Dead Man's Land (15 page)

‘No, thank you. I don’t want to take up too much of your time.’

‘Oh, take all you wish. I have to say, Major, I am a great admirer of your work. Such a tonic when I was in South Africa. The copies of the magazine were in shreds by the time the Officers’ Mess had finished with them.’

‘Thank you.’ Watson had the sudden impression that it was whatever small fame he enjoyed that had gained him entry to see the General Officer Commanding, a veteran of the Boer War apparently, rather than any medical or military concerns. He so hoped he wasn’t going to start asking about the unpublished adventures.

Phipps, though, sat down behind his desk and invited Watson to take the chair opposite. Instead, Watson placed the Gladstone bag on the desk, opened it and took out a carefully folded piece of linen. ‘These are fragments recovered from a wounded man at the East Anglian Casualty Clearing Station. He had most of his lower face blown clean off.’

He unfolded the material to show the small pile of metal shards he had insisted be saved after their extraction from Cornelius Lovat’s jaw.

‘Shrapnel?’ Phipps asked, running a fingertip down one side of his moustache. ‘Well, that’s hardly new.’

‘Sniff it.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

The ormolu struck the quarter-hour.

‘Sniff it, sir. It’s faded over the last day or so, but a good nose can still detect the aroma. I suspect you have good olfactory abilities.’

Phipps frowned. ‘Why would you say that?’

‘The selection of glasses on your cocktail cabinet suggests you are a man who likes to savour the aroma of a good brandy or port. Similarly, the flowers, which I suspect are not easy to obtain at this time of year, indicate a man with heightened sensitivities.’

Phipps’s face crinkled into a grin and he wagged a finger at Watson. ‘Ah, I see now. A touch of the old deduction.’

A silly piece of vaudeville, thought Watson, but he nodded sagely. No man would deny such flattery, even if it was completely untrue and he had the senses of an earthworm. Phipps picked up the fabric and held it to his nostrils, breathing deeply. Watson watched a range of emotions cross over his features, until, after a long minute, he put the cloth back down.

‘Is it . . . onions?’

Slightly better than an earthworm, then, but no bloodhound. ‘Very good, although you may also have perceived undertones of burned garlic.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Phipps touched his forehead, as if admonishing himself. He waited for a few seconds before asking. ‘And that means . . . ?’

‘Cadet’s liquid. I think the bullet contained a quantity of Cadet’s liquid, perhaps at the core of a charge of fulminated mercury.’

‘A rifle bullet?’

‘Yes. A particularly wicked one.’ He described the facial wound in detail.

‘An ordinary high-velocity bullet can cause extensive damage too. But this does sound like it is of a different order. And this unfortunate Lovat?’

‘Dead. I should have realized at the time he could not be saved. Cadet’s fuming liquid, to give it its full title, means that, should the victim survive the gunshot, the arsenic in the compound will still kill him. All of which contravenes the Hague Convention.’

‘You have come across this before?’

‘Twice. Never as propellants, but in static explosive devices designed to cause mayhem. Once with Latvian anarchists and once, it pains me to say, with planned suffragette outrages.’

‘You know there have been claims and counterclaims about such bullets. At the beginning of the war, any British officer captured with flat-nosed rounds in his revolver – standard issue for some years – was liable to be shot on the spot. And we found German dum-dum bullets, of course. Hideous things.’

Watson was about to mention that such expanding rounds got their name from the British arsenal at Calcutta, but held his tongue. Phipps would be well aware that there was a degree of hypocrisy at work whenever anyone condemned the other side’s atrocities.

‘Such things have paled beside the use of flamethrowers and poison gas,’ Phipps continued. ‘But your bullet seems to be in a different league from even a dum-dum.’ He put his fingertips together. ‘I can issue a field notice, asking for front-line officers to be on alert for such wounds and report them, and I can write to the International Committee of the Red Cross, alerting them to a possible breach of the Hague and Geneva Conventions. And of course, mention the threat to Field Marshal Haig when he arrives, so he knows to keep his head well down when we tell him. Don’t want the Field Marshal having his skull split open in my sector.’

No, Watson thought, I bet you don’t. Not a career-enhancing scenario. ‘I was told he was visiting medical facilities.’

‘It’s a bit of a Cook’s Tour to be frank. He’s mainly to inspect the Ypres salient proper. Pretty beastly up there.’ Watson knew ‘up there’ was only a few miles distant. ‘No doubt hatching some scheme to break the stalemate. But he also intends to visit us here at Somerset. You know this was a quiet sector until someone decided it might be a grand idea to start shooting the new rifle grenades over at Fritz.’

‘Yes, I’d heard. One of my nurses mentioned much the same thing.’

‘Ah, well. Keeps us all on our toes, I suppose.’

Watson, his objectives achieved, made some small talk before he repacked his Gladstone and took his leave. As he stepped back into the anteroom, he was surprised to see the lieutenant-colonel who had stormed out of the office thirty minutes earlier, sitting, brooding in the over-elaborate chair. The adjutant was nowhere to be seen. He stood as soon as he saw Watson.

‘There you are, Major. My apologies for not recognizing you earlier. Uniform threw me.’

Watson held the door open for him to re-enter the ballroom.

Colonel Winston Churchill shook his head, making his jowls wobble. ‘No, no. Shut that. It’s you I want to see, not that shrinking violet in there. Dr Watson, I do believe I have the perfect case for you.’

Lieutenant Metcalf found a large scrubbing brush under the sink in the kitchen at Suffolk Farm, A Company’s billet. He used it to get the last of the whitewash from under his nails. He had quite enjoyed the physical work of painting and had enjoyed the company of the two nurses even more.

He was not sure that his mother would have approved of them, mind. The red-haired one in particular, Mrs Gregson, was positively intimidating. He imagined her coming to tea and the look on his mother’s face when she let forth with some of the rather fruity opinions she had about the war and women.

‘It’ll never be the same again,’ she had said. ‘Women won’t have to break windows to get the vote. Because men will have seen them at their best – away from the washing tub and the hearth.’

Mrs Metcalf thought suffragettes were some kind of inverts, who needed only a strong man to make them see the error of their ways. She was very baffled when a significant number of men – some of whom she admired – turned out to support the idea of universal suffrage. But he was getting ahead himself. He had never brought any girl home for tea yet, let alone one as sparky as Mrs Gregson.

‘How are the men at the hospital?’ asked de Griffon as he entered the kitchen, ducking to clear the low door beam.

‘Bearing up for the most part,’ Metcalf replied. ‘Shipobottom was a little windy. How was the ride?’

De Griffon had been up early to exercise Lord Lockie, his horse. ‘Excellent. You don’t, do you? Ride?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Pity. He’s a fine horse and a few miles east of here you could almost forget there is a war on. Have you seen Sunderland?’ This was their batman. ‘Need to get these boots off.’

‘He’s gone scavenging for food. Promised us eggs. And milk.’

‘Have to make my own tea then, I suppose.’ De Griffon set about filling the enormous black kettle. ‘How are you getting on with the dance?’

‘Oh, I’ve found some likely candidates.’

‘I passed a barn down the road. Peeked in. Clean and dry. Make a good spot for it. Just have to track down the farmer and see how much he’d want.’

He placed the kettle on the hotplate of the range. He touched the metal. It was barely tepid. ‘We’ll be lucky if that boils in time for breakfast.’ He used a cloth to open the stove’s door. ‘Send one of the men to gather some more wood, will you?’

‘Sir.’

There was a knock on the door and de Griffon walked through to answer it. When he returned his face looked glum.

‘What is it?’ Metcalf asked.

De Griffon held up the written orders. ‘I think you’d best postpone the dance. We haven’t got a week here. Apparently one of the replacement units didn’t make it. We’ve got three days at the most and we’re back on the front line.’

Metcalf stopped drying his hands as this sank in. ‘You want me to tell the men?’

De Griffon blew out his cheeks and sighed. ‘No. Leave it to me. Just as long as they get a hot bath before we turn them back around, they’ll count that as a decent result.’

‘And the wounded at the CCS?’

‘Will just have to join us when they can. If they think they can sit this one out, they’ve got another think coming. We’re all in this together, Metcalf. The Leigh Pals will live and die together.’

That, thought Metcalf, is what worries me.

As they walked down the corridor towards the front entrance of Somerset House, Churchill worked at lighting a cigar the size of a cavalryman’s lance. ‘I had no idea you were out here, sir,’ Watson said,

‘It took some string-pulling, I can tell you.’

Watson was well aware the former Home Secretary had been driven from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty after the fiasco of the Dardanelles and cast into the wilderness. ‘But eventually they gave me the Royal Scots Fusiliers, just to shut me up. A fine bunch, though. Distrusted me, a Sassenach, at first, of course, especially when I turned up with my own bath and boiler, but it’s a wonder what a round of clean, dry socks for every man can achieve.’ He chortled, his face wreathed in smoke from the newly caught cigar.

‘I’m sorry you witnessed the scene earlier. Phipps is one of those who want us to sit on our hands and wait for the Germans to make the first move. My God, I have experience of fighting the Boers too and yet it appears we learned nothing. Small, light skirmishing units, highly mobile, stirring things up a bit. That’s what we need. Not sitting in slits in the ground, year after year. We need to remind them we still have a fight in us.’

Watson knew instinctively that it had been Churchill goading the Germans with rifle grenades to elicit a response in his sector. It was he who had brought the ‘hate’ – the bombardments – down on the heads of a quiet stretch of the line.

‘Watson, I don’t think I ever told you how grateful I was that you never wrote up what you would doubtless have called
The Adventure of the King’s Wife
, or some such.’

Watson was offended. ‘I felt it was my patriotic duty not to do so.’

‘Quite. One thing that always puzzled me,’ said Churchill, halting in the gloomy hallway beneath the skeletal remains of a glass chandelier, stripped down to a few lonely pendants by percussion and concussion. With the windows heavily curtained, light was provided by a string of guttering electric bulbs that weren’t up to the job, ‘was how he knew I had come straight from the Reform Club when I pitched up at Baker Street?’

Churchill had been smoking a Home Spun Broad Leaf No. 2, a Cuban cigar imported exclusively by the Wine and Cigar Committee of the Reform Club. But as a distant voice reminded him:
A conjurer gets no credit once he has explained his trick
. ‘I am afraid I am not at liberty to tell you, sir.’

Churchill narrowed his eyes as if he were going to bark an order to reveal all, but eventually smiled. ‘Well, I have a most mysterious occurrence that I would welcome your help on. Let’s call it
The Case of the Man Who Died Twice
. The events—’

Watson could feel his curiosity being aroused. He could not allow that to happen. ‘Sir, I am afraid I am acting merely as a medical doctor here. Not a companion or a foil or a biographer. Certainly not any shade of detective.’

‘That may be so. But you have contacts. I didn’t expect him to be here in person, but I thought if anyone can engage the great consulting detective—’

‘It pains me to say this, sir, but the partnership is dissolved.’

Churchill’s jaw sagged, and only his moist and fleshy lower lip kept the cigar in place. ‘Dissolved?’

‘He is happy keeping his bees and walking the Downs, his conscience disturbed only occasionally by the rumble of the distant guns, or so I would imagine. I am here to do what little I can to alleviate pain and suffering. We – he and I – are no longer in the business of deduction.’

‘Really? I’m sorry to hear that.’ Churchill opened the door to allow Watson to step through. ‘But perhaps you would consider taking a look at the facts in the case?’

‘Until the war is over, I am simply a medical man.’

Winston stepped out into the fresh air. Mrs Gregson, seeing Watson was readying to depart, fetched the starting handle to fire up the Crossley.

‘Ah, well. So be it.’ Churchill held out his hand. ‘Thank you again for your work on the Mylius case. I’m sorry it can never be officially recognized.’

‘It was a pleasure.’ Watson wasn’t lying. He longed for the days when an average week might involve helping Holmes save the royal family from disgrace, a game played out in the library at the Athenaeum, the drawing rooms of the great stately homes of Hampshire, the Old Bailey and even Buckingham Palace. He would never have countenanced such a statement at the time, but life was so much simpler then.

He came back to the present when the clocks in the house began a staggered chiming of one o’clock, a sound that merged perfectly with the whistle of an approaching German shell.

The first 105mm round of the afternoon bombardment detonated close to the lonely tower of the church, the great thud in the earth causing the structure to sway alarmingly. As Churchill and Watson watched the dirty fan of earth spread, both were aware of a smaller explosion behind them, as part of the plaster disintegrated into fine powder. Watson felt the heat cross his face and his skin prickle with the impact of dust and stone and caught a noxious garlicky smell.