SIXTY-EIGHT
Watson was seething by the time he reached the concrete loading apron of the overhead railway. He was enraged at the way the nocturnal army had sprung into life at sunset, spilling out onto the roads its battalions of marching soldiers, details loaded with precious water destined for the trenches, ration orderlies humping dixies of hot stew, and the convoys of lorries and carts moving men from rest to reserve and active and back again, all of which contrived to block his way to the front. Going into that mêlée would require the determination and stamina of a spawning salmon.
He was mad at the idiots who had managed to misdirect a whole company, who were now jamming the roads trying to find the correct village.
He was angry at the German airmen for wasting an innocent, harmless life. Miss Pippery deserved to die old, with many grandchildren to mourn her.
He was irritated with Tobias Gregson who, apparently, was on a suicide watch for a man condemned to be shot at dawn and could not help with an arrest till morning.
And with a Major Tyler, who had agreed to place de Griffon under close arrest. His incredulity, however, was apparent even down the crackly field telephone line. He would detain the captain but not release him to an outside party until someone had explained the situation fully to him.
Watson, though, was mostly furious with himself, for not being able to solve completely the conundrum that de Griffon presented. It was within his grasp, he was sure, if he just knew which pieces of information to hold on to and which to discard.
He hauled himself off the motor cycle and looked up at the sky. No rain, thank goodness, but a three-quarter moon playing hide-and-seek with an archipelago of clouds. There would be little or no wind down in the trenches, but the subterranean system could be bitterly cold and damp, so he had swapped his Aquascutum for a British Warm greatcoat.
‘Will you be all right, Major?’ Mrs Gregson asked, turning off the machine.
‘Yes. I’ll sit with him till your . . . until Lieutenant Gregson comes to place him under formal arrest. Perhaps I can get some answers from him before that.’
‘Do you have enough to arrest him? For the Military Police to charge him?’
A good question. Watson had enough circumstantial evidence of murder; but nothing he would bring to the Bailey with confidence. There was a trail of death in de Griffon’s wake, going all the way back to England, that much was certain. But how to link it to de Griffon’s coat-tails?
‘I hope so. At least until we can piece everything together. I’d best get on.’
The overhead railway was a system for delivering the wounded on stretchers from one of the forward dressing stations. It was actually more like a cable car than a rail system, with the platforms for loading the injured hanging from a steel cable that ran around giant drums and was fed through a series of pulleys en route. Most of the carriage system was sunk into a trench, to protect the wounded from further injury by shrapnel. Some of these systems worked by hand cranking, others by gravity or steam; this one ran on electricity. It was, Torrance had suggested, like a latter-day Roman road – the straightest, fastest way for a solitary officer to get near the front without too many tiresome questions or delays on crowded roads and circumventing hundreds of yards of zigzagged trenches.
There were two sappers in charge of the railway and, standing idle, half a dozen ambulances and their drivers, ready to ferry the wounded when and if they arrived. Most of the men were sleeping in the cab, heads cushioned on arms folded across the wheel. A couple, however, knowing they were well out of sniper range, were smoking with open abandon.
‘Here,’ said Mrs Gregson, handing him an armband. ‘Put this on.’ He slid the white band with a Red Cross symbol on it over the sleeve of his greatcoat. ‘That’ll explain quicker than any words why you are up there. Are you certain you should go?’
‘Try and stop me.’
He was shocked when she stepped forward and threw her arms around him, clamping him tight. His damaged rib protested and he tried not to flinch. ‘I could, you know. I could stop you. If I really wanted to. We’ve already lost Alice.’
Her body began to quiver, and he put his own arms around her back, the Dunhill leathers creaking as he did so. Her torso was shaking and her breath was hot against his neck. There were tears, too.
‘The padre told me Alice knew. About the divorce. It’s . . . difficult to accept that she must have died hating me.’
‘No.’ With a studied deliberateness Watson untangled her arms from his body. He made a mental note to intercept the letter than Miss Pippery had written in haste. Mrs Gregson must not see it.
‘That’s not true. There was an initial shock when she discovered—’
‘That I had lied to her.’
‘A necessary deception. I’ve indulged in a few of those in my time. She didn’t die angry, Mrs Gregson. You shouldn’t think that. She spoke to me, she understood, I promise you. Now, I have to leave before de Griffon charms Major Tyler into letting him go. And you crack another of my ribs.’
‘Sorry.’ A big sniff. ‘Back to being a grown-up.’
She took off a glove, and wiped her eyes, giving her bravest smile. Their breaths pooled and mingled in the chill air. He was aware of the sappers watching. They could be two lovers parting. Ridiculous, he knew, but the thought cheered him. He leaned in and kissed her forehead, as chastely as he could. ‘I shall be back tomorrow.’
A distant rat-tat of machine-gun fire sounded, way south, towards Churchill’s HQ. A Very flare arced up, burning like a lonely firework. There was a ragged volley of shots, then silence and blackness once more.
A vast darkness lay over the land ahead, cloaking three enormous armies, and men drawn from across the globe, all preparing for more killing and maiming. A locomotive’s whistle hooted a desolate warning, but Watson couldn’t tell from which side of the lines it came. It didn’t matter; it sounded lonely and scared, whichever army it served. It was like despair made tangible. As if in response to the sounds of war, an enthusiastic nightingale started up – his lusty song doubtless a result of trying to compete with the guns – reminding everyone who could hear that the natural world was still out there, and fighting back, despite man’s best efforts to annihilate it completely from this part of the earth.
‘Be safe, Major.’
‘Just in case, I’ve left some letters—’
She put a finger to his mouth. It felt incredibly warm against his chilled lips. ‘Shush. They’ll be there when you get back.’
She removed the digit, leaving a tingling afterglow. ‘They are on the washstand in my room. Just the two.’
‘I can guess who gets one.’
‘You don’t have to think too hard,’ he admitted. Holmes would want to know he had a good crack at finishing the case.
‘You can rip it up when you get back. Tell him yourself. And the second?’
‘It’s for you.’
‘Me? Why—’
‘No, it’s your turn to be quiet. There’re a few favours in there, Mrs Gregson. I can’t think of a better person to ask.’
Mrs Gregson’s mouth worked but no word came. What kind of favours? Is that all there was? She oscillated between disappointment in the workaday explanation and relief that there might not be more in there, no matter how small. But in the end, she simply felt touched. She reached up and put a hand to his cheek. He didn’t recoil.
‘Then you can do me a favour in return.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Call me Georgina.’
He tried to answer, but there it was again. The finger to the lips. ‘Next time we meet will do just fine, Major Watson. Now go.’
She watched him walk to the hut where sappers sat, show his armband and point east, towards the front. There was a moment’s discussion before the men shrugged and got to work. The pair strapped a stretcher between two of the hanging supports, which were shaped like upside down ‘L’s, and stood back to let him on. Watson clambered aboard stiffly, although she could tell he was making an effort to seem sprightly. One of the sappers threw a switch, there came the whine of a motor and, after a single jerk to overcome the machinery’s inertia, the cable began to run, taking a prone Watson up towards the hostilities.
As its solitary occupant rattled and clanked off into the darkness and the cable descended into the dark slit of the protecting trench, Mrs Gregson shuddered. As if someone had walked over her grave, as the saying went. Major Watson was a remarkable man. She wished she had known him when he was younger. She remounted the bike and kick-started it to life, unable to shake the terrible sense of foreboding that had descended upon her.