The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Peter Robinson In Flanders Fields from Not Safe After Dark

I considered it the absolute epitome of irony that, with bombs falling around us, someone went and bludgeoned Mad Maggie to death.

To add insult to injury, she lay undiscovered for several days before Harry Fletcher, the milkman, found her. Because milk was rationed to one or two pints a week, depending on how much the children and expectant mothers needed, he didn’t leave it on her doorstep the way he used to do before the war. Even in a close community like ours, a bottle of milk left unguarded on a doorstep wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

These days, Harry walked around with his float, and people came out to buy. It was convenient, as we were some way from the nearest shops, and we could always be sure we were getting fresh milk. However mad Maggie may have been, it wasn’t like her to miss her milk ration. Thinking she might have slept in, or perhaps have fallen ill with no one to look after her, Harry knocked on her door and called her name. When he heard no answer, he told me, he made a tentative try at the handle and found that the door was unlocked.

There she lay on her living room floor in a pool of dried blood dotted with flies. Poor Harry lost his breakfast before he could dash outside for air.

Why Harry came straight to me when he found Mad Maggie’s body I can’t say. We were friends of a kind, I suppose, of much the same age, and we occasionally passed a pleasurable evening together playing dominoes and drinking watery beer in the Prince Albert. Other than that, we didn’t have a lot in common: I was a schoolteacher — English and History — and Harry had left school at fourteen; Harry had missed the first war through a heart ailment, whereas I had been gassed at Ypres in 1917; I was a bachelor, and Harry was married with a stepson, Thomas, who had just come back home on convalescent leave after being severely wounded at the Dunkirk evacuation. Thomas also happened to be my godson, which I suppose was the main thing Harry and I had in common.

Perhaps Harry also came to me because I was a Special Constable. I know it sounds impressive, but it isn’t really. The services were so mixed up that you’d have the police putting out fires, the Home Guard doing police work, and anyone with two arms carrying the stretchers. A Special Constable was simply a part-time policeman, without any real qualifications for the job except his willingness to take it on. The rest of the time I taught what few pupils remained at Silverhill Grammar School.

As it turned out, I was glad that Harry did call on me, because it gave me a stake in the matter. The regular police were far more concerned with lighting offenses and the black market than they were with their regular duties, and one thing nobody had time to do in the war was investigate the murder of a mad, mysterious, cantankerous old woman.

Nobody except me, that is.

Though my position didn’t grant me any special powers, I pride myself on being an intelligent and perceptive sort of fellow, not to mention nosy, and it wasn’t the first time I’d done a spot of detective work on the side. But first, let me tell you a little about Mad Maggie...

I say old woman, but Maggie was probably only in her mid-forties, about the same age as me, when she was killed. Everyone just called her old; it seemed to go with mad. With a certain kind of woman, it’s not so much a matter of years, anyway, but of demeanor, and Maggie’s demeanor was old.

Take the clothes she wore, for a start: most women were trying to look like one of the popular film stars like Vivien Leigh or Deanna Durbin, with her bolero dresses, but even for a woman of her age, Maggie wore clothes that could best be described as old-fashioned, even antique: high-buttoned boots, long dresses with high collars, ground-sweeping cloaks and broad-brimmed hats with feathers.

Needless to say, the local kids — at least those whose parents hadn’t packed them off to the countryside already — used to follow her down the street in gangs and chant, “Mad Maggie, Mad Maggie, she’s so mad, her brain’s all claggy...” Children can be so cruel. Most of the time she ignored them, or seemed oblivious to their taunts, but once in a while she wheeled on them, eyes blazing, and started waving her arms around and yelling curses, usually in French. The children would squeal with exaggerated horror, then turn tail and run away.

Maggie never had any visitors; none of us had ever been inside her house; nobody in the community even knew what her real name was, where she had come from, or how she had got to be the way she was. We simply accepted her. There were rumors of course. Some gossipmongers had it that she was an heiress cut off by her family because she went mad; others said she had never recovered from a tragic love affair; still others said she was a rich eccentric and kept thousands of pounds stuffed in her mattress.

Whoever and whatever Mad Maggie was, she managed to take care of life’s minutiae somehow; she paid her rent, she bought newspapers, and she handled her ration coupons just like the rest of us. She also kept herself clean, despite the restriction to only five inches of bathwater. Perhaps her eccentricity was just an act, then, calculated to put people off befriending her for some reason? Perhaps she was shy or antisocial? All in all, she was known as Mad Maggie only because she never talked to anyone except herself, because of the old clothes she wore, because of her strange outbursts in French, and because, as everyone knew, she never went to the shelters during air-raids, but would either stay indoors alone or walk the blacked-out streets muttering and arguing with herself, waving her arms at the skies as if inviting the bombs to come and get her.

When Harry called that Monday morning, I was lying in bed grappling with one of my frequent bouts of insomnia, waiting for the birds to sing me back to sleep. I couldn’t even tell if it was daylight or not because of the heavy blackout curtains. I had been dreaming, I remembered, and had woken at about half-past four, gasping for air, from my recurring nightmare about being sucked down into a quicksand.

I heard Harry banging at my door and calling my name, so I threw on some clothes and hurried downstairs. I thought at first that it might be something to do with Tommy, but when I saw his pale face, his wide eyes, and the thin trickle of vomit at the corner of his mouth, I worried that he was having the heart attack he had been expecting daily for over twenty years.

He turned and pointed down the street. “Frank, please!” he said. “You’ve got to come with me.”

I could hear the fear in his voice, so I followed him as quickly as I could to Maggie’s house. It was a fine October morning, with a hint of autumn’s nip in the air. He had left the door ajar. Slowly, I pushed it open and went inside. My first impression was more surprise at how clean and tidy the place was than shock at the bloody figure on the carpet. In my defense, lest I sound callous, I had fought in the first war and, by some miracle, survived the mustard-gas with only a few blisters and a nasty coughing fit every now and then. But I had seen men blown apart; I had been spattered with the brains of my friends; I had crawled through trenches and not known whether the soft, warm, gelatinous stuff I was putting my hands in was mud or the entrails of my comrades. More recently, I had also helped dig more than one mangled or dismembered body from the ruins, so a little blood, a little death, never bothered me much. Besides, despite the pool of dried blood around her head, Mad Maggie looked relatively peaceful. More peaceful than I had ever seen her in life.

Funny, but it reminded me of that old Dracula film I saw at the Crown, the one with Bela Lugosi. The count’s victims always became serene after they had wooden stakes plunged through their hearts. Mad Maggie hadn’t been a vampire, and she didn’t have a stake through her heart, but a bloodstained posser lay by her side, the concave copper head and wooden handle both covered in blood. A quick glance in the kitchen showed only one puzzling item: an unopened bottle of milk. As far as I knew, Harry’s last round had been the morning of the air-raid, last Wednesday. I doubted that Maggie would have been able to get more than her rations; besides, the bottle-top bore the unmistakable mark of the dairy where Harry worked.

Harry waited outside, unwilling to come in and face the scene again. Once I had taken in what had happened, I told him to fetch the police, the real police this time.

They came.

And they went.

One was a plainclothes officer, Detective Sergeant Longbottom, a dull-looking bruiser with a pronounced limp, who looked most annoyed at being called from his bed. He asked a few questions, sniffed around a bit, then got the ambulance men to take Maggie away on a stretcher.

One of the questions Sergeant Longbottom asked was the victim’s name. I told him that, apart from “Mad Maggie,” I had no idea. With a grunt, he rummaged around in the sideboard drawer and found her rent book. I was surprised to discover that she was called Rose Faversham, which I thought was actually quite a pretty name. Prettier than Mad Maggie, anyway. Sergeant Longbottom also asked if we’d had any strangers in the area. Apart from an army unit billeted near the park, where they were carrying out training exercises, and the Gypsy encampment in Silverhill Woods, we hadn’t.

“Ah, Gypsies,” he said, and wrote something in his little black notebook. “Is anything missing?”

I told him I didn’t know, as I had no idea what might have been here in the first place. That seemed to confuse him. For all I knew, I went on, the rumor might have been right, and she could have had a mattress stuffed with banknotes. Sergeant Longbottom checked upstairs and came back scratching his head. “Everything looks normal,” he said, then he poked around a bit more, noting the canteen of sterling silver cutlery, and guessed that Mad Maggie had probably interrupted the thief, who had killed her and fled the scene — probably back to the Gypsy encampment. I was on the point of telling him that I thought the Nazis were supposed to be persecuting Gypsies, not us, but I held my tongue. I knew it would do no good.

Of course, I told him how everyone in the neighborhood knew Mad Maggie paid no attention to air-raids, how she even seemed to enjoy them the way some people love thunderstorms, and how Tom Sellers, the ARP man, had remonstrated with her on many occasions, only to get a dismissive wave and the sight of her ramrod-stiff back walking away down the street. Maggie had also been fined more than once for blackout infringements, until she solved that one by keeping her heavy black curtains closed night and day.

I also told Longbottom that, in the blackout, anyone could have come and gone easily without being seen. I think that was what finally did it. He hummed and hawed, muttered “Gypsies” again, made noises about a continuing investigation, then put his little black notebook away, said he had pressing duties to attend to, and left.

We never saw him in our street again.

And there things would have remained had I not become curious. No doubt Mad Maggie would have been fast forgotten and some poor, innocent Gypsy would have been strung up from the gallows. But there was something about the serenity of Mad Maggie’s features in death that haunted me. She looked almost saintlike, as if she had sloughed off the skin of despair and madness that she had inhabited for so long and reverted to the loving, compassionate Christian woman she must have once been. She had a real name now, too: Rose Faversham. I was also provoked by Detective Sergeant Longbottom’s gruff manner and his obvious impatience with the whole matter. No doubt he had more important duties to get back to, such as the increased traffic in blackmarket onion substitutes.

I would like to say that the police searched Maggie’s house thoroughly, locked it up fast, and put a guard on the door, but they did nothing of the kind. They did lock the front door behind us, of course, but that was it. I imagined that, as soon as he found out, old Grasper, the landlord, would slither around, rubbing his hands and trying to rent the place out quickly again, for twice as much, before the army requisitioned it as a billet.

One thing I had neglected to tell Detective Sergeant Longbottom, I realized as I watched his car disappear around a pile of rubble at the street corner, was about Fingers Finnegan, our local black marketeer and petty thief. Human nature is boundlessly selfish and greedy, even in wartime, and air-raids provided the perfect cover for burglary and blackmarket deals. The only unofficial people on the streets during air-raids were either mad, like Maggie, or up to no good, like Fingers. We’d had a spate of burglaries when most decent, law-abiding people were in St. Mary’s church crypt, or at least in their damp and smelly back-yard Anderson shelters, and Fingers was my chief suspect. He could be elusive when he wanted to be, though, and I hadn’t seen him in a number of days.

Not since last Wednesday’s air-raid, in fact.

After the police had gone, Harry and I adjourned to my house, where, despite the early hour, I poured him a stiff brandy and offered him a Woodbine. I didn’t smoke, myself, because of that little bit of gas that had leaked through my mask at Ypres, but I had soon discovered that it was wise to keep cigarettes around when they were becoming scarce. Like some of the rationed items, they became a kind of currency. I also put the kettle on, for I hadn’t had my morning tea yet, and I’m never at my best before my morning tea. Perhaps that may be one reason I have never married; most of the women I have met chatter far too much in the morning.

“What a turn up,” Harry said, after taking a swig and coughing. “Mad Maggie, murdered. Who’d imagine it?”

“Her killer, I should think,” I said.

“Gypsies.”

I shook my head. “I doubt it. Oh, there’s no doubt they’re a shifty lot. I wouldn’t trust one of them as far as I could throw him. But killers? A defenseless woman like Maggie? I don’t think so. Besides, you saw her house. It hadn’t been touched.”

“But Sergeant Longbottom said she might have interrupted a burglar.”

I sniffed. “Sergeant Longbottom’s an idiot. There was no evidence at all that her killer was attempting to burgle the place.”

“Maybe she was one of them once — a Gypsy — and they came to take her back?”

I laughed. “I must say, Harry, you certainly don’t lack imagination, I’ll grant you that. But no, I rather fancy this is a different sort of matter altogether.”

Harry frowned. “You’re not off on one of your Sherlock Holmes kicks again, are you, Frank? Leave it be. Let the professionals deal with it. It’s what they’re paid for.”

“Professionals! Hmph. You saw for yourself how interested our Detective Sergeant Longbottom was. Interested in crawling back in his bed, more like it. No, Harry, I think that’s the last we’ve seen of them. If we want to find out who killed poor Maggie, we’ll have to find out for ourselves.”

“Why not just let it be, Frank?” Harry pleaded. “We’re at war. People are getting killed every minute of the day and night.”

I gave him a hard look, and he cringed a little. “Because this is different, Harry. While I can’t say I approve of war as a solution to man’s problems, at least it’s socially sanctioned murder. If the government, in all its wisdom, decides that we’re at war with Germany and we should kill as many Germans as we can, then so be it. But nobody sanctioned the killing of Mad Maggie. When an individual kills someone like Maggie, he takes something he has no right to. Something he can’t even give back or replace, the way he could a diamond necklace. It’s an affront to us all, Harry, an insult to the community. And it’s up to us to see that retribution is made.” I’ll admit I sounded a little pompous, but Harry could be extremely obtuse on occasion, and his using the war as an excuse for so outrageous a deed as Rose Faversham’s murder brought out the worst in me.

Harry seemed suitably cowed by my tirade, and when he’d finished his brandy he shuffled off to finish his deliveries. I never did ask him whether there was any milk left on his unattended float.

I had another hour in which to enjoy my morning tea before I had to leave for school, but first I had to complete my ritual and drop by the newsagent’s for a paper. While I was there, I asked Mrs. Hope behind the counter when she had last seen Mad Maggie. Last Wednesday, she told me, walking down the street towards her house just before the warning siren went off, muttering to herself. That information, along with the unopened milk and the general state of the body, was enough to confirm for me that Rose had probably been killed under cover of the air-raid.

That morning, I found I could neither concentrate on Othello, which I was supposed to be teaching the fifth form, nor could I be bothered to read about the bombing raids, evacuation procedures, and government pronouncements that passed for news in these days of propaganda and censorship.

Instead, I thought about Mad Maggie, or Rose Faversham, as she had now become for me. When I tried to visualize her as she was alive, I realized that had I looked closely enough, had I got beyond the grim expressions and the muttered curses, I might have seen her for the handsome woman she was. Handsome, I say, not pretty or beautiful, but I would hazard a guess that twenty years ago she would have turned a head or two. Then I remembered that it was about twenty years ago when she first arrived in the neighborhood, and she had been Mad Maggie right from the start. So perhaps I was inventing a life for her, a life she had never had, but certainly when death brought repose to her features, it possessed her of a beauty I had not noticed before.

When I set off for school, I saw Tommy Markham, Harry’s stepson, going for his morning constitutional. Tommy’s real dad, Lawrence Markham, had been my best friend. We had grown up together and had both fought in the Third Battle of Ypres, between August and November of 1917. Lawrence had been killed at Passchendaele, about nine miles away from my unit, while I had only been mildly gassed. Tommy was in his mid-twenties now. He never knew his real dad, but worshipped him in a way you can worship only a dead hero. Tommy joined up early and served with the Green Howards as part of the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force in France. He had seemed rather twitchy and sullen since he got back from the hospital last week, but I put that down to shattered nerves. The doctors had told Polly, his mother, something about nervous exhaustion and about being patient with him.

“Morning, Tommy,” I greeted him.

He hadn’t noticed me at first — his eyes had been glued to the pavement as he walked — but when he looked up, startled, I noticed the almost pellucid paleness of his skin and the dark bruises under his eyes.

“Oh, good morning, Mr. Bascombe,” he said. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, but you don’t look so good. What is it?”

“My nerves,” he said, moving away as he spoke. “The doc said I’d be all right after a bit of rest, though.”

“I’m glad to hear it. By the way, did your fath—, sorry, did Harry tell you about Mad Maggie?” I knew Tommy was sensitive about Harry not being his real father.

“He said she was dead, that’s all. Says someone clobbered her.”

“When did you last see her, Tommy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Since the raid?”

“That was the day after I got back. No, come to think of it, I don’t think I have seen her since then. Terrible business, in’it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Anyway, sorry, must dash. Bye, Mr. Bascombe.”

“Bye, Tommy.”

I stood frowning and watched him scurry off, almost crabwise, down the street.

There was another air-raid that night, and I decided to look for Fingers Finnegan. By then, I had talked to enough people on the street to be certain that no one had seen Rose since the evening of the last raid.

We lived down by the railway, the canal, and the power station, so we were always copping for it. The Luftwaffe could never aim accurately, though, because the power station sent up clouds of appalling smoke as soon as they heard there were enemy planes approaching. If the bombs hit anything of strategic value, it was more by good luck than good management.

The siren would go off, wailing up and down the scale for two minutes, and it soon became a sort of eerie fugue as you heard the sirens from neighboring boroughs join in, one after another. The noise frightened the dogs and cats, and they struck up wailing and howling, too. At first, you could hardly see a thing outside, only hear the droning of the bombers high above and the swishing and whistling sound of the bombs as they fell in the distance. Then came the explosions, the hailstone of incendiaries on roofs like a rain of fire, the flames crackling, blazing through the smoke. Even the sounds seemed muffled, the distant explosions no more than dull, flat thuds, like a heavy book falling on the floor, the crackle of anti-aircraft fire like fat spitting on a griddle. Sometimes you could even hear someone scream or shout out a warning. Once I heard a terrible shrieking that still haunts my nightmares.

But the city had an eldritch beauty during an air-raid. In the distance, through the smoke-haze, the skyline seemed lit by a dozen suns, each a slightly different shade of red, orange, or yellow. Searchlights criss-crossed one another, making intricate cat’s cradles in the air, and ack-ack fire arced into the sky like strings of Christmas lights. Soon, the bells of the fire engines also became part of the symphony of sound and color. The smoke from the power station got in my eyes and up my nose, and with my lungs, it brought on a coughing fit that seemed to shake my ribs free of their moorings. I held a handkerchief to my face, and that seemed to help a little.

It wasn’t too difficult to get around, despite the blackout and the smoke. There were white stripes painted on the lampposts and along the curbside, and many people had put little dots of luminous paint on their doorbells, so you could tell where you were if you knew the neighborhood well enough.

I walked along Lansdowne Street to the junction with Cardigan Road. Nobody was abroad. The bombs were distant but getting closer, and the smell from a broken sewage pipe was terrible, despite my handkerchief. Once, I fancied I saw a figure steal out of one of the houses, look this way and that, then disappear into the smoky darkness. I ran, calling out after him, but when I got there he had vanished. It was probably Fingers, I told myself. I’d have a devil of a time catching him now I had scared him off. My best chance was to run him down in one of the back-street cafés where he sold his stolen goods the next day.

So instead of pursuing my futile task, and because it was getting more and more difficult to breathe, I decided that my investigation might next benefit best from a good look around Rose’s empty house.

It was easy enough to gain access via the kitchen window at the back, which wasn’t even latched, and after an undignified and painful fall from the sink to the floor, I managed to regain my equilibrium and set about my business. It occurred to me that if I had such an easy time getting in, then her killer would have had an easy time, too. Rose had been killed with the posser, which would most likely have been placed near the sink or tub in which she did her washing.

Because of the blackout curtains, I didn’t have to worry about my torch giving me away; nor did I have to cover it with tissue paper, as I would outside, so I had plenty of light to see by. I stood for a few moments, adjusting to the room. I could hear fire engine bells not too far away.

I found little of interest downstairs. Apart from necessities, such as cutlery, pans, plates, and dishes, Rose seemed to own nothing. There were no framed photographs on the mantelpiece, no paintings on the drab walls. There wasn’t even a wireless. A search of the sideboard revealed only the rent-book that Longbottom had already discovered, a National Identity Card, also in the name of Rose Faversham, her Ration Book, various coupons, old bills, and about twenty pounds in banknotes. I did find two bottles of gin, one almost empty, in the lower half of the china cabinet. There were no letters, no address books, nothing of a personal nature. Rose Faversham’s nest was clean and tidy, but it was also quite sterile.

Wondering whether it was worth bothering, I finally decided to go upstairs to finish my search. The first of the two bedrooms was completely bare. Most people use a spare room to store things they no longer used but can’t bear to throw out just yet; there was nothing like this in Rose’s spare bedroom, just some rather austere wallpaper and bare floorboards.

I felt a tremor of apprehension on entering Rose’s bedroom. After all, she had lived such a private, self-contained life that any encroachment on her most intimate domain seemed a violation. Nonetheless, I went inside.

Apart from the ruffled bedclothes, which I assumed were the result of Detective Sergeant Longbottom’s cursory search, the bedroom was every bit as neat, clean, and empty as the rest of the house. The one humanizing detail was a library book on her bedside table: Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. So Rose Faversham had been an educated woman. Butler’s savage and ironic attack on Victorian values was hardly common bedtime reading on our street.

I looked under the mattress and under the bed, and found nothing. The dressing-table held those few items deemed essential for a woman’s appearance and hygiene, and the chest of drawers revealed only stacks of carefully folded undergarments, corsets and the like, among which I had no desire to go probing. The long dresses hung in the wardrobe beside the high-buttoned blouses.

About to give up and head home to bed, I tried one last place — the top of the wardrobe, where I used to keep my secret diaries when I was a boy — and there I found the shoebox. Even a brief glance inside told me it was the repository of whatever past and personal memories Rose Faversham might have wanted to hang onto. Instead of sitting on the bedspread to read by torch-light, I went back downstairs and slipped out of the house like a thief in the night, which I suppose I was, with Rose’s shoebox under my arm. A bomb exploded about half a mile away as I sidled down the street.

I should have gone to one of the shelters, I know, but I was feeling devil-may-care that night, and I certainly didn’t want anyone to know I had broken into Rose’s house and stolen her only private possessions. Back in my own humble abode, I made sure my curtains were shut tight, poured a large tumbler of brandy — perhaps, apart from nosiness and an inability to suffer fools gladly, my only vice — then turned on the standard lamp beside my armchair and settled down to examine my haul. There was a certain excitement in having pilfered it, as they say, and for a moment I imagined I had an inkling of that illicit thrill Fingers Finnegan must get every time he burgles someone’s house. Of course, this was different; I hadn’t broken into Rose’s house for my own benefit, to line my own pockets, but to solve the mystery of her murder.

The first thing the shoebox yielded was a photograph of three smiling young women standing in front of an old van with a cross on its side. I could tell by their uniforms that they were nurses from the first war. On the back, in slightly smudged ink, someone had written “Midge, Rose and Margaret — Flanders, 30th July, 1917. Friends Inseparable Forever!”

I stared hard at the photograph and, though my imagination may have been playing tricks on me, I thought I recognized Rose as the one in the middle. She had perfect dimples at the edges of her smile, and her eyes gazed, pure and clear, directly into the lens. She bore little resemblance to the Rose I had known as Mad Maggie, or indeed to the body of Rose Faversham as I had seen it. But I think it was her.

I put the photograph aside and pulled out the next item. It was a book of poetry: Severn and Somme by Ivor Gurney. One of my favorite poets, Gurney was gassed at St. Julien, near Passchendaele, and sent to a war hospital near Edinburgh. I heard he later became mentally disturbed and suicidal, and he died just two or three years ago, after nearly twenty years of suffering. I have always regretted that we never met.

I opened the book. On the title page, someone had written, “To My Darling Rose on her 21st Birthday, 20th March, 1918. Love, Nicholas.” So Rose was even younger than I had thought.

I set the book aside for a moment and rubbed my eyes. Sometimes I fancied the residual effects of the gas made them water, though my doctor assured me that it was a foolish notion, as mustard gas wasn’t a lachrymator.

I hadn’t been in the war as late as March 1918. The injury that sent me to hospital in Manchester, my “Blighty,” took place the year before. Blistered and blinded, I had lain in bed there for months, unwilling to get up. The blindness passed, but the scarring remained, both inside and out. In the small hours, when I can’t sleep, I relive those early days of August 1917, in Flanders: the driving rain, the mud, the lice, the rats, the deafening explosions. It was madness. We were doomed from the start by incompetent leaders, and as we struggled waist-deep through mud, with shells and bullets flying all around us, we could only watch in hopeless acceptance as our own artillery sank in the mud, and our tanks followed it down.

Judging by the words on the back of the photograph, Rose had been there, too: Rose, one of the angels of mercy who tended the wounded and the dying in the trenches of Flanders’ fields.

I opened the book. Nicholas, or Rose, had underlined the first few lines of the first poem, “To the Poet Before Battle”:

Perhaps Nicholas had been a poet, and Gurney’s call for courage in the face of impending battle applied to him, too? And if Nicholas had been a poet, was Rose one of the “lovely things” he had to set aside?

Outside, the all-clear sounded and brought me back to earth. I breathed a sigh of relief. Spared again. Still, I had been so absorbed in Rose’s treasures that I probably wouldn’t have heard a bomb if one fell next door. They say you never hear the one with your name on it.

I set the book down beside the photograph and dug around deeper in the shoebox. I found a medal of some sort — I think for valor in wartime nursing — and a number of official papers and certificates. Unfortunately, there were no personal letters. Even so, I managed to compile a list of names to seek out and one or two official addresses where I might pursue my inquiries into Rose Faversham’s past. No time like the present, I thought, going over to my escritoire and taking out pen and paper.

I posted my letters early the following morning, when I went to fetch my newspaper. I had the day off from school, as the pupils were collecting aluminum pots and pans for the Spitfire Fund, so I thought I might slip into “Special Constable” mode and spend an hour or two scouring Fingers Finnegan’s usual haunts.

I started at Frinton’s, on the High Street, where I also treated myself to two rashers of bacon and an egg. By mid-morning, I had made my way around most of the neighboring cafés, and it was lunchtime when I arrived at Lyon’s in the city center. I didn’t eat out very often, and twice a day was almost unheard of. Even so, I decided to spend one and three-pence on roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. There was a lot of meat around then because the powers that be were slaughtering most of the farm animals to turn the land over to crops. I almost felt that I was doing my national duty by helping eat some before it went rotten.

As I waited, I noticed Finnegan slip in through the door in his usual manner, licking his lips, head half-bowed, eyes flicking nervously around the room trying to seek out anyone who may have been after him, or to whom he may have owed money. I wasn’t in uniform, and I was pretending to be absorbed in my newspaper, so his eyes slid over me. When he decided it was safe, he sat down three tables away from me.

My meal came, and I tucked in with great enthusiasm, managing to keep Finnegan in my peripheral vision. Shortly, another man came in — dark-haired, red-faced — and sat with Finnegan. The two of them put their heads together, all the time Finnegan’s eyes flicking here and there, looking for danger signs. I pretended to pay no attention but was annoyed that I couldn’t overhear a word. Something exchanged hands under the table, and the other man left: Finnegan fencing his stolen goods again.

I waited, lingering over my tea and rice pudding, and when Finnegan left, I followed him. I hadn’t wanted to confront him in the restaurant and cause a scene, so I waited until we came near a ginnel not far from my own street, then I speeded up, grabbed him by the shoulders, and dragged him into it.

Finnegan was not very strong — in fact, he was a scrawny, sickly sort of fellow, which is why he wasn’t fit for service — but he was slippery as an eel, and it took all my energy to hang onto him until I got him where I wanted him, with his back to the wall and my fists gripping his lapels. I slammed him against the wall a couple of times to take any remaining wind out of his sails, then when he went limp, it was ready to start.

“Bloody hell, Constable Bascombe!” he said when he’d got his breath back. “I didn’t recognize you at first. You didn’t have to do that, you know. If there’s owt you want to know why don’t you just ask me? Let’s be civilians about it.”

“The word is civilized. With you? Come off it, Fingers.”

“My name’s Michael.”

“Listen, Michael, I want some answers and I want them now.”

“Answers to what?”

“During last night’s air-raid I saw you coming out of a house on Cardigan Road.”

“I never.”

“Don’t lie to me. I know it was you.”

“So what? I might’ve been at my cousin’s. He lives on Cardigan Road.”

“You were carrying something.”

“He gave me a couple of kippers.”

“You’re lying to me, Fingers, but we’ll let that pass for the moment. I’m interested in the raid before that one.”

“When was that, then?”

“Last Wednesday.”

“How d’you expect me to remember what I was doing that long ago?”

“Because murder can be quite a memorable experience, Fingers.”

He turned pale and slithered in my grip. My palms were sweaty. “Murder? Me? You’ve got to be joking! I’ve never killed nobody.”

I didn’t bother pointing out that that meant he must have killed somebody — linguistic niceties such as that being as pointless with someone of Finnegan’s intelligence as speaking loudly to a foreigner and hoping to be understood — so I pressed on. “Did you break into Rose Faversham’s house on Aston Place last Wednesday during the raid?”

“Rose Faversham. Who the bloody hell’s she when she’s at home? Never heard of her.”

“You might have known her as Mad Maggie.”

“Mad Maggie. Now why would a bloke like me want to break into her house? That’s assuming he did things like that in the first place, hypnotically, like.”

Hypnotically? Did he mean hypothetically? I didn’t even ask. “To rob her, perhaps?”

“Nah. You reckon a woman who went around looking like she did would have anything worth stealing? Hypnotically, again, of course.”

“Of course, Fingers. This entire conversation is hypnotic. I understand that.”

“Mad Maggie hardly draws attention to herself as a person worth robbing. Not unless you’re into antiques.”

“And you’re not?”

“Wouldn’t know a Chippendale from a Gainsborough.”

“Know anybody who is?”

“Nah.”

“What about the thousands of pounds they say she had hidden in her mattress?”

“And pigs can fly, Constable Bascombe.”

“What about silverware?”

“There’s a bob or two in a nice canteen of cutlery. Hypnotically, of course.”

The one thing that might have been of value to someone other than herself was Rose’s silverware, and that had been left alone. Even if Fingers had been surprised by her and killed her, he would hardly have left his sole prize behind when he ran off. On the other hand, with a murder charge hanging over it, the silverware might have turned out to be more of a liability than an asset. I looked at his face, into his eyes, trying to decide whether he was telling the truth. You couldn’t tell anything from Finnegan’s face, though; it was like a ferret-mask.

“Look,” he said, licking his lips, “I might be able to help you.”

“Help me?”

“Yeah. But... you know... not standing here, like this...”

I realized I was still holding him by the lapels, and I had hoisted him so high he had to stand on his tiptoes. I relaxed my grip. “What do you have in mind?”

“We could go to the Prince Albert, have a nice quiet drink. They’ll still be open.”

I thought for a moment. The hard way hadn’t got me very far. Maybe a little diplomacy was in order. Though it galled me to be going for a drink with a thieving illiterate like Fingers Finnegan, there were larger things at stake. I swallowed my pride and said, “Why not.”

Nobody paid us a second glance, which was all right by me. I bought us both a pint, and we took a quiet table by the empty fireplace. Fingers brought a packet of Woodbines out of his pocket and lit up. His smoke burned my lungs and caused me a minor coughing fit, but he didn’t seem concerned by it.

“What makes you think you can help me?” I asked him when I’d recovered.

“I’ll bet you’re after Mad Maggie’s murderer, aren’t you?”

“How do you know that?”

“Word gets around. The real police think it was Gypsies, you know. They’ve got one of them in the cells right now. Found some silver candlesticks in his possession.”

“How did they know whether Rose had any silver candlesticks?”

He curled his lip and looked at me as if I were stupid. “They don’t, but they don’t know that she didn’t, do they? All they need’s a confession, and he’s a brute in the interrogation room is that short-arse bastard.”

“Who?”

“Longbottom. It’s what we call him. Longbottom. Short-arse. Get it?”

“I’m falling off my chair with laughter. Have you got anything interesting to tell me or haven’t you?”

“I might have seen someone, mightn’t I?”

“Seen someone? Who? Where?”

He rattled his empty glass on the table. “That’d be telling, wouldn’t it?”

I sighed, pushed back the disgust I felt rising like vomit in my craw, and bought him another pint. He was smirking all over his ferret face when I got back.

“Ta very much, Constable Bascombe. You’re a true gentleman, you are.”

The bugger was enjoying this. “Fingers,” I said, “you don’t know how much your praise means to me. Now, to get back to what you were saying.”

“It’s Michael. I told you. And none of your Micks or Mikes. My name’s Michael.”

“Right, Michael. You know, I’m a patient man, but I’m beginning to feel just a wee bit let down here. I’m thinking that perhaps it might not be a bad idea for me to take you to Detective Sergeant Longbottom and see if he can’t persuade you to tell him what you know.”

Fingers jerked upright. “Hang on a minute. There’s no need for anything drastic like that. I’m just having my little bit of fun, that’s all. You wouldn’t deny a fellow his little bit of fun, would you?”

“Heaven forbid,” I muttered. “So now you’ve had your fun, Fin— er... Michael, perhaps we can get back to business?”

“Right... well... theatrically speaking, of course, I might have been in Aston Place on the night you’re talking about.”

Theatrically? Let it go, Frank. “Last Wednesday, during the air-raid?”

“Right. Well I might have been, just, you know, being a concerned citizen and all, going round checking up all the women and kids was in the shelters, like.”

“And the old people. Don’t forget the old people.”

“Especially the old people. Anyway, like I said, I just might have been passing down Aston Place during the air-raid, seeing that everyone was all right, like, and I might just have seen someone coming out of Mad Maggie’s house.”

“Did you?”

“Well, it was dark, and that bloody smoke from the power station doesn’t make things any better. Like a real pea-souper, that is. Anyway, I might just have seen this figure, like, a quick glimpse.”

“I understand. Any idea who it was?”

“Not at first I hadn’t, but now I’ve an idea. I just hadn’t seen him for a long time.”

“Where were you?”

“Coming out of— Can’t have been more than two or three houses away. When I saw him he gave me a real fright, so I pressed myself back in the doorway, like, so he couldn’t see me.”

“But you got a look at him?”

“Not a good one. First thing I noticed, though, is he was wearing a uniform.”

“What kind of uniform?”

“I don’t know, do I? Soldier’s, I suppose.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, he moved off sort of sideways, like.”

“Crabwise?”

“Come again?”

“Like a crab?”

“If you say so, Constable Bascombe.”

Something about all this was beginning to make sense, but I wasn’t sure I liked the sense it made. “Did you notice anything else?”

“I saw him go into a house across the street.”

“Which one?” I asked, half of me not wanting to know the answer.

“The milkman’s,” he said.

I didn’t want to, but I had to see this through. Tommy Fletcher. My own godson. All afternoon I thought about it, and I could see no way out of confronting Harry and Tommy. No matter how much thinking I did, I couldn’t come up with an explanation, and if Tommy had murdered Rose Faversham, I wanted to know why. He had certainly been acting oddly since he came back from the army hospital, but I had acted rather strangely myself after they released me from the hospital in Manchester in 1918. I knew better than to judge a man by the way he reacts to war.

I consoled myself with the fact that Tommy might not have killed Rose, that she was already dead when he went to see her, but I knew in my heart that didn’t make sense. Nobody just dropped in on Mad Maggie to see how she was doing, and the idea of two people going to see her in one night was absurd. No, I knew that the person Fingers had seen coming out of Rose’s house had to be her killer, and he swore that person was Tommy Fletcher.

Fingers could have been lying, but that didn’t make sense either. For a start, he wasn’t that clever. He must also know that I would confront Tommy and that, one way or another, I’d find out the truth. No, if Fingers had killed Mad Maggie and wanted to escape blame, all he had to do was deny that he had been anywhere near her house and let the Gypsy take the fall.

I steeled myself with a quick brandy, then I went around to Harry’s house just after eight o’clock. They were all listening to a variety program on the Home Service, and someone was torturing “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” As usual, Tommy was wearing his army uniform, even though he was on extended leave. He still looked ill, pale and thin. His mother, Polly, a stout, silent woman I had known ever since she was a little girl, offered to make tea and disappeared into the kitchen.

“What brings you out at this time of night, then?” Harry asked. “Want some company down at the Prince Albert?”

I shook my head. “Actually, it’s your Tommy I came to see.”

A shadow of fear crossed Harry’s face. “Tommy? Well, you’d better ask him yourself, then. Best of luck.”

Tommy hadn’t moved yet, but when I addressed him, he slowly turned to face me. There was a look of great disappointment in his eyes, as if he knew he had had something valuable in his grasp only to have it taken from him at the last minute. Harry turned off the radio.

“Tommy,” I said, speaking as gently as I could, “did you go to visit Mad Maggie last Wednesday night, the night of the air-raid?”

Harry was staring at me, disbelief written all over his face. “For God’s sake, Frank!” he began, but I waved him down.

“Did you, Tommy? Did you visit Mad Maggie?”

Slowly, Tommy nodded.

“You don’t have to say anymore,” Harry said, getting to his feet. He turned to me as if I were his betrayer. “I’ve considered you a good friend for many years, Frank, but you’re pushing me too far.”

Polly came back in with the teapot and took in the scene at a glance. “What’s up? What’s going on?”

“Sit down, Polly,” I said. “I’m asking your Tommy a few questions, that’s all.”

Polly sat. Harry remained standing, fists clenched at his sides, then Tommy’s voice broke the deadlock. “It’s all right, Mum,” he said to Polly, “I want to tell him. I want to get it off my chest.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, son,” she said.

Tommy pointed at Harry. “He does. He’s not as daft as he looks.”

I looked at Harry, who sat down again and shook his head.

Tommy turned back to me. “Did I go visit Mad Maggie? Yes, I did. Did I kill her? Yes, I did. I got in through the back window. It wasn’t locked. I picked up the posser and went through into the living room. She was sitting in the dark. Didn’t even have a wireless. She must have heard me, but she didn’t move. She looked at me just once before I hit her, and I could swear she knew why I was doing it. She understood and she knew it was right. It was just.”

As Tommy spoke, he became more animated and his eyes started to glow with life again, as if his prize were once more within his grasp.

“Why did you do it, Tommy?” I asked. “What did she ever do to harm you?”

He looked at Harry. “She killed my dad.”

“She what?”

“I told you. She killed my dad. My real dad.”

Polly flopped back in her armchair, tea forgotten, and put her hand to her heart. “Tommy, what are you saying?”

“He knew,” he said, looking at Harry again. “Or at least he suspected. I told him about the field, about the villagers, the madwoman.”

Harry shook his head. “I didn’t know,” he said. “You never told me it was her. All I knew was that you were upset, you were saying crazy things and acting strange. Especially when you came in from the raid that night. I was worried, that’s all. If I ever suspected you, that’s the only reason, son, I swear it. When I found her body, I thought if there was the remotest possibility... That’s why I went for Frank. I told him to lay off it, to let the gypos take the blame. But he wouldn’t.” Harry pointed his finger at me, red in the face. “If you want to blame anyone, blame him.”

“Calm down, Harry,” I told him. “You’ll give yourself a heart attack.”

“It’s not a matter of blame,” Tommy said. “It’s about justice. And justice has been served.”

“Better tell me about it, Tommy,” I said. The air-raid siren went off, wailing up and down the scale. We all ignored it.

Tommy paused and ran his hand through his closely cropped hair. He looked at me. “You should understand, Mr. Bascombe. You were there. He was your best friend.”

I frowned. “Tell me, Tommy.”

“Before Dunkirk, a group of us got cut off and we were in this village near Ypres for a few days, before the Germans got too close. We almost didn’t make it to the coast in time for the evacuation. The people were frightened about what the Germans might do if they found out we were there, but they were kind to us. I became quite friendly with one old fellow who spoke very good English, and I told him my father had been killed somewhere near here in the first war. Passchendaele. I said I’d never seen his grave. One day, the old man took me out in his horse and cart and showed me some fields. It was late May, and the early poppies were just coming out among the rows of crosses. It looked beautiful. I knew my father was there somewhere.” Tommy choked for a moment, looked away, and wiped his eyes.

“Then the old man told me a story,” he went on. “He said there was a woman living in the village who used to, you... you know... with the British soldiers. But she was in love with a German officer, and she passed on any information she could pick up from the British directly to him. One soldier let something slip about some new trench positions they were preparing for a surprise attack, and before anyone knew what had hit them, the trenches were shelled and the Germans swarmed into them. They killed every British soldier in their path. It came to hand-to-hand combat in the end. Bayonets. And the woman’s German lover was one of the last to die.”

Tommy paused, glanced at his mother, and went on. “He told me she never recovered. She went mad, and for a while after the armies had moved on she could be heard wailing for her dead German lover in the poppy fields at night. Then nothing more was heard of her. The rumor was that she had gone to England, where they had plenty of other madwomen to keep her company. I thought of Mad Maggie right from the start, of course, and I remembered the way she used to burst into French every now and then. I asked him if he had a photograph, and he said he thought he had an old one. We went back to his house, and he rummaged through his attic and came down with an old album. There she was. The same sort of clothes. That same look about her. Much younger and very beautiful, but it was her. It was Mad Maggie. And she had killed my father. He was in one of those trenches.”

“What happened next, Tommy?”

“I don’t remember much of the next couple of months. The Germans got too close and we had to make a hasty departure. That’s when I was wounded. I was lucky to make it to Dunkirk. If it hadn’t been for my mates... They carried me most of the way. Anyway, for a while I didn’t know where I was. In and out of consciousness. To be honest, half the time I preferred to be out of it. I had dreams, nightmares, visions, and I saw myself coming back and avenging my father’s death.”

His eyes shone with pride and righteousness as he spoke. Outside, the bombs were starting to sound alarmingly close. “Let’s get down to the shelter,” Harry suggested.

“No,” said Tommy, holding up his hand. “Hear me out now. Wait till I’m done.” He turned to me. “You should understand, Mr. Bascombe. She killed my dad. He was your best friend. You should understand. I only did what was right.”

I shook my head. “There’s no avenging deaths during wartime, Tommy. It’s every man for himself. Some German bullet or bayonet had Larry’s name on it, and that was that. Wrong place, wrong time. It could just as easily have been me.”

Tommy stared at me in disbelief.

“Besides,” I went on, getting a little concerned at the explosions outside, “are you sure it was her, Tommy? It seems an awful coincidence that she should end up living on our street, don’t you think?”

“I’m sure. I saw the photograph. I’ve still got it.”

“Can I have a look?”

Tommy opened his top pocket and handed me a creased photograph. There was no doubt about the superficial resemblance between the woman depicted there, leaning against a farmer’s fence, wearing high-buttoned boots, smiling and holding her hand to her forehead to keep the sun out of her eyes. But it wasn’t the same woman whose photograph I had found in Rose Faversham’s shoe-box. In fact, it wasn’t any of the three — Midge, Rose, or Margaret. There were no dimples, for a start, and the eyes were different. We all have our ways of identifying people, and with me it’s always the eyes. Show me someone at six, sixteen, and sixty and I’ll know if it’s the same person or not by the eyes.

Another bomb landed far too close for comfort, and the whole house shook. Then a split second later came a tremendous explosion. Plaster fell off the ceiling. The lights and radio went off. I could hear the drone of the bombers slowly disappearing to the southeast, on their way home again. We were all shaken, but I pulled myself to my feet first and suggested we go outside to see if anyone needed help.

I didn’t really think he’d make a run for it, but I stuck close to Tommy as we all went outside. The smell was awful; the bitter, fiery smell of the explosive and a whiff of gas from a fractured pipe mixed with dust from broken masonry. The sky was lit up like Guy Fawkes night. It was a terrible sight that met our eyes, and the four of us could only stand and stare.

A bomb had taken out about three houses on the other side of the street. The middle one, now nothing but a pile of burning rubble, was Mad Maggie’s.

When the answers to my letters started trickling in a couple of weeks after Tommy’s arrest, I picked up some more leads, one of which eventually led me to Midge Livesey, now a mother of two boys — both in the RAF — who was living only thirty miles away, in the country. I telephoned her, and she seemed pleased to hear from someone who had known Rose, though she was saddened by the news of Rose’s death, and she suggested I be her guest for the weekend.

Though it was late October, the weather was fine when I got off the train at the tiny station. It was a wonderful feeling to be out in the country again. I had been away for so long I had almost forgotten what the autumn leaves looked like and how many different varieties of birdsong there are. The sweet, acrid scent of burning leaves from someone’s garden made a fine change from the stink of the air-raids.

Midge and her husband, Arthur, welcomed me at the door of their cottage and told me they had already prepared the spare room. After I had laid out my things on the bed, I opened the window. Directly outside stood an apple tree, and beyond that I could see the landscape undulating to the north, where the large anvil shapes of peaks and fells were visible in the distance. I took in a deep breath of fresh air — as deep as I could manage with my poor lungs — and for once it didn’t make me cough. Perhaps it was time I left the city, I thought. But no, there were police duties to attend to, and I loved my teaching job. After the war, perhaps, I would think about it again, see if I could get a job in a village school.

When I showed Midge the photograph of the three of them over dinner that evening, a sad smile played across her features, and she touched the surface with her fingers, as if it could send out some sort of message to her.

“Yes,” she said, “that was Rose. And that was Margaret. Poor Margaret, she died in childbirth ten years ago. The war wasn’t all bad for us. We did have some good times. But I think the day that photograph was taken marked the beginning of the end. It was the day before the third Ypres battle started, and we were field nurses. We used to go onto the fields and into the trenches to clean up after the battles.” She shook her head and looked at Arthur, who tenderly put his hand on top of hers. “You’ve never... well, I suppose you have.” She looked at her husband. “Arthur understands, too. He was wounded at Arras. I worry about my boys. Just remembering, just thinking about it, makes me fear for them terribly. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” I said.

She paused for a moment and poured us all tea. “Anyway, Rose was especially sensitive,” she went on. “She wrote poetry and wanted to go to university to study English literature when it was all over. French, too. She spoke French very well and spent a lot of time talking to the poor wounded French soldiers. Often they were with the English, you know, and there was nobody could talk to them. Rose did. She fell in love with a handsome young English lieutenant. Nicholas, his name was.” She smiled. “But we were young. We were always falling in love back then.”

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“Rose? She broke under the strain. Shell-shock, I suppose you’d call it. You hear a lot about the poor boys, the breakdowns, the self-inflicted wounds, but you never hear much about the women, do you? Where are we in the history books? We might not have been shooting at the Germans and only in minimal danger of getting shot at ourselves — though there were times — but we were there. We saw the slaughter firsthand. We were up to our elbows in blood and guts. Some people just couldn’t take it, the way some of the boys couldn’t take combat. I’ll say this, though, I think it was Nicholas’s death that finally sent Rose over the edge. It was the following year, 1918, the end of March, near a little village on the Somme called St. Quentin. She found him, you know, on the field. It was pure chance. Half his head had been blown away. She was never the same. She used to mutter to herself in French and go into long silences. Eventually, she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of morphine, but a doctor found her in time. She was invalided out in the end.”

“Do you know what happened next?”

“I visited her as soon as the war was over. She’d just come out of the hospital and was living with her parents. They were wealthy landowners — very posh, you might say — and they hadn’t a clue what to do with her. She was an embarrassment to them. In the end they set up a small fund for her, so she would never have to go without, and left her to her own devices.”

After a moment or two’s silence, I showed Midge the book of poetry. Again, she fingered it like a blind person looking for meaning. “Oh, yes. Ivor Gurney. She was always reading this.” She turned the pages. “This was her favorite.” She read us a short poem called “Bach and the Sentry,” in which the poet on sentry duty hears his favorite Bach prelude in his imagination and wonders how he will feel later, when he actually plays the piece again in peacetime. Then she shook her head. “Poor mad Rose. Nobody knew what to do with her. Do tell me what became of her.”

I told her what I knew, which wasn’t much, though for some reason I held back the part about Tommy and his mistake. I didn’t want Midge to know that my godson had mistaken her friend for a traitor. It seemed enough to lay the blame at the feet of a Gypsy thief and hope that Midge wasn’t one of those women who followed criminal trials closely in the newspapers.

Nor did I tell her that Rose’s house had been destroyed by a bomb almost a week after the murder and that she would almost certainly have been killed anyway. Midge didn’t need that kind of cruel irony. She had suffered enough; she had enough bad memories to fuel her nightmares, and enough to worry about in the shape of her two boys.

I simply told her that Rose was a very private person, certainly eccentric in her dress and her mannerisms, and that none of us really knew her very well. She was a part of the community, though, and we all mourned her loss.

So Mad Maggie was another of war’s victims, I thought, as I breathed in the scent of the apple tree before getting into bed that night. One of the uncelebrated ones. She came to our community to live out her days in anonymous grief and whatever inner peace she could scrounge for herself, her sole valuable possessions a book of poetry, an old photograph, and a nursing medal.

And so she would have remained, a figure to be mocked by the children and ignored by the adults, had it not been for another damn war, another damaged soul, and the same poppy field in Flanders.

Requiescat in pace, Rose, though I am not a religious man. Requiescat in pace.

It should never have happened, but they hanged Tommy Fletcher for the murder of Rose Faversham at Wandsworth Prison on 25th May, 1941, at eight o’clock in the morning.

Everyone said Tommy should have got off for psychiatric reasons, but his barrister had a permanent hangover, and the judge had an irritable bowel. In addition, the expert psychiatrist hired to evaluate him didn’t know shell-shock from an Oedipus complex.

The only thing we could console ourselves with was that Tommy went to the gallows proud and at peace with himself for having avenged his father’s death.

I hadn’t the heart to tell him that he was wrong about Mad Maggie, that she wasn’t the woman he thought she was.