Chapter 13 A Sickly Season
A Sickly Season
During the course of the following morning, Flynn grew increasingly agitated about what Archie’s “favour” might be. I hear they’re talking murder.
“Spot of lunch, Harry?” Evans said. “You’re looking a bit green about the gills.
Food might help.” Flynn doubted it would, but nonetheless he accompanied Evans to the Lyons Corner House next to Charing Cross Station, where they shared a ham salad and boiled potatoes, neither of them feeling able to commit to an entire meal.
For a long time after he came back from the East, Flynn had been unable to stomach anything but rice.
The irony was not lost on him. He had returned part of the way on an American troop ship, where the food was the stuff of a starving man’s dreams. A breakfast buffet piled high with shelled boiled eggs, white and shiny as marble; trays of cereal to be dived into; heavenly tasting bacon; the most unimaginably soft white bread.
Gallons of milk, maple syrup, coffee. For the first day or two, his fellow POWs had, with the encouragement of the sympathetic American cooks, gorged themselves on everything going.
To the Yanks’ horror, a couple of them died, their stomachs unable to take this bounty.
“Same thing happened when they liberated Belsen,” Evans said as they lingered over their cigarettes. “I heard Richard Dimbleby’s report for the BBC when I was home on leave. Painful listening. April ’44. You’d have missed that.”
“I did.” Flynn couldn’t remember exactly where he had been in April ’44. After a while, one hellhole merged into another. He certainly hadn’t been listening to the Home Service.
“Poor fuckers,” Evans said. “Not many people had it worse than we did, Harry, but the Jews in the camps did. We all walk on the bones of the dead, boyo.” Sometimes the musical lilt of Evans’s accent made it seem as if he was speaking in pleasantries.
“It’s all about the glorious ‘Few,’ ” he added bitterly.
“Or your ‘plucky’ Londoners during the Blitz. Makes me sick. No one talks about the Atlantic convoys or your lot in Burma. Even the Bomber boys have been swept beneath the carpet.”
“The Malays, the Chinese, the Tamils,” Flynn said. “They had it worse than anyone on the Railway and there were a lot more of them. I doubt their story’s ever going to be told.”
“No pageants for them, eh?”
“People always move on as quickly as they can from war,” Flynn said. “Can’t blame them. A few years later and they start wanting to remember again. A few decades more and they’re wallowing in it.”
“Not the First World War, surely no one will ever wallow in the memory of Passchendaele or the Somme.”
They split the meagre bill and paid the nippy. Flynn recognized her from the cake judging.
“She was flirting with you,” Evans said glumly. “I don’t think a woman has ever flirted with me.”
As they left the Lyons, they encountered a man parading up and down with a sandwich board announcing The End Is Nigh, a message which seemed to perk Evans up. “Glad someone’s noticed. The end came a long time ago for some of us. Apologies, Harry. Miserable Welsh bugger and all that.”
Flynn patted him on the shoulder. “You’re all right with me, Hywel.”
They were late. They could just hear Big Ben chiming a quarter-hour. “Creeping like snail,” Flynn said.
“What?”
“ ‘The whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school.’ The Seven Ages of Man.”
Evans had no Shakespeare. He had left school at fourteen and later qualified as a marine engineer by attending night classes. “I would remind you, Harry,” he said, “that I am a philistine.”
“I think you’re probably the smartest person I know.”
A flustered Evans, unused to flattery, almost tripped on an uneven paving slab.
—
“This came for you, Mr. Flynn,” Maud Ogilvie said when they returned to their desks.
She handed him one of the official-looking slips of paper she kept for messages.
It was a note from Lydia, saying she would be in the Rose and Crown in Mayfair early evening if he wanted to join her.
He was surprised that she wanted to see him again; she had seemed to ignore him outside the Royal Opera House and had been decidedly cool when he had last spoken to her on the phone after their tryst (a pleasant, almost courtly word for something that had been more of a frenzied abandonment).
“Thank you,” he said to Maud Ogilvie. She gave him a conspiratorial little smile. “Lydia Fairchild,” she said, more a statement of fact than a question.
“Do you know her?”
She laughed. “Not at all.”
—
Although on the South Bank frantic preparations were being made for the opening of the Festival, in the basement of Savoy Court the afternoon laboured onwards, unaffected by any particular sense of urgency.
The only excitement came when the Boy rushed in to report a bomb in the Dome of Discovery.
They all trooped dutifully upstairs, anticipating watching from the Embankment as the South Bank was blown up.
(“I wish,” Evans said.) They hadn’t even got as far as the street when they were informed that it was, disappointingly, a hoax and they trooped back downstairs again.
The Boy was particularly deflated by this news.
To cheer him up, Maud Ogilvie set him the task of going round all the offices to scavenge for stray rubber bands until it was time for the tea break.
“He would make an excellent dog,” she said. “A retriever or a spaniel.”
“He’s more of a terrier, I think,” Evans said. A general discussion ensued about the various breeds of dog and their canine attributes, until the Boy returned, his truffling successful, and Maud Ogilvie patted him on the head and said, “Well done, Terence.”
Flynn had to push his way through quite a crowd in the Rose and Crown.
He spotted Lydia already seated at a table, although she wasn’t alone.
She was having what looked like a rather intense conversation with a man who had Security Service written all over him.
As Flynn approached, the man got up and left quickly, tipping an imaginary hat in his direction.
“You’re early,” Lydia said by way of greeting.
“Who were you talking to? One of your lot?”
“Oh, no, he was no one. Just some man trying his luck. Told him I was waiting for my fiancé, who was an Oxford Blue.”
“And in what sport do I hold this prestigious award?”
“Boxing.” She laughed, her mood suddenly brightening. “He scarpered pretty quickly when he saw you, didn’t he? I’ll have a G and T. Thank you.”
—
“You can’t really think that the police believe you’re involved in this Frenchwoman’s disappearance?” Lydia said after he had given her a curtailed version of events. “What’s her name again?”
“Delphine Dubois,” he said. “It’s worse than that. I think the police suspect that I’ve killed her.”
“And have you? Killed her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Very reassuring.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure. I lost a whole night,” he confessed. “I had some kind of a blackout.”
“Again—very reassuring,” she said, opening her cigarette case and offering it to him.
“Fabergé,” she said carelessly when he complimented it.
A twenty-first-birthday present, although she didn’t say who from.
He tweezered two cigarettes out and she leant in to his lighter, making a languid performance out of it.
Her expensive perfume mingled with the first hit of tobacco.
“You seem to have got yourself in a bit of a pickle, Flynn.”
“Don’t you think that if I’d killed someone I would remember?”
“Just because you don’t remember killing someone doesn’t necessarily mean that you didn’t.”
“What a comforting thought.”
“I do love a juicy murder though, don’t you?”
“Can’t say I do,” Flynn said. “Out of interest, what does a murder have to involve to earn the accolade ‘juicy’?”
“Sex. The more deviant the better, usually. Do the police have any actual evidence against you?”
He refrained from mentioning Archie or admitting to the scarf. There was nothing about either its appearance or disappearance that could be interpreted in his favour by Lydia. They may have been intimate, but he hardly knew her, and she might feel duty-bound to inform the police.
“No one would ever know if I killed someone,” she said.
“I would commit the perfect murder.” The little diamonds in her ears glinted in the fug of cigarette smoke that seemed to have replaced most of the oxygen in the atmosphere of the pub.
She crossed one finely stockinged leg over the other, and Flynn thought that he could catch the faint susurration of nylon on nylon.
Or more likely, being Lydia, silk on silk.
She was fascinating, Flynn thought. Like a rare and beautiful animal who would think nothing of tearing open your veins and lapping your blood.
“I saw you, you know,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Going into the opera. You were with someone.”
“Are you jealous?” She laughed. “No need to be. That was Bertie, he’s a country cousin, up in town for a few days.
Pa charged me with entertaining him for the night, but Rigoletto bored him rigid—quite rightly—so we snuck out at the interval and I took him to the Astor club.
Full of tarts and criminals, much more entertaining for Bertie.
He’s an estate manager in Aylsham, his life is very dull, poor boy. ”
Flynn chinked his glass against hers and said, “Our Noble Selves. It’s an Army toast,” he added when she raised an eyebrow.
“I only know naval toasts. My favourite is ‘A bloody war or a sickly season.’ ”
“I don’t understand it.”
“It means you’re hoping your fellow shipmates will die so you can gain promotion.”
“We walk on the bones of the dead.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing, just something Evans said. He’s a colleague. By the way, did you find anything ‘on file’ about the Blinkhorns? You said you were going to look. Did you?”
“I did.”
“And?”