He’d waited ten minutes, spying on her from an upstairs window, letting her stew in the stifling afternoon heat with the ice-cream, butter, and frozen peas. Curiosity and impatience finally forced open the car door and Roger flew down the front steps. “Sorry, Mum,” he said bundling her back into the Renault and driving off.
“Who were it?” she demanded, craning to peer into the blank windows, suspecting a female; suspecting she was being cheated on.
“Just a friend,” he repeated, knowing it would drive her insane.
“Sergeant 247639, Mitchell,” George introduced himself to the sergeant at his door, thinking—“Quite a day.” “I’ve just been talking to your lads, Serg. Nasty stain one of ’em had. Doubt if it’ll come out.”
“Yes, Sergeant Mitchell,” he started, then changed his tone and added conspiratorially, “Mind if I call you George?”
He hadn’t minded, placing the policeman from London as a peer, and they sat in his kitchen like a couple of old soldiers, chin-wagging over a cuppa for fifteen minutes before getting around to Roger.
“Like I told the others,” he said, “Funny looking bloke—he looked like the snowmen we made as kids; just two balls, one big’un for the body and a little’un for the head; no neck to speak of and stubby little arms and legs.”
That’s our man, thought the staff sergeant, nodding in the direction of the house on the other side of the road. “Who does it belong to George— who owns the place?”
“It’s his of course, as far as I know. I saw him talking to the real estate bloke the day it were put up for sale.”
What’s going on? puzzled the policeman; his mother would have known surely …“Are you sure it’s his?”
George, affronted, went on the offensive. “It’s his I’m telling you. I can even give you the name of the estate agents if you like,” and, without waiting for a response, he did. “It were Jefferson’s up the High Street.”
“Interesting,” the staff sergeant mused, mulling over Roger’s motives, wondering why he’d never told his parents. “What do you know about the place George?”
George Mitchell knew a great deal, most of his knowledge first hand, the wartime holding his most vivid memories. “It were August 1940, in the Blitz, the end ’ouse got bombed,” he recounted. “A lot of people round here reckoned it was one of our own. See, there weren’t no real air raid that night, not so far as we knew anyhow. Oh the sirens went off all right, dronin’ on and on, but no one heard nuvving else until, ’Bang!’ Bloody near shook me old mum’s false teeth out it did.” He paused long enough for a chuckle at his joke—and the memory. “Then we looked out and the ’ouse were gone. Just like that. ’Course it were the blackout so we couldn’t do nowt ’til the morning. Then they found ’em hiding under the stairs, only the stairs were right on top of ’em.” Clapping his hands in emphasis he added, “Flat as pancake.”
“It was never rebuilt?”
“Nah. The son had been sent to Australia,” said George, his strong cockney accent turning the country into something sounding more like a horse-trailer. “ ’Course the big tragedy were next door, where that bloke of yours lives.”
Ears pricked, the sergeant leant forward.
“Oh yes,” George continued, now deeply lost in the past. “The poor bastards,” he said slowly. “The whole family went. Trampled to death in that underground disaster. You remember?” he said, as if it were an order.
“No, I don’t actually.”
George, puzzled, gave him a look, then smiled, more to himself than the sergeant. “Silly me, ’course not—you ain’t old enough. Anyhow it were about a year later, maybe more.” He paused, searching the floor for the exact date, “I dunno. Anyhow it ain’t important,” he said finally, giving up. Then continued, “Anyhow, after what happened to the couple on the end—flat as a pancake … under the stairs—the family next door were petrified. They had three kids and they was worried to death the kids would get killed. So they took ’em down to ’is brother’s in Hampshire for a holiday, to get away from it, the bombing that is, and they was all coming back by Tube. Brother, wife, and all.” He stopped, took a long swig of tea and swilled it noisily around his mouth, puffing out his cheeks, as if deliberately allowing the tension to rise, then gulped it down and finished his story. “They was just coming up the stairs to change platforms when a bomb, a big ’un, dropped straight down the hole. It didn’t go off, but everyone panicked and they all got crushed to death. Hundreds of ’em were killed, maybe thousands. They never got the bodies out you know, just buried ’em all together … Tragedy … Poor bastards.”
Closing his eyes for a second, he sat back, breathing deeply, recalling every macabre detail as if he had been there. A notion he dispelled with his next words. “I was in Africa at the time. Rommel and El Alamein, you know.” A faraway look glazed his eyes and the crease of a smile warmed his mouth for a few seconds, then he straightened up. “It were a tragedy—poor bastards.”
“And after the war?”
“Oh, there’s been eight or ten different families since then. Most of ’em foreigners.” He hesitated, “Not that I’ve got anything against them you understand. Nice enough, most of ’em anyhow. Take Mrs. R. next door, good as gold she is, she’ll do me washing …”
The police sergeant started to rise. “Thank you, George, most informative. Now, I don’t suppose you’d know anybody with a key to the place would you? I’d like to have a little snoop around.”
George fumbled in his pocket sheepishly. “Well, I shouldn’t let on really, but the Greeks gave me a key when they moved out. Just to let the water and the ’lectricity people in. ’Course he might have changed the locks, but we could give it a try.”
Slivers of faded saffron yellow cracked off the front door as it opened with an arthritic creak and the odour of abandonment—fungus, damp earth and musty clothing— signalled to it being unoccupied. A pile of mail lay swept to one side by the door and the staff sergeant scooped a handful. “Anybody home,” he shouted, making George jump, dropping it back on the pile. “Junk.”
There was no reply. Trudy was there but she couldn’t hear.
They searched the entire house; it didn’t take long. Two rooms upstairs and two down, plus the cupboard under the stairs, and the poky little bathroom tacked onto the back in the early 1950s, at a time when the combined introduction of running water, piped gas, and electricity turned personal cleanliness from a chore to a pleasure. Each room contained more or less the same. “Garbage,” according to the policeman. “Just a load of old garbage.” And everywhere the same powerful smell, the exhaled breath of billions of unseen creatures all busily devouring the fabric of the place.
“Look at it, George,” he said scornfully. “Nobody’s living here. Scraps of bloody firewood, that’s all there is. Look at this chair,” he exclaimed. “A fly couldn’t sit on this without breaking it.” And to prove his point he put his foot on it and pushed. “Oh Shit!” he exclaimed, as the chair splintered into a half a dozen pieces.
“I’m buggered if I know what he’s been living on,” said George, obviously dispassionate about the damage. “There’s no furniture to speak of, no food, there’s not even a bed.”
There was a bed—Roger’s bed—hidden in Roger’s secret room. It was an oversized single bed; an expensive bed with a floral patterned pocket sprung mattress, and it had a very solid looking fancy brass bedstead. Trudy was lying on it, dreaming of somewhere else— anywhere else. Trudy, bruised black and blue, exhausted and bleeding, was sleeping, and had fallen asleep praying that her mother would rescue