Anthem for Doomed Youth (11 page)

By the time Alec and Tom returned to the big room, Mackinnon had sent off a couple of detective constables to hunt for bullets at the scene of the burials while daylight lasted. He had arranged for the local bobby, PC Elliott, to show them the way. A stenographer was typing up the reports of the day’s interviews, while a somewhat reduced crew continued to sort the thinning stream of incoming paper. Mackinnon was now skimming through the pile of tips that Cavett had classified as unlikely to be of use but not impossible.

‘Good work. Keep at it.’ Alec went over to Ernie Piper.

Piper had divided about half of his ‘most likely’ pile into three and was puzzling over the scribble on what appeared to be the back of a betting slip.

‘If you ask me, Chief,’ he grumbled, ‘this one ended up getting passed on because no one could tell what it says so they didn’t dare to discard it.’

‘Give it to Tom and get on with the ones you can read.’

‘I’m no handwriting expert, Chief!’ Tom protested.

‘If after five minutes you still don’t know whether it’s worth keeping, we’ll set it aside in case we reach the point where we’re desperate enough to take it to the experts. Ernie, which of these is the lot we need to get in touch with?’

‘Dunno that we need to get in touch with all the writers, but this lot’s worth following up one way or another.’ He pushed the smallest pile across the desk, then pointed at the other two in turn. ‘This lot maybe, these prob’ly not.’

Alec sat on the corner of the desk and started reading. The first was a three-page diatribe, unsigned, from a man who had served under Pelham in the Boer War. Full of venom and a sense of bitter injustice, the writer wished he had met his well-deserved fate much sooner. He did not, however, mention what Pelham had done to earn such opprobium. The shaky handwriting suggested an elderly man, and he didn’t mention either Devine or Halliday, so the lack of either name or address wasn’t important. Alec wondered why Piper had set it aside.

Then he noticed that at the bottom of the third sheet of ivory notepaper, upside down, was the reverse side of an embossed address. The old man had presumably not noticed it. His large writing also suggested poor
eyesight
. Turning the page over, Alec saw that the address was that of a residential hotel in Hounslow. Easy to find him – and he might shed light on Pelham’s conduct in the army, on the sort of action that could have led to enmity enduring long enough to result in murder years later.

Tom came over with the letter he had been trying to decipher.

‘Greek, or maybe Russian,’ he announced.

‘What!’ Alec took it from him.

‘Well, it’s some kind of foreign alphabet. I’d recognise Chinese, having seen plenty of it in Limehouse, and Arabian’s all sort of twirly—’

‘How on earth do you know that? We don’t have an Arab colony in London, do we?’

Tom’s face and head turned a rosy pink, an impressive sight. ‘The missus saw that film,
The Sheik
, with Rudolph Valentino. Very keen on it, she was. So when she read about an exhibition of Arabian stuff at the V and A, she talked me into taking her. There was that squirly-twirly writing all over the place.’

‘All right, so it’s not Arabic. But you’re right, it’s not the Roman alphabet. It’s hard to credit that anyone would write to us in Russian or Greek – if he doesn’t know English, how did he find out we’re asking for information? – but I
suppose
we’d better get it translated. Next week, if we’re not getting anywhere.’

‘File and forget, laddie,’ Tom advised Piper as Alec laid the paper, which was indeed a betting slip, on the desk.

‘I never forget anything, Sarge,’ Ernie retorted.

‘Right now, Tom, I want you to read this, and go down to Hounslow for a chat with the chap who wrote it. See if you can find out what he’s still all steamed up about a quarter of a century later.’

‘No peace for the wicked.’

‘You’d rather help with this lot?’ Alec gestured at the room full of coppers reading and writing reports.

‘Not bloody likely.’ Tom preferred – and was much better at – dealing with people than paperwork. ‘I’m on my way.’

‘Ring up after you’ve talked to him, just in case there’s something else to be done out that way.’

‘Not in that lot you’ve got, Chief, there isn’t,’ said Piper.

‘Too much to hope for. The next little job’ll be in Harrow or Clapham, one of those “you can’t get there from here”
places as far as Hounslow is concerned, if it’s not out of town altogether.’

As far as Tom was concerned, ‘out of town’ meant not on the Tube, and ‘can’t get there from here’ meant having to go into central London to change Tube lines. He carried a map of the underground railway system in his head.

So did Ernie. ‘Cheer up, Sarge,’ he said. ‘Hounslow’s on the District Line, a straight run from Westminster. As long as you don’t hop on the wrong train.’

‘Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs,’ Tom growled. ‘I’m not quite in my dotage.’ He went out, walking with less than his customary lightness of foot.

Not in his dotage by a long chalk
, Alec thought, watching him with concern,
but no longer able to take a run of late nights in his stride
. If nothing further had come up in
southwest
London by the time he phoned, he could go home for the night.

A constable brought over a chair. Gratefully, Alec sat down. He wasn’t growing any younger himself. He used to be able to perch comfortably on the corner of a desk for as long as he chose, but now he could feel a distinct ache in his lower back. It had been another long day, and it wasn’t finished yet.

He turned to the next missive in his handful. Paperclipped to it was a note that it had been handed in at a police station in Southwark – M Division – just across the river. Written in an uneducated hand on a sheet of lined paper that looked as if it had been carefully cut from a school exercise-book, it was mercifully brief. The writer had served for a few weeks under a Lieutenant Devine and a Captain Halliday, though he didn’t know ‘nobody’ by the name of Pelham. He’d always
been a law-abiding man, and if the police was to want to talk to him, he was their ‘obdt. servant, Robt. Thomson.’ The signature was followed by an address, also in Southwark.

‘Devine and Halliday served together!’

‘Pelham, too, Chief. You’ve got a couple there that was with all three in France. Sorry, I didn’t get round to sorting in order of importance.’

Damn!
thought Alec. With a little patience, he could have avoided requesting immediate access to War Office records and thereby disturbing a number of important people. On the other hand, he could make a persuasive case for needing official confirmation of whatever these witnesses had to say. What was more, reports from the battlefields might reveal whatever it was the three officers did that had eventually led to their murders, not to mention who else had been involved and could now be in danger.

After all, a fourth murder was the nightmare of everyone from the man in the street to the home secretary.

While these considerations passed through his head, Alec had flipped through the rest of his collection and found the two messages Piper referred to. The three names jumped out at him at a glance.

One of the tips was a letter. The other, unfortunately, came in a telegram from Newcastle upon Tyne. Unless the investigation dragged on to unthinkable lengths, in which case he’d probably be taken off it, he couldn’t send someone up there. No telephone number was given. If a number to match the name could be found in the relevant directory, he’d have to make an expensive trunk call to interview Mr Peter Chivers, who had served in Colonel Pelham’s regiment with Halliday and Devine. If not, he’d have to ask
the Newcastle police to help, not only ringing them up at equally vast expense to explain what he needed, but more than likely finding himself on the other end of the line from someone with an absolutely impenetrable accent.

No, surely they must have men on the force who spoke the King’s English! The case was getting him down. He had to stop worrying about beating the killer to the next victim and concentrate on catching him.

‘Ernie, get hold of a telephone number for Peter Chivers, Newcastle, if there is one. And train timetable for Gerrards Cross.’

‘No phone number, Chief.’ Ernie continued sorting as he spoke. ‘Fast trains every half hour from Marylebone, quarter to and quarter past, till eleven fifteen. It takes twenty-six minutes.’

‘I should have known you’d have checked already.’

Gerrards Cross, in Buckinghamshire, was where the letter came from. Brief and businesslike, it stated that the writer, Stanley West, a captain at the time, had been posted close to Pelham’s regiment at Loos. As liaison officer, he had made the colonel’s acquaintance, but did not claim to know him well, except through what his junior officers had said of him. He had shared a mess with Halliday, Devine and other officers of the regiment fairly regularly for several weeks.

An outsider’s view – Alec would have liked to go himself to talk to West, but he decided he was the only person who could deal with the Newcastle police. Besides, he ought to stay in case something more urgent turned up. He went over to Mackinnon and dropped the letter on the desk in front of him.

‘All yours,’ he said. ‘You know the case thoroughly and I
trust you to ask the right questions. You’ve got things ticking over smoothly here. Delegate whomever you choose to keep it running while you’re gone.’

Mackinnon read the letter. ‘Ye think he’ll bide at home this evening, sir?’

‘One can only hope so. He gives a phone number, so ring beforehand, but if you’re told he’s out and will be coming home later, I want you to go out there anyway.’

‘Och, aye. And if there’s no answer, I’ll get the Gerrards Cross coppers to try and find out when he’ll be back.’

‘I’ll leave it to you. Piper has the train times. If it’s after midnight when you finish there, you can go straight home. But before you go, get the switchboard to put through a call to the main police station in Newcastle upon Tyne, would you? When it comes through, I’ll take it up in my office. After that, I’m going to pop over to Southwark.’ Alec could have sent a detective constable to interview his ‘obdt. servant, Robt. Thomson,’ but he had a feeling, illogical and inexplicable, that as he couldn’t send Tom Tring, he ought to go himself, even though Thomson had not known Pelham.

‘Southwark, sir? Better take a constable.’

‘I’ll call in at the local coppers’ and see what they say about the address I’m bound for. If it’s in a respectable area, as I expect, I don’t want to embarrass the man I’m going to see by turning up with a uniform in tow.’

‘Nor his guidwife, if any,’ Mackinnon agreed with a rare grin.

‘Especially not his good wife, if any. I’ll see you in the morning, if not before.’

Upstairs, while waiting for the trunk call to come through, Alec tried to analyse his feeling that Thomson
might be important. There was a whiff about the crime of a lower-class, other-ranks grudge against superior officers. Perhaps he was letting himself be influenced by the choice of burial-place. Epping Forest was, after all, the traditional spot for the concealment of homicide victims originating in the East End, from illegitimate babies to those who fell afoul of gangs.

Was that the only indication? Unable to come up with anything more convincing to support the hypothesis, Alec decided a better use of his time would be going through the rest of the few papers Piper considered worthy of investigation.

None seemed as likely to yield results as the four he was already dealing with.
They could wait for the morning
, he thought, pushing them aside as the telephone bell rang.

After all the usual pauses, pings, crackles and
exhortations
from operators, he was connected with DS Miniver, the senior detective on duty in Newcastle. Miniver’s Geordie accent was quite strong but comprehensible. What was more, he had read about the case in the papers and was pleased to be asked to help in such a notorious affair. He quickly grasped what Alec wanted of Peter Chivers.

‘Ah’ll go to his hoose reet away, an if he’s not in, Ah’ll see if Ah can find him. Shall Ah ring back the neet?’

Alec blinked.
The neet?
Oh, tonight, presumably. ‘If you manage to see him, yes, please, and send a written report by first post. If you can’t find him, a telegram to that effect will do. Then one of your day officers can try again tomorrow.’

‘Reet ye are, sir.’

Thanking him, Alec rang off. He went over to the window and looked out over the Thames towards Southwark. The
sun, already sinking in the west, glinted pinkly off the glass roof of Waterloo Station. It would be near dark before he reached the humble abode of Robert Thomson. Better get moving. Doubtless Ernie Piper would know which bus he should take across Westminster Bridge.

Ernie had the route number at his fingertips, along with three more letters.

‘I’ll read them on the bus. This shouldn’t take long, I hope. I’ll be back.’

It was early enough for buses to be frequent, late enough for them not to be over-full. Alec spared a glance from his seat upstairs for the famous view from the bridge. Though Wordsworth’s ‘All bright and glittering in the smokeless air’ had ceased to apply long ago, on a warm June evening the permanent haze over the great city was at its minimum. In spite of familiarity, the vista was still majestic.

He took the new letters from his pocket. One was a stiff note from Pelham’s nephew, who assumed the police would be in touch at their convenience. Alec had been too preoccupied with the immediate families of the victims and the search for links between the three to spare him a second thought. It was always possible he might be able to shed some light on his uncle’s past. Tom or Mackinnon would have to see him tomorrow.

According to Mrs Pelham, Reginald Pelham was, or had been, at the India Office. So was the husband of Daisy’s close friend, Mrs Prasad. Prasad and Pelham more than likely knew each other.
Perish the thought!
Did it bring Daisy close enough to the colonel to give the super ammunition for one of his diatribes? He must never find out.