Sky High

by Michael Gilbert

  Pillows and bedclothes had been spewed about the floor.

  There was one long, brightly coloured bolster lying against the wainscoting under the window. Tim looked at it twice before he realised that he had discovered Major MacMorris.

  Forcing himself to hold the torch steady he made a quick examination. There was nothing that he could usefully do. The body presented that general appearance of a rag doll with all the stuffing out that high explosive produces where it lays its hands too intimately on a human being.

  Lying beside MacMorris, on the floor, was an envelope. The flap was stuck down and the envelope itself was old, and crumpled, as if with much handling. Impossible to guess where it had come from. Off the table, out of the eviscerated cupboard or the ripped-up chest of drawers? Had it fluttered down from behind some picture? Or had it been by chance in MacMorris’ hand at the moment of the explosion? He pushed it into his pocket for later inspection.

  Tim had no real recollection of going back. The next thing he clearly remembered was sitting on the edge of the broken staircase. Sergeant Gattie was peering up at him.

  ‘You found him, did you?’ he said.

  ‘He’s in the bedroom,’said Tim. ‘He’s wearing pyjamas – I think.’

  ‘Was he in bed, when it went off?’

  Tim forced himself to think.

  ‘He might have been sitting on the bed,’ he said, at last. ‘I don’t think he was in it or he’d have been lying by the mattress and the bedclothes. They were the other side of the room. They might have protected him a bit.’

  ‘And he’s—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tim. ‘Yes. Very definitely. I’ve hardly ever in my life seen anyone more so.’

  Sergeant Gattie peered up at him again. His face and head were white with plaster. It was so caked into his hair and smothered over his forehead that it was difficult to see where the handkerchief over his nose and mouth began. Only his black eyes were alive.

  Tim felt an urgent desire to laugh at him, but he had a feeling that once he started he might not be able to stop.

  ‘I should come down if I were you, sir,’ said Sergeant Gattie. That sounds like the fire brigade arriving. We’d better give them a clear run.’

  II

  The following evening, after supper, Liz Artside put down her book and said, ‘How much did I ever tell you about your father’s death?’

  ‘Never very much,’ said Tim, looking up with a frown from a black covered exercise book in which he was working out something in pencil.

  ‘I wasn’t sure,’ said Liz.

  It looked for a moment as if that was the end of the conversation. Tim picked up his pencil again.

  ‘I meant to explain about last night,’ said Liz. ‘I’ve been thinking about it. I expect it was the coincidence that set me off.’

  ‘I knew that Dad got blown up,’ said Tim slowly, ‘and that it was an accident, and that it happened in Cologne, a little time before I was born. That’s really all anyone’s ever told me about it.’

  Liz said slowly, ‘It was an autumn evening, like yesterday, only rather darker and more overcast. I was sitting, looking out of the window. We had a flat in the Onkeldam suburb, overlooking the Rhine, just south of the city. From where I sat I could see Bill’s headquarter building. It was a big house – an old school – further up, on the South Bank. He was working late that night. He didn’t often work late. He usually got it all done in the day and he liked to sit at home in the evenings and plan what we were going to do when we got back to England.’

  Tim looked up quickly. But there was no feeling there, suppressed or other. His mother’s voice was as matter-of-fact as it always was.

  That evening he had told me he would be late. There’d been some trouble. It was large scale looting by one of the Army contractors. He had all the papers with him to study. I think it was worrying him, a little. We had dinner together, and he left soon afterwards. I could see the window of his office. It was almost the only lighted one in the building. Then, suddenly, just like last night, when no one was expecting anything in particular, it happened.’

  The same sort of explosion as last night?’

  ‘Not really. They wouldn’t have the same sort of explosives in those days, would they? It was a sort of white glare. Then the crash. Then lots and lots of smoke. I knew that something awful had happened and I ran down and out into the street. I’d forgotten about curfew. There wasn’t a person or a car in sight. I ran all the way there, through the empty streets. It was nearly a mile, and I don’t remember feeling tired at all, but it must have taken some time, because when I got there, there was a cordon round the building and they wouldn’t let me in. They never let me see the body. I never saw Bill again.’

  Liz was silent, looking back at her more than thirty years younger self, a serious, rather squat black-haired girl, scudding through the empty streets of Cologne. She had wondered afterwards why it hadn’t killed the four-month old child she was carrying. Afterwards. Not at the time. At the time she hadn’t given it a thought. It had started to drizzle, she remembered. She had been glad, because people were unable to tell if the moisture on her face had been tears or rain. It had seemed important then.

  She was silent for so long that Tim said, ‘I shouldn’t go on if it worries you.’

  ‘It doesn’t worry me,’ said Liz. ‘I worried so much at the time that, in the end, I worried all the worry out of myself. I got calloused over. Nature’s like that, she breeds her own anti-bodies. I haven’t talked to you about it before, but it wasn’t because it worried me – at least, not that part of it. It was the thoughts which came afterwards.’

  Tim looked up sharply, but said nothing.

  ‘There was a Court of Inquiry and I suppose there was an inquest as well, but I don’t remember it. It came out that there had been a lot of explosive stored in the headquarters building. It seemed a bit odd. But I don’t think people were quite so careful about things then. We’d just finished the biggest war anyone had ever heard of and I expect people were still a bit casual. It came out that the engineers had been dismantling the charges which the Germans had laid under the Rhine bridges. The charges had never been used, because the war was over before we got near the Rhine, but they had to be dug out eventually and disposed of. I gather they were quite primitive things – slabs of gun-cotton and detonators – and, of course, they’d taken out all the detonators, or thought they had.’

  ‘But they hadn’t?’

  ‘So the Court of Inquiry decided. I didn’t understand it all. There was talk about some gun-cotton which had been protected and some which should have been but hadn’t.’

  ‘Sheathed, I believe we call it now.’

  ‘Something like that. It was just one of those ghastly mistakes that happens. The C.R.E. was the man I was sorry for. Brigadier Tom Havers. He was a nice little person, with a face just like a duck. It was the end of him, of course.’

  ‘He got the sack?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t think he was cashiered. Severely reprimanded and lost seniority. He took the hint and handed in his papers. I never thought it was his fault at all, and I said so. We were very good friends after he left the Army.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘He’s dead. He died a few years later – boredom, I fancy.’

  ‘Was it an accident?’ said Tim.

  His mother did not reply directly. She got up and went across to the cupboard in the corner of the room and pulled out a heavy, old-fashioned, cash box. Originally, no doubt, impressive in green and gilt, it was worn with age and travel to a uniform drab. Tim could remember that box as long as he could remember anything. It was full of old Post Office Savings books, certificates, passports, licences, photographs; the hundred and one things that had once seemed valuable. From it she extracted a bundle of letters, fastened with a rubber band, and took out the top one.

  It was evident that she knew just where it was and that she had taken it out lately.

  She passed it
across to Tim, who looked at it curiously.

  It was on cheap grey paper, much folded, in the faded, chunky handwriting that he knew to be his father’s. It was undated, and headed Trenches, near Ginchy’. It said:

  ‘Darling Liz, a great day. I’ve got my “step”. In fact, the chances are the next letter I write won’t be headed “trenches”, but Chateau – Something-or-other. In this part of the line even Brigade Commanders live in Chateaus (Chateaux?). If Roney gets the Corps – and no one deserves it more thoroughly – then it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility – splotch – sorry, that was half a ton of flying pig landed near the dug-out door and blew out the candle. Don’t worry about it, though. My privilege as Commanding Officer is to have the deepest and safest dug-out. As I was saying. It’s not even beyond the bounds of possibility that they might leap-frog me straight up to Division! In which case, I shall be writing to you on embossed notepaper, and I shan’t even post it. I shall get one of my gilded aide-de-camps to bring it to you personally. Seriously, though, I do sometimes wonder how all this is going to end. Most people at the top are doing jobs that are two, three and four grades higher than they could hope to hold down in peace time. To say nothing of the fact that we always treat the Armed Forces as Cinderella as soon as the war is over. I suppose the cynical answer is to make the most of it whilst it’s there. You can hardly expect the government to maintain a war-sized army in peace time so as not to have to demote a lot of brass-hats. However, don’t let’s count chickens. Better to wait and see if we get up there, before complaining about being booted down again.’

  ‘But he did get there, didn’t he,’ said Tim.

  ‘He was an acting Lieutenant-General when he commanded at Cologne.’

  ‘And how old? Thirty?’

  ‘Thirty-one.’

  ‘On top of the world.’

  ‘So you might think,’ said Liz. ‘He’d just been offered a job in England, too. Commandant of the newly-opened School of Chemical Warfare.’

  ‘Was it a good job?’

  ‘It was a job. Even by 1920 any job was a good job. It carried the acting rank of Brigadier.’

  ‘I see,’ said Tim. ‘But as he happened to die a Lieutenant-General, you got a very much higher pension.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Liz.

  ‘Well, I don’t believe it,’ said Tim. He suddenly looked very red-faced, determined and young.

  ‘Don’t believe what?’

  ‘What you’re trying to tell me. That he might have killed himself because he saw the slump coming. No one would do that, at thirty-one, for himself, or anyone else.’

  Liz looked calmly at her son for a moment and said, ‘I don’t really know that I believe it myself. But Bill wasn’t a straightforward character. He was a terrific soldier. People who ought to know say that if he had lived he must have been at least an Army Commander in this war. He might even have run the whole show. Everyone who knew him trusted him, but at the heart of it all, he wasn’t quite sure of himself. Bob understood him as well as anyone. You should ask him about it sometime. And another thing you’ve got to remember. After a long war a lot of people who have fought in it – really fought, I mean – are queer for a long time. Often it doesn’t show, but it’s there, and you’ve got to make allowances for it.’

  ‘You may be right,’ said Tim. ‘I wouldn’t know. I never did any real fighting. I was just a bag-snatching cut-throat. Ask the General.’

  III

  Rupert Cleeve sat on the piano stool in the small drawing-room and kicked his heels against the mahogany of that long-suffering piece of furniture.

  Then he rotated solemnly, until the stool was as high as it could be made to go, reversed direction, and came down again to keyboard level. Then he looked at the clock on the mantelshelf, shut the lid of the piano with a bang, and walked across to the window.

  The cook’s cat, a large, dangerous animal, was squatting on the flat top of the ashlar wall that ran, knee high, round the sun garden. He was not easy to see, because he was so arranged that the dapple of evening light through the hedge blended confusingly with his tortoise-shell camouflage.

  He was waiting for birds.

  Rupert went up to his bedroom and pulled the bottom long drawer of his chest of drawers right out. Behind it, held in clips to the woodwork of the chest, and invisible whilst the drawer was in position, were a number of implements. One of them was a powerful looking catapult of thick rubber on a steel frame.

  He took this out, and pocketed two marbles from a box beside his bed.

  Then he shut everything up and went downstairs again. All his movements were neat and self-contained. He lived comfortably in the fifth dimension which a lonely child inhabits.

  Back in the small drawing-room he went over to the window and eased it very carefully open.

  It was a tricky shot. Rupert considered it with gravity. Safer to aim low, perhaps, and trust a ricochet off the coping.

  He stretched the elastic, held his breath, and let go. There was a twang, a ‘tock’ of marble on stone, and a sharp oath from the cook’s cat as it disappeared into the shrubbery.

  When Rupert had retrieved the marble and put everything away neatly, he went to look for his father. He found him in the breakfast-room, struggling with a report on juvenile delinquency.

  ‘Who got blown up last night?’ he asked.

  Cleeve looked up vaguely. Statistics. Trends. Home influence. Graphical reproduction of repeated offences.

  ‘Who got what?’

  ‘Blown up.’

  ‘Major MacMorris.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Rupert.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s pretty obvious who did it, I should think.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s that Bramshott Choir. They’re trying to bitch up our Anthem.’

  ‘Who taught you that disgusting expression?’

  ‘It’s not disgusting,’ said Rupert. ‘It simply means—’

  ‘That’ll do. And it’s time you went to bed.’

  It was time he went to boarding school, too. Time. Time. Time.

  The Chairman returned to his report.

  Chapter Five

  FIRST INTERVAL: TRIO (MA NON LEGATO)

  Berowne:

  ‘A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound

  When the suspicious head of theft is stopped.’

  ‘We’ll give you all the help we can, of course,’ said Tim. That’s why we’ve come along. The only thing is, I’ve simply got to be in London by one o’clock.’

  ‘I quite appreciate that, sir,’ said Inspector Luck. He had hair that had once been auburn and plentiful but was now a sparse ginger, and a face like a tired fox. ‘It’s very good of you and Mrs. Artside to come along at all. Mind that step. That’s right. I’d better go first and see if the door’s open.’

  He led the way out of the back door of Bramshott police station, and into a sort of large shed at the back. Battered furniture was piled round the walls. On trestle tables, under the long skylight, a jumble of smaller objects had been sorted out. An elderly police sergeant was making entries in a book.

  ‘It’s everything we could find,’ said Luck. ‘There’s probably a good deal more, under the rubble, but we shan’t get it until the demolition team has finished.’

  ‘It doesn’t look much for the contents of a fully-furnished house,’ said Liz.

  ‘As a matter of fact it wasn’t all that fully furnished,’ said Tim. ‘On the ground floor I only went into the living-room, but I looked into the front room as I went by and it seemed pretty bare. Upstairs there was practically only one bedroom furnished at all, and one bed in another room.’

  They inspected the sad miscellany of household goods laid out on the tables; disembowelled cushions, strips of curtains, pillows, bedclothes, a plaster dog, a selection of kitchenware, mostly intact, pictures, some of them almost unrecognisable, some undamaged. It took Tim back to Italy and Greece, and the collection of household goo
ds which he had so often seen, heaped on to handcarts, dumped beside roads, torn, scattered, trampled on, soaked with their owner’s blood.

  He searched among the glass and woodwork of the pile of pictures and pulled out two framed photographs.

  ‘I noticed these when MacMorris was talking to me on Wednesday night. They’re Regimental groups. I don’t know if you’re interested in his background, but these might be a help.’

  Liz and the Inspector came over and peered at them.

  ‘That one’s the Suffolks,’ said Liz at last. ‘It’s a Minden Day photograph. You can see the roses. But it was taken a long time ago. Those pill-box hats went out before the South African War. I don’t believe MacMorris was as old as all that.’

  ‘This one looks as if it was taken in India,’ said Tim.

  ‘I don’t suppose they belonged to him at all,’ said Liz. ‘It wasn’t his house, was it? I mean, he hadn’t bought it.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Luck cautiously, ‘that it was rented furnished from a Miss Anglesea.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right then,’ said Liz. ‘Dolly Anglesea’s father was in the Suffolk Regiment, and he went to India with them. Those photographs are nothing to do with MacMorris at all.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Tim. ‘There was one that was him – or his twin. Quite unmistakeable. Dressed up as a one-pipper. And he had some sort of gong up, too. Not a campaign ribbon. Might have been the M.C.’

  As he spoke, he was piecing together the fragments on the table. Seeing what he was doing the other two came and helped him. But nothing even remotely resembling a photograph of a Second Lieutenant appeared.

  ‘Did you find the letter?’ said Tim suddenly.

  ‘Which letter, sir?’

  ‘The anonymous letter.’

  There was a pause. Then the Inspector said. ‘Yes. Yes, we found that. The desk wasn’t much damaged, you know. But just how did you happen—’