The Return of Captain John Emmett (38 page)

'I'm too tired to think all this through,' he said finally. 'But I don't think there's much doubt that we're looking at murder now. Probably four murders, maybe more. I'm going to go back and talk to Mrs Lovell. She must know more than she's letting on. To start with, I wondered whether Hart could be her son, but it doesn't fit. All the same, I do think her son's story may be mixed up with the execution and its aftermath. I might get a picture out of her on some pretext, though I can't think of any now, and she won't be letting any photographs far out of her sight, I imagine.'

Charles nodded, holding his glass with both hands. 'You could say you thought you might have known him, I suppose?'

It was obvious, yet Laurence had more of a problem with the idea of lying to Gwen Lovell than to the others he had deliberately misled. He didn't answer.

'You're thinking, what if the old girl is excited at being able to exchange recollections of her boy?' said Charles.

'Yes, I suppose I am. But also we aren't even absolutely certain he was ever in the army. The records don't show it.'

'Difficult one. Perhaps Lovell lied to his mama? Ran away to avoid being called up? Perhaps she lied to you? Not impossible. If you want me to come along to see Mrs Lovell, I will.' He looked at Laurence expectantly.

Although tempted for a moment, Laurence sensed he would get more out of Mrs Lovell if he were alone. Force of numbers might cause her to be suspicious and he thought Charles's jocular confidence might grate on her. Nevertheless, if her son had not been a soldier and she knew it, then she had lied persuasively about receiving the telegram.

Just as Charles put his glass down and stood up, Laurence said, 'Why do you think Somers, if it was him, took Emmett to the Connaught instead of his club? It's a bit furtive.'

'The Connaught is hardly a Limehouse opium den. And skulking about is not really in his character, I'd say,' Charles replied.

'You know Limehouse well, then?' Laurence asked, keeping his face expressionless.

'Of course.' Charles was struggling into one arm of his coat. 'Opium dens—just the sort of place the really depraved murderer plots his crimes. Ask Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Or there's Fu Manchu—you don't have to have smoked an opium pipe to know where to find trouble. To get inside the mind of a drug fiend in his lair, you just need to read a few books. After all, you haven't been to the Connaught either but you know how it'll be in there. Palms. Tea. Cocktails. A grand piano. And plenty of people who don't know one another. That's the key to anonymity.' He finally heaved his coat over his shoulders. Actually a chap I knew from Birmingham days—Arthur Ward—his father was our works foreman—he wrote the Fu Manchu stories.'

'I could have sworn the author was—'

'Rohmer. Sax Rohmer. German name, but not his real one. "Arthur Ward" carried too much of the smell of the tannery for tales of the Orient. Taking a German pseudonym was an odd sort of choice, but there we are. Damn good yarns.'

For a while Laurence had considered it just possible that the tensions between John and Sergeant Tucker had become lethal. Now that he knew that so many of those involved were dead, the situation seemed unreal, something out of Charles's detective novels. Leonard Byers' rueful comment about a curse was close to the truth but there was nothing supernatural about these deaths. Neither John nor Tucker could have killed all three men: Lilley, Jim Byers and Mullins, because both were by then dead themselves. So who else knew them all and could have done?

He realised now that what they ought to be looking for was not a message but a motive. A motive should lead him to the man to whom this violence made sense. A sense driven by hatred or greed or jealousy, perhaps, or even a sort of biblical retribution, but a sense that Laurence currently couldn't begin to grasp. If the motive was to remove everyone connected with the firing squad, then he needed, urgently, to find out more about young Hart himself.

Yet not everyone connected with the execution was dead. With a suddenness that made his hair stand on end, he realised how stupid he had been. John had died at the end of December. Tucker had died the same winter, Lilley in April, Byers in early summer. Mullins had been murdered in August. Whoever was carrying out these killings had not necessarily stopped. The arrangements just took time. The killer needed to track down his quarry, to undertake his mission and then return to normal life without arousing suspicion. It was not necessarily over.

Who else might be on the list? Was the lost legatee of John's will, the Frenchman, Meurice, already one of the victims or could he have been the assailant all along? More than ever, he was aware that his enquiries had always been patchy.

What about Leonard Byers? Was he in any danger now? Laurence also had an increasing sense of unease about the safety of Tresham Brabourne, even faintly considering whether he might be at risk himself. Had he even met the murderer already as he lumbered around with his questions?

Thinking about Brabourne, it occurred to him that Charles's unexpected visit had diverted him from looking at the bundle of cuttings he'd picked up at the
Chronicle.
He laid them out on his table. There were articles on parliamentary debates, a few letters, mostly from
The Times
rather than the
Chronicle.
There was a profile of Colonel Lambert Ward and blurry photographs accompanied an older article on General Somers when he was fighting in Africa. There was a vast front-page headline from Horatio Bottomley's
John Bull:
TRAGEDY OF A BOY OFFICER. The only bit of the page not covered by the headline was an advertisement for Excelda handkerchiefs.

He turned over and skimmed through the article. It concerned the death of one of the other two officers executed. The journalist was in full flow but the case against the hapless lieutenant of the Naval Reserve seemed as weak as the one against Hart. What surprised him was that the piece had been published in March 1918, before the war had even ended. He imagined the fury it must have caused in the War Office.

He read through the letters. Despite a few enraged denunciations, there was nothing here that hinted at future violence. Laurence noticed that several of the letters were from the fathers of sons who had been killed while obeying orders and they didn't want their boys buried next to a coward. While he could understand their point of view, he didn't think their sons would agree, were they to rise from their ranks of stone in France. What had John wanted to add to all this?

Brabourne, who had known John Emmett as a fellow officer, was the one person who seemed to accept all along that John might well have killed himself. He was an intelligent observer and had seen John at his worst. Laurence had liked Brabourne—he was a man facing forward, he thought, and for that reason he had an energy that Laurence could only recently detect in any measure in himself. He thought of Brabourne dressed for the outdoors in his bitterly cold office with its ill-fitting window, or striding down Fleet Street at one with his world, but otherwise apparently immune to his surroundings.

Something had rung a bell when he'd seen him and it burst upon him suddenly what it was. The scarf Brabourne was wearing was, he was almost certain, a school sporting colours scarf, but he was equally certain it was the same colours as the one John had with him at his death. The one that had been returned to the Emmetts, not his own school scarf, but another man's.

Another man's school. It meant nothing: hundreds of boys had joined up from schools like Eton and Harrow, Rugby and Wellington—Brabourne's school—and, indeed, like John, Charles and Laurence himself, from Marlborough. Brabourne too had commented on this. No doubt this was how it had always been: he had read the memorials to the battle dead of the Crimean and Boer Wars during interminable sermons in the college chapel. As a schoolboy he would try to make anagrams of their names to pass the time. But each of these previous conflicts accounted for only a handful of old boys. The memorial boards erected now would list tens of names for every house in the school. And there was Brabourne—not, as Byers had predicted, dead in the mud, a casualty of his own sense of invincibility, nor reduced to gold letters on a plaque to create wonder in generations of boys to come, but moving on, away from the war. One day he would be an old man, with no doubt a fine career behind him, while those three or four years in uniform would be no more than one brief, if distressing, episode in a life rich in adventures, challenges, sorrows and joys. It wouldn't be the first and the last thing he thought of every day. Laurence doubted it was, even now. It would be history. Brabourne would tell his grandsons about it.

He realised that it was quite possible that Brabourne had lent John a spare scarf, though it was unusual to have two, and in peacetime no public schoolboy would wear the colours of another school. War, however, was a colder, more pragmatic way of life. It was even easier to imagine that Brabourne would have given his own scarf to Edmund Hart. Laurence remembered Brabourne commenting on the cold in the room where they had imprisoned the condemned man as they waited to hear his fate.

He reflected just how many young officers had known one another. He was always amused by Charles's social networks but they formed the web that both trapped and supported people like him; people like himself, too, Laurence supposed. It was that society that men like Edmund Hart were excluded from. Even as the war progressed and more officers had been promoted from the ranks, there was a gulf between the traditional officer class and those on whom war had bestowed a grudging commission. If Edmund had been to Eton or Marlborough or Harrow, he might well not have died for his offence. It was a chilling thought.

When he picked up the envelope to replace all the cuttings, he could feel something still inside. He had missed a rough note from Tresham Brabourne, folded round a photograph. It was of a very young, light-haired man, with a blanket round his shoulders; he was sitting at a table with what appeared to be a plate of bread and cheese. The background was very indistinct but, although the photograph was quite dark, the man's fatigue was obvious. He looked solemnly at the camera. Along the top of the scrap of paper Brabourne had scrawled in pencil, 'Vis Tucker's death. Police records state it was in late February.' Laurence registered that it let John off the hook for Tucker's murder and that he owed Brabourne a drink. Then all other thoughts drained away as he read the note that had enclosed the photograph. Brabourne had written:

I checked again if I had another photograph of the firing squad. The one you have is definitely the only one and was previously in my possession (not that I want it back). I had absolutely forgotten I also had this picture. It's Edmund Hart on the night I told you about: bitter cold, poetry, a mistaken, though shared, belief that his sentence would be commuted, and all the rest. I took this at his request; he wanted to reassure his ma. A day later he was shot. The film hadn't even been developed. I could hardly give it to the padre to send home with his effects—and yet it seemed wrong to destroy it. You might find that it makes the whole affair more real to have a likeness of a man much more sinned against than sinning.

Laurence could not take his eyes off the picture in his hand. Hart looked about seventeen. His hair was tousled, his eyes wide. Laurence immediately grasped that his task had become easier. Here was a picture he could show to people. Somebody out there who might not have known his name might yet recognise his face. He would show the Bolithos, Mrs Lovell, even Charles. Either of the Bolithos might have come across him in France. Mrs Lovell had said her son had brought home a friend or two and it was possible this man was one of them. Although Charles was a remote chance, he seemed to know so many more people in the army than one war would normally make possible. Laurence would take it to Holmwood and try Dr Chilvers; after all, Brabourne had said Hart had been treated for shell-shock in England. He might just have been at Holmwood despite Chilvers' assurance that he'd never treated a Hart. Could it have been under an assumed name? Some family shame protected?

He hadn't expected to hear from Mary with any speed. Yet on the Friday he received a letter by the afternoon post, postmarked Sussex, saying that she would be in London on the Tuesday and why didn't they catch up. He felt a familiar pang of jealousy at her continued journeys to see an unknown friend and was irked by her casual offer to fit him in with her existing engagements in London, followed by an equally familiar irritation with himself.

But a second letter soon took all his attention. The envelope was larger with round, neat writing. Inside were two sheets of writing paper. It was, to his astonishment, from Vera Chilvers.

Dear Mr Bartram,

I couldn't help but overhear you talking with my husband yesterday and afterwards when George had gone out I found your card in the grate. Please don't tell him I have written to you or he would be very angry with me and the post-boy for taking my letter.

You were right, he did take some of Captain Emmett's things. There was a watch on a chain and the letters I think you were looking for. I hadn't realised why he took the letters. I thought it might be that John was complaining about how my husband treated him and it might have got him (George, I mean) into trouble. George can be quite unkind.

He hated John because John was kind to me. John Emmett was my only friend, when he came it was the best time in my life. I miss him all the time. He just talked to me and he gave me a poem he'd written in the war but George tore it up. He gave the pieces back to John. I think George has burned all the letters a while back and now the watch is gone from its usual place so you must have scared him. He was in a furious mood after you had gone.

Before the letters disappeared, they were in his desk. It was the day John went missing and there was such a brouhaha and George was in and out, but he had left these on the top when he was suddenly called away. I only had time to read the one which seemed to have been by John because he had that odd writing. Mostly they were to him from a woman called Elly. I didn't dare take any. They had gone by the evening. I never saw any of them again.