The Return of Captain John Emmett

by Elizabeth Speller

  She changed the music and played some Brahms he recognised. He opened a kitchen drawer, found some candles and inserted them in the piano candleholders; as he pushed them into place, he could feel the accretion of old wax on his fingers. Wax that had dripped there when Louise was stil thudding through her Chopin. He put some more coal on the fire and lit the oil lamp that had been his mother's.

  Mary played for a little longer; the soft light on her skin made her look as young as he remembered her from before the war. But after a while she stopped suddenly, and swung her legs back over the stool.

  'No, the piano needs more love to do Brahms justice. I'l tel you what, you get her tuned and I'l give you a concert.'

  'I don't have any wine, to reward your efforts, I'm afraid,' he said. 'But I've got gin. And biscuits,' he added as an afterthought. 'Sweet-meal. Mostly broken. Or would you like cocoa?'

  'What a feast,' she said.

  In the end he found some bottled plums and a loaf of bread, as wel as the biscuit fragments. The combination had shades of a school midnight feast. While he put them on a tray, she was looking at his bookcase.

  'A man's shelves reveal al his secrets,' she said as she puled out a book.

  After a second of anxiety, he felt pleasure at this strange intimacy. 'Mostly my father's secrets, in this case.'

  'Fair enough for the Dickens and the Wordsworth, and I don't think you'd have chosen Meredith, but The Return of the Native is a bit racy for somebody's father, I'd have thought. And—goodness, Laurence— Sons and Lovers.' She looked back at him questioningly. 'Whatever next?' She squatted down to look at the lower shelf. 'Now we get to it.'

  Again he felt a flicker of unease.

  ' Three Men in a Boat next to their natural companion-on-shelf, Foxe's Martyrs. The many faces of Laurence Bartram.'

  'Foxe is for my book research.'

  'But you don't like your book.'

  'No, I do.'

  'No, you don't. You never talk about it. We've passed scores of churches and you've never said a thing about any of them.'

  He didn't like to say that he had assumed she wouldn't be interested. When he didn't answer, she got to her feet. 'I didn't mean to pry.'

  'No. It's fine.' He forced a smile. 'I do like churches a lot but the book's an excuse not to have to do anything else. I haven't looked at it for weeks.'

  'Am I an excuse?'

  'No, of course not.'

  'But helping me is?'

  'You mean, is it a diversion? Wel, yes, but not in the way you think.'

  Fatigue and gin had relaxed them by the time she finaly braved the iciness of his bathroom, took a glass of water and kissed him on the cheek. He waited until she'd closed the door of the bedroom before stripping down to his shirt, drawers and socks.

  He could hear her moving about for a while and the creak as she got into bed. He snuffed out the candles and then stubbed his toe on the armchair he'd arranged. He puled his dressing-gown colar up around his face, covered himself with a blanket and tried to settle for the next half an hour. Eventualy he dragged the seat cushions on to the floor, lay down on them and roled himself up in the old blanket. He had not slept on a floor for three years. He hadn't expected to do so again but he was quietly content and lay for a while, looking towards the grey shape of the window and listening intently to any noise from next door. Was she awake? What was she thinking? He fancied he could hear her breathe though he knew it was impossible.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The deep contentment he felt in Mary's company lasted him al the next day, even when she'd gone. He thought how pretty she looked in the morning, dressed but with her hair loose and legs bare. She had insisted on assembling a rudimentary breakfast. Eventualy he'd surrendered and watched her as she handled his china and put a kettle on the stove as if she had visited many times before. He ached for her, not just to possess her, although certainly that, but also to protect her and to know her with an absolute familiarity.

  But she ate swiftly, returned to the bedroom and sat, tidying her hair in front of the looking-glass. He turned away. She emerged with her hat on and her bag in her hand. To his surprise, she now wanted to go to Charing Cross. She had decided not to go back to Cambridge yet, she said. She referred vaguely to cousins near Wadhurst. Instead of asking her about them quite naturaly, he'd resisted, convinced it would sound like an interrogation.

  When he eventualy walked out of the station and turned up the Strand, it was a fine day with the sky bright above the piebald trunks of the plane trees. He was determined not to let his mind dwel on her unexplained times in Sussex.

  He had decided to start looking for Inspector Mulins in the archives of the Daily Chronicle. The Chronicle had the sort of ordinary coverage he needed, but also he had once penciled the words of one of its war correspondents into his day book. The man had written: 'As an outside observer, I do not see why the war in this area should not go on for a hundred years, without any decisive result. What is happening now is precisely what happened last year.' Laurence had found it comforting rather than depressing. It meant he wasn't going mad.

  He had occasionaly peered at the Chronicle's offices tucked away in a tiny square to one side of Fleet Street. The building had a dark and elaborate brick façade with an impressive portico. He was taken immediately down to an airless basement room crammed with files. The woman running the library of back copies looked blank when he asked whether she remembered the incident.

  'I don't read any of them,' she said, as if he'd accused her of idling. 'I just keep them tidy.'

  His first problem was in remembering when exactly he'd seen the original article. It was recent, he thought, not long after he met Mary. He took out a month of copies and placed them on a long table, going through them a week at a time. He was pretty sure this would be front-page news. A violent attack on such a senior officer was almost unknown in England, though he vaguely remembered that the head of Scotland Yard had survived being shot by a madman not long before the war.

  He found the first mention of Mulins' murder fairly quickly on an inside cover of a September newspaper, but it was obviously a folow-up story, considering whether Bolsheviks might have been behind the attack, so he kept going backwards. Finaly he found the headline he sought. It was unequivocal: SCOTLAND YARD

  SLAYING. The accompanying photograph was a portrait shot of the officer in uniform. The date was Friday, 26 August 1921.

  He ran through the columns beneath. Chief Inspector Mulins had left Scotland Yard as he usualy did at five-thirty in the afternoon. He was walking down the steps accompanied by a constable who, although some way behind him, was to be the nearest witness. As Mulins reached the last step, a man came up and spoke to him. The constable thought he had addressed him by name and that, although the inspector had nodded, he did not appear to recognise the gunman. The assailant then puled out his weapon from inside his coat and fired. Mulins fel to the ground almost immediately and the gunman fired one further shot, mutilating him. Mulins expired within seconds. With the element of surprise in his favour and because those nearest were attempting to provide aid to the dying officer, the gunman was able to escape apprehension. He was described as clean-shaven, of average build, possibly in middle age. He wore a hat, which concealed some of his features, and a British Warm, with the colar up. The piece ended: 'Chief Inspector Gerald Mulins joined the Metropolitan Police in 1900 and served with distinction within the Corps of Military Police from 1916 to 1919. He leaves a widow, a son who is a police cadet, and four daughters.'

  Laurence was struck straight away by the similarity, albeit as much in its vagueness as anything more significant, in the descriptions of the murderer of Jim Byers and the assailant described here.

  He went back to the desk at the entrance and rapped lightly. The curator appeared out of the doorway behind it.

  'Do you know how I can find out who wrote this?' He laid down the paper and pointed.

  She shook her head, much as he expected. But then
she said, 'Please wait,' and went back through the door. He could hear her footsteps as she climbed the stone stairs. After ten minutes he began to wonder whether she'd gone for a tea break, but she appeared as suddenly as she'd gone and beckoned him to folow her.

  The porter in the little cubbyhole by the front entrance looked up. He was holding the telephone receiver in his hand and after a couple of seconds said, 'Mr Peterkin? Gentleman here to see you, sir.'

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Peterkin was waiting as Laurence extricated himself from the smal cage of a lift on the first-floor landing. He was shabbily dressed, with a harassed expression.

  'Yes?' he said. 'May I help you?' He sounded mildly resentful at any expectation that he should.

  'I'm sorry. I just wondered if I could speak to someone about an article in your paper.'

  'Today?'

  'No. A while back. It's about the murder—of a police officer—last summer. I realy have only a few questions.'

  'You mean the Mulins case?' The man looked slightly more interested.

  Laurence nodded.

  'It's not me you want to see.'

  The man turned and Laurence folowed. They passed through a long, scruffy room, amid a low buzz of chatter from men and one woman working at typewriting machines behind half-height partitions. Screwed-up bals of paper littered the floor. A telephone rang as he passed. At the far end was a tiny office. Peterkin stood aside at the open doorway. The room smeled strongly of tobacco.

  'Mr Tresham Brabourne,' he said wearily, and a younger man looked up as if strangers were bundled into his office every day. By the time he stood up from his desk and shook Laurence's hand, Peterkin was gone.

  Even as he absorbed the extraordinary coincidence unfolding in front of him, Laurence remembered Byers commenting on Brabourne's youth. He stil looked very young, though he had to be wel into his twenties. He was dressed in baggy tweed trousers and a thick corduroy jacket, a Fair Isle jumper and a striped scarf.

  Brabourne shut the door and gestured to a bentwood chair while he sat astride a similar one, facing Laurence over its curved back. He was silent for a couple of minutes, patting various pockets and finaly puling out a rather crushed packet of cigarettes before selecting one and putting it in his mouth.

  Laurence read a poster on the wal:

  BLESS

  Cold

  magnanimous

  delicate

  gauche

  fanciful

  stupid

  ENGLISHMEN.

  'Wyndham Lewis,' Brabourne muttered, puling strands of tobacco from his tongue as he folowed Laurence's glance. He offered the cigarettes to Laurence, then lit his own. As he struck and discarded a succession of faulty matches, he gestured to Laurence to speak.

  Laurence, stil astonished that fate should have delivered Brabourne to him, tried to explain his presence methodicaly but, as he jumped from Mary to Holmwood to the execution in France, he realised how muddled he sounded.

  Brabourne listened patiently and intently. 'So,' he said, finaly. 'You came here wanting to find out about the death of a London policeman in the summer, but now you're here, you've discovered you'd rather talk about my part in a firing squad in France in 1917? You know, when they were rebuilding these offices, the first year of the war, they found an old stone lion—probably Roman—hidden beneath our site. You never know what you're going to find if you start digging.'

  'It is al a bit odd,' Laurence acknowledged. 'I'm realy only trying to find out what happened to a friend with whom I should never have lost touch.'

  Brabourne raised his eyebrows.

  'The thing is, his sister realy needs to understand why he shot himself.'

  Laurence was aware it al sounded a bit lame. Why a man being treated for mental distress might kil himself was not a very profound mystery.

  'But then one thing has led to another; his story was tied up with other stories and everything became more complicated. Or perhaps I've simply complicated it.

  The policeman was one thread, a man shot for cowardice became another and finding you is just a stroke of unnerving luck.'

  'And they're al connected.'

  'I'm sorry?'

  'They're al connected. John Emmett and Private Byers were part of the firing squad. Mulins was the APM there. Emmet was hit hard by it al ... So we end up at this place Holmwood,' he went on. 'It's what journalists do: remember things. Tie them together. However, I was hardly likely to forget those names. I never knew the names of the other soldiers involved but Byers had been in my platoon way back in 1915. And of course you probably already know that I met John Emmett, but not, perhaps, that I liked him. You may know that I defended Edmund Hart? In theory, at least.' He stopped abruptly. The ash fel from his cigarette onto the floor.

  Laurence ran his hand through his hair. 'The execution. I've had one other account—from Byers, in fact, and he had tried very hard not to talk about it since.'

  'Byers,' said Brabourne, nodding. 'Wel, it was a bad business, in that al capital punishment is bad. The offence and the trial were both mishandled, frankly. And the execution was a complete travesty of justice and dignity. But to set the record straight, it was desertion he was charged with, not cowardice. For cowardice, you have to be within hailing distance of the enemy. Hart never got as far as the enemy. And there was the whole question of shel-shock.' He shook his head slightly. 'Hart had been treated for it the year before. In England. But there were those who said he'd faked it and that went against him. He certainly wasn't deranged enough when I met him to gather the medical evidence. Some doctors were sympathetic; some weren't and would simply hammer home the nail already in the coffin. That and the fact that he'd spent every moment since his arrival trying to leave the regiment and get into the navy. Not popular. Not a man you'd want to join your club.'

  'And you? What did you think?'

  'He was sane enough. A rather awkward, immature man. Not a leader. Hart repeatedly said he was nervous. But he managed to make everyone else nervous too. The colonel had been hesitant about sending him forward on the day in question but he had no other officer available. In my opinion, Hart was a liability in action.

  Not his fault. I didn't care if he was barking mad, neurasthenic or even a fake; he just wasn't officer material, as they used to say, or at least only, and redundantly, right at the end. But there was no question in my mind that he was, at the very least, confused and disoriented the night he disappeared. At the end of his tether; it's just his tether wasn't as long as some people's.'

  He stubbed out his cigarette and threw it in the empty grate.

  'We were at Beaucourt, late October. Three brigades, a ludicrously complicated plan of attack on enemy positions north of the river: a lot of pencil marks and stopwatches. The battalion moved forward. The men were overloaded with kit: it was a miserable evening; damp, foggy, no good for sleep.' He was lighting another cigarette as he spoke.

  'We went forward as the third wave, with the German guns blasting away, and the wire in the fog like the tentacles of some hungry subterranean monster.' He added, almost with wonder, 'It was extraordinary: when the bulets struck the wire they sent diamond sparks into the mist: it was as if this monster we were approaching was electrified.'

  Laurence didn't interrupt. He could see why Brabourne had done wel as a journalist.

  'It was chaos up there. Hart wasn't in my company—but after a bit I hardly saw anybody anyway. My colonel was kiled; I saw two other dead officers recognisable only by their badges.' Brabourne drew in deeply on his cigarette, exhaled after a few seconds' contemplation and re-inhaled the smoke up his nose.

  'At first there'd been something comic about my war. I joined in Monmouth. My father's family came from the South Welsh borders. Found myself with a bantam regiment. Byers too although he was transferred soon after. Al these midget Welshmen: five feet three inches or so. Until then I'd thought of myself as rather average build. Perhaps I was down under some mysterious military acronym: SFO, Shor
t for Officer.'

  Laurence guessed the man in front of him was about five feet eight inches.

  'Suddenly I was a giant. We could go down an open trench and the men would be undercover, walking upright, and I'd have to bend down for safety. I needed to stoop to hear my sergeant if there was a bombardment. Then, in the first serious action, I put my pipe in my pocket and while we're heads down, crossing no-man's land, my jacket starts to smoulder. Gave me the nickname Fiery, of course. Even when I was moved, the name stuck. Trench humour. It must have run in the family: my brother Diggory started his war in Egypt, shifting mummies to Europe to turn them into paper—using the dead to make paper to replace the shortages caused by kiling people. Though in my family, war was safer than peace. We're both alive. Our father died in 1906 in the Salisbury train crash; his father, a planter, bit of a black sheep, disappeared without trace in the eruption of Krakatoa.'

  Brabourne looked quite cheerful as he contemplated his legacy of disaster.

  Laurence smiled. He had liked Byers' description of Brabourne and he liked him even more in the flesh.

  'I had this sense of being at this realy momentous period in history and, what's more, right at its heart. I thought everyone at home would want to share it. I thought, in my innocence, that it was an opportunity.' He gestured with his cigarette. 'Spectacularly naive. But like everyone, I also thought it would soon be over and I was in a hel of a rush to get stuck in. I wanted to picture modern warfare with modern photography. Then, of course, it al became longer and tougher than any of us had dreamed, and I think taking photographs became a way for me to deal with things that were beyond anything I'd imagined. Or, at least, that's with the wisdom of reflection.' He grinned. 'I'm good on that. I'd had two warnings about taking photographs of sensitive subjects and I stil couldn't resist it.'

  'Yes. I heard. About the camera,' said Laurence. He puled out of his inner pocket the photograph that Byers had identified as the firing squad. He slid it over the table and said nothing.