‘But why should the General want the body recovered?’ he asked Captain Carstairs.
‘It is an old man’s privilege to be slightly eccentric,’ Carstairs said, ‘and when that old man happens to be as distinguished as General Fortesque, it is our duty to respect those eccentricities. The regiment would not have the reputation it undoubtedly has today without men like the Hero of Afghanistan.’
Sod the regiment! Blackstone thought.
‘What I want to know is how the General even found out that Danvers was dead,’ he persisted. ‘After all, he was nothing but a common soldier — one of scores of thousands who’ve been killed since this bloody war started.’
‘Oh, that,’ Carstairs said, offhandedly. ‘It seems that Private Danvers was the General’s head gardener’s grandson, and that, before the war, he had been training to be a gardener himself.’
‘So Lieutenant Fortesque already knew Private Danvers, before they served together?’ Blackstone said.
‘Knew him?’ Carstairs repeated incredulously. ‘A gentleman does not know members of the labouring classes. But I expect he will have ridden past while the boy was working in the gardens, so it’s perfectly possible that he knew of him.’
Oh no, it was more than that, Blackstone told himself — much more than that.
It was suddenly all clicking into place for him, and now he could not only see that he had been entirely wrong about almost everything, but why he had been wrong about it.
It was not Fortesque’s threat to expose their racket that the three musketeers had thought would ruin them — because there had been no racket.
And it was not some kind of contraband — perhaps gold — that they had been trying to get their hands on when they stole the coffin from the warehouse in Calais, because the box had contained exactly what it was supposed to contain — the corpse of Lieutenant Fortesque.
He had speculated about why there was no blood on Soames’ uniform when he had emerged from Fortesque’s dugout to carry out the inspection — and reached a conclusion which he was now almost certain had been correct.
All he needed, he told himself, was a single confirmation with which to frame all the pieces, and then he would have the whole investigation wrapped up.
‘There was another soldier with Fortesque and Danvers on the night that Danvers was killed, wasn’t there?’ he asked Captain Carstairs.
‘Yes, there was. As I believe I told you, Lieutenant Soames risked his own life to drag the man back to our trench.’
‘And what happened to him?’
‘Happened to him?’
‘Once he was back in the trenches.’
‘I expect that if the bullet was still in his body, it was removed in the dressing station, and that after that extraction, the wound was dressed.’
Blackstone was managing to resist the urge to grab Carstairs by the shoulders and shake him until his teeth rattled — but only just.
‘What happened after the wound was dressed?’ he asked. ‘Was the man invalided out — or is he still here?’
‘Good God, you can’t expect me to be aware of mundane little details like that. I have a whole company under my command.’
And maybe if you did know those mundane details, you might command it better than you do now, Blackstone thought. Maybe if you’d paid a little more attention to what was going on around you, both Private Danvers and Lieutenant Fortesque would still be alive.
‘Who will know what happened to the man who was wounded?’ he asked.
‘Ask Lieutenant Soames’ sergeant,’ Carstairs said. ‘He’s bound to know.’
TWENTY-ONE
The cavernous dugout was located in the reserve trench. It was an outpost — or perhaps a sub-branch — of the quartermaster’s store, and it was where Blenkinsop, the hapless servant, had been waiting for the bottles of whisky to be delivered on the morning that Lieutenant Fortesque had died.
Blackstone had no idea who had been in charge of the store on that fateful morning, but the man who was running it now was a young private with his right arm in a sling, who went by the name of Mitchell.
‘I thought this might have bought me my papers back to Blighty,’ Mitchell told him, pointing with his left hand at the sling. ‘But when the Doc examined me, he said it wasn’t serious enough for that, and I suppose he was right.’
Had the decision that Private Mitchell should stay in France really been a medical one?
Blackstone didn’t think so.
What was much more likely was that he was still there because the three musketeers wanted him there — where they could keep an eye on him — and that they had put some kind of pressure on the doctor to pronounce the man fit to continue his military service.
‘You must have been quite disappointed when you were first told you wouldn’t be going home,’ Blackstone said.
‘I was,’ Mitchell admitted. ‘But I’ve no complaints now, because this job is a really cushy number, just like I was pro-’
His mouth slammed shut, trapping the dangerous words which had been just about to escape from it.
‘What were you about to say?’ Blackstone asked.
Mitchell looked down at the counter.
‘Nothing,’ he mumbled.
‘That’s not true,’ Blackstone countered. ‘You were going to say you’d been given a cushy job just like you were promised. Isn’t that right?’
A look of indecision crossed Mitchell’s face as he debated whether to simply deny the obvious truth, or to tell an outright lie.
‘That’s right,’ he said finally, plumping for the lie. ‘That is what I was going to say. It was the doctor who promised it me, you see. He said he’d make sure I wasn’t given any heavy work.’
‘How did you feel about going out on patrol, that night you got shot?’ Blackstone asked, changing tack.
‘What do you mean?’ Mitchell asked, suspiciously.
‘When your sergeant came up to you, and told you that Lieutenant Soames had selected you to go out on patrol with him, what were your feelings?’
‘I didn’t really have any feelings, one way or the other,’ Mitchell said, avoiding what he probably thought was one trap, and stepping right into the middle of another one.
‘So it was Lieutenant Soames — rather than the sergeant — who chose you,’ Blackstone said.
‘I suppose so.’
‘When an officer makes the selection, he usually picks a man he thinks he can rely on, doesn’t he?’
‘I wouldn’t know. The sergeant doesn’t tell you why you’ve got to do something — he just tells you to bloody well do it.’
‘But it makes sense that the officer would think that way, doesn’t it?’ Blackstone insisted. ‘No Man’s Land’s a dangerous place, and any officer worth his salt would want good men — men he could trust — covering his back.’
‘Maybe,’ Mitchell said, non-committally.
‘So if you’re a good man — and we’ve already both agreed that you are — Danvers, who was the third person on that patrol, must have been a good man, too, mustn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ Mitchell replied — far too quickly.
‘Listen,’ Blackstone said, ‘I’m not trying to blame you or the lieutenant for Danvers’ death — we all know that it was just a bit of bad luck that he was killed, and that it could have happened to anybody — but I really would like to know just what kind of soldier he was.’
Mitchell hesitated for quite a while, then said, ‘Well, to be honest with you, I was a bit surprised when the lieutenant chose him for the patrol.’
‘And why was that?’
‘I don’t really know.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘Danvers hadn’t been in our platoon long. He was transferred from Lieutenant Fortesque’s platoon.’
‘I know.’
‘And from the moment he arrived, Lieutenant Soames seemed to take a dislike to him. He was always picking on the poor lad, and telling him how completely bloody useless he was.’