No Man's Land

by Reginald Hill

  Only for the riders of the motorcycle combination as it dropped out of sight below the ridge on its descent into Barnecourt, where German shells were already falling, did there seem a moment of peace and safety with nothing in the air more discordant than the creaking call of a partridge disturbed from its egg-filled nest. The wind lifted Nicole’s hair and, despite everything, she felt the exhilaration of rapid movement. She looked down at Josh in the sidecar and he returned her gaze and her loving smile also, then closed his eyes and smiled again as he felt the sledge go whistling down the snowy fellside and himself warm and exhilarated in the certain arms of Wilf.

  Only Denial did not smile. His enemy lay behind him, almost certainly dead. Alongside him rode a prisoner, guilty beyond any doubt. Ahead lay his duty, unambiguous and clear. But he could neither triumph nor rejoice.

  EPILOGUE

  THE HORSEMEN (2)

  The War-to-end-Wars itself ended with the signing of an armistice on November 11th, 1918. The formal peace treaty was signed on June 28th, 1919.

  Total military casualties were over 20,000,000 (twenty million) wounded, and between 8,000,000 and 9,000,000 (eight and nine million) dead. War-related civilian deaths exceeded 8,000,000 (eight million).

  But at least war had been made unthinkable.

  The boy heard the horses while they were still a quarter of a mile away, but he did not waken the man. They had been labouring in the fields at the golden harvest since dawn and after a mid-morning meal of bread and cheese washed down with a litre of thin beer, his father deserved a sleep.

  The boy could not sleep, however, though the sun was hot and the air was drowsy. He stood up, filled with all the nervous energy of thirteen years, and peered through the heat-haze in the direction of the horsemen.

  There were two of them, approaching slowly up the long sunken lane from the distant farmhouse. He screwed up his eyes to make identification certain, then shrieked in delight and pummelled his father’s shoulder.

  ‘Papa! Papa! Les voilà! Les voilà!’ he cried.

  His father awoke, stretched and yawned. Beneath the silk scarf which he always wore around his throat, the edges of a broad and unsightly scar were momentarily visible.

  ‘Aujourd’hui, parl’ anglais,’ he growled in the low, rough tones which had nothing to do with his natural disposition. ‘In honour of our guest, speak English.’

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ said the boy carefully.

  Now the horsemen were near. One of them, a tall, athletic, blond-haired young man, was riding a handsome bay gelding. The other, a man of almost fifty, slightly built with greying hair, was mounted on a sturdy old chestnut, more suited to the plough than the saddle.

  Pre-empting criticism, the young man cried, ‘I wanted him to ride Theo, but he wouldn’t.’

  ‘I’ve got more sense,’ grunted Jack Denial, dismounting stiffly from the chestnut. ‘Well, Josh, how are you?’

  ‘Well,’ said Josh Routledge who for more than twenty years now had been Auguste Gilbert. ‘Mon cousin,’ Nicole had explained to the priest, who had looked doubtfully at the pale silent young man with the bandaged throat, reprovingly at the huge swell of Nicole’s stomach, and then, resignedly, married them.

  The two men shook hands.

  ‘I didn’t expect you so soon,’ said Josh. The gruffness of his voice after his throat wound healed had been a great help in easing him into his new life. Even now he was notorious in the countryside for his monosyllabic conversation. And his English creaked with such long disuse that his school-taught children believed they spoke it better.

  ‘The trains were on time for once,’ said Denial. ‘Loti didn’t let me say much more than hello to Nicole and the girls before dragging me up here!’

  He smiled to show no reproach was intended.

  Josh said, ‘He knew how much I looked forward to seeing you. Hey, Joseph, come and shake hands with Mr Denial!’

  His younger son who had been chattering excitedly to the brother he adored came shyly forward.

  ‘How do you do?’ he said carefully, offering his hand.

  ‘I am very well, Joseph,’ said Denial. ‘And how are you?’

  ‘I am very well also,’ said the boy.

  ‘Yes, you look it!’

  ‘All right, Joseph. You and Loti go down to the house. Take the horses. Mr Denial and I will come down on the cart.’

  With a yell of joy, the youngster flung his leg over the old chestnut and set it at a clumsy gallop down the slope crying, ‘Je vais gagner!’

  Behind him Lothair Gilbert smiled at the two men, then set Theo in pursuit.

  ‘Fine boys,’ said Denial. ‘The youngster’s very like his mother, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Josh. ‘And Loti’s like his dad.’

  The two men exchanged glances, then Josh went to where he’d put his draught horse in the shade and began hitching him up to the haycart.

  ‘Are you still going to tell him?’ said Denial as he accepted Josh’s offer of a helping hand on to the cart. As the years went by, his leg had given him increasing pain and, though he admitted it to no one, he had not been too displeased when recent promotions at Scotland Yard, had placed him pretty firmly behind a desk.

  ‘He’s twenty-one today,’ said Josh. ‘I always said I’d tell him at twenty-one. But we’ll have the celebration first. I’m glad you could come, Jack.’

  ‘I’d not have missed it,’ said Denial.

  ‘No. You’ve been a good friend to us,’ said Josh.

  As the cart creaked slowly down the slope towards the farm, Denial recalled that other, faster, more terrifying descent all those years ago.

  There must have been a point at which he decided to enter into a conspiracy to conceal Josh’s identity, but he did not know when it was. The chaos of those critical spring days had made the question of one young deserter seem unimportant. If he thought of it, it was merely as a duty temporarily postponed.

  And then the chaos came under control, the Germans were first held, then pushed back, and at last it was possible to confront his responsibility.

  Instantly he had recognized it was already too late. The point of decision had slipped by unnoticed after all.

  But Jack Denial was not the man to shrug his shoulders and put the matter out of his mind. One responsibility ignored meant another taken on. He had betrayed his clear duty and given this man his life, and his conscience demanded that at the very least he should understand the nature of the gift.

  His tutelage had necessarily been distant and intermittent but nothing that he saw of the young couple’s life in the years that followed made him regret his lapse. On the Gilberts’ side, suspicious gratitude had grown into true affection, and he himself knew without analysis that his relationship with this ever-growing family filled a gap in his emotional being which would otherwise have stayed a vacuum.

  ‘Any news?’ grunted Josh.

  Denial was their postman, except that all the messages were one way. Through a contact in the Cumberland police he got all the news about the Routledges of Outerdale, and Josh knew of all their marriages, births and deaths. But he had never shown any desire that they should know of his existence, nor spoken any wish of making the journey back to England, even safely disguised as a French farmer.

  Denial brought him up to date with a new niece and the purchase of a new pasture.

  ‘Soon own half the valley,’ said Josh. ‘Owt else?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Denial, knowing what the question referred to.

  What had finally happened back in the ruined farmhouse that distant spring day had never been clear. What they did know was that early the following year a large sum of money had been transferred via a firm of German lawyers to a firm of French lawyers for the use of Nicole Gilbert.

  Nicole had been terrified when the lawyers finally tracked her down, convinced it must have something to do with Josh. Instead she had found herself a comparatively rich woman, and this prosperous farm showed how wisely the young
couple had invested their money and energy.

  So Lothar had survived, and for a short time at least must have enjoyed his wealth and title. Denial had tried to keep him in sight but he was a moving target in a turbulent landscape. The German Revolution, the brutalities of the Freikorps, the blunderings of the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Nazis – Lothar von Seeberg had been in there somewhere, a name, a reputation, till suddenly, not long after Hitler came to power, all mention had ceased.

  Denial feared the worst; though, like most Englishmen of the time, he had not yet any real concept of what that ‘worst’ might be.

  As for Viney, there had been no trace. It was difficult to think of that huge, anarchic figure as dead, but it was just as difficult to think of him as alive and invisible. Australia had been no help. A gift of money had been accepted by his wife with no more acknowledgement than the cashing of the draft. Denial had mixed feelings. The cause he had for hating Viney would never die. Yet the eager hope in Josh’s voice whenever the Australian’s name was mentioned was a brake on his hatred.

  They were close to the farmhouse now. Its ochre tiles seemed to throb in the late summer heat. Josh’s two daughters, aged seventeen and fifteen, were filling buckets at the pump. Joseph came out of the stable where he’d been seeing to the horses. It was a scene which could have been medieval except for the sagging overhead cable by which the mixed blessing of electricity was carried to the house. Denial smiled in pleasure. In the dreadful balance sheet of that war-to-end-wars, this at least could be set on the credit side. It was a blessing to escape to this place from the pressures of his job and from the pessimism of the British newspapers, which the previous morning as he set out on his journey had been full of the news of German troops moving into Poland. At least he could forget all that in the celebration to come.

  But as the cart came to a halt in the yard, Loti came rushing out of the open farm door, his face flushed with excitement.

  ‘Papa! Papa! The news! It’s on the wireless!’

  ‘What’s that then, Loti?’ growled Josh.

  Now Nicole had appeared in the doorway, still slight of figure and usually gay of face despite the advancing years. But now she stood there, pale and drawn, as the son she had borne twenty-one years earlier on the third of September, 1918, cried, ‘The war! The war! We have declared war on the Germans! England too, Mr Denial. We are at war!’

  Infected by his brother’s enthusiasm, Joseph gambolled around the yard crying, ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! We’re at war! We’re at war!’

  But Nicole and her daughters did not speak and the two middle-aged men on the cart looked at each other in sick amazement.

  ‘They’ll not let it happen again?’ said Josh. ‘Not again!’

  The horror of it paradoxically seemed to take years off his face, turning him into a stricken young man again.

  ‘No, they’ll do something, surely,’ said Denial. ‘Come on, Josh. Let’s get into the house. I thought there was meant to be a party!’

  Slowly the yard emptied. Joseph, realizing too late that his high spirits were not shared by most of the others, was the last to enter the house, subdued and resentful at what he did not understand.

  The horse pulling the haycart whinnied its own resentment at this neglect, and then settled stoically to drinking water out of the abandoned buckets.

  Behind it on the cart, a small butterfly which had been carried down unnoticed from the harvest field spread its brown and golden wings and took off. For a moment it fluttered outside the still open door of the farmhouse. Then it rose out of the shaded yard and let the explosion of heat from the baking tiles carry it skywards, as if it would not stop soaring till its tiny wings were shrivelled in the burning heart of the sun.

  About the Author

  Reginald Charles Hill FRSL was an English crime writer and the winner of the 1995 Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

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

  Copyright © 1985 by the Estate of Reginald Hill

  Cover design by Ian Koviak

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-5974-9

  This 2019 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  REGINALD HILL

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