Alison’s eyes sparkled in the candlelight. ‘How spooky!’
‘When I asked her why she wanted to stay with the babies,’ Susan continued, ‘Eleanor told me that she was a widow. Her only daughter had died childless so she never had any grandbabies. When Samantha and Victoria were born, she simply decided to go home with them.’
‘But this is fascinating, Janet,’ I said, turning to face our hostess. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Eleanor the other day when I told you about meeting Susan in Foss Street?’
Janet flushed. ‘I didn’t want to frighten you away, Hannah.’
‘Why would I have been frightened away?’
Janet stole a quick glance at her husband, then looked back to me. ‘Because the room that you and Paul are staying in used to be the nursery.’
I have to admit that I felt a shiver begin at the base of my spine, but another fortifying sip of wine kept it at bay. ‘Is she still there?’ I whispered.
‘Eleanor? No,’ Susan answered. ‘Eleanor explained that she worried when the mother – that would be you, Janet – let the poor babes go on crying for hours and hours.’
‘Two minutes!’ Janet sputtered. ‘Imagine being criticized by a ghost.’
Susan chuckled. ‘Spirits have their own timetables, dear. Anyway, after I explained that Janet was a good mother, and that recommended child-rearing techniques had changed a lot since her day, Eleanor agreed to go.’
‘Then Susan lit a candle, waved some rosemary about, and that was that,’ Alan added.
‘Woo-woo.’ Jon waggled his fingers.
Rather than take offense, Susan shot a benevolent smile in Jon’s direction. ‘I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I feel I’m in safe company. Lighting an aromatic candle and waving a bundle of herbs through the smoke doesn’t actually do anything, Jon, but it makes the client feel good because it’s something they can see. Mostly I simply reassure the spirit that all is well, pass on any messages the spirit may have for the living, and make sure they can both rest easy. Laying spirits to rest is one of the most popular segments of my television show.’
‘I just love your show,’ Alison gushed. ‘I’d love to attend some time.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Susan said, reaching down for her handbag, ‘I’ll be taping a live broadcast at the Palace Theatre in Paignton on Wednesday night.’
‘Paignton! That’s just twenty miles from here!’
‘It’s sold out, I’m afraid, but if you call this number . . .’ She located her business cards and handed one across the table to Alison. ‘There’s always the possibility of a cancellation. Here’s a card for you, too, Hannah,’ Susan said, peeling another one from the pack.
The card was elegantly simple, printed on cream-colored stock: Dead Reckoning, website URL and telephone number, that’s all. No crystal ball graphics, no freephone numbers to psychic hotlines.
‘I’ll call first thing in the morning!’ Alison tucked the card into her pocket and patted it for security.
Paul leaned across the table. ‘Susan, I hope you don’t think I’m being impertinent, but do you mind if I ask you a question? Do you have a code word?’
Susan paused in the act of returning her business cards to her handbag. ‘Code word?’
‘Like Houdini. He promised his friends that when he died, he would try to communicate with them from the other side. I understand they had a prearranged code so that if a message came to them from the Great Beyond, they would know it was really Houdini speaking.’
Susan’s smiled seemed a tad forced. ‘The spirits I talk to don’t speak in code, Paul, but if I had to pick a word, it would be Basingstoke.’
‘Basingstoke!’ Alison clapped her hands. ‘How delightful!’
Jon was the only one around the table who looked confused.
‘It’s a town in Hampshire, darling. But that’s not the delightful part. Tell him, Susan.’
‘It’s from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta, Ruddigore,’ Susan explained. ‘Mad Margaret keeps lapsing into hysteria, so she and Sir Despard Murgatroyd hit upon using the word Basingstoke to calm her down whenever she goes off on a wild tangent.’
‘Poor child, she wanders,’ Paul quoted airily, having seen the production half a dozen times. ‘Margaret, if you don’t Basingstoke at once, I shall be seriously angry.’
I looked at my husband and grinned. ‘Basingstoke it is.’
‘How do you know Susan’s not making it all up?’ Paul asked Alan in an aside after Susan trailed off into the kitchen after Janet to help her get the dessert together – summer pudding with red fruits, as it would turn out. Paul wore skepticism on his face like a badge, but what Alan said next shut my husband’s I-told-you-so mouth right up.
‘That’s the astonishing part,’ Alan whispered. ‘Susan could have had no idea on what day our girls were born, yet when I had a friend check the death census at Torbay Hospital for January the third, there were only two names on it. A Henry Thomas, twenty-seven, who died in a road accident, and Eleanor Swindon, widow, age eighty-two.’
SIX
‘We went into the field and walked some 60 to 80 yards. Then he said beneath where we were standing there were two brick and concrete air-raid shelters with steps leading down to them. The bodies were in those shelters and the steps had been blown up to seal them off.’
Ken Small, The Forgotten Dead, Bloomsbury, 1989, p.209
Eleanor Swindon’s ghost may have moved on to a happier afterlife, but Cathy Yates clung like my shadow, dogging my trail all day Friday, the day Paul and Alan had set aside for a bike ride to Kingsbridge along the coastal road. With the guys out of my hair, I’d planned a solitary pilgrimage to Greenway House, Agatha Christie’s home, recently opened to the public by the National Trust following a multi-million-pound renovation.
I slipped away from Horn Hill House shortly after breakfast and was standing in a short queue at the Greenway Ferry kiosk at the Dartmouth boat float pawing through my change purse muttering I know I have something smaller than a twenty, when Cathy materialized at my elbow, waving a ten-pound note and asking, ‘Do you mind if I tag along?’
I did, but Britain, like America, was a free country, and even though it was the height of tourist season, there turned out to be plenty of room aboard the Dartmouth Belle.
The Belle, I noticed immediately upon stepping aboard, was my kind of boat. It boasted a full-service bar, with bottles of booze suspended upside down in some sort of rack-and-pour dispensing system. Alas, the bar was closed, or I might have ordered a G&T. Cathy had scheduled an appointment with Stephen Bailey at his daughter’s house on the following day, so she was in high gear, chattering away in anticipation of the meeting like a sewing machine gone berserk. A G&T would have helped, especially if I poured it down her throat.
After a leisurely cruise up the River Dart, Cathy and I disembarked, then wound our way together up a sun-dappled forest trail to the estate proper. While we waited for the clock to tick over to the time stamped on our admission tickets, I showed her around Agatha’s garden, the same garden where Amyas Crayle drank a fatal glass of beer in Five Little Pigs. Then we wandered down to the picturesque Victorian boathouse where poor Marlene Tucker was strangled in Dead Man’s Folly. Cathy confessed to having seen the DVD of Murder on the Orient Express, but had never found the novelist’s books ‘engrossing’. When she told me she was partial to Patricia Cornwell and Danielle Steele, I bit my tongue and reserved comment.
The highlight of the garden tour for Cathy was a cluster of small gravestones in a fern-shaded rockery, the cemetery where the family pets had been buried. ‘H, E double toothpicks,’ she murmured. ‘Even the pets have graves.’
I didn’t need Susan Parker at my side to tell me what Cathy was thinking.
Christie’s house itself is Georgian, the color of clotted cream, set on several hundred acres of lawns and gardens that sweep down to the river. It was the ‘perfect house’ where Christie spent every summer from the time she bought it in
1938 until her death in 1976. Due to the generosity of Christie’s grandson, Matthew, we found the house just the way the family left it – hats, canes and umbrellas stacked on a table in the hallway, Agatha’s favorite serving dishes laid out on the dining-room sideboard, a book resting on a table in the library, bookmarked by reading glasses.
Thankfully, no docents dressed as Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot were hovering in the doorways to spin implausible tales for the curious visitor about bodies in the library or corpses in the studded leather Baghdad chest, just there, in the hall! No velvet ropes kept us back. We were able to wander the house freely, as if we were Agatha’s guests and she’d just stepped out to the shops for a moment. I wanted to leave Cathy to poke around by herself in the gift shop, park myself in the wingback chair by the window and re-read each of Dame Agatha’s novels in chronological order, calling on the butler at regular intervals to fetch me sustaining cups of tea.
The following day, ‘The Hannah and Cathy Show’ continued with Cathy’s planned interview with Stephen Bailey at his daughter’s home on Waterpool Road, a short uphill walk from our B&B.
Alison answered our knock. ‘Dad’s in the conservatory, but I should warn you that he’s in a bit of a snit. Some American just made a cheeky offer for the farm. He’s rejected it out of hand, of course,’ she said, leading us down a long hall toward the back of the house. ‘Since the evacuation, Dad doesn’t think very highly of Yanks, Cathy, so you’ve been warned.’
The hallway opened into a bright conservatory. At the far end, a pair of glass doors stood open, admitting a delightful morning breeze. The doors led to a manicured rose garden, my friend Alison’s pride and joy. Just beyond the roses, tiered planters held neat rows of rocket – arugula to us Yanks – and other lettuces. Tomato plants thrived on trellises ranged along the north wall.
Stephen Bailey, dressed in khakis and a light blue, open-necked shirt, was holding court in an elaborate rattan chair, like the Raj. Cathy and I sat on the flowered chintz sofa opposite him while Alison, at her father’s request, went to check on the tea.
Cathy got right to the point. ‘Thank you for seeing me, Mr Bailey. I really appreciate it. Did your daughter tell you that I’m trying to locate my father?’
Bailey nodded. ‘She did. Don’t know if I’ll be able to help you or not, Miss Yates.’
‘It’s actually Hannah’s idea. She suggested that you might be able to tell me the real story of Slapton Sands.’
‘Don’t know as anyone’s got the whole story.’ Bailey clicked his tongue. ‘All I can tell you is that it isn’t in any book I’ve ever read. Take that Sherman tank you saw the other day, for example. A fine memorial to some fine young men, to be sure, but it wasn’t lost during Operation Tiger like everyone thinks.’
Cathy’s eyebrows disappeared under her bangs. ‘It wasn’t?’
That was news to me, too.
The hint of a smile transformed Bailey’s face. ‘I know this chap, a senior guide at the Brixton Battery. Gives lectures from time to time. The way he tells it, on the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day, he went down to the tank for the big celebration and ran into a group of four Yanks – uh, beg your pardon, US soldiers. Old blokes, they were, wearing hats and medals.’ He leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees. ‘Do you know what connected them?’
Cathy shook her head, lips compressed into a thin line.
‘Believe it or not, they were the survivors of that very tank’s crew!’
‘Well, God Bless America!’ Cathy exclaimed.
If Bailey was perturbed by this outburst, he was careful to hide it. ‘So my friend from Brixton, he asks ’em, “How did you lose this tank, anyway?” And do you know what they said?’
Cathy and I shook our heads.
‘“Driver error,” they say! Hah!’ He slapped his knee, enjoying the joke. ‘Apparently they were transferring the tank from an LST to a barge. Backing it on to the barge, if you please. One of the tracks ran off the edge of the ramp and the tank simply toppled into the sea. Sank like a stone, it did, but the driver managed to escape.’
Cathy frowned. ‘Didn’t I read that the tank at Slapton Sands was one of those swimming tanks? You can still see the gear boxes and the propellers. Wouldn’t it float?’
‘Not with the hatches wide open, it couldn’t. Hah!’
‘That’s interesting, sir, and I’m glad the crew survived and all, but I’m wondering if you can tell me a bit more about the bodies?’
‘I’d be lying to you if I said nobody was killed at Slapton Sands, Miss Yates, but that was a day earlier, before the sub attacks, when the operation began and soldiers stormed the beach. They were using live ammunition, don’t forget. Some of the soldiers . . . well, I guess they forgot to duck.’
‘Cathy’s father was aboard one of the doomed LSTs,’ I told him.
‘Hannah’s right, sir. Number five three one.’
Bailey nodded sagely. ‘Well, then. His body would never have washed ashore at Slapton Sands. None of ’em did.’
‘What?’ Cathy and I said in unison.
‘God’s truth, ladies. When it was attacked by the German E-boats, that convoy was in Lyme Bay, twelve miles west-southwest of Portland. It was a major disaster, all right, but when those LSTs went down and the bodies floated ashore, they floated ashore at Chesil Beach in Dorset.
‘Some never came ashore, I’m sorry to say. The current’s strong in the bay. Carried many of ’em up the English Channel where they were never seen again.’
‘But what about the bodies that did float ashore? What happened to them?’
‘It took the Yanks eight days, but I can tell you on good authority that every body that washed ashore was accounted for. Had to be. Do you want to know why?’ His eyes twinkled mischievously.
Cathy nodded like a five-year-old at story hour, enrapt.
‘Ten of the missing men carried top-secret maps with details of the invasion. Until those maps were recovered, D-Day would be off.’
Cathy took a deep breath. ‘Since the invasion went forward, they must have . . .’
Bailey leaned forward, cutting her off. ‘All present and accounted for. The Americans had this burial regiment, you see. Efficient blokes. They loaded all the bodies into lorries and carried them to a cemetery in West London. Later, the bodies were moved to Cambridge.’
Tears filled Cathy’s eyes. ‘Were there any survivors, Mr Bailey?’
‘More than three hundred, I’d say. Every available boat in Portland, Weymouth and West Bay went out to help pick up survivors. Horribly burned they were, suffering from hypothermia, too.’
I shivered. ‘What happened to them?’
‘They were taken to hospitals all over the United Kingdom. Split up, kept out of contact with their families and with each other for more than five weeks. Locked up, some of them. Guarded twenty-four-seven. You know why, don’t you?’
Cathy was a quick study. ‘They had to protect the secret of the D-Day invasion.’
Bailey leaned back, folded his arms across his chest. ‘Exactly.’
‘I have this fantasy that my father survived,’ Cathy said, clearly grasping at straws. ‘Maybe he lost his dog tags when he jumped overboard. Maybe he was injured, suffering from amnesia.’
‘Frankly, Miss Yates, if your father was not accounted for at Chesil Beach, or listed among the survivors, most likely he floated out to sea. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it was.’
‘Missing in action. I know.’ Cathy sat silently for a moment, staring out the window where a sparrow was busily scattering seeds about the base of a feeder. ‘But you can’t be sure, can you? You didn’t actually see it.’
‘No. At the time, I was only seventeen. My family had been evacuated to a farm near Dittisham.’
‘Weren’t you ever curious what was happening to your farm, Mr Bailey? Didn’t you sneak back just to have a look?’
‘Dad and I wanted to, but American security was too tight. Even the Home Guard weren’t allowed int
o the American Zone, although they patrolled the roads that led up to it.’
Cathy puffed air out through her lips. ‘And we should believe what the government tells us – why?’
‘There’s no denying that there was a cover-up, but surely you can understand why.’
‘Then? Sure. But now? So long after D-Day? There can’t be any good reason to keep the details secret now!’ Cathy closed her eyes, massaged the bridge of her nose with two fingers. ‘Some of those soldiers and sailors are shriveled up old men now, dying of emphysema in VA hospitals,’ she said at last. ‘Death’s knocking at the door and they’re still covering their patooties.’
Somewhere deep within the house, a telephone rang, filling a sudden silence. We hadn’t laid eyes on Jon as yet, but he must have answered the call because he appeared at the door of the conservatory after a few minutes, waving a portable handset and asking, ‘Hannah, can you spare Paul for a few days?’
‘The last time you asked me that question, Jon, Paul ended up helping you build the very conservatory in which we are presently sitting.’
Jon beamed. ‘And a fine job it was, too. No, I entered my boat in the races at Cowes, and I need a grinder. I have a six-man crew, but one chap just dropped out.’
Grinders, I knew, worked in pairs, cranking sheets – ropes to you landlubbers – on a variety of winches to help shape the sails in coordination with other guys called trimmers. Grinding was not for the flabby, and Paul, still lean and mean at the ripe old age of . . . well, never mind . . . would be good at it.
‘Unless I miss my guess, Captain, Cowes Race Week begins this Saturday, as in just a week from today.’
‘Short notice, I know.’ He flashed a toothy, apologetic grin.
I gave Jon Paul’s cell phone number and resigned myself to a week of temporary widowhood. Cowes Race Week – unfolding on the waters of the Solent between the south coast of England and the Isle of Wight – was huge in sailing circles, and because of the area’s strong double tides, exciting. There was no way Paul, an experienced sailor, was going to say no to the opportunity of joining a team, even if he had to be a lowly grinder rather than, say, a navigator or tactician.
All Things Undying Page 6