The Stratford Murder by Mike Hollow (love books to read txt) 📕

‘So shall I ask you now?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘OK. What is it you hope for in your life, John Jago?’

He immediately wished he hadn’t invited her to do this. He struggled to find the words to reply. For all these years in the police he’d been the one who asked the questions and had the right to expect answers. Intrusive probing by journalists was to be batted away. But this was not just a journalist. This was Dorothy, and the door she was knocking on was one that he knew he wanted to open. It just felt as though the hinges were rusted fast.

Her eyes were locked on his. Again he looked away, like a guilty suspect. He wanted to escape, but even more he wanted not to. He willed himself to meet her gaze.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t find this easy – talking about what I feel inside. I think I got out of the habit many years ago.’

‘I understand that,’ she replied, her voice gentle and reassuring.

He forced himself to keep speaking. ‘It’s just that hope can be very painful, and when hopes don’t come true, sometimes all you can do is let them die – or make them die.’

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘No, I want you to ask. I don’t think there’s anyone else in the world who’d ask me a question like that, and I need it.’

‘So, John, what do you hope for?’

He thought carefully. ‘I’m not sure I could answer a big question like that in one sentence,’ he replied. ‘It just feels so complicated. But if I have to, I think I’d say this is what I hope – that by the time I die I’ll have mattered enough to someone for them to remember me.’

When Jago got home that evening the light was fading. He knew that Dorothy had said goodbye on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields and returned to her hotel to write about the National Gallery concerts for her readers in America, while he had returned to his own world at West Ham police station. He also knew he’d spent the afternoon in the CID office waiting for an order to search that was now promised for the morning, but by the time he got home that evening the rest was a blur.

He let himself into the house, more conscious than usual of its emptiness, and switched on the wireless to break the cold silence, but the talk in progress was earnest and depressingly dull. He snapped the broadcast off with a flick of his wrist. Soon the sirens would go, he thought. He should put the kettle on and make a flask of tea to keep him warm in the shelter that night. But he felt listless and turned instead to the cupboard where he kept his Scotch. He took out the bottle and a glass, poured himself a tot and sat down in his favourite armchair. Not for the first time, he thought of the night to come and whether he would see the day that followed.

He reached into his jacket pocket and felt a piece of paper. Pulling it out, he recognised the old handbill that Greville Ballantyne had given him. It was crumpled. He rested it on his thigh and tried to smooth it with his hand.

The image of Ballantyne’s face as he’d last seen it rose like a ghost in his mind. How will that poor man remember me, he thought. I’m the one who took his wife away, who stole all that was precious in his life to destroy it. I’m the law, I’m the bringer of vengeance and death. If he remembers me now, it’ll only be to hate me.

He looked down at the handbill and ran his finger gently along his father’s name. His father’s memorial. Will there be someone who sits down one day and remembers me like this, he thought, or will I just be forgotten? The words were captive in his mind, and the silence of the room remained unbroken. He felt his eyes moisten as he raised his glass to the handbill and took a sip.

He thought of the question Dorothy had asked him, and wondered what she’d made of his answer. To be remembered. Was that a strange thing to hope for? He didn’t know, but he had a feeling she would understand. There was only one person in the world that he wanted to be remembered by, and her name was on his lips as the darkness slowly fell.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As in all the Blitz Detective novels, some of the events in this story really happened. A bomb did explode in the middle of Beethoven’s Razumovsky String Quartet during a lunchtime concert at the National Gallery, London, in October 1940, although I have taken the liberty of moving its date by a day or two. I’d like to thank Zara Moran and her colleagues in the National Gallery Research Centre for letting me consult their archived materials on this explosion and also the Myra Hess lunchtime concerts, and for their efforts to find answers to my questions. Thanks are due also to my old friends Tim and Janet Griffiths for their expert counsel on Beethoven and Brahms.

A Tube station named Trafalgar Square may sound fictional to the modern reader, but in 1940 it was fact (nowadays it’s part of Charing Cross station), and a bomb really did hit it in October of that year, causing extensive damage and taking the lives of ten people who were sheltering at the bottom of the escalator. I’m thankful to Nick Cooper, author of London Underground at War, for his help in providing me with details of this incident. Sadly, it was just one of many instances during the Blitz when people seeking a refuge from the bombing, whether in a Tube station or an Anderson shelter, were killed when bombs landed not on their home but on their supposed place of safety.

The bombing