IT WAS CLOSE on six when Eric strode into the Britannia Club after leaving Norris in the capable hands of a medical man he knew: a Dr. Filgrave, whose father and grandfather had practiced almost on the Peterkin family doorstep, but who himself now practiced in the heart of Lambeth, on the south side of the Thames.
Life was slowly coming back to the Britannia. From the dining room came the familiar, subdued clink of silverware, and a pair of elderly bachelors had paused to talk on the stair landing under the painting of the Arthurian Knights. The club wasn’t quite up to full strength yet, but it wasn’t so dead as it had been since the murder.
Eric noted none of this.
He gave Old Faithful a curt military nod as he marched by. Parker had lit a fire in his belly, and the sight of Norris at Brolly’s had fanned it to blazing. Now it carried him forwards the way it carried him through the confrontation with Breuleux, and it sharpened his focus on the present. At the same time, it drew a shade over the images of Helen Benson lying dead in the hospital morgue and Patrick Norris’s pinprick pupils. All he saw was his objective: the puppetmaster who pulled the strings, arranged the favours, and Got Things Done. Jacob Bradshaw.
Bradshaw was in his office with a copy of the Sunday Express, open to the crossword puzzle that was to be the first of a regular feature. He had the comfortable air of the freshly fed, and a hot cup of tea sat steaming by his elbow. He looked up with some surprise as Eric marched in and kicked the door shut behind him.
“Peterkin, what—”
“Who are you, Bradshaw?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Bradshaw knows people. Bradshaw Gets Things Done. Bradshaw pulls a string in Cornwall and half the bloody gentry in Northumberland jump off a bloody bridge. Too bloody right! But who are you really?”
“I don’t care for your tone of voice, Peterkin. Now spit it out: What’s got your back up?”
“I was at Brolly’s an hour ago. Guess who I found there? Norris. And I think you know exactly what the circumstances were.”
Bradshaw’s brow came together in a frown. “Be quiet, Peterkin. You don’t know what you’re on about.”
“And you do!” Eric said. “So explain it to me, Bradshaw. Norris was half dead when I found him. I think if I’d left it to tomorrow, he would be dead. But that would just go down in the papers as another ‘accidental shooting,’ wouldn’t it?”
“Shut up, Peterkin!”
Bradshaw was standing now. His face was red, and Eric thought the man ready to explode. Eric clenched his jaw, ready to weather the storm. But in that moment, Bradshaw’s face slackened and a sad warmth poured back into his brown eyes.
“Peterkin,” Bradshaw said, “you know better than I do what the Great War was like. I wasn’t there, but I heard it all from the boys I’d put into uniform and shipped over. My war was the Second Boer War. The men who came home from that … some of them turned to drink, and you understood that they’d seen and done things they wanted to forget but couldn’t. But that was nothing like the trenches, was it? Did what you see match up in any way with anything your father ever told you about what to expect on the battlefield? Did it sound at all like Kipling?”
Bradshaw stared across the desk at Eric. The conflicting emotions continued to resolve themselves into an expression of sorrow and regret.
“I made him,” the man who Got Things Done said. “I trained him and I taught him to hold a rifle and then I sent him out there. You’re responsible for the things you make, Peterkin, and I made him—like a toymaker painting a set of toy soldiers, hoping against hope that they’re sturdy enough to withstand a bit of punishment, that they don’t get crushed underfoot or left out in the rain to rust. You find a broken soldier, and your heart breaks along with it.”
“So you set him up to kill himself on morphine?”
“I kept him alive! You can’t take all the rust off a toy soldier, but you can clean it up and paint it over, and you can set it aside where it’ll be safe, and you can give it the special care it needs. As a boy, you’d only ever played at toy soldiers; you don’t know what it is to make one, to build something up and see it destroyed in ways you never thought possible.”
It was a frightening image: Father Christmas in his workshop, churning out toy soldiers for Flanders. What child reenact Ypres or Verdun with toy soldiers? Eric imagined a shell landing among the tidy formations of his childhood, and the gaily painted red-coated figures scattering in broken shards.
Bradshaw said, “I set Norris up with Breuleux because I know Breuleux and Breuleux knows me. Norris was still alive when you found him, wasn’t he? Breuleux knows to take care of my men, and I depend on him for that. If a man’s going to lose himself in a vice, better he do it where I can keep an eye on him.”
The effort of explanation seemed to have drained Bradshaw of all energy. The old man dropped back into his chair, and Eric dared to venture forward. Age had put grey rings around the brown eyes looking back at Eric; they looked alien, as though Bradshaw had pupils within his pupils.
“The world was a different place when I was your age, Peterkin. Mustard gas! Chlorine! That’s not how things used to work. This wasn’t the war I set those boys up for.” Bradshaw looked at Eric, and for the first time, Eric saw—not Father Christmas, not a stern drill sergeant, and not even an ancient reptile—just a tired old man. The white beard trembled, and a voice behind it whispered, “I just didn’t want to see another old boy swinging from a rope or bleeding out over a pavement.”
No. Nobody did. But Eric remembered the squalid mattress where he’d found Norris, and the rank odour of two-day-old sweat. He thought of the bright-eyed laughter dying behind the stultifying haze of morphine. He thought of his own men. The rage blazed up again.
“That is not how you handle an ex-serviceman’s distress! Wrap them up in comforting vice? You’d given up on them!”
Bradshaw’s eyes narrowed dangerously as his fury returned. “Peterkin—”
“You didn’t ‘set them aside’; you decided they were worthless and turned your back on them!”
“Peterkin!”
“And it’s clear Norris wasn’t the only one you ruined—”
“Lieutenant!”
Bradshaw had leapt to his feet. It was his turn to raise his voice, and he raised it in true drill sergeant fashion. It rang out like a gunshot and rattled the window. A porcelain tortoise, displaced by the excitement, finally fell off the edge and shattered on the floor. Eric, like countless soldiers before him, started back in silence.
“Bloody subalterns,” Bradshaw growled. “You get a pip on your shoulder and you think you know everything. I’ve been doing this since before you were born. Don’t you dare question my decisions.”
“Aldershott cured Norris.”
“He doesn’t sound cured to me.”
“No thanks to you! He’d have been fine, but you abandoned him to the likes of Breuleux, and look what happened!”
A second emotion joined the fury on Bradshaw’s face. Resolution.
“Get out. Get out of my office and get out of this building. I brought you in, and I can take you out. Did you know that Aldershott stormed in here yesterday demanding to have you expelled?” Bradshaw swept his newspaper aside to reveal a letter of dismissal, already signed by Aldershott. The Britannia liked to be thorough about its membership records, and this document, once approved by the board, would be clipped to Eric’s original application and the file closed forever. All it wanted was a second signature, which Bradshaw applied now with vicious strokes of his pen, and acknowledgment initials from the rest of the officers.
Eric stood frozen as Bradshaw waved the document in the air to dry the ink. “I think Saxon and Wolfe are in the dining room,” Bradshaw said. “We can make this official tonight, and you can go home with all ties to your father’s club cut and done with. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Eric’s mouth felt suddenly dry. The rage that had carried him this far began to ebb. He said, “You need Norris’s initials too.”
“The purpose of acknowledgment is to say the motion won’t be challenged. Just two out of the remaining three officers are needed for that, and even then it’s more formality than necessity.” Bradshaw strode around Eric, yanked open the door, and marched on out.
Following Bradshaw, Eric paused in the lobby to glance up the stairs to the painting on the landing of the Arthurian Knights. King Pellinore was still modelled on a Peterkin ancestor, and Sir Palomides was still a reminder that any man could be a knight. Eric’s rage had been dampened. All he could think of was what his father would say.
Saxon and Wolfe were indeed in the dining room. Saxon was lounging in one corner with his feet up on the next chair, an apple in one hand and a Latin text open in his lap. Wolfe had just sent his dinner back for being overcooked and was waiting to be served again. He came over at Bradshaw’s beckoning, eyes dancing at the prospect of drama. Saxon, engrossed in his book, didn’t notice.
Wolfe took one look at the dismissal letter and turned to Eric. “My goodness, Peterkin. Ever the charmer, aren’t you? What can you possibly have done to get Bradshaw, of all people, to second a motion of dismissal against you?”
Eric had too much pride to plead with either man, especially with everyone watching. He adopted a gruff attitude and said, “Do what you have to do, Wolfe. I don’t care anymore.”
“Don’t you really?” Wolfe took the letter from Bradshaw, looked it over again, then handed it back. “No, I don’t think I will. Spoil my fun? You must be joking.”
“Are you challenging the motion, Wolfe?” Bradshaw barked.
“Don’t be a bore, Bradshaw. Sunday evenings weren’t made for official club business. Now, Peterkin, why don’t you join me for dinner? They’ve overcooked the portions, but you’d eat anything, wouldn’t you?” Wolfe grinned at Eric, pulled him close with an arm around the shoulder, and ruffled his hair.
There was a bang from the entry vestibule as someone slammed open the front doors. Inspector Horatio Parker strode into the Britannia and planted himself in the lobby, feet apart, face grim. He was flanked by a pair of burly constables who took a step forward as Eric and the others emerged from the dining room.
“Mr. Mortimer Wolfe,” Parker said, “your presence is requested at the Yard. If you please?” Even as he spoke, Parker’s eyes darted to the stairs and to the dining room doorway, where other members were trying and failing to hide their curiosity. Nobody wanted the indignity of being dragged away in handcuffs in front of everyone, but that, Parker intimated, was always an option.
The constables fell in on either side of Wolfe, who lit a cigarette with exaggerated calm, nodded to Parker, and strode out half a pace ahead of them. He paused at the doors to look back and give Eric and Bradshaw a mocking salute. His eyes rested on Eric. “It appears we’re both hors de combat, eh, Peterkin? I wonder if you’d care to duplicate my exit.”
Then the doors closed, and they were gone.