The Return of Captain John Emmett (19 page)

An officer executed?'

'Yes. Poor fellow. Cowardice, I imagine. Of course you can't make exceptions but still, he was very young, I gather. There were chaps out there who couldn't have commanded a tea party, much less an assault on a machine-gun post.'

'You don't—?'

'Remember his name? No. Absolutely not, if I ever knew it. Not very good on names. I dare say you could find out. Careful how you go with Byers—touchy subject. All this stuff in the papers now: accusations of summary justice and so on. Though it beats me how you can expect much subtlety in military law, not in the field, not when there are men out there who couldn't find their way into battle with a map. So deciding theoretical degrees of guilt when the German guns were rumbling in the background ... Well, a lot seemed to depend on local morale and setting examples, nothing consistent about it. But, d'you know, I only ever read of one other officer being executed. They were tougher on the whole: good schools, independence, team sports, values. Byers won't welcome talking about it, I can tell you. I'll have a word. Smooth things over. You'll need to be persistent.'

It was obvious that Calogreedy had little else to share with him and Laurence stayed only long enough not to seem impolite. He was eager to speak to Leonard Byers and Calogreedy made it easy for him by taking him across to a smaller office on the far side.

'Look, it's almost their lunch hour. He might feel more relaxed off the premises. Take a walk, that kind of thing.'

Calogreedy strode ahead, pushing open a door. Laurence looked up at the spitting rain without enthusiasm. Inside the office, surrounded by graphs and diagrams, Leonard Byers sat hunched over a desk between hefty files, writing notes against columns of figures in front of him. He didn't hear the door open or see them standing there at first. When he did he looked embarrassed, jumping up while straightening his tie.

'Sorry to disturb you,' Calogreedy said, 'but curiously it turns out that although it was me that he had come to see, you were, in a manner of speaking, really the man Mr Bartram was after all the time. He was hoping you might be able to help him look into the death of his friend. Anyway, take your time. Nothing urgent to do here.'

It might have been Laurence's imagination but he thought he detected a look of wariness cross the younger man's face. Although it was gone almost immediately, he looked uncomfortable even as he belatedly reached out his hand.

Calogreedy paused in the doorway. 'Difficult times. But try to help him, old chap. I'd be grateful, you know.'

Leonard Byers had a pale, serious face, a faint shadow of stubble on his chin and purple hollows under his eyes. One lens of his wire spectacles was cracked. Laurence remembered that he had only recently, and violently, lost a close relative. Most people still assumed that talk of death meant talk of the war, but here they both were with enough distance from it to have experienced death in peacetime.

Byers, who was slight in build with intelligent eyes, looked younger than his years. He must be in his mid-twenties at least but could have been five years younger. He faced Laurence unsmilingly. A farm boy, Calogreedy had said. Yet here he was, translated by the war into an urban clerk on the banks of the Thames.

Byers motioned him to a spare chair and sat down behind the desk.

'I'm sorry,' Laurence said. 'I gather this is a difficult time for you. Death in the family. Not a time to answer questions, perhaps?'

'My cousin, Jim,' said Byers, 'back in the summer. But it's all right, ask what you like. If the major thinks it'll help.' He looked unconvinced. 'Nothing'll bring Jim back.' He took off his spectacles and held them in front of him.

Laurence could hear a slight west country burr in his voice.

'You must have been close?'

'Well, close as lads. We were the same age to the month. Almost like twins when we were young 'uns. Up to all sorts. I was the clever one but he was the sportsman. Strong. Ran like the wind. Star of the village cricket team before the war. When they still had a team. But when he went back to the farm in 1918 and I followed the major here, he wasn't so happy. Didn't say as much, mind, but I could tell he thought he'd got a raw deal. It was just him and the old man. I should've gone to see them more, but it's a long way and I was helping the major get things going. Then I met Enid—she's my wife now—and we were saving. But I should have gone down. It wasn't fair on Jim.

'The farm hadn't been properly run in the war. Couldn't get the labour, it was all girls and old men. Didn't buy in new animals, let a few bills go unpaid. Couple of bad harvests, didn't keep the repairs up to scratch and it's an old place, needs work on it all the time. After the war, for all the talk, nobody gave a...'

He seemed to struggle to find a respectable word.

'Nobody cared if a tatty little farm went to the dogs. Stupid thing is, neither of us had to fight. We were needed at home. Essential work, they called it. But to tell the truth, I was bored and wanted to see the world.' He frowned. 'Which I did. And we both thought that girls would be all over a man in uniform. Which they weren't. And once I'd joined up, then Jim wasn't going to be left behind in the mud at Combe Bisset. Went to find some nice foreign mud of his own. Come Christmas, he just signed on the line. Went in as a private, came out with his stripes. Uncle looked like he could carry on with the lads we'd got, but then he fell off a roof he was fixing and his leg was never right, and of course eventually the younger lads were itching to get into uniform too.'

'Your uncle?' The conversation had moved a long way from where Laurence intended it to go but he wanted to gain the young man's trust and Byers seemed willing to talk about his family catastrophe.

'Yes. That's what made it worse. The old man had been pretty well bedridden since Jim'd got back. But he liked to sit in a chair by the window upstairs. He saw it all.'

'The death?'

'The murder.'

'He saw the person who did it?'

'He did that. Though a fat lot of help it's been. Man in a hat and a coat. That's only half the population, then. Arrived by car probably, though left it out of sight. My uncle said he heard it but never saw it. He'll have been right about that: his eyesight's not great but his hearing was always spot on. So it was a man with the nerve to drive within earshot of the house and to see off our dog, and she's a nasty bit of work. A man who carried a gun and didn't hesitate in using it at close range. Twice.'

'Twice?'

'Once in the chest and then a second, head shot, once he was on the ground. The police said the first shot would have done for him. He can't have known anything. The second was just to make sure.'

'How extraordinary,' said Laurence. 'Did the police have any ideas at all who it might have been?'

'No. I mean, Jim'd never been anywhere, excepting after he joined up. We were brought up on the farm. Both his parents died when he was very young. My father died of lockjaw when we were boys. My uncle looked after my mother and both us cousins in return for her keeping house. She passed on just before the war. Anyone Jim knew, I knew. I'd have known if he'd got into any kind of trouble. We had the same friends, got into the same trouble—but only the schoolboy kind: scrumping, girls, playground knuckle fights. Nothing out of the ordinary ever happened to Jim until the day somebody came all the way out to the farm and shot him. Nothing to nick, either. No reason to it.'

'What kind of gun was it?'

'Not a shotgun. A pistol. Kills him, then blows his face off,' Byers said bitterly.

Laurence was surprised. When Byers had spoken of a final shot to the head, he'd been thinking of a single bullet, a military
coup de grâce.

'They might of got his tyre tracks,' Byers was saying, 'and had some hope of tracing the car, the major says, but the police and the local doctor had driven backwards and forwards down the same track by the time those clods thought of it. Mashed into nothingness, it was. But what did they care? Single man, mucky farm. Probably thought he'd been after some other yokel's wife.'

'How dreadful for your uncle.'

'Yes. It was. He comes down the stairs on his ... on his behind, must have taken him for ever. Got himself out in the yard. Found Jim, but there was nothing he could do for him and no way he could get help. Lucky he didn't die of cold, poor old man. Didn't have an obliging bone in him but he didn't deserve that. The girl found him—the one who did the milking. Him and the dog sitting in the muck, and then Jim's blood splattered all over the yard. But it did for him really, the old man. The farm was sold. The money that was left after the creditors had their take went to pay a widow in town to look after him in her home. Me and Enid didn't see a penny of it,' he added defensively.

His face softened. 'Funny thing is, when the police first came, I thought, just for a minute, that Jim'd done it himself. Topped himself. He was that fed up. So, just for a minute there was a queer kind of relief that he hadn't. Mind you, I wasn't the one who had to find him. The old man wasn't beyond covering up a suicide: that generation, you know, and a bit on the religious side. He could of made up cars and strangers, but not the gun. Jim had a shotgun—crows and rabbits—but it was still back in the house. Didn't have it with him so obviously wasn't expecting any trouble. Hadn't been fired for a while, the police said.'

Laurence's head was buzzing. 'Do the police think the assailant knew your uncle was there as well?' he asked.

'God knows. Local man would of known, but anyone else—probably not. Bastard was taking a risk but then he was carrying a loaded gun. Not so much of a risk if you've got a strong stomach and more of us around now have seen some sights would've turned us before the war.

'A few days earlier a man came into the pub in the village. It's a mile or so's walk from our farm. It was early and nobody much was in there but he had a half of cider. Kept himself to himself but was pleasant enough. Might have been useful information if the landlord didn't help himself to his own spirits all day. All he could remember was the man spoke like a gentleman and asked where the farm was. And he didn't even remember that for a week. The stranger took himself off. Where he went, if it was him, for the next day or so, who knows? If he had a car, he could of gone anywhere. But I'm certain Jim had no more idea than I do why anyone would want to kill him in the first place.

'You'll be thinking he might of got involved with something in France I don't know of Leonard Byers rushed on. The circumstances were obviously still bothering him. 'The major got me to see a senior policeman friend of his. But he was really just doing it as a favour for the major. Small fry, me and Jim, but people will do all sorts for the major.' He looked almost proud. 'A London policeman. Mullins. Turned out I'd sort of met this Mullins when we were both in France. He thought Jim had got mixed up with some bad lads there. But Jim didn't get into any funny business. We weren't close like we once were, but he would still've told me if anything was really wrong. He just said his time out there was mostly uncomfortable or frightening. He said it was his duty and, like all duty, boring but unavoidable.'

Laurence nodded. Byers' assessment was well observed. He was also relieved that he was talking so freely, although most of the time he avoided eye contact.

'I would of known if he'd been caught up in anything so odd that someone would've come hunting for him over two years after the war ended. After all, he was hardly in hiding, was he? He wasn't scared. He was right back where he started. He didn't expect
anything
to happen, not ever again. That was his gripe. I don't suppose we'll ever know. Too careful, too planned, Mullins said, for a homicidal maniac. Everyone knows us down here. Whoever it was, he wouldn't have got that far without being clear precisely who he was about to shoot. And he did get right up to him. Looked him in the face. Perhaps Jim knows the answer but he's past telling.'

Awkwardly Laurence asked, 'Would you like to go for a beer or something? The major's quite happy for you to take time away...'

'I'm temperance.'

'Oh. Right. A walk?'

Byers looked to the window. 'It's raining,' he said flatly.

There was a long-drawn-out silence. The door of the small iron stove rattled as wind came down the pipe. Laurence was absorbing the fact that Combe Bisset was one of the names written on the list John had carried at his death, but now was not the time to bring this up and he knew he was avoiding a more difficult topic.

'Look, I'm sorry to have to ask you this,' Laurence began in a rush, 'but were you ever part of a firing squad?'

Byers shoulders tensed. He looked down, turned his spectacles over in his hands. His lips tightened. For a minute Laurence thought he was going to refuse to speak.

'So that's why you're really here. The major told you, is that it? And he wants me to tell you?' he said, stiffly. 'Why do you want to know? For the papers? It's all over now.'

'I asked him—your name had come up—and he said you'd help me,' Laurence said, not quite truthfully. 'It's just the friend that he mentioned, the friend whose death I'm looking into, may have been connected with it.'

'You think he was involved in that dismal bloody mess?' Byers looked suspicious.

Laurence felt for his wallet and took out the photograph. 'Is this you?' he said.

Byers took the picture. He stared at it impassively. 'Jesus,' he said. 'Mr Brabourne and his ruddy camera. Could never leave it alone. I'm surprised he didn't take one of the actual shooting as well.'

'Brabourne?'

'First Lieutenant Tresham Brabourne. They called him "Fiery". He wasn't so much fiery, though, as some kind of fizzing grenade that you're not sure if it's a dud or it's about to turn you to mincemeat. I'd been under him early on in the war. We were bantams. Short-arses. Never thought I'd see him again. He was so green, so lacking any normal sense of self-preservation, the lads there said just following him was the most dangerous thing you were ever likely to be asked to do.' Byers' face relaxed momentarily. 'Nineteen, twenty perhaps? Not that I was any older. Apparently his mama had given him the camera as a goodbye present. Perhaps she thought it was going to be like a touring holiday. Going to visit family friends in this or that chateau, chomp on snails and frogs' legs for dinner? When he went on leave, he hopped off to Paris. Brought back some champagne one time. Wanted to be a writer or some such, though what he really loved was his camera. No, I remember now, he was going to be a newspaperman when he got out of the war. Which was about as likely as the Kaiser being invited back for tea at Buckingham Palace. If ever there was a man with a short lifespan it was Mr Brabourne.