Anthem for Doomed Youth (9 page)

‘Bully,’ she suggested.

‘He gets my goat, and what’s more, he knows it. If I’d discovered Quakerism sooner,’ he said bitterly, ‘I wouldn’t have been so keen to join up and I might … But that’s water
under the bridge. The real hero is Tesler. He stuck to his pacifist principles and was sent to Dartmoor.’ He lowered his voice. ‘That’s where he lost the use of his hand, you know. An accident in the quarries.’

‘The man I was engaged to was a Quaker.’ Daisy seldom spoke of Michael, but, much as she loved Alec, her throat still ached with tears when she thought of him. ‘He
volunteered
for the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and was blown up in France.’

‘That’s real heroism.’ Tesler had returned to them.
Helping
his friend stand up, he went on, ‘Dartmoor wasn’t so bad, old chap. You shouldn’t take any notice of what that fat-head says. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s as lacking in brains as in nerves.’

Pencote was obviously still seething, but he managed to chuckle. ‘That of God in every man?’ he said, giving the Quaker principle an ironic inflection.

‘Yes,’ Tesler said serenely. ‘Even Harriman, though he hides it well. Mrs Fletcher, you say Belinda’s talking of a career in science? I wish I could encourage her. She’s one of the few pupils who truly grasp that science is not just about learning rules but about discovery. However, there are few – if any – opportunities for women in the sciences.’

‘Marie Curie!’ Miss Bascombe joined them, as they moved slowly towards the school buildings.

‘All right, few.’ Tesler gave her a fond smile, which was returned, Daisy noted.

‘That child has determination. She’ll be good at sports, too, Mrs Fletcher, once she stops growing so fast. If she wants to be a scientist, don’t discourage her.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Daisy assured the earnest young
woman. ‘But she’s only in the second form. She’ll change her mind a dozen times, I dare say, before she has to decide.’

At that moment, Harriman caught up with them, with a group of boys carrying chairs. As they passed, he swung round and said, ‘Look what I found on the field.’

He handed something to Tesler, who automatically took it. He strode on. Daisy and the three teachers stared down at the small object in Tesler’s hand.

A white feather.

‘A gull, I should think.’ Tesler seemed unmoved by the obvious implication that he was a coward. But Pencote and Miss Bascombe stared after Harriman with loathing.

By the time Alec and his team reached Tunbridge Wells, the day was still hotter, more like August than June. Colonel Pelham had lived on the north side of the common. His favourite public house, the Duke of York, was in the Pantiles on the south side, one of the old buildings surrounding the hot springs, a fashionable spa since the seventeenth century.

When they stopped to drop off Tom, he looked at the common, dropping into a valley then rising again, and groaned. ‘Why can’t these people live closer to their locals?’ he demanded.

‘It would have made things more difficult for our
murderer
,’ Alec pointed out. ‘The common’s well-wooded, with plenty of lurking places, and roads as well as footpaths
cutting
across so he could have left a vehicle not too far from his chosen spot.’

‘Bloody lucky murderer,’ Tom grunted. ‘If one of ’em had lived in a busy street—’

‘He’d have found a way. It seems to me he must have been obsessed with these three, and might well have been studying their habits and movements for some time.’

‘That means you think the pub connection’s valid, Chief?’ Piper asked eagerly.

‘Hold on, Ernie! It’s still only speculation. You’re going too fast. The landlords of both the Cricketers and the Goat and Compasses said no strangers were about on the evenings Devine and Halliday disappeared.’

Mackinnon nodded. ‘He canna hae been a local resident in both Guildford and Ayot St. Paul.’

‘No,’ Piper had to agree, somewhat crestfallen. ‘It must have been the army, then.’

‘I’m not ready to give up either possibility,’ Alec said firmly. ‘Let’s hope Tom will find enlightenment at the Duke of York.’

Tom cast another sour look at the common.

‘Dunno about enlightenment but you’ll find a pint, Sarge,’ Piper consoled him. ‘It’s ten minutes to closing time.’

‘Ten minutes? Ta, laddie. I’m on my way.’ Always light on his feet for such a big man, Tom rapidly disappeared into the arcade.

‘Happy thought, Ernie,’ said Alec. ‘Let’s go.’

Colonel Pelham had lived in a stuccoed post-war
bungalow
, painted a bilious shade of mustard yellow with a dreary olive-green front door. The contrast with the typical Kentish red-tile roof was particularly distressing.

The front garden was laid out with military precision. A rectangular patch of lawn on each side of the brick path had rectangular flowerbeds centred in each lawn, edged with low, rectangular box hedges, as was the path. The beds were planted with rigid rows of magenta rose-campion and sternly staked red-hot pokers.

The overall effect was sufficiently hideous to draw a ‘Blimey!’ from Piper, who had not seen it the night before.

Alec sent Mackinnon to talk to the neighbours. The Kent
police had done so when Mrs Pelham first reported her husband missing, but without any great sense of urgency. After the passage of ten months, the likelihood of any
remembering
much about the late August evening he’d disappeared was slim. The possibility couldn’t be ignored, though. The subsequent enquiries might have fixed some oddment in someone’s memory that they hadn’t bothered to bring up earlier but would recall now that it was a matter of murder.

As Alec and Piper walked up the garden path, their ears were assailed by a well-bred but determined female voice floating out through an open window.

‘Everything,’ it insisted. ‘The lawn, the box, the campion – hideous colour! – the lot. I’m putting in a forsythia, and rambler roses, and … What else sprawls all over the place?’

‘But madam—’

‘What else?’

‘Well, buddleia, madam, an’ … But they be mortal untidy, madam!’

‘Just what I want, a bit of untidiness in my life. Nasturtiums! Trailing geraniums! You can start digging everything up, Johnson, and I’ll get a book to help me decide what to plant.’

‘Yes, madam,’ came the mournful, resigned voice of – presumably – the gardener.

Alec knocked on the front door.

‘Oh good, that must be the painter. I wonder why he’s come to the front door? But never mind, the sooner he gets busy the better. You, too, Johnson. Off you go and get rid of the whole lot.’

‘If ’ee sez so, madam.’

‘I do.’ Mrs Pelham, a stout woman in her sixties, of
commanding
aspect, appeared at the window of the room to the
right. ‘Oh, it’s the police. Good afternoon, Mr Fletcher. You haven’t come to tell me there’s been a mistake and the
colonel
’s been found alive and well after all, have you?’

‘I’m afraid not, Mrs Pelham.’

‘Thank goodness! Come in, come in, do. Now I remember, you said you’d be back today. I hope you don’t imagine
I
murdered William, though I can’t say I didn’t sometimes consider it!’ She giggled, a sound so incongruous with her appearance and inappropriate to the occasion that Alec couldn’t think of anything to say.

He opened the door, which was not locked, and stepped into a narrow hall. A man in gardener’s clothes was tramping away towards the back of the house, muttering, ‘Mortal maggotty she be!’

As Piper was closing the front door behind him, Mrs Pelham came to the sitting-room door. ‘Leave it open, young man,’ she commanded. ‘The colonel insisted on having it closed, even in the hottest weather, but at last I’m free of his tyranny. Leave it open, wide open!’

They followed her into the sitting room where Alec, last night, had posed delicate questions about her husband’s toes. It was all dark wood, leather upholstery and crimson curtains, in accordance, he assumed, with Colonel Pelham’s taste. He wondered what she’d replace it with. She didn’t seem the sort of woman who’d cover everything in chintz, but the girlish giggle proved her unpredictable. For all he knew, she’d always longed for a room decked in multiple shades of pink frills.

‘Sit down,’ she commanded, and, as a maid came in, added, ‘will you take tea or coffee? Or – no – lemonade! William didn’t care for lemonade. Have we any lemons,
Bella? He didn’t approve of calling servants by their given names, either.’

‘I’ll ask Cook, ma’am,’ said Bella, and departed.

Mrs Pelham turned to the men with an expectant air. Alec introduced Piper, who took out his notebook and one of his ever-ready well-sharpened pencils.

‘All I want at present,’ said Alec, ‘is an idea of Colonel Pelham’s character and as many names as you can come up with of his relatives, friends and other people he associated with.’

‘Anyone he could buttonhole. He was a monumental bore, telling the same army stories over and over again. Very few of them were even remotely interesting the first time. He did have one friend of sorts, a junior officer who had served under him, a captain he was. Now what was his name?’

Alec could see that Piper was all agog, the name ‘Devine’ hovering on his lips. He shook his head slightly at the eager young man. He didn’t want his witness prompted.

‘Beresford,’ said Mrs Pelham, and Piper’s shoulders sagged in disappointment. ‘Bernard Beresford, that’s it. His family’s local. We only came here after the war, you know. I’m not saying Captain Beresford would have chosen to be William’s closest friend, but he was the sort who can’t say boo to a goose, and my husband, as you may have gathered, was a tyrant and a bully.’

Obviously Beresford could have held a grudge against the colonel for having been forced into intimacy with him. Could the constant repetition of pointless stories, like a
variation
on the Chinese water torture, have driven him in the end to murder? Was it possible he had also known Halliday and Devine in the army and found in their behaviour
towards him a cause for bitter resentment? Devine hadn’t sounded like someone who would take advantage of
another
’s meekness.

‘How on earth did Beresford rise to the rank of captain if he was so timid?’ Alec asked.

‘Sheer longevity! He was shoved into the army by his family – one of those ridiculous traditions. William said it was bad for morale to have a lieutenant in his late forties, so he was promoted, but there was simply no justification for making him a major.’

‘Where did they serve together?’

‘In the Buffs, the East Kent Regiment. They were always dashing off to Africa to fight one war or another. They both retired before the Great War, of course, and Captain Beresford – who preferred, incidentally, to be addressed as plain Mister – Where was I? Oh, yes, he was too old for the Territorials, a dozen years older than William. He died just two years ago at nearly eighty. He joined the Local Defence Volunteers, though what use he’d have been boggles the imagination. But there, luckily we weren’t invaded.’

Alec and Piper had lost interest in Beresford as soon as they heard he’d been dead for two years.

‘Which branch of the Territorial Army was your husband in, Mrs Pelham?’

‘One of the TA battalions of the Buffs, in the Home Counties Division. Once they started taking volunteers in the regular army, they let him go in spite of his age. They needed experienced officers, of course, even if they were mess-room bores. But I don’t suppose they had much of a mess-room for him to bore people in, most of the time.’

‘You don’t happen to know which battalion he ended up in?’

‘Why on earth … ? Well, never mind, yes, as it happens, I do. If something’s repeated often enough, it sinks in even if you’re not listening. He was in the Eighth Battalion. They went all over the place, Ypres, Loos, the Somme and who knows where else. Wherever there were trenches. William didn’t approve of trenches. He said the Buffs had fought without in Napoleon’s war and the Boer War and they ought to be out attacking, not cowering in holes in the ground. I must say, it seems to me that if someone is shooting at you, a hole in the ground is quite a sensible place to be.’

Alec couldn’t help smiling. ‘An eminently practical point of view,’ he agreed. ‘Was there anyone else your husband saw regularly, besides his elderly military friend?’

‘Not if they saw him coming! I don’t know whom he bored at the Duke of York – the barman if he couldn’t catch anyone else, I feel sure.’

‘He walked to the Duke of York?’

‘Yes, always, across the common whatever the weather. He had always seen worse somewhere – Africa, or the Himalaya mostly. He was determined to keep fit, but no one would play golf with him after he laid down the law once too often. He decided it was a footling game. No one invited us for bridge, for the same reason. We didn’t go to church because he held a low opinion of army chaplains he’d known. As a matter of fact,’ she said simply, ‘I’ve felt very isolated for years, and now I’m going to join everything I can find. But I didn’t kill him.’

‘We have no reason to suppose you did, Mrs Pelham. What about relatives?’

‘We never had children. I have quite a few relatives that
I shall see more often now, but on his side there’s only a nephew, with whom he quarrelled several years ago.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Oh, just after the war.’

Not much hope there, then
, Alec thought, but he asked, ‘His name?’

‘Reginald Pelham. A civil servant. The last I heard of him, he worked at the India Office, but I don’t know if he’s still there.’

‘Never mind, we’ll find him.’ He asked a few more
questions
, thanked her and warned her that he or one of his men might have to return in search of further information. He and Piper stood to leave.

‘Oh, but you haven’t had any lemonade, and it’s such a hot day! Do stay a little longer. I don’t know what can be taking Cook such an age.’ She went to the door and called, ‘Bella! Bella?’ before going out into the hall.

‘No sense in leaving before Mr Tring arrives, Chief,’ Piper pointed out in a low voice. ‘Like as not we’d miss him on his way across the common, and Mr Mackinnon, too.’

‘True. Very well, you can go to the kitchen and have a chat with Bella and Cook, and I’ll let Mrs Pelham entertain me.’

‘She’s given us some good stuff. Maybe there’s more to come. You never know your luck.’

‘It’s about the first bit of luck we’ve had in this case! If any of it actually turns out to be useful.’

Mrs Pelham returned, followed by Bella with a tray. Ernie gallantly took the tray from the maid and deposited it on a table, then left the room with her.

The widow looked after them knowingly. ‘Your assistant’s gone to interrogate my servants, I suppose,’ she said, pouring lemonade from a cut-glass pitcher.

‘Just to chat with them. Thank you.’ Alec took the glass she offered and drank deeply. ‘Perfect.’

‘A little too much sugar, and she didn’t have time to pour boiling water over the lemons and let them steep, but one can’t blame her for that. Are you going to tell me what
happened
to William, and why?’

‘As I told you last night, Mrs Pelham, he was shot, and buried in Epping Forest alongside two others. As to the how and why, we have very little to go on.’

‘You don’t think of someone being killed because they’re boring,’ she mused, ‘more that they’ll bore someone to death. Three victims murdered for that same reason seems even more unlikely. So it must have been his martinet side that did for him. Had the others any connection with Africa? Those Boers hold a long grudge.’

‘None. They were considerably younger than the colonel. Both lived all their lives in England, and neither had any connection with the army before the Great War. Nor was either of a tyrannical disposition, as far as we can judge.’

‘Hmm. Well, unless William kicked someone’s dog while crossing the common, I can’t think of anything he might have done or anyone he might have seriously offended since he retired for the second time, in ’19. Do you want me to identify his body?’

Alec winced. ‘I’m sorry, there’s … not enough left to make that necessary – or indeed, possible.’

‘Pity. It would have been a pleasure. What is it, Bella?’ she asked, as the maid returned once more.

‘It’s the painter, madam, and two more policemen. Detectives, I should say. All come at once.’

‘That will be my sergeants,’ said Alec, standing up. ‘I’d
better be off. You’ve been extremely helpful, Mrs Pelham, and thank you for the lemonade. Just one more question, if I may: what colour are you going to paint the house?’