In a Dry Season

by Peter Robinson

  Not only had there been no confetti, there had been no wedding bells, either. All the church bells had been silent since 1940 and were only supposed to ring if there was an invasion. The thing was, I hadn’t even noticed at first because I had got so used to the silence.

  I thought that was very sad, and I cried myself to sleep that night.

  Annie paused with the dusty file folder in her hands when she heard footsteps on the stairs. She hoped it would be PC Gould bringing her a cup of tea, so she was surprised when she saw, instead, DCI Banks.

  “Inspector Harmond told me you were down here,” Banks said.

  Annie turned her nose up and gestured around at the musty-smelling, ill-lit basement room. “Welcome to central records,” she said. “You can see how often we dip into our history around here.”

  “Don’t worry. One day it’ll all be on the computer.”

  “When I’m long since dead and buried.”

  Banks smiled as he ducked under an overhead pipe and walked over to join her. “Anything yet?”

  “Quite a lot, as a matter of fact. I’ve been on the phone most of the day, and I was just checking some missing-persons files.”

  “And?”

  “It’s a bit of a confusing period for that sort of thing. Just after the war. There were so many changes, so many people coming and going. Anyway, most of the ones who went missing seemed to turn up eventually, either dead or alive, or in the colonies. There are a couple of young women who fit the general description still unaccounted for. I’ll follow up on them.”

  “Fancy a pint? The Black Swan?”

  Annie smiled. “You took the words right out of my mouth.” What a relief. If she had been hoping for a cup of tea, the prospect of a pint of Swan’s Down was even more appealing. She had been in the stifling basement for the best part of the afternoon, and her mouth was full of dust, her contact lenses beginning to dry out. And it was gone five on a Friday afternoon.

  Comfortably ensconced on a padded bench just a few minutes later, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, pint already half-finished, Annie smacked her lips. If she were a cat, she would have been purring.

  “I checked the Voters’ Register first,” she said, “but the clerk in the council office told me it was frozen at the start of the war. The last person they’ve got listed for Bridge Cottage is a Miss Violet Croft. I had a bit more luck with the Land Registry. Violet Croft rented the cottage from the Clifford estate, and the manager kept impeccable records. She lived there between 14 September 1919 and 3 July 1940, so she must be the old lady Ruby Kettering remembered, the one the village kids thought was a witch. The cottage remained empty until June 1941, when a Mr and Mrs Shackleton took up residence there. It might have been requisitioned for the billeting of evacuees or military personnel in the interim period, but there was no record of that, and there’s no way of finding out.”

  “I doubt that many places stayed empty for long during the war,” said Banks. “Maybe some soldiers got billeted there, killed a local tart in a drunken orgy then decided to cover their tracks?”

  “It’s possible.” Annie gave a slight shiver.

  “We’re talking about wartime,” Banks went on, “and that complicates matters. Nothing was normal during the war, I shouldn’t imagine. People moved around a lot. Army camps and air force bases sprang up overnight, like mushrooms. Evacuees came and went. It was easy to disappear, change identity, slip through the cracks.”

  “But people had identity cards and ration books. The council clerk told me. He said there was a National Registry at the beginning of the war, and everyone got identity cards.”

  “I imagine those sort of things were open to a fiddle easily enough. Who knows, maybe we’re dealing with a Nazi spy done in by the secret service?”

  Annie laughed. “Mata Hari?”

  “Maybe. Anyway, what happened to Miss Violet Croft?”

  Annie flipped over a page in her notebook. “I dropped by St Jude’s next and found the young curate very helpful. They’ve got all the old parish registry records and magazines from St Bart’s stored in the vestry there. Boxes of them. Violet Croft, spinster of the parish, died in July 1940, of pneumonia. She was seventy-seven.”

  “That lets her out. What about the Shackletons?”

  “Much more interesting. They were married at St Bart’s on 7 June 1941. The husband’s name was Matthew Stephen Shackleton, the wife’s maiden name Gloria Kathleen Stringer. The witnesses were Gwynneth Shackleton and Cynthia Garmen.”

  “Were they Hobb’s End residents?”

  “Matthew Shackleton was. His parents lived at 38 High Street. They ran the newsagent’s shop. The bride’s listed as being from London, parents deceased.”

  “Big place,” Banks muttered. “How old was she?”

  “Nineteen. Born 17 September 1921.”

  “Interesting. That would put her within Dr Williams’s age range by the end of the war.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Any mention of children?”

  “No. I looked through the registry of baptisms, but there’s nothing there. Was he certain about that, do you think?”

  “He seemed to be. You saw the pitting for yourself.”

  “I wouldn’t know a parturition scar from a hole in the ground. It could have been a post-mortem injury, couldn’t it? I mean, these things are often far from accurate.”

  “It could have been. We’ll check with Dr Glendenning after he’s done the post-mortem. Do you know what? I’m beginning to get a vision of St Catherine’s House looming large in your future.”

  Annie groaned. Checking birth, marriage and death certificates was one of the most boring jobs a detective could get. The only positive aspect was that you got to go to London, but even that was offset by the department’s lack of willingness to grant expenses for an overnight stay. No time to check out the shops.

  “Any luck with the education authorities?” Banks asked.

  “No. They said they lost the Hobb’s End records, or misplaced them. Same with the doctors and the dentist. The ones who practised in Hobb’s End are all dead, and their practices went with them. Records, too, I imagine. I think we can say goodbye to that line of inquiry.”

  “Pity. What does your instinct tell you, Annie?”.

  Annie pointed her thumb towards her chest. “Moi?”

  “Yes, you. I want your feelings on the case so far.”

  Annie was surprised. No senior officer had ever asked for her feelings before, for her feminine intuition. Banks was certainly different. “Well, sir,” she said, “for a start, I don’t think it’s a stranger killing.”

  “Why not?”

  “You asked for my feelings, not logic.”

  “Okay.”

  “It looks domestic. Like that bloke who killed his wife and sailed off to Canada.”

  “Dr Crippen?”

  “That’s the one. I saw Donald Pleasance play him on telly. Creepy.”

  “Crippen buried his wife under the cellar.”

  “Cellar. Outbuilding. Same difference.”

  “All right, I take your point. Conclusion?”

  “Victim: Gloria Shackleton.”

  “Killer?”

  “Husband, or someone else who knew her.”

  “Motive?”

  “God knows. Jealousy, sex, money. Pick one. Does it matter?”

  “Did you ask Mrs Kettering if she kept in touch with anyone else who lived in Hobb’s End?”

  “Sorry, sir. It slipped my mind.”

  “Ask her. Maybe we can track down some people who actually knew the Shackletons. Who knows where the old residents live now? We might even get a weekend in Paris or New York out of this.”

  Annie noticed Banks avert his eyes. Was he flirting?

  “That would be nice,” she said, sounding as neutral as possible. “Anyway, for what it’s worth, I think it’s more the kind of thing someone who lived there, or near there, would do. It was a good hiding place. I don’t thi
nk anyone could have foreseen the reservoir, or the drought. Not that it would matter, really. I mean, if Adam Kelly hadn’t been playing truant and larking about on that roof, we’d never have found out. You can’t anticipate an accident of fate like that.”

  “Blackout curtains.” Banks slapped his palm on the table.

  “Come again, sir?”

  “Blackout curtains. It’s something John Webb told me. He said they found some heavy black material with the body. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but it makes sense now. The body was wrapped in blackout curtains, Annie. And Geoff Turner mentioned wartime dental work. When did the blackout end?”

  “At dawn, I suppose.”

  Banks smiled. “Idiot. I mean when was it no longer required?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We can find out easily enough, I suppose. Either the blackout material was left over—which I’d guess was unlikely, because from what I remember my mother telling me, nothing was left over during the war—or it was no longer needed for its original purpose, which might help narrow down the time of the murder even more. But I certainly think we’re dealing with a wartime crime, and Gloria Shackleton fits the bill as victim.”

  “Brilliant, Holmes.”

  “Elementary. Anyway, before we go any further, let’s find out all we can about her. What was her maiden name again?”

  “Stringer, sir. Gloria Stringer.”

  “Right. We already know she’s about the right age, and we know she lived in Bridge Cottage during the war. She hasn’t shown up as missing?”

  “Not in any records I’ve seen. And hers was the first name I looked for.”

  “Okay. If you can find no trace of her existence in the local records after, say, 1946, then we could narrow things down a bit.” Banks looked at his watch. “How about something to eat? I’m getting hungry. I don’t want to eat here again. Are there any decent restaurants in Harkside?”

  Annie paused for a moment, thinking of every restaurant where she had found nothing she could eat but a salad, or meat and two veg without the meat, then she gave in to the little surge of devil-may-care excitement that tingled through her and said, “Well, sir, there’s always my place.”

  After the honeymoon, Gloria continued to report for work at the farm every day at eight o’clock and she wasn’t home until five or later. On weekends, she was at Bridge Cottage, looking fresh and beautiful, ready for Matthew’s arrival. Matthew passed his engineering degree, graduating with first-class honours, as I knew he would, and started his military training at Catterick, which wasn’t too far away.

  Gloria had managed, I discovered one evening, to barter her needlework skills for an extra half-day off work at the farm, which gave her the full weekend. Her local area supervisor would be none the wiser, so long as the Kilnseys didn’t tell. And while Gloria kept them in mended clothes they were hardly likely to do that.

  Most days I was busy with the shop. In my spare time I was involved in the Harkside Amateur Players’ production of a new J.B. Priestley play, When We Are Married, so I spent a lot of time in rehearsal.

  Despite all this, we managed to get to the pictures in Harkside together a few times. Gloria just loved films and sometimes she didn’t even have time to change out of her uniform before pedalling at breakneck speed to meet me outside the Lyceum or the Lyric. She always managed some little eccentricity in her appearance, like wearing a bright pink ribbon or a yellow blouse instead of the regulation green.

  That summer, for the first time, we had double summer time, which meant it stayed light much later. In autumn and winter, though, it was always dark when we had to go home. It was only a mile or so from Harkside to Hobb’s End across the fields, but there was no marked path or road, and on a cloudy, moonless night you could wander for hours in the pitch darkness and miss the place entirely. Unless there was a bright moon, we had to walk the long way home: all the way up Long Hill and then along The Edge, careful not to fall into Harksmere Reservoir.

  Because it was much bigger, Harkside was eerier than Hobb’s End in the blackout. For a start, they had street-lamps, which we didn’t, and though they weren’t lit, of course, each one of them now had a white stripe painted up its length to help you see your way in the dark, the same way there were stripes of white paint along the kerbsides. People had also put little dabs of luminous paint on their doorbells, which glowed like fireflies all along the streets.

  Sometimes we accepted a lift with some of the RAF boys from Rowan Woods, and we even became quite friendly with a couple of Canadian airmen attached to the RAF: Mark, from Toronto, and Stephen, from Winnipeg. Mark was the handsomest one, and I could have listened to his soft, smooth accent all night long. I could tell he liked Gloria by the way he looked at her. He even contrived to touch her in small ways, like taking her hand to help her step into the Jeep, and touching the spot between her shoulders if he opened a door for her and ushered her through. Gloria seemed amused by it all.

  Stephen had a high, squeaky voice, ears that stuck out and hair that seemed glued on like handfuls of straw, but he was nice enough. Sometimes we let them take us to the pictures and they were both very well behaved.

  For Gloria’s twentieth birthday, in September, I took her to Brunton’s Cafe on Long Hill, where we gorged ourselves on grilled sausage with mashed potatoes, braised butter beans, followed by jam roll andcustard. Matthew couldn’t be with us because it was a weekday, but Gloria showed me the locket he had already given her as a birthday present. It was beautiful: dark gold with their names entwined on the heart and a photograph, cut out from one of the wedding pictures, of the two of them inside. After tea, holding our tummies, we went to the Lyceum to see Ziegfeld Girl, starring James Stewart, Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr and Judy Garland. It was so memorable that the next day I couldn’t remember a single melody.

  It was Gloria’s choice, of course. Unfortunately, our tastes couldn’t have been more different. Gloria liked empty-headed Hollywood musicals and romantic comedies with beautiful stars and handsome leading men, whereas I preferred something with a bit of meat on its bones, an adaptation of the classics, say. More often than not, I preferred to stay home and listen to dramas on the Home Service, where I very much enjoyed Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, among others.

  Anyway, it was Gloria’s birthday. She also liked the Lyceum best because of the red plush seats and the way the organ came rising up slowly and majestically through its trapdoor, with the famous Teddy Marston, usually playing “The White Cliffs of Dover,” “Shine On Victory Moon” or some such patriotic tune. Gloria would have tears in her eyes when she listened to that sort of thing. Then the lights dimmed and the heavy red velvet curtains parted slowly.

  Sometimes Alice, Cynthia and Betty came to the pictures with us, even Michael Stanhope on occasion. While he often delighted us with his wicked critical commentary on the way home, he disappointed me in leaning more towards Gloria’s sort of film than towards something with a bit more substance. After all, he was supposed to be a serious artist.

  I often wondered what he and Gloria found to talk about when they went drinking together in the Shoulder of Mutton. I was too young to go with them, of course, not that they ever invited me. Anyway, I suppose they must have had long, intricate conversations about the deeper meaning of Hollywood musicals.

  Matthew and Gloria tried to furnish Bridge Cottage as best they could. This was before the government banned most furniture production, but even then the good stuff was either expensive or unavailable. You had to scrounge for the simplest of things, like curtain rods and coat hooks. They went to auctions some weekends, bought an old sideboard or a wardrobe here, a dresser there, and bit by bit they managed to furnish the house in a tasteful if not terribly elegant way. They made a home out of Bridge Cottage.

  Gloria’s pride and joy was the radiogram they bought from the Coopers after their son, John, was killed when the Prince of Wales was sunk just before Christmas. It had been John�
�s pride and joy, and his mum and dad couldn’t bear to keep it around the house after he was gone.

  Gloria honoured her promise to give me dancing lessons and I spent an hour or so over at Bridge Cottage each weekend while Matthew read the newspaper after dinner. It felt strange having her put her arms around me. Her body felt soft and I could smell her perfume, Evening in Paris. She was a good teacher, but with her being so much shorter, it was awkward at first, having her lead me. I soon got used to it. I was a good pupil, too. Over the next couple of weeks, I learned the waltz, the quickstep and the foxtrot. I actually tried out my skills at a Bonfire Night dance in the Harkside Mechanics Institute. We might not have been able to have bonfires during the war, but we still managed to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night. Anyway, I did very well at dancing, and that worked wonders for my confidence.

  By Christmas, Matthew had almost finished his training, and there was talk of a posting. I asked him if he was going to be a commissioned officer and he said he didn’t think so. He had been for an interview and was upset at the way the board asked him about what his parents did for a living and how often he rode with the local hunt. He said there wasn’t much hope of a shopkeeper’s son getting a commission.

  It was also that Christmas, at a party Gloria and Matthew held, when I got my first real inkling of Gloria’s problems with men.

  Annie’s place turned out to be a squat, narrow terrace cottage at the centre of a labyrinth. Banks left his car parked by the green and walked through so many twisting narrow streets and ginnels, by backyards where washing hung out on lines in the evening sun, where children played and dogs barked behind sturdy gates, that he was lost within seconds.

  “Why do I keep thinking I should have left a piece of thread attached to the Black Swan?” he said as he followed her down a snicket narrow enough to pass through only in single file.

  Annie cast a glance over her shoulder and smiled. “Like Theseus, you mean? I hope you don’t think I’m the Minotaur just because I live at the centre of all this?”

  Banks’s mythology was a bit rusty, but he remembered being impressed by an ancient vase he had seen on a school trip to the British Museum. It depicted Ariadne outside the labyrinth holding one end of the thread and Theseus at its centre killing the Minotaur.