Truth Dare kill

TWO

It was a bad start to a new year. Not that I could say ’45 had been much of a year either. Not for me. Or maybe that’s being ungrateful. They gave me a medal and said I was a hero, that I nearly died for my country. I don’t know; literally I don’t know. All I want is a year of my life back. Some days I wake and don’t hurt too much and then it doesn’t matter. Like a scratch on a record.

The needle jumps and I miss a word or a beat. Then I catch up with the song, and I’m back with the melody as if nothing has happened.

Other days, bad days, when the ache wakes me, and it takes till midday and a big shot of scotch to make it go, it feels like the song will never be right, not with that missing piece, and I can’t bear it to go on. They’ve done all they can, but I’m left with just the bass line, not knowing if the singer has paused or gone.

In the meantime I have to live. Heroes don’t get paid any more than cowards. And jobs don’t come any easier if your trade is subterfuge and you can only ply it on good days. I’m a copper. Was a copper. Now I’m a thief. I steal people’s cover from them. I pull them blinking into the light and nick their happiness, those libertine days and nights that the war permitted. I hand them back to their loved ones to exact their revenge in small cuts every day until they’ve had their pound of wayward flesh. Which explains why I was sitting here, flustered by a pretty girl’s smile, on this night of all nights.

At least I was alive. Sort of. A lot of blokes like me didn’t make it. I should have been out there rejoicing with the rest of the world. The war was over, it was New Year’s Eve, and though London wasn’t much more than a pile of rubble, there were enough pubs still standing to make for one helluva party. And like VE day (I was otherwise engaged for that, but I’d seen the newspaper photos of folk hanging off lamp-posts) the streets would be jammed with hugging and kissing strangers.

There was a sense out there that the world had changed forever. For the better of course, was the official view. And in truth, it had to be an improvement over the Blitz. But we’d lost something too: an identity, a purpose. Like a really good party that had gone on too long and we were all creeping home in the cold daylight, embarrassed at how we’d let our hair down. Days of reckoning when we had to stomach the hangover and explain the inexplicable pregnancies and challenge the evasive eyes until our infidelities were soaked from us in great confessional homecomings.

Maybe tonight of all nights, I should have gone home after all. Caught the overnight sleeper back to Glasgow, then the branch line down to Kilpatrick.

Tracked down my old pals and got blind roaring drunk like we used to. Three days of parties, everyone your friend. No doors closed. Maudlin tears for the old year and Celtic fear for the new one.

I remembered the last time, just as we turned into the year when our lives jumped the rails. Me and Archie and Big Tam rolling a barrel of beer down the Foregate. We mowed down other drunks in high good humour. And we got to Kilpatrick Cross and set up our barrel and tapped it and toasted 1939 in with a singing, dancing bedlam of new friends. I was twenty-four. I’d wangled leave for Ne’erday by doing the Christmas roster at Castlemilk police station in Glasgow.

The youngest detective sergeant in the force. On target for inspector and then who knew?

But I couldn’t go back. Not yet. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to lose every recollection of a whole year of your life? To wake up and be told you were a year older, with nothing to show for it except some startling scars and blinding headaches?

It’s not an unbroken gap; occasionally a flake of memory from the missing time floats to the surface. I grab at it, straining to hold on to it and lodge it in some mental archive, like portraits in a grisly art gallery. I feel if I can get enough pictures, and in the right order, then I have a story. Doc Thompson tells me not to expect too much. There’s no saying where these images are coming from.

They might even be false. That scares the shit out of me. I’ve got a loose enough grip on reality thank you very much.

I came back from my own particular war in pretty bad shape. I’d lost every single reference point after leaving England for France in May 1944. All I remember is a round man called Gregor with a huge moustache, and his hard-handed compatriots. And how I briefly led these faction-riven amateurs and melded them into a fighting force. Then there was a huge hole in my head until the moment when I stuttered back into life in April this year, on a bunk bed in a small town called Dachau in southern Germany.

“Is this one dead?”

“Cain’t hardly tell. Help me lift him.”

Somewhere in my head I realised the voices were American. I thought that was nice. Americans always sounded hopeful. Heaven should have slow Southern accents. But I didn’t want them to disturb me. I was quite happy being dead. It was… comfortable. And being alive recently hadn’t been. Not for a while. So when I felt rough hands on me and my body being hauled out of my little wooden coffin I rebelled. That is, I did the only thing that my body was capable of; I groaned.

“He’s alive. Get the medics. Christ, he smells!”

What did they expect? From somewhere a shard from my broken memory surfaced and I remembered being appalled at how my bunk mates stank when I first arrived.

Then the smell went away. There were other things to worry about. Like the beatings. I can’t recall much about the people doing it – they all looked like wolves -but I know it was me on the receiving end. I guess the Americans hurt me when they pulled me out because I don’t remember any more of that bit either.

Later, the pain came back, with the light.

I tried to explain this to my mother when she came to visit me in the hospital in Hatfield, four hundred miles from home and her first time south of the border. She looked old and bewildered when she came through the door of the ward. She’d always been small, but now her best coat sat too big and too long on her tiny frame. I hadn’t noticed how white her hair had got and how lined her skin was, despite the make-up. She never wore make-up. It made her look like my Aunt Jeannie, last seen in her plush-lined box, victim of the undertaker’s embalming arts.

Mum was rooted to the floor, twisting the handle off her handbag. She scanned the faces on the beds looking for mine. Her scared eyes slid over me, not once but twice. The bandage round my head didn’t help, but neither did the sunken cheeks and rictus grin, my feeble effort to smile at her. Then she found me and through the greetin – no English word has quite the sense of heartfelt sobbing – she told me about my pals and how lucky I was.

Big Tam hadn’t made it. He died on Gold beach with half his regiment during the landings. And Archie was missing presumed dead according to the telegram to his mum. Somewhere over Germany. His plane falling out of the sky into the cauldron they’d stirred up. I wondered how he’d felt, the air shrieking over the fuselage and the tracers coming up, diving into their self-made funeral pyres. Was it like our boyhood suicide runs, free-wheeling and screaming like banshees down the forty-five-degree slope in Burns’ Park? Archie and Tam and me on bone-shakers with no brakes? Death or glory? Seems I got the glory, but it didn’t feel like it. Not with a steel plate in my head.

And now I’m scared to go home to Scotland. Scared of what I’d find and who I wouldn’t find. Scared of how they’ll look at me now, those glad girls from my boyhood. Scared that I’ll see in their eyes what my own don’t want to tell me.

That the head wound goes deep. That I’m no a’ there, as they’d put it. So, I’m here in London, prowling my last haunts, looking for clues to my lost time, asking the folks round about who I was. Seeing in their eyes the wariness of the sane for the demented.

“I think I’ve killed a man.” The words sat between us like a newly dealt card in a game of poker. Call or raise. But the blonde had said it as though she was reporting a broken nail.

I did up the bottom button of my cardigan and sauntered over to the fireplace. I tapped the dying briquettes with my toe to encourage more heat and put another one on for show.

“You think?” I asked with a little sarcastic edge. “Let’s take this step by step, shall we? Is he dead or not?”

“Probably.”

I sighed. “Let’s – for the sake of making progress – assume he is. My condolences, miss. But did you kill him?”

She wrinkled up her nose and smiled sweetly. “Well that’s the trouble. I’m not sure. That is, I can’t remember. Not exactly. We were celebrating.”

Christ, that’s all I needed. The amnesiac leading the amnesiac. I adjusted my desk lamp to throw stronger light across the desk and across her face. Maybe it would have an illuminating effect on what she’d been telling me. So far, it wasn’t clear at all.

I saw her glance at my face and her eyes widen a fraction. I knew what she was seeing. My thick red hair, combed now on the wrong side for me, hides most of the damage, but the main scar runs like a wide ribbon from the hairline to above my left eye. It looks as though someone took a steel bar and hit me with it full on, bending it round my skull, and then didn’t bother to stitch the sides back together. Which is pretty well what happened.

The other wounds around my nose and right brow would have looked dashing on a duellist from Heidelberg. They made me look like a hard man from the Billy Boys, one of Glasgow’s finest razor gangs. They help if you want elbow room at a bar, but not if you’re hoping for a dance at the Palais.

“You may have to give me a wee bit more information than that so I can see if there’s some way I can help, Miss Graveney.” I tried to keep the vinegar out of my voice but it was hard. “Excuse me asking, but just how much had you been celebrating?” I left it dangling. Pretty young things like her would have access to the best that the black market could offer: booze or cocaine.

She looked at me strangely, as though I’d overstepped the mark or said something she wasn’t prepared for.

“We might have had a glass or two of bubbly, but I most certainly wasn’t drunk.

Nor anything else for that matter,” she admonished, reading my mind. “We were visiting a friend. In Pimlico.” Her eyes shifted, then came back to mine.

“Actually, we’d borrowed his flat.” Her tightened mouth challenged me to find any fault. I didn’t change my expression.

“We had a bit of a row. Oh, if you must know, it was over a woman. I’d just found out he was married. The swine.” Quiet venom. I would not like to have been on the receiving end of her bit of a row. Beneath the perfect femininity was a wildcat. Just how much, I would learn later, but the hint of danger already hung in the air alongside her perfume.

“So I had it out with him. His wife was in the sticks somewhere. He operated from his club in Jermyn Street. He was a Major working in Whitehall; hush-hush, you know. We were introduced at a party.” I noticed the past tense. “Anyway things got a bit het up, you see. I’m afraid when I get mad I get a bit demonstrative. And he was trying to deny it, you see. So I was throwing things at him and he was ducking and I think his foot tripped on the carpet because next thing he’s down and he’s moaning and groaning. He’d hit his head on something, I suspect. And then the wall is coming in and the curtains are flying at me and I hear the bang and that’s it…”

“The bang? When was this? We haven’t been bombed for… a year now, is it?” I wasn’t around – one way or the other – so couldn’t be sure.

“That’s the crazy thing. Just crazy.” She shook her head. I wondered what it would be like to hold it steady between my hands and put my mouth on those red lips? “It was a month ago. Thirtieth of November to be exact. I remember it precisely. It was supposed to be my birthday celebration. We had a table booked at the Carlton.” Her grin was rueful.

“The bomb was a left-over. Unexploded. No one saw it land. Or had forgotten about it. They think it had a delayed fuse and during the clear-up that day a bulldozer started it up again. Anyway when I came to, I was wrapped in these huge curtains. Great black velvet jobs. All lined. I thought – it’s silly, I know – for a moment I thought I was dead or buried alive. You know, in a velvet-lined coffin. I was in a perfect state. Couldn’t move my arms or legs.

The velvet was so heavy and it had wrapped itself around me. Like a shroud.” She shuddered. I didn’t tell her that I knew exactly how she’d felt.

“But I could shout. A bit. And I heard people talking and walking about, and they heard me and unwrapped me and I was completely all right you know. Not a mark. Though my shoes had gone. Funny, that. We never found them. They were good shoes too. Anyway, they took me off and it wasn’t till we got to hospital that I remembered Phil – that’s the chap I was with. And I asked them if they’d got him too, and they said they hadn’t seen any other body but they would look under the rubble.”

“Did they find him?”

“That’s the silly thing. I don’t know. So I’m just wondering – well – if I knocked him down and then the wall fell on him and he died and was… bulldozed away.” She lit another cigarette. I let the silence settle to see what else she’d come out with.

“I was fine. I kept telling them that. A bit of a shock but otherwise absolutely fine. I stayed in hospital overnight. Called Mummy to tell her what had happened – well, some of it – and not to worry. Next day she came round and whisked me off to Surrey, and that’s it. I left messages at his club telling them what had happened – not everything, you understand. And one time I called and they said someone had been in to collect his things from his locker. So…” She shrugged.

“Anyway, I keep thinking I’m going to hear from Phil any day now. You know, that he’ll just ring up and say sorry, old girl, got hit on the head and wandered off or something. But nothing. Last week I even went back to the flat – the one we borrowed so we could meet. But it was cleared. I mean just a big hole where the house had been.”

“Did you report this?”

“Just the bare bones… sorry… to his club. And not the bit about the fight and Phil falling. It didn’t seem… relevant somehow. And I couldn’t very well call his wife and ask if she’d retrieved the body of her husband from the flat, could I? Even if I knew where she lived. That’s why I’m here. I want you to find out what’s happened to him and let me know. Do you see?” She took a deep pull on her cigarette and eased back in her chair uncrossing and re-crossing her legs.

“I mean I wasn’t in love with him. Especially when I found out about his domestic arrangements. But I do think I ought to find out. One way or the other.

Don’t you?”

I wasn’t sure. It all sounded too unlikely and messy. But I gave myself a mental kick in the pants; mess was my business now. And I might just get a decent bit of cash out of this. God knew I could do with it. I had no other clients; maybe they’d all made new year resolutions to be nice to each other. Thankfully it wouldn’t last. Human nature guaranteed my business would pick up before January was out. But that left me a short-term cash flow problem and some difficult choices between eating, smoking and drinking. Good job I wasn’t a big eater.

“My god!” she cried as the lights went out.

This never happened to Marlowe. “Sorry. Don’t move.” I scrambled to my feet, dug into my desk and found the tin. I took out a couple of bob, and walked smartly out the door to the meter on the wall. I stuffed a shilling in and then another, swearing all the time under my breath. The lights came back on and I strolled back to my desk as nonchalantly as was possible in the circumstances. I sat down and steepled my hands.

“Now, where were we?” I tried to smile even though the perspiration was beading my spine. I needed this work and here I was looking like a rank amateur down on his luck.

She looked shocked, as if I’d just asked her to take her clothes off. Then amusement filled her eyes. I preferred shock.

“Do you think you can help? I can pay you in advance,” she said in the caring way of the rich for the poor. Her accent was beginning to wear down my very recent infatuation with her grey eyes. Though we Scots consider ourselves amused onlookers to the English class system, it doesn’t mean we can’t spot when we’re being talked down to. But this was no time to stand on my dignity.

“My rates are twenty pounds a week plus expenses. And – as you suggest – I prefer in advance.”

She didn’t flinch, even at twice my normal rates. She wrinkled her fine forehead, reached into her bag and tugged out four large notes from a splendid fold of white fivers. She handed them over. I should have gone higher. But I had a client. A paying client. Maybe my luck was turning, a good omen for the new year. I tried not to grab the money, and coolly slid my drawer open and dropped the notes in it, as though fivers went in there every day. I decided she’d earned some professional attention.

“Let’s start with some details.” My hand went back in the drawer again and dug out a pad of paper and a pen; the good fountain pen the “office” had given me to mark my return, and my hasty departure.

“What’s Phil’s full name?”

She looked coolly at me for a second. “Philip Anthony Caldwell. Major.”

My pen stopped, frozen over my pristine pad. “Did you say Caldwell? Philip Anthony Caldwell?” My scar was throbbing and hot.

“Yes. They said you might know him.” She wanted to see my reaction.

“They?”

“64 Baker Street.”

Head office of the Special Operations Executive. They’d told her more than they seemed ready to tell me. I played for time to get over my shock.

“Maybe. Can you describe Major Caldwell to me?”

She did, and in my mind’s eye the sketchy figure took on three dimensions and emerged clearly as Major Tony Caldwell. I met him two years ago. Clever Tony, Tony with the affected smile, and the knowing eyes, who wouldn’t take no for an answer. The man who might have the key to the locked door of my mind. The man I’d been searching for, ever since they let me out of the loony bin.

“Good morning, Sergeant McRae.” The voice is bright and breezy.

I struggle fully awake and ease myself up on my elbows on the bed. At the foot is an officer, a Major sporting the winged Mercury badge of the Signals Regiment.

“Morning, sir. Sorry, didn’t see you there.”

“It’s perfectly all right Sergeant. I should be apologising to you. I’ve disturbed you and you need your rest, nurse tells me.”

“I’m sleeping too much. Catching up they tell me.” The hospital ship from Alexandria took six days to get back to Portsmouth, and Biscay was bloody. I push myself back and up so that I’m sitting, a bit bleary-eyed, but receptive. I presume this is some sort of visiting rota he’s on. To buck up the troops or something. I preferred the kip.

“Mind if I sit?”

“Of course not, sir.”

“And Sergeant, do you mind awfully if we drop the rank stuff for a bit? I’m Tony, Tony Caldwell. Can I call you Daniel?”

“Yes of course, sir, I mean Tony. I’m Danny.” He’s not wearing padre duds, nor doctor’s insignia. What’s he after? “I ’spect you’re wondering who I am and why I’m bothering you?” My eyebrows give him the answer.

“I’m actually doing a spot of recruiting. Not for my regiment.” He points at his shoulder flash. “I’m on secondment to a unit in Whitehall and looking for more talent.”

His accent is hard to place. To my untutored ears it’s just posh English, the accent of officers, the natural enemy of the working class. I inspect the man more closely. About five foot ten I guess, strong-shoulders, open face. Blue eyes and gingery moustache under a nose with a bump in the middle. His hair is lighter than his moustache, more sand in it, and it falls across his forehead in flat lines from a severe side parting.

“How’s the leg, by the way?” He points at the tent covering my lower body.

“Better, thanks. They think they’ve got all the shrapnel out, but I think they took some of me with it.” I try to joke, but I know the bone got pretty smashed up and can’t see how they managed to put it all back together again. Even with the steel pin I was likely to be lopsided. And I’d never play for Scotland now.

“Look, Danny. Fact is you’ve been shot up enough not to have to worry about the war any more. Find a nice desk for you somewhere, eh? Or go back to your old work in Glasgow. Policeman, weren’t you?”

He knows that. But I play along till he tells me what he’s here for. “A sergeant in civvy street and a sergeant in the army. Seems like I’ve found my level.”

“No, you haven’t. Why weren’t you offered a commission? A degree in languages from Glasgow, police background… seems a natural?” There’s a sudden toughness in his eyes.

“Officers lead from the front. And get shot first.” It’s my standard defence. I just feel more comfortable with the lads.

“You’ve got the wrong war.” He smiles. “When you’re fit, we could use a chap like you. With your sort of background. You’ve got pluck and intelligence. And you’d get paid as an officer. Lieutenant. Wartime commission obviously. Like mine.”

“Why should I take a pay cut?” A top sergeant gets paid more than a first lieutenant.

“We might be able to swing Captain.”

Captain Daniel McRae has a ring to it. But no doubt it comes at a price.

“Doing what, Tony?” I can use his name more freely now if we’re to be brother officers. But I’m already feeling a con coming on. You don’t get officers pay for sitting behind a desk.

He leans closer. The ward is heaving with nurses and soldiers. “Heard of an outfit called Special Operations Executive? The SOE? Yes? Well, keep it simple, old chap, we train you and then send you to France or Greece or somewhere Jerry is. Then you link up with the local resistance and mess things up a bit. Blow up bridges, trains, give Jerry a hard time of it. We’re building up a big operation for when we go back. SOE’s role will be to cause havoc behind the lines until the rest of us get through. Absolutely vital stuff. And great fun.”

Fun! This was his idea of fun? It wasn’t mine, thank you very much. At least that had been my first reaction, and my second and third. But Tony Caldwell was a determined character and liked getting his own way. Insisted on it. And, as I was about to learn, to hell with the consequences for anyone else.