Angels in the Gloom wwi-3 Read online

  Joseph looked at it. It was a perfectly ordinary piece of garden equipment such as he had himself, gray steel with a wooden shaft and green handle at the top, now heavily smeared with mud. Three of the prongs were stained with blood. There was something obscenely brutal about such a domestic tool used to tear a man’s flesh and veins apart until the red, arterial blood gushed out onto the ground.

  “How . . .” His mouth was dry. “How could you swing that to . . . ?”

  Perth went over and picked it up, his mouth twisted in distaste. “No fingerprints as we could use on it,” he said. “Not with all this mud. S’pose that’s why they did it.” He picked it up with one hand at the top, the other where the shaft met the metal tongues of the tines to hold them on. He swung it around as if to hit Joseph on the side of the head. “Damn!” he swore. “Sorry,” he apologized instantly. Repositioning his grip, he then stabbed it into the ground. “When his man fell down he must have pierced him something like that.” He replaced the fork where it had been and wiped most of the mud off his hand with his handkerchief, then examined it ruefully.

  “Hurt yourself?” Joseph asked.

  Perth grunted. “Just a scratch. Must be a screw high on it with a rough edge. But useful, that. If I cut myself, then he might have, too. Or she, I suppose. More likely a man, though. Man’s sort of thing to do.” He looked at the gate. “What’s the other side of there, Constable?”

  “Lane, sir,” the constable replied. “Goes along past the houses, all the way to the river, then up to the main road. Down to the road to Madingley the other way.”

  “So whoever it was probably came along it one way or the other?”

  “Yes sir, ’less they came through the garden, or from one o’ them other houses.”

  “Did you look along the path? Ask anyone?”

  “Yes, sir. Nobody saw anyone, but then if it were after dark, they likely wouldn’t. But there was tracks here an’ there in the earth, like a bicycle’d bin down very recent. Somebody of a fair weight, to judge by the depth o’ the marks.”

  “Good work.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He straightened his shoulders.

  “No one seen a bicycle, by any chance?”

  “Not yet, sir, but we’re still looking. There moight have bin someone out walking late—courtin’ couple, or someone with a dog. Never know.”

  “Good. Don’t stop.” Perth turned back to Joseph, his voice lowered, his eyes anxious. “I understand this Mr. Blaine was one of the top scientists at the Establishment. This isn’t good, Captain Reavley.”

  “You think it had to do with his work?” Joseph asked. Corcoran would miss Blaine appallingly if he was really one of his best men. Would it actually affect the invention he had spoken of, and the time in which it could be completed?

  Perth chewed his lip. “Don’t know about that, sir. Could be German spies, an’ no doubt that’s what some folks’ll think. But seems a bit odd to me. Why the garden fork, eh? Looks more like a crime of opportunity, don’t you think?”

  “You mean a German spy would be better organized?” Joseph asked. The morning air smelled of damp leaf mold and it was muddy underfoot, but there was nothing left to mark what had happened except the dark patch of blood pooling and soaking into the earth. Joseph looked at it, and thought he must arrange for somebody to come and perhaps lay a stonework path over it. It shouldn’t be left like this. There were plenty of men in the village who would do that, as a kindness, a mark of decency. Albie Nunn, Tucky’s father, or Bert Arnold. They were good with their hands. “Perhaps he was better organized,” he said aloud. “But he saw the fork, and used it precisely so we would think it was impulse, a passion of some sort.”

  Perth looked sideways at him. “You’re getting clever at this, Captain Reavley. If that arm of yours don’t get really right, mebbe we could use you in the police force.”

  Joseph had no idea if Perth was being sarcastic or not, and he could think of no sensible reply. He was painfully conscious that a young man had died here, suddenly and violently, and that someone, for whatever reason, had committed a crime that would surely mark him forever, too.

  They walked slowly back up to the house. Perth spoke briefly to Lizzie Blaine, then took his leave. Joseph stayed another half hour to help her with some of the most immediate arrangements, simple things like informing the bank, her solicitor, and placing her notice of bereavement in the newspapers. Then he too left, but promising to return, and giving her his telephone number in case she needed him for anything.

  Hallam Kerr had waited patiently in the lane, reading his Bible, as Perth had observed. He looked up, startled and unhappy, when Joseph reappeared, but he asked no questions, as if the entire visit fell within the realm of confidentiality, and in truth, Joseph had no wish to confide in him. They drove back in silence.

  Hannah was waiting in the hall. She must have been listening for the car.

  “You look terrible,” she said urgently as Joseph came in. “I’ll get you a cup of tea and something to eat. How about a boiled egg and some toast?”

  He smiled in spite of the grief inside him. “I’m all right,” he assured her. “I did what I could to help Mrs. Blaine. There’s not a great deal, other than assist with a few practical things, and be there to sit beside her while she goes through the ordeal of telling people. I’m afraid it’s going to be very ugly. Because of Theo Blaine’s work, it is possible he was killed by a German spy.”

  She frowned. “Isn’t that better than by somebody in the village, which would mean one of us, and that would be awful!”

  “My dear,” he said gently, “he died in his own garden. Whoever killed him has to be one of us. It is only their reason for doing it that is in question.”

  “We don’t have any . . .” She stopped. Her voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “I suppose we wouldn’t know, would we? I can’t believe anyone here would betray us. But then I can’t believe anyone here would murder him for any other reason, either.”

  “Three years ago I would have believed you,” he replied gently. “But I am afraid we are not so naÏve anymore.”

  She avoided meeting his eyes. “Archie’s going on the night train to Portsmouth. Nancy Arnold will drive him to Cambridge.”

  “Nancy Arnold?” he said in surprise.

  “She runs the taxi service now. I can’t make up my mind whether to go with him or not.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he said immediately. “Railway station goodbyes are always pretty rotten. Let him think of you here at home.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “No.” Archie had not spoken to Joseph of anything so intimate. They had discussed the news, and more seriously the possibility that England could lose the war, and what that would mean, how their lives would change. They might both be killed, in fact Archie almost certainly would be. For Joseph it would depend more upon whether he was in Flanders at the time, or home, but well enough to carry on the fight in whatever resistance was left. The same would surely be true for Matthew. To imagine him surrendering was impossible. But what would happen to the women and children?

  There was no answer, and they left it only as a dark shadow it was better to share than face alone.

  “No, he didn’t say so,” Joseph expanded. “It’s just how I would feel.”

  “But you’re not ready to go back!” she said urgently. “And we need you here. Kerr went to pieces today. What good is he when someone loses a son or a husband in France, or just as bad, has come home armless or legless or blind? Who else but you will help to console them?”

  Joseph pondered her words. “No need to think of it now,” he said. “It’ll be ages before I’m well enough anyway. Yes, I’ll have a boiled egg. In fact, two.”

  She clung onto him for a moment, fiercely, then kissed his cheek. Joseph watched as she trod straight-backed into the kitchen, her skirt twitching a little as she walked. She had always had that little sway, a part of her character that surprised. One might have expected it of
Judith, but not of Hannah.

  Kerr turned up again the next morning. Hannah seemed pleased to see him and regarded Joseph’s exasperation with patience. “He needs you,” she said simply. “The poor man is out of his depth. I’m going to the shops to get more wool, and then to the VAD center for supplies to sew ditty bags. I’ll be back at lunchtime.”

  Kerr was in the sitting room as before, standing in the middle of the floor and looking just as white-faced as he had the previous day. Joseph’s heart sank. “What is it now?” he said somewhat less than graciously. He was afraid Kerr was going to ask him to conduct the funeral, a duty that should fall to the incumbent of St. Giles.

  “I have a moral dilemma,” Kerr replied. “I have never been in this position before!”

  “Life is full of positions we have never been in before,” Joseph pointed out a little tartly. Kerr’s failure was tempting him more than he wished. He could feel the yielding in himself.

  Kerr was nervously clenching and unclenching his hands. He would not be put off. “This policeman seems to think it was someone in the village who killed poor Blaine,” he said abruptly. “He’s like a ferret with his teeth in your leg—he won’t let go until he has nabbed someone.”

  Joseph smiled bleakly. “I think your acquaintance with ferrets must be better than mine.”

  “He is going to hound us all until he knows everything about everybody. It will do untold harm.”

  “Murders do,” Joseph assured him bitterly. He remembered acutely what murder had done to St. John’s and the students there. “I’m sorry. It’s a wretched thing, but there is no dilemma because there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “But I know people’s secrets!” Kerr protested, his voice rising. “It is part of my calling. You know that! What am I supposed to tell this awful man?”

  “It’s perfectly simple,” Joseph replied. “You tell him nothing.”

  “And if what I know allows a murderer to go free? Or worse than that, an innocent man to be hanged?” Kerr’s face twisted in misery. “It isn’t as simple as you are saying. This crime may be linked with the war. Perhaps poor Blaine was killed because of his work at the Establishment, and whoever is guilty is a German spy. Have you considered that? Doesn’t that alter my duty? I may not be in the army, but I am as loyal to my country as you are.”

  Joseph saw the wretchedness in the man’s face, the confusion and the longing to be accepted.

  “Of course you are. And it is a dilemma. If you observe anything for yourself that has bearing on the crime, or could have, then you should tell Inspector Perth. But if it is only something that you have been told by someone else, then you do not know if it is true or not. You can’t judge. Let Perth find it out for himself, or not.”

  Disbelief filled Kerr’s face. “You make it sound so simple.” It was almost an accusation, as if Joseph were still attempting to evade the issue.

  Joseph looked away. “Judgment is anything but simple.” Judgment was impossible, he thought. One stumbled from hour to hour, trying to understand, trying to get it right, hardly ever sure whether one had or not. It all mattered far too much: love and hate, loyalties torn in too many directions, uncertainty, guilt, decisions that had to be made too quickly and without a chance to think and weigh.

  “Just do your best,” he said to Kerr. “Perth will probably find out eventually anyway. Don’t betray anybody’s trust in you.”

  “Thank you,” Kerr said with a rush of overriding gratitude, his face suddenly pink. “I knew you would advise me.” He hesitated a moment as if to repeat himself, then straightened his shoulders and went to the door.

  Joseph was exhausted and his arm ached appallingly. It seemed as if a hideous pattern was starting all over again.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Matthew was in his office as usual on the morning Blaine’sbody was found. He was reading a letter and he finally put it down with a sense of relief. He was always pleased to hear from Judith because he worried about her, not only because of the very obvious danger of being injured, or even killed, but the threats of ordinary illness made far worse by the long hours and the wet and filthy conditions.

  But in her letter she accepted that every avenue of inquiry had been followed to its end, and they knew no more about the Peacemaker than they had before. He could still be almost anyone, except Ivor Chetwin or Dermot Sandwell. Even Aidan Thyer, Master of St. John’s, might be the Peacemaker. Most painful to Matthew, and perhaps most frightening, was the chance it was Calder Shearing himself. That thought touched Matthew now and then like the cold fingers of nightmare. His father had hated Secret Intelligence and all its works. Was Shearing’s involvement what his father had meant when he had warned Matthew to trust no one because the corruption reached right to the very top?

  He had had no difficulty in deciding not to tell Judith anything of his thoughts on Patrick Hannassey yet. There was too much yet to test. Where had Hannassey been at the time of John and Alys Reavley’s deaths? And was it imaginable that John Reavley had known him? Could he possibly have had private access to the king and the kaiser?

  He still had these questions in his mind when Desborough entered and announced that Shearing wanted him immediately. “Something bad,” he added with a frown. “By the look on his face, pretty bloody. Thought I’d warn you.”

  “Thanks,” Matthew said drily, rising to his feet. He put Judith’s letter in his pocket and went along the corridor to Shearing’s office. His mind raced over the most probable disasters in the Atlantic, or worse still, in America itself. Either one of their own agents had been caught, or there had been another major incident on the Mexican-American border.

  “There’s been a murder in St. Giles,” Shearing said bluntly as Matthew entered his office. “Theo Blaine. He was Corcoran’s best man, in fact he was brilliant, key to the whole project.”

  Matthew was stunned. It was the last thing he had been expecting. “Do we show our interest by investigating it, or leave it to the Cambridge police?”

  Shearing looked exhausted. He had the dazed, rather stiff air of someone newly bereaved, but Matthew knew it was not the young scientist personally whose loss bruised him so deeply, but the wound it dealt to the project that was possibly crucial to their survival in the war. He harbored the thought that perhaps this was another brilliant act of the Peacemaker’s. A blow like this, with such surgical precision, emulated the pattern of his parents’ deaths—swift, murderous, but in its own way hideously strategic.

  “Reavley!” Shearing’s voice broke his moment’s inattention.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “I can go to St. Giles without drawing any particular notice, if you want me to. I can stay at home, visit with my brother. He’s still far from recovered. But if it was a German agent who killed him, that won’t fool anyone.”

  “We’ve no idea yet who it was,” Shearing replied. “He was only found this morning.”

  “Where? By whom?” Matthew asked. It was still hard to grasp as reality. It was someone he had never met, but his death could affect the entire country, millions of lives, perhaps the course of history. It was too vast to have meaning yet.

  “By his wife,” Shearing answered. He moved to stand with his back to the window, the late morning light shadowed from his face for a moment. “By the potting shed at the bottom of the garden. He was probably there all night.”

  “She didn’t miss him?” Matthew was startled. Perhaps this was nothing to do with Germany, but was simply a domestic tragedy.

  Shearing must have read the thought in his expression. The ghost of a smile touched his eyes and vanished instantly. “Don’t cling to that, Reavley. It means nothing.” He walked slowly over to his desk, but without sitting down in the leather-padded, round-backed chair, as if it would in some way imprison him. “His throat was torn out with the prongs of a garden fork.”

  Matthew winced.

  Shearing saw it. “It could still have been a woman’s crime,” he pointed out. �
�That doesn’t mean it had nothing to do with Germany. It could be any of a dozen things, and whatever it was, it is still the loss of the best scientific brain in the country. That matters more than any one man’s life.”

  There was nothing to argue. “What do you want me to do, sir?”

  “Get your brother the priest to resurrect the man!” Shearing snapped, his eyes blazing for a moment, then with fear and will suppressing the panic he leveled his voice. “We need to know whether it was personal or enemy inspired,” he answered. “We’ve done everything we can to keep the project secret, but it’s almost impossible. If there is a German spy or sympathizer in St. Giles, we must find and destroy him, preferably without exposing him publicly. It’s devastating for morale to know we are so vulnerable. And of course we need to guard ourselves better in the future.”

  Matthew did not interrupt.

  “In the hope that it was personal, possibly domestic,” Shearing went on, “we must avoid drawing undue attention. It’s a murder. Leave the local police to do what we have to hope they are trained for.” His lips tightened. “What I need you to do, Reavley, is find out from Corcoran the absolute truth, however bitter—can we complete the project without Blaine?”

  “Yes, sir,” Matthew said quietly.

  “We can allow other people hope,” Shearing said. “I need the truth, Reavley, whatever it is.”

  “Yes, sir. I know that.”

  Matthew assigned his immediate duties to his colleagues and cleared his desk, then early the next morning he drove to St. Giles. There was no point in going the same day. The police would need time to assemble the preliminary facts, and more important, Corcoran would have to assess the situation at the Establishment. He would investigate what Blaine had left in the way of notes or instructions to others, whom else he had trusted, or who might understand his calculations. It was not a judgment that would be made in haste.

  As Matthew motored to St. Giles, there was a haze of green over the fields and the first leaves were beginning to open in the hedges. Every so often there was a burst of white blossom.