The Red Horse

by James R Benn

  “This is war, Boyle. Trust me, it would be far easier on me if I didn’t know the people involved. Far easier,” Cosgrove said, his voice trailing off into a faint murmur.

  “So Kaz gets a second chance,” I said. “That’s his consolation prize. He gets an American miracle worker in exchange for a dead sister. Too bad it will break his heart all over again.”

  “I would have done that anyway, damn you!” Cosgrove said, jumping up to face me, his voice raging through clenched teeth. “How do you think it makes me feel to have cheated death? It should have found me by now and taken me for all the things I did in the last war and this one. But it hasn’t. It’s left me here to make choices that chill my soul. But by God, I will make them, if only to prevent that burden from falling on another man’s shoulders. If I can stop these vile missiles from raining down on us, thousands of lives will be saved. And if I find some small recompense in doing this favor for the baron, what of it?”

  His hands were clenched at his side, his entire body vibrating with righteousness and guilt, a deadly cocktail of repressed emotions.

  “I’ll never mention Sweden again,” I whispered, my jaw clenched tightly as I held his stare. “Make sure Kaz never knows you left Angelika there to die and bought him off with Dr. Harken.”

  “Billy, come on,” Big Mike said, grabbing my arm and pulling me back, putting a couple feet of distance between me and Cosgrove. “What’s he supposed to do?”

  “The right thing. Something human, I don’t know. But not this,” I said, wrenching my arm away. “I’m going back to the madhouse. It’ll be a welcome change.”

  I slammed the door on the way out. It felt good, the way silly gestures do, for about a second.

  “You! I thought they still had you locked up, Boyle.” It was Sergeant Jenkins, sitting in Blackford’s wicker chair, his rifle across his knees.

  “It was all a misunderstanding,” I said.

  “There’s a lot of misunderstandings you’re in the middle of,” Jenkins said, drumming his fingers on the rifle stock. “Like with that electrical therapy, or so I hear.”

  “Yeah. You could call it that. Or maybe someone wanted me confused and forgetful for a while. You see Miller around today?”

  “That Yank? I did. Not himself, he was. I’d be careful, Boyle. And speaking of not being careful, you’re out after curfew. I ought to bring you back at the point of my bayonet.”

  “Hard to do sitting down, Sarge.”

  “If I thought it made sense to get up out of this comfortable chair and bother with a bloke like you who hobnobs with the high and mighty, like this lot,” he said, crooking a thumb toward the guest quarters behind him, “I would. I might even think about it for the next minute or two. If you’re thick enough to still be here, I’ll tell you my conclusion.”

  “Got it,” I said, stepping off the porch. “How’d you draw the short straw tonight anyway?”

  “Too few men on duty. It’s getting harder to convince the lads to give up a night or two when they’ve been at work all day. It’s nothing like when we were ready for Jerry to drop out of the skies and land on the beaches. Everybody was eager, believe me. Now there’s talk of standing down the Home Guard. I had to send for someone to come in from the village. I’ll be here an hour or so till he shows up. What’s this all about, anyway?”

  “Brass, Sarge. Who knows what they’re thinking?”

  “God only,” he said. “Same in every army.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I hit the sack thinking about Cosgrove. About how mad I was at him and his insidious conniving. His plan had laid bare the duplicity and double-dealing of this lousy war. He’d shown how men manipulate the lives of others from the comfort of London offices, dealing out death and survival like chips at a roulette table. On the front lines, behind the lines, or even behind barbed wire, people thought they played a role and had a choice in their own destiny. Maybe they did. But men like Cosgrove also made them dance like puppets, and no matter how glorious the cause, how high the stakes, it still belittled them and cheapened their suffering.

  Cosgrove knew it. The stink of guilt trailed him like a dead fish.

  Trouble was, I’d made those trade-offs, played God here and there, gave life and dealt death a hundred times over. In a place so far down in my heart and soul that I might never find my way back from it, I could sacrifice hundreds of people, maybe thousands, to get Diana back. Especially if they were strangers to me. A nameless company of GIs, families living in a row of London townhouses, sailors on a submarine, prisoners in a wooden barracks, they all could vanish in a flash if it would bring Diana home safely out of the hell of Ravensbrück. I could close my eyes and never see their faces. But I knew Diana’s face.

  She haunted my dreams.

  I tried to sleep. I didn’t think I’d be able to, but it had been a helluva long night and day, beginning with a bit of B and E, evading guards, a sojourn in the padded cell, and having my brain zapped. I tried to stay awake and think everything through.

  But mostly I didn’t want to see the vision of Diana again. Not until I’d sorted this craziness out in my own mind. At least I was in the perfect place to work on crazy.

  “Billy, wake up.” The words floated above me, faint and faraway. “Wake up!” I felt a hand on my shoulder, shaking me like a rag doll. It was Big Mike, towering above my bed.

  “Jeez, what time is it?” I said, prying open one eye. It was light, I could tell that much. I’d slept like I was drugged and felt like I still was. “Whaddaya want?”

  “You gotta get up, Billy,” he said, his face flushed with urgency. “It’s Cosgrove. He’s dead.”

  “Oh God,” I said, swinging my legs off the bed and rubbing my eyes. “His heart?”

  “You might say that. There’s a knife in his chest.”

  I looked up at Big Mike. I couldn’t take it in. Major Charles Cosgrove had been part of my life in Europe since I’d first arrived in ’42. Not always the most pleasant part, but an important one. But I had to put that aside and figure out what this meant. Who’d wanted Cosgrove dead? I couldn’t see a connection between Holland and his arrival, other than a secondary interest in what had happened. I was missing something. Big time.

  “Hang on,” I said, grabbing a towel and heading to the washroom. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  I cleaned up and used the time to try not to think about how Cosgrove and I had parted company. I’d taken out my own frustrations on him. He’d delivered the news about his plan and that made him an easy target for all my guilt about abandoning Diana in Paris and my worries about Kaz. I guess I figured we’d work things out in the morning. Trouble was, the clear light of day would never dawn for Charles Cosgrove.

  I grabbed a clean set of olive drabs, got dressed, and found Big Mike pacing in the narrow hallway. He was shaken.

  “This is strange, Billy,” he said. “Really strange.”

  “Okay, first tell me who’s at the scene,” I said as we clambered down the stairs.

  “Colonel Blackford. I told him not to let anyone in. His dander was up.”

  “You found Cosgrove?” I said as we left the building.

  “Yeah. He wanted to check on Skory. We were supposed meet at seven and go to the hospital. I knocked on his door and there was no answer. I waited a minute and tried again. Blackford came out of his room, and I asked if he’d seen the major. He hadn’t, so I opened the door.”

  “Hold on. It wasn’t locked?”

  “No.”

  “How late did you stay with Cosgrove after I left?” I asked, slowing my pace as the guest quarters came into view. I wanted to get the facts straight in my mind before I saw the body. No matter how many times you visit a crime scene, it’s always a shock. But more so if the victim is no stranger to you. It’s the face. Instead of seeing the face of a corpse, you see the face of a friend or acquaintan
ce. You can harden yourself viewing a murdered stiff whose name you never knew, but it doesn’t work so well with a guy you talked to last night. It’s distracting. Totally human and understandable, but it makes it difficult to focus on the evidence.

  “Five minutes tops,” Big Mike said. “I think he was embarrassed at losing his temper. He told me you were right about what you said, by the way.”

  “What was his mood when you left?” I said, stopping before the steps to the guest quarters. Blackford stood by Cosgrove’s door, arms folded.

  “Tired. Sad, maybe. I can’t really say. It was late, so I went off to bed.”

  “Did you see Sergeant Jenkins?”

  “The guard? Yeah, out on the porch,” Big Mike said. “But we didn’t speak other than to say hello. I went right to my room. And no, I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary all night.”

  “Okay, let’s go on in.” Big Mike was a heavy sleeper, enough so that a tussle in the next room wouldn’t register if he were out cold.

  “This is a terrible business, Boyle,” Colonel Blackford said. “I can’t believe Charles is dead.” Blackford shook his head, his disbelief playing out in his slack-jawed look and unfocused eyes.

  “Has anyone come by, Colonel?” I asked, wondering how long we’d have until the place was crowded and any evidence trampled into nothing.

  “No one,” he said.

  “And you haven’t gone in? Sir.”

  “No. Your sergeant told me you were both policemen before the war and you needed the area undisturbed, so I stayed out here. I will keep any bystanders at bay, but I imagine Major Snow should be notified. Promptly.”

  “Right after we’ve had a look around, sir,” I said. “Once Snow’s on the scene it gets official, and we’ll lose control. I need to be able to search the area around the guest quarters before anyone shows up.”

  “Of course, Boyle. Do your job. Find out who killed Charles,” he said and turned away, stiff upper lip and all.

  I opened the door, not worrying about fingerprints on the latch. It was probably covered in them. I stood in the doorway looking over the room, taking it in while at the same time not focusing on Cosgrove. That was one of the things Dad had insisted on when he first let me come along to crime scenes as a patrolman. His way of teaching me the ropes was to bring me along for crowd control and door-to-door questioning. I didn’t always like it, especially if it came at the end of my shift, but I never complained. At least not to him. I wouldn’t have dared.

  His idea was to take in the room, or the alley, or wherever you found the body. Absorb the details, all of them, so you could more easily see what was out of place. It took me a while to understand what he was getting at, but once I did, I stuck with his technique.

  The room was much as I’d left it, except for Cosgrove’s jacket tossed over the back of a chair. The rug bunched up beneath his feet.

  And the bayonet stuck in his chest.

  A Lee-Enfield socket bayonet, I noted as I kept my eyes moving, cataloging the objects in the room. Big Mike had said a knife, but this British bayonet was more like a sharpened spike.

  “Big Mike, get over to the Home Guard canteen,” I said. “Find out who was on guard after Jenkins, and if anyone’s missing their bayonet.” He left with a look of relief on his face. Big Mike was a tough guy, but he and Cosgrove had gotten friendly, and it took a really tough guy to hang around a pal’s murdered corpse.

  I stepped around Cosgrove’s feet. He was on the couch, slumped to one side, his legs splayed out, heels dug into the thin rug. I checked the fireplace, but no sign of anything being burned or disposed of. I got on my hands and knees and peered under the couch, finding nothing other than dust. Same thing under the chairs.

  I went into the bedroom. It was cramped quarters: a dresser, nightstand, and bed took up most of the space. An overnight bag lay on the floor, displaying rumpled underclothes and rolled-up socks. Two shirts hung in a closet. Cosgrove was traveling light. A single window was open a few inches. That could have been Cosgrove letting in fresh air. Or did the killer use the window to escape? It wasn’t an entry point, since that would have alerted the major. But perhaps the killer needed a quick exit with the sentry on duty out front.

  A small bathroom provided no clues other than that the plumbing was ancient.

  How had the killer gotten in? Had there been a gap between Jenkins on duty and his relief? Or had one of them left the place unguarded?

  Cosgrove was still dressed, so it couldn’t have been too late at night. I needed to speak with Jenkins and find out how long he’d been on the porch, and if he’d seen anything.

  Back in the sitting room, I took a closer look at Cosgrove. His face betrayed nothing. No frozen shock of surprise, no wide-eyed terror in his death throes. Which meant he’d died quickly. Immediately, based on where the bayonet had been thrust into his heart.

  It was an odd murder weapon. The steel spike had no handle, nothing to grasp when wielding it as a knife. It had a socket that could be affixed to the end of the rifle barrel. Its one advantage, when not protruding from the business end of a Lee-Enfield rifle, was that it could be easily hidden. And there were a lot of them around. Every member of the Home Guard armed with a rifle had one.

  I knelt and studied the angle of the blade to the body. It hadn’t gone straight in. It was angled at maybe sixty degrees, meaning that the killer had thrust upward with significant force. It was the only way, really. With no sharp edge, the point of the spike had to be driven in, hard. The bayonet could have been hidden in a coat pocket or stuck in a belt. Either way, it told me that Cosgrove had known his attacker, or, at a minimum, had felt no threat from him, letting him get close enough to unleash a killing blow.

  Or her? There were women here who’d been trained to kill, silently and up close. I leaned in and looked at where the bayonet had pierced Cosgrove, between the ribs and into the heart. There was blood, but the body wasn’t soaked with it. The heart had ceased pumping the stuff in no time flat. This was a killer who had a practiced aim and a steady hand, and knew what they were doing. Which did nothing to narrow the field of suspects.

  “Billy,” Big Mike said, out of breath as he stood in the doorway. “Snow is on his way. He saw me in the canteen asking about the bayonet. I had to tell him.”

  “No problem, he was bound to find out,” I said.

  Then I saw it.

  Cosgrove’s hand, already stiffening, clutched a piece of paper. I’d been so focused on the bayonet that I hadn’t taken it in. I withdrew the crumpled paper from his fingers, holding it by the edges in case we could dust it for fingerprints. It was manila-colored, heavy stock. A blank postcard.

  Blank on one side. The other side had a blue stamp filled with Hitler’s profile. There was a typewritten message in German, but no address had been filled in. As if a German postcard with Adolf postage wasn’t surprise enough, there was a stylized drawing of what I took to be a horse. A red horse enclosed in a red circle. It looked like it had been put on the card with a rubber stamp.

  “What the hell is that?” Big Mike said, looking over my shoulder. “It looks sort of familiar.”

  “That’s Adolf Hitler, big guy,” I said.

  “Yeah, I hearda him,” Big Mike said. Jokes were a cop’s best armor against the realities of a crime scene, so I knew he’d recovered his wits somewhat. “I mean the horse. It’s carved into a hillside near here. The Uffington White Horse, they call it. I saw it from the train once. Doesn’t look exactly like that, but close.”

  “Well, this is a red horse, on a Kraut postcard, in a dead man’s hand. I don’t think it’s a local tourist brochure,” I said.

  “Can you read it?”

  “Hell no,” I said, gesturing in the direction of his service coat. “But Kaz can. Open your flap.” I dropped it in the roomy pocket of his jacket. I didn’t need to tell him to be careful ab
out prints, but I did make a zipper motion across my lips a second before Snow came in.

  “Dear God,” Snow said from the doorway. “Who did this?”

  “Someone he trusted,” I said, stepping back from the body. “Major, we need this area secured before people start sightseeing. I need to check the perimeter.” Snow stood still, frozen, unable to take his gaze off Cosgrove’s body. “Major?”

  “Yes, yes, sorry,” Snow said, coming to his senses and running a hand across his eyes, as if that might alter the scene before him. He’d been Cosgrove’s friend as well, but I needed him to get over the shock and on with the job.

  “A few guards on the path would be good,” Big Mike said, guiding him out of the room. “A couple in each direction, okay?” Snow agreed, nodding slowly. Big Mike had a calming effect, especially when he loomed over you and patted your shoulder with one of those big hands.

  “Okay, what’d you find at the canteen?” I asked, once Snow was on his way.

  “There’s gear lying all over the place. Turns out some of the guys dump their web belts and ammo pouches there before going on duty,” he said. “They figure the Krauts aren’t going to storm the place, so the rounds they have in their rifles are more than enough.”

  “What about bayonets?”

  “There’s a bayonet holder on each belt. Most held a bayonet. But a couple of guys I talked to said they don’t carry the bayonet on duty, since they’re afraid of some nutcase grabbing it.”

  “Did you see any bayonets lying around loose?”

  “Yeah. One was being used as a paperweight and another was hanging from a nail in the wall, probably so one of the men could pick it up when he went off duty.”

  “Sounds like anyone could have wandered in there and snatched one,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t be hard,” Big Mike agreed. Then he leaned in to whisper, “Hey, Billy, isn’t Colonel Blackford with the German Section at SOE? Maybe he could translate that card.”

  “Yeah, I’d forgotten that,” I said. “But he was right next door. He’s still a suspect until we rule him out. Best to wait and talk to Kaz.”