The First Casualty (11 page)

TWENTY-ONE

The Kingsley family home, Hampstead Heath, London

Agnes Kingsley, or Agnes Beaumont as she now called herself, was in her drawing room engaged in embroidery when her maid informed her that an officer, a certain Captain Shannon, wished to see her. She had been most surprised, for she was not expecting a visitor. As she had explained to her husband at their last meeting, nobody called upon her any more. Nonetheless she bid her maid bring the captain in and, having asked him to sit down, ordered tea.

‘Mrs Kingsley,’ the captain began.

‘Beaumont, Captain,’ Agnes corrected. ‘I call myself Beaumont now. It is my maiden name. My husband and I are shortly to be divorced.’

‘I am afraid that considerations such as that are no longer necessary, Mrs Beaumont. It is my painful duty to inform you that your husband…’

Agnes’s hand froze in the act of raising a teacup to her lips.

‘Mrs Beaumont, Inspector Kingsley is dead.’

She was wearing very little rouge or powder and so the draining of colour from her face was quite startling in its speed. The rosy cheeks that Kingsley loved so well turned white in an instant. An observer would have concluded that, whatever she thought of her husband’s views on the war, she loved him still.

‘Dead?’

‘I am afraid so. I am truly sorry.’

‘But how can this…’

At that moment a small boy ran into the room, a lively-looking lad in a little soldier’s uniform.

‘Not now, George, please.’

The boy’s face fell.

‘I heard you talking, Mummy. I thought it was Daddy.’

‘No, darling…’ She was struggling to keep her voice steady. ‘I have told you, Daddy is away…He will be gone a long time, a very long time…’

Now the boy was looking at Captain Shannon.

‘You’re a soldier, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am…It’s George, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. Are you very brave?’

‘Oh, I don’t know so much about that, George.’

‘My daddy’s brave, he’s got three ci…ci…’

‘Citations, darling,’ Agnes said, and now she was hiding her tears behind a handkerchief. ‘Run along…’

‘He’s very, very brave. Can I see your gun?’ George asked.

‘I said run along, darling.’

‘I’m afraid I do not have it with me, George,’ the captain replied with a smile.

‘What sort of soldier doesn’t have a gun?’ George enquired. ‘A rather poor one, I suppose,’ Shannon answered. Agnes rang for the maid and asked her to take George to his nanny. When the boy had gone she took a moment to collect herself.

‘I’m sorry, Captain Shannon. Forgive me, but there must be some mistake. My husband is in prison.’

Shannon reached across the tea things and patted her hand. He was a strikingly handsome man with what seemed to be a genuinely sympathetic manner.

‘No, he’s not, Mrs Beaumont. He’s dead. Shot while trying to escape. I’m so very sorry that on top of all your trouble you should be burdened with this.’

For a moment it seemed almost as if Agnes’s distress would overwhelm her, but then she looked puzzled.

‘Why…why have you come with this news, Captain? Why is this an army matter? Douglas had nothing to do with the army. That’s why he was in prison.’

‘I’m with, well…I’m with what you might call intelligence. Whilst in prison your husband was contacted by Irish nationalists. We do not believe he told them anything but we had to look into it. I was on my way to the prison to interview him when he attempted to escape. In his way your husband was a brave man; personally I admired him. I volunteered to bring you the news immediately since it will without doubt be in the evening newspapers.’

‘Thank you, Captain. Thank you for that.’

Once more Captain Shannon patted her hand.

‘Thank you, Captain,’ she repeated.

‘If there is ever anything I can do…anything at all.’

Agnes stood up.

‘I think that George and I shall manage very well together, Captain. And I have my father.’

‘Of course.’ Captain Shannon rose to leave. ‘Well, goodbye, Mrs Beaumont.’

‘Mrs Kingsley, I think, Captain,’ Agnes replied.

TWENTY-TWO

A journey to Folkestone

‘Shot dead while escaping. Not many men have taken that route out of Wormwood Scrubs.’

‘Yes. And still fewer have been shot dead while escaping and survived.’

Once more Kingsley found himself listening to disembodied voices whilst he lay wounded, although this time he was not in a strange bed but in a motor car, a big one, and well upholstered — perhaps a Daimler, he thought, or a Roller, judging by the leathery smell and the big, heavy, dependable sound of the engine. Kingsley’s head ached more than he would have imagined it possible for a head to ache, and the bumpy movement of the car made him feel sick. Nonetheless he was clearly alive, which, considering what he remembered of events when last he had been conscious, seemed to him a considerable bonus.

‘Exceptionally brave fellow,’ the first voice said. This voice came from his right, and it appeared to Kingsley that it belonged to an older man. ‘To stand there and face it like he did.’

‘I don’t know so much about brave,’ the man on Kingsley’s left argued. ‘Intelligent certainly, intelligent enough to see that he was done for. He could either run or stand, same result both ways. Bang. Cheerio. Ta-ta. Goodbyeee. He knew that. Less trouble to stand, I’d say. Is that courage? I don’t know. Does a dog that gets hit by a stick show courage?’

‘Well, I hope I show as much bravery if ever I find myself facing a pistol at point-blank range.’

Kingsley wanted water desperately but decided that he would not yet alert the speakers to the fact that he was awake. Something very strange was occurring and Kingsley thought he might learn more if the men were not aware that he was listening. ‘Poor fellow had a hell of a night, eh?’ the man on Kingsley’s right said. ‘How long do they say before he’ll be operational?’

‘Well, the good news is Castle says his ribs aren’t broken after all, despite what the prison sawbones said. So it looks like we’ll be able to get him to the front far sooner than we’d feared.’

‘Not bad for a dead man, eh, Shannon?’

‘Yes, not bad at all,’ the man called Shannon replied. He had a more brutal, arrogant tone than the older man, a tone that Kingsley did not much like.

‘We won’t know for sure, of course, until a decent doctor’s taken a look at him but I must say he seemed pretty fit to me.’

Kingsley attempted to take stock. Who were these people? How had he come to be in their car? What could they possibly want?

He considered their voices.

He had heard voices like theirs many times before. Languid, relaxed voices, effortlessly confident and commanding. Kingsley had been listening to these voices all his life, voices that simply assumed the authority which men who spoke in different accents had to earn. Kingsley remembered those voices from his youth, when his grammar school rugby team had faced one of the nearby public schools. When some progressive-minded headmaster from Harrow or Winchester had thought it proper that his boys should mix briefly with the sons of the next class down. Kingsley and his friends had to hide their jealousy as a horse-drawn charabanc arrived from the station full of adolescent boys who spoke as if they owned the country. Which of course they did, or would do when their papas died.

So, these men who had taken possession of him were upper class and English.

What else could he discover? The back of Kingsley’s hand was resting against the older man’s trouser leg. Kingsley struggled to discover what type of cloth it might be. The back of the hand is not a sensitive instrument of touch, particularly if the owner is fearful to move it, but Kingsley thought that the material was thick and roughish. This was not the sort of fabric that would normally be used to make the trousers of men who spoke in voices such as the ones he had been listening to. Unless, of course, the material was khaki…And they had spoken earlier about getting him to the front.

Had he been kidnapped by the army? It was an extraordinary thought.

‘Do you think he’ll cooperate?’ the older man was saying.

‘Oh yes, I think so,’ Shannon said. ‘After all, what choice does he have? He’s dead already, or so the world believes. Nothing to stop us popping him off for real, after the fact, so to speak.’

Kingsley struggled to make sense of what they were saying. There was something that these arrogant, supercilious men wanted him to do. Somehow they had spirited him from gaol by faking his death and now they were casually discussing killing him in earnest if he refused to cooperate with them.

‘I think that Inspector Kingsley will weigh all the options, apply his famous logic, add a dash of that derring-do for which he has also been so rightly celebrated and come round to our way of thinking. What do you say, Inspector? Am I right?’

It was a shock but Kingsley managed not to flinch. Was it a trick? Or did Shannon really know that he was conscious?

‘Inspector, I have been listening to your breathing. I considered it before you regained consciousness and I am considering it now. I asked if you thought that you might come round to our way of thinking.’

Kingsley attempted to open his eyes but realized that there were bandages across them. For a moment he feared that his eyes had been damaged when they shot him. But they did not feel damaged. It seemed more likely that he had simply been blindfolded.

‘I have absolutely no idea what your way of thinking is,’ he whispered. ‘But if you are the man who shot me in the head with something that did not kill me and has left me wishing I was dead then you are clearly mad. So no, sir, I doubt that I shall come round to your way of thinking.’

‘That’s a shame. It was a bullet made of rubber, by the way. I constructed it myself actually, tested it on stray dogs. Killed three before I got the consistency right. Wanted something that would lay you out, bust the skin enough to look convincing to a casual onlooker but leave you fit to fight another day. Worked a treat, though I hate to crow. You went down like a sack of coal, all the guards saw it happen, that appalling old drunkard they use for a doctor pronounced you dead on my say-so and here you are. A dead man with a splitting headache.’

‘Why?’

‘We need you.’

‘Why do you need me?’

‘All in good time.’

‘Does the world think that I am dead?’

‘My dear fellow, what on earth would have been the point of constructing such an elaborate fiction if we were not to make it public? Of course the world thinks you are dead. You were shot while trying to escape from prison.’

‘And you arranged for that escape?’

‘Ah-ha, the penny drops.’

Now Kingsley understood the reason behind the ridiculously easy manner in which he had made his way through the prison.

‘Are you the SIS? The Secret Intelligence Service? ‘

‘Not supposed to talk about that sort of thing, old boy…’

‘Kell’s men or Cumming’s?’ Kingsley insisted, and for the first time Shannon seemed to lose the tiniest degree of his irritating sangfroid.

‘I must say you are well versed, Inspector.’

‘Not really. Your secret service isn’t as secret as all that, you know. An awful lot of chattering goes on in the pubs and clubs around Whitehall.’

‘Well then, Cumming’s,’ Shannon conceded, whereby Kingsley knew that he was dealing with the foreign section of military intelligence. This confused him even more. He had assumed that anything they might want from him would involve domestic counter-intelligence. He was after all a policeman, not a soldier.

‘Then you have gone to a great deal of trouble for nothing, Mr Shannon,’ Kingsley said, ‘for I will not be a part of this war. Not in any capacity, secret or otherwise.’

‘Well. We shall see, eh? Discuss it tomorrow when you feel a little better, eh?’

‘I shall not join your war.’

‘We do not intend to ask you to. Not
join
it, just trot along beside it for a few days.’

‘Does my wife believe that I am dead?’

‘Of course. She was the first person we told. There is a proper process to these things, you know. We’re not without human decency, old boy.’

‘Damn you!’

‘Well, there’s gratitude.’

‘And my son?’

‘Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s four, isn’t he? Good time to lose a father, hasn’t had the chance to get too attached. Besides, it only puts him in common with thousands of other little boys across the country, doesn’t it? Good heavens, there’s precious few lads about the place these days who
haven’t
lost their father. He’d have felt quite the odd one out with you above ground.’

Kingsley struggled to master his emotions.

‘Sir,’ he said finally, ‘I do not like your tone. You have clearly preserved my life for a purpose, please do not make the mistake of thinking I am grateful.’

‘What on earth makes you think I’d value the gratitude of a malingering, traitorous toad like you, Kingsley? Quite frankly, you make my skin crawl. Agnes Beaumont could have done
so
much better. Perhaps she will.’

‘Don’t you dare mention my — ’

‘Oh, do put a sock in it, you two,’ the older man interrupted. ‘We’ve miles to go and I can’t stand bickering.’ After that none of them spoke and soon the older man could be heard snoring. Then, despite his racing mind and his anguish at the thought of his family being so deceived, Kingsley himself fell into a fitful sleep.