‘That’s men for you,’ Gilchrist said, putting a bottle of white wine and two glasses on the coffee table.
Kate Simpson looked at her.
‘Sarah — I’m really sorry to hear about Reg Williamson.’
‘Me too,’ said Gilchrist, sitting on the edge of the chair on the other side of the table.
‘But you’ve been able to get a few things clarified?’
Gilchrist nodded as she poured two generous glasses of wine and passed one to Kate. Their hands touched for a moment.
‘Just a question now of whether I still have a job,’ Gilchrist said.
Kate shuddered.
‘And whether I go to jail.’
Gilchrist held her glass out to chink against Kate’s.
‘I’d bet money on a suspended sentence at worst.’
They took their first sips. Gilchrist took more of a healthy swig.
‘Finally figured out the identity of the Brighton Trunk Murderer. Bloke called Eric Knowles.’
Gilchrist shrugged.
‘Should I know him?’
‘No. But I think we should be able to find out more about him than we already know.’
Gilchrist nodded.
‘Job done, then.’
Kate smiled.
‘We still don’t know who the victim was.’
‘Of course,’ Gilchrist said, topping her glass up. She proffered the bottle to Kate. Kate shook her head.
‘I really want to find out who she is. I keep thinking: she liked music, she had a favourite food, she sighed over a favourite movie star. We know she liked the sun.’
Gilchrist nodded again.
‘She was another human being.’
‘Right,’ Kate said.
Gilchrist gave her a tight smile.
‘That’s your next project, then.’
EPILOGUE
Restless still, Watts roamed his father’s house. He wandered over to his father’s bookshelves. His father had read widely, more widely than Watts would have expected. Organized, too. Alphabetical within countries.
He was scanning the American section. It was all classic stuff: Hawthorne, Melville, Fenimore Cooper, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald. There was a narrow-spined work by Thomas Wolfe called
On the shelf below were photo albums. An old cigar box was acting as a bookend. Watts took it down. He sat at the table by the window and slid the lid open. The box was filled with papers. He took out his father’s birth certificate. Three First World War medals lay beneath it. Watts smiled.
He knew the slang name for these medals were Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, sarcastically named after a long- running strip cartoon that had begun 1919. Pip was a dog, Squeak a penguin, Wilfred a rabbit with very long ears. They went everywhere together, as did this trio of medals. You got one, you got the rest. Though it didn’t mean you were alive.
Watts picked up one of the medals. The British War Medal, issued in 1919 to anyone, dead or alive, who had fought in the Great War. It was silver with George V’s head on one side and a naked St George mounted on a horse on the other. The sun of Victory shone down on St George trampling the Prussian shield beneath his horse’s hooves.
The second was the four-pointed Mons Star made of bright bronze, with a crown on one side and crossed swords on the other. It had a wreath of oak leaves beside a scroll inscribed ‘August 1914’.
The third was an Allied Victory medal, also issued in 1919 to all those who had been awarded the other two medals. This one was bronze lacquer. Winged Victory on one side, ‘The Great War for Civilization, 1914–1919’ engraved on the other.
His grandfather would have been awarded them post-humously. Watts knew he had been in the Royal Sussex Regiment, 2nd Battalion. He’d gone over with the first division of the Expeditionary Force in August 1914 and been killed at the battle of Mons.
The Great War. He had seen a TV drama about Rudyard Kipling and his son Jack recently. Kipling, gung-ho about the war, had pulled strings to get his severely short-sighted son into the Irish Guards. He had fought at the Battle of Loos in torrential rain. With his glasses on, Jack Kipling wouldn’t have been able to see anything, especially not the bullet that killed him.
Watts had visited his grandfather’s grave once at St Symphorien cemetery, near Mons. It had been created by the Germans for both the Allied and German soldiers who fell in the battle. Well, some of the ones who fell.
He’d stood on a mound beside a tall obelisk and looked down at the five hundred or so grey granite headstones laid out in neat rectangles on every side. The man he was named after was somewhere among them.
He spent the next thirty minutes looking for him. It was quiet in the cemetery, although a breeze occasionally shivered the branches of the trees.
Some graves were unidentified. He found the grave of Private John Parr, killed on 21st August 1914, believed to be the first Commonwealth soldier killed in the Great War. Nearby was the grave of the Canadian soldier, Private Gordon Price, believed to be the last.
He found his grandfather’s grave in a secluded patch of the cemetery. Private Robert Edward Watts, Royal Sussex, 24th August 1914. It didn’t state his age, though ages were listed on some of the others. A rosemary bush had been planted in front of the headstone. He took out his pocketknife, bent and sliced off a clump. Put it to his nose.
He ran his hand over the rough granite of the headstone. A little self-consciously, he saluted his grandfather, the clump of rosemary still between his fingers, then turned and headed for home.
In the box there was a faded, creased black-and-white photograph of a pretty young woman. Nothing written on the back but Watts was sure it was his grandmother, Jenny. Robert’s wife. He hadn’t known her either. She had died a decade before Watts was born.
He picked up the photo albums he had found earlier. He was surprised that his father kept something so sentimental. He went slowly through the albums, page by page.
He found a photograph of his grandmother standing beside a short, broad-shouldered man with a walrus moustache and dark hair scraped back from his forehead. It had been taken in a studio with a rural scene on a painted backdrop behind them. Both were standing erect and neither was smiling, though there was a glint of humour in the man’s eyes.
Watts went back to the cigar box. There was a thin envelope addressed in faded copper plate to Mrs Robert Watts at an address in Haywards Heath. He extracted two sheets of flimsy paper, one wrapped in torn tissue. He carefully removed the tissue paper. There was a crumpled, muddied, sheet inside it. A note in faded pencil. It had been folded twice and on the back the same pencil had written: ‘For Jenny’. Not all the words were legible. Watts wrote it out on a sheet of paper, filling in words as best he could. It read:
Dear[est?] Jenny,
I don’t know if this will ever get to you. They tell us the post from here only takes a day although I feel a world away from hearth and home and my beloved family. If you are reading this, however, that will probably not bode well [for me?]. A big surge tomorrow and I’m over [the top?] again. I pray all goes [well?]. I carry your picture at all times in my breast [pocket?] and [your?] last words and kisses to me forever in my heart. If this is to
