‘Well, you’re jolly likely to get bashed over the head if you carry on like that.’
‘That will be your fault, then, won’t it?’
‘I don’t see how, I won’t be the one bashing you.’
‘Who will then?’
‘Anybody could.’
‘It’s up to you to keep an eye on me.’
I put my hat on. Jenny adjusted it and said, ‘Do you always put it on skew-whiff, or just when I’m around?’
‘I put it on the way I always do.’
‘In that case you have been walking around all your life with your hat on skew-whiff. Aren’t you glad you met me?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose I am.’
Jenny rolled her eyes. ‘I see we are going to have to do some work with you. Oh just say yes, for Pete’s sake. Don’t you see you’ve got no choice? I’m just going to follow you otherwise.’
‘But mustn’t you go to work?’
‘I’ve left the Anaglypta Mill. I found Aunt Agatha’s Premium Bonds. There was £97. I’m going to find another job.’
I stood staring intently at her. She balled her fist in an amusing show of threatening to box me.
‘Don’t make me do it,’ she said.
‘All right then.’ I relented. ‘Have it your way.’
She held out her hand and I saw no other option but to shake it.
‘Where are you taking me now?’ she said.
‘I really don’t know. Where would you like to go?’
‘Somewhere nice.’
I thought for a moment. ‘Have you seen the Severn Junction signal box?’
‘Oh, Jack, I’m sure you take all your girls to the signal box. Take me somewhere . . . somewhere . . . I know, let’s go to Barker & Stroud’s and ask to speak to Magdalena’s sugar daddy.’
‘I’ve already telephoned. They told me he’s away for the time being.’
‘Did you know about him and Magdalena?’
‘I must say I didn’t. Although it should have been obvious, really.’
Jenny interlocked her arm in mine and we wandered through town. Whether by chance or intention we arrived at the Lyons tea shop where we went on that first day. We went in and ordered coffee. This was not something either of us would normally do, but Jenny insisted that our new partnership needed to be sealed with some sort of celebration.
‘Mr Barker always had a soft spot for her, you see. That’s why he chose her as the model for the Lindt Chocolate mural on the wall of his shop. He had a friend who worked in Harley Street, a special doctor who came to see her.’
‘Was she ill?’
‘She had a very rare condition that made her senses become distorted, like Alice in Wonderland. Sometimes she would feel herself very tall, so her head was almost touching the ceiling; and other times she would feel tiny, no bigger than a mouse. Or sometimes she said she could smell a noise, or hear a colour.’
‘That sounds rather fun.’
‘She said it was frightening. She also complained about an intruder, a girl dressed like her, knocking on the glass and demanding to be let in. But we always searched the grounds when that happened and never found anything. Even one time when it snowed, we didn’t even find a footprint.’
‘Did the doctor cure her?’
‘No, there is no cure. It’s connected with migraines, which was this chap’s specialism. He wanted to write about it and call it Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. I think he probably liked her, too. Everybody did. It was quite a black day in the home when she was beaten.’
‘What did they beat her for?’
‘For saying she wouldn’t go into service. All the girls were trained for this employment. She once told me about all the rules they were taught. You wouldn’t believe it. When meeting a member of the family in a corridor, you should turn your face to the wall. You must never speak unless with a specific necessary request or errand. You must on no account smile at an amusing story told by a member of the family in your presence, or even in any way indicate that you had heard it.’
‘I don’t think I would have liked to learn all that either.’
‘No, she didn’t. Then one day we had a visit from Lady Susan Seymour who talked to us about her travels and showed some lantern slides of Moon Beam, the Potawatomi Indian princess. She asked Magdalena what she wanted to be when she grew up and received the answer, Suffragette. That’s what she was beaten for. Magdalena knew quite a lot about Suffragettes because once a lady died and left to the orphanage her collection of the Illustrated London News.’
‘When you telephoned, they didn’t say when Mr Barker will be back? In that case, we must go and find Sister Beatrice first. Where is Povington?
‘Near Chirk, about an hour north of here on the train. But I understand the priory has been closed for many years.’
‘We could still go. Sister Beatrice might still be there.’
‘How would we find her? All we know about her is she is astigmatic.’
‘We could ask the local optician. I know,’ she said suddenly, ‘we will return her lost Bible.’
‘Where will we get her Bible?’
‘Couldn’t you get one from Lost Property?’ said Jenny.
Chapter 9
If you wanted to create an inventory of every item on this earth, and write all these items down in a ledger, you might think the task would be too much for one man and he would need to bequeath it to his son. But you would be wrong. Such a ledger already exists in the form of the Weeping Cross Railway Lost Property Book. False teeth, coffins, funerary urns, books, manikins, skulls, dead bats, live bats, cows, pigs, goats, monkeys, snakes, spiders, wooden legs, eye-patches, dead octopi, prams, musical instruments, old masters, gramophones, parasols, Japanese fans, stone giants, elephants’ tusks, elephant-foot umbrella stands, stags’ heads, small boys . . . everything that man is capable of losing has been lost and handed in. The Book is an inventory of the human race. Mr Jarley in the Lost Property Office was low in spirits because of a heavy cold but my request for a small travelling Bible, a rosary, a group photo of nuns and a pair of spectacles of a sort worn by astigmatics filled him with delight. The same delight, I suspect, exhibited by the hotel concierge who, after years of being asked to supply theatre tickets to see The Mousetrap, is one day asked to procure a ticket on the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way to Vladivostok.
Mr Jarley said he had drawers full of group photos of nuns. Did I want it in a frame, a locket, loose, sewn into a tea cosy or in an album? What sort of album? One containing other group photos of nuns with scenes from nunnery life? Or as the record of the life of the particular nun, beginning perhaps with a faded and creased photo of a blissful man in a backyard somewhere, holding a newborn baby as his wife looks on adoringly. And then progressing through the Christening, first steps taken, the birthdays and Christmases, a snap of her crying in the bath tub on the kitchen table, the first school photo and awkward onset of youth and with it the troubled countenance, the evidence of a heart torn by conflicting currents; and then, perhaps, the chap in battledress, painfully young, scarcely started shaving, staring out from the ellipse with a forced smile filled with uncertainty? The one who never returned and thus precipitated the decision to enter the convent? I said, if you’ve got one like that it would be ideal. To which he replied that he had many like that. What about a name? I told him Beatrice was the name but I was fully capable of writing it on the flyleaf myself. Mr Jarley answered that if I permitted him to swap photographs between albums he could provide me with one that perfectly answered my needs in all respects. Of course, he added, once you have finished with it, you will have to return the item. It will remain property of the Railway all the while it is in your possession, and he needed to have it back in case the lady in question should ever turn up and ask for it. What material did I want the rosary to be fashioned from? Wood, ivory, ebony, carved bone? And the Bible, which translation? King James, Tyndale’s, Taverner’s, Webster’s? In leather, cloth or wood? He had them all
. And as for spectacles of a sort worn by astigmatics, he was able to offer a variety of frame materials from simple wire to tortoiseshell and narwhal horn, and corrective lenses in a range of dioptric powers. I wondered aloud, as was my custom at such times, whatever would we do without him. He replied, sadly, that we should soon all find out the answer to that time-worn question because he had just that morning received a letter regretfully informing him that his services would not be required after Christmas.
The small travelling Bible, rosary, group photo of nuns and a pair of spectacles of a sort worn by astigmatics were all duly delivered to my office before the end of the day. The consignment also included the Cadbury Holt case file I had requisitioned. Or rather that particular file marked G–H. This included his notes on the numerous German counts he had disarmed of their swordsticks, the notorious case of Henbane Henrietta, and the Hail Mary Celeste. I had arranged to meet Jenny the next day at the ticket barrier, and the prospect of a jaunt to Povington, although I did not hold out any hope that it would prove fruitful, put a spring in my step as I left the office that evening.
As I entered the street, a car engine started up. A seal grey Morris 1000 moved away from the kerb and slid up alongside me. The driver reached across and wound the window down. Our eyes met in a look of mutual recognition. It was the chap who appeared in my office the day after Jenny came, the elder one.
‘Jack!’ He pulled the handle and shoved the door ajar. ‘Have you got a minute? We need to chat.’
‘I am rather busy.’
‘It won’t take long.’
‘Where do you want to take me?’
‘Nowhere, just around the block.’
I climbed in and closed the door.
We drove to the top of Dandelion Hill and parked looking out over the town below. Fog and smoke and fumes filled the valley, fed by the chimneys of the biscuit works, the textile mill and the Anaglypta Mill. Two chimneys pumping out beige smoke, and one pouring out fumes that were dark brown and made the eyes water. The smoke curdled the sky. Gasometers added a sallow, gassy smell. Up here the air was slightly better. This was good for the men with bad lungs, but not such good news for the knocker-up boy employed by the railway company to cycle round Weeping Cross knocking on the doors of the drivers and firemen in the middle of the night.
Mr Old spoke. ‘We’re all good chaps, Jack. You must believe that. Good chaps. But sometimes being a good chap can involve . . . methods that some people don’t understand.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘There’s no reason why you should, you have to trust us.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we love England. Because you love England.’
‘Is it true Jenny’s aunt saw a letter being stolen? A letter from the missing nuns of 1915, addressed to His Majesty the King?’
‘What will you do if I tell you?’
‘As a man I will do my duty.’
‘Your duty is to mind your own business.’
‘In my opinion the worst form of cad is the one who steals a postal order from a child’s birthday card. I have to say a chap who steals a letter from the King runs a close second. If I find this letter I would have no hesitation returning it to the King.’
‘But would you read it?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Even though it contains the solution to the greatest mystery in railway history? What man, what Gosling could forbear? It doesn’t matter what assurances you gave, we wouldn’t believe you. You would read it and then we would have to hang you.’
‘What sort of Gosling would I be if I shirked my duty?’
‘You have a greater duty.’ He turned to me with an imploring look in his eye. ‘You have to try and understand the situation the country was in in 1915. Unrestricted submarine warfare – such a thing had never been known before. Our merchant ships were going to the bottom of the ocean in appalling numbers. We were being exsanguinated, Jack, like a stag with its throat cut, hung up to drain. There was less than a week’s food left in the whole country. Do you know what that means? We would have had to contemplate the unthinkable. Can you guess what that was? What the stark choice facing us was? Can you?’
‘I’m afraid I have no idea. Build airships and drop bombs on them?’
‘Oh no, too late for that. Surrender. That was the only option. To the Hun!’
‘No!’
‘You see! One of our chaps in Berlin got hold of the German War Plans. It made shocking reading. They weren’t just going to vanquish us. That wasn’t good enough. They wanted to complete the job left unfinished by their Hun ancestors and smite us utterly. The cities would be ploughed into fields and sown with salt; the men would be turned into human dray-horses, pulling the ploughs . . . pulling ploughs, Jack! And as for the women, don’t ask!’ He paused and looked at me as if to gauge the effect his words were having. ‘In Belgium they tied the priests to their own bell-clappers. Did you know that?’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘The bells ran red with gore and clerical pulp.’
‘Did you know a lot of our chaps played football with them on Christmas Day in 1914? In No-man’s-land.’
‘Yes, yes, but those men were traitors. Never forget that. They allowed themselves to fall for the wiles of their enemy. No honourable soldier does that. It is tantamount to treachery. They should have been shot.’
‘I met a chap once who played football with them that Christmas. He swapped buttons with one. Said they were chaps same as you and me. He struck me as a good man.’
‘And therein lay his undoing. Chaps like him can’t imagine what we are dealing with, all their lives they live in England’s bosom and encounter straight-dealing and goodness. They are as easily deceived as babies. They don’t understand: the German soldier is a perfumed dandy in lace socks, but his heart is blacker than pitch. War is a foul business, Jack. You can’t afford to play by the Queensberry Rules. You say you met a chap who played football with them. I met a chap too. He had a different story to tell. He lost his brother. You know what they did to him? I quake to tell you. The German war machine needed glycerine, and for that they needed fat. They had a secret factory in the Black Forest. Totally hush-hush, but you can’t keep something like that secret. They used our chaps. Prisoners of war. Boiled up and rendered down. Threw them on the conveyor belt with pitch forks. Pitch forks!’
‘But how can you pitch fork a man? It’s not possible.’
‘Two men holding the same pitch fork could do it. But you are missing the point, it doesn’t matter how they did it.’
‘What is the point then?’
‘The point is, no one could countenance surrendering, appealing to the mercy of such inhuman brutes, but we would have had no choice. You know why? Because there is a fate even worse than surrender.’ He paused and spoke again in a softer register. ‘Do you know what happens in a city under siege? People swap cats, did you know that?’
‘No, I didn’t. Why do they swap cats?’
‘So that they don’t have to eat their own. That’s how it is. How it has been since the dawn of time in all cities under siege. Dogs, cats, rats . . . they all go. Then they eat the zoo if there is one. This is what desperate people do, and hunger, Jack . . . hunger of a type you have never experienced and almost certainly cannot imagine, drives men and women to the very limit and beyond. Some people give up, they prefer to die. But those who don’t, they become beasts utterly without conscience. They boil up leather and bones, make soup from sawdust, they eat joiner’s glue, toothpaste, cough mixture, wallpaper paste, cold cream . . . anything. A fur coat buys you a pound of flour, a woman can be had for a tin of spam. A boy will murder his granny and boil her up rather than face the pangs of hunger. Amputated limbs are stolen from the hospital. Corpses are dug up from the cemetery. When hunger stalks, everything stops – no police, no water, no fire brigade, civilisation disappears overnight. You know what the Bible says? They knew what happened in sieges. And I will cause them to eat the flesh of
their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege.’
‘I would rather die than surrender to the Hun.’
‘That would be your right. But do you have the right to condemn a nation to the terror of the siege? What would you do to avoid it all? What would you sacrifice, Jack? To save the country you love? Would you sacrifice a town? Twenty thousand men died on the first day of the Somme. That’s all the men in Weeping Cross. It carried on for another one hundred and forty-one days. What’s a handful of nuns compared to that? You wince, you twitch your nose in disdain, like a rabbit, but what would you do? Have you ever stopped to wonder? No. I’m sure you haven’t. That’s the trouble with fastidious people like you, you have it easy. You stand on the sidelines and hold court. You condemn. It’s easy to condemn. Much harder to act in a way that is right but still invites condemnation.’ He sat up and turned the ignition key. ‘I’ll take you home.’ As the engine shuddered into life he added, ‘If you want someone to blame, blame the Americans. Where were they when we needed them?’
That evening after tea, I received a visitor at my digs. One of the chaps came into the kitchen to say there was a man standing on the doorstep asking for me. This was very rare. It turned out to be the Dingleman. I invited him up to my room on the second floor. We climbed up bare wooden stairs, for which I apologised. I explained that the stair carpet had fallen prey to a soaking last spring when the pipes broke on the fifth landing. I felt a slight embarrassment for the bare and humble features of my life. My room had a small sash window commanding a view of the recreation ground, although it was dark now. There was a single bed, a chair, a wireless on a table, a wardrobe and a gas fire. A clothes horse was positioned in front of the table and this was draped with socks. The fire was not lit and clothes took a long time to dry. Ron sat on the bed and I fetched a bottle of brown ale from the cupboard under the stairs, and we shared this.
The Case of the 'Hail Mary' Celeste Page 10