Transcription

  There was a soporific atmosphere in Dolphin Square. It was a warm afternoon and the air was stifling inside the flat. The stone paths in the garden were shimmering with heat and the flowers in the beds, so fresh a few days ago, were wilting now in the hot glare of the sun. Lily was asleep beneath her desk and Juliet wished she could curl up next to her on the floor and have a nap as well. How could people be at war in such weather?

  ‘Mr Gibbons coming in?’ Cyril asked.

  ‘No, he said he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. He’s closeted somewhere in the country with Hollis and White, some big pow-wow about the Cabinet crisis – what to do if Halifax gets his way.’ At Dunkirk the beach was filling up with troops. Three hundred and sixty thousand of them, all needing to come home. The map of Europe was on fire, but in Parliament Lord Halifax was fighting for a peace settlement with Hitler. (‘It makes me despair,’ Perry said. ‘The rank foolishness of it.’) Europe was already lost, next it would be Britain. (‘We stand alone,’ Perry said, as if quoting for the future.)

  ‘Hitler’ll march straight in, miss,’ Cyril said. ‘He won’t keep to any treaty.’

  ‘Yes, I know, it’s awful. We have to soldier on, I suppose. Who’s coming today?’

  Cyril consulted the weekly chart drawn up by Godfrey. ‘Dolly at four o’clock, followed by Trude and Betty at five.’

  A coven of witches, Juliet thought. They would be anxious about the vote, knowing that a peace deal with Hitler wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on. The path would be cleared for them and their ilk. Perhaps it would be best to turn the Mauser on oneself if the Nazis marched up the Mall. Juliet could almost see the parade – the tanks, the chorus lines of goose-stepping soldiers, the spectacular fly-pasts, the fifth columnists cheering them from the pavements. How smugly triumphant Trude and her pals were going to be.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Cyril said. ‘We’re late with our tea.’

  ‘Thanks, Cyril.’

  Afterwards – and there was a long afterwards – Juliet could never be sure how it happened. Perhaps they had grown careless, at ease with the routine of their work, their vigilance blunted by the commonplace. Or perhaps it was the heat that made them drowsily inattentive. Perhaps the clock was fast, although Juliet checked it later and there was nothing wrong with it. Perhaps it was Dolly’s watch that was out of step with time. However it happened, the fact was that they were caught completely off-guard.

  Juliet had taken her tea through to drink it in Cyril’s room, where he was busy taking something apart and putting it back together again (his favourite occupation). ‘Biscuit interval?’ she said. They both laughed – it had become one of their shared jokes.

  They ate the last three biscuits – one each and one for Lily, who had woken up. They chatted about Cyril’s sister, who was trying to arrange a special licence so that she could get married before her fiancé was shipped off to an Army training camp. Cyril was wondering if Perry might be able to help in some way when Lily suddenly began to growl. It was not her usual growl, which was little more than a playful grumble – a protest when they played tug of war with one of her knitted toys. This was an angry, frightened rumble deep in her throat, a trace of the ancestral wolf.

  She was staring fixedly at the door to the living room and Juliet left her tea to find out what was upsetting the little dog so.

  An intruder! Dib – Dolly’s decrepit poodle.

  ‘Dib?’ Juliet puzzled to the dog. He acknowledged his name with a dismissive twitch of an ear. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘How do you know my dog’s name?’

  Dolly!

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Juliet heard Cyril murmur behind her. ‘We’re for it now.’

  Dolly was standing on the threshold of the living room. Juliet could see that the front door was ajar – it must have come unlatched somehow, and Dib had come in to investigate and Dolly had pursued him in order to retrieve him.

  Dolly entered the living room cautiously, a wild animal stepping into a clearing. She gazed around the room in bewilderment.

  Juliet found herself seeing the flat through Dolly’s eyes – the filing cabinet, the big Imperial typewriter and the two desks, all the paraphernalia that constituted an office. Other people in Dolphin Square worked in their flats – including Godfrey himself – so in itself it wasn’t peculiar, was it? On the other hand, other people didn’t have a room that was full of what was – quite clearly – recording equipment. Nor did they have playback machines and headphones, and, most incriminating of all, files lying around announcing themselves to belong to ‘MI5’ or folders that had ‘Top Secret’ stencilled across them in large red capitals.

  Dolly regarded all of this in dumbstruck silence. Juliet could almost see the wheels of her brain turning.

  ‘Dolly,’ Juliet said in a conciliatory voice, desperately trying to think of a reasonable explanation, but all she managed to come up with was a feeble, ‘You’re early.’

  Dolly frowned. ‘Early? Early? You know what time I’m due?’

  All the cogs finally ratcheted into place. Dolly glared viciously at Cyril, who had taken up a rather pugilistic stance in front of Perry’s roll-top. ‘You’re MI5,’ Dolly said, her voice coloured with disgust. ‘You’ve been listening to everything we say.’

  She advanced into the room and started pulling papers from a stack on Juliet’s desk. She read out loud from the top one. ‘Record Three. 19.38. Party reassembled. Godfrey, Trude and Dolly. D. I wanted to show you what I think is the most important thing about it. You have to go through Staines, on the Great West Road. D. – that’s me, isn’t it? I remember this conversation from a couple of days ago.’ Dolly shook her head in disbelief.

  She commenced reading the transcript again. ‘T. There’s a reservoir, surrounded by woods. D. A lot of soldiers there. G. Soldiers? Yes.’ Dear God, Juliet thought, was she going to read the whole thing? She seemed hypnotized by it.

  ‘All right, that’s enough, Dolly.’

  ‘Don’t call me by name as if you know me.’

  Oh, I do know you, Juliet thought.

  With a violent sweep of her hand Dolly knocked everything off Juliet’s desk and roared, ‘You bloody, bloody bastards! Everything we talk about with Godfrey – you’ve listened to it all!’ Dib started snarling and growling in much the same apoplectic vein as his mistress. One of the sheets of paper that Dolly had displaced caught Juliet’s eye as it floated as quietly as a drifting leaf to the ground. The words jumped incriminatingly off the page. ‘Report of Godfrey Toby, 22nd May 1940. I met with the informant Victor alone at 7.00 p.m. Victor wished to discuss a new make of aeroplane engine he had heard about. I asked him if he was able to obtain specifics …’ Oh, please don’t look down, Dolly, Juliet prayed. Don’t find out the truth about Godfrey, because then the game will really be up.

  Her prayers seemed answered, for the moment anyway. ‘Godfrey!’ Dolly said in a choked whisper, more to herself than Juliet. ‘He introduced you to me, didn’t he?’ She jabbed a finger in Juliet’s direction. ‘You had him fooled into thinking you were just a neighbour. He’s due any minute. I have to warn him about you. He’s in terrible danger.’

  ‘Do calm down, Dolly,’ Juliet urged. ‘Why don’t we talk about this over a cup of tea?’

  ‘A cup of tea? A cup of tea?’

  ‘Well, perhaps not,’ Juliet said. Obviously it was an absurd idea, but what on earth were they going to do with her? The front door was still open and half of Nelson House must be hearing the brouhaha Dolly and Dib were making. Juliet tried to gesture silently to Cyril to close the door, but he seemed transfixed by the sight of Dolly.

  It was too late anyway, as at that moment Godfrey gave his familiar rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat-TAT on the open front door and came into the flat, saying, rather anxiously, ‘Is everything all right in here, Miss Armstrong? There seems to be quite a commotion.’

  ‘Here’s Dolly,’ Juliet said to him, with a kind of mad enthusiasm. She felt herself teeterin
g on the edge of hysteria.

  ‘Yes, yes. I see,’ he murmured, more to himself than Juliet.

  ‘They’ve been spying on us!’ Dolly shouted at Godfrey. ‘Run, Godfrey, you make a run for it. Quickly!’ Dolly drew herself up, heroic sacrifice etched on her face now, ready to fight on behalf of the German High Command in the shape of Godfrey Toby, with her bare fists if necessary.

  Godfrey still had his cover, he might be able to explain to the members of the group that he had talked his way out of trouble. MI5 were always bringing fifth columnists in, questioning them and then letting them go. Trude herself had boasted to Godfrey that ‘one of the head ones’ had interrogated her ‘very pleasantly’ before realizing what a superior kind of person she was. ‘Ran rings round him,’ she said. Was that Miles Merton, Juliet wondered? No one could fool Merton, certainly not Trude. I just needed to ask the right questions.

  And perhaps they could remove Dolly from the entire equation – throw her into prison and spin some tale to the others about her having gone away. All was not yet lost.

  Juliet supposed these tactics were running through Godfrey’s mind too, hence his indecision, but, in the lapse, Dolly’s eye was unluckily caught by Godfrey’s report, staring condemnatorily up at her from the floor.

  She stooped to pick it up and read, ‘Edith arrived shortly after Victor left. The usual chatter from Edith about the shipping lanes. She is not a very intelligent woman and it is difficult to say whether she understands what she is seeing. Dolly reported that she had a new girl, Nora, very keen to volunteer.’ She stopped reading and stared wordlessly at Godfrey. Juliet supposed the disparity between what Dolly had believed and the truth of the situation was stunning. ‘Godfrey,’ she murmured to him, a woman betrayed. There were tears in her eyes, as though she had been scorned by a lover. ‘You’re one of them,’ she said to him, her voice trembling.

  ‘I’m afraid I am, Dolly,’ Godfrey said. He sounded regretful.

  The spell was broken. Boiling with rage and frustration, Dolly launched herself into a scream, a full-blooded, top-of-her-register sound that could have shattered an entire cabinet of Sèvres. Dib took his own stand and commenced barking, loudly and monotonously. You could have tortured someone to distraction with the noise being created between the two of them.

  Cyril, too, came back to life and hurried to the front door and slammed it shut. Dolly was rabid now, hissing and spitting like a wildcat. Oh, Lord, Juliet thought, Trude and Betty would be here any moment. It would become a brawl. The whole operation was about to go down the drain in the most inflammatory manner possible.

  Dolly finally found her voice. ‘You traitor, you bloody traitor, Godfrey – is that even your real name? You wait until I tell them what you’ve done!’

  ‘You won’t be telling anyone, I’m afraid, Dolly,’ Godfrey said – quite calmly. You had to admire his sangfroid, Juliet thought. His nerves were steady, unlike her own.

  ‘Who’s going to stop me?’ Dolly said.

  ‘Well, I am,’ Godfrey said reasonably. ‘As an agent of the British government, I have the power to arrest you.

  ‘Cyril,’ Godfrey said, turning to Cyril, ‘do you think you could find some wire or some such to tie Miss Roberts’s hands?’ Cyril went and rummaged obediently in his cupboard and came back holding a length of electrical flex aloft.

  Unfortunately, Dolly had somehow manoeuvred herself near to Perry’s roll-top and made an unexpected lunge for the only weapon available to her – the little bust of Beethoven. She clearly wasn’t expecting it to be quite so heavy and only just managed not to drop it, so that for a moment it hung down heavily in her hand, but then she found momentum, swinging it upwards in an arc just as Godfrey sprang forward to restrain her. He was caught on one shoulder by the bust and sent spinning off-kilter. His legs went from beneath him and he landed heavily on his other shoulder on the floor.

  He was already clambering dazedly to his knees, but Dolly was clutching the bust by the base, raising it high, like a trophy, above his head, shouting at Cyril and Juliet, ‘Don’t come near me! I’ll smash his head with it, I promise I will!’ Juliet stared in horror at this tableau and then did the only thing she could think of. She shot Dolly.

  The noise of the little Mauser was overwhelming in the small space of the flat and it shocked everyone into silence for a moment. Dolly dropped to the ground like a wounded deer, clutching her side. Juliet put the gun on her desk and hurried to Godfrey, ignoring Dolly’s howls of pain. Cyril helped Juliet get Godfrey to the sofa, although he kept saying, ‘I’m all right, I really am. Just a little winded. You must attend to Dolly.’

  ‘She’s not dead, Mr Toby,’ Cyril said.

  ‘Of course she’s not,’ Juliet said. ‘I just wanted to wing her, not kill her. We don’t want a corpse on our hands.’

  Dolly started crawling across the floor on her hands and knees, trailing blood like a snail. Her goal seemed to be to reach the front door. Dib was bouncing up and down by her side in a fit of barking that would have woken the dead. I should have shot the bloody dog as well, Juliet thought.

  ‘The others will be here soon,’ Godfrey said to Cyril. Did Cyril interpret this as some kind of order? (Perhaps it was.) He reached for the Mauser on the desk and shot Dolly again.

  ‘Oh, dear God, Cyril!’ Juliet cried. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’

  ‘Yes, he did, Miss Armstrong,’ Godfrey said. He sighed deeply and tipped his head back wearily on the sofa as though he were going to go to sleep.

  ‘She’s still not dead,’ Cyril said. He looked awful, all the colour gone from his skin, and the hand that was still holding the gun was shaking violently. Juliet removed it from his slippery grasp. Cyril had never shot a gun before, of course, and had aimed wildly at Dolly, succeeding in only wounding her in the arm. It wasn’t enough to stop her progress and somehow she kept moving, although now she was dragging herself in circles, mewling like a sick cat. Finally she stopped and slumped against the wall, still whimpering and moaning. She was made of steel. It was like dealing with Rasputin, not a middle-aged woman from Wolverhampton.

  How had the situation got so out of hand so quickly? It was literally a handful of heartbeats since Dolly had understood the full extent of the trick that had been played on her and now Godfrey was struggling to get up from the sofa, saying, ‘We must finish her off, I’m afraid.’ As if she were an animal and it was an act of kindness.

  Juliet felt queasy. She didn’t know if she could do the deed. It felt like something you would do in the abattoir, not the heat of battle. Before she had to make that decision, Godfrey did something that she could never have anticipated. Still rather unsteady on his feet, he bent down and picked up the walking-stick that had fallen to the floor in the course of his combat with Dolly.

  He fiddled with the silver knob on the top of it, releasing some kind of catch that allowed him to withdraw the sword-stick that, unbeknownst to them, had been hiding quietly inside its walnut casing all this time. And then he pierced Dolly through the heart with it.

  After what seemed an eternity of silence, even Dib shocked into muteness, Cyril said, ‘I think she’s completely dead now, Mr Toby.’

  ‘I think she is, Cyril,’ Godfrey agreed.

  -18-

  D. I was very careful about what I said about the war. It was just – ‘Well, we seem to be going on with it, don’t we?’ and she definitely wasn’t keen.

  G. On the war?

  D. Yes, the war.

  G. And she wasn’t keen on it?

  D. Exactly.

  G. I see.

  T. You should write

  G. Yes, yes.

  There was some desultory talk, of which little could be gathered. DIB barks, making what follows difficult to catch.

  T. ‘And then what about the hare (?) hair (?) don’t like him (a bloke like him?) can’t always (four words)

  Several words inaudible thanks to DIB. They seem to be discussing the invisible ink.

  D. Well,
it comes out all right, you know but – well, I don’t like to … (4 words) run one word into another. (Inaudible) It was bat (? ‘cat’ or ‘rat’?)

  Or hat, fat, sat, mat or pat, and that was just the monosyllables. It wasn’t the dog barking that was the problem, the dog wasn’t even there. The problem was Juliet’s lack of attention. But then how could she be attentive, given all that had happened?

  ‘Miss Armstrong?’ Oliver Alleyne was slouched against the door frame, self-consciously louche. ‘Did I startle you?’

  ‘Not at all, sir.’ He had. Horribly.

  ‘And is everything all right here, Miss Armstrong?’

  ‘Absolutely, sir.’

  ‘How are your neighbours?’

  ‘Oh, you know, sir, same as ever.’

  ‘No problems?’

  ‘No, sir. None.’

  She could see a flick of blood on the skirting board behind him. In fact, if she looked she could see little freckles and splashes of blood everywhere. She would have to clean again. And again. Out, damned spot. Cleaning up the carnage left behind by Dolly’s death had been a terrible task, not one that Juliet wished to dwell on.

  After they had ascertained that Dolly was dead – or ‘completely dead’ as Cyril put it, Godfrey said, ‘We must carry on as normal, Miss Armstrong.’ The three of them stared helplessly at Dolly’s body sprawled on the floor. Her skirt had ridden up, exposing her stocking tops and the pale blancmange of the thighs above. It seemed more indecent somehow than the death itself. Juliet tugged her skirt back down.

  ‘As normal?’ she said to Godfrey. Surely there was to be no more normal after this?

  ‘As if nothing untoward has happened. I shall take the meeting as usual. We can save this operation if we keep our heads. Do you think you could find me a clean shirt – one of Mr Gibbons’s?’

  The good white twill was a terrible fit, Godfrey had to cram himself into it, but by the time his jacket had been sponged of blood and he had tightened his tie and stood up straight, he could pass. He rubbed his shoulder and smiled as he said ruefully, ‘I think I shall have a bruise tomorrow to show for all this. Now I must get next door before Trude and Betty arrive.’