Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

When he eventualy walked out of the station and turned up the Strand, it was a fine day with the sky bright above the piebald trunks of the plane trees. He was determined not to let his mind dwel on her unexplained times in Sussex.

He had decided to start looking for Inspector Mulins in the archives of the Daily Chronicle. The Chronicle had the sort of ordinary coverage he needed, but also he had once penciled the words of one of its war correspondents into his day book. The man had written: 'As an outside observer, I do not see why the war in this area should not go on for a hundred years, without any decisive result. What is happening now is precisely what happened last year.' Laurence had found it comforting rather than depressing. It meant he wasn't going mad.

He had occasionaly peered at the Chronicle 's offices tucked away in a tiny square to one side of Fleet Street. The building had a dark and elaborate brick façade with an impressive portico. He was taken immediately down to an airless basement room crammed with files. The woman running the library of back copies looked blank when he asked whether she remembered the incident.

'I don't read any of them,' she said, as if he'd accused her of idling. 'I just keep them tidy.'

His first problem was in remembering when exactly he'd seen the original article. It was recent, he thought, not long after he met Mary. He took out a month of copies and placed them on a long table, going through them a week at a time. He was pretty sure this would be front-page news. A violent attack on such a senior officer was almost unknown in England, though he vaguely remembered that the head of Scotland Yard had survived being shot by a madman not long before the war.

He found the first mention of Mulins' murder fairly quickly on an inside cover of a September newspaper, but it was obviously a folow-up story, considering whether Bolsheviks might have been behind the attack, so he kept going backwards. Finaly he found the headline he sought. It was unequivocal: SCOTLAND YARD

SLAYING. The accompanying photograph was a portrait shot of the officer in uniform. The date was Friday, 26 August 1921.

He ran through the columns beneath. Chief Inspector Mulins had left Scotland Yard as he usualy did at five-thirty in the afternoon. He was walking down the steps accompanied by a constable who, although some way behind him, was to be the nearest witness. As Mulins reached the last step, a man came up and spoke to him. The constable thought he had addressed him by name and that, although the inspector had nodded, he did not appear to recognise the gunman. The assailant then puled out his weapon from inside his coat and fired. Mulins fel to the ground almost immediately and the gunman fired one further shot, mutilating him. Mulins expired within seconds. With the element of surprise in his favour and because those nearest were attempting to provide aid to the dying officer, the gunman was able to escape apprehension. He was described as clean-shaven, of average build, possibly in middle age. He wore a hat, which concealed some of his features, and a British Warm, with the colar up. The piece ended: 'Chief Inspector Gerald Mulins joined the Metropolitan Police in 1900 and served with distinction within the Corps of Military Police from 1916 to 1919. He leaves a widow, a son who is a police cadet, and four daughters.'

Laurence was struck straight away by the similarity, albeit as much in its vagueness as anything more significant, in the descriptions of the murderer of Jim Byers and the assailant described here.

He went back to the desk at the entrance and rapped lightly. The curator appeared out of the doorway behind it.

'Do you know how I can find out who wrote this?' He laid down the paper and pointed.

She shook her head, much as he expected. But then she said, 'Please wait,' and went back through the door. He could hear her footsteps as she climbed the stone stairs. After ten minutes he began to wonder whether she'd gone for a tea break, but she appeared as suddenly as she'd gone and beckoned him to folow her.

The porter in the little cubbyhole by the front entrance looked up. He was holding the telephone receiver in his hand and after a couple of seconds said, 'Mr Peterkin? Gentleman here to see you, sir.'

Chapter Twenty-three

Peterkin was waiting as Laurence extricated himself from the smal cage of a lift on the first-floor landing. He was shabbily dressed, with a harassed expression.

'Yes?' he said. 'May I help you?' He sounded mildly resentful at any expectation that he should.

'I'm sorry. I just wondered if I could speak to someone about an article in your paper.'

'Today?'

'No. A while back. It's about the murder—of a police officer—last summer. I realy have only a few questions.'

'You mean the Mulins case?' The man looked slightly more interested.

Laurence nodded.

'It's not me you want to see.'

The man turned and Laurence folowed. They passed through a long, scruffy room, amid a low buzz of chatter from men and one woman working at typewriting machines behind half-height partitions. Screwed-up bals of paper littered the floor. A telephone rang as he passed. At the far end was a tiny office. Peterkin stood aside at the open doorway. The room smeled strongly of tobacco.

'Mr Tresham Brabourne,' he said wearily, and a younger man looked up as if strangers were bundled into his office every day. By the time he stood up from his desk and shook Laurence's hand, Peterkin was gone.

Even as he absorbed the extraordinary coincidence unfolding in front of him, Laurence remembered Byers commenting on Brabourne's youth. He stil looked very young, though he had to be wel into his twenties. He was dressed in baggy tweed trousers and a thick corduroy jacket, a Fair Isle jumper and a striped scarf.

Brabourne shut the door and gestured to a bentwood chair while he sat astride a similar one, facing Laurence over its curved back. He was silent for a couple of minutes, patting various pockets and finaly puling out a rather crushed packet of cigarettes before selecting one and putting it in his mouth.

Laurence read a poster on the wal:

BLESS

Cold

magnanimous

delicate

gauche

fanciful

stupid

ENGLISHMEN.

'Wyndham Lewis,' Brabourne muttered, puling strands of tobacco from his tongue as he folowed Laurence's glance. He offered the cigarettes to Laurence, then lit his own. As he struck and discarded a succession of faulty matches, he gestured to Laurence to speak.

Laurence, stil astonished that fate should have delivered Brabourne to him, tried to explain his presence methodicaly but, as he jumped from Mary to Holmwood to the execution in France, he realised how muddled he sounded.

Brabourne listened patiently and intently. 'So,' he said, finaly. 'You came here wanting to find out about the death of a London policeman in the summer, but now you're here, you've discovered you'd rather talk about my part in a firing squad in France in 1917? You know, when they were rebuilding these offices, the first year of the war, they found an old stone lion—probably Roman—hidden beneath our site. You never know what you're going to find if you start digging.'

'It is al a bit odd,' Laurence acknowledged. 'I'm realy only trying to find out what happened to a friend with whom I should never have lost touch.'

Brabourne raised his eyebrows.

'The thing is, his sister realy needs to understand why he shot himself.'

Laurence was aware it al sounded a bit lame. Why a man being treated for mental distress might kil himself was not a very profound mystery.