Dead Man's Land (16 page)

The sentry stepped across, blocking the doorway and putting himself in harm’s way to cover the colonel. He was rewarded with a round in his chest, which imploded into a grisly crater. As the sentry went down, Watson grabbed Churchill by the arm and hurled him back inside the hallway, yelling over his shoulder for Mrs Gregson to follow them in.

As she dropped the handle and sprinted, a salvo from a battery of Minenwerfer landed in the trees and backtracked towards the steeple, the noise building with each fall, until it was like a continuous series of hammer blows.

The concussion from a Minnie shell the size of a railway carriage snatched at Mrs Gregson and hurled her across the threshold into Watson’s arms. They collapsed into a heap in the hallway.

Watson was back on his feet when two things happened: firstly the Crossley was picked up and flung against the front of Somerset House, the bodywork twisting and crumpling as it shattered windows and stonework, and one of the rounds took out the brickwork at the base of the steeple of Le Gheer. Despite the flying shrapnel and splinters, Watson stood at the side of the doorway, transfixed, and watched the tower totter like a drunkard before it fell, poleaxed, into the surrounding wood, with a ground-shaking boom that, just momentarily, blotted out the kettle-drum roll of enemy shellfire.

Sergeant Shipobottom’s skin was contracting. He could feel it tightening all over his body. It was as if his entire epidermis was shrinking, like over-boiled cotton.

He managed to roll over onto his side and look around the transfusion ward. There was one other patient, a driver, they had said, but he was busy talking gobbledegook in his sleep. There was no nurse.

His skin was itching now, little islands of intense irritation, popping up over his neck and torso. He began to scratch and as he did so his fingers started to burn. He could feel something within them constricting, causing the fingers to bend. He held them up in front of his one good eye. His hands were becoming claws, like that old woman in Cairo who had told him . . .

A scream tried to escape his throat, a cry for help, but it wouldn’t form. His throat was tightening too. It sounded more like a gargle than a shout. It was coming true, her prophecy was coming true.

A wave of sweaty panic broke over him and he tried to swing out of the bed. But the itching started again, so intense it was as if he were being branded with a thousand tiny irons.

He slumped back on the bed and the pain subsided for a moment. He breathed as deeply as he could.
You might feel warm
, they had said after his infusion.
Warm?
Friggin’ agony this were.

Then he heard it. A low whistle, picking out an old folk tune, the sort they played on fair days. He managed to pull himself up in the bed, but he couldn’t see clearly thanks to the moisture filling his eye. He could just make out that there was a third person on the ward, cloaked in shadow, standing by the central tent pole.

Then, some words to match the tune came.

This the story of two sisters, sisters

good and true,

They worked the reels in Lancashire

and only wanted their due.

More whistling.

‘Who’s tha?’ Shipobottom managed to croak. ‘Who’s tha’?’

There came a low, soft laugh. The only answer was another verse.

They asked for men and women to be treated the same,

to be treated all alike,

And if that was not to be, they promised a bitter strike.

Well, you won’t strike, you cannot strike, you will not strike, said the boss,

For the Lord will hear of it, it’ll surely be your loss.

Oh, we can strike, we will strike,

we are ready to fight.

And you can tell the Lord,

his mill will close tonight.

‘Think on that,’ the shadowy figure said.

‘On wha’?’ Shipobottom pleaded in a voice that wasn’t his own. ‘Wha’ y’on about?’

‘Think on Trolley Wood.’

Shipobottom slumped back. He sensed the singer of the song was leaving. Trolley Wood?

A small copse, close to Blackstone Mill, a ring of oak, hornbeam and birch encircling a lovely glade, rich with bluebells in spring, a prime picnic spot and . . .

The implication of that place name had just hit home when his agony moved to a new phase. Like steel cables being wound by a winch, the tendons and ligaments in his face and neck began to shorten. He felt muscles bulging and his features being distorted. Trolley Wood? Is that what this is all about?

Again Shipobottom tried to cry out, but to no avail. The mechanics of his face had been hijacked. The lips were being pulled back and up, the jaw down and, slowly but surely, his dying body was producing a terrible, unnaturally hideous grin.

The blitz from the German guns lasted for fifty minutes in all, although to those beneath the falling shells it felt far longer. Incredibly, the main building of Somerset House suffered no more than a glancing blow and a motor car being flung into its edifice. But ancillary buildings and tents had been hit, and the nearest communication and relief trenches badly damaged. Many vehicles and a number of horses were out of the war for good.

It was fortunate indeed, as he would later remark, that Watson had brought his Gladstone, which contained one of the John Bell & Croyden ‘Colonial & Overseas’ emergency medical kits. It gave him the bare essentials to treat the injured; anything else would have to be improvised.

They used one of Somerset House’s subterranean kitchens as a makeshift field-dressing station. A sturdy cherrywood table, assiduously scrubbed with blocks of lye and lard soap by an admirably unshaken Mrs Gregson, acted as an operating surface, while less serious cases were sat in wicker chairs to have their facial wounds tended. Mrs Gregson had found a laundered smock, skirt, petticoats and apron in the laundry press of the great house. She had shed her motorcycling clothes – Watson had left the room, even though she had assured him that the combination chemise and drawers with long wide legs that she wore under the Dunhill left everything to the imagination – and donned the servant’s clothing, even though, as she was at pains to point out, they had once belonged to a very large servant indeed.

With the electricity supply gone, and no windows to let in daylight, they worked by oil lamp and candles. Most of the injuries they saw were from shrapnel or flying glass. A few men, caught in the open, had been killed. Several had been reduced to ‘wet dust’ – a smog-like mist of blood and brains and muscle, the remnants of a pulverized body, that filled the air for a short time before falling to earth. There would be nothing of those unfortunates left to bury.

Of the survivors, the more heavily wounded were shipped off to the nearby CCS, having been assessed by Watson and tagged using the cache of gummed labels Mrs Gregson had found in the pickling room.

Phipps had been one of the last patients, who came to have a gashed hand – inflicted during the clear-up – treated and he explained that during the night German sappers, under a cloak of absolute secrecy, had laid a branch rail line to enable them to bring up several large guns and some large-calibre Minenwerfen on flatbed trucks. The British had been able to return fire eventually and had caused them to withdraw. The British guns were expected to saturate the area around the new rail lines soon, ensuring there would be no repeat for the time being. Phipps then invited both Watson and Mrs Gregson to join him for dinner in the mess, as there would be no transport available to their CCS until either late that night or early the following morning.

When the final casualty had been dealt with – a young man with a smashed face, burst eardrums and the clothes blown off his back – Mrs Gregson put the copper kettle on the range to boil once more and indicated Watson should sit down.

‘I need to look at that eye of yours,’ she said.

He was aware that it had been stinging, but when he took a look in the medical kit’s pocket mirror, he could see it was red and angry. ‘Dust from the sniper round,’ he said matter-of-factly.

‘What sniper round?’

He explained his suspicion that an attempt had been made on the life of Churchill or himself or both moments before the first shells had fallen. Or possibly at exactly the same time. One bullet had hit the wall; the other had exploded in the chest of the poor sentry.

She poured out some of the boiling water and let it stand. Her brow furrowed. ‘I don’t know much about guns. Although I know what they do to the human body. But to fire to here from the enemy lines, is that quite some feat?’

Watson recalled what he knew about sniping from studying the career of Sebastian Moran, the big game hunter and would-be assassin of Sherlock Holmes. ‘A good rifle is accurate to six hundred yards. Perhaps eight in the hands of an expert with telescopic sights. That is far exceeded by the distance to even the first of the German trenches. In solving a problem of this sort, one needs to be able to reason backward. I can only conclude the weapon was fired from our side of the lines.’

‘A traitor?’

‘An infiltrator. And if I am not mistaken, one who was secreted atop of the church steeple we saw fall. I watched it go down, in the hope I would see such a figure, but no.’

‘How . . . that’s impossible. For a German to walk through our trenches undetected.’

‘Unlikely,’ he conceded. ‘But not impossible.’

‘Head back, please.’

Using a syringe and the cooled, sterilized water she began to irrigate the eye. She held her fingers lightly under his chin, gently guiding his head this way and that. He found himself enjoying the sensation.

‘Major, I would like to apologize for being so rude about your friend.’

‘You are not the first to take him wrong.’

‘I am not apologizing for the sentiments. Keep still. I swear, doctors are the worst patients of all. I stand by those.’

‘You are being unfair. Let me see, what are the charges? Vainglorious? Yes, he has a healthy regard for his talents. I myself wrote on several occasions that I sometimes found his egotism repellent. But he rarely pursued cases for financial reward or glory. Drug-addled? Only if there is nothing to engage his intellect and his attempts to unravel the mysteries of the hive have kept his mind busy of late, I believe. Smug, I think you said? He is pleased when he is right, and he is right more often than not. And . . .’

‘Woman hating.’

Watson hesitated at that one. In fact, all the charges had a tiny element of truth. But ‘hate’ was far too active an emotion to be accurate. ‘Indifferent’ might suffice. ‘Well, it is true he does not dwell on the fairer sex overmuch. And never will. But there was one woman . . . perhaps two.’ Watson had harboured high hopes for Miss Violet Hunter, the governess of Copper Beeches, whom Holmes had once seemed rather taken with, but that had come to naught. Once the case was over she was dismissed from his mind.

‘I am talking about the idea of suffrage. Of women’s rights. Was he not responsible for gaoling several dozen suffragettes?’

This was not a case Watson had been involved in. He recalled some of the details, however. ‘My dear Mrs Gregson, were those same women not involved in a scheme to burn down the Houses of Parliament?’

‘While they were empty,’ she objected.

‘They are never empty. There was a risk to human life. A crime was planned and was thwarted in the nick of time. The suffragette movement had moved from being a valid – yes, I’ll admit valid – movement of protest to one of terror and intimidation.’

‘Some of those women were friends of mine.’

‘Really?’ He pulled his head round to look at her. Sister Spence had been right about political VADs. ‘So it’s a dislike for personal reasons we are about talking here?’

‘Keep still, Lord above. Why do you defend him so? I mean, you will admit to no flaws.’

‘Of course I will. The flawless man does not exist. I would rather judge him by his virtues. I defend him because he is my . . .’ Say it. Friend. Except no longer could he call him that with any degree of certainty. Watson knew how ruthless he could be with those he deemed to have been disloyal. Even so, that was no reason to disown him or what they had been through together. ‘Because the world is a better place for him.’

‘All done. Blink.’

She gently mopped at his watering eye. ‘I should keep my opinions to myself, Major. I’m sorry. It’s one of my own many, many flaws.’

‘And the
Strand
is hardly a penny dreadful.’

‘Yes, yes, granted.’ She was keen to move along now. ‘Why didn’t you tell the general your suspicions about the sniper?’

‘Two reasons. I think we should wait until we are certain it is all clear out there before sending anyone to inspect the ruins. Plus, one has to hold back some subjects for conversation over dinner. It could be a very long and very dull evening otherwise.’

Mrs Gregson laughed and began clearing the instruments from the tabletop, preparing for another scrubbing down.

‘Of course we won’t get a word in edgeways if Churchill is there,’ he added. The colonel would no doubt insist on telling him the tale of
The Man Who Died Twice
. Under normal circumstances Watson’s curiosity might be aroused, but he was wary of being drawn into any scheme involving Churchill. He might be a wounded animal after Gallipoli, but he was still a politician first and foremost and a bruising bare-knuckle fighter when he needed to be. Watson’s instinct was to keep away.

Mrs Gregson splashed soapy suds onto the cherrywood surface. ‘How the dickens do you know Winston Churchill?’

Watson wondered how much to say. In 1910, the editor and pamphleteer Edward Mylius had accused the new King, in print, of being a bigamist, of having hastily married an admiral’s daughter in Malta while he was a junior naval officer. Mylius had even threatened to produce the woman.