Page 2 of Return Ticket

“Miss, miss!” The one in front’s eyes went to her uniform. “Youse the police?”

“Traffic warden,” Gabriella said. “But I can get the police. What’s wrong?”

“We found a body, miss.” The second boy nearly ran into the back of his friend. “In the rubble.”

“In the rubble,” the third boy echoed, pointing back the way they’d come.

Gabriella knew which rubble they meant. One of the final half blocks destroyed during the war that had yet to be cleared and rebuilt.

Something to do with an argument over who owned it, she’d heard.

“What kind of body?” she asked. She didn’t think they were lying, they looked too shocked, but she didn’t want to call the police and then find it was a cat or something.

“Maybe a lady?” the first boy said. “The shoe is a lady’s shoe.”

“Can you tell me where?” Gabriella asked, walking in the direction they’d come. “You don’t have to show me.”

“Protecting evidence,” Boy Two said, sagely, but she thought she caught an undercurrent of relief in his voice.

“That’s right,” she agreed.

“Where’d you learn that, Billie?” Boy Three asked.

“Me bruvver’s detective magazines. Gets ’em from America, he does.”

They had reached the rubble, and Billie pointed to the top of the pile. “Up there, miss, over the top of the bricks. Just out of sight over the other side.”

Hidden from the street, Gabriella thought. “Thank you, boys. You wait here, I’ll just do a quick check.”

She was wearing her sturdy shoes, but still the going was treacherous. Some of the bricks had been crushed into small, sharp pieces, others balanced on each other precariously. By the time she reached the top of the pile she was sweating, despite the cool autumn weather. She had begun to smell the decomposition long before then, though.

She had to breathe through her mouth to stop herself from retching by the time she could see over the side.

A woman lay, half-buried under debris, one stockinged foot outstretched, the shoe a little distance away. A hand reached out to the side, with a delicate watch on the wrist, although her skin was purpling and swollen with decomposition. Her jacket was a neat houndstooth.

Gabriella carefully reversed as the ground shifted beneath her feet. She was relieved to have something to focus on that wasn’t the death and desecration behind her.

When she reached the road again, the boys were still there.

“It’s real, isn’t it?” Boy One asked.

They had been hoping she would tell them they were wrong, she realized.

She gave a grim nod. “It’s real.”

She looked around, saw there were no shops down this road, only a few narrow entrances that she guessed were to the flats in the low buildings that lined the road.

This was a pricey area, but the flats opposite would be affordable housing while a pile of rubble lay across from them as the only view.

She headed back toward the Kings Road, where there would be a telephone box, or perhaps a friendly shopkeeper.

“Where ya going?” Billie asked, as he and his two friends followed behind her.

“To find a phone.” She reached the Kings Road, and then, to her deep relief, saw a bobby walking along on the other side of the road.

She knew him. His beat was the same as her own, and they crossed paths regularly.

“Constable Evans!” She gave a wave, and he turned to her in surprise. “I need help.”