The Dead Can Wait (44 page)

‘Put your back into it.’

Mrs Gregson glared, spat on her hands and leaned everything she had into turning the crank the fast half-turn normally required. The engine made a desultorily chuffing sound. ‘Throttle,’ she said. ‘When it catches. Not too much or you’ll flood the carburretor.’

Another two attempts and the engine caught, tentatively at first, then gaining in confidence. A well-timed blip of the throttle from Miss Deane and the whole thing settled down in a satisfied purr. Mrs Gregson, pleased not to have broken a wrist, pulled the crank free.

‘There you are. What now?’

‘Strip, please.’

‘What?’

‘You said it yourself. I’d look silly in this truck in my Sunday best. But those peculiar leathers of yours . . .’ She stepped down and waved the gun. ‘Take off your clothes.’

FORTY-SIX

Jack Whent had lived all his life on Foulness. He was born in 1829, seventeen years before the first school was opened on the island. So he had missed that, never really learned to read or write, just enough sums to know the price of feed and how much to sell his mustard to Colman’s for. He had been to the mainland for extended periods three times in his life, one of those as baby when his mother feared the scarlet fever had him and they had taken a pony and trap along the Broomway to the hospital at Great Wakering, another to get married, and a third to travel to the Lake District with his father to buy sheep.

His brother had been a farrier and a blacksmith, put out of business by the tractor and dead of drink soon after. His wife had died of TB. His son had Old Marsh Farm now, but Jack didn’t care for Jinny, the wife. She was an off-islander – no problem with that, his own wife was from Burnham – but she acted as if she had fallen among Stone Age people.

The Whents were still farmers and his son made a good job of it. But Jack and Jinny in the same room was always a recipe for a good row. So he preferred to live at what she called The Seashack, but which he knew as Perrin’s Cottage, after the harness-maker who used to live there. Another business gone, taken by mechanicals.

Jack was happy at Perrin’s, but he didn’t sleep much or well. If he was still slumbering when the first birds started up, it was unusual. So it was no surprise he was propped up in bed, stoking the first pipe of the day, when he heard the sprinkle of stone or the like on the salt-darkened windows of his home.

He slipped out of bed, the smoke forgotten, and walked over to peer out, see if it wasn’t some local children playing a joke on old Jack. The new generation seemed to have lost all respect for their elders. His old dad would have strapped some of them for even looking at him the way they did.

Outside, though, was still dark and visibility poor, not helped by the mists.
No urchins would be out in that. Not at this hour
. But as Jack turned away to give some more attention to his pipe, he caught the sound of voices. Sharp and brittle at least one of them was. A woman? Then fading. Someone was going out on the Broomway. They had to be mad.

He slipped back into bed, finished the preparation for the smoke and lit it. Mad, they were. He’d walked and ridden that road hundreds of times to pick up supplies from Wakering. Knew it like the back of his hand. And he wouldn’t walk it in this mist. Not unless his life depended on it. You could find yourself walking straight out to sea in a heartbeat, convinced you were heading for land. Well, you were. Kent. On the other side of the estuary.

As the first tendrils of smoke warmed his lungs, he gave a small, exploratory cough and he closed his eyes. How many more mornings would he have like this at his age? Hundreds, if he was lucky, no more. Why cut short his quota by going out there in filthy weather? Couldn’t see hand in front of face, let alone the poles. He had seen those sands swallow whole ponies and traps. There were at least two motor cars he knew of under the mud. And God alone knew how many bones. It would be madness to go out there. A man would need his head testing.

With a sigh he threw back the covers once more.
What was that old
saying about curiosity and cats?

FORTY-SEVEN

Mrs Gregson stepped out of the leather breeches and skirt combination and threw them at Miss Deane. She plucked them out of the air and tossed them into the lorry’s cab. Mrs Gregson had hoped there might be an opportunity to tackle her while she changed, but she obviously intended to do that down the road.

‘Turn around and kneel.’

Mrs Gregson, dressed now in her Braemar winter-weight all-in-ones, shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Turn around, kneel down. I’ll make it quick.’

Mrs Gregson felt a surge of anger that made her clench her fists. It was better to go down fighting than to be meekly executed like some lamb in an abattoir. ‘No.’

‘So be it.’ Miss Deane cocked the pistol, the ominous click audible even above the engine. ‘You aren’t the first woman to die at the hand of the
Sie Wölfe.
By the way, who did take the grenade at the cottage?’

‘Booth.’

‘Ah. No great loss then.’ She took a breath and levelled the gun.

Mrs Gregson took a step forward just as a rock bounced off Miss Deane’s skull with a dull ringing sound.

The spy’s eyes rolled in her head and she staggered sideways, the gun falling from her hand. Mrs Gregson leaped for it, her fingers closing around the butt when a mighty kick caught her under the chin, sending her skidding on her back along the ground. The sky was full of daylight stars, and she could taste the iron-sting of blood in her mouth.

As she leaned up on one elbow, the gears of the truck ground and it pulled away, gathering speed as it careered onto the road with an ungainly swerve.

She was aware of figures approaching at some speed, but she plucked up the fallen pistol and stood. As the lorry crunched into a higher gear, she took aim and fired, pulling the trigger until the hammer clicked on empty cylinder after empty cylinder.

She flung the useless weapon after the disappearing silhouette, then turned to the shapes at the corner of her vision and saw Watson approaching, bedraggled and limping, but alive at least. She threw out her arms and clasped the major to her body, squeezing the air out of him. She gave him a kiss on the cheek, cold and bristly on her lips, but she didn’t care. Only after a few moments did she remember she was dressed only in her underwear. She pushed him away, holding him at arm’s length.

‘I am so glad to see you, Major. And you too, Mr Holmes—’

But it wasn’t Holmes. It was a wrinkled old man, his face as weathered as driftwood, bracketed by a great crescent of a white beard.

‘This is Jack Whent. Islander,’ said Watson. ‘A man who can throw a stone with enviable accuracy.’

She felt a terrible sense of foreboding. ‘Is Mr Holmes all right?’

‘He’s restin’ up at Molly Birkin’s place,’ said Whent. ‘He’ll be a lot warmer’n you at the minute.’ He shrugged off a tweed backpack and fetched a blanket from it, whether for warmth or to spare her modesty, she couldn’t be sure. She was grateful for it, whatever the reason.

‘Your mouth,’ said Watson with concern. ‘There’s blood.’

She slapped his hand away. ‘It’s nothing. I’ll have a sore jaw tomorrow. I don’t quite follow,’ she said. ‘What happened out there?’

‘Holmes was not as ill as he seemed. I recall he once said to me: “I have my plans. The first thing is to exaggerate my injuries.” ’

‘That would be the affair with Baron Gruner and the Chinese pottery?’

‘Yes,’ said Watson, surprised but pleased she had remembered a story he had yet to write, told to her one night in Belgium. ‘Well, this time he wasn’t as disabled as he seemed. He was using his stick to search for some of the old rotted withies that mark a path from land to the Broomway.’

‘I told him about it, in passing, like,’ said Whent. ‘That there was, is, a path that ran not to Wakering Stairs but to Haven Point. It was so called because if you make a sprint for that, the tide wraps around that causeway, but doesn’t cover it till a good fifteen minutes after the rest. A haven, see? It’s narrow, though; you gots to know what you doin’. Luckily I do.’

‘But what made you follow them?’ she asked.

‘Some bloody fool threw some cockles against m’window in the darkness.’ The old man laughed. ‘An’ I heard voices. Who’d be crazy enough to take the Broomway in a swale like that? I had to see. So I followed, in the mist, like. Thought someone’d spotted me now and then, but I hung back until I found Mr Holmes and his friend here on the sand. I brought ’em ashore, took Mr Holmes to Molly’s and came across here fast as we could. We heard the lorry start up and reckoned it was you two. I saw that woman looking to make mischief and thought I’d better stop her. ’Tweren’t that long a throw.’ Whent sucked in a lungful of air. It was the longest speech he had made in decades.

Mrs Gregson still had questions, but they could wait. ‘Well, thank you, Mr Whent. What now? That woman is on her way to London. She is about to tell the Germans about the tanks.’

‘I’ll wager that woman is on her way to the first telephone box,’ corrected Watson.

‘Probably not one till Great Wakering,’ said Whent. ‘Only army stuff at the camp over yonder. She won’t get in there.’

‘But if we can gain access, we can get the duty intelligence officer to shut the local exchanges,’ said Watson. If they could convince them of the nature of the emergency, that was.

‘You can do that, can you?’ asked Whent, not familiar with telephones.

‘DORA can.’

Even Whent had heard of that. ‘Good ten-minute walk,’ he said, looking Watson up and down. ‘Maybe fifteen.’

Which probably meant at least twenty. ‘We have to warn France about the tanks, as soon as we can,’ said Watson, his exhaustion driving him close to despair. ‘Many lives depend on it.’

‘Hold on a second,’ said Mrs Gregson, hurrying over to where the pistol had fallen. ‘Even an empty gun has some persuasive power.’

‘What is it?’ asked Watson, wondering why she needed the pistol with no bullets.

But then their older ears heard what Mrs Gregson’s younger ones had already noted: the rise and fall of a thrumming engine as it negotiated bends. A motor cycle was coming.

FORTY-EIGHT

The tankman and the infantryman read the new instructions by sputtering candlelight in the dugout near the parked tanks. Halford, the young tank commander, had a stack of notes in his pocket about start times, direction of attack and infantry support – the first few typed, the second lot hastily scribbled as tactics shifted. He was now down to just two tanks. Two more of them had come to grief in a wide, sunken lane called Monkey Valley, which was part pathway and part shell-cratered swamp. One had broken down four times before it gave up the mechanical ghost; the other was stuck fast in mud that doubled as the strongest glue in the world.

Halford’s own tank, the ‘male’ known as
G for Glory
, was running superbly, and he had managed to scrounge sixteen extra gallons of fuel off a Royal Engineers convoy, so he was keeping the extra French juice in reserve. In truth, Halford didn’t like the sound of it. He had been laughed at when he said that, but his father had raced at Brooklands before the war and he knew about the noise that various grades of petrol made as they sloshed in their tins. This new stuff sounded thin.

He looked at his watch. Four in the morning. An hour until his tank rolled forward through the shattered, leafless tree trunks that surrounded them, towards the place called Chop Alley – he didn’t want to ask where the name came from – and onto no man’s land. The new orders said his tank was to be in the vanguard, arriving a few minutes ahead of accompanying infantry. Halford’s would be the first ever tank to see action against an enemy. A mixture of pride and trepidation swirled inside him at the thought.

‘So,’ said Lieutenant Archie Cross of the 6th Battalion, The King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, ‘you will have a man in front of you to guide you through this part.’ He pointed at the trench map. ‘Just to the beginning of no man’s land. There are craters here and here that need careful skirting. After that, you are on your own. You will head diagonally across here towards Delville Wood here. There is a German outpost there, protruding into no man’s land. It has a wide field of fire. Our objective it to destroy that post, then swing across to support the main thrust of the attack towards Flers, where you will liaise with the second tank. The artillery has been instructed to leave a corridor in the rolling barrage to allow you safe passage. During the attack, my men will be coming behind you, using your machine as a shield where possible. I have to say, sir, they are all jolly excited about going into action with you.’

One tank
, thought Halford. Would he had a hundred and one of the things. That would provide proper shelter from the German guns. And with the tanks’ own weapons blazing, that number would be able to keep German heads down while the infantry advanced.

‘Well, let’s hope we justify their excitement,’ said Halford, scratching at his armpit through the layers. The lice, the real victors of the Western Front, had wasted no time locating fresh meat.

‘First time over the bags?’ Cross asked. ‘I mean, not that you’ll be going over the bags. But first time in an attack?’

Halford nodded. ‘We are all first-timers. Just like our tanks. What’s the phrase? Baptism of fire.’

Cross nodded. ‘One thing I know, sir, is that despite the best-laid plans, which these do not appear to be’ – he held up the scribbled orders and they both laughed, a hollow sound to their ears – ‘it soon descends into chaos out there. So, if I might venture some advice, from what little I know, you’d best fix a single objective and go for that. Then always keep your attention on the next objective – the next shell hole, the next trench, the next strip of wire, the next machine-gun nest. Don’t try and take in the whole battle. The big picture is, well, just too big. Leave that to the experts.’

‘How long have you . . .?’

‘Since July,’ said Cross. ‘Since day one of the offensive here. That makes me a veteran. Listen, I’ll get someone to lay white tape along Chop Alley. So if anything happens to the man walking in front, you have something to follow in the dark.’ He, too, consulted his watch. ‘Less than two hours to go until the guns start. Which means about fifty minutes till we form up and move forward. Think you can get some sleep?’