. “Mr Hitchen.”

  After the smallest of hesitations, Adam extricated his right arm by lifting it carefully over my head before reaching out and taking Jim’s hand. Jim gave it a firm shake then he nodded at us and turned to go, and that was it. He went to wrap up his next loose end.

  Adam and I watched him go. We sat quietly side by side while the clock tower struck a quarter past the hour. I had no idea which hour. It felt like midnight but it probably wasn’t on account of the sun still being in the sky. Beside me, Adam observed calmly and quite unexpectedly, “You’ve been fighting my corner from the very beginning, haven’t you?”

  For a momen
t I didn’t understand his meaning. I’d thought his gaze was fixed on the bustle outside my gallery but then I realised his attention had dropped to his left hand where it lay across his thigh. Mine had passed across my lap and was closed over his very firmly. I must have sought his hand when Jim had been describing their efforts to entrap Gregory by using Adam. I was gripping him very tightly indeed. I loosened my fingers. “Sorry.”

  “Whatever for this time?”

  His tone might have made me give a little laugh but something in the way he turned his head caused my breath to catch. I made him turn a little further and saw the ragged little cut above his ear. It was largely covered by his hair but there was still a faint trace of dampness where the doctor had tried to clean it. Very lightly, I touched the limit of his hairline with my fingertips. He flinched a little but then let me find the bruise on his cheek. “It looks sore.”

  “It is sore,” he agreed. He reached up a hand to drag mine down to his lap again.

  Then he resumed whatever he had begun to say before by remarking, “If the sense of desperate isolation I encountered for a while in that place is even half of what you must have been dealing with lately, this is just one more bit of proof that I’ve never quite been doing you justice.”

  I grinned as I was supposed to, only for my humour to fracture a little and I suddenly found myself in the curve of his arm again. His grip was tight. His cheek was warm against my hair. Then he broke across my thoughts by saying roughly, “When you came to me in that room upstairs after Rhys’s unpleasant revelation about that photograph, I thought you were saying goodbye. I thought you were going to help them. I thought you were sorry, but you were going to help them build their case against me all the same.”

  I was very still. My hand was clutching at his jumper somewhere about his middle. I knew now what he was feeling; what he had felt. Of course I did. For years he and I had shared the same fear – the one where loneliness tried to consume everything. I think he knew full well how it felt to be perceived as something other than he was.

  And if today I hadn’t known instinctively that he was honest. If today I’d shown that the distrust that had haunted my dealings with him over the past week still lay dormant ready for the first hint of accusation … It would have proved at last that he had to fear that even the people who loved him could define him and teach him that what he believed about himself wasn’t really true at all.

  His hand moved upon my arm. Restless. He hadn’t even been certain at the time that I did love him. I could sense the exhilaration running beneath his skin and the uncertainty even now.

  He drew a sharp little breath and said quite calmly, “Will you let me come and visit you in a couple of days? After you’ve had a bit of time to recover?”

  And then just as abruptly he seemed to come to a decision.

  It took an extraordinary degree of courage for him to say fiercely, “No.” It was a hard correction. “I know that informing your family was a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do. But I don’t want you to let them organise you into going to your sister’s. And I don’t want you to go back to Lancaster with your parents. I know it’s not remotely the done thing but I want you to come back to my house.” A pause, then, “Will you come back?”

  Without moving from my place in the curve of his shoulder I knew those serious grey eyes were fixed intently on the only bit of me he could see. His hold on me tightened. He said blandly, “Please? I need you. I love you.”

  I think he knew he was going to make me cry again. He said quickly, “I promise I’ll encourage you to paint any subject you like.”

  His words were for my ears alone. My fingers had moved jerkily upon his jumper and he lifted his hand to cover them. Then he added persuasively, “And I won’t make you use any brown …”

  There was a smile in his voice. I drew a little calming breath.

  “And,” he added very seriously indeed, “you can organise the garden; that is, just so long as May doesn’t claim the wilderness as a vital wildlife habitat.”

  That made me turn my head and find his smile. He was there at the moment I rediscovered happiness. He was there when the sense of who we were and what we wanted to be was laid out and put in its proper place for both of us, and stayed there beneath that cold November sky.

  His grip grew fierce. Crushing. I could feel the fire pounding through his veins and it was echoed in me. A while later he drew an unsteady breath. Across the market place, the shop windows were becoming blazes of light.

  With his gaze on them, he admitted in a rueful whisper, “You might have to change your name.” I laughed when he asked as an automatic afterthought, “Can you bear it?”

  A Letter from the Author to the Reader

  Thank you for reading The War Widow. The original idea for this book came from the discovery of a pre-war Aberystwyth guidebook in a Cirencester charity shop window. I’d just finished writing my first novel In the Shadow of Winter, and the discovery of the Aberystwyth guidebook came at the crucial moment when my mind was toying with a new idea about linking an old life with a present one. The guidebook united my memory of life as an art student in the Welsh seaside town with my new life in Cirencester. It made me think about how much a woman might try to reinvent herself after the end of a relationship and how certain elements of the past might quite simply refuse to let her go.

  The part of me that was inspired to set this story in the post-war period came from my sense that to me it all seems a very long time ago and yet it still has a significant impact on the world I live in today. There are, after all, quite a lot of people alive who remember that time. And actually that’s part of why I have loved doing the research for this novel. I haven’t needed to learn what life was like after the war from a historical record. Someone could tell me. They could tell me how the nation had to heal after the years of hard conflict. They could share their experiences of the shortages and the worries of the time. And they could describe the sense some people had that the new peace was the opportunity to shake off the old ties from a former life and build instead the new life they had always hoped for. It was the perfect, dynamic, challenging time for Kate, the heroine of this novel, to arrive in Aberystwyth.

  Kate’s account of her story unfolds in November 1947. She’s working hard to save herself from a crisis that is threatening her independence and it happens at a time when a woman’s power of making her own judgements is at best uncertain anyway. For me there’s no more proof of Kate’s bravery than in the way she faces her most personal challenge of all - the question of who she thinks she is, set against the way other people perceive her.

  I have loved helping Kate to learn to trust her judgement of these people in her turn. She has to choose whether to cautiously get to know Adam in the midst of danger and through that rebuild her confidence in her own identity, or to admit that her ex-husband’s opinion of her is still powerful enough to define her life even after she’s left him.

  I know she’s brave enough for the task. I’m really glad you’ve joined her.

  Acknowledgements

  There are many people who have been a wonderful influence on me in the course of writing this book but my particular thanks must go to my editor Suzanne Clarke. Her guidance has been invaluable.

  Thank you also to Charlotte Ledger at HarperImpulse for her enthusiasm. The Ceredigion Museum Service kindly provided access to historic photographs and information on locations within Aberystwyth. Details of other Welsh tourist entertainments and destinations from the period were taken from the Cambrian News Illustrated Guide ‘Aberystwyth: What to See and How to See It’ (c. 1928).

  The appearance of buildings and streets in Cirencester during the post-war period was drawn from the photographic record in ‘Cirencester Through Time’ by David and Linda Viner (Amberley Publishing, 2009) and ‘Cirencester in the 1930s and ’40s’ by Jean Welsford and Peter Grace (Hendon Publishing, 1990).

  Finally, a special thank you goes to my husband Jeremy f
or discovering my treasured Cambrian News Illustrated Guide in a Cirencester charity shop. Through that single act, he bears responsibility for gifting me the idea that grew into this novel.

  About the Author

  Lorna Gray’s relationship with the rugged beauty of the West Wales coastline began when she studied Fine Art (BA Hons) at Aberystwyth University. Lorna’s subsequent training as an archaeological illustrator led her to Cirencester where she’s been exploring her love of history, adventure and romance ever since.

  Her first post-war novel In the Shadow of Winter was published in 2015. She lives in the Cotswolds with her husband.

  If you enjoyed The War Widow, why not try In the Shadow of Winter

  Click here to buy now

  About HarperImpulse

  HarperImpulse is an innovative, award-winning digital imprint. In the four years since launch, we have continually hit digital bestseller lists, hosted the UK’s first online romance festival, published into over ten countries and grown an exciting stable of commercial women’s fiction authors.

  Readers, come and say hi to the team and your next read…

  www.facebook.com/HarperImpulse

  @HarperImpulse

  www.instagram.com/harperimpulse

  www.harperimpu‌lseromance.com

  Writers, our vision is to publish the very best in digital-first commercial women’s fiction and we are simply looking for good stories! So, what are you waiting for? To submit, e-mail us at harperimpulse@harpercollins.co.uk.

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.