A Question of Honor: A Bess Crawford Mystery

by Charles Todd

  “But, Matron,” I protested.

  She put a hand on my arm. “Are you—is there something between you and Corporal Caswell?”

  “No!” I said at once, dismayed that she would think such a thing—but then I had brought it on myself with my personal comments about a patient. “I—it’s just that I have—it’s a matter of responsibility to—”

  “Then that does you credit. I shouldn’t have doubted you. Go on. I must complete my rounds.”

  I thanked her and walked away, my thoughts in turmoil. If I went to see Corporal Caswell now, it would appear on my record. I had no business in that ward. If I said nothing, he would be discharged and returned to duty. Whether he actually arrived there was another matter.

  I wished I could speak to Simon. But I knew what he would tell me.

  Either call the MFP or walk away.

  I went to bed. But I didn’t sleep. When a Sister came to wake me in time to dress and leave for Dover, I was ready, my kit packed and closed.

  I said, “Keep an eye on Corporal Caswell,” as she walked with me to the waiting ambulance. “He—he’s not to be trusted.” It was as far as I could go without telling her the whole story.

  “Yes, that’s true enough.” Sister Bailey laughed. “He’s flirted with all the Sisters. Nothing serious, of course, just passing the time. He knows how charming he is.”

  I bit my lip. “Still, be careful.”

  “Always.”

  I got into the ambulance, thinking that I should have asked Matron to call the MFP after all.

  But would anyone have listened to me? “Corporal Caswell” had seen to it that everyone believed he was a lovely man, while giving me nothing to be going on with.

  After we reached London it required three days to escort all my charges to their destinations. Blind patients went to a lovely house in Essex, while those with shattered bones continued to Suffolk, where the care was extraordinary.

  I discovered that the nurse I’d replaced was due a short leave, and I was expected to take it in her stead, although I had volunteered to go back to France.

  Paperwork, apparently, would be impossibly confused, so said the doctor in Suffolk. The lorries that had conveyed us there had no instructions about returning me to Dover, only to London.

  I managed to put in a telephone call to Somerset before I left Suffolk, and so my father was there to meet me when I arrived outside the barracks.

  He looked well, although the strain of this war had touched him too. Everyone was well at home, he assured me, although several friends had died of the contagion that was rampant. One of them was the mother of a girl I’d known in India.

  After looking in on Mrs. Hennessey, the Colonel Sahib and I went on to Somerset. We were halfway there and had stopped for tea when my father said, “You and Simon have been busy. We’ve hardly seen you on your last few leaves.”

  I could feel myself flushing and looked down. “You’ve been away as well. And Portsmouth was so short a stay that I couldn’t have come home at all. Fortunately Simon was there to rescue me and give me a night’s lodging. The town is full.”

  “Yes, I’m glad of that. Your mother worries when you stay alone at a hotel.”

  That made me smile. “How like her to worry about that, when I crisscross France in the company of strange men.”

  He laughed but said, “Crime doesn’t go away in wartime.”

  That sadly was true.

  “Still, there’s something going on, Bess. And you might as well tell me now, or I’ll put Simon on the spot.”

  “No, he doesn’t deserve that. All right, if you must know.” I sighed as I looked around. The next tables were too close, we could be overheard. “It’s a long story. And a confusing one. Wait until we’re back in the motorcar.”

  We finished our tea and left. I tried to think how best to start my tale, and in the end decided to begin with the Subedar.

  My father’s face tightened as I described what I had seen, and how Simon and I had gone to Petersfield and even to Winchester. But I stopped short of telling him that I had treated Lieutenant Wade and then left him in a convalescent ward in France. Or that I’d learned the name he was using now. He would feel compelled to act on that information. Best to leave the Lieutenant’s whereabouts vague.

  “You should have told me. Straightaway,” my father admonished me.

  “We had nothing to be going on with. For all we knew, the Subedar had been mistaken. For all we knew, the man I’d glimpsed was someone who looked rather like how I believed Lieutenant Wade might look now. Perhaps if I hadn’t spoken to the Subedar, I would never have seen such a likeness at all. Perhaps I was expecting to see what I saw.”

  It was jumbled, but my father nodded.

  “And you didn’t want to bring up the past when there was so little to go on. That’s understandable.”

  He was silent for a time, and then he said, “There aren’t many men who could have done what Wade did. And of all the men under me at the time, I’d have said that Simon was the only one who could have got through. His knowledge of languages would have saved him, and he didn’t have Wade’s lighter eyes to make people take a second look. But there are light-eyed Afghans and others in that part of the world who are fair. It would be interesting to know how Wade accomplished it.”

  “Did you think he was guilty, when the MFP came looking for him?”

  “In 1908? I thought they were wide of the mark. I’d have backed him up if he’d stayed and stood trial. But then he fled. And I could see why—the proof I was shown was overwhelming.”

  “Still, it could have been overwhelming—but wrong. I rode with him any number of times after he came back from England. You always sent me out with an escort, and he volunteered if he was off duty. There was nothing—nothing—that could have convinced me that he’d killed his mother and father only nine weeks before. Surely that would have changed him in some fashion.”

  It was a theme I kept returning to—why hadn’t Lieutenant Wade suffered visibly for what he’d done? It would have made him more—human—in my eyes. The answer was always, He had to carry it off or betray himself too soon. . . . Judging him by my own standards was useless.

  “You said that Simon is pursuing the Subedar’s past?”

  “Yes. I was considering asking Mr. Kipling if his contacts in India could tell us any more.”

  “All right then, go ahead. But there remain the three deaths in Petersfield.”

  “I know.”

  He glanced my way. “I have met one or two men in my lifetime who could kill and show no remorse. I don’t mean soldiers who must kill in the course of their duties. I’m speaking of someone who appears to be quite pleasant, and yet who could walk up to a stranger with no reason on earth to like or dislike him, and in cold blood kill him without turning a hair. One such man was in my command early on, and I had him discharged and tried for what he’d done.”

  I shivered even in the warm sunlight coming through the windscreen.

  The description could very well fit Lieutenant Wade. Hadn’t he charmed the other nursing Sisters, effectively spiking my guns if I’d broken my promise and betrayed him?

  I had to ask. I wanted my father’s opinion. “Do you think Lieutenant Wade is one of these men?”

  He took a deep breath, and I knew he was finding it hard to be fair. “Ten years ago, I’d have said it was impossible. Now? I don’t have an answer for you. Just—be careful, Bess.”

  It was an echo of what Simon had said to me already.

  Chapter Thirteen

  We talked of other things after that. But ten miles from home, I asked the Colonel Sahib, “Do you think we should tell Mother? About Lieutenant Wade?”

  “We might as well,” he said, resigned to the inevitable. “She’ll find out sooner or later.”

  Before I went to bed that n
ight, I wrote to Mr. Kipling. I told him what I could about the death of Mr. and Mrs. Wade, and about the Subedar’s brother, and asked him if he could use his contacts in India to look into the matter.

  Mr. Kipling had known so many people out there. In the newspaper business, in the Army, in the police. If anyone could discover useful information about that brother, it was he.

  Simon was away, and so I spent several days enjoying being home, as much as I could, given what was happening in France, the war, the epidemic. Not to mention Corporal Caswell’s whereabouts.

  My mother broached the subject of Lieutenant Wade one afternoon when we were in the kitchen, putting up jars of plums.

  “I don’t know what to tell you about the man,” she said, setting aside the jar she had been working with and reaching for another. “I was content when he volunteered to see Mary Standish safely to England, and I wasn’t surprised that he took her all the way to the Middletons. That was a kindness.”

  But was it? I asked myself. Was he merely trying to be sure little Alice had died of natural causes, or to see if whatever had happened to his own sister had happened to her? After all, it was not until he knew for certain that Mary Standish was not going to travel with him back to India that he killed the Caswell family. Would they still be alive if Mary Standish had decided to return to her husband? I couldn’t put that out of my mind.

  My mother wiped her hands on her apron and stared out the window at the summer sunlight beating down on the gardens. “I’d always told myself that if I could have seen his face—Lieutenant Wade’s—as the MFP took him into custody, I’d have known whether he was guilty or not. But of course that never happened.” She picked up another jar and began to fill it with the fruit.

  I had seen his face when I told him his parents were dead—and I hadn’t been able to judge anything. Whether he was lying about not knowing or if he thought I would have doubts about his guilt if I was convinced he hadn’t known about two of the murders.

  “Well,” my mother said, as we finished the last of the jars, “we aren’t going to solve the puzzle of Lieutenant Wade this afternoon, are we?”

  And we dropped the subject, walking out to the orchard to see how the apple crop was coming.

  When Simon arrived at last, I had no chance to speak to him alone. It was the next morning before I could walk down to the cottage, just before breakfast.

  He was awake, sitting in the back garden with a cup of tea in his hand and the pot at his elbow on a white-painted iron table.

  “Hullo,” he said. “There’s another cup just inside the door. I rather thought you’d be coming over.”

  I smiled, but I still hadn’t made up my mind how much to tell him. Would he and my father feel that they had no choice but to take measures to arrest Lieutenant Wade? I had a little time. I needn’t make the decision straightaway, I told myself as I brought out the extra cup and poured myself a little of the tea. The milk in the jug was fresh, and there was a pot of honey beside it. I sighed with pleasure as I took my first sip.

  “I want to go back to Petersfield. I know, there are problems with that. But I would like to go all the same.”

  “I looked into the estate agent who is handling The Willows. Nothing I learned about him seemed to be of interest. He’s been in that same location for some years, his reputation is good, and because of a bad foot he’s not in the war. Then I called on him. I’d put his age closer to forty than to thirty. When I mentioned The Willows, he showed no reaction whatsoever. I asked if he’d seen the property himself, and he said he had not. Nor could he tell me anything about the history of the house, only that it was far too large for the present owner.”

  “All the more reason to go back to Petersfield.”

  “I rather thought you would suggest that. The day is yours.” He grinned at me. “What’s this you wrote to me about a friend from our India days. Don’t tell me you actually had Wade as a patient?”

  “I haven’t said anything to my parents. But yes, I did. He tried to make me believe he hadn’t known about his parents’ death—only about the three here in England. And he couldn’t have known, could he, if he escaped before he spoke to the Military Foot Police?”

  “Surely if he had tried to contact them, he’d have found out.”

  “He said he dared not try, that it would prove he’d survived. And he’s clever, Simon, the men under him think he’s a good soldier, the Sisters and even Matron thought him a lovely man. I tried to tell them they were wrong, but no one would listen. And I was sent away to bring another convoy across, while he was still a patient.”

  He turned to stare at me. “Are you quite serious? Yes, you are. You should have called in the police yourself.”

  “The fact that I was Colonel Crawford’s daughter might have carried some weight. But the Army already knew him as Corporal Caswell, and I’m sure he had an unblemished record. Well, of course it was unblemished, he didn’t dare step out of line for fear in any inquiry someone might stumble over his real past while looking into his background.” I couldn’t tell him about my promise—he’d have thought it mad.

  “There’s that dead Subedar, Gupta.”

  “But we don’t know for certain who shot him. The Subedar could have seen him somewhere, just as I did. It doesn’t mean he followed the Lieutenant to the Front. I think that if Thomas Wade had shot him, the Subedar would have said something about that, if only to reinforce his account of having spotted the man. It would have been a telling point.”

  “Then what was he doing so near the Front lines? Why would he have risked his life going that close to the trenches? He must have been tracking Wade.”

  “That’s true.” I took a deep breath. “Of course, there’s his brother. If the Lieutenant had been caught and tried for the murder of his own parents, there was no reason for guilt to fall on the Subedar’s brother. Perhaps the brother hadn’t killed anyone—but the Subedar suspected he might have done.”

  “There must have been hundreds of other men at the Front who had served with Wade over his career. Why didn’t they recognize the man?”

  “Because he chose the sappers, not the infantry. It was only recently that he was posted to that regiment. And because in the chaos of trenches, people have more to think about than India ten years ago.”

  “Or because,” Simon suggested, “he saw to it that anyone who might have begun to wonder or ask questions caught a bullet in the back during the next attack.”

  I remembered what my father had said about someone who killed without remorse.

  “Well, it’s not too late. He must still be a patient, he was too weak to return to his company. Have him taken into custody before he’s discharged.”

  “We’ll go to Petersfield, first, shall we?” Simon asked, setting his cup back on the tray.

  “I’ll tell Mother. Ten minutes?”

  “Agreed.” He took my cup from me and added, “Bess. We don’t know if or how Wade and the Gesslers are connected. We can’t afford to be rash.”

  “I know. I’ve thought about that too.” I could still see the faint outline of the bruise on his cheek.

  Ten minutes later, we were pulling out of the drive and on our way to Petersfield.

  The day that had begun with a lovely summer clear sky was growing cloudy by the time we reached Hampshire, and by Petersfield, we could see black clouds gathering way out to sea, hovering on the far horizon.

  By two o’clock, we were driving into Church Square in the heart of the village. It was quiet at this hour, for this wasn’t market day.

  We left the motorcar by a milliner’s shop, and Simon had just come round to open my door when he saw Mr. Gates crossing the lower part of the square and disappearing down the High Street. Head down, the man looked haunted, and I felt pity for him.

  “Let’s go into the churchyard. Give him a head start,” Simon suggested, and I ag
reed.

  It was quiet too. I wondered if the sexton was looking out a window of one of the houses on the lane that ran on the far side of the churchyard, but there was no help for it if he was.

  We paused by the Caswell tombstones, standing there busy with our own thoughts, when someone spoke from just behind us.

  “Knew them, did you?”

  We turned to see an elderly man standing there, leaning on a rosewood cane. He looked to be sixty-five, at the most seventy. It was hard to judge, for other than the cane, he appeared to be fit.

  I realized that he’d been speaking to Simon, not to me.

  “I’m not sure,” Simon said. “The name is familiar.”

  “You’re too young to be one of their lads,” the man replied, squinting to look up at Simon.

  “My elder brother.” Simon had no brothers, but I said nothing. “Dead in the war, you see.”

  “Yes, well, a pilgrimage, like.” The old man nodded. “I was sexton at St. Peter’s when they were put into the ground. Another young gentleman was here not long ago—July, it must have been. Or just after I’d come from having my back seen to. Lumbago, they said it was. At any rate, he was standing by these graves at dusk, a lonely figure somehow. I came across to speak to him. He said he needed to see their graves. The way he spoke, I thought perhaps it made him feel better, knowing they were well taken care of in death.”

  I had the oddest thought—that he’d come to see they were indeed dead and buried. An exorcism . . .

  I wanted to glance at Simon, to follow his lead. But when he said nothing, I asked, “Did you catch his name? He could have known our brother.”

  “If he told it, I don’t remember.”

  Simon asked, “You must have seen the children at The Willows often. Attending church, coming into the village on market day or for an outing.”