The Remembrance Read online

  The Remembrance

  Natalie Edwards

  Copyright © 2021 by Natalie Edwards

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  Cover art by Kealan Patrick Burke & Elderlemon Design

  For everyone who’s stuck with El, Ruby, Sita and the others to the end - thank you

  Contents

  Bethnal Green, London, January 1941

  1. Northampton, March 1998

  2. Mornington Crescent, London, February 1941

  3. West Hampstead, London, March 1998

  4. Haverstock Hill, London, February 1941

  5. Kingston, London, April 1998

  6. Kensington, London, February 1941

  7. King’s Cross, London, April 1998

  8. Los Angeles, May 1957

  9. Holloway Road, London, April 1998

  10. Santa Monica, February 1972

  11. Chelsea, London, April 1998

  12. Soho, London, 1977

  13. Chelsea, London, April 1998

  14. Bethnal Green, London, April 1941

  15. Chelsea, London, April 1998

  16. Chelsea, London, April 1998

  17. Ludgate Hill, London, April 1998

  18. West Hampstead, London, April 1998

  19. Pahrump, Nevada, September 1995

  20. Golders Green, London, May 1998

  21. Kingston, London, May 1998

  22. Mayfair, London, May 1998

  23. Charing Cross Road, London, May 1998

  24. Osterley Park, London, May 1998

  25. Osterley Park, London, May 1998

  26. West Hampstead, London, April 1998

  27. Southwark, London, May 1998

  28. Osterley Park, London, May 1998

  29. The Strand, London, May 1998

  30. Osterley Park, London, May 1998

  31. Hampstead Heath, London, June 1998

  32. Blackheath, London, April 1998

  33. Osterley Park, London, May 1998

  34. Ludgate Hill, London, June 1998

  Palermo Soho, Buenos Aires, March 1999

  About the Author

  Also by Natalie Edwards

  Bethnal Green, London, January 1941

  She’d been under a table when the bomb hit, scrabbling around for a coin she’d spotted on the floor. It was a shiny, well-polished thing, bright as a sliver of moonlight; a casualty, most likely, of some half-cut drinker’s carelessness as he stood up from his seat and dug into his pocket for another fivepence to swap for a pint at the bar.

  That coin, Dolly had thought later, had probably saved her life - or kept her, at least, from injuries more serious than the high-pitched ringing in her ears and the sporadic headaches she was left with, after.

  Her parents weren’t so lucky.

  Her Dad had been at the bar too, queuing up to get her a glass of water and himself another bitter; she’d seen his work boots shuffling impatiently on the carpet just before she felt the blast, before the shockwaves sent the glassware flying and blew the joists and beams to smithereens, pulling the ceiling down on top of them and carving out a man-sized hole in one of the walls.

  Her Mum had been sitting down, perched on a stool on one side of the thick wooden table that had unwittingly sheltered Dolly as she’d hunted for her treasure. The exposed side; the wrong side.

  Dolly was on her hands and knees, eyes stinging from the smoke and trickles of fluid spilling from her perforated eardrums, when one of her Mum’s severed arms rolled - soundlessly, or so it seemed to her then, through the cotton wool veil of silence that had fallen over her - off the stool and under the table, stopping just shy of Dolly’s downturned palm.

  It was the left arm, Dolly saw: her Mum’s diamond wedding band still fixed to the scorched ring finger of its blackened hand. And it was whole: cleaved from its trunk at the shoulder joint, if not exactly what Dolly would have called cleanly.

  She wasn’t, she found, at all distressed to see it; nor to realise, in seeing it, what seeing it meant. Only surprised, and very mildly repulsed - the way she might have been had she stumbled on an uncooked side of beef from the butcher’s shop on the pavement, raw and bloody and unwrapped.

  That her Mum was dead was a foregone conclusion; no body could have survived a blast strong enough to do that to it. It was a miracle Dolly herself had come out of it alive.

  She couldn’t see her Dad at first, through the smoke and her streaming eyes and the heat haze pouring off the smouldering rubble - even after she’d crawled away from the wrenched-off arm and used what was left of the table to lever herself upright and stagger four or five paces across what had been, until recently, the pub. So dense and toxic was the air around her that it took her a minute or two to become aware that she was standing almost on top of him - that the smoking pile of wood and half-melted metal just in front of her were the ruins of the bar, and that the remains of him were buried underneath it.

  He wasn’t dead, though. Not quite.

  He’d been crushed: pinned into place by the heavy, splintered plank across his chest and stomach. Bone rose up through the charred, torn meat of both his shins; a second, smaller piece of wood pressed down onto his throat. A broken piece of someone’s pint glass, she saw, had wedged itself - grotesquely - into the jelly of one of his eyeballs, forcing the eyelid upwards.

  She edged closer to him, unsteadily, and he seemed to register her presence - his other pupil darting in her direction even as his stoved-in head stayed fixed to the spot. His lips moved, and she got the sense - though she wouldn’t have been able to hear what he was saying, even if he’d been capable of speech - that he was trying to tell her something. Ask her something.

  Help me. Please.

  Get me out.

  And just as she’d found herself unmoved by the evidence of her mother’s death - sudden and brutal as it must have been - so it struck her, as she took in the smashed remnants of the man who’d given her piggybacks and tucked her and her sister into bed at night since both of them were little, that she had no interest at all in getting him help.

  The fire brigade would be there soon enough, she reasoned; might well be on their way already, sirens blaring. They’d be able to dig him out; to help him, if there was anything left of him to help.

  She didn’t think there would be, though. He was too far gone.

  And what she really wanted, she realised, was to watch him die. To see the look on his face, as the life drained out of him.

  Something moved to the side of her - in what she’d come to know later as her peripheral vision. Close to where her Mum had been sitting, before the bomb went off; close to the hole in the wall.

  She ducked down, on instinct; hid as much of herself as could be hidden behind the pile of wood, a hand over her mouth to stop the smoke from choking her.

  If it was the firemen, then they could come and find her. If it was the soldiers or the police, then they’d find her too, eventually, just as soon as they started digging.

  And if it was the Germans chasing after their bomb with a land invasion, unlikely though she thought that was… then hiding from them made a lot of sense, didn’t it?

  It wasn’t the Germans, though. Or the police, or the army, or the fire brigade.

  It was a man - a buck-toothed, thin-faced man in a flat cap and overalls, leather boots like her Dad’s on his feet, brown kid gloves covering his large hands and his back bent nearly double under the weight of something that looked to her like an enormous sack of potatoes.

  He didn’t se
em like an air warden - he didn’t have a helmet or a uniform, for starters. And he was on his own, not with a rescue party, which was out of the ordinary - didn’t they normally come in teams, the rescuers?

  There was something else about him too, she thought. Something slippery in the way he slithered through the hole in the brickwork; something shifty in the way he scanned the wreckage before he took another step inside. As if he was hunting - not for survivors, but for an opportunity.

  She ducked lower behind the wood; held her breath.

  The floor was hot to the touch, singed though not quite burning, but the thin-faced man navigated it lightly, nimbly, even with the heavy sack slung over his body; as if, Dolly thought, he was doing nothing more demanding than strolling down the pavement on a warm summer’s evening.

  In the centre of the newly formed bomb site, where the largest portion of the ceiling had come away and heaped itself into a bonfire of oak and lath and plaster, the man stopped in his tracks. He seemed to study the ground below and around him for a moment with great intensity and then, apparently satisfied with what he found, laid down the sack, untied the knotted length of rope that held it closed and reached his arm inside, all the way up to the elbow - reminding her, just for a second, of a stage magician preparing to pull a recalcitrant rabbit from an oversized hat.

  There was a body in the sack: an old man, grey-haired and fancily dressed, jowls like Churchill’s drooping from his yellow jaw and a square of green handkerchief pressed neatly into the top pocket of his dark suit jacket. He looked to Dolly like a banker or a businessman: someone rich and important.

  He had to be dead, though - as dead as her Mum, as dead as her Dad soon would be. There was a dent in his forehead, a bloody crater dripping red gunk down his cheeks and into his snow-white sideburns. His lips were blue.

  The thin-faced man dragged him from the sack by the armpits, hoisting his body upright until they were chest to shoulder, looking to Dolly as if they’d stopped to catch their breath in the middle of dancing a tango. Then, with not so much as a glance behind him to check the path was clear and still cradling the dead man in his arms, the thin-faced man took two steps backwards over the rubble, paused again, and laid the body down like a human sacrifice on top of the wood pile.

  With one gloved hand, he pulled a brick from a smaller pile of debris to his left - and, with a turn of speed that took Dolly so completely by surprise she had to press her fingers tighter to her mouth to hold in her gasp, dropped to a crouch and dashed the brick, hard, against the dead man’s head, on almost exactly the spot where the crater had been made.

  He’s hiding the body, Dolly told herself, in awe of the thin-faced man’s ingenuity. He killed him, and he needs to get rid of the evidence, so he’s leaving it here for the firemen to find so’s everyone’ll think the old sod died in the air raid.

  And it’ll work, too.

  Because who’s going to know in all this mess whether it was a flying brick or a blackjack that got him?

  It’s a stroke of genius.

  The thin-faced man rose up from his crouch; walked with the same fleet-footedness as before to his rope-tied sack where it lay on the ground; picked it up, folded it neatly into a rectangle no bigger than a tablecloth and tucked it away in the capacious expanse of his overalls.

  Then, fast as a rattlesnake, he took to his heels and disappeared from the crumbling shell of the pub the exact same way he’d come, through the hole in the wall.

  Chapter 1

  Northampton, March 1998

  El Gardener wasn’t a dog person.

  She wasn’t opposed to dogs, per se - even found some of the bigger eyed, better groomed ones quite appealing, from a comfortable distance. But the particular circumstances of her childhood had precluded much meaningful interaction with animals of any sort, much less the kind that might lead inexorably to a spaniel or a Labrador curled up in her lap on the sofa. And if, she reasoned, the urge to rear Yorkshire terriers or take long, slow walks in the countryside with a pack of Border Collies at her side had failed to strike her in the thirty-four years of life she’d already accumulated, then the odds were good it never would.

  She was more than a little uncomfortable, therefore, to find herself not so much surrounded by dogs as drowning in them.

  They were miniature Dachshunds, all of them: small, smooth little bullets of fur and enthusiasm, clambering over the furniture - over her - with their stubby legs, tails wagging and ears flapping in excitement at the presence of visitors. She’d counted eight of them when she’d been shown into the living room, drawing up a mental tally of wet noses and wetter tongues as she lowered herself onto the hair-covered sofa. But there were more in the house, she was sure of it, more Dachshunds and other breeds, besides; she could hear them, scratching at doors and yapping at the strangers they could sense but couldn’t see, desperate to be released.

  It’ll be worth it, she told herself, as one of the dogs - a chocolate brown puppy with the doleful, faintly accusatory eyes of a disappointed toddler - leapt down from a sofa cushion to position itself on her shoulder like a ship’s parrot. You’ve suffered worse for less before.

  “We don’t like to keep them locked up,” said the man on the larger sofa opposite her, in lieu of apology for the Dachshunds’ misbehaviour. “It’s just cruel, isn’t it, Lauren?”

  “Cruel, that’s what I say,” his wife agreed, nodding vigorously. “We wouldn’t like it, would we? Cooped up all day long in a little space like that?”

  El took in the narrow confines of her current environs, the four walls of a lounge overflowing with cushions and knick-knacks and teeming with excess canine life, and suppressed a sigh.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” she said.

  There was a depressing banality to the Robinsons, she considered; a petty, priggish, proudly Middle Englander quality to their conversation - to the structure of their lives - that seemed to sap the air from the room and the energy from El’s body. He was white, red-faced and beefy, in his mid-fifties but ostentatiously toupee-d, his lips perennially puckered in a moue of low-level distaste. She was very slightly younger; permed, petite and sinewy, her makeup an orgy of blue eyeshadow and her fingernails painted a nonthreatening coral. Their patterned knitwear didn’t quite match, but had almost certainly been ordered from the same department store catalogue.

  They were nothing at all like her usual marks. And they certainly weren’t the marks she would have chosen, had the choice been hers to make.

  But they had something she needed. And while the scope of their ambitions was small and unlovely, it gave her just enough room to manoeuvre her way into their home, if not their hearts.

  “Let’s get down to brass tacks,” she said, transferring the wandering puppy from her shoulder to the armrest and settling into the blunt, no-nonsense, Yorkshire-tinged bark she suspected would appeal to the couple’s sensibilities. “What is it you want doing? ‘Cause I might as well tell you now, I won’t put ‘em down. I’ll dock a tail, if I absolutely have to, but I don’t believe in killing ‘em.”

  The Robinsons startled as one unit.

  “What?” the wife yelped, the timbre of her voice not vastly dissimilar, to El’s mind, to the high-pitched wailing of the Dachshunds. “Kill them? Who said anything about killing him? Good God, no! We don’t want him hurt, do we, Colin?”

  “We most certainly do not,” the husband replied firmly - the moue, El noticed, growing so pronounced at even the possibility that his lips seemed in danger of disappearing entirely into the corrugated trench of his mouth. “I don’t know how you normally do things, Miss Cutler…”

  “Call me Annie,” El told him. “Everyone does.”

  “Right. Well, I don’t know how you normally do things, Annie, but we don’t hold with harming poor defenceless creatures in this house. Me and Lauren, we’re animal lovers. Dog lovers. And if you think we’d ever, ever want something like that to happen…”

  “What do you want, then?” El said, st
opping him mid-flow. “Because you told me you wanted this Erasmus out of the picture in time for the show, and there are only so many ways I can do that for you.”

  “We didn’t mean that!” Lauren Robinson spluttered. “We thought you could, you know… shave his fur off, or something. Make him look bad, so he couldn’t compete.”

  El believed her; had anticipated exactly the reaction she received, when she’d made the suggestion. The Robinsons, she suspected - disagreeable though she found them - would conceive of animal cruelty as a hanging offence, on a par with premeditated murder and the desecration of war memorials in their personal hierarchy of punishable ill deeds. The question for her had been how close to actual physical harm they’d be willing to go in pursuit of their goal.

  Their quarry, Erasmus, was a mustard Dandie Dinmont, the prize pet of a pair of retired dentists from Kettering and Best In Show three years running at Marfett’s, Northamptonshire’s somewhat lower-key answer to Crufts. He was also the chief rival, for Marfett’s much-coveted winner’s rosette, of the Robinsons’ Horatio, an energetic beagle who’d been runner-up for the last two years at that same event - and who was, or so the word on the Northamptonshire pure-breed grapevine had it, set to sail into second place behind Erasmus for a third year, too.

  The Robinsons, though, had other plans.