Rose put my address and number in her bag and left; walking erect and, I couldn’t help thinking, with some degree of elegance. She glanced towards the two men who were still standing at the bar as she passed, but they kept their eyes studiously on their glasses. I waited a minute or two then finished my beer and followed Rose out the door. Once on the pavement I jogged a few yards and ducked into a doorway. Sure enough, a moment later the two men came out of the Minstrel Boy and looked up and down the street. After some indecision they set off unhurriedly towards Rose’s flat. I let them turn the corner then went in the opposite direction.
8
June 18th
The streets around my flat had long since been cleared or rubble. But only as far as the side of the road and onto vacant lots where it had been bulldozed into piles. Successive springs had spread a proliferation of weeds and buddleia and now the gaps between buildings had begun to look like vagrants’ gardens. I had no idea when work would begin shifting the mounds of brick, stone and plaster that had once represented homes, although rumour had it that when they did they’d pull my building down first. I think the only reason it hadn’t been pulled down earlier was that it had been expected to collapse under its own weight. Judging by some of the cracks in the façade, it hadn’t quite given up on the idea. The place had been condemned as unsafe during the war, but somehow the old girl living on the top floor had been overlooked when everyone else had been moved out. Later, after it failed to collapse, people came and went again, more through desperation at finding somewhere to live than any belief in the building’s integrity. I planned to stay there as long as I could, but that was through habit rather than sentiment.
I stopped for a bite to eat on the way home. It was still light by the time I got back, the evening dancing on the edge of twilight as it does in early summer. Later in the season, just as one has got used to the light evenings they wane, dusk bringing with it that sense of fading hope. Perhaps the notion is a consequence of a melancholy nature. Yet I wasn’t alone. I imagine we had all got used to the war being over and those first feelings of exhilaration going flat. The future we may have suspected we didn’t have now seemed full of lost illusions.
Passing the telephone in the hall, on the spur of the moment I put in a trunk call to Penny. I only had to wait five minutes for the connection as, being late in the day the lines weren’t busy. I smoked another cigarette to pass the time while tracing the progress of one of the newer cracks from the corner by the front door to the cornice where an opportunistic spider had made its home. When the phone rang with my call it almost took me by surprise. Only it wasn’t Penny I was talking to but my mother.
‘Why won’t you give Penny a divorce?’ she demanded without preamble.
‘How nice to hear your voice, Mother.’
‘Don’t be facetious, Harry, it doesn’t suit you.’
‘I wasn’t aware Penny wanted a divorce,’ I said.
‘Why do you think she came to see you?’
‘I thought she came up to go to the theatre with Julia and Maurice Coveney.’
‘Maurice Coveney? What’s he got to do with it?’
‘Precisely what I was thinking. Put her on and I’ll ask.’
‘She wants to marry your brother,’ Mother said.
‘I thought it was the other way around.’
‘She isn’t home.’
‘Is George home?’
‘Do you want to speak with him?’
‘Not especially.’
‘Then why have you called?’
‘I wanted to speak with my wife.’
‘Don’t play games, Harry,’ said Mother and hung up.
I assumed games didn’t suit me either. I held onto the receiver as if giving her the opportunity to reconsider, but the connection was broken and she would have had to call trunks and book another call. That would have been far too much trouble for my mother to go to just to speak to me. I hung up, said goodnight to the spider and went up to my flat. I passed Sam on the stairs, on his way out, and I wondered if perhaps he wasn’t a housebreaker just off to work for the evening. If I’d still been a policeman I might have asked.
*
Early on in my army career I had always supposed——given that we’d win the war and I’d get through in one piece——that I’d go back to the police once it was over. Getting a commission changed that and, as the years passed, the prospect looked less and less appealing. For one thing those contemporaries of mine who had chosen to stay with the police rather than enlist would have made progress through the ranks while I would have had to re-enter again as I had left——as a uniformed constable. I suppose having reached the rank of captain in the army might have counted for something eventually, although the thought of taking orders from sergeants and inspectors in the meantime——men who might have only achieved rank through the general lack of manpower——would have stuck in my craw. I had got used to telling others what to do and wasn’t sure how long I’d last taking orders from people who, in another service, might well have been serving under me. That left me in the position (depending upon how one chose to view it) either with the prospect of a bleak and uncertain future, or the opportunity to start over with a fresh slate. Being divorced might have looked like part of the freshness of that slate, but being told to do it was something else that stuck in my craw.
*
Peter Quince was sticking new pins into the map when I got into the office the next morning. In addition to the flag that marked the general area where Kearney’s carrier had been found, a series of coloured arrows showed how the Allies had moved off the beaches towards Caen. South of the town, there were several new flags flying swastikas.
Peter glanced over his shoulder as I walked in.
‘It’s not as straightforward as it looked.’
‘Oh, why not?’
‘The 12SS-Panzers were in Caen. Kurt Meyer took over divisional command when Fritz Witt was killed on June 14th. He held Caen until July 8th then evacuated the city, leaving some elements of the division holding the line between Eterville and the River Orne.’ He stabbed a finger to a spot to the south of Caen near Maltot. ‘The division pulled out of the line on July 11th and was sent to Potigny, about 30 kilometers north of Falaise, for a rest and a refit.
‘That puts them where we want them, doesn’t it? Briefly, anyway. Vogel had Kearney’s ID discs and he was Hitlerjugend.’
‘Except the Hitlerjugend weren’t the only Division in the area.’
‘Who else was there?’
‘Let’s start with the other SS units,’ Peter said, picking some papers up from the desk.
As far as I was concerned, if it was a war crime you were investigating, the SS was always a good place to start. Experience had shown one rarely had to look any further. The propensity of the SS for atrocities was legend.
Peter pointed to the map again.
‘The 17SS Gotz von Berlichingen arrived just a few days after the window we’re looking at, part of the ISS-Panzer Corps. That included the 101SS Heavy Panzer Battalion, 12SS Hitlerjugend, 17th SS-Panzer Grenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen, and the Panzer Lehr Division as well as 1SS Leibstandarte. Although it does look as if most of these units arrived too late to be involved in Operation Epsom at the end of June. That’s the 26th to the 30th.’
I looked at Peter askance. ‘Epsom? Goodwood? Did a bookie help plan the invasion?’
‘Actually, Colonel G was wrong. Operation Goodwood was July 18th to 20th and took place to the east of Caen. Kearney’s carrier was involved in one of a series of feints Montgomery designed to pin the Germans to the west, away from Goodwood.’ He went back to his map. ‘I’d assumed Kearney’s carrier was involved in Epsom, but they weren’t. His platoon was attached to the 7th battalion of the Hampshire Regiment. They were part of 130 Brigade’s operation to take the village of Maltot and seize the bridgeheads over the Orne while 129 Brigade was to take the high ground of Hill 112 that commanded the ground between the vil
lage and the Orne.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, ‘what was that called, Operation Cheltenham?’
Peter smiled indulgently. ‘No, Jupiter, as a matter of fact. July 10th. That’s when the carrier was lost, along with much of 7th Hampshire’s B Company. It wasn’t actually recovered until 23rd of July, after Operation Express on July 22nd.’ He grinned at me. ‘There were two other operations before Goodwood, called Greenline and Pomegranate, if you were wondering.’
I hadn’t been. It sometimes seemed that headquarters staff kept a special detachment solely for the purpose of dreaming up names for military operations. For me these last names spoilt the symmetry of racecourse-themed operations and made them more difficult to remember. I hadn’t read any of the reports on the battle for Caen and the surrounding country and place names like Orne and Hill 112 didn’t mean anything to me. I wanted to concentrate on the carrier.
‘All right, the Hitlerjugend were there on the 10th when the carrier was lost. What other units can we definitely place at the scene?’
‘Companies of the 21st and 22nd battalions of the 10SS-Panzer Division——Frundsberg. They were holding Hill 112 and the ground east to Maltot and the River Orne. The Hohenstaufen——its sister Division, 9SS-Panzers——was in reserve. It was because they came up into the line that Jupiter didn’t succeed in taking Hill 112 and crossing the Orne.’
‘But they were all SS, right? And if we’re talking racing they’ve all got form. You said there were still elements of the Hitlerjugend nearby and the Division wasn’t pulled out until July 11th, the day after Dabs was murdered.’
‘The day after the carrier was lost,’ Peter corrected. ‘Not necessarily the same thing.’
‘Well, if Meyer’s 25th Grenadiers were there then as far as I’m concerned they’re still the favourite. But just to be safe let’s start by taking a close look at the others.’
‘That shouldn’t be too difficult,’ Peter said. ‘Although if you’re thinking of making a bet, there was another SS unit in France at the time. You might want to make them joint-favourites.’ He consulted the papers on his desk for a moment and stuck another flag on the map.
‘Who’s this?’
‘They were in Montauban, north of Toulouse on D-Day, and were ordered to the landing beaches. They were in Tulle on the 9th and the on the 10th reached Oradour-sur-Glane.’
‘2SS Das Reich?’
‘Right on the money.’
Ninety-nine men had been murdered in Tulle and the next day the village of Oradour-sur-Glane was torched and six hundred and forty-two more were massacred. They were civilians. Given the nature of the fighting north of Caen between the Canadian and 12SS Hitlerjugend, the fact that prisoners were not taken was not exactly surprising; it was even rumoured that the Canadians hadn’t been too fussy in their treatment of surrendering Germans. 2SS Das Reich, though, had systematically murdered men, women, and children. If Das Reich had been anywhere near Kearney’s carrier I knew who my money was riding on.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s see who we can place where and when. We’ve got runners with form, let’s see if we can put them in the same paddock.’
I left Peter to get on with it and went into my office. Jack was venting his ire on his Remington, stabbing accusatory fingers at several keys in turn. I knew how he felt.
‘Did you find out about the condition of the ID discs in the carrier?’ I asked when he stopped typing long enough to push his glasses onto the bridge of his nose again.
He pulled a sheet of paper from the pile beside the typewriter.
‘Yes,’ he said, passing it to me. ‘Consistent with going through a fire. What was left of their weapons were also present but pay-books and any other ID didn’t survive. They found nothing else, anyway.’
I read through Jack’s notes, verifying the facts for myself, then dropped into my chair.
‘I don’t suppose Major Hendrix rang back?’
Jack shrugged. ‘Not while I’ve been here.’
I got up again and went into the other office.
‘Stan, did Arnold Poole’s father mention he’d been visited by a Major Hendrix by any chance?’
‘Nope,’ said Stan, looking up from the pile of papers Peter had dropped onto his desk. ‘But then I didn’t ask.’
‘Robert Burleigh’s widow told me Saturday she’d had a visit. This Hendrix told her he was from the Graves Commission. He’s been to see Rose Kearney, too. Told her he was with the Paymaster General’s office. He rang here the day before yesterday after me with a story about being with the Provost Marshall.’
‘Gets around,’ said Stan.
‘Doesn’t he, though? I was supposed to meet him but he never got back to us.’
As I turned back into my office Stan said:
‘Ida got a visit from an officer from Poole’s battalion asking about Kearney and the others.’
‘Ida?’
‘Poole’s girlfriend.’
‘The wife of the man you smacked?’
Peter and Susie looked at Stan and then at each other.
‘Whoever it was could only have got her name from Poole’s father,’ Stan said. ‘No one else knew about her and Arnie, she reckoned.’
A thought occurred to me. ‘Assuming it was Hendrix who visited her, why didn’t she give him the letters?’
‘Because her husband was there probably. That’s why when I turned up he got so irritated and turned nasty. Someone else talking to his wife about her old boyfriend. I suppose the letters were the last straw.’
‘You’ve read them all now?’ I asked Susie.
‘Every line,’ she boasted. ‘Unfortunately our Arnie doesn’t mention any of the men he served with. There’s the usual sort of stuff you’d expect but mostly he wrote Ida about what they’d do when he got home. Sad really. Since he didn’t come home, I mean.’
The phone rang in the other office and a moment later Jack put his head around the corner.
‘Major Hendrix sends his apologies.’
‘For not getting back to us? Did he say why?’
‘Just that something came up.’
‘Would that be with the Graves Commission, the Paymaster General, or the Provost Marshall?’
‘Didn’t specify.’
‘He didn’t leave a number, I suppose?’
‘No.’
Peter and I exchanged a meaningful look and I decided I needed to ask Colonel G if he knew anything about Major Hendrix.
‘All right,’ I announced while I still had their attention, ‘let’s keep digging with what we’ve got. This looks to be straightforward and maybe I’m just suspicious, but something doesn’t smell quite right and I’d like to find out what it is before it starts rubbing off on us.’
I went back to my desk and rang Jekyll’s number. He wasn’t in his office so I left a message with his secretary. Her name was Joan and she had the kind of husky voice that was full of promise. I’d woven a whole series of fantasies around the sound of that voice while studiously avoiding any opportunity I might have of meeting her. I had so few illusions left I was rather miserly about keeping those I still had.
Having apportioned the work among the others, I found myself at a loose end. It was a warm day and stuffy in the office. There had been a wind overnight and dust hung in the air as it had in Berlin after the bombing. Like the other German cities, Berlin had resembled a sea of destruction out of which the few buildings that hadn’t been pulverised stuck like the bleached bones of beached whales. Dust had coated everything. It got in your teeth and the balls of your eyes. It left a gritty residue that wouldn’t wash off. Maybe it was my imagination but I thought the Biblical accounts of how the world might end had missed a trick. They should have added dust to fire, water, ice and plague. I sometimes thought everything might finally end by being swallowed under a fine accretion of bone-dry particles, choking us all on our last words. Perhaps that’s how they had died in Pompeii and Herculaneum; moving up through the Italy I’d never had t
he chance to investigate. Now I’m glad I hadn’t.
I got up, making an excuse to Jack he didn’t believe, and walked out of the office onto the street. The air smelt clearer outside but only because petrol was rationed and the few horse-drawn vehicles that had been left on the roads before the war had now disappeared. Perhaps in Victorian London I would have worried about drowning in horse-shit.
9
June 19th
If finding the unit responsible for the death of Dabs and his comrades would take some disentangling——given the close proximity of several German SS companies——it wouldn’t be impossible. Finding the exact culprits, though, was another matter. If, indeed, culprits there were. We’d been assuming that at least one of the dead had been the victim of a war crime although the burnt-out carrier and the bodies——even the missing Kearney——could very well still have quite logical explanations; it was really only the fact that Joseph Dabs had been found with a bullet in the head that marked the case out at all. The fact that Kearney’s ID discs had turned up on a dead German didn’t mean the man had killed him. Soldiers were notorious for collecting souvenirs. I had heard from old police colleagues I’d run into that London was awash with small arms now the war was over——some purloined British and American army service revolvers, others German pistols taken as souvenirs. In the far east it had been Samurai swords and gold teeth, pulled from the unresisting mouths of Japanese corpses.
That was the nature of war and if people want to get prissy about it, it behoves them to elect leaders who’ll keep them out of conflicts.
All right, I’ll admit not everyone has the opportunity to cast a ballot. But Germany certainly had, and it struck me they got more than they bargained for. If you want to make a pact with the devil, however, you’re obliged to dance to his tune. Even so, although I wasn’t about to admit to having much sympathy with Kurt Meyer and his 25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers, it seemed to me that given the desperate nature of the fighting, had the jackboot been on the other foot and Germany had won the war, the commander of the Canadian forces might well have found himself in the dock. And not a few British commanders alongside to keep him company. Always assuming the SS would have bothered with a dock, that is. Whether those who had sentenced Meyer to hang suspected something similar, I don’t know, but since we’d started looking into the circumstances of Kearney’s carrier I’d learned that back in January Meyer’s death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment.
The Unquiet Grave Page 8
