David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Deciding it might be just as well to ask what he was getting himself into, he stopped and turned to Browning.

‘The note, sir,’ he began, but Browning merely gave him another shove along the corridor, as if not choosing to waste breath on idle questions.

Paul moved along, becoming rather irritated by it all… confusing rooms and corridors… turrets and rusty iron bridges… arcane notes… In fact, it was all beginning to seem a little suspicious. There was a shady air about it he didn’t like, and although he was ready to admit he was in something of a fix, that didn’t necessarily mean he would be willing to get involved in any old dubious business. He was still an officer and a gentleman, as the saying went, and wary of anything that might reflect badly on him. It was true that he had begun to reassess some of his old inherited attitudes, but there were still some things that it just wouldn’t be right to be involved in. He had already found himself on the wrong end of one shady enterprise, courtesy of Valentine, and he was none too eager to repeat the experience.

At the end of the corridor a flight of stairs descended into yet another hallway, wider this time with doors through which he could hear the distinctive clatter of typewriters. At the end he was faced with one more door and glanced at Browning who stared back at him impassively.

‘Go in then, man,’ he ordered. ‘You’ve come this far.’

Paul stepped into an anteroom, furnished with chairs around its perimeter and a desk in the centre, empty except for an inkwell. A dusty filing cabinet stood against one wall next to which was a door.

‘It’s Ross, then, is it?’ Browning said again, as if even this late juncture he suspected an impostor. ‘Wait here.’ He passed through the other door, closing it behind him.

Paul glanced at the chairs but didn’t sit. Instead he looked around in the hope that the decor of the office might give some indication as to the nature of the business undertaken there. But there wasn’t any decor to speak of. The walls were unadorned, painted in a muddily indistinct hue which looked in need of some renovation. The room lacked any sort of real colour at all, in fact, reminding him more of a railway station waiting room than an office. In that line he thought the place might have benefited from a poster or two — advertising the charms of Torquay, perhaps, or Scarborough — or even Lake Como if there were Italian connections.

His mind was still wandering over ideas of how to brighten the place up — light-headed from hunger, he supposed — when Browning returned, indicating Paul was to come into the adjoining room.

This, he found, was undeniably an office. A row of telephones stood on one side of a large desk, a pile of beige files and a scattering of papers laying across the remainder. Some of the papers looked to be sketches or maps from where Paul stood; others were covered with dense blocks of typed text, all liberally annotated by the same green ink used in his note. On the other side of the room was a table on which a collection of model boats and aeroplanes were displayed. Even a small submarine, Paul noticed. Above these, on a shelf, stood bottles containing different coloured liquids. Propped beside the table stood, unaccountably, a child’s scooter. The room’s one window gave onto a view of the neighbouring roofs and, silhouetted in front of it with his back to Paul stood the stout figure of a man.

He was dressed in the uniform of a naval captain and, as the man turned around, Paul drew himself up and offered a smart salute. Capless, the captain touched a lazy finger to his brow in response. He had a broad, rectangular face, dimensions echoed in the rest of his body, and wore a gold-rimmed monocle at his right eye. He held a walking cane in his right hand, slanted out at a slight angle in front of his right leg which, itself, seemed to angle rather stiffly beneath him.

Paul felt pierced by the monocled eye. It bored into him out of a face set with challenging self-assurance, an expression Paul last recalled having seen on the face of a Chow Chow belonging to one of the doctors at his hospital.

The resemblance to the dog oddly persisted until the man spoke. Then, Paul noted with some relief as the man opened his mouth, that unlike the Chow, the captain’s tongue was not blue.

‘My name is Mansfield Cumming,’ he announced, skewering Paul with his eyes. ‘Yours, I am informed, is Pavel Sergeyevich Rostov.’

Huddled into the corner of the railway carriage Paul was sweating. He had tried several times to take an unobtrusive peek beneath the greatcoat to judge how bad the bloodstains looked but, each time he tried, the eyes of the couple on the seat opposite strayed in his direction. He assumed they were wondering why he persisted in wearing the coat in the middle of summer and the thought of their curiosity made him all the hotter. What was worse was that each time he looked at the woman he found she was looking at him. She was a handsome creature, not quite of middle-age, well-dressed and — thankfully — not in black. On several occasions she had seemed on the point of speaking to him, but each time had averted her eyes and frowned, as if she was worried about something. He wondered is she perhaps had a boy in France herself and would have liked to speak to him about it. It might be, of course, that she was uncertain whether or not he was in the services. The greatcoat, although undoubtedly of a military cut, did not display any insignia to denote regiment or rank and neither was he wearing a cap.

Perhaps she took him for one of the wounded who had boarded the train at Liverpool Street. If that were the case he wondered if it might be best simply to take the coat off, then she would take the blood for a still open wound… But he realized that idea was nonsense and he wondered if he wasn’t still light-headed. Anyway, beneath the coat he was dressed in civilian clothes which would ruin the whole impression, and there was always the chance, seeing blood, she might start screaming like that woman in the alley.

Catching him fussing with the coat again, Paul began patting through the pockets as if looking for something. Thinking about it, if the blood was dry it might look no worse than spilt gravy, and decided that if he was going to be the object of curiosity he’d rather be taken for a sloppy eater than a murderer. But the stench of the dead man’s blood still lingered in his nostrils, nothing like gravy, and while he suspected it to be no more than his imagination he couldn’t quite convince himself that the woman and her companion weren’t able to smell it too.

Considering the matter dispassionately as he gazed out the window, he wasn’t sure why it was making him so squeamish. It was hardly the first time he had another man’s blood on his clothes, and often a lot worse than simple blood. But he had always been in uniform then and that was the result of war, not an unseemly scuffle in an alley.

That thought prompted memories of the shell-hole at Passchendaele and although he couldn’t see it out of the window, it was nonetheless in front of his eyes…

They had been out at night on a patrol cutting wire in advance of a push. A sudden barrage had caught them in the open and they’d scattered. He had dived for cover into the nearest crater, a shell-hole half-full of filthy green water. Having slid face-down into the scum and come up coughing, he had found that two of his patrol had followed him into the hole. And that there was a third person there, too. A German, half submerged in the water and looking as if he’d been there for some time already.

‘Caw, he’s ripe,’ Sykes had said before another shell had burst overhead and Sykes never said anything else again. A piece of shrapnel split his head in two and the wet jelly that Sykes was made of had splattered all over Paul. He had used the stagnant water to wash Sykes off as best he could, unable to stop thinking that, in a few days, Sykes was going to be just as ripe as the German.