The Trebelzue Gate

by Anna Fitzwilliam

  ‘Nothing was ever proven, it was a stupid misunderstanding, that’s all’

  ‘In your statement, Captain Nyland, you said – and I quote: ‘I had paid for Miss Tooth’s ticket to the regimental ball, surely I had a right to expect something in return.’

  ‘Look, Penelope was no angel for God’s sake.’

  ‘Is that so, sir? Well, setting aside the question of the young woman’s character, it seems that you were about to be charged with the alleged offence, but then there was an eleventh-hour intervention?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do say so, Captain. According to my understanding of the case, our Kensington and Chelsea colleagues were actually reading you the charge sheet when a senior army medical officer arrived and interrupted them. The M.O. gave a statement to the effect that because of your work – work of national importance – you were suffering from nervous exhaustion and had experienced a mental breakdown. You could therefore not be held responsible for your actions or for any statement that you might have made. An hour or so later you were released into the care of two RAMC orderlies.’

  ‘I did not have a bloody breakdown, I’m not a basket case for God’s sake.’

  ‘You spent several months at a military recuperation facility somewhere in Wiltshire. Following your discharge, a period of lighter duties was recommended, and you were posted here to RAF St Mawgan on an inter-services loan, to work as a translator and teacher.’

  ‘Look, I just had a bit of burn out, that’s all, I was fine … I am fine. My role here is hardly a sinecure and it was a logical move for me because I had already worked closely with the RAF at Gutersloh. I say again, I did not have a nervous breakdown, I was just over worked, that’s all, you people outside can have no idea of the pressures of my sort of work.’

  She smiled, ‘Perhaps more than you might think, Captain.’

  Sergeant Bee saw the captain look up at her sharply, returning her gaze steadily for the first time. Then it was Monica’s turn to look away, she shuffled the signal sheet back inside the folder.

  ‘But despite the period of recuperation, you do still tend to find life a bit difficult, don’t you, Captain, when things don’t go your way? You can become quite angry, I believe. One of my team discovered that there’s been some complaints about your teaching methods here … something about you throwing a blackboard rubber at a young airman - he almost got a black eye - because he hadn’t done his homework, that was it wasn’t it, Sergeant?’

  ‘Apparently so, M’am, the young chap hadn’t learned his vocabulary.’

  The Captain stared fixedly at the patch of floor where the guitar leaned. He said

  ‘If I am expected to teach utter dolts...’

  ‘Did you ask Amanda Shute to spend the evening with you on Tuesday, Captain?’

  ‘No, I did not.’

  ‘One of the mess stewards says he heard you ask her to have dinner with you.’

  ‘Well the mess steward heard right, I did ask her to have dinner with me, but that is not the same as inviting someone to spend the evening. What I actually suggested to Miss Shute was, that if she was at a loose end, she might like to stay on and have dinner at the mess.’

  ‘And what was her answer?’

  ‘She thanked me but said she had to go and meet somebody later on. She asked if she could buy me another drink before she left. I said no thank you and we parted company, amicably. I wished her well, for the future.’

  ‘What was her future going to be?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know, I didn’t ask her, but she was clearly happy, looking forward to something.’

  ‘Are you happy, Captain?’

  ‘Not particularly, Chief Inspector, Are you?’

  Briefly, Monica smiled again.

  ‘What did you do after Miss Shute had left?’

  ‘I ate dinner, alone, and then I came back to my room and listened to a concert.’

  Monica was writing on her notepad. She underscored the last line of her handwriting and then flicked shut the mechanism of the golden pen.

  ‘Very well, thank you Captain, we’ll leave it there for now, but we may need to speak to you again.’

  They stood up, as they reached the door Monica asked

  ‘By the way, Captain, what was it - the concert?’

  ‘Mahler. The Ninth.’

  She nodded, ‘And is there a batman to look after each of these huts?’

  ‘Yes, there’s a whole cabal of them.’

  ‘How long are they on duty?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, I have to confess I’m not entirely clued up on the station’s domestic arrangements. The batmen are just around, in the background.’

  ‘Right, well Sergeant Bee, perhaps you could go and check?’

  Monica waited by the sandbagged entrance doors of the mess building. A coach full of airmen was driven up the main station road towards the airfield. In a seat towards the back of the coach, one man appeared to be sleeping, his lolled head pressing against the window glass.

  Sergeant Bee returned, ‘Each hut has its own batman, they come on at six in the morning, but they finish at two. I’ve had another word with Bill Eddy though and he confirms Captain Nyland’s story, up to a point. He went into dinner on his own, then about nine thirty he asked for a newspaper from the desk and signed out.’

  ‘So, in theory that gives him plenty of time. If he went off site after that, would there be any record of his car leaving?’

  ‘Not going out, but coming back in maybe, they’re supposed to check all passes coming in so there’s a chance that the guard room would remember, especially as he’s not in RAF uniform. Apparently, his car’s out of the ordinary too – a dark red SAAB, left hand drive, he brought it back from Germany. There can’t have been that much traffic later on during a week night, especially when they were gearing up for this carry on. We can get them to check.’

  ‘And he would have had to go out and come back via the main gate?’

  ‘By car he would, yes – any of the other exits, including the Trebelzue gate, are solely for emergencies, only the RAF Fire Service can operate the padlocks. In theory he could have gone out on foot, but it’d be one hell of a walk over to Trebelzue, let alone to wherever it was that she was actually killed.’

  As they returned to Monica’s Clubman smoke was drifting down the hill and the air raid siren began to wail. She said, ‘Let’s get out for a bit, I’m getting tired of all the sound and fury.’

  They went to an inn named the Blue Anchor, ‘We’ll stop here, and I’ll buy you lunch. Afterwards I can drop you at the newspaper office in Newquay and with any luck they’ll have set up an interview with the Julian boy.’

  The main bar was almost empty. Two elderly men, one in a beige windcheater and the other in a thick grey overcoat, sat hunched like roosting birds on their high stools. A younger man, perhaps a sales representative, stood at the corner of the bar eating a toasted sandwich. Periodically symbols on the silent fruit machine flashed light pulses of differing colours. On the mantel shelf above the gas fire was a handwritten notice objecting to the theft of a charity collection tin. It expressed the hope that the ‘crepe who stole’ was ashamed of himself.

  Carrying a crate of bottles, the landlord, a small man with crinkled black hair and darting dark eyes, appeared behind the bar. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a tie bearing the crest of the St Austell Brewery.

  ‘I think I recognise you good sir, don’t I?’ he said to the sergeant.

  ‘Possibly,’

  ‘Constabulary?’

  ‘Yes, but we’re only here for our lunch break,’

  ‘That’s all right then, we’re a well-behaved crowd round here, most of the time at any rate,’ he nodded towards the notice on the mantelpiece. He handed them menus in maroon plastic covers and they took their glasses to a dark oak table in the lounge bar. Monica was drinking bitter lemon, the sergeant had bitter shandy. The lounge was dim and smelled of furniture polish and old smoke. Sad
dle fittings and horse brasses and a Great War memorial plaque were nailed to the beams of the low ceiling.

  Sergeant Bee said, ‘That course the girl was taking M’am, are we thinking it’s significant?’

  ‘What, do you mean significant as in Russian in these nervous times? I’m not sure.’

  ‘But doing it out in public, and she’d have been a bit of a liability, wouldn’t she, at anything confidential?’

  ‘As in intelligence work of some kind? Yes, I think it’s fair to say that she might have been a risk, but then sometimes people who don’t conform, people who can’t or won’t fit in like everyone else and have messy private lives, they can end up being quite suited to that sort of world. Perhaps it offers them a discipline and order, but of a kind which isn’t like normal conformity and so they can accept it. In one way or another they always seem to be outsiders – or imagine themselves to be - they might be a dead loss at their own personal relationships, but they can be first class at spying on other people’s.’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  The landlord brought their food order. It was scampi and chips served in baskets lined with paper napkins.

  ‘Give us a shout if you need anything else,’ he said. When he had gone back to the other bar Monica said

  ‘And of course, a girl as good looking as Amanda Shute could have been very useful. A so called honey trap. It may be outlandish but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.’

  Sergeant Bee speared one of the bread crumbed balls of scampi with his fork.

  ‘What about the local suspects?’

  ‘As for Robin Harvey, he’s strange, but I don’t think there’s any real harm in him, I think he’s lonely more than anything else, but we’d better wait to hear what the experts have to tell us.’

  ‘And Graham Jarvis?’

  ‘Jarvis is another matter. I think he’s lying about something – I’m just not sure what it is yet.’

  In the foyer of Newquay police station, the desk sergeant watched intently as Monica approached from the car park. The main entrance was a large door of wire-meshed glass banded by wide, dark blue painted wooden frames.

  ‘There you are, M’am’ he said as she pushed open the door.

  ‘Here I am, sergeant,’ she replied.

  ‘We’ve been trying to contact you, urgently, as it happens, M’am.’

  She sensed his barely contained satisfaction.

  ‘Why is that, sergeant?’

  ‘Problem over one of your interviewees, M’am, the teenager, Robert Julian,’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Apparently, he’s run away from home, M’am. His mother’s in a right old state, Harwood’s out there with her now. The Chief Constable been on.’

  ‘This is regrettable,’ said Commander Scott. Monica’s call had been connected instantly.

  ‘It is, I …’

  ‘Sort it out asap, would you? We really wouldn’t want the press getting hold, would we?’

  When Monica had heard Constable Harwood’s account of his visit to Paula Julian, she prepared to go home with two bundles of case notes. She quashed the temptation to leave the station by the back door. As she passed through reception the desk sergeant was talking to a colleague. She wished them both goodnight. They watched her cross the car park and agreed that she was a sight too cheerful for someone who’d just caused an almighty cock up.

  At the cottage Monica opened wide the back door and the windows onto the garden, hoping that the soft evening air would draw away the smell of damp. She paused in the doorway, noticing how white flowers appeared to step forward and become spectral in the twilight. Beside the door was a rose, still in its pot. The variety was Prince Klaus, it had been a leaving gift from the station secretaries. On the gift card they had written ‘Now that you’re going to have roses round the cottage door’. Prince Klaus was a standard rose; she had not decided where best to plant it out. As she watched the garden she became acutely aware of the silence of the countryside, a silence only deepened by its occasional noises: the movement of small and purposeful nocturnal animals, the buffet of a moth against the light bulb, some settlement in the old cob wall, a bough bending beneath the landing of a night bird. Once in the distance there was the reverse roar of engines as an aircraft returned to St Mawgan.

  She ate a banana which was so ripe that its flavour seemed artificial and began to spread the pages of statements and notes on the kitchen table. She marked the pages with numbers in sequence, sometimes she changed her mind about the order of the papers and added As and Bs to the numbers.

  There were now too many suspects. Sometimes this happened, there were none and then there were several and each one of the several, it could be reasoned, had a cogent motive.

  Graham Jarvis, Robin Harvey, Roxanna, Captain Nyland and the shadow figure of the American marine. Somehow, in the basement stored files of Newquay police station, they had managed to retain one small photographic image of the marine, black and white and deadpan. An image both immediately recognisable and utterly indistinguishable from those faces captured by the urging, clamouring photo journalists who had flocked to Vietnam to document America going wrong. Then there was another possibility, a new boyfriend, a man that Amanda, for all her lack of control and her indiscretion, had managed to keep a secret. Even Pat Henestan, thanks to the diligence of Jones, had acquired a mildly criminal past, prosecuted for his involvement in auction ringing. And now a disappearing teenage boy.

  ‘Had you actually accused the boy of something?’ Commander Scott had asked.

  The kitchen had become chilled by the night air, Monica’s spine was stiff from hunching over the table and her mouth dry from too many cigarettes smoked.

  ‘There is such a thing as over-thinking,’ Garth had sometimes used to caution.

  It was just after midnight when she piled the papers back into the folders and stood up. She went to the sink and, catching sight of the reflection in the night blacked window glass, she seemed to see not her own but her father’s face. Lined and haggard and rather older than she had thought herself to be. She yanked the curtain on its wire across the face and locked the door and went to bed. She dreamed that she was standing in the queue of the self-service restaurant at the college in Sunningdale Park. Jones was there, sitting at a table with Garth. Garth was in a wheelchair and someone had tucked a blanket made of knitted squares around his knees. She knew that the person in the queue behind her was waiting for her to turn around but when she did so it was not the man that she had expected it to be. Instead, Captain Nyland stood there, he was holding one of the brown wood patterned trays and he smiled at her as though they were good friends. She stirred and the dream ended.

  She woke early and went downstairs and watched from the cottage window as the milkman’s van drew up. John Cowburn had not yet returned.

  She stood at the back door drinking tea and smoking a cigarette. An early bee hovered over a mound of purple aubretia. Visiting a flower, it would seem to have finished and rise and start to fly away, only to pause and lower itself again onto the same bloom. The telephone rang.

  ‘I’ve been on to the station, M’am, no news of the Julian boy yet. However, we have had a confirmation from one of the platform staff at Bodmin Road station, he says he remembered Conrad Gertsmann getting off the Paddington train early on the Wednesday morning, he saw him go out and pick up his car from the car park. I managed to speak to Mr Gerstmann late last night, and he has no objection to us speaking to the boy, it’s the mother who’s being obstructive.’

  ‘Right, we’ll get over there first thing, before she can start shouting for her solicitor, and see if he knows where Robert Julian might have got to. I’ll pick you up on the way.’

  Sergeant Bee stood waiting on the tarmac drive of the small bungalow. In the window of the house next door a woman was laying a table with Golden Shred marmalade and a plated toast rack. She and the sergeant nodded to one another as he opened the passenger door of Monica’s car.

 
; As he placed a flat zippered brief case in the footwell she said ‘Of course, if Robert Julian turns up at the bottom of a cliff, the press will have a field day.’

  Watching the road ahead he was solid and unemotional. He said

  ‘I doubt it’s going to be anything dramatic with him. After all, according to the officers attending, he was well prepared, he took money and a change of clothes.’

  Monica, silently, felt better and was grateful.

  They reached St Columb Major and she said that as it was still early she would take a turn around the town.

  ‘I need to familiarise myself, try to make some connections.’

  It was part of her working practice to make such geographical connections, to understand how streets were linked in routes of travel, to observe the façades of the addresses recorded in a file, the names on bell pushes, the curtains and the vantage point of windows and the black box stages of the rooms beyond those windows. Similarly, she made connections between things, the commonplace props of peoples’ lives. She would become absorbed by the contents of a drawer – the picture postcards and the bottle opener, the gas bills and nail scissors and guarantee certificates and souvenir programmes.

  ‘Not sure that there’s all that much to see in St Columb,’ the sergeant replied.

  She did not tell him that he was wrong, that there was always something to be seen. She said only ‘That’s all right, I’ll take a look anyway.’

  At the top of the town posters on the cattle market wall advertised the next sale by auction. A woman was cleaning the windows of the Silver Ball pub, a man was stowing sweep’s brushes into a small white van. Outside Glanville’s the ironmonger’s tools and plastic sacks were ranged neatly on the pavement. Further along Fair Street more businesses were opening for the day, two estate agents and two banks, a dairy and a wool shop and a shoe shop, a jeweller named Eagle and a greengrocer. There was a bookshop named the Turangalila Press, for crossword purposes Monica made a mental note of the word. The doors of some of the small terraced houses stood open to the narrow pavement. A baby, put out for air in a brown pram, looked on. At a house beside the churchyard a sign for Morning Coffee hung in a window full of willow pattern china.