The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  ‘I know,’ Jack said as soon as the door closed on Colonel G. ‘Get on the blower and see what I can dig up on Operation Goodwood. You looking for anything in particular?’

  I hadn’t the faintest idea. ‘Something out of the ordinary?’ I suggested. ‘Why anyone’s interested in Dabs...?’ But I could tell from Jack’s expression that he hadn’t any ideas either.

  ‘Does that include military fuck-ups?’

  ‘Out of the ordinary, I said.’

  3

  Fridays I generally liked to wind things up as soon as Colonel G left the office, get a jump on the weekend and have a drink in a club I knew that opened early. This Friday the colonel had got the jump on me and it looked as if the drink would have to wait. I wasn’t sure what his rush was but supposed I’d find out all in good time. Until then it seemed wise to make it look as if we were on top of things.

  ‘Peter, you’d better concentrate on the SS. See if we can get a better idea of which units were where at the time. Get hold of a decent map for the area south west of Caen if you can. In the meantime we’ll see what we can dig up about the carrier crew, just in case someone believes there’s something dodgy about all this.’

  ‘Dodgier than an SS bullet, you mean?’ Jack said.

  ‘I just want to make sure we touch all bases, as the yanks like to put it.’

  ‘My yank certainly wanted to touch them all,’ Susie remarked as she put on a face before we called on Rose Kearney. ‘When I told him I was a FANY he took it quite the wrong way.’

  I tried to ignore the picture that brought to mind and asked Stan if he had anything on for the weekend. He didn’t so I told Jack to draw a rail warrant for Burnley if Stan fancied the trip. He had a brother there he hadn’t seen for a while and if he travelled up on Saturday for the weekend, I thought he could call on Arnold Poole’s father who lived in nearby Blackburn. If he took the early train Monday he could be back in the office mid-morning. I couldn’t really see that talking to the dead men’s families was going to be of much use but we had to do something while we waited for all the information we’d requested to come in. And in the army, I’ve found, it’s often appearances that count. Even if you’re really wasting time, not looking as though you’re wasting time is what’s important.

  ‘And try and find out if any of the crew spoke French,’ I suggested as an afterthought, thinking that if there had been a desertion a French speaker might get a head start.

  Then, having sorted Peter, myself and Susie, and Stan out, I suggested to Jack that while he was digging up what he could on Operation Goodwood, he might see if he could find out what had started Colonel G’s nose twitching about the business. If there was something, I wanted a sniff of it too.

  While Susie finished putting on a face I looked up the street in Kilburn where Rose Kearney was staying then bid my staff a cheery goodbye. I really didn’t expect them to hang around much after we left and assumed they’d be gone while Susie and I were still walking around Kilburn in search of Kearney’s sister’s address.

  *

  In exceptional circumstances we could have asked for a staff car from the pool. But staff clerks don’t rate relatives of missing servicemen as exceptional unless they wear a general officer’s insignia or have more than two lines in Burke’s Peerage. Somehow I doubted that Rose Kearney’s name had ever been mentioned in anything, except perhaps the County Wicklow Gazette——if there was such a publication.

  We rode the Metropolitan and District line a couple of stops to Edgware tube station then caught the number six bus through Warwick Station to Kilburn Lane, Susie craning her pretty neck round at the view as if we usually kept her chained in the office.

  Sitting on the top deck of the bus offered a good perspective of the area and I often spent my spare time riding around London looking at the damage the Blitz and the later V1 and V2 attacks had done. Seeing those gaps where houses——sometimes entire blocks——had disappeared, I often found myself wondering what all those vanished buildings had been. Even on routes familiar from before the war, I still had trouble remembering what had filled the gaps. Like pulled teeth they left a sense of their own former presence behind, a ghostly flabbiness, not of the gum but of the memory. Time would remove it eventually and from the fifteen-foot high vantage point on top of a bus it looked as though, for many people, it already had.

  The previous Saturday I had watched the Victory Parade process through the streets surrounded by cheering crowds as the Chiefs of Staff, mechanized columns and lines of marching men passed us by. Behind them——at least from where I stood between Trafalgar Square and Admiralty Arch——the boarded-up buildings and ruined façades seemed to provide a backdrop that showed the other side of Victory’s coin. Or was it just the cost of the coin? For many, perhaps the parade was the full stop that finally ended their war.

  From the top of the bus I watched pedestrians hurrying up and down the streets, barely giving their surroundings a second glance. Most people, I suppose, thought life was getting back to normal. But that was only because most people had forgotten what normal was.

  I certainly had. The army had changed me, although not through any personal commitment to it. Never having been one to concern myself overmuch with military strategy——and certainly not those grand Napoleonic movements so beloved of armchair generals——I had adopted the only tactic that had seemed sensible. That of self-preservation. Gaining promotion is generally a matter of displaying leadership qualities——staff appointments apart where they seem to play by their own rules. To what I owed my commission, I assumed, was the ability of personally taking control of situations where I thought those issuing the orders didn’t have my own safety uppermost at heart. That’s a dangerous game to play, of course. I’d been fortunate enough to get away with it and come out with a commission. Despite the obvious direction in which the finger of blame for Private Dabs’ death was pointing, the possibility had occurred to me that William Kearney might have tried something similar. Perhaps he had taken control of a situation in an attempt to save his own skin, abandoning the rest of the carrier crew to their fate. If he had, Dabs’ fate hadn’t been a fortunate one.

  But none of it was anything more than idle speculation and perhaps Kearney hadn’t been any luckier than Dabs.

  *

  I’d brought my briefcase along with the original report and had Rose Kearney’s letter in my pocket. In truth, I was only going to be able to tell her what she already really knew: that her brother wasn’t coming back. How I was going to tell her was another matter. I could use the same words that everyone she’d already talked to probably had and let her down as gently as I could, or I could show her the report that had been filed after they had found Kearney’s carrier. It wasn’t pretty reading but that sort of thing rarely is. I don’t know if anyone had told her yet that her brother’s ID discs had been found on a dead SS soldier. If not, I didn’t want to be the one who did. Particularly since the soldier in question had belonged to Kurt Meyer’s 25th SS-Panzer Grenadier Regiment.

  After they found the bodies of the murdered Canadian soldiers, the story had been all over the news. The men had either been shot or bludgeoned to death over a two-day period. That it had happened more than a month before Rose Kearney’s brother had gone missing was neither here nor there——nor that the monastery at Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe was several miles from where the burnt-out carrier had been found. That distance was no more than a quick run for a Panzer. Whether we could pin Dabs’ death on Meyer, though, was doubtful——even if you could put him on the spot. But it had been established that he had issued orders to the effect that prisoners were not to be taken. I didn’t suppose too many people would quibble if Joseph Dabs’ name was added to the list of Hitlerjugend’s victims. And——since one of his men had been found with Kearney’s ID discs on his body——Sergeant William Kearney’s name, too.

  I would have been happier if they had found Kearney’s remains. But until they did, he’d go down in
the book as another unexplained casualty of war. All but two of the abbey massacre victims, Canadians from either the North Nova Scotia Highlanders or the Sherbrooke Fusiliers Regiment, had remained missing until early in 1945——over six months after they had been murdered. Only one body was found in July of forty-four when the ground around Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe was finally taken, which meant that the remaining body has yet to be discovered. In the Canadians’ case there was little doubt as to what had happened. They had all been taken prisoner together and the outcome had been clear. As far as Rose Kearney’s brother went, it wasn’t.

  Despite the obvious need to bring criminals to justice, given the butcher’s theatre that the Caen campaign had been, it still seemed a lot of trouble to go to over what was, at most, the death of two men. But perhaps I had become desensitized to this sort of thing. I had spent too much time reading reports of similar cases and the repetition had begun to numb me. Too long looking in the face of war had insulated me against the horror. Perhaps the same was true of that line of men and women——ordinary-looking for the most part——who had been brought to the dock of justice in Nuremburg. They might even have pleaded something of the sort in their own defence. If they had, it hadn’t washed. Equally, I suppose, neither should it wash in my case.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have even considered trying to shelter Kearney’s sister from the nastier possibilities of his failure to return home. Being told what had——in all probability——happened to him might at least persuade her to go back to Ireland. Desensitized or not, one shouldn’t shy away from the realities of war. Glory and honour are, after all, little more than a veneer some use to cover what is in truth monstrous ugliness. It seemed to me that to ignore the fact merely risked everyone stumbling blindly into the horror once again.

  *

  The address Rose Kearney had given in her letter was Claremont Street, a crescent off Kilburn Lane sandwiched between the railway line and the main road. There was severe bomb damage at the eastern end and what buildings remained proved to be a line of shabby terraced housing subdivided into flats. I couldn’t imagine it was the kind of place that figured in the dreams of anyone from County Wicklow, but then I hadn’t been to County Wicklow. At least these terraces had the advantage of still standing, which was more than could be said for the area around my flat. There had been a plate for residents’ names by the front door but no one had bothered to use it and it was now little more than a smudge of rust. I pushed the front door open and we went inside.

  The flat was given in the letter as number three which was on the first floor. There was a telephone on the wall in the hall, which made me wonder why Rose hadn’t supplied the number in her letter. But perhaps she hadn’t known it. Susie jotted it down in case we needed it then looked over the other numbers scrawled on the stained wallpaper beside the phone, as if she might be considering a blind date.

  A gloomy silence filled the house as we climbed the stairs, pale light filtering through a grimy window at the turn of the half-landing giving only a hint of the bright afternoon we’d left on the street. The stairs led up to a second floor and, I supposed, an attic beyond, and the door to number three lay down a short corridor. Its once green paint was now peeling and cracked. The frame, too, was chipped and splintered around the lock which suggested it had been forced more than once. That could have been a reflection on the area’s crime rate, or simply an indication that whoever lived there was in the habit of forgetting their key.

  I knocked on the door. The house was quiet enough for me to believe I caught the sound of movement inside the flat. When no one answered, I looked at Susie who raised her eyebrows as if she had heard a noise, too. I waited a moment longer, knocked again and found myself feeling that if there’d been a peephole in the door, someone would have been looking through it at us. I was considering whether it was worth knocking a third time when the latch clicked and the door opened an inch or two on a chain.

  ‘What is it you want?’

  I couldn’t see much through the crack but it was a woman’s voice and it had an Irish accent.

  ‘I’m looking for Rose Kearney,’ I said, taking off my cap and leaning towards the door. ‘Sister of Sergeant William Kearney?’

  The woman hesitated, then said:

  ‘I’m Rose Kearney. Who’s wanting to know?’

  As she came closer to the door and I could see her eye flicking from me to Susie, I experienced a momentary sensation of what the Germans call schadenfreude——or at least future schadenfreude——and relished the thought of Jack’s discomfort when I told him how Rose Kearney had pronounced her own name.

  ‘My name’s Tennant,’ I said into the crack.

  ‘You’re from Billy’s regiment?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I have the letter you wrote to your brother’s commanding officer.’ I held it up so she might see it. ‘Can you spare us a few minutes...?’

  She pulled the door wide, almost as wide as her eyes.

  ‘You have news of Billy?’

  She was tall, almost my height, and slim to the point of thinness. Her face looked drawn and tired and somehow angular like her body. I put her in her thirties and saw there was no wedding ring on her finger. She was wearing a darned sweater over a cotton print dress, her auburn hair tied back at her neck. The overall impression was one of drabness. Except for her eyes. They were still wide.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t have any news about your brother.’

  The bony shoulders slumped and the spark went out of her eyes. ‘Then why have you come?’

  ‘I was hoping you could to tell us something about your brother that might be of help.’

  She stepped aside to let us in and shut the door behind us. A cramped hallway led past two closed doors to a kitchen. It held a two-ring gas stove, a sink and some chipped cabinets. A scrubbed deal table and chairs stood in the middle of the room. Rose Kearney slumped into one. Above the sink tattered curtains framed the window and its view of a brick wall beyond. I sat opposite her at the table while Susie walked around to the window and leaned against the sink. Rose Kearney glanced up at her then back at me.

  I told her I was sorry again and that her letter had come to me because my department dealt with missing servicemen. I didn’t go into details. She listened patiently, her hands resting on the table, the left over her right. I asked when she had last heard from her brother.

  ‘We got a letter from him in early June, nineteen forty-four.’

  ‘And no word since.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have other family?’

  ‘Uncles and cousins, but it was just me and Mam after Billy left.’ Rose Kearney raised a defiant chin. ‘The rest of the family took against Billy when he joined the British army. When Mam died in December I decided to come to see what I could find out about Billy. This is our cousin Patrick’s place. He’s not told his father I’m here but he says I can stay till I get fixed up for myself.’

  ‘You’re going to stay in England?’

  The thin shoulders rose half an inch as if she thought I might have an objection to the fact. ‘There’s nothing back home,’ she said.

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘He died when Billy and me were kids.’

  ‘What would he have thought of your brother joining the British army?’

  Rose Kearney’s eyes flashed and she gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘It’s just as well he was dead, I’ll tell you that.’

  I didn’t suppose that meant a lot. Thousands of men from the Irish Republic had joined the British army at the outbreak of war, despite the fact their government and many of their fellow citizens saw them as traitors. Almost a quarter of a century had passed since partition and the civil war but the wound was still raw.

  Susie asked Rose what her brother had done before the war but she didn’t tell us much. There’d been some farm work, she said, then unemployment and Kearney had come to England looking for work. When he couldn’t find any he joi
ned the army.

  ‘He wasn’t conscripted?’

  ‘Billy joined before the war,’ Rose said.

  ‘Did he write often? To you and your mother?’

  She nodded. ‘Every week, right after church.’

  ‘He was Catholic?’

  ‘And why wouldn’t he be?’ she demanded.

  ‘Would you have a photograph of him, Rose?’

  She reared a bit at that, my use of her first name, then calmed quickly.

  ‘No. We never had any taken back home. There was no photographer in our village.’

  ‘He didn’t have one taken here and sent back for your mother?’

  She regarded me suspiciously. ‘And how would you be knowing that?’

  ‘So he did.’

  ‘Yes, but I buried it with our Mam. It’s what she asked me, before the end.’

  ‘It must have been a comfort to her,’ Susie said.

  But Rose Kearney was having none of that, no hollow-sounding sympathy from a busty ATS in her own flat. She threw Susie one disdainful glance then ignored her.

  ‘Did your brother ever mention any of the men he served with?’

  It hadn’t occurred to her to bring his letters with her, she said; they were back in Ireland with what few other possessions she owned and would be sent on once she was settled. She did remember Billy mentioning some names now and then though, but couldn’t recall exactly who.

  ‘One or two of the officers, maybe. But it wasn’t a subject Mam cared to read about, it being the British army you understand.’ Then she reached across the table and laid a hand on my sleeve. ‘No offence meant, Captain. Things being what they are, if you take my meaning.’

  I did and wondered——things being what they were——if her brother would have been likely to go back to Ireland given the rest of the family’s feeling against him.

  ‘No,’ she said when I asked. She didn’t think so. As far as she was aware he hadn’t any particular plans for after the war.