“Daphne. Ask this guy if the town is cleared of Krauts.”
“Bonjour! Nous sommes les premiers soldats Britanniques en la ville. Nous vérifions pour voir si des Allemands partaient ici?” Daffin’s accent sounded perfect to Reg.
The man smiled, shaking his head. “Non. Non. Ils ont couru la nuit dernière partie.” He gestured towards the women on the chairs. Daffin turned to his sergeant. “The Germans buggered off last night, he says. They’re dealing with their French mistresses now.”
“Tell him. No lynching.”
“Do you think they’re going to take any notice of us, Sarge? They look pretty determined.” Daffin sensed the mood of the crowd turning uglier.
“Tell him.”
“Mon sergent dit que l’armée Britannique ne veut pas que vous exécutiez ces femmes.”
The man shrugged his shoulders, nodding his head towards the crowd. “Qu’est-ce que je peux faire? Ils réclament le sang. Regardez-les!”
Someone shouted: “Argent pour les putains!” A bronze coin flashed over the heads of the nearmost crowd and struck one of the women above the eye. A sliver of blood quickly appeared and ran down over her eye. A cheer went up and more coins began to rain down. Reg realized that situation was getting out of control and he turned to Daffin. “We’ve got to get these women out of here otherwise they’re going to get torn apart.”
“That isn’t going to be easy, Sarge! This lot look as if they’ll flatten us as well!”
“Tell him that these women are now under arrest and are in British jurisdiction. And quick!”
Reg unslung his rifle but before Daffin could translate his sergeant’s order a figure emerged from the crowd brandishing a Luger pistol. The man was dressed in grey trousers and over a collarless white shirt he wore a brown jacket fraying around the cuffs. He grabbed the woman with the German officer jacket and pulled her off the chair, propelling her away from the crowd. A few of the other men made as if to follow but he turned and brandished the pistol at them, waving it menacingly in a wide arc. Without saying a word he quickly turned and dragged the woman away and towards a side street.
“OK, Daphne. Follow me. Let’s call-up the others.” Reg put his fingers to his mouth and produced a piercing whistle. Potter, keeping watch by the street corner, saw his sergeant’s overarm beckoning and emerged with the others. Doubling across the square they quickly caught up with the sergeant and Daffin, who had taken off after the gunman.
“Let’s just keep tabs on him for the moment. See what his plan is.”
Reg was trotting along, feeling more uncomfortable with every step. He was leading his troop into a part of town that hadn’t been reconnoitred properly. As they entered a cobbled street behind the Town Hall he noticed a bombed building about half-way down that had spewed lathe, plaster and wooden beams across the width of the street. The man with the Luger, roughly dragging the stumbling woman over the debris, stopped momentarily and aimed his pistol at the pursuing soldiers. Reg heard the crack and the ping of the bullet as it struck a lamp-post close by his shoulder.
“Right, you fucker. That’s it. No more pussy-footing.” He raised his rifle to his shoulder but hesitated. The woman was blocking a clean shot. “Fan out, lads, and keep your heads down. He could get lucky if we’re bunched together like this.”
Reg pressed himself up against a shop door and watched as the rest of the troop took up the best positions they could. The man fired another shot towards them which struck the concrete lintel of an overhead window and then he made off on the other side of the debris, pulling the woman along with him. Reg moved away from the door and signalled his men to follow. As he reached the bomb debris he hesitated, just catching sight of the woman as she was pulled through an archway about thirty yards away.
“Quick, otherwise we’ll lose them.”
Reaching the archway entrance he carefully checked around the corner before following. It looked to be an entrance to a courtyard that sat between the houses. A few washing-lines, empty of any clothes, hung listlessly across the space between the windows. Reg could see the woman. She was pressed up against the left-hand wall close by a doorway. He couldn’t see the gunman but guessed he was probably hidden from his sight in the abutment on the right-hand side. A voice shouted:
“Cassez-vous! C’est rien vos affaires. C’est mon épouse!”
“Daphne! What’d he say?”
“He says that this isn’t any of our business and we should fuck off.” He hesitated for a second. “And that’s his wife.”
“Oh, bloody hell.” They all looked towards the figure of the woman, cowering against the wall, her mouth a grotesque grimace stretched by the nylon gag. She had her face turned towards the wall as if she was desperately trying to push herself into the unyielding concrete.
“Right. OK. Tell him, tell him…” Before he could come up with any suggestion a shot rang out. The woman’s head cannoned into the wall and a spray of blood spattered the building behind her. She slid sideways and slumped down to the ground, the German officer’s jacket crumpling around her like a rag on a broken mannequin. The echoing ricochet startled two pigeons on the rooftop and they clattered away in a flurry of wing beats.
“Oh, fuck.” Reg was up and into the courtyard, quickly followed by the others. Standing just off to the right was the gunman. Reg raised his rifle to his shoulder and shouted, “Drop it!”
“Laissez tomber le pistolet!” Daffin shouted from behind his sergeant.
The man wasn’t looking at the soldiers. His gaze was towards the broken woman on the ground opposite. Blood was beginning to pool around her head.
“Tell him again, Daphne!”
Before Daffin could repeat the order, the man, in one swift, continuous movement, lifted the Luger, placed it under his chin and pulled the trigger. Corporal Potter was to say later that he heard the bounce of the back of the man’s skull as it hit the cobbles of the courtyard some ten yards away. The man’s body deflated like a punctured tyre, crumpling onto its knees before slowly toppling onto the ground. The sergeant lowered his rifle.
Reg realized later that these deaths, just two of the many he had witnessed, had affected him more than he expected. They had returned back through the courtyard entrance, passing underneath the brown-beamed façade with its distinctive white stucco between the shuttered windows and then back towards the town, noticing that the crowd in the square had now all but dispersed. Just the three chairs on which the women had been sitting lay askew and to one corner a couple of elderly head-scarved women, dressed in black, were animatedly talking to one another. The soldiers walked on, mostly in silence, lost in their own thoughts.
Reg became aware of the little book of verse he always carried in his Penguin pocket banging against his thigh. It had been handed out to the troops just before D-Day and even on the sickening, turbulent journey across the Channel he had noticed a number of soldiers with their noses in the book. He hadn’t taken much notice of it and he would have been the first to admit he wasn’t much of a reader of poetry. Just that morning, however, while waiting for orders he had slipped out the little brown book with its curious overlapping press-stud fastening and idly leafed through its wafer thin pages. One particular poem had caught his eye.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
Reading it had set up a tremor of remembrance for the wife he had left behind in England. What was she doing now? He hadn’t bothered to go home on his last leave, preferring to spend a couple of nights in Southampton rather than trek back to London. Not enough time was his excuse but if he was honest with himself he hadn’t had any real inclination. But what he had just witnessed left him deeply troubled. What had happened to those two people, husband and wife, so that their end would be so dreadful? They had been eager lovers once. Now, one betrayed, the other the betrayer, passion had overwhelmed them, destroyed them both.
“Browning.” Daffin was close by Reg’s shoulder.
“What?” Reg was pulled
out of his reverie.
“You were repeating the same words over and over from Browning’s poem. Let me count the ways. Let me count the ways.”
Reg looked at Daffin. At the young face and the eyes that had seen things no-one should have to see. Suddenly he felt tired. So tired. Would it never end? “Daphne, son. The more I see and the longer I live, God help me, the less I understand.” He gave his rifle a hitch on his shoulder. “Let’s get back to base. I could use a cup of char.”
Reg sat at the kitchen table, a half-drunk cup of tea by his hand. Doris would be back soon so he’d have to get on with it. In front of him lay a notebook with a black glossy cover that he had retrieved from the suitcase in the shed. It had a small swastika inside a circle stamped in red at the bottom right-hand corner of the front cover. He ran his finger over the symbol and followed the zig-zag path of the embossed design. It was one of the many things he and his fellow sergeant, George Tanner, had unearthed in the desk drawer of the Belsen camp commandant and since it hadn’t been used Reg decided to add it to his little haul of goods. There had been a lot of looting in those final days. Empty houses in the area around Belsen had been ransacked and stripped of anything that wasn’t screwed down; especially after they had discovered what had been going on in the camp, they’d marched into the bigger houses in the town and helped themselves. Anyone who complained was threatened with a bayonet.
Reg opened the notebook and flicked through the first forty pages which had been filled with his neat handwriting. One of the things his father had drummed in to him as a child was the importance of neat handwriting and he had spent hours copying out the sentences in the Vere Foster practice books that his father brought for him.
By the time he was twelve he had mastered the whole alphabet, upper and lower case, with the only exception of the capital “H”. While the rest of the alphabet flowed freely from his pen, looping above and below the stave in symmetrical precision, the letter “H” sat like an intrusive and ugly wall, concreted to the baseline. He had tried all ways to blend the letter in with the elegant swirls and loops of the sentences, adding discrete curlicues to the masts, leaning it to left or right, bending and twirling the centre bar ever so slightly. None of it worked and ‘H’ sat irresolute on the page.
Now, he unscrewed the top of his pen, opened a fresh page in the book and entered the date on the top left-hand, first ruled line of the page.
Tuesday May 26th 1953
The black ink glistened on the fresh white page. A small ink globule on the lower upturn of “3” threatened to overspill in its own weight. Reaching for a blotter Reg folded one corner into a narrow point and stabbed gently at the offending drop. It deflated, soaking into the blotter and then dried. Wiping the nib of the pen before carefully touching in the final stroke on the “3”, he waited while it dried. Satisfied, he moved over to the right-hand side of the page and wrote Wandsworth, London on the same level as the date. This would be his third job at Wandsworth and it was his least favourite of the London prisons. There was a smell and an atmosphere about the place, as unalloyed as a London smog that smothered him as soon as he stepped through the main gate. And, unless things had improved since his last visit, the overnight accommodation would be little better than a poorly converted cell with a couple of single beds squeezed in together with a small wardrobe. It was the one thing that Pierrepoint had always railed against; the attitude towards the executioner by the authorities. He had been assisting Pierrepoint on the occasion that a meagre salad had been served up to them on the evening before the execution. The warder had placed the two plates consisting of a bit of ham, some limp lettuce and half a tomato on the table and was turning to go when Pierrepoint slammed down his hand.
“What’s this?”
The warder looked down at the table and then up at Pierrepoint. The cigarette hanging from the corner of Pierrepoint’s mouth twitched and he disdainfully flicked the edge of the plate. Reg said nothing but watched carefully, relishing the warder’s discomfort as he weighed up how to reply. Pierrepoint raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“It was all the cook had left, Mr Pierrepoint.”
There was a few seconds’ silence as Pierrepoint rocked back on his chair and plucked the cigarette from his lips. Suddenly he thumped forward, pushing the cigarette forcefully into the pile of lettuce on the plate in front of him.
“Well, my son, tell the cook that His Majesty’s Executioner doesn’t eat rabbit food and would he be so kind as to get some fish and chips sent up pronto. Fish and chips OK with you, Reg?”
“Fine by me.” Reg watched as Pierrepoint placed one plate on top of the other and held them up to the warder. The warder hesitated.
“I think the cook’s left for the night, Mr Pierrepoint.”
“Well, son, I suggest to you that you go and raid the governor’s piggy bank and trot out down the road and get us some from that chippy I saw when I arrived here this afternoon.” He hesitated, watching for the warder’s reaction. “Or Mr Manley and myself will be packing our bags and fucking off fast and we’ll leave you and the governor to run the execution tomorrow. Now, fuck off and get us some hot food.”
He thrust the plates into the warder’s hands and pulled out his silver cigarette case. The warder retreated through the door and closed it behind him.
Pierrepoint offered the open case to Reg. He pulled out a cigarette from the case and waited while Pierrepoint struck a match, offering it to Reg before lighting his own, sucking down the first intake of nicotine. Blowing out a stream of smoke he leant back on his chair. “Calcraft. Know the name, Reg?”
“No, should I?”
“Hangman from the last century Reg. Forty-five years’ work. Reckoned he did about 500 during that time, although the number was probably much higher.” Pierrepoint paused, taking another drag from his cigarette. “Treated like royalty wherever he went, he was. Greeted by the governor, cheered by the crowds on the way into prison and mobbed by them on the way out.” He turned to Reg and nodded towards the door through which the departing warder had just left. “How times have changed, eh? Look at what we have to do. Creeping in and out, incognito like, and treated like dirt.” He shook his head. “Not right, not right.”
Reg, unsure how to react, remained silent, holding his cigarette between his fingers, the smoke curling slowly upwards across his knuckles.
“And I’ll tell you something else.” Pierrepoint jabbed his finger on to the table in front of him. “That Calcraft bastard was hopeless. Left the poor buggers struggling on a short drop. Sometimes it took them fifteen minutes to die – once almost an hour. If it carried on too long he’d go and swing on the legs of prisoners and break their necks that way. Can you believe that? Swinging away like some fucking human pendulum under the trap. And still they thought he was the bee’s knees!”
He leaned back in his chair, lifting the front feet off the concrete floor of the cell but balancing himself carefully with a hand on the tabletop. Reg watched as Pierrepoint rocked back and forth, the cigarette agitatedly bobbing up and down in his mouth. He turned his face towards Reg, a faint smile creasing the corners of his mouth.
“But never forget this, Reg. Calcraft was a hangman, a butcher. We,” he nodded towards Reg, “are executioners. Professionals.”
Reg returned to his notebook and placed the nib of the pen on the next line down; centred accurately between the date and place, he began to write Henry Charles Eastman. The first capital “H” crabbed from the pen and an overloaded downward stroke left a globule of ink hanging tremulously from the middle of the horizontal line. Reg looked at the scaffold of the letter and watched as the weight of the ink broke the tenuous bubble, slowly seeping downwards before expiring and soaking into the paper. He put down the pen and applied the corner of the blotting paper to the thin skein of ink hanging from the letter but it was too late, the damage had been done. A surge of anger swept through him.
“Bloody bastard – you bloody bastard!”
He gr
ipped the edges of the notebook and stared at the offending ink straggle as if willing it to disappear. In all the years he had been keeping the record book this was the very first time he had made a mistake that looked as if it couldn’t be rectified. Some minor spelling mistakes on earlier entries had been so judiciously corrected that it would be difficult for anyone to spot the changes, but this one couldn’t be hidden. It hung there, a disfigurement reaching down to the line below.
The sound of a key in the front door broke his reverie. Doris was home.
“Fuck.” Slamming the notebook shut and slipping it to the back of the shelf, Reg put the top back on his pen. “Bastard thing,” he muttered to himself. “Bitch.”
Bradford on Avon 1939
Henry, Mavis & Victor
In truth, during the week following Arthur’s death, Mavis became less sure that she would be able to cope alone despite the brave face she put on for Henry’s sake. Her own despair and sorrow became inextricably wound up in the general feeling of panic induced by the declaration of war on that Sunday. She had listened to Chamberlain’s lugubrious voice drifting from the radio that morning – she deliberately avoided going to church that day, couldn’t face anyone and their well-meaning condolences – and silently she cursed Arthur for leaving her alone.
A Coin for the Hangman Page 7
