The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  ‘I know. But we didn’t know that then, did we? How come we didn’t pick that up, Jack? We thought he had a sister and he says he’s got no next of kin?’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, if he didn’t have one, Kear——O’Connell’s going to put down no next of kin.’

  I stared at him, wondering if he was being deliberately obtuse.

  ‘If someone turns up saying she’s his sister,’ I tried again, ‘and he says he’s got no next of kin...’

  ‘Perhaps it was assumed they were estranged,’ Jack said, looking down at the tea and not at me.

  ‘I don’t remember assuming anything of the sort,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry, Boss,’ he finally muttered. ‘My cock-up.’

  I took my tea into the other office and sat at my desk. Had I known that Kearney/O’Connell had registered himself as having no next of kin I might have been able to find out who Rose really was when I met her in the Minstrel Boy. Then maybe I wouldn’t. No one else she contacted had picked up the fact Kearney didn’t have a sister. And, as I recalled, she had had an answer to everything; a plausible answer given she was lying through her teeth. I wondered where she fitted in, although couldn’t see how it could have any bearing on the carrier even if I found out. It was a careless slip, though, and I spent the next couple of hours going back through all the information we had gathered to see if there were any other anomalies we had missed. I looked at what Stan had gleaned from Barnado’s as well.

  He had managed to get a photograph of the boy from the Barnado’s records although Dabs couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve when it was taken. He looked a beggarly little kid with spiky, uncombed hair and resembled nothing as much as a dishevelled rodent. Maybe by the time he took to burglary he grew out of it, although at that age he seemed an unlikely candidate to become a companion for the sharp-dressing Arnie Poole. Ida said she didn’t take to Dabs when he came up on leave with Poole, so I slipped the photo into my pocket to show Ida when I next saw her——just to double-check we had the same man. Dabs might have been only a kid when it was taken but his was the sort of face that would never change much, the sort he was going to have to spend the rest of his life with. Not that it turned out to be a very long life as it happened. And the face did change in the end, rearranged by the bullet that had entered the back of his skull.

  19

  ‘Been busy?’ I asked Peter when he came in after lunch.

  ‘I spoke to one of the 7th Hampshires’ officers. He had to come up to town so I thought I’d take the opportunity. I’m not sure he was of much help.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he remembers any of them?’

  ‘Jupiter tore the heart out of the battalion. I got the impression he remembers too many of them. One thing he could tell me was that as far as he was aware there were no other suspicious deaths. Apart from Dabs. Not all dead accounted for, though, so Kearney wasn’t alone.’

  ‘O’Connell,’ Susie piped up from behind her desk.

  I told Peter about it.

  ‘Do you think it’s relevant?’

  ‘What, exactly?’

  ‘That he took his girlfriend’s name.’

  ‘It depends why,’ I said.

  ‘Does it?’ Peter replied. ‘With respect...,’

  Peter was a great one for respect. It was his lawyer’s training, no doubt. I suppose——like the rest of them——he had been taught to follow the letter of the law, even if that meant sometimes letting justice go hang. It was the sort of attitude likely to stick in my craw.

  ‘Whatever reason he had to enlist under the name Kearney is neither here nor there,’ Peter insisted. ‘Our brief is to establish whether or not a war crime has been committed. And if it has, if possible establish who might be responsible.’

  ‘Which German unit, you mean.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘But supposing it wasn’t the Germans? Suppose Kearney was presented with a good opportunity to disappear again? He’d done it once.’

  Peter scratched his head and indicated the shelves around us, files full of the testimony of witnesses and the statements of participants that pointed to German guilt.

  ‘The evidence is overwhelming,’ he said.

  ‘And we’re spoilt for choice,’ I agreed. ‘With just what we’ve got to trawl through here, we could spend the rest of our lives uncovering every mean act committed. Or every panicky decision made on the spur of the moment. Nine times out of ten these men we are trying to link to crimes would have led normal, decent, law-abiding lives if the war hadn’t happened.’

  ‘But it did,’ said Peter.

  ‘And does that excuse it, boss?’ Stan asked, having walked in and caught the end of the conversation.

  ‘You made good time,’ I said.

  ‘Started early. So, does it?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted, ‘but you know as well as I do what’s going to happen a year or two down the line. The big fish will have been netted. They’ll hang some, like they always do, and give the rest prison terms that in four or five years will be commuted. The tiddlers, the kind of people we’re chasing, won’t matter by then. We’ll have been wound up and all this stuff,’ I indicated the files, ‘will end up in some archive somewhere and probably never looked at again.’

  ‘Not our decision,’ said Stan.

  ‘No, and I for one won’t lose any sleep over it.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ said Peter.

  ‘My point is, why did this particular file end up on our desk?’

  ‘Colonel G brought it,’ Susie said.

  ‘I said why, not how. And someone gave it to him to give to us. Haven’t we got enough files to trawl through without another, if it’s just the same old story?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘maybe it isn’t.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Susie and I looked at each other but I wasn’t sure she had got the point.

  ‘It’s the policeman in him,’ Jack said, finally favouring us with his presence. And I knew he had the point. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he hadn’t got it before I did.

  ‘The policeman?’ asked Susie.

  ‘Jack means Harry has a suspicious character,’ Peter told her.

  ‘Well we all know that,’ she said.

  ‘Has not is,’ I said.

  ‘You think,’ Peter said, ‘that the object of the exercise is for us to pin the deaths of Dabs and Kearney on the Hitlerjugend.’

  ‘That seems to be Jekyll’s object,’ I told him. ‘But I’m not sure that’s why we were given the file.’

  ‘So you think something else happened,’ Susie said.

  ‘I think someone else thinks something else might have happened,’ I told her.

  ‘Tea?’ said Jack, his answer to anything confusing.

  ‘And you think Kearney’s background might be relevant,’ said Stan.

  ‘O’Connell’s might,’ I said.

  ‘Point taken,’ said Peter.

  But Stan had missed the revelation that William Kearney was really William O’Connell, so while Susie explained it to him, I said:

  ‘Let’s keep calling the man Kearney. To avoid confusion.’

  ‘Well,’ Susie decided, taking the teapot from Jack, ‘Colonel G’s not going to be pleased, not if we come up with an answer he didn’t want.’

  ‘That’s why we’re not going to give him one,’ I said. ‘At least not yet. We’re not going to tell him I went to Ireland either.’

  ‘I wrote you a rail warrant to Liverpool,’ Susie reminded me. ‘Won’t he want to know why you went there?’

  ‘I’ll tell him an uncle died,’ I said. ‘And I’ll give you the money to cover the warrant for the petty cash.’

  She turned her big brown eyes on me, blinking. ‘Did you tell lies when you were a policeman, too, Captain?’

  ‘Only when I appeared in court,’ I said.

  *

  Over tea I outlined the way we were going to proceed: Peter would continue concentrating on the 25th SS-Pa
nzer Grenadiers as we now knew that SS-Obersturmführer Franz Müller’s platoon was at the château. Müller and Vogel were dead, but the diarist, SS-Mann Werner Richter, as far as we knew wasn’t, and we needed to find out which POW camp was holding him. Assuming he hadn’t been repatriated already. Yet at the same time I didn’t want to lose complete sight of the other possibilities that Peter had suggested earlier: 2SS Das Reich, Gotz von Berlichingen and 1SS Leibstandarte may have arrived in the area too late to be the culprits, but units of 9SS Hohenstaufen and 10SS Frundsberg were still on-hand.

  Jack and Susie could do Peter’s ringing round for him and handle the paperwork——until I needed one of them to type up my report to Jekyll, that is. In the meantime I wanted to get back to Gifford and see if he knew anything about O’Connell’s past. The man had already changed his identity once and, before I was willing to let the 25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers carry the can, I wanted to be sure he hadn’t done it again.

  ‘You don’t need my input anyway,’ I told Peter. ‘I do bugger-all around here as it is. Just keep me informed so I can put anything that’ll keep Colonel G happy in the report.’

  ‘What about me, boss?’ Stan asked.

  ‘First you can tell me what the man from 129th Field Ambulance said.’

  We went into my office and Stan brought a sheaf of notes with him. Susie came in with our tea while he was sorting them into order.

  ‘You know who the woman in that photo is, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘The one with O’Connoll formerly known as Kearney. After all that next of kin fuss with Jack,’ she said, waving the photograph I’d given her to file in front of my face, ‘I took another look.’

  ‘Still known as Kearney,’ I said. ‘And no, I’ve no idea. The people I showed it to didn’t know her. I know it’s not Cathleen, though.’

  ‘Look at it again,’ she said, handing me the photograph and a magnifying glass.

  I focussed the glass on the woman’s face. Having been told to look, I saw now there was something familiar about her, something in the sharpness of the features...something in the way she was looking at the camera.

  ‘It’s——’

  ‘The Rose of Tralee herself,’ said Susie triumphantly. ‘Younger, but try to picture her the way we saw her, without make-up.’

  At the time I’d taken Rose’s lack of cosmetics to be the consequence of a country upbringing. Looking at the Rose in the photo, it now seemed to have been more a matter of tactics.

  ‘Well done, Susie,’ I said. ‘I would never have noticed if you hadn’t spotted it.’

  ‘You want to pay more attention to women, Captain.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ I said to Stan after she bounced back into her office, ‘my wife always accused me of paying them too much attention. So, learn anything of interest?’

  ‘I spoke to a bloke from D Company 4th Wilts. Mostly he just told me what we already had in the file. He remembers the carrier because of Dabs. Thought by the look of it an anti-tank gun had done for the carrier and that it was odd two of them were burnt and the third wasn’t. When they looked closer they saw why.’

  Stan took the cigarette I offered, lit it and inhaled.

  ‘He said the road was a gravel track and the carrier had been pushed out the way. It was July and the two bodies in the carrier had already been more or less cooked. Another two weeks sitting in the vehicle hadn’t done them any favours. Dabs wasn’t as bad but...’ he shrugged. ‘The stretcher-bearers with D Company HQ buried them where they found them which is standard procedure. They usually stay in the temporary graves until their own battalion Orderly Room Sergeant can arrange a proper burial. Knowing it was a four-man carrier they looked for the extra man in the immediate area, including the house.’

  Stan sipped his tea then dragged on his cigarette and raised his eyebrows in what I assumed was supposed to be a significant manner.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘They found a grave at the back of the house. Whoever had dug it hadn’t made much of a job but at least they'd taken the trouble of putting a stake in as a marker. They naturally thought it might be the fourth man, but when they dug the body up it wasn’t wearing a uniform. It had been partially burned but not as badly as the men in the carrier and what was left of the clothing proved to be civvies. They made sure, though, and found French ID papers on him.’

  ‘That was all in the file,’ I said. ‘But they were sure it wasn’t Kearney?’

  ‘They were satisfied it wasn’t.’

  ‘Did they get a name from the papers they found on the body?’

  ‘Civilians weren’t their responsibility, so no.’

  ‘And no other sign of Kearney?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That it?’

  ‘Not quite.’ Stan stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Apparently, when the 4th Wilts men came to temporarily interring the bodies, they found Poole's and Burleigh's ID discs on the floor of the carrier, not round the men’s necks. They weren't sure which man was which. You know how careful they have to be, taking down the information on the disc and where the body's buried. So a note to that effect was left for 7th Hampshires Orderly Room Sergeant. And when the time came to exhume Poole and Burleigh for proper burial, blood tests were made to make sure which was which. I got this from the 7th Hampshires’ Orderly Room Sergeant himself whose job it was to ID their own battalion's dead from the lists of missing.’

  ‘But they were sure the two were actually the bodies of Poole and Burleigh?’

  ‘Yeah. As sure as they could be at the time. 7th Hampshires’ blood tests matched the ID discs. They're interred in the War Graves Cemetery in Bannerville-la-Campagne, east of Caen. That's near Sannerville.’

  ‘That it?’

  ‘One more thing. The Orderly Room Sergeant gave me the name of the man from B Company who'd been able to visually identify Dabs. He’d been on Kearney’s carrier before Operation Jupiter...,’ he glanced at his notes, ‘...name of Barker. That’s why I was in Chelmsford this morning. He said the body wasn't a pretty sight but he was sure it was Dabs.’

  ‘Did he happen to know Kearney too?’

  ‘Yeah. Reckoned he was a bit of a loner. Good man, he said, but in the habit of keeping to himself. This Barker got his stripe just before the landings and was switched to another carrier. Burleigh took his place. He said he wasn’t sorry to switch except it pissed him off that he had to leave Burleigh his PIAT. He didn’t have one on the carrier he went to. If he’d stayed, of course, he reckons he’d have been toast like the rest of them.’

  ‘Barker knew the other two, Poole and Dabs?’

  ‘Yeah. Didn’t care much for either apparently. One reason he wasn’t sorry to switch vehicles. Reckoned Poole being a corporal was too full of himself. Only a lance-jack but apt to act like he was in command of the carrier. Kearney was always having to slap him down.’

  ‘Dabs?’

  ‘He said Dabs was a thief. Stuff was always going missing and a lot of the men blamed Dabs for it. Though no one was ever able to catch him at it. Between you and me Barker said he wasn’t surprised someone put a bullet in his head.’

  ‘What kind of stuff went missing?’

  Stan shrugged. ‘Nothing of any particular value. Just personal stuff. That’s what annoyed them.’

  ‘Official complaint?’

  ‘No. Barker said some men gave Dabs a working over just before Jupiter. Nothing serious. Not enough for him to get excused duty. He seemed uncomfortable telling me about it and I got the idea Barker must have been one of them. Probably felt guilty afterwards when he had to identify Dabs' body.’

  ‘I don’t suppose one of them did it because of the thefts?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Stan. ‘Just talk.’

  ‘Did this Barker say if Poole and Dabs were close?’

  ‘Not especially. Dabs was always trying to ingratiate himself. Didn’t work with Kearney, but Poole wasn’t above having Dabs do his skivvying for him.’

&nb
sp; ‘Was Barker’s carrier anywhere near Kearney’s on the advance?’

  ‘West of it. Once the Panzers opened up, though, he reckoned there was no telling what was going on. A round fell short of his carrier and flipped it over, otherwise he thought they would have caught it like Kearney’s lot. Barker and one of his other men were injured.’

  Jack came back and resumed abusing his Remington.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Nothing definite,’ said Stan. ‘Someone told Barker a carrier was reported crossing the road towards the wood sometime mid-morning. No one could say if it was Kearney’s, though.’

  ‘Any other sightings?’

  ‘No.’

  Jack’s phone rang.

  ‘All right, Stan,’ I said. ‘Good work. Give Jack your notes and he’ll get them typed up.’

  Jack exchanged a few words down the line then held the receiver towards me.

  ‘Superintendent Gifford.’

  20

  Ida opened the door and seemed oddly disappointed to find me standing there.

  ‘Captain Tennant,’ she said, ‘I was expecting——’ then didn’t tell me who she was expecting. Stan, I supposed. I almost told her I’d left him at the office, that we’d all worked later than we had intended. But it was none of my business and instead I took the photograph Stan had found of Joseph Dabs out of my pocket and showed it to her.

  ‘Recognize him?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a boy,’ she said.

  ‘If he was a few years older...?

  She scrutinized the photo taking it back into her room to hold it by the window.

  ‘It’s Joe Dabs isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s what I was hoping you’d say. It was taken when he was a boy in the Barnado’s home. It’s the only one we have and I wanted to be sure it was him.’

  ‘He’s got that same pinched face. Cruel, if you know what I mean.’

  I hadn’t thought of it being cruel, just rather weasel-like. If you drew whiskers on him he wouldn’t have looked out of place in the cast of Toad of Toad Hall.

  ‘You didn’t like him did you?’

  ‘Not much, but I only met him that once.’