The Unquiet Grave
David J Oldman
© David J Oldman 2016
David J Oldman has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2016 by Endeavour Press
Table of Contents
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1
Cocooned in the dark, it came as a shock to see her standing in front of me, larger than life and in the arms of another man. I recognized her immediately, even though they had changed her. Done something with her hair and somehow softened her rather angular features. But they couldn't change her eyes. It was the look in her eyes I remembered most of all.
*
June 14th 1946
The summer I met Rose Kearney I was living in a cold water flat in Clerkenwell, hidden at the back of one of those old courts just off Cowcross Street. It wasn’t much of a place, just two rooms and a shared bathroom down the hall——even if there was no one left to share it with.
Late in the war one of the last V2 rockets to reach London penetrated the maze of railway tunnels beneath Smithfield market and the explosion brought many of the surrounding buildings down into the crater. The building I lived in stayed up but most of the old warehouse tenements around it collapsed. More than a hundred people died——women and children among them, queuing in the market that morning on the rumour of rabbits for sale. But the damage to the building ensured the rent on the flat was cheap and the location was handy for work; two stops by underground from Farringdon on the Metropolitan and District Line to the office my section had been allocated just off Great Portland Street. And living on a bombsite was hardly uncommon in London at that time. Nor, I suppose, was being jammed up against a railway line or a market. At least by then they’d stopped slaughtering live animals there. Even so, none of it gave the address much of a cachet.
The area was close to what had once been known as Little Italy. There weren’t as many Italians as there had been before the war——internment and the Blitz had thinned out much of the population——but they had slowly begun drifting back. I daresay swapping sides helped rehabilitate many of Italian descent; we’d all seen the newsreels of the partisans stringing Mussolini up by his ankles.
They’d strung up Il Duce’s mistress, too, although watching the film of it I have to admit to feeling a little sorry for her. A case of the wrong place at the wrong time, I suppose. Which ought to be a lesson for us all in choosing the company we keep.
*
I was in Berlin when the war ended, having got there through North Africa and Italy where I received my commission. While waiting my turn to be demobbed, I had expected to spend what remained of my army career riding around the city in a Jeep helping prevent the Russians taking the sort of inch they could turn into a mile. The army hadn’t quite finished with me, though, and before my papers came through I found I had been promoted and transferred into a section of the Intelligence Corps under a hard-faced Scot named Jekyll. It had been set up to investigate war crimes and I assumed someone had got wind of the fact that before the war I’d been a policeman. I suppose they thought it might give me some sort of expertise in the matter. It didn’t, of course, but I soon discovered that no one else had much expertise in that line either.
To say we were investigating war crimes makes the work sound as if we were personally dropping the sword of justice onto the necks of the Nazi leaders. The truth was our section was just one among many and didn’t have anything to do with the big fish being netted for Nuremburg. Our brief was to look into those cases of army personnel who may have been either the victims or the perpetrators of war crimes. And the only things we ever hooked in the piscatorial line were small fry, tiddlers from the schools of cod-faced National Socialists who had “just followed orders”; and some from that swarm of bureaucratic guppies who swam alongside them, handling the paperwork. If it ever looked as if we might get a bite from someone really worth landing——someone involved in camp administration or a regional bigwig——we were supposed to throw them back to the prosecutors higher up the food chain. What this meant in reality was that our job consisted mostly of sifting through files: the interrogation transcripts of POW and Displaced Persons, witness statements, reports dealing with missing persons and accounts of unidentified bodies, where the death might have occurred in questionable circumstances. Trying to marry up the loose ends. War crimes being within the purview of the Army Intelligence Division, cases usually came to us so that we could do the donkey-work before passing on anything of value so that others could squabble over the kudos.
Colonel Jekyll——or Colonel G as we called him——was a short-tempered Borderer with a head of hair like the bristles on a scrubbing brush and a manner just as abrasive. He only had one good eye, which rarely looked warmer than the glass replacement he wore in the other socket, and he used it like a watchful vulture, presiding over other sections besides ours. He’d been an engineer before the war, apparently, used to working within the world of tolerances and pressures, stress and loadings——all measurements he brought to bear upon his subordinates.
Once a week Jekyll would arrive and go over what we were working on. He would take with him anything which he thought others might be more fitted to deal with and, on occasion, leave us with something that had turned up in one of his other units. This meant as a general rule we only saw him on Friday afternoons, although——to keep us on our toes——he was just as likely to drop in unannounced anytime.
We inhabited two stuffy first-floor rooms overlooking Clipstone Street, and were a mixed bunch; it not being immediately clear what sort of military reasoning had brought us together. I admit there was some logic behind co-opting Peter Quince, a lanky lieutenant who had just received his law degree when he’d been called up. To my mind that end of justice always seemed like examining a mummified corpse——hidebound, desiccated remains from which anything recognisable had already been removed. But for some reason it appealed to Peter. He was generally able to pick out the salient points from a situation, like a pathologist separating the vital organs from an otherwise uninteresting carcass. Still looking like precisely what he had been——a bookish law student——Peter was the antithesis of Stan Woodruff, a bull-like NCO who at first glance most would have pegged as a professional boxer. He had the nose for it, slightly flattened by the gloves he hadn’t managed to avoid, and also the makings of a cauliflower ear. But he’d acquired these for nothing in the amateur ring, boxing for his regiment. Damage apart, there was still more than a residual trace of the masculine good looks he’d once possessed and, luckily, none of the punches he’d failed to avoid seemed to have made much of a dent in his still sharp brain.
The sole female on our staff was Susie Blake, an ATS――a service arm whose members had once been called, and often still were, FANYs. Susie looked after our filing and most of the routine typing and office work. A vivacious brunette, she gave the office the spark it would have otherwise lacked. Short and bright-eyed, she seemed to suffer from having been issued with a uniform one size too small. It gave her a top-heavy look, but she was good-natured about it and never comp
lained about the extra work re-sewing her buttons might have given her.
Apart from me, that just left my corporal, Jack Hibbert, the man responsible for putting things on and taking things off my desk, and generally keeping the office running. Jack had a thin, bird-like face with a beaky nose that wouldn’t support his glasses. He was forever interrupting his typing to push them back in place. He occupied a desk and a typewriter on the other side of the room I shared with him. The other three worked next door.
Jack was sitting at his battered Remington as I got in that particular June morning, picking out the letters with four fingers and a thumb and having to stop now and then to adjust his glasses or untangle the keys where his enthusiasm had got the better of his skill.
He glanced up briefly and said ‘good morning’ as I dropped into the chair behind my desk, then pushed his glasses back up his nose and went on with whatever it was he was doing. I looked down at what I had in front of me, tried to remember what I had been doing the previous evening, then matched one against the other. Nothing seemed out of place except for a file that lay in the centre of the desk. I opened it and found a letter attached to a report about a burnt-out Bren gun carrier.
I flipped through it then turned to Jack. ‘Who’s Rose Kearney?’
He stopped typing. ‘Rose who?’
‘Rose Kearney.’
‘Search me. What, some actress or other?’
I waved the file at him.
‘What’s that?’
‘That’s what I’m asking.’
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d left it there.’
In the privacy of the office, and in the absence of Colonel G, none of us bothered with the protocols of rank. By then we had all pretty much had our fill of military etiquette.
‘Who did you say again?’ he came over and looked through the file.
‘Not Kearney like in King Lears,’ he said.
‘King Lears? What’s Shakespeare got to do with it?’
‘Rhyming slang,’ said Jack. ‘Ears. I served with a bloke called Kearney. Irish, but from the north. In the south they pronounce it Karney, as in blarney.’
‘Very apt,’ I said. ‘How do you know this Rose was from the south?’
He pointed to the letter. ‘She wrote from County Wicklow. A Rose by any other name...?’
I took the file back. Jack was fond of the odd Shakespearean quotation although they rarely led anywhere. I read the letter properly then looked through the rest of the file. Kearney was the name of the NCO who had commanded the damaged Bren gun carrier.
‘So,’ I said to Jack, getting back on track. ‘Bren gun carrier. Normandy, July of forty-four. One vehicle, two dead, burned to a crisp, ID through discs. Third member of the crew found with a bullet in the back of the head, which, I presume, is why there’s a file. Fourth man——the aforementioned Kearney——sergeant in command, never found.’
‘Not one of mine.’
He put his head into the other room and said something to the others about Bren gun carriers and kebabs. Jack had also spent some of his war in North Africa and claimed to know a thing or two about Middle-Eastern cuisine.
Getting no response, he turned back to me and shrugged. ‘Got a reference? Want me to look it up?’
I shook my head, tossed the file aside and lit a cigarette. Although tobacco had never been rationed during the war, some brands of cigarettes were difficult to get and I’d recently switched from Capstan Full Strength to Park Drive, finding myself missing the way the Capstan had had of scraping the throat like a rasp. Jack continued to watch me for a moment as if he was thinking of something else, then went back to clattering on the Remington. I pulled on the cigarette for a minute or two and found, if you didn’t look, the discordant racket of the typewriter sounded like a tap dancer who hadn’t quite mastered his routine. As I watched the smoke curling in a shaft of sunlight coming through our one window, I pictured a fat man in a tuxedo shifting his weight from foot to foot with his face getting redder and redder. Then Susie brought me a mug of tea and I got a picture in my head of something altogether different.
She put the tea down, reached a finger under my chin and raised my eyes to the level of hers.
‘I saw Colonel G leaving as I arrived.’
I sat up. ‘Did you? What did he want?’
‘I was the other side of the road. He didn’t see me.’ She pouted as if he might have ignored her on purpose.
‘Did he leave a message?’
‘Not on my desk.’
‘Oh...right.’ I put the cigarette back in my mouth, picked up the tea with one hand and pulled the Kearney file back towards me with the other. ‘Thanks, Susie.’
‘One good turn, Captain,’ she replied archly, bright eyes widening and leaving me wondering what she meant.
*
The letter from Rose Kearney was clipped to the top of the file. Beneath it was a sheet headed 43rd Wessex Division, 129th Brigade, and an account of the discovery by D Company of the 4th battalion Wiltshire Regiment of the burnt remains of a Universal Carrier to the south-west of Caen on July 23rd, 1944, some six weeks after the D-Day invasion. The rest of the file was a mix of documents: excerpts from the military records of the carrier crew, a smudged copy of the initial report from the Field Ambulance unit who had recovered the vehicle and bodies, and details of the battalion to which the carrier had been attached. Most interesting of all was a statement dated 29th August 1944, concerning effects found on the body of a dead SS-Unterscharführer by the name of Vogel following the fighting in the Falaise Pocket that month.
Rose Kearney’s letter was much more recent and dated February 3rd of the current year. It informed the recipient that she was Sergeant Kearney’s sister. She wrote that she had been told in the summer of 1944 that her brother was missing in action and had heard nothing since. Her subsequent enquiries had not been answered. Since the war was over and her brother had still not returned home——home being a village in County Wicklow, Ireland——she was coming to London to make enquiries. Her Irish address was at the top of the letter and she also supplied an address in Kilburn where she would be staying once in London. She gave no telephone number.
It was a decent letter and Rose Kearney had a neat hand, her loops bordering upon the florid, giving the note an almost artistic air. Reading it made a nice change from deciphering the scrawl that made up the majority of the reports we handled. The letter didn’t add anything to the file to which it was attached and I could only suppose that whoever had passed it on to Colonel G had thought it might be worthwhile interviewing Rose Kearney when she arrived in London. Since she was coming to ask us about her brother, though, I didn’t see why it should.
The reason a file existed to which Rose Kearney’s letter could be attached was plain enough; while two dead men in a burnt Bren gun Carrier, identified only through their ID discs, and a third man missing was hardly out of the common run of things, a fourth with a bullet in the back of his head was another matter. It was the sort of circumstance that our section had been set up to look into——although usually a single death that appeared beyond the code of the Hague Convention wasn’t generally of enough importance to warrant the time spent investigating. Besides which, of course, there could also be a reasonable explanation for each of the deaths.
I read all the papers again and decided the most pertinent fact was that found among the effects on the body of an SS sergeant, Otto Vogel, were the identity discs belonging to the missing Sergeant William Kearney. Although Vogel had been killed a month after the carrier had been recovered and at a different location, it was still, on the face of it, a damning piece of evidence. Once again though even this might have an innocent explanation.
I got up and dropped the file on Jack’s desk.
‘Get on the blower and make sure this Kearney hasn’t turned up alive, will you? One of the four seems to have been executed and possibly Kearney too. It’s not very likely he survived but there’s no point in going t
o any trouble over him if it’s just a clerical fuck-up.’
Jack reached for the phone. ‘To be or not to be...?’
‘If he hasn’t, try his battalion and see what else they’ve got on him and his carrier crew. And the Red Cross, too. See if his name appears on any of their POW lists. Oh, then see if you can find out if any of Colonel G’s other people have seen this file already.’
Jack threw one of his sardonic deadpans over the top of his glasses. ‘Anything else?’
‘Not unless you can think of something.’
I started back to my desk then turned. ‘Yes, the sister. See if she’s been in touch since she arrived.’
‘Sister?’
‘Rose. It’s in the letter.’
I left him to it and brewed up another pot of tea for everyone. I ran a very democratic unit.
2
When I first got back to London I found it strangely intact. It might be an odd thing to say but after Berlin it seemed to me as though London had got off lightly. Some parts of the German capital had simply ceased to exist; whole suburbs were little more than a desert of rubble. The centre of London and the docks and the East End had caught it badly, of course, but to me it appeared that beyond these areas the bombing had been random——unlike Berlin where you got the impression that the objective had been to exterminate every living creature.
Having gone through the war to that point without the slightest regard for the fate of any German at all, I had found to my surprise a creeping sympathy for the civilian population. The feeling waxed and waned, of course, depending on things you learned about what had happened, but by then a new villain had already taken the place of the Germans, tailor-made as a substitute once you heard the stories of what the German women went through when the Russians arrived.
Getting back to England was like being able to breathe fresh air again after being forced to inhale someone else’s rancid odour. London, of course, was still redolent of coal smoke and fog and the pervasive tang of crushed masonry, but the population weren’t wearing that haunted look, that expression of defeat the hunted have when they’ve finally given up running.
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