by James R Benn
“Does the condition of the body tell you anything at all?” I asked.
“Why? What’s so special about this man?” Dawes asked, not unreasonably, since we were surrounded by dozens of dead men.
“He’s not supposed to be here,” I said.
“No one was supposed to die out there,” Dawes said. I didn’t bother to explain, waiting for him to continue. “Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet, although the cold water can slow that process. Some of the boys who were brought in first are stiff already.”
“I was told the temperature in the Channel waters was around forty-five degrees,” I said.
“That would do it,” Dawes said. “Here’s something interesting.” He had pulled one of Peter’s eyelids fully open.
“What?”
“Do you see the line?” He pointed to the eyeball, and sure enough, there was a horizontal border between a clear area of cornea and a cloudy one. “Water keeps the eyeball glistening. When a body comes out of the water, the eyes are lifelike, but the cloudiness sets in with exposure to air.”
“Everyone I’ve seen has cloudy eyes,” I said.
“Not those two,” Dawes said, pointing to the bodies that came in with Peter Wiley. I looked, and he was right. Their eyes were clear. “They’ll start to cloud up soon, but that’s how a drowning victim’s eyes initially appear.”
“Then what’s with the line on Peter’s eyes?” I asked, beginning to understand.
“I’d wager he died out of the water with his eyes partially open. The air dried out the exposed portion.”
“What if he died from the blow to his head during the torpedo attack, and went into the water shortly after?”
“There probably wouldn’t be enough time for the pupils to dry,” Dawes said. “Even with the life vest on, his head would naturally fall forward into the water, and the action of the waves would keep his face and eyes soaked. But once the drying takes place, there’s no reversing it.”
“So how long was he dead before he went into the water?” I asked.
“Impossible to tell, really,” Dawes said. “Depends upon conditions. Humidity, condition of the tear ducts, a whole host of variables that makes it difficult to say anything other than he likely did not go into the water alive. Perhaps he fell and died from the blow, or complications, some hours before the attack. I can’t really say. Sorry.”
“Can we get this body to a morgue and keep him in cold storage?” I asked. “Maybe you could perform an autopsy.”
“Normally, yes,” Dawes said. “But with the security precautions in place, I don’t know. I’ve heard talk that all these bodies are going into a common grave very soon. What I can do is write up a report on what we’ve found, in case you need a statement. And I’ll try to get him to the morgue at the field hospital.”
“Good,” I said. “I’m going to radio this in to my boss, see if he can do anything. You’ll need to go over this with Constable Quick, too. It may involve the local police.”
I sent Tom to be briefed by the doctor and went to the radio tent. I radioed a quick message to Harding, saying that Peter Wiley was among the dead, under suspicious circumstances, and we needed his body on ice. I gave Major Dawes as the contact and said he was writing up his findings.
“A mystery on top of a tragedy,” Tom said, shaking his head as he got into the jeep. “What do we do now?”
“I’ve notified Harding,” I said. “We should head to the next Casualty Clearing Station and try to wrap things up. Then we need to determine which LST Peter Wiley was on.”
“When he wasn’t supposed to be on one at all,” Tom said. “Might be tricky, that.”
“There has to be someone in charge of who was allowed on board,” I said, “outside of the major units assigned to take part in Operation Tiger. Wiley was on his own. There has to be a list of observers, anyone who wasn’t assigned to any major formation.”
“Any idea why he wanted to go? He must have had a pressing reason if he disobeyed orders to do so.”
“Perspective,” I said. “When we talked about it, that’s what he said. But it was almost like he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. He clammed up right after that.”
“Maybe he meant a painter’s perspective?” Tom suggested. “Or he could have been thinking about a different viewpoint on things. Some incident at Ashcroft House, perhaps, that he wanted to get away to think about.”
“Could have been either,” I said as we drove through the guard’s station and left the ramparts behind, the old iron cannon zeroed in at our backs. “And speaking of artwork, where is his painting gear?”
“Right,” Tom said. “It wasn’t in his room at Greenway House. Perhaps you should check the bedroom he used at Ashcroft.”
There was a lot to check up on at Ashcroft House, now that a potential heir had turned up dead. I was suddenly much more interested in attending Sir Rupert’s funeral. Yesterday going was a courtesy. But tomorrow’s burial would now be a duty.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE SMALL STONES of Slapton Sands slid out from under my boots as breaking waves clawed at them, drawing the smooth, glistening pebbles back into the Channel with a rocky clatter. Two Higgins boats were making their way to shore, where idling trucks and bored GIs waited. Out in the Channel, vessels cut through the waves in all directions, the search for floaters still in full swing. The wind stung my face, the air cold and damp under darkening clouds.
We’d driven from Brixham and found no sign of Kaz and Big Mike here. Maybe their search was over and they’d headed back to Greenway House. If we didn’t find them soon, I’d try to raise them on the radio again. For the moment, I was content to watch the boats come in as I thought about what to do next. It all depended on what Harding thought was more important: the dead BIGOT who wasn’t supposed to be there, or a full body count of those who were.
“Look over there,” Tom said, pointing to a pile of debris above the high-tide mark. Life belts, packs, and a few helmets lay in a heap. Evidence that bodies had recently been collected.
“I wonder if Big Mike and Kaz have been here already,” I said.
“Maybe they went out on those Higgins boats,” Tom said. “They’d be good for a slow search.”
“Kaz? Never. He gets seasick, and he hates to admit it,” I said, launching into my impression of Kaz’s precise Polish-accented English. “I do not like boats.” We both laughed.
Until the Higgins boats hit the shingle, their engines revving, and their bow ramps dropped.
They were filled with the dead.
They hadn’t been searching as much as collecting.
“Christ,” Tom said, the curse hissing through clenched teeth. “Will it never end?”
No, not for a good long time, I thought, but I didn’t say it. This pile of corpses was only a small down payment. When the Higgins boats went in under fire and the ramps went down, German machine gunners could have a field day, their deadly twenty-five-rounds-per-second MG-42s filling a single Higgins boat with enough hot lead to wipe out a platoon in the time it took to draw your last breath. It would look much like this, but with blood, not water, drenching the uniforms.
I shook the vision off. There was too much at stake for the D-Day planners to have left that to chance. Wherever they hit the beach, concrete emplacements and bunkers would have to have been obliterated by bombers, fighters, battleships, and rocket boats. We had the firepower, and there was no reason in the world not to use every shell, rocket, and bomb stashed in ammo dumps across southern England. I kept telling myself that, but I still had to look away, as if I were scanning the strand for Kaz and Big Mike, blinking against the wind. I could almost hear the MG-42, the machine gun the Germans gleefully called the Bonesaw. With good reason. It fired so fast that it was impossible to hear single bullets being fired. Some guys said the sound was like canvas being quickly ripped apart. All I knew was that it was a noise from the depths of Hell. But now, as I stood in front of corpses stacked three deep, there was on
ly silence. Even the waves quieted, as if in deference to the dead. I felt dizzy and stepped back, fear rising in my gut as if the guns were here and it was happening right now. My face went hot, and I jumped when I felt a hand on me.
“Billy,” Tom said, shaking my arm. He was looking at me with a worried expression, and I realized he’d called my name several times. His voice sounded like a distant echo, but I heard him. The wind returned, as did the click clack of the stones rolling in the water. “We should check these men now.”
“Sure,” I said, unsure of where all the sounds had gone. I thrust my trembling hand into a jacket pocket. I’d seen the Bonesaw at work in Italy. Some days I didn’t think about it. Most nights I still dreamt about it. We walked closer to where sailors were carrying the dead off the Higgins boats to the waiting trucks. Men, Tom had called them. Respectful, but these were no longer men. They’d joined the ranks of the war dead, that long line of final sacrifice, before they’d even had a chance to storm that far shore.
“Read me the name, Billy,” Tom said, clipboard in one hand as he placed the other on my shoulder. It struck me as funny that Tom Quick, a man so haunted by his own loss and the losses he’d inflicted on others, was comforting me, leading me by the hand like a wayward child. I grinned, then laughed, and kept laughing until I got it under control, my sleeve pressed against my mouth. The situation was so bizarre that no one even took notice, or they pretended not to, at any rate.
“Okay,” I said, checking the dog tags of the lieutenant at my feet. “Greenberg, Phillip.” Tom shook his head. Not one of ours. I shuffled sideways, kneeling on the wet stones, pulling chains from officers’ necks. Finally we got a hit. Captain Roger Malcolm, from Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Almost a neighbor. Tom checked him off the list, the last of the officers from the landing craft. We followed the trucks as they drove off the strand once the bodies had all been loaded. Since this was a restricted area, there was no need to hide anything. The Casualty Clearing Station was off the road behind Slapton Ley, on a rise above the empty village of Torcross. The view was stunning, not that it mattered to most of the residents. The thatched roofs of Torcross were scattered on the hillside below us, beyond them the curve of the beach stretching out, the grey Channel on one side and the waters of Slapton Ley, rippled by the wind, on the other. Torcross held the only road off the landing area, and from here it was easy to see why they’d simulated an airborne drop behind the beach. If the enemy held that single road, everyone would be stuck in the landing area with nowhere to go but six feet under.
We turned our attention to the tents laid out in rows on the grassy field. Two long hospital tents faced three unmarked pyramidal tents, with a scattering of others beyond, probably a command post, judging by the antennas and jeeps, and a field kitchen, based on the woodsmoke and the odor of burnt Spam.
“Let’s have another go,” Tom said, then stopped as Big Mike and Kaz exited the tent nearest us.
“Billy, we’ve finished here,” Kaz said, waving as he spotted us. “We found the colonel and a lieutenant. How did you fare?”
“A captain and two lieutenants,” I said. “Well, three, actually. Peter Wiley is dead.”
“How did that happen?” Kaz said.
“Not entirely certain,” I said. “We found him with the bodies at Brixham.”
“I thought Sam ordered him to stay behind,” Big Mike said.
“He did,” I said. “Harding was damn clear about that. I don’t know how Peter managed it. I left a radio message for the colonel at Greenway House.”
“Ask him right now,” Big Mike said. “He’s grabbing some coffee in the mess tent. He got here about an hour ago to see what we’d come up with.” Thunder rumbled in the distance, and rain began to fall. To the northwest, I saw lightning crackle between thick grey clouds that were tumbling closer. A lot of the weather here rolled in from the northwest, swooping over the Channel before hitting France. I sent up a quick prayer to Saint Clare of Assisi, patron saint of good weather, to intercede when the invasion came, and to ease up on this bit of nasty weather while she was at it.
“What?” Harding nearly shouted when we sat down and told him about Peter Wiley. “That’s impossible. He wouldn’t make it on board without authorization.” He slammed his coffee cup down hard enough for the hot joe to jump ship.
“Colonel,” I said, casting my eyes around the mess tent to be sure no one could hear, “this whole exercise was screwed up six ways to Sunday. One guy getting on an LST by hook or by crook isn’t that hard to imagine.”
“You both saw the body?” he asked, still not wanting to believe it. “Drowned, like the others?”
Tom and I both shrugged. “The surgeon at the Brixham clearing station wrote up a statement about what he found. I asked him to keep Wiley’s body secure, but he wasn’t sure he had the clout to get that done. From his quick exam, it looked like Peter may have been killed before he went into the water.”
“You mean when the LSTs were attacked?” Harding said.
“He can’t say for certain. I asked him to get the body to the morgue at his hospital and take a closer look, do a full autopsy if he had to. Is that something you can make happen? Major Dawes said the bodies were going to be taken away soon. We’ve heard rumors they’re going to be dumped in mass graves.”
“I’ll head there now and look up this Dawes. Between the two of us, we should be able to get the body released. But there’s a lot of pressure to wrap this up and keep a tight lid on it, so I can’t promise anything. This thing is being handled way above my pay grade. And there are no mass graves. Every man will get a decent burial.”
“Could you ask Ike to intervene, just to make sure?” Big Mike said. “Otherwise we got no corpus delecti.”
“No. He’s too busy working on the real invasion. He put us in charge of finding these officers for security reasons, but other than that, he’s focused on the real thing. It’s up to us. What’s the status on the missing men?” Harding asked, gulping the dregs of his coffee.
“We found all but one lieutenant and one captain,” I said, going over our checklists.
“Okay,” Harding said, tapping his fingers on the wooden table as he calculated how best to proceed. “Constable Quick, you and Big Mike continue the search. Go back to Start Point and see if any more bodies have been brought in.”
“That’s where we bagged the colonel,” Big Mike said to Tom.
“Then work your way north. My guess is that by tomorrow all the bodies will have been accounted for, unless the fish or the Germans got to them. Boyle, you and Lieutenant Kazimierz go to Greenway House. Lieutenant James Siebert is the officer who was responsible for keeping the manifests for all observers. He went into the water, but he had all his papers in a waterproof bag. He got a little banged up, but he’ll be back on duty tomorrow morning. See what light he can shed on how this happened.” Rain splattered the canvas above us, a crash of thunder not much farther away.
“Tomorrow morning is the funeral of Sir Rupert Sutcliffe,” I said. “Since everyone who spent time with Peter will be there, it might be worth our while to attend. Maybe he confided in one of them.”
“Worth a shot,” Harding said, giving us a curt nod. “But get to Siebert right after that. There’s no telling what may happen to any evidence connected with this debacle.” The rain became fiercer as wind gusts sent the tent flaps flying.
“Is the search going to proceed in this storm?” Kaz asked, a peal of thunder punctuating his sentence.
“It probably shouldn’t,” Harding said. “But then again, we may have to launch an invasion in weather not much better than this.” A loud, sharp crack whipped through the air as a bolt of lightning hit a nearby tree, the wood cracking and crashing to the ground seconds later. Saint Clare must have been busy elsewhere.
Harding went off to the command tent to radio Brixham and tell Major Dawes he was on his way, while the four of us waited for the worst of the storm to pass. Big Mike resupplied himself with doughnu
ts, and Kaz went in search of a cup of decent tea, a foolish venture in a US Army mess tent. Tom Quick and I stood at the open flaps, watching the rain fall on the sodden field.
“It’s a hard thing to see,” Tom said. “Even if you’re used to it.”
“It is,” I said. “I don’t think you ever get used to it, though.”
“You’ve been in combat,” he said. A statement, not a question.
“North Africa. Sicily. Salerno. How can you tell?”
“A man unused to carnage will throw up at the sight of it,” Tom said. “A man who has seen too much gets the shakes. And a man who tries to hide the fact stuffs his hands in his pockets.”
“You don’t miss much,” I said.
“I’m a trained constable,” he said. “Most days, all a village constable does is watch people. Little things tend to stand out. And I do know something about carnage. From a distance.”
“Does that make it any easier?” I said, turning to face Tom. For some reason, I had to know.
“I’ve no idea,” he said. “That’s like asking a one-legged man if losing a leg is easier than losing an eye, or a hand. How can he know? All he’s aware of is his own misery. What I do know is, it doesn’t get any easier when you’re confronted with more and more misery. It comes at you from every direction, no matter what you do. And it’s likely to keep doing so until this war is over. God knows when that’ll be.”
“It could be soon,” I said. “If the invasion goes well.”
“Jerry isn’t going to roll over once we get to France, you mark my words. It’s going to be a long haul. Some of the chaps I served with are starting their second tour of thirty missions. Nowadays they give them a few months’ rest with ground duty, then back for another go. Start the clock ticking all over again. Hard to fathom going through that twice.”
