A Presumption of Death Read online

  ‘I’ll check up on these men as soon as I can,’ he said. ‘I’m being driven up the wall, my lady, by reports of spies. Everywhere. You wouldn’t have been able to see the moon for parachutes if the half of these tales were true. They all turn out to be Polish or Jewish refugees or fellows from Scotland whose funny accents hail from Glasgow rather than Berlin. But I can’t risk not investigating.’

  ‘There was a real one in the paper this morning,’ said Harriet. ‘A couple who turned up at Largo asking for the train to London, and aroused suspicion by not knowing where they were.’

  ‘See what I mean? We have to check however barmy it sounds. Look, we obviously have to follow up this Birdlap person. If I gave you a note to his commanding officer, you wouldn’t care to do that for me, would you?’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Harriet, carefully folding the hastily scribbled note into her handbag. ‘If he won’t talk to anyone unofficial, I’ll hand it back to you.’

  As she reached the door of his office it occurred to her to ask, ‘What about Wendy’s parents?’

  ‘In Brighton!’ he cried, as though it had been Timbuktu.

  ‘We have a friend who might be able to help,’ said Harriet. ‘I couldn’t go myself, I’m afraid; but the friend in question has been very useful to Peter in several enquiries.’

  ‘Lady Peter,’ said Mr Kirk, ‘you are the answer to a maiden’s prayer, in a manner of speaking, of course. Just a minute while I find the parents’ address.’

  Getting in to Steen Manor proved to be a little difficult. Harriet drove herself there, since it was rather too far to walk, even for an able-bodied and healthy woman. The road ran for two miles alongside a six-foot-high wall of mellow brick, topped with rolls of barbed-wire. She had to wait for ages at the guard post at the entrance. The lovely wrought-iron gates of what had clearly been the drive to a substantial gentleman’s house had been opened wide, and in the space between them a wooden hut had been erected, together with a red and white pole barrier. The sentry rang for instructions, which took some time to come.

  Harriet stood quietly, leaning on her car bonnet, listening to the sweetly unaware birdsong. It comforted her, like the flowers in the banks. Eventually an airman in uniform came marching down the drive, and escorted Harriet up to the house. Surprisingly for a house built in Hertfordshire it was of a stone, grey, ashlar under a tiled roof, a bold plain Georgian building with Victorian additions and grand bay windows along the front. Her escort led her into a large hall with an elaborate oak staircase, and into a room that had once been the drawing-room, but was now lined with filing cabinets. The man behind the half-acre desk who rose to meet her was not in uniform. Harriet’s escort introduced her as: ‘The plain-clothes police officer, sir!’ saluted, and departed, closing the door behind him.

  ‘I’m sorry to say I may be here under false pretences,’ said Harriet at once. ‘I am not a police officer. I am simply a private citizen helping the police.’ She handed Superintendent Kirk’s note across the desk.

  ‘Do sit down,’ said the officer. He read the note carefully, twice.

  ‘Well, Lady Peter,’ he said eventually, ‘this is irregular, very irregular, but then these are not normal times. I think I met your husband once. It was some years back.’

  ‘Before I met him myself, I expect,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Yes, no doubt,’ he replied. ‘My name is Baldock. I am in charge of this establishment, which is, Lady Peter, very hush-hush. I am afraid we should not have admitted you, and having done so we must limit the damage.’

  ‘There isn’t any damage so far,’ said Harriet quietly, ‘unless English domestic architecture is part of the secret.’

  ‘Fine house, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Glad you noticed. Well now, I am to understand that you need to question one of my staff. A valuable man, if somewhat temperamental. My own concern is twofold. First I must attempt to conceal from you in every way possible the nature of the work going forward here. And second I must try to protect Birdlap from any upset that might take his mind off his work.’

  ‘You need have no concern about the first of those things,’ said Harriet. ‘It is about incidents in the village of Paggleham that I wish to ask him. I need not, and will not ask him anything about his war work. You have my assurance.’

  ‘Thank you, Lady Peter.’

  ‘About your second concern, however, I cannot be so emollient. It concerns the brutal murder of a young woman with whom he is said to have been involved. I am afraid he may find it very upsetting indeed.’

  ‘I see. Does he already know of this death?’

  ‘I don’t know. He may well do. What he may not realise is that he seems to have been the last person to see her alive.’

  ‘And if I refuse your request to interview him, I shall shortly be confronted with one Superintendent Kirk bearing an arrest warrant?’

  ‘Very likely, yes.’

  Brigadier Baldock rose, walked to the window, and stood looking out of it, rocking on his heels. Then he turned to Harriet. ‘You appear to be the lesser of two evils, Lady Peter,’ he said. He rang a bell on his desk, and a uniformed sergeant appeared.

  ‘Fetch Birdlap,’ he said.

  Baldock sat down again. ‘I shall be present throughout this interview,’ he stated.

  Harriet did not demur. A silence grew in the room. She heard the clock ticking ponderously in the corner. A self-dramatising clock, making the most of ticking off the seconds.

  ‘Lord Peter must have changed a good deal since I knew him,’ the Brigadier suddenly observed.

  ‘Why do you think so?’ said Harriet, anger flickering in her heart. ‘You find me rather unexpected as his wife?’

  ‘Well, I . . . goodness me, dear lady, I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘What you did mean, I imagine,’ said Harriet, ‘is that I have neither the beauty nor the class that you would have thought necessary to capture him. I take it that you did not know Lord Peter very well.’

  ‘It would be brains, of course,’ said the Brigadier imperturbably. ‘Brains would do it.’

  Harriet was spared the need to answer this by the arrival of Birdlap.

  He proved to be a very young, very dishevelled, RAF officer, who had left his jacket unbuttoned, and his dark hair unbrushed. The knot of his tie hung below his unbuttoned shirt collar and he looked not quite sleepy, but very much preoccupied. He was dazzlingly handsome in a vulnerable-looking way, with a long sensitive mouth, and a bony, boyish frame. Harriet thought he would appeal deeply to the mothering instinct in many young women.

  She watched him carefully while the Brigadier explained the situation to him, and saw the colour drain from his face when he understood that Wendy Percival was dead.

  ‘I heard something . . . I didn’t know it was her,’ he said, very quietly.

  ‘But you did know the young woman?’ said the Brigadier.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then I think it would be best if you would answer the questions Lady Peter wishes to put to you.’

  ‘There was a dance in the village last Saturday,’ Harriet said. ‘Were you there?’

  He hesitated. Glanced at his commanding officer and away again.

  ‘I have been told that your name was on the list of those who went from here to attend it. Your name was checked off when the party returned here,’ Harriet prompted. ‘But were you actually at the dance?’

  ‘No,’ he said quietly.

  ‘It has been suggested to me that the reason why Wendy was not at the dance was that she was with you. Is that true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It might help very much if you would tell me about it.’

  ‘It was just such a good chance,’ he said miserably. ‘Wendy’s quarters would be empty, because all the girls were going to the dance. Transport there, transport back again . . . You’re going to think me an awful heel, I know, but it wasn’t like that. She wanted me to . . . to find a way to . . .’ His voice began to shake, and suddenly
he was looking at Harriet wide-eyed and desperate. ‘It was for me,’ he said. ‘In case I was going to die – we thought there might never be a chance again. We couldn’t wait to make it respectable, we were jumping the gun, but we thought one of us might die at any moment . . . and we hadn’t expected – and we thought it would be me – of course we thought it would be me!’

  ‘But you are trying to tell us the young woman was previously of good character?’ the Brigadier interposed.

  ‘She was – of course she was! But we were in love, and we didn’t know how long we had got; it was first time for both of us, and of course I would have married her if I got back safely . . .’

  ‘About any danger your work entails, least said soonest mended,’ said the Brigadier.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ said Harriet gently. ‘And I do understand that you are under very great pressure. Peace-time rules seem hardly to apply. Could you tell me, however, exactly how you parted from Wendy and got back here undetected?’

  ‘It was easy,’ he said. ‘It went like a dream. We could hear the air-raid warning from Wendy’s bunk, and it gave us time to dress, and get back where we ought to have been. I just joined the press of people getting on to our truck. She stayed back so that the trucks would have driven off, and the locals would all be in the shelters, and nobody would see her, and she was going to get down to the shelter almost last, and say she had gone back for a blanket to keep her dress from getting scruffy sitting on the ground.’

  ‘And did you see anyone else around as you made your way to the truck? Did anyone see you?’

  ‘Not that I can remember. I wasn’t watching. I was in a sort of daze . . . I’ll tell you one thing,’ he added, suddenly sounding collected and emphatic. ‘You’re going to have more than one murder on your hands if I get to know who killed her. I’ll get them myself. And I’m trained to kill, trust me for it.’

  ‘Don’t be a silly chump,’ said the Brigadier. ‘You’ll talk yourself into a scrape that might be hard to talk you out of. I’m confining you to barracks, understand? Off with you now, and back to work.’

  Birdlap saluted and took himself off.

  ‘I shouldn’t think for a minute the poor chap means it,’ said the Brigadier. ‘But there might be more than one kind of peace-time rule that hardly seems to apply.’

  Later Harriet settled down to her desk to write to Miss Climpson. She didn’t exactly know why she had not spelled out to Mr Kirk that she, under the aegis of Peter, had a private agency at her command. Miss Climpson had worked ingeniously for Peter for some years. ‘Putting questions,’ he had said, ‘which a young man could not put without a blush.’ He had used her, and a little bevy of superfluous otherwise unoccupied ladies answering suspect advertisements placed by fraudsters and money-lenders and tricksters, and gathering the evidence that convicted them, and rescued their victims. A job without end. And now she had diverted the efforts of her team of ‘hens’ to keeping an eye on public opinion, the sort of women’s underground public opinion that Mass Observation might find impenetrable. Women under stress might grumble to each other, whereas they would put a good face on things in the public world. When she had heard from Miss Climpson recently, she had sounded rather fully occupied. Harriet opened the letter.

  . . . Sunday evening is my quietest time now – of course we have to have Evensong in the middle of the afternoon, what with the blackout and winter-time, and the choir-school has been evacuated and two of the assistant priests have gone to be army chaplains, so we have to have Low Mass instead of High Mass, and what with an air-raid shelter in the crypt and one thing and another, we are beginning to feel quite persecuted like early Christians in catacombs! Though indeed I oughtn’t to talk in that light-hearted way when Christians in Germany and Austria are being really persecuted – so subtly and wickedly, too, the older people being allowed to go to church, and all the CHILDREN being kept away by Hitler-Jugend meetings on Sundays, and being taught to insult Christ and despise their parents for believing in religion. It must be terrible to be a father or mother and feel that the government is deliberately ALIENATING one’s children and BREAKING UP the family and encouraging quite little boys and girls to read horrible, dirty stories about Jews and priests in that dreadful Stuermer. I believe they even teach those horrible things in schools. But I suppose a totalitarian state can’t afford to allow any group of people to have interests and ideas of its own – not even the FAMILY! And when one thinks how deeply the nicest Germans have always been attached to their gemütlich (isn’t that the word?) home-life, it seems quite heart-breaking . . .

  Miss Climpson was clearly keeping herself busy. Nevertheless, she might like a little trip down memory lane in the form of an investigation related to a murder enquiry, even if she was asked by Harriet rather than by dear Lord Peter. But pen in hand, and sheet of paper at the ready, Harriet was overwhelmed with the emotion of missing Peter. She, Harriet, had been involved before in murder enquiries, but never without Peter at her side or somewhere in the background. She was missing him desperately, on every front. But how ridiculous to be reduced to tears by writing to Miss Climpson!

  Harriet pulled herself together, and looked again at the three names: Jake Datchett; Archie Lugg; John Birdlap. Birdlap she had dealt with. She wondered what she herself knew about either of the others. Archie Lugg was a handyman, and he had put up some rough-and-ready bookcases for her only a week or so back, using old floorboards. A good-looking man, who seemed to live and work in a musing calm she associated with true craftsmen, and who smelled faintly of wood-shavings. She tried, and failed, to imagine him driven mad with love, and killing in a jealous rage; it wasn’t easy to imagine, but then she didn’t know much about him. If they had been looking for a blunt instrument, Archie’s toolbox would have contained plenty. Looking for a man with expertly homicidal hands was quite another thing. Disconcertingly, Harriet found she had quite a good mental picture of Archie Lugg’s hands: broad hands with rather spoon-shaped flattened fingers and thumbs. He would have the muscular strength, of course.

  She turned back to her letter.

  But the letter was out of luck this morning. She heard a child sobbing quietly on the way up the stairs, and put her head round the door to find Charlie in tears.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Uncle Jerry’s gone!’ he wailed.

  She held out her arms to him, and briefly hugged him. At ten did he still want to be hugged? Yes, it seemed he did, for he held on to her. Lord, thought Harriet, what can I say? I can’t tell him Jerry won’t come to any harm when it’s only too likely that he will. I don’t believe in lying to children. The news was horribly depressing. An increasingly vicious air battle was developing over the North Sea. German planes and German U-boats were attacking neutral shipping and even little inshore fishing boats. The British government had decided to arm merchant ships, and the Nazis had announced that British merchant ships would count as warships. Of course that meant fighter pilots like Jerry flying sorties over the Channel and the North Sea. Anyone could see how dangerous that was. And that the need for seaborne supplies was Britain’s Achilles’ heel.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Charlie, muffled in her loose embrace, ‘and I can’t make it work! And Sam can’t either,’ he added, in a normal tone, extricating himself.

  ‘Can’t make what work, Charlie?’

  ‘My crystal set!’ he cried.

  ‘Are you sure you’ve put it together right?’ she asked, stalling.

  ‘I’m pretty sure,’ he said. ‘But it keeps picking up the wrong wavelengths.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I can help in person, Charlie,’ she said. ‘It’s not my field. But your father and mother are coming at the weekend. Perhaps your father can help.’

  ‘That’s ages!’ lamented Charlie. But he wandered away, and when Harriet looked up from her letter a few minutes later she saw him with Bredon and Polly, playing French cricket on the lawn, and looking perfectly happy. She finished her letter to Mis
s Climpson, and began one to Peter.

  She had no recent letter from him to respond to, but was still hungrily reading over his last, perfectly discreet letter, in the form of an official letter-gram, reduced to the size of a postcard, closely typed in tiny letters, and bearing an official stamp from the censor.

  . . . Like the gentleman in the carol, I have seen a wonder sight – the Catholic padre and the refugee Lutheran minister having a drink together and discussing, in very bad Latin, the persecution of the Orthodox Church in Russia. I have seldom heard so much religious toleration or so many false quantities . . .

  Peter’s light and ironical tones came clearly off the paper, as though he were in the room, conversing with someone. The letter was censored, but he had managed to make her smile with it. Then the post-script: In case of accident I will write my own epitaph now: HERE LIES AN ANACHRONISM IN THE VAGUE EXPECTATION OF ETERNITY.

  Harriet put the letter away in her desk, alongside others, and began to compose a letter for him. The uncertainties of the correspondence made a smoothly alternating sequence of letters and replies impossible. But she could write in hope of reaching him, like Noah sending out a dove.

  If one wanted gossip in Paggleham, thought Harriet, one only had to bump into Mrs Ruddle. Not that Mr Kirk had actually asked her to find out about the two local young men, beyond getting their names from the land-girls, but, Harriet thought, either one was doing something or one wasn’t. And once involved she couldn’t be not involved. Writing to Peter caused her heart-ache, and there was no certainty that any letter would ever reach him. She laid it aside, put on her coat, and having asked Mrs Trapp if anything was needed at the village shop, and put the ration-book into her gas-mask case, she went out for a walk.

  Her way took her past the undertaker’s shop, and she went in.

  ‘Are you looking for Archie?’ enquired Fred Lugg, who was behind the counter, with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, and his folding rule in his hand. ‘Or have you come to have a chat with me?’