Dead Man's Land

by Robert Ryan

  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.

  SATURDAY–MONDAY

  FIFTY-TWO

  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.

  My Dear Watson,

  I pray this finds you well. I have thought long and hard about what to say in this letter. How to express the anguish I felt, and still feel, at the manner of our parting and the anxiety every time I hear the news from France.

  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.

  FIFTY-THREE

  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.

  ‘I hope this is worth it,’ she said to herself as she flipped open the canvas sheet that covered him. There was the sound of scuttling.

  Hornby was naked under the shroud. The hands, she noticed, were still curled to claws. Despite herself, she looked at the face. The eyes had been pushed forward from the sockets. There were tiny creatures, bright red in the torch beam, running over the clouded, sightless hemispheres. The tongue, startlingly black, had been forced between the teeth. The skin had shrunk hard onto the skull. But, she noticed with relief, the skin was still intact over the upper body. A vile colour, perhaps, but intact.

  She took out the magnifying glass and began to look at the blue-grey covering of his torso, examining the throat and chest, trying to ignore the red mites and other scavengers. Three, she reminded herself. You are looking for the numeral three. A series of slashes. Something regular, artificial.

  Sure enough, the skin had split here and there, but in ragged lines. There was nothing that looked like a knife or a scalpel mark.

  ‘They’re getting closer. The guards.’ Brindle sounded frightened.

  Mrs Gregson swore vigorously, which made her feel better. ‘Just a minute. I’m rushing it as it is.’

  ‘I’m bloody rushing you,’ said Brindle. ‘They’re coming right for us.’

  She stood up, away from the coffin, and took in a lungful of relatively sweet air then, as if about to dive for pearls at some great depth, plunged in again. She waved her arms to direct the beam that Brindle controlled. The rain was hissing on Hornby’s taut skin and she risked brushing away the film of surface water. A piece of Hornby’s outer flesh the size of a dinner plate came away on her fingers. She tried to shake it off, but it seemed glued tight. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  She could hear voices now. It was hopeless. So much for playing the great detective-ess.

  She scraped the pancake of skin off on the side of the coffin and replaced the lid. She stood on it, hoping that might push some of the fixings into place and then scrambled up the side of the grave.

  ‘Aye, aye. What’s going on here?’

  There were two of them, dressed in oilskins and helmets, but, judging by their ages, not front-line soldiers.

  ‘I slipped in. Sorry. Gosh, that wasn’t nice. Look, we’ve been asked by the family to make sure that these two brothers are buried together. As a personal favour. And, well . . .’ She wiped the rain off her face.

  ‘You can’t just come here and do your own digging,’ one of them said.

  ‘No. I can see that now.’ She reached into her coat pocket and brought out a flask. ‘I need a drink after that tumble. Anyone? Filthy night ahead by the look of it.’

  The two newcomers shrugged in unison. She moved round the hole in the ground and handed them the rum. She had intended it as a gift for Brindle, a thank you for joining her, but needs must, she supposed.

  As they drank she took the flashlight off the driver and waved it at the ambulance. ‘The thing is, we’d be awfully grateful if you could help us get the coffin in here.’ She swung the flashlight down into Hornby’s grave. She heard Brindle give a little gasp. Her efforts to reseal the coffin had dislodged some of the clumps of soil that had clung to it. There, in the beam of light, as clear as if they had been recently scored, were three deep single grooves in the lid, capped and underscored by lighter strokes. The Roman numeral for three.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  ‘This Mrs Gregson is an interesting one,’ the old man said, handing an old copy of the Pall Mall Gazette to Bert. ‘Have a read. Then do you think you could snip that out and put it on our wall?’

  The space above the fireplace now reminded Bert of a spider’s web, an intricate pattern of threads spiralling out from the centre. Or dual
centres, he should say. And the spider, he had to admit, looked to be intoxicated, as wobbly as his father on Christmas Day. But even though it looked to be a confusing jumble, Mr Holmes, as he called him, seemed to hold every piece of information in his head, too.

  Having spent the day on his plank, the former detective was spending an evening on the sofa, although propped up ramrod straight by cushions. They had enjoyed a dinner of bangers and mash cooked by ‘the girl’, who was far from being as young as that name suggested, Bert thought. Now, they were talking over the case. Thrillingly, he was treated as an adult in these sessions, with no subject – sex or war or politics – out of bounds. Bert did occasionally offer opinions and sometimes his employer reacted as if he were surprised Bert was in the room. Or could speak at all.

  But at times like this, when his opinion was sought, he relished the fact that his mother had allowed him to come and assist. Although her permission was granted only after she had insisted on scrubbing the place to her standards (she clearly didn’t think much of ‘the girl’), blacking the front doorstep and putting fresh sheets on the narrow bed shoehorned into the boxroom. Before his first overnight visit she had taken Bert aside and said: ‘Even if he is a bit funny, he isn’t likely to cause you too much trouble with that back of is, is he?’

  ‘Well?’ he asked when Bert had finished and was neatly clipping the piece with the long-bladed scissors that Mr Holmes had designated for the task.

  ‘It is obvious she has criminal tendencies from this article,’ said Bert, using a term he had heard the old man use. ‘And is quite ruthless. And political. So could she be the murderer?’

  ‘We can’t rule anyone out at this stage. Watson has given me the dramatis personae, but little in the way of stage directions.’ He pointed at the centre of his web. ‘I think the answer lies in one or both of those places.’ There were two names written at the heart of the construction on the wall. One was ‘Leigh’ and the other was ‘Flitcham’.