A Whispered Name (38 page)

Half an
hour later Anselm guided the glossy paper out of the fax machine, almost
pulling it ahead of the print mechanism. He read the entries slowly his finger
checking off each day When he’d finished, he lowered himself on to a stool,
barely conscious of his surroundings. He arranged the material in his mind,
laying the facts into position. Shortly Anselm saw a picture whose wild shape
and vibrant colour he could never have imagined. When he was quite calm and
altogether sure of his judgement he dialled the Prior’s extension.

‘I
think there’s something you ought to know about John Lindsay’ he said, casually.

They met in the parlour
where Anselm and the Prior had received Martin Reid and the Osborne family.

On the
table was the map of the Ypres Salient. Beside it, laid out like torn pages
from a book, were the faxed entries from The Lambeth Rifles’ War Diary. Anselm
read out a selection of each day’s events, beginning on the 1st September — ‘Divine
Service held in the village, lecture to senior officers, route march, Company
training …’ — and stopping on the 18th, when he disclosed the fact implicit
to every activity. ‘The Lambeth Rifles were
out of the line.
They were
preparing for the attack on the Menin Road. They didn’t go into action until
the twentieth.’

The
Prior nodded ponderously He drew back a chair, showing neither comprehension
nor growing intuition. But he asked the key question.

‘When
was Doyle reported dead?’

Anselm
had the place marked in his bundle of documents. ‘On the sixteenth … the day
following Joseph Flanagan’s execution, and three days before The Lambeth Rifles
set off for their designated areas. And from whom do you think the report
originated? Unfortunately there’s no name, but the unit is cited: the eighth
Service Battalion, Northumberland Light Infantry. But they too, were out of
the line.’

‘Which
means an official in the NLI sent a memo about a casualty he couldn’t know
about … and which couldn’t have happened.’

‘Precisely’
replied Anselm. ‘And that memo is just the opening shot in a savage but …
stylish
protest.’

Anselm
pointed to the map. He’d marked in red ink the dispositions of the Army that
was ready to attack the Menin Road, broken down into Corps, Divisions, and
Brigades. Anselm’s finger hovered to the northwest of a copse of trees near the
entrenchments of 1 Anzac Corps.

‘Whoever
sent that message from the Northumberland Light Infantry wanted to make a
point. And I’m now fairly certain that it was the same person who weeded the
Flanagan file. He said Doyle died northwest of Glencorse Wood. That part of
the line was held by the
Australians.
They’re the only part of the BEF
who
didn’t
have the death penalty. This is an attack on military capital
punishment … in one, sweeping sentence. If anyone within the administration
had bothered to check the detail they’d have seen that Doyle could not have
been a fatal casualty … and that would have led them back to the Étaples
material and the link with Flanagan, whose file carried its own message: the
leading recommendation in the queue was for
clemency,
which is precisely
what should have happened and didn’t. The actual decision of the
Commander-in-Chief had been removed … thrown away Along with the death
certificate. It’s as though this critic was saying to the Army in the name of
the regiment, “We
refuse
to accept this man’s death.”‘

A
mixture of sobriety and approval had gradually transformed the Prior’s
features. He was, of course, glancing impatiently ahead, to the identity of the
man who’d come to Larkwood, and who remained out of reach, but Anselm hadn’t
quite finished his appraisal.

‘First
and foremost, however,’ he said, admiring the economy and ingenuity of the
unknown critic, his poise and insolence, ‘this shredding of paper and
memo-sending is not just a protest, it is an act of calculated subversion: by
reporting Doyle killed in action he set him free … right under the noses of
the administration, because they should have known that Doyle
couldn’t
have
died among the Australians … and
wouldn’t
have done, if he’d been, say
a Queensland boy But of course, they never looked. That’s why the boy finally
got away He was as good as dead to the army.

The Prior sighed and put
on his glasses again. ‘You’re right, Anselm. But if we didn’t understand the
papers, neither have we understood the people. It makes sense now Kate Seymour
allowed Martin Reid and the Osborne family to believe she was related to
Flanagan because she was protecting the dignity of John Lindsay He lives, as
Herbert anticipated, with enduring guilt and shame. Who wouldn’t? Like Mr Shaw,
he carries a unique kind of burden.’

He drew
a hand across the bristles on his head, closing his eyes tight as though he
were very tired. ‘We now know the meaning of the trial; we know what Herbert
wanted to say and we know who is waiting to hear it. His tags are in our
keeping.’

But the
contact address had been mislaid by a dear old man who represented all that was
good in Larkwood, along with its folly A matchless Gatekeeper. This fond
thought was shared by Anselm and the Prior. Their eye contact, however,
betrayed a recognition that the resulting state of affairs was almost hopeless.

But
only almost. With the Prior hopelessness was often rapidly converted into
buoyancy and clear-thinking. Folding his arms, eyes smouldering like a forest
fire, he began talking as if he were addressing the community at Chapter.
Tracing Mr Lindsay through conventional means was a massive task, he conceded.
It required professional skills that Larkwood did not possess. The simplest
solution — in fact the only option left open — was to follow John Lindsay’s
movements after September 1917. He almost certainly returned to England, either
during the war or afterwards and had, of course, a ready means of permanent
concealment: he would be coming back as
John Lindsay,
not Owen Doyle.

‘And Mr
Lindsay had never joined the army’ said Anselm, understanding the Prior’s line
of thought.

‘And he’d
never been tried by Field General Court Martial.’

So the
military suspended sentences lay buried with Doyle near Glencorse Wood …
while the three-year borstal sentence from 1915 remained very much alive. Wasn’t
this their best chance? argued the Prior, knitting his hands. Could it be that
the court system had eventually caught up with Lindsay? Martin Reid may have
examined the borstal files but he didn’t go beyond 1915 because that was the
year Lindsay had joined the army.

‘I
think you should go back to the national archives and trawl any penal records
held after nineteen eighteen,’ concluded the Prior. ‘I’m confident you’re going
to pick up his trail fairly easily’

‘Why?’
Anselm didn’t share his optimism in the least.

‘Because
John Lindsay first left his mark in life upon a school punishment book. He was
a prolific offender before and during the war. He can’t have a turned a new
leaf that easily’

2

Martin listened to Anselm’s
exposition with unconcealed admiration. That John Lindsay had survived was, he
agreed, ‘the meaning of the trial’, to use Kate Seymour’s phrase. Finding him,
however, was another matter, and it was plain from his tone that he shared Anselm’s
lack of confidence. His own reluctant view was that— Anselm for a brief moment
lost his bearings. He leaned on the calefactory wall, reliving that first
accidental meeting by Herbert’s grave.
This was no ordinary trial, Father,
she’d
whispered with sudden feeling … as though hiding her thoughts from the old
man who wouldn’t draw near. She’d looked down on Herbert’s cross from a wounded
place inside herself, and said,
I’d hoped he would explain it to me
…
and
bring an old man some peace before he died.
Anselm tried to penetrate that
plea, knowing what he’d subsequently learned. Floundering, he gripped a
terrible probability: the old man could not begin to comprehend what Joseph
Flanagan had done for him; and it needed Herbert, who became a monk, to place
revealing words upon it, healing words …

… so,
you see,’ said Martin, ‘I didn’t research the borstal records after nineteen
fifteen because any subsequent action regarding Lindsay’s sentence for
shopbreaking would have reactivated the file:

‘Ah,’
said Anselm, disorientated, as if he’d just surfaced out of nowhere in someone’s
swimming pool.

‘Of
course, Lindsay may have attracted later custodial sentences for other
offences—’

‘I was
just going to say that:

‘—but
most records are kept at the
prisons
themselves …’ Martin stalled
portentously — ‘and, frankly I doubt if any of the registers kept from the
twenties have been placed on a data base.’

‘Which
means that I’d have to check the vaults of every prison in the United Kingdom?’
asked Anselm, moored to the conversation now ‘Turning pages in ledgers?’

‘Precisely’

When
someone wants to hold out hope, they often say all sorts of nonsense — anything
to cushion the impact of disappointment which will, ultimately have its day And
with such a tone of confidence and helpfulness, Martin said he’d check the
available records at the PRO. ‘We’ve got some … not many … but you never
know.’

Anselm went back to his
hives, rather like a witness might revisit the
locus in quo
of a complex
accident. He sat on his bench between Augustine and Thérèse. Slowly he walked
out of the clearing and into the shade of the aspens, approaching Herbert’s
grave by stealth. With the freshness of the enactment, he listened again to
Kate Seymour’s words, and he looked at the man with the wide cap and the wild,
white beard. Something at the back of his mind told him a greater truth had
presented itself that day but that even now he lacked the vision to see it.

Chapter Forty-Nine

A Matter of Example

1

The
estaminet
sparkled
with all kinds of glass: flat, round and tinted. Green and yellow bottles stood
in rows on a back wall counter beneath shelves covered in upturned glasses. A
vast mirror multiplied their number and the depth of the room. Pictures covered
the remaining walls: of boats and bays, a packed harbour, buildings of timber
and stone leaning into one another, a walled town with a great gate, men and
women in large flat hats working with rakes by the sea.

Herbert
sat at a polished wooden table opposite Madame Lisette Papinau. Unable to face
her directly he let his eyes rest on a vague spot over her shoulder. But all he
could see was the woman whose face had been framed by the window, the beautiful
woman who’d opened the door in silence and drawn back his chair in welcome,
surmising why he had come.

‘Joseph
is dead?’ she asked.

Her
self—possession was so complete, her tone of voice so measured, that his
compassion was out of place. She wanted a clinical reply.

‘He was
executed by a firing squad yesterday morning at five forty-six a.m.

‘Where?’

Herbert
still couldn’t look at Madame Papinau. But neither could he escape what he’d
already seen: rich black hair wound into a bun at the back of the head; a
spotless white blouse with loose cuffs, like a buccaneer’s, the laces tied into
neat bows; a black silk band held the collar high, covering her throat.

‘Oostbeke.’
He sensed a brutal requirement for greater detail. ‘A road leads out of the
village past an abbey and a school. After a mile there is a wood. A track on
the right leads to a clearing … I was there. The singing of birds is all I
want to bring you from that place..’

‘Thank
you.

A hint
of flowers captured the room, though Herbert couldn’t see any blooms.

‘He was
buried with dignity among the roots of great, living trees. There is no other
marker.’

Now
that he’d managed to say what had happened, Herbert brought his eyes into focus
and saw a door that led, presumably to Madame Papinau’s living quarters. It was
slightly ajar. And in this place of cold precision, even a door left open was
incongruous. Owen Doyle was on the other side, listening. Herbert was sure. The
certainty gave him the confidence to finally look upon Madame Papinau. In
complete silence he reached over and placed three small shells in her cupped
hand.

‘Joseph
asked me to give you this letter.’

He
passed the envelope across the table. Madame Papinau took out the single sheet
of paper and opened it. Her eyes swam but no tears fell. Herbert could see the
writing through the paper; it crossed the lines in a wild diagonal. Very little
had been written but Madame Papinau read it over and again, her face gathering
into a frown —not because of the sharpness of moment: the handling of a dead
man’s final words — but because she was completely taken aback by what she read.
The hand holding the letter dropped and she closed her eyes in thought, like
someone trying to hear a very distant sound. Thus occupied, she slowly folded
the paper and put it back in the envelope. After a long moment, she looked at
Herbert as if she’d emerged from the dark, and said, weakly, ‘He wrote
something I don’t understand.’