The Art of Detection (27 page)

     ‘Did he take any possessions with him?’

     ‘His clothes are still in his rooms, but who knows what else he had?’

     ‘There might be one thing to indicate whether he planned to be away for good,’ I suggested. ‘I happened to be shown a letter he wrote some time ago, from Manila, which referred to a number of pearls that he’d bought to have made into jewellery for various family members. If we looked in his rooms and found them, that would be fairly definitive indication of an accidental absence.’

     The major thought this over for a minute, and nodded. He opened his mouth to summon his adjutant outside the door, then changed his mind. Instead, he opened a drawer in the desk and came out with a formidable ring of keys, stood and set his cap on his head, and told me, ‘I’ll do this myself. I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

     I, however, was standing as well. ‘I can come with you, see if anything catches my eye. I will give you my promise that I will touch nothing, if you like. The family will want to know,’ I added. I intended to see the inside of the young officer’s rooms, even if it meant breaking into an Army base at midnight.

     Such a venture proved unnecessary, for the major only hesitated a moment before deciding that a fellow officer could be trusted that far, and shouted for his car.

     The major, it seemed, preferred to motor under his own power rather than use the driver that rank might have expected. No sooner were we away from the parade ground than I began to wish him more concerned with appearance than the art of motoring. Major Morris was a terror behind the wheel, one of those men who can scarcely bear to glance at the road ahead, and instead peers to either side, into his passenger’s face, and even around to the back window. I clung to the front and attempted to empty my mind of all thought.

     The road to the neighbouring fort was steep, but brief, and cut through the intervening hills in a distressingly long and narrow tunnel which was in a condition my younger associates might term ‘dodgy’. It couldn’t have been more than eight or ten years old, but the massive timbers making up its damp walls and ceiling looked as soft as old bed sheets, and when the major had to shift into a lower gear with the gradient, I expected the sound to shake the walls down onto our heads. I came closer to prayer than I have at any time since I gave up the habit as a schoolboy.

     After a small eternity, blessed daylight opened up around us, and I peeled my fingers out from the dents on the dash-board and reminded myself to breathe.

     The fort on the other side of the tunnel was a collection of buildings overlooking a long, narrow lagoon. It was an attractive setting, but appeared nearly deserted, as I saw only two men in uniform between the tunnel’s mouth and the apparent centre of the fort. We passed the chapel and pulled to a stop--adding a large dent to the smaller ones in the dash-board, as the major’s use of the brake was as vigorous as might be expected. I lowered myself to solid ground and followed him up the steps into the officer’s housing.

     ‘This is a duplex,’ he informed me. ‘Raynor’s got the west half, Lieutenant Halston the other. The house-boy lives in the back.’

     Raynor’s quarters had the methodical tidiness of an experienced soldier, with everything in its place and, apart from the furniture, capable of being packed up in an hour. The books on his shelves were the usual--Thackeray, Defoe, Hugo, two poetry collections--although the recordings stacked neatly by the Victrola were more classical than the Jazz I might have expected. Some of them I owned myself.

     His most personal effects were a small, intricately worked Chinese carpet on the floor between his armchair and the fireplace, its thick pile depicting a lively and colourful twisting dragon, and three similarly intricate carvings on the table beside his armchair, each a different form of dragon. The smallest was of age-darkened ivory, no bigger than a chestnut, the creature turned back on itself and with features picked out by a knife-blade like the point of a needle. The next was of a lustrous jade the colour of the ocean across the next ridge, grey tinting the green and giving it a depth and mystery. This dragon was simpler, but muscular, if that word can be used to describe a thing that would fit into a fist.

     The third dragon was of some tropical wood, a glossy dark substance almost without texture. The seven-inch-high creature was sitting on its haunches like a begging lap-dog, its tail curled around its rear legs and both small fore-legs in the air. It was the sort of thing an amateur critic would instantly dismiss as rough and whimsical, but in fact, the eye kept returning to it, for behind the whimsy the dragon gave off an air of watchful deliberation, and the roughness of the carving was of a kind with the rough surface of a master Japanese potter. A curious object, all the more so to find it in the establishment of a junior Army officer.

     I pulled myself away from Raynor’s collection of dragons and turned to the man’s desk, but before I had done more than open a drawer, Major Morris came upon the small velvet bag of pearls. It was in the first place he looked, the bottom of his lieutenant’s sea bag. ‘They always hide things in their travelling kit,’ he mused, the black bag pulled open on his palm, but his mind was clearly taken up with the implications of the pearls rather than the habits of young soldiers. ‘If he left them here…’

     ‘Then he did not intend to be gone,’ I finished his sentence for him, equally preoccupied with the scrap of paper in my own hand. (I had not actually promised to touch nothing, merely said that I would make such a promise if he had asked. He had not.) ‘Do you know a man whose name begins with DuM? The “M” is a capital letter, so perhaps DuMons, DuMont, something of the sort?’

     ‘No,’ he said, pulling the strings shut on the bag. Then he added, ‘There’s DuMaurier, but that’s not a man, it’s a battery. Was a battery, I should say.’

     ‘It is no longer?’ I asked, but he was already set on his historical lecture.

     ‘The emplacements are all named for Army men. DuMaurier was a captain who led a daring raid against Fort Sumter in the Civil War. DuMaurier is one of the older emplacements, although the gun itself was pulled out in 1917 and sent to France. Probably melted down by now and being used to tin peaches. Anyway, turns out there’s no point in having a gun you can see from the air, not any more. Airplanes are changing everything.’

     ‘Quite.’

     ‘Why do you ask?’

     ‘Because he’s made a note here, “DuM 2:00”.’

     The major dropped his find back in the duffel bag and came to look at the paper in my hand. He scowled at it, then at me, for the paper I held had nothing written on it, but then, I’d had more practice than most in the art of reading pencil indentations pressed from one sheet to another. I had needed only the light through the window, but for the major, I took a pencil from the desk drawer and gently rubbed at the sheet until the letters appeared.

     He raised one of those bushy eye-brows, and without another word walked to Raynor’s door. I hesitated, my fingers yearning after the envelopes that lay so tantalising in the drawer behind the pencils, but Morris was standing there waiting. I closed the drawer reluctantly and wondered again about the difficulties of a night-time raid on Army grounds. I was glad to see him turn the key in the door behind us.

     As he marched down the steps of Raynor’s ‘duplex’ the major spotted a callow uniform approaching, and raised his voice in that effortless parade-ground bellow of the career soldier.

     ‘Corporal, double-time it over to the stables and have a horse saddled by the time I get there.’

     ‘I say, Major,’ I began.

     ‘And another horse for this gentleman here. You do ride?’ he demanded of me.

     Not by preference in a city suit and shoes, but if the alternative was to be left behind, then ride in a city suit and shoes I would.

     Before long I could see why the major had called for four-legged transport over that with four wheels. The road was well enough maintained, but when we turned off it for the cliffs that first climb, then precipitously drop down to the sea, we should have had to proceed on foot. As it was, the way the horses picked their cautious path downhill, it might well have been more comfortable to have walked. Certainly it would have been faster. However, a major requires the dignity of transport, even if it be just for a mile, so transport we had. Morris led the way, his voice reaching me in uneven phrases, snatched away by the perpetual wind from the sea. ‘…not maintained…new long-range guns…mine-fields…bird-watchers…’

     Eventually, we reached the gun emplacement, a low, grey, weed-choked concrete structure rooted in the cliffs like the nest of some enormous sea-faring bird. Unlike the other batteries we had passed, this one was, as the major had been trying to tell me, not well maintained. One of the cliffs had slumped across the narrow roadway, and the horses were not happy about picking their way across. We reached the gun and dismounted, tying our reins onto an iron ring clearly set there for the purpose, and walked past the circular clearing where once the gun had thundered. To the south had been built a set of rooms for the storage of powder and such, although as the gun was inactive, and looked to remain that way, the wide doorway was not supplied with so much as a padlock. The major wrestled with the rust-clotted handle, then laid his shoulder against the door. The hinges gave way with a groan that appeared to embarrass him, as evidence of neglect.

     Neither of us said anything, however, and in a moment the thought of rusted metal had fled from our minds. For inside the first room, slumped in a heap against the northernmost wall, we found the body of Lieutenant Jack Raynor.

INSPECTOR Kate Martinelli, reading this section of typescript in a busy office crowded with ringing telephones and well-used computers, sitting beneath fluorescent lights and holding a half-forgotten focaccia, turkey, and provolone sandwich in one hand, exclaimed aloud. The two other detectives in the room at the time looked up at her, and one of them asked her a question. She looked up at him blankly, more aware of a hillside eight decades earlier than the room she was in, then lowered her eyes again to the story.

…the body of Lieutenant Jack Raynor.

     The moment I saw the figure, I was aware of a considerable feeling of satisfaction. Not, I hasten to say, that the man was dead, but rather that Major Morris and I had come here alone. It was rare to be given the opportunity to examine a body before the police arrived with their clumsy ways. I held out no hope that the Army methods would prove any more gentle.

     ‘You must go back and summon assistance,’ I told him, wincing at the way his great boots scuffed the floor around Raynor’s head.

     ‘I can’t leave you alone here,’ he declared.

     ‘But the poor fellow, he’ll be eaten by the foxes,’ I protested, with more sentiment than accuracy. ‘I can’t very well go for help, your men wouldn’t obey my orders--indeed, they’d probably clap me in the brig for trespassing. I’ll just remain here and chase away the vermin. You won’t be long.’

     The man gave a brief and disapproving look at the remains of his lieutenant, mounted up, and rode off. I took up a position just outside the entrance of the emplacement and lit a cigarette, sketching a brisk salute as Morris turned to look back at the top of the rise. And the moment his hat had vanished behind the hill, I tossed the half-smoked cigarette over my shoulder and stepped inside.

     The room had clearly gone unused for some months, if not years, which vastly simplified my examination of the floor. From the door, I shone my pocket-torch at an oblique angle, comparing what I saw there with the soles of the shoes worn by the dead man. I could see no sign that Raynor had walked over the accumulated dirt; instead, he had been bodily carried inside by a size- nine boot with a heavily worn right toe, then dropped. I then continued inside to look at the body itself.

     Raynor lay on his left side, and had done so for some days, long enough for rigor to come and go, long enough to attract the interest of flies and a few small teeth. He had been described as handsome, but no one would say that now. He possessed the requisite facial structures of nose and lips; his teeth had been good and his hair light; that was about all that could be said of his appearance.

     Fortunately, he had come to this place fully dressed, and the thick wool of his uniform had preserved the rest of his skin against encroachment. I searched the pockets, finding a silver cigar-case in one pocket, containing two slim, brown cigarillos, and a matching silver wind-proof lighter. In another pocket lay his note-case. This held eighteen dollars in assorted denominations, a letter from his mother, and an assortment of scraps and receipts that seemed to have no immediate bearing on the case, although I made note of them, for future reference, before returning them to their respective places. The case also contained two items of interest to a limited number of people; those I transferred into my own pocket, for the sake of the young man’s reputation.