At Some Disputed Barricade wwi-4 Read online

“Alan Wheatcroft was a student of yours some time ago,” Matthew began. Thyer knew he was in intelligence; there was no purpose whatever in being overdiscreet.

  Thyer sighed. “Unfortunate,” he said quietly. “Yes, I heard about it, of course. Very foolish. End of a fine career.”

  “You think he was guilty?” Matthew asked.

  “Probably of nothing more than indiscretion,” Thyer replied. “And a startling naïveté. What did he imagine a good-looking boy was doing hanging around in a public toilet? He should have given the boy a wide berth and not even spoken to him, let alone indulged in a conversation.”

  “And Corracher?”

  “Corracher? Tom Corracher?” Thyer’s fair eyebrows rose. “How is he involved?”

  “Wheatcroft’s defense is that the whole episode was set up to blackmail him, by Tom Corracher,” Matthew replied.

  Thyer was incredulous. “For God’s sake, what for? Money?”

  “Yes, to begin with. Once you’ve paid money to keep quiet over something, then you establish a precedent. It’s as good as an admission. After that, other things can be asked for: favors in office, information, the right vote. The list is endless.”

  “What a damnable mess.” Thyer’s face was filled with distaste but his eyes never left Matthew’s. “What is it you imagine I can do that would be of service to intelligence?”

  “Wheatcroft is going to take Corracher down with him,” Matthew began.

  “You don’t think Wheatcroft will survive this?” Thyer asked. “No, probably not. That sort of mud sticks once it’s public.” He pulled his mouth down at the corners. “Still, if he was ill-advised enough to get caught out in such behavior and leave himself open to blackmail, then guilty or innocent of the charge of approaching the boy, he’s guilty of unforgivable stupidity.”

  “Apparently his wife is very handsome, and an heiress, and he has two sons,” Matthew pointed out.

  “Yes, of course,” Thyer said guardedly, a shadow of pain crossing his face. “If he loves her, or his sons, he may be far more concerned with their feelings, and belief in him, than any continuance in high office. Blaming Corracher might seem the obvious escape.”

  Matthew looked at him. If he were in truth the Peacemaker, and had engineered this whole tragedy, knowing each man’s weaknesses, then he was a superb actor. But the Peacemaker was superb. Time and again that had been only too evident.

  “Do you think he’s deliberately lying in order to save himself?” Matthew asked. “It’s a pretty filthy thing to do.”

  Thyer stood up, walked over to the French windows and looked out. The lavender was buzzing with bees; the scent of flowers and crushed herbs filled the air. Beyond the hedges, the mellow walls of St. John’s rose into a blue sky. It had looked like this in 1914, and probably in 1614.

  “If you don’t know that men lie and betray when they are frightened of losing what they most want, Matthew, then you are unfit for intelligence work—or much else,” Thyer said softly. “The average priest or schoolteacher would tell you as much.”

  “It doesn’t occur to you that Corracher could be guilty of blackmail?” Matthew asked.

  “Frankly, it doesn’t. I know Wheatcroft. He is…susceptible,” Thyer said regretfully. “Can you help Corracher? Is that why you are interested?”

  “Partly.” Should he tell Thyer the truth, and see what his reaction was? Saving Corracher was important. Finding the Peacemaker might be vital. Or was he allowing his own vendetta to blind his judgment? Had he lost perspective?

  Thyer did not prompt him, but waited quietly, his fingers propped in a steeple, the sunlight shining on his pale hair.

  Matthew plunged in. Caution had gained him nothing. “The rest is to see if you consider it likely that there could be someone else behind it, pulling the strings, as it were.”

  Thyer looked startled. “I have no idea. To what end? Do you imagine Wheatcroft is sufficiently important that someone would do all this in order to get rid of him? Why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Both Wheatcroft and Corracher,” Matthew pointed out. “I think possibly Corracher is the more important.”

  Thyer was suddenly motionless. Matthew could hear the birds singing outside.

  “Do you mean a German, or at least a German sympathizer?” Thyer said slowly.

  “They were two of the strongest standing in the way of a settlement of peace before total obliteration of one side or the other,” Matthew pointed out.

  Thyer sighed. “Do you really think that is realistic, Matthew, after all we have lost? Is there not too large a section of the country who have paid in blood for victory, and will feel betrayed by any government that settles for less?”

  “Does that make them right?” Matthew parried.

  Thyer was watching him almost unblinkingly, his pale eyes brilliant. “It makes them the voice of the majority,” he said. “And whether that is correct or not, it is moral, since we are a democracy.”

  “Is government to follow rather than to lead?” Matthew asked.

  Thyer thought for several moments. “In matters where it is the people who have fought and died, yes, I think perhaps it is. Government may argue a case for something different, or lay before them arguments, facts, and reasons, but in the end we must abide by their decision. And before you argue that point, consider the nature of leading without reference to public wish. Would that not be dictatorship? I imagine most dictators believe themselves to have superior wishes to those of the people, and certainly superior information. That may even be true in the beginning, but eventually it leads to government by oppression rather than consent, and finally to tyranny.”

  He flexed his fingers as if they were stiff. “And it is also supremely impractical,” he added with an oddly gentle smile, “unless you have a very great force at your command. And believe me, we have all had enough of bloodshed. We do not need civil war after this…if there is an afterward? From what I read, a German victory is far from impossible. We seem no closer to defeating the kaiser than we were in 1914, and half of an entire generation is mutilated or dead. What man who has seen this war in its hideousness will ever return from it whole in mind, even if his body seems preserved?”

  Matthew did not answer. Either Thyer was far from the Peacemaker in his philosophy, or his mask was impenetrable. Matthew was driven back again to consider Dermot Sandwell, or Shearing. He had excluded Sandwell once, because evidence had made it seem impossible, but everything within him recoiled from believing it was Shearing.

  And yet in his own way the Peacemaker had begun as an idealist. It was not his ultimate aim—peace—that was intolerable, it was the means he was prepared to use, even from the beginning, to obtain it: a betrayal of France and eventually of America, and dominion, in the cause of an enforced peace, that would extend across half the world. Was that better or worse than war?

  “Could there be someone behind Wheatcroft’s accusation against Corracher?” he asked aloud.

  “Of course there could,” Thyer replied. “But I have no idea who. I can make some highly discreet inquiries, if you wish?”

  How much was there to gain, or to lose? Matthew had committed himself already. “Thank you,” he said. “Yes. But be careful, they will think nothing of killing you, should they feel you threaten them.”

  Thyer gave the ghost of a smile. “War is full of death,” he said very softly. “It is an occupational hazard.”

  Since he was already close, Matthew took the local train to Selbourne St. Giles and spent the night in the old family home with Hannah. It was her husband Archie MacAllister, who had commanded the Cormorant at the Battle of Jutland, where Matthew had killed Patrick Hannassey, just before the burning ship had gone down. Several times he had drifted in and out of consciousness before being picked up. He still woke in the night fighting for breath, beating his way out of a darkness that threatened to crush his lungs, his face, everything in him that longed for life.

  It had given him a new closeness to Archie an
d an understanding of both the horror and the comradeship of the men who faced the real violence of the war, not just the crushing fear of defeat that came from knowing the casualty figures better than most people. He saw reports that the public did not, and knew the shortages, the ever-shifting political alliances and the new threats internationally. He read the reports from agents in Europe and the rest of the Empire.

  Before the Battle of Jutland he had only imagined the numbing horror that Joseph saw every day in the trenches. He had had no experience of the exhilaration and the horror of battle, no idea what it did to the mind and body to watch another human being—a man with whom you had shared jokes, food, the long tension of waiting—broken to a bleeding, unrecognizable pulp at your feet. He had never even imagined physical pain of that degree, the indescribable noise, the smell of blood and burning flesh.

  After supper he sat quietly with Hannah in the soft summer dusk and watched the last light fade beyond the elms. The fields lay wide and quiet. The garden was overgrown. She had not had time to pull weeds, or to prune, and there were no young men to hire. They were either dead or in France, or like Archie, at sea. There were no delivery boys anymore, hardly any men in shops or banks or even on the land, only those too old to fight, or too ill. Women did the work now, in hospitals, factories, and farms, and they had no time for private gardens. They drove buses, cycled all over the place delivering things. He saw dozens of them on the country roads or out in the fields.

  Hannah knew that Matthew’s visit was not simply for pleasure. “The Peacemaker again?” she asked with a twisted little smile. She knitted automatically as she sat, the needles almost soundless in her hands.

  He had not told her about Hannassey, at least not all. He still found it hard to talk about. Part of the pain he felt was because of the price Detta had paid. She had been spying for her cause, just as he was for his. One of them had had to lose. If it had been he, and he had done so deliberately, then he would have betrayed both himself and his country.

  “I thought he was dead,” he replied to Hannah’s question.

  “I know you did,” she said with a tight little smile. She was looking more like her mother as she reached her mid-thirties. Something of Alys Reavley’s inner calm was there in her features in repose. Matthew liked it, but it tugged at memories, reminding him of an old safety that could never return.

  “Then why do you ask?” he said aloud.

  “There’s an excitement inside you, an edginess,” she told him. “And what else would bring you back here now?”

  “Any number of things,” he said.

  She looked up from her work. “You mentioned St. John’s. Is that to do with Aidan Thyer? Do you still think it could be him?”

  He was startled. Had he been so transparent?

  She continued knitting, the faint click of her needles an intensely comfortable sound in the quiet room. All three children were upstairs, either in bed or doing homework.

  He thought of denying it.

  “It doesn’t matter.” She dismissed it. “I expect you can’t tell me. Just don’t lie.”

  “I don’t know whether he is or not,” he admitted. “I thought I knew who it was last year, and that he was dead—after Jutland. Now things have happened that make it look as if I was wrong, and he’s still alive.”

  She looked up quickly. “Be careful, Matthew!” There was fear in her voice, and in her dark eyes so like Alys’s.

  He did not think of her words again until two days later. He had returned to London the morning after and pursued all the further information he could. It was distasteful, the sort of investigation into who had been seen offering or accepting illicit sexual activity that was one of the sadder and grubbier sides of police work. But he needed to know if Wheatcroft was guilty of seeking an escape from scandal by trying to blame Corracher, saying that he had deliberately set a trap for him in order to blackmail him, and he was entirely a victim. There seemed no doubt he had behaved extremely foolishly, at the kindest judgment. But was his blaming of Corracher a ploy he had thought up for himself? Or had the idea been planted in his mind, directly or indirectly, by someone else?

  The only way to answer that was to see Wheatcroft himself, in spite of all his excuses that he was ill and had nothing to say. Matthew used the power of his Intelligence authority to force the issue. Even when he arrived at Wheatcroft’s house, the servant at the door, an elderly, obviously infirm man, refused to admit him.

  “No, sir,” he said resolutely. “Mr. Wheatcroft is unwell, sir. He is not receiving visitors. Doctor’s orders.”

  “I am from the Intelligence Service, and my orders supersede the doctor’s,” Matthew answered. “I can return with the police, if you oblige me to resort to such extremes. But I am sure that since you are as patriotic as the next man, you would wish Mr. Wheatcroft to assist the country’s forces as much as he would wish to himself.”

  “Well…” the man said, confusion filling his face. “I…I’m sure I would, but I have my orders, sir. I can’t just let anybody in here because they say so!” But he backed away several steps to allow Matthew to enter the hallway, and closed the front door behind him. It was a larger house than average, graciously furnished. Even in these restricted times, the marks of elegance were easy to see: the paintings, the gilt-framed mirrors, the crystal vase of roses on the table near the bottom of the stairs below the carved newel post.

  “Sir!” The manservant’s voice rose a little in protest as Matthew came farther in.

  A door opened and a slender woman in a fashionable blue dress stood in the entrance. She was handsome in a fair, brittle way, but Matthew did not mistake the delicacy of her coloring for any fragility of mind or will.

  “Mrs. Wheatcroft?” he asked, stepping around the manservant.

  “Of course,” she said coldly. “Oh, do be quiet, Dobson,” she said to the manservant. “I can see what has happened.” She waved her hand in dismissal without looking at him. “Who are you?” She regarded Matthew’s uniform with distaste. “What are you doing forcing your way into my home?”

  “Captain Matthew Reavley of the Secret Intelligence Service, Mrs. Wheatcroft,” he replied. “I am sorry for disturbing you, but matters have arisen about which I need to speak to Mr. Wheatcroft.”

  “I’m afraid whatever you have to ask him will have to wait!” she replied. “My husband is unwell, as I believe Dobson has already told you.”

  “It is a matter of information necessary to the Intelligence Service, Mrs. Wheatcroft,” he insisted. “It cannot wait.”

  She looked at him icily. “My husband has served his country all his adult life, and been repaid for it by vile accusations which are distressing to him and to all his family. Now you come here and push your way into his home demanding he answer your questions? You are brutal, Captain…I forget your name. The answer is no. You will have to wait for a more fortunate time.”

  “Reavley,” he said again. “Undoubtedly your husband has served his country. So have we all. Some of us are fortunate that it has cost us no more than a little discomfort. I have a brother in the trenches at Passchendaele, and a sister out there driving ambulances for the few wounded they have some chance of saving. Now go and find Mr. Wheatcroft in his bedroom, and tell him I need to see him immediately. He may come down, or I shall go up.”

  She glared at him, her body trembling, searching wildly for an answer to hold him at bay, and finding none. She wheeled around, her skirt swinging, and marched away.

  Five minutes later she returned. Without speaking she led Matthew up the stairs and across a spacious landing whose long windows gave a view of a sunlit lawn. Then, after a brief knock, she opened the master bedroom door. She stared at Matthew, leaving him to go in unannounced.

  “Thank you,” he said pointedly. He closed the door behind him, but he did not know if she waited outside it.

  Alan Wheatcroft was sitting in a chair by the window, not in a dressing gown as Matthew expected, but fully dressed. He
was ash pale and his skin shone with sweat. For a minute Matthew wondered if perhaps he really was ill, then he saw the hands clenched, white-knuckled, and decided it was more probably fear that made the man look so wretched.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Wheatcroft, but the matter cannot wait.” He spoke very quietly, only sufficiently to be heard, aware that Mrs. Wheatcroft might be only just beyond the door.

  “My wife said so.” Wheatcroft also kept his voice low. “Although I can’t imagine what I might know that would be of interest to the Intelligence Service. I haven’t been in my office for…for several weeks.” His hands clenched even more tightly on the rug over his knees.

  Matthew sat on the edge of the bed, more to avoid towering over him than for comfort. “It is nothing to do with your office,” he replied. “It is a matter of possible treason.”

  “Treason!” Wheatcroft was stunned. There was no comprehension in his eyes, not even fear, simply total bewilderment. “I know nothing about anything remotely treasonous. I haven’t been out of my house since…” He drew in his breath sharply and then let it out without finishing his sentence.

  “Since you were accused of approaching a young man for homosexual favors at the men’s convenience on Hampstead Heath,” Matthew completed it for him.

  A tide of color washed up Wheatcroft’s neck and face. He started to speak, and stopped again.

  “I’m sure the charge is profoundly embarrassing,” Matthew said with some sympathy. “Any man would find it so. Whose idea was it to save your reputation by saying that Tom Corracher set up the whole scene in order to blackmail you?”

  Wheatcroft stared at him in horror, as if Matthew had physically struck him.

  “Presumably not only to salvage something of your career, but to save your wife’s feelings,” Matthew added. “Whether you actually approached the boy or were merely naïve is not my concern. I don’t wish to know.”

  “You…you are assuming…” Wheatcroft began.

  “That it was not your idea? Yes, I am,” Matthew agreed. “Your record up to this suggests you are a man of honor.”