A Presumption of Death

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  He fell silent. He had knocked back his whisky, and Peter poured him another.

  ‘So what did you do then?’

  ‘I had a weekend leave coming up. So I wrote and told him I was coming to find him, and if he wouldn’t state a time and place to meet me I really would tell the group commander he was skiving. And I got this really odd reply.’

  ‘Have you still got it?’ asked Peter.

  Quarley opened his wallet and took out a folded, typed sheet. He pushed it across the table to Peter, and Peter moved it to his right so that Harriet too could see it. It said:

  Nine p.m. Last shed on right in stable yard between Bateson’s farm and the house known as Talboys.

  ‘I thought it was pretty silly stuff. Boy Scout stuff, but I hadn’t been able to find him on my other trips, so I went along with it. I borrowed a torch to go blundering around a farmyard in, and I kept the assignation.’

  He fell silent, brooding.

  ‘And then?’ Peter asked.

  ‘He didn’t come. I sat around on a bale of hay, waiting for him. I switched the torch off after a bit, to save the batteries. The chap I borrowed it from said the batteries were down a bit. There was one of those stable door things where the top and bottom open separately. I left the top half open, to use the moonlight. And I was just about to give up and go home when he came – no, I mean when someone came.’

  ‘You thought it was Brinklow?’ said Peter quietly.

  ‘Of course I did. He leaned on the lower door, and he blocked the moonlight so I was sitting in pitch darkness, looking at his outline against the sky. I couldn’t see who the hell it was. I said, “Alan?” and he flung the door wide and hurtled in and went for me. I was taken off guard. I was expecting some sort of argument, not hand-to-hand combat. He got me by the hair, and forced my head back, and he was trying to hit me in the throat, and I was kicking and punching all I could. We were both breathing heavily, and blundering about. He forced me right back towards the wall. Then he stood back a bit, catching his breath, or getting his footing or something, and I said, “Joan’s pregnant, and what are you going to do about it?” I just blurted it out. And he said . . .’

  Quarley’s voice began to shake. ‘He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who is Joan?” And then I really saw red. I went berserk. I drew my knife. He pushed me again, and I fell against something, some bit of wood or something, sticking into my back, and then there was a rumble and a crash, and he barged against me, and I went for him like a rugger tackle, going for him low down, and leaning round him to slash the back of his knees. I thought I’d ham-string him first, and argue later. No, that’s not true, I didn’t think at all. It was just black anger; I wasn’t thinking straight, except perhaps that I thought it was him or me. The enemy is supposed to collapse when you cut his ham-strings. According to survival training. But he didn’t. He was still there between me and the door, but he wasn’t fighting any more, and he hadn’t made a sound except a sort of gurgle. And I went cold. I stood there shaking, and I was saying, “Alan, Alan, are you all right?” Damn silly – how could he be all right? I switched the torch back on, and I could see he was hanging upside down in a noose, and I had cut his throat. There was a lot of blood, pouring down the side of his head, but I could see it wasn’t him. It wasn’t Alan at all.’

  ‘Nasty moment,’ observed Peter.

  ‘Who was it?’ Quarley asked him. ‘Do you know who it was? Do you know why he went for me like that?’

  ‘Yes, I think I do,’ said Peter. ‘What I don’t understand is why you did what you did next. I suppose you know that on your account so far you would not be at risk of a conviction for murder. It was self-defence. Did you realise that?’

  ‘I suppose I did. I just couldn’t understand it. I mean if Alan were really trying to get out of things, to lie low, I could just about understand that he might want to attack me; well, no, really I couldn’t get my head around that idea. But why would a perfect stranger do it? Who did he think I was? I was in a hell of a hole.’

  ‘You were. But a jury might think that an honest man in your situation would have called the police and handed himself over. From where we are now, Quarley, it’s what you did next that is the source of the trouble.’

  ‘The batteries ran out,’ said Quarley. ‘I couldn’t see a blind thing. I was shaking like a leaf, and I only wanted to run away. I would have done just that if nobody in the village had seen me that evening, but I had a drink in the pub before going to the meeting with Alan. People knew I had been in Paggleham. I had to cover my tracks. So I went and hid out in that wood till first light. Then I walked around a bit. I was in a nightmare, I thought I must have got it all wrong; I must have been dreaming. But when I went back to the shed, of course I found it was true.’

  ‘There’s a phone box in the High Street from which you could have called the police,’ said Harriet.

  ‘You’re not going to believe me,’ Quarley said sadly. ‘Why should you believe me? But I wasn’t thinking of saving my neck. I was thinking of saving the job. I knew you, or someone would catch up with me eventually. But I just couldn’t bear to let people down.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ asked Peter. His voice was very gentle, unthreatening. But his face was guarded. Harriet found herself looking at the scene as if from outside it; three of them, she the witness whose report would clinch the matter, Peter, cat-like, poised to pounce, Quarley the hapless mouse, hypnotised into offering himself to be devoured . . . she shook the thought off.

  ‘I cut him down,’ said Quarley, shuddering. ‘I slung him over my shoulder, and carted him a little way down the street, and tipped him into a hole in someone’s garden. I spotted it when I was walking around a bit earlier. There it was with a nice pile of earth beside it, all ready to cover him over.’

  ‘Anyone might have seen you carrying the body,’ said Peter. ‘Did you think of that?’

  ‘Anyone might have,’ Quarley said. ‘If God were on the side of the enemy, someone would have. That would have stopped me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘But the Nazis don’t believe in God, do they? And he didn’t help them that morning. Nobody saw me. I shoved enough earth over him to keep him covered for a day or two, and hopped it.’

  ‘You say, for a day or two? You expected discovery?’

  ‘You see,’ said Quarley, ‘I had a job to do. You might be right that I wouldn’t hang – that it would be self-defence and all that. But there would certainly have been hell to pay. I would have been grounded.’

  ‘Indeed you would,’ said Peter.

  ‘I had a mission to fly. I only got the leave that let me go down there because the mission was coming up. We had been training for months; and we only had three of us left to do it. The absolute minimum. We lost Alan early on, and poor Bob Fletchling a couple of weeks ago. He flew into a hillside in a spot of mist. So there were – there are, only three of us left. And it takes three. Believe me.’

  ‘We believe you,’ said Peter. ‘Go on.’

  ‘So I didn’t give a damn for what a law-abiding person would have done. I didn’t give a damn for the bastard I had done for; after all, he set about me. I didn’t start it. I only cared for getting the hell out of there, and getting back on base, and doing my duty by my mates. Flying the mission, as planned. So that’s what I did. I just pitched him in a hole, and got on my bike and got the hell out of there.’

  ‘And how was the mission?’ Peter asked.

  ‘We made it. We all made it back, what’s more.’

  ‘Good. Congratulations. So then you were thinking of facing the music over what you had done?’

  ‘I’ve torn it now,’ Quarley said. ‘Made things worse than ever, haven’t I? What I didn’t know was that the mission was just a warm-up for something else. Something even trickier. So that they were going to say to us: Well done, boys, now you’re going to do that every day for months. So it’s still just as urgent. Maybe more so. We’ve lost ano
ther good pilot since then, and we’re flying with a new boy. He’s pretty brilliant, but he’s a bit too hot for safety. He’s Polish. He doesn’t fly technical, if you see what I mean, he flies with murder in his heart. He hates them so much he might risk a mission to down one of theirs. In the heat of the moment. Someone in the formation needs a cool head, and a bit of experience.’

  ‘So what you’re telling us is, you do mean to own up, but the moment hasn’t come?’

  ‘I suppose it has come,’ said Quarley. ‘I suppose you’re it.’

  ‘Time to go and talk to your commander,’ said Wimsey. He was at the door, when he turned suddenly and said to Quarley, ‘I say, old man, would you mind lending me that sheath knife of yours?’

  Quarley drew it out of his belt, and handed it over. Peter took a handkerchief from his pocket, shook it out and picked up the knife through it. Harriet saw Quarley blanch. She followed Peter out of the room.

  ‘Harriet, I need to go and get a sort of drumhead court martial organised,’ he said. ‘Would you stay with Quarley here, and not let him out of your sight?’

  ‘If you want me to, of course.’

  ‘This might take a little while.’

  ‘Okay, Peter.’

  ‘I’d like to know what you think.’

  She could feel the misery seeping out of him, darkening the gloomy passageway in which they were standing, that feared and now familiar moment when Peter had cornered someone, and his appetite for justice suddenly waned and left him sickened. She had seen him through it before, and expected to see him through it again. But what was he asking her now?

  ‘I’m sorry for him,’ she said decisively. ‘Are you going to tell him it was a German spy?’

  ‘But it wasn’t,’ he said. ‘As far as he knew when he struck the blow, it was a fellow officer who had been messing with his sister. And there is a chink in his story, Harriet. That knife. Why was he carrying a knife, if he didn’t mean murder or mayhem?’

  ‘So you don’t feel it would be right to tell him he killed one of the enemy and let him go?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, would it?’ he asked her.

  An image of false-Brinklow, limping along the street, talking to Mrs Maggs, radiating charm at the village dance came to her clearly. Whoever he was. ‘No, I don’t think it would,’ she said. ‘But, Peter, it took a bit of inhumanity from high places to bring this about. It took somebody deciding that they didn’t need actually to tell a dead man’s friends and family that he was definitely dead. It was “missing presumed dead”, that did the damage. That caused the misunderstanding. Don’t you see?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ he said. ‘I would say that it was Quarley’s knife that did the damage. But look, my dear, it won’t be up to us. Too much depends on it. Possibly many lives. I’m sorry to ask this of you, but just stay with him. Make sure he doesn’t scarper or string himself up.’

  Harriet nodded.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he said. ‘But it’s a long way from London here. There might be trains; someone might be able to get a plane, but it might take all night.’

  Only a minute after he had gone did she realise, with a lurching heart, how fast he might be going to drive.

  The publican made up the fire before going to bed. He brought a mug of cocoa for each of them, and produced a couple of blankets. Quarley played patience for a while. Harriet read some ineffably corny ghost stories from the scant run of books on a shelf. It was an ordeal, no question, sitting with the man. He was in mental agony, and they didn’t seem to have anything safe to talk about. Now and then he threw down the cards, got up, paced round the room like one of the big cats in the zoo.

  Somewhere round midnight Harriet could bear the overpowering unease in the room no longer. ‘Why did you take a knife?’ she asked him. ‘Do pilots always carry a knife? Is it official issue?’

  ‘It’s not official,’ he said, turning to her eagerly. ‘But we mostly carry them. It can be difficult to get free of a parachute, sometimes. If you’re on the ground you can just unbuckle, but if you’re caught up in something – if the thing is under tension, you’re hanging in a tree or something like that, then it’s handy to be able to cut free. Worst of all is if you’re down in the water. The parachutes can fill up and drag you under in seconds. So most of us do carry knives. I didn’t take it with me specially, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not at all.’

  ‘It might be worth while to make sure that they know that. It’s just a detail, but . . .’

  ‘I can see that it makes a difference. If I had taken a knife deliberately it would look bad, wouldn’t it? Premeditated? I wasn’t premeditating, Lady Peter, truly I wasn’t.’

  ‘I believe you,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Look, do you mind if I try to get some sleep? Tomorrow looks pretty bloody, however things work out.’

  ‘Go ahead. I’ll try to catnap too. You aren’t really going to run off, are you?’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ he said, suddenly smiling at her, and he curled up on the lumpier sofa, punched a cushion to shape up under his head, and fell instantly asleep.

  Harriet settled on the opposite sofa, covered her knees with the inn-keeper’s blanket and studied the man lying stretched out opposite. She was amazed at his capacity to sleep in such a situation, but he was undoubtedly asleep very deeply. The fire burned down to a glowing pile of ashes, and Harriet got up to put another log on it, and stumbled. She knocked a stool over, but he did not stir. She wondered exactly how old he was – he could easily be younger than Jerry – but his seamless face looked neither young nor old, as though the stresses of his waking life had somehow blurred the fresh and expressionless visage of a very young man, and ripened him, even in sleep. Or perhaps especially in sleep, for she didn’t remember thinking him older than his age when he was awake. She had a strong protective feeling about him; someone so young should not have had to cope with all this, should not have to risk his life and that of his companions, should not have killed anyone, should not be on the run; what peace meant, she thought, was that people were free to grow slowly into themselves, like well-lit plants, without this hothouse of distortion and pressure. Then she remembered the pig-shed, and shuddered. What was happening to her judgement? Shouldn’t she feel nothing but horror and revulsion at this fellow? And there was a conundrum here: who had he killed? Was Peter right to say he had killed his friend? Or had he killed an enemy? She needed to talk it over with Peter, and he had gone about his business, and she was more than half asleep.

  She woke suddenly in a chilly room. The faintest early light was angled through the half-drawn curtains. The fire was cold. Quarley was sitting up opposite her with his head in his hands.

  ‘I’ve realised something awful. Really awful,’ he said to her. ‘Can I tell you – you can’t think any worse of me than you do now, can you?’

  ‘You can tell me things if you think it will help,’ said Harriet.

  ‘I hope they charge me,’ he said softly. ‘I hope they bang me up out of harm’s way, and try me for murder, and take a long time about it. I’m not anything like as scared of that as I am of flying. I’m thinking, well maybe they’ll hang me, but at least I won’t have to do that again. At least I won’t be burned alive.’

  ‘I don’t see anything awful in being afraid when you have to do hideously dangerous things,’ said Harriet. ‘Anyone would be.’

  ‘You can’t admit it, though,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to be a bloody hero. If anyone cracks it demoralises everyone else. You just keep pretending. You sit around on the ground making tea, and playing cards, and pretending that you hate it, and you just can’t wait to be up there in the blue, ducking and weaving while the enemy does his damnedest to down you, and your ground-crew think you’re the cat’s whiskers, and everyone all round you is showing no fear. All the time it seems that some of them are crazy, plumb crazy. Wild boys, filing the rivets down on their wings to get a little extra speed, playing it like a fantastic game, thinking they’re
immortal. If they are just pretending too, you’d never know it. But the awful thing is, if I get arrested and locked up the mission plan will be shot to blazes, but I will be relieved, in a way. I am ashamed of myself, but there it is.’

  ‘You don’t have to be ashamed of it,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Of being a coward?’

  ‘I don’t think courage can have anything to do with what one feels inside,’ Harriet said. ‘I think it has to do with what one does. You haven’t funked a mission yet, or “cracked” in front of others, have you?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Harriet told him, ‘I think you might find being locked up awaiting execution asked for a lot of courage; as bad as a flying mission without the excitement.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ he said, smiling sheepishly at her.

  Heavens! Harriet thought. He hasn’t heard of me. Not a word. And, of course, when I stood trial he would have been only a schoolboy . . .

  ‘I won’t have a choice, will I?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think you will,’ she said.

  A dirty grey line had appeared between the curtains of the room. It cast a pencil of ineffectual grey light at an angle across the floor. Then both these apparitions glowed pink. Daylight; dawn. Harriet got up and drew the curtains. Outside it was already quite light, and there was some activity. A farm-worker was walking down the street with a billhook in his hand, and the postman was mounting a bicycle at the other end of the street. Quarley came to stand beside her. His voice had completely changed as he said, ‘Thank you for listening to me. You’re a real brick. Sorry for inflicting all that tommy-rot on you.’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ she said. ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘You won’t hold it against me? It is a bit off, really. You know, the squadron has the Pole I told you about, and two Czech pilots, and two Canadians who couldn’t wait for the official organisation to get them here, and even a Yank. All these people volunteering, and I . . .’