Hardcastle's Soldiers

by Graham Ison

  ‘No, sir. I thought that what the guard commander said would be right.’

  ‘When I send you to make an enquiry in a murder investigation, Catto, I don’t expect you to take the word of a bloody sergeant. And I suppose the guard commander was a sergeant, was he?’

  ‘No, sir. He only had two stripes. A corporal would that be, sir?’

  ‘They’re called bombardiers in the artillery,’ said Marriott quietly.

  Hardcastle sighed. ‘It’s true what they say, Marriott,’ he said, ignoring his sergeant’s latest exposition of military knowledge. ‘If you want a job done properly, do it yourself. Come, Marriott, we’ll have to go there ourselves.’

  Hardcastle was in a foul mood by the time he and Marriott arrived at St John’s Wood Barracks.

  The guard commander stood up from behind his desk as the DDI crashed open the door.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I want to see whoever’s in charge of the officers’ mess, Bombardier.’ Although Hardcastle was often withering about Marriott’s frequent explanation of military terminology, he was, nonetheless, quick to take advantage of it when it suited him.

  ‘Might I ask who you are, sir?’

  ‘Divisional Detective Inspector Hardcastle of the Metropolitan Police, and I don’t have time to waste.’

  ‘Ah, that’ll be the mess sergeant you want, Inspector.’

  ‘No, it is not the mess sergeant I want. It’s an officer. I’m sick and tired of dealing with sergeants, and it seems to me that I can only get an answer from someone who knows what he’s doing. Not that I’m sure an officer will give me what I want anyway. Not in my experience so far.’

  ‘One moment,’ said the guard commander. He turned to one of the off-watch sentries. ‘Here, you, gunner, double across to the officers’ mess, and tell the mess sergeant there’s a policeman here wanting to see an officer about mess business, and be quick about it.’

  While he waited, Hardcastle turned and stared out of the window of the guardroom, tapping irritably at the side of his leg with his umbrella and watching a gun team hitching a field gun to its limber. ‘D’you know, Marriott,’ he said, without turning, ‘I sometimes wonder if we shall ever win this bloody war.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Marriott, and received a glance of sympathy from the guard commander who had quickly worked out that Marriott was Hardcastle’s subordinate.

  Eventually the sentry returned. ‘If you come with me, sir, I’ll show you across to the PMC’s office.’

  ‘What the hell is a PMC?’ demanded Hardcastle crossly, believing he was being treated to yet more of what he termed army hocus-pocus.

  ‘The president of the mess committee, sir,’ said Marriott, trying to stave off any further show of bad temper on the DDI’s part. ‘He’s usually a major or a captain. He’s responsible for the good running of the mess.’

  Hardcastle grunted. ‘Well, let’s hope we can get a half sensible answer from him.’

  ‘Archibald Grayson, Inspector.’ The booted and spurred captain crossed his office, and shook hands with Hardcastle and Marriott. ‘I’m the battery commander of A Battery. How may I help you?’

  ‘I understand you’re President of the Mess Committee, Captain Grayson,’ said Hardcastle, who had quickly mastered this latest piece of army terminology.

  ‘That’s so. Do take a seat, gentlemen.’ Grayson was a tall, fair-headed officer, immaculately attired in khaki service dress tunic and sand-coloured breeches. Above his left breast pocket was the ribbon of the India General Service Medal, preceded by the Distinguished Conduct Medal. It was an indication, did Hardcastle but know it, that Captain Grayson had received the award prior to becoming an officer, and had, therefore, been commissioned from the ranks.

  Hardcastle related briefly the circumstances of Herbert Somers’ murder, and his desire to trace one of the witnesses, namely Lieutenant Geoffrey Mansfield of the North Staffordshire Regiment who had claimed to be staying at the barracks.

  Grayson opened a drawer in his desk and withdrew a slender book. ‘Mess accounts,’ he said, glancing briefly at the DDI. ‘Yes, there is a record of a Lieutenant Mansfield, North Staffs, having booked into the mess for the night of Tuesday the ninth of this month, for an indeterminate period.’

  ‘But did he actually stay here, Captain Grayson?’

  ‘Ah, that I can’t tell you. One of the army’s regulations is that officers on furlough from the Front must leave an army address with their commanding officer so that they can be recalled should the necessity arise. The officer in question must then, in turn, leave details with the PMC of that local mess of any private address at which he might stay. To be perfectly honest, Inspector, it’s a rule that’s more often honoured in the breach. He certainly didn’t leave any such address with me.’

  ‘Is there anyone here who might know?’ Hardcastle was beginning to become frustrated at what he saw as military intransigence.

  ‘One moment.’ Grayson lifted the receiver from the ‘candlestick’ telephone on his desk, jiggled the rest, and asked for the officers’ mess sergeant. ‘He’ll ring me back as soon as they find him, Inspector. Won’t be long. I hope.’

  Marriott’s long experience of working with Hardcastle told him that the DDI was becoming increasingly frustrated at the casual way that the army appeared to deal with police enquiries. The army, however, had a war to prosecute, and that, in Marriott’s view, probably took precedence. However, he attempted to fill the conversational void.

  ‘Are you back from France, Captain Grayson?’ he asked.

  ‘Good God, no. As a matter of fact, I’ve only just returned from India. I finished up commanding a screw gun battery at Chitral on the North West Frontier,’ explained Grayson. ‘The irony is that although we’re fighting the Hun, I was wounded by a Pathan, of all people, and was repatriated to England.’

  Hardcastle was not greatly interested in Captain Grayson’s experiences, and had no intention of asking what a screw gun battery was. He had been treated to long, and meaningless, explanations about the army before.

  The telephone rang, and the PMC snatched at the receiver. ‘Captain Grayson. Ah, Sergeant Broad, did we have a Lieutenant Mansfield of the North Staffs staying in the mess?’ After a few moments spent in conversation, he turned again to Hardcastle. ‘It seems that a room was assigned to Mr Mansfield, but was never used, Inspector. I rather imagine that Mansfield has a young lady somewhere with whom he might have stayed. On the other hand, he might’ve stayed at a hotel.’

  ‘I suppose that’s possible,’ said Hardcastle grudgingly. ‘He did say that he was at Victoria Station to meet his fiancée.’

  ‘I daresay that’s the answer, then,’ said Grayson. ‘The North Staffs have their depot at Lichfield in Staffordshire. And if his fiancée’s place was in London, or the south somewhere, he wouldn’t’ve wanted to travel the one hundred and fifty-odd miles from Lichfield.’

  ‘But if he didn’t intend to stay at the mess he booked into, what difference would it have made which one it was?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, Inspector.’ Grayson laughed. ‘But you’re the detective, not me.’

  Hardcastle’s bad mood had not lifted by the time he and Marriott returned to Cannon Row Police Station.

  ‘Well, we didn’t get much more out of that trip, Marriott.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Marriott.

  Hardcastle took his pipe from the ashtray, looked at it, and put it back again. ‘Get a telegraph message off to the Staffordshire Constabulary. Ask them to make enquiries at the North Staffs depot at Lichfield, and find out where this Lieutenant Mansfield is now.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ Marriott departed without much hope that he would get an answer to the DDI’s query. The police had had dealings with the military before regarding the whereabouts of individuals, and it took time. And more often than not the answer was inconclusive.

  At breakfast on that Thursday morning, Hardcastle opened his copy of the Daily Mail and propped it against a bottle of H
P Sauce. He read that on the previous Tuesday, there had been an uprising in Petrograd, encouraged by some hothead called Leon Trotsky. And this coincided with the news that the Russians had started to retreat from the Eastern Front.

  Leaving the newspaper, Hardcastle spent the next few minutes tucking into his breakfast. Despite the shortages, his wife was still able to provide him with his usual fried eggs, bacon, two slices of fried bread, and a couple of sausages, two slices of toast and marmalade, and three cups of tea. He justified such a large meal by claiming that he could not go to work on an empty stomach. Hardcastle never asked his wife how she managed to get enough to feed the family, given the strictures imposed by the general shortages and rationing. He was, however, cynical enough to believe that the grocer, knowing that she was a policeman’s wife, gave her preferential treatment because of it.

  ‘This is bad,’ said Hardcastle, glancing once again at the newspaper. ‘Very bad indeed.’

  ‘What is, Ernie?’ Alice Hardcastle began to clear away the plates and cutlery from the breakfast table.

  ‘Now that the Tsar’s abdicated, it could develop into a full-blown revolution, Alice. If that happens, the Russians will likely capitulate, and that means that all the enemy troops on the Eastern Front will come west to fight Britain and France. Thank God the good old Americans have joined in.’

  ‘I daresay it’ll turn out all right in the end, Ernie,’ said Alice, forever the optimist.

  ‘Well, I hope you’re right, Alice, my girl. If not, we’re going to be in serious trouble.’ Hardcastle folded the newspaper, took off his glasses and stood up. He glanced briefly at his watch. ‘I’d better be going,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve got a reply from Staffordshire, sir.’ Marriott greeted Hardcastle with the news as the DDI reached the top of the stairs.

  ‘Have we now? Come in.’

  Once the DDI was settled behind his desk, Marriott referred to the telegraph form in his hand. ‘It seems that the Staffordshire Constabulary doesn’t cover Lichfield, sir. They passed our enquiry to the Lichfield Borough Police. The chief constable himself went to the barracks.’

  ‘Ye Gods!’ exclaimed Hardcastle, pausing in the act of filling his pipe. ‘They can’t have much to do up there. Either that or the chief’s angling after an invitation to a regimental dinner.’

  Marriott smiled, but did not respond to Hardcastle’s acerbic comment. He had never known his DDI to have a good word to say about any other police force, his severest condemnation being reserved for the City of London Police whose square mile of jurisdiction lay in the centre of the Metropolitan Police District.

  ‘Well, don’t keep me in suspense, Marriott. What did the bold chief constable have to say about it?’

  ‘It seems that Lieutenant Mansfield is back in France, sir. His leave expired on Saturday the fourteenth of July. It also says that his leave – a week altogether – was spent in London at his fiancée’s parents’ house in Bayswater, and that Mansfield had informed the adjutant at Lichfield Barracks.’

  ‘Did they give a name and address for this young lady?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Her name is Isabella Harcourt, and she lives with her parents in Westbourne Terrace.’

  Hardcastle spent a few seconds getting his pipe alight before answering. ‘Keep a note of it, Marriott. On reflection, I doubt that young Mansfield could’ve given us any more, but we may have to see him again. Certainly when it comes to a trial. If there is one,’ he added gloomily.

  EIGHT

  At half past eleven, Captain McIntyre telephoned from Aldershot to say that Lieutenant Colonel Fuller, the commanding officer of the Army Service Corps training battalion, had reluctantly agreed to a check of his officers’ sidearms. It would, however, take some time, but McIntyre promised to let Hardcastle have the result as soon as possible.

  ‘The bloody war will probably be over by the time we get an answer to that, Marriott,’ said Hardcastle. ‘I wouldn’t mind betting that that dugout colonel is going to make it as difficult as possible. I suppose because men are being killed in their thousands at the Front, one dead body at Victoria Station don’t carry much weight with him.’

  But no sooner had the DDI expressed that pessimistic view of the army than there was a knock at his office door.

  ‘There’s a military gentlemen downstairs wishing to see you, sir,’ said the station officer, a youngish sergeant.

  ‘Who is it, skipper?’

  ‘He says he’s RSM Punchard, sir, of the Army Service Corps. He says it’s important.’

  ‘Send him up,’ said Hardcastle.

  The ramrod figure of the training battalion’s RSM appeared in Hardcastle’s doorway a few moments later.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Hardcastle.’

  ‘Good morning to you, Mr Punchard,’ said Hardcastle, shaking hands with the RSM. ‘Take a seat.’

  Punchard placed his cap on the hatstand in the corner of Hardcastle’s office, and, noticing that the DDI was smoking, withdrew a pipe from the inner recesses of his tunic and held it aloft. ‘D’you mind?’ he asked.

  ‘Not at all, carry on. Perhaps you’d care for a cup of tea.’

  ‘That would be most welcome, Mr Hardcastle, thank you.’

  Hardcastle glanced at Marriott. ‘Be so good as to organize that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Marriott crossed to the detectives’ office and told one of its occupants to arrange for three cups of tea.

  ‘Now, Mr Punchard,’ began Hardcastle, once Marriott had rejoined them, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve made the journey up here because you like being in the Smoke. Or has the War Office decided to offer you a commission?’ he added flippantly.

  ‘Not me,’ said Punchard. ‘I’d rather be top dog in the sergeants’ mess than a spare part in the other place. Anyhow, they’re making any young fool a second lieutenant these days, and often do, but regimental sergeant-majors are hard to come by. No, Mr Hardcastle, I’m stuck where I am, thank the Good Lord. However, to get down to business, I thought it best to come up here to see you in person rather than trusting to the telephone. You never know who’s listening.’

  ‘You managed to get away without any questions being asked, then.’

  Punchard bristled slightly at that. ‘What an RSM does and where he goes is no business of anyone else, Mr Hardcastle, except the colonel, and between you and me he’s not that much interested. I come and go as I please.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Hardcastle, who never quite understood the status of warrant officers in the army. There was no comparable rank in the Metropolitan Police, although, having witnessed a few army warrant officers exercising their authority, the DDI often wished there were.

  ‘I have a piece of information that I think might be of interest to you, Inspector.’ Punchard took a slim notebook from his breast pocket and flicked it open. ‘When officers are commissioned into the ASC, they have to attend a regimental officers’ course at Buller Barracks, to learn about what the Corps does. I had a word with the chief clerk of the battalion …’ The RSM paused. ‘Name of Fred Welch, SQMS Welch to be exact.’ Seeing the puzzled look on Hardcastle’s face, he explained that SQMS meant staff quartermaster sergeant, and that Welch was a warrant officer.

  ‘I see.’ Hardcastle nodded. He did not need to know the precise rank of the battalion’s chief clerk, but imagined that Punchard thought it would add weight to his statement.

  The RSM was interrupted by the arrival of Mrs Cartwright, the station matron, who appeared in the doorway carrying a large tray. ‘I’ve got your tea, sir,’ she said to the DDI.

  ‘Thank you, that was very good of you,’ said Hardcastle, dropping a sixpence on the tea tray.

  ‘But I’m afraid there ain’t any biscuits today.’

  ‘Never mind, Mrs C.’

  ‘I give ’em all to my boy Jack, you see. He was off to the Front again yesterday. He’s a bombardier now.’ Mrs Cartwright was clearly very proud of her son.

  ‘I hope he keeps safe,’ said Hardcastle.
>
  ‘He says as how he’ll be all right. He’s in the Royal Garrison Artillery. And he’s a long way behind the lines, he says.’

  ‘He should be all right there, ma’am,’ volunteered Punchard, running a thumb up the inside of the cross-strap of his Sam Browne belt.

  Once Mrs Cartwright had departed, the RSM continued. ‘Fred Welch told me that out of the twenty officers who’d finished the course, four of the young gentlemen never arrived at the units they was posted to.’

  ‘How on earth can that happen?’ asked an incredulous Hardcastle. ‘D’you mean they’ve deserted?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine, Mr Hardcastle, but just because they’ve got a pip on their cuffs don’t mean they don’t run. You’d be surprised how many officers have slung their hook since this caper with Fritz started.’

  Hardcastle pulled a sheet of paper across his desk. ‘Do you have the names of these officers, Mr Punchard?’

  Punchard referred to his notebook again. ‘They was all posted on Friday the sixth of July, Mr Hardcastle. The course ended on the preceding Wednesday, and they was given forty-eight hours’ leave. There was a Mr Adrian Nash who was posted to 143 Mechanical Transport Company at Boulogne, Mr Wilfred Bryant should have gone to 1 Corps Troops Column BEF …’ The RSM looked up. ‘God knows where they are; apart from being somewhere in Flanders, the last time I heard tell of ’em. Anyhow, then there’s Mr Bertram Morrish who should have gone to 233 Supply Company at Fort William in Scotland, and Mr Ashley Strawton to 64 Ambulance Company at Cairo with General Allenby’s lot. But, like I said, none of ’em turned up.’

  Hardcastle put down his pipe, leaned forward, and linked his hands on the desk, his interest suddenly aroused. ‘Can your colleague be sure of that?’ he asked.

  ‘Most certainly,’ said Punchard. ‘The training battalion sends a signal to the receiving units advising them of the officers’ impending arrival. But the orderly room got signals back asking if there’d been a mistake, because the officers hadn’t arrived.’

  ‘Do you know anything about these officers, Mr Punchard?’