The Return of Captain John Emmett (32 page)

Suddenly the whole scenario he'd constructed, with Tucker as a stealthy and methodical killer, seemed ridiculous. He was just a semi-criminal local down-and-out. He would never have had the means to travel to Devon and to Oxfordshire to kill former comrades, much less the ingenuity. Deflated, Laurence felt a fool for allowing himself to believe in the dangers of chasing Tucker.

He looked at Charles. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'What a wild-goose chase.'

Charles still looked interested. He turned to their companion. 'Thank you,' he said. 'Very helpful.'

He handed him the promised sixpence and a further shilling. The man nodded, touched his cap, hovered for a few seconds and started to walk off before he turned and added, 'Tucker might quite have liked being called a murderer but then the man said Bert forced himself on some girl. No way Bert was going to take that one—used to fancy hisself with the ladies way back.'

'So,' said Charles, as they walked the slightly uphill route back towards the station, 'I assume we agree the man in the fight was John?'

Almost certainly.'

'How did John find Tucker?'

'He got hold of his address, like us, I suppose. Florence Place—Florence
Street
was written down on a note in John's effects. He had Byers' original address too. It was in his pocket when they found him.'

'You're with our friend and think Tucker was killed deliberately? But was it the same man who did for the chap in Devon?'

'Jim Byers?'

'Yes, Byers Two. The cousin of Byers One. And Inspector Mullins? Or, just possibly, John Emmett?'

'
If
they were all murders,' Laurence answered. 'Yes, it's a huge coincidence. I can't think it's worth checking with the police here or trying to track down the couple who might have seen Tucker's assailant. The whole damn thing is vague.'

And, he thought, if the facial injuries in all the deaths, bar John's, were intended as a message, whom was the message for?

As they climbed on to the homeward train, Laurence said, 'You know, I'm completely losing sight of what I set out to do.'

'Find out what on earth the fair Mary Emmett's brother was thinking of when he pulled the trigger,' replied Charles as they were pulling out of the station in a carriage that smelled strongly of old tobacco. 'All pretty straightforward when you started. What a man will do for love.'

Laurence felt tired and irritated. 'I hardly knew her when I agreed to look into it,' he said. 'I just wanted to help her with a horrible event in her life. Tie up loose ends. I didn't know it wasn't going to be so simple. It isn't like your storybook sleuths. Everybody isn't either good or bad, with clues and a tidy solution to be unravelled. Everything here goes round in circles. There isn't going to be the clear answer she wants answered: why did John die? And if there was, it wouldn't be the sort of answer she'd understand. He died because he was born at the wrong time. Or he died because he crossed the wrong person. Bad luck. No more. For God's sake, we still don't even know there was a murder or a killer. Or if there was, only of a farmhand, and a policeman, both of whom might have nothing to do with anything. If we did, we'd have told the police.'

'Point taken,' said Charles. 'Though you underestimate Mrs Christie, by the by. It's not individuals but combinations of circumstances that lead to catastrophe in her books. A fatal collision of character and events.' He beamed. 'But I suppose Emmett's sister would be happiest with clarity. It was So and So's fault—George Chilvers, the late Sergeant Tucker, General Haig. If you could find a murderer, that would help everyone. Well, not the murderer; perhaps it wouldn't help him. But it would be simple. Emmett didn't kill himself. Someone else, the embodiment of evil, did. A homicidal maniac. Which means there was nothing anyone could have done and Miss Emmett doesn't have to feel guilty.'

'Why on earth should she feel guilty?' Laurence jumped in. 'She's the last person who should feel guilty. John was off in Germany before the war, then he was fighting in France, then he became ill. She'd hardly talked to him properly for years.'

'I rest my case!'

Laurence gazed out of the window. He didn't want to continue the conversation. But Charles, apparently oblivious that he was treading on eggshells, went on, 'The thing is that a murderer wouldn't really help. Murderers have their stories too. Their reasons. The people they crossed. The people who did them down. Mrs Christie can leave their world behind on the last page but a real murderer's story doesn't end on the gallows.'

'Extreme violence changes everything for ever,' Laurence said, and then, in a more conciliatory tone he added, 'There is one loose end, though. Tresham Brabourne gave me another name—the junior officer who sneaked on Hart to their superior officer and got him charged. If I could track him down and if he survived the war, that would be informative. Man was called Lilley, Ralph Lilley.' He looked at Charles expectantly.

Charles shook his head. 'Never heard of him. But I'll ask around.' He sounded tired. He fumbled for his pipe and then gazed out at the darkening day.

Laurence rested his aching neck against the back of the seat. He couldn't think straight. Was it possible the man who told them the news of Tucker's death had deliberately misled them to put them off the track? He thought not. He realised now that the landlord had been amused when they'd been making their not very subtle enquiries.

Charles had been right, of course, Tucker had provided the easy solution. But if Tucker was out of the picture, then the murder of Jim Byers and any possibility of John having been murdered became much harder to link.

On the blank margin of his paper he wrote down the name of everybody connected with the execution of Edmund Hart. It was an untidy list because in some instances he either didn't know the name or had only a rank or a partial name. He drew a line through those he knew were dead or disabled. The list became much shorter. He wrote down a second list of everyone he knew of who'd been there when John was trapped in the trench fall and repeated the process. Again, it was not a long list, though he had less information this time. Only Leonard Byers was on both lists. Then he added Eleanor Bolitho. She was not there but she'd nursed John at both periods in his life.

Finally he set down the names of anyone else he could think of who had been significant in John's life in recent years. After Eleanor this had just six names on it: Mary, Mrs Emmett, Doctor Chilvers, George Chilvers, Mrs Chilvers and an unknown army friend who had visited him in Holmwood. He added Minna's name at the top with two question marks. She was dead, but she was the only possible link with the word 'Coburg' on John's note.

Obviously John was the man who had attacked Tucker but it had happened well before Tucker's death. Could John have returned to Birmingham after the initial fight and killed him before killing himself? Everyone agreed Tucker had enemies but one of them was certainly John. Instead of looking for Tucker as a potential killer of John Emmett, what if he discovered it was the other way around? It was John who had been arrested for assault, John who had been put in a nursing home to avoid prosecution.

What if these enquiries turned up something worse for Mary? He knew that was one reason he'd avoided going to the police in Birmingham. When John went absent, could he have travelled all the way to Birmingham to deal with Tucker? Was that where he was in those missing days? If Tucker had died in January or February, it was too late, but if he'd died earlier, it was just possible John could have been involved and he certainly had a motive. It would help if he had the dates, which meant he would have to contact the police after all, although he would be surprised if they hadn't made their own inquiries as to whether the dates fitted, given the earlier attack.

He recalled the various descriptions of John as much improved in the last weeks before his death. He was talking more, he seemed to have had a burden lifted from him. Might it have been because he'd finally dispensed his own sort of justice? If John had killed Tucker, then his own suicide became more comprehensible.

By the time they pulled into London, Laurence was hungry and thirsty, and Charles was snoring. The air felt wintry. They shared a cab, which dropped Charles off first before going on up to Bloomsbury.

'Thank you,' Laurence said. 'It was much better having you there. If ever I can reciprocate...'

'You can,' said Charles, patting his pocket. 'Two tickets for the Varsity Match. First time at Twickenham. New beginnings. Come with me and cheer for the dark blues.'

Laurence smiled. 'Of course.' Then before Charles went in, he remembered one thing that had been on his mind since the morning. 'Is there a river in Birmingham?'

'The Rea, not one of the great waterways of the world or, indeed, England. Not, I'm afraid, one of which poets sing. Or can pronounce, really.'

Delicate ice crystals radiated across the inside of Laurence's bedroom window when he woke late the next day. As he waited for some water to heat for shaving—it must be the coldest day of the year so far, he thought—he picked up a monograph on the church of St Alfrege but soon found his thoughts drifting back to Birmingham.

The violence of Tucker's end added to a list of possible murders, yet removed the most likely perpetrator. It was just feasible that John could have killed Tucker, although the deaths of Byers' cousin and Mullins had taken place well after John's own. Laurence found himself more rather than less determined to get to the bottom of things.

When he reread the list he'd made on the train, his instinct was that Eleanor Bolitho was the key to it all. The more he thought about it, the more he saw a discrepancy between Eleanor's insistence that William must be protected from reminders of the war, and the feeling he got from the man himself who appeared to welcome company. Was Eleanor worried that Laurence might let slip something that she would rather her husband didn't know, or that William might tell him something she wanted to keep hidden? Eleanor had lied about how well she'd known John. What else had she lied about?

He decided that the only way to make sense of this was to try to see her again and tell her he knew she had been to Holmwood. If he could put pressure on Eleanor to help him, things might start to fall into place. Nevertheless, when he left his flat, he almost changed his mind. The sky was heavy; freezing rain was turning fast to snow and by the look of it there was much more to come. By the time he was on the bus, the snow was coming down heavily and they made slow progress.

He had come to assume that William, at least, would always be at home. But nearly an hour after he set out, he stood on the doorstep outside their flat, having rung the bell three times, feeling that certainty, among others, seep away from him. He had been fired up with a determination to confront Eleanor. She had, of course, a right to privacy, but he needed to be certain what her part was in John's death. What did she know? What had she guessed? He was convinced that she was withholding knowledge about John from him and, more importantly, from John's family. From Mary.

The weather continued to deteriorate. He stepped back to look up at the three-storey building; the Bolithos' windows were dark. He had been prepared for Eleanor to be angry or even to refuse to let him in, but not for her absence. He felt in his pockets for a piece of paper, but as the only pencil he had on him was broken, there was no way he could leave a message. Anyway, he had wanted to catch her without her being forewarned. The snow flurries were now obscuring the view to the end of the street: he couldn't just stand between the pillars of the stone porch and wait in the cold. The black-and-white lozenge-shaped tiles beneath his feet were already partly obscured by white and the street itself was completely covered.

He pulled the brass bell knob one more time. He thought he could hear it jangling somewhere in the building, but he moved away immediately, knowing it was no good. He slipped on the lower step and swore loudly.

Eventually he pulled up his collar and set off back towards Kensington High Street. An absolute peace descended as he walked by. He gazed into a bay-fronted room where a woman was already drawing the curtains. Smoke and snow billowed over a chimney. He turned the corner, into a street that bore slightly downhill, becoming aware that he had to be careful not to fall. He looked down at his feet. He could already feel the wet seeping in and cursed the fact he had not worn sturdier boots. As he trudged on, he wondered again why he was pursuing all this. There was nothing to pursue really. A man had died, one of millions in the last seven years or so. He had no moral imperative to find out exactly why or how; despite what everyone assumed, he had not been a close friend of John Emmett. There had already been a perfectly thorough judicial examination by the police and coroner. He felt cross with himself, with the situation and with the weather so early in the winter.

As he looked up, a cumbersome shape caught his eye between the swirls of snow. Whatever it was, it was moving slowly and unevenly towards him, though many yards away on the other side of the street. Thinking it was a woman caught out with a perambulator, he moved to help her, but even as he speeded up, the shape twisted, then seemed to sprawl sideways and stop. He tried to run towards what was evidently some kind of accident. As he got closer it dawned upon him that it was a wheelchair and before he could identify the faces he realised it must be Eleanor and William. Eleanor didn't see him, even when he was only a few yards away from where the chair had tipped over. William was still half in it and seemed to be trying to pull himself clear. Eleanor had her arms under William's and her elbows were tucked into her sides as she tried to move him. Her boots were slipping and she heard Laurence only when he spoke their names. He looked first at Eleanor. Her face was grim and determined, but was lightened by relief as she recognised him.

'Could you steady the chair?' he said as he leaned forward and checked that William was simply stuck, not injured.