The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery(61)

Hauptmann Niemeyer said, ‘You, Iskander, you will be shot. A firing squad. You, Lieutenant Gilmore, will also die. But your sentence will be a darker justice in line with the darker crime you committed. In one week’s time you will be bayoneted to death.’

Nell felt as if she had been dealt a blow. Bayoneted. Stephen, that gentle, bewildered young man – the boy who had clung desperately to the memory of lights burning in the windows of his childhood home. The frightened boy who crouched in corners, trying to fix his gaze on a horizon far beyond the nightmares of a dreadful war. He had been sentenced to that brutal death.

Bayoneting. Repeated and vicious stabbing of the victim with a long blade attached to the muzzle of a rifle. Over and over again, until the blade finally pierced a vital organ – heart, lungs, liver. Oh, Stephen, thought Nell, leaning her head back for a moment, and watching the landscape slide past. Did they really do that to you? Or did you manage to escape? Did you finally manage to see again the lamps burning in Fosse House?

There was still more than an hour before they reached Norwich. She collected a cup of coffee from the buffet car, and resumed reading.

I do think, Freide, that the cruellest part of the sentence is that it has been set for one week ahead. If Gilmore could have been taken out immediately after the enquiry and executed at once, the matter would have been over and done with. But Niemeyer would not permit it. And that, I think, was when the last rags of Stephen Gilmore’s sanity deserted him.

Some of the officers have tried to talk to Niemeyer, but he will not be swayed. The sentence stands, and anyone refusing to carry it out will be court-martialled, and probably shot for treason in the face of the enemy. I begin to think if anyone is mad in this camp, it is Niemeyer himself.

Today he decided he will not risk solitary confinement for either prisoner, in case they cheat their executioners by some means of suicide. Instead, they have been locked away in the dormitory they share with six other men, and two armed guards have been posted at the door day and night. The other prisoners have been told that to assist Iskander and Gilmore in any way will result in their own deaths.

Iskander seems unruffled by his approaching execution, although he is clearly frustrated at being confined to the room, for the sentries report that he paces to and fro, as if seeking a chink in the structure through which he might escape.

Gilmore is retreating deeper into his own haunted darkness. He sits on his bed for long hours, sketching – some of the sketches he tears angrily to shreds, but others he places with great care between sheets of card. One is of the dormitory, with the men playing cards or chess, and several of our own men peering in at him. Curiously, Gilmore has drawn himself in the picture, but he has drawn himself as seated apart from the others. I do not have the knowledge to interpret this, but I find it immensely sad.

Last evening I asked him if I might have one of the sketches – not the dormitory one, which disturbs me, but a drawing of the courtyard beyond the dormitory’s windows. Gilmore has caught the brooding shadows, but has woven into them the suggestion of a watching, waiting figure. The face is barely discernible, but it is very clear that seen in light it would not be a pleasant face. And yet the sketch has such intensity that I cannot stop looking at it.

Gilmore said, ‘You can have it if you want. I don’t care.’

‘I shall treasure it,’ I said, and meant it, but, Freide, when we finally have our own house together, I don’t know whether we would want to hang it on our walls.

When Gilmore is not sketching, he walks back and forth to the same corner of the room, and stares down at a particular spot on the ground, like a man watching the slow, crawling progress of an insect. There is no insect there, of course, but he constantly peers down at something which he can see, but the rest of us cannot. At times he retreats quietly to a corner and huddles there, wrapping his arms around his body, staring at nothing.

Today both men were permitted to write a final letter to their families. I took them when they were finished, ready to post. Gilmore’s is addressed to a place called Fosse House in a village on England’s east coat. Iskander’s is to the Netherlands – a small town which I think is just outside Amsterdam. I did not read the letter, but before I placed it in an official envelope I could not avoid seeing that it was written in French, and that it began, ‘Ma trés chére, fille. Ma bien-amié, Leonora.’

I have not pried, but I cannot help remembering asking Iskander if there was a lady somewhere who was waiting for him, and his sudden defensive look, as if he was guarding something too precious to speak of.

Whoever had edited the letters – presumably Freide Edreich – had inserted the equivalent of a chapter break here. But there was still a good forty minutes left of the journey, and there did not seem to be many more pages, so Nell read on.





Twenty


Dearest Freide,

I write in some haste and not a little turmoil.

Stephen Gilmore and Iskander have escaped. Incredibly, they walked out of Holzminden wearing the same officers’ uniforms as they did the first time, and even more incredibly no one realized they had gone until it was too late.

We have pieced together as much as we can. It seems that Iskander acquired from the medical block (I dare say we will never know exactly how he did it) a strong opiate, which he used to drug not only the two soldiers guarding him, but also the other prisoners in the dormitory. Or, if he did not drug them, they made an extremely good pretence of being deep in drugged slumber for twenty-four hours, until Iskander and Gilmore had got away. This is either very devious of them, or loyal and courageous, depending on how you look at it.