The Dead Can Wait (2 page)

It was too late to run through the trenches hoping for a spare mask, so he turned to take whatever shelter the aid station could offer. As he did so, his left foot slipped off the duckboards. It plunged into the thick slime of the trench mud, a glutinous mass that had been festering for nigh on two years. It clasped his ankle and held him firm.

He uttered a crude curse, a bad habit he had picked up from the men. He tried to lift his foot free, but the grip only tightened and the suction pulled his leg deeper into the mire. He would have to lose the boot, a precious Trench Master, ten guineas the pair.
Don’t worry about that now, man. Pull!
But the pressure of the ooze was too great to allow him even to wiggle his toes. He held his knee and yanked, but to no avail. The greedy sludge that had taken so many men had him tight.

The gas was rolling down the sides of the trench now, viscous and evil. The gas alarm bell sounded once again and didn’t stop this time. Attack in progress. All across the front a cacophony of sirens, hooters, whistles and rattles joined in the warning.
Don’t die here, not like this.
But by now he was holding onto the wall, watching the black filth creep further up his trapped leg, his desperate fingers leaving grooves on the rotten wood as he sought purchase.

He looked around for assistance, but every sensible soldier was taking cover. ‘Help!’ he yelled. The only answer was an imagined snide hiss from the poison drifting towards him. Watson closed his eyes, held his breath, and waited for the vapour to do its worst.

‘Major Watson!’

The strident tones of the familiar and distinctly female voice snapped him from his reverie. He opened his eyes. Before him was the coal-grimed window of his surgery and, beyond that, Queen Anne Street, its features blanketed by an eerily unseasonal fog, the traffic reduced to a passing parade of ghostly silhouettes. He wasn’t at the front. He hadn’t seen, or smelled, a trench for months. Mud was no longer his constant companion and intractable enemy. It was another waking dream of the sort that had haunted him since his return from France.

He turned to Mrs Hobbs, his housekeeper, standing in the doorway to the hall, her face drawn even tighter than her bun.

‘Major Watson, did you not hear the telephone?’

The telephone
. Not a gas alarm.

She indicated over her shoulder to where the phone sat on its dedicated walnut telephonic table from Heal’s. It was a piece of furniture that Mrs Hobbs had insisted was the only proper platform for the new instrument. Not that she actually liked using it herself; they had an agreement that Watson would normally pick up the receiver.

‘No, I didn’t. My apologies, Mrs Hobbs. Who was it?’

‘Mr Holmes.’ She said this with studied neutrality.

What, again?
Watson looked at the wall clock. It was three in the afternoon and already Holmes had telephoned him four – perhaps even five – times that day, on each occasion repeating some trivial news about having a new water tank fitted at his cottage or some such. Watson had to admit that, to his shame and chagrin, he had taken to drifting off while his friend rattled on about such inconsequential trivia. Especially if it involved bees.

‘Is he still on the line?’ Watson asked.

‘I expect so. He said it was important. He did sound agitated, sir.’

It was always important. And he was always agitated. Watson glanced outside at the lazily eddying wall of fog, the phantom stench of chlorine still prickling his nose. The senses were no longer to be trusted these days. Neither, sadly, could his old companion be relied upon to make sense.

‘If you would be so kind as to tell him I’m with a patient.’

Mrs Hobbs pursed her lips at the thought of uttering an untruth, and closed the door after her.

Watson sat down in his chair and opened the drawer containing a tin of Dr Hammond’s Nerve and Brain Tablets, which the salesman had assured him cured men’s ‘special diseases’ arising from war service. He replaced the tin unopened, lit a cigarette and felt the friendly smoke calm him. His statement to Mrs Hobbs had not been a total lie. He did have a patient for company. Himself.

A nagging little voice was hammering away inside, though, even as he enjoyed the tobacco warming his lungs. It was that Holmes telephone call. It was like the Retired Detective Who Cried Wolf.

What if one day it really was something important?

TWO

Miss Nora Pillbody had cycled for a good two miles through the Suffolk countryside before she realized exactly what had been niggling at her.

The day had begun like any normal school-day morning. After a breakfast of porridge, she had loaded her basket with the work she had marked and corrected overnight, and set off from her cottage in plenty of time to take registration. As always, she wondered what excuses would deplete her class that morning – ‘So-and-so isn’t here, miss, because he needs to help with sheep shearing/haymaking/de-horning the calves/irrigating the potatoes.’ There was always something happening on the land that took priority over mere learning.

Once out of the dead-end lane that housed her cottage, her route took her past Cyril Jefford’s farm, skirted Marsham Wood, with its shy herd of roe deer, in a long, lazy loop, before she took the old drovers’ track that pierced the Morlands’ property. This cut a good half-mile off the journey, even if it was a bone-rattling surface, baked dry by the early summer sun. The Morlands had eight children, including three in her school class. With two older boys already in the army and one just eligible for conscription, it was a nervous time for the family.

Miss Pillbody ducked through the shifting, pointillist clouds of midges blocking her way and found time to admire a flash of iridescent green dragonfly, and a Red Admiral warming its spread wings on a fence post. A sparrowhawk hovered expectantly above a corn-field, beady-eyed for potential prey.

She was a few hundred yards from the low, flint-built school-house when it hit her what had been amiss throughout that whole morning’s ride. The children. There hadn’t been any. Her ears had been full of the calls of skylarks and the rougher cadences of the restless crows, underpinned by the creaking and cracking of the wheat and the buzz of passing bees, but not the usual babble of conversation as her pupils made their way to her schoolhouse.

She had not had to stop to tell Freddie Cox to stop flicking Ben Stone’s ear, or coax poor, cleft-lipped Sidney Drayton down from a tree as he indulged in his favourite pastime: spotting and logging the planes taking off and landing at the RFC aerodrome. Or chivy along the Branton sisters, three pretty, startlingly blonde siblings, a year between them in age, always with arms linked as if they were a single child facing the world. With their vile father, mind, it wasn’t surprising they needed a united front. Or what about lonely little Victoria Hanson, trudging down the road, feet dragging, trailing an air of melancholy behind her, all big sighs and even bigger eyes that appeared to be perpetually on the brink of leaking?

Where had all the children gone?

She felt a curdling in her stomach as if she had eaten something unpleasant, and her head swam with a sensation akin to vertigo. She had last felt this when the telegram about Arnold, her brother, had arrived. Her mother had passed the brown envelope to Miss Pillbody and she had handed it back, unwilling to be the first to read the news. In the end, they had opened it – and wept – in unison.

He had been nineteen, a full ten years younger than she, when a trench mortar had dropped a shell on him, the baby of the family. He was, she had realized much later, unexpected by her parents, but they had made out he was the son that, after three girls, they had always longed for. People had said Nora and Arnold were very alike, but she couldn’t see it. The grief of his death had chased her away from Chichester to the Suffolk countryside, to teaching the children of the estate and the surrounding villages, trying to blank out the war and what it was doing to millions of young men like Arnold.

It wasn’t only the children who were absent. By now she should have seen a dozen or more people on the farms. In summer, Mrs Dottington always leaned on the gate after she had collected the eggs from her henhouses, enjoying the sun on her face. Old ‘Zulu’ Jenkins, veteran of the South African wars, ninety if he was a day, was normally out in the fields, helping – or just as often hindering – his son Johnnie. If not, he’d be sitting on a stump, taking a pipe. And then there were the nameless workers who would pause and doff a cap to her as she rode by.

All nowhere to be seen.

The area outside the schoolhouse was also empty of children, who by now would usually be playing marbles or jacks, or gossiping and sniping. An ad hoc game of boys’ football or cricket, perhaps; hopscotch or skipping rhymes from the girls. But apart from a car she didn’t recognize, parked across the entrance, the playground was deserted.

She dismounted from her bike, leaned it against the wall and examined the vehicle. She didn’t know much about the various makes of car, but from its drab paintwork and stencilled numbers on the bonnet sides, even she could tell it was military in origin.

Miss Pillbody undid the ribbon under her chin and removed her hat before she stepped inside the little vestibule of the schoolhouse.

‘Hello?’ she asked tentatively. ‘Who’s there?’

‘Come in, please,’ came the reply. Inviting her into her own schoolhouse.
The cheek of it
.

She opened the door and stepped through into the classroom, chairs still up on desks from the previous night, the six times table chalked on the board, because she had promised her pupils they would be doing it again first thing.

There were two men in the room, one standing next to the blackboard, the other perched on the corner of her desk. The one on his feet was older, his moustache almost white, a corporal of the new Home Service Defence Forces, who were ubiquitous in the towns and villages of Suffolk and East Anglia. The one seated was an officer, as proclaimed by the gleam on his boots and the swagger stick in his hand. He was square of jaw and dark of moustache, probably a good few years younger than she.
Striking-looking
, she thought, but with a cruel aspect to his mouth and sharp blue eyes that shone with a glacial coolness. His top lip was a smidgeon too thin, she decided, for him to be entirely handsome, but he was certainly attractive. And, she suspected, he knew it. The officer stood and scooped off his cap as she crossed towards the pair.

‘Miss Pillbody.’

So he had her name. ‘You have the advantage of me, Lieutenant . . .?’

‘Booth. Lieutenant James Booth, from the Elveden Explosives Area.’ His eyes ran over her, making her feel uncomfortable. ‘I must say I was expecting someone older.’

She was in no mood for flirtatious flattery. ‘Where are my children, Lieutenant Booth?’

The grin faded to something more sombre. ‘They won’t be coming to school today, Miss Pillbody.’

‘And why not?’

‘In fact,’ he said, the pink tip of his tongue touching his top lip for a second as he hesitated, ‘they won’t be coming to school for the foreseeable future, I am afraid.’

A multitude of possibilities rattled through her mind – were they recruiting children for the war? Was it a disease quarantine? Evacuation because of the Zeppelins? – but none made any sense. ‘And why not?’

‘I can’t say. But we have extended the quarantine zone around Elveden. All the tenant farmers are being relocated for the duration, and the children are going with them.’

‘Duration of what?’ she pressed. In fact, there was only one week of school left before the holidays, but she wasn’t going to let that assuage her indignation.

‘I can’t say.’

She looked at his uniform, searching for regimental badges, but could spot none. Wasn’t that unusual? She wished she had paid more attention to such matters. ‘Who are you with, Lieutenant? Which regiment?’

A tight-lipped smile silently repeated his previous statement. Those chill eyes told her not to pursue the matter.

‘These children need schooling, you know. A good proportion still can’t read or write—’

‘All that has been taken into consideration. They will be well looked after where they are going.’

‘And where is that? No, don’t tell me. You can’t say.’ She could feel anger rising in her, the sort that bubbled up when she had to deal with locals who told her that their young daughter was going to marry at sixteen and be a farmer’s wife and had no need of any further schooling. ‘You have no right to do this—’

‘But I have,’ said Booth, his manner suddenly abrupt. He reached into his top pocket and brought out a folded sheet of paper. ‘I have every right under the Defence of the Realm Act. You actually live just outside the new exclusion zone, so you can keep your cottage, but after today you will not be allowed anywhere on the estate until further notice.’

‘But—’

‘And if you do set foot on the estate, or indeed mention anything that has happened to you today, or speak to any of the locals about this or any subsequent events, you will be prosecuted under this Act.’ He unfurled the sheet of paper and shook it threateningly. ‘I’m sorry we didn’t reach you before you made the journey here, but there has been a lot to do. I suggest you return home to your cottage now. You will be compensated financially, of course, for loss of salary. Perhaps you should go back to your parents in Chichester. I am sure you can find a young man who will snap you up.’

She was furious at both the crass remark and the fact that he had been peering into her life. ‘There is more to life than finding a young man.’

Booth raised an eyebrow.

‘And there is no appeal against this?’

‘None, I am afraid.’ He put on his cap. The matter was closed.

He indicated to his driver they were leaving. ‘Look on the bright side, Miss Pillbody. Your holiday has come a little early.’

She could think of nothing to say, although she wanted to stamp her foot and wail at him. ‘Very well. But I intended to run summer art classes here—’