The Painted Altar

Chapter Seventeen

Plot reminder: Mary and Lucio have just visited Francesco Brancaleone, a former prisoner of camp 106a. He recounted how Vincenzo D'Ambra had planned a tryst with Irene and how the next morning all the men were quickly moved on to other camps. Confirming that Sergeant Reynolds had been on duty that night, he also revealed that a second man was missing, D'Ambra's best friend Ettore Lo Bianco.

~~~~~

The return journey was a wordless one at first, ours a tired silence, yes, but also reflective, our minds shuttling between those many and varied investigative signposts the old man had planted. A mental route map which no matter how many times re-run, no matter how many alternative diversions we explored or dead-end streets we temporarily got lost down, arrived always at the same destination, that chilling inevitable conclusion: the bones which had been unearthed in that dank, dismal field were those of Ettore Lo Bianco, my father's closest friend and chief assistant in the painting of the altar.

This much seemed a given; only the precise dynamics of the incident were still open to debate, historical interpretation. Had Reynolds and the other guard on duty that night come across Lo Bianco's escape attempt during a sweep around the perimeter fence, the prisoner refusing to halt, forcing them to give chase? Possibly, but given the mugginess of the night Francesco Brancaleone had described, wasn't it strange that their calls and shouts hadn't awoken some of the prisoners through the opened windows of the Nissen huts? No, much more probable was the bloodcurdling hypothesis that Reynolds and his accomplices had somehow got wind of Lo Bianco's escape plans and had been waiting in ambush for him beyond the wire. That the whole godless incident had been pre-meditated. Willed.

And if this were indeed true, then there was perhaps a second supposition that an investigator might confidently make: Vincenzo D'Ambra too had been ruthlessly knifed down under the cloak of that terrible September night. Whilst sixty-four years later the mouth of the digger had chanced upon Lo Bianco's remains, his own were still hidden there somewhere beneath the Lincolnshire soil. How else could one explain the unearthing of his ID tags in the vicinity? How else the fact that he was never seen or heard of again?

I wondered if the pair had been attempting to escape together. Or if, given the expertise he'd gained over the previous months at slipping himself beyond the wire to meet Irene, my father had acted only as assistant and accomplice, the thirty shillings borrowed not for himself but for his friend. As Francesco Brancaleone believed, he'd simply had too many reasons to remain. Not just the painted altar, but Irene too.

My mother, yes...

Had their tryst been postponed that night, I wondered, or had she been waiting there vainly in the nearby copse of trees for him to arrive? The blackness of the night blinding her, the rustle of the leaves above covering the hissed whispering voices, the muffled cries of pain.

*

We were back onto the motorway, the rosy tint of approaching sunset framed in the wing mirror to my right, when finally I voiced out loud the thought which like a new bruise had been swelling in my mind.

"Maybe I was wrong."

Lucio swivelled head sideways, observed me curiously for a moment.

"About my mother," I explained. "Maybe it was just a coincidence. She died in her sleep, nothing more than that."

It seemed the only possible explanation, that contrary to my original belief my father's murder and mother's death were two separate events, as distinct from each other as the sun and the moon. I doubted that Reynolds or his accomplices had boasted of the foul deed to their children or grandchildren. Murder wasn't a medal of military valour or some distant sporting triumph. And even if someone amongst later generations had known, it was unlikely that the name Irene Harvey would mean anything to them, that upon discovery of the remains she had been considered some nefarious threat to family honour, to be silenced immediately.