done?
He realised now that what they ought to be looking for was not a message but a motive. A motive should lead him to the man to whom this violence made sense. A sense driven by hatred or greed or jealousy, perhaps, or even a sort of biblical retribution, but a sense that Laurence currently couldn't begin to grasp. If the motive was to remove everyone connected with the firing squad, then he needed, urgently, to find out more about young Hart himself.
Yet not everyone connected with the execution was dead. With a suddenness that made his hair stand on end, he realised how stupid he had been. John had died at the end of December. Tucker had died the same winter, Liley in April, Byers in early summer. Mulins had been murdered in August. Whoever was carrying out these kilings had not necessarily stopped. The arrangements just took time. The kiler needed to track down his quarry, to undertake his mission and then return to normal life without arousing suspicion. It was not necessarily over.
Who else might be on the list? Was the lost legatee of John's wil, the Frenchman, Meurice, already one of the victims or could he have been the assailant al along? More than ever, he was aware that his enquiries had always been patchy.
What about Leonard Byers? Was he in any danger now? Laurence also had an increasing sense of unease about the safety of Tresham Brabourne, even faintly considering whether he might be at risk himself. Had he even met the murderer already as he lumbered around with his questions?
Thinking about Brabourne, it occurred to him that Charles's unexpected visit had diverted him from looking at the bundle of cuttings he'd picked up at the
He turned over and skimmed through the article. It concerned the death of one of the other two officers executed. The journalist was in ful flow but the case against the hapless lieutenant of the Naval Reserve seemed as weak as the one against Hart. What surprised him was that the piece had been published in March 1918, before the war had even ended. He imagined the fury it must have caused in the War Office.
He read through the letters. Despite a few enraged denunciations, there was nothing here that hinted at future violence. Laurence noticed that several of the letters were from the fathers of sons who had been kiled while obeying orders and they didn't want their boys buried next to a coward. While he could understand their point of view, he didn't think their sons would agree, were they to rise from their ranks of stone in France. What had John wanted to add to al this?
Brabourne, who had known John Emmett as a felow officer, was the one person who seemed to accept al along that John might wel have kiled himself. He was an inteligent observer and had seen John at his worst. Laurence had liked Brabourne—he was a man facing forward, he thought, and for that reason he had an energy that Laurence could only recently detect in any measure in himself. He thought of Brabourne dressed for the outdoors in his bitterly cold office with its il-fitting window, or striding down Fleet Street at one with his world, but otherwise apparently immune to his surroundings.
Something had rung a bel when he'd seen him and it burst upon him suddenly what it was. The scarf Brabourne was wearing was, he was almost certain, a school sporting colours scarf, but he was equaly certain it was the same colours as the one John had with him at his death. The one that had been returned to the Emmetts, not his own school scarf, but another man's.
Another man's school. It meant nothing: hundreds of boys had joined up from schools like Eton and Harrow, Rugby and Welington—Brabourne's school—
and, indeed, like John, Charles and Laurence himself, from Marlborough. Brabourne too had commented on this. No doubt this was how it had always been: he had read the memorials to the battle dead of the Crimean and Boer Wars during interminable sermons in the colege chapel. As a schoolboy he would try to make anagrams of their names to pass the time. But each of these previous conflicts accounted for only a handful of old boys. The memorial boards erected now would list tens of names for every house in the school. And there was Brabourne—not, as Byers had predicted, dead in the mud, a casualty of his own sense of invincibility, nor reduced to gold letters on a plaque to create wonder in generations of boys to come, but moving on, away from the war. One day he would be an old man, with no doubt a fine career behind him, while those three or four years in uniform would be no more than one brief, if distressing, episode in a life rich in adventures, chalenges, sorrows and joys. It wouldn't be the first and the last thing he thought of every day. Laurence doubted it was, even now. It would be history. Brabourne would tel his grandsons about it.
He realised that it was quite possible that Brabourne had lent John a spare scarf, though it was unusual to have two, and in peacetime no public schoolboy would wear the colours of another school. War, however, was a colder, more pragmatic way of life. It was even easier to imagine that Brabourne would have given his own scarf to Edmund Hart. Laurence remembered Brabourne commenting on the cold in the room where they had imprisoned the condemned man as they waited to hear his fate.
He reflected just how many young officers had known one another. He was always amused by Charles's social networks but they formed the web that both trapped and supported people like him; people like himself, too, Laurence supposed. It was that society that men like Edmund Hart were excluded from. Even as the war progressed and more officers had been promoted from the ranks, there was a gulf between the traditional officer class and those on whom war had bestowed a grudging commission. If Edmund had been to Eton or Marlborough or Harrow, he might wel not have died for his offence. It was a chiling thought.
When he picked up the envelope to replace al the cuttings, he could feel something stil inside. He had missed a rough note from Tresham Brabourne, folded round a photograph. It was of a very young, light-haired man, with a blanket round his shoulders; he was sitting at a table with what appeared to be a plate of bread and cheese. The background was very indistinct but, although the photograph was quite dark, the man's fatigue was obvious. He looked solemnly at the camera. Along the top of the scrap of paper Brabourne had scrawled in pencil, 'Vis Tucker's death. Police records state it was in late February.' Laurence registered that it let John off the hook for Tucker's murder and that he owed Brabourne a drink. Then al other thoughts drained away as he read the note that had enclosed the photograph. Brabourne had written:
I checked again if I had another photograph of the firing squad. The one you have is definitely the only one and was previously in my possession (not that I want it back). I had absolutely forgotten I also had this picture. It's Edmund Hart on the night I told you about: bitter cold, poetry, a mistaken, though shared, belief that his sentence would be commuted, and al the rest. I took this at his request; he wanted to reassure his ma. A day later he was shot. The film hadn't even been developed. I could hardly give it to the padre to send home with his effects—and yet it seemed wrong to destroy it. You might find that it makes the whole affair more real to have a likeness of a man much more sinned against than sinning.
Laurence could not take his eyes off the picture in his hand. Hart looked about seventeen. His hair was tousled,
