In A Dry Season

“I’ll teach you,” she said. “Not right now, of course… but I’ll teach you. Will you let me?”

I nodded stupidly. “Yes. If you want.”

“It’s the least I can do.”

Then she excused herself and went to talk to Mother and Cynthia, smiling on everyone she passed with those Hardy-heroine eyes of hers.

I did my bit, moving from table to table, being polite to my distant relations, removing Uncle Gerald’s hand from my knee without drawing attention to the fact that it was there.

The local people started to drift home around sunset to make sure they had all got their blackout curtains in place. Our relations were staying with friends in Harkside, so they began to leave, too, before it got too dark to see their way across the fields.

Matthew and Gloria went to Bridge Cottage for their first night together as man and wife. Whether this was their first time together, I have no idea. It may be hard to believe now, when everyone seems to be very sophisticated about sex, but I knew very little of such things back then. I had no idea, for example, what men and women actually did when they made babies.

The next day they were going to Scarborough for a three-day honeymoon. Matthew had already booked a room at a guest house in St. Mary’s near the castle. After that, it was back to university for Matthew – with his finals coming up soon – and back to Top Hill Farm for Gloria, though she would live at Bridge Cottage and walk or cycle to and from work.

Mother was talking to Sue and Olive at the door when I finally excused myself through tiredness and set off home alone. It had been a long, hard day.

Though it was late, a deep purple-and-vermilion glow still lit the sky in the west, behind the dark mill. The streets were quiet, though I could still hear music coming from the church hall behind me. Back home, I made sure the blackout curtains were drawn tightly, then, weary to the bone, I went to bed.

It was only when I was on the very edge of sleep and heard the thrumming and droning of the bombers taking off from Rowan Woods RAF Base that I remembered what had bothered me so much outside the church after the wedding.

Not only had there been no confetti, there had been no wedding bells, either. All the church bells had been silent since 1940 and were only supposed to ring if there was an invasion. The thing was, I hadn’t even noticed at first because I had got so used to the silence.

I thought that was very sad, and I cried myself to sleep that night.

Annie paused with the dusty file folder in her hands when she heard footsteps on the stairs. She hoped it would be PC Gould bringing her a cup of tea, so she was surprised when she saw, instead, DCI Banks.

“Inspector Harmond told me you were down here,” Banks said.

Annie turned her nose up and gestured around at the musty-smelling, ill-lit basement room. “Welcome to Central Records,” she said. “You can see how often we dip into our history around here.”

“Don’t worry. One day it’ll all be on the computer.”

“When I’m long since dead and buried.”

Banks smiled as he ducked under an overhead pipe and walked over to join her. “Anything yet?”

“Quite a lot, as a matter of fact. I’ve been on the phone most of the day, and I was just checking some missing-person files.”

“And?”

“It’s a bit of a confusing period for that sort of thing. Just after the war. There were so many changes, so many people coming and going. Anyway, most of the ones who went missing seemed to turn up eventually, either dead or alive, or in the colonies. There are a couple of young women who fit the general description still unaccounted for. I’ll follow up on them.”

“Fancy a pint? The Black Swan?”

Annie smiled. “You took the words right out of my mouth.” What a relief. If she had been hoping for a cup of tea, the prospect of a pint of Swan’s Down was even more appealing. She had been in the stifling basement for the best part of the afternoon, and her mouth was full of dust, her contact lenses beginning to dry out. And it was gone five on a Friday afternoon.

Comfortably ensconced on a padded bench just a few minutes later, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, pint already half finished, Annie smacked her lips. If she were a cat, she would have been purring.

“I checked the Voters Register first,” she said, “but the clerk in the council office told me it was frozen at the start of the war. The last person they’ve got listed for Bridge Cottage is a Miss Violet Croft. I had a bit more luck with the Land Registry. Violet Croft rented the cottage from the Clifford estate, and the manager kept impeccable records. She lived there between the fourteenth of September, 1919, and the third of July, 1940, so she must be the old lady Ruby Kettering remembered, the one the village kids thought was a witch. The cottage remained empty until June 1941, when a Mr. and Mrs. Shackleton took up residence there. It might have been requisitioned for the billeting of evacuees or military personnel in the interim period, but there was no record of that, and there’s no way of finding out.”

“I doubt that many places stayed empty for long during the war,” said Banks. “Maybe some soldiers got billeted there, killed a local tart in a drunken orgy and then decided to cover their tracks?”

“It’s possible.” Annie gave a slight shiver.

“We’re talking about wartime,” Banks went on. “Army camps and air force bases sprang up overnight, like mushrooms. Evacuees came and went. It was easy to disappear, change identity, slip through the cracks.”

“But people had identity cards and ration books. The council clerk told me. He said there was a National Registry at the beginning of the war, and everyone got identity cards.”

“I imagine those sort of things were open to a fiddle easily enough. Who knows, maybe we’re dealing with a Nazi spy done in by the secret service?”

Annie laughed. “Mata Hari?”

“Maybe. Anyway, what happened to Miss Violet Croft?”

Annie flipped over a page in her notebook. “I dropped by Saint Jude’s next and found the young curate very helpful. They’ve got all the old parish registry records and magazines from Saint Bart’s stored in the vestry there. Boxes of them. Violet Croft, spinster of the parish, died in July 1940 of pneumonia. She was seventy-seven.”

“That lets her out. What about the Shackletons?”

“Much more interesting. They were married at Saint Bart’s on the seventh of June, 1941. The husband’s name was Matthew Stephen Shackleton, the wife’s maiden name Gloria Kathleen Stringer. The witnesses were Gwynneth Shackleton and Cynthia Garmen.”

“Were they Hobb’s End residents?”

“Matthew Shackleton was. His parents lived at 38 High Street. They ran the newsagent’s shop. The bride’s listed as being from London, parents deceased.”

“Big place,” Banks muttered. “How old was she?”

“Nineteen. Born the seventeenth of September, 1921.”

“Interesting. That would put her within Dr. Williams’s age range by the end of the war.”

“Exactly.”

“Any mention of children?”

“No. I looked through the registry of baptisms, but there’s nothing there. Was he certain about that, do you think?”

“He seemed to be. You saw the pitting for yourself.”

“I wouldn’t know a parturition scar from a hole in the ground. It could have been a postmortem injury, couldn’t it? I mean, these things are often far from accurate.”

“It could have been. We’ll check with Dr. Glendenning after he’s done the postmortem. Do you know what? I’m beginning to get a vision of St. Catherine’s House looming large in your future.”

Annie groaned. Checking birth, marriage and death certificates was one of the most boring jobs a detective could get. The only positive aspect was that you got to go to London, but even that was offset by the department’s lack of willingness to grant expenses for an overnight stay. No time to check out the shops.

“Any luck with the education authorities?” Banks asked.

“No. They said they lost the Hobb’s End records, or misplaced them. Same with the doctors and the dentist.