The First Casualty (10 page)

NINETEEN

A radical assembly

The conversation had quickly grown heated.

Lord Abercrombie was not the only person who was angry about Viscount Abercrombie’s death. Nor were the senior figures in the Cabinet with whom the Tory peer had discussed the matter the only people of power in Britain who were concerned with the fate of the man accused of the murder.

Heated debate was hardly unusual at the home of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, that almost legendary Socialist salon on the Embankment near the Tate Gallery in which dark injustice had been angrily debated on an almost daily basis for some three decades or more. Yet again Fabians, trades unionists and Labour politicians had gathered in the Webbs’ cosy sitting room in order to consider a collective response to the iniquities of the ruling class.

‘You say that this man Hopkins was arrested and has now simply disappeared? Accused of a murder which the army say never happened?’ The speaker was Ramsay MacDonald, former Labour Party leader and implacable opponent of the war.

‘That seems to be what has occurred,’ Beatrice Webb replied. ‘Some terrible incident took place at the château in which both Hopkins and Abercrombie were convalescing. Now Abercrombie is trumpeted in the press as a hero who fell in battle while the army continues to hold Hopkins for his murder.’

‘How do we know this?’ enquired Arthur Henderson, who had replaced MacDonald as leader of the Labour Party. ‘I am personally highly suspicious of the tendency of some comrades to see conspiracy wherever they look. Perhaps the army is telling the truth.’

‘Ha!’ MacDonald snorted.

‘Hopkins was no ordinary soldier,’ Beatrice Webb insisted. ‘He was a Communist, well connected within leftist circles amongst the rank and file. A comrade of his, one Private McCroon, has made an appeal to Hopkins’s trades union which has been forwarded to me. I have made what enquiries I can and only two things appear to be clear: Abercrombie is dead and Hopkins has disappeared. He is not listed as killed, missing or deserted but neither is he with his battalion. I can only presume that the army are holding him.’

‘Lies and deception!’ MacDonald stated. ‘This lad’s been pinched for being a Communist, that’s what, for speaking out against the war. The government’s making the same mistakes the bloody Tsar made and they’ll reap the same whirlwind.’

Henderson winced at what he clearly considered was MacDonald’s inelegant turn of phrase.

‘I urge a cautious reaction,’ the party leader insisted. ‘The public adored Alan Abercrombie. Imagine what harm it would do to us in the Labour movement if we were to announce that he did not die a hero, and were instead to take the part of a Communist activist who may well have killed him.’

‘You
would
urge caution, Arthur!’ MacDonald retorted unkindly. ‘After all, you wouldn’t want to upset your old paymasters, would you?’

Until recently, Henderson had represented Labour in Lloyd George’s coalition Cabinet. He was seen by many as having supped with the devil and having liked it rather too much.

‘You’re little better than a Liberal yourself these days,’ MacDonald continued. ‘Sometimes I wonder why you don’t run off and join them.’

‘Now hang on, Ramsay,’ Henderson retorted. ‘I’m a bit sick of this damned sneering. If I hadn’t been in Cabinet exercising a restraining influence, things might have gone a lot harder on the Clyde last year and — ’

‘Scottish strikers do not need
protection
, Arthur, they need
representation!
‘

‘I am not a meeting of Glasgow dockworkers, Ramsay, ‘Henderson replied, ‘so please don’t address me as one!’

The teacups perched on the knees of both men rattled in their saucers as they jabbed their fingers at each other.

‘Now then, now then, now then!’ Sidney Webb intervened. ‘Really, you two. Am I to fetch a bucket of water and throw it over the pair of you?’

‘More tea, Arthur?’ Beatrice Webb suggested soothingly. ‘Perhaps another scone, Ramsay? It’s the last of the butter.’

The fierce-eyed Scot accepted a scone with little grace and consumed half of it in a single emphatic bite, as if it was his Socialist colleague’s head that he would have preferred to be biting off.

‘We really must stick to the point,’ Sidney Webb insisted. ‘I’m afraid it is a natural tendency of us Socialists to try to solve
all
the problems of the world each time we meet, a tendency which often leads us to solve nothing at all.’

‘All the problems of the world emanate from a single system, ‘MacDonald grumbled.

‘Ramsay, please. I think we may take it as read that we all disapprove of the excesses of capitalism.’

‘The point to which we should be sticking,’ Beatrice Webb insisted with gentle-voiced but steely firmness, ‘is that something very strange has occurred and the authorities are lying about it. Perhaps the government’s agenda is ‘one which we can support, perhaps not. However, before we can make a decision on that score, surely the truth must be uncovered. We must insist that the army explains itself and if it will not, we shall make public such information as we have. If Britain is fighting for justice then that justice must be visited upon all equally, without fear or favour, even upon Communists.’

And for a moment within that famous sitting room there occurred a most strange and unfamiliar thing. Consensus. Grumpy, irritable and grudging consensus perhaps, but consensus nonetheless.

TWENTY

A lifeline

Kingsley lay in the hospital room for another week, nursed, after a fashion, by the Irish orderly, who saw Kingsley as a gift sent from heaven to feed his morphine addiction.

‘Oh, he’s still in a terrible amount of pain, sor,’ the orderly would explain, whilst Kingsley groaned loudly when the doctor paid his brief daily visit to the room. ‘He suffers terribly from his cracked ribs.’

‘Morphine,’ the doctor would duly announce, ‘and be sure to note it in the book.’

Kingsley was in fact nearly recovered but the doctor had continued to accept his deception and so the orderly received his drugs. Kingsley was left alone with his increasingly desperate thoughts, knowing that even with such a poor physician he could not dissemble forever.

At the end of the second week of incarceration in the medical room, Kingsley awoke from a fitful sleep in which as usual he had dreamed of Agnes and his son, to find that he was being examined by a very different orderly from his usual drug-addicted companion. This was a serious and softly spoken man, who inspected Kingsley’s chest with expert care.

‘Not cracked at all,’ he said, ‘just badly bruised and definitely well on the mend.’

‘I know,’ Kingsley replied, ‘but I thought it best not to contradict the doctor. I hope you will not feel obliged to note your observation in his book?’

‘Don’t worry about that, Inspector. ‘

‘What is your name?’

‘Names don’t matter here. We are all numbers. Except for you, of course — everyone knows your name and hates it.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid that they do and it will be the death of me.’

‘It’s pretty clear that the senior warder intends that it should be, which is why you must listen to me very carefully.’

Kingsley’s ears pricked up. There was something about the man’s manner which for some reason gave him hope. Before speaking further the orderly checked that there was no one outside the door.

‘Inspector Kingsley, let’s face it, your death warrant is signed. There are twenty men under this roof who have sworn to kill you. It is openly discussed and there have already been fights about who’s going to have the pleasure of being your executioner. Men have laid bets on how long you have left to live and the brutal truth is that no odds, no matter how generous, will draw bets above a month or so from now. Most of the lads don’t even give you another week. You must escape.’

‘Ah yes. That would be a clever move, wouldn’t it? Sadly, I fear there is no escape route available to me.’

‘Not every door in this prison is locked when it should be locked.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Tonight the door to this room and that at the end of the room beyond will not be locked.’

‘You’d do this for me?’

‘The doors will be open, that is all I can say.

‘You will be blamed.’

‘No, they will be locked when I leave and the locking duly noted in the book, but they will be open again later tonight. That is all you need to know.’

‘Why are you helping me?’

‘The doors will be open tonight. After that you’re on your own,’ the man insisted.

With that he departed, leaving Kingsley to sweat out the rest of the day and make what preparations he could.

When night fell, Kingsley gritted his teeth against the pain and, swinging his legs off the bench, lowered himself to the floor. He had attempted some exercise over the previous week and was fairly fit to walk, although perhaps not to carry out an escape from prison. However, he had no choice. Fate had thrown him one single card to play and clearly he must play it that night. Whoever his mysterious comrade might be, Kingsley doubted that he would be able to leave doors unlocked indefinitely. Staggering across the room, he turned the handle of the door and it opened. He found himself immediately in what might be described as the heart of the prison hospital. although it would have taken a leap of the imagination to think of such a cold, bare stone garret as a heart.

Two doors led from this second room in addition to the one through which Kingsley had entered. The first carried a board on which were written the names of several prisoners. This door was heavily bolted but through a grille cut into its steel panels Kingsley could hear the groans and weeping of men in pain. A heavy, sweetish smell hung in the air also, a smell Kingsley knew well from his journeying amongst the sinks of London where injuries were common and medicine pitiably rare. The smell was gangrene and Kingsley knew that some poor soul beyond that bolted door must either have it cut from him in its entirety or have his blood fatally poisoned. Since the only medical expertise available was supplied by the appallingly casual and self-indulgent doctor and his ‘book’, Kingsley doubted whether the man would still be groaning one or two nights hence.

The second door was located at the far end of the room. It was not bolted and, if the orderly had kept his word, it would not be locked either and would lead from the medical wing out into the body of the prison. Before trying it, Kingsley sought to arm himself from what supplies he might find in the medical cabinet. He had only the vaguest idea of how he was to proceed once he had left the security of the medical wing but he felt certain that at some point he would encounter guards.

The cabinet was locked but Kingsley saw that it was attached to the wall by a bracket: it would be a simple matter to lift the entire thing from the wall and gain access from behind. Having done so, he found himself pitying the poor prisoners whose health relied on such dismal supplies. Few modern drugs seemed to have found their way on to the doctor’s procurement list but there was morphine aplenty, and chloroform. It was clear to Kingsley that the pursuit of cures was not the objective in this particular hellhole, and that the sole purpose of the drugs available in the so-called ‘hospital wing’ was to subdue troublesome patients until they either recovered or quietly died.

Kingsley took the bottle of chloroform and, having wrapped a rag torn from his prison shirt around the neck of the squat little container, stuffed it into his pocket. Then he approached the second door in the room and turned the handle.

As promised by the orderly, this last door was open. It led out on to one of the numerous iron landings overlooking the great well of the prison. Kingsley had suspected that this would be the case, but as he had been carried unconscious into the hospital wing he could not have known for sure. Trying not to gasp from the pain of his bruised ribs and the unaccustomed movement of his limbs, Kingsley began to make his way along the silent corridor towards the first stairwell. To his left were cells packed to bursting point with sleeping prisoners. To his right was the great well of the prison, across which through the anti-suicide mesh he could see the mirror image of the walkway he was on, and beneath it another, identical one and beneath that four more. This much he had expected: what he had not expected was the absence of guards. It seemed to him that, apart from the prisoners who could be heard snoring and grunting behind their cell doors, he was alone in all that vast, cavernous space. Could it be that once the cell doors were locked the warders simply retired for the night? It seemed incredible but, as Kingsley made his way along each corridor and down one stairway after another, he could think of no alternative explanation. There was not a soul about.

Having finally descended to the floor of the great hall, Kingsley peered through the gloom for the exit, the door through which he had been brought on his first evening, to be paraded before the prisoners on his way to the governor’s office. He could see it now, on the other side of the hall, so he made his way towards it across the dining area where he had eaten his solitary supper. Kingsley was astonished to discover that this door, too, was unlocked. He had had no idea of how he was to engineer a way through this barrier but he had certainly not expected to have simply to turn the handle.

He closed the door behind him and paused momentarily for breath. He was beyond the great hall and in a small internal courtyard, which he recalled crossing when he had first been brought to the prison. He knew that the reception area could be found in the building opposite and beyond that lay the prison gates. So far no alarm had been raised and he had encountered not a single soul, but he knew his luck could not last much longer. Surely escaping from His Majesty’s prisons could not be as easy as this?

He stepped from the doorway and began to cross the cobbled yard. He had scarcely gone three steps when he found himself staring into the light of several electric torches.

‘Good evening, Inspector,’ a voice said from behind the light. ‘Leaving us so soon?’

The door behind Kingsley, which he had just closed, opened once more and he heard footsteps behind him.

‘It would seem not,’ Kingsley replied.

The man stepped out from behind the torches. ‘Run,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I said,’ and with this the man raised his pistol, ‘run!’ Now the torches parted and beyond them Kingsley could see another open doorway, the one that led to the reception area of the prison, the door to which he had been heading. He struggled to make sense of what was happening. They wanted him to run. Why did they want him to run?

Suddenly Kingsley knew their game. They wanted a neat finish. No untidy paperwork. No further investigation required. They wanted him to be shot whilst escaping.

They wanted to kill him by the book.

‘I will not run.’

‘Run!’

‘I will not. If you wish to shoot me you must shoot me where I stand.’

The figure before him raised an arm. Silhouetted as he was by the torch lights behind him it was difficult to make out any detail, but from the man’s position it was clear to Kingsley that he was facing the barrel of a sidearm.

‘The prisoner Kingsley is running!’ the shadow shouted. ‘All here stand witness to the fact. Does any officer or warder here take issue with the fact that this man is in the process of escaping and I have no option but to shoot him down?’

Silence.

‘Speak now,’ the man called out, ‘or forever be silent!’

Still there was silence.

‘Prisoner Kingsley, I command you to stop! Stop, I say, or I shoot! ‘

Kingsley did not move. Nobody spoke.

The man fired directly at Kingsley’s head and there he fell.