In a Dry Season (25 page)

“You did well,” Banks said. “But you should have passed this on to me the first time I came to see you. It's not what you were looking for.”

Adam seemed disappointed. “It's not?”

“No. It's not a talisman, it's just an old button.”

“Is it important?”

“I don't know yet. It might be.”

“Who was it? Do you know? The skeleton?”

“A young woman.”

Adam paused to take it in. “Was she pretty?”

“I think she was.”

“Has she been there a long time?”

“Since the war.”

“Did the Germans kill her?”

“We don't think so. We don't know who killed her.” He held out the button on his palm. “This might help us find out. You might help us.”

“But whoever did it will be dead by now, won't he?”

“Probably,” said Banks.

“My granddad died in the war.”

“I'm sorry to hear it, Adam.” Banks stood up. “You can come down now, if you want. Nobody's going to do you any harm.”

“But my mum—”

“She was just upset, that's all.” Banks paused in the doorway. “When I was a lad your age, I once stole a ring from Woolworth's. It was only a plastic ring, not worth
much, but I got caught.” Banks could remember as if it were yesterday: the smell of smoke on the department-store detectives' breath; their overbearing size as they stood over him in the cramped triangular office tucked away under the escalator; the rough way they handled him and his fear that they were going to beat him up or molest him in some way, and that everyone would think he deserved it because he was a thief. All for a plastic ring. Not even that, really. Just to show off.

“What happened?” Adam asked.

“They made me tell them my name and address and my mother had to go down and see them about it. She stopped my pocket money and wouldn't let me go out to play for a month.” They had searched him roughly, pulling everything from his pockets: string, penknife, cricket cards, pencil stub, a gobstopper, busfare home and his cigarettes. That was why his mother had stopped his pocket money: because the Woolworth's store detectives told her about the cigarettes. Which they no doubt smoked themselves. He always thought that was unfair, that the cigarettes had nothing to do with it. Punish him for stealing the ring, yes, but leave him his cigarettes. Of course, over the subsequent years, he had come across many more examples of life's basic unfairness, not a few of them perpetrated by himself. He had to admit that there were occasions when he had arrested someone for a driving offence, found a few grams of coke or hash in his pocket and added that to the charge sheet.

“Anyway,” he went on, “it took me a long time to work out why she was so upset over something so unimportant as a plastic ring.”

“Why?”

“Because she was ashamed. It humiliated her to have to go down there and listen to these men tell her that her son was a thief. To have them talk down to her as if it were her fault and have to thank them for not calling the police. It didn't matter that I hadn't done anything serious. She was ashamed that a son of hers would do such a thing. And worried it might be a sign of what I'd turn into.”

“But you're a copper, not a thief.”

Banks smiled. “Yes, I'm a copper. So come on down-stairs and we'll see if we can make your mother a bit more forgiving than mine was.”

Adam hesitated, but at last he jumped up from the bed. Banks moved aside and let him go down the narrow staircase first.

Adam's mother was in the kitchen, making tea, and Annie was leaning against the counter talking to her.

“Oh, so you've decided to join us have you, you little devil?” said Mrs Kelly.

“Sorry, Mum.”

She ruffled his hair. “Get on with you. Just don't do owt like that again.”

“Can I have a Coke?”

“In the fridge.”

Adam turned to the fridge and Banks winked at him. Adam blushed and grinned.

Eight

V
ivian Elmsley sat down with her gin and tonic to watch the news that evening. The drinks were becoming more frequent, she had noticed, since her memories had started disturbing her. Though it was the only chink in her iron discipline, and she only allowed herself to indulge at the end of the day, it was a worrying sign, nonetheless.

Watching the news had become a sort of grim duty now, a morbid fascination. Tonight, what she saw shook her to the core.

Towards the end of the broadcast, after the major world news and government scandals had been dealt with, the scene shifted to a familiar sight. A young blonde woman held the microphone. She stood in Hobb's End, where crime-scene searchers in their white boiler-suits and wellies were still digging up the ruins.

“Today,” the reporter began, “in a further bizarre twist to a story we have been covering in the north of England, police investigating some skeletal remains found by a local schoolboy are almost certain they have established the identity of the victim. Just over an hour ago, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, who is heading the investigation, talked with our northern office.”

The scene shifted to a studio background, and the camera
settled on a lean, dark-haired man with intense blue eyes.

“Can you tell us how this discovery was made?” the reporter asked.

“Yes.” Banks looked straight into the camera as he spoke, she noticed, not letting his eyes flick left or right the way so many amateurs did when they appeared on television. He had clearly done it before. “When we discovered the identity of the people living in the cottage during the Second World War,” he began, “we found that one of them, a woman called Gloria Shackleton, hasn't shown up on any postwar records so far.”

“And that made you suspicious?”

The detective smiled. “Naturally. Of course, there could be a number of reasons for this, and we're still looking into other possibilities, but one thing we are forced to consider is that she doesn't show up because she was dead.”

“How long have the woman's remains been buried?”

“It's hard to be accurate, but we're estimating between the early forties to mid-forties.”

“That's a long time ago, isn't it?”

“It is.”

“Don't trails go cold, clues go stale?”

“Indeed they do. But I'm very pleased with the progress we've made so far, and I'm confident we can take this investigation forward. The remains were discovered only last Wednesday, and within less than a week we are reasonably certain we have established the identity of the victim. I'd say that's pretty good going for this sort of case.”

“And the next step?”

“The identity of the murderer.”

“Even though he or she may be dead?”

“Until we know that one way or the other, we're still
dealing with an open case of murder. As they say in America, there's no statute of limitations on murder.”

“Is there any way the public can help?”

“Yes, there is.” Banks shifted in his chair. The next moment, the screen was filled with the head and shoulders of a woman. Surely it couldn't be? But even though it wasn't a photographic likeness, there was no mistaking who it was:
Gloria
.

Vivian gasped and clutched her chest.

Gloria
.

After all these years.

It looked like part of a painting. Judging from the odd angle of the head, Vivian guessed that Gloria had been lying down as she posed. Michael Stanhope? It looked like his style. In the background, Banks's voice went on, “If anyone recognizes this woman, whom we think lived in London between
1921
and
1941
and in Hobb's End after that, if there is any living relative who knows something about her, would they please get in touch with the North Yorkshire Police.” He gave out a phone number. “There's still a great deal we need to know,” he went on, “and as the events occurred so long ago, that makes it all the more difficult for us.”

Vivian tuned out. All she could see was Gloria's face: Stanhope's vision of Gloria's face, with that cunning blend of naïveté and wantonness, that come-hither smile and its promise of secret delights. It both was and
wasn't
Gloria.

Then she thought, with a tremor of fear, if they had already discovered Gloria, how long would it take them to discover
her
?

“It only said he's
missing
,” Gloria insisted more than two months later, at the height of the summer of 1943. We were standing by one of Mr Kilnsey's drystone walls drinking Tizer and looking out over the gold-green hills to the north-west. She thrust the most recent Ministry letter towards me and pointed at the words. “See. ‘Missing during severe fighting east of the Irrawaddy River in Burma.' Wherever that is. When Mr Kilnsey's son was killed at El Alamein it said he was definitely dead, not just missing.”

What had kept us going the most since we heard the news of Matthew's disappearance was our attempt to get as much information as we possibly could about what had happened to him. First we had written letters, then we had even telephoned the Ministry. But they wouldn't commit themselves.
Missing
was all they would tell us, and nobody seemed to know anything about the exact circumstances of his disappearance or where he might be if he were still alive. If they did, they weren't saying.

The most we could get out of the man on the telephone was that the area in which Matthew had disappeared was now in the hands of the Japanese, so there was no question of going in to search for bodies. Yes, he admitted, an unspecified number of casualties had been confirmed, but Matthew was not among them. While it was still likely he might have been killed, the man concluded, there was also a chance he had been taken prisoner. It was impossible to get anything further out of him. Since the telephone call, Gloria had been brooding over what to do next.

“I think we should go there,” she said, crumpling the letter into a ball.

“Where?
Burma
?”

“No, silly. London. We should go down there and buttonhole someone. Get some answers.”

“But they won't talk to us,” I protested. “Besides, I don't think they're in London any more. All the government people have moved out to the country somewhere.”

“There has to be
somebody
there,” Gloria argued. “It stands to reason. Even if it's just a skeleton staff. A government can't just pack up and leave everything behind. Especially the War Office. Besides, this is London I'm talking about. It's still the capital of England, you know. If there are answers to be found, you can bet we'll find them there.”

There was no arguing with Gloria's passionate rhetoric. “I don't know,” I said. “I wouldn't have the faintest idea where to start.”

“Whitehall,” she said, nodding. “That's where we start. Whitehall.”

She sounded so certain that I didn't know what to reply. For the rest of that month I tried to talk Gloria out of the London trip, but she was adamant. Once she got like that, I knew there could be no stopping her getting her own way. Even Cynthia and Alice and Michael Stanhope said it would be a waste of time. Mr Stanhope had no time at all for government bureaucrats and assured us they would tell us nothing.

Gloria insisted that if I didn't want to come with her, that was fine, she would go by herself. I didn't have the courage to tell her that I had never been to London, not even in peacetime, and the whole prospect scared me stiff. London seemed about as remote to me as the moon.

It was finally arranged for September. Gloria decided it would be best if we went and returned by night train. That way she would only have to rearrange her one and a half days off for midweek rather than ask Mr Kilnsey for more time when things were busy. To her surprise, Mr Kilnsey said she could take longer if she wished. Since he had lost Joseph at El Alamein, he had become a more compassionate and sympathetic man, and he understood her grief. We still decided to stick to the original plan because I didn't want to leave Mother alone for any longer.

Cynthia Garmen said she would look after Mother and the shop while we were gone. She said Norma Prentice owed her a day's work at the
NAAFI
in exchange for baby-sitting the previous week, so it should be no problem. Mother offered to buy the train tickets and gave Gloria some of her clothes coupons to use down there if we had time to visit the big shops. Though she accepted them gratefully, for once clothes were the last thing on Gloria's mind.