‘Sir?’
Stratton looked up from his desk to see Ballard standing in the doorway of the office, covered in brick dust and holding a battered iron deed box in his hands. ‘Blimey. Where have you been?’
‘Conway Street, sir.’ Ballard put the box down on the floor and mopped his face with his handkerchief, looking in distaste at the muck that came off on it. ‘It’s bad, sir – three houses down. Hell of a mess. The lodgers were in the shelter, but the landlady …’ Ballard shook his head, slowly.
‘Bad, eh?’
“Fraid so, sir. Not much left at all. Direct hit. High explosive.’
‘Oh, dear. Miss Morgan, the one who jumped, she lived in Conway Street, didn’t she?’
‘That’s why I’m here, sir. That was one of the houses. The ARP man gave me this.’ He prodded the box with his foot. ‘Thought it looked important. When I saw the name I remembered you asking me about her, sir, and I thought you might like to see it.’ He squatted down and blew on the top of the box. As the last of the dust lifted, Stratton could see the word ‘Morgan’ painted in white. ‘There’s a label on this handle,’ said Ballard, showing him a brown paper tag tied on with a piece of string.
‘Let’s see.’ Stratton peered down at it. ‘Initials. W. B. & C. Whatever that means. Have you looked inside?’
‘No, sir. It’s padlocked, see?’
A hammer and chisel’ll soon see to that, thought Stratton, but all he said was, ‘Thanks. You’ve brought it to the right place.’
‘I thought so, sir.’ Ballard’s face was impassive, and Stratton wondered what he was thinking, but didn’t ask.
‘Best get yourself cleaned up,’ he said. ‘I think Cudlipp’s got a clothes brush somewhere.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Left alone, Stratton walked around the box. Was this what Wallace had been looking for? It was a pretty big thing to hide – under the bed was the obvious place, but Joe had said they’d pulled the mattress off, so it couldn’t have been there. And surely Joe would have removed all his things before he left, and Mabel’s too if he’d wanted to keep them, so where had it been? Not under the floorboards – it was too large for that, or for a cistern … He lifted it up – not too heavy – and stowed it under his desk. He’d have to take it home with him; if DCI Lamb were to find him messing about with Mabel Morgan’s possessions, there’d be hell to pay. And he’d have to get it out of the station without exciting the curiosity of Cudlipp … Stratton looked at his watch. One o’clock: time for lunch. Or rather, time for a walk – one that would take him to Conway Street.
He crossed Oxford Street and walked up towards Fitzrovia. A newspaper seller on the corner of Newman Street had chalked OUR SCORE 44 AT HALF TIME on his board. ‘Don’t worry,’ he called out as Stratton passed, ‘It’ll take them a hell of a time to knock it all down!’
In Conway Street, three houses at the end of a row of five-storey dwellings, mostly rooming and boarding, were down, and several more had had their fronts blown off. Tasting the dust in his mouth, Stratton ran his tongue round his teeth and grimaced. The road was covered in a mixture of bricks, slates, shattered glass, and wooden beams and joists, and where one house had been sliced in two he could see, high up on the fourth floor, a man’s coat still hanging from the back of a door. Above that, balanced precariously on ragged boards, was a child’s cot. Stratton thought of Pete and Monica, safe in the country, and wondered what had happened to its occupant.
Ten or fifteen oldish men and women were standing about, red-eyed and haggard. Had these been their homes? One woman was holding a china basin – the remains of her life, perhaps – in shaking hands. Next to her, an elderly man in a Homburg hat was staring at the debris. The brick dust on the group’s clothes made them look as if they were wearing shrouds. As he passed, Stratton
heard Homburg hat say, ‘It’s happening right across London.’ He pronounced it ‘acrawss’ in the Edwardian way.
The old woman said, ‘Will they find us somewhere to go before tonight?’
‘Everywhere,’ said the man. ‘The whole of London.’ The woman ignored him, and kept repeating, in a quavering voice, ‘We haven’t anywhere to go. Will they find us somewhere?’
Stratton skirted the rubble and made his way towards the ARP warden, who was standing at the end of the road talking to one of the demolition crew. ‘DI Stratton,’ he said. ‘Are you the one who found the deed box?’
‘That’s right.’ The warden looked exhausted. ‘Down there.’ He gestured vaguely towards the shattered houses.
‘Was there anything else?’
‘Just the usual. Nothing like that.’
‘Many casualties?’
‘Old lady dead from number thirty-five, and we had to send three to the hospital.’
‘Everyone out?’
The warden nodded wearily, and was about to turn away when a tall, raw-boned man appeared at his elbow, carrying a tatty-looking piece of carpet. ‘I need to get the geyser out,’ he said, urgently. ‘I’ve got two more payments to make on it.’ The warden stared at him. ‘Only two more payments,’ the man repeated.
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until the demolition squad have finished,’ said the warden. ‘I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.’
‘You’ll tell me, won’t you?’ asked the man. ‘When I’ve got the geyser,’ he explained to Stratton, ‘I’ll be satisfied.’ He tipped his hat and went to join the other onlookers. Stratton turned to the warden, bewildered.
‘Can’t blame him,’ said the warden. ‘Looting. You wouldn’t believe the trouble we’ve had, and it’s getting worse.’
‘They’re not likely to make off with a geyser, are they?’
‘Those bastards’d take anything. Ought to be ashamed of themselves.’
Stratton pointed out the distressed woman he’d seen further down the street, then walked back to West End Central, thinking how extraordinary it was how quickly you got used to the raids
– the bombing itself, the fear and the din, the changes it made to
the landscape … New views seen through gaps in rows of houses, and on moonlit nights the place looked almost fragile – the thought that you might be looking your last on some familiar piece of architecture made you more aware of it. It was the effect on people, like that poor old duck in Conway Street, which shocked and angered him. Tottenham hadn’t had it too bad so far, thank God. After the first few raids, when she’d clung to him, shaky and crying, Jenny seemed to have got used to it. Stratton had been worried about her being alone in the Anderson shelter if the warning went when he was at work, but as Doris and Donald had volunteered to join her if this happened, it was no longer a problem. Since the bombing started, she’d stopped agitating for Pete and Monica to come back, and had even gone so far as to tell him he’d been right all along, but he knew better than to make a song and dance about that. What will be left when they do come back, he wondered. Would everything be flattened? The newspaper seller had said it would take a hell of a time, which was true, but the Nazis had all of Europe’s resources at their disposal. With the civil defences worked to exhaustion – not to mention the police, he thought, yawning – how long could one little island stand it?
He stopped to indulge these reflections, but after a moment, his melancholy feelings struck him as unsuitable and repugnant. He remembered reading somewhere that sentimentality was the exact measure of a person’s inability to experience genuine feeling. He reflected that he couldn’t have put it better, or even half as well, himself, and, in any case, standing about feeling sorry for himself wasn’t going to help. DCI Lamb may have been mollified, back in July, by his solving the business at the jeweller’s shop and the murder of the prostitute Maureen O’Dowd, but he hadn’t yet managed to discover who’d stabbed Kelland in the gang fight and nor, frankly, was he ever likely to. Besides which, there had been four more thefts from jewellers’ shops in the last month, plus a spate of robberies from high-class furriers, and two nights ago an eighteen-year-old ‘hostess’ had been assaulted in a night-club in Rupert Street.
Thinking about these cases reminded Stratton of what the warden had said about looting from bombed buildings. Just the sort of stupid thing, he thought, that his nephew Johnny might find himself involved in. He hadn’t seen the boy for a while, and neither Reg nor Lilian had mentioned him. The problem was, Stratton
thought, that boys like Johnny knew everything in theory but nothing in practice. They learnt – or thought they learnt – about ‘real’ men from James Cagney and George Raft, and about women from strangers who scrawled their desires and conquests on the walls of public lavatories. He made a mental note to take Johnny aside for a chat, then rejected this idea on the grounds that this would be interfering. It was Reg’s job, after all, not his. And in any case, the boy wouldn’t have listened.
Smuggling the deed box out of the station after work was less of a problem than Stratton had anticipated. He carried it home and stowed it under the bench in the garden shed before going in to kiss Jenny and wash for tea. He went upstairs, wondering what the box would contain, when a sudden image of the cot, high up in the ruined house, compelled him to open the door of his daughter’s room. Looking round, he saw, on the shelf in front of her two least favoured dolls, a small piece of pale pink knitting. He remembered Jenny teaching Monica to knit the previous summer, their heads, one chestnut and one dark, bent over tangles of wool, and Monica’s proud announcement, once she’d got the knack of it: ‘I’m going to knit my doll a scarf, and knickers to match!’ They’d laughed about it; Jenny had worried Monica by pointing out that knitted knickers were both uncomfortable and unhygienic, and he’d had to assure her that the doll wouldn’t mind. He picked up the little scarf and examined it. It was very neatly done; Monica, like her mother, was careful and deft. Good at drawing, too, Stratton thought proudly, though heaven knew where she got that from, because neither of them were particularly artistic.
Hoping that Jenny wouldn’t walk in on him, he lifted the dolls’ skirts in turn to see if either of them was wearing the matching knickers. Neither was, and, feeling a little foolish, he stuffed the miniature scarf into his pocket and left the bedroom.
After tea, he left Jenny listening to Hippodrome Memories on the wireless, and went out to the shed. Clearing a space on the work bench, he lifted the box onto it and took a hammer and chisel from his rack of tools. The padlock gave at the first blow and Stratton, with deliberate slowness, removed it, returned the tools to their place, and lifted the lid.