The Sleeper

by J. Robert Janes

  Crawley took up his station and the two old friends all but blocked the view.

  ‘I say,’ said Telford, ‘isn’t that Ashby and Mrs. Pearce going up into the hills?’

  Their assistant headmaster never missed a trick. God, how the boys must suffer, felt Crawley, plucking shreds of a roll-your-own from his lower lip. ‘It is, Telford, but what of it?’

  ‘Well, I only …’ he hazarded. ‘Well, you know. Really, it’s most unseemly.’

  ‘Until you know the truth,’ said Banfield, fixing him with the look he reserved for the most delinquent of boys.

  Flustered, Telford said, ‘I … I don’t know what you’re implying. I really wish Headmaster would get this whole business out in the open. I’ve had to stop the boys from whispering and passing the most dreadful of notes. Their finals are coming. The school’s in enough of a …’

  ‘A rumble?’ snorted old George, exhaling cigarette smoke.

  ‘Yes! If you want to put it that way. I don’t like caning boys any more than you do.’

  It was Banfield who said, ‘Have they been passing notes to the effect that Tics is bent?’

  Telford ran an agitated hand over his thinning locks. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’

  Crawley boxed him in. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Arthur, you know the boys as well as we. Grantley’s isn’t sainthood. Did the notes claim he was camp?’

  ‘Queer,’ shot Banfield. ‘A homosexual.’

  ‘There’s got to be an end to it,’ demanded Telford, furious with them. ‘I’ve enough trouble getting the boys to work as it is, without all this talk of sex and murdered barmaids and him out there running about the countryside in that dreadful motor. Ashby should be dismissed.’

  ‘Not Headmaster?’ asked Crawley, squeezing the last bit of goodness out of his cigarette, then deciding to bum one of Roger’s with but a curt nod to the enemy who stiffly said: ‘Headmaster deserves our absolute loyalty and trust!’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Crawley, lighting the cigarette and coughing.

  Banfield affected a dry and impatient air, for when all was said and done, it was characters like Ashby that made a school. ‘I fear the Great War cost the Lower Fifth’s hero a good deal, Telford. One must temper one’s judgement with the distillation of history.’

  ‘And what, precisely, does that mean?’ demanded Telford.

  Crawley found comfort in scratching the stubble under his chin. ‘That he’s been drifting ever since, poor chap. Searching for a reason to it all, I expect.’

  ‘Blaming himself, George,’ said Banfield. ‘I’m certain of it.’

  ‘You two do talk nonsense!’

  ‘Cock, some would say,’ retorted Banfield. ‘Cock, Arthur. That shattered leg of his kept our Ashby in and out of hospital and convalescence for a good two years. Time enough to consider things, I should think, what with all those other poor wounded wretches lying about in the wards for company. Then off to Rotterdam pushing paper for Royal Dutch Shell and trying to get used to the oil business and civilian life. Delayed reaction, like a time fuse and the blessed bomb still buried with the buildings all round and everyone waiting.’

  ‘Six years of it,’ mused Crawley with a nod. ‘Pity they wanted him to go to America for them—a logical mistake, of course. Ashby’s one of us come hell or high water. The immigrant son from Philadelphia returned to the land of his forefathers.’

  These two hadn’t been wasting their time, thought Telford, waiting for more.

  ‘Then he packed it in,’ said Banfield. ‘Lost his chance right there. No more scheduling tankers and messing about with guilders. Did a stint of tutoring in Paris—must have been a bit of a comedown being forced to pick up the sou like that. Wandered on the Left Bank, I should think, with periodic rambling off to Greece and the Aegean, to the heart of it all, the searcher.’

  ‘And always with a beautiful girl on his arm, no doubt,’ interjected Crawley, spitting tobacco flakes to one side and coughing like death.

  ‘And then?’ prodded Telford.

  ‘Lloyd’s,’ snorted Crawley. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know our Ashby had been in insurance? It’s the languages, Arthur. Those and a smattering of tanker jargon. Lloyd’s put him back on his feet and let him take the girls out dancing, the theatre, too, I suspect, and the races of course. Motors and horses, Arthur.’

  ‘Then he had to go and get himself married,’ sighed Banfield, looking off towards the hills, willing himself to be with them in the woods or up by the ruins. ‘A return trip to Paris, Arthur, in 1928, the girl twenty-two, he a thirty-five-year-old repentant cavalry officer wanting to finally settle down, though why, for God’s sake, he should have chosen the only daughter of a German general is beyond me. Perhaps that was the trouble, eh, George? His shooting up the Hun, then trying to atone for it by marrying the daughter of such.’

  ‘It can’t have gone down well with the father,’ said Crawley.

  ‘I should say not, George. The trouble is, Telford, with the new job he had the means to indulge the girl, but then the Crash of ’29 came and it all frittered away overnight. No money, no job, and holes in his socks she couldn’t even mend.’

  ‘And Paris again,’ said Crawley. ‘More tutoring but with Daddy hot on his heels to take his daughter back to where things were significantly better, though economically tough, I’m sure.’

  ‘There was, unfortunately, a child,’ said Banfield. ‘Born 17 January 1931, but the couple separated, you see, Arthur, and our boy was sentenced to live alone and no doubt pine away for that daughter of his.’

  ‘May of ’34,’ said Crawley. ‘Greece again, and tutoring, too, but with very little money and likely wondering if he would ever get back on his feet and get a chance to see his daughter.’

  Telford couldn’t resist saying, ‘Headmaster finding him like that and bringing him back here to the Lower Fifth, but I fail to see that this has anything to do with his walking out like that with Mrs. Pearce!’

  ‘Then you must understand,’ said Banfield, ‘that what happens on the battlefield welds men together like nothing else. Ask any old soldier who’s had a taste of it, eh, George? They’ll all tell you the same. Hate or love, one or the other, but God help the woman who comes between.’

  ‘Ashby’s not a homosexual,’ snorted Telford.

  Crawley lost patience with him. ‘Of course not, you bloody fool. His is the sin of knowing and hers is that of finding out.’

  Alone with Ashby, Ruth wondered if he had chosen the ruins to remind her of Daisy Belamy and the chantry at Kilve. He would wait until darkness had fallen, though, and she didn’t know if she could wait that long. ‘Ash, why not tell me and get it over with?’

  ‘What do you want me to say, Ruth, that I found Tony in a bunker making love to one of the men?’

  ‘Is it the truth?’

  How could she understand the utter loneliness, he wondered, the terror of never knowing when one would die, especially since everyone round them had? For all of them the war had long since lost all its illusions. Three years of it had been too much.

  ‘He would have been court-martialled and shot, Ruth. The boy had only just turned nineteen and was killed in action the very next day. I thought … Well, Tony pleaded with me not to report the incident, that he had never done anything like that before and never would again.’

  ‘He was desperate, wasn’t he, so you let him hide it but exacted a promise—I know you would have, Ash. You gave that future husband of mine a warning, and are as guilty as he is.’

  As the last of the sunlight fell, a nightingale called, and from down over the hills came the distant sound of the bell calling the boys to chapel. ‘Ruth, please try to understand. It was hell.’

  ‘Oh, don’t give me that rubbish about the sound of the guns. Don’t tell me that’s why he still wakes up in the middle of the night and I can hear him
crying like a baby. Don’t tell me he was a hero—the VC and the DSO, the 1914 Star with bar and the OBE.Just tell me the truth and why he never talks about it.’

  ‘Because I held him. Because when the shells started coming in that last time, everyone else was dead and he had gone completely to pieces. There wasn’t anything left of him.’

  The Third Battle of Ypres—Passchendaele—the shattered trunks of the branchless trees in Sanctuary Wood, 23 September 1917, and at the end of it, nearly half a million men had died in that one battle alone.

  ‘God I hate you,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t. Try to understand. We were both terrified.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about him? You had plenty of chance. Instead, you let me think he was a hero charging up that hill, taking that German machine-gun post. Oh, I see, you … Well, of course, you thought it was the ideal solution. Let him hide his sickness in marriage. Never mind the damage it would cause. Never mind that I would be forced to live a life of hell wanting desperately for someone to hold me, Ash. Me! The very sight of him makes my skin crawl. I can’t stand it any longer!’

  The fireflies had come out amid the darkened ruins reminding her that once they had made her think of tracer shells.

  ‘Ruth, they cut us to ribbons—the men, the horses, what were left of them. They pinned the two of us down and when I held him, he told me that he had always loved me, and when I pushed him from me, he ran up that hill hoping the Germans would kill him.’

  The truth at last. ‘And you were wounded going after him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ruth knew she couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice. ‘So you let the King pin medals on him. You were both cowards. Neither of you were due a thing.’

  ‘The hill was there and we took it. I never wanted the medals and I don’t think Tony did either.’

  ‘Yet you still didn’t tell me about him. You knew I was in love with you, that I would have given anything to have had you change places with him.’

  ‘I couldn’t. You were his fiancée. I thought … Ruth, I thought it was only the war that had done that to him. I went into hospital. He was captured within a week and put in a prisoner-of-war camp. We lost touch. For me the war was over and I was glad of it, and when I got home I … well, I thought he would forget all about it.’

  ‘His desire for other men, yet you didn’t come to Grantley’s when he first asked you in the autumn of 1920. You were afraid, Ash. You knew only too well the truth of what you had done to me. God only knows what happened to him in that prison camp. The final degradation, I suspect, for homosexuality goes on even more in places like that, and the Boches would have known of it and got him to spy for them. That must be why he never speaks of that time either. But the latest is out, you know. Among all the other nasty little rumours that are floating round the school, just how long do you think it’s going to take before they all twig to the fact that the gun Colonel Hacker found in your room was really Anthony’s and that you’d taken it from him because you were afraid he might well shoot himself?’

  ‘I didn’t take it for that reason. I borrowed it when I went to Germany to get my daughter, and like a damned fool, I kept it loaded in case they came for me. Ruth, Tony needs the school and I think the school needs him.’

  ‘If he can keep his hands off the boys.’

  ‘He’s not like that. There’s never been any suggestion of it.’

  ‘Little pieces of the puzzle will begin to fit together. The enrollment’s bound to drop off. Word gets round. He takes his holidays in Greece each summer but what does he do when he gets there, eh? The least you could have done was to have told me you were married. I could look after your daughter. I could do such a good job of it, even at the school, or I’d buy Wetherby Cottage and move into it. Yes … Yes, that would be best. Then maybe …’

  ‘Ruth, what did you tell Hacker? He took a photograph of Karen and the couple who are looking after her. The trawler they own was in the background.’

  Abruptly she turned away to grip the edge of the wall, she bowing her head. ‘Everything we’ve just been saying. That I wished you would love me, that it was all so unfair, and that … that when at last you had come here to teach, I had hoped you would see how unhappy I was. That Colonel Hacker of yours humiliated me, Ash. He left that gun in my lap, and though he didn’t specifically tell me to, he as much as dared me to kill myself.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘How should I know? I thought he was a detective.’

  Gearing down, Ashby touched the brakes. Dousing the headlamps, he let the car coast through the village before pulling over to the side of the road. Crowcombe’s thatched roofs were huddled under a star-filled sky on the western edge of the Quantocks, not all that far from the school. A glimmer of light washed over the road in front of the Carew Arms. Up at the church, two bicycles leaned against the lamp standard, while a third, a woman’s, stood bolt upright on its kickstand.

  MI5 would have initiated an immediate record search of every port within a 300-mile radius of the school. They would find the Bonnie Jean and then find Karen. There would be no need for Hacker to ask again. They would simply leak that information to the Abwehr.

  When he got through to the Pilchard Arms, Ewen came on the line and it was good to hear his voice and that Karen was safe. ‘Move the Bonnie Jean, Ewen. Take her north. Get her out of Saint Ives as quickly as you can and keep clear of any ports for as long as possible.’

  ‘And th’ lass, Dave?’

  ‘Hilary knows what has to be done. Just tell her that I’ll make it up to her. I will, Ewen. The same to yourself and Monica, and thanks for all you’ve done.’

  Hating himself for not having anticipated Hacker, he rang off. There was just a chance the colonel hadn’t found them yet, but why hadn’t Tony been at home when he’d returned that call of his from the Dorchester? Knowing what Hacker had done to Ruth would have given them some warning, especially if Ruth had told him the colonel had taken that photo. As to the rest of what Hacker had done, it could only have been to cause a scandal and force himself into revealing where Karen was.

  A sleeper … Scotland Yard would never be able to apprehend Kurt Meydel and Martin Lund, nor would MI5. Both would have vanished into the Reich to be assigned other duties, but had they really killed Daisy? Everything pointed elsewhere, and that, too, wasn’t good, should Hacker succeed in using Hilary and Karen.

  Christina would still be in London, at the Dorchester, but when he rang through, he found that she had only stayed Friday night and had left the hotel well before dawn. A taxi had taken her to the German embassy, the doorman said when asked by the receptionist. ‘Will you be coming in to pay the lady’s bill, sir, or shall I send it over to Pratt’s?’

  Pratt’s would do just fine. Out under the stars, the scent of clover was heavy on the air. ‘Christina,’ he said, alone and not liking what he’d just discovered, ‘where are you?’

  At the Rose and Thorn, its occupants long since retired, the wind found every nook and cranny, thought Christina. Apart from Miss Staples, who had seemed to take an inordinate interest in her comings and goings, the inn was perfect. It was just on the outskirts of the tiny village of East Quantoxhead. Reached by a lane off the A39 from Holford and Bridgwater, it was easily accessible to the school, but also to the village of Kilve by a footpath, and if she went out from there to that main road, the Dogs of War.

  She had been to the ruins of the chantry, the scene of the murder, and had asked all sorts of questions of the curious, had been to that pub to ask about the man with the ginger moustache, and had seen the farmhouse where Daisy Belamy had once lived.

  Ash wouldn’t find her until it was too late. It had been so easy to discover where Karen was staying, he so trusting and careless. Foolishly he had made two telephone calls from the Dorchester, one of which had been to Saint Ives. There had been no need for he
r to have even bribed the hotel’s operator for the information. Burghardt would now know, again through her having used the embassy, that she had taken the train to Saint Ives and that last Sunday Ash’s little car had been parked outside a small stone cottage in the older part of the town, the home of a Monica and Ewen MacDonald.

  He would also know that she had gone out along the road a good two miles to the west, and that Ash had met and talked with a girl named Hilary Bowker-Brown who lived in a small cottage near the cliffs and owned the ruins of an old tin mine, but would Burghardt send Osier to herself as she had pleaded?

  And what of this Colonel Hacker? she wondered. Had he stayed in this inn?

  It was pitch-dark in the lobby when she came downstairs at near on midnight, but behind the desk, by the telephone, there had been a small lamp. Switching it on, she let her eyes adjust, then quickly scanned the register. There wasn’t a listing for a Colonel Hacker but on the night following the murder, and on the preceding two, a Harris Blackburn from Leeds, an insurance salesman, had stayed at the inn.

  At 0217 hours, Thursday, 2 June, one of the green lights came on and the first of the encoded five-letter groupings spilled from the wireless transceiver. Burghardt listened attentively. The frequency and manner of transmitting were those of the Bridgwater set, the sending extremely rapid but steady, the wrist action certain but delicate, that of a woman, one might have thought, had one not known better.

  The first part of the message came to an end in less than a minute, Bridgwater, he knew, then transmitting at a different frequency, having broken the data down into at least two parcels for added security. Three agents used mail drops to funnel intelligence through Bridgwater. None knew the identity or whereabouts of their wireless operator—Bridgwater had insisted on building a wall round himself. Banks of the latest Telefunken transceivers constantly monitored the British Isles, signals like this one coming in from scattered operatives in Britain, Wales, Scotland and both Northern and Southern Ireland. The small hours were always best, and he did like to be here at least two or three times a week. One kept a finger on the pulse of one’s agents, the wireless often the only contact for months.