The Return of Captain John Emmett (28 page)

'He didn't. Nobody saw me use the camera. More than my life was worth.'

'But you gave it to him?'

'No. God, no. Hardly. Last thing I'd want him to know about.'

'Well, somebody gave it to him,' said Laurence. 'Are you sure this is yours?' He handed it to him. 'Could anyone else have been taking pictures that day?'

'Very unlikely,' said Brabourne, examining the picture. 'No, this is mine. Was mine. Look—my monogram on the back. I still have that stamp. P is my first name, Peregrine. Not very surprisingly, I opted to use one of my other names—Tresham. It was that or my third name, Everard, which wasn't a great improvement on Peregrine.' He looked down at the photograph in his hand. 'But God knows where the negative is.'

'When did you last see the picture? Do you have any sense of when it was lost?'

'No. I mean, no, it wasn't lost. It was hardly something I gazed at every day but it was with my things until I met Colonel Lambert Ward. I set up an interview with him a couple of years ago. Do you remember the Darling Committee? Suggesting reforms for courts martial?'

'Lambert Ward?' Laurence echoed.

'The MP. The parliamentary questions man. I was doing this big piece on him; I can probably find it. Certainly got the goat up plenty of our regulars. Letters came pouring in.' He looked happy. 'Especially from those who'd never fought, of course. Very keen on the ultimate sanction, our older readers. But the rest was pure coincidence. We were talking about the bee he's got in his bonnet about burying executed men alongside their more valiant comrades in arms. He's very old school in his ways but strangely vehement about keeping our dead together.'

He stopped, got up again, walked to a cabinet and pulled out a drawer. He seemed to find what he wanted almost immediately, ran his eyes over it and handed it to Laurence.

'Quotes. They were for my piece, he said. I could hardly improve on their words. From Hansard or public speeches.'

Laurence looked down at the transcript. Two speeches had been marked in pencil.

'The first is Philip Morrell. The former MP. Liberal. I'd like to do a piece on him too. And this is the colonel,' said Brabourne. '"These men, many of them volunteered in the early days of the war to serve their country. They tried and they failed ... I think that it is well that it should be known and the people of this country should understand ... that from the point of view of Tommy up in the trenches, war is not a question of honours and decorations, but war is just hell."'

Laurence nodded. He sat back. Just hell. He was glad someone had spoken this truth in parliament.

'He told me that there was utter silence in the Commons after he'd spoken, and nobody would meet his eyes,' Brabourne added. 'But what I found interesting when I met him was his conviction that intolerable fear pushed some men into extraordinary acts of courage, and others into cowardice quite out of keeping with their characters. I think he was saying both extremes were a sort of madness. I liked him.

'I mentioned that I'd been personally involved in a court martial and a firing squad. He seemed quite interested—well, he would, of course. Much more so when he found the condemned man was an officer. He was the first person I'd spoken to about it since the war. Even my brother doesn't know. I didn't tell Lambert Ward about the photograph at first. Partly because it's not of the execution itself, thank God, but mostly it didn't seem fair to the other men involved, who didn't have any choice about being there.' He held the tiny stub of his cigarette between finger and thumb, inhaling before discarding it. 'And I felt that it looked a bit like a souvenir. That wasn't how it was, but I wasn't proud of it.'

Laurence asked, 'Are Lambert Ward and Morrell working together?'

'Loosely, yes. The colonel, Morrell, General Somers, and the man who's the member for North-West Lanarkshire, whose name I can't remember. Pringle? No, Thirtle; all good men of absolute probity, no axes being ground, I think. Somers and Lambert Ward were military heroes themselves in their time, which probably helped. The war and the public making subsequent attacks on them all were playing hell with Lambert Ward's health. But then there's Horatio Bottomley.'

Laurence watched, puzzled, as Brabourne slid his matchbox open and tipped his matches out on to the desk.

The name rang a bell with Laurence. 'Another MP?'

Brabourne gave him a wry look. 'Yes. "The Soldier's Friend". Among other things. Including being owner-editor of
John Bull.
It puts me in a difficult position. The
Bull
is a bit of a rag and Bottomley would stop at nothing to support his causes. And there's no end to the causes that support Bottomley. Our editor loathes him. He's had some murky dealings and he's rabid about Germany. I just thought the next thing would be that those men in my picture who had a right to remain anonymous would be plastered all over Bottomley's front page,
and
I'd also be in deep trouble here for not letting
The Chronicle
have the story. But I trusted the colonel. In the end when I sent him my meagre notes on Hart's defence, I also sent the photograph, which was with the file. He wrote back and said he'd like to talk to me properly about the execution. After all, on the previous occasion he was there for me to interview
him,
not vice versa.'

Brabourne was arranging matchsticks into an elaborate snowflake pattern. He nudged the final one into position and looked up.

'We agreed that we would meet again. In the event, he was unwell; an ulcer apparently. Morrell was down in the country so it was Somers who contacted me and suggested we meet at a hotel, the Connaught. Lambert Ward had passed on the photograph. But I trusted him just as much as the colonel, who had given me his word that it would be seen only by him. Somers gave me an equally solemn assurance. Not that the picture was very informative in itself but I was confident that there was no possibility of it emerging in any public way. I didn't trust Bottomley an inch but I trusted Lambert Ward; he understands modern soldiering. Somers is utterly honourable, although from a different generation and a different war. And he'd lost two sons in ours so he had some idea of its realities. I knew one of his boys. At Wellington. You know how schools yoke you for life, willy-nilly? Why you're here for Emmett, really.'

Was that true, Laurence wondered?

'I told him who was involved, the names of the officers, at least. Again, Somers said he would never make them public. I couldn't remember those of the soldiers, apart from young Byers, if I ever knew them. To tell you the truth, I didn't particularly want to remember any of it. I didn't want the photograph. It's history now.'

Laurence watched with regret as Brabourne's elbow came down in the middle of his fragile matchstick creation. The sticks scattered.

'Somers listened, took a few notes.' Brabourne brushed a matchstick off his coat. 'Told me the Germans executed only a handful of men. Fifty or so. Makes you think, doesn't it?'

Laurence was astonished. Were British soldiers so much less disciplined than Germans? Everybody said they were the best army in the world.

He was about to speak when Brabourne said, 'I did in the end tell him about Emmett—that whole ghastly botch-up.' Brabourne looked straight at Laurence when he didn't respond. 'You think I shouldn't have said anything?'

Laurence shook his head vigorously. 'You were the one who was there.'

'I thought about it after meeting Lambert Ward and decided it was the details that make a cause. Told him it was idiotic to mix up the rifles. Which was worse? Having to shoot him, or finding they'd mostly missed? Somers looked grim, although he said he'd seen men flogged and hanged in the war in Africa and he himself had even confirmed their sentences. But that was in the last century.'

He tapped out a further cigarette from the pack but held it without lighting it.

'He asked me a bit about Hart's background. He already had his name from the records but said he was interested because so few officers were executed on any side. He had details of one other case, a Lieutenant Poole. There wasn't much I could tell him except about the indecent haste of it all. And I tried to explain how the other officers took against Hart, and the tension between Tucker and Emmett, but it all sounded a bit thin if you hadn't seen it. I was biased in Emmett's favour probably. Perhaps one of the other committee members had the photograph afterwards? Not Bottomley, I hope.' He grimaced. 'But I'll check I didn't have any more of them. It was all a muddle back in the war!'

'May I think about it for a while?' Laurence said. 'I'm going to try to trace Tucker—he seems to be the lynchpin for so much of this. He lives in Birmingham.'

Brabourne looked at him. 'You should be careful.'

'Because?'

'Because your friend John Emmett told me a couple of things about Tucker that were all too plausible, having seen him in action myself. I don't think Emmett was trying to exonerate himself. He knew he'd messed things up—it was undoubtedly a terrible burden—but he was trying to explain Tucker. Ostensibly he hoped that because of my paltry experience at the Bar I might be able to advise him. Really, he just needed to get it off his chest, I think. He was a man obsessed. Also—and it sounded a bit melodramatic—he wanted to pass on the information in case anything should happen to him. Not at the hands of Jerry but of Tucker.'

'Anything I should know?'

'Tucker and Captain Emmett met long before. Perhaps you knew that? Emmett joined the West Kents. Tucker was a sergeant. Tucker had a chum whose name I can't remember, a corporal. The two had joined up at the same time. Tucker was brighter than the average soldier and did well. But Emmett said he was a bad influence over his weak pal.'

'Perkins?' Laurence said, remembering the name William Bolitho had given.

'Possibly.' Brabourne shrugged. 'They were vaguely implicated in lots of minor trouble-making but none of it was pinned down. But then, in spring the following year, not long before things got really sticky, apparently they were running out of wire. As they were everywhere. Two details went to get wire from farms in the area. Tucker headed up one lot, John said. They found precious little; the French were already hiding stuff by then. Three days later a girl on one of the farms is raped and murdered. She's very young: fourteen or fifteen. Emmett said it was just possible the death itself had been an accident—caused by an attempt to subdue her. But it was now the third rape that had occurred near their positions.

'The French police discovered an army-issue canteen outside the barn when her body was found. Tucker claimed he'd never been near that farm, but the mother gave a description of a belt buckle and insignia she'd seen when the soldiers had come before. Her husband and son were serving with the French so she could identify the uniforms.'

Brabourne stopped and appeared to be thinking back.

'I think Tucker eventually conceded he might have been there—he took the line that one small farm was much the same as any other and all the French were devious, English-hating peasants. But of course he said he hadn't gone back. Emmett has a bad feeling about it all. Calls the friend in and it's obvious the soldier—Perkins, if that's his name—is uneasy. Keeps contradicting himself and both men are the only alibis for one another for part of the day in question.'

'I'm surprised that was enough to exonerate them; it sounds more a cause for suspicion, I'd have thought.'

'Indeed. To you, me and, especially, John Emmett. But not to a harassed CO, it appears. Emmett said he just knew, increasingly, that Tucker was involved and probably this Perkins too. And Tucker knew he knew and it amused him. The French gendarmes thought two men had raped her. Technically, one rape and one act of sodomy.' He looked up. 'Emmett must have spoken good French?'

He waited for Laurence to reply.

'Yes, he spoke nearly perfect French.'

'Emmett was the liaison officer. Perhaps he was more convinced by the police than his tired CO, who was trying to prepare his men for the next attack. And Emmett saw the body in situ; her own neckerchief stuffed in a mouth choked with vomit, though death occurred when her throat was crushed, possibly by a forearm during the act...'

Brabourne tailed off, stubbing out his cigarette in his overflowing tin ashtray.

'I'm sorry, this is probably more than you want to know about something that happened a long time ago,' he said. 'But when I met him, it had worn Emmett's nerves down. I think that the circumstances show that Emmett's failure in commanding the execution detail wasn't weakness and Tucker's promptness to step in wasn't courage. And Hart was going to be shot one way or the other.'

'It's helpful,' Laurence said. 'The whole picture, the way it fits together. John's state of mind. It's what I've been trying to get a grasp of.

'The fact that he told me all these details is some indication that things weren't good. Though we did share a billet for a while and some wine—increasing quantities of wine, in his case. Emmett told me there were items missing off the girl's body: a comb, some ribbons and so on. It also seemed as if someone had cut off some of her ... pubic hair.'

When Laurence looked surprised, Brabourne added matter-of-factly, 'I had actually come across this in my time at the Bar. These men ... they do sometimes collect items from their victims.'

'But wasn't that incredibly risky?' asked Laurence. 'It was murder, after all, and the men all lived on top of each other, and were often on the move and had few personal possessions. Anyway, the colonel would have had a right to search Tucker's things at the time.'

'He might have done but it was hardly likely. Tucker was a sergeant; he wasn't some spotty private. And I do wonder if for Tucker it was the risk that made it attractive.

'So the gendarmes leave Emmett with a list of pathetic missing personal items. He took all the information to the colonel, but there was no other evidence. They were preparing for the big push and the colonel said Tucker was a good enough NCO not to be antagonised by excitable French women with vague accusations. "Against the general good" was the line, Emmett said.