Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [129]
“Although come to think of it, she may have gone back before the end, since I don’t remember seeing her after that week. She wouldn’t have been the only one who didn’t last the summer, that’s for sure.”
“You said she looked sick?”
“Not so much sick as unhappy. Now if that doesn’t sound daft, considering the circs we were in, I know. But when the nurse said something about the chain she was wearing, Phil didn’t seem embarrassed, like she’d been caught out with a beau. She seemed . . . Well, I guess the nurse was afraid Phil was about to collapse, because she sort of grabbed for her, but Phil shook her off and went back for the next stretcher. And that was the end of the discussion. So . . . maybe her beau didn’t make it through.”
Either sensitivity or long experience led Dorothea to the same conclusion that I had reached.
“When would this have been?” I asked her.
She returned to the album as a reference point, and when that proved too indefinite in its dates, she handed it to me along with the powerful glass and took up her personal journal. I studied the photograph, finding it more evocative than informative. A smudge of face, a tuft of dark hair springing out from under the sexless cloth cap, and a rangy shape beneath the shapeless overalls; the only thing I could have said for sure was that her stance shouted self-confidence and strength, and perhaps even a degree of humour, although I couldn’t have explained where that last impression came from. Several minutes passed before Dorothea spoke. “It looks to have been the end of July or the first part of August. Sorry, that’s the nearest I can make it.”
Gabriel Hughenfort had been arrested on the twenty-sixth of July and executed at dawn on August the third.
“Where would records of the VAD drivers be kept now?” I asked her.
She wrote an address for me, handed me the paper, closed her photograph album with regret. “Ask for Millicent,” she suggested. “Some of the other girls who work there are dead useless, but Millie was a nurse. She’ll help you.”
She walked with me to the door, and pulled her knit cardigan more tightly around her as the cold pushed in. I thanked her, for the third or fourth time, and went down the steps.
Halfway down the walk, I stopped. When I turned, she had not moved, in spite of the cold. I spoke without thinking.
“You ought to take up mountain-climbing, or flying,” I urged her. “Or go on a world tour. Let your sister care for your parents for a while.”
She looked startled, and then in an instant the jaunty daredevil VAD driver of her photo album was standing in the doorway, her head tossed to one side and a grin of schoolgirl mischief on her thirty-year-old face.
“You’re absolutely right, Mary. I think I’ve been good far too long.”
And with a wink of understanding, she stepped back inside and gently shut the door. Somehow, I doubted her hair would remain long for many more weeks.
Thursday morning, with Holmes sufficiently recovered that he could do up his own shoe-laces and amble off for a second immersion in the Turkish baths, I set off to trace the green-eyed driver, whose name might be in doubt but who had become a clear personality in my mind.
Millicent, unfortunately, was absent, and the “other girls” proved as useless as Dorothea had predicted. I dismissed them with empty thanks and pored over the records on my own. By the time the tea-cart came through in the middle of the