by David Mark
‘It wasn’t taken for evidence?’ she asked, hopeful but appalled.
‘There’s no case, love. Chivers said so. It’s just junk now.’
‘So there may be something in the boot,’ she said, eagerly. ‘Something that could help. God, there could be a body …
John shook his head, like she was going too far. ‘You can’t sneeze in Gilsland without somebody telling you they’ve heard all about it. And I know what you’re thinking and I’m not having it.’
‘We could do it quietly …’ she began.
I shook my head. ‘This has gone far enough. We should just tell Chivers what we think. Or his boss. Tell the other office. Or go to Carlisle …’
Cordelia flushed red. ‘They threatened me,’ she said, like a hissing cat. ‘I can’t let anything trickle back to this Dingwall. Not until I know for certain what’s happened. Please, Flick, let’s just poke about …?’
‘Who the bloody hell’s Flick?’ asked John, indignant.
‘We haven’t read the papers I found,’ I protested, trying to stop her from persuading me to go with her. My heart felt like it was falling through my body. I wasn’t right for this. I should just step back, I knew it. And yet, a part of me didn’t want to end the game. And though it was superstitious nonsense, the bird had truly unsettled me. If Fairfax did die wrong, he deserved some help in putting it right.
‘What’s these papers then?’ asked John.
He looked a bit clueless, sitting there in his vest. He looked like he’d intruded into something that were nowt to do with him and I suddenly felt an urge to tell him to bugger off and mind his own business. Goodness, what was I becoming?
‘Please,’ she said, again. And that were what sealed it. The way she looked at me and made me feel like I was the only one in the world who could fix the gaps in her. I’ve seen her do it to other people plenty times since but it’s never changed how good it felt when she did it to me.
‘I’ll fetch them,’ I said, and went to the coal bunker in the passage. The papers were in a biscuit tin by the door. I should have opened the back door and given them to the breeze. Should have tossed them on the fire. Instead I returned to the kitchen and handed the tin to Cordelia. They were typed out neatly. No mistakes. He’d done it a few dozen times. There weren’t many pages but from the way he had laid it all out, you could tell he was proud of the job he had done. This was the story he had always been searching for – the one his son would have written if he could have done. When I saw the second name that had been inscribed beneath the title, I felt something reach into me and squeeze my lungs flat.
Cordelia took the words and pulled herself out of the seat. She crossed to where John sat and plonked herself down next to him. Then she patted the empty cushion beside her and I sat down too.
She removed the papers from the tin and took them in her pale hands.
We read, and everything changed.
SECRET HERO
By Fairfax Duke and Christopher Duke
They told me their story because they couldn’t keep it to themselves any longer. And I’m telling you because somebody, some time, deserves to know. It won’t be in my lifetime, I know that. It won’t be in theirs. These words will go somewhere safe. Under the flagstones, beneath God’s gaze. I think of them as a time capsule: something to be opened for future generations at a time when we are all just names and the wars we fought in are memories.
I won’t name him. That would be wrong. I’m sure if somebody truly wanted to know they could put the pieces together and make sense of it all, but I promised I would not tell, and I am trying to keep that promise. At the same time, I have a vow to keep to Christopher. When he went to war I swore I would keep him informed of life back home. I got into the habit of asking people questions. People started telling me their stories and I would write them down and send them to Christopher. When he died, I didn’t stop. It somehow became more important to keep asking. Keep writing. It helped me to continue to feel his presence. Eventually, I knew I would find the tale that would have inspired him to write the book that would have made him famous. Christopher was destined to matter. He had a gift with words that I cannot replicate. War robbed me of my son but more importantly it robbed the world of a true talent. It is in his memory that I write these words and you will forgive an old man for crying as he writes.
They came to me in early spring. They brought a bottle and a fruit loaf and we talked, as we had so often. Crops. Birds. Plans for the hall and whether the river would flood again this year. We talked as old friends. And then he said it. Told me he had something he wanted to get off his chest. I wince, thinking about the way he said it. That little smile of acknowledgement at his poor choice of words.
He told me that all I knew of him was a lie.
How do I start? Perhaps I should simply repeat it the way he said it to me. His name had been Abel. He was a Frenchman. Was apprentice as a printer in a little town called Les Papillons in the Dordogne. He told me that meant The Butterflies. His home was in a commune of cliffs and caves in a pocket of the world that I will never see. I have looked at the area on maps and seen photographs but I cannot truly imagine how it would be to grow up in that place of fossils and bones. His childhood was simple, his ambitions no different to that of any other young man. He played in the caves. Played football. Drank wine and coffee and sang songs with his friends. Then the Germans came.
It was with disgust that Abel witnessed his government give in to the Nazis. Their collaboration turned his stomach and like so many other brave young men and women, he searched for a way that he could help liberate his country. He became a member of the Resistance. He joined the Maquisards. Brave men and women who refused to surrender to an occupying force.
For long months and years he lived in constant expectation of death. He learned to kill. To live with the knowledge of having taken a life. He considered himself fortunate each day that he was not captured or shot. But his luck ran out. Fleeing the Gestapo, Abel suffered a terrible fall and was left with terrible injuries. Despite his wish to fight the Germans he could no longer be thought of as a fighting man. Instead he was sent to a town in Correze where he could be involved in the passing of information and could use his knowledge of the printing press to ensure that even the remotest villages received information about the Resistance.
He was a useful asset, but his fighting days were done.
In 1944, the year that my son was taken from me, the Maquisards had become the scourge of the SS. They won countless victories against the Germans and it was Hitler’s personal command that all possible measures be taken to stamp them out. Their primary tool in this was the Milice. These men were a unit of paramilitaries created with the express instruction to obliterate the Resistance. They were brutal extremists and many were recruited from prisons where they had been serving sentences for terrible deeds.
The Milice frequently used torture to extract information or confessions from those whom they interrogated. The French Resistance considered the Milice more dangerous than the Gestapo and SS because they were native Frenchmen who understood local dialects fluently, had extensive knowledge of the towns and countryside, and knew local people and informants.
Among them was a man called Jean Favre. He was known as Le Tanneur due to his ability to skin a man without killing him.
In June 1944, three days after the D-Day landings at Normandy, the Maquisards had passed through a town in Correze. They had been victorious in seizing key towns from the Nazis but the arrival of the 2nd SS Panzer Division forced them to retreat to a town known to be loyal to the cause. The SS followed them. So too did the Milice.
Abel was mute witness to what occurred next. As the tanks rolled into the square, he saw the horror of what had already been done in the search for the Resistance men. He recognized the young man strapped to the hood of the commanding officer’s car. The young Maquisard had suffered almost beyond endurance.
The Mayor of Correze stepped forward to beg
for mercy and was killed with a single shot. Then the SS commanding officer began to shoot the inhabitants of the town. Men aged 16 to 60 were strung from lampposts for daring to aid the Resistance. And then the young man on the front of the tank found the strength to speak.
Despite his pain, despite his suffering, he cursed the Nazis as dogs. From among the ranks of soldiers and the huddle of Milice bastards, emerged Favre – Le Tanneur. He tortured the boy. Branded him with flaming coins and took pieces of his skin.
It was a miracle that Abel survived. He had already accepted that he was to die. There was already a noose around his neck when the commander declared that ninety-nine corpses were sufficient. Abel would have been the hundreth man. It was Abel who cut free the young Maquisard who had been dropped, on the verge of death, on the blood-soaked road as the Nazis retreated. It was Abel who nursed him back to health, even as news of fresh hells from nearby Oradour trickled through.
Das Reich had cut a bloody swathe through the resistance. Hundreds were killed. Abel spread such stories. With his printing press he shared word of the atrocities. Even towns that had collaborated began to resist.
Within months the Nazis had capitulated and the war was over.
It was men like Abel who gave evidence at the trials demanded by the people. His testimony helped secure justice for countless men. He stood bravely in the courtroom and fixed his eyes on Jean Favre and told the court what he had seen him do.
Favre was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. As he left the courtroom, he promised Abel that he would find him. He would hurt him. And he would take his skin.
That threat has been with Abel every day since and I admire him so vehemently for making something of his life in spite of that which he has seen. He has tried to live a good life, and that is no easy thing to do. I, too, have always hoped to be thought of as a good man, but in truth, I cannot truly call myself such.
I believed in liberty when I fought in the first war but three decades later, the echoes of that conflict took my son. I believe in working hard for a living and not taking from your fellow man, and yet my soft heart insists I help my young neighbour with activities I know to be illegal, due to the loyalty he showed my son.
Should anybody find his guns and tobacco and brandy in the flagstones of this church, I trust you will say a prayer for his soul. He is not a bad person, I believe that, and Christopher always felt very fondly about him. Do not think too harshly of an old man who wanted to help him.
Abel’s life has taken many turns since that day. I know him as a good man, and I understand why he has been so quiet about his past. I am honoured he chose me as a confidante.
I do not know when these words will be read or what small part I have played in their preservation but I hope in some distant time, they are studied by somebody who will say a quiet prayer for the souls of a brave man, and for my son, whose loss I still feel as keenly as if somebody had removed my soul.
FD, 04.04.67.
CORDELIA
I slept on Flick’s sofa under a crocheted blanket that her mum had made and which I couldn’t resist twisting my fingers through. The pillow she gave me smelled of baking and rain. I didn’t sleep much. The curtains in the kitchen didn’t close all the way and it seemed that wherever I put my head, the shaft of pinkish moonlight kept finding my face. It was like a persistent lover. At first I enjoyed the delicate kisses and soft caress but as I grew tired and cold and grouchy it became another annoyance, alongside the creaking pipes and the settling stones in the fire. I heard one of them get up for a pee in the night. It might have been John, based on the heaviness of the footsteps. At one point I felt eyes upon me but by then I was in that half-asleep state where nothing feels fully formed and the edges of things seem to bleed into one another and by the time I sat up and looked around I was completely alone.
The clouds seemed to have blown themselves out overnight for a while and there was a pleasant violet hue to the sky. I opened the front door and sat myself on the front step wrapped in the blanket. It was a fresh, chilly morning and the mist had lifted enough for me to be able to see all the way down the road to the church.
My thoughts turned to the man in blue before they turned to Dingwall and the things he had said to me. Maybe I was distracting myself on purpose but as far as I saw it, I had little choice. If I stopped thinking about the dead man I would have to begin thinking about all the other aspects of my ragged life.
As I sat there I thought of the stranger’s words, painstakingly transcribed in Fairfax’s hand. Was the man of whom he spoke to also the man whose corpse I had seen? Could a man who had survived so much truly have met his end in such a tiny, faraway place?
I thought upon all of the different lives that would have had to bounce off one another in order for Flick and I to gaze upon his dead body beneath the broken stones of the Kinmont tomb. Was it possible? And if Fairfax had been aware there was a corpse in the mausoleum that shouldn’t have been there, was his complicity an act of cruelty or kindness? Could he have been protecting Pike? And if he was, how would Pike respond when he learned that his neighbours had been digging into his crimes?
I heard the rumble of an approaching train. It wouldn’t stop. No trains would stop in Gilsland ever again. The line cut the village in two as precisely as the Romans did two millennia before but the station itself had been closed down on the orders of Dr Beeching. A team of navvies had come in the night a few months before and dismantled half the rural stations on the line.
I watched the engine as it trundled past: steamed up windows and a few glimpsed faces – pink circles scribbled with blurry features. Could the dead man have been sitting on the train and seen a face from the past? Somebody he once knew? Is that what persuaded him to get off the train and go speak to the man who knew everybody? Had that decision cost him his life? Had he been trying to protect his own identity or revenge himself upon a past abuser?
More than anything else, I wanted to know whether it was possible that a wartime sadist had found his way to this tiny part of the world in order to inflict revenge upon the Resistance fighter whose evidence had secured his incarceration. Was there even the slightest chance of such a thing? I needed to know more. Needed to learn what had happened to the man called Favre after Nuremberg. And what of Abel? Was he our victim?
My head span. I tried to focus on what I could see. Broken down houses and damp stone; tatty outbuildings and the distant grey blur of the church. Somewhere a bell chimed the hour. The distant bleating of a sheep carried on the wind and the cold breeze played with my fringe.
‘Tea?’
I turned and saw James. He was dressed and ready for school. He’d combed his hair and fastened his tie right to the top. I could smell toothpaste coming off him. He handed me a burgundy mug and I shifted up to let him sit on the step.
‘Sleep OK?’ he asked, getting comfortable.
‘Bit chilly but I got a few hours.’
‘I’d have brought you more blankets.’
‘I don’t think there’s enough blankets to keep me warm at the moment,’ I said, watching a little bird, sharp as an arrowhead, flitting into the eaves of Fairfax’s house across the road. ‘Feels like the cold’s got into my bones.’
‘You need to run about more,’ he said, watching the bird with me. ‘That’s a wagtail. Pretty isn’t it?’
I shifted my position to better look at him. He had lovely manners and his accent didn’t sound like either of his parents. He wasn’t overweight but there was a roundness to him, a fleshiness, that suggested he would always battle with his weight. He didn’t seem shy, not exactly – just slightly removed from things. He was the sort who could leave a party and nobody would notice them go.
‘You ever draw birds?’ I asked, making conversation. ‘You’re the artist in the family, aren’t you?’
He smiled and looked away, embarrassed at being pleased. ‘I don’t draw things I can look at. I just draw the things I see in my head.’
‘
And that’s all the gruesome stuff?’ I asked, a little surprised.
‘It’s not gruesome,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘Not really. You’re watching a bird and thinking it’s lovely and I’m seeing the worm in its beak. That’s all.’
I was a bit surprised at how mature he sounded. He was a clever lad, I could see that, but it was the sort of cleverness that rarely brought happiness. It was a restless, questioning intelligence that would forever leave him dissatisfied. I knew it well.
‘And you see people having their heads cut off, do you?’
‘Most of the stories you hear around here involve death. You know the ghost story? The castle?’
I shook my head then settled against the doorframe, wrapping my hands around my tea.
‘Centuries back the baron of Featherstone Castle arranged for his daughter to marry a man she didn’t love. She wanted this other man who had no money but a good heart.’ He paused at that to make sure I was listening and not laughing at him. Satisfied, he continued. ‘She refused to go through with the marriage but her father insisted. After the wedding, he instructed his daughter to ride out with the wedding party to see the new lands she had inherited through the marriage while he oversaw preparations for the banquet. When the wedding party reached a clearing in the woods, the bride’s lover and a group of his friends tried to rescue her and ride away. It was all very romantic. But her new husband was a warrior as well and there was a battle. In the midst of it all the bride was struck by her lover’s sword and died in his arms – as did her husband, and the man she loved, all mixed in together and their blood soaking into the ground.’
I looked at him and saw he was staring off into the distance as though the story he was telling was playing out in front of his eyes.
‘You’re good with words,’ I said, hoping for a smile in return. He barely noticed me.
‘Back at the castle the baron became worried,’ James continued. ‘He sent out riders. Where were they? Finally he heard the sound of horses and rushed out to greet his returning guests.’
