See no evil, p.15
See No Evil, page 15
“I don’t know why you are being so mournful,” said Gerard. “We are going to go on one of those big red buses, aren’t we?”
“I was rather thinking we might take the Underground,” suggested Gabriel, plaintively, but he could sense mutiny coming. He knew Gerard was desperate to get on a bus so that he could get a better view of London, and there was not a great deal to see through the window of a tube train. “All right, all right.” He thought he remembered where the bus terminus was and led Gerard out of the station.
Gerard had been right that Gabriel’s suggestion to calm down had been uncalled for. For a city that had endured one of the most savage bombing campaigns of the war, it seemed to have a cheerful atmosphere everywhere they went. There was the same joie de vivre he remembered from long ago, the same understated sense of thousands of ordinary men and women getting on with life. Everywhere they looked, there were reminders of the war’s destruction, but it was as though the inhabitants of London had made some wordless decision to behave as though nothing had happened. As the bus lurched towards Victoria, they passed magnificent buildings reduced to rubble, some of them being used as playgrounds by children with nowhere else to go; there were dapper young men weaving through the traffic on bicycles, flower sellers plying their trade just as he had remembered, and the occasional elderly man wearing a top hat and polished walking cane, striding elegantly down the street as though the last forty years had not yet come to pass.
“Is that the Thames?” asked Gerard, pointing at the magnificent stretch of water they were passing. “D’ya reckon we’ll have time to go on a riverboat—”
Gabriel stood up and rang the bell. “Next stop’s ours,” he said. “Watch your step as we get out.”
TWENTY bridges from Tower to Kew—
Wanted to know what the River knew. . .
Gabriel thought better of quoting Kipling at Gerard, and they walked towards the Albion Museum with Gerard offering a running commentary at every step. Gabriel was never as irritated by the compulsively talkative as he felt he ought to be; the inability of a chatterbox to engage in an actual conversation worked in favour of a man like Gabriel, who had a great deal on his mind and needed time to collect his thoughts. Whilst Gerard talked, Gabriel could think.
Except that Gerard was no longer talking. Like the persistent low rumble of water pipes, Gerard’s chatter was only ever noticeable when it stopped abruptly and silence fell. Gabriel looked around for whatever it was that had rendered Gerard speechless and smiled at the sight before them. They had turned the corner into Presentation Road, a long, tree-lined road steeped in the grandeur of the past. Massive, ornate buildings towered over them on both sides, some bearing the scars of the Blitz: chipped and crumbling masonry, scorch marks, cracks and pockmarks across stone façades. There were empty spaces where buildings had once stood. The rubble had been cleared away, but the work of rebuilding had yet to commence. Gabriel’s smile faded. “Every time I see a damaged building,” he said, “I find myself wondering who died in there.”
Gerard gave Gabriel a sympathetic look. “I don’t think many of these buildings were ever lived in,” he consoled him. “They would have been empty at night. And there were thousands of air-raid shelters . . .”
“Thousands dead, though. Tens of thousands. All those poor families in the East End.”
They stopped at the foot of a short flight of stone steps leading to the imposing entrance of the Albion Museum. Gerard skipped up the steps ahead of Gabriel, turning around to encourage him inside. “Come along, Brother. We’re here. Your friend’ll be waiting.”
Gabriel reddened, entering the museum behind Gerard. “I’m not sure about that,” Gabriel whispered. He was not sure why everyone always whispered in a museum, but there was something about those pristine stone floors and immense vaulted ceilings that inspired reverential silence, even if it was just that the environment magnified the slightest sound. He busied himself studying a headless statue on display near the door, suddenly noticing that it was female and gloriously naked. He turned his back, blushing ever deeper. “I sent him a telegram saying I was coming up to town.”
The uncomfortable truth of the situation was dawning on Gerard. “So you didn’t wait for a reply then?”
“Not exactly, no.”
“So, you can’t even be sure he received the telegram.”
Gabriel looked around for assistance and noticed a middle-aged woman regarding them in quiet astonishment from behind a desk. He was quite used to being looked at as though he had just metamorphosed from a giant bat, and he gave the attendant a friendly smile. “May I help you, sir?” she put in before he could speak. “The Roman gallery is open today if you care to have a look.”
If the reference was intended as an obscure insult, it was lost on Gabriel. “I haven’t come to visit the museum,” he explained. “I was hoping to meet with Mr Ellsmore.”
A frown flickered across the woman’s thin face. “Mr Ellsmore is a very busy man, sir. Our archivists do not meet with members of the public.”
Gabriel felt as though she were shepherding him towards the tradesmen’s entrance. “Oh, we’re old friends,” he explained, hopefully. “I’m sure he’ll see me.”
If her last expression had been a frown, she looked now as if she was trying hard to suppress a yawn. “I’m sorry, sir, do you have an appointment?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Gabriel began. “Perhaps it would be easier if you were to give him a message from me? I’m only in town today, you see.”
The woman looked impassively down at her desk, helping herself to a piece of paper and a pencil. There was a time Gabriel could have given her his calling card, but the days of such vanities had vanished into the smog at around the last time he and Alan Ellsmore had met. “Whom shall I say wishes to see Mr Ellsmore?” she asked, tersely, looking up at him for an answer only to put her pencil down abruptly.
Gabriel looked over his shoulder, following her gaze. He heard the uneven squeak of old shoes against stone a moment before his eyes focused on a bearded figure who looked strangely familiar. A man of middling height walked stiffly in Gabriel’s direction, his face crowded by a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, an unruly mop of greying brown hair and a beard that would not have disgraced the face of a Franciscan. Alan Ellsmore was dressed so completely as Gabriel had imagined an archivist ought to style himself that Gabriel was not sure whether the effect was deliberate or whether poor Alan had spent so long seated in the bowels of his museum, poring over artefacts and manuscripts, that he had one day found himself dressed in slightly frayed trousers, a shirt and tie badly in need of a trip to the laundrette and a hand-knitted jumper darned so many times he could not be entirely sure what the colour of the original wool had been.
“Eminence!” Alan called, his face breaking into a broad grin. “Well, well, well! If it isn’t the great man himself.”
Alan and Gabriel shook hands warmly. Gabriel had wondered what it would be like to meet his old school friend again after so many years, but the sincere show of affection was tremendous after the journey back to London and all its connections with the past. “It’s good to see you again, Nell.”
Gerard, unwilling to be forgotten, bounced up beside them. “Eminence? Nell? Don’t they have proper names at public school?”
Gabriel smiled, grateful for Gerard’s presence to dissipate the emotions they were both feeling. “This is Brother Gerard,” said Gabriel, waiting while the two men shook hands. “He’s keeping me company in case I get into any mischief.”
“Well,” said Alan, turning back to look at Gabriel. “I told the boy at the door to come and let me know immediately if a priest turned up, and he came running to me out of breath, thoroughly overexcited, saying that there were two clerics advancing on the museum. I think he expected double the tip.”
“Not a priest yet,” said Gerard, quietly.
Alan led them into a small side room, the walls lined with glass cases containing small, ancient artefacts: coins dug up by some lucky farmer years before, random pieces of jewellery, bracelets, a ring; broken pots, combs, objects for which there was still no known use; the fragments of an ancient civilisation modern man could view only in tiny, disconnected shards. Gabriel felt uncomfortably like an impostor, crashing into another man’s place of work without invitation. “Nell, it’s awfully decent of you to see us like this. I know you must be dreadfully busy.”
“Dreadfully busy,” echoed Alan without irony. “We’re still completing the process of gathering in our treasures from their hiding places.”
“I do hope you didn’t lose very much,” asked Gabriel solicitously. The concern was genuine. As a lover of history, Gabriel hated to think of how much had been lost irrevocably during the bombing raids: old buildings, books, artworks . . . People’s lives, people’s families. That was the problem: in a world mourning the loss of millions of lives, it felt heartless to feel sorry for the loss of material objects. But he felt it all the same.
“Anything of value was packed up and stored away in safe places,” Alan explained. “Mercifully nothing was lost, but as you can imagine, the process of bringing everything back, sorting, cataloguing—well, we’re almost there, but it’s taken us this long.”
“I can imagine it’s a labour of love,” said Gabriel, then immediately wondered whether he had sounded patronising.
Alan laughed. Gabriel remembered him as a compulsive giggler, the sort of boy who was constantly being thrown out of class for laughing at an entirely inappropriate moment. “Well, it’s no way to make one’s fortune. When you told me you were entering a monastery, I rather imagined you sitting at a desk all day copying manuscripts.” He patted Gabriel on the shoulder, sensing his anxiety at blundering in on him out of the blue. “No need to look so worried, old friend. I’m not too busy to be curious. I’m dying to know what was so urgent that you should come all the way to London to talk to me about it.”
“I hope it won’t be an anticlimax.”
Alan ignored him. “I shall be stopping for lunch at one. Why don’t you and your friend take a walk around the museum, and we can meet for a bite of lunch at that little eatery opposite?”
Gabriel and Alan shook hands again, and Alan walked away to the cavernous cellars of the museum where he did his work.
Gerard was a little too happy to make himself scarce when Gabriel suggested that he might not be very interested in sitting through a lengthy conversation about an old amulet. Fr Foley had given Gabriel more than was required for the train fare, appreciating that trips to London were expensive, and he handed Gerard some spending money with the instruction to enjoy himself for a few hours and meet him at the cathedral at six o’clock sharp. Gabriel felt a little as though he were giving his annoying little brother pocket money for sweeties to get him out of the way, but Gerard trotted off enthusiastically, giving him a cheery wave as he went.
With Gerard out of the way, Gabriel took a final walk around the atrium of the museum before making his way across the road to the Château d’Or where Alan had suggested they meet for lunch. Gabriel had never been blessed with a strong sense of irony, but the interior of the restaurant left him suppressing a wry chuckle as he glanced around for the quietest place to sit and settled on a table for two in a far corner, close enough to the kitchen door to mean that any conversation was likely to be blocked out by the sound of food being prepared and waiters talking animatedly.
For starters, the restaurant clearly had absolutely no connection with France, but there was something about a French name associated with food which made an establishment immediately feel chic and sophisticated, the sort of place where caviar and foie gras would be served. He did not recognise the language the staff were using to talk to one another, as well as to some of the other diners, but a Polish flag was pinned up against one wall and had been lovingly decorated into what almost looked like a shrine. Gabriel glanced down at the menu, which was smeared with grease from handling by many hungry fingers, and he noticed quickly that he did not recognise a single dish on the menu.
It was with some relief, therefore, that Gabriel saw Alan walking through the door, conversing easily in Polish with the waiter, before looking round and spying his friend waving discreetly from the corner. “Where did you learn Polish?” asked Gabriel, admiringly. “You’ve no connection with Poland, have you?”
“Not exactly, old chap,” Alan said, sitting opposite Gabriel. He did not bother looking at the menu; Gabriel suspected that he came here every day. “I’ve always had a fascination with languages, as you know. When this little place opened six months ago, I was curious. It’s very convenient, nice and close to the museum. Since almost all the customers are Polish, I asked the waiters to teach me the language. Once a week, that charming young lady laying the table over there gives me a lesson.”
Gabriel glanced at the beautiful young woman, a good ten years Alan’s junior, who was working with undue care. She looked up briefly, made eye contact with Alan and smiled cheekily before disappearing back into the kitchen. Gabriel was no expert, but he had his suspicions about Alan’s sudden interest in the Polish language. Having said that, claiming to have a fascination with languages was the understatement of the decade coming from Alan, who had left school speaking five languages fluently and seemed to have an almost superhuman ability to absorb information. “I’m afraid I shall need your help with the menu,” said Gabriel, sheepishly. “English and Italian food are about all I know.”
“You’ll love the food here,” Alan reassured him with the same easy chuckle. “I placed my order when I walked through the door, and I asked them to bring the same to you. The dumplings are a bit of a speciality here.”
“They sound delicious. I’m fond of dumplings.”
“You were not so fond of them at school,” laughed Alan, leaning back in his seat. “But then, these ones are actually cooked.” He looked across the table at Gabriel, his face becoming more serious. “It’s good to see you again, old friend. I’ve often wondered how you got on, hoped you’d be all right.”
Gabriel found himself avoiding Alan’s concerned gaze. “I suppose it must have looked as though I were running away. Escaping from everything. It wasn’t quite like that, you know. I thought very hard about it before I entered, and you know, they don’t let men take vows immediately or anything. There are years of waiting and studying.”
“I’m sure. I’m sure you knew what you were doing. It was just, I always wondered—”
“I’m perfectly happy,” Gabriel broke in. “Truly. I would not have it any other way now.”
Alan hesitated as though standing at the edge of a minefield, wondering the best way to tiptoe across. “You don’t miss the old life? Even a little bit?”
“I miss people, if that’s what you mean.” Gabriel could feel his hands trembling under the table. Part of him wanted desperately to change the subject, but Alan was one of his few links with the past, and he was one of the only people with whom Gabriel could have such a conversation if he was ever going to have it. “The anniversary is coming up, of course. I always find it a little hard at this time of year. Nicoletta would be twenty now.”
The awkward silence became a deathly pall, broken only by Alan’s Polish teacher laying out glasses before them filled with something Gabriel did not recognise. She exchanged a few words with Alan. Gabriel watched in silence as Alan slipped his hand around hers, caressing her fingers lovingly, but it did not occur to either of them that the gesture of affection was visible. A moment later, she scurried away. Alan found his voice again. “I’m so sorry; it was so cruel. I’ll never forget—”
“Don’t,” said Gabriel hastily, cutting Alan off before he said anything Gabriel could not bear to hear. Time was never a healer, not really; it simply dulled the pain. Sitting with a man he had met for the first time in a dusty common room at the age of seven, Gabriel realised that he was as unwilling to talk about it all as he had been in the days after the tragedy had occurred. Even with this man. “Faith helps, and my new life has been a cause of great solace to me,” said Gabriel quietly. “There are so many broken hearts, Nell. Half the country seems to be grieving someone. Look at the Poles sitting around us. How many of them lost their families? How many of them witnessed death? If they’ve lost nothing else, they’ve lost their homeland. I think it makes it easier for me to minister to those souls.”
Gabriel felt bile rising in his throat. Grief so like fear again. He reached into his pocket to take out the amulet and handed it to Alan as though he were handing him the Holy Grail. Alan looked quizzically at him before unwrapping the handkerchief as though he half expected it to be a trick of some sort. “So this is what you hiked away to London for, is it?” he asked, but to Gabriel’s relief, Alan appeared transfixed by the object before him. He picked it up gingerly in one hand, looking at it intently, before turning it round to take a look at the other side. Finally, he looked back at Gabriel, but his face had hardened in a manner Gabriel had never witnessed before. “How the devil did you get hold of this?” he asked coldly. “Do you understand what it is?”
“I know only that it’s Jewish,” said Gabriel, falteringly. “That was why I assumed it would be important.”
“But where’d you get it?” asked Alan. “How did you come to possess such a thing?”
Gabriel felt an unexpected attack of nerves. His friend’s characteristic bonhomie had distilled into the manner of an interrogator remarkably quickly at the sight of that amulet. “I’m investigating a murder,” Gabriel began, but he saw Alan’s eyes rolling to heaven and suspected he would have burst out laughing if the mood of the conversation had not darkened so seriously. “No, I really am. I know how mad it sounds to you, but that’s exactly how I came about it.”
“I think we’d better take this from the top,” said Alan. His voice was calmer and softer now, but he continued to look searchingly at Gabriel in a manner that made Gabriel want desperately to look away. The only break in the tension was Alan’s lady friend appearing with steaming plates of food, forcing Alan to take his attention away from Gabriel, scoop up the amulet safely out of the way and smile at Beata before she disappeared again. “It’s all right,” Alan continued when they could no longer be heard. “Please don’t imagine I’m accusing you of anything, but I’m not sure you understand what you’ve got yourself into. That’s why I think it would be better if you told me what was going on.”
