Hardcastle's Soldiers (10 page)

‘Who have we got in the office?'

‘There's only Catto at the moment, sir.' As was his duty Marriott knew the whereabouts of all the detectives at Cannon Row Police Station, and what they were doing at any given time.

‘I suppose he'll have to do.' Hardcastle replaced his teacup carefully in the saucer. ‘Catto!' he yelled.

Detective Constable Henry Catto hovered uncertainly in the doorway of the DDI's office. ‘Yes, sir?'

‘Well, don't stand there like a dying duck in a thunderstorm, Catto. Come in.'

‘No, sir. Er, yes, sir.' Catto moved closer to Hardcastle's desk.

‘D'you remember that army officer who reckoned he saw our murderer running away?'

‘Yes, sir. Lieutenant Geoffrey Mansfield of the North Staffordshire Regiment.'

Hardcastle raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘You're coming on a treat, Catto,' he said. ‘Get up to St John's Wood Barracks in Ordnance Road—'

‘Where's that, sir?' asked Catto, interrupting.

‘In St John's Wood, Catto,' snapped Hardcastle. ‘Where the hell did you think it was? Timbuktu? Just listen, will you?'

‘Yes, sir.' Catto was usually a confident and competent detective, but always became uncertain of himself in the DDI's presence, almost to the point of becoming a quivering mass of indecision.

‘Lieutenant Mansfield gave his address as the officers' mess there. Get up there a bit
jildi
, and ask him if he can give a better description than the useless information he gave us at the time. And don't take all day about it.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Catto, and fled to do Hardcastle's bidding.

‘I don't know, Marriott,' said Hardcastle. ‘You'll have to do something about Catto. He never seems to know what he's about.'

‘I'll have a word, sir,' said Marriott, who had no intention of so doing. He knew Catto's worth, and knew that it was only the DDI who had such a debilitating effect on him.

An hour and a quarter later, Catto reappeared in Hardcastle's office.

‘Well?' barked the DDI.

‘He's not there, sir.'

‘Who's not where? I've told you before about sloppy reporting, Catto. I won't have it. There are God knows how many names I'm dealing with in this damned enquiry.'

‘Lieutenant Mansfield's not at St John's Wood Barracks, sir,' replied Catto nervously.

‘What d'you mean, he's not there?'

‘I had a word with the guard commander, and he said that he'd never heard of him. He said they were all Royal Horse Artillery there, and there was no reason why there should've been an infantry officer staying there.'

‘Is that it?'

‘Yes, sir.' Catto waited for the inevitable rebuke.

‘Did you enquire at the officers' mess?'

‘No, sir. I thought that what the guard commander said would be right.'

‘When I send you to make an enquiry in a murder investigation, Catto, I don't expect you to take the word of a bloody sergeant. And I suppose the guard commander
was
a sergeant, was he?'

‘No, sir. He only had two stripes. A corporal would that be, sir?'

‘They're called bombardiers in the artillery,' said Marriott quietly.

Hardcastle sighed. ‘It's true what they say, Marriott,' he said, ignoring his sergeant's latest exposition of military knowledge. ‘If you want a job done properly, do it yourself. Come, Marriott, we'll have to go there ourselves.'

Hardcastle was in a foul mood by the time he and Marriott arrived at St John's Wood Barracks.

The guard commander stood up from behind his desk as the DDI crashed open the door.

‘Sir?'

‘I want to see whoever's in charge of the officers' mess, Bombardier.' Although Hardcastle was often withering about Marriott's frequent explanation of military terminology, he was, nonetheless, quick to take advantage of it when it suited him.

‘Might I ask who you are, sir?'

‘Divisional Detective Inspector Hardcastle of the Metropolitan Police, and I don't have time to waste.'

‘Ah, that'll be the mess sergeant you want, Inspector.'

‘No, it is
not
the mess sergeant I want. It's an officer. I'm sick and tired of dealing with sergeants, and it seems to me that I can only get an answer from someone who knows what he's doing. Not that I'm sure an officer will give me what I want anyway. Not in my experience so far.'

‘One moment,' said the guard commander. He turned to one of the off-watch sentries. ‘Here, you, gunner, double across to the officers' mess, and tell the mess sergeant there's a policeman here wanting to see an officer about mess business, and be quick about it.'

While he waited, Hardcastle turned and stared out of the window of the guardroom, tapping irritably at the side of his leg with his umbrella and watching a gun team hitching a field gun to its limber. ‘D'you know, Marriott,' he said, without turning, ‘I sometimes wonder if we shall ever win this bloody war.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Marriott, and received a glance of sympathy from the guard commander who had quickly worked out that Marriott was Hardcastle's subordinate.

Eventually the sentry returned. ‘If you come with me, sir, I'll show you across to the PMC's office.'

‘What the hell is a PMC?' demanded Hardcastle crossly, believing he was being treated to yet more of what he termed army hocus-pocus.

‘The president of the mess committee, sir,' said Marriott, trying to stave off any further show of bad temper on the DDI's part. ‘He's usually a major or a captain. He's responsible for the good running of the mess.'

Hardcastle grunted. ‘Well, let's hope we can get a half sensible answer from him.'

‘Archibald Grayson, Inspector.' The booted and spurred captain crossed his office, and shook hands with Hardcastle and Marriott. ‘I'm the battery commander of A Battery. How may I help you?'

‘I understand you're President of the Mess Committee, Captain Grayson,' said Hardcastle, who had quickly mastered this latest piece of army terminology.

‘That's so. Do take a seat, gentlemen.' Grayson was a tall, fair-headed officer, immaculately attired in khaki service dress tunic and sand-coloured breeches. Above his left breast pocket was the ribbon of the India General Service Medal, preceded by the Distinguished Conduct Medal. It was an indication, did Hardcastle but know it, that Captain Grayson had received the award prior to becoming an officer, and had, therefore, been commissioned from the ranks.

Hardcastle related briefly the circumstances of Herbert Somers' murder, and his desire to trace one of the witnesses, namely Lieutenant Geoffrey Mansfield of the North Staffordshire Regiment who had claimed to be staying at the barracks.

Grayson opened a drawer in his desk and withdrew a slender book. ‘Mess accounts,' he said, glancing briefly at the DDI. ‘Yes, there is a record of a Lieutenant Mansfield, North Staffs, having booked into the mess for the night of Tuesday the ninth of this month, for an indeterminate period.'

‘But did he actually stay here, Captain Grayson?'

‘Ah, that I can't tell you. One of the army's regulations is that officers on furlough from the Front must leave an army address with their commanding officer so that they can be recalled should the necessity arise. The officer in question must then, in turn, leave details with the PMC of that local mess of any private address at which he might stay. To be perfectly honest, Inspector, it's a rule that's more often honoured in the breach. He certainly didn't leave any such address with me.'

‘Is there anyone here who might know?' Hardcastle was beginning to become frustrated at what he saw as military intransigence.

‘One moment.' Grayson lifted the receiver from the ‘candlestick' telephone on his desk, jiggled the rest, and asked for the officers' mess sergeant. ‘He'll ring me back as soon as they find him, Inspector. Won't be long. I hope.'

Marriott's long experience of working with Hardcastle told him that the DDI was becoming increasingly frustrated at the casual way that the army appeared to deal with police enquiries. The army, however, had a war to prosecute, and that, in Marriott's view, probably took precedence. However, he attempted to fill the conversational void.

‘Are you back from France, Captain Grayson?' he asked.

‘Good God, no. As a matter of fact, I've only just returned from India. I finished up commanding a screw gun battery at Chitral on the North West Frontier,' explained Grayson. ‘The irony is that although we're fighting the Hun, I was wounded by a Pathan, of all people, and was repatriated to England.'

Hardcastle was not greatly interested in Captain Grayson's experiences, and had no intention of asking what a screw gun battery was. He had been treated to long, and meaningless, explanations about the army before.

The telephone rang, and the PMC snatched at the receiver. ‘Captain Grayson. Ah, Sergeant Broad, did we have a Lieutenant Mansfield of the North Staffs staying in the mess?' After a few moments spent in conversation, he turned again to Hardcastle. ‘It seems that a room was assigned to Mr Mansfield, but was never used, Inspector. I rather imagine that Mansfield has a young lady somewhere with whom he might have stayed. On the other hand, he might've stayed at a hotel.'

‘I suppose that's possible,' said Hardcastle grudgingly. ‘He did say that he was at Victoria Station to meet his fiancée.'

‘I daresay that's the answer, then,' said Grayson. ‘The North Staffs have their depot at Lichfield in Staffordshire. And if his fiancée's place was in London, or the south somewhere, he wouldn't've wanted to travel the one hundred and fifty-odd miles from Lichfield.'

‘But if he didn't intend to stay at the mess he booked into, what difference would it have made which one it was?'

‘I've no idea, Inspector.' Grayson laughed. ‘But you're the detective, not me.'

Hardcastle's bad mood had not lifted by the time he and Marriott returned to Cannon Row Police Station.

‘Well, we didn't get much more out of that trip, Marriott.'

‘No, sir,' said Marriott.

Hardcastle took his pipe from the ashtray, looked at it, and put it back again. ‘Get a telegraph message off to the Staffordshire Constabulary. Ask them to make enquiries at the North Staffs depot at Lichfield, and find out where this Lieutenant Mansfield is now.'

‘Very good, sir.' Marriott departed without much hope that he would get an answer to the DDI's query. The police had had dealings with the military before regarding the whereabouts of individuals, and it took time. And more often than not the answer was inconclusive.

At breakfast on that Thursday morning, Hardcastle opened his copy of the
Daily Mail
and propped it against a bottle of HP Sauce. He read that on the previous Tuesday, there had been an uprising in Petrograd, encouraged by some hothead called Leon Trotsky. And this coincided with the news that the Russians had started to retreat from the Eastern Front.

Leaving the newspaper, Hardcastle spent the next few minutes tucking into his breakfast. Despite the shortages, his wife was still able to provide him with his usual fried eggs, bacon, two slices of fried bread, and a couple of sausages, two slices of toast and marmalade, and three cups of tea. He justified such a large meal by claiming that he could not go to work on an empty stomach. Hardcastle never asked his wife how she managed to get enough to feed the family, given the strictures imposed by the general shortages and rationing. He was, however, cynical enough to believe that the grocer, knowing that she was a policeman's wife, gave her preferential treatment because of it.

‘This is bad,' said Hardcastle, glancing once again at the newspaper. ‘Very bad indeed.'

‘What is, Ernie?' Alice Hardcastle began to clear away the plates and cutlery from the breakfast table.

‘Now that the Tsar's abdicated, it could develop into a full-blown revolution, Alice. If that happens, the Russians will likely capitulate, and that means that all the enemy troops on the Eastern Front will come west to fight Britain and France. Thank God the good old Americans have joined in.'

‘I daresay it'll turn out all right in the end, Ernie,' said Alice, forever the optimist.

‘Well, I hope you're right, Alice, my girl. If not, we're going to be in serious trouble.' Hardcastle folded the newspaper, took off his glasses and stood up. He glanced briefly at his watch. ‘I'd better be going,' he said.

‘We've got a reply from Staffordshire, sir.' Marriott greeted Hardcastle with the news as the DDI reached the top of the stairs.

‘Have we now? Come in.'

Once the DDI was settled behind his desk, Marriott referred to the telegraph form in his hand. ‘It seems that the Staffordshire Constabulary doesn't cover Lichfield, sir. They passed our enquiry to the Lichfield Borough Police. The chief constable himself went to the barracks.'

‘Ye Gods!' exclaimed Hardcastle, pausing in the act of filling his pipe. ‘They can't have much to do up there. Either that or the chief's angling after an invitation to a regimental dinner.'

Marriott smiled, but did not respond to Hardcastle's acerbic comment. He had never known his DDI to have a good word to say about any other police force, his severest condemnation being reserved for the City of London Police whose square mile of jurisdiction lay in the centre of the Metropolitan Police District.

‘Well, don't keep me in suspense, Marriott. What did the bold chief constable have to say about it?'

‘It seems that Lieutenant Mansfield is back in France, sir. His leave expired on Saturday the fourteenth of July. It also says that his leave – a week altogether – was spent in London at his fiancée's parents' house in Bayswater, and that Mansfield had informed the adjutant at Lichfield Barracks.'