A Presumption of Death (29 page)

‘Bunter, what were you doing at twenty?’ Harriet asked the silent rider in the back seat.

‘I was in service, my lady, with Sir John Sanderton. I had risen to be head footman.’

‘That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, Bunter,’ Harriet observed. ‘Can one easily misspend one’s youth as a footman?’

‘You’d be surprised, my lady,’ said Bunter, ‘at how much misspending of various kinds can go on below stairs in a large establishment. Sir John kept thirty servants indoors and out. And his butler was a vain and inattentive man, who did not run a tight ship, I’m afraid. His lordship’s offer to me of respectable service as a gentleman’s gentleman after the war came as a most welcome escape.’

‘Good lord, Bunter,’ said the aforesaid lord, ‘I didn’t know I was an alternative to assignations in the cellars and propositions in the pantries! Harriet, you have uncovered an aspect of Bunter hitherto completely unknown to me. Amazing.’

Harriet’s curiosity about young Bunter seemed likely to be frustrated; it would be very indiscreet to press him further. But he offered a little more unprompted. ‘It was difficult, in that household, to maintain a proper formality in dealings with the family,’ he said. ‘We knew too much about them, and it was hard to regard them with that respect which makes service acceptable with dignity. In particular, when a member of the family gets a young woman servant into difficulty, and abandons her to the harsh judgement of the outside world, it becomes demeaning to assist that person in the conduct of their everyday life. Employment with his lordship, on the other hand, has never given me a moment’s concern.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Bunter!’ cried Peter, taking a sharp corner with a squeal of brakes. ‘How can I keep my mind on the road, while you chatter like that?’

‘If I may make a suggestion, my lord,’ said Bunter imperturbably. ‘You might find the road less surprising at a more modest speed.’

‘You may not make such a suggestion, Bunter,’ said Peter, slowing down considerably, and driving very soberly and chastely through back-roads frothing with cow-parsley in bloom till they reached the Fanshaws’ little house in Evesham, and left Bunter at the door. In view of the long miles that lay ahead of them they declined offers of tea and biscuits, and Bunter said firmly he would make his own way back to Paggleham when he thought his parents-in-law had had enough of him.

Culpits turned out to be an ordinary enough village with a pretty eighteenth-century inn. Peter booked them in for dinner and bed, and then he and Harriet went for a quiet walk. The High Street rose at a gentle gradient to a modest ridge, with the village houses petering out as the road ascended. Good solid English houses of mellow local brick, with sash windows and fanlights over front doors. The largest of these was the last on the left, and Peter pointed out to Harriet the modest perfections of its proportions, and the old cotton tree growing against the wall. From the ridge they looked down towards the coast on the airfield, which in this case really was an airfield. Within a perimeter fence a dozen Hudsons and an Anson were drawn up on grass, and the runway looked raw and new. A scatter of tents, and some Nissen huts still under construction suggested very rough comfort for the airmen, although there was a smallish hangar on the far side of the field.

As they gazed at this scene they heard a motor vehicle coming up behind them, and found themselves confronted by a pair of Local Defence Volunteers. One of them carried a lethal-looking, ancient, distinctly unofficial blunderbuss. They were both wearing armbands and tin hats. ‘What are you doing here?’ demanded one of these.

‘Taking the air, and stretching our legs,’ said Peter pleasantly. ‘We have had a long drive.’

‘Identity cards?’ the man demanded.

Peter and Harriet meekly produced them. Handing them over, Peter also produced his cigarette case, and offered it, open.

‘You look harmless,’ the man decided, returning the cards and helping himself to a cigarette. ‘You haven’t got a camera, or field glasses or anything?’

‘Nothing of the kind,’ said Peter, offering the cigarettes to the other fellow. ‘Just out for a walk. But you are right to be careful.’

‘It’s just a bit of routine, really,’ the officer conceded. ‘If the enemy want a look at this they’ll take a picture from the air. I expect they already have.’

‘Bound to have done,’ agreed Peter. ‘I say, though, this does look a bit makeshift. Doesn’t look as though they’ve got proper quarters down there, or a canteen or anything. Rough comfort, I would say.’

‘Uster be only the local flying club. Gliders and Moths sort of thing,’ said the first man. ‘It’s being used as a forward station. It’s taking them one hell of a time to get it organised.’

‘How right you are!’ said his companion. ‘Those poor blokes get back from a mission and they can’t even have a cup of coffee unless they fix it up themselves on a Primus stove. Bloody marvellous! My wife does a bit of helping out down there,’ he added.

‘So the local people are helpful?’ Harriet chipped in.

‘Doing our best. A lot of the men are billeted in the village while some huts get built. Bed and breakfast sort of thing. They can’t be in a house without a telephone, so they’re all with the better sort of people. Got it made.’

‘Well, we’ll potter along,’ said Peter. ‘Good luck to you.’ And he drew Harriet’s arm through his, and began to walk back.

‘We didn’t get arrested as spies,’ Harriet said. ‘That’s what rank does for you.’

‘No; our identity cards give just Christian names and surnames. Not a hint of a title to be found. They must have succumbed to our natural charm.’

‘I admit you don’t look like a spy,’ said Harriet. ‘You look far too guileless.’

‘English teeth, and all that?’

‘And all that, yes.’

‘Talking of teeth,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I wonder what the landlord will be able to rustle up for supper.’

‘Something truly gruesome,’ Harriet promised.

‘Like what?’

‘Turnip tart, followed by spotted dick, with dried-egg custard,’ suggested Harriet.

‘Devil woman! Fiend!’ said Peter. ‘It couldn’t be as bad as that!’

And it wasn’t. The inn rose to a rabbit jugged in cider, and a very nice apple pie.

After dinner Harriet settled by the fire in the residents’ lounge. Peter went through to the bar to order a brandy. Harriet could hear voices across the open counter, in the bar, engaging in conversation about the sins and misapprehensions of the Ministry of Instruction and Morale.

Peter was asking the landlord if he knew of a young man called Mike Newcastle. ‘Sorry, can’t help you there,’ said the landlord. ‘Anyone know a Mike Newcastle?’ he asked his customers, but he drew a blank.

Then what about a friend of a friend; Peter believed she had once lived hereabouts, called Joan Quarley, something like that? He invited the landlord to pour a brandy for himself: ‘Be my guest, landlord, what’s yours?’

‘Whisky and soda, thank you very much, sir,’ said the landlord. ‘Oh, yes. That young woman is well known in this village. Very well known.’

There was an edge to his voice. ‘Gentry, come down in the world, you might say. But still giving themselves airs, oh, yes. But she’s a friend of yours, did you say?’

‘Oh, not a close friend at all,’ said Peter. ‘Just someone I have heard about from other friends.’

The landlord visibly relaxed. ‘No hard feelings, then,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of talk about that young woman, though, I can tell you. Mind you, I blame the war.’

‘The war has a lot to answer for,’ Peter said gravely.

‘It’s all these young airmen,’ the landlord went on. ‘Very good for trade, of course. Seem very thirsty. And there isn’t anywhere else for them to go of an evening, till they get a mess for them built. I shouldn’t complain, really, but of course it isn’t like the old days. Time was when you never saw a stranger in the village from one week’s end to the next, and now anything in uniform has the girls all of a dither. And what with them being all up and down the village in digs, and coming and going at all hours and haring around in fast cars, can’t see what else we could expect.’

‘So you were saying about the Quarleys?’

‘Old farming family. Have the best house in the village, so they took in lodgers like everyone else. Now the girl has a bun in the oven and no ring on her finger. Bit of a comedown. It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t lots of people who remember what old man Quarley was like. Her grandfather.’

‘What was he like?’ asked Peter.

‘Quite a martinet, I believe. It’s before my time; I took on the licence here in 1923. But he employed a lot of people back then. Big farm, grew lots of vegetables, needed a lot of men. He had cottages everywhere for his labourers; and let there be just a breath of scandal and he’d put the whole family out on the street with one week’s pay in the man’s pocket. He was hard as nails about it, and people have long memories of that sort of thing.’

‘Yes, in many ways the good old days were the bad old days,’ said Peter.

‘Mind you, if you kept your nose clean, he saw you right,’ said the landlord. ‘You wouldn’t be in want, working for him, and when the children were sick he’d pay for the doctor. But it’s hard not to smirk when you think of his grand-daughter being a common slut like those he put on the parish years ago.’

There was suddenly uproar in the public bar. The sound of an overturned chair, the sound of a glass breaking, and someone shouting, ‘I’ll knock your teeth down your throat if you talk about her like that!’

‘All right, all right, Jeff,’ the landlord was saying. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see you was sat over there. Didn’t mean any harm.’

‘Strewth, Dick, what are you like when you do mean harm?’ said a woman’s voice. ‘Your tongue’s so sharp it’s a wonder it doesn’t cut your mouth sometimes.’

‘No offence meant,’ the landlord was saying. ‘Let’s have last orders and change the subject.’

A few minutes later Peter reappeared in the lounge.

‘Who was that who got so angry?’ Harriet asked him.

‘The young lady’s brother, I understand,’ he told her. ‘And a brother is an interesting addition to the cast list, don’t you think?’

‘This is a bit ticklish,’ said Peter the following morning. They were breakfasting in the snug, on porridge and toast, there being neither eggs nor bacon available. Peter, Harriet noticed, took his porridge with only salt and milk, whereas she sugared hers. ‘What next, do you think?’

‘Why hasn’t anyone heard of Mike Newcastle?’ Harriet mused. ‘I had thought it would be a good idea to talk to him first.’

‘I suppose he could be a friend of Brinklow’s without serving in the same unit,’ said Peter. ‘But it doesn’t leave us any option but to interview the young lady herself. She will be found, I imagine, from the landlord’s description, at that rather agreeable Georgian farmhouse on the Alnwick road.’

After breakfast therefore, Peter and Harriet went looking for the Quarley farmhouse. It was indeed the one that had caught Peter’s eye; a good four-square brick house with a pleasant fanlight over the door, and a look of run-down gentility. Peter knocked and waited. Harriet felt sudden embarrassment. What would he ask? How could he explain himself?

The door was opened by a woman in middle age, wearing a slightly felted twinset and a tweed skirt. She had a pair of secateurs in one hand, and a flower vase in the other. She stared blankly at them. Harriet let Peter do the talking while she observed as closely as she could.

‘Can I help you?’ the woman said. She sounded as though she thought it unlikely. She had an abstracted look, and that air about her suddenly brought to Harriet’s mind various friends of her mother’s long ago – a stance of deliberate vulnerability and refinement – a femininity that was a constant unspoken appeal for chivalry in anyone who came within range.

‘Mrs Quarley? You might be able to help us,’ said Peter. ‘We are trying to find out what we can about a young man called Alan Brinklow.’

‘Oh,’ she said. She glanced rapidly away from Peter and towards Harriet, directing a pallid and anxious gaze on her. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said.

She led the way through a hall cluttered with a laden coat-stand, – there was a flying jacket hanging on it – and into a pleasant sitting-room. She closed the door behind them. ‘Please keep your voices low,’ she said. ‘My daughter is sleeping in. I don’t want her disturbed.’

She did not invite them to sit down, and they stood around uncertainly.

‘Alan Brinklow . . .’ Peter began.

‘They say he’s dead,’ Mrs Quarley said. ‘Have you come for his things?’

‘No,’ said Peter. ‘It is the months before he went missing we would like to know about. Anything you can tell us about him.’ There was a gentleness in Peter’s voice, Harriet noticed, rather more than would be accounted for by the request not to talk loudly, so that she thought he too had picked up that curious note of fragility about Mrs Quarley.

‘He was a lovely young man,’ she said shakily. ‘Lovely manners. You couldn’t ask for a more helpful and considerate person. And always joking; keeping us smiling. And he’s very young; only nineteen.’

‘You don’t happen to know what he did with himself between leaving Barnardo’s and joining up?’

‘Oh, yes!’ she said eagerly, suddenly willing to talk. ‘He was in a land surveyor’s office. And he had learned to fly as part of the job, because it helps a lot to take pictures from aeroplanes. His boss didn’t like the flying part of it, so Alan did all that bit, and when he joined up they promoted him very quickly, because they hadn’t got a lot of people who already knew how to fly. That’s how he got to know my son – my son Jeff. Jeff brought Alan home with him and said he was a brother officer, and we should treat him as one of the family. And we were glad to.’

‘He wasn’t a quarrelsome young man? He didn’t have enemies?’

‘Oh, no, no, not at all. I never heard of anyone he didn’t get on with.’