Homeland (48 page)

He pedalled hard up the last of the slope and along the boundary fence at the top of the meadow before turning in through the gate. Coasting down the track, he saw Stan standing in the yard with
two men, and below them, coming up the drove-road, a bunch of uniformed policemen in tight formation. At first Wladyslaw couldn’t make out what locked them together, then he saw Jozef’s
head jerk up from their midst and his legs flailing uselessly. One moment Jozef seemed to struggle, the next to collapse, so that the policemen were drawn tighter together by the effort of dragging
him along. Lastly came Billy, with a shotgun over his shoulder.

Halting in a judder of brakes, Wladyslaw ran over and shouted, ‘Jozef! Are you all right?’

Jozef’s head lifted, but the timing was coincidental: his eyes were jammed shut, his teeth bared; he wasn’t seeing anything and he wasn’t hearing much either. He struggled
again, a twist of his shoulders, a wild swing of his head, and Wladyslaw realised his hands were manacled. As one of the uniformed men opened a car door, another pushed Jozef’s head down, and
they bundled him head-first into the back seat.

Wladyslaw said to the approaching plain-clothes officers, ‘This is not a violent man.’

‘Are you Wladyslaw Malinowski?’ asked the older one.

‘This is not a violent man!’ Wladyslaw repeated forcefully.

‘He resisted arrest, sir. We were forced to restrain him. Now, if I might ask you to accompany me to the police station?’

‘Yes, yes!’ Wladyslaw cried impatiently. Then, on a note of reason: ‘But, Officer, I tell you – he knows nothing of this man’s death. And me also. We were here last
night, both of us. Billy – he will tell you—’

But when he turned to look for Billy, it was to see him walking rapidly away towards the house.

‘I’m sorry about Hanley.’ Billy was panting hard from his bike ride up the hill; his words arrived in a rush.

Annie was standing in the doorway wearing a coat; coming or going he couldn’t tell. She was waiting for him to say more, but when he tried to speak again his tongue felt thick, it seemed
to stick to the roof of his mouth; the words came with painful slowness. ‘And I’m sorry . . . for what I said . . . to you.’

She dropped her eyes momentarily, but her expression told him it wasn’t enough.

‘I wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘No.’

Again it was a wrench to speak. ‘It was because of . . . the way I felt about you –
feel
about you. It made me . . .’ He made a gesture, helpless, conciliatory, but
still she offered no help. ‘. . . stupid.’

‘You can say that again.’

Impatient with himself, aware that he must not waste this opportunity, he said boldly, ‘You’re the only one for me, Annie. Always were. Always will be.’

She dipped her head rapidly to look at her feet. When she looked up again, it was with a slow nod, a glimmer of a smile, which gave him a jolt of absurd happiness.

She stood back to let him in and he saw the child standing there, also dressed to go out. Taking off the child’s coat, Annie asked her to go and play for a while.

In the kitchen they embraced silently, before she moved away to fill the kettle. ‘They’re dragging the river at Stanmoor Bridge.’

Relief made him slow on the uptake. ‘What for?’

‘The motorbike. They reckon that’s where it must be. Something to do with the tide – I don’t understand exactly. But Stanmoor Bridge makes sense all right. That’s
the way he would have gone. And there’s a slight bend there, just before the bridge, enough of a bend for him to miss it, the stupid bloody idiot.’ She said it fiercely, with affection
and sorrow.

‘They think he might have crashed, then?’

‘Of course,’ she said, an odd note in her voice. ‘What else would he have done?’

He felt he must be missing something obvious. ‘It’s the police who’re dragging the river?’

‘Yes. Constable Longman, with some Burrowbridge men.’

‘And it was an accident?’

Again, the strange look. ‘Yes. Why do you keep asking?’

‘Because the Taunton police seem to be thinking a bit differently. They’ve just arrested the Polacks and hauled them off for questioning.’

‘Wladyslaw? Jozef? But why?’

‘They didn’t say.’

‘To do with Lyndon’s death, though?’

‘Yes.’

‘But what . . .?’ She pressed a hand to her forehead while she ordered her thoughts. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake . . . Not that stupid fight . . .’ She explained
fretfully, ‘Lyndon and Jozef – they had a scrap last night. There was nothing to it. Nothing. But that was why he came to find me. He always did, you see, when he needed to
talk.’

She stood in the doorway to the sitting room, watching the child drawing pictures at a table under the window. From time to time she called encouragement, once she went over to applaud the
child’s progress, but for the most part she leant back against the door-frame and recounted her story in a low voice.

‘Lyndon found this job for Jozef in London,’ she began. ‘But it all turned sour. I don’t know how or why exactly. But Jozef went and blamed Lyndon, as if Lyndon had done
it on purpose or something. Lyndon was hurt . . . disappointed. He’d only been trying to help.’

Billy leant back against the opposite door-frame, watching her closely, both because he could not get enough of her and because he wanted her to see that he was listening attentively.

‘Jozef was a difficult sort of person, of course. But that was why Lyndon felt a duty to try to help him. He knew what it was like to be an outsider because he was an outsider himself. Oh
yes,’ she insisted, as if Billy had been about to argue the point. ‘He never really fitted in, did Lyndon. Not at school, not at home, not in the army. He felt he marched to a different
tune, that he was always on the outside looking in. The only place he felt happy was at the university because he had a couple of good friends there, and no one cared if he read all day and did no
sport and didn’t join in. It was the only place where he felt no one was looking over his shoulder.’

While she turned to give the child a few words of encouragement, Billy battled to stop a fresh surge of jealousy from showing in his face. ‘He wouldn’t be the first to feel he
didn’t fit in.’

‘No, he wouldn’t. But he had it so bad he could never settle. He was always searching for something, and he never knew what it was.’ She sighed. ‘But this fight last
night – well, it was the last straw. He was already in a high old state about taking the job with the Colonial Office. Is that its name? Colonial Office? Well, whatever it’s called, he
knew he should never have taken the position there. He knew it was a mistake. But his father was proud as Punch, expecting him to rise to whatever you rise to in the Colonial Office. And his mother
was fretting about him going overseas, sure she’d never see him again. And Stella – well, Stella was being Stella, hanging about in hope, waiting for the day he’d ask her to marry
him. All of them wanting him to be something he wasn’t, couldn’t be.’ She stopped abruptly and gazed at the child in an unfocused way. ‘So he came to find me, like he always
did when he needed to talk. We could always talk, see, right from the start.’ She slid Billy a warning look. ‘Now don’t go getting the wrong idea again, Billy. We were drawn to
each other all right, but not in
that
way. Never in
that
way. Which was why we could talk. Why things were so easy between us.’ Once she was satisfied that he had absorbed this
statement, she added with a touch of pride, ‘He knew that I went by my own opinions, that I didn’t give a toss for what he was meant to be, past, present, or future. That whatever he
was, it was all the same to me.’

The child began to hum tunelessly as she laboured at her drawing, and Annie tilted her head to catch the sound. Then she murmured almost to herself, ‘No, they both came out of the war
badly, him and Jozef. That’s what brought on the trouble.’

‘Well, the war wasn’t too easy for anyone, was it?’

‘No,’ she agreed quickly. ‘No, of course not. But with Lyndon—’ She gazed at Billy before coming to a decision. ‘Well, he lost his best friend in Burma, you
see. I don’t know how exactly – he wouldn’t say – but he couldn’t get it out of his mind. It was like—’

A sudden clatter from the living room made them look round. Annie went to retrieve the drawing pad from the floor and say something to the child. When she returned, she said in a murmur,
‘I couldn’t swear to it, but from a couple of things he said I think his friend was captured by the Japanese and badly treated. And that somehow Lyndon heard it happening. They were in
the jungle, you know. And somehow he heard it . . .’

In the silence that followed, Annie straightened up and went into the passageway. When she returned she was wearing her coat again.

‘I must get Beth to her friend’s then go to the police. Do you think I should try to find Constable Longman? Or go to Taunton, to the police station there?’

‘I don’t know. What’re you going to say?’

‘Why, that I saw Lyndon right as rain after the fight. That he drove off on his bike afterwards. That the Poles were nowhere about.’

‘I’ll come with you then.’

She looked pleased. ‘You will?’

‘Course.’ He kissed her lightly on the mouth, and the memory of their row receded like a bad dream. ‘And for what it’s worth I’ll tell them I saw the Polacks making
their way down the hill from the pub, and that they got to the farm a short time after I did and went straight to sleep.’

‘When was this?’

‘After you sent me away with a flea in my ear.’

‘And before you came and stood under my window?’

‘Didn’t know you’d seen me.’

She gave a small smile. ‘Oh, I saw you all right.’

‘Well, it was before then, yes.’

‘You didn’t think of knocking?’

‘Didn’t dare.’

‘I only wanted you to cool off a bit.’

‘I did that all right. Chilled to the bone I was. Teeth rattling.’

‘In that case you’d better knock next time, hadn’t you?’

B
ENNETT WASN’T
aware that the phone had rung or that Marjorie had answered it until she shook his shoulder and dragged him from sleep. Even then,
he wasn’t entirely sure if her voice was real or belonged to the strange confused dream that clung so heavily to him, a dream in which he had something vital to do, a life to save, only to
find himself in a hospital bed, bound tightly by massive bandages and unable to move. Even as he struggled to free himself, he felt the temptation to succumb, to let himself slip towards a warm and
beguiling place where he would be undisturbed for ever.

‘Darling, wake up. He says it’s important.’

As he rolled onto his back, the pain around his lung was sharp as a knife.

‘It’s Captain Robertson from Middlezoy Camp.’

Bennett had left a note for Robertson that afternoon. He’d driven to the camp as soon as he heard about Wladyslaw’s arrest, only to discover that he’d missed Robertson by a
matter of minutes. After some language-based confusion, he’d established that Robertson had gone to the police station in Taunton with Major Rafalski and an interpreter and possibly a lawyer,
though no one was quite sure about the lawyer. Feeling he could achieve nothing useful by waiting, he had left a note for Robertson and come home, where he had slept like the dead for an hour
before calling on two patients and returning to sleep again. At some point Marjorie had give him chicken broth. Now, as he hauled himself back from sleep, he knew only that he had slept for a long
time and his mouth was parched.

Marjorie’s bedside light was on, but as she handed him the receiver he had the impression that dawn was breaking in the world beyond the curtains.

‘Hello?’

‘Sorry to bother you, Doctor,’ came Robertson’s voice, ‘but I thought you would want to know.’

In Bennett’s groggy state he heard a Polish name that was surely Wladyslaw’s and the word ‘dead’, and his heart seized, he had a sense of disconnection from the room, his
ears roared with anguish and repugnance. Grief blocked his throat, and he thought his chest would burst. It was a long moment before he became aware of Marjorie calling anxiously to him and
Robertson’s voice repeating a name in the earpiece.

‘Walczak?’

There was a baffled pause from Robertson. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s
Walczak
who’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not Wladyslaw?’

‘No, no. Walczak.’

Heat pricked at Bennett’s eyes. He heard a long shuddering sob of relief, and realised it had come from his own mouth.

‘I’m all right, thank you, dear,’ he said to Marjorie as he rang off, but it was a good two to three minutes before he felt steady enough to get up.

An hour later, Bennett followed Detective Inspector Shearer down a corridor and through a pass door into a reception area rather different from the one that greeted visitors to the front of the
police station. Here there were no windows, just overhead lamps that cast a baleful light over chipped green walls and a floor of worn grey lino. The air was filled with the smell of disinfectant
and cigarette smoke and what might have been fried bacon. A uniformed sergeant stood at a high counter, filling out a logbook. Behind him, in an office area, two constables sat at a table with mugs
of tea, while another leant against the open flap at the far end of the counter.