They had driven to Peebles through the night, taking it in turns to sleep in the back. Using the journey to avoid talking. Jago didn’t know how to chat to her. He didn’t know how to while the long miles away in banter. She had delivered him to SOE in Baker Street as a member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, but on this night journey he felt he was sharing the car with the Lavender who was a member of a communist cell. He remembered her face as she left the Daimler to follow her brother; the anger in it: What you did to Austen – I think it was really horrible. And she’d been right.
Lying in the back of the car, pretending to sleep, he thought about his descent. It had been at a urinal he had first discovered his sexual bent. It was in an Oxford pub and Jago had become uncomfortably aware that the man next to him at the wall was staring at the side of Jago’s face. He’d turned, seen a Middle Eastern man with dark eyes and an actor’s sweep of hair. The man had smiled at him, pleased to have got his attention, and had turned his body to reveal his penis. He’d asked Jago if he would like it. Jago had been surprised to discover that he did. In the cubicle they’d adjourned to, Jago’s world suddenly made sense.
For a mad month Jago had haunted the cottages of Oxford, until a sense of disgust slowly took hold of him, the way the smell of the urine gradually impregnated his clothes. Whether he was on his knees or standing, he started to feel his dead father’s presence behind him, leering. He’d tried staying away and for most of the time he could – but then something would happen and he’d find himself seeking consolation amongst the puddles and flushing.
He’d had a row with Major Smedley and, feeling he deserved something other than the perpetual bureaucratic boredom of theForgetting School, he’d gone to seek an adventure. In a gents’ lavatory in Soho he looked for it, but thought he was out of luck. The place was empty, then Austen had slipped in after him and lurked in the shadows as he discreetly eyed up Jago from a urinal he was pretending to use. Jago had seen a young man as gauche and awkward as himself. There was a ritual to these encounters. With the minimum of eye contact, they moved from pretending to pee to one of the cubicles and bolted themselves in. Still in silence they began using each other, strangers, enjoying the balm of intimacy with an unknown person. Yet when it was happening, with the boyish stranger so far below him, working away, Jago discovered he yearned for something else. He wanted to reach down and pull him up onto his feet. He wanted to look into his eyes again. He wanted to kiss.
He remembered reaching down and gently pulling Austen up. In the event he’d been too nervous to try to kiss him. It hadn’t been agreed, kissing. The stranger might take umbrage at an attempted kiss. Instead Jago hugged him; held him close and rubbed his cheek against his. He felt the boy respond and there they were, hugging in a lavatory that someone had stolen the seat from. After that, neither seemed to need to return to the sex. Jago had slipped out first. He went home to Pimlico, still excited by the gentle intoxication of tenderness. When the stranger had reappeared some weeks later, for what Jago assumed was blackmail, he’d felt betrayed.
Outside the car, it was growing light. A resentful day was trying not to wake up. Jago sat and looked out. They were passing through the borderlands, a place where the trees had been watered with blood. But the present war was somewhere else; now the borders were at peace.
‘Do you want me to drive?’
He saw the small, silent shake of her head. He climbed over and sat next to her.
‘Dawn’s coming up.’
This time a silent nod.
He’d grown up with over three hundred girls; he knew she could keep up the silent treatment till Armageddon came and went. He also knew they needed a working relationship and that meant communicating. ‘I’m sorry, Lavender, but we need to talk.’
There was no gesture in the half-light, but Jago knew her profile was saying she was prepared to listen to him.
‘What I did to your brother was unforgivable. As soon as I have the opportunity, I intend to make a full and heartfelt apology to him.’
The blare of the car’s horn blasted out three times in quick succession, causing Jago to start and some sheep in a field to lumber away.
‘Bravo,’ said Lavender.
‘What?’
‘Isn’t that what you want? Approval? Do you think if you say sorry that’s the end of it?’
Jago supposed he did, but this, he realised, was possibly a mistake in this instance. ‘I thought he was trying to blackmail me – I thought he was after money.’
‘It always comes down to cash with your lot doesn’t it, sir?’
Jago wondered if he should keep trying or whether things between them were irreparably damaged. People, he noticed, were far more likely to forget a hurt done to themselves than to a friend or family member. ‘I can only repeat how sorry I am.’
She snorted and pressed down on the accelerator. ‘What really makes me angry is that he liked you. When he volunteered to make the contact again, he thought you’d be pleased to see him.’
It was now light enough to see each other clearly. Not light enough yet to add colour to their bones. They sat like wraiths with ivory-cold complexions.
‘Do you think we might slow down a little?’
His request was ignored.
‘He hasn’t had much kindness. They kicked him out of the navy, put it on his papers: invert – put it there in black and white for all the world to see – an invert. No one would take him on with that on his discharge papers. He’s an outcast, and the world is cruel to outcasts. Then because the Party’s interested in all the young queers down from varsity, the Don tells him to try and have some sort of congress with you. So he does, follows you to a gents’ and apparently, the first time, you’re nice to him, so he likes you, thinks you like him back and might be pleased to see him again. And what do you do when he turns up? You hit him in the face with a dustbin lid.’
The sudden and deafening screech of the brakes sounded like Lavender’s rage to Jago. The car veered wildly as she struggled with the wheel. Jago was thrown forward and, through the windscreen, saw the early morning tractor and the angry face of the farmer driving it. The wheels of the car locked and it slid sideways after the accelerating farm machine. They came to a halt broadside across the lane.
‘Well done. Good control,’ said Jago lamely.
‘Damn,’ said his driver.
They made their way in silence, and at a more sedate pace, to the police station in the lowlands town of Peebles.
A sergeant in the Military Police briefly told Jago that The good captain had met hisend in a live-firing accident. Tragic. He held Jago’s eye a beat longer than was necessary. The mute look to convince Jago there was more to it. The sergeant had then directed him to a village and the local policeman who had questioned the shepherd who’d found the body. Orwhat was left of the poor man.
In the hamlet, the small police station was attached to the larger inn that served the holiday needs of fly fishermen in peacetime. War had seen it requisitioned by the military and it was being used as a mess for officers of the battery of artillery whose guns had brought about the end of Captain Thomas. The police station was located in a house built for that purpose at the turn of the century, a plaque informed them. It was red brick and slate, ugly and cosy, and Jago knew Christine would have swapped their large house in Pimlico for it in a flea’s heartbeat.
Lavender stayed in the car. The constable, after Jago had introduced himself and stated his business, had led him through to his own parlour at the back of the house. It was a service where men lived in uniform and indicated they were on duty by putting on a cloth armband of black-and-white stripes, their duty stripes. It was a world where the home was also the workplace. So, although the war posters had been left behind in the tiny front office and Jago was now sitting in the man’s own back parlour, because of the distinctive stripes around the cuff Jago knew the constable was still on duty; their chat in chintz armchairs before a fire wasn’t cosy but official.
‘Was he a pal, a comrade, the late Captain…’ the policeman struggled to recall the name of the body, ‘Captain Thomas?’
Before Jago could answer, the man disappeared through a doorway, summoned by the shrill shriek of an outraged kettle come to the boil. Jago registered the man had a Scottish burr and that he was old for the police. He wore the distinctive garish ribbons of the first war on his chest and his face was as brown and tough as bark on an old broadleaf tree. Jago invented a life for him: he’d never turned to teak in the lowlands. This man had served out his time in the Empire, in the tropics. He was probably a dug-out, an older man called back from retirement by the advent of war for routine duties, thus releasing a younger man for more active service. The walls gave no clue to his past, being bare and distempered without even a calendar pinned up. There was a mirror above the fireplace and a coal fire in the hole. A battered bucket contained the anthracite, and a hammer and short shovel were the only fire dogs. The constable bustled back with a tray of tea things and a teapot without a cosy. So just one cup and on your way, Jago realised. Jago spoke, ‘No, Captain Thomas wasn’t a pal, nor was he a comrade – I stepped into his shoes and we met just once; at the hand-over.’
Jago refused sugar; he wouldn’t loot the man’s ration. The constable poured the tea and joined Jago in the other chintz armchair before the fire. ‘It’s a long drive to enquire into the death of a man you don’t know.’ He smiled and said, ‘You must have coupons to burn?’
The duty stripe really was on. Jago felt the usual tide of snobbery sweep over him. He wanted to snap at the man that he, Major Craze, was the person asking the questions and to remember his place. But he was in the man’s parlour, in his armchair, drinking his tea. So he answered the question. ‘I can’t go into details but Captain Thomas’s last posting was, shall we say, hush-hush.’
A deep cynicism lit the constable’s smile from within. ‘Hush-hush? How many sins are hidden under that blanket? It’s up there on the same billboard as the alibi I was home in bed, ask the wife.’
The old dug-out was seriously irritating Jago. He wanted to spring to his feet and bawl him out; but there was the problem of the teacup and the over-deep armchair.
‘I’m sorry you doubt my word, Constable, but as you’ve already pointed out it’s a long drive and heavy on the coupons. They certainly wouldn’t have been issued unless the powers that be deemed my journey necessary.’
‘Point taken,’ said the beaming policeman, defying Jago to dislike him. ‘Now sir, may I ask just one question before I answer yours?’
Jago wished he was Mrs Cambridge and able to freeze the jauntiness out of the man beside him, intimidating him into subservient obedience. ‘Go ahead,’ he said instead.
The constable put down his tea and pulled himself up. He loomed over Jago, so that Jago felt even weaker. ‘The late Captain Thomas, I accept you only met him once, but did he seem down in the mouth, glum?’
Jago remembered his excitement at escaping the backwater of Foxley and his mistaken belief he was being returned to his regiment. ‘When I met him, no, he was quite elated. He thought his next posting was to France, but I believe he was mistaken in this.’
The constable nodded. ‘You don’t have to be much of a fire-eater to want to be there at the finish. I was there on the Western Front at the Armistice. The eleventh hour and all that, wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I remember the first Christmas we kicked a ball about with Fritz, but no one writes about what it was like at the end of the war, that November morning when we walked over no man’s land for the last time. They didn’t meet us halfway singing carols this time; they were still in their trenches – crying, weeping like women. They were a Prussian Guards regiment, tough bastards, and I saw one of our kids, a boy soldier, holding a great grizzled sergeant major of their lot in his arms as this giant sobbed his heart out and said they’d been betrayed. A couple of days later I watched them walk away, back to Germany, a long file of them, heads down, beaten. Dreadful: all that blood and sacrifice and to lose.’
Jago looked around the room without mementos; it was all up on the walls of his mind, he thought. ‘I didn’t know him,’ Jago said, ‘but when Captain Thomas discovered he was not returning to his regiment in France and was going to see out the duration in a Pay Corps depot, I think it would be safe to assume he would have been down in the mouth.’
The constable pulled a nugget of coal onto the shovel, using the claw of the hammer, and dropped it on the flames. ‘Sorry,’ he apologised. ‘Only autumn but I feel the cold. Twenty years in the Shanghai Police.’
Jago felt inordinately pleased with himself for reading the man’s complexion correctly.
‘That might explain it,’ said the constable. ‘To be honest there are things that don’t add up. If he was well and truly browned off, it might just explain his actions – which are frankly bizarre. We try to protect the family in circumstances where we suspect suicide.’
Jago considered the constable’s words, aware of his own relief and then guilt at that relief. Tragic as Captain Thomas’s suicide would be, Jago was ashamed to discover he preferred that to the possibility that the cause of death had been murder, and the victim mistaken for him; that there might still be people out there who, on discovering their error, would come looking for Jago Craze, determined not to make another cock-up.
‘A shepherd moving a flock had found the captain’s car partially blocking the lane. The sheep spilled past it and the shepherd squeezed around; he assumed the driver was behind the wall relieving himself. When he came back later, without the sheep, the car was still there and still no driver. Concerned, he went looking and, as there’d been a live-firing exercise earlier, he already had a suspicion. The target zone is three fields in, well away from the road. There’re red flags up all around it during battery fire. The shoot was over and the shepherd arrived just before the fall-of-shot observers, so he got to the body first – or what was left of it.’
‘But why suicide? Perhaps he had wandered off to relieve himself?’
The policeman stared at Jago and obviously considered this a foolish remark. Nonetheless he spoke patiently. ‘We’ve all been caught short haven’t we, sir? What d’you do? You hop out and go behind the nearest bush or tree. You don’t go on a ramble across three fields, especially when your vehicle is blocking the lane.’
‘Point taken – but it still seems an uncertain way to kill oneself?’
The constable shrugged, slipped back into his chair and joined Jago in staring into the flames, pondering mortality. ‘Maybe he didn’t want certainty. Maybe it was a way of handing over. I’ve heard that from would-be suicides dragged out of rivers. They jump from a bridge and wait to see if the current takes them to the bank or drowns them. They’re checking out God’s will. He saw the notices by the road, warning drivers not to leave the road, he saw the red flags, and he was a commissioned officer. So, sick to his back teeth at the hand he’s been dealt, he walks into the middle of a field and waits to find out the Almighty’s plans for him.’
Jago cleared his throat. ‘And no sign of anything sinister?’
‘Foul play?’ The old dug-out smiled. ‘No sir, though of course these things happen in the world of hush-hush and Bulldog Drummond.’
Jago felt himself blushing as he stood. ‘No. Well that seems to wrap it up.’
The policeman rose as well. ‘Will you be hitting the road, getting some mileage in before night?’
Jago thought. It wasn’t midday – they could turn around – but on the other hand they’d driven all night. ‘I think I need to give my driver a break. We’ll stay the night in Peebles and go home after breakfast tomorrow.’
‘As you will. You might try and get accommodation at the Tontine Inn. It’s on the High Street. Their beds are dry and their breakfast hot.’
The constable opened the door to the office, where they discovered Lavender waiting. Jago felt strangely irked she wasn’t still sitting in the car.
‘We’re staying the night in Peebles,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir,’ she replied, but didn’t make a move to exit the small office.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Permission to use the facilities before getting in the car again.’
He wondered what she was talking about. ‘What?’
The policeman explained, one man to another, his voice slightly lowered in deference to Lavender’s bodily needs. ‘She wants to use the toilet, sir.’
Jago had sought responsibility when he applied for the officer selection course; real responsibility, leading men in battle. Now he found himself a glorified teacher, deciding if a hopping pupil could hold it in till break. ‘Permission granted, make it snappy.’ Jago had a sudden thought and he turned to the policeman. ‘If that’s alright with you?’
‘Up you go, lass. Turn right and go to the end of the corridor.’
‘Thanks.’ And she was gone.
Jago felt he’d had enough of the smiling policeman and sauntered outside to wait by the car, but the old dug-out came with him. ‘That’s the late captain’s motor.’
He pointed at a Morris. Jago, for want of something better to do, wandered round it and looked it over. He was aware of the constable going back inside. The tiny village was as quiet as a vacuum. The distant bleating of sheep only seemed to emphasise the silence. The peace was as thick as marmalade, he thought. He let himself into the passenger side of the Riley and waited.
Lavender returned, turned the car around and drove them back towards Peebles. A mile down the road, she pulled over and turned off the engine.
‘What is it? You surely don’t need to go again so soon?’
‘There’s something wrong, sir. Something odd about the propaganda posters in the front office.’
‘How?’
She looked at him the way he might once have looked at Major Smedley; the look of an intelligent subordinate, trying to convince an obdurate superior officer of the facts in front of their stupid face. ‘For a start, sir, some of those posters dated back to the Blitz and invasion fears.’
‘Come on, Lavender; there are noticeboards all over the country covered in out-of-date bumf.’
She nodded; she’d known this would be his counter-argument. ‘Yes, sir, you’re right, but the thing that struck me as strange was that the drawing pins sticking them to the board were new and shiny.’
Jago had a sudden vision of the board in his old office in the Empire Office; the drawing pins were as tarnished as Wallace Simpson’s reputation.
Lavender spoke over his thoughts. ‘I unpinned one regarding the formation of a new unit of defence, the LDV, the Local Defence Volunteers – what later got called the Home Guard.’
‘I know that,’ he said, snappier than he meant. ‘What of it?’
‘It’s at least four years old; four years on the board, but when I lifted it, the baize underneath was as green as the stuff that hadn’t been covered. It wasn’t marked, as if it had just been pinned up.’
Jago looked at the stone walls imprisoning the car, defining the road, masking the fields, keeping them secret. Autumn had long happened in the Borders and the dry, discarded leaves were blown up and down the lane, making a rasping on the surface that mirrored the agitation and suspicion growing inside him.
‘Is that everything?’ he said.
It wasn’t.
‘No, sir. I pretended to use the toilet to get upstairs and take a peek around.’
Of course she had, he thought. Lavender was everything he wasn’t, a professional. ‘Go on.’
‘I thought it was funny when he sent me upstairs. When did coppers start having bathrooms inside like the la-di-das? Where I came from, the rozzers had a tin bath in front of the parlour fire, and the khazi was out back in the yard.’
Why hadn’t he noticed that?
‘So I had a snoop around upstairs.’
‘Weren’t you scared he’d catch you?’
Lavender gave him the all-knowing look of the wise child. ‘In my experience, sir, when a lady goes to the lavatory, the gentlemen move away out of earshot. Apparently we’re powdering our nose – funny place to keep a nose…’
‘Yes, alright. I understand. Go on.’
‘Short corridor, sir, door at either end, and one in the middle. The far door leads to the bathroom; pre-war of course but not by much – pretty swish. Not the sort of facilities you’d normally find in a police house. My feeling is it was installed by the hotel. The door at the other end of the corridor leads into the inn and the bedrooms of the Royal Artillery officers’ mess. The final door led to what was once the bedroom of the cop-shop. Male occupant – but stouter than our grinning stick bean, if the clothes in the wardrobe are anything to go by. Hanging up in the wardrobe were the Number 2s and mess dress of a captain in the Gunners. No plod-togs at all, sir.’
Jago sat, silently thinking, trying to concentrate on the things Lavender had told him, trying not to put himself in the accused dock and prosecute himself for being useless.
‘I suppose at some time in the past the village police station became surplus to needs and it was closed.’
‘And the inn next door bought it, sir.’
‘Incorporated it into the main body of the building and possibly as a staff annexe, or perhaps the owner used it. So today I’ve unwittingly taken part in a play. It’s taken organisation on their part to set the scene and square it with the military up here. This is a conspiracy and I fell for it hook, line and sinker. I listened to a real or bogus policeman and believed every word he said. I’m surprised I didn’t take his advice and drive straight back to London.’
Jago banged himself back in his car seat. ‘I’ve totally ballsed up.’
She touched his wrist. He wondered if his humiliation was what Lavender required to forgive him, because her smile was not mocking but soft, almost understanding.
‘Look, sir, this isn’t about who’s a clever boy.’
A clever boy, intellectual vanity, that’s what it really is about, he thought. His whole life, his Oxford years, had been about acquiring that very currency.
Lavender was speaking again. ‘Sir, you’re not stupid, but you don’t have the blinkers.’
‘Blinkers?’
‘Blinkers, sir, what horses wear to keep them on the straight and narrow. I have blinkers and you haven’t. You’ve got a wide-sky head: look at that paper you wrote. Nicky says it’s clever stuff. You’ve got strategy, I’ve got tactics, so all’s well with our world. You can see what’s happening on the other side of the hill with your mind – it’s just sometimes you can’t see what’s happening in front of your face. Now what I suggest, with respect, sir, is I drive us to the scene of Captain Thomas’s death. And you look at it your way and I’ll look at it my way, then we’ll compare notes and that way get the whole picture. Sir?’
Jago nodded. ‘Yes, drive on.’
Jago thought of the sad fact that he was brought up to believe Lavender’s class was put on earth to empty his class’s chamber pot. He had convinced himself that he didn’t believe that, but he discovered it had gone deeper in than he realised.