The Warning Bell Page 18

  ‘And what did you find out?’

  ‘Funny thing. Another kid might have got pregnant and caused a scandal. Young Sally May gets disembowelled by a maniac. Them’s the breaks, I suppose. She wasn’t the only one, like I told you on the phone.’ He looked down at his notes. ‘There were two more of these so-called Gold Sovereign murders that they knew about. A housewife in Canterbury in October ’43, and a prostitute in Deal, about a month before young Sally. Same MO in each case. Sexual assault. Mutilation with a knife, probably a commando dagger. And a sov left in the mouth.’

  ‘No one was arrested?’

  ‘Not so far as I can see. But no wonder. Our Sally, by all accounts, liked to have fun, and there was no lack of volunteers. In 1944 the whole of the South of England was packed with young blokes armed to the teeth, all juiced-up about the Landings, half of them fearing they were going to die. You know they used to give gold sovereigns to behind-the-lines types?’

  I nodded and stared down at the vile pictures and at the murky photocopies of old-fashioned newsprint. I thought about a girl who liked to dance and drink, a girl who liked to make love. A girl who ended up torn apart in some shabby basement, with a gold sovereign in her mouth. When I looked up I realised Cruikshank was watching me across the table.

  ‘Mr Madoc, let me take a guess. You know something about this crime you haven’t told me yet.’ He smiled and sat back in his chair, his hands locked behind his neck. ‘Why don’t you tell me now?’

  I took out my wallet and tipped my own sovereign onto the table.

  He unfolded his glasses again and leaned forward.

  ‘My father brought it back from France in March 1944. I believe he was given it by an agent he ferried across to Brittany.’

  Cruikshank looked at me over his glasses. ‘Very good. Do we have a name?’

  ‘Robert Hamelin. Long dead now.’

  ‘Did he tell you all this, your dad?’

  ‘Not in so many words. But I do know that a month later he didn’t want to go back to France to collect this man.’

  ‘That would be logical, if he’d found the body.’ Cruikshank closed the file. ‘Oh, yes. That would be logical, all right.’

  A few minutes later, we pushed through the doors and walked down the steps to the carpark. Evening had fallen while we had been inside. It was chill and dark and the masts of the ships on the Medway stood like gallows against the fading sky.

  ‘Take a tip from me,’ he said, as we reached the car. ‘I was thirty-seven years a copper, and if there’s one thing I learned, it’s that nothing ever really makes sense.’

  I unlocked the car and rested my hand on the driver’s door handle. I was anxious to get away, to think things through, but Cruikshank didn’t show any sign of wanting to go back into the building.

  ‘It’s like my dicky heart,’ he said.

  I took my hand away from the car door.

  ‘See, I was lucky,’ he went on. ‘Someone thought things weren’t quite the way they ought to be, and took the time to ask why. Next month I’ll have a little operation, and more than likely I’ll be right as rain after that. But it could’ve been the other way so easily. A little thing like that meant life and death. What I mean to say, Mr Madoc, is that it’s not the times when we’re in doubt that we do most damage. It’s when we know something for certain sure. That’s when we make the big mistakes.’

  He put out his hand and I took it. He must have thought it strange, because his words struck me so forcibly that I forgot to let go, and stood there pumping his hand absently as the patterns shifted in my head. He finally withdrew it as gently as possible and shoved it into his jacket pocket in case I might be tempted to seize it again. He kept it there and watched me cautiously as I drove past him and out of the car park.

  31

  I went back to London and ate at a local pub and spent the night in the empty flat.

  The next morning I drove down to Plymouth again. I got there in the early afternoon. A wind was picking up, and a few petals from the apple blossom in Betty Coleridge’s orchard whirled across the windscreen as I came up the lane and parked in the lay-by opposite my father’s cottage. I saw him at once. He was standing in the vegetable garden, leaning on a hoe. There was some broken soil at his feet and a small pile of dislodged weeds at the end of the trellis. He watched me expressionlessly as I got out of the car. I stopped a few feet in front of him.

  ‘She loved the roses so,’ he said, as if his presence in the garden needed to be explained. ‘Useless bloody plants. But she loved them so.’ He looked into my eyes, and his gaze carried such pain that I thought it would break my heart. ‘I never thought to see you again, Iain.’

  I put my hand on the hairy sleeve of his jacket. ‘Dad, let’s go inside.’

  He rested the hoe carefully against the trellis and I followed him into the house. The kitchen was tidy this time, and no longer smelled of fish and mould. The candles had been removed and I saw that the groceries I had delivered had been put neatly away. The Bible lay closed on the table. He led me through to the main room and stumped over to his old leather chair in the bay window. The space was pleasantly melancholy at this time of day. I remembered from my childhood that this was the only time that I had liked to be in here, with the afternoon sun throwing dusty bars of light into the dim house.

  He slumped into his chair and stared out at the sea, his shoulders rising and falling. I sat down opposite him. I pulled out my wallet and emptied it, setting out the map of La Division, the sovereign, the photographs, the old newspaper cutting, on the wide window ledge. He didn’t watch.

  ‘I know about Lucien,’ I said. ‘I know about what he did.’

  ‘Do you? And what else do you know?’

  ‘I know about what you did. Or didn’t do.’

  ‘And what was it I didn’t do?’ His voice was very soft, as if he was tempting me to say it aloud, as he himself could not say it.

  ‘You left him. Or maybe you just didn’t try hard enough to save him.’

  I lifted the sovereign so that it shone in the light. His gaze settled on it and it seemed to cost him an effort to look away and meet my eyes again. When the silence had gone on for long enough I spun the coin and caught it and closed my fist around it.

  ‘You knew Lucien was more than half mad when you ferried him over to Brittany,’ I said. ‘He gave you this coin during that trip. So when you got home, and you found Sally Chessall, you knew he’d killed her.’

  He held back a moment longer, but then a barrier inside him collapsed and something of the architecture of his body sagged. His eyes shifted away from mine and focused in the past.

  ‘We saw that child, your mother and I,’ he said. ‘She was gutted like a fish. Like a wild animal had been at her. Dreadful to see. Dreadful.’

  ‘Dad, nobody blames you for what happened.’

  ‘Don’t they, now?’ he said, wearily.

  ‘Nobody ever did blame you. Billington doesn’t. The lads on the launch would have said you made the right decision. You tried to get them all to safety.’

  ‘I failed him,’ he said. ‘I was sworn to save life, and I failed. I could see him. I could hear him screaming for help, and I turned away. How could I talk about such a thing after?’

  ‘And that’s why you had the memorial put up? Jesus, Dad, you’d saved other men. Good men. You’d saved many of them. But this man? When you knew what he’d done? What could you owe him?’

  ‘I owed him that I should do my duty,’ he said quietly.

  ‘So you turned away a little earlier than you would have done otherwise. So what?’ I gave him space to answer, but he didn’t take it. ‘For God’s sake, Dad, you were under fire. You had a choice to make, a split-second decision. To take the one chance of getting away with your crew, or of sacrificing them for this maniac.’

  ‘They were sacrificed anyway.’

  ‘How could anyone know that? You still had to make that choice. You still had to try.’

  He
kept his steady gaze on me for a very long time. ‘You think too well of me,’ he breathed at last. ‘I suppose I should be grateful.’

  ‘It’s the truth, isn’t it?’

  I couldn’t read the expression in his eyes. ‘I failed,’ he repeated, very quietly. ‘That’s the only truth that matters.’

  ‘And because of that you couldn’t look yourself in the eye? Couldn’t look me in the eye?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said at last. ‘How could I? I sat in judgment on that boy.’

  ‘But he was a psychopath!’

  He lifted his head and his voice took fire. ‘Don’t you understand what an awesome thing it is to sit in judgment, no matter what I thought of him? And if it had only stopped there. But good God, look at the vileness that flowed from it. You must know all the things that turned bad after I did what I did. How I let in the evil to corrupt everything that followed.’

  But I was hardly hearing him by then, which is perhaps why I did not register the strangeness of that reply.

  ‘Dad, why didn’t you talk to me about this earlier?’

  ‘What good would it have done? Talking?’

  ‘It would have given us a chance to put things right.’ I pushed my hand through my hair. ‘Maybe it could still do that.’

  ‘What?’ He was scornful, incredulous, as if I had said something inane. ‘Don’t be foolish. How could such abominations ever be put right?’

  ‘I worshipped you – don’t you know that?’ I felt my voice begin to escape from my control but I didn’t much care. ‘I still do.’

  ‘You think this is just about you and me?’

  The incredulity had not left his voice. In the silence that followed I grew aware that he was watching me with a new keenness. Just for an instant I was surprised by something in his eyes that flickered like a compass needle, and then settled.

  ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘You wouldn’t have understood. And no more do you understand now.’

  I did detect it even at the time – an odd timbre to his voice as he spoke this phrase – a hint of relief, like a suspect who, under questioning, realises that his interrogators can’t prove a thing after all. But at that moment I was wound too tight to trust my own perceptions.

  I got up and paced away across the room. I found myself standing at the bookcase in front of the photograph of 2548 and of her crew, with their cocky grins, crowded onto the waist of the craft with the English Channel glittering behind them. I picked up the frame and turned it in the light. I thought of the grave mounds in St Cyriac churchyard, the clipped grass and the daisies and the squabbling starlings and the beech trees shifting in the sea wind above them. Not a bad spot to come to rest, I thought, if you had to come to rest at seventeen or twenty-one, or twenty-five or even thirty-eight years old.

  ‘St Cyriac’s a pretty place now,’ I said. ‘It’s a peaceful place.’

  I glanced over at him, but his gaze was directed somewhere very distant, out beyond the shining estuary.

  ‘Dad, why don’t you come back with me?’

  He lifted his head slowly. ‘To St Cyriac?’

  ‘Why not? We could do it. We could find a place that was big enough for all of us. Even if it was just for a while.’

  He looked at me as if I might be mad. ‘You want me to go back to that place?’

  ‘But why not, Dad? There’s nothing in this house to keep you.’

  He gazed at me in disbelief. ‘Sixty years we lived in this house, your mother and I. I didn’t always give her a good life, but such life as we had was planted here, and grew here. It was here she brought me when she led me back to the light. It was here you were born. And you say there’s nothing to keep me?’

  ‘Nothing but ghosts now.’

  ‘That’s where I belong. Among the ghosts.’

  I had a lurching sense of loss. I had thought that unlocking the past would unlock the present too. It had never occurred to me that I could learn what there was to learn and that nothing would change. I turned away from him again, not knowing what else to say. The photograph was still in my hands. I gazed at it. What would these young men have said? How would MacDonald and Billy Billington have handled this? Would they have known how to reach him in a way that I had never able to? I stared at their smiling faces as they pushed their shoulders towards the camera, MacDonald flaunting his three stripes and Billington his two.

  The image before me suddenly bloomed into yellow flame. I stared at the reflection, uncomprehending, and then whirled round. I was too late: he held the burning map until the flame licked at his fingers and then dropped the charred corner of cardboard onto the floor, where it curled and smouldered.

  I put the picture down and stepped quickly across and picked up the sovereign and the photographs and the cutting from the window ledge and held them out of his reach. I knew that if he had been quick enough he would have grabbed for them all.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I said.

  ‘Best all this stuff is forgotten,’ he said.

  ‘How can it ever be forgotten?’

  We stood looking at one another while big sooty flakes drifted down over us.

  ‘Best you go now,’ he said. ‘Best you go.’

  ‘Dad –’

  But in a gesture, for him, of extraordinary intimacy, he groped for my hand, gripped it hard then released it. ‘Best you go now.’

  I walked back to the car. I could still feel his hard old hand on mine.

  It was a cool, breezy afternoon up here on the cliffs and the apple blossom swept across the windscreen in a blizzard, piling in a pink and white drift against the wipers. I started the engine. My father had not come out with me, but now I could see him in the mirror standing in the doorway, his face turned towards me but his eyes focused somewhere far away, while the petals whirled around him like spindrift out at sea. He didn’t move as I pulled away slowly down the hill. The windscreen was blurred. I flicked on the wipers to clear it, but they didn’t make any difference.

  I knew it wasn’t right. Even as I drove back across the moorland roads with the flinty light riding up over the bonnet and dazzling my eyes, I sensed I had missed something important. That doubt nagged at the back of my mind, just out of reach.

  But for the moment it was drowned out by the renewed pain of his rejection – rejection at the very instant when I had hoped at last to close the gap between us. It was a cruel refinement of that pain I had felt all my life, and it blinded me to everything else.

  32

  That pain had receded to an ache by the time I drove into St Cyriac the next morning.

  Hoardings had gone up outside the Hotel de Ville, advertising a local carnival in a couple of weeks’ time. Girls in bright tee-shirts were handing out flyers about it and a team of men with a cherry picker were fixing up bunting. The innocent energy of the preparations came as a relief to me and I felt my spirits lift.

  They lifted still further when I saw Chantal standing at the corner by the Café du Sport, waving me down, waving so vigorously that her black hair flashed about her face. She was in blue jeans and white tee-shirt and her backpack was slung over her shoulder. She looked like a student hitchhiker about to set off on the adventure of her life.

  I had been unsure of my reception after our argument, and now I was achingly glad to see her. She wrenched the car door open before I had properly stopped, tossed her pack over the back of the seat and threw herself across me, hooking her arm around my neck and pulling me down into a long kiss.

  ‘It is so bloody good to see you!’ she said, then kissed me again, and her body moved against mine. The driver behind us blasted his horn and pulled out to swing past. It was Le Toque, in his battered white Landcruiser, a mermaid painted on the door and the back of the vehicle piled with plastic boxes and tackle. I glimpsed his laughing red face as he made a cheerful and obscene gesture in my direction.

  ‘Chantal? I think maybe we ought to move out of the middle of the square for this.’

  ‘Last of th
e great romantics,’ she sniffed. She sat up and slammed the car door. ‘OK. Down to the front and turn right.’

  I had no idea why she was directing me this way, but I did as I was told and drove the length of the seafront. The road curled back to follow the river bank for a little way before petering out.

  ‘Stop here.’

  I pulled up. To our left a strip of shingle sloped down to the water and I could see out across the narrow mouth of the Vasse to the willows on the far bank. On our right stood a weatherboard cottage with a slate roof and a veranda, half hidden behind a neglected garden.

  ‘Evangeline Didier’s owned it for years,’ Chantal said.

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘She said that if we were staying on for a while it would be more comfortable than the guesthouse.’

  ‘Are we staying for a while?’

  ‘Of course we are,’ she said airily, as if there had never been any question over the matter. ‘The place is a bit tatty, but it’s really quite sweet. Drive on in.’

  I put the car into gear and drove down the rutted track to the front of the house and pulled up next to an elderly motorcycle. I recognised it at once.

  ‘Serge’s is helping out around the place,’ Chantal said, glancing at me to check my expression. ‘That’s his excuse, anyway.’

  The front door was open and in the hallway, between stepladders and paint pots and dustsheets, I could see Serge and Kate at work. Kate came to the top of the veranda and stood there, in paint-spattered jeans, her hair tied up in a scarf, waving and smiling at me. I turned back to Chantal. She was grinning like an idiot.

  ‘What have you done?’ I said.

  ‘Bought it, obviously,’ Chantal replied. ‘Signed the contract, anyway.’

  ‘You are one crazy bitch,’ I said. ‘You know that?’