my family. I'd had my fill of spying.
I had been back in France nearly ten days when the letter came from Inspector Herbert at Scotland Yard.
It was brief, and it contained a photograph. I turned it over, to find myself staring into a dead man's face. I could see clearly the bullet wound in his temple.
I turned to the letter. This is Lieutenant Fordham. He died of a single gunshot wound to the head. Forgive me for sending this to you without some warning, but I'm told you're in France and there's no other way. Fordham's death appears to be a suicide. I use that word, appears, because there is a modicum of doubt. He was an officer in the Wiltshire Fusiliers. Are you still certain that the man with Marjorie Evanson the evening of her death was in this regiment? Could this be the man?
I looked again at the photograph. But I already knew the answer. This was not the man at the railway station.
I felt a chill. Suicide among soldiers was more prevalent than the Army admitted. It wasn't good for morale to give exact numbers, they said. Why had Lieutenant Fordham chosen to kill himself? What demons drove him? And why-other than his regiment-had Inspector Herbert thought this might be the man I'd seen with Marjorie Evanson?
Was there something in his suicide note that pointed in that direction?
And what did Inspector Herbert mean by 'appears to be a suicide'?
His brief message told me so little that my curiosity was aroused. I found myself thinking that he'd have done better to satisfy it.
I reached for pen and paper to answer him before the next post bag left. Poor man. To answer your questions: I am not mistaken in the matter of the Wiltshires. And this is not the person I saw at the railway station.
But even as I finished putting those words down on paper in black ink, stark on the page, I glanced again at the photograph. Lieutenant Fordham was a handsome man even in death, and if he were charming into the bargain, he might easily turn a lonely woman's head. He was the sort Serena Melton should have invited to a weekend party, not a Lieutenant Bellis, who considered himself a friend of Meriwether Evanson's, or Captain Truscott with his shaking hands. They were loyal to the dead, and not likely to confide anything they might know to a grieving sister.
I added another line to my message. What weapon did Lieutenant Fordham use to kill himself? Service revolver? Other?
It was the price Inspector Herbert must pay for not being more straightforward. For something had just struck a chord of memory.
Thinking about Serena and her house party had brought to mind a vivid image of Jack Melton's hand pausing over an empty depression in the lining of his gun cabinet.
To suspect Serena Melton of killing a man she thought was her sister-in-law's lover was ridiculous. And yet- and yet I had seen for myself how deep her grief and anger ran. If she'd found someone she believed was the guilty man, and there was no way of proving it, what would she do?
For one thing, she wouldn't have a weapon handy, in the event she needed to use it. That was a very different thing from being so angry one could lash out with the first thing that came to hand. Besides, Lieutenant Fordham was a soldier, with a soldier's reflexes. He wasn't likely to let someone walk up to him, revolver in hand, and fire at him.
I was letting my imagination run away with me. But as much as I didn't want to believe it, there was most certainly the possibility that Marjorie had had more than one lover. And Lieutenant Fordham could have had his own guilty conscience.
And so I didn't tear up the reply to Inspector Herbert and start again. I left the query in my letter.
But Scotland Yard never answered. Not even to thank me for helping them with their inquiries.
CHAPTER SIX
Finally I WROTE to Simon Brandon.
He had been my father's batman, his friend even though he was less than half my father's age, and eventually his RMS, his regimental sergeant-major, a position of some responsibility as well as prestige. If anyone could find the answer to my question without involving the police or causing a stir, it was Simon. His contacts were myriad, and they had long memories of service together.
I knew my father well enough to be sure he'd find the answer to my question, and then want to know why I had asked it. The Colonel Sahib, as we called him behind his back, was accustomed to commanding troops in battle. Raising a daughter would-he'd thought-be as simple as taking a seasoned company on maneuvers. He could do it blindfolded. Hands behind his back.
By the time I was walking, he was in full retreat from that position. 'She'll be running the British Army before she's ten!' he'd warned my mother. It wasn't long before all the servants and half the men in his command were enlisted in a conspiracy to keep me safe. Not to mention our Indian staff and all their relatives.
The Army has a code of its own. I had been well taught not to air its dirty linens in public, and in India my father would have made short work of finding out who had been involved with Lieutenant Evanson's wife, and seeing to it that he was disciplined. Or learning how Captain Fordham had shot himself. It would have gone no further, been dealt with quietly and appropriately. We weren't in India now, but the same circumspection was still there, inbred in us.
A letter came back faster than I'd expected. It occurred to me that Simon had somehow arranged to have it sent with dispatches. The post where I was presently stationed was notoriously slow. And sent with dispatches, the letter wouldn't pass through the hands of the military censors.
I opened it quickly, eager to see what he had discovered. Bess. It's been hushed up. I can't discover why. What's this about? Do you know this man?
Before I could answer Simon, we were moved again, this time to the tiny village of La Fleurette, so destroyed by war and armies that I could find nothing to show me what it might have looked like, once upon a time.
There was a pitted street, half buried in piles of rubble, only the west wall of the little church still forlornly standing, and miraculously, a stone barn that had somehow escaped damage. It was whole, even its roof intact.
'Praise God,' Sister Benning said, looking up at it. 'Now to see if we can do anything about the inside.'
The lane into the barn's forecourt was no more than a muddy and rutted track. The barnyard was already jammed with lorries and ambulances jostling for room, and we had orderlies clearing up the interior as fast as they could, so that we had a space in which to work.
The walking wounded were already sitting on benches, shoulders drooping, bloody bandaging around heads, torsos, or limbs. Sometimes all three. Stretchers with the worst cases were being set across frames made from mangers, and a surgeon was already at work, calling for us to hurry and bring him what he needed. The first of the dead had been taken away, out of sight in what had been the milking shed.
It was chaos, and we were accustomed to it, having packed in such a fashion that we could find anything we wanted immediately.
Ambulances were coming in now in twos and threes, and I was meeting them, trying to sort the wounded into those who could wait, those who needed immediate attention, and sometimes, offering up a brief prayer as I came across a soldier who had died on the way to us.
We worked almost thirty-six hours without respite on one broken body after another. Someone had managed to brew tea, and we drank gallons of it without milk or sugar, to stay awake. I took my turn at the tables where Dr. Buckley was operating, my eyes on his hands and the wound. Ellen Benning, on the other side, was constantly mopping his brow, and as I looked up, I realized he was flushed, perspiration rolling down his face, and I wondered if he were ill. At a break while the patients were being shifted, I led him outside and asked, 'Sir, what's wrong?'
