The Return of Captain John Emmett (46 page)

'There was no connection in all this with a Frenchman called Meurice?' he asked on the spur of the moment. Somers' expression was uncomprehending and his head shook almost imperceptibly.

As they reached the front door, Laurence turned to Gwen Lovell. She hadn't put on the light in the hall and in the open doorway her face was dark.

'Your son was a wonderful poet,' he said. 'He had a magical gift and he spoke for all of us. He should have lived.'

She was silent.

He followed Charles down her chequerboard path and didn't look back. Even as he shut the gate behind him, he still wasn't sure he had made the right decision. Would Somers have shot him but for Gwen Lovell and Charles's adventitious arrival? How close had Somers been to shooting Mrs Lovell?

He stood for a second, feeling the weight of Somers' gun in his pocket, and looked in through the open curtains. Somers and Mrs Lovell were sitting opposite each other in the front room. They could have been any middle-aged couple about to make cocoa and go to bed.

As he and Charles trudged up the street towards the car he spoke. 'So, what made you come and find me?'

'Saved by an old soldier. You were hardly through Mrs Lovell's door,' Charles said, 'when I noticed Nicholas Bolitho had left his wooden guardsman in the footwell of the car. I thought I could just whizz back and give it to Mrs Bolitho and still get to Savile Row. But Mrs Bolitho—Eleanor—wanted to give me a message for you. It was something she'd remembered. She thought she might have come across the man in the photograph. She was thrown when you showed it to her because he was so much thinner in the picture than when she'd nursed him, and she'd known him as Harry not Edmund. But it was the name that niggled at her, because Hart was a German name as well as a British one, and that made her think, because she'd once had a British patient with a German name. And she thought it was him. She remembered that, because they'd had prisoners of war as temporary orderlies and she had heard Hart joking with them. Harry spoke perfect German, she said. When she warned him to be careful who overheard him—feelings were running high after some bad losses—he told her his mother was half German and had been a classical singer in Berlin and that he'd been born in Germany. Well, after we'd left—what a mind that woman has—Eleanor starting putting two and two together. Almost as good as Mrs Christie. Apparently you'd told her Mrs Lovell had once been a singer in Germany?'

'I've no idea. I may have done.'

'So I said, "But our Hart was born in England. We checked. In Winson in the Cotswolds. Can't get much more British than that." She gave me a very long, teacher-like look and said, "Winsen is a city in Lower Saxony." But the next bit's interesting. She said that illness and long, sleepless nights often had the effect of causing men to unburden themselves of secrets. At one point, the lad had also told her that his father was a famous British military man, but that he had never met him and that his mother didn't even know that he'd found out. Eleanor thought it was a fantasy—a product of fever and unhappiness.'

'He knew Somers was his father all along?'

'Well, possibly not all along. But he knew. It can't have been that hard for a enquiring boy.'

Laurence thought of that other enquiring boy, John Emmett, who had discovered that his sister was not his father's child. He also remembered puzzling over Brabourne's account of Hart's dying words. So the boy died believing that his father, the courageous officer, would be ashamed of him. Laurence was glad Somers need never know.

'Once she'd remembered the name,' Charles said, 'she recalled that, like Emmett, he was something of a poet. She didn't know whether they'd met but thought John might have seen some of Hart's work.'

'Dear God. But what made you break in?'

'Well, Eleanor was suddenly uneasy. Mostly because she was sure you were going to blunder in, oblivious, waving your waiting-for-dawn photograph at the mother of a dead man, which of course was precisely what you did.' Charles looked smug. 'But partly she, and I, just had a bad feeling about it. About Mrs Lovell, to be honest. Had a hard time stopping Eleanor coming along. Thought I might as well come to the house, gun in pocket; knew you wouldn't approve if you saw it. If all was well, or you'd just got yourself in an emotional pickle with Mrs L, I could have done my "can't sit freezing my bollocks off in the car any longer" speech. If all was not well, then I could weigh in. QED. Looked in through the window, saw Somers. A famous military man, no less, in Mrs L's parlour. And then I saw the gun in his hand. Pointing at you.'

'Thank you. You may just have saved my life.'

'I don't think so for a minute,' said Charles. 'I don't think he ever intended to hurt you and I'm certain he wouldn't have done anything more to hurt Mrs Lovell. I think you just caught them unexpectedly. He improvised while he decided what to do. The gun simply gave him time, although I thought better of announcing myself by the front door once I'd seen it. Went round the back. Found Mrs Lovell sitting at the pantry table, all these papers and photographs spread out around her, and her head on her arms, weeping. I just tapped, smiled. She jumps up, very embarrassed to be caught red-eyed and wild-haired, and lets me in, easy as you please. Neither of them exactly has a criminal bent. My guess is she wanted it stopped.'

'Your rescue mission could have gone hideously wrong.'

'Hard to see Somers as a killer.'

'I think he saw himself as a warrior. Soldiers at war aren't murderers. They're heroes. Somers was fighting a battle.'

'I don't expect Mrs Lovell knew?'

'Not at first. Later she may have suspected something was amiss but it's not as if Somers was living with her or as if the news of each death was a headline murder until Mullins. She didn't even know the names of the men involved in her son's execution. She didn't even know he'd been shot at dawn. I think Somers only told her when Brabourne contacted him about where the photograph was.'

'But she knows now,' Charles said grimly. 'She heard much of your conversation.'

'I think she already knew. She may have found out only recently. But she knew.'

He remembered the sad but calm, candid woman he had met a matter of weeks ago. Since he first saw her, her spirit had been crushed.

'But what
I
want to know,' Charles went on, more slowly, 'is how did the general persuade Emmett to break bounds and meet him, then go off to some godforsaken wood in the middle of winter?'

'The meeting was easy. He simply asked him to come. Said Gwen Lovell would be there. John could tell her everything, as he longed to do. Why John then went with him to such a remote spot, I don't think we'll ever know. He knew the Folly from school, of course.'

'When did Somers shoot him?'

Laurence shook his head, still unable to understand why it had ended there. Somers obviously wanted to kill him away from the house and presumably John just trusted him.

'Probably a couple of days after they met. He didn't want to interrogate John at Holmwood, apart from anything else. He certainly didn't want him reaching Gwen and giving her every miserable detail. He'd promised she'd be at his house. How long could he stall, even when he'd told John the truth about his son? Yet John was torn apart with remorse, did what he could to make some kind of restitution. Was honest with Somers himself. I should think Mrs Lovell was horrified to know Somers killed him. I don't think she knew
that
until tonight. After all, Emmett had only wanted to help her.'

Nevertheless, he reflected that Somers, who had gone out of his way to mutilate the men he'd killed, had been careful to leave John's face untouched.

'What are you going to tell Mary?'

'The truth, I suppose. Before anyone else does.'

'And the police?'

'I'll give him his twenty-four hours.'

Charles shrugged. They sat in the car and still he made no move to go. Three girls passed them, arm in arm, singing a Christmas carol.

'You don't really believe that there'll ever be a trial?' Charles said.

'No.'

'Will he do the decent thing?'

'Possibly.'

'So you think that him putting an end to himself would be a better outcome than the gallows?'

'Yes, I do, actually. A trial would only injure more people.'

'And you don't think there's a risk to Mrs Lovell and the girl?'

'No,' said Laurence, trying to suppress a flicker of uncertainty. 'He had his chance and he couldn't face it.'

Nevertheless, whatever happened to Somers, he thought, the future looked bleak for the Lovells, both mother and daughter.

Charles started the car and they drove on slowly out on to the main road, following a tram into the heart of the city, and in all that time they never exchanged another word.

Laurence lay awake for hours, going over and over the previous evening, trying to understand what had happened. He had a profound sense of having made a serious mistake. Was it a failure to imagine the impact of his questioning on those he spoke to? He had been too ready to treat them as one-way conduits of information, never considering that the flow of information might run both ways. Why
hadn't
he called the police? Although he had felt reasonably certain that Somers was of no further danger, it was a huge and possibly dangerous assumption. He had been numb and exhausted at the time but now anxiety crept in.

Laurence would never be sure whether he had acted correctly. And what would Somers do now? For all his chivalric instincts to unravel John's death for Mary, it was she who had asked the one question he should have looked into early on: where were Edmund Hart's family? There was in itself nothing sinister about anglicising German names in war. It was common sense. The Coburg Hotel, the Bechstein Hall; even the royal family had dispensed with Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in favour of Windsor. Anyone with British loyalties or interests shed a name that tied them to an enemy.

However, even if he'd laid his hands on every bit of information; even if he had persuaded the police in the beginning that there was a link between the deaths—and perhaps he should have done this—they would only ever have succeeded in tracking down Somers slightly earlier than they had. Almost all the killing had already been done. Charles and Laurence had, perhaps, saved the life of General Hubert Gough, a man for whom Laurence had little respect. He wondered whether, had Somers' intended ultimate victim been anybody other than Gough, he would have been so willing to walk away the evening before.

His thinking was cut short by a hammering on the street door.

'Telegram,' the lad said, handing over the familiar envelope. 'Your bell needs to be fixed.'

Laurence's heart raced for a moment. Telegrams were always bad news. He walked back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed, just holding it. He dreaded finding that it was from India.

Finally he tore it open and forced himself to look. It was from Mary.
PLEASE MEET TOMORROW EASTBOURNE STATION MIDDAY REPLY ONLY IF NOT AVAILABLE M
.

Sitting there, all alone, he beamed.

Travelling to the south coast was easy. The day was clear, the train was on time, the carriages half empty. As he stepped from the train, seagulls were wheeling and screeching overhead. Even on this December day he could smell salt in the fresh air.

Mary was waiting outside in a small car.

'See, I drive
and
punt,' she said, as he slipped into the passenger seat and finally succeeded in shutting the door after banging it three times. 'I was taught during the war.' The car smelled of leather and mould and her. It creaked every time he moved. 'And I've borrowed my doctor friend's car so that we can get about. We've got it for only two hours, though, while he's on duty at the cottage hospital.'

She leaned over and gave him a kiss. He nuzzled into her hair and tried to clasp her neck beneath the folds of scarf. She twisted round awkwardly, burying her face in his coat with her arms around his neck. The embrace was bulky and marvellous and safe. Then she pushed him away from her slightly.

'You've got things to tell me,' she said. 'Important things. I can see it in your face. I'd asked you here because I had something to show you but now you must tell me what's happened.'

And so, not at all as he had planned, he sat in the Austin on the station forecourt and told her everything that had unfolded and much, though not all, of what he knew. She didn't stop him; indeed, her expression scarcely changed. Mostly she gazed full at him, a little anxiously but concentrating. After a while she looked down at her gloved hands on the wheel and moved them to her lap.

'I'm not sure whether my intervention helped, really,' said Laurence. 'I'm afraid the truth is as dismal in its way as how things originally looked.'

'Not for me,' she said.

Laurence didn't respond.

'Which doesn't mean it isn't just as horrible and sad. In fact, because it involves more people and more destroyed lives, it's sadder really. But, in a selfish way, for me, it's a kind of easing of the heart. An enemy killed John as surely as they might have done at any time in the war. The motive was desperately unfair.' Her voice was slightly hoarse. 'But this way I can think about John without struggling with the fact that after all he'd been through he chose to leave us.'

He was immensely relieved that she felt the same as Eleanor, although something had bothered Somers about John's death and that something was bothering Laurence now.

'How do you think the general thought it would end?' Mary asked.

'I'm not sure. Somers certainly intended to kill General Gough. Who knows whether that would finally have been enough?'

'Why did he leave Gough until last?'

'My guess is that it was tactics. If he went for the high-profile people first—Gough and, to a degree, Mullins—there would have been many more questions asked and the risk of him not finishing his self-imposed task would have been increased. After all, if you hadn't wanted to understand John's death, not even dreaming that he'd been murdered, Somers would presumably have got away with it all.'