‘Well,’ I said, ‘let’s let ’em get it built first.’
But I did fancy the notion.
We pressed on through the haunted wood, and after a while it fell out that I was walking with Dawson, the others having disappeared from view ahead of us. His face was filthy – looked as though his muddy moustache had spread over all of it. Some shells were falling quite near; every so often you’d catch the force of one, and feel a little winded, as though you’d just run ten yards.
Dawson said something I couldn’t catch, and I saw he was indicating a bloke on a white horse in the trees. He looked as though he’d always been there. He was calling to us.
‘You there!’
Dawson said to me, ‘That’s not a very military form of address, is it?’
We walked up to the bloke, and we both saluted (in a ragged sort of way) since he was on a horse after all, and he wore a cap instead of a tin hat. It seemed odds on that he was an officer. In fact, he was just about as perfect – up there on that horse – as any toy soldier. He had a waxed moustache; his well-pressed uniform was offset by a gleaming thin white rope about one shoulder – a lanyard. He took out a paper, and struck a match, the better to read it, and by the light of this flame, I saw his red cap cover. He was a member of the Military Mounted Police – a monkey, as they were known to the men – and he had three stripes on his sleeve. Compared to him, the regimental police in our own battalion had just been playing at the job.
‘Are you the 17th Northumberland?’ he said. He spoke like a machine. ‘I’m looking for a Captain Quinn. Quinn of ‘E’ Company.’
I knew he’d come about William Harvey. I saw in my mind’s eye the sodden dead boy, left out to dry on the sea wall at Spurn … and the bug-like eyes. The matter had followed us to France, and it broke in on me for the first time that I had no more means of proving my innocence than any other man in the section. All that could be said in my favour was that I had no obvious motive for killing Harvey.
We indicated the direction of the tavern, and the ruin next door that would be housing Quinn. The bloke turned his horse and went off that way, and we trooped after. Dawson smoked in silence as we walked and I thought how this wasn’t like him: the smoking was, but not the silence.
When we got back to the billet, we saw Quinn, sitting on his own horse (he’d evidently just got back with it), talking to the Military Policeman on his. They were in between the tavern and the ruin next door. Every so often the horses would twitch or start at the wilder noises coming from the front line. As Dawson and I made for the tavern, I could make out Quinn’s voice.
‘My men have had a very hard time of it today,’ he was saying, ‘or so I should imagine. I myself was in Albert trying to find a horse, and then lunching with the adjutant.’
Well, at least he was honest about it. Another thing: it was funny to hear him say ‘My men’.
Inside the tavern, I discovered that orderlies from battalion HQ had visited earlier in the day and not only located a stove, but filled it with coal. A dixie of the usual sort of stew was boiling away on it. Everything was now focused on that stove. The men had shifted their couches towards it, and tunics and trousers were draped over chairs and stools and pushed towards it for drying. Two hurricane lamps burned on the bar, and all the blokes were stripping off prior to going out back where, Oamer promised, there was a pump and a bucket. The twins, I noticed, wore nothing underneath their rough tunics. Roy Butler smoked while contemplating the hard muscles of his stomach; he didn’t seem proud, just interested. Their brother, on the other hand, was combing his hair in a fragment of mirror that he’d got hold of. Scholes was sitting on his couch, and taking his penny whistle from his pack. There was quite a happy undercurrent of conversation because at least we were all out of the rain. The fact that something a bit heavier might fall on us at any moment seemed generally forgotten about. Scholes began to play his whistle – just a short burst of something fast and complicated. When he’d finished, Oliver Butler, stowing his mirror back in his pack, said, ‘It’s good, is that. Carry on.’
He could be a decent sort sometimes, and I noticed the expression on Scholes’s face. Chuffed, he was – and perhaps for another reason as well: he’d gone to the front line and come back, proved himself up to the mark.
But his happiness didn’t last, for Oamer walked in just then, went directly over to Scholes and had a word in his ear. Looking dead white, Scholes put down his whistle, and walked out of the tavern.
I collared Oamer as he followed Scholes out, saying, ‘What does that red hat want?’
Oamer replied without stopping, ‘Spurn. New evidence come to light.’
That was at seven o’clock. At quarter past seven, Scholes came back, sat silent on his couch, then took his whistle from his sack and didn’t play it but sat there holding it. At twenty past, Oamer returned. The twins were to go over to the next-door ruin for their turn at being questioned.
‘What’s this about?’ barked Oliver, as his brothers were marched off.
When they’d gone, Oliver Butler turned his anger on Scholes: ‘What did you tell him that he’s called Roy and Andy in?’
Scholes just shook his head, could barely bring himself to speak. At length, he said, ‘He’s had a report from our regimental police.’
‘What’s his name?’ said Butler.
‘Thackeray,’ Scholes muttered, ‘Company Sergeant Major Thackeray.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That he thinks William Harvey was done in by one of us; that he doesn’t mean to let the matter drop, just because we’ve come out here. That no man will be promoted within our section until he’s got to the bottom of it all.’
‘What did he want with you?’
Scholes just shook his head, still staring at nothing.
‘Why does he want to see the twins?’
‘Why do you bloody think?’ said Scholes. ‘Because they’re not right in the head.’
‘They’re my brothers,’ said Butler, furious.
‘That’s your look-out,’ said Scholes, and he thought: yes, that’s just what it is. Oliver Butler is perpetually looking out for his brothers. Scholes had had enough of our stares. He picked up his whistle, and quit the room, with Butler looking daggers into his back.
At seven-thirty, the twins returned, grinning – but then that meant nothing in their case – and Oliver took them into a huddle in the corner. He wanted to know if they’d been seen separately or together. Evidently, they’d been seen separately. Young Tinsley had taken refuge in the Railway Magazine. Dawson lay flat on his couch, which was next to mine. I looked a question at him.
‘I’m looking at that bottle, mate,’ he said, indicating with his stockinged foot the poster behind the bar, ‘and I’m thinking I’d like to go large on whatever wine is left over in this place.’
‘Like a drop of wine, do you?’
He nodded.
‘Beer for preference, but I do like a drop of white wine. Van Blonk,’ he said, ‘Point blank … Or cider, of course. I like a drop of that.’
He gave me a queer smile, the meaning of which I would only understand later. I wondered if it was only beer that turned him into the other Dawson, the wild man, as he’d been turned on Spurn Head – and only John Smith’s bitter at that.
‘Not bothered about the red cap?’ I said.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Now this is you with your detective hat on. No, I’m not bothered about him. He’s part of the future, and I don’t really think about the future.’
‘Because you might cop it at any moment, you mean?’
‘No,’ he said, after a while. ‘As a general rule I don’t think about the future.’
He reached under his couch and caught up his water bottle; he passed it over to me.
‘Cider,’ he said, ‘from the basement. It’s dark down there, but I found a crate of this.’
I took a pull. After receiving another nod from him by way of encouragement, I took another, longer
one. It was a strong brew of cider, and it affected me directly.
‘So even in the past you didn’t think about the future?’ I said, giving it back.
Dawson nodded. ‘Even then.’
Oamer returned, and this time he marched Tinsley out. When he’d gone, I walked over to his couch, and picked up the Railway Magazine he’d left lying there. I wanted to see the words that always appeared at the foot of the back page – and they appeared in full this time: ‘The Railway Publishing Co., Ltd., 30, Fetter Lane, Fleet St., London, E.C. Telephone – 2087 HOLBORN’.
Tinsley returned looking white-faced. He too had evidently been given a roasting. He collected up his rifle on coming back into the tavern, and went off again to do his sentry-go. Next it was Dawson’s turn with the red cap, and when Oamer returned him, he called for me.
Quinn stood outside the small ruin. The red cap, Thackeray, was evidently within.
Quinn nodded as I approached, saying, ‘You will address the Company Sergeant Major as “sir”’, which had me wondering whether one of the blokes had tried to ‘sarge’ Thackeray.
The small ruin held a kind of coffin-like box bed – Quinn’s. Beside it was a rickety table with Company Sergeant Major Thackeray sitting at it. Quinn himself remained hovering outside, and since the door of the ruin was kept open, he would have heard what took place inside. This was a sort of compromise. He would be a witness to the questioning but would not quite sit in on it.
‘You are Fusilier Stringer,’ said Thackeray, in his clattering, mechanical way. ‘Do you have anything to add to your statement?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You were the last man to go to bed.’
‘Yes.’
He stared at me for a while.
‘Do you have any grievance against any man in your section?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Does any other man in your section have any grievance against any other man?’
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ I said.
(Which wasn’t exactly true.)
‘And yet you were involved in a fight during the evening.’
‘More of a scuffle, as I said in the statement. It never came to blows.’
‘Every man had been drinking,’ he said, and I knew at that moment: this bloke’s teetotal. ‘In the fight, you sustained a cut to your right knuckle.’
I nodded. This was rather concerning … but it had been a tiny cut, and Dawson would testify that I’d got it from him, and not through striking William Harvey. Anyhow, I believed he would, and perhaps he already had done.
Thackeray stood, proving there was not a single crease in his uniform.
‘No,’ he said, ‘because you are all pals. You are part of a whole battalion of pals, in fact.’ He was standing, more or less to attention, by the side of the table; even so, his riding boots creaked a little. ‘Chums,’ he said, with disgust. ‘You have left your homes, wives, children, jobs to come to the aid of Blighty in her hour of need; and for no more in return than twice the pay of a regular soldier, and the status of national hero.’
‘Is there a question?’ I said, having decided to stop sirring him.
With a great squeaking and creaking of boots, he sat back down again, saying, ‘You were a policeman of sorts.’
‘Detective sergeant on the railway force.’
‘Where were you based?’
‘York station,’ and at that the moustache fluttered, signifying a laugh.
‘And did your power of arrest extend beyond the ticket gate?’
‘It extended over all the railway lands.’
‘The railway lands’ – and again the moustache went up. ‘That sounds like somewhere in your imagination.’
‘They are set out in The North Eastern Railway Police Manual.’ I eyed him for a while, before adding, ‘It’s not an over-imaginative book.’
‘Why the hell aren’t you in the Military Mounted Police?’
‘I can’t ride a horse.’
‘No,’ he said, after a space, ‘I’m not surprised.’
‘And I wanted to see action.’
‘Alongside your pals?’
‘And others besides.’
‘Your pals and your chums.’ He leant forwards. ‘What do you suppose this is? A war or a social outing?’ He leant further forwards. ‘Even though you are unaccustomed to army life, you are hoping to have the nerve to keep your head up.’
‘Something of that.’
‘Well, a boy is dead, and it appears to me that you or one of your drunken pals is responsible, so you will be seeing some action, that I guarantee, fusilier.’ I thought that might have been it, but he eyed me for a good long while before adding, ‘In his report the doctor said he’d never seen a greater injury of that type. You might think the eye – the right eye – was coming out of the boy’s head. But it went in – all the way into his brain. Do you suppose he saw his brain? Do you suppose he had sight of it just before he died?’
But I was not meant to answer this morbid question.
‘You are free to go,’ said Thackeray. ‘For now.’
When I stepped out, Quinn was still hovering, and looking none too pleased.
An hour later, after our feed, Oamer stood in that apology for a wood, on the dark border of our camp, and lit his pipe. It was his turn for sentry-go. He passed the match to me, and I touched it to the end of a Woodbine.
‘What was the new evidence?’ I asked him. ‘I never found out.’
‘Regarding Scholes,’ said Oamer. ‘It was the manner of his finding the bike … And it was a question of nuance.’
‘Of what?’
‘You recall those children with the flags on Spurn? It seems they have the power of speech after all, and they’ve given their version of events.’
‘But they’d cleared off by the evening,’ I said.
‘But they came back the next day,’ said Oamer, ‘and they saw the search.’
I recalled that he was right; that I’d seen them myself while searching.
‘One of the two – name of Lucy – said she saw a man finding the bike. She was asked about that, and she said, “I saw him pick it up. I don’t know that he found it.” So naturally she was then asked, “Did he look as though he’d found it?”’ Oamer sighed and looked at his pipe. ‘She said “no”, and was quite insistent on the point. The man she’d seen – Scholes – had, it appeared to her, known where the bike was when he made towards it.’
‘Rum,’ I said.
‘It’s quite a subtle distinction for Lucy to make,’ Oamer ran on. ‘But they turn out some bright sparks at the Spurn elementary school.’
‘So the position is that we’re all in it, but Scholes is the number one suspect?’
‘That’s right.’
A thought struck me. I asked Oamer:
‘Were you questioned?’
‘I was … Pleasant sort, isn’t he?’
‘Not a crease in his uniform.’
‘I think that may be the entire point of him. I hope so, anyhow.’
In fact, the point of the red cap, Thackeray, was that he was one of those regular army types who saw the volunteers as merely civilians in uniforms – so many slackers and wranglers, given an easy time of it so as to encourage others to join up.
It was a common sort of prejudice, I believed, and now we’d come up hard against it.
I took over from Oamer as sentry, walking in the wood, listening to the fireworks of the front, and thinking hard. One question particularly bothered me. On Spurn … why would Tinsley have put an edition of his beloved Railway Magazine in the stove?
When I was relieved, by Dawson, I went straight to sleep, but dreamt again – this time of the trenches. It appeared that the war invaded sleep as well as the waking hours. I was just dangling about in no man’s land waiting to be shot, looking out for an opportunity to die with no particular feelings about it either way. Corporal Newton came up to me and said, ‘You’re in the wrong place, mate. You ought to be over h
ere.’ Then the red cap, Thackeray, was before me on his horse. A voice – it was Bernie Dawson’s – said, ‘You can tell he’s a bastard just by the expression on his face – on his horse’s face, I mean.’ The horse, and Thackeray, moved off, and I was awake. In the light of the candle stub that still burned by Tinsley’s couch, I inspected the tavern room. Two couches were empty: Oliver Butler’s, and Scholes’s. Oliver Butler would be standing sentry, but Scholes, I knew, did not have a sentry duty that night. He ought to have been sleeping. His kit bag was there, and his rifle ought to have been propped against it, but I couldn’t make it out. Then again, the room was half enclosed in darkness. I went over and picked up the candle, looking harder. I then put on my trousers and my boots; I took up my own rifle, and walked out. No sound came from the direction of the front. I heard a cough, and there was Scholes on the margin of the wood, sitting on a broken tree. He wore his uniform, with tunic unbuttoned. ‘Where’s your rifle?’ I said, walking fast up to him.
‘Under the couch. Why? Did you think I’d make away with myself?’
I leant against the tree.
‘Thackeray gave you a tough time of it.’
‘He tried his best,’ said Scholes. ‘Tried his best and succeeded.’
‘What about the bike?’
‘You’ve heard about that, have you? Evidently, I didn’t find it, but put it on the dune. Fact is …’ he said, finally looking up at me, ‘I did come upon it earlier. I’d seen it ten minutes before and I was just wondering what to do about it – if anything. I just knew that some copper would take that line if I spoke up about seeing the bike. That’s the thing about this war, isn’t it? The world’s gone out of balance: there’s no good luck any more.’
‘Did you explain that to him? About the bike, I mean?’
Scholes nodded. ‘I think I’m off the hook for now. I told him I’m a policeman myself, I don’t commit crimes. He said, “You were. You were a policeman. I’m the law now.” I haven’t seen the last of him, none of us has. He means to keep cases on all of us. He has a down on all our lot.’
‘Our unit?’ I said, ‘The Northumberlands? Railwaymen?’
But I knew the answer.
The Somme Stations Page 12