The Return of Captain John Emmett (24 page)

He was about to tell her that she would have to sleep in his bed, and that he was quite happy to sleep in an armchair, but didn't want her to think his mind had raced ahead to the sleeping arrangements.

They stopped and bought roasted chestnuts on a street corner; the man who huddled over the glowing coals was wearing his campaign medals on his coat. Cradling the small, warm bags in their hands, they caught a bus that took them right up to Bloomsbury. Mary insisted she didn't want anything else to eat.

The house was in darkness but, as they climbed the first flight of stairs, the door to his neighbour's flat opened. Laurence stopped dead, placing his hand on Mary's forearm.

'Good evening,' said his neighbour, his unkempt bulk filling the doorway. He looked Mary up and down.

'Ah ... this is a friend of mine: Miss Emmett.'

'Yes. I see.'

'Was there anything?' Laurence began.

'No. I was just going out.' His neighbour stayed watching them as they climbed up to the next floor.

'Sorry,' Laurence said as soon as they were in his flat and he had lit the fire. 'Perfectly harmless. But something a bit odd about him.'

Mary looked amused. 'It's all right. He was just awkward in the way men are who live by themselves for years.'

She slapped her hand across her mouth.

'There I go again, piling on one insult after another. I hope you know I don't mean you.'

'One of your droopy widowers who, having the misfortune to be living a single life, has fallen into unsavoury habits?'

'You know I don't think that and I certainly don't mean you.' She lightly batted her fists on his chest.

He looked at her. Her eyes were only a little lower in level than his, grey-green and clear. Her smile faded a little and her lips parted almost imperceptibly. He held her gently by the upper arms, locking her gaze for what seemed like a minute but was probably no time at all, and then let her go. She looked away, apparently confused.

Laurence went through to his bedroom, leaving Mary to warm herself by the fire.

'May I play the piano?' she asked.

'You can try,' he called through, 'but it's probably unplayable. It hasn't been tuned since ... for ages.'

He knelt down by his bedroom wardrobe to see whether he had any spare linen at the bottom. He heard her open the piano lid and pull the stool closer. Then the stool lid opened and there was silence. He rocked back on his heels to peer through the doorway. She was standing, leafing through some sheet music, staring at it intently with her head bobbing. Then he realised she was hearing the music in her mind. She looked up, saw him gazing at her and laughed.

'Sorry, just trying to work out what I won't disgrace myself with.' She paused and indicated the front sheet. '"Louise Scudamore". Scudamore? Was that your wife? Was she good? At the piano?'

'She practised a lot,' said Laurence, remembering her playing rather heavily, leaning forward with a look of fraught concentration on her face and her nose screwed up. 'Her biggest trouble was that she needed spectacles.'

He remembered how hard Louise had tried. Her mother had thought her exceptional.

'Actually,' he went on, with a sudden burst of honesty, 'she was probably a bit hopeless, but she enjoyed it and she loved the piano. That's why I've kept it, even though I can't play a note.'

'You should learn to play. It would relax you.'

'I don't know any teachers,' he countered. 'Anyway, I'm far too relaxed half the time. I need to be less relaxed.'

She looked at him knowingly. 'I don't think so, Laurie. I don't think you're ever truly relaxed. In fact, I seem to recall thinking you were a very coiled-up, contained man when I first met you.'

He was about to protest but she had already returned to the music.

'Right, Liszt. That's a good start,' she said, sitting down. 'I used to be quite good at this. Or perhaps not?' she said, as she began to play, faltering a little on the first notes.

He finally found a pair of sheets. They were old and had been neatly turned, sides to middle, but they were clean and without holes. While she was engrossed in the music he held them to his face to check they didn't smell damp. When he shook them out, they were plainly for a double bed. Swags of embroidered flowers and bows decorated the upper edges. He found one recently laundered pillowcase and for the lower pillow kept the case already on it, smoothing it with his hand.

She went on playing. Her touch was assured but the tone was pretty awful. When he'd finished making the bed—
her
bed, he realised with pleasure—adding an extra blanket under the eiderdown because she might not be used to a bedroom as cold as his could be, he stood in the doorway and watched her. She thudded on a dead key, and not for the first time.

'It's stuck,' she said. 'You really ought to get this tuned, Laurie. It's a good piano, a willing one. It deserves to be tuned.'

'Pianos have personalities?'

'Of course they do. There are good pianos and bad pianos, willing ones and disobliging ones, modest ones and blustering ones. And
this
one shouldn't be abandoned.'

She leaned over and touched a slightly warped panel on the front where a shell in faded mother-of-pearl inlay was contained in a cartouche.

'Nor should her finery be neglected. When we still lived in the country, I had a lovely piano: a small Bluthner. Well, it was my mother's, really. My paternal grandfather had given it to her as a wedding present. My mother could play beautifully, much better than I can. When I was very little we used to laugh when she played duets with my grandfather.'

'You haven't got it now?'

'No. No room and anyway it was too valuable. We had to sell it.'

'I didn't realise...' Laurence began.

'Actually father was dreadful with money,' she said. 'Hopeless. The house in Suffolk was in trust for John. My grandfather—my other one, my mother's father—must have seen the way things were going long before he died. My father was really kind—well, you know he was,' her eyes shone, 'but he believed everybody. Every chancer with a half-baked scheme to make money. Every tip on a horse that might reverse our fortunes. And he never learned. He always wanted to see the good in people. Like John, in a way.'

'I'm sorry. Your parents were awfully good to me.'

'They were good people. But my mother was always a bit disappointed. She would have liked more of London life, I think, and she got worn down by staving off one crisis after another. Although my father was a steadfast family man, he never seemed to notice the odd writ, or the grass three feet tall, or living on mutton and onion tart for a week, or the smell of boiling soap ends.'

She changed the music and played some Brahms he recognised. He opened a kitchen drawer, found some candles and inserted them in the piano candleholders; as he pushed them into place, he could feel the accretion of old wax on his fingers. Wax that had dripped there when Louise was still thudding through her Chopin. He put some more coal on the fire and lit the oil lamp that had been his mother's.

Mary played for a little longer; the soft light on her skin made her look as young as he remembered her from before the war. But after a while she stopped suddenly, and swung her legs back over the stool.

'No, the piano needs more love to do Brahms justice. I'll tell you what, you get her tuned and I'll give you a concert.'

'I don't have any wine, to reward your efforts, I'm afraid,' he said. 'But I've got gin. And biscuits,' he added as an afterthought. 'Sweet-meal. Mostly broken. Or would you like cocoa?'

'What a feast,' she said.

In the end he found some bottled plums and a loaf of bread, as well as the biscuit fragments. The combination had shades of a school midnight feast. While he put them on a tray, she was looking at his bookcase.

'A man's shelves reveal all his secrets,' she said as she pulled out a book.

After a second of anxiety, he felt pleasure at this strange intimacy. 'Mostly my father's secrets, in this case.'

'Fair enough for the Dickens and the Wordsworth, and I don't think you'd have chosen Meredith, but
The Return of the Native
is a bit racy for somebody's father, I'd have thought. And—goodness, Laurence—
Sons and Lovers
.' She looked back at him questioningly. 'Whatever next?' She squatted down to look at the lower shelf. 'Now we get to it.'

Again he felt a flicker of unease.

'
Three Men in a Boat
next to their natural companion-on-shelf, Foxe's
Martyrs.
The many faces of Laurence Bartram.'

'Foxe is for my book research.'

'But you don't like your book.'

'No, I do.'

'No, you don't. You never talk about it. We've passed scores of churches and you've never said a thing about any of them.'

He didn't like to say that he had assumed she wouldn't be interested. When he didn't answer, she got to her feet. 'I didn't mean to pry.'

'No. It's fine.' He forced a smile. 'I do like churches a lot but the book's an excuse not to have to do anything else. I haven't looked at it for weeks.'

'Am I an excuse?'

'No, of course not.'

'But helping me is?'

'You mean, is it a diversion? Well, yes, but not in the way you think.'

Fatigue and gin had relaxed them by the time she finally braved the iciness of his bathroom, took a glass of water and kissed him on the cheek. He waited until she'd closed the door of the bedroom before stripping down to his shirt, drawers and socks.

He could hear her moving about for a while and the creak as she got into bed. He snuffed out the candles and then stubbed his toe on the armchair he'd arranged. He pulled his dressing-gown collar up around his face, covered himself with a blanket and tried to settle for the next half an hour. Eventually he dragged the seat cushions on to the floor, lay down on them and rolled himself up in the old blanket. He had not slept on a floor for three years. He hadn't expected to do so again but he was quietly content and lay for a while, looking towards the grey shape of the window and listening intently to any noise from next door. Was she awake? What was she thinking? He fancied he could hear her breathe though he knew it was impossible.

The deep contentment he felt in Mary's company lasted him all the next day, even when she'd gone. He thought how pretty she looked in the morning, dressed but with her hair loose and legs bare. She had insisted on assembling a rudimentary breakfast. Eventually he'd surrendered and watched her as she handled his china and put a kettle on the stove as if she had visited many times before. He ached for her, not just to possess her, although certainly that, but also to protect her and to know her with an absolute familiarity.

But she ate swiftly, returned to the bedroom and sat, tidying her hair in front of the looking-glass. He turned away. She emerged with her hat on and her bag in her hand. To his surprise, she now wanted to go to Charing Cross. She had decided not to go back to Cambridge yet, she said. She referred vaguely to cousins near Wadhurst. Instead of asking her about them quite naturally, he'd resisted, convinced it would sound like an interrogation.

When he eventually walked out of the station and turned up the Strand, it was a fine day with the sky bright above the piebald trunks of the plane trees. He was determined not to let his mind dwell on her unexplained times in Sussex.

He had decided to start looking for Inspector Mullins in the archives of the
Daily Chronicle.
The
Chronicle
had the sort of ordinary coverage he needed, but also he had once pencilled the words of one of its war correspondents into his day book. The man had written: 'As an outside observer, I do not see why the war in this area should not go on for a hundred years, without any decisive result. What is happening now is precisely what happened last year.' Laurence had found it comforting rather than depressing. It meant he wasn't going mad.

He had occasionally peered at the
Chronicle
's offices tucked away in a tiny square to one side of Fleet Street. The building had a dark and elaborate brick façade with an impressive portico. He was taken immediately down to an airless basement room crammed with files. The woman running the library of back copies looked blank when he asked whether she remembered the incident.

'I don't
read
any of them,' she said, as if he'd accused her of idling. 'I just keep them tidy.'

His first problem was in remembering when exactly he'd seen the original article. It was recent, he thought, not long after he met Mary. He took out a month of copies and placed them on a long table, going through them a week at a time. He was pretty sure this would be front-page news. A violent attack on such a senior officer was almost unknown in England, though he vaguely remembered that the head of Scotland Yard had survived being shot by a madman not long before the war.

He found the first mention of Mullins' murder fairly quickly on an inside cover of a September newspaper, but it was obviously a follow-up story, considering whether Bolsheviks might have been behind the attack, so he kept going backwards. Finally he found the headline he sought. It was unequivocal: SCOTLAND YARD SLAYING. The accompanying photograph was a portrait shot of the officer in uniform. The date was Friday, 26 August 1921.

He ran through the columns beneath. Chief Inspector Mullins had left Scotland Yard as he usually did at five-thirty in the afternoon. He was walking down the steps accompanied by a constable who, although some way behind him, was to be the nearest witness. As Mullins reached the last step, a man came up and spoke to him. The constable thought he had addressed him by name and that, although the inspector had nodded, he did not appear to recognise the gunman. The assailant then pulled out his weapon from inside his coat and fired. Mullins fell to the ground almost immediately and the gunman fired one further shot, mutilating him. Mullins expired within seconds. With the element of surprise in his favour and because those nearest were attempting to provide aid to the dying officer, the gunman was able to escape apprehension. He was described as clean-shaven, of average build, possibly in middle age. He wore a hat, which concealed some of his features, and a British Warm, with the collar up. The piece ended: 'Chief Inspector Gerald Mullins joined the Metropolitan Police in 1900 and served with distinction within the Corps of Military Police from 1916 to 1919. He leaves a widow, a son who is a police cadet, and four daughters.'