The Warning Bell Read online

  ‘It’s the greatest blasphemy of all...’

  He rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. I moved back a little.

  ‘Dad, something happened there, didn’t it? Something really bad, that no one’s talking about.’

  He didn’t answer.

  I said: ‘You can’t be responsible for everything that went wrong. No matter what it is, why can’t you tell me about it? Why have you never been able to tell me about it?’

  ‘You think you would have benefited from such talk?’

  ‘Yes. I would have had a chance to understand why things were the way they were between us. We’d both have had a chance to put it right. We both wanted to.’

  He sat quietly watching me. I knew he wouldn’t speak until he was ready, and after a while I could no longer bear the weight of his gaze, and I looked away.

  ‘That day when you were a little lad,’ he said at last. ‘Out in Tom Blake’s boat. You remember?’

  ‘Oh, I remember.’

  ‘You heard it that day, Iain. Out there on the waters.’

  I felt something cold trickle down my spine. I kept my gaze fixed out over the sea. ‘What should I have heard?’

  ‘The voice of one who would have told you that your father isn’t a hero and never was.’

  ‘I didn’t hear any voice,’ I said, but I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stir. ‘How could I have heard a voice? Out there?’

  ‘That’s not what you said back then, as I recall.’

  ‘I was eight years old, for God’s sake. I was terrified. I imagined it.’

  ‘What difference would that make?’

  I looked back at him, and we sat with our eyes locked, like two checkmated chess players.

  ‘You let it be, now,’ my father said. ‘It’ll be over soon with me. I’ll be gone, and it will all be gone with me, and that’s as it should be.’

  I did not then know his whole meaning, but I could see that things would be just the way he described them. He was shutting down, as he had shut down the house around him. One day quite soon Betty Coleridge would come rapping on that window and, peering through the glass between her cupped hands, would see him here, his head bowed onto the open Bible, her untouched Dundee cakes rotting around him.

  I could already hear Betty’s tearful, accusing voice wavering down the phone line. And what would I be doing when that call came through? Sipping wine in some French café with my daughter who loved me, and my wife who loved me, watching the setting sun, looking forward to tomorrow.

  ‘Dad, who says we can’t have another chance?’

  ‘It’s too late for all of that, Iain.’ He moved a leather bookmark into place and closed the Bible on it with a soft thump, so that the candle flames trembled. ‘I expect you’ve come here meaning well enough, but now you’ve had your say you must leave me with such peace as I can find. And don’t trouble to come back no more.’ He looked up, unblinking. ‘Believe me, it’s better that way; for both of us.’

  I wanted to fight him, to rage against him, but when I saw what lingered in his eyes I knew I had lost. There was pain there, and loss, and something else, something deeper than both of those. I remembered my mother’s words – that he had loved me, that he had always loved me. Perhaps that was why I was incapable of resisting him. He was my father and, face to face with him, I was not strong enough even now to overcome the hold he had on me. He wanted me to walk out of that door and never see him again in life, and that was what I would do.

  I got to my feet. I opened the door a fraction and the cold night wind fluttered the candle flames so that shadows swooped and lurched around the kitchen. I stepped out into the darkness. When I got to the corner of the house he was still sitting there in the window, motionless.

  28

  I found a red brick pub along the coast road, tricked out with a lot of fake copper and brass. A darts tournament was under way and the bar was a deafening crush of red-faced men drinking pints. The landlady was a tough woman in her fifties with mauve hair.

  I paid for the room in advance, bought half a bottle of scotch and took it straight upstairs, feeling the woman’s eyes on my back, part suspicious, part concerned.

  The bedroom had a view across dark fields to the open sea. I poured myself a massive slug of scotch, took off my shoes, rested the glass on my chest and stretched out on the bed, listening to distant roars of triumph and despair as the duel was fought out below. I could see the moon from where I lay, paving a path of beaten silver to the edge of the cliffs.

  He used to ride that trackless sea, my father, in all weathers, in storm and rain, and sometimes with people trying to kill him while he did it. He and his crew would blast out into that lurching darkness, looking for lost men who were no longer friends or enemies, just men who were cold and despairing and utterly alone. My father hadn’t abandoned them. He never abandoned anyone.

  Now he was himself alone, and fearful. And I knew that, no matter how hard he struggled against me, I must not abandon him. I thought of the carefree buccaneer in the photograph I carried in my wallet, a young man full of the love of life. I had not seen that smiling, courageous man since I was a small boy, and very soon I would lose my last chance to catch the merest shadow of him.

  I shifted my weight on the bed and felt something slip from my pocket. The sovereign lay there on the counterpane, denting the material with its weight. I picked it up and turned it between my fingers, rubbing the gold thoughtfully until it winked at me in the soft light. I could feel my mind casting about to make the last connections, as a spider casts about to anchor its web. I thought of Lucien. Robert Hamelin. I thought of a fare paid and a debt called in.

  In the morning I ate a huge and unnecessary English breakfast in the bar. The room looked tawdry in the sunshine and smelled of stale beer. The landlady served me the greasy food with a rough motherliness and I stayed at the table for some time, listening to the peaceful sound of the country birds in the trees outside.

  I made a couple of calls on the mobile and it wasn’t until about nine-thirty that I drove off. I stopped at a supermarket on the outskirts of Plymouth, and not long after that I pulled up on the gravel outside my father’s cottage. I carried the boxes of groceries one by one over to the front porch and stacked them up there. He opened the front door as I was lugging the fourth and last one from the car. He was unshaven and in the hard daylight he looked haggard and pale.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’ I put the box down and stood up.

  He peered down at the cartons and back up at me.

  ‘The store will send the same again every fortnight. If you need anything meanwhile, ring them up. Here’s the number.’ I held out the supermarket’s card and stock list but he made no move to take these things. I tucked them into the top box. ‘It’s all paid for, this and whatever else they send. You want me to take this stuff inside?’

  He stared down at the boxes.

  ‘You can let it rot on the porch, Dad. But it’ll pile up after a while, and then Betty will have the Council round here, and the ratcatchers and the dog patrol and the health people and the SAS and a squadron of Challenger tanks. You know what she’s like. Oh, and by the way I’ve had the power put back on.’

  ‘I don’t need no electric,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘So don’t turn the lights on. Walk round blindfolded if you like. I’ve sorted the phone and gas too, for the next year.’ I took the first thing that came to hand from the top box – a milk carton – and thrust it at him. ‘Here. Go to town. Have some milk in your tea while you’re locking yourself away in this morgue. What the hell, treat yourself to a gingernut too. Live a little.’

  He looked at the container in his hands as if he had never seen one before. Condensation made the surface pearly and he ran his finger through the drops.

  ‘I’m not going to leave this alone, Dad,’ I said quietly. ‘You know that.’

  I waited until he looked at me, and I could see that he understood.

&nbs
p; 29

  I put the Discovery in the underground car park at Clerkenwell Road and took the lift up. The flat echoed with our absence. It had always been crowded, full of Kate’s music and my computer gear, of Chantal’s camera equipment and half-packed bags. Now the rooms felt hollow.

  I shut the door behind me, gathered up a sheaf of mail, walked through to the kitchen and checked the phone. There was a score of messages on the answering service. I didn’t listen to any of them. I made myself a coffee and walked through into my study. I switched on the computer and the green-shaded desk lamp and opened the window a little on the cool spring afternoon.

  I took Billington’s letter from my wallet and smoothed it out on the desktop. A man can do no more than act on his beliefs, and on the information he has available to him at the time. He’s not always right.

  The space beside the monitor was clear and set the other relics out there: the sketch map of La Division, the sovereign, the Box Brownie photograph of my parents on that empty beach, and my mother’s yellowing newspaper cutting about Sally Chessall. I moved the pieces of the puzzle around on the desk, as if a new configuration might suggest a new approach. I knew I must have overlooked something.

  I stopped.

  I took the old cutting out of the pattern and put it to one side, pulled the keyboard towards me and keyed in Sally Chessall’s name. It failed to get a single hit. I tried the two names separately, and got pages of information, none of which looked relevant. I linked the name with Dover, with World War Two. Still nothing. I tried ‘wartime crimes’ and got everything from local historical societies to research material for teachers. I scrolled rapidly through, but almost all of it seemed to refer to London. I could find nothing about any Sally Chessall.

  I tried the Women’s Royal Naval Service. Their website invited queries about World War Two personnel, and for a moment my hopes rose. But the link took me no further than the Ministry of Defence’s Veterans Agency site, which told me that only the barest details of rank and postings were available for personnel who had left the WRENs before 1972. I couldn’t see how that would be of any use, and even to get that far I would need permission from Sally’s next of kin.

  I tried ‘Kent Police Service’. The homepage displayed a rearing white horse on a seven-pointed shield. It boasted photographs of smiling officers of both genders and various racial backgrounds chatting to residents, directing traffic, kneeling to comfort lost children. Running ‘Sally Chessall’ in the site’s search box drew a blank. I wasn’t surprised: I didn’t hold out much hope that a modern police force would provide links on its website to a sixty-year-old murder.

  I typed in ‘archive’ and was given a link to Kent Police Museum. The web page contained a brief history of the museum’s collection and of its installation in the restored Royal Chatham Dockyard. The place didn’t look much use as a source of information. It was run by volunteers, and was only open three or four half-days a week. Visitors were asked to ring first, or risk finding the place locked and unattended. I imagined something like the Tangmere museum, but on a smaller scale.

  I played around on the site for a few more minutes. At least there was a photo gallery which I could access online; I did so, turning up agreeable studio pictures of self-conscious constables with large moustaches sitting stiffly next to aspidistras, and shots of Wolseley patrol cars, antique handcuffs and truncheons. There was no search box, but I’d started now and was reluctant to give up. I picked up the phone and tried the number.

  I had been expecting an answering service, but to my surprise a man’s voice came on the line at once. He introduced himself as John Cruikshank. He had lugubrious voice and an estuary accent. I told him my name, mentioned the newspaper clipping. He was quiet for a moment.

  ‘Chessall, you say?’

  ‘Sally May Chessall, yes.’

  He waited, as if he expected me to go on. I found this oddly intimidating.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure what I’m after,’ I started to say. ‘I believe there’s some kind of a connection…’ But then I trailed off, hearing how absurd this already sounded, one stranger calling another about a murder more than sixty years ago.

  ‘A connection with what?’ he asked.

  ‘With my mother,’ I said. ‘Look, I realise –’

  ‘She wasn’t one of the victims, was she? Your mother?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Sorry if it’s a delicate subject at all, Mr Madoc, but I wondered if maybe your Mum…’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘You’ve lost me, Mr Cruikshank.’

  ‘It’s just that they were never entirely sure they identified all the victims. You didn’t know that? He was what they now call a serial killer, see. The one who did Sally Chessall.’

  ‘Are you saying this was a famous case?’

  ‘I don’t know about famous. The killings were bit notorious at the time. But I only know that because we’ve got a file on them. They were known as the Gold Sovereign murders.’

  I took the phone away from my ear and looked idiotically at it.

  ‘It’s kind of a nickname they got after the event,’ Cruikshank was saying. ‘Sally May Chessall was the last victim.’

  I was silent for so long that he prompted me.

  ‘Mr Madoc?’

  ‘I’ll be there in an hour,’ I said.

  30

  High brick walls encircled the old dockyard at Chatham, now a heritage site packed with museums and galleries and cafés with nautical names. I drove in through the archway only an hour after leaving London.

  The Kent Police had been allocated an old boiler house as their museum space, a handsome yellow brick building with a blue 1930s police box standing outside. At a reception sat a solidly built man of about sixty with two cardboard folders in front of him. He had pepper-and-salt hair and steel rimmed glasses. He looked up as I came in and held out his hand to me.

  ‘John Cruikshank.’

  ‘Iain Madoc.’

  ‘I gathered.’ He gave me a wry look. ‘I was going to tell you we were about to close, Mr Madoc, but you didn’t give me the chance.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not a bit. It’s nice to hear a bit of enthusiasm for all this ancient history. Gets the old juices flowing a bit.’

  He stood a cardboard sign on the desk, picked up his folders and led me between glass fronted cabinets of police memorabilia – helmets, medals, photographs – and into a study space at the back. There was a single table with a light over it and a couple of chairs and some shelves of books and a touchscreen computer with an ‘Out of Order’ sign stuck on it.

  We sat. Cruikshank lowered his head so he could see me over the top of his glasses and tapped one of the folders in front of him.

  ‘You can read this one for yourself, but it’s mostly only photocopies of old newspaper articles you’ve probably seen already.’ Cruikshank handed it to me and the chair creaked under his weight as he leaned back. ‘Funny, isn’t it? There’s a World War going on, and the greatest seaborne landing in history just about to be launched, yet people still liked to get their teeth into a nice juicy murder.’

  There were half-a-dozen articles, four from the Kent Courier including the two I had already seen, and two more from the national papers, all of them dated March and April 1944. I scanned them rapidly. Several reproduced the same fuzzy picture of Sally May Chessall, a laughing, round-faced girl in uniform. They all told the same story, with hardly any variations. She was nineteen, she had served at Dover for just under a year, she had been the subject of a frenzied attack, probably with a dagger or bayonet, and she may have been dead for two days or more by the time she was found.

  The later articles were more or less the regular fare of crime journalism when there’s not much new to report: horrified quotes from neighbours, a statement from the girl’s commanding officer, a photograph of her family home in the Cotswolds taken through locked iron gates. All repeated the same account of the discovery of the body. Only t
he latest, from the London News Chronicle of 18 May 1944, carried one extra detail, and then I almost missed it.

  The alarm was raised by Miss Chessall’s colleague Corporal Joan Fordyce, who visited her friend’s flat when she grew concerned. Receiving no answer at the door, Corporal Fordyce left and returned with her fiancé, Pilot Officer George Madoc of the Royal Air Force, who effected entry and made the grim discovery.

  I re-read the words. Again. From a distance, I became aware that Cruikshank was speaking again, that he was sliding the second folder over to me.

  ‘This is what they didn’t release at the time. Got a strong stomach, Mr Madoc, I hope?’

  Dully, I opened the folder. They were crime scene photographs, stark black-and-white and revolting in their clarity. Sally Chessall had died in a mean room which had peeling wallpaper and stains on the ceiling. A plywood wardrobe stood in the corner with one door hanging loose. A chipped sink was streaked and dribbled with what must have been blood, ink black in the camera flash. A jumble of smeared handprints on the wall looked like Stone Age cave paintings. And on the bed, on blankets black and clotted, lay a very young girl with a face as white as paper. Her eyes were bulging, and her intestines were festooned over the edge of the mattress. A close-up shot showed her gaping mouth. A coin lay on the cushion of her tongue, a shiny coin.

  ‘Nutcases like this often leave some sort of a signature.’ Cruikshank glanced at me. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, Mr Madoc, just what is your interest?’

  I lifted my eyes from the awful pictures. ‘My father found the girl. It did something to him.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ He took off his glasses and folded them on the table in front of him. ‘They retired me two years ago with a leaking heart valve, of all things,’ he said, as if this somehow followed from our conversation.

  I looked at him.

  ‘I never knew I had it,’ he went on. ‘I ran marathons and all sorts. Would you believe it? Felt as fit as a fiddle, but I could have dropped down dead any minute. So these days I amuse myself in here, helping out, getting the files in order. It keeps me off the streets, as the wife says. But an old copper’s instincts die hard. I could tell this was personal with you, so after you called I made a couple of inquiries of my own.’