Death of an Unsung Hero

by Tessa Arlen

  “Captain Martin,” she greeted the senior officer who was turning the handle to raise the board. The captain’s appearance was deceptive: he was extraordinarily tall with broad shoulders and the physique of an athlete, but Clementine knew how frail Captain Martin was underneath breadth of shoulder and well-toned muscle. He had failed his Medical Board review last week and had withdrawn even more into himself in the last few days, his old diffidence had returned, and his eyes had an evasive, almost defeated look. It is almost impossible to believe he commanded a company of men through some of the worst battles in France, was mentioned in dispatches and awarded the DSO, when I see him standing here looking so uncertain and apologetic. “Would you join us at the house for Sunday luncheon, after church?” she asked, turning to include the younger of the two officers, Lieutenant Fielding.

  Both men looked up and Clementine was touched by their enthusiasm. “I say, how awfully nice of you!” Lieutenant Fielding clearly welcomed an invitation to be with a family again, sitting around a gracious dining table, in an elegant and comfortable house, with the fascinatingly beautiful Lady Althea dressed in a pretty summer frock.

  The captain flushed with pleasure and said with only the slightest hesitance in his speech, “We should … bring … some of our cider.” Captain Martin, DSO, gave the handle of the cider press a spin and down came the board.

  “Yes, if you would prefer it to claret,” she said, laughing.

  Martin dug in his pocket and shook a packet of cigarettes up to his mouth, then stopped and looked for permission from Clementine.

  “That’s right, sir, light up a gasper,” commanded Corporal Budge. “It’ll keep the wasps away.”

  More apples were shoveled in and Captain Martin made a joke, beloved by an island race, about Lieutenant Phipps, who had gone with a wheelbarrow to fetch more apples being lost at sea. He made a brief attempt at command: “When you have shoveled that lot in, Fielding, you better go and find Phipps, probably sitting under a tree scribbling poetry.”

  Clementine momentarily closed her eyes to enjoy the sun on her face. She wondered what sort of poetry Phipps wrote; Major Andrews encouraged his patients to write prose, poetry—indeed anything that gave them the opportunity to express the inner world they were locked in.

  As if summoned by the captain’s words, the door in the wall to the kitchen garden was thrown open and Second Lieutenant Phipps came barreling through it from the kitchen garden.

  “There you are, Phipps—finished skiving off…?” Martin got no further than this.

  Phipps staggered forward, his face as white as the plaster on the walls of the potting shed, his eyes wild. He stopped and cried out a few incoherent words and then froze in his tracks. He might be with them in corporeal form, but his eyes were fixed ahead and it was clear that he did not register where he was or even that he could see them. He was somewhere else completely. And not, Clementine thought as she saw his ashen, sweating face, and his blank eyes, in a good place at all. Corporal Budge stubbed out his cigarette and walked over to the stricken Phipps. He took him firmly by the shoulders and Phipps began to struggle and cry out.

  “He’s in shock,” Budge said. He put a strong supporting arm around the lieutenant and gently lowered him to a bench, then crouching down next to him he spoke in slow, quiet tones.

  “There now, sir, deep breaths. Remember the drill. Breathe easy, sir, nice and slo-ow.” He was as gentle and soothing as a mother with a frightened child, Clementine thought. She turned to Captain Martin and Lieutenant Fielding standing by the cider press, all authority surrendered to Budge.

  “Anything we can do, Corporal? Shall we get him back to Haversham Hall?” Clementine said as the young man began to sob, great shuddering, shouting sobs as he rocked back and forth in his anguish. “No, m’lady. He will be all right in a minute. Something happened to him in the orchard and it’s sent him back. There, lad…” Budge spoke gently in his rough West Country burr, but he did not suggest that Phipps pull himself together. The young man, for Phipps was barely twenty, dropped his head and his sobs died to weeping.

  “What happened back there then, sir?” asked Budge. Pulling a cigarette from his jacket pocket, he lit it and passed it to Phipps. There was silence. They all stood quite still, their eyes on the man on the ground, and waited for him to speak.

  “Head smashed…” he managed, and then he started to stammer. He struggled for some moments, his mouth working to try to form words: “S-s-s-mashed, s-s-s-mashed … head all smashed in.”

  Budge nodded his head. “Yes,” he said, “it were a terrible thing to happen.” He looked up at Clementine even though it was Phipps he was talking to. “Pinned under three dead bodies when they found you in a water-filled shell crater, weren’t you, sir? Been there for several days.” Phipps lifted both his hands and pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets as if to force the memory away. Budge looked up at Clementine again. “His closest friend was lying immediately on top of him with his head … on his chest.” He gestured with his hand to indicate half a head, and Clementine must have looked appalled because he hastily added, “Sorry to distress you, m’lady.”

  “No, no, not at all,” she said. “Poor, poor man.” Had this man, a boy really, lay in the mud under a pile of dead bodies with his friend’s smashed head on his chest for three days? No wonder he lost his reason.

  Phipps took a long pull on his cigarette and slowly exhaled. Then he spoke. “No, Budge,” he said, his voice still wavering with the horror he had experienced three months ago and then again in his mind, just moments past. “You d-d-don’t understand. Captain Bray…” he lifted his hand and jerked his thumb toward the open door into the kitchen garden, “lying … lying in the trench with his head … smashed in.” He slumped forward with the effort of articulating what he believed he had seen.

  “It was a hallucination, sir,” Budge said firmly. “Just a hallucination, you know it was. Come on, sir, let’s get you on your feet and we’ll go and find Major Andrews. You can talk about it with him.” He stood up and waited for the young man to rise to his feet.

  “Don’t be so d-d-damned daft, Budge,” Phipps said, looking up at the orderly. He threw his cigarette down on the ground. “I haven’t been ‘seeing things’ since I left Dottyville. Captain Bray is in the kitchen garden, lying facedown in the dirt with his head smashed in. S-s-someone”—he paused for breath and made the effort to keep his voice steady—“has bloody well done him in.”

  Chapter Three

  Captain Martin started toward the door into the kitchen garden, followed by Lieutenant Fielding. Budge called after them, “If you please, Captain, might I go and look first? It would perhaps be best if you stayed here with Lieutenant Phipps.” It was a request, politely worded, but nonetheless Corporal Budge was in charge here. Martin hesitated for a moment and then said in a voice that had probably not been as authoritative since the day he had given his first order to his men in Flanders, “Fielding, go and get the doc; Budge, you stay here with Phipps, and that’s an order.” He walked past Clementine and through the open gate. Clementine cast an apologetic look at Budge and followed him.

  “Your ladyship,” Budge called after her. “Perhaps best to wait here with me and Phipps?”

  “I will be quite all right, Corporal.” Clementine was already through the open gate.

  * * *

  The kitchen garden covered several acres within its old mellow brick walls, which supported the espaliers of pear, greengage, and apple trees. Clementine remembered that before the war the garden had been a thing of orderly beauty tended by a regiment of gardeners who, under the head gardener Mr. Thrower’s direction, had produced a bountiful procession of vegetables and fruit in the abundant days of spring and summer. But she did not have time to notice that under the lesser competence of men who had never wielded a spade before in their lives, even at the Front, the kitchen garden had lost much of its aesthetic appeal over past years. But Clementine’s mind was not on the loss
of artistry in her garden, she was curious to see what had caused Lieutenant Phipps’s hallucination. Perhaps in his mind he ties the action of digging vegetable beds to the digging of trenches? She suggested this to herself because underneath her outward composure she was beginning to feel distinctly uneasy. And maybe Phipps did not hallucinate, and if that’s the case then what on earth am I doing here? When the captain paused in the center of the garden she stopped too, and they stood staring around them, both at a loss. “Where is he? I can’t see him.” Martin’s earlier air of authority was deserting him, she thought; he looked around, doubting himself, perhaps hesitant of what he might find in this domestic scene so far removed from the acts of violence that had been part of his everyday existence just months ago. She noticed that the captain had lifted his arm as a polite barrier to prevent her from walking ahead of him.

  “Bray told us at breakfast that he was going to dig over the potato rows,” he said. And they set off down the gravel path together under a pergola heavy with fat green grapes for the table. At the end of the shady tunnel was an intersection of raked gravel pathways that radiated outward from a central irrigation fountain. They slowed only to negotiate an old wooden wheelbarrow overturned on its side, its load of apples strewn in their way. Abandoned no doubt by Lieutenant Phipps in his desperate need to run from a world where rotting bodies lay in rain-filled shell craters.

  Clementine stopped at the end of the path and looked at the neatly turned root-vegetable beds to their right. At the end of each row lay the debris of potato stems and leaves, and piled in the center of the middle row was a carefully built hill of potatoes graded in size with the largest at the bottom.

  Uncomfortably conscious that her heart was hammering as if she had run through the garden at top speed, Clementine looked around. I can’t see anyone, she thought, there is no one here at all. What can the poor boy have been on about? He must have imagined … Oh dear God, no! Her gaze had passed over the dark, freshly turned soil of the potato bed, not seeing at first the well-camouflaged khaki designed to blend so well with the earth. It was Captain Bray’s feet that she noticed first. He was lying across the last row of the potato bed with his booted feet on the grass lawn at the end of the garden’s cultivated area. She narrowed her eyes and focused on the outline of a man’s body facedown in the newly turned loam, with a potato spade planted in the ground next to him. She walked forward and stopped, and then took a few steps more as the outline came fully into focus.

  There was a relaxed, almost nonchalant air to the body’s position, as if the man had said, “That was a jolly good lunch. You go on ahead; I am awfully fagged by all that digging,” and had flung himself, facedown to avoid the sun, on freshly mown grass for a postprandial nap. But this was not a daisy-speckled lawn, nor did the sprawled khaki-clad body appear to be asleep in the sun. She hesitated, feeling unsure and reluctant.

  “Lady Montfort, I think it would be wise if you would perhaps…”

  “Nonsense, Captain, he might be ill and in need of my help. I have done my Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses’ training.” Clementine started to go forward and to her relief was gently moved to one side as the captain walked past her onto the narrow dirt path to where the body lay.

  Don’t be silly, you have been trained for this sort of situation, she told herself, and coming up behind the captain she peered around his broad shoulders as he bent over the inert form on the ground. It is true what Lieutenant Phipps said then, his head has indeed been smashed in, she found herself thinking as she took in the plight of the man at their feet in a snapshot of vivid detail.

  Someone was awfully angry when they hit him on the head, was her next thought as she felt her stomach churn and clammy sweat break out on her palms and her nape, where her hair lay heavily coiled.

  He has to be dead; he could not surely have survived an injury as serious as this. Her body felt as if it were made of wood, but she somehow managed to turn her head away and caught sight of the potato spade dug into the earth, standing upright like a sentry on guard.

  Captain Martin, still bent over the body, started to turn the man over onto his back. “No, don’t do that, don’t move him. Feel for a pulse in his wrist.” Her voice sounded to her own ears sharp in the quiet of the garden.

  “No need, he is dead,” Martin replied. Any man who had spent a scant twenty-four hours with the British Expeditionary Force in France recognized violent death when he saw it.

  “It is Captain Bray then?”

  “Yes,” said Martin, standing up and brushing his hands on his trousers. “And someone has bashed the poor blighter’s head in. Probably…”

  As he reached for the spade handle, Clementine said, “No, Captain, whatever you do—do not touch the spade,” with such authority that he turned and stared at her as if seeing her for the first time.

  Clementine’s stomach heaved and her mouth, moments before as dry as dust, filled with saliva. One moment she felt unbearably hot, the next she was chilled through and through, and there was a high-pitched ringing in her ears. “He has been murdered,” she said and turned away from the sight of the stricken man to look out across the garden at the far wall, concentrating all her effort into bringing every brick into focus. Listen to the birds, look up at the sky. There now, that’s better. Her hands still felt clammy as she walked away from the body, careful to stay on the path. She made herself look at the ground around the area; there were signs of disturbed earth everywhere. But there was order to the disturbance. The only footprints in the upturned soil were as orderly as the rows made by the man who had dug them. There was no sign of a skirmish, of a fight. The stamped-earth path between the root-vegetable rows was hard and at least three feet wide at this end of the bed. It looked as if the captain had been standing on the lawn at the bottom of the bed, had been hit on the head from behind, and had then fallen forward into the row he had just finished digging.

  Now back on the main gravel path, she pulled a handkerchief from under the band of her wristwatch and carefully blotted her upper lip and the back of her neck. She walked down the path toward the lawn and into the protection of a nut tree growing by the garden’s west wall. Its tall, wide branches gave shade to the bench underneath it, offering her a place to recover. She sat down and looked up into the green canopy until the crawling sensation in her scalp went away.

  On the other side of the kitchen-garden wall was the orchid house. It would be full of flowers as bright as birds of paradise. She fixed on this image until the other one—the one of the man lying in the earth—began to recede. She heard the distant trickle of water from the fountain, and licked her dry lips, but she was too drained to walk to it for a drink.

  After all these months of complete silence, enduring the torture of not knowing who he was and what had happened to him, why had this taciturn man on the edge of unlocking his identity been bludgeoned so ferociously to death in the carefully dug vegetable bed that had helped him to find himself again? She felt a flash of momentary anguish that after weeks of dedicated work this quiet man struggling to find his reason and his life had been denied both.

  She exhaled slowly, unclenched her hands, and looked around her. Who, she asked herself, could have come into this secluded place and killed the captain—apart from the obvious choice of Lieutenant Phipps?

  There were two heavy, arched oak doors in the ten-foot-high wall that surrounded the garden: the one she and Captain Martin had come through at its east end and the other, to her left, in its north side, which led to the drive she and Lord Montfort had walked up not half an hour ago. She noticed that it was closed. To her right, on the south side of the garden wall, was a pair of tall double gates to give entrance to carts. They stood half open at this time of year as the summer’s now empty garden beds were spread with well-rotted manure for autumn planting.

  The sound of voices, several of them, brought her head up to see a procession emerge at her end of the pergola. First came her husband, followed by Major Andrews—the hospi
tal’s commanding and chief medical officer—then Mrs. Jackson. They all stood in a group for a moment, hands lifted to shade their eyes, and then started across the garden toward her.

  “Good God, Clemmy!” Her husband’s face expressed both concern and exasperation. Yet again I have discovered a dead body. “Why on earth didn’t you wait for us before coming in here?” He half turned back to the body in the potato bed. “Major Andrews said that given Lieutenant Phipps’ recent progress it was highly unlikely that he was hallucinating.”

  “No, he wasn’t.” She looked over at the body in the potato bed. “Captain Sir Evelyn Bray,” she said, as if making an introduction, “is quite dead.” She looked around the garden, expecting to see someone else there with them standing under the shade of the walnut tree.

  Her husband’s concerned eyes sought hers, and he lifted a hand to her shoulder. “Clemmy, you are in shock, how sensible of you to come and sit over here.” She noticed that he was standing directly in front of her to block the sight of the man on the ground. “As soon as you can, I want you to go back to the house. Mrs. Jackson will take you.”

  “Did you…?”

  “Telephone? Yes, at Haversham Hall before I left. Colonel Valentine will be here as soon as he can. I will have to wait here for him, of course.”

  As indeed I shall too. She thought Ralph had been very efficient in calling in Colonel Valentine, their chief constable for the county. No doubt he’s hoping to prevent us from involving ourselves. She glanced at Mrs. Jackson, who was looking down her nose at the garden bed in which the body of Captain Bray was sprawled.