In Pale Battalions - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  ‘Be sure you know what you’re walking out on, Lieutenant.’

  I wasn’t sure, not sure at all. But I kept on walking.

  Droxford police station was a solid, two-storey, redbrick building down a side turning off the main street of the village. I entered the outer office and found Shapland sooner than I’d expected. He was seated at a low desk behind the counter, sifting through some documents jumbled in a shoe box, whilst a wall clock behind him beat time to his deliberations and stale tobacco mixed in the air with the scent of polished wood and old linoleum.

  Shapland looked up at the sound of the door creaking shut behind me. ‘Well, Mr Franklin. Do step in.’

  ‘I hoped to find you here, Inspector.’

  ‘You were lucky. There’s not much left for me to do here. Now that my enquiries have finished.’

  ‘Finished?’

  ‘Didn’t they tell you? The Chief Constable’s considered my report and our official conclusion is that Cheriton killed Mompesson, then killed himself. Subject to the findings of the inquests, of course. They’ll be held next week: Tuesday the third of October. You’ll be required to give evidence about Cheriton, so I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to be available until then.’

  ‘This conclusion: is it yours?’

  ‘Of course not. But the Chief Constable’s not inclined to pursue the matter on the basis of my unsubstantiated suspicion. Not where a peer of the realm’s involved.’

  ‘Frustrating for you, I imagine.’

  ‘Not a bit of it.’ The communicating door from the police house swung open and Constable Bannister entered, bearing a tray. ‘Ah, here’s breakfast. Do you want some?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  Bannister eased past me and placed the tray on the desk in front of Shapland, who snatched away a paper he’d been studying. Bannister cast me a sheepish look and retreated. ‘Not even some tea?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Please yourself. George fries bacon just the way I like it: plenty of grease.’ He seized the sandwich from the plate and began eating. ‘You don’t mind me going ahead?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘So what can I do for you?’

  ‘I just wanted a quiet word.’ I moved round to his side of the counter. ‘I didn’t want you to think I was avoiding you.’

  ‘Never crossed my mind.’ He went on chewing enthusiastically: a thin rivulet of grease had seeped to his chin but he didn’t seem to notice. ‘I think you killed Mompesson and you know I’m right – obviously. But nobody else does, so don’t worry: you’re in the clear. Judging by these papers, Mompesson’s no great loss to the world.’

  ‘Those are his possessions?’ I pointed to the shoe box.

  ‘Yes. They’re what he had with him at Meongate. Cheque book, passport, cash, IOUs, an address book containing several titled ladies, I’m afraid, odd scraps and letters: nothing much. Nor did the Metropolitan Police find anything significant at his London flat. No family that the American Embassy can trace. In fact, something of a mystery man. He lived well, had good connections, dealt profitably in shares, held a lot of stock in American railways, attracted despairing letters from married women and had the nerve – or the foresight – to keep them all. No. Not a nice man at all.’

  ‘If it’s all so straightforward and the inquiry’s closed, why are you sifting through his stuff?’ I was still trying to find a way to approach what I really wanted to tell him, still delaying – as long as I could – a fateful move.

  ‘Because it’s only straightforward in the official version. Cheriton couldn’t have killed a mosquito, leave alone Mompesson. You did it – and I want to know the reason.’ There was no melodrama in his statement. He had finished his sandwich. Now he slumped back in his chair and sipped tea from a chipped 1911 coronation mug.

  ‘I can’t give you the reason for something I didn’t do.’

  ‘Then try something else. Here …’ He rifled through the pile of papers by his elbow, pulled out one torn sheet and tossed it across the desk at me. ‘From the stamp pouch of Mompesson’s wallet. Just a scrap – but what does it mean?’

  I picked it up. A few lines scrawled on a half-sheet of cheap, lined notepaper, jaggedly torn at the base: ‘Since 13th June: Room over 7 Copenhagen Yard, off Charlotte Street.’ I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘It’s an address in Portsea.’

  ‘It means nothing to me, Inspector.’ But that wasn’t quite true. My mind was racing to make connections, yet had no way of testing them. An address in Portsea, where the first Lady Powerstock had worked with the poor. Her memoir of it studied by Leonora the night before her disappearance. An address known to Mompesson – since 13th June. It meant less than nothing, but it was more than I had to go on before.

  ‘A prostitute, I surmised.’

  ‘You could be right.’

  ‘But the writing isn’t Mompesson’s.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s just another inconsistency, another oddity. You and Mrs Hallows were discussing Portsea on Sunday evening, weren’t you?’

  ‘In passing. It’s where the first Lady Powerstock …’

  ‘I know. But that was more than ten years ago and Portsmouth’s a big city. So it means nothing … does it?’

  ‘As you say, Inspector. Not a thing.’

  He gulped more tea. ‘Until the inquest, I’ve a chance to catch you out, Mr Franklin. The murder weapon’s still missing. New evidence could persuade the Chief Constable to re-open the inquiry. One of these scraps’ – he gestured at the pile – ‘could make all the difference.’

  ‘I can’t help you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Then why did you come to see me?’

  ‘Simply to say that. I would help you if I could, but I can’t.’

  His brow furrowed and he stared at me over the rim of his mug. His doggedness – which I’d arrived intending to put my trust in – had become inconvenient. Now that I had a clue of sorts to follow, I wanted only to be rid of him.

  ‘I must get along.’

  ‘The Coroner will write to you formally about the inquest. You’ll still be at Meongate?’

  ‘If not, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Do that. And if you want another chat before the inquest, you know where to find me.’

  But I had drawn back from the brink. I no longer needed to turn to Shapland and I didn’t intend to. At last, I had something to go on.

  SEVEN

  I WENT STRAIGHT to the railway station and waited for the next train down the line. There, where the troika bells on Lucy’s harness had first summoned me, unsuspecting, into Meongate’s taut enactment of a private war, I began at last to trace the path I’d overlooked till then. I was the only passenger on the platform, waiting in the brooding stillness while the affable old porter manoeuvred a trolley in the shadow of the station canopy: nothing else moved, nothing stirred, nothing verified the sensation I nevertheless felt – I wasn’t alone, save by the trick of time, wasn’t free of others who’d begun a journey there. Nor, now, were they free of me.

  When the train duly came, and I boarded it, the sensation grew. It chugged and clanked southwards, its lurching progress became a metaphor in my mind for the reluctant approach of an uncomfortable truth. I shared a compartment with a child and his demure governess, who was at constant pains to prevent him asking why I wasn’t in the Army. I was wearing mufti and they weren’t to know, but even her embarrassment didn’t stir me, didn’t break the mood of uncertain, fatalistic familiarity. As on that first long train journey across Normandy to the Front, I had no idea what was growing ever and slowly nearer, only a presentiment, a shade of a suspicion that it was worse than I thought yet, in some strange way, exactly what I had expected.

  At Fareham, I changed to another train, full of boisterous sailors returning to Portsmouth. Once again, I was immune to their mood, alone in my world of motionless turmoil. While they swapped cigarettes and loud jokes, my mind was afloat. The grey mudflats of Portsmouth H
arbour and the glowering keep of Portchester Castle, canvas biplanes assembled on the airfield at Hilsea and the green-bowered gravestones of Kingston Cemetery: other places, other faces overlaid, glimpsed like passing reflections in the sooted glass of the carriage window – Hernu’s Farm with Hallows, Meongate without him, Leonora’s calm yet questing countenance and Miriam Powerstock, long dead but daguerreotyped on our memories and our lives, fixed by some chance or significance, there, at the heart of the mystery, waiting peacefully to confront me.

  Portsmouth Town station: high-roofed and crowded, echoing with shouts and whistles. I asked at the bookstall for directions to Charlotte Street and was given them with a straight look. The road outside was a jumble of vehicles and people, horns sounding and dust billowing from a tarpaulined gap in the row of buildings opposite. ‘Zeppelin raid last night,’ a newsvendor told me. ‘Aiming for the Dockyard. They caught us a wopper instead.’

  I made my way through the ruck as best I could, then tried my luck down a side-turning: a maze of back alleys and dingy terraces, opening out as I pressed on into a motley spread of market stalls, peeling shopfronts and grimy taverns opening for business – a smell of fish and stale hops, dirty water standing in cobbled runnels and a parrot squawking at me from a petshop cage. All so far – so very far – from the rural grace of Meongate. And yet some strand linked the two.

  I asked for more directions at a whelk stall: the way to Copenhagen Yard was gestured with a thumb. It lay down a cobbled alley with a central gutter where a dog was sniffing at a grating. The dog didn’t move at my approach, just bared its teeth and watched me pass. Stained sheets long past washing hung across the alley on a line. Beyond them, the yard opened to my right, where several tenement stairways shared a narrow space with the lean-to of a woodyard. A grubby child without shoes regarded me blankly from a doorway. From the stairs behind him came the sound of two slurred female voices raised in argument: he paid them no heed.

  ‘Wot you want, mister?’ the child said without expression.

  ‘I’m looking for … the room over number seven.’

  He pointed to a door at second-floor level above the woodyard, reached by rickety stairs that bridged the lean-to. ‘You sound just like ’im.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The bloke wot lived there.’

  ‘Is he there now?’

  ‘Dunno.’ He turned abruptly and disappeared into the house.

  I took the stairs two at a time, for all their ominous creaks. The door at the top was plain and unmarked, its paint peeling. There was no bell, not even a letterbox, just a keyhole and a padlocked hasp that told me nobody was in. Nevertheless, I knocked several times and strained across the railings at the top of the stairs to look in at the window. The thin curtains were drawn: through the gap between them all I could see was a sparsely furnished kitchen.

  ‘What do you want?’ An adult voice, from behind me. I swung round. At the foot of the stairs stood a burly figure in a flat cap and working clothes, his apron smeared with grease and wood shavings.

  ‘I was looking for the occupant of the room over number seven.’

  ‘That’s the room. But there ain’t no occupant.’

  I walked down the stairs towards him. ‘Are you the owner?’

  He squared his shoulders. ‘You could say. Who’re you looking for?’

  ‘As I said – the occupant.’

  ‘The room’s empty.’

  ‘Has it been empty for long?’

  ‘Mind your own business. I’ve already ’ad the police sniffing round ’ere. Now you.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘Same as you. Nobody lives there. It’s been empty for months.’

  ‘Since 13th June, perhaps?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

  ‘Do you know a man called Mompesson?’

  ‘Never ’eard of ’im.’

  ‘It’s hard to believe a room would stay empty for months in a place like this.’

  His lip curled. ‘Believe what you like.’

  I decided to try one method the police couldn’t have used. I took a sovereign from my pocket. ‘All I want is some information. Who was the last person to live up there?’

  He looked at the coin in my palm. ‘Double it and I’ll give you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A name. That’s all.’

  ‘The name of the occupant?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  I had no choice. ‘Very well.’ I handed him the sovereign and took out another.

  ‘Dan Fletcher: friend o’ mine. ’Is sister keeps the Mermaid in Nile Street.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I gave him the other coin and walked away. Another name was all I needed – another clue to follow. Besides, the name of the pub struck a chord. The Mermaid. As I made my way out of the yard, I trawled my memory of ‘Squalor Amidst Plenty’, Miriam Powerstock’s posthumous plea for action. That’s where I’d heard it before. ‘The police raid on the Mermaid Inn meeting of 26th November 1904, justified on the grounds of supposed seditious links with Royal Naval personnel, has done much to undermine local confidence in the good faith of the authorities …’

  Behind the flapping sheet strung across the alley, the boy from the yard was waiting for me. ‘’Ello, mister. Joss tell y’ much?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The bloke from the top room. Y’ know.’

  ‘A little.’ I made to move on.

  ‘It weren’t Dan Fletcher. I know ’im.’

  I turned back and stooped to his level. ‘Then who was it?’

  ‘Wot’s it worth?’

  ‘Half a crown for his name.’

  He drew the ragged cuff of his shirt across his nose. ‘Dunno ’is name.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘More ’n Joss told you.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘’E weren’t like Dan Fletcher. ’E were more like you. Moved in a few months back. Didn’t see much of ’im. Went out at night. Ain’t seen ’im since last Thursday.’

  I gave him the half-crown. He turned towards an open doorway in the wall of the alley. ‘What did you mean … like me?’

  He stopped and thought, just for a moment. ‘Like you look. Like a soldier.’ Then he was gone.

  Nile Street was only a short step away, but it took me long enough to find it through the maze of alleys. The Mermaid Inn stood on a corner, a green-tiled alehouse with smoked-glass windows, the words BRICKWOOD & CO.’S BRILLIANT ALES blazoned over a central door giving on to a dim, cavernous interior. It was not yet noon and still quiet inside, one or two mournful figures gazing into cloudy glasses while a broadly built, aproned woman stood behind the bar, polishing it. It wasn’t as bad as I’d expected, not as dirty, not as hostile. Not then, anyway.

  The woman was stern-faced, with grey hair tied back. Once, she might have been good-looking. Now, her vitality had turned to gauntness. I ordered a whisky, then broached the subject.

  ‘I’m looking for Dan Fletcher.’

  She put my drink down in front of me. ‘Who wants him?’

  ‘My name’s Franklin. He doesn’t know me.’

  ‘Then why are you looking for him?’

  ‘It’s about the room in Copenhagen Yard.’

  She stopped polishing the bar. ‘Wait here. I’ll see if he’s in.’

  She disappeared from view and left me to look around at the low, tobacco-stained ceilings, the bare tables and alcoves, the pinched, absent looks of the solitary drinkers. One was a woman, with matted hair and a tight dress: I avoided her eye.

  The landlady came back, by a door from the passage to my side of the bar. ‘Come through,’ she said. I followed her into the passage. ‘It’s at the far end.’

  I walked ahead while she returned to the bar. The door at the end of the passage stood ajar. I knocked and went in.

  The room was not what I’d expected. Small and lit only by one window looking on to an enclosed yard, it was nevertheless spotlessly tidy, carp
eted in some fashion, with a couple of fraying armchairs, a bureau by the window and several well-stocked bookcases. A budgerigar in a cage hung in one corner and there were red geraniums in a window box. The place had a wholesome, homely air.

  In one of the armchairs, a square-shouldered, lean-faced man with thinning grey hair and much of his sister’s gauntness sat smoking a pipe and reading a book, a strangely restless, muscular figure at odds with his quiet back-room surroundings. He didn’t get up when I walked in, just closed his book and sucked on his pipe.

  ‘Franklin – my sister tells me.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I don’t know you.’ His tone was guarded but neutral, a touch more cultured than the man at the woodyard. ‘What do you want of me?’

  ‘I gather you can tell me who lives in the room above number 7, Copenhagen Yard.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘I asked around.’

  ‘Are you from the police?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why do you want to know?’

  ‘Have you heard of the murder recently at Meongate, near Droxford? A man named Mompesson.’

  ‘I read of it.’

  ‘Did you know the man?’

  ‘No. Did you?’ He had a direct, straight-eyed defiance about him: he was not to be rattled.

  I walked over to the window to be out of his flinty gaze. ‘Slightly. Amongst his possessions was a note recording the address in Copenhagen Yard. And a date: 13th June.’

  He frowned. ‘I can’t help you, Mr Franklin.’

  ‘But you do know who lives there?’

  ‘I didn’t say so.’

  ‘Yet when I mentioned the address to your sister, she brought me to you straight away.’

  He smiled. ‘She was trying to be helpful. That’s all.’

  I glanced at the yard beyond the window – narrow, whitewashed walls, empty barrels in one corner, a scent of geranium through the open sash. ‘It’s tenuous, Mr Fletcher, I agree. But there’s something wrong here, I know. The police have given it up, but …’

  ‘You haven’t?’

  ‘I can’t. I’m in too deeply.’ My gaze shifted to the bureau, its flap open on an orderly array of books and papers, a well-used blotter, ink in a stand. Almost more of a study than a pub back-room, I remember thinking. ‘I have a dead friend, you see, to whom I owe a debt.’