“So they’ve put you on a murder case already, hinney! Good for you. What most of them bluebottles need is a boot in the rear, if y’ask me.”
Mavis, Grace’s landlady, perched on the end of one of two beds shoe-horned into the room, swinging her legs restlessly as she watched Grace empty her suitcases. Grace had arrived late the night before and the two had barely had a chance to speak.
“No one at the station thinks it was a murder or else I wouldn’t be investigating. I’m only an auxiliary.”
“Oh, it’s a murder. Woman’s intuition.” Mavis was a petite brunette dressed in drab overalls a size too large. She picked up Grace’s peaked uniform hat from the bed and settled it on her cropped hair.
Grace looked up from her suitcases. “Pardon? You’ll have to speak slower, Mavis, until I get used to your accent.” It wasn’t just the accent, she thought. Geordie, the local dialect, resembled a foreign language to her Southern ears.
“Shove your knickers in the top drawer there. Is that why they call them drawers, do you think? Afraid we’re a bit short of space here. I’ll make some room for your clothes in the wardrobe. You’ll get used to living in a place with only two rooms, a scullery, and a netty in the backyard.”
“Netty? You mean outdoor privy? I’m already used to those. That’s what I grew up with. I’m a country girl.”
What she wasn’t used to was the cramped layout. The shared bedroom was the first room opening off a short hall leading to the combination kitchen and living room heated by a coal fire in a fireplace fitted with an oven to one side and a well-polished brass fender in front. The kitchen led to a scullery whose claustrophobic space under a slanted ceiling housed a gas cooker. A sink with a cold water tap and wooden draining board stood below the window next to a door opening on to a narrow brick-walled backyard.
“For heaven’s sake!” Mavis cried. “What are you doing with that disgusting thing?” She was staring at the charm in Grace’s hand.
“It’s a keepsake of my grandmother.”
“Your grammy was a Nazi?” Mavis’ legs in the baggy overalls stopped swinging. She sat rigid, as if Hitler himself had goose-stepped into the room.
“No. It’s a charm. Look, the arms are pointed in the opposite direction from the Nazi version. They’re anti-clockwise. Left-handed, see?” Grace held the charm out for closer examination but Mavis put her hands up as if to push it away.
“It’s nothing to do with the Germans, Mavis,” Grace continued. “The swastika has been around for centuries. It’s considered a symbol of good luck, long life, and prosperity. The Germans adopted a certain form of it, made it stand for something it was never meant to represent.”
“If you say so, but I’m not touching it.”
What would Mavis think if Grace told her that the body of the woman found at the temple had been laid out in the form of a left-handed swastika?
She placed the trinket into a drawer. Mavis’ reaction was understandable. Not everyone had grown up with a wise woman for a grandmother. Grace clicked the suitcase shut and slid it under the bed. The last thing she needed was to get into an argument with the woman she was going to be living with, possibly for the war’s duration.
Grandma had always been a troublemaker and she was still causing trouble.
Mavis surveyed the tiny room bleakly. “Here I am, the best years of me life flying by, ruining me hands working at Vickers. It’s good money and I’m helping the war effort but I’m left all alone while me husband fights abroad—not that Ronny wasn’t forever fighting at home. Thank heaven we never had any bairns.”
Upon arriving the previous evening Grace had noted there were no photos of the absent husband serving in the forces. She wasn’t sure how to respond. Luckily Mavis changed the subject.
“What about the rest of your family, Grace? They’re still down south?”
“In a way.”
“Dead, eh? Sorry. Bloody Germans. I do rattle on. Sorry about your grammy’s charm too. Gave me a bit of a start.”
“It’s the sort of thing gives spies away in novels.”
“Is it? I’m not much of a reader myself. Love to dance. I’ve got a gramophone and practice me steps most nights.”
Grace believed her. There were binders of the sort used to store records stacked in the corner. She’d seen others on a kitchen shelf and individual records scattered here and there.
Mavis took off Grace’s hat, which was too large for her, and tossed it down. “I don’t think I have an outfit to match that.”
With her severe haircut, plain face devoid of makeup, and ill-fitting overalls, Mavis didn’t look like a woman who gave any thought to fashion or dancing.
“I’m not much of a dancer,” Grace admitted. “I can muddle through a waltz or a polka, if you call a fast waltz a polka. Did you go dancing with your visitor last night?” A tall man had briefly exchanged words with Mavis on the door step before departing. “I hope I won’t..I mean, I don’t want to intrude.”
“Hans van der Berg? He’s not my fancy man, if that’s what you mean. He’s angled a bit but I do keep in mind I’m married, unlike some. The neighbors already gossip because I like to go out and have fun. Do we have to waste our lives because we had the bad luck to be young when there’s a war on?”
Grace smiled. “If you practice dancing here with Hans, I won’t tell anyone.”
“I wouldn’t want to give him ideas. That reminds me, did I tell you Hans is coming over later?”
***
After their evening meal Grace sat with Mavis in the kitchen.
“Was your sergeant pleased with your efforts?”
“Hard to say.” Grace frowned. “He was gone by the time I returned. When he met me this morning I got the impression that he felt I was offending him simply by being there, being a woman.”
“The men prefer us to stay home. And knit.” Mavis indicated the teddy bear she was making, coloured a bright red never seen in nature. “This is for a little girl down the street. Poor bairn won’t get much for Christmas as it is and as for the others, Santa needs all the coal he would usually leave for bad lads! I’ve knitted her mittens and a pixie hood from the same old sweater. Then I’ve made a paper tooter and one of those twirly things on a string you go cross-eyed looking at. I should have liked to get hold of a bit of coloured chalk.”
“That’s good of you, Mavis.” It pleased Grace to be forming a good impression of this young woman she’d arranged to stay with sight unseen.
“Bairns have no childhood these days. I’ve also got something different for her. It’s a stone with a hole in it. Picked it up at Cullercoats on the coast, years ago. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Grandma told me they’re good for protection. You could plait some wool and make her a necklace with it.”
“It’s a nice idea. She’d like that. Then again, your grammy thought swastikas are lucky! Your family does have strange ideas!”
There was a knock on the front door. Mavis got up to answer it and returned followed by a tall, blond man with deep blue eyes and a thin, tanned face, the man Grace had glimpsed speaking to Mavis the night before. “It’s Hans, come to get the old wives gossiping again. This is Grace, Hans, my new lodger.”
The visitor gave a half-bow. “Goedenavond, Miss Grace,” he said, addressing her in Dutch. “Miss Mavis told me you had arrived when I called last night. I did not think I should come in. You must have been very tired from traveling.” Turning to Mavis, he went on, “I have for you a present to honour the season.” Delving into a pocket of his shabby pea coat, he brought out a pair of glass Christmas ornaments carefully wrapped in a handkerchief. “I purchased them from a gentleman in a public house.”
“Very nice, too, Hans. Thanks. I’ll pinch a couple of pine branches from the cemetery—you didn’t hear that, Grace!—stick them in a jam jar, and add a bit of tinsel and these ornaments. And very festive they’ll look too. Now, get snipping!”
Hans hung his coat over a chair back, sat down at the table, and began cutting strips from sheets of painted newspaper Mavis produced from a cupboard. He gave the impression of being very much at home. Grace deduced that decorative paper chains were to be made.
“Tell us about the adventures of a woman police auxiliary then, Grace,” Mavis asked.
“It’s not much of an adventure. Knocking on doors in the cold, mostly. How are we going to stick these paper strips together?”
“I’ve thought of that,” Mavis said, going into the scullery.
“It must have been a very bad thing to see that poor dead lady,” Hans observed.
Grace reached for a strip of paper at the same moment as Hans laid more on the pile and their hands momentarily met. An accident?
Hans pulled his hand away and smiled.
“No, no.” Grace felt flustered. “She had been taken to the morgue by the time I arrived at the station. I’ve only seen a drawing so far. The odd thing was it looked like her arms and legs were arranged in the shape of a left-handed swastika.”
Mavis returned with a basin. “Never mind about that, Grace. Here we are, see? Flour and water paste will hold our paper chain together. Not that Mr. Churchill would approve.”
“It is good for people to have a little joy in their lives,” Hans replied. “So I shall not tell him!”
Mavis resumed knitting. “Tell Grace how you came to be in England, Hans. It’s a good story.”
“I was a fisherman. One night I got into my boat and sailed to England—”
“’Got in his boat,’ he says!” Mavis put in. “He forgot to tell you he had to dodge sentries, brought other refugees with him, and the Germans sank his boat. Luckily they were near to the coast and got rescued. Well, most of them.”
“It was so,” Hans admitted. “Now I work as a translator but I am hoping my friend Mavis will help me get work at the Vickers factory down by the river. I wish to strike back more directly at the Germans.”
“We do a canny bit of war work down there,” Mavis agreed.
Hans nodded vigorously. “Tanks. That is what I want to make. If I could I would gladly drop bombs on the swine.” He grasped the scissors and made stabbing motions.
The gesture startled Grace. The man had struck her as mild-mannered.
Mavis patted Hans’ arm. “Wouldn’t we all like to bomb the Huns? Hans does make fighter planes, though.” She showed Grace the silver brooch pinned to her blouse, the crude but recognizable shape of a Spitfire. “He made it from a sixpence.”
It reminded Grace of one of her grandmother’s many charms. She asked Mavis whether it was such a thing.
“No. It’s not a charm. It’s to show support for the Brylcreem boys. You know, fighter pilots. Not that we aren’t a superstitious lot. There was a girl on this street who got herself into trouble, wouldn’t have her baby christened, refused to have it adopted, and then abandoned it and went off. All the old wives said, ‘What could you expect from a tart who wouldn’t be churched?’”
Grace looked puzzled.
“You’re supposed to have yourself blessed first thing after you get home with the baby before you do anything or go anywhere,” Mavis explained. “Superstition, see.”
By now several piles of newspaper chains adorned the table. Mavis put her knitting needles down and lifted the almost completed teddy bear to her face, examining her work. She scowled. “That poor woman found in the next street. I wonder if she left any bairns behind?”
***
The china clock on the mantelpiece maddeningly ticked off each passing minute that Grace was unable to sleep. She gave it a scolding look. The base was inscribed with a breezy declaration—A Present From Blackpool.
Hans had left long since, sent off by Mavis with a peck on the cheek which made Grace wonder again whether she was in their way. Mavis retired but Grace remained in the kitchen. She couldn’t turn off her thoughts. She kept imagining the remains of the temple, a shadowed body crumpled before the altars, kept going back over the interviews she’d conducted. She leafed through the newspaper Mavis had left on a chair and found a brief story about the unidentified young woman found there. It was believed to be an accident. Police were investigating. Nothing was mentioned about the body’s odd position.
Finally she read a paperback thriller—A Gun For Sale by Graham Greene. Not the best choice, perhaps. Her mother had disapproved of her reading what she termed rubbish. The only books her mother kept in the house were the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress.
The clock’s relentless ticking sounded loud against a backdrop of rumbling industrial equipment, ships’ horns on the Tyne, and a gusty, rising wind rattling a loose drainpipe. And another noise. She glanced at the back window but the blackout curtain was drawn and anyway the backyard would have been a featureless pit.
Probably a rat. She got up and went into the scullery. Biting chill and the odor of fresh washing met her. Mavis’ ghostly underthings hung over the cooker. The air in Newcastle was full of smoke. Soot speckled everything, including any washing hung out on lines crisscrossing the back lanes between each street of terraced houses or pegged out in cramped backyards. Before going to bed Mavis had rinsed a few things in the sink and shown Grace what she described as the most advanced method of drying laundry known to womankind, which turned out to be a rack suspended from the ceiling over the cooker, so heat from cooking or baking carried out the task. The contraption was raised and lowered by means of a thin rope looped round a hook in the wall nearby.
“Make sure you anchor it well, mind,” she warned. “Otherwise it’s liable to fall on your head while you’re cooking. Another thing. If you’re ever in a hurry to get your knickers dried, stick them under the grill. There’s many a nappy been dried that way. Make sure you keep an eye on them so they don’t get scorched.”
Mavis was surprised when Grace mentioned cooking with wood back home. “One thing about that, no fear of gas escaping if the Luftwaffe pay a call,” she had observed. “Who said the old ways are useless?”
The old ways. Returning to the kitchen and picking up her book, Grace thought of her grandmother and her knowledge of charms, herbal remedies, and what she was pleased to call persuasions. The wise woman would surely have enjoyed talking to the study group the woman she had interviewed had mentioned. Such a group would be a likely source of information about the temple, wouldn’t they? What god did the temple honour? What rites had been conducted? Was it possible the unknown woman’s dying there was not accidental? That her death had to do with the temple in some way beyond it being a place to meet?
Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. Your imagination is running away with you. If Grandma hadn’t filled your head up with all her nonsense you’d never have thought of such a thing. Isn’t an accidental death bad enough without inventing worse? Besides, you’re not supposed to be thinking about police work at this hour.
She lowered the book to her lap and tried to empty her mind.
As she dozed she saw her grandmother. Then her father. Several villagers she had known. Two elderly aunts who had died while she was still a child. All people who had died. She was awake yet unable to control this ghostly slide show. Tick. There was her grandmother. Tick. There was her mother. Was her mother dead, then?
Still half awake, she struggled to add a living person to the display and failed.
What did it mean, this procession of the dead?
Her grandmother smiled at her tiredly, as if to chide her for being so slow.
“Grandma, really!” Grace murmured under the breath. “If you have something to say to me, say it.”
A tinny chime announced one in the morning.
Grace came out of her daze. She had better get to bed or else Mavis would find her asleep in the chair when she got up. She yawned and decided to pay a visit to the netty. As she went into the scullery there was a muffled thud and what sounded like a muttered curse from outside.
She stopped cold, heart jumping, hand on the doorknob, head tilted, listening hard. She heard the sound of rapidly receding footsteps.
Grace flung the door open. An indistinct figure hauled itself up over the backyard wall and vanished. Grace went out into the back lane but saw nothing.
She returned to the backyard, shivering in the cutting wind. Using the netty quickly she started back indoors. With eyes now adjusted to the dark, she could better make out the scullery door.
Painted on it was a red swastika.