Under Cover of Darkness / Lies and Desperate Measures Bundle (eBooks)

March 1914

The children next door had been running up and down the stairs for the past hour, the thump of each small footstep reverberating through the thin wall to the cramped room where Max Barreau sat with his head in his hands.

His fingers dug into his scalp, parting the dark greasy hair to make red semicircles in the skin. The pain made no difference. The desire he had been fighting for so long remained.

The mother’s voice rang out loud and shrill, calling the children down for their tea, and the thumping ceased. Max raised his head, red-rimmed eyes blinking. He’d come to a decision.
People died all the time. Only the previous week, a fellow lodger had cut her wrists, her body being discovered with a scream by the landlady and chatter from the other residents as to how unsurprised they were the woman had taken her own life. She was unhappy, one said, and another remarked that most people were and that it was only surprising there weren’t more suicides as depressed men and women sought a way out of their misery.

So, Max reasoned, if people were unhappy anyway, and were ready to kill themselves to escape their dreary lives, why should he worry so much, put himself through so much agony, over taking a few of those lives away?

He rose from his bed with its damp sheets and broken springs and stared out of the window. Looking down at the people on the street, heads down against the wind as they hurried to get home to their families, Max wondered if they had any notion they were being watched. How easy it was to see without being seen. How simple it would be to follow one of those people, one of those women, until they reached a place where he could take them with no one seeing. Down a dark alley, perhaps, or behind the bushes in a park.

Why not? Why shouldn’t he do this very night the thing he had been denying himself for so long?

Max pulled on his jacket, dropped the few coins he possessed into his trouser pocket, and yanked open the door. Hurtling down the stairs, ignoring his landlady’s shout to keep the noise down, he burst out onto the street, turning his collar up against the cold night air. A decision needed to be made even before he left the path. Left or right? Max chose left and set off.
He’d been walking for about ten minutes when he noticed a group of people all heading in the same direction. He followed and saw them go into a church hall through whose open doors music blared out. The church had put on a dance.

Max paused at the end of the street. Should he go to the dance or try somewhere else? There should be plenty of women to choose from in the church hall, but would he be able to get one of them alone? His toe nudged something that made a metallic scraping sound against the paving stones, and he looked down to see a metal bar half hidden amid leaves. He picked it up, feeling the weight of it in his hand. Max smiled, taking the metal bar as a sign, a good omen. He slipped the bar up his sleeve, cupping his hand to hold it in place, and headed for the church hall.

The man on the door looked at him dubiously as he approached. It was true he was not dressed for a dance, but Max pressed the requisite entrance fee into the man’s hand before he could refuse to admit him and entered.

Women, clustered around the entrance, turned with expressions of interest which quickly changed to disgust as they took in his shabby appearance. Bitches, he thought. Killing them would be a pleasure, but he’d have to get one alone first. Maybe it had been a mistake to come to the dance. He should have waited at the end of the street for one of these women to leave.
Max turned to go, but people were coming in behind him, blocking the exit, and there was nothing for him to do but move further into the hall and try to look inconspicuous. Max dipped his head, side-stepping the couples who waltzed into his path, and settled into a chair by the side of the stage. He watched the couples dance, his dark eyes studying the expressions of the men. Did they think like him? he wondered. Were they smiling at the woman in their arms and thinking how they could hurt them?

‘Mon Dieu! Max?’

Max jerked his head up. A woman with an abundance of dark hair piled half on her head, half hanging down in a decidedly un-English fashion, had put fingers to his shoulder and was smiling down at him.

‘It is you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember me? Marguerite?’

Max searched his memory. Images flooded his mind. Dirty plates stacked up in a sink, half-finished canvases propped against walls, rats scurrying behind the skirting boards. Paris, just as things were starting to go bad and the desire began to grow.

‘Yes, of course I remember,’ he said, rising and giving her his hand. She took it and he recoiled at the moistness of her palm. ‘It is good to see you, Marguerite.’

She leant in and kissed his cheek. There was a funereal odour about her, as of lilies. ‘Now, when did we last see each other?’ Her face fell as the answer came to her. ‘Oh, it was Norman’s funeral, wasn’t it?’

Max nodded, not wanting to think about his friend’s drowning in the Seine after the critics had savaged his painting.

‘But what are you doing here of all places?’ Marguerite gestured at the hall as if it was the most ridiculous place in the world to meet an old acquaintance.

A wicked impulse bubbled up in him to tell her the truth. But he had the feeling that if he did, she would only think he was joking, and he didn’t want his desire turned into a joke. So, Max smiled and shrugged, and the musicians struck up a new tune, a daring Ragtime number which got Marguerite’s attention.

‘Shall we dance, Max?’ she asked.

‘I can’t dance,’ Max said, taking a step away as if worried Marguerite would pull him into an embrace.

Instead, she frowned. ‘Why come to a dance, then?’

He shrugged again. ‘I needed the company.’

Marguerite’s expression softened into pity. ‘Oh, Max, you poor thing.’ She levered his right hand out of his pocket and squeezed. ‘Why don’t you come home with me? My flat’s not far. We’ll have a few drinks and talk, just like we used to. Yes?’

Max was about to say no, that the last thing he wanted was to talk to anyone, especially an old friend, but stopped himself. It was perfect. He wouldn’t have to waste time either trying to get a woman to leave the dance with him or watch and wait until one walked home alone. He would have Marguerite all to himself and the privacy to do what he wanted.

He curled his fingers around her hand and squeezed back. ‘I’d like that.’

LIES AND DESPERATE MEASURES
Tuesday, 17th March 1914

Harvey Wheeler smiled at the woman on the other side of the counter and handed back her passbook. The smile vanished as soon as she turned away, only to reappear immediately as the next customer stepped up to the grille.
How long had he been doing this? Wheeler wondered as he went through the motions of a chief clerk – taking the passbook, counting out coins and banknotes, updating the balance, stamping the date, handing it back, moving on to the next… Fourteen years, was it? He tried to remember when he had got his promotion from clerk to chief clerk, and found he couldn’t recall the date, only the joy he’d felt believing he was on his way to the top. And yet here he was, all these years later, still waiting for his own bank to run.

‘Mr Wheeler?’ a voice behind him called.

He turned and raised his eyebrows at the secretary. ‘Yes, Miss Hurst?’

‘Mr Fowler wants to see you.’ Miss Hurst led him to the manager’s office before he could utter a reply. ‘You can go straight in,’ she told him as she resettled herself at her desk.

Wheeler opened the manager’s door and poked his head inside. ‘You wanted to see me, Mr Fowler?’

‘Yes, come in.’ The bespectacled man in the black three-piece suit at the desk waved him to a chair. ‘Sit down.’

Wheeler did so and watched as the bank manager lifted an envelope from the pile of post on his desk and laid it before him. ‘I’ve had a letter from Head Office about you,’ he began, and Wheeler’s breath caught in his throat. ‘It seems you’ve applied for a new position?’

His heart sank. This could only mean he had been unsuccessful. ‘They’ve written to you?’ he said, a little indignantly. ‘Why did they do that?’

‘I expect they thought I had a right to know my chief clerk was looking for a new position.’ Fowler fixed him with a hard stare. ‘It seems there are no suitable vacancies at present.’

Wheeler groaned. What do I have to do, for heaven’s sake? ‘But they will keep my application on file?’

‘They don’t say.’ Fowler set the Head Office’s letter aside. ‘I understand this hasn’t been your only application for promotion. In fact, it was your fourth. I must say I am surprised.’

‘I’m entitled to apply,’ Wheeler said defiantly.

‘Quite frankly, Wheeler, I’m surprised you think yourself capable of running your own branch when your running of the floor has hardly been exemplary of late. You’re supposed to keep an eye on the staff, yet you failed to notice the new clerk wasn’t filling in his paperwork correctly. That oversight resulted in miscalculations that took weeks to correct—’

‘He assured me he knew what he was doing,’ Wheeler protested.

‘And then there was all that trouble with Mrs Gormley,’ Fowler went on. ‘Your handling of her complaint made the situation far worse than it should have been. As a result, we lost both her and her husband’s accounts.’

‘They’re no great loss,’ he muttered sulkily.

‘Any loss is an unacceptable loss, Wheeler. Not just in financial terms, but in the loss of our good name. The Gormleys have taken their accounts to the London & South-Eastern.’ Fowler’s lip curled in vexation. ‘I know because Mr Fyfield has taken great delight in informing me of that fact.’

Wheeler rolled his eyes. What did he care if another bank manager had gloated in the pub?

‘In view of this,’ Fowler continued, ‘I think it would be wise for you to stop applying for promotion and concentrate on improving your performance here. Otherwise, I may be forced to reconsider your position at this establishment.’

Wheeler’s hands curled into fists on his knees at Fowler’s last words. Who the hell did he think he was, talking to him as if he was a naughty schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework properly? And was Fowler actually threatening him with the sack? After all the years of service he had put in? Why, he had a good mind to—

‘That’s all, Wheeler,’ Fowler said. ‘You can go.’

Punch him, Wheeler told himself. Smash his face in and show him you won’t take this from him. Go on. Do it.
He glared at the bank manager, who was reaching for the telephone and who had already dismissed Wheeler from his mind as well as his office.

Fowler glanced up at him, an eyebrow raised at Wheeler still being there. ‘I said you can go, Wheeler.’

Wheeler’s fists uncurled. He’d never thrown a punch in his life and he knew he would only make a fool of himself if he tried, and end up losing his job and then where would he be? Forty-nine years old, thrown on the rubbish heap, destined to join the great unwashed. Dejected, Wheeler rose and left the office without a word.