A Long Time Dead

by Sally Spencer

  Charlie Woodend was probably already sifting through the evidence with the same earnest diligence he had shown when he was a sergeant.

  But then, Woodend, as had already been established, was a greatly inferior being altogether.

  So while Charlie rooted around in the dirt, all he – the superior man – had to do was wait.

  Wait while events evolved.

  Wait until the moment was right to take action.

  He had entered a very dark tunnel, but when he emerged from it again – totally vindicated on all charges – the light would shine on him more brightly than it had ever done.

  Eleven

  ‘So what was that all about?’ Monika Paniatowski asked, when she and Woodend had taken their drinks over to a corner table in the Dun Cow.

  ‘What was what all about?’ Woodend countered.

  ‘All that stuff the landlord was saying. “Argument with young thugs over coloured boys”?’ she repeated, in her best Devonshire accent. “Take my hat off to you for the way you handled it”?’

  ‘Oh that!’ Woodend said, unenthusiastically.

  ‘Sounds like a good story to me.’

  ‘It’s not a good story. As a matter of fact, I find it a thoroughly depressin’ story.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because in the twenty-one years since that incident occurred, things have only got only a little better in the United States – an’ they’ve got a bloody sight worse over here.’

  ‘I’d like to hear the story anyway,’ Paniatowski said.

  Woodend sighed. ‘All right, if you insist,’ he agreed reluctantly. ‘But if you’re to understand it at all, you’re goin’ to have to endure a bit of a history lesson first.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘The American government started sendin’ its soldiers over here in 1942,’ Woodend said. ‘There were both black soldiers an’ white soldiers. But they were kept separate.’

  ‘Do you mean that they slept in different huts?’

  ‘I mean they were in completely different regiments an’ usually slept in separate camps. The coloured soldiers were never intended to go into battle. I think there was a general belief among the American top brass that they couldn’t fight – or maybe wouldn’t fight. They were only there to do the menial work – diggin’ latrines an’ the like. So, in that way, they were a bit like Victorian servants – never seen at all unless there was a dirty job to be done, an’ their white officers had ordered them to do it.’

  Paniatowski took a sip of her vodka. ‘Interesting,’ she said.

  ‘We’ve had a bit of racial conflict over here in the last few years, ever since the West Indians started comin’ across in large numbers, but we’d had no problems of that kind before the war. There were less than ten thousand coloured people livin’ in Britain – and most of them were concentrated around the docklands of two or three major ports. Which meant that the majority of people livin’ in this country had never seen a black face in their entire lives.’

  ‘So how did they feel about the coloured soldiers?’

  ‘They liked them. As a matter of fact, a lot of folk liked them more than they liked the white American soldiers. It’s true that, in some places, the cinemas and cafés would have one section for the whites an’ another for the coloureds, but that was more a concession to the white soldiers’ sensibilities than because the locals disliked the idea of rubbin’ shoulders with the coloureds. An’ as for the girls, they were very struck by what they used to call the “tan” Americans.’

  ‘I imagine that some of the white American soldiers can’t have liked that,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘They bloody hated it,’ Woodend replied. ‘Most of them had been brought up in the belief that the coloured man was inferior, an’ that the races should never – ever – mix. As I understand it, most of the coloureds who were lynched in the 1930s suffered that fate because they’d been accused of assaultin’ white women. So can you imagine how some of these white soldiers felt when they saw local girls walkin’ out on the arms of coloured men?’

  ‘Yes, I think I can,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘There was certainly a feelin’ among some of the white soldiers that the coloureds had better be taught a lesson.’

  ‘How did the coloureds react to that?’

  ‘They weren’t goin’ to take it. For the first time in their lives, they found themselves in a situation where, if a white man hit you, you could bloody-well hit him back. An’ they had every intention of doin’ just that.’

  ‘Is that what happened in this pub?’

  ‘It might well have done, if they’d been equally matched.’

  ‘But they weren’t?’

  ‘No, as things turned out, the coloured lads found themselves outnumbered ten to one.’

  There were three of them in the jeep that night. Woodend was driving, and though Kineally would have undoubtedly have preferred to sit next to him, he had decided to follow protocol and travel in the back with Coutes. The real breach between the two captains – the Mary Parkinson breach – was still several days away, but even without that, they had so little to say to each other that they had scarcely exchanged a word on the journey between the camp and the pub.

  The moment Woodend pulled the jeep up alongside the Dun Cow’s skittle alley, it was obvious that something was seriously wrong. No one played skittles on a cold March evening, under blackout restrictions, yet at least a couple of dozen American soldiers seemed to have gathered in the alley, under the pale light of the half-moon – and were shouting in the harsh tones that men resort to when they have scented blood.

  ‘I don’t like the look of that,’ Robert Kineally said, worriedly.

  ‘Me neither,’ Coutes agreed. ‘Riff-raff like them should be confined in barracks, not allowed to roam the countryside disturbing gentlemen’s peace.’

  ‘It’s not funny,’ Kineally told him.

  ‘And I wasn’t making a joke,’ Coutes replied.

  ‘Look, those are American soldiers in that alley!’ Kineally said, as if he thought that pointing that fact out would be enough to change Coutes’s mind about the seriousness of the situation.

  ‘So they are,’ Coutes said. ‘Which means that if they’re anybody’s concern, they’re yours.’

  ‘I’m appealing to you, as a brother officer, to help me to …’ Captain Kineally began.

  ‘If you’re so concerned – if you really feel you have to do something – why don’t you just call your MPs?’ Coutes suggested.

  ‘It’s over three miles to the camp. You know that as well as I do, Captain. And that means that by the time the MPs get here, whatever’s about to happen will probably be all be over.’

  ‘Good point,’ Coutes said. ‘So perhaps there’s no point in calling in the MPs after all. Can we go and have a drink now? That is, I shouldn’t need to remind you, the reason why we’re here.’

  ‘You may choose to look the other way, but I’m going to investigate,’ Kineally said disgustedly, as he climbed down from the jeep. He took a couple of steps towards the skittle alley, then stopped and turned round. ‘Want to give me a hand, Chuck?’ he asked.

  ‘Why not?’ Woodend asked, ignoring his own captain’s meaningful glare and following the American officer.

  The soldiers had formed a half-circle around the back wall of the alley, and trapped within that half-circle were two coloured men. Each of the coloured soldiers had acquired a weapon of sorts – one held a bottle in his hand, the other a short plank. The expressions on their faces said they weren’t willing to go down without a fight, but they must surely have known that once the white soldiers rushed them, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

  ‘Stop this right now!’ Kineally bellowed.

  The white soldiers, who’d been so absorbed by their own anger that they’d been unaware of the arrival of the two newcomers, turned around. When they saw an officer standing there, they fell silent.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ K
ineally demanded.

  One of the white soldiers, a man of middle height, and with a bad case of acne, took a step towards them.

  ‘This has nuthin’ to do with you,’ he said aggressively.

  ‘This has nothing to do with you, sir,’ Kineally countered.

  The other man looked down at the ground. ‘This has nuthin’ to do with you, sir,’ he said, in a surly tone.

  ‘What’s your name, soldier?’ Kineally asked.

  ‘Wallace. Harold Wallace. Private First Class.’

  ‘And what’s happened here, Wallace?’

  ‘These two niggers—’

  ‘These two coloured soldiers,’ Kineally interrupted. ‘These two coloured comrades of yours.’

  Woodend stood by, watching in amazement and admiration. In the time it had taken the captain to walk from the jeep to the skittle alley, he seemed to have become an entirely different person. The diffident Robert Kineally now seemed a thing of the past. This man who had replaced him was towering and commanding – this new Kineally would not have been intimidated by the devil himself.

  Kineally tapped the toe of his shoe on the ground impatiently. ‘Start again, soldier!’ he said. ‘And this time, take great care to make sure I don’t feel the need to interrupt you.’

  ‘These two ni … these two coloured soldiers came into the bar,’ Wallace said. ‘They just strode up to the counter, as proud as you please, an’ asked for drinks.’

  ‘And why shouldn’t they have?’

  ‘You kin see them!’ Wallace said. ‘Ain’t it obvious?’

  ‘Did they do, or say, anything to anger you?’ Kineally asked mildly, as if he were trying to be fair to everyone concerned. ‘Did they insult you in any way, Private Wallace?’

  ‘Sure they insulted me. They insulted me by tryin’ to order drinks in a white man’s bar.’

  ‘But it’s not a white man’s bar,’ Kineally pointed out. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, this is England, and Jim Crow laws don’t apply here.’

  ‘You want these ni … these coloured soldiers … to go back home to the States thinkin’ that they’re as good as we are?’ Wallace demanded.

  ‘We’re not talking about them, we’re talking about you,’ Kineally told him. ‘And what I want you to do is obey the laws of the country in which you happen to be a guest,’ He paused for a moment, to let the message sink in. ‘So what happened next?’

  ‘We invited these boys to come out into the yard with us,’ Wallace said, ‘an’ we was just about to teach them their place when you come in like the goddamned US Cavalry.’

  ‘In other words, these soldiers did nothing whatsoever to provoke you, but you had every intention of hurting them?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s right! An’ we’re still gonna beat the crap out of them,’ Wallace said.

  ‘I think not,’ Kineally said calmly. ‘What you’re actually going to is to apologize to these soldiers for your behaviour. And while you’re about it, you may as well apologize for calling them “niggers”.’

  An angry growl, like that of a wounded and enraged animal, rose up from the white soldiers standing behind Wallace.

  ‘I ain’t gonna do no such thing,’ Wallace protested.

  ‘Then I’ll personally see to it that you’re tried by a court martial on the charge of treason,’ Kineally promised.

  ‘Treason! What you talkin’ ‘bout? I ain’t no treasoner. I love my country!’

  ‘If you truly loved it, you wouldn’t try to undermine it by taking two of its soldiers out of action.’

  ‘They ain’t soldiers. They’re ni—’

  ‘You have one minute to make your apology, and after that, whatever you say it will be too late to save you from a court martial,’ Kineally said firmly.

  Wallace looked down at the ground again.

  ‘You ain’t gonna do what he wants, are you, Harry?’ a voice from the crowd demanded.

  ‘I don’t know, Huey,’ Wallace mumbled. ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘Thirty seconds left,’ Kineally said.

  ‘You cain’t do it!’ the man in the crowd – Huey – screamed.

  Woodend had a fix on him now. He was standing at the very edge of the half-circle. He was a big, ugly-looking bastard, with bad teeth and a rough scar running down his right cheek.

  ‘Fifteen seconds,’ Kineally said.

  Huey chose that moment to make his move. He broke free of the mob and rushed towards Kineally. He had a brick in his hand, and there was no doubt at all about what he intended to do with it.

  Woodend let him get a little closer, then stepped into his path. A look of confusion crossed Huey’s face, then it changed to a look of pain, as the sergeant’s fist buried itself in his ample gut.

  Gasping for air, Huey sank down to his knees. Woodend pushed the fallen man aside, and swung round to ready himself for his next attacker. But having seen their champion felled with comparative ease, none of the other men seemed overly eager to take his place.

  ‘Five seconds,’ Kineally said calmly, as if totally unaware of what had just happened only a couple of feet from him.

  Harry Wallace swallowed hard. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said in a croak.

  ‘It’s not me you need to apologize to, it’s the coloured soldiers,’ Kineally told him.

  Wallace gulped again. ‘I’m sorry, boys,’ he said, looking vaguely in the direction of the black men. ‘I guess I just got carried away.’

  ‘You don’t think I handled that very well, do you, Chuck?’ Kineally asked Woodend, as they sat together in the bar of the Dun Cow, half an hour later.

  ‘I’m sure those two coloured men appreciated your efforts on their behalf,’ Woodend said evasively.

  Kineally smiled. ‘Give me a straight answer to my question, Chuck,’ he said. ‘I can take it.’

  ‘I think you could have defused the incident without humiliating Wallace quite so much,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Don’t you think he deserved to be humiliated?’

  ‘I think he deserved to be thrashed to within an inch of his life. But that’s not the point.’

  ‘Then what is?’

  ‘In the long term, you’ve just made matters worse. Wallace won’t hate the coloureds any less as a result of what you made him do. If anything, his hatred will only increase, because every time he sees a black man, it will remind him of what happened here. The only difference you’ve made is that the next time he does something hateful, he’ll be much cleverer about it. You haven’t taught him to be better – you’ve taught him not to get caught.’

  Kineally sighed. ‘I guess you’re right,’ he admitted. ‘I got angry, and I shouldn’t have done. Maybe when this war is over, I’ll go into politics. Maybe then I’ll be able to help change attitudes.’

  ‘But he never lived to see the end of the war,’ Woodend said to Paniatowski. ‘He didn’t even live long enough to see any real fightin’. An’ it was his brother who eventually ended up in politics.’

  He paused, expecting his sergeant to make some comment on the story he had just told her – the story she had been itching to hear – but she said nothing.

  ‘Of course, there’s another way of lookin’ at it,’ Woodend continued. ‘Bearin’ in mind that Robert was really a robot, put on this earth by bug-eyed aliens intent on world domination, it’s probably for the best that it was his brother who ended up with a seat in Senate.’

  Paniatowski maintained her silence.

  ‘I’m not borin’ you, am I, Monika?’ Woodend asked loudly.

  The sergeant jumped slightly. ‘What was that, sir?’

  ‘I asked if I was borin’ you.’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Or maybe you’ve simply perfected the art of fallin’ asleep with your eyes open.’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep,’ Paniatowski said defensively. ‘I was thinking.’

  ‘Now there’s a novelty. An’ might I enquire what it was you were thinkin’ about?’

  ‘I was thinking about your friend,
Robert Kineally. I’m starting to see an entirely new side of him.’

  ‘Are you? An’ what side might that be?’

  ‘Up until now, the picture that you’ve been painting has been of a very nice man.’

  ‘An’ that’s just what he was. A grand lad! A lovely feller!’

  ‘But you gave me no idea at all of just how easy he found it to make himself enemies.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘He made himself an enemy of Private Harry Wallace that night in the skittle alley, didn’t he?’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d put it quite like—’

  ‘You told Kineally that every time Wallace saw a coloured man, it would remind him of how much the captain had humiliated him. But how much more intense that feeling must have been when he actually saw Kineally himself.’

  Woodend frowned. ‘So you think that Harry Wallace might be the murderer?’ he asked.

  ‘It could be him, certainly,’ Paniatowski replied. ‘But it could be any one of the thousands of other bigots who must have been at Haverton Camp at the same time.’

  ‘Wallace was the one who Kineally forced to apologize to the coloured lads,’ Woodend said.

  ‘On that occasion,’ Paniatowski countered. ‘But do you really believe that Wallace was the only enlisted man to ever come up against Kineally’s almost evangelical zeal and walk away hating him?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Woodend said, somewhat gloomily.

  ‘And if one of those enlisted men did decide to kill the captain, wouldn’t he have been likely to try and make sure that if the body was eventually found, someone else would take the blame for the murder?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘And who better as the fall guy than a Limey officer?’

  ‘You’re forgettin’ the bloody fingerprint on the dog tag …’ Woodend protested.

  ‘Maybe Coutes is right,’ Paniatowski argued. ‘Maybe that was faked somehow! Or maybe – though Special Agent Grant would throw an absolute fit if he heard me say this – the wonderful, super-efficient FBI crime lab made a mistake for once, and it isn’t Coutes’s fingerprint at all!’

  ‘When you prove me innocent of this murder – and you will prove it – it will be like thrusting a dagger in your own gut,’ Coutes had told Woodend. ‘And when you see me walk away – more powerful than I’ve ever been – it will be twisting that dagger round in the wound.’