Grace stepped over an eroded stone wall lower than her knees and stood in the middle of what had once been a temple. On three sides, fences and the backs of houses enclosed the open patch of ground occupied by the ruins. On the remaining side ran a street lined with terraced houses facing the temple. Chandler Street, she had noted, trying to orient herself.
The tour Constable Wallace gave her had been brief, mostly of smoke-blackened flat-fronted maisonettes and high-walled backyards containing outdoor privies and small shed-like lean-sot or under-staircase niches—coal holes—where the precious fuel was stored whose burning added to a constant pall of smoke generated by factories and foundries. As the year advanced to a close, the air was further obscured by the fog of December.
Then he’d quite abruptly left her to it. She had the impression Wallace expected she could handle herself while Sergeant Baines expected her to flounder, and rather hoped that she would.
Grace herself wasn’t sure how she felt. Part of her was exhilarated to be patrolling the streets on her own. Part of her was scared. The police training she’d received in Manchester was perfunctory. Everyone seemed to accept that she already knew what she was doing.
Suddenly on her own in a strange city, Grace wondered if in her zeal to join the WAC and do her bit for the war effort she had exaggerated her role in investigating the horrific crimes that had shaken her little village. If the truth were told, she may have implied that her positions as her father’s assistant and, after he left, de facto constable, required more expertise than was actually the case.
If it were up to her she’d be carrying her father’s rook rifle as she had at times in Noddweir. But that wasn’t allowed.
She tried to put doubts out of her mind. She crossed her arms and hunched her shoulders, attempting to keep warm. A chill drizzle, not quite fog, not quite rain, filled the grey metallic air. She might have been back in Noddweir, standing in the middle of the stone circle on the summit of Guardians Hill. The remains of the temple walls, half hidden by tall grass, were like the smaller, overgrown boulders in the circle. The pair of four-foot or so high altars resembled the larger stones.
The place gave her the same shivery sensation she received from Noddweir’s stone circle. The ancient rocks still breathed out the past and caught within their compass, like a wasp in amber, was something unthinkably old and powerful.
Did everyone feel this? The Romans who built the temple must have. Or was it simply her overactive imagination?
As she turned to look around, a cold droplet fell from the brim of her hat and hit the back of her hand, startling her out of her musings. Surely it was only coincidence that her first official investigation should, like her first unofficial one, involve an ancient pagan ruin. She needed to be concentrating on her new job, not daydreaming about the countryside and her old life. By contrast, fogs here were sulfurous, thick and oppressive, not the white, gentle blankets common to the countryside.
She could imagine the fog was smoke from the fires of a Roman encampment on the furthest border of the empire. Here civilization took its stand against the savagery beyond. Even as today the line was drawn here, Britain standing almost alone against Nazi savagery.
For an instant ghostly walls rose around her and she sensed murmurous words she could not understand.
She shook herself free of the illusion. Certainly it was nothing but an illusion. She needed to examine the site of what Baines had described as “the incident.”
To her annoyance the site had not been cordoned off, nor had anyone bothered to mark the body’s position. More evidence it was considered an accident. She examined the altars. There were carvings on them. A garland, a pitcher, a knife. She could make out a rusty stain on one corner, the victim’s blood or simply an innocent discoloration? The city air, she had already seen, blackened everything. She gauged the distance from the nearest foundation. Yes, if the victim had taken a misstep in the dark and stumbled forward she might have hit her head on the stained corner, although it would have taken a very bad piece of luck to fall in exactly the right direction.
She surveyed the dismal scene again. This was not how she had envisioned her first day on the job in Newcastle. How had she pictured it? Striding along crowded streets while heads turned in admiration, staring at her uniform? She’d hardly encountered a soul on the short walk to the temple, and the few pedestrians she had seen were hunched over and muffled up, rushing to escape the miserable cold, seeing nothing but their warm destinations. All carried gas masks. The box holding her own hung from a string draped over her shoulder, a constant reminder that death might fall from the skies at any moment.
The rectangular temple outlined by what remained of its walls wasn’t large. About fifteen feet long, Grace estimated. Sweet wrappers lay in the tall grass and under the surrounding hedges. She trudged dutifully around the wet ground, seeing nothing but rubbish, wishing she had a pair of wellingtons. No doubt the spot had already been thoroughly searched.
Wallace was probably right that it was an accident and no one had seen anything. The streetlights had been off. The houses all sat at a distance, windows blocked by the omnipresent blackout curtains.
A rustling in the weeds caught her attention.
It was only a black cat, crossing this tiny piece of wilderness.
A good omen. Black cats meant good luck, just as left-handed swastikas did, according to Grandma.
Grace smiled at the cat, then crossed Chandler Street and started knocking at doors.
***
“Do you think Santa will be able to get to us this year?” Six-year-old Veronica Gibson sought comfort from Jim Charles, a boy in his early teens accompanying a group of several children returning home after school. “Will the Luftwobble catch him? It would be awful if he got killed.” Her voice wavered.
Short and slight, with a solemn face framed by dark wispy hair chopped off at chin level, Veronica was of an age when reindeer-drawn sleighs bearing presents and airplanes loaded with bombs were both shadowy possibilities moving through the vast misty world beyond the concrete reality of her own neighborhood. She had heard her parents talking about the Luftwobble and Hitler and Nasties when they thought her out of earshot. Their tones terrified her. She could not imagine what would scare adults.
“Santa’s clever enough to avoid them Germans,” Jim reassured her. “I’ll bet he’s got a great big machine gun on his sleigh just in case.”
Veronica frowned up at the gangly creature beside her. Jim could be unreliable, mean and teasing at times. At other times he was protective of her and other younger children living in the neighborhood. She walked on, thoughtful as always. An invisible sun infused the fog with a sickly yellow light that made everything look flat and dead.
“Made yer list for Santa and chucked it in the fire?” Jim asked.
Veronica nodded. The ashes still flew up the chimney to Santa like previous years, she hoped, but with the Luftwobble up there, could she be sure?
“What did you ask for?”
“A dolly and sweeties and a book,” came the reply. “And for me mam—” The little girl broke off and stopped walking. “Look. There’s a bobby at the ruins.”
A voice from behind them broke in. “That’s because someone bashed in some tart’s head last night.” The boy, around Jim’s age, expelled his words in gusts of cigarette smoke rather than the misty exhalations issuing from other mouths. His narrow features were set in a sneer.
Jim showed him a doubled-up fist. “Divn’t torment the bairn, Stu.”
“You keep yer gob shut, Jim.”
Veronica felt tears welling up. “Did…did…the lady….?”
“She got killed, Nica.” Stu told her. “Same as you would if somebody smashed you over the head with a big, jagged rock.”
Veronica pressed mittened hands to her mouth. The other children had gathered around Stu. He offered them a wicked smile. “It was me what reported her, see. Huns done it.”
Jim laughed. “Harraway wi’ yer barrer! Who’d be stupid enough to fall for that?”
“Must have been the Huns. They bent her arms and legs so she looked like one of them swastikas they parade about with, the swine.”
The children were wide-eyed.
The bobby Veronica had spotted moved off.
“Look. The copper’s a girl,” Jim said.
“Bloody hell!” Stu tossed his cigarette away. “Like to see some girl stop me in the street and tell me what to do!”
***
A few of Grace’s knocks were answered, many were not. Those who did answer told her about as much as those who didn’t. Grace scribbled in her notebook, mainly to give the impression she was doing her job.
A young woman with a harassed expression and two toddlers clinging to her skirt complained about the lack of moral guidance youngsters had these days. “Hardly any left around here with so many evacuated, but the ones that stayed get up to as much mischief as all the rest put together. What are their parents thinking? Why, the woman at number fifteen caught her next door neighbor’s son shoplifting only last week. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t some of these wild kids did that poor woman in.”
The industrial city and its deafening noise of clock-round war work in factory and shipyard created conditions in which children might be left to their own devices when their mothers were working and their fathers away.
As Grace continued along the street it was always a woman who opened the door, invariably looking her up and down, puzzled and wary. Grace guessed they did not pay her the deference they would have had she been a man, but then, how would she know how city people normally acted?
Questioning her neighbors in Noddweir had been easy. Those who hadn’t known her as Constable Baxter’s daughter from the time she was a child had grown up with her. In Newcastle she was among strangers. Suspicious strangers. And who could blame them? Her accent set her apart, as did her ruddy complexion. The faces in this gloomy city were all ashen. Or was that her own prejudice showing?
Several doors down, a white-haired woman carrying tins in a string shopping bag arrived at her door as Grace approached. She invited her inside because, as she put it, “I don’t want gossip.” She had nothing to offer except a fervent wish the Germans would oblige her and the neighbors by turning the ruins into a pit.
“It’s a natural place of business for loose women. Nobody can see what’s going on over there after dark. Why, only the other day I was telling my friend Ada there’d be trouble sooner or later. A well-placed bomb would solve the problem. I’d be happy to replace a few broken windows. Was the woman one of those…well, you know? Do you think it was a customer killed her? Maybe it was someone from the street. You never know what husbands will get up to.”
Everyone had a theory but no one had seen or heard anything. No commotion, no screams in the night, raised voices or running feet. No reason for anyone to put out the light, push aside a blackout curtain, and peer out, as if it were possible to see anything anyway.
But residents were afraid. They did not share the official assumption that the woman had died by accident. “Until the person responsible is found, I’m asking to change to a day shift,” one woman told her.
Was it the stress of war that caused everyone in the street to assume the worst, or was it some sort of collective instinct?
By the time Grace finished her circuit the haze and drizzle had given way to pale sunlight, as weak as the third cup of tea from the same leaves. Her damp feet had stopped stinging long before and gone numb. When she spotted a woman whitening her doorstep with a scouring stone, she was reluctant to stop and question her.
The woman gave a start when she became aware of Grace, ceased rubbing with the stone, and scowled upwards.
“Anything to do with that temple, you need to talk to Rutherford at number sixty,” she replied to Grace’s query. “Old as the hills, he is. Knows all about them ruins. Gives lectures about such things at the church. Them ruins ought to be bulldozed, in my opinion. Magnets for troublemakers, they are.”
The woman stood, sniffed, and adjusted the tartan headsquare covering her curlers. Her wet hands were fiery red from the cold. What kind of weather was this for such a task? “Mind, you’ll be lucky if you can get him to talk. We hardly see him in the daytime. He creeps out after dark every night. I’ve moved my wardrobe to block my front room window so I can’t see that abomination. The ruins, I mean.” Her voice degenerated into a bout of coughing as she wiped her hands on her apron.
“He goes out every night?”
“Aye, hinney. Straight over to them ruins. Only the Almighty knows what he gets up to, or who he meets, or what.” She gave another sniff, drawing her apron tighter about her thin frame.
Grace questioned her further and learned nothing more. “And he lives at number sixty, you say?”
“That’s right. Six six six would be more appropriate.”
“If anything comes back to you, anything strange you saw or heard that night, come round to the police station and let us know.”
The woman offered a noncommittal grunt, picked up her bucket and scouring stone, and went indoors. Grace heard her clumping up uncarpeted stairs.
Number sixty turned out to be a ground-floor maisonette, distinguishing itself from the others in the street by the peeling paint on its door and a dirty window. Grace had tried knocking earlier. She plied the knocker vigorously again. Despite her gloves, the cold from the metal knocker flowed into her hand like an electric current. Her fingers were as numb as her toes.
Finally she decided there would be no answer. Presumably Rutherford worked at night, since he went out every evening. He’d be asleep during the day but the racket she’d made should have awakened him. She would have to come back later.
As she turned to go, disappointed and wondering what Baines would say at her failure to find out anything useful, she glimpsed a slight twitch in the still drawn blackout curtain.
Was the elderly Mr. Rutherford deaf or did he want to avoid opening the door to the police?
She remained in front of the door for a short time, in case he was making up his mind but the curtain fell back into place and the door remained closed.
This was her first impression of Newcastle. Much cold, many locked doors.