The Return of Captain John Emmett (18 page)

I hope this is helpful and that when things are calmer we shall meet again. In the meantime I shall take the slightly clandestine step of handing this to Ethel to post.

Yours,
William Bolitho

Laurence ran back downstairs to where his scavenged newspaper lay on top of the rubbish in the bin. Self-consciously he looked around to check he wasn't observed and smoothed it out on the wall, brushing tea leaves off its back page. He suddenly had an image of Louise's father scrutinising the financial pages, making gruff noises of approval or concern and occasionally putting a mark against certain figures. He remembered Louise's mother objecting to her husband tucking his silver propelling pencil behind his ear while he read. For a brief moment, his father-in-law felt more real to him than any memory of Louise.

Laurence's fingers travelled down the columns. Calogreedy and Weatherall were there; their shares seemed to be healthy. He put the paper back in the bin. The next day he would try to find out where they did business.

He was relieved that William Bolitho had been in touch; Eleanor had been so adamant that he was causing her husband distress that he had been almost persuaded of it, although, if anything, Bolitho seemed bored by the constraints on his actions. John's death must have eased the Bolithos' circumstances, but it could never have given Bolitho any kind of life. Fleetingly, he wondered whether Eleanor could have been petitioning John for financial help but Eleanor was only a collateral beneficiary anyway. Had she simply become over-involved with John while she nursed him? Or was it a passionate love affair, independent of war, and was it reciprocated? The period when she would have visited John at Holmwood would have been well after she got married so an enduring love affair seemed unlikely.

He wondered whether Eleanor knew about John's role in the firing squad. Whether she was friend or nurse, it was not unlikely she shared his secrets. Not that this one was his alone; there would have been plenty of others at an execution, of course.

He stared at the photograph he'd received from Mary and remembered Chilvers' evidence to the inquest, stating that John was preoccupied by the event. This photograph was one that John had carried with him to his death. Bolitho had identified John, Tucker and the sapper's servant. They were all men involved in the trench accident, yet this was clearly winter and Bolitho had said the collapse took place in the heat of summer. Could they also have been part of a firing squad? Although the presence of the medical officer meant it could have been an execution detail, there were also plenty of times when soldiers clustered together, looking glum and waiting for action. Yet who could have photographed the men and why? Whose was the monogram on the back?

He'd never seen an execution but tales of them circulated from time to time. Sometimes he thought that their circulation was deliberate; it made it clear to nervous soldiers that whilst the Germans might be aiming to kill them on one side, the forces of their own military discipline were equally lethal on the other. Like every other aspect of the war, horror stories abounded. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who'd been involved. The officer who was supposed to deliver the
coup de grâce
fiddling with a jammed revolver; executioners calling out to a friend or brother tied to a stake; right down to the straightforward humiliations: the condemned soldier losing control of his bowels or bladder, the young ones crying for their mothers. Better to go towards the guns or through the wire.

Trench tales were always about removing choice, he reflected; the good soldier was a resigned soldier. The good soldier never wasted time thinking about alternatives.

Finding Major Calogreedy turned out to be Charles's easiest task so far. There were only two Calogreedys who'd seen service in the war. Calogreedy and Weatherall had offices at Lambeth. A telephone call established that Calogreedy was in the office, running the business, and had indeed seen action in France. Laurence made an appointment to go over and see him the following Friday at midday, ignoring Charles's efforts to lure him to a party in Suffolk.

'But we're celebrating,' Charles had said and added, 'Funny choice of day to track down this Calogreedy.'

It was not cold so he decided to walk. He passed down a peaceful Kingsway towards Aldwych but as he got nearer to the Strand he seemed to be crossing the tail-end of a crowd, the bulk of which he could see pushing westwards towards Whitehall. The mass of people were hardly moving. Just out of sight, but still just audible, was a brass band. He listened and recognised it as a hymn. He knew the words to it. 'Victor, he rose; victorious too shall rise, They who have drunk His cup of sacrifice.' Hearing it so unexpectedly made a great impact on him. Although he was far from sharing its sentiments now, the music was as powerfully evocative as ever; to his horror, the conflicting emotions made him shiver.

As the hymn died away he realised with a shock the significance of Charles's apparently throwaway remark. Almost simultaneously the bells of Big Ben rang out over a nearly silent London. Eleven o'clock. It was Armistice Day. This year there was a ceremony at the new Cenotaph and a few of those around him were wearing the paper poppies. They looked oddly frivolous but the expressions on the faces in the crowd belied that. Whether the crowds wanted to see the King or wanted to honour their dead, everybody was looking back, either in sorrow, as here, or in jubilation—going to the races or, like Charles, preparing for a party. The country was divided: between those who wept and those who danced.

Except he was doing neither. Only three years had passed, yet he had forgotten it was the eleventh. Peace descended more abruptly around him now than it had in 1918; he could hear the flutter of squabbling pigeons on a window ledge. The sky above him was uniformly grey.

He remembered when the news had come through in France. He'd been in a makeshift stable, examining a sick horse. They were trying to decide whether to shoot it. The horse was coughing and rolling its eyes as a young farrier tried to restrain it. Its jaw was dark with saliva and it looked completely mad. The new adjutant had rushed in but was stopped in his tracks by the sight of the deranged horse. Then he said, 'It's over.' And for a second Laurence had thought he meant they should hurry up and shoot the horse. Once he understood what the officer really meant, his first thought was that it would be marvellous to have a clean collar every day. His second had been a feeling of such profound pointlessness that even remembering it now made him want to weep.

When the silence came to an end, he crossed over Waterloo Bridge, which was bitingly cold in the wind, and then moved into the shelter of buildings on the south bank of the river. He walked briskly along York Road towards Lambeth. The business was easy to find: a middle-sized factory abutted the road. Above a wide archway the words 'Calogreedy and Weatherall' were spelled out in ironwork. The buildings were quite old but the sign looked new. When Laurence entered the gateway a young man in a dark suit came towards him.

'Mr Bartram,' he said, holding out his hand. 'Would you please follow me, sir?'

Calogreedy's office was just across a small yard. Laurence stepped forward and greeted the tall man who had stood up behind his desk. As the door closed behind them, a distant background of banging and grinding became fainter.

'The men all wanted to come in, business as usual, but we stopped for the commemoration,' said Calogreedy, shaking Laurence's hand and nodding back towards the yard. 'I said a prayer. It was appreciated, I think, but one never quite knows.'

Calogreedy was obviously a military man, upright and with decisive movements. He had dark hair, a neat moustache, blue eyes and weathered skin. He was about forty-five, Laurence guessed. The entire wall behind him was covered in photographs. Some looked recent and were of what Laurence presumed was the factory floor: with workbenches, presses and tool racks as a background to ten or so men in overalls. One picture was of Calogreedy shaking hands with a government minister. The more faded ones were either regimental or apparently taken in India: a tiger shoot, a magnificent picnic overlooking a fort in the foothills of some mountains, and one of what looked like the 1912 Durbar. The King and Queen stood pale and stiff under a silken canopy, dwarfed by ostrich-plumed officers, jewelled maharajahs and ornately decked elephants. It might as well have been another century.

'Well, to start with, you've certainly found the right man. Funnily enough, the only other serving Calogreedy—I believe—was my brother Godfrey. He's a director of the company, too, and might as easily have been here today, but I'm clearly the man you are after. Basil Calogreedy. A regular. Indian Army.' He nodded to the photographs. 'Sappers.'

Laurence wondered, briefly, whether Calogreedy had been in the same outfit as his fictitious brother, Robert.

'Came out in 1919 and bought this business. We've been expanding ever since. Weatherall was a sleeping partner. Very much asleep, in fact, as he passed on before the war, but the name means something in the locks and safes world so we kept it. Doing well. Factories in Birmingham and Bristol. Unfortunately, we live in hard times: men come out of uniform and there's no job for them.' He sat back, placing the palms of his hands flat on his desk. 'Outcome: desperation. Burglary. Petty theft. Solution: good locks. All the men I take on have been in uniform. We owe it to them. Find they can't get skilled positions because they've been out of their trade for four years and some fifteen-year-old is being trained up for a pittance.'

He shook his head in apparent disbelief at his own words before his attention returned to Laurence.

'I can't think I've much to contribute but perhaps if you fire off some questions, something I say will be of use. Strange business, your friend's death. Sadly not unique, though.'

'It was very hard for his sister and widowed mother,' said Laurence. Then, hesitantly, 'Do you remember an incident in 1916? I believe you were passing through a village near Albert where there was a collapse of a major trench system. Two men killed, one injured? My friend was one of those men.'

Calogreedy wrinkled his brow. 'It happened all too often,' he said, but it was obvious that he knew what Laurence was talking about. 'I wasn't actually there on that occasion—I was surveying another stretch. It was my servant who helped get the men out. They were lucky. Lucky not more men were down there, I mean. I'd been sent forward because the diggers were anxious about the stability of the trenches; they were pushing ahead at terrific speed. HQ wanted them back in commission, but they didn't have the materials to prop the new tunnels adequately and the ground was chalky; tree roots a problem, as I recall, and they kept running into abandoned German trenches. Anyway the collapse simply bore out my judgment. Three or four men, including your fellow presumably, were underneath when it caved in. Byers, an officer and an NCO got the survivor out.'

'Byers?' said Laurence, remembering the name on John's list.

'Yes. Leonard Byers. He was my servant—a good man; tremendous aptitude for figures. Farm boy. Bit of a phenomenon. If commissions were awarded on intellect alone, he'd have been an officer of engineers. As it was, he just proved that if you had a good batman the war could be a very much more congenial experience. Started off as a bit of a joke, getting him to do mental arithmetic. Lads used to throw questions at him and lay bets on how long it would take him to tot up forty numbers, that kind of thing. He was always quicker in his head than anyone doing the same sum on paper. Heaven knows where he got his abilities from; left school at twelve and, from what he tells me, they never got the farm to pay. But I've kept him with me. Man who showed you in.' He nodded at the door. 'He married one of our lady typewriters the same year we set up and I've half a mind to bring him on to the management side eventually. One day. Just need to persuade Godfrey who is a conventional chap. Can't see the brain behind the rough edges.'

'Byers was your mess servant in 1916?' Laurence asked. He had temporarily forgotten that Calogreedy was rumoured to have kept his batman with him when the war finished. It was not so odd for a regular officer but usually the relationship became one of master and valet. The making of such an easy connection, after so much information that had seemed to go nowhere, caught him by surprise. He was looking for a Byers, and for the batman, and now they had turned out to be one and the same.

'Was there a Darling or a Coburg there?' It was a very long shot and he wasn't surprised when Calogreedy shook his head. His mind was evidently still on his employee.

'He's had a tough time recently because of all the palaver over the death of his cousin a few months back. Poor chap was murdered. In cold blood. Can you believe it? Policeman came here to tell him as the nearest surviving relative. He took it badly. Can understand why: his cousin makes it unscathed through three and a half bloody years in France and someone does for him while he's milking cows. As I said: desperate times—desperate men. But have a word with him in a while; he'll be in his office until late.'

'I do have one other question.' Laurence hesitated. 'It's a slightly strange one. Perhaps this should be for Mr Byers himself and you may not know the answer anyway, but was he ever part of a firing squad?'

It was obvious he had hit on something. Calogreedy's face answered for him.

A bad business. He really shouldn't have had to do it. I was on leave or I would have stopped it. He was forced into making up numbers because so many had dysentery at the time and even then there was a bit of malice in his selection, I think. The condemned man was an officer, you see.'

Laurence stiffened. The execution of an officer was virtually unheard of. He struggled for a second to take it in.

'His own men were loath to do it,' Calogreedy said, 'but once the sentence had been handed down and confirmed, I expect the powers that be wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. At least Byers didn't know the man, but neither did he really know anybody else on the squad except for the sergeant and a couple of the officers. And although he was a country lad he wasn't even very good with a gun. Needed spectacles.'