by Robert Ryan
Watson nodded. ‘Holmes never was the neatest of men.’ He crossed over to the fireplace and lifted a threadbare Persian slipper from a hook on the chimney breast. He sniffed deeply, the aroma of the shag tobacco within tingling his senses, then moved to the armchair and sat. ‘And he seems incapable of keeping a housekeeper these days. I’ll make us some tea in a moment.’
‘Aren’t you worried?’
‘About Holmes? Yes, of course. For several reasons. However, I suspect I know what has happened. When I said Holmes’s mind had gone, I didn’t mean completely. It’s just that he has trouble accessing the higher faculties sometimes. It’s as if his brain is stuck in neutral, and he has forgotten how to engage the gears. It started with small incidents: a moment’s forgetfulness, an inability to make a connection that, in the old days, he would have seen in an instant. The worst thing was, he became aware of it happening. That’s why he retired. That’s why he won’t get involved with any government schemes. He has a reputation. He wants to die with it intact.’
‘I can see that,’ agreed Coyle. ‘I’m sorry, it’s a bloody shame . . . but you know what happened to him, you say?’
Watson nodded. At first, the realization of Holmes’s diminishing faculties had upset him dreadfully, but somehow the war had made it seem less of a tragedy. We all wither and die. Even the world’s greatest – and only – consulting detective. Now, when he pictured Holmes, he conjured up the man who solved the problem of the Notorious Canary Trainer, the death of Cardinal Tosca, the tragedy of Woodman’s Lee and death of Captain Peter Carey. That was 1895. What a year. He could still feel the thrum of excitement as case after case came to the door of 221 Baker Street and up the stairs to 221B. Watson thought the detective at the peak of his physical and mental powers then; it was always that fine vintage, Holmes ’95, that he returned to whenever he thought of his friend.
‘When his brain is not running properly,’ Watson said, ‘he behaves oddly. He calls me up, we have a lucid conversation, then he calls me up an hour later, forgetting we have spoken. It’s most . . .’ He thought of the times recently when he had refused a call from Holmes. He felt his face redden. Could one of them have been something about this business? Could Holmes have been reaching out to an old friend and confidant, only to find himself rebuffed? Watson gave a shiver of shame. ‘. . . trying. The old Holmes was the most circumspect man alive. The Holmes we have now is a gossip. He could not keep a confidence, even if he wanted to. I suspect that Churchill or his people realized this mistake and had him removed.’
Watson was now certain it had been Holmes who had inadvertently opened his mouth about Miss Mary Culme-Seymour, the young lady the King was meant to have married in Malta in 1890 and neglected to divorce before he married Princess May. It would take only the wrong word to a sharp hack — reporters often pitched up at that very cottage unannounced to interview the legend — for the true facts to emerge.
‘You think someone tried to shut him up?’
‘Yes, I do. Churchill said those who knew too much were sent to a “safe and secure place”. I think that was the phrase. Although he didn’t specify exactly where. The North Sea, he said.’ Watson held the Persian slipper up to his nose once more. ‘The problem is, Holmes would have known too much but could no longer be trusted to keep it to himself Watson felt disloyal even voicing this, but he believed it to be the truth. ‘Or at least, that is how Churchill would see it.’
‘So, Churchill would have gone to Holmes before he came to you? Forgive me, but you were second choice in this?’
‘Certainly,’ Watson said without rancour. ‘We usually come as a package – Holmes’s mind and whatever meagre medical skills I still possess. I think once he realized Holmes would no longer be able to bring his powers to bear, Churchill hoped I could supply a spark of the former to join the latter. I am afraid he will be sorely disappointed. Time has taught me that Holmes’s abilities are not easily transferred.’
‘So you want to find out where he has been deposited?’
‘I do. And I shall agitate for his release, DORA be damned. But aren’t you charged with such matters? The incarceration of those who pose a threat to national security or some such?’
Coyle shook his head. ‘Internment? Not usually. Special Branch or military police, they’re the lads for that. I’ve not heard of anywhere in the North Sea where they are sending folk.’
Watson stroked his moustache in thought. ‘But could you find out where it is? Where he might have been taken?’
Coyle nodded. ‘Possibly. It might take some time. Harry, he’s the one . . .’ He paused, struggling with the tense. ‘He was the one who dealt with other departments, went in for office politics. Him having a proper accent, an’ all. They wouldn’t talk to the likes of me – Special Branch was once the Special Irish Branch, y’know.’
Watson nodded. It had been formed specifically to target the Fenians and their bomb plots; the country-specific name had changed when its brief was widened to all international terrorists and anarchists. ‘But you are an officer of MI5.’
‘That’s as m’be. But they’re still not keen on talking to bog-trotting micks. Their words, not mine.’
‘I’ll put the kettle on.’
But Coyle motioned for him to stay where he was. Watson frowned a silent question. Coyle mouthed the reply. ‘There’s someone outside.’
SIXTEEN
The summer evening had faded into dusk and then thickened into night, and it had grown chill and damp. Rain was in the air. Oxborrow led Ross down the narrowest of country lanes, across stiles, skirting fields, always pressed close to the hedgerow, heading south and then cutting east, towards the black stand of trees that marked the beginning of the forbidden estate.
The poacher said very little, just the occasional whispered warning. The deal was very straightforward: Oxborrow would lead Ross to the access point that would enable him to cross over into Elveden undetected. From then on, he was on his own. Oxborrow had no desire to be put through the grinder again by the goons who had caught him at his traps the last time. He hadn’t even been on their land then. Whatever they were doing in there, he said, they were welcome to it. He was just a simple poacher.
And he certainly wanted no truck with invisible men.
Ross was puzzled by that. An invisible army would, indeed, be a fine advantage. But so would getting the Germans to accept a giant wooden horse as a farewell present as the British pulled back. It was about as likely as invisible men. However, something had clearly spooked the poacher out there. When they stopped periodically, Ross cocked his head, but all he could hear was the rustle of wind through branches, the friction of restless leaves and the call of an owl. ‘What did you mean, that this is all yours?’
‘My dad’s middle name was Singh. Dark-skinned, he were. Michael Singh Oxborrow. Descended from them that had it before the Guinnesses. There’s a fair few of us from the wrong side of the blanket, to be honest, so I wouldn’t get it all. But a sizeable share, I reckon. Come on, then.’
They started off, moving in silence once more. ‘Dark here,’ muttered Oxborrow. He turned into a sunken path, the night sky reduced to a slit above their heads by walls of hawthorn and hazel. It felt like one of the trenches Ross had read so much about but, thank the Lord, had never experienced.
No matter how dangerous and underhand the life of a spy, there were worse options.
He stumbled on a stone and cursed.
‘Quiet now,’ admonished Oxborrow. ‘We’s not too far away.’
It was cold in the lane, a deep, primitive chill, as if summer had never penetrated this pathway since it was first constructed. Ross shivered as he picked his way after the villager, who seemed to have taken on a new fleetness of foot as he skipped over the slow-rotting mulch beneath their feet. Perhaps he could see in the dark or had bat-like powers. It would be handy for a man in his line of work, Ross supposed.
After five or more minutes, a fresh sound entered his consciousness. The soft burble of wat
er, the trickle of tiny tributaries, the steady drip-drip of wet undergrowth. They were near the stream that Oxborrow had spoken of. Sure enough, Oxborrow slowed and Ross all but walked into the back of him. The soil underfoot was boggy and sticky, the ground beginning to rise, and they emerged from the mud of the lane into a small clearing in a copse of beech trees, which stood like a circle of druids, arms raised in incantation. The gusting wind unsettled them and their branches swayed, as if they were imploring the sky to bring down gods. An opal thread of water pierced the heart of this ring. And something else flitted about. It wasn’t the cold of the earth making Ross shiver now. It was the voices.
They were indistinct, overlapping, braided together into a single, transitory hum. But they were male, he could tell that much. The bursts of sound came into the circle of trees from several directions, dancing between the wrinkled, saggy trunks like wood sprites, then fading again. There were moments of clarity, when a single word leaped from the mumble. ‘Stupid,’ he heard clearly. Were they talking about him? Then, a burst of laughter, rolling like a peal of bells. Then, quite clearly, as if at his shoulder, each word clearly enunciated, the accent top drawer, in contrast to the sentiment: ‘It’ll make the Hun shit themselves, mark my words—’
He spun and looked for the dark shape of Oxborrow. The man was already retracing his steps. Even in the gloom, Ross could see the paleness of his wide eyes quite clearly.
‘Hold on,’ he hissed. ‘How do you get to the estate?’
‘We’s on the edge now. You follows that stream, and it goes underground, but a man can crawl through it. You come up to where the huts are. Gotta be real quiet then.’
‘Huts?’ He hadn’t said anything about huts.
‘Tin huts, they are. Sort of half a cylinder.’
Ah. The new Nissen huts. One of his previous assignments had been to discover what was being tested at the Royal Engineers’ proving ground in County Durham. It had turned out to be prefabricated units for housing people and supplies. There was, he discovered, actually a Major Nissen. Clever, but not a war-winner. What about here, though?
‘How many people know about this lane?’ Ross whispered to Oxborrow.
The reply was so soft he had to strain to hear it. ‘Nobody. No reason to use it. Old Tom Jenkins told me about it and he’s dead.’
‘And so are you,’ Ross muttered to himself.
The razor had been modified from the standard shaving cutthroat, so that the blade flicked out from the handle, but here it locked solid. It was also fashioned to a sharp tip, rather than the gentle curve of the barber’s model. At first he thought he’d misjudged it and missed, but then he saw a dark curtain of blood emerge from the gash that ran beneath Oxborrow’s chin.
Such was the shock of the moment, it was easy for him to push the man to the ground and clamp his mouth shut while the life force pulsed out of his body. A few convulsions, a series of tremors and he was gone. He would bury him at the base of the hedgerows in the lane.
Huts. That meant soldiers. He lay still, listening for more of the phantoms’ talk, but there was none. They had departed. The only sound was the insistent buzzing of a distant aeroplane, no doubt one of the English night fighters sent over to patrol the skies for the German Zeppelins. Lying next to the dead man, he let his own body go limp for a few seconds, allowing the tension to ooze out of his muscles.
Such temporary respites were like a sip of sweet nector in his profession. German spies, indeed, spies of any nation he would imagine, could rarely let their guard down.
Getting into position in the village had meant a stressful few weeks. The tip-off that something potentially interesting to German intelligence was happening in the region had begun with a letter in Liverpool. A mother had boasted to a sister that her son had been transferred to ‘something vital to the war effort’ in Suffolk. The letter had been passed to the chief censor to recommend action against the woman and perhaps the loose-tongued son. Ross was one of two or three people in Great Britain who knew that the head of the North-West England censor office was, in fact, a German, albeit one born in Poland. That censor, Silber by name, passed on these broad hints that something very big, very important – very ‘hush-hush’– was happening at Elveden to his controller in Holland. So, Bradley Ross had been brought into the field to investigate. Bradley Ross.
He had laboured under so many names now, he sometimes forgot his own. It certainly wasn’t Bradley Ross, a name he had but recently adopted. Nor Dirk Alberts from Movietone, who, after meeting the genuine article at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, had stolen Ross’s identity as being more useful than that of a Dutchman. The Dutch in England were treated with suspicion; most had been interviewed by Special Branch or MI5, as Dirk Alberts had been, twice.
US citizens were inevitably given the benefit of the doubt and so posing as an American made it easier to cover up any slips in his persona. They were still exotic creatures to most of the British, rare specimens from a distant land. Plus, the Allies wanted all that US might and muscle on their side, fighting on the Western Front, so he found people went out of their way to be courteous.
If only they knew . . .
The chances of his being discovered were very slim. The original Ross certainly wasn’t going to complain from the bottom of a gravel pit on the outskirts of London. ‘Dirk Alberts’ had lured him there with the promise of ‘hush-hush’, as well as something altogether more unsavoury, and taken his life, in all senses.
The new ‘Bradley Ross’ was really Pieter Dagna, late of South Africa and Germany, and a man whose family had good reason to hate the British down the years. Tales of what Rimington’s Tigers, the freebooting British light cavalry, had done to his grandma and mother during the second Boer War was a cornerstone of Dagna history. No bedtime fairy stories for Pieter and Christian and little Hester – just tales of terror and horror drawn from real life.
He shook his head, flinging Dagna back into a shadowy corner of his brain. To survive in his chosen life you had to live in the moment, be who you were meant to be. A writer. American. A British supporter. Not a German spy searching for clues to something so ‘hush-hush’ that they threatened to shoot schoolmarms.
Whatever was hidden in the forests and meadows of this country estate was clearly a big prize, but he had to be careful. Not for him the firing squad in the Tower of London, which had taken the lives of Lody, Melin, Meyer, Zender and the others. All now at rest, peaceful or otherwise, in East London Cemetery. The last resting place of German spies. He was in no hurry to join them.
The sound of a low-flying plane jolted him back to the matter at hand. An aeroplane. That, he realized, was the next move. Before he went into the lions’ den, he wanted to know exactly what was in there. He would request an aerial reconnaissance, with a diversionary bombing raid on the nearby aerodrome to cover the real purpose of the incursion over England.
Perhaps he could persuade Elveden to give up its secrets without having to crawl on his belly into an enemy encampment. But even as he worked out how to get the message across to his superiors, he knew in his heart what the answer would be: ‘It’s your mission. Just do it and report back.’ After all, he was a lot cheaper and more expendable that the pilots and planes of the Imperial German Flying Corps.
Ross gave a sigh and stood, putting his back into the tiresome work of dragging Oxborrow’s body towards its final resting place. But not before he’d ransacked the pockets and retrieved the forged money he had given him.
He reached the entrance to the lane and rested, panting from the exertion. He always forgot just how heavy and awkward a corpse could be. When he returned he would come better prepared, with the right boots, clothes, weapons and camouflage. And he would be ready for the shock of those voices. He didn’t believe in invisible soldiers. But what if the British were perfecting a weapon to amplify the sound of their army? Some kind of acoustic device. That one, clear phrase came back to him: It’ll make the Hun shit themselves.
; All he had to find out now was what, exactly, those bastards had out there that would loosen bowels on the Western Front.
SEVENTEEN
Coyle put a finger to his lips and pulled the pistol from his pocket. He walked backwards, turning as he went, so that by the time he reached the front door he was facing it, gun held loosely at his side. He listened again, frowning, trying to pick up the slightest sound.
Watson saw it before Coyle did, just an indistinct shadow crossing the glass to the left of the entrance.
‘The window!’ Watson shouted.
The sound was enormous, blowing Watson deeper into the armchair and making his ears ring. One of the panes shattered, but such was the report of the Smith & Wesson, its fragments cascaded in silence.
Coyle was already out of the door with, Watson thought, reckless abandon. He pushed himself from the chair and went after him.
There were two figures sprinting through the fading daylight, the intruder followed by Coyle, up the slope from the side of the cottage, to where Holmes kept his bees. Coyle was gaining on the stranger and Watson saw him drop his pistol, letting his arms pump him on, until he was close enough to launch himself onto the back of the other man. They landed and rolled into a ball, like an eight-legged hedgehog, before Coyle jumped up and dragged the man up after him.
Except it wasn’t a man. Even from that distance Watson could see it was a boy that Coyle was half pushing and half carrying back down the incline, stopping only to scoop up his pistol.
‘I could have blown your bloody head off , ’ he was saying as he came into earshot. ‘You little fool.’
The gangly youth was windmilling his arms as he came, afraid of losing his balance as Coyle swept him along. ‘I’m sorry. I left Mr Holmes a note on the door and I saw it had gone. I thought he must have come back. I’ve been worried about him.’
Watson plucked the rain-stained note from his pocket and flipped it open. His eyes went to the signature. ‘Bert’.