A Presumption of Death (32 page)

‘I expect he was provoked. Let’s see what he says.’

Jeff Quarley presented himself at five o’clock that afternoon. He came alone, with a bleak and stony expression, and an air of defeat about him. Peter had negotiated the use of a little sitting-room at the back of the inn, where they could talk undisturbed. And Harriet recognised the young airman at once.

‘Good evening, Mr Newcastle,’ she said.

He gave her a despairing gaze. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It seemed a good idea at the time,’

‘What did?’ asked Peter. ‘Giving my wife a false name?’

‘That – yes. And other things.’

‘Such as killing someone like a pig?’ asked Peter.

Quarley returned a terrified expression to the question. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.

‘I think you do,’ said Peter quietly. ‘What did you do with your boots when you couldn’t get the blood off them? What did you tell your mother, that makes her so afraid?’

‘I’m getting out of here,’ said Quarley. ‘You can’t make me stay here.’

‘No, I can’t,’ said Peter. ‘But look, my wife and I are not the police. We are not the authorities in any shape or form. If we lay our suspicions about you before the authorities, then you are in for a nasty time. But for good and sufficient reasons we haven’t yet decided to do that. You don’t have to talk to us. But you might very shortly find you had to talk to somebody.’

‘Put a noose round my own neck, you mean?’

‘You have a right of self-defence,’ said Peter.

Quarley said, ‘Can I have a drink?’

Peter went to the bar to fetch a whisky.

‘You spoke to my mother and sister?’ Quarley asked Harriet.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘How in hell did you find us?’

‘Alan Brinklow’s will.’

He nodded. ‘I just can’t get him sorted out,’ he said. ‘I think he must have been mad, the way he behaved.’ Then he said, ‘He can’t have had much to leave, but of course Joan should have it.’

Peter, returning, waited for the barman to put down the tray of drinks and a bottle of malt, and withdraw before saying, ‘Did your sister know what you were going to do?’

‘No! Yes, in a way . . . Look, it’s all so complicated.’ Peter handed Quarley a glass. ‘I can’t very well say I don’t know anything about your beastly village. Never been there in my life.’

‘Not really,’ said Harriet. ‘I saw you there.’

‘It’s a funny thing, isn’t it,’ said Quarley bitterly, ‘if someone attacks you at five thousand feet, and you kill him you’re a hero; if he does it in a shed and you kill him, you’re done for.’

‘Begin at the beginning,’ said Peter gently. ‘Take your time.’

Quarley got up and paced about the room. He was having difficulty sitting still. He reminded Harriet of an athlete, running on the spot while waiting for a race. Then suddenly he came to a decision, and sat down again and faced them.

‘It was a nightmare,’ he said, ‘a bloody nightmare. Why did he go for me like that? Do you know why?’

‘Yes, I think I do,’ said Peter. ‘Look, I can guess, roughly, what went on. We haven’t read you your rights. Nothing you say to us now is evidence. But you left what they call a smoking gun behind you, and it has to be sorted out. It would be a great help if you would tell us the whole thing, from your point of view.’

‘Well, we were pretty upset when we heard that Alan was alive and living in Hertfordshire,’ Quarley said, ‘as you can imagine.’

‘How did you find out?’ asked Peter.

‘A fluke really; a pure fluke. Some time after we lost him I had to go down to Lopsley to discuss some photos I had taken, and a nice young woman there told me to cheer up. I was brooding a bit, I will admit. So I told her I had lost a friend and she said she thought he was alive and well in Paggleham. She has friends there. I didn’t believe her, but I asked about a bit, and found someone who had been at a dance there and thought he had heard the name. I don’t have to tell you what it looked like.’

‘You didn’t think of reporting him to the RAF police?’ asked Peter.

‘I didn’t know why he was hiding out,’ said Quarley. ‘He was a friend of mine. If he didn’t fancy getting back to combat duties right away, I wouldn’t have blamed him. I wouldn’t have wanted to shop him. I needed to talk to him.’

‘But you were pinned down on a tour of duty yourself.’

‘Yes. And there was an awful uproar at home. Joan wouldn’t hear of it. As far as she was concerned he was dead, or he would have come back to her, and that was that. Mother was afraid she had helped a rotter who was trying to wriggle out of promises. That thought did cross my mind too, along with the thought that he might have had a really nasty scare getting shot down and baling out, and he might just not like the thought of more flying. I needed to see him. So I kept writing to him, and I managed to get down there once or twice, with just an hour or two to spare – it’s a hell of a long way on a motor-bike, even a Harley-Davidson. I kept missing him. He was apparently in Cornwall on one occasion I got down there. He never answered my letters. I got pretty angry with him.’

He fell silent. He had knocked back his whisky, and Peter poured him another.

‘So what did you do then?’

‘I had a weekend leave coming up. So I wrote and told him I was coming to find him, and if he wouldn’t state a time and place to meet me I really would tell the group commander he was skiving. And I got this really odd reply.’

‘Have you still got it?’ asked Peter.

Quarley opened his wallet and took out a folded, typed sheet. He pushed it across the table to Peter, and Peter moved it to his right so that Harriet too could see it. It said:

Nine p.m. Last shed on right in stable yard between Bateson’s farm and the house known as Talboys.

‘I thought it was pretty silly stuff. Boy Scout stuff, but I hadn’t been able to find him on my other trips, so I went along with it. I borrowed a torch to go blundering around a farmyard in, and I kept the assignation.’

He fell silent, brooding.

‘And then?’ Peter asked.

‘He didn’t come. I sat around on a bale of hay, waiting for him. I switched the torch off after a bit, to save the batteries. The chap I borrowed it from said the batteries were down a bit. There was one of those stable door things where the top and bottom open separately. I left the top half open, to use the moonlight. And I was just about to give up and go home when he came – no, I mean when someone came.’

‘You thought it was Brinklow?’ said Peter quietly.

‘Of course I did. He leaned on the lower door, and he blocked the moonlight so I was sitting in pitch darkness, looking at his outline against the sky. I couldn’t see who the hell it was. I said, “Alan?” and he flung the door wide and hurtled in and went for me. I was taken off guard. I was expecting some sort of argument, not hand-to-hand combat. He got me by the hair, and forced my head back, and he was trying to hit me in the throat, and I was kicking and punching all I could. We were both breathing heavily, and blundering about. He forced me right back towards the wall. Then he stood back a bit, catching his breath, or getting his footing or something, and I said, “Joan’s pregnant, and what are you going to do about it?” I just blurted it out. And he said . . .’

Quarley’s voice began to shake. ‘He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who is Joan?” And then I really saw red. I went berserk. I drew my knife. He pushed me again, and I fell against something, some bit of wood or something, sticking into my back, and then there was a rumble and a crash, and he barged against me, and I went for him like a rugger tackle, going for him low down, and leaning round him to slash the back of his knees. I thought I’d ham-string him first, and argue later. No, that’s not true, I didn’t think at all. It was just black anger; I wasn’t thinking straight, except perhaps that I thought it was him or me. The enemy is supposed to collapse when you cut his ham-strings. According to survival training. But he didn’t. He was still there between me and the door, but he wasn’t fighting any more, and he hadn’t made a sound except a sort of gurgle. And I went cold. I stood there shaking, and I was saying, “Alan, Alan, are you all right?” Damn silly – how could he be all right? I switched the torch back on, and I could see he was hanging upside down in a noose, and I had cut his throat. There was a lot of blood, pouring down the side of his head, but I could see it wasn’t him. It wasn’t Alan at all.’

‘Nasty moment,’ observed Peter.

‘Who was it?’ Quarley asked him. ‘Do you know who it was? Do you know why he went for me like that?’

‘Yes, I think I do,’ said Peter. ‘What I don’t understand is why you did what you did next. I suppose you know that on your account so far you would not be at risk of a conviction for murder. It was self-defence. Did you realise that?’

‘I suppose I did. I just couldn’t understand it. I mean if Alan were really trying to get out of things, to lie low, I could just about understand that he might want to attack me; well, no, really I couldn’t get my head around that idea. But why would a perfect stranger do it? Who did he think I was? I was in a hell of a hole.’

‘You were. But a jury might think that an honest man in your situation would have called the police and handed himself over. From where we are now, Quarley, it’s what you did next that is the source of the trouble.’

‘The batteries ran out,’ said Quarley. ‘I couldn’t see a blind thing. I was shaking like a leaf, and I only wanted to run away. I would have done just that if nobody in the village had seen me that evening, but I had a drink in the pub before going to the meeting with Alan. People knew I had been in Paggleham. I had to cover my tracks. So I went and hid out in that wood till first light. Then I walked around a bit. I was in a nightmare, I thought I must have got it all wrong; I must have been dreaming. But when I went back to the shed, of course I found it was true.’

‘There’s a phone box in the High Street from which you could have called the police,’ said Harriet.

‘You’re not going to believe me,’ Quarley said sadly. ‘Why should you believe me? But I wasn’t thinking of saving my neck. I was thinking of saving the job. I knew you, or someone would catch up with me eventually. But I just couldn’t bear to let people down.’

‘So what did you do?’ asked Peter. His voice was very gentle, unthreatening. But his face was guarded. Harriet found herself looking at the scene as if from outside it; three of them, she the witness whose report would clinch the matter, Peter, cat-like, poised to pounce, Quarley the hapless mouse, hypnotised into offering himself to be devoured . . . she shook the thought off.

‘I cut him down,’ said Quarley, shuddering. ‘I slung him over my shoulder, and carted him a little way down the street, and tipped him into a hole in someone’s garden. I spotted it when I was walking around a bit earlier. There it was with a nice pile of earth beside it, all ready to cover him over.’

‘Anyone might have seen you carrying the body,’ said Peter. ‘Did you think of that?’

‘Anyone might have,’ Quarley said. ‘If God were on the side of the enemy, someone would have. That would have stopped me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘But the Nazis don’t believe in God, do they? And he didn’t help them that morning. Nobody saw me. I shoved enough earth over him to keep him covered for a day or two, and hopped it.’

‘You say, for a day or two? You expected discovery?’

‘You see,’ said Quarley, ‘I had a job to do. You might be right that I wouldn’t hang – that it would be self-defence and all that. But there would certainly have been hell to pay. I would have been grounded.’

‘Indeed you would,’ said Peter.

‘I had a mission to fly. I only got the leave that let me go down there because the mission was coming up. We had been training for months; and we only had three of us left to do it. The absolute minimum. We lost Alan early on, and poor Bob Fletchling a couple of weeks ago. He flew into a hillside in a spot of mist. So there were – there are, only three of us left. And it takes three. Believe me.’

‘We believe you,’ said Peter. ‘Go on.’

‘So I didn’t give a damn for what a law-abiding person would have done. I didn’t give a damn for the bastard I had done for; after all, he set about me. I didn’t start it. I only cared for getting the hell out of there, and getting back on base, and doing my duty by my mates. Flying the mission, as planned. So that’s what I did. I just pitched him in a hole, and got on my bike and got the hell out of there.’

‘And how was the mission?’ Peter asked.

‘We made it. We all made it back, what’s more.’

‘Good. Congratulations. So then you were thinking of facing the music over what you had done?’

‘I’ve torn it now,’ Quarley said. ‘Made things worse than ever, haven’t I? What I didn’t know was that the mission was just a warm-up for something else. Something even trickier. So that they were going to say to us: Well done, boys, now you’re going to do that every day for months. So it’s still just as urgent. Maybe more so. We’ve lost another good pilot since then, and we’re flying with a new boy. He’s pretty brilliant, but he’s a bit too hot for safety. He’s Polish. He doesn’t fly technical, if you see what I mean, he flies with murder in his heart. He hates them so much he might risk a mission to down one of theirs. In the heat of the moment. Someone in the formation needs a cool head, and a bit of experience.’

‘So what you’re telling us is, you do mean to own up, but the moment hasn’t come?’

‘I suppose it has come,’ said Quarley. ‘I suppose you’re it.’

‘Time to go and talk to your commander,’ said Wimsey. He was at the door, when he turned suddenly and said to Quarley, ‘I say, old man, would you mind lending me that sheath knife of yours?’

Quarley drew it out of his belt, and handed it over. Peter took a handkerchief from his pocket, shook it out and picked up the knife through it. Harriet saw Quarley blanch. She followed Peter out of the room.