Murder in the Museum

Chapter Forty-Three

The story that Laurence Hawker’s researches unearthed was a grim one, and a tribute to the strength of will of one man, Felix Chadleigh. He it was who had masterminded a cover-up of enormous proportions, who had forced the complicity in the subterfuge of one of his closest friends, Lieutenant Hugo Strider, and of his entire family, stretching down for generations beyond his death.

It was the power of Felix Chadleigh’s personality that had turned Belinda Chadleigh into a murderer, and blighted the entire life of his great-grandson, Graham Chadleigh-Bewes.

Graham Chadleigh was at the heart of it, Graham Chadleigh the golden boy, killed, as everyone knew, on 26 October 1917 at Passchendaele within days of arriving on the continent. He was the hero celebrated in ‘Threnody for the Lost’, his brother’s most famous poem.

It was the date of that poem’s publication which got Laurence Hawker thinking. Vases of Dead Flowers came out in 1935 and, though the ‘Threnody’ might have been written some time before that, it still seemed an odd time for war poetry.

And it was only a year or so before that Hugo Strider had been writing letters of impassioned guilt to his Catholic confidant, Father Gerard Hidebourne. In one of them he’d referred to a ‘vow he’d made to F’, and in another he wrote:

Do something about what, Laurence Hawker wondered. What could Esmond do? Well, he was a writer. He could write something. If there was some cloud over the memory of his brother, what better way to dissipate it than by writing a celebration with the power of ‘Threnody for the Lost’

But what was the cloud over Graham Chadleigh? Hugo Strider had spoken of his guilt over his ‘involvement’ in the boy’s death. Miss Hidebourne had even hinted the Lieutenant might have been responsible for the death, murdering his junior in the hell of Passchendaele.

But that didn’t fit. Whatever Lieutenant Strider had done, it was something Felix Chadleigh had known about, possibly even forced him into. And what kind of man would offer a home for life to someone he knew to be the murderer of his precious son?

Laurence Hawker then wondered whether the cloud hung over the boy himself, whether Graham Chadleigh had committed murder. The only candidate as victim was Pat Heggarty, the boy who had apparently run away to avoid conscription. If it could be proved that the body unearthed in the Bracketts kitchen garden had belonged to Pat Heggarty . . . But it hadn’t been proved, and the police were, as ever, reticent in spreading the results of their forensic investigations.

Still, Laurence now had a thread to follow, and follow it he did, through the piles of dusty papers (which didn’t do his cough any good at all). And eventually he found what he was looking for.

The first clue appeared in the document that Carole had looked at in the secret cell beneath the Priest’s Hole. It was definitely in Esmond’s handwriting and it began: ‘I’m writing to you at the request of my commanding officer who had a request from Lieutenant Strider for anyone who witnessed what happened to his men . . .’

Laurence knew he’d read those words before, and it didn’t take long to uncover the photocopies which Graham Chadleigh-Bewes had prepared for Professor Marla Teischbaum. There was exactly the same text, though now written in the uneducated hand of a common soldier. J. T. Hodges (Private).

Yet Esmond Chadleigh’s version was full of changes and crossings-out. In fact, his had been written before the soldier’s letter. In other words, he had faked an eye-witness account of his brother’s death.

With this doubt sown in his mind, Laurence Hawker cast a sceptical eye over some of the other documentation of Graham Chadleigh’s time at the Front. And, though some of the accounts from fellow-soldiers had no rough drafts by Esmond, a sufficient number did to cast doubt on his brother’s ever having been at Passchendaele.

Supposing Lieutenant Strider had supported that subterfuge, had lied about the boy’s presence by his side in battle . . . then that surely would have justified his later paroxysms of guilt.

So if Graham Chadleigh wasn’t on the Ypres Salient in October 1917, where was he?

Laurence Hawker found the truth in two devastating documents.

The first was a letter written to Esmond by his mother in 1921. He was then an undergraduate at Oxford and apparently worrying about work pressures.

So, thought Laurence Hawker, that was it. Someone should have realized, from the fact that Graham Chadleigh’s service revolver stayed at Bracketts. If he had been so thoroughly blown up at Passchendaele that no trace of his body was found, then what were the chances of his gun turning up?

Everything else fitted, though. There was no place for cowards in any household run by Felix Chadleigh. No son of his could be known to have ducked out of his duty to King and Country in such a shabby way.

There was the religious dimension too. For a Catholic, suicide is the ultimate sin. The boy’s body must have been secretly buried, without benefit of any funeral rite, in the kitchen garden, there to stay for more than eighty years, until accidentally uncovered by the spade of Jonny Tyson.

For his father, the reality of what Graham Chadleigh had done was too appalling ever to be made public. An alternative, more pleasing, truth would have to be invented.

So Felix Chadleigh had invented it. And by God only knew what amount of bullying and persuasion, he had forced his family and friend to endorse that new truth.

There was one document Laurence Hawker found more chilling than all the others. It was written in 1919 to his wife by Felix Chadleigh, when he was away from Bracketts shooting in Scotland. The part that shocked Laurence read as follows: