The Dead Can Wait (38 page)

For a delicious few minutes, Watson felt time had rolled back twenty, thirty years. With two chairs pulled up in front of the cast-iron stove that heated the cottage, a mug of beef tea each, a pipe for Holmes and a cigarette for Watson, he felt the same comforting glow of familiarity that marked his times at Baker Street. Holmes, too, seemed content, his eyes hooded, a smile on his lips, as if in a relaxed reverie.

‘Tell me what you have been up to, Watson,’ he said softly. ‘Spare me no detail. What brings you here?’

‘You do. I intend to give you some of my blood.’

A chuckle. ‘That’s very generous of you, Watson.’

‘I am a universal donor. It won’t work miracles, but it will keep you from that abyss you mentioned.’

Holmes’s brow furrowed. ‘To be honest, it is more like a black fog. You have the necessary equipment with you? For this . . . transfusion?’

‘I do,’ Watson said, slightly taken aback. ‘You aren’t going to try to dissuade me?’

‘As with the fairer sex, medical matters are your department, Watson.’

The major thought back on all the arguments over Holmes’s use of cocaine and the days without food when he was in thrall to a particularly vexing case, and how he rarely won any of those arguments with the detective. This was a changed man, at least for the moment. Well, he was going to seize on this new compliance.

‘It is just the start, Holmes,’ Watson warned. ‘I have to get you off the island and to hospital for tests.’

‘I hear that Montgomery has only ever let one person off the island. A woman. That took the influence of Mr Winston Churchill himself.’

‘I know, Holmes. That was Mrs Gregson, and Winston had his own reasons for removing her.’

‘Can we get word to him?’

‘Churchill is busy with the Gallipoli inquiry. He won’t give us the time of day. So, as we speak, Mrs Gregson is organizing our escape.’

Holme’s eyes were wide open now. ‘Your Mrs Gregson? From the de Griffon case?

‘Yes, she is the woman Churchill took off Foulness, for his own reasons, of course. It is a rather long story, Holmes.’

‘The best always are.’ Holmes leaned forward and, with some grunting, threw another log into the stove. ‘And we aren’t going anywhere for the moment, are we?’

And so, for the next hour, Watson explained to Holmes all that had happened, from being intercepted by Coyle and Gibson, through the unmasking of Cardew, to Mrs Gregson finding a spot to hide on the
King of Burnham,
while Watson insisted to the captain that she had jumped overboard rather than return to Foulness. He hoped, by now, she had managed to slip ashore onto the mainland. Several times Holmes asked him to repeat a section, as if he couldn’t quite grasp it.

‘And so you volunteered to come here to be with me, rather than stay at Elveden?’ he asked finally.

‘Yes, once I recovered. I think they were glad to see the back of me.’

‘And these “tanks”, where are they now?’

‘On the way to France.’

‘In great numbers?’

‘I fear not. Not as many as young Cardew would have liked.’

Holmes said nothing, simply leaned back and closed his eyes.

‘And these toxic fumes,’ he said eventually. ‘You didn’t discover how this engineer could have created them?’

‘No. Swinton insisted on keeping the coded formula as evidence for any eventual inquiry. He has had no luck breaking it.’

‘Pity. That you didn’t bring it, I mean.’

Holmes, of course, might well have had more success with the cipher. ‘Quite so. Of course I should have made a copy. But I suspected something to do with ergot of rye—’

‘Ergot? It would take someone with a sophisticated knowledge of chemistry to extract the active substance. Did he have this?’

‘I have no idea, Holmes.’ Another familiar feeling crept over Watson, not one of contentment, but of dread. He could feel himself being drawn along by Holmes to a place where the ground shifted under his feet and all certainty fled. He tried not to snap, but his exhaustion got the better of him. ‘What is it, Holmes?’

‘Levass. Not too common a name.’

‘It might be in France.’

Holmes pointed the stem of his pipe at Watson. ‘You know of
La Bouche?
The Buzzard? A famous French pirate. Real name Levassuer. Believed to be part of the inspiration for the novel
Treasure Island.
His family disowned him, especially after he was hanged for piracy, and shortened their name to Levass.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Watson, with more sarcasm than he intended.

‘It is. Because a certain Jean-Paul Levass became one of early nineteenth century Paris’s top perfumers. His son expanded the business into pharmaceuticals and chemicals. And his grandson still runs the business, I believe.’

‘Colonel Levass?’ Watson felt a hollowness in his stomach. Hadn’t the Frenchman mentioned something about his family being privateers? ‘It wasn’t Cardew after all?’

‘I didn’t say that. But perhaps the two shared a common aim – to delay the deployment of this super weapon until it had a better chance of success. I must say I have some sympathy with that thought. Although not with their methods, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Watson wasn’t really concentrating on the words, he was replaying his memories. The bodies in the ice house. It would have taken more than one man to move them from their coffins. He had thought that at the time. Yet when Cardew was unmasked, he had shut that inconvenient fact away. ‘So you think—’

‘All I am saying is that there was one man among those you have described with the expertise to create this diabolical psychotomimetic. Levass is famous for his expeditions to central and South America searching for new drugs. You must have read his account of his time in the jungle
? La recherche de Dieu I'usine
?

Watson had neither read nor heard of anything of the kind. ‘He mentioned Mexico, I seem to recall,’ he said vaguely, ‘Over the first dinner.’

‘Then perhaps he came across the
semillas de la Virgen.’

Watson’s Spanish was rudimentary, but he managed the translation. ‘The Seeds of the Virgin Mary?’

‘A powerful hallucinogen used in religious ceremonies. It comes from a species of morning glory. And you mentioned fear of light? Datura is also widely cultivated in Mexico. A hallucinogen that causes dementia and, as a side effect, intense photophobia.’

‘Well, Hitchcock certainly had that.’

‘It also causes rapid post-mortem necrosis of the extremities. Which can be mistaken, if I remember correctly, for gangrene.’ Holmes raised one eyebrow.

‘Really?’ said Watson glumly, feeling like a chided schoolboy.

‘But any worldly toxicologist worth his salt would know what it was. After all, it is mentioned in Mathieu Orfila’s
Toxicologie générale.
As a Spaniard, Orfila had travelled extensively in Central America. I would contend that it was why the bodies were disposed of. The methodology and the necrosis would have pointed to Mexico or similar.’

‘Wouldn’t the killer know that from the start? That it would leave telltale signs?’

‘Ah. You are forgetting von Hohenheim’s famous maxim.’

Watson, on the back foot, racked his brains.
‘Sola dosis facit venerium?

‘Excellent, Watson, excellent. The dose makes the poison or
“Alle Dinge sind Gift und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dan ein Ding kein Gift lit.”’

The man was showing off now. Holmes, Watson appreciated, was enjoying himself. This was one thing he had clearly lacked for these past weeks and months: an audience. It was improving him by the second.

‘“All things are poison and nothing is without poison”,’ translated Watson slowly. ‘Only the dose makes a poison.’

‘Yes. It is possible, Watson, that we have an accidental murderer on our hands. He may have meant merely to incapacitate the tank crew but miscalculated the toxic effects of the vapour. It is devilishly difficult to control the dose of a gas.’

Despite feeling both annoyed and humiliated, Watson couldn’t help but look at his friend with renewed admiration: even Holmes’s clouded mind was superior to his own. ‘So I was only half right,’ he said glumly. ‘It was Cardew and Levass, working in tandem.’

‘Ah, but without me you only had half of the usual resources,’ said Holmes with a wan smile. ‘And you did well. A fifty per cent solution is better than none.’ There was a twinkle in his eye. ‘Although as you know, I used to favour a seven per—’

‘That’s as maybe,’ said Watson quickly, not wishing to be reminded of Holmes’s cocaine preferences, ‘but we need to warn the Heavy Branch about Levass. They have a singularly evil cuckoo in their nest.’

‘Indeed they do. But there is no communication with the mainland, Watson. No telephones. Only a radio, controlled by Montgomery.’

Watson clenched his fists in determination. ‘Failing word arriving from Mrs Gregson that she has succeeded with Churchill, we have to get to that radio, Holmes.’

‘What? All in good time, old chap, all in good time. Shall we eat?’

Watson sensed Holmes had left him again, his intellect smothered by an animal instinct. He was hungry.

At that moment there came a loud hammering on the door. ‘Ah, that will be Miss Deane,’ said Holmes with a grin. ‘Let her in, would you?’

THIRTY-NINE

Colonel Swinton looked across the bleak landscape of the field outside Yvranch in Picardy. Once it had been productive farmland. Now it was pitted into troughs and churned into peaks, so that it almost looked an ocean, frozen in mid-swell. The creatures responsible for this desecration were lined up in a row, their engines grumbling into life. Next to Swinton was Lieutenant-Colonel John Brough, the man designated to take these machines into battle. He was in his forties, a veteran of the Africa campaign against the Germans, which had left him gaunt and sallow. Doctors suspected malaria, but Brough was the sort of soldier who got on with the job rather than worry about such a mildly inconvenient illness.

‘Haig will be coming tomorrow,’ said Swinton, as they trudged towards the tanks. Crews in overalls were busy fussing over the machines, making sure the tracks were properly tensioned and the exhausts weren’t blocked – there were several suicidal species of birds that liked to build nests in them. ‘Best make sure the men smarten up.’

‘It’s dirty work, Swinton. You know that. You can’t run tanks and look like the Household Cavalry. When is he coming?’

‘The nine o’clock show.’

‘Bloody circus.’

Swinton wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. ‘I beg your pardon?’

Brough stopped walking. He was a head taller than Swinton and he leaned in and towered over him. ‘I said, it’s like a bloody circus. Show times nine and two. Crush that boulder. Knock over that tree. And they come and smirk. Like we are clowns performing for them. We need to be training for war, not performing for the top brass on a whim.’

Swinton nodded. ‘You have made your thoughts on that very clear. You and Clark.’ This was Major Philip Clark, Brough’s second in command of the Heavy Branch – now known also as the ‘Fighting Side’ – who also despaired of the ‘pony show’, as he called it, of displaying the tanks to the generals and colonels who had to be persuaded that the machines could fight alongside men.

‘Any news on when we will be used?’ Brough asked.

Swinton did indeed have news, but he ducked the question. ‘Within a few weeks.’

‘And we have how many more cars coming over?’ The tanks were shipped, in great secrecy, from their proving grounds at Elveden and the new base at Bovington by train and boat, all the while shrouded in canvas and classified as ‘Water Tanks: Mobile’.

Swinton cleared his throat and gave the most optimistic number of machines he could expect. ‘Thirty.’

‘So, we’ll have no more than a hundred completed tanks. Well, reckon on a third of them breaking down. That means we can field sixty or seventy. I’m not sure that’s really enough to show what they can do. But I, for one, can’t wait to get stuck in.’

A tank lurched forward from the line, moving into the clearing and giving a little pirouette as the driver tested the running gear. The rear steering wheels were up, Swinton had noticed. Drivers disliked them and found them unnecessary, because the best operators could do incredible things with just the tracks and gearboxes.

‘You won’t be getting stuck in, John,’ said Swinton softly, his voice full of regret.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m sorry to be the one to break the news. Haig is going to tell you tomorrow. I thought I’d better prepare you, just in case you do or say anything foolish. You are being transferred.’

‘What? Where?’ The yellowness of the skin had been replaced by a creeping redness.

Swinton sighed. ‘Not certain. Blighty, so I hear.’

Brough spun around so that Swinton could not see the expression on his face. After a few moments’ composing himself, he turned back. ‘And Philip gets my post? Well, he’s a good man—’

Swinton shook his head. ‘No, Clark is tarred with the same brush. You should have just got on with your circus shows, John. The Brass don’t like being told when they can and can’t see their new toy.’

‘Yes, that’s the trouble, isn’t it?’ Brough said with suppressed fury. ‘They think it is a toy. Wind it up and watch it run. So who will take charge?’

‘We think Elles, eventually.’

‘Sound choice,’ admitted Brough. Elles was an engineer by trade and had been involved in placing the orders for the early tanks. ‘He’ll understand the challenges.’

‘Unfortunately he is working on the strategy for the next big push. Haig won’t let him go just yet.’

‘Then whom?

‘Frogatt-Lewis.’

‘Flogger Lewis?’ he said. The man was well known as a martinet, the worst kind of stick-in-the-mud army officer, who thought striking miners should be shot and hanged from the lift gear, and suffragettes sent to nunneries for life. His view of military discipline was even more unyielding. Clearly, someone wanted to smarten up the corps. Haig, he suspected, always a stickler for appearances. He would, no doubt, rather the tanks gleamed than worked. ‘Apart from the madness of changing commanders just before a first engagement, what on earth does Flogger know about tanks?’