Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

The Return of

Captain John Emmet

Elizabeth Speller

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

...

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Boston New York

2011

Copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Speler

Al rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Virago Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Speler, Elizabeth.

The return of Captain John Emmett / Elizabeth Speler.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-51169-6

1. World War, 1914–1918—Veterans—England—London—Fiction.

2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6119.P39R47 2011

823'.92—dc22

2010052590

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my brother, Richard, and for my nephews Dominic, Tristan, Wiliam, Barnaby and Charlie, who, had they been born exactly one hundred years earlier, might al have found themselves on the Western Front.

You were only David's father,

But I had fifty sons

When we went up in the evening

Under the arch of the guns.

Lieutenant Ewart Alan Mackintosh

(died Cambrai 1917)

Prologue

NOVEMBER 1920, KENT

They gathered in the dark long before the train arrived at the smal station. It was mostly women: young mothers holding tightly wrapped infants, elderly women in shawls, black-coated middle-aged matrons alongside grown children. There were men too, of course, some already holding their hats self-consciously at their sides, and a cluster of soldiers stood to one end of the platform near the bearded stationmaster. Even so, the men were outnumbered by the women as they always were these days.

Occasionaly the station buffet sign creaked or a baby wailed and the isolated murmur of one woman to another was almost indistinguishable from the faint sigh of wind, but mostly there was quiet as they waited. Stil others stood a little further away. In the houses on either side of the line, behind lighted windows, silhouetted occupants held back curtains. Below them, at rail-side garden fences or on the banks, stood a handful more. On the far platform, almost out of reach of the lights, it was just possible to pick out one individual, swathed in a dark coat and hat, who stood at a distance from the rest. The stationmaster looked across the rails with some apprehension. In a long career he had never had a suicide, but tonight was different; this train's freight was despair and sorrow. However, the watcher seemed calm, standing at a reasonable distance from the platform's edge, with the width of the down track separating his stiffly upright figure from the expected train.

They felt it before they heard it. A faint vibration in the rails seemed to transmit itself to the people waiting, and a shiver trembled through them, folowed by a more audible hum and finaly a crescendo of noise as the train, puled by its great dark engine, appeared around the bend. Tiny points of fire danced red in its smoke and singed the grass. The last hats were removed hurriedly and one young woman buried her face in her companion's chest. The soldiers stood to attention and, as the train thundered by without stopping, its compartments briliantly iluminated, they saluted. A wave ran through the crowd as several of the spectators craned forward, desperate to catch a momentary glimpse of the red, blue and white flag, draped over the coffin of English oak, before its passing left them to the dark loneliness of their changed world.

As the crowd slowly dispersed, almost as silently as they had assembled, the stationmaster looked along his platform once more. Now quite alone on the far side of the track, one figure stayed immobile. Hours after the stationmaster had gone to his bed, reassured in the knowledge that it was six hours until the milk train, the last watcher remained solitary and now invisible in the darkness, waiting for dawn and the last battle to begin.

Chapter One

In years to come, Laurence Bartram would look back and think that the event that realy changed everything was not the war, nor the attack at Rosières, nor even the loss of his wife, but the return of John Emmett into his life. Before then, Laurence had been trying to develop a routine around the writing of a book on London churches. Astonishingly, a mere six or so years earlier when he came down from Oxford, he had taught, briefly and happily, but on marrying he had been persuaded that teaching was not a means of supporting Louise and the large family she had planned. After only token resistance he had joined her family's long-established coffee importing business. It al seemed so long ago, now. There was no coffee, no business—or not for him—and Louise and his only child were dead.

When his wife and son lay dying in Bristol, Laurence was crouched in the colourless light of dawn, waiting to move towards the German guns and praying fervently to a God he no longer believed in. He had long been indifferent to which side won; he wished only that one or the other would do so decisively while he was stil alive. It would be days before the news of Louise and their baby's death reached him. It was not until he was home, with his grief-stricken mother-in-law endlessly supplying unwanted details, that he realised that Louise had died at precisely the moment he was giving the order to advance. When he finaly got leave, he had stood by the grave with its thin, new grass while his father-in-law hovered near by, embarrassed. When the older man had withdrawn, Laurence crouched down. He could smel the damp earth but there was nothing of her here. Later, he chose the granite and speled out both names and the dates to the stonemason. He wanted to mourn, yet his emotions seemed unreachable. Indeed, after a few days shut up with his parents-in-law, desolate and aged by loss, he was soon searching for an excuse to return to London and escape the intensity of their misery.

As he sat on the train, returning to close up his London house, he had felt a brief but shocking wave of elation. Louise was gone, so many were gone, but he had made it through—he was stil quite young and with a life ahead of him. The mood passed as quickly as it always did, to be replaced by emptiness. The house felt airless and stale. He started packing everything himself but after opening a smal chest to find a soft whiteness of matinée jackets, bootees, embroidered baby gowns and tiny bonnets, al carefuly folded in tissue paper, he had recoiled from the task and paid someone to make sure he never saw any of it again.