Gerald Seymour - The Waiting Time

‘You are Mrs Barnes, Mrs Adelaide Barnes? We have a warrant issued by Slough magistrates to search this property because we have reason to believe that a possible offence under the Official Secrets Act may have been committed by your daughter. I apologize for the mess we’ve left you. I can provide you with a list of items taken from your daughter’s room for further examination. If you find that anything not listed is missing, if you find any of your possessions to be broken, then you should put that down in writing and send it to Slough police station. I regret that I cannot offer you a fuller explanation, and I wouldn’t go bothering the police because they are not authorized to make any statement on this matter.’

She stood in front of him in shock.

He shouted past her, ‘Get that door fixed, made secure.’

The yapping of the spaniel filled the hail. In the kitchen, down the end of the hall, was the fridge-freezer her Tracy had bought her. On top of it, crouched, arched, was Fluff. She wished that the young woman in jeans would let go the bloody leash so that the spaniel could jump at Fluff and have its bloody eyes scratched out. Behind her she could hear the hammering of nails through plyboard and into the old wood of her front door. She started up the stairs.

A young constable was on the landing. He looked at his feet. He whispered, ‘We’re really sorry about this, love, all of us locals are. It’s a London crowd in charge, not us. I shouldn’t tell you… We weren’t told what they were looking for – whatever, they didn’t find it.’ He went down the stairs heavily, noisily.

Tears welled in Adie Barnes’s eyes. She was in her Tracy’s room. Her Tracy’s clothes were on the floor, carpet up, boards up. She heard the quiet, then the noise of. the wagon engine starting. Her Tracy’s music centre was in pieces, back off, gutted. Her Tracy’s bookcase had been pulled apart. The books were gone. Her name was called. Her Tracy’s bear – she’d had it since she was eight – was on the stripped bed and it was cut open. Mr Patel was at the door of her Tracy’s room.

Mr Patel was a good neighbour. Some of the old people at bingo on a Friday, those who had been in Victoria Road for ever, said there were too many Asians, that they’d brought the road down. She’d never have that talk. She thought Mr Patel as well mannered and caring as any man she knew, and Mr Ahmed and Mr Dcv and Mr Huq.

‘It is disgraceful what has happened to you, and you a seniorcitizen lady. You should have the representation of a solicitor, Mrs Barnes. A very good firm acted for us when we bought the shop. I think it is too late for tonight…’

In ten minutes, with her coat on and her best hat, ignoring the pain of her feet, Mrs Barnes set off for the offices of Greatorex, Wilkins amp; Protheroe in the centre of Slough. The offices might be closed, but it was for her Tracy, and she did not know what else she could do.

‘Only a stenographer in Berlin, weren’t you, Tracy? So you wouldn’t have understood much about the intelligence business. I doubt you were alone, doubt that the people running Hans Becker knew much more than you. Did they tell you, Tracy, that running him was in breach of orders? Doubt they did. The running of agents was supposed to be given to us, the professionals. You made, Tracy, the oldest mistake in the book. You went soft on an agent. You couriered to him, didn’t you? Slap and tickle, was there? A tremble in the shadows? So, it was personal when you beat three shades of shit out of Hauptman Krause. Why him, Tracy? Where’s the evidence? You want to talk about the murder of your lover boy, then there has to be evidence..

When he heard the banging down below, he was bent over his desk, studying the papers of another grubby little case off the streets of another grubby little town that would end up in the grubby little court on Park Road. Two youths fighting over first use of a petrol pump. The client was the one who had hit straighter and harder.

It was not a loud banging, just as if someone was knocking on the high street door.

The partners were long gone, and the typists. The receptionist would have been gone an hour. He worked in the open plan area among the typists’ empty desks, word processors shut down and covered up. The partners’ offices were off the open area, doors locked, darkness behind the glass screens. He worked late so that Mr Wilkins could have all the papers in the morning for the pump rage and the affray, then the indecent assault, a remand job, and the possession with intent to supply.

The knocking continued, harder, more insistent. He pulled up his tie, hitched his jacket off the back of the chair and went out of the office down the stairs into reception.

She was outside the door. He let her in.

She had been crying. Her eyes were red, magnified by the lenses of her spectacles.

She asked him, straight out, was he a solicitor, and he said that he was ‘nearly’ a solicitor. He took her upstairs, made her a pot of tea, and she told him about her Tracy, and what the officer had said about the search and the warrant.

‘Mrs Barnes, what unit is your daughter with?’

‘She’s a corporal. She’s with the Intelligence Corps.’

And that was a bit of his history – quite a large part of Josh Mantle’s history.

He dialled the number that Mrs Adie Barnes had given him.

‘Hello.’

‘Could I speak, please, to Corporal Barnes, Tracy Barnes?’

A hesitation as if, so early in the morning, her brain was grinding. ‘Who is it?’

‘A friend, a solicitor.’

He knew that block, knew where the call had been answered. He could hear the radios screaming behind her and the shouting, bawling, hollering.

Softly, and with a hand cupped over the mouthpiece, the voice said, ‘Needs friends, locked up, in the cells, ‘cos she bashed that German.’ A voice change, loud and disinterested. ‘Any calls for the corporal are to go to the main camp number, and you should ask for the Adjutant’s office.’

He rang off.

He had showered early. He lived in a small part of a large house, the roof space converted into two rooms. There was a kitchenette area in one and a wash-basin in the other. The lavatory and shower, no bath, were down the stairs. If he used them early he didn’t have to queue. He shaved carefully. It seemed important that day that he should look his best. When he had shaved, checked in the mirror that he had not cut himself, he went to his wardrobe.

There were only two suits to choose from. There was the one he wore five days a week at Greatorex, Wilkins amp; Protheroe and there was the darker one, which carried the story of Joshua Frederick Mantle’s recent life. Worn for the job interview eighteen months before – a formality because Mr Greatorex had already offered him office-boy employment. Worn for her funeral twenty months before, a bright May day with daffodils still out in the graveyard. Worn for the appointment with the specialist and for the wedding thirty-three months before, autumn leaves scrambling against the steps of the register office and only enough witnesses behind them to make it decent. Bought and worn for the leaving party in the mess a very long time before, and he had been a washed-up casualty of the ‘peace dividend’. From the wardrobe he took the dark suit and the white shirt hanging beside it. He laid them on his bed, which he had already made – it was the routine of his life, from far back, to make his bed as soon as he was out of it. Back at the wardrobe, he glanced over his ties. Two of silk, both from Libby, both for his birthday, but they remained hanging on the bar. His fingers touched two of polyester, Army Intelligence Corps and Royal Military Police, then left them. Two from the high street in Slough, neutral ties that gave away nothing of him, of his past, green and navy. He took the green one, and placed it on the shirt, beside the suit, on the bed. In a cardboard box on the floor of the wardrobe was the shoe polish, the brushes and the duster. He took the better black pair of shoes, the pair from the interview, the funeral and the wedding, the pair he didn’t wear in court or at the offices of Greatorex, Wilkins amp; Protheroe. The routine was to clean his shoes each morning, to spit on the polish and to buff the shoes to brilliance. It did not matter to him that it was raining, that the shoes would be quickly dulled. He dressed.