‘Yes, sir. I know you were planning on going back with us at midnight but I don’t think that’s going to be possible. There’s a storm closing in behind us and another coming down from Islay.’
‘We’re not turning back, are we?’
‘No, sir, but Captain Store says we’ll have to stay over in Douglas tonight. Perhaps longer if things get worse.’
‘Aren’t there ferries?’
‘I very much doubt it, sir, not in this weather. It looks like we’ll all be spending Christmas on the Isle of Man. Sorry.’ Liddell sighed. This was the last thing he needed. ‘So am L’
He reached out and touched the coffee cup on the little table in front of him. It had gone cold long ago. He sighed again. ‘Perhaps you could have the steward bring me a brandy.’ The uniformed man nodded. ‘Certainly, sir.’
‘A large one.’
* * *
Katherine Copeland and Morris Black reached the down-at-the-heels house in the Vale of Heath just after dark. Both of them had been lost in thought since leaving Fenny Stratford and neither one had exchanged a word for the last quarter of an hour.
Drawing up in front of the house, Katherine switched off the engine and stared out through the windscreen. It was still snowing, and at the end of the street beyond the ruins of the last house, the bleak, deserted reaches of Hampstead Heath were lost in utter blackness.
‘What will you do now?’ the young woman asked.
‘Very little, at least for the moment,’ answered Black. ‘This man Snow won’t be in his office until after Boxing Day. I’ll just have to wait.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant Christmas.’
‘I don’t keep Christmas. Not really. Nor Hanukkah, for that matter.’
‘No family?’
‘My father’s dead. My mother has been staying with her sister in Devon since the spring. I don’t have anyone else.’
‘No brothers or sisters?’
‘My younger brother, Jacob, died when I was fifteen. In a zeppelin raid, as a matter of fact.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’
Black shrugged. ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about. He was only five; I barely knew him. It was all a very long time ago.’ He looked across at her. ‘What about you?’
Katherine spoke out of the darkness. ‘My family is all back in the States. This is the first Christmas I’ve ever spent away from home. Quent Reynolds is having a lunch tomorrow in his flat at Landsdowne House. I suppose I’ll go to that.’
‘And tonight?’
‘Nothing. Home and sleep, I guess. Everyone says there’s some sort of unspoken truce so there won’t be any raids for the next few nights.’ She paused. ‘Do you think that’s true?’
‘Probably.’ There was a short silence. ‘Would you like to come in?’ he said quietly. ‘You and Fleming seemed to have stocked the larder rather well. I can offer you a drink at least.’
‘I’d like that.’
No. 2 Byron Villas was typical of middle-class housing built in London at the close of the last century. A drawing room, dining room and kitchen were on the ground floor, with three small bedrooms and a bath above, the two narrow levels joined by a simple staircase that ran up the adjoining wall.
The house had been let empty and Knight’s people had only furnished it with the necessities. The floors were wood or linoleum, uncovered except for a threadbare Axminster in the drawing room, and there was minimal furniture.
Two well-worn upholstered chairs in front of the electric fire in the drawing room, table and four chairs in the dining room, folding table and two chairs in the kitchen. The rest of the furniture and decorations were shades from previous owners: an elongated area of unfaded wallpaper in the dining room where a sideboard might have stood, similar patches on the walls marking framed prints or paintings long since removed.
Nail holes above each doorway in the house, vague indicators of crucifixes and Catholic ownership. A dark stain on the battleship linoleum in front of the grumbling old refrigerator, sign of a forgotten kitchen accident.
Morris Black could read the domestic runes as easily as printed words on paper; his own flat was a journal of such marks and jottings, each one telling a tale about the life he’d lived with Fay.
He found a bottle of brandy in the cupboard above the sink, poured two glasses and brought them to the drawing room. Katherine had pushed back the blackout curtains and switched off the lights. She was standing at the small bay window, looking out into the night. Black handed her a glass.
‘A gesund dir in pupik,’ he said, raising his glass.
‘Is that a toast?’ Katherine asked, standing beside him.
‘Not really,’ Black answered, smiling and remembering. ‘It’s something my father used to say.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘Literally? ‘Good health to your navel.’ The proper toast in Yiddish is l’chayim, “to life,” or you could say sholem aleichem, “peace be unto you.”’
‘Is there a response?’
‘Aleichem sholem. “To you be peace.”’
‘Sholem aleichem, Morris Black.’
‘Aleichem sholem, Katherine Copeland.’
They touched glasses and drank, looking out at the gently falling snow. After a moment Katherine put her glass down on the windowsill, half turned and put one hand on Black’s shoulder. Rising slightly, she kissed him softly on the lips.
‘Teach me to say something in Yiddish, Morris. A question,’ she whispered.
‘What question?’
‘How do you say, “Will you make love to me?”’
‘No.’
‘Is that an answer to the question or just that you won’t teach me how to say it?’
‘Both.’
‘Why?’ she asked quietly. ‘Why won’t you let me give you this, Morris? I know you’d never ask me on your own. Why?’
Black sighed. He’d known it would come to this, felt it again after leaving the two men from Bletchley. Known what needed to be said. ‘Trust. You lied to me, Katherine. About who you were and what you were doing.’
‘I didn’t have any choice.’
‘There’s always a choice.’
‘When it was important, I told you the truth. Jesus, Morris, doesn’t what we’ve been through mean anything? Don’t you think you can trust me now?’
‘I don’t know who to trust.’
‘Me. Believe that, Morris, please.’
‘I don’t know what to believe, either. About anything.’
‘Is that the only reason you won’t make love to me?’
‘No.’
‘Is it because of your wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s dead, Morris. You’re still alive.’
‘That doesn’t mean I love her any less.’
‘I asked you to make love to me, Morris.’ Katherine stepped away from him. Releasing him. ‘And now you’re turning it into something awful.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he answered, knowing that what she said was true. He knew that it wasn’t lack of desire stopping him; it was guilt, a feeling that he would be betraying memory. He smiled to himself, remembering Fay, wondering how she would have dealt with his problem. Probably tell him to stop being a fool and get on with it. Always so wise and relentlessly practical in the face of logic.
Katherine spoke quietly in the gathering darkness. ‘Do you have to love the person you make love with?’
‘I always thought so.’
‘So did I. Once. Now I’m not so sure. All I’m certain about right this minute is that I want to go to bed with you. Is that wrong?’
‘No,’ he said after a moment. She kissed him again, pressing against his chest. He felt himself respond this time, the hard ache in his heart he’d kept so long suddenly changing, almost melting with the warmth of her body so close to his. But he pushed her away. Gently. Dear God in heaven. Forgive me, Fay, he thought. No. Forgive yourself.
‘What now?’ she murmured, refusing t
o take her hands away from his shoulders this time.
‘I’m making a moral judgement.’
‘On me or you?’
‘Neither. Both. The world.’
Katherine moved one hand down from his shoulder and laid it flat against his chest. With her other hand she took his and brought it up to cup her breast and shivered at the feel of it.
‘You’re not responsible for the morality of the world, Morris. And you don’t have to forget the past, you just have to make peace with it.’ There was another silence. Under her hand Katherine could feel the steady pulse of his beating heart and knew that he could feel hers as well.
‘What about the future?’
‘It doesn’t exist, Morris. Not tonight.’
Outside, in the darkness, the snow continued to fall. Not very far away it would be whispering over the cold earth of the cemetery in Golders Green, lying over it like a blanket, warming Fay as she slept. Imagining it, he smiled then looked down into Katherine’s waiting eyes.
‘Vilstu schlofen mit mir?’ he said, asking and answering the question at last.
‘Yes.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
Friday, December 27,1940
10:00 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time
By ten o’clock in the morning Dr Charles Tennant was driving his Bentley south on the Streatham High Road heading for Smitham Bottom, Coulsdon and the Cane Hill Mental Hospital. Behind him the city was enjoying its brief respite from the raids, locked in a rolling yellow fog that had rolled down from the marshes the night before to melt the last of the newly fallen snow. He almost had his quarry now and he drove quickly, eager to ring down the final curtain.
Even on Christmas Eve, his attempts to trace Raymond Loudermilk’s movements after leaving Wick Hall School had proved remarkably easy. Acting on the assumption that Loudermilk had almost certainly come in contact with the law sometime between 1914 and the present, Tennant placed a call to Nosey Smith at Special Branch and was once again given access to the wealth of information in the Central Records Office. Thankfully, Scotland Yard, like the criminals it pursued, took no holidays.
Searching through the index under the letter L, the psychiatrist wasn’t particularly surprised to find that Loudermilk indeed had a card made out in his name. The surprising thing was that it contained only one conviction. In July 1917, Loudermilk, then fifteen, had been arrested for violently assaulting a boy three years his junior at a funfair in the south-London district of Battersea.
After a magistrate’s hearing held under Section 11 of the Prevention of Crime Act, Loudermilk was given a two-year sentence and sent to a borstal institution for training. Three months later, after a series of violent incidents, his borstal licence was revoked and he was reassigned to the Boys’ Wing of Wandsworth Prison. Six weeks after that, there was another violent altercation, this time with a warder, followed by two suicide attempts.
It was concluded that Loudermilk could not be kept within the general prison population, even after a long period of confinement in a straitjacket. After examination by the Wandsworth medical officer, Dr Allan Pearson, Raymond Loudermilk was remanded to the Cane Hill Mental Hospital for a period of four years under the authority of the Mental Deficiency Act. His release date was not on file. Although Loudermilk had been a minor at the time of his arrest, he was listed as having no fixed address and no next of kin.
Dr Richard Hillman, the director of Cane Hill, had already left for the holidays when Tennant called but the administrative assistant who answered the phone made an appointment for the morning after Boxing Day. Frustrated by having to wait for almost three days, Tennant had spent Christmas alone in his Cheyne Walk Mews office, assembling his notes.
Enjoying the feel of the Bentley’s wheel beneath his hands, Tennant continued his southward journey. From Tooting Bec to Croydon and even beyond to Purley and Riddle’s Down, the road was relentlessly suburban, the old villages and the newer, grey-faced ‘garden cities’ melding into a long, bleak unbroken wall, but at Smitham Bottom, just past the Coulsdon railway halt, the landscape suddenly became more rural. Open country replaced the cloying lines of pseudo-cottages, rolling chalk hills and gentle downs marking the farthest limits of the city.
Following the directions in his RAC guide, Tennant turned off the main road onto a narrower track; ancient hedgerows, deep woods and downland farms ranged on either side, overseen by a long high ridge that ran away at an angle to the west. Half a mile later he turned again, swinging between the high stone gates that marked the entrance to Cane Hill, then climbed along the winding drive between the trees, eventually reaching the asylum itself.
It was monstrous, of course, places like Cane Hill always were. The asylum was a featureless pile of brick built by prison labour at the turn of the century, identical to the other institutions of its type that seemed to have chosen this particular part of the countryside. As well as Cane Hill there was Netherne Mental Hospital, no more than three miles away below Farthing Downs, and Caterham Asylum to the east. Between Caterham and Reigate there were half a dozen smaller clinics for those who could afford their special care.
Cane Hill was made up of a central block, two sprawling wings jutting out from it to the north and south, and two minor wings at the rear. Every window on every floor was glassed, wire-meshed and barred. The grounds were sodded in short, mean-spirited turf gone brown with winter. The bleakness of the place was made even worse by the heavy fog, great trails and wisps of it caught against the damp, dark brickwork like the remnants of a rotted shroud.
Hillman was seated behind his large, utilitarian metal desk when Tennant was ushered into his office. The asylum director was in his late fifties, slim, his close-cropped hair and the sides of the second and third fingers of his left hand the same nicotine shade.
He had a thin, clean-shaven, fox-like face with prominent cheekbones and a knife-edged Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down between his navy blue bow tie and his small, pointed chin. A pair of circular, wire-framed glasses perched on a hooked, wide-nostrilled nose. He was wearing a plain, blue suit and a white shirt.
The desk in front of him was almost bare. To the left there was a single black telephone, to the right a simple wooden letter box. Between them was a large unframed sheet of dark green blotting paper. At the edge of the blotter on the bottom left corner was a row of sharpened Eagle pencils in a perfectly straight line. In the upper right corner three identical fountain pens waited to be used.
To the ordinary eye the desk would be taken as an orderly reflection of the man who sat behind it. To Tennant the surface of the desk marked the overt expression of an obsessive-compulsive neurotic. Dr Richard Hillman was half as mad as the inmates he controlled.
‘Dr Tennant.’ The voice was flat, almost metallic.
‘Dr Hillman.’
The Cane Hill psychiatrist nodded in the direction of a padded chair. Tennant seated himself. Another nod and the secretary withdrew, closing the door behind her. In the distance, muffled by the thick glass of the office windows and the sound deadening of the bricks, Tennant could hear the grumbling of aircraft engines. Spitfires at Kenley revving up for a practice sortie in the fog.
‘According to my secretary, you appear to have some interest in one of our ex-patients.’ As Hillman spoke, he used his left hand to disturb the row of pencils then rearrange them again.
Tennant nodded. ‘Raymond Loudermilk. He was sent here in 1918, remanded from Wandsworth.’
‘Yes.’ The pencils askew, the pencils aligned. The movement of Hillman’s hand kept distracting Tennant and he suddenly realised that the man didn’t have the slightest idea of what the hand was doing.
‘Were you director of Cane Hill at that time?’
‘No.’
‘Did you know Loudermilk?’
‘Yes.’ The pencils moved, then returned to their position. ‘I was on staff here. An interesting case.’
‘How so?’
‘Perhaps I should know why you’ve taken
an interest in him first.’
‘His name came up in connection with a patient.’
‘I see.’ Hillman didn’t sound convinced. The pencils moved magically under his twitching fingers.
‘My patient and Loudermilk would seem to have a great deal in common,’ said Tennant, lying easily. ‘It occurred to me that I might publish.’
‘Ah.’ Hillman nodded. This was something that he could understand. He frowned then the small mouth opened as though he were about to speak. The fingers moved. Tennant knew what he was going to say and spoke first.
‘Of course, I’d be more than happy to share credit with you in the article.’ Tennant paused. ‘If I do publish, that is.’ He paused again. ‘I suppose that would depend on what I could find out about Loudermilk,’ he added, smiling. The request made and the payment arranged.
Hillman smiled briefly and nodded. The fingers stopped moving for a moment. Tennant’s transparent blandishment had done its job. Hillman sat back in his chair.
‘Yes.’ He nodded, tenting his hands over a non-existent stomach. ‘It might be useful. Loudermilk was quite an exceptional case.’
‘How was he diagnosed?’
‘Restricted ego, substitutive, totemic.’
‘Not psychotic?’
Hillman smiled condescendingly. ‘Dear me, no, Dr Tennant.’
‘But he was violent. Extremely so.’
‘Only in terms of his substitutive neuroses,’ Hillman pontificated. ‘His anger was aimed at inducing his substituted mother-image to accomplish his wishes. He had no mother, ergo, he transferred those frustrations onto society in general. Thus, violent expression.’
Tennant nodded. Hillman was clearly one of the new post-Freudians. The words he had spoken were a perfect parroting of Ian Suttie’s The Origins of Love and Hate. Suttie was one of the typically British School who would rather deal with the esoteric nuances of love rather than the raw realities of sex.
‘You mentioned totemism?’
‘Yes. By far the most interesting feature of the case.’ Hillman offered the bland smile again. ‘Were you aware of Loudermilk’s obsession with the works of John Martin?’
A Gathering of Saints Page 40