The House in Holywell Street

By David Roberts

Captain Adam Harkaway is wounded at Spion Kop, a famous battle in the South African or Boer War. Invalided out of the army, he returns to London in the spring of 1900, with nothing to do and no income – or, rather, he has one debt to pay. His life had been saved by a fellow officer, a Lieutenant Glover, who in saving Adam’s life lost his own ...

Adam volunteers to deliver a letter Glover wrote before the battle to his sweetheart. The only problem is, according to the lieutenant’s father, the girl his son loved is dead of brain fever. Adam is unconvinced, particularly when he discovers the lovers were half-brother and half-sister.

To complicate things for Adam, his casual interest in a house in Holywell Street – a slum between the Strand and the Thames – leads him to be suspected of murder. The house is a brothel in which the bodies of several women are discovered, all showing signs they were tortured, perhaps for the pleasure of perverted clients.

Adam is not completely friendless. In South Africa he had become friends with Jack Churchill – Winston’s brother – who has also been wounded in battle. He has also meets and falls for a rich American, Laura Carlyle.

With the help of his new friends, Adam sets out to solve the murders at the house in Holywell Street and soon finds himself facing greater dangers than any he had met in war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Roberts
• Release date: Mar 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370095612

David Roberts

David Roberts is an award-winning illustrator. After graduating, he worked as a milliner and a fashion illustrator, but always felt his true calling was in children’s books. He has collaborated with some of Britain’s finest children’s authors, including Julia Donaldson, Sally Gardner, Philip Ardagh and Jacqueline Wilson. He is also the creator of the popular Dirty Bertie books. He lives in London with his husband. He has been twice-shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal, and in 2006 he won the Nestlé Children’s Book Prize Gold Award.

Book preview

1.

‘My dear sister, it is now almost midnight on the 23rd of January 1900. At last we have our orders after procrastination and delay. We are to capture Spion Kop, the highest mountain in the range that divides us from the town of Ladysmith which we are attempting to relieve. We have been fighting for twelve hours a day for four days and are no forwarder, and I really cannot say how it will end, though I am inclined to believe this may be my last day upon this earth and perhaps my first under it.’ Captain Harkaway licked the stub of his pencil and added, ‘Before we left England The Times declared that the twentieth century was going to be our century – that the British Empire would spread across the world bringing with it peace and prosperity. Maybe so, but if this is how our century begins, for God’s sake how will it end?’

Adam Harkaway, along with most of the army, recognised that their general, Sir Charles Warren, was indecisive and incompetent. They had been told that they had come to South Africa to punish a few Dutch farmers who had dared to oppose the inexorable advance of the British Empire. It was to be little more than a holiday ramble but that was not how it had turned out. The Boers, the Dutch farmers who had made the Transvaal – this part of Southern Africa – their own, had seen no reason why they should yield their place in the sun to the British. They had opposed the might of empire not with superior firepower – that was the undisputed advantage held by the British – but by guile, endurance and their mastery of the terrain over which they fought.

The British Army was recognisably the same that had won Waterloo eighty-five years earlier. The Boers were – though the British were reluctant to admit it – a modern force using new tactics. Their generals were innovative and shrewd. They deployed small mobile attacking groups to harry the slow-moving British army and disappeared into the landscape before the British could bring them to battle in the same way that reebok fade into the landscape and became invisible to the human eye. When the Boers decided to make a stand they dug trenches and protected them with barbed wire. Safe in these trenches, they cut down much greater numbers of the enemy as they walked slowly, bayonets fixed, into the jaws of death – very much as they had at Waterloo. As General Warren remarked, ‘It just wasn’t cricket.’

The Boers had their weaknesses, of course. They had fewer weapons than the British but some of what they had were modern German-made arms. What they lacked, however, was discipline. The Boer army was democratic. Their general, Louis Botha, had to cajole rather than order, and these amateur soldiers had a healthy distaste for meeting the highly disciplined and well-armed British army head on rather than in the guerrilla warfare in which they excelled. When they decided that they were under attack from an overwhelmingly superior force they would panic and return to their farms.

General Warren was fatally ignorant of the mountain General Buller had instructed him to capture and made no effort to scout the way ahead. He saw no need. It did not worry him that he had no knowledge of what the enemy might be doing out of sight behind the mountain. He ordered his men – and Adam was part of the advance guard – to climb Spion Kop and use their bayonets against the small force of Boers who, the general believed, commanded the summit. As the order came for the advance, Adam hurriedly added to the letter he was scribbling to his sister, ‘God bless you, my dearest. If I should die, it may be a comfort to you to know that my last thoughts were of you, Adam.’

He put the letter inside his pocket-Shakespeare so that it might have a chance of surviving the battle and then stared moodily into the darkness. He scratched a sore place on his neck where his uniform chafed. His spirits were low though he tried to disguise his gloom from the men directly under his command. He hated night attacks. A night attack was always hazardous and all the more so when the ground was uneven as it was on the mountain – a mixture of rough grass and rock. Whatever could go wrong would go wrong he was sure. There was no moon and a persistent drizzle drenched him as they waited the order to advance. At last the whistles blew and he ordered his men to begin the ascent. The climb was slow and arduous but to Adam’s relief they were not fired upon from above. However, he was panting hard when they came across the first Boer outpost. Hearing the noise of sentries patrolling the perimeter of their camp, he signalled to his men to lie flat. At his command his men shouted a battle cry and fired off a shot or two while remaining on their stomachs.

As he had hoped, the Boers panicked and fired blindly into the night until their magazines were emptied. None of his men were hit by the fusillade and when the Boer rifles – much inferior to the British Martini-Henry – had fallen silent Adam rose to his feet and, without waiting to see if his men would follow him, charged uphill screaming a war cry with all the fury of a frustrated soldier. He took out his anger on the Boers since his own senior officers were not there to be punished for their mismanagement of what should have been a relatively easy campaign. He thrust his bayonet into one heavyset and heavily bearded Boer and swung him over his shoulder as though he had been no heavier than a bale of hay. The rest of the Boers fled and Adam, once he had regained his breath, called for three cheers which was the agreed signal to the army below that their attack had been successful. They then set about digging trenches but their work was made difficult by the darkness and the mist that now enveloped them. The ground proved hard and stony and the entrenching implements they carried inadequate to scratch more than shallow ditches.

With the dawn, Adam saw to his dismay that his trenches were of little use – not just because they were too shallow but also because they had been dug in the wrong place. What he had believed to be the summit of Spion Kop was merely a ridge just below the real summit. No doubt in the night attack he could easily have taken the summit had he understood the terrain. If only he had brought with him a local guide he might have been celebrating a famous victory but now it was too late.

As the light improved, the Boers above them poured a killing stream of lead into the British who struggled to return fire. Pinned down within their shallow trench Adam and his men were unable to advance or retreat. They were driven to use their dead comrades like sandbags to provide some small protection from the enemy’s remorseless fire. Cursing himself, Adam understood he had led his men into a trap and almost certain death. For the rest of his life he would blame himself for the disaster that had overtaken them. He had been given an opportunity of securing a great victory but had instead found humiliating defeat at the hands of few Dutch farmers.

The night had been cold and wet but the dawn sky was clear. For three long hours Adam defended the position. The day became hot beyond endurance and before midday thirst was added to the torture of being trapped like badgers in their sett. He held on, expecting to be relieved by the main body of the army and but no relief came. The heavy guns, which should have been pounding the Boer forces, did not thunder. The messenger he had sent down the mountain had either been killed or ignored he supposed. It was clear that they had been abandoned to their fate. Finally, Adam had no option but to order the retreat – he refused to contemplate surrender. He waited until the enemy fire slackened as the Boers began to run short of ammunition or were called away to face attacks from different quarters. Then he ordered half his men to fire rapidly at the enemy while the other half of his company retreated to a rocky position from which they could cover Adam and the remainder of his small force as they retreated or tried to.

The first part of the operation went relatively smoothly. The Boers seemed not to have expected their prey to attempt to escape and maybe they feared a trick. But when it was Adam’s turn to retreat with the remainder of his men the Boers were alert. They had no intention of seeing their prey slip away a second time. Unintimidated by the less than determined fire from those of Adam’s men who had gained the protection of the great boulders, the Boers stood up in their trenches and concentrated their fire on the little bunch of men scuttling like rabbits beneath them. Adam put his rifle over his shoulder and began to run over the rough ground towards the rocks not more than two hundred yards distant.

Halfway, he stumbled over a tuft of grass and the awful recognition came to him that he had twisted his ankle. Using his rifle as a crutch he hobbled on, only too aware of the tempting target he must make to the Boers above. The end came with all the agony he had experienced when, aged thirteen, standing before the wicket a cricket ball had broken his leg below the knee. He felt the bullet smash into his thigh and the pain was unbearable. He tumbled to the ground. He knew he was a dead man. With every muscle tensed he awaited the shot that would send him into darkness. It may have been because the Boers assumed he was already dead but that killing bullet did not come. Then he became aware that he was being urged to get up and there was a hand pulling at his arm. A man was kneeling beside him shouting at him to get to his feet.

He wanted to say that it was impossible and he should be left to die like so many others on this hateful hill, that his guilt would be – could only be – erased by death. But his companion did not seem to hear his mumbled protests or did not listen. Against his will, Adam made an effort to move. He forced himself on to one leg – his other dangled useless – and supported by his comrade – began to hop. In this way he was half dragged over the fifty yards that remained to be covered. With a groan of mingled pain and relief he sank to the ground behind a boulder. He was safe – at least for the moment.

He began to shout his thanks to the man who had rescued him from the killing field. He did not recognize him but saw that he wore the uniform of the Lancashire Fusiliers, his own regiment. His rescuer straightened up and looked at him with Christlike compassion – or so he thought when later he tried to relive the moment. He smiled and seemed about to say something when a look of surprise turned his smile to a frown, almost of puzzlement. A flower of blood sprang from between his eyes. He who ought to be dead was alive and the man who ought to have lived was dead. In that second, Adam Harkaway’s life was changed. He recognised he had a debt to pay and no way of paying it. Added to the guilt he felt for leading his men into a deathtrap he had this heavy burden that sat on his shoulder like an incubus. He owed a man without a name a life he no longer desired.

2.

In Cape Town, six weeks later, Captain Harkaway lay on a bed trying to write a reassuring letter to his sister – though he could not seem to get started. Really, what was there to say? In any case, it might be that he would reach England at the same time as his letter or even before it. There were so many wounded officers and men waiting to be shipped home that not even the harassed doctor in charge of the hospital had any idea of when they would be moved. Adam was not unduly distressed. He had no particular reason to want to be back in England.

In fact, for the first time since he was a child, he had nothing to do and no object in life. His days of soldiering were over and what could there be left for him to make it worth going on? He would be like a thousand other discharged and disabled officers with no way of earning a living, dependent on the charity of strangers or, worse still in his case, on his sister and brother-in-law. He had no home to return to and no one, except perhaps his sister, cared whether he lived or died. He had been a soldier all his adult life, since he had left Rugby and had been made aware by his guardian, recently deceased, that his small inheritance was all but exhausted. He must work or starve. On an impulse he had joined the army and by 1898 was Captain Adam Harkaway of the Lancashire Fusiliers. All that was now over.

He wallowed in self-pity for several minutes before telling himself not to be so ungrateful. The army had been good to him and if now it was throwing him on the rubbish dump of history, so be it. There was no point in complaining. In fact, at his court-martial he had refused to defend himself against the charge of incompetence and nodded his head in agreement when it was read out to him. Even so, the officers must have had their doubts as to the extent of Captain Harkaway’s culpability because, despite his admission of guilt, he was cleared of anything worse than misfortune. He was honourably discharged from the army on account of his wounds.

He tried to count his blessings. For one thing, he was not dead and there were many worse places to be than in this spacious house overlooking Cape Town with the sun warming the blood and the fresh breeze from the sea cooling the brow. His thoughts were always of his men. Those that had not been killed on Spion Kop were now under another’s command, still struggling on towards Ladysmith. He had not deserted them, he told himself even if his mistake had been deadly. Indeed, General Warren had commended his courage when he had visited wounded officers. Adam would like to have said something biting about it all having been his – the general’s – fault that so many of his comrades had died for what? For nothing. But when he saw that weary suffering face he understood that the general was being punished enough. The British people – or at any rate the British newspapers would blame him for his dilatory and ineffective decision-making and his career too would end in disappointment and failure.

Instead, Adam – when asked by the general’s ADC, a Captain Falkner, if there was anything he needed – merely inquired if someone could find out the name of the man who had given his life for him. The ADC – dapper in his perfectly tailored uniform – seemed kindly enough and made a note of his request. Adam assumed he would hear nothing more about it but in this respect he did the general and his staff an injustice. Just as he was being loaded on to one of the heavily laden ox carts which were transporting the wounded back to Cape Town, the ADC found him out and gave him a large envelope.

‘Here you are, old man. It was found on the body of Lieutenant Glover, the man who saved your life – Gabriel Glover, a most gallant officer.’ He sounded – at least to Adam’s sensitive ears – disapproving that this man should have died when fate had surely decreed that it was Adam’s time to meet his maker.

‘I have had a look and it seems to be a letter for some girl in England to whom, it appears, he was engaged,’ he continued. ‘No name, I am afraid, beyond a first name Catherine but there’s a photograph which I imagine must be of the young lady to whom the letter is addressed. I thought you might like to give the letter and the photograph to her – or rather since we don’t know her name – to Lieutenant Glover’s parents. No doubt they will know how to find her if she isn’t living with them. You will have the pleasure of explaining to them the heroic nature of their son’s death. Or rather, I don’t mean the pleasure, of course, but at least they will have the satisfaction of knowing their son died doing his duty – more than his duty. As for the girl, she will take some comfort, no doubt, in the knowledge Glover carried her image next to his heart. Lieutenant Glover has been recommended for the Victoria Cross but there were so many valiant deeds that day on Spion Kop I fear his bravery may be overlooked – yours too,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘Bad show, though,’ he added, looking meaningfully at Adam’s crutches. ‘Damn bad show.’

When the officer had left, Adam opened the envelope. It contained a brief covering note from the General explaining that the enclosed had been found on the body of the dead man and that it had been entrusted to Captain Harkaway to be delivered to the dead hero’s fiancée. The Lieutenant’s letter had been folded but it was not in its own envelope. Presumably, like Adam’s letter to his sister, it had been written just before the battle and Glover would have thrust it into his coat pocket when the order had been given to advance, as had Adam with his letter.

Adam saw, before he could stop himself, that it began, ‘My dearest Catherine’. He blushed and quickly refolded it. It was not for him to read something so intimate – a love letter to a sweetheart.

Then he saw the photograph flutter to the ground. It had been attached to the note of explanation from the General. He picked it up and examined it carefully. It conveyed very little. The girl looked to be young, maybe in her twenties and with long, luxuriant hair but her face was expressionless – possibly owing to embarrassment at having her likeness taken for her lover or merely the time it was taking for the photographer to do his work. Whatever the reason, she looked pretty enough, like a hundred other girls except, perhaps, for having a rather long nose and a chin which jutted out suggesting to Adam that she was determined or even obstinate but that was mere guesswork.

It appeared he had been responsible not just for a fellow officer’s death – a blow every soldier’s parents must dread – but for the grief of a woman who had hoped to be his wife or perhaps was his wife. It was a painful thought. He would take Lieutenant Glover’s letter to his family as soon as he was in England and no doubt they would know what to do with it. The address – Hampstead Village – was given in the official army letter. He sighed and wondered what to do with his own letter – the letter he had written on the eve of battle to his sister. He touched his breast pocket where it still lodged. She would hardly want to read it now.

He sighed. He loved Hester dearly, despite her choice of husband but could he really live under the same roof – even for a few weeks, let alone a lifetime – as the egregious Rev. Augustus Trampleton? His brother-in-law would kill him with kindness or at least smother him in good advice. On the other hand, he had to admit, better surely to be a live cripple than a dead hero even if, as Trampleton might opine, Heaven was to be welcomed. Adam rather doubted that he would find Paradise, as described by his brother-in-law, anything other than dull.

As the ox cart made its tortuously slow and uncomfortable way to the coast, Adam had plenty of time to consider his future. Did he even have a future? He had achieved so little – less than the ink-stained solicitor’s clerk or the bank teller trapped behind his desk. Both of these at his age twenty-three – twenty-four next month, he reminded himself – would have had a woman, perhaps married her and had a child. He was still a virgin though had there been anyone interested enough in him to have asked, he would never have admitted it. He had no sweetheart in England who would shed tears to hear of his injury and rejoice that he still lived. Once more he wallowed in self-pity. Was he so unlovable? He would never find a girl willing – or stupid enough – to take on a bad-tempered cripple.

No, he told himself, staring at the blue of the sea and the ships gathered in Cape Town harbour, he would not burden his sister with his misery. He still had a little money inherited from his parents on their death. He did not know London well but a friend had told him of a small private hotel in Bloomsbury where – so it appeared from what his informant said – he could spend a month or more at no great cost. In London he could see what work he could do. Better that than idle away his time in Burnham Market where he was sure his melancholy would be exacerbated by the cold and damp and his brother-in-law’s sermons. He would once again attempt to write a letter to his sister and break the news to her. He took out the earlier letter he had composed before the attack on Spion Kop and tore it to shreds. Then, his writing shaky owing to the jolting cart, he put pen to paper.

‘My dearest Hester,’ he began, ‘I was unfortunate enough to have been wounded in battle – my right leg or rather my hip was broken by a Boer bullet but the doctors say it will heal if I am careful. The break was a clean one and I am promised that I will walk again though with the aid of a stick. You will understand I am a poor creature for the moment, unable to sleep at night for the pain and would be a troublesome guest were I to visit you when I reach England so I know you will understand if I delay coming to see you until I am quite recovered from my wounds. I won’t disguise from you that we had a bad time of it here in South Africa and though Ladysmith is relieved – so I have just been told – there are still many battles to come before the Boer accepts the blessings of becoming part of the British Empire.’

He scored out the last sentence feeling that the irony might be lost in the reading of it. ‘My comrades complain that I call out in my dreams. I would not like to frighten little Billy ...’ Billy was his five-year-old nephew and the apple of his sister’s eye. ‘I shall always have in my memory that acre of massacre, that complete shambles at the summit of Spion Kop. The green gully, the cool granite rocks – the way to heaven I believed when dawn showed us our predicament. Our men were all in a small square patch, brown men in brown trenches and there was no escape so tightly were we crammed into that little space. That I survived when so many of the men I was so proud to lead died beside me, shames me and will always haunt my dreams.’

He hesitated. Why tell her all this, about the battle? It sounded, as he re-read it, flowery ... insincere. Why burden her with his depressing account of what the British Press were – he understood – calling a glorious victory? His sister would not want to hear about his little ‘acre of massacre’ – an altogether too melodramatic phrase. Would she, would any civilian, want to hear this? Would it make any sense to her who had never left England? She had never even been to London, as far as he knew. How could she imagine the pain and suffering? But would it not be equally odd if he did not explain how he came to be wounded? He would say nothing of General Warren’s poor generalship. That was neither here nor there – a discussion to be left to the historians. He would merely pay tribute to the bravery of the men under his command and his betrayal of them. That might ease his conscience. It was he, after all – not the general – who had been deceived in the darkness. It was he who without proper entrenching tools had left his men unprotected. To blame others was easy but no excuses would bring his heart ease or assuage his guilt.

He put aside his letter and tried once more to count his blessings. Medical care for the wounded had been greatly improved thanks to the reforms set in motion by Florence Nightingale after the Crimean War. Enteric fever was, of course, rife – it was almost impossible to bury dead horses on the rocky veldt and the animals had to be left to rot in the sun. How they stank and how the flies buzzed indiscriminately over the quick and the dead! And the fever they bred was a much more deadly enemy than the Boer. He was grateful to have been spared that. Colonel Richardson, the chief medical officer, had told him when he had examined Adam in the field hospital to which he had first been taken, that the wooden water barrels harboured the disease and the soldiers’ water bottles were often covered in mould. There were standing orders that the drinking water be boiled but this was widely ignored. The Colonel had said that in war the enemy most to be feared was always disease.

General Buller was accused of pampering his troops because he supplied his men with canvas shelters to protect them against the bitter cold at night, though these blocked the roads and delayed the army. There were trained nurses in the hospitals but too few of them. Some of England’s finest doctors had volunteered to come out to South Africa and Adam was certain his leg would have been amputated if he had not had the good fortune to have been examined by one of these – Sir William MacCormack, five times president of the Royal College of Surgeons.

‘Young man,’ he had said to Adam, ‘I will not disguise from you that you will never march again, never run again, but walk you can and will if you follow the regime I shall sketch out for you. You will limp and maybe even require a stick but walk you will if you have a mind to it. Here ...’ – he scribbled on a piece of paper – ‘when you reach England go and see my colleague, Dr Grant. He will look after you.’ The sharp-eyed doctor saw Adam wince and suspected it was not from physical pain, so he added as casually as he could so as not to offend – ‘and the consultation will not cost you a penny. That I guarantee. Dr Grant has served in the Transvaal and knows the conditions in which we work and the wounds we have to deal with as best we may. Just mention that I sent you and he will do what he can for you.’

There had been times when he had thought the journey to Cape Town would kill him. At every creak and groan, at every tussock and stone, the ox cart had reminded him of the meaning of pain. However, it had delivered Adam and the other wounded officers to Colenso where they were transferred to an armoured train which took them on to Durban. Adam had chummed up with a nice young fellow, Jack, the nineteen-year-old son of Lady Randolph Churchill and brother of the celebrated journalist, Winston. Jack was a lieutenant in the South African Light Horse and like Adam had suffered a leg wound in his first skirmish. Ironically, he was one of the first to benefit from his mother’s philanthropy. Lady Randolph, an American and the widow of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, had chartered the Maine as a hospital ship and fitted it out to the highest standards. It had accommodation for over two hundred patients in four large wards. There was also a modern operating theatre and even X-ray equipment. Unusually, it flew two flags – the stars and stripes and the Union flag.

At last the day had come when Adam was ordered to pack up his few possessions and embark on the Maine along with Jack and thirty or more other wounded officers. The long voyage back to England revived his spirits and the pain in his leg lessened. The high spirits of Jack Churchill were irresistible and Adam gradually began to shrug off his self-pity. When the ship reached England Churchill warmly shook his hand and invited him to ‘our place in Oxfordshire’ which Adam had no difficulty in identifying as Blenheim Palace. He replied, insincerely, that he would be delighted to accept his friend’s kind invitation while knowing that he would never dream of inflicting himself on that noble family but not doubting his friend’s sincerity in making the suggestion.

3.

Adam was not looking forward to meeting Lieutenant Glover’s parents, and having to explain to them why their son had sacrificed himself to save a man he did not know. He was only too well aware of the unfairness of the situation. He had no parents, no wife or loved one to mourn him had he died. No one, he told himself, giving way once more to self-pity, would have missed him had he taken a bullet. Lieutenant Glover, on the other hand, had had everything to live for – not least a new life with the girl he loved. So, calling himself a coward, he did not at once venture forth on his quest from his lodgings in Doughty Street. Instead he visited the British Museum and afterwards roamed about Bloomsbury enjoying being alone, anonymous and unnoticed in the crowd. Even the stink of horse manure on the road and the mud that clung to his feet however hard he tried to avoid it, could not dampen his pleasure.

He did enjoy being alone and anonymous but at the same time he was lonely. He had no particular chum with whom he could talk over problems and ideas, certainly no family at whose hearth he could warm himself. He was a young man determined to make his way in the world but if he didn’t – if he fell between the cracks, as it were – there was nobody he could turn to for help. If, for instance, he were taken up by the police or had an accident – run over by an omnibus, say – who would come to his aid? It was true that he had received a half-hearted letter from his sister inviting him to come and convalesce at the vicarage but he had not yet replied. The thought of it – the dullness, the badly disguised contempt his brother-in-law would show him – sent his heart into his boots. That would be a last resort. He tried to shake off his feelings of vulnerability. He knew he must not give way to self-pity. At the moment, he told himself firmly, he might be flotsam bumping about on London’s human stream but soon he would find his particular channel and take control of his own life.

He supposed it was because of his mood but the London in which he wandered seemed a brutal place. A cabman casually whipped away a child who was in his way. Men and women walked over the prostrate body of a man without a second glance – probably dead drunk but just possibly dead. A beggar woman put out a clawlike hand to a prosperous-looking man in a top hat who shouted an obscenity at her and poked her with his cane. Had he been in better spirits he might have admired the baby in the perambulator, the flowers in Coram’s Fields or the sooty splendour of the British Museum but, as it was, he could only see the poverty and the grime, smell the filth that lay in the street crushed under the carriage wheels. Even the air choked him, laden with dirt from a thousand coal fires and he longed for the cold, clean air of the high veldt.

At last, after walking about aimlessly for a couple of hours, unable to quiet his conscience, he hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to Hampstead Village. He tried to prepare himself for what might prove a painful interview. He took out the photograph of the girl and looked at it for the twentieth time. Although he had refrained from reading Gabriel Glover’s letter he had considered that the dead man would not object to his looking at the picture. He certainly hoped not.

He assumed that Lieutenant Glover’s parents must already know of their son’s death. The army was meticulous about writing to an officer’s family and expressing its collective condolence. But maybe they had not heard ... Adam sighed. That would be dreadful. One thing was certain, it would be a distressing moment for his fiancée to read his final letter but might it not be even worse for his mother who might resent that her son’s last