The Somme Stations

Ilkley Again

When I was half awake, but still under the gas, I looked through a gap in the curtains and saw, in the dawn light, Ilkley Moor, a good deal higher than it had been before, and moving towards this house, and towards me, closing in. It then came to me that this was a great bank of cloud, with a ragged top, but I was still not quite thinking straight, because it seemed very clear that this bank of cloud was called the Western Front, and so the Western Front was coming to Ilkley.

I shifted my position a little, and saw on the bedside table, alongside my pocket book, which was stuffed with letters of recent date from the Chief, a packet of cigarettes. But a smoke was just then out of the question. I knew that I had surfaced, so to speak, only briefly from my long sleep. But at the sight of the carton, I recollected the matter that had plagued me ever since I had come to ‘Ardenlea’, namely the lighting of a cigarette – heard, not seen – at a late stage on the journey back to Albert from Amiens, with Alfred Tinsley sitting before me, and the train crashing over points.

The uppermost parts of cloud were now breaking away from the Western Front, looking first like sea waves, and then floating clear. I was aware of a bad pain in my leg, but it was remote, more like a pain I might be reading about rather than actually suffering. It was time to go back to sleep.

On waking, or rather not quite waking, I saw there was only the Moor beyond the window – the Moor at its normal height, under a sky that threatened snow. The wife came into the room, and it was comical to watch her trying to make an entrance so quietly. She sat down on the visitor’s chair, and I could tell that she did not quite know what to do, so she rose up, and kissed me, then sat down again, looking slightly embarrassed. I liked the grey-blue of her dress, the darkness of her eyes, but it seemed best to contemplate them from a half-sleeping state. This was like a sort of deal made between myself and my bad leg. If I did not provoke it, then it did not provoke me.

The wife looked restless. She had more energy than was required for almost any situation in which she might find herself, and I was sure she must have had enough of this gloomy house and its silent, shaking men. She was eyeing me closely. Perhaps she thought I was shamming, not really asleep and so, just in case, she began to speak:

‘I have just spoken with Hawks, the surgeon, Jim, and he assured me that the operation had been a complete success.’

She looked at me uncertainly for a while. She didn’t know whether to carry on with her speech or not, but in the event she did so.

‘I told him, “That’s what you said that time”, and he replied, “Your husband was very unlucky in what happened to him in the previous operation.” I said, “He certainly was.”’

At this, the wife bit her lip, or not exactly that, but somehow gave me the idea by her expression that she regretted saying that to Hawks, and also regretted telling me that she had said it. She carried on:

‘He’s right this time though, Jim. I know he is.’

Another pause, then she said, ‘Well, I think I will go for crumpets at Betty’s Tea Rooms today! I’ve been meaning to do that ever since I came here!’

But it was forced jollity, and the next moment, she was almost in tears as she said, ‘There is a man called Thackeray coming to see you, I am not allowed to be here when he does. But Hawks will be with you,’ and she stood up in a flurry, with a rustling of her skirt, adding, ‘… because Hawks is an officer, and there must be an officer present for what the man Thackeray has to say.’

She turned to the door very noisily and was gone.

It might have been an hour later, or five hours later, that Thackeray was standing at the foot of my bed. Hawks was at the side of it, in the visitor’s chair. I recall, as though by way of preparation, Thackeray talking to Hawks, saying, ‘There are some good men in here’, by which I supposed he did not include the men from the New Armies. He explained to Hawks that the task he was about to perform might have been given over to another military policeman, only he – Thackeray – had had to escort an important German prisoner from France to the York Castle, where he was to be held from the duration of the war. So he was killing two birds with one stone. At this, he turned to face me, stood to attention, and started with the killing.

He asked me some quick questions, machine-like. The one he liked best, I could tell, was: ‘Why did you take hold of a German rifle after your train crashed at Flers?’I believe he enjoyed greatly both the question and my answer: ‘I’ve no clear notion.’ He then told me my name and my rank. I had thought he was already standing to attention, but he went up straighter still in order to say that he was charging me with the murder of Fusilier William Harvey… and he gave the date and the place, the place being Spurn Head. He asked if I understood and I heard myself saying yes. Thackeray looked at Hawks, and Hawks nodded on my behalf, but Thackeray wasn’t done yet, and he started all over again. He was now charging me with the murder of Fusilier Alfred Tinsley. Once more, he gave a date, and the place: Flers, France. He had instructed a member of the regimental police of my own battalion to guard me during my convalescence. I was to obey without hesitation his orders, and the instructions of the staff of ‘Ardenlea’. Presently, I would be visited by my counsel, a man supplied from the Army Legal Corps. I would, when fit enough, be removed to the military wing of Armley Gaol in Leeds, to await court martial. Thackeray then walked around to the side of the bed with a tremendous squeaking of boots that seemed to cause some pain to Hawks, handed me the charge sheet, and was gone.

Hawks remained behind, and removed the bandage from my leg. I saw the patch of iodine, and the bristling cat gut, like barbed wire, and I did not much care for the sight, so I distracted myself with talking in – no doubt – a dazed sort of way. I told Hawks that Thackeray had found a motive for me vis-à-vis the boy Harvey. I had arrested his father on York station. The prosecution had not been proceeded with, since Read – the father – had fallen severely ill before the matter could come to the police court. But word of the arrest had spread, and the disgrace stood. It was Thackeray’s belief that Harvey had come to know of it. It was also Thackeray’s belief, I explained to Hawks, that on the stormy night in Spurn, when I had been up late in the building called the Hope and Anchor, Harvey had picked a fight with me over this, and that we had come to blows on the sea wall. He – Thackeray – had found it telling that I had at no stage volunteered the information about my arrest of William Harvey’s natural father. Furthermore, I had admitted to having cut my knuckle on Spurn. I had said I had done this before the arrival of Harvey on the peninsula, and this Thackeray did not believe.

As to the second charge, this all rested – I explained to Hawks, as he re-bandaged my leg – on the fact of Tinsley having been shot and killed by a bullet from a German Mauser rifle. I had been discovered lying wounded from a shell with such a rifle close at hand. Inspection of the magazine showed that one bullet had been fired. An artillery man called Dobson – the one who had told me, as I lay wounded, that ‘the Control’ (Oliver Butler) had been instructed to hold the train back – had testified to having seen me point the rifle towards Tinsley, although he would not swear that I had fired at Tinsley. The evidence for this second charge was stronger than that for the first, but the two were connected, in that my motive for killing Tinsley was taken to be that he knew – and had let on that he knew – that I had done for Harvey on Spurn. He had, on the afternoon of his final day, asked Quinn how he might get into touch with Thackeray, and Thackeray believed that I had known of this.

Hawks had no doubt been told most of this already by Thackeray, and so he said nothing in response. He might have wondered how I’d got such a good idea of the case against me at this early stage. Well, I had pieced together the picture using the pointers given by the questions of Thackeray, my own guess-work, and from my correspondence with the Chief. Thackeray had quizzed the Chief about my arrest of the indecent Read. He – Thackeray – had told the Chief that charges were likely, and the Chief had evidently replied that, if brought, they would certainly be defeated, which reply would very likely have done my case more harm than good, diplomacy not being one of the Chief’s points.

My ‘guard’ was a Corporal Brewster, the one I’d thought might have been called Baxter of the two regimental police who’d politely questioned our section after the death of Harvey. He arrived with the snow, and slipped on the doorstep of ‘Ardenlea’ after ringing the bell. He began shamefaced, and so he continued. He had not been in France, but had been kept back as part of a something called the ‘Hull Dock Garrison’. Accordingly, most of the blokes in the house wouldn’t give him the time of day. They’d all heard of the charges against me, but it did not seem as though I was under a cloud. Inasmuch as the charges were believed – and I had no idea how far they were, since a gentlemanly reserve applied to discussion of them… Well, bad things happened on the front. All men who’d been ‘through it’ knew that, and quick judgements were to be resisted.

Brewster was rather stooped for a military policeman, as though perpetually ducking the shellfire that he’d never been subjected to. Having been cold-shouldered by all the blokes in the house, he came up to my room, and told me that he personally had nothing against me, and that I might move freely about the house on my crutches, and he would see his way clear to letting me roam the grounds once my leg had got a bit better.

For four days, I lay in bed. I wrote to the Chief saying I’d been charged, and he told me to expect a visit from himself at some point in the near future. On my first night downstairs, I sat in the library with my crutches by the side of my armchair and a packet of Virginians Select on my lap. There were a dozen of us in there, and we were watching a fellow from Leeds – name of Ross (although whether that was his first name or his last, I wasn’t sure) – who was an amateur magician, and who performed tricks with cigarettes. This was a species of war work. He toured the hospitals and convalescent homes entertaining the men. He had lost an eye at Mons, and so could not be accused of slacking, and he began by giving an account of how this happened. He then started in on his tricks. All of his audience smoked, so he was well away. He would take a man’s Woodbine, and put it into a packet of, say, Churchman’s, then hold out the packet, and the Woodbine would rise up. After he’d done this a couple of times, I noticed my guard, Brewster, watching from the doorway and grinning in his shamefaced way.

Ross would offer a cigarette from his own packet; he would then turn this packet around, and it would have become a box of matches. He performed a couple of other tricks, just as good, and he was going on very well indeed until he tried a bit of business with Anderson, who was very badly shellshocked. Well, Anderson could remove the cigarette from the packet as instructed; he was able to inspect it carefully, as also instructed, but the returning of the cigarette to the packet… that was quite beyond him owing to his shaking hand, and so the trick had to be abandoned. Ross seemed to lose heart after that, and he went off shortly afterwards.

Over the next two weeks I began to walk in the grounds, trying to master crutches along with all the other crocks, but my progress was evidently the fastest that Hawks had ever seen, and my target became the lower slopes of the snowy Moor, which lay directly beyond the gates of ‘Ardenlea’, and the white house up there, a place where folk would take spring water baths: it was called the White Wells, and seemed to have been assembled from the surplus snow all around.

The grounds of ‘Ardenlea’ received a fresh dusting most mornings, and a little ritual developed: Anderson and Birch (who was just as nervy as Anderson) would go out every morning and break the ice on the fish pond. They would always be watched by Major Dickinson, who was the most senior man in the place, and who propelled himself in a bath chair, being partly paralysed through shellshock – he didn’t believe he could move his legs. Breaking the ice, and so giving the fish what Major Dickinson called – it was a queer expression in the circumstances – a ‘dog’s chance’ of surviving was the highlight of the day for all three, and I had the idea that the job never took as long as they would have liked.

These three men would talk of a stranger who had been seen in the grounds lately. Dickinson (who was a bit nuts, shellshock aside) believed him to be after the fish, some of which were valuable, but the other two reported that he’d been seen looking up at the windows of the house. My own suspicion was that this man was looking for me. I knew he would not be friendly, and I wondered whether Brewster would find himself having to guard me from him. Brewster carried a gun, and the Chief in one of his letters had urged me to do likewise, for I’d told him of my expectation.

But I did not want to be guarded from my visitor, should he arrive, by the man Brewster, and I did not particularly want to shoot my visitor either. I wanted to talk to him, my aim being to confirm my suspicion about the cigarette lit on the train from Amiens. I wanted to draw him in, and then draw him out.

I began to encourage Brewster to walk with me in the frosted garden, and I would look up at the Moor, at the White Wells. ‘I’ve no hope of getting up there,’ I said. ‘But I might get halfway.’

The fish pond trio were going past us at that point, and I believe it was to get points with them that Brewster said, ‘Want to try? Don’t mind me. I can keep cases on you from here, if I want.’

But he didn’t want to, and the next day I got halfway to the White Wells on my own and, as far as I knew, unobserved from the house. Later that same day, the wife came, and then the man from the Army Legal Corps – my lawyer. This fellow’s name was Roberts. It was his second visit, and he told me he thought he could prove that the rifle with which I’d supposedly shot Tinsley hadn’t been fired for ages at the time of its discovery by my side.

The next morning, I offered to sign for Brewster the special bail undertaking that required me to keep to the house and grounds and that he had not got round to asking me to sign up to that point. He said, ‘We might amend it to include the path up to the Wells, or shall we just take it as read?’ He seemed as amiable as ever, but later on that morning, while walking past the office of the Matron, Oldfield, I heard him say to her, that if I made it up to the White Wells, it could be safely concluded that I was fit enough to go to gaol. Oldfield replied something to the effect she’d be glad to be shot of me.

That afternoon, I went all the way up to the White Wells in falling snow. The sky was the colour of… I would say the dirty white of a young swan – the colour of a signet – and it made a pleasant change to see something soft coming down from it. The white cottage that housed the Wells was closed, and the stone bench before it was covered in snow. I waited a while beside this bench, then returned to ‘Ardenlea’ when the cold began to hurt my new-set bone.

At four o’clock the next day, with darkness closing in, I cleared the snow off the bench, leant my crutches against it, lit a cigarette, and sat down. I surveyed the lights of Ilkley, which were somewhat subdued on account of the Zeppelin threat, giving the effect of many small points of gold under a purple sky. Presently, a man came across the Moor from my left, and sat down by me on the bench. It wasn’t the man I’d expected – not quite.

‘Some leave finally came through, then,’ I said to Oliver Butler.

‘Well, I’m not deserting, Jim,’ he said, and he took in the view for a while, before saying, ‘… sailed home a week ago… and it’s back to France tomorrow.’

I offered him a cigarette; he shook his head.

‘Well, you got to him in the end,’ he said. ‘I knew you would. He was questioned… let me see… the day before yesterday by your governor, Weatherill.’

‘That was on account of letters I’ve sent from here,’ I said, indicating the low lights of ‘Ardenlea’. ‘I put Chief Inspector Weatherill in the picture.’

‘You’re proud of the fact, and that does you credit, Jim. You’ve a brass neck… amongst other things.’

‘You gave us the green light against orders.’

‘Those orders were more confused than you might think, Jim. Remember, this is the British Army.’

‘It surprised me because it seemed to me at the time you ought to have let the boy live. Roy had overheard the conversation – most of it – that I’d had with Tinsley on the train back from Amiens, so you would have known that the kid was about to come clean over what happened on Spurn. Thackeray would have called off his investigation, and that’s what you’d been hoping for all along, given that the twins were always the likeliest suspects on the face of it. So you’d a reason to see Tinsley live; trouble was, you’d obviously been given a better reason to see him killed – him and me both, in fact. That’s why you gave us the green light to go along the dangerous stretch at Flers. What could that reason be? I revolved it all the way back in the hospital train, thought of everything I knew about Tinsley. Well, it didn’t amount to much. He was a railway nut… and then there was your friend.’

‘Not my friend really, Jim.’

‘Tinsley’s hero, Tom Shaw, bicycled into the engine shed over muddy lanes, yet he always kept clean. He lived in a place that had a railway connection to York. Naburn fitted the bill in both cases. And he looked a nasty bastard from his picture.’

‘You worked it all out from that?’

I shook my head.

‘Going over that chat between me and Tinsley on the train from Amiens, one sentence rang out clear. “He’s capable of anything, is Tom Shaw.” The train wasn’t going over points just then, you see, and it struck me – in recollection – that it had been going over points during every other part of our talk that touched on Shaw. So it seemed to me that Roy wouldn’t have heard those parts – which were all to do with how, if Shaw wanted to arrive early at a station, he’d just go ahead and do it. Tinsley was making out that he was bloody-minded as an engine man, not saying he was a killer. But that would have been lost to Roy in the jangling of the points. He’d have heard Tinsley’s account of the Spurn business – we’d run clear of the points by then – but all he would’ve picked up on the matter of Shaw was that Tinsley believed him capable of anything.’

In Ilkley, all the lights showing in the window of a mill went off in an instant. More snow was coming down.

‘Somebody struck a match just after Tinsley said that. It was Roy, and he was lighting up because he was worried. It was the first time you or him had heard of the connection between Tinsley and Shaw. It had just always fallen out that you were elsewhere when Tinsley mentioned him. It might have struck you, when you were getting off the train, that we’d been keeping the connection secret from you, having found out about the killing of Matthew Waddington. I mean to say, you knew I’d been curious about Naburn Lock. You probably knew I’d looked into what had gone on there, having seen the way you and your brothers reacted to seeing one of the little Somme stops named after it. And in Albert you’d seen me in conference with the Chief.’

Oliver Butler gave a kind of snort, and moved position on the bench. ‘So you didn’t know?’

‘Tinsley didn’t know what Shaw had done, and nor did I – not then: not on the train back from Amiens. I wasn’t sure that Shaw existed, and I didn’t know for certain until I wrote to the Chief from here asking him to look up him.’

Butler was removing an item from his greatcoat pocket.

‘You wanted to silence Tinsley and me,’ I said, seeing that it was a revolver he held, ‘because you thought we knew Tom Shaw had killed Matthew Waddington, about which you were wrong. But why would the matter be of any concern to you in the first place? Why would you fight Shaw’s battles? It could only be that you were involved… I don’t believe you personally had a hand in killing Waddington.’

‘Good of you to say so, Jim.’

‘Killing’s not really your way of going on.’

‘Well, we’ll see about that.’

‘You’ve got too much to lose.’

‘That’s debatable.’

‘I’m thinking of your wife.’

‘So am I, Jim.’

‘So it must have been your brothers.’

Butler inspected the gun – a revolver; he set it on his lap.

‘They’ll be questioned in due course,’ I said. ‘The Chief said he might get Thackeray on the job, only it’s a crime committed in civvy street. Shaw’s already let on to the Chief that he knew Andy and Roy. Pair of head cases, he calls them – makes out they had it in for Shaw for some reason. He’s starting to cough, no question. When the Chief puts the blocks on a fellow, that’s generally the result. They’ll swing at the end… all three.’

Some of this was true; some of it wasn’t, as I believed Butler knew. I couldn’t really claim the credit for what he came out with next…

‘Matthew Waddington owed Shaw money,’ said Butler, seeming to address one particular illuminated street corner in the town below. ‘Waddington was a tough customer. Shaw’s a little bloke, and he wanted back-up when he confronted him at the lock. He paid the boys a pound apiece… Well, it’s a lot of money to them.’

‘You pay those boys to do a job, they do it well. The Army found that out.’

‘Saved your life on July 1st,’ Butler put in.

‘True enough,’ I said. I’d forgotten about that – how the twins had saved my life by their digging.

‘Waddington’, Butler continued, ‘said Shaw would have to wait a little while for his money. Shaw said he wouldn’t wait. Waddington came at him, so Andy and Roy stepped in, just as I stepped in for you when Dawson came at you on Spurn.’

I’d forgotten about that as well.

‘Anyhow,’ I said. ‘It ended in a killing. And you were involved because you knew of it.’

That, I was sure, was why he and his brothers had enlisted: put distance between themselves and Shaw. But the mystery was… why all the panic among the three Butlers over Naburn Lock? They could just have denied everything.

I asked Butler, ‘Will you say all you’ve just told me in court?’

‘Say all what, Jim? I’ve said nothing.’

Silence for a space. Ilkley, I decided, was just the right size of town. It had trams, but I did not believe they were necessary.

‘You didn’t shoot Scholes on July 1st, did you?’

He held the revolver in his right hand now, weighing it.

‘Don’t be silly, Jim.’

The bloke was emerging with a sight more credit than I’d have thought possible.

‘Dawson told you he’d done it,’ I said, ‘… took the blame. Why didn’t you tell Thackeray?’

‘Thought of it, Jim, but I didn’t think I’d be believed. It’d only throw more suspicion my way.’

Silence for a space.

‘I never knew which way Thackeray would jump. He was – is – bloody loony. He might be thinking of bringing the charge against you, for all you know.’

I eyed Butler. He wasn’t putting on side. He didn’t know.

‘Thackeray’s been here,’ I said. ‘I’ve been charged with the murders… Harvey and Tinsley.’

‘What?’

Butler saw me as a man trying to charge a killer, not as a man being charged with killing.

‘I’m on a sort of special bail,’ I said. They’ll cart me off to Armley nick in a few days.’

‘How many days?’

I shrugged.

‘I knew they’d found you near a German rifle,’ said Butler, ‘but… Why would you kill Tinsley? How do they make it out?’

I gave him the theory. ‘I suppose I’ll tell the court martial what really happened on Spurn, but I’ve no evidence, and Tinsley’s not around to back me up, thanks to you and your fucking green light…’

‘Don’t talk rot, Jim.’

‘And I don’t suppose you’re going to pitch in and help.’

‘How?’

‘By saying your brother overheard Tinsley’s confession, of course, and told you of it directly.’

‘Jim,’ he lied, ‘I know nothing of what was said on that bloody train. Anyhow,’ he continued (which choice of word proved he was lying), ‘you’ve put me right in it by going after Shaw. I don’t owe you any favours. Quite the opposite, in fact.’

He stood up, turned and faced me, revolver in hand.

‘I can see the difficulty you were in right from the start,’ I said. ‘You were involved in one bit of business – at Naburn – where a bloke’s knocked about the head and put into water. You knew that investigation might be re-started at any minute. Then another comes up along the same lines… Somebody might see that the twins made a connection between them.’

Butler was eyeing me, and it was a direct look, not sidelong, as when Tinsley and I had rolled past him onto the dangerous stretch of line. He continued to hold the revolver in his right hand. The hand was gloved. His left hand, also gloved, he brought up to the revolver. He set back the hammer. As he did so, the finger of his glove became caught, nipped in the mechanism. With a look of irritation on his face that I was not meant to see, he pulled, and quite suddenly the left hand and glove came away from the gun, which he had continued to point at me all along. We were now back to square one. Well, not quite, because the hammer was now cocked. It was a single action gun, and we both awaited the single action – the pulling of the trigger, with Ilkley puffing away peacefully below us. I did not feel the cold in that moment, and nor I believe did Butler. Presently, he stepped forward and set the gun on the bench beside me.

As he walked away, I called after him, ‘You’ve told the man Shaw where I’m to be found, I suppose?’

No reply.

I called louder, ‘He’s been here already, creeping about in the garden!’ Again no reply. I reached for the gun, and carefully uncocked the hammer.

The gun – a service revolver – proved to be fully loaded. On returning to ‘Ardenlea’, I put it into the trunk in my room. The fact that Butler had left it for me meant he’d told Tom Shaw it was on my say-so that he was being questioned over the murder of Matthew Waddington; that I had found him out. It also meant that Butler had then regretted having told Shaw this and was charitably equipping me for what was to come… or that he wanted me to do the job of dealing with Shaw… or that, having meant to do for me himself, and having funked it, he couldn’t stand the sight of the thing, or… I gave it up.

The end result anyhow was that he was leaving things in the balance, as he had at Flers. He would assist a man’s fate, but he wouldn’t become it.

The next day, I received a parcel, forwarded from Old Man Wright, the clerk in the police office at York station. Inside it was a letter from Mrs Tinsley, of Albemarle Road, York, and five years’ worth of Railway Magazines. The numbers for 1911 to 1914 were bound in red cloth with gold lettering. The ones for 1915 came loose. November 1915 was in the envelope in which Mrs Tinsley had received it from the back numbers department of the Railway Magazine offices in London, and she explained that she’d sent off for it to make good the missing number. There was a good deal in the letter about what a tremendous chap I was, according to the letters Tinsley had sent home.

Tinsley had been only a kid but he’d had a philosophy of life, which said that you ought not to try and avoid trouble, but should put yourself in its way – only then did you deserve whatever good things might occur in your life. It was a philosophy I admired, and it was for this reason that I left the revolver in the bottom of the trunk while continuing with my programme of walking the Moor.

Or it might be that I was suffering ‘a depression’ – a condition much talked of among the soldiers of ‘Ardenlea’.

‘Ardenlea’,

Ilkley,

Yorkshire.

November 4th, 1916

Dearest Lillian,

I’m sorry not to have been back for the children last night. There has been another drama here, in the place where ‘life passes in a pleasant dream’ (you will remember).

I arrived at mid-afternoon yesterday, to be told by the Matron that Jim was out on the Moor – and this in the falling snow. I went straight out there myself. It was becoming rapidly dark, but I saw Jim progressing slowly on his crutches. He was halfway up towards the bathing place that sits on the lower Moor here. I then… I then saw what appeared to be a scene from a play or a film – a scene from one of the ‘Westerns’ that Jim takes me to at the Electric Palace, and the world of this drama was black and white, with small black figures against the snow, just as the world of the films or bioscopes is black and white.

I watched a small man I did not know (he was just a shadow to me, but I could see he was small, and very fit) making quickly towards a small man that I did know, namely Jim. The first man had his arm held out, as though pointing at Jim and accusing him… only it was a gun that he held, and I thought: this man means to shoot my husband, and I found myself thinking that this was extremely bad manners, and that I would on no account stand for it. I made a move in the direction of the man, and then I saw the flame as he fired the gun. With the stage melodramas, and in the Westerns, you hear the bang but you do not see this great leap of orange flame, and it shocked me so that I called out some wild words I cannot now recollect.

And yet it was as though my Jim did not know his part in the play or the film, for he remained upright, and it was the man with the gun who had fallen at the very moment of firing. It was then that I saw a third man on the Moor: Weatherill, the Chief Inspector. He had shot the man who had fired at Jim.

He – Jim’s Chief – was making slowly towards Jim with his own gun carried loosely, while I ran pell-mell in the same direction, and some of the fitter men from the house came streaming up the hill after me, having heard the shot. The faster I moved, the slower the man Weatherill did, and I saw him come to a stop in the falling snow, and light a cigar.

The first small man – the stranger – had completely missed Jim, but had been terribly wounded by Weatherill’s shot. He was carried into the house, and when I saw him in the light I realised that his coat was quite soaked in blood, so that when they took it off him, and lay it down on the floor of the hall, the blood continued to flow from it, just as it was flowing from the man himself.

Oldfield, the Matron, telephoned through to the hospital for an ambulance as Weatherill screamed questions at the man, who was obviously in agony. I saw on the floor a paper that had dropped from his coat. It was half covered in blood, but I could make out that it was a certificate from the railway company addressed to ‘Thomas Shaw, Engine Driver’. In spite of the blood, I caught it up, and did not know whether to give it to the shot man, or to Weatherill, or to Jim. In the event, I gave it to Jim. It began, ‘You are hereby informed that your services are required in connection with the working of the railway. You will not, therefore, at present be required to join the army…’

Jim and Weatherill then left with the man in the ambulance. Jim’s guard here, Brewster (I have told you of him before), was quite happy to let Jim go, and it is clear that what this man Shaw has to say – if anything, for he seemed hardly capable of speech – could have an important bearing on Jim’s case.

Not much else is clear, I’m afraid.

I will write to you again tomorrow, dear.

You will of course not mention a word of this to the children.

With love,

Lydia.

In the library of ‘Ardenlea’, a fellow was giving a Gramophone Concert for the benefit of the invalids. The fellow – whose name I do not recollect – had a lot of gramophone records and a lot of very strong opinions about them. First of all, he liked all his gramophone records – there wasn’t a dud amongst them, evidently – and he was particularly keen on the symphonies among them. The symphony was the highest expression of the musical art. He had just given part of ‘something new from Elgar’, with whom he was on terms of the closest friendship, or so you would have thought from his talk. At the end of it, he lifted the needle and said, ‘Well, that’s woken you all up.’ But it hadn’t. The two men nearest the fire – two Marines, late of the Chief Mechanical Engineers’ Office at York, who’d been shelled and badly burned in the same armoured car – were fast asleep, in spite of all the loud parts.

But then it was a very good and soothing fire that was burning in the library.

The symphony man was now taking out a record by Brahms. He blew the dust off all his records before playing them, even though there was quite obviously no speck of dust on them.

‘Now Brahms, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘was German.’

‘Poor show,’ said Major Dickinson, but he did not wheel himself out of the library, which he very easily might have done. In fact, he and the record man nodded at each other, just as though this little exchange had gone perfectly to plan.

The man put the needle down on the record, and sat in the chair he had placed next to the gramophone. He bent his head as the music started, as he always did, out of respect to the composer, as I supposed. But I did not care for Brahms, who was even keener on the quiet-then-suddenly-loud business than Elgar. The man’s music seemed to go with clattering of one of the nurses as she came in with the cocoa, and it reminded me that a library ought to be silent.

I lit another cigarette and removed myself mentally from the library…

… That morning, the wife had come into my room with her portmanteau in her hand, and an opened envelope tucked into the belt of her skirt, and I could see it was an army envelope. ‘Sorry for opening this,’ she said, being not in the least sorry.

She held the envelope over the counterpane of the bed, upended it, and three little cloth squares fell out directly. The letter floated down a moment later. Well, the pieces of cloth were diamond-shaped rather than square, and I showed the wife how they would fix onto a tunic sleeve.

‘Captain Stringer,’ she said, and she stood back, marvelling at me.

‘A field commission,’ I said, ‘they’re pretty rare.’

‘As an officer,’ said the wife, ‘if you came into the soldiers’ buffet at the station and had cakes with your tea on a Sunday afternoon, you’d have the silver service.’

‘That’s a big if,’ I said.

Leaning suddenly forward, she said, ‘What on earth did you do to deserve it?’

‘Search me,’ I said.

‘It’s all very well to be modest,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think you should be saying things like “Search me”. Not as a captain.’

In fact, I knew. This was the doing of Muir, the officer with the notebook. He had observed – and noted – my rescue of the train and its load of shells from the German bombardment. I’d saved a pretty big bang there. Or rather, Tinsley had, with my assistance.

The wife said, ‘Today, Harry gives a talk on the book – in front of the whole school.’

‘The Count of Monte Cristo? Will he talk about the book or the hole in the book?’

‘Both. And about how it saved your life… which he believes it did, at any rate.’

My tale about the book had never really ‘taken’ with the wife.

She caught up her portmanteau. She was leaving ‘Ardenlea’ for good, and I would soon be doing likewise…

In the library, the nurse was continuing with her clattering, in that she was going around the room closing the curtains, and so concealing the total blackness beyond. In fact, it was probably snowing. The stuff had been coming down for days – fast and silent, a mysterious but generous offering. It was also snowing at the Burton Dump, Oamer had written to tell me, in a note that congratulated me on my commission. The push was now on for a spot called Beaumont Hamel, which was a little way to the north, requiring new branches from the existing ‘main line’.

Brahms was not being very well received. One of the Marines – Howell – had set down his cocoa and gone over to the shelf where the bound volumes of Punch were kept. The record man took the hint, and said that by way of closing his programme of music he would give us a rest from crashing and banging (well, he didn’t quite put it like that), and would play us ‘one of the Nocturnes by Debussy’. This was not a symphony, which suited me, and Debussy was French, which suited Major Dickinson. Nocturne meant ‘of the night’ – my French was up to that much – and the record man explained that this particular piece was called by a word I can’t recall that meant ‘Clouds’.

Night was the thing, though. William Harvey had died at night, and we had run our trains at night. (The first day of the Somme battle had been conducted in broad daylight, but that to my mind had been a mad exception in every way.) I thought of the war and of death in general as taking place at night.

I figured the man Shaw, dying at midnight in a room full of policemen at the Ilkley hospital. (Word had spread fast among the coppers of Ilkley, and they’d all come for a look at a killer.) The last thing he would have seen, I calculated, was the thin shaving of moon that had moved into position above the one window in that place. After he’d died, the Chief had drawn the blind, and I had imagined the moon sailing on to another window, rather put out at this rudeness. Why the Chief had drawn the blind I couldn’t have said. Out of respect for Shaw? Well, he had practically shouted the man to death with his questions. But the confession had been obtained.

There had been, as Oliver Butler had told me, a fight over money at Naburn Lock. (Well, the war itself was just the same thing when you came to think about it.) Shaw had tied the brothers in by paying them another pound – on top of the one they’d already earned – to sign two papers on which he’d set out what had happened. (They could sign their names, after a fashion, and I thought of the scrawl next to the hoops board in the Hope and Anchor.)

And this was why Oliver Butler had gone all out to cover up the story of Naburn Lock: it could not be denied.

I had then stepped in, and done a bit of shouting of my own, in order to secure the information I needed to put myself in the clear, and in due course I had got it. Shaw said that Oliver Butler had told him the true story of events on Spurn – the one overheard from Tinsley by Roy Butler on the train from Amiens – and he repeated this for the benefit of all the coppers. Of course, this had been of only incidental interest to Shaw and the Butlers. Their only concern was that Tinsley and I had apparently known that Shaw was a killer.

Shaw had come after me so as to remove a witness. It was a lost cause, as he admitted, since he had already been questioned by the Chief, and was in line to be charged. But he was a violent sort, and that was all about it. Towards the end, Shaw said that if we let him go, he’d enlist the next day, which took me right back to the deal the Chief had made with Bernie Dawson at the start of it all. But Shaw was going into delirium. His next idea was a better one: being a Catholic, he asked for a priest. But he pegged out before any of the Ilkley coppers could lay hands on one.

Over opposite me in the library, Howell had laid the volume of Punch aside. He was listening to the music: the Nocturne of Debussy. We all were. It called to mind the gradual spreading of night, and somehow the rumbling movement of machinery in that night. I pictured Burton Dump, and the materiel train from Acheux reversing without warning and with no proper illumination, having just been unloaded. Oliver Butler had evidently been crossing the tracks with a new sort of field telephone in his hand, studying the thing and not paying proper attention to his surroundings. The confession of Tom Shaw had put him right in it, but now he was right out of it – gone off into the night. What would happen to his brothers remained to be seen. Two days after learning of Oliver Butler’s death, I had been informed by telegram that a – or possibly the – Deputy Judge Advocate General of the Army Legal Corps had authorised the dropping of the charges against me. Of course, I would have preferred to hear the words from Thackeray himself.

The record man was now blowing the dust off another record – a second Nocturne by Debussy. This – in site of being another night piece – was more cheerful, and as it began, the fellow asked us to imagine ‘all the excitement of young people dancing at a fairground’.

I sat back in my chair and tried my best.