The Sign of Fear

by Robert Ryan

  Watson held out his hand and Sir Gilbert took it. ‘Same time next week?’ Sir Gilbert asked. ‘Chopin.’

  ‘I’ll check my duty roster,’ said Watson. He liked Sir Gilbert’s company. He was an excellent surgeon, based at Moorfields, and a man who appreciated a comfortable silence and was not prone to mindless gossip. Watson had met him when he had been giving evidence about so-called shell shock and psychological damage to the War Injuries Compensation Board, on which Sir Gilbert served. They had continued the discussion over dinner at the Criterion, and Watson had found him a convivial companion. But Watson was in no frame of mind to be tied down by rigid social engagements. Sometimes only the work kept him sane. And he was not sure his fragile soul could take an evening of Chopin.

  ‘ONE HUNDRED PER CENT!’ The cry made Watson start and he turned just in time to see the crude missile arc over his shoulder and land in Sir Gilbert’s chest, where it exploded with a whoosh, covering both of them with a fine patina of white powder.

  Sir Gilbert, stunned by the impact, staggered back, but was saved from falling by members of the crowd.

  Watson turned to confront the assailant, who was dimly illuminated by the foyer lights of the Wigmore Hall. He was young, under thirty, with untidy hair and a look of ragged hatred on his face. He was wearing a tweedy lounge suit, dusted with some of the flour he had thrown, with a medal ribbon in the buttonhole. Watson went to reach for the man’s lapel, with a view to detaining him, but a remarkably strong blow dashed his hand away.

  ‘One hundred per cent!’ he yelled again and turned on his heels. One brave soul, an elderly gentleman of seventy or thereabouts, tried to block his path, but again the arm lashed out and the man stumbled backwards, blood oozing from an eyebrow. Nobody else attempted to apprehend the crazed assailant after that and he was able to sprint off into the darkness that was wrapping itself around the streets of London.

  Watson quickly examined the wound of the brave old man, but it was simply a split in thin skin. ‘I’d have knocked him down ten, fifteen years ago,’ he said, as Watson mopped up the blood. ‘And boxed his ears to boot.’

  ‘I think we are both too old for this malarkey, don’t you?’

  ‘What was it all about?’ the man asked. ‘Robbery?’

  It wasn’t such a foolish question as it seemed. The blackout of London had seen a surge in petty crime. Watson instinctively checked the pockets of his tunic, but his wallet, cigarette case and army pay-book were all in place.

  After delivering his patient to a doorman at the Wigmore – the venue had a first-aid kit containing small adhesive bandages that would do the trick – Watson turned back to Sir Gilbert, who was busy trying to dust his ruined topcoat. ‘Bloody fool.’

  ‘Do you know him?’ Watson asked.

  ‘I know his type,’ snarled Sir Gilbert.

  ‘You all right, sir?’ A policeman about the same age as Watson had emerged from the gloom. Watson felt at a pang of guilt, as he always did at the sight of a uniformed bobby, remembering the poor chap whose body had saved him from the worst of the blast at Liverpool Street.

  ‘Yes, officer, yes. Can you fetch me a taxicab?’

  The policeman looked around, bemused. Thanks to the petrol shortage, motor taxicabs were rare beasts, even in the West End.

  ‘Underground’s best bet. Although the stations are filling up fast, even around here.’

  Sir Gilbert’s expression showed what he thought of that suggestion of using the Tube system. Platforms were increasingly crowded with families seeking shelter from the yet-to-materialize night raiders. The thought of the mass of commoners congregating down there was enough to keep respectable folk like Sir Gilbert firmly above ground.

  ‘I’m only round the corner in Wimpole Street,’ offered Watson. ‘My housekeeper will help clean you up or you can borrow a coat of mine. And there’s brandy to steady the nerves.’

  The thought of alcohol seemed to lift the surgeon’s mood. ‘Ah. Very well. Lead on. Thank you, Officer.’

  The darkness had congealed in the short time since the attack, so the air resembled a shroud of thick black velvet cloth. The walk to Wimpole Street necessitated stepping very carefully, with slow, exaggerated motions, through the unfamiliar blackness, avoiding the self-absorbed figures that occasionally loomed out of the shadows. Sometimes the glow of a cigarette, the rustle of a dress or the tap of a cane was the only warning of the presence of a fellow pedestrian, and in some places, Watson was reduced to groping along the wall, even though he knew these streets well enough in daylight. How he missed the fluidity of his youth at times like this, a body seemingly built of elastic, able to swerve around opponents, leaving them grasping air, almost dancing along the rugby pitch, knowing there was an explosive burst of energy still in reserve if needed. His stock of spare energy, these days, was very depleted.

  Crossing the street was particularly hazardous; one had to wait at the kerbside, ears pricked for the clop of hoofs, the clatter of a motor engine or the bell of a tram, for any lights on vehicles were meagre indeed – a slit of illumination at best. Then it was a headlong dash, as if running over no man’s land, Watson thought, hoping not to get cut down halfway across.

  ‘One hundred per cent of what?’ Watson asked once they were heading north. ‘That young man and his flour grenade, he kept saying one hundred per cent.’

  ‘Compensation,’ Sir Gilbert replied. ‘The board has decided to offer a hundred per cent of a pension only to those who have lost two limbs or more.’

  ‘Yes, I read something of the sort,’ said Watson, recalling a Times leader on the subject. ‘But one hundred per cent of how much? I mean, what is the core figure? What is the most a soldier can expect?’

  ‘Ah, well, we await the Treasury’s decision on that. You remember Lord Arnott? Of the Bank? He’s the Treasury liaison. There’s a lot of argy-bargy at the moment – what we think is fair, what the Treasury claims it can afford, that sort of thing. We have settled on forty shillings a week for an enlisted man, although we are still arguing about the rate for officers, but there are already those who feel our new sliding scale is unfair. As if it were possible to please every—’ He stumbled slightly on an uneven pavement and Watson steadied him. ‘Some would say that, I don’t know, blindness should carry equal weight to the loss of a limb. Not that the hooligan tonight was blind.’

  ‘No, I would say your attacker has lost but one limb.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Well, my thumb is still throbbing from the blow he struck. Yet it was hardly delivered with any great force. And the chap who tried to stop him from fleeing? Opened his brow up like one of those hookless fasteners. Wood or ceramic, I would say. His false hand, I mean.’

  ‘Well, he won’t be getting anything close to a hundred per cent for that, no matter how much he protests. And he can’t be that poor if he can afford to throw flour around in these straitened times.’

  ‘I don’t envy you the job of deciding men’s fates. Just on the left here, there’s a corner.’ He steered Sir Gilbert around the junction. ‘It can all seem very arbitrary to an outsider. One arm is worth this, an eye that.’ And, he thought, what was psychological trauma worth in the grand scheme of things? But he didn’t want to raise that subject just now. His view that it should be considered every bit as debilitating as physical injury had caused some violent disagreements within the Board.

  ‘Somebody has to make these decisions,’ snapped Sir Gilbert. ‘It’s very simple – how does it affect your manliness? Are you one hundred per cent of a man? Fifty per cent?’

  Watson considered again the neurological cases he had witnessed and sometimes treated, their ‘manliness’ stolen by the intense mental damage the war had wrought. Sir Gilbert, he knew, was one of those sympathetic to soldiers suffering non-physical damage, and had lobbied to have it included in the compensation tables. Others on the War Injuries Compensation Board, however, believed the only wounds that counted were those that destroyed flesh
and bone, those that they could put their fingers into, like some latter-day Doubting Thomas.

  ‘Not too far now,’ said Watson, taking the surgeon’s arm. ‘So you know who did this to you? Who that fellow represented?’

  ‘I have a suspicion. They picketed the Board last week.’

  ‘Hush,’ Watson said, harsher than he intended.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Listen.’

  A bell, tolling frantically, but some way distant. Not a church bell. A tram? No, there were no tracks allowed in the West End. It was a handbell.

  Watson stopped and waited, and it was but a few moments before he heard the sound that would soon freeze all of London’s blood in its veins. It was coming from high above the blanket of cloud, the layer he thought might offer some protection. But no, they had come anyway. The low thrum of engines announced their arrival. To the north, the gun battery known as ‘Union Jack’ opened fire, a jagged pyramid of light signalling the first discharge. Windows rattled nervously in their frames with each boom. The battery was firing blind, but then the bombers about to drop their loads were also trusting to dumb luck to make their aim true. ‘Honeysuckle’ battery offered a sustained salvo, the sky above the rooftops shimmering bright with the muzzle flashes. Next came the searchlights, probing upwards like spokes of a wheel, but finding only the featureless underside of the clouds.

  ‘Take cover!’ Another handbell rang from just behind Watson and Sir Gilbert and a police whistle sounded. There would be no maroons, the roof-fired rockets that alerted the populace during daylight – the authorities considered the sleep of munitions workers to be sacrosanct. Quite how they would sleep through the subsequent detonations of bombs wasn’t clear.

  ‘Take cover!’ the policeman yelled again.

  From every direction, or so it seemed, came the slap of leather soles and the ring of hobnails on pavements as the spectres around them broke into a run. One of them careened into Sir Gilbert, spinning him around. Watson gathered him close and propelled him forward, goaded into an undignified sprint as the air pulsed with the sound that London – and Watson – had learned to dread ever since the first bombing raid in June. That had been in daylight; the throbbing somehow seemed far more sinister at night. It was the Gotha Hum.

  THREE

  It wasn’t a squadron or even a half-squadron of Gothas generating the hum across central London that was often likened by those below to the noise created by a monstrous bee trapped in an enormous bottle. It was a single solitary plane, but it sounded like a whole squadron of Gothas.

  High above the clouds that blanketed London, the lone bomber that had caused panic on the streets was not a Gotha, but the first of the latest German bombers. The four-engined, Maybach-powered Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI was better known as a Riesenflugzeug – a ‘giant aircraft’ – or R-type. And giant it was. With four engines, a wingspan of 42 metres and a crew of nine, chosen from the élite of the England Squadron, it was a monster of the night sky.

  Above the cotton-wool layer that sealed in London, the night sky was blazing with stars, bright enough to cast a faint shadow of the plane on the tops of clouds that glinted like new marble. It was a feeling of both great power and great solitude, thought Oberleutnant Schrader, the man chosen to command this first, tentative mission over the enemy capital by an R-Type.

  Using primitive radio-beacon navigation, Oberleutnant Heinrich Schrader of the Englandgeschwader, the England Squadron, had nursed the enormous creature over the North Sea, making landfall just south of Margate and then turning north-west, floundering a little until, thanks to a rip in the clouds, he managed to find the Thames. Then he directed the senior pilot, Leutnant Hermann Deitling, a foul-mouthed but talented Swabian, to keep the river on the port side of the bomber, navigating by gyrocompass and the star Arcturus, a celestial body that always seemed to favour the German’s missions.

  The commander had his orders: he was under no circumstances to bomb Buckingham Palace – the Kaiser would not countenance his relatives being killed in an air raid. But anything else was considered a legitimate target. ‘Fortress London,’ they called it. Every sweatshop down there was making uniforms, boots, webbing, bullets, bicycles – all the machinery of war. The whole city was militarized, all of it fair game.

  At least, that was what Schrader told himself; had done so on every Gotha raid. The commander had been a fighter pilot, a hero of Bloody April when the German high-speed, twin-gunned Albatros fighter had blown the RFC out of the sky, but a shrapnel wound to his shoulder had left him with limited movement. Hence his transfer to bombers. Fighting one-on-one with the British had seemed a very different kind of war, nobler and fairer than bombing. And besides, he had a secret. He liked London. Schrader had visited as a young boy with his father, who had been almost overwhelmed by the demand for black cloth from his factories in the wake of Queen Victoria’s death. He had brought Heinrich across with him to witness the funeral and the vast inland sea of mourning clothes that the city became. Schrader had liked London, loved its energy and its centre-of-the-world arrogance.

  And now he was helping destroy it.

  The British newspapers would have them believe that every bomb hit only hospitals, schools and churches, but he hoped that was just propaganda. Besides, if his raids shortened the war, then he was doing some good. The fact a machine as vast as the R.VI, with a wingspan that made it look like some prehistoric bird, could fly over and bomb London would surely dent the British sense of superiority. U-boats at sea, R-types in the air, and the likelihood of tens of thousands of German troops released from the Eastern Front now that Russia had problems at home – the war was definitely going the Kaiser’s way. Perhaps, Schrader thought, he would be seeing London again soon, this time as a victor of war.

  At seventeen thousand feet, even travelling at a ponderous 130 kilometres an hour, Schrader knew his Giant was immune to enemy fighters. As with the nimbler Gothas, it would take night-fighters too long to reach a height where they could be a threat. In their enclosed cockpit, plugged into electrically heated suits, with oxygen bottles to gulp on, the R-type bomber crew felt invincible in a way the Gotha fliers never could. Not that the Gothas were done yet – it was rumoured to cost half a million marks to produce one R-type. Which meant the fleets of bombers the England Squadron planned to send over London before the month was out would have to be a mix of the cheaper Gothas and the new Giants.

  Schrader looked down the bombsight tube but, apart from the odd flicker of an explosion from an anti-aircraft gun or a sudden finger of light from a searchlight poking through cloud, there was little to see.

  He checked the map again. By his reckoning, he was over the East End and the docks. Time for the R-type’s other innovation. Bomb doors, electrically operated. To think, just a few years before, they had been tossing grenades and sticks of dynamite out of aircraft by hand. Now there was a dedicated bomb bay, racks with release systems and a payload of a ton, including incendiaries.

  When the England Squadron had been formed to succeed the Zeppelins, its mission had been to set London ablaze – the so-called ‘Fire Plan’. But the incendiaries had proved unreliable at best, so they had added High Explosive to the mix once more. In truth, Schrader didn’t want to burn the city to the ground. But he did want Germany to win the war.

  ‘Bomb doors open,’ the commander said, and felt the aircraft judder slightly as the metal flaps lowered into the night air, increasing drag.

  Schrader pressed the button that opened the clamps holding the mixed payload in place. The commander’s stomach somersaulted as the plane leaped upwards.

  ‘Bombs released.’

  FOUR

  ‘And how is Mr Holmes?’

  Watson took a piece of cheese from the tray and popped it into his mouth. He and Sir Gilbert were in the basement of his Upper Wimpole Street apartment, which in turn sat above an ophthalmic practice. The cellar was low ceilinged but dry, lit by yellow-flamed paraffin lamps that emitted threads of black
smoke into the air, like a fine cotton yarn. It was furnished with two rather threadbare but comfortable wing chairs. Mrs Turner, Watson’s housekeeper, had her own area next door, equipped with a single gas ring, table and bentwood chair, where she was busy dealing with Sir Gilbert’s flour-splattered outer clothes. They could hear the rhythmic shushing of the brush, interrupted every now and then by a loud tut from Mrs Turner.

  ‘Holmes? As well as can be expected,’ Watson said flatly before taking a sip of cognac from a balloon glass.

  ‘Oh dear, that doesn’t sound encouraging,’ said Sir Gilbert, helping himself to a Bath Oliver and snapping it in half.

  Watson was tired of answering questions about Holmes. Leave the man be. When they had been unable to locate Frank Shackleton – Watson had tended to the dying and injured at Liverpool Street in the aftermath of the bombing and the trail had gone cold – Holmes had returned to his bees, where he was content. He sent the occasional letter to confirm that, no, he did not miss London or his old life at all. Not one bit of it. But if there was anything vexing Watson, perhaps he’d get in touch . . .?

  Watson lit a cigarette, wondering while he did so what was going on above ground. If there was, indeed, anyone left above ground. It seemed to him that London was in danger of becoming a troglodyte city, where people lived and died in the Underground stations or the tunnels under the Thames that had been colonized ever since the Zeppelin raids of 1915. Hadn’t H.G. Wells prophesied something like that? Watson sometimes felt he was living in that damned man’s fiction, especially after nearly losing his life in a ‘land ironclad’, as Wells had called the tank.