13 May 1940
Westminster, London, England
Precious moments slipped away while I rotted in that cell. I could feel every tick, every tock. Desperation had me on the brink of feigning illness serious enough for a doctor. I was assessing my chances of taking a hostage when something strange happened: the coppers let me go.
It was Francis’s partner who came to give me the good news. Since Will hadn’t pressed any charges, he said, there was nothing for them to do but let me free.
I asked, “That’s all, then?”
“That’s all. Sorry for the misunderstanding, sir.” He smiled uneasily, and paused awkwardly as if debating whether to clap me on the back. “But do stay out of St. James’ from now on, won’t you?”
Ha bloody ha.
“Straight home with you, sir. And don’t leave the house without an ID next time. You’ll be in a spot of trouble if you get nicked again.”
If anything, it seemed they were eager to see me go. Quite a change from the previous evening. And the mention of St. James’ brought home another oddity. They’d dropped the public indecency charge. Not that I was keen to preserve that particular humiliation, but it was strange.
Stranger still: they returned Will’s billfold complete with contents. And they glossed over my missing ID card. The coppers cut me loose knowing bloody well I still had no proper identification.
I emerged from the police station into a damp, gray afternoon. Looked like it had rained stair-rods while I was in the clink, though I hadn’t heard a hint of it through the thick stone walls. Now the clouds had conjured a cold, thin drizzle that snaked beneath my collar. I missed my fedora.
I paused on the pavement, stretching and generally playing the part of a man sipping at freedom and relief in equal measure. It gave me my first real glimpse of the London I’d left behind long ago, in fact if not in spirit.
And dear God: I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed this city. London had been such a proud city before Luftwaffe bombs erased centuries of our history and culture. The postwar rebuilding had been extensive, but soulless and perfunctory. London’s postwar caretakers hadn’t so much as nodded at the city’s architectural heritage. But now I stood in the midst of London as it was meant to be.
I wiped my eyes while studying my surroundings. Little things had changed, as well. In 1940 it was still possible to find gas lamps. I stood beneath one.
After the look and feel of the city itself, I next noticed the cars on the street. I hadn’t appreciated how much they’d changed over the years until the change had been erased. I supposed it had been a gradual evolution. And there were so few of them on the street; I’d forgotten about that, too. Part of that came out of the petrol rationing. But even accounting for the rationing, there were simply more cars on the street in 1963.
A placard pasted in the window of a chemist’s shop exhorted me to LOOK OUT IN THE BLACKOUT. Other placards exhorted passersby to buy Victory Bonds and to spot enemy uniforms on sight. An ARP warden nodded to me from beneath the narrow brim of his metal helmet. I nodded back.
I took it all in. The sights. The sounds. The rainy smell of springtime in the city. This was where I belonged. Fighting a chiaroscuro war, black and white. I wasn’t cut out to be a cold warrior. Events subsequent to my return to the service had borne that out.
The survey of my surroundings also enabled me to spot the black Vauxhall parked down the street from the station. Picked it out at once; SIS used modern descendants of that model into the 60s.
I realized what had happened. Will’s departure incited a heated discussion between those who thought he was just another brainless toff, and those (probably the minority) who thought Will’s claims merited closer attention. In the end, discretion won out. Next, a rapid series of telephone calls ricocheted from Cannon Row, to the Met, to the Home Office, to the Security Service, and back down the chain again. I reckoned the message from MI5 said something akin to: Give us time to get down there. Cut him loose when we say. We’ll send someone to pick up the file. After that, tell your men this never happened.
At which point the coppers couldn’t wait to see the last of me. Catching the occasional butcher who short-changed customers on their ration cards was one thing; cracking Jerry spy rings was a different kettle of fish.
This explained why they had set me free in spite of my dodgy credentials and lack of identification. Even the gentle advice to go straight home: so MI5 could track me. They’d returned Will’s billfold complete with its original contents; I reckoned they might have added something, too. Something damning. The poisoned cheese of their rat trap.
I turned up my collar and started walking, careful to stay visible to the Vauxhall. After a few dozen yards I stopped behind a parked car, and stooped over to tie my shoes. I tried to use the car’s chromed bumper as a mirror, but that had been painted over. Right … the blackout regs. I’d forgotten. So I watched the street behind me from the corner of my eye.
Sure enough. The Vauxhall eased into the sparse traffic the moment I disappeared from sight.
Splendid. I was officially under observation by the domestic intelligence services. They’d be running a standard box if they knew what they were about; I hadn’t picked out all the watchers. Nor did I want to. Not yet. They’d get cross if they knew I’d picked them out so easily.
The residual ache in my knee twinged in warning as I hopped on the rear platform of a passing omnibus. These, at least, had resisted the passage of time, for which I was glad. Not for the comfortable familiarity, but because it meant I still knew a few tricks for dodging a fare.
The conductor frowned at me, clearly discomfited by my scars. “That’s dangerous,” he said. “Wait ’til we’ve come to a proper stop, what?”
“Sorry, mate. Bit of a hurry,” I said. I took an empty seat behind a mother and daughter, and fished out Will’s billfold. I plucked out a five-pound note and folded it into my hand while the clippie dealt with another fare. Then, while nobody was looking, I kicked the girl’s seat. Her mother shot me a look that could have blistered paint, but frowned and turned away when she saw my wounded face. Didn’t like doing it—I thought of Agnes—but it got the girl crying, loudly, which is what I needed.
When it came my turn to pay, I held the folded bill between my fingers so that the clippie could clearly see the “5”. I smiled apologetically, and rasped, “Lost my pocket change at the pub. Help a fellow out, will you?”
He did. And he gave me change for the fiver: the crying kept him too distracted to give the bill a proper look. One of the oldest tricks around, yes, but that’s because it works. You just have to know how to play it.
It wasn’t much money, but it meant finally having some legal tender on my person, and enough to get me to Walworth.
A gas mask canister hung from the clippie’s neck. It bumped against his chest when the bus lurched around a corner. Others—men, women, even the children—carried similar bundles. I didn’t have a gas mask, but I wasn’t worried; they’d been common in the first few months of the war, though by 1940 one could find folks who’d decided not to bother. More and more people opted to leave the masks at home as the war dragged on. They’d been right; Hitler never got around to lobbing mustard gas across the Channel.
I had to hope that piece of history wouldn’t get rewritten. Only Gretel could tell me how things would change as my work unfolded. But I had to get to her before we could have that conversation.
I glimpsed a black Vauxhall trailing the omnibus when I transferred to another line. My eyes scanned the other traffic around us, what little there was of it, but I couldn’t pick out the rest of the surveillance team. My fingers worried at the cold brass house key in my pocket. If I was going to break the box, I had to do it before I led them to Liv. And me. The other me.
The second bus wasn’t as crowded as the first. Each time a lorry or fountain momentarily blocked the line of sight between the Vauxhall and my omnibus, I hopped a seat closer to the rear plat
form. The clippie looked bemused, or perhaps annoyed. But soon I was as close to the platform as one could be without physically standing on it. That was the best position for what I intended, but it would have tipped off my followers.
The dome of St. Paul’s loomed out of the gray mist to my left as the bus trundled along Cheapside. I couldn’t help but stare at the ghostly giant as though it were a long-lost friend; the Fire Watch had failed to save the cathedral from several direct hits in the autumn of 1940, after the systematic crippling of the RAF had given the Luftwaffe free rein of Britain’s skies. After the war, the city had eventually filled the crater and turned the site into a municipal car park. But now Wren’s masterpiece stood proudly over its neighbors, no less grand for the cloak of dampness. I hoped it fared better the second time around. I’d missed it more than I realized. I had my city back.
The omnibus slowed as we approached Newgate. I gritted my teeth, anticipating the flare of agony in my bad knee. The omni swerved onto St. Martin’s Le Grand. I threw myself out of my seat and leapt from the platform.
My knee gave out when I hit the macadam. It sent me tumbling, but I managed to roll with the worst of it. Got soaked in the process. I dodged traffic, loping and limping to the entrance to St. Paul’s station on the Underground while behind me the clippie cursed and tires screeched. I earned more curses with my elbows, squeezing past the throng on the escalator down to the ticket hall. I prayed a copper didn’t see, and ask for my nonexistent Identity Card. I’d have to do something about that damned ID problem.
The Tube was my best shot at breaking the box. I had lived in London most of my life. Although, in that regard, my extra twenty years spent riding the Tube might have been a liability. I vaguely remembered how this stop had been known as Post Office until it had undergone modernization, when the Underground had replaced the lifts with escalators and changed the name a few years prior to the war. But those alterations were recent to those around me.
I spent the next hour using every trick I knew for throwing off a tail: backtracking, choosing my direction at random, buying multiple tickets, entering cars and jumping out just before they pulled away from the platform.… My jump from the omnibus might have been enough to lose my followers, but I wanted to be damn certain.
It was late afternoon by the time I made it to Walworth. I knew exactly what I had to do; I’d had plenty of time to think in the cell. But it was one thing to formulate a plan, and quite another to put it in motion while standing on the doorstep of one’s own home. Liv and I had bought the mock Tudor not long after our wedding in the old man’s garden; we’d been lucky to find it.
I couldn’t use the key in my pocket until I knew the house was empty. Accounting for my own whereabouts was easy: my doppelgänger was at the Admiralty. That I knew because I’d been at work most of the day when Klaus snuck in to free Gretel. But where was Liv?
I drew a steadying breath, then knocked. If Liv answered the door, I’d pretend to be lost and hope to hell she didn’t recognize me.
No answer. I rapped more firmly the second time.
I fished the house key out of my pocket, just as I’d done countless times. The familiar divot in the brass cradled my thumb as I pushed the key into the lock.
The key and lock resisted each other. A frisson of panic wormed its way into my gut. What had I forgotten? I could have sworn we’d never changed the locks. But then the key jittered home, and I realized what had happened.
The house key I’d carried in my pocket from 1963 was the original mate to the lock on this door. But it was also twenty years older, meaning its teeth had worn slightly from decades of regular use whereas the tumblers inside the door were still sharp. So the key gave me a bit more resistance than I’d been accustomed to. It took a fair bit of jiggling before the bolt snapped open with a muffled clack. But it did, eventually, and then I was inside …
… and reeling from the onslaught of memories.
The first thing I noticed was the reek of fish stew simmering in the kitchen. The smell slammed into me with the force of an anchor chain snapping taut. If the other things I’d witnessed since my return to wartime had been a gradual sinking back into the seas of my past, this was a nighttime high-altitude drop without a parachute.
Austerity food. Hadn’t experienced it for a long time, and I’d never missed it. But I’d know it anywhere.
Liv hated fish stew. We both did. But fish and offal were the only two meats not covered by the rationing system. By now they were already getting hard to find, forcing people to experiment with unfamiliar and unwelcome varieties; I shuddered at memories of nasty surprises from the fishmonger. We’d braved the whale steaks only once. The flavor of oily, fishy-tasting liver bubbled up from the recesses of my reinvigorated memory.
Simmering food meant Liv didn’t expect to be gone for long. I had to hurry.
The house differed from the one I knew in myriad fine details. We hadn’t kept a bowl of water near the front door since the war, and I hadn’t laid eyes on that watercolor in years. Sunlight hadn’t yet bleached the wallpaper in the vestibule; the banister glistened under a recent coat of varnish, still unblemished by the scuffs and scratches of coming years. But it was still the same house.
I thought I’d been ready for this. This was my own home, after all. I’d expected this visit to be easy and quick. But then I glanced into the den.
Where, alongside the wireless cabinet, sat Agnes’s bassinet. Her baby blanket, the pink one with elephants, was draped over the bottom. The same blanket that had caught Liv’s tears while I dug through the rubble of Williton with my bare hands.
Before I knew it, I was on my knees with that blanket pressed to my face. It smelled like my daughter.
Oh, God. It smelled like my living baby daughter.
It was real. This was all real. I was truly here, not in a dream. My daughter was here, and she was alive. She was with Liv right now.
In the early years after Agnes had died, we’d kept some little things around to remind us of her presence in our home and family. But as our marriage had withered, John’s shrieking and yowling had transformed the constant reminders of Agnes from bittersweet mementos to instruments of torture. Liv packed away the blanket, and the rest soon followed. It had been so very long since I’d seen or smelled or touched any evidence of Agnes’s existence aside from the single faded photograph—
—my head spun round to stare at the mantel, and there it was: the photo that would eventually go into my billfold.
I don’t know how long I lingered in the den. My face was wet and the blanket damp when I finally stood. I wiped my eyes.
You’re not getting her this time, Gretel.
First things first. I took the stairs two at a time, wincing at every throb from my bad knee. I went straight to our bedroom. Liv’s wardrobe stood tidy in one corner. But she had more clothes than I did, so we shared the closet. I rummaged it, pushing aside shifts and shirts until I reached the very rear. And there it was, pressed against the wall, still hanging in its garment bag.
My naval uniform. His naval uniform.
I opened the bag and tipped it over the bed. The familiar blues of my uniform tumbled out, followed by the headgear. Then I hung the empty garment bag back in its spot in the closet and pushed the other clothes back into a semblance of their original clutter.
I dug out a slim briefcase before shutting the closet. It was almost new; I’d never been in the habit of carrying one. But it would be useful.
He would never miss the uniform. I probably hadn’t laid eyes on it since the day I mustered out and started my real career with SIS. I’d made lieutenant-commander on my way out; a hair earlier than usual, and I was proud of that. Though it had never been the life for me, I’d served my country well. But the rank had counted in my favor when I joined the Firm. As the old man had known it would.
Next, it was back downstairs, through the miasma of austerity stew in the kitchen, and out the rear door. But rather than the garden,
my destination was the Anderson shelter. Where Liv and I—and Agnes, in the early days—had huddled during countless bombing raids, listening to the wail of the sirens, the chuffchuffchuff of the ack-acks, the thunder of explosions as London disintegrated around us.
It had been our refuge. And though it was a tight fit, Liv had managed to stock a few supplies in case our house got bombed out. An oil lamp. Candles. A change of clothes. A few tins of food. And money.
We had stashed the glass jar in the corner, under the cot. I had sealed the lid with candle wax after we’d discovered how easily water seeped into the Anderson. It wasn’t quite so musty in the shelter after I had cobbled together a sump pump out of an old bicycle tire pump. But that had been later in the summer, and so for now the shelter floor was damp.
I didn’t have time to count it all, but it was enough to grease the wheels for a while. The paper money disappeared into my billfold. The coins, as well. It wasn’t exactly stealing, I told myself. Not technically.
After that, I stripped out of the clothes I’d been wearing since 1963. The Anderson rang like a Chinese gong when I banged my head against one of the low curved steel sheets that formed the walls and ceiling. I folded the old clothes into the pile on a low shelf, then struggled into the uniform. It didn’t fit as well as it might have; life as a hard-drinking fifty-year-old gardener hadn’t left me as fit and trim as I had been as a thirty-year-old spy. But I managed to pull the trousers, shirt, and jacket on without popping a seam.
Liv had stowed a secondhand shaving kit in the shelter for me; a quick look in the mirror suggested I looked reasonably like a naval officer. The uniform was the man. Unless somebody knew what to look for, it would hide a multitude of sins. My shoes, for instance.
I didn’t take the rest of the shelter supplies. Not yet. There was something else I needed, but it wasn’t here. I knew that I—he—carried it with him. So I’d have to get it later. But I knew I’d be returning, depending on how things went at the Admiralty tonight. I was destined to spend the night bouncing back and forth between the Admiralty and my house like a badminton shuttlecock. A wearying thought. But time had grown very short, and it was crucial that my counterpart, the other Raybould Phillip Marsh, made that rendezvous with the U-boat.
Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) Page 6