The Vanishing Woman

by Fiorella De Maria

  “I hope you’re right. If there’s room for me.”

  Gerard rolled his eyes theatrically. “Don’t go taking against Boniface for treating you like a stranger. He’s new; he didn’t know. Cheerio!”

  “Cheerio,” he echoed, but Gerard’s chirpy words of farewell only sounded sarcastic coming out of Gabriel’s mouth. He raised a hand to wave goodbye, but the car was already spluttering away into the distance. Gabriel could feel the wrench of something more than homesickness. He felt rather like the naughty boy of the family who has just paid a visit to his blissfully happy home and been dumped back on the doorstep of his boarding school.

  He was relieved when he stepped into the bookshop to find that there were no customers browsing the shelves and no sign of Pamela’s child. George Smithson was in the process of repositioning an old rug that appeared to have been rolled up or moved, perhaps for the purposes of cleaning the floor. “No Scottie today?” asked Gabriel, as lightly as he could manage.

  George got up from kneeling and dusted down his hands. “Her mother is taking her out to do some Christmas shopping, thank God,” he answered, then checked himself. “Please don’t misunderstand me. She’s a delightful girl, but she was determined today that there was a secret hiding place somewhere in the shop and wouldn’t rest until she found it.”

  “And did she?”

  George laughed and shook his head. “Sadly no, but that did not stop her tapping on every floorboard and every wooden panel, looking behind every book and rearranging all the furniture. All the children’s books she reads are full of stories of secret tunnels and hidden trapdoors and priest holes, so naturally she imagines that every old building has them. I’m afraid she was disappointed today.”

  “Unlike little Agnes.”

  The effect on George was immediate. The affable smile vanished, his body visibly tensed and Gabriel could have been forgiven for thinking that the man grew a few inches in the process. “I think you had better tell me what you mean by that, Father,” he said slowly, throwing him the remorseless look of an interrogator. Any doubts Gabriel had had about his latest mad theory evaporated as he met George’s glance and held it across the room.

  “You know perfectly well what I mean,” he answered. “I know what you did to Agnes. You are no more a bookseller than I am Pius the Twelfth. Now why don’t you close the shop and we can talk a little more privately.”

  George strode towards the door without further prompting, pulled the bolt across and flipped the open sign to closed. He turned back to glare at Gabriel. “If you know as much as you claim to, Father, I wonder that you are brave enough or foolish enough to meet me alone.”

  “Perhaps foolish,” conceded Gabriel, “or maybe just hopeful that you will do the right thing this time.”

  George regarded him a little longer before giving a nod in the direction of the backroom. “Very well, let’s get the kettle on.”

  Gabriel followed George behind the counter and through a battered interconnecting door that looked as though it hung permanently open. The backroom into which they emerged consisted of a small kitchen area marked out by a square of worn lino on the floor and an L-shaped work surface with a single gas hob on one side next to a sparklingly clean sink. Several newly washed cups stood to attention in a row on the draining board. The other half of the room was an Aladdin’s cave of heaving bookshelves, the books stacked in serried ranks by size and colour rather than by author or subject matter; the old rocking chair looked almost insolent in the shabby but spotless room, slouching at a lazy angle between the obedient books and a small, polished table with its lieutenant—a smaller, lower stool—tucked away neatly beside it.

  George filled the kettle, took a box of matches out of a drawer and lit the gas ring with a neat little pop before setting the water to boil. “Am I allowed to ask what you have worked out, Father?”

  “Well,” Gabriel began, perching on the stool. He had some vague sense that he should not make himself too comfortable in the rocking chair in case he had to make a run for it. “Would you be offended by the title ‘retired spy’?”

  “Yes,” said George, mildly. Gabriel noticed that he made no attempt at turning to face him. “Retired makes me sound old, and spying makes me sound—I’m not sure what. I don’t feel somehow that it does justice to the occupation. How did you know?”

  “Quite a few little details gave it away. Look at this room, for example.”

  “You’ve only just walked in here,” George pointed out, reaching into a cupboard to take down two white teacups and saucers.

  “It confirms everything, that’s all. The tidiness of it, the particular way everything is sorted. It speaks of a military man.”

  “Well, there are plenty of those about. Being a former military man hardly makes me anything else, does it? And I could simply be very tidy.”

  “Indeed. But then there’s your knowledge of languages. You speak fluent French—nothing unusual about that, I suppose—but you are fluent in several languages, aren’t you? I noticed the series of books in French and German on a shelf near the counter. If I may say so, there cannot be very much demand for foreign literature in this town, and virtually nobody buying German literature at all. Nor were the books merely part of a collection. There was no sign of dust and the pages were cut, suggesting they had all been read.”

  Gabriel glanced across the bookshelves, pulling out the collected works of Goethe, only for George to spin round, advance on him and snatch the book out of his hands, replacing it immediately. “I say, do you mind?” George demanded, then took a step back as though conceding a position. “I’m sorry, but I don’t altogether like this.”

  “Then there’s your name, of course,” Gabriel continued, ignoring the man’s discomfort. “George Smithson. It’s just a little too generic, only one step away from Smith, the ultimate pseudonym. It made me think that perhaps you had done your work, the war ended and you were sent packing with a modest sum of money and the instruction to live a quiet, anonymous life.” Gabriel paused, mentally ticking off the list. “My only question would be, why did you settle in the place where you had served? Surely it would have been better to move somewhere entirely new, where there was no chance of anyone finding you out?”

  George was busily opening the tea caddy, a task that seemed to take an inordinately long time. “I was not stationed here long once the threat of invasion had passed, and more importantly I was not raised here,” he said. “In this part of the world, that counts for quite a lot. If one settles in a town like this in adult life, one is always regarded as a bit of a foreigner. And there were many people, many men who came and went during the war. No one really took them very seriously, except young ladies, of course, and I was not much of a lothario, even in those days. In my line of war work, one did not allow anyone to come close, especially a woman.”

  “Keep mum, she’s not so dumb,” recited Gabriel.

  “Exactly. When I was stationed here, I was invisible. No one even knew that our base existed.” He placed a brown ceramic teapot, cups and saucers, a milk jug and a sugar bowl—containing virtually no sugar—on the tea tray and carried it over to the table. “Help yourself, Father,” he said, sitting down in the rocking chair but with his torso rigidly upright, defeating the point of the thing. “I hope you don’t have a sweet tooth; I’m afraid I lent Pamela most of my sugar ration. She’s hoarding for Christmas. But then, I will be attending Christmas dinner at her house, so I suppose I should call it an investment rather than a donation.”

  “Have you told Pamela about Agnes?” asked Gabriel, quietly, and he would have forgiven George for thumping him.

  “Why the devil should I?” George scrutinised Gabriel’s every move as he poured a little milk into his cup and reached for the teapot. “It was a long time ago, in a very different world. And I would appreciate it if you were not to go talking to her yourself, Father. It would ruin everything.”

  Gabriel took an inordinate interest in the sight of the
cup filling with brown tea before he could summon up the courage to answer. “Mr Smithson, if a woman were not dead and you did not have another child in your care, I should not hesitate to respect your privacy.”

  “I had nothing to do with Enid Jennings’ death,” said George emphatically, “and if you’re implying for a single second that I would ever consider harming Scottie—”

  “Agnes was as young and helpless as Scottie when she had the misfortune to fall foul of you.”

  “Father, there was a war on. And other people did far worse things to her afterwards.”

  Gabriel curled his hands around the teacup as though to warm them. “Perhaps it would be better if you told me exactly what happened rather than allow me to torture you in this way.”

  George stood up sharply and walked back to the sink, for the specific purpose, Gabriel suspected, of turning his back on his accuser. Another detail of his training perhaps. “You’ve heard of the Home Guard, I suspect?” asked George without turning around.

  “Of course. I should have joined myself if I were allowed to bear arms these days.”

  “Well, Father, as you will well remember, there was a significant period during the war when Britain faced the threat of invasion. The majority of fit and able young men had been called up, and many were serving abroad. But contrary to popular belief, Mr Churchill did not leave these hallowed isles to be defended by a bunch of grandads armed with carving knives tied to broomsticks. The Home Guard were—at their best—quite well organised and well armed, but there was another, smaller, more efficient army being trained out of sight at the same time. The aim was to repel an invading force if the Germans turned up on our doorstep, but also to serve as resistance fighters if Britain were to fall. I had served in both the army and intelligence before the war started, and I had expected that I would be sent behind enemy lines, thanks to my proficiency in certain languages. But that was not to be.”

  Gabriel had been reluctant to interrupt, but George’s narrative faltered a little at the crossroads between the acceptable and the unthinkable, and Gabriel put his teacup down. “There is nothing ignoble about defending one’s country, even covertly. An agent must go where he is sent, rather like a priest.” He paused, then decided to just come out with it. “Whose ridiculous idea was it to build the bunker there?”

  George turned around and gave Gabriel a half smile. “I had nothing to do with the planning and building of the bunker, and there are several of them hidden around the country. Now that the war is over, they are no longer needed; most have been abandoned and will simply fall into disrepair. My understanding is that the location of that bunker was quite carefully considered. There was some sort of chamber there from long ago, an abandoned mine or something, which removed the need for expensive, noisy excavations. Besides that, the lie of the land was perfect, the area isolated without being too far from human habitation either.”

  “It was overlooked by a cottage,” Gabriel protested. “Any Tom, Dick or Harry could have seen people coming and going.”

  “That’s not quite true actually. There were a few more trees during the war than there are now—some blight or other a couple of years ago killed off a lot of them—so the entrance to the bunker was very easy to conceal from view of the house. The cottage could have been requisitioned—heaven knows, plenty of homes were, without compunction—but if it had been, rumours would have spread. It would have been too obvious that there were plans for the area. The cottage acted as quite a convenient distraction in that sense. No one would ever have suspected that there was a military operation going on a few feet below ground, just yards away from a family home.”

  “Did your people spread the rumour about the area being haunted?”

  George chuckled. “Oh no, that’s a very old story. Places like this tend to be quite superstitious. Let’s just say we fostered it. We made absolutely sure that no one other than that family would ever come anywhere near that stretch of ground. It was widely known that the Jenningses were reclusive types who never entertained. The father was away and then died, leaving just one woman and two children. Even the postman didn’t call. It was too much of an inconvenience to get down there, or Mrs Jennings had had a falling out with him years before. She always collected her letters at the post office. Apart from the milkman, who was notoriously as blind as a bat and the very occasional visit from a friend, there was no one else to worry about. In any case, those bunkers were very carefully designed to be invisible even in plain sight. No one would have found it even if he were looking for it, and of course no one was.”

  “How did Agnes find it?”

  George sighed and made his way back to his chair. “It’s amazing how one tiny oversight can cause so much trouble. I think one of us dropped a cigarette end on our way down once. We didn’t even use that entrance very much. She must have been playing nearby and found it. It’s hard to imagine it to look at her, but as a child she was incredibly daring, and she’s a great deal sharper than she lets on. Agnes must have put two and two together immediately, realised someone had been in the area who should not have been and thought it would be a jolly funny idea to go and find him. I don’t know how she stumbled upon the entrance, but children do what adults virtually never do: they grub about in the grass; they get on their hands and knees and poke around. For an inquisitive child, finding a concealed entrance must have felt like falling into a storybook. Of course she couldn’t help herself. She came creeping in as bold as brass, without even going back for a torch—imagine having the nerve to do that as a child? Stepping into an almost completely dark tunnel just to see what was in there.”

  “And you were waiting for her.”

  “Father, I swear I never hurt her.”

  “She was bruised. There were bruises on her arms.”

  George flinched. “If there were, they were accidental. I may have squeezed her a bit too hard as I dragged her into the main chamber. I had to get her away from the entrance as quickly as possible in case she screamed and someone else heard. One lapse in security was easy enough to take care of; two would have compromised everything. I never hurt her, but I said I would if she told anyone.”

  “You must have been pretty persuasive. She wouldn’t tell her own mother, even when she tried to beat it out of her.”

  George shrugged, but all the energy had drained from him, and he talked as though he were half asleep. “I may as well come completely clean about it. She was already very badly frightened by the time I got her into the main chamber. Well, you can imagine, can’t you? Someone suddenly grabbing her like that, slamming a hand over her mouth, dragging her, kicking and struggling, away from daylight. When a person is frightened, a child even more so, they are very easy to manipulate. I—well, oh, this sounds so much worse than it really was!”

  “What did you do?”

  “I fired a gun in her direction.”

  Gabriel could not hide his disgust. “You shot at a child?”

  “It’s all right, Father,” answered George, as though the priest had misunderstood him. “I’m a dead shot. I would never have hit her accidentally, but she wasn’t to know that. The gun was fitted with a silencer, but even if it hadn’t been, I doubt anyone would have heard the shot anyway.”

  “She was missing for hours. There was more to it than that, wasn’t there?”

  George refused to look up. “I may have had to reinforce the message several times before we could risk letting her go. And in any case, we knew people would be looking for her and we couldn’t just release her into broad daylight like that, or she might have been seen. It was the only time that patch of ground might be searched. So we kept her in the bunker, repeating the message to her over and over again that she saw nothing, that she could not remember a thing. We couldn’t even risk giving her a cover story because lies can be unravelled quite quickly, and if there were any holes in her story, it would have become obvious that she was hiding something. Then it might not be long before someone began to join t
he dots.”

  “So you simply repeated to her that she had seen nothing and threatened her with death if she told anyone what she had seen, knowing that silence was safer for you than a plausible story?”

  George gave him a look that Gabriel did not care for very much. “You know, you’re quite good at this. You would have done pretty well in intelligence.”

  “I’d rather do my fighting out in the open, if it’s all the same to you,” remarked Gabriel.

  “Someone’s got to do it.”

  “I wish I had a shilling for every time someone has said that to me,” answered Gabriel, feeling an unusual stirring of temper. “I have already said that there is nothing wrong with serving one’s country, but there are laws even in wartime. How close to Agnes’ head did that bullet get?”

  George was on his feet, and Gabriel suspected he would have raised his voice if it were not for the risk of being overheard. “I would never have killed her, Father. Yes, I fired very close indeed, inches away from her head, and I will never forget the sound of her screaming. I had to force a rag into her mouth just to stop the noise, not because I thought anyone would hear but because I couldn’t bear the sound of it. But I needed her to believe that I really would shoot her dead if she told a soul what she had seen. And if you think me so very brutal, please consider, Father, that if there had been an invasion, I might have had to kill her.”

  Gabriel jumped off his stool, almost unsettling the cups and saucers as he did so. “Are you seriously telling me you would have considered shooting a child? Precisely how dirty was the dirty war?”

  The two men stood only inches apart like duellers awaiting the signal to draw. George glanced momentarily towards the door before responding. “Father, if there had been an occupation and word had got out that little Agnes Jennings was in possession of information that the Gestapo would be very, very interested to hear, her life would not have been worth living. And many other lives might well have been at risk.”