Troubled Midnight Page 2

  Chapter Two

  “YOU EVER WANT to be me?” Tommy asked.

  “Be you?” the question puzzled Suzie, lifting her voice just short of a screech.

  “Yes. Ever feel you’d like to be me?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Read it in a book.”

  “In a book?”

  “Yes – lovers often want to be the other person. Love’s known for it, heart.”

  “I’d never want to be you. God, no. I wouldn’t want to have to shave every day, and I wouldn’t want your body either, not with…”

  “Not with what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You’ve never complained about my body before.”

  “No, but I wouldn’t want to wear your body.”

  “Oh.” Tommy sounded disgruntled, turning down the corners of his mouth.

  “Poor darling.” Suzie reached over and kissed him on the cheek, realising that she hadn’t done that – shown that kind of spontaneous affection – for quite a long time.

  They had been in the Coffee Room of the Bear Hotel having tea because it was almost four o’clock, beautiful view, looking down on the cobbled courtyard at the back of the hotel shimmering in flat sunlight as they drank their tea and ate the little triangular cucumber sandwiches.

  “Let’s go have a nose round, eh?” Tommy said and she smiled at him, took his hand and let him lead her down the narrow stairs and onto the cobble stones that went right to the gates at the back and out in front of the building, all the way to the pavement, what the American GIs called the sidewalk, along the east side of the Market Place.

  “Oh, a bear,” she said, still a shade high-pitched, looking up at the black bear, chained and with a bunch of grapes in its mouth, high on a plinth on top of a pole that made up the extraordinary inn sign.

  “Name of the hotel, heart. Bear Hotel.”

  Suzie Mountford felt extraordinarily happy because they were on what Tommy called ‘a frivol’.

  When they had first become lovers, on her posting, in 1940, to the Reserve Squad – Tommy’s elite unit inside the Metropolitan Police Force – he was forever surprising her with trips here and there at a moment’s notice. Recently all that seemed to have come to an end: after she’d refused to agree a date for their planned marriage.

  Until now.

  They had been working hard – the pier murder last month, 26th July. Pier Murder was what the papers called it, at one of East Anglia’s best-known watering places: a girl, Angela Williams, who sometimes looked after two roundabouts for small children, the little merry-go-rounds squeezed in between the full-sized carousel and the Pier Theatre where a scratch company was playing to good business, Rookery Nook one week followed by Noel Coward’s Hay Fever the next, the theatre right out at the end of the pier. In fact this year, 1943, was the first year the pier had been back in business since the start of the war in the autumn of 1939. The girl, Williams, turned a big wheel that made one of the roundabouts work, the little kids sitting in small cars, miniature London taxis and racing cars. Grinning fit to bust. Pleased as Punch.

  It was Angela Williams looking after the small children’s roundabouts who was found dead between the two machines, neck broken, clothing disturbed – police jargon for knickers removed so you’d know what else had happened. Unsavoury. July 26th 1943.

  The combined wisdom of Scotland Yard had it that: first, murders were usually perpetrated by members of the victim’s family or very close friends; and, second, that if you didn’t nab the killer in the first forty-eight hours you were in for a long, and possibly fruitless, haul.

  This one had taken Tommy over three weeks of intensive sleuthing, and even then the unmasking of the murderer had been almost an accident: a young lad working among the stage staff at the Pier Theatre, a lad called Pearse who was almost the invisible man as far as Tommy and his squad were concerned. Suddenly they spotted him and Tommy did the algebra and geometry, fixed him in their sights and they got him – blubbering and confessing in some terror once accused.

  “Poor boy,” Tommy said, “not a real killer but a stupid mistake he’ll regret for the rest of his life.”

  Nobody said he probably didn’t have much of a life left and they all went back to London to see what would be thrown up next, but on the Saturday morning Tommy suggested that they drive up to see Suzie’s mum and stepfather – the Galloping Major.

  They were welcomed with huge excitement and plenty of food. Suzie’s mum, Helen, had a deal going with a butcher in nearby Wantage so they had a nice piece of beef on the Saturday night. “I was saving it for Sunday lunch,” Helen told Suzie, “but Tommy says you can’t stay to Sunday lunch.”

  Tommy hadn’t told Suzie, so she got quite shirty with him, over in the Coach House. “Why can’t we stay to lunch, tomorrow?” she asked, face twisted up in her not so convincing impression of anger.

  “Because we can’t,” Tommy smooth but firm. “We can not.” Three words equally spaced.

  “Bugger it, Tommy, why the blazes not?”

  “I have other plans.”

  And that was that. When Tommy had his mind made up there was no gainsaying him, so they slept pleasantly in the Coach House that was the last thing Suzie’s father had accomplished with their property before his fatal accident: did the old place up, two bedrooms and a wide open room with a kitchen off on the ground floor: very smart, a lot of exposed pine and nice carpets. Her mum put them in there, of course, because she didn’t really want them sleeping together in the main house: didn’t like to think of her daughter having a bit of nookie with Tommy under her roof, without the benefit of a priest as she would probably say.

  In the end it was a lovely surprise when instead of taking the London Road, Tommy drove them to the little market town of Wantage that seemed, from The Bear Hotel, to be a nice and interesting place – nestling in the Vale of the White Horse, as all the guidebooks said, with the ancient Roman roads nearby, the Portway running through the town and the Ridgeway just above them on the Berkshire Downs; and the great King Alfred’s birthplace, Alfred King of Wessex, the one who burned the cakes.

  Now they were standing, looking across the square, outside Arbery’s haberdasher, big windows and white paint, barley-sugar twists at the corner of the windows, when there was a snarl from above and they glanced up to see a North American Harvard aircraft in the all-yellow livery of RAF Training Command turn on its back about fifteen hundred feet above them, its big Wasp engine grumbling as it completed the roll and disappeared over the rooftops. For Suzie the noise seemed to score a tangible trail against the great bowl of deep blue sky.

  “Silly bugger,” Tommy still looked up, craning his neck. “Don’t think they’re supposed to do that. The engine can cut out inverted. Not supposed to do it over built-up areas.”

  “Showing off?”

  “’Course.”

  “And that’s King Alfred over there?” nodding towards the grey-white statue that stood on a rough stone plinth in the centre of the Square.

  They danced around a red Oxford bus just leaving from outside Gibbs – printer & stationer – then threaded their way over to take a closer look.

  “Like his frock,” Tommy chuckled.

  “And the hat,” Suzie agreed.

  Alfred wore a belted robe that ended just above his knees, and a long enveloping cloak, an elongated pudding basin helmet perched on his head, a scroll in the left hand, while the right rested on the haft of a long-handled fighting axe, single-bladed with the curved head by the king’s right cross-gartered boot.

  “How do they know he was born here?” Suzie asked.

  “Biographer says so. Geezer by the name of Asser. Born here in the ninth century.”

  She thought bloody Tommy’s a know-all. “When the years had only three numbers, right?”

  “Absolutely: measured in the hundreds. Axe signifies his warlike reputation, scourge of the Vikings, and the scroll has to do with his dedication to learning and educ
ation.”

  “So he’s a Saxon king?”

  “Known for it, heart. That and the legend of the burned cakes.”

  “Fleeing from the Vikings; took shelter in a cottage. Lady of the house told him to look after the cakes she was baking. He didn’t, cakes burned and the woman boxed his ears. Right?”

  “That’s how it goes.”

  Suzie craned up, gazing at King Alfred the Great’s face. “Doesn’t look very Saxon to me.”

  “No, more your Saxe-Coberg-Gotha than your Saxon.”

  The statue’s face certainly had the features more moulded to Edward VII than a Saxon.

  “Fact is,” Tommy continued, “the fellow who sculpted him was a relative of Queen Victoria, had a studio in the grounds of St. James’s Palace so it’s not really surprising.

  They diced with death again, returning to the east side of the square and walking up to the silent and closed fish shop on the corner, The Regent Cinema across the way looking oddly out of place: Suspicion on Monday to Wednesday and How Green was my Valley Thursday to Saturday. B Picture, Gaumont British News and shorts – Full Supporting Programme.

  They turned right into Newbury Street, the Post Office across the road, then Clegg the Chemist, The Blue Boar to their right.

  They strolled on up Newbury Street and Suzie took his arm.

  Old married couple, she thought.

  “All this is a very posh girl’s school, run by the Wantage Sisters,” he said.

  Not on your life, she thought referring to the old married couple thought.

  “Very, very posh school. Posh and spikey.” Tommy grinned.

  “What’s spikey?” she asked.

  “High Church, heart. Bells and smells, genuflecting, plainsong, vestments of gold thread, more Roman than the Pope himself.”

  “I’m High Church,” Suzie gave him a tight little smile and remembered Father Harris, making her confession to Father Gibbs and being caught up in the wonders of the Mass.

  They came abreast of The Royal Oak public house on the corner of Portway, across the road stood a little sweet shop – Readhead it said above the window.

  “Up here we’ll find King Alfred’s School,” Tommy continued.

  Like a bloody travelogue, she thought.

  “Bit pretentious, King Alfred’s School,” he said. “Like to think it’s a public school, but it ain’t.”

  “I wonder if you can get violent creams under the counter at Mr Readhead’s,” she dreamed. “What we used to call them, our favourites, violent creams.”

  “I think he’s more your sherbet dabs and gobstoppers. Violent creams are middle class nutty.”

  In the Mountford family the joke had been that Suzie adored violet creams that she always spoke of as violent creams. She was surprised that Tommy even recalled the tale because he seemed quite immune to childhood humour.

  There was a short row of houses on the same side of the road as Readhead’s shop, then a wide expanse of school playing fields, a gap from the houses, then one house on its own: three stories high, steps up to the front door and a little black and white sign, Portway House.

  They came to a pile of grey stone buildings that made up the school on the right and a small stretch of prefabs, temporary classrooms across the road next to a solid grey building that said King Alfred’s School, OTC carved in stone above the heavy door.

  They crossed the road, Tommy still chuntering on about schools and the like, pausing at a memorial gate for those fallen in 1914-18.

  “Going to have to add-in the current squabble,” he grimaced and hurried Suzie along, loitering again outside Portway House where a slim attractive woman was closing the door and coming down the steps, hurrying as though late for church.

  “Funny place to build a house, unless it’s got something to do with the school,” Tommy said quietly as the hurrying woman moved out of earshot. She had given them a hard look, as though they were potential troublemakers, as she came into the street and crossed over near The Royal Oak.

  They came abreast of Redhead’s shop, headed right, crossed the road and walked on past neat rows of houses, then a black wooden building set back from the road, identified by a sign that told them it was a British Legion Old Comrades Club close to a wide expanse of grass, dotted with swings, a chained maypole and a small round shelter – a recreation ground where young children could play on the swings and older kids could make their own fun in the long grass that ran up to the skyline.

  As they approached the entrance, the gates already removed like every other piece of ornamental metal in the town, leaving only two somewhat new looking red brick stanchions, a couple were walking out, the boy no more than sixteen years old, the girl around the same in a thin summer dress, yellow with little blue flowers. They held hands as though trying to save one another from some unseen fate, occasionally glancing at one another with adoring eyes.

  After they passed, Suzie glanced back to see that the rear view showed a fine display of grass cuttings and burrs across the youngsters’ backs.

  Up to no good in the long grass she thought as she tried to match Tommy’s step head down starting to toil up the long hill.

  Half way up they passed a man on his way down – a countryman dressed in tattered trousers a shirt with no collar and a waistcoat.

  “This hill got a name at all?” Tommy hailed him with a slightly superior wave and one eyebrow up.

  The fellow hardly paused, “Workhouse ’ill, though some’ll call it Red ’ouse ’ill on account of the Workhouse being made of red brick.”

  “The Workhouse is still working then?”

  “People round ’ere live in fear on it. Segregated it is. Don’t get to stay with your wife if they take you in there. Good day to ’e.”

  The spike, the workhouse, the poorhouse, whatever, stood almost at the crest of the hill. They stopped just short of it, standing on the grass verge looking down on the town, Tommy a couple of paces behind Suzie.

  “Nowhere like England on a summer afternoon,” Suzie muttered.

  “Beautiful.” But he was looking at Suzie as she turned her head, the burning sun catching the highlights in her hair, the natural lighter gold streaks, the handsomeness of her face, sleekness of figure visible under the summer skirt trembling on her hips and buttocks. She was all Tommy wanted, yet, and yet.

  “Tommy, you’ve enslaved me,” she said when he took her the first time in her mother’s pied-à-terre in Upper St Martin’s Lane where they now lived in secret bliss – Scotland Yard wouldn’t really have held with a marriage though Dandy Tom now said he’d got over that hurdle. No, she corrected in her head, no, it’s not all bliss these days.

  Standing almost on the brow of Workhouse Hill, Tommy thought back to that time, three years ago, during the Blitz, when he had tried to shape her, mould her from the inexperienced, naïve young plainclothes girl into a woman with confidence and comprehension. He had so badly wanted her as his wife but recently she seemed to have shied away from him, like an untested colt. He had been unable to capture the great clamp of feelings they had experienced, one for the other and this made him sad.

  “Wonderful,” she said now. “Look at that,” as three Wellington bombers flew in a Vic straight over their heads. She turned to look back at him, her light grey-green luminous eyes alight, one small, but workmanlike hand touching her hair, lips parted and creased into a smile. “What a view,” she said, and Tommy followed her gaze towards the grey tower of the church of SS Peter and Paul, rising from among the red brick and grey slate roofs of the houses far below.

  On that first night together in ’40s London she had pushed him away, held him at arm’s length and said she now knew why the newspapers called him Dandy Tom, giving his manhood a playful tweak. Suzie Mountford was a quick learner he’d thought at the time.

  “Tommy, look. What the heck are they doing…?”

  In the distance two Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bombers, twin-engined, slab-sided, twin-tailplanes – flying suitcases a
s they called them – circled to the south each towing a large snub nosed glider. The aircraft were approaching the airfield almost out of sight, about a mile to the north of Wantage.

  “Gliders,” Tommy said watching the first aircraft line up and release the big sailpane – a Horsa, all wood and canvas – that seemed to hesitate for a moment as though it had no forward momentum, then it slewed around and dropped its nose, heading towards the airfield at an angle of forty-five degrees, sushing in, flaps extended, sliding down the unseen wires, straight across Wallingford Street, down, down, down until it slowly pulled up, grazing its way on to the runway.

  The other Whitley released its glider, the aircraft, the big cumbersome Whitley bombers turned then came down after each other to overfly the airfield and drop the towing cables.

  “Gliders?” Suzie repeated. “What’s that all about?”

  “Guess they’re going to give Hitler a taste of his own medicine.” Tommy gave his side-on smile: turning up the corner of his mouth so his teeth showed – what he called his terrible smile.

  In 1940, May, when the German army was blitzkrieging its way across the continent, they had used their airborne forces to great effect, taking airfields, catching the Dutch with their clogs off and using glider borne troops to neutralise Belgian strongpoints. Again, in 1941, the battle for Crete, their paratroops – das fallschirmjaeger – came out of the skies, by way of hundreds of Ju52s and DSM gliders. Tommy now watched the Airspeed Horsa gliders with their huge wingspan, almost 90 feet, angling down and he thought of the same craft multiplied by hundreds and filled with armed men bumping down in the early morning in occupied France: surprise package for the Nazis one day soon.

  As early as June 1940 Churchill sent a memo to the Chiefs of Staff calling for the training of airborne forces. Within the year there were soldiers wearing red berets with parachute wings high on the right arm, while large numbers of Royal Marines Commandos also sported the parachute badge.

  As they stood, Tommy and Suzie, looking across the miles of open country lying behind the town of Wantage, a crocodile of sad elderly men and women crossed the road into the Workhouse, the men and women separating and being led to their various segregated quarters. They looked browbeaten, silent with ragged clothes and sullen manners. 1943 and this brutal Victorian social assistance still persisted.