I don’t believe in anything supernatural. I don’t think that such things are possible, but whatever Stojka had in his hand lit the scene in front of my eyes so brilliantly that I could now see the hard lines of hatred on Captain Mansard’s face. Addressing Martin Stojka, he said, ‘Give the Nail to me.’
I wanted to say something about his not believing in this thing, but by that time I was speechless. As Stojka held it out to Mansard I motioned for Hannah to get out of it sharpish. But she was as fascinated by what was going on as I was. Her eyes looked almost as if she were seeing inside herself rather than staring at what was happening outside. There was probably half a second of the deepest silence this side of the grave. I turned my attention from Hannah to Stojka. But now the scene had changed. There was nothing bright and ethereal in Stojka’s hand any more and Captain Mansard was screaming.
‘Oh, Christ!’ Mansard yelled. He was lying on the forest floor, rocking, holding his face and shouting.
I’d seen nothing happen, yet Mansard was tearing at one blood-filled eye. Martin Stojka, who had embedded the nail in Mansard’s face, watched impassively. Even when Mansard’s sergeant hefted his rifle and shot Stojka, the Gentleman Gypsy did not move. In fact, it wasn’t for some moments that I realised Stojka had been shot. Then, slowly, like a tree that has been felled, he dropped forwards on to the ground, the wound in his back pouring blood, his eyes wide open and seemingly without life. The nail in Mansard’s face had ceased to glow and we were all where we had been before Stojka had removed it from his jacket, caught in the gloom of Mansard’s boys’ torches.
‘Help me!’ Mansard shouted, as he clawed and shredded his face.
‘Fucking hell, Sarge,’ one of the younger MPs said, to the man with the stripes on his arm in front of him.
Rosie’s Edward and her mother lifted their heads from the ground, only to be shot by the other equally terrified young MP behind the Gypsy group. He did it as reflex, a deadly reaction to fear.
‘Betty!’ Mr Lee lunged across towards his wife’s twitching body.
‘Stay where you are!’ the sergeant MP warned him. He took his eyes off Mr Lee and turned to Mansard. ‘Captain?’ he said.
But Mansard was speechless. Gasping for breath, his fingers lost in a bloody hole inside his face, he rocked on the ground in the grip of an agony I could only imagine. I made to go over to him to see what I could do. We’re all human, aren’t we, and he was a human in great pain? But as soon as I moved I found myself looking down a gun barrel.
‘Kill ’em all, and then we’ll think about what we’re going to say later,’ the man with his gun in my face said to his younger colleagues.
‘There ain’t half a lot of ’em,’ the young lad who had shot Edward and Betty replied, as he surveyed the remaining wailing and bloodied Gypsies on the ground before him. ‘What about Captain Mansard?’
‘I’ll deal with him,’ the sergeant replied. ‘You do what I tell you.’
‘Sarge.’ He swung his machine-gun down from his shoulder again and clicked off the safety catch.
The man in front of me bent down towards Mansard as Mr Lee tore himself away from his wife’s body and shouted, ‘No!’
‘Sarge’ looked at his younger colleagues and said, ‘Now!’
I saw one of the kids swallow hard before he fired, but both he and his mate still did it. I could hear Hannah screaming behind me and I feared she might run forward in an attempt to save the Gypsies. But she didn’t move any more than I did. Whether we were rooted to the spot with fear or whether we didn’t feel the Gypsies were worth our own lives, I will never know. But the fear that it might have been the latter haunts me. I felt pain when I saw little Charlie Lee’s life shot out of him, but that doesn’t do anything to lessen my guilt. In the end, if you’re there you do something, and in that moment I did nothing.
Once the shooting had finished there was silence. People imagine that after an execution like that some of those only wounded will groan and cry out in their agony. But it doesn’t always happen, and it seemed at the time that the young MPs had been thorough. All I could hear was Hannah’s weeping and the pounding of my own blood inside my head.
‘You,’ Sarge said to me, as I stood trembling with terror in front of him, ‘get the nail out of Captain Mansard’s face. I think he’s almost dead now.’
‘No,’ I whispered, my throat almost closed by terror. His voice was so far from humanity it made me want to be sick.
Sarge moved towards me. ‘Now, you listen to me, you dirty little wog,’ he said. ‘The Captain, Jonesy, young Hanson over there and me, we’ve had ’ard time getting hold of what these bleedin’ Gyppos have. We’ve lost the fuckin’ war anyway, so why not give old Adolf what he wants, eh? Captain would’ve done it for love of the Fatherland, but I’m quite happy with the ackers and the chance to carry on living meself.’
Mansard had now stopped clawing at his face and was just twitching in a way that the dead Gypsies were not doing. The nail, long, dark and thin, stuck way out and up from inside his bloodied, smashed-up eye-socket.
‘Don’t do it, H!’ I heard Hannah cry. ‘We haven’t lost this war! We can’t have lost this war!’
Sarge’s face moved up into a sneer. ‘What the fuck do you know, love?’
I wasn’t going to do a thing to help him.
‘No,’ I said, more strongly this time. ‘You want it, you get it.’
‘I’ll fucking shoot—’
‘You’re going to shoot us anyway!’ I said. ‘No, you do it yourself.’
The youngster still standing behind the great heap of dead Gypsies said, ‘Sarge, it’s getting light!’
I would have done what Sarge did, which was glance up into the lightening sky, but my eyes were on something that was moving at the edge of my view. It was a man and, though bloodied, he did not appear to be hurt.
‘If you touch the Nail with bad intent it will do you harm,’ Mr Lee said, as he picked himself up from among the bodies of his dead children.
‘Jonesy!’
But the lad was frozen, his eyes riveted to the gory, weeping figure that had emerged from the massacre.
‘The Gentleman, Mr Stojka, was keeper of the Nail. It will let me, as one of his own, for a while, take it now,’ Mr Lee said.
Sarge moved his pistol away from me and pointed it at the Gypsy. ‘If you think I’m going to let you have what we’ve taken months to find, then you’ve another think coming! You ain’t doing to me what that German done to the captain!’
Mr Lee stood very still, then raised his arms slowly into the air.
‘Now, look here,’ the MP said, ‘unlike the captain, I ain’t no Nazi. Hitler must be a bloody madman to be offering ackers for something like this. I just want the money.’
‘You’ve killed all these people for it!’ I said. Until I heard him talking so calmly about money the true horror hadn’t really hit me. A man, a woman and children had been wiped out for something I would’ve put in the same box with Lily’s visions – something from the mind. Relics were just bits of old wood, metal and bone that people said were powerful because there was a story attached to them. They weren’t real. But all of us, Sarge included, had seen that nail glow when Stojka took it out of his pocket. And if Sarge was so confident he didn’t believe in its power, why had he asked me to pull it out of Captain Mansard’s face? Why hadn’t he done it himself?
‘Yeah,’ Sarge replied, ‘and if you try to stop me and Jonesy and Hanson, we’ll kill you an’ all.’
I glanced across at the other two and caught just the briefest hint of doubt flash between them. They were young and, as I knew from my own experiences, killing doesn’t always become a habit with blokes who take oath for King and country. There were four of us – Horatio, Mr Lee, Hannah and myself – and only three of them. They had less to lose than us, but they had the weapons we lacked. Not that that superior situation had saved Captain Mansard. Something else had happened to him, something I still can’t explain. It
did make me think, though. ‘Well, Sarge,’ I said, as I fixed Mr Lee with what I hoped was a meaningful stare, ‘we certainly don’t want that, do we?’
‘You don’t.’
‘No. So why don’t you take the nail yourself and—’
‘It’s in the Captain’s eye!’ The watery early-morning sun had risen considerably now and by its light I could clearly see Sarge cringe. ‘I ain’t pulling that out!’ He pointed to Mr Lee. ‘He can do it. Seems he wants to.’
‘And then have you take it off him and kill us all anyway? No, Mr Lee,’ I said, ‘don’t do it. Don’t—’
The muzzle of a pistol jammed against the side of your head will generally shut you up and Sarge’s weapon had the appropriate effect on me.
‘You ain’t giving the orders here, Mr Hancock,’ Sarge said. ‘That’s for me to do.’
‘Leave him alone!’ I heard Hannah squeak.
But no one took any notice of her. ‘Get the fuckin’ thing out of the captain’s face, Gyppo!’ Sarge said to Mr Lee. ‘Then lay it on the ground so I can pick it up meself.’
‘And if I won’t?’ Mr Lee was looking at me in a way that told me he had understood what I’d wanted him to do, which was to confound and confuse these already edgy men by playing on their squeamishness, and their distrust of him – another Gypsy with his hands on that nail.
‘Sarge, this is all going wrong!’ the lad called Jonesy said, panicking.
‘Shut up, Private! Let me think,’ Sarge said now, visibly sweating with the strain.
‘Jonesy’s right,’ Hanson chipped in, his voice shaking with what sounded to me like terror. ‘We can’t kill all these people and get away with it! Captain said all we had to do was get that nail thing for him and he’d give us money. No one said nothing about killing.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a bloody baby, Hanson! You knew that the Captain killed the girl and you weren’t too upset about that. You even knew about Williams.’
‘Ah, yes, Lily and Sergeant Williams,’ I said. Sarge’s gun was still jammed against my temple but I felt I had to carry on keeping him mentally off-balance. Also, I was curious. Mansard had never explained why he’d killed the Gypsy girl and his sergeant. ‘Why did the captain kill them?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Why do you not want to tell me if you’re going to kill me anyway?’
Sarge wiped some sweat off his brow, then said, ‘Fair enough.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Williams found out the girl knew about Stojka, heard her talking about him to her brother-in-law. So, anyway, the girl, she fancied Williams a bit, talked to him and that. He was a good-looking bloke, he got close. He convinced her he was in love with her, playing her, like. You know how it is with red-blooded geezers.’
‘He was in love with her,’ I heard Mr Lee say. ‘He was.’
‘The girl liked him and told him Stojka was special, but she wouldn’t tell Williams where the German was. He told the captain as much as he’d found out – he trusted him then – and the captain told Williams to try and find out more. But then Williams heard me and the captain talking one day, about the nail and Hitler and the money we was going to make. Couldn’t hide how cold he was towards us after that, so we followed him. He went to see her first, Lily, to warn her. After that, we heard him say, he was going to the coppers. Left us with little choice. Captain killed the girl, I killed Williams, and then the captain put his knife in Williams’s hand. It weren’t difficult.’ He took the gun away from my head now and said to Private Jones, ‘Get that nail for us, will you?’
The boy didn’t answer, just stood there with a dead white face. A few birds were singing.
‘Christ!’ Sarge sighed, then reached into his battledress pocket for a fag. ‘Don’t you blokes want to make some ackers?’
Neither of the two privates, still with their guns trained on us, answered.
‘You’ll have to come with me, whatever we do,’ Sarge said. ‘So you might as well put your backs into it and help me make some money. You’ve just killed some people, for Christ’s sake! Now, let’s get this fucking thing Hitler wants and get out of here!’
I sensed, rather than saw, the two privates make up their minds to do as he asked, so I said, ‘But how are you going to get it to Hitler?’
‘Oh, don’t you worry about that,’ Sarge said, and gripped me hard around my throat. ‘Captain had that all arranged.’ He let go of me and said to his men, ‘All right, Jonesy, you drag the captain’s body into that hearse and we’ll deal with his eye later. Must be dead by now, mustn’t he.’ He looked back at me. ‘Handy coffin in the back we can put him in, ain’t there? You,’ he said to Horatio, ‘help Jonesy.’
Private Jones and Horatio picked up Captain Mansard’s body and loaded it into the shell in the back of my hearse. Sarge went on about how ‘handy’ it was to have my motor at his disposal, while Hannah, Mr Lee and I looked on with, in my case, mounting anxiety. As soon as Sarge and his blokes had put the captain away, the four of us would be of no use to him. Not a ruthless man in the way I think Mansard had been, but I recognised Sarge’s type of pitiless greed. He came, I imagined, from Canning Town or the Island or some other place where kids walk about in Salvation Army jumpers and the only uncle they know is the one who lives in the shop with the three brass balls over the door. Not that I think poverty can be an excuse for killing, it can’t, but it can and does explain some people, like Sarge.
Once Horatio was back with us again, we were all made to go and stand by Mr Lee, whose dead wife, children and son-in-law were on the ground behind his back.
‘Making a neat pile?’ I asked Sarge, as he and his two colleagues stood before us with their weapons at the ready.
‘It ain’t personal,’ he said, ‘but if you live we might not have time to get to the coast.’
I wanted to make some sharp comment about Sarge meeting Hitler in Brighton for a walk around the Pavilion and an ice-cream from the stop-me-and-buy-one man. But I knew that even if I did have to die, I could try to save Hannah. Sarge and Jonesy took aim.
I put one hand out in front to try to stop them. ‘Let Hannah live!’ I blurted. ‘Take her with you!’
‘H? No!’
‘If you get into difficulty with the police you could use her as a hostage,’ I said. And then, laughing hysterically at the madness of what for me was the last clutched straw, I added, ‘Take her with you. Use her . . . She . . . let her live . . .’
‘No!’ Hannah said. ‘Go with them? I’d rather die!’
I began to weep. ‘Hannah, this is nothing to do with you. You must live . . .’
‘I don’t want to!’ Her eyes were full of tears too, smudging what little remained of her carefully put-on funeral makeup. ‘Not without you!’
I saw in her eyes what I had always known anyway, but I wanted her to say it to me before one or both of us died.
I put out my arms to her. ‘Say it, Hannah, that you love me.’
‘I . . .’ She moved into my grasp but was violently jerked away from me. Private Hanson dragged her out of the firing line by her neck and pushed her toward an amazed Sarge. ‘I—’
‘Bloody hell, Hanson!’
‘I can’t kill a woman!’ the private said. He was little more than a boy, really. Then he just smiled weakly at Hannah.
‘You didn’t have a problem with that Gypsy!’ Sarge snapped back, referring, I imagined, to Hanson’s part in the death of Lily Lee.
‘No, I know, but . . . Well, that was a Gypsy and . . . Sarge, maybe the undertaker fella’s right about a hostage . . .’
As I’ve said before, Sarge wasn’t exactly an evil man, so I knew he didn’t take pleasure in killing us. I saw him think about what Hanson had said and then, perhaps in spite of his better judgement, I saw him shrug and say to Hanson, ‘Well, put her in the hearse, then. But if she gets lairy she’s all yours.’
‘You fucking—’ Hannah spat and cursed as the young boy dragged her towards the car. ‘H! H!’ I turned my face awa
y from her now and sighed with something like contentment as I heard the two remaining MPs take aim at us. I knew this routine of old.
First Mr Lee dropped in an explosion of blood, followed by Horatio, who died in the selfsame way. Not a word or a look passed between any of us, not even an expression of friendship, comfort or goodbye. We were simply things to be slaughtered so others could get money. It wasn’t personal or cruel or even really that frightening. My only regret, as everything went black around me, was that I hadn’t heard Hannah say she loved me.
Chapter Fifteen
In all the time I’d spent in Flanders not once had I ever been shot. I was gassed, twice, and wounded with a bayonet to the left-hand side once, but until that moment in the middle of Epping Forest I had never taken a bullet.
It hurt. Once I’d come round from what must have been a faint, the pain smashed into me like a tank. I couldn’t scream, though. I couldn’t make any sound until the hearse had driven away, and for several endless seconds Sarge and his boys hung around. Although I thought of nothing at the time, I imagined later it was because whoever was driving had had to work out how to operate the Lancia before he took it on the road. But eventually it went, and when I was sure I couldn’t hear it any longer I let out a long, low growl.
In a way I was angry with whoever had shot me for not finishing me off. Surrounded only by the dead, I looked at the place where the pain was coming from, which was on my right-hand side, just under my ribs. It would match up with my left side now, I thought grimly, provided I survived, which didn’t look possible. I’d been shot in the stomach, the same as Horatio, who was clearly dead, and unlike Mr Lee who had obviously been shot in the head. Why the different methods, I neither knew nor cared. I just felt the pain, which had sent even all thought of Hannah from my mind. There was blood everywhere. If I’d tried to stand I would have slipped over in it. I remember that I looked at the hand with which I’d attempted to cover my own wound once and found that as soon as I took it away I could hear my blood leaving my body in a powerful stream. I felt dizzy and sick, and I knew, with a certainty I’d never experienced in the Great War, that I was going to die. There, on that leafy forest floor, surrounded by dead Gypsies. I wondered, as the lights went out in my head, what people would make of the scene and whether what had really happened there would ever be discovered.
After the Mourning Page 17
