Invitation to Die Read online

  “He looked at the six of us, ragtag and bobtails, from the height of his horse, and something very like pity flitted for a moment across his noble features. He dismounted, put the map down on the sand in front of us and invited us to kneel with him while he poked at it with his swagger stick. ‘Look here. If you take my advice, you’ll travel by night. The Boer will pick you off in the daylight. By night, you’ll stand a better chance. They’ll be lighting fires, so you’ll be able to spot them before they spot you. Cushion your boots with cloth if you’re walking on a stony terrain and use the compass. If there’s no moon to see it by, you’ll have to strike a match. But for God’s sake, not a Swan Vesta! They go up in a flare that’ll alert every Boer between here and Kimberley. Here, take these.’ He fished in his pocket and produced a slim package of American matches. ‘These are more discreet,’ he said, ‘but hide the light behind a rock nevertheless.’

  “He added a few words of jolly nonsense to cheer us up. Even handed us an early Christmas present, in case we were held up and unable to get back in time for the regimental celebrations. The general was planning—at last—to give the men a few days’ rest. Coinciding with the holiday season and as a reward for a tough job dutifully done. He’d decided to let us stage some sporting events—”

  “Sporting events? Are you telling me the men were doing the one-hundred-yard dash while Kimberley waited for your attention?” Redfyre asked in disbelief. “Fifty thousand townsfolk and troops trapped there, starving, being bombed by six-inch field guns every few seconds, women and children confined to the depths of the gold mines for safety days on end, and the Relief Force sits down and unwraps its Christmas presents!”

  “I see you read the Manchester Guardian reports. I would paint quite a different picture. But . . . ‘Ours not to reason why, ours just to march and die!’ In any case, the besieged of Kimberley were having a much easier time of it than the relieving army. They’d had supplies laid in with such forethought by Cecil Rhodes, who—what an irony!—found himself besieged in his own town. Others had fled the Transvaal while they could, clanking their jewellery, flashing their guilders and their pounds sterling and buying up first-class cabins on the ships back to Europe. Why was he still there? He wasn’t saying. But he was keeping a close eye on his assets, that much was obvious. Every day a signal or an exhausted, often wounded, messenger got through from Cecil. Always the same message. More bellyaching about his relief. ‘Methuen, where the hell are you? How much longer must I wait?’ Every day his gold mines were out of action was a day’s trading lost and a pain to him.

  “They did still have their uses, though. Cecil made the grand gesture of opening the company mines for the use of women and children to hide in when the Boer cannons began to fire. The civilian death rate was minuscule—about twenty souls, they said, from start to finish. However, their military saviours—the British Army—were losing thousands every day. So we weren’t too bothered on Cecil’s account. By that time, a pontoon bridge had been established on the Modder and our tents and supplies were coming over freely. The Top Brass were established in the Grand Hotel that they’d cleared of Boer. Cronje had apparently been watching the fight from behind the French windows. He’d bunked off, leaving his meerschaum smoking in the ashtray.

  “So my little band was preparing to go off into the wilderness while the rest of the regiment relaxed, with the promise of organised sports to pass the time. Besides a chance to shine in the running races, the football and the boxing, the men were being given a presentation tin of chocolates from Queen Victoria herself. They’d come out on the same troop carrier, thoughtfully labelled with the new year’s date, 1900. Natty little things! We were glad to have them. You may have seen one? They are much collected, I understand. Red with a gold medallion of the queen’s head. Inside, six bars of the best Fry’s milk chocolate—”

  “Bugger the chocolate!” Redfyre stirred impatiently. “A unit of six men? Even if you call them a tactical sub-unit, they’re never going to be able to do work more suited to a platoon! And, for railway maintenance and doubtless telegraph repair work, you’d need a squad of engineers.” A sympathetic shake of the head told the witness that the inspector, in spite of his youth, had his eye on the ball and was not to be distracted by a mention of Mr. Fry’s best. “Six men being sent into uncertain terrain? With the vaguest of instructions? What half-wit gave that command? And what poor sod was put in charge of this suicide squad?”

  “I was. Battlefield promotion, you could call it. Or a desperate decision taken in haste by an inexperienced and badly briefed officer?”

  “What rank was conferred?”

  “I was made captain. My old sergeant was made lieutenant. And we both regretted it as soon as our oh-so-helpful information officer told us we were being given the opportunity to take a day’s course with the men on close combat techniques with the regimental experts before we set off into the unknown. ‘Just a refresher, don’t you know! Always worth having!’” His eyes narrowed. “Clown! But he wasn’t wrong.” His smile was angelic as he added, “I’ve always found ‘three easy ways to incapacitate your enemy in twenty seconds’ to be an invaluable skill. It’s served me well, in and out of uniform.”

  “Only three?”

  “It’s enough for me.”

  The slow drawing of the chain through the manacle, Redfyre interpreted as a subtle threat. It said clearly, If only . . . He was glad he’d insisted on having the man wear a restraint, even though he suspected he would never live it down in the constabulary canteen.

  The old soldier appeared unsurprised to be handed a sheet of paper. “Ah! You’ll be wanting a list of the weasels and wastrels I commanded, then? I thought that was where this was leading. Here goes. Do you want me to list them in order of rank or villainy?”

  “Probably amounts to the same thing, but let’s try rank, shall we? Starting with yourself. Chief Weasel.”

  The man scribbled in silence for a few minutes, then passed the sheet bearing six names back to the inspector.

  Captain Richard Dunne (officer i/c patrol)

  Lieutenant Abel Hardy (2 i/c)

  Corporal Ralph Merriman

  Corporal Ernest Jessup

  Private Herbert Sexton

  Private Sydney Fox

  “You’ll find they appear in order of experience, also. Worth noting that, of the two privates, Private Sexton was several years older than Private Fox. Herbert was a difficult man to promote.”

  Intrigued, the inspector followed up the odd remark. “Owing to criminal tendencies? Lack of moral fibre?”

  “No, no! Quite the reverse. One of the straightest and bravest men I ever had dealings with. Herbert was of limited mental capacity, but bright enough to know it. He had no wish for promotion. He adopted a paternal role towards Private Fox. We all did. The kid was seventeen years old and just out of training, having joined up the previous year. Young Sydney was fresh-faced, naïf, youngest of three brothers and—I’d have guessed—had been rather spoiled by his mother.” He smiled. “I remember he was always hungry. On our march north we were short of supplies. Our daily ration of three hardtack biscuits and a can of bully beef had been reduced to one biscuit and half a can of beef. This was a nasty shock to all of us, but especially to young Syd, whose father owned a grocer’s shop on some murky street corner in . . . Leeds, I think it was.

  “Syd had clearly never gone short of rations before. He would gobble down his campaign biscuit for the day, then look about him in despair like an open-beaked chick on the nest. I used to break my hardtack in two when no one was looking and give him half, for which he was always tearfully grateful. Until I realised that young Sydney was creating occasions when he could be alone with each of us. A bit of quiet shadowing and I had it! The scheming little bugger was getting a half or a quarter of every man’s biscuit! Not getting fat on it, by any means. With all the marching and fighting, not even Syd retained his
puppy fat, but he was surviving well.

  “When I was quite certain that the lad’s behaviour was calculated, cunning and detrimental to the well-being and, yes, the discipline of the group, I had a word with the men. With each in turn. I told them to hold back. But Herbert Sexton wasn’t listening. ‘That poor little boy! He’s nobbut a bairn! If we can’t look after our own young ’uns, what are we then?’”

  “Not a bad sentiment! I’m beginning to like Private Sexton,” Redfyre said heartily, beginning to wonder quite where this road map was now leading him. Round the houses again, or off a cliff?

  The prisoner’s look, a blend of despair and pity for his naïveté, told him there would be no happy ending to this South African Christmas story.

  Chapter 6

  Cambridge, Saturday, the 7th of June, 1924

  “So, reprovisioned, fortified by a refresher course in self-defence, out-of-date map in hand, the fearless six of the tactical sub-unit set off into the sunset to reoccupy and man the main artery of communication of the South African Empire?” Redfyre sighed. “Am I getting this right?”

  The prisoner smiled. “Pretty much.”

  “Did they at least give you horses?”

  “None available. We were generously given written leave to commandeer any strays we might find, British or Boer. But we did the first twenty miles on foot. By this time, we had learned to soft-foot it around the countryside, and we were glad of our khaki uniform, which was exactly the colour of the burned-out veldt, and glad of our light loads. Little food to spare, we were told to ‘live off the land.’ Antelope? Lizard? Ostrich? We found it easier to kill a Boer or two and steal their biltong. We found out later that the Boer had mostly decamped—a tactical retreat—upcountry into a more defensible position they’d been preparing for months, but their outposts were still about. Not that we’d ever sighted one of them—not even when they were in battle formation and firing at our lines! There were miles of trenches dug, barbed wire brought in by the ton. Another wheeze our armchair generals had failed to anticipate, another failing of our intelligence system.” He groaned. “I think you know what was to follow, while we were enjoying our little jaunt into the backveldt.”

  “Magersfontein,” Redfyre said quietly into the sudden silence. “The horrible business of Magersfontein.”

  “The tenth of December. The column they’d sent out to the east, four thousand Highlanders, Black Watch and Seaforths, drenched to the bone and lost in the darkness, were ambushed. Walked straight into it. They fell by the hundred. Densely packed as they were, one Mauser bullet could go through several men, and there were hundreds of Mausers firing down on them. Many poor sods fleeing the massacre were caught up on the wire fences the Boers had rigged up around their trap. They found them next morning, strung up like crows on the wire. Target practice for the sharpshooters.”

  “But these were Highlanders,” Redfyre prompted him gently.

  “The bravest of us. And the most tenacious. Ordered into an impossible situation. By dawn, they’d reformed their companies, hunkered down wherever they could find shelter from the firing and taken stock. Without their officers, they still made an advance. A group of clansmen on the right wing made off for the nearest Boer trenches and returned with prisoners and bloodied bayonets. The Guards and the Yorkshires were sent up to relieve them, and after a day’s hard-fought engagement, they finally managed to extricate themselves and retreat back to base at the Modder River. We heard the din of the battle from our first bivouac camp, miles away by then.

  “‘Cor! D’you ’ear that, Captain?’ young Fox said. ‘That’s the old man giving the buggers what-for! We should have been there! Shame we’ve missed it!’ He was a bloodthirsty little tyke, so long as it was someone else’s blood being spilled.

  “To celebrate what we all wrongly assumed to be a British victory, Private Sexton scrabbled in his pack and brought out his Queen Victoria tin of chocolate. There were six bars in each tin. He passed them round and we had one each.”

  “What generosity! And what self-restraint! To have them still intact after—what was it?”

  “Ten days. Considering the condition we were in, they were a lifesaver! Mine, eaten slowly at the rate of one a day, had kept me sane and ticking over! They meant so much to every man. More than cigarettes or money. Very few were traded. Fewer were stolen. And that’s unusual for the riffraff army that we were.”

  Redfyre held back the compulsion to urge the man to get on with it. He sensed that the prisoner was not deliberately wasting his time. If he dwelt on the Victoria tins, he took them to be significant. The inspector knew well that, in a world of unimaginable pressure and hardship, men with few possessions would kill for a sixpence.

  He stirred in his seat, then looked Redfyre in the eye. “I know what you’re fishing for. You need to know which of us has been cutting a swathe through your peaceful town and why. We’re all trained killers, but you need to know which of us was capable of murder. What you’re interested in is the mental makeup of the men in my small unit, including myself.” He smiled. “At that time, a subject of intense interest to me as well! Life and death were riding on the quality of the men I had been handed to lead. So if you’re thinking chocolate consumption is any indicator of character—intriguing idea!—I’ll declare: out of the six of us, four were normal guzzlers. Empty tins in packs by the time we started out. Ratty Merriman and Ernest Jessup had eaten theirs by the end of day one. Abel Hardy and I rationed ours a little better. It was the two privates who showed restraint. Herbert? No idea why. It could have been as simple as a concern not to open a Christmas present before Christmas Day. He came from a clean-living Methodist family, and apart from continually breaking the Sixth Commandment, he followed a stringent moral code. Sydney? Hard to say. He made a big stir about keeping his tin intact to take it home and present it to his mother. You got a lot of respect for expressing that sort of piety in the army at that time. We all supported him. Sydney’s mum’s tin was sacrosanct. Being less gullible—very well, being cynical—it was my thought that he was doing what some ghastly kids do—hanging on to his share until everyone had eaten theirs and then he’d produce it, eat it slowly and gloat. I still think I had it right. Still, we all were very grateful for Herbert’s gesture. In a strange way, it bonded the company. For a while.

  “Was it good? The chocolate.” Redfyre asked. He knew the query would cause no offence. Tastes and smells—the pleasant ones—were precious to the fighting man, and sometimes these were the memories he carried with him the longest. And were the easiest to talk about. His own most personal letters to his aunt Hetty during the last war had been triggered by such moments—the scent of rabbit roasting over a campfire, the unexpected sight of a flower—a single snowdrop standing proudly in the middle of a sea of mud.

  “It was very good! A bit deformed by the heat—the old lady hadn’t factored meltability into her gift planning, and those days on the veldt were scorchers, but yes, incomparable! I still can’t pass an advert for Fry’s chocolate without salivating! . . . I say, Inspector, you look as though you could do with a cup of tea before we start on the truly heart-stopping moments I have lined up for you. After the high points of the thrill of bogus victory and the fleeting joy of chocolate, it all descends into blood, death and disaster. Fortify yourself!”

  Redfyre walked to the door and had a word with Constable Jenkins, then went to the window and puffed nervously on a cigarette until the constable returned. He’d probably just put his job on the line. But it was worth a try, he reckoned. Time for a change of bowling to shake up that straight bat.

  “Here you are, sir. You were right—there were some left.”

  “Any trouble with the super, Jenkins?”

  “Naw, sir! I said as it were a requisition. He just grinned. And made a disobliging remark about your presumption, sir, though he used a term that would have had my granny reaching for the carbolic soap.”
>
  He put a tray down on the desk, carefully out of reach of the prisoner.

  “Thank you, Jenkins. That will be all. I’ll pour.”

  The prisoner was trying without much success not to laugh. Redfyre poured out two cups of strong brown canteen tea and put a plate of Peek Frean’s chocolate digestive table biscuits in front of him. Some baker’s brilliant notion of combining the buttery shortness of a biscuit with the nectar that was smooth chocolate.

  “I shouldn’t try dunking one of these in your tea,” Redfyre advised. “It ruins both elements! These come to us courtesy of the superintendent. No Fry’s chocolate available, but this is the next best thing. He keeps supplies in his locker. Even the strongest among us have our weaknesses.”

  They sipped and munched in companionable silence until the prisoner seemed not only ready, Redfyre slyly noted, but eager to continue his story.

  “We stuck to the riverbank and kept our noses to the west. All we could do. We had a constant supply of disgusting cholera-ridden river water, but there were pure springs enough along the north bank to keep us going. We saw and tried to catch one or two masterless Boer horses, but they wouldn’t let us anywhere near them. We can’t have smelled right to their delicate nostrils. We tried the whistling trick to attract them, but they weren’t deceived! We clearly weren’t whistling the right tune. On the second day, we came across a spavined mule that had been cut loose by the Boers. After a bit of stomach-churning attention involving a penknife from Private Sexton—Herbert—who’d been a horse-handler back home, it recovered enough for us to recruit it to our cause and carry our baggage. And if the worst occurred, it would stew up and feed us for a few days.”