A Duty to the Dead (20 page)

The Colonel Sahib stepped in, his frame filling the room in a way I hadn’t remembered before.

Guilty conscience,
a voice in my head pointed out.

“She’s at home. I needed to be in London for a few hours and wanted to ask if you’d decided to come home again. We could travel together.”

I said in a distracted way, “I’m thinking of staying on a few more days.”

“Do you feel your social calendar might accommodate an elderly relative desirous of your company at lunch?”

I smiled in relief. “If the elderly relative is my father—of course.”

For an instant I thought he was about to ask Diana to join us. But she said, “I’ve things to do to get myself ready. Go, and leave me to see to them.”

And then I was instantly suspicious. Had she and the Colonel planned this between them?

I said, “Let me fetch my coat,” and all but ran to my room. I found paper and pen, jotted a brief message for Peregrine, telling him that I’d be back as quickly as I could, and was ushering my father out the door in short order.

M
Y FATHER HAD
his motorcar waiting, with a familiar driver. I’d grown up knowing Simon Brandon. He’d been in and out of the house so often that my mother said that she felt he must be related. From lowly soldier-servant to my officer father, he had risen to the heights of his profession: regimental sergeant major. There were not many people who argued with him. My father was one, and I was the other.

Simon greeted me warmly, as if he hadn’t seen me in many months, though I’d had lunch with him in his cottage a few days before I’d left for Kent.

He helped me into the rear seat, and my father followed me. Simon closed the door, resumed his place behind the wheel, and my father asked, “Where would you like to dine, my dear?”

“Your choice. Most of the restaurants are struggling to survive these days.”

He gave Simon instructions, and we drove off. The streets were crowded, and the weather was fair for a change, though cold.

“In your haste,” my father was saying, “you forgot your gloves.”

I grimaced. So I had. Depend on the Colonel Sahib to notice.

“Tell me about the visit to Kent.”

“It went very well. I honed my nursing skills on a man with pneumonia—who lived—and another with shell shock, who didn’t.”

He raised his eyebrows at that. “And how did you find the Grahams? Did they take your message in the spirit Arthur had intended?”

“I don’t think they did,” I said honestly. “I was disappointed in that.”

“Perhaps they disagreed with young Arthur.”

“It appeared they did.”

“Bess.”

I knew what was coming.

“You don’t look well. I think Kent was perhaps too much too soon. How is the arm?”

“Healing. I can do a little more each day.”

“Then if it isn’t your arm that’s worrying you, what is?”

Oh, yes, I could hear myself now telling my father of all people that I was harboring an escaped lunatic in my flat and that we’d had a brief journey back to Kent in each other’s company to find out what had possessed him to do bloody murder when he was only fourteen.

Instead I said, “I’m learning that you can’t save everyone in this world. I thought that my shell-shocked patient was convinced that he could heal. And I was wrong.”

“Yes, well, sometimes there are miracles, and sometimes there are not.”

Peregrine surviving had been a miracle. And I was paying for it even now.

I said, “Let’s not talk about guessing wrong.”

He said nothing more until we’d reached the small restaurant not far from St. Paul’s. I’d been to The Regent’s Table only once, and the food had been good. That was before the war.

Women had been warned that they must do their part against the Hun. That they must sacrifice their men, their comfort, their necessities, and anything that brought them pleasure. That included most foodstuffs. God knew what even the chef at such a restaurant could do with the only cuts of meat available in wartime.

Simon joined us as soon as he’d seen to the motorcar, and we enjoyed a table set in one of the windows, with a view down to the street below. My father ordered for me, and Simon made his own choices.

I’d been right. The mutton was as old as the Kaiser and nearly as difficult, but the wine sauce was exquisite.

My father waited until we were nearly finished with our meal, and then said to me, “I want to take you back to Somerset with me. Will you come? I find it hard to know what could be keeping you in London. I can understand that after such a difficult time in Owlhurst, you might need a day or two to settle yourself. Your mother wants your opinion on cuffs and collars and God knows what.”

“I can’t leave just at the moment,” I told him. “Please don’t ask me why.”

“Why not? Bess, you can talk to me. Simon will leave if you wish, and you can tell me what’s put those circles under your eyes and the strain in them. I’m not imagining things—and if you’re fair, you’ll understand my concern.”

I went rapidly through all the problems facing me at the moment and chose the one least likely to worry either the Colonel Sahib or Simon Brandon.

“I want to find someone. The family of a girl who died in service nearly fifteen years ago. And I don’t know how to begin.”

My father’s eyes met Simon’s across the table. “And if I help you find this family, you’ll come home with me?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. It will depend on many things.”

“Does this have to do with Arthur and his message?”

“Arthur must have been all of eleven at the time Lily died,” I replied, evading his question.

“I see.” I don’t think he did. But one could never be sure with my father.

Finally he added, “All right. Simon knows people. Give me the name of the family and we’ll see what he can discover.”

“I think it’s hopeless. But I have to try. The girl’s name was Lily.
Lily Mercer. And she was murdered in a house on Carroll Square, Number 17. I want to know what became of her family.”

Simon had finished his flan. “I’ll leave the motor with you, then, shall I?” he said to my father, and then to me, “I’ll bring whatever I can learn to the flat. Tomorrow morning. Will that do?”

“How are you going about this?” I asked, more than a little alarmed.

He grinned. “One of the lads in the regiment is now a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police.”

Before I could ask him to be circumspect, he was gone—a tall, slender man striding through the restaurant as if he were about to lead the regiment into battle.

“Who is Lily Mercer?”

I turned quickly to face my father. “Let me do what needs to be done. And afterward, I’ll tell you what I can.”

“I don’t care to find you involved in a murder, even an old one.”

“I’m not involved. I just want to know what became of this girl’s family afterward. Whether they were satisfied that justice had been done.”

“Why is it so important to you? Tell me that?”

“You’ll learn soon enough, if Simon speaks to the police. It had to do with the Graham family.”

“You told me it had nothing to do with the message you carried.”

“No, I told you that Arthur was only eleven at the time.”

He smiled. “You are no better at lying to me now than you were at seven.”

“I don’t want you taking charge and doing it all your way. I want to satisfy myself in my own fashion. I can’t do anything about the past, I can’t bring back the dead, but I think Arthur was—changed by what happened in Carroll Square, and perhaps he’ll rest a little easier at the bottom of the sea if I finish what he never could.”

“All right. That’s fair enough.” He signaled to the waiter, and
we left the subject of Lily Mercer until we reached the street. As we walked to where Simon had left the motorcar, my father said, “We’ll say nothing of this to your mother. Is that agreed?”

“Yes. Oh, yes.”

“And if you should find yourself in over your head in this business, you’ll remember to call in the cavalry, won’t you?”

“I promise.” He handed me into the motorcar, and as he walked around to the driver’s side, I thought,
This is my chance.
I could tell him about Peregrine, and let him see to finishing what I’d inadvertently begun in Owlhurst.

But I couldn’t. It wasn’t clever to deal with a murderer, let alone a man who has spent years in an asylum. It wasn’t clever to hide an armed man with a history of murder in his background. It wasn’t at all clever to think I could do what I’d set out to do, alone and in the dark.

Yet if I sounded the alarm now, Peregrine would be returned to the asylum to live out his life there. And the truth would be locked away with him.

If Arthur had had any part in what had happened to Lily Mercer, I wanted to know.

He was only eleven,
the little voice in my head reminded me.

Who was I to say that a child of eleven could or couldn’t kill. I didn’t even know if a child that age really understood the significance of killing.

I remember one summer morning in India when the box wallah came to tell the cook that his favorite grandson was dead. The boy had been bitten by a cobra that had been called out of its hole in the roots of a tree near the river by the boy’s own cousin with a flute he had made for himself from a reed. It was called an accident, a tragic accident, but other children told me later what the adults hadn’t known, that the cousin had been eaten up by jealousy and wanted the boy out of the way. They were both nine.

I had told my ayah, my Indian nanny, what I’d learned, but she
said to me, “It was the boy’s time to die, don’t you see? If it hadn’t been, the cobra would never have come, no matter how much the cousin had played his flute.”

Her fatalism had frightened me far more than the death of the boy. It claimed that the universe I knew wasn’t run by a benevolent God, as I’d been taught, but by Chance, a system where one’s turn was dictated by forces over which one had no control.

My father was saying, “You must get this altruistic nature from your mother, not me.”

I laughed in spite of myself. “That indicates a choice in the matter,” I told him. “This wasn’t so much choice as it was thrust in my face when I wasn’t looking.”

The Colonel dropped me at my flat.

As I watched him drive away, I wished I’d had the forethought to ask him to stay in London, within reach, and not return to Somerset just yet.

Then I turned and hurried into the flat, where Peregrine and Diana were comfortably discussing a visit she’d made to Rochester shortly before the war. But his eyes as I came through the door flicked to my face on the instant, searching for any sign of betrayal.

Diana went out that night to dine with friends, and I made dinner for Peregrine and myself.

“What did you tell your father?”

“That I was in London to discover what had become of Lily Mercer’s family.”

He started up, sensing betrayal.

“Sit down. I can’t track them alone. Nor can you. The best chance we have is to use my father’s connections. You don’t know the Army, Peregrine—the regular Army. It’s as tightly knit a group as the Knights Templar—or the Masons or the Catholic Church. If there’s a way to find them, my father will.” I had left out Simon Brandon.
Don’t muddy the waters too far, my girl.

Besides, no military plan should be without a line of retreat.

But Peregrine was nothing if not astute.

“Who was the man with your father? The one waiting with the car?”

I would have sworn, if I’d been my father’s son instead of my father’s daughter. As it was, I was sorely tempted.

The windows of Elayne’s room looked down on the street. I had forgot.

“His batman. My father retired as a Colonel. Simon had risen to sergeant major. But they served together when my father was a lowly lieutenant, and the bond has lasted all these years. Simon drives my father, he always has.”

“But he didn’t drive you back here, did he?”

The temptation to swear was overwhelming now.

“He had other business to attend to. He left us while we were still in the restaurant.”

Peregrine wasn’t convinced, though he said nothing more. But I could feel him watching me for the rest of the evening, speculation in his eyes.

Diana left the next day, and I was grateful not to have to consider her in my dealings with Peregrine. She gave him a good-bye kiss on his cheek, though, a dancing dervish in her eyes, and blew me one, then was gone, back to France, leaving silence behind her. I saw that Peregrine was staring at the door with an unreadable expression on his face.

At teatime, Mrs. Hennessey brought up a folded note. “From your father, dear,” she said.

I thanked her and read it quickly.

Lucy Mercer’s family had emigrated to New Zealand soon after she was killed. Their passage had been paid for them by the Graham solicitors.

They had traded their daughter’s death for a better life for themselves.

I turned to Peregrine as he came up from Elayne’s room. “Not the best of news,” I said, and gave him the message.

He read it and swore.

“A dead end,” he said, finally.

“But it’s odd, isn’t it? That they should take the money offered them, and leave England on the heels of their daughter’s murder.”

“Desperate people. She wasn’t coming back, and something good—for them, at any rate—had come of it.”

“I expect so.” But I couldn’t rid myself of doubts. Still, I had no children, and I couldn’t judge whether a grieving mother might well take the chance to better the lives of her remaining children while she could, even at the hands of the murderer’s family, or whether she had been willing to sacrifice one for the good of the others, making the best of what life had brought her.

Had that been the bribe? Had the family accepted a new life in lieu of demanding that Peregrine be sent to prison? The police of course had decided Peregrine’s fate, but without the Mercers demanding an eye for an eye, they might have been more easily persuaded to be lenient with a disturbed boy.

“I’m going back to Carroll Square,” I said on my way to my room to fetch my coat and hat. “I’ll see if anyone there still remembers Lily.”

He was at the door before me, his own coat over his arm as I came out of my room.

“No, Peregrine—”

“Yes. They aren’t going to know me, for God’s sake. Why shouldn’t I accompany you?”

Reluctantly I let him come with me. We found a cab and arrived at Number 17 as a few early flakes of snow began to fall.

An elderly maid answered our knock, and I asked her if there was anyone still employed in this house who remembered a maid here some fourteen years ago, by the name of Lily Mercer.

She stared at me for a moment, and said, “You must ask Mrs. Talbot, Miss.”

And so it was that we were admitted to the presence of Mrs.
Talbot, a formidably fat woman in her later years, swathed in shawls and seated like a toad in the largest chair in a very fashionable drawing room. Her trim feet rested on a stool.

She had an eye for Peregrine and asked him where he’d been wounded.

“On the Somme,” he said, but didn’t elaborate.

She nodded. “Indeed. I lost a son at Mons and another at Ypres. I didn’t want to live myself, at first, but it’s not in my nature to die. Which of my many committees and sponsorships brings you to my door tonight?”