Troubled Midnight Read Free Page A

followed by Noel Coward’s Hay Fever the next, the theatre right out at the end of the pier. In fact this year, 1943, was the first year the pier had been back in business since the start of the war in the autumn of 1939. The girl, Williams, turned a big wheel that made one of the roundabouts work, the little kids sitting in small cars, miniature London taxis and racing cars. Grinning fit to bust. Pleased as Punch.
    It was Angela Williams looking after the small children’s roundabouts who was found dead between the two machines, neck broken, clothing disturbed – police jargon for knickers removed so you’d know what else had happened. Unsavoury. July 26 th 1943.
    The combined wisdom of Scotland Yard had it that: first, murders were usually perpetrated by members of the victim’s family or very close friends; and, second, that if you didn’t nab the killer in the first forty-eight hours you were in for a long, and possibly fruitless, haul.
    This one had taken Tommy over three weeks of intensive sleuthing, and even then the unmasking of the murderer had been almost an accident: a young lad working among the stage staff at the Pier Theatre, a lad called Pearse who was almost the invisible man as far as Tommy and his squad were concerned. Suddenly they spotted him and Tommy did the algebra and geometry, fixed him in their sights and they got him – blubbering and confessing in some terror once accused.
    “Poor boy,” Tommy said, “not a real killer but a stupid mistake he’ll regret for the rest of his life.”
    Nobody said he probably didn’t have much of a life left and they all went back to London to see what would be thrown up next, but on the Saturday morning Tommy suggested that they drive up to see Suzie’s mum and stepfather – the Galloping Major.
    They were welcomed with huge excitement and plenty of food. Suzie’s mum, Helen, had a deal going with a butcher in nearby Wantage so they had a nice piece of beef on the Saturday night. “I was saving it for Sunday lunch,” Helen told Suzie, “but Tommy says you can’t stay to Sunday lunch.”
    Tommy hadn’t told Suzie, so she got quite shirty with him, over in the Coach House. “Why can’t we stay to lunch, tomorrow?” she asked, face twisted up in her not so convincing impression of anger.
    “Because we can’t,” Tommy smooth but firm. “We can not.” Three words equally spaced.
    “Bugger it, Tommy, why the blazes not?”
    “I have other plans.”
    And that was that. When Tommy had his mind made up there was no gainsaying him, so they slept pleasantly in the Coach House that was the last thing Suzie’s father had accomplished with their property before his fatal accident: did the old place up, two bedrooms and a wide open room with a kitchen off on the ground floor: very smart, a lot of exposed pine and nice carpets. Her mum put them in there, of course, because she didn’t really want them sleeping together in the main house: didn’t like to think of her daughter having a bit of nookie with Tommy under her roof, without the benefit of a priest as she would probably say.
    In the end it was a lovely surprise when instead of taking the London Road, Tommy drove them to the little market town of Wantage that seemed, from The Bear Hotel, to be a nice and interesting place – nestling in the Vale of the White Horse, as all the guidebooks said, with the ancient Roman roads nearby, the Portway running through the town and the Ridgeway just above them on the Berkshire Downs; and the great King Alfred’s birthplace, Alfred King of Wessex, the one who burned the cakes.
    Now they were standing, looking across the square, outside Arbery’s haberdasher, big windows and white paint, barley-sugar twists at the corner of the windows, when there was a snarl from above and they glanced up to see a North American Harvard aircraft in the all-yellow livery of RAF Training Command turn on its back about fifteen hundred feet above them, its big Wasp engine