“One of your marines would have known what to do.” The inspector’s gritty response offered no absolution. “Were you still armed at this point?”

“I never let go of my Lee–Metford. I was staggering up the bank, gasping, vomiting river water, looking about me for my company, knowing I had at best ten seconds to live. The air around me was humming with bullets falling thick as hailstones on a pond, kicking up spurts of sand round my feet and all the way to the tree line, when I heard it.”

“It?” So sudden and so deep was the man’s descent into his past, the inspector felt almost embarrassed to interrupt his thoughts.

“The whistling! The Boers stopped shooting. God knows what the signal was—I never heard it—but like a well-rehearsed orchestra, they ceased fire all at once. There was an uncanny silence, bewildering, more threatening than the noise of battle had been. And then the whistling started. My knees buckled under me and I collapsed onto the sand.”

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Cambridge Police Station, Saturday,
the 7th of June, 1924

“Whistling? . . . Oi! Wakey wakey! You can’t say something as far-fetched as that and then just doze off! Who or what was whistling? Human, monkey, freak wind or Wilfred the Whistling Coster Boy?”

The witness snapped back from the past and focused once more with irritation on the cynical face of the inspector. “Human, of course. But not the sort of frightful mouth music that rouses a heckle from the back rows of Wilton’s Music Hall. This was whistling with a purpose, and it came from the treetop perches of the Boers.”

“Passing a message along the line to their mates? That’s a new one! We could have used that in the trenches.”

“No. It wasn’t directed at their fellow soldiers.” The man smiled. “It was meant for their horses.”

“Eh?”