SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman

by Francis Selwyn

  Francis Selwyn

  Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman

  Futura Publications Limited

  A Futura Book

  First published in Great Britain in 1974 by Andre Deutsch Limited under the title CRACKSMAN ON VELVET

  First Futura Publications edition 1975

  Copyright © Francis Selwyn 1974

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN: o 8600 7252 5

  Printed in Great Britain

  by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd,

  Bungay, Suffolk

  Futura Publications Limited

  49 Poland Street, London W1A 2LG

  Contents

  1 THE McCAFFERY DODGE page 7

  2 VERNEY DACRE 51

  S CRACKSMAN'S MOON 147

  4 SERGEANT VERITY AT BAY 177

  1

  McCaffery's part in the plan was over, even before he knew the details of the plot. In a few more minutes, in the barrack field near Meerut, the chaplain of the garrison would begin to read to him his own burial service. Precious moments passed and still he could not collect his thoughts properly.

  The gold fringes on the epaulettes of the mounted officers jiggled to the horses' walk and the wine-red of their sashes glowed richly against the bright scarlet of their tunics. Both the riders and the foot escort were clear of the town already, leaving behind the strange cluster of buildings which made up the principal British garrison town in the Punjab. Beside the Indian temples and the native bazaar stood airy bungalows, the military bandstand, the polo grounds, and the new Victorian church of St John, a gothic building which looked as if it had been snatched up from Knightsbridge or Cheltenham and set down on this hot, windy plain.

  They had led McCaffery from his cell at daybreak, and the morning light began to catch in quicksilver flashes on the men's bayonets and the officers' drawn swords, like sun on a moving river. A few white-robed palanquin-bearers and coolies watched the detail, in its tall fur shakos, red serge tunics with white webbing, and blue trousers, as it marched to the slow, dying beat of a muffled drum. Both regiments of Native Infantry had been confined to their quarters. Colonel Collins believed it bad for discipline on both sides for the execution of a British soldier to be witnessed by the subject race.

  Even in the early morning, the April heat of the Punjab made the sweat start and prickle like a rash under the red serge of the men's tunics. At the head of the little column, the perspiring bandsmen filled their cheeks and blew the opening notes of the army's favourite funeral dirge, "The Dead March from Saul," on gleaming silver instruments. To the men stationed in Meerut in the oppressive spring of 1857, the notes of the slow march had only one meaning. McCaffery.

  McCaffery sauntered in the centre of the detail, almost as though the proceedings were no concern of his. His head was bare, even of a forage cap, and his brown hair was dishevelled. His red tunic hung open. They had cut away his buttons after the court-martial finding was confirmed. There was no need to strip him of medals or rank; McCaffery was not the sort to win medals or earn promotion. As he walked, he rubbed his wrists from time to time, where the manacles had left a red indentation.

  Some of the newest recruits, little more than boys, seemed dazed with fright at what they were about to witness. The older privates and NCOS, with their mutton-chop whiskers and sun-reddened foreheads, stared impassively ahead of them. It was a bad business when a man had to be shot to death by a file of muskets, but many of them had seen wholesale death, and mutilations worse than death, in the Afghan campaign or the Sikh wars of the 1840s. Some had watched their comrades blown into butcher's meat by the Russian mortars on the Sebastopol ramparts. All had paraded regularly when a man was stripped and lashed to the triangle. Two drummers laid it on from either side, their thongs slicing open the man's back until the flesh shone with blood and the flies clustered hungrily round the wounds. The men of the regiment might pity a condemned comrade, but they had taken the Queen's shilling. They took it for bread and beef twice a day, for gin in the regimental canteens, and for the golden-skinned Indian girls in the garrison knocking-shop. In return, they accepted the savagery of war and the harsh discipline of peace.

  Several subalterns, with smooth cheeks and trim moustaches, rode forward on smartly brushed and glossy bay geldings. To them, too, it was a disagreeable business. They wanted it over, so that they might return to the comforts of the sofa, with cigars, hock and seltzer, talk of polo matches or tiger shoots, and rumours of the latest regimental adulteries. It had become a damned bore, the way that no woman in Meerut would talk of anything but McCaffery. Not only had the confounded man deserted his post and shot Private Spurgeon, he had raped a delicious Anglo-Indian girl into the bargain.

  Bearded and lantern-jawed, McCaffery walked lankily between his guards. He was not going to give way to fear now, to be dragged there, as some were, dying for respite, having to be tied into a chair and despatched sitting down. He had promised the padre to "act like a man," and he would. It was only to suffer a little pain, less than a cut with a razor. He had felt worse in many a Saturday night brawl off the Waterloo Road, in the Brill or the dark side-streets. In any case, it was not going to happen yet, they had not even reached the barrack field.

  Just before they had left the cell, he was invited to make any final requests. He had one, though it was not one which anybody there could fulfil. He wanted to know why the girl, Jolie, had lied.

  McCaffery knew, of course, that girls told lies. He had once been in the way of making a dishonest pittance by it in Blackfriars. But why this one? Why Jolie? The regiment would have shot him for desertion and attempted murder, whether or not he had raped the girl. Why had she sworn to it when it never happened? She had gained nothing, not even his execution, which would have taken place anyway, and she had destroyed her own reputation Why?

  Each night McCaffery had pictured her in the darkness of his prison cell. The profile and colouring of a young Egyptian princess. A body that was slender but well shaped. He remembered the dark, scented hair coiled in an elegant coiffure, the delicate moulding of her ears and the nape of her neck.

  It began when he was sent with Sergeant Pickles to deliver copies of garrison commander's orders, and had been left to make his own way back to his billet. In the warm dusk, the girl had approached him, close to the native bazaar. He would have taken "a shillings-worth of greens" from any woman that night, the mood he was in. But even by the lamplight he knew that this was not one of the local whores, kept more or less free from pox to provide comforts for Queen Victoria's army. This one was an officer's doxy, sure to be. Probably out to make a little spending money while her usual protector was on secondment at Bombay or Cawnpore. Better still, perhaps she had been left for weeks and was desperate for a man. Who better to oblige her than Thomas McCaffery? It never occurred to him to be frightened. After all, he had his "Brown Bess" with one round for the spout.

  The house they went to, on the edge of the Indian quarter, was no ordinary brothel. In the twilit room, McCaffery had never seen such expensive undergarments on a girl, not even in England. Candy-pink petticoats slid to the floor, and then Jolie displayed herself in bodice and in silk drawers that fitted tight as a ballet-girl's fleshings. Turning out the single lamp, she posed on one knee on the chair, her back arched to increase the tilt of her little breasts and the full rounds of h
er rear cheeks.

  "Well?" she said, in a voice that owed more to the Ratcliffe Highway than to the Punjab, "Unlace me, then! "

  McCaffery was no lady's maid and, in the gloom, he began to fumble chaotically with the strings of her drawers. He fingered her thighs and backside roughly through the awkward material, as she seemed to push her body harder into his hands. He breathed the perfume of her hair and then, in a fit of frustrated desire, began to tear at the tangled laces. To his utter dismay, a few seconds later the girl started to scream.

  "Hold on, can't you?" he said irritably, still not understanding.

  Her nails flew in his face and he hit back methodically, punching her on the arms and legs, which was his habitual way with an awkward woman. It flashed through his mind that as soon as he could knock her flat, he had better snatch up his musket and run, using the butt on any native pimp who might stand in his way. Then there was a babble of Indian voices outside. The door of the darkened room was kicked open. Its tiny bolt splintered from the frame, and strong light shone inwards, dazzling him. McCaffery threw the girl from him and clutched his musket, equally frightened of having been missed from his duty or of being caught in a native ambush and murdered for his week's pay and the price of his clothes.

  Another lamp appeared in the doorway, blinding him completely, and a man's shape hunched forward. McCaffery could see nothing but the girl's face, contorted to a devil's mask as she screamed abuse at him. He crouched in the furthest corner of the room, shouting,

  "Halt! Standfast!"

  It had no effect. An Englishman, surely, would have answered the challenge somehow. These were Indians. McCaffery had heard enough garrison tales of the Cabul massacre or the fate of Tippoo Sahib's prisoners, the victims mutilated and cauterised by hot oil. No bastard of a savage was going to take Thomas McCaffery alive.

  But he had no wish to answer a charge of murder. So he aimed the muzzle of his rifle at the dark space of the doorway, knowing that any Indian pimp would run like a hare at the first flash of a musket. A jet of flame shot from the barrel, like a miniature thunderbolt, and the very floor shook with the stunning roar in that confined space. But instead of running like hares, two men threw themselves upon him and bore him to the ground. For their courage in facing and overpowering an armed deserter, Sergeant James O'Sullivan and Lance-Corporal Henry Dawes were commended by the garrison commander. Private William Spurgeon lay across the threshold of the doorway, his forage cap gone and a darker red staining the lower back of his scarlet tunic. McCaffery offered no resistance as they led him away, his wrists bound behind his back, but he asked repeatedly,

  "Why, for God's sake, did you not speak?"

  The incident was what the Liberal newspapers in London called "a tragedy."

  McCaffery knew little of military trials, but he had supposed them to be rather grand occasions. His own court-martial was perfunctory enough, even though the presiding officers wore full-dress uniforms, medals and swords. It was held in an empty ward of the garrison hospital, with a single punkah wallah pulling lethargically at his cord to fan the humid air round the heads of the officers.

  The proceedings themselves were conducted with the brisk precision of a drill exercise. McCaffery was charged with desertion and attempted murder. The bullet had entered Spurgeon's left side, just above the hip, and exited close to the spine. McCaffery could hardly deny either of the charges and, with something of the petty criminal's sense of fair play, he would have been content to say nothing and take his punishment. Sergeant O'Sullivan told the court how he and his detail had been begged for assistance by a group of terrified Indians on the fringe of the bazaar. As they approached the house, they had heard the girl beginning to scream. McCaffery was sure that O'Sullivan had no reason to lie, and he let the evidence pass unchallenged.

  But when they read out Jolie's affidavit, accusing him of rape, McCaffery's sense of fair play was offended. He knew little about the law, but he was wise enough in other matters to know that tumbling a girl and pulling her laces did not amount to rape. Why had the stupid little bitch sworn to it? She had destroyed her own character and gained nothing. Bewildered by such injustice, McCaffery tried to challenge the evidence of Surgeon-Major Fitzgerald. Was the surgeon-major sure the girl had been an unwilling partner in the romp? Oh yes, beyond a doubt. Indeed, the bruises on the arms of the poor "child," not to mention those upon her—er —her upper legs, were additional corroboration of the main evidence of rape. McCaffery had never begun to learn reading or writing and most of the answer was incomprehensible to him. But he caught the final words. Main evidence of rape? Indeed, said the surgeon-major, evidence of—er— criminal connection having occurred, of which the bruising and the discovery of McCaffery were additional confirmation. At this McCaffery asked plaintively,

  "Sure, and how can there be evidence, sir, of what I never did?"

  Surgeon-Major Fitzgerald permitted himself a thin, disapproving smile at the man's stupidity.

  "If you had not done it," he said crisply, "there would have been no evidence. The conclusion is, I think, obvious."

  McCaffery capitulated. The presiding officers failed to see why he should make such a bother over the business of rape. They were not trying him for rape, it was merely part of the circumstantial evidence. Moreover, they wished to spare the girl the ordeal of a court appearance. Several times, the Judge Advocate, a cadaverous, thin-blooded John Company lawyer with clothes like an undertaker's mute, warned McCaffery to answer the actual charges of desertion and attempted murder. For these crimes, men faced a firing party.

  McCaffery cared nothing for the actual charges. He had no contradictory evidence, and no means to show that the prosecution witnesses were mistaken. But why had the officer's doxy lied? They would shoot him anyway, without a word of her affidavit.

  McCaffery's reverie ended as the detail marched into the barrack field.

  "Prisoner and escort, stand fasti Detail, forward march! Quick time!"

  The regiment was drawn up on three sides of the field, as the brigade-major began to read out the court-martial finding and sentence, confirmed by the commander-in-chief at Delhi. McCaffery had heard it all before. It was irrelevant to his present preoccupation.

  Sergeant-Major Hayward finished distributing muskets to the firing party, two guns at random loaded with blank powder, so that no man should bear the certain guilt of murdering a comrade. Then a bearded officer, who was a stranger to the regiment, approached Colonel Collins and saluted. The colonel returned the salute with exaggerated precision and said,

  "Your prisoner, sir I"

  In the little group that hid McCaffery the provost-sergeant lifted a mug of something warm and sweet to the lips of the condemned man.

  "Get this down, lad," he said gently.

  McCaffery wanted to refuse, but the contents of the mug seemed to be burning in his throat before he could speak. The actors in the grotesque melodrama then began to move with a brisk punctiliousness. The stranger pinned a little square of white cloth to McCaffery's left breast, like a medal, while the provost-sergeant strapped the man's wrists behind his back.

  "Head up," said the officer, with sharp disapproval.

  "Be quiet," said McCaffery, fumbling for words. "Be quiet, will you? I want to think."

  Another voice, calm but ringing loud, came from a distance.

  "Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live . . ."

  A file of soldiers, who had acted as a human screen, were marched smartly away and McCaffery saw for the first time a white wooden box lying by a short trench. It was not twenty yards away.

  "He cometh up and is cut down like a flower . . ."

  McCaffery's mind began to wander in the misty stupor induced by the hot rum. Why had the little bitch lied? Quickly! Why? Why? Faster and faster, the padre unrolled the cadences of the living man's burial service.

  "He fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay . . ."

  Before he clearly u
nderstood what they were doing to him, McCaffery was pushed to his knees on the white coffin. Another second and a black band over his eyes closed him from the sunlight.

  "Firing party, present!"

  From the edge of the field, in an instant of great stillness, he could hear the chatter of sparrows. He swayed as the twelve muskets came up to a level. The signal was the drop of the officer's arm, so that the condemned man should not hear the order and twist out of aim. The arm went down. But in the instant before the volley of bullets came, the men in the barrack field heard McCaffery give a wild cry. Whether it was a final protest, or a curse on them all, they never knew. To Corporal Alfred French it sounded as if, on the verge of eternity, Thomas McCaffery had solved the riddle of a lifetime and had only the fraction of a second to tell the world. The shout itself meant nothing to Corporal French, as it drifted away across the dry echoes of the field, and faded in the hot, distant plains. "Take her . . . ! "

  The last reverberations blended with the sharp, sputtering burst of eleven rifles. The firing party looked pale as any sick parade and one of the men had dropped his musket and collapsed. McCaffery's body was knocked sideways by the force of the bullets and fell at full length. The birds were silent, and for a long second not a man moved. Then the anonymous officer marched smartly towards the body, for the hands and feet still twitched in muscular spasms. He drew his Manton pistol, but before he could use it, all movement in the shattered chest of Thomas McCaffery was extinguished.

  McCaffery's final cry upset Colonel Collins, who complained angrily in the mess-room of the condemned man further dishonouring the regiment by "screaming like a damned girl when they shot him."