The Dead Can Wait

by Robert Ryan

  Bradley Ross and Nora Pillbody sat in her garden, shadows lengthening around them. On the face of it, they were taking tea, their conversation low and polite. In reality, they were plotting their next move as a newly formed confederacy of German spies.

  ‘Has Booth been around?’

  ‘Briefly, this morning,’ said Miss Pillbody. ‘He was distracted. I sense some sort of emergency.’

  ‘Caused by us?’ Ross asked. He was looking at Miss Pillbody in a new light. Before that night in the woods, the thought of the sexual conquest of Miss Pillbody had been detached, academic. Now, though, he felt genuine excitement about the thought of taking her. He could see that the schoolteacher had been a cleverly constructed mask, a layer of thick paint, like a kabuki performance. Now he could detect the cracks, the little betrayals of her cover that he hadn’t noticed before. But, then again, he hadn’t imagined her pulling the pins from hand grenades and blowing men’s heads off before.

  ‘Are we the emergency?’ he repeated.

  ‘I doubt it. The Zeppelin raid, perhaps. They’ll be worried that Elveden was the target, don’t you think? I doubt our little pantomime will be discovered.’

  ‘Tell me, Miss Pillbody, do you always carry Mills bombs with you?’ he asked.

  Miss Pillbody took a dainty sip of her tea. ‘Never when I teach school, no,’ she said, deadpan. ‘At other times, it is an excellent way to confuse any pursuers. You should try them. Lieutenant Booth says, if he can get away he wants me to go picnicking with him tomorrow. He made it clear he would prefer it if you didn’t come along this time.’

  ‘He’s circling the prey, is he?’

  Miss Pillbody raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh, I don’t think the roles of prey and predator have been fully assigned yet. Do you?’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘We are going about this the wrong way. Sneaking around in that estate, trying to snatch a guard, it is far too risky. And who is to say that if we got one, he would understand what they are doing? A mere guard?’

  Ross nodded. ‘Good point.’

  ‘But Booth certainly knows what is going on,’ she said. ‘As any intelligence officer would.’

  ‘True.’ Then he understood. He almost felt sorry for Booth. ‘You are hoping for some pillow talk?’

  She wrinkled her nose at the thought. ‘Not at all. When Booth comes here tomorrow, I want you waiting for him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And we’ll go with your original plan. We’ll torture the truth out of him.’ She waited while this sank in. ‘More tea?’

  Claude Levass led Watson away from the echoing voices and the sponson-less tank that he had observed.

  ‘Really, Major, you should not be prying. I saw you swerve off the path earlier and I thought, what is he up to now? Those men can tell you nothing. If you listened to anything they said, you would know that.’

  ‘But the voices,’ protested Watson. ‘Those disembodied voices – they come from that tank, yet they seem to echo through the forest.’

  Levass helped him negotiate the gully once more. ‘I should have explained. The tanks without the sponsons on, the open-sided ones we train in? They have a very strange acoustic property. The voice is projected, thrown hundreds of yards away, like some variety trick. The crews use them to smoke in sometimes and their voices drift through the trees. Between you and me, Major, that’s how Swinton and the others found out the men were planning on cracking open the hatches during trials – even a whisper can carry for hundreds of yards. The men, they spy on themselves!’

  Watson nodded. ‘That explains it.’

  ‘Explains what?’

  ‘The voices I could hear at the lodge. They seemed to be outside my window. It was unsettling.’

  ‘You get used to it. Why didn’t you ask me? You didn’t think it was part of our work here, did you?’ Watson said nothing, feeling slightly foolish. His imagination had run away with him a little. ‘It is just a by-product as we say in industry. My car is just through here,’ Levass said, indicating a snaking path through to the right. ‘I sent the driver back, so you will have to take your life in your hands with my driving.’

  On the short trip to the Hall, in which Levass handled the motor with a ready ease, they came across Major Thwaites, cantering along a bridle path through the trees. Levass stopped the car to let him pass and the major touched his brim in thanks.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ the Frenchman shouted after him.

  ‘Thetford. Errands.’

  ‘Give her my regards,’ called Levass.

  Thwaites simply shook his head and spurred his mount on.

  ‘There goes history,’ said Levass.

  ‘Thwaites?’ The man was younger than Levass.

  ‘The horse.’ He turned to face Watson. ‘Sixteen years ago, the streets of Paris belonged to the horse. London, too. And now? Motor car, motor bus, motor lorry. The cavalry charge has already been made obsolete by the machine gun. In fact, some units of the Royal Horse Guards, Thwaites’s regiments, are being retrained as machine-gun battalions. The writing is on the wall. The tank will finish the job. The cavalry will be no more.’

  ‘Do you think that is a good thing?’

  ‘Times change. Several generations ago my people were pirates, yes, pirates. Well, what you politely called privateers. Then, within fifty years, we are respectable businessmen. We must move with the seasons. You can’t stay pirates for ever.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s a shame,’ said Watson. ‘About the cavalry.’

  ‘You think so?’

  It was Watson’s turn to shrug. ‘I am an old man. I don’t like change.’

  Levass gave a laugh, head thrown back, showing his teeth. ‘Not so old, I think, Major Watson, eh? What is the expression, there’s life in the old dog yet?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Watson said, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘While you were in Genevieve I came back for the water and I spoke to Mrs Gregson, just seeing how Hitchcock was coming along. I think you have an admirer there.’

  ‘Hitchcock?’

  Levass frowned, not sure that Watson was being deliberately obtuse. ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Mrs Gregson? Not in the sense you mean, Colonel.' Watson insisted. ‘Though we have been through a lot together.’

  ‘I would imagine.’

  Watson didn’t reply, simply let Levass drive him the last few hundred yards in silence. He knew it would be impossible to convince a Frenchman of the platonic nature of their relationship.

  As he climbed out of the car, they both caught the strains of a piano, being played with some proficiency. Watson cocked an ear to catch the tune, but Levass beat him to it.

  ‘Debussy,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Arabesque Number One. Someone with good taste among you English.’

  ‘It’s Hitchcock, I suspect,’ said Watson. ‘How was he when you saw him?’

  ‘Catatonic. Mrs Gregson was reading to him. Jerome K. Jerome, I think.’

  ‘If that’s him playing . . .’

  ‘She will have worked wonders. I shall come in with you, if I may.’

  They found him at the piano, swaying, playing the theme with his eyes closed, rapt. Mrs Gregson was seated by one of the sugar-twist pillars, book in hand, reading by the light of a candle. ‘It’s a good thing I like Debussy,’ she said. ‘This is the twentieth time of this one. He did thirty “Für Elise”.’

  ‘What happened, Mrs Gregson? What triggered it?’

  She shook her head. ‘I did as I was told. I was speaking to him and suddenly he began playing, dreadfully at first, but slowly getting better and better, as if he were remembering the keyboard.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Watson. He crossed over, leaned close and whispered in Hitchcock’s ear, but he gave no sign of having heard.

  ‘Is this a breakthrough?’ asked Levass.

  ‘I hope so,’ said Watson. ‘Has he said anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Eaten?’

  ‘Some bread and che
ese.’

  ‘I think we should get him back to his room. He must be getting tired.’

  ‘I shall speak to you tomorrow, Major,’ said Levass, ‘when we know how the repairs are coming along. Good evening, Mrs Gregson.’ He gave a small bow.

  Watson listened for a little longer then tapped Hitchcock on the shoulder. ‘Lieutenant, I think that is enough for today. We can play again tomorrow.’

  A pause, a breath, and then the piece began over again.

  ‘Lieutenant. Listen, I’ve been inside the tank. Where it happened. I’m going to repair her. Then run her. I am going to find out exactly what happened in Genevieve.’

  The fingers froze, Hitchcock’s head snapped round, his eyes widened with horror. The scream must have been heard all the way to Thetford. Then he began to bang the piano, manically, his fingers jabbing at the keys in a senseless staccato.

  Mrs Gregson came over to assist Watson, but he held up his hand. ‘No, wait.’

  Like a clockwork toy, Hitchcock was running out of energy, the rhythm slowing, until his hands drooped at his sides and he let his forehead rest on the keys with a final, discordant coda.

  They were able to lift him to his feet and walk him back to his temporary prison. Once inside, he took three paces to his chair, sat down, placed his palms on the table then let out a long sigh, as if glad to be home. Silent tears ran down his face.

  Mrs Gregson promised to bring him supper and read to him. The room was, as always, a few degrees cooler than outside, so she put the paraffin heater on low, just to take off the chill and they left, bolting the door on the outside, although Watson doubted Lieutenant Hitchcock would be much trouble.

  ‘I need some air,’ said Mrs Gregson. ‘Will you take a turn around the walled gardens with me, Major Watson?’

  ‘Gladly, Mrs Gregson.’

  There were actually two walled gardens, connected by arches, the second flint-walled one added to the redbrick original as the household grew in the nineteenth century. Each was filled with neat rows of vegetables, well tended in contrast to the somewhat neglected formal gardens, which suffered from the lack of manpower (due to the exile, under DORA, of even the elderly gardeners, Watson assumed). The walls themselves were draped with trained, ornamental fruit trees and patches of decorative clematis.

  Above the walls he could see stables and the estate’s flint church, unremarkable except for the fact it had twin towers.

  ‘Was the day productive?’ she asked Watson.

  ‘Not as productive as yours.’

  She prodded him with a finger. ‘Don’t tease me, Major. All I did was get bored with Debussy. Did you really find something in the tank this time?’

  He nodded. ‘Actually, it’s what I didn’t find.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Just a theory at the moment, but there was something missing inside that tank. But I have solved one mystery – actually two.’

  ‘Ah, at last. What are they?’

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up.’ He explained about the sponson-less training tanks and their magnification effect on the human voice.

  ‘Intriguing.’

  ‘Yes, although the soldiers don’t seem to realize that it can be used to eavesdrop on them.’

  ‘And the other mystery?’

  ‘More relevant. I know where that mark on Hitchcock’s face comes from. It happened at the live firing practice – when potshots were taken at the tank during the trial, before disaster struck the men inside. It seems that when a bullet strikes the outside of one of those machines, a speck of paint is dislodged in the interior wall or sometimes a blob of welding material. It is hot and travelling fast and it will burn the skin.’

  ‘Have you told Swinton or any of the others?’

  ‘Not yet. But I will. I don’t think, however, that a burn to the cheek caused his condition.

  ‘Did you mean what you said? About starting up Genevieve?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather foolhardy? What if you end up like that?’ She pointed over her shoulder.

  ‘That is all part of the risk. I have experimented on myself before.’

  ‘With the blood transfusion, you mean?’ When they had been together in Belgium, in order to prove a batch of blood was not lethally contaminated, Watson had infused some into his own veins.

  ‘Yes. And no harm came to me. Not from the blood, at least.’

  ‘That was different,’ she said, watching a flight of starlings race around the sky.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You knew there was nothing wrong with that blood sample, didn’t you?’

  He grunted an acknowledgment.

  ‘You have no idea what you are dealing with here. Or do you?’

  ‘No,’ he admitted.

  ‘So, I have a suggestion.’

  ‘What’s that, Mrs Gregson?’

  ‘If you insist on doing this, I come with you.’

  Watson had opened his mouth to reply when he saw Swinton crossing the garden towards them. The colonel had a face like a storm cloud and was muttering to himself. Watson saluted and Swinton barely returned it. He was some yards past them when he changed his mind and spun on his heel.

  ‘Major,’ he said, ‘I am afraid you might not have time to complete your investigations. The orders are for the sponsons to be fitted and men trained as quickly as humanly possible. We are to ship to France on September the 1st.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather sudden?’ Watson asked.

  Swinton nodded furiously. ‘Sudden? It’s indecent. Experimental machines, and not enough of them, barely trained crews, no spares . . .’ He glared at Watson, as if this new development was his fault. ‘I detect the hand of Churchill in all this.’

  With that he carried on his almost comically fast walk and resumed his one-sided conversation.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said Watson, after he had gone, ‘is that if Churchill is so unpopular, why they allowed me in as his . . . envoy?’ Unwilling envoy, he had almost said.

  It was a rhetorical question, but Mrs Gregson replied. ‘Because Churchill set this whole process in motion with his Landships Committee. So he feels rather proprietorial towards it. Paternal, you might say. And because Churchill still controls some of the purse strings, and because Churchill could probably scupper the whole project if he so desired. You don’t cross Winston in the skullduggery game.’

  ‘As I know to my cost. You speak as if you know his mind,’ Watson said, stopping to inspect one of the apple trees. It was showing signs of neglect and needed a good prune. ‘But if he knows about things such as the deaths in Genevieve, there must be . . .’ The truth hit him. That damned ex-First Lord was up to his usual tricks. ‘He must have a spy in here, mustn’t he? Churchill must have a man within these walls.’

  ‘No, Major.’

  ‘No?’ he asked, surprised by the certainty in her voice.

  ‘Churchill doesn’t have a man in here.’ Her smile, at once mischievous and guilty, told him before she confirmed it that Mrs Gregson was Churchill’s eyes and ears at Elveden. ‘But he does have a woman.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Coyle was not a man for thinking too much. Introspection did not come naturally. Not since he had been taken under the wing of the Bureau. Now, however, he ran through the day’s events, looking for holes in his preparations. He had arranged for the landlady of the pub to do his laundry. He had stripped down his Smith & Wesson and made sure it was in perfect working order. He had written a bland letter to his mother, saying he had lost a close friend, but once he had taken care of that business he would come home for a visit. And then what?

  Now he lay on his bed upstairs at the pub, hands behind his head, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, replaying the last few years, beginning from the moment he had walked into the warehouse on Liverpool’s Dock Road and seen a corpulent little man tied to a chair, his face showing the marks of a good old-fashioned beating. The victim’s head had lolled onto his shoulder. With his
eyes swollen closed it was difficult to tell whether he was conscious or not.

  Gibson.

  Not that he knew who he was back then. Just some British spy dumb enough to be caught. It had been stupid to send him in posing as a gun dealer. But it was the early days of the SSB and the cover story had seemed sound enough – disgruntled and disgraced ex-officer of Irish descent with access to weapons from the Continent and happy for them to be used against the British. They hadn’t reckoned with the Brotherhood having ways and means of deep-checking background stories with the British Army, and Gibson’s elaborate tale had fallen apart, just as he was promising them a boatful of barely used Maxims and Mausers.

  When Coyle had walked into that dusty, echoing space, thick with the clinging smell of mace and cinnamon, there had been three fellow rebels in there. Two were brothers, the Dalys, John and Conor – both short and dark-haired with teeth that seemed to dislike their companions so much they had run in opposite directions – and the third, Eamonn ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald. The latter, taller and with striking dark looks helped along by the fine-honed ridges of his cheekbones, was the Witchfinder General of Liverpool and Belfast. His job was to sniff out spies and traitors, and if there was any doubt he always came down on the side of ‘guilty’.

  ‘Coyle, where the fuck you been?’ Fitz had shouted across the vast spice warehouse as his footsteps echoed on the stone floor. ‘Missing all the fun here, lad.’

  Fitz had a small table before him and laid out on it were various implements for stabbing, snapping and squeezing the human body. But in his hands was a blowtorch that he was busy priming. Satisfied, he put a Balkan to it and a blue flame roared from the nozzle. A curl of pungent smoke rose from the cigarette.

  ‘There we go.’ Fitz adjusted it down to a hiss.

  ‘Who is he?’ Coyle asked nonchalantly.

  ‘That’s what we are about to find out. Get him awake, boys.’

  Conor tossed a pail of water in Gibson’s face and he stirred, managing to open one eye. It widened slightly when he saw the man before him and what he had in his hand, but to his credit that was the only reaction. A few moments passed before he managed to get some words from his pillowed lips. ‘You are making a mistake.’