‘It’s not just Sid’s death that’s getting to me — though that’s bad enough,’ Mick said.
‘Then what else is it?’
Mick’s face contorted, as he struggled to find the right words to express himself.
‘Did you ever see that recruitment poster?’ he asked finally.
‘Which recruitment poster?’ Blackstone asked. ‘There’ve been so many different ones since this bloody war started.’
‘The one that I’m thinking of had this soldier right in the centre of it. He’d got his bayonet fixed on the end of his rifle, and he was going over the top.’
‘Yes, I know that one,’ Blackstone said.
‘There was this streaked red and green sky behind him.’ Mick paused. ‘I said maybe that was because the sky in France was red and green, and everybody laughed at me. But how was I supposed to have known — one way or the other — when I’d never been outside London?’
‘You couldn’t have known,’ Blackstone said soothingly.
‘Anyway, it turns out that the sky over here is just as blue as the sky back home, so they were right to laugh at me, weren’t they?’
‘It’s never right to laugh at other people,’ Blackstone told him.
‘So what I still don’t understand is why they made the sky in that poster red and green?’ Mick persisted.
It was all to do with group psychology, Blackstone thought. The propagandists at the Ministry of War had read the works of Gustave le Bon, and knew those were just the colours they needed to use in order to manipulate the emotions of undereducated, unsophisticated lads like Mick.
But even if he could have explained that to Mick, it would only have made the young man feel even more inadequate.
‘Maybe, when they came to make the poster, they’d run out of blue paint,’ he suggested.
‘Could be,’ Mick said, agreeing easily — and making Blackstone feel just a little bit guilty. ‘Yes, that might well be it. They soon ran out of a lot of things once the war started. Anyway, I was telling you about the poster, wasn’t I?’
‘You were.’
‘This soldier was standing against a green and red sky, but he was all in black — his uniform and everything. He was a sort of. . a sort of. .’
‘Silhouette,’ Blackstone supplied.
‘That’s the word,’ Mick said, ‘a silhouette. All black ’cept for his bayonet, which was shining white. So, because he was all black, you couldn’t see what his face looked like. But you didn’t need to! And do you know why?’
‘Because you already knew what it looked like,’ Blackstone guessed.
‘Because you already knew,’ Mick agreed. ‘You’d seen his face in the mirror every morning. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘I understand,’ Blackstone said softly.
‘But the more you thought about it, the more you realized that this you was a different you. This you wasn’t heartily sick of the life he was leading. He didn’t have to get blind drunk on a Saturday night, just to stop himself from thinking that the week ahead was going to be just as miserable as the week that had just finished. He was excited! He wasn’t just living — he was alive!’ Mick paused. ‘Am I talking like an idiot again?’
‘Far from it,’ Blackstone said. ‘Tell me more.’
‘It took you into another world,’ Mick continued. ‘Looking up at it, you knew that if there’d been more pictures — if it had been a comic, instead of just a poster — you’d have seen this new you kill half a dozen big nasty Huns, and then be back in the trenches in time for tea.’
Blackstone merely nodded.
‘But when you get out here, you find it ain’t like that at all,’ Mick said miserably.
Detective Sergeant Archie Patterson ran his hands thoughtfully over his ever-expanding stomach, and then looked through the window of his office in New Scotland Yard at the traffic passing below on the Victoria Embankment.
When he’d first entered this office, in 1896, he’d been a fresh-faced — but even then, slightly overweight — young man, and the traffic below the window had been almost exclusively horse-drawn.
Back then, the arrival of a motor vehicle — which hadn’t even been called a motor vehicle at the time, but had been referred to as a horseless carriage — had drawn interest from the adults and produced a positive frenzy of excitement from some of the children.
Now it was the horse-drawn vehicles which were the rarity, and the motor vehicles which were king. And though he hated to admit it — as any forward-looking man who enjoyed poking gentle fun at his boss’s dislike of progress would — he did rather miss the horses.
He turned away from the window and contemplated the wall. Things were very quiet — unnaturally quiet — with Sam Blackstone away, he thought.
Or had he got that the wrong way around, he wondered? Was this the natural state of things — the way that everyone wanted and expected them to be — and was it only when Sam started stirring things up that they became unnatural?
Ask any of the top brass in the Yard their opinion of Blackstone, and they would say he was ill-disciplined, disorganized, and a liability who they should have got rid of years ago.
But he was still there, wasn’t he?
Because whatever they might say — and however much they might complain — they knew that when there was an investigation that had baffled every other inspector in the Met, the ill-disciplined, disorganized liability would find a way to get to the bottom of it.
Patterson twiddled his thumbs in a clockwise direction for a while, and then, for the sake of a little variety, twiddled them anti-clockwise. He should be enjoying this respite from being run ragged by Sam, he told himself, but the fact was that he was bored.
There was a knock on the door, and one of the clerical officers entered the room.
‘I’ve got a telegram here from your boss, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘It’s come all the way from France.’
‘Well, it would have to have done, since that’s where he is at the moment,’ Patterson replied. ‘What does he say — that the weather’s lovely and he wishes I was there?’
The clerical officer grinned. ‘Funnily enough, he doesn’t mention the weather at all — nor even his desire for your delightful company — but he’s got a great deal to say about other things.’
He produced the telegram with a flourish.
‘Bloody hell fire, that must be at least five hundred words long,’ Patterson said.
‘Six hundred and forty-eight,’ the clerical officer replied. ‘I counted them personally.’
‘Well, it’s nice to know you’ve been making good use of your time,’ Patterson said.
‘Will there be anything else you require, Sergeant?’ the clerical officer asked.
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Patterson replied. ‘It seems to me this telegram will be quite enough.’
‘I’ve been talking to some of the lads in my platoon,’ Mick said, as he and Blackstone walked around the village. ‘One of them — a bloke called Hicks — was telling me about this offensive they took part in the other day.’
‘Hicks!’ Blackstone exclaimed. ‘Are you in Lieutenant Fortesque’s platoon? I mean — are you in the platoon that was commanded by Lieutenant Fortesque,’ he corrected himself immediately.
‘Is he the officer who got himself murdered?’ Mick asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘Then I am in what was his platoon, only the officer’s called Lieutenant Sampson now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Blackstone said. ‘I interrupted you. You were telling me what Hicks told you.’
‘That’s right,’ Mick agreed. ‘They had trouble with the gas that had been set off, because it had blown back on them. Hicks said, “That’s one way to get us to shift out of the trench — bloody gas us,” but I think he was joking.’
‘I do, too,’ Blackstone said.
‘Anyway, when the gas had cleared, they went over the top, but Fritz. .’ Mick paused. ‘They don’t call them the Huns out here on the front, they call them Fritz.’