The Chessman

by Dolores Gordon-Smith

  To the front of the church, the doorway to the vestry stood open. He could hear the scrape of furniture being moved. Someone – Ashley or the vicar, he presumed – was in the vestry close to where that ghastly body had been.

  He walked past the entrance to the bell tower to get round to the side aisle to the vestry, when a gasp made him turn round.

  Jerry Lucas rose up from a pew where he was kneeling behind a squat pillar. His face was ashen. ‘You!’

  ‘Hello,’ said Jack pleasantly, turning back to him. ‘I’m looking for Superintendent Ashley.’

  ‘The police!’ said Jerry Lucas in a strangled whisper. He started to back out of the pew. ‘No! I know what you think but you’re wrong!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Jack. He walked towards Lucas. ‘I only want to—’

  Jerry Lucas gave a yelp and retreated out of the pew. ‘No!’ he said again, still in that strangled whisper. ‘No!’ He reached out behind him and his grasping hands picked up a solid hymn book. He held it in front of him like a shield. ‘Leave me alone.’

  He looked, thought Jack, at the end of his tether. His face was white, his hair dishevelled and there were dark shadows under his eyes. The hymn book trembled in his hands.

  ‘Did you sleep last night?’ asked Jack. He didn’t look as if he had. Jerry Lucas twitched his head impatiently. ‘Why don’t you come with me …’ Jack began.

  ‘No! Leave me alone!’

  Jack stepped forward and Lucas hurled the hymn book at him.

  Completely taken aback, Jack raised his arm to ward off the heavy book, flung it to one side, and stepped forward to grab Lucas. With a yelp, Lucas evaded his grasp and, flinging out his fist, shot past him to the open door. Jack dodged the blow, whirled round and nearly caught Lucas as he ran.

  A man holding a bucket stepped into the porch. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked in a slow Sussex voice.

  ‘Stop him!’ shouted Jack.

  Lucas veered off to one side, grabbed the door to the bell tower, and wrenched it open.

  Jack plunged after him, thrusting his way through the hanging ropes of the bells. ‘Lucas!’ he yelled. ‘Stop, you idiot!’

  Jerry Lucas didn’t answer but with an odd little whimper, backed across the room, then ran up the narrow winding stairs to the clock chamber above.

  Jack followed him, his feet slipping on the narrow, worn stone. ‘Lucas!’ he called again. ‘Stop!’

  There was no answer apart from the thud of feet on the stone stairs. The sound hollowed out to a drumming noise as Jerry Lucas gained the wooden floor of the clock chamber.

  Jack emerged into the bare, sun-filled space of the clock room. The door to the belfry stood open and he could hear feet racing up the stairs.

  ‘Lucas!’ he called once more, then followed him.

  The belfry was dark, the light from the louvered windows blocked by the great bronze hanging bells above him. Jack paused, then saw Lucas swarm up a ladder attached to the wall, past the bells, up to the timber cage from which the bells hung.

  There wasn’t a solid floor up above, just a network of ancient wooden beams forming a walkway. Jack climbed onto the walkway, the bells spread out beneath him.

  A movement and a flash of sunlight caught his eye. Jerry Lucas had reached the end of the timber walkway, climbed the short ladder and opened the trapdoor onto the roof.

  Jack reached the foot of the ladder. He paused, listening, before he climbed.

  Jerry Lucas could easily push him off the ladder as he came through the narrow trapdoor. Then he’d fall, fall onto the vast bronze convex slope of the bells, with nothing to grasp, nothing to hold, nothing to stop him sliding off the bell to be dashed to his death below.

  ‘Lucas!’ he called again, trying to make his voice steady.

  There was dead silence. Jack clung onto the ladder, blinking in the sunlight streaming through the open trapdoor. Above him was a rectangle of blue with scudding white clouds. Around him, the dust motes danced in the light. From far away came the sound of birdsong and the distant bark of a dog.

  ‘Lucas!’ he called again.

  For a few moments nothing happened, then Jerry Lucas’s head appeared, black against the light.

  ‘I’m coming up,’ said Jack firmly, and started to climb.

  ‘Leave me alone!’

  Jack ignored him. Lucas drew back, then, as Jack grasped the final rung, hit down hard with his fist on Jack’s hand, pushing him away.

  It was a stinging blow and Lucas was strong. With a yell, Jack missed his footing, his feet scrabbling into the void. Holding on with one hand, he made a wild grab for the ladder, then Jerry Lucas, unexpectedly but miraculously, caught his flailing arm and pulled him out of the trapdoor onto the stone slabs of the flat roof of the tower.

  Jack sprawled out on the stone, then unsteadily raised himself up on his knees. He tried to stand but his knee gave way and he fell back against the low stone wall, clutching his leg.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Jerry Lucas after a difficult silence.

  ‘I injured my leg some years ago,’ said Jack through gritted teeth. ‘It’s still weak.’

  This was true. Although he was for all practical purposes recovered, he’d still put enough strain on his leg in the last few minutes for it to let him down.

  Lucas slumped down, his back against the low wall, under the crenulations of the tower. ‘How did you injure your leg?’ he asked awkwardly.

  ‘I came an awful cropper flying.’

  ‘The muscle must’ve been damaged,’ said Jerry Lucas in a different voice. He sounded calm and professional, for all the world as if Jack was in his consulting room and not stuck at the top of a hundred-foot tower after chasing a man who’d first tried to kill him, then save him. ‘There’s some exercises that would help. Have you tried massage?’

  This was bizarre. Jack raised his head and looked him straight in the eyes. ‘Why did you run?’

  Blind panic leapt up once more in Lucas’s face. ‘The police were there! You knew!’ He pressed his hands against the rough flint of the walls and levered himself upwards. The wind whipped his hair and he glanced nervously over his shoulder to the dizzying drop below. He gulped defiantly. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll jump.’

  The knuckles on the hand that grasped the corner of the wall were white. Jerry Lucas was tense to breaking point. Jack knew that the slightest wrong move, the merest hint of aggression, could send Lucas literally over the edge.

  He bent his head and rubbed his leg again. ‘Don’t do that. People care about you.’ Lucas gave a snort of dissent. ‘They do,’ Jack persisted. ‘My cousin, Isabelle and her husband, Arthur, like you very much. They told me so. And your father cares for you deeply, doesn’t he?’

  Despite himself, Lucas nodded dumbly.

  ‘I need you, Jerry. I can’t get down those ladders alone. I need you.’

  The knuckles on Lucas’s hand relaxed and Jack breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Come on, Jerry. Let’s go down.’

  ‘No!’ Panic flared again. ‘I can’t go down. I just can’t. Ryle’s dead. If you only knew, if you knew about me, you’d know everything. You’d know why I wanted him dead.’

  ‘I don’t know if Ryle’s dead.’ Jack’s voice was measured. ‘I do know why you’d like him to be dead though.’

  He didn’t know; he’d had an idea, an idea that explained quite a lot, but he didn’t know. He had been going to discuss his idea with Ashley, to get some proof that he was on the right lines but he needed to tell Jerry Lucas something. If Lucas thought the game was up there was every chance he’d fling himself over the tower.

  Jerry Lucas gaped at him. ‘You can’t,’ he said eventually. ‘No one knows. Dad said …’ He broke off, his eyes fixed on Jack’s face.

  It was working. Curiosity was keeping Lucas safe. ‘Your father said he’d look after you, didn’t he?’ suggested Jack.

  Lucas nodded slowly.

  ‘I know it happened in the war.’ Jack knew the war ha
d to come into it somehow. The snatch of conversation Arthur had overheard between Dr Lucas and Ryle told him that much. What happened he could only guess. He just hoped that Jerry Lucas would fill in the gaps in his knowledge.

  ‘The war,’ repeated Lucas softly. ‘I hated the war.’

  Jack grinned and leant back against the wall. ‘It wasn’t the best thing that’s ever happened to me, either.’

  Lucas looked at him with scared eyes. ‘You were brave, though, weren’t you? I’ve heard Mrs Stanton talk about you. You won the DFC.’

  This was the second time in two days his record hadn’t won him any friends, but he was damned if he was going to apologize for it. ‘I think most of the time I was numb,’ he said thoughtfully, and that was probably true.

  Lucas looked at him with quick understanding. ‘Numb? Yes, I think most men were. I … I wanted to be numb. I wanted to shut it out, to make it all routine and duty. I wanted to stop feeling.’

  Jack felt a surge of acute sympathy. He’d seen men with their nerves rubbed raw. There had been times when he’d been one of those men. He remembered, although he hated to remember it, exactly what it was like.

  ‘I know,’ he said softly.

  Jerry Lucas looked up. ‘You do know,’ he said wonderingly. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you would, but you do.’

  Jack eased himself back against the wall. Taking out his cigarette case, he lit a cigarette, then slid the case across the roof to Lucas. ‘Tell me about Ryle.’

  Lucas paused with a cigarette in his hand. ‘But you know about Ryle.’

  That was awkward. Guesses weren’t knowledge. ‘I’d like to hear it from your point of view.’

  It worked. Lucas shrugged. ‘Why not? If you know already, you might as well hear my side of things. I wish it hadn’t happened,’ he added. ‘I’ve always regretted it.’ He sighed deeply. ‘As you know, I’d only just qualified as a doctor.’

  Jack didn’t know, but he nodded in agreement.

  ‘It was the spring of 1918. I was in an Advanced Aid Post, in a shelled-out house in Hooge, only a few hundred yards from the front line. We were all at fever pitch, waiting for the next wave of attacks …’

  A sound like a giant insect whined overhead. The shelling was getting closer. Jerry instinctively winced and grabbed the table, bracing himself for the explosion. It came in a ground-juddering crump, rattling the surgical instruments on the table. Another piece of plaster fell off the wall, adding to the heap of debris that rimmed the room.

  Corporal Harris ducked, then looked up with a grin. ‘Blimey, sir, that was nearly a bull’s eye.’

  Jerry tried to smile and failed miserably. When he was completing his degree, he’d never dreamed that anything resembling medicine could be practiced in the ill-lit, bombed-out ruin, with its dank cellar smells of wet brick dust and earth that was the Advanced Aid Post. He couldn’t begin to copy the breezy cheerfulness of his orderlies, with their graveyard humour and seemingly unflinching nerves.

  His nerves, as he knew only too well, were shot, but he mustn’t let the men know. He couldn’t let them know how close to the edge he was. They needed him. He was in charge. That miserable little rag of pride was all he had left to keep going. The only sleep he’d had for the last four days had been in twenty-minute snatches and he was dangerously close to complete exhaustion.

  Another shell, and another, whined overhead, nearly drowning Private Simmons’ yell of ‘Field Ambulance!’

  A Field Ambulance wasn’t a vehicle, it was men, stretcher bearers, who gathered up the wounded and brought them back to the Aid Post, with the walking wounded following in their wake. It was a beastly journey, through trenches with broken duckboards and over cratered, waterlogged ground, where the blast from a shell could knock a man off his feet and into the waiting deep, evil mud that was Flanders.

  Jerry, working mechanically, sorted out the casualties. Four men, with massive shrapnel wounds, were nearly dead. Private Connolly gave them morphia and they were laid against the wall to die. More morphia for three men caught in the same shell blast who would probably survive after amputation. They were taken to the rear of the cottage for the Field Ambulance to carry them up to the Main Aid Post. Yet more morphia for a man whose hand and arm was a bloody mess. A bad blast to the cheek and eye, a serious chest wound – fatal? Maybe not. It was worth taking him to the Main Aid Post. Embedded shrapnel accounted for seven more injuries and there were two more possible amputations.

  It wouldn’t be so bad, thought Jerry, if he couldn’t hear. Morphia masked the pain but the sound of the wounded would stay with him always.

  The walking wounded were next. They always presented a challenge. The point of an Aid Post was to get as many men as possible back into the fighting line as quickly as possible. Bandages and iodine solved most problems, and …

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked a soldier, slumped on the ground.

  The man seemed perfectly well, apart from his arm which he held limply by his side.

  ‘It’s my arm, sir. It was the shell blast. I can’t move it.’

  An orderly helped him off with his tunic and Jerry examined the arm. There was a long graze, but he couldn’t find anything seriously wrong.

  ‘You’re shirking, Ryle,’ said the man behind him, whose tunic was stiff with blood. ‘You’re yellow. You always were. You wanted to duck it. He’s just a shirker, sir,’ he said to Jerry.

  Ryle spun round and let fly with a string of obscenities.

  ‘Cut that out!’ shouted Jerry, above another giant whine of a shell. That shell was really close. The impact shook plaster from the roof, sending clouds of choking dust into the air. In the haze, Jerry saw Ryle dodge nimbly to avoid the falling plaster, lifting his supposedly damaged arm to shield his eyes.

  ‘Right,’ he yelled. ‘You – Ryle – get out. There’s nothing wrong with you.’

  Ryle sullenly squared his shoulders. ‘I ain’t going. I need a stretcher. Me legs have gone too.’

  The pent-up frustration and sheer exhaustion of the last few days struck Jerry like a tidal wave. He let Ryle have it. He hardly knew what he was saying, but the nods of approval and mutters of, ‘You tell him, sir’ from the men surrounding Ryle added to his fury. That someone – this shirker – should demand that his men, his men who risked so much, should demand to be carried on a stretcher was the last straw. He saw Ryle’s fist – the supposedly injured fist – twitch.

  ‘Go on,’ jeered Jerry. ‘Hit me. It’s a court martial for you if you do. Go on, hit me …’

  His voice was lost in the biggest insect scream yet.

  ‘Down!’ yelled Private Connolly, forcing him to the floor as the shell hit.

  Jerry woke up with his mouth full of the taste of cordite and earth, his ears ringing with silence, Connolly’s weight heavy on him. He raised his head. He could only have been unconscious for a few minutes. The room was full of dust-hazed light, open to the sky. Ryle was half-buried under a pile of rubble and for a stupid moment, although he couldn’t hear anything, Jerry thought he was singing. Then he realized the man was shouting for help.

  He had to help. He could move if Connolly rolled away … but Connolly was dead. Jerry blinked around the ruin. There were other men, some dead, some also singing – no, shouting – for help, their mouths opening and shutting. He groggily got to his feet. He had to help. He stumbled forward, then the first sound he’d heard since the shell burst, a sound like a giant insect, scissored through his head.

  He ran. He left his post, he left his patients, he left his men, and ran. He didn’t know where he was running to but he had an impression of staring eyes and grime-blackened faces and hands trying to hold him, then an invisible giant’s hand picked him up, shook him and kicked him high into the air …

  Jerry Lucas pulled deeply on his cigarette. ‘I ran,’ he said flatly. ‘I called Ryle a coward, but I was the one who ran. I left my patients and my men and ran. A shell took me off my feet and when I woke up this ti
me, I was in a field hospital as a patient. I ended up being shipped back to England and that was the end of my war.’

  ‘You poor beggar,’ said Jack.

  Lucas looked at him with haunted eyes. ‘You think so? I never told anyone what I’d done. I deserted my post and deserted my patients when they needed help urgently. Men died because of me. I could’ve got help for them, but I ran. I told my father. He knew, but he was the only one. I couldn’t forget it, though. I always dreaded the past catching up with me. When Ryle turned up it seemed meant, somehow. He knew who I was, all right. I wanted to apologize to him, to try and make it up somehow, but he wanted far more than that.’

  So that was that. Jack had guessed as much. Not the circumstances or the details, but the result. ‘Blackmail.’

  Lucas sunk his head in his hands. ‘Blackmail. Ryle told Sir Matthew Vardon everything and he put the screws on my father. Dad’s not a wealthy man. He had savings, yes, but they went fast. I wanted to face the music, to own up to what I’d done, but Dad couldn’t bear the idea. Once that story got out, my reputation would be shot.’ He paused. ‘A doctor needs his reputation. Once it’s gone, he’s ruined.’

  That, thought Jack, was true.

  Jerry Lucas lit another cigarette, smoking mechanically. ‘Can you imagine the relief when Sir Matthew was taken ill? That damned nurse guessed something of my father’s feelings, but Dad was in the clear, no matter what she may have thought or said. He knew Sir Matthew was dying. All he had to do was wait. Ryle, on the other hand …’

  Jack waited.

  ‘Ryle knew,’ said Lucas in a flat voice. ‘He was dangerous. My God, I hated Ryle. “Good morning, Doctor,” he’d say, inviting me to challenge him. I dreamed that he was dead.’ Jack looked at him sharply. Lucas’s voice had quickened. ‘Don’t you understand? I wanted to be free. I dreamt of killing him.’ His voice took on a hard edge of satisfaction. ‘And now he’s dead. I got what I wanted.’

  In that moment Jack could well believe that Jerry Lucas really had murdered Ryle. It didn’t answer all the questions, but it was an answer. There was one big question though, that Lucas hadn’t touched on.