McColl and his mother had helped each other through their months of grief over Jed. In truth, she’d been in much better shape than McColl had, and her continued immersion in the postwar radical politics of Glasgow’s Clydeside had provided a focus that his own life lacked. Then in the spring of 1919, he’d received a letter from London. Long before the war, in what seemed another age, McColl had met and married Evelyn Athelbury, and gone on to work for her brother Tim, a designer and manufacturer of luxury automobiles. It was the opportunities implicit in hawking these vehicles around the world that had first persuaded Mansfield Cumming, the head of Britain’s new Secret Service, to enlist McColl as a part-time spy.
Already aware that Evelyn had died in the postwar flu epidemic, he had learned from the letter that her brother had recently succumbed to one of the more aggressive cancers. Before dying, Tim had advised his younger sister Eileen—the letter’s author and his sole beneficiary—that she should seek McColl’s advice on the future of the firm. Would he be willing to visit her in London and do as her brother had suggested?
McColl had been reluctant, but his mother had persuaded him that the change would do him good. Eileen, an attractive widow in her late thirties with a traumatized eleven-year-old son, had asked him if he could take a week or two to decide on which was the sensible course—selling the firm outright or finding a new man to manage it for her. The business, as McColl soon realized, was nothing like its prewar self—the days of small automobile manufacturers were rapidly drawing to an end, and Athelbury’s was now little more than an upscale garage that specialized in servicing luxury cars. But the buildings were sound, the equipment mostly up-to-date, and the Swiss Cottage location a good one for the trade in question.
McColl had taken on its renaissance, hiring a one-armed mechanic named Sid whose skills were far greater than his own and making his home on the premises. He liked Eileen, and when she suggested they share the office cot, his body didn’t get the argument that it probably should have. Over the next six months, they made love once or twice a week, and it was only when she suggested marriage that he realized how serious she was about him.
He couldn’t face the responsibility, for her or her son, who sometimes even looked like Fedya, if only in McColl’s imagination.
He had built her a thriving business, and she let him go without any rancor. McColl had learned a lot from the one-armed mechanic and soon found another job at a garage in Wembley. With someone else doing all the paper work, he had more time for the disabled veterans’ group, which Sid had introduced him to, and spent much of his spare time ferrying men with missing limbs around London. On several occasions his passengers were bound for demonstrations outside Parliament or one of the ministries, and twice he found himself involved in skirmishes with the police.
Waiting for a passenger on one occasion, it occurred to him that a car could be adapted for disabled use. He arranged to meet Sid for lunch at a pub on the Finchley Road, and the two of them had enjoyed a long and liquid discussion of the possibilities. In the eight months since, they’d experimented with all sorts of bespoke adaptions for the myriad forms of maiming suffered in the war, often in vain but sometimes with heartwarming success. The vehicle that Nate Simon had driven through the funeral parlor window had been one of their simpler jobs, and McColl was still at a loss as to what had gone wrong. He suspected that Nate—not the sanest of men since losing half his face and limbs—had done it deliberately, but now he would never know. Nate was beyond questioning, by McColl or the jury upstairs.
“I would like to take you through Police Constable Standfast’s statement to the police,” the defense attorney began.
McColl nodded.
“He said that the car was traveling at excessive speed in the middle of the road. Do you agree?”
“In the middle of the road, perhaps. There was, as far as I remember, no other vehicle in sight. At excessive speed? I would guess we were traveling at around twenty-five miles per hour, which few drivers would consider excessive in this day and age.”
“I think we can agree that the automobile took a sudden turn to the left, before mounting the pavement and crashing into the funeral parlor?”
“Yes.”
“Can you explain why that happened?”
“It certainly had nothing to do with the modifications we had made to the car. They were still in perfect working order.”
“How do you know that?” his counsel asked.
“I used them myself to drive the constable to hospital.”
“So what do you think happened?”
McColl hesitated. He was reluctant to point the finger at Nate Simon, because of how it might reflect on other disabled drivers, but the truth was the truth. “I think Nate—Mr. Simon—had a moment of madness. He saw the sign above the funeral home—‘the best care for your loved ones’—and something just snapped.”
“Were you ‘laughing hysterically’ when PC Standfast arrived on the scene?”
“We were. It just seemed so appropriate somehow, after everything that happened in the war, to find ourselves literally in death’s lap. It wasn’t as if anyone had been hurt.”
“Quite. So what happened next?”
“Mr. Simon took off his mask, something he often did when confronted by figures of authority.”
“With the intention of upsetting the person in question,” the judge interjected, with only the slightest hint of inquiry.
McColl took it in his stride. “He liked to make people aware of the sacrifices he and others had made for their country.”
“But a provocative act, nonetheless,” the judge insisted.
“If you say so,” McColl said dryly.
The judge considered another verbal intervention, but opted instead for simply shaking his head.
“How did PC Standfast react?” the defense counsel asked McColl.
“He blanched. Which was not an unusual reaction—Mr. Simon’s face was quite shocking at first sight.”
“And did he ask you to help him get Mr. Simon out of the automobile?”
“In a manner of speaking. He said: ‘Get this monster out of the car.’”
“Those were the exact words he used?”
“Yes.”
“And what happened next?”
“I punched him,” McColl admitted.
“Because of what he called your friend?”
“Yes,” McColl said, more hesitantly than was sensible. How could he explain the years of pent-up anger and anguish that had gone into that punch?
“And when you saw that the constable had struck his head on the curb, and was probably seriously hurt, what did you do?”
“I drove him to Harrow Cottage Hospital.”
“Did Mr. Simon accompany you?”
“Yes, I helped him into the passenger seat.”
“Was he upset?”
“I think so. He refused to put his mask back on.”
“One last question, Mr. McColl. If PC Standfast was unconscious, what was to stop you simply driving away and leaving him and avoiding the situation in which you now find yourself?”
“Humanity, I suppose. It didn’t occur to me. I never had any intention of seriously hurting the constable, and I certainly didn’t want his death on my conscience.”
“Thank you, Mr. McColl.”