The Best American Mystery Stories 2001

Peter Robinson Missing in Action

From Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

People go missing all the time in war, of course, but not usually nine-year-old boys. Besides, the war had hardly begun. It was only the twentieth of September, 1939, when Mary Critchley came hammering on my door at about three o’clock, interrupting my afternoon nap.

It was a Wednesday, and normally I would have been teaching the fifth-formers Shakespeare at Silverhill Grammar School (a thankless task if ever there was one), but the Ministry had just got around to constructing air-raid shelters there, so the school was closed for the week. We didn’t even know if it was going to reopen, because the idea was to evacuate all the children to safer areas in the countryside. Now, I would be among the first to admit that a teacher’s highest aspiration is a school without pupils, but in the meantime the government, in its eternal wisdom, put us redundant teachers to such complex, intellectual tasks as preparing ration cards for the Ministry of Food. (After all, they knew what was coming.)

All this was just a small part of the chaos that seemed to reign at that time. Not the chaos of war, the kind I remembered from the trenches at Ypres in 1917, but the chaos of government bureaucracies trying to organize the country for war.

Anyway, I was fortunate enough to become Special Constable, which is a rather grandiose title for a sort of part-time dogsbody, and that was why Mary Critchley came running to me. That and what little reputation I had for solving people’s problems.

“Mr. Bashcombe! Mr. Bashcombe!” she cried. “It’s our Johnny. He’s gone missing. You must help.”

My name is actually Bascombe, Frank Bascombe, but Mary Critchley has a slight speech impediment, so I forgave her the mispronunciation. Still, with half the city’s children running wild in the streets and the other half standing on crowded station platforms clutching their Mickey Mouse gas masks in little cardboard boxes, ready to be herded into trains bound for such nearby country havens as Graythorpe, Kilsden, and Acksham, I thought perhaps she was overreacting a tad, and I can’t say I welcomed her arrival after only about twenty of my allotted forty winks.

“He’s probably out playing with his mates,” I told her.

“Not my Johnny,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Not since… you know…”

I knew. Mr. Critchley, Ted to his friends, had been a Royal Navy man since well before the war. He had also been unfortunate enough to serve on the fleet carrier Courageous, which had been sunk by a German U-boat off the southwest coast of Ireland just three days ago. Over 500 men had been lost, including Ted Critchley. Of course, no body had been found, and probably never would be, so he was only officially “missing in action.”

I also knew young Johnny Critchley, and thought him to be a serious boy, a bit too imaginative and innocent for his own good. (Well, many are at that age, aren’t they, before the world grabs them by the balls and shakes some reality into them.) Johnny trusted everyone, even strangers.

“Johnny’s not been in much of a mood for playing with his mates since we got the news about Ted’s ship,” Mary Critchley went on.

I could understand that well enough — young Johnny was an only child, and he always did worship his father — but I still didn’t see what I could do about it. “Have you asked around?”

“What do you think I’ve been doing since he didn’t come home at twelve o’clock like he was supposed to? I’ve asked everyone in the street. Last time he was seen he was down by the canal at about eleven o’clock. Maurice Richards saw him. What can I do, Mr. Bashcombe? First Ted, and now… now my Johnny!” She burst into tears.

After I had managed to calm her down, I sighed and told her I would look for Johnny myself. There certainly wasn’t much hope of my getting the other twenty winks now.

It was a glorious day, so warm and sunny you would hardly believe there was a war on. The late-afternoon sunshine made even our narrow streets of cramped brick terrace houses look attractive. As the shadows lengthened, the light turned to molten gold. First, I scoured the local rec where the children played cricket and football, and the dogs ran wild. Some soldiers were busy digging trenches for air-raid shelters. Just the sight of those long, dark grooves in the earth gave me the shivers. Behind the trenches, barrage balloons pulled at their moorings on the breeze like playful porpoises, orange and pink in the sun. I asked the soldiers, but they hadn’t seen Johnny. Nor had any of the other lads.

After the rec I headed for the derelict houses on Gallipoli Street. The landlord had let them go to rack and ruin two years ago, and they were quite uninhabitable, not even fit for billeting soldiers. They were also dangerous and should have been pulled down, but I think the old skinflint was hoping a bomb would hit them so he could claim insurance or compensation from the government. The doors and windows had been boarded up, but children are resourceful, and it wasn’t difficult even for me to remove a couple of loose sheets of plywood and make my way inside. I wished I had my torch, but I had to make do with what little light slipped through the holes. Every time I moved, my feet stirred up clouds of dust, which did my poor lungs no good at all.

I thought Johnny might have fallen or got trapped in one of the houses. The staircases were rotten, and more than one lad had fallen through on his way up. The floors weren’t much better, either, and one of the fourth-formers at Silverhill had needed more than fifteen stitches a couple of weeks ago when one of his legs went right through the rotten wood and the splinters gouged his flesh.

I searched as best I could in the poor light, and I called out Johnny’s name, but no answer came. Before I left, I stood silently and listened for any traces of harsh breathing or whimpering.

Nothing.

After three hours of searching the neighbourhood, I’d had no luck at all. Blackout time was 7:45 P.M., so I still had about an hour and a half left, but if Johnny wasn’t in any of the local children’s usual haunts, I was at a loss as to where to look. I talked to the other boys I met here and there, but none of his friends had seen him since the family got the news of Ted’s death. Little Johnny Critchley, it seemed, had vanished into thin air.

At half past six, I called on Maurice Richards, grateful for his offer of a cup of tea and the chance to rest my aching feet. Maurice and I went back a long time. We had both survived the first war, Maurice with the loss of an arm and me with permanent facial scarring and a wracking cough that comes and goes, thanks to the mustard gas leaking through my mask at the Third Battle of Ypres. We never talked about the war, but it was there, we both knew, an invisible bond tying us close together while at the same time excluding us from so much other, normal human intercourse. Not many had seen the things we had, and thank God for that.

Maurice lit up a Passing Cloud one-handed, then he poured the tea. The seven o’clock news came on the radio, some such rot about us vowing to keep fighting until we’d vanquished the foe. It was still very much a war of words at that time, and the more rhetorical the language sounded, the better the politicians thought they were doing. There had been a couple of minor air skirmishes, and the sinking of the Courageous, of course, but all the action was taking place in Poland, which seemed as remote as the moon to most people. Some clever buggers had already started calling it the “Bore War.”

“Did you hear Tommy Handley last night, Frank?” Maurice asked.

I shook my head. There’d been a lot of hoopla about Tommy Handley’s new radio program, “It’s That Man Again,” or “ITMA,” as people called it. I was never a fan. Call me a snob, but when evening falls I’m far happier curling up with a good book or an interesting talk on the radio than listening to Tommy Handley.

“Talk about a laugh,” said Maurice. “They had this one sketch about the Ministry of Aggravation and the Office of Twerps. I nearly died.”

I smiled. “Not far from the truth,” I said. There were now so many of these obscure ministries, boards, and departments involved in so many absurd pursuits — all for the common good, of course — that I had been thinking of writing a dystopian satire. I proposed to set it in the near future, which would merely be a thinly disguised version of the present. So far, all I had was a great idea for the title: I would reverse the last two numbers in the current year, so instead of 1939, I’d call it 1993. (Well, I thought it was a good idea!) “Look, Maurice,” I said, “it’s about young Johnny Critchley. His mother tells me you were the last person to see him.”

“Oh, aye,” Maurice said. “She were round asking about him not long ago. Still not turned up?”

“No.”

“Cause for concern, then.”

“I’m beginning to think so. What was he doing when you saw him?”

“Just walking down by the canal, by old Woodruff s scrap yard.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“Was he alone?”

Maurice nodded.

“Did he say anything?”

“No.”

“You didn’t say anything to him?”

“No cause to. He seemed preoccupied, just staring in the water, like, hands in his pockets. I’ve heard what happened to his dad. A lad has to do his grieving.”

“Too true. Did you see anyone else? Anything suspicious?”

“No, nothing. Just a minute, though…”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s probably nothing, but just after I saw Johnny, when I was crossing the bridge, I bumped into Colin Gormond, you know, that chap who’s a bit… you know.”

Colin Gormond. I knew him all right. And that wasn’t good news; it wasn’t good news at all.

Of all the policemen they could have sent, they had to send Detective bloody Sergeant Longbottom, a big, brutish-looking fellow with a pronounced limp and a Cro-Magnon brow. Longbottom was thick as two short planks. I doubt he could have found his own arse even if someone nailed a sign on it, or detect his way out of an Anderson shelter if it were in his own backyard. But that’s the caliber of men this wretched war has left us with at home. Along with good ones like me, of course.

DS Longbottom wore a shiny brown suit and a Silverhill Grammar School tie. I wondered where he’d got it from; he probably stole it from some schoolboy he caught nicking sweets from the corner shop. He kept tugging at his collar with his pink sausage fingers as we talked in Mary Critchley’s living room. His face was flushed with the heat, and sweat gathered on his thick eyebrows and trickled down the sides of his neck.

“So he’s been missing since lunchtime, has he?” DS Longbottom repeated.

Mary Critchley nodded. “He went out at about half past ten, just for a walk, like. Said he’d be back at twelve. When it got to three… well, I went to see Mr. Bashcombe here.”

DS Longbottom curled his lip at me and grunted. “Mr. Bascombe. Special Constable. I suppose you realize that gives you no real police powers, don’t you?”

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I thought it made me your superior. After all, you’re not a special sergeant, are you?”

He looked at me as if he wanted to hit me. Perhaps he would have done if Mary Critchley hadn’t been in the room. “Enough of your lip. Just answer my questions.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You say you looked all over for this lad?”

“All his usual haunts.”

“And you found no trace of him?”

“If I had, do you think we’d have sent for you?”

“I warned you. Cut the lip and answer the questions. This, what’s his name, Maurice Richards, was he the last person to see the lad?”

“Johnny’s his name. And yes is the answer, as far as we know.” I paused. He’d have to know eventually, and if I didn’t tell him, Maurice would. The longer we delayed, the worse it would be in the long run. “There was someone else in the area at the time. A man called Colin Gormond.”

Mary Critchley gave a sharp gasp. DS Longbottom frowned, licked the tip of his pencil, and scribbled something in his notebook. “I’ll have to have a word with him,” he said. Then he turned to her. “Recognize the name, do you, ma’am?”

“I know Colin,” I answered, perhaps a bit too quickly.

DS Longbottom stared at Mary Critchley, whose lower lip started quivering, then turned slowly back to me. “Tell me about him.”

I sighed. Colin Gormond was an oddball. Some people said he was a bit slow, but I’d never seen any real evidence of that. He lived alone and he didn’t have much to do with the locals; that was enough evidence against him for some people.

And then there were the children.

For some reason, Colin preferred the company of the local lads to that of the rest of us adults. To be quite honest, I can’t say I blame him, but in a situation like this it’s bound to look suspicious. Especially if the investigating officer is someone with the sensitivity and understanding of a DS Longbottom.

Colin would take them trainspotting on the hill overlooking the main line, for example, or he’d play cricket with them on the rec or hand out conkers when the season came. He sometimes bought them sweets and ice creams, even gave them books, marbles, and comics.

To my knowledge, Colin Gormond had never once put a foot out of line, never laid so much as a finger on any of the lads, either in anger or in friendship. There had, however, been one or two mutterings from some parents — most notably from Jack Blackwell, father of one of Johnny’s pals, Nick — that it somehow wasn’t right, that it was unnatural for a man who must be in his late thirties or early forties to spend so much time playing with young children. There must be something not quite right in his head, he must be up to something, Jack Blackwell hinted, and as usual when someone starts a vicious rumour, there is no shortage of willing believers. Such a reaction was only to be expected from someone, of course, but I knew it wouldn’t go down well with DS Longbottom. I don’t know why, but I felt a strange need to protect Colin.

“Colin’s a local,” I explained. “Lived around here for years. He plays with the lads a bit. Most of them like him. He seems a harmless sort of fellow.”

“How old is he?”

I shrugged. “Hard to say. About forty, perhaps.”

DS Longbottom raised a thick eyebrow. “About forty, and he plays with the kiddies, you say?”

“Sometimes. Like a schoolteacher, or a youth-club leader.”

“Is he a schoolteacher?”

“No.”

“Is he a youth-club leader?”

“No. Look, what I meant—”

“I know exactly what you meant, Mr. Bascombe. Now you just listen to what I mean. What we’ve got here is an older man who’s known to hang around with young children, and he’s been placed near the scene where a young child has gone missing. Now, don’t you think that’s just a wee bit suspicious?”

Mary Critchley let out a great wail and started crying again. DS Longbottom ignored her. Instead, he concentrated all his venom on me, the softie, the liberal, the defender of child molesters. “What do you have to say about that, Mr. Special Constable Bascombe?”

“Only that Colin was a friend to the children and that he had no reason to harm anyone.”

“Friend,” DS Longbottom sneered, struggling to his feet. “We can only be thankful you’re not regular police, Mr. Bascombe,” he said, nodding to himself in acknowledgment of his own wisdom. “That we can.”

“So what are you going to do?” I asked.

DS Longbottom looked at his watch and frowned. Either he was trying to work out what it meant when the little hand and the big hand were in the positions they were in, or he was squinting because of poor eyesight. “I’ll have a word with this here Colin Gormond. Other than that, there’s not much more we can do tonight. First thing tomorrow morning, we’ll drag the canal.” He got to the door, turned, pointed to the windows, and said, “And don’t forget to put up your blackout curtains, ma’am, or you’ll have the ARP man to answer to.”

Mary Critchley burst into floods of tears again.

Even the soft dawn light could do nothing for the canal. It oozed through the city like an open sewer, oil slicks shimmering like rainbows in the sun, brown water dotted with industrial scum and suds, bits of driftwood and paper wrappings floating along with them. On one side was Ezekiel Woodruffs scrap yard. Old Woodruff was a bit of an eccentric. He used to come around the streets with his horse and cart yelling, “Any old iron,” but now the government had other uses for scrap metal — supposedly to be used in aircraft manufacture — poor old Woodruff didn’t have any way to make his living anymore. He’d already sent old Nell the carthorse to the knacker’s yard, where she was probably doing her bit for the war effort by helping to make the glue to stick the aircraft together. Old mangles and bits of broken furniture stuck up from the ruins of the scrap yard like shattered artillery after a battle.

On the other side, the bank rose steeply toward the backs of the houses on Canal Road, and the people who lived there seemed to regard it as their personal tip. Flies and wasps buzzed around old Hessian sacks and paper bags full of God knew what. A couple of buckled bicycle tires and a wheelless pram completed the picture.

I stood and watched as Longbottom supervised the dragging, a slow and laborious process that seemed to be sucking all manner of unwholesome objects to the surface — except Johnny Critchley’s body.

I felt tense. At any moment I half expected the cry to come from one of the policemen in the boats that they had found him, half expected to see the small, pathetic bundle bob above the water’s surface. I didn’t think Colin Gormond had done anything to Johnny — nor Maurice, though DS Longbottom had seemed suspicious of him, too, but I did think that, given how upset he was, Johnny might just have jumped in. He never struck me as the suicidal type, but I have no idea whether suicide enters the minds of nine-year-olds. All I knew was that he was upset about his father, and he was last seen skulking by the canal.

So I stood around with DS Longbottom and the rest as the day grew warmer, and there was still no sign of Johnny. After about three hours, the police gave up and went for bacon and eggs at Betty’s Cafe over on Chadwick Road. They didn’t invite me, and I was grateful to be spared both the unpleasant food and company. I stood and stared into the greasy water a while longer, unsure whether it was a good sign or not that Johnny wasn’t in the canal, then I decided to go and have a chat with Colin Gormond.

“What is it, Colin?” I asked him gently. “Come on. You can tell me.”

But Colin continued to stand with his back turned to me in the dark corner of his cramped living room, hands to his face, making eerie snuffling sounds, shaking his head. It was bright daylight outside, but the blackout curtains were still drawn tightly, and not a chink of light crept between their edges. I had already tried the light switch, but either Colin had removed the bulb or he didn’t have one.

“Come on, Colin. This is silly. You know me. I’m Mr. Bascombe. I won’t hurt you. Tell me what happened.”

Finally, Colin turned silently and moved out of his corner with his funny, shuffling way of walking. Someone said he had a clubfoot, and someone else said he’d had a lot of operations on his feet when he was a young lad, but nobody knew for certain why he walked the way he did. When he sat down and lit a cigarette, the match light illuminated his large nose, shiny forehead, and watery blue eyes. He used the same match to light a candle on the table beside him, and then I saw them: the black eye, the bruise on his left cheek. DS Longbottom. The bastard.

“Did you say anything to him?” I asked, anxious that DS Longbottom might have beaten a confession out of Colin, without even thinking that Colin probably wouldn’t still be at home if that were the case.

He shook his head mournfully. “Nothing, Mr. Bascombe. Honest. There was nothing I could tell him.”

“Did you see Johnny Critchley yesterday, Colin?”

“Aye.”

“Where?”

“Down by the canal.”

“What was he doing?”

“Just standing there chucking stones in the water.”

“Did you talk to him?”

Colin paused and turned away before answering “No.”

I had a brief coughing spell, his cigarette smoke working on my gassed lungs. When it cleared up, I said, “Colin, there’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there? You’d better tell me. You know I won’t hurt you, and I just might be the only person who can help you.”

He looked at me, pale eyes imploring. “I only called out to him, from the bridge, like, didn’t I?”

“What happened next?”

“Nothing. I swear it.”

“Did he answer?”

“No. He just looked my way and shook his head. I could tell then that he didn’t want to play. He seemed sad.”

“He’d just heard his dad’s been killed.”

Colin’s already watery eyes brimmed with tears. “Poor lad.”

I nodded. For all I knew, Colin might have been thinking about his dad, too. Not many knew it, but Mr. Gormond senior had been killed in the same bloody war that left me with my bad lungs and scarred face. “What happened next, Colin?”

Colin shook his head and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Nothing,” he said. “It was such a lovely day, I just went on walking. I went to the park and watched the soldiers digging trenches, then I went for my cigarettes and came home to listen to the wireless.”

“And after that?”

“I stayed in.”

“All evening?”

“That’s right. Sometimes I go down to the White Rose, but…”

“But what, Colin?”

“Well, Mr. Smedley, you know, the Air-Raid Precautions man?”

I nodded. “I know him.”

“He said my blackout cloth wasn’t good enough and he’d fine me if I didn’t get some proper stuff by yesterday.”

“I understand, Colin.” Good-quality, thick, impenetrable blackout cloth had become both scarce and expensive, which was no doubt why Colin had been cheated in the first place.

“Anyway, what with that and the cigarettes…”

I reached into my pocket and slipped out a few bob for him. Colin looked away, ashamed, but I put it on the table and he didn’t tell me to take it back. I knew how it must hurt his pride to accept charity, but I had no idea how much money he made, or how he made it. I’d never seen him beg, but I had a feeling he survived on odd jobs and lived very much from hand to mouth.

I stood up. “All right, Colin,” I said. “Thanks very much.” I paused at the door, uncertain how to say what had just entered my mind. Finally, I blundered ahead. “It might be better if you kept a low profile till they find him, Colin. You know what some of the people around here are like.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Bascombe?”

“Just be careful, Colin, that’s all I mean. Just be careful.”

He nodded gormlessly, and I left.

As I was leaving Colin’s house, I noticed Jack Blackwell standing on his doorstep, arms folded, a small crowd of locals around him, their shadows intersecting on the cobbled street. They kept glancing toward Colin’s house, and when they saw me come out, they all shuffled off except Jack himself, who gave me a grim stare before going inside and slamming his door. I felt a shiver go up my spine, as if a goose had stepped on my grave, as my dear mother used to say, bless her soul, and when I got home I couldn’t concentrate on my book one little bit.

By the following morning, when Johnny had been missing over thirty-six hours, the mood in the street had started to turn ugly. In my experience, when you get right down to it, there’s no sorrier spectacle, nothing much worse or more dangerous, than the human mob mentality. After all, armies are nothing more than mobs, really, even when they are organized to a greater or lesser degree. I’d been at Ypres, as you know, and there wasn’t a hell of a lot you could tell me about military organization. So when I heard the muttered words on doorsteps, saw the little knots of people here and there, Jack Blackwell flitting from door to door like a political canvasser, I had to do something, and I could hardly count on any help from DS Longbottom.

One thing I had learned both as a soldier and as a schoolteacher was that, if you had a chance, your best bet was to take out the ringleader. That meant Jack Blackwell. Jack was the nasty type, and he and I had had more than one run-in over his son Nick’s bullying and poor performance in class. In my opinion, young Nick was the sort of walking dead loss who should probably have been drowned at birth, a waste of skin, sinew, tissue, and bone, and it wasn’t hard to see where he got it from. Nick’s older brother, Dave, was already doing a long stretch in the Scrubs for beating a night watchman senseless during a robbery, and even the army couldn’t find an excuse to spring him and enlist his service in killing Germans. Mrs. Blackwell had been seen more than once walking with difficulty, with bruises on her cheek. The sooner Jack Blackwell got his call-up papers, the better things would be all around.

I intercepted Jack between the Deakins’ and the Kellys’ houses, and it was clear from his gruff “What do you want?” that he didn’t want to talk to me.

But I was adamant.

“ ’Morning, Jack,” I greeted him. “Lovely day for a walk, isn’t it?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Just being polite. What are you up to, Jack? What’s going on?”

“None of your business.”

“Up to your old tricks? Spreading poison?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He made to walk away, but I grabbed his arm. He glared at me but didn’t do anything. Just as well. At my age, and with my lungs, I’d hardly last ten seconds in a fight. “Jack,” I said, “don’t you think you’d all be best off using your time to look for the poor lad?”

“Look for him! That’s a laugh. You know as well as I do where that young lad is.”

“Where? Where is he, Jack?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t. Tell me.”

“He’s dead and buried, that’s what.”

“Where, Jack?”

“I don’t know the exact spot. If he’s not in the canal, then he’s buried somewhere not far away.”

“Maybe he is. But you don’t know that. Not for certain. And even if you believe that, you don’t know who put him there.”

Jack wrenched his arm out of my weakening grip and sneered. “I’ve got a damn sight better idea than you have, Frank Bascombe. With all your book learning!” Then he turned and marched off.

Somehow, I got the feeling that I had just made things worse.

After my brief fracas with Jack Blackwell, I was at a loose end. I knew the police would still be looking for Johnny, asking questions, searching areas of waste ground, so there wasn’t much I could do to help them. Feeling impotent, I went down to the canal, near Woodruff’s scrap yard. Old Ezekiel Woodruff himself was poking around in the ruins of his business, so I decided to talk to him. I kept my distance, though, for even on a hot day such as this, Woodruff was wearing his greatcoat and black wool gloves with the fingers cut off. He wasn’t known for his personal hygiene, so I made sure I didn’t stand downwind of him. Not that there was much of a wind, but then it didn’t take much.

“Morning, Ezekiel,” I said. “I understand young Johnny Critchley was down around here yesterday.”

“So they say,” muttered Ezekiel.

“See him, did you?”

“I weren’t here.”

“So you didn’t see him?”

“Police have already been asking questions.”

“And what did you tell them?”

He pointed to the other side of the canal, the back of the housing estate. “I were over there,” he said. “Sometimes people chuck out summat of value, even these days.”

“But you did see Johnny?”

He paused, then said, “Aye.”

“On this side of the canal?”

Woodruff nodded.

“What time was this?”

“I don’t have a watch, but it weren’t long after that daft bloke had gone by.”

“Do you mean Colin Gormond?”

“Aye, that’s the one.”

So Johnny was still alone by the canal after Colin had passed by. DS Longbottom had probably known this, but he had beaten Colin anyway. One day I’d find a way to get even with him. The breeze shifted a little and I got a whiff of stale sweat and worse. “What was Johnny doing?”

“Doing? Nowt special. He were just walking.”

“Walking? Where?”

Woodruff pointed. “That way. Towards the city center.”

“Alone?”

“Aye.”

“And nobody approached him?”

“Nope. Not while I were watching.”

I didn’t think there was anything further to be got from Ezekiel Woodruff, so I bade him good morning. I can’t say the suspicion didn’t enter my head that he might have had something to do with Johnny’s disappearance, though I’d have been hard pushed to say exactly why or what. Odd though old Woodruff might be, there had never been any rumor or suspicion of his being overly interested in young boys, and I didn’t want to jump to conclusions the way Jack Blackwell had. Still, I filed away my suspicions for later.

A fighter droned overhead. I watched it dip and spin through the blue air and wished I could be up there. I’d always regretted not being a pilot in the war. A barge full of soldiers drifted by, and I moved aside on the towpath to let the horse that was pulling it pass by. For my troubles I got a full blast of sweaty horseflesh and a pile of steaming manure at my feet. That had even Ezekiel Woodruff beat.

Aimlessly, I followed the direction Ezekiel had told me Johnny had walked in — toward the city center. As I walked, Jack Blackwell’s scornful words about my inability to find Johnny echoed in my mind. Book learning. That was exactly the kind of cheap insult you would expect from a moron like Jack Blackwell, but it hurt nonetheless. No sense telling him I’d been buried in the mud under the bodies of my comrades for two days. No sense telling him about the young German soldier I’d surprised and bayonetted to death, twisting the blade until it snapped and broke off inside him. Jack Blackwell was too young to have seen action in the last war, but if there was any justice in the world, he’d damn well see it in this one.

The canal ran by the back of the train station, where I crossed the narrow bridge and walked through the crowds of evacuees out front to City Square. Mary Critchley’s anguish reverberated in my mind, too: “Mr. Bashcombe! Mr. Bashcombe!”! heard her call.

Then, all of a sudden, as I looked at the black facade of the post office and the statue of the Black Prince in the center of City Square, it hit me. I thought I knew what had happened to Johnny Critchley, but first I had to go back to his street and ask just one important question.

It was late morning. The station smelled of damp soot and warm oil. Crowds of children thronged around trying to find out where they were supposed to go. They wore nametags and carried little cardboard boxes. Adults with clipboards, for the most part temporarily unemployed schoolteachers and local volunteers, directed them to the right queue, and their names were ticked off as they boarded the carriages.

Despite being neither an evacuated child nor a supervisor, I managed to buy a ticket and ended up sharing a compartment with a rather severe-looking woman in a brown uniform I didn’t recognize, and a male civilian with a brush mustache and a lot of Brylcreem on his hair. They seemed to be in charge of several young children, also in the compartment, who couldn’t sit still. I could hardly blame them. They were going to the alien countryside, to live with strangers, far away from their parents, for only God knew how long, and the idea scared them half to death.

The buttoned cushions were warm and the air in the carriage still and close, despite the open window. When we finally set off, the motion stirred up a bit of a breeze, which helped a little. On the wall opposite me was a poster of the Scarborough seafront, and I spent most of the journey remembering the carefree childhood holidays I had enjoyed there with my parents in the early years of the century: another world, another time. The rest of the trip, I glanced out of the window, beyond the scum-scabbed canal, and saw the urban industrial landscape drift by: back gardens, where some people had put in Anderson shelters, half covered with earth to grow vegetables on; the dark mass of the town hall clock tower behind the city center buildings; a factory yard, where several men were loading heavy crates onto a lorry, flushed and sweating in the heat.

Then we were in the countryside, where the smells of grass, hay, and manure displaced the reek of the city. I saw small, squat farms, drystone walls, sheep and cattle grazing. Soon, train tracks and canal diverged. We went under a long noisy tunnel, and the children whimpered. Later, I was surprised to see so many army convoys winding along the narrow roads, and the one big aerodrome we passed seemed buzzing with activity.

All in all, the journey took a little over two hours. Only about ten or eleven children were shepherded off at the small country station, and I followed as they were met and taken to the village hall, where the men and women who were to care for them waited. It was more civilized than some of the evacuation systems I’d heard about, which sounded more like the slave markets of old, where farmers waited on the platforms to pick out the strong lads, and local dignitaries whisked away the nicely dressed boys and girls.

I went up to the volunteer in charge, an attractive young countrywoman in a simple blue frock with a white lace collar and a belt around her slim waist, and asked her if she had any record of an evacuee called John, or Johnny, Critchley. She checked her records, then shook her head, as I knew she would. If I were right, Johnny wouldn’t be here under his own name. I explained my problem to the woman, who told me her name was Phyllis Rigby. She had a yellow ribbon in her long wavy hair and smelled of fresh apples. “I don’t see how anything like that could have happened,” Phyllis said. “We’ve been very meticulous. But there again, things have been a little chaotic.” She frowned in thought for a moment, then she delegated her present duties to another volunteer.

“Come on,” she said, “I’ll help you go from house to house. There weren’t that many evacuees, you know. Far fewer than we expected.”

I nodded. I’d heard how a lot of parents weren’t bothering to evacuate their children. “They can’t see anything happening yet,” I said. “Just you wait. After the first air raid you’ll have so many you won’t have room for them all.”

Phyllis smiled. “The poor things. It must be such an upheaval for them.”

“Indeed.”

I took deep, welcome breaths of country air as Phyllis and I set out from the village hall to visit the families listed on her clipboard. There were perhaps a couple of hundred houses, and less than fifty percent had received evacuees. Even so, we worked up quite a sweat calling at them all. Or I did, rather, as sweating didn’t seem to be in Phyllis’s nature. We chatted as we went, me telling her about my schoolteaching, and her telling me about her husband, Thomas, training as a fighter pilot in the RAF. After an hour or so with no luck, we stopped in at her cottage for a refreshing cup of tea, then we were off again.

At last, late in the afternoon, we struck gold.

Mr. and Mrs. Douglas, who were billeting Johnny Critchley, seemed a very pleasant couple, and they were sad to hear that they would not get to keep him with them for a while longer. I explained everything to them and assured them that they would get someone else as soon as we got the whole business sorted out.

“He’s not here,” Johnny said as we walked with Phyllis to the station. “I’ve looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find him.”

I shook my head. “Sorry, Johnny. You know your mum’s got a speech impediment. That was why I had to go back and ask her exactly what she said to you before I came here. She said she told you your father was missing in action, which, the way it came out, sounded like missing in Acksham, didn’t it? That’s why you came here, isn’t it, to look for your father?”

Young Johnny nodded, tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t understand why she didn’t come and look for him. She must be really vexed with me.”

I patted his shoulder. “I don’t think so. More like she’ll be glad to see you. How did you manage to sneak in with the real evacuees, by the way?”

Johnny wiped his eyes with his grubby sleeve. “At the station. There were so many people standing around, at first I didn’t know… Then I saw a boy I knew from playing cricket on the rec.”

“Oliver Bradley,” I said. The boy whose name Johnny was registered under.

“Yes. He goes to Broad Hill.”

I nodded. Though I had never heard of Oliver Bradley, I knew the school; it was just across the valley from us. “Go on.”

“I asked him where he was going, and he said he was being sent to Acksham. It was perfect.”

“But how did you get him to change places with you?”

“He didn’t want to. Not at first.”

“How did you persuade him?”

Johnny looked down at the road and scraped at some gravel with the scuffed tip of his shoe. “It cost me a complete set of ‘Great Cricketers’ cigarette cards. Ones my dad gave me before he went away.”

I smiled. It would have to be something like that.

“And I made him promise not to tell anyone, just to go home and say there wasn’t room for him and he’d have to try again in a few days. I just needed enough time to find Dad… you know.”

“I know.”

We arrived at the station, where Johnny sat on the bench and Phyllis and I chatted in the late afternoon sunlight, our shadows lengthening across the tracks. In addition to the birds singing in the trees and hedgerows, I could hear grasshoppers chirruping, a sound you rarely heard in the city. I had often thought how much I would like to live in the country, and perhaps when I retired from teaching a few years in the future I would be able to do so.

We didn’t have long to wait for our train. I thanked Phyllis for all her help, told her I wished her husband well, and she waved to us as the old banger chugged out of the station.

It was past blackout when I finally walked into our street holding Johnny’s hand. He was tired after his adventure and had spent most of the train journey with his head on my shoulder. Once or twice, from the depths of a dream, he had called his father’s name.

I could sense that something was wrong as soon as I turned the corner. It was nothing specific, just a sudden chill at the back of my neck. Because of the blackout, I couldn’t see anything clearly, but I got a strong impression of a knot of shifting shadows, just a little bit darker than the night itself, milling around outside Colin Gormond’s house.

I quickened my step, and as I got nearer I heard a whisper pass through the crowd when they saw Johnny. Then the shadows began to disperse, slinking and sidling away, disappearing like smoke into the air. From somewhere, Mary Critchley lurched forward with a cry and took young Johnny in her arms. I let him go. I could hear her thanking me between sobs, but I couldn’t stop walking.

The first thing I noticed when I approached Colin’s house was that the window was broken and half the blackout curtain had been ripped away. Next, I saw that the door was slightly ajar. I was worried that Colin might be hurt, but out of courtesy I knocked and called out his name

Nothing.

I pushed the door open and walked inside. It was pitch dark. I didn’t have a torch with me, and I knew that Colin’s light didn’t work, but I remembered the matches and the candle on the table. I lit it and held it up before me as I walked forward.

I didn’t have far to look. If I hadn’t had the candle, I might have bumped right into him. First I saw his face, about level with mine. His froth-specked lips had turned blue, and a trickle of dried blood ran from his left nostril. The blackout cloth was knotted around his neck in a makeshift noose, attached to a hook screwed into the lintel over the kitchen door. As I stood back and examined the scene further, I saw that his downturned toes were about three inches from the floor, and there was no sign of an upset chair or stool.

Harmless Colin Gormond, friend to the local children. Dead.

I felt the anger well up in me, along with the guilt. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have gone dashing off to Acksham like that in search of Johnny, or I should at least have taken Colin with me. I knew the danger he was in; I had talked to Jack Blackwell before I left. How could I have been so stupid, so careless as to leave Colin to his fate with only a warning he didn’t understand?

Maybe Colin had managed to hang himself somehow, without standing on a stool, though I doubted it. But whether or not Jack Blackwell or the rest had actually laid a finger on him, they were all guilty of driving him to it in my book. Besides, if Jack or anyone else from the street had strung Colin up, there would be evidence — fibers, fingerprints, footprints, whatever — and even DS bloody Longbottom wouldn’t be able to ignore that.

I stumbled outside and made my way toward the telephone box on the corner. Not a soul stirred now, but as I went I heard one door — Jack Blackwell’s door — close softly this time, as if he thought that too much noise might wake the dead, and the dead might have a tale or two to tell.