Not Safe After Dark (40 page)

Nobody except me, that is.

Though my position didn’t grant me any special powers, I pride myself on being an intelligent and perceptive sort of fellow, not to mention nosy, and it wasn’t the first time
I’d done a spot of detective work on the side. But first, let me tell you a little about Mad Maggie . . .

•

I say
old
woman, but Maggie was probably only in her mid-forties, about the same age as me, when she was killed. Everyone just called her
old
; it seemed to go with
mad
. With a certain kind of woman, it’s not so much a matter of years, anyway, but of demeanour, and Maggie’s demeanour was old.

Take the clothes she wore, for a start: most women were trying to look like one of the popular film stars like Vivien Leigh or Deanna Durbin, with her bolero dresses, but even for a woman of her
age, Maggie wore clothes that could best be described as old-fashioned, even antique: high, buttoned boots, long dresses with high collars, groundsweeping cloaks and broad-brimmed hats with
feathers.

Needless to say, the local kids – at least those whose parents hadn’t packed them off to the countryside already – used to follow her down the street in gangs and chant,
‘Mad Maggie, Mad Maggie, she’s so mad, her brain’s all claggy . . .’ Children can be so cruel. Most of the time she ignored them, or seemed oblivious to their taunts, but
once in a while she wheeled on them, eyes blazing, and started waving her arms around and yelling curses, usually in French. The children would squeal with exaggerated horror, then turn tail and
run away.

Maggie never had any visitors; none of us had ever been inside her house; nobody in the community even knew what her real name was, where she had come from, or how she had got to be the way she
was. We simply accepted her. There were rumours of course. Some gossip-mongers had it that she was an heiress cut off by her family because she went mad; others said she had never recovered from a
tragic love affair; still others said she was a rich eccentric and kept thousands of pounds stuffed in her mattress.

Whoever and whatever Mad Maggie was, she managed to take care of life’s minutiae somehow; she paid her rent, she bought newspapers, and she handled her ration coupons just like the rest of
us. She also kept herself clean, despite the restriction to only five inches of bath water. Perhaps her eccentricity was just an act, then, calculated to put people off befriending her for some
reason? Perhaps she was shy or antisocial? All in all, she was known as Mad Maggie only because she never talked to anyone except herself, because of the old clothes she wore, because of her
strange outbursts in French and because, as everyone knew, she never went to the shelters during air-raids, but would either stay indoors alone or walk the blacked-out streets muttering and arguing
with herself, waving her arms at the skies as if inviting the bombs to come and get her.

•

When Harry called that Monday morning, I was lying in bed grappling with one of my frequent bouts of insomnia, waiting for the birds to sing me back to sleep. I couldn’t
even tell if it was daylight or not because of the heavy blackout curtains. I had been dreaming, I remembered, and had woken at about half-past four, gasping for air, from my recurring nightmare
about being sucked down into a quicksand.

I heard Harry banging at my door and calling my name, so I threw on some clothes and hurried downstairs. I thought at first that it might be something to do with Tommy, but when I saw his pale
face, his wide eyes and the thin trickle of vomit at the corner of his mouth, I worried that he was having the heart attack he had been expecting daily for over twenty years.

He turned and pointed down the street. ‘Frank, please!’ he said. ‘You’ve got to come with me.’

I could hear the fear in his voice, so I followed him as quickly as I could to Maggie’s house. It was a fine October morning, with a hint of autumn’s nip in the air. He had left the
door ajar. Slowly, I pushed it open and went inside. My first impression was more surprise at how clean and tidy the place was than shock at the bloody figure on the carpet. In my defence, lest I
sound callous, I had fought in the first war and, by some miracle, survived the mustard gas with only a few blisters and a nasty coughing fit every now and then. But I had seen men blown apart; I
had been spattered with the brains of my friends; I had crawled through trenches and not known whether the soft, warm, gelatinous stuff I was putting my hands in was mud or the entrails of my
comrades. More recently, I had also helped dig more than one mangled or dismembered body from the ruins, so a little blood, a little death, never bothered me much. Besides, despite the pool of
dried blood around her head, Mad Maggie looked relatively peaceful. More peaceful than I had ever seen her in life.

Funny, but it reminded me of that old Dracula film I saw at the Crown, the one with Bela Lugosi. The count’s victims always became serene after they had wooden stakes plunged through their
hearts. Mad Maggie hadn’t been a vampire, and she didn’t have a stake through her heart, but a bloodstained posser lay by her side, the concave copper head and wooden handle both
covered in blood. A quick glance in the kitchen showed only one puzzling item: an unopened bottle of milk. As far as I knew, Harry’s last round had been the morning of the air raid, last
Wednesday. I doubted that Maggie would have been able to get more than her rations; besides, the bottle top bore the unmistakable mark of the dairy where Harry worked.

Harry waited outside, unwilling to come in and face the scene again. Once I had taken in what had happened, I told him to fetch the police, the real police this time.

They came.

•

And they went.

One was a plainclothes officer, Detective Sergeant Longbottom, a dull-looking bruiser with a pronounced limp, who looked most annoyed at being called from his bed. He asked a few questions,
sniffed around a bit, then got the ambulance men to take Maggie away on a stretcher.

One of the questions Sergeant Longbottom asked was the victim’s name. I told him that, apart from ‘Mad Maggie’, I had no idea. With a grunt, he rummaged around in the sideboard
drawer and found her rent book. I was surprised to discover that she was called Rose Faversham, which I thought was actually quite a pretty name. Prettier than Mad Maggie, anyway. Sergeant
Longbottom also asked if we’d had any strangers in the area. Apart from an army unit billeted near the park where they were carrying out training exercises, and the gypsy encampment in
Silverhill Woods, we hadn’t.

‘Ah, gypsies,’ he said, and wrote something in his little black notebook. ‘Is anything missing?’

I told him I didn’t know, as I had no idea what
might
have been here in the first place. That seemed to confuse him. For all I knew, I went on, the rumour might have been right, and
she could have had a mattress stuffed with banknotes. Sergeant Longbottom checked upstairs and came back scratching his head. ‘Everything
looks
normal,’ he said, then he poked
around a bit more, noting the canteen of sterling silver cutlery, and guessed that Mad Maggie had probably interrupted the thief, who had killed her and fled the scene – probably back to the
gypsy encampment. I was on the point of telling him that I thought the Nazis were supposed to be persecuting gypsies, not us, but I held my tongue. I knew it would do no good.

Of course, I told him how everyone in the neighbourhood knew Mad Maggie paid no attention to air raids, how she even seemed to enjoy them the way some people love thunderstorms, and how Tom
Sellers, the ARP man, had remonstrated with her on many occasions, only to get a dismissive wave and the sight of her ramrod-stiff back walking away down the street. Maggie had also been fined more
than once for blackout infringements, until she solved that one by keeping her heavy black curtains closed night
and
day.

I also told Longbottom that, in the blackout, anyone could have come and gone easily without being seen. I think that was what finally did it. He hummed and hawed, muttered ‘Gypsies’
again, made noises about a continuing investigation, then put his little black notebook away, said he had pressing duties to attend to and left.

•

And there things would have remained had I not become curious. No doubt Mad Maggie would have been fast forgotten and some poor, innocent gypsy would have been strung up from
the gallows. But there was something about the serenity of Mad Maggie’s features in death that haunted me. She looked almost saintlike, as if she had sloughed off the skin of despair and
madness that she had inhabited for so long and reverted to the loving, compassionate Christian woman she must have once been. She had a real name now, too:
Rose Faversham
. I was also
provoked by Detective Sergeant Longbottom’s gruff manner and his obvious impatience with the whole matter. No doubt he had more important duties to get back to, such as the increased traffic
in black market onion substitutes.

I would like to say that the police searched Maggie’s house thoroughly, locked it up fast and put a guard on the door, but they did nothing of the kind. They did lock the front door behind
us, of course, but that was it. I imagined that, as soon as he found out, old Grasper, the landlord, would slither around, rubbing his hands and trying to rent the place out quickly again, for
twice as much, before the army requisitioned it as a billet.

One thing I had neglected to tell Detective Sergeant Longbottom, I realized as I watched his car disappear around a pile of rubble at the street corner, was about Fingers Finnegan, our local
black marketeer and petty thief. Human nature is boundlessly selfish and greedy, even in wartime, and air raids provided the perfect cover for burglary and black market deals. The only unofficial
people on the streets during air raids were either mad, like Maggie, or up to no good, like Fingers. We’d had a spate of burglaries when most decent, law-abiding people were in St
Mary’s church crypt, or at least in their damp and smelly backyard Anderson shelters, and Fingers was my chief suspect. He could be elusive when he wanted to be, though, and I hadn’t
seen him in a number of days.

Not since last Wednesday’s air raid, in fact.

•

After the police had gone, Harry and I adjourned to my house, where, despite the early hour, I poured him a stiff brandy and offered him a Woodbine. I didn’t smoke,
myself, because of that little bit of gas that had leaked through my mask at Ypres, but I had soon discovered that it was wise to keep cigarettes around when they were becoming scarce. Like all the
rationed items, they became a kind of currency. I also put the kettle on, for I hadn’t had my morning tea yet, and I’m never at my best before my morning tea. Perhaps that may be one
reason I have never married; most of the women I have met chatter far too much in the morning.

‘What a turn up,’ Harry said, after taking a swig and coughing. ‘Mad Maggie, murdered. Who’d imagine it?’

‘Her killer, I should think,’ I said.

‘Gypsies.’

I shook my head. ‘I doubt it. Oh, there’s no doubt they’re a shifty lot. I wouldn’t trust one of them as far as I could throw him. But killers? A defenceless woman like
Maggie? I don’t think so. Besides, you saw her house. It hadn’t been touched.’

‘But Sergeant Longbottom said she might have interrupted a burglar.’

I sniffed. ‘Sergeant Longbottom’s an idiot. There was no evidence at all that her killer was attempting to burgle the place.’

‘Maybe she was one of them once – a gypsy – and they came to take her back?’

I laughed. ‘I must say, Harry, you certainly don’t lack imagination, I’ll grant you that. But no, I rather fancy this is a different sort of matter altogether.’

Harry frowned. ‘You’re not off on one of your Sherlock Holmes kicks again, are you, Frank? Leave it be. Let the professionals deal with it. It’s what they’re paid
for.’

‘
Professionals!
Hmph. You saw for yourself how interested our Detective Sergeant Longbottom was. Interested in crawling back in his bed, more like it. No, Harry, I think
that’s the last we’ve seen of them. If we want to find out who killed poor Maggie, we’ll have to find out for ourselves.’

‘Why not just let it be, Frank?’ Harry pleaded. ‘We’re at war. People are getting killed every minute of the day and night.’

I gave him a hard look, and he cringed a little. ‘Because this is different, Harry. While I can’t say I approve of war as a solution to man’s problems, at least it’s
socially sanctioned murder. If the government, in all its wisdom, decides that we’re at war with Germany and we should kill as many Germans as we can, then so be it. But nobody sanctioned the
killing of Mad Maggie. When an individual kills someone like Maggie, he takes something he has no right to. Something he can’t even give back or replace, the way he could a diamond necklace.
It’s an affront to us all, Harry, an insult to the community. And it’s up to us to see that retribution is made.’ I’ll admit I sounded a little pompous, but Harry could be
extremely obtuse on occasion, and his using the war as an excuse for so outrageous a deed as Rose’s murder brought out the worst in me.

Harry seemed suitably cowed by my tirade, and when he’d finished his brandy he shuffled off to finish his deliveries. I never did ask him whether there was any milk left on his unattended
float.

•

I had another hour in which to enjoy my morning tea before I had to leave for school, but first I had to complete my ritual and drop by the newsagent’s for a paper. While
I was there, I asked Mrs Hope behind the counter when she had last seen Mad Maggie. Last Wednesday, she told me, walking down the street towards her house just before the warning siren went off,
muttering to herself. That information, along with the unopened milk and the general state of the body, was enough to confirm for me that Rose had probably been killed under cover of the air
raid.

That morning, I found I could neither concentrate on
Othello
, which I was supposed to be teaching the fifth form, nor could I be bothered to read about the bombing raids, evacuation
procedures and government pronouncements that passed for news in these days of propaganda and censorship.