on Saturday nights, had two jobs through each working day of the week. She trudged home in the last light of the afternoon, and her feet were hurting. Buses cost money, and there wasn’t much money in cleaning. The chiropodist cost a fortune. She walked in pain at the end of each day back to Victoria Road. Her street, little terraced homes, was off Ragstone Road, almost underneath the railway embankment. Two things were worrying Adie Barnes as she turned off by the halal butcher’s on the corner, went past Memsahibs, the dress shop, the Tandoori take-away and into Victoria Road. At the afternoon house she hadn’t left a note for the lady to say she’d finished the window cleaning fluid, and that bothered her. Her second worry was that she hadn’t been able to speak to her Tracy last evening, and she must try again tonight. That nice Captain Christie, that her Tracy spoke of so well, had been short with her.
She saw the big police wagon half-way down Victoria Road, and the police car. She saw her neighbours, the Patels, the Ahmeds, the Devs and the Huqs, standing in the street with their children.
As fast as her bruised and swollen feet could take her, she hurried forward. The door of her house was broken and wide open, the wood panel beside the mortice lock splintered. She stopped, breathing hard, and a policeman carried two bin-liners out of her front door and put them in the wagon. She pushed past her neighbours, and through the little open gate. The policeman with the bags shouted after her.
Her hall was filled with policemen and men in suits, and there was a young woman in jeans and a sweater with a yapping spaniel on a leash. One of them in a suit came to her. It was like she’d been burgled – not that the thieves had ever been in her house, but they’d been in the Patels’ next door, and she’d seen the mess when she’d gone to make Mrs Pate! a good cup of tea. Adie could see into her living room: the carpets were up and some of the boards, and there were books off the shelf, and the drawers were tipped out.
‘You are Mrs Barnes, Mrs Adelaide Barnes? We have a warrant issued by Slough magistrates to search this property because we have reason to believe that a possible offence under the Official Secrets Act may have been committed by your daughter. I apologize for the mess we’ve left you. I can provide you with a list of items taken from your daughter’s room for further examination. If you find that anything not listed is missing, if you find any of your possessions to be broken, then you should put that down in writing and send it to Slough police station. I regret that I cannot offer you a fuller explanation, and I wouldn’t go bothering the police because they are not authorized to make any statement on this matter.’
She stood in front of him in shock.
He shouted past her, ‘Get that door fixed, made secure.’
The yapping of the spaniel filled the hail. In the kitchen, down the end of the hall, was the fridge-freezer her Tracy had bought her. On top of it, crouched, arched, was Fluff. She wished that the young woman in jeans would let go the bloody leash so that the spaniel could jump at Fluff and have its bloody eyes scratched out. Behind her she could hear the hammering of nails through plyboard and into the old wood of her front door. She started up the stairs.
A young constable was on the landing. He looked at his feet. He whispered, ‘We’re really sorry about this, love, all of us locals are. It’s a London crowd in charge, not us. I shouldn’t tell you… We weren’t told what they were looking for – whatever, they didn’t find it.’ He went down the stairs heavily, noisily.
Tears welled in Adie Barnes’s eyes. She was in her Tracy’s room. Her Tracy’s clothes were on the floor, carpet up, boards up. She heard the quiet, then the noise of. the wagon engine starting. Her Tracy’s music centre was in pieces, back off, gutted. Her Tracy’s bookcase had been pulled apart. The books were gone. Her name was called. Her Tracy’s bear – she’d had it since she was eight – was on the stripped bed and it was cut open. Mr Patel was at the door of her Tracy’s room.
Mr Patel was a good neighbour. Some of the old people at bingo on a Friday, those who had been in Victoria Road for ever, said there were too many Asians, that they’d brought the road down. She’d never have that talk. She thought Mr Patel as well mannered and caring as any man she knew, and Mr Ahmed and Mr Dcv and Mr Huq.
‘It is disgraceful what has happened to you, and you a seniorcitizen lady. You should have the representation of a solicitor, Mrs Barnes. A very good firm acted for us when we bought the shop. I think it is too late for tonight…’
In ten minutes, with her coat on and her best hat, ignoring the pain of her feet, Mrs Barnes set off for the offices of Greatorex, Wilkins amp; Protheroe in the centre of Slough. The offices might be closed, but it was for her Tracy, and she did not know what else she could do.
‘Only a stenographer in Berlin, weren’t you, Tracy? So you wouldn’t have understood much about the intelligence business. I doubt you were alone, doubt that the people running Hans Becker knew much more than you. Did they tell you, Tracy, that running him was in breach of orders? Doubt they did. The running of agents was supposed to be given to us, the professionals. You made, Tracy, the oldest mistake in the book. You went soft on an agent. You couriered to him, didn’t you? Slap and tickle, was there? A tremble in the shadows? So, it was personal when you beat three shades of shit out of Hauptman Krause. Why him, Tracy? Where’s the evidence? You want to talk about the murder of your lover boy, then there has to be evidence..
When he heard the banging down below, he was bent over his desk, studying the papers of another grubby little case off the streets of another grubby little town that would end up in the grubby little court on Park Road. Two youths fighting over first use of a petrol pump. The client was the one who had hit straighter and harder.
It was not a loud banging, just as if someone was knocking on the high street door.
The partners were long gone, and the typists. The receptionist would have been gone an hour. He worked in the open plan area among the typists’ empty desks, word processors shut down and covered up. The partners’ offices were off the open area, doors locked, darkness behind the glass screens. He worked late so that Mr Wilkins could have all the papers in the morning for the pump rage and the affray, then the indecent assault, a remand job, and the possession with intent to supply.
The knocking continued, harder, more insistent. He pulled up his tie, hitched his jacket off the back of the chair and went out of the office down the stairs into reception.
She was outside the door. He let her in.
She had been crying. Her eyes were red, magnified by the lenses of her spectacles.
She asked him, straight out, was he a solicitor, and he said that he was ‘nearly’ a solicitor. He took her upstairs, made her a pot of tea, and she told him about her Tracy, and what the officer had said about the search and the warrant.
‘Mrs Barnes, what unit is your daughter with?’
‘She’s a corporal. She’s with the Intelligence Corps.’
And that was a bit of his history – quite a large part of Josh Mantle’s history.
Chapter Three
He dialled the number that Mrs Adie Barnes had given him.
‘Hello.’
‘Could I speak, please, to Corporal Barnes, Tracy Barnes?’
A hesitation as if, so early in the morning, her brain was grinding. ‘Who is it?’
‘A friend, a solicitor.’
He knew that block, knew where the call had been answered. He could hear the radios screaming behind her and the shouting, bawling, hollering.
Softly, and with a hand cupped over the mouthpiece, the voice said, ‘Needs friends, locked up, in the cells, ‘cos she bashed that German.’ A voice change, loud and disinterested. ‘Any calls for the corporal are to go to the main camp number, and you should ask for the Adjutant’s office.’
He rang off.
He had showered early. He lived in a small part of a large house, the roof space converted into two rooms. There was a kitchenette area in one and a wash-basin in the other. The lavatory and shower, no bath, were down the stairs. If he used them early he didn’t have to queue. He shaved carefully. It seemed important that day that he
