The Mystery at Rake Hall E-Book

Maureen Paton

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: C.S. Lewis Investigates
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 314

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'Satisfyingly violent'The Times, Best Crime Fiction of 2025 So Far 'Sprightly and elegantly written mystery'The Daily Telegraph 'A marvellous literary thriller' Clare Chase 'A clever and refreshing take on the mystery novel' Jo Silva In post-war Oxford, secrets lie behind every door. In 1947, with rationing still biting and the black market thriving, university don C.S. 'Jack' Lewis finds himself pulled into a mystery straight from one of his friend Dorothy Sayers' novels. Susan Temple, his brightest student, has hidden herself away at Rake Hall — a hostel for unmarried, outcast mothers – and hasn't been heard from since. With no experience beyond catching the occasional student plagiarist, Lewis is hardly a detective. But when Susan's absence continues to haunt him, he teams up with her concerned friend Lucy and together they delve into the disturbing rumours of a nasty racket at Rake Hall. Can Lewis's nose for the truth separate fact from fiction? In The Mystery at Rake Hall, Maureen Paton – whose mother lived at the real-life Rake Hall while pregnant with Maureen – brilliantly recreates a post-war Oxford world, as well as imagining an alternative life for one of its most famous residents. RAVE READER REVIEWS - 'An homage to post war Oxford ... an entertaining read with a mystery to solve' - 'Blends historical authenticity with a compelling "whodunit"' - 'Very easy to read, a page-turner and a real sense of Oxford' - 'I loved this mystery .. the author brought to life the time beautifully … I cannot wait to see what she offers for her second book but this one will be hard to top' - 'An enjoyable, atmospheric and very cosy read' - 'A famous real-life writer solving a mystery … I really enjoyed it'

Leseprobe

In memory of my mother, Blanche

Autumn 1947

Chapter 1

Normally, he never took much notice of what a female student was wearing. That way danger lay, even if you were saying something gallant about their outfit. And Jack Lewis wasn’t that kind of man. But there had been something odd about Susan Temple’s appearance at tutorials recently that had puzzled him, try though he might to set his mind on higher things.

And now, for the second week in a row, there was no sign of her. Tapping his pipe on his desk to give himself time to ponder, he eventually looked up at the long, glum face of the other pupil, Christopher Henchard, who was probably also wondering why Temple hadn’t turned up to help him out of his usual scholarly jam with some well-chosen words.

Although she looked as delicate and willowy as one of the wood nymphs from Lewis’s beloved Greek mythology, Temple stood up well to intellectual interrogation. There was something defiant about her that amused him; despite his college image as a middle-aged bachelor terrified of what the university’s young bucks called ‘totty’, he secretly relished pitching his wits against the women students. Having fought to gain admission in the first place to the tiny minority of female colleges, they were almost guaranteed to be brighter than many of the men – especially the rugger buggers heading for thirds after spending too much time on the pitch. Lewis, a clumsy, butterfingered man, detested sport and left all that to his brother Warnie.

Yet the vulnerability of someone as rashly combative as Temple also disturbed him. There were men who would see that as a challenge and take advantage – especially with her lush-lipped, high-cheekboned, dark beauty, although he tried not to be too aware of that. He had always been bothered by the potential susceptibility of the female undergrads, so vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts after leaving home for the first time – and therefore only too ripe for exploitation and domination.

The don knew he was being patronising – tantamount to suggesting that they were the weaker sex, not up to the demands of academia, which was certainly not his intention – yet it troubled him nonetheless. After all, the university had yet to recover from the strange and shocking case of the girl who had been found dead in her bed in Lady Margaret Hall only the previous term. The inquest had established that she had a weak heart, a condition confirmed by her family, yet the whisper was that she had been taking amphetamines to cram overnight for her finals.

Benzedrine tablets, or Bennies, were technically not illegal: the RAF boys had been chucking them down their throats to match the Luftwaffe’s daily doses of Pervitin for the bloody dogfights of war. But not for nothing were amphetamines nicknamed ‘speed’, and the jury was still out on their effect on a dodgy ticker – or even on a normal one.

Where had she got the stuff? A boyfriend had to be involved, according to the usual order of things in which young women were led on by worldlier men. Not all of them were callow youths of the same age as the girls: a number of male students had deferred their higher education in order to serve in the war. And when they returned from the conflict, these soldier-students were sometimes damaged men, just like the don himself after the First World War. Most of them had been officers, but they were not necessarily gentlemen.

Beyond that was the lurking presence of black marketeers, whose dabs were over everything in this and every other city. They seemed to exert an unhealthy influence over students with more money than sense – of which there were far too many, in Lewis’s opinion.

According to the university grapevine, the pathologist had found no evidence of substances in the girl’s body, but it might all have been hushed up to prevent a scandal. The official verdict was accidental death, much to the relief of the college, as well as her distraught parents. The local papers covered it as a nib, a ‘news in brief’. But the tantalisingly short reports continued to haunt Lewis, a details man. He remembered how he had once overheard a bunch of Senior Common Room sherry gossips smacking their lips while piously shaking their heads over the dead girl’s ‘parchment-pale’ face. He found it hard to stomach the gloating interest; it was as if they were old dears sharing hospital horrors over the garden fence. But then these were men that had never been war-forged.

His thoughts returned to the strangely absent Susan Temple. Of course, it was never the done thing to chase up students if they didn’t turn up for seminars or tutorials; that was their lookout. There was usually a reckoning at the end of each term with questions asked about gaps in attendance if they affected their performance, but great universities were not schools, and undergraduates were not children. At this level, they were expected to be self-disciplined, which was why higher education could be so overwhelming for the weaker students.

Susan Temple was not one of them. If she was unwell, the usual form was to send a note with an excuse, but no apology had arrived. Usually, she showed up early to show off with her latest essay, a smile on her face at the certainty of impressing the exacting Mr Lewis yet again.

He knew he would have to contact Somerville and her other tutors eventually, but he was reluctant to cry wolf too soon and perhaps get the girl into trouble. It seemed to him that Temple was too clever to stage a disappearing act without a very good reason.

‘Grim day, sir,’ said the clearly hung-over Henchard, trying to delay the dreaded business of reading out his meandering thoughts on Spenser.

This term, his written work had not been quite so lazy and patchy as usual, and Lewis, who had one of the finest noses in the university for sniffing out deceit, suspected the involvement of another hand. The subtlest of touches, of course, to try to conceal the spectral presence of a ghostwriter, usually one of the better students.

Could that be behind Temple’s non-appearance? She might be reluctant to look him in the eye; she could get sent down as well as Henchard if she were found to be helping him, especially for payment. Yet judging by what Lewis had observed, she was much more the type to brazen things out.

Spears of horizontal rain were being hurled by an angry weather god at the windows of the chaotic sitting room where the detritus from yesterday’s afternoon tea – Lewis’s favourite meal, a hangover from his nursery days – sat on top of piles of paper. The lino was scratched and singed in places, a cheap floor-covering that did no favours to the handsome white-panelled room with its perfect view of the college’s Grove meadow.

His tiny book-stacked study and bedroom faced in the opposite direction on to Magdalen’s tranquil Cloisters and Tower, but so long as there was enough fuel to warm the bigger room, the don preferred that hint of wildness outside a window. The Grove reminded him of the wood behind The Kilns, his house in nearby Headington, that gave its grounds what he imagined was a certain epic quality. Sometimes he thought that a thousand sinister golden eyes were fixed upon him as he looked out. It was only the deer sheltering in the bracken, yet he put the feeling of paranoia down to the wartime surveillance that seemed to have continued into peacetime.

The never-ending shortages encouraged people to spy on each other, always wondering who might be concealing a secret stash supplied by the ugly, prowling profiteers. Some of those creatures were known as ‘claw boys’, according to gossip passed on by his own loyal Magdalen servant Cyril, known as Squirrel. When Squirrel told Lewis they derived the nickname from the razor blades they used as weapons, it was hard to suppress a shudder. ‘Surely they would never dare in somewhere like Oxford? Maybe parts of London, but not here?’ Squirrel merely tapped his nose, glad to have passed on the warning just in case. Not that saintly Mr Lewis was ever likely to be in danger from such a source.

When the don’s domestic slavery at The Kilns allowed, he particularly liked to linger by one of the old stone-quarry pools between the house’s nearby trees. Sometimes he tried to take a punt out, but the almighty effort with the pole was usually defeated by his physical awkwardness. He told himself he would make a terrible adventurer, blaming the shrapnel that had finally been dug out of his forearm only three years ago.

Indoors, he was on surer ground. His tutorials always started off as affable affairs, with Lewis lounging across his Chesterfield and scattering ash everywhere as he switched from pipe to cigarettes. It was a disarming sight. Yet, like his Irish solicitor father, he would pounce on any hint of sloppy thinking. And he always loved goading his students on to greater things.

The don sighed and shifted on the creaky sofa. ‘Well, there’s no use waiting for Miss Temple if she’s mislaid her brolly. She’s usually as regular as clockwork, as we know, but The Faerie Queene won’t wait for her. Give me the benefit of your expertise on the virtue of chastity as embodied in the character of Spenser’s warrior princess Britomart, Mr Henchard.’

Sometimes, Lewis found himself wishing that a latter-day Britomart might rise up and fight on behalf of her fellow females. Although women were few and far between at the university itself, they had formed a majority in the city during the war with so many men having been conscripted: every tinpot London company, not to mention many of the hospitals, seemed to have moved its mostly female staff there because of the bombing.

As well as the city’s opportunistic bootleggers, the Yanks at nearby RAF Bicester would lay siege to this abundance of hungry and lonely women with gifts of lipstick and nylons as well as edible treats or chewing gum. The reputation of Oxford’s Randolph Hotel for all-night trysting had reached even the don’s cloistered ears, with Lewis quickening his pace as if he might be corrupted every time he walked past it on a Tuesday lunchtime to meet John Tolkien and other chums over a pint at the Bird and Baby.

One of the regulars in the Eastgate, a rival establishment, used to swear that all through the war discarded condoms were thrown into the pile of rubbish at the back of the Randolph, a yarn that Lewis had to put firmly to the back of his mind whenever he was asked to give wartime theology talks at the nearby air bases. In his heart, however, he felt that he couldn’t condemn. Besides, it was a world he knew nothing of, save for the occasional bit of gossip in pubs and a barmaid’s sometimes knowing looks.

As for female students, ‘too pretty’ was his facetious blanket excuse if anyone in the Senior Common Room asked him over a glass of sherry what he thought of their presence. He knew it was just the interrogator’s impudent way of being nosy about one of the university’s more eligible bachelors, who surely must be in want of a wife to sort out his haphazard life or at least get the old fool a decent suit.

The Magdalen muckrakers had long been exasperated by the enigma of Lewis’s domestic situation, under the thumb of an old lady at home according to the daily helps that she bullied. He had lived at The Kilns since 1930 with the mother and sister of his dead fellow officer and friend Paddy Moore, who had been killed in action towards the end of the First World War, while Jack, wounded by shrapnel from a shell, was invalided back to England.

Separated from her husband, Paddy’s mother, Janie Moore, had developed a strange possessiveness towards Jack – at least in the opinion of others, including his brother Warnie – despite the 26-year age difference. At 18, he and Paddy had made a pledge that if either perished in the war, the survivor would take care of the dead man’s parent. So Jack, Janie and her daughter Maureen shared a succession of Oxford lodgings until they and Warnie clubbed together to buy The Kilns for the four of them to live there. After Maureen had moved out, following her marriage in 1940, Janie – nicknamed Minto for the mints she liked to guzzle, though not for a sweet disposition – jealously guarded her position as the only resident woman in Jack’s life.

There was certainly no sign of Lewis wanting to share with a bride the rumoured wealth that his bestselling books had brought him on both sides of the Atlantic. He seemed wedded to his work, and a casual fob-off to the curious would usually stop any further mention of the matter, especially as some of the other dons’ wives seemed to share his view that women could be a distraction. Like John Bunyan’s Christian, he tried to avoid temptation, treating even barmaids as respectfully as novice nuns.

Suddenly, as Henchard tried in vain to give the impression he had even read The Faerie Queene, Lewis remembered the unusual thing about Susan Temple. For a number of tutorials now, she had not been wearing her figure-hugging suits, glimpsed beyond the open flaps of her black academic gown. She was usually quite the glamorous mannequin; sometimes he wondered how she pulled off such a trick, since Minto was always complaining about the impossibilities of fashion on the ration.

Yet, recently, Susan had taken to turning up to his rooms in a heavy coat that she never once removed, despite the fires that Squirrel made up in the grate. Lewis had also noticed that Temple seemed withdrawn, her face puffy and fatigued, with none of the almost insolent pertness that he rather admired.

After encountering her narcissistic mother the year before, when Temple had been driven up from London by her parents to join all the other freshmen for the formal introduction to their first term, he could quite understand the daughter’s battle-ready behaviour. Her mother was an armour-plated siren, flaunting an ivory cigarette holder and flirting with everything in trousers while her dry old stick of a husband stood grimly aloof. She had stared lingeringly at the don, enjoying the evidence of her provocative effect in his dark eyes.

‘Oh, Professor Lewis, I was so looking forward to meeting you and hearing about those wonderful books of yours,’ she had purred, raising one perfectly etched eyebrow and scrutinising his shabby suit as if she doubted the old buffer’s successful reputation as an author. ‘You’re quite the celebrity, I’m told, especially with the Yanks and all their dollars.’

He realised she had sought him out, dragging her husband and daughter over from Somerville. Seeing Susan’s embarrassed scowl, he had ignored this conversational equivalent of a bank raid; it was none of her or any other tittle-tattler’s business what he did with his royalties. If he had revealed that he privately gave most of it away, the woman would have been incredulous – and probably even more impertinent. Instead, he had replied mildly, ‘Very kind, Mrs Temple, but I don’t actually have a professorship; I’m just plain Mr Lewis to all my students.’

Smiling satirically, she had turned on her French heels and walked towards another group of dons as Mr Temple abruptly gripped Lewis’s hand – a bone-crusher if ever there was one – and said goodbye.

Lewis had been curious about Susan’s home circumstances ever since. He had been almost tempted to put an avuncular arm round her shoulders as she sat hunched up during their last essay-dissecting session and ask how she was, but of course that would never do.

‘Never make the mistake of getting too close to the female students: even with the most honourable of intentions, it will always be misinterpreted.’ With a jolt, he remembered the timely warning from his worldly friend Dorothy Sayers – an alumna of Somerville.

It was often admiringly said that Dorothy had covered the entire spectrum of human wickedness in her crime novels, which made her seem something of an oracle in college circles, where the everyday brutalities of the outside world rarely seemed to penetrate. All he knew of that was what he read, or what he wrote in his bestselling theology books and his science-fiction thrillers about the eternal battle between good and evil. After all, he was just a cloistered academic with a vivid imagination – and an abiding interest in human nature.

As his closest female chum, Dorothy was old enough and respectable enough – safely laden as she was with the baggage of her invalid husband Mac – to pass muster with all the gleaming-eyed gossips around him. And she always seemed to speed-read Lewis like a book. He wondered whether he should pass on to her his worries about his missing student.

Why the devil had Temple been feeling the cold so much? The question niggled away at him. What do I know? he concluded. I’m just a silly old bachelor. Young women and their wardrobes are a mystery, thank goodness, and long may it stay that way.

Bad idea to get involved. And yet…

He resolved to drop a few lines to Dorothy anyway.

Chapter 2

For the umpteenth time that morning, Lucy Standen had traipsed down to the basement to collect a book ordered by a teacher. She had been at Oxford University Press for nearly three years and was now seriously plotting her escape.

The basement was where the elementary-school boys shared a smoke and a snigger in between filling the vast racks with volumes from the trolleys. Hired for their muscle, they were given regulation brown overalls to differentiate them from the scholarship boys since they were considered factory hands, not clerks. During their dreary daily OUP routine, there was always the chance of enlivening things by leafing through what they thought of as a ‘dirty’ book, such as the much-thumbed medical one with sepia photographs of the genitalia of rare hermaphrodites.

One of the elementary-school boys, Eddie Jarvis, always seemed to be in Lucy’s way somehow. Olive-coloured eyes, almost like army khaki. Wet lips. Hunched, bat-like shoulders and a long-armed reach with big hands. There was something hungrily avid about him. She would squeeze past his bony body with elaborate care as if trying to insinuate herself into a very narrow imaginary gap, rather like the rubber-bodied mime artist Monsieur Marcel Marceau in that performance for the troops that she had seen on the newsreels at the pictures during the war. Wary of any contact, she took care never to lock eyes with him.

The grammar-school boys, destined for the Dickensian heights of head clerkships, never hung around downstairs for long but shot back up to their desks, which were arranged in rows like a classroom with the supervisor’s desk facing them. At nearly 19, she was older than many of them.

Institutional cream and olive-green paint made the offices drearier than they should have been, given that the honey-coloured building was considered by Oxford snobs to be a particularly handsome example of neoclassical architecture in the local Headington limestone. Yet at first sight, its many-paned windows gave it the look of a vast gaol. They were never opened either, so the airless atmosphere was pervaded by the sickly smell of floor polish that reminded Lucy of her old assembly hall.

What was the point, she thought, of having a job if it’s just like being back at school?

Ignoring the sly, sideways glances that always came her way in the basement, she trudged upstairs again to enter the order in the Kalamazoo ledger in her neat italic hand.

She was the only girl there, addressed as ‘Miss’ by the supervisor who could never – would never – remember her name. The boys were all called by their surname with no dignifying ‘Mister’ before it; that came with seniority.

No one ever chatted upstairs, except occasionally and quietly round the tea urn. Lucy still missed her encounters with Charles Williams on those breaks; he was never an ignorer of intelligence in the lower ranks. His sudden death after an operation two years before had come as a tremendous shock. She had been amused and touched by the fact that Williams, a formidably clever OUP editor, still spoke with a slight Cockney accent, like her London-born father. Lucy’s accent had long since been ironed out by her grammar school.

Sometimes she had attended his lectures, which were always packed, in the university’s Divinity School, although she had a secret horror of being thought to number among the fawning female worshippers who behaved like such ninnies in his presence.

Charles Williams had been renowned as the only intellectual in Oxford without a degree, having been forced to leave University College London when family funds ran out, and also for his surprising attractiveness to women. The expressiveness of that long upper lip, more conducive to comedy than to beauty, had often made Lucy smile as he put his points across with a flourish.

To her, he had always been gentle and considerate, even asking her polite and friendly questions about the deadly dull clerking. She sometimes allowed herself to hope that he might have recognised a fellow kindred spirit, albeit one who was in the wrong job.

At one of his lectures, she had found herself sitting next to a well-built, rather red-faced fellow who arrived a few minutes late and then dumped his brolly and briefcase untidily on the floor. When Williams’s talk came to an end and all his female followers set up their usual frenzied clapping, she sensed a certain disdain at their reaction in the aquiline profile of the burly man next to her.

Even a sideways view had been enough identification for Lucy, who recognised him from the inky little image that accompanied reports in the Oxford Mail about the wartime broadcasts by the Magdalen don and author C.S. Lewis. She also remembered reading that he was known as Jack, having called himself that instead of his first name Clive ever since his beloved dog Jacksie had been run over by a horse-drawn carriage when Lewis was four years old.

The weather-beaten complexion made him look more like a farmer than a dry old academic. In his newspaper mugshot, the dark eyes had looked calm and the mouth well shaped and sensual. Still covertly staring at him, Lucy suddenly had a strange feeling that she had seen this slightly shambolic figure once before. It was a few years ago, during the war, when she was still at school. She racked her brains, trying to recall the circumstances.

Bending down to pick up his muddle on the floor, Lewis stood up and abruptly exited the den of femininity, perhaps aware of her stare. He must be bashful around women, she hazarded, unlike Mr Williams.

It could hardly be called an encounter, yet Lucy remained curious about him thereafter. She began to obsessively scour the local papers for any more mentions of the great man, sometimes scolding herself for behaving like one of that singer Frank Sinatra’s hysterical bobby-soxer fans. The truth was that, despite herself, she had begun to fall in love with another world and the life of the mind.

She looked up at the large wall clock above the supervisor’s head. Ten minutes till lunch and then only time for a quick tea and bun in Joe Lyons on Cornmarket with Susan Temple, who had sent a note out of the blue saying she wanted to meet her there.

Why Susan didn’t simply drop round to Lucy’s house in Jericho was mystifying. After all, her father, Alfred, was always happy to put the kettle on, and Susan’s discreet visits to what Lucy wryly thought of as their humble home had been fairly regular since she’d got to know the Standens.

Sometimes Lucy wondered whether her father was too gentle to be a scout. The brawny-armed college manservants were a famously tough breed, hauling buckets of coal up every staircase, placing bets on the sportier students, sometimes looking askance at the more scholarly types and uncomplainingly clearing up the marathon student drinking sessions of which they tacitly approved as a young blood’s birthright.

There were rumoured to be some bullies among their fraternity, and Alfred would do anything for a quiet life, which usually meant he didn’t get one. Whenever she got so frustrated with her father that she would talk about going into battle on his behalf, he would just smile and call her ‘Lucy Lionheart’. But there was a limit to what she could do to protect him: college rules were college rules, and his refusal to shop Susan Temple last June for catching her in a male student’s Christ Church rooms overnight had been a huge risk for him to take.

Susan’s own father was a headmaster and a stickler for strictness, or so she implied whenever she called round to Alfred’s place. Her aloof mask always slipped in his company; he seemed such a guileless man that people dropped their guard. Lucy was different, but after a chilly start, Susan seemed to have decided she was worth talking to. There was a year between them, but that didn’t matter with a servant’s daughter; age was the least of the barriers.

‘Meet Lyons lunchtime Tuesday,’ her note to Lucy said, with a haphazard S scrawled at the end. Susan had never summoned her in this abrupt way before. It was a terrible place to have a conversation; you could hardly hear yourself think amid all that clatter. Was that the point? Lucy couldn’t work it out. And why was she allowing herself to jump through hoops for her, anyway? They had nothing in common; it was a friendship she couldn’t explain. Yet there seemed an unspoken need in Susan for the plain home comforts of Alfred’s little domain that his daughter found intriguing. And judging by the sprawling calligraphy, Lucy guessed the note had been written by a hand that couldn’t stop shaking with nerves.

So, as the clock in the Oxford University Press struck, she unhooked her coat and beret from the peg rail and ran obediently out into the rain to do her friend’s bidding, consumed with curiosity and unaware that someone was following her.

Chapter 3

‘I’m Fetch,’ the bulldog said to the youth, smiling slightly. ‘It’s what I do.’

The Bulldog in St Aldate’s was a redbrick Victorian building with large windows, much frequented by the college policemen known as bulldogs who felt they owned the place because of its name. Sometimes they found themselves drinking alongside the odd intrusive copper from the official city police station across the road, hence a certain atmosphere that had led to the tavern’s nickname of the O.K. Corral.

The pub was a regular drinking den for Mick Fetchley, known to friends and foes alike as Fetch. He had placed his back to the window in his usual spot, directly opposite a sulky-looking young man sitting on a bench. The light falling on the youth’s face made it an illuminated picture against the brown-painted walls for anyone who cared to study it.

Fetch was a big man, aware of his imposing build. Women found him oddly attractive, probably because of the bright blue eyes in a pink-skinned face and the ostentatiously brilliantined dark hair. He didn’t care about that: bints had their uses, but he always felt more comfortable in male company.

He missed the army: he had had a good war, especially in Egypt when the Tommies would bellow ‘King Farouk, King Farouk, hang your bollocks on a hook’ as the British soldiers marched captive Italian soldiers into Cairo. You felt like a bit of a king yourself at that point.

Yet he had made quite a bit of money since he got back to Oxford via London. Rationing was a mug’s game, and there were always ways round it. His old bulldog job at Christ Church provided plenty of front for those with a sideline and had been obligingly kept open for him throughout the war by the proctors. When it came to policing the college, they preferred single men with no families to distract them, especially ones like Fetch with a bit of experience and enough wolfish cunning to root out the rule-breakers.

And the compact size of his little home city suited him. He couldn’t wait to leave demob London after the Yard started up its post-war Ghost Squad, an undercover operation that was a bit too bloody good at sniffing out the stuff that had fallen off the back of a lorry. Too much competition from other gangs, as well. Then there were all the deserters still milling around in the Smoke, relying on the likes of Fetch to help them keep body and soul together. The main thing was to try to avoid the serious headcases among them.

The rough stuff Fetch left to his small army of boys, whose youthful callousness could carve its way through anything. The plans to bring National Service conscription in next year for youngsters was bad news, true, but Fetch was already working on that with fake ID cards so the lads could claim Irish ancestry and disappear to the Republic for a while.

‘Cig?’ he said affably to the youngster on the bench, offering him an Abdulla.

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said the boy after a momentary hesitation. You weren’t a man if you didn’t smoke.

Olive gaze stared at blue, trying to assess.

‘I’m Jarvis, Edmund Jarvis,’ muttered the youth eventually. ‘Most people call me Eddie.’

‘So, what’s your line, then?’ said Fetch.

The young man told him where he worked and no more, reluctant to give too much away to someone who might be trying to flog him something dodgy. He had heard about such things.

‘Oh, very impressive,’ said Fetch sarcastically. ‘I’m not a great one for book-learning myself. But the thing about people who’ve got their heads stuck in books is that they never notice the bleeding obvious.’ He had been intrigued by the morose look on his new drinking companion’s face; with the old codgers, you could understand it, but not with someone as wet behind the ears as this kid. ‘What’s up?’ enquired Fetch conversationally. ‘You look a bit down in the dumps. You need a plan to cheer you up, that’s what.’

Everyone had to have a plan: you had to beat the system because it was always stacked against you, just like one of those fairground stalls where you could never win, no matter how good your aim, unless you worked out how they were diddling you. And then you had them.

Jarvis returned his stare and then mumbled, ‘Thing is, there’s this girl.’

‘Oh, there’s always a girl,’ said Fetch indifferently. ‘Fancy another pint?’

The boy’s lips seemed to glisten at the offer of ale.

‘You’re new in town, aren’t you?’ said Fetch. ‘Relax, you’ll be okay.’

The youth bridled. ‘I’ve been here since the London office moved here during the war. My family came too after we nearly got bombed out in Lewisham.’ He added, ‘I know I look old for my age’ – although to the other man’s eyes, he didn’t – ‘but I’ve only just turned 19, so maybe that’s why you haven’t seen me around.’

It was obvious that he was still finding his feet, but there was a sheen of resentment mixed with the naivety that Fetch thought might come in useful. As if to prove it, the boy added, ‘Oxford still seems a bit cliquey if you ask me. And the bints are really snooty.’

‘Is that so?’ said Fetch, wrinkling his nose theatrically. Then he smiled again. ‘Is there one in particular who’s been bugging you? I know what’s going on around here, and you’d be surprised. Be very careful, my lad. You don’t want to get trapped.’

‘What do you mean, “trapped”?’ asked the boy suspiciously.

‘In the way men always are,’ said Fetch. ‘If you ever get into trouble, let me know. They’ve got a place for ’em here. It’s just down the road, but it’s hidden away. Very discreet, they are. They know what to do with them all right. There’s a very good system going on here.’

Jarvis leant forward awkwardly, still trying to read the expression in the bright blue eyes. Fetch looked at the boy’s crumpled tweed jacket – poor quality schmutter by the bulldog’s standards. I could get him a good double-breasted demob but he probably wouldn’t know the difference, he thought. Aloud, he merely remarked, ‘See, the thing is, you gotta be ahead of the game. Stick with me, kid.’ The kid instinctively squared his bony shoulders, trying to be the big man.

Marcia leant across the bar, looking curiously at Fetch’s latest quarry and showing off an impressively tethered top half as she rested it flirtatiously on the counter. ‘Another drink, dearie?’ she enquired of Jarvis, though she knew full well who would be paying. She had run these premises all through the war while most of the men were away, either fighting or dodging the fighting, and she knew how to rule her little world with the lightest of touches.

Fetch’s intent stare slid round to her briefly. ‘Yeah, we’ll have two pints of stout, Marce. Don’t rush. We’re in no hurry. Nice and snug here.’

Chapter 4

Minto was giving Jack hell from the redoubt of her bed, roaring like a tiger cub when she had the strength and mewing like a petulant kitten when she did not.

He had sluiced the downstairs flagstones and run the carpet-sweeper awkwardly across each step of the stairs – Was there ever such a useless object? Better to beat the dust out instead with a hard bristle brush when he had the energy – but that insistent voice penetrated his labours every time. The ailing Minto, plagued by leg ulcers and beginning to show signs of senility at 75, was forever falling out with the maids, who kept handing in their notice – leaving Lewis to mop up the worst of the dirt.

In Warnie’s opinion, his brother had fulfilled, many times over, his side of the sacred pact made with Paddy Moore. It was Paddy who drew the short straw in death, yet it was Jack who could be said to have drawn the short straw in life, as Minto’s de facto servant forever after. She never spoke of her estranged husband, with Warnie suspecting she saw Jack as a substitute. Yet Jack always maintained that Minto was simply behaving like an overprotective mother who would regard any other woman as competition for her precious boy’s affections.

The fact that the three of them owned The Kilns gave Minto the power of veto over who else could live there, and it was only too easy to imagine the comic horror of Jack trying to carry a bride over the threshold while that she-devil, as Warnie thought of her, guarded the entrance with bared fangs.

Her paranoid suspicions could certainly be a nightmare. She governed with a love that sometimes made Jack dread going home, but he accepted his yoke with what seemed to be the humble patience of a donkey. Yet he got a literary revenge in the end: Minto had no idea he had fictionalised his feelings in his book The Screwtape Letters.

Would his scout be surprised to find him on his knees with a scrubbing brush or helping Minto with her blessed marmalade-making whenever she had saved up enough sugar? His rooms in college were a paper-strewn pigsty, so perhaps it was divine justice that he should play the charlady at home.

He was hopelessly cack-handed, he knew, when it came to operating equipment, domestic or otherwise. For that reason, he had never learned to type or drive a car, even though he would have found both skills useful. Though his sense of duty had made him volunteer for the Home Guard during the recent war, he sometimes felt that a one-legged, wall-eyed poodle might have done a nimbler job. He knuckled down to all the dreary drill and the patrols in the early hours; however, reviving his rusty Great War skills at loading a rifle and then firing it at a target range of sacks with scribbly Hitler moustaches was quite another matter.

He had always found it hard to pull the trigger because of the deformity, shared with his brother Warnie, of having only one joint in his thumbs. As for bayonets, he fervently hoped he would never be expected to use one of those again – even on just a stuffed sack. There was something so personal about cold steel. From what he had heard, that lunge into another man’s flesh could be felt all the way up the arm of the attacker.