The Dead Can Wait (17 page)

Men.
Churchill had meant Holmes and Watson. And now they had just the one.
The lesser one, they no doubt thought,
Watson concluded.

Tut-tut, Watson, we are two halves of the same kidney.

‘So you went along with him in this matter?’

‘It isn’t easy to argue Churchill down,’ said Swinton.

‘Quite,’ said Watson, without, he hoped, too much bitterness. ‘Nevertheless, I can’t proceed unless I have your permission to examine every aspect of the case, including the place where the men were struck down. Believe you me, Holmes would say the same thing.’

‘How much do you know about Puddleduck?’ asked Swinton. ‘Is Churchill telling everyone who walks through his door about it?’

‘Not at all. He’s closed up tighter than one of these oysters back when it had a shell. I know very little for certain. I have made informed guesses. But they are just that. Guesses.’ He took a sip of Chablis. The room swam slightly, but not from the alcohol. He was tired. He wanted to get to bed. He wondered how many courses before the inevitable toasts to the King and fallen comrades and the port and cigars. ‘But, I repeat, I need to see what killed seven men and drove one insane, no matter how hush-hush it is.’

‘Drove
eight
men insane to begin with,’ Thwaites corrected. ‘Gibbering wrecks. And one by one they died. Some within the hour, the MO in the group took almost half a day.’

‘You realize that you may well be confined to quarters if we reveal everything to you?’ said Booth. ‘Nobody, apart from Churchill and a handful of others, is allowed to be privy to this project and wander the streets.’

Levass swallowed a spoonful of shrimp mousse with an exaggerated gulp. ‘We are prisoners of our own making, Major. Very comfortable prisoners, but it could be months before the world knows of what we do. Until then . . .’

‘I’ll take that chance,’ said Watson.

Swinton and Booth exchanged glances once more. ‘Very well,’ said the colonel.

‘Perhaps I could show the major his, what did you call it, “scene of the crime”?’ asked Levass.

‘I’ll accompany you, of course’ said Booth quickly.

‘Thank you,’ said Watson. ‘Immediately after breakfast?’

‘As you wish,’ said Levass.

‘Just one thing,’ said Swinton. ‘There was no crime, Major Watson. This is an unfortunate accident. You’ll understand why when you see the conditions the men were placed under. I appreciate your reputation as a sleuth but—’

Watson raised a hand. ‘That reputation was not mine. I would never claim it for myself. I am here as a medical man.’

Swinton seemed to relax. ‘Very well. The sooner we get to the bottom of this case, the better.’

‘Where, exactly, is the machine that did this to them?’ Watson asked and pre-empted any questions about how he knew the nature of the device. ‘Yes, I know it is a machine of some kind, able to wage war in the trenches. Mere logic tells me that.’
And H. G. Wells.

Booth answered. ‘There is a proving ground in front of this house, beyond the trees. It remains where it came to a halt.’

‘And you will introduce me to this nurse of yours? I might need an assistant who has some medical knowledge. What’s her name?’ Watson asked.

‘She’s a bit of handful,’ said Thwaites. ‘We call her the Red Dragon. Not to her face, of course. Real name’s Mrs Gregson.’

It was gone midnight by the time Watson got to bed back at the lodge. His meagre valise had been unpacked and there was a jug of hot water and a mug of Horlicks awaiting him. He ran through the evening in his head. Booth had quizzed him on events in London and the assassination attempt. Swinton was interested in Churchill. Levass talked about shell shock and French wine and his time in Mexico among the remains of Aztec civilization. Solomon held forth on his dislike of Vorticism, but how the art movement had a practical application in camouflage. That, Watson realized, was why they had a distinguished Royal Academician in their midst – Solomon was to be the master of disguise for whatever they were developing to unleash on the Germans. It was quite a long way from executing portraits of the great and the good, which was why the ‘housepainter’ jibe had clearly stung.

Thwaites, on the other hand, was most keen to talk about the adventures of Mr Sherlock Holmes. When Watson agreed to some small talk on the matter, he again studied the expressions of the men around the table, to see if, perhaps, they knew something about Holmes’s whereabouts, but they were as impassive as professional bridge players.

Watson had had enough after twenty minutes and switched tack. ‘And what is your role in all this, if I might enquire?’ he asked Major Thwaites.

‘Me?’ Thwaites said. ‘Tactics. Battlefield tactics. With the new . . .’

‘The new weapon,’ said Levass. ‘Of which we are so proud.’ There was a slight slur to his words. ‘Aren’t we, gentlemen? Although perhaps not Hitchcock, eh? I doubt he’s too proud.’

‘I think that’s enough, Levass,’ said Swinton.

Levass turned to Watson. ‘You can cure him?’

Watson pushed his wine away. He suddenly felt very sober. ‘We ’ll see.’

That apparently satisfied the Frenchman. Levass’s presence was something of a puzzle. The French were allies, of course, but also notoriously loose-lipped. ‘It’s all classified information until the first glass of champagne’ went the old adage. The Frenchman also seemed to enjoy poking fun at what he called ‘perfidious Albion’, especially over its annexation of the Punjab and the theft, as he put it, of the Koh-I-Noor. He had returned to the subject several times, until Booth had snapped at him, quizzing him sardonically about his own country’s colonial record in Indochina, the Caribbean and Africa.

To trust a Frenchman with what Churchill called ‘the greatest secret of the war’ . . . well, he had to be rather a special kind of Frenchie. And the fact that he seemed drunk and snippy didn’t bode well. Watson didn’t doubt he’d find out more the next day.

Mrs Gregson’s presence at Elveden was perhaps the most surprising revelation. Strictly speaking, she wasn’t a nurse, she was a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment, the VADs. But such niceties were often lost on soldiers. And she was a very competent medical woman, as he knew from their time together in Belgium.

Plus
, he reminded himself,
she loves and knows motor cycles
. His patient had been in the Machine Gun Corps – as had the orderly who acted as gaoler – which used sidecars with machine guns on them. Was it her love of those machines that had got her involved?

Watson stripped off his uniform. The warm water on his face made him feel even sleepier. Whatever questions he had would be resolved after breakfast, when he would see Churchill’s
Scourge of Malice
in the flesh, or whatever material it was made of.

But he would be there with Booth, Levass and God alone knew how many others. Holmes would never have countenanced that.

He heard voices outside his door and stopped his splashing. He crossed over to listen, but they faded. Back at the washstand, they became clearer once more. They were coming from outside his window. And he was on the second floor.

He pulled back the curtains and yanked up the sash. At first there was only the sigh of the wind, but then he heard them, a number of speakers, talking low and urgently. He looked down at the ground below, but could see nothing in the darkness. There they were again, phantom words floating through the night.

There was the drum of a sudden shower, and he felt raindrops on his head. It increased in severity, pouring down onto lawns and shrubs with a sound like scattershot. The voices were lost to it. He pulled the window down and yawned.
Ah well
, he told himself again,
all will be revealed tomorrow
.

Watson placed the little pistol Coyle had given him on the night-stand and finished his ablutions, eager for the feel of the fresh cotton sheets.

He was just nodding off when he heard the soft tapping at the door and reached for the gun.

That was when the first explosion rattled the windows, throwing sticks of light across the walls and shaking the glass in its frame like chattering teeth.

TWENTY-ONE

Petty Officer Third Class Joachim Kuhn climbed into the observation craft of L.18, the
Admiral Karl Rudolf Brommy
, just as the enormous Zeppelin crossed the British coast. She was cruising above the clouds, and the captain didn’t want to bring his precious machine down to within range of the searchlights or artillery. Yet he wanted to make sure they were heading for the correct target. Too many times he had dropped bombs guided only by the glow of city lights through thin, translucent clouds. Tonight, the clouds weren’t thin or translucent and, on this bombing mission, he was charged with being more accurate than usual. So, like a plumb-bob, the observation capsule – christened Effi by the men – would be winched down from the main ship to dangle below the cloud cover.

Kuhn opened the hatch in the floor of the Zeppelin’s forward control gondola and lowered himself through into the miniature craft slung beneath it. The capsule swayed as he let it take his full weight. As he steadied himself, one of his fellow officers tossed down a pack of Königin von Saba cigarettes. ‘Lucky bastard,’ he said.

An icy breeze of air was blasting through Effi, which had side windows, but no glass, and Kuhn belted his coat and pulled up his gloves.
Lucky?
He wasn’t so sure. But it would go on his record that he had volunteered. And then there were the Königin von Sabas.

Effi was shaped like a miniature ‘sausage’ observation balloon, with a bulbous nose and four tail fins. Inside, Kuhn had a wicker chair, bolted to the floor, and a table with a compass, charts, a square – so it wouldn’t roll away – flashlight, a flask of water and a telephone. There was also a bucket next to the table, next to a hatch in the floor. It could be a long, lonely night in the little craft.

He settled down into the chair. Around him the wind whistled, and the little baby craft vibrated in time with the Zeppelin’s engines. Kuhn laid the cigarettes and a box of matches in front of him. Once it was depolyed, Effi was the only place on a Zeppelin one could safely smoke without the risk of a lethal hydrogen explosion.

He checked the compass. Still heading west. Kuhn picked up the phone. ‘Captain, this is Kuhn in the observation capsule, testing communications.’

‘Receiving you. Thank you for volunteering, Kuhn.’

‘Pleasure, sir.’ He felt a little stab of pride. The captain, von Schuller, was a legend in the service, a veteran of Zeppelin service, a survivor of the LZ2 forced landing in the Allgäu mountains after engine failure.

‘Ready to release, Kuhn?’

‘Aye aye, sir.’

The capsule bucked as the quick-release clamps were unclipped by his shipmates in the gondola above. Effi dropped a foot, a jolt that caused his stomach to somersault one way then another. Then the wind caught the little device, causing it to yaw, and he gripped the sides of the wicker chair. A bang as the brake came off the drum, and the capsule was lowered. He looked out of one of the side windows, down onto the cottony clouds that the stars and moon were illuminating. Above him, the umbilical cord of rope was paying out and the precarious little vessel was dropping away from the mothership, the airstream pushing it back towards the giant tail of the Zeppelin.

Once out of the shadow of the airship and its engines, Kuhn could see the cold beauty of the star-rich sky and the ivory moon. Soon, it would be lost to him. Away from the ship, the whole of the night sky seemed to vibrate with the sound emanating from the Maybach engines in their nacelles, slung under the streamlined body. He was surprised they couldn’t hear it in London. But he knew the clouds below him acted as an acoustic blanket and most people on the ground might hear only a faint buzz, if that.

‘I’m going into the clouds now,’ he said, even though he knew the men in the gondola would be watching his progress. And then a darkness enveloped him. He switched on the torch, but it simply generated a milky glow all around him. Effi began to oscillate at the end of her tether. He knew this part. You kept your nerve as the currents and eddies in the clouds threw you this way and that.

Please God, let me live through this. Just one more leave, one more sight of my family, and I promise—

He burst through over a darkened countryside, illuminated only by sporadic lights of hamlets. They were beyond the large conurbations of the coast, the usual targets like Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, and below him was the flat, featureless – at least at night – farmland of Norfolk and Suffolk.

He consulted the charts and the compass and phoned up the heading, along with a correction. One bright spot of lights had to be the town known as Diss.

‘You all right down there, Kuhn?’

‘Sir.’

‘We must be almost there.’

‘Sir.’

‘There will be red lights to guide us in.’

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘According to my orders, there will be three red lights, placed by our agents, visible to you, but not from the ground. If you line those up, east to west, it points directly to the airfield.’

‘Very well, sir.’

From the corner of his eye he saw a flash of something, which disappeared as he looked at it. He moved his head, relying on his peripheral vision. It was there again. Red light.

He picked up the phone just as the capsule filled with a miniature tornado, blasting the charts and causing Effi to spin like a compass needle. Kuhn found himself on his hands and knees, the roar of an aero engine drowning out all rational thought except one. He scrabbled for the phone. ‘Fighter!’

‘Have you seen the lights?’ von Schuller asked coolly.

‘There is a British fighter down here. It almost rammed me.’

‘He can’t reach us at his height.’

No, but he can reach me.

‘Red lights, Kuhn? Have you seen them?’

Kuhn felt like a tethered goat, waiting for the wolf. ‘Yes, I have red lights. And I can see the aerodrome,’ he said, looking around for that fighter. It was from Thetford, their very target, for it was from there that the planes with the new tracer bullets were operating, defending the night skies. They had already claimed three Zeppelins.