The Dead Can Wait (11 page)

Booth nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘So you plan to remove me from the area?

The lieutenant waved at the now-distant Miss Pillbody. ‘In a nutshell, again, yes.’

‘Can you do that? Legally? To an American citizen?’

Booth fiddled with the cap that lay on his left thigh. It was a moot point, but he wasn’t going to reveal that. He certainly didn’t want Ross shouting ‘foul’ at his embassy. ‘It’s said we hanged Roger Casement on a comma. That the question of whether DORA applies to acts of treason committed outside Great Britain hung on a little piece of punctuation. We made sure it was interpreted the correct way, of course. In your case, we don’t need to resort to such a merry dance. In your case, you’d be spying for a foreign power.’

Ross looked horrified. ‘But I’m not. That’s slander, young man.’

‘I think you’ll find America is foreign, Ross.’

‘Perhaps. But I’m not spying for it or anyone else.’

Booth grunted his disbelief. ‘Perhaps not for America in total. But a newspaper? Once a hack . . .’

A voice drifted over on the breeze. They both looked up. Miss Pillbody was waving at them across the undulating waves of shingle.

Ross stood and brushed sand off his trousers. He was angry at being challenged by the youngster. His eyes flicked to the figure of Miss Pillbody, holding on to her hat against the stiffening onshore breeze, her dress pressed against her slim figure. The sea, so placid a few minutes earlier, had begun to show signs of restlessness. The lead-heavy waves, shedding spray as they came, were thumping percussively into the beach. The water’s colour had changed too, from gunmetal grey to a more ominous brown. ‘If you should remove me from the area, then what is to stop me going into the first telegraph office I come to and telling my former newspaper that I have the biggest scoop of the war? That deep in the Suffolk countryside, the British are developing something hush-hush—’

Booth leaped to his feet, the flask forgotten, fists clenched. ‘You wouldn’t dare—’

‘Two million readers, Lieutenant Booth. But if that was my game, don’t you think I’d have done it by now? At least tipped them the wink I had a big story? Asked for some expenses up front? Go and check all the local telegram offices. There’ll be nothing from me, I promise you. And the local exchange will confirm no calls to America. Really, I ought to box your ears—’

‘You are welcome to try.’

At that moment Miss Pillbody’s plaintive voice drifted over to them and they turned to see her frantically waving for them to join her.

‘It’s probably not the best time,’ said Ross.

‘Perhaps a postponement?’

He turned to go. Booth grabbed his sleeve. ‘Hold on . . .’

Ross waited.

‘If I find out you make any contact with a newspaper . . .’

‘Booth, truce, eh? Just for today.’

Ross was certain the soldier must be able to hear his heart thumping. It sounded like a bass drum to his own ears. He was very close to being deported. He had to play this carefully.

‘I want your word that you will not discuss or approach the estate until we decide what to do with you.’

‘Do with me? Look, I am not here for your damned estate, Booth.’

Booth wondered if he should tell him what he had in mind. A few phone calls to check the legality and he could easily have him taken off and locked away on the island they had sequestered for that very purpose. There were no telephones there, no way of contacting a newspaper. ‘If you do try, I shall not hesitate to shoot you.’

‘You won’t have to go that far. I’ll promise not to come sniffing around. On one condition.’ Ross paused. ‘When it gets out what you’re doing in there, you tell me everything about it, for this book or another. The inside story. Once it is public domain. I’d give you full credit, of course.’

Booth hesitated and then shrugged. ‘If I get clearance.’
Ah, vanity
thought Ross. He held out his hand and the other took it. Then he gave the lieutenant a shove in the shoulder and Booth staggered back, dropping his hat. Before he could recover, Ross was off, sprinting across the stones as best he could, heading for Miss Pillbody. Booth, who gave no quarter even to his seniors in the 200-yard dash at school, scooped up his cap and set off after him, his whoop drowning out the screeches of the alarmed gulls overhead.

Mrs Georgina Gregson stood and stared at the steamer trunk lying on her cot bed for a few minutes before opening it. She was enjoying the anticipation of being reunited with some old friends. She was hoping the flowery Russian peasant tunic she had purchased from Jollys was in there. And the blue crinoline skirt. Perhaps the striped afternoon dress. And some fresh undergarments – those she possessed were thin and scratchy, thanks to continuous washing and reuse since her detention.

After she had tormented herself enough, she unclipped the trunk’s catches and heaved the lid back. Inside, the clothing looked like a rat’s nest, all scrunched and intertwined, thrown in without any care or regard. She cursed whichever oaf had been sent to her lodgings to fetch her things. A man, that much was certain. She shuddered at the thought of some unwashed brute rifling her wardrobe and her drawers.
Yes, definitely a man
, she thought, as her eyes fell on a ball of material that turned out to be her ivory silk blouse. A woman would know that the entire caseful would have to be steamed or ironed before any of it could be worn.

She lifted out a pleated Fortuny tea gown, the hem weighted with dozens of glass beads. It had once been her mother’s and still smelled of the vanilla fragrance she favoured. Not that she had any need of a tea gown in her present surroundings. Mrs Gregson wouldn’t be attending any manner of social event in the near future. She had been plucked out of society, whisked away into a nether world ruled by despots and the Defence of the Realm Act.

Beneath the dress was a small stack of envelopes, all wrapped up in a red ribbon. Within the envelopes were Desmond’s letters. He had written her such a precious few of them before—

Two paces took Mrs Gregson across the tiny room from bed to writing desk, where she scooped up and lit a cigarette. She told herself it was the smoke making her eyes water.
Don’t dwell
, she told herself.
And don’t cry. You are in quite a pickle as it is without collapsing completely
.

After that baby-faced detective had arrested her she had indeed spent a night in Holloway, but in solitary isolation. From there she had been transported in a blacked-out van to the first of a series of ‘safe and secure’ locations. All the time she had been promised her clothes and the trunk by various guards and warders – after all, she was a detainee, not a convict – but it had taken this long to catch up with her. And hidden in there was all that fate had left her of poor Desmond.

Mrs Gregson stubbed out the cigarette half smoked, picked up the letters and put them to one side, and set about extracting the tangled items of clothing and smoothing them out, laying them on the bed, over the chair and the desk, careful to move the note she had been composing to Major Watson. She had been writing it for weeks now, but she knew it was hopeless: she had no chance of getting to a postbox or post office. And that was terribly frustrating. There was one vital piece of information that trumped all the mundane jottings about Holloway and the dreadful man Colonel Montgomery, who had been in charge of her for a time and did not seem to care that she had but one pair of knickers. No, all that was irrelevant. But if the man she had seen striding the clifftop was indeed whom she believed him to be, Watson must be going out of his mind. She would pay a month’s wages to get the information through to the major.

She paused in the act of shaking out one of her Smedley silk and merino vests. Perhaps that was the answer. Bribe someone to post the letter. But no, it would still be opened and read by the local censor. Perhaps if she reduced it to a single, pertinent line, surely nobody could object to that. Ah, but even that would beg a hundred questions. What, after all, could she write?

‘I have seen Mr Sherlock Holmes and he too is a prisoner of DORA’?

When, later that night, a hand reached out for the two freshly delivered Mackeson bottles, manna delivered as if from heaven, Ross was waiting. He had crouched low next to the entrance of Oxborrow’s cottage, biding his time, breathing slowly, ignoring his craving for a cigarette and the predatory whine of mosquitoes in his ear. Then, after a good forty minutes, something happened. No light showed; Ross simply heard the slight scraping of freshly oiled hinges as the wooden door swung back.

Ross acted fast, gripping the wrist he could just make out in the weak moonlight and dragging the man up to a standing position. Oxborrow worked at the forge assisting the blacksmith and Ross knew instantly that the man was strong, stronger than he in a fair fight, but he had the advantage of surprise. He kept the man off balance and walked him into the dark room, the pair clattering into furniture.

‘Shush, there, shush, Jimmy, it’s the American. Not the guys from the estate. Shush. Be quiet, you’ll have them down on both of us. Calm down!’

Oxborrow stopped struggling and hissed, ‘Leave me alone.’

‘I just want a word.’

‘Fuck off.’

Ross used his second advantage. He tapped the great oaf on the bridge of his nose with the lead-filled cosh. The man gave a yelp as pain exploded in his sinuses and his vision became a veritable Milky Way of celestial bodies. He slumped back into a chair. Ross went and fetched the Mackeson and slammed the door, waiting for the whimpering to subside.

‘Mr Oxborrow, I need your help. I am prepared to pay for it. With money enough to keep you in drink for a year. Do you understand? But I need you to answer some questions.’

‘You’ve broken my fuggin’ nose,’ Oxborrow said in a thick voice.

‘No. It just seems like it. It’ll feel like there is a cauliflower up each nostril for a day or so. But it isn’t broken.’

‘Who the fuck are you?’ It came out as ‘oodafugaroo’.

‘I am a journalist. A writer.’

‘What kind of writer carries a blackjack?’

‘A very determined one who once rode with Roosevelt in Cuba.’ A little embellishment never hurt. ‘Now, would you like one of these beers?’

A grunt.

‘Do you have an opening device?’

‘Give ’er ’ere.’

Oxborrow took the bottle and put it between his teeth, levering off the cap, spitting it across the floor into darkness. ‘Always carry an opener with me,’ he chortled.

Ross waited while the man gulped some down. ‘Mr Oxborrow, I would like to know what happened to you when you went on to the estate. Am I right in thinking you know a way in?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘Word has reached London of a terrible injustice. Families turfed out of their home, livelihoods ruined—’ An aggrieved snarl in the throat. ‘Schools and churches declared out of bounds. Now, I say the Government,
your
Government, has gone too far.’

‘Aye. And it’s mine by rights, you know.’

‘What is?’

‘The estate, like. From my grandfather.’

‘Of course it is, Jimmy.’ The man was rambling. ‘Miss Pillbody asked me to investigate, to see what can be done.’

‘But it’s army secrets, innit?’

‘What kind of secrets?’

Ross could hear the man’s ragged breath in the darkness, sense he was thinking things out, considering the possibilities. ‘You’re not with ’em, are you? Is this like a trial? I told you that I saw nothing in there. Nothing.’

‘Relax, Jimmy. I’m not with them.’

The man guzzled the bottle dry.

‘Another?’ Ross asked.

‘Suppose.’

Ross handed it over. ‘You know a way in? To the estate?’

A chuckle. ‘Course I do.’ Ross winced at the sound of teeth enamel on metal. ‘Like I said, it’s all mine. Know every inch. I should sue that Lord Iveagh. There’s a stream . . .’ He clammed up. ‘You said summit about money.’

‘So I did.’ In the half-light Ross took out a stack of banknotes. Forgeries, but good ones. ‘Fifty pounds there.’

‘Fifty pound?’ He reached out, but Ross snatched it away.

‘Not yet. So there’s this stream that you use?’

‘Aye.’ Oxborrow was sullen once more, now the cash had done a vanishing act back into a pocket.

‘You can show me on a map?’

‘’Tain’t on no map. Can show youse for fifty pound.’ He laughed to himself and glugged some more stout.

‘But you got caught.’

‘Not there. I had some old traps for rabbits I went to inspect. Over in woods to the south. Nabbed me straight away.’

‘But they let you go.’

‘They was all for shippin’ me off to some place, but I told them, I saw nothing. Never changed me story. Promised them I’d disappear and say nowt to anyone.’ He laughed again. ‘And also, those woods with the rabbit, they weren’t in the evacuation area. Not really. That’s what I said. An’ I was right and they knew it. So when I buggered off, they weren’t too concerned. They searched the woods, came here once. But they’ve given up now, I reckon.’ Now he gave a low giggle. ‘But I never told ’em the truth.’

Ross leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘Told them what? You did see something? In the woods?’

‘Not a bloody sausage.’

Ross remembered his training.
You have to ask the right question
. ‘But there
was
something?’

He could see the head with its shaggy hair nodding up and down. ‘Aye, was something all right.’

The temptation was to hit him with the bloody cosh again. But he kept his temper. ‘What was it, Jimmy?’

‘Gotta be worth another tenner?’

‘An extra sovereign.’

Oxborrow grunted a reluctant acceptance. ‘It were voices. All around me. In the trees. Took me a while to work out what they was doing.’

The man paused and Ross resisted the urge to grab him by the throat. ‘What are they doing?’

‘They’s making invisible men.’

‘What?’ asked Ross, louder than he intended.

‘I reckon they’s building an army of invisible men.’

FIFTEEN

They hadn’t spoken for some minutes when Watson broke the silence. ‘H. G. Wells.’