“Intriguing . . . a captivating wartime whodunit.” –Boston GlobeLondon, 1920. In the aftermath of the Great War and a devastating family tragedy, Laurence Bartram has turned his back on the world. But with a well-timed letter, an old flame manages to draw him back in. Mary Emmett’s brother John—like Laurence, an officer during the war—has apparently killed himself while in the care of a remote veterans’ hospital, and Mary needs to know why.Aided by his friend Charles—a dauntless gentleman with detective skills cadged from mystery novels—Laurence begins asking difficult questions. What connects a group of war poets, a bitter feud within Emmett’s regiment, and a hidden love affair? Was Emmett’s death really a suicide, or the missing piece in a puzzling series of murders? As veterans tied to Emmett continue to turn up dead, and Laurence is forced to face the darkest corners of his war experiences, his own survival may depend on uncovering the truth.“An elegant, moving read.” –Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
PROLOGUE
NOVEMBER 1920 , KENT
They gathered in the dark long before the train arrived
at the small station. It was mostly women: young
mothers holding tightly wrapped infants, elderly women in
shawls, black-coated middle-aged matrons alongside grown
children. There were men too, of course, some already holding
their hats self-consciously at their sides, and a cluster of
soldiers stood to one end of the platform near the bearded
stationmaster. Even so, the men were outnumbered by the
women as they always were these days.
Occasionally the station buffet sign creaked or a baby wailed
and the isolated murmur of one woman to another was almost
indistinguishable from the faint sigh of wind, but mostly there
was quiet as they waited. Still others stood a little further away.
In the houses on either side of the line, behind lighted windows,
silhouetted occupants held back curtains. Below them,
at rail-side garden fences or on the banks, stood a handful
more. On the far platform, almost out of reach of the lights,
it was just possible to pick out one individual, swathed in a
dark coat and hat, who stood at a distance from the rest. The
stationmaster looked across the rails with some apprehension.
In a long career he had never had a suicide, but tonight was different;
this train’s freight was despair and sorrow. However, the
watcher seemed calm, standing at a reasonable distance from
the platform’s edge, with the width of the down track separating
his stiffly upright figure from the expected train.
They felt it before they heard it. A faint vibration in the rails
seemed to transmit itself to the people waiting, and a shiver
trembled through them, followed by a more audible hum and
finally a crescendo of noise as the train, pulled by its great dark
engine, appeared around the bend. Tiny points of fire danced
red in its smoke and singed the grass. The last hats were
removed hurriedly and one young woman buried her face in
her companion’s chest. The soldiers stood to attention and, as
the train thundered by without stopping, its compartments
brilliantly illuminated, they saluted. A wave ran through the
crowd as several of the spectators craned forward, desperate to
catch a momentary glimpse of the red, blue and white flag,
draped over the coffin of English oak, before its passing left
them to the dark loneliness of their changed world.
As the crowd slowly dispersed, almost as silently as they had
assembled, the stationmaster looked along his platform once
more. Now quite alone on the far side of the track, one figure
stayed immobile. Hours after the stationmaster had gone to his
bed, reassured in the knowledge that it was six hours until the
milk train, the last watcher remained solitary and now invisible
in the darkness, waiting for dawn and the last battle to
begin.
CHAPTER ONE
In years to come, Laurence Bartram would look back and
think that the event that really changed everything was
not the war, nor the attack at Rosières, nor even the loss of his
wife, but the return of John Emmett into his life. Before then,
Laurence had been trying to develop a routine around the writing
of a book on London churches. Astonishingly, a mere six
or so years earlier when he came down from Oxford, he had
taught, briefly and happily, but on marrying he had been persuaded
that teaching was not a means of supporting Louise
and the large family she had planned. After only token resistance
he had joined her family’s long-established coffee
importing business. It all seemed so long ago, now. There was
no coffee, no business – or not for him – and Louise and his
only child were dead.
When his wife and son lay dying in Bristol, Laurence was
crouched in the colourless light of dawn, waiting to move
towards the German guns and praying fervently to a God he
no longer believed in. He had long been indifferent to which
side won; he wished only that one or the other would do so
decisively while he was still alive. It would be days before the
news of Louise and their baby’s death reached him. It was not
until he was home, with his grief-stricken mother-in-law endlessly
supplying unwanted details, that he realised that Louise
had died at precisely the moment he was giving the order to
advance. When he finally got leave, he had stood by the grave
with its thin, new grass while his father-in-law hovered near by,
embarrassed. When the older man had withdrawn, Laurence
crouched down. He could smell the damp earth but there was
nothing of her here. Later, he chose the granite and spelled out
both names and the dates to the stonemason. He wanted to
mourn, yet his emotions seemed unreachable. Indeed, after a
few days shut up with his parents-in-law, desolate and aged by
loss, he was soon searching for an excuse to return to London
and escape the intensity of their misery.
As he sat on the train, returning to close up his London
house, he had felt a brief but shocking wave of elation. Louise
was gone, so many were gone, but he had made it through –
he was still quite young and with a life ahead of him. The
mood passed as quickly as it always did, to be replaced by
emptiness. The house felt airless and stale. He started packing
everything himself but after opening a small chest to find a
soft whiteness of matinée jackets, bootees, embroidered baby
gowns and tiny bonnets, all carefully folded in tissue paper, he
had recoiled from the task and paid someone to make sure he
never saw any of it again.
Louise had left him money and so he was free to follow a
new career. It did not make him a man of substantial means,
but it was enough for him to tell Louise’s father that he wouldn’t
be returning to the business. Even if Louise had survived
and he were now the father of a lively son, he doubted he
would have continued buying and selling coffee beans. The war
had changed things; for him life before 1914 was a closed world
he could never reach back and touch. He could recall banal
fragments of people but not the whole. His mother’s long
fingers stabbing embroidery silks into her petit point. His
father snipping and smoothing his moustache as he grimaced
in the looking-glass. He could even remember the smell of
his father’s pomade, yet the rest of the face never quite came
into focus. His memories were just a series of tableaux, dis -
connected from the present. Louise, and the small hopes and
plans that went with her, were simply part of these everyday
losses.
He’d rented a small flat, a quarter the size of the town
house he and Louise had lived in for their eighteen months of
marriage before he was sent to France. It was in Great Ormond
Street and on the top floor, with windows facing in three
directions so that the small rooms were filled with light. There
he could lie in bed listening to the wind and the pigeons
cooing on the roof. He rarely went out socially these days but
when he did it was usually to see his friend Charles Carfax who
had been at the same school and had served in France. Charles
was someone to whom nothing need be explained.
Sometimes as he gazed out across the rooftops Laurence
tried to picture where he might be in a year’s time – five years,
ten – but he couldn’t imagine a life other than this. At Oxford
he had been teased about his enthusiasms: for long walks,
architecture, even dancing. That excitement was a c...
