The Blasphemer: A Novel (50 page)

He landed heavily, his knees buckling, and as he pitched
sideways, he felt his skull crack against something solid. The fragments of glass darkened and thickened. They were everywhere, showering him, suffocating him, burying him alive.And then he felt nothing.

Le Bizet, Belgium. Second Tuesday of September, 1918

SLEEP DROPS AWAY AS ABRUPTLY AS A TRAP DOOR AND ANDREW SITS
up in bed. He has a sense of a noise dimming, a shadow sound, a dog barking somewhere. He is baffled momentarily by a hollow sensation in his stomach then, as he remembers what is to happen this day, he finds his voice. ‘What time is it?’The words are shouted.

No one answers. He stands up. Light is edging under the door – a dirty white dawn. He contemplates the clothes draped over the chair and knows that he does not want to die in a uniform that does not fit him. When the assistant provost marshal unlocks the door, Andrew is standing naked, squaring his shoulders defiantly.

‘I want a uniform that fits me,’ he says.

The APM turns his head and, without taking his eyes off the prisoner, speaks to his own shoulder. ‘Medic.’

Surgeon-Major Hayes steps out from behind him, unrolls a cloth pouch and lifts up a syringe. ‘We need to give you this, Kennedy.’

‘What is it?’

‘A tranquillizer.You won’t know anything.’

‘Don’t need it, sir. Not afraid. No fear left.’

The chaplain is the next to appear in the doorway. He is wearing purple insignia and a white clerical stole. He holds the prisoner’s arm tight to reassure him. Distracted by this, Andrew does not notice Hayes step behind him until it is too late. As he
turns, the surgeon-major jabs the needle into his left buttock. He slumps forward into the chaplain’s arms. The APM wraps the now limp body in a blanket and carries him out as if he were carrying a sleeping child, down the steps of the police station and into the yard.

When the firing squad arrives half an hour later they are surprised to see the prisoner already tethered to the post. A rope is tied tightly around his chest to stop him slipping down. He is wearing a hood. His head is lolling forward. The APM pins an off-white aiming mark to the prisoner’s tunic, over his heart. The mark is a four-by-two flannelette used for rifle cleaning.

Several members of the firing squad are swaying, anaesthetized with drink. The twelve rifles are laid out ready – Major Morris’s final order has been followed.The soldiers line up, one behind each gun in two rows of six. All raise their rifles to their shoulders and take aim, with the back rank remaining standing while the front rank, on an order from the RSM, get down on one knee. Lieutenant Cooper nods at a drummer boy and a roll begins. The RSM raises a handkerchief at a ninety-degree angle in front of him and, as he lets it go, a ragged volley is fired. The prisoner’s body sags on the wooden post. Surgeon-Major Hayes marches over to it, feels for a pulse and holds a stethoscope to the chest before nodding at Lieutenant Cooper. The subaltern puts away his revolver, relieved that he will not have to deliver the
coup de grâce
.

Hayes unties the ropes and supports the dead weight as he lays it out on the ground. ‘You there,’ he barks at Macintyre, ‘give me a hand.’ With Macintyre taking the feet and Hayes lifting under the arms, the two men carry the body over to a waiting coffin and tip it in.The coffin is too small: the body looks big inside it. Macintyre looks at the prisoner’s bare feet, unable to hide his disappointment.

‘He said I could have his boots,’ he mutters.

They each take one end of the coffin lid and lay it on top.

‘Sir?’ Macintyre says.

‘Yes?’

‘How come there’s no blood?’

The surgeon-major does not answer. As he marches back inside
the police station to fill out a death certificate, the members of the firing squad stand around. The only sound is the clattering of bolts being drawn back and spent cases tumbling down into the dust.

‘Any recoil?’ one says.

‘Not much.’

‘Me neither.’

‘Thought I felt a kick, but I’m not sure.’

Le Bizet, Belgium. Present day. Seven months after the crash

A SMALL CROWD OFVILLAGERS HAD GATHERED IN THE GROUNDS OF
the old police station. The owners of the house were among them, back from their holiday.They had not been aware of the headstone in their garden, still less that an English war hero was buried underneath it. Not only had they given their permission for his exhumation, they had turned it into an event – inviting neighbours, handing around drinks on trays. A gendarme and a priest were here in a semi-official capacity, as was the mayor of Le Bizet who was to accompany the remains to their new burial place, the Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery on the Passchendaele Ridge.This was why Clive and Philip were here, too. For Philip, making the journey through the Eurotunnel without Daniel had been distressing, but he felt he had no choice.There was unfinished business here. He knew Daniel would have wanted him to come back.

The remains were to be joined at Tyne Cot by the headstone, once it had been cleaned. A photographer from the local paper was recording the occasion. Whenever he used his flash, he gave depth to an otherwise flat and grey afternoon.

‘You know Morris was a conductor before the war?’ Clive said to Philip as the two men stood slightly apart from the others.

‘Yes.’

‘Quite a distinguished one. There’s a reference to him in a diary that a friend of mine bought at auction a couple of years ago, part of a job lot. He’s sending it to me …’

The headstone was worked free and carried with awkward solemnity by two officials from the Nord
département
towards a waiting van. When they returned, they marked with their spades the outline of where the grave should be.The first nestled his boot on the lug and his hand drew leverage against the inside of his knee. The spade bit into the soil easily and a square of turf was cut out, then another. As the hole widened, the second official joined in with his spade. After a few minutes they stopped to pull from the ground what looked like a rat’s nest made from threads of soilmatted fibre. A rotting plank of wood was attached to the end of it. They dug a hole four feet deep before they found something similar. A sandbag. It took both of them to pull it out.

‘How does that poem go?’ Clive said taking a step closer. ‘ “There shall be / In that rich earth …” ’

Philip finished the line: ‘ “A richer dust concealed.” ’

The first official pulled out another rotten plank of wood, longer this time.The shape of the other piece of wood was consistent with it. A third plank was visible. It was nailed to another one, a lid of some sort.The coffin proper.They lifted it out, trailing soil with it, and scraped back a layer with their spades. They could see more rotting sandbags. A row of them. Five in all. They opened one. It was heavy and solid, the sand hard and imprinted with the hessian’s weft. They laid all the bags on the ground side by side and stood panting as they looked in the hole. There were no bones.

Philip walked back to the house, supporting himself on his cane. Clive watched him disappear from view before following.When he turned the corner he found his friend with a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth. He was clenching his fists.

‘You OK?’

Philip removed the handkerchief and recoiled as a spasm of pain carried through his age-silted body. His mind emptied. The air left his lungs. The past was rushing in on him.

‘Philip?’

‘Can you fetch the underground monitor,’ Philip said, once he caught his breath. ‘A radius of twenty feet from the grave.’

A yellow and white device resembling a lawn mower was brought over from the van. As Clive pushed it at walking pace back and forth within the radius Philip had specified, a transmitter mounted on its right side emitted a ground-penetrating radar pulse that was picked up by a receiver mounted on its left. The results were displayed on a liquid-crystal screen. ‘I think we’ve found something,’ Clive said a few minutes later. He was on an area of lawn twelve yards from the grave. ‘According to this, whatever it is should be about three feet below the surface.’ He looked across to the owners of the house and, when they shrugged and nodded, he signalled for the officials with the spades.

Once they were three feet down, they stopped digging. One of them slipped on a pair of latex gloves and pulled from the ground an object the size of a shoe. He laid it on a sheet of plastic. It was alive with worms. While Clive shone a torch on it, the official brushed away the soil to reveal that it was a bone fragment, its surface greasy with dark yellow-brownish discoloration. The bone was human. A femur.

A fleeting coolness roused Philip from sleep. He was in his highwinged armchair in front of the inglenook fireplace in his study and there was a package beside him on a small table. Amanda must have put it there and her walking in front of the fire must have caused the coolness, like a passing ghost. His arthritic fingers struggled to pull apart the layers of Sellotape in which the package was bound. His fumbling was compounded by his eagerness. It was the parcel he had been expecting: a diary. There was an accompanying letter, handwritten.

Dear Philip,

This is the diary I mentioned, written by an army chaplain called the
Rev. Horncastle. He died in 1927 and has no surviving relatives as far as we can determine. It came with a job lot of medals and memorabilia my friend picked up at a First World War auction at Sotheby’s a couple of years ago. Not worth much, fifty quid at most. He says it’s yours if you want it. He was going to donate it to the Imperial War Museum, so if you don’t want it, perhaps you could donate it for him.The entry I thought you should read is for 15 September 1918. I think you will find it interesting. It concerns the death of Major Morris.

Yours ever,

Clive

The diary was written in pencil on yellowing paper. A Post-it note marked 15 September 1918.

Major Peter Morris VC killed himself yesterday. He was one of the judges at the court martial. Let God be his judge. Apparently he was a conductor. Friend of Gustav Mahler’s.We have no record of a next of kin and we weren’t sure what to do with his body, as we could not bury a suicide in consecrated ground. Came to an arrangement with the MO and the APM. Buried him in the grounds of the police station and marked his grave. A proper headstone is being organised.The same will not apply to the soldier shot at dawn yesterday.

Philip turned to the previous day’s entry, 14 September 1918. There was a heaviness to the page, even though it was tissue-thin.

Soldier court-martialled for desertion today. He had gone missing for more than a year. Settled down in a French town. Met a French widow. I acted as the court’s legal advisor.The fellow didn’t say much during his trial, but afterwards I went to visit him in his cell and asked him to tell me exactly what had happened. Got the impression he said what he said for my benefit. Must have heard the Angel of Mons rumours. Nevertheless I wrote it down and got the poor blighter to sign it.

Philip’s jaw went into spasm for a second. He took a sip of morphine. The reverend hadn’t even bothered to mention the
private’s name. He examined the diary; it had a leather skin, the back cover of which had been badly stitched. A thread was hanging and he tugged at it. A leather flap hung loose from the lining, like a disembowelled stomach. There was a piece of paper inside, folded into four. It was a statement signed ‘Private Andrew Kennedy, Shropshire Fusiliers’ and dated 14 September 1918. Philip closed it again. He would read it with Daniel, once he recovered. Whatever it said, they should find out together.

He read the entry for 15 September once more, tapped the page twice with his finger, opened his drawer and took out the rusting shortbread tin.The lid came off easily and he reached inside for the copy of
Punch
. This opened, he removed the sheet of music, held it up to the light under a magnifying glass and examined its dark stains, looking for the name ‘Gustav’. He stared at it for a moment, lost in thought, before struggling across the room to his desk and turning on his computer. After googling ‘Mahler signature’, he held the score up to the screen to compare the writing, nodded to himself and reached for the phone.

‘Professor Wetherby please, department of music …’

‘Wetherby speaking.’

‘Hello, professor, we haven’t met. I’m Daniel Kennedy’s father.’

Wetherby was silent.

‘I have something,’ Philip continued, ‘which I believe you have been looking for.’

‘What?’

‘Rather not discuss it over the phone.When might be a convenient time for me to come and see you?’

‘My secretary keeps my diary.’

‘How about now?’

‘I have a college formal tonight, but that is not until eight.’

Philip’s next call was to Geoff Turner. ‘It’s me, Philip. I have another favour to ask.’

*

‘What do you reckon?’

‘Fifty-fifty. Better than when he was first brought in.The REMs are promising.’

‘Think he can hear us?’

‘No.’

‘Probably as well.’

‘Yeah.’

There were two people. A man and a woman. They were speaking in a whisper.

Daniel tried to open his eyes. They were glued. He felt a sleeve brush across his face. Hands were plumping up his pillow. His position was being shifted but he could not feel his body, only a heaviness where his limbs should be. What he did feel was a spiralling drift into sleep.

When he next awoke he tried to open his eyes and managed a slit, but they stung under the harsh strip lighting. He thought he could make out the blurred fronds of a spider plant in the corner of the room. There was a cage around him, a chrome contraption with pulleys. He could see a face reflected in it but not one he recognized. The eyes were puffy and bruised, the lips blistered. The nostrils had splints in them and the bridge of the nose was taped. There was gauze on the chin that was black with congealed blood and across the cheek there was a line of stitching. His tongue felt heavy. An involuntary heave of his stomach. A taste of bile in his throat. He closed his eyes again and retreated back into unconsciousness.