by Ben Elton
‘Of interest? No, I don’t think so.’
‘And don’t you find that interesting?’
‘What?’
‘That this fascinating celebrity poet, envied and lionized by most of the nation, should have nothing of interest in his personal effects at all. No notes,’ no jottings. No poems.
‘He’d given up writing.’
‘Yes, so I believe he told everyone.’
‘There was blank paper.’
‘But nothing written?’
‘No.’
They continued along the corridor to what had been McCroon’s ward, pausing to inspect the water closets that he had been visiting when the mystery officer rushed past him.
‘Where is McCroon now?’ Kingsley enquired.
‘We sent him back to his mob.’
‘Still alive?’
‘I would not have the faintest idea. That’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to know, isn’t it? You’re the military policeman, aren’t you?’
She was looking at him rather inquisitively.
‘Well, aren’t you?’ she repeated.
‘Of course,’ Kingsley replied.
‘Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea?’ Murray said. ‘We don’t have a canteen here but I have a little spirit stove in my billet. I’m afraid I’ve no milk.’
Nobody seemed to have any milk these days, Kingsley thought, except the Prime Minister. No wonder the great man had guarded his so jealously.
Nurse Murray led Kingsley down through the labyrinth of corridors, the richly papered walls of which were punctuated with the marks of absent works of art that had been removed for the duration. They progressed to where the steps became narrower and the passages meaner — the part of the house no doubt once occupied by the servants — before arriving finally at a little door that bore in French the legend ‘Third assistant scullery girl’.
‘This is me,’ Murray said. ‘This is where I close my eyes and dream of one day being promoted to second assistant scullery girl.’
It felt good to be in a woman’s room, even the poor garret that the RAMC saw fit to provide for its staff nurses, although Kingsley could not deny that he felt a momentary distaste imagining the odious Captain Shannon making a beast of himself in this very place. Kingsley liked Nurse Murray and for some reason felt rather protective of her, an emotion for which of course she would have despised him. She had a little bed and a dressing table on which stood a mirror and a hairbrush. There was a small chest of drawers but no wardrobe; Murray’s dresses were hung from a hatstand. Just like George’s dressing-up costumes behind which Kingsley had hidden what seemed like a year before but which in fact had been only a few days ago. Above a small basin hung a clothes line on which were pegged out three or four stained, rust-coloured rags. Kingsley saw Murray’s eyes flit towards them and for a moment an expression of extreme embarrassment passed across her face; however, he was not surprised to see it followed by one of indignant resolve.
‘Boring being a woman sometimes,’ she said, angrily pulling the rags from the line and stuffing them into a drawer. ‘Menstruation definitely not the Almighty’s best bit of design. The only thing that makes me doubt Darwin — I’d have thought such a palpably awful arrangement would have been naturally deselected centuries ago. I suppose it’s just one more of nature’s clever little ways of keeping women in their place. Now then, Captain. Tea. ‘She lit her little stove and then, with the same Lucifer, a Capstan Full Strength cigarette on which she drew hungrily. ‘Last one, I’m afraid,’ she added.
‘I have plenty. Take a pack.’
He gave her a box of twenty-five Black Cat and took another from his cigarette case for himself.
‘Do you have a first name?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she answered.
‘Mine’s Christopher.’
‘Bully for you, Captain. I do not wish to be on first-name terms with policemen. I’ve told you, I don’t like them. I don’t like them as a class. You seem all right but you’re still a rozzer and that’s enough for me.’
‘This all sounds rather personal, Nurse Murray. Do you have a reason for hating the police so much?’
She looked at him for a moment, the smoke curling up around her nose and eyes, which seemed suddenly to shine more brightly through the tobacco fug.
‘Don’t miss much, do you?’ she replied finally.
‘Not much as a rule.’
‘Can spot an old con, eh?’
‘You’ve been arrested?’
‘Oh, many times, Captain. Many, many times.’
‘You must have started your life of crime rather young.’
‘I did. I was eighteen. Scarcely more than a child, but that didn’t stop you rozzers from assaulting me.’
All at once Kingsley realized to what she must be referring. He felt a guilty fool.
‘Cat and mouse?’
‘Yes, cat and mouse.’
The infamous Temporary Discharge for Ill Health Act of 1913, commonly known as the Cat and Mouse Act, in which hunger-striking Suffragettes were released and then rearrested on regaining their health. Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst herself had suffered twelve successive incarcerations.
‘Of course,’ said Kingsley, ‘I should have guessed. You were a Suffragette.’
‘I am a Suffragette, Captain. Even though we’re British women and can see that currently we must pull together with the men for the good of the whole team, we are still women and one day soon women will vote. And when we do, we will make laws that shame the kind of bullies who beat us and abused us for having the temerity to state that half the population of Britain had a right to a say in how the country was run.’
‘How many times were you rearrested?’
‘I was in and out seven times. They tied me down and forced a rubber tube down my nose and my neck and into my stomach. I still feel the pain in my throat to this day.’
And as if to prove it, having taken a huge pull on her cigarette until the glowing end threatened to creep back and burn her fingers, she succumbed to a coughing fit and hacked away most mightily for a spell, her small frame shaking, dislodging her glasses and causing the bed on which she sat to shake too.
Kingsley looked away, ashamed. He well remembered the terrible policy of Cat and Mouse: it had been a grim time to be a policeman and a period which had tested his conscience sorely.
He had been a servant of a government that denied any power or influence whatsoever to every mother and sister in the country. What was more, as a policeman he had been called upon to attempt to police the increasingly violent terror tactics which the Suffragette movement, in its anger and frustration, had felt obliged to adopt. Kingsley had never himself subjected a hunger striker to force-feeding but he had worn the same badge as the men who did.
As Nurse Murray coughed, Kingsley once more found his mind flashing back to his own time in prison when the big red-haired trades unionist had accused him of having allowed all sorts of iniquities to pass him by without protest. The man had been right. Abuse of the poor, abuse of the Irish, abuse of women, as a policeman he had connived directly in them all. Why had it taken the war to make him recognize his duty to his conscience? Once more the only answer he could come up with was that of scale. The war was just too wicked to ignore. But now he looked at this young woman who had been so abused and yet was serving her country with the same courage as any man. Reflected that this splendid person still had no vote. Agnes, the mother of his child, had no vote. Emmeline Pankhurst, a brilliant strategist and fighter, had no vote. Every woman who laboured in the munitions factories and on the land had no vote. It was truly incredible. Kingsley concluded that his conscience should have troubled him earlier.
‘I apologize unreservedly for my offensive assumption,’ he said, before adding with a smile, ‘and also, for what it’s worth, for men in general.’
‘Not worth a lot really,’ Captain,’ Nurse Murray replied, but she smiled. ‘Ta very much all the same, though.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
Cassoulet and much grumbling
During the afternoon Kingsley returned to Merville, where he had been assigned a billet above a small bar or estaminet which lay on the outskirts of the little town and was patriotically named Café Cavell after the martyred British nurse.
Kingsley was aware of the urgency of his mission. The Third Battle of Ypres was fully under way a few miles up the road and whatever might be left of the case he was investigating must surely by now be in danger of sinking into the mud of Flanders. Who could tell whether this mystery officer, if indeed there was a mystery officer, had not already been dealt his punishment by fate in the shape of a German shell or bullet? Perhaps McCroon, the Bolshevik comrade who had been present at the château on the night of the murder, might also already be dead. However, Kingsley had chosen the Military Police Headquarters at Armentières as his next point of investigation, and since he had no chance of getting there and back that day he decided it would have to wait until the morning. He took comfort from the fact that the 5th Battalion in which Abercrombie and Hopkins had served were at rest and so whoever was left who might be of use to him was unlikely to be killed in the immediate future. McCroon might even be at the concert that evening. As might the mystery officer.
Despite being only a few miles from the front, Merville was fortunate in that it was outside the range of normal field artillery and had so far been untouched by shelling. Two or three miles up the road, in the area immediately behind the front line, the story was very different: some villages had been quite literally wiped off the map, as if they had never existed at all. War had of course come to Merville in other ways, principally in the form of commerce. The town was full of Tommies and equally full of French peasant entrepreneurs anxious to profit from them, selling eggs, bread, wine, livestock, pots to piss in and any other comfort that they might hope to unload at a ruinous price.
As Kingsley walked through the central marketplace he heard many raised voices as Frenchman and Briton alike haggled over a few francs. Very few British private soldiers spoke any French and the vast majority of French peasants had no English. Therefore, even after three years of living cheek by jowl, all conversations between soldier and local were conducted in sign language accompanied by loud cursing. Kingsley noticed that his MP uniform had a markedly calming effect on the Tommies as they saw him approach but that the shouting began again the moment he had passed.
It started to rain as Kingsley explored the cobbled streets that the Tommies cursed so. The British soldiers who had to march on them loathed the cobbles, for they were all large and rounded with big dips between them that continually threatened to turn an ankle. They offered no opportunity to develop a regular marching rhythm, for no step landed the same way twice. At the railhead that morning, as the men from the horse trucks had formed up for their march up line, many unflattering comparisons had been made between British road-building and French. Walking through Merville, Kingsley could see their point: a seven-mile march with full pack up the line on roads such as these would require the equivalent exertion to twenty-five or thirty miles on decent paving or tarmacadam.
He passed a large house with a number ‘1’ painted on it. This he knew to be a brothel, a Number 1 Red Lamp establishment as licensed by the French government. His companions on the train had warned Kingsley against these places; the fear of venereal disease was almost pathological amongst the soldiers.
At the Café Cavell, Kingsley was shown his billet by the French matron who owned it. It was a small bare room with a crucifix on the wall and an uncomfortable-looking cot with a straw mattress. The blanket seemed clean enough but there were no sheets. The matron explained that the room was her son’s but that he had fallen at Verdun,’ along with half the sons of France. Her husband, although over fifty, was a soldier also and was paid very little and so she had turned her house into an estaminet in order to support herself and no fewer than three surviving grandparents. When Kingsley asked for a bath he was shown to the pump in the back yard,’ where he washed himself down as best he could with pump water and in the pouring rain, under the mildly contemptuous eye of a pig and a few chickens. Then he went back inside and ordered an early supper. Since Abercrombie’s battalion were to attend the concert at Château Beaurivage that evening he had decided to attend also, and he doubted that food would be provided.
The ground floor of Café Cavell consisted of one large room with a biggish table in the centre and two or three smaller tables set against the walls. The bar itself was little more than a kind of lectern arrangement upon which stood yin blanc, yin rouge and a jug of what Kingsley presumed must be beer. It smelt vaguely hoppy although he could not detect the faintest hint of a head on the still, dark surface of the liquid.
‘Stick to the wine,’ a voice spoke up from the group who were sitting at the large centre table. ‘The beer comes straight out of Madame’s pig.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it don’t come straight out of Madame,’ a second soldier remarked. ‘They try to sell us every other stinking thing they produce.’
Kingsley had taken the precaution of removing his police insignia. He knew that had he been wearing them none of the men would have spoken to him, or to each other in his presence. In fact they probably would have left the room.
Kingsley sat at an empty corner table. He was approached by an ancient gentleman who he assumed was one of the three surviving grandparents whom Madame was struggling to support. Kingsley enquired in French if he could order some food; the man was clearly surprised to be so addressed by a Tommy and suggested that he might like to try the chicken cassoulet.
‘What have you besides cassoulet?’ Kingsley asked.
‘More cassoulet,’ the man replied.
Kingsley ordered cassoulet and a glass of yin rouge. The other men in the room were naturally interested in hearing an Englishman who did not appear to be an officer so fluent in French, and fell into conversation with him. They were part of a group taken out of the line for a period of rest, in fact part of the same 5th Battalion who would be attending the evening’s cabaret. They had clearly been making the most of their days off and Kingsley reckoned that, if they were anything to go by, the audience that night would be a drunken one.
‘I don’t mind dying for bleeding King and Country,’ one of them was saying, banging his glass of wine down on the table. ‘None of us minds dying for King and Country…
‘I fucking do,’ another interjected.
‘Well, all right, yes, we all minds. Granted, we all minds, but we dies if we has to ‘cos we ain’t cowards neither. What I does object to, and I objects to it with knobs on, is getting paid less to die for King and Country than some cunt what joined up a year after me! Paid half as bleeding much.’
This was an obsession of army life that Kingsley was already very familiar with. The illogical and inexplicable disparities in pay and conditions were a source of more passion to the Tommies than the alleged frightfulness of the Hun, a frightfulness which obsessed the civilian population back home but that Kingsley had never once heard mentioned at the front.
‘What about leave?’ another soldier added. ‘Never mind pay, what about leave?’
‘What about it?’
‘Exactly! Exactly. My very point. What a-fuckin’—bout it,’ eh? We’ve ‘ad none. That’s what about it. This caff’s the furthest I’ve got from the front in eleven months and my cousin wiv the Gloucesters down at Plug Street just got a ticket after six.’
Kingsley began to jot down notes. He sympathized with these men enormously; he felt, like them, that it was one thing to suffer terrible hardships and quite another to have to deal with the frustration of apparently arbitrary decisions. He had been in France only three days and yet it was already glaringly obvious to him that the inability of the army to standardize pay and conditions was undermining morale up and down the line. The notes that he began to take were in the form of a memo to Sir Mansfield Cumming and the SIS, explaining tha
t if they wanted to avert mutiny in the British ranks they might dispense with cloak-and-dagger work altogether and simply lobby parliament to put an end to such a manifestly unfair system. A system where staff officers and men who saw no fighting at all were paid more and got considerably more leave than their comrades who were dying in the trenches.
‘Can’t say nuffink though, can yer,’ the man who had had no leave for a year added. ‘Can’t go complaining in case you meets an officer what got out of his puddle the wrong side that mornin’ and gives yer what for.’
‘But we have to make our grievances known, surely? Nothing will change if we don’t say anything,’ a quieter voice suggested.
‘And nuffink ain’t gonna change if we do neither, ‘cept we might end up on Field Punishment Number One like that stupid cunt Hopkins.’
Kingsley’s ears pricked up at this.
‘What happened to him?’ he enquired.
‘Lashed ‘im to a limber wheel in the flies and the rain, that’s what. And why? For talkin’, that’s what, just talkin’. Nothing more than that.’
The soldier next to him did not feel that Kingsley was being given the full story.
‘Talkin’,’ Jack! He was doin’ more than talkin’. He was incitin’, that’s what he was doing. Refusin’ to obey an order in the field.’
‘In the field! In the fuckin’ bath’ouse,’ more like.’ Kingsley’s cassoulet arrived, a very decent bean stew with quite a lot of meat in it, although Kingsley suspected that the meat was rabbit and not the promised chicken. With bread and a half-bottle of wine the meal cost him four francs, which was very steep.
Whilst Kingsley ate, the men around the big table continued to discuss the unfortunate Hopkins.
‘D’ye fink ‘e did murder Captain Abercrombie, then?’ ‘Abercrombie died in battle,’ a younger man said. ‘That’s what the army says but don’t you believe it, son.’ ‘Why the ‘ell would anybody want to murder Captain Abercrombie ? ‘
‘Abercrombie was in charge of the punishment detail that lashed Hopkins to that wheel.’