The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  ‘You might know about the latter being a policeman, Harry,’ she replied mordantly, ‘But I think I know more about domestic service.’

  ‘Don’t you mean servitude?’ But I could see I was making Tuchman uncomfortable so I raised a placatory hand and said, ‘That’s not why I’m here. I spoke to Penny on the phone this evening and she said someone had been to see her asking questions about Helen and Reggie. Has anyone been to see you?’

  ‘Drink, Harry?’ Tuchman asked at the drinks cabinet. ‘Another, Julia?’

  ‘Please, Ben,’ she said.

  ‘Just an Indian tonic, if you have one,’ I told him.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Julia, ‘there has.’

  ‘Can you describe him? Short? Ugly...round face, snub-nose?’

  ‘You sound like one of Ben’s detectives.’

  ‘I read detective stories,’ Ben said, handing me the tonic. ‘The hard-boiled kind. Julia finds the fact endearingly American.’

  ‘She never found it endearing to have one living in her house,’ I said.

  Julia took her drink from Tuchman. ‘You were a uniformed constable. There is a difference.’

  ‘I suppose there must be,’ I said. ‘I never got to slap the girl around.’

  ‘Who’s the ugly snub-nose, Harry?’ Tuchman asked.

  ‘An Irishman named Diamaid Caomhánach. He’s an IRA gunman who’s been impersonating an army officer.’

  ‘Well,’ said Julia tasting her fresh drink, ‘you certainly choose your company.’

  ‘Is he dangerous?’ Tuchman asked.

  ‘It’s this carrier business. One of the men in it betrayed Caomhánach to the police and he wants to kill him if he’s still alive.’

  ‘And is he?’

  ‘No, I don’t think he is.’

  ‘If it’s any consolation,’ said Julia, ‘the man who came to see me was neither Irish nor ugly. One might have described him as seedy. Nothing a decent suit of clothes and a little grooming wouldn’t have improved. He could have been almost as presentable as you, Harry.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ I said. ‘I was going to ring Penny again and ask her to describe the man. It doesn’t sound like Caomhánach so I’d rather not. There’s no point in worrying her.’

  ‘But why on earth did you think he’d be interested in Helen and Reggie?’ Julia asked.

  ‘He’s not. Caomhánach’s interested in me. At least he is if Kearney’s dead.’

  ‘Who is Kearney?’ Julia sighed.

  ‘He was the sergeant in command of the carrier. His real name was O’Connell.’

  She still seemed mystified. ‘And if this Kearney is dead why would the Irishman be interested in you?’

  ‘Thwarted ambition,’ I replied, preferring the vague to the melodramatic.

  She laughed. ‘We’ve all been there, darling.’

  ‘One other thing,’ I said, as if it was nothing more than idle curiosity. ‘That chap Bryce I met here the other evening. Do you know him well?’

  ‘What chap Bryce?’ asked Julia.

  ‘I think he said he was Maurice Coveney’s secretary.’

  I was aware of Tuchman’s eyes on me but kept mine on Julia.

  ‘Oh, him. Young man with those spectacles. He brought Maurice’s evening dress over. Typical of Ronnie to ask him in for a drink. He doesn’t have to pay for the stuff. Drinks quite enough by himself without handing it out to all and sundry.’

  ‘Has Bryce been with Coveney long?’

  ‘I’m not familiar with Maurice’s office arrangements, Harry, although in this instance I do happen to know he hasn’t. Maurice used to have a female secretary until her sweetheart came home and she ran off to marry him. Maurice told me he would employ only men in future as marriage doesn’t tend to go to their heads as it does with girls. Why the interest?’

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ I said. ‘He rang my office this morning, that’s all. Said he wanted a word.’ I glanced at Tuchman. ‘Don’t know what about.’

  Tuchman’s face remained impassive. For a moment I considered asking to speak with him on his own and telling him I’d received a letter about Pellisier’s exhumation. But apart from not wanting to arouse Julia’s curiosity, I didn’t want to play all my cards in front of Tuchman. Instead, I finished my tonic water and said I’d leave them to it. Julia rang the bell for Ida to let me out——as if I wasn’t smart enough to find the front door by myself.

  ‘Thank you, Ida,’ she said while pointedly looking at me. ‘That will be all for tonight.’

  Ida bobbed and took me down the hall.

  As she opened the door she said, ‘Tell Stan for me I’m sorry, will you, Captain Tennant?’

  It closed again before I was able to ask sorry for what. But on reflection I didn’t really want to know.

  *

  I was in the office early the next morning but even so Jack was in first.

  ‘Did you see the note I left,’ I asked him.

  ‘What, the one about Richter?’

  ‘We need to find him.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to go to Hamburg,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you see my note?’

  ‘What note?’

  ‘I left it on your desk. They got back to me while you were in Ireland.’ He began sorting through the mess of papers on my desktop. He pulled one out and waved it at me. ‘Here. Richter was repatriated in August forty-five.’ He grinned unpleasantly. ‘His wound turned septic and they had to take his leg off. As soon as he got back up on his foot they told him to hop it.’

  ‘Very good, Jack,’ I said, finding less humour in it than Jack obviously did, ‘but you might have checked to see if I’d got the note.’

  He looked offended. ‘I can’t do everything around here. Oh, and that Gifford bloke rang after you’d gone yesterday.’

  ‘Do you mean Superintendent Gifford?’ I asked, wishing Jack could show a little more respect for rank even if any hope of discipline had long since evaporated.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jack. ‘He’s the one. Wanted you to meet him today. Same place as last time, he said. Twelve o’clock.’

  I took the same place to be the greasy café off the Caledonian Road. The thought of the tea there made me queasy so I put our kettle on and looked in Susie’s biscuit tin to see if there was anything other than crumbs. There weren’t and I sent Jack to the shop down the road to see if they had anything we could have with our tea. While he was gone I flipped through our burgeoning file on the Bren Gun carrier. The Irish connection had been a red herring, achieving little apart from putting Diamaid Caomhánach on my tail, and if it wasn’t Caomhánach asking questions about Helen and Reggie Forster, that left only Tuchman’s investigation into Claude Pellisier’s collaboration. Assuming, that is, Reggie wasn’t wanted for fraud or tax-evasion. Something I wouldn’t have wholly discounted. But barring that, I couldn’t imagine what bearing Reggie and Helen might have on Pellisier’s crimes and would have assumed that if the questioner had been connected to Tuchman, he would have found some way of letting me know the previous evening at Julia’s.

  The others arrived while I was still looking through the file. The frostiness between Peter and Susie seemed to have thawed although I no longer detected that frisson between them which had suggested to me that they had something going on. Stan, however, seemed as morose as ever so I thought twice about passing on Ida’s message.

  An apology is one thing, but one that carries with it the suggestion of finality wasn’t the sort of thing I thought Stan was going to welcome.

  ‘Jack not in?’ Peter asked. ‘Do you know what he did with that letter from the Caen avocat général?’

  It was still in my pocket from my visit to Jekyll’s club. I fished it out and gave it to him. Peter gave it to Susie who had just settled in behind her desk.

  ‘If you can book the call for me, Susie,’ Peter said, ‘I’ll speak to them. Just get them on the line, if you will. Is that all right?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said brightly. ‘
It’ll probably take a while though.’

  ‘That’s all right. Whenever you can manage it.’

  International calls had been suspended just prior to the outbreak of war and had only recently been reinstated. As trunk calls within the country often took an age to be put through due to the demand, I couldn’t imagine how long a call to France might take.

  Jack walked in with some stale buns, moaning about the fact they were all he could get. Which at least made a pleasant change from the exaggerated politeness with which Peter and Susie seemed now to be treating each other.

  ‘Take them or leave them,’ said Jack. ‘I had to queue for fifteen minutes just to get these. Want me to toast them on the ring?’

  ‘What do you want with the Caen avocat général?’ I asked Peter.

  He blinked at me in his scholarly fashion. ‘You remember in his diary Richter said that when the platoon arrived at the Château de Hêtres there were Gestapo there with the owner? Now everyone assumed that the body they dug up in the garden must have been the owner of the house since it was dressed in civilian clothes and carried French ID.’ He glanced down at the letter from the avocat général’s office, ‘...name of Claude Pellisier according to this.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, where the SS or the Gestapo are involved we all jump to conclusions. But if the French are going to exhume him again, it’s obvious they’re having second thoughts about it being Pellisier. Which means the body might well turn out to be William Kearney after all.’

  ‘We’re not jumping to another conclusion, are we?’ I said.

  Peter looked non-plussed. ‘Why else would they write to us if they didn’t think it was Kearney?’

  ‘So what do you want to talk to them about?’

  ‘If the blood group of the body is A-positive, it could be Kearney. And I thought if there was a record of this Pellisier’s blood group somewhere and he was also A-positive, it might be that Kearney was murdered to fake Pelliser’s death.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he admitted. ‘But the body was burned and in civilian clothing. With French ID...? It’s a possibility don’t you think?’

  ‘The body was also identified as Pellisier’s from a birthmark,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ said Peter. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  And the only reason he didn’t was because I’d not told him. Not about that, or about Pellisier and his collaboration. It was true I had only found out about Pellisier’s connection to the Château de Hêtres and Penny’s family myself over the weekend, but I still might have mentioned it to Peter.

  On Sunday night Tuchman——however politely——had suggested I stay away from asking questions about Pellisier. So far I’d complied. But Tuchman hadn’t asked Peter. Nor could it be said that I’d led Peter to the Frenchman. He’d followed his own nose.

  ‘So you already know about him?’ Peter asked. And although I couldn’t detect any trace of grievance over the fact I’d failed to pass information on to him, it was there nonetheless.

  ‘Colonel G does,’ I replied, not exactly answering his question.

  ‘Should I pursue it?’

  ‘By all means,’ I said. ‘Although even if the blood group of both men does turn out to be A-positive it won’t be conclusive. It occurs in about thirty percent of the population. There’s a one-in-three chance they will be the same anyway.’

  ‘One in nine,’ said Jack, who’d been listening while passing out the buns. ‘That’s the thing about odds...one in three for each man but for them both to be the same you have to――’

  ‘And it won’t mean the 25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers didn’t kill him,’ I said to Peter.

  ‘Or the Gestapo,’ Peter concluded. ‘What do we know about Pellisier?’

  ‘Is that the time?’ I said, looking at the clock on the wall and stuffing a bun in my mouth. ‘I’ve got an appointment. You’ll let me know what the Caen avocat général has to say, won’t you Peter?’

  *

  Fortified with tea and toasted buns, stale as they were, I took the tube a couple of stops and walked to the café to meet Gifford.

  Run-down for decades, the area around Kings Cross was a well-known red-light district. The cheap housing had made it a mecca for successive waves of immigrants since well before the war and Göring’s Luftwaffe had done it no favours since. It hadn’t been my beat when I’d been a copper but I knew it from the second-hand market on the Caledonian Road which had been notorious for selling stolen goods. I’d been there on several occasions on the lookout for property stolen in my area, but it wasn’t the sort of place anyone would go for high-end goods. Besides, the local villains had a nose for the police, even in plain clothes, and green as I was they generally knew I was coming before I’d decided to go there myself.

  During the war it had been a natural hive of black market activity and still was now. If you wanted anything off-ration, or anything generally unobtainable, the market in the Caledonian Road was the place to get it. Turning towards the café, I wondered if that might be why Gifford favoured the place; perhaps not for black market goods, but for something less tangible, something passed not by hand but by mouth.

  Avoiding Peter’s questions had made me early and Gifford wasn’t at the café. Patrons came and went and I found an empty table easily enough. The tea didn’t look to have improved appreciably so I tried a mug of what they described as coffee. When it arrived I found it wasn’t easy to tell the difference. Or from what the stuff had been made from, for that matter. Acorns, judging by the taste. Or an old bottle of Camp coffee someone had turned up on a bombsite. Whatever its origin, like their tea it reminded me more than anything of the mud I’d swallowed as we’d worked our way up the boot of Italy during the winter campaign.

  I didn’t notice Gifford arrive until I found him standing over my table. He had a chameleon’s ability to blend into his environment. He put his enamel mug down next to mine. The brew in them looked identical.

  ‘Anything on Caomhánach?’ I asked as he sat down. When he shook his head I said, ‘Rose O’Shaughnessy came to see me.’

  I could tell that got his attention by the way one of his eyebrows rose slightly.

  ‘She admitted that Caomhánach was my Major Hendrix. But I already knew that. I showed that photo you gave me to some of the people he talked to. They identified him.’

  Gifford didn’t say anything. He lifted his tea and took a swallow. To his credit his expression barely changed.

  ‘I’m pretty sure Kearney——O’Connell, that is——is dead. I told Rose as much. She doesn’t think Caomhánach will believe it. A difficult thing to prove. One of my men is working on the angle that the body in the Château de Hêtres wasn’t Pellisier’s at all but Kearney’s.’

  I watched Gifford’s face. As with the tea, he gave no indication what I said was hard to swallow. He didn’t reply and I took that as indication enough. I had mentioned Coveney’s name the first time I’d phoned him. But not since. Nor had I ever told him anything about the Château de Hêtres or Claude Pellisier. If he’d not known what I was talking about, at the very least I’d have expected some expression of curiosity. Instead, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out another buff envelope.

  ‘More photos?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, dropping it on the table between us and speaking for the first time. ‘It’s what you’ve been asking for. It’s the full transcript of Franz Müller’s interrogation.’

  I must have looked surprised.

  ‘That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but how did you know? And how come you could get it when I couldn’t? You’re not army.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but then it’s not an army problem.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  He regarded me with an expression that could have been disappointment. ‘Why do you think this particular file landed on your desk?’

  I shrugged. ‘I could say it’s because investigating war crimes is what we do. But as far as this
business goes even I don’t believe that.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever wonder why anyone was interested in the death of Joseph Dabs and the disappearance of William Kearney? How many other men were summarily executed or went missing during the Normandy campaign?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But the Hitlerjugend’s 25th SS-Panzer Grenadier Regiment was right on the spot when Dabs was shot. We already knew they didn’t take prisoners. I assumed someone thought it would be nice and easy to pin this one on them too. It’s what my colonel wants and I just do as I’m told. And if it wasn’t them, there were plenty of other SS units in the area we could hold responsible.’

  Gifford gave a mirthless chuckle. ‘You do as you’re told, do you? What about when you saw Jekyll at your wife’s aunt’s house? And when you discovered this carrier of yours was found outside the Château de Hêtres? A place owned by the brother-in-law of your wife’s uncle?’

  ‘Not a blood relation,’ I said, as if that had anything to do with it.

  ‘Somewhere your mother-in-law spent her holidays as a girl...,’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I admit I’ve always thought the business a bit odd. I did wonder why I was given it, and why whoever passed it to my colonel thought I might be able to turn up something they couldn’t. Don’t ask me what. Particularly since Tuchman——I assume you know who Ben Tuchman is?——warned me off asking about Coveney’s brother-in-law since it might be embarrassing for the family...’

  Then it dawned on me just what Gifford might be suggesting.

  ‘Is that why I got it? Because of the Forster family? Or Coveney? What is it, the old boy network covering each other’s backs again? Did they think that because of my family connection I’d do as I was told? I thought we got the file because it was the sort of thing we did, spend our days trawling through testimony like that,’ and I pushed the envelope containing Müller's interrogation back towards him. But the table top was sticky from someone else’s breakfast and the thing didn’t move more than half an inch. ‘Anyway, since you’ve already got it, what did you need me for?’

  Gifford pulled out a pipe and started thumbing tobacco into the bowl.

  ‘Don’t go off half-cocked. Read the file first, although you won’t find it as useful as you thought you might.’ He pushed the envelope back to me again, struck a match and lit the pipe. ‘And Tuchman’s interested in Pellisier. We have another angle.’