Authors: Gordon Ferris
I pull open her drawer and rifle through the bric-a-brac. Something solid comes to hand: the black notepad she always carries. Now I know it’s bad. She went nowhere without it. It was her
life. I heft it and run my finger round the edges. No one is looking, so I hold it up to my nose to see if I can catch a whiff of her, that particular scent that she said was cheap and anyone could
buy from Woolworth but smells only of her. There is something. A hint. A distillation of the past hectic two months. I can’t be sure. I put the notepad back on the desk, ready to open it.
Ready to see if something in it could be a clue about how to find her. Dead or alive.
I open it and find a journal, part written in English but mostly in hieroglyphs. Shorthand of some sort that I couldn’t decode. I flick to the end – her last entries. Some are in
code, some in clear. Clear enough. She’d been lying to me.
ELEVEN
What I learned convinced me I didn’t want the police trampling over her life – or mine. Not yet. I slipped the notebook into my pocket and gave my farewells to Jim.
He eyed me suspiciously from under those great grey brows but didn’t probe. I left the building just as a squad car drew up. I pulled my hat down and walked up Fleet Street and into the
Strand with the book burning a hole in my pocket. I crossed Waterloo Bridge, not pausing as I normally do to watch the coal barges trundling up and down river. I should have got a bus. My leg was
aching. But I needed to walk. And the physical pain was oddly comforting. It took my mind off the one fact:
She knew she was being followed. Why did she keep it from me?
I reached home in a lather. I threw off my jacket, undid my tie and made myself comfortable at my desk. I guessed it wouldn’t take long before I had visitors, and I needed to read enough
to decide if I was keeping the notebook or handing it over.
The inside page had her name on it: Eve Copeland. She’d underlined her first name and written her office address underneath. The ink was black and was already fading to brown in the early
entries. I had seen the fountain pen she used: a gold-nibbed, green lacquered tube, capable of producing elegant calligraphy in the right hand. A present, she said.
She seemed to be using three different scripts: plain English, some kind of jagged scrawl which included some English lettering, and a type of shorthand.
In the early pages – the pages in clear – Eve had jotted her thoughts down in a fine script, all leaning neatly to the right in flowing loops. My old teacher would have given her
five gold stars. It was a feat beyond my talents; somewhere between dipping my nib in the inkwell and transferring it to the page, my hand would be taken over by the school poltergeist. Even the
threat of the belt across my trembling palms was never enough to stop the inky havoc.
Eve’s pages were lined but unnumbered. She’d turned it into a kind of diary by putting dates at the start of every new item no matter where it began on the page. The entries began in
mid ’45. Some pages had several short notes; some in plain English, some in “squiggle” as I called the indecipherable scrawl, and then the coded shorthand. Some items went on for
several pages as she drafted a column or took down notes of a long interview. It also seemed to serve as an appointments book, with follow-up observations about some event or person she’d
met:
no doubt he’s a con man… mind like a sewer
(I hoped she wasn’t talking about me!)
; sweet gentle lady… love to be friends; big disappointment compared to
voice; great picture… wish I had legs like Cyd Charisse!!
It was uncomfortable; like dipping into her mind. But how else was I going to find out what happened to her? That’s how I’d explain it when we next met. When.
If
had no room
in my thinking. I was chewing my nails as I got to the later stuff covering the last few weeks, our weeks. What would I find about me? My anxiety rose when I identified the dates, but found the
comments themselves in squiggle or shorthand.
I should have been able to read some of the shorthand, albeit slowly; it had been part of our SOE training. There were many forms but usually enough of an overlap to get the gist. But I was
stymied by hers. The secret of Pitman is it’s phonetic; there are hundreds of symbols each with its own sound. The thickness of the strokes distinguishes vowels and consonants. All you have
to do is memorise them and put them together in your head to make words. With daily practice you can become competent – in a year or two.
I tried saying some of the shorthand out loud, the ones that bore a vague resemblance to what I’d learned. Nothing. Gibberish. In fact with the ochs and achs I was making they sounded a
bit like the Ayrshire dialect – Lallan Scots, the language of Burns.
The idea hit me. I grabbed the notebook and a pad and a pencil from my drawer. I ripped my jacket from its peg and ran down the stairs. The cat exploded at my feet.
I was out and running, gammy leg forgotten. A double-decker was trundling away from the stop. I sprinted and caught the pole and hauled myself inside, vowing to give up the fags sometime soon. A
change at Elephant and I was in Bloomsbury within half an hour.
I’d never been inside the British Library but had once stood outside peering through the glass doors. To me it was a sort of shrine. Kilpatrick’s old Victorian library and museum,
with its stuffed lion guarding the top of the stairs, held what I thought of as the world’s biggest collection of books. I would raid its shelves every week. But the British Library! Where
Marx and Dickens sat. Too much for me before. Now, I needed to get in.
I explained my errand to the girl behind the desk. She said that it was impossible. I said I was a private detective. She said she shouldn’t. I said my girlfriend had been kidnapped. She
said only if you’re quick and don’t let the Super see you. She led me to a little seat in front of a long brown desk. High overhead soared the great dome, and under it the wooden
gallery that followed its curve. Around me and above me were miles of aisles holding books from every corner of the English speaking world. It was better than the echoing vacuum of St Paul’s.
This was religion enough. A few minutes later the girl came back with a small heap of books. She laid them on my desk, gave me a stern look from behind her glasses and then a wink. I blew her a
kiss and she shot off, red as a tomato.
I took the first book; it was Pitman’s standard shorthand dictionary. That was my benchmark. I then set out in front of me the other three books: versions of shorthand dictionaries for the
German language. In the Lallan Scots and north of England dialects you can hear the last throaty vestiges of the language roots. I placed Eve’s notebook alongside and opened it at the first
page of hieroglyphs. I propped up the three German dictionaries in front of me and began to scribble on my pad. It took me five minutes to be certain: Eve hadn’t been writing in English
shorthand. It was Gabelsberger’s system, which looked a little like proper writing with its flowing cursive style. Simple. But why?
Then I noticed something else. In the appendix of one of the dictionaries, was a set of squiggles that looked remarkably like the third form of entry Eve had used. The heading explained that I
was looking at Suetterlin script, the standard form of German handwriting taught in all their schools until just before the start of the war. How did my ace reporter come to be able to write like a
German and use a German shorthand? I put the obvious conclusion to one side while I grappled with the problem of turning both scripts into English.
I decided to tackle the shorthand first. It was closer to what I’d learned in spy school. The trouble was that the shorthand would translate into German words. Prof Haggarty had tricked me
into revealing that I’d picked up some of the language while I was sunning myself in Dachau. The language student in me had learned enough to obtain a workaday if specialised vocabulary. The
camp held some pretty bright people – doctors, engineers, teachers, musicians – and conversations sprawled across culture and philosophy as well as the mundane details of living and
dying behind the barbed wire. But I never saw written material except on official signs.
Arbeit Macht Frei
for example. It wasn’t the sort of place to order your copy of
Die
Zeitung
to be served with breakfast.
At the rate I was going it would take me a month to translate all her codes. But it didn’t take me long to spot the sign that meant Danny
,
a sort of lower case d with a tail and
circle. So I confined myself to the last two months and wherever I saw my name.
Translating shorthand is an inexact science at the best of times. But now I was having to rely on getting a set of sounds and symbols on the page then listening in my head for the German word to
pop up that most closely resembled it. I couldn’t write down the word because I didn’t know how it was spelled in German. I had to make the leap straight to English, and see if some
meaning emerged from the jumble.
As I struggled with my silent battle the receptionist came over looking anxious. She asked me in a whisper if I was all right as someone had complained about me making faces. I pointed at the
dictionaries and made some mouth shapes. She seemed to get the message but gave me a frown to keep my funny faces to myself. Like other women in my life, she was already regretting her
kindness.
I worked away for an hour or two until I had a page of jottings. Some of it was guesses, some inspired analysis, but sitting back and taking it from the top, I could get the gist of recent
events from the day she invaded my office and my life:
22 May: d very red very scot, funny sarcastic, hates my paper, bastard, d needs money, hook?
23 May: d called, caught fish!!!!
25 May: mary prostitute, d very close ???? , first mention PG, d offer more?/deeper? action for me, d interest me/him?
28/29 May: tommy chandler warehouse job, big thrill, big time, big risk, showed?/ revealed??? gun, no choice, PG upset?,
29 May: d bed, tired lonely excuse? not love just warmth, stupid stupid
3 June: love? D soft hard, funny sarcastic, why not? Stupid time
There were several more entries along these lines, each a seeming debate with herself about how to avoid falling in love. In three of them the word
watcher
or
follower
appeared
with a query after my name. She knew, didn’t she? Then…
15 June: mother dress, Savoy, mother!!! Big night, big mess, beautiful couple, wrong time!!!! PG gate crash, mad, mad. D saw watcher, too late, always too late, must stop!!!
Then in clear English a week later:
23 June: Horrible day. Danny saw the watcher again and attacked him. I pulled him off and denied everything. Told Danny we had to break for a while. But it’s over, has to be. How did we
get here? What am I doing? So sad…
Then back in code again except for the Latin:
25 June: saw midge saw stan, d watcher now!!! Quis custodiet!!!
30 June: all gone. All quiet, waiting. Alone again
.
Waiting for them.
That was her last entry a week ago. She knew something was about to happen to her. I could see her sitting in her room in a period of quiet before the storm hit. It tore my heart out. Why did
she hide it from me? Why couldn’t she turn to me? All her notes seemed to be telling me she was trying not to fall in love with me, but she wasn’t succeeding. So why did she lie about
the watchers? I could have helped. I could have saved her. Maybe.
Did she want to be taken? Was she protecting me? I’m certain the reference to PG was to Pauli Gambatti. That was more than coincidence. I flicked back through her notes. I was right; there
were other PG references before my time. She’d feared him and decided that he was having her followed. But why would he? An East End thug? If he wanted to harm her, why didn’t he send
one of his hoods round to her flat and pick her off there? And why did she walk into the lion’s gambling den? Did her nerve snap and she had to confront him, face her fears? Like the mad
bastard who storms a machine gun nest?
My head was reeling. I’d had enough. I needed time to digest it all. I handed back my books to the librarian and made her blush just by smiling at her and saying how sweet she’d
been. I needed her on my side; there was more to uncover in this book, much more. For the moment it was time to act. In the absence of any better target, I wanted Gambatti in my sights. But before
I could pull the trigger I had to flush my bird. There was no returning to Carlyle’s; they wouldn’t let me within a hundred yards.
Over the next three days – more exactly, nights – I put the word out. It was easy enough. I went on a pub crawl. I was careful to drink only in the East End and only in
Gambatti’s patch. Wherever I went I bought a half of bitter and began asking questions. I would smile at the landlady and ask if Mr Gambatti ever frequented her fine establishment, and watch
her face crumple in fear or irritation. Sometimes they flat out denied everything. Never heard of him. Sometimes I was told to drink up and piss off. Sometimes they asked why I wanted to know. When
I explained I had a bone to pick with him, they were as likely to laugh in my face as to tell me to clear off. Whatever their reaction I made sure they knew my name and I always used my loudest
voice. Drunks have big ears.
I made a particular point of buttonholing Fast Larry when he slid into the George on night three. The lads were as startled as Larry was when I called him over to our corner of the snug.
“Let me buy you a drink, Fast Larry.”
He looked at me like I was dispensing hemlock. “I’m fine, Danny. You want to place a bet?”
“Sit down. I want a word in that shell-like of yours.” I ignored his protests and made the boys move over so that he could sit by me. He was twitching like a diviner’s rod, his
eyes rolling everywhere except near mine.
“I want to talk to Pauli Gambatti.”
Fast Larry’s eyes stopped swivelling and he looked at me. “You’re fucking mad, Danny. Why d’you want to get your balls cut off?”