‘Lydia, please. I’m sorry about Horace—’
‘Think nothing of it. I’ve seen it all before – had three years of the old fool. I also know, of course, that he can be quite charming when it suits him.’
Wilde shook Eaton’s hand. ‘What did you make of Kholtov, Eaton?’
‘Obviously committed to his cause. I think you got to him.’
‘What puzzles me is how he managed to enter the country in the first place. Does Britain really allow such men to come and go as they please? Even as an American I have to sign the Aliens register. Perhaps a favour was called in.’
‘Horace Dill, you mean?’ Eaton nodded towards the comatose figure sprawled across the table. ‘I suppose he must know quite a lot of people.’
Wilde doubted he’d get any more out of Eaton. ‘You’ll have to excuse me. I see spies and conspiracy everywhere.’ He wondered what Kholtov had discovered in Spain that could have had any bearing on Britain – and why he had been reluctant to discuss it.
‘You’re right,’ Eaton said. ‘A strange, unsettling day altogether. Something’s going on. Something nasty.’
Wilde nodded. The horror of the Langleys’ bedroom was close to the surface. The obscenity of using a man’s blood to make a political point. Eaton had promised that no newspaper would publish a word of it beyond the fact that they had been murdered, but the damage was done: the government, the establishment knew. How would they react? How did governments always react when they felt threatened?
‘Oh, by the way,’ Eaton said. ‘Who was the man who joined us – Braithwaite, I believe?’
‘An unemployed miner walking south to find work in the Kent coalfield,’ Wilde said. ‘Lydia offered him food and a night’s rest – and now she seems lumbered with him.’
‘Very charitable, I’m sure. Shall we talk tomorrow, Wilde?’
‘Yes, I think that would be a good idea.’
Eaton turned to Lydia. ‘I’ll try to get Horace Dill home, otherwise you might find him here at breakfast, his head in the ashtray.’ He put his hands under Dill’s armpits and pulled him to his feet. Dill allowed himself to be manhandled towards the doorway. ‘Night, all,’ Eaton said. ‘Thank you for a splendid evening.’
Wilde watched Eaton descend the steps, out into the windy night, holding up Dill. They looked like a pair of drunks which, he supposed, was no more than the truth. ‘Take good care of him, Eaton,’ he called after them. ‘Believe it or not, I rather like the old sodomite.’
Wilde closed the door and went into the kitchen where Lydia was looking at the piles of dirty plates and dishes with open-mouthed dismay. ‘I can’t do anything about this. Not tonight.’
‘Leave it for Doris. That’s why you have a char, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve got to go to bed before I’m sick.’
‘Goodnight, Lydia.’
CHAPTER 14
Lydia closed the bathroom door behind her and sat at her dressing table to brush her hair, as she always did before bed. Her face in the mirror was swimming before her eyes. She wore a Chinese silk dressing gown, nothing else. The gown had been her mother’s and she fancied she could still smell her scent, even though it was seventeen years since the Spanish flu killed her.
The drink, the deaths of her friends . . . she was overcome by an unbearable weight of emotion. But it was her parents’ faces that came to her rather than those of Nancy or the Langleys.
They had been so young. Her father was thirty when the shell tore the life out of him in the last year of the war, her mother twenty-nine when the sickness took her in the first year of the peace.
Her beloved father had been a doctor. At the field hospital, he shouldn’t even have been in danger, but the artillery of both sides did not always know where they were hurling their missiles. And nor did they necessarily care. The shell had taken out a whole tent ward in one go. Her father’s body had, apparently, been found untouched. And yet he was dead. She hadn’t seen him; he had been buried in France. She closed her eyes and saw his face as she remembered it. Her mother said he was the best-looking man in Cambridge, even more handsome than Rupert Brooke. Killed by the stupid war he had hated. He had been a Quaker. Lydia had inherited his pacifism, but not his religion. There was no God. There could be no God, because God would not have allowed the senseless death of such a good man.
It was difficult to think of her beautiful mother even now. Influenza. How could a little thing like that take her away? She had been so full of life, so fervent in her desire for the rights of women, so insistent that Lydia should have the education she had been denied by her own Victorian father – an education as rigorous as any offered to a young man. Lydia had been left a nine-year-old orphan in the care of her Aunt Phyllis – her mother’s widowed sister – in suburban Surrey. She had also been left a woman of some means and the owner of this house, with all its memories.
Lydia removed the gold ring from the fourth finger of her right hand. It was a simple gold band, the ring her father had given her mother on their wedding day. Though the exchanging of rings was not part of the Quaker tradition, Lydia’s mother had not been a Quaker and her father had willingly compromised with a plain ring. Lydia wore it now, every day, and took it off every night.
The dull gold glinted in her hand. She opened the lid of the jewellery box at the back of the dressing table and put the ring in its small compartment, then closed the lid. For a moment she caught her reflection in the mirror, frowning, hazily aware something was wrong. She raised the jewellery box lid again. Her maternal grandmother’s gold-chain bracelet wasn’t there.
She hadn’t worn it recently, but she was certain it had been there last night. She would have noticed if it was missing. She picked through the box again, sure it must be there. She was befuddled, yes, but she would know if she had left it somewhere else.
From outside the door she heard a noise: Braithwaite padding about in his room probably. It was time he went. She looked at the space in the jewellery box where the bracelet should be, then thought of Braithwaite again – and immediately chastised herself for making the connection.
She heard the noise once more. Tying the gown tighter around her slender waist, she went out into the corridor and switched on the light. She didn’t feel well; she really had drunk a great deal too much. Braithwaite was at the top of the staircase, looking away from her.
‘What are you doing, Mr Braithwaite?’
He turned with the look of a guilty schoolboy, then composed himself and nodded. ‘Ah, did I disturb you, Miss Morris? I’m just going down to get a cuppa. Couldn’t sleep, you see. Shall I make you one?’
‘This isn’t working, Mr Braithwaite. I want you to move on in the morning. As I said, I’ll pay your fare to Kent.’
‘And I thought we were getting on famously, miss.’ He wore ragged trousers tied with string. No shirt, no shoes, no socks.
‘Goodnight, Mr Braithwaite.’
‘Hang on a mo.’ He was moving towards her. ‘They’ve all gone, all the others. Time for ourselves now, Miss Morris. Get to know each other a bit better.’
What was he talking about? Instinctively, she edged backwards, suddenly aware of the threat in his eyes. He maintained his leering grin and put his finger to his lips as he moved towards her, bow-legged, small and wiry. And then he was upon her, folding his arms round her, clutching her buttocks and kissing her face.
‘I know what you want. I heard you last night with him. Your little sobs. I know what you are.’
She pushed at him, and managed to break away. ‘Get your hands off me,’ she said and thought how feeble it sounded. Then, without thinking what she was saying, ‘I know you’ve been stealing. You’ll be doing twenty years with hard labour if you touch me.’
He laughed and grabbed her again. ‘You’re as pissed as a rat, miss.’
She couldn’t believe what was happening, but his hands were wandering, inside the silk of her gown from front and back, defiling her. His right hand went to her th
ighs and pressed between her legs. She was trying to pull away, but he had a grip of iron. The grip of a man accustomed to wielding a pickaxe into a coal face and hauling two-hundredweight sacks every day of his life. A squat man with the brute strength of a pit pony. With his left hand he ripped off his string belt, opened his fly buttons and his trousers fell away.
Prising her legs apart with his hand and knee, he pushed her back into her room, to the edge of the bed. She cried out and his left hand clamped her mouth. ‘Do you want me to hurt you? Is that it? Think you’re too good for me, do you? Oh, I can hurt a woman.’ His voice rasped in her ear. ‘If you don’t want to be hurt, then shut the fuck up and enjoy it. You know you like it, you dirty middle-class slut. Your type always do.’ He grunted like a maddened pig.
With revulsion, she felt him forcing his way between her legs and she could do nothing. Her eyes were wide open with disgust and fear. His were closed, his rotten teeth clenched like a dog at bay, growling, grunting. The veins in his face were blue, and pulsing. She sensed a movement of shadow and light and then he was wrenched away from her.
*
Tom Wilde led with his left, a blow to the body, then came up with a right uppercut. His bare fist connected with the man’s jaw. Braithwaite, caught off guard, sprawled sideways across the bedroom floor. He crawled up on to his hands and knees.
He started to rise to his feet, mouth set in a cadaver grin, blood seeping from the corner of his lips. He made no attempt to conceal himself, arching his back to thrust his cock at Wilde, like a weapon of war. ‘Think you can take me? All your books and learning and you’re soft like putty, Wilde. I’ll break every bone in your body with my bare hands, then I’ll give the bitch what she wants.’
Wilde towered over his opponent, but Braithwaite would fight like a terrier. ‘Get out, Braithwaite.’
Braithwaite launched himself, but Wilde sidestepped and tripped him with an outstretched leg, hammering his fists into his back as he stumbled, pummelling him to the wooden floor. Braithwaite gasped for breath and jumped up; he was kneeling on one leg, a predator weighing up prey.
‘Here.’ Lydia held out a heavy, long-handled electric torch. Wilde took it and swung it at Braithwaite’s scrawny head. He swerved right and the torch glanced his ear, slashing it, then crunching into his naked shoulder blade. Braithwaite yelped with pain, blood dripping from his torn ear.
‘Now I’m going to kill you, Wilde.’ He lunged upwards, his vice-like hands going for the throat, but Wilde was quicker. He kicked hard at Braithwaite’s balls. Very hard. The miner let out a scream, doubled up in agony and emitted a long anguished groan. Wilde kicked again, this time at the man’s chin. He rather fancied he could hear the crunch of teeth breaking. Then he grabbed the man by the hair and began dragging him from Lydia’s bedroom.
‘What are you going to do, Tom?’
‘Call the police. Let them deal with it.’
With shaking hands, Lydia picked up Braithwaite’s discarded trousers and went through the pockets. ‘I think he stole my grandmother’s bracelet.’ Her fingers touched metal and she pulled the precious object from the rancid depths. ‘Well, well.’
‘He’s going down for a long time.’
He had turned his back on Braithwaite for just a moment. Didn’t see the injured man rising to his feet, naked, and stumbling towards the stairs.
‘Tom!’
Wilde turned again, but Braithwaite was halfway down the staircase, doubled up and clutching his balls. The miner leapt the last few steps, landed awkwardly, but was at the front door before Wilde could get downstairs after him. Reaching the doorway, Wilde watched him run bleeding and naked down the street. He could have followed him, might have caught him, but he couldn’t leave Lydia.
Behind him, she dusted the filth off her gown. It would never be the same, even if she were to have it cleaned a hundred times. She would never smell her mother’s scent again, only the foul stink of Leslie Braithwaite.
‘Come on, I’ll call the police – I don’t think he’ll get far like that. Then something to drink.’
‘God, Tom, I never want to drink again.’
He laughed. ‘I was thinking more in the line of cocoa or tea.’
*
While they waited for the police they sat at the kitchen table. Wilde brewed up a pot of tea.
‘So you were right,’ she said, her breathing calmer. ‘He wasn’t worth the effort. I suppose I owe you an apology.’
‘Are you all right? Did he—’
‘No. No, you arrived on cue. Why did you come back, by the way?’
He hesitated momentarily, then smiled. ‘To check you were locked up. You weren’t.’
There was a knock at the door. Wilde ushered in a constable. They told him what had happened and gave him a thorough description of Braithwaite. The officer assured them they would find the man. He wouldn’t get far unclothed and without transport.
‘Perhaps you and Mr Wilde would come to the station and give statements in the morning?’ the constable said. When you’re both a bit more sober, was the unspoken message.
After he had left, Wilde offered to sleep on the sofa again. She shook her head. ‘I can’t keep asking that of you.’
‘I don’t mind. A sofa is a fine thing for anyone who has endured an English public school dormitory bed.’
She gave a wan smile. ‘It’s like some ghastly nightmare, Tom.’
He wanted to fold her in his arms, but he kept his distance. ‘Yes, I know.’
She shivered. ‘Thank God you came back.’
‘The sofa then.’
FRIDAY DECEMBER 4, 1936
CHAPTER 15
Unable to face her cleaner, Lydia fled before Doris arrived. Wilde stayed behind to explain.
Doris looked at the depredations of the dining room left over from the feast and tutted with dismay. She held up a plate and inspected it. ‘This is Royal Doulton and it’s chipped. Her mother loved this set.’
She was a small woman, smaller even than Lydia, grey-haired and in her fifties, strong and clever. She came to Lydia twice a week; her husband had lost a leg in the war and the farm where he had worked no longer had any use for him.
‘Things got a bit out of hand, Doris,’ Wilde said, drinking coffee at a corner of the table that he had hastily cleared by the simple expedient of pushing glasses and plates deeper into the middle. ‘Lydia asked me to give you her apologies.’
‘I’ve never seen so many cigarette ends or so much ash! As for the booze . . . well, it smells like a working men’s club in here.’
‘There was a bit of trouble with Braithwaite and I turfed him out. I slept on the sofa in case he came back.’
‘Well, good riddance to him. It’s a blessing that he’s gone, I don’t mind telling you, Professor Wilde. Perhaps I can get into his room now. What about you, sir? You look as if you could do with some Sanatogen, or at least another pot of coffee.’
‘No, thank you, I’ve got to get home.’
*
After shaving and bathing, Wilde picked up the telephone and asked the exchange for a London number he knew by heart.
‘American embassy.’
‘Jim Vanderberg, please.’
‘Putting you through.’
A few moments later a cultured east coast voice came on the line. ‘Hello, James Vanderberg speaking.’
‘Jim, it’s Tom Wilde.’
‘Hey, how you doing, pal?’
‘Well enough, Jim. And you?’
‘Oh, everything here’s hunky-dory. We’re all just watching with dazed amusement as the British ruling class tears itself apart. What is it that they hate most about Wallis Simpson – her divorces or the fact that she’s American and doesn’t have a title?’
‘All that and more. There’s also the unspoken fear that a forty-year-old twice-married woman who has had no children never will. They think she’s barren – and a king’s first duty is to secure the succession, which means children. The royal family ar
e breeding machines.’
‘Well, she certainly doesn’t fit that bill!’
‘You’ve got it, Jim. But I think there’s something else, as well. They’re worried that she’s altogether too fond of the Nazis. A severe case of Germanophilia.’
‘You know, Tom, there have been whispers that Mrs Simpson and Von Ribbentrop . . . well, you can guess what I mean.’
Wilde laughed. ‘Use the words, Jim.’
‘OK, the German ambassador is screwing the King’s broad. Direct enough for you?’
Wilde and Vanderberg had been friends since Chicago University, where they shared rooms and both studied history under Walsingham’s biographer Conyers Read. Their friendship continued at the end of their course, but their career paths diverged: Wilde into academia, Vanderberg into the diplomatic service.
‘It’s still only a rumour, and I teach my undergraduates to be wary of unsubstantiated gossip. If you recall, Jim, you told me rumours this time last year that Hitler was dying of throat cancer and would be replaced by Goering come summer. Well, summer’s come and gone and Herr Hitler’s still with us. Not only that but when I watch the newsreels, his throat seems to be in fine form.’
‘Maybe he’s been replaced by a dummy with Goebbels as his ventriloquist,’ Jim suggested. His tone darkened. ‘But what I do know is that Von Ribbentrop is even more rabid than Hitler, if such a thing were possible. It’s said that if the Führer comes on the line while he’s in the bath, he stands up and heils him, arm outstretched, in God’s own regalia. It’s not healthy to be close to a man like that. Mrs Simpson does herself no favours, even if she’s not actually being screwed by him.’
‘Whatever the truth, the British Cabinet don’t like it. They want their kings to marry fertile virgin princesses without politics or opinions.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, but you can’t explain that back home. The way it’s playing in Washington right now is that folks see the British looking down their noses at us. A good American gal born plain Bessie Warfield ain’t good enough to be Queen of England. Baldwin would do well to explain things better to FDR. Anyway, I guess you didn’t call to shoot the breeze, so how can I help?’
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