TWENTY
Mrs Gregson swung the front of the Crossley round so it was parallel to the front of Somerset House. Watson looked up at the sad, scarred edifice, and then to his left, down through a swathe of fallen trees to a lonely church tower and beyond that, a smudge of smoke that hovered over the lines. Gas? No, too high, too thin. He looked at his watch. It was just gone 12.30 p.m. Where had the morning gone?
Once the staff car had juddered to a halt and given itself a shake like a wet dog, Watson grabbed his Gladstone bag from the back seat. ‘I expect I shall be thirty minutes or so.’
‘Shall I come in with you?’
‘I’d prefer it if you waited with the car, Mrs Gregson,’ he replied coldly. It was their first exchange since her intemperate outburst about his former colleague. She had only been playing devil’s advocate, but Watson had reacted as if she had goosed the King in public.
‘As you wish.’
After saluting the sentry, then jumping through the inevitable hoops held at a variety of angles by a team of impossibly young subalterns, Watson was eventually shown towards the rear of the building, to what had once been the ballroom of the grand house. In the reception area and cloakroom sat an immaculately dressed but sour-faced captain, who agreed that, yes, he had been informed of his request to see Lieutenant-General Phipps as a matter of urgency, but, as perhaps the major could hear, the general was busy.
What the general was busy with beyond the white, gilded doors to the ballroom was trying to interrupt a tirade from an angry fellow officer. There were thumps of punctuation during the speech, as one or other of them banged a desk, and low growls of displeasure that made it seem as if there was a large cat, a lion or a panther, in there with them.
‘I don’t mind waiting,’ Watson said to the captain.
The adjutant indicated a ridiculously ornate padded chair that might look more at home in a boudoir. ‘I’ll stand,’ said Watson.
The door of the ballroom was flung back, making them both start, and for a moment Watson thought he must have been correct in assuming a wild animal was in there, for the man who emerged was snorting and snuffling like a bull about to charge. It was a second before Watson recognized the belligerent officer and took a step forward.
‘Sir.’
A pair of narrow eyes turned towards him, failed to register who he was, and turned to the captain. ‘Where the blazes is Hakewill-Smith?’ he demanded.
‘In the mess, I believe,’ replied the captain evenly.
‘Sir . . .’ Watson repeated, but the lieutenant-colonel strode off and out down the corridor in search of the doubtless unfortunate Hakewill-Smith.
The adjutant picked up his telephone, spoke a few quiet words, and then looked at Watson. ‘You can go through now, sir.’
Phipps, a precise, straight-backed man in his early fifties, was gazing out of windows that were not masked by curtains, and the room was bright and airy compared to the rest of the house. His view was of the main drive, down to the stone gates that opened onto the road to Ploegsteert, and the surrounding woods. It all looked deceptively normal.
The ballroom in which he stood had been converted to an office with the addition of filing cabinets, a blackboard and a great slab of a desk, on which various maps and papers were laid out. At one end of the room was a cocktail cabinet, its flap down, on which stood a series of balloon brandy glasses and cut-glass decanters. A Louis XIV-style side table held an ornate ormolu clock, the face held aloft by golden cherubs, and a vase of fresh flowers.
‘Major Watson?’ Phipps asked as he turned. ‘Do come in. Close the door, just in case he comes back.’
‘Was that . . . ?’ Watson began, not sure he could believe his eyes.
‘Of course. Who else would come in and treat his commanding officer with such contempt? I don’t know why French gave him the command. I should imagine over Haig’s objections.’ He was as much thinking aloud as addressing Watson. ‘Man has too much to prove now, he’s become reckless.’ Phipps stopped himself. ‘Can I get you some tea, Major?’
‘No, thank you, sir.’
‘Something stronger?’ He indicated the cocktail cabinet.
‘No, thank you. I don’t want to take up too much of your time.’
‘Oh, take all you wish. I have to say, Major, I am a great admirer of your work. Such a tonic when I was in South Africa. The copies of the magazine were in shreds by the time the Officers’ Mess had finished with them.’
‘Thank you.’ Watson had the sudden impression that it was whatever small fame he enjoyed that had gained him entry to see the General Officer Commanding, a veteran of the Boer War apparently, rather than any medical or military concerns. He so hoped he wasn’t going to start asking about the unpublished adventures.
Phipps, though, sat down behind his desk and invited Watson to take the chair opposite. Instead, Watson placed the Gladstone bag on the desk, opened it and took out a carefully folded piece of linen. ‘These are fragments recovered from a wounded man at the East Anglian Casualty Clearing Station. He had most of his lower face blown clean off.’
He unfolded the material to show the small pile of metal shards he had insisted be saved after their extraction from Cornelius Lovat’s jaw.
‘Shrapnel?’ Phipps asked, running a fingertip down one side of his moustache. ‘Well, that’s hardly new.’
‘Sniff it.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
The ormolu struck the quarter-hour.
‘Sniff it, sir. It’s faded over the last day or so, but a good nose can still detect the aroma. I suspect you have good olfactory abilities.’
Phipps frowned. ‘Why would you say that?’
‘The selection of glasses on your cocktail cabinet suggests you are a man who likes to savour the aroma of a good brandy or port. Similarly, the flowers, which I suspect are not easy to obtain at this time of year, indicate a man with heightened sensitivities.’
Phipps’s face crinkled into a grin and he wagged a finger at Watson. ‘Ah, I see now. A touch of the old deduction.’
A silly piece of vaudeville, thought Watson, but he nodded sagely. No man would deny such flattery, even if it was completely untrue and he had the senses of an earthworm. Phipps picked up the fabric and held it to his nostrils, breathing deeply. Watson watched a range of emotions cross over his features, until, after a long minute, he put the cloth back down.
‘Is it . . . onions?’
Slightly better than an earthworm, then, but no bloodhound. ‘Very good, although you may also have perceived undertones of burned garlic.’
‘Of course, of course.’ Phipps touched his forehead, as if admonishing himself. He waited for a few seconds before asking. ‘And that means . . . ?’
‘Cadet’s liquid. I think the bullet contained a quantity of Cadet’s liquid, perhaps at the core of a charge of fulminated mercury.’
‘A rifle bullet?’
‘Yes. A particularly wicked one.’ He described the facial wound in detail.
‘An ordinary high-velocity bullet can cause extensive damage too. But this does sound like it is of a different order. And this unfortunate Lovat?’
‘Dead. I should have realized at the time he could not be saved. Cadet’s fuming liquid, to give it its full title, means that, should the victim survive the gunshot, the arsenic in the compound will still kill him. All of which contravenes the Hague Convention.’
‘You have come across this before?’
‘Twice. Never as propellants, but in static explosive devices designed to cause mayhem. Once with Latvian anarchists and once, it pains me to say, with planned suffragette outrages.’
‘You know there have been claims and counterclaims about such bullets. At the beginning of the war, any British officer captured with flat-nosed rounds in his revolver – standard issue for some years – was liable to be shot on the spot. And we found German dum-dum bullets, of course. Hideous things.’
Watson was about to mention that such expanding rounds got their name from the British arsenal at Calcutta, but held his tongue. Phipps would be well aware that there was a degree of hypocrisy at work whenever anyone condemned the other side’s atrocities.
‘Such things have paled beside the use of flamethrowers and poison gas,’ Phipps continued. ‘But your bullet seems to be in a different league from even a dum-dum.’ He put his fingertips together. ‘I can issue a field notice, asking for front-line officers to be on alert for such wounds and report them, and I can write to the International Committee of the Red Cross, alerting them to a possible breach of the Hague and Geneva Conventions. And of course, mention the threat to Field Marshal Haig when he arrives, so he knows to keep his head well down when we tell him. Don’t want the Field Marshal having his skull split open in my sector.’
No, Watson thought, I bet you don’t. Not a career-enhancing scenario. ‘I was told he was visiting medical facilities.’
‘It’s a bit of a Cook’s Tour to be frank. He’s mainly to inspect the Ypres salient proper. Pretty beastly up there.’ Watson knew ‘up there’ was only a few miles distant. ‘No doubt hatching some scheme to break the stalemate. But he also intends to visit us here at Somerset. You know this was a quiet sector until someone decided it might be a grand idea to start shooting the new rifle grenades over at Fritz.’
‘Yes, I’d heard. One of my nurses mentioned much the same thing.’
‘Ah, well. Keeps us all on our toes, I suppose.’
Watson, his objectives achieved, made some small talk before he repacked his Gladstone and took his leave. As he stepped back into the anteroom, he was surprised to see the lieutenant-colonel who had stormed out of the office thirty minutes earlier, sitting, brooding in the over-elaborate chair. The adjutant was nowhere to be seen. He stood as soon as he saw Watson.
‘There you are, Major. My apologies for not recognizing you earlier. Uniform threw me.’
Watson held the door open for him to re-enter the ballroom.
Colonel Winston Churchill shook his head, making his jowls wobble. ‘No, no. Shut that. It’s you I want to see, not that shrinking violet in there. Dr Watson, I do believe I have the perfect case for you.’