Beyond the Bone by Reginald Hill

Author:Reginald Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

’Tis opportune to look back upon old times. We have enough to do to make up ourselves from present and passed times, and the whole stage of things scarce serveth for our instruction.

Lakenheath must have been watching from the foyer of the hotel, for he came limping out of the front door just as she arrived.

‘You look as if you’re going to the office on the seven-twenty-five,’ she said, nodding at the ancient briefcase he was carrying.

‘Do I? It’s just a little light refreshment in case I get peckish. And some reading matter.’

‘How disappointing. I made sure you’d have an old service revolver at least,’ she said primly setting the Range Rover in motion.

‘No. Sorry. The service I did never reached the revolver-owning stage.’

‘Ah !’ she said. ‘You told me you were never in the army.’

‘No. I said I was never an officer in a fashionable regiment,’ he said. ‘But I was a boy soldier.’

‘What?’

‘Yes ! Signed on the dotted line when I was fifteen. I wanted out of that terrible school and I didn’t want in to the kind of job lads like myself were getting just then.’

‘Ah. The deprived child syndrome,’ she said, then flushed hideously and unconcealably as she felt his cool gaze rest on her profile.

‘Could be,’ he said, and fell silent.

‘What happened?’ she asked. To finish there would leave her very much in the wrong.

‘Oh, I stuck it for four, five years,’ he said. ‘Passed some exams I wouldn’t have got if I’d stayed at school. Saw a bit of the world before it ended. My army career, I mean !’

‘And how did it end?’ she asked.

‘Fortuitously,’ he said. ‘By the time I was nineteen, I’d had enough. Unfortunately I’d signed on for twelve years.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Like I said, fortuitously about this time the army decided to dispense with my services.’

‘Oh. I see.’

She didn’t see at all. The first picture that came into her mind was of Lakenheath getting the sack for turning up late on parade three mornings in a row, but surely even the modern army did not work like that? The second picture was of Lakenheath having all his badges of rank stripped from him on the open square while a muffled drum beat insistently in the background. But that was officers only, wasn’t it?

And for the third picture she had to turn to her memories of the girl at Whitethorn who was so expert on the Turkish Army Officers’ Manual. She had a brother seven years older than herself who she claimed had avoided National Service by faking both the only two fool-proof methods of making yourself unwanted by the army.

These were bed-wetting and homosexuality.

She risked a sideways glance at Lakenheath and tried to see him as either enuretic or queer.

Perhaps his subsequent career would give a clue.

‘What did you do then?’ she asked.

‘After the army? Well, I felt like a rest, something completely different. So I gathered up my little certificate, trotted round to my local education office and managed to get myself accepted at a teachers’ training college.

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