The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller Read Free Book Online Page A

expression belied his words. 'More surprising to find Emmett had any to leave. Jack's usually spot on about stuff. Emmett and Bolitho served together in France. Emmett was inspecting a redoubt when it collapsed. Nothing to do with Jerry, just one of those things. Two other chaps with him died but Emmett wasn't far in and I heard that old Bolitho dug like fury and got him out. Banged him about, got him breathing. Heroic measures. Emmett must have remembered when Bolitho was invalided out.'
    'And a Frenchman who's disappeared and a woman called Lovell, or Lowell? Does she mean anything to you? She lives in London now, Kentish Town way.'
    Charles thought for a moment. 'No,' he said. 'No. Can't say it does. No, don't personally know any Lowells, Lovells or whoever. Or anybody at all in Kentish Town.' He looked amazed at his own fallibility. 'The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell the Dog, rule all England under the Hog.'
    Laurence stared at his friend, speechless.
    'Richard III's nasty chums,' said Charles, happily. 'Only bit of history I remember from school. So, this Miss Lovell, an heiress too now, is she? Some floozy of Emmett's? Well, at least she sounds English this time. Always a dark horse, that man.'
    '
Mrs
Lovell, I think.'
    Charles raised his eyebrows. 'Just so,' he said.

    After the strangely disquieting day in Cambridge and the dinner with Charles, Laurence half expected Louise to come; she so often did when he had drunk a bit. Trying to avoid her, he delayed getting undressed. Eventually he fell into bed around two, thinking briefly about the sun and the river. He must have fallen asleep as the next thing he knew it was morning; he had been woken by a bee buzzing angrily between curtain and windowpane. He flicked it out into the day and lay back. Despite his aching shoulders and back, he felt content, relaxing in the early light, recalling his meeting with Mary, and he pushed away thoughts of her now-dead lover.
    He considered the feasibility of actually contacting people who had known John. What questions could he reasonably ask on her behalf? Nothing too wild; there was a limit to how far anybody wanted to look back these days. He simply hoped to give Mary some sense of her brother's war and of what others made of him. He thought of his own sister, as he almost never did, and reflected how very little she would know about him if he should die suddenly. He pulled out his bedside drawer and found the picture he had of them, side by side, just before she left to go on honeymoon and out of his life. He was already taller than her. All these photographs looked so real, yet were as much illusions and ghosts as oil paintings in a gallery. He had left all those he had of Louise in their London house. He thought back to the family portrait of the Emmett children. Who was the baby, he wondered? Had they once had a younger sibling? He felt sorry for Mary, now the lone survivor.
    He felt happy in a way he hadn't for years at the thought of simply walking over to the concert hall to check the programme. To satisfy his conscience, he wrote solidly all day. The pages at the end of it suddenly looked remarkably like a proper chapter.

    He decided to start following up John Emmett's trail the next morning, although when he woke heavy skies threatened rain, putting him in two minds whether to postpone his day's plans or not. There was, after all, no hurry: John Emmett had been dead for nine months or so.
    The postman delivered a letter from Charles. He took out the single, crisp page with a smile. Having inherited and swiftly sold the substantial business built up by four generations of Carfaxes, Charles had time to involve himself in other men's lives. Sometimes Laurence wondered whether, in the absence of war, Charles was bored.
Albany
10 September 1921
Dear Bartram,
Before you turn detective, because any fool can see that's what you've got in mind, and probably a lady behind your transformation into Mr. Holmes, I thought I might help you