The Warning Bell Read online

  ‘I’ll thank him for you.’

  Billington looked up at the pale sky, and back down again. ‘I’d be much obliged to you if you would.’ He made a sound somewhere deep in his throat. ‘Very much obliged.’

  I let a moment pass. ‘Mr Billington, what happened to him at St Cyriac?’

  He peered sharply at me. ‘Why ask me?’

  ‘I thought you’d know something about it. As adjutant.’

  ‘Mr Madoc, the last time I saw your father he was at the wheel of 2548, slipping away from Dover docks that April afternoon. He never came back to Dover so far as I know. I was posted overseas myself in May, and nothing had been heard of him or the boat by then. I only heard years later that he’d managed to get out.’

  ‘And the rest of the crew?’

  ‘I gather he brought one out with him. Don’t know who. The others were POWs for the duration, I expect.’

  ‘So the boat was captured?’

  ‘Logical assumption, since it’s still in one piece over there.’

  ‘You didn’t try to make contact with any of these men after the War?’

  ‘I was overseas for nearly ten years after ‘44. Malaya, Hong Kong. Never kept up with the Section.’ He made an impatient gesture. ‘If you want to know this sort of thing, you really must ask your father.’

  ‘He won’t talk about it.’

  ‘Well, then,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘St Cyriac was a balls-up, young Mr Madoc. Just like every other balls-up in wartime. Not even an important balls-up in the grand scheme of things. There’s no more to be said about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t leave it like that.’

  ‘Can’t you indeed?’ he flared. ‘And why is it suddenly so important that you know? This isn’t even your story. You weren’t even born! Why does it matter what we old fools choose to remember and choose to forget?’

  ‘Do you have a son, Mr Billington?’

  He hesitated, caught off guard by my question. ‘Three of them. What of it?’

  ‘Do you ever talk to them about those days? About the War? About your friends back then, and the funny or sad or stupid things you did together?’

  He stared at me for a few moments. ‘I bore them rigid, if you must know,’ he said at last. ‘Endlessly. And the grandchildren. They humour me, but they think I’m talking about the Land that Time Forgot.’

  ‘I’d have liked my father to bore me every now and then, Mr Billington. I’d have liked him to feel that he could bore me whenever he wanted. But he never did. He never talked to me about those days. I’m coming to think that’s why he never really talked to me at all.’

  For some seconds he sat softly thumping the arm of his wheelchair. I don’t know what it was about him – his age, I suppose, or the vulnerability suggested by his disfigurement and disability. Whatever it was, I found I couldn’t hold back now.

  ‘I worshipped him, Mr Billington. And for a while he was what every kid wants from his father. But then when I was eight years old something happened. A boating accident. It wasn’t very serious. Nobody died. Nobody was even hurt. But he was never the same after that. A few days ago, when she was dying, my mother said the accident had brought back something that happened to him in the War. Something horrible, she said. That was the word she used. Horrible. I need to know what it was.’

  Billington kept his lidless jackdaw eyes fixed on me for a long time. Over the fence I could hear the wind hissing in the long grass of the abandoned airfield.

  ‘Your father was sent over to St Cyriac in March of ’44 to drop off this mad Free French Johnny. Codename of Lucien.’

  ‘Lucien?’

  ‘Correct. Some sort of a resistance organiser fellow. Trained assassin, more like. The drop-off went all right, but in April George was sent back to pick this chap up again. And that’s when everything went belly-up. I don’t know what went wrong over there. But that was the sequence of events.’

  I took out my wallet and held the flattened Senior Service packet up for him to see, with its sketch map scribbled on the back.

  He frowned. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘I found it among my mother’s things. I wondered if it meant anything to you.’

  He peered at it for a moment then shook his head. ‘Should it?’

  ‘Or this, maybe?’

  I tipped the gold sovereign into his palm. He rolled it between the stumps of his fingers, examining both sides.

  ‘Cloak-and-dagger types were given gold sovereigns as emergency funds,’ he said, handing the coin back. ‘They still are, I believe. I expect that’s what this was.’

  ‘You mean this man Lucien gave it to my father?’

  ‘That’s possible.’

  ‘For good luck?’

  ‘Who knows? Though if you ask me Lucien wasn’t the sort of cove who’d bring good luck to anyone.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘There was something about him. I remember the first time I saw him. He was just sitting there in the CO’s office in that black get-up, smoking these foul cigarettes. He was supposed to wait for the CO to invite him to smoke, but Lucien didn’t bother about that, and nobody quite had the nerve to tick him off. I shouldn’t think he was more than nineteen or twenty, but he looked like Old Nick in all that commando gear, with his face blacked up. Slightly unhinged, in my view. Very polite and correct – spoke good English. But he gave you the feeling he’d stick a knife into you as soon as look at you. Which was his job, in point of fact, sticking knives into people.’

  ‘Did my father feel that way about him too?’

  ‘More so, I’d say. When he was due to go over and pick him up again, George didn’t want the job. I’d never seen him windy. I’d never heard him sound worried about anything. Of course, we had to send him anyway. No one knew that coast like George did. But if he had some sort of premonition, it seems it was correct.’ Billington huffed a bit and rocked around in his chair. ‘Look, I think I’ve said quite enough, don’t you? It hardly seems up to me to talk to you about matters your father quite clearly would rather forget.’

  ‘I expect you’re right.’ I got to my feet. ‘Just one last thing, Mr Billington.’ I took the faded Kent Courier cutting from my wallet and showed it to him. ‘Does this ring any bells?’

  He stiffened, and I watched the wary light hardening in his eyes as he read it.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It does not.’

  ‘You can’t think of any reason why my mother would keep an article about a girl found dead in Dover back in 1944? A WREN called Sally?’

  ‘You’re assuming that was the name of this unfortunate WREN.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you? It’s written on the cutting.’

  He grunted, but didn’t deny it. ‘Your mother was a WREN. Perhaps they knew one another. How would I know?’

  I rested my hand on the back of the bench and drummed my fingers on the warm wood. I waited for him to say more, but by degrees his glittering eyes were focusing somewhere in the past and I knew I’d get nothing more out of him. I leaned forward and placed my hand over his on the arm of the wheelchair.

  ‘Thank you.’

  The old man stared down at my hand covering his own mutilated one. I thought he might pull away, but he did not. Instead he took a couple of deep breaths, gradually recovering his composure.

  ‘I’ll tell you something about your father, Mr Madoc,’ he said eventually. ‘Might help, might not. George could have had what they used to foolishly call a “good war”. Could have gone into the Navy. The Senior Service.’ He curled his lip a little to show what he thought of such nonsense. ‘Instead, he ended up with the lowest commissioned rank it’s possible to get, in command of just about the smallest vessel afloat. And do you know why? Because he wouldn’t kill. He abhorred the very idea. He came close to being interned as a conscientious objector. And let me tell you, in the Second World War they didn’t think there was anything very noble about that. Then somebody suggested the Air-Sea Rescue to him.
Not glamorous. Not safe. Not an easy option. But saving life, not taking it. And that’s the path he followed, to the great privilege of all of us who knew him. To the lasting gratitude of all the men he pulled from the water, and their families, their children and grandchildren. All the men – British, French, German, American, whatever – whom he never abandoned, when everyone else had given up hope. And he never abandoned anyone. I want you to remember that, Mr Madoc. He never abandoned anyone.’

  I sat in my car outside the museum for some time after I had left Billy Billington, staring out over the airfield. The early spring sun washed primrose yellow over the meadowland, and then shrank away, leaving the fields dull and wintry again. A coach pulled up on the gravel and discharged twenty or thirty elderly men and women in overcoats, some with sticks, some wearing veterans’ berets with badges on them. Across the car park one of the men working on the scarlet jet aircraft was belting something in the cockpit with a big spanner.

  I looked across at the glass doors of the museum. A shrine to the living dead, Billington had called the place, to the shades that still flickered with life so long as someone remained to conjure them from the past and give them honour – not even honour, but the simple respect of memory. He had been speaking from the heart about that, but not everything he had said had been so frank. I knew I had not imagined that.

  I saw again the slight retraction of his head, tortoise-like, when I had shown him that faded cutting, the hunted light in his eyes. For a second I considered going back in and asking him outright why he hadn’t been straight with me, but I pictured his outrage and his dismay and I didn’t have the heart for it.

  But I didn’t have to go straight back to London either.

  7

  Three hours later I parked in a multi-storey not far below in the centre of Dover.

  The Library and Discovery Centre occupied a futuristic block in the Market Square, all cantilevers and glass walls. A middle aged woman with tawny hair sat behind a reception desk in the glossy foyer. She looked bored, but her interest sparked up at once when I showed her the cutting.

  ‘A murder?’ She scanned the article and opened her eyes very wide. ‘How exciting!’

  ‘I’m wondering if you can help. There’s something I want to know about this.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I’m trying to find out who the dead girl was. This WREN, presumably by the name of Sally something-or-other. How would I go about that?’

  She frowned in concentration. ‘Well, when this was written the police obviously hadn’t identified her. But as soon as her full name was released they would have reported it.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘So you’d have to find some later issues of the Courier and look through them.’ She put on reading glasses and looked at the article more closely. ‘We don’t keep anything this old, I’m afraid. Your best bet would be Kent County Archives. They have all the local papers on microfiche, going back to year dot. That’s up at Maidstone.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘But you wouldn’t make it before they closed today. Still, I imagine it isn’t all that urgent after sixty-odd years.’ She caught my expression. ‘Or is it?’

  ‘I suppose not. But it feels that way.’

  ‘I see.’ She nodded and thought for a moment. ‘In that case, you could always go direct to the Courier.’

  ‘The newspaper? It’s still in business?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Take more than a little war to finish them off. I think they still keep the originals at their office.’

  ‘Would they let me see them?’

  ‘They would if I asked.’ She winked. ‘The archivist’s a friend of mine. You want me to give her a ring?’

  The Kent Courier’s offices were a couple of miles down the Canterbury road. I had been expecting something modest and old fashioned to fit my view of regional papers, but this was a modern block with a lot of glass and steel and a gatehouse at the entrance. A security man buzzed me through. By the time I got into the marble foyer a round woman swaddled in bright woollen clothing, was already waiting for me, drumming her fingers on the reception desk.

  ‘Mr Madoc? I’m Melanie Townsend. Jane Hatton at the Museum called me about you.’ She took my hand. ‘You’re doing some research into wartime crimes, I gather? Down from London, did she say?’

  ‘Well, yes. That is –’

  ‘My daughter’s at London. University College.’ She was already leading me towards the lifts, her heels clicking on the parquet. ‘One of her courses is criminology. That’s your line, I suppose. Or history, is it?’

  ‘Not exactly, but there’s a particular murder –’

  She glanced at her watch and ushered me into the lift. ‘Yes, I’m sorry to hurry you, but I’ll have to leave in about half an hour. So we’ll go straight to it, if we may.’

  I kept quiet after that. On the second floor I followed her down a long corridor and into an open plan room furnished with maplewood tables and computer terminals. The walls were ranked with broadsheet-sized bound volumes with cracked leather spines. I handed her the cutting. She took it and put on her glasses.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘20th March, 1944.’

  She was already reaching for one of the oversized volumes. I helped her heave it down from the shelf. It was extraordinarily heavy and came to rest on the desk below with a thud. It contained bound copies of ancient newspapers, yellowed and spotted, and it gave off a smell of dust and age. She turned up the original story within a few moments.

  ‘Here we are. But there’d be a follow-up story for sure, when they identified her, for instance.’ She lifted over the soft pages. ‘It’s just a question of finding it.’

  Murky photographs, columns crowded with newsprint, advertisements for Bird’s Custard, Ovaltine, Tetley’s Tea, War Bonds. I saw it even before she did, the cheeky schoolgirl face on the front page of the 28th March issue, a plump face with dimples, grinning from under a uniform cap. The caption was in blockish type: ‘Savage killer sought for WREN’s death’ . I put my hand on the page to stop her turning over.

  Police have appealed to the public for help in tracking down the killer of 19-year-old WREN Sally May Chessall, whose body was found last Friday in a flat in Buckland, Dover. Detective Inspector Charles Hopkiss of Kent Police, leading the investigation, described the murder as ‘particularly brutal’. He said that he would like to hear from anyone who was in Brent Street, Buckland, on the night of Wednesday 15th March or early in the morning of Thursday 16th March. Inspector Hopkiss confirmed that the murder weapon, believed to be a commando dagger or similar knife, has yet to be found.

  I looked at the saucy 1940s face in the picture, smiling, cap at an angle. Sally May Chessall. I still didn’t recognise the name. I didn’t recognise anything about the story. I read on, not knowing what I was looking for until I reached the last paragraph. Then I stopped and re-read it.

  Miss Chessall was stationed at Naval Headquarters, Dover Castle, where friends described her as ‘popular’ and ‘outgoing’. Her unit was reported to be ‘deeply shocked’ at the tragedy. Miss Chessall failed to report for duty on Thursday morning. On Friday evening, her colleague Corporal Joan Fordyce became concerned and called at Miss Chessall’s lodgings, where she made the grim discovery.

  Melanie Townsend glanced at me. ‘Well, that’s got your attention. Answer a question, does it?’

  ‘Joan Fordyce was my mother.’

  ‘Was she now?’ She looked at me in owlish surprise. ‘Well, there may be more about this, you know, especially if they caught the chap, and there was a trial or whatever. But you’d have to come back tomorrow and look through all the files. We don’t have it on disc, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Glad to be of help.’ She bustled a bit, anxious to get rid of me. ‘Look, I’m so sorry, but I really must close up now.’

  I left the building and walked back to the car. It was dark now and the evening rush hour was under way beneath a steady drizzle. I drove ba
ck into town and found a café and sat there with a mug of tea and a bacon sandwich. The original cutting lay on the table in front of me in a plastic sleeve. The story had led me down a blind alley and I felt slightly foolish. The cutting had nothing to do with my father. Instead it was merely a memento my mother had kept of a long ago drama, and of the cameo role she had played in it. It was part of her history, not his, and all my father’s mysteries remained as dark as ever. For some reason, this fired my determination more than success would have done.

  I finished my sandwich and walked through the city centre and up the narrow shining streets. I had just wanted to get some air while I pondered my next move, but I found myself following the signs to the castle. The road climbed out of the bustling centre, past wealthy residential houses, and looped steeply up through wet green banks.

  I was out of breath and by the time I saw the castle walls floodlit against the evening sky above me. I stopped. Rain swarmed in the yellow light. It hadn’t been like that in those days. Back then it would have been pitch dark, all lights shrouded in the black-out. I walked on along the perimeter road which followed the curtain wall. Constable’s Gate, she had said. I set off again, following the road around for some distance, ducking under a barrier beside an empty kiosk. And quite suddenly I saw it on the far side of the moat, an ancient stone barbican, its huge studded gates hinged back against the wall and the lights of the castle shining on the wet flagstones within.

  He used to ride his old motorbike up here and wait outside, my mother had said, standing in that way of his, with his legs planted apart on the cobbles. She had hidden in those shadows within the vaulted entry of the gate for a minute or two each night as she had come off duty, just so that she could feed on the sight of him standing here, waiting for her.