Never Go Back (3 page)

Tancred was as good as his word. It was clear to Harry that he felt little real kinship with his fellow survivors of Operation Clean Sheet. But then the same was true of Harry himself. They were not the veterans of some arduous campaign in foreign parts, after all. They had simply been thrown together for three months fifty years ago in strange but scarcely hazardous circumstances. There were many humorous recollections of those months to be shared, however, and Tancred did his best to encourage the flow of them as the train headed north, much to the obvious exasperation of the several businessmen seated nearby, who had been hoping for guffaw-free quietude in which to concentrate on their FTs and laptops.

The opening of the buffet was the signal for Tancred to order a bottle of champagne, swiftly followed by a second and a third when Owen ‘Gregger’ Gregson joined them at Peterborough. Alerted by a mobile-phone call from Lloyd to their presence in coach L, Gregson was meeker and milder spoken than Harry recalled, a shrunken, vague-eyed man with a faint tremor in his hands, who took one sip of champagne, then ordered tea, and insisted on writing Judd a cheque for the supplement on his fare, which Judd had settled smartly in cash with the ticket inspector. Askew asked after Gregson’s wife and the pitiful account that followed of their domestic routine took the fizz out of everyone until Judd called to mind an incident in the pub in Lumphanan one Saturday night involving a barmaid and a yard of ale that set them all laughing.

GNER provided smoking accommodation in coach M, which Judd and Lloyd repaired to for periodic fags, while Tancred shared with Harry the responsibility for anecdotalizing. Gregson smiled stiffly at their embroidered recollections, as if uncertain whether he had truly participated in such antics or not. Carefree youth was for him more remote than the most distant of memories. Askew, nervous and distracted though he often seemed, contrived nonetheless to make one or two telling contributions to the badinage, recalling the rules of a word-game they had played to pass an idle hour or four in the hut more accurately than Tancred, its inventor.

Askew had also hunted down an obituary of Professor Mac in the Daily Telegraph from twenty years ago and had brought along copies to distribute. There was, as he pointed out, no mention in it of Operation Clean Sheet. Most agreed with Tancred’s assessment that academics were no keener than politicians on trumpeting their failures. A fuzzily reproduced photograph of ‘Professor Alexander Stuart McIntyre, died 24 October 1985, aged 87’ showed him much as he had been in the spring of 1955, bald and beaming in half-moon spectacles, one hand clasping a fat-bowled pipe, the other the lapel of a heavy tweed jacket.

By the time the train reached York, where Milton ‘Paradise’ Fripp joined them, the champagne was wreaking havoc with Harry’s thought processes. Fripp, lean, stooped, balding and taciturn, consequently made little impression, accepting Judd’s generosity and that of whoever was paying for the next bottle without demur. Alcohol rapidly loosened his tongue, however, though what he actually said Harry could not have even vaguely summarized more than a minute after he had said it.

This was soon true of everyone. Drinking sessions at the Macbeth Arms; kick-about football matches on the lawn behind the castle; half-hearted square-bashing on a patch of tarmac adjoining the hut at the bawling behest of Warrant Officer Trench; the idiosyncrasies of the teaching staff brought in by Professor Mac; the inadequacies of their reluctant students: all these and more floated in and out of the conversation as the champagne flowed and the North of England slid past the window.

As the train neared Newcastle, the decision was taken to adjourn to the restaurant car for a lunch that had the potential to last until Aberdeen. Gregson, who had drunk virtually nothing, said he would stay where he was and eat the sandwiches he had brought, cueing much eye-rolling by Judd and a faintly patronizing smile from Tancred.

Gregson’s withdrawal had the advantage that the six remaining could occupy a table for four and an adjacent table for two at one end of the restaurant car, where a bibulous time ensued, although Harry found himself sharing the table for two with Askew and was consequently at one remove from the centre of quippery and merriment. At some point, however, Chipchase’s name cropped up and Harry was obliged to admit to a brief business association with him some years after they had left Kilveen. This aroused an unhealthy amount of curiosity, which he deflected as best he could, though not very effectively in Tancred’s case.

‘A garage, you say, Ossie?’

‘Yes. Barnchase Motors. In Swindon.’

‘Well, Fission always did have a way with a spanner and a greasy rag,’ put in Lloyd.

‘True,’ Tancred agreed. ‘But I’m not sure I’d have cared to have him as a business partner.’

‘That’s because of your distrustful nature, Tapper,’ Fripp observed drily.

‘Perhaps. But let’s ask Ossie to adjudicate on the point. Was Fission an entirely reliable man to work with?’

‘Well…’

‘I sense the answer’s no.’

Harry shrugged. ‘We all have our flaws.’

‘What became of Barnchase Motors?’

‘It folded up.’

‘And whose fault was that?’

Harry managed a smile. ‘I always put it down to decimalization myself.’

The joke raised a laugh and set Judd off on a cheery diatribe against all manner of modern reforms.

At some point in the ensuing discussion, Askew leaned across the table towards Harry and said, quietly but distinctly, ‘Are you sure Professor Mac’s obituary didn’t mention Clean Sheet because it was a failure?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Are you? Really?’

Tancred and Judd were by now locked in an argument about the European Union. Harry could clearly sense that none of their companions was aware of Askew’s question — or of Harry’s faltering attempts to answer it. ‘What do you… What are you getting at, Peter?’

‘Looking back on our time at Kilveen, what do you remember best?’

‘Well, the… kind of stuff we’ve been laughing about, I suppose. Booze-ups. Cock-ups. The usual.’

‘What about the lessons?’

‘Not much stuck, as I recall. I don’t think we were exactly model pupils.’

‘Because not much stuck?’

‘Well, it didn’t, did it?’

‘Perhaps it wasn’t intended to.’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘I don’t know.’ Askew laughed. ‘Sorry. Let’s forget it.’

‘OK, but—’

‘Excuse me.’ Askew rose suddenly from his seat. ‘I’ll be right back.’

It was only as Askew slipped through the sliding door into the vestibule that Harry realized he was answering a mobile-phone call. He heard Askew say ‘Hello?’ as the door slid shut behind him, and noticed the phone held to his ear. It must, Harry supposed, have been set to vibrate rather than ring. He was mildly surprised Askew should sufficiently have kept pace with technology to possess such a thing, let alone master its greater intricacies. Harry himself was technically the owner of a mobile, but never switched it on other than to make a call and that rarely. When he did, he usually found the battery had run down. Today, he had left it in Swindon.

Tancred had commenced his own musings on Professor Mac’s achievements by the time Askew made a low-key return to the carriage. The minor puzzle of Askew’s questions about the purpose of Operation Clean Sheet was thus jettisoned from Harry’s mind.

‘We all qualified for Professor Mac’s residential tutorial by rebelling against RAF discipline in one way or another,’ Tancred reasoned. ‘It seems those of us here stopped rebelling at that point, however, so you could say the old boy achieved something, even if it wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. Of course—’

‘Some of the others might have taken to a life of crime without us hearing about it,’ said Fripp.

‘Or some of us might be hiding our rebellious light under a bushel,’ said Lloyd.

‘Danger’s researches have turned up nothing out of the ordinary,’ Tancred responded. ‘We all seem to be desperately respectable.’

‘Who are you calling respectable?’ growled Judd.

‘Three Foot might have been making a getaway from a burglary when he died in that motorbike crash,’ said Lloyd.

‘And someone could have been holding poor old Coker’s head under the water when he drowned, for all we know,’ said Harry. ‘I was sorry to hear he’d gone. After everything he told us he’d had to put up with in Germany.’ (Leroy Nixon had cracked under the strain of racist abuse at RAF Gütersloh and broken a warrant officer’s nose, thus earning his passage to Kilveen and the grudging respect of WO Trench. His was the first black face most of them had ever seen, back in the monocultural days of their youth, when a Jamaican in Aberdeenshire counted as a contradiction in terms.) ‘I’d like to have met him again and shaken him by the hand.’

‘You’re not serious, are you, Harry?’ asked Askew suddenly.

Harry frowned. ‘Certainly.’

‘I mean about how he drowned. You don’t think … he was murdered, do you?’

‘Murdered? No. Of course not. I just meant—’

‘Ossie was speaking metaphorically, Crooked,’ Tancred mellifluously intervened.

Askew looked around at his companions in evident bemusement. Then he shaped an uneasy smile. ‘Sorry. You’re right. Obviously. Not sure I’m used to drinking so much. I… think I’ll leave you to it. Maybe take a nap. Yes. A nap.’ He stood up. ‘That’s what I need.’

‘Are you OK, mate?’ Judd called as Askew headed along the aisle towards coach L.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Askew replied, with a wave of the hand. And on he went.

‘Think someone should go and see if he’s all right?’ Harry asked as the door at the end of the carriage slid shut behind him.

‘Gregger’ll look after him,’ said Lloyd. ‘Crooked probably needs one of his sandwiches to sober him up.’

There was general laughter at that. And an observation by Fripp that the next bottle would now stretch further prompted more laughter. It was not long, indeed, before the bottle was duly ordered.

‘You’re going to drink us dry, gents,’ the steward said with a wink as he pulled the cork. And it was instantly agreed that this was a challenge they could not let pass.

—«»—«»—«»—

During the train’s ten-minute lay-up at Waverley station in Edinburgh, Harry stepped out onto the platform for a breath of air. He badly needed to clear his head, having drunk too much and sat too long. It was an imprudent start to the weekend and he foresaw some crippling hangovers among his companions, none of whom was young enough to be setting such a pace.

Askew was on the platform ahead of him, walking up and down, frowning pensively and breathing heavily, like a man psyching himself up for an important speech.

‘Did you ever get that nap, Peter?’ Harry called to him.

Askew started and looked round. ‘What? Oh, Harry. The nap? No. Not yet.’

‘You seem a little… on edge.’

‘Do I?’ Askew’s eyes widened. He grimaced. ‘Well, I suppose I am. To be honest, I’m having second thoughts about this whole reunion idea.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘Not sure. It’s just…’ Askew stepped closer and lowered his voice. ‘Meeting people you haven’t met in fifty years makes you realize how quickly those years have passed — and how little you have to show for them.’

‘We’re all in the same boat, Peter.’

‘No, we’re not. Believe me, we’re not.’

‘OK.’ Harry smiled appeasingly. ‘Depends on your point of view, I suppose.’

‘It depends on how you remember things, actually. And how you forget them.’

‘I don’t…’

‘Understand? No. You wouldn’t.’ Askew shook his head. ‘Sorry. I’m not making any sense.’

Harry laughed. ‘Neither are that lot.’ He gestured with his thumb towards the restaurant car.

Askew rubbed his eyes. ‘I think maybe I will try and get my head down.’

‘Good idea. I reckon I’ll join you.’

—«»—«»—«»—

They found Gregson dozing in his seat in coach L. Harry sat down next to him. As the train eased out of the station, he felt his eyelids grow heavy. Askew was sitting across from him on the other side of the aisle. Whether he was nodding off too Harry could not have said for certain. Fuzzy shafts of sunlight misted his vision. Askew became a silhouette, then a shadow. Harry closed his eyes.

—«»—«»—«»—

He was never to see Peter Askew again.

It was difficult, looking back, to say exactly when Askew had gone missing. Harry slept as solidly as only a man who has drunk too much can until roused by the noisy return of Judd, Tancred, Lloyd and Fripp from the restaurant car. This was as the train was nearing Stonehaven, with half an hour to go till it reached Aberdeen. Two hours of oblivion had passed for Harry since its departure from Edinburgh. Gregson, who had slept less heavily, recalled registering the train’s arrival in Dundee and was more or less certain that Askew had still been there then. He also recalled registering Askew’s absence some time later, but was vague about when that would have been.

Harry and his companions did not actually take seriously the idea that Askew was missing until the train entered the outskirts of Aberdeen and the guard announced their imminent arrival at ‘our last and final station stop’. A hasty check of the nearest loos began, but Askew was in none of them. They did find his bag, however, left where he had stowed it on the rack, and duly took it along with theirs when they stumbled off the train into the grey chill of an Aberdeen afternoon.

They followed the ruck of passengers off the platform assuming Askew had for some reason gone to the front of the train and would soon be sighted. But he was not. They lingered on the concourse, expecting him to appear from one direction or another. But he did not. Harry accompanied Lloyd and Judd back to the train, where the cleaners were already at work and the guard assured them that all the passengers had left. He surmised that their friend had simply got off earlier. Why Askew would have left his bag behind was a puzzle the guard neither needed nor wished to dwell on.

Back on the concourse, Johnny Dangerfield had arrived to collect them. A weather-beaten but still handsome figure in Barbour, guernsey, corduroys and brogues, he had kept the trimmed moustache and Brylcreemed hairstyle of his youth, but the moustache had lost most of its colour, while his face had reddened with age and whisky. The twinkle in his eyes, that had once been like Venus in the night sky, was now more akin to a distant star in an unnamed galaxy. But there was still enough dash about him to suggest he had left an E-Type in the car park, rather than the minibus he had actually hired to transport them to the castle.

Harry had expected to see Chipchase at Dangerfield’s elbow, but there was as little sign of him as of Askew. The mystery of Askew’s whereabouts took priority, however, and it was not until a deputation, which he and Dangerfield were both part of, had been despatched to the railway police office, that Harry had the chance to ask after his old friend.

‘Did you leave Barry in the van, Danger?’

‘Fission? No. Actually, this is a bit of a double whammy, chaps. Fission’s sister died last night. Her husband’s in a godawful state, apparently. Fission’s had to fly down to Manchester. He’s not going to be able to join us.’

‘Sister, did you say?’ It was the first Harry had ever heard of Chipchase having siblings, dead or alive.

‘Yes. Know her, did you, Ossie?’

‘No. Actually, I didn’t.’

‘Well, there it is. Can’t be helped. At least we know where Fission’s gone. Unlike Crooked, blast the fellow.’

The railway police were not a lot more helpful than the train guard. The officer on duty took a note of their friend’s apparent disappearance, but emphasized that much the likeliest explanation was that he had got off the train at an earlier stop or had disembarked at the front on arrival at Aberdeen and left the station, forgetting to take his bag with him.

It was only then that Harry remembered Askew’s mobile. Why not simply ring him and ask where the blue blazes he was and what he thought he was playing at? But no-one had the number. Lloyd, indeed, did not even know Askew possessed a phone.

‘He never made or took a call while I was with him yesterday. Or while we were at my daughter’s.’

‘He took a call on the train,’ said Harry. ‘While we were having lunch.’

But no-one else had noticed. And some suggested Harry was confused.

‘Your powers of observation while under the influence were always close to zero, Ossie,’ said Tancred. ‘I can’t think age has improved them.’

Harry could not find the energy to be riled by this and it was generally agreed that none of them could claim more than partial recall of the events of the journey anyway. They adjourned to the station buffet for much-needed coffee, which completed the sobering-up Askew’s vanishment had kick-started without inducing much in the way of inspired thoughts.

But Harry’s memory was slowly booting up, distracted though he was by the parallel mystery of Chipchase’s sudden flying of the coop. (He did not think this was the moment to voice his certainty that Chipchase had never had a sister.) ‘I spoke to Peter on the platform at Waverley station. He said he was having second thoughts about the whole idea of the reunion.’

‘Why?’ snapped Tancred.

‘Something about it reminding him of how little he’d achieved in life.’

‘He’s hardly alone in that,’ said Fripp.

‘Well, it seemed to be preying on his mind,’ said Harry.

‘That’s it, then,’ said Lloyd. ‘He’s baled out. He always was chicken.’

‘It’s possible, I suppose,’ said Dangerfield. ‘Let’s see.’ He flourished a GNER pocket timetable and leafed through it. ‘We know from Gregger he was still on at Dundee. But if he got off after that, at Arbroath, say, or Montrose…’ He recited various train times under his breath. ‘Mmm. Montrose would’ve been too late. It has to have been Arbroath.’

‘Can you spell it out for us, Danger?’ pleaded Judd. ‘You might be firing on all cylinders, but I can assure you the rest of us aren’t.’

‘It’s simply that if he’d got off at Arbroath and caught the next southbound train… he could connect with the seven o’clock from Edinburgh to London… and get into King’s Cross just after midnight.’

‘You mean he’s bolted back to London?’

‘I don’t know. What do you think, Ossie? Based on his state of mind during your chat at Edinburgh.’

Put on the spot, Harry had to admit it was a distinct possibility. ‘I reckon he must have done.’

‘Charming,’ said Lloyd. ‘I go to all the bother of arranging for my daughter to put him up and he goes and does this.’

‘He obviously wasn’t thinking straight,’ said Dangerfield. ‘Otherwise he’d have taken his bag. No doubt he’ll be in touch with us about that — and to apologize. Sorry, gents, but we’re two down and we’ll just have to make the best of it. That’s all there is to it.’

—«»—«»—«»—

Harry did not share Dangerfield’s complacency. He knew Chipchase was lying about a dead sister and a distraught brother-in-law in Manchester. He also knew Askew had a mobile and had been using it on the train. If Askew had been capable of working out the logistics of getting back to London from Arbroath, he would surely not have been so forgetful as to leave his bag behind. What all this meant Harry had no idea, but the coincidence of Chipchase and Askew going missing was too much to swallow. Something was going on. And Chipchase was up to his neck in it.

Still Harry said nothing about the non-existence of Chipchase’s sister. Some loyalty to his old friend that he could not shake off, despite the many occasions on which that friend had let him down, bound him to silence. Denied this information, his companions naturally made no connection between the two turns of events. Chipchase had been called away. And Askew was AWOL. There was no more to be said.

—«»—«»—«»—

They piled into the minibus and began the final leg of their journey. The Deeside railway line was long gone, a victim of the Beeching cuts of the mid-sixties. Their arrival at the castle would not be a re-creation of how they had arrived fifty years previously, in ones and twos, on different days, by slow, labouring steam train. It was the road for them this time, with Dangerfield at the wheel, cursing and swearing his way through the rush-hour traffic as a pallid sun cast a sickly hue across the grey city. Conversation was subdued, thanks to encroaching hangovers, incipient indigestion and a general feeling that the absences of Chipchase and Askew had taken some of the gloss off the proceedings. Some even wondered if Wiseman had deserted them as well, though Dangerfield seemed certain he would join them before the evening was out.

Their spirits revived somewhat when they left the straggling suburbs of Aberdeen behind and headed on towards the sun-gilded hills of Deeside. They had a first encounter with Erica Rawson to look forward to — and a weekend of carousing. As Lloyd put it: ‘Bugger Crooked. And bad luck, Fission. They’re going to miss a right royal piss-up.’