Broken Music (21 page)

1917

In the late summer, there had been a curious lull after the prolonged fighting which had ended with the victorious capture of the Messines Ridge from the enemy, and a mood of tentative optimism prevailed, regardless of the artillery thundering in the distance on other battle lines. Rumours were rife that an enormous offensive was in the offing, one designed to drive right through Belgium to the coast and capture the enemy submarines which were doing so much damage to the navy. More than a rumour, if the massive influx of troops, guns, supplies, horses, wagons and tents now camped out in the Ypres salient meant anything.

Meanwhile, in the relative calm, the day-to-day nursing went on: everyday ailments, coughs, colds and mild flu epidemics, bronchitis, trench fever and the ever-present trench foot. Even, from time to time, cases of highly contagious tuberculosis, consumption, that men from poor backgrounds, malnourished and undersized, unsuspectingly carried, bringing them a certain ticket home if a less than hopeful future.

The big push eventually began at the end of July, and by the time it was two weeks old, it was only too evident that this was going to be one of the bloodiest battles of the war so far. The bloodiest and surely the wettest. It began to rain, and went on raining as no one had seen it rain since Noah, it seemed, and the mud level, on this low-lying land reclaimed from the sea, rose. Tommies stood up to their waists in mud and slime to fire their guns at the enemy. Dead and wounded men, horses, limbers and guns sank into it without trace. And into the casualty clearing station, barely six miles from the fighting line, where the medical team which Duncan headed was now working night and day, snatching whatever sleep they could, whenever possible, the casualties poured in, convoy after convoy, in numbers uncountable. The wounded and dying, grateful for any comfort they could be given, looked on the nurses as angels, the doctors as miracle workers. The nurses were surely angels, but Duncan knew he was no miracle worker. Amputating hopelessly smashed arms and limbs hour after hour, up to the elbows in blood, he felt more like a butcher.

Nella had come out of the makeshift ward one night, despatched off duty for a few hours' rest, just as dark was descending. The nightly barrage, the firework display of Very lights, bursting star shells and the accompanying crescendo of guns, was beginning. He was standing outside, snatching a few minutes to smoke a cigarette in the lee of an ambulance from the last convoy which would shortly return for yet another cargo of wounded, his cigarette a red pinpoint glow in the dark. She didn't at first see him, and stood for a moment on the duckboards over the mud outside the lighted opening as if she couldn't quite orientate herself. She looked dazed with exhaustion, as they all were, by the continual demands of the work, and emotionally drained by the suffering they witnessed daily. When would it all end? she had asked, only the day before – not until both sides had annihilated each other and there was no one left to fight? She'd had no news of her brother recently and he knew she lived in hourly dread of seeing him brought in, mortally wounded.

Two weeks ago, her friend, Daisy, had been killed.

It was almost an accident, a shell tearing through the canvas walls of the makeshift operating theatre where she and Nella were assisting Duncan. She had turned to catch some light to thread a needle for him to stitch a wound. An orderly, standing two or three feet away, had moved at the precise moment when the piece of shrapnel would have hit him; Daisy fell, and died within a few minutes. She wasn't the first nurse to have been killed or injured, by any means, but this had been Daisy, Nella's friend. Funny, brave Daisy who would never again make rude remarks about Sister Griggs, or weep over the bundle of their chopped-off hair on the floor, who would never again run risks to be with George Chiversleigh. In a uniform so unbelievably immaculate it was hardly believable in all that filth and chaos, with his blonde hair disciplined to smooth silk when he took off his cap at the funeral, his face like stone and his eyes dazed and blank, George had been granted a few hours' leave to come and see Daisy lowered into her grave, watched by a crowd of weeping nurses, the coffin covered with a Union Jack. A week later, he, too had been killed. Company officers did not last long, after all.

Seeing Nella standing there, looking so lost, Duncan spoke her name gently and she raised her head. ‘Captain Geddes,' she said automatically, as if still on duty, rubbing her hands, chapped and chilblained in winter, always raw with constant scrubbing and disinfectants: hydrogen peroxide, Lysol and carbolic.

‘What's that you're rubbing?'

‘Only a scratch.'

‘Be careful.'

She nodded. Her glance went to the photo he was holding.

Creased with much handling, it was with him wherever he went, and without any conscious thought of what he was doing, he held it out to her saying, ‘My son, Jamie.' He saw his words, and the sight of his wife and child, fall like a blow on her and could not believe what he had done. Apart from the unforgivable insensitivity of it, he could not have chosen a worse time.

But she seemed hardly to glance at it, and even summoned up the ghost of a smile as she handed the photo back. ‘He looks very like you.' She said nothing about pretty Dolly, in her light chiffon dress, with her hand on the shoulder of their son, but pushed her hair back from her face and leant back against the wall of the hut, closing her eyes. He could not have forced explanations on her then, utterly spent as she was. She would be asleep where she stood if she stayed there much longer.

‘You need some rest,' he said gently, shaking her. He took her elbow and began to guide her to the billet she now shared with another nurse. Someone came out of the ward. ‘Captain Geddes?'

‘You're needed,' she said.

He hesitated fractionally. Then he bent and kissed her gently on the forehead. Tomorrow he would explain.

The sight of her walking away from him was not one he wished to remember.

The following day she was forced to report sick, and was immediately despatched by ambulance to the base hospital. Infected fingers weren't unusual – dressing the filthy, gangrenous and often poisonous wounds the men suffered was dangerous, however careful you were – but this was acute. She lay, very ill, in the base hospital for several weeks, after which she had been sent home. He wondered if she knew how fortunate she was not to have died.

He carried on with his work. The carnage and suffering was beyond human belief. All for a few yards of territory, and possession of a small village called Passchendaele. It went on and on, mirrored by the never-ending struggle to ameliorate pain, to save what life they could. In the midst of it all, weary above exhaustion, he had found time to scribble one or two brief notes to her, but he never received an answer. He knew it was highly unlikely she had ever received them.

Reardon had left Broughton meanwhile and ridden back to Dudley to give the report Kelly had demanded.

‘So it was blackmail?'

‘If it wasn't, I don't know what else you'd call it.'

As usual, Kelly had a quick grasp of the situation, most of which he held in his memory, helped by the few meticulous notes he'd taken as Reardon brought him up to date with the case so far.

‘Lady Sybil
says
the jewellery was to repay her maid for services rendered, so to speak,' Reardon said, ‘but even her husband and daughter seemed to find that hard to swallow. There was nothing of any outstanding value there, I reckon, but added together – well, let's say I wouldn't mind finding a collection like that in my Christmas stocking. But I can't see anyone giving that amount away, unless they were under pressure.'

‘Some indiscretion on the lady's part, maybe, that she needed to keep from her husband? This Arthur Foley's quite a bit older, you say.'

‘Yes he is, but that wasn't the situation as I read it. He's elderly and not in the best of health, apparently, but it seems a perfectly happy marriage.'

‘And that precludes the possibility of a bit of playing fast and loose? Not from what I hear. The expected thing, in some circles, I understand. And anyway, blackmail doesn't only apply to sexual shenanigans.'

Reardon thought for a moment. ‘Any hanky-panky going on was between the victim herself, and the gamekeeper.'

‘That's the man who found her – Naylor…Ben Naylor, right? And I see he found the other girl, the one before the war, Marianne Wentworth, and in the same place, too. Hmm. Unlucky chap – or do we have a prime suspect here?'

‘The verdict on the Wentworth girl was given as accidental death.'

‘And Edith Huckaby was murdered for sure. Well, we'd better find anyone else, as well as her mistress, who might have had good reason to want her out of the way. The lady is capable of using a heavy weapon, I assume?'

‘Physically, I dare say, but—'

‘All right, not much of a woman's crime, I agree. Someone could have done it for her, of course…fancy man, mebbe, if she had one. If the blackmail had become too much to endure. No trace of the weapon?'

‘Not yet. We might do better if we had some idea what we're looking for. Searching for a broken branch or a rock in that spot, I tell you, needles and haystacks aren't in it! Ten to one it's been chucked in the lake, anyway,' observed Reardon gloomily.

‘The PM report should tell us more. Should be here any time, in fact.' Kelly checked the big clock on the wall. ‘Doc Simpson has meetings in London tomorrow, so it's suited him to give it priority. Meanwhile, this Naylor, the gamekeeper. What about him?'

‘He's been with the family since he was a boy, head gamekeeper now, following his father's footsteps. He's a widower, and has been for some time. I reckon he's a bit of a loner, doesn't mix much in the village, doesn't drink there – though he seems respected. He's a religious type, a Methodist.'

‘You're not saying because he's a Methodist he couldn't commit a murder?'

‘No more than I'm saying Edith Huckaby couldn't blackmail because she was a Roman Catholic. But I have to say it doesn't strike me that way, although he admits she'd been trying to persuade him to leave and find better-paid employment. The possibility of that appears to be so remote to him I doubt if he even gave it a passing consideration, never mind had a row about it. As far as I know – yet – he could've had no other motive.'

‘And how many men have you known who've committed murder for no motive any sane person would consider reasonable? Come on, Reardon!'

But Reardon still thought Naylor an unlikely suspect. He was stubborn, no doubt. He would dig in his heels in an argument, but he doubted there was enough passion in him to kill. On the other hand, he
could
be one of the quiet types who smouldered until something, often a quite trivial something, made them explode. But these sort of murders, the way in which Edith Huckaby had been killed, where the killer was in close contact with the victim, were rarely, if ever, coolly premeditated. They were invariably frenzied, repeated attacks, blow after blow committed in uncontrollable anger, in the heat of the moment.

The report on the post-mortem was in fact brought in a few minutes later, by the pathologist who had performed the autopsy himself, a man in a hurry, just as Reardon was about to leave. Kelly gave it a quick scan and passed it over. Sifting through the jargon, it appeared that it had indeed been a single blow to the temple which had killed Edith Huckaby, though it had been one delivered with some force, splitting the skin and fracturing the delicate bones beneath, leaving a star-shaped wound, two inches across.

‘A wound of that type, what sort of implement does it suggest?' mused Kelly.

‘A police truncheon?' hazarded Simpson, a man renowned for his humour.

Kelly looked at him.

‘Well, something similar, or with a similar smooth, rounded end.'

‘A branch, or a smooth stone, maybe?' asked Reardon.

‘Stone, maybe, but wood? Unlikely.' He shook his head. ‘No fragments or wood splinters in the wound. No evidence of a struggle, either, so the end must have been quick. But close contact like that, you should be looking for a good deal of blood on her assailant. These scalp wounds, they bleed a lot. And sorry,' he finished, anxious to be off, ‘that's the best I can do. I'll leave the rest to you.'

‘What about other possibilities? Other than anyone known to her, I mean,' Kelly asked when he'd gone, rubbing the side of his nose. ‘It was a lonely spot. And there are enough tramps, homeless, workless around nowadays, God help 'em, who might have attacked her for what they might get – just for the contents of her handbag, say.'

‘She was still wearing her jewellery, and she didn't have a handbag with her. But she was on her way to visit Naylor, so I don't suppose she needed one,' Reardon answered slowly, his mind on something else. Kelly was right, of course, about the growing number of itinerants, that band of bitter and disillusioned ex-servicemen forced on to the roads by the impossibility of finding any sort of employment. But there were other types of itinerants…

‘Women carry handbags whether they need them or not, ask my wife,' Kelly was remarking dryly. He looked very sharply at Reardon. ‘There's something else?'

With some reluctance, Reardon told him about the Boswell tribe and their encampment in the village, and felt Kelly's ears prick up as he added, ‘…the same family who've been coming back to Broughton for years, except for the war.'

He had no wish to involve the Boswells again, he thought as he watched Kelly add to his notes, but he knew there was no possible way they could be left out of the questioning that the whole village would be subjected to, until Edith Huckaby's killer was found.

The meeting with Kelly over, he was once more on his bike, heading back to Broughton. Blow this for a game of marbles, he thought, but at least henceforth he would be staying at the Greville Arms. And since Kelly had seemed satisfied with how things were going so far, he hoped it meant that he would allow him to have his head without keeping such a tight rein in future.

 

The police were still questioning the hospital staff about the murder but hadn't yet asked for Nella, and as soon as she had the chance, she escaped for a while across the garden to the old summerhouse, the only place she imagined no one was likely to find her. It was known to everyone as the summerhouse, though it was really not much more than a wooden shed with a shingled roof which had always been devoted to the children's use, built beyond the tennis court by the big cedar in the corner before the wild garden began, a little hidden place shaded by trees, where the ground rose in a slight slope above a small, deep, reed-fringed pond.

She hadn't visited it since before the war. Was it possible, she wondered, ducking under the low branches of the dripping trees, that they had grown so much since she was last here? The shade was deeper, the silence more intense as she approached. How gloomy it was, though it had never seemed so before. Or was that only because it wasn't now seen from the perspective of childhood, when this corner had seemed deliciously secret and hidden? Certainly the only colour now was the greenish yellow of the emerging daffodils under the beeches, and a smoulder of purple showing here and there between them where the prima donna chequered fritillaries had condescended this year to put in an appearance. Among the reeds fringing the pool's edges, the yellow flags had spread to take up most of what had only been a small pool in the first place, and were already showing dozens of fat buds among the long spears of their leaves. Fish had once swum there, but the predatory heron which was always on the lookout had no doubt long since despatched them all.

The door wasn't locked. Inside was the same old clutter of cricket bats and warped tennis racquets, sundry odd chairs and a wooden table. The air was dry and dusty, the windows had spandrels of spiders' webs in the corners, the sills were littered with dead lacewings and the corpses of wasps. It smelt of dry wood and the resiny scent of the old cedar whose branches overhung the roof; a smell redolent of all those childhood afternoons passed here, playing games on wet days, with the rain pattering on the shingles.

The old wind-up gramophone still sat on the floor in the corner. Gently, she rubbed the dust off the name painted on the lid in schoolboy characters: GCR Foley. Grev, who'd had it at school with him. Who had soon, in France, been listening to a very different kind of music. Infinite sadness touched her, and despite the dry warmth of the summer house, she shivered.

It seemed her flight across the lawn had not been unobserved, after all. The door opened and the scarfaced man Reardon stood there, one foot in the doorway. ‘Inspector Reardon,' he said, in case she needed reminding. Inspector now – so he had, after all, gone back into the police. ‘I don't wish to intrude, but I did wish to see you before you went home, Miss Wentworth.'

She looked at him warily, then sat down on the nearest chair and gestured to another. The ancient cushions on the seat gave off puffs of dust as they sat. After being told that she had last seen Edith several days ago, and ascertaining that she had been at home with all her family the previous evening, he said, unexpectedly, ‘I'm sorry, this business must have brought it all back to you, about your sister.' She simply nodded. ‘Did you know her well?'

‘Who, Edith? Hardly at all, really.'

‘I'm told your sister knew her better?'

She looked startled. ‘Who told you that?'

‘It doesn't seem to have been a secret that they had interests in common.'

‘Reading, you mean? Yes, there was that. But nothing else.'

‘How did
you
find Miss Huckaby? As a person, I mean?'

She tried to keep her voice even. ‘I'm sorry she's dead but…to be honest, no, I didn't care for her much. She was sly. She listened to private conversations and then repeated them. That was the only reason she made herself friendly with Marianne, I'm sure – to find out anything she could. Marianne was naive enough to believe it was all because of those books.'

‘Do you have any evidence for this?'

She looked at him steadily, wondering if she could trust him, for such a long time that he must think she wasn't going to respond at all. Then she took a deep breath and said, ‘Only my sister's notebooks. We thought they were lost but they've…turned up, after all this time. Only last night, in fact. She never allowed anyone to see what she'd written and she'd hidden them, though it seems…well, it appears she let
Edith
read her notebooks.'

Another long drawn-out silence followed, broken only by the soft scratch and patter of a bird's feet on the shingled roof. Eventually, she said, ‘Well, anyway, that's beside the point. It's Edith you want to talk about now, isn't it, not Marianne?'

‘Miss Wentworth,' he said gently, ‘maybe this is as much about your sister as Edith Huckaby. I suspect there was something in those notebooks you think you ought to tell me about, was there not? Otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned them.'

She looked down at her shoes, the sensible black shoes she was forced to wear day after day, and after a moment or two, she said, ‘She wanted to be a writer, you know…Marianne, I mean. She wrote down everything in those exercise books – ideas for stories as well as completed stories, descriptions of people and the things she knew about them, sometimes not very complimentary. Secrets, sometimes, I'm afraid. She wouldn't let anyone see them, but last night I sat up reading right through them…she can't mind now. Most of the stories were, well, embroideries, though sometimes not.'

‘Isn't all fiction a form of embroidery?'

‘Lies, you mean?' She managed a pale smile. ‘I meant embroideries on real life. She would, you know, take something that had actually happened, or was happening, and write it down as though it was fiction. I recognised all sorts of situations, people too. She was careless about disguising names, and sometimes she didn't even bother. I suppose you'd call them diaries as much as notebooks.'

‘So what was it you learnt from them?'

‘Nothing that I didn't…suspect…before.'

She was starting to regret that she had begun this conversation, but now that she had, she saw there was no alternative but to go on, and maybe he was right, perhaps confronting the past was the only way to deal with the present. ‘We were very close, and I loved her so much, but she was a funny mixture, Marianne. She was hopelessly dreamy, but at the same time she was very determined, and she always had a streak of practicality…shrewdness, I suppose.' She swallowed. ‘Well…a few months before she died, she had…a proposal.'