Chapter Thirty-nine
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2011
Copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Speler
Al rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Virago Press
Speler, Elizabeth.
The return of Captain John Emmett / Elizabeth Speler.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-51169-6
1. World War, 1914–1918—Veterans—England—London—Fiction.
2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6119.P39R47 2011
823'.92—dc22
2010052590
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my brother, Richard, and for my nephews Dominic, Tristan, Wiliam, Barnaby and Charlie, who, had they been born exactly one hundred years earlier, might al have found themselves on the Western Front.
Lieutenant Ewart Alan Mackintosh
(died Cambrai 1917)
Prologue
They gathered in the dark long before the train arrived at the smal 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.
Occasionaly 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. Stil 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, folowed by a more audible hum and finaly a crescendo of noise as the train, puled 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 briliantly iluminated, 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
