In Pale Battalions - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  SIX

  I SURPRISED MYSELF by sleeping soundly, at least until dawn. Then I was wide awake, pacing my room and squinting out of the window at the creeping light of a misty morning. I dressed and went downstairs, intent upon breathing some fresh air before Shapland came back and, with him, the fetid recollection of Mompesson’s death.

  With Fergus not yet about, I had to slip the latch on the front door and go out that way. I felt unduly conscious of the crunch of my boots on the gravel drive, amplified by the stillness and silence around me. The day was cold, with dew on the grass, but there was a promise of warmth and brightness later: the mist had a wispy quality of reassuring impermanence. I thought of France then, of waking in a dug-out after Loos the autumn before to find Hallows’ batman frying bacon on the tiny stove only he could manage whilst Hallows himself stood at the sand-bagged door, greatcoat flung round his shoulders, drawing on his first cigarette of the day and straining to descry, by sight of intuition, what message the misty morning held.

  I was going to walk round to the garden. But then I saw, at the edge of the grass beyond the drive, a break in the cobwebbed sheen of the dew, a footprint, a trail of footprints in fact, leading out across the park, curving away from the house and down towards the orchard. They could only recently have been made, otherwise the dew would have re-formed, yet who else could be about at such an hour? I began to follow them.

  One of the elms in the park stood on a slight knoll, its thick roots stretching like a rib-cage beneath the dome of grass. There the trail of footprints led and there they ended. As I approached, I saw who’d made them. Cheriton was sitting at the foot of the tree, with his back to the trunk, cradled between the gnarled two shoulders of two descending roots and staring towards me and the house beyond.

  I raised my hand in greeting but he did not respond. I glanced back at the house, its ivy-clad flint and brickwork emerging slowly from the mist, and saw how the view might have plunged him into reverie. I raised my hand again and called to him: ‘Fine morning, isn’t it?’

  He didn’t answer. And as I took one further step towards him, out of a shaft of misty sunlight into clear sight, I saw why.

  Cheriton was dead. The certainty was there in the staring blankness of his eyes and the strange, stiff severity of his posture. It didn’t need the clotted blood on his sagging chin or the splatter of it on the bark behind his head to tell me: he was dead and at peace. His legs were crossed, as a man’s at ease might be. His right hand, which had held the revolver in his mouth, had slipped down his chest, but the fingers were still curled around the butt and trigger. His left hand was by his side, clasping an envelope.

  I stooped over him and closed his eyes. It was the most and the least that I could do. I didn’t feel any more moved than by all the other dead and strangely shocked young men I’d seen since the spring of 1915. Some of those too had taken their own life. But I did feel a pang of regret. Why hadn’t I spared Cheriton the time he’d asked for – on the stairs, the day before? Later, when I’d been willing to talk, he hadn’t been, as if, with the coming of night, he’d decided what to do. And this was it: death at the time of his choosing, a privilege the war had seemed to take from him, but now reclaimed with faltering dignity, drawing comfort from the tree, from the earth, from the dust, even from the bloody taste of ashes in his mouth.

  I slid the envelope from his left hand. There could have been no more than a single sheet within. I turned it over in my hand. He had written on the front a single word, a name: Olivia.

  I folded the word out of sight and slipped the envelope into my jacket pocket. Then I took it out again and stared at it. Should I open it? What had Cheriton said to her? And why her? I looked down at the slumped figure and wondered what it was I hadn’t known about him. Had he too been led by Olivia to areas of desire he’d rather not have known about? Had he killed Mompesson? The letter might tell me, but the letter was addressed to her and, in his presence, I hadn’t the heart to thwart his last wish by opening it. I put it back in my pocket. Then I began to walk slowly towards the house.

  Only Fergus was up. I got him to telephone Bannister at the police station, then inform Lord Powerstock. I sat in the morning room, waiting for the shock to hit me, not of Cheriton’s death, because I didn’t know him well enough, but of what it seemed to mean: an implicit confession to Mompesson’s murder that wrote a neat if scarcely happy finis to all the police probing and doubtful pondering. Except that I could already see the begged questions lining up for answers. Cheriton was no killer: that’s why the war had caused him such anguish. If his death did explain all the mysteries, only the letter he’d left could tell me how. But the letter wasn’t for me.

  Charter came in, still in his dressing gown and Turkish slippers, white hair tousled and portly figure rumpled, his voice gruff from slumber. ‘What’s happened?’ he rumbled.

  ‘Cheriton’s shot himself. I found him in the grounds.’

  Charter slumped down in a chair. ‘’Pon my soul.’ A look of pain passed across his face. ‘Poor young fellow. Shot himself, you say?’ And his great, grey old head shook slowly from side to side in mourning for the ways of youth he did not understand.

  ‘I’ve asked Fergus to cover the body with a blanket. I’ve no doubt the police will be here soon.’

  ‘This is a bad, sad business.’

  ‘Is a suicide worse than murder?’

  ‘In this case, young man, it is.’

  ‘I suspect the police will see in it a solution to their problem: that of who killed Mompesson.’

  Charter shot his eyes to the ceiling. ‘No doubt they will. But you don’t believe Cheriton did, do you?’

  ‘No. As a matter of fact, I don’t.’

  ‘I must get dressed.’ He hauled himself from the chair and ambled to the door. ‘We’ll speak again later.’

  When I heard a ring at the front door, I guessed it would be Bannister and made my way to the hall. Lord Powerstock was standing solemnly at the foot of the stairs whilst Fergus went to answer the bell.

  ‘I’m sorry about this, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Not your fault, Franklin. Nor anyone else’s. Fitting, in a way: a soldier’s death. Goaded beyond endurance, I suppose.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘By Mompesson, of course.’ He seemed slightly irritated by my reservations. ‘Isn’t that how it was?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He grunted, then made for the door, where Bannister was now announcing himself. ‘Come with me, Constable. We’ll show you where he is.’

  They bustled out. I stood alone in the hall, almost on the very spot where Cheriton had stood the night before, wondering how Powerstock could be so suddenly decisive and certain. I didn’t have to wonder for long. Offered a way out of confronting his suspicions about Leonora, he’d taken it, with all the excess of relief that betrayed the falsity of his confidence. He would escort Bannister to the place, he would take command of his battered but unbowed household, he would forget all the portents of a more sinister truth that he had been prepared to confront only the day before. That, I saw, was now his purpose.

  I left him to it. There was something I had to do before Shapland returned. I hurried up the stairs and made straight for Lady Powerstock’s room.

  I went in without waiting for an answer to my knock. In the outer room, Sally was clearing a breakfast tray. She looked up in surprise. I heard Olivia’s voice from the bedroom beyond. ‘Who is that?’

  ‘Lieutenant Franklin, ma’am.’

  She appeared in the doorway, in a nightdress and gown, all hints of the voluptuary suppressed: this was the dignified lady of means at the respectable conclusion of a restrained toilet. ‘You may leave us, Sally.’

  The maid gathered the tray and walked out past me. I closed the door behind her.

  ‘What do you want, Lieutenant?’

  ‘You’ve been told about Cheriton?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Then, what I want to
know is why he should have left you this note.’ I took the letter from my pocket.

  Her eyes widened, for an instant. Then she restored the practised air of unconcern. ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘He shot himself, you know. He put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. And I found this letter in his hand, addressed to you, by your Christian name.’

  She was unmoved by the details. ‘Who else knows of this?’

  ‘Of the letter – nobody.’

  ‘And you’ve come to deliver it?’

  ‘I was in two minds whether to open it at once or give you the chance of telling me what it says. I felt I owed it to Cheriton to do the latter.’

  ‘How noble of you. But what makes you think I know what’s in it?’

  ‘Everything I know about you tells me you do. You drove Cheriton to this, didn’t you?’

  She walked slowly to the window, as if considering a philosophical point. ‘I wonder sometimes if it is military conditioning which gives you young officers this special facility for blaming your own actions on other people.’

  I tried to break free of her sarcasm. ‘Lady Powerstock, two men are dead. And you had a hand in both deaths. I know what you were to Mompesson: his whore. But what were you to Cheriton?’

  She was as impervious to insults as to threats. ‘I can only conjecture what’s in that note. Perhaps he did become infatuated with me. Some men do’ – she smiled – ‘as you know. Perhaps he grew jealous of Ralph – for whatever reason – and killed him, then took his own life in remorse. Who knows?’

  ‘We can find out – by reading this letter.’

  ‘Of course. But consider: it may say other things. If I really was intimately involved with Lieutenant Cheriton, he might know what I know … of your amorous inadequacies … and peep-hole discoveries. He might know – and speak of it … in the letter.’

  ‘That’s preposterous.’

  ‘Is it? Well, you may be right. But the Lieutenant Cheriton I knew was a young man of delicate sensibilities. I remember you speaking once of what you saw as the depravity of this house. If that was a valid perception, what if he entertained it as well? What if he saw what you saw from the observatory on Friday?’

  That was her ace, played with the ease and artistry of a mistress of her craft. ‘The observatory? How do you know …?’

  ‘Tut, tut, Lieutenant. Are we to be obtuse as well as absurd? Leonora’s unconventional proclivities have long been known to me and have enjoyed free rein – if I may use the word – since her husband obligingly got himself killed. But I can only guess what effect a knowledge of her practices would have on a shy young man not without aspirations for the hand of an attractive young widow.’

  ‘Cheriton? How could he possibly …?’

  ‘He may have been shown.’ She smiled. ‘I may have thought him entitled to know. The letter may tell me what he discovered. It may tell anyone who reads it.’

  ‘Is this true? Did you really do that?’

  ‘Once that letter is opened, it becomes public knowledge. The beautiful young widow of a fine gentleman who died for his country shames his memory in perverted couplings with an American fortune-hunter – and is pregnant into the bargain. It would be a feast for the newspapers. But what about you … and Leonora … and my husband? What would there be left for you?’

  In that moment I forgot how impossible it was to believe that Cheriton had killed Mompesson as a prelude to killing himself. In that moment, Olivia convinced me. She plucked the letter from my faltering grasp and tossed it into the grate, where the fire Sally had recently laid was crackling into life. Bright young flames began to lick around the sealed white envelope. I watched, transfixed, as the last words of a reticent man went up in smoke.

  I walked downstairs in a daze, not sure where to go in the aftermath of what I had allowed Olivia to do. Fortunately, I wasn’t to be left to my own devices. Bannister was waiting for me in the hall.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you, Mr Franklin. The Inspector’s here. Wants to see you right away.’

  Without a word, I followed him into the morning room. Shapland was slumped in one of the wing-backed armchairs, sending up clouds of acrid smoke from a fat-bowled pipe.

  ‘And so, Mr Franklin,’ he said, without getting up, ‘we meet again. This isn’t how I’d planned to spend my Sunday morning.’

  ‘Nor any of us, I imagine.’

  ‘They tell me you discovered the body.’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘Then, show me how.’ He lurched from the chair and led the way back into the hall. ‘Absent when Mompesson is murdered – first on the scene of Cheriton’s suicide. I’m not sure whether to compliment you on your timing or sympathize with your bad luck.’

  ‘Neither is necessary.’

  ‘If you say so.’ We came to the front door, where Bannister stood back to let us pass. ‘Did you come out this way?’

  ‘Yes.’ I blinked in the sudden brightness as we stepped out on to the drive. ‘I hadn’t slept too well and decided to take a stroll before breakfast.’

  Out in the sunlight of the day, with the last of the mist burned away, Shapland looked more rumpled and seedy than ever, but still artful and dogged enough to see through most deceptions. ‘Why come out this way?’

  ‘Since the … murder, all the doors have been locked at night. I knew I could lift the latch on the front door.’

  He nodded and gazed down the drive. ‘And why did you head across the park rather than stick to the gravel?’ He ground his heel in it. ‘Unless it was too noisy for your purpose?’

  ‘It’s true I didn’t want to disturb anybody – but there’s nothing sinister in that.’

  ‘Let me be the judge of what is and isn’t sinister, Mr Franklin.’

  I exerted myself to remain unruffled. ‘Very well. I’d probably have struck across the park anyway, but then I noticed footprints in the dew.’

  ‘Where?’

  I walked to the spot at the edge of the grass. ‘Here. Footprints leading away from the house. Quite distinct in the dew, which meant …’

  ‘They were recently made, probably since dawn.’ He joined me on the grass. ‘So you followed them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I didn’t know anybody else was up. I was curious – and worried; it might have been an intruder.’

  ‘Unlikely, if the footprints only led away from the house.’

  ‘So I thought.’

  ‘Lord Powerstock’s servant is adamant he put the catch down on the front-door latch last night. Is that how you found it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think it was up already. But I can’t be sure.’

  ‘He moved ahead of me across the grass and I followed. ‘If it had been an intruder – or even if it hadn’t – you might have found yourself alone with Mompesson’s murderer.’ He stopped and looked at me. ‘Did that worry you?’

  I stopped alongside him. ‘Not unduly. I didn’t think of it in those terms.’

  ‘No. I suppose not.’ We went on again, aiming un-erringly for the elm on the knoll where I’d found Cheriton. ‘So what did you expect?’

  ‘Somebody else who couldn’t sleep. That’s all.’

  ‘And was Lieutenant Cheriton a sound sleeper?’

  ‘Invalid officers seldom are, Inspector. As it happens, since my room was next to Cheriton’s, I’m in a position to know that he suffered a good deal with nightmares.’

  Shapland nodded. ‘No doubt.’ We topped the knoll and rounded the bole of the tree; I was relieved to see that the body had been removed, though string between a couple of stakes had been used to mark off the spot. ‘And you found him here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Describe how he was – if you will.’

  ‘Surely you’ve seen …’

  ‘I’d like to hear it from your own lips, Mr Franklin. Please.’

  So I told him, in as much detail as I could, omitting only the note I’d removed. As I went through
it all, Shapland crouched on his haunches by the string, sucking on his pipe and glaring back occasionally at the house. When I’d finished, he remained silent for some time, then tapped his pipe out on one of the tree roots and rose to look at me.

  ‘The condition of the body as it was shown to me – and as you’ve described it – leaves no room for doubt. He took his own life. But why?’

  ‘Who can say?’

  ‘You could hazard a guess, Mr Franklin. Yes, I think you could do that. Lord Powerstock hasn’t hesitated. He takes it to be an admission of Mompesson’s murder. He tells me that Cheriton was often taunted – or felt taunted – by Mompesson about his war record. His Lordship tells me that it was touch and go whether Cheriton would be sent here to convalesce or be court-martialled for cowardice. He thinks Mompesson may have got wind of that and used it against Cheriton. What do you think?’

  ‘I think Lord Powerstock would know better than I. I’ve not been here as long as Cheriton. And I wasn’t privy to the reasons why he came. But what you’ve told me doesn’t seem out of character – for either Cheriton or Mompesson.’

  ‘How would Mompesson have come by such information?’

  ‘I imagine somebody must have told him.’

  ‘By implication, Lady Powerstock?’

  ‘That’s your inference, Inspector. I’m implying nothing.’

  He turned back to the marked-off space at the foot of the tree. ‘Laying Mompesson’s murder at this poor young wretch’s door solves everybody’s problems, of course. The Powerstock family name is left intact and you and I can go our separate ways and forget all about it. It’s altogether too convenient for my liking.’

  ‘Surely you shouldn’t rule it out on those grounds.’

  ‘I don’t. But nor do I come easily to the conclusion that a nerve-shattered young man unable to cope with the pressures of war could summon the resolution necessary to murder Mompesson.’

  ‘Perhaps he just snapped.’