In Pale Battalions (26 page)

“And what is it you’re going to do?”

“I’m going to see Shapland and tell him everything I know.

Everything that may enable him to find Leonora.”

“I can’t stop you, of course, but I think I should warn you: once you involve this man Shapland, there’ll be no end to it. He’ll root out everything there is to be found—not all of it to your credit.”

“You won’t sway me this time.”

“It’ll be the excuse he needs to re-open his murder inquiry.”

“I have nothing to fear from that.”

“Really?” She drew closer, with a hint of menace. “Once it’s established that Cheriton didn’t kill Ralph, the question will be: who did? Imagine all the good reasons why the answer might be Leonora. Then ask yourself if going to the police now is really in her interests.” “You might be trying to distract attention from yourself, Lady Powerstock. Imagine all the good reasons why a link between Leonora and Mompesson could be thought to have made you murderously jealous.”

She drew back slightly. “The Army has trained you too well,

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Lieutenant. You think only in straight lines. You still do not understand. Neither of us knows what the other knows save this: that we stand or fall together. If you try to destroy me, you may succeed. But it is certain you will destroy yourself. That is the truth which you claim to desire.” “Too late. My mind is made up.”

“You overrate your own decisiveness. I know you for the equiv-ocator you really are. Look at this.” She thrust the newspaper towards me, folded open at the roll of honour. A tightly packed column of dead officers’ names marched across my gaze: the daily consignment of futile, epauletted sacrifice. “You can end up like those without the slightest difficulty. John did it easily enough. You can make a fuss about one fellow officer who died here rather than in France and, maybe, blacken our name. Then you can go back out there and be killed in your turn. Is that what you really want?” “I’m aware of the bleakness of my prospects, Lady Powerstock.

What I want now is the truth.”

“That is a luxury we can ill afford in times of war. If you could bring yourself to realize that, your prospects might not be so bleak.”

“Oh?”

“Lord Powerstock and I have influential friends in the War Office. It would not be difficult to arrange for you to be posted somewhere where your prospects of survival—not to mention advancement—would be greatly enhanced.”

I looked straight at her. “In return for my silence?”

“It is a simple enough service to render. John felt obliged to follow his regiment to France and where is he now? Will you make the same mistake?”

“I’ve already made too many mistakes. This time I shall do what I know to be right. Excuse me.” I made for the door. I’d been stung into refuting her implication that I could once again be swayed, but already I sensed she was not entirely in error: somewhere the claws of her corruption still clung to my sense of self-preservation. I wanted to be out of her sight before she could tighten her grip.

“Be sure you know what you’re walking out on, Lieutenant.”

I wasn’t sure, not sure at all. But I kept on walking.

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Droxford police station was a solid, two-storey, red-brick building down a side turning off the main street of the village. I entered the outer office and found Shapland sooner than I’d expected. He was seated at a low desk behind the counter, sifting through some documents jumbled in a shoe box, whilst a wall clock behind him beat time to his deliberations and stale tobacco mixed in the air with the scent of polished wood and old linoleum.

Shapland looked up at the sound of the door creaking shut behind me. “Well, Mr. Franklin. Do step in.”

“I hoped to find you here, Inspector.”

“You were lucky. There’s not much left for me to do here. Now that my inquiries have finished.”

“Finished?”

“Didn’t they tell you? The Chief Constable’s considered my report and our official conclusion is that Cheriton killed Mompesson, then killed himself. Subject to the findings of the inquests, of course. They’ll be held next week: Tuesday the third of October.

You’ll be required to give evidence about Cheriton, so I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to be available until then.”

“This conclusion: is it yours?”

“Of course not. But the Chief Constable’s not inclined to pursue the matter on the basis of my unsubstantiated suspicions. Not where a peer of the realm’s involved.”

“Frustrating for you, I imagine.”

“Not a bit of it.” The communicating door from the police house swung open and Constable Bannister entered, bearing a tray.

“Ah, here’s breakfast. Do you want some?”

“No thanks.”

Bannister eased past me and placed the tray on the desk in front of Shapland, who snatched away a paper he’d been studying. Bannister cast me a sheepish look and retreated. “Not even some tea?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Please yourself. George fries bacon just the way I like it: plenty of grease.” He seized the sandwich from the plate and began eating.

“You don’t mind me going ahead?”

“Not at all.”

“So what can I do for you?”

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“I just wanted a quiet word.” I moved round to his side of the counter. “I didn’t want you to think I was avoiding you.”

“Never crossed my mind.” He went on chewing enthusiastically: a thin rivulet of grease had seeped to his chin but he didn’t seem to notice. “I think you killed Mompesson and you know I’m right—obviously. But nobody else does, so don’t worry: you’re in the clear.

Judging by these papers, Mompesson’s no great loss to the world.”

“Those are his possessions?” I pointed to the shoe box.

“Yes. They’re what he had with him at Meongate. Cheque book, passport, cash, IOUs, an address book containing several titled ladies, I’m afraid, odd scraps and letters: nothing much. Nor did the Metropolitan Police find anything significant at his London flat. No family that the American Embassy can trace. In fact, something of a mystery man. He lived well, had good connections, dealt prof-itably in shares, held a lot of stock in American railways, attracted despairing letters from married women and had the nerve—or the foresight—to keep them all. No. Not a nice man at all.” “If it’s all so straightforward and the inquiry’s closed, why are you sifting through his stuff ?” I was still trying to find a way to approach what I really wanted to tell him, still delaying—as long as I could—a fateful move.

“Because it’s only straightforward in the official version.

Cheriton couldn’t have killed a mosquito, leave alone Mompesson.

You did it—and I want to know the reason.” There was no melodrama in his statement. He had finished his sandwich. Now he slumped back in his chair and sipped tea from a chipped 1911 coronation mug.

“I can’t give you the reason for something I didn’t do.”

“Then try something else. Here . . .” He riffled through the pile of papers by his elbow, pulled out one torn sheet and tossed it across the desk at me. “From the stamp pouch of Mompesson’s wallet. Just a scrap—but what does it mean?” I picked it up. A few lines scrawled on a half-sheet of cheap, lined notepaper, jaggedly torn at the base: “Since 13th June: Room over 7 Copenhagen Yard, off Charlotte Street.” I shrugged my shoulders.

“It’s an address in Portsea.”

“It means nothing to me, Inspector.” But that wasn’t quite true.

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My mind was racing to make connections, yet had no way of testing them. An address in Portsea, where the first Lady Powerstock had worked with the poor. Her memoir of it studied by Leonora the night before her disappearance. An address known to Mompesson—since 13th June. It meant less than nothing, but it was more than I’d had to go on before.

“A prostitute, I surmised.”

“You could be right.”

“But the writing isn’t Mompesson’s.”

“So?”

“It’s just another inconsistency, another oddity. You and Mrs.

Hallows were discussing Portsea on Sunday evening, weren’t you?”

“In passing. It’s where the first Lady Powerstock . . .”

“I know. But that was more than ten years ago and Portsea’s a big city. So it means nothing . . . does it?”

“As you say, Inspector. Not a thing.”

He gulped more tea. “Until the inquest, I’ve a chance to catch you out, Mr. Franklin. The murder weapon’s still missing. New evidence could persuade the Chief Constable to re-open the inquiry.

One of these scraps”—he gestured at the pile—“could make all the difference.”

“I can’t help you, I’m afraid.”

“Then why did you come to see me?”

“Simply to say that. I would help you if I could, but I can’t.”

His brow furrowed and he stared at me over the rim of his mug.

His doggedness—which I’d arrived intending to put my trust in—had become inconvenient. Now that I had a clue of sorts to follow, I wanted only to be rid of him.

“I must get along.”

“The Coroner will write to you formally about the inquest.

You’ll still be at Meongate?”

“If not, I’ll let you know.”

“Do that. And if you want another chat before the inquest, you know where to find me.”

But I had drawn back from the brink. I no longer needed to turn to Shapland and I didn’t intend to. At last, I had something to go on.

seven

Iwent straight to the railway station and waited for the next train down the line. There, where the troika bells on Lucy’s harness had first summoned me, unsuspecting, into Meongate’s taut enactment of a private war, I began at last to trace the path I’d overlooked till then. I was the only passenger on the platform, waiting in the brooding stillness while the affable old porter manoeuvred a trolley in the shadow of the station canopy: nothing else moved, nothing stirred, nothing verified the sensation I nevertheless felt—I wasn’t alone, save by the trick of time, wasn’t free of others who’d begun a journey there. Nor, now, were they free of me.

When the train duly came, and I boarded it, the sensation grew.

It chugged and clanked southwards, its lurching progress became a metaphor in my mind for the reluctant approach of an uncomfortable truth. I shared a compartment with a child and his demure governess, who was at constant pains to prevent him asking why I wasn’t in the Army. I was wearing mufti and they weren’t to know, but even her embarrassment didn’t stir me, didn’t break the mood of uncertain, fatalistic familiarity. As on that first long train journey across Normandy to the Front, I had no idea what was growing ever and slowly nearer, only a presentiment, a shade of a suspicion that it was worse than I thought yet, in some strange way, exactly what I expected.

At Fareham, I changed to another train, full of boisterous sailors returning to Portsmouth. Once again, I was immune to their mood, alone in my world of motionless turmoil. While they 178

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swapped cigarettes and loud jokes, my mind was afloat. The grey mudflats of Portsmouth Harbour and the glowering keep of Portchester Castle, canvas biplanes assembled on the airfield at Hilsea and the green-bowered gravestones of Kingston Cemetery: other places, other faces overlaid, glimpsed like passing reflections in the sooted glass of the carriage window—Hernu’s Farm with Hallows, Meongate without him, Leonora’s calm yet questing countenance and Miriam Powerstock, long dead but daguerreo-typed on our memories and our lives, fixed by some chance or significance, there, at the heart of the mystery, waiting peacefully to confront me.

Portsmouth Town station: high-roofed and crowded, echoing with shouts and whistles. I asked at the bookstall for directions to Charlotte Street and was given them with a straight look. The road outside was a jumble of vehicles and people, horns sounding and dust billowing from a tarpaulined gap in the row of buildings opposite. “Zeppelin raid last night,” a newsvendor told me. “Aiming for the Dockyard. They caught us a wopper instead.” I made my way through the ruck as best I could, then tried my luck down a side-turning: a maze of back alleys and dingy terraces, opening out as I pressed on into a motley spread of market stalls, peeling shopfronts and grimy taverns opening for business—a smell of fish and stale hops, dirty water standing in cobbled runnels and a parrot squawking at me from a petshop cage. All so far—so very far—from the rural grace of Meongate. And yet some strand linked the two.

I asked for more directions at a whelk stall: the way to Copenhagen Yard was gestured with a thumb. It lay down a cobbled alley with a central gutter where a dog was sniffing at a grating. The dog didn’t move at my approach, just bared its teeth and watched me pass. Stained sheets long past washing hung across the alley on a line. Beyond them, the yard opened to my right, where several tenement stairways shared a narrow space with the lean-to of a woodyard. A grubby child without shoes regarded me blankly from a doorway. From the stairs behind him came the sound of two slurred female voices raised in argument: he paid them no heed.

“Wot you want, mister?” the child said without expression.

“I’m looking for . . . the room over number seven.”

He pointed to a door at second-floor level above the woodyard,

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reached by rickety stairs that bridged the lean-to. “You sound just like ’im.”

“Who?”

“The bloke wot lived there.”

“Is he there now?”

“Dunno.” He turned abruptly and disappeared into the house.

I took the stairs two at a time, for all their ominous creaks. The door at the top was plain and unmarked, its paint peeling. There was no bell, not even a letterbox, just a keyhole and a padlocked hasp that told me nobody was in. Nevertheless, I knocked several times and strained across the railings at the top of the stairs to look in at the window. The thin curtains were drawn: through the gap between them all I could see was a sparsely furnished kitchen.