It was uncomfortable; like dipping into her mind. But how else was I going to find out what happened to her? That’s how I’d explain it when we next met. When.
If had no room in my thinking. I was chewing my nails as I got to the later stuff covering the last few weeks, our weeks. What would I find about me? My anxiety rose when I identified the dates, but found the comments themselves in squiggle or shorthand.
I should have been able to read some of the shorthand, albeit slowly; it had been part of our SOE training. There were many forms but usually enough of an overlap to get the gist. But I was stymied by hers. The secret of Pitman is it’s phonetic; there are hundreds of symbols each with its own sound. The thickness of the strokes distinguishes vowels and consonants. All you have to do is memorise them and put them together in your head to make words. With daily practice you can become competent – in a year or two.
I tried saying some of the shorthand out loud, the ones that bore a vague resemblance to what I’d learned. Nothing. Gibberish. In fact with the ochs and achs I was making they sounded a bit like the Ayrshire dialect – Lallan Scots, the language of Burns.
The idea hit me. I grabbed the notebook and a pad and a pencil from my drawer. I ripped my jacket from its peg and ran down the stairs. The cat exploded at my feet.
I was out and running, gammy leg forgotten. A double-decker was trundling away from the stop. I sprinted and caught the pole and hauled myself inside, vowing to give up the fags sometime soon. A change at Elephant and I was in Bloomsbury within half an hour.
I’d never been inside the British Library but had once stood outside peering through the glass doors. To me it was a sort of shrine. Kilpatrick’s old Victorian library and museum, with its stuffed lion guarding the top of the stairs, held what I thought of as the world’s biggest collection of books. I would raid its shelves every week. But the British Library! Where Marx and Dickens sat. Too much for me before. Now, I needed to get in.
I explained my errand to the girl behind the desk. She said that it was impossible. I said I was a private detective. She said she shouldn’t. I said my girlfriend had been kidnapped. She said only if you’re quick and don’t let the Super see you. She led me to a little seat in front of a long brown desk. High overhead soared the great dome, and under it the wooden gallery that followed its curve. Around me and above me were miles of aisles holding books from every corner of the English speaking world. It was better than the echoing vacuum of St Paul’s. This was religion enough. A few minutes later the girl came back with a small heap of books. She laid them on my desk, gave me a stern look from behind her glasses and then a wink. I blew her a kiss and she shot off, red as a tomato.
I took the first book; it was Pitman’s standard shorthand dictionary. That was my benchmark. I then set out in front of me the other three books: versions of shorthand dictionaries for the German language. In the Lallan Scots and north of England dialects you can hear the last throaty vestiges of the language roots. I placed Eve’s notebook alongside and opened it at the first page of hieroglyphs.
I propped up the three German dictionaries in front of me and began to scribble on my pad. It took me five minutes to be certain: Eve hadn’t been writing in English shorthand. It was Gabelsberger’s system, which looked a little like proper writing with its flowing cursive style. Simple. But why?
Then I noticed something else. In the appendix of one of the dictionaries, was a set of squiggles that looked remarkably like the third form of entry Eve had used. The heading explained that I was looking at Suetterlin script, the standard form of German handwriting taught in all their schools until just before the start of the war. How did my ace reporter come to be able to write like a German and use a German shorthand? I put the obvious conclusion to one side while I grappled with the problem of turning both scripts into English.
I decided to tackle the shorthand first. It was closer to what I’d learned in spy school. The trouble was that the shorthand would translate into German words. Prof Haggarty had tricked me into revealing that I’d picked up some of the language while I was sunning myself in Dachau. The language student in me had learned enough to obtain a workaday if specialised vocabulary. The camp held some pretty bright people – doctors, engineers, teachers, musicians – and conversations sprawled across culture and philosophy as well as the mundane details of living and dying behind the barbed wire. But I never saw written material except on official signs. Arbeit Macht Frei for example. It wasn’t the sort of place to order your copy of Die Zeitung to be served with breakfast.
At the rate I was going it would take me a month to translate all her codes. But it didn’t take me long to spot the sign that meant Danny, a sort of lower case d with a tail and circle. So I confined myself to the last two months and wherever I saw my name.
Translating shorthand is an inexact science at the best of times. But now I was having to rely on getting a set of sounds and symbols on the page then listening in my head for the German word to pop up that most closely resembled it. I couldn’t write down the word because I didn’t know how it was spelled in German.
I had to make the leap straight to English, and see if some meaning emerged from the jumble.
As I struggled with my silent battle the receptionist came over looking anxious.
She asked me in a whisper if I was all right as someone had complained about me making faces. I pointed at the dictionaries and made some mouth shapes. She seemed to get the message but gave me a frown to keep my funny faces to myself.
Like other women in my life, she was already regretting her kindness.
I worked away for an hour or two until I had a page of jottings. Some of it was guesses, some inspired analysis, but sitting back and taking it from the top, I could get the gist of recent events from the day she invaded my office and my life: 22 May: d very red very scot, funny sarcastic, hates my paper, bastard, d needs money, hook? 23 May: d called, caught fish!!!! 25 May: mary prostitute, d very close????, first mention PG, d offer more?/deeper? action for me, d interest me/him? 28/29 May: tommy chandler warehouse job, big thrill, big time, big risk, showed?/ revealed??? gun, no choice, PG upset?, 29 May: d bed, tired lonely excuse? not love just warmth, stupid stupid 3 June: love? D soft hard, funny sarcastic, why not? Stupid time There were several more entries along these lines, each a seeming debate with herself about how to avoid falling in love. In three of them the word watcher or follower appeared with a query after my name. She knew, didn’t she? Then… 15 June: mother dress, Savoy, mother!!! Big night, big mess, beautiful couple, wrong time!!!! PG gate crash, mad, mad. D saw watcher, too late, always too late, must stop!!!
Then in clear English a week later: 23 June: Horrible day. Danny saw the watcher again and attacked him. I pulled him off and denied everything. Told Danny we had to break for a while. But it’s over, has to be. How did we get here? What am I doing? So sad…
Then back in code again except for the Latin: 25 June: saw midge saw stan, d watcher now!!! Quis custodiet!!! 30 June: all gone. All quiet, waiting. Alone again. Waiting for them.
That was her last entry a week ago. She knew something was about to happen to her. I could see her sitting in her room in a period of quiet before the storm hit. It tore my heart out. Why did she hide it from me? Why couldn’t she turn to me? All her notes seemed to be telling me she was trying not to fall in love with me, but she wasn’t succeeding. So why did she lie about the watchers? I could have helped. I could have saved her. Maybe.
Did she want to be taken? Was she protecting me? I’m certain the reference to PG was to Pauli Gambatti. That was more than coincidence. I flicked back through her notes. I was right; there were other PG references before my time. She’d feared him and decided that he was having her followed. But why would he? An East End thug? If he wanted to harm her, why didn’t he send one of his hoods round to her flat and pick her off there? And why did she walk into the lion’s gambling den? Did her nerve snap and she had to confront him, face her fears?
Like the mad bastard who storms a machine gun nest?
My head was reeling. I’d had enough. I needed time to digest it all. I handed back my books to the librarian and made her blush just by smiling at her and saying how sweet she’d been. I needed her on my side; there was more to uncover in this book, much more. For the moment it was time to act. In the absence of any better target, I wanted Gambatti in my sights. But before I could pull the trigger I had to flush my bird. There was no returning to Carlyle’s; they wouldn’t let me within a hundred yards.
Over the next three days – more exactly, nights – I put the word out. It was easy enough. I went on a pub crawl. I was careful to drink only in the East End and only in Gambatti’s patch. Wherever I went I bought a half of bitter and began asking questions. I would smile at the landlady and ask if Mr Gambatti ever frequented her fine establishment, and watch her face crumple in fear or irritation. Sometimes they flat out denied everything. Never heard of him.
Sometimes I was told to drink up and piss off. Sometimes they asked why I wanted to know. When I explained I had a bone to pick with him, they were as likely to laugh in my face as to tell me to clear off. Whatever
