The Second Midnight by Andrew Taylor

Author:Andrew Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-06-25T17:00:00+00:00

Ten

Muriel Kendall died on 27 March 1945.

‘Poor Mother,’ Meg said to Stephen after the funeral. ‘It seems so unfair. Why was she always unlucky?’

Stephen shrugged. ‘Someone has to be unlucky.’

Mrs Kendall died in Orpington in Kent. She had never been there before and in all probability she would have never gone there again. She was escorting home a convalescent patient – a cantankerous publican who had lost a leg in one of the December V-1 raids. To make matters worse, she was doing it as a favour on one of her days off.

She was killed by the last V-2 to land in England. She would not have heard the rocket beforehand because it would have been travelling too fast. She must have died instantaneously. Rescue workers found the publican, unharmed in his wheelchair, a few feet away from where most of her body lay. He was crying quietly and monotonously; on his lap was Mrs Kendall’s handbag.

The handbag, which was undamaged, eventually found its way to Meg. She sorted through the contents with an increasing sense of sacrilege. At the bottom of the bag was a battered lead soldier wearing the gaiters and flat cap of a World War I British officer.

Meg was her mother’s executor and her sole heir. There was little to inherit: Mrs Kendall’s possessions had contracted over the years to the contents of a second-floor back bedroom in Aunt Vida’s house in Richmond. Meg found five other soldiers beneath her mother’s handkerchiefs. She reunited them with their officer and put them away in a deed box that she had discovered in the wardrobe. She didn’t mention them to anyone.

Nor did she mention the bundle of letters that she had found in the same drawer as the soldiers. They were from her father. Most of them dated back to the last year of the Great War and the first years of the peace. She skimmed through two of them and was disturbed by the love they expressed; it was easier to hate her father than to pity him. A few of the letters, according to their postmarks, had been written since her parents separated; Meg could not bring herself to read any of those.

The letters posed a problem: should she keep them, destroy them, or return them to her father? She hadn’t spoken to him for nearly three years, apart from the muttered greetings they had exchanged at the funeral. Aunt Vida had been openly hostile to him, when she remembered who he was. Stephen was still on speaking terms with their father, but treated him with contempt. There was no one to act as go-between.

And there was no one to advise her, either. She dared not ask Wilbur Cunningham; he was at present working a sixteen-hour day at the embassy and it wouldn’t be fair to bother him with personal trivia. Michael – poor, dear Michael whom Mother had liked so much – might have been able to help, but he had been posted to Washington in February.

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