The Spies of Shilling Lane, page 9
So many figures hovering on the brink of reconciliation.
“Well,” announced Mrs. Braithwaite in her forthright manner. “This missing person very definitely exists, and I’ve searched the hospitals and every other place she can be. Her boyfriend is up to something, and I know it.” She drew in a fearsomely large breath. “So it’s about time you pull your finger out and do something about it.”
“I’ll take down the details and let the head office know about Baxter,” P.C. Watts said, sweeping the form he had filled to one side. “That’s all I can do until I get more evidence.”
Mrs. Braithwaite scowled, then she took Mr. Norris’s elbow and began pulling him gently away. “I think we should let the constable get on with his work, don’t you?”
“Er, do you think so?” Mr. Norris had the unsettling feeling that she had a plan of her own and remained clutching the police desk in front of him.
Then Mrs. Braithwaite did something very unlike her. She winked at him. It was a surreptitious kind of wink, the type that criminals might give each other. She motioned toward the door with her head, then did it again: the wink.
Weakened by confusion, he allowed her to drag him through the door.
“What are you thinking?” he asked when they got outside.
She began walking briskly back to the house. “If they aren’t going to do something about it, then we most certainly will.” Stopping dead in the middle of the pavement, she turned to him. “Mr. Norris, if no one else is going to save Betty, then it’ll have to be us.”
“But P.C. Watts is going to inform Scotland Yard. They’ll be certain to stop Baxter, whatever he’s up to.”
“You heard the man! He said that they have reports like this every day, that most of them don’t amount to much. He doesn’t take us seriously.” She put her hands on his upper arms, giving him a small shake. “It’s up to us to find out what’s happened to Betty.”
The day was gray. Thick clouds sat in a windless sky, going nowhere, and Mr. Norris couldn’t help thinking that everything was closing in on him. Becoming too much.
He began plodding back to the house.
Mrs. Braithwaite came hurrying after him. “Where are you going, Mr. Norris? We need to go back to Baxter’s place, see if we can follow him again. Maybe try the Pendulum. Perhaps we can get a lead from there. We have work to do. We need to get on with it!”
But Mr. Norris hardly heard a word. He was exhausted. He’d had enough of this darting around on wild-goose chases.
“We can’t just leave it, Mr. Norris. Where is your sense of duty?”
He stopped, opening his hands. “I have none.” He reached out and took one of her hands in his, imploring her. “You have to believe me. I’m simply not the kind of man who does these things.”
“But you do do these things, Mr. Norris.” Her hand began squeezing his. “You could be so much more. You only have to try it to see. You are a very skilled and dexterous person. You just have to point all that cleverness in the right direction.”
He let the words flow into his mind, weave around like snakes trying to poison him. “It’s no use, Mrs. Braithwaite. I have to go to the office. They need me there. Accounts are my rightful place.”
They walked home in silence.
Mrs. Braithwaite went to the kitchen to try to rouse him with a very hot, very strong cup of tea, but Mr. Norris took his briefcase, his gas mask box, and his bowler hat, and plodded to the front door.
He was going to work.
14.
Mrs. Braithwaite watched his departure with utter frustration. How could he abandon her like this? Then, with deliberation, she stood up, tied on her head scarf, and headed for the front door.
“I’ll jolly well find Betty on my own.”
There was nothing else for it: Baxter was her last link to Betty. Mrs. Braithwaite had to go back to his house and follow him from there. He would lead her to Betty at some point. She was sure of it.
Many thoughts surged through her mind as she marched up the hill to Clapham, most of them relating to Mr. Norris.
“I’ll show him,” she muttered to herself.
But as she got to the top of the hill and stood in front of Baxter’s house, it was Betty who crept to the forefront of her mind.
The worst hazard in life, her own experience had shown, was joining oneself to the wrong kind of man.
And Baxter was that, without a doubt.
She eyed his front windows. They were still blacked out from the night, and yet she had a suspicion there was something going on inside, shadows moving behind the shades. Someone was inside the house, and that person would have to come out sooner or later.
She propped herself against the wall around the darkened corner from the front door. Time passed, and her shoes began to pinch a little after the first hour, but she was determined to wait it out. Betty’s life depended on it.
Then, just as she was about to nod off, someone came out of the house.
By his lilt and stature, she knew it was Baxter. She pinned herself to the wall, hoping he wouldn’t turn her way. Eyeing his broad shoulders and remembering his aggressive stance when he’d found them in the bush, she shuddered. He was probably a trained fighter.
Let’s hope I’m not his next victim, she thought as she held her breath.
He strode off in the other direction, obviously in a hurry, and headed toward the telephone box on the common in front of the Pendulum. Tiptoeing out, she watched him pick up the telephone receiver. He stood for a few minutes speaking to someone before replacing the receiver to leave.
But he didn’t go straightaway. As he came out of the telephone box, he stooped down to retie his shoe, and as he did so, he seemed to wipe his hand against the door, low down, close to the ground. After that he walked swiftly off.
She tailed him at a distance. He was striding toward central London, following back streets lined with terraced houses, turning quickly and often.
Because it was quiet once he’d left the main road, with fewer people on the streets, she had to let him go farther ahead of her so that he wouldn’t become suspicious.
Suddenly he seemed to have heard something—her footsteps perhaps—and he turned around sharply. He blinked into the daylight as Mrs. Braithwaite leaped into someone’s front garden, crouching down and praying that he wouldn’t come and drag her out.
He stood for a few moments, watching, listening. Then a bird fluttered out from behind her, giving Mrs. Braithwaite a fright.
Baxter turned and carried on walking. He must have thought it was the bird.
Winding through the back streets, he came out at a high street. It was crowded with queues from bakeries and grocery shops spilling out onto the pavement, people trying to buy food before it ran out for the day. Women with baskets on their arms hurried from place to place, some with small children trotting to keep up. A blind man with a stick tapped his way through the chaos. Beside a red telephone box, an aging policeman looked around superciliously, probably missing crimes being committed right under his nose.
Just past a butcher’s shop, Baxter paused slightly, looking around before vanishing into a door tucked between the butcher’s and a closed florist’s. It clunked shut behind him, leaving Mrs. Braithwaite standing, watching it.
The door, a battered wooden one with chipped black paint, did not look appealing. A bomb had taken off the upper floor of the butcher’s shop, but a sign in the window proclaimed BUSINESS AS USUAL, MR. HITLER. That would mean it was a door to a basement or cellar.
But what, or who, was inside? Although Mrs. Braithwaite prided herself on her toughness, she considered carefully whether to try the door or wait for Baxter to come out.
In the end, curiosity got the better of her, and she decided to ease the door gently open, if she could, and listen. She felt quietly confident that she would know something was amiss if she heard it.
The handle clicked down surprisingly easily, and she pulled it open with a jerk. The interior was pitch-black with stairs leading down to a cellar. Muffled voices were coming up, but there must have been another, closed door at the bottom of the stairs.
Dare she tiptoe down and open the next door a fraction?
Before she could decide, the lower door flew open, and a beam of low light stretched across the lower stairs. The voices became clear.
“There can’t be any sabotage or assassinations.” It was Baxter, loud and clear.
Another man said something too quiet for her to hear, but she made out the name Fox, and he finished by saying slightly louder, “Eight on Saturday at the church.”
She strained her ears, but there was a lot of movement, someone kicking or moving boxes perhaps.
And that’s when she heard it.
“What shall we do with her?” It was a thuggish voice, thick and deep.
A man—was it Baxter?—replied something that she couldn’t quite hear.
Did they have Betty locked up down there?
Mrs. Braithwaite hardly had time to think before the sound of heavy footsteps came echoing up the stairs.
Pulling away quickly, she dodged back into the street, horrifically exposed, unsure what to do.
She could feel her heart pounding in her throat. She glanced around frantically for a hiding place. A stairwell or a side alley? But there was nothing. She simply had to stay and hope he didn’t see her, or—
A heavyset man in a boiler suit pushed the cellar door open and strode past her without looking twice as Mrs. Braithwaite, retying her head scarf, hurried down the pavement as if she were a normal woman, on a normal day, on her way to the grocery shop. It was the best disguise she had. Hiding in plain sight. No one would ever suspect a middle-aged housewife.
As she went past, she saw Baxter come out and stride off in the other direction.
“Who are these people?” Mrs. Braithwaite murmured, keeping her head down. Baxter could recognize her, after all.
When he was out of sight, she stopped, her heart racing.
What am I going to do?
That Betty might be held down there seemed possible, probable even.
She looked around for the policeman she’d seen earlier, but he’d gone, and she knew she didn’t have enough time to return to the police station to explain everything.
Drawing a deep breath, she was certain of only one thing.
She had to go in herself.
A niggling worry that it was, perhaps, a little foolhardy, made her think twice. What would happen if she was captured, too?
With this in mind, she walked briskly to the telephone box, found a few coins in her purse, and dialed the number to Mr. Norris’s house.
One ring, two rings, three rings. Mrs. Braithwaite imagined the sound echoing in the empty house. Mr. Norris was probably still at work, of course, and the girls, well, she didn’t know whether they’d be there.
Four rings, five, six.
Would one of them come home for lunch?
Seven rings, eight rings, nine.
If only she’d taken down Mr. Norris’s work telephone number.
Ten rings, eleven.
There was a loud click as someone picked up the telephone.
Mrs. Braithwaite held her breath, hoping for it to be Mr. Norris.
“Hallo.” It was the haughty voice of Cassandra.
Mrs. Braithwaite sighed, wishing it had at least been Florrie, although her flightiness would have lessened the chances of Mr. Norris’s actually receiving the message.
“This is Mrs. Braithwaite,” she said clearly—Mrs. Braithwaite always spoke clearly on the telephone. Good diction was the sign of good breeding. “Would you take a message for Mr. Norris, please?”
There was some clattering as Cassandra found the pen that Mr. Norris always left beside the telephone. “What’s the message?” Her voice was curt to the point of rudeness.
The awful thought crossed her mind: Was Cassandra trustworthy?
She certainly was unconscionably rude.
Thinking quickly, Mrs. Braithwaite decided to encode the message, hoping that Mr. Norris would have the presence of mind to work it out.
“Tell him that I had to go to the high street to find some sausages,” she said crisply.
“Is that all?” Cassandra said, the sound of jotting coming through the telephone.
“Tell him ‘Business as usual.’ He’ll know what I mean.”
Well, I jolly well hope he will! Mrs. Braithwaite thought as Cassandra bid her a brusque good-bye and put the receiver down.
Outside the telephone box, she collected herself for the task ahead, and headed for the door.
She turned the handle, but this time it was locked.
Putting her head to it, she thought she heard a noise inside, and felt herself edging back. Who was in there? Who might come to the door? Could it be a thug like the one who’d just left? He would kill her if he saw her. She’d be found dead in the river next week. Her clothes would be eaten by fish, and she’d be found on a beach bloated and naked. How Mrs. Metcalf would laugh victoriously.
Mrs. Braithwaite deliberated about whether to run for it or face this dreadful, humiliating death head-on. But after a full five minutes, no one came out of the door.
She tried to open it again, attempting to budge it as much as she could. But it was locked fast.
She was going to have to break in.
Digging around in her handbag, her fingers closed around her trusty hairpin. She’d used it before to open various entry points: her own back door when she was locked out, the neighbor’s shed when a cat went missing, Mrs. Metcalf’s terrace French door. It could take some time, but she knew she could do it. The street was crowded—who would pay attention to a middle-aged woman having difficulty with her key, after all?
Hiding in plain sight, she thought to herself, taking out her own set of keys, to jangle around convincingly.
Looking both ways, she tackled the lock, concealing the hairpin within her keys.
“I’m from the WVS looking for potential housing for the bombed out,” she muttered, quietly rehearsing the story she’d tell if she was spotted.
It took a few minutes of careful tinkering, nudging the end of the hairpin against the insides of the lock, before she felt a small click, and suddenly the door pushed open.
She was in.
Straightening her coat, she quietly closed the door behind her.
The landing was dark, but she recalled the location of the stairs heading down into the basement, and feeling her way with each step, she began creeping as quietly as the rotting stairs would allow. At the bottom, she felt around the walls for a door handle, and then tried it. It opened straightaway, and she found herself inside another dark space. She struck a match—borrowed surreptitiously from Mr. Norris’s hallway collection—the little flare settling into a steady, bright flame, illuminating a long corridor, three or four doors leading off on each side.
That’s when the noises began.
First there was a light scraping, which could have been made by a mouse or a rat, only then it turned into a rhythmic kind of banging, the kind that could only be made by a person. It was coming from behind one of the doors.
Taking a few steps backward, she retreated into a cupboard under the stairwell, pulling the door closed behind her. She rummaged through her handbag for a lethal kind of weapon, like a knife or a bottle, but the only pointed item she had was a ballpoint pen, and she was loath to use that as it was her only one.
From her hiding place, she waited, sweating. But after a minute and then more minutes, she realized that no one was coming after her. The muffled banging had gone back to a slight scratching. Maybe it was a mouse after all.
Creeping out of her corner, she decided, bravely, to try one of the doors.
The scratching was coming from the second door on the left, so she decided to start with the first door on the right.
Easing the door open, she struck another match. The flame fired and simmered, showing some kind of meeting room, uneven chairs crammed around an old wooden refectory table. The chairs were in disarray, as if a meeting had come to a sudden end, everyone leaving their chairs wherever they were.
She went back to the corridor and tried the next door on the right. Inside she struck another match. She’d run out of matches the way things were going.
But then she stopped in her tracks.
She quickly tried to piece together what it was she was looking at. There was an old worn, backless wooden bench in the center of the room. Some areas close to the four corners were rubbed bare of the varnish and dirt that was covering the rest of it, exposing the raw wood beneath. A metal bucket lay next to the bench, empty.
On a table at the side were a number of chains and a bottle with a clear liquid. She went over, opened it, and sniffed. The smell was so pungent that she was almost sick. Was it pure alcohol? Meths? Something worse? Beside the bench on the floor was another metal chain.
She looked at the chain. At the bench.
Had someone been chained here, wearing down the corners as they struggled to be released?
Was this some kind of interrogation room?
The match went out.
Feeling the wall behind her, she backed out of the room into the corridor.
There was that scratching sound again, small scrapes on the floor or wall coming from the door opposite.
She’d try the door. The noise could be anything, after all, but she was ready to run for her life, even though she couldn’t remember the last time she had.
The lock clicked, a minuscule sound that seemed to carry around the empty corridor, making her stand stock-still for a moment, waiting for someone to fly toward her. But there was nothing. Only the sound of scraping, which had become louder, faster.
