The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  ‘I don’t see why,’ Julia persisted. ‘It’s not as though Claude was German. Why shouldn’t Helen write to him if she wanted? I don’t suppose he wanted the Nazis there any more than the rest of France did.’

  I might have given Julia an argument about French ambivalence to the German Occupation but I’d already spoken out of turn once.

  ‘After America entered the war it was a different matter, of course,’ said Julia. ‘When was that, Ben?’

  ‘December eighth, nineteen forty-one,’ Tuchman said, although he wasn’t smiling any more. ‘The day after Pearl Harbour.’

  ‘Of course it was.’ Julia patted his hand again. ‘Better late than never.’

  A slightly pained expression crossed Tuchman’s face and before Julia could get herself into deeper trouble, I asked:

  ‘What was Claude and Marie-Louise’s family name?’

  ‘Pellisier,’ said Penny, stifling a yawn. ‘Sorry. I’m not used to late nights. In the country we’re usually in bed by ten.’

  She looked sideways at me as if expecting another tasteless remark. I pretended not to notice.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll take me home, Harry. You don’t mind, do you Julia?’

  ‘It’s past my bedtime, too,’ I said rising.

  Tuchman got to his feet. Julia was eyeing us suspiciously, no doubt wondering if she might find Penny and I in our old room when she got home. But Penny’s thoughts weren’t running along those lines unfortunately. And since I could tell they weren’t, I wouldn’t have minded staying a little longer and finding out more about Coveney’s brother-in-law, Claude Pellisier.

  But the topic had died a natural death so we said our goodnights, leaving Julia and Tuchman at the club and taking a taxi back to Julia’s house. Outside, Penny told me to take it on, gave me the briefest of pecks on the cheek and asked me to call her in the morning. Before I could stop her she slipped out of the taxi and was running up the steps and letting herself into the house.

  ‘Clerkenwell,’ I told the driver, sinking back into the seat.

  *

  The definition of chance depends upon one’s theology, I suppose. It’s a word under which both benign providence and malign fate can masquerade; where the concept of a guiding hand or——more sinisterly——predestination abnegate any need for explanation.

  But a cynic like me requires answers.

  Like chance, a definition of happenstance is an event that might have been arranged and yet is, in reality, accidental.

  A cynic might argue that coincidence is the reverse.

  *

  Although it was late there was a light under Ida’s door and I felt a sudden impulse to apologise to her for any slight Penny may have given earlier in the day. I thought I heard a sound inside and stopped to listen. It might have been the radio except by that time of night the BBC was off-air. Then, as I stood there, the light went out and I heard nothing more.

  Lying on my bed unable to sleep and despite what I had learned from Julia, I found myself wishing I had taken Penny to the cinema after all. Moonlight filtering through my ragged curtains cast a silver glow over the room, washing it with a sheen of unreality that masked the tawdry verity. In that light the place looked almost presentable. I supposed it was the kind of view of life that we all——and not only Susie——looked for when we went to the cinema. We sought the glossy unrealities that film gave us; not the dust and the dirt and the grime of everyday life. Perhaps we were trying to avoid the truth of how we had to live now the war was over. For most people the experience had been hateful, terrifying and devastating. And yet for some it had been a thrilling escape from everyday existence——like the celluloid world. Now it was over I wasn’t sure anyone was prepared to go back to what they had been before.

  After a while these thoughts and the evening slid imperceptively into that half-conscious state one has between sleep and wakefulness, when weightless perception slips the tethers that keep one anchored in reality. On the edge of sleep, deviant imagination has its own priorities and, like surrealist film, unreels images of its own choosing.

  The château near Caen came to me, shimmering opaquely through the moonlight. People I did not know yet could strangely recognize floated past me like ghosts down the long corridors of the house. I saw two young girls playing in and out of inter-connecting rooms, while in the shadows an older boy watched on silently. Uniformed men appeared and somehow, in the trance of dream, I could understand what was happening. As if I had been given the key piece to a once-incomprehensible puzzle, I found myself able to slot each element into an apprehensible whole——a whole that encompassed the château and Kearney, the carrier and its crew...even the elusive Rose. While I dreamed it all made perfect and knowable sense and, having understood, I fell into the deep oblivion of consummate sleep.

  In the morning, waking, I could remember little of it. Only that briefly I had had an answer and now, the more I stretched to retrieve it, the further it receded. Until finally, as I became fully conscious, the memory vanished altogether.

  *

  It was early but I got up and made myself a breakfast with egg powder and milk. Feeling at a loose end until I could telephone Penny, I had a blitz on the flat and cleaned up.

  By ten o’clock when I knew Penny would be up even if Julia might still be in bed, I went downstairs to the phone in the hall. She answered surprisingly quickly although any hope that she had been waiting by the telephone for my call was quashed when she said:

  ‘Did you forget something?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Who did you think it was?’

  ‘Julia. I’ve just been speaking to her. I thought she forgot something and rang again.’

  ‘Isn’t she with you?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘she didn’t——’ and stopped abruptly.

  ‘Didn’t come home?’ I asked. ‘I could have stayed over then.’

  But Penny didn’t take the bait.

  ‘Don’t tell her I told you, Harry.’

  ‘Not a word,’ I assured her. ‘You’re on your own?’

  ‘Julia just rang to invite me out to lunch. At the Savoy.’

  ‘I was hoping we could do something together,’ I said. ‘I take it the lunch invitation didn’t extend to me. Will Ben be with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Penny said, ‘and she didn’t exactly say I wasn’t to bring you...’

  ‘Nor that you should?’

  ‘No...and it is the Savoy. I don’t often get the opportunity these days.’

  ‘Afterwards?’

  ‘All right. Where shall I meet you?’

  Even in London there were limits to what one could do on a Sunday afternoon, but there was always a walk in the park. I arranged to meet her near the Savoy at two-fifteen.

  It was ten-fifteen just then and I had four hours to kill. I’d already filled my cleaning quota, didn’t have the patience to sit still listening to the wireless or read a book, so decided to go into the office and, finally, make a start on the report for Jekyll.

  I took a bus and walked rather than wait for the Sunday tube service. The sun felt warm when it broke through the cloud and I was experiencing an unusual optimism. It might just have been the weather or perhaps a reaction to the fact I was meeting Penny later and that we had managed to get through an evening without arguing.

  I realized I was beginning to re-map the ice on our mutual pond. Before the war I’d had a pretty good idea of where I could tread and where I could not, even if I did not always heed the warnings. Some subjects screamed thin ice, mostly those concerning her parents. It wasn’t that I had been overly critical——by my lights at least——it was more that my responses had been a reaction to their criticism of me. Penny had been well aware that aspects of their behaviour warranted criticism but still felt bound to defend them. It upset her when I pointed out she was defending the indefensible.

  Her friends——those that had predated our marria
ge——had been another bone of contention. By and large, I had found them an insufferable lot. I daresay they thought much the same about me, only then of course I didn’t consider that possibility. I tried to remember if Jeremy Coveney had been among their number. He would have been two or three years younger than Penny so I supposed not. I certainly couldn’t recall ever having met him. Those I did meet——the men at any rate——had figured pretty low in my estimation even before being introduced. I saw things differently now. The war and the year since had changed me. I could now see that back then I had had a chip on my shoulder. I had been conscious of the social difference between myself and Penny’s circle and had reacted boorishly. The wonder was that Penny had ever put up with me at all. The irony now was that having mellowed and for the most part rid myself of the chip, Penny and I were no longer together. Perhaps she had liked the raw and diffident young policeman better than the man I had become. He was gone for good, though, lost somewhere between North Africa and Berlin, and Penny seemed unable to adjust to the man who had replaced him.

  The office seemed a somehow alien place when empty. It was its default status, I suppose, and capable of making me feel like an outsider. There was an overwhelming silence despite the muted hum of traffic on the street below. It was a silence compounded by the lack of Jack’s Remington and of the hiss of the ever-boiling kettle; of Peter’s peremptory requests and Stan’s grunted replies. Even the air seemed bereft without Susie’s scent. What my contribution to the schema was I couldn’t say. I had brought that in with me, I suppose, and could never more sense its absence than I would ever recognize its presence.

  I put the kettle on hoping its familiar hiss would chase away the metaphysical aura that seemed to have surrounded me ever since I had got out of bed. Perhaps it had been the dream of the château and that the certain knowledge I had gained was now no more than a memory of certainty. Then I realized I was slipping back into the metaphysical and still procrastinating over the report.

  I stood with my tea in front of Peter Quince’s map. The flag indicating the position of Kearney’s carrier was a short distance from the outline of a building that had to be the Château de Hêtres. Julia said the château had been destroyed but that wasn’t surprising as it had been in the middle of a battle. Little survives under those circumstances and I supposed, like Caen itself and most of the nearby villages, it had been pulverized. Anywhere that afforded shelter for troops or concealment for guns would have been pounded by the opposing artillery. Particularly local châteaux or other large buildings that were liable to be commandeered as Staff HQs or command posts. It made them prime targets. I often wondered how the French had felt about their liberators, effectively destroying everything in their path in order to free it. Yet we had been welcomed by joyous crowds, many of them perhaps the same people who four years earlier had accepted the arrival of the Wehrmacht. All of which, I suppose, at least said something about what life must have been like under the Occupation.

  I wondered if Claude Pellisier, Marie-Louise Coveney’s brother, had accepted the arrival of the Germans with equanimity. He had fought against them in the Great War, according to Penny, but then so had Marshal Pétain. Pellisier hadn’t had a chance to welcome the liberators since Julia said he had been killed during the invasion. And although I would have liked the opportunity to ask exactly how and when, the chances were he had died in similar circumstances to his sister; perhaps in an air raid in Caen.

  I was still staring at the blank sheet of paper that was supposed to be Jekyll’s report when I remembered from the entry in SS-Mann Richter’s diary for the day Müller’s platoon arrived at the château that the owner was there when they arrived. The man Stan had spoken to from the Field Ambulance unit had told him they’d found the body of a French civilian buried in the garden. If that was true it was possible it had been Pellisier’s body. Richter had also said there had been Gestapo officers present. Perhaps Dabs hadn’t been the only man at the château on the wrong end of a war crime.

  I assumed Coveney would know the details. Penny had said he had identified Pellisier’s body, although quite how, after the length of time that must have elapsed, I couldn’t imagine. Given the man’s attitude towards me when we met, however, I doubted he’d appreciate me asking him questions about it. I might be able to persuade Penny to do it for me, though.

  As long as the subject didn’t turn out to be thin ice.

  I finally spent two or three hours on Jekyll’s report, going back over what we knew from various sources. Susie had already begun to put some of it together in readable order. Going through it again, it now seemed to me that William Kearney turning out to be Willy O’Connell was something I’d do well to leave out for the present.

  O’Connell’s involvement in a raid on a Belfast barracks for arms proved a curious and interesting development——as was his turning King’s Evidence——and although it suggested Dermot Kavanaugh and Rose O’Shaughnessy were looking for him in order to exact some sort of revenge, they couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with Dabs’ death. It might have been a powerful motive for O’Connell wanting to disappear, admittedly, but Kavanaugh was still in prison at the time, even if it wouldn’t have taken a lot of imagination to predict what Kavanaugh would do once he was out.

  Believing that O’Connell was prepared to kill his comrades to facilitate his escape, though, was still a stretch: a barely credible, and unreasonably drastic, solution to a problem that could be solved in other ways. And as Peter had already pointed out, if that’s what he did he would surely have left his identification discs on one of the burnt corpses.

  Despite considering the alternative possibility of it not being O’Connell but one of the others whose body hadn’t been found, I hadn’t turned up any reason for Poole, Burleigh, or Dabs to want to disappear either. Dabs had been visually identified and so, of the four, I was confident it was O’Connell’s bones which were waiting to be discovered at the bottom of some muddy ditch in Normandy.

  I put as much in the report while leaving O’Connell as we had originally found him——in the innocent guise of Sergeant William Kearney.

  Afterwards I sat at my desk, feet up, smoking. My conclusion was the sort of thing Jekyll wanted to hear and so I assumed he’d be pleased enough to pass the report back to the place from where it had originally come.

  I should have been pleased, too. Yet looking down at the small sheaf of papers that made up my considered opinion on the business, it seemed they were more eloquent in what they didn’t say rather than in what they did.

  I listened to the clock tick and watched smoke rings float over the report in the dusty office air, looking for answers that weren’t there.

  22

  June 30th

  Penny was waiting outside the Savoy.

  ‘I thought we could walk through Trafalgar Square and down the Mall to the park. Or is that too far for you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I walk everywhere now.’

  ‘Doesn’t George still have the car?’

  ‘We don’t use it unless we have to.’

  George was thin ice so I didn’t enquire further. We walked along the Strand. The centre of London had its share of damage. There were gaps in the buildings here and there, much like the gaps the bombs had left in people’s lives. I’d known one or two people who had died in air raids and supposed that Penny did too. She’d had a wide circle of friends before I met her.

  I thought about Jeremy Coveney again and asked her if I had ever met him.

  ‘Jeremy? I don’t think so. He was still at school or had just gone up to university when we got married. He joined up shortly afterwards, anyway. I know he was overseas when his mother was killed. What made you ask?’

  ‘Nothing really,’ I said. ‘It’s just an odd coincidence. This business with this carrier crew I’ve been looking into...’

  ‘The Irish woman and the IRA?’

  ‘That turned out to be a red herring,’ I said. As were my suspic
ions about Arnie Poole and Joseph Dabs. ‘They’ve got nothing to do with it.’

  ‘So you said last night. What’s so odd about it?’

  ‘They were killed near Caen. Pretty close to your Aunt Louise’s old house.’

  ‘Château de Hêtres? That is odd. What a strange coincidence.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘We were only talking about Uncle Claude over lunch,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Ben spent time in the area before the war. He was wondering if he knew the house.’

  ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. It was a bit out of the way. And it wasn’t the sort of house one imagines when one thinks of French châteaux. Not one of those grand houses the aristocracy owned before the revolution. It wasn’t somewhere you’d visit, anyway. Not like the local big house, the Château de Maltot.’

  ‘That was closer to the village, I suppose.’

  ‘Uncle Claude’s house was in the middle of a wood. One wouldn’t pass it on the way to somewhere else. There was only the drive leading to it and a track at the back down to the river. After Aunt Louise married Uncle Maurice it was never much more than a weekend place for Claude. Mummy always loved it, though, and went back whenever she could.’

  ‘Do you happened to know where Claude was killed?’ I asked casually.

  ‘I’m not sure. Mummy wrote to tell me but not the details. I suppose she got it from Uncle Maurice. I did ask him once but he doesn’t like to talk about it. Too upsetting. First Aunt Louise and then Claude...’

  Past Admiralty Arch we walked down The Mall and into St James Park. Although no longer being exhorted to Dig for Victory, the allotments that had been part of Churchill’s campaign were still there——a small fraction of the parks and common land that had gone under the plough to supplement the country’s food supply. During the war allotments had sprung up all over the city. The moat at the Tower of London had been transformed into a market garden. Even the Kennington Oval had been dug up. Cricket would return soon, I supposed, but the scars on the land would take longer to heal. Much like the human scars left after people’s lives had been dug over; even the superficial ones like those Penny and I carried.