The Return of Captain John Emmett

realised Mulins might be piecing things together. It was Gough I wanted, above al. Gough served with me in Africa. I knew him. He deserved to die. An ambitious man. An incompetent commander. Calous, arrogant; I doubt he even bothered to read through Harry's defence.

'In those crucial days when the top brass were weighing Harry's fate in their hands, even General Shute, who had no respect for Harry's division and whom the men hated, pointed out that Harry was very young. So I let Shute live. The request for confirmation of sentence rose upwards until it reached Gough. Gough rejected a unanimous cal for clemency by the officers of the court martial. Gough said with zeal that he 'recommended' that sentence be carried out. Only rank distinguished him and Tucker: brutal men who reveled in war's cruelty and humiliations. He's been in Switzerland. But now he's back. And I have waited for him.'

There was absolute silence. Laurence had heard a single car pass by and a door slam across the road; the sounds provided a comfortable, though brief, assurance that there were people out there. Was Gwen Lovel listening to al this? Had she known al along what Somers was planning or what he'd done? While he was certain she hadn't known when he had first come to her house, he sensed that she did now. She had aged twenty years since then.

'Mulins came to see me after Emmett vanished. Very polite, of course. A favourite nephew had been a patient at Holmwood, as bad luck would have it. The late Inspector Mulins was obviously a very wel-connected man. The boy had no father so Mulins was up and down to see him. He made a miraculous recovery. So Dr Chilvers, not putting vast store by the local constabulary, had asked Mulins to cast an eye over Emmett's disappearance as a personal favour. Bad for the place's carefuly built reputation to lose a patient. It was Chilvers who told Mulins that Emmett had been in touch with members of the Darling Committee and was obsessed with the Hart execution. Al the same, it should have been a formality for a busy senior police officer from another force. Eventualy I had to concede to Mulins I'd visited Emmett at Holmwood. Chilvers was bound to tel him. I said Emmett had been a friend of Hugh.'

The army friend that the staff at Holmwood had described, Laurence thought. He had simply assumed it was a wartime contemporary of John's. How careless he'd been.

'Mulins was sharp. He seemed to be satisfied but he obviously kept turning it over. He remembered Hart's execution, of course. Then Emmett was found dead and Mulins thought a little harder.'

'And Mulins was briefly involved in investigating Jim Byers' death,' Laurence said.

'I didn't know that,' Somers said, obviously digesting this new information. 'Perhaps he was already looking out for connections? A clever man. But Dr Chilvers knew of Emmett's assault on Tucker—it was why he had been admitted: to escape prosecution for assaulting a policeman in that fracas—and that, too, Chilvers passed on to Mulins. Tucker was also dead, as Mulins discovered from the Birmingham force. Too many coincidences. At some point he commandeered Harry's file and tracked down the letter I'd written, pushing for him to be given a commission. He came to talk to me. I don't know if he ever knew about Liley. His death was carried in The Times, so it was likely. Liley lived and died just two miles from my house. Sooner or later Mulins would have approached Gwen because of Emmett's wretched bequest. Then, a week before his death, he asked me to come and see him again when I was next in London. Nothing urgent, so he said.

'I couldn't risk it any more but, anyway, he'd always been on my list. The perfect public servant. Duty and inflexibility. I went up to London, and the rest you know. The police were always going to go flat out once nemesis had caught up with Mulins. He'l have kept a record. Today it's you on the doorstep, tomorrow it wil be them.'

Somers got up and came towards him. Laurence tensed himself, but Somers simply walked unevenly past him to the window. Charles had said he had been wounded in South Africa. Somers stood looking out at the darkness, with his back to Laurence. Laurence wondered whether he should make a run for it. With his back so stiff, he doubted he'd get far. Who would win if it came to a tussle, and what part might Gwen Lovel play?

'Brabourne was so clear about what happened at the trial but I smeled a rat when he became vague about the execution itself,' said Somers, stil gazing out. 'I didn't want to alert him with too many questions, and I had to keep my emotions tightly under control. Eventualy he revealed that Harry hadn't died immediately. It had a taken a coup de grace. Which meant Emmett should have put the last bulet in his brain. Except that Brabourne's essential decency covered up Emmett's disgrace. It took Emmett himself to tel me what had realy happened.'

Laurence was finding it increasingly hard to concentrate. He knew how the story Somers was now teling would end. He wished he hadn't sent Charles away.

'Emmett and I talked for an hour or so at the Coburg in the first instance,' Somers continued, 'just establishing the outline of it al. I couldn't push him too hard as I didn't want him to be uneasy, and he needed to get back to Holmwood before the police were caled to find him. I put him on a train. Made arrangements to meet again. I wanted to get him to my own house, away from onlookers, with time to go through it al. I wanted to make sure I got every fact, every name. To know exactly what happened and who was involved.'

He glanced at Laurence more directly.

'But Emmett knew it would be very difficult to escape from Holmwood a second time.'

He paused.

'And I knew that once I'd persuaded him to come to see me, he would have to disappear, you see. He was a link to me and I had my mission to complete. I didn't care about surviving myself but I did care about justice.'

Somers was almost persuasive, his tone of voice reasonable.

'I told Gwen to write to him. To ask to meet him. To suggest myself, as he had already met me, as an intermediary. To say that I lived not far from Holmwood, that I could arrange it. She wrote in good faith, believing it would happen—and Emmett had absolutely no idea that I knew Gwen other than professionaly. But, as I said, he was desperate to see her. She was the lure. However, I had absolutely no idea that he had left Gwen a bequest, which meant that his death would lead straight back to her.

'I set up the final meeting at my house in Oxfordshire. When he arrived, Gwen was not there, needless to say, but Emmett didn't realy seem surprised. He just wanted to talk. He told me every damn thing about Harry. His poetry. His trial. His death. Harry's persecutors and those few who tried to help him. Above al, Emmett gave me the names and each individual's portion of guilt became clear. I promised to tel Harry's mother everything.'

He stopped again, and then he said in a slower voice, 'I have thought about it since, of course. Did I feel pity for Emmett? Obviously he had suffered. Nerves, mostly. His right arm was useless, you know? When I had seen him for the first time, I assumed he'd been wounded but it wasn't that. Nothing realy wrong with the arm at al, but plenty wrong in the mind.

'But, do you know, during the long hours he was with me, I thought there had been some sort of lightening of his spirit, as if by teling me everything he had rid himself of his guilt. In the end I told him the truth. He had been so