Chapter 2: Cold trail

I HAD a one to one conversation with Bob Cummings at a café near New Scotland Yard later that morning. He had already told me on the telephone when I arranged the meeting that the police had no time to investigate fully and he confirmed that Military Intelligence were now not even prepared to admit they were pursuing him as a deserter.

As far as the Yard knew, Gold was now a Special Branch agent because almost immediately Cummings’ team began to make enquiries, he was dragged out of his office and questioned about Gold by those higher up in the Metropolitan Police chain of command. Meanwhile, the Military Intelligence actually denied he was one of theirs, while all the RAF were saying was that he was no longer one of their serving officers and had transferred to the Special Intelligence Service.

“This stinks to high heaven, Bob. Miss la Mare had her office send me some photos this morning, which arrived by cab about ten o’clock. They included several press cuttings from papers and magazines where the RAF were all over him as a hero from the day he signed until the day he saved most of his crew when he crash landed his bomber. Then suddenly, nothing.”

“Look, Mr Onslow,” Bob said, he never called me by my Christian name, “Gold’s a bloomin’ volunteer, an American citizen. That’s a neutral country, for Chrissakes, even if they is helpin’ us with war loans and utility ships in exchange for land leases for expanding their military options around the world. Whatever Gold says, he ain’t really one of us even if he really was born in the East End as he boasts. An’ if he’s gone AWOL, then it seems like no bugger’s int’rested in trackin’ ‘im down. They pumped ‘im up so high when he joined up, that now he’s gone an’ done a disappearing act, they just want him to go quiet like, without fuss, without damaging the morale of those what’s left behind still fighting the war. So, officially, he never was and until some crime is reported to us, then Gold definitely ain’t currently a police matter.”

He handed me some notes that he had made for me from the official files.

So, from a call box, at the nearest railway station, I briefly spoke on the telephone to the Air Officer Commanding of the bomber station where Gold had served for the longest period. It was clear from the conversation that what “missing” meant to the AOC was that Gold must’ve been shot down while serving with the fighter squadron that he believed he had been transferred to. He was initially cagey about why I was making enquiries, but I pitched him the rather lame line that the police investigation I was helping them with dated from before he went missing, and indicated that Gold had information that would help with our enquiries. I got him to believe that the police were following a lead and had brought me, a former Yard detective inspector, out of retirement to help find out what made Gold click.

I gave the AOC Bob’s number at the Yard as a reference, but I doubted he would bother to follow it up. Since the start of the war, all sorts of retired people were being brought back out of obscurity, many of them pleased to be considered worthy to help share the burden of the war effort.

Bob gave me the last known address of Gold’s digs that he had stayed in for the last month before he disappeared, so I followed it up that afternoon. I wasted a trip, involving a train and two bus changes each way, visiting the place deep in the East End. After two weeks with Gold missing, his shifty landlady admitted that she had assumed the man who had first turned up on her doorstep as a handsome RAF pilot, and then disappeared, “without a bye or leave, mind”, had either been shot down or posted away somewhere. This left her keeping his room empty ready for his return, without leaving her anything to cover future rent and the arrears for the last week he was seen. She told me she was forced to sell all his effects, not that there was much more than a couple of changes of clothes, “to settle the rent wot he owed us”. All she had left over was his rather worn, patched and mended RAF Flight Lieutenant uniform, which she couldn’t easily find a buyer for.

The only other fact that she could tell me was that after that first day in the digs, he wore civilian suits when he went to work, although his hours were quite irregular, returning late or staying away for several nights at a time. This boarding house only provided breakfast and evening meals for a few regular guests, not for him, so she didn’t even have his ration book. Gold’s hours were too irregular for set meal times in the lodgings so he had elected to eat out. That was why she left it until she hadn’t seen him for a week before checking with her daughter when the last time his bed had to be made up. I couldn’t speak to the daughter, only a slip of a girl aged 13, because she was still in school. I left the landlady my calling card, in case the daughter had any new information to offer me.

It was quite late before I headed back towards my lodgings in Mile End, only a short walk from my offices. It was too late to attend my telephone “office” too. I did manage to pop into the public library, though, just before they closed for the evening at seven.

I asked the Librarian, a single young woman in her early twenties, if she knew anything about a film actress called Marcia la Mare.

The Librarian had her fair hair tied into a bun, pulled so tight that the skin on her face was squeezed of blood flow and looked like glazed porcelain. I had seen her a number of times but had never spoken to her in conversation, other than the usual polite monosyllabic exchanges when handing books over for stamping or returning. The library was empty this close to closing time and she looked bored, her blank listless look emphasising the plainness of her features.

“Oh yes, sir,” she replied brightly, her features appeared much more animated at the mention of Marcia la Mare. She removed her reading glasses and suddenly, in her excitement and enlivened countenance, she looked quite pretty. “She’s one of my favourites. Wait on sir, I believe she was on the cover of ‘Picturegoer Weekly’ about four or five months ago, I’ll see if I can find it.”

She went into a back room and emerged less than a couple of minutes later with a magazine. And there on the front page was a glamorous posed shot of my latest client. The Librarian flicked over a few pages and found a double page spread article, plus a further page and two out of three columns on a further spread, dedicated to Miss la Mare. It was approaching seven o’clock by then, near to the Library’s closing time, so I really didn’t have time to read it.

“May I take this magazine away with me, Miss?” I asked.

“Normally, sir,” she lowered her voice even more than her usual whisper, even though the library was virtually deserted, “these weekly magazines are withdrawn to the store cupboard after a week and we then have them bound up in six-month volumes for reference, for people like yourself, who need to refer to old news. Normally, we do not let them out of the Library and risk the set being incomplete, but I know that you are a regular, I see you in here virtually every day. So, as long as you promise to return it within two weeks...”

I nodded.

She smiled, now looking quite attractive, continuing, “Do you have a library card with you, sir?”

I had several with me, so I handed over one and she scribbled with a pencil on a strip of paper, tucked it into my folded card and filed it in the tray behind the date a fortnight hence. She stamped the date on another slip of paper with her machine and tucked it into the magazine before handing it over. I thanked her and walked out.

I knew I was going to be home too late for Mrs McPherson’s tea, which she held rigidly at six-forty-five in the evening, so I popped into a café for a cup of tea and, once there, convinced myself that some buttered toast covered with grilled sardines would adequately fill my supper requirements. The magazine article passed the time while I waited for my meal and made interesting reading.

Since the start of the last war, I had never watched films at picture houses, like I regularly used to as a child. Now the flickering lights disturb me, always taking my mind back to the time I was wounded and stuck in no-man’s land with bullet wounds in both legs and the continual silent flashes of the guns.

My hearing had gone when a shell had landed close by, the blast and shrapnel ripping through my comrades and knocking me off my feet. I had one broken leg and a badly damaged foot in the other leg, along with other less troublesome wounds.

Furthermore, I was stuck at the bottom of an older, partially-flooded, shell hole and soon exhausted myself utterly while fruitless trying to climb out, the collapsing mud under my hands only serving to widen the hole I was stuck in. I was losing a lot of blood, so I tied a tourniquet around my lower leg before fainting away on and off throughout my remaining time in that hellish shell hole.

I was there all day and half the night before stretcher bearers reached me and carted me off to the medics. The doctor at the Field Hospital was unable to save my right foot, so he cut it off just above the ankle.

Sometimes, even nowadays in the dark at night, I close my eyes and am tormented again by those terrible silent flashes.

The article about Miss la Mare was written with very little depth and appeared to have been exclusively gleaned from heavily-biased press releases from her film studio. At least I was able to find out that she was aged 29 and had been married to Bradford Gold for ten years, after a two-year long engagement, although no children were mentioned. A list of her films and their dates of release showed a steady schedule of three or four a year throughout her marriage, so it was extremely unlikely that she had taken any time off for having children.