Dry Bones

by Sally Spencer

‘You didn’t know for certain,’ I correct him. ‘But after all the trouble with the American in the pub, you must have considered it a strong possibility.’

  ‘Ah, you’ve found out about that,’ he says.

  ‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’ I wonder.

  ‘I didn’t know whether you would or not,’ he confesses. ‘But it’s true that the need to find out is the reason I hired you.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make sense?’ I ask.

  ‘You were quite right just now, when you said that I suspected one of the bodies might have been James,’ Charlie said, ‘and if it did turn out to be him, I was afraid the police might suspect me of murdering him.’

  ‘And why would they have done that?’

  Charlie shrugs. ‘Well, you know …’

  ‘Because he was your lover?’

  ‘Yes, and … and there might have been other things as well.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘They might have suspected that he was blackmailing me.’

  ‘And was there any reason they might have had that suspicion?’

  Another shrug. ‘They’d know that Makepeace would have needed to get away in a hurry after Comstock was murdered.’ He pauses. ‘You know who Comstock was, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I know who Comstock was,’ I confirm.

  ‘They might have thought that he’d threatened to reveal our relationship if I didn’t give him money. And that’s why I didn’t tell you all about it from the start – because I wanted to see if you could find it out by yourself.’

  ‘You mean that if a smart girl like me couldn’t find out, it was very unlikely that the police would?’

  ‘Exactly,’ he says, gratefully.

  ‘And it didn’t matter what happened to me, did it? It didn’t matter that you’d put me at risk, and that I could have gone to jail – could still go to jail – for concealing evidence!’

  ‘If I’d thought for a second that I was putting you at risk, I’d never have done it,’ he says. ‘But I didn’t think at all. I was so panicked that I never considered any of the implications.’

  I pick up my suitcase, and head straight towards the car rental booths.

  ‘There’s no need for that. I’ll drive you wherever it is that you want to go,’ Charlie says.

  ‘I don’t want you to do anything for me, ever again,’ I tell him – and I’m breaking my heart anew even as I say the words.

  We stop arguing when we reach the rental desk, and Charlie doesn’t say another word until the girl behind the desk has the distraction of ringing the garage to order up my vehicle.

  And even then, he speaks in little more than a whisper.

  ‘Are you still on the case?’ he asks.

  Yes, I’m still on the case. I’m on it because I still have some of the generous retainer left – and now, of course, I know why it was so generous – and I’m damned if I’m giving it back to Charlie.

  I’m on it because I’m that kind of person – because I don’t like to walk away and leave unanswered questions behind me.

  And I’m on it because, deep down inside myself, I still think I might find a way to help Charlie.

  No, that third reason’s bullshit, I think, dismissing it.

  It simply has to be bullshit!

  ‘Are you still on the case?’ Charlie repeats.

  ‘Yes, I’m still on the bloody case!’

  ‘Then I might have a lead for you.’

  ‘A lead!’ I say dismissively. ‘Oh, come on, Charlie – you might think that finding out when I was landing makes you some kind of super sleuth, but you’re just deluding yourself!’

  But then I think about it, and I decide that however preposterous his lead might be, it still has be a prizewinner in comparison to the leads I’ve got – which are approximately none – so I add, ‘All right, let’s hear it.’

  ‘At the time Comstock was killed, he was being investigated by an American military policeman called Donald Dickerson,’ Charlie says.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘James Makepeace.’

  ‘Oh, well, if it comes from such an impeccable source as your piece-of-shit ex-lover …’

  ‘Just listen,’ Charlie says. ‘When the war ended, Dickerson didn’t go back to the States. He stayed on in England – in Oxfordshire – because he’d married a local girl.’ He hands me a piece of paper. ‘This is his address and telephone number.’

  I put it in my bag. ‘Right, you’ve done what you came here to do, so there’s no absolutely point in you hanging around and getting in my way any longer, Charlie,’ I say.

  He looks at me through eyes which are deep pools of misery.

  ‘I know I’ve screwed up badly, but isn’t there anything I can do or say …?’ he begins.

  ‘Nothing comes to mind,’ I interrupt him.

  I watch him walk away. He is doing a fair impersonation of a broken man. Well, that’s what comes of unscrupulously using other people, and I’ve no sympathy for him.

  In fact, now that I’ve seen the real Charlie for myself, I’m amazed that I ever even liked him, let alone felt any real affection for him. And if I’m certain of one thing, it’s that I feel absolutely nothing for him now.

  I sign the appropriate forms, and the girl behind the desk gives me the set of car keys.

  ‘Normally, you’d have to take the shuttle bus to our lot,’ she says, ‘but we’re having a quiet day, and in order to save you time, I’ve had someone from the garage drive it right up to the terminal.’.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ I tell her – and I feel so grateful for that kindness that for one mad moment, I contemplate becoming a lesbian and doing all I can to win her love.

  She reels off a registration number.

  ‘Would you like me to write it down for you?’ she asks.

  She is so very, very kind, I think emotionally, and I wonder what I can possibly do in return.

  ‘Shall I write it down?’ she asks.

  I detect impatience in her voice. There’s no more than a tiny sliver of it, but it is enough for her to cease to be – in my eyes – a paragon of all that is virtuous and good, and to shrink her down to the pleasant, helpful, but totally unexceptional woman that she obviously is.

  ‘No, there’s no need to write it down – I’ll remember it,’ I say, and reel off the numbers myself, before she has a chance to ask me if I’m sure.

  The car she’s promised me – a nice new electric blue Ford Escort – is waiting there for me just where she said it would be.

  I climb in, and insert the ignition key. I’m intending to drive away, but instead I just sit there and sob my heart out.

  I don’t know why – I just do.

  NINETEEN

  The man who answers the front door of the chocolate-box-pretty thatched cottage, just outside Abingdon, is in his late fifties. He is balding, and slightly overweight, though he seems quite comfortable with both these signs of aging. But looking him up and down (surreptitiously, of course, which is something we private eyes learn to do) I feel as if I can detect an entirely different man beneath the surface; this one young and eager and earnest and slim, with a crew-cut that declares proudly that he is an American – and couldn’t possibly be anything else.

  ‘Captain Dickerson?’ I ask, out of politeness.

  He grins. ‘I was Captain Dickerson once upon a time, little lady, but that was before you were born,’ he says. ‘Now, I’m just plain old Donald T Dickerson, taxi driver of this parish.’

  His accent is a melange of southern-fried American and mid-Oxfordshire educated-yokel English, and he has just been very disingenuous – or possibly merely modest – about his occupation, because I’ve been checking up on him, and he owns a small fleet of taxis and minibuses.

  ‘Come inside,’ he says. ‘My wife isn’t here at the moment, but I’m one of those liberated guys who can not only find his own way to the kettle, but can actually switch it on, so with a little bit of luck, I just might be able to produce a
passable cup of tea.’

  I like the man, and – much more to the point – I’m on the verge of trusting him.

  He leads me into a large kitchen with an oak-beamed ceiling. There is an inglenook fireplace taking up most of one wall, and in the centre of the fireplace sits a wood-burning stove, surrounded by drying logs.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Dickerson says, indicating a large scrubbed table that I guess is used both for preparing the food and for dining at.

  ‘This place is pretty English, hey?’ he asks me.

  ‘So English, Mr Dickerson, that most English people probably wouldn’t recognise it,’ I tell him.

  ‘Call me Don,’ he says. He grins again – it seems to come naturally to him. ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right about it being ultra-English. That’s the trouble with us converts – we go way over the top.’

  He crosses over the kitchen to the sink, and fills the kettle.

  ‘If you’d told me before the war that I’d end up living in a country so small that you could slip it into one corner of Texas without it even being noticed, I’d have said you were crazy,’ he tells me.

  When the kettle boils, he warms the pot and measures out the tea from a swirling-patterned tea caddy.

  No tea bags for this man – he is, as he has already acknowledged himself, as traditionally English as only a foreigner could be.

  ‘Yep, I’d have said you were crazy, if you’d said that,’ he repeats. ‘And then I met my Susan at a dance at the base, our eyes met, we whirled around the floor to the music of Glenn Miller, and my fate was sealed.’

  ‘That’s a nice story,’ I say.

  ‘And what’s even nicer is that it happens to be true,’ he counters.

  He brings the teapot, cups and saucers, milk jug, sugar bowl, sieve, spoons – and, of course, a packet of biscuits (ginger nuts) – over to the table.

  A look of mild horror comes to his face, because – I guess – he’s made the connection between my hair and the biscuits.

  ‘I didn’t mean to …’ he says. ‘It’s not as if … it’s just that ginger nuts are my favourites.’

  ‘They’re my favourites, too,’ I say, which is diplomatic, if not entirely accurate.

  He nods gratefully, then performs the tea ceremony (three spoons of sugar for him, none for me). He takes a sip of his own tea, and sighs in approval.

  ‘I think I’m finally getting the hang of this,’ he says.

  ‘I think you’re far too modest,’ I tell him.

  We both laugh, then his face grows more serious.

  ‘When you rang me, you told me you wanted to talk about Sergeant Comstock,’ he says.

  ‘That’s right,’ I agree.

  ‘Comstock was one of those guys who would have sold his own grandma if the price had been right,’ Dickerson says. ‘Hell, he’d have sold her to five or six different guys at the same time, if he’d thought he could get away with it. He was what you’d call a wheeler-dealer from way back, and he saw his time in England as an opportunity to make a real killing on the black market.’

  This isn’t really pertinent to my investigation, but the man has given up his own time to see me – not to mention providing me with a very nice cup of tea and some ginger nut biscuits – so the least I can do is show a little interest. And perhaps there’s a reason he’s dealing with this side of Comstock’s life first – perhaps he’s building up the nerve which he feels will be necessary if he’s to talk about homosexuality in front of a ‘little lady’.

  ‘Yes, he saw it just like that – a way to make a real killing,’ Dickerson says, then falls silent.

  And it occurs to me that he’s expecting me to take a more active part in this conversation.

  ‘So what was it he decided to sell?’ I ask. ‘Was it petrol?’

  For a moment, it seems as if he’s no idea what I’m talking about, and then he grins again.

  ‘I’ve lived in this country for over thirty years, yet when I fill up my car, I still think of it as gas – not petrol – I’m putting into the tank,’ he says. He shakes his head in answer to my question. ‘No, it wasn’t that. The problem with gas – with petrol – is that while it might have been easy enough to siphon off from the big old tank on the base, it was too easily traceable on the outside.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

  ‘See, petrol was subject to the strictest sort of rationing. Everybody got the same number of eggs (damn few!) no matter who they were, but you only got petrol if you could prove that you needed it for essential war work. So if you were stopped at a roadblock, and had no documentation which stated you’d been allowed extra fuel by this ministry or that ministry, then the authorities knew straight away that you’d obtained it illegally. And there was only one place you could have got it from – the military base. So it wasn’t a giant step from that to working out which particular soldier had sold it to you, which meant that those soldiers who might have thought about it – Sergeant Comstock amongst them – soon decided it just wasn’t worth the risk.’

  ‘So what was safer for them to deal in, Don?’ I ask. ‘Was it perhaps cigarettes?’

  ‘Yeah, there was certainly a market in cigarettes – but it wasn’t a big one,’ Dickerson says. ‘Nearly everything was rationed, you know – even bread went on the ration card at one point. But there were two things – and two things only – that the British government made sure were never rationed. The first was beer, and the second was cigarettes. And strange as it may seem to you, some Brits preferred their own tiny cigarettes (like Woodbines) to jumbo smokes like Pall Mall and Camel.’

  ‘There’s no accounting for taste,’ I say, and all the time – because he’s challenged me to find an answer, and I hate to give up – I’m thinking about what the Yanks might have been bloody selling.

  And then it comes to me.

  ‘What he was selling was nylon stockings, wasn’t it?’ I say.

  ‘Do you know how nylon got its name?’ he asks.

  I groan inwardly, because this is going to be one of those fascinating facts that I so rarely find fascinating – but, like I said, he provided the tea and biscuits, and it seems only polite to go along with him.

  ‘Isn’t it because it was developed in laboratories in New York and London?’ I ask, assuming that’s the answer he wants me to give.

  He beams with pleasure that I’ve not just got it wrong, but got it wrong in precisely the right way.

  ‘That’s a mistake that a lot of people make,’ he says. ‘It’s certainly a very neat and tidy explanation, but, sad to say, it’s a load of horsefeathers. It was, in fact, developed exclusively at DuPont Chemicals lab in Delaware – nothing at all to do with New York or London. They were originally going to call this marvellous new product “no run”, but the problem with that was that it did run. So they played around with a few letters until they came up with a word which sounded about right – and that word was nylon.’

  ‘So it was nylon stockings that Comstock was selling?’ I say, as a gentle reminder that I haven’t come here to be given a short history of the American petro-chemical industry.

  ‘That’s right,’ he agrees. ‘Comstock had cut a deal with one of the pilots who was flying in what were regarded as essential supplies for our boys – peanut butter, jello and the like. He must have brought in thousands of pairs before we had a clue what was going on. It was with the arrival of the stockings, of course, that James Makepeace comes into the picture.’

  ‘So there was a business relationship between them before it became a sexual relationship, was there?’ I ask, trying to make it easier for him to approach the almost-taboo subject by making him aware that I already know all about it.

  ‘A sexual relationship?’ Don Dickerson repeats. And we’re both surprised – him by my statement, me by his reaction to it. ‘Whatever are you talking about, my dear?’

  ‘They were both homosexual, weren’t they?’ I ask.

  ‘Makepeace might have been a faggot for all I know, but Com
stock was about as hetero as they come. He didn’t have much time for the niceties of the male-female relationship, mind you – flowers and chocolates just weren’t his things – he was more of a “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” kind of guy – except that, a lot of the time, he missed out the “thank you” part.’

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ I ask him.

  ‘I’m absolutely certain. There are a couple of ex-whores living not more than a couple of miles from here, who regarded servicing Sergeant Comstock as almost a full-time job. Incidentally, one of them is now a justice of the peace, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.’

  So why had Mr Gough claimed that Comstock was homosexual when he clearly wasn’t? And why hadn’t he mentioned that Makepeace had been assisting Comstock in his black market activities?

  It seems to me that there’s only one possible explanation – he was laying down smokescreens to confuse me.

  And why would he do that?

  Again, there is only one possible explanation – he must have done it because he was trying to protect someone!

  ‘You see, what Comstock needed was someone on the outside for distribution purposes, and Makepeace just fitted the bill perfectly,’ Dickerson says. ‘He was exactly the right man for the job, as he proved with the distribution plan that he came up with, which was so simple that it was almost genius.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘He got on well with women. I know that for a fact, because, a couple of times, I watched him in action. They found him charming. I believe a lot of women find faggots charming.’

  I think about Charlie Swift – my own dear Charlie – though not in the present, where there are problems, but in the past, when there weren’t.

  ‘Yes,’ I agree, ‘they can be quite charming.’

  ‘So Makepeace made friends with a couple of dozen working girls – and by that, I don’t mean the kind of working girls who Comstock got his rocks off with, just the other side of the wire. What I’m talking about here are women who made things or grew things.’

  ‘I understand,’ I say.

  ‘So he chats all these women up, and then he says to them, hey, if you sell these stockings in your factory or on that big farm you’re working on, you can keep ten percent of everything you make. So, at bargain rates, he’s got a dedicated sales force – and, for a while, it works like a charm.’