by Rennie Airth
‘An alarming thought, to be sure, though less so for me than for others.’ Aunt Maud’s bright eyes twinkled. Old age has its advantages. One can always claim senility as an excuse. But thank you for the advice, my dear.’
Needle-sharp in spite of her advanced years, she had the reputation of a tartar in Helen’s family and few had escaped her barbed tongue unscathed. But for reasons unknown to him, Madden had always been a favourite of hers, and during his stay in London their talks had centred largely on family gossip, a passion of Aunt Maud’s, whose interest these days was focused on the youngest member of the Madden clan.
‘I’m beginning to wonder if she has a young man,’ she announced before he took his leave, having arranged to spend a further night under her roof. You can usually tell with girls. They get a look in their eye. But it’s no use asking her. She’s as deaf as a post when she wants to be. Mind you, her mother was just the same.’
In the course of their conversation that day, Madden had also enquired about the hoard of illicit foodstuffs downstairs and received Aunt Maud’s permission to plunder it at will. After conferring with Alice, he filled a shopping bag borrowed from her with a selection of items from the cupboard, to which he added the chunk of homemade cheese he’d brought up from the country – it could hardly compare with the Stilton – and the pork pie May Burrows had made at his request but which Alice assured him, apologetically, she could find no possible use for.
Though anxious to be on his way – he had something of an expedition ahead of him – he delayed his departure long enough to ring Billy Styles at the Yard to ask him for directions to the open-air market in Southwark where Alfie Meeks had had his stand.
‘Are you planning to go down there, sir?’ Billy asked after Madden had made a note of its location.
‘Yes, I am. But you’d better not tell the chief inspector. He might think I was taking things into my own hands.’
‘You’re not actually doing that, are you, sir?’
Billy’s concern was so naked it made Madden laugh.
‘Of course not. It’s just an idea that’s come to me; something I can only do myself. But on second thoughts you can tell Mr Sinclair I may have a surprise for him later.’
‘A surprise—?’
‘And ask him if he’s ever heard of Occam’s razor.’
18
THE MARKET WASN’T hard to find. Though it had no address as such, the piece of waste ground on which it was located, fronting a derelict warehouse by the Thames, in the shadow of Southwark Cathedral, was visible from some distance off.
‘You’ll see it upriver to your right when you cross London Bridge,’ Billy had told Madden when he’d learned that his old mentor was planning to travel down from St John’s Wood on the Underground. ‘It’s only ten minutes’ walk from Monument.’
In the event, the light rain that had been falling when he set off from Aunt Maud’s house had turned to driving sleet by the time he emerged from the tube station, and crossing the bridge, at first he caught only a glimpse of his goal as he clutched at his hat, turning his face away from the stinging pellets of ice, harbingers of more bad weather that was moving in from the Atlantic, according to a forecast he had heard on the wireless that morning.
But even before he reached the further bank the squall passed and he was able to pause and take stock of the scene. Being near the docks, it was an area that had suffered heavily in the Blitz four years earlier, and while Madden could recall the dramatic newsreel footage of the destruction wrought by the bombing and of the damage left in its wake, it was the first time he had seen for himself the gutted buildings lining the river, their walls charred by the nightly rain of incendiary bombs, and the near-mystical sight of the great dome of St Paul’s, floating calm and serene above the devastation surrounding it, miraculously untouched.
It was not a part of London he knew well – he had never been posted to Southwark during his time as a policeman – but on the journey down he had found his thoughts straying to an episode from his past, before the Great War, when as a young detective he’d been assigned with a more senior colleague to investigate a double murder that had taken place in the borough. Two bodies had been found in a house not far from the river, one of them that of a postman who had gone missing. Like the second victim, a drayman’s wife, he’d been battered to death, and detectives later discovered he had called at her house the day before with a registered letter and, finding the door ajar, had stepped inside – no more than that – most likely announcing his presence as he did so, only to be struck on the head with a heavy lamp stand swung by the already dead woman’s enraged husband, who had just beaten his wife to death after a furious quarrel.
Although the case had been easily resolved – the husband had tried to drown himself in the Thames, but lacking the nerve, finally, had struggled ashore and lain sprawled on a stretch of bank exposed by the tidal ebb until he was spotted – Madden had never forgotten it. The casual manner of the postman’s death – the terrible power wielded by chance in human destiny – had struck a chord in him that was to sound over and over again in the years ahead when his own life had hung by a thread in the charnel house of the trenches while those of so many others around him had been blown away.
Only that morning he had put the same thought into words while relating to Helen what he had learned from Sinclair about Rosa’s tragic encounter in Paris with the man who would later kill her.
‘They might so easily have missed one another in the Underground. He wasn’t stalking her. He had no idea she was here. But he saw her by chance and her fate was decided in a moment.’
The market site, when he reached it, proved to be a stretch of muddy ground cobblestoned in places and crammed with stalls whose owners were still busy removing the protective strips of canvas and other makeshift coverings they had used to shield their goods from the rain. One of many that had sprung up all over the country in response to the shortages that were now a part of everyday life, it had the air of a temporary encampment hastily pitched and liable to vanish at any moment, an impression heightened by the chestnut vendors whose mobile braziers, glowing like campfires, had been set up at whim about the site.
‘Between you and me, we tend to turn a blind eye to them,’ Billy had told him that morning. ‘A lot of the goods on sale are black market, and then there’s the stuff that’s been pilfered from bomb sites. We come down hard on looters when we catch them, but once the stuff they’ve lifted has been put back in circulation, there’s not much we can do about it. And there are always people looking for household goods these days – stoves, pots and pans, cutlery – folks that might have been bombed out themselves and lost everything. So as I say, we tend to look the other way.’
Whatever else, there seemed to be no lack of customers, Madden noted wryly as, despairing of finding any easy way through the tightly packed stalls, he chose one of the roughly marked avenues between them and started to forge a path through the dense throng of shoppers, most of them women, and some of whom were still in their dressing gowns and slippers, suggesting they must live locally. The row he had picked was devoted to kitchenware and the trestle tables lining it on either side were heaped high with crockery, little of it matched, as well as an assortment of second-hand cooking utensils and mounds of cheap-looking cutlery. At the end of the line were some smaller tables where a variety of goods were on display: cigarettes, lipstick, pocket combs. One bore a stack of American magazines beside a bottle of men’s hair oil.
‘There are blokes really scraping the bottom of the barrel down there,’ Billy had told him. ‘And Alfie was one of them. I was told he had the odd bottle of scotch for sale and sometimes a few bars of decent soap. But mostly it was cigarettes and tinned food. It’s a mystery how he made a living at all.’
During his slow passage along the crowded avenue, Madden had been scanning the faces behind the banked tables. What he could see of them. With a cold wind still gusting up the river, most of the stallholders, b
oth men and women, had wrapped themselves in heavy coats with scarves that were not just wound about their necks but in many cases pulled up to cover their mouths so that few of their features were visible. Having reached the end of the row, he paused, and as he did so his eye fell on some wooden planks that were lying stacked one on top of the other near to where he was. Stepping up on to the low platform they provided, he stood still, scanning the whole expanse of the market, letting his gaze move slowly up and down the rows of trestle tables, studying the faces of the stallholders. Towards the edge of the market, not far from the river, was a section where clothes were being sold, and as his glance wandered along the row, his eyes narrowed and he began to stare hard at one stall in particular, a long trestle table piled high with various articles of clothing, behind which a woman stood stamping her feet and slapping her gloved hands together. Clad in a coat and scarf like others, she also wore a knitted woollen cap pulled down low over her forehead, but even so there was something familiar about her stocky figure, and Madden smiled in recollection.
Two minutes later, having ploughed his slow way along another avenue packed with shoppers, he approached the stall where Nelly Stover was busy with a customer, a housewife by the look of her: she had a shopping bag not unlike the one Madden himself was toting, which she had parked on the table in front of her. He paused a short way off – now that he was closer he could make out Nelly’s craggy features more clearly, the jut of her lantern jaw – and waited patiently while the prospective purchaser chose a dress from a number hanging on a rail behind the stall. Holding it up to her body, she examined her reflection in a mirror which Nelly had produced from beneath the table, and, having nodded her approval, paid for the garment with a banknote and some change. As she moved away, Madden edged forward until he was standing in front of the stall. Nelly had bent down to return the mirror to its place under the table and he waited until she stood up before he addressed her:
‘Hello, Nelly,’ he said.
The slate-blue eyes beneath the woollen rim of the cap narrowed with suspicion. She gave him a long hard look. Then, without warning, a harsh cackle of laughter burst from her lips.
‘Well, strike me pink!’ she declared. ‘If it isn’t Officer Madden!’
‘I heard about you,’ she told him later. ‘Cos I asked, see. That sergeant at the station in Bethnal Green, what was his name – Callahan – he said you’d left the force. That you weren’t a copper no more. That was before the war. The last war. And I told him it was a pity. That we could do with a few more like you.’
‘I came back afterwards,’ Madden told her. ‘I rejoined the police. But not for long. I’m a farmer now.’
‘Garn …’ She was disbelieving.
‘It’s true. I got married and my wife and I bought a farm in Surrey. I’m hardly ever in London any more.’
By good fortune he’d arrived shortly before Nelly shut up shop for the day.
‘It’s too bad I have to close early. I lose a bit of business. But the kids come first.’
She left the market every day at half-past three, she told him, so as to collect her two grandchildren from the woman who looked after them during the morning and gave them their lunch.
‘They’ve been living with me for the past three years, them and their dad, when he’s here. Bloke called Denny Miller. He married my Margie. You never knew her. She was just a nipper when you was in Bethnal Green.’
‘I remember your son, Nelly.’
‘You mean Jack?’ She smiled. ‘Him that you kept out of stir?’
‘He wouldn’t have gone to prison. Not at his age.’
‘Maybe not, but they’d have sent him to a borstal for sure, and I’ve seen many a boy come out of there after a year or two and never the same again. Anyway, he turned into a good bloke, my Jack, thanks to you. Got himself a proper trade – he’s a fitter and turner. Works in an airplane factory up in Birmingham.’
She had glanced at Madden as she spoke: he was helping her clear her stall. They were loading the clothes into card-board boxes and the boxes on to a trolley – the kind used by railway porters to shift luggage.
‘What happened to Margie, Nelly?’
‘Copped it in the Blitz, that’s what.’ She bit her lip. ‘I heard their house had been hit, they were living just down the street from where we were, her and Denny, only he was often away, being a merchant seaman, so I ran down there and when I saw the house, what was left of it, I thought it was all up with them. Margie and the kids. Both floors had caved in. But when the firemen dug down they found them in the basement, Tom and little Sally. Covered in dust, they were, but not a scratch on them. Margie must have taken them down there when she heard the sirens and then gone upstairs to fetch something. Anyway she was in her bedroom when the bomb hit, so that was that. And then a month later I got the telegram …’
‘The telegram?’
‘About Bob … you remember him? My old man?’
Madden nodded. He had put his own bag on the trolley.
‘I was told he was lost at sea. I’m sorry, Nelly.’
She grunted something and was on the point of turning away when a thought seemed to strike her and she paused to peer at him; more keenly now.
‘Told was you? It wouldn’t have been by that copper who was down here the other day, asking questions about Alfie Meeks?’
‘Yes, I heard it from him.’ Madden nodded. ‘Billy Styles. We’re old friends.’
Nelly Stover absorbed the information in silence. Then she cocked an eye at him.
‘So you turning up here – it’s not just a coincidence then?’
‘Hardly.’ Madden met her glance and she guffawed.
‘Fancy that.’ She chuckled to herself. ‘Well, if you’ve come down here to ask me about Alfie, you’re wasting your time. I told that copper everything I knew, which wasn’t much. And you’ve left it a little late, what’s more. I’ve got to go off now. I can’t stay here.’
‘I know. But I thought I might come with you, Nelly.’ Madden smiled. ‘I’d like to meet your grandchildren.’
‘Oh, you would, would you?’ She produced the same harsh, cackling laugh. ‘Well, if you like … I’ve got no objection.’ But she shook her head as she turned away. ‘My grandkids … my eye!’
Still chuckling to herself, she grasped hold of one of the handles of the trolley, Madden the other, and together they set off, pushing the clumsy vehicle over the cobbles, skirting the market and the line of chestnut vendors, pursuing a course set by Nelly that took them away from the river and up the side of the ruined warehouse into a street lined with houses, several of which were only bomb sites now, yawning holes from which the debris had long since been removed. It was in front of one of these that Nelly paused, and at her direction they steered the trolley down a narrow alley into what must once have been a small back garden where a potting shed still stood undamaged.
‘I managed to get hold of the key for this,’ she told Madden after she had unlocked the door and they had begun to move her goods inside. ‘Bloke who owned the house sold it to me for a fiver. It’s been worth its weight in gold.’
Inside the dark, unfloored structure there was a suitcase lying on the ground, and Nelly gave it a kick.
‘I don’t have to tell you who that belonged to, I reckon,’ she remarked. In fact, if ‘I’m not mistaken you knew Alfie when he was a lad. Back in Bethnal Green. Him and his family.’
Madden nodded. ‘I was talking to Billy about him the other day.’
She digested his statement in a silence that lasted for several seconds.
‘And you’re still telling me you ain’t a copper no more?’
‘That’s right, Nelly.’
His words produced another cackle of laughter from her.
‘Well, if you say so …’
What light there was in the sky was already dying as she locked the door behind them and they set off through the deepening dusk. In the distance the faint wail of an air-raid siren sound
ed, but faded quickly into silence. Across the river a searchlight probed the darkening sky. Paying no heed to either, Nelly plodded on, talking as she walked, offering Madden a brief account of her life in the years that had passed since they had last seen one another.
‘We left Bethnal Green, Bob and I, back in ’20, after the war. He’d been at sea since he was sixteen and he was in one of the first ships that was torpedoed – bet you didn’t know that. When this lot started he told me not to worry: said it couldn’t happen to him twice. Anyway we came over here, south of the river, and we never went back. I told that friend of yours, that copper, I hadn’t seen Alfie since he was a lad. But I heard he’d got himself sent to a borstal. Poor little sod. Never had a chance in life, not with a father like that.’
‘When did you go into the clothes business, Nelly?’ Madden paced along beside her.
‘A year ago come Christmas. With Bob gone I had to do something, and then I thought of these markets that had started up all over. I get hold of old clothes and do ’em up. Sell ’em like new. Well, not new, but you know what I mean. That’s what I did when I was a lass. Sewed. I was a seamstress. Bet you didn’t know that neither.’ She chuckled. But then who would have guessed you’d turn into a farmer. Officer Madden …’
They had been walking through narrow streets in a darkness so dense Madden had been able to make out little more than the dim outlines of the terrace houses on either side. Here the full blackout was still in force and only the occasional faint glow at the edge of a blind or curtain signalled the presence of life inside. With little sense of where they were any longer – he knew only that the river lay to their left – he had allowed Nelly to guide them, and when she came to a halt outside a front door he checked his own stride.
‘Wait here. I’ll just be a sec.’
She knocked on the door, was quickly admitted and in less than a minute was back again with two small figures who tumbled out into the dark of the street holding on to her hands.