by Nicola Slade
Henry glanced at me but all he said was, ‘It sounds wonderful. I hope… I hope it comes true.’ He checked his watch. ‘Time for my nap,’ he made a face. ‘For once I’m quite looking forward to it. Cousin Edgar is sending his car for me later, to spend the evening with him and Cousin Bertha, so I need to be fresh for them.’
He hesitated. ‘Thank you, Christabel,’ he said and he bent his head and kissed my hand lightly, before turning hastily away towards the Hall.
I watched him until he was out of sight behind the churchyard trees and wondered if this meant I was now completely grown-up. I felt out of my depth but one thing I did know: that Henry liked me and would be staying in Ramalley. That would be enough for now.
I shook myself and wondered whether to investigate the Fishing Lodge. Not a good idea. Papa might be skulking there and I was still furious with him. I decided to go home and apply myself to my Zeppelin story, casting aside all thoughts of errant fathers, possible murderers – and a good-looking young man, my friend, who had kissed my hand.
Rather than take the path across the park I made my way downhill. There’s a kind of wilderness there with a way through the bushes, like an overgrown tunnel. I slipped inside, feeling safer because I had no wish to meet anyone who might notice that I was in what Granny describes as a “bit of a state”.
As I crept along I heard someone scrambling through the shrubby undergrowth towards my tunnel. Whoever it was sounded out of breath and panting as he – or she – shouldered aside the young hawthorn and hazel branches. There was a ripping sound, followed by an oath and I looked out to see Captain Halliday, strangely transformed, where the bushes opened up again. He was just six feet away from me.
No longer melancholy or mute, he was not using his crutches and was crossly examining his uniform jacket. I could see that the pocket was hanging loose, almost torn off.
‘Damn and blast,’ he grunted. ‘What a bloody nuisance.’
I must have gasped aloud for his head jerked up and he stared at me in horror.
Chapter Fourteen
Our eyes met and Capt Halliday drew a deep breath. The darkened glasses had vanished and I saw him take in just what I’d seen, what I’d heard and, still with his eyes on me, he bent and fumbled in a bag at his side and drew out a Webley service revolver. Where had that come from? Patients weren’t armed. I felt suddenly weak and terrified; what a fool I’d been – nobody knew where I was. Alix was busily cutting sandwiches for the patients’ tea, while Henry was probably back in the ward, dozing in anticipation of dinner with his elderly cousins.
The rest of my family would be busy too. Granny was knitting a jumper for Addy, with a complicated cable stitch, so we knew better than to get in her way. Not only were we all keeping away from Granny, it was even more important to make sure we were out of Mother’s clutches, particularly me. If she caught me I’d be trapped while she had me typewriting in a frantic effort to keep up as she composed and dictated pages, then altered and discarded them, demanding I retype them.
She was still engaged in her ongoing tussle with Lady Esmerelda who, at the eleventh hour, had developed a sudden, unaccountable desire to play croquet with an unsuitable young stranger rather than spend a couple of hours in church listening to a sermon. Things were not going well because the sermoniser in question was Mother’s second choice of suitor since the young lady had so exasperatingly jilted the duke.
I hoped and prayed that Addy was by now happily working at Judith Evershed’s bedside where the two of them spent hours engaged in happy discussion of all kinds of topics whenever the invalid felt up to it. The last one I had eavesdropped on was about the French Revolution. Addy, naturally, is an ardent sans culotte.
No, there would be nobody to come to my rescue – if rescue I needed. The officer pointed his pistol straight at me.
‘But why?’ I cursed myself for the inanity of the question but he answered anyway.
‘Why did I pretend to be mute?’
I nodded – mutely – which was much easier than speaking.
‘I was a motor cycle despatch rider,’ he said with a shrug, gesturing to me to walk beside him. We headed downhill towards the hedge that bordered the length of the drive. His voice was educated, which surprised me. It had briefly occurred to me that if not, after all, a German spy, he might have had another reason for not speaking, though I had not mentioned it to either Alix or Henry, since they had been dismissive of the German theory. Suppose, for instance, that his voice might have revealed him to be a working man seeking a possible escape route by impersonating an officer? I suppressed the thought that I might have admired such enterprise but now was not the time for idle speculation.
‘You’ve talked to the chaps here, heard a little of what it’s like over there. Well,’ his eyes were bleak as he stared first at the sky and then at me. ‘It’s worse than hell. Nothing can describe it and I’d been in it since the beginning. I was on my way to HQ when I got caught in some unpleasantness.’ He smiled mirthlessly. ‘The upshot was that I ended up in a shell-hole with a dead sergeant whose almost-dead officer was lying next to him.
‘I was in bloody awful pain myself with half a foot gone but I strapped myself up somehow and held his hand while he died. It was then that I realised I had a chance to get out of it all. I’d been trying to work up enough nerve to shoot myself in the foot – for a Blighty, you know. And here I was with a genuine wound, ironically in my foot, that would do the trick. What to do?’
He broke off and gestured to the grass. ‘You’d better sit down, you look pale enough to drop.’
‘Thank you,’ I whispered and lowered myself like an old woman on to a moss-covered log. As I obeyed, he surveyed me irritably.
‘What the… oh well, something will occur to me,’ he frowned. ‘I suppose you wonder who I am?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but carried on talking almost reflectively, as though to himself. ‘I’m not Captain John Halliday, that’s for sure. I laid the poor devil down when he died and it dawned on me that he was my passport out of Hell. Not only a Blighty but a new identity, an officer this time. Why not? I’d joined up early on, full of grief and anger, refusing all suggestions that I, a gentleman, should go for officer training. Why should I? Being an officer and a gentleman hadn’t protected my friend Alan so why should I join the very people who offered him a choice between disgrace and suicide.’
I must have looked as confused as I felt because he shook his head.
‘You don’t know, of course,’ he said. ‘You heard old Donkey Larking braying about a house party where a senior subaltern was found in flagrante with a major, didn’t you? I saw you listening from behind a pillar at that bloody At Home the other day.’
He broke off and sketched a bow. ‘I beg your pardon. I’ve lost the art of talking to young ladies. Let’s say instead that the At Home was frightful.’
I nodded, watching the gun that he held, still aimed at me, and he continued. ‘He was my friend, the young subaltern they forced to run into the guns. We were stuck in quarantine for three weeks in the school San during a whooping cough outbreak when we were kids, and it made us firm friends. After school I went to Cambridge and he went to Sandhurst but we met up as often as we could, mostly in London where nobody knew us…’
He closed his eyes briefly. ‘You haven’t the slightest idea what I’m talking about, have you? Of course you haven’t. As I said before, you’re a nice young lady whose innocence must be preserved at all costs.’
His face twisted as he said that and I clamped my lips shut rather than confess that, on the contrary, I had a very good idea what he meant. Bertie and I used to spend hours discussing the vagaries of life at his boarding school and the personalities and customs there.
He glanced at his watch and then at the sky. ‘My wounds have healed as well as I can expect and I’ve had enough of this place. I’ll make a run for it in a minute. It’s only a matter of time before someone arrives expecting to find Halliday and the cat will be out
of the bag with a vengeance.’
I peered hopefully round, praying that someone, anyone, would be out for a walk in the park. In vain.
‘Might rain later, but I’ll be long gone.’ He was very pale and he suddenly grimaced and manoeuvred himself awkwardly to sit on the other end of the fallen log, less than a yard away from me. He eased his wounded foot into a comfortable position.
‘That’s better,’ he said and he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one, lighting one for himself when I declined.
‘Where was I? Oh yes, when I heard what had happened to Alan, I chucked Cambridge and the academic career I had embarked on and went to the Recruiting Office. My only plan was to get over there and be killed.’ His laugh rang out harshly. ‘I should have gone in for officer training. You know what they say? A subaltern has a survival expectancy of six weeks. They deny it, of course, probably have you shot if you came out with that, but it’s true enough. Six weeks would have suited me but here I am, more than three years later and never a scratch till I got my Blighty.’
He blew a perfect smoke ring and I thought, with a shiver, of Addy who was desperate to learn the trick but too fastidious, too young, and too short of funds to take up smoking. A memory stirred.
‘So there I was,’ he said quietly. ‘I tidied up the strapping on my foot and ransacked poor Halliday’s pockets. He had a clean handkerchief so I added that to my bandages and wondered what the hell to do about it. Could it work? Could I simply take the poor dead chap’s clothes and papers, and become him? What of his friends and family? My deception would be uncovered the moment I encountered anyone who knew him. But then…’
His face twitched and he took a long drag on his cigarette. ‘It was staring me in the face. If I were mute, shell-shocked, it didn’t matter whether I matched the name or not. Everyone knows confusion and chaos reign over there, and who would interrogate a poor, dumb bug… fellow, who had no idea who he was?’
He looked irritably at me and I saw beads of sweat on his forehead. He wasn’t as calm as I had believed so I sat in silence.
‘I found his papers and that’s how I became Captain John Halliday, stripping him right down to his underclothes.’ He shrugged. ‘It was a head wound that killed him, poor devil, but it happened that his uniform wasn’t too badly damaged. God knows how, but it was a stroke of luck.
‘It all took time, you understand, because the bombardment was still going on and it was raining stair rods. The hardest part was getting him into my own uniform and stretching him out beside the wreck of my motorcycle. I was weak as a baby and the lifting and dragging almost killed me. For a moment I thought the best thing I could do was shoot myself right there and finish the job, but it’s curious how tenaciously you hold on to life. How precious it becomes when you’re about to lose it.
‘Choosing to be mute saved me. I stared at them in bewilderment when they poked and prodded or asked me questions, and when they addressed me as Captain Halliday or tried the chummy approach and called me John. In the end they had to assume I was the man my papers said I was, but they did acknowledge that some kind of mix-up could easily have happened. The trek from the shell-hole to the Casualty Clearing Hospital was hell on earth, easy for mistakes to occur. These things happen. Meanwhile I stayed silent and it worked until the first day I was here. That was when Matron woke up that poor wreck of a human being.
‘What are the odds?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘To come all that way: months in transit, in hospital and now convalescent, only to meet someone who knew Halliday’s name and, moreover, called him a wrong’un.’
He fidgeted and shifted along the log, closer to me and I was suddenly, sharply reminded of Papa for some reason, before I caught the scent of his tobacco not just from the cigarette in his hands but on his clothes too. It caught at the back of my throat and set me off in a coughing fit and suddenly there was my missing memory – and with it the days and hours I’d spent working things out. When I could catch my breath, I wiped my streaming eyes and whispered,
‘You killed him! Lt Trevelyan, you killed him, I know you did!’
Captain Halliday, or whatever his name was, jerked up his head to stare uneasily at me, shifting his position though the pistol was no longer aimed at me. I held my breath. I’d been right when I suspected his initial calm to have dissipated. His mood was definitely more volatile and I was afraid of sending him over the edge of reason and now, of all stupid things, I’d accused him of murder.
‘Well! How on earth do you make that out?’ His tone was conversational, but I was taut with fear.
‘Your cigarette smoke,’ I faltered. ‘And the bay rum hair oil you use. That night – my sister and I made cocoa in the kitchen just before we went off duty. I went back into the ward and did a last check on everyone. I had to squeeze past Captain Makepeace’s bed to reach Lt Trevelyan’s which was in the round bay. I’d just taken a quick look at Major Peebles who was snoring his head off in there, when something caught at the back of my throat and I started to cough for no obvious reason. I recognised the smell when you blew a smoke ring just now. It was cigarette smoke, and none of those other three patients was a smoker. There was something else – I suddenly thought of my father and couldn’t think why, but now I know. It was your bay rum hair oil. Papa always used it and I smelled it then. I smelled it again just now.’
I had to clench my hands together to stop them trembling. Would he shoot me where I sat? If I made a run for it, would he shoot me in the back? Or would he strangle me to avoid attracting attention by a gunshot?
He did none of those things, just nodded.
‘The only people near enough to Lt Trevelyan’s bed to kill him were Major Peebles who snored all night – and Major Larking, Henry Makepeace, and you. And Matron,’ I added. ‘She had time to hurry in from the conservatory and escape afterwards.’
He cocked his head, apparently interested. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’m quite impressed. Why shouldn’t Matron have done the deed?’
‘Because she either smells of disinfectant or that awful California Poppy scent, and Major Larking smells of lavender hair oil. And they both – and you – smell of cigarettes and that’s what I remember. I started coughing when I reached that corner and had to hurry away in case I disturbed the patients. Some smells make me cough and sneeze,’ I explained. ‘It’s often dust or hay or – cigarette smoke. But there was the smell of bay rum too.’
‘You’re too clever for your own good,’ he said, looking tired. ‘What am I supposed to do with you now?’
‘L-let me go home,’ I said in as unthreatening a voice as I could muster, though I couldn’t stop it shaking. ‘M-my family know I set out for a walk in the park and they’ll expect me home soon. Someone will certainly come looking for me at any moment, but you can get away now if you hurry. The station isn’t far and the train to Southampton…’ I looked at the watch pinned to my blouse. ‘Yes, it’s due in fifteen minutes, you can get to the station if you hurry. You’ll be safer in a big place, Ramalley is too small; everyone knows everyone else and you’d be better off in London. You can catch a train from Southampton, it’s on the main line.’
I paused, to give him time to consider my suggestion then pushed on, crossing my fingers as I tried to sound sympathetic.
‘I think I understand why you felt you had to act as you did about Lt Trevelyan,’ I faltered, and I did, I truly did, but he must also have attacked Miss Evershed, which was what I couldn’t understand or forgive. This was not the moment, however, to be judgemental. Although he was fidgeting and fretful now, he was at least listening to me.
‘How did you kill him? Did you think only of silencing him? Or was there part of you that felt it was an act of mercy? He had nothing to live for, after all.’
‘You know, you’re a nice kid,’ he surprised me. ‘Inconvenient, but decent. There was a little of that, I admit, poor devil, but I couldn’t risk him drawing attention to me every day. As to how…’ He drew on his cigarette. ‘There
was a chap in my unit in France, been in prison, up to all kinds of games. One day he told a bunch of us how he’d killed his drunken stepfather by putting pressure on the throat, blocking the carotid artery. It was quick, he said, worth a try if we ever wanted to rid ourselves of a nuisance.’ He avoided my eyes and said, ‘Trevelyan was so frail that it was all over more quickly than I’d imagined. He was unconscious in seconds and dead within a minute or two.’
‘Surely Judith – Miss Evershed – hadn’t done you any harm?’ I asked, hoping I wasn’t tempting fate.
‘No.’ He looked away rather than meet my gaze. ‘I felt bad about that but she kept on and on talking at me and then old Donkey Larking told the tale about Alan.’
He brushed a hand across his eyes and looked bleakly at his gun. ‘She knew him, you see. There had been garden parties, concerts, that kind of thing when she was staying at her uncle’s. I even met her once, at an evening reception at Alan’s home where I had an open invitation. Old school chum, don’t y’know?’
The cynicism in his voice contrasted sharply with the pain etched on his face but he carried on.
‘That was bad enough, she could have linked the two of us that way, but worse than that, she was teaching in Cambridge. I’d had no idea but she recognised Alan in the station
tea room. She had an hour to wait for her train to see her parents in Oxford and suggested we share a table. It would have been churlish to refuse and Alan had forty minutes before his own train.
‘She was pleasant enough company and Alan was fond of her but I was irritated. We had so few chances to be together and here was this schoolmarm taking up our time.’
‘She didn’t recognise you, did she?’ I was surprised. Was this why he had attacked her? ‘At the Hall, I mean. She certainly didn’t mention you after the At Home.’
‘I’d grown a mighty beard when I embarked on my doctorate,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘I thought I looked magnificent, a regular professor, and I doubt my own mother would have recognised me in those days. But now? Yes, I suppose I was afraid she might notice a gesture, something in the way I moved, perhaps. That wasn’t why I hated her though.’