THIRTY-TWO
‘Murder?’ Torrance rolled the word around his tongue, as if it assessing a fine claret. ‘Murder? Have you taken leave of your senses?’
Watson shifted in his chair. They were in Torrance’s office, a room that had once been the abbot’s sanctum. It was lined on three sides with bookshelves, all empty apart from a few military manuals, with the fourth wall taken up almost entirely by mullioned windows that overlooked the nearest tents of the CCS. Dense sheets of rain obscured the rest.
‘Yes, that’s correct.’
‘Are you all right, Watson? You don’t look too good.’
‘Just a small post-transfusion reaction. I’m feeling better by the minute.’ He mopped his brow. ‘It isn’t unusual. I suspect our method of cross-matching blood is a touch crude and sometimes our bodies remind us of this fact.’
‘A transfusion? Why have you had a blood transfusion?’
‘To demonstrate that whatever caused the death of Shipobottom was not related to the blood I gave him. I considered every aspect, and can think of no other explanation than that the man was murdered.’
Torrance began to quake. A ripple ran through his body, his shoulders heaved and he let out a great blast of laughter. ‘Why on earth would anyone want to murder the already dead? Every man sent back up the line is likely to die within weeks or months. We lost 1,500 men at the battle of Mons, then 80,000 at Marne a month later. Total Allied casualties at Ypres? About 150,000. The British alone lost 50,000 at Loos. How many do you think will perish in the next big push? Five thousand a day? Ten? Twenty? There is murder, Watson, on an unprecedented scale, but it isn’t happening in forgotten little aid stations behind the lines.’
His face had gone quite red and he began to excavate his briar with a pocketknife.
Watson was having none of it. ‘Don’t you see, that this is the perfect place for a murder? Bodies, dead bodies, have lost all currency. They matter not one jot. Stabbed, shot, gassed, blown to smithereens, rotted away from gangrene – there are so many ways to take a life, they have lost any value. I have only been here a few days and I feel it happening to myself. The care and compassion we would have over one lost soul has been swept away. We doctors always run the risk of becoming inured to suffering. But here, that impunity is the only way to survive and keep your sanity. And against that backdrop, in the midst of this indifference, it would be so easy to commit a murder.’
Torrance looked unimpressed. ‘I ask again, why? Why go to such lengths when, as we agree, the odds are that this conflict will take the victim at some point anyway.’
This was the important question. Who profits from the act? No real answer had yet presented itself. ‘Perhaps the murderer wanted to be certain of the man’s death. Dear God, some of our youth must survive this war; nobody can be one hundred per cent sure of any one man’s demise. Perhaps he wants to, needs to, witness the event for himself. Or, indeed herself. It is also possible that it is important to the perpetrator that the victim knows who is killing him and why.’
Torrance tapped the bowl into a saucer, making a cone of ash. ‘That smacks of melodrama, Watson, not fact. A field in which you are something of an expert, or so I hear. Never read any of your stuff myself. But I am of the opinion this was a form of tetanus. An involuntary muscle spasm, a lockjaw. I admit the symptoms were peculiar in their strength, but I have seen many strange things since I came out here. Things beyond reason. Who knows if it wasn’t a delayed reaction to gas? Or a rat bite? They have become monsters, feeding on the dead. Or perhaps something from the damned lice they all carry. Now, if you tell me that I should keep an eye out for similar occurrences, I would agree. But murder? You want me to call in the Military Police, do you?’
Watson spoke more calmly this time, but still with conviction. ‘It is not tetanus. The cyanosis tells us that. There are no breaks in the skin consistent with a rat bite. I have seen rat bites, by an animal as unfeasibly large as they grow in the trenches, albeit a type native to Sumatra. Unmistakable. There were no such marks. The symptoms we witnessed, Major, are called Risus sardonicus, the sardonic grin. Although this seems to be a peculiarly powerful version of it. It is the result of an alkaloid poison. I have come across these toxins before. I had hoped never to do so again.’ Watson didn’t want to go into details of the case known at The Sign of Four. That would involve thinking about Mary again, and he needed to stay focused on this case, not dwell on his past.
‘If – and I mean if – there has been a murder, whom do you suspect?’ asked Torrance.
‘I need to question Miss Pippery further, to establish a time sequence and who had the opportunity to enter the tent. But, of course, the poison might have been administered prior to him entering the transfusion tent. It could be a slow-acting toxin. I saw blue flecks in the white of Shipobottom’s eye earlier that morning. It might have been the first expression of the symptoms.’
‘In other words, you have not the faintest idea.’
Watson wiped his brow once more. How he wished at this moment he could have said, with the confidence of a Holmes, that he had all the pieces of the puzzle in hand and merely needed a few hours to complete the picture. But it would have been a downright lie. ‘No, but I am confident—’
‘And you have a motive?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Did this Shipobottom have any obvious enemies?’
‘He seemed to be well liked. I need to question his platoon.’
‘You need to question?’ Torrance demanded. ‘By whose authority?’
That was a good point. He and Holmes had always assumed every right to investigate on behalf of clients. In the army, though, it was different. Who was the client? Shipobottom was hardly in a position to give his permission to investigate. ‘Well, perhaps we should call in the Military Police then.’
Torrance began to stuff tobacco into his pipe with some force. ‘My dear Watson, I am sure life as a blood doctor is dull compared with your old adventures. I am afraid you have a case of over-active imagination. Not everything we can’t explain is a crime. And you are not a policeman or even a detective. You are a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps.’
‘And as an RAMC doctor, I need to clear the reputation of the citrated blood process. I am not looking for extra adventure, Major Torrance. How many volunteers as either donors or recipients do you think we’ll get when the rumours start to fly about the manner of Shipobottom’s end?’
‘All the more reason not to make a song and dance about one, single unexplained death amongst so many.’ He pointed the stem of his pipe at Watson. ‘I want that body disposed of as soon as possible.’
‘You aren’t inclined to contact the Military Police?’
‘On such flimsy evidence?’
‘Are you worried about Field Marshal Haig’s visit?’
Torrance twitched as if he had stepped on a live wire and Watson knew he had hit a nerve. The thought of the CCS being overrun by MPs and the shadow of an unsolved murder – with a grisly corpse to boot – hanging over it was not one he relished.
‘I am more worried about you making a fool of yourself.’
Watson, though, was not yet out of ammunition. ‘There was another curious aspect of this case. There were small incisions on the chest. Quite tiny, and not difficult to overlook with the naked eye. But they were easily spotted under a magnifying glass. I suspect the scores were made post mortem, as there was little or no blood.’ Watson reached over and grabbed a pencil, sketching the marks in the column of a report. He held it up. ‘Like this. Does this suggest anything to you?’
‘Is it a symbol?’
‘Yes. A Roman symbol. It is the number four. Do you see? The Roman numeral for four. It just so happens the downstroke is longer than the V.’
‘Which suggests what exactly?’ Torrance asked, lighting his pipe and sucking loudly, generating a sudden billow of blue-grey smoke.
‘I think, Major Torrance, we have been witness to victim number four.’
Torrance looked cross. ‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, it rather raises the question, who were victims number one, two and three?’