The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  That first impression of seeing the city as relatively untouched soon began to fade. Each morning I became subtly aware of more damage, as if overnight the bombing raids still continued, only silently now. It was an odd sensation and one I kept to myself. In time that faded too as I began struggling like everybody else with the unreliable public transport, food and fuel rationing, and the general drabness of life that manifested itself mostly in shortages of everything you needed and surpluses only of things you didn’t want.

  *

  It took Jack the best part of the day to pull together what I’d asked for, including some material which the battalion said they would forward. This was 7th Hampshires, a territorial battalion to which the carrier had been attached. Sergeant William Kearney was still officially posted as missing, presumed dead, and neither he nor any of the others in the carrier had left any particular impression on those Jack had been able to talk to. But then that was hardly surprising, given the size of battalions and the turnover of men once the Normandy landings had begun. The only fact that anyone could remember was that Kearney had been Irish, hardly a revelation given that his sister Rose hailed from County Wicklow. From what Jack could gather she had been making something of a nuisance of herself, first with the Hampshire Regiment and then with the her brother’s battalion commander who until that point had never heard of Sergeant William Kearney. He had shuffled her further along the line and after that she appeared to have been passed from one office to the next like a contagious virus.

  ‘That,’ Jack said as he returned a thickening file, ‘is probably why she ended up on your desk. We were next in line to catch the thing.’

  Yet despite what Jack thought, it seemed to me that at some point her correspondence must have caught up with the file on the man who appeared to have been executed. Seen in the perspective of what else had happened during the war, the case might be thought of as small beer. Gravitating towards Colonel G as it had, I supposed it was hardly surprising it had come to us. We, too, were small beer.

  *

  Moving up through Italy, once we’d got off the beachheads and made some ground, I’d spent a couple of weeks myself in what is properly termed a Universal Carrier. They are tracked open-topped vehicles that on uneven ground pitch and yaw like an Atlantic liner in a gale. Carrier platoons were devised to be small mobile units attached to infantry battalions, usually made up of half-a-dozen vehicles with three or four men in each. Their main armament was a Bren gun and an anti-tank rifle——a Boyes until it was later replaced by the PIAT anti-tank gun. When not ferrying men or supplies or officers around, their job was to move ahead of infantry to secure ground before an advance, hopefully knocking out any tanks or armoured vehicles opposing them. Riding in one, it had dawned upon me what a thankless task that was. They weren’t a match for a German tank and the best that could be hoped for was they kept the enemy busy by providing a target while the infantry moved up and found cover. It was the kind of vehicle that often found itself out on a limb, caught as it usually was between the lines. In the case of Kearney’s carrier, Jack had a map reference for where the vehicle had been lost, close to a village called Maltot a few miles to the south west of Caen in Normandy.

  According to the file, Sergeant Kearney commanded on the Bren, with Private Robert Burleigh as driver and mechanic, Private Joseph Dabs carrying the PIAT and Lance corporal Arnold Poole as the radio operator. As carriers went, Kearney’s was well armed; it was just that whatever they had come up against had been better armed. The report said that when the 4th Wilts had come across the carrier they found it by the side of the drive leading to a ruined château. First indications suggested the carrier had been hit by a shell——most likely from a hand-held anti-tank weapon——killing and incinerating the two men inside who could only be identified by their ID discs. They were named as Lance corporal Arnold Poole and Private Robert Burleigh. A third body, that of Joseph Dabs, lay some yards from the carrier. Decomposition aside, Dabs was unmarked except for the bullet in the back of his head. A brief description of the wound was attached but it didn’t make a guess at the weapon used or even of the calibre. As there had been no sign at the scene of the fourth member of the crew, a search was made and a shallow marked grave discovered in the garden of the château. The corpse of a man was exhumed, but although it had been partially burned the body was dressed in civilian clothes. Still legible identification papers found on him suggested he had been a French national.

  There were no further indications as to what might have happened to William Kearney.

  Jack typed up the notes made from his enquiries and I put these with what I was now calling the Joseph Dabs’ file. I took it into the other office for Peter Quince and Stan to look at. First I gave Susie the list of the men in the carrier.

  ‘Start a separate file on each, please Susie.’

  She looked at the first name. ‘Kearney? As in Gene Tierney?’

  The film star Gene Tierney was a particular favourite of Susie’s. Only a couple of weeks earlier on her recommendation I’d gone to watch a Technicolor farrago called, Leave Her to Heaven, starring Tierney and Cornel Wilde, discovering too late I could have better spent the two-hour running time less painlessly hanging by my thumbs. But Susie loved a glossy melodrama. It was the romantic in her.

  ‘Not Tierney,’ I told her ‘Kearney. As in carny. You know, carnivals?’

  ‘Carny is American parlance,’ Peter pointed out.

  Susie hooted. ‘I went out with GI before the invasion. I could barely understand a word he said.’

  ‘He’s almost certainly dead,’ said Peter, glancing through the file and ignoring her.

  ‘Couldn’t say as much for my GI,’ Susie muttered. ‘He was more than lively.’

  I tried to ignore her as well. ‘You’re probably right, Peter. But we have to consider the other possibilities.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as why is anyone interested? The list of missing in the Normandy campaign must be as long as your arm. Dead bodies without names and names without bodies. Why do they want us to look into this one?’

  ‘Because an SS man had Kearney’s discs?’

  ‘I’d have thought it was an open and shut case, then.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m just speculating. This Kearney’s missing. Perhaps someone suspects he deserted.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be the first,’ said Stan. ‘Have you seen the figures?’

  I had and they were alarming. It wasn’t something the War Office broadcast but desertion had been endemic. Not so easy in Kearney’s case, I would have thought, in France and probably unable to speak the language, with the Germans on one side and the Allies on the other.

  ‘You think he might still be alive?’ Peter queried. ‘Injured and parted from his ID discs?’

  ‘Happens,’ I said.

  ‘Then why hasn’t he surfaced?’

  ‘Holed up in Normandy?’

  ‘After two years? Hardly likely.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s like Ronald Coleman in Random Harvest,’ Susie suggested. ‘He lost his memory and Greer Garson found him and——’

  ‘Suppose,’ I said quickly so we didn’t get the plot of the whole film, ‘Kearney killed his mates to cover his tracks? But didn’t have time to burn Dabs.’

  Peter looked at the file again. ‘No, too obvious. If you’re planning to disappear you leave your own discs on one of the burnt corpses.’

  ‘Maybe Kearney’s not too bright,’ Stan put in.

  ‘He made sergeant.’

  ‘All right, Kearney’s dead and one of the others switched discs,’ I suggested.

  ‘Poole or Burleigh? They had a positive ID on Dabs.’ He’s the one who got it in the back of the neck.’

  ‘Head,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose it’s possible. But if that’s the way it went he’d need a damn good reason to disappear, particularly if he’s going to kill his mates.’

&
nbsp; ‘Comrades. They served together but in my experience that didn’t necessarily make them friends.’

  Susie was looking up at us. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m just wondering why anyone thinks it worth investigating.’

  ‘It appears they do,’ said Peter, ‘although the chances are Kearney died at the same time as the others. A German unit they ran into wasn’t bothering to take prisoners so Dabs caught one in the back of the head. Kearney, too, only his body hasn’t turned up yet. What’s left of it by now, that is.’

  It was the most likely answer, of course, and sooner or later Kearney’s bones would surface, turned up by a plough in some out of the way spot. A retreating army is far less likely to take prisoners than an advancing one and, like Joseph Dabs, a bullet in the head and a shallow grave was probably as much as William Kearney got to see of France. Only Dabs never even got the grave. Whoever had shot him probably had to pull out before they got the chance to bury him. Either that or they just weren’t bothered and left him where he fell. The chances were SS-Unterscharführer Vogel killed them both and took Kearney’s discs as a souvenir——or traded for the discs with some other man who actually did it. Small beer except for Kearney and Dabs but, whichever way you looked at it, still a war crime, an act that contravened the Hague Convention. How anyone was going to prove it, I didn’t know, never mind bringing anyone to book for it.

  Peter handed the file back. ‘You saw what regiment the SS man who had Kearney’s discs was with, didn’t you? 25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers. That’s Hitlerjugend.’

  Once he pointed it out, of course, the bells started ringing.

  ‘Weren’t they responsible for the Ardenne Abbey massacre?’

  ‘That’s right. Unterscharführer Otto Vogel was in the 25th. Kurt Meyer’s regiment. They were part of 12SS-Panzer Division.’

  The Hitlerjugend were SS raised late in the war and formed around veterans from the remnants of 1SS-Panzer Division, the army and the Luftwaffe. Most new recruits came from the Hitler Youth leadership schools, and some were no more than boys of sixteen. 12SS Hitlerjugend, of which the 25th was part, might have been thought of as mainly inexperienced troops who would buckle under Allied pressure. The reverse had been true. What they lacked in experience they made up for in devotion to Hitler and the Nazi cause. They had spent the better part of their young lives immersed in Nazi ideology and were as convinced of its inevitable triumph as other men believe the sun will come up tomorrow.

  The Ardenne Abbey massacre had taken place when the 12SS Hitlerjugend came up against the Canadians to the north-west of Caen. There had been a series of particularly bitter engagements in which the Canadians lost nearly three thousand men. The Hitlerjugend, too, had taken heavy casualties and had not taken prisoners. Over the span of a couple of days at a monastery at Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe, twenty Canadians were executed, most of their bodies not discovered until early the following year. Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer, commander of the 25th SS-Panzer Grenadier Regiment, and two of his officers had been sentenced to hang for the war crimes committed. As far as I was aware they were still awaiting execution.

  ‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘all bets are off. It doesn’t seem as though we have to look far after all.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Peter asked.

  I consulted my watch. It was almost three, the usual time on a Friday that Colonel G appeared for his weekly briefing.

  ‘Use my initiative,’ I said, ‘and see what Colonel G wants me to do.’

  *

  We didn’t have long to wait. He strode in with his usual air of intent, as if he had decided to shake the place up which always left the rest of us on tenterhooks. He said, ‘Good afternoon, Harry,’ which was a good start as when he used my surname——or worse, my rank——I knew I must have put my foot in it somewhere. The rest he called by rank and surname, except occasionally Peter who he’d address by his Christian name if he’d done some good work; like the time some bodies had turned up in a shallow grave on the Belgian border near Oost Capel and Peter had managed to identify the German unit who’d been operating in the area during our retreat at the end of May 1940.

  There was a general shifting of furniture as we all crammed into the larger of the two rooms and found somewhere to sit. One of Peter’s task was to prepare a précis of what we’d been doing all week and Susie had typed it up and had it waiting with the relevant files on her desk. Then she made some tea and passed it round with a few biscuits she had managed to turn up somewhere. Black market, probably, and none too fresh but Colonel G liked a biscuit and always reacted as if it was the highlight of his week. He munched through three or four, dropping crumbs on the files as he read and asked a few questions.

  Jekyll was one of those upper-class Scots who’d gone to a public school and had the kind of accent that could cut glass. There wasn’t a trace of brogue about him but put him in a kilt and give him a claymore and he’d have been the picture of a Highland terror. Susie maintained he was the laird of some outlandish clan or other but as I’ve already said she was just a romantic.

  ‘Righto, Harry,’ Colonel G said, fixing me with his good eye. ‘The file on this fellow Dabs? Had a chance to assess it yet?’

  ‘An execution probably, sir,’ I replied, barely pausing, just so he’d know I was on top of the fact he’d been in that morning and dropped off the file. ‘And the missing man’s ID discs were found on a sergeant from the 25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers, so the chances are we’ve got two murders. The 25th were part of the 12SS-Panzer Division——the Hitlerjugend. They’ve got form for this sort of thing. We need to place them in the area, of course, although it’s as well not to ignore other possibilities. Jack’s pulling the records together for dates and details for the carrier.’

  ‘Where are we talking about, exactly?’ Jekyll asked.

  ‘Normandy campaign,’ Peter said, glancing at his notes. ‘Near Caen. The battalion was 7th Hampshires.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, all business. ‘Peter, let’s see what we can turn up about the German troops in the area. Specifically the Hitlerjugend. Near the village of...’

  ‘Maltot,’ Jack supplied smartly, covering for me as I fumbled the name.

  ‘...near the village of Maltot.’

  Peter nodded. ‘Will do, sir.’

  ‘And Jack,’ I said, ‘get back on to Kearney’s battalion and double check that the identity discs on the two burned bodies had been through the fire.’

  Colonel G looked at me as if thinking that no-one swapping discs would be stupid enough to put an undamaged pair on a burned corpse, and I could only agree. But if it turned out later down the line that someone had been that stupid, I didn’t want to be the one to have to explain to the colonel why we hadn’t checked out the fact first.

  ‘The next of kin,’ I said to Colonel G while he was still looking at me. ‘We don’t have anyone for the executed man, Joseph Dabs, but we’ll get on to Poole and Burleigh’s families. Just on the off-chance...’

  Off-chance of what, I didn’t know, but as Jekyll didn’t pick me up on it I went on:

  ‘There was a letter from the sergeant in command’s sister, Rose Kearney. Her brother is the missing man. I can’t see as she’ll know anything under the circumstances, but it’ll be worth having a word if only to put her mind at rest.’ I turned to Stan Woodruff. ‘Stan, perhaps you can follow that up.’

  Colonel G looked over at Stan from where he was sitting behind Peter’s desk and sucked air through his teeth.

  ‘We don’t want to scare the poor woman, Harry. The sergeant has his uses but consoling widows and orphans isn’t one that springs to mind. Do it yourself. The sooner the better. This afternoon, I think. And take Blake with you. Women’s touch and all that.’

  I thought Colonel G was being a bit hard on Stan, particularly as from what I had seen, getting himself knocked about a bit had only enhanced Stan’s appeal rather than damaged it. But I suspected Jekyll was aware that R
ose Kearney had become a nuisance and decided it was going to take a visit from an officer to pacify her. Though just why he should want me to take Susie along I didn’t know.

  ‘Any particular reason, sir, that you’ve given us the Dabs file?’ I asked.

  Jekyll skewered me with the glass eye. ‘Do you mean apart from the bullet in the back of the man’s head and the SS having a missing man’s discs?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said quickly. ‘But given the number...,I mean, since it’s just the one man――or two, that is――I was wondering...’

  Floundering, I turned to the others for assistance. They turned the other way.

  ‘Normandy,’ Colonel G said. ‘The area south of Caen? Would that have been Operation Goodwood?’

  He raised an eyebrow while we all looked at each other hoping someone might know the answer.

  Jack was taking notes. ‘As in the racecourse, sir?’

  ‘You were on the beaches, Stan,’ I said for the want of something better to say. ‘Wasn’t your outfit involved in that?’

  Stan knit his brows in a scowl. He had been on the beaches but only for twenty-four hours——as he knew I knew full well. He’d caught one in the arm on landing and had spent hours on the beach before eventually being shipped back across the channel again.

  ‘Well,’ Colonel G said, standing up abruptly. ‘If that’s all?’

  We got to our feet. Everyone swapped salutes and the Colonel left.

  I wasn’t sure whether he had dropped the hint about Goodwood deliberately or was boasting because he happened to know the name of some operation in the area the carrier had been found. But if he already had some sort of handle on the thing, I thought I’d better get a grip on it too. And quickly, if I knew which side my bread was buttered.

  Not that it went any further than the metaphor. Butter was still on ration and as scarce as contributors to an Adolf Hitler memorial fund. Besides, no one wasted the stuff spreading it on bread these days.