The Return of Captain John Emmett

by Elizabeth Speller

  Charles started the car and they drove on slowly out on to the main road, folowing a tram into the heart of the city, and in al that time they never exchanged another word.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Laurence lay awake for hours, going over and over the previous evening, trying to understand what had happened. He had a profound sense of having made a serious mistake. Was it a failure to imagine the impact of his questioning on those he spoke to? He had been too ready to treat them as one-way conduits of information, never considering that the flow of information might run both ways. Why hadn't he caled the police? Although he had felt reasonably certain that Somers was of no further danger, it was a huge and possibly dangerous assumption. He had been numb and exhausted at the time but now anxiety crept in.

  Laurence would never be sure whether he had acted correctly. And what would Somers do now? For al his chivalric instincts to unravel John's death for Mary, it was she who had asked the one question he should have looked into early on: where were Edmund Hart's family? There was in itself nothing sinister about anglicising German names in war. It was common sense. The Coburg Hotel, the Bechstein Hal; even the royal family had dispensed with Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in favour of Windsor. Anyone with British loyalties or interests shed a name that tied them to an enemy.

  However, even if he'd laid his hands on every bit of information; even if he had persuaded the police in the beginning that there was a link between the deaths—

  and perhaps he should have done this—they would only ever have succeeded in tracking down Somers slightly earlier than they had. Almost al the kiling had already been done. Charles and Laurence had, perhaps, saved the life of General Hubert Gough, a man for whom Laurence had little respect. He wondered whether, had Somers' intended ultimate victim been anybody other than Gough, he would have been so wiling to walk away the evening before.

  His thinking was cut short by a hammering on the street door.

  'Telegram,' the lad said, handing over the familiar envelope. 'Your bel needs to be fixed.'

  Laurence's heart raced for a moment. Telegrams were always bad news. He walked back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed, just holding it. He dreaded finding that it was from India.

  Finaly he tore it open and forced himself to look. It was from Mary. PLEASE MEET TOMORROW EASTBOURNE STATION MIDDAY REPLY ONLY IF NOT AVAILABLE

  M.

  Sitting there, al alone, he beamed.

  Traveling to the south coast was easy. The day was clear, the train was on time, the carriages half empty. As he stepped from the train, seaguls were wheeling and screeching overhead. Even on this December day he could smel salt in the fresh air.

  Mary was waiting outside in a smal car.

  'See, I drive and punt,' she said, as he slipped into the passenger seat and finaly succeeded in shutting the door after banging it three times. 'I was taught during the war.' The car smeled of leather and mould and her. It creaked every time he moved. 'And I've borrowed my doctor friend's car so that we can get about. We've got it for only two hours, though, while he's on duty at the cottage hospital.'

  She leaned over and gave him a kiss. He nuzzled into her hair and tried to clasp her neck beneath the folds of scarf. She twisted round awkwardly, burying her face in his coat with her arms around his neck. The embrace was bulky and marvelous and safe. Then she pushed him away from her slightly.

  'You've got things to tel me,' she said. 'Important things. I can see it in your face. I'd asked you here because I had something to show you but now you must tel me what's happened.'

  And so, not at al as he had planned, he sat in the Austin on the station forecourt and told her everything that had unfolded and much, though not al, of what he knew. She didn't stop him; indeed, her expression scarcely changed. Mostly she gazed ful at him, a little anxiously but concentrating. After a while she looked down at her gloved hands on the wheel and moved them to her lap.

  'I'm not sure whether my intervention helped, realy,' said Laurence. 'I'm afraid the truth is as dismal in its way as how things originaly looked.'

  'Not for me,' she said.

  Laurence didn't respond.

  'Which doesn't mean it isn't just as horrible and sad. In fact, because it involves more people and more destroyed lives, it's sadder realy. But, in a selfish way, for me, it's a kind of easing of the heart. An enemy kiled John as surely as they might have done at any time in the war. The motive was desperately unfair.' Her voice was slightly hoarse. 'But this way I can think about John without struggling with the fact that after al he'd been through he chose to leave us.'

  He was immensely relieved that she felt the same as Eleanor, although something had bothered Somers about John's death and that something was bothering Laurence now.

  'How do you think the general thought it would end?' Mary asked.

  'I'm not sure. Somers certainly intended to kil General Gough. Who knows whether that would finaly have been enough?'

  'Why did he leave Gough until last?'

  'My guess is that it was tactics. If he went for the high-profile people first—Gough and, to a degree, Mulins—there would have been many more questions asked and the risk of him not finishing his self-imposed task would have been increased. After al, if you hadn't wanted to understand John's death, not even dreaming that he'd been murdered, Somers would presumably have got away with it al.'

  'And then what?'

  'He said he dreamed of taking Gwen and Catherine Lovel abroad to start a new life. But I don't think he believed it realy.'

  'And al for revenge,' she said.

  Laurence was silent. As wel as vengeance, John's death and the pattern of his own life were simply about fathers and sons, and the struggle to make things right.

  He looked at Mary. Quite late on, he'd grasped that her real question al along, even if she had never known it herself, had been why her brother had rejected her. He had an unequivocal answer to that now: her father was not who she believed him to be and, to the young and imaginative John, she was the living proof of his mother's infidelity. It was an answer he could never give her.

  Instead he said, 'I hope you'l meet Eleanor Bolitho. I think you'd like her and she could tel you much more than I can about John. She looked after him during the war and even when he was realy unhappy, quite cut off from the world, she cared for him.'

  He was sure Mary would realise the truth about Nicholas Bolitho as soon as she set eyes on the child, but thought Eleanor would eventualy tel her everything.

  The likeness between the little boy and John was remarkable.

  Laurence thought of his own father. He couldn't remember his voice or his face, just his singing in the bath and his strong, square hands. Strangely, he could recal Mr Emmett more clearly. The affable smile, the absent-minded pats as he passed by; the sudden appearances and disappearances always with a dog or two beside him; the nightly toast to the survivors of Omdurman, at which they had al giggled.

  He must have smiled at the memory because Mary asked, 'What are you thinking about?'

  'Nothing. Vague memories. Your father, funnily enough.'

  Something was bothering her, he could tel. Finaly she said, 'John's wilingness—his need—to give General Somers every last detail of the execution: the names of those involved, the circumstances, grim as they were. It probably sealed the fate of al of them, I suppose?' There was something in the tone of Mary's voice that made him think she hoped for contradiction.

  'I think John's way out of despair was scrupulous honesty,' he said. 'He needed to make his peace. He could hardly guess that Somers was using his list to conduct his own war. He wasn't just speaking to a very eminent and much more senior military man, but one who had an official role, assisting a parliamentary committee. He also thought he was bringing some sort of help to Hart's mother.'

  Suddenly he thought back to Somers' last conversation with him. 'You know, I think John held back on teling him of Hart's last words. Somers had told John he was Hart's father but th
at the boy never knew him. To discover his son knew who he was al the time and believed he'd be ashamed of him, would have been too terrible to bear. John told Somers that Hart was incoherent after the first voley. It must have been one of the few times John evaded the truth.'

  Mary's face cleared a little. 'I'm glad,' she said.

  Within minutes they had turned off into a vilage. Thatched cottages bordered the main street, with a smal brook on one side. After they passed a couple of larger red-brick houses, the vilage petered out by a flint-and-stone church and a field gate. Laurence guessed the smal church to be very old, possibly twelfth century.

  His eye was taken by the vast, white-chalk figure that rose up in front of them, dominating the grassy hilside above the church.

  'The Long Man,' Mary said with almost proprietorial pride.

  The outline, clutching a stave in each hand, was obviously pagan in design and spirit. Laurence's spirits lifted. God knows how old the figure was, or what it meant to its creators, but undoubtedly it had stood on its hilside for milennia and would stand there long after they and their strange world were reduced to dust. He found the prospect of his own irrelevance comforting.

  They left the car and walked across the churchyard in which grew a yew, also of great age, its wide branches propped on wooden supports. He could see why Mary liked this place. Ahead of them lay a medieval building with a long barn at an angle. As a dark figure carrying a box across the courtyard drew closer, he saw to his astonishment that it appeared to be a nun.

  'Wilmington Priory. It's a nursing order,' Mary said. They crunched across the gravel and he prepared himself for the explanation that he sensed would folow.

  'The thing is,' she said very slowly, 'that when I told you Richard was lost, I meant lost. It wasn't a euphemism. He isn't dead, you see. Not realy.'

  Instantly Laurence felt his hair prick on the back of his neck. Mary puled on a metal boss next to a studded wooden door, silver-grey with age, and waited.

  The door was opened by another nun. She left them in a dark hal, whose only ornamentation was a black oak table, two upright chairs and four religious paintings.

  'Everything I told you—how he was injured—was al true.'

  As she spoke, Mary wouldn't look at him.

  'In a sense he died the minute the shrapnel hit him, but although his injuries were terrible, he survived.'

  Finaly her eyes moved, almost pleading, to Laurence's.

  'He was brought back to England. It became obvious that he would live, but also obvious that he would never be able to do anything for himself. The damage to his brain was never going to heal. He was a child. An infant. He knew no one and nothing, he could not move. He—' She paused. 'He even has to wear baby napkins.

  So he was lost, you see—the man he was, the man I'd loved. He came here and here he wil stay for the rest of his life. He wil never walk, wil never see his lovely Downs or winter seas again. A few friends come from time to time, but less and less often. His doctor is an immensely kind, wise man. It's his car, actualy. I bumped into him at the concert we went to. I thought you'd seen us talking together; I wanted to explain but to start to tel you the whole story was too much then. I didn't know you wel enough and I wanted you to like me, and the alternative was to lie, which I didn't want.'

  He stroked her arm. 'It's al right.'

  'As for his wife, despite her scruples before, she eventualy divorced him and married her lover. I would have married Richard then, even as he is, especially as he is, but legaly he can't make the vows. She can divorce him, but I can't marry him unilateraly. Besides, he has no idea who I am.'

  She looked at Laurence and shrugged.

  'So that's that.'

  He removed his hand as an older nun, wearing a white apron, came into view and beckoned them to folow her. They went up a shalow flight of black oak stairs and turned into a long dormitory. The first thing Laurence noticed were the large Gothic windows, which filed the long room with light. The views over the hil and past the Long Man in al his vigour were superb. The second thing he noticed was the row of beds and the peace. Younger nuns in slightly different habits attended the patients. One man groaned as two nuns turned him from his back on to his side. The occupant of the bed nearest the door lay on his back, one eye half open, his hands moving jerkily under the sheets. A shining line of saliva ran down his chin. Laurence looked away, feeling embarrassed.

  He had thought their guide might have taken a vow of silence, but now she was talking quietly to Mary as they moved down the beds. Finaly she left them at the last one, under a window in the corner. Mary leaned over and kissed the supine form, his head supported on either side by pilows. She looked back at Laurence, who was hovering uncertainly, and motioned him over.

  'Richard, this is Laurie Bartram,' she said in a low but even voice.

  Sitting down on a plain wooden chair by the bed, she brought the man's hand out from under the covers and held it.

  'He's been wonderful in finding out what happened to John.' She leaned forward to do up a pyjama button that had come adrift. Then she sat in silence for a while, stroking his fingers.

  Laurence studied Mary's lover's face. He was freshly shaven and his hair was slightly damp. Mary was right: he was a handsome man. He looked wel, were it not for the puckered crater of healed tissue visible on the nearside of his head and the absolute lack of any facial response. His eyes were open, his irises very blue, yet Laurence could detect not a single indication that he had any awareness of their presence. When Mary let go of his hand, it fel loosely to the cover. She tucked it away, under the blanket.

  'I can't stay today. But I went to see the house this morning and it's looking at its best. They've repaired the window frames and since the boys came home from the war, the gardens are getting back into shape. Mr Strangeways tels me they've had a wonderful year for roses—most of them stil blooming until the last few weeks.'

  She stood up, bent over and stroked Richard's brow, then looked down at his face intently, as if she couldn't believe what she saw. 'Bye bye,' she said, finaly.

  'I'l be back to see you soon, darling.'

  She nodded to a nun by the door. 'Thank you,' she said simply.

  They walked down the stairs and out into the open towards the church.

  'The house is gone, of course,' she said. 'I haven't seen it since before the war. Strangeways, the head gardener, has gone to work at Compton Place. The court-appointed guardians decided that, as Richard had no heir, they needed to raise funds for his care throughout his remaining life and the house was too dilapidated to leave empty.'

  She walked down the path between gravestones made smooth by time and through the Saxon doorway into the church. He folowed.

  'Then there was a fire. Some mischief by local lads.' She wrapped her arms about herself. 'Not that he wil ever know.'

  They sat in the empty church. It was cold. The tiny vestry held one of the most beautiful stained-glass windows Laurence had ever seen, simple and ful of colour. St Francis stood among butterflies and birds, al depicted as identifiable specimens. Beneath its rich light, the parish registers lay on a table.

  'So you don't consider yourself free to make a life with anyone else?' asked Laurence.

  'No, I don't. I'm not. Who knows, one day...'

  'It's fine. You don't have to say anything. I should have liked ... Wel, you must know ... But I'm sad. Not mostly for me,' he hoped this was true, 'but for you and for him.'

  'It was one of the reasons I wanted to know more about John,' she said. 'I was so angry when he kiled himself. Perhaps not with him but with God or fate.

  There was Richard, a body without a working brain, and there was John, only slightly injured, with a proper life if only he'd grasp it, and it seemed that he'd just thrown it away. I know that's unfair. I knew his mind was probably as damaged in its way as Richard's, but I needed to know that for certain. I needed to grieve, not rage.

  That's why I got in touch with you, I suppose.'
<
br />   'Yet I turned out to know John a lot less wel than you thought,' said Laurence. 'Less than you, certainly. And Eleanor Bolitho knew him best.'

  She looked at him questioningly. 'But you were the only friend John ever brought home. It had to count for something. I'd very occasionaly seen him with others, heard him mention names, but you'd been to our house. Anyway,' she smiled rather sadly, 'you and I—we saw something in each other ages ago, didn't we?

  Back then? Something that might have been but wasn't?'

  'I wish I'd been braver.'

  She headed him off. And of course, you took finding John so much further than I'd ever intended and I became much more involved with you than I'd ever dreamed. And because you found out the real story, I have General Somers and the odious Tucker to feel angry about, instead of my own brother, and that's easier.'

  'I'm not sure you'd feel angry at General Somers if you met him,' he said. 'Angrier at circumstances. Sad, even.'

  Then he added, 'I've been thinking about our first meeting, that summer—when I was at school. I suspect John's invitation came from the same instinct that he showed in his bequest to Wiliam Bolitho, and to Edmund's mother, and probably to the unknown Monsieur Meurice. He may have been a solitary man, but he was a kind one, you know: a man who wasn't very good at intimate friendship but was very aware of others' unhappiness. Not an easy combination. And I was a very lonely boy after my parents died.'

  'Have you exorcised your ghosts?' sad Mary, so quietly he almost didn't take it in.

  'Ghosts?'

  'You said earlier that John and, to a degree, Tresham Brabourne, were exorcising ghosts by speaking up. Somers was too, I suppose, in a ghastly way. Even Byers, in talking to you, from what you say. Are you the only man who walked through these horrors unscathed?'

  'I was lucky,' he said, though he knew it sounded implausible. 'I was il with pleurisy once and in hospital, and I hurt my back helping an injured soldier, but apart from that I was lucky.'

  'But you lost Louise?'