The Dead Hand of History

by Sally Spencer

  The mention of ‘Auntie’ Putibai had got Louisa thinking of other pseudo-relatives.

  ‘Do you know what?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I do miss Uncle Charlie. I know he’s only just gone, but I already miss him.’

  And so do I, Paniatowski thought. So do I.

  Detective Constable Jack Crane was sitting on a stool in his bedsit, with a well-thumbed book of Andrew Marvell’s poems open on the small kitchen table in front of him.

  As he read, his lips moved, not because they needed to, but because he liked the feel of them as they formed themselves around the words.

  An hundred years should go to praise

  Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze

  Being both a university graduate and a policeman was not an easy furrow to plough, he thought with that small part of his mind which was still refusing to be absorbed by the poem.

  His old university friends – still mindlessly quoting the words of Marx and Kropotkin, even three years after leaving their ivory tower – looked down on him as some kind of traitor.

  And his colleagues in the Force? They didn’t even know he’d been to university.

  For, lady, you deserve this state,

  Nor would I love at lower rate.

  It had been a conscious decision on his part to keep his academic background a secret from the people he worked with, and it was one he had never regretted taking, because the simple fact was that most bobbies – and not just Neanderthals like Sergeant Walker – distrusted a man with an education. And when even a grammar-school education was looked on with suspicion, a man with a 1st Class Honours degree in English Literature would have to be a complete fool not to keep quiet about it.

  While his lips continued to mouth Marvell’s words, his mind turnpped to the murder investigation in which he, as a detective constable, would be playing a minor role.

  He already knew much more about the case than most of the other junior offices involved in it, because, unlike them, he had been at the bakery with Walker, and so had learned the identity of the two victims.

  He wondered if Linda Szymborska and Tom Whittington had been lovers, and decided that they probably had.

  The grave’s a fine and private place,

  But none I think do there embrace.

  And where were the bodies now?

  Not in a fine and private place. That much was certain.

  But wherever they were, he would be one of the people who would be looking for them.

  ‘It’s a crappy job, but you expect to be given crappy jobs when you’re working for a crappy boss, don’t you?’ Detective Sergeant Walker had asked him over the phone.

  But Crane didn’t see it like that at all. Finding Linda and Tom might not provide the solution to the case, but there would at least be some satisfaction in knowing that he would be bringing two people who died for their love a little closer to their final dignified rest.

  He slammed the book shut, suddenly angry with himself.

  Two people who died for love!

  He was just as bad as his old friends at university, he told himself. The only difference between them was that while they spouted political claptrap, his claptrap was romantic.

  Died for love!

  How did he know they had even been in love? What gave him the right to automatically think of them as ‘star-crossed lovers’?

  It could have been no more than lust that held them together – the hot and gasping coupling of two people who couldn’t stand each other personally, but formed a perfect union in the bedroom.

  ‘Maybe I shouldn’t be a policeman at all,’ he said, still angry with himself. ‘Maybe I should catch tuberculosis and become a poet!’

  ‘I’m not complaining about having to look after your mother, Colin,’ said Mrs Taylor, in a voice thoroughly drenched with complaint, ‘but I was under the impression that you were putting her into residential care today.’

  ‘Yes, I was going to,’ Colin Beresford admitted. ‘But then something went wrong.’

  ‘Went wrong? What do you mean?’

  He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that he’d forgotten – couldn’t admit that, but for his oversight, Mrs Taylor would have had the afternoon and early evening to herself.

  ‘I think it must have been some sort of administrative mistake at the home,’ he said.

  ‘Well, they’d better get it fixed soon, whatever it is,’ Mrs Taylor told him, severely. ‘Because looking after your mother is like looking after a child – worse than looking after a child.’

  And as she spoke, she glanced across at the subject of this conversation, who was sitting on the edge of the sofa, drooling down her blouse and gazing blankly into space.

  ‘I’ll ring them first thing in the morning, and tell them to hurry the process along,’ Beresford promised.

  Mrs Taylor’s eyes filled with suspicion. ‘Are you sure you really want to put her in a home?’ she said.

  ‘She needs to be in a home,’ Beresford replied.

  ‘That’s not what I asked you, Colin, and you know it. Do you want to put her in a home?’

  Of course he didn’t. She was his mother – or, at least, what was left of his mother. And despite all the evidence to the contrary, he kept hoping that if he tried just a little bit harder, she would show some signs of being her old self again.

  ‘I know you never expected to be looking after her today, so I’m more than willing to pay you a bit more than usual,’ Beresford said weakly.

  ‘It’s not a question of money, Colin,’ Mrs Taylor said. ‘It’s a question of what looking after your mother involves. I’m not a trained nurse, you know. I used to be a hairdresser, which – unlike this one – is a very clean job.’

  ‘I know,’ Beresford said.

  ‘And I’ll tell you this much for nothing, Colin,’ Mrs Beresford continued unrelentingly, ‘I’m not prepared to keep being her nursemaid for much longer.’

  ‘I know. I can understand that.’

  ‘And it’s not just me. Nobody on the street is willing to do it – however much you offer to pay them!’

  Beresford turned towards his mother.

  ‘Save yourself, Mother!’ he pleaded silently. ‘Do something – just one thing – to show that there’s a little of your old spark left!’

  His mother looked vaguely in his direction – though he had no evidence she was actually looking at him – and replied with a loud bodily noise.

  ‘She’s messed herself again,’ Mrs Taylor said, not quite hiding her disgust. ‘She’s doing it more and more often now. She’s got to go, Colin – there’s no two ways about it.’

  ‘Yes, she has,’ Beresford said, as he felt a tear run down his cheek.

  TWELVE

  Sergeant Ted Walker looked, with disgust, around the tiny living room of his tiny rented flat.

  It was a shithole, he told himself, not for the first time – a real honest-to-God shithole.

  The wallpaper was faded and peeling off the wall, the carpet was frayed at the edges, the window leaked when it rained, the cold-water tap in the kitchen dripped persistently. And while he knew that all these things could be easily fixed, he didn’t really see the point in bothering, because that would just make the place an improved shithole.

  He had had a nice home once – a pleasant semi-detached in a quiet cul-de-sac. And then his wife – the ungrateful bitch that she was! – had run away with a door-to-door insurance salesman called Byron Jones.

  A door-to-door insurance salesman! A Welsh door-to-door salesman!

  Not a fighter pilot or a heavyweight boxer – that, at least, he could have understood – but a weedy little bastard who tramped the streets, collecting a pound here and one pound fifty there.

  His mates – when he had still had some – had really been very good about the whole thing.

  ‘You’re better off without her,’ they’d told him.

  ‘She must have been mad to leave you for that little creep,
’ they’d said consolingly.

  ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t come crawling back on her hands and knees any day now,’ they prophesied.

  Yes, the men had been good.

  But not the women!

  Not the wives of those mates of his!

  They had looked on him with contempt – which was bad.

  Or as if he had become nothing more than a figure of fun – which was even worse.

  He didn’t know exactly what had brought about this change in their attitude.

  Perhaps Doris had said something to them herself, before she ran away with the weed.

  Perhaps they had needed no encouragement, but had cooked it up all by themselves – in their own nasty, poisonous little minds.

  But however it had got there, he’d known what they were thinking – because he could see it in their eyes.

  ‘You’d have thought he was quite good in bed, wouldn’t you? But he can’t have been, or she’d never have left him.’

  ‘There mustn’t be much lead in his pencil.’

  ‘I doubt he can even get it up at all.’

  ‘Well, you were all wrong, you bloody cows!’ he shouted now, his voice bouncing off the walls of his shithole living room. ‘You couldn’t have been more wrong.’

  Of course he could bloody get it up! Any time he wanted to! It was just that in the last couple of years with Doris, he hadn’t got it up very often.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised that the women had turned on him like that, he told himself. What else should he have expected?

  Because all women – women everywhere, and women throughout time – had always taken pleasure in crushing men’s balls. They loved it. It was what they lived for.

  And Chief Inspector Monika Paniatowski – with her tight figure and her superior bloody attitude – was a world-champion ball-crusher if he’d ever seen one.

  But she’d taken on more than she could handle this time. He wasn’t some whining little puppy, like Beresford, lying at her feet and yearning for a pat on the head or a few words of encouragement. He was a real man, and he wouldn’t be pushed around.

  Oh, yes, indeed, Doris would soon learn that it had been a big mistake to tangle with Sergeant Ted . . .

  ‘I didn’t mean Doris,’ he told the wall. ‘I meant Monika. That’s who I meant – bloody Monika!’

  It was almost midnight. Stan Szymborska was asleep, but not at rest. He twisted and turned, and sometimes he emitted a soft groan. If Linda had been there beside him, she would have known what was happening – would have understood that he was having the dream again.

  But Linda was not there – nor ever would be again.

  In his dream, Stan is back in the prisoner-of-war camp. In German, it is called a stalag luft – which means that it is reserved exclusively for airmen – and it is divided into four sections, one for the British, one for the Canadians, one for the Americans and one for the Poles.

  The British, Canadian and American prisoners are fed an adequate if monotonous diet, and sometimes there is a Red Cross parcel to add a little variety. They are allowed to ‘associate in all kinds of ways’, and so there are football matches and educational lectures, bridge tournaments and chess knockouts. And though these prisoners feel it is their duty to escape – and will do so whenever the opportunity presents itself – they are willing to admit their life in the camp is boring, rather than difficult.

  It is different for the Poles. They are regarded by the Nazis – and especially by Colonel Schiller, the camp commandant – as being less than human. Their section of the camp is dirtier and meaner than the rest of the complex. Like all the other prisoners, they are not – in accordance with the Geneva Convention – made to work, but unlike the rest, they are not allowed to play, either.

  When the other prisoners are given potatoes, they are given potato peelings. When the Red Cross parcels arrive, none of them finds its way across the wire to the Polish section. And when winter comes, and the other prisoners are issued with fuel for the pot-bellied stoves which dominate their huts, the Poles miss out again, though even if they were given fuel, they would have nothing to burn it in – because they are not allowed stoves, either.

  Stan, who has been in this camp for six months, sometimes catches himself wondering whether conditions are any better for the Poles in other camps. But when this happens, he quickly tells himself that such speculation is pointless. It doesn’t matter how Poles are treated elsewhere. He must deal with conditions as he finds them – and try to survive if he can.

  Despite the difficulties – or perhaps because of them – morale is high in the Polish ‘ghetto’. What little the prisoners have, they share, and when one man is weakened through illness, the others give him a portion of their own meagre rations, in the hope that, with more food, he will become strong again.

  It is early in the seventh month of Stan’s confinement that things start to go wrong.

  One night, Józef outlines a plan he has thought up for their escape. It is a good plan, and it might just work, but it is never implemented, because the next day the guards come and take him away, and he is never seen again.

  Another night, Piotr – drunk on the vodka they have managed to produce from their potato peelings – amuses the whole hut by telling scurrilous stories about Hitler’s sexual failure with women. And the next day, he is gone too.

  Stefan, the unofficial leader of the hut, calls a meeting.

  ‘There is a traitor in our midst,’ he says gravely.

  Most of the others nod in agreement, because it is a conclusion they have already reached themselves.

  Only Tadeujz – thin, nervous, Tadeujz, who has bulging eyes like a wild hare’s – seems uncertain.

  ‘We must find this traitor,’ Stefan says.

  ‘And how . . . how will we do that?’ Tadeujz wonders.

  ‘He will not have betrayed us unless there was something in it for him,’ Stefan says. ‘Like Judas in the Bible, he will have been given his thirty pieces of silver. And he will have stored his blood-money in this hut, for where else could he have put it?’

  ‘Perhaps they have not paid him at all,’ Tadeujz says. ‘Perhaps he will get his reward later.’

  ‘Perhaps that is so,’ Stefan agrees. ‘But you will all consent to a search of your personal possessions anyway.’

  ‘Maybe the Germans used hidden microphones to hear what we have been talking about,’ Tadeujz says, almost frantic now. ‘We should search the rafters for microphones.’

  ‘Each man will submit to the search, while the others look on,’ Stefan says undeterred.

  ‘Not me!’ Tadeujz protests. ‘I refuse.’

  ‘And we will start with Tadeujz,’ Stefan says coldly.

  They find half a chocolate bar hidden in his bedding.

  It is not much in the way of evidence, but since none of the other fliers have seen a chocolate bar since before they were shot down, it is more than enough to convict him in their eyes.

  ‘It’s been planted on me!’ Tadeujz screams. ‘It must have been put there by the real spy.’

  ‘So now you think there’s a spy after all, do you?’ Stefan asks.

  ‘Yes! But it isn’t me. I swear it isn’t me.’

  Two of the other men grab his arms, pinioning him, while a third wraps a gag around his mouth.

  ‘Take him over to the centre of the hut,’ Stefan says. ‘I want his hands on the table – palms down.’

  ‘Palms down?’ Stan repeats to himself. ‘Why would he want Tadeujz’s hands on the table palms down?’

  ‘What are you going to do to him, Stefan?’ he asks.

  ‘Wait and see,’ Stefan tells him.

  He goes over to the corner of the room, and carefully jiggles one of the boards in the wall until it comes free.

  Tadeujz, who has his back to these proceedings, attempts to twist round to see what is going on, but the men who are holding him do not allow him to.

  Stefan puts his hand into the space
behind the board – and when he brings it out again, it is holding a hatchet.

  The black rat was six inches long, and two and half years old. With luck on its side, it could live for another two and half years, though – statistically – the chances were that it would be dead within six months. The black rat knew none of this. But it did know there were other living things – non-rats – which had periodically posed a threat to its survival, and were therefore to be avoided at all cost.

  There were none of these non-rats in the old bakery which the rat had chosen to make its home. Here it was safe, and if it scurried across the floor, it was not through fear but simply because that was what rats did.

  Even so, it exercised caution, choosing to make a detour around the large metal structure which human beings would have recognized as a car – and not just any car, but an E-type Jag – on the off-chance that something dangerous lurked beneath the chassis.

  The objects of the rat’s journey were to be found just beyond the car, lying on the ground. One of these objects was over ten times the rodent’s length, the other over eleven times. But the rat did not know – or care about – that, either.

  What did interest it was that both objects were a source of easily obtainable food, and now that it had reached them it was working out – in its little ratty mind – which one it would choose.

  Its decision to select the woman had nothing to do with her sex – of which, once again, the rodent was ignorant. Rather, it was motivated by ease. For while both corpses had stumps which had once been connected to hands, the woman also had extensive facial lacerations, which made harvesting the juicy meat so much simpler.

  THIRTEEN

  Annie looked smart in her nurse’s uniform, Charlie Woodend thought, gazing fondly at her across the breakfast table.

  Very smart – and very competent.

  And caring, too. She definitely looked caring.

  She must surely be an inspiration to her fellow nurses, and it was beyond doubt that her patients would think she was wonderful and all the young doctors would immediately fall in love with her.