Authors: Bill Aitken
The villages of Bishopsbourne and Kingston slid past as their car bounced along at speed. Eventually, a large gate appeared on the right, barred by a huge farmer’s waggon. Two serious-looking men were standing hidden behind the flanking pillars. They scrutinised the passes of the driver and, while one pushed the gates inward, the other grabbed the bridles of the Shires and pulled the cart out of the way just far enough to allow the cars to pass through. Hubert heard one of the horses stamp heavily as it helped reposition the barrier as soon as the Rolls had moved off. They continued down the winding road that led to the bottom of the shallow valley and the Hall beyond.
Moments later he found himself in the main drawing room of Broome House, being welcomed by a couple of large crackling fires. Although the day had been warm, the valley was in shadow and still had the chill of lingering spring. He looked around, wondering why Kitchener had never fitted electricity, or even gas.
Thompson, on the other hand, set things in motion without delay. All daytime staff who had been in attendance at the time of the shooting had been detained in the house and were waiting in the main kitchen area. Hubert could see the Commissioner was a man on a mission – it had been
his
people who had failed to preserve Kitchener's life and he’d want to find out quickly what went wrong. Looking over at Fitzgerald and remembering his reaction at being introduced to Thompson, it was clear the former wanted blood but was biding his time.
Thompson turned to Kell, who was warming himself in front of the fire, looking at an unfinished coat of arms. It had been drawn in charcoal and chalk on the centrepiece of one of the large granite mantelpieces. “I'm off to question MacLaughlin. He was supposed to be in charge of Kitchener's security detail. It might be best if you were to begin with the domestic staff. See what you can find out. None of the house staff were in the building last night because of the work going on so the head gardener sounds like a good bet to start with. At any rate, we'd better push on. This is going to take most of the day – and probably well into the evening."
Kell turned from the fire and caught sight of Hubert, standing at ease near one of the windows. “Hubert? Are you quite well?”
Fitzgerald turned to look at Hubert and noticed the tell-tale pallor and shallow chest movement caused by exposure to chlorine gas. “Belgium, Hubert?” he asked, gently.
“Yes, sir. I was invalided out from the return match at Ypres last year.” He had no intention of going into details. Whoever said that time was a healer clearly hadn’t served in the trenches up to his eyeballs in filth. The noise, the crying, the gas were still too raw to be a subject of casual conversation for a country drawing room. Oddly enough, he sensed that Fitzgerald had no desire to discuss it either – something he had noticed in officers, particularly senior ones, who had never experienced trench warfare at close quarters – a strange sort of shame at being miles away from a type of conflict they just didn’t understand.
He suppressed a cough that threatened to send him into another racking fit. ‘Dry land drowning’, it was called, where damaged lungs wept fluids that ended in violent coughing spasms. He hated the weakness it brought and the knowledge that his life was inevitably shortened. Exactly how long he had was anyone’s guess, but one thing was for sure –
he
wouldn’t be seeing any telegrams from the King.
“I wonder if I might just go and splash my face a little?”
Kell gestured at a double set of doors. “Yes, of course.”
**********
Fitzgerald rang for the butler to call for Dudeney the gardener. A few minutes later, Kell opened the door in response to a soft knock, and ushered in an old man who looked to be in his seventies. The visitor insinuated himself into the room, slicking down his thin white hair and ducking his head to Fitzgerald.
"Ah, Dudeney, come over here. I must ask you a few questions concerning the dreadful events of today,” said Fitzgerald in a tone he reserved for servants and junior officers.
Kell raised a laconic eyebrow. "If you please, Colonel, allow
me
to conduct this investigation."
For a moment, there was a strained silence in the room, underlined by a sibilant wheezing from Kell – like Hubert, the journey in the damp air had done him no good. Fitzgerald nodded abruptly and sat down, allowing Kell to turn his attention back to Dudeney.
"Sit yourself down, Mr Dudeney – over here. My name is Kell, Major Kell. Colonel Fitzgerald, you already know, of course. Now, I’m sorry to say that I’m going to ask you to think back over everything that took place here, this morning."
Dudeney turned his rheumy eyes to the fire. “We still can’t believe it, sir, if you know what I mean. His Lordship being killed like that – murdered in his own home.” The old man looked tearfully up at the standing Kell. “And I think it might’ve been all my fault,” he said.
**********
Hubert jerked back to the present. For a brief moment, he stared without comprehension at the sink he was leaning on and then stood up, sweating, as he realised he was
not
gasping his last in the glutinous mud of the Ypres Salient. Flashbacks were likely to remain part of his life for a while – ‘just the mind struggling to come to terms with memory,’ they had said – but this was the first time since the beginning of the year and it was a shock he could happily have done without. It was as good as a doctor’s note telling him he still had a long way to go. Swaying a little, he unpinned his uniform shirt collar, loosened the tie and washed the sweat off his face.
He growled at his pale reflection in the mirror. “Big girl.”
He stumbled back into the corridor, adjusting his uniform, and smiled at the sight of the woman waiting for him, holding half a dozen buff folders tightly to her chest. It was Kathleen Sissmore, a pretty 18-year old clerk who had just joined MI5 and was, unaccountably, called Jane by everyone. “You didn’t sound too good in there, Chris. Do you want me to get a doctor?”
Hubert laughed in spite of himself – her painfully upper-class English accent always brought out the colonial in him – and she really was very sweet to worry. It seemed that
all
the secretaries and most of the Registry girls were somehow related to officers of the Army or Navy. That was how MI5 worked – word of mouth, a whisper in the ear and suddenly a post would be filled. In his more sardonic moments, he sneeringly called it ‘enlightened nepotism’ but it did seem to work. He, for one, could hardly complain. If it hadn’t been for his father using his influence to lobby the High Commission back home in Canada, he’d have been invalided out of uniform at the end of last year. Instead, here he was – working for MI5 in London as some sort of high-level dogsbody. That’s what he liked to tell himself. In fact, he was a key member of Section G(a) – the department charged with the investigation of espionage and suspected persons.
“No, I’m fine, Jane. Don’t cluck around me.” He beamed at her to remove any offence. “Anyway, what are you doing down here? You should be back in the Registry with all the other Harpies.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “Major Kell wanted administrative support with him and sent me down ahead of you. I had someone hammering on my mother’s door at seven this morning.” Her mouth trembled despite a valiant effort not to cry. “It’s just so …
awful
.”
“It’s all of that. The question is ‘what are we going to do about it’.” He coughed, almost retching.
“You’ve come back to work too soon, Chris. Yes, I know,” she said archly, holding up her hand to forestall his reply, “you’d have been sent back home to manage your father’s hotels and what-not. You would have hated it and gone round the bend in no time.” She smiled, sadness in her eyes. “But that would have been better than gasping your last in England, one breath at a time.”
“Hated it? It's
hate
that keeps me going, Jane – I just hate them,” he sighed, leaning back against the cloakroom door.
“
Hate
them – who?”
“Who? The Hun. Who else?” He brooded for a moment, and then grinned at her. “It’s difficult for you English roses to understand,” he said, acknowledging her stage-curtsey. “But people like my lot are sort of Gallic mongrels. I’m part French-Swiss and part French-Canadian. Both sides of me hate what they’re doing in France and Belgium. That’s why I dropped out of business school in Ottowa the minute the balloon went up.” He chuckled at the brief memory. “My old man was mad as a snake. God, was he mad!”
“Whereas now you’re twenty-four years old and your lungs are so badly damaged you can’t walk up a flight of steps without collapsing. You’ve done enough, Chris.”
“Well, I clung to life at Pops. Now I’m clinging to my uniform. Anyway – look at Kell. He’s Director of all he surveys and he’s asthmatic as a vicar’s wife.”
“Pops?”
“Sorry – Poperinghe – the casualty clearing station outside Ypres. That’s where most of us ended up. I had an engaging couple of weeks there before being shipped back.”
“Chris,” she said.
“I’m fine. Honestly.” Changing the subject, he jerked a thumb towards the drawing room and lowered his voice. “What do you know about this Thompson chap? Know him well?”
“Not particularly. But you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff he’s done.” She leaned forward in confidence. “He was actually the Prime Minister of Tonga at one point! Can you believe it?”
“You’re kidding me – right?”
“No, I swear …”
Interesting.” He thought for a moment about how impartial Thompson’s ‘investigation’ could possibly be and pushed himself off the door, saying, “Well, anyway, I’d better get back in there with Kell and Fitzgerald.”
**********
Hubert walked back in to see an old man twisting his cap in an agony of despair.
Kell turned at the sound of the door closing. “Ah, Hubert, hope you’re feeling a little better? Mr Dudeney here is the Head Gardener. He thinks he may have played a part in the tragedy.”
Hubert smiled at the thought of the inoffensive old man causing the death of his employer but Kell, more experienced perhaps, was reserving judgement in the absence of facts.
“So, why do you say that, Mr Dudeney?” Hubert asked.
“Well, I couldn’t find them, could I?
“Whom?”
“The two men.” Dudeney looked back at Kell with watery eyes and said, “His Lordship calls me over to the rose beds yesterday. Just before lunch it must have been. ‘Dudeney’, says he, ‘have we taken on any new men?’ Well, I says ‘No, my lord. In fact, we’ve had to let men go, for the War an’ all.’”
“And what did he say to that?”
“He says, ‘I’ve just seen two workmen I don’t recognise.’ So I says, ‘If you’ll point them out to me next time, your lordship, I’ll tell you who they are.’ And then he goes back to his roses. Proper beauties they are. His Lordship worked on them every minute he could. I remember the state of those beds before he bought the place ...”
Kell dragged him back to the moment. “Yes, I’m sure, Mr Dudeney but if we can get back to the question of these two mysterious men. Did Lord Kitchener describe them?”
"His lordship said that one of them was a little taller than me, so that would make him about five foot seven. He said he had thick black, curly hair. The other one was tall, perhaps about six foot, with brownish hair and a pock-marked face."
“What about clothes and so forth?”
“Never said nothing about that – just working men.”
"Well, never mind. Did you or His Lordship see them again?"
Dudeney dragged his gaze away from Kell and stared into the fire once more. “That’s just it, sir, I kept a weather eye open for them, so to speak, but one thing drives out another, you know how it is, and I just lost track o’ time. I was looking after the clearing of the flowerbeds along the top wall. We needed some bedding plants and young Jim was all busy with the raking, so I goes off to the potting shed to get them.”
Hubert was beginning to warm to the old man. His maternal grandfather had been the one to emigrate to Canada from Switzerland in the middle of the previous century. A proud, independent sort, he had wrested most of his 500 acre farm from virgin forest with his own hands. All that remained of him now were a few, stiff-looking cabinet portraits and the farm itself but, somehow, that was enough to tell you all you needed to know about him. Dudeney here had that sort of ‘feel’ but, clearly, events were beginning to prove a little too much for him. He walked over to a yew side table near the armchairs and poured a generous measure of brandy from one of the decanters. “Here you go, Mr Dudeney, have a drink of this. It’ll do you the power of good.”
Dudeney glanced at Fitzgerald and, receiving a peremptory nod, accepted the drink. After a few sips, he was ready to continue.
“Go on. What then, sir?” asked Hubert.
“Well, we never did see anything more of them and I never thought about it for the rest of the day.” He took another sip of his drink as the memory tightened his stomach. “Then, this morning, as I’m getting the tools together to do the borders around the back of the Hall, I hears all this commotion and banging on His Lordship’s bedroom just above where I was workin’. One of the tweenies sticks her head out to me from downstairs to say that they can’t wake him up. So, I gets my ladder and climbs up to his window. And that’s when I saw him." Dudeney looked at Hubert with a glint of fire in his eyes. "They shouldn’t have done that. Not like that. Not in his sleep when he couldn’t defend hisself. It were wicked.”