paean to her beauty (
I now had a first name to attach to Gabriel’s green-eyed driver. But “Gigi,” it seemed, was not through with her.
“Philippa, yes, and an Irish last name to go with those eyes. O’something. O’Hanlan, O’Flannigan, O’Neill . . .”
I hoped she did not plan on working through the Dublin telephone directory, and reined in my impatience.
“Mary,” she said. I thought she was addressing me, but: “O’Meary. That was her name. I’ve always been good with names—I knew hers was in there somewhere. Philippa O’Meary, although she was no more Irish-looking than I am, other than her eyes. And I do remember, she once slung a man over her back all the way through the communications trenches to get him out. Big girl. Slim, but big bones. What you might call farm stock. Not English, though.”
“What, French?” I couldn’t picture that.
“American, I think. No, I’m a liar—she was from Canada. Now why do I think that? That aviator’s jacket?” She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “It’s gone. May come back, but I picture her as Canadian. She was based near Reims. Had a couple of sisters, I think—lots younger, like mine; we agreed that we hoped it would be over before they could join up. Black hair, she had, shiny and with a little curl to it. She wore it short. Had dimples when she laughed. Good boots—Now why should that come back to me? Someone in her family was a shoemaker. What else can I drag out of this grab-bag of a mind of mine? Fearless driver, had bullet holes—actual bullet holes, not just shrapnel—in her ambulance. Lent me a pair of gloves once—she had two and my hands were ice; I returned them through a friend.
“And do you know, I think she had a ring? We weren’t supposed to fraternise, and of course you couldn’t be married, but by that time things were too desperate for anyone to pay much attention, so long as you were careful. But I remember the ring—not a gemstone or anything, just a bit of silver, but she wore it on a chain, to keep it hidden. That must have been the last time I saw her, that last summer of the War. It was hot, and the wounded were suffering so, and she looked dreadful herself. The top button of her blouse had come unbuttoned—or perhaps she’d undone it herself, it was that stifling, and one of the nurses said something to her about proper uniform. ‘Proper uniform,’ I ask you, with crawling out of a hot bunk after two hours’ sleep and working at a run in a world of dust and blood—and the smell! But if Sister had spotted that ring on the chain, Phil would’ve been on the next boat home.
“Although come to think of it, she may have gone back before the end, since I don’t remember seeing her after that week. She wouldn’t have been the only one who didn’t last the summer, that’s for sure.”
“You said she looked sick?”
“Not so much sick as unhappy. Now if that doesn’t sound daft, considering the circs we were in, I know. But when the nurse said something about the chain she was wearing, Phil didn’t seem embarrassed, like she’d been caught out with a beau. She seemed . . . Well, I guess the nurse was afraid Phil was about to collapse, because she sort of grabbed for her, but Phil shook her off and went back for the next stretcher. And that was the end of the discussion. So . . . maybe her beau didn’t make it through.”
Either sensitivity or long experience led Dorothea to the same conclusion that I had reached.
“When would this have been?” I asked her.
She returned to the album as a reference point, and when that proved too indefinite in its dates, she handed it to me along with the powerful glass and took up her personal journal. I studied the photograph, finding it more evocative than informative. A smudge of face, a tuft of dark hair springing out from under the sexless cloth cap, and a rangy shape beneath the shapeless overalls; the only thing I could have said for sure was that her stance shouted self-confidence and strength, and perhaps even a degree of humour, although I couldn’t have explained where that last impression came from. Several minutes passed before Dorothea spoke. “It looks to have been the end of July or the first part of August. Sorry, that’s the nearest I can make it.”
Gabriel Hughenfort had been arrested on the twenty-sixth of July and executed at dawn on August the third.
“Where would records of the VAD drivers be kept now?” I asked her.
She wrote an address for me, handed me the paper, closed her photograph album with regret. “Ask for Millicent,” she suggested. “Some of the other girls who work there are dead useless, but Millie was a nurse. She’ll help you.”
She walked with me to the door, and pulled her knit cardigan more tightly around her as the cold pushed in. I thanked her, for the third or fourth time, and went down the steps.
Halfway down the walk, I stopped. When I turned, she had not moved, in spite of the cold. I spoke without thinking.
“You ought to take up mountain-climbing, or flying,” I urged her. “Or go on a world tour. Let your sister care for your parents for a while.”
She looked startled, and then in an instant the jaunty daredevil VAD driver of her photo album was standing in the doorway, her head tossed to one side and a grin of schoolgirl mischief on her thirty-year-old face.
“You’re absolutely right, Mary. I think I’ve been good far too long.”
And with a wink of understanding, she stepped back inside and gently shut the door. Somehow, I doubted her hair would remain long for many more weeks.
Thursday morning, with Holmes sufficiently recovered that he could do up his own shoe-laces and amble off for a second immersion in the Turkish baths, I set off to trace the green-eyed driver, whose name might be in doubt but who had become a clear personality in my mind.
Millicent, unfortunately, was absent, and the “other girls” proved as useless as Dorothea had predicted. I dismissed them with empty thanks and pored over the records on my own. By the time the tea-cart came through in the middle of the morning, I had filthy hands and confirmation of the name. By lunch-time my back ached and I could trace her movements up and down the Front with some reliability. By the afternoon tea break my head was pounding and I knew where she was—or at any rate, where she came from in 1916, and what Philippa Helen O’Meary had given as her home address upon leaving France in August 1918.
Unfortunately, that address was in Canada.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I crossed London at its wet and dreariest, let myself into Mycroft’s flat, found it empty with no indication that either Holmes brother had been there since the morning, and decided that the cure for heaviness of spirit and head-ache—or at least the only cure to hand—was cleanliness. And as Mycroft had recently installed an elaborate and modernistic shower-bath (I believe it was becoming too much of an effort to heave himself out of the bath-tub, although I would never have said anything of the sort), I thought I might give it a try.
With trepidation, I stepped into the closet of this technological wonder and opened all four sprays. I stepped out of it a fervent convert. And beyond the invigoration was the discovery that long hair washed while standing upright did not become the usual mass of tangles. I was humming as I ran the comb through it.
My hair was little more than damp when my companions returned—together, which indicated that Holmes had reentered the investigation. I watched as he divested himself of coat and hat, and was pleased to see a near- normal range of motion. He had been very lucky; for the moment, all was well.
Dinner—sans business—and a fire, tobacco and brandy for the brothers, and we were ready for work. I sat on the floor with my arms around my drawn-up knees, and watched them speak. Mycroft was, in all things, slow and thorough, where his younger brother flew straight to the core. Together they were formidable, and I could not imagine that many details got past them unnoticed.
It was Holmes who set aside his impatience in order to tell me what they had discovered during the day. That amounted to: One of the clerks who was in a position to know more or less where one inquisitive Frenchman
