I’ve found that when there’s so much shit coming your way that you’re going to drown in it, the best thing to do is start swimming. It still stinks, but you can take your mind off it by concentrating on staying afloat. That’s how I survived when my unit of the Seaforths was under fire from tanks, machine guns, artillery and Stuka bombers in the desert.
My leg was broken and bleeding from being blown against one of our Shermans by a near miss. I stopped the bleeding with a tourniquet made from the belt of a man who no longer needed to hold his trousers up. I made a splint from the ribs of the wrecked canopy of a truck. I collected three water bottles and started my hobble towards my own lines. Or at least where my own lines had been yesterday; we moved a lot. It was a long three days; I had to keep stopping to release the tourniquet before my leg dropped off. I holed up in a hollow I scraped in the tough desert sand during the day and hobbled slowly in the night. The war was going on around me, but all I concentrated on was walking.
It worked. I’m here. It was time to tie on my tourniquet again, set my compass and make a start.
I took my pad out and wrote two names at the top. On the left, the dowdy Mrs Caldwell, on the right, the elegant Kate. Then I started to write what I knew under both of them. Then I wrote down the simple questions I wanted to put to them both.
Kate Are you also known as Mrs Catriona Caldwell?
What’s your real relationship with Tony Caldwell?
What was really wrong with you in the hospital the night of the bomb?
Why hire me to find out if he was dead? You could have done it yourself.
Liza Are you or are you not married to Tony C?
Why don’t you care enough that your husband is dead?
Did he mention the murder to you? What else did he say about me?
Why are you lying to me?
Finally I stared at both columns trying to plan what action to take. I needed to move fast; Wilson was bearing down on me. But I also needed to move with circumspection; I didn’t think I’d get anywhere by phoning up Kate or Liza and asking if I could pop round for tea and questions. I thought about where they lived, and then the decisions became very easy. Liza’s house bordered the heath.
It would give me terrain to operate from.
SIXTEEN
The next day, good and early, I got out my sole remaining screwdriver and my hammer. The screwdriver was fine and thin and it didn’t take much bashing on the edge of the iron stove to knock up a snake-ended pick. It wasn’t the quality of my bike-spoke versions but it would have to do.
I dug out my oldest clothes: a tough jacket of Harris tweed that still smelled of my father, corduroy trousers, boots and a good flat cap. I put them on over vest, shirt and a sleeveless pullover my mother had knitted. When I got out of hospital she’d sent down a cardboard box full of my old stuff, on the mail train that stops at Kilpatrick on its way south from Glasgow.
I inspected myself in my mirror. I looked like a poacher. The pick went into my breast pocket along with a good clasp knife with enough gadgets to earn me a dozen scout’s badges. I washed out a big hip flask and filled it with water, turfed out my gas mask from its canvas shoulder bag and replaced it with the flask. A pack of fags, matches and some Spam sandwiches went in alongside.
Lastly I rolled up my plastic mac and stuffed it into the bag. This lot would see me right if I had to hole up for twenty-four hours.
I kept hoping to hear Val’s cheery voice before I left. Truth is I’d have liked her blessing. Maybe she’d had second thoughts about me. Or maybe – and I kept wondering this – she was married and couldn’t get away. It would explain a lot.
There was one thing I needed but didn’t have. I knew where to get it, though: a little army surplus shop at Camberwell Green.
“Bird watching then, guv?”
“Tanks,” I replied, twisting the screw on a pair of binoculars and aiming out the dusty window across the road.
“None of my business, I know.”
It wasn’t. I paid for the bins and found space in my gas mask case, and made for the tube.
If you walk up Hampstead Hill and into the trees on the edge of the Heath, you can circle round and get yourself to a vantage point on the wooded hill above Willow Road. From there to Liza’s house was a distance of about four hundred yards. There are enough shrubs and tree trunks, even in their denuded winter state, to provide cover. I found a spot down from the path where I had angled but unobstructed views of the Caldwell house and the whole area either side of her front gate. I didn’t need the binoculars to maintain my broad sweep.
The weather was cold and damp, but at least it wasn’t snowing. Real winter was forecast, but mainly for Scotland and the north of England. With luck it would steer clear of us. I piled dead leaves under my plastic mac and settled down to wait. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for; visitors to Mrs Caldwell?
Tony Caldwell himself in some fanciful resurrection? In truth I was following the habits I’d adopted as a private detective; stake out the target and watch, watch and note, wait for them to do something that convicts them. But what could Mrs Caldwell be guilty of?
It was a quiet street, even by the standards of the suburbs. Hardly a soul went by and cars were as rare as a winter tan. I felt the woods gently embrace me. A blackbird echoed through the bare trees and a dog barked from some distance away. The stillness infected me, and reminded me of long walks with my dad in the sounding woods above Dundonald Castle, a bus ride from Kilpatrick. We’d leave my mother laying out the old plaid and setting out the hard-boiled eggs, the meat-paste sandwiches and the vacuum flask with lemonade. And we’d go off into the woods and learn the names of trees and birds.
I raised my glasses and watched a man go by with a dog, talking to it as if he expected an answer. Then a couple who looked like they’d done all their talking years ago; then a weary old woman. I watched their closed faces and wondered about their lives. I trained my sights on the house to see if there was movement behind the net curtains. Nothing. And no smoke from her chimney. Had she gone away for a few days? By mid-afternoon I was stiff and cold and increasingly convinced this bird had flown. Then suddenly her door opened. Liza Caldwell stepped out in coat and hat. She had a little wicker shopping trolley which she carried down the short run of steps. She trundled off down the street.
An hour later she was back, and I could see she really had been shopping. She had to haul her basket up behind her, straining on each step. Soon afterwards lights went on in some windows and finally the street lights did too. I rose, aching and chilled. My ribs felt as though they’d been put through my mother’s mangle. I shook my mac and began the trek home, looking forward to warming up in front of a fire with a glass of whisky in my hand.
I repeated the pattern the next day. She was a creature of habit, our Liza. What did she do all day alone in the house? I would have kept up the vigil for the rest of the week except for the headache that started to come down on me as I travelled back to my flat. Maybe sitting in the cold with my eyes screwed up, peering down at the little house set something off.
I took to bed as the clamps came down. I think I got up a couple of times to be sick. Once I found myself in coat and pyjamas in the entrance hall, not sure if I was just going out or coming in. Sleepwalking of some sort. Then the blackness floored me for a full day and another night. I woke shivering and sick, my bedclothes in a damp tangle.
There were fresh scrawls in my jotter, but they told me nothing new about my condition or where I’d been. I was so sickened by the whole damn business I tore the page out and used it to help start a fire. In the flames I saw old horrors, old beatings in the camp and nearly picked up the phone to see if the Doc would take me back and blast some current through my brain and expunge these sordid memories for good and ever.
I needed another day lying doggo in my flat before I felt fit enough to tackle another watch.
Same routine, same result: nothing. It was on the fourth morning – not counting the two I missed – that my severely tested patience and sore ribs were rewarded.
