“I think we’re all right, Billy,” said Maisie, taking a seat and pulling out the chair next to her for Archie to be seated as Billy left the café.
“Vivian, Archie has been talking to me about the difficulties involved in being related to Jimmy Robertson, and I wonder if I can ask you a few questions—I just want to connect the dots, if I may.”
“Uncle Jimmy’s not a difficulty, Miss Dobbs. People thinking he is, that’s the difficulty. He’s been good to us.” She turned to face her brother. “And you should learn to keep your mouth shut, you stupid idiot.”
“But Viv—”
Maisie held up a hand. “A row between the two of you isn’t going to help matters—and neither is denial, Vivian. You could be in a lot of trouble, and lose a very good job. I just want to get some things sorted out. And you probably don’t know this, Vivian, but Archie was on his way to barracks and was coming here to say good-bye to you when I bumped into him—he’s enlisted, so you don’t have a lot of time with your brother.”
“Oh that’s just wonderful.” Vivian glared at her brother. “You yellow-bellied twit! Off to join the army because you can’t get anything right—see what good that did Teddy. You’re like a child with his hands over his eyes who thinks no one can see him.”
“Oh, leave off, Viv—things are bad enough as it is.” Archie rested his head in his hands, elbows on the table.
“And don’t loll around on that table—I know people in here. You’ll have everyone looking at you and you’ll show me up,” added his sister.
“All right, Vivian, here’s your choice,” said Maisie. “You either talk to me now, or you’ll be talking to the police for hours on end. You’re going to have to talk to them anyway, but you can make it easy on yourself by starting to tell the truth right now. Get into practice. You’re in trouble—but it might not be as bad as you expect, if you cooperate.”
“I’ve been cooperating since I was a child—I’m fed up with cooperating with someone. Mum and Dad, and now Uncle Jimmy. I suppose you want to know all about Teddy too, don’t you?”
“Actually, no—I know about Teddy, and I know all about Archie. What I want to know about is every step that was taken so your uncle was awarded the contract to supply Mike Yates with a special paint to use as a fire retardant on airfields.”
“That? You want to know about that? That was nothing much.” Vivian Coombes smirked and turned away, her back to her brother, and her right shoulder to Maisie. She lifted up her handbag, which she had placed on the floor, and took out a lipstick and compact. She proceeded to apply the red lipstick, rolling her lips together before closing the compact with a snap. Maisie could see she struggled to control her shaking hands. “And how long do you think I can stay here in this café? I’ve got to get back to work.”
Maisie looked at her watch. Not long now. “Just another couple of minutes, then you can go. But first—that contract, how did you find out about it?”
Vivian Coombes sighed and flapped her hand at Maisie, as if the answer were hardly worth her time.
“I’m on the government exchanges—you know that. And I heard it on the line—it’s not as if they’re all scrambled, after all, and not all the calls are important or top secret. Most of the time it’s just one boring civil servant speaking to another boring civil servant. Anyway, it was before the war, when I’d just been promoted—I heard this bloke talking to another bloke about putting the contract out to tender, that it had to be done quickly, none of this waiting for months. Painting the airfield buildings with that special paint to stop fires was urgent, on account of the expected attacks and the chance of invasion if war were declared. I knew Uncle Jimmy was always looking for a new bit of business, and that he’d sold paint to Yates before, so I let him know. After that I didn’t do anything—he’s got his ways of finding out about the other bids, so he made sure he got it. I can’t go about my job listening to everything.”
“Just as well.” Maisie sighed. “But you were rewarded for your trouble, weren’t you?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Vivian.
“Come on, Viv—she knows,” said Archie. “And this is about our Joe. Uncle Jimmy wasn’t on the up and up, not with that paint.”
Maisie watched as Vivian Coombes looked at her brother, then at her hands, and when she met Maisie’s eyes, her lips trembled.
“You’re a strong young woman, Vivian, and you are loyal to your family. Your uncle has seen you all supplied with some lovely things in the past, gifts that made life a little easier. You’ve had brand-new clothes, good shoes, nice furniture, all sorts of little extras. And he had that telephone put in at the pub. It wasn’t the brewery, was it?” She looked from Vivian to Archie. “Your family were the recipients of stolen goods, and have been for a long time. Being a ‘receiver’ of such items is a crime in itself, but the passing on of confidential information carries a different kind of punishment in a time of war.”
“We weren’t at war, not when I told him,” said Vivian. “I just thought I would let him know.”
“All in your favor, Vivian, that there was a limit to your sharing of information from a confidential government call. But the judge might see it as simply a question of semantics,” said Maisie.
“Of what,” asked Archie.
Vivian rolled her eyes. “She means it’s down to how the judge sees it. That big bits of information are the same as small bits, when it comes to language—it’s confidential whether it comes from the prime minister or the cleaner, when it’s on a government line. You dopey item.”
“It’s the seriousness of the crime that counts, and character,” said Maisie. “Fortunately, you weren’t in on the most egregious part of the crime.”
“What was that?” said Vivian.
Archie began to weep, his head low, his shoulders revealing his grief and fear.
“Oh you, you blimmin’ watery head. I wish you’d pull yourself together,” said Vivian to her brother. She took her bag and began to stand up.
Archie looked up at his sister. “You’re not as hard as you try to be, Viv. Uncle Jimmy killed Joe. He might have got him that job, so he was in a reserved occupation, but he was killing him slowly because he was adding other stuff to the paint to make it go a lot further. He wasn’t supplying Yates with the stuff exactly as it was shown to him by the RAF bods and the government officials. I know—I’m a slave in his blimmin’ engineering works. I know what he does, and he was doing things on the cheap so he made more money—a lot more money. He was thinning it down so he could sell it to other businesses, for painting factories, shops and all sorts of other buildings, telling the landlords that it would save their properties from burning down when the invasion came and we were bombed. He couldn’t use water because it would have just gone lumpy like rotten eggs, so he used chemicals. Mike Yates was in on it. And yes, Dad wanted me and Joe to have jobs where we wouldn’t be called up, but what were we really protected from? Eh? No one protected Joe, did they? That stuff was killing him.”