3
When Byfold and Goyles got back to their room they found Tony Long sitting at the table. ‘Hugo and Grim are out too,’ he explained. ‘We only got seven days this time. Just petty criminals. What on earth have you been up to whilst I’ve been away?’
Goyles and Byfold told him what had happened.
‘Thank God Colonel Baird stuck his toes in over our tunnel,’ said Long. ‘It should be through in six weeks – less if we hurry. The other scheme’s not unpromising either.’ He reported the results of his and Baierlein’s observations the previous night. ‘Both cell windows are wide open,’ he said. ‘It took two months to do but it’s a beautiful job. The stone that holds the bottom of the middle bar has been loosened so that you can slide it right out. The bar then drops away from the top socket and leaves you quite enough room to squeeze through and get out on to the roof. Grim was too hefty, but Hugo and I did it easily. Once up on the roof you need a short wooden ladder. Pick your moment when the gate sentry’s in his box, and it would be money for old rope.’
‘The real difficulty,’ said Byfold, ‘would be making sure that we all got put in the cooler at once.’
‘There’s a bigger snag than that,’ said Goyles. ‘The first part’s all right, but what about the next. We should need all the usual kit – money, food, and so on. How are we going to get it into prison with us?’
Whilst they were thinking that one out, it might be an opportunity to snatch a moment to introduce them.
They formed one of those close, prisoner-of-war friendships which, if analysed, would have been found to be based on community of interests and dissimilarity of character.
Their own accounts of how they came into captivity afford a sufficient commentary.
Roger Byfold was a regular soldier. He had left Sandhurst at about Munich-time to join a Lancer Regiment already under orders for the Middle East. He had been there when war was declared. He was a tank man and a professional soldier, and desert warfare had suited him down to the ground. Indeed, he had done very well at it, as the white-and-purple ribbon on his battle-dress bore witness, until one day everything went wrong: ‘Just a normal patrol. Can’t help thinking it must have been Friday the thirteenth and I never noticed it. First my wireless went dead. Then I broke a track. Told the rest of the troop to complete the recce and pick me up on the way back. I heard afterwards they lost their way and were lucky to get back themselves. Got out and mended the track and found we were in a mine field. First news of this was when we blew the other track off, and half the suspension with it. Nothing much left to do. Waited for the troop all day. When they didn’t turn up, we tried to walk back. Got picked up by the Krauts early next morning.’
‘Bad luck,’ everyone agreed, ‘but just the sort of thing one expected in armoured warfare.’
Henry Goyles was a schoolmaster, the son of a solicitor. He was a good bit the oldest of the three. When war broke out he joined the ranks of a Gunner Regiment, where his precision of thought and speech, his occasional absence of mind, and his large round steel spectacles had earned him the name of ‘Cuckoo’ – a name which had followed him through the Army and accompanied him into captivity. He must have been quite a good gunner, because in 1941 he got one of the few and much-coveted commissions into a regular Horse Artillery Regiment, and he reached his battery in time for the Auchinleck offensive. If he was frequently frightened in the course of the next three months he managed to conceal it as well as most, particularly when he could devote his mind to a purely technical problem.
This was eventually his undoing.
‘It was rather an advanced sort of O.P.,’ he explained. ‘We got there before first light, in Bren carriers, and then everybody who had come with us seemed to fade away. I was just thinking that we were rather out in the blue, and perhaps we ought to pull back a bit, when suddenly I saw a most beautiful target – the type of thing you get on the ranges at Larkhill, but never expect to see in real life. It was a German Staff car, which had broken down, just behind a sort of hump. They thought they were hidden, but I could see them all right. A pin-point target, you understand, with flank observation. Really, a fascinating problem. Being out to one side, you could see the effect of the charge zone very clearly. I bracketed for line, and I bracketed for range and I worked out the angle and the factor and then I put over a beauty – I think it landed on the radiator cap. I had noticed someone come up behind me just before I gave the order to fire, and I turned round and said, “What about that for a shot?”’
‘And,’ concluded Goyles sadly, ‘it was a German with a tommy-gun.’
‘Very bad luck,’ everyone agreed, ‘but just the sort of thing which was always happening to forward O.P.s.’
Tony Long, the youngest of the three, was a born irregular. He took to any form of special service like a duck to water. To look at him you might have thought that he was one of those serious, polite, hard-working, athletic boys who make the best regimental officers. To a certain extent, this was true. What you would never have guessed was that he was at heart a bandit and a killer. He had arrived at Campo 127 after three years of miscellaneous and improbable enterprises.
‘The last one really was rather mad,’ he said. ‘I landed on the coast of Sicily with one sergeant and a bag of bombs. I had to blow up two railway bridges. Moreover, I did blow them up. Unfortunately, something went wrong on the last one and we brought down a good deal of bridge on top of ourselves. When I came to I found the sergeant was dead and I had broken an ankle. I got picked up two nights later.’
‘Extremely bad luck,’ everybody agreed. ‘But what else can you expect if you go about behaving in such an unorthodox way?’
4
‘You want to do what?’ said Colonel Lavery, surprised for once out of his usual calm.
‘Just a precaution, you understand,’ said Benucci.
‘Everybody’s finger-prints?’
‘We must take everybody’s. Otherwise the check will not be complete.’
‘The orderlies too?’
‘Everyone,’ said Benucci firmly.
‘I don’t think you can do it,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘I don’t think the Geneva Convention allows it.’
‘The Geneva Convention governs the conduct of the captor towards his prisoners of war,’ agreed Benucci. ‘In this case it is not a question of prisoners of war. An unexplained death has taken place. Indeed, the matter has ceased to be entirely under my control.’
‘How do you propose to set about it?’
‘It should not take very long. The pads have been prepared and if you will issue the necessary orders, I will have it carried out at roll-call this evening.’
‘I shall report the whole matter to the Protecting Power,’ said Colonel Lavery.
5
‘Really,’ said Rupert Rolf-Callender to his friends in Hut A. ‘I mean to say – finger-prints. What next?’
‘If you feel so strongly about it, why didn’t you refuse?’
‘Really, Terence, I couldn’t start a brawl.’
‘If you want my opinion,’ said Captain the Honourable Peter Perse, ‘it’s all on account of this stupid tunnel. I always told Duncan it would be discovered, and of course it has been, and now there’s going to be nothing but unpleasantness, you see if I’m not right.’
‘I’ve never known them behave quite like this before,’ said Terence Bush. ‘Usually they strafe the hut a bit when a tunnel’s discovered and then forget about it. They haven’t done a thing this time except shut up that actual bathroom – they haven’t even turned the showers off.’
‘I don’t think they’re really worried about the tunnel,’ said Rolf-Callender. ‘It was finding that chap in it.’
‘How did he get there?’
‘As a matter of fact I can tell you that,’ said Bush. ‘He was put there. I got it from Chris Martin in Hut C. Apparently Colonel Baird got a lot of them to put up a sort of gym display to cover up carrying the body across and Chris was in it. They put Coutoules on Byfold
’s back and galloped him across.’
‘Do you mean to say,’ said the Honourable Peter with some indignation, ‘that they simply dumped him on us. Why can’t Hut C stick to their own rotten bodies? Here we are, cut down to one bathroom between eighty of us—’
‘Shocking.’
‘What can you expect,’ said Rolf-Callender. ‘Those cloak-and-dagger types are all the same. It isn’t as if they’d got a chance in a million of getting anywhere. If they had, one might do something about it. But no one’s ever got out of this country yet and no one’s ever going to. All that happens is that they dig these footling holes in the ground, which get discovered, and everyone else is made uncomfortable. If they do get out they spend about three nights in the open and then get caught and come back and have thirty days in the cooler and think themselves no end of chaps.’
‘In any case,’ said the Honourable Peter, ‘we’ve only got to sit tight a few more weeks and the Eighth Army will catch up with us. Is anyone going to spin the wheel tonight?’
‘Not tonight,’ said Rolf-Callender. ‘Have you forgotten? We’re rehearsing tonight. We’ll use the dining-room after supper’s been cleared away.’
‘We shall probably find someone starting another tunnel there,’ said the Honourable Peter bitterly.
6
Baierlein, Overstrand and Grimsdale were walking round the perimeter of the camp, just inside the trip wire, which guarded a six-foot forbidden zone at the foot of the wall itself. Every fifty yards inside the wire, a notice board bore an imaginative piece of English prose which ran ‘Passage and Demurrage strictly forbidden’. If anyone stepped over this wire the sentries had orders to shoot at them.
Baierlein and Grimsdale were busy reporting to Overstrand the results of their recent imprisonment. Their conclusions were much the same as Long’s had been.
‘It’s easy enough,’ said Baierlein, ‘provided you’re a stock-sized person, to get out on to the roof. If Grim’s going to do it, it will mean loosening another bar.’
‘What about the gap between the roof and the wall?’
‘Ten feet,’ said Baierlein. ‘You’d need a short ladder for that bit, but you could make it out of the double bedsteads in the cell. They’re enormous things – the side pieces are over ten feet long. That isn’t the real trouble though—’
‘It’s the kit,’ said Grimsdale. ‘What’s the use of getting over the wall if you find yourself dressed in battle-dress, with no food and no money and no papers in the middle of Italy.’
‘I had wondered,’ said Baierlein, ‘if we mightn’t arrange to have the stuff brought in to us. I know we shall get thoroughly searched when we go into the cooler, and it would be risky to smuggle much escaping kit in with us. One might get away with money, maps and compasses, but nothing really bulky.’
‘If we’re going cross-country we should want some sort of covering – a blanket, or at least an overcoat, and a knapsack to carry hard rations.’
‘To say nothing of the rations themselves.’
‘Exactly,’ said Baierlein. ‘Well, my idea was, we take in the small stuff hidden on us, and get the orderlies to smuggle the rest in bit by bit, in the food.’
‘It would need a bloody big apple pie to hide an overcoat in,’ said Overstrand.
They paced on for some minutes and had made a complete circuit of the camp before Overstrand spoke again.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘that we ought to look for something more immediate.’
Neither of the others said anything.
‘I’ve been in nearly two years,’ went on Overstrand, ‘and that’s one hell of a sight too long. Now we’ve had this trouble over the Hut C tunnel I don’t see it going ahead very fast. They may decide to seal it up altogether for a bit. There are too many snags in this ‘cooler’ business to make it worth going flat out for – that’s my view, anyway. I think we ought to try something more straightforward and less – well, less fiddling.’
Baierlein and Grimsdale looked worried. They were both genuinely fond of Overstrand, but they knew that he was apt to be unreliable where his emotions were involved.
‘Had you anything particular in mind?’ said Long.
‘As a matter of fact I had,’ said Overstrand. ‘It’s something that Desmond Foster is doing—’
‘He can’t be starting another tunnel already.’
‘It isn’t exactly a tunnel. It’s top secret, of course, but he couldn’t mind my telling you two. This is how it goes—’
7
‘Should we look in somewhere for a cocktail first?’ suggested Captain Abercrowther to Captain the McInstalker.
‘Not a cocktail,’ protested the McInstalker. ‘Geraldo is digging out a 1924 Mouton Rothschild for us. A cocktail would be definitely out of place.’
‘Perhaps a glass of sherry.’
‘One glass of brown sherry. We’ve just time. Let’s have it at the Salted Almond. We may run into someone amusing.’
A few minutes passed in silence.
‘One more.’
‘One for the road, then.’
‘Curse. It’s beginning to rain – I don’t think we’ll bother about a cab, though. It’s only a hundred yards.’
Both gentlemen turned up their coat collars against the light autumn rain and strolled down the Shaftesbury Avenue of 1939.
8
‘Five women,’ said Rupert Rolf-Callender, ‘and twelve men. Thirteen, if you count Flush.’
‘Was he a man?’
‘It says “Flush – a spaniel”.’
‘How are we going to manage about Flush?’
‘First things first,’ said Rolf-Callender. ‘We’ll start with the girls. Peter, you’ll have to do Elizabeth.’
‘Must I?’
‘Certainly you must. The part’s made for you.’
‘Why do I always have to do girls?’
‘To be quite honest,’ said Rolf-Callender kindly, ‘I don’t know. It isn’t as if you were pretty, in any sense of the word, and the trouble we had keeping the backs of your legs shaved for the run of Bitter Sweet is a thing I prefer to forget. Nor is your voice precisely virginal. It’s something to do with the bones in your face—’
‘Who’s going to do the father?’
‘I think we shall have to ask Abercrowther.’
‘You can’t have a Mr Barrett with a Scots accent.’
‘We shall have to put up with it. He’s a damned good actor. Do you remember how good he was in the Monty Woolley part in The Man Who Came to Dinner?’
‘All right, put him down. Where is he, by the way?’
‘He’s dining out tonight,’ said Bush. ‘What are you going to do, Rupert?’
‘I rather thought I’d try Robert Browning.’
‘My God, Rupert, do you mean to say I’ve got to make love to you again?’
‘You did it very nicely last time,’ said Rolf-Callender complacently. ‘Now all these brothers – Octavius and Septimus and so on. They’re really only stooges. We’d better let the Adjutant do one of them, as then he’ll make no trouble about letting us have the Theatre Hut for rehearsals.’
‘Whatever happens,’ said Bush, ‘we’ve got one absolutely guaranteed laugh here.’ He was turning over the pages of the acting edition.
‘What’s that?’
‘At the beginning of Act III. “Elizabeth (rapturously). ‘Italy! Oh, it’s hard to take in even the bare possibility of going there. My promised land, Doctor, which I never thought to see otherwise than in dreams.’” ’
‘That should bring the house down,’ agreed Rolf-Callender.
Chapter 4
The Scapegoat
1
‘Doctor Simmonds,’ said Benucci, ‘you are a man of experience?’
‘That would depend what you mean by experience.’
‘Medical experience?’
‘I should say so, yes.’
‘You are not a regular military doctor?’
‘Oh, no. Certa
inly not.’
‘You are a civilian doctor. You hold the degree of F.R.C.S.?’
‘It’s not exactly a degree,’ said Doctor Simmonds cautiously. ‘Anyway, I expect it’s in my record somewhere. What’s it all about?’
They were in the Camp Commandant’s Office. Besides Benucci, the Chief Interpreter and Doctor Simmonds there was a fourth party present. A thin civilian in black coat and striped trousers, with that neat beard which appears to be the hallmark of professional eminence in Latin countries.
‘I must introduce Professor Di Buonavilla of the medical faculty of the University of Florence.’
The professor rose to his feet and bowed. Doctor Simmonds half got up, made an indeterminate noise, and sat down again.
‘It is because we wish to proceed correctly in this,’ said Captain Benucci smoothly, ‘that I have afforded you – Doctor Simmonds – this opportunity of examining the body of Lieutenant Coutoules. Also, because I understood that you were the best qualified in the Camp to make this examination.’
‘Very good of you,’ said Doctor Simmonds. He was not quite sure what a professor in the faculty of medicine did. ‘If this gentleman is a practising doctor, I have no doubt that his conclusions will be the same as my own.’
‘No doubt,’ said Benucci. ‘That is exactly what we wish to establish. I should perhaps have explained that the professor is consultant to the Police Force at Firenze. It is for his experience in this type of work that we have asked him to assist us. He does not speak English himself but I will ask Lieutenant Mordaci to read you a translation of the statement he has prepared. If there are any questions you wish to ask, pray use the services of the interpreter.’
Mordaci read from the statement in front of him. It was a long statement. It started with a description of the body of Coutoules as the professor had seen it at two o’clock on the afternoon of its discovery. It contained some sound observations on rigor mortis, postmortem bruising and the tendency of blood to drain outwards from the centre of the corpse after death. Doctor Simmonds, who had the essential disinterested honesty of the expert, found it hard to disagree with any of its conclusions. These were: that Coutoules had died some time one side or the other of midnight, but not earlier than nine o’clock on the previous evening; that death had been due to asphyxiation; and that the body had been moved and handled after death.
Death In Captivity Page 5