For some moments there was silence in the ambulance, except for the distant sound of sirens.
“Did Oliver see you?” asked Sarah.
“Oh yes. He’d followed Coffey at a safe distance. He recognized my run. Coffey saw it was a young man’s run, and thought it was one of his boys. Oliver knew it was me. After that, all the time, he was covering up for me. He’d been suspicious of my postcards.”
“Why?”
“The stories of fighting on them never seemed to correspond with the reports in the papers. He was following the war, while Mother and Father were just deploring it. Oliver is the best of us, you know.”
“I know,” said Sarah.
The ambulance had turned down towards Charing Cross and the hospital, but Sarah could almost feel the life of the man on the stretcher ebbing away.
“What is it Housman says gives a man the taste for blood? I don’t remember, but I know killing does. It was like a release. I took the ferry to Dieppe, went to Paris, and was in on the ground floor when the International Brigade was formed. By December I was inside Spain, by the end of the year I was fighting. I fought through the spring and summer of 1937, till I was captured in October . . . I served my sentence in a Spanish jail . . .”
They were halted just above Foyle’s. Firemen had cordoned off part of the road.
“I can’t describe the Falange jail. The disease, the lice, the starvation . . . the beatings and the executions. Above all the executions. Everyone I knew and loved seemed to end up before the firing squad. It was hell on earth. This is heaven by comparison. I would have been shot, but I told them I was from an English noble family. They wanted to keep in with the Tories. They sent me home in March, ‘39, riddled with consumption . . . Funny: the Spanish war was a dress rehearsal for this one. I was in on the dress rehearsal, but missed the show. The army wouldn’t have me, nor anyone else, so I joined the firemen.” He nodded at the body on the stretcher. “Seems that’s just as dangerous.”
They were still stalled. The fire seemed to be getting out of control. Will smiled at Sarah, a smile of great charm. She was to remember it often when she saw him on television, that attractive lock plastered over his forehead, to hide the scar.
“It’s odd, isn’t it? I’m the only one doing something that Dennis and Helen approve of. I’m surrounded by conscientious objectors who regard my parents as secular saints. Elizabeth has married a Welsh sheep farmer and become a moral vegetable, and Oliver is in the army, as I always said he would be if war broke out. I suppose I’m happiest of all, except for Winifred, who is taking in evacuees and in her seventh heaven. Mother and Father are agonizing in Oxford over which part of the war effort they can engage in with a clear conscience.”
“Did you tell them when you got home?” Sarah asked.
“Oh yes. We all went along to Minchip in Banbury, and in the end he was satisfied that it was virtually an accident. It was old history by then. Nobody wanted to revive it, and Minchip was a fair man. He could see I had suffered . . . The case is closed. Except that it changed all our lives.”
The hand of the man on the stretcher went limp as the ambulance at last moved forward. Sarah drew her hand away and looked at Will. Then she stood up and drew his eyelids down, with the calm efficiency of one who has been granted great familiarity with death.
By the Same Author
The Cherry Blossom Corpse
Bodies
Political Suicide
Fête Fatale
Out of the Blackout
Corpse in a Gilded Cage
School for Murder
The Case of the Missing Brontë
A Little Local Murder
Death and the Princess
Death by Sheer Torture
Death in a Cold Climate
Death of a Perfect Mother
Death of a Literary Widow
Death of a Mystery Writer
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Copyright © 1987 by Robert Barnard
First American Edition, 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnard, Robert.
The skeleton in the grass.
I. Title.
PR6052.A665S55 1988 823’.914 88-3075
ISBN 0-684-18948-8
eISBN-13: 978-1-4767-3718-8
The Skeleton in the Grass Page 19