The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  ‘I’ll have to get a job,’ Ida said, ‘but they’re not easy to find.’

  ‘What did you do in Blackburn?’

  ‘I worked in a factory during the war. But we all got the sack when the men came back.’

  ‘There are factories in London,’ I said, although I supposed the same thing applied.

  Everyone had wanted women to do their bit and take on factory and agricultural work while the war was on and the men were away, but it was a different matter now they were back. Labour was cheap and jobs were scarce. Attitudes had changed, too, and all those women who had worked in service before the war had found a freedom they might never had dreamed before the conflict. Most weren’t prepared to go back to the sort of servile work they had done before as a matter of course. Witness Julia’s problems, I thought to myself. But that didn’t help Ida. Nor Stan if he was helping support her. But maybe he looked upon it as part of a master plan. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the girl, escaping the clutches of one man to perhaps fall under the control of another, decent man though Stan Woodruff was.

  She jumped up suddenly and said, ‘Ooo, what’s the time? I’m being shown the London sights today.’

  It was gone eleven. I started to clear the table and pushed the jar of jam towards her.

  ‘Take it. I won’t eat it.’

  Ida looked at me doubtfully then swept up Penny’s jam, clutching the pot to her moth-eaten pullover. She smiled shyly as I saw her to the door. Washing up, I couldn’t help thinking what a different proposition Ida from Blackburn was to the oddly confident, Rose Kearney from Ballydrum.

  *

  Despite the office presumption that we were Colonel G’s right hand, he rarely told us what his left hand was doing. So——in a spirit of equitability——when Jekyll dropped in unexpectedly on Monday afternoon, I didn’t tell him about Henry Gifford from Special Branch.

  When I got back from an early lunch I found him leaning over Susie’s desk, talking to her in a voice so low I couldn’t catch what he was saying. Peter, who had been on the telephone all morning was adjusting the pins in his map again, taking no notice.

  Jekyll straightened up as I came in, nodding to me. I waited, assuming he had some particular reason for being there since we’d only seen him the previous Friday, but he merely asked how the investigation was progressing, as if we had spent the whole weekend in the office.

  I made a general comment about waiting for people to get back to us before asking, while trying to sound as off-hand as I could, how he had come to be at Julia’s the weekend before last. I had been meaning to ask when I’d joined him for a drink at the Rag, and again on Friday, but the appropriate opportunity never seemed to turn up.

  It was obvious he didn’t care that it had turned up now, glaring at me indignantly as if I’d breeched some rule of social etiquette. With Susie and the others present, though, he wasn’t prepared to be as rude to me as he might had we been on our own.

  ‘A meeting,’ he replied curtly. ‘Sir Maurice happened to be running late and suggested we talk in the car on his way to his engagement.’

  And having now given me an explanation he apparently felt bound to justify the way he had been attired.

  ‘Coveney asked me in for a drink. Had I known it was a formal evening, naturally I wouldn’t have accepted. Not dressed as I was.’ His Scots nose wrinkled as though he’d just been presented with an over-ripe haggis. ‘Rather bad form on Coveney’s part, I thought.’

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone noticed, sir,’ I said, suppressing a smile.

  He turned his glass eye on me, no doubt suspecting impertinence.

  ‘Of course, I was surprised to see you there. I had no idea the hostess was your aunt.’

  ‘Wife’s aunt actually, sir.’

  ‘So Coveney said.’

  ‘My wife and I lived at the house for a few months when we first married.’

  ‘He said as much. A friend of the family, isn’t he? I had assumed you’d met before. Not at the wedding?’

  By his tone, I took this to be some reverse impertinence and recalled how Coveney had looked down his nose at me. I suspected the man might have told Jekyll what sort of wedding it had been. Whatever he and Coveney had met to discuss, I had the feeling I had been tacked on under “any other business”.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was a quiet wedding. We were married at a registry office.’

  The fact was, neither Penny’s family nor mine had been present. Apart from Julia, that is. And she hadn’t really wanted to be there. Having a civil wedding service had been just another stick Penny’s family had used to beat me with——one they shared with my mother in this case——despite it having been Penny’s idea to get married at a registry office. She maintained she couldn’t face one of those elaborate society weddings and, since I was just a lowly policeman and Penny’s father had refused to pay for the affair, I was only too happy to agree. Reggie’s motive had been to make Penny think twice, of course; it was only afterwards, once I found out how the rest of her family felt about me, that I had begun to question Penny’s motive.

  But Jekyll was right, Coveney hadn’t been at the wedding but it was odd how I had never heard of him before or since. True, I didn’t see much of my in-laws before the war——and consequently their friends——even so it seemed surprising that no one had mentioned him, Coveney’s wife having been such a good friend of Penny’s mother. I wondered suddenly what Penny was in the habit of calling him: Uncle Maurice? If so, it would hardly qualify him as a potential suitor. Equally, if he did have designs in that direction, I could hardly believe that Penny’s mother would entertain the idea. Then I have found that the upper-classes have a different perspective on that sort of thing: their children, like their pets and their livestock, are often viewed as commodities, particularly useful for alliances and breeding programmes.

  My conversation with Jekyll having died a natural death, he had turned to where Peter was still playing with his map. I looked over their shoulders as Peter pointed out the Château de Maltot to Jekyll. But the blood-red pin denoting where the carrier and Dabs’ body had been found was no longer there. It had travelled slightly north-east and was now stuck in the middle of a wood bordering the River Orne.

  ‘You’ve moved the carrier pin,’ I said

  Peter glanced over his shoulder. ‘I had the wrong château. The fighting at the Château de Maltot was pretty fierce and I was thinking on Friday that if Kearney’s carrier had been destroyed nearby someone would have seen it. But I went through both the Hampshire’s and the Dorset’s War Diaries for the day but no one mentioned it. 7th Hampshires’ B Company was here, you see——’ and he pointed to the edge of Maltot village closest to Caen. ‘They got nearer the river than the rest of the battalion and must have been under severe pressure. It occurred to me that some of them might have crossed this road here, to Feuguerolles-sur-Orne, looking for cover in the wood perhaps.’

  ‘But how do you know there was a château in the wood?’

  ‘I got on to 43rd Wessex Division. They put me on to the 129th Field Ambulance who recovered the bodies. It’s what I should have done in the first place, of course. They confirmed there was a building here——’ he gestured to a small square on the map in the centre of the wood. ‘The 43rd said that it was known as a château but wasn’t a particularly grand house. Nothing but a ruin when they got there, or course, but not a château in the strictest sense of the word. But the French often allow themselves some latitude in these matters.’

  So much for the French, I thought. I assumed that was what he had been doing on the telephone all morning.

  ‘I was called Château de Hêtres, apparently,’ Peter said, ‘Hêtres being the French for beeches. I assume the wood is a beech wood.’

  I took his word for it, Peter’s French being far better than mine. Then the significance of the name dawned on me and I began to laugh. Peter and Jekyll both looked at me as if I’d lost my senses.

  ‘Châtea
u de Hêtres,’ I said. ‘Strandhaus, as Werner Richter called it. Beach house...The Beeches...? A play on words. At least there was one German in Normandy with a sense of humour.’

  Jekyll didn’t appear to know what I was talking about but Peter offered up the ghost of a smile. It wasn’t much of a joke but I don’t suppose there was too much else to laugh about during the Normandy campaign. What it did show was that Richter and the rest of Müller’s platoon had been at the Château where Kearney’s carrier had been found.

  Grand house or not, according to the 43rd Division it was now a ruin. But then most towns, villages and farmsteads fought over following the invasion had been left in ruins. It made me wonder, assuming Richter was right, what the owner had been doing there, in the middle of a war zone. If they had had any sense, anyone left in the area would have evacuated themselves before the fighting came their way. But perhaps the owner had had no choice; and if the Gestapo were with him, as Richter had maintained, the man might well have been under arrest.

  ‘I can’t see,’ Jekyll said to Peter, ‘that confusing the châteaux is going to make any material difference. It’s still down to the 25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers, isn’t it?’

  ‘Probably more so, sir, as the Château de Maltot was held by Frundsberg——10SS-Panzer-Division——not Hitlerjugend.’

  ‘I’ve requested a copy of Obersturmführer Müller’s file and anything further held on SS-Mann Richter and SS-Unterscharführer Vogel,’ I put in, just so Jekyll would know I hadn’t been sitting on my hands while Peter had been doing all the work. ‘Ideally I’d like to interview Müller myself. In the meantime, though, we’ll keep searching through the files we hold for anything relevant.’

  ‘Well, if you need any further authorization to expedite the matter,’ Jekyll said, taking my arm and steering me towards he door, ‘just contact my office.’ We were through the door and at the top of the stairs before he added, ‘I shan’t be making my usual Friday visit this week. I have to go to Scotland.’

  ‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘Leave is it, sir?’

  ‘Business. But at least I’ll have an opportunity to see my people. I doubt I’ll be back before the weekend.’

  I noted he said “people” rather than “family”. We still weren’t sure if Jekyll was married or not. Susie was confident he wasn’t and, in a twist on Jane Austen, was convinced a laird in possession of a grouse moor must be in want of a wife. She hadn’t yet turned up for work in brogues and tartan, but I suspected she might have them on hand in her wardrobe.

  At street level Jekyll stopped. ‘Have a report for me when I get back, will you?’

  He tipped his forefinger to his cap and I threw up a salute then watched him walk smartly down the street to his car.

  ‘Colonel G’s off to Scotland,’ I told them back in the office. ‘He won’t be in Friday. That will give us a week to come up with our corroborating evidence. We’ve got his authorization to G-up anyone who’s slow responding to requests.’

  ‘G-up,’ said Jack, putting the kettle on. ‘Very dry.’

  ‘Not for me, Jack,’ said Susie, picking up her bag. ‘I’m out for lunch.’

  I went back to my desk. After a couple of minutes Jack came in with the tea, sat down and began pecking at his Remington again, like a novelist in the grip of his muse.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance our Major Hendrix has called back?’ I asked.

  Jack merely shook his head, more miserly with the spoken word.

  A fattening file marked Joseph Dabs sat on the corner of the desk. I leafed through it again and found a photograph I hadn’t seen before.

  ‘Where did this come from?’

  Jack glanced at the photo and back at his typewriter.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Find out, will you?’

  He muttered and went next door.

  The photograph showed a well-dressed man in a suit and hat standing in front of a portico entrance to a building. Next to him was a woman in a short jacket and pencil skirt. They were young and, judging by the clothes, the photo had been taken some years before the war. She was smiling attractively for the camera. He was not. On the back was written: For Billy: A terrible beauty.

  A terrible beauty I knew to be a line from a W.B.Yeats poem, although that was as much as I knew. Was Billy William Kearney?

  I lit a cigarette and blew a couple of smoke rings. If Jekyll expected to be in Scotland for the whole week, I began to wonder what I was going to do while he was gone. I’d seen everyone I could; Rose had disappeared and Hendrix never appeared. Peter and Stan would be busy chasing the Hitlerjugend, Peter having suggested he go through the transcript of Meyer’s trial to see if it threw up any familiar names. He would enjoy that, reading pages of legal testimony, although personally I couldn’t see that it would advance things materially. We’d already added Meyer’s tainted name to the mix, heaping more opprobrium upon the former general, and that was clearly enough for Jekyll. Even so, I still had a nagging suspicion there might be more to it.

  I leaned across the desk towards the open door. ‘Stan!’

  A second later he looked around the jamb, the sort of a questioning expression on his face that his namesake, Laurel, usually wore whenever he’d done something to exasperate Oliver Hardy. Given his battered nose, though, the quizzical look wasn’t as humorous.

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘The Barnado’s homes? Any progress?’

  ‘Susie’s still ringing round to see which one Dabs was at.’

  ‘All right. I want you to go back to the Wiltshire battalions. The ones involved in Operation Express. They should have a record of precisely who first found the carrier. I want as much detail as possible.’

  ‘I’ll get on to them tomorrow.’

  ‘And see if anyone has any idea what it was doing so far outside the village...if there were other bodies found in close proximity... If so, on the road or in the wood, fine. But it just seems a bit odd to me that Kearney and his men were out on a limb like that by themselves.’

  That left me at a loose end. I should have made a start on the report Jekyll said he expected on his desk upon his return, put the whole thing down as another SS crime, except that there were still some things that didn’t fit that scenario. They may not have had any bearing on the outcome——that it was probably SS-Unterscharführer Otto Vogel, or his officer, Müller, who executed Dabs and, in all likelihood, Kearney. But the actions of the odd Major Hendrix and the fact that Rose Kearney had done a moonlight flit kept interfering with the report I was writing mentally in my head.

  I would have liked to speak to Rose again but had no idea where to find her. And somehow her absence also made the week ahead look suddenly very empty.

  I smoked, mulling it all over, thinking about what Stan had said about leave. I heard Susie come back and, in that instant, made an uncharacteristically impetuous decision. I’d kill two birds with one stone.

  I stubbed out my cigarette and went into the other office. Susie was on the phone so I waited until she finished.

  ‘A rail warrant for Liverpool,’ I said to her as soon as she put the receiver down.

  ‘And I thought you were waiting to ask me out to dinner,’ she said. ‘Who’s the warrant for?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon as possible.’

  ‘What’s in Liverpool?’

  ‘The ferry to Ireland.’

  15

  June 25th

  Tuesday morning, after packing a bag and leaving my uniform behind, I stopped at my bank to cash a cheque where they assured me that the Irish Republic still accepted sterling as currency. I still had the joint account with Penny that we had opened when we married. When I’d been posted overseas I’d arranged for my pay to go straight in, all but for running expenses. Penny had had her own money——an allowance from her father——although I had insisted we live on what I earned. When she moved down to live with my mother she had still drawn on our account and had d
one so until she seemed to have decided that our marriage was over. I told her——in a rather formal letter I regretted as soon as I posted it——that until she remarried I still had an obligation to support her. What she did with the money, I had no idea. I assumed her father still paid her allowance, so she was hardly likely to be short of funds. I only hoped she wasn’t giving it to my mother or brother. I had never asked, not wanting to know the answer.

  What was left in the account was enough for me to live on——provided I was frugal. The ferry fare and travelling expenses, though, would make a hole in my funds. I might have argued that the rail warrant was necessary for the investigation, even if I would have had a hard time making Jekyll swallow it, but expecting expenses on top of it was out of the question.

  Despite making a reasonably early start, by the time I’d been to the bank then found the station, the train to Liverpool was delayed and I was too late for the Dublin ferry. I took a room in a cheap hotel, caught the early ferry the next morning then bought myself a map so I’d know where I was going. I’d never been to Ireland before, never been anywhere further than Wales until they shipped me off to North Africa, and I didn’t know what to expect. I’d served with enough Irishmen to get an idea though. They had mostly hailed from Belfast or Dublin or one of the other cities, and the towns were fine, they’d said. I’d even heard them call Belfast the second city of empire when there wasn’t anyone from Glasgow or Manchester around to contradict them. But they usually dismissed the rest of the country as a priest-ridden backwater. A priest-ridden backwater of empire once, I suppose, and now——the south at least——a priest-ridden backwater of the Republic.

  A gazetteer I found in a bookshop revealed the presence of two other Ballydrums in Ireland, one in County Mayo and another in County Longford, although these were only townlands, that odd geographical division of land peculiar to Ireland. My Ballydrum lay on the other side of the Wicklow Mountains and to get there I’d have to take a bus to a town about twenty miles south of Dublin called Newtownmountkennedy, then catch another into the mountains. Looking at Ballydrum on the map there didn’t seem to be much there except a couple of lakes and a lot of empty space. Little wonder, I thought, that William Kearney had got out when he could. The mystery was why his sister, Rose, had stayed so long.