THE PLATFORM OF THE NELSON train station bustled with travellers going to the coast. Some stood in awkward silence next to those who had come to send them off, their goodbyes said, the travellers looking anxiously at the train pulling in. A group of young women were talking, seemingly all at once. Lane heard “you’d better get a new hat before he sees you” and looked toward them. Off to join a fiancé? Or better, take up a job in the city? She almost envied the girls’ sense of purpose, whatever the cause. She herself felt like a leaf caught in an eddy, swirling uselessly, waiting for Darling who was in the station buying his ticket.
She wore her yellow cardigan over her shoulders. It had been vain of her to wear her summer dress with the calla lilies, and she regretted it now, feeling ostentatious, and wrapping her arms tightly across her chest in a subconscious effort to hide. How had she succumbed to the temptation to look her prettiest for a very new lover who was going away? In a moment he was beside her, dressed in his one brown suit. He put his bag on the ground and stood before her, turning his hat in his hands, his charcoal eyes filled with longing and worry. The train had come to rest and hissed loudly. Travellers moved forward expectantly, waiting for passengers to alight so that they might get the best seats.
“I want to kiss you,” he said.
“You always say that.”
“I always, every minute, want to. It’s probably very unseemly behaviour for Nelson’s dour inspector.”
“Well, you’d better get on with it, unseemly or not, or you’ll be left behind.”
Darling put his hat on the suitcase and pulled her close. “I can’t bear to leave you,” he murmured into her hair.
Lane could feel tears welling up. “Look, this won’t do.” She kissed him, embarrassed by her own desperation to keep him there, to memorize the softness and passion of his lips. “I’ll look an idiot stood here weeping like an ingénue. Get off with you.” Anyway, she wanted to say, I’ll see you soon. “Wire me as soon as you get there. Promise.”
“God, you are beautiful. I will always remember you in that dress.” He stroked her cheek.
“For God’s sake, Inspector. Now you’re being dramatic. You’ll be back in no time.” How Lane wished that were true, but there was a sinister quality to this sudden polite summons to London that really frightened her.
“Look after Amesy,” Darling said, recovering slightly and putting his hat on.
“I’ll bake him cookies and knit him socks,” she said, wiping away the tear that had escaped.
“I thought you didn’t bake. I’ll be very cross if I come back and find him with his stockinged feet on my desk and guzzling your cookies.” The stationmaster made the last call for boarding. Darling picked up his suitcase and looked at her as if he were memorizing every plane of her face. “I love you.”
“Me too,” she said. He turned and boarded the train.
She did not stand and weep on the station platform but instead went outside and sat on a bench, watching cars pulling back up the hill, their travellers dropped off and safely away. The idea that had lodged in her head as she waved at Darling, until his face in the window disappeared under the reflection of the sun on the glass, would not now leave her, and it alarmed her. Of course. She could use her grandparents as the excuse; she had not seen them for more than a year. But she was too honest to disguise from herself that she could not bear to see him go. He would be appalled, think her clingy, and might be angered that she couldn’t trust him to look after himself. But right at the centre of her mental struggles, one truth stood out. If he was in trouble, the connections she had in England might be able to help him.
She would stop in to see Ames. But first things first. She went resolutely to her car and drove to the post office to write and mail off a letter to her grandmother, announcing that she would be there within the fortnight.
London
THE TAXI PULLED up outside a row of houses and the driver called into the back, “There you are, gov, number five.” Darling pushed some coins through. He had spent the ride from the aerodrome at Croydon reminding himself about the workings of pounds, shillings, and pence and staring out at the city he’d not expected to see again for many years. Buildings that had been bombed still lay in heaps, though the roads around them had been cleared, but in spite of the lingering mess, the streets had an air of getting on with things. Their route had taken them through the City, and men with bowler hats were pouring out of buildings, talking and laughing. Young women met on the steps of buildings and lit up cigarettes. He had glanced at his watch. It must be noon. He should have changed it to local time.
“Thanks,” Darling said, pulling his suitcase out after himself. He’d wired his friend Rudyard about his visit to London and had been told he was not to think of staying anywhere else. The door opened even before he mounted the steps. A woman of his age, with a great pouf of permanently curled blond hair framing a round and cheerful face, came onto the steps.
“You must be Rudy’s friend Frederick. Come in! I’m Sandra Donaldson, Rudy’s wife, for my sins.” She offered a hand with deep red fingernails. “I was so pleased to hear you were coming over. Rudy talks about you all the time. Here. Give us your hat and I’ll show you up.” She led him up a narrow flight of stairs to a room at the top of the landing.
“Here you are, then.” She pushed open the door to a small, neat room with one window that looked over the narrow back garden. The flowered bedspread and matching curtains gave the room an air of cheerfulness that Darling hoped would be a refuge from whatever decidedly cheerless business brought him here.
“This is lovely. Thank you so much for allowing me to impose on you.”
“Oh, nonsense. The loo’s down the hall. Have a bit of a wash-up and come down for a cup of tea and some lunch. You must be exhausted.”
He was exhausted. He put his hat down on the desk by the window and looked longingly at the bed. He knew if he succumbed and lay down for even a moment, he would be lost to sleep and would wake groggy and disoriented at some inconvenient time. Instead he took out his sponge bag and went down the dark hallway to the bathroom. When he had washed and shaved, he stopped a moment to gaze at himself in the mirror. He could see the bags under his eyes. It was not just the journey over, through most of which he had been unable to sleep. It was the anxiety before he left that had rendered his nights long and without peace. It was leaving Lane, who had become a touchstone, a growing centre around which he organized his sense of self. Now suddenly he was just himself again, alone, self-sufficient. He had not understood how much she had grown to be a part of his world until he confronted the sudden void that her absence left. He turned away and pulled himself back to the present moment, pressing his lips into a grim line. Whatever was about to happen, he knew he would need all his wits about him.
Darling and Donaldson sat in the warm, dim light of the sitting room nursing Scotches. Sandra Donaldson had taken herself off to bed, and the two men occupied matching chairs in front of the fire. They had been friends since flight school, a friendship that intensified as the losses in the air diminished their number throughout the war. Both had been pilots and, aside from the attraction, which had been almost immediate, their deeper understanding of the feelings a pilot developed toward his crew and his plane brought them a level of common experience that infused their understanding of each other. Where they should have been able to sit in companionable silence, this silence was full of anxiety.
“I don’t understand, Darling. What’s this all about?”
“Hanged if I know. A smarmy party turned up in Nelson claiming to be from the Canadian government, a claim I doubted immediately, given his posh public school accent, and began to grill me about the accident. I agreed to come here on my own for ‘further investigation’ because I honestly didn’t know how much power he wields in his velvet gloves. For all I know he could have had me arrested there and then. For what I am at a loss to explain.” Darling swallowed the remains of his Scotch and did not prevent his friend from refilling his glass.
“I mean, what are they hinting at?” Donaldson asked. “Cowardice at the scene of the accident? Fault for the crash in the first place? You lost a couple of men as I recall. Is it something to do with that?”
“I’ve been through my report ten different ways, I’ve written out every bloody thing I can remember about that night, and I’m stumped. I feel like I’m playing a game with someone who has half the high cards up their sleeve. They have something on me they haven’t deigned to share with me, only since I can’t think of a single thing I did wrong, I can’t begin to guess what they’re on about.”
Donaldson got up, put his glass on the mantle, and spoke with sudden decision. “You need a solicitor. My flight engineer, Drake Higgins, was in the law before the show. He’s gone back to it. I’ll call him first thing in the morning.”
Darling wanted to say, “I’m sure it’s not as serious as all that,” but he was beginning to feel, all things considered, that it was. He leaned forward and took a folded piece of paper out of his wallet. “Listen. If anything happens, I mean, something serious, like I get arrested, I want you to contact this person. She lives in the countryside, but she’s on the telephone. But only in extremis. I don’t want her bothered otherwise.”
Unfolding the paper Donaldson read it and then glanced at Darling. “You’re a dark horse. You never told me about her.”
“You can stop being coy. It doesn’t become you. I met her last year when she came out to Canada from here, as a matter of fact. She’s intelligent and deserves to know if I’m not coming back.”
“Well, well. I thought after that balls-up with Gloria you’d be off women for a while. Good for you. You deserve someone wonderful. I bet she’s a looker, too.” Gloria had been Darling’s disastrous wartime romance. It was the event that had taught him something essential about himself; that he could never be casual about love.
Darling refrained from discussing Lane’s looks, though he felt his heart ache at the memory of her standing in a slant of sun in her sitting room in the house by the lake, her dark hair framing her exquisite cheekbones.
“I DON’T KNOW why we went through all this palaver. He could simply have been arrested by Canadian authorities.” Andrew Sims, a detective inspector seconded from Scotland Yard into Special Investigations Branch, grumbled. He was unhappy because he’d been given a cramped office in the basement of the War Office that was at the farthest remove from an entrance to the building, and it had taken him twenty minutes to find it in the warrens that were the corridors of the Horse Guards Avenue behemoth. He wanted the whole business over with and to get back to his office with the window at the Yard.
“Well, sir, we don’t strictly know the level of his involvement. He evinced genuine puzzlement when I interviewed him,” Jensen said.
“Rubbish. It’s open and shut. We have a completely impartial witness who saw him do it. He may have pulled the wool over your eyes with his genuine puzzlement, but it won’t work with me. I want him here first thing tomorrow so we can get this business over with.”
“I appreciate the severity of the evidence. However, he has a distinguished war record and deserves to have the case thoroughly investigated.”
Sims stood up. “If you’re questioning my ability to conduct a murder investigation . . .”
“I do beg your pardon, Detective Inspector Sims. That was not my intention at all. Please, let me show you to the canteen, where you can have a decent tea, and I’ll assemble all the paperwork and bring it here. Darling knows to come here at nine o’clock. Anything else you require will be at your disposal.” Crikey, Jensen thought. At least ten civilian police seconded to War Office work through the war years, and I get the one with the thorn in his paw.