The Distant Dead

by Lesley Thomson

  On Abbey Terrace, the other ‘murder house’ caused Stella’s heart take a dive. She and Jack had fantasized about living there. His kids would join them, Jack had said. ‘We’re not put off by a body in the hall.’ As they passed now, Stanley showed no interest, as if, like Stella, he’d never believed in the dream.

  Stella was unfazed by murder; it was life and all it threw at her from which she shrank. The business of a live-in relationship, all the day-to-day stuff. Then one day you die.

  Dusk was gathering as Stella trundled the van along the Old Brockhampton Road. She wasn’t expected anywhere, but as she disliked driving in the countryside at night she knew she should soon set off for Tewkesbury. But she had one more visit.

  Angling her van onto a verge by a five-bar gate, Stella released Stanley from his jump seat and, checking for vehicles, let him out. Stanley, who all day had been as sluggish as she felt, shot out, wriggled under the gate and galloped off across a ploughed field. In the dwindling light, his champagne-coloured coat was a smudge against the ploughed soil. Stella climbed the gate and stumbled along a claggy furrow. No panic, she knew exactly where he’d gone.

  Crow’s Nest stood in the middle of the next field at the end of a track. When she and Jack had stayed there, initially Stella – rarely afraid – was spooked by the darkness and silence. A townie, every field looked identical and, for the boss of a cleaning company, too muddy. Regardless, with Jack there, Crow’s Nest had soon felt like home. She had come to see the specificity in wild flowers, the hedgerows and clusters of grasses. She could appreciate blackthorn, beech, teazels and sedum.

  That was then. No longer the boss of a cleaning company, now she was in the countryside alone and again she saw only fields and mud.

  When Stella reached the track, she found Stanley rigidly staring into the gloom. She saw why. He did not recognize where he was.

  In place of the ramshackle mock-Tudor house with a sagging roof and rotting timbers was a glass and steel cube with wrap-around balconies.

  Stella’s ghosts had fled. She could not evoke Jack. The quiet was profound and all encompassing. A thing in itself.

  She stumbled back to the van, Stanley at her heels. Never go back, you can’t cheat the passing of time. No more memory lane.

  As she accelerated out of Winchcombe along dark winding roads bordered by impregnable hedges, Stella lamented the lack of light. Shadows leapt and shrivelled in the headlamps as, grim-faced, she hugged the wheel and fervently hoped that nothing would come towards her. The twisty byways with hidden ditches and protruding dry-stone walls offered few passing places.

  Spears of light pierced the darkness ahead. As she rounded a bend, Stella saw that they were rear lights. A van was travelling in the same direction as her. But where most locals averaged sixty, hounding her bumper before overtaking, the van – white like her own – was crawling at fifteen miles per hour. Stella hung back. In daylight she wouldn’t have minded tootling along, but now she wanted to get back.

  The van stopped. Stella slammed on the brakes. The interior of her own van was washed with lurid red light from the rear lamps. She waited. It must have stalled. She rapped a tattoo on the wheel then caught herself on the edge of another simmering rage. Grief could make you angry, she’d read. The driver could have been taken ill. She should get out and check. Her own lights were on full beam, she dimmed them. She’d dazzled the driver and he or she had stopped to let her know. Sorry. She toggled the lights.

  The brake lights went out. All the lights were off. Although Stella was also driving a white Peugeot Partner, she assumed the driver was male. She shivered. Not from cold, the heater was on full. Stanley growled.

  The man might have been taken ill or unconscious. Or his battery had died. She had jump leads. Thinking to help, Stella reached for the door handle. Stanley’s whimpers recalibrated to a dreadful cry that was eerily human. The thing about dogs was they could be reassuring company or crank up your nerves to sheer terror. Stella was paralysed.

  The van was stationary, the lights were off. A spattering rain began to fall; automatically Stella flicked on the wipers. The creak of the blades dragging across the windscreen nearly stopped her heart.

  Stella had no way out. In the narrow lane, she couldn’t turn or reverse. The rear mirror reflected black like a void. Stella grabbed her phone from the console. No signal. Exactly why she preferred towns.

  The van’s driver’s door was opening. Stella stiffened, her mind racing. Her own doors were locked, but a wrench like the one in her van, therefore likely in his too, could smash through glass. She smacked clammy hands on her trousers and dry swallowed.

  Stella knew, even as she got out, she was making a mistake. Stanley gave a shrill bark. She was watching herself in slow motion, one foot on the tarmac, the other…

  Light speared through the back window of Stella’s van. Another vehicle was coming down the narrow road behind her. Stella slammed her palm on the hazard light button. The ‘phantom’ van in front trickled forward, still with no lights. It gathered speed and slipped away into the teeming dark.

  Fired by adrenalin, her breathing ragged, Stella’s foot shuddered on the accelerator and she bunny-hopped the van a few metres. It was then she noticed the time on the dash. Ten to six.

  On the Tewkesbury Road, wipers swiping away streaming rain, Stella reached forty. It wasn’t true that she didn’t have to be anywhere. The Death Café began at six.

  Chapter Three

  Wednesday, 11 December 1940

  7 p.m., Wednesday. Thirteen shopping days until Christmas. In the sulphurous dark, pedestrians, shopworkers, as if in a giant game of Blind Man’s Bluff, fumbled across Hammersmith Broadway. Blackout had been in force since 5.24 p.m. Late commuters, emerging from the Underground station, jostled with shelterers descending into the Hades of makeshift camps, patrolled by looters and chancers, that every night lined the Piccadilly line platforms.

  Epitaph For A Spy read the headline of a copy of the Daily Express lying in a gutter and captioned beneath a photograph…judgement of death was duly executed… of one of the two notices outside Pentonville Prison yesterday…

  Maple Greenhill set her jaw. Her dad had said that, little older than Maple at twenty-four, Jose Wahlberg, one of the spies, was too young to die. Old enough to be a traitor, Vernon had said. Crisply elegant in a reefer coat, blonde hair rolled, sabots crunching on fragments of glass littering even those streets that had escaped bombing. Maple felt the draught of a trolley bus – the ‘silent peril’ – and veered away from the kerb. When anyone could be killed at any moment, two men who planned to kill them all deserved to hang. You couldn’t feel sorry for spies. What if it was Vernon?

  Aleck had promised Maple that, when it was conscription, he’d put in a word for Vern. Aleck knew people.

  Maple was haunted by the memory of William, her boy (at three in no danger of dying as a soldier), sobbing in his nana’s arms on their doorstep. She’d promised she was only going up the shop for cigarettes. She’d heard his cries all the way up Corney Road. Her mum stayed there to make her feel bad. Don’t tell him lies, he’ll never forgive you.

  The arrest of the spies was meant to reassure the British public that the Germans were losing, but if two men could land in Dungeness with recording equipment in posh suitcases, Maple reckoned William’s nightmares of Nazis coming down the Thames or out of the sky was likely.

  Her mum had shouted, ‘It’s your baby you should be with, not some fancy man.’

  ‘I’m seeing Ida,’ she had shouted, almost believing it. ‘I don’t have a fancy man.’ Not a lie. Aleck was her fiancé, not some fly-by-night like William’s dad.

  ‘I’m thinking of Will,’ Maple had said to herself as, on the tram, she’d wiped William’s teary snot off her gorgeous plum-red coat and rearranged the mink which made her mother’s lips pucker in mute disapproval. That was after Maple had offered to do the blackout curtains, which nearly killed her.

  St Paul’s church bells ch
imed seven. The thickened air rendered the peals directionless – they came from everywhere as if rung by God himself.

  As it trundled away, the trolley bus missed a taxi which, hearse-like in the swirling dark, turned into Brook Green Road and halted outside the Palais de Danse. A crowd was milling around the blacked-out doors. Tonight, it was rumoured, Glenn Miller and his band would do a spot before flying out of RAF Northolt.

  ‘I say,’ Aleck paid off the taxi and, trim in belted coat and trilby, stepped up to Maple and took her by the shoulders, ‘it’s Tallulah Bankhead.’ He kissed her forehead.

  ‘Get on with you.’ Maple reached up and brushed his cheek, noting his smooth skin. She adjusted her stole. No bloke ever compared her to a film star. Fancy her, typist at the dairy, being engaged to a man with a proper job. She’d whispered to William as she pinned up the living room blackout that very soon they would be living happily ever after. Now, Maple said, ‘Dad says, seeing as we’re engaged, he wants to meet you.’ She gave a light laugh to smother the little fib. ‘You’ve to come to tea Sunday.’

  *

  At that moment, in Corney Road, Chiswick, crouched in the Anderson shelter with his wife, son and little grandson, Keith Greenhill knew nothing of this. He did indeed want to meet Aleck – the nameless scoundrel who was playing about with his daughter. The mink told Keith, as it had told his wife, that Maple’s fancy man was at best a trickster who’d signed up to the forces to escape responsibility, like the shiftless fellow who’d left Maple in the lurch. As he gazed at Maple’s distraught lad, cried-out in his wife’s arms, Keith Greenhill vowed to get him by the scruff of the neck and tell him… Neither of them would sleep until Maple got back, which, from recent experience, they knew would be the small hours.

  ‘Whoever he is, the scoundrel lacks the decency to walk her home.’ Greenhill leaned close to his wife to be heard above the cacophony of the guns. ‘We’ll have to have it out with her.’

  ‘Give her time, she’ll tell us.’

  ‘She’s had time.’

  ‘See how the land lies in the morning.’ Audrey stroked a cow-lick from William’s forehead. ‘She really could be seeing Ida.’

  ‘Pigs might fly.’ Vernon, the Greenhills’ twenty-one-year-old son who was slumped by the shelter’s entrance, roused himself.

  ‘Do you know something?’ Keith demanded.

  ‘Course not.’ Vernon pulled the horse-hair blanket up over his chin and rolled over to sleep. His parents exchanged a look; they didn’t believe him.

  The ground shook with a bomb that they knew wasn’t as near as it sounded. Huddled in the cold damp of their newly constructed shelter, which Keith complained was cheap and nasty and not up to the job, the Greenhills retreated into private terror. Everyone knew the Nazis were not the only enemy. There was talk of women being raped in public shelters, old people attacked in their homes for savings and gold watches. Danger lurked around every corner.

  Maple should hurry up and come home.

  *

  The Palais doors shifted briefly ajar and, gripping Maple’s elbow, Aleck piloted her into a world of glitter and magic where Hammersmith Broadway was Hollywood and, even as sirens wailed, one might believe the Blitz could be kept at bay.

  Lamps, wreathed in a bluish canopy of cigarette smoke, cast ghostly light over a boiling mass. Ecstatic faces were caught in a match’s flare, red lipstick, sleek oiled hair. The floor was marked with scuffed chalk marks from where the BBC had snaked cables for the Force’s Sunday broadcast of Services Spotlight, the dance hall slot in The Sunday Nighters.

  Tonight’s swing band’s sound, not Glenn Miller, bounced off walls plastered with posters that urged women to take up factory work. Tonight’s Gas Mask Ball was thrown to encourage Londoners to carry masks. Not really Hollywood.

  For Maple, as she danced her life away, a gas mask and doing war work were the last things on her mind.

  Last week, when she’d told Aleck about William, he’d just kissed her quiet and undone her blouse. ‘We all make mistakes.’ The next time they met he’d given her the mink and, from deep inside her, his hands around her hips, asked her to marry him.

  William wasn’t a mistake. Maple hadn’t told Aleck the toddler with pudgy legs and such a cheeky smile was the best thing in her life. Every man liked to come first.

  Aleck always got the barman’s attention. As he handed Maple the first of several daiquiris, he told her, ‘Chin-chin, baby.’

  They swooped and swirled to ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’ and ‘Easy to Love’. Aleck’s hand, on the small of Maple’s back, slipped lower. He pressed her to him and she felt his love. For her. If she was Tallulah Bankhead, he was James Stewart from It’s a Wonderful World. She’d tell him later. Maybe when he came to tea.

  *

  Watching the couple from the bar, a woman whose husband had been killed in a U-boat attack, who expected never to smile again, felt gin-infused hope. It was for such love Britain was fighting. A better world in which everyone cared. Then the man and his girl were lost amidst the throng. And the woman felt desolate as if, with their departure, had gone all chance of happiness. Later, spotting a polite notice for customers at the Palais on the night of the eleventh to come forward with any information about a murdered girl, Una Hughes recognized her. She was able to give the divisional detective an excellent description of the couple.

  *

  On the corner nearest the river, an incendiary had ripped away the front of a house to reveal a tableau of shattered domesticity. In dancing flames, as if in a magic lantern show, was a carpeted staircase cut off before the landing, the bathroom mirror above a pallid sink still intact. The stern portrait of a Victorian grandee hanging askew above the drawing room mantelpiece frowned upon the front area infilled with smashed brick and timber, crockery and broken furniture displaced by the blast.

  Maple couldn’t believe it would happen to her mum and dad’s home, their pride and joy. Since Aleck, she felt she and all those she loved would be safe.

  The road was blocked by an AFS team attacking flames from a burst gas pipe in the kitchen. In intervals between guns and distant bombing was the grind of the pump engine. Urgent shouts – Ruddy low tide, Where’s the fire-boat?, Shift the turntable – helmeted fire-fighters, two of them women, like cut-out figures in the orange light which suffused the cobbled road as if it were paved with gold.

  Guiding Maple past the criss-cross of vehicles, between pooling water and rubble, Aleck whispered in her ear, ‘Wardens dug the family from the cellar two nights ago, crushed to a pulp, all of them. Mind you, the wife was on short commons, and riddled with cancer when I opened her up – handy really, she got a painless death.’ He nuzzled into Maple’s neck.

  Maple imagined telling her mum and dad how there was little Aleck doesn’t know about London’s dead. His phrase. Now, she said, ‘It’s not fair getting ill in a war. Everything like that should stop. At least we got those spies.’ She liked to show Aleck she was up on things.

  ‘Nothing’s fair, Maple. Blighters got their just desserts.’

  Smoky clouds were thinning to the west. Light from a fitful moon flickered on the Thames. A mud-slicked cobbled causeway, accessible when the tide receded, led to the eyot, an outcrop of land overgrown with reeds and stubby trees. The stench of charred timber and damp mortar was stronger on the shoreline.

  ‘It’s the smell of death,’ Maple said to sound clever.

  ‘Death doesn’t smell like that,’ Aleck said. ‘Here we are.’

  Skirting poles on trestles that protected a large house on Chiswick Mall, he flicked his torch over a board propped against the gate – Danger. Structure Unsafe – and led Maple up the path of a house on three floors with rooms either side of the door. Despite the danger sign, it looked undamaged. Maple would tell her dad that Aleck saw past danger, she felt safe with him. Her dad was always worrying, he’d cried during Chamberlain’s speech.

  Aleck said the war had been good to him. It was good to her too. If not
for Hitler, she wouldn’t have met Aleck and he’d never have proposed.

  ‘This is yours?’ Maple gasped when Aleck fitted a key into the front door. Aleck usually found an alley at the end of gardens, behind shops, hidden by bins. The first time Maple had worried they should wait until it was decent. Aleck told her, ‘There’s a war on, rules have changed.’

  ‘Of course not.’ He pocketed the key and opened the door.

  ‘Are we allowed?’

  ‘I’m allowed.’

  ‘Who does live here?’ Maple blinked in the encompassing light of a vast chandelier. A small voice suggested, We will.

  ‘A friend.’ Aleck shucked off his coat, folded it and placed it across the post at the bottom of the staircase.

  ‘Is he here?’ Maple darted a look up the stairs.

  ‘So many questions.’ Aleck gave a braying laugh.

  ‘We’ve never done it in a bed, will your friend mind?’ Shouting above the endless clatter of guns, Maple felt appalled. It had to be Aleck’s idea to do it, and she must act surprised. ‘What if he comes home?’

  ‘He won’t.’ Aleck lifted off Maple’s mink stole and pulled off her coat, his gift. Tugging her, he went into a room off the hall. A table lamp gave a soft circle of light. Aleck tossed Maple’s things onto a wing-back chair. The coat slipped off onto a Turkey carpet, but he didn’t notice. Without it, Maple shivered. The ashes in the grate looked cold and she imagined asking Aleck to make up a fire, but, in another man’s house, that would be cheeky. ‘He’s never coming back. Oliver Hurrell, aged fifty-three, solicitor of this parish, unmarried with no living relatives, was killed by shrapnel fire-watching at the Commodore yesterday. Our acquaintance began and ended at Hammersmith Mortuary.’ Aleck often said the dead were his friends. Sometimes, despite her pride in him, Maple wished he wouldn’t.