Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [87]
“Under that name, however, there was little more, only the record of where he’d trained before being sent to France. No service record, no medical papers, not even a death notice.
“Of course, the Records Offices are in deplorable condition, and even the most straight-forward of records go astray all the time. Assuming that this specific case of loss was due to malice would be leaping to conclusions—an exercise at which, as Russell could tell you, I have much practice, although I try to kerb the impulse.
“Still, I now had the unit with which he’d been sent to France. Assuming, that is, that he stayed with the original regiment.”
“Which he didn’t,” Iris broke in. “When I saw him in Paris in March, he was en route to a new posting.”
“My dear lady, I might as easily have remained here and had most of my work done for me by your arrival. However, in the end, rather than pursuing the boy through several million dusty bits of paper, we let ourselves out of the building and I caught a cab straight-away for my brother Mycroft’s.”
He paused to choose his words. “My brother is a mine of information when it comes to the inner workings of the machinery of government.” This was a delicate way of explaining Mycroft’s all-pervasive and enormously powerful role in, as Mycroft whimsically called it, “accounting.”
“I know your brother,” Iris said. “I did some work for him during the War.”
“You don’t say? Well. In any case, after I’d turned Mycroft from his bed and confronted him with the name, he was no more forthcoming than the clerk’s file had been. He’d never directed a man by that name. He did agree, however, that for a second lieutenant to have virtually no records was an unexplained irregularity, and it is my brother’s function, certainly in his own mind, to explain the inexplicable, to account for the unaccountable. It took him the entire morning—which is an exceedingly long time for Mycroft—but he did follow young Gabriel’s elusive tracks far enough to uncover the second regiment to which he was posted, following his release from hospital in March.
“Once I possessed that piece of information, the rest was foot-work. The names of the demobbed from that regiment and their addresses allowed me to winnow out those men from London, as I could see no advantage to be had in seeking out names from far-flung villages. Time enough for that, if it proves necessary.
“From the score of names that immediately presented themselves, I chose half a dozen to begin with, all of them old enough to suggest that their survival was due to a degree of low cunning, rather than sheer luck. One captain, one sergeant, the rest privates.
“The four I located before the hour became too late for calling told me a story that interested me deeply. I began by showing them the photograph I had borrowed from the library downstairs, and although they were all uncertain about the name Hughenfort, they did know the face, and knew that ‘Angel’—their nick-name for the lad—had been shot.
“Two things concerning the testimony of these soldiers interested me greatly. First and most obvious, that they knew the face and the first name, but none recognised the family name. This confirmed that your nephew used his nom de guerre exclusively, not just for the authorities.
“The other thing that interested me was not so much what the men knew, as how they felt about their ‘Angel’ Gabriel. When I first brought up the subject, each was loth to speak of the lad at all. When they did, it was with an uncomfortable mixture of deep resentment and sorrow that quite obviously pained them. All felt considerable distress at what happened to the lad, and a kind of hurt bafflement, as if a friend had badly let them down, for reasons they could not comprehend.
“It was not shame. Nor was it the disappointment in a too-soft sprig of the aristocracy, a lad who had no business in the trenches and ran afoul of his own inadequacies. It was more a case of, There but for the grace of God might I have gone.