Wondering whether it was worth bothering, I finally decided to go upstairs to finish my search. The first of the two bedrooms was completely bare. Most people use a spare room to store things they no longer use but can’t bear to throw out just yet; there was nothing like this in Rose’s spare bedroom, just some rather austere wallpaper and bare floorboards.
I felt a tremor of apprehension on entering Rose’s bedroom. After all, she had lived such a private, self-contained life that any encroachment on her most intimate domain seemed a violation. Nonetheless, I went inside.
Apart from the ruffled bedclothes, which I assumed were the result of Detective Sergeant Longbottom’s cursory search, the bedroom was every bit as neat, clean, and empty as the rest of the house. The one humanizing detail was a library book on her bedside table: Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. So Rose Faversham had been an educated woman. Butler’s savage and ironic attack on Victorian values was hardly common bedtime reading on our street.
I looked under the mattress and under the bed, and found nothing. The dressing table held those few items deemed essential for a woman’s appearance and hygiene, and the chest of drawers revealed only stacks of carefully folded undergarments, corsets and the like, among which I had no desire to go probing. The long dresses hung in the wardrobe beside the high-buttoned blouses.
About to give up and head home to bed, I tried one last place—the top of the wardrobe, where I used to keep my secret diaries when I was a boy—and there I found the shoebox. Even a brief glance inside told me it was the repository of whatever past and personal memories Rose Faversham might have wanted to hang on to. Instead of sitting on the bedspread to read by torchlight, I went back downstairs and slipped out of the house like a thief in the night, which I suppose I was, with Rose’s shoebox under my arm. A bomb exploded about half a mile away as I sidled down the street.
* * *
I should have gone to one of the shelters, I know, but I was feeling devil-may-care that night, and I certainly didn’t want anyone to know I had broken into Rose’s house and stolen her only private possessions. Back in my own humble abode, I made sure my curtains were shut tight, poured a large tumbler of brandy—perhaps, apart from nosiness and an inability to suffer fools gladly, my only vice—then turned on the standard lamp beside my armchair and settled down to examine my haul. There was a certain excitement in having pilfered it, as they say, and for a moment I imagined I had an inkling of that illicit thrill Fingers Finnegan must get every time he burgles someone’s house. Of course, this was different; I hadn’t broken into Rose’s house for my own benefit, to line my own pockets, but to solve the mystery of her murder.
The first thing the shoebox yielded was a photograph of three smiling young women standing in front of an old van with a cross on its side. I could tell by their uniforms that they were nurses from the First World War. On the back, in slightly smudged ink, someone had written “Midge, Rose, and Margaret—Flanders, July 30, 1917. Friends Inseparable For Ever!”
I stared hard at the photograph and, though my imagination may have been playing tricks on me, I thought I recognized Rose as the one in the middle. She had perfect dimples at the edges of her smile, and her eyes gazed, pure and clear, directly into the lens. She bore little resemblance to the Rose I had known as Mad Maggie, or indeed to the body of Rose Faversham as I had seen it. But I think it was her.
I put the photograph aside and pulled out the next item. It was a book of poetry: Severn and Somme by Ivor Gurney. One of my favorite poets, Gurney was gassed at St. Julien, near Passchendaele, and sent to a war hospital near Edinburgh. I heard he later became mentally disturbed and suicidal, and he died just two or three years ago, after nearly twenty years of suffering. I have always regretted that we never met.
I opened the book. On the title page, someone had written, “To My Darling Rose on her 21st Birthday, March 20, 1918. Love, Nicholas.” So Rose was even younger than I had thought.
I set the book aside for a moment and rubbed my eyes. Sometimes I fancied the residual effects of the gas made them water, though my doctor assured me that it was a foolish notion, as mustard gas wasn’t a lachrymator.
I hadn’t been in the war as late as March 1918. The injury that sent me to a hospital in Manchester, my “Blighty,” took place the year before. Blistered and blinded, I had lain in bed there for months, unwilling to get up. The blindness passed, but the scarring remained, both inside and out. In the small hours, when I can’t sleep, I relive those early days of August 1917 in Flanders: the driving rain, the mud, the lice, the rats, the deafening explosions. It was madness. We were doomed from the start by incompetent leaders, and as we struggled waist deep through mud, with shells and bullets flying all around us, we could only watch in hopeless acceptance as our own artillery sank in the mud, and our tanks followed it down.
Judging by the words on the back of the photograph, Rose had been there, too: Rose, one of the angels of mercy who tended the wounded and the dying in the trenches of Flanders’s fields.
I opened the book. Nicholas, or Rose, had underlined the first few lines of the first poem, “To the Poet Before Battle”:
Now, youth, the hour of thy dread passion comes;
Thy lovely things must all be laid away;
And thou, as others, must face the riven day
Unstirred by rattle of the rolling drums
Or bugles’ strident cry.
Perhaps Nicholas had been a poet, and Gurney’s call for courage in the face of impending battle applied to him, too? And if Nicholas had been a poet, was Rose one of the “lovely things” he had to set aside?
Outside, the all-clear sounded and brought me back to earth. I breathed a sigh of relief. Spared again. Still, I had been so absorbed in Rose’s treasures that I probably wouldn’t have heard a bomb if one fell next door. They say you never hear the one with your name on it.
I set the book down beside the photograph and dug around deeper in the shoebox. I found a medal of some sort—I think for valor in wartime nursing—and a number of official papers and certificates. Unfortunately, there were no personal letters. Even so, I managed to compile a list of names to seek out and one or two official addresses where I might pursue my inquiries into Rose Faversham’s past. No time like the present, I thought, going over to my escritoire and taking out pen and paper.
* * *
I posted my letters early the following morning, when I went to fetch my newspaper. I had the day off from school, as the pupils were collecting aluminium pots and pans for the Spitfire Fund, so I thought I might slip into Special Constable mode and spend an hour or two scouring Fingers Finnegan’s usual haunts.
I started at Frinton’s, on the High Street, where I also treated myself to two rashers of bacon and an egg. By midmorning, I had made my way around most of the neighboring cafés, and it was lunchtime when I arrived at Lyon’s in the city center. I didn’t eat out very often, and twice a day was almost unheard of. Even so, I decided to spend one and threepence on roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. There was a lot of meat around then because the powers that be were slaughtering most of the farm animals to turn the land over to crops. I almost felt that I was doing my national duty by helping eat some before it went rotten.
As I waited, I noticed Finnegan slip in through the door in his usual manner, licking his lips, head halfbowed, eyes flicking nervously around the room trying to seek out anyone who might be after him, or to whom he might have owed money. I wasn’t in uniform, and I was pretending to be absorbed in my newspaper, so his eyes slid over me. When he decided it was safe, he sat down three tables away from me.
My meal came, and I tucked in with great enthusiasm, managing to keep Finnegan in my peripheral vision. Shortly, another man came in—dark-haired, red-faced—and sat with Finnegan. The two of them put their heads together, all the time Finnegan’s eyes flicking here and there, looking for danger signs. I pretended to pay no attention but was annoyed that I couldn’t overhear a word. Something
exchanged hands under the table, and the other man left: Finnegan fencing his stolen goods again.
I waited, lingering over my tea and rice pudding, and when Finnegan left, I followed him. I hadn’t wanted to confront him in the restaurant and cause a scene, so I waited until we came near a ginnel not far from my own street, then I speeded up, grabbed him by the shoulders, and dragged him into it.
Finnegan was not very strong—in fact, he was a scrawny, sickly sort of fellow, which is why he wasn’t fit for service—but he was slippery as an eel, and it took all my energy to hang on to him until I got him where I wanted him, with his back to the wall and my fists gripping his lapels. I slammed him against the wall a couple of times to take any remaining wind out of his sails, then when he went limp, I was ready to start.
“Bloody hell, Constable Bascombe!” he said when he’d got his breath back. “I didn’t recognize you at first. You didn’t have to do that, you know. If there’s owt you want to know why don’t you just ask me? Let’s be civilians about it.”
“The word is civilized. With you? Come off it, Fingers.”
“My name’s Michael.”
“Listen, Michael, I want some answers and I want them now.”
“Answers to what?”
“During last night’s air raid I saw you coming out of a house on Cardigan Road.”
“I never.”
“Don’t lie to me. I know it was you.”
“So what? I might’ve been at my cousin’s. He lives on Cardigan Road.”
“You were carrying something.”
“He gave me a couple of kippers.”
“You’re lying to me, Fingers, but we’ll let that pass for the moment. I’m interested in the raid before that one.”
“When was that, then?”
“Last Wednesday.”
“How d’you expect me to remember what I was doing that long ago?”
“Because murder can be quite a memorable experience, Fingers.”
He turned pale and slithered in my grip. My palms were sweaty. “Murder? Me? You’ve got to be joking! I’ve never killed nobody.”
I didn’t bother pointing out that that meant he must have killed somebody—linguistic niceties such as that being as pointless with someone of Finnegan’s intelligence as speaking loudly to a foreigner and hoping to be understood—so I pressed on. “Did you break into Rose Faversham’s house on Aston Place last Wednesday during the raid?”
“Rose Faversham. Who the bloody hell’s she when she’s at home? Never heard of her.”
“You might have known her as Mad Maggie.”
“Mad Maggie. Now why would a bloke like me want to break into her house? That’s assuming he did things like that in the first place, hypnotically, like.”
Hypnotically? Did he mean hypothetically? I didn’t even ask. “To rob her, perhaps?”
“Nah. You reckon a woman who went around looking like she did would have anything worth stealing? Hypnotically, again, of course.”
“Of course, Fingers. This entire conversation is hypnotic. I understand that.”
“Mad Maggie hardly draws attention to herself as a person worth robbing. Not unless you’re into antiques.”
“And you’re not?”
“Wouldn’t know a Chippendale from a Gainsborough.”
“Know anybody who is?”
“Nah.”
“What about the thousands of pounds they say she had hidden in her mattress?”
“And pigs can fly, Constable Bascombe.”
“What about silverware?”
“There’s a bob or two in a nice canteen of cutlery. Hypnotically, of course.”
The one thing that might have been of value to someone other than herself was Rose’s silverware, and that had been left alone. Even if Fingers had been surprised by her and killed her, he would hardly have left his sole prize behind when he ran off. On the other hand, with a murder charge hanging over it, the silverware might have turned out to be more of a liability than an asset. I looked at his face, into his eyes, trying to decide whether he was telling the truth. You couldn’t tell anything from Finnegan’s face, though; it was like a ferret mask.
“Look,” he said, licking his lips, “I might be able to help you.”
“Help me?”
“Yeah. But . . . you know . . . not standing here, like this . . .”
I realized I was still holding him by the lapels, and I had hoisted him so high he had to stand on his tiptoes. I relaxed my grip. “What do you have in mind?”
“We could go to the Prince Albert, have a nice quiet drink. They’ll still be open.”
I thought for a moment. The hard way hadn’t got me very far. Maybe a little diplomacy was in order. Though it galled me to be going for a drink with a thieving illiterate like Fingers Finnegan, there were larger things at stake. I swallowed my pride and said, “Why not?”
* * *
Nobody paid us a second glance, which was all right by me. I bought us both a pint, and we took a quiet table by the empty fireplace. Fingers brought a packet of Woodbines out of his pocket and lit up. His smoke burned my lungs and caused me a minor coughing fit, but he didn’t seem concerned by it.
“What makes you think you can help me?” I asked him when I’d recovered.
“I’ll bet you’re after Mad Maggie’s murderer, aren’t you?”
“How do you know that?”
“Word gets around. The real police think it was Gypsies, you know. They’ve got one of them in the cells right now. Found some silver candlesticks in his possession.”
“How did they know whether Rose had any silver candlesticks?”
He curled his lip and looked at me as if I were stupid. “They don’t, but they don’t know that she didn’t, do they? All they need’s a confession, and he’s a brute in the interrogation room is that short-arse bastard.”
“Who?”
“Longbottom. It’s what we call him. Longbottom. Short-arse. Get it?”
“I’m falling off my chair with laughter. Have you got anything interesting to tell me or haven’t you?”
“I might have seen someone, mightn’t I?”
“Seen someone? Who? Where?”
He rattled his empty glass on the table. “That’d be telling, wouldn’t it?”
I sighed, pushed back the disgust I felt rising like vomit in my craw, and bought him another pint. He was smirking all over his ferret face when I got back.
“Ta very much, Constable Bascombe. You’re a true gentleman, you are.”
The bugger was enjoying this. “Fingers,” I said, “you don’t know how much your praise means to me. Now, to get back to what you were saying.”
“It’s Michael. I told you. And none of your Micks or Mikes. My name’s Michael.”
“Right, Michael. You know, I’m a patient man, but I’m beginning to feel just a wee bit let down here. I’m thinking that perhaps it might not be a bad idea for me to take you to Detective Sergeant Longbottom and see if he can’t persuade you to tell him what you know.”
Fingers jerked upright. “Hang on a minute. There’s no need for anything drastic like that. I’m just having my little bit of fun, that’s all. You wouldn’t deny a fellow his little bit of fun, would you?”
“Heaven forbid,” I muttered. “So now you’ve had your fun, Fin—er . . . Michael, perhaps we can get back to business?”
“Right . . . well . . . theatrically speaking, of course, I might have been in Aston Place on the night you’re talking about.”
Theatrically? Let it go, Frank. “Last Wednesday, during the air raid?”
“Right. Well I might have been, just, you know, being a concerned citizen and all, going round checking up all the women and kids was in the shelters, like.”
“And the old people. Don’t forget the old people.”
“Especially the old people. Anyway, like I said, I just might have been passing down Aston Place during the air raid, seeing that everyone was all right, like, and I might j
ust have seen someone coming out of Mad Maggie’s house.”
“Did you?”
“Well, it was dark, and that bloody smoke from the power station doesn’t make things any better. Like a real pea-souper, that is. Anyway, I might just have seen this figure, like, a quick glimpse.”
“I understand. Any idea who it was?”
“Not at first I hadn’t, but now I’ve an idea. I just hadn’t seen him for a long time.”
“Where were you?”
“Coming out of—Can’t have been more than two or three houses away. When I saw him he gave me a real fright, so I pressed myself back in the doorway, like, so he couldn’t see me.”
“But you got a look at him?”
“Not a good one. First thing I noticed, though, is he was wearing a uniform.”
“What kind of uniform?”
“I don’t know, do I? Soldier’s, I suppose.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, he moved off sort of sideways, like.”
“Crabwise?”
“Come again?”
“Like a crab?”
“If you say so, Constable Bascombe.”
Something about all this was beginning to make sense, but I wasn’t sure I liked the sense it made. “Did you notice anything else?”
“I saw him go into a house across the street.”
“Which one?” I asked, half of me not wanting to know the answer.
“The milkman’s,” he said.
* * *
I didn’t want to, but I had to see this through. Tommy Markham. My own godson. All afternoon I thought about it, and I could see no way out of confronting Harry and Tommy. No matter how much thinking I did, I couldn’t come up with an explanation, and if Tommy had murdered Rose Faversham, I wanted to know why. He had certainly been acting oddly since he came back from the army hospital, but I had acted rather strangely myself after they released me from the hospital in Manchester in 1918. I knew better than to judge a man by the way he reacts to war.
Not Safe After Dark: And Other Stories Page 32