A Blind Goddess bbwwim-8

by James R Benn

  “Good thinking, Tree,” Payne said. “Were you a detective yourself in the States?”

  “Naw,” Tree said, grinning mischievously. “I was a criminal, according to the judge.”

  “Hardly a criminal mastermind,” I said. “But that’s a good idea. I’ll come by tomorrow, Constable, and see what you’ve found out. I’ve got to get Tree back to his unit.”

  “I will be back at the Newbury Building Society in the morning,” Payne said. “I want to find out if Neville might have made any notes after his last visits. I still think finding Razor Fraser in the midst of all this is damned odd.”

  “He’s kept his nose clean, that’s all I can say,” Cook offered. “The gossips say his wife craves the respectable country life. In a comfortable sort of way, of course.”

  “You think he’s reformed?” Payne asked.

  “No, his type seldom do. But quieter than in his youth, I’ll bet. Smarter maybe. I’d say the driving force behind his new image is the wife. She’d not like her reputation besmirched by the inconvenience of her husband going to prison. Certainly not over a bank loan.”

  “Still, there’s something fishy there,” Payne said, “even if it’s not about Neville’s murder.”

  “The missing girl?” Tree asked.

  “No,” Cook said. “Not Razor’s area of interest. Well, good night, gentlemen. I’ll go and see if I can reclaim my office.”

  Cook returned to the station, Payne walked to his car, and Tree and I got into the jeep. I buttoned up my coat against the cool evening air, and was about to start the engine when Cook burst out of the front door.

  “He’s unconscious,” Cook yelled. “Cosgrove. I’ll get Doc Brisbane.” As he raced across the street to the coroner’s office, we rushed inside, Payne not far behind. I didn’t know what we’d find, and I felt a surge of fear it would be a corpse.

  Cosgrove was sprawled on the floor in front of Cook’s desk, but he wasn’t dead. Yet. His face was flushed and sweaty, his mouth agape as he tried to draw in air with ragged, wheezy gasps. One arm clutched the edge of the desk, as if it were a life raft floating upon the deepest sea. Papers were scattered around him, spilled out of the files he’d been carrying.

  “The doctor’s on his way,” I said, kneeling next to Cosgrove. I took his hand from where he was grasping the desk and laid it on his chest. His skin was clammy. I loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, the collar soaked with sweat. Tree took off his jacket, folded it, and slid it under Cosgrove’s head. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” came the answer, a hiss of air, no more. Cosgrove’s eyes darted left and right, looking for something. I prayed for the doctor to hurry.

  “What do you need?” I asked.

  “Pa … papers,” he whispered. The papers from the file he had on the desk. Secrets.

  “I’ll take care of them, Major,” I said. “I promise. Relax and wait for the doctor, you’ll be okay.” He didn’t really look like he’d be okay anytime soon. Payne entered the room with a stretcher and set it down next to Cosgrove.

  “How’s he look?” Payne whispered.

  “Bad,” I answered, in a low voice. “I think it’s a heart attack.”

  “Boyle,” Cosgrove said, his voice surprisingly strong.

  “Yes,” I said, my face close to his.

  “Get … the papers. No sedative.”

  “Okay, the papers,” I said. “But do you know what’s wrong? Have you been ill?”

  He thumped his chest, weakly. His heart.

  “Out of the way, young man.” Doctor Brisbane, at last.

  “It’s his heart,” I said.

  “Well, you don’t need me then, do you?” Brisbane pulled open Cosgrove’s shirt and listened with his stethoscope. I decided against further diagnosis as I gathered up the files on the floor. Brisbane checked his eyes, spoke to the major, and got the same insistent rejoinder about sedatives. He and the others got Cosgrove onto the stretcher, and we each took a corner to carry him across the street. He was a big guy.

  “Boyle,” he rasped out. “Call the number, the one I gave you. No sedatives, remember.” His eyes went to the file tucked under my arm, and for the first time since we’d found him, he seemed to relax. “No sedative.”

  Doc Brisbane got Cosgrove settled in his examination room. I reminded the doc about Cosgrove’s insistence on no sedation, and vaguely hinted at state secrets.

  “If he rests quietly, there will be no need,” Doc Brisbane said. “It does look like a heart attack, you were right. Not much we can do beyond bed rest. He could stand to lose some weight, though. I’ll keep him here overnight and check his vital signs. You’ll see about getting him picked up?”

  I said I’d attend to it, then asked Inspector Payne to drop Tree off at his battalion, and to explain the situation to his CO, and to let me know if that wasn’t enough.

  “Thanks, Billy,” Tree said before he got into the car. “I owe you.”

  “What are friends for?” I asked. “Take it easy, I’ll let you know if we come up with anything.” Payne and I made plans to meet at the building society at nine o’clock the next morning, and I went back to the station to make the call.

  I sat at Constable Cook’s desk and dialed the number on the piece of paper. It rang twice, and a female voice answered, repeating the number. I said I was calling for Major Charles Cosgrove.

  “He is unavailable.”

  “No, I’m calling on his behalf. He’s ill, probably had a heart attack.” More questions about who I was, where I was calling from, and how I got this number. I promised to call with an update and the woman said someone would be in Hungerford by morning. Then she hung up, no goodbye, no “tell Charles to get better.” Nice bunch he worked for.

  I hadn’t mentioned the file, and they hadn’t asked. No one had told me not to look in it, but MOST SECRET stamped in red on the cover was a pretty strong warning. I’d had to look at the papers when I picked them up, I told myself, so another glance wouldn’t hurt, would it?

  They looked like personnel files. Sergeant Eugene Jackson, Inspector John Payne, and me. Photographs, service records, a local address for Payne. My photo was from my identification papers. Tree’s wasn’t so formal, a bit blurry, like it was taken with a telephoto lens. Was MI5 spying on Tree?

  Carla and George Miller were there too, along with their son, in his naval uniform, and their daughter, Eva. Lots of details about their lives, but no conclusions, no assessment of their loyalty. Sergeant Jerome Sullivan was pictured arm in arm with Eva Miller.

  There was Michael Flowers of the Newbury Building Society, along with Miss Gardner, the helpful secretary. Razor Fraser and Ernest Bone. Laurianne Ross and the missing Sophia Edwards. Jack Monk from the pub, and old Tim Pettigrew. Can’t tell the players without a scorecard.

  But what was the game?

  CHAPTER TWENTY — THREE

  It was still light when I arrived back at the Prince of Wales Inn. The sun was down, but the clouds were backlit from the sunset, casting a soft golden glow over the landscape. It shouldn’t be so pretty, I thought, with a young girl dead and another missing, the innocent behind bars, and a good man dying. I found Kaz, Diana, and Laurianne Ross from the school seated outside, the flagstones warm from the day’s sunlight. I’d half forgotten that Diana and Kaz had paid a visit to the Avington School for Girls today. Diana was in her brown wool FANY uniform, which I guessed she’d worn to interest the kids, since her brass buttons and leather belt were polished to a gleam.

  “Billy,” Kaz said as I sat down on the wooden bench. “You remember Miss Ross?”

  “Of course,” I said. “What brings you here?” She looked nervous, twirling a half-empty glass of what looked to be brandy, the same as Kaz and Diana were drinking. It had to be serious.

  “We brought her back with us, Billy,” Diana said, patting her on the arm. “It was a bit of a shock. And we thought it best for you to hear it directly from Laurianne.”

  “Okay,” I said, slo
wly, holding back my curiosity. “Tell me about it.”

  “When the baron and Lady Seaton came by today, I of course thought they were bringing news of Sophia,” Laurianne said. Kaz used his title whenever he made restaurant reservations or needed to gain entry. Evidently it worked. “But they wanted to question the girls, as you know. We thought it best if we treated it as a visit, with the baron speaking about his native Poland and Lady Seaton talking about her experiences with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. The girls were thrilled, especially about the FANY. So many of them want to sign up as soon as they are old enough.” She took a sip of the brandy, and I watched Diana nod encouragingly.

  A roar of engines announced a low-flying pair of fighters, P-47 Thunderbolts by the sound of their growling radial engines. They swooped over the village, probably headed back to Greenham Common air base. It was a routine event, but Laurianne jumped in her seat.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Ever since I saw that picture, my nerves have been on edge. I can’t help but feel guilty.”

  “Tell me about the picture,” I said.

  “Lady Seaton-” Laurianne began again, taking a deep breath. “Diana, please call me Diana. That lady business is frightful, really.”

  “Thank you, Diana. Well, Captain Boyle, Diana asked the girls a few simple questions about Sophia, what she was like and so on. Then one of the girls said she looked like that girl who had come by asking for food. Similar hair, that sort of thing. Both were slender girls.”

  “Wait,” I said, trying to understand. “What girl? Not one of yours?”

  “No. She rode up on a bicycle one day and asked for food. She said she was traveling to Southampton and would work for a meal. She looked like a runaway so I invited her in and went to my office to call the constable. She must have overheard me on the telephone, because when I came out, she was gone.”

  “You didn’t mention this before,” I said.

  “No, I hardly recalled it. I wasn’t certain she was a runaway, but thought I should place the call just in case. Then she was gone, and there were a hundred other tasks to attend to. I quite forgot about it until the girls reminded me today.”

  “I showed her the picture of Margaret Hibberd,” Kaz said, taking the photograph out of his pocket. “It was her.”

  “She’d be alive if I hadn’t called the police,” Laurianne said. Her chin quivered and she looked ready to fall apart.

  “Whatever happened to Margaret easily could have happened after a good meal,” I said. “We know she was making her way to London to search for her parents. She said Southampton to throw you off.”

  “I keep telling myself that,” Laurianne said. “But if she had stayed, she might not have met up with whoever killed her. Isn’t that right?” Her dark eyes were watery, tears about to cascade down her cheeks. I searched for the right thing to say, and came up empty. She had spoken the truth, and there was no dancing around it.

  “What fates impose, that men must needs abide; It boots not to resist both wind and tide,” Kaz said quietly.

  “Shakespeare,” Laurianne said. “Romeo and Juliet, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Kaz said. “A story of another doomed girl. Margaret was set upon a course to find her parents, only she could not know they were both dead. Fate led her to them, not you.”

  “Thank you, Baron,” she said, and finished her brandy.

  “Did she say anything at all, other than asking for a meal?”

  “She had some story about working on a farm, but being called back to Southampton by her father. She did say he found a place in the country for her because Southampton was so heavily bombed, which is true enough.”

  “Anything else? Anything unusual?”

  “No. She was friendly. She had confidence. It took some nerve to bicycle up and ask for a meal. I imagine she saw the girls and felt comfortable enough about it, but still, it would be hard for any girl her age to do that.”

  “She was trusting,” Diana said.

  “Yes. Open and trusting,” Laurianne said, clasping her hands around her empty glass. “Now she’s dead, isn’t she? So much for confidence.”

  Kaz offered to drive Laurianne back to the school, and Diana and I stayed outside in the cool air under the feeble lamplight. I hadn’t had a chance to tell her or Kaz about Cosgrove’s heart attack, much less pass on his warning.

  “Diana, I-” She held up her hand, watching as Kaz helped Laurianne into the jeep and started the engine.

  “Wait, Billy,” Diana said, “but there’s something else. Before I left, I had a chance to speak to several of the girls alone. They all saw Margaret ride in on her bicycle. They were coming in from the playground when she knocked on the front door. But none of them actually saw her leave.”

  “Where were they? Could they have seen her?”

  “They’d come in through a side door from the playground. The girls I spoke to were in a classroom at the front of the house with a clear view of the drive. They saw Margaret waiting in the foyer as they entered, and then never saw her again.”

  “Is there another road or path leading away from the house?” I asked, leaning back in my seat, trying to remember the layout of the place.

  “I don’t know,” Diana said. “Laurianne escorted us throughout the building, so it seemed impolite to wander about. I thought it best to tell you. Perhaps Margaret hid herself there.”

  “I’ll check it out,” I said. “Good work.”

  In my experience, runaway girls don’t end up tucked safely away in a girl’s school, but no reason not to let that remote possibility stay with us. Chances were the girls missed seeing her leave, or she went out a different way. Miss Ross didn’t seem the type to store bodies under the floorboards, but I knew I had to look into the possibility that Margaret had come to grief not far from the school. Or at the school, which was much more sinister. Laurianne Ross was in charge at the school, she had the run of the entire building. She could have brought Margaret wherever she wanted, and quietly disposed of the bicycle. But why? There was no motive I could think of. Still, it was odd that she had forgotten to mention Margaret Hibberd until one of her schoolgirls brought it up. With one child missing, why not report a runaway who showed up and then disappeared?

  “Sorry, Billy, what were you about to say?”

  “It’s Major Cosgrove. He’s had a heart attack,” I said.

  “How terrible,” Diana said with a gasp of surprise. “How did you hear? Will he recover?”

  “It happened this afternoon, at the Hungerford police station. He came to read me the riot act about the investigation.” I gave Diana an account of our meeting, and how we’d found Cosgrove on the floor. “He’s at the doctor’s now. Luckily the surgery is right across the street from the station. Doc said he’d keep him there overnight.”

  “How bad is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. He was able to speak, but he looked terrible. He had a message for you.”

  “What was it?” Diana asked, worry furrowing her brow. Her hands clasped the empty glass in front of her as if it might give off warmth.

  “It was off the record,” I said. “He seemed very concerned about you. He said they have their eye on you, and that you should stop talking about the extermination camps.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Roger Allen, for one. Cosgrove said that your father may have inadvertently gotten you involved with people who do not want the truth about the camps to come out.”

  “I know I ruffled his feathers,” Diana said. “He certainly didn’t like being confronted by a woman, much less a woman concerned about Jews. But what did poor Charles mean when he said they had their eye on me?”

  “I asked him if it was the same as him keeping an eye on me. ‘Not like that at all’ was his answer. He was truly worried for you Diana, and now I am too.” I didn’t think Allen and his ilk would cause Diana harm, not directly. What I wouldn’t put past them was a dangerous assignment, dangerous enough to silence her indirec
tly.

  “Billy, we have both been in danger before. Just yesterday someone tried to kill you. That is the price we pay for being who we are and the times we live in. I’m not going to be told to be quiet like a schoolgirl because it’s inconvenient for some politician. People are being murdered, Billy, by the thousands. We can’t pretend it isn’t happening.”

  “I know,” I said, leaning over and taking Diana’s hand. “But you also can’t pretend these aren’t powerful men, and you’ve offended them, challenged the way they look at the world. You went into the lion’s den, Diana. Don’t be surprised at how sharp their claws are.”

  “Well, perhaps this isn’t the best time to tell you, Billy, but Father has got an appointment with Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary. We are both dining with him tomorrow night in London.” She gave a rueful laugh.

  “They have their eyes on you, Diana. Be careful.”

  “Don’t worry, Billy. Father has known Eden since they served in Parliament together. It is more of a social occasion, really. I think Father is hoping this will put an end to my campaign.”

  “I don’t want you to end it, Diana. Just let the dust settle.”

  “After this dinner, I shall take the remainder of my leave and lounge about Seaton Manor, drinking tea and eating biscuits, all the time thinking of you.”

  “Okay. If I wrap all this up in time, I’ll come visit.”

  “That’s settled then,” Diana said, shivering as she tried to rub warmth into her arms. “Let’s go inside. This may be our last night together for a while.”

  I had no argument with that. As we ascended the stairs to our room, I thought about what I’d read in reports smuggled out of Poland, where the extermination camps were working overtime, incinerating bodies in ovens and belching greasy smoke out over the countryside. I tried to clear the gruesome images from my mind and enjoy the rest of the night with Diana. But some dust never settles.

  CHAPTER TWENTY — FOUR