Dead Man's Land (21 page)

A
Frontschwester
, one of the front-line nurses, strode past and he shouted for her. She looked down at the porcelain container in her hand and indicated, with a wrinkle of her pretty nose, she needed to dispose of something within it first.

He watched her go, a tall, broad-shouldered girl with, beneath her cap, corn-coloured curls. The
Feldpuffordnung
– the widely circulated, semi-official guide to setting up a field brothel – suggested that there was no need for any such facility if there was a hospital staffed with Red Cross nurses nearby. This, part of him thought, was a terrible slander. On the other hand, he had heard all the dugout tales of comely
Frontschwestern
using unconventional means to nurse a man back to health or raise morale.

The thought caused an unfamiliar movement against his leg and he shifted uneasily when the nurse returned, as if she could see through the blankets that covered him. She examined the piece of card pinned above his bed and asked: ‘How can I help, Unteroffizier Bloch?’

A thick Swabian accent, also strangely erotic. He was beginning to see how such stories about nurses’ behaviour could arise.

‘Is something funny?’

‘No, forgive me. I was just thinking . . . you remind me of my girlfriend back home. Hilde.’

‘That’s odd,’ she said solemnly.

‘What is?’

‘You must be, oh, the hundredth man today to tell me that.’ She smiled and the tops of her cheeks bulged, like tiny, rosy apples. ‘I apparently look like every Olga and Heidi and Karin and Erna—’

‘I’m sorry. I bet you do remind us soldiers of all those girls.’

‘Only because I am a woman. Any German woman would remind you boys of home. I can’t blame you. This war . . .’ the sentence tailed off. ‘And you soldiers aren’t too fussy.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘My name is Nurse,’ she said, although not in an entirely unfriendly way. ‘Now what was it you wanted?’

‘Where am I now, exactly?’

‘A château to the north of Menin. Now Field Hospital Number 19. Is that all?’

‘A mirror.’

She shook her head, as if he had asked for the moon. ‘Why on earth would you want that?’

He touched his face. ‘To see what they’ve done to me.’

‘You can’t see anything because of the dressings. And there is bruising. Swelling, too. Wait a few days. You don’t look too bad.’

‘I’d say it was an improvement.’ Hauptmann Lux, turned out as if for the Kaiser’s birthday parade in dress uniform with medals, stepped from behind her. He had a canvas bag slung over his shoulder that he placed at the foot of the bed. ‘Staff Nurse? Do you mind?’

She gave a small curtsy and left. Lux stared at him for a few moments before speaking.

‘Well, Bloch, I’ve seen worse.’ He took off his gloves, leaned in and parted the sharpshooter’s lips, as if inspecting a horse. ‘I’ll have the section dentist sent over. That is one area in which we have the advantage of the enemy. They don’t bring dentists to the front. Mind you, have you seen their teeth? Probably a waste of time.’

Bloch found it hard to share in the joke. A few less dentists, a few more snipers wouldn’t go amiss, he thought.

‘Now, do you feel strong enough to report?’

Bloch thought he meant for duty, but he then realized that Lux wanted a verbal account of his action. ‘Of course, sir.’ He took a sip of water and gave a concise but detailed recap of his adventures from the moment he went out into no man’s land with the
Patrouillentrupp
until his return almost twenty-four hours later. Lux listened in silence for the most part, interrupting only when Churchill appeared and cursing when Bloch described the bombardment that firstly ruined his aim and then brought down the church tower.

‘Remarkable. I owe you an apology, Bloch.’

‘Sir?’

‘I did not know about the artillery barrage in that sector. Nobody did. Or I would not have sent you out. That is the trouble with this army. The right hand does not know what the left is doing and neither of them have a clue what the air force is up to. You know those idiots bombed one of the British casualty stations the other day? I think they thought the red crosses on the roof were target markers.’ He shook his head in despair. Such folly led to tit-for-tat raids; before they knew where they were, the Red Cross symbol would be meaningless. ‘But you did well. And the sergeant you eradicated for his uniform? That counts as half a kill. Twenty-nine and a half points. No Iron Cross, I am afraid, but perhaps some leave once you feel well enough? How does forty-eight hours sound?’

Not long enough, Bloch thought. With military rail traffic given priority it could take that to get back to Düsseldorf. ‘That’s very generous, sir.’

Perhaps he could arrange for Hilde to meet him half-way? That might be possible. He would write as soon as this stuffed shirt had gone.

‘Don’t mention it. And I have something else for you.’ He reached down into the canvas bag and brought out an object swaddled in soft cloth. He handed it over. Bloch unwrapped it. It was a telescopic sight, although the distal end was enormous, almost the size of a saucer.

‘What is it?’

‘The new Voigtländer illuminated night sight,’ Lux said with pride, as if he himself had crafted it. ‘We have permission to undertake field trials. With and without atropine as a mydriatic.’

Atropine eye drops – extracted from deadly nightshade – were used to dilate a sniper’s pupils, increasing the amount of light to reach the retinae. The disadvantage was that the user became very susceptible to glare and losing his night vision altogether. It also caused blurred vision and heart palpitations if you weren’t careful. Bloch was not an admirer.

He peered through the eyepiece and moved the sights so that the cross hairs rested squarely in the middle of his superior’s face. ‘Heavy,’ he said.

‘It’s worth it, believe you me.’

‘I’ll need a new rifle, sir.’

‘Of course. And ammunition. No more homemade efforts, Bloch. The new
Spitzgeschoss mit Stahlkern
round is armour piercing. A fresh Mauser Gewehr rifle, those bullets and the scope and I’m sure that Iron Cross will be yours any day now.’

‘I’m sorry about Churchill, sir.’

‘Ach, do not worry about that. You’ve proved a special kind of man can get behind enemy lines and back again, with the right planning. You missed him this time. There’ll be another. Eh, Bloch? We’ll get him next time.’

But Bloch didn’t answer. He was too busy looking at the damaged stranger reflected in the unforgiving glass of the telescopic sight.

‘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?’