The Dead Can Wait (24 page)

The fat lips moved. It was like watching two slugs dancing. ‘I am Michael Colbert—’

John Daly grabbed a fistful of the bound man’s hair and pulled his head back. The leather soles of the agent’s shoes scuffed over the floor with the pain. Fitz stepped closer and adjusted the flame so it was louder and longer once more. Then he looked at Coyle.

‘Yer fancy a go, Coyle? Human flesh smells just like roast pig, y’know. At least the English do.’

Fitz held out the torch.

Coyle shrugged. ‘Why not? Is y’man definitely English?’

‘If he’s Irish he’ll smell like roast beef This was Conor, the shorter and stupider of the pair.

The prisoner was scared – who wouldn’t be? – but was astute enough not to show it. That was what these lads wanted. Some snivelling. Some pleading. If there was none of that, they’d end it quick anyway. But even the bravest of men were liable to scream for mercy when their eyeballs melted and ran down their faces.

Coyle stepped around the table and held the blue flame close to the Englishman’s face. The man could feel the fierce heat now. He closed the one good eye.

‘Not too quick, now,’ warned Fitz.

‘Start with his fingers,’ said Conor.

‘Or his little English cock,’ offered John, to a round of laughter.

Enough,
a voice screamed in Coyle’s head.
There has been enough of this.

‘You know, John Daly, you always were a little shite.’

Coyle thrust the torch into John’s eye, pushing hard as he did so, then letting it go. His left leg kicked back, sending the table flying towards Fitz and his right hand cleared the pistol from his waistband. He shot Conor in the face, but didn’t wait to see him fall, and then he swivelled back to Fitz, who had his own weapon raised, pointing at him.

‘Now, Coyle, what the fuck was that all about?’

Gibson made the only move open to him at that point. He hooked a toe under the blowlamp that had landed at his feet and sent it arcing towards Fitz’s head. He saw it coming, spinning his way, a streak of blue flame, and he instinctively moved to one side. Which is when Coyle shot him dead. Then he turned and did the same to the remaining brother.

Lying on the bed now, Coyle felt a wave of nausea roll over him as the smells came back to him. The blood, cordite and burned flesh mixed queasily with sweet spices. He had never been able to stomach anything with cinnamon in it since that day.

Gibson and he had fled the country and, in gratitude, the ex-sapper had offered Coyle a job. As a spy. So, he became Gibson’s partner. As he moved through their time together in the SSB, their lives intertwined, thanks to those few minutes in the warehouse, his reminiscences eventually came to Gibson’s death in the street, gunned down by . . .

By whom?

Men who wanted to prevent Major Watson from heading to Suffolk? Here, in this small bedroom illuminated by the golden glow of a falling sun, in an idyllic part of England, it didn’t add up to thruppence. But then, something that did make sense suddenly struck him. It made him sit up, bolt upright. His eyes went to the pistol, laying on the square of cloth on the dresser.

Major Watson hadn’t been the target that morning in Mayfair.

He had.

Watson laid out the files of the seven dead men on his bed. He had been through each of them, making notes and cross-referencing with Hitchcock’s record. There was little overlap between the tank crew. The commander had been to a top public school, one of the gearsmen to a decent grammar. All were under thirty, the majority barely into their twenties. All had some degree of engineering training – marine engines, motor cycles, motor cars, steam tractors, aeroplanes. One had been a mechanic for the London General Omnibus Company, working on the motor buses that had been running in the capital for more than a decade now.

Apart from the interest in all things mechanical, very little connected them. Had it not been for the war it was unlikely their paths would ever have crossed.

There was a tap on the door.

‘Come in!’ Watson instructed.

It was Thwaites, the cavalryman. ‘Sorry to disturb you, Major.’

‘That’s all right. I wanted a word anyway.’

‘Really? With me?’ He sounded genuinely surprised.

‘Take a seat.’

‘I prefer to stand,’ said Thwaites.

Of course he would. The imposing cavalryman stood well over six foot, taller than Holmes, and was a hard man to intimidate when he was on his feet. Not that Watson was in the business of intimidating.

‘What do you make of it?’ Watson asked him. ‘The incident with
Genevieve
?’

Thwaites blew out his cheeks to show his bafflement. ‘I have no idea. Strategically, it is a disaster. To lose confidence in the machine at this point . . . you understand that is why Swinton wants to keep it all under wraps?’

‘Because he doesn’t want the tanks taken away from him,’ said Watson flatly.

‘Yes.’ Thwaites narrowed his eyes slightly. ‘Not much gets past you, does it, Major Watson?’

He had to laugh at that. What would Holmes have to say about that statement?

‘Swinton will do whatever the high command wants in order to go down in history as the man who unleashed the tank on the Hun. Remember that.’

‘I shall. But tell me, surely you should consider the tank the work of the devil? Replacing the horse with a machine.’

‘Replacing?’ Thwaites’s moustache quivered at the very thought.

‘Eventually, I would imagine.’

Thwaites was silent for a moment. ‘I am fifty-three years old, Major. I have been in the cavalry since I was eighteen and seen action at Kimberley and Paardeberg. My father was in The Blues before me, fought at Tel-el-Kebir. I have two sons, fourteen and twelve; the thought that they might not follow in our footsteps pains me immensely.’

‘I understand. Family tradition.’

‘Yes.’

Watson sat on the bed. His bones ached from all the stooping in the tank. ‘Yet here you are, helping seal the fate of the cavalry—’

‘On the contrary,’ Thwaites insisted.

‘But I hear that some of The Blues are to become machine-gun battalions. Cavalry in name only.’

‘Only while we find a new role for the horse.’ Thwaites’s eyes widened. ‘Picture this. Ten tanks abreast, twenty perhaps, sponson-to-sponson, advancing over no man’s land, a moving wall of steel, impervious to bullets. Behind them, the cavalry, shielded by the tanks, and behind them, the infantry. When the wire is breached, the horses dash forward, piercing right through enemy lines, a pincer movement, tanks and infantry one side, the cavalry the other.’

Watson could think of many objections. Tanks might be able to cope with trenches; horses had proved rather less adept. And the Germans would change tactics, from the murderous machine guns to lobbing shells over the tanks to burst among the men and horses. But he wasn’t there to discuss the tactics of tank warfare. ‘You’ll need a lot of tanks.’

‘And we’ll get them.’

‘Why did you come to see me?’

‘Oh, nothing important.’ Thwaites looked uncomfortable. ‘It can wait.’

‘I’m here now.’

‘It’s just . . .’ He produced a slim volume from his tunic pocket. ‘I wondered if you would mind signing this for me?’ He handed it across. It was an 1890 Spencer Blackett edition of
The Sign of Four.‘It
seems a little frivolous, now . . .’ the cavalryman began.

‘Not at all,’ said Watson, laying the book down. ‘I’d be pleased to. But let me take my time over it. You don’t want a smudged dedication.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘And I am flattered you carry some of my work around with you.’

‘Actually, I found it in the Thetford bookshop this evening. Seemed too good to be true. So that’s my rather banal reason for coming to your room. But why did you want to see me? Didn’t you say earlier you wanted a word?’

‘Oh, yes. But I think you’ve answered my question.’

‘Really?’ Thwaites looked perplexed.

Watson nodded. ‘If you travelled to and from South Africa by Union Castle Line, then you have.’

‘I did. But—’

‘It is of no consequence,’ Watson lied.

‘Right. Well, I am keeping you from your work.’ Thwaites pointed to the files.

‘There’s nothing here that speaks to me. Just words on paper.’

‘Ah. So what do you do next?’

Watson picked up one of the folders. ‘I go and look at the men behind these words. Or what is left of them.’

Before he examined the corpses, Watson called in on Hitchcock, unbolting the door from the outside and announcing himself as he entered. There was no reply. Hitchcock was calm and still, his tears dried, and he was still sitting at the card table, his eyes closed, only a single lamp burning in the corner and a dull glow from the paraffin heater illuminating his room. The fumes from the heater caught Watson’s throat and he opened the hinged door at the front of the cylindrical body and peered inside. The flame was yellow when it should have been blue. It was hard to tell in the gloom, but he suspected that the mantle needed a good clean and the wick trimming. He made a mental note to turn it off before he left and get some blankets sent to Hitchcock. The fumes from a badly adjusted heater could be lethal.

‘I am glad you are calm now, Hugh. Well, we can do the piano again tomorrow if you wish. But we don’t have to. I can see that it upset you somewhat. We could just listen to some gramophone music. It can be very soothing. Holmes used to play, you know. Violin, not piano. Not so much in later years. I think he gave up when he realized he was finding the violin versions of Mendelssohn’s
Songs Without Words
trickier than usual. He liked German music. I remember him saying once, “German music is rather more to my taste than French or Italian. It is introspective and I want to introspect!” I ’d never heard it used as a verb like that. To introspect indeed. And he loved Sarasate, the Spanish violinist. One afternoon at St James’s Hall, he sat in the stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long, thin fingers in time to the music, his languid, dreamy eyes quite unlike the normal Holmes. The music took him to another place, where he no longer had to be the great calculating machine of a detective. I wonder if it can take you out of that place they’ve trapped you in.’

Watson stopped himself, suddenly aware that he had been speaking of his old friend in the past tense, as if he were already lost to him. He reached up and cracked opened the single, small window. The paraffin fumes were becoming far too pungent.

Watson sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t know about you, Hitchcock, but I am just about done in. Early start, long hours cramped in that tank, a wild-goose chase through the woods. If I’d known this was what fate had in store for me I’d have become a porter at Smithfield or Billingsgate. At least they get beer in the mornings.’

An unfamiliar noise from Hitchcock made Watson look up. As if his neck were a seized joint being freed, Hitchcock’s head rotated painfully and slowly towards him. There was so little light that Watson couldn’t be sure, but he thought he detected a flicker of a smile on the lips. Yes, there it was, if not a full grin then certainly the promise of one.

Progress!
Watson shouted inside.
Progress at last.

TWENTY-SIX

The ice house that contained the tankmen’s bodies sat outside the walled garden, beyond the ha-ha and on the edge of a trout lake that sat behind a grassed embankment. The entrance was a vaulted brick arch with two steel doors, obviously recent editions, and stone steps that led down into a series of rooms, only one of which was clearly an ice store: it was a vast circular space with a floor that sloped to a central drain and racks, now empty, for holding imported Scandinavian ice. The others were larders and game rooms. There was electricity, too, something else newly installed, although only a single weak bulb per room and one over the steps down.

The coffins of the dead were stacked in three pairs and a single in a section of the chamber that, judging from the steel rails and hooks in the ceiling, would have been used to hang the estate’s venison. The room was suitably chill for its purpose – Watson had had the foresight to don a thick coat, scarf and gloves – but even so, he could detect the sweet smell of decay from within the plain wooden boxes. Nevertheless, he knew he had to examine at least one of the corpses.

As well as his medical bag, Watson had brought with him a large screwdriver he had found in the handyman’s cupboard next to the butler’s pantry below the stairs in the Hall.

Each coffin had a name written on the lid in black paint. He chose the single coffin – Pte B. Knowle, MGC – kneeled down, slid the blade under the lid and levered. The wood and nails screeched in protest, and Watson leaned back as the vapours from within belched into the space. He grabbed the lid and wrenched it free.

‘Good God,’ he said, his voice amplified by the bare brick walls.

Watson had seen plenty of dead bodies before. He had exhumed them, examined them, he knew what death and putrefaction looked like. He was prepared, but not for the sight that greeted him: Private B. Knowles, late of the Machine Gun Corps, was absent from his own coffin.

There were several large stones placed in his stead. The smell was coming from the traces of bodily fluids that smeared the inside. A few flies rose up to greet him, irritated at being interrupted from their liquid feast.

It didn’t take Watson long to establish that the others were empty, too, but for a motley assortment of rocks. He took off his gloves and lit a cigarette. It was clear what the motive for removal must be. The dead could still tell tales. Whatever condition those bodies were in, they could have told him, or another professional, something about the cause of death. But what would it betray? What had caused the hedgehogging madness and death? And how had the bodies been moved? Manhandling seven bodies from the ice house was no easy matter, even for a young, healthy man. True, it was tucked out of sight, so a person could work undisturbed. Even so, where could the bodies have been moved to?
Think, man
.