At Some Disputed Barricade (5 page)

“I’m only interested in finding who set up the Wheatcroft scandal and blamed you,” Matthew said vehemently. “If you are right, then someone is effectively ruining both of you. They are robbing the government of the men most likely to fight for a lasting peace. One that will prevent enemy alliance with future elements in Germany which would allow the same thing to happen again. God knows, we need a just peace, but not a weak one.”

“That is why I came to you, Captain Reavley,” Corracher said, his eyes meeting Matthew’s again. “I don’t believe it is coincidental. Whoever has created the evidence that makes me look guilty has been very clever. There’s no way I can fight against it without betraying other good men and raising doubts about other men’s personal lives.”

Matthew saw it very clearly. It was simple and supremely effective. Like a slip noose, every movement against it pulled it even tighter. “Tell me about Wheatcroft,” he asked. “Exactly what is he accused of doing? Where? Who else was involved, and what part are you supposed to have played? What evidence is there, written or witnessed? Is any of it true, even the bits that merely support or contribute?”

Corracher was deeply unhappy. He began slowly, hesitating as he searched for words, too embarrassed to look up. “Wheatcroft is accused of having solicited a sexual act with a young man in a public lavatory near Hampstead Heath. He lives not far from the heath and was walking his dog, which he does regularly. He had been seen talking to the same young man at least twice within two or three hundred yards of the place a week or two earlier. He says that this man simply asked him directions and he gave them.”

“Both times?” Matthew interrupted.

“Yes. It was quite late, at dusk, and he was apparently lost.”

“What does the young man say?”

Corracher’s face tightened. He looked up quickly, then away again. “That’s the thing. He’s a friend of mine, at least his father is. I’ve known him in a casual way most of his life. He’s a bit wild. He’s run up a degree of debt that he can’t pay, and it would be difficult for his father to come up with that much.”

“I take it he says Wheatcroft approached him?” Matthew concluded.

“Yes.”

“And it couldn’t be true?”

“He says I told him to say it!” Corracher’s face was scarlet now, but the anger in him was painfully real.

“Give me times, dates, and names,” Matthew said gently.

“There’s more.” Corracher’s voice was husky. “Wheatcroft says I asked him for money to keep it quiet, and he paid me a hundred pounds, but when I came back for more he told me to go to hell. And that was when I told Davy Pollock—the young man in question—to report it to the police. There is a hundred pounds in my bank that I can’t account for. Wheatcroft said he put it there the day after I demanded it, and he has the paying-in receipt.”

“How are you supposed to have asked for it?” Matthew asked.

“In a typewritten note.”

“Which I imagine he gave to the police?”

“Yes.”

“Write down everything you can think of, Mr. Corracher, including where I can reach you at any time, and I’ll do everything I can to expose the truth,” Matthew promised.

“Thank you.” Corracher seemed relieved that at last someone appeared to believe him. He rose to his feet a little unsteadily and offered his hand, then withdrew it and turned to the door. Was he afraid Matthew would decline to shake it? It was a mark of how deeply he already felt tainted by the charge.

After he had gone, Matthew read all the information, made the briefest of notes himself, then left his office to begin his inquiries.

Outside the air was close and heavy, as if waiting for thunder. The streets were quiet compared with peacetime. Petrol was scarce and expensive, and the army had first call on good horses. There was something heartbreakingly drab about the quiet women waiting in queues or patiently walking along the pavements. The omnibuses had women conductors. One passed Matthew as he waited on the curb to cross. The driver was a woman also, her hair drawn back off her face and tied behind her neck. The girls who worked in munitions factories had actually cut theirs short. It was too easy to get it caught in the machinery and literally have one’s scalp torn off.

No one seemed to wear red or pink anymore, as if it were somehow indecent in the face of so much loss.

Matthew crossed the street and reached the other side, stepping up onto the pavement past a group of white-faced women, silent, each lost in her own world. There were such groups in every town and village all over Europe, waiting for the casualty lists. In some places where a whole brigade had been wiped out, every house in street after street would have the blinds half drawn and stunned, white-faced women would sit in the August heat and wonder how they were going to face tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that.

Too much had been paid to allow this ever to happen again, anywhere, for any reason. To appease now would be to make this terrible sacrifice meaningless. That thought was not bearable.

He walked past them to the top end, caught an omnibus to Hampstead Heath, and climbed the steps to the upper deck. He sat alone, his mind turned inward.

He barely glanced at the streets he passed through. They were gray and dusty, the city trees in full leaf between the occasional stretch of fire-scarred rubble where a zeppelin had bombed.

Was it possible that Hannassey had left some legacy behind him? Matthew had never imagined that the Peacemaker worked alone, but he had believed that the Peacemaker was not only the brain of the conspiracy, but the heart and the will of it also. Was he wrong? Was there still someone with the skill to concoct a plan like this and carry it through? Had the Peacemaker designed it and left the instructions before his death?

He dismounted at Hampstead Heath and walked to the police station. With his credentials, it was not difficult to find a senior officer willing to tell him about the alleged incident, the young man involved, and his debts.

“Miserable business,” Inspector Stevens said unhappily, sitting behind a desk piled with paperwork. He stirred a tin mug of tea to dissolve the sugar in it.

Matthew had declined the offer of tea.

“Could it have been a misunderstanding on Wheatcroft’s part?” he asked. “Unwise, perhaps, and young Pollock jumped the gun a bit?”

“Of course it could,” Stevens answered. “Pollock withdrew the complaint anyway. Said he was put up to it when he was drunk and only half knew what he was saying.” His bland face registered a weariness and unutterable contempt. “Young waster should be in the army, like everyone else!” He could not disguise the bitterness and the grief in his face. For a moment it was embarrassingly naked. Matthew did not need to ask where his own son was, or if he was still all right. The answer was stifling, like the hot air in the closed room.

“Why isn’t he in the army?” he asked, because he needed to know more about the boy.

Stevens shot him a look of disdain. “If someone propositioned him, it’d be the first time he bloody complained about it!” he said hoarsely.

“Obvious he was willing?” Matthew asked.

Stevens raised his eyebrows. “You mean should Wheatcroft have known what he was and kept clear? Not necessarily. He wasn’t refused by the army for that. Flat feet! That’s what it says on the forms. But that isn’t the point. Wheatcroft said the whole incident never happened, and Pollock changed his story. Said Corracher put him up to it.”

“Could that be true?”

“God knows!” Stevens replied. “I doubt it. Wheatcroft denied that Corracher tried to blackmail him at first, and then he refused to say anything at all. Seemed in a blue funk to me. Sweating like a pig and white as paper.” He ran his hand over his face, rubbing it hard. “He wanted to withdraw the whole thing, let it go, but his wife was furious, determined to charge Corracher, in case it ever came up again. Prove once and for all that he was a vicious liar.”

“Professional rivalry between the two men?” Matthew asked.

Stevens looked genuinely surprised. “Political? You mean for office? Never thought of that, but I don’t think so.”

“What do you think?”

Stevens rubbed his face again and moved his eyes to meet Matthew’s. “Honestly? Ever met Mrs. Wheatcroft? Formidable woman. Beautiful as cut glass, and about as comfortable. My guess would be that Wheatcroft behaved like a fool, refused to do the honorable thing and own up to it. Took the way out by blaming Corracher, until the alternative became facing his wife over it, and her public embarrassment if it became known. If he denied it to her—and maybe quite honestly—it might have been no more than an indiscretion. Then she insisted on taking the way out offered by blaming Corracher. Or at least he didn’t have the courage to deny that it was him. Poor devil!”

“Corracher?”

Stevens looked at him bleakly.

“Both of them. But it’s only my guess. Could be wrong. I don’t know Corracher, except by repute. And I’ve long ago learned that damn near anyone can surprise you—for better
or
worse.”

Matthew did not press him any further. He thanked him, asked him for David Pollock’s address, and went to see him. He was a handsome, rather effeminate young man. However on looking at him more closely, Matthew realized that that effect had been achieved more by allowing his hair to grow longer and wearing a loose shirt like an artist’s smock than by the basic cast of his features. At first he affected a slight lisp, but as soon as he became angry he forgot it.

“Of course I didn’t!” he said furiously. “It’s all lies! That damn politician put me up to it. Scared me silly. Thought I was going to be accused of…of being a…” He did not finish the sentence, as though the thought were too repellent for him to speak it. “The army refused me because I have flat feet! I couldn’t march if my life depended on it.”

Matthew did not bother to respond. He did not know the truth of his fitness, or his honesty. Nor did he care. It was not his job to chase cowards. It was Corracher who mattered, and the possibility of the Peacemaker’s plans still alive, still working their slow poison.

He did not believe Pollock, but neither could he prove him a liar. All he had achieved was to substantiate what Corracher had told him.

He left and walked back across Hampstead Heath in the late, thundery dusk. The leaves seemed to shiver in the heavy air and the breeze smelled of rain.

He turned it over in his mind. Was this plot a legacy of the Peacemaker? Or was it possible that Hannassey had been the tool, not the principal of the conspiracy? It was now a year since the Battle of Jutland, and Matthew had basked in a certain kind of peace. He had heard about the punishment of Detta and it had hollowed out a new place of pain inside him, but he had known it would come, even if not in so savage a form. He had found a degree of calm inside himself knowing that the man who had caused the death of John and Alys Reavley had finally met his own death. He was both horrified and satisfied that Hannassey’s end, too, had been violent, even that Matthew himself had caused it. He had had no moral alternative but to kill him, and when he had woken in the night, sick and sweating at the memory, that knowledge had enabled him to sleep again.

And there was the infinitely larger issue of the Anglo-German alliance, which the Peacemaker had so nearly brought about, with its monstrous dishonor. Now that, too, was laid to rest.

Except that perhaps it was not. The removal from office of four junior but highly effective members of the government was exactly the sort of thing the Peacemaker would do, and the skill and subtlety of the method suited his style. It was only by chance that the plot had come to Matthew’s notice. Now he realized with a chill that there may have been other plots during the year since Jutland, successful ones that he had not recognized because his assumption that the Peacemaker was dead had blinded him to even considering such a thing. He would have to rectify that fault urgently.

The next day he began inquiries about the death of Kemp in the zeppelin raid. No one had considered it suspicious at the time. There had been many deaths in such raids; his was simply more notable because of his position. Where he had lived was a matter of public record.

“Could it have been murder?” Matthew asked the fire warden who had been first on the scene.

“Murder?” the man looked startled, as if Matthew had said something in bad taste. “Call it that if you like, sir, but it’s better just to say it’s the war. Murder’s sort o’ personal. It’s this way for everybody at the moment.”

“What I mean, Mr. Barker, is could he have been killed by some other means and left with the casualties, to hide the fact that in his case it was murder?” Matthew explained.

Barker was taken aback. “Oo’d want ter do a thing like that?”

“Most people who have power also have enemies,” Matthew said evasively. “Is it possible?”

Barker still looked confused. “’Ow would I know, sir?”

“Where was he found? Inside the house? Under rubble? With other people or alone?” Matthew elaborated.

“Alone. In the street just outside the ’ouse,” Barker replied thoughtfully. “You sayin’ as ’e were put there, an’ we reckoned as it were the bombs wot killed ’im, but it weren’t? Yer never goin’ ter prove nothin’ now!”

“I daresay not. I’d just like to know.”

“Then ’e could a’ bin. Or not.”

“Thank you.”

About Newell he could learn nothing. Reasons of health were given for his resignation, but no one had any knowledge of what illness it might be. Newell himself refused to see or speak to Matthew, claiming that he was not well enough, and had nothing relevant to say.

Blackmail again? Possibly. Its particular nature did not matter. Matthew was now certain in his own mind that there was a concerted plan to get rid of ministers who were individually able to affect the course of war, through diplomatic skill or connections, whether it was the Peacemaker who was behind it or not. The nation was exhausted with the loss of men, with shortages of food, fuel, and luxuries of all sorts, with the drabness and ever-present fear of bombing. They dreaded even greater hunger, and ultimately invasion and conquest. Perhaps after that might come civil war, Briton against Briton as some surrendered, believing it the lesser evil, and others fought on until the slaughter and defeat were total.