Bottled Spider Read online

  Bottled Spider

  John Gardner

  Copyright © John Gardner 2002

  The right of John Gardner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Severn House.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This book is for my oldest and best friend.

  We met when we were both aged seven. Seven years later we lived through the time in which this novel is set. On and off we have been in touch ever since, and we have never forgotten.

  So this one’s for you old friend,

  John Hunter

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  MARGARET:

  Poor painted queen, vain flourish of my fortune:

  Why stew’st thou sugar on that bottled spider.

  Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about?

  William Shakespeare, Richard III

  Author’s Note

  Though I vividly remember the real time covered in this novel — November-December 1940 — I have taken a few liberties. The Reserve Squad did exist at Scotland Yard but certainly never in the size or formidable expertise that I suggest here.

  I have also taken huge geographical liberties regarding the position of the almshouses for the Laverstock and Whitchurch areas in Hampshire. Even worse, I have added a further village between Whitchurch and Andover just within the Hampshire county border. The reasons for these places being where I have put them are simple: I wanted no accidental similarity to real people in these litigious times.

  Come to that, I have done something even more brazen. I have invented the Borough of Camford within the Metropolitan area of London. I have also invented many police officers and some seriously dodgy civilians, including the unpleasant, unsavoury and unhinged Golly Goldfinch. But I have not invented the flavour of London, and indeed the whole country, as it was during the Blitz, coming up to, and just after, Christmas 1940.

  John Gardner

  One

  You could see your way by the silvery, shadowless moonlight across the bit of scrubby grass they called the Common. Less than a hundred yards long by fifty wide, the Common is bordered by two roads: one linking with the main London Road, the other, Church Street, petering off near the church of St Michael and All Angels.

  The vet’s surgery stood next to Dr Bartholomew’s grand seventeenth-century mansion in Henry Lane, the street that ran parallel to Church Street. It was hard to believe this was less than a hundred miles from the centre of London; less than a hundred miles, yet cows grazed on the far side of the church, and sheep littered the next meadow over by the watercress beds — part of Harricky Farm.

  In the sixteenth century Harricky had been Lord of the Manor and even in Victorian times many of the village houses demanded that on purchase you signed fealty to ‘Edmund Harricky, his heirs and successors’. But the line had dribbled out and come almost to nothing by 1892. Now, in the fourth decade of the twentieth century the manor house, three miles the other side of the village, was a hospital for officers, though old Miss Harricky still had rooms on the third floor.

  They now specialized in eye problems up at the Manor and you could see young men, the upper parts of their faces swathed in bandages, or wearing dark glasses, being led about by pretty nurses.

  ‘Lucky buggers,’ the locals would say in the White Hart, ‘wouldn’t mind being bandaged up by one of them girls.’

  ‘Could bandage me ’til closing time — and after,’ said Ted Gristwood, who still had an eye for the ladies though he was going on seventy-two come All Souls Day. ‘I’d do it all by feel.’

  And the lads laughed with him.

  The vet’s surgery had whitewashed walls and a crimson door, black in the moonlight, like the Common and the strip of grass in front of the house: most things are black at night. Couldn’t see a chink of light once the blackout frames and curtains were in place.

  There was plenty of light on the inside behind the crimson door. Light enough to perform a delicate operation in the dead of night.

  Inside, ‘the Surgeon’ chuckled. ‘Slice carefully along the dotted line,’ he said. It was a little joke he always used at this point in the operation as he drew the scalpel blade along the natural seam of the patient’s scrotum. ‘The unkindest cut of all, this is.’

  He usually operated on animals — ‘Surgeon’ was more of a nickname for he worked as assistant and nurse to Mr Wright the vet — but this time he was grateful to have a real patient, one who could share his amusement.

  The patient felt nothing, the area totally dead from the injection of veterinary anaesthetic, but he knew exactly what was going on: knew the procedure backwards because he had studied it in books before he took the plunge to punish himself and find the right doctor.

  Now, far away, as in a dream, he heard the ululating air-raid warning siren.

  ‘They’re over again tonight,’ he murmured.

  ‘Getting to be a habit, but don’t worry. We’ve had it all the time since September. They fly directly over the village, or near enough. That’s why they’ve got to sound the warning, though we haven’t had a bomb anywhere near Overchurch. It’ll be London again. They’ve got a moon for it as well, tonight. “Bomber’s moon” I heard one of the lads from the aerodrome call it.’

  ‘The Surgeon’ cut through the membrane, tied off the two arteries, then snipped off each testicle, allowing them to drop one at a time into the little kidney dish: a pair of tiny white spheres, like small packed rice balls slimed with blood: the quivers filled with unseen arrows: the engines of desire. It was all done in less than five minutes and now he sluiced the blood from the scrotum, pouring in antiseptic because the only real danger was post-operative sepsis. That and shock.

  There was a lot of blood, but this was always the case. The first time he had done it, on a dog, he had become alarmed, thought he had not tied off the arteries correctly, there was so much blood.

  He glanced at the patient who had closed his eyes. Some day, ‘the Surgeon’ thought, some day people might understand, and the operation’ll be done legally: properly, in a hospital operating theatre, not a hole and corner job like this one, done in the vet’s surgery at night after hours, by an unqualified man.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked.

  The patient opened his eyes for a moment. ‘Tired. Wretchedly tired.’ He had what people called a cultured voice, an Oxford accent, though Oxford didn’t have much to do with it.

  ‘You will be able to get me back to town?’ the patient asked.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ve told you. I get a good ration of petrol. I’ll get you right back to your door. Now, you sleep a bit. Okay?’

  Far away there were dull thuds as the bombs fell on London and the guns barked. Bloody hell, ‘the Surgeon’ thought, if the Jerries get here, if they invade, they’ll take his balls off for nothing. Wouldn’t cost him a penny.

  Again he soaked the bloody sac wit
h antiseptic and prayed there wouldn’t be any infection.

  It was a relatively easy two hundred pounds. Who’d believe that a man would ask to be castrated? Normal people just wouldn’t understand. Shit, he thought, it would be Guy Fawkes Night in a few days. They cut everything out when they topped Fawkes: hung, drawn and quartered. They didn’t hang him to death: he was drawn and quartered while he still lived. The ground reverberated from the bombs forty-fifty miles away. He could feel the ripples through the soles of his feet as he started to sew up the empty scrotum.

  They wouldn’t have the traditional Guy Fawkes fireworks this year — couldn’t get them anyway — the Luftwaffe would provide the display. It would be just like any other night in this autumn of 1940.

  As he stitched, ‘the Surgeon’ hummed, ‘Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run. Don’t give the farmer his fun, fun, fun ...’

  Isn’t it strange, the skein of coincidence? How could it be that this illegal operation would be unknowingly linked to Falcon Cottage, right up at the top end of the village where Henry Lane turns into the Keepsake — as they call it — across from the War Memorial. In Falcon Cottage that night they were sad because the husband and father was off to the war the next day.

  But here, in the vet’s surgery ghosts of his deviations loitered through the patient’s mind. It’s best this way, the patient thought. It’ll save the suffering and shame of others, and it’ll be my just deserts. It’s what I need.

  Much earlier that year, and many miles away, before a single bomber had ever sought out London, a man walked across a field near Stratford-upon-Avon, and brought horror with him.

  Two

  From the lane he could see right across the field. The house was on the edge of the village and he clearly saw the bus pull up quite close to it. Then he watched the girl get off and walk to the house: she turned and waved to the conductor, and by the end of that week this same conductor was quoted as saying that he knew her and had been at her wedding a month before. Later, it said in the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald that the bus conductor was a well-known character. On Shakespeare’s birthday he always wore a red rose on his uniform and sang songs from the plays as he went about his work. His favourite was ‘Where the bee sucks there suck I’. It wasn’t Shakespeare’s birthday today but the conductor still sang — ‘When icicles hang by the wall, and Dick the shepherd blows his nail,’ but the papers didn’t say that. Neither did they say he wore plimsolls because of a foot problem that kept him out of HM Forces; nor did they mention that, for a time, the police suspected the bus conductor and interrogated him with a certain amount of hostility.

  The man had got off the bus earlier and had watched as it turned left and was hidden by the hedge and a line of trees. Then it came into sight again, before stopping to let the girl off, finally driving away, disappearing as the road swallowed it up.

  Round Soho in London they called the man Golly, or Two-Faced Golly because of his dreadful affliction. He’d seen the girl on the bus. Three days ago the woman had whispered in his ear while he slept, and told him to kill a girl at Stratford, where Shakespeare was born.

  This was near enough: a few miles from Stratford. The girl, young woman, had been standing in the bus queue in Bridge Street and he couldn’t resist her. It was as though the voice was saying this is the one. The one he had to kill. Kill with the wire. He didn’t know her from Eve, but later the papers said her name was Patricia Cooke.

  He climbed over the gate and walked across the field. It was a clear, warm day and he had too many clothes on: his dark coat, the collar turned up, the muffler over his cotton mask, and his hat with the brim pulled down. He felt a rivulet of sweat run down his ribs from his armpit.

  He was quite hot when he got to the house. Saw nobody else. Heard nobody. The wire was in his right-hand pocket, all ready with the insulating tape wound tightly round each end, making thick handles. The knife was in his other pocket. He listened at the front door and heard nothing. Then he put his ear to the back door. His gloves were on and he opened the door, stepped in and killed her.

  She was standing in the kitchen by the sink, and she did half the work for him by turning to run away with a little squeal. When the mask came down and his hat fell on the floor she screamed loudly. Then when she glimpsed his face she screamed with terror. A blood-chilling fearful sound that reached into his body, clawing at his nerves. He could almost touch her awful foreboding, and he came up fast behind her, looping the wire over her head, dropping it around her neck, crossing his wrists and pulling.

  She made a terrible noise, her fear seemed to rush into his bloodstream, then her feet went from under her, kicking, so he held her up and pulled and pulled, and pulled, talking to her all the time, soothing her until the wire bit through her skin, drawing blood. He heard the gurgle and her windpipe crush, like cracking a walnut at Christmas time. It was very quick.

  When she was dead he propped her up against the wall and filled a big pan with water, putting it on the range in the front room. It would soon get hot. The cottage was nice, freshly painted and done up for the newlyweds, though Golly only guessed at the girl just having got married. She was lovely, let him do whatever he wanted. Stripped her. How pretty. Did it. ‘Oh my dinky darling, oh.’

  Then he went through the house. Upstairs, downstairs and in my lady’s chamber, singing quietly to himself. ‘When icicles hang by the wall, and Dick the shepherd blows his nail.’ He sang it over and over because he didn’t know any more of the words. He turned out some of the drawers; saw her private things, like he did when his cousin Lavender was away, then he went downstairs again, laughing. He felt full of energy. Free.

  Rummaging through the kitchen, he found a pair of meat skewers, so he did the eyes, and remembered another bit of the song the conductor had been singing — ‘When blood is nipped and ways be foul, then nightly sings the staring owl’, and ‘When greasy Joan doth keel the pot’. He turned the heat down under the pan and left by the kitchen door. It was nothing to him. If he had not done this he would have been in terrible trouble. ‘When blood is nipped and ways be foul.’ Oh Golly, you’ve done it again.

  He walked all the way back to Stratford, then he took a bus to Leamington and caught the train to London. He kept out of sight. Sat in the lavatory nearly all the way. He heard a man say that in all these years the timetable between London, Leamington Spa and Stratford-upon-Avon had not changed. The times were still the same as they had been in the 1890s. The journey still took exactly the same length of time now as it had done then. ‘I don’t call that progress,’ the man said.

  It was May 9th 1940. The next day the Germans went mob-handed into Belgium and the Low Countries. German paratroops and gliderborne soldiers secured bridgeheads for the tanks, with the Stuka dive-bombers leapfrogging them. The German code word for the operation was ‘Sichelschnitt’ — ‘Sicklestroke’ — and it finally drove the British Expeditionary Force and the French First Army Group into the sea and ‘Operation Dynamo’ lifted over three hundred thousand soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk and brought them back over the Channel to England.

  Just after that, another girl was killed with the wire, in a village outside Cambridge. He had never been to Cambridge before, but he liked it. All the colleges and that. He wrote to his mum and told her how lovely it was — all the colleges: old and beautiful — sent her a postcard with his spidery, lopsided scrawl spelling out: ‘OLD COLLEDGES LOVLY. VERI BUTIFUL.’

  Before they knew it, summer was over and the bombs came: the Blitz. And in the middle of the Blitz Suzie Mountford was promoted and moved towards her destiny.

  *

  It was all very well for Mr Churchill to growl, ‘Britain can take it,’ WPC Mountford thought. The problem was that she couldn’t be sure if she could take it much longer. She was very down that morning. Low. What was more she was late for work, and Woman Police Constable Suzie Mountford was never late for work. She put it down to last night’s raid, but knew that wasn’t really to blame bec
ause she’d stayed in her flat instead of going down to the basement — the building’s designated air-raid shelter.

  She had given up going to the shelter in the cellars below the building because it somehow felt wrong: people just sat there looking at each other in an embarrassing silence. She was also slightly claustrophobic, but didn’t own to it. Once, about five weeks ago, she had been caught in the Underground and swore she’d never ever get caught again. It stank down there in the station, and people sometimes behaved badly. Some of the older ones organized sing-songs but that couldn’t disguise the stench of bodily waste and the acid reek of urine cloying around the back of your throat.

  So, very soon after the Blitz began, Suzie had started to train herself to act normally: go about her usual jobs as though nothing had altered. It was better to be occupied in her flat, getting an evening meal, or washing her ‘smalls’ and stockings, then lying on the bed, fully dressed of course, reading a book and drifting off to sleep. Her body had adjusted and she was only aware of the bombs if one came really close and she knew that on warmer evenings some people would stroll out in their gardens. She had heard that some society hostess had apologized to her guests for the noise.

  Last night she had dropped into a deep sleep but was wakened suddenly by a noise nearby. She knew it must have been a bomb, but what she heard through the filter of her dreams was a noise she instantly recognized: she had only been sixteen years old and was in the garden, bringing in the metal numbers from the clock golf set on the lawn when she heard the terrible crash, the grinding of metal and smash of glass, preceded by the scream of rubber on the macadam.

  In her head she’d seen mediaeval knights coming together in a joust, but she also knew what had happened and who was involved. She ran and was the first to get to the car and van, butted and entwined together on a bend, and her father covered in blood, and dead. It was a memory that returned often in nightmares and flashbacks. The horror of it never really went away: it did get easier, except for when it all flooded back less than two years later — when their mother married again.