“Now then,” said Priscilla. “Let’s introduce you.”
For the next hour, Maisie was introduced to guest after guest, always with Priscilla at her side, and always presented as “My dear friend Maisie,” or “This is my bestest ever chum, Maisie Dobbs.”
The dancing continued on, and though Maisie was weary, she took to the dance floor several times and found that as the music played, so her fatigue was beaten back. After thanking the gentleman who had asked for what she hoped might be her last dance, she went again in search of Priscilla, moving through the waves of people before reaching the bar. She always knew she would find Priscilla close to the bar.
“May I have a large glass of water, please? And some ice, if you have any left.”
The waiter poured water from a crystal jug into a glass, which he passed to Maisie. She drank half the liquid and then turned to her left, where Priscilla had her back to her and was regaling one of the guests with stories of Biarritz. She tapped Priscilla on the shoulder.
“Oh, Maisie, are you having a lovely time?”
“Yes, I am—and I seem to be holding up against the onslaught of sleep.”
“Good girl, not long now until breakfast is served. The spread is being set up in the morning room even as we speak.”
“Pris, what’s your New Year’s resolution?” Maisie asked the question, drank the remaining water, and set her glass on the bar.
“That came out of the blue,” said Priscilla.
“And what is it?”
Priscilla nodded to the waiter, who brought her another glass of champagne. “I don’t know. I’ll think about it tomorrow.” She took a sip from her glass. “You look as if you are about to tell me what it should be.”
“Come with me, Pris.” Maisie took her friend’s glass and placed it on another waiter’s tray as he passed.
“Where are we going?”
“Upstairs.”
“Upstairs?”
Maisie had stayed at the house before, so knew the geography of the Partridge home. She walked toward the large bedroom where Priscilla’s three sons were sleeping and opened the door with care. A night-light was glowing on a table to one side of the room, and the two women looked in at the boys, asleep. The youngest, Tarquin, had thrown off his bedcovers and slept at the bottom of his bed, with one leg over the side. The eldest, Timothy, lay on his back, with one arm bent across his eyes. The middle son, Thomas, slept under the covers, the bump under the eiderdown making it seem as if an animal were in the midst of hibernation.
Priscilla began to weep again.
“They’re all here,” said Maisie. “And they’re all safe. You can’t keep them so forever, because one day they will be men, and I know they will be very fine men. But now they are safe, and they are well, and they are loved. You need do no more, or less, for them.”
“But, I—”
Maisie closed the door without a sound. “But what you can do is not try to dull your fears with drink. You know, more than anyone, that it doesn’t take away the pain of grief or fear, it only robs you of today.”
Priscilla nodded. “I suppose I know what my resolution should be.”
“Darling? Are you up there?” The voice of Douglas Partridge echoed on the stairs. “Ah, I might have known I’d find you here with ‘Tante Maisie.’ Come on, breakfast is about to be served and—believe it or not—even after that never-ending supper, everyone’s famished.”
“Just coming!” Priscilla turned to Maisie and took her hand. “Thank you, Maisie. Thank you for coming tonight. I know you were exhausted, but your being here means so much to me.”
“I’m glad I came too,” said Maisie. Then, louder, “You know, I am very, very hungry. Douglas is right—let’s go down to breakfast.”
SEVENTEEN
January 1st, 1932
After a late start on New Year’s Day, Maisie arrived just in time to join Frankie for a midday meal of rabbit stew and mashed potato. Father and daughter sat together at the kitchen table with the door of the cast-iron stove wide open, so the warmth of the blaze could be felt even as the sky outside was wreathed in the shimmering gray clouds that were known to herald a dusting of snow.
“I’ll have to get Jook out soon, just in case that weather closes in.”
Maisie pushed some potato onto her fork and looked out of the window. “I’ll take her if you like, Dad. You stay here in the warm.” She turned back to her father and continued eating.
“We’ll go together, down to the meadow, across the field beyond, then double-back around through the woods to the front of the manor. I want to check on the horses, too. Drop in temperature like this can bring on a colic.”
“And you’d better wrap up warm, Dad. You don’t want to catch anything yourself.”
As soon as they’d finished the meal, Maisie dressed in thick corduroy trousers more suited to a farm laborer, with a flannel shirt and a heavy pullover to keep the cold at bay. Woolen socks and heavy Wellington boots would keep the moisture and, hopefully, the cold from her feet, and she wore her old cloche to hold the warmth in her body—otherwise Frankie would remind her that heat escaped from the top of the head. Soon father and daughter were making their way across the field, with the lurcher at heel but ready to run in pursuit of a rabbit if given leave to do so. Maisie walked at a slower pace than she might if alone, for her father could not move as smartly as a younger man, and when they reached the bottom of the meadow, he stopped to catch his breath. Barely a sound dented the silence; on such a cold day not even birds sang. In the distance, they watched a fox steal across the top of a snow-dusted field, and all the while, the dog remained still, her head tilted up as she watched Frankie’s eyes, her skin attuned to his every move.
Frankie turned his head at another sound, one that did not come from nature. “There’s a motor car coming, just pulled up along by the Dower House.”
“Is Lady Rowan expecting anyone today? Or Maurice, perhaps?”
“No plans for guests, as far as I know—and I always know who’s coming and going.”
Maisie looked back at the Groom’s Cottage, and turned to her father. “We’ll see who it is soon enough, when we come around the front. Ready then?”
“Right you are, love.”
They began walking again, though Maisie wondered about the crunching of tires on gravel, a sound that echoed in winter’s stillness as the vehicle pulled into the estate. Motor cars were rare in the village still, and never seen on a Sunday or bank holiday. And because the Comptons did not entertain quite so much now, the arrival of guests was always known and expected, and the unexpected was unwelcome by the Comptons and their servants alike.
Leaves still crisp from an overnight frost crackled underfoot, disturbing the silence of a winter woodland. They crossed the stream where it narrowed, and Maisie held out her hand to help her father up the bank to join the path again. Now Jook was walking on in front, her head low, her nose to the ground as she loped along with such a light step that her paws left barely a print underfoot. Father and daughter climbed over a stile to begin the last lap of their walk, which would bring them out to the front of the estate, where they would continue along past the lawns until reaching the turning off to the Groom’s Cottage, Frankie’s home.
As they approached the narrow turning to the right, they could see smoke from the cottage’s two chimneys lazily snaking upward, and the thought of easing back in armchairs on either side of a crackling fire caused them to walk a bit faster.
“I think I might sit down in that chair and go right off like a top, what with that lovely drop of stew inside me and a bit of fresh air. I can have a look at the horses later.”
“You should, Dad. It’ll do you good.” Maisie was tired, and thought the idea of an afternoon’s forty winks sounded like just the prescription she needed after the events of the past week and a late night behind her.
“Well, who’s this then?” Frankie Dobbs stopped at the top of the lane leading to the cottage, and l
ooked straight in front of him. His lurcher stood at his side and began to growl.
“Oh no, now what?” Maisie linked her arm through her father’s. “They’ve no right to come here.”
“That your Scotland Yard blokes then?”
Maisie nodded. “I could tell that black Invicta anywhere, Dad. Yes, it’s them.”
As Maisie and her father approached the cottage, Stratton and MacFarlane emerged from the motor car.
“Sorry to disturb you on New Year’s Day, Miss Dobbs.”
Maisie thought MacFarlane seemed less than contrite. “I trust you wouldn’t have come to my father’s home unless it were urgent.”
“Yes, it is important,” said Stratton, who held out his hand toward Maisie’s father. “Mr. Dobbs, a pleasure. And I’m sorry we’ve had to come to your house today.”
Frankie shook hands with both Stratton and MacFarlane, and stepped up to the front door. “You’d better come on in, instead of standing out here in the perishing cold.”
Maisie made a pot of tea, which she served in front of the fire in the small sitting room. Frankie said he wanted to read the racing pages anyway and took his seat alongside the kitchen stove.
Maisie passed a cup of tea to MacFarlane. “What’s happened?”
“Bit of a problem, I’m afraid. We brought in your man, Anthony Lawrence, to identify the body.” MacFarlane took a gulp of the hot tea and winced as it went down. Then he set the cup on a small table next to his chair and folded his hands in his lap. “Anthony Lawrence says he’s never seen this man in his life, and it’s not Stephen Oliver, because Stephen Oliver is in a secure wing at the Princess Victoria Hospital, or should I say the loony bin.”
“It’s not Oliver?”
“No.”
Maisie was silent. “But we know our man was the one who wrote the letters, and was the same man who killed the dogs, birds and a junior minister—and who planned to kill again, most likely at St Paul’s.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Stratton. “Our guest in the morgue is definitely the man we’ve been after. But we don’t know who he is.”
MacFarlane spoke again. “A couple of things came to light during the postmortem.” He handed Maisie an envelope. “You will see he had areas of deep scarring to the legs, and upon closer examination there was a significant amount of shrapnel still embedded in his flesh. There was also that scar on his face and jaw. All of this indicates a man who served in the war—and given his age, it wasn’t the Boer War. He was definitely British, we know that. Mind you, he might have gone overseas before the war, when thousands of boys went off to find their fortune, so he could have served with any army from the Canadians to the South Africans, Anzacs or the Doughboys. He could have been an airman, which I doubt, or on board ship, though evidence of his wounds would suggest a battlefield. But we should remember that men from the navy were pressed into the artillery and infantry, because that’s where they were needed.”
Maisie had been reading the contents of the envelope as MacFarlane spoke. Now she replaced the pages and pulled out the dead man’s diary, which had also been placed in the envelope. She leafed through it, stopping at a page here and there, then closed the diary and returned it to the envelope, which she passed back to MacFarlane.
“You’re very quiet about this, Miss Dobbs. What do you think? Who do you think this man might be?”
“I don’t know, Chief Superintendent MacFarlane. My search led me to think it was Stephen Oliver, but there was an element of doubt—in fact, I think there’s always an element of doubt. We know we have our man, and we’re as sure as we can be that he acted alone, even though he had a friend, Ian Jennings—oh, and I wouldn’t be too sure that Ian Jennings is the man’s real name. Of course we were given to understand he received a pension, but we never saw any official forms with his name, did we?”
MacFarlane and Stratton looked at each other. Stratton cleared his throat. “What are you saying, Miss Dobbs?”
Maisie wondered how to couch her response, how to best present her sense of the situation. “I am saying it’s a possibility you’ll never discover the man’s true identity. He might as well be John Smith. He destroyed or did not retain any identification and did not reveal his name in either his diary or to me when I was in his flat. If Croucher knew, it’s too late, he took that information with him when he died, as did Ian Jennings.”
“We’ve searched Croucher’s rooms and there’s nothing there, though it seems he was in the habit of trying to help out men who are homeless and who were soldiers in the war. We’ll have more on him by tomorrow, in any case.” MacFarlane sighed. “Well, at least we know there’s a killer off the street and we’re all safe, don’t we?” He placed his hands on the arms of the chair, as if he was about to stand.
“I don’t think we can be that complacent.”
“What do you mean?” MacFarlane sat back again and looked at Maisie, then Stratton, and back at Maisie.
“Chief Superintendent, in our man we saw the symptoms of a disease. He was wounded in body and mind in the war—indeed, he was wounded in his soul. He came home to endure a great deal of pain and felt as if he had become invisible, as if he didn’t exist—read that diary, it says as much. Now, according to Dr. Lawrence, there were about sixty, seventy, eighty thousand men who suffered some sort of war neuroses—shell-shock—to a greater or lesser degree. And if you listen to Lawrence for long enough, he’ll tell you how that number has been massaged since 1915—first, to put the lid on a syndrome that few understood, and secondly to limit damage to the exchequer from a never-ending pensions liability. Lawrence says that some two hundred thousand men are alive today who were shell-shocked, and if you agree that anyone who served has sustained a psychological wound of some description, then you are looking at more than just a few time bombs.”
“Are you saying that all these men are likely to go off and cook up nerve agents or get up to some other mischief?”
Maisie shook her head. “Of course not. Our man was clearly someone who knew his way around a laboratory, and who was capable and inventive enough to create those conditions in a small cold-water flat. He might be someone you can find on the basis of that skill alone, but don’t count on it.” Maisie considered her words with care. “Many of those men came back to loving families. When I was a nurse at the Clifton Hospital, you would see mothers and fathers who treated their sons with such care, such gentleness, as if they were children again. There were others who could not bring themselves to see a son so maimed, or you’d see a sweetheart, a young wife, perhaps, who could not bear to go unrecognized by her husband, who could not envisage sharing a home with a mate who was not the man she had taken into her heart. Many of those men were discharged from hospital care at the earliest opportunity, allowed to leave, told to find a job and settle down and live a normal life. But life will never be normal again, not when you’ve gazed into the jaws of death, not even when you have heard the cannonade in the distance. The screech of tires on the street or a motor car backfiring can send a man running for cover, can lead him to lose control of his physical movements, of his speech. And the people look away, don’t they? We all know when someone isn’t quite right, and for the most part, it’s an element of our nature to want to be out of the way of people who aren’t what we consider to be ‘normal.’”
“So what are you saying, Miss Dobbs?”
“That there are others like our man. Most of them will never do what he has done, but others will be moved to do something. They might cut themselves off from those who love them, they might be cast out by relatives to live on the streets, or they could be alone, as alone as they have always been. They might take their own lives, because what is in their minds cannot be borne a second longer, or they could make their families’ lives a misery, with jagged moods keeping everyone on tenterhooks as they try to placate the demon inside the man. They might have a short temper, followed by a time of regret, of extreme affection. They could be drinkers, or resort to na
rcotics to ease mental and physical anguish. Or they might just exist, until they die.”
“But somewhere,” said MacFarlane, “there’s a man who is a time bomb, who wants to be seen and heard.”
“Yes.”
“And that man may sooner or later cause damage on a bigger scale.”
“It’s a possibility.”
“And we’ll never know who he is until it happens.”
The three were silent for some moments, each alone with their thoughts.
MacFarlane slapped his knees and stood up. “Well, this will never get the eggs cooked. Come on, Stratton, we’d better get back to the Yard.”
Maisie came to her feet. “You traveled all this way for such a short meeting?”
“We thought it best to come to see you personally with the news,” said MacFarlane. “And we wanted to discuss the outcome with you—and not on the telephone.”
Stratton shrugged. “And I think we’ve got a lot more to chew on now.”
Maisie nodded. “I do have one more thought.”
“And what might that be?” MacFarlane raised his eyebrows.
“Bring in Catherine Jones to identify the body, just to make sure. I know you’ve already heard from a very credible source, but I’d be interested to know whether the man in the morgue is the same man she saw and spoke to at one of the meetings, the one she told me about.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt. I’ll see what can be done. Thank you, Miss Dobbs.”
“Thank you for coming, Chief Superintendent, Inspector Stratton. Let me see you out.”
Frankie came to the sitting room upon hearing the door open and the company bid their farewells. Both Stratton and MacFarlane shook his hand again, and as they left, MacFarlane informed Maisie that they would be in contact if she was to be consulted again, though her presence at the inquest would be required.