Not Safe After Dark: And Other Stories

by Peter Robinson

  “Nothing. I swear it.”

  “Did he answer?”

  “No. He just looked my way and shook his head. I could tell then that he didn’t want to play. He seemed sad.”

  “He’d just heard his dad’s been killed.”

  Colin’s already watery eyes brimmed with tears. “Poor lad.”

  I nodded. For all I knew, Colin might have been thinking about his dad, too. Not many knew it, but Mr. Gormond Senior had been killed in the same bloody war that left me with my bad lungs and scarred face. “What happened next, Colin?”

  Colin shook his head and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Nothing,” he said. “It was such a lovely day I just went on walking. I went to the park and watched the soldiers digging trenches, then I went for my cigarettes and came home to listen to the wireless.”

  “And after that?”

  “I stayed in.”

  “All evening?”

  “That’s right. Sometimes I go down to the White Rose, but . . .”

  “But what, Colin?”

  “Well, Mr. Smedley, you know, the air-raid precautions man?”

  I nodded. “I know him.”

  “He said my blackout cloth wasn’t good enough and he’d fine me if I didn’t get some proper stuff by yesterday.”

  “I understand, Colin.” Good-quality, thick, impenetrable blackout cloth had become both scarce and expensive, which was no doubt why Colin had been cheated in the first place.

  “Anyway, what with that and the cigarettes . . .”

  I reached into my pocket and slipped out a few bob for him. Colin looked away, ashamed, but I put it on the table and he didn’t tell me to take it back. I knew how it must hurt his pride to accept charity, but I had no idea how much money he made, or how he made it. I’d never seen him beg, but I had a feeling he survived on odd jobs and lived very much from hand to mouth.

  I stood up. “All right, Colin,” I said. “Thanks very much.” I paused at the door, uncertain how to say what had just entered my mind. Finally I blundered ahead. “It might be better if you kept a low profile till they find him, Colin. You know what some of the people around here are like.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Bascombe?”

  “Just be careful, Colin, that’s all I mean. Just be careful.”

  He nodded gormlessly and I left.

  * * *

  As I shut Colin’s front door, I noticed Jack Blackwell standing on his doorstep, arms folded, a small crowd of locals around him, their shadows intersecting on the cobbled street. They kept glancing toward Colin’s house, and when they saw me come out they all shuffled off except Jack himself, who gave me a grim stare before going inside and slamming his door. I felt a shiver go up my spine, as if a goose had stepped on my grave, as my dear mother used to say, bless her soul, and when I got home I couldn’t concentrate on my book one little bit.

  * * *

  By the following morning, when Johnny had been missing over thirty-six hours, the mood in the street had started to turn ugly. In my experience, when you get right down to it, there’s no sorrier spectacle, nothing much worse or more dangerous, than the human mob mentality. After all, armies are nothing more than mobs, really, even when they are organized to a greater or lesser degree. I’d been at Ypres, as you know, and there wasn’t a hell of a lot you could tell me about military organization. So when I heard the muttered words on doorsteps, saw the little knots of people here and there, Jack Blackwell flitting from door to door like a political canvasser, I had to do something, and I could hardly count on any help from DS Longbottom.

  One thing I had learned both as a soldier and as a schoolteacher was that, if you had a chance, your best bet was to take out the ringleader. That meant Jack Blackwell. Jack was the nasty type, and he and I had had more than one run-in over his son Nick’s bullying and poor performance in class. In my opinion, young Nick was the sort of walking dead loss who should probably have been drowned at birth, a waste of skin, sinew, tissue, and bone, and it wasn’t hard to see where he got it from. Nick’s older brother, Dave, was already doing a long stretch in the Scrubs for beating a night watchman senseless during a robbery, and even the army couldn’t find an excuse to spring him and enlist his service in killing Germans. Mrs. Blackwell had been seen more than once walking with difficulty, with bruises on her cheek. The sooner Jack Blackwell got his call-up papers, the better things would be all around.

  I intercepted Jack between the Deakinses’ and the Kellys’ houses, and it was clear from his gruff, “What do you want?” that he didn’t want to talk to me.

  But I was adamant.

  “Morning, Jack,” I greeted him. “Lovely day for a walk, isn’t it?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Just being polite. What are you up to, Jack? What’s going on?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Up to your old tricks? Spreading poison?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He made to walk away, but I grabbed his arm. He glared at me but didn’t do anything. Just as well. At my age, and with my lungs, I’d hardly last ten seconds in a fight. “Jack,” I said, “don’t you think you’d all be best off using your time to look for the poor lad?”

  “Look for him! That’s a laugh. You know as well as I do where that young lad is.”

  “Where? Where is he, Jack?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t. Tell me.”

  “He’s dead and buried, that’s what.”

  “Where, Jack?”

  “I don’t know the exact spot. If he’s not in the canal, then he’s buried somewhere not far away.”

  “Maybe he is. But you don’t know that. Not for certain. And even if you believe that, you don’t know who put him there.”

  Jack wrenched his arm out of my weakening grip and sneered. “I’ve got a damn sight better idea than you have, Frank Bascombe. With all your book learning!” Then he turned and marched off.

  Somehow I got the feeling that I had just made things worse.

  * * *

  After my brief fracas with Jack Blackwell, I was at a loose end. I knew the police would still be looking for Johnny, asking questions, searching areas of waste ground, so there wasn’t much I could do to help them. Feeling impotent, I went down to the canal, near Woodruff’s scrapyard. Old Ezekiel Woodruff himself was poking around in the ruins of his business, so I decided to talk to him. I kept my distance, though, for even on a hot day such as this Woodruff was wearing his greatcoat and black wool gloves with the fingers cut off. He wasn’t known for his personal hygiene, so I made sure I didn’t stand downwind of him. Not that there was much of a wind, but then it didn’t take much.

  “Morning, Ezekiel,” I said. “I understand young Johnny Critchley was down around here the day before yesterday.”

  “So they say,” muttered Ezekiel.

  “See him, did you?”

  “I weren’t here.”

  “So you didn’t see him?”

  “Police have already been asking questions.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  He pointed to the other side of the canal, the back of the housing estate. “I were over there,” he said. “Sometimes people chuck out summat of value, even these days.”

  “But you did see Johnny?”

  He paused, then said, “Aye.”

  “On this side of the canal?”

  Woodruff nodded.

  “What time was this?”

  “I don’t have a watch, but it weren’t long after that daft bloke had gone by.”

  “Do you mean Colin Gormond?”

  “Aye, that’s the one.”

  So Johnny was still alone by the canal after Colin had passed by. DS Longbottom had probably known this, but he had beaten Colin anyway. One day I’d find a way to get even with him. The breeze shifted a little and I got a whiff of stale sweat and worse. “What was Johnny doing?”

  “Doing? Nowt special. He were just walki
ng.”

  “Walking? Where?”

  Woodruff pointed. “That way. Toward the city center.”

  “Alone?”

  “Aye.”

  “And nobody approached him?”

  “Nope. Not while I were watching.”

  I didn’t think there was anything further to be got from Ezekiel Woodruff, so I bade him good morning. I can’t say the suspicion didn’t enter my head that he might have had something to do with Johnny’s disappearance, though I’d have been hard pushed to say exactly why or what. Odd though old Woodruff might be, there had never been any rumor or suspicion of his being overly interested in young boys, and I didn’t want to jump to conclusions the way Jack Blackwell had. Still, I filed away my suspicions for later.

  A fighter droned overhead. I watched it dip and spin through the blue air and wished I could be up there. I’d always regretted not being a pilot in the war. A barge full of soldiers drifted by, and I moved aside on the towpath to let the horse that was pulling it pass by. For my troubles I got a full blast of sweaty horseflesh and a pile of steaming manure at my feet. That had even Ezekiel Woodruff beat.

  Aimlessly I followed the direction Ezekiel had told me Johnny had walked in—toward the city center. As I walked, Jack Blackwell’s scornful words about my inability to find Johnny echoed in my mind. Book learning. That was exactly the kind of cheap insult you would expect from a moron like Jack Blackwell, but it hurt nonetheless. No sense telling him I’d been buried in the mud under the bodies of my comrades for two days. No sense telling him about the young German soldier I’d surprised and bayoneted to death, twisting the blade until it snapped and broke off inside him. Jack Blackwell was too young to have seen action in the last war, but if there was any justice in the world, he’d damn well see it in this one.

  The canal ran by the back of the train station, where I crossed the narrow bridge and walked through the crowds of evacuees out front to City Square. Mary Critchley’s anguish reverberated in my mind, too: “Mr. Bashcombe! Mr. Bashcombe!” I heard her call.

  Then, all of a sudden, as I looked at the black facade of the post office and the statue of the Black Prince in the center of City Square, it hit me. I thought I knew what had happened to Johnny Critchley, but first I had to go back to the street and ask just one important question.

  * * *

  It was late morning. The station smelled of damp soot and warm oil. Crowds of children thronged around trying to find out where they were supposed to go. They wore name tags and carried little cardboard boxes. Adults with clipboards, for the most part temporarily unemployed schoolteachers and local volunteers, directed them to the right queue, and their names were ticked off as they boarded the carriages.

  Despite being neither an evacuated child nor a supervisor, I managed to buy a ticket and ended up sharing a compartment with a rather severe-looking woman in a brown uniform I didn’t recognize, and a male civilian with a brush mustache and a lot of Brylcreem on his hair. They seemed to be in charge of several young children, also in the compartment, who couldn’t sit still. I could hardly blame them. They were going to the alien countryside, to live with strangers, far away from their parents, for only God knew how long, and the idea scared them half to death.

  The buttoned cushions were warm and the air in the carriage still and close, despite the open window. When we finally set off, the motion stirred up a breeze, which helped a little. On the wall opposite me was a poster of the Scarborough seafront, and I spent most of the journey remembering the carefree childhood holidays I had enjoyed there with my parents in the early years of the century: another world, another time. The rest of the trip I glanced out of the window, beyond the scum-scabbed canal, and saw the urban industrial landscape drift by: back gardens, where some people had put in Anderson shelters half covered with earth to grow vegetables on; the dark mass of the town hall clock tower behind the city center buildings; a factory yard, where several men were loading heavy crates onto a lorry, flushed and sweating in the heat.

  Then we were in the countryside, where the smells of grass, hay, and manure displaced the reek of the city. I saw small, squat farms, drystone walls, sheep and cattle grazing. Soon train tracks and canal diverged. We went through a long, noisy tunnel, and the children whimpered. Later, I was surprised to see so many army convoys winding along the narrow roads, and the one big aerodrome we passed seemed buzzing with activity.

  All in all, the journey took a little over two hours. Only about ten or eleven children were shepherded off at the small country station, and I followed as they were met and taken to the village hall, where the men and women who were to care for them waited. It was more civilized than some of the evacuation systems I’d heard about, which sounded more like the slave markets of old, where farmers waited on the platforms to pick out the strong lads, and local dignitaries whisked away the nicely dressed boys and girls.

  I went up to the volunteer in charge, an attractive young country woman in a simple blue frock with a white lace collar and a belt around her slim waist, and asked her if she had any record of an evacuee called John, or Johnny, Critchley. She checked her records then shook her head, as I knew she would. If I were right, Johnny wouldn’t be here under his own name. I explained my problem to the woman, who told me her name was Phyllis Rigby. She had a yellow ribbon in her long wavy hair and smelled of fresh apples. “I don’t see how anything like that could have happened,” Phyllis said. “We’ve been very meticulous. But there again, things have been a little chaotic.” She frowned in thought for a moment, then she delegated her present duties to another volunteer.

  “Come on,” she said, “I’ll help you go from house to house. There weren’t that many evacuees, you know. Far fewer than we expected.”

  I nodded. I’d heard how a lot of parents weren’t bothering to evacuate their children. “They can’t see anything happening yet,” I said. “Just you wait. After the first air raid you’ll have so many you won’t have room for them all.”

  Phyllis smiled. “The poor things. It must be such an upheaval for them.”

  “Indeed.”

  I took deep, welcome breaths of country air as Phyllis and I set out from the village hall to visit the families listed on her clipboard. There were perhaps a couple of hundred houses, and less than fifty percent had received evacuees. Even so, we worked up quite a sweat calling at them all. Or I did, rather, as sweating didn’t seem to be in Phyllis’s nature. We chatted as we went, me telling her about my schoolteaching, and she telling me about her husband, Thomas, training as a fighter pilot in the RAF. After an hour or so with no luck, we stopped in at her cottage for a refreshing cup of tea, then we were off again.

  At last, late in the afternoon, we struck gold.

  * * *

  Mr. and Mrs. Douglas, who were billeting Johnny Critchley, seemed a very pleasant couple, and they were sad to hear that they could not keep him with them for a while longer. I explained everything to them and assured them that they would get someone else as soon as we had the whole business sorted out.

  “He’s not here,” Johnny said as we walked with Phyllis to the station. “I’ve looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find him.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Johnny. You know your mum’s got a speech impediment. That was why I had to go back and ask her exactly what she said to you before I came here. She said she told you your father was missing in action, which, the way it came out, sounded like missing in Acksham, didn’t it? That’s why you came here, wasn’t it, to look for your father?”

  Young Johnny nodded, tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t understand why she didn’t come and look for him. She must be really vexed with me.”

  I patted his shoulder. “I don’t think so. More like she’ll be glad to see you. How did you manage to sneak in with the real evacuees, by the way?”

  Johnny wiped his eyes with his grubby sleeve. “At the station. There were so many people standing around, at first I didn’t know .
. . Then I saw a boy I knew from playing cricket on the rec.”

  “Oliver Bradley,” I said. The boy whose name Johnny was registered under.

  “Yes. He goes to Broad Hill.”

  I nodded. Though I had never heard of Oliver Bradley, I knew the school; it was just across the valley from us. “Go on.”

  “I asked him where he was going, and he said he was being sent to Acksham. It was perfect.”

  “But how did you get him to change places with you?”

  “He didn’t want to. Not at first.”

  “How did you persuade him?”

  Johnny looked down at the road and scraped at some gravel with the scuffed tip of his shoe. “It cost me a complete set of ‘Great Cricketers’ cigarette cards. Ones my dad gave me before he went away.”

  I smiled. It would have to be something like that.

  “And I made him promise not to tell anyone, just to go home and say there wasn’t room for him, and he’d have to try again in a few days. I just needed enough time to find Dad . . . you know.”

  “I know.”

  We arrived at the station, where Johnny sat on the bench and Phyllis and I chatted in the late-afternoon sunlight, our shadows lengthening across the tracks. In addition to the birds singing in the trees and hedgerows, I could hear grasshoppers chirruping, a sound you rarely heard in the city. I had often thought how much I would like to live in the country and, perhaps when I retired from teaching a few years in the future, I would be able to do so.

  We didn’t have long to wait for our train. I thanked Phyllis for all her help, told her I wished her husband well, and she waved to us as the old banger chugged out of the station.

  * * *

  It was past blackout when I finally walked into our street holding Johnny’s hand. He was tired after his adventure and had spent most of the train journey with his head on my shoulder. Once or twice, from the depths of a dream, he had called his father’s name.

  I could sense that something was wrong as soon as I turned the corner. It was nothing specific, just a sudden chill at the back of my neck. Because of the blackout, I couldn’t see anything clearly, but I got a strong impression of a knot of shifting shadows, just a little bit darker than the night itself, milling around outside Colin Gormond’s house.