Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

When he picked up the envelope to replace al the cuttings, he could feel something stil inside. He had missed a rough note from Tresham Brabourne, folded round a photograph. It was of a very young, light-haired man, with a blanket round his shoulders; he was sitting at a table with what appeared to be a plate of bread and cheese. The background was very indistinct but, although the photograph was quite dark, the man's fatigue was obvious. He looked solemnly at the camera. Along the top of the scrap of paper Brabourne had scrawled in pencil, 'Vis Tucker's death. Police records state it was in late February.' Laurence registered that it let John off the hook for Tucker's murder and that he owed Brabourne a drink. Then al other thoughts drained away as he read the note that had enclosed the photograph. Brabourne had written:

I checked again if I had another photograph of the firing squad. The one you have is definitely the only one and was previously in my possession (not that I want it back). I had absolutely forgotten I also had this picture. It's Edmund Hart on the night I told you about: bitter cold, poetry, a mistaken, though shared, belief that his sentence would be commuted, and al the rest. I took this at his request; he wanted to reassure his ma. A day later he was shot. The film hadn't even been developed. I could hardly give it to the padre to send home with his effects—and yet it seemed wrong to destroy it. You might find that it makes the whole affair more real to have a likeness of a man much more sinned against than sinning.

Laurence could not take his eyes off the picture in his hand. Hart looked about seventeen. His hair was tousled, his eyes wide. Laurence immediately grasped that his task had become easier. Here was a picture he could show to people. Somebody out there who might not have known his name might yet recognise his face.

He would show the Bolithos, Mrs Lovel, even Charles. Either of the Bolithos might have come across him in France. Mrs Lovel had said her son had brought home a friend or two and it was possible this man was one of them. Although Charles was a remote chance, he seemed to know so many more people in the army than one war would normaly make possible. Laurence would take it to Holmwood and try Dr Chilvers; after al, Brabourne had said Hart had been treated for shel-shock in England. He might just have been at Holmwood despite Chilvers' assurance that he'd never treated a Hart. Could it have been under an assumed name? Some family shame protected?

He hadn't expected to hear from Mary with any speed. Yet on the Friday he received a letter by the afternoon post, postmarked Sussex, saying that she would be in London on the Tuesday and why didn't they catch up. He felt a familiar pang of jealousy at her continued journeys to see an unknown friend and was irked by her casual offer to fit him in with her existing engagements in London, folowed by an equaly familiar irritation with himself.

But a second letter soon took al his attention. The envelope was larger with round, neat writing. Inside were two sheets of writing paper. It was, to his astonishment, from Vera Chilvers.

Dear Mr Bartram,

I couldn't help but overhear you talking with my husband yesterday and afterwards when George had gone out I found your card in the grate. Please don't tel him I have written to you or he would be very angry with me and the post-boy for taking my letter.

You were right, he did take some of Captain Emmett's things. There was a watch on a chain and the letters I think you were looking for. I hadn't realised why he took the letters. I thought it might be that John was complaining about how my husband treated him and it might have got him (George, I mean) into trouble. George can be quite unkind.

He hated John because John was kind to me. John Emmett was my only friend, when he came it was the best time in my life. I miss him al the time. He just talked to me and he gave me a poem he'd written in the war but George tore it up. He gave the pieces back to John. I think George has burned al the letters a while back and now the watch is gone from its usual place so you must have scared him. He was in a furious mood after you had gone.

Before the letters disappeared, they were in his desk. It was the day John went missing and there was such a brouhaha and George was in and out, but he had left these on the top when he was suddenly caled away. I only had time to read the one which seemed to have been by John because he had that odd writing. Mostly they were to him from a woman caled Ely.

I didn't dare take any. They had gone by the evening. I never saw any of them again.

John didn't complain about his treatment in that letter. In fact he said after he'd been up to London he'd got a lot of things off his chest. He'd been in touch with a man he needed to speak to and also a woman he'd done a great wrong to, he said. He talked about hoping his son would never see the things John had seen. John never told me that he had a little boy or even that he'd been married and I was sad that he hadn't. I didn't know he loved someone caled Ely. I would have kept his secrets whatever George did. I hope you wil tel his little boy that his father was a very special person.

I had nothing else left of John since George tore up my poem so I hope you wil not think wrong of me that I read them.

I just wanted to have him for a bit. But don't let George know.

Yours sincerely,

Vera Elizabeth Chilvers

As he read her rather childlike letter, Laurence felt overwhelmingly sorry for Vera whose life, he thought, must be hel. He wished he could report the theft of the watch, which Mary had said right at the start was missing, though it would probably simply make Vera's life worse. He had been unable to question her as he'd wished, yet she had stil come up with crucial new information.

Vera implied that John had met a woman while he was in London. Had this been Eleanor? Was John's inability to marry her when she was pregnant this 'great wrong'? He didn't think Eleanor saw it that way. It could have been Gwen Lovel. But then he stopped himself; John's world was infinitely larger than the fragment he had been exploring. There could have been many women wronged, though he smiled to think of John as a voracious seducer.

Nevertheless, the train of thought this opened up, no matter how fantastic, raised one other question. Was there any possibility, however unlikely, that the kiler, if there was one, could have been a woman? Al the accounts of the deaths came down to a faceless figure in a heavy coat. Eleanor, as fearless as any man, seemed quite capable of subterfuge and, given her experience in the war, was almost certainly familiar with guns. Gwen Lovel, who had once been on the stage, was tal and wel built with a low voice. He tried to imagine either woman in a greatcoat and hat with their hair up, and visualise whether they could possibly have masqueraded behind the anonymously familiar outfit. It was not impossible. What might drive them to it? The answer was the same for both of them: to protect their sons. But the image that returned to his mind's eye was of Hart, friendless and alone as he went to his death.

Chapter Thirty-three

The first person he showed the photograph to was Mary, whom he had arranged to meet in the Lyons teashop in Piccadily in the early afternoon. He thought it would be very hard for her to see a picture of the man her brother had been ordered to shoot. He had found it hard himself, gazing on that boyish face while it stil held a little hope. When it came to it, he held back despite Charles's admonition not to treat her as a child.

From the teashop they took a cab as rain was faling heavily. The driver insisted on dropping them at the end of Lamb's Conduit Street. They half walked, half ran down the street, trying to avoid the deepest puddles, and when they reached his flat they were cold to the bone. Mary had a bag with her and he hoped that meant she intended to stay.