Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

Just as Charles put his glass down and stood up, Laurence said, 'Why do you think Somers, if it was him, took Emmett to the Connaught instead of his club?

It's a bit furtive.'

'The Connaught is hardly a Limehouse opium den. And skulking about is not realy in his character, I'd say,' Charles replied.

'You know Limehouse wel, then?' Laurence asked, keeping his face expressionless.

'Of course.' Charles was struggling into one arm of his coat. 'Opium dens—just the sort of place the realy depraved murderer plots his crimes. Ask Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Or there's Fu Manchu—you don't have to have smoked an opium pipe to know where to find trouble. To get inside the mind of a drug fiend in his lair, you just need to read a few books. After al, you haven't been to the Connaught either but you know how it'l be in there. Palms. Tea. Cocktails. A grand piano.

And plenty of people who don't know one another. That's the key to anonymity.' He finaly heaved his coat over his shoulders. Actualy a chap I knew from Birmingham days—Arthur Ward—his father was our works foreman—he wrote the Fu Manchu stories.'

'I could have sworn the author was—'

'Rohmer. Sax Rohmer. German name, but not his real one. "Arthur Ward" carried too much of the smel of the tannery for tales of the Orient. Taking a German pseudonym was an odd sort of choice, but there we are. Damn good yarns.'

Chapter Thirty-two

For a while Laurence had considered it just possible that the tensions between John and Sergeant Tucker had become lethal. Now that he knew that so many of those involved were dead, the situation seemed unreal, something out of Charles's detective novels. Leonard Byers' rueful comment about a curse was close to the truth but there was nothing supernatural about these deaths. Neither John nor Tucker could have kiled al three men: Liley, Jim Byers and Mulins, because both were by then dead themselves. So who else knew them al and could have done?

He realised now that what they ought to be looking for was not a message but a motive. A motive should lead him to the man to whom this violence made sense. A sense driven by hatred or greed or jealousy, perhaps, or even a sort of biblical retribution, but a sense that Laurence currently couldn't begin to grasp. If the motive was to remove everyone connected with the firing squad, then he needed, urgently, to find out more about young Hart himself.

Yet not everyone connected with the execution was dead. With a suddenness that made his hair stand on end, he realised how stupid he had been. John had died at the end of December. Tucker had died the same winter, Liley in April, Byers in early summer. Mulins had been murdered in August. Whoever was carrying out these kilings had not necessarily stopped. The arrangements just took time. The kiler needed to track down his quarry, to undertake his mission and then return to normal life without arousing suspicion. It was not necessarily over.

Who else might be on the list? Was the lost legatee of John's wil, the Frenchman, Meurice, already one of the victims or could he have been the assailant al along? More than ever, he was aware that his enquiries had always been patchy.

What about Leonard Byers? Was he in any danger now? Laurence also had an increasing sense of unease about the safety of Tresham Brabourne, even faintly considering whether he might be at risk himself. Had he even met the murderer already as he lumbered around with his questions?

Thinking about Brabourne, it occurred to him that Charles's unexpected visit had diverted him from looking at the bundle of cuttings he'd picked up at the Chronicle. He laid them out on his table. There were articles on parliamentary debates, a few letters, mostly from The Times rather than the Chronicle. There was a profile of Colonel Lambert Ward and blurry photographs accompanied an older article on General Somers when he was fighting in Africa. There was a vast front-page headline from Horatio Bottomley's John Bull: TRAGEDY OF A BOY OFFICER. The only bit of the page not covered by the headline was an advertisement for Excelda handkerchiefs.

He turned over and skimmed through the article. It concerned the death of one of the other two officers executed. The journalist was in ful flow but the case against the hapless lieutenant of the Naval Reserve seemed as weak as the one against Hart. What surprised him was that the piece had been published in March 1918, before the war had even ended. He imagined the fury it must have caused in the War Office.

He read through the letters. Despite a few enraged denunciations, there was nothing here that hinted at future violence. Laurence noticed that several of the letters were from the fathers of sons who had been kiled while obeying orders and they didn't want their boys buried next to a coward. While he could understand their point of view, he didn't think their sons would agree, were they to rise from their ranks of stone in France. What had John wanted to add to al this?

Brabourne, who had known John Emmett as a felow officer, was the one person who seemed to accept al along that John might wel have kiled himself. He was an inteligent observer and had seen John at his worst. Laurence had liked Brabourne—he was a man facing forward, he thought, and for that reason he had an energy that Laurence could only recently detect in any measure in himself. He thought of Brabourne dressed for the outdoors in his bitterly cold office with its il-fitting window, or striding down Fleet Street at one with his world, but otherwise apparently immune to his surroundings.

Something had rung a bel when he'd seen him and it burst upon him suddenly what it was. The scarf Brabourne was wearing was, he was almost certain, a school sporting colours scarf, but he was equaly certain it was the same colours as the one John had with him at his death. The one that had been returned to the Emmetts, not his own school scarf, but another man's.

Another man's school. It meant nothing: hundreds of boys had joined up from schools like Eton and Harrow, Rugby and Welington—Brabourne's school—

and, indeed, like John, Charles and Laurence himself, from Marlborough. Brabourne too had commented on this. No doubt this was how it had always been: he had read the memorials to the battle dead of the Crimean and Boer Wars during interminable sermons in the colege chapel. As a schoolboy he would try to make anagrams of their names to pass the time. But each of these previous conflicts accounted for only a handful of old boys. The memorial boards erected now would list tens of names for every house in the school. And there was Brabourne—not, as Byers had predicted, dead in the mud, a casualty of his own sense of invincibility, nor reduced to gold letters on a plaque to create wonder in generations of boys to come, but moving on, away from the war. One day he would be an old man, with no doubt a fine career behind him, while those three or four years in uniform would be no more than one brief, if distressing, episode in a life rich in adventures, chalenges, sorrows and joys. It wouldn't be the first and the last thing he thought of every day. Laurence doubted it was, even now. It would be history. Brabourne would tel his grandsons about it.

He realised that it was quite possible that Brabourne had lent John a spare scarf, though it was unusual to have two, and in peacetime no public schoolboy would wear the colours of another school. War, however, was a colder, more pragmatic way of life. It was even easier to imagine that Brabourne would have given his own scarf to Edmund Hart. Laurence remembered Brabourne commenting on the cold in the room where they had imprisoned the condemned man as they waited to hear his fate.

He reflected just how many young officers had known one another. He was always amused by Charles's social networks but they formed the web that both trapped and supported people like him; people like himself, too, Laurence supposed. It was that society that men like Edmund Hart were excluded from. Even as the war progressed and more officers had been promoted from the ranks, there was a gulf between the traditional officer class and those on whom war had bestowed a grudging commission. If Edmund had been to Eton or Marlborough or Harrow, he might wel not have died for his offence. It was a chiling thought.