The Sign of Fear

by Robert Ryan

  ‘Wait a minute, Major.’ The next coffee arrived and Shackleton waved him down. ‘I know who stole the Irish Crown Jewels.’

  Watson sat.

  ‘It wasn’t Frank. It was a Shackleton. Actually, that’s not true. He’s a Garavan, on my mother’s side, but he likes to use the Shackleton name. He looks like one of us, y’see.’ He traced a circle around his face with a finger. ‘Same looks. Well, if he parts his hair like this and you squint a little, he can pass for a Shackleton. He stole the jewels and it was him who put it around that it was Frank, to keep the authorities wrong-footed.’

  ‘I see. And you think he could be doing the same here?’

  ‘I just mention it in passing.’

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘Garavan. Michael Garavan. A bad sort.’

  Watson wrote it down in his notebook and then stood. ‘Well, thank you, Sir Ernest. I wish you well in Buenos Aires.’

  ‘If those U-boats don’t get me.’

  ‘They wouldn’t dare.’

  Shackleton hooted at this. ‘You could be right. I will see you next year, perhaps, Major.’

  ‘If I manage to secure something, I will let you know.’ They shook hands once more and Watson turned to leave.

  ‘One other thing, Major. Might be important.’

  Shackleton had the coffee in his hand now, poised to drink.

  ‘This Micky Garavan. He did three years of medicine at Trinity before he was kicked out.’

  ‘For what?’

  Shackleton took a slug of coffee. ‘Unauthorized vivisections.’

  The smell at Old Street Tube station made Miss Pillbody gag. It wasn’t just the bleach that clawed at the throat but the underlying stench of human excrement. The platform was lined with tottering piles of rags, blankets and newspapers, as well as the occasional folding ‘privacy’ screen, similar to ones used in hospital, to preserve the modesty of those bedding down for the night and others answering a call of nature in the small hours. There were even rumours of people risking the live rail to go about their nocturnal business.

  Miss Pillbody took all this in as she hurried along to the exit in search of fresh air. She might have, for the moment, thrown her lot in with Watson, but to her very core she was still a Sie Wölfe, an agent of Imperial Germany. And this panic, this fleeing for the underworld of London, was a sign that the bombers were succeeding the way the ungainly and vulnerable Zeppelins never had. ‘Send more!’ she wanted to shout. ‘Send more Gothas and Giants!’ Along with the U-boats sinking thousands of tons of material, the bombs could crush Londoners’ morale and make them sue for peace.

  The term ‘fresh air’ was highly relative, she decided when she emerged into Old Street itself and stood on the corner. The air was tainted with the soot and stink of a hundred small industries operating in the yards, warehouses, basements and attics of Hoxton and Shoreditch. The entire street was streaked with grime, the atmosphere laden with dust and grit. It might be doing this whole area a favour to burn it down and start again.

  Along from the Tube, a gang of roughly dressed men was erecting two enormous wooden beams, designed to stop the frontage of a shop and the rooms above collapsing into the street. A system of ropes and pulleys was being used to manoeuvre them into position where they would be fixed with steel plates and bolts. There was the sharpness of coal gas in the air. The bombers were getting through, all right, she thought with satisfaction, although they would have to do better than targeting places like E. Sheldrake, Boot Repairers.

  She took four steps forward along the pavement and then quickly stooped to refasten a boot button. A slight stumbling behind her confirmed what she had thought from the beginning of her journey. She was being followed. But she mustn’t allow herself to notice. If she gave away that she knew some street craft, then people might become curious about Miss Adler.

  She walked until she could see the building that had brought her to Old Street. It was enormous. Perhaps 200 metres long, she estimated. The vernacular of St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics was more like a grand country house than a mental asylum. There was a grand porticoed central section, topped with pediment and a brass-roofed belvedere and two wings, faced in what had once been a coloured brick, now blackened and sombre. These two wings had a row of triple-height windows and each ended in a square structure, like the keep of a castle, complete with crenellated tops. It was almost as if the British thought being a lunatic was nothing to be ashamed of.

  A high, spike-topped wall ran around the entire building, but the poplars and planes that poked their heads above the elaborate capstones suggested there were gardens within, most likely for the inmates to exercise. Although fresh air was not an option for every one of the incarcerated. There were three hundred tiny cells, she had read, many of them containing men and women too deranged to be ever let out of confinement. Surely it would be better just to end their suffering, humanely, than leave them strapped in restraining jackets to rot?

  Miss Pillbody crossed the road, careful to avoid the trams, and approached the main gate. It was locked shut by a hefty chain through the bars. Beyond it she could see steps – adorned with white stripes for the blackout – leading up to the columns, beyond which were three-metre-high panelled doors, once painted in black gloss, now fading and cracked. A plaque directed men to one wing, females to another. Leaves were piled up at the foot of the doors. It looked as if they hadn’t been opened for some time. When she touched the bars of the main gate, though, she could feel a vibration through her fingertips.

  ‘Can I help you, miss?’

  The man who approached was not yet forty, but wore an old man’s mutton-chop whiskers. He was dressed in crudely made corduroy trousers, a waistcoat and collarless shirt, with some sort of kerchief at his neck. In his hand he held a wide wooden rake, with several missing teeth.

  ‘All closed up here now,’ he said.

  ‘I see. I used to have a relative in here,’ she began tentatively, frantically weaving the lie in her head. ‘I wanted to see where she was kept.’

  ‘All gone to Muswell Hill or Colney Hatch now,’ the gardener said. ‘All the records, too, if you’re interested in tracing someone, are at Colney. Just us gardeners here now and the caretakers.’

  ‘Can I come in and take a look. Just for a minute?’

  He gave a firm shake of the head. ‘Built in 1750 this place was. Not safe now.’

  She felt the Tube rumble under her feet.

  ‘I’ll take my chances with that.’

  ‘I don’t think so, miss.’ There was a slight steeliness to his voice. She gripped the bar, felt the vibration again. Was it the Tube? But no, the train had passed.

  ‘I’d best get on,’ he said, but didn’t move.

  ‘So, Colney Hatch, you say.’

  ‘Yes. Up in North London. They’ll be able to help.’

  She looked up at the forbidding façade and felt a shiver. Who knew what horrors had gone on beyond those soot-stained bricks. If it was built in the mid eighteenth century, more than a hundred of years of suffering had taken place within. ‘Well, thank you for your help. Nice meeting you.’

  The man touched his forehead and she could feel his eyes on her as she turned to cross the road back to the Tube. She waited for a gap in the traffic as a number of drays and a bus clattered by, the latter driven by a cheerful-looking ruddy-faced woman. The rather more sour-faced conductor standing at the rear platform was a female, too. Enjoy it while you can, my dears, Miss Pillbody thought. One day the men will return and they’ll want their jobs back.

  Directly opposite her was a man in a bowler hat almost reading a newspaper, but she avoided staring at him directly. Clumsy, she thought. Too obvious to take seriously.

  She had just taken a step into the road, careful to avoid the consequences of horses being used in large numbers once more, when a vehicle swerved towards her from the opposite side.

  She took a step back and instinctively reached for the clasp of her bag before stopp
ing herself. She wasn’t carrying a gun. She had felt naked without it at first, but the neat little Italian pistol she favoured might take some explaining.

  The car drew to a halt with a squeal and then settled into a sort of rattly coughing. The rear door opened.

  ‘Get in, Miss Adler,’ said an authoritative voice from within.

  She did as she was told.

  It was early afternoon by the time Watson arrived for a new post-mortem at the mortuary at the Poplar Hospital for Accidents. As his taxicab had woven its way through the East End, his mind was reeling from what Shackleton had told him about this Michael ‘Micky’ Garavan, who had a conviction for his illegal vivisections. He was a strange mix by all accounts: thief, blackmailer, possibly a rapist, certainly an adulterer, but also a man who enjoyed inflicting suffering, both physical and psychological. Was it likely this man would become champion of the maimed and shattered?

  There were signs of recent bomb damage along the streets they drove through on the way to the East India Dock Road, with gaps in the terraced frontages, the odd dwelling with its front blown off to reveal the meagre possessions of the occupants within. Watson looked away. It was like the wind catching a woman’s skirt and blowing it up. Bad manners to stare.

  The hospital itself had also been hit, a new wing looking as if a giant creature had taken a bite out of the upper corners of one of the towers. An inadequate tarpaulin stretched over the hole snapped in the breeze.

  The mortuary was hidden out to the rear, beneath the isolation block. This hospital, Watson recalled as he walked under the main arch and past the porter, was where the victims of the Silvertown munitions explosion had been brought on that terrible night in January 1917. He had been a POW in Germany then, but people still talked about the strange glow that spread over London, as if the devil had left the door to hell ajar.

  A hollow-eyed soldier on crutches watched him pass, and Watson almost saluted, forgetting he was in his civvies. Instead he touched the brim of his bucket-style fedora, even that coming as a shock after the unyielding peak of his major’s cap.

  He descended the steps and passed into the world of formaldehyde and Eusol. The walls were painted dark green, the floors tiled. Trolleys, some with bodies hidden under sheets, were lined up like buses in a garage. A nurse was busy mopping the floor nearby.

  ‘Professor Elroyd?’ he asked her.

  ‘Room three, sir,’ she said, pointing with the mop head.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘There’s nose plugs in a bucket outside. You might need them.’ She waved a hand in front of her face and wrinkled her button nose to signify there was a stench. Of course there was. They had dug up a dead man in a state of severe decomposition.

  Watson eschewed the plugs but collected a cotton facemask from a rack before he rapped on the door and stepped in.

  Just for a second panic engulfed him and the earth wobbled beneath his feet. The decay of the flesh reminded him of the trenches and the liquefied organic mush that would ooze out of the trench walls; ‘hero juice’ the more callous called it. He took three deep breaths and the vision faded.

  ‘Come in, man, close the door; you want to stink the whole hospital out?’

  Watson pushed the door shut with his heel and pulled on the mask. He was aware of circling flies and the smell from the air freshener burning in the corner, almost as sickly as the one rising from the corpse that was laid out on the metal table. A pile of musty clothes cut from the body lay discarded on the floor.

  ‘You might want to gown up. You’ll ruin that nice suit.’

  Professor Roger Elroyd was Assistant Supervisor of Medico-Legal Post-Mortems at Scotland Yard. Almost totally bald, with a beak-like nose, he always reminded Watson of a buzzard pecking at flesh.

  ‘Forgive me for not shaking hands, Watson. Hope you don’t mind, I made a start. Although I’m not sure what I am looking for. He’s in worse shape than the last time he was up in the fresh air, I can tell you.’

  Watson didn’t need telling. The damage from the explosion that had killed him had stripped away a lot of skin from the face and what was left was grey and spongy. Most of his jaw had been pushed up into the sinus cavity. The chest had been split and the organs reduced to mulch. There was no glistening flesh of the newly dead to be seen, just a colourless mass.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to do this.’

  ‘You said on the phone something about mistaken identity.’

  ‘We think he was misidentified, yes.’

  Elroyd pointed a scalpel at the face. ‘Well, it is hardly surprising.’ He picked a maggot from the eye socket with the forceps in his other hand. ‘You know I have done a number of bomb victims. Professional curiosity about causes of death. Sometimes it is just the compression wave, leaving the victim relatively unscathed.’

  ‘I have seen that at the front.’

  ‘At other times there is more extensive external damage, as we see here. But the blast pattern in this one . . . odd. I’ve also become rather an expert in German bomb cases.’ He held up a piece of metal. ‘And this isn’t one.’

  ‘Could it be a British anti-aircraft shell case?’ Watson asked.

  Elroyd shook his head. ‘No. It’s tin.’

  ‘Like from a can?’

  ‘Judging from the amount of it in the chest, more like an oil or petrol can.’

  Watson stepped forward. Yes, now he looked closely he could see the glint of jagged metal under the lights. ‘What are you thinking, Roger?’

  ‘I’m thinking you owe me a large whisky after this, John Watson.’

  ‘There might be a bottle in it.’

  Elroyd chortled. ‘I warn you, I like a Johnnie Walker White. Not so easy to find.’ He paused. ‘If I had to hazard a guess I would say this man had a device of some description strapped to his chest and detonated, to mimic the effect of a bomb.’

  ‘Post-mortem?’

  Elroyd shook his head. ‘I can’t tell at this stage. Let’s hope so, eh? How was he identified?’

  ‘Clothes, boots. By his wife. Who wouldn’t have wanted to linger over the sight of her husband like that.’

  Go on, Watson. Go on.

  ‘Let us assume someone wanted us to think this is John Crantock. They mutilate the body and dress him in the real Crantock’s clothes.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the pathologist. ‘The boots, by the way, were probably a size or two too small, from what I can make out. But nobody pays too much attention when the cause of death is so readily at hand.’ He pointed to the sky.

  ‘If you were going to do that, how thorough would you be in preparing the body? Knowing the explanation for death is so obvious.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  But Watson was still taking his thoughts to a logical conclusion. ‘The Crantocks wouldn’t have had the money for a fancy undertakers who might try to rebuild the features. And no open coffin—’

  ‘I should think not.’

  Watson walked passed the professor, kneeled down and sorted through the dead man’s clothes, ignoring the smell of earth and musty pine that rose from them.

  ‘You think his real name might be in the clothes?’ Elroyd asked.

  ‘No,’ Watson said with a grimace. ‘I don’t think we’ll be that fortunate.’

  After a few minutes of gruesome sorting of material stained by the inevitable processes of biological decay, and colonized by creatures that made him shiver when they slithered through an aperture or rip, he found what he was looking for on the remains of a pair of silk-merino drawers with a Jaylex waist. ‘Expensive for a nightwatchman.’

  Elroyd said nothing.

  ‘Ah, here we are. Thank the Lord local outfitters still like to sew their own labels in the garments they sell.’ He looked up at Elroyd. ‘We’d be in trouble if it just said Selfridges. But it says Donovan & Co., York Street, and a telephone number. Crantock was a Poplar man. Why on earth would he go all the way to Colchester for his underwear?’

  ‘Who are you, Miss
Adler?’ Bullimore asked as he tapped the driver on the shoulder. ‘Montague Street. Is that right? You’ll be going to your rooms?’

  ‘Until we reconvene later, yes.’

  She leaned back in the seat as the driver pulled away, bag placed on her lap, ignoring the policeman’s question. How much did he know? He knew where she was lodging. He might even have searched her rooms. But the gun was well hidden and there was nothing to suggest her name wasn’t Adler. Although the look on Watson’s face had suggested he thought she had plucked it from thin air, she had created the alias before leaving Germany. He must have thought the name referred to that woman he had mentioned in his stories. In fact, she’d borrowed it from her Klein Adler typewriter.

  ‘So, Miss Adler,’ said Bullimore, twisting slightly in his seat as if to examine her more closely. ‘Who are you, again?’

  It was she who did the appraising. Late thirties, perhaps early forties, jawline firm, hair mostly dark but for a peppering of silver threads, dark lines under his eyes suggesting fatigue. And the eyes themselves . . .

  ‘Well? Where did you come from?’

  ‘Cambridge, originally.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I am a friend and companion to Dr Watson.’

  ‘He’s never mentioned you.’

  ‘You know him well, do you?’

  ‘Not that well. By reputation, mainly.’

  ‘I have known Major Watson for some years.’ True. ‘We have become very close.’ Laughingly false. ‘A gentleman would enquire no further.’

  ‘At the moment I am being a policeman, not a gentleman. Dr Watson has made you privy to a very sensitive investigation. I need to know why.’

  ‘Have you asked him?’

  The car braked suddenly for a brewer’s dray, then swerved around it.

  ‘I’m asking you, Miss Adler.’

  ‘We have found, over the past few years, that we compliment each other rather well.’ She swallowed as she said his Christian name, as if it had stuck in her throat. ‘John has some attributes I do not possess. I, on the other hand, bring a different perspective to some scenarios.’

  ‘A woman’s perspective?’