“On my head be it? Agreed. Off you go.”
“Very well. It’s twenty-five years since I took part in ‘one of the longest and fiercest battles ever fought in the annals of war,’” he said in a mock-portentous tone, smiling as the inspector flicked away an imaginary bee from his ear. “Not my description! Oh no. That was our experience as thoughtfully put into words for us (and for posterity!) by our general, Lord Methuen. A good man, Methuen—brave and dogged. He meant well and was speaking in the flush of a third consecutive victory, you understand. Victories not due to inspired strategy, but the ferocity and determination of his troops, troops stiffened not a little by the presence of a brigade of Guards, a bristling pack of the Ninth Lancers and a naval squadron of English seaman gunners and marines. The best in the business with a cannon, full of skill and heart!”
For the first time during this interview, Redfyre sensed he had been treated to an honest comment devoid of sarcasm or scheming. That was surely a genuine glow of admiration in the old feller’s eyes. But it swiftly faded.
“The old man was rallying us for the next onslaught. My own summary of the enterprise would be less gallant, more unprintably demotic. I would risk adding a charge of public profanity and antigovernment rhetoric to my charge sheet.” He leaned across the desk to the farthest extent his shackle would permit and added with a bitter smile: “You might even accuse me of being an agitator!”
The dreaded word “agitator” was accompanied by a theatrical clattering of chains. The snort of irritation the inspector could not quite suppress did not go unnoticed.
“Just humour me, sir,” Redfyre said evenly. “Swear as much as you like, but leave out the politics.”
“I’m sorry, but I must again decline your invitation to reminisce. I’d be wasting your time. My South African experiences, fighting the enemies of the Great White Queen, can be of no conceivable interest to a . . . provincial English constabulary.” He left a brief pause to allow the insult to be registered. “We are separated from my youthful misfortunes by two continents, a waste of seas and a quarter of a century. To say nothing of the War to End War. I simply can see no connection.”
The prisoner appeared to have found and touched a nerve in the phlegmatic officer. “Murder! That’s the connection!” the inspector barked at him. “Multiple murders! It’s hardly the Spion Kop for body count around here and may scarcely rate with an old warrior like you, but bodies carelessly left lying about on my patch will be accounted for and retribution exacted from the guilty!”
Then, more calmly: “And let’s think of us as the Cambridge CID, shall we? You’ve met our Detective Superintendent MacFarlane and come out of that encounter with a bloody nose—figuratively speaking. The superintendent is nothing if not correct in his dealings with villains. You are aware of the quality of the policing you are attempting unsuccessfully to slur, so come off it! When recent deaths are calculated to have sprung from murky sources in the past, we have the habit—uncomfortable for some—of rooting around until we come up with what we’re seeking. And, believe me, here in Cambridge, we have history by the bucketful to play with! Drawers and filing cabinets bursting with it! Bodies buried six deep! The whole damn place is built on bones.”
The upwards twitch of the corners of the inspector’s tight mouth was intended to be conciliatory. “Yes, we’re busy blokes, but don’t fret—you can leave any deriving of connections to us! Now then, you were about to tell me your whereabouts between the hours of midday and midnight on the twenty-eighth of November, 1899.”
“Twenty-five years ago? Are you mad?”
The witness engaged with the cynical and remarkably rational gaze directed at him, then, resignedly, with a shrug of the shoulders, answered. Quietly. Reasonably. “I understand you were a soldier once upon a time? Before you took up policing? Then I invite you to imagine for yourself my state of mind and body on that date. Towards the end of a fifteen-hour battle—the third such in five days, starved, exhausted by a fifty-mile march, many officers shot dead and more than half of my company lying bleeding to death on a scorching plain behind me . . . Are you still with me? Then add to that the bodily pain of a bullet wound to the arm, lungs full of putrid river water after a swim across a perilous river and the mental terror of being under unremitting fire from enemy snipers in the treetops on the opposite bank.”
The languid delivery and the meaningful glance at the station wall clock that said, Had enough yet? I could go on spinning this yarn for hours, had their intended effect and needled the inquisitor into a flippant remark.
“What about the crocodiles? Surely they get a mention?”
“Not even a walk-on part for the crocs. Sorry. Those creatures tend to infest the Orange River to the south, not so much the Modder River. No, no. The Modder was for many years the scene of civilised regattas in the style of Henley—races rowed between willow-lined banks, all parasols and punts. A welcome, home-from-home entertainment for the British colonial settlers, don’t you know. Crocodiles had long since been discouraged along that water course. Mustn’t frighten the Memsahibs! It was very unsettling for us English lads—can you imagine? There we were, ready to go, bullets up the spout, bayonets fixed, the order to charge ringing in our ears and we were facing a four-mile riverfront. Only lacking an enemy. Where the hell were the Boers? Nowhere to be seen.
“We could make out a long line of rich green bordering the river. On the far side there were tall trees and, brightly white, shouldering through the greenery, stately buildings like those of an English spa town. We could clearly pick out the wedding-cake lines of the hotel and the grand bougainvillea-clad houses where the bigwig European businessmen of Kimberley liked to spend their weekends. And their ill-gotten profits. All that gold . . . all those De Beers diamonds, weighing them down. They got out pretty sharpish with their worldly goodies in their saddle-packs when the trouble started. They were back in London, Amsterdam, New York, shuffling their share certificates. Waiting for us to clean up their political mess and establish economic supremacy at the cost of our lives.”
He caught the asperity in his tone and smiled. “But it all looked so familiar! I expected any minute to hear a tinkling laugh and ‘Was that tonic or lime juice with your gin, Daphne?’ ring out. Inspector, we might have been invading Henley-on-Thames! Raiding Royal Leamington Spa! It was unreal! Until the moment we caught sight of the Mauser rifles poking through the lace-curtained upper windows. And then the barrage started up.”
“But you got across. Thanks to the purging of the crocodiles.”
“The worst of the obstacles to crossing we had to contend with was the very large number of enemy corpses and dead horses swirling down from the carnage being inflicted on the Boer by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders holding our right wing, upstream of our position. There’d been heavy rain in the night, the current was fierce and the Scotsmen were ruthless killers. Or ‘bonny fighters,’ if you prefer.”
“I do prefer.” The rebuke was frosty.
The man smiled as he chalked up another point in the obscure game he was playing.
“You admired the capabilities of the enemy?” the inspector enquired carefully.
“Whoa there! Nothing treacherous in that, if treachery is what you’re implying. And I wasn’t the only man to notice. We were all impressed by their military prowess, including our commanders, who made many remarks to that effect in dispatches from the battle lines. No one had suspected that a group of Dutch settlers would be such a hard nut to crack. Ragged-looking scarecrows, not a uniform among them. The only flourish they allowed themselves was the occasional ostrich feather or a white cockade in their dusty old hats. The Boers of the Transvaal! Absolute sods when you got to know them at close quarters. Treacherous ticks! You wouldn’t want to play them at cricket! But the best marksmen in the world—best horsemen, too, most probably. And equipped with the finest rifles: the Mauser 95, bought at great expense from Ge
rmany.” He lightly caught the eye of the detective and added: “It struck some of us as odd, that. Dirt-poor farmers, scraping a living from an unproductive wilderness, yet armed with the latest imported machine guns, field artillery and rifles? Ordnance of European origin. French and German mostly. Far in advance of anything the British army could boast.” He sighed. “The cream of Her Britannic Majesty’s regiments was being shot to pieces by guerrilla gangs of rough-riding, sharpshooting farmers.”
“But evidently, you made it over to the northern bank.”
The old soldier nodded. “Some of us. Enough. We’d shot and bayonetted our way through the first line of Commandant Cronje’s troops, dug in deep on the southern side. They were well prepared for us. Their barrels were level with our kneecaps as we came on, all unsuspecting, across the plain. They know how to keep quiet and hold their fire for the moment critique, the Boers. Cronje’s clever idea, that—a double bank of defence, the first on the near side of the river. It took us all by surprise. They mowed us down like tall grass before a scythe. The old fox had placed his younger, weaker units down there in the trenches, saving his old beardies and his artillery for the more secure position on the northern bank.
“At great cost, we’d fought our way up close to the defence pits and were within yards of overrunning them when the Boers decided to call it a day. They never stood to the last man. They had an uncanny way of judging to perfection the moment the fight began to go against them and—without need of a bugle call—they all scarpered. Cronje’s front line men had to take their chances and flee back across the river right under their own side’s guns! That’s Boer ruthlessness for you. Did he care? The old goat had a reputation for being unacquainted with ‘the more chivalrous usages of war.’ He wouldn’t have hesitated to sacrifice his third-raters. They’d done the job they’d been set to do, after all.
“They’d brought us up short and given us a bloody nose, identified and shot a good number of our officers. Their hawks’ eyes could pick out an officer’s markings a mile away. And in our outfit, the officers put themselves in the front line. But I think the Boer were so confident of their marksmanship they knew that from up there in the treetops they could spot and spare their own fellows, even in the sauve qui peut that ensued. At one point, I found myself swimming alongside an escaping Boer lad not old enough to have a beard. At the same moment we stopped and trod water, just staring at each other, eye to eye. With his fair hair and eyes the colour of the North Sea, he could have been my little brother. I gave him a jokey salute, he winked at me and we swam on together. Matching stroke for stroke, inches apart. Each protecting the other from opposing fire, I suppose. Did it occur to us at the time? I’m sure it did. We went our separate ways when we grounded. Nothing in the rule book about that! ‘Tactical use of enemy to facilitate preservation of self,’ would you say? It seemed to work.”
“One of your marines would have known what to do.” The inspector’s gritty response offered no absolution. “Were you still armed at this point?”
“I never let go of my Lee–Metford. I was staggering up the bank, gasping, vomiting river water, looking about me for my company, knowing I had at best ten seconds to live. The air around me was humming with bullets falling thick as hailstones on a pond, kicking up spurts of sand round my feet and all the way to the tree line, when I heard it.”
“It?” So sudden and so deep was the man’s descent into his past, the inspector felt almost embarrassed to interrupt his thoughts.
“The whistling! The Boers stopped shooting. God knows what the signal was—I never heard it—but like a well-rehearsed orchestra, they ceased fire all at once. There was an uncanny silence, bewildering, more threatening than the noise of battle had been. And then the whistling started. My knees buckled under me and I collapsed onto the sand.”
Chapter 5
Cambridge Police Station, Saturday,
the 7th of June, 1924
“Whistling? . . . Oi! Wakey wakey! You can’t say something as far-fetched as that and then just doze off! Who or what was whistling? Human, monkey, freak wind or Wilfred the Whistling Coster Boy?”
The witness snapped back from the past and focused once more with irritation on the cynical face of the inspector. “Human, of course. But not the sort of frightful mouth music that rouses a heckle from the back rows of Wilton’s Music Hall. This was whistling with a purpose, and it came from the treetop perches of the Boers.”
“Passing a message along the line to their mates? That’s a new one! We could have used that in the trenches.”
“No. It wasn’t directed at their fellow soldiers.” The man smiled. “It was meant for their horses.”
“Eh?”
“Highly trained animals! Horses have a keen sense of hearing, and the Boer nags were taught more tricks than a circus pony from an early age. The men were—to put it mildly—fluid. As a blob of mercury is fluid when you try to touch it with a forefinger. I never saw them march anywhere. They arrived and left the battle on horseback. Alive, dead or dying. The previous week we’d been fighting our way towards Kimberley, encountering stiff resistance from their troops dug in on what they called ‘kopjes.’ A kopje is a steep, round-topped hill, and there was no end of them sticking up out of the veldt, barring our way north to Kimberley. Very simply, the Dutchmen arrived to ambush us from the southern slopes of these hills. And they were certainly well concealed! I swear I was fighting the buggers for days before I clapped eyes on one. Nothing visible but the dull lead-coloured barrels of their rifles poking through the rocks. And by the time you’d spotted that, the bullet that would hit you between the eyes was on its way. Their positions were impossible to catch sight of because they all used the new smokeless powder. No expense on armament spared with that lot. They’d arrive and abandon their horses, untethered, in the shade on the far side. The horses waited. Never known to stray. When the moment came for the Boers to do a bunk, they simply stopped shooting and whistled for their horses. Yes, whistled! And the animals came when summoned, racing up to the northern foot of the kopje to their masters, who’d scrambled down and were ready to take off.
“It was a while before I worked out what the significance of the sound was. When first heard, it was eerie. Terrifying. But the moment you understood—it became a wondrous sign of release. They were off! Scarpering! My knees gave way and I sank onto the sand in relief. Murmuring a prayer of thanks that I’d been saved to live another day and do all this over again.”
The inspector gave a tug to keep this man’s head pointing in the right direction. “So there you are, dripping wet on the riverbank, not so much as an anthill for cover, but still armed, certain death within a few paces and then—miraculously—the sound that heralds your safety rings out.” Then, military curiosity getting the better of him. “Did you take prisoners?”
“Ha! No. We collected a number of dead they hadn’t managed to haul away, but that was it. We men weren’t in the mood by that time for taking prisoners. The previous two battles had curdled our view of soldiering.”
An expectant silence and a raised eyebrow greeted this comment.
The witness suppressed a sarcastic laugh. “My first sight of a Boer! And it wasn’t a pretty one!” He leaned forward, fixing the inspector with a hypnotic grey eye. “It was at Belmont. Our first touch with the enemy. A smart young Guards officer advancing up the kopje on our right flank stumbled on a well-concealed shelter pit. A Boer, wounded in the chest, suddenly rose up from it. He struggled to his feet and mouthed something. A pitiful sight. He was clearly dying of thirst as well as his wound. The Guardsman whipped out his water bottle and stepped forward, holding it out to him. The desperado’s response was to raise his rifle and shoot the officer’s face off.”
The inspector flinched, then pursed his lips. “That’s war. These stories take hold of the common imagination and snowball out of proportion. Faults on both sides, no doubt.”
Stu
ng by the dismissive comment, the prisoner gave a withering response. “That’s a very newfangled view of war, young man. War is as old as Satan. And it has only one rule. In the same battle, we were on the point of taking out a stoutly defended kopje when a man with comrades at his sides emerged from the rocks waving a white flag. We immediately ceased fire and our officer went forward to accept their surrender when—bugger me!—he threw down the flag and they all fired a volley straight at us. We captured the lot of them, including the flag-waver, and such was the humanity and discipline of my men, even he was spared the bayonet. And if you think that’s just a snowballed story, you may check the facts in the Morning Post. Their correspondent was with us on the line. Edward Knight. He lost his right arm to a dumdum bullet in that encounter. Try explaining to a man with a throbbing stump that it’s due to nothing more than the common imagination running riot, and anyway, he’s probably done worse himself.”
“Well, we have you inching forward rather than striding towards your objective—the relief of besieged, bombed, starving Kimberley. Were you able to reconnect with your platoon after your swim? Did you have further orders?”
“I found five of my original unit.” With a thoughtful look, he added: “Not the ones I’d have liked to find still standing in some cases, but that’s war, as you would say. The boldest and best go first. We managed to collect ourselves, stand to attention with our rifles to hand and even look as though we knew what we were doing when a senior officer came riding up with orders from Lord Methuen. They were about to clear the land between the river and Kimberley of enemy. Not an easy task; the place was still crawling with them. He eyed us up and came to a decision.
“He had a little job for us. It amounted to following the river westward until we arrived at the railway line running north towards Kimberley. It was vital that the line be secured. We were to be what I’d have judged a reconnaissance patrol-cum-outpost, though he called it a ‘tactical sub-unit,’ working the left flank of a four-mile-wide front. He showed us a hand-drawn map and pointed at the railway. ‘We understand it hasn’t been sabotaged by the Boer yet,’ he explained, ‘because they depend on it themselves for the running of heavy armament up to the siege site. We want it to remain untouched and will be sending in a company to guard and patrol it once we’ve got things straight here. Now, do you see this little box affair here? Where the railway line crosses the river? It’s a shelter, guard station, horse-relay depot, that sort of thing. You must take it from whoever is in residence, should you find it occupied, and settle in there. Establish a forward base. You’ll be relieved very shortly.’ He gave us a confident smile as he said it. ‘Draw your supplies,’ he told us. ‘For a week. Hard tack, tinned meat, compass, matches, whatever you need. Here’s a chit.’
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