The First Casualty

by Ben Elton

  ‘Actually, sir, I was retrieving evidence,’ Kingsley replied.

  ‘Eh? What’s that?’

  ‘I am investigating the death of Viscount Abercrombie.’

  ‘Abercrombie? I thought it had been established that he died in action? ‘

  ‘Oh yes, sir. It has. Nonetheless, I am looking into it.’

  ‘Oh. I see,’ the colonel replied with a knowing look.

  ‘The gun Captain Edmonds was using once belonged to the viscount. It is believed to have been the weapon which killed him.’

  ‘In action,’ Hilton added.

  ‘Yes, sir, if you wish, in action. I need to know for sure whether it was, so I was attempting to retrieve the gun. In the mêlée, however, the gun was lost and I was forced to retrieve one of the bullets it had fired instead.’

  Kingsley reached into the blood-caked pocket of his greatcoat and produced, with a small flourish, the bullet he had removed from the body of the fat German cook. Despite all his doubts and the terrors of the previous few hours, Kingsley was still Kingsley and his vanity and sense of theatre were now getting the better of him. He could not resist playing up to the drama of the moment and was gratified to note that the colonel and others present were open-mouthed with surprise and admiration.

  ‘Well, I’m jiggered!’ the colonel said finally. ‘That is as rum a bit of business as I can recall in twenty-five years of soldiering. Do you mean to say that while you were taking part in a trench raid, killing hordes of Huns and beating a damn fine retreat, you were also conducting a police investigation?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I was.’

  ‘Well then, I think it’s high time we drank your health.’

  Hilton pushed Kingsley into a chair at his map table.

  ‘No fizz, I fear, but we have a tolerable cognac. Probably better in weather like this anyway. We were just about to have a snort. Mornings are our evenings, don’t ye know. We’re all owls these days.’

  Kingsley accepted a glass of brandy and also some toasted cheese that the colonel’s batman was preparing. Just then a soldier appeared at the farmhouse door, announcing that there was a private who wished to see Captain Marlowe. It was Cotton, Captain Edmonds’s batman.

  ‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir, I followed you back,’ he said. ‘Been tryin’ to catch you all the way but you certainly can travel. We thought as how you ought to have a bit of this, you know, just for fellowship.’

  The man opened up a small oilskin parcel to reveal a generous slice of fruit cake.

  ‘The captain’s got a Blighty, sir, and they say he’s going to live,’ thanks to you. And all the boys wanted to say as how we’re very grateful and we swears we’ll never call coppers what we usually calls ‘em ever again.’

  ‘And what do you usually call them, Private?’ the colonel demanded.

  ‘Cunts, sir.’

  ‘Ha ha! Good man! Well done! Although personally I’d say they were the opposite, because while I can’t normally abide a military policeman I’ve never met a cunt I didn’t like! Well done, Private. Carry on.

  Kingsley took the cake from the little batman.

  ‘Thank you, Private Cotton. I am very touched.’

  The slice of cake was sufficient to be sub-divided and went down very well with the cognac and cheese, just as Edmonds himself had said it would. When the little victory feast was over, Kingsley said that he would be obliged if he could ask the colonel one or two questions.

  ‘Of course, of course. Fire away.

  ‘When did you last see Abercrombie alive?’

  ‘I visited him at Beaurivage two days after he was invalided back.’

  ‘That was very good of you, Colonel. Do you visit all your injured officers?’

  ‘Well, one tries, you know, one tries. Besides, he was most concerned about his leather case — it had been with him in the forward trench and he wanted it back, so I took it with me.’

  ‘Do you know what was in that case?’

  ‘Well, papers, I suppose.’

  ‘You did not look inside?’

  ‘Good lord, Captain! What a suggestion. I say, you peelers do have a horrid view of people. As if I’d go fossicking about in another chap’s kit.’

  ‘Only blank paper was found in his room when he died.’

  ‘Well, perhaps that was what he wanted. Blank paper. I’ve known stranger things, believe me. Fellahs who are convinced they’ve painted bloody great canvases and it turns out to be two dots and a splodge. Shell shock is very delusionary.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true, I suppose,’ Kingsley conceded, ‘although he was not thought to be suffering very severely.’

  ‘He probably wanted to write more poetry.’

  ‘No poetry was found, and the staff nurse there, a woman named Murray, claims that he’d given up on poetry anyway.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, he certainly has now.’

  Hilton drained the last of his cognac.

  ‘It’s a bad business all round but look here, Captain,’ I really do need to turn in now, battle going on and all that. We’ll be back in the thick of it again soon, no doubt. Is there anything else I can tell you?’

  ‘No, not at present, Colonel. Thank you for your time and also for the meal.’

  ‘Well, thank you for bringing the raid home. I meant what I said, you know. I’m mentioning you in dispatches. You, sir, shall have a medal.’

  FOURTY-FOUR

  Under the magnifying glass

  Kingsley’s journey back to the Château Beaurivage took him all the rest of the morning and it was late lunchtime before he finally stood once more in front of the beautiful old house. He was surprised to discover how much he had been looking forward to seeing Kitty Murray again, and how disappointed he was when he discovered that she was not at the château. She had left in order to accompany some severely distressed men back up to that same railhead where Kingsley had first arrived at the battle zone.

  ‘Will she be accompanying them to England?’ Kingsley enquired of a medical orderly whom he met in the great entrance hall.

  ‘I hope not, sir. Things would be a lot less jolly around here without her.’

  Kingsley very much agreed with the man, which rather disturbed him. The last thing he needed was any emotional complications clouding his judgement and he resolved to dwell on the diminutive Suffragette no longer.

  Kingsley had returned to the château in order to see the military policemen whom he had ordered to exhume the body of Captain Abercrombie. An order which had not endeared Kingsley to the staff of the Château Beaurivage.

  ‘Digging up corpses is not the sort of thing we need around here,’ the senior medical officer complained as he scurried after Kingsley through the château towards the stairwell that led down into the cellar where the autopsy was to take place.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I need that body,’ Kingsley insisted.

  ‘My patients have just come from a place where bodies pop up out of the ground continually, and they’re supposed to be safe from that here. If one of them was to see…

  By this time they had arrived in the cellar, where the sergeant from Armentières was waiting for him with the corpse. It had been removed from its coffin and placed ready on a makeshift operating table built from boards and packing cases.

  ‘All present and correct, sah!’ the sergeant said, stamping the stone floor so hard that sparks flew from the nails on his boots. ‘One body. Dead. Previously belonging to Captain the Viscount Abercrombie, sah! ‘

  It seemed a strange way to describe a corpse but Kingsley let it go.

  ‘I have run an extension cable to a portable generator which I have placed outside, sah, as I does not think you can do delicate stuff such as this by candlelight, sah!’

  The sergeant had indeed wired up a sixty-watt electric light bulb above the corpse, which made the sallow whiteness of its skin positively glow in the otherwise darkened cellar. It was a truly macabre scene.

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant. That was extremely sensible of y
ou.’

  ‘Sah!’ More sparks flew.

  ‘Right,’ said Kingsley, ‘this won’t take long.’

  He approached the body stretched out upon the planks, naked save for a loincloth.

  ‘You buried him like this?’ Kingsley enquired of the senior medical officer.

  ‘Yes. His friend Lieutenant Stamford informed us that he had expressed a wish not to be buried in uniform.’

  ‘Really? I did not know that.’

  ‘We saw no reason to deny the request.’

  Looking down at the corpse, Kingsley recalled the verses he had read in the newspaper in Folkestone library. He repeated them now.

  ‘To mark the sacrifice I gave

  Put ‘Forever England’ on my grave. ’

  There was silence for a moment.

  ‘Funny that the man who wrote that did not wish to be buried in uniform, eh?’

  Kingsley bent down and looked at the wound in Abercrombie’s head. A single bullet hole almost exactly between the eyes. The wound had been washed, much to Kingsley’s annoyance, but still he inspected it.

  ‘Do we have a magnifying glass?’ he asked.

  ‘I anticipated that, sah!’ the sergeant said, producing one. ‘Good, well done. You know, Sergeant, when you find yourself demobbed, you should apply to Scotland Yard. You would be an asset to the murder investigation team.’

  ‘Thank you, sah. I shall remember that.’

  ‘Of course you’d have to give up the stamping.’

  ‘I only stamps ‘cos it is required, sah. Civilians are not required to stamp.’

  Kingsley studied the wound. The magnification afforded by the glass was not great, nonetheless he detected specks of black at the entrance that he would not have expected unless they had been deposited there by the bullet.

  ‘Sergeant, you wouldn’t by any chance have — ’

  ‘Tweezers, sah?’

  ‘Yes, exactly, Sergeant. Tweezers.’

  The sergeant produced a pair.

  ‘Well done, Sergeant.’

  ‘Borrowed them off a nurse, said I had a splinter. Best not tell her what you’re actually using them for, she does her eyebrows with ‘em.’

  Kingsley set to work with his magnifying glass and tweezers, picking tiny bits of residue from the jagged flesh of the wound and depositing them in a saucer which the sergeant had also thought to provide.

  ‘I must say, Sergeant, you think of everything.’

  ‘Thank you, sah.’

  ‘And this exhumation has also been most efficiently carried out. Well done.’

  ‘Sah!’

  Kingsley was crouched over the corpse, talking as he worked. Were someone to have entered the cellar at that point they might easily have thought that Kingsley was imparting some urgent wisdom to the dead body.

  ‘I can’t help asking myself,’ Kingsley continued, ‘and I know that you’ll forgive me for saying this,’ Sergeant, how was it that such a thorough fellow as you could make such an unholy mess of the initial scene-of-crime investigation? ‘

  ‘Well, sah…I assume you are aware that we was called off.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who called you off?’

  ‘Staff. The same Staff what put us on in the first place. We was in bed at Armentières when we received a call from Staff to attend a murder here at Château Beaurivage and to arrest Private Hopkins.’

  ‘They told you who to arrest, before you’d even attended the scene?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Well, he had been found with the gun after all.’

  ‘Who was this person from Staff?’

  ‘A Colonel Willow, sir. I don’t know him personally. Anyway, shortly after we attended the scene we received another call here at the château,’ which, as you may know, is on the telephone, saying that we should take our prisoner and depart without causing further disturbance to the medical work of the centre.’

  ‘Did that not seem strange to you?’

  ‘Well, no, not really, sir. The case was pretty cut and dried, and we do make a bit of noise when there’s a bunch of us.

  ‘Sergeant, when we are finished here I would like you to get in touch with Staff HQ and enquire after this Colonel Willow. I should very much like to speak to him.’

  The sergeant assured Kingsley that he would, and for a few moments silence fell on the grim scene as Kingsley worked away at the entry wound between the eyes of the corpse. Finally he was satisfied that he had picked up all the evidence he could from that source.

  ‘Were you aware, Sergeant,’ Kingsley said, ‘that amongst Viscount Abercrombie’s effects only one boot was found?’

  ‘No, sir, I was not.’

  ‘Well, that was the case, and I know what happened to the other boot. It was used as a silencer. The killer put his gun down the leg of one of Abercrombie’s boots and shot the bullet through its heel. I have found rubber, leather and what I think are wool fibres too. Possibly the killer had filled the boot with socks. He must have taken the boot away with him when he made his escape.

  ‘Well I never,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘Quite extraordinary,’ the senior medical officer added.

  ‘Which also accounts for the fact that the bullet did not exit Abercrombie’s skull: its velocity had been reduced by the impact with the boot heel. And speaking of bullets, let us retrieve it.’

  Using a scalpel and the tweezers Kingsley dug into the wound,’ delving deep between the eyes to extract the thing he sought. Having done so, he washed it off and took it upstairs to where there was more light. There, with the help of the sergeant’s magnifying glass, he compared it with the bullet he had taken from the German cook the night before.

  ‘Dear me,’ he said after a moment or two of investigation, ‘I had thought that I might require a microscope but this is as plain as day.’

  ‘What is, sir?’ the sergeant enquired.

  ‘Every gun is different, Sergeant. Not very different but different enough to leave its own particular signature on every bullet it fires. These two bullets were fired from different guns. ‘No, sir!’

  ‘Yes, sir! The gun which was found on Private Hopkins, the one which fired this bullet,’ and Kingsley held up the one he had brought back from the trenches, ‘did not fire this bullet, the bullet which killed Viscount Abercrombie. That fact and that fact alone clears Private Hopkins, for he was arrested on no other evidence than his possession of Abercrombie’s gun. Sergeant, you must release him.’

  FOURTY-FIVE

  Back into battle

  That evening, despite the fact that he had not slept at all the previous night, Kingsley returned to the trenches. He did not feel he needed sleep now; the puzzle was beginning to show tiny signs of resolution and in Kingsley’s mind the hunt was on.

  As he battled his way along the waterlogged duckboards that constituted the communications system of the Ypres salient, he saw a man in front of him, bowed down with barbed wire, slip and drown. Down or suffocate, all in an instant. Even as he watched, he knew there was nothing to be done, no time to do more than note such a gruesome example of the arbitrary barbarity of this war.

  Eventually the duckboard pathway came to an end and Kingsley descended into the forward trenches, struggling up the communications slits towards the very front of the British line.

  ‘You there! You men!’ he shouted at the groups of soldiers carrying breakfast, fresh water and rum for the men who crouched beneath their parapets counting seconds. ‘‘C’ Company. Where can I find ‘C’ Company?’

  Some men pointed up the line, others merely shrugged. Some pretended not to hear and others genuinely could not, for the barrage hurtling through the air above them was intense.

  ‘I must find a fellow named McCroon. Private McCroon, ‘Kingsley shouted through the rain and thunderous noise.

  ‘Who fucking cares?’ a voice shouted back.

  What sanction could Kingsley threaten that would be worse than the sentence already passed on the tens of thousands of
men scuttling about and skulking in those forward muddy holes? Men who were expected shortly to emerge from that mud and proceed in good order towards the German machine guns? Kingsley’s shoulder tabs gave him little authority here. He was alone and the man who shouted at him with such contempt was with his mates. The pre-dawn was dark, the rain torrential, the mud and water waste deep, thousands of cannon were firing, the noise was appalling. No one would miss one bastard copper who had made the mistake of venturing too close to where the real killing was done.

  Besides, Kingsley reflected as he hurried past, the man was right. Who fucking did care? Why should the hunt for any individual matter in the middle of this terrible war? Particularly on a morning such as this one, when battle was once more to be joined in the Ypres salient which all the boys called Wipers? In an hour or two’s time most of the men whom Kingsley was passing would be dead. Nobody cared that Kingsley wanted to find a man called Private McCroon, and Kingsley knew that he of all people should care least. But he did care: some unanswerable compulsion drove him on and so he struggled, sometimes chest-high in water, along the crisscross of stinking and fetid mini-canals that made up the communications network of the British forward position.

  The going was horrendously hard but the distances were no longer great and it was not long before Kingsley arrived in the most advanced excavations of the line. Beyond this point there was a thin ribbon of mud and wire and beyond that the German Empire. It had been thus at the time of the First Battle of Ypres and also at the Second, and it was thus once more in the Third. Nothing had changed in that dreadful place for years. The shells currently exploding just ahead of the line were rearranging the bones of the men who had died in the battle before, and the battle before that.

  Some wag had chalked Savoy Bar and Grill upon a board.