Charles Todd - An Impartial Witness

I did as she asked, and when she had left the motorcar, she turned back to me and said, "If you hear anything about Marjorie, anything at all, you would let me know, wouldn't you?"

Now there was a conundrum. I hadn't told her what I knew. And I couldn't in good conscience promise to keep her informed. And I wasn't sure I trusted her to act wisely if she did learn the truth.

"Serena-" I began.

But she said bitterly, "You're just like the rest, aren't you?"

"No," I said sharply. "I will go to the police if I hear anything that's helpful in finding her murderer. That's what everyone should do."

"Liar," she answered, turning her back.

And she was gone, marching toward the station as if she were marching to war.

In a way she probably thought she was.

I took Michael, still protesting, back to Little Sefton.

"I've made a promise to your doctors," I told him over his protests when I finally ran him to earth at the Marlborough. "After I keep it, you're free to do as you like."

He was not in a good mood. As we threaded our way through London's traffic-mostly bicycles, military convoys or vehicles, omnibuses, and the occasional lorry trying to make deliveries to the next shop-I let him sulk.

He did it beautifully. But I was immune to his blandishments.

When we were in the clear and running through the countryside beyond London, I said, "I came looking for you earlier. Where were you?"

At first I was sure he wasn't going to tell me. Finally, he said, "I went to Scotland Yard."

Surprised, I asked, "And did they have news for you?"

"They would tell me nothing." There was suppressed anger in his confession. "Apparently I'm a suspect in Marjorie's death."

"But-you said you were in France."

Yet Jack Melton had told me he was not.

He turned to look at the passing scene, as if he hadn't heard me. Then, grudgingly, he went on. "I haven't said anything about it. I was given forty-eight hours' leave. A foreign object in my eye. I was sent to a specialist in London. My men were in rotation, I could be spared. He removed the particle, gave me drops and a patch, and I went straight back to the line. I didn't actually lie. Everyone thought I was in France. I let them go on thinking it. But the Yard stumbled on the truth."

"I don't understand."

"I hadn't heard from Marjorie for three months. Just-silence. I wrote to Victoria, but she wouldn't answer. That worried me more. I tried to get word to Meriwether, to ask him if everything was all right. But it didn't get through. When my eye was inflamed, they thought I might lose it, and I was given the choice of seeing someone in Paris or in London. Luckily, I knew a chap in school whose father was an eye surgeon in Harley Street, and the doctors at the Front approved."

"And did you see Marjorie?"

"No. I sent her a telegram the day before, telling her where I would be, begging her to come and sit with me for a bit. Either she didn't get the message or she had something else on her mind. She never came."

He was staring at a field where cows grazed, and so I couldn't read his face.

"And you didn't go to the house? Why not?"

"I was told not to leave the surgery. Not to move for twenty-four hours. I waited all that day and the next for her, and she didn't come."

"You went back to France, not knowing she'd been killed?"

He didn't answer.

"Michael-?"

He turned to me, his face twisted with grief and anger. "Do you know how many times I've wondered if she was on her way to Dr. McKinley's surgery when she was killed? How many times I've wondered if she might have lived if she'd been with me instead of out on the street somewhere and vulnerable?"

And Marjorie's housekeeper had said she went out earlier in the day and never returned. From the train station, could she have been on her way to see Michael? Was the timing right?

Catching sight of the next turning, I asked as I slowed for it, "You couldn't leave the surgery?"

"Dr. McKinley told me not to jar the eye in any way. He left me in a darkened room and his wife brought me my dinner and my breakfast the next morning."

"So you weren't supervised?"

"I was there whenever they looked in on me," he said, which wasn't necessarily the same thing.

I let a little time pass.

"Was it your child she was carrying?"

"No," he said quietly. "It was not."

And this time I believed him.

We arrived in Little Sefton late in the afternoon. I took Michael directly to the house of his aunt and uncle.

As I helped him get out of the motorcar, stiff from the drive down, he said, "Thank you, Bess Crawford. For taking me to London."

"I'm sorry it wasn't more helpful."

"It made me feel less useless. As if I'd at least tried to find the truth." He nodded to me, picked up his valise in his good hand, and walked up to the door. There he turned, and with that smile that seemed to light up the world, he said, "Give my regards to Sergeant-Major Brandon."

I laughed in spite of myself.

I went on up the street to Alicia's house and knocked at the door. She was surprised to see me but greeted me with friendly warmth. "I didn't expect to find you on my doorstep. But do come in. I'll put on the kettle and make sandwiches."

I thanked her and joined her in the kitchen as she worked. It was her cook's day off, and she was rummaging in the pantry for cold chicken and a pudding as she said, "This is my dinner, but I dine alone far too often. It will be nice to have someone to share my meal."

We ate it in the kitchen, and talked about everything but the war.

"I'm tired of knitting and growing vegetables to save room in the holds of ships for war materiel," she said as we ate our pudding. "I'm restless, I want to do something useful, really useful. But Gareth won't hear of turning the house into a hospital or my going to London and finding work. I type, you know."

"Do you? You'll be in demand."

"I think what he really wants is to know that nothing has changed at home. Not the village, not the house, not me. That it's all there to come back to."

"A good many soldiers feel that way. It's what sees them through."

"He sent me photographs in the last letter but one. Would you like to see them? His father gave him a camera for his birthday and he's been using it to capture memories, he said."

"I'd love to see them." I had a long drive ahead of me, but she had been good enough to invite me to dine, and I owed her a few minutes of my time.

She went off to find the letter, and I finished my pudding, looking out at the kitchen garden and the outbuildings and the quiet peace of late afternoon.

Alicia came back with the envelope, and took out a sheaf of photographs. "He found someone who could develop these for him. They cover a year or more. I was so pleased to have them, because now I know what his world is like."

But the photographs were not his world as it truly was. It was a tidy look at war that made me want to cry. Had Gareth chosen to spare his wife, or was he afraid that the censors would object to the truth and confiscate these photographs?

There were tents pitched in neat rows, well behind the lines, like an encampment for troops on parade. Artillery that was silent, the gunners standing grinning in front of a jumble of empty casings. A group of French children, smiling for the camera, their faces unmarked by fear and despair. I turned it over to see the name of the village where this was taken, and it was well south of the lines too. There were several photographs of his fellow officers posing absurdly, as if they hadn't a care in the world. But I could see the tension around their eyes, belying their antics. There was even one photograph of Meriwether Evanson's aircraft, with Meriwether standing proudly with a hand on the prop, his face only partly shadowed by his cap. Alicia pointed him out to me.