The Corpse in the Garden of Perfect Brightness Read online

  ‘Meat?’

  ‘At an early stage in its development. A prototype chicken.’

  ‘What I would really like is powdered egg. I don’t suppose we have any?’

  ‘You’re in luck.’

  ‘I’m in luck every day,’ I said playfully.

  Despite the dark lines around her eyes, she smiled and the smile reached her eyes. ‘How was your night? Was it very hard?’

  ‘I’m afraid it was all rather dull. Not too cold. I was partnered with Ifan again. I caught a chap stealing coal.’

  ‘Oh really? And knowing you,’ she said with a hint of mischief, ‘I expect you wanted to box his ears.’

  ‘Actually, no,’ I said. ‘I … I thought … I didn’t think I ought to begrudge a chap one lump of coal for his fire.’

  She drew back slightly in surprise. ‘Really?’ She looked pleased.

  ‘Yes, why not?’ I said feeling slightly guilty. ‘It could have been Ifan’s brother who mined that coal.’

  ‘Oh, Jack!’ said Jenny, her eyes glittering with what appeared to be pride. ‘I’m proud of you!’

  She went to the stove wedged between the bed and the window, and buttered a slice of bread to go with my egg. ‘I thought today I would go and ask at Quails the nicotine throat pastille makers, the mothball warehouse, the creosote wholesaler and the Coal Tar toothpaste people.’

  ‘You asked at all those not two days ago, Jenny.’

  ‘There’s not much to do after I clean the saucepan.’

  ‘Why don’t we go for a walk instead?’

  ‘Don’t you want to sleep?’

  ‘No.’

  I had met Jenny four months before, when she proved to be the last client to walk into my office. In so doing she provided me with the opportunity to resolve, as my swan-song case, the mystery of the ‘Hail Mary’ Celeste. As a child you no doubt shivered to read about it: a party of twenty-three nuns travelling from Swindon to Bristol Temple Meads who vanished into thin air.

  Jenny and I were married on the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve 1947, just as the Great Western Railway vanished from existence and British Rail was born. Our wedding ceremony took place on the footplate of number 4070 Godstow Castle. In those days the driver of a mainline express was still empowered by an Act of Parliament to perform the marriage ceremony, a privilege also granted to the captains of ships and hydrogen-filled dirigibles, although since the tragedy of the Hindenburg this last office was seldom performed. At the precise moment that we said ‘I do’ every train in the land tooted its whistle to salute or lament the birth of British Rail. That collective choir of tooting whistles had been dearer to my ears than church bells.

  We put on our coats and walked to the end of the street, and through the gate out onto Dandelion Hill. The children’s swings and roundabout were still, the boating lake had been drained during the war. The town lay below us and a sense of it stirring, like a hive waking, could be felt. We held hands and walked into a breeze never stiff enough to threaten my hat. Smoke from the factories and the gasworks filled the sky, but here and there the blue broke through like a jumper patched at the elbow. To the south another train appeared, puffing plumes of white smoke into the sky.

  ‘What’s that one, Jack?’ said Jenny as the train crawled across the horizon with a languor that contrasted with the energy of the smoke.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know.’

  I could feel her disappointment. ‘There was a time when you knew them all.’

  ‘Yes, but there are new ones now. A new timetable.’ I felt like a farmer who could no longer remember the names of his cows.

  I recalled the December afternoon when she walked into my office. The room filled with the beautiful reek of sulphur and steam, gushing in glorious chuffs through the broken window, as the 17.17 to Hereford passed outside. I told her without needing to look that the engine was number 4070 Godstow Castle, a 4–6-0 Castle class, the sort with a sloping throatplate in the firebox, which meant that even after the modifications to the blastpipe and chimney, the steam superheating still fell short, betraying its presence with the characteristic double cough in the chuffs. She looked at me and said, ‘Golly’, barely able to believe that a man could discern so much from a few chuffs, so I laughed and pretended I was joking, but of course I wasn’t. To a man brought up in a railway servants’ orphanage a chuff is an encyclopedia, containing the life story of the engine, a sound as dear and identifiably specific as the cry of a baby to its mother, or the bleat of a lamb lost on a hillside.

  The sound of Jenny’s voice brought me back to the present.

  ‘Will you teach me to drive a train?’ she asked.

  I laughed.

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘I know. But why would you want to learn such a thing?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘I’m not saying you shouldn’t, I’m just curious to know why you want to.’

  She hesitated, as if naming the precise motive was not easy. ‘Because of what you said.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘You know very well.’

  Indeed I did, or at least had a good idea, but it was more fun to feign ignorance. I moved behind her and enfolded her with my arms, resting my chin on the top of her head. ‘In the time I’ve known you, Jenny, I’ve said many things about the railways, some would say I talk about little else.’

  ‘You said that there were times when the engine is running fast and firing beautifully and all is going well and that … that the feeling is … rather wonderful.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘In fact, you said more than that.’

  ‘Did I?’ A half-smile tugged at the corner of my mouth.

  The factory hooter from Chumley’s sounded, faint and far away. A man near the boating lake was walking his dog. It was the only other sign of life this morning.

  ‘You know very well you did.’

  ‘You’ll have to remind me.’

  ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know.’ There was a hint of exasperation in her voice. She knew she was being teased, but realised, too, there was no retreat.

  The man threw the stick. The dog chased after it, stopping for a second at the rim of the empty boating lake before continuing after the stick.

  ‘If it’s what I think you mean,’ I said, ‘I’ve never heard it cited as a reason to learn to drive a train.’

  ‘You said it was like the pleasure a man takes privately with his wife.’

  When I had stopped laughing, I told Jenny I had an extra shift that afternoon. In truth, I intended catching the train to Exeter St David’s and from there taking the connection for Wisskirriel. But first I would ask Ifan to cover for me.

  I did not tell Jenny about the letter because I knew it would arouse the same unjustified hope in her that it had in me. If it should prove to be a cruel hoax, or simple mistaken identity, it would be very hard to return and tell her. All the same, I could not entirely extinguish the hope in my own heart. I knew well that if Jenny failed to find a job soon, I would not be able to pay the rent arrears we owed; we should be turfed out onto the street.

  Chapter 3

  The last meeting of the Board of God’s Wonderful Railway took place on 19 December 1947. Various business was transacted. The house at 10 Florence Road, Ealing was bought from the organisation ‘Homes for Motherless Children’ for use as a GWR hostel. Six Hillman Imp motor cars were bought to serve as company cars, at a cost of £2,968 13s 6d. Monies were allocated for the refurbishment of the Kingswear–Dartmouth ferry, the Mew. The awards for the best station gardens were announced: £6 each to Cholsey & Moulsford; Swindon Town; Creech St Michael; Halt; Symonds Yat; Pontllanfraith; Peterston; Pembrey & Burry Port. It was like a man about to be executed renewing his order with the milkman.

  That final year, 1947, had been a hard year, starting with snow, ice and blizzards. Coal was still in short supply and the government prohibited excursion trains, including those intended to convey support
ers to the F.A. Cup semi-finals in April. Throughout the land men and women of the railway laboured in dreadful conditions, to serve the public and keep the railways open. Signalmen battled to work across drifts higher than hedges, wading through snow waist-deep or sometimes crawling on all fours. Often the snowploughs got stuck and the driver and his fireman would dig her out with spades. And sometimes that too didn’t work and the men sat in the guard’s van where there was food and tea and coal for the stove, and waited for relief.

  One member of the permanent way team died in a storm that winter. Lost and confused in a snowstorm at night, he was hit by a train. He left a wife and seven children and the Great Western Board awarded her £707 10s.

  What made those men labour so heroically in that winter? The Great Western Railway was our home. At Swindon the company built the houses for the workers and provided a hospital, school, church and swimming baths. In March 1947 the Great Western Railway Music Festival was opened, for the last time, in Reading Town Hall by the Mayor, Lady Phoebe Cusden. For six days it went on, morning, noon and night: orchestras, soloists, recitations and the highly popular production of The Rebel Maid by the GWR operatic society. In July the Minister of Transport lifted transport restrictions to permit the Annual Swindon Works Outing to take place. Between 5 and 8 July, twenty-four special trains took 20,000 workers to the seaside.

  There was also accommodation at the Swindon Works for the busiest man of all, the funeral director. Because death was never far away. People had heart attacks, or contrived to open the carriage door at 80 mph and fall out. Some choked to death or choked each other. Some leaned out of the window too far and lost their heads. Desperate people threw themselves into the path of a train and destroyed their own lives and gave the men on the footplate nightmares for the rest of their lives. Some chaps on the footplate were scalded to death when things went wrong, and some were crushed like a beetle in a collapsing tin can. One boy infamously preferred sleeping in the firebox to cleaning it at 3 o’clock of a cold winter morning. He went up in smoke. A hundred years ago, for a while, there was a train that only the dead could take, from Waterloo to Brookwood cemetery in Surrey. I regret to recall I occasionally found dead babies in the lavatories. We were all touched by death, but we did not dwell on it. The only death we were not prepared for was the death of our beloved Great Western itself.

  Lady Seymour had sent me a first-class ticket. I sat alone in the richly upholstered compartment and contemplated the pickle I had got myself into as a consequence of solving the case of the ‘Hail Mary’ Celeste. The disappearance of the nuns turned out to be the result of a foul plot in which His Majesty King George V was implicated. As a consequence, I found disfavour in the eyes of a shadowy organisation called Room 42, who were determined that I should not disclose the role of the King.

  I knew little about them apart from the fact that they seemed to operate in a clandestine way within the government. The name derived from a time-honoured practice in which chaps who let the side down were expected to retire to a hotel with a revolver and bottle of whisky, book room 42, and blow their brains out in it. I had good reason to believe that they had a similar fate in mind for me – thus it was that I had been living under the name of Cunningham. But if Cheadle could find me, it was clear that so could they.

  A chap called Bates met me at Wisskirriel Station and took my small overnight case. He told me lodging had been secured for me at the local inn and he would take me there later, then showed me to a Rover parked in the station yard and ushered me in.

  It was a ten-minute drive from the town, through a narrow lane that twisted and turned around a hill, gradually rising until we broke clear of the hedges that obstructed our view. All at once we could see the ocean, grey-green against a leaden sky, and set against it, on the promontory, stood a grand house that was situated in parklands dotted with trees where deer grazed. The house itself was made from grey stone, obscured with ivy and adorned with crenellations and fake towers, the sort they have on railway stations and that one doubts would be much use in a real siege.

  We parked on a gravel forecourt and a maid came out of the main door and curtsied before me, then led me inside and into a drawing room where she requested me to wait. The room was gloomy, filled with mahogany furniture, heavy curtains, and oil paintings in which little could be discerned except perhaps the red tunic of a chap on a horse and a patch of silver that represented a body of water. At the far end, French windows opened on to a conservatory, which in turn looked out onto the lawn.

  The sideboard was covered with bric-a-brac, including a carriage clock, a brass shell case acting as a vase for some dried flowers, and a framed photo of a young man in battledress of the Great War. There was also a bronze statue from India showing a god with four arms. The maid brought me a tray bearing a teapot and a single cup and poured. She explained that after I had refreshed myself she would take me upstairs to see Her Ladyship, which she duly did, leading me to the first floor and to a bedchamber commanding a view of the Downs and sea beyond. Lady Seymour lay in a four-poster bed, propped against a mountain of pillows and smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Mr Wenlock!’ she said. ‘It was so good of you to come.’ She scrutinised me, as if examining a purchase. Her hair had once been blonde but was now greying in loose skeins that fell over her shoulders. Her skin was lined and dusted with powder, and her nose sharply sculpted and rather handsome. She looked to be in her seventies. But what struck me most about her was her eyes. The fine lines around them suggested that she had once been gay, and given to a mirth that seldom visited her now.

  ‘Would you care for a cigarette?’

  I declined.

  ‘We’ve met before, actually,’ she said without ceremony. ‘But I don’t expect you to remember.’

  ‘I’m sure I might, if …’

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘The first time was when you were a little boy. I gave a talk at the Weeping Cross Railway Servants’ Orphanage and showed some lantern slides of Moon Beam, the Potawatomi Indian princess.’

  ‘I remember that!’

  ‘The second time was in 1935. I sent my niece a birthday package via the Great Western postal service. It contained a postal order for half a crown. But when she opened it on her birthday, the postal order was missing. We reported the matter, not expecting anything to come of it. But the following week you came to see her and apologised. You said you had managed to recover the postal order from the bounder who had taken it, and you made good a restitution. She was so thrilled. You gave her a Gosling’s Friend badge, too. That was very kind of you.’

  I smiled and brushed it aside with a gesture.

  ‘She always talked about it, kept that badge until she … she died in childhood you see, pneumonia.’ I was about to make an appropriate remark, but she shook her head. ‘The point is,’ she continued, ‘it was jolly big of you, that’s all. To take the trouble. I know you couldn’t really have found the chap who stole it.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Because I never sent the postal order. A month later while cleaning out my dressing room, my maid found it under the bureau. I must have dropped the damned thing.’

  I laughed.

  She drew thoughtfully on her cigarette, leaning back slightly as she regarded me. ‘And now you’ve got married.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On the footplate of a train.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You really are most curious.’

  ‘I suppose I am. Your letter mentioned … my …’

  ‘Your mother.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was involved in the early stages of the Gosling programme. I interviewed the prospective mothers. I had a lady’s maid at the time – Millie. Your mother. She was sixteen years old, and a real jewel; I was very fond of her. So was my son Curtis, who was fourteen; he doted on her and she on him.’ She paused, and her eyes narrowed slightly as if she was troubled by the memory. She exhaled her cigarette smoke sl
owly, and said, ‘Something terrible happened. Some money went missing. Curtis told me he had seen Millie take it.’ She paused again, the muscles of her face tightening as she recalled the events of long ago. ‘So, with a heavy heart, I had to dismiss her. It was some years later when Curtis found the courage to own up to me that he had taken the money. The guilt has tormented him ever since. After she was dismissed, she immediately left the neighbourhood. No one knew where she had gone. It turned out she was with child. You, in fact.’

  Her cigarette was only halfway smoked, but she stubbed it out elegantly and lit another. Dusk was beginning to settle in and the blue smoke curling around her face, caught by the light from the window, shrouded her in a twisting veil of gauze the colour of a dove’s plumage.

  ‘Here—’ She handed me a photograph. It showed a girl wearing the customary uniform of an Edwardian domestic servant: a dark dress with crisp white apron and cap. She posed stiffly, next to an occasional table in a nondescript hall. She looked painfully young. Her face was soft, childish, with wisps of fair hair tucked into her bonnet.

  ‘That is your mother,’ said Lady Seymour.

  I stared across an abyss of years at the face of my mother. My heart filled with a feeling that has no name. I stood there thunderstruck and struggled to know even what it was that I was feeling. My mother? A woman I had often dreamed about, but who had passed like a ghost through those dreams, evanescent, a figure for whom I had never imagined a face, and not even been aware that it was lacking. And now I saw it plainly. It struck me that my mother, even at that young age, was very beautiful, and had about her gaze that stared so trustingly at the camera a sweetness and innocent candour.