The War Widow Read online

  The woman looked panicked again for a moment, shoulders high, mouth tight and those dark brown eyes showing their whites. ‘You’re not . . . ?’

  ‘Oh don’t worry, you’ve come to the right place,’ Billie assured her. ‘It’s just that private inquiry agents in this country are prevented by law from using the word detective regarding their work.’ It was, in fact, practically the only legislation pertaining particularly to the trade. The Australian police were more protective of the term than their North American counterparts evidently were. ‘If you could write me that list, that would be a good start. May I ask, does Adin have a place of work?’

  ‘He works for the fur company, yes.’ She pushed a business card across the table and Billie leaned forward and picked it up:

  Mrs Netanya Brown

  Brown & Co Fine Furs

  Strand Arcade, Sydney

  Billie turned the card over a couple of times. That explained the fur all right. The Strand Arcade was north of Billie’s office, but not far. She recognised the company name, though she had never been inside the shop. It was downstairs at the Strand, from memory. There were a handful of successful fur companies in Sydney, the largest of which was a shop on George Street. She wondered how business was after the war. Had the restrictions been fully lifted?

  ‘It’s a family company,’ Mrs Brown added. ‘Adin works the floor, sometimes does stocktake, looks after the odd jobs.’

  ‘Do you have a lot of staff on this time of year?’ Though winter sales would probably be more substantial, considering the goods, it was likely to be getting busy not so long before Christmas.

  ‘Around Christmas we sometimes get one or two temporary sales persons, part-time, but we can’t afford any extra staff at the moment. There is just myself, my husband and Adin.’

  ‘And where is your husband today?’

  ‘At the shop.’ She looked at the thin watch on her wrist. ‘He’ll be closing soon. Oh, it’s been such a distressing couple of days.’

  ‘I understand. Mrs Brown, I’d like to drop into the shop this weekend, if that is acceptable. Perhaps tomorrow in the late morning? I can be discreet.’

  She nodded and Billie got her to describe her son’s appearance in detail, run through his usual routines and write down the names and addresses of his close friends.

  ‘Would I be able to speak with your husband, also?’

  Mrs Brown hesitated a little, but nodded. Billie took a mental note.

  ‘Does your son own a passport?’

  Mrs Brown’s eyebrows shot up. ‘No. Are you suggesting he might have left the country?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything; I’m narrowing our search. Does he have access to any money, Mrs Brown? His own, or someone else’s he might use?’

  ‘Well . . . no. He’s a good boy, I told you.’ Billie noticed she was now gripping the bag in her lap like a woman on a roller-coaster. When it came to these initial meetings, clients were an even split in Billie’s experience – half of them loved pouring out every sordid detail of their lives and their traumas, and the other half were something like this, finding every detail painful or embarrassing to share with a total stranger, paid or otherwise. Mrs Brown didn’t like this conversation.

  Billie ignored the constant reinforcement of Adin Brown’s high moral standards. People did not come in just two kinds – good and bad – and in any event Billie wasn’t there to judge. ‘How much would he keep on him, normally?’ she asked.

  ‘Only a few pounds for snacks and the tram.’

  You couldn’t get far on that. Billie leaned back in her chair again. The woman had barely touched her tea. ‘Is there anything else you think I ought to know?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’ The tone was almost accusing.

  ‘I don’t mean anything by it. The more I have to go on, the better,’ she explained.

  ‘He’s a good boy, Miss Walker. I . . .’ She trailed off, unable to finish her sentence, and looked down, her brow creased. The large brown eyes looked wet again.

  ‘I’ll do my best to find your son for you, Mrs Brown, and quickly. We’ll start right away.’

  ‘Tonight?’ It was now after four.

  Billie nodded. ‘Yes. Normal business hours don’t apply to this work. And we’ll work through the weekend.’

  Mrs Brown’s features perked up a little, her mouth relaxing, the sense of immediacy seeming to put her more at ease. Or perhaps it was that Billie had accepted the retainer and something was being done. Billie stood and opened the communicating door for her, and bade her new client good day. Sam was sitting at his desk, pretending he hadn’t been doing his best to listen through the door. He opened the office door and stepped back to allow Mrs Brown into the hallway.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Walker,’ Netanya Brown said again, and disappeared towards the lift as they watched, that fur stole having never left her shoulders.

  Sam shut the door gently. ‘Nervy one,’ he commented.

  Billie nodded thoughtfully and wondered if she was the one who had called that morning. She was just nervy enough to hang up on Sam when she heard a male voice.

  ‘She is quite anxious. Not without reason, perhaps,’ she mused. ‘How much of that didn’t you catch?’

  He smiled. ‘The amount of the retainer.’

  Billie laughed out loud. ‘Ten pounds, Sam. Ten. We won’t have to close up shop just yet. I could have pressed her for more but that will do for now. There isn’t exactly a stampede rushing the door today.

  ‘I want you to head to the hospitals as soon as you’re ready,’ she continued. He was good with the nurses, she’d noticed, and it wasn’t necessary for her to go with him. He knew that drill well enough by now. ‘Take this photograph with you. We’re looking for an Adin Brown, age seventeen. Five foot nine, slim build, no tattoos or identifying scars.’ She handed over the photo. ‘Check out the main city hospitals: Sydney, RPA, Prince of Wales, Prince Henry and St Vinnies. Royal South Sydney, too. Have a good chat and find out about any male patient who came in during the past two days – since Wednesday night – and might vaguely fit the description of our boy. Don’t bother heading across the bridge yet, but I might send you out there tomorrow, and to the smaller hospitals if we must, though a ring around might suffice for some of them. I’ll make a visit to some of his friends, and tonight I’ll drop in to see if he’s—’

  ‘In the death house,’ he said, completing her sentence.

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Let’s hope not.’

  The first ports of call for missing persons were always the places you hoped you wouldn’t find them. Billie would make a visit to the Sydney City Morgue, but not until well after dark, when she knew she would be welcomed by the man at the desk. It was all about who was on the shift, and if she was right, the best timing would be after eleven when everyone else was gone. But if Adin was lucky he’d be with one of his friends, or perhaps being harboured by a lady love his mother wouldn’t approve of. If Netanya Brown was right – there was no girlfriend, his friends hadn’t seen him and he only had a few pounds to his name – that did indeed spell trouble.

  ‘You’re sure you don’t want me to tag along?’ Sam asked.

  Billie looked at the list of friends. ‘I can handle these boys,’ she said. ‘Much as I like having a case to pay our rent, time is of the essence with something like this.’ Stretching it out was no good. Billie glanced at the clock again. ‘When you’re finished I want you to have a good meal, but give me a call at eight o’clock sharp – try the office and then my flat – and tell me what you’ve found. Hopefully then you’ll be able to knock off, but I can’t promise you’ll have much time off this weekend. If there’s no dice tonight, we’ll be visiting the fur company tomorrow.’

  She grabbed her trench coat off the rack. ‘You’ve enough petrol coupons for your motor car?’ she asked. The rationing allowance was around fifteen gallons each month. They could share coupons normally, but Billie was out for the month.

  He nodded, no
t seeming overly disappointed that his work day had not ended early after all, or that his weekend would be busy. An hour’s wage was an hour’s wage. They locked up and set off.

  Chapter Two

  Billie stepped off the tram on Parramatta Road in Stanmore and took in the sounds of the summer evening: cicadas singing, dogs barking, children playing.

  Her trench coat was over her arm. The breeze was refreshing, and she stood for a moment as it gently lifted her wavy hair from her neckline, wondering if Sam had already found the missing boy, Adin Brown, laid up in one of the city hospitals. This was her last stop before a reheated dinner and a date with the death house. It might sound grim on paper, but in fact she felt quite buoyed untangling the pieces of this new puzzle. She liked puzzles. Particularly the paid kind.

  Since Netanya Brown walked out of her office some hours earlier, she’d been working through the list of Adin’s close friends. So far the work had been singularly uneventful, yet Billie was rarely happier than when embarking on a new investigation, hunting down the answers to a mystery or the hidden details of some story she knew she could break open. It was true that her cases were often frustratingly small, involving domestic and sometimes depressing issues, but she was her own boss and that counted for a lot. The banality of much of the work did not dampen her spirits. And as for returning to work as a reporter – something she’d given considerable thought to before taking over her father’s inquiry agency – the Sydney newspapers had dismissed most of their women reporters home once the men started to return from the war, or else confined them to the social pages, or covering the Easter Show, which was a bit too steep a downgrade for Billie after she’d chased Nazi activity across Europe, built a good portfolio of published articles, and worked alongside the likes of Lee Miller and Clare Hollingworth. No, she wouldn’t last in that kind of work. It was an imperfect world and her chosen profession was decidedly imperfect, but for now she had a hint of that spark again, that sense of doing something that mattered to someone. In these moments she felt that answers could be just around the next corner. This had been true whenever she’d been assigned a new story in Europe, and it was true now that she was funnelling those skills into her work as a private investigator in the city of her birth. Perhaps it was something in the blood, but launching into a case excited her more than any ticket to the pictures. In that respect she was her father’s daughter.

  Let’s hope this kid knows something.

  In the past two hours Billie had ticked off the first two friends on the list Mrs Brown had given her. One boy had convincingly sworn that he hadn’t seen Adin in over a week, and the other friend hadn’t seen him since Saturday. Neither had thought anything was amiss until Adin’s mother had rung them and asked if they’d seen him. With Billie’s arrival, they seemed genuinely concerned. Having a PI on the case made it more real, more pressing. So far, everything she’d learned had confirmed what Mrs Brown had told her, and that left this third friend, Maurice, whom she hoped would have something helpful to say and would not already be out on the town this early Friday evening.

  She turned a corner, then checked the leather-bound notebook in her hand. Yes, this was it – a narrow two-storey brick terrace just a couple of blocks from the tram line on the main road. The homes on this stretch of Corunna Road were crammed together, as if they had been constructed in the middle of space-poor London. Still, the overall effect was charming. As Billie approached the house where Adin’s friend Maurice lived she could see that plenty of work went into keeping the small front garden neat, sweeping the steps and keeping up the potted plants by the door, but the exterior was in dire need of a fresh coat of white paint, and the balcony railings looked unstable. She moved slowly up the little path and knocked on the front door with a gloved hand. A dog barked somewhere, and Billie adjusted a hair pin, listening for movement inside the house.

  After a moment, she heard footsteps. It was a young man who opened the door. He was no more than twenty, long-lashed and lean, almost skinny, and he wore his trousers rolled at the cuff to show white socks above his loafers. His single pocket shirt was unbuttoned at the top. Billie guessed that he’d spent a fair bit of time on his hair, which was side-parted in the standard way, but a bit wavy and long on top, while short at the back and sides. It was the latest style for a certain kind of Sydney boy, some of whom liked the top to sit up even higher. The style was no good for wearing hats, and Billie imagined he didn’t don one often. Doubtless he had a comb in his back pocket, because he’d need it.

  ‘Maurice?’ He looked her up and down, surprised that she wanted him. ‘I’m Billie Walker.’ She flashed him a business card. ‘Glad to know you. I’d like to speak to you about your friend Adin Brown,’ she explained, pushing the card into his palm.

  He looked panicked for a moment, his deep brown eyes wide, and he drifted back from the door a touch and then read her card and nodded, as if having decided something. ‘Mum, I’m heading out to the shop. Be back shortly,’ he called loudly and stepped outside onto the path, shutting the door behind him.

  ‘I don’t want any trouble. My ma’s a bit deaf but she’s not stupid.’

  Billie followed him, intrigued, keeping pace as he led her towards the street corner at Northumberland, out of the line of sight of the house. The sun was still up, but the shadows were lengthening and the shadows had eyes, she sensed. A group of boys was watching from the side of a terrace home on the opposite side of the street, their faces stacked like a totem pole, and when she turned her gaze in their direction they vanished like apparitions. Billie turned her attention back to her subject but thought fleetingly about how she’d sent Sam off to check the hospitals, leaving her without a strong arm in a neighbourhood that was now feeling less tame than she remembered before the war. All those absent fathers and tales of war seemed to have done the local boys little good, and she was pleased with her last-minute decision to slip her little Colt 1908 pocket semi-automatic into her garter. It was hand-sized and factory nickel-plated, with shining mother-of-pearl grips, and came with a sweet little soft suede change purse pouch, which was attractive but not easy to access if one was in a hurry. The thigh garter she had sewn herself for the purpose of holding the diminutive thirteen-ounce pistol worked nicely by comparison, and could be worn under most of her clothes, as it was today. The gun had been a gift from her mother, who was ‘not stupid’ either. It would take Billie only a few seconds to have it comfortably in her hand.

  ‘I’m not trouble,’ she said soothingly to the boy as they neared the corner, trying to ease his nerves, or perhaps her own, though the statement wasn’t strictly true if history was anything to go by. She and trouble knew each other pretty well. ‘I know you told Mrs Brown that you haven’t seen Adin, but I wanted to ask you personally to hear your side of things.’

  ‘Why do I have to have a side?’

  ‘Surely you absorb information and form views like any thinking young man in this state,’ she answered.

  Her interview subject narrowed his eyes. ‘You’re not a cop?’ he asked accusingly, slowing down to scowl prettily and dart his eyes from side to side to see if they were being watched, which of course they were. Billie wasn’t sure if he wanted to be seen with her or not; it seemed even odds.

  ‘Do I look like a police officer to you?’ she asked him, in response to which he looked her over from heel to hat, and took his time about it. Yes, he knew he was pretty. This boy was different from the other two. He was older and had more edge.

  ‘No, lady, I can’t say as you do,’ he finally decided, having finished his appraisal at her expressionless red lips. He paused, eyes still fixed on her mouth. ‘But they’ve been recruiting them lately. I read about it in the paper.’

  At this, Billie had to resist rolling her eyes. In ’41 when the panic set in about a lack of able men, the New South Wales police had added six women officers to the force, bringing the grand total to a mere fourteen in the state. But now Premier McKell had approved an increase in
the number of female cops to thirty-six, and the papers were going mad with the idea, as if the fairer sex might suddenly take over the entire force, leaving men out of work or even, heaven forbid, waiting for their dinners, despite the fact married women weren’t being accepted anyhow. Billie was on a first-name basis with the famous Special Sergeant (First Class) Lillian Armfield, who had joined the force in 1915 and through her knew well enough the struggle. The female recruits hadn’t even uniforms, weren’t paid overtime like the boys, nor were they entitled to either superannuation or a pension. They had to sign contracts stating that they wouldn’t be compensated for any injuries suffered in the line of duty, couldn’t join the Police Association and had to resign if they married – one of the reasons Lillian never had. With all that, it was a wonder so many women were keen to sign up, but the applications always far outnumbered the spaces allotted. The relationship between the police and private inquiry agents was sometimes fraught, but Billie had her contacts, as her father had before her. But a cop? No, a cop she was certainly not.

  ‘I assure you I’m not a newly recruited officer of the law,’ Billie said, placing a hand on her hip as his eyes followed the movement, ‘and if you’re a good boy I suspect you’ll never meet one of those fine women.’ If he was a good boy, he at least wanted to be bad, that much was clear.

  ‘You look more like you could be in the pictures,’ he said.

  ‘Well, we’re not shooting any Hollywood pictures in Stanmore today,’ she said flatly, not interested in his flattery.

  They walked on for another minute or two, their route taking them almost in a loop. Curtains parted in a house across the street and a silver-haired lady looked out at them, her nose to the window glass. One more block and Maurice finally stopped. Billie noticed a milk bar further along the street, close to where she’d stepped off the tram, and saw a small group of children who seemed to be sharing a treat of some kind. Another set of curtains rippled; this time a dark-haired youth poked his head out of a window to stare at them. They may have been far from where Maurice’s mother could see them, but plenty of others were having a gander. Billie suspected Maurice was enjoying the scrutiny and her patience was wearing thin, but she needed patience if she was to get anything out of this boy.