Chapter 1: Ten days ago

WHEN I emerged from the Mile End tube station at ten to seven upon that icy cold early spring morning on 29th January 1941, I could see the black smoke rising from Wapping and Limehouse to the south west and south, and rather lighter smoke coming from Spitalfields to my west. The smell of burning was less intense this morning, the air still, the late winter ground frost testimony to the clear skies that had drawn to London yet another intense bombing raid from German-occupied Europe during the night.

According to my late father’s trusty old fob watch, I pulled from my waistcoat pocket to check, I had ten and a half minutes to walk what was normally a six-minute journey in order to make my early appointment at seven o’clock on schedule.

Plenty of time, I had thought at the outset. But as I emerged from the tube station I could see we had also had a light dusting of snow overnight and the ticket guard announced that it was as low as 22 degrees or ten degrees of frost, “so look out for ice”, he called out as a warning when I hobbled past him.

I soon found out that two of the sticks of bombs had landed in terrace housing in Southern Grove, leaving bricks and rubble strewn across the road directly across my route and this meant that, picking my way through the debris, my progress was exeedingly slow.

I regretted now that I hadn’t carried a walking stick when I went out last night, mostly because of my damned stupid pride. As a consequence, I didn’t reach my office in Hamlets Lane until five past seven.

So, I was late for my appointment and, due to my hurrying and the rough terrain, my missing right foot was bloody well killing me.

“Mornin’, Mr Onslow,” the old doorman greeted me with a cheery wave, adding with a nod of his grizzled head upwards and a knowing smile on his lips, “there’s a young lady in yer office. She was waiting outside when I turned up, so I let ‘er in an’ lit yer fire for ya, ‘bout 10 minutes since.”

“Thanks, Bert.”

I turned to climb the first of the three flights to my icy garret office, but Bert couldn’t let me go without a final remark, “She’s a right tutti that one, Guv. Her old man must be bleedin’ fore an’ aft, ter go cheatin’ on ‘er an’ risk losin’ everyfink over anovva ord’nry bit o’ skirt! She definitely ain’t nuffink like ord’nry, Guv.”

I just waved my hat at him. Bert was at least thirty years older than my 42 years of age, but still as sharp as they come, or at least he was usually right on the button when it came to visitors to the various and diverse offices in the old office building. This time he had assumed that my new client was a wronged wife wanting to hire me to catch her “daft” husband in the act of his infidelity, usually with a girl younger and prettier than my client usually was. That was my usual cut of clientele, to be honest, but Bert was well out of his crease to a full toss on this one.

I knew that my potential client’s husband was a volunteer in the military of a country no longer his nationality and had gone absent without leave, in unusual circumstances. I also understood that she just wanted to know the wherefore and why, and not yet aware if there was any “who with” involved in his disappearance.

As I laboured one by one up those 39 painful steps to my tiny office, I recalled our brief telephone conversation from last night.

The fog had come rolling in from the river as soon as it grew dark and the air was developing quite a nip in the air after a clear, dry and partly sunny winter’s day. Due to the war, the public telephone on the corner of Mile End Road and Eric Street has become my office telephone from 6.15 to 6.30 the five weekday evenings each week, and had been thus for the past four months.

‘Private Dicks’ in London at the height of the Blitz, during the winter of 1940 to spring 1941, didn’t always have the luxury of their own telephone line, or even shared party line. At least not a Dick who had been bombed out of two different offices in the previous five months and the military demanded first dibs on every new telephone line that was available, ‘for the war effort’.

Besides, business in my line of work was so bad that, if truth be told, I could no longer afford the line rental, and incoming calls on the public call box cost me nothing. I was beginning to find that few potential clients cared much about such trifling details as spousal infidelity when they were being blown to smithereens every night and expected the invincible German Nazi panzers to invade on the very next tide under cover of darkness.

I had been so deep in my thoughts that evening that I had almost missed the call, and only answered the ringing telephone on the fifth ring, “Mile End 551,” I answered automatically.

“I almost gave up ringin’ yah,” the woman at the other end of the line said rather tetchily, “Are yah’ll the discrete private detective they call ‘One Shoe Onslow’?”

I was well aware of my nickname at the Yard, so I was long past taking enough offence at the remark to slam the receiver down. Besides, most of my work came from personal recommendation and I needed the work, so I didn’t hesitate to confirm my identity to the female caller.

“Yes, Madam, I am Mr Onslow. How may I help you?”

I almost straightened my back as if back on parade, one time the Army or until recently the Metropolitan Police. Her voice was unmistakably American, but carried with it an air of authority, and therefore a complete expectation of the immediate and satisfactory service of her yet to be specified requirements. This was no retiring mousey housewife in denial of her husband’s moral shortcomings or depression because she suspected her husband of walking all over her, by having an affair of the heart, without considering the consequential damage to his own wife’s heart.

“I am Marcia la Mare...” she started. Then she paused momentarily, like the name was supposed to mean something to absolutely everyone she thus introduced herself to. Maybe to others her name did mean something, but it rang absolutely no bells at all with me. I did regularly read the “society” pages of all the British national papers in the Public Library, and some of them were clients or potential clients at one time or another, but the name Marcia la Mare meant nothing at all to me in any social context.

I replied, “And I am Edgar Onslow, Madam, a private investigator. How may I assist you?”

“You do know who I am, don’t yah, hey?” There was more than a hint of surprise in her voice.

“I understand that you’re either a Miss, or more likely, a Mrs Marcia la Mare and I assume you are calling me to assist you with the investigation into a problem you might be having involving your husband? Perhaps he goes missing without adequate explanation from time to time and you want to know where he goes and who he spends time with?”

“Yeah, wanting someone to assist me with an investigation into a missing husband ... yeah, I guess that’s exactly who I am,” she replied, “Look, mah husband has been missin’ here in London for four weeks now, but the damned authorities around here can’t seem to help me none, so I need a Private Eye to find him, see. I spoke to some detective guys in New Scotland Yard earlier today and they told me that yah were the best possible unofficial investigation help I could rustle up round here at a moment’s notice. They gave me yah number and told me that ya could only be reached in the early evenin’ ‘bout this time, a quarter after six.”

“That’s right. I find my work mostly starts out in the early evenings and sometimes takes me extremely late into the night.”

“I guess that is the nature of yah business, Sir. Well, Mr Onslow, may I see yah later tonight about my ahhh ... problem? I assure yah it’s a matter of some urgency.”

“I’m afraid that I am already preparing to leave the office to work on a case tonight,” I replied, “What about meeting up tomorrow morning?”

I was working too, despite how quiet business had become recently. The last two Tuesday nights I had been trailing an erring Colonel and his cute waitress girlfriend from a restaurant for dinner, a hotel for dancing and, after dancing, with absolute certainly, they would retire to one of the rooms the hotel had available to rent for an hour or two at the most. I knew that by the time I had negotiated a key from the night porter, so I could catch them in the act, it would be well past midnight if I was lucky. Sometimes the client, in this case the Honourable Lady Bletchley-Havering, one of the ancient and wealthy Sussex Haverings, wanted to be present at the moment the adulterers were discovered in flagrente. This meant a lot more hanging around by both the photographer and me while she was brought to the scene in her chauffeur-driven Bentley from whatever fancy West End hotel she was staying at for the night.

I didn’t know it at the time that I was speaking to Miss la Mare about my prior engagement, of course, but it was the Luftwaffe that intervened between eleven and midnight so that my night was not only wasted, I also lost my only current paying client following a direct hit on her Bentley by 500 pounds of high explosive. A divorce from the dissolute Colonel was no longer necessary or, in fact, even legally possible, and I was unlikely to have my bill, including the photographer’s time, settled by either the Colonel or his late wife’s own vast estate.

“Okay?!” Miss la Mare on the line snapped, clearly frustrated by my negative response to granting her an immediate audience, “When is the earliest possible time that I can see yah at yah offices in the mornin’?”

I thought that if the same pattern as the last several nights similar to this repeated itself, I would be emerging from an Underground station about 6.30 in the morning and I could be at any one of the stations up the West End, then a bus ride home... “Seven o’clock,” I told the caller, “my office address is 67C Mile End Road, Mile End, any London cabbie will find it for you.”

“Thanks, Mr Onslow, I will see yah there tomorrow, Wednesday morning, at 7 sharp, then.”

Click, went the telephone as the receiver was replaced in the cradle at the other end.

Of course, I immediately called the Yard to gather information about the caller and what the facts were regarding her missing husband. A few of my old colleagues still worked at New Scotland Yard, several of them feeling that they owed me the odd favour from time to time. My old Sergeant, Bob Cummings, now promoted to Detective Inspector, was still in. He told me that he was just about to ring me about Miss la Mare.

Apparently, Miss Marcia la Mare had expected me to know that she was not only a well-known actress but currently one of the hottest properties that one of the larger Hollywood Studios had on their books. Her missing husband was a certain Captain Bradford Gold, an even more famous Hollywood actor, producer and director, a former pilot recently transferred from Bomber Command to a squadron operating fighters over south east England, where he had been a Flight Lieutenant. But, Bob said, this posting may well have been a ruse by the Military, as Cummings believed he was actually transferred to Army Intelligence and was so well thought of that he had been promoted to an Army Intelligence Captain in the last four months. This additional information was all off the record, of course.

The trouble was, that this Captain Gold was now missing, not exactly in action, but had last been seen in the East End of London whilst working on an intelligence operation about a month before, and was now several weeks late in reporting to his superiors.

The actor was an American citizen, but was born in the East End of London around 1895 and emigrated with his parents to the West Coast of America when he was about ten years old. Gold’s family had made a fortune over there in the import export business in silver-plated cutlery and tableware and invested heavily in the motion picture industry during its infancy, well before the boom in that business since the early 1920s. Gold’s father had thrown himself headlong into the business and invested everything he had into moving picture production and had therefore multiplied his original fortune many times over. Bradford Gold was Gold Senior’s youngest son and had been indulged in film-making where he developed an enthusiasm for acting and subsequently had starred in a number of extremely popular films in the late Twenties and had been a rising star all through the Thirties until he was a major box office success.

Bob Cummings told me that the secretary in their office in the Yard had called Gold a “heart throb” and was considered a “true hero” for putting his lucrative career and his personal safety on hold to help save his old country from invasion by Nazi Germany. As soon as Britain declared war on Germany, and the United States of America decided to have nothing to do with the war, Gold had apparently been determined to take full part in the action. He had flown over the Atlantic on the earliest seaplane that he could catch. Gold had actually wangled a place on one of the trans-Atlantic mail carrying flights, between Newfoundland and Ireland, and joined the RAF as a pilot shortly after his arrival on these shores. In a press release that the film studio had issued to his adoring fans, Gold had stated that he couldn’t let his old country down in their hour of need. It sounded much like a publicity stunt issued by the Gold Film Studio but, according to the AOC of his RAF station, Bob told me, he turned out to be a “damned fine pilot”, and had completed a large number of successful bombing missions over enemy territory.

Bob told me that he had briefly spoken by telephone with Gold’s last RAF commanding officer at a location in East Anglia. Gold been trained by the RAF on twin-engined bomber planes, in fact he actually owned a twin-engined plane in California that he regularly used to cross the North American continent to his various homes, in preference to taking the train or using chartered flights.

So he was welcomed with open arms to join Bomber Command for basic training and was such a good flier that he had no trouble converting to the larger Wellington bombers that his squadron was flying. In six months he had flown almost 80 missions and earned his first promotion from Pilot Officer to Flying Officer.

However, in the last months of 1939 and early 1940, during the period we were now calling the “Phony War”, the bombers were flying into Germany and only dropping propaganda leaflets not bombs onto civilian targets. Although there was a lot of anti-aircraft flak coming up from some of these German cities, mostly they acted as though they were still at peace, especially after the fall of France in 1940, with no blackouts in place like we have had over here in London since the day war was declared, as well as all our other main cities and ports.

Also, incidents with enemy fighters had been a rare occurrence, as Germany seemed reluctant to escalate the war footing with Britain at that early stage in the war, so long as we were only dropping propaganda leaflets on their civilian populations.

Gold was a good officer and a lucky pilot, who had hand-picked an effective crew from those men available. After four or five months of dropping leaflets, he had become bored with the unexciting but exhausting routine and the lack of action, so he had applied for a transfer to fighter duty, hoping for a spell in Hurricanes or Spitfires.

However, soon after he applied for transfer, the war footing with Germany changed and the Blitz started in earnest, so the bombers began to retaliate by bombing targets in Germany and his application to transfer was put on hold. Of course, the German defences kicked into action and losses of bomber aircraft had mounted alarmingly, so much so that Britain were fast running out of both trained pilots and serviceable airplanes.

Gold may well have been a lucky flier, but just as his crew neared the time when they were due for a fortnight’s well-earned leave, their luck ran out and they were hit by flak that killed two crewmen on board and wounded his co-pilot and another crew member. His plane was severely crippled and he limped back to the English coast over East Anglia before he decided he had to ditch in the Fens, as the damaged undercarriage refused to lower.

Then, by luck, they spotted another airfield. The fit crewmen landed safely by parachute, while he had circled the airfield for half an hour until he had exhausted the rest of the fuel before he landed heavily on the grass runway and saved the lives of his co-pilot and one of the severely wounded crew who had been unable to use the parachutes.

He was mentioned in dispatches, swiftly promoted to Flight Lieutenant and given immediate leave to recuperate from his ordeal.

While on leave he had been approached by the Special Intelligence Branch, Bob Cummings had managed to get someone from the military to admit off the record. Because of his action in saving most of his crew, as well as his celebrity status within the military, he had become noticed by the “Brass Hats” in the War Office.

For one thing Gold was a multi-linguist. One grandmother was a German speaker and he spent much of his youth with her as his family initially built up their business in London before moving to New York; so he apparently spoke German as if he was a Bavarian native.

Gold’s maternal grandmother, who he also spent much of his youth with, was Italian and he had easily picked up that lingo as a second language too. He had been with the Intelligence Branch since late September 1940, for about three months before his disappearance four weeks ago. It appeared that the apparent transfer from Bomber to Fighter Command had been maintained as a ruse to cover his redeployment as an intelligence officer, probably because his public profile was so high.

I asked Bob if he had gone through the long list of unidentified men who were victims of the overnight raids. He admitted that they had started on them two days ago, had found nothing so far, but were still working through that list.

Bradford Gold’s wife showed up at New Scotland Yard about three days after she had arrived in England.

Her husband’s father, Alfred Gold, head of the Gold moving pictures studio in Hollywood, had received a telegram from the War Office, informing them that his son was missing, suspected of being absent without leave.

The Army were hoping that he had had enough and gone home to the States, but were informed by Alfred Gold that he hadn’t returned, nor had the pilot communicated by air mail letter with his family for several weeks.

It was three weeks before her father-in-law got around to telling Miss la Mare that her husband was missing somewhere in London. She was furious with her father-in-law and the staff at the studio, and she immediately chartered a flying boat flight to England, via Newfoundland and Ireland.

Of course, Military Intelligence had kept Gold’s disappearance very close to their chest, so New Scotland Yard didn’t know anything about the case when she arrived and made initial contact with the police. Even after a couple of days of investigating they still had nothing to go on. So, when she made enquiries about getting a ‘Private Dick’ involved, Bob Cummings had quietly put her onto me. That was all Bob could tell me last night, before I had to dash off to my next job. Besides, I had run out of coppers to keep feeding the coin slot in the telephone box.

I climbed those 39 steps of the narrow staircase to my office slowly, my foot aching, so I gripped the rail tightly as I pulled myself up. It had been a long, frustrating and exhausting night, before we gave up on the client ever turning up in her Bentley, we never got any pictures and we gave up shortly after the Colonel and waitress waved each other fond farewell, while all around us the Luftwaffe were turning London into Hades. I only found out while dozing in the crowded Underground station the rumour that Lady Bletchley-Havering was blown to bits along with her lovely motor car.

When I opened my office door, the young American woman, who I had spoken to on the telephone the previous night, stood in front of the fireplace, the glowing embers from the evening before probably refuelled from the coal scuttle and agitated back into life again by Bert some ten minutes before me. He would do that for her, of course, but never for me. In the ten minutes I was delayed, the fresh coals were well alight and giving off a fair amount of light and heat.

She had her back to me, looking out of the office window, which was cross-crossed with white tape, as was every other window in London during the Blitz. She was tall and slim, maybe 5 foot 8 or 9 inches tall, slimmer than average but clearly very feminine in her curves. She was wearing a pale lilac jacket that hugged her curves, and matching skirt down to mid-calf, with a split part way up the back, to facilitate ease of walking. She wore sheer silk stockings with a thin black seam up the back of her legs, accentuating the eye-pleasing shape of her ankles and calves. Her matching lilac-coloured shoes had sensibly broad two-inch heels for walking and standing comfort. Folded over the chair in front of my desk was a long mink fur coat and a lilac pillbox hat, with a long peacock feather perched jauntily from a circular band of silk.