Not Safe After Dark (41 page)

Instead, I thought about Mad Maggie, or Rose Faversham, as she had now become for me. When I tried to visualize her as she was alive, I realized that had I looked closely enough, had I got
beyond the grim expressions and the muttered curses, I might have seen her for the handsome woman she was.
Handsome
, I say, not pretty or beautiful, but I would hazard a guess that twenty
years ago she would have turned a head or two. Then I remembered that it was about twenty years ago when she first arrived in the neighbourhood, and she had been Mad Maggie right from the start. So
perhaps I was inventing a life for her, a life she had never had, but certainly when death brought repose to her features, it possessed her of a beauty I had not noticed before.

When I set off for school, I saw Tommy Markham, Harry’s stepson, going for his morning constitutional. Tommy’s real dad, Lawrence Markham, had been my best friend. We had grown up
together and had both fought in the Third Battle of Ypres, between August and November 1917. Lawrence had been killed at Passchendaele, about nine miles away from my unit, while I had only been
mildly gassed. Tommy was in his mid twenties now. He never knew his real dad, but worshipped him in a way you can worship only a dead hero. Tommy joined up early and served with the Green Howards
as part of the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force in France. He had seemed rather twitchy and sullen since he got back from the hospital last week, but I put that down to shattered nerves. The
doctors had told Polly, his mother, something about nervous exhaustion and about being patient with him.

‘Morning, Tommy,’ I greeted him.

He hadn’t noticed me at first – his eyes had been glued to the pavement as he walked – but when he looked up, startled, I noticed the almost pellucid paleness of his skin and
the dark bruises under his eyes.

‘Oh, good morning, Mr Bascombe,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine, but you don’t look so good. What is it?’

‘My nerves,’ he said, moving away as he spoke. ‘The doc said I’d be all right after a bit of rest, though.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. By the way, did your fath—, sorry, did Harry tell you about Mad Maggie?’ I knew Tommy was sensitive about Harry not being his real father.

‘He said she was dead, that’s all. Says someone clobbered her.’

‘When did you last see her, Tommy?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Since the raid?’

‘That was the day after I got back. No, come to think of it, I don’t think I have seen her since then. Terrible business, in’it?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Anyway, sorry, must dash. Bye, Mr Bascombe.’

‘Bye, Tommy.’

I stood frowning and watched him scurry off, almost crabwise, down the street.

•

There was another air raid that night, and I decided to look for Fingers Finnegan. By then I had talked to enough people on the street to be certain that no one had seen Rose
since the evening of the last raid.

We lived down by the railway, the canal and the power station, so we were always copping it. The Luftwaffe could never aim accurately, though, because the power station sent up clouds of
appalling smoke as soon as they heard there were enemy planes approaching. If the bombs hit anything of strategic value, it was more by good luck than good management.

The siren would go off, wailing up and down the scale for two minutes, and it soon became an eerie fugue as you heard the sirens from neighbouring boroughs join in, one after another. The noise
frightened the dogs and cats and they struck up, wailing and howling, too. At first, you could hardly see a thing outside, only hear the droning of the bombers high above and the swishing and
whistling sound of the bombs as they fell in the distance. Then came the explosions, the hailstone of incendiaries on roofs like a rain of fire, the flames crackling, blazing through the smoke.
Even the sounds seemed muffled, the distant explosions no more than dull, flat thuds, like a heavy book falling on the floor, the crackle of anti-aircraft fire like fat spitting on a griddle.
Sometimes you could even hear someone scream or shout out a warning. Once I heard a terrible shrieking that still haunts my nightmares.

But the city had an eldritch beauty during an air raid. In the distance, through the smoke haze, the skyline seemed lit by a dozen suns, each a slightly different shade of red, orange or yellow.
Searchlights criss-crossed one another, making intricate cat’s cradles in the air, and ack-ack fire arced into the sky like strings of Christmas lights. Soon, the bells of the fire engines
became part of the symphony of sound and colour. The smoke from the power station got in my eyes and up my nose, and with my lungs, it brought on a coughing fit that seemed to shake my ribs free of
their moorings. I held a handkerchief to my face, and that seemed to help a little.

It wasn’t too difficult to get around, despite the blackout and the smoke. There were white stripes painted on the lampposts and along the kerbside, and many people had put little dots of
luminous paint on their doorbells, so you could tell where you were if you knew the neighbourhood well enough.

I walked along Lansdowne Street to the junction with Cardigan Road. Nobody was abroad. The bombs were distant but getting closer, and the smell from a broken sewage pipe was terrible, despite my
handkerchief. Once, I fancied I saw a figure steal out of one of the houses, look this way and that, then disappear into the smoky darkness. I ran, calling out after him, but when I got there he
had vanished. It was probably Fingers, I told myself. I’d have a devil of a time catching him now I had scared him off. My best chance was to run him down in one of the back-street cafes
where he sold his stolen goods the next day.

So instead of pursuing my futile task, and because it was getting more and more difficult to breathe, I decided that my investigation might next benefit best from a good look around Rose’s
empty house.

It was easy enough to gain access via the kitchen window at the back, which wasn’t even latched, and after an undignified and painful fall from the sink to the floor, I managed to regain
my equilibrium and set about my business. It occurred to me that if I had such an easy time getting in, then her killer would have had an easy time, too. Rose had been killed with the posser, which
would most likely have been placed near the sink or tub in which she did her washing.

Because of the blackout curtains, I didn’t have to worry about my torch giving me away; nor did I have to cover it with tissue paper, as I would outside, so I had plenty of light to see
by. I stood for a few moments, adjusting to the room. I could hear fire-engine bells not too far away.

I found little of interest downstairs. Apart from necessities, such as cutlery, pans, plates and dishes, Rose seemed to own nothing. There were no framed photographs on the mantelpiece, no
paintings on the drab walls. There wasn’t even a wireless. A search of the sideboard revealed only the rent book that Longbottom had already discovered, a National Identity Card, also in the
name of Rose Faversham, her ration book, various coupons, old bills and about twenty pounds in banknotes. I did find two bottles of gin, one almost empty, in the lower half of the china cabinet.
There were no letters, no address books, nothing of a personal nature. Rose Faversham’s nest was clean and tidy, but it was also quite sterile.

Wondering whether it was worth bothering, I finally decided to go upstairs to finish my search. The first of the two bedrooms was completely bare. Most people use a spare room to store things
they no longer use but can’t bear to throw out just yet; there was nothing like this in Rose’s spare bedroom, just some rather austere wallpaper and bare floorboards.

I felt a tremor of apprehension on entering Rose’s bedroom. After all, she had lived such a private, self-contained life that any encroachment on her most intimate domain seemed a
violation. Nonetheless, I went inside.

Apart from the ruffled bedclothes, which I assumed were the result of Detective Sergeant Longbottom’s cursory search, the bedroom was every bit as neat, clean and empty as the rest of the
house. The one humanizing detail was a library book on her bedside table: Samuel Butler’s
The Way of All Flesh
. So Rose Faversham had been an educated woman. Butler’s savage and
ironic attack on Victorian values was hardly common bedtime reading on our street.

I looked under the mattress and under the bed, and found nothing. The dressing table held those few items deemed essential for a woman’s appearance and hygiene, and the chest of drawers
revealed only stacks of carefully folded undergarments, corsets and the like, among which I had no desire to go probing. The long dresses hung in the wardrobe beside the high-buttoned blouses.

About to give up and head home to bed, I tried one last place – the top of the wardrobe, where I used to keep my secret diaries when I was a boy – and there I found the shoebox. Even
a brief glance inside told me it was the repository of whatever past and personal memories Rose Faversham might have wanted to hang on to. Instead of sitting on the bedspread to read by torchlight,
I went back downstairs and slipped out of the house like a thief in the night, which I suppose I was, with Rose’s shoebox under my arm. A bomb exploded about half a mile away as I sidled down
the street.

•

I should have gone to one of the shelters, I know, but I was feeling devil-may-care that night, and I certainly didn’t want anyone to know I had broken into Rose’s
house and stolen her only private possessions. Back in my own humble abode, I made sure my curtains were shut tight, poured a large tumbler of brandy – perhaps, apart from nosiness and an
inability to suffer fools gladly, my only vice – then turned on the standard lamp beside my armchair and settled down to examine my haul. There was a certain excitement in having pilfered it,
as they say, and for a moment I imagined I had an inkling of that illicit thrill Fingers Finnegan must get every time
he
burgles someone’s house. Of course, this was different; I
hadn’t broken into Rose’s house for my own benefit, to line my own pockets, but to solve the mystery of her murder.

The first thing the shoebox yielded was a photograph of three smiling young women standing in front of an old van with a cross on its side. I could tell by their uniforms that they were nurses
from the First World War. On the back, in slightly smudged ink, someone had written ‘Midge, Rose and Margaret – Flanders, 30 July 1917. Friends Inseparable For Ever!’

I stared hard at the photograph and, though my imagination may have been playing tricks on me, I thought I recognized Rose as the one in the middle. She had perfect dimples at the edges of her
smile, and her eyes gazed, pure and clear, directly into the lens. She bore little resemblance to the Rose I had known as Mad Maggie, or indeed to the body of Rose Faversham as I had seen it. But I
think it was her.

I put the photograph aside and pulled out the next item. It was a book of poetry:
Severn and Somme
by Ivor Gurney. One of my favourite poets, Gurney was gassed at St Julien, near
Passchendaele, and sent to a war hospital near Edinburgh. I heard he later became mentally disturbed and suicidal, and he died just two or three years ago, after nearly twenty years of suffering. I
have always regretted that we never met.

I opened the book. On the title page, someone had written, ‘To My Darling Rose on her 21st Birthday, 20 March 1918. Love, Nicholas.’ So Rose was even younger than I had thought.

I set the book aside for a moment and rubbed my eyes. Sometimes I fancied the residual effects of the gas made them water, though my doctor assured me that it was a foolish notion, as mustard
gas wasn’t a lachrymator.

I hadn’t been in the war as late as March 1918. The injury that sent me to a hospital in Manchester, my ‘Blighty’, took place the year before. Blistered and blinded, I had lain
in bed there for months, unwilling to get up. The blindness passed, but the scarring remained, both inside and out. In the small hours, when I can’t sleep, I relive those early days of August
1917 in Flanders: the driving rain, the mud, the lice, the rats, the deafening explosions. It was madness. We were doomed from the start by incompetent leaders, and as we struggled waist deep
through mud, with shells and bullets flying all around us, we could only watch in hopeless acceptance as our own artillery sank in the mud, and our tanks followed it down.

Judging by the words on the back of the photograph, Rose had been there, too:
Rose
, one of the angels of mercy who tended the wounded and the dying in the trenches of Flanders’
fields.

I opened the book. Nicholas, or Rose, had underlined the first few lines of the first poem, ‘To the Poet Before Battle’:

Perhaps Nicholas had been a poet, and Gurney’s call for courage in the face of impending battle applied to him, too? And if Nicholas had been a poet, was Rose one of the ‘lovely
things’ he had to set aside?

Outside, the all-clear sounded and brought me back to earth. I breathed a sigh of relief. Spared again. Still, I had been so absorbed in Rose’s treasures that I probably wouldn’t
have heard a bomb if one fell next door. They say you never hear the one with your name on.

I set the book down beside the photograph and dug around deeper in the shoebox. I found a medal of some sort – I think for valour in wartime nursing – and a number of official papers
and certificates. Unfortunately, there were no personal letters. Even so, I managed to compile a list of names to seek out and one or two official addresses where I might pursue my enquiries into
Rose Faversham’s past. No time like the present, I thought, going over to my escritoire and taking out pen and paper.

•

I posted my letters early the following morning, when I went to fetch my newspaper. I had the day off from school, as the pupils were collecting aluminium pots and pans for the
Spitfire Fund, so I thought I might slip into Special Constable mode and spend an hour or two scouring Fingers Finnegan’s usual haunts.