The Skeleton in the Grass (24 page)

“How long shall we take, do you think?”

“I can't say. You must know what it's like. This is one of the worst nights yet. Do you need anything?”

“No, no . . . A bit of dressing and a good night's sleep . . . They didn't have to tell me about it. I saw it.”

“You
saw
it?”

“Did you never suspect?”

In her shock Sarah blurted out something of which she was ashamed.

“I suspected Oliver. It was Bounce wagging his tail . . .”

“Poor old Oliver. Not really the temperament. He's a lieutenant in Signals, did you know? He says he's the army's most incompetent recruit but, being Oliver, he'll make himself useful somehow. The parents were very distressed when he volunteered.”

“They're still the same, then?”

“Oh yes. When I was in prison in Spain they organized an Oxford boycott of Seville oranges.”

Sarah bent over her patient, who was grunting in pain, then when he was silent she turned back to Will. She could see him now: still slight, but broader of shoulder; more haggard, yet somehow almost cheeky.

“I once had a vision,” Sarah said. “A sort of nightmare. That your parents were not the kind, generous, high-minded people they appeared to be. That they used people, ignored the ones who were of no use to them . . . It was mean of me. After all they'd done for me.”

Will smiled with faint traces of his old boyishness into her wan face.

“You fell in love with us, didn't you, Sarah? Dennis and Helen did have rather a bad habit of making people love them . . . You fell in love so completely, I suppose you were bound to fall out of love violently . . . I expect the truth is somewhere between the two. They aren't bad people, or selfish beyond the normal. I suppose the worst thing you could say about them is that they are futile . . . Dad's finished his book on the Emperor Karl's peace initiative. This doesn't seem a good time to find a publisher for it, does it?”

“I think you're talking too much,” said Sarah. “That wound could turn out to be nasty.”

She clasped the hand of the unconscious man on the stretcher as the ambulance lurched forward. She peered out. They were crossing Regent Street into Soho. He was a clever driver, whom the blitz had taught new tricks. He would get them there if anybody could, but by then it would surely be too late for the man on the stretcher. She wished for the hundredth time she was a doctor, not a hastily trained ambulance attendant. But she doubted if even a doctor could do anything in the present case, without an operating theatre.

They stopped in a seedy little street Sarah didn't know, behind another ambulance. She was aware that Will had been watching her, and now he started speaking again.

“Perhaps the worst thing about them, about my parents, is that they paralyse people. You can't follow that incredible mixture of public-spiritedness and personal warmth. I
went to fight in Spain, and I sat on the border, paralysed. I thought I'd kicked over all their training, all their oversimplified precepts, but when it came to the point . . .”

“But you
did
fight in Spain?”

“Oh yes, I fought in Spain,” said Will, his voice tinged with cynicism.

“We got postcards.”

“I gave them to friends who were going in. All the early ones.”

“But—” Sarah wanted to put it obliquely—“how did you come to be at Hallam that night?”

Will smiled, with a sort of insolent self-deprecation that was to be his trade-mark when he hosted television panel games in the ‘fifties.

“The answer is so banal that it has to be true. I was coming back to go up to Oxford. I had sat there, on the border, since August. I'd done some work with refugees, but there weren't many, so early in the war. I kept willing myself to go in, offer myself, take up the fight. And yet all the old Hallam instincts kept me there, immobilized. It was the worst period of my life . . .
till then
. In the end I could bear it no longer. I was futile, and might as well face up to my own futility. A journalist friend with the
Manchester Guardian
was motoring home. I came with him, intending to go up to Balliol, if they would still have me.”

The ambulance jumped forward. Sarah saw bright firelight to her right, and realized they were going up towards Oxford Street to avoid it. They no sooner got there than they were stalled again. There was a faint sigh, but no more, from the man on the stretcher.

“Poor bastard,” said Will. “His number's up.”

When they had been stalled for some time, Will began again.

“This journalist was driving up to Manchester, but he made a detour and left me in Chowton. I wanted to walk,
to get my thoughts together—decide what to say, how to present it. I took the river path, so as not to meet anyone. When I got to the lawns of Hallam, I looked towards the house, and there were no lights. Everyone was out.”

He swallowed, remembering the time.

“I stood there by the tree, wondering whether to go and talk to Mrs. Munday. But that wasn't at all how I'd planned it. Not dramatic enough—you know what sort of a boy I was. I stood there, paralysed again. And then I heard noises from the river path. Someone coming along—quite slowly, clumsily. I couldn't imagine who it might be. I set down my haversack and waited in the shade of the willow, hardly breathing. He passed the bridge, left the path, and came up on to the lawn. Bounce had begun barking in the house. I'm sure he had sensed me there. Now there was something else too: a hostile presence. He was barking like crazy.”

The ambulance was still stalled. There was a faint sound from the man on the stretcher, and Sarah took a wet flannel and bathed his face.

“It all seems so long ago,” Will said wryly, as if to himself. “Another age—when I thought the Falange taking over in Spain was the end of the world.”

“And your cousin Mostyn thought the King going was the end of the world,” said Sarah.

“Yes . . . Bounce quietened down a bit, and Chris Keene came up near to the tree. Now I could see who it was. He wasn't willing to go up to the house just yet. The moonlight was quite bright, and I was only feet away. I saw him smile. He put down the rifle, and then he began laying out his other burden. I hadn't been able to see what it was before, but now I saw it was a skeleton—weird, glowing. I just couldn't make out what he was doing. Then I realized there was no backbone. It had been painted out. Then,
when the skeleton was tidily arranged, he took up the rifle and bent over to put it in place. Suddenly I realized what it was all about. Those rumours about Dad . . . The rifle was to be pointing at his foot. The whole thing seemed like a cruel jeer, not just at him, but at me—a comment on my funking my first test as a man, a sneer at my lack of will, my futility. I felt the blood go to my head . . .”

“We're moving,” said Sarah.

“I had no idea the gun was loaded,” Will said urgently, still in the past. “You've got to believe that. How could I have imagined it would be? I threw myself on him, and we grappled, and the next thing I knew it had gone off, and Keene was crumpling to the ground . . .”

The ambulance was going forward, slowly, carefully, and Sarah realized they were nearing the top of Charing Cross Road.

“That was the end of my boyhood, when I realized I'd killed him. I didn't think. I just reacted. I grabbed my haversack from beside the willow, and I ran . . . Odd, isn't it? If it hadn't been for my parents and their notions, Chris would never have been killed. If I hadn't felt this overwhelming, crushing paralysis, I'd never have thrown myself at him. I'd have said: ‘What the hell do you think you're doing?' or something like that . . .”

For some moments there was silence in the ambulance, except for the distant sound of sirens.

“Did Oliver see you?” asked Sarah.

“Oh yes. He'd followed Coffey at a safe distance. He recognized my run. Coffey saw it was a young man's run, and thought it was one of his boys. Oliver
knew
it was me. After that, all the time, he was covering up for me. He'd been suspicious of my postcards.”

“Why?”

“The stories of fighting on them never seemed to correspond
with the reports in the papers. He was following the war, while Mother and Father were just deploring it. Oliver is the best of us, you know.”

“I know,” said Sarah.

The ambulance had turned down towards Charing Cross and the hospital, but Sarah could almost feel the life of the man on the stretcher ebbing away.

“What is it Housman says gives a man the taste for blood? I don't remember, but I know killing does. It was like a release. I took the ferry to Dieppe, went to Paris, and was in on the ground floor when the International Brigade was formed. By December I was inside Spain, by the end of the year I was fighting. I fought through the spring and summer of 1937, till I was captured in October . . . I served my sentence in a Spanish jail . . .”

They were halted just above Foyle's. Firemen had cordoned off part of the road.

“I can't describe the Falange jail. The disease, the lice, the starvation . . . the beatings and the executions. Above all the executions. Everyone I knew and loved seemed to end up before the firing squad. It was hell on earth. This is heaven by comparison. I would have been shot, but I told them I was from an English noble family. They wanted to keep in with the Tories. They sent me home in March, ‘39, riddled with consumption . . . Funny: the Spanish war was a dress rehearsal for this one. I was in on the dress rehearsal, but missed the show. The army wouldn't have me, nor anyone else, so I joined the firemen.” He nodded at the body on the stretcher. “Seems that's just as dangerous.”

They were still stalled. The fire seemed to be getting out of control. Will smiled at Sarah, a smile of great charm. She was to remember it often when she saw him on television, that attractive lock plastered over his forehead, to hide the scar.

“It's odd, isn't it? I'm the only one doing something that Dennis and Helen approve of. I'm surrounded by conscientious objectors who regard my parents as secular saints. Elizabeth has married a Welsh sheep farmer and become a moral vegetable, and Oliver is in the army, as I always said he would be if war broke out. I suppose I'm happiest of all, except for Winifred, who is taking in evacuees and in her seventh heaven. Mother and Father are agonizing in Oxford over which part of the war effort they can engage in with a clear conscience.”

“Did you tell them when you got home?” Sarah asked.

“Oh yes. We all went along to Minchip in Banbury, and in the end he was satisfied that it was virtually an accident. It was old history by then. Nobody wanted to revive it, and Minchip was a fair man. He could see I had suffered . . . The case is closed. Except that it changed all our lives.”

The hand of the man on the stretcher went limp as the ambulance at last moved forward. Sarah drew her hand away and looked at Will. Then she stood up and drew his eyelids down, with the calm efficiency of one who has been granted great familiarity with death.

By the Same Author

The Cherry Blossom Corpse

Bodies

Political Suicide

Fête Fatale

Out of the Blackout

Corpse in a Gilded Cage

School for Murder

The Case of the Missing Brontë

A Little Local Murder

Death and the Princess

Death by Sheer Torture

Death in a Cold Climate

Death of a Perfect Mother

Death of a Literary Widow

Death of a Mystery Writer

Copyright © 1987 by Robert Barnard

First American Edition, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Scribner

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barnard, Robert.

The skeleton in the grass.

I. Title.

PR6052.A665S55     1988     823'.914     88-3075

ISBN 0-684-18948-8
eISBN-13: 978-1-4767-3718-8