FORTY-FIVE
Night was setting in as Watson reached the barn at Suffolk Farm. The lorry parks he passed were alive with lights and idling engines; the munitions trucks rattled along the narrow-gauge tramways that crisscrossed the countryside, and everywhere men were on the march. The crunch of hobnails would have filled the air but for the blasts of the guns that had started up, their muzzle flashes scorching the base of the low clouds.
Suffolk Farm was deserted, the only sign of habitation the detritus left behind by the Pals – bully beef cans, piles of carelessly thrown tea leaves, rain-sodden newspapers and magazines, a few broken and useless piece of equipment – and a brief sighting of Cecil, who raced a few circuits around the yard before sprinting off.
‘Hello?’ Watson shouted. There was normally a farmer around, the man who would have let out his property (five francs for an officer, one for a regular soldier), a Madame and some kids. This one appeared deserted. ‘Anybody there?’
Watson dismounted, reached down and picked up several large, dangerously sharp shards of earthenware that were littering the yard. They had once been part of a container marked SRD, the mysterious organization – Supply Reserve Depot or Special Rations Department, depending on whom you believed – that managed to deliver rum to every corner of the conflict. It was the remains of one of the jugs that the tots arrived in. He tossed the pieces onto the big rubbish pile adjacent to the stone horse trough. Another unit would doubtless be in the next day, complain about the state the billet had been left in, clean it up and then, as was the way of the world, leave it similarly strewn with detritus when they abandoned it. Lord Lockie pulled him over to the trough near the midden of garbage, bent his head and drank.
The bay gelding had done exceptionally well, riding dozens of miles without any complaint, and appeared to have more to give. Watson, on the other hand, was almost spent. He felt somewhat deflated, his bones excessively heavy. The sudden elation he had felt when he discovered the coded message in the magazine had been deflated by fatigue and a gnawing sense of failure. He could not help feel that, had Holmes been with him, he would have seen wide avenues to explore where Watson only saw culs-de-sac, discovered connections when all Watson could sense was a scatter-pattern of unrelated incidents, spread like buckshot across the fabric of the case. He was, he concluded, only half a detective. Perhaps less.
But, he reminded himself, half a Holmes was better than none. He had met successful policemen at Scotland Yard who were a fraction of that. But so far he had established one fact: Caspar Myles was a far more decent man than he suspected. Though perhaps hotheaded and clumsy around women, he was no molester. Quite the opposite. Which posed the question: where had he taken Staff Nurse Jennings?
No, it didn’t, he reminded himself. It wasn’t any of his business. His sole concern, he told himself, had been for Staff Nurse Jennings’s safety. If she was safe, even if she was perhaps behaving foolishly, then he really should close the matter.
Is that all you are worried about? Her safety?
He wasn’t going to justify that with a reply, he decided.
But you like her.
Of course I—
Ha. His conscious was trying to tell him his concern for the girl was distracting him away from the real matter in hand. Of course I like her. He had always enjoyed the company of intelligent, independent women. He even appreciated Mrs Gregson, although there was a wild streak in there that any man of his generation would find unsettling. It was fine when it was harnessed for good, such as the retrieving of the burial records of Hornby, but he suspected—
And speaking of Hornby. And Shipobottom. And de Griffon.
Yes, yes, enough of women. Back to murder. So, he was now as certain as he could be that gas had not played a role in this case, unless Churchill found otherwise from the Wiltshire death. Had he been right about that? It was possible he had maligned British scientists.
Watson pulled open the door to the nearest stone barn and lit one of the lanterns in the doorway. He wrinkled his nose at the acrid smell of ammonia and worse. Some of the men had decided to use at least one of the stalls as a latrine. These were people, he reminded himself, who often made do with earth closets at home. A pile of clean straw might seem rather tempting to them. They could have used some chloride of lime, however, to soften the stink.
He took the light and walked Lord Lockie to a stall at the far end, away from the odiferous area. Hanging up the lantern, he began to untack, starting with the nose lash to release bridle. He didn’t bother with a rope harness; Lord Lockie was glad to be home and wasn’t going to give him any trouble.
As he unbuckled the girth, he thought about how marvellous it would feel to be going back to Baker Street. To a steaming cocoa from Mrs Hudson. A hot bath and soaking to the sound of a violin seeping through the closed door. A good whisky waiting on a side-table. One of their landlady’s fine pies for supper. Perhaps an unexpected knock at the door . . .
Stop torturing yourself, Watson admonished. There are a million men crouched in trenches all across Europe, pining for home comforts and old friends. You have considerably less right to them than they. He was an old man sliding into the past rather than facing his inevitable future. He had seen it happen to many of his patients, that yearning for a golden age that had never really existed, at least not in the prelapsian version that memory presented. It was true in this case. He had always exaggerated Holmes’s ability on the violin. It could be maddeningly caterwauling at times. The pies, mind, really were delicious.
Watson chuckled to himself as he heaved off the saddle and its pad, and placed it on the stall divider. Then he draped a fresh mantle over the horse’s back. Lord Lockie gave a little shudder of pleasure at the touch of the cool blanket and Watson stepped back as the animal emptied his capacious bladder. Watson fetched oats and water for the horse while he waited for the stream to weaken. He had just started to search for some brushes, when he heard the barn door slam in the wind. At least, he thought it was the wind. But it was a clever breeze that could lift up a beam of wood and re-bar the door from the outside.
‘Hello?’ he shouted, his voice strangely deadened by the stone and wood that surrounded him. The flat, empty timbre of the word made his heart beat a little faster. It sounded like it had come from another place, the dream world he had just been indulging in.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked. ‘Lewis? Is that you?’ Why would it be Corporal Lewis? Because he had asked where he was going next and Watson had told him. Using footpaths, Burnt-Out Lodge was only a short walk across two fields.
Watson took a step towards the now-closed double doors when he saw something snake underneath them, whiplashing as it came. It was a hose. Perhaps, he thought, the stable was to be sluiced. Then it gave a twitch and a jolt, as if given an electric shock. A shushing noise issued from the open end, followed by a foul white-green cloud that blossomed rapidly, like the bloom of a flower speeded up by a cine camera. Watson instinctively took a step back and put a hand to his mouth. It was the hiss of chlorine gas.