Sweet Sorrow (17 page)

‘Please call me Verity. Everyone does. I didn’t mean to offend you. Do you think I talk too much about being an atheist?’

‘It’s not that,’ Fisher responded defensively. ‘It’s just that I’m a friend of Tommie Fox, as you know, and he told me how you wouldn’t let him bless your wedding. He was very hurt.’

His look of reproach stung Verity to the quick. She resented being rebuked by someone who had no right to chastise her and felt herself become angry – her normal reaction when corrected.

‘I won’t try to convert you if you don’t try to convert me!’ she said with an effort at good humour.

‘This is no time for levity, Lady Edward,’ he said, ignoring her request to call her by her first name. ‘We live in a godless age and we face unimaginable evil. How can we hope to overcome our enemies if we cannot overcome ourselves?’

‘You are very severe, Mr Fisher. Did not Christ say forgive your enemies, turn the other cheek?’

‘How can you say that to me? Can you really forgive what the Fascists are doing to the Jews in Germany and to the brave Christian priests who protest against an evil regime? Christ is being crucified again even as we speak.’

Verity was ashamed. ‘You are right, of course. There can be no forgiveness for that. I have seen enough of it to know its true nature.’

Fisher seemed satisfied. The smile on his thin lips made him suddenly less severe and better-looking. He raised his hat. ‘We shall see each other in Sussex, no doubt, but goodbye for now.’

‘Good heavens!’ Verity exclaimed, perhaps inappropriately, as he disappeared into Broadcasting House. Silently, she added, ‘It’s a bit much to be dressed down by a bigot and a prig in this temple of free speech. I must ring Tommie and find out what has made him such a Bible basher.’ Her experience of Church of England vicars was not great but those she had met tended to be amiable men with liberal views, unwilling or unable to preach hellfire at the non-believer. Paul Fisher made her more certain than ever that she was an atheist.

10

The next few days passed quickly and quietly as time tends to do before any major catastrophe, at least in retrospect. Edward spent a day at the Oval with Tommie Fox watching England draw with the West Indies. A third wicket stand of 264 between Len Hutton and Walter Hammond recalled Hutton’s mighty 364 against Australia at the Oval the previous year.

Edward itched to take up a cricket bat again but had to make do with a box of croquet mallets and balls he discovered in what had once been the summerhouse but was now little more than a ruined shed given over to rats and birds. Basil tried to evict the rats but they were too fierce for him so he turned his attention to the birds who protested loudly but otherwise ignored him.

Leonard and Virginia they saw almost every day. Edward grew very much to like Leonard and at his urging made a determined attack on Virginia’s
Three Guineas
which puzzled and rather repelled him. Virginia was so complicated and subtle a character that he found it hard to get a grip on her. While he now thought of Leonard as a friend, he still regarded Virginia as something between a seer and La Gioconda – elusive but infinitely fascinating.

Verity was much less struck by Leonard and made no attempt to read Virginia’s novels, having convinced herself that she would not understand them. However, she became very fond of her and constantly sought her advice or approbation. It was almost as if she had adopted Virginia as an unpractical but wise older sister – the sister she had never had. Verity accepted her for what she was and her uncomplicated affection seemed to spark something similar in Virginia who, in Verity’s company, was cheerful and sometimes merry. She seemed to see in her something of Julian, her beloved nephew. Leonard and Edward would look at each other in delighted surprise when they heard the two women – so different in every way – laughing together.

‘When I first knew Virginia, she used to laugh and make jokes but now she laughs so seldom that I treasure each occasion. I owe your wife a lot, Edward.’

‘Not as much as I owe her,’ Edward responded fervently.

Verity found she was nervous as she pushed through the swing doors of Broadcasting House the following Wednesday. She had stopped before entering to admire the famous window boxes outside the Director General’s office on the first floor which, viewed from the street, recalled Sir John Reith’s shaggy eyebrows. She might not sympathize with all his views but his creation – the BBC – seemed to her almost perfect.

Frieda met her and took her straight up to the third floor. It was six o’clock and they used the interval until the recording to rehearse some of the questions Verity would be asked. Frieda wanted the conversation to sound spontaneous but found that it helped to prime the pump, as it were. Although Verity was no novice when it came to broadcasting, she had in front of her, as was her practice, a list of the names, dates, facts and figures which could so unaccountably elude her at a crucial moment when she was in full flow.

At twenty to seven they went into Studio 3D. Reg Barnes, talking to them from the control room behind a plate-glass window, tested their voice levels and twiddled knobs until he was satisfied with the technical side. The two women sat opposite one another across a table, each with a microphone in front of her. Frieda faced the control room so that she could take instructions from Reg Barnes. Although there was a clock on the wall, he said he would put his hand in the air when they were five minutes from the end and again two minutes before the stop signal. He was a comfortable calm figure and Verity knew she was in good hands. At five to seven she fought down an impulse to run out to the lavatory and the recording began. It was to last forty minutes.

She listened to Frieda’s introduction with some astonishment, hardly recognizing herself. Was she really the hard-bitten war correspondent Frieda painted her? There were references to her ‘scoop’ – her dispatch from Guernica just after its destruction by the Luftwaffe in April 1937 – her deportation from Vienna after the Anschluss and also her recent illness. Verity had not wanted this mentioned but Frieda felt that her recovery from TB might encourage others who had been struck down by the disease to feel that they too could regain their health and return to normal life. Verity had reluctantly agreed but absolutely refused to discuss her marriage so was annoyed when Frieda sneakily mentioned that she was the wife of the celebrated amateur sleuth, Lord Edward Corinth.

After the first questions about how she had become a war correspondent and the problems a woman faced competing with men in a difficult and occasionally dangerous job, she relaxed and rather enjoyed talking about herself. Frieda asked one or two awkward questions about why she had joined and then left the Communist Party but they ended with what was almost a call to arms. She said the Nazis
could
be defeated and that in her experience the worst thing about war was the waiting.

All in all she thought it had gone well. When the red light went off, she got up, stretched and – leaving Frieda to tidy up her papers – went into the control room to see if Barnes was happy with the interview.

He was playing it back on the Marconi-Stille machine. ‘Very good! You’ll get a lot of sneers from the far right, but take that as a compliment. I think the DG will be pleased.’

Verity listened to the first few minutes of the interview but then begged Barnes to stop the machine. ‘I can’t bear my voice! I sound quite different in my head. Have I really got that clipped, nasal whine? Please tell me I sound more like Greta Garbo.’

‘You mustn’t be so hard on yourself. You have a low voice for a woman and that always sounds better on the wireless. Now, where is Frieda? There are a few things I need to say to her about the next interview.’

‘Who is that with?’

‘E. M. Delafield. She writes in
Time and Tide
.’

‘Of course! I love her books, particularly
The Diary of a Provincial Lady
.’

Barnes glanced through the window of the control room into the studio. ‘Good heavens! What on earth . . .?’

He got up hurriedly, knocking over a chair. Verity turned round, anxious to discover what had happened, and saw that Frieda appeared to be lying across the table. Her first thought was that she had fainted. The studio was certainly stuffy despite what Frieda had told her about the building’s ventilation system.

As she followed Barnes into the studio, a sudden fear gripped her. If Frieda had fainted, she would surely have fallen on the floor and, in any case, she had given no sign of feeling ill. Barnes was already leaning over her as Verity came through the door. She cried out when she saw Frieda’s head. She had been hit with something heavy which had caused a terrible wound. Blood was leaking on to the table in an ever-widening pool. There could not be the slightest doubt. Frieda had been murdered.

‘Oh my God! Frieda! How can this be possible? I was only out of the room for a minute. Who could have done it? And why?’

Verity found that tears were pouring down her cheeks and she wiped them roughly away. It was the shock of finding someone so alive one moment, dead the next, murdered by some lunatic in the heart of Broadcasting House where, just a short time before, she had felt so safe.

Barnes pointed to a small bust of Sir John Reith covered in blood and worse which had fallen to the floor. There could be no doubt as to what had happened. In the five or six minutes Verity had been in the control room, someone had entered the studio, picked up the nearest heavy object and beaten Frieda to death. It would have been unbelievable had the evidence not been in front of them.

Pulling herself together Verity went to the door and looked into the passage. There was no one and nothing to be seen.

‘The killer must still be in the building,’ she said. ‘Quickly, ring down to security and tell them to stop anyone leaving until the police get here.’

Barnes still appeared dazed by the suddenness with which the horror had come upon them.

‘She was so alive . . . I can’t believe it . . . for this to happen in the BBC of all places,’ he muttered, unconsciously echoing Lady Macbeth. He looked at Verity and seemed to get a grip on himself. ‘Yes, the police – I’ll telephone the front desk.’ Then he added, rather strangely Verity felt, when she thought about it later, ‘Well, at least no one can suspect either of us of killing the poor girl.’

‘Whoever did this will be covered in blood,’ Verity pointed out. ‘He must be changing his clothes as we speak or at least cleaning himself up. Where are the nearest washrooms?’

‘At the end of the passage but you can’t go on your own. If he’s killed once, he’ll have no hesitation in killing again. Wait while I raise the alarm and then I’ll come with you. Oh God, what a mess! I must inform the DG. Murder in Broadcasting House! It’s never happened before. Why kill Frieda? What had she ever done to anyone?’

Verity, too, was beginning to recover from the shock. ‘We must keep out of here. There may be . . . Look!’ She pointed to a bloody footprint. ‘Someone needs to be on guard in here.’

Barnes went back to the control room and started telephoning. Putting his hand over the receiver, he said to Verity, ‘No one covered in blood has been seen at the front desk. I suppose he must have gone out through the back.’

‘Let’s go and look at the washrooms. He may be hiding.’

Barnes would much rather have waited for the police but, unable to admit this to Verity, he followed her down the passage. The women’s cubicle, containing a basin and a lavatory, was small and rather squalid. It was empty and there was no sign of anyone having used it to wash bloody hands or clothes. Barnes emerged from the men’s washroom and shook his head. To his relief, he hadn’t had to grapple with a murderer nor had he seen anything to suggest the basin had been used to wash away blood.

He had a sudden thought. ‘The murderer . . . he might have gone up the stairs.’

‘What stairs?’

‘There’s a small spiral staircase at the end of the passage that goes to . . .’

‘Goes where?’

‘To the Silence Room.’

Verity remembered Frieda telling her that the Silence Room was where announcements could be made and telephone calls taken without interrupting whatever was going on in the studios.

Grim-faced, her heart racing, she ran down the passage and up the staircase, her leather-soled shoes clattering against the metal. She thrust open the door of the Silence Room not quite knowing what to expect but fearing the worst. She half-suppressed a cry. A heap of bloodstained overalls lay by a chair. Panting, Barnes came up and stood beside her. They both stared open-mouthed at the sinister pile of clothes.

‘That knitted thing with eye-holes . . . it’s a balaclava, isn’t it? He must have put it over his head to disguise himself.’ Verity shuddered. It was clear that this was where the murderer had lurked and where he had changed after attacking Frieda. ‘If only we had been a bit quicker . . .’ she said under her breath.

‘We must have only just missed him.’ Barnes was sweating from the effort of climbing the stairs and felt rather dizzy. He tried not to show how relieved he was that they had not come face to face with the killer. ‘What’s that on the floor by the clothes?’ he added, bending down to pick up a shiny piece of metal. ‘It’s a badge, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t touch it,’ Verity said urgently. ‘We must leave everything exactly as we found it. Quick – let’s get back to the studio. We mustn’t let anyone in before the police arrive.’

As they reached the studio, they saw two commissionaires running towards them along the passage.

‘There’s been a terrible accident,’ Barnes told them. Verity wondered vaguely why he called it an accident. There was no way of disguising what had happened. For one thing, police would soon be crawling all over the place and, for another, there would be no more broadcasts from the third floor for the foreseeable future. She suddenly felt exhausted and deeply depressed. Why was violent death so often her companion, even here at the BBC, even before war made death a matter of routine? First Byron and now Frieda. Where was Edward? She needed him.