"I doubt that very much."
Smedley looked up with a tortured, frightened grimace.
Jones's heart began to thunder like all the guns on the Western Front. “So?"
"There's one they call John Three. They have a John Two, and there was a John One once, I expect. No name or rank. Doesn't speak. Can't or won't say who he is or what unit he was in."
Jones sucked in a long breath of the chilling air.
"I'd forgotten how blue his eyes are,” Smedley whispered.
"Oh, my God!"
"Bluest eyes I ever did see."
"Is he ... Is he injured? Physically, I mean?"
"Nothing major. Touch of gas burn or something.” Smedley shook his head. With another of his abrupt mood changes he sat up and laughed. “I expect I was imagining it."
"Let's just pretend you weren't, shall we? Did you speak to him?"
"No. He was with his keeper. Being exercised. Walked around the lawn like a dog. I wandered over. He looked right through me. I asked his keeper for a light. Said thanks. Trotted off."
Of course Exeter would have enlisted as soon as his leg had mended. It was impossible to imagine him not doing so. False name ... Tricky, not impossible...
"One thing you should know,” Smedley said shrilly. “He doesn't look a day older than he did in Victoria Station, three years ago. So a chap really has to assume that he's just a little bit more shell-shocked than he hoped he was, wouldn't you say? Imagining things like that?"
"You're all right, man!” Jones said sharply. “But Exeter? Amnesia? He's lost his memory?"
Smedley's eye had begun to twitch again. He threw down his cigarette and stamped on it. “Oh, no! No, no, old man, that's not the problem at all. He knew me right away. Turned white as a sheet, then just stared at the horizon. That's why I didn't speak to him. Chatted up the keeper to keep him busy till Exeter got his color back, then left without a glance at him."
"He's faking it?"
"No question. Unless I imagined it."
"You didn't imagine this!"
"Oh, I wouldn't say that!"
"Don't be a fool, man!” Jones snapped. “Have you had other delusions? Seen any other ghosts?"
"No."
"Then you didn't this time. He can't reveal his name without going on trial for a murder he didn't commit!"
The eye twitched faster. “He'd better find himself a name pretty soon, Mr. Jones! Very soon! I've been asking a few discreet questions.” The twitch had spread to his cheek. “He turned up at the front line under very mysterious circumstances. No uniform, no papers, nothing. They think he's a German sp-p-py!"
"What!"
"That's one th-th-theory.” Smedley was having trouble controlling his mouth now. “So he's got the choice of being hanged or sh-sh-shot, do you see?"
"My god!"
"What'n hell're we going to do, Ginger? How can we help him?” Smedley buried his face in one hand and a sleeve. He began to weep again.
II
White Knight
3
AS SOON AS THE NURSE TURNED HER BACK, SMEDLEY SPAT OUT THE sleeping pill. When the light was turned off, he placed it carefully under his pillow. He would need it later. He rolled onto his back and prepared to wait.
His right hand throbbed. The fingers were tightly clenched, the nails digging into his palm. They were all somewhere back in Belgium, but he could feel exactly what they were doing ... hurt like hell sometimes. Just part of the trouble of going bonkers.
Staffles had not been designed as a hospital. He shared a room with two other men, and there was barely room to walk between the beds. Rattray tossed and scuffled on the right; Wilkinson wheezed and bubbled on the left, his lungs ruined by gas. Very shortly both men were snoring—those pills packed a punch like twelve-inch howitzers.
Light filtered in from the corridor. The sounds of the hospital dwindled into silence. Once in a while it trembled as a train clattered by, London to Dover or Dover to London ... no question which was the better way to be heading these days. The guns were still throbbing.
He needed a fag, but the nurses gathered up every cigarette in the building at lights-out. Staffles was one giant firetrap.
He lay and brooded, trying to fit what he had learned about the anonymous John Three in the west wing to the Exeter story he had heard from Jones—how that man had aged! An impossible disappearance and an impossible reappearance? Somehow that was appropriate. At least it made sense to a loony with a bad case of shell shock who couldn't sit still for ten minutes without having an attack of the willies.
I would kill for a cigarette.
He should have done something about Exeter days ago, but he hadn't really been able to believe himself. It had taken Ginger's reassurance to convince him of his own story, to persuade him he wasn't that far gone in the head. Not quite. Close, but not on target.
Exeter had vanished from Albert Memorial Hospital in Greyfriars. Somehow he had passed by the nurses on duty and the doorman, all of whom had sworn he had not. The night nurse had discovered his room wrecked, blood on the floor, and yet no one had heard a thing. Impossible, but Ginger believed, although he admitted it was hearsay. Hearsay from Mrs. Bodgley was good as Holy Writ.
John Three had been brought in from the battlefield with no uniform on. With nothing on, so the rumors said—shows how far gone the poor sod must be. No sane skulker would go so far as to strip to the buff in that rain-swept, bullet-swept, shell-swept hell. Mad as a March hare.
There were only two ways into no-man's-land. Either he had come from the British lines or the German lines. Or perhaps he'd cracked up an aeroplane. But why bare arsed? The mud had been known to suck off a man's boots and trousers but not his tunic. Shell blast could collapse his lungs or his brain and kill him without leaving a visible mark on him, but stripping him naked without otherwise harming him seemed rather too freakish even for shell blast.
I would give my right arm for a fag. It's no damn use anyway.
Why John Three? Could he speak at all? Why not invent a name?
Name, rank, and serial number.
The alternative was a bullet.
Why had Exeter not been shot out of hand? Why was he not in a provost cell, at least, instead of a low-security mental ward? There were weird rumors. Or at least there were rumors of rumors, tales of people who knew more than they were able to tell but rolled their eyes expressively.
He might not have been faking when he was brought in. Men picked up in battlefields were usually in bloody rotten shape. The journey back on a stretcher would be enough of an ordeal to drive a chap bonkers all by itself. So perhaps Exeter had genuinely been unable to talk when he was brought in, although Smedley himself had walked on his own feet into the casualty clearing station and tried to shake hands with—never mind.
Exeter had been putting up a stall on Wednesday. He had known Smedley. And if there was one thing Smedley had learned to recognize in Belgium, it was terror.
Exeter hadn't even given him a don't-give-me-away look. It had been an attempt at an I-don't-know-you look. That rankled a little, but if he couldn't trust an old pal not to give him away, then he was in something very deep and ever so smelly.
How long could he swing it? The medicals weren't dumb; they knew a skulker when they saw one. They'd use all kinds of tricks—sneak up behind him and bark orders, ask unexpected questions, leave newspapers lying around....