Dead Man's Land (34 page)

‘Just me, Sister. Major Watson has been gassed.’

‘Gassed? But how? Why? By whom?’

All very good questions. None of which she could answer. ‘Can you give me a hand?’

Watson was leaning against her, his full weight pressing on her chest. Sister Spence came around the bike and took one of his arms, but as she did so he twisted and almost fell. Then he began to retch.

‘Hold on, Sister.’

Mrs Gregson crouched down and came up beneath Watson as he pitched forward, her shoulder meeting his waist. He jackknifed across her, steadied by Sister Spence.

‘There’ll be a stretcher in a minute.’

‘We might not have a minute.’ She straightened up, staggered a little and felt Sister Spence’s support. She carried him into the transfusion tent, each step wobblier than the last and pitched him onto the nearest bed.

‘Heavier than he looks,’ she said, one arm on the bedspread.

‘What kind of gas?’

‘Chlorine. He’ll need oxygen. Over there.’

For a second Mrs Gregson thought Sister Spence was going to object to being ordered around, but she gave a curt nod and went to fetch the trolley.

‘Oh my goodness!’ Miss Pippery, unable to decide who looked more shocking, Watson or her friend. ‘George, are you all right?’ Her eyes went down to Watson. ‘Is—’

‘Alice,’ Mrs Gregson said calmly, ‘his eyes need irrigating. And his mouth. It’s poison gas.’

Mrs Gregson watched approvingly as she, too, snapped into action. Other medical staff arrived, including Major Torrance, and soon Watson was being attended to by half a dozen willing hands, including Nurse Jennings.

‘How can I help?’ she asked as she entered the tent.

‘What are you doing here?’ Mrs Gregson replied.

‘I work here.’

‘Not for the past few days.’

Jennings prickled. ‘Twenty-four hours, I think you’ll find.’

‘He’s been worried sick.’

‘Who has?’

The nurse’s eyes flicked towards the bed holding Major Watson.

You have to be cleverer than that, Georgina.

‘Dr Myles,’ she said. ‘Very concerned about you.’

Jennings looked puzzled. ‘I don’t see why. Is he here?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘No. What are you talking about, Mrs Gregson? Have you been at the ether?’

‘No. Have you been at Dr Myles?’

Jennings’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. She knew better than to cross swords with this woman. The Red She-Devil was capable of anything. ‘I haven’t seen anything of Dr Myles since I left the CCS.’

‘My apologies, I . . . a misunderstanding.’

Watson began to retch again. Jennings pulled off his oxygen mask. ‘We’ll need another oxygen cylinder. This one is nearly empty. Shall I organize one?’

‘If you would,’ said Mrs Gregson, unsure why everyone was suddenly doing her bidding.

After Jennings had departed to find an orderly, Mrs Gregson walked over to where they had slung Watson’s tunic, reached into the pocket and brought out his magnifying glass. In the dim light she read the inscription on the handle. It was so tiny, she almost needed a second glass to decipher it.

To my all-seeing eye, my steadfast companion and my infallible conscience, with my eternal gratitude, S.H.

She backed slowly out of the tent. For the moment those tending to Dr Watson didn’t notice. Only Alice looked up and a quick shake of the head warned her not to draw attention to the exit. If Mrs Gregson stayed, someone would start quizzing her about what had happened at the farm. She didn’t have enough answers yet. She had to go and fetch de Griffon, bring him back for a check-up. And, now Watson was incapacitated, she had to carry on his work. Mrs Gregson slipped the magnifying glass into her pocket, feeling as if a baton had been passed on.

Watson knew that he had been sedated, but there was little he could do about it. The chemicals had him. He had tried to break out from the stupor, but he felt like a diver trying to rise from the deep, only to find that someone had placed a translucent but impenetrable sheet just beneath the surface of the water. He could make out what was going on – vaguely – but was unable to join in because of this glass ceiling. The effort so exhausted him, he eventually floated back down into the dark depths. At some point he became aware of various people standing over him and struggled to put a name to the rippling features. Sister Spence. Torrance. Mrs Gregson. De Griffon, too. Miss Pippery. Another face joined the throng that he almost recognized, but he couldn’t quite place.

Words drifted through the barrier as well.
De Griffon
, he heard.
Lord Lockie
. That poor animal.
Gas
. On the mention of this he felt his throat close again and he struggled to breathe.

He remembered being on his face in the stall, having fallen to the floor. The stench and attack of the gas was overwhelming. He had held his breath for as long as possible. He had pressed his nose to the floor, pushed through the straw and almost gagged on the smell of urine.

Urine. Ammonia.

In between the stalls were gullies full of the stuff, from both horse and man, great pools of it. He had forsaken all pretence at dignity and soaked his handkerchief in Lord Lockie’s still warm fluids, and placed the cloth over his face, even his eyes. It was disgusting in a different way from the gas, but as far as he knew, nobody ever died from exposure to horse piss.

It had been, at best, a temporary measure and he had no idea how long he had lain there before he had heard the motor bike and the gunshots. When de Griffon had opened the door Watson had herded out the poor, suffering horse ahead of him, as grateful thanks for saving him. Too late for the poor beast, though.

There was one question he needed answering above all others. One he wanted to burst back into real life for. One he had asked Mrs Gregson before his collapse at the CCS, but apparently she had no more of a clue than he.

Who had been under the gas mask?

A delirium took hold. Above the waves that swamped him he could see Staff Nurse Jennings. And Caspar Myles? No, he was nowhere to be seen. Just Staff Nurse Jennings leaning in, her face lit by the smile that reminded him of Mary . . . or was it Emily? No, Mary. The smile playing across her face, so soothing. She said something, but the words came out slow and fat and then floated off, like balloons.

He tried to reply, but he could tell by the vibrations along his own jawbones that the words were ill formed and clumsy. He tried to warn her, about throwing her life away on Caspar, about dishonouring herself.

But where was honour now? The morals he had lived by as a grown man, the rules that had been his waymarks in a journey across three monarchs, had all been blasted apart like the ground of Flanders.

He dreaded to think what fate awaited England after the war
. A cleaner, better, stronger land
. Did anyone still believe that? It was just one of the stories, the fairy tales we have told ourselves.

Your Country Needs You. It’ll All Be Over by Christmas. God Is on Our Side. The Germans Bayonet Babies and Rape Nuns. The Sun Will Never Set on the British Empire. There Is a Corner of a Foreign Field That Is Forever England. It’s a Long Way To Tipperary.

No, hold on, that last one was true. He tried to laugh, but couldn’t. Did I tell you, Staff Nurse Jennings, that we are friends again? No? Well, I think we are. Holmes, I’m talking about. We’d been through too much to throw it all away on a spat.

It was a peculiar way to get in touch, but it was perhaps the single most cheering message he had ever received. What would he make of the reply? Would he realize it, too, was a coded message? No great outpourings, just the snippets of a puzzle. It said one thing: forget that silly disagreement. This is business as usual
. What do you make of this, Holmes?

The game’s . . . no, the game has changed, transmuted, evolved. Everything had. He just hoped his old friend hadn’t.

Rain billowed across the graveyard, rippling like sheets of chain mail, making the rows of wooden crosses seem even more baleful than usual. The light was fading now, and the two people standing at the graveside were shivering, although not all of that was due to the plummeting temperature and the rain seeping into their greatcoats.

An ambulance was parked nearby, as close as they could get to the grave. It contained the coffin of Sergeant Geoffrey Shipobottom, awaiting interment. But first, there was another coffin to examine.

‘You are sure about this?’ asked Brindle, a globule of rain hanging expectantly on the end of his nose, his long face a picture of misery. ‘It’s rather a lot of laws to break in one day.’

Mrs Gregson looked around the Bailleul cemetery. There was hardly another soul in sight. This section of the burial grounds was full; it had burst its boundaries. New burials were happening in adjacent plots. A few solitary figures walked between the rows some hundreds of yards away, searching for a name or number. Relatives, probably, or comrades. They paid the pair no heed, being locked in another time and place.

‘Just count yourself lucky,’ she said, ‘that they don’t do mass graves here.’ She pointed to the name on the cross. Edward Walter Hornby. ‘And it’s one man, one plot.’

The cover story for their spot of exhuming had been clever, Brindle had to admit. Mrs Gregson had told the gatekeepers that she had permission to bury Terence Hornby with his brother Edward. She even had documents saying as much. But there was no Terence Hornby. Shipobottom was playing that role. She had promised Brindle that she had written to Shipobottom’s parents with the plot number and location on it. She was adamant that any subterfuge would be undone. The driver had chosen to believe her.

‘Well,’ said Brindle in his best plummy tones. ‘I suppose we’d best get to it.’

Mrs Gregson hesitated. The confidence she had felt the previous day had evaporated overnight. She had forced herself to go through with this, to recruit Brindle, to convince him to meet her with the ambulance and the body and to start digging. It was, she had said, a matter of life and death. But at this particular moment, it felt more about death than life. That was a real body down there.

Mrs Gregson made a tentative stab with the blade of her shovel and was surprised when it slid into the soil. She looked up at Brindle.

‘Still loose from the burial, I would imagine.’ He put his own spade into the plot and lifted a dome of dark earth. Then a thought struck him. ‘Is it true the hair and nails still grow after death?’

Mrs Gregson didn’t know for sure. ‘I don’t think so. No. Unlikely.’ She carried on excavating. ‘You’ve seen enough bodies, surely?’

‘Fresh meat, mostly,’ he said. ‘And a lot of skeletons. We did do some work with bodies at St Martins, but they’d been embalmed. Death studies, as opposed to life studies.’

‘How peculiar.’

‘It made some sense. You didn’t have to pay the cadavers by the hour.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘They were like wax, shiny and unnatural. What will he look like when we open the coffin? Hornby?’

‘I have no idea.’ She leaned on the spade. ‘Not at his best, I suspect. But he’s probably past caring.’

Brindle laughed.

‘What’s funny?’ she asked.

‘You are.’

‘How do you mean?’

But he just shook his head and then bent to the digging. Mrs Gregson copied his rhythm and was soon sweating under the layers of heavy clothes she was wearing. The rain meant her hair began to stick to her forehead and cheeks, so she had to keep blowing or brushing it out of the way. Soon her face was filthy.

‘There’s another thing we haven’t thought of, Mrs Gregson,’ said Brindle when they were down about two feet.

‘What’s that?’ she gasped, glad of the chance to rest.

‘He was a big boy, that Shipobottom. It took four of us to get him into the ambulance. There’s just you and me. It’s going to be a struggle to get him in this grave.’

She looked over at the vehicle. It suddenly seemed a long way away. ‘You’ll think of something.’

Brindle hit a solid surface first, shallower than he had expected, certainly not six feet deep. So digging up Shipobottom again wasn’t going to be a problem. He would be close to the surface.

As dusk approached, they redoubled their efforts, shifting earth at a healthy lick. Soon enough, they had exposed the simple square wooden coffin. Nothing fancy, she thought.

Brindle passed her a screwdriver. ‘Me?’ she asked. ‘You want me to do it?’

‘I’ll hold the flashlight.’

‘How gentlemanly of you.’

The lid eased off after three digs and twists with the screwdriver. It looked as if the army were economizing in nails too. As she levered the top up, the box seemed to belch the vilest of smells. She staggered backwards, against the edge of their earthworks. Brindle let out a groan, found his handkerchief and pressed it against his nose.

Mrs Gregson waited for the attack of nausea to subside. If she was going to be sick, she’d be sick. She found her own handkerchief, ripped it in half and screwed one portion into each nostril. This wasn’t the time to worry about appearances.

‘There’s flashlights over there,’ said Brindle with some alarm. ‘Looks like a foot patrol. They must be closing up the cemetery.’

‘Don’t worry about that.’

‘Mrs Gregson, I don’t want to be in some stockade for grave robbing.’

‘We are not robbing.’

‘Molesting then.’

‘I’ll molest you with the sharp edge of this spade in a minute,’ she said. It didn’t sound as if she was joking. ‘I need a light here, Brindle.’

His whining gave her courage, and she pushed the coffin lid up, holding her breath as she felt another waft of noxious gas brush over her face.

This must be the worst time to do this, she realized. In another few weeks all the decomposition would have been completed and the flesh and organs mostly liquefied. Here, the digestion was in full swing, hence the stink.