Death In Captivity

by Michael Gilbert

  ‘Have you any comments to make, Doctor?’ asked Benucci, when the statement had finished.

  For form’s sake, Doctor Simmonds asked a few questions and Mordaci translated them, and retranslated the professor’s answers. He asked the professor if he had noticed a bruise on the back of Coutoules’ neck. The professor had noticed it. He suggested it might have been made by a stone in the fall of sand. Doctor Simmonds agreed that it might. It was quite clear to him that the professor knew his job – as he would be likely to do if he was, in fact, the police consultant.

  ‘Well, Doctor,’ said Benucci again, at the end of it, ‘what are your conclusions?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I follow you.’

  ‘It seems plain to you that Coutoules was moved after death?’

  ‘That’s a matter of argument and inference. Not a matter of fact.’

  ‘If we accept it,’ said Benucci, ‘is it not logical to surmise that Coutoules was smothered first, and placed in the tunnel afterwards, in order to conceal the truth about his murder – and his murderers?’

  ‘You mean that you think he was killed in one of the huts and put in the tunnel afterwards?’

  ‘It is not a question of thinking,’ said Benucci, in an ill-natured parody of the doctor’s professional manner. ‘It is a question of evidence.’

  ‘But that’s absurd,’ said Doctor Simmonds. ‘Did you look at his hands?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘He must have died under the sand. Why, he’d pulled half his nails off trying to claw his way out.’

  The last few exchanges had been in English. The professor had clearly understood nothing.

  ‘Ask him,’ said Doctor Simmonds.

  There was an awkward moment of silence whilst Mordaci looked at his senior officer for guidance.

  ‘Put the question, Lieutenant,’ said Benucci evenly.

  Mordaci said something in Italian.

  Doctor Simmonds did not listen to the answer. He was looking at the professor’s face. His expression was enlightening. He started to say something, then changed his mind; started a second sentence, and broke off in the middle of it.

  Benucci said: ‘The professor says that he does not attach any particular significance to the state of Coutoules’ hands.’

  2

  The Escape Committee met in Colonel Baird’s room. Baird sat on the only chair; the other two members of the committee sat on his bed. They were Colonel Stanislaus Shore of the U.S. Air Force and Commander Oxey of the Royal Navy. No one had been able to discover by exactly what administrative muddle these two had been sent to a camp for British Army Officers, but everyone was very glad to have them. Colonel Shore, in particular, was a three-dimensional character in his own right. He was the only prisoner-of-war in Italy who had ever forced an officer of carabinieri to carry his luggage for him to the station. The fact that he was drunk at the time had detracted nothing from the performance.

  It was Colonel Shore who was speaking.

  ‘I certainly find it difficult to figure out exactly what they’re up to,’ he said. ‘They’ve never made a fuss like this before over a dead body. You remember when they shot Colley and his two friends when they tried to rush the gate – we didn’t hear anything more about them, did we? They were buried and forgotten inside a week. Forgotten by the Italians, I mean. I reckon someone’s got the facts notched up somewhere to sort out after the war’s over.’

  ‘Or those men who jumped the train—’ said Commander Oxey.

  ‘I think this is a little different,’ said Colonel Baird. ‘Those others were all killed escaping. For some reason the Italians refuse to be convinced that Coutoules was.’

  ‘That doctor from Florence,’ said Shore, ‘and the finger-printing and all those photographers they’ve been taking round the dig. Maybe I’ve got a suspicious mind, but the whole thing’s beginning to look to me like the beginning of a frame-up. It has the smell of one. They want to pin the murder on to someone, and I don’t believe they’re fussy who they choose.’

  ‘Who did kill Coutoules?’ asked Oxey.

  This direct, naval question produced a silence.

  ‘I’m damned if I know,’ said Colonel Baird. ‘On the face of it, the thing’s impossible. The only sort of solution that holds any water is that he was knocked off sometime that evening in Hut C, and dumped in the tunnel.’

  ‘If that’s so,’ said Shore, ‘an awful lot of people are telling an awful lot of lies.’

  ‘It might be a good thing to find out,’ said Oxey. ‘We don’t want the wrong person hanged.’

  3

  ‘Now, Captain Byfold,’ said Benucci, ‘I should strongly advise you to speak the truth.’

  ‘I doubt if you’d recognise it if you heard it,’ said Byfold.

  Nevertheless, he was neither as comfortable nor as confident as he sounded. He was in the Camp Commandant’s Office. The Commandant, Captain Benucci and Lieutenant Mordaci were seated. Since there were only three chairs in the room, it followed that the rest of those present – Captain Byfold, Under-Lieutenant Paoli, two camp guards and three or four carabinieri – were standing. They seemed to have been standing for a long time. Byfold wondered what would happen if he suddenly sat down on the floor.

  ‘Were you a member of the party who were engaged in digging a tunnel from the bathroom in Hut A?’

  ‘As I have said a dozen times before, that’s not a question I can be made to answer.’

  ‘If it was simply a matter of escaping, no. This is a question of murder.’

  ‘Who says that it is murder?’

  ‘The facts say so. For the last time, Captain Byfold, did you work in that tunnel?’

  ‘For the last time, I refuse to say.’

  ‘Are you aware that your finger-prints – and only yours – have been found in several places on one of the pieces of wood which formed the upright of the framework in the shaft of that tunnel?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do say so. A piece of wood, Captain Byfold, which formed – I use the past tense – which formed one of the uprights. It had been removed from the framework of the shaft, and very carelessly replaced. It had plainly been put to some use in the tunnel.’

  ‘Very possibly,’ said Byfold wearily. ‘Woodwork is used in a tunnel you know. It has a variety of uses—’

  ‘A variety of uses.’ Benucci smiled. It was not a very pleasant smile. ‘Might I inform you also – I do not wish it to be said at some future time that we have concealed anything from you – might I therefore inform you that photographs taken in the tunnel show a number of marks in the roof – and that these marks have been measured and match exactly the piece of wood to which I refer. What do you deduce from that, Captain Byfold?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I suggest that the wood was used to bring down the tunnel on Coutoules – whilst he was, perhaps, unconscious – ’

  That’s a perfectly filthy suggestion.’

  The Commandant said something, and Mordaci translated. Byfold gathered that the Commandant was asking what his answer had been.

  He therefore said slowly and loudly in his best Italian, ‘All that has been suggested is quite untrue.’ The Commandant looked up at him for a moment, but said nothing. He seemed to be almost asleep.

  ‘You still refuse to admit,’ went on Benucci, ‘that you were a member of this tunnel gang.’

  ‘It’s obviously not much use denying it,’ said Byfold. ‘You seem to have made up your minds about it. I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you that I don’t even live in that hut.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Benucci, ‘and you never visit it either – after dark?’

  Byfold had nothing to say to this. It seemed silly to say that he had visited the hut once only after dark, in order to play a rubber of bridge. Also he had been afforded a sudden glimpse of the care with which the case against him was being constructed – a fractional lifting of the curtain – and it gave him a cold feeling in the pit of his
stomach.

  ‘You must not imagine we are blind, Captain,’ went on Benucci. ‘Because we do not always take action, it does not mean that our sentries have not got eyes – and tongues.’

  The Commandant asked a question and Mordaci translated.

  ‘The Commandant asks if you were a friend of Coutoules.’

  ‘No. Certainly not. I hardly knew him.’

  ‘Then you disliked him?’

  ‘I didn’t dislike him – I hadn’t much time for him.’

  Mordaci did his best with this idiom and the Commandant nodded, and asked another question.

  ‘Why was Coutoules disliked?’

  Byfold, who had seen this one coming, answered it more or less truthfully. ‘It was thought that he had been giving away information about the prisoners to the authorities – to you.’

  Mordaci again translated, and Byfold was interested to see that the Commandant looked genuinely surprised. Benucci remained impassive. Either the suggestion was not news to him or, possibly, he had a better command of his face.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘that is all, Captain Byfold.’ He motioned with his hand and one of the carabinieri threw open the door.

  As the two guards hustled him out Byfold saw Benucci lean across and say something to the Commandant. He seemed to be pleased with himself. The Commandant had relapsed into a stupor.

  4

  Colonel Lavery refrained from saying ‘I told you so’ when Colonel Baird reported to him that evening.

  ‘They seem to be making a dead set at Byfold,’ he said. ‘It’s easy to be wise after the event, but if I’d thought they were going to push the case so hard I’d have taken some elementary precautions.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s just Byfold,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘I think the truth of the matter is that they want a scapegoat—’

  Baird said, with unusual bitterness, ‘Since when have they become so fussy about a death. And I don’t only mean escaping. You remember last winter when the Red Cross parcels didn’t arrive for two months and we had to live on a minus quantity of Italian rations. How many prisoners did we lose then, from starvation and near-starvation? And young Collingwood, with blood-poisoning, that they wouldn’t even let a doctor look at until it was too late. If they want to investigate anything let them start on that.’

  ‘I expect that the approach of the British Army is making them progressively more tender-hearted,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘What are you proposing to do now?’

  ‘I suggest we wait and see if the case against Byfold comes to anything. It may be just bluff. Something for the record, as you suggest. Meanwhile, we push on as fast as possible with Tunnel C.’

  Colonel Lavery looked anxiously at the home-made calendar on the wall. It said ‘July 5th’.

  ‘How soon do you think you can be ready?’

  ‘It isn’t just a question of digging,’ said Baird. ‘If that’s all it was we’d have non-stop shifts and be out inside a week. It’s the shoring-up of the tunnel, and, above all, the old, old problem of getting rid of the sand. I’ve got an idea about that. If it comes off we might be out in just over three weeks – say twenty-five days.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Colonel Lavery, ‘because if my reading of the situation is correct, that could be all the time we’re going to get.’

  5

  ‘Life,’ said Rupert Rolf-Callender, ‘is getting perfectly intolerable.’

  ‘Grim,’ agreed Terence Bush.

  ‘They’ll be asking us for another bed-board soon.’

  ‘It’ll be a nice change if they ask for it,’ said Rolf-Callender. ‘Last time they just took it. I can’t lie on my bed now without bits of me sagging through the boards. I feel like a lot of shopping in a string bag.’

  ‘You look perfectly disgusting,’ agreed the Honourable Peter Perse who slept underneath him. ‘There’s another of those damned penguins.’

  Through the open door of their room in Hut A they watched in disapproving silence as a large subaltern – a stranger, from Hut C – waddled down the passage. Waddled is the exact description of his gait, since he seemed to find his legs unnaturally heavy, and lifted them one after the other with just the tentative deliberation of a young penguin learning to walk. The ends of his long drill trousers were tied tightly round his ankles, and the calves of his legs seemed to be suffering from a form of shifting elephantiasis.

  ‘Where does he put the sand?’ asked Bush, when this remarkable figure had passed out of sight.

  ‘In our tunnel,’ said Rolf-Callender.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a fact. The Eye-ties have posted a sentry on the outside end, but they just sealed down the bathroom end and left it. The bright boys have got the trap open again and are filling the tunnel up from this end.’

  ‘Do you mean to say,’ said Bush, ‘that those types from Hut C are digging sand out of their tunnel and putting it into our tunnel?’

  ‘It’s all very well talking about our tunnel,’ said the Honourable Peter, who was a fair-minded man, and also enjoyed provoking people. ‘I can’t remember you doing much about it when it was actually being dug.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Bush, ‘but if this caper is discovered – God, there’s another of those penguins’ – he got up and shut the door pointedly – ‘if it is discovered, it’s this hut that’s going to suffer. With Benucci in his present frame of mind I can see him shutting off the water and the electric light.’

  The others agreed that this was highly possible.

  6

  ‘We’re definitely interested,’ said Overstrand to Desmond Foster, ‘but we’d like to know a little more about it first.’

  ‘Particularly that bit about the lights,’ said Baierlein.

  ‘All right. You know Tim Meynell?’

  ‘The sewer rat?’

  ‘That’s him—’ They referred to an enthusiast from the Royal Engineers who had dug a way for himself from the camp latrine into the main sewer and had propelled himself along it on an inflated rubber mattress in a number of indescribable journeys of exploration. He had never succeeded in reaching the open and the only result so far of his pioneer work had been that his friends ostentatiously walked up-wind of him.

  ‘Well, he went down last week to have another look at the main pipe – he’s got an idea of forcing a grating inside the Italian quarters – and he reckons he was just about here’ – Foster demonstrated on a plan of the camp which he had drawn – ‘when he suddenly ran into this new electric cable.’

  ‘New?’

  ‘Oh, definitely. He’d been that way two months before, and it wasn’t the sort of thing you could miss seeing. A great insulated cable, obviously new.’

  ‘That sounds very interesting,’ said Overstrand. ‘You think—’

  ‘Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Between the time he was down before, and that time, those four chaps got away over the wall by fusing the lights. You know how it was done.’

  ‘They cut the overhead wire with a pair of shears on a stick, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes. And it’s hard to guard against that sort of thing. There are too many places where you can get at the overhead wire – from the roof of the theatre for one, or anywhere along the south wall, if you’re prepared to take a bit of a chance on it – or from the cooler. Obviously, if they wanted to prevent it happening again, either they had to change all the overhead wiring or else—’

  ‘Or else,’ said Overstrand bitterly, ‘or else, like the triple bastards they are, they might install an alternative underground wiring to all the sentry boxes, so that the next lot who tried to fuse the lights and rush the wall would only fuse one of the systems – the other would come into operation, and the results would be sticky.’

  ‘Just the sort of clever, slightly sadistic thing Benucci would think up,’ agreed Baierlein. ‘It’s got his signature all over it.’

  ‘And you think that this cable is the alternative system?’

  ‘It looks
like it, doesn’t it?’ said Foster. ‘It was put in a few weeks after the last attempts, and you can see from its direction’ – he demonstrated again on the plan – ‘it runs out from the main towards the outer wall. I don’t see what else it can be.’

  Overstrand and Baierlein turned this over for some time in silence. They were walking with Desmond Foster round the perimeter, since this offered the only chance of complete privacy to conspirators.

  ‘The idea being, I take it,’ said Overstrand, ‘to cut both systems at the vital moment.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think it sounds rather hopeful,’ said Baierlein. ‘It’s got just that element of the unlikely that brings a scheme off. Have you thought about the ladders yet?’

  Foster looked the least bit embarrassed.

  ‘As a matter of fact we have,’ he said, ‘only you must most solemnly promise not to say a word about it to anyone. There’s going to be a certain amount of feeling about this, when it’s found out, but I don’t see what we could have done. There simply wasn’t another piece of wood in the camp of the right length.’

  ‘Of course we won’t say anything,’ said Baierlein. ‘What’s it all about? You sound as if you’ve robbed a church.’

  ‘Well, it’s not quite as bad as that,’ said Foster. ‘I’ll tell you.’

  7

  ‘Are you coming out for a kickabout this afternoon?’ said ‘Tag’ Burchnall. ‘We thought we might start with a scrum practice and have a pick-up game afterwards.’