A Presumption of Death (33 page)

‘Harriet, I need to go and get a sort of drumhead court martial organised,’ he said. ‘Would you stay with Quarley here, and not let him out of your sight?’

‘If you want me to, of course.’

‘This might take a little while.’

‘Okay, Peter.’

‘I’d like to know what you think.’

She could feel the misery seeping out of him, darkening the gloomy passageway in which they were standing, that feared and now familiar moment when Peter had cornered someone, and his appetite for justice suddenly waned and left him sickened. She had seen him through it before, and expected to see him through it again. But what was he asking her now?

‘I’m sorry for him,’ she said decisively. ‘Are you going to tell him it was a German spy?’

‘But it wasn’t,’ he said. ‘As far as he knew when he struck the blow, it was a fellow officer who had been messing with his sister. And there is a chink in his story, Harriet. That knife. Why was he carrying a knife, if he didn’t mean murder or mayhem?’

‘So you don’t feel it would be right to tell him he killed one of the enemy and let him go?’ she asked.

‘Well, would it?’ he asked her.

An image of false-Brinklow, limping along the street, talking to Mrs Maggs, radiating charm at the village dance came to her clearly. Whoever he was. ‘No, I don’t think it would,’ she said. ‘But, Peter, it took a bit of inhumanity from high places to bring this about. It took somebody deciding that they didn’t need actually to tell a dead man’s friends and family that he was definitely dead. It was “missing presumed dead”, that did the damage. That caused the misunderstanding. Don’t you see?’

‘Not entirely,’ he said. ‘I would say that it was Quarley’s knife that did the damage. But look, my dear, it won’t be up to us. Too much depends on it. Possibly many lives. I’m sorry to ask this of you, but just stay with him. Make sure he doesn’t scarper or string himself up.’

Harriet nodded.

‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he said. ‘But it’s a long way from London here. There might be trains; someone might be able to get a plane, but it might take all night.’

Only a minute after he had gone did she realise, with a lurching heart, how fast he might be going to drive.

The publican made up the fire before going to bed. He brought a mug of cocoa for each of them, and produced a couple of blankets. Quarley played patience for a while. Harriet read some ineffably corny ghost stories from the scant run of books on a shelf. It was an ordeal, no question, sitting with the man. He was in mental agony, and they didn’t seem to have anything safe to talk about. Now and then he threw down the cards, got up, paced round the room like one of the big cats in the zoo.

Somewhere round midnight Harriet could bear the overpowering unease in the room no longer. ‘Why did you take a knife?’ she asked him. ‘Do pilots always carry a knife? Is it official issue?’

‘It’s not official,’ he said, turning to her eagerly. ‘But we mostly carry them. It can be difficult to get free of a parachute, sometimes. If you’re on the ground you can just unbuckle, but if you’re caught up in something – if the thing is under tension, you’re hanging in a tree or something like that, then it’s handy to be able to cut free. Worst of all is if you’re down in the water. The parachutes can fill up and drag you under in seconds. So most of us do carry knives. I didn’t take it with me specially, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not at all.’

‘It might be worth while to make sure that they know that. It’s just a detail, but . . .’

‘I can see that it makes a difference. If I had taken a knife deliberately it would look bad, wouldn’t it? Premeditated? I wasn’t premeditating, Lady Peter, truly I wasn’t.’

‘I believe you,’ said Harriet.

‘Look, do you mind if I try to get some sleep? Tomorrow looks pretty bloody, however things work out.’

‘Go ahead. I’ll try to catnap too. You aren’t really going to run off, are you?’

‘Not a bit of it,’ he said, suddenly smiling at her, and he curled up on the lumpier sofa, punched a cushion to shape up under his head, and fell instantly asleep.

Harriet settled on the opposite sofa, covered her knees with the inn-keeper’s blanket and studied the man lying stretched out opposite. She was amazed at his capacity to sleep in such a situation, but he was undoubtedly asleep very deeply. The fire burned down to a glowing pile of ashes, and Harriet got up to put another log on it, and stumbled. She knocked a stool over, but he did not stir. She wondered exactly how old he was – he could easily be younger than Jerry – but his seamless face looked neither young nor old, as though the stresses of his waking life had somehow blurred the fresh and expressionless visage of a very young man, and ripened him, even in sleep. Or perhaps especially in sleep, for she didn’t remember thinking him older than his age when he was awake. She had a strong protective feeling about him; someone so young should not have had to cope with all this, should not have to risk his life and that of his companions, should not have killed anyone, should not be on the run; what peace meant, she thought, was that people were free to grow slowly into themselves, like well-lit plants, without this hothouse of distortion and pressure. Then she remembered the pig-shed, and shuddered. What was happening to her judgement? Shouldn’t she feel nothing but horror and revulsion at this fellow? And there was a conundrum here: who had he killed? Was Peter right to say he had killed his friend? Or had he killed an enemy? She needed to talk it over with Peter, and he had gone about his business, and she was more than half asleep.

She woke suddenly in a chilly room. The faintest early light was angled through the half-drawn curtains. The fire was cold. Quarley was sitting up opposite her with his head in his hands.

‘I’ve realised something awful. Really awful,’ he said to her. ‘Can I tell you – you can’t think any worse of me than you do now, can you?’

‘You can tell me things if you think it will help,’ said Harriet.

‘I hope they charge me,’ he said softly. ‘I hope they bang me up out of harm’s way, and try me for murder, and take a long time about it. I’m not anything like as scared of that as I am of flying. I’m thinking, well maybe they’ll hang me, but at least I won’t have to do that again. At least I won’t be burned alive.’

‘I don’t see anything awful in being afraid when you have to do hideously dangerous things,’ said Harriet. ‘Anyone would be.’

‘You can’t admit it, though,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to be a bloody hero. If anyone cracks it demoralises everyone else. You just keep pretending. You sit around on the ground making tea, and playing cards, and pretending that you hate it, and you just can’t wait to be up there in the blue, ducking and weaving while the enemy does his damnedest to down you, and your ground-crew think you’re the cat’s whiskers, and everyone all round you is showing no fear. All the time it seems that some of them are crazy, plumb crazy. Wild boys, filing the rivets down on their wings to get a little extra speed, playing it like a fantastic game, thinking they’re immortal. If they are just pretending too, you’d never know it. But the awful thing is, if I get arrested and locked up the mission plan will be shot to blazes, but I will be relieved, in a way. I am ashamed of myself, but there it is.’

‘You don’t have to be ashamed of it,’ said Harriet.

‘Of being a coward?’

‘I don’t think courage can have anything to do with what one feels inside,’ Harriet said. ‘I think it has to do with what one does. You haven’t funked a mission yet, or “cracked” in front of others, have you?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘As a matter of fact,’ Harriet told him, ‘I think you might find being locked up awaiting execution asked for a lot of courage; as bad as a flying mission without the excitement.’

‘You’re probably right,’ he said, smiling sheepishly at her.

Heavens! Harriet thought. He hasn’t heard of me. Not a word. And, of course, when I stood trial he would have been only a schoolboy . . .

‘I won’t have a choice, will I?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think you will,’ she said.

A dirty grey line had appeared between the curtains of the room. It cast a pencil of ineffectual grey light at an angle across the floor. Then both these apparitions glowed pink. Daylight; dawn. Harriet got up and drew the curtains. Outside it was already quite light, and there was some activity. A farm-worker was walking down the street with a billhook in his hand, and the postman was mounting a bicycle at the other end of the street. Quarley came to stand beside her. His voice had completely changed as he said, ‘Thank you for listening to me. You’re a real brick. Sorry for inflicting all that tommy-rot on you.’

‘That’s quite all right,’ she said. ‘It was nothing.’

‘You won’t hold it against me? It is a bit off, really. You know, the squadron has the Pole I told you about, and two Czech pilots, and two Canadians who couldn’t wait for the official organisation to get them here, and even a Yank. All these people volunteering, and I . . .’

‘I’ve forgotten already,’ she said, spectacularly untruthfully. But what does one say to someone who has opened his heart to you, and wishes to close the door again?

Then there was a sound of cars. Three cars drawing up to the building, men in dark overcoats getting out. Peter, Bungo, Sir Impey Biggs, an RAF officer of high degree, Superintendent Kirk, Wing-Commander Thompson: Peter’s drumhead court martial, come to try their man. Harriet gazed at them with a spasm of hostility that almost, though not quite, included Peter.

William Wordsworth,
The River Duddon
, 1820

Quarley had to go through it all again. Each detail, each movement, each gesture and blow. Sitting at the back of the room, Harriet listened acutely, attentively for any variation in the tale, any slip that would catch him out; complete consistency is difficult for liars. But he didn’t vary his tale by one iota. He forgot to mention the knife; Peter got it out of him with a deftly placed question. He was white-faced, tensed, looking constantly across the table at his Wing-Commander, who sat head down, fiddling with a pen against a note-pad, looking, Harriet thought, black as thunder.

When Quarley had finished, the Wing-Commander said abruptly, ‘So where does this leave us?’

Superintendent Kirk said, ‘If this was peace-time I would arrest and charge this man, and the law would take its course. That’s what I’d prefer to do now, war or no war.’

Sir Impey Biggs said, ‘You wouldn’t get murder, Kirk, you know. And I think if you go for manslaughter you still might not get it. If I were defending I’d have a good go at justified homicide. Self-defence. It’s nearly watertight. And if the jury knew who the deceased was, you’d never get a conviction.’

‘They wouldn’t know,’ said Bungo. ‘We’d make sure of that.’

Quarley said, ‘How could I get someone like him defending me? I haven’t a penny to my name.’

Peter said, ‘If it comes to that, I’ll retain Impey.’

‘Why?’ said Quarley. ‘Why should you help me? Look, who the hell was he? He was somebody special, wasn’t he?’

‘I think in human decency, we have got to tell him,’ said Peter quietly.

‘He was an enemy agent,’ said Bungo.

‘But . . .’

‘Pretending to be Brinklow,’ Peter said. ‘You would have known at once. Had you caught sight of him in daylight the game would have been up for him. He had to try to kill you.’

Quarley sat silent for long seconds. ‘So when he said he hadn’t heard of Joan, he really hadn’t,’ he said at last. ‘That’s what got me so blindingly angry. And it was true.’

‘Yes, it was,’ said Peter.

‘So is that it? Can I just go now? I killed a spy, and I’m a sort of hero?’

‘You’re a damn nuisance,’ said Bungo. ‘We would have caught up with him in a bit, and found out what he was up to. And if he was acting alone. What he was doing for the enemy. Vital intelligence. Then you come along.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Look, in all the circumstances,’ said Thompson, standing up, ‘can I have my man back? He’s supposed to be airborne in half an hour, and I haven’t a substitute who’s up to the job.’

‘If it was up to me, I’d charge him,’ said Kirk. ‘But it isn’t up to me, I suppose.’

‘Look, Commander, Superintendent Kirk has security clearance,’ said Peter. ‘Couldn’t you tell him enough about these missions to convince him that he ought to hold his hand?’

‘We need to know where the key German warships are,’ said Commander Thompson. ‘We need to know if they move out of port. They can hide them in the fjords now they have Norway in their clutches, and it’s very hard to fly over a deep fjord between high mountains. The fall of Norway is a disaster. Those ports give them mastery of the northern Atlantic. I know all eyes are on the south, and that’s where the battle to get air-cover for an invasion will be. But without supplies from across the Atlantic we’re going to be starved out. We must try to protect our shipping, and we must try to sink theirs. The bastards are attacking unarmed trawlers now, as well as neutral shipping. We’re flying Hudsons,’ he added. ‘They aren’t as fast as Spitfires, or as manoeuvrable.’

‘If it’s so important, why don’t they give you Spitfires?’ asked Kirk.

‘Spits haven’t got the range. Two hours cruising, or forty-five minutes at combat speeds at most. We’ve got a lot more in a Hudson. Hamburg and back. Quarley got to Hamburg and back last month.’

‘Convinced?’ asked Peter.

‘All right, all right,’ said Kirk. He was glaring wrathfully at Bungo. ‘But I have got a body, and you tell me I shan’t have either a conviction or an acquittal.’