Angels in the Gloom wwi-3 Read online

  Kerr flopped into the chair opposite him, clasping and unclasping his hands. “No one knows,” he said wretchedly. “The police have been sent for, of course. I mean someone from Cambridge. There’ll have to be an investigation. It’s going to turn the whole village upside down. There’ll be scandal. As if we hadn’t enough to . . .” He covered his face with his hands. “What can I say to his wife? I can hardly go in with condolences as if she had lost him in France. This is hideous . . . personal hatred so terrible . . .” He looked up, his skin blotched from the pressure of his fingers. “What do I say?” he pleaded. “How do I explain this, and tell her there is some kind of God who is in control and can make sense out of it all? What can I do to comfort her?”

  “You won’t know until you see her,” Joseph answered. “There’s no formula.”

  “I can’t do it! I don’t know the words. . . .” He gestured helplessly. “If he’d died in the army, or the navy, I could say he made a great sacrifice and God would . . . I don’t know . . . watch over him, take him home. . . .” He floundered to a stop.

  Joseph wanted to argue the futility of saying such things however anyone had died, but Kerr was not listening to him. He wanted Joseph to do the job for him—and for Mrs. Blaine’s sake, as well as for Kerr’s, he must. “You’ll have to drive me,” he answered, and saw the flood of relief in Kerr’s face, and then apprehension. “I haven’t got a car, and I couldn’t drive it with one hand if I had,” Joseph pointed out.

  “Oh! Yes, yes of course.” Kerr stood up. “Thank you. Thank you. Will you . . . er . . . come now?”

  “I must tell my family, then I’ll accompany you.” Joseph stood also, finding himself oddly stiff and a little dizzy. “I shall be back in a moment.” He left Kerr in the sitting room and went through to look for Hannah.

  She was in the kitchen. She turned to face him as soon as she heard his footsteps, even before he was through the door. She had a dish cloth in one hand, dripping unnoticed onto the floor. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s happened?”

  “One of the scientists at the Establishment has been murdered,” he answered gently. There was no point in trying to protect her. The whole village would know in an hour or two. “Kerr wants me to go with him to see the widow.”

  “You don’t have to.” She put the dish cloth down and took a step toward him. “You’re still sick.”

  “Yes, I must, for Mrs. Blaine’s sake.”

  She drew in her breath to argue, then let it out again, the struggle over before it began. “Can I help?”

  “Maybe later.” He turned to leave.

  “Joseph?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is that going to stop Shanley from completing the invention?” She was frightened and it was naked in her face.

  He knew the fear, tight gripping in the stomach, shivering cold. It was far bigger than one life or death, however terrible. It could be the loss they all dreaded, the beginning of the final defeat.

  “I don’t know.” He tried to sound calm, braver than he felt. “This man might not have even been working on it.”

  “Shanley’s going to be so distressed—either way. Don’t forget him, will you!” she warned.

  “No, of course not.” He hesitated a moment more, touched her briefly with his good hand, then went out into the hall.

  He sat silently beside Kerr as they drove along the main street of St. Giles. It was the first time Joseph had seen it since his last leave in October. In the ambulance from Cambridge he had been lying down, and in too much pain to think of peering out. Now he looked at the familiar buildings whose shape he could have drawn in his dreams with the name of every shop, and who owned them, the post office, the school, the village pond, and of course the lych-gate to the church and the graveyard beyond. John and Alys Reavley were there. He missed them with a slow ache that never entirely left him, but he was also grateful that they did not have to see the gathering darkness of this time, or fear for those they loved.

  Once again he was dealing with murder, the shock and grief of it, and the anger that would certainly follow. And he thought of Mrs. Prentice. He had loathed her son. He could have imagined killing him himself, especially the night of Charlie Gee’s injury. That still sickened him almost beyond bearing. He understood Sam. God!—how he understood Sam! And missed him still.

  At least he did not know the poor woman he was going to see now, and whoever had killed her husband would also be someone he did not know. This time he would be a bystander, and perhaps he could be of some help. He might eventually even help Kerr! He needed it as much as anyone.

  Kerr drew up abruptly alongside a flowering hedge, white with early blackthorn blossom. “The house is just the other side of that,” he said, nodding toward it. “I’ll wait here. I don’t want to seem to be watching. It would make the poor woman feel even worse.”

  Coward, Joseph thought, but he said nothing. He opened the car door with his good hand and stepped out. The air was cool and sweet and the earth slightly damp as he walked to the gate and then up the path. He loathed doing this and was prepared to be told pretty briskly to go away.

  He knocked on the door, and waited long enough to believe it would not be answered. He stepped back and was about to turn away, both disappointed and relieved, when it pulled open slowly and he saw a slender, dark-haired woman with a face bleached by shock.

  “Mrs. Blaine?” He did not wait for her answer. It could be no one else. “I am Mrs. MacAllister’s brother, Joseph Reavley. I’m a chaplain in the army, home on sick leave.” His bandaged arm in the sling was obvious. “If I can be of any help or comfort to you, please call on me.”

  She stared, then looked past him as if to make certain he was alone.

  He waited without moving.

  “I don’t know what anyone can do,” she said helplessly. “It’s . . .” She made a small gesture of complete loss.

  He smiled very slightly. “Well, I’m not a lot of practical use at the moment,” he admitted. “I couldn’t even make you a decent cup of tea. But I can write letters, or get in touch with solicitors or banks, or anyone else you need to notify. Sometimes doing that sort of thing is terribly hard because you have to keep on repeating the same things, and it doesn’t get any easier. It’s like hammering home the reality of it.”

  Her blue eyes widened very slightly. “Yes . . . it . . . it will be. I hadn’t thought . . .” She gave a little shake of her head. “I suppose you do this all the time.”

  “No. I just write letters to tell people that someone they loved is missing or lost,” he answered. “Sometimes it’s just that they are wounded and can’t write themselves.”

  “You sound as if you know. . . .”

  “I lost my own wife.” He did not want to add anything more. It was over three years ago now, and the whole world had changed in that time, but it still hurt.

  “I’ll make the tea.” She pulled the door wider. “Please come in. I suppose I need advice, and I’d rather not do this alone.”

  He followed her through to the kitchen. It was an ordinary house, tidy but obviously lived in. There were coats hanging in the hall, a basket of clean laundry on the bottom of the stairs ready to be carried up. An open book lay on the hall table and letters were waiting to be posted. There were two umbrellas in the stand next to outdoor shoes, and a pair of binoculars.

  The kitchen was immaculate. She must have found the body before starting to make breakfast. What had she done since then? Perhaps nothing, just moved from one place to another aimlessly, suddenly without purpose, too stunned to care about anything.

  Now she had something to do, tea to make for a visitor. Her hands were shaking slightly but she managed, and he allowed her to do it without interfering. She offered him biscuits and he accepted. All the time he talked, just trivia, letting the conversation wander wherever she wished it to, half sentences, irrelevances.

  “We came here because of Theo’s work at the Establishment,” she said as she sat down a
t the wooden kitchen table opposite him. “He’s brilliant. Mr. Corcoran isn’t going to know how to replace him. Of course he won’t be able to. Theo was unique. He seemed to be able to get ideas out of the air, to think sideways.” She looked at him questioningly to see if he understood what she meant. It seemed to matter to her that he believed her. Small pieces of sense seem to, absurdly, at such times. He knew that.

  He nodded. In a while he would ask her about letters, people to tell, anything that needed canceling. The practical things could be very hard to do alone. Even sorting through a dead person’s clothes was desperately painful. The very familiarity of it was overwhelming, the smell, the remembered touch of someone you loved. With only one useful arm he would be little physical help, but he would at least be there.

  They were discussing such things, when to do it, which charity to give them to, when they were interrupted by another knock at the front door. Lizzie Blaine answered it and returned to the kitchen followed by a very ordinary looking man of barely average height. He was wearing a suit of indeterminate brownish gray and brown leather shoes scuffed at the toes. His hair was sprinkled with gray and definitely receding. When he spoke, one could see that his teeth were crooked, and two were missing.

  “Morning, Captain Reavley,” he said with slight surprise. “Home on sick leave, are you? Hope it’s not too bad. That your driver outside, reading his Bible?”

  A tide of memory washed over Joseph. It was as if for a moment he were back in Cambridge before the war, and it was Sebastian who was dead, not some brilliant young scientist full of promise whom he had never met, never taught or cared about, or whose work he had loved and believed in so fiercely. All the ugliness of suspicions came back to him, the angers, the jealousies uncovered, the hate where he thought there had been friendship, the shabby deeds that life could have left covered, and death had exposed.

  “Good morning, Inspector Perth,” he replied, his voice suddenly scratchy. “It’s the vicar. Yes, I suppose you could say he is my driver. How are you?” He had found Perth intrusive then, worrying at injuries and hidden pain like an animal with an old bone. He had returned to the vulnerabilities again and again, but in the end he had not been without compassion. Now he looked tired and anxious. Probably the police were short-handed, as all the fit young men had gone to France. “I expect you are here to see Mrs. Blaine,” he concluded. “Am I in the way?”

  “Please stay!” Lizzie Blaine said quickly. “I . . . I’d like you to, if you don’t mind?” She looked frightened and on the edge of losing the fragile control she had managed to cling to so far.

  Joseph did not move. He met Perth’s eyes.

  “If you don’t interrupt, Captain,” Perth warned. He nodded his head fractionally. There was a respect in his eyes as if Joseph were in uniform. He was a man from the trenches, the front line of battle, and in a country at war that meant he was a hero. He could ask for and receive almost anything. It was an artificial role, and he disliked it. The heroes were the men who went willingly to the front, to live and all too often to die on the line, the ones who went over the top into no-man’s-land and faced the bullets, the shells, and the gas. A lot of the time they did it with a joke, and so often when they were injured appallingly, if asked if it hurt, they would say, “Yes, sir, but not too much.” By the next day they might be dead. Many of them were not yet twenty.

  He forced his attention back to the present and the white-faced woman of perhaps twenty-five or so, looking at Perth and trying to find the words to tell him what had happened.

  “When did you last see your husband, Mrs. Blaine?” Perth said calmly, waiting until she sat down in one of the kitchen chairs, then doing the same.

  “We quarreled last night,” she admitted, her face flushed with shame. “About half past nine. He went out into the garden. I went up to bed about half an hour after that. I . . . I didn’t see him again.”

  “What did you quarrel about?” Perth asked, no expression in his voice or his tired, ordinary face.

  “Nothing, really,” she said miserably. It was a lie. Joseph knew it as he watched her, but not a guilty one. Perhaps it was defensive—to hide the foolishness of a man already dead. “It was stupid, just tiredness and short temper,” she went on. “He’d been working very hard at the Establishment. He didn’t often get home before eight or even nine in the evening.”

  Perth’s expression was unreadable. Had he seen the lie as well?

  Joseph did not believe Lizzie Blaine this time, either. There was a change in the way she sat, not a movement but a lack of it, as if she were rigid inside, guarding herself. The quarrel had been specific, and she did not want to admit it. Did she know who had killed her husband?

  Perth looked at her curiously. “Were you angry that he worked late so often, Mrs. Blaine?”

  She hesitated. “No, of course not.” She met his eyes. “It’s for the war. It’s something we all have to do. It would be worse if he were in the army, or the navy, wouldn’t it?” Suddenly her eyes filled with tears. “At least it might have been,” she corrected herself.

  Perth glanced at Joseph, then he nodded again. “I’m afraid, Mrs. Blaine, that terrible as it is out there, we’ve got our own troubles at home, too. Crime doesn’t stop just ’cos of the war. Wish it did. You went to bed, you say? Did you hear Mr. Blaine come back inside?”

  “No.” She swallowed.

  “That didn’t worry you?” There was skepticism in his face.

  She looked at him defiantly now. “No. He used to stay up sometimes, thinking. He was a scientist, Inspector, not an office clerk. He was always thinking.”

  Perth’s face tightened. Not many people worked office hours these days, certainly not police, but he did not say so aloud. “And you didn’t wake up in the night and wonder where he was?”

  “No,” she answered. She was sitting stiff-backed on the wooden chair, her shoulders rigid, her knuckles white on the tabletop. “I slept right through. I’d worked pretty hard during the day, too, and I was exhausted.”

  Perth’s eyes flickered around the tidy kitchen. Had he noticed that there was nothing belonging to children downstairs, and no mention of them? “Working?” he asked.

  “With the VADs,” she answered. “We had a garden party where everybody brought a blanket. We got nearly three hundred, but it took a long time afterward to fold and pack them.”

  “I see. So you would have been late home also?”

  “Half past six. I wanted to cook dinner for him.”

  His voice dropped a little and became gentler. “And this morning, Mrs. Blaine?”

  Her lips quivered and she swallowed as if there was an obstruction in her throat. “When I woke up and saw he still wasn’t there, I knew something was wrong. We . . . we have a shed at the bottom of the garden, where the walk is at the end under the trees.” She shivered although it was warm in the room from the black lead stove still alight from the night before. “I thought he might have been so angry that he had slept down there,” she went on. “I know that’s ridiculous. It’s far too cold for that, but I went down anyway, after I knew he wasn’t in the house. I . . .” She dragged her hand over her face, pushing her dark hair back. “I found him lying on the earth just by the path, and the . . .” She stopped. Every trace of color left her face. Joseph could only imagine the horror in her mind.

  “I see. And what time was that?” Perth asked.

  “What?” She looked lost, as if the meaning of what he said had evaded her.

  “What time was that?” he repeated. He was uncomfortable, aware of the clinical coldness of the question.

  “I’ve no idea.” She blinked. “It was light so it must have been after six o’clock. I don’t know. It seems like ages ago, but maybe it wasn’t. I came back up to the house. We have a telephone for Theo’s work. I called the police.”

  “Yes. The constable said so.” He went on asking her questions, quiet and persistent, about her husband’s habits, his friends, anyone who disliked hi
m, anything else she could think of. Joseph listened as a picture emerged of a quiet, somewhat impatient young man with a dry sense of humor, a love of the late chamber music of Beethoven, and a rather impractical desire to have a dog, preferably a large one.

  In spite of every effort not to, Joseph felt a wave of grief for him. Considering the number of men who were dying in war, it was foolish, irrelevant, and made him less able to think clearly and be of help, but he had no power over it. He looked at Lizzie Blaine, and perhaps she saw something of his emotion in his face, because for an instant there was gratitude naked in hers.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Blaine,” Perth said at last. “I’ll go down and look at this shed now.” It was odd to hear him being so delicately oblique. It was ridiculous, but Joseph liked him better for it.

  Perth stood up. “You stay here, ma’am. Captain Reavley can take me down.”

  “He doesn’t know . . .” she started, then realized it did not matter. They could hardly get lost in the small, slightly overgrown back garden.

  They went out of the back door and walked down the lawn bordered on either side by walls with espalier trees and low shrubs in front, some of them chosen for flowers, others for leaves. Beyond the garden was a wood stretching perhaps half a mile to the right, and rather less to the left. There was a gate in the fence behind the potting shed, so apparently there was a path on the other side. A uniformed constable stood by the wall, his face pale. He recognized Perth with a slight stiffening to attention.

  The body of Theo Blaine had been moved an hour or so before, and the place where he had been was marked out very carefully with little sticks in the wet earth and tape tied to them. Perth regarded the scene with tight lips, shaking his head.

  “Garden fork right through the neck,” he said, his voice quiet and sad. “Savage. Never seen anything like it, to be honest.” He glanced sideways and away again. “That’s it over there, propped up against the wall.”