Death In Captivity (7 page)

‘If we’re going cross-country we should want some sort of covering – a blanket, or at least an overcoat, and a knapsack to carry hard rations.’

‘To say nothing of the rations themselves.’

‘Exactly,’ said Baierlein. ‘Well, my idea was, we take in the small stuff hidden on us, and get the orderlies to smuggle the rest in bit by bit, in the food.’

‘It would need a bloody big apple pie to hide an overcoat in,’ said Overstrand.

They paced on for some minutes and had made a complete circuit of the camp before Overstrand spoke again.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘that we ought to look for something more immediate.’

Neither of the others said anything.

‘I’ve been in nearly two years,’ went on Overstrand, ‘and that’s one hell of a sight too long. Now we’ve had this trouble over the Hut C tunnel I don’t see it going ahead very fast. They may decide to seal it up altogether for a bit. There are too many snags in this ‘cooler’ business to make it worth going flat out for – that’s my view, anyway. I think we ought to try something more straightforward and less – well, less fiddling.’

Baierlein and Grimsdale looked worried. They were both genuinely fond of Overstrand, but they knew that he was apt to be unreliable where his emotions were involved.

‘Had you anything particular in mind?’ said Long.

‘As a matter of fact I had,’ said Overstrand. ‘It’s something that Desmond Foster is doing—’

‘He can’t be starting another tunnel already.’

‘It isn’t exactly a tunnel. It’s top secret, of course, but he couldn’t mind my telling you two. This is how it goes—’

‘Should we look in somewhere for a cocktail first?’ suggested Captain Abercrowther to Captain the McInstalker.

‘Not a cocktail,’ protested the McInstalker. ‘Geraldo is digging out a 1924 Mouton Rothschild for us. A cocktail would be definitely out of place.’

‘Perhaps a glass of sherry.’

‘One glass of brown sherry. We’ve just time. Let’s have it at the Salted Almond. We may run into someone amusing.’

A few minutes passed in silence.

‘One more.’

‘One for the road, then.’

‘Curse. It’s beginning to rain – I don’t think we’ll bother about a cab, though. It’s only a hundred yards.’

Both gentlemen turned up their coat collars against the light autumn rain and strolled down the Shaftesbury Avenue of 1939.

‘Five women,’ said Rupert Rolf-Callender, ‘and twelve men. Thirteen, if you count Flush.’

‘Was he a man?’

‘It says “Flush – a spaniel”.’

‘How are we going to manage about Flush?’

‘First things first,’ said Rolf-Callender. ‘We’ll start with the girls. Peter, you’ll have to do Elizabeth.’

‘Must I?’

‘Certainly you must. The part’s made for you.’

‘Why do I always have to do girls?’

‘To be quite honest,’ said Rolf-Callender kindly, ‘I don’t know. It isn’t as if you were pretty, in any sense of the word, and the trouble we had keeping the backs of your legs shaved for the run of
Bitter Sweet
is a thing I prefer to forget. Nor is your voice precisely virginal. It’s something to do with the bones in your face—’

‘Who’s going to do the father?’

‘I think we shall have to ask Abercrowther.’

‘You can’t have a Mr Barrett with a Scots accent.’

‘We shall have to put up with it. He’s a damned good actor. Do you remember how good he was in the Monty Woolley part in
The Man Who Came to Dinner?
’

‘All right, put him down. Where is he, by the way?’

‘He’s dining out tonight,’ said Bush. ‘What are you going to do, Rupert?’

‘I rather thought I’d try Robert Browning.’

‘My God, Rupert, do you mean to say I’ve got to make love to you again?’

‘You did it very nicely last time,’ said Rolf-Callender complacently. ‘Now all these brothers – Octavius and Septimus and so on. They’re really only stooges. We’d better let the Adjutant do one of them, as then he’ll make no trouble about letting us have the Theatre Hut for rehearsals.’

‘Whatever happens,’ said Bush, ‘we’ve got one absolutely guaranteed laugh here.’ He was turning over the pages of the acting edition.

‘What’s that?’

‘At the beginning of Act III. “Elizabeth (rapturously). ‘Italy! Oh, it’s hard to take in even the bare possibility of going there. My promised land, Doctor, which I never thought to see otherwise than in dreams.’” ’

‘That should bring the house down,’ agreed Rolf-Callender.

‘Doctor Simmonds,’ said Benucci, ‘you are a man of experience?’

‘That would depend what you mean by experience.’

‘Medical experience?’

‘I should say so, yes.’

‘You are not a regular military doctor?’

‘Oh, no. Certainly not.’

‘You are a civilian doctor. You hold the degree of F.R.C.S.?’

‘It’s not exactly a degree,’ said Doctor Simmonds cautiously. ‘Anyway, I expect it’s in my record somewhere. What’s it all about?’

They were in the Camp Commandant’s Office. Besides Benucci, the Chief Interpreter and Doctor Simmonds there was a fourth party present. A thin civilian in black coat and striped trousers, with that neat beard which appears to be the hallmark of professional eminence in Latin countries.

‘I must introduce Professor Di Buonavilla of the medical faculty of the University of Florence.’

The professor rose to his feet and bowed. Doctor Simmonds half got up, made an indeterminate noise, and sat down again.

‘It is because we wish to proceed correctly in this,’ said Captain Benucci smoothly, ‘that I have afforded you – Doctor Simmonds – this opportunity of examining the body of Lieutenant Coutoules. Also, because I understood that you were the best qualified in the Camp to make this examination.’

‘Very good of you,’ said Doctor Simmonds. He was not quite sure what a professor in the faculty of medicine did. ‘If this gentleman is a practising doctor, I have no doubt that his conclusions will be the same as my own.’

‘No doubt,’ said Benucci. ‘That is exactly what we wish to establish. I should perhaps have explained that the professor is consultant to the Police Force at Firenze. It is for his experience in this type of work that we have asked him to assist us. He does not speak English himself but I will ask Lieutenant Mordaci to read you a translation of the statement he has prepared. If there are any questions you wish to ask, pray use the services of the interpreter.’

Mordaci read from the statement in front of him. It was a long statement. It started with a description of the body of Coutoules as the professor had seen it at two o’clock on the afternoon of its discovery. It contained some sound observations on rigor mortis, postmortem bruising and the tendency of blood to drain outwards from the centre of the corpse after death. Doctor Simmonds, who had the essential disinterested honesty of the expert, found it hard to disagree with any of its conclusions. These were: that Coutoules had died some time one side or the other of midnight, but not earlier than nine o’clock on the previous evening; that death had been due to asphyxiation; and that the body had been moved and handled after death.

‘Have you any comments to make, Doctor?’ asked Benucci, when the statement had finished.

For form’s sake, Doctor Simmonds asked a few questions and Mordaci translated them, and retranslated the professor’s answers. He asked the professor if he had noticed a bruise on the back of Coutoules’ neck. The professor had noticed it. He suggested it might have been made by a stone in the fall of sand. Doctor Simmonds agreed that it might. It was quite clear to him that the professor knew his job – as he would be likely to do if he was, in fact, the police consultant.

‘Well, Doctor,’ said Benucci again, at the end of it, ‘what are your conclusions?’

‘I’m not sure that I follow you.’

‘It seems plain to you that Coutoules was moved after death?’

‘That’s a matter of argument and inference. Not a matter of fact.’

‘If we accept it,’ said Benucci, ‘is it not logical to surmise that Coutoules was smothered first, and placed in the tunnel afterwards, in order to conceal the truth about his murder – and his murderers?’

‘You mean that you think he was killed in one of the huts and put in the tunnel afterwards?’

‘It is not a question of thinking,’ said Benucci, in an ill-natured parody of the doctor’s professional manner. ‘It is a question of evidence.’

‘But that’s absurd,’ said Doctor Simmonds. ‘Did you look at his hands?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘He must have died under the sand. Why, he’d pulled half his nails off trying to claw his way out.’

The last few exchanges had been in English. The professor had clearly understood nothing.

‘Ask
him,’
said Doctor Simmonds.

There was an awkward moment of silence whilst Mordaci looked at his senior officer for guidance.

‘Put the question, Lieutenant,’ said Benucci evenly.

Mordaci said something in Italian.

Doctor Simmonds did not listen to the answer. He was looking at the professor’s face. His expression was enlightening. He started to say something, then changed his mind; started a second sentence, and broke off in the middle of it.

Benucci said: ‘The professor says that he does not attach any particular significance to the state of Coutoules’ hands.’

The Escape Committee met in Colonel Baird’s room. Baird sat on the only chair; the other two members of the committee sat on his bed. They were Colonel Stanislaus Shore of the U.S. Air Force and Commander Oxey of the Royal Navy. No one had been able to discover by exactly what administrative muddle these two had been sent to a camp for British Army Officers, but everyone was very glad to have them. Colonel Shore, in particular, was a three-dimensional character in his own right. He was the only prisoner-of-war in Italy who had ever forced an officer of carabinieri to carry his luggage for him to the station. The fact that he was drunk at the time had detracted nothing from the performance.

It was Colonel Shore who was speaking.

‘I certainly find it difficult to figure out exactly what they’re up to,’ he said. ‘They’ve never made a fuss like this before over a dead body. You remember when they shot Colley and his two friends when they tried to rush the gate – we didn’t hear anything more about
them,
did we? They were buried and forgotten inside a week. Forgotten by the Italians, I mean. I reckon someone’s got the facts notched up somewhere to sort out after the war’s over.’

‘Or those men who jumped the train—’ said Commander Oxey.

‘I think this is a little different,’ said Colonel Baird. ‘Those others were all killed escaping. For some reason the Italians refuse to be convinced that Coutoules was.’

‘That doctor from Florence,’ said Shore, ‘and the finger-printing and all those photographers they’ve been taking round the dig. Maybe I’ve got a suspicious mind, but the whole thing’s beginning to look to me like the beginning of a frame-up. It has the smell of one. They want to pin the murder on to someone, and I don’t believe they’re fussy who they choose.’

‘Who
did
kill Coutoules?’ asked Oxey.

This direct, naval question produced a silence.

‘I’m damned if I know,’ said Colonel Baird. ‘On the face of it, the thing’s impossible. The only sort of solution that holds any water is that he was knocked off sometime that evening in Hut C, and dumped in the tunnel.’

‘If that’s so,’ said Shore, ‘an awful lot of people are telling an awful lot of lies.’

‘It might be a good thing to find out,’ said Oxey. ‘We don’t want the wrong person hanged.’

‘Now, Captain Byfold,’ said Benucci, ‘I should strongly advise you to speak the truth.’

‘I doubt if you’d recognise it if you heard it,’ said Byfold.

Nevertheless, he was neither as comfortable nor as confident as he sounded. He was in the Camp Commandant’s Office. The Commandant, Captain Benucci and Lieutenant Mordaci were seated. Since there were only three chairs in the room, it followed that the rest of those present – Captain Byfold, Under-Lieutenant Paoli, two camp guards and three or four carabinieri – were standing. They seemed to have been standing for a long time. Byfold wondered what would happen if he suddenly sat down on the floor.

‘Were you a member of the party who were engaged in digging a tunnel from the bathroom in Hut A?’

‘As I have said a dozen times before, that’s not a question I can be made to answer.’

‘If it was simply a matter of escaping, no. This is a question of murder.’

‘Who says that it is murder?’

‘The facts say so. For the last time, Captain Byfold, did you work in that tunnel?’

‘For the last time, I refuse to say.’

‘Are you aware that your finger-prints – and only yours – have been found in several places on one of the pieces of wood which formed the upright of the framework in the shaft of that tunnel?’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do say so. A piece of wood, Captain Byfold, which formed – I use the past tense – which formed one of the uprights. It had been removed from the framework of the shaft, and very carelessly replaced. It had plainly been put to some use in the tunnel.’

‘Very possibly,’ said Byfold wearily. ‘Woodwork is used in a tunnel you know. It has a variety of uses—’

‘A variety of uses.’ Benucci smiled. It was not a very pleasant smile. ‘Might I inform you also – I do not wish it to be said at some future time that we have concealed anything from you – might I therefore inform you that photographs taken in the tunnel show a number of marks in the roof – and that these marks have been measured and match exactly the piece of wood to which I refer. What do you deduce from that, Captain Byfold?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I suggest that the wood was used to bring down the tunnel on Coutoules – whilst he was, perhaps, unconscious – ’

That’s a perfectly filthy suggestion.’