Laurence spotted the past tense and felt a flicker of anticipation.
'Until?'
'Laurence, you bad man. You're already wishing harm to come to young Liley. Wel, you won't have to wait long. I found he was in the Ox and Bucks. So I started asking around and hit gold with my second cousin, Bim.'
Laurence marveled, not for the first time, at the names of individuals in Charles's circle, names that rarely indicated their sex.
'Bim's wife, Didi, is quite a horsewoman. Marvelous seat, side-saddle. Formidable in top hat and veil. And she hunts with the Old Berks. As does—or did—
their late lamented master, Ralph Liley. Didi was terrificaly happy to find someone who didn't already know the story.'
Laurence knew the hunt from his school days.
'The Old Berks have their stables at Faringdon. The Liley estate is near by; it stretches along the Vale of the White Horse. In fact, do you remember when we used to take picnics out from school and go to Dragon Hil?'
Laurence nodded, memories suddenly flooding in. Legend had it that the hil and guly were where St George had finaly slain the dragon and no grass had grown there since the dragon's blood soaked into the earth. When he was thirteen he had believed this to be fact. Even when he knew it wasn't, the place was stil atmospheric.
'But what's the connection?' he said.
'No connection with Dragon Hil, per se, except that the Lileys lived close by. But also near by, as I'm sure you've realised, is the spot where John Emmett died.' Charles drank his whisky very slowly. Laurence knew he was savouring the moment to come.
'Faringdon Foly.' Laurence said.
'And, indeed, near the smal station at Chalow where, early last spring, Ralph Liley fel to his gruesome death under the London-bound train.'
'Good Lord.'
'Of course you're wondering: did he fal, jump or was he pushed?'
'I suppose so. Which, then?'
'Rather as with Tucker, the official verdict was that it was an accident. They said he fel when somewhat under the influence. He went up most Wednesdays, quite late, to dine with friends in London. It was getting dark. He'd been hunting and had had a stirrup cup or two. There was certainly no hint of suicide. Far too much self-regard, young Liley, and life was going wel for him. He'd just got engaged to the younger daughter of Lord Fitzhardinge, though Didi implied he had rather an eye for women. Plural.'
'But?'
'But there were only four witnesses of any kind. Six, if you count the driver and fireman, though the engine was past the spot by the time Liley went under its wheels. Train almost empty and nobody on that side of that carriage. On the station: a pregnant woman and her mother. Neither woman actualy saw him fal and the one who was with child passed out. The porter was inside and the elderly stationmaster was at the near end of the platform, looking at the engine, not at the people waiting to board, when Liley tumbled on to the line.'
'That's three,' said Laurence.
'Yes. But there's the rub. Liley was talking to another chap just before the accident. That same man jumped down to help the mortaly injured Liley after he fel.
He wasn't yet dead but was not a pretty sight. The driver and fireman stepped down too and the stationmaster ran off to cal for a doctor, though there wasn't much a medic could do with a man who'd gone under a train. By the time they returned, Liley was dead. The doctor had his work cut out, dealing with the pregnant woman and the distressed driver. The stationmaster was trying to keep the few passengers on the train and eventualy the local bobby arrived. By then the other man was nowhere to be seen.
'I actualy drove over on my way back from Bim's to London and had a word with the stationmaster. Both he and the two women had been able to give only the vaguest of descriptions of this other man, and although the stationmaster had a faint feeling he'd seen him travel from there before, he was utterly unable to add to the basic description they al put forward. You'd probably be able to provide it yourself by now: a man in a British Warm and hat. A gentleman, the stationmaster thought.
A soldier, the women had thought. The fireman saw that someone was crouched over, dealing with Liley, but he couldn't describe him at al. He thought it might be the young porter. Nobody got a clear look at his face. The stationmaster thought he was middle-aged, the women that he was quite old.'
'So not an octogenarian grandmother, at least, then?'
'Quite honestly, Laurence, it could wel have been a giraffe for al the powers of observation of those on the platform. The stationmaster said the mystery man hadn't bought a ticket. Not that day, anyway, but he could have had one already.'
'Then Liley wasn't shot in the face?'
'No, but his legs were cut off by the train.'
'So,' Laurence summed up, finding himself indifferent to Liley's horrible end, 'if we assume that Liley was no accident, and that the same man was involved in Liley's death as with the others, which is a bit of a leap but not a huge one, then it seems he manages to avoid attention because he has no particular distinguishing features and he dresses in clothes worn by half the men in England.'
'It has the feel of your man. Your unknown man. Although the police would have liked to speak to him, of course, they believed it was just the typical modesty of a decent Englishman, slipping away to avoid thanks, having done al he could. But this is a smal station. Not many people use it. Liley did, regularly, but did the unknown man know this? And if he did, how did he know it? It could be that he lives near by.'
'And it could, just possibly, be why John ended up where he did.' Laurence heard the excitement in his own voice. 'But this man, he couldn't have used the station regularly or the stationmaster would have recognised him.'
'He did recognise him, of course,' said Charles, 'if only slightly. Perhaps he's got a motorcar.'
Laurence thought for a minute. 'The murder of Jim Byers seems likely to have been committed by a man with a car. No other way, realy. That bit of Devon's pretty isolated. He wouldn't have needed one for Mulins or Tucker. I think we do have to include those two on our list.'
Laurence began to calculate the distance from Fairford to Chalow: fifteen miles or so, he guessed. George Chilvers had a car. Could the fact that the presumed murderer had always been seen in a military greatcoat be a clever ruse? Unlike most men of his age, Chilvers had never been in the forces. However, in al other ways Chilvers seemed an unlikely kiler. He was too fastidious and although a buly and a thief, he didn't seem like a man with the ruthlessness to carry out so many murders and, with some regret, Laurence had to accept that he had no conceivable link with any of the other dead men.
'I'm too tired to think al this through,' he said finaly. 'But I don't think there's much doubt that we're looking at murder now. Probably four murders, maybe more. I'm going to go back and talk to Mrs Lovel. She must know more than she's letting on. To start with, I wondered whether Hart could be her son, but it doesn't fit. Al the same, I do think her son's story may be mixed up with the execution and its aftermath. I might get a picture out of her on some pretext, though I can't think of any now, and she won't be letting any photographs far out of her sight, I imagine.'
Charles nodded, holding his glass with both hands. 'You could say you thought you might have known him, I suppose?'
It was obvious, yet Laurence had more of a problem with the idea of lying to Gwen Lovel than to the others he had deliberately misled. He didn't answer.
'You're thinking, what if the old girl is excited at being able to exchange recolections of her boy?' said Charles.
'Yes, I suppose I am. But also we aren't even absolutely certain he was ever in the army. The records don't show it.'
'Difficult one. Perhaps Lovel lied to his mama? Ran away to avoid being caled up? Perhaps she lied to you? Not impossible. If you want me to come along to see Mrs Lovel, I wil.' He looked at Laurence expectantly.
Although tempted for a moment, Laurence sensed he would get more out of Mrs Lovel if he were alone. Force of numbers might cause her to
be suspicious and he thought Charles's jocular confidence might grate on her. Nevertheless, if her son had not been a soldier and she knew it, then she had lied persuasively about receiving the telegram.
Just as Charles put his glass down and stood up, Laurence said, 'Why do you think Somers, if it was him, took Emmett to the Connaught instead of his club?
It's a bit furtive.'
'The Connaught is hardly a Limehouse opium den. And skulking about is not realy in his character, I'd say,' Charles replied.
'You know Limehouse wel, then?' Laurence asked, keeping his face expressionless.
'Of course.' Charles was struggling into one arm of his coat. 'Opium dens—just the sort of place the realy depraved murderer plots his crimes. Ask Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Or there's Fu Manchu—you don't have to have smoked an opium pipe to know where to find trouble. To get inside the mind of a drug fiend in his lair, you just need to read a few books. After al, you haven't been to the Connaught either but you know how it'l be in there. Palms. Tea. Cocktails. A grand piano.
And plenty of people who don't know one another. That's the key to anonymity.' He finaly heaved his coat over his shoulders. Actualy a chap I knew from Birmingham days—Arthur Ward—his father was our works foreman—he wrote the Fu Manchu stories.'
'I could have sworn the author was—'
'Rohmer. Sax Rohmer. German name, but not his real one. "Arthur Ward" carried too much of the smel of the tannery for tales of the Orient. Taking a German pseudonym was an odd sort of choice, but there we are. Damn good yarns.'
Chapter Thirty-two
For a while Laurence had considered it just possible that the tensions between John and Sergeant Tucker had become lethal. Now that he knew that so many of those involved were dead, the situation seemed unreal, something out of Charles's detective novels. Leonard Byers' rueful comment about a curse was close to the truth but there was nothing supernatural about these deaths. Neither John nor Tucker could have kiled al three men: Liley, Jim Byers and Mulins, because both were by then dead themselves. So who else knew them al and could have done?
He realised now that what they ought to be looking for was not a message but a motive. A motive should lead him to the man to whom this violence made sense. A sense driven by hatred or greed or jealousy, perhaps, or even a sort of biblical retribution, but a sense that Laurence currently couldn't begin to grasp. If the motive was to remove everyone connected with the firing squad, then he needed, urgently, to find out more about young Hart himself.
Yet not everyone connected with the execution was dead. With a suddenness that made his hair stand on end, he realised how stupid he had been. John had died at the end of December. Tucker had died the same winter, Liley in April, Byers in early summer. Mulins had been murdered in August. Whoever was carrying out these kilings had not necessarily stopped. The arrangements just took time. The kiler needed to track down his quarry, to undertake his mission and then return to normal life without arousing suspicion. It was not necessarily over.
Who else might be on the list? Was the lost legatee of John's wil, the Frenchman, Meurice, already one of the victims or could he have been the assailant al along? More than ever, he was aware that his enquiries had always been patchy.
What about Leonard Byers? Was he in any danger now? Laurence also had an increasing sense of unease about the safety of Tresham Brabourne, even faintly considering whether he might be at risk himself. Had he even met the murderer already as he lumbered around with his questions?
Thinking about Brabourne, it occurred to him that Charles's unexpected visit had diverted him from looking at the bundle of cuttings he'd picked up at the Chronicle. He laid them out on his table. There were articles on parliamentary debates, a few letters, mostly from The Times rather than the Chronicle. There was a profile of Colonel Lambert Ward and blurry photographs accompanied an older article on General Somers when he was fighting in Africa. There was a vast front-page headline from Horatio Bottomley's John Bull: TRAGEDY OF A BOY OFFICER. The only bit of the page not covered by the headline was an advertisement for Excelda handkerchiefs.
He turned over and skimmed through the article. It concerned the death of one of the other two officers executed. The journalist was in ful flow but the case against the hapless lieutenant of the Naval Reserve seemed as weak as the one against Hart. What surprised him was that the piece had been published in March 1918, before the war had even ended. He imagined the fury it must have caused in the War Office.
He read through the letters. Despite a few enraged denunciations, there was nothing here that hinted at future violence. Laurence noticed that several of the letters were from the fathers of sons who had been kiled while obeying orders and they didn't want their boys buried next to a coward. While he could understand their point of view, he didn't think their sons would agree, were they to rise from their ranks of stone in France. What had John wanted to add to al this?
Brabourne, who had known John Emmett as a felow officer, was the one person who seemed to accept al along that John might wel have kiled himself. He was an inteligent observer and had seen John at his worst. Laurence had liked Brabourne—he was a man facing forward, he thought, and for that reason he had an energy that Laurence could only recently detect in any measure in himself. He thought of Brabourne dressed for the outdoors in his bitterly cold office with its il-fitting window, or striding down Fleet Street at one with his world, but otherwise apparently immune to his surroundings.
Something had rung a bel when he'd seen him and it burst upon him suddenly what it was. The scarf Brabourne was wearing was, he was almost certain, a school sporting colours scarf, but he was equaly certain it was the same colours as the one John had with him at his death. The one that had been returned to the Emmetts, not his own school scarf, but another man's.
Another man's school. It meant nothing: hundreds of boys had joined up from schools like Eton and Harrow, Rugby and Welington—Brabourne's school—
and, indeed, like John, Charles and Laurence himself, from Marlborough. Brabourne too had commented on this. No doubt this was how it had always been: he had read the memorials to the battle dead of the Crimean and Boer Wars during interminable sermons in the colege chapel. As a schoolboy he would try to make anagrams of their names to pass the time. But each of these previous conflicts accounted for only a handful of old boys. The memorial boards erected now would list tens of names for every house in the school. And there was Brabourne—not, as Byers had predicted, dead in the mud, a casualty of his own sense of invincibility, nor reduced to gold letters on a plaque to create wonder in generations of boys to come, but moving on, away from the war. One day he would be an old man, with no doubt a fine career behind him, while those three or four years in uniform would be no more than one brief, if distressing, episode in a life rich in adventures, chalenges, sorrows and joys. It wouldn't be the first and the last thing he thought of every day. Laurence doubted it was, even now. It would be history. Brabourne would tel his grandsons about it.
He realised that it was quite possible that Brabourne had lent John a spare scarf, though it was unusual to have two, and in peacetime no public schoolboy would wear the colours of another school. War, however, was a colder, more pragmatic way of life. It was even easier to imagine that Brabourne would have given his own scarf to Edmund Hart. Laurence remembered Brabourne commenting on the cold in the room where they had imprisoned the condemned man as they waited to hear his fate.
He reflected just how many young officers had known one another. He was always amused by Charles's social networks but they formed the web that both trapped and supported people like him; people like himself, too, Laurence supposed. It was that society that men like Edmund Hart were excluded from. Even as the war progressed and more officers had been promoted from the ranks, there was a gulf between the traditional officer class and those on whom war had bestowed a grudging commission. If Edmund had been to Eton or Marlborough or Harrow, he might wel not have died for his offe
nce. It was a chiling thought.
When he picked up the envelope to replace al the cuttings, he could feel something stil inside. He had missed a rough note from Tresham Brabourne, folded round a photograph. It was of a very young, light-haired man, with a blanket round his shoulders; he was sitting at a table with what appeared to be a plate of bread and cheese. The background was very indistinct but, although the photograph was quite dark, the man's fatigue was obvious. He looked solemnly at the camera. Along the top of the scrap of paper Brabourne had scrawled in pencil, 'Vis Tucker's death. Police records state it was in late February.' Laurence registered that it let John off the hook for Tucker's murder and that he owed Brabourne a drink. Then al other thoughts drained away as he read the note that had enclosed the photograph. Brabourne had written:
I checked again if I had another photograph of the firing squad. The one you have is definitely the only one and was previously in my possession (not that I want it back). I had absolutely forgotten I also had this picture. It's Edmund Hart on the night I told you about: bitter cold, poetry, a mistaken, though shared, belief that his sentence would be commuted, and al the rest. I took this at his request; he wanted to reassure his ma. A day later he was shot. The film hadn't even been developed. I could hardly give it to the padre to send home with his effects—and yet it seemed wrong to destroy it. You might find that it makes the whole affair more real to have a likeness of a man much more sinned against than sinning.
Laurence could not take his eyes off the picture in his hand. Hart looked about seventeen. His hair was tousled, his eyes wide. Laurence immediately grasped that his task had become easier. Here was a picture he could show to people. Somebody out there who might not have known his name might yet recognise his face.
The Return of Captain John Emmett Page 29