The Distant Dead, Lesley Thomson [simple e reader .TXT] 📗

could not evoke Jack. The quiet was profound and all encompassing. A thing in itself.

She stumbled back to the van, Stanley at her heels. Never go back, you can’t cheat the passing of time. No more memory lane.

As she accelerated out of Winchcombe along dark winding roads bordered by impregnable hedges, Stella lamented the lack of light. Shadows leapt and shrivelled in the headlamps as, grim-faced, she hugged the wheel and fervently hoped that nothing would come towards her. The twisty byways with hidden ditches and protruding dry-stone walls offered few passing places.

Spears of light pierced the darkness ahead. As she rounded a bend, Stella saw that they were rear lights. A van was travelling in the same direction as her. But where most locals averaged sixty, hounding her bumper before overtaking, the van – white like her own – was crawling at fifteen miles per hour. Stella hung back. In daylight she wouldn’t have minded tootling along, but now she wanted to get back.

The van stopped. Stella slammed on the brakes. The interior of her own van was washed with lurid red light from the rear lamps. She waited. It must have stalled. She rapped a tattoo on the wheel then caught herself on the edge of another simmering rage. Grief could make you angry, she’d read. The driver could have been taken ill. She should get out and check. Her own lights were on full beam, she dimmed them. She’d dazzled the driver and he or she had stopped to let her know. Sorry. She toggled the lights.

The brake lights went out. All the lights were off. Although Stella was also driving a white Peugeot Partner, she assumed the driver was male. She shivered. Not from cold, the heater was on full. Stanley growled.

The man might have been taken ill or unconscious. Or his battery had died. She had jump leads. Thinking to help, Stella reached for the door handle. Stanley’s whimpers recalibrated to a dreadful cry that was eerily human. The thing about dogs was they could be reassuring company or crank up your nerves to sheer terror. Stella was paralysed.

The van was stationary, the lights were off. A spattering rain began to fall; automatically Stella flicked on the wipers. The creak of the blades dragging across the windscreen nearly stopped her heart.

Stella had no way out. In the narrow lane, she couldn’t turn or reverse. The rear mirror reflected black like a void. Stella grabbed her phone from the console. No signal. Exactly why she preferred towns.

The van’s driver’s door was opening. Stella stiffened, her mind racing. Her own doors were locked, but a wrench like the one in her van, therefore likely in his too, could smash through glass. She smacked clammy hands on her trousers and dry swallowed.

Stella knew, even as she got out, she was making a mistake. Stanley gave a shrill bark. She was watching herself in slow motion, one foot on the tarmac, the other…

Light speared through the back window of Stella’s van. Another vehicle was coming down the narrow road behind her. Stella slammed her palm on the hazard light button. The ‘phantom’ van in front trickled forward, still with no lights. It gathered speed and slipped away into the teeming dark.

Fired by adrenalin, her breathing ragged, Stella’s foot shuddered on the accelerator and she bunny-hopped the van a few metres. It was then she noticed the time on the dash. Ten to six.

On the Tewkesbury Road, wipers swiping away streaming rain, Stella reached forty. It wasn’t true that she didn’t have to be anywhere. The Death Café began at six.

Chapter Three

Wednesday, 11 December 1940

7 p.m., Wednesday. Thirteen shopping days until Christmas. In the sulphurous dark, pedestrians, shopworkers, as if in a giant game of Blind Man’s Bluff, fumbled across Hammersmith Broadway. Blackout had been in force since 5.24 p.m. Late commuters, emerging from the Underground station, jostled with shelterers descending into the Hades of makeshift camps, patrolled by looters and chancers, that every night lined the Piccadilly line platforms.

Epitaph For A Spy read the headline of a copy of the Daily Express lying in a gutter and captioned beneath a photograph…judgement of death was duly executed… of one of the two notices outside Pentonville Prison yesterday…

Maple Greenhill set her jaw. Her dad had said that, little older than Maple at twenty-four, Jose Wahlberg, one of the spies, was too young to die. Old enough to be a traitor, Vernon had said. Crisply elegant in a reefer coat, blonde hair rolled, sabots crunching on fragments of glass littering even those streets that had escaped bombing. Maple felt the draught of a trolley bus – the ‘silent peril’ – and veered away from the kerb. When anyone could be killed at any moment, two men who planned to kill them all deserved to hang. You couldn’t feel sorry for spies. What if it was Vernon?

Aleck had promised Maple that, when it was conscription, he’d put in a word for Vern. Aleck knew people.

Maple was haunted by the memory of William, her boy (at three in no danger of dying as a soldier), sobbing in his nana’s arms on their doorstep. She’d promised she was only going up the shop for cigarettes. She’d heard his cries all the way up Corney Road. Her mum stayed there to make her feel bad. Don’t tell him lies, he’ll never forgive you.

The arrest of the spies was meant to reassure the British public that the Germans were losing, but if two men could land in Dungeness with recording equipment in posh suitcases, Maple reckoned William’s nightmares of Nazis coming down the Thames or out of the sky was likely.

Her mum had shouted, ‘It’s your baby you should be with, not some fancy man.’

‘I’m seeing Ida,’ she had shouted, almost believing it. ‘I don’t have a fancy man.’ Not a lie. Aleck was her fiancé, not some fly-by-night like William’s dad.

‘I’m thinking of Will,’ Maple had said to herself as, on the tram,