The Return of Captain John Emmett (21 page)

Byers looked momentarily uncomfortable but after a brief hesitation he went on.

'Then Captain Emmett calls out, not loud enough really, "Ready", and there's the first click and then Mr Hart shouts out, "Goodbye, lads. Shoot straight and for God's sake make it quick." And the captain, he seems startled. Instead of going on, he stops. Then starts again: "Ready, aim, fire." Which we do.

'But the thing is, we
don't
shoot straight. First off, we're not using our own weapons. Dusty had been tippling out of his flask all night; God knows where he got it but he'd had plenty. Watkins is so busy with his mutterings about Jesus that his aim's all over the place, and the lad next to me whose name I can't remember shoots even before the captain has given the order to fire, he's that jumpy, and he hits the bloke all right, but not in the heart. We can all hear him moaning. Vince fires when he's told to, I think, and so do I, but I'd never even had to shoot a real person, not close up. Hart slumps against the ropes. As for Tucker, he shoots, but after me and he gets him in the leg or the belly or somewhere, and he was a good shot. Famous for it. Wasn't nervous either. It's Tucker's shot that makes him fall forward and the weight of him pulls the post with him at an angle and the ropes give way and he's on the ground and we can see he's bleeding. It doesn't take the MO to make it official. He's alive. We all look at Captain Emmett. Not just us but the padre and the MO and Mr Brabourne. It's the captain's mess to sort out now.'

Laurence felt cold with disgust. The inhumanity of it all.

'Captain Emmett takes his pistol out of its holster. He steps up to Hart, who's moving slightly. He hesitates and it looks like Hart's trying to speak. God knows how. Captain Emmett should have just ended it there and then. But he stoops down and tries to hear what Hart says. Puts his hand on his arm. Then he stands up again, whiter even than he was before. His arm with the gun is just hanging at his side. He looks up towards the MO and Mr Brabourne and for a minute nobody moves. Mr Brabourne looks back. The MO moves forward but stops. Hart's sort of coughing. His leg's twitching.'

Byers swallowed hard.

'Then suddenly Tucker walks across to the captain. He pushes Hart half over with his boot, reaches out and takes the captain's pistol out of his hand. No resistance at all. He shoots Hart, straight in the face. Then he takes Captain Emmett's hand, puts the gun in it, salutes sharpish, and walks back to the rest of us.'

Byers fell silent and when he spoke again his voice was husky.

'It was all wrong, all of it. It's why I took it so bad with Jim, it brought it all back.'

He put his spectacles back on and looked defiantly at Laurence.

'Tucker marches us off back to the farmyard. But not before we could all hear someone throwing up, Mr Brabourne, I think it was, but then whatever you say about Mr Brabourne, he'd had guts to be there; he didn't have to be. Could have been the padre, mind you. He was green too. God knows what happened between the officers. We don't see the MO and the padre again; they went off someplace else, and Captain Emmett and Mr Brabourne get back a while later. No mention of any irregularities. Nothing. No comeback I ever heard of against Tucker. Nor against your friend, Captain Emmett. Our secret. But Tucker, when the officers come in, he's standing next to the captain and the captain won't even look at him, when Tucker calls out, "Byers, there's an officer here needs his boots cleaning," and I look down and Captain Emmett looks down and there's blood and brains and stuff all over his foot.'

The room was suddenly silent. Then, slowly, sound crept back in. Laurence was aware of a clock ticking and a squeak each time Byers moved in his chair. His own grated as he pushed it back. Incongruously he could hear a blackbird somewhere outside. Byers was looking down and absent-mindedly tapping his pencil on his desk. Slowly Laurence picked up the more remote noise of metalworking and someone shouting.

'Thank you for telling me,' he said. 'You're a brave man. It can't be easy to go back over it.'

'None of us were brave, ever,' said Byers. 'Bravery's when you've got a choice.' He blinked as if finding himself somewhere he didn't quite expect. 'I'm not a man for fancies but sometimes I think we were cursed after. Dusty was gassed, I heard. Not in an attack but by some stupid lamp in a dugout. Probably too drunk to notice. Vince's body was never even found after the last push at Ypres. I heard Watkins went raving mad after his twin brother was killed, and he was locked up. The padre was done for when they took a big German dugout. Some well-meaning lad tells him there's a little shrine in the corner still with a cross. Padre rushes in, marvelling. Booby-trapped. Blew him to kingdom come. And the APM, a hard man, they say, survived the war, went back to the police here in London—he was the copper the major knew. Just the other week he was shot by some villain with a grudge. I saw it in the paper. Now you tell me Captain Emmett's done himself in. I'm not even surprised; it was a stinking business from start to finish.'

'Yet you're still here.'

But even as he spoke, Laurence was considering the reach of coincidence. Most of the casualties Byers had spoken of were straightforward, but if the assistant provost marshal had been murdered the balance seemed to shift.

'Right,' said Byers. 'Well then, that leaves me and Tucker and the MO. Who knows about the young one whose name I've forgotten and the one with the shakes. Tucker's alive and kicking, of course. Alive, at any rate.'

'Our secret,' Byers had said. But not many shared it now. He didn't tell the younger man that the MO had died.

'Enid's brother-in-law, Ted, who'd served with him, said Tucker came out and took himself back up to the Black Country. Hasn't managed to hold down a job, though, I hear. So perhaps the war did get him in the end? Ted's a Birmingham man and he saw him a year or so back, though not to speak to. Had a wife all along, did Tucker, and some kiddies. The devil looks after his own's all I can say.'

'And Mr Brabourne?'

'Never heard of him again. Doubt he made it through. Like I said, he was a schoolboy on a spree. Right out of his depth.'

Laurence wondered about Tresham Brabourne. In ideal circumstances, advocates at courts martial were chosen from those who'd had legal experience before the war but circumstances were seldom ideal. With a military manual, a so-called Prisoner's Friend might try to construct a defence. It was surprising, though, that an officer hadn't been represented by someone who'd been a barrister in civilian life. However, if they'd been in a hurry, and his family either hadn't been notified or hadn't been well connected, then someone like Brabourne might be the best the accused could hope for. All the same, he had accompanied a man he'd defended, presumably to the best of his ability, to a horrible death. He didn't have to be there. That made him a bit more than the careless boy that Byers took him for.

Could Brabourne still be alive? Rumour had it that if a man defended the accused too energetically, he found himself on all the worst sorties afterwards. Simply defending Hart might have shortened the odds on young Brabourne's survival.

When he looked at his watch, Laurence was embarrassed to see that over an hour had passed. He jumped to his feet, apologising.

'No matter,' said Byers, although he looked relieved. 'I'd said I'd never talk about it again but now I have. It doesn't change anything. The major knew, of course, and I'd spoken of it to Jim, but I've never even told Enid. I don't want her to know the man I was then. I'm only talking of it now because the major brought you in. All my anger's gone Tucker's way but the war just gave Tucker his head. Yet who else is there? The system? The generals on both sides? The Kaiser? The hothead who chucked a bomb at that duke in Serbia? Truth is, I don't even know
who
to blame. It's the same with Jim's death. A great unknown enemy out there that I can't even hate properly.'

Laurence had a sense that there was something Byers had withheld from his account. 'And there's nothing else you want to tell me?' he asked.

Byers was rotating a pencil in his fingers; it twirled like a propeller. Suddenly he lost control of it and it spun across the room. Momentarily Laurence followed its trajectory with his eyes. It hit the wall. When he looked back, Byers seemed not to have noticed; his fingers were still moving.

'Isn't that enough?' he said.

Laurence put his hand out and after a moment's hesitation Byers shook it. The rain had stopped and men were struggling to get a large safe on to a pallet as Laurence walked across the yard. There was no sign of Major Calogreedy.

He strode out through the open gates and turned left. The Thames was brown, with foam from one of the industrial works forming a pale scum along the pilings. It was chilly down by the river. Laurence could smell the dankness of the water and the smoke of a thousand afternoon coal fires.

As he walked back along the Thames, he found himself hoping that Leonard Byers' marriage was a comfort to him. On the point of leaving he'd asked him whether he would ask Mrs Byers' brother-in-law where Tucker could be found. Byers doubted he knew—but he gave him the name of the pub he'd been told Tucker drank in: The Woodman.

'I've never been there, never been north of London, but he said that's where to go if I was ever up in our Birmingham works and wanted to look Tucker up. That was his idea of a joke.'

He was impatient to see what Charles could unearth so rather than wait until their usual rendezvous, Laurence scrawled a note to him with the few details he had about Hart and Brabourne in the hope Charles might find out something by Thursday, when they were due to meet. He didn't even know Hart's first name. He kept the thrust of the story to himself; he was interested to see its effect on Charles when he retold it in person.

Seeing Calogreedy and Byers caught up in their working lives, Laurence had felt guilty. Recently he'd hardly picked up his own work. That was the trouble with his research: too solitary, too quickly set aside. His publishers were easy on him and, in a sense, the small income Louise's money had provided was a trap. It was time he did something more demanding. Not in business like Calogreedy and Weatherall, and certainly not a return to coffee trading. What did begin to attract him was going back to a classroom, not the tutoring he'd done after leaving Oxford, but something more structured. He wondered whether he could get a beak's job at a good school.

On Thursday night Charles's club was almost empty. They both chose lamb chops with Cumberland sauce. The lamb was beautifully tender and sweet but Laurence scarcely noticed as he struggled to recall every detail of what Byers had told him. When he had finished, his friend whistled through his teeth.

'We had a private who faced the death penalty for sleeping at his post but the colonel was never going to let it be carried out. It was enough the lads thought it could be. Kept the rest awake. But bad for morale, these things. Shooting an officer. Rotten luck that old Emmett drew the short straw. They usually made a subaltern do the dirty work. As always. Byers give you anything else?'

'That was it,' Laurence said. 'Resentful but frank.'

Charles said, 'I heard there was a point when the powers that be wanted to quash the rumours that there was one rule for officers and another for the men. From what you say, this Hart seems to have been the best they could do for an example. Don't imagine it would have happened if his people had known the right people.' He stopped and gave it some thought, then said, 'Damn odd about the batman's cousin, don't you think?'

'There's something odd all round. I keep thinking there's something I'm missing,' said Laurence. 'John seems to have been making amends for things that happened in the war. Leaving money to Bolitho after his terrible injury, unburdening himself to Dr Chilvers. Various people seem to have noticed an improvement in his mental state towards the end of his life. It seems unlikely Mrs Lovell's son was part of either the trench collapse or the execution of Lieutenant Hart, although he might have been involved in the court martial, I suppose. But he was apparently close to his mother, and never told her about it. So what is John's connection with Lovell—or even Mrs Lovell herself? It's quite possible there was something else there that he was trying to put right. John served for over three years. God knows what else happened. And what about the unknown Frenchman?'

Eventually Charles spoke again. 'Well, there's another possible line of enquiry re Hart. Young Tresham Brabourne's alive, you'll be surprised to hear. Or he was when he came out of the army in December 1918.'

Laurence found his spirits lifting. He'd instinctively taken to the unknown Brabourne and was glad he was still around. His survival disproved Byers' gloomy predictions. If they could find him, Brabourne's account of John's state could be invaluable. He might even know of a connection with a Lovell.

'But no idea where he is, I'm afraid. There's his mother's name as next of kin.' He pulled out a bit of paper from an inner pocket. 'Fulvia—they go in for funny names, these Brabournes. Mind you, she's not Brabourne, either. She's Green. Mrs Fulvia Elizabeth Green. Must have remarried. But the only address is Beverley, Yorkshire. Brabourne joined up in 1915. Profession, pupil in chambers. All of which is a fat lot of good to us. Leave it with me and I'll see what other sleuthing I can do. Or we can go north to find him?'

'So he was training at the Bar? That's why he defended Hart.'

'Possibly. Poor disgraced Hart. My cousin in the War Office clammed up about Hart, or any execution. Papers not public and they're currently sensitive to parliamentary concerns. Whatever that means. But the records are in chaos anyway. He just gave me the enlistment details. His name was Edmund. A Londoner when he joined up, if this Hart is our boy. Which he probably is, though it's quite a common name, but the date's right. Born in Winson...'

'What kind of place is that?' Laurence asked.

'A small place,' Charles replied. 'In Gloucestershire, I think. A coincidence? No profession given, which is not so surprising as he was only eighteen. Parents, Mr and Mrs P. Hart. Very informative,' he said dryly. 'At least there's a street this time, but no name or number and you can hardly go from door to door saying, excuse me, was your son shot as a coward? Families try to cover these things up. In fact, they often don't find out until they begin to smell a rat when the pension doesn't come through. Still, more officers were sentenced to death than you'd think. Just not shot on the whole. Recommendations to pardon or commute hurtling across the Channel like whizz-bangs. Hart was unlucky.'