I consoled myself with the fact that Tommy might not have killed Rose, that she was already dead when he went to see her, but I knew in my heart that didn’t make sense. Nobody just dropped in on Mad Maggie to see how she was doing, and the idea of two people going to see her in one night was absurd. No, I knew that the person Fingers had seen coming out of Rose’s house had to be her killer, and he swore that person was Tommy Markham.
Fingers could have been lying, but that didn’t make sense either. For a start, he wasn’t that clever. He must also know that I would confront Tommy and that, one way or another, I’d find out the truth. No, if Fingers had killed Mad Maggie and wanted to escape blame, all he had to do was deny that he had been anywhere near her house and let the Gypsy take the fall.
I steeled myself with a quick brandy, then I went around to Harry’s house just after eight o’clock. They were all listening to a variety program on the Home Service, and someone was torturing “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” As usual, Tommy was wearing his army uniform, even though he was on extended leave. He still looked ill, pale and thin. His mother, Polly, a stout, silent woman I had known ever since she was a little girl, offered to make tea and disappeared into the kitchen.
“What brings you out at this time of night, then?” Harry asked. “Want some company down at the Prince Albert?”
I shook my head. “Actually, it’s your Tommy I came to see.”
A shadow of fear crossed Harry’s face. “Tommy? Well, you’d better ask him yourself, then. Best of luck.”
Tommy hadn’t moved yet, but when I addressed him, he slowly turned to face me. There was a look of great disappointment in his eyes, as if he knew he had had something valuable in his grasp only to have it taken from him at the last minute. Harry turned off the radio.
“Tommy,” I said, speaking as gently as I could, “did you go to visit Mad Maggie last Wednesday night, the night of the air raid?”
Harry was staring at me, disbelief written all over his face. “For God’s sake, Frank!” he began, but I waved him down.
“Did you, Tommy? Did you visit Mad Maggie?”
Slowly, Tommy nodded.
“You don’t have to say any more,” Harry said, getting to his feet. He turned to me as if I were his betrayer. “I’ve considered you a good friend for many years, Frank, but you’re pushing me too far.”
Polly came back with the teapot and took in the scene at a glance. “What’s up? What’s going on?”
“Sit down, Polly,” I said. “I’m asking your Tommy a few questions, that’s all.”
Polly sat. Harry remained standing, fists clenched at his sides, then Tommy’s voice broke the deadlock. “It’s all right, Mum,” he said to Polly. “I want to tell him. I want to get it off my chest.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, son,” she said.
Tommy pointed at Harry. “He does. He’s not as daft as he looks.”
I looked at Harry, who sat down again and shook his head.
Tommy turned back to me. “Did I go visit Mad Maggie? Yes, I did. Did I kill her? Yes, I did. I got in through the back window. It wasn’t locked. I picked up the posser and went through into the living room. She was sitting in the dark. Didn’t even have a wireless. She must have heard me, but she didn’t move. She looked at me just once before I hit her, and I could swear she knew why I was doing it. She understood and she knew it was right. It was just.”
As Tommy spoke, he became more animated and his eyes started to glow with life again, as if his prize were once more within his grasp.
“Why did you do it, Tommy?” I asked. “What did she ever do to harm you?”
He looked at Harry. “She killed my dad.”
“She what?”
“I told you. She killed my dad. My real dad.”
Polly flopped back in her armchair, tea forgotten, and put her hand to her heart. “Tommy, what are you saying?”
“He knew,” he said, looking at Harry again. “Or at least he suspected. I told him about the field, about the villagers, the madwoman.”
Harry shook his head. “I didn’t know,” he said. “You never told me it was her. All I knew was that you were upset, you were saying crazy things and acting strange. Especially when you came in from the raid that night. I was worried, that’s all. If I ever suspected you, that’s the only reason, son, I swear it. When I found her body, I thought if there was the remotest possibility . . . That’s why I went for Frank. I told him to lay off it, to let the gyppos take the blame. But he wouldn’t.” Harry pointed his finger at me, red in the face. “If you want to blame anyone, blame him.”
“Calm down, Harry,” I told him. “You’ll give yourself a heart attack.”
“It’s not a matter of blame,” Tommy said. “It’s about justice. And justice has been served.”
“Better tell me about it, Tommy,” I said. The air-raid siren went off, wailing up and down the scale. We all ignored it.
Tommy paused and ran his hand through his closely cropped hair. He looked at me. “You should understand, Mr. Bascombe. You were there. He was your best friend.”
I frowned. “Tell me, Tommy.”
“Before Dunkirk, a group of us got cut off and we were in this village near Ypres for a few days, before the Germans got too close. We almost didn’t make it to the coast in time for the evacuation. The people were frightened about what the Germans might do if they found out we were there, but they were kind to us. I became quite friendly with one old fellow who spoke very good English, and I told him my father had been killed somewhere near here in the first war. Passchendaele. I said I’d never seen his grave. One day, the old man took me out in his horse and cart and showed me some fields. It was late May, and the early poppies were just coming out among the rows of crosses. It looked beautiful. I knew my father was there somewhere.” Tommy choked for a moment, looked away and wiped his eyes.
“Then the old man told me a story,” he went on. “He said there was a woman living in the village who used to . . . you know . . . with the British soldiers. But she was in love with a German officer, and she passed on any information she could pick up from the British directly to him. One soldier let something slip about some new trench positions they were preparing for a surprise attack, and before anyone knew what had hit them, the trenches were shelled and the Germans swarmed into them. They killed every British soldier in their path. It came to hand-to-hand combat in the end. Bayonets. And the woman’s German lover was one of the last to die.”
Tommy paused, glanced at his mother, and went on, “He told me she never recovered. She went mad, and for a while after the armies had moved on she could be heard wailing for her dead German lover in the poppy fields at night. Then nothing more was heard of her. The rumor was that she had gone to England, where they had plenty of other madwomen to keep her company. I thought of Mad Maggie right from the start, of course, and I remembered the way she used to burst into French every now and then. I asked him if he had a photograph, and he said he thought he had an old one. We went back to his house, and he rummaged through his attic and came down with an old album. There she was. The same sort of clothes. That same look about her. Much younger and very beautiful, but it was her. It was Mad Maggie. And she had killed my father. He was in one of those trenches.”
“What happened next, Tommy?”
“I don’t remember much of the next couple of months. The Germans got too close and we had to make a hasty departure. That’s when I was wounded. I was lucky to make it to Dunkirk. If it hadn’t been for my mates . . . They carried me most of the way. Anyway, for a while I didn’t know where I was. In and out of consciousness. To be honest, half the time I preferred to be out of it. I had dreams, nightmares, visions, and I saw myself coming back and avenging my father’s death.”
His eyes shone with pride and righteousness as he spoke. Outside, the bombs were starting to sound alarmingly close. “Let’s get down to the shelter,” Harry suggested.
“
No,” said Tommy, holding up his hand. “Hear me out now. Wait till I’m done.” He turned to me. “You should understand, Mr. Bascombe. She killed my dad. He was your best friend. You should understand. I only did what was right.”
I shook my head. “There’s no avenging deaths during wartime, Tommy. It’s every man for himself. Some German bullet or bayonet had Larry’s name on it, and that was that. Wrong place, wrong time. It could just as easily have been me.”
Tommy stared at me in disbelief.
“Besides,” I went on, getting a little concerned at the explosions outside, “are you sure it was her, Tommy? It seems an awful coincidence that she should end up living on our street, don’t you think?”
“I’m sure. I saw the photograph. I’ve still got it.”
“Can I have a look?”
Tommy opened his top pocket and handed me a creased photograph. There was no doubt about the superficial resemblance between the woman depicted there, leaning against a farmer’s fence, wearing high-buttoned boots, smiling and holding her hand to her forehead to keep the sun out of her eyes. But it wasn’t the same woman whose photograph I had found in Rose Faversham’s shoebox. In fact, it wasn’t any of the three—Midge, Rose, or Margaret. There were no dimples, for a start, and the eyes were different. We all have our ways of identifying people, and with me it’s always the eyes. Show me someone at six, sixteen, and sixty and I’ll know if it’s the same person or not by the eyes.
Another bomb landed far too close for comfort, and the whole house shook. Then a split second later came a tremendous explosion. Plaster fell off the ceiling. The lights and radio went off. I could hear the drone of the bombers slowly disappearing to the southeast, on their way home again. We were all shaken, but I pulled myself to my feet first and suggested we go outside to see if anyone needed help.
I didn’t really think he’d make a run for it, but I stuck close to Tommy as we all went outside. The smell was awful; the bitter, fiery smell of the explosive and a whiff of gas from a fractured pipe mixed with dust from broken masonry. The sky was lit up like Guy Fawkes Night. It was a terrible sight that met our eyes, and the four of us could only stand and stare.
A bomb had taken out about three houses on the other side of the street. The middle one, now nothing but a pile of burning rubble, was Mad Maggie’s.
* * *
When the answers to my letters started trickling in a couple of weeks after Tommy’s arrest, I picked up some more leads, one of which eventually led me to Midge Livesey, now a mother of two boys—both in the RAF—who was living only thirty miles away, in the country. I telephoned her, and she seemed pleased to hear from someone who had known Rose, though she was saddened by the news of Rose’s death, and she suggested I be her guest for the weekend.
Though it was late October, the weather was fine when I got off the train at the tiny station. It was a wonderful feeling to be out in the country again. I had been away for so long I had almost forgotten what the autumn leaves looked like and how many different varieties of birdsong there are. The sweet, acrid scent of burning leaves from someone’s garden made a fine change from the stink of the air raids.
Midge and her husband, Arthur, welcomed me at the door of their cottage and told me they had already prepared the spare room. After I had laid out my things on the bed, I opened the window. Directly outside stood an apple tree, and beyond that I could see the landscape undulating to the north, where the large anvil shapes of peaks and fells were visible in the distance. I took in a deep breath of fresh air—as deep as I could manage with my poor lungs—and for once it didn’t make me cough. Perhaps it was time I left the city, I thought. But no, there were police duties to attend to, and I loved my teaching job. After the war, perhaps, I would think about it again, see if I could get a job in a village school.
When I showed Midge the photograph of the three of them over dinner that evening, a sad smile played across her features, and she touched the surface with her fingers, as if it could send out some sort of message to her.
“Yes,” she said, “that was Rose. And that was Margaret. Poor Margaret, she died in childbirth ten years ago. The war wasn’t all bad for us. We did have some good times. But I think the day that photograph was taken marked the beginning of the end. It was the day before the third Ypres battle started, and we were field nurses. We used to go onto the fields and into the trenches to clean up after the battles.” She shook her head and looked at Arthur, who tenderly put his hand on top of hers. “You’ve never . . . well, I suppose you have.” She looked at her husband. “Arthur understands, too. He was wounded at Arras. I worry about my boys. Just remembering, just thinking about it, makes me fear for them terribly. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” I said.
She paused for a moment and poured us all tea. “Anyway, Rose was especially sensitive,” she went on. “She wrote poetry and wanted to go to university to study English literature when it was all over. French, too. She spoke French very well and spent a lot of time talking to the poor wounded French soldiers. Often they were with the English, you know, and there was nobody who could talk to them. Rose did. She fell in love with a handsome young English lieutenant. Nicholas, his name was.” She smiled. “But we were young. We were always falling in love back then.”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“Rose? She broke under the strain. Shell shock, I suppose you’d call it. You hear a lot about the poor boys, the breakdowns, the self-inflicted wounds, but you never hear much about the women, do you? Where are we in the history books? We might not have been shooting at the Germans and only in minimal danger of getting shot at ourselves—though there were times—but we were there. We saw the slaughter firsthand. We were up to our elbows in blood and guts. Some people just couldn’t take it, the way some of the boys couldn’t take combat. I’ll say this, though, I think it was Nicholas’s death that finally sent Rose over the edge. It was the following year, 1918, the end of March, near a little village on the Somme called St. Quentin. She found him, you know, on the field. It was pure chance. Half his head had been blown away. She was never the same. She used to mutter to herself in French and go into long silences. Eventually, she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of morphine, but a doctor found her in time. She was invalided out in the end.”
“Do you know what happened next?”
“I visited her as soon as the war was over. She’d just come out of the hospital and was living with her parents. They were wealthy landowners—very posh, you might say—and they hadn’t a clue what to do with her. She was an embarrassment to them. In the end they set up a small fund for her, so she would never have to go without, and left her to her own devices.”
After a moment or two’s silence, I showed Midge the book of poetry. Again, she fingered it like a blind person looking for meaning. “Oh, yes. Ivor Gurney. She was always reading this.” She turned the pages. “This was her favorite.” She read us a short poem called “Bach and the Sentry,” in which the poet on sentry duty hears his favorite Bach prelude in his imagination and wonders how he will feel later, when he actually plays the piece again in peacetime. Then she shook her head. “Poor mad Rose. Nobody knew what to do with her. Do tell me what became of her.”
I told her what I knew, which wasn’t much, though for some reason I held back the part about Tommy and his mistake. I didn’t want Midge to know that my godson had mistaken her friend for a traitor. It seemed enough to lay the blame at the feet of a Gypsy thief and hope that Midge wasn’t one of those women who followed criminal trials closely in the newspapers.
Nor did I tell her that Rose’s house had been destroyed by a bomb almost a week after the murder and that she would almost certainly have been killed anyway. Midge didn’t need that kind of cruel irony. She had suffered enough; she had enough bad memories to fuel her nightmares, and enough to worry about in the shape of her two boys.
I simply told her that Rose was a very private person, certainly eccentric
in her dress and her mannerisms, and that none of us really knew her very well. She was a part of the community, though, and we all mourned her loss.
So Mad Maggie was another of war’s victims, I thought, as I breathed in the scent of the apple tree before getting into bed that night. One of the uncelebrated ones. She came to our community to live out her days in anonymous grief and whatever inner peace she could scrounge for herself, her sole valuable possessions a book of poetry, an old photograph, and a nursing medal.
And so she would have remained, a figure to be mocked by the children and ignored by the adults, had it not been for another damn war, another damaged soul, and the same poppy field in Flanders.
Requiescat in pace, Rose, though I am not a religious man. Requiescat in pace.
* * *
It should never have happened, but they hanged Tommy Markham for the murder of Rose Faversham at Wandsworth Prison on May 25, 1941, at eight o’clock in the morning.
Everyone said Tommy should have got off for psychiatric reasons, but his barrister had a permanent hangover, and the judge had an irritable bowel. In addition, the expert psychiatrist hired to evaluate him didn’t know shell shock from an Oedipus complex.
The only thing we could console ourselves with was that Tommy went to the gallows proud and at peace with himself for having avenged his father’s death.
I hadn’t the heart to tell him that he was wrong about Mad Maggie, that she wasn’t the woman he thought she was.
The Duke’s Wife
I was absolutely speechless. After everything that had happened, there he stood, bold as brass, telling all the world we were going to be married. Married! You would have been speechless, too.
Let me give you a little background. My name is Isabella, and until that moment I had been all set to enter a convent. I fear I have a wayward and impulsive nature that needs to be kept in check, and the convent I had in mind, the votarists of St. Clare, was one of strict restraint. Imagine my feelings when, head swimming from the twists and turns of recent events, I heard I was to be married to the duke!
Not Safe After Dark: And Other Stories Page 33