The Case of the Fighting Soldier: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  He gaped a bit. “For instance,” I said. “I’m your superior officer. Don’t forget in public to call me a —”

  George glared, then called me something very different.

  Collect had done some more rearranging of places at the high table, and George was placed between Collect and Flick. I could see he was enjoying that first public appearance, and though I had lost much of the thrill of the real opening of a new Course, I could still find a warmth of pleasure at the sight of the crowded room. The Home Guard seemed much like the last lot: just as fit and keen, just as busy already at talking shop, and just as silent when the full plates were in front of them.

  The loyal toast was drunk at last and then the Colonel rose to make his usual opening speech. He was a man of little imagination but retentive memory, and his second effort was—but for circumstantial alterations—word for word like the first. There were the same gestures, the same inflexions of the voice, and it was fascinating to guess when he was going to smile, when to sink to an impressive inaudibility, and when to look round at the staff for some wholly unnecessary confirmation. The little speech we had decided on that morning had also been committed to memory.

  It was a masterpiece of evasion. The students were told that at the school they would be taught the correct and safe handling of explosives, and that it was a matter of life and death neither to omit nor to exceed instructions. Carelessness was the enemy, and one little moment of forgetfulness might mean the death not only of a fool but of the innocent and trustworthy. If an officer of the staff, after years of immunity in the handling of the most deadly explosives, had had to pay the greatest price of all for an aberration—perhaps—

  And there the Colonel broke artistically off. There was no need to labour the point, he said. He was sure that no man there had the wind up. Simple precautions were one thing, and nervousness another. But one thing remained to do. Captain Mortar, whose loss the school mourned, needed perhaps no tributes paid to his memory, but the last Course, who had worked under him, would always remember him as a magnificent instructor, and the staff were mourning the loss of a colleague. Captain Mortar always spoke of himself as a fighting soldier. That was a true summary of a varied and honourable career, and no man could wish for a finer epitaph.

  So much for that. There was an unrehearsed silence of a few seconds and then came the rest of the speech. Then the Colonel rose and, with the staff at his heels, passed out through the lines of standing students. I had somehow got well to the rear, and as I stepped out to the darkness of the parade ground, a hand touched my arm, and Ferris was drawing me aside.

  “Did you ever hear such damned hypocrisy?” he said.

  That knocked me a bit off my perch. “You mustn’t let yourself be jaundiced,” I told him. “Certain things have had to be said in the interests of the school, and it’s bad discipline for you to question them. What you’ve got to do, at least openly, is to let the dead bury the dead. You come along to the Mess and have a drink with everybody. The way you’re behaving is the surest way to call attention to yourself.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he turned my way.

  “How’s Feeder?” I asked him, as we quickened our pace in the cold.

  “About the same,” he said. “He was asking me when the funeral was going to be and if he might go to it.”

  “I expect it could be arranged,” I said, and then suddenly had an idea that made me stop in my tracks.

  “By the way,” I said, “why shouldn’t I try to take on Feeder as my private batman? That would keep his mind off brooding while he has to stay here. And he’d be nice and handy if a certain gentleman wanted information.”

  “I think he ought to like that,” he said. “He always had a soft spot for you, sir.”

  “Then you see him and play on it,” I told him. “But don’t let him know I’m using him for ulterior motives. As soon as the hut is ready for occupation again I’ll mention the matter to the Colonel. That strikes me as a favourable time. And, by the way, how are you getting on in the writing-room with Staff?”

  He gave a little grunt and I could imagine the sneer. “Oh, we say good night and good morning.”

  I grunted too. “You open out a bit,” I said, and rather testily, “and don’t wear your grievances on your sleeve. A very few hours and you’ll be confidentially questioned. That’ll be the time to get things off your chest.”

  He did seem a little more friendly and even cheerful in the Mess that night, where, thanks perhaps to the presence of Wharton, there was quite a lot of business at the bar. I had never found the bar so animated a spot, and I was feeling quite cheerful myself when I turned in. It was fine to think that Feeder might be my batman in a day or two, and, frankly, not because of one of the reasons I had given Ferris. That reason had in fact been given in order to cover up a streak of sentimentality in my make-up, even if it was true that Feeder, as my batman, would always be on tap for questioning. But I liked Feeder, in spite of his unprepossessing appearance and various aberrations. He was the antithesis of red tape and convention and, like his late master, he was a fighting soldier.

  Chapter IX

  I forgot to tell you that the Colonel had agreed to a readjustment of duties in order that I might have more time with Wharton, if he needed me. Collect was being called in to do a job of work at last, thank heaven, and he and the Colonel would undertake most of the supervisory duties.

  I was up at an hour which I considered very early indeed, but when I went to Wharton’s room he was not only up and dressed but doing a job of work, if you can give that description to the careful examination of what looked like a very high-class camera.

  “What’s it for, George?” I asked quite unnecessarily. “Taking a few pictures,” he told me, equally unnecessarily. “I knew I’d have to be my own photographer and finger-print man, so I borrowed it and brought it along.”

  “Going to use it this morning?”

  “Straightaway,” he said. “The doctor’ll be here in a couple of shakes, or he should be.”

  Then he did some explaining that fairly made my flesh creep. While I have grown somewhat accustomed to the grisly sights of violent and disintegrating deaths, I knew I could not bring myself to be present at what George and the doctor were about to do. But I had to admit that George was putting to the test a brilliant idea, and one that would never have occurred to myself. The Maigret business of absorbing atmosphere and then trusting to ideas to come was all very well, but George was only too aware that certain essentials came first.

  When Compress came in I heard all about it.

  “Sorry to get you out of bed at this unearthly hour,” Wharton began, “but there’s something that has to be done before this afternoon’s funeral. I want to photograph and I want you to label every portion of the body you’ve recovered—that lies under the sheet, in fact.”

  Compress had looked a bit surprised. I was also gathering that Wharton must have already dropped him a hint as to who he actually was.

  “Well, it’s rather a mixed lot,” Compress said. “He caught the full blast of the explosion and most of him practically disintegrated. I can’t put it more clearly than that.”

  “Well, a word in your ear,” Wharton said, wagging a paternal finger and with a fine pretence of humour. “This business is highly confidential. I know what you’re going to say—that it’s your creed to keep confidences, but it’s my official duty to warn you. Now I can be frank with you about what we’re going to do.”

  As soon as he said that I knew only too well that frankness would consist in revealing the obvious and keeping the rest well up his sleeve.

  “Here’s where we start,” Wharton told him, and laid the camera down. “According to what’s left of the body we might determine the exact position of Captain Mortar in relation to the explosive at the very moment of death. Suppose, for instance, he’d been found with his head blown off. That might have proved—might, mind you—that he was crimping a fuse into a detonator
with his teeth instead of using nippers. If the legs were gone and the trunk left, then he probably kicked against something on the ground. But you say the torso’s gone.”

  “A few bits and pieces left,” said Compress casually. “Extremities of limbs and so on.”

  “Well, the expert to whom these photographs and things are going has had tougher jobs than the one we’re giving him,” Wharton said. “But here’s something that mayn’t have occurred to you.”

  He tore a page from his notebook and drew a couple of diagrams.

  “This first one is a hand and part of a forearm found after the explosion, and we assume the arm was in a normal position at the owner’s side when the bomb went off.

  “Now then. The blast of an explosion is upwards and outwards, provided there’s anything to check the downward blast, and in this case there must have been the floor. Very well then. This first drawing severed the arm in such a way that the owner must have been facing the explosive point. In this other diagram, it’s just as plain that he must have had his back to the explosive point. Is that perfectly clear? It is? Then we’ll get on a bit.

  “You say the torso doesn’t exist. That proves conclusively that he was slap up against it when it went off. You might even assume the middle of his body was in actual contact. Very well then. Our photographs should show whether he was facing the explosive or had his back against it; isn’t that so?”

  “It looks so to me,” I said. “If Compress has enough fragments and you can take clear enough photographs, you ought to find out a whole lot about that explosion.”

  To my surprise Compress had a kind of objection to make. “But how could he have had his back to the explosive?” He saw George’s lifted eyebrows, and hedged a bit. “I mean, I was given to understand that he was doing something with explosives. You can’t have your back turned and be doing something at the same time.”

  “You be patient with an old gentleman,” Wharton told him. “Explosives can go off by delayed action. Most bombs go off with a fuse. Mortar might have inadvertently set off the action that started the fuse burning, and then have turned his back to do something else. Still,” and he waved an airy hand, “that’s neither here nor there. If you’re ready I think we might make a start. The light looks like being good and after breakfast we can go right ahead.”

  “You won’t want me,” I said hopefully, but already I was talking to George’s back, for he had grabbed the camera and was off. I sidled out, then moved at a more stately pace back to my room, and hoped for the breakfast bugle.

  After breakfast I kept out of George’s way. When the parade had moved off to the lecture-room I watched the progress of the rebuilding of the centre of the hut, and I was not surprised when the foreman told me that the job would be entirely finished that evening. Then I thought I would take a walk which would lead me by the magazine, and present an opportunity of seeing Store. So far I had never seen him at really close quarters, for his work was largely connected with and taking place in the magazine, from which he issued material either live or dead for use at lectures, demonstrations, and actual firing. He also was responsible for the keeping of the highly important records of issues and expenditures.

  The door of the magazine was open and I made no bones about walking in. Store was there, and he was trying to be humorous and official at the same time as he waved me back to the door.

  “Sorry, sir, but I daren’t let you in here.” As I backed out again, he explained. “I have to search everyone who comes in here, sir, to see if they’ve any matches or stuff like that on them.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “The last thing I want to do is to break regulations.”

  I don’t think I described Store to you, though I did say that he was a Second-class Warrant Officer, and addressed therefore not as Mr. Store—as one said “Mr. Brende”—but as Quartermaster-Sergeant. But you can picture him in a second; a shortish, powerful-looking man with ramrod back, a minute Chaplin or Adolf moustache, and a sallow complexion. Perhaps that moustache prejudiced me against him, for I hate all topiary work in moustaches, and above all the movie-star streak. But I also didn’t like the look of Store in other ways. I didn’t like his mouth, and his eyes struck me as shifty. I didn’t care too much for his manner either, which was far too hearty and decidedly cocksure.

  “Now then, sir,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I don’t know that you can do anything, as you put it,” I said somewhat frigidly. “As second-in-command of the school I felt it my duty to see at least something of the magazine and the armoury.”

  “Come on then, sir,” he said. “No matches or inflammable matter on you?”

  There was nothing but a petrol lighter, which I left outside. Store led the way in, and I saw at once that it was no place for a man who might suffer from nerves. If nine pounds of high-explosive had blown Mortar to smithereens, then if the collection at which I was looking happened to go off, there wouldn’t be enough of me to scrape up. Mills were there in hundreds, all beautifully oiled, and there was a row of murderous-looking Blackers, as well as cases of Stickies and the big Anti-tank that looks like a full-sized thermos. There were plenty more that I didn’t recognise.

  “What happens when you lose anything?” I asked.

  “We can’t lose anything, sir. The system’s too good. Everything that leaves here, no matter if it’s a dummy, has to be signed for. Whatever’s unexpended comes back and I sign for it. The difference has to tally with the written certificate of the officer who expended the difference.”

  “Well, there’s the first loophole,” I said, maliciously delighted to have the chance. “When you get down to brass tacks, your real safeguard is the integrity of the officer who expends the explosives.”

  “How’s that, sir?”

  “Heavens, man, think!” I told him impatiently. “An officer might think he’d like a Sticky for himself, to experiment with. Right. All he’s got to do is certify that he’s exploded the ten with which you issued him, whereas he’d have exploded only nine.”

  “There’re other safeguards,” he said. “Always at least two officers there, sir.”

  “And each keeps a record and counts the bombs as they go off?”

  “They’re supposed to, sir.”

  “I see. So we arrive at a possibility of collusion. Let’s suppose something that’s utterly fantastic; something that didn’t happen because everybody’s confident of the integrity of the two officers concerned. Let’s suppose that two officers put their heads together—Captain Mortar and Mr. Ferris, for example—because they think they can improve a bomb. It’d be child’s play, wouldn’t it, for them to retain an unexploded bomb?”

  “Well, if you put it like that, sir, I suppose it would. Only you can’t make regulations for things like that.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “Yet one curious thing does remain. Captain Mortar blew himself up, shall we say, with some very powerful explosive. Where’d he get it from?”

  Store smiled confidently. The question had evidently been discussed and he had an answer ready, and one naturally that would redound in some measure to his own credit.

  “Probably brought it with him, sir, from that other school he was at. They aren’t so particular there, so they tell me, as we are here.”

  “Well, that’s excellent hearing,” I said. “What are those little chaps up there?”

  “Bakelites,” he told me.

  I said I ought to have recognised them, but my bat eyes were always playing tricks on me. Would he mind letting me have a look at one at close quarters?

  He fetched a very short ladder and brought me one from the shelf. When he had replaced it I said it was getting late and I’d have to be going. I thanked him for showing me round and I congratulated him on the scrupulous cleanliness of everything.

  At the door I turned. “Strictly in confidence, I think I’d better return you these.”

  With something of horror he watched me lug the two Millses from the
pocket of my British warm, and he took them as if they were a couple of snakes.

  “Gawd, sir, where’d you get these from?”

  “Just put them in my pocket while you were getting me the Bakelite,” I said.

  An extraordinary’ expression flashed across his face. It wasn’t suppressed anger, or surprise, and it wasn’t sheepishness at having been caught out, even if trickily. It was more like suspicion, and as if he were wondering just how much I knew.

  “I suppose I could have slipped a Blacker under my arm,” I said.

  “Not a heavy thing like that, you wouldn’t,” he told me, and was shaking his head. “But that wasn’t a fair test, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so. I wouldn’t think of watching an officer like you.”

  I smiled consolingly and apologetically. “Of course it wasn’t a fair test. Forget all about it, except that when anybody comes in here in future, imagine he’s as big a rogue as I am.”

  He had quite recovered his aplomb by the time we were outside. He even showed me of his own accord the subsidiary magazine which lay some hundred yards farther north, and housed the inflammable stuff like the S.I.P. bottles. There were scores of yards of all sorts of fuses, and electrical apparatus used for remote detonation, and when I finally left him I felt I had had a very interesting hour.

  I dropped in at the Mess where Shorty made me some mid-morning coffee, and it was well after eleven hours when I went in search of George again. He had finished his job with Compress and was now in the room that had been Mortar’s. Feeder was there, and the camp Quartermaster, arranging a new issue of furniture precisely like the old. Feeder was assuring Wharton that the room was exactly as it had been on the Saturday morning, except for private baggage. Wharton went to the trouble of having two bags of his own brought in to represent those destroyed.

  While he was waiting for them to come he explained that the photograph of the room would supplement the photographs of the body, and that Compress had already marked on a ground-plan of the room the spots, as nearly as he could remember, where each portion of the body had been found. The fire had been the really disastrous concealer of evidence.