Hardcastle's Soldiers

by Graham Ison

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Graham Ison from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Glossary

  Recent Titles by Graham Ison from Severn House

  The Hardcastle Series

  HARDCASTLE’S SPY

  HARDCASTLE’S ARMISTICE

  HARDCASTLE’S CONSPIRACY

  HARDCASTLE’S AIRMEN

  HARDCASTLE’S ACTRESS

  HARDCASTLE’S BURGLAR

  HARDCASTLE’S MANDARIN

  HARDCASTLE’S SOLDIERS

  Contemporary Police Procedurals

  BREACH OF PRIVILEGE

  DIVISION

  DRUMFIRE

  JACK IN THE BOX

  KICKING THE AIR

  LIGHT FANTASTIC

  LOST OR FOUND

  WHIPLASH

  WHISPERING GRASS

  WORKING GIRL

  HARDCASTLE’S SOLDIERS

  Graham Ison

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2010 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2010 by Graham Ison.

  The right of Graham Ison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Ison, Graham.

  Hardcastle's Soldiers. – (A Hardcastle and Marriott historical mystery)

  1. Hardcastle, Ernest (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Marriott, Charles (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  3. Great Britain. Metropolitan Police Office–Fiction.

  4. Murder–Investigation–Fiction. 5. World War,

  1914-1918–Social aspects–England–London–Fiction.

  6. Great Britain–History–George V, 1910-1936–Fiction.

  7. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9'14-dc22

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6860-2 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-213-0 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-492-8 (ePub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  ONE

  The news on that July morning in 1917 was bleak, even to a nation inured to nearly three years of war. On Monday the ninth, two days previously, the battleship HMS Vanguard had been destroyed by an explosion at Scapa Flow. Only three men had survived out of a complement of 807. The official communiqué gave no reason for the tragedy, other than to say that it was an accident. But that did not stop a Daily Mail reporter from hazarding a guess that a German submarine had got close enough to fire a torpedo into the vessel’s magazine.

  ‘Bloody war!’ muttered Ernest Hardcastle. Taking off his spectacles, he folded the newspaper and threw it into the waste-paper basket. He crossed to the open window and stared down momentarily at Westminster underground station below, just as a train pulled out, rattling the windows of his office. However, as the divisional detective inspector of the A or Whitehall Division of the Metropolitan Police, he was about to be occupied with matters closer to home than the tragic loss of HMS Vanguard.

  ‘Excuse me, sir.’ Detective Sergeant Charles Marriott – a first-class sergeant and Hardcastle’s assistant – appeared in the doorway of the DDI’s office on the first floor of Cannon Row Police Station. The station, and New Scotland Yard opposite, had been built in 1888 of granite hewn, fittingly by convicts from Dartmoor prison.

  ‘What is it, Marriott? Not more bad news, I hope.’

  ‘Matter of opinion, sir,’ ventured Marriott. ‘At about twenty past ten a railway copper called the PC on the Victoria Street and Vauxhall Bridge Road traffic point. One of the cashiers on Victoria railway station was found dead in his booth.’

  ‘What was a cashier doing in a booth on Victoria Station, Marriott?’ Hardcastle took out his pouch and carefully filled his pipe with St Bruno tobacco.

  ‘It’s an arrangement the army has with a bank, sir. The cashier in question exchanges French money into sterling for troops arriving home from the Front. Looks as though he was attacked in the course of a robbery.’

  ‘Where on Victoria Station is this booth, Marriott?’

  ‘On the concourse, sir.’ Marriott spoke hesitantly; he knew what was coming next.

  ‘Dammit!’ exclaimed Hardcastle.

  It was one of the perversities of the Metropolitan Police that responsibility for the platforms and track at the railway station rested with the B or Chelsea Division, whereas the concourse came under the aegis of A Division. Even before Hardcastle had been posted to Cannon Row Police Station, discussions had been going on among the hierarchy at Scotland Yard about transferring the responsibility for crimes committed on the entirety of the railway station to B Division.

  After all, A Division – known informally as ‘the Royal A’ – had more than its fair share of responsibility, with Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace, Parliament, Westminster Abbey and the government offices in Whitehall within its purview, added to which was the onus of policing the royal palaces at Windsor Castle and Holyrood House in Edinburgh.

  Hardcastle’s view was that it was typical of the muddled thinking of the senior officers at Scotland Yard, that they had shilly-shallied over making what to him was a simple decision. Not that he would give voice to that criticism in the presence of a subordinate.

  He took out his chromium hunter watch, glanced at it, briefly wound it, and dropped it back into his waistcoat pocket. ‘Better go and take a look, I suppose, Marriott.’ He took a box of Swan Vestas matches from his pocket and lit his pipe. ‘Sent anyone up there?’ he asked, emitting a plume of smoke towards the nicotine-stained ceiling.

  It was Marriott’s job to know the present whereabouts of every detective at Cannon Row, and he knew that Hardcastle meant an A Division CID officer. ‘I’ve already sent Catto and Lipton up there to secure the scene, sir,’ he said, naming two detective constables.

  ‘Fat lot of good they’ll be,’ growled Hardcastle, seizing his bowler hat and umbrella, and making his way downstairs.

  ‘And I took the liberty of calling Dr Spilsbury, sir,’ continued Marriott,
as he hurried after the DDI.

  ‘I should hope so, Marriott,’ muttered Hardcastle, who always wanted the country’s leading forensic pathologist to examine the victim of any murder that he was investigating.

  Spilsbury was renowned in courts throughout the country, and defence counsel always took special care in preparing their case when they knew he was to appear for the prosecution. In particular, his evidence in the infamous Brides in the Bath case in 1915 had resulted in George Joseph Smith being hanged for his crimes. During the course of that trial, a bath had been brought into the Old Bailey courtroom and filled with water. A nurse, attired in a bathing costume, stepped into the bath. Pulling the nurse’s ankles upwards and submerging her head, Detective Inspector Neil demonstrated how Smith had murdered his victims. By so doing he almost succeeded in killing the unfortunate nurse, but newspaper reports attributed the demonstration to Spilsbury. He never denied it.

  Turning out of the police station into Derby Gate, and thence to Whitehall, with his sergeant chasing behind him, Hardcastle peered in vain for a taxi.

  ‘Might be quicker to take a bus, sir,’ suggested Marriott warily. ‘I heard the other day that a lot of cabbies have joined the army.’

  ‘Divisional detective inspectors do not travel to the scene of a crime on a bus, Marriott,’ said Hardcastle sternly. At last, sighting a cab, he waved his umbrella at it imperiously. ‘Victoria Station, driver.’

  The cab driver yanked down the flag on his taximeter. ‘Having a day at the seaside, guv’nor?’ he asked. ‘Five-and-nine on the Brighton line,’ he added jocularly, quoting army housey-housey callers’ slang for the number fifty-nine.

  ‘Just get on with your bloody driving,’ snapped Hardcastle. ‘I’ve got a murder to deal with.’

  The chastened cab driver remained silent for the remainder of the short journey down Victoria Street.

  It was drizzling with rain when Hardcastle and Marriott arrived at Victoria Station. A troop train had just disgorged a thousand or more soldiers returning from the Front. They were borne down with packs and rifles, while others, taking a brief respite, had dumped their kit around their feet. These men had arrived on leave, although few people would have guessed it. Each had a muddied, drawn and haggard appearance, as though he had been to hell. And back.

  Many of the soldiers were clustered around the three money-exchange booths, one of which was to become the focus of Hardcastle’s latest murder enquiry.

  In an attempt to marshal those unfortunates who were bound for the Front, Movement Control sergeants dashed around shouting orders and scribbling on papers.

  Clouds of steam swirled across the crowded station and the odour of burning coal filled the air. Occasionally the hubbub of noise was punctuated by the doom-laden whistles of hissing locomotives hauling their reluctant passengers on the first stage of their journey to France or Belgium.

  Little knots of people were saying goodbye to loved ones returning to the fighting. Some women clutched handkerchiefs and were crying, while others did their best to put on a brave face.

  One young girl, her long black coat failing to disguise her pregnancy, was clinging to a lance-bombardier who only yesterday had done ‘the right thing’ by her. Her face was buried in the rough material of his tunic, and she gripped the webbing of his equipment as though trying to prevent his going, doubtless wondering if she would ever see him again.

  A line of ambulances stretched down one side of the concourse, the women drivers talking to a group of red-caped nurses of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service as they waited for the next hospital train.

  Suddenly, as if in response to some secret signal, the group broke up, clambered into their vehicles, and drove on to one of the platforms. They stopped and swung open ambulance doors as the first of a depressing number of wounded soldiers was carried off the train on stretchers.

  Once again, reminding him of his visit to the little Belgian town of Poperinghe only last year, Hardcastle witnessed the human detritus of war being loaded for the last part of its long journey to Charing Cross Hospital, some of them to recover fully, some partly, some to remain in an awful limbo between life and death. And some to die. These pathetic human wrecks were the result of jingoism, political bungling, military incompetence and ignorance. And patriotism and gallantry of the very highest order.

  Few of the civilians on the station afforded a second glance for those wounded men who, in 1914 and 1915 and even in the earlier months of 1916, they had hailed as ‘our brave boys’, and had cheered and encouraged with cigarettes and chocolates. But now, especially since the Battle of the Somme, the human mind had become numbed to the carnage. And there were no longer military bands to greet them.

  Although the victims of frequent air raids, the civilian population had not experienced the horrors of front-line trench warfare, nor had they learned much of them. A soldier returning to his family wanted to forget the mud and the shells and the screams of the wounded, and the sight of a friend blown to smithereens when seconds before he had been talking to him. Kith and kin did not want to hear how he had wiped the man’s brains from his tunic before getting on with the war.

  People rarely spoke of the conflict now, but were only too conscious of the mounting losses, and were beginning to wonder what had gone wrong, and to ask if the slaughter would continue until there was not a man under forty left alive in Britain.

  Hardcastle and Marriott forced their way through this throng, and eventually reached the kiosk that was about to become the centre of Hardcastle’s latest investigation.

  A railway policeman stood in front of the booth, one of three small huts constructed of wood with corrugated iron roofs, above which was a large sign that read: FRENCH MONEY EXCHANGED HERE FOR OFFICERS & SOLDIERS IN UNIFORM.

  ‘This kiosk’s closed,’ said the constable importantly, as Hardcastle and Marriott approached. He nodded at the closed hatch as if to emphasize his point.

  ‘I’m DDI Hardcastle, Metropolitan, come to clear up a crime for you.’ Hardcastle stared pointedly at the PC whose thumbs were tucked under the buttons of his tunic breast pockets.

  ‘Yes, sir. Very good, sir.’ The railway policeman hurriedly assumed a position of attention and sketched a salute. ‘Your two officers are inside the hut, sir, and this here officer saw a man running away, sir,’ he said, suddenly affecting an air of obsequiousness as he indicated a young army officer standing next to him.

  ‘I’ll be with you in a moment, Lieutenant,’ said Hardcastle, recognizing the officer’s rank from the two stars on each of his shoulder straps. That insignia had long since been transferred, unofficially, from the cuffs, in an attempt to make it more difficult for enemy snipers to identify officers in the trenches. But, in the face of that widespread practice, it had, this year, been officially sanctioned.

  ‘While you’re hanging about,’ said Hardcastle to the railway PC, ‘ask if any of these soldiers saw anyone running off. Meanwhile, I’ll get on with finding out what’s what.’

  The DDI pushed open the door of the kiosk. Face down on the floor lay the body of a man. The back of his head was a mess of blood and hair, and Hardcastle did not need the services of a doctor to tell him that the man was dead, and that he had been the victim of a savage blow. Scattered across the floor, near to the man, were abandoned bank notes, both British and French.

  ‘Learned anything, Catto?’ demanded Hardcastle of the detective constable who was standing near the body.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Henry Catto.

  ‘That don’t surprise me,’ commented Hardcastle, who, unreasonably, had no great faith in the young detective’s abilities.

  ‘But the army officer outside apparently saw someone legging it, sir,’ said Catto, and then pointed at a revolver lying on the floor. ‘That firearm was at the scene when we arrived, sir,’ he added.

  ‘I hope you haven’t touched it.’ Hardcastle shot a censorious glance at Catto.

  ‘Certainly not, sir.’

&
nbsp; ‘It’s interesting though,’ mused Hardcastle, ‘I wonder what it’s doing there.’ He knelt to make a closer examination of the body. ‘It don’t look as if he was shot, and there’s blood on the butt of the revolver.’ He stood up again. ‘Well, there’s not a lot we can do until Dr Spilsbury gets here. In the meantime, I’ll have a word with this army officer.’ The DDI paused at the door. ‘And arrange for a van to remove the body, Catto, once Dr Spilsbury’s conducted his examination. I daresay the railway police have got one of them telephone instruments in their office, and we don’t want the deceased taken through the streets on a hand ambulance. It don’t look good.’ The DDI despised the introduction of the telephone, believing, in common with other senior officers, that it was a flash in the pan that would not last.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Catto, and hastened to do Hardcastle’s bidding.

  The DDI turned to DC Lipton. ‘Put that revolver in a bag once the pathologist has finished, lad, and take it to Detective Inspector Collins in the Fingerprint Department at the Yard, tout de suite. And make a note of the serial number, and let me have it before I leave.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Lipton.

  Hardcastle, in common with older CID officers, was only just coming to realize the value of fingerprints, introduced into English policing from India by Sir Edward Henry, now Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. It had been as recently as 1905 that this newfangled science had been accepted by the courts for the first time. When Albert and Alfred Stratton, the two murderers of Mr and Mrs Farrow, a Deptford oil shop proprietor and his wife, had been convicted on such evidence, it was regarded as a significant advance in criminal investigation.

  Emerging from the booth, Hardcastle turned his attention on the young army officer. Although he was wearing a cap, the officer was holding another, the reason for which was shortly to be made clear.

  ‘Perhaps we could start with your name, Lieutenant,’ said Hardcastle.

  ‘Geoffrey Mansfield, the North Staffordshire Regiment.’

  ‘What can you tell me, Mr Mansfield?’