Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

The Reunion by Eric Wright

Celebrated Canadian crime writer Eric Wright was born in London and emigrated to Canada at the age of twenty-two. For his novels and stories in the mystery genre he has won numerous awards, including the Arthur Ellis Award and the Derrick Murdoch Award for Lifetime Achievement. His latest tale for us involves a mystery of sorts, but whether there’s a crime, we’ll leave up to you.

I ran into Billy one afternoon at Sandown Park between races, in the tea lineup in the refreshment room. It took a long time to find the name to put to the face, but I was well past the point where I could be mistaken, and he didn’t look away. Afterwards, I wondered how long he’d been seeing me before I noticed him. He was a couple of people ahead in the line, and when we were sure of the eye contact, he moved back to where I was. “Stan?” he asked. “Stan Collier, isn’t it?”

“Billy Sutton,” I said, and we shook hands.

It occurred to me afterwards that we shook hands that day for the first time ever, as far as I could remember, even though we’d been together from the beginning. We joined up together and stayed together all through Dunkirk. Actually, for us it was Le Havre, not Dunkirk. Billy and I were picked up off the beach by one of the navy rowboats which took us out to their ship, the last one still waiting for survivors. We had a bit of an argument on the beach, because Billy said he couldn’t swim in his boots, and I said I couldn’t walk out across the pebbles without mine. We’d been retreating for a week and my feet were so sore I was afraid that only my boots were holding them together. In the end we compromised by walking out in our boots until the water was up to our waists, then kicking them off and trying to swim a bit. It was a good thing the sailors got to us right away, because neither of us could do much more than the dog paddle we’d learned on holidays at the seaside. After we landed, I had to wear slippers for a week until I could get my boots on again.

After Le Havre we stayed together in the same mob, the Royal Army Service Corps, in a supply battalion at a depot up in Yorkshire near Catterick racecourse, until we were fit to go again.

As soon as we could march, we were shipped off to Greece to help out with the Italian invasion. I understand we coped pretty well with the Eyeties at first — our army, I mean — and then Jerry arrived to help out his ally, and we were in retreat again.

We regrouped and crossed to Crete just in time to get the order to retreat. Billy and I walked for two nights across Crete, one canteen of water between the two of us, and on the third night we were sucking the biscuit crumbs out of the linings of our trouser pockets. Dozens of us, probably hundreds, if you could see them, shuffled through the dark, many in pairs, one helping out the other who had gone lame, stopping sometimes to retie their boots or just to have a rest. One soldier was sitting by the roadside alongside his mate who was sleeping and he waved us down to get a mouthful of water for his friend. When we got close, we saw his friend was dead, and we told him to come along with us, but he only shook his head. He’d come to the end of the road. We saw two or three like that, stopped, waiting for Jerry to come along and take them prisoner, or shoot them. During the third night I lost Billy, and didn’t see him again until after the fourth race at Sandown, twenty years later.

Sandown was the one place where I was likely to bump into him, and if I hadn’t thought he had gone for good that night in Crete, “missing in action,” I might have had my antennae tuned in for an encounter. As it was, I first wondered where I had once seen that face, now ten feet away — perhaps in the paper, or on the telly, and then it became more personal, a neighbour perhaps, as he returned the look I was giving him and I tried to sort him out. And then who it was announced itself, still without a name until he spoke mine, and then it was Billy.

We collected our tea and confirmed by individual observation that each of us was on his own, and we walked over to a vacant table and sat down.

The way we were, you’d think we were two brothers, living in different parts of the world, not communicating much if at all over the years, come together at a funeral, say, arriving early before anyone else turned up, wondering where to start. “Why didn’t you write?” would be the first question, followed by, “Why didn’t you?”

We sipped our tea and waited to see who would find the right button.

“Thought you were a ghost at first,” he said. He didn’t smile.

“Twenty years,” I said, eventually. “Maybe I am.”

“Twenty-two.”

I don’t think he meant it as a challenge, though that’s what it sounded like.

But it was too soon to get into it. “Fancy anything for the next race?” I asked.

He looked at his newspaper, marked up before he left home, probably. “This one belongs to Piggott, I reckon,” he said.

I thought so, too. “Got your money on yet?”

He nodded.

“Wait here, then, while I put a bet on. I want to watch this one from the rail, so if we miss each other, I’ll meet you back here after the race.”

“How long should I wait?” He leaned back, watching me.

“What do you mean?” I asked. But I knew what he meant.

“You might get detained,” he said.

There was no mistaking his meaning now, but I wasn’t ready for it yet. “I’ll be here,” I said.

The crowd was thick that afternoon, so when I went back after the fifth, and again after the sixth, and there was no sign of him, I let it go. I knew I would see him again soon.

He was there at the next race meeting, two weeks later, waiting at the same table with his tea before the first race. I wondered if he had gone through the same process that I had. Missing him had been no accident. I’d gone back after the sixth race, all right, but I didn’t wait when he wasn’t there right away.

But not to go to the next meeting would have been unnatural for me, as would not buying a cup of tea before the first race to study the form with.

I said, “I did come back after the last race but there was no sign of you.”

“I picked the last winner and there was a lineup at the tote.”

“I always bet with the bookies on the last race. That way you get paid off quick and you don’t have to wait around.”

“That what you did?”

“I didn’t have a bet on the last. I just made sure you weren’t here, then I left.”

“I was here. You must have gone already.”

“I hung on for a few minutes.”

He waited to see if I was finished. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Another time. What do you fancy for the first?”

“Sunny Jim,” I said. “He got off to a bad start last time out, but he still only got beaten by a short head. I’ve been waiting for him to reappear.”

“Do you still transfer to Tattersall’s if you win the first?” he asked.

“Did I tell you that?”

“Your dad used to do it. Have a big bet on the first and if it comes in, buy yourself a seat in the stands. I always remembered that. You told me about it while we were in that ditch, the first night in Crete. We were waiting for it to get dark enough to make a move.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I do. I dozed off, but when I woke up you were still talking, about the times you’d watched the Derby, that sort of thing.”

“That was the idea, wasn’t it? Stay awake?”

“Until we realised that we should sleep in shifts so as to be ready for the night march.”

“Right. You come to every meeting here?”

“I will now. I worked up north for a long time. Leeds.”

“Doing what?”

“Commercial traveller. For Crosse & Blackwell’s. When I had enough seniority I put in for a transfer. I’m here for good now. But this is only the second time I’ve been to Sandown since the war.”

“You married?” I asked.

“Twice. First wife died of cancer. Angel, she was. Then I got lucky, found another angel two years ago. Friend of my first wife’s, actually. What about you?”

“Married once, then divorced. Nobody’s fault. We couldn’t get along. Fact is, we weren’t suited. But we still have a drink together, now and then.”

I found it very strange, catching up on the missing twenty years, and at the same time falling into our old way with each other immediately. In some ways, nothing had changed. He was wearing his hair longer, of course; we both were. And we were in civvies, which showed up the little differences which uniforms hide. He was one of those blokes who dress to disappear, who think if anyone notices what they are wearing then there’s something wrong. But I was still trying to impress women, as well as look good on the job. I worked for a travel agent in Kensington. That day I was wearing my new duffel coat, an Austrian loden coat, actually. Dark green.

The horses moved on to the course for the next race, and paraded in front of the stands. “You doing this one?” Billy asked.

“I haven’t found anything to fancy yet.”

“What about Last Call?”

“I’d noticed that. Might be a possibility.”

He had been doing what I was, what everybody does sometimes, not finding a horse he fancied, so falling back on the jockey on the grounds that good jockeys like good horses. Apart from that, it was just a matter of fancying a name. For some reason, Last Call, a useless twenty-to-one shot, had caught his eye. He stood up. “See you back here?”

It was a test again, a little challenge: Did I plan to come back after the race?

I felt in my watch pocket for the fiver I kept for emergencies. “Let’s have it each way,” I said, holding out the note.

He looked in his wallet to find a fiver to go with it. “We’re on,” he said, and disappeared towards the line of bookies.

While he was gone, I tried to pick my way across the minefield that lay between us, going over again in my mind the events of that night in Crete.

We had been walking for two nights, hiding from Stukas during the day as we made our way to the coast. We had lost touch with the rest of our unit when the retreat turned into a shambles. Billy and I weren’t part of the regular infantry; the Service Corps was what its name says, the backup brigade. We had rifles, of course, until we threw them away, but that wasn’t our function; our job was to move supplies — ammunition, equipment, and so on — to where they were needed, to get them to the troops who were doing the actual fighting. Billy and I were left in charge of a small dump of supplies — rations, mostly — protecting them from the local population. Then one morning everything went quiet and we waited for a messenger with some orders, but he never appeared. Then Billy pointed and said, “We’d better scarper if we can.” A couple of furlongs away, a Jerry bicycle platoon appeared, not coming towards us but crossing at right angles to us, four of them. Our front line had gone and these Jerries were the sign that we had been overrun.

When we had retreated in France, we knew where we were most of the time. You could hear and feel Jerry advancing as all round us our own soldiers were grouping and regrouping, fighting a rearguard action. This, now, was a bit eerie, just four cyclists in uniform looking as if they were out for a ride.

“Where’s our mob?” I wondered.

Billy said, “They haven’t passed us, and I don’t hear them in the distance. I reckon there’s been an order to cease fire and no one has told us.”

I thought Billy had probably guessed right. “Shall we chuck it in, then? Wait for them?” I pointed to the cyclists in the distance. “Standing orders says we have to destroy our weapons.”

Our Lee Enfield rifles leaned against the wall of the hut we were sleeping in. “That’s easy,” Billy said. He slid the bolts out of the rifles and threw them into the irrigation ditch. “What about the ammo?”

We gathered together the few hundred rounds of ammunition and the hand grenades and dropped them into the field latrine.

“Bayonets?” Billy asked.

I shook my head. “We might need a tin-opener. Bloody hell! Get your head down!”

One of the cyclists had returned and was now no more than fifty yards away. But it wasn’t us he was looking for, and he got back on his bike and rode off.

“I gather we’re not surrendering,” Billy said. “So what did we destroy the rifles for?”

“Makes us lighter on our feet,” I said. “No. This could go on for years with us in a Jerry prison camp living on black bread and potatoes, if we’re lucky. I’m for trying to get out of here. On our own.”

Billy nodded. “One last go.”

Two more helmets appeared across the field. “Now,” I said.

We made a run for it through the olive trees and then across a stony field, past a dead goat still tied to a post, running until we couldn’t see the cyclists, and then started to walk, south to the sea, we hoped.

We had water — it was standing orders to keep our bottles full at all times — and I’d hung on to my small pack with its bandages and iodine and an issue of biscuits. Billy had left his small pack behind when we ran, so I divided the biscuits between us. We stuffed the field dressings and the iodine into our pockets, and I threw away my pack and we started to walk.

At first, once we were well out of sight of the cyclists, it looked like plain sailing. We knew enough to go south, and it was easy to find footpaths. During that first morning, while we were still moving in daylight, we picked up one or two stragglers like ourselves, pairs of men, often one limping, leaning on the other, and the landscape started to fill up with us, all heading south. There are lots of stones in Crete and I was glad when we found ourselves on a paved road going our way, but now Billy said, “Let’s go round those olive trees.” He pulled me towards the grove on our right.

Normally our relationship was such that I was the leader and spokesman if one was necessary, so I was surprised at him asserting himself, but I let him lead us through the trees on a parallel course with the crowd on the road. Half an hour later we watched from a distance as a staff car appeared on the road, driven by a major. The truck stopped and the major jumped down to stand in the road. He had red hair and one of those little bristly moustaches. “We’re making a stand here,” he shouted. “We’ve got to create a diversion to give the regiment a chance to regroup. N.C.O.’s to the front.” It was an order.

We were N.C.O.’s. We’d got our lance-corporal’s stripes by surviving Le Havre.

A sergeant stepped forward. “Sir,” he said. “This mob couldn’t make a stand against a boy-scout troop and you are a bleeding lunatic who wants to die. I don’t.”

The major looked around for someone to arrest the sergeant, but just then three Stukas came out of the sky and raked the crowd with machine-gun fire; back and forth they went as we watched from the trees. The planes stayed in the sky, hovering like carrion birds, using anything that moved for target practice. We found an orchard to wait in until dark, when we could move unseen. That first day we ate the biscuit and drank some of the water.

That night we walked forward, avoiding the groups of stragglers who had started to reappear. We had nothing to eat the second day, and on the third day we tore out the linings of our pockets to suck out the biscuit crumbs. In the early hours we ran out of water and stopped to fill up the canteen at a well, but the water was putrid. At that point I didn’t want to go on. I’ve had varicose veins all my life and my legs wouldn’t stop hurting, and now my foot was paining me, too, and we had to have water soon. We sat down by the well, and Billy told me to stay there while he went for water. I never saw him again, until now.

While I waited for him to come back, I took off my boot, slid it off, rather, because it was full of blood. I dried it up as best I could with a field dressing. Once I’d got it tidied up, it wasn’t as bad as it looked, but a stone had got wedged under the ankle bone and cut a little hole where the blood was draining out. At the same time, an insect the size of a cockroach had got into my boot below the laces, and, as I surmised, tried to bite its way out. There were five or six marks where it had stung or bitten me, now all swollen up. I don’t know what kind of insect it was — a Greek insect — but I decided it wasn’t a scorpion or anything like that or I would be dead. Then, as I was dabbing at the bites, I must have pulled off a scab because a thin jet of blood shot out, strong enough to travel a yard before it hit the ground. I got frightened because I thought I’d opened an artery. I’ve found out since that with an artery you get a pumping action, but all I could think of was how to make a tourniquet. While I was panicking it stopped just with the pressure of my thumb and I found I could keep it stopped with a field dressing.

The next bit is hazy. I must have passed out or just fallen asleep and when I came round Billy had evidently been and gone. There was a small sheet of Greek newspaper beside me with a piece of grey bread and a lump of cheese, that soft white stuff. I ate a couple of mouthfuls, and then I passed out again. When I came round the second time, it had been more than an hour since Billy first went off and I tried to think what that meant. There wasn’t much I could do but wait. I knew the beach wasn’t far away, but I couldn’t get my boot back on, my foot had swollen up so. I sat there, not knowing what to prepare myself for, and along came a German motorcycle and sidecar. I stood up and put my hands on my head to show I was unarmed, but as they got close, even by moonlight I could see that the helmets weren’t German; in fact, these blokes were bareheaded.

“This the road to Sphakia?” the bloke in the sidecar shouted, in an accent that I knew but couldn’t place. One of ours, anyway.

“It is,” I said. “Want me to show you? I know the road well. I’m a transport driver. Been over it a dozen times.”

They looked at each other. “What happened to you?”

I identified the accent now. Australians, or New Zealanders. “Caught one in the foot,” I said. “Stuka. Shot up my engine. The rest of our patrol bought it. I was lucky.”

The driver twisted the grip, revving the engine. “We’ve lost our unit,” he said. “Seen any New Zealanders come by?”

“No,” I said. “But I’ll help you look.”

“You on your own?”

“I had a mate,” I said. “He went off to find some water, a couple of hours ago. He must have come back and gone off again. He left me this bread and cheese.”

“Which way did he go?”

I pointed.

“There be dragons,” he said. “You won’t see him again. The bastards are ahead of us and on both sides. This is the last road out.”

The man in the sidecar said, “Get in behind me. We’ll drop you off with the first ambulance we pass.”

I didn’t know much after that. They gave me some water, which I drank too quickly and brought up. Then I passed out. I remember lying on a stretcher; there was a rowboat, then a ship, then I woke up in a camp in the desert, where I spent the next two months getting fit again.

Now, drinking tea between races in Sandown Park (Last Call came seventh out of eight), listening to my story, Billy said, “Did you look for me in the camp?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I was afraid I would find you alive and in one piece.”

“You thought I’d left you there and gone ahead on my own?”

“I didn’t know, did I?”

He said, “Let me get a bet on this last race. Then let’s have a pint at the bar.”

I said, “The bar closes right after the race.”

“Then we can go over to the bleeding pub by the station, can’t we?”

I could see what he wanted, a chance to think, mostly. I thought I would give him fifteen minutes, enough time to collect his winnings and come and find me. He was back five minutes after the race. “No luck?” I asked.

He held up some notes. “Ten quid,” he said. “Paid for my afternoon.”

We turned and walked across the course towards the railway station. “We can do this another time,” I said.

“Unless you’re in a hurry, I’d like you to hear my story, too,” he said. “Been twenty-two years.”

The pub was nearly empty. We settled down in a corner with a couple of light ales, and he started in right away.

“About a quarter of a mile away from us there was what looked like an empty farmhouse, but I’d seen a shadow cross the yard. There was no one about when I reached the farmhouse. I turned the kitchen upside down looking for something to bring you back but all I could find was a crock of olives. I walked through every room and didn’t find anybody home, but I was sure I’d seen that shadow so I did the old trick of slamming a door, then sat down to wait. Soon the trapdoor I hadn’t noticed lifted itself from the kitchen floor and a head poked out, an old woman. I got my foot under the trapdoor and kicked it open, and the old woman started screaming, then blubbing, and there were a couple of kids down there, as well as the goats by the smell of it, and they all got into it. I made shushing noises and when she quietened down I pointed to my mouth and she passed up the bread and cheese I left you and a bottle of wine. Wine would have been a mistake in our condition, of course, but I couldn’t make her understand I wanted water, so I left with the bread and cheese, which I brought back to you, and I took off again with the canteen to find some water. Halfway back, I heard a commotion coming from the farmhouse and I went close enough to see a party of Jerries pushing the old woman and the kids into the yard. Then they set fire to the house. It was so bright I was afraid I would be seen, so I waited until the soldiers had gone, leaving the family to watch their home burn. I suppose, when it was cool enough, they could still go down to the cellar. I don’t know.

“I still didn’t have any water, but I’d been away a long time so I decided we’d have to manage on a few sips of wine, if we wanted to get away. Then, almost as soon as I turned to go, I nearly fell down the family’s well. I drew up a bucket and it was sweet and cold and freaking marvellous — I can still taste it — and I filled our canteen and headed back to you.”

I said, “And I was gone, of course.”

“Not quite. I saw them take you away. I was that close.”

“Saw who take me away?”

“The two Jerries with the motorbike. The ones I thought took you prisoner.”

“You thought?”

“Yeah. It was a German bike, I could tell that from the sound.”

“All right. What then?”

“How do you mean?”

“What did you do next?”

“I kept walking towards the coast. I got to Sphakia. I had to dodge about a bit because some keen types were assembling rearguards, like that arsehole major, using the odds and sods to cover the fighting troops. I was no use to them, having no gun, but I couldn’t see explaining that, so I left them to it. It took two days to get to the beach. But once I got there it was simple, a navy lifeboat came to the edge, someone shouted, ‘Last call for the Skylark,’ and someone hauled me over the side, and then we were climbing up a rope net into a destroyer, which made a run for it. I remember we had to go between two rocks and I saw the boat ahead of us turn over when the Stukas dive-bombed it, and the one after us went the same way, but I think we were just a bit too quick for them. Then I woke up in a camp in the desert, just like you. I was there for a month, made sergeant, and posted to Eritrea to fight the Eyeties. After that it was pretty cushy.”

“You didn’t come looking for me when you were in the camp?”

“Last time I saw you, you were on the back of a Jerry motorbike. Prisoner of war, like. Right?” He waited for my reaction.

“They weren’t Jerries—”

He cut me off. “By the time I got to the camp, I’d found out what really happened, and I didn’t see the point of looking for you. Let it go, I thought.”

“What? Let what go?”

He took his time about responding to that. Then, in that flat voice soldiers use when replying to a question from an officer, he said, “While I was on the beach waiting, wondering whether to give myself up when the Jerries arrived, because it looked as if the last boat had come and gone, I wondered if we’d find ourselves in the same batch of prisoners, you and me. That was when someone on the beach told me about seeing these New Zealanders on a Jerry motorbike.”

“So you knew I’d got away.”

“I knew you hadn’t waited around, yes. Not after they offered you a ride.”

“I thought you’d gone, left me with the bread and cheese, like.”

“That why you didn’t look me up, after the war, too? You knew where I lived.”

“You took me home once, when we had a three-day pass before we shipped out to Greece.”

“That’s right.”

“Seems clear now, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose it does, yeah.” He brushed a crumb off his tie. “I’ve thought about it every day for twenty-two years.”

“And?”

“I tried to keep an open mind.”

“Now you know. Right?”

“Now we both know,” he said.

“I suppose we do.”

“Another pint?” It was his turn.

“Not this time. When’s the next race meeting?”

“Here? Couple of weeks. Why did you think I would have gone without you?”

“My foot. I couldn’t walk. You would have been stuck with me.”

“I would never have done that.” He stood up.

“No.”

“What about the next meeting here? You coming?”

“I’ll look out for you.”

“I’ll do the same.”

We travelled back on the train to Clapham Junction together, not saying much, certainly nothing about Crete. I changed at Clapham Junction for East Croydon. He stayed on the train. I offered him a hand, which he shook without standing up. “Maybe Derby Day?” I offered. “Up on the downs?” It was something we’d promised each other we would do after the war.

“If I go, I’ll keep my eyes open for you,” he said.

I got out and the train started to move. I gave him a bit of a wave, and he nodded, and then he was gone.

I didn’t see him again. I didn’t actually stop going to Sandown altogether: There was no need for that. On the other hand, there was no great urge to bump into him again.

I’m an old man now, but I still turn the whole thing over in my mind, not every day, but often.

Copyright ©; 2005 by Eric Wright.