Leslie went about his work, but when he returned to his office a half hour later there was already a brief acerbic note from his doctor friend, to the effect that he understood his role was to cure the wounded, so he would not waste much time playing the amateur detective and, besides, he was not equipped for any proper forensic exam. That said, he believed the shot that killed Dodds was fired from a pistol, perhaps a German pistol, with a high-caliber bullet (the sort of death rarely seen at the aid post, and only in the event of close fighting, when men were storming a trench or resisting others storming theirs). He was not going to do a full autopsy, but his probing had brought no trace of fragments of the cartridge, and the size of the exit wound, and the bits of bone around the edge of it, seemed to indicate that the powerful shot fired from close quarters had blasted right through the body. The entry wound, however, was rather neat, a contained puncture of his battle-dress jacket, shirt, and back, and it was his calculation of its slightly larger caliber that indicated a pistol rather than a rifle had fired the shot.
Leslie pondered this one piece of off-the-cuff evidence, trying to resist the next practical step it was urging him to take. The trouble with being placed in a context of maximum uncertainty like war is that the scale of each of your thoughts has now no comparative norm to be measured against, to keep it within bounds, so that there is a risk that any idea can fill your whole empty and nervous head. Leslie, as a careful lawyer, knew this well, but right now the idea was growing within him that he should go and visit the site where Dodds was struck down. By Braddis’s own account, the shot was fired not more than fifty yards from the Norfolks’ line. He should take that solid Private Alston, who brought the news of his death, and perhaps one other person, so they could show him the route they had withdrawn along—surely they would find some sign of Dodds’s fall? Against this in his mind flashed repeatedly a terse warning: you do not go into no-man’s-land to play amateur sleuthing. So at this point, the careful adjutant did not know what he would do. He would wait and see if further information or opportunity was forthcoming, to tilt the balance towards action.
Back in his trench, Private Timothy Callum had no doubts about what he thought. And he had no doubts about what he had seen from the moment that Braddis had appeared, stooped but making good time, under the burden of Dodds’s body. He had seen a murderer and his victim, a hunter and his trophy over his shoulder; whatever words you laid on the framed picture, Braddis was tied to Dodds, till Judgment Day and past, as slayer to slain. Callum had joined the involuntary rush to the corner of the trench, raised his arms and helped lay the body on the fire-step, and he had not felt or allowed himself such a surge of grief as standing over that pale face, since, coming down from the bedroom in the fisherman’s cottage when he was ten, where he had been told to stay and read to his brother and sisters till he was called, he had finally been allowed to see his dead mother laid out in the parlor, waiting for her funeral.
But grief was not the only emotion surging through the young soldier; rage had joined it in an equally powerful stream, the one abetting the other. He went and sat next to Charles Alston to unburden himself; the gamekeeper’s wise counsel had appeased him when he was losing his grip after a number of lesser affronts from the sergeant. But he did not want appeasing now.
“He killed him, Charlie,” he said, managing to keep his voice low. Braddis, who had gone to change his bloodied uniform, had returned to the other end of the trench looking impressively neat and soldierly; he was their platoon commander now, and his bearing would be different. Tomorrow would be Tuesday, but no one would be offering odds on his cutting his nails and sharpening his bayonet in the regular ritual tomorrow.
“We don’t know that, Tim.”
“I know it, and you know it, and even many of his flunkies know it. The question is, what is anyone going to do about it?”
“Now listen carefully, Tim, because I’m going to say it but once,” said Alston with unusual sternness. “A man comes back with a fallen comrade’s body is not automatically assumed to have killed him. There were Germans about yesterday, and we lost good men because of them, and we sent them back with bearers. And then comes a last one dead, and he’s brought in by a good soldier-sergeant, who saved a lot of our bacon on that day, and we, who were sitting safe back in our trench and never saw a thing, are immediately declaring him the killer. Now, I ask you, is that fair, Tim?”
“It’s fair if you know he killed him, and I do. Braddis hated Dodds, because he knew he was on to him, and that he wasn’t afraid of him.”
“That still doesn’t mean he killed him. That’s small evidence, Tim.”
“So nobody’s going to do anything,” said Callum, in a detached, bitter voice.
“That doesn’t follow either. When Braddis brought the lieutenant in, I thought company HQ should know right away, because there was the question, not just of an officer lost, but of who would command the platoon right now, so I went and told Captain Leslie, the adjutant, and when he heard that it was Braddis brought the body in, his expression turned a little grim-like, and he just said, ‘Did he, now?’ So I says, ‘Yes, sir,’ and he says, ‘On his own?’ and I say again, ‘Yes, sir,’ and he just turns away, clearly not happy. And I say, if anything follows on now about Braddis and Mr. Dodds, that’s the proper place for it to begin, and Captain Leslie is a lawyer, and it will be done proper.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re satisfied about that, Charlie. But see here now. Everyone says, I just sit here and draw my silly pictures, and take no interest in this great war we are all fighting here, but I’m telling you this right now, Charlie, so you’ll know: I’m taking a real interest in this war now, Charlie, and I’m going to look close and make sure things are done right.”
“Now, now, Tim. You’re young yet, and you’re a great artist, Mr. Dodds said, and your main business is to get out of this war alive and well, because you may be able to make things which show a whole lot of people how to look at the world very different from what they see now. So don’t you go getting into trouble in the meantime.”
“You’re a kind man, Charlie, and I know you mean me only good. But the way I see it, Charlie, is we’re all in trouble right now.”
Callum, having delivered this parting shot, shook his head, and went down the trench and sadly lost himself in a sketch of Braddis delivering the body to the helpers in the trench, a Deposition, he thought, like the ones he’d seen of the poor suffering mother about to receive her crucified son, though you saw nothing of the helpers, except a small forest of weak, dirty, and damaged hands; the whole concentration was on the figure of Dodds, his tunic torn away and a great hole in his pallid, hairless chest and his pale head twisted contortedly askew on his neck, as though in revulsion away from something loathsome; and standing brooding over the delivered body loomed the figure of Braddis, dark, massive but foreshortened, with his bloody hands hooked and clawed in front of him, the telltale finger- and thumbnails dripping blood. Callum was just putting the title over the top of this drawing, “Scavenger Vulture and Victim,” when a runner came to Braddis from company HQ , instructing him that Major Erskine was calling a meeting of platoon commanders at 1600 hours, one hour before the battalion meeting— that is, in twenty-five minutes. Callum looked up when he heard Braddis’s voice saying he would be there; and then he saw him take out his watch to verify the time. But Callum, noting every word, intonation, and gesture carefully, realized with a shock that the watch Braddis was holding in his hand was the gold watch that Dodds had shown him after telling the story about winning it from his grandfather. Now his assurance about Braddis was made doubly sure in his mind. He tried to curb his fever of certainty, telling himself in Charlie Alston’s voice, “A man can be the looter and not the killer”; but the certainty was not a static one, but a stampeding one, and the cautionary thought could not gain ground on it, let alone catch it.
Ten minutes later Braddis went off to his meeting in his new status, and Callum told Alston ab
out Dodds’s watch. Alston tried to hold off his own growing, horrified conviction about the sergeant by questioning the boy. Dodds had never shown any gold watch around the trench: where had Callum seen it? And had he just had a quick glimpse, and it might not be the same one? And impatiently Callum told him about the interview he had had with Dodds, who had encouraged him about his art after Braddis had taken two of his pictures, and said there was a kind of get-together of painters and such from the Artists’ Rifles every Wednesday at a bar in Armentières, and he would be welcome there, and he could show his drawings to people who knew about art; “and he had this old watch out, that he said he won from his grandfather Augustus Dodds, and I admired it, and he let me hold it, and feel its weight—real hefty it is—in its gold case all sealed up, and its gold chain, and he told me how I could see its face if I pressed the button which held the little winder wheel. So I did that, and you can see I didn’t get any quick glimpse, but I got to know the watch and I have a good eye for things. And today I saw Braddis with the same watch and chain, and I saw him press the button on the top, to open the face and read the time, after the runner came from HQ. It’s the same watch.” And Alston knew it was.
Then, MacIver wrote, there came a swift development arising out of a quirk. (A dying man, he thought, would be held to the strictest laws of probability only up to a point, and God knows, where do quirks occur more frequently than in war?) Giving way to his impulse of indignant curiosity, the methodical Captain Leslie decided to use the absence of Sergeant Braddis from the trench to investigate the supposed crime scene. He would need Private Alston to direct him to the place, and another man would be useful for another pair of eyes and to provide cover. The scene would either reveal something quickly or not at all: fifteen minutes there and back; he was not going to go into the small print of grass stains and soil samples or fibers of cloth. A spent bullet would be useful, a German weapon discarded even better. They would see what was to be seen, and come away. They would enter no-man’s-land from the trench of the next section, whose platoon commander was a subaltern Leslie knew and trusted, rather than from Dodds’s, where the unsupervised curiosity and gossip about what they were doing would flow freely. The announced mission was to explore the amount of wire damage done by the morning’s work, for details to guide future wire parties.
When Leslie summoned Alston and Alston told him about Callum and Dodds’s watch, Leslie’s hunting instincts started sniffing the air less ambivalently, and he told Alston to get Callum and where they would go. Alston duly went off and returned with Callum, and Leslie briefly checked his story on the details of the watch, his eyes on the boy’s face—small, wiry, self-contained, and sharp-eyed, he judged. At the end of his story the young private could not help blurting, “He’s sitting there right now, sir, in his meeting with Mr. Dodds’s watch in his pocket.” Leslie nodded, and said, “Yes. So let’s go to work. I’m trusting you, Alston, to lead us to the likely place of Mr. Dodds’s death, or at least the close vicinity of it along the path.”
“Yes, sir. We’ve been in and out along that path plenty since we’ve been up in the line, and I have a shrewd idea where he went down. I’ll lead the way, sir, and Private Callum will bring up the rear, and we’ll all be moving low, sir, you’ll be remembering, so we don’t start up any firing party.”
It was about 1620 when they headed out, with Leslie trying to repress that queasy guiltiness of the prefect at a public school sneaking off for a smoke behind the squash courts with junior boys. The site took no finding at all. Within five minutes, in a small bowl of crater mounds, protected from view from front and behind, the well-trodden path was still stained and wet with blood. That much alone held a horror for all three of them. But all three were good at looking and they started pointing out details to each other. There was a clear sign in the wet imprints of two different shoe sizes, Dodds’s from before he crumpled, and the larger ones of Braddis, two prints quite well set in the middle of the path, which might be the point where he took up the burden of Dodds’s body. There was a small trail of other human matter strewn forward in the direction from which they had come, but they could not find any trace of the cartridge.
“Never mind that,” said Leslie. “I was hoping to find a discarded weapon, very possibly a German pistol.” He wasn’t about to elaborate.
It was Callum who checked the small crater four paces farther up the track, off to the right, and found the imprint of Braddis’s heels, dry, behind the buttress, and then a full footprint, wet, facing the little pool of water at the bottom of it. With rising excitement, he called the others over.
“Over here, sir, at this Johnson hole.”
“Yes,” said Leslie quietly, after a short survey. “The before and the after. This is where he crouched, waiting for Dodds to go by, and this is where he came back and stood, we hope, to throw away his pistol after he killed him, the bottom of his boot bloody. I’m going to ask you, Callum, to step into that pool, very slowly and carefully, and feel around with your boot for any dislodgeable object, pistol sized or larger. It should move if you nudge it. But go very carefully, first because you never know how deep these damn things are, and secondly, because we don’t want to stomp the evidence further into the mud.”
Callum needed no urging. The pool at the bottom of the crater, for all its steep sides, was only about five feet in diameter, and, it turned out, never more than eight or nine inches deep. The other two watched him in silence, leaving him to explore according to his own system. The water was reflecting a small section of sky before he stepped into it and ruffled the surface. His plan was that he would move first straight across the pool to determine its depth, and then explore the two semicircles to left and right of center. He found the pistol on his first passage, slightly past the center, having nudged it forward in his underwater, ground-level shuffle, and felt it move on.
“There’s something right here, sir, about pistol sized,” he said tensely.
“Push your sleeve all the way up, and try to pick it up with minimum contact—just a firm grip of thumb and forefinger, if you can.”
It was a pistol, and it was, in all likelihood, the pistol, as it emerged, completely untarnished, a German 9 mm P08 Luger held in the way Leslie had prescribed, by the bottom of the handle. It had been underwater for less than two hours.
“Excellently done, young Callum,” said Leslie. “We will wrap it right here, in this oiled cloth, and take it back for the MPs to tell us what sure information it gives.”
He wrapped it gently, and slid it into the pocket of his battle dress.
They were all back in their regular places before 1645. “I must enjoin you both,” Leslie said sternly before they parted, “to say nothing about our expedition to anyone at all. You understand?” They did.
Captain Leslie was surprised, on taking his seat, to find that the small group was discussing a wire party that night to repair damage caused during the morning activities; the Germans had made some incursions, and to do that they must have cut some wire. Sergeant Braddis was impressing with his detailed knowledge of the area. “I quite agree, sir,” he was saying, “this should not be a big operation at all. I was in on the parties laying most of that wire, and the Germans would certainly not have climbed to any high ground to cut, where they would have been exposed in broad daylight. That leaves the more sunken tracks, and we can check those, repair where needed and get home in short time and good order.” The perfect combination of willing and cautious. Major Erskine was entirely happy, though Leslie noticed the other platoon commanders were not liking it, or this Braddis thrust among them.
“Right, then,” said the major. “Let’s do it. Wire parties to leave at 2200 hours; all safely home by midnight. Nothing dare-devil: we’ve lost too many men today already.”
The meeting broke up, and Erskine patted Braddis on the shoulder on his way out, and said, “Welcome to the group, Sergeant. A very useful contribution.”
For a long time after this, Leslie s
earched his soul about his conduct at this meeting and after it, and could not say he had performed well. It is hard to catch the mood of a meeting when you come in very late and have no idea of the developments before; and now it was clear they were accelerating to a close. If he had acted promptly then and there (“Sergeant Braddis, could I see the watch in your pocket?”), as Private Callum would certainly have done, and expected him to do, it would have created quite a stir: there were several people in the room who would recognize it as Dodds’s watch, including all his fellow officers probably, and even Erskine. But Braddis was not a fool. He had only to say, “Certainly, sir. Mr. Dodds seemed anxious for me to take it and get it to his family as he was dying, so I was bringing it here to give it to the major, who would know how to handle the matter. It’s a lovely old thing.” And he would lay it quietly on the table. No sympathy would be lost, certainly from the major, and he, Leslie, would have played a card and had it trumped, before he was ready to present the whole hand. He could, of course, have waited till Braddis was at the door, and therefore leaving with the watch, before making his challenge, but Erskine was the first to leave the room, on his way to the battalion meeting at 1700. The real problem was he had not prepared Erskine for any trouble regarding Braddis, and he was a man who often needed a lot of careful preparation to do the right thing. He was very unlikely to react well to having his meeting transformed into an impromptu courthouse, and his favorite NCO, whom he had just complimented, virtually brought up on charges under his nose. He would regard such a ploy as underhand and subversive, and Leslie could see why. So he was waiting until he could combine Dodds’s memo to him, the watch, the sketchy note from the medical officer, and the Luger into one package of evidence. It had been impressed on all of the officers in one of their regular meetings that fingerprints could now establish an individual’s identity with absolute certainty: that was the sort of evidence he needed. The only question was whether the local detachment of MPs were equipped and trained to handle such evidence. Did they have to send it on to a lab in the hinterland? Would it get there with its vital evidence intact? How many days for a reply? By temperament, as he knew himself, when he asked “the only question,” he was always inclined to let another three or four pop out of the envelope.
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 16
