I was feeling glum and the alcohol hadn’t helped. The prospect of seeing Penny in the morning filled me with a sense of trepidation. We had only seen each other two or three times since I’d got back and we’d managed to argue each time. She could hold her end up in an argument but I always felt afterwards that it was my fault. Knowing that never helped to stop it happening again the next time, though. I’d fall into the same trap like a stubborn child who knows he’s in the wrong but is too wilful to admit it.
I resolved to phone her early the next morning and make some excuse for not seeing her, not sure if that was cowardice or the bitter part of valour.
Taking the bus back to Clerkenwell reminded me of the ride out to see Rose Kearney with Susie the previous day and that thought led inexorably to her missing brother and his dead comrades. I recalled what I had overheard Jekyll say to Sir Maurice Coveney about my “handling the business” and wondered, if he was talking about Dabs and Kearney’s carrier, what Coveney's interest in the matter might be. A couple of scorched corpses was hardly uncommon in war——an occupational hazard in armoured divisions——and hardly a concern, I would have thought of a civil servant. If that was what Coveney was. There was the way Dabs had died, of course, but as for Kearney, Europe was a continent of missing bodies. All the same, whatever it was about, I thought I had better get abreast of it or find myself on the wrong side of Jekyll’s short temper. In peace as in war it was generally the innocent——like us in the office, or Rose Kearney in County Wicklow for that matter——that got caught in the crossfire. I thought about Rose for a while and then about Edna Burleigh whom I’d seen that morning. Winning the war hadn’t done her and her kids any good and I doubted if she’d get much out of the peace that was to follow, either. Life was hard enough for her as it was without people like me coming round asking questions she didn’t have answers to.
Then I remembered she’d said something about someone else coming round asking questions, an officer from the Imperial Graves Commission. Edna’s husband, Bob, would have wound up in one of the military cemeteries in France, I supposed, and it was hardly out of the ordinary for the next of kin to be notified. Although why he had asked her about William Kearney I couldn’t guess. Of course, it just might be that Kearney’s body had finally turned up and through some bureaucratic foul-up his battalion hadn’t yet been informed. That would hardly be uncommon, either. I’d have to get Jack on to it Monday morning, to double-check with Kearney’s battalion and the Graves Commission. I tried to remember the name of the officer Edna Burleigh had said visited her, but after a couple of Ronnie’s gins it had gone. By the time I reached Clerkenwell I had given up trying.
6
June 16th
I telephoned the Belgravia house at eight the next morning. Without a flunky to answer her phone and too early for Julia to answer herself, I assumed Penny would be up and waiting for me. But I didn’t get Penny.
‘It’s Harry,’ I said. ‘Can I speak to Penny?’
‘You’re too late,’ Julia said. And for an odd instant I thought she was sharing some insight she possessed on the state of our marriage until she added, ‘She’s already left.’
‘Left? Left where?’
‘Back down to the country, where do you think, Harry?’
‘But I was supposed to see her this morning.’
‘Were you, Harry? She never said.’
‘When did she leave?’ I asked, loading my tone with enough suspicion that even Julia couldn’t fail to think I didn’t believe her.
‘Half-an-hour ago. The man who brought her up had to get back unexpectedly.’
‘She didn’t leave a message for me?’
‘No. You could always telephone down there,’ she suggested. ‘You know your own mother’s number, I suppose?’ When I didn’t reply she said, ‘It was nice seeing you again, Harry,’ her tone conveying enough irony that I couldn’t fail to miss that either. Then she hung up.
The exchange left me out of sorts despite the fact I had telephoned to tell Penny I couldn’t see her. The desired result had been achieved but I couldn’t help thinking I had lost an advantage. I won’t term it as the moral high-ground because morals didn’t exactly figure too much in our relationship. It was more a case of Penny having done to me what I was about to do to her, and no one likes a dose of their own medicine. I tried to persuade myself that her lift back to the country probably did have to leave early, but there wasn’t enough sugar in that to make the pill taste any less bitter.
I idled my way through the rest of the day, which is about all one can do with the barren wasteland that is a British Sunday, and went to bed so early that I was up at dawn and in the office before any of the others.
Jack attempted to hide his surprise at seeing me already in when he arrived and assumed there was some sort of flap on.
‘What’s up, Jekyll been on to you?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘although funnily enough I did run in to him on Saturday evening.’
‘You don’t look as if it was funny.’
‘He was with some ministry wallah. I got the idea they were talking about our Dabs case.’
‘Why would——’
‘No idea,’ I said. ‘We’d better see if we can find out, though.’
Jack dropped into his chair and reaching for the telephone. ‘Name?’
‘Coveney,’ I said, ‘Sir Maurice Coveney. Oh, and by the way, Kearney rhymes with journey, at least that’s how his sister Rose pronounces it.’ I’d liked to have laid it on a bit thicker, using rhyming slang, but I didn’t know the cockney slang for journey. I suppose I could have taken the trouble to look it up at the library but that would have knocked the spontaneity out of the thing. As it was Jack only looked at me doubtfully and grunted and I couldn’t squeeze much schadenfreude out of that.
We only had the one telephone line so I made a pot of tea as the others arrived then, between Jack’s calls, and before Susie got on the extension, I made one of my own to the Graves Commission. I still couldn’t remember the name of the officer who had visited Edna Burleigh, which was beginning to annoy me, so I made some general enquiries to see if there were any plans afoot for the re-interring of Burleigh, Poole and Dabs. The usual practice——given the circumstances of battle and troop movements at the time——would be for the dead to be buried where they fell until such time as a permanent grave and headstone could be provided for them. The clerk I was speaking to wanted to know the area of operations in which the men had died so I gave them the map reference we had. Several minutes later he came back on the line and told me that all the bodies in that area had already been moved to purpose-built cemeteries.
I put the phone down wondering why, if that were the case, a man from the Graves Commission would visit Edna Burleigh. I told Jack about it and asked him to get back onto Kearney’s battalion again and double-check that his body hadn’t turned up after all, then went into the other room and had Peter show me exactly where the carrier and the three bodies had been found.
Peter said he was waiting for a more detailed map and in the meantime had pinned up a general one of Normandy on the board and stuck a flag into the village of Maltot. It was to the south-west of Caen.
I remembered there had been some sort of argument between the Allies about Montgomery’s progress around Caen after the Normandy landings, the Americans operating to the west of Caen accusing the British of a certain lack of resolve. I only heard of the controversy later. At the time I’d been fully occupied in Italy, trying to make an impression on what Churchill had described as the soft under-belly of Europe. Perhaps there had been soft patches but I hadn’t found any. Most of the bits I’d had a poke at were as hard and unyielding as a Panzer’s carapace and, if a lot of the Italians had been pleased to see us, there weren’t many Germans standing by the side of the road waving flags as we passed.
I made a few notes as questions occurred to me but mostly I stood staring sightlessly at the map, running through the different sce
narios that would leave two men dead in a carrier, a third man with a bullet in the back of his head, and a fourth who had vanished altogether.
I was still staring at Peter’s flag when Stan rolled in. It was too early for lunch but I’d had no breakfast so I took him out to the pub around the corner, found they had nothing on offer that looked palatable enough to eat, and settled for a couple of pints.
‘Poole’s father’s a decent sort,’ Stan said. ‘There wasn’t much he could tell me, though. His wife died and he bought his son up on his own. Turned into a bit of a wide boy is the impression I got.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Eye for the main chance, is how his old man put it. He was a bit worried about him till the army took him and he thinks they straightened Arnie out.’
‘Arnie?’
‘That’s what they called him.’ Stan reached into his pocket and took out a photograph and slid it across the table.
It had been taken in Blackpool because I could see the tower and the amusement arcades along the Mile. Arnold Poole was between two girls, his arms linked through theirs as they walked along the front. All three were grinning as if they were having a hell of a time. It looked to me like a works’ outing before the war and one of the Mile photographers had snapped them and, I supposed, sold Poole a copy. I took a closer look at him and saw a young man in his best suit, dark hair slicked back under a trilby and with one of those thin moustaches that Flynn and Ronald Coleman had popularized before the war. Despite what Edna Burleigh had said, he didn’t look miserable. But perhaps he hadn’t cared for the army. He was a good-looking boy and I could tell by his expression that he knew it, and knew the two girls he was escorting knew it, too. Given how he looked at the end, I thought not for the first time that it was as well we don’t know what the future holds for us.
‘He worked at a cotton mill before he was called up,’ Stan said.
‘Where?
‘Blackburn. Not on a loom,’ said Stan. ‘Poole was office staff.’
I was puzzled. ‘Even a V1 off-course couldn’t reach Blackburn. They didn’t have that sort of range.’
‘V1?’
‘Edna Burleigh said her husband told her Poole’s wife and kids had been killed by a doodlebug. Perhaps they were in London.’
Stan shook his head. ‘Poole wasn’t married. Either she was confusing him with someone else or perhaps Arnie was in the habit of making up stories.’
I supposed that was possible if what his father had said about him was true. ‘Write home, did he?’
‘Postcards to his dad but he did have a girlfriend he wrote to. Met her six months before he left. Seemed serious.’
‘Either of these two?’ I asked, gesturing at the photo.
‘No.’
‘Perhaps she was the one who was killed.’
Stan lifted his pint and took a swallow. I waited.
‘No,’ he eventually said. ‘I went to see her. Pretty little thing. Married someone else after she heard about Arnie but kept his letters.’
‘Oh? Did you ask to look at them?’
Stan drank some more beer and I could tell there was more to it.
‘Poole’s dad gave me her address and I went to see her on the Sunday morning.’
‘Surprised to see you, I suppose,’ I said.
‘Yes. So was her husband. She was sort of embarrassed about it, though I could tell she wanted to talk about Arnie. I would have preferred to speak to her on her own, but her husband wasn’t having that. Kept interrupting. Belittling her...you know the type.’ Stan lit a cigarette. ‘Anyway, she didn’t know anything about Kearney or Burleigh but she had met Dabs. They’d had some leave and Poole had brought Dabs back with him. He hadn’t stayed with Poole’s father so he must have had a room somewhere for the weekend. Ida——that’s Arnie’s girlfriend——had taken a friend along to make up a foursome and they’d gone out together. She said she didn’t care too much for Dabs. Sly, she thought, although she said him and Arnie got on well.’
‘Sly’s an odd way of describing someone you probably never met for more than a few hours,’ I said.
Stan didn’t have an opinion on that but he did have more to say.
‘As I was leaving, Ida try to slip me the letters Arnie had sent her. Her husband saw them and wanted to know what they were. Upshot is he flies into a rage and starts cutting up rough.’
‘With you?’
‘With his wife.’ Stan looked at me and shrugged. ‘I had to teach him some manners.’
‘Hit him?’
‘Just a clip,’ said Stan.
I imagined how much damage a clip from Stan might do.
‘She said she’d be all right but I was worried what he’d do when I wasn’t around.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ I told him.
‘I was the one who went there asking questions,’ he said.
‘Sounds to me like her husband is the type who doesn’t need excuses.’
Later, when everyone got back from lunch I called a meeting. Most of what we were currently employed upon was the routine business that took up most of our time. Given that I was coming to suspect Coveney was putting pressure upon Colonel G over the matter, I decided it would be as well to concentrate all our efforts on Dabs, Kearney and the carrier until we at least knew precisely what it was about.
I’d spent the best part of the previous week ploughing through sworn testimonies taken from a clutch of minor minions in some lower Bavarian backwater. From the version these men had given their interrogators, I was almost convinced that the war hadn’t reached that far south in Germany. We were looking for links to a Waffen SS unit active in Czechoslovakia in 1940 and although there was still a healthy stack of interviews left to go through, I knew the odds of finding anything useful in the Bavarian testimonies would be slightly longer than the chance of Adolf Eichmann getting a caution and being bound over to keep the peace should anyone ever lay their hands on him.
Tired of reading the accounts of people who apparently hadn’t noticed anything of what was going on all around them, I for one wasn’t averse to a change of subject.
We talked about what we had discovered so far over a mug of ersatz coffee and Stan passed the letters from Arnie Poole to Susie to read. I pinned Arnie’s photo up on the board by the map and put beside it the one of Robert Burleigh his wife Edna had given me. Burleigh hadn’t been blessed with looks as good as Poole’s and, in contrast, looked more like a gormless member of the Three Stooges. Thin where his wife was stout, they must have made an odd couple. I didn’t think his children had inherited his looks, which might be thought of as a blessing until you considered that he hadn’t left them anything else either.
‘These are really sweet,’ Susie said, looking up from the letters. She was sitting on one of the desks, swinging her legs.
‘Heartfelt?’ I asked.
She scowled as if she suspected I was being cynical. I wasn’t. From the description Poole’s father had given of him, Stan had assessed Arnie Poole as being something of a wide boy. I was merely wondering if his letters held any trace of insincerity, any suggestion that he was stringing the girl along. Hardly any concern of ours if he had been, one might think, but it would give some sort of indication as to the way Arnie Poole’s mind worked.
‘Yes,’ said Susie. ‘He must have really loved her. They’d been planning on getting married.’
‘Then suddenly he was posted to the south coast in time for D Day,’ said Stan, as if he’d already got the story from the girlfriend herself.
‘But nothing in them about the rest of the carrier crew?’ I asked.
‘Not yet,’ Susie said, reaching for the next letter.
I lit another cigarette, trying to remember what the Capstan I’d switched from used to taste like. Beach tar came to mind, but I was probably just trying to persuade myself I’d made a good decision. I was thinking of cigarettes mainly because I didn’t want to think of the letters I’d written to Penny while
I’d been away. And, more to the point, whether she had kept them.
‘Well,’ I said, exhaling a stream of less than satisfactory smoke. ‘It was a long shot anyway, but it doesn’t look as if we’re going to get anything useful from Burleigh or Poole’s families——’
‘Dabs was an orphan,’ Jack put in. ‘A Barnardo’s Boy, so he’s a dead end.’
‘Aptly put, Jack,’ Peter observed.
‘We don’t know anything much about Kearney, do we?’ said Stan. ‘Do you want me to have a word with this sister of his, see what I can get out of her?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s got a cousin who doesn’t care for the British army, so you’d better keep your hands to yourself for the time being.’ This brought a round of raised eyebrows from the others but I wasn’t about to explain. ‘I’ll have another go at her myself,’ I told him.
‘Would you like me to come along again?’ Susie asked. ‘In case you need a chaperone, Captain.’
‘Thanks but I think you inhibited her last time, Susie. Give me that phone number you took and I’ll see what she can tell me about her brother without the distraction of having to compete with you.’
‘There’s gratitude,’ said Susie, flouncing off the desk and narrowing her eyes. ‘Just you mind that Rose Kearney doesn’t become too uninhibited, Captain.’
I went over the map with Peter again, trying to pin down exactly which German units were active west of Caen. It must have been a confusing campaign, particularly for Bren gun carriers which, by their very nature, operated in advance of the infantry. He had made an appointment with the Hampshire Regiment to go through the official accounts and the 7th battalion’s War Diaries. For the moment, though we still had several choices for the units Kearney’s carrier had run up against.
The Unquiet Grave Page 6
