“About then,” Keede said. “Well, this Sergeant, instead of coming down from the trenches the regular way an’ joinin’ Battalion Details after dark, an’ takin’ that funny little train for Arras, thinks he’ll warm himself first. So he gets into a dug-out, in Butcher’s Row, that used to be an old French dressing-station, and fugs up between a couple of braziers of pure charcoal! As luck ’ud have it, that was the only dug-out with an inside door opening inwards—some French anti-gas fitting, I expect—and, by what we could make out, the door must have swung to while he was warming. Anyhow, he didn’t turn up at the train. There was a search at once. We couldn’t afford to waste Platoon Sergeants. We found him in the morning. He’d got his gas all right. A machine-gunner reported him, didn’t he, Strangwick?”
“No, sir. Corporal Grant—o’ the Trench Mortars.”
“So it was. Yes, Grant—the man with that little wen on his neck. ’Nothing wrong with your memory, at any rate. What was the Sergeant’s name?”
“Godsoe—John Godsoe,” Strangwick answered.
“Yes, that was it. I had to see him next mornin’—frozen stiff between the two braziers—and not a scrap of private papers on him. That was the only thing that made me think it mightn’t have been—quite an accident.”
Strangwick’s relaxing face set, and he threw back at once to the Orderly Room manner.
“I give my evidence—at the time—to you, sir. He passed—overtook me, I should say—comin’ down from supports, after I’d warned him for leaf. I thought he was goin’ through Parrot Trench as usual; but ’e must ’ave turned off into French End where the old bombed barricade was.”
“Yes. I remember now. You were the last man to see him alive. That was on the twenty-first of January, you say? Now, when was it that Dearlove and Billings brought you to me—clean out of your head?... Keede dropped his hand, in the style of magazine detectives, on Strangwick’s shoulder. The boy looked at him with cloudy wonder, and muttered: “I was took to you on the evenin’ of the twenty-fourth of January. But you don’t think I did him in, do you?”
I could not help smiling at Keede’s discomfiture; but he recovered himself. “Then what the dickens was on your mind that evening—before I gave you the hypodermic?”
“The—the things in Butcher’s Row. They kept on comin’ over me. You’ve seen me like this before, sir.”