We shook hands and smiled at the end of it, and I set off down Baker Street in the car that was taking me to the airfield and France. My last sight of him was him standing in the doorway, stroking and twisting his moustache with both hands.
“That’s Tony,” Liza was saying. “I kept telling him not to play with his moustache. It looked affected. Like biting your nails. And you can’t remember anything else about him?”
I shook my head. I could have told her that in some of my nightmares I could see his face leering down at me. But I guessed that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
“Mrs Caldwell, I’m sorry about your loss and I’m sorry that I found you too late. The office wouldn’t tell me anything about Tony. As though they were shielding him from me.”
She sized me up for a moment. “I suppose I should tell you.” She took a breath.
“Tony mentioned you. Said you’d been brought home and were in hospital. He said that you had problems and that it might get a bit difficult when you were let out.”
I felt my face colouring. I didn’t ask what sort of problems. “Difficult for whom?”
She studied me. “For him. For us. For the people you worked with.”
“That I might become a nuisance? Is that it?”
She shrugged and said nothing more.
“So your husband told SOE not to talk to me about him? Is that it?”
“I have no idea, Mr McRae,” she lied. “More tea, or do you have to be going?”
As I pulled on my coat, Liza Caldwell watched me as though she had something else to say but wasn’t sure how I’d take it. I gave her a second or two after buttoning my coat to see if the silence would draw her out.
“Did you know he was with a woman the night he died, Mr McRae?”
Now, that was unexpected. My face must have given it away.
She was nodding. “I suppose everyone knows about it.” It wasn’t said as a question. “You can always tell with a man. They can’t help themselves. They have needs that seem to override all sense. Tony was like that.”
She seemed to be summing him up. I stared at her not knowing what to say. She was talking in a flat, calm voice. As though she had been resigned to his ways.
It might explain why she didn’t seem quite as distraught as a woman should be who’d lost her husband barely a month ago. I wondered if she knew Kate.
As I walked back towards the tube I thought about how SOE had blocked me. A word or two planted by Tony would have been all it took, so that when I showed up, I’d be treated like a leper. With my scar it was like walking around with a label saying warning – madman.
The sun had gone in and the afternoon had turned colder. Much colder for me. I caught the tube in the favoured village of Hampstead and surfaced again in dreary London. I looked at the faces and saw the new year celebrations were over. We were back in the real world, and it was colourless and impoverished.
One egg a week and all our clothes like uniforms.
I started walking home along the Walworth Road, watching their faces. No one complained much. We all knew we should be grateful. Even for our ration cards. I turned up my collar against the cutting wind, strangely depressed by what I’d found, depressed by the rubble and grubby houses around me. London was like my mind; a broken landscape with tantalisingly familiar patterns that slipped from my grasp the tighter I gripped. Maybe my eyes had changed. Maybe I had a different vantage point now. But this new year was more than ever like a death than a birth.
NINE
I got in, half expecting, half hoping Val would be there. She wasn’t. So I called Kate Graveney to report. She sounded busy. She cut me short and fixed to meet at my office the next evening. I didn’t know why that should raise my spirits, but it did. Then for one daft moment I felt guilty, as though I was being disloyal to Val. We were just pals, for god’s sake, and Kate was business.
But it was a surprise that Kate wanted to wait to get the news face to face.
Fine by me, given her face. But why hadn’t she wanted to get the gist of my findings on the phone? Why didn’t she just ask me if Caldwell was dead?
And then she was late. It was twenty past six when I recognised the sound of those elegant heels picking their way up the stairs. This time I was on my feet in front of my desk to greet her, jacket on and cardigan well out of sight. I sat nonchalantly on the edge of my desk and let one leg swing free to show how well creased my trousers were. I’d damped down my hair with Brylcreem and a hard brush. The fire was in good shape in the grate. I’d queued for two hours today to get a stone of coal, mainly dross as usual. Half a dollar it cost me. And I had to queue twice. They only let you have seven pounds at a time, but they didn’t mind how often you came back. It was easier if you had a big family or knew someone.
She looked preened and pampered. I wondered what they’d made of the fur stole out on the Walworth Road? I don’t know mink from sable, but whatever it was stood out from the coney coats I see down the pub. I pulled the chair out and pushed it behind her, only just stopping myself from stroking the fur. I took the other side of my desk. She had a cigarette ready and I lit it for her, then one for me. I reached into my bottom drawer and pulled out a bottle of Scotch, a bottle of soda and two glasses.
“Drink?”
She looked thoughtfully at me and sucked in her cheeks. “Why not? It’s past six.
Half and half, please.”
I poured us two big ones. She sipped.
“Well, Mr McRae?” She had lost all her first night nerves. This was the upper class in full sail, unflappable and in control.
I’d rehearsed a dozen different ways of telling it, most of them involving a steady build up to the punch line after some impressive detective work. “In a nutshell, Miss Graveney, I regret to tell you that Mr Caldwell is dead.”
She blew out a plume of smoke. She didn’t seem surprised or much upset for that matter. How would you feel if you learned your lover – albeit a deceitful one – had been blown to bits in the explosion that you survived? Which reminded me. I reached into my desk drawer.
“Recognise this?” I placed a lady’s blue leather shoe on my desk. I’d given it a clean and brush-up. A fine shoe. She cocked her head.
“Do you have the other one? They were a good pair.” She took another drink, a bigger one. Did nothing get through to this iceberg? “Sorry. I thought I was looking for one heel, not two.”
Her eyes flickered in surprise. “Most amusing, McRae.”
I thought so. “Do you want to hear the story?”
She nodded but it was nearer a shrug, almost as though she was being polite. But I didn’t want this over in a hurry. And I wanted her to feel I’d earned her advance. I told her of my hospital trek and the Somerset House fiasco. Finally I explained how simple it had turned out, once the message got picked up by his wife from his club.
“What’s she like?” She meant what did she look like. That’s women for you.
Always squaring up to the competition.
“Quiet, but tough underneath. Took it surprisingly well.” I didn’t tell her that neither of them was finding his death over-traumatic. But then I couldn’t rustle up much of a wake either for Tony Caldwell.
“Did she say anything about how, or rather where, he died?”
“She knew about you, if that’s what you mean. Maybe not who you are.”
“But what am I, eh, Mr McRae?” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Well that seems to be that.” She was pulling on her gloves. “You’ve been most efficient and thorough. I think we can all move on now, don’t you?”
She uncrossed those trim legs of hers and stood up to go. I stood up too.
“He was cremated, his wife said. So there’s no stone or anything.”
She blinked, as though startled at the thought. Why hadn’t she asked about that?
