The Mitford Murders Page 3

  Dismissing the idea as fast as it had come, Louisa ran past, moving ever further away from her mother, towards a cobbled mews street where she might lose her uncle to the shadows, if not to a lack of sure footing on the slippery round stones.

  But her hesitation at the house’s steps was fatal and this time Stephen caught both her wrists and held them behind her back. Her face twisted in pain, and she buckled her elbows and knees, trying to pull herself away. Stephen gripped her small wrists together, both easily held in just one of his large hands, the other grabbing a handful of her hair and the back of her neck. She caught a glimpse of the dark yellow nicotine stains on his fingernails and her stomach turned.

  ‘I wouldn’t try that, if I was you,’ he sneered. ‘You’re coming with me.’

  Louisa gave up trying to fight him. He was bigger and nastier than she was; she wasn’t going to win. He felt her submit beneath his grip and relaxed his hold on her neck, though he kept her arms behind her back. A woman walking smartly on the other side of the street, heels clipping like a dressage pony, gave them a quick glance but carried on.

  ‘Good girl,’ said Stephen, soothingly. ‘If only you listened to me more, we wouldn’t have to have all this trouble.’

  As if he were a policeman and she a criminal, he marched Louisa down to the end of the mews and out on to the Fulham Road, where he hailed a taxi. If the driver was at all concerned to see a man in workman’s boots and a patched-up woollen coat forcing a young woman in a plain outfit and cheap hat into his cab, together with a dog, he didn’t show it.

  ‘Victoria station,’ said Stephen to the driver. ‘And look sharp about it.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  12 January 1920

  Guy Sullivan’s long frame was bent nearly double with laughter, his hat was threatening to fall off and he could feel the seam of his jacket stretched to bursting point. ‘Harry, stop! I can’t take any more.’

  Harry Conlon looked as if he was considering whether to stop or continue this delicious torment of his friend. They had stolen a quick tea break in the stationmaster’s office at Lewes, where they had been sent down to investigate a missing pocket watch. The stationmaster, Mr Marchant, was well known for summoning the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway Police for non-existent crimes on an almost weekly basis.

  ‘Nonetheless, lads,’ Superintendent Jarvis had solemnly reminded them, ‘that doesn’t mean that this time he’s not in the right. Never assume – not if you want to make decent policemen. Remember the turkey who believes the sight of the farmer’s wife each morning means he’s going to get his feed, only to find he was wrong—’

  ‘On Christmas Eve. Yes, sir,’ Harry had interrupted.

  ‘Er, yes. Quite right. On Christmas Eve. Well done, Conlon,’ Jarvis had grumbled, clearing his throat. ‘What are you standing around for, then?’

  Harry and Guy had speedily exited the Super’s office, a narrow room that barely contained its occupant’s leather-topped desk and wooden chair but nevertheless had the atmosphere of Court One at the Old Bailey to anyone summoned within its smoke-stained walls. The office led directly on to platform twelve at Victoria station.

  ‘What did you do to put the boss in such a good mood with us, Harry?’ asked Guy.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he replied, smirking.

  ‘Yes, you do. Bob and Lance usually get this one. It’s not an investigation so much as a nice day out. I was all ready for another morning resetting the signal box.’

  ‘Don’t get too excited. It’s a bloody freezing day in January, not exactly an outing by the sea in June,’ laughed Harry. ‘But I may have made sure the Super had a nice box of his favourite cigars at Christmas …’

  As new recruits, Harry and Guy had been paired together when in training for the railway police force four years before. They were not an obvious choice for a partnership at first sight: Harry had apparently stopped growing when he was twelve years old yet had the kind of blond good looks that might have passed for a matinée idol in a dim nightclub. Indeed, he had tried that trick quite a few times, with occasional success. Guy was tall – ‘Lanky,’ said his mother – with high cheekbones, a flop of pale brown hair and a gap between his teeth. Thick, round specs were always slipping down the bridge of his nose. Yet they had each responded to the other’s easy humour and forged their friendship as two men who had been excluded from the war – Harry because of his asthma, Guy because of his extreme shortsightedness.

  The morning he had returned home without his orders but a letter of exemption instead flashed into Guy’s mind with disarming regularity. In 1916, one brother was already dead, killed at the start of the war in the Battle of Mons. Two more brothers were in France, deep in the trenches, their stoic letters home betrayed by shaky handwriting. His father worked long shifts at the factory and his mother had turned into a colourless wisp of a woman, slipping into the shadows of her own home, hardly making a sound, let alone talking. Guy had stuttered at the eye test; desperate not to fail, he guessed at the answers but the letters had jumped and blurred before him, and he had known it was hopeless. Walking back to number eight Tooley Street where his mother waited for him, the rain had poured, water trickling down the back of his shirt, soaking him to the skin. It wasn’t enough when he wanted physical pain, something – anything – to let him stand alongside his brothers and their courage. Standing before the front door and trying to find strength to push it open, he was cloaked in humiliation. Even the tears of his mother, sobbing with relief into his chest, were not enough to stop him wishing he could pack up and go to war.

  Signing up to the LB&SCR Police had given him purpose, a spring in his step, even if it hadn’t done away with the smirks altogether. When Mrs Curtis from number ten had congratulated him on passing his policeman’s training, she had not been able to stop herself from remarking, ‘The railway police – not proper police, is it?’ Last year, his three brothers had returned home – Bertie, the youngest, having joined up six months before the end – and all had taken up work as bricklayers and hod-carriers. Guy had been happy to see them all safely back and thought his smart uniform and policeman’s helmet would earn him a smidgen of respect from his siblings, but when he had been forced to admit that some of his duties included watering the hanging baskets at the station and resetting the signals, the ridicule had started again and never stopped.

  When Guy and Harry walked into Mr Marchant’s office that morning, they found the stationmaster pacing around with a pocket watch in his hand. ‘Ah, there you are!’ he said, his squirrel face twisted with concern. ‘You’re just too late again. I opened my desk drawer five minutes ago to find the pocket watch inside.’

  Harry threatened to burst out laughing and Guy gave him as stern a look as he could manage through his thick lenses.

  ‘I see, sir,’ said Guy. ‘Do you think it was replaced when the thief heard you had reported it stolen?’

  Mr Marchant stopped pacing and stood absolutely stock-still, looking at Guy as if he had told him the meaning of life. ‘Do you know, I do! I think that’s exactly what happened.’

  Harry had to pretend to busy himself with finding his notebook, hiding his face and doing his best to muffle snorts that were threatening to escape. Guy managed to carry on as he took notes from Mr Marchant and nodded as seriously as he could, but when the telephone rang he finally allowed himself to catch Harry’s eye and smile.

  ‘Sorry, lads,’ said Mr Marchant, ‘there’s a delay on the train from Bexhill. I’ve got to go and deal with it. Help yourselves to a cup of tea.’

  No sooner was the door shut behind him than Guy and Harry exploded. ‘Is he completely off his rocker?’ said Harry. ‘A war medal, a five-pound note, a fountain pen and now a pocket watch all mysteriously found in his desk drawer hours after he’s reported them stolen?’

  ‘Please, don’t,’ said Guy, doubled over, eyes squeezed shut. ‘My stomach hurts.’

  Harry drew himself up and started to c
ontort his face like the stationmaster’s. ‘Is that the police?’ he began, as if booming down a telephone, ‘I’ve got a very, very serious crime to report …’

  Which is how it happened that neither of them heard the door of the office fly open.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  12 January 1920

  In the taxi, Stephen held Louisa by her wrist, her arm twisted behind her back, though not as firmly as before. When the motorcar slowed down at a crossroads, she thought about trying to leap out but was intimidated by the general cacophony of the streets. Trams shuttled up and down their metal rails, sparks flying from the wires overhead; buses leaned slightly as they rounded corners, the Pears Soap poster beneath two or three cold passengers on the open-top upper deck. Boys, who should be at school, marched up and down the pavements with sandwich boards proclaiming the news: LLOYD GEORGE RAISES TAXES AGAIN and BABY LEFT ON CHURCH STEP. A pre-war relic – the horse and cart – stood like a statue at the side of the road, a fresh heap of manure the only testament to the animal’s life force. Young men and middle-aged spinsters wobbling on bicycles would suddenly appear at the side of the cab, occasionally glancing in through the window to see a grim-faced man, his face set straight ahead, hat pulled low over his forehead, an unsmiling woman beside him.

  Louisa’s heart was hammering fast in her chest. Socks lay on the floor of the cab looking relaxed but his ears were pulled back.

  Her uncle was a man she knew too well not to worry about where he was taking her. Louisa’s father had been the youngest of six children and Stephen had been the black sheep, leaving home as soon as he could, resurfacing only when there was a funeral. ‘And not because he’s paying no respects, neither,’ her father had said. ‘Only because he thinks there might be a payout from the will, or at least the chance of palming an aunt out of a few coins.’

  During the years of her childhood, Stephen had come several times, always outstaying his welcome, both her parents too weak and unwilling to ask him to leave. Besides, they were working all the hours they could and when Stephen offered to walk Louisa to school in the morning, they took it as a favour earned. They never found out that he took her to railway stations instead, teaching her ‘from the school of life’, as he put it, picking pockets from the rich – or at least anyone with a decent-looking coat. She certainly learned lessons but none that she told Ma about. Stephen kept her quiet with a supply of barley sugars and the oily sensation of guilt. Her parents had enough to worry about, didn’t they? Bitterly, she remembered that often she had been pleased with his attention when she’d got so little at home. She didn’t like doing what it took to make him smile at her but she’d do it anyway. Sometimes he’d give her a shilling – ‘A share of the profits,’ he’d say with a smirk – and she started to save the coins in a jar hidden beneath her bed. One day she’d have enough to leave home, she’d thought.

  So it hadn’t been entirely surprising when Stephen had shown up at her father’s funeral and come to the small wake afterwards at the Cross Keys pub. Socks was with him this time, a young but already well-trained dog, and Stephen had won Louisa’s sympathy when he told her he was just like the dog he’d had when he was a boy. She knew the story, having been told it often, usually after Stephen had had a few too many and was feeling morose. As a child, he’d found a stray on the streets and taken it home, and though the whole family had taken to the dog, it was only Stephen that it followed around, sleeping by his side every night, keeping him warm as he lay on the floor of the bedroom that was shared by all six children. When his father kicked it out of the house for stealing the precious leftovers of a stew, Stephen’s heart had broken. Socks was just like that dog, Stephen said, and they would both smile at the mutt, tail thumping on the pub floor.

  Winnie had been distraught after the funeral, and when Stephen offered to help take her back to the flat, Louisa had forgotten to be on her guard and was grateful for the extra pair of arms. It had been late and ale had been drunk, so it would have been churlish not to give him her bed for the night – she could easily share with her mother, she’d said.

  As usual, over the next few days, the right moment or the right words couldn’t be found to ask Stephen to leave. Winnie and Louisa avoided talking about it to each other, as if to discuss it out loud would make his presence in their flat too much of an uncomfortable reality. Stephen never gave them any money, but sometimes he would bring back to the flat something he’d bought, or possibly won, off someone at the pub – a cut of beef or some mutton – so they couldn’t complain that he hadn’t contributed anything to the meagre suppers Winnie cooked. He always cut a chunk off for Socks before he ate any himself. Stephen never made any mention of where he had come from the day of the funeral or what he had been doing before he’d turned up – it had been two or three years since he’d last been around – and they knew better than to ask.

  Over the weeks, they’d learned to tolerate his presence and adjusted to it in the way one adjusts to a pain in the knee: at first it niggles every time you move, and then you start to forget it’s even there. Apart from the fact that he had taken over Louisa’s room and came home drunk most nights, the sum contribution of his personality to their domestic life was largely made up of surly grunts and a deeper imprint in the armchair where Arthur used to sit and Stephen now slept off the worst of his hangovers after lunch, Socks at his feet.

  In the cab, Louisa thought about her mother – she’d be wondering what had happened. At the same time, she knew Winnie wouldn’t be doing much about it. She had the laundry to get done and she’d be more worried about the missing basket. Perhaps she would return to Mrs Shovelton’s to see if it was there. More likely she’d return the washing she did have and meekly accept the loss of the job, apologising for their carelessness as she backed out the door, despite the many years of laundry where not so much as a single handkerchief had ever gone astray. Louisa loved her mother but sometimes she resembled nothing more than one of the pillowcases she so faithfully washed and pressed: clean, white, smelling of Lux flakes and existing only to provide comfort for others.

  As the facts stood, nobody knew that Louisa was in a taxi heading for Victoria station with her uncle. The trains from Victoria went south, she knew that much. Her stomach lurched, empty as it was. She looked sideways at Stephen but his face remained stony.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked, in a voice firmer than she felt.

  ‘Never you mind,’ said Stephen. ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘At least let go of my arm – it hurts.’

  ‘And let you jump out?’ As if to make the point, he jerked on her wrist again, sending a shot of pain up to her shoulder.

  ‘We’re here now, anyway,’ he said as the taxi juddered to a stop at the station’s entrance, opening the door with one hand and still holding on to Louisa with the other. She was dragged out and stood beside him as he dug in his pockets for change to pay the taxi. He leaned in through the window, handed the money over and pulled Louisa away as the car drove off.

  ‘That’s three and six you owe me now,’ he said to his niece. It was almost a skill how someone like him could persuade himself that nothing he spent was for him but was always owed back – as if he was a saint who did only favours for others. Once, she’d been shown a negative for a photograph and marvelled at the perfect inversion of light and shadow in the image beneath the glass; Stephen was exactly like that.

  This reminder of her uncle’s absurdity took her fear away. There was no reasoning with an unreasonable man. She wasn’t going to be able to talk her way out of this and she hadn’t the physical strength to cut free of his grasp. She had better go along with it for now and keep alert to the first chance she spotted to outwit him. He wasn’t very clever so it surely wouldn’t take long.

  ‘Uncle,’ she said, and he turned to look at her without breaking their pace. ‘At least could you hold on to my other arm? This one is starting to hurt.’

  Stephen paused, trying to work out if
this was one of her tricks. He grunted assent and swapped his hands around, holding her other arm and moving to her right side without ever letting go of her completely. Louisa shook her left arm out, feeling sensation return to her fingers as the blood flowed freely again. As he moved to her other side, she noticed a piece of paper sticking out of his coat pocket. She couldn’t see much, just a corner, but it was the creamy colour and thick texture that she noticed. An envelope. Stephen wasn’t a man to receive letters; certainly not ones of quality. She moved her head back up before he could realise that she’d seen it. She knew, she absolutely knew what it was, and she had to get hold of it.

  All around them were the usual busy travellers of a main thoroughfare station. First-class and third-class passengers alike moved in and out of the grand entrance, like bees around a hive: country naïfs arriving to seek work in the city where the streets were paved with gold – or so they hoped; top-hatted men off to inspect factories in the north, and bowler-hatted men following in their wake, leather briefcases swinging against their matchstick legs.

  At any other time, she would have enjoyed the scene: the flower stalls, the newspaper stands, the porters wheeling stacks of luggage. How much had she longed to be one of those people? Buying a ticket and confidently boarding a train that would take her across the country, speeding through fields and valleys to arrive somewhere no one knew her and anything was possible.

  Instead, she was jerked roughly by her uncle as he bought two tickets – ‘One-way, third-class’ – to Hastings. She vaguely heard the ticket officer go on to say that there was a short platform at Lewes, the first stop, where the train divided.

  ‘Hastings?’ said Louisa as they walked away. Liam Mahoney rang in her head.