The Return of Captain John Emmett (9 page)

'It's just that John Emmett killed himself. His family has very little idea why he did so. His mother's a widow. He has a sister. Forgive me; they just thought that you might have been a friend or the wife of a friend of his.' He didn't want to say outright that he'd just been told she too had lost a son. 'They never wanted to bother you.'

'Still, I understand it no more than you, Mr Bartram,' she said. 'Until a year or so ago I had never heard of Captain Emmett. And then I received a letter from him. Just a few months later I hear that he has died in that dreadful way, leaving me all this money. Discovering that we had received this from a complete stranger, and a stranger who had then killed himself, was very disturbing.'

'A letter?' Laurence hoped he hadn't sounded too excited.

'Yes. It was an odd letter in its way, but then it turned out to have been written only weeks before he took his life. It came in November last year. Captain Emmett said he wanted to meet me, that he had something to tell me about Harry, my son. I can't remember his phrasing but he was quite pressing. However, sadly, he never made an appointment.'

'Do you still have the letter?' Laurence asked.

'Not any more. I'm sorry. But I knew men sometimes wrote to parents of friends who'd been killed and I was grateful to hear from him.'

When she went to fetch the tea-tray he paced around the room. To one side of the door were two silhouettes: a boy and a younger girl. He presumed they were Catherine and her brother. There was a lithograph of a Gothic-looking castle and an old theatre poster in a frame. A young woman in an elaborate feather headdress stood singing, hands clasped. He looked closely. It looked like Catherine, but could be a much younger Mrs Lovell.

She returned, set a teapot, china and a plate of cake on a small table, then sat in a chair with her back to the window.

'Did you reply?' he said. 'To the letter?'

'Of course. But he never wrote again.'

There was an awkward silence, which she filled abruptly.

'You knew Captain Emmett well? It must be very terrible for his family.'

Laurence hastily swallowed his mouthful of Dundee cake. Crumbs fell on his tie. 'I was at school with him, but he wasn't a close friend. Not really. Not as adults.'

'But Miss Emmett, his sister, she is a friend?'

'Well, I suppose so. I don't really know her either. I mean, not well.'

She looked at him quizzically. 'My husband died when Captain Emmett must have been scarcely more than a child,' she said, effectively pre-empting his next question. 'He was older than me and had been an invalid for many years. He died in Nice when Catherine was three. Then my son was killed in the war.' Her eyes dropped to her linked hands. She wore no jewellery. 'He was twenty-one. Now we are just the two of us.'

This time the silence seemed infinite. To say he was sorry seemed an absurd irrelevance.

'Harry volunteered as soon as he was eighteen. He was buried near Le Crotoy. But I am told his grave is lost.' She looked at Laurence. 'Captain Emmett must have been a friend of Harry's. Don't you think so? I met only one or two of his friends, and one died out in Flanders, but I don't remember an Emmett. Wouldn't he have told me?'

'I simply have no idea. But certainly one of the other bequests, apart from his family, was to an officer who served with him, so it's possible. Was Harry in the West Kents?'

This time it was she who had a mouthful of cake, so she shook her head. He put down his plate and when he looked up she had turned to gaze out of the side pane of the bay window.

'You know all these stories people tell about how they were lying in bed one night and their loved one walked in, or they were out walking and heard a voice calling them from far away, and soon after the news came of their death? How they just
knew?
Well, nothing like that happened to me,' she said quietly. 'If it
were
possible, then it would have. We were very close, you see. He was quite a solitary boy and he would share things with me: stories, pictures, shells, birds' eggs.

'One afternoon Catherine and I went walking on Parliament Hill Fields. It was March and we were trying to fly a kite. We weren't very good: it was Harry's kite really and he was so clever with it. Finally it went soaring off and caught round a chimney. It looked like a flag: white, red and black, and I said to Catherine that we had better escape or we might be arrested as foreign agents.' She smiled, more to herself than him. 'We came back laughing to the house, just clutching the string, and when I turned a corner I saw him. The telegraph boy. Standing at the bottom of our steps, just out there.'

She turned her head a little towards the window.

'I held Catherine's hand so tightly that she cried out, and I turned round and I walked with her across the road and back to the green, and then I ran and ran, pulling her along, and she kept stumbling and she started to cry, and I looked up and saw the kite, bright on the rooftops, and I knew it was no good. I couldn't turn the clock back an hour earlier, or a day, or a year, or three years. We sat on the grass for hours until it got dark and rather cold, and finally a woman came out from the houses, and she spoke to us and was kind, and she and her husband walked us home and there it was—the telegram. My neighbour had it. She had told the boy "no reply". She knew, of course.'

The rush of words stopped. She swallowed hard.

'We hadn't been here that long. It had gone to our old address first. It was weeks since he'd actually died. So, you see, I wasn't even thinking about him when I thought I still
had
him, before I knew he was gone. Who knows what I was doing at the moment he died. Peeling an apple? Riding on a tram? Shopping at Swan and Edgar? Who knows what
he
was doing? I didn't. Was he killed immediately? Did he linger in pain? I dreamed of it, of course. Not every night but often. As one does.'

Laurence thought how natural she seemed to think dreams of the dead were. He never admitted to anyone that he dreamed of Louise.

'I dreamed of him dying in every imaginable way, but it was worse when I dreamed he was alive. I could smell him, touch him, and then I'd wake up and it was new agony all over again. But you've lost someone yourself?' she ventured, obviously noticing his unease. 'Someone close to you? Not just Captain Emmett?'

Laurence said nothing for a few seconds. Finally he said, 'A long time ago,' and knew she didn't believe him.

The room was starting to darken but she made no attempt to turn on the light, not even when she went out to the kitchen to send the maid home. When she returned, she seemed to have come to a decision.

'You know, I would very much have liked to know what Captain Emmett had to tell me. He probably knew Harry, possibly had some details about his death. But I don't think I ever shall know now what he wanted and I don't want to try to find out. For a long time I did but I owe it to Catherine to make a proper life for her, not one overshadowed with grief.' She paused. 'It's different for me, of course. For me life is over.'

Laurence sat forward.

'I'm so very sorry,' he said, and he meant it. 'I wish I could help, I wish I could tell you more about John Emmett; there must be a connection but I've found nothing, yet.'

'No,' she said, 'I'm not asking for that.'

She looked down at her hands. It was obviously time for him to leave and in saying goodbye he was not surprised that she didn't ask him to keep in touch with her.

On the way home, Laurence was cross with himself for not asking her a bit more. However, he had been unnerved by the depths of sorrow behind her dignified exterior and it had seemed to him that she didn't want her daughter to overhear their conversation.

As he left he'd said, 'I don't have a card, but...' He plunged his hand into his coat pocket to find only the Wigmore concert programme. 'I'll give you my name and address in case you want to talk to me.'

He tore off a bit of the back cover and started to write. She didn't offer him anything better to write on and he felt a bit of a fool, but it seemed a courtesy after he'd invaded her afternoon without warning.

'Thank you,' she had said and then added, 'So you like music, Mr Bartram?' She picked up the programme as it lay on the console table.

'Yes, I do,' he replied.

'I was a singer once,' she said almost off-handedly. 'Classical repertoire mostly. I trained for over four years. I sang on the continent but gave it all up when my son was born.'

'The Elgar was wonderful at this concert,' he said after a few seconds. 'It made me feel that things were getting back to normal.'

He cursed himself for not thinking. He was talking to a woman whose life could never be normal again, yet she actually brightened and nodded in agreement as she skimmed the programme before handing it back. He hovered on the doorstep for a second, made his farewell and walked towards the main road deep in thought.

People didn't just inherit money from strangers. There had to be a link and he would find it. He felt that he had at least established that John had a reason, even one known only to John, for the bequest. One he'd meant to explain, perhaps. But what had made him change his mind?

When Laurence got home there were, unusually, three letters waiting. A plump one was from India and he set it aside for later. The second was from his publishers. The third was in unfamiliar handwriting.

Dear Mr Bartram,

There was something I wanted to ask you but I didn't want to speak in front of William because he needs to look forward, not back to the war. We all must.

However, you may not have realised, and it didn't seem the time to raise it, but I knew John Emmett for a while. I doubt William will have thought to tell you.

I nursed him out in France and of course that's how I met William, too. I just wondered, for my own peace of mind, whether you were quite certain that John's death was deliberate. You see, although John may have been troubled, he was strong in his way. He had inner resources—talents. He wrote, he could draw marvellously. He had things to live for, however difficult his circumstances.

You do hear of people being careless while cleaning a gun, say (though I'd like to know how he had hidden a gun if he was being treated for melancholia). But I just hope somebody who didn't know him properly hadn't jumped to any conclusion just because he was ill after the war. Someone told me that tens of thousands of men are trying to claim pensions for nervous conditions and they are probably the saner ones. Anyway, they are not all killing themselves. I'm sorry to bother you and to ask you to keep my letter to yourself but hope, in time, you might be able to reassure me that things were properly investigated. John Emmett was an exceptional man.

Yours sincerely,
Eleanor Bolitho

Laurence read it twice and sat back in his chair. Her words on the need to face forward carried echoes of Mrs Lovell's determination but, knowing Eleanor Bolitho had been a nurse in France, he should have thought to ask her whether she knew John. Nevertheless, he had never considered for a minute that John's death could have been an accident. Was that naive of him, being so ready to believe the man he once known and admired had loaded his gun and shot himself in the—what? temple? mouth? He'd had a corporal once who'd shot himself, though no one was sure whether it was because he was careless or had had enough. The shot had gone through his chin and taken off the back of his head.

Eleanor was right. He had accepted the story at face value because John was already unstable. It dawned on him that he knew very little about how John had died. Where
had
he got the gun? Plenty of officers had held on to their pistols, although it was officially frowned upon, yet he imagined any nursing home would have searched their patients' belongings. John could have got one from someone else but that would mean that there was someone out there who knew more about the suicide and yet hadn't come forward. Given John was dead, it had never seemed to matter where the gun had come from.

Once Laurence started to consider what he did not know, or even what Mary might know but had not volunteered, he realised how little substance there was to the account of John Emmett's death. Where was the wood where the body was found, for instance? Mary had said it was on the edge of the county.

He pulled out an elderly atlas of England from his shelves. Fairford was in south-east Gloucestershire, almost on the border where three counties met: Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire. But Somerset, Monmouthshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire also shared boundaries, though much further away. How far had John travelled before dying? Where was the inquest held?

He wasn't sure whether acting as Mary's private detective was quixotic or ridiculous, but there were surprisingly positive aspects to it and not just the emotions he was trying to suppress regarding Mary herself. He'd enjoyed meeting William and Eleanor Bolitho and he was intrigued by Mrs Lovell. He had wondered briefly whether either she or her daughter had been John's lover, but the girl was far too young and he just couldn't see Mrs Lovell's charms appealing to a man in his twenties.

He was still puzzled by John having that much money to leave. It didn't fit in with the gossip relayed by Charles. He could ask Mary, if he phrased it subtly. But at least John's will had established a scale of things. Bolitho had received a goodish sum for helping John survive an accident, although Bolitho had represented himself as little more than an observer. Whatever Mrs Lovell had done, it was evidently of slightly less importance than that, judging by the size of the bequest. The lost or dead Frenchman, M. Meurice, had been left half the sum Bolitho had received. Doullens was near the battlefields of the Somme. Had Meurice helped John out there in some way?

Realistically, Lovell and Meurice had to be connected through John's military service. Bolitho certainly was and, anyway, war had been John's occupation for most of the years leading up to his incarceration and death, leaving little time for anything else. Was it possible that Mrs Lovell, like Eleanor Bolitho, had been a nurse in France? It seemed highly unlikely as she had a young daughter. Yet whatever the connection was, it had not existed, or had not been pressing enough, for John to recognise it in his previous will, made in 1914. Yet perhaps that first will had been made with very little thought of death as a real possibility. It was just a routine for all departing officers and they were all such gung-ho optimists then.