War Damage by Elizabeth Wilson Page B

when he was eight. He’d got a scholarship to a grammar school and his mother had gone out to work as a char to keep him on after fourteen to sit the School Certificate, but the expense had been a tremendous strain. The school had wanted him to stay on even longer and do the Higher Certificate, but that was out of the question.
    He’d joined the force as soon as he could after leaving school. At least the police offered a career; it was better than an office job and with more prospects. When war broke out he’d have liked to join up, but there was his mother and little brother to think of. He didn’t know how she’d manage if he got killed. So he’d stayed on all through the war. People thought you had it easy back in Blighty. That was a laugh, he thought bitterly. The home front had been far from bloody safe. And as if criminals didn’t have to go on being caught even if there was a war on. The amount of crime there’d been in the war; it was unbelievable! The callousness of it sometimes – looters going in after a raid and pulling rings and jewellery off corpses, lifting anything they could lay their hands on, handbags with ration books, absolutely anything. And talk about the black market … As he sat with his cup of tea and his cigarette at the end of the meal he felt himself descending into a mood of self-pity. If only he had medals and tales of wartime bravery in action with which to dazzle Mrs Milner.
    But he pulled himself together. He had been brave in the war. He’d risked death many times. He’d chased gangsters and deserters. He’d saved bomb victims from toppling buildings and chased army deserters from them too. Now he was determined to solve this sinister case, and as he pictured again the overripe body of the masculine-looking man said to be a flamboyant homosexual, he wondered at what Neville Milner had said: that the late Freddie Buckingham was one of his wife’s closest friends. How could such a beautiful woman sully herself by friendship with such a character? And how could her husband allow it?
    His tea drunk, he left the house again, to telephone his fiancée, Irene, from the box at the end of the road. He’d applied to have a telephone installed in the house, he could afford it now, but there was a lengthy waiting list, even for a policeman, although Plumer had promised to pull some strings.
    It would be Irene’s birthday soon. He had to think of a present, and of somewhere more exciting to take her than the Gaumont restaurant on the Broadway.

eight

    T HE CONGREGATION DRIFTED OUT of Brompton Oratory and stood about in twos and threes. One mourner, then a second, walked out to the kerb and scanned the horizon right and left for a taxi.
    â€˜I’m going straight back to the museum, kitten. I don’t feel like hanging around, toiling over to the Hallams’ and then coming back here again, it doesn’t make sense and I’ve missed half a day’s work already.’
    Regine watched the retreating figure in dapper suit and bowler hat as he made off at a brisk pace. But now Freddie’s brother-in-law, who had organised everything, simply drove away with his wife, Freddie’s sister, Margaret, in a large black Austin behind the hearse, accompanying Freddie to his final resting place in Brompton Cemetery. The mourners were left rudderless in the Brompton Road.
    Regine had wanted to invite friends back to Downshire Hill, but Neville had pointed out that they didn’t know Freddie’s more famous friends from the world of ballet. Better by far to let Vivienne take charge, even if her house was a bomb site.
    John Hallam rounded them up. Regine found herself in a taxi, her thigh squashed against that of Roberto Miletti, the famous male character dancer. Charles sat on the pull-down seat opposite her. He looked out of the window in a silent trance as they drove up Park Lane, still lost, perhaps, in the funeral.
    The