Not Safe After Dark: And Other Stories

by Peter Robinson

  * * *

  When Harry called that Monday morning, I was lying in bed grappling with one of my frequent bouts of insomnia, waiting for the birds to sing me back to sleep. I couldn’t even tell if it was daylight or not because of the heavy blackout curtains. I had been dreaming, I remembered, and had woken at about half past four, gasping for air, from my recurring nightmare about being sucked down into a quicksand.

  I heard Harry banging at my door and calling my name, so I threw on some clothes and hurried downstairs. I thought at first that it might be something to do with Tommy, but when I saw his pale face, his wide eyes, and the thin trickle of vomit at the corner of his mouth, I worried that he was having the heart attack he had been expecting daily for over twenty years.

  He turned and pointed down the street. “Frank, please!” he said. “You’ve got to come with me.”

  I could hear the fear in his voice, so I followed him as quickly as I could to Maggie’s house. It was a fine October morning, with a hint of autumn’s nip in the air. He had left the door ajar. Slowly, I pushed it open and went inside. My first impression was more surprise at how clean and tidy the place was than shock at the bloody figure on the carpet. In my defense, lest I sound callous, I had fought in the first war and, by some miracle, survived the mustard gas with only a few blisters and a nasty coughing fit every now and then. But I had seen men blown apart; I had been spattered with the brains of my friends; I had crawled through trenches and not known whether the soft, warm, gelatinous stuff I was putting my hands in was mud or the entrails of my comrades. More recently, I had also helped dig more than one mangled or dismembered body from the ruins, so a little blood, a little death, never bothered me much. Besides, despite the pool of dried blood around her head, Mad Maggie looked relatively peaceful. More peaceful than I had ever seen her in life.

  Funny, but it reminded me of that old Dracula film I saw at the Crown, the one with Bela Lugosi. The count’s victims always became serene after they had wooden stakes plunged through their hearts. Mad Maggie hadn’t been a vampire, and she didn’t have a stake through her heart, but a bloodstained posser lay by her side, the concave copper head and wooden handle both covered in blood. A quick glance in the kitchen showed only one puzzling item: an unopened bottle of milk. As far as I knew, Harry’s last round had been the morning of the air raid, last Wednesday. I doubted that Maggie would have been able to get more than her rations; besides, the bottle top bore the unmistakable mark of the dairy where Harry worked.

  Harry waited outside, unwilling to come in and face the scene again. Once I had taken in what had happened, I told him to fetch the police, the real police this time.

  They came.

  * * *

  And they went.

  One was a plainclothes officer, Detective Sergeant Longbottom, a dull-looking bruiser with a pronounced limp, who looked most annoyed at being called from his bed. He asked a few questions, sniffed around a bit, then got the ambulance men to take Maggie away on a stretcher.

  One of the questions Sergeant Longbottom asked was the victim’s name. I told him that, apart from “Mad Maggie,” I had no idea. With a grunt, he rummaged around in the sideboard drawer and found her rent book. I was surprised to discover that she was called Rose Faversham, which I thought was actually quite a pretty name. Prettier than Mad Maggie, anyway. Sergeant Longbottom also asked if we’d had any strangers in the area. Apart from an army unit billeted near the park where they were carrying out training exercises, and the Gypsy encampment in Silverhill Woods, we hadn’t.

  “Ah, Gypsies,” he said, and wrote something in his little black notebook. “Is anything missing?”

  I told him I didn’t know, as I had no idea what might have been here in the first place. That seemed to confuse him. For all I knew, I went on, the rumor might have been right, and she could have had a mattress stuffed with banknotes. Sergeant Longbottom checked upstairs and came back scratching his head. “Everything looks normal,” he said, then he poked around a bit more, noting the canteen of sterling silver cutlery, and guessed that Mad Maggie had probably interrupted the thief, who had killed her and fled the scene—probably back to the Gypsy encampment. I was on the point of telling him that I thought the Nazis were supposed to be persecuting Gypsies, not us, but I held my tongue. I knew it would do no good.

  Of course, I told him how everyone in the neighborhood knew Mad Maggie paid no attention to air raids, how she even seemed to enjoy them the way some people love thunderstorms, and how Tom Sellers, the ARP man, had remonstrated with her on many occasions, only to get a dismissive wave and the sight of her ramrod-stiff back walking away down the street. Maggie had also been fined more than once for blackout infringements, until she solved that one by keeping her heavy black curtains closed night and day.

  I also told Longbottom that, in the blackout, anyone could have come and gone easily without being seen. I think that was what finally did it. He hummed and hawed, muttered “Gypsies” again, made noises about a continuing investigation, then put his little black notebook away, said he had pressing duties to attend to, and left.

  * * *

  And there things would have remained had I not become curious. No doubt Mad Maggie would have been fast forgotten and some poor, innocent Gypsy would have been strung up from the gallows. But there was something about the serenity of Mad Maggie’s features in death that haunted me. She looked almost saintlike, as if she had sloughed off the skin of despair and madness that she had inhabited for so long and reverted to the loving, compassionate Christian woman she must have once been. She had a real name now, too: Rose Faversham. I was also provoked by Detective Sergeant Longbottom’s gruff manner and his obvious impatience with the whole matter. No doubt he had more important duties to get back to, such as the increased traffic in black market onion substitutes.

  I would like to say that the police searched Maggie’s house thoroughly, locked it up fast and put a guard on the door, but they did nothing of the kind. They did lock the front door behind us, of course, but that was it. I imagined that, as soon as he found out, old Grasper, the landlord, would slither around, rubbing his hands and trying to rent the place out quickly again, for twice as much, before the army requisitioned it as a billet.

  One thing I had neglected to tell Detective Sergeant Longbottom, I realized as I watched his car disappear around a pile of rubble at the street corner, was about Fingers Finnegan, our local black marketeer and petty thief. Human nature is boundlessly selfish and greedy, even in wartime, and air raids provided the perfect cover for burglary and black market deals. The only unofficial people on the streets during air raids were either mad, like Maggie, or up to no good, like Fingers. We’d had a spate of burglaries when most decent, law-abiding people were in St. Mary’s church crypt, or at least in their damp and smelly backyard Anderson shelters, and Fingers was my chief suspect. He could be elusive when he wanted to be, though, and I hadn’t seen him in a number of days.

  Not since last Wednesday’s air raid, in fact.

  * * *

  After the police had gone, Harry and I adjourned to my house, where, despite the early hour, I poured him a stiff brandy and offered him a Woodbine. I didn’t smoke, myself, because of that little bit of gas that had leaked through my mask at Ypres, but I had soon discovered that it was wise to keep cigarettes around when they were becoming scarce. Like all the rationed items, they became a kind of currency. I also put the kettle on, for I hadn’t had my morning tea yet, and I’m never at my best before my morning tea. Perhaps that may be one reason I have never married; most of the women I have met chatter far too much in the morning.

  “What a turn up,” Harry said, after taking a swig and coughing. “Mad Maggie, murdered. Who’d imagine it?”

  “Her killer, I should think,” I said.

  “Gypsies.”

  I shook my head. “I doubt it. Oh, there’s no doubt they’re a shifty lot. I wouldn’t trust one of them as far as I could throw him. But killers? A defen
seless woman like Maggie? I don’t think so. Besides, you saw her house. It hadn’t been touched.”

  “But Sergeant Longbottom said she might have interrupted a burglar.”

  I sniffed. “Sergeant Longbottom’s an idiot. There was no evidence at all that her killer was attempting to burgle the place.”

  “Maybe she was one of them once—a Gypsy—and they came to take her back?”

  I laughed. “I must say, Harry, you certainly don’t lack imagination, I’ll grant you that. But no, I rather fancy this is a different sort of matter altogether.”

  Harry frowned. “You’re not off on one of your Sherlock Holmes kicks again, are you, Frank? Leave it be. Let the professionals deal with it. It’s what they’re paid for.”

  “Professionals! Humph. You saw for yourself how interested our Detective Sergeant Longbottom was. Interested in crawling back in his bed, more like it. No, Harry, I think that’s the last we’ve seen of them. If we want to find out who killed poor Maggie, we’ll have to find out for ourselves.”

  “Why not just let it be, Frank?” Harry pleaded. “We’re at war. People are getting killed every minute of the day and night.”

  I gave him a hard look, and he cringed a little. “Because this is different, Harry. While I can’t say I approve of war as a solution to man’s problems, at least it’s socially sanctioned murder. If the government, in all its wisdom, decides that we’re at war with Germany and we should kill as many Germans as we can, then so be it. But nobody sanctioned the killing of Mad Maggie. When an individual kills someone like Maggie, he takes something he has no right to. Something he can’t even give back or replace, the way he could a diamond necklace. It’s an affront to us all, Harry, an insult to the community. And it’s up to us to see that retribution is made.” I’ll admit I sounded a little pompous, but Harry could be extremely obtuse on occasion, and his using the war as an excuse for so outrageous a deed as Rose’s murder brought out the worst in me.

  Harry seemed suitably cowed by my tirade, and when he’d finished his brandy he shuffled off to finish his deliveries. I never did ask him whether there was any milk left on his unattended float.

  * * *

  I had another hour in which to enjoy my morning tea before I had to leave for school, but first I had to complete my ritual and drop by the newsagent’s for a paper. While I was there, I asked Mrs. Hope behind the counter when she had last seen Mad Maggie. Last Wednesday, she told me, walking down the street toward her house just before the warning siren went off, muttering to herself. That information, along with the unopened milk and the general state of the body, was enough to confirm for me that Rose had probably been killed under cover of the air raid.

  That morning, I found I could neither concentrate on Othello, which I was supposed to be teaching the fifth form, nor could I be bothered to read about the bombing raids, evacuation procedures, and government pronouncements that passed for news in these days of propaganda and censorship.

  Instead, I thought about Mad Maggie, or Rose Faversham, as she had now become for me. When I tried to visualize her as she was alive, I realized that had I looked closely enough, had I got beyond the grim expressions and the muttered curses, I might have seen her for the handsome woman she was. Handsome, I say, not pretty or beautiful, but I would hazard a guess that twenty years ago she would have turned a head or two. Then I remembered that it was about twenty years ago when she first arrived in the neighborhood, and she had been Mad Maggie right from the start. So perhaps I was inventing a life for her, a life she had never had, but certainly when death brought repose to her features, it possessed her of a beauty I had not noticed before.

  When I set off for school, I saw Tommy Markham, Harry’s stepson, going for his morning constitutional. Tommy’s real dad, Lawrence Markham, had been my best friend. We had grown up together and had both fought in the Third Battle of Ypres, between August and November 1917. Lawrence had been killed at Passchendaele, about nine miles away from my unit, while I had only been mildly gassed. Tommy was in his midtwenties now. He never knew his real dad, but worshipped him in a way you can worship only a dead hero. Tommy joined up early and served with the Green Howards as part of the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force in France. He had seemed rather twitchy and sullen since he got back from the hospital last week, but I put that down to shattered nerves. The doctors had told Polly, his mother, something about nervous exhaustion and about being patient with him.

  “Morning, Tommy,” I greeted him.

  He hadn’t noticed me at first—his eyes had been glued to the pavement as he walked—but when he looked up, startled, I noticed the almost pellucid paleness of his skin and the dark bruises under his eyes.

  “Oh, good morning, Mr. Bascombe,” he said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, but you don’t look so good. What is it?”

  “My nerves,” he said, moving away as he spoke. “The doc said I’d be all right after a bit of rest, though.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. By the way, did your fath—, sorry, did Harry tell you about Mad Maggie?” I knew Tommy was sensitive about Harry not being his real father.

  “He said she was dead, that’s all. Says someone clobbered her.”

  “When did you last see her, Tommy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Since the raid?”

  “That was the day after I got back. No, come to think of it, I don’t think I have seen her since then. Terrible business, in’it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Anyway, sorry, must dash. Bye, Mr. Bascombe.”

  “Bye, Tommy.”

  I stood frowning and watched him scurry off, almost crabwise, down the street.

  * * *

  There was another air raid that night, and I decided to look for Fingers Finnegan. By then I had talked to enough people on the street to be certain that no one had seen Rose since the evening of the last raid.

  We lived down by the railway, the canal, and the power station, so we were always copping it. The Luftwaffe could never aim accurately, though, because the power station sent up clouds of appalling smoke as soon as they heard there were enemy planes approaching. If the bombs hit anything of strategic value, it was more by good luck than good management.

  The siren would go off, wailing up and down the scale for two minutes, and it soon became an eerie fugue as you heard the sirens from neighboring boroughs join in, one after another. The noise frightened the dogs and cats and they struck up, wailing and howling, too. At first, you could hardly see a thing outside, only hear the droning of the bombers high above and the swishing and whistling sound of the bombs as they fell in the distance. Then came the explosions, the hailstone of incendiaries on roofs like a rain of fire, the flames crackling, blazing through the smoke. Even the sounds seemed muffled, the distant explosions no more than dull, flat thuds, like a heavy book falling on the floor, the crackle of antiaircraft fire like fat spitting on a griddle. Sometimes you could even hear someone scream or shout out a warning. Once I heard a terrible shrieking that still haunts my nightmares.

  But the city had an eldritch beauty during an air raid. In the distance, through the smoke haze, the skyline seemed lit by a dozen suns, each a slightly different shade of red, orange, or yellow. Searchlights crisscrossed one another, making intricate cat’s cradles in the air, and ack-ack fire arced into the sky like strings of Christmas lights. Soon, the bells of the fire engines became part of the symphony of sound and color. The smoke from the power station got in my eyes and up my nose, and with my lungs, it brought on a coughing fit that seemed to shake my ribs free of their moorings. I held a handkerchief to my face, and that seemed to help a little.

  It wasn’t too difficult to get around, despite the blackout and the smoke. There were white stripes painted on the lampposts and along the curbside, and many people had put little dots of luminous paint on their doorbells, so you could tell where you were if you knew the neighborhood well enough.

  I walked along
Lansdowne Street to the junction with Cardigan Road. Nobody was abroad. The bombs were distant but getting closer, and the smell from a broken sewage pipe was terrible, despite my handkerchief. Once, I fancied I saw a figure steal out of one of the houses, look this way and that, then disappear into the smoky darkness. I ran, calling out after him, but when I got there he had vanished. It was probably Fingers, I told myself. I’d have a devil of a time catching him now I had scared him off. My best chance was to run him down in one of the back-street cafés where he sold his stolen goods the next day.

  So instead of pursuing my futile task, and because it was getting more and more difficult to breathe, I decided that my investigation might next benefit best from a good look around Rose’s empty house.

  It was easy enough to gain access via the kitchen window at the back, which wasn’t even latched, and after an undignified and painful fall from the sink to the floor, I managed to regain my equilibrium and set about my business. It occurred to me that if I had such an easy time getting in, then her killer would have had an easy time, too. Rose had been killed with the posser, which would most likely have been placed near the sink or tub in which she did her washing.

  Because of the blackout curtains, I didn’t have to worry about my torch giving me away; nor did I have to cover it with tissue paper, as I would outside, so I had plenty of light to see by. I stood for a few moments, adjusting to the room. I could hear fire-engine bells not too far away.

  I found little of interest downstairs. Apart from necessities, such as cutlery, pans, plates, and dishes, Rose seemed to own nothing. There were no framed photographs on the mantelpiece, no paintings on the drab walls. There wasn’t even a wireless. A search of the sideboard revealed only the rent book that Longbottom had already discovered, a National Identity Card, also in the name of Rose Faversham, her ration book, various coupons, old bills, and about twenty pounds in banknotes. I did find two bottles of gin, one almost empty, in the lower half of the china cabinet. There were no letters, no address books, nothing of a personal nature. Rose Faversham’s nest was clean and tidy, but it was also quite sterile.