The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  She watched as I examined Caomhánach. The bullet had entered from the side and into his heart, not through his back, thankfully. It was hardly perfect but it would do.

  I wiped the Beretta clean with my handkerchief then knelt over Caomhánach. I prised his .38 out of his hand and replaced it with Rose’s automatic, wrapping his dead fingers around the butt and trigger. Then I took hold of it with my right hand, making sure my fingerprints were on it, too. I left it lying by his side.

  I stood up, Caomhánach’s .38 in my hand.

  ‘Get going, Rose. And be quick about it. They might already be on their way.’

  She stared at me with genuine surprise. ‘And what are you going to tell them?’

  ‘That I shot him while we were struggling for his gun. I know the man from Special Branch who was after him. He’ll accept what I say.’

  I had no idea, of course, if Gifford would accept it or not. But Rose had shot Caomhánach before he had shot me and I owed her this at least. If I told them what really happened there was a chance she wouldn’t hang. But she was an Irish Fenian and it would have meant prison however you looked at it. She deserved more than that.

  I held out Caomhánach’s .38. ‘If I give you this,’ I said, ‘will you promise not to shoot anyone with it?’

  She laughed. ‘Now what’s the point of me having the thing if I can’t shoot anyone with it?’

  Then she came to me, pulled my head down on hers and kissed me on the mouth, taking the gun from my hand. She placed her cheek next to mine.

  ‘I’ve almost a mind to stay,’ she whispered.

  I pushed her towards the door. ‘What will you do? Where will you go?’

  She cocked her head a little. ‘Perhaps I’ll try America. Isn’t that where all we Irish go when we’re sick of our lives and are looking for a new one?’

  ‘Then go quickly,’ I told her. ‘Do you have money?’

  ‘Are you offering me money, Captain? Now what sort of girl do you take me for?’

  ‘One after my own heart, Rose.’

  I opened the door and glanced along the corridor. She slipped past me, looking back once before hurrying down the dark stairs and out into the night.

  I waited fifteen minutes but no one came. Outside it was quiet; inside it was as deathly still as the corpse I was sharing the room with. When I judged she must be clear I went down to the telephone in the hall and rang the number Gifford had given me.

  *

  I got him out of bed, something he was none too pleased about. The first thing he did when he arrived was make sure Caomhánach was dead. Rose’s shot had made a hole in Caomhánach’s jacket and I could see from where I stood there was no powder burn on the material. If Gifford noticed he didn’t mention it. For a moment he regarded me with a sceptical expression before going back downstairs to use the phone. In the hour it took for them to arrive I explained what had happened; how I found Caomhánach waiting in the flat for me and how I realized he meant to kill me.

  ‘I didn’t think I had much to lose so I jumped him at the first opportunity.’

  I waited for a response. When it didn’t come I said:

  ‘We struggled for the gun and it went off.’

  Gifford glanced at the blood on my forehead and at Rose’s Beretta on the floor. He bent down and picked up a shell casing that lay under the table.

  ‘And we’ll find your prints on the gun, I suppose?’

  ‘I assume so.’

  He turned the casing in his fingers. ‘Small calibre for a man like Caomhánach. More of a woman’s gun.’

  ‘Easy to conceal,’ I suggested.

  A van finally arrived, two men with a stretcher and a third man carrying one of those old newspaper cameras with the big flash. He was young, unshaven and dishevelled, as though like Gifford he too had been pulled from his bed. He looked oddly familiar. Then he took a shot of Caomhánach’s body and blinded me with the flash. Dropping the spent bulb into a pocket of his coat, he screwed in a new one and took a second shot, looking over at me as if about to say something. Then he glanced at Gifford and seemed to think better of it. He followed the stretcher and Caomhánach out the door.

  Waiting for the van and afterwards, Gifford and I had drunk our way through my week’s tea ration. If he was tired he gave no sign of it.

  ‘Did he mention the O’Shaughnessy woman?’

  ‘The one who posed as O’Connell’s sister? No, he didn’t. Perhaps he just used her to get information about O’Connell. Are you still looking for her?’

  Gifford seemed to consider the question. ‘We’ve nothing on her,’ he said eventually. ‘The sooner she’s back in Ireland the better as far as I’m concerned.’

  I told him about the poem Caomhánach had written; about O’Connell and the birthmark on his buttock. I said:

  ‘Isn’t that how Maurice Coveney identified Pellisier’s body?’

  ‘There were some half-burned identity papers but it was the birthmark Coveney said he recognized.’

  ‘How did he explain that? Was he in the habit of gambolling naked with his brother-in-law?’

  Gifford cocked a sardonic eye. ‘Swimming in the river near Pellisier’s château. He said they never wore bathing costumes.’

  ‘A stroke of luck.’

  Gifford shrugged. ‘How do you contradict him without evidence? The body in the château wasn’t in good condition. They only had the photographs, Pellisier’s clothes and ID——’

  ‘And the blood type?’

  ‘If they can type it. The body’s been in the ground two years. But with or without it you’d still have to prove the birthmark was O’Connell’s. How? Caomhánach is dead and even if he wasn’t I can’t imagine he’d be likely to volunteer information to help us. O’Connell’s mother is also dead. There’s Rose O’Shaughnessy, she’d know presumably.’ He shrugged. ‘But it would be her word against Coveney’s and no one’s going to take the word of an IRA sympathizer against a man in Coveney’s position. And even then you’d have to prove Pellisier didn’t have an identical mark.’

  ‘How do you prove a negative?’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. Who’s left to say the birthmark wasn’t Pellisier’s, that he didn’t have one? His sister’s dead and there’s no other family. A lover perhaps, if you could find one.’

  I said it without thinking.

  ‘There’s Helen Forster.’

  ‘Forster’s wife? What about her? Did they all go skinny-dipping?’

  I tried to picture Helen stripping off and jumping in the river. The thought was farcical. At least it was for the Helen I remembered. But she had been a girl once, and younger when she had first known Pellisier than Penny was when I met her.

  Gifford was watching me, waiting. I shouldn’t have said any more but Gifford was the sort of man who could get things out of people they didn’t even know they knew. At that moment just his silence and his expectation seemed enough. Besides, I was tired and hung-over. More to the point I didn’t think I owed Helen and Reggie Forster a damn thing.

  I sighed heavily, just to let him know I’d put up some sort of fight.

  ‘As you seem to already know, when my mother-in-law was a girl she used to spend her summers at the Château de Hêtres. She apparently had an affair with Claude Pellisier. It went on over several summers. Of course, I can’t say whether or not she ever saw him naked.’

  ‘That would all depend on how and how often they did it and where,’ Gifford said, cutting prosaically through any vestige of romance and getting down to brass tacks. ‘If they were shy, or enthusiastic. You knew her, what’s your guess?’

  I wondered if he imagined I had some sort of inside knowledge simply because I was married to Helen’s daughter. I did, of course, but was he thinking what I was thinking? Could one’s appetite for sex be passed down from mother to daughter like some inherited predisposition? I had discovered early on what an enthusiastic lover Penny was. Neither demure nor in the least inhibited and I admit it had shocked me at first
. Did Penny take after her mother?

  ‘Who knows,’ I finally answered vaguely.

  ‘Who told you about it?’ Gifford persisted. ‘Your wife?’

  ‘She got it from her Aunt Julia, Helen’s sister. And I was told in confidence,’ I added, far too late to do any good. ‘Anyway, I can’t imagine she’d ever admit to it.’

  ‘But you’re certain it happened? Did Forster know? I thought he and Pellisier were supposed to be chums?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. You know what that class can be like. They think no more of bed-hopping than they do about a rubber of bridge. Perhaps he didn’t know. Perhaps he didn’t care.’

  ‘When did it end, assuming it did?’

  ‘She heard Pellisier had been killed in the war——the Great War, that is. She married Forster soon after. It was a year or more before she found out Pellisier wasn’t dead but in a POW camp. At least, that’s the story according to my wife.’

  In fact when Penny first told me about it, I had wondered if the affair had continued after Pellisier had come home. Even briefly speculated whether Penny was perhaps Pellisier’s daughter and not Reggie’s. It might have explained how different Penny was in attitudes and prejudices to her father. But the timings hadn’t seemed to work out and now it turned out that Pellisier had been even more deeply fascist than Forster.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said again, ‘she’d never admit to it. Besides, she’s in America.’

  ‘Due back on the second of August, aren’t they? Sailing on the Queen Mary?’

  I wanted to ask how he knew but wasn’t too sure I wanted to know the answer.

  It was beginning to get light. Gifford looked at his watch and got up from the table. ‘Hardly worth going back to bed now.’

  ‘Don’t you want me to make a statement or something?’ I asked. ‘There’ll have to be an inquest I suppose?’

  Gifford yawned. ‘Caomhánach was a gunman on the run. No one is going to be surprised that he’s turned up dead. All the same, it will be as well to keep this to yourself.’ He paused at the door. ‘Rose O’Shaughnessy. She’ll probably keep her head down now but if you do see her you’ll let me know won’t you?’

  I assured him I would. After he went I washed up the teacups and scrubbed at the bloodstain Caomhánach had left on the floor. By the time I finished that I decided it was hardly worth my going to bed, either.

  29

  July 6th

  Being a Saturday I slept in then later, bleary-eyed, went to the shops. Perhaps I was light-headed from the events of the previous evening but I had conceived some wild idea about baking my own bread. Since the news that it was to go on ration, though, it seems a lot of other people had become light-headed too and there had been a run on flour emptying the shelves.

  Back at the flat I found a van parked outside and Sam from upstairs helping another man load furniture into the back. I thought he might be moving his ill-gotten gains until he explained he was helping old Mrs Randall move to her niece’s place in Sussex. Out of breath from carrying an old Victorian sofa down the stairs, he collapsed on top of it and asked:

  ‘Found anywhere yourself yet?

  I admitted I hadn’t while wondering why clambering up drainpipes for a living didn’t keep him in better condition. But perhaps his modus operandi was picking locks.

  ‘I’ve made a few enquiries,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve found a nice flat on the Ossulston Estate,’ he said. ‘Lucky to get it. And it’s not far from the station so it’ll be handy.’

  The Ossulston Estate had been built on the site of the old Somers Town slum between St Pancras and Euston Stations about fifteen years earlier. I wouldn’t have thought the area provided particularly rich pickings for burglary but since he said it was close to the station it might be that he commuted to his favourite haunts, dropping down into Bloomsbury, say, for his work. I supposed he knew his business better than I did.

  I asked if Mrs Randall was leaving that morning, ready to lend a hand if need be. But they’d almost finished so instead I popped up and said goodbye to the old girl, none too sure as I wished her the best that she knew who I was.

  I rang Penny that evening, briefly speaking to my mother before I could get her to hand over the phone to my wife.

  ‘So,’ my mother announced without preamble, ‘you’ve managed to persuade Penny to move back in with you. You were always a selfish boy, Harry. I had hoped the army would teach you something of moral responsibility...,’

  She never had, of course. As she blamed the army for getting my father killed, she thought less of the institution than she did of me. But everything about my mother was selective, from memory to prejudice, and getting her to change her opinions was an alchemy as difficult as transmuting base metal. There was some more of the same until I heard Penny’s voice near the phone and imagined the two of them having a struggle over the receiver. Nonsense, but Penny did sound breathless when she finally answered. I might have hoped that the prospect of speaking to me had taken her breath away but she soon disabused me of that notion.

  ‘I was out in the garden earthing up our potatoes,’ she said.

  ‘Quite the country girl,’ I observed.

  ‘We’ve all had to muck in.’

  I thought for some reason her tone was implying I hadn’t been doing my share. As if fighting my way up the Italian peninsular hadn’t been “mucking-in” enough.

  I told her I was looking at some more flats in the coming week which, although not quite true, would be once I had fixed up some appointments.

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose there’s any hurry,’ she said. ‘We could always wait till after Mummy and Daddy get back.’

  Assuming for a second she was suggesting we move in with them, I was on the verge of saying something in reply that would have well and truly shattered the ice. Then I realized that even six years of war wouldn’t have been enough to make her forget my reservations on that score.

  ‘They’re booked on the Queen Mary on the twenty-ninth this month, aren’t they?’

  ‘How did you know that? I only got a letter myself yesterday telling me their plans.’

  ‘It must have been Julia,’ I said. ‘I was over there the other day to see Ben Tuchman.’

  ‘I’m no longer sure that’s a good idea,’ she said.

  ‘What, me seeing Tuchman?’

  ‘Don’t be obtuse, Harry. Julia seeing Ben Tuchman. He’s apparently been asking her all sorts of odd things.’

  My first thought was that she meant Tuchman had been making some peculiar requests of Julia——to suit some particular sexual peccadillo or other——but of course she hadn’t.

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘About Mummy and Daddy before the war and how much they saw of Aunt Louise and her brother...,’

  I told her it was probably only curiosity and changed the subject. I said she’d be happy to hear they were going to knock my building down.

  ‘I know. Ida told Julia. Now she’s living in, it must be lonely for you in the flat.’

  I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Whether it was some sort of retroactive dig at Ida again or concern for my well-being. I might have told her I hadn’t been lonely at all, what with Rose’s visits and Caomhánach lying dead on the floor, Gifford and his men traipsing in and out, but there was no point in mentioning any of that so I shifted the subject again and asked how the garden was coming on. I had spent too many hours as a boy digging over a previous garden of my mother’s to care, but suddenly there didn’t seem much else to talk about. It kept her happily on the line, though, until I could decently tell her my money was running out and I’d have to hang up. I told her I’d ring again after I’d seen the flats.

  *

  The rest of the weekend dragged and by Monday morning I wasn’t sorry to be back in the office. I felt a little nervous, half-expecting Jekyll to turn up any minute. But he didn’t and by lunchtime I’d polished up my report and put it with Peter’s typed account of our interview with SS-Sturm
mann Karl Hess. By the time everything was finished it was well past the time Jekyll had said he expected the report on his desk and, preferring not to face him, I got Susie to drop it round to his office in New Cavendish Street. She seemed a little jumpy, as if expecting me to dress her down for submitting the monthly account with the rail warrant without clearing it with me first. But there was no point in rehashing that. I was in a better frame of mind than I had been on Friday, now fully expecting the fact of our having more or less solved the question of Dabs’ death and Kearney’s disappearance to outweigh with Jekyll the price of a return rail fare to Liverpool. And, since we heard nothing from him for the rest of that day, I felt——not unreasonably——pleased with myself.

  Which only goes to show how one erroneous judgement can lead to all sorts of complacent assumptions. A point well worth entering, I would have thought, into the army officer’s handbook.

  This particular officer saw the error of his complacent ways early the following morning when Jekyll turned up unexpectedly and dropped the bombshell upon us that our unit was to be wound up.

  He made a little speech complimenting us on our “sterling work” over the past months, saying it was through our efforts that new evidence had been added to that already held against certain individuals——which all came as news to me. He told us we had until the end of the week to tie up any loose ends and to send all unfinished business over to his office so it might be reallocated. He was personally going to ensure, he added, that our papers were processed without delay so we might resume our civilian lives as soon as possible. To that end――and as a mark of the Corp’s gratitude――there would be no need to return to our respective battalions, and we would continue to be paid until our demobilization became official.

  To me it all smacked a little of what Susie’s GI might have called the bum’s rush, and Jekyll’s gratitude little more than a lever to get us out of the door that much quicker.

  I was thinking this as he wound up by asking, ‘Any questions?’ and, before waiting to see if there were, turned to me and added gruffly, ‘A word in private.’