Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

And maybe he was using army ink and paper. Probably made from the grave-wrappings of Nefertiti.'

Laurence pushed the photograph to one side and puled out the smal magazine Mary had given him.

'Good Lord. So you had one al the time.'

'Mary Emmett, John's sister, gave it to me. Is this one of the last issues?'

'Yes.' Brabourne looked again at the cover and blew his ash off it. 'It's the last one. He fel apart after that.'

He picked it up, turned the pages and showed a poem to Laurence; it was just two columns, headed 'Verdure' and 'Ordure'. Underneath were rhyming lists of loves and hates, wittily, if self-consciously grouped and cleverly rhymed.

'It's very—wel, Wyndham Lewis again,' said Brabourne. 'Avant-garde. Blast. Al that stuff. Better when it was original.' He turned over another page and grimaced. 'I can't say that revisiting my own youthful creation is always a great experience. Some of these poems stand up to the test of time. This one of mine was straining to do so even when I wrote it.'

Laurence folowed his eyes. 'You were Hermes?' he said.

'Oh yes. I saw myself as the messenger, bringing news from the front to ... wel, I'm not sure who to. My mother, perhaps? Hermes without a destination. More of a lost homing pigeon.' He turned back a few pages, pointed. 'That's John Emmett's work.'

He was Charon,' said Laurence.

'Charon the ferryman,' said Brabourne. 'How pleased my Classics master would be to know I remembered something. Rowing the dead to Hades.'

Chapter Twenty-four

'Why did you have to defend Hart anyway?'

Brabourne shrugged as he lit his cigarette. 'Wel, somebody had to. He was in my regiment. My father died when I was young but he'd been a barrister. KC in criminal law. Mostly to please my mother I was supposed to be going the same route. I was a pupil in chambers: Paper Court, strings puled, shoehorns applied.

Outcome, disappointment al round. I hated it and suddenly the war came and there was a way out. So I'd had some experience of advocacy, though not much. Fat lot of good it did Hart. Frankly they were only giving lip service to the conventions anyway.'

'Was the court martial fair?' asked Laurence. He wasn't sure whether any of this was relevant to John but having heard Byers' disturbing version of Hart's execution, he wanted to get a sense of the whole episode.

'Fair? What a question. It was a ful-field, general court martial, of course, as he was an officer. Would he have been convicted in a peacetime court? No.

Would he have been shot if he were a private? Probably. Did guiltier men than he escape prosecution? Undoubtedly. Were there grounds for leniency? Certainly; the board made a unanimous recommendation for mercy. And I gather some, at least, were appaled to find the sentence had been confirmed. Were they out to make an example of somebody? Unquestionably.

'But was the sentence unjust in the circumstances?' He appeared to think it over. 'No, not realy. But hard? Very. The evidence was hardly substantial. It was the handling of the whole affair that was cruel. They took six weeks to decide to act against him in the first place and that hiatus had persuaded him that there wouldn't be any court martial. In the event, he had less than two days to prepare a defence, though proper procedures were just about folowed. A court martial isn't realy an inquiry. It's not like a court case at the Old Bailey. There's no real cross-examining, just statements with an assumption the truth is being told—except by the defendant.'

He stopped and examined his cigarette, which was burning fast, and then drew on it almost experimentaly. 'About a hundred years old,' he said, 'my brother got them in Turkey.' He paused for a moment. 'You know how it al came about?'

Laurence shook his head. 'I don't know anything about what he did.'

Ah.' Brabourne said nothing for a while. The cigarette looked close to catching fire completely.

'Do you have the time for this now?' Laurence asked.

'I'l tel you what,' Brabourne said. 'I do need to meet someone actualy. Old friend now at the Bar. Come with me. Have a quick drink at the Cock. He's invariably late.'

He stood up without waiting for a reply, took what looked like an old naval duffel coat from a hook on the back of the door and let Laurence folow him down several flights of stone stairs.

***

They came out of the square and turned right into Fleet Street. Brabourne kept talking al the while.

'In a nutshel, Hart vanished when he should have been fighting. He started off in the rear. The CO instructed another junior officer to tel Hart to take some reserves forward to the green line. He didn't order Hart directly; every aspect of Hart's orders that day was equivocal. He should have got off the charge simply on that count. Anyway, they came under heavy fire and the group dispersed, some taking cover, some wandering about. Hart wasn't the only man to get lost. He told an NCO

that he was going back to HQ for more orders. The trouble was that on his way back he met another junior officer who told him to go forward again with a dozen stragglers. There was bad blood going back months between Hart and this man. In court Hart argued— we argued—that technicaly Hart had seniority and the other officer had no right to give him orders, but it didn't look good. Hart not only refused to go forward again, but just turned round and walked away from battle by himself, in the opposite direction from his battalion and in ful view of a handful of men.'

Brabourne was moving briskly, dodging pedestrians, and when he puled ahead sometimes his words were lost. Eventualy he stopped to cup his hands round a match. As he did so, three different sets of bels began to ring the hour. Laurence looked up with sudden pleasure at the congestion, even of churches, in the heart of the city. Although Brabourne appeared not to have noticed, he said, 'There was a time St Bride's and York Minster were the only churches to have a twelve-bel peal.'

Brabourne went on, 'Something else seems to have happened on that walk back: when Hart was found, he'd discarded part of his uniform despite the bitter cold. He said a shel had landed near him, opening a smal mass grave, and that rotten fragments of bodies hit him. Who knows the truth? I didn't. There were graves everywhere, theirs and ours, rotting bodies everywhere, come to that. It might have happened that way. His story was semi-coherent. It was generaly believed that he was trying to disguise the fact that he was an officer while keeping his head down until the worst of the attack was over.

'The trigger for Hart's absenting himself was undoubtedly the squabble over who had the right to give who orders. Puerile. This other chap—who was supposed to be in charge of ammo, not giving tactical orders—rushed back to report him. Pathetic and lethal. It was tit for tat realy. Hart had reported him a while back for smuggling a woman into their shared quarters, said he couldn't sleep.'

Laurence recognised so much of what he was hearing: antagonisms, feuds, intolerance born of sheer fatigue, but rarely with such a fatal outcome. In his own regiment, Polock—said to be the fattest, least fit soldier ever to be sent into action, and who was rumoured to have needed to have his uniform made specialy—had been mocked relentlessly as he blundered and wheezed through his duties, always trying to deflect jokes made at his expense by being the funny man. To his shame Laurence had tried not to notice.

'But if Hart had gone straight back,' Brabourne continued, suddenly crossing the street at an angle between two motor buses, 'it would probably have passed over.' A car narrowly missed Laurence and the driver hooted his horn at him.

'When he drifted in the next day, his failure to account for his absence led the acting CO to put him under arrest. What happened to Hart between the moment he walked off and his eventual return to the battalion is anybody's guess. I don't think he planned to get out of a tough situation. I think he genuinely lost his mind. Just for a while. But that wasn't the majority view; they thought he was simply in a funk.'