“The gas,” he said. “That bloody awful stuff. It came into the shell hole, and we put our gas masks on – Burton and I, and this young private. Wish I could remember his name. And our CO, Captain Palgrave, watched the gas getting closer, and he backed away from it as far as he could, and his feet were slipping in the mud and splashing the water and all the while he was trying to cover his face with his jacket, but we all knew that was useless, and he did too. And he panicked.”
He took another gulp of his beer, and another drag of his cigarette, as if they alone were keeping him from breaking apart entirely. Then he smiled, but it wasn’t like any kind of smile Martha had ever seen before. It was bitter and angry and as full of sadness as anything Martha had ever seen, except, perhaps, for Max’s eyes sometimes. “Avery,” he said.
“What?”
“That was his name. The boy. Private Avery.”
“Oh.”
“Palgrave took the service pistol from his holster, and he looked at us, at Burton and me and Avery. I knew what he was going to do, and I didn’t stop him. He ordered Avery to remove his gas mask, and Burton and I did nothing. What could we do? Palgrave was our commanding officer. But it was murder, no matter what Palgrave was. I can see Avery looking at us, at Burton and me, but mostly at me because I was the only other officer there. And I did nothing. And Avery refused, and Palgrave shouted at him to remove his mask, and Avery’s eyes were huge with fear, and then Palgrave shot him dead and removed the gas mask and he survived. A few hours later, under cover of dark, we crawled back to our trench.”
“God,” Martha said. “Max, that’s—”
“Wait, Martha. I haven’t finished yet. There’s a lot more to tell, and it’s relevant to what’s happening.”
But he didn’t continue. Martha moved her chair closer and put her hands out to cover the one that Max had put on the table. She was trying to stop his hand shaking. “Max,” she said.
She didn’t say any more. She didn’t trust herself to say any more without sobbing.
He stubbed out his cigarette and placed his hand on hers. They were cold, her hands, and soft and delicate. They were serene, unsullied, and the only thing Max wanted to do was hold her hands and forget everything that had once happened. But he pulled his hand away.
He stood and went to the bar and bought another pint. When he brought it back, he sat down again, and leaned back from the table. He lit another cigarette, his third in five minutes.
“Palgrave handed in a list of known casualties, including Avery. I didn’t contest it, didn’t report it. Things back then were… different. When two million men a few hundred yards away are trying to kill you, law is subjective. Burton and I never talked about it. But Palgrave must’ve feared we’d say something because he started sending us on these patrols, always my platoon, always Burton’s section with me commanding. We had to go out and repair telephone wires, plant mines, cut barbed wire. He’d send us on any reconnaissance or intelligence mission that battalion or brigade HQ wanted. We knew what he was doing, of course – he was trying to kill us. But we just kept coming back, sometimes with casualties, but we kept coming back. Trench raids were the worst. The men couldn’t use their rifles in the German trenches; there wasn’t enough room. I had a pistol, of course, and we carried grenades, but we had to be as quiet as possible, so most of the fighting was hand to hand, brutal, medieval. We used bayonets and home-made clubs and maces.”
Max lifted his glass with trembling hands and downed half the pint in one go. He smoked some more of his smoke, drank more of his drink and put the glass back slowly. “But it kept on,” he said, “and I knew that our time would run out one day, and Burton and I wouldn’t come back from a patrol. And I made a mistake.”
He finished his drink, and sat awhile, holding the empty glass, and his mind seemed to wander so that Martha had to bite her tongue. Let him tell it in his own way, she thought. Let him tell it in his own time. He’s had half a lifetime to remember, to keep this to himself, and now he’s talking, so let him have a few minutes more.
“I went to our battalion commander and told him what’d happened,” Max said. “A man called Monroe, Lieutenant-Colonel Monroe as he was then. He’s an important man now, and a general to boot. Anyway, Monroe and Palgrave were tight. They’d been regulars in the Guards, had seen a lot of action while most of us were still civvies. So I spoke to Monroe, told him what had happened in that shell hole, told him about Avery. And he wouldn’t believe me, of course, but he called in Palgrave and Burton. And Palgrave admitted shooting Avery but said it was necessary because Avery was panicking and threatening all of them. Burton didn’t know what to say, and I don’t blame him for that, but Monroe pushed him and he agreed that it might’ve been justified. That left me, and I maintained it was murder, but now I was alone and the thing was dropped. The patrols went on, but now with Monroe’s knowledge, which made it worse. They’d closed ranks, see. The old boy network and all that.”
Here Max’s voice had become bitter and dark, like the mud and night of no man’s land. “And then, one day, we had another big push. And I was half mad with fury, like nothing you could imagine, just this awful suicidal rage, gnawing at my guts and my mind. But not for the Germans, not them. They were just doing what we were doing; we were told to kill them, and they were told to kill us. We respected them. No, my anger now was against my own officers, the ones who should’ve been on our side but who were intent on preserving themselves at the cost of anything – the enemy, us, principles, honour. And I raced towards the German lines, not caring about a thing except that I had this burning desire to destroy everything.”
Whenever he paused, it felt to Martha as if a hole had opened up in the world and taken everyone else away. Max was her centre and everything else diminished in proportion to distance from him. There was Max’s voice, and all other noises were just the faraway mutterings of other people who weren’t real, or didn’t seem to be.
His voice, when he spoke again, was like thunder in the silence. Like thunder, or like a shell blasting deep into the dark earth. “And there was an explosion,” he said, “and I felt the shock wave blast me sideways. When I came to, I was in a shell hole with three other British soldiers. Two of them were dead and the third had a gut wound. And I looked up and saw that the man with the wound was Palgrave. Captain Palgrave and me in a shell hole. Again. He was staring at me, and I stared at him, into his eyes that were like dark holes in a white mask, blood caked to his skin.”
He hadn’t looked at Martha for a long time. He watched the dreg of cloudy beer in his glass, rolled it around a bit. “And I kept thinking about that boy,” he said, “the private, what was his name? What was his bloody name? Avery. Yes. I kept thinking about him, and about what Palgrave had done, and what I’d allowed Palgrave to do. And I started to imagine that we were dead, Palgrave and I, and that we were stuck there in some kind of purgatory, each trapped with the other, locked by a shared guilt, each one accusing the other, not with words but with the mere fact of our presence.”
“I knew I should’ve done something to help Palgrave, of course. I’d have done it for anyone. Most of us would’ve. Even him, probably. But I just sat there and he just sat there and his lips moved now and then and I thought he was asking me to help him. But I kept thinking of that kid, of Avery, and I did nothing. It might’ve been minutes. It seemed like hours. It was getting near dusk and there was a fog or mist or something. It might’ve been smoke. For all I knew it was more of that bloody gas, only now neither of us would get away from it. And then his lips moved again, and this time I heard the word. Just one word: ‘Traitor.’”
“That word, it cut me in half. It destroyed me. It was the worst word a man could hurl my way, worse even than coward or murderer. I couldn’t speak. I tried, but my mouth wouldn’t work. I just looked at him. I admit, at that moment I wanted him to die. But he didn’t. Then I thought about Palgrave’s family, a
nd I suddenly snapped to. Nobody deserved to die alone, like that, in a bloody hole in the middle of that carnage. So I grabbed Palgrave by the back of his collar, and I slid out of the hole, hauling him behind me, and used the gloom and the mist as cover, moving slowly through the mud and rainwater and blood and dead bodies. I crawled for ever, and then I crawled some more. And I finally made it back to the British line and fell into the trench, bringing his body with me. He was dead, had been so for half an hour or more.”
Finally, he glanced up at his wife, and saw in her eyes the pain that he knew was a reflection of his own.
The elderly ladies were still talking, complaining of the price of this and that, the quality of this and that, and the laughter and chatter from the public bar came through the divide, but the table where Max and Martha were seated was surrounded by that hole, by that memory and those horrors.
“Max,” she said. “Oh, Max. Why couldn’t you have told me this?”
“It was murder, Martha. How could I?”
“You didn’t kill him, darling. It wasn’t your fault.”
“There’s murder and murder. You can kill a man with a command, or with a bayonet or with the turning away of your eyes. It was murder, whatever else anyone may call it. The British army doesn’t like murderers. They especially don’t like commissioned murderers, unless they’re high-ranking commissioned murderers, in which case they seem to like them very much. But shoving me up against a wall and shooting me wouldn’t have made good copy. So they gave me an MC instead. I fail to wear it with pride.”
“And what about that man in the hotel room? Major Rice – what does he have to do with all that?”
“He and Palgrave were friends. He’d been a regular too, became a company commander. Palgrave and Monroe and Rice, all of them old soldiers, regulars, officers, friends. And me, an interloper, makes an accusation of cowardice and murder. They must’ve hated me.”
“But nobody knows, Max. You said it yourself, it was just the two of you in that hole, just you and Palgrave.”
“Rice knew, I’m sure he did. He never said anything, but he used to look at me sometimes with utter loathing. And maybe he found something out. Maybe that’s why he was here, in London. And now he’s dead, and I’m in trouble.”
“But you didn’t kill him.”
“Can you prove that? And does it matter if nobody can prove I didn’t kill Rice, or Burton? People will suspect I had a reason to kill them, and then they’ll start to wonder what happened at Passchendaele.”
“So what if they do? I don’t care what anyone thinks. I only care what I know, and I know you’re the most honourable, decent, kind person I’ve ever known. And I know I love you, and always will.”
Max smiled weakly. “The thing is, old girl,” he said, “I know. I know what happened, what I did, what I didn’t do. Funny thing, though. I don’t care what happened with Palgrave… but that kid, that private. We watched him being murdered, and we did nothing.”
“Max, you were so young. You were a boy.”
“We were all boys,” Max said, “apart from the men who killed us.”
He stubbed out his cigarette, put a hand through his hair. “I don’t understand all this, Martha. It has to be something to do with the war, and that frightens me. What if it’s to do with Palgrave? What if I’m guilty? Not now, but then?”
Martha stood and walked to Max, standing behind him. She leaned over, rested her cheek on his, her hands on his shoulders. “We’re going to find out what happened to your friend,” she said. “Nick and Nora Charles, remember?”
“The Thin Man.”
“Yes. And, by the way, you’re more handsome than William Powell.”
“Good. What about Clark Gable?”
“Don’t push it.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
They walked slowly back to Pimlico, hand in hand. They didn’t speak a great deal, but every now and then Max would slow his steps and crease his brow in thought.
“I wonder,” he said as they passed a couple of workmen who were sitting behind a red and white wooden barrier and smoking, their feet dangling in the hole they’d dug in the road.
“What?”
“Oh, I was just thinking about that newspaper in Burton’s pocket. You might be right about him buying it on the way to see me. If not, he must’ve bought it before he got to the hotel. Either way, it’s interesting.”
“How so?”
“Well, why did he have it on him when he met me in The Lion? Either he would’ve bought it before going to the hotel, in which case he’d have dumped it in his room. Or he’d have bought it – like you said – on his way to meeting me, in which case, why? I mean, whatever he wanted to see me about must’ve been important, urgent, even, so why would he pause just to buy a newspaper? It doesn’t fit.”
Martha wasn’t sure that Max’s logic was correct, but she had to acknowledge that it was odd behaviour if he’d bought it on the way to see Max. That certainly didn’t seem to fit. Unless…
“Unless there was something in the paper that was important,” she said.
“Exactly. If he’d been bringing the paper specifically to the meeting with me, then there must’ve been a reason.”
“Right. We need to see a copy of Friday’s Standard, then.”
“Yes. And I’d still like to know what the papers are making of Burton’s murder.”
“Call Sherry,” Martha said. “Would he know anything?”
“He’s deputy editor these days, but they’ve moved him over to the Foreign desk. Still, he’d be able to chat to some people, I think. Quietly.”
“Well, go on then. Call him. He’d be pleased to help. You know how much he likes you.”
“It’s not me he likes. It’s my gorgeous wife.”
“Oh,” Martha said, smiling a little.
They continued in that fashion for a while, Max throwing out the odd question, such as, why hadn’t anyone at the hotel found Rice?
“That’s easy,” Martha said, in a position of out-logicking Max, if that was even a word. “Didn’t you see the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign? Nobody would dare go in there while that was up. And, since Burton didn’t check out, they must assume he’ll come back.”
That made sense.
“Why a twin room, Max?”
“I think for protection.”
That also made sense. Still, there was something else plaguing Max. He thought about things, clicking his tongue now and then, as he was wont to do when trying to write. Then he realised what it was that was worrying him. He stopped, and Martha stopped and looked at him. “It’s Monday,” he said.
Martha waited for him to say something else, and when he didn’t, she said, “Yes.”
“There was lividity in Rice’s body, and the room temperature was cool. I checked the radiator, which was cold.”
He started walking again, but slowly, thinking. Martha, her hand still in Max’s, walked slowly with him, and waited. “No rigor,” Max said, “and some smell.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, we know Burton was killed on Friday evening. I’d say that Rice was likely killed around then.”
“How do you know so much about dead bodies?”
“There are a few million of us who know more than we’d ever wanted to know about dead bodies.”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Still, it tells us a few things. I think we need to speak to someone at The Lion.”
“Let’s go home first. We both need a nice cup of tea.”
Max smiled. He shouldn’t have worried so much about Martha seeing a dead body. What was it he’d said to Mr Bacon? She’s not as delicate as she seems. No, indeed she wasn’t. His old girl had strength all right.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Upon entering the flat, Max and Martha were met by a strange sight. A yo
ung, pink-faced, slightly portly chap in a dark woollen suit was sitting on the sofa staring at the large feet of a large police constable.
Max and Martha stopped short and glanced at each other. Max shrugged. Martha said, “Well, this is interesting.”
The policeman looked over at them. “Mr and Mrs Dalton?”
“Yes,” Martha said.
“Eric?” Max said, only now recognising their guest.
“This young man deserves your thanks, I believe.”
It took a few minutes for the policeman to explain what had happened and to tell Max and Martha how Eric had come along at an appropriate moment, preventing the two would-be burglars, who were probably miles away by now. He further explained that it was unlikely they’d be able to catch the miscreants, and that, since nothing was taken and nobody was injured, it would probably not be taken much further, but that he, the police constable, would personally do as much as he could, until this evening, anyway, when he had an important darts match.
By now, Flora had also appeared and added to the account, describing Eric’s role and her role and the role of the villains, who had evolved diabolical menace.
During this time, Eric had said nothing. Indeed, he had done nothing except try his hardest not to stare at Martha, and, most particularly, at her legs, in which effort he was pointedly failing, as everyone, except apparently Martha, could see.
The policeman took his leave and Max lit a cigarette. “Blimey,” he said.
“He was heroic, I reckon,” Flora was saying, glaring at Eric, whose mouth was hanging open.
Eric reddened and smiled broadly, and his eyes swam with delight that Flora could possibly see him as a hero. “It weren’t nothin’,” he said, shrugging.
“It wasn’t not nothing at all,” Martha said, surrounding herself in negatives and becoming confused by them. “I mean, it was something, Eric. It was heroic. Well done.”
Flora calling him heroic was a wonderful thing, but with Martha doing it too, and with those legs, Eric became overwhelmed and blushed even more and became stupidly cumbersome. “’Alf a pound, ma’am,” he said, to which the others looked completely baffled. “I mean, er, giblets.”
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