In Pale Battalions (22 page)

The frank intensity of her look seemed to command me to believe her. “I can’t answer any of your questions, Tom.” I was to believe, then, that for the best of reasons she could tell me nothing.

“Please leave me to myself—at least for a while.”

“Very well.” There seemed nothing else for it. I moved towards the door.

“Tell Lord Powerstock not to worry—too much.”

“Won’t you tell him yourself ?”

“He would only be distressed by my inability to answer his questions.”

“They will have to be answered, sooner or later.”

“Then it must be later.”

“Shapland will be back by morning—with Thorley’s testimony and the results of the post-mortem. What will you say then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Leonora . . .”

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She silenced me with a single, raised hand. “It’s no use, Tom. For our friendship’s sake—for John’s sake, if you like—give me time.”

I nodded in silent acquiescence and went out.

The afternoon lengthened into evening. Constable Bannister took a telephone call from Alton, then announced his departure, pending Shapland’s return on the morrow. We at Meongate were left to brood.

Dinner was a strained and cheerless occasion. Leonora did not join us, sending a message via Sally that she would stay in her room.

That left five of us to gather in the mannered charade of a communal meal: Lord Powerstock was as set and stony as William de Brinon, Knight of Droxenford, whilst Lady Powerstock added a sinister silence to her sultry, nocturnal presence and only Cheriton, with the quaver of his voice and the quiver of his hand, disclosed the tensions that were truly at play. To these old Charter seemed the most immune, his appetite holding up whilst others picked and sipped. And only he seemed prepared to speak—even obliquely—of what had happened.

“It’d never struck me before,” he remarked towards the end of the meal, brushing Stilton crumbs from his whiskers as he did so.

“But it seems a rum business having the police investigate so-called murders when all the armies of Europe are running riot the other side of the Channel.”

Cheriton coughed and gulped down some water.

“I am not at all surprised,” Olivia responded, “that the difference escapes you.”

“As you know, my dear”—he smiled theatrically—“most things do . . . escape me.”

“But not all?” There was some serpentine purpose now behind her probing—and behind Charter’s parries.

“Even blind and deaf old men see and hear some things—when those things are garish and loud enough.”

“It is reassuring to know that not all your senses are gone.”

Lord Powerstock brought his glass down on the table with just enough force to impose a truce. I attempted to divert the discussion.

“Should we take any steps to secure the house rather better, sir, in view of what’s happened?”

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“I’ve told Fergus to make sure all the doors are locked and windows latched.”

Olivia caught my eye with the candlelit glint of her own. “You truly believe then, Lieutenant, that Ralph was the victim of an intruder?”

Powerstock intervened. “I had hoped we could avoid this kind of pointless speculation. When Inspector Shapland returns in the morning, we shall know more. In the meantime, please let us be-have . . . with decorum.” There were nods of assent. “I shall be attending morning service at St. Mary’s tomorrow as usual. Until then, I’ll bid you all good night.” He left us then and, having no taste for further sparring with Olivia or, on this occasion, the unstemmed flow of Charter’s stray thoughts, I withdrew as well. Until the morning, solitude seemed the only bearable condition. I went out through the conservatory for a breath of night air, but, finding the garden door locked in testimony to Fergus’s vigilance, I retreated in the direction of my room.

In the hall, I found Cheriton smoking a cigarette and walking up and down by the long-case clock beside the fireplace. I bade him good night.

“Oh, Franklin,” he said, “could I . . . ?”

“Yes?”

Then he seemed to think again; he tossed the cigarette into the grate with a jerky, strangely decisive gesture. “No. Never mind.

Less said the better, what?”

“Probably. Good night.”

He said nothing, just smiled faintly: his face had the crumpled look of a man well aware of his own frailties. I’d seen such a look many times during the war, often in myself. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t look back as I climbed the stairs.

six

Isurprised myself by sleeping soundly, at least until dawn. Then I was wide awake, pacing my room and squinting out the window at the creeping light of a misty morning. I dressed and went downstairs, intent upon breathing some fresh air before Shapland came back and, with him, the fetid recollection of Mompesson’s death.

With Fergus not yet about, I had to slip the latch on the front door and go out that way. I felt unduly conscious of the crunch of my boots on the gravel drive, amplified by the stillness and silence around me. The day was cold, with dew on the grass, but there was a promise of warmth and brightness later: the mist had a wispy quality of reassuring impermanence. I thought of France then, of waking in a dug-out after Loos the autumn before to find Hallows’s batman frying bacon on the tiny stove only he could manage whilst Hallows himself stood at the sand-bagged door, greatcoat flung round his shoulders, drawing on the first cigarette of the day and straining to descry, by sight or intuition, what message the misty morning held.

I was going to walk round to the garden. But then I saw, at the edge of the grass beyond the drive, a break in the cobwebbed sheen of the dew, a footprint, a trail of footprints in fact, leading out across the park, curving away from the house and down towards the orchard. They could only recently have been made, otherwise the dew would have re-formed, yet who else could be about at such an hour? I began to follow them.

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One of the elms in the park stood on a slight knoll, its thick roots stretching like a rib-cage beneath the dome of grass. There the trail of footprints led and there they ended. As I approached, I saw who’d made them. Cheriton was sitting at the foot of the tree, with his back to the trunk, cradled between the gnarled shoulders of two descending roots and staring towards me and the house beyond.

I raised my hand in greeting but he did not respond. I glanced back at the house, its ivy-clad flint and brickwork emerging slowly from the mist, and saw how the view might have plunged him into reverie. I raised my hand again and called to him: “Fine morning, isn’t it?” He didn’t answer. And as I took one further step towards him, out of a shaft of misty sunlight into clear sight, I saw why.

Cheriton was dead. The certainty was there in the staring blankness of his eyes and the strange, stiff severity of his posture. It didn’t need the clotted blood on his sagging chin or the splatter of it on the bark behind his head to tell me: he was dead and at peace.

His legs were crossed, as a man’s at ease might be. His right hand, which had held the revolver in his mouth, had slipped down his chest, but the fingers were still curled around the butt and trigger.

His left hand was by his side, clasping an envelope.

I stooped over him and closed his eyes. It was the most and the least that I could do. I didn’t feel any more moved than by all the other dead and strangely shocked young men I’d seen since the spring of 1915. Some of those too had taken their own life. But I did feel a pang of regret. Why hadn’t I spared Cheriton the time he’d asked for—on the stairs, the day before? Later, when I’d been willing to talk, he hadn’t been, as if, with the coming of night, he’d decided what to do. And this was it: death at the time of his choosing, a privilege the war had seemed to take from him, but now reclaimed with faltering dignity, drawing comfort from the tree, from the earth, from the dust, even from the bloody taste of ashes in his mouth.

I slid the envelope from his left hand. There could have been no more than a single sheet within. I turned it over in my hand. He had written on the front a single word, a name:
Olivia
.

I folded the word out of sight and slipped the envelope into my jacket pocket. Then I took it out again and stared at it. Should I open it? What had Cheriton said to her? And why her? I looked down at the slumped figure and wondered what it was I hadn’t known about 150

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him. Had he too been led by Olivia to areas of desire he’d rather not have known about? Had he killed Mompesson? The letter might tell me, but the letter was addressed to her and, in his presence, I hadn’t the heart to thwart his last wish by opening it. I put it back in my pocket. Then I began to walk slowly towards the house.

Only Fergus was up. I got him to telephone Bannister at the police station, then inform Lord Powerstock. I sat in the morning room, waiting for the shock to hit me, not of Cheriton’s death, because I didn’t know him well enough, but of what it seemed to mean: an implicit confession to Mompesson’s murder that wrote a neat if scarcely happy
finis
to all the police probing and doubtful pondering. Except that I could already see the begged questions lining up for answers. Cheriton was no killer: that’s why the war had caused him such anguish. If his death did explain all the mysteries, only the letter he’d left could tell me how. But the letter wasn’t for me.

Charter came in, still in his dressing gown and Turkish slippers, white hair tousled and portly figure rumpled, his voice gruff from slumber. “What’s happened?” he rumbled.

“Cheriton’s shot himself. I found him in the grounds.”

Charter slumped down in a chair. “ ’Pon my soul.” A look of pain passed across his face. “Poor young fellow. Shot himself, you say?” And his great, grey old head shook slowly from side to side in mourning for the ways of youth he did not understand.

“I’ve asked Fergus to cover the body with a blanket. I’ve no doubt the police will be here soon.”

“This is a bad, sad business.”

“Is a suicide worse than murder?”

“In this case, young man, it is.”

“I suspect the police will see in it a solution to their problem: that of who killed Mompesson.”

Charter shot his eyes to the ceiling. “No doubt they will. But you don’t believe Cheriton did, do you?”

“No. As a matter of fact, I don’t.”

“I must get dressed.” He hauled himself from the chair and ambled to the door. “We’ll speak again later.”

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When I heard a ring at the front door, I guessed it would be Bannister and made my way to the hall. Lord Powerstock was standing solemnly at the foot of the stairs whilst Fergus went to answer the bell.

“I’m sorry about this, sir,” I said.

“Not your fault, Franklin. Not anyone else’s. Fitting, in a way: a soldier’s death. Goaded beyond endurance, I suppose.”

“What do you mean?”

“By Mompesson, of course.” He seemed slightly irritated by my reservations. “Isn’t that how it was?”

“I don’t know.”

He grunted, then made for the door, where Bannister was now announcing himself. “Come with me, Constable. We’ll show you where he is.”

They bustled out. I stood alone in the hall, almost on the very spot where Cheriton had stood the night before, wondering how Powerstock could be so suddenly decisive and certain. I didn’t have to wonder for long. Offered a way out of confronting his suspicions about Leonora, he’d taken it, with all the excess of relief that betrayed the falsity of his confidence. He would escort Bannister to the place, he would take command of his battered but unbowed household, he would forget all the portents of a more sinister truth than he had been prepared to confront only the day before. That, I saw, was now his purpose.

I left him to it. There was something I had to do before Shapland returned. I hurried up the stairs and made straight for Lady Powerstock’s room.

I went in without waiting for an answer to my knock. In the outer room, Sally was clearing a breakfast tray. She looked up in surprise. I heard Olivia’s voice from the bedroom beyond. “Who is that?”

“Lieutenant Franklin, ma’am.”

She appeared in the doorway, in a nightdress and gown, all hints of the voluptuary suppressed: this was the dignified lady of means at the respectable conclusion of a restrained toilet. “You may leave us, Sally.”

The maid gathered the tray and walked out past me. I closed the door behind her.

“What do you want, Lieutenant?”

“You’ve been told about Cheriton?”

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“Naturally.”

“Then, what I want to know is why he should have left you this note.” I took the letter from my pocket.

Her eyes widened, for an instant. Then she restored the practised air of unconcern. “I can’t imagine.”

“He shot himself, you know. He put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. And I found this letter in his hand, addressed to you, by your Christian name.”

She was unmoved by the details. “Who else knows of this?”

“Of the letter—nobody.”

“And you’ve come to deliver it?”

“I was in two minds whether to open it at once or give you the chance of telling me what it says. I felt I owed it to Cheriton to do the latter.”

“How noble of you. But what makes you think I know what’s in it?”

“Everything I know about you tells me you do. You drove Cheriton to this, didn’t you?”

She walked slowly to the window, as if considering a philosophical point. “I wonder sometimes if it is military conditioning which gives you young officers this special facility for blaming your own actions on other people.”

I tried to break free of her sarcasm. “Lady Powerstock, two men are dead. And you had a hand in both deaths. I know what you were to Mompesson: his whore. But what were you to Cheriton?”