The Information Officer - Mark Mills

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of the wood, the burly widower, always did his washing on Saturday morning, irrespective of the weather, stringing the clothes up in the barn if it was raining. And the old couple who walked their two wire-haired terriers on the hill most evenings always stopped and kissed each other on the lips before negotiating the stile by the clump of gorse. He also noticed the mysterious black sedan parked in the driveway of the thatched house near the old meadow copse every Tuesday afternoon between the hours of two and four. At four, or thereabouts, he saw a young man, prematurely bald, hurry from the house to the car. And if he crept through the trees round to the back of the house, he could see a woman draw back the bedroom curtains the moment the car was gone.

      Her name was Mrs Beckett, he discovered, and Mr Beckett sold engineering equipment around the country, spending much of his time on the road. They didn’t have children. It took him a month or so to build up the courage to knock on the door. When he did, he was pleased with what he saw. Mrs Beckett was more attractive up close, dark and petite and with a lively sparkle in her eye. When he asked if he could trouble her for a glass of water she invited him inside.

      The kitchen was large and light and spotlessly clean. He had caught her in the act of making jam, straining fruit through a piece of muslin slung between the legs of an upturned stool. He knew all about making jam but pretended he didn’t, and an hour later he was still there, helping her.

      She knew who he was, or rather, she had heard his story from someone in the area. He fed on her compassion, but picked his responses carefully, not wishing to overplay the role of tragic victim, which he judged would not appeal to her. He selected a couple of anecdotes to make her laugh, which she did, throwing back her head and emitting a throaty chuckle. When he finally left, she took his hand and shook it firmly and told him he was a brave and impressive young man. She also told him to stop by again if he was passing on one of his walks.

      He left it a couple of weeks before doing so, during which time he toyed with his options, playing them through in his head in all their various permutations. Knowledge might equate to power, but the successful application of that power required meticulous preparation. He had a reputation to preserve, and he needed to be sure of Mrs Beckett’s silence.

      He opted for a Thursday. It was a hot and sultry afternoon, a great cathedral of cumulus clouds stirring high overhead, threatening an electrical storm. She was in the garden, pulling weeds from the borders, and seemed delighted to see him. The perfect excuse to take a break, she joked. She poured them both a glass of lemonade from the jug she kept in the larder and suggested they drink it out of the heat, in the cool of the kitchen.

      They sat facing each other across the scrubbed pine table, the sweat slowly drying on their skin. It wasn’t a scene he had imagined, but it was close enough, so he set about his business. He told her he was going away for a month with his mother to Bad Reichenhall, a spa town in the Bavarian Alps, guests of some German friends of his father. Herr Kettelmann was a regular at the Brooklands race meetings, and his eldest son, Lutz, had proved to be good company, bright and mischievous and fond of dirty jokes. He pretended to be under-whelmed by the idea of going abroad, dismissing the invitation as a gesture of pity towards a woman whom the Kettelmanns barely knew. She told him not to be so cynical, not to mistake kindness for pity. He lowered his eyes to the table, bowing to her superior wisdom and apologizing for his mean-spiritedness.

      And so it continued, just as he had planned it: he, the troubled young soul in search of guidance; she, rising to the role of guide. She was less sure-footed when he turned the conversation to her, her life, her husband. He tried to show interest while listening to her tales of love and marriage and a happiness born in heaven—lies which invigorated him, entitling him to proceed.

      When she rose to fill their glasses, he followed her to the larder and told her that he had never met anyone like her. She handed him his glass and told him not to be silly. When he took her hand and raised it to his lips, she snatched it away before he could kiss it. He was tall for his age, more man than boy, and she seemed to sense this now. Pushing past him out of the larder, she said that she had to get back to her weeding before the rain came, and suggested that he hurry home to avoid a drenching. He didn’t reply; he just looked at her. When she asked him firmly to leave, he asked her about the bald man.

      The colour drained from her face, but she recovered quickly, pleading no knowledge of a bald man. When forced to concede that he did exist, she claimed that he was her brother. When he enquired if she thought it normal for a woman to spend two hours in a darkened bedroom with her brother every Tuesday afternoon, she began to grasp the hopelessness of her situation. She tried to wriggle off the hook a couple more times, first appealing to his conscience, then defiantly ordering him to go ahead and do his worst. But they both knew that they were edging inexorably towards a trade. She asked him what he wanted for his silence. Something I’ve never had before, he replied.

      He might not have known what he was doing, but he was big, and he assumed that counted for something. He knew he was big because he had seen the other boys in the showers at school after games, as they had seen him, and they had remarked respectfully on his size.

      It didn’t seem to give Mrs Beckett much pleasure. But he wasn’t thinking of her; he was thinking of himself, watching himself moving in and out of her and wondering if this was what all the fuss was about. Looking to improve on the experience, he manoeuvred her into a number of different positions, which helped a bit. Her passivity gave him no satisfaction, but neither did it hamper his performance. He did what he had come to do then he got dressed and left. He turned at the bedroom door and reassured her that her secret was safe with him. He wanted her to know that he was a man of his word. She was sobbing quietly into a pillow and didn’t look up.

      The storm broke as he was crossing the meadow. Lightning scythed the sky, thunder echoed off the hills, and the rain sheeted down in warm torrents, soaking him to the skin. And yet he remained strangely immune to this assault on his senses, caught up in dark thoughts, wondering what he would have to do, just how far he would have to go before he finally felt something stir in him.

      He wasn’t to know it at the time, but the answer lay only a little way off, in Bad Reichenhall.

       Day Three

      Max was at his desk, taking a red pen to a news item, when the phone rang. He snatched up the receiver distractedly, irritably.

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘I know the feeling.’

      ‘Freddie.’

      ‘Bad morning?’

      ‘That new chap we took on, you met him at the party…’

      ‘Pemberton.’

      ‘Turns out he thinks he’s Shakespeare.’

      ‘He’ll learn. You did.’

      ‘Thanks for that.’

      ‘Listen, Max, I know who she is.’

      Max’s smile died on his lips. ‘The girl…?’

      ‘She has a name now. Carmela Cassar. Her father was here earlier and identified the body. It’s as we thought, another sherry queen.’

      ‘You spoke to him?’

      ‘Don’t worry, I was very discreet.’

      ‘That’s not what I meant.’

      ‘Yes it is. Have you got a pen?’

      Max scribbled down everything Freddie had gleaned, both from the official paperwork at the mortuary and from his conversation with the father. Carmela lived with her parents in the family home on the hillside near Paola, just up the slope from Santa Maria Addolorata Cemetery. She always got back from work late, between one and two in the morning, but in the five months she had been working at the Blue Parrot she had never once failed to return.

      Max knew the Blue Parrot, not intimately, and not of late. It was one of the few dance halls in the Gut reserved for officers,

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