The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  ‘It could be,’ I agreed. ‘Charles the Second’s bastard son, Monmouth, is supposed to have pleaded for his life on the scaffold.’

  Dónol chuckled. ‘You can’t condemn a man for trying a little grovelling in the face of the axe, now.’

  ‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘Then again, his grandfather, Charles the First, is supposed to have asked for a second shirt before his execution. It was a cold day and he didn’t want the onlookers to think he was shivering through fear.’

  Dónol emptied the bottle into our glasses.

  ‘Doesn’t that just go to show it takes all sorts to make up a family?’

  18

  June 27th

  The deck of the ferry on the return trip to Liverpool was crowded, mostly with passengers hanging over the rails making a contribution to the choppy sea beneath. I might have joined them had I anything in my stomach to donate, but feeling delicate after leaving Ballydrum that morning I had contented myself with cigarettes and a single cup of coffee. I’d been late getting into Dublin and had only just managed to catch the last ferry. The hangover, dogging me all day, had cleared a little by the time we reached Liverpool and the throbbing in my head had subsided to a tolerable ache. I remained queasy until I got my feet on land that didn’t move beneath them, then gingerly tried a second cup of coffee and some dry biscuits at the railway hotel.

  Once at the station I picked up a copy of the Lancashire Evening Post and read on the front page that it had been announced in the House of Commons that bread rationing was to be introduced on July 21st. This was something the government never had to resort to during the war and seemed to me now like a kick in the teeth in return for all the sacrifices made. But the weather was poor with a wet summer thus far, following on from a cold spring. That was their excuse, anyway. The wheat harvest looked as if it would be a fraction of that expected and I suppose we didn’t have the money to import the stuff. Now we’d fallen out with Uncle Joe I presumed eating Russian wheat was more than we could be expected to swallow; and perhaps the Americans wanted to charge us more for their wheat than they had for the broken-down destroyers they’d sent us at the beginning of the war.

  I know I had a hangover but the news left me with a feeling of despondency. It was more than just bread. It was everything. The country was bankrupt. We’d lost most of what had been left of the Empire——India would be going her own way any day——and no matter how hard we might scramble to retain what we had once held in the Far East, the people we’d ruled there for a century had seen us humiliated by an Asian race and weren’t about to invite us back. And who could blame them? Given the mess we had at home, they could hardly do worse by themselves. All that sort of thing was behind Britain now and we’d better accept the fact with as much grace as we could muster. It was a new world and the Americans and the Russians had emerged with the loudest voices. We had no choice but to listen to them.

  All the same, the thought of it didn’t fill one with a sense of optimism. Not this one, anyhow.

  And on top of it Dónol Casey had given me more than a headache to worry about. Not that it wasn’t uncommon for men to enlist in the army under an assumed name. There were many reasons they might have for doing so: escaping family commitments or debts; evading the law or simply wishing to make a new start. I imagined the man we’d known as William Kearney had had his reasons for wanting a new start although, if I had got the timings correct from what Father Byrne and Casey had told me, he had waited a long time to do so.

  I’d visited the graveyard at Ballydrum before catching my bus back to Newtownmountkennedy that morning and had found Cathleen Kearney’s grave tucked away in a neglected corner. Father Byrne had got his way and had buried the girl and her baby in consecrated ground, but he hadn’t flaunted the fact in the face of his Ballydrum parishioners. There were no signs of flowers ever having been left on the grave and the now flat soil in front of the stone was hidden under a tangle of weeds and rank grass. The stone simply read, ‘Cathleen Kearney’ with her dates given as 1913 to 1931. Father Byrne had said the baby had been buried with her. Unbaptized, it apparently hadn’t rated a mention. Conceived in sin, I supposed the consensus had been, and so not worthy of a Christian name. So much for the milk of Christian forgiveness.

  William O’Connell, as I now had to learn to think of him, had enlisted in 1939. Cathleen had been dead eight years by then although I couldn’t be sure exactly when O’Connell had decided to change his name, perhaps when he’d come home to bury his mother and look on Cathleen’s grave again. After all, from that date on there was nothing left for him in Ballydrum.

  I was catching the late train to London and thought if I could book a quick trunk call I might still catch someone at the office. The bank of public kiosks wasn’t busy and I squeezed into one of the boxes and placed the call. I wanted to let them know I’d be back in the morning although not first thing; it would be a Friday but since Jekyll said he was going to be in Scotland I saw no need to hurry. The call came back in a few minutes and when they rang I fed my money into the box and was put through. Jack answered and I asked if he’d heard anything from Colonel G.

  ‘Not since you left,’ he said.

  ‘Any developments?’

  ‘A Superintendent Gifford rang and left a number for you to call.’

  ‘Did you tell him where I was?’

  ‘Just that you’d be out of the office for a few days.’

  He gave me the number and I asked the exchange for trunks again. A woman began banging on the glass to use the phone and I pushed opened the door and explained I was waiting for a long distance call from London. It didn’t wash with her and I spent the next minute arguing the toss until the box next to mine became free. She pushed her way into it and glared at me through the glass until the exchange rang back and I was put through.

  Jack had been cautious on my behalf and while the line went through its last clicks and buzzes I wondered whether to let Gifford know I’d been in Ireland. Given the sort of area I policed when I’d been on the force I hadn’t been likely to run across anyone Irish unless you counted Lord Londonderry or the Countess of Carlingford, and not even Julia moved in their rarefied circles. I had had no experience of the problem that the Irish Republican Army had posed between the wars and knew nothing of the work Gifford might have done. Ignorance seemed not only the best policy but the only possible one for me so, by the time the operator told me my party was on the line, I had decided that if Gifford asked where I’d been it couldn’t hurt to tell him. But only if he asked.

  ‘I thought I’d let you know,’ Gifford said when he knew who he was speaking to, ‘that you won’t be treading on anyone’s toes. You’re free to trace your William Kearney as far we’re concerned.’

  I thought that a typical reply as far as Special Branch was concerned. I was free to investigate but the way he put it didn’t necessarily rule out the fact that they had an interest.

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied, counting how much change I had in case the pips went. ‘Only now I’ve found out that Kearney’s real name was William O’Connell.’

  ‘O’Connell?’ said Gifford, as if the name sounded familiar.

  ‘He spent some time in Dublin from nineteen-thirty on. Had a friend named Dermot Kavanaugh who went under the Gaelic form of his name. May have been involved in politics.’

  ‘And what would the Gaelic form of Dermot Kavanaugh be?’ Gifford asked.

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ I told him, unable to remember what Dónol Casey had said. ‘Ask one of your Fenian friends.’

  ‘What bearing has this got on Kearney’s disappearance?’

  ‘O’Connell’s disappearance,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know the answer to that one either. I take it Hendrix wasn’t one of yours then,’ I added, trying to clear that up at least.

  ‘Not one of anybody’s as far as I can tell,’ Gifford said. ‘There’s nothing on anyone by that name.’

  I couldn’t say I was surprised. I was beginning to have
other suspicions as far as Major Hendrix went.

  ‘That is who you were wondering about, isn’t it?’ Gifford went on.

  ‘Yes,’ I assured him, probably less convincingly than I sounded. I had used Coveney’s name when I had first approached Gifford and still the man had not been mentioned. I wondered if Gifford had begun to smell the rat.

  ‘Where does this leave the sister, Rose Kear——’

  The pips went.

  ‘I’m out of change,’ I told him, broke the connection and swept what was left of my money off the top of the box. I stepped out of the booth and went off to the station buffet to wait for my train.

  *

  It was gone midnight when I got back to my flat. The tube had closed and the alternative was to walk from the station or take a taxi. I took the taxi, using the ride to calculate how much the trip had cost.

  There was some post waiting for me and I took it upstairs and looked through it while I waited for the kettle to boil. I had had nothing to eat all day except the biscuits in Liverpool and found I was now hungry; but there was nothing edible in the flat beyond a stale half-loaf of bread and no means of toasting it without the risk of immolating what was left of the building.

  I found another letter from Penny amid the assorted bills, and a note from my landlord accompanied by a notice from the local authority saying that they’d finally settled on a date for demolition. I thought twice about the toast then. But there was still the old girl upstairs and Sam the housebreaker, and now Ida to consider as well as myself. So I settled for going to bed on an empty stomach and hoped that Penny’s news wasn’t going to upset it further. She was coming up to town on the weekend, she said, and needed to see me. She’d be at Julia’s on Saturday if I cared to call.

  Lying in the dark, the street below quiet, all I could hear was the creaking of the building as if now——officially condemned——it had decided to give up the long struggle to keep intact. Would I get up if things around me fell apart, or would I stay in bed and give in to it all?

  I lay undecided.

  Things around me had already fallen apart and I hadn’t done much about that so far.

  She needed to see me, she had written, and I considered whether her use of that particular adjective held more meaning than, say, her writing wanted to see me. Needed, I decided, was a less personal declaration than wanted——one somewhat akin in some way to the formal announcement that my home was about to be demolished. The phrase “if I cared to call” seemed to establish the required distance between us. In other words, as Jack might have said, it put the tin hat on it.

  *

  I felt better in the morning but still hungry. I did some shopping and cooked myself breakfast before going into the office. Over tea, I read through Penny’s letter again. It was short and didn’t go into detail and on rereading didn’t seem as full of omens as it had the night before. Then again, the sun was now shining.

  Susie was alone in the office when I arrived about midmorning although I could hear Jack pecking at his Remington next door. I wondered what on earth he found to type and if perhaps he was writing a novel after all——an account of his wartime experiences. The only trouble with those was that we all had them and no one was much interested in other people’s.

  Susie smiled brightly as I walked in.

  ‘Did you find the Rose of Tralee, Captain?’

  ‘No, but I did find out that William Kearney didn’t have a sister named Rose. In fact he didn’t have a sister at all. And Kearney’s not Kearney. Kearney’s O’Connell. Where is everyone?’

  Her eyes widened and she lost the bright look.

  ‘Stan’s gone to Chelmsford to meet someone from 7th Hampshires.’

  ‘Did he manage to speak with anyone from the Field Ambulance unit who recovered Kearney’s carrier——’

  ‘O’Connell,’ she corrected. ‘Yes, someone in Aldershot yesterday.’

  ‘And Peter?’

  ‘Something came up,’ she said without elaborating further.

  I gave her the photograph of Willy O’Connell and the notes I’d taken while I’d been in Ireland so she could put them in the Dabs file where I’d be able to find them again.

  ‘Anything come in?’ I asked as she looked at the photo.

  She pulled a sheet of paper off her desk and held it out. ‘Reply from the Home Office. Joseph Dabs is the only one they had anything on. Eighteen months for burglary in May, nineteen thirty-six. Conviction spent so no bar to conscription.’

  ‘Nothing on the others?’

  ‘No. But that was before Kearney became O’Connell. Do you want me to get back to them with a new request?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ve done channels. I’ll find out another way.’

  In fact I was hoping Henry Gifford already had that in hand. My mentioning Dermot Kavanaugh going under a Gaelic name would have sent him scurrying back to the Special Branch Registry. And even if O’Connell hadn’t committed any offences of interest to Special Branch, that wouldn’t necessarily mean he was unknown to them.

  ‘Colonel G been in touch?’

  Susie shook her head making her dark curls dance. ‘What’s he doing in Scotland?’

  ‘Drinking scotch in an Edinburgh club probably,’ I said.

  The Remington fell silent and Jack put his head round the door. ‘Ready for tea?’ We nodded and he turned to Susie as he lit the gas ring under the kettle. ‘Biscuits?’

  ‘I was saving them for Colonel G.’

  ‘Bugger Colonel G,’ said Jack. ‘He’s not coming in, is he?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but he’ll bugger me if I don’t start on that report he wanted.’

  ‘You paint the prettiest pictures,’ said Susie.

  ‘One thing while you were gone,’ said Jack, rinsing our mugs under the tap. ‘I found out in which camp SS-Obersturmführer Franz Müller was——’

  ‘Is he still there?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ Jack said.

  ‘And what manner would that be?’

  ‘He’s buried there. Hung himself, summer of forty-five. Got a letter through the Red Cross. Told him his wife and young daughter were killed when the Russians took Berlin. Didn’t say how.’

  I didn’t want to know how. I’d already heard enough horror stories of the days after the city fell to the Russians to last me a lifetime.

  ‘He’s a dead end, then.’

  Jack’s face adopted its customary expression. ‘You could say that.’

  ‘What about Werner Richter?’

  ‘Nothing as yet.’

  ‘It’s been a week, Jack. Get back to them, will you? Tell them I want a detailed report of Müller’s death from them for our file. It’ll give the clerks there something to do other than bully the POWs. And they still haven’t told us why the original interrogation report isn’t available.’

  ‘They finally admitted an earlier request had been submitted for it and the thing was sent off two months ago.’

  ‘Earlier request? Who from?’

  ‘That’s why they were stalling. According to them the request had been mis-filed and no one remembers who the report was sent to. They won’t know who had it till it comes back.’

  Someone of a suspicious nature might have seen a conspiracy in this——a missing request for a report that was unavailable, and the man it concerned conveniently dead, but I’d been in the army long enough to know that ordinary military circumstances were quite sufficient to confuse any otherwise straightforward issue.

  ‘Kearney’s not Kearney,’ Susie said to Jack, breaking the intervening silence. ‘Kearney’s O’Connell.’

  ‘And who’s O’Connell when he’s at home?’

  ‘William O’Connell,’ I said, ‘so at least we got the William right. And home was Ballydrum. He left when his sweetheart died after having her own father’s baby.’

  Susie dropped the biscuit tin.

  I ran through what I’d turned up. Susie’s bottom lip trembled and she dabbed at her ey
es when I said Cathleen was only eighteen when she died.

  ‘We can’t do any more until I hear from my Special Branch superintendent again,’ I said, hoping I was right. ‘So we’ll pull together what we already have and see if I can’t come up with something that’ll keep Colonel G off my back.’

  ‘There you go again,’ said Susie.

  I had to wonder what sort of mind lay behind that pretty face. ‘Did Stan come up with anything at Barnado’s,’ I asked her.

  ‘I’ve just been typing up his notes,’ Jack said. ‘I know how much you hate his handwriting.’

  ‘Good of you to find the time between recording for posterity how you cleared Jerry out of the Middle-East.’ Jack frowned but I didn’t trouble to explain. ‘That photo of Kearney,’ I said.

  ‘O’Connell,’ Susie corrected.

  ‘Did you find out where it came from?’

  Jack began fiddling with the tea mugs. ‘Came with his battalion records, I think,’ he muttered.

  ‘Battalion records?’

  ‘When they sent them over last week. They also sent his personal effects. The stuff he left behind when he was sent to France.’

  ‘What personal effects? First I’ve heard of them. Did we get the effects of the rest of the crew?’

  ‘Not Burleigh’s or Poole’s,’ said Jack, stirring the pot. ‘They went to the families.’

  ‘Robert Burleigh’s didn’t,’ I said. ‘At least his wife said she didn’t get anything.’

  ‘Didn’t leave anything behind then,’ said Jack. ‘Dabs didn’t, apparently. And being a Barnado’s Boy, he hadn’t registered any next of kin, neither.’

  ‘So why have we got Kearney’s?’

  ‘O’Connell,’ said Susie once more.

  ‘O’Connell, neither,’ said Jack.

  ‘Neither what?’

  ‘Registered a next of kin.’

  ‘What about Rose?’

  ‘You just said she wasn’t his sister after all.’