London, June, 1943
MRS. DONALD CALLED UP THE stairs, “The post, Miss Winslow! From your bosses at the Ministry!” She thought Lane was a secretary. Lane, who’d been drinking the last of her tea before she set off to work at that self-same Ministry, was sure she would have a mission in the next week or so and was doing the mental exercises she had early decided helped her to prepare. She had developed her kitchen shelving metaphor for storing information and she was mentally clearing each of the shelves, one by one, taking things out, packaged like groceries from the shop: tins, paper-wrapped sugar, and so on, but were facts, figures, and coordinates to she had no idea what, and she was throwing them into a large metal bin. She’d not been on a mission since May, when she was sure she’d seen Angus on the train. And she’d not heard from him, either. It had been difficult, having no word from Angus and not being able to talk to anyone about him. He had been clear: their relationship must be kept completely hush-hush, mainly, he told her, to protect her work of translation. And reporting to work every day and finding that she was set to translating what seemed to her to be extremely non-essential documents. A report in Pravda about the marriage of a minor government official did not seem to her to be something the security of Great Britain would be hanging on.
The sound of Mrs. Donald’s voice calling out the post nearly made her heart stop. Angus! It must be; who else would write to her? She was not deterred by the return address that must have been from one of the government offices. Angus had always written as though he was an official of the government. Well, he was, as a pilot. The letters were always breezy, as if from a friend, but the language they had developed provided them with meeting places, with their chance to be together. Their relationship had needed to be kept secret, but his letters, sent in the often-long intervals between their meetings, kept her alive. She put her cup down with a clatter and bounded down the stairs. The letter was sitting on the landing and she snatched it eagerly.
There was her name, all right, but typewritten, and the envelope looked official. She groaned in disappointment and saved opening the letter until she was back in her room. She leaned against her dressing table and applied the letter opener to the envelope. There was a single sheet, even the signature typewritten. Dear Miss Winslow, you are asked to present yourself to the Office of Commander R. Fredrickson at 08:00 hours on Wednesday, June 23. Nothing else. June 23rd was the next day.
At lunchtime, she was at the door of the building she worked in with another of the girls, Betty, who was blowing smoke rings in a nonchalant fashion into the cool drizzle of the day while watching the crowds in the street. “Honestly,” Betty said, “there isn’t a single decent man left in London.” In spite of the anxiety that had been gnawing at her all day, Lane smiled at this. While, indeed, not in London—there was a war on, as everyone was so fond of saying—her man was decent. She wished sometimes she could babble about how good-looking he was, like the other girls did over their glasses of beer at the pub. Betty waved at a young woman approaching them. “Ah, Mary, there you are. The tea shop today?” The other two laughed at this, as they had never been anywhere else after finding the best lunches for the best price. Sometimes even ham made a rare appearance on the menu, though usually it was thin slices of the ubiquitous Spam. It was too risky to pick somewhere else and miss the rare ham day.
The tea room was steamed up from the damp coats of the girls, who crammed in at lunch from firms all over the area, and the warmth coming from the kitchen. Not a ham day today, but they opted for the bowl of bean soup that was on offer, with a nice roll. Mary was leaning in. “I think something’s gone wrong. Everyone on my floor is all quiet and people keep going into closed rooms to confer. I think something’s gone west with an operation!” Her two companions looked anxiously around at this revelation. They never, ever talked about operations outside their offices. But Mary was too full of her news to be concerned, though she lowered her voice further. “One of the agents has been killed; not shot down, but on the ground during a pick-up. Angus someone. I heard one of the men talking by the wc .”
Lane stopped hearing anything her companions said. Angus. She felt a rush of horror go through her. She forced her mind, which suddenly seemed to be in slow motion, to order the facts. It was not possible that it could be her Angus. He was not an agent, for starters, and he was stationed in Ireland and he flew missions over . . . the North Atlantic, surely. It’s what he’d told her. He’d never been in operations. But he’d been on a train in France a month ago and he shouldn’t have been there either. She shuddered violently and stood up. “I’m not feeling well. It must be something in the soup. I’m . . . I’m . . .” and she made her way through the suffocating tea room to the door. The other two looked at their bowls with suspicion and then Betty noticed Lane had rushed out without her coat and hat. “For pity’s sake! Mary, hold the fort; I’ll go after the daft sickie. God, I hope she isn’t up the spout!”
She found Lane shivering on the front step, the back of her hand over her mouth, taking deep breaths. “You don’t look too clever. Here, put your coat on and get off home. I’ll stop on your floor and tell them you’re not well.” She helped her on with the coat and positioned her hat over her auburn hair. She took Lane’s hand, suddenly. “Listen, you’re not . . . ?”
Lane looked at her as if she were only just seeing her, and then somehow realized what she meant. She shook her head and turned to go, then she looked back at her friend. “Thank you,” she said simply, and walked away, leaving Betty standing ambivalently on the pavement. Betty knew Lane was intensely private and that she would only annoy her by trying to follow and help.
Lane had never received another word from Angus after that, so she knew it must have been her Angus. She had mourned silently and deeply. She could not get past it. There was nothing to help her close the door on her grief; no funeral, no newspaper obituary. She saw only then what an absolute fantasy she’d been living in. She hadn’t even known where he’d come from. It was as if he had never existed at all.
LANE WAS GLAD to step outside into the sun. She’d finally stopped mourning for Angus in the last year, but sorrow had ground her down, left a hollow that she had come to expect would be permanent. It was not just the loss of him; it was the strange lack of any trace of him after. She had realized as the weeks passed after she learned of his death that she had not a single token of his. She hadn’t even kept the letters, because he’d been so insistent that she burn them. She hadn’t questioned him about this, or anything really. It was his physical presence that was everything to her. How young she’d been to have that absolute trust in a man! She had recovered in stages by continuing her war work, then moving to France, and now by moving here. It had been well over two years. But she was oppressed by the memories that had flooded her mind at the sight of that W, the sheer inadmissibility of it and yet the too-plausible idea that on that paper, her name must be inscribed . . . by someone. She led the policemen around the house and past the new flowerbed she’d put in. The sun, nearly overhead, cast short busy shadows around them as they walked across to the clearing in front of the barn.
“Please take us only as far as the shoe. We will have to decide what steps to take from there.” Inspector Darling was walking directly behind Lane, and his voice sounded sudden in the heavy afternoon silence.
“Yes, of course,” she replied. In a few minutes she stopped, relief sweeping through her. The shoe was still there, looking more than ever in the light of day as if it had been dropped. If it had not been there its absence would have indicated that whoever it was had been back again. Just as quickly her anxiety was renewed. Not only did she have to worry about Darling’s puzzling attitude to her and this incomprehensible problem of the note, now she realized that she had become used to feeling safe so far from anywhere. But clearly someone had been right here on her land, who might be—no, was almost certainly—a murderer. She could see that the area around the shoe had been disturbed and realized with a sinking heart that the only disturbance visible would be what she had caused. Any ability to follow who might have come there in the night had been eliminated by her own reckless crashing about in the dark.
From where they were standing they could see Harris’s field stretching out and then down on the other side of the fence. Ames was already photographing the shoe and Darling was inspecting, Lane assumed, its position or condition or something. She looked across the fence to the other side, but it was impossible to see anything much but deep yellow grass and low fern and the purple spatters of what she thought of as wild sweet peas that tangled around the base of them.
“I think I must have been here and the light I saw was sort of over there, at eye level, and then I saw it moving that way.” She moved her arm to the left. “It was going down as well as away, and then it disappeared. I could see even last night that the person would have been heading across the field and down toward the road, I assumed to Harris’s house. Though in that case, why not cut down toward the right, which probably leads directly to the back of the house? Much shorter than going by the road. It would surprise me that he didn’t know about it, but it was three in the morning.”
“Thank you. We’ll take it from here. You may, if you would be so kind, return to the house. We will stop by on the way out.” Darling touched the rim of his hat, and went past her with Ames at his heels holding the bag and his camera.
Poor Ames, she thought, having to do all the heavy lifting. He didn’t seem to mind it. In fact he appeared to like his inspector. She was sorry to be ordered away. The heat of the afternoon filtering through the trees and the immediacy and intrigue of the shoe had begun to keep the other, darker, thoughts at bay. She turned and walked back up the path and down toward the house, gleaming white against the lawn and weeping willow that hung over a long-empty rock pond. She would revive the pond, she thought. Kenny might know how to do that. He’d probably built the thing in the first place. Now though, the security she had felt in this fresh new land was shaken. She would have to face it, have to follow Darling in to town, have to look squarely at the dead man and pray he was no one she knew, because really, no matter what, she was never going back.
“PUZZLING, SIR,” AMES declared as he and Darling were returning to where they had parked the car in Lane’s driveway.
“Yes, Ames. Well spotted. Murders in which the suspect does not walk into our police station to turn himself in usually are.” They had reached the car and Ames was opening the trunk to put away his camera bag and the shoe, which he’d wrapped in his handkerchief. “However, if you mean that the behaviour of Miss Winslow is puzzling, I must concede. Still—” he said this with sudden resolve “—we’d better go down the hill and have a chat with Harris. Run and tell Miss W. that we will be back in due course. Let’s see if she does a bunk while we’re gone.” He didn’t really think she would, he decided, which added to every puzzling aspect of the case.
“Now then, Ames. Let us contemplate this shoe business. We have found one shoe on the path but not the other and furthermore, this shoe was not there when we went up to see and retrieve the body. We would have seen it. Well, unless Miss Winslow moved it last night, which she has assured us in her meticulous way that she did not.”
Ames had backed the car into the road during this speech and now reflected on Miss Winslow. “You know, sir, she shows some familiarity with policing. Didn’t she say she is a writer? Perhaps she writes crime novels.”
“Shoes, Ames. Shoes.” But Darling made a mental note to ask Miss Winslow that very question.
“Right. Well, are they the dead man’s shoes? And if they are, were they taken off after he was killed and if so, why? Where have they been up to now? And this is the part I don’t get, sir: why only one?” He drove slowly back toward the Nelson road junction, as if wanting to give this conversation sufficient time.
“Good questions, Ames. A for effort. Let’s see what we learn from Mr. Harris.”
“GOD, WHAT A depressing place,” Ames said, looking around at the neglected garden and peeling house.
“Yes, thank you, Ames,” Darling said. At that moment Harris appeared at the door of the barn.
“Mr. Harris, good morning. I wonder if you could spare us a couple of moments?” Darling said.
“I haven’t got all day,” was the reply.
This caused Ames to look around. Though the house was positioned with a view of the lake and looked like it had been built to house a family, the bleakness of it was the dominant note. Harris, he decided, had nothing but time.
“Miss Winslow has just told us that she saw someone on your property at about three in the morning, walking about in the brush with a flashlight. Can you tell us anything about this?”
“I tell you what I told her. It is absolutely fantastical rubbish. This is a quiet and long-standing community. People do not fumble about in the underbrush in the middle of the night.”
Darling switched tactics. He would not, he decided, bring up the fact that a shoe that had not been seen on the path on the first visit to the scene now had appeared there. It was possible that this man, angrily fisting and unfisting an oily cloth in a way that suggested either nervousness or a desire to pop him one, could have been the one moving shoes in the middle of the night.
“Do you live here alone, Mr. Harris?”
“What bloody business is it of yours?”
Darling was pulling for the pop in the nose theory. “We are trying to solve a murder, Mr. Harris, and someone was walking around your property last night with a flashlight, an activity that you have just told us would be nearly impossible to imagine in this traditional, well-run community, and if it wasn’t you, perhaps it was someone else in your household.”
Harris threw the rag viciously onto the floor of the tractor. “There hasn’t been anyone in my ‘household’ since my slut of a wife left in the first war.”
“Did you quarrel?”
“No, we did not quarrel. I was not here; there was a war on, in case you’ve forgotten. I suppose she got tired of being alone and buggered off.”
“So you came back from Europe and found her gone? When did you get back?”
Harris stood squarely in front of Darling and seemed to pull himself up to some new, menacing height. “That question can have absolutely nothing to do with this business. I got back after the thankless job of serving my country in 1920 to find my wife gone and my orchard burned. Since then I keep myself to myself. I was not crashing about in the bush last night and I did not kill that man and I want you off my property. Now clear off!”
Darling tipped his hat and turned back toward the car. “Come, Ames. Please don’t leave the area, Mr. Harris. We may have a few more questions at a later date.” When he opened the door of the car, he put his foot on the running board and then looked back at the simmering Harris with a pleasant expression. “You’ve done well, sir, orchard-wise, if you found yourself burnt out. You must have worked hard to put it back together.”
And with that he was back in the car. “Back to Miss Winslow’s, please, Ames. What did you think of Mr. Harris?”
“Am I right in suggesting he seemed angrier than absolutely necessary? Why all this fuss about when he got back from the front? It’s ancient history, isn’t it? Nearly thirty years ago. Come to think of it,” Ames added brightly, “if he got back in 1920, that is, in fact, late. My dad returned quickly at the end of the proceedings.”
Darling turned to look at Ames with interest. He realized with a twinge of guilt that he too often employed his constable only as a foil for his jibes. Ames was quite a good young policeman. Perhaps he didn’t give him quite enough scope. “You know something I don’t?”
“Well, only this. I happen to know that there was a big fire here in 1919. Quite a lot of orchard burned as well as local forested land, and it set the apple industry back a bit. My dad again.”
“Well done. So he makes a large fuss over a couple harmless questions, and he comes back late from the war. Neither one is a hanging offence; nevertheless, it’s peculiar. Especially his trying to get us off the activities of last night. Remind me when we get back. I must send a wire to the War Office. There might be something in Harris’s war record.”