It Begins in Betrayal

by Whishaw, Iona;

  “It’s really not worth my having bothered you, I’m so sorry. It’s just that there’s an Inspector Sims from the civilian police who has been seconded by the War Office, and I urgently need to see him. That ass at the front desk says he’s not on any list, which I suppose makes sense.”

  “No trouble at all. I gather he’s working on the same thing you saw me about before?”

  Lane desperately wanted to trust this woman, but the fact that she knew and understood what she’d done during the war, and knew not to talk about it, made the woman more suspect, potentially more involved with intelligence or Special Branch. She could even be in with Dunn. Lane had only a couple of days to try to get one jump ahead of the director, to get Darling off by the normal legal channels, before Dunn closed all those down as well.

  “Oh, I just have a bit of information to give him,” She smiled warmly.

  “Right you are then. You sit here and I’ll totter off and find him for you. I know where they’ve put those poor chaps in a sort of cubicle in the basement. You won’t get a moment’s privacy, so I’ll find a room for you.”

  “You’re so kind,” Lane said, sitting and pulling off her gloves.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  June 1947

  AGATHA WAS OUTSIDE IN THE garden when she heard the banging on the door. She was kneeling on the edge of the bed with a small-pronged trowel, scraping weeds from around the carrots. She ignored the sound at first. Beastly priest, no doubt. Pious bastard. More banging. Agatha finally pushed herself up and walked stiffly around the side of the cabin to see who was on her front porch. She frowned. It was an old woman whom she’d never seen in her life before. She walked into the open.

  “Yes?” She’d had to clear her throat to scratch the word out.

  The woman turned and looked at her for a long time before she spoke. “I suppose it’s you, is it Aggy?”

  Agatha dropped the trowel. “Mary?” She looked around her, as if trying to understand how her sister could suddenly appear out of nowhere. Then she caught sight of the small suitcase Mary had set down beside her on the stair. “You’re not planning on staying are you? I haven’t got room.”

  “After forty years that’s the best you can do? Can you boil water in this godforsaken place? Let’s just start with tea, why don’t we?”

  Inside the cabin, Mary looked around, barely aware that she was breathing as lightly as possible, as if to block out the stale smell. The single bed, unmade, pushed into a corner by a wood stove, the sparse furnishings of a table with two chairs, and some sort of bedraggled armchair with a stool in front of it. A kerosene lamp stood on the table next to it. There was a basket of firewood by other side of the stove. At one end, where Agatha was now, still wearing her Wellington boots, there was a cupboard with some crockery in it, a shallow chipped enamel sink with a copper faucet, and on the other side, a cupboard with foodstuffs.

  Behind the chair, under one of the two small windows that let meagre light into the room, a bookshelf held more books than Mary would have expected. But it was not the books that drew her interest—Agatha had always been a bookworm—it was the photograph in the silver frame. She took off her light coat, dropped it onto the chair, and picked up the photo.

  “You haven’t forgotten us completely then,” she said. “How innocent we look!”

  Agatha had put a blackened kettle on the stove, and now opened the stove door and shoved in two more sticks of wood. She turned and looked at Mary. She hadn’t aged well, she thought.

  “How the blazes did you find me? What are you doing here?”

  “Thank you, I will sit down,” Mary said, pulling out one of the two chairs at the table. “I found out from Henderson’s lawyer. He had to go to a lot of work to find you. He wasn’t supposed to tell me, but I convinced him we all thought you were dead, you see.”

  Agatha refused to sit.

  She glowered at her sister. “Why should I be dead?”

  Mary didn’t answer this question but instead observed, “I live in only two rooms of the house now. Can’t be bothered with the rest.”

  “I suppose Father’s gone,” Agatha said. She checked the water and brought a cracked brown teapot to the table.

  Mary looked around the cabin again. “I can’t understand what you’ve done with all the money. You live like an indigent.” She picked up the cup that had been placed before her and inspected it carefully.

  Agatha poured water into the pot and put the kettle back onto the stove, and finally sat down opposite her sister. “I don’t have any money. You look old. Did you marry?”

  “No. Father died in ’09. He gave up his seat, of course, after what happened, and his heart gave out. I just stayed on in the house. Tilly stayed on after the others left, and then she married a rich mechanic and moved off. She deigns to come visit me once a week. Very kind, really. ‘For old time’s sake’ she tells me.”

  Agatha stirred the tea and then poured it. Mary watched as unimpeded tea leaves poured into the cup. No sugar and no milk she wagered. But there was sugar. Agatha produced it from out of the cupboard.

  “Priest visits every now and then and brings it. Seems to think I’m some sort of charity case. Sorry about milk. I go up to town once a month for supplies, but don’t bother with milk. Can’t keep it, you see.”

  “Why don’t you have money? He left you a small fortune,” Mary said.

  Agatha frowned. “Who left me a small fortune? Daddy?”

  “Henderson. Are you seriously telling me you don’t know? You would have had a letter.”

  “Why on earth would Henderson have left me money? In any case, if notice came in a letter, I’d never have seen it. I never read official-looking letters. Some busybody is trying to get me to leave here so they can put a road through. I shove ’em in the fire.”

  They drank in silence. Mary thought about her sister, so changed after so many years, and yet so intimately familiar to her, as if she were slipping into a relationship she’d only just slipped out of the day before. Finally it was Agatha who spoke.

  “What about Lucy? You haven’t said. How is she? Did she and that pillock Henderson have children?”

  Mary put down her cup and stared at her sister, speechless. Then she got up and looked around the cabin, a blue hot fire burning inside. She took her own chair and flung it aside. It clattered across the floor and banged up against the stove, where it came to rest. Agatha jumped up, suddenly afraid, and grabbed at the teapot, retreating toward the sink. Mary turned the table over and then stood over it, glaring.

  “You disloyal bitch! You killed her. You killed the only sweet and lovely thing in our family, and now you’re here sitting on money that should be hers!” Mary lunged at her sister and pulled at her arm so that Agatha was forced to look straight into her sister’s face.

  “Do you know how she died? Do you want to know? She threw herself off the cliff on the upper path. We couldn’t find her for two days.” She yanked hard on her sister’s arm, causing Agatha to cry out and try to free herself. Her fingers scratched fruitlessly at Mary’s hand.

  “The doctor thought she might have taken a day to die. A day, broken, alone! Can you imagine that? Can you?” She’d let go of Agatha’s arm and now had her by the hair. “Where’s the money? You shouldn’t have it. It belongs to that pathetic woman he married. She lived with him for forty years knowing he loved you.”

  Gasping at the sudden pain of her head being wrenched back, Agatha croaked, “I don’t have any money, I told you!”

  SIMS LOOKED AT the woman sitting in the room he’d been shown to and only just stopped himself from whistling aloud. Now she was a beauty! “Good morning, Miss. I’m Inspector Sims. I understand you want to see me?”

  Lane stood up and offered her hand. “Good morning, Inspector. My name is Lane Winslow. I am a friend of Inspector or, if you will, Flight Lieutenant Frederick Darling.”

  Are you indeed? thought Sims. “Right. Please sit down. What can I do you for?” He threw a
pad of paper onto the desk and waved her to the chair.

  Lane remained standing. “I know I am taking a risk in coming to you, but time is running out, and I have information that may be useful, though you seem to have locked up the case and are quite content to see an innocent man hang.” Damn, she thought. I’ve insulted him. Not a way to win friends. “I’m sorry,” she added. “That came out wrong. I . . .”

  To her surprise, Sims made something of a smile. “I can see why you two might be friends. Darling has charged me with the same thing.”

  “You’ve seen him?” Lane felt her heart pounding, and sat down.

  “Yes. Just yesterday. He’s fine, but claiming to all and sundry he’s innocent.” Sims pulled a chair away from the table and sat down himself. “It’s a long, tall claim, under the circumstances. And he’s had the brass to call me a dupe.”

  Lane pulled herself together, her relief at knowing for certain that Darling was alive and accessible to someone giving her wings. “Where is he?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say. He’s been moved to a place about three hours away. I don’t understand it, and it’s a nuisance. And I’m going to be honest with you, I’d have said the case was a lock, but he’s claiming he’s innocent, and now you’re here. I have a witness statement that I’m not sure about. It’s all adding up not quite right.”

  Lane looked at him. She saw in his face something that gave her hope. She saw doubt, a good honest man’s doubt. “He’s a lot like you, you know. He’d never let a column of facts add up wrong.”

  Sims emitted a big sigh. “Be that as it may, the circumstances are not in his favour at the moment. What have you come to say? If it’s a fervent plea for his innocence from the little woman, I’m afraid it will do us no good. We need something solid.”

  “Well then, how’s this for solid? I’ve been trying to understand why this whole thing started in the first place. I started by trying to trace the surviving airmen who flew with him, and things got interesting right away. The first one I talked to, a chap called Watson, refused to let me into his house, and told me he was to talk to no one on the subject of the crash in ’43. That wording struck me as odd. Who told him to ‘talk to no one’? Secondly . . .”

  “Sorry, Miss, could you hold on a minute? I’d like to write this down.” He took a fountain pen out of the inside pocket of his jacket. “Right. Watson. He was the navigator, I believe.”

  “Yes. So I went to Norfolk with a woman called Sandra Donaldson—she’s the wife of a fellow pilot of Darling’s—because I wanted to talk to a man called Salford, who operated the wireless. Only when we got there, he was dead. A train hit him the week before. The wife’s been told it was suicide.”

  Sims looked up. “You don’t believe that?”

  “It could have been. I don’t want to unnecessarily complicate things, but it seems singular that one man has been told to keep quiet and another has suddenly died. In any case, I learned from his wife that they were in Paris in March, and he saw someone he thought was a member of their crew, someone he hadn’t expected to see by the sound of it. He got preoccupied after that. She said she believed someone had been in their house, in his office, but that might be just a kind of paranoia on her part, I don’t know. She thought a letter might be missing. I felt anxious enough about her safety that I suggested that after the funeral she go and stay with his parents for a bit.”

  Sims leaned back, his expression puzzled. “Now that’s odd. Why should you feel she was in danger?”

  “That question is immaterial, Inspector. I just did. And I was right, I think, given what I subsequently found. When the plane was shot down in ’43, two people died. Evans, whom Darling is accused of shooting, and the map reader, a man called Jones, who was believed to have gone up with the plane. There is a very clever policeman who works with Darling back in Canada, and he accidentally found something very much to the purpose. It turns out that Salford wrote a letter to Darling shortly after the Paris incident, and the letter never got to Darling. It got stuck into a catalogue the neighbour received, and he’s only just found it.” Lane opened her purse and took out her transcript of the letter, pushing it over to Sims. “I had Constable Ames read it to me over the telephone. Here is the transcript. In it, Salford tells Darling he thinks he’s seen Jones in Paris. The man doesn’t recognize him, and claims only to speak French, but Salford cannot shake the idea that it is Jones. He wonders if Jones has lost his memory and decides to leave him to it. He wrote to Darling to let him know, because he knew Darling felt really dreadful about the loss of his two crew members.”

  Taking the paper Lane handed him, Sims read the letter, his lips in a grim line. “It’s interesting, I suppose. But I don’t actually see how it is to the purpose. It does not in any way touch on the death of Evans. It does not, in fact, move the case forward one bit.”

  “Look Inspector. It’s another number you have to add to your sum, along with Watson keeping shtum and Salford being dead. Where are you going to put them, how are you going to squeeze them in so they add up to Darling being guilty of something he didn’t do? I was going to see the other airman, Belton, but I became afraid that something would happen to him too. Now I want to see Anthony. I want to know why he thinks he saw what patently didn’t happen.”

  “You certainly have a lot of faith in Darling. How do you know it is not misplaced? If I were facing a hanging offence, I’d be protesting my innocence as well.”

  “It is not misplaced. I believe it’s possible some sort of crime has been committed, and this is an attempt by someone to cover it up.”

  Sims was silent. Corporal Edwards, he was certain, had been about to say, “Special Branch,” when he talked to him. “That’s . . . a leap, Miss Winslow. I’ve already reinterviewed Anthony, before you ask. His story is identical to his original story that led to Darling’s arrest. Identical.”

  Lane was alert. “You say ‘identical’ with some emphasis. Do you think it’s significant?”

  Sims was silent again.

  “Please, Inspector Sims.” Lane tried to keep the desperation out of her voice, but knew she was failing. “I’ve . . . we’ve very little time. If you think there is something not right, you must act on it! I will not stop, I can tell you that. I want Anthony’s address. I want to talk to him myself.” Lane stood up, glaring down on the inspector.

  “Sit down, Miss Winslow,” he said, resignation deciding him. “If you want to know, I was troubled by Anthony’s story being identical. It was identical to the last syllable, as if he’d memorized it. He was terribly careful when he spoke, as if wanting to make sure there was not a word out of place. I was convinced by the army’s evidence right from the beginning, based on that statement. The man was described as extremely distraught, saying he’d lost sleep because he could not shake the image of Darling shooting a man in cold blood, and he finally had to come forward to someone. But I said to myself, if a man were pouring out a story in a distraught state, it would be all over the map. Okay, so when he signed off on the story, they’d organized it into something coherent, I understand that. Why then is he giving me the same exact wording so long after the fact?”

  Lane sat down and put her purse down beside her. She had a little over a day before she had to give Dunn her answer. “What are we going to do?” She asked simply.

  Sims gazed at her. Lucky, lucky Darling, he was thinking.

  “WHAT’S UP?” AMES asked O’Brien, when his desk phone rang.

  “A citizen is complaining about a car. She thinks it’s been there a couple of weeks, and she wants it moved.”

  “Been where for a couple of weeks?”

  “Oh, sorry. She lives along Lakeside, and there’s a kind of path that goes past the back of her house along the lake, and it’s blocking her view.”

  Ames ran a mental scan of the city. “Below the station. All right, I’m on my way. For a moment I worried that man was back about his stolen car.” Ames thought again about what Darling had to put up
with. Maybe this was the man’s bloody missing car. Or maybe, and here he brightened up, it was Agatha’s car. They’d certainly had zero luck finding it anywhere, even with the help of the mounted police. One could always hope.

  It was nearing ten, and the train station was busy with people being dropped off for the ten o’clock to the coast. Ames walked past it and onto the quiet treed street that ran at an angle along near the edge of the lake. It made him think of a small village. The woman, a Mrs. Thomas, was happy to show him through her fenced yard to where the car stood, indeed blocking her view, and a good portion of the grassy path.

  Ames saw immediately that it was not the tiresome man’s late model Dodge, but what it was set his heart aflutter. He turned to the woman. “Do you remember seeing who might have been driving the car?”

  “I don’t spend my time mooning out the window, Constable. I have four children and a husband to attend to. All I know is it was not there one day, and there the next, and it’s been there over a week and no one’s come to move it.”

  “Not to worry, ma’am. I’ll get the towing company to move it right away.” Well, that was something, anyway, thought Ames, gazing at the dark green 1927 Ford. Right here in his own backyard. And not before time. He had a summons to the municipal office, and he was pretty certain he knew what it would be about. They’d want to know how he was getting on with the murder up the lake. He ordered the towing and then stopped in at the ticketing office at the station.

  “YES, I AM the guy who usually sells tickets here, and no, I don’t remember an old lady buying a ticket a week ago. I remember dozens of old ladies buying tickets. We don’t take their names and addresses, you know, they give us money and we hand ’em a ticket.” The man in the ticket booth now looked past Ames at a couple lined up behind him, as if he’d like to get on with his work.

  “This one would have had a British accent,” said Ames.