The Zig Zag Girl (11 page)

Edgar and Bill shook their heads. Edgar was aware that the dazed feeling was back again.

‘It was supposedly the lance that pieced Christ’s side. It was kept in a church in Austria, but when the Germans invaded Austria, Hitler went to the church and took the spear. The legend is that whoever possesses it controls the destiny of the world.’

‘It’s very Wagnerian,’ said Edgar.

‘Very,’ agreed Max. ‘And Hitler loves Wagner, as well as myth and magic.’

‘Do the Germans really believe all that?’ asked Bill.

Max shrugged. ‘People will believe anything, especially in wartime. Why do you think Goebbels published all those Nostradamus prophecies saying that the Nazis would conquer Europe? Only after he’d rewritten them first, of course.’

‘And how’s this going to help us make the Germans think that we’re invading Norway?’ asked Edgar. He realised that he’d used the word ‘us’.

‘Be careful,’ said a voice behind them. ‘Careless talk and all that.’

Edgar turned and saw a woman in WAAF uniform. She had dark-red hair tied back in a bun and was the possessor
of a face of such perfect beauty that Edgar could only gape at her.

‘Who’s going to overhear?’ asked Max, gathering up his cards. ‘Bambi’s father up there?’ He gestured at the stag.

The woman smiled. ‘Just be on your guard. I’ve never met such a lax crew.’

She moved away to speak to Tony and Diablo. Edgar tested his voice to make sure that it still worked. ‘Who’s that?’ he croaked.

Max was also watching the woman, but his expression was hard to read. ‘Captain Parsons,’ he said. ‘Charis Parsons. Our commanding officer.’

Bill and his wife lived in Wembley, a district close enough in spirit to Esher to make Edgar feel nervous. But where Esher was still toy town, Wembley was vast, expanding in every direction. The Bentley glided past sprawling estates of new social housing, each with their small square of garden. Children played hopscotch and the chimes of an ice cream van sounded in the distance. Edgar sank lower in his seat.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Max with a malicious smile. ‘Suddenly realising that domestic bliss isn’t up your street after all?’

‘It just reminds me of the place where I was brought up.’

‘You’ve never told me where that was.’

‘It’s in Esher in Surrey. My mother still lives there.’

Max shot him a glance. ‘Do you see her much?’

Edgar shifted uncomfortably. ‘I try to see her as much as I can, but I’m pretty busy and she …’ His voice drifted away.

‘You should see her,’ said Max. ‘You’re lucky that you’ve still got your mother.’

Edgar looked at his friend’s profile. He knew that Max’s mother had died when he was very young. He probably couldn’t understand what it was like to have a mother with whom you had nothing in common, someone who never failed to make you feel obscurely guilty about everything, even the fact that you had survived the war when your brother hadn’t. Still, Max was right. He should visit Rose more often.

‘I don’t like places like this,’ he said, to change the subject as much as anything. ‘They make me feel nervous.’

‘Wembley’s a boom town,’ said Max. ‘Lots of new businesses and houses. They had the Olympic Games here, after all. The Athens of north London.’

But Max liked lots of people around him. People meant audiences, new towns meant new theatres, crowds to entertain. As he often said, it was the countryside that made him feel nervous. Too many open spaces, too much silence. But, for Edgar, cities meant crime. Who knew what was hiding in these newly tarmacked streets, each named after a First World War general. Allenby Avenue, Haig Drive. Each one of these little houses might be housing a murderer. Besides, he’d never been to Athens, but he couldn’t imagine that it included a greyhound stadium.

Bill and Jean didn’t live in one of the new estates. Their street was obviously a step up: net curtains at the windows and cars parked in driveways. Edgar knew that Bill
had a good job with the General Electric Company. Clearly things were going well.

‘Now this,’ said Max, coming to a halt in front of a semi-detached house with a wishing well in the garden, ‘is charming.’

‘I can’t see you living here,’ retorted Edgar.

‘No. I’m a vagabond. It’s a sad life.’ He sighed heavily, but Edgar thought he looked rather smug all the same.

Edgar had called to say they were coming, and it seemed that Bill was waiting for them. He flung open the door before they had time to knock.

‘Ed! Max! It’s great to see you again. Is that your car, Max? What a beauty.’

Edgar noticed that Bill didn’t assume for one second that the Bentley could be his. Bill hadn’t changed, he thought. Still tall and good-looking with an open, friendly face. (‘What does Charis see in him?’ he had once asked Tony in a fit of drunken despair. ‘What, you mean apart from the classic good looks and the bulging muscles,’ Tony had replied.)

But now Bill was ushering them into the house and saying, ‘Of course, you remember Jean.’ Edgar
did
remember, as a matter of fact. Oh, not her name, but he remembered the face – pretty, symmetrical, small blue eyes. She could have been any one of the girls at the WAAF base in Inverness. Why had Bill married her? How could he stand looking at her face after Charis’s?

But, as Bill led them into a sitting room dominated by
a vast playpen, it seemed that his overriding emotion was pride.

‘And this is our son and heir, Barney. You wouldn’t have thought such a petite little thing could produce such a huge baby, would you?’

‘Oh, Bill!’ Jean aimed a playful slap at him.

‘Would you fellows like tea?’ Jean put her head on one side coquettishly. ‘Or something stronger?’

Edgar and Max assured her that tea would be perfect.

On the phone Edgar had told Bill that he wanted to discuss Tony’s murder but now, in this pink-and-white room, he found it almost impossible to raise the subject again. He caught the baleful eye of the baby and looked away again. He really was huge.

It was Bill who said, sinking into an armchair, ‘Poor old Tony. Who would do such a terrible thing?’

Edgar and Max sat side by side on the sofa. It was covered by a fabric so fiercely floral that Edgar felt as if the tendrils were about to wrap themselves round his legs, imprisoning him in a deadly chintz embrace. Max, on the other hand, seemed perfectly at home.

‘I don’t know,’ said Edgar. ‘But I think it could have something to do with the Magic Men.’

He explained about The Zig Zag Girl murder and Tony’s last message.

‘He said he wanted to talk to me about the Magic Men, but he was killed before I could see him.’

‘Maybe that was a coincidence,’ said Bill. ‘Maybe he just wanted to reminisce.’

‘Maybe,’ said Edgar, ‘But the theatrical nature of the murders …’ He looked at Max. He hadn’t told Bill exactly how Tony was killed. ‘And the fact that there seem to be links to both me and Max makes me think that this could be someone from … well, from those days.’

‘You think the killer could be someone from Inverness?’ Bill’s voice rose in disbelief. ‘Who? Major Gormley? Old Diablo? Me? Perhaps you think it’s me?’

Jean, frozen in the doorway with the tea-tray, said, ‘Why are you shouting, dear?’

Edgar, who’d been wondering the same thing, said, ‘It’s OK, Jean. Just discussing the old days.’

Jean carefully put the tray on the table. ‘Oh, I expect you’re talking about her. Charis. Well, she was no better than she should be. Everyone knew that.’

The baby let out a sudden and terrifying guffaw.

*

Edgar had fallen in love with Charis immediately. In those desperate days of the war, there seemed no point in waiting for anything. Jonathan was dead, London was still being pounded by German bombs every night, there seemed little chance that the raggle-taggle soldiers with whom Edgar had served in Norway could ever defeat the mighty Axis powers – even with the help of the Americans. Their little unit seemed cut off from the war, cut off from ordinary life. ‘Massingham has the ideas,’ Gormley had said and, in this, he was certainly right. Max had about fifty ideas a day and it was Edgar’s job to decide which could be turned into life – or into wood and canvas.
One of Max’s first suggestions was an army of dummies that would make the base look as if it were stuffed full of troops, ready for an imminent invasion.

‘They tried dummies on the south coast,’ said Diablo, ‘when everyone was worked up about an invasion after Dunkirk. They wouldn’t have fooled a child.’

‘That was because of the shadows,’ said Max. ‘Get the shadows right and, from the air, they’ll look just like real soldiers.’

‘If we have them lying around smoking cigarettes and playing cards they will,’ said Tony.

In the end, Bill only built a few members of Max’s dummy army. One of these, a corpulent sergeant with a cigarette butt in his hand, was positioned on the first-floor landing of the Caledonian and never failed to give Edgar a shock when he visited the lavatory in the night.

The dummy tanks were more successful. They were stage props really, wooden frames covered with painted sackcloth. From a distance, with the right lighting (Diablo was an expert at lighting), they looked incredibly realistic. The problem was that there was really no reason to have tanks at Inverness. Edgar knew that Max had created whole squadrons of tanks in Egypt (‘the shadows are wonderful in the desert’), but here there was only room for one or two. It was one of these tanks which, positioned on the front lawn of the Caledonian, had given the Major such a shock when he opened his bedroom window to commence his morning stretches.

Building the props was quite fun. Bill did most of the skilled carpentry work, but the others all helped with painting and what Diablo called ‘dressing’. The trouble was that this left a whole lot of time when there was nothing much to do. Days when Edgar walked by the river thinking about his brother, shot down as he struggled for his boat at Dunkirk, and wondering if anyone had ever spent a more useless war than Captain Edgar Stephens.

Charis, though nominally in charge, kept her distance from the physical work, those long hours spent in the barn workshop, angling lights at cardboard flats and working out the exact colour to paint a slightly bullet-damaged tank. Nobody knew much about her. She had joined the WAAFs as soon as war broke out. ‘The interview was ridiculous,’ she told Edgar. ‘All they wanted to do was check that we could hold a knife the right way.’ She had been a plotter, one of these steadfast girls working in the Operations Room, mapping both British and enemy planes and reporting their movements to the Filter Room. She worked through the raid on Dieppe, Edgar knew, and people still spoke about the way she had remained calm throughout the dreadful night, her hands remaining completely steady as she put down the arrows, over a hundred losses. The command of the Magic Men had meant promotion, but Edgar thought that Charis was often bored by the long days discussing camouflage and sleight of hand. ‘I’m not one of the Magic Men,’ she would say with her trademark teasing smile, ‘I’m not magic and I’m certainly not a man.’ She
sometimes took a rather competitive tone with the magicians, as if to prove that she was as clever as they were. And she was clever: she could play cards almost as well as Max and spoke three languages. She could swap badinage with Tony and quote Shakespeare with Diablo. Once she had filled in three clues on his cryptic crossword while he was at the bar getting drinks. In his darker moments, Edgar wondered if she’d only had an affair with him to stave off the boredom.

It was certainly the situation – the isolation, the boredom, the sense that the rest of the world might have been swallowed up by one of the sea frets blown in from the Firth – that led to Edgar’s uncharacteristic boldness in making the first move. He had desired Charis from the first and, as the months wore on, he found himself becoming obsessed with her: her face, her hair, her walk, her bold appraising glance. Finally, almost driven mad by boredom and frustration, he had grabbed hold of her as they stood looking over the Ness one evening and pressed his lips against hers. He had expected her to break away, to cry, to slap his face. Instead, she had responded to his kiss and, when they finally broke apart, had leant forward to murmur her room number in his ear.

She wasn’t his first girl, but she was the first girl that mattered. They went to great lengths to keep their affair secret – not least because she was his commanding officer – so it was a real shock to Edgar when he realised that everyone knew about it. It took a snide comment from Tony about his ‘magic powers’ to alert him to the fact.

‘You couldn’t expect us not to find out,’ said Max. ‘We’re magicians, we’re used to reading body language, picking up unspoken clues. Besides, you keep staring at her.’

Charis was a constant wonder to him. She didn’t tell him much about her past. In fact, looking back, they didn’t really talk much at all. She was born in Wales, but her father was dead and she didn’t get on with her mother. She had been to boarding school, she said, and she certainly had the kind of cut-glass accent that would have made Edgar’s mother swoon with delight if he had ever taken her home to Esher. She had spent a couple of years abroad and this, to Edgar’s inexperienced eyes, imbued her with a mysterious foreign glamour. Sometimes she would roll her eyes at him and accuse him of being ‘typically English’, something which Edgar could not really deny. Apart from his time in Norway, he had never even been out of Britain. Charis had left school at sixteen, but she knew about art and opera, she could play the piano and occasionally used an amber cigarette-holder. And she was effortlessly, exotically beautiful. Watching her walk across the saloon bar at the Caledonian could move Edgar almost to tears.

Edgar never quite knew what she felt about him. She called him ‘darling’, but she never talked about a future together or suggested that they formalise their relationship. In fact, she seemed to expect nothing more from him than frequent and energetic sex. Edgar tried to convince himself that they were somehow engaged, that after
the war they would settle down together and produce a series of beautiful, red-haired children. ‘I love you,’ he said, whenever he got the chance. And now, years later, he was tormented by the fact that he could not remember whether she had ever said it back.

Predictably, it was Tony who told him that Charis was sleeping with Bill. Although Charis was always nice to Bill, congratulating him on his carpentry prowess and calling him her ‘wood-working wizard’, Edgar had never really considered him a rival. Max was the one that the WAAFs swooned over, the one whom Edgar’s mother would have called (disapprovingly) ‘a ladies’ man’. Even Tony, fast-talking and smooth, had his successes. Bill – steady, hard-working, always slightly behind on a joke – was easy to overlook. Afterwards, Edgar wondered if it was, after all, simple snobbery. Bill was the sergeant, the worker. How could he aspire to a woman who was not only a goddess but also a commissioned officer? But aspire he did, and one day, about six months after their arrival at Inverness, Tony leant forward in the bar of the Caledonian and said, ‘How does it feel to be second best to Clueless Cosgrove?’

‘What do you mean?’ Edgar had asked.

Tony pointed up at the rafters. ‘You’ve been replaced in La Parsons’ bed by Bill. Didn’t you know?’

Edgar remembers turning to Max and seeing him, momentarily, look away. That was how he knew.