Chapter 3

A man is not what he thinks, he’s what he hides.

Vesta grudgingly agreed to look after the office while Mirabelle set out to investigate.

‘There’s no time like the present.’ She pulled on her coat, realising with a slight smile that Bulldog Bradley would have approved of the sentiment. She’d have to go up to London. That’s where the records were held.

Fighting her way up Queen’s Road through the elements, Mirabelle made it to the station in the wake of a particularly vicious burst of icy wind that almost took her breath away. It was too cold to think straight. A sodden newspaper whipped down the hill as she hurried to board the eleven o’clock train. The guard slammed the door behind her. On board everyone was muffled, the men smoking furiously to keep warm. Mirabelle took a seat in a first-class carriage next to a lady wearing a long mink coat.

‘Nippy, isn’t it?’ the woman remarked smugly as she put up her collar. ‘And if anything it’s worse in the city.’

Mirabelle stared blankly at the window, which was gilded by a sheet of ice outside so that as the train pulled out of the station the countryside passed in a desolate blur of grey, muted green and icy white.

After the war there had been so many displaced people it was impossible to keep track. Prisoners of war, concentration camp victims, those who had hidden the entire length of the conflict, sheltered by friends or even strangers: the world shifted as peace was declared and from back rooms, basements, attics, sewers and caves survivors flooded out to tell their stories, hoping to be reunited with those they loved. But the world into which they emerged had changed. Whole cities had been reduced to rubble and the maps of Europe had been redrawn.

Perhaps after the war, Mirabelle mused, Bulldog Bradley simply couldn’t face trying to find his friend. She wouldn’t blame him. It had been difficult to keep going. At the time she hadn’t foreseen the toll those first years of peace would take. She remembered the elation when the news came in. Jack had waltzed her across the office in full view of everyone. There had been a chorus of champagne corks. And then they’d realised just how far there still was to go.

The sight of the red brick back yards of Pimlico heralded the train’s arrival into Victoria. Disembarking, Mirabelle coughed as she took her first lungful of sooty, biting London air. At the end of the platform a man with one leg busked on his mouth organ playing ‘We’ll Meet Again’. The lady in the mink coat stalked past him without a glance and slipped into the back of a cab. Mirabelle popped sixpence in his tin.

Outside, hillocks of filthy grey snow melted slowly, seeping into the drains. Passers-by looked like smudges, their dark coats bundled round them and their hats lowered.

Mirabelle cut off the main road for Belgrave Place. The stucco houses in this part of town seemed like greying ice palaces – dank shadows of the era when the streets of Belgravia sported pristine white plasterwork, in the days when there had been money. Panther the office dog was born nearby on Wilton Crescent. Mirabelle looked in the direction of the house as she passed. The puppy was a present two years before from a grateful client. She thought suddenly how different she had felt only that short time ago, when Rose Bellamy Gore had gone missing and Vesta’s friend Lindon Claremont was accused of kidnapping her. Then when she came to London it had meant a painful return to her memories of living with Jack. Now that felt less barbed. She knew if he could see her now he’d laugh at her picking her way past houses where they had been invited to dinner and doorsteps where they had kissed, away from the glare of yellow streetlamps and the not-dark-enough summer skies. Walking through Belgravia no longer felt like betraying his memory.

The skeletal trees on the square were dusted with frost. Above, the clouds sealed a pewter lid over the city. Mirabelle rounded the corner into Grosvenor Crescent to the sound of water dripping onto stone as the sodden snow softened. She smiled when she saw the brass plaque wrapped round a grand column, stamped her feet to remove any ice, and walked through the door of the British Red Cross.

Inside, the hallway smelled of overstewed tea. The reception desk was lit from high above by a single bulb hanging on a wire. A house like this would have had chandeliers in its heyday, but like the wrought-iron balconies that had been scrapped for the war effort the indoor finery had also been stripped away. The buildings that still had their embellishments looked smug somehow – like that woman in the fur coat on the train.

‘May I help you, madam?’ the secretary at the reception desk enquired.

Mirabelle smiled. She had been trained by the Red Cross during the war – not as a nurse but in emergency first aid.

‘I’m enquiring after a displaced person.’

The girl looked too young to remember much about the post-war chaos in which the Red Cross had played such a key part. She couldn’t be much older than Vesta.

‘Displaced?’ The girl checked the word and Mirabelle realised the child was sporting an accent. It was only a slight nuance, but still.

‘Yes. Lost.’

‘Lost? I see.’

Mirabelle smiled. ‘You’re Polish.’

The girl’s forehead wrinkled as if she had been caught out. Then she nodded.

‘Is there someone to whom I might speak? Someone who can help?’

‘Give me a moment.’ The girl disappeared into the room behind her.

Mirabelle looked up. The building seemed hopelessly old-fashioned. Along the cornice the old wires operating the system once used to call servants remained tacked in place. Here and there a vital wire was cut. Mirabelle wondered how the Red Cross’s many activities might be organised from somewhere so close to being domestic. The paintwork was scratched and worn, grubby with a million smudged fingerprints. High above the curl of the grand stairwell, opaque glass had been used to glaze the cupola. It was still taped up in case of a direct hit.

The door opened and Mirabelle felt a wisp of heat from the inner office, or if not exactly heat at least temperate air. If anything the girl who emerged was younger than the Polish secretary but she had an entirely different manner – so fresh that it was as if she had been cut out of a magazine and her Red Cross uniform pasted onto her slim frame. She was wearing make-up – something that wouldn’t have been allowed in the old days.

‘I’m Ann Kettle.’ The girl’s scarlet lips parted to reveal a set of very white teeth. ‘I understand you’re looking for a displaced person?’

‘Yes. One of our soldiers who went missing in wartime France. Can you help?’

‘If you’re looking for British military personnel the best place to start is with the chap’s regiment, Miss …’

‘I’m Mirabelle Bevan.’ Mirabelle held out her hand. Nurse Kettle shook it, her eyes softening in the wake of Mirabelle’s manners. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know his regiment,’ Mirabelle admitted. ‘The man was an escaped POW who went off the radar. The chap he escaped with lost him en route home. It occurred to me that after the war, if the chap was still in France, a Red Cross clearing camp might have been his first stop.’

‘I see.’ Nurse Kettle quizzically tipped her head to one side. ‘Why are you looking for him now, if you don’t mind my asking? It seems rather late.’

‘It is. I’m afraid it was the last request of an acquaintance who recently passed away. He was the other escapee – the one who got out. He never found out what happened to his friend.’

The nurse paused, considering. Mirabelle guessed this was probably not the first time she had heard a story about the derring-do of British troops in wartime. For all her pretty face, the girl had gravitas.

‘Well, if this missing person made it out of France, even after the war, his regiment is still your best port of call,’ she said flatly. ‘But if the chap passed through our hands at any stage, his name will be in our papers. The thing is, the archives are very short staffed. They’ve just been moved, in point of fact. Here.’ She leaned over the reception desk and wrote down an address in Kensington on a scrap of paper. ‘That’s where they’ve gone. If you’re lucky they’ll let you have a look. Though this chap isn’t a relative of yours, is he?’

Mirabelle shook her head.

‘Well, I hope you find him.’

‘Thank you. I’d like to know what happened.’

Nurse Kettle sighed. Her perfect veneer softened a fraction. Knowing what had happened didn’t always help. The women’s eyes met.

‘Anyway, I’ll do my best,’ Mirabelle said and turned back onto the grey London street, in the direction of Sloane Square.