In Pale Battalions (40 page)

Grace Fotheringham.”

“That’s her.”

“Left under a cloud, as I remember.” She clicked her tongue at the birds. “Simply failed to turn up at the start of the autumn term: 1920, it would have been.”

“Do you know why she left?”

“Absolutely no idea. I had better things to do with my time than inquire into such matters. But she was clearly . . . well, not sound.”

“In what way?”

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“She fostered an orphaned baby. Can you imagine? A woman in her position. Extraordinary. Quite extraordinary.”

“Any idea where she went?”

“None whatever. I think we were all glad to see the back of her.”

There was no more to be learned in Bonchurch. I returned to Portsmouth and asked a taxi driver to take me to the Mermaid Inn, Nile Street.

“There’s no Mermaid in Nile Street.”

“There must be.”

“Not as I’ve ’eard of.” He leant out and shouted to the driver next to him on the rank. “ ’Ere, Reg: ever ’ear of a Mermaid Inn in Nile Street?”

“Yeah. Bombed out in the war. Never rebuilt.”

So I had him take me to Brickwood’s Brewery instead, where I was referred to a Mr. Draycott as having the most reliable memory for lapsed tenancies. I found him stooped over a desk in a busy office above the yard.

“The Mermaid? Yes, your information is correct. Destroyed in the Blitz: April 1941. We’d probably have closed it after the war anyway. Trade was contracting in—”

“It’s the tenant I was interested in.”

He paused for a moment, then remembered. “Nora Hobson.

She ran the place with her brother. Fellow named Fletcher. Both killed in the bombing raid.”

Another dead end. I went to the library and looked up the same back copies of the local newspaper that Franklin had. It was all there, in verification of his account. I even found a report of the inquests into Mompesson and Cheriton. That too bore him out. But documents, it seemed, were now the only witnesses. The actors in the drama were beyond my reach.

My next step was disguised as a shopping trip to Bristol. In reality, I drove to Winchester and located the auctioneer who’d handled the sale at Meongate. However loathsome they were, Olivia’s two paintings were embedded in the tragedy that had overtaken my parents: I’d begun to regret my rejection of them. And the book Olivia had taken from me, the book with which I’d fought off Sidney Payne: Willis’s account had made me want to read it for myself, bloodstained or not. I’d almost begun to hope that Olivia hadn’t destroyed it after all.

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The auctioneer remembered the sale well; it was relatively recent.

“I’m trying to trace some of the items you sold, Mr. Woodward,”

I explained. “Some paintings by an artist named Bartholomew and a book: a church committee report on poverty in Portsea at the turn of the century.”

“As far as the paintings go, I think I know the ones you mean.”

He smiled. “A pair of rather obsessive medievalist pieces.”

“That’s them.”

“Let’s see.” He thumbed through a ledger. “Yes, here they are.

Two oils, by P. Bartholomew. They went for twelve guineas. Not bad, all things considered.”

“Who bought them?”

He shrugged. “A member of the public. Paid cash. He wasn’t a dealer, that I do remember.”

“And the book?”

“Except for a couple of Victorian atlases and some Trollope first editions, we sold the contents of the library as a job lot to a local bookseller—Blackmore’s in Jewry Street.”

Mr. Blackmore was as helpful as I could ask. “They were no great bargain, Mrs. Galloway. I haven’t sold many of them. I don’t remember the book you describe at all. But you’re welcome to have a look. They’re rather scattered about the shelves now, I’m afraid.” I looked, but in vain.

There seemed, as I walked away from the shop, one more avenue worth exploring. At police headquarters, the officer behind the inquiries desk volunteered what information he could—but that wasn’t much.

“The name Shapland means nothing to me, madam, though that’s not surprising. If he retired during the First World War, he’s probably dead by now, so even the pensions branch couldn’t help you. Where did you say he was stationed?” “I don’t know for sure. Portsmouth seems likely.”

He pondered for a moment. Then: “You could try George Pope.

He’s been desk sergeant at Pompey since Adam was a lad. If Shapland was stationed there, George would remember him.”

It hardly seemed worth the effort, but I was determined to trace every loose end that I could. A fortnight later, Tony went away for a few days to Manchester on business. I took the opportunity to drive 270

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down to Portsmouth. I’d telephoned ahead and established that Sergeant Pope would be on duty at the police station and he, it seemed, was expecting me.

“Are you the lady who phoned earlier?” He filled his large uniform with pride and looked at me with piercing eyes set in the large, sad face of a man who’d contemplated a lifetime of crime.

“I am, yes. I was very much hoping to have a word with you.”

“It must be my lucky day.” He smiled with sudden, endearing coyness. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m trying to trace an Inspector Shapland. I think he was stationed here and I was told you might remember him.”

He frowned. “Do you mean Arnie Shapland?”

“I don’t know his first name. He retired before the First World War—and was recalled during it.”

The great grey head nodded in slow remembrance. “You
do
mean Arnie Shapland. He was an inspector here when I joined the Force. Prickly old . . .” His concentration returned to the present.

“But that was forty-two years ago. You’re right: he retired just before the Great War. Why should a young lady like you be interested in old Arnie? He must be dead and gone these twenty years or more.”

“He investigated a case involving my family. It was never cleared up.”

“What case?”

“A murder. At Meongate, near Droxford, in 1916.”

“The Meongate murder?” He chuckled. “Fancy you dredging that up. Yes, it was one of Arnie’s. His very last case. He was put out to grass again straight afterwards.”

“He didn’t stay on until the end of the war, then?”

“No. The case turned sour on him. The aristocracy were mixed up in it.” He caught himself up. “Your family, did you say?”

“Yes, but do go on. You won’t offend me, I assure you.”

“It’s just that he claimed to have solved the case.
Insisted
, I should say. Went on insisting, long after he was told to drop it. Then he was taken off the strength, suddenly, as if . . .”

“As if somebody wanted to shut him up?”

Pope smiled again. “As if his conclusions weren’t too popular.

Let’s say that.”

“And what were his conclusions?”

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“I was a raw young copper, Mrs. Galloway. Arnie Shapland wasn’t about to confide in me—or anyone else.”

“His family, perhaps?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought so. He was a bach-elor. Lived over his sister’s grocery shop in Goldsmith Avenue. Her son runs the place now.”

I shared Pope’s scepticism, but it was no great hardship to drive across the city to M. & F. Lupson (Groceries & Provisions) and try my luck.

It was a dowdy, dun-painted corner shop at the end of a terraced street. From the other side of Goldsmith Avenue came the dull, heavy clanking of a railway goods yard. Otherwise, the populous neighbourhood was strangely still and silent, drugged by the sultry afternoon. Inside the shop, torpor and gloom prevailed. A thin, nervous-looking man was weighing and packing tea: its acrid scent hung in the air.

“Mr. Lupson?”

“Er . . . Yes.” He turned, sank the scoop in the sackful of tea, wiped his hands aimlessly on his apron and looked wanly towards me. “Can I help you?”

“I believe you’re the nephew of Arnold Shapland, the police inspector.”

He frowned. “Well . . . Yes . . .”

“He investigated the Meongate murder in 1916. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Meongate?” His words came slowly, in time with his thoughts.

“Meongate, you say?”

“That’s right. I know it’s a long time ago, but it’s a tragedy that still hangs over my family. I gather your uncle thought he’d solved the case and was then taken off it. I wondered if he might ever have . . . said something . . .” Lupson’s glasses had slid most of the way down his nose. Now he pushed them back up, focusing his eyes with sudden, gleaming animation. “The Meongate murder. You know about it?”

“My family lived at Meongate.”

“Well, well, well. So Uncle Arnie was right after all. It’s just a pity you left it twenty-five years too late.”

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“What do you mean?”

A smile had broken out on his drawn, pinched face—a lop-sided smile of strange, unfamiliar pleasure. “He said we hadn’t heard the last of it. He said he’d be proved right in the end. Well, well, well.

Who’d have . . .” Suddenly, the smile dropped from his face and his mouth clamped shut. A moment later, I saw why. A hard-jawed woman with scraped-back hair had entered the shop from the rear.

I had the immediate impression that she modified what she was about to say when she saw me. Even so, there was no gentleness in her tone.

“Maurice! When you’ve served the lady, I want these biscuit tins moved.” She went out again at once.

Lupson leant across the counter towards me. “I can’t talk now,”

he whispered.

I found myself whispering as well. “I wouldn’t keep you long.”

“That’s not the point. I’d like to discuss it, really.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll be doing my rounds in the van later. We could meet then, if you like.”

“I’d like that very much.”

“This end of South Parade Pier. Half-past four.”

I nodded in agreement. He swayed back into an upright position and, feeling slightly foolish, I ordered a twist of tea.

Lupson was precisely on time. At 4:30, I was standing near the entrance to the pier, looking down over a low wall at the beach and the few bathers braving a keen breeze, when his bull-nosed, rusting van pulled up beside me and he climbed out, sucking nervously on a cigarette.

“It’s kind of you to have come,” I said, in an effort to put him at his ease.

He shrugged his shoulders awkwardly. “Shall we walk a way?”

We moved slowly in the direction of Southsea Common. As we went, I told him what little I wanted him to know of my connection with the Meongate murder. I hoped it would draw him out and I was not disappointed.

“Mrs. Lupson hated Uncle Arnie. That’s why I couldn’t talk earlier. When we first married, we lived over the shop with my mother and him. It was a tight squeeze. They didn’t get on. Now, my uncle

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and me—that was different. I was closer to him than to my own dad.

When I was a lad, he told me all about the Meongate murder. Other cases, too—but that one most of all. He’d always come back to it, like a dog to his bone. He’d take me for walks to Milton Park—or down to his allotment—and go through it, time and again.” “Why did you say I’d left it twenty-five years too late?”

“Because that’s how long he’s been dead. He always reckoned we hadn’t heard the last of it, you see. He always maintained that, one day, it would crop up again and he’d be proved right—right about who the murderer was. They didn’t want to know—his superiors, I mean. They wanted it hushed up. But my uncle wouldn’t stand for that—so they sacked him.” “I understood he’d retired.”

“That’s not the way he looked at it. He brooded on it endlessly, cooped up in his little attic room; ran through it, over and over, for my benefit.”

“What was his theory, Mr. Lupson? I’d be fascinated to know.”

“You can read it in his own words. He sent a letter of protest to the Chief Constable about the case being closed. Typed it out labo-riously on the old sit-up-and-beg machine he kept in his room. It sets it all out in detail. I’ve brought the carbon copy he took. I thought you might like to see it.” It was more than I could have hoped for. When we’d retraced our steps to the van, Lupson pulled an old attaché case from beneath the driver’s seat, lifted out a bundle of papers, detached a crinkled clip of flimsy sheets and handed them over solemnly. Then he leant against the bonnet, smoking another cigarette and taking the air, while I read his uncle’s letter.

It took the form of a memorandum, with neither address nor salutation.

CONFIDENTIAL

To: The Chief Constable

From: A. W. Shapland, Det. Insp.

Date: 13th November 1916

Subject: The Meongate Murder Inquiry

I realize you will not welcome another communication from me on the above subject, but I feel obliged to state my 274

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position clearly, since the plain implication of the Watch Committee report on this case is that its investigation was mishandled. That, I take it, is why my recall from retirement has been so abruptly terminated, although no formal explanation has so far been given to me.

If this case is to be considered closed, it must be on the basis that Lieutenant Cheriton murdered Mompesson before taking his own life. The only motive put forward to explain this is Lord Powerstock’s claim that Cheriton was victimized by Mompesson on account of his dubious war record. It seems to me that there are three fundamental objections to this explanation.

1. Why should the gun used to kill Mompesson not subsequently have been found amongst Cheriton’s possessions?

2. If Cheriton suffered from neurasthenia—as stated at the inquest—how did he manage to plan and execute such a cool and calculated murder?