Slapton Sands

by Francis Cottam

  The machine-gun fire command was given in six stages. Lieutenant Johnny Compton stood. This was his moment. ‘Prepare to fire,’ he said, giving the alert. He was glad that his voice sounded strong, full-lunged, with natural authority. ‘Front,’ he said, giving the direction. In his peripheral vision, he saw the appreciable sight of alert squads hunkered over their guns. ‘Amphibious infantry assault,’ Compton said, giving the target description. The Higgins boats were almost on the beach. In pure spring light, across shell-cratered sand, he thought they looked very close. ‘Range, eight hundred,’ he called out. ‘Traverse and search,’ giving the method of fire. ‘Rapid fire,’ giving the engagement command. On the beach, the ramps were coming down. Men were wading with rifles at port arms and above their heads in columns five and six abreast into the surf. ‘Fire!’ Compton said.

  And he watched as soldiers began to jig and shudder in the surf and the foam on wavetops turned red with the terrible clatter of bullets leaving muzzles and entering men and killing them. Killing them in a red, tattering swathe, soaking the sea with them. Killing them all, it seemed to Johnny Compton, who had given the last order he would ever utter. Killing them all.

  Seven

  Slapton Sands, 1976

  It was still light when Alice left the pub. She didn’t really mind going back to the cottage in Strete in the dark. It was the thought of arriving there in darkness that bothered her.

  Before leaving the pub, she tried to reach Sally Emerson. Emerson picked up her extension on the first ring.

  ‘You’re a workaholic,’ Alice said.

  ‘I hope you’re calling me long distance. From sunny Pennsylvania.’

  ‘That soldier identified by the partial print?’

  ‘Lieutenant Compton.’

  ‘Did your American embassy friend find out anything about him you haven’t told me?’

  ‘He’s dead, Alice. He died at Slapton Sands.’

  ‘Anything?’ Alice could hear Emerson rifle through papers. The detective coughed to clear her throat.

  ‘There’s a comment on his file written by a Colonel Fitzpatrick, dated April 1944. Just says that Compton’s antipathy towards prostitutes might be connected to the manner of his father’s death. Compton senior died of renal failure, but the cause was syphilis, apparently contracted in France in the final stages of the Great War. Got furlough. Got laid. Got unlucky.’

  ‘Sounds like a direct quote.’

  ‘I’m reading what’s written in front of me.’

  Alice nodded.

  ‘Compton’s father was a hero, by the way. But I told you that, didn’t I?’

  ‘You did,’ Alice said. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Take care, Alice.’

  ‘Everyone tells me that, lately. Is that, like, a figure of English speech?’

  ‘No. It’s a piece of advice.’

  She walked back to Strete along the beach. It was late, and the sea and sand wore that luminescent, late light, as though they were being vividly imagined, more than lived, in some dream she was having of them. The tide line was a thick trail of debris and glossy, dark-green weed. Walking it, she could single out artefacts amid the stones and shells and flotsam from boats. She sat on her haunches and picked at something that had caught her eye. It was a small, rust-covered button. It could have been a tunic button from a uniform. But it could have been anything, she thought, discarding it, brushing rust smears from her fingers on the legs of her jeans.

  There had been two separate tragedies. The one Rory Carnegie had told her about had happened first. That explained the bodies that Carnegie, her Colorado veteran and other independent sources reported being washed up on the beaches of Devon beyond the military exclusion zone around Slapton Sands.

  The second incident had happened on the beach itself. It was the aftermath of this event that her Colorado veteran had almost stumbled on on his hungover return from leave in London. It was this event, or its aftermath, that Jane Cartwright recalled in remembering the two hysterical troops sent to gather what medical supplies they could from a local cottage hospital.

  Carnegie had not underestimated the number of bodies in the water. That attack and sinking had claimed about half of the total number of lives she believed to have been lost. You could allocate blame in the convoy attack. The Americans should not have been using an open radio frequency for their communications. The British should have sent the destroyer escort they had promised. The troops aboard the LSTs should have been drilled in the use of their life jackets. But it was the enemy who had attacked. It was an expensive lesson learned and reflected badly on Poon, the American admiral in overall charge of the naval contribution to Operation Tiger. But it did not really amount to a scandal.

  So what had happened on the beach? It had to be friendly fire. Alice could only imagine casualties in their hundreds being inflicted by large offshore naval batteries laying a creeping barrage at the wrong time, or in the wrong place. But Johnny Compton had been an infantry soldier and a relatively lowly soldier at that. How could he have been instrumental in the deaths of seven hundred men? What could Compton’s ghost be trying to scare her away from finding out?

  She was only sure that she would not now find the answer at Slapton Sands. It lay in a file she had failed to access. Armed with a name, she might be able to source fresh information from somewhere. Sally Emerson’s old college pal at the American embassy could be a useful contact. She would have that drink with Emerson when she got back to Canterbury and see if there was some way an introduction could be engineered.

  Away by the coast road, she could see the small obelisk erected by the US army in tribute to what the people here had endured in having to leave their homes during the war. Even armed with her existing, incomplete knowledge, she thought the British government might erect a very substantial monument to commemorate what the Americans who trained here had done for them in liberating Europe. She walked closer to the stone tribute and looked at it. It was modest, but more dignified for the modest isolation of its size on the ground where it stood. She brushed a hand against the stone, which wore a fine, polished grain against her fingertips. The face of the obelisk, fully shaded from the sun, was almost cool. It cast a shadow, now, in this late part of the day, longer than its height, caught in the descent of the sun.

  A friendly-fire catastrophe would have wounded as well as killed men. The two troopers looking for blood plasma at that cottage hospital had been urgent about the treatment of the living, not about the accommodation of the dead. If there were living witnesses to such a terrible event, why had it not become public knowledge long before now? Partly it would have been because exposure was not the fashion of the day. Public attitudes had changed a lot in thirty-odd years. You only had to look at something like the raid on Dieppe. Nothing could have been so suicidally misconceived. In that single assault, over the space of a few hours, six thousand Canadian commandos were killed and wounded. The raid had been Mountbatten’s idea, but he had kept his job and reputation. The Queen’s uncle, admiral and lord, had been promoted beyond his abilities by the fiercely royalist Churchill. But no blame had attached to him either. Men died in war and in the preparation for war. It was to be expected. And the men expected to fight were stoical about the fact. Certainly none of the commandos who survived it complained about what met them at Dieppe.

  But there was another reason, too, Alice felt.

  She had crept down from bed to the door, once, one night when Bobby was back from ’Nam on leave and drinking with her dad in his dad’s den. Dad was relaxing on his Naugahyde recliner. Except that he wasn’t really relaxing. He had his arms and ankles crossed and the veins were big and blue and knotted with tension in his big, cop arms, below his rolled-up shirtsleeves. Alice had felt terribly sorry at that moment for her father and had been too young then to know why. She knew now, though. She knew how desperately afraid that Bobby would lose his life her dad had been. His posture had been that of a father curtailing fatherly instinct only by agoni
zed effort of will. His instinct, he told his daughter later, all the time Bobby was home, was to gather his son in his arms and carry him to his room and secure him there with locks and bars and nails, hammered through the doorframe.

  ‘Just a boy,’ her dad kept saying, the afternoon he told her this, in a Washington coffee shop a half-mile from Arlington after they had put her brother in the ground. He kept clenching and unclenching his fist on the counter, looking at it. ‘I felt all the time he was home his life was like sand, or water, Allie. Slipping through my fingers.’

  But she didn’t know that on the night she crept down the stairs to the door of the den. She remembered registering shock at the fact that her brother was holding a beer. He was nineteen, not yet old enough legally to drink, and he seemed slightly self-conscious, sipping occasionally from the bottle in front of his dad. But their father must have given it to him. Bobby wouldn’t have helped himself to beer from the fridge.

  Alice remembered that the lights were dimmed and that Simon and Garfunkel were playing on the stereo. Her dad liked Oscar Peterson, that kind of thing. Bobby liked Hendrix and the Doors. Simon and Garfunkel was the middle ground between them. The den had been built on to the back of the house and had a glass roof. Alice remembered the insistent drumming of heavy rain on the roof. They were playing the stereo with the volume very low. The two of them weren’t saying anything. But that was normal. Sometimes they would fish together for hours side by side on the bank of a stream and swap barely a grunt. It was more contentment than reticence. They took great pleasure, her father and brother, in one another’s company. At least, they did when her father wasn’t wrestling against the strength of the fear and foreboding he felt for his son.

  Then Bobby said: ‘How’s the war going, Dad?’

  And her father sighed. ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘I know what I read in Stars and Stripes,’ Bobby said. ‘None of us believes it, though. It’s all chaos on the ground. You get into a firefight, you might be aware of the two or three guys closest to you. Anything else is just confusion and chaos.’

  ‘Not like John Wayne, then,’ her father said.

  And Bobby laughed. ‘No, Dad. Definitely not like John Wayne.’

  And that was how it was when men came under fire. It was chaos and confusion. It was why generals stood on the high ground to the rear of the action. If there had been a friendly-fire incident on the beach Alice now walked, none of the men who survived it would have known its true extent or reason. Only a very few people would have been aware of the complete picture. And in desperate times, with the invasion for which they Were rehearsing only weeks away, they had done everything in their power to conceal it.

  *

  Alice was dreaming of exorcism, of swinging incense burners and hooded figures murmuring incantations, when she was awoken by hammering at the cottage door. In the dream she had been dressed as some sort of neophyte, standing at an altar in a chapel resembling the pub opposite the Imperial War Museum in which she had talked with the ghost of Rachel Vine. Rachel Vine was in the dream, robed in black, her powdered face grotesque in candlelight under a halo of platinum hair. But the knocking was real. It crashed with ominous insistence through the dream’s shaky logic and woke her from her sleep on the sofa of the cottage sitting room. From here, she could see the front door. And she saw a substantial shadow moving this way and that through the stained-glass circle in the door as the knocker was hammered at again.

  ‘Let me in.’

  Sweet Christ, Alice thought.

  ‘Let me in, Alice.’

  And she recognized the voice.

  ‘Hang on.’

  He looked dirty and dishevelled and tired. There were grease stains smearing his cheeks and chin and his hair was pale with dust. He had on an old, open motorcycle jacket, and there was a gleam of sweat from the sitting room light in the cleft where his neck met his chest.

  ‘Fucking hell, David!’ He recoiled. ‘Have you the remotest fucking idea of the time?’

  ‘Hello, Alice,’ he said.

  She tried to hold him, to gather him in her arms. He slid the motorcycle jacket from his shoulders and held her tightly. His hair was smoky with the smell of burning fields, and the muscles jumped under his skin with fatigue.

  ‘It seems a long time,’ he said.

  ‘Years,’ she said. ‘It seems like years.’

  She made him some coffee from a jar of instant she found in the kitchen.

  ‘Is there any milk?’

  She looked. The fridge was empty. ‘No.’

  ‘Alice Bourne. Homebuilder.’ He found a can of Marvel on a shelf and spooned some of it into his cup. He seemed distracted. ‘Why are you sleeping downstairs?’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘You said you were staying in a cottage on the coast at Strete. This is the only building fitting the description. The lights were on. I thought you were up, working. Or playing cards with an insomniac landlady. Where is the landlady, by the way? I should really rent a room.’

  ‘Where’s your watch?’ There was a circle around the wrist of his left arm paler than his otherwise tanned skin.

  ‘I sold it. Bought a bike with the money. The rear tyre punctured about three miles back. I didn’t intend just to turn up like this in the middle of the night. I’d brought a sleeping bag. I tried to bed down in an old concrete shelter on the side of the coast road back there. But I really got the creeps. Funny. I’ve never been frightened of the dark.’

  ‘Why are you here, David?’

  ‘I’m going on a trip. It’s why I bought the bike. I wanted to see you before I went. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.’

  ‘Have you wanted to?’

  He smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not remotely.’

  He had been detained by police as he went through Portsmouth and tried to board the Isle of Wight ferry. They didn’t arrest him or charge him with anything. They just made it very plain that he would be wiser to cooperate than to make unnecessary fuss. It had been David’s past experience with the police that the Perry Mason stuff only worked on television. So he went obediently with them. He surrendered his student ID. He submitted to fingerprinting and, when questioned, admitted to a series of juvenile misdemeanours he presumed they had learned of from the force in Merseyside. He did not think two incidents of adolescent shoplifting and a nightclub fracas involving hair-trigger doormen deserving of this kind of fuss. Then he remembered the King’s Road pub fight and wondered if the spitter he’d hit had been more badly damaged than had been realized at the time. He hoped not. He very much regretted the incident. He’d thought himself a tosser and a bully for throwing the punch, once he’d considered it soberly.

  He was left in a locked room, with plenty of opportunity to dwell on his possible crime, deprived of his watch and belt and bootlaces. There was nothing to read, no clock on the wall. He sat on a plastic modular chair, facing a Formica-topped table separating an identical, opposing chair from his. As unrecorded moments slipped by, David started to wish there was something to occupy him there. He’d have welcomed even the diversion of one of those magazines from which he’d learned the intimate details of poor Peter Cushing’s grief-afflicted life.

  The woman entered the room unescorted. She sat without ceremony and questioned him. She knew a lot about him and wanted to know more.

  ‘What did she look like?’ Alice asked. But she didn’t need to ask.

  ‘Slim,’ David said. ‘Green eyes. Sexy. Smokes too much.’

  ‘Exactly as I described her to you.’

  ‘No,’ David said. ‘You described her as sympathetic. She wasn’t sympathetic. She was scary. And she was extremely angry.’

  He was allowed to leave, to collect and gather his things, after Emerson was summoned from the room to take a telephone call.

  ‘I could have told you the prints weren’t mine,’ David said to her, as she passed afterwards in the corridor and he threaded the laces back into his boots.r />
  ‘You could,’ she said, her back to him, walking away. ‘You could have told me anything, or nothing at all.’ But she’d seemed ruffled, shaken. One hand played distractedly with her hair where the weight of it sat bright between the shoulder blades on her retreating back.

  It didn’t matter that David was late turning up at Bembridge. The fort dive was headed by a Frenchman called Robert Artaud. Artaud had worked on and off with David’s father. The two men were old friends. It was how David had got the job. Artaud smiled wryly when he saw the Rolex fastened to David’s wrist.

  And he seemed to take to David. The clear skies and calm of the heatwave made the job more straightforward than it otherwise might have been. Perhaps because he hated doing it, David was a thorough and scrupulous diver. He operated at a level of professionalism well above the student wage he was being paid. Rig divers had a deserved reputation for playing hard, and Robert Artaud did his best to live up to this, even given the limited opportunities presented to his crew on the Isle of Wight. There were no clubs or casinos on the island and he moaned loudly about the lack of them. But there were plenty of pubs. On their fourth evening, pretty hammered in a pub in Cowes, David noticed that Robert was looking at him in a way he didn’t really understand. He put it down to drink. But it persisted. Eventually he was too uncomfortable with the scrutiny to let it pass any longer without comment.