The young receptionist with shiny red hair also managed the breakfast buffet. Sterling observed her bustling about in this different role, her freckled face flushed in the room’s warmth, before reflecting back on his latest nagging dream. He had been making notes from a physics textbook in some kind of classroom laboratory. John Lennon, his round glasses flashing in an angry face, had been telling him that research could not be pure research anymore. You had to publish papers and chase after funding. When he disappeared, a woman in a white coat came in and asked Sterling what he was doing.
‘I’ve just started a Physics PhD,’ he said. ‘I’m making a few notes’.
‘Where are you getting your funding from?’ she asked.
Sterling said that it was all paid for, but she said that couldn’t be right, until she saw the confirmation among his notes. He followed her into the corridor.
‘I’m a bit worried about all this,’ he said. ‘I can’t understand the textbook, even though I’m making notes, and I’m doing this PhD, but I haven’t even got a GCSE in Physics.’
Angela often provided unexpected insights into Sterling’s dreams. This time, he thought he knew what she’d say. You’re out of your depth, Frank, and the case is too complicated for you. And you might not get paid.
The restaurant smelled of bacon, kept in a large metal container. The lid slid back to reveal a mass of stuck-together meat that achieved the miracle of being burnt and undercooked at the same time. The girl had clearly seen too many breakfasts to notice anymore. In silent islands around the room, fellow guests picked their way desultorily through their food. A child in the corner with blond curls banged his spoon arhythmically on his plate. A baked bean was propelled onto the floor. His father did nothing. His mother, blond hair escaping from a clasp, looked boredly out of the window. Sterling imagined swiftly walking over, removing spoon from hand, throwing plate against wall and cuffing the kid, in smooth unhurried movements. The ‘plink… plink, plink’ rattled tinnily in his head.
‘Miss…?’ he called out to the waitress-receptionist. If he was going to stay a few days, it would be good to know her name.
‘Christina,’ she smiled.
‘OK. Thank you. Christina, why did I see streams of people heading out to the right of the square last night?’
She looked at him. ‘Aren’t you here for your war dead? At 8 o’clock, everyone – except we Flemish – goes to the Menin Gate to pay their respects and hear the Last Post. That’s why the British come. The Ypres fire brigade sends trumpeters – every day since it all began in 1926.’
The Menin Gate. He remembered the crossword clue again. It made him miss the pub, and in a more obscure way, England itself. Maybe he’d go along, to get some background, though he was more intent on solving Gloria’s little mystery.
The square had had a soft magic in yesterday’s evening glow, supplemented by the lights as they went on in all its hotels and cafes. In the morning light, it sparkled in a new way. He had noticed that the hall in the square was now a museum. Lennon was out there somewhere waiting for him, and those others. But where he was going he wanted no company. He guessed that the In Flanders Fields Museum would have a map to show him where his destination was, and give him a way to keep his own company.
Inside, the air was cool and the light supplied by muted spotlights. A man with a seemingly permanent frown lodged between his eyes briskly took his money and pointed to an interactive map.
‘You’ll find what you’re looking for on that.’
And he did – it was in a lane off the Armentières road, about four miles east of Ypres. He made a note and ensured that there was no record of his search. The tourist guide had a good map of the town and the surrounding district. He was lucky to find the information so quickly, as he had not been organised enough when he left England. He lingered at the entrance to the museum beyond the ticket office, engrossed for a minute or two in the story of a Berlin student conscripted to the Ypres front in 1916 in an interactive display.
He didn’t have to wait long. At the other end of the entrance area, Lennon had slipped in. A small queue had developed at the ticket booth. Sterling moved quickly into the museum and out of sight. Maybe in other circumstances, the displays and stories would have occupied him all day. Angela would have loved this. But he hurried on, room by room, in an urgent rush to the exit.
He was in the street moments later, heading for the car. For a furious moment, he thought it wouldn’t start. Then a blue plume of exhaust spurted into the crisp air and he lurched away, rattling over the cobbles into the road and heading towards what he identified as the Lille Gate out of the town in the direction of Armentières. He glanced in the mirror and just saw his stalker pitching into the street. Lennon knew that Sterling had slipped away from him. He stood still, put his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket and watched him go. ‘Yes’, Sterling breathed as he rattled up Rijselsestraat to the other end of the town. As he puttered along he realised, in a small eureka moment, that Rijsel must be the Dutch name for Lille.
It wasn’t hard to find Chester Farm Cemetery. The war dead were buried all over West Flanders and beyond, and the signposts to the cemeteries, in white lettering against a sombre brown, came up every few hundred metres. Sterling turned left off the Armentières road into flat well-cultivated farmland. Flemish and Dutch people had come to Sandley in the 17th century to escape persecution. Their Low Countries brickwork and architecture was everywhere in his hometown. Everything was different here, but curiously the same.
The cemetery shimmered in the Flanders light. Sterling needed his coat, but he also needed his sunglasses as he stepped from the car in the lay-by onto the springy deep green turf. He drew up for a moment at the gate of the cemetery, enclosed in its perfect brick and white stone rectangle. He could see a tractor a few fields away, and two men in work boots talking and pointing at something beyond. The rows of pristine headstones extended out symmetrically before Sterling. He breathed deeply to calm himself. He’d remembered to bring the reference Gloria had given him. He squatted at the headstone near the back of the cemetery furthest from the gate and the road. All the details were here – Etchingham, Frederick (EF), Private 9174, row II.G.14. Sterling learnt further that the young man had been in the 4th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment and killed on 10 October 1917, three years after the start of the war. He was ‘Remembered with honour’.
Sterling wasn’t sure why tears sprang into his eyes in that immaculately kept piece of ground deep in the Flanders countryside. It had all happened nearly a hundred years ago. But Frederick Etchingham had been ten years younger than Sterling when he died, and the landscape then had not been the calm and peaceful setting it was now, with the wind whispering softly through the nearby trees and the shadows wavering under the sky.
The turf around the headstone looked undisturbed. So did the flowerbed full of hardy annuals in which the headstone stood in perfect relation to all the others. Sterling had been to many crime scenes and walked in line with many other police officers searching for clues and murder weapons. There were archived film reports to prove it. He could tell that nothing had been left in this little corner of Belgium even as he scrabbled through the soil with his fingers, feeling a weight of blasphemy and the reproach of his ancestors. He stood up and stretched. It was disappointing. What had seemed so clear-cut in the office in Sandley was murkier here. He drifted back to the car. If there was nothing here, he’d been wasting his time. In the car, he put his hands on the wheel and reflected. He did not much relish the conversation he’d have with Gloria Etchingham.
As he prepared to go, he thought that perhaps he’d been too hasty, and that he should sign the book of remembrance, if there was one. It would be a form of penance for scrabbling about in the soil. Just inside the gate of the cemetery was a small square metal door set into the stone, with a handle perfectly shaped for a half-closed fist. It looked standard enough to be in every Commonwealth cemetery in southern Belgium and northern France. The book was there. Sterling leafed through the comments, which were overwhelmingly poignant: ‘Rest in peace’, ‘Never forgotten’, ‘Very peaceful’, ‘Thank you’; ‘We will remember’.
With the book was a register. Sterling wondered why he had been so fixated on the headstone. He turned immediately to Frederick Etchingham. He quivered slightly with the feeling that comes when you know you are on the right track. There it was – a small rectangular card sellotaped under Etchingham’s details. He peeled it off and slipped it into his pocket – but not before he had memorised the neatly printed letters.
He took a last look at Chester Farm Cemetery. He did not think he’d be returning. Some of the side wall towards the left had been knocked or fallen down. A little warning tape in yellow and black fluttered in the breeze. He hoped someone would come along and repair it soon. The souls of the dead in the cemetery deserved that.
The bright bricks and stones and white cross receded in his mirror as he drove back to the main road. But something else caught his eye – and it looked uncannily like a silver Ford. He was still excited by his discovery, but now he was anxious as well. Somehow Lennon, if it was him, had managed to follow him after all those manoeuvres at the museum. The question was, how could he stop him next time?
As he drove back into town on the bridge over the moat, he thought he had the answer when he saw a young cyclist. It wasn’t that he was riding with no hands on the handlebars, even on the cobbles, or that in one easy, confident movement he swept off his pullover and draped it round his neck. It was that he appeared to be going the wrong way down a one-way street.
At the hotel, Christina had turned back into the hotel receptionist. Sterling wondered when she did not have to work. He leaned sideways with an elbow on the counter and clasped his hands.
‘Christina, don’t you ever have time to rest?’ She looked up from the computer screen. He noticed her green eyes. Small earrings and a ring on her right finger were little green islands on her pale skin.
‘Well, Mr Sterling, this is a family place. We all have to work here to make it worthwhile. Have you had a good morning?’
‘Not bad. I’m going to need to make a telephone call back to England. Can I do that from my room?’
‘Yes, Mr Sterling, all the instructions are by the phone, but it’s expensive.’ She looked at him for a moment; eyebrows raised a little, one just a little higher than the other. ‘Don’t you have a mobile telephone? Everyone has a mobile these days.’
‘I lost mine on the way over.’ Sterling winced as he rubbed his shoulder and thought of the struggle on the ferry. I’m also going to need to get on the internet. Any advice on that?’
She thought for a moment and made a decision. ‘I have a laptop behind the counter. If you don’t need to be online for long, you can come and use that’.
‘Lovely offer, Christina. I’ll come back when I need to do that.’
He turned around from the second stair up towards his room.
‘One last thing, Christina … What does Uitgezonderd mean?’
When he heard the answer, he resumed the trudge upwards. The idea was promising. He might need it if he could solve the next part of the riddle. He sat at the desk and looked over the square. It was getting towards lunchtime and Ypres townsfolk were filling up the cafes, interspersed with groups of British and Commonwealth visitors. At the café below, a couple of doors from the hotel, a plump Flemish man and his wife were attacking what Sterling now knew was one of the Ypres staples, spaghetti bolognaise, and drinking what looked like the cherryade he had been fond of when he was a kid. But surely it wasn’t that. It was something else to check with Christina.
Even Sterling could follow the instructions for external calls. He pushed the buttons. There were more clicks and bleeps than usual, but then came the familiar English dialling tone. Efficient and cool as ever, Angela picked up after three rings.
‘Sandley Library. How can I help?’
‘Angela, it’s Frank.’
‘Frank, how’s it going? Any progress?’
He was glad to hear her voice. Angela was like all his other friends. She could tease. She could laugh at his outlandish dreams. But when it all got to a certain point, he could rely on her for anything. Another of those times had come around again.
‘Yes, good progress – if progress means fighting off someone on the ferry, losing my mobile and getting followed by five people at the last count. And, probably most important of all, finding something from that reference we researched.’
‘Frank, when you say “fight off”, what exactly are we talking about here?’
‘Angie, I’ll tell you about it later, but most of the tools of my trade I can’t get access to here. I really mean my computer. If I read out what I found at Chester Farm, can you do a bit more digging for me?’
‘Read away. I’ll have some time to look this afternoon.’
Once more, Sterling gave silent thanks for his own personal researcher. ‘Here we go: Pop TH SaD Exec P. It’s pretty obscure. But I have confidence in you.’
‘More than I have in myself, maybe. Take care now, Frank. It sounds as though things are getting dangerous.’
He hung up. Angela was right, and what was disturbing him was how Lennon seemed to know where he was and where he was going - in fact, he seemed to know every aspect of his business. The less Lennon knew, the safer Sterling felt. If Angela found anything out and it involved another journey, he wanted to do it without anyone else being involved. He lay on the bed, hands behind his head, staring at the opposite wall. His idea just needed thinking through.
A few minutes later, it was time to cement his friendship with Christina. Being a private investigator meant long hours of boredom, sordid secrets and an uncertain income. But attractive hoteliers were a bonus.
‘Mr Sterling – again’, said the hotelier in question. There was a sardonic smile to go with the raised eyebrow. He felt himself beginning to be smitten.
‘Christina, I’m going to be here a few nights, I’m sure. Please call me Frank. What I need this time is a bicycle hire shop. I think I’m going to get a bike and pedal around a bit.’
Clearly, she did not take him for a cyclist, but she directed him to a place in Diksmuidsestraat, one of the streets opposite the hotel. It was 1:30. The shop was not likely to be open till two or later. He decided to join the townsfolk at Au Miroir for a croque monsieur, which he learned was a toasted ham and cheese sandwich, and maybe some cherryade.
The croque tasted good. He got the cherryade by pointing to a glass that a man was drinking from a few tables away on the terrace. It was a kind of strawberry beer. He would not repeat the experience, and felt a pang for a pint of his local brew. But homesickness was not high on his list of worries. As his eyes scanned the square from behind his sunglasses, there was Lennon on a bench outside the Town Hall, and there were the other men, still dressed like Seventh Day Adventists, window shopping opposite the Grote Markt, doubtless looking for jackets with a continental cut. Lennon looked like Lennon – skinny in a black leather jacket, slouching a little. But the others … Sterling could see how they filled their jackets and slacks. They had muscles, and their bull necks signalled trouble and violence. Somehow, he couldn’t finish his croque anymore, and the bitter taste in his mouth didn’t come from the Früli beer.