‘But—’
‘Don’t worry about it. My treat.’
‘I can’t—’
‘Don’t argue, Ossie,’ said Lloyd in an undertone. ‘You’ll queer the pitch for the rest of us.’ He nodded ahead at the lurching figure of Judd. ‘I reckon bricks and mortar have served him well. Just look at the cut of that overcoat.’
‘All right. I won’t argue. But where are the others? You mentioned seven.’
‘Didn’t you read Danger’s notes?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Gregger and Paradise live up the line. Gregger’s joining us at Peterborough, Paradise at York.’
‘That still only makes six.’
‘Not if we count you.’
‘But you weren’t counting me. Were you?’
‘No. Bit of a change of plan where Magister’s concerned, actually. I’ll fill you in when we’re on board. You’ll have to get over the shock of meeting Tapper first.’
‘Shock? Why should it be—’
‘Just you wait and see.’
Harry followed the others onto the train mentally preparing himself for his first sight of Gilbert ‘Tapper’ Tancred’s time-ravaged features. Perhaps, it occurred to him, there was worse to be faced than the imprint of the years. Disability; disfigurement: who knew what?
Then he saw Judd move ahead of him down the aisle between the seats and touch the shoulder of one of the passengers already aboard. The passenger looked up at Judd, then rose and turned towards Harry.
The shock, it turned out, lay in the ease of recognition. Tancred was as slim and erect as he had been at twenty. His black hair had been lightened by no more than a few strands of grey. There were more lines about his pale, high-cheeked face, but fewer than might have been expected. All in all, he was quite astonishingly unaltered. If he had swapped his smartly tailored jacket and rumple-free trousers for his old RAF uniform, the effect would have been positively uncanny.
‘Ah. You found him, then.’ Tancred’s voice had altered. A career in merchant banking had given him a syrupy drawl that Harry did not recall. ‘Well met, Ossie.’
Harry advanced to shake his hand. ‘Life treating you well, Tapper?’
‘Can’t complain, old boy. Yourself?’
‘Oh, fair to middling.’
‘Are you, er, staying here?’ Tancred frowned at Lloyd’s hoisting of his bag onto the rack.
‘Thought we’d join you in first, Tapper,’ said Judd, grinning broadly. ‘Keep you company, like.’
‘Really?’ Tancred smiled. ‘Excellent. I’d have joined you, of course, once we were under way. But this … is better all round.’
‘Supercilious sod,’ Lloyd whispered to Harry as Judd’s manhandling of his bag briefly shielded them from Tancred.
‘What were you going to tell me about Magister, Jabber?’ Harry asked, loudly enough to be heard by everyone.
‘Oh, he’s flying up. That’s all. Meeting us there.’
‘That’s not quite all, Ossie,’ said Tancred as they sat down. Harry joined Lloyd, Askew and Judd in occupation of the quartet of seats on the other side of the aisle from Tancred. ‘Magister, we’re told, has to attend an auction this afternoon in Geneva, so he’s flying from there to Aberdeen tonight. Such is the life of the international art dealer.’
‘He’s not … retired, then?’ asked Askew.
‘Doesn’t wish to be thought retired, at all events,’ said Tancred. ‘There’s a spot of one-upmanship in this breathless announcement of his hectic schedule, I suspect.’
‘One-upmanship’s not something you’d know anything about, though, is it, Tapper?’ Lloyd enquired sarcastically.
‘Sniping before the train’s even pulled out of the station,’ said Judd, pressing several podgy fingers to his brow. ‘Blimey, we’ve gone straight back to how it was in that Nissen hut.’
‘Pax,’ said Tancred, holding up a hand and bowing his head in a gesture of humility. ‘We’re the lucky ones, gentlemen, for being alive and well enough to undertake this journey. Yes, we often used to irritate one another and may do so again before the weekend’s out. But to meet again is nonetheless cause for celebration. Shall we try to put half-remembered petty grievances aside and concentrate on the task in hand?’
‘I’m all for that,’ said Judd.
Lloyd shrugged. ‘So am I.’
‘Me too,’ said Harry.
‘But …’ Askew looked thoughtful. ‘What task would that be … exactly?’
‘Why, enjoying ourselves, of course.’ Tancred beamed benignly at Askew. ‘What else?’
Chapter Five
TANCRED WAS AS good as his word. It was clear to Harry that he felt little real kinship with his fellow survivors of Operation Clean Sheet. But then the same was true of Harry himself. They were not the veterans of some arduous campaign in foreign parts, after all. They had simply been thrown together for three months fifty years ago in strange but scarcely hazardous circumstances. There were many humorous recollections of those months to be shared, however, and Tancred did his best to encourage the flow of them as the train headed north, much to the obvious exasperation of the several businessmen seated nearby, who had been hoping for guffaw-free quietude in which to concentrate on their FTs and laptops.
The opening of the buffet was the signal for Tancred to order a bottle of champagne, swiftly followed by a second and a third when Owen ‘Gregger’ Gregson joined them at Peterborough. Alerted by a mobile-phone call from Lloyd to their presence in coach L, Gregson was meeker and milder spoken than Harry recalled, a shrunken, vague-eyed man with a faint tremor in his hands, who took one sip of champagne, then ordered tea, and insisted on writing Judd a cheque for the supplement on his fare, which Judd had settled smartly in cash with the ticket inspector. Askew asked after Gregson’s wife and the pitiful account that followed of their domestic routine took the fizz out of everyone until Judd called to mind an incident in the pub in Lumphanan one Saturday night involving a barmaid and a yard of ale that set them all laughing.
GNER provided smoking accommodation in coach M, which Judd and Lloyd repaired to for periodic fags, while Tancred shared with Harry the responsibility for anecdotalizing. Gregson smiled stiffly at their embroidered recollections, as if uncertain whether he had truly participated in such antics or not. Carefree youth was for him more remote than the most distant of memories. Askew, nervous and distracted though he often seemed, contrived nonetheless to make one or two telling contributions to the badinage, recalling the rules of a word-game they had played to pass an idle hour or four in the hut more accurately than Tancred, its inventor.
Askew had also hunted down an obituary of Professor Mac in the Daily Telegraph from twenty years ago and had brought along copies to distribute. There was, as he pointed out, no mention in it of Operation Clean Sheet. Most agreed with Tancred’s assessment that academics were no keener than politicians on trumpeting their failures. A fuzzily reproduced photograph of ‘Professor Alexander Stuart McIntyre, died 24 October 1985, aged 87’ showed him much as he had been in the spring of 1955, bald and beaming in half-moon spectacles, one hand clasping a fat-bowled pipe, the other the lapel of a heavy tweed jacket.
By the time the train reached York, where Milton ‘Paradise’ Fripp joined them, the champagne was wreaking havoc with Harry’s thought processes. Fripp, lean, stooped, balding and taciturn, consequently made little impression, accepting Judd’s generosity and that of whoever was paying for the next bottle without demur. Alcohol rapidly loosened his tongue, however, though what he actually said Harry could not have even vaguely summarized more than a minute after he had said it.
This was soon true of everyone. Drinking sessions at the Macbeth Arms; kick-about football matches on the lawn behind the castle; half-hearted square-bashing on a patch of tarmac adjoining the hut at the bawling behest of Warrant Officer Trench; the idiosyncrasies of the teaching staff brought in by Professor Mac; the inadequacies of their reluctant students: all these and more floated in a
nd out of the conversation as the champagne flowed and the North of England slid past the window.
As the train neared Newcastle, the decision was taken to adjourn to the restaurant car for a lunch that had the potential to last until Aberdeen. Gregson, who had drunk virtually nothing, said he would stay where he was and eat the sandwiches he had brought, cueing much eye-rolling by Judd and a faintly patronizing smile from Tancred.
Gregson’s withdrawal had the advantage that the six remaining could occupy a table for four and an adjacent table for two at one end of the restaurant car, where a bibulous time ensued, although Harry found himself sharing the table for two with Askew and was consequently at one remove from the centre of quippery and merriment. At some point, however, Chipchase’s name cropped up and Harry was obliged to admit to a brief business association with him some years after they had left Kilveen. This aroused an unhealthy amount of curiosity, which he deflected as best he could, though not very effectively in Tancred’s case.
‘A garage, you say, Ossie?’
‘Yes. Barnchase Motors. In Swindon.’
‘Well, Fission always did have a way with a spanner and a greasy rag,’ put in Lloyd.
‘True,’ Tancred agreed. ‘But I’m not sure I’d have cared to have him as a business partner.’
‘That’s because of your distrustful nature, Tapper,’ Fripp observed drily.
‘Perhaps. But let’s ask Ossie to adjudicate on the point. Was Fission an entirely reliable man to work with?’
‘Well …’
‘I sense the answer’s no.’
Harry shrugged. ‘We all have our flaws.’
‘What became of Barnchase Motors?’
‘It folded up.’
‘And whose fault was that?’
Harry managed a smile. ‘I always put it down to decimalization myself.’
The joke raised a laugh and set Judd off on a cheery diatribe against all manner of modern reforms.
At some point in the ensuing discussion, Askew leaned across the table towards Harry and said, quietly but distinctly, ‘Are you sure Professor Mac’s obituary didn’t mention Clean Sheet because it was a failure?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Are you? Really?’
Tancred and Judd were by now locked in an argument about the European Union. Harry could clearly sense that none of their companions was aware of Askew’s question – or of Harry’s faltering attempts to answer it. ‘What do you … What are you getting at, Peter?’
‘Looking back on our time at Kilveen, what do you remember best?’
‘Well, the … kind of stuff we’ve been laughing about, I suppose. Booze-ups. Cock-ups. The usual.’
‘What about the lessons?’
‘Not much stuck, as I recall. I don’t think we were exactly model pupils.’
‘Because not much stuck?’
‘Well, it didn’t, did it?’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t intended to.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘I don’t know.’ Askew laughed. ‘Sorry. Let’s forget it.’
‘OK, but—’
‘Excuse me.’ Askew rose suddenly from his seat. ‘I’ll be right back.’
It was only as Askew slipped through the sliding door into the vestibule that Harry realized he was answering a mobile-phone call. He heard Askew say ‘Hello?’ as the door slid shut behind him, and noticed the phone held to his ear. It must, Harry supposed, have been set to vibrate rather than ring. He was mildly surprised Askew should sufficiently have kept pace with technology to possess such a thing, let alone master its greater intricacies. Harry himself was technically the owner of a mobile, but never switched it on other than to make a call and that rarely. When he did, he usually found the battery had run down. Today, he had left it in Swindon.
Tancred had commenced his own musings on Professor Mac’s achievements by the time Askew made a low-key return to the carriage. The minor puzzle of Askew’s questions about the purpose of Operation Clean Sheet was thus jettisoned from Harry’s mind.
‘We all qualified for Professor Mac’s residential tutorial by rebelling against RAF discipline in one way or another,’ Tancred reasoned. ‘It seems those of us here stopped rebelling at that point, however, so you could say the old boy achieved something, even if it wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. Of course—’
‘Some of the others might have taken to a life of crime without us hearing about it,’ said Fripp.
‘Or some of us might be hiding our rebellious light under a bushel,’ said Lloyd.
‘Danger’s researches have turned up nothing out of the ordinary,’ Tancred responded. ‘We all seem to be desperately respectable.’
‘Who are you calling respectable?’ growled Judd.
‘Three Foot might have been making a getaway from a burglary when he died in that motorbike crash,’ said Lloyd.
‘And someone could have been holding poor old Coker’s head under the water when he drowned, for all we know,’ said Harry. ‘I was sorry to hear he’d gone. After everything he told us he’d had to put up with in Germany.’ (Leroy Nixon had cracked under the strain of racist abuse at RAF Gütersloh and broken a warrant officer’s nose, thus earning his passage to Kilveen and the grudging respect of WO Trench. His was the first black face most of them had ever seen, back in the monocultural days of their youth, when a Jamaican in Aberdeenshire counted as a contradiction in terms.) ‘I’d like to have met him again and shaken him by the hand.’
‘You’re not serious, are you, Harry?’ asked Askew suddenly.
Harry frowned. ‘Certainly.’
‘I mean about how he drowned. You don’t think … he was murdered, do you?’
‘Murdered? No. Of course not. I just meant—’
‘Ossie was speaking metaphorically, Crooked,’ Tancred mellifluously intervened.
Askew looked around at his companions in evident bemusement. Then he shaped an uneasy smile. ‘Sorry. You’re right. Obviously. Not sure I’m used to drinking so much. I … think I’ll leave you to it. Maybe take a nap. Yes. A nap.’ He stood up. ‘That’s what I need.’
‘Are you OK, mate?’ Judd called as Askew headed along the aisle towards coach L.
‘I’ll be fine,’ Askew replied, with a wave of the hand. And on he went.
‘Think someone should go and see if he’s all right?’ Harry asked as the door at the end of the carriage slid shut behind him.
‘Gregger’ll look after him,’ said Lloyd. ‘Crooked probably needs one of his sandwiches to sober him up.’
There was general laughter at that. And an observation by Fripp that the next bottle would now stretch further prompted more laughter. It was not long, indeed, before the bottle was duly ordered.
‘You’re going to drink us dry, gents,’ the steward said with a wink as he pulled the cork. And it was instantly agreed that this was a challenge they could not let pass.
During the train’s ten-minute lay-up at Waverley station in Edinburgh, Harry stepped out onto the platform for a breath of air. He badly needed to clear his head, having drunk too much and sat too long. It was an imprudent start to the weekend and he foresaw some crippling hangovers among his companions, none of whom was young enough to be setting such a pace.
Askew was on the platform ahead of him, walking up and down, frowning pensively and breathing heavily, like a man psyching himself up for an important speech.
‘Did you ever get that nap, Peter?’ Harry called to him.
Askew started and looked round. ‘What? Oh, Harry. The nap? No. Not yet.’
‘You seem a little … on edge.’
‘Do I?’ Askew’s eyes widened. He grimaced. ‘Well, I suppose I am. To be honest, I’m having second thoughts about this whole reunion idea.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘Not sure. It’s just …’ Askew stepped closer and lowered his voice. ‘Meeting people you haven’t met in fifty years makes you realize how quickly those years have passed – and how little you have to
show for them.’
‘We’re all in the same boat, Peter.’
‘No, we’re not. Believe me, we’re not.’
‘OK.’ Harry smiled appeasingly. ‘Depends on your point of view, I suppose.’
‘It depends on how you remember things, actually. And how you forget them.’
‘I don’t …’
‘Understand? No. You wouldn’t.’ Askew shook his head. ‘Sorry. I’m not making any sense.’
Harry laughed. ‘Neither are that lot.’ He gestured with his thumb towards the restaurant car.
Askew rubbed his eyes. ‘I think maybe I will try and get my head down.’
‘Good idea. I reckon I’ll join you.’
They found Gregson dozing in his seat in coach L. Harry sat down next to him. As the train eased out of the station, he felt his eyelids grow heavy. Askew was sitting across from him on the other side of the aisle. Whether he was nodding off too Harry could not have said for certain. Fuzzy shafts of sunlight misted his vision. Askew became a silhouette, then a shadow. Harry closed his eyes.
He was never to see Peter Askew again.
Chapter Six
IT WAS DIFFICULT, looking back, to say exactly when Askew had gone missing. Harry slept as solidly as only a man who has drunk too much can until roused by the noisy return of Judd, Tancred, Lloyd and Fripp from the restaurant car. This was as the train was nearing Stonehaven, with half an hour to go till it reached Aberdeen. Two hours of oblivion had passed for Harry since its departure from Edinburgh. Gregson, who had slept less heavily, recalled registering the train’s arrival in Dundee and was more or less certain that Askew had still been there then. He also recalled registering Askew’s absence some time later, but was vague about when that would have been.
Harry and his companions did not actually take seriously the idea that Askew was missing until the train entered the outskirts of Aberdeen and the guard announced their imminent arrival at ‘our last and final station stop’. A hasty check of the nearest loos began, but Askew was in none of them. They did find his bag, however, left where he had stowed it on the rack, and duly took it along with theirs when they stumbled off the train into the grey chill of an Aberdeen afternoon.
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