Blackest of Lies (30 page)

Tuesday, 6 June 1916 1100 hours – 1630 hours, Wick

Hubert strained until finally he could open his swollen eyes and peer groggily at his surroundings.  He seemed to be in the living room of someone’s house, lying on what felt like a sofa.  Trying to move his head to take a look around turned out to be a big mistake – his head and neck exploded in pain like hot needles.  Lying gently back to luxuriate in the gentle, domestic sounds coming from what was probably the kitchen seemed like a better idea.  Outside, the rain was pattering against the window just above his head but from the sound of it the wind had abated from the madness of the night before.  Well, he was
assuming
it was only the night before.  God knows how long he’d been here – and where
was
‘here’?  He tried to call out at whoever was working in the kitchen and was horrified at the hoarse croak that crawled out of his throat.  But it brought results – Anne walked into the room and sat down on the floor near his head.

“You mustn’t try to talk.”  Anne smiled archly at him.  “Although I
know
it’ll drive you mad.”  She gently stroked a shock of his black hair away from his eyes, causing him to wince slightly at her touch.  “Sorry.  Your skin is a bit inflamed from being immersed in seawater for that length of time.  We had one of ‘our’ doctors take a look at you both when we got here.  I suppose you …”

His eyes widened at the sound of the ‘both’.  “Henry,” he whispered, “Henry, is he alive?”  Hubert felt the salt of her tears splash on his cheeks to join his.  “Yes – he’s alive.  He’s in a bad way but it seems he’s going to make it.”  Anne looked beyond Hubert’s head.  “He’s just behind you on another sofa at right angles to yours – no, you mustn’t move yet.  His head is only a couple of feet away from yours.  When we picked him up, he was very nearly dead.  It took us a while even to feel a pulse but his lifejacket had done the trick and kept his head clear of the water.  It was the cold of Cape Wrath that nearly did for him.  In that storm, and with his age, it was a miracle he survived at all.  The doctor puts it down to your body warmth making that tiny difference between life and death.  You saved him.”

Played back in his mind, like a flickering biograph, Hubert saw again the tableau of Fitzgerald tying his own lifejacket around Farmer and calming him before their escape from the
Hampshire
.  He shook his head weakly, squeezing his eyes shut against the misery of it all.  “No, I didn’t,” he whispered. “It was someone else entirely.” 

Anne clasped his hand in hers and held it to her cheek, just like she had done when she pulled him from the sea.  “Well, the main thing is that you’re both safe.”

“How ma…”  Hubert retched a little and tried to swallow.

“Are you thirsty?”  Seeing his nod, she poured him some from a jug placed between the two sofas and holding his head carefully up, helped him drink from the glass.  “Better?”

“Thank you.  My throat … my throat is so swollen.”

“The doctor says that your eyes and nose will be in a bad way from a few days and, because of all the salt water you probably swallowed, there will be other … more
unfortunate
effects, too.  But with proper hydration, you should be fine soon enough.  He also says that the orbit of your left eye is fractured.  Nothing to be done about it, apparently – it’ll heal itself.  When you’re a bit fitter, you can tell me about it all.”

“How many?”

“How many survived?”  She sighed and bowed her head.  “It doesn’t look like many.  Probably only a dozen or so.  Maybe fifteen.”

“Out of seven hundred?”

“I know.  MacDonald’s been listening to the navy frequency.  The recovery operations were criminally bad – apparently, the Thurso lifeboat boys are spitting blood over it and the worst of it is that many did make it to shore in rafts but they weren’t rescued until it was too late.” 

“Kell – that’ll be Kell.  Pointless … destroy ship … let Henry survive in some hospital.”

“Don’t talk – you’re exhausting yourself.”  She paused and closed her eyes against the news she had to break.  “Chris, they recovered Colonel Fitzgerald’s body.  And that’s not all – his neck shows signs of
ligature
marks.”  He didn’t drown.”

Hubert turned his face away.

“You
knew
?”

He looked back into her eyes and nodded slowly.  “Duquesne … just as Henry and I went overboard.”

For a moment or two, they sat silent.  Anne took a deep breath and smiled tearfully.  “Very well,” she nodded, holding herself together.  “I’ll hear about that later, too.  For now, I suppose I should do the talking.  You’ll want me to give you chapter and verse while Mac makes us a late breakfast.”  She shouted the last bit like a stage aside.

“I’m doing it – I’m
doing
it!” came the pained reply from the kitchen.

Smoothing the coverlet around Hubert’s neck and shoulders, she chuckled at the thought of MacDonald as a kitchen slavey.  She brought her face close to Chris’s and stroked his cheek.  “You’ve no idea how awful it made me feel to leave you locked up in that bloody trunk.  Right up until we saw you in the water, I was imagining half the time that you had suffocated.”

“Damn near did,” he rasped.

“Glad you didn’t.”

Hubert grinned painfully.  “Knew it was just a matter of time.”

“Now don’t start all that again!”  She prodded gently with her index finger.  “Anyway, where was I?”

“You were abandoning me in the trunk.”

“Right.  It took a couple of hours or so to get to Wick and then I had to find Mac.  I went straight to the harbour area and, of course, he was at sea.  By the time he came back in because of the worsening weather, refuelled and waited for the tide to change, I was pretty sure you’d have set sail but we headed off for Orkney.”

Anne helped him to another sip of water, easing his throat a little.  “Even although you thought I had snuffed it in a posh trunk?”

“There was always Henry – and anyone else we could find.”

Hubert squeezed her hand.  “Henry will be mortified you risked your life for him.”

“Oh, for God’s sake don’t tell him.  It’s bad enough
your
knowing.”

“All right, I won’t, but I just don’t see the point of being rescued if I can’t embarrass you now and again.”

Anne gave him her up-and-down look and went on with her story.  “It has to have been the worst voyage I’ve ever taken in my life.  I mean, the boat is designed for deep-sea, rough weather like you get in these parts – it isn’t called Cape Wrath for nothing, you know – but I was so sick I can’t tell you.  When we got to the site, there was nothing to be seen but bodies and a bit of wreckage.  And it was so dark.  I was expecting it to be daylight until about eleven but the storm and spray made it hard to see anything.  What
really
stood out was that there was
no-one
else around.  We saw no other ships trying to find survivors.  I’d have laid good odds that the place would have been crawling with the Navy trying to find Kitchener after they’d lost him.  But – nothing.”

A thought insinuated itself into Hubert’s drowsy consciousness.  “The flag.”

“The flag?  Oh you mean ‘why were we flying the Dutch flag’?”  She smiled sheepishly.  “That’s just a little conceit we use in our circles.  Flying the neutral flag of Holland is a good way to move around and not be bothered too much by inquisitive types.  The German Navy do it all the time.  Anyway, we searched for two or three hours but all we found were bodies.  We just had to leave them,” she sighed.  “But you and Henry had to be our priorities.  We’d have stopped if we’d found anyone alive but we never saw a survivor in all that time.  Right at the beginning we passed one of those big rafts with about forty men on board – all dead.  I jumped into it to look at them in case …”

Hubert cradled her head on his chest as she sobbed for a moment and then shook herself upright.

“That wasted quite a bit of time,” she continued in a firmer voice.  “And I got damn wet.  I was so scared of falling overboard.  My sweater became so heavy and with that and the boots I’d have gone down like a stone.”

“Why do your fishermen wear them, then?”

“Arrans?  I think it’s so that relatives of drowned sailors can identify the bodies by the family cable patterns.”

“Comforting.”

“Ye-e-e-s.  Anyway, by the time we picked up Henry in the searchlight, I was exhausted by the cold and just hanging on for dear life.”  She looked sadly at Hubert.  “I was sure he was dead – absolutely sure – but Mac found a pulse, got him into the cabin and I dried him off while Mac carried on looking for you.  We searched for ages and that’s when I began to believe you hadn’t made it onto the
Hampshire
.  I was sure that if we found Henry, we would have found you close by.  Even worse, that … that you had never managed to make it out of that damn trunk and had gone down in the ship.  And then – and then I saw a body in the water almost at the edge of the light.  Trying to turn about in that weather was a nightmare.  You just couldn’t do it quickly but I kept the light on you all the time until we reached you.  When I saw it was really you…”  She hugged Chris, trying to hide her tears.  “I’m getting the covers wet,” she said after a moment.  “Mac helped me to pull you in and I gave you the same treatment as Henry.  We headed back for home, trying to follow the likely drift path of the rafts, but we passed only bodies or rafts with dead men aboard.”

“So where
is
‘home’?”

“Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know.  You’re in Mac’s house in Wick.  It’s only a little thing with one bedroom.  He made me take that since we could hardly fit you and Henry in a single bed and it would probably be better for the two of you to be together after all you’ve been through.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting your ‘Mac’.  Henry and I owe him our worthless lives – you, too – and I’m looking forward to spending the rest of my life paying you back.”

Kissing him for the first time, Anne cradled Hubert in her arms.

“You realise, of course, that I wasn’t referring to Mac in that last part?” he wheezed.

The sound of crockery crashing disastrously to the floor made Anne jump from her laughter.  “Mac! What the hell are you doing in there?  Mac?”  She stood up to go and see what MacDonald had done and instantly froze as the silhouette of a man appeared in the doorway of the kitchen.

“God bless all here!” he said, quietly.

“Who the hell are you?” said Hubert, feebly trying to rise.

“You lie where you are, son.  You’ve been through some interestin’ times by the look of it – you, too darlin’.  Just sit back down there with your patient.  I’ve no orders for anyone else other than the ‘ould fellah’ here, unless they get in my way.”  A silenced Mauser appeared from behind his back as he walked slowly into the middle of the room towards Henry’s unconscious body.

“What have you done with Mac?” she trembled.

Gallagher cocked his head in the direction of the kitchen.  “The pullover in the kitchen?  Not to worry, love, he’s just takin’ a wee nap.”

“So, you’re Gallagher?” said Hubert

Gallagher looked up from gazing at Henry and smiled at Hubert.  “That’s it, son.  D’you know, I spent every waking minute after Easter Monday planning that operation at Broome and then – when I kill him – you lot bugger it all up for me.”  He wagged the gun at Anne and Chris, “Have you any
idea
how much trouble I got into when I got home?  They
court martialled
me!  I’m sentenced to death if I don’t bump your actor off.”  He turned to look at Henry again.  “Doesn’t look so much like Kitchener without the moustache.”

Anne stood up, slowly, arms raised pleadingly.  “Wait – just wait.  Listen to me – he’s not an actor.  Not in that sense.  He’s a
doctor
who just happened to look a bit like him and was willing to help keep the secret a bit longer.  It was never the plan for him to replace Kitchener.  He’s been through so much and all he wants to do is to go back to being a doctor.  That’s all – just to go back and save lives.”

Gallagher shook his head firmly.  “Sorry, darlin’, my orders were to kill your double as publicly as possible so that there’d be no chance of anyone trying it again.  Well, the public bit’s out with him lying there like a log but what’s to stop the British Government wheeling ‘Kitchener’ back out of convalescence when they cock something else up – ‘oh, he’s been on secret work in the Orient, don’cha know’?” he mocked.  “No, he’s got to die here and then you can find yourselves another double if you want.  It won’t be my problem.”

Anne took a step forward as Gallagher pointed the gun at Henry’s head.  “Please!” she screamed.

He snarled at her, baring his teeth like a dog.  “Sit down!  Sit!”

Anne covered her face as Gallagher tightened his grip on the trigger and the sound of the double shot brought her, crying, to her knees. For a few moments Hubert pawed weakly at her back but nothing seemed to reach her senses.  “Anne!  Anne!”

Slowly, as though she was emerging from a winter of sleep, she raised her head from the floor and looked disbelievingly at Gallagher’s body lying prone a few feet away from her.  Blood was pooling from beneath his chest.