Slapton Sands Page 17

  ‘I know what a latent is.’

  ‘We’ve vastly improved our whole forensic database,’ Emerson said. ‘After the Black Panther case?’

  The detective sounded nervous. Alice said: ‘The match for the print?’

  ‘A Paddington prostitute was roughed up by a punter. Her pimp arrived and confronted the punter, armed with a knife. Your partial matches a print on the knife handle left by the punter after he’d taken the knife from the pimp and cut him up with it.’ Emerson sounded odd. ‘And cut the girl.’

  Pips interrupted, and Alice shoved coins into the slot. ‘So what’s the connection? Apart from the print.’

  ‘The crime I’m talking about was committed early in 1944,’ Emerson said. ‘The man who committed it was an American soldier based at Slapton Sands.’

  Breathing was a function Alice Bourne was unaware of normally. Now it came so laboured that it threatened her capacity to speak.

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Johnny Compton.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Not where he’s supposed to be. He’s dead, Miss Bourne. According to his record, Compton died at Slapton Sands.’

  ‘You’ve got his army file in front of you?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Emerson said. ‘I did a course with a chap who works at the American embassy. I asked him to get whatever he could on Compton, released and telexed to me.’

  ‘OK. OK.’ The breathing was already marginally better. It was a relief, what she was hearing, in a way. ‘What did Compton’s father do?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Do you have that information?’

  ‘Compton was from a military family, it seems. His father fought with distinction in the First World War.’

  ‘He was an infantryman,’ Alice said. ‘He was a doughboy sergeant. He fought at Ypres.’

  ‘I think you ought to come back to Canterbury,’ Emerson said. Her tone now was measured, neutral.

  ‘I saw Johnny Compton three days ago. In Canterbury, near the Cathedral Gate.’

  There was a silence. Then: ‘He’d be a man in his early sixties now.’

  Alice laughed.

  ‘I think you ought to come back here.’

  ‘What for?’ Alice said. She was thinking about the rusty, arterial gush of water down the side of a Paddington tenement. Of a grey visage behind grey nets and filthy glass. ‘You don’t believe in ghosts.’

  ‘There’s something else. David Lucas was hurt yesterday in a diving accident.’

  ‘Oh Jesus.’

  ‘He’s OK,’ Emerson said. ‘He spent the night under observation. But he’s absolutely fine.’

  ‘Would you tell me how the accident happened?’

  ‘I think you should come back to Canterbury, Miss Bourne.’

  After Alice hung up, she thought about what Champion had said at his supper gathering about Sally Emerson, about how her talent would take her to Scotland Yard, where she would gain no further promotion and eventually become disillusioned. This case at least, would provide her with no collar. It would do nothing for her detective’s reputation. From inside the pub, the jukebox was loud when customers, mostly young men, opened the swing doors to the lavatories and a row of coathooks over a bench where the phone had been installed. Someone was singing on the jukebox about how he must have been through about a million girls. It was Elvin Bishop, the song ‘Fooled around and Fell in Love’. A ploughman’s lunch had provided her dinner, cheddar cheese and pickled onions eaten to the same cock-happy soundtrack. Thin Lizzie swaggering on about the boys being back in town. Or Bad Company, Paul Rodgers crooning mightily about some easy sexual conquest. Why didn’t they fucking grow up, all of them? She could think of several things she would like to do with Messrs Bishop, Lynott and Rodgers. None of them involved a bed. The pickled onions had been shallots really, and they had given her heartburn. Or maybe the music had. Or the pint of cider she’d drunk, eating her bread and cheese. Except that it wasn’t heartburn, was it? She was sick with dread at what Emerson had told her about Johnny Compton. She was sick with guilt and foreboding about David Lucas. She looked at the phone, wishing she could call someone. Wishing she could call her dad, truth be told, hear once again the comfort and resolution in her father’s voice. She went back into the pub, where at least she wasn’t bothered. Not bothered, anyway, by the living.

  In the bar, Alice fought the emotions threatening to overwhelm her at that moment by thinking of salient facts. It was a new discipline, this. One she was quickly having to learn. Alice knew, because her father had told her, that fingerprinting was the gold standard of criminal forensics. The police forces of England and Wales had pioneered its use, adopting the Henry classification as long ago as 1901. Fingerprints, friction ridges dermatologically, were individual. Characterized by loops, whirls, arches and tents, no two people on the planet possessed an identical set.

  Alice knew, because Sally Emerson had told her, that the Fingerprint Bureau at ScotlandYard used civilian scene-of-crime officers. They weren’t cops, but they underwent five years of training before they qualified to work on actual cases. Their fingerprint cards, until this year, had been held in manually maintained files. Now, following the mistakes made in this Black Panther case, they had introduced a computerized database. Maybe the computers had enabled the match to be made quicker. But the old card-index system worked just fine back home, where the FBI held around a hundred million sets of prints, yet Depression gangster John Dillinger had been so concerned about being nailed by his that he burned the pads off his fingers with acid. It hadn’t worked.

  Dillinger’s prints had grown back. Everyone’s did, apparently. It was as though there was a fingerprint template, her dad had told Alice, burdened on a felon’s soul.

  A Frenchman called Edmund Locard had devised a twelve-point comparison proof for fingerprint identification in 1918. But you didn’t need twelve. Not really, you didn’t, unless you were showboating in front of a particularly stupid judge and jury.

  Alice rubbed her eyes and swallowed gas, aware of ghostly shallots in pickling vinegar and ancient cider apples. She groaned to herself, alone.

  David had driven straight back to Canterbury, arriving soon after midday. He’d taken the boat out at around five in the afternoon for a routine dive in about three fathoms of water off Reculver. He’d been accompanied by a friend.

  ‘You’re not supposed to dive alone,’ Emerson said. ‘Divers have this thing called the buddy system. If a diver gets into trouble, or suffers equipment failure, his buddy knows what to do. But Lucas dived solo.’

  ‘Who was in the boat?’

  Emerson was silent for a moment. Alice sensed that the detective was furious about all of this: about Compton, about David Lucas, about her.

  ‘What are you like on multiple choice, Alice?’ she said. ‘If it had been the flatulent public school moron, or the tramp he knocks about with, he’d be dead, wouldn’t he? It was the half-caste boy. It was Clifford Lee who saved his life.’

  Clifford had been wearing David’s watch. It was a ten-minute dive. David was roped around one ankle to a rowlock on the boat. After ten minutes, Clifford tugged on the rope. After twelve, he tugged again. And nothing happened.

  ‘Lucas had at least had the sense to bring along a spare face mask,’ Emerson said. ‘Lee put it on, went in and pulled his way down along the rope. He managed to get Lucas’s weight belt and air tank off and hauled him back up.’

  ‘What had gone wrong?’

  Emerson laughed. ‘Depends on who you ask,’ she said. ‘Lucas is convinced he got snagged in seaweed. His air mix could have been wrong. In this weather, in a full wetsuit, it could have been the heat. Divers can become disorientated and confused, even at relatively shallow depths. It’s why they have this buddy procedure. Whatever, he was unconscious by the time he came up.’

  ‘What does Clifford say?’

  Emerson laughed again. Her laugh was bitter over the phone with lack of
mirth. ‘I don’t think Mr Lee thinks much of the police. Made some remark about blacks being poor swimmers on account of their small lungs. I think he was being ironic. But he was adamant about one thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Seaweed. There wasn’t any.’

  Salient facts, Alice thought to herself, her fingers drumming an absent tattoo on the side of her glass. Salient facts.

  The US army had introduced fingerprinting as early as 1905. She hadn’t known that until poor, bright Sally Emerson had told her so over the phone. But she hadn’t needed to, had she? It was Compton’s latent. They’d find others, if they went to a room near the top of a Paddington tenement clad in white tiles like rotting tooth enamel and did some dusting there. It was Johnny Compton, and wasn’t ‘latent’ a terrible threat of a word?

  He’d been a vicious individual in life, possessed of the same shiftless malice embodied in his father’s photograph on the wall in the War Museum. Meanness had been born and bred in him. Alice could pretty much guess at the facts contained in the file from which Sally Emerson had been permitted her extracts. There’d be a catalogue of thinly detailed misdemeanours. Pilfering, drunkenness, incidences of paid-for sex where the bargain struck was not kept to the payee’s satisfaction. Joining America’s small, shabby peacetime army was what men like Johnny Compton did to avoid Depression breadlines and to stay out of jail. She could hear his crackerbarrel accent, the voice pitched on the bitter ground between a quarrel and a complaint. He’d have had that sinewy strength a jackal has. He’d be reptile quick in a fight. Her wonder was what such a soldier would have done at Slapton Sands. After the draft and the army reforms, they rooted out and replaced all the feeble-minded and degenerate timeservers not up to the rigours of fighting a war. The process had been as ruthless as it had been comprehensive. So how had a recidivist like Compton survived the cull? More important, what was he doing right now, interfering from death with the living? What was this uneasy spirit trying to scare her away from finding out?

  The answer to these questions might be contained in his file. But Alice doubted it. The army files she’d been allowed to see in the past had always been remarkable for how little significant detail they contained.

  When finally she walked outside the pub, she shivered, though it wasn’t cold. There hadn’t been a single jacket or pullover hung on the hooks by the pub payphone. How many English summers could have boasted that? There was shingle, gritty under the soles of her shoes and the tide must have been out, out there in the blackness, because there was a subtle odour of salt decay.

  It had to be coincidence, what had happened to David Lucas. Diving was dangerous, and he had said himself that he was out of practice at it. The ghost of Johnny Compton couldn’t harm people in the physical world. She was fairly confident of that. If he could, he would have harmed her by now. He’d been a man in life with an appetite for hurting women. But she had dreamed too often lately of drowning. And she couldn’t help thinking of David Lucas, who’d got up from a hospital bed and gone home and packed and left for the Isle of Wight and Bembridge. She couldn’t help seeing David dead on the bottom of a dim sea, swaying in the current, his precious life spent on the promise of a few hundred pounds.

  Four

  The South Hams, 1944

  A brass hat called Clark had coined the phrase that voiced the obvious. Clark was a two-star memo specialist who had somehow weaselled his way into General Marshall’s little black book of officer preferment. Some soldiers thought the black book a myth fostered by Marshall himself to encourage efficiency and openness among officers discussing the art and mechanics of war. Johnny Compton, however, knew this to be horseshit. Openness worked only if your opinions on military matters were voiced in the right accent, in sentences securely bolted by grammar gained as the privilege of a paid-for education. And Marshall’s little black book of preferment was no myth. He’d seen the general take it out and make entries in it twice, once in manoeuvres at Benning and, again, in George Patton’s army kingdom in California.

  Clark was no doubt some servile, self-seeking jerk. In a moment of revelation, however, he’d opined that ‘A soldier is always green unless he’s been under fire’. To Compton’s knowledge, the general had never in his service life fought anything more lethal than a cold. But his words, with his reputation, had since gained the currency of gold.

  At least, that was the comfort Johnny Compton clung to as he waited to see Colonel Fitzpatrick under the canvas awning of the camp’s administration block. He was flanked by two MPs. They were big guys, and they’d strip-searched him after the English police had delivered him into their custody. He didn’t look or feel his best. He’d struggled with the English cops who’d tried to arrest him at Paddington. He’d known that English cops went unarmed and bet heavily on his chances of escape. The cops were old, all the young English guys abroad, fighting, or down the coal mines or in factories, combat exempted. So the cops had been older guys, maybe in their forties. He’d decked three of them but then got cornered in an alley. They hadn’t taken kindly to seeing their own, unconscious and bleeding in a street gutter. A skilled beating had followed in the cells under Paddington police station. A really tough old limey cop had delivered it with his fists and knees and a hardwood truncheon. Johnny thought he’d be lucky if he stopped pissing blood after a week. He also thought that if the guys with the white armbands had not come for him as promptly as they had, he would now be occupying a mortuary drawer.

  He turned his hat in his hands. Rain beat and withered on shuddering canvas. The MPs stood like burly statues on either side of him. He hated the weather in this fucking country. He would have paid for the smell of jasmine and julep, now, in the English night. But he got kerosene smoke and damp, mildewing canvas. It was a rotten fucking place. He hurt everyfuckingwhere.

  He concentrated on what it was he knew about Richard Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick was a proper lawyer, at least. That was the one perverse benefit of this amateur, vastly inflated army he had found himself in. You could get a proper haircut and expert dentistry. Real musicians performed at the concerts that real impresarios organized on behalf of their fellow brothers in arms. Real cooks dished out the chow. And Fitzpatrick would tell him exactly what chance he had of escaping a sentence served in an English prison cell.

  The pimp hadn’t even looked English, when he came to think about it. He was some kind of spic from one of those little British Empire places. Maltese, maybe. And the spic had been the one who upped the stakes by pulling the knife.

  Rain dripped and canvas shuddered like cold flesh. If he looked to right or left—and his facial swellings just allowed it—Compton saw disdainful fury on the faces of the MPs flanking him. In truth, he was ashamed. His own father would have felt the same shame, he knew, chastising himself with that unshirkable fact. He’d let matters get messy, out of hand. He’d been caught. And you did not get caught. It was his own first principle, the rule by which he judged himself. His daddy would have expected no different. He had a standard to maintain, a proud tradition. You absolutely did not get caught. But he had; he’d been caught. It was no consolation that he’d got clean away from similar scrapes on a dozen occasions. He’d have to deal with the failure and with the shame of it eventually. Now, though, he had to think about Fitzpatrick.

  He had to forget that the colonel was a wartime colonel, and not a colonel of note. He had to forget the Irish name, with its privileged reek of Boston Catholicism. He had to remember his own value, in which regard he could give sincere and grateful thanks to General Mark Clark. And he had to remember to identify Fitzpatrick’s weaknesses.

  It was hard, though. They had brought him back manacled, lying on his stomach on the boards of a flat-bed truck. He felt like he needed desperately to pee, thanks to the attention paid his kidneys by the big limey cop. He hadn’t smoked a cigarette in better than thirteen hours and his craving for a Lucky now was even greater discomfort to him than his bruises, his abrasions, his bone-weary fa
tigue. He didn’t even have the consolation of a stick of gum. And he wasn’t going to get one from the white hats guarding him. They tended to cosy up to the British police, to foster good relations. Didn’t matter to them that he was a trained officer who had dedicated his professional life to the service of his country. Cops were cops in any language, in any uniform you chose to clothe them in. They’d pronounced their own verdict on the man in their charge. It was a harsh and unhappy one.

  Rain pattered and squalled in big, gusty drops against the canvas roof. It really knew how to fucking rain in England. And it was damp all the time. The waterproof hadn’t been invented that could keep this miserable climate from seeping into your clothes and your flesh and, eventually, into your bones. There were lots of things he liked about England, able to consider it in a more convivial mood. The booze. The women. The blackout. But the weather was awful. The climate was defeating. And they said that in France the weather was even worse. Compton wondered, seriously, if he would now ever get to see France. His father had fought with distinction in France. What a sorry fucking mess he was in. He tried to look at his watch, out of habit, but they’d taken it from his wrist and, anyway, the crystal had been smashed in the first part of his long night of London trouble, when he had wrestled the knife from the grip of that greasy fucking pimp before giving him what he had coming.

  Fitzpatrick, Fitzpatrick. He must know something about the colonel. In the sorry condition he was in, it was hard enough to think straight, let alone to remember or plan. But he couldn’t go in there naked, unarmed. There had to be something. Maybe it would come to him when he saw the man.

  He could smell bacon cooking on the long iron skillets in the kitchen block. He could smell hot bacon fat and eggs frying in the fat left on the skillets from the soft rinds of tender hogs. He could hear the banter of the Negro cooks, growing more cheerful as they snaffled themselves a morsel of pork belly and their senses wakened and stirred to the hot rhythms of a busy kitchen shift. In truth, though, they sounded more subdued than usual. Or maybe that was just him. He could smell bread and coffee, too, as the camp stirred into life long before the reluctant coming of another miserable English dawn. And he could hear an approaching column of marching men, weariness evident in the trudge of their boots and the creak of leather and canvas under rain capes as they laboured home after a field exercise. It was breakfast and then bed for those troops, the snug and blissful reward well earned for the hard routine of bivouacs and field rations high up on Dartmoor. They’d have been up there for seventy-two hours, lying low in the day and fighting at night. Learning by touch the contours of unfamiliar territory. Making the hostile terrain their friend, their advantage. They were becoming soldiers. Christ, who was he kidding? They had become soldiers, hadn’t they?