Gunner Kelly Page 8

  The Colonel was plainly worried about his unimpeachably reliable subordinate, notwithstanding that loyalty-to-the-death. And although that added to Benedikt’s confusion, so far as that was possible, it also fed his instinctive liking for the man: Colonel Butler was a leader out of the same mould as Papa’s idols.

  “I don’t know what he made of me, sir.” He came back to the original question. “But I was not the man he was waiting for—that I know.”

  “The man?” Colonel Butler forgot his worries. “The man?”

  “It could not have been a woman. He would not have come to look at me if I had been the wrong sex.” He stretched what he believed to its limits. “At the worst … he was not sure of me—that I was not doing what I was actually doing … Looking over the place, that is.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I was never alone, sir. From the moment I entered the Chase, there was always someone, I think, who was watching me.” He struggled with the concept. “At the road-block … and in the public house … But there was a man on the hillside—on the ridge—before that… And in the village, when I walked round it, there was this woman on a bicycle who seemed to follow us—”

  “Us?”

  Benedikt smiled. “There were these two little boys I met, on their racing bicycles—they showed me round … Before lunch they took me to the Roman villa, and afterwards they led me through the village, to the footpath which leads to the Duntisbury Rings—”

  Benje had been dismissive: “She’s just an old nosey-parker—you don’t want to take any notice of her.”

  She had been tall and thin, riding a tall and thin bicycle unbalanced by an immense wicker basket resting on her front mudguard. But she had been there behind them, off and on, until the second man had appeared.

  “—and after her there was another man—”

  The man with the gun couched under his arm, on the skyline.

  “That’s Old Levi—from the Almshouses. He lives on boiled sausages, Mum says—and boiled rabbits, when he can bag one, ‘cause there’re not many of them around … An’ he sleeps in his gumboots, Mum says … Because when they took him into the cottage hospital, when he had ‘flu, they had to cut them off his feet, to get him into bed—yrrrch!”

  But Old Levi—(who didn’t look particularly old, from the way he kept up with them; but everyone who wasn’t obviously young was old to Benje and Darren) but Old Levi had paced them, on the skyline and off it, all the way from Duntisbury Rings to Caesar’s Camp, and then down along the possible terrace of the Roman agger into the valley, to the sun-dappled pools where the stream idled between the trees—

  Another thought struck him, which dove-tailed beautifully with everything else he had said, like the good work of a master carpenter slotting together, yet much more frightening, and much more humiliatingly—

  “What’s the matter?” It was the Chief Inspector who had read his face more quickly.

  The little boys! thought Benedikt. The little clever boys, with their clever and insistent questions—?

  But he had clued himself to the answer, with his own remembrance of that village near Leipzig two years ago, when because of his stupidity the Russians and the East Germans had both been close behind him—inescapably close—with the women carrying their sheets off the line, down by another stream, and the children coming back from school, staring at him with huge eyes until the women had sent them about their business as he had slipped away into the trees—

  All he had to do was to reverse the situation—he had said as much himself: I’ve never been in a place like it, not even on the other side— to become an enemy, not a friend!

  But here in England—?

  Here in England, too! Yes!

  He looked at Chief Inspector Andrew, then at Colonel Butler. “I think I have been stupid, you know.”

  They both waited for the end-product of that conclusion.

  “It is not that I have given anything away. Perhaps quite the contrary … But I have nevertheless been stupid.”

  Suddenly he saw the little girl beside the water-splash, sitting on the footbridge in her grubby dress, and then ducking behind the phone-box. And then into it—

  “Yes … these two small boys, who accompanied me … not so little, but not big boys …”

  “Little boys?” Butler regarded him incredulously.

  “They attached themselves to me.” There had been no escape from them then, and there was no escape from them now. “I…I have experience with boys. I have nephews … and I help to run a youth club for the church, in the place where I live, when I am there.” The need for honesty outweighed the burden of his humiliation: in a de-briefing honesty was essential, anything less than the truth mediated against security. “I thought to use them—to ask questions which I could not so easily ask their elders.”

  “Yes?” The Special Branch man was there.

  “I thought I was cultivating them. But now I’m not sure that it wasn’t the other way round—that they were questioning me … And that they were watching me more closely than their elders could have done—that the woman, and the second man … they were the back-up, watching over the boys, rather than watching me.”

  “Yeah—yeah!!” Chief Inspector Andrew at least didn’t find it outrageous. “I’ve seen little kids look out for their elder brothers, on a job … Nothing like this, of course. But if you’ve got a bright kid …” He nodded at Butler.

  “God bless my soul!” The Colonel took a moment to adjust to the idea. “Children?”

  “These were clever children, sir.” Benedikt himself still couldn’t quite accept the little girl at the water-splash. “They were at… is it ‘secondary school’, you call it?”

  “Comprehensive? Grammar?” hazarded Andrew. “Public?”

  “It was named after a king of England. And they both learnt Latin.”

  “They still learn Latin at comprehensive schools, or some of them do,” said Andrew. “Thank God!”

  “They had scholarships—”

  “Never mind!” snapped Butler. “What you’re saying … what you are saying is … the whole village?” The adjustment still taxed him, too. “The children … the tractor driver—and the Land Rover driver … the woman on the bicycle, and the man with the shot-gun … ?”

  “The petrol-station attendant at the garage,” supplemented Andrew. “Him too. And the publican.”

  “And Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith.” The Colonel added to the roll-call. “And Audley.”

  Benedikt began to feel foolish. Behind the Iron Curtain was one thing, from the Elbe to the Vistula and along the Danube … But not in England, surely! Or … if in Toxteth and Brixton, maybe … not in Duntisbury Royal, anyway—

  Yet Colonel Butler was nodding at his Chief Inspector. “That could be it. Remember how she said ‘we’?‘ We really have a chance’?”

  Benedikt stopped feeling foolish. “A chance of what, sir?”

  Butler came back to him. “Let us get this absolutely straight, Captain. You believe, having been to Duntisbury Royal, that they are waiting for a man to arrive there?”

  “A man—or men, perhaps.” Benedikt nodded. “Or someone.”

  “With hostile intent?”

  He could only shrug. “I cannot tell that. But they had no flags out—no garlands of welcome. They wished to be warned of the approach of strangers, and they were concerned to identify such strangers.” In the end he had to commit himself. “What I am saying is … subjective, of course. Since you asked me to look there, I went there looking for something. And there was Audley …”

  “And there was Audley.” A corner of the Colonel’s mouth twitched. “And you would know that where Audley goes there is trouble—that would be on your computer.”

  “Yes.” No point in denying that, even though Audley had not operated in Germany for many years. He stared at the Colonel. “Hostile intent… yes. Or the intent may be with the stranger. So perhaps defensive intent, sir.”


  “And the whole village is involved in this … defensive intent?”

  That was still the sticking point. “I did not meet the whole village. It seems … unlikely.”

  “Unlikely?”

  “In England unlikely. There are places where it would not be unlikely—places where the government of the country is hated, and where strangers are feared and distrusted—where the laws are unjust and oppressive … And also in peasant communities, where there is still traditional leadership and strong feelings of local solidarity. In such places it is the objective of the regime to cut off such leadership and undermine such feelings, but sometimes such efforts have the opposite effect. But… .”

  “But?”

  “But I do not think I am describing England in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Colonel. That is the difficulty.”

  Colonel Butler nodded. “Yes. So it is possible that you have imagined all this?” He smiled suddenly. “Not altogether unreasonably … on the basis of your instructions, and the presence of David Audley … and also perhaps because of your own experiences elsewhere, eh?”

  “I did not imagine the searching of my baggage.”

  “No. But that could have been an ordinary thief—ordinary, but skilful—on the look-out for money and a good German camera. There’s a lot of that about in England in the last quarter of the twentieth century, I’m afraid, Captain.”

  Well: there was the challenge. And all the rest of what they had said could have been merely leading him on.

  “My car was parked very publicly, outside the public house, beside what passes for the main street in Duntisbury Royal. It would have had to have been a very skilful thief.” Benedikt played for time.

  “Oh, we’ve got a few of them.” Chief Inspector Andrew cocked his head ruefully. “They just don’t go around in cloth caps and striped jerseys any more, carrying bags labelled ‘Swag’.”

  No more time.

  He looked the Colonel in the eye. “No. Duntisbury Royal is different. There is something very wrong there. I cannot prove it, but I feel it.” His confidence strengthened as he spoke. “It is … what I feel is … it is a most beautiful and peaceful valley, where the people are kind and helpful—and I was glad to get out of it in one piece, Colonel.”

  They stared at each other for one more moment, then the Colonel turned to his colleague. “Aye … Well, show him the papers, Andrew. Sheet by sheet, if you please. He’s ready for them now.”

  The Special Branch man half-turned, to pick up a grey folder which had been hidden behind him within the jumble of stacked ecclesiastical furniture half-filling the cell. From the folder he passed a single sheet of closely-typed paper to Benedikt.

  Herbert George Maxwell was born in 1912, the son of Lieutenant-Colonel Julian Robert Maxwell MC, Grenadier Guards, who was killed in action in 1917 shortly after succeeding to command the 2nd/21st West Yorks at Ypres, and who as ‘Robert Julian’ was widely recognised as one of the most lyrical of the war poets while his military identity remained a close secret shared only with a few close friends.

  The Maxwell family has lived at Duntisbury Manor, in Duntisbury Chase, Dorset, since the Reformation. From the time of Marlborough the first-born son of the house without exception has served the sovereign as a soldier, invariably rising to command a distinguished regiment of cavalry or battalion of infantry, and often retiring from a higher command still.

  ‘Robert Julian’s’ poems were nothing exceptional in the Maxwells; most of the soldiers among them were considered by their colleagues to be ’brainy‘, and army gossip and gaps in their recorded service indicate a remarkable range of interests, from the collection of antiquities in Italy and Greece to friendship with Darwin and Huxley. At the same time, the Maxwells traditionally devoted much of their lives to the service of the family estate, of which the Manor was the centre and the surrounding farms of Duntisbury Chase the greater part, which pursuit was not in those days incompatible with a military career.

  Herbert Maxwell differed from his ancestors only in joining the Royal Artillery. After his father’s death he was brought up by his mother, but with help from her brother, Major William James Lonsdale, who had lost an arm commanding a troop of field-guns at Mons in 1914, and who looked after the estate at his brother-in-law’s request until 1917 and thereafter until his nephew’s majority, retiring to Bournemouth then, where he died in 1934. Herbert was educated, as his father had been, at Wellington, and, as his uncle had been, at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He was commissioned in 1932, serving subsequently with pack-guns on the North-West Frontier and later with the Home Forces, latterly as an instructor in Gunnery at the School of Artillery, Larkhill, not far from his beloved Duntisbury Chase. He was a devoted—

  The sheet ended there, and Benedikt looked up, to receive the next one.

  Husband? There had been no mention of wife and children yet—

  —student of symphonic music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and officers who served with him remember his books on musicology, his portable radiogramophone apparatus dismantled for carrying in steel cartridge-boxes, and his box of gramophone records.

  On the outbreak of war in 1939 Maxwell left the School of Artillery— the Commandant later remarked that he all but cut his way out of Larkhill—and returned to take command of a troop in his old regiment, which was one of the first artillery formations to go to France in that autumn, and one of the last to leave, via Dunkirk in June 1940. Awarded the Military Cross for gallant and above all effective conduct as one of his regiment’s Observation Post officers in actions from near Brussels all the way back to Ypres and then to Nieuport, he remarked of this period long afterwards that if there were a military manoeuvre more difficult to do well than a fighting retreat, he had yet to see it; and that while it was not a test he would choose, nothing revealed the quality of units and formations more clearly than did a lost battle—not even the debilitating stalemate they had endured between September and May.

  Soon after returning to England with the remnants of his troop, Maxwell was appointed General Staff Officer Grade III Liaison at Divisional Headquarters. He said of this period afterwards that it was his most entertaining and unrewarding military job: all he had to do was stand about pretending that he knew what was going on, until called upon to dash off on a powerful motor-cycle to talk to some senior officer who knew even less than he did.

  By the end of 1940 the division of which Maxwell’s regiment formed a part was back to full strength. But for many months the war was conducted without the help of what its officers and men considered to be the best regiment in the best division in the British Army. Early in 1943 the command of Maxwell’s troop fell vacant and he returned to it, however— which was correctly recognised by members of the regiment as a sure sign that their long wait would soon be over.

  The second sheet ended on that note of high expectation, but Benedikt was beginning to become confused again. This was all very interesting, the ancient history of the Maxwells—or, at least, it would have been very interesting to Papa, whose guns had been the best ones in his beloved Division Afrika zur besondern Verfügung—the immortal goth Light—and who, come to that, knew exactly how Major William James Lonsdale had felt at Mons, and afterwards. But where did it all fit into the modern history of Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith and Duntisbury Chase?

  In March the division sailed to Algeria, to join the First Army in its assault on Tunisia. Herbert Maxwell promptly fell ill with a bad case of dysentery, and so missed the spoiling attack by the Germans across the Goubellat Plain south-west of Tunis. The attack was launched with their customary élan and professionalism in an area where the British forces were not well deployed for defence. However, when the German armour made contact south of Medjez-el-Bab it had the misfortune not only of encountering two of the most capable of the British divisions (one arriving and the other about to depart), in a sector where a single brigade might have been expected, and there were not only more British regul
ar officers per square mile than anywhere else in North Africa, but also the new British 17-pdr anti-tank guns which matched the fearsome and much admired German 88s—

  Papa would like this—to be characterised as ‘fearsome and much-admired’ would make his day—his month—his year—

  —fearsome and much admired 88s. Even so, the Germans inflicted casualties, and when the uproar died down there were promotions. Herbert Maxwell thus returned afterwards to the command of a battery in another regiment.

  After the inevitable end in North Africa, where the struggle had become unequal, there was another distressing period of inaction for Major Maxwell, during which the division was called on to reinforce other formations, and when trained and experienced units seemed on the verge of disintegration. Maxwell nevertheless held his battery together, and was rewarded by transfer, sailing to Italy in February 1944 as Second-in-Command of his original regiment.

  The Italian front was static for a while, and the guns were in the comparatively quiet Garigliano sector. But in May the regiment formed part of the great concentration of artillery supporting the Eighth Army’s third and final attack across the Rapido, past the dominating height of the Montecassino Abbey. The crossing was difficult and casualties heavy among all ranks, but particularly among officers. More than one Commanding Officer of an artillery regiment was disabled by nebelwerfer fire on brigade headquarters—

  There had been a slow change in the narrative, Benedikt noted, as he reached for the next sheet. It had moved gradually from the generalised second-hand, with memories recalled ‘long afterwards’, to exact recollection which could only come from first-hand experience: the narrator had not been in Larkhill or Dunkirk, but he had crossed the Rapido under that nebelwerfer barrage—

  —at this time. Maxwell was promoted and transferred again, this time taking command of a regiment.

  The family record was unblemished, though with guns this time, rather than horsemen or sweating infantrymen. But what command was there for little fierce Becky, in her turn?