The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  Massacres like those committed at Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane had been a different matter. And yet even they paled by comparison to what was now coming out about the actions of the Special Action Groups——Einsatzgruppen——in eastern Europe and Russia.

  What I suppose I was wondering was how the degree of what constituted a crime was a matter of perspective. Not just relative to other, greater crimes, but to the victor and the vanquished. Not a very original thought, I grant. It’s a cliché——but still also a truism——that the victor writes the history; but he also convenes the court——or erects the scaffold, or merely find a convenient wall to stand his victims against. At base, it’s a matter of morality and even then one has to try to pin down morality’s shifting parameters. The evidence and consequences of that lay all around me in the results of bombing raids; raids the consequence of which were even more apparent in the German cities. There was plenty of guilt to spare for actions once deemed necessary and, I had noticed, it already seemed some of those who had taken the necessary action were no longer so keen to have the responsibility lying at their door.

  *

  I walked around for an hour or so then went back to the office. Peter and Susie were out to lunch but Stan was still at his desk trawling through interrogation reports and I could hear Jack's Remington taking a beating in the other room.

  Stan glanced up, looking even more dour than usual, as if something was troubling him.

  ‘If you're worried about that woman's husband lodging a complaint over you smacking him,’ I said, ‘I'd forget it. From what you told me he's more likely to take it out on his wife than go through normal channels.’

  ‘That’s what’s worrying me,’ said Stan. ‘Can't get her out of my head, if you want the truth.'

  'What?'

  'Not like that,' he said quickly. 'Don't get me wrong, she's a good-looking girl. Or was when I left,’ he added morosely. ‘It's just I feel guilty about bringing her trouble.'

  ‘People make choices,’ I told him. ‘She married the man. Would Arnie Poole have treated her any better? What was it you called him, a wide boy? He certainly wasn’t above making up stories about himself. It seems to me that those who have mainly their own interest at heart rarely have room for anybody else's. Perhaps she's better off with her memories of Poole than what she might have got if he came back.'

  'I can't see that she could do much worse than what she's got,' said Stan.

  Not having been there, I couldn't disagree, so left him to brood over it. Jack wasn't doing much brooding but was threading a new ribbon through the Remington, fingers stained with ink.

  ‘Did you get a chance to ask anyone about Maurice Coveney?’ I asked, dropping behind my desk and lighting up my lunch.

  Jack looked at me in his lugubrious way, wiped his fingers on the piece of rag he called a handkerchief, and leaned across the gap between our desks with a sheet of paper in his outstretched hand.

  To be honest my main interest in Coveney was his interest in Penny, but given his conversation with Jekyll at Julia’s house which seemed to concern the business we had in hand, at least I had a legitimate reason for wasting Jack’s time in making enquiries. Not that he had needed to do much asking around. The typewritten sheet consisted mostly of the fact of Coveney’s being in the Foreign Office and his entries in Who’s Who, Debrett’s, and Burke’s Peerage. The last two, to be strictly accurate, weren’t entries for Maurice Coveney but for his cousin, Peregrine, who held the baronetcy. It dated from the elevation of their grandfather, John Coveney, who was a mill owner in the 1860s and made his fortune in the manufacture of cotton goods. By now the family had their fingers in other pies——heavy engineering and ship-building on the Clyde——so they weren’t old aristocracy but trade, although I didn’t suppose the fact gave Peregrine dyspepsia. And I didn’t suppose it mattered to Sir Maurice either; he had made his way in the Civil Service and, if his entry in Who’s Who was current, was one of the Permanent Secretaries in the F.O. He had followed the usual upper-class education route——Eton and Cambridge——and had achieved a First in Classics, joined the Civil Service following war service and had married Marie-Louise Pellisier in 1920——one son.

  The more I read the more I understood why he had looked down his nose at me. When I got to the bit that said his wife had died in an air raid in 1941, I found I was even beginning to feel some sympathy for his attitude: Coveney had lost his wife while I had thrown mine away. There was just the one child from Coveney’s marriage and Maurice’s pursuits were listed as shooting and fishing. On Peregrine’s estate, no doubt.

  I dropped the sheet of paper on my desk. ‘What interest would Coveney have in us?’ I said, more to myself than to Jack.

  ‘We could always try asking?’ Jack suggested.

  I favoured him with what I hoped was a withering look. ‘Didn’t you learn any tactics in the army? I was hoping to outflank him.’

  Jack grunted. ‘That’ll be why you’re the officer then, I suppose.’

  *

  I tried telephoning Jekyll again at around six that afternoon and managed to find him in his office. I told him what I knew of Major Hendrix. He hadn’t heard of the man but said he’d make some enquiries. Then he asked if I was free for a drink. Not having to consult my diary I said yes, and he said he’d meet me in his club at seven.

  We’d had the odd drink together before——more than once when he’d been pleased with our work——but that had usually been in the pub around the corner from the office and involved all of us. He had certainly never invited me to his club. That was the Army and Navy in Pall Mall, somewhere I had always thought I would have liked to be put up for if I could have scraped up the provenance. I’d been inside once, early in the war before I’d shipped out to North Africa. Only not for a drink. I had a message for a major in the tank corps that I’d been instructed to deliver by hand. He wasn’t at his home so I’d gone to his club. They’d kept me hanging around in the foyer and I’d assumed at the time that corporals weren’t encouraged in the lounges unless their name happened to be Bonaparte. The place was all sandbags and broken glass then as an air raid had demolished a couple of the gentlemen’s clubs up the road and inflicted some on the Rag——as the Army and Navy was apparently known.

  Walking up the street towards it, I saw that the sandbags had gone along with much of its pre-war grandeur. I supposed the last years had taken their toll of its membership, too, and that there were probably now a few vacancies. No longer a corporal but an officer and eligible for membership, I nevertheless suspected that I still lacked the provenance.

  A steward led me through the club to a small smoking room where Colonel G was waiting. We shook hands and, as I sank into the soft embrace of one of the Army and Navy’s leather armchairs and pulled out my cigarettes, I thought it just as well I’d switched brands and wouldn’t be stinking the place up with my old Capstans.

  Colonel G was in civvies although he had abandoned the houndstooth. He was wearing a nicely cut suit with creases in the trousers that were sharp enough to shave with. The suit was made-to-measure, rather than the sort of off-the-peg kind I could afford, and I wondered if the Army and Navy kept a maid on hand to press pants at short notice.

  ‘Good of you to come, Harry,’ he said. ‘What’ll it be?’

  That’s when I noticed the waiter, silent as a doodlebug once the engine had cut, hovering behind me. I asked for a gin and French and Colonel G indicated his empty glass and said he’d have another.

  ‘How’s the investigation?’ he asked, squinting at me with his glass eye.

  There was no one else in the room to eavesdrop and the armchair was winning an easy points decision over the battered settee in the my flat, so I saw no reason to sit on the edge of the seat and whisper. Just to let him know we hadn’t been idling away the hours, I told him about my visit with Susie to Rose Kearney and that I’d seen her again since; how I’d also talked to Burleigh’s widow and how Stan had seen Poole’s father a
nd an old girlfriend in Blackburn. I left out the bit where he’d smacked her new husband as not being relevant to the investigation.

  He listened dourly as I went through it all, since what interested him most were any German army units we could identify as being in the area at the right time. Then I told him what Peter had come up with——the companies of the 21st and 22nd SS-Panzer Grenadiers, and 10SS-Panzer Division that had been between Hill 112 and the River Orne on the day.

  The waiter returned with our drinks.

  ‘No shortage of suspects there,’ Colonel G said.

  ‘No,’ I agreed, and having left the best till last said:

  ‘The 12th SS-Panzer Division pulled out on July 11th which means there’s a good chance the 25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers were actually on the spot the day the carrier went missing. Actually pinning Dabs’ death on them won’t be so easy, even though the SS man who had Kearney’s ID discs was from the 25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers.’

  ‘You’ll find a way,’ Jekyll said, making the remark sound more like a threat than a vote of faith in my capability.

  I took a slug of my gin. Then, trying to make it seem as though the thought had just that moment occurred to me, asked what Sir Maurice Coveney’s interest was in the matter.

  Jekyll cocked his head as if he’d caught the faint skirl of bagpipes somewhere in the building.

  ‘What gives you the idea Sir Maurice is interested?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘perhaps I’m wrong. Only when you introduced us, I thought I heard you tell him I was the man handling the business. I rather assumed you meant the investigation into Dabs’ death.’

  ‘You rather assumed it, did you?’

  His brows knitted and he fixed his glass eye on me like an irritable owl sizing up his next meal. I knocked back the rest of my gin, trying to hide the fact I’d started to squirm.

  He let me stew a minute or two longer but didn’t press the point. Instead, he seemed to become almost indifferent about the business.

  ‘Given the reputation of the SS, I doubt you’ll have too much difficulty in pinning the responsibility where it belongs. Let’s not waste too much time on this, Captain Tennant. Wrap it up as soon as you can.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ I said, still apparently a captain even though I felt I’d been demoted. I lifted my glass again but discovered it was empty. I should have excused myself and left, but finding myself in a hole felt compelled to keep digging. ‘We’ve not turned up any hard evidence as yet. It’s a matter of trawling through all the SS interrogation reports to see if we can find men who served with the units——’

  ‘Exactly the work you were set up to do,’ he interrupted curtly. Then he looked at his watch, downed his drink and announced, ‘If that’s all, I’ve got a dinner engagement,’ stood and abruptly strode off at a pace that suggested he hadn’t eaten all day.

  The waiter returned immediately to collect our glasses and pointedly neglected to ask if I wanted another. I acted as if I hadn’t anyway and, after a wrong turn or two and having to double-back in front of him, eventually made my way out of the Rag.

  On the tube back to Clerkenwell it occurred to me I hadn’t reminded Jekyll about Major Hendrix and, given how the interview had gone, wished I’d saved myself the trip to Pall Mall in the first place. The only useful thing to come out of it were the second thoughts I was now having about wanting to join the Army and Navy Club.

  Coming up from Farringdon station, although it was still light, I found the streetlamps had come on——at least those that were still working. The gaps between and the odd bombed buildings gave the city a snaggle-toothed air, like an old harridan in a children’s pantomime. She’d been knocked about a bit but could still cackle with fun if you had the money to pay her. Not that the people passing me on the pavement looked as if they had enough——most seemed merely intent on where they were going, shoulders hunched and heads down. I couldn’t help compare the way they were dressed to Jekyll in his tailored suit. Fashion for most people had been on hold since before the war. Many dressed the way they had in the thirties. There hadn’t been a lot of money around for clothes then, either. By now, though, the women’s dresses and men’s jackets and trousers had the look of having been through a hard campaign and in need of being demobbed. My gear hadn’t fared too well, either. Penny and I were still living with Julia when I enlisted and the clothes I had left behind had followed Penny down to the country and had probably ended up on my brother’s back, covered in chicken shit and cow dung. He had been drafted into the land army, poor eyesight having kept him out of the services. I didn’t mind that so much except it left me with a limited wardrobe besides my change of uniform. And, after six years, no one looked so dated as a man in uniform. True, I wasn’t spending my pay on anything much and could have afforded a new wardrobe, except that the lack of ration stamps hindered any spending-spree and made hoarders out of everyone. There were other ways——the black market or those out-of-the-way tailors who were busy turning now unneeded uniforms into serviceable clothes. But heavy khaki serge for summer wear seemed somehow even less of an attractive proposition than even pre-war fashions did.

  Lost in thought, I reached home quicker than I expected and decided I wasn’t yet ready to shut myself away for the evening. It was still relatively early but Clerkenwell didn’t offer too many attractions for a man on the town. There were the pubs, of course, and a cinema not too far away, but the main feature would have already started and I didn’t want to walk in halfway through the story. I felt I’d been doing too much of that recently——finding myself having missed the beginning and piecing events together from what I could pick up as the story unfolded. Kearney and his carrier was like that. I’d come in on the last reel, long after the characters had been established and their motives worked out. Piecing the story together from the last few scenes was like working out the picture on a jigsaw from a half-dozen pieces left lying in the box.

  I was beginning to mix my metaphors and that just shows how muddled you can get when you walk in after the show’s begun. I’d been in the show——all over North Africa and Europe——but still I couldn’t shake the feeling of having missed it. Most of what was important had happened somewhere else, to someone else, and I had become a bit player. The kind of character who wasn’t going to get the girl. That’s really what it was all about and for once I could feel it was one of those times when just two drinks weren’t going to be enough. I’d already had one at the Rag so I turned my back on the cinema and headed for the nearest pub, someplace where they didn’t employ snobs to serve the drinks.

  10

  June 20th

  I should have known better than to play around with a concept like schadenfreude as there appears to be something infinitely amusing for other people in seeing someone else suffering with a hangover. It’s akin to watching a man being hit in the balls by a football or a cricket ball——vastly entertaining for all except the poor bugger writhing on the ground in agony.

  I wasn’t writhing on the ground, exactly, more wallowing in a puddled heap behind my desk. Everyone else in the office was chirping cheerfully around me, being insincerely solicitous and asking if I wanted more tea. Well, not everyone. Stan was looking almost as morose as I was although no one seemed prepared to offer him more tea. In those moods he was just as likely as not to take a swing at you. I managed to weather the worst of it and by lunchtime everyone else had gone out to eat, having squeezed as much enjoyment from my condition as I suppose they thought they’d get. Again, everyone except Stan. He stood in the doorway of my office and looked at me like a man bereaved.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked. ‘You don’t get hangovers so don’t come here looking for sympathy.’

  ‘I’ve got a problem,’ he said.

  Feeling less than charitable I was hoping he was going to keep it to himself but knew only too well that there was more than a grain of truth in the old adage that misery loves company. Stan pulled out Jack’s chai
r and sat down.

  ‘It’s Ida,’ he said.

  ‘Ida? Who’s Ida?’ It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to know, just that if one of us was going to expend the energy talking I’d rather it was Stan.

  ‘You know, Arnold Poole’s girlfriend. The one I went——’

  ‘Blackburn,’ I said. ‘Yes, I remember now. What about her?’

  ‘She’s here.’

  ‘Here?’ I sat up so quickly my head began to pound.

  ‘No, not here,’ he said. ‘In London.’

  ‘What’s she doing in London?’

  ‘She’s left her husband.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘He knocked her around after I left like I thought he might, so she cleared out as soon as he went to work.’ His face hardened and I wouldn’t have given Ida’s husband much chance of staying out of hospital if Stan could have got his hands on him.

  ‘She’s been in touch?’

  He mumbled something.

  ‘She what?’

  ‘I said, she turned up at my lodgings.’

  ‘How did she know where you lived?’

  He mumbled again then said, ‘I gave her my address.’

  ‘So what’s she going to do now?’

  ‘She needs somewhere to live. She doesn’t know anyone in London and she can’t stay at my place. You know what my landlady’s like. It was all I could do to persuade her to let Ida sleep on her settee last night.’