The Dead Can Wait (19 page)

Thankfully, the place reeked of Sanitas and carbolic, rather than bird droppings and feathers, and was dominated by a well-scrubbed table and two high-backed leather armchairs, taken from the house, which could easily be sterilized, and a variety of cupboards holding medical supplies.

The men sat at the far end of the aviary, smoking as they waited to be called one by one for treatment. A barracks hut had been side-swiped by high explosive, although most of the damage had been done by the bomb’s compression wave rather than the blast. There were ringing ears and bleeding noses and concussion, and the worst damage was two broken fingers and a cracked rib. A plywood structure had been hit by an incendiary – that was what Watson had seen sending blazing sparks skyward from his window – but it had been empty. There had been smoke inhalation and singed hair and skin from those who’d battled the blaze, but not much more.

Then, as they were scrubbing down, Booth had appeared, his face vexed and concerned. Mrs Gregson and Watson were busy cleaning instruments and disposing of soiled cloths. ‘I thought that was it. We have four more.’

‘Bring them in,’ said Watson.

‘It’s not worth it. I mean, there is nothing you can do for them. They’re dead.’

‘You’re certain?’ Watson had witnessed battlefield resurrections before.

‘Oh, yes. Two of them have no . . . there is extensive damage from explosives. You don’t need to be a doctor.’

‘You’ll need a death certificate,’ said Mrs Gregson, rinsing her hands in diluted Lysol.

‘I am sure that can wait,’ Booth said. He looked at his watch. ‘Let’s get some sleep. We can assess the damage to the estate more easily in the daylight.’

‘Where are the bodies?’ asked Watson.

‘In our morgue. The ice house.’ He pointed to the eastern side of the Hall. ‘Next to the lake. We have kept the other seven in there too. It’s getting rather crowded.’

‘Do you think the Germans know?’ asked Watson. ‘Know what you are doing here? Is that why you were raided?’

Booth slumped at the very thought. ‘Christ, I hope not. I’m telling myself it was just blind luck on their part. And bad luck for them they didn’t do more damage. Good night, Major, Mrs Gregson. As I said, we’ll know more in daylight. See you at breakfast, Major Watson.’

After he had left, Watson said, ‘Mrs Gregson, what was it you were going to tell me upstairs? Before Booth arrived.’

‘That island they put me on,’ said Mrs Gregson. ‘It’s called Foulness.’

It rang a vague bell, but no more. ‘I’m not familiar with it.’

‘There’s no reason why you should be. I can’t think of any reason why one would visit or even seek it out on a map. But . . .’ She hesitated.

‘What?’

A deep breath. ‘I can’t be certain, you understand. I was only on Foulness for forty-eight hours. And I have only ever seen him from a distance, that time when we docked at Folkestone. But I am rather sure I saw Mr Holmes there, too far away to speak to. But he is very distinctive. He looks just like the drawings of him in the
Strand
. A little stooped, perhaps . . .’

‘Indeed.’ Watson’s pulse quickened. ‘And this island is where?’

‘Foulness? At the mouth of the Thames. In the North Sea.’

Holmes’s prison. Now it had a name.

TWENTY-THREE

Ross had barely managed to strip off his soiled clothes and wash his face when there came a rapping at the door of his cottage.
Who could it be, at this hour?
He pulled on a robe and went to answer it, scooping up his pistol as he went. He peered out into the darkness and recognized the pale face of Miss Pillbody.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘The bombing has stopped now—’

‘I know the bloody bombing stopped. I was right under it. Come to my cottage, in by the back way. Don’t worry, I’ve taken care of everything.’

‘What?’ He could hardly contain his incredulity at what he was hearing. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Ten minutes.’

He was exhausted and part of him wanted to crawl upstairs and fall asleep on top of the hideous pink candlewick cover on his bed. But that desire was trumped by wanting to know what little Miss Pillbody was up to. So after cleaning off the last of the mud and blood, he dutifully tiptoed round to her house.

She, too, had scrubbed herself and her skin shone in the lamplight. He was amazed by the change in her. Before she had been pretty but docile. Now she looked animated, alive and alert, as if she was on some kind of stimulant. She was in clean underwear, but there was no sign of bashfulness as she told him she would fetch a robe from upstairs.

‘There’s some disgusting sherry in that cupboard,’ she said, ‘and glasses on the shelf above. I’ll have a large one.’

So would he, he decided.

As he waited for her to finish upstairs, he looked around the cottage, seeing it with fresh eyes. Now he realized how artificial it all was. It was the room one would expect a near-spinster to have, full of hand-stitched cushions and tablecloths, twee porcelain figurines and stiff family portraits, those fiddly watercolours of village scenes and local wildlife, not to mention her collection of strange, rather unsettling dolls. It was a construct, as phoney as the whole Miss Pillbody identity.

‘Right,’ she announced as she came downstairs, belting a dressing gown. ‘You have questions.’

Ross couldn’t help but hoot at this. ‘Questions? I have hundreds. Who the hell are you?’

‘You first.’

‘Not a chance. It was you in the woods, then?’ he asked.

She nodded, and he shook his head in amazement. ‘I’ll be blowed. I think you owe me an explanation, Miss Pillbody.’

‘All right,’ she said, with a ghost of a smile at his incredulity. ‘My name is Brandt. Ilse Brandt. I am from Koblenz. But my father was a naval attaché with the German Embassy in London and I was educated here in England for two periods of three years each. I also went to a Swiss finishing school with many English girls. Hence my accent.’

‘But the whole story of you, your dead brother, the parents in Chichester. It was so convincing, so heartfelt—’

She frowned at him. ‘Do I have to tell you that this job requires you to live the role? You think it, so you believe it, and if you believe it then so will they. One doesn’t play a part, one
becomes
that part. Tomorrow morning I will be Miss Pillbody again, with Mama and Papa in Chichester, and a tragically killed brother called Arnold. Ilse will have gone.’

‘But what were you doing in the forest?’

‘I am with N-A.
Nachrichten-Abteilung,
German naval intelligence. I am supposing your organization is attached to the army?’

He nodded.

‘And now I hear the air force has its own intelligence branch and von Kuhlmann of the Foreign Ministry has his own unit. And do they talk to each other?’ She picked up her sherry and drank. ‘Do they hell. Too many cooks.’

‘So you aren’t here for Elveden?’

‘I am here for Thetford aerodrome. To check air movements and aircraft types, which was easy when I had little boys like Sidney Drayton to do it for me. It is from there they are striking at the Zeppelins, with new planes, new bullets. That raid was intended to put the aerodrome out of action. My mission was to place lights that pinpointed the direction of the field. Looks like something went wrong.’

‘That still doesn’t explain how you ended up in the forest.’

‘I followed you.’ More sherry. ‘I thought you were a British spy on my tail. Trying to get close. It was pathetically easy to shadow you, you know. And I thought you and that arrogant Booth were cooking up something about me on the beach that day. I assumed it was entrapment, some way of flushing me out. But when I saw you heading for the estate, I realized there was another explanation, as unlikely as it sounded. But the more I considered it, the more it seemed a compelling explanation for you being here. You are an agent of Germany, too. Correct?’

Ross studied his glass and his face reddened slightly under her gaze. ‘Well, yes. And Booth
is
suspicious of me.’

‘
I
was suspicious of you. So when I followed you from the cottage, I thought you were going to track my lights and extinguish them. Instead you went towards Elveden . . . There was nothing I could do here anyway, except risk being bombed, so I decided to stick with you.’

‘I’m glad you did. But aren’t the N-A curious about what is going on in that estate?’

‘Curious, yes. I have reported it, several times. But they suspect it is an army, not a naval concern. They are far more worried about Zeppelin losses – there is talk of handing over the bombing to the air force. The High Command does not want that. But, once Thetford is out of commission, I am ordered to take a look at Elveden. I think they thought they could use it as a bargaining chip with the army.’

‘Didn’t that strike you as odd? That they wouldn’t want to know about what is happening in the estate. Careless, to say the least.’

‘I have considered another explanation.’

‘What’s that?’

‘They already have a spy in there.’

‘The navy?’ he asked.

‘It is widely accepted that the
Nachrichten-Abteilung
is the best intelligence unit in Germany.’

He didn’t rise to the bait. It was an infuriating thought, though, this duplication of responsibilities. ‘And what will you do now?’

‘Until I receive orders about a new raid I shall be Miss Pillbody. Spinster of this parish.’

‘But is Ilse married?’

She hesitated before admitting the truth. ‘Ilse was married to a Zeppelin captain who died last year doing his duty, bombing British minelayers in the North Sea.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘Yes, me too.’ It was said matter-of-factly, as if she had shed every tear she was going to over her husband.

‘It must have been difficult,’ he offered.

‘Not for long. Before the war I was a member of the radical arm of the
Deutscher Verein für Frauenstimmrecht.’

He gave a low whistle. Those girls made British suffragettes look like wet nurses.

‘That taught me the realities of sacrifice. And, afterwards, after Willi’s death, I offered to help the service and was trained at Admiral Hersch’s
Sie Wölfe
camp in Saxony.’

‘I’ve not heard of it,’ Ross admitted.

‘Of course you haven’t. It is a unit of young women whose husbands have given their lives for Germany. The She Wolves are designed for infiltration behind enemy lines as nurses, housewives, spinsters, showgirls and schoolteachers. We are a steel fist in a lace glove. Our motto is:
Taten statt Worte, Zähne statt Tränen.’

Deeds not Words, Teeth not tears,
he translated.

‘You have no doubt wondered how I could track you and how I could dispose of the bodies with unfeminine impunity? One of Hersch’s passing-out tests is the hunting down of live targets. In my case, one of the girls I shared a dormitory with who hadn’t quite come up to scratch.’

‘What?’ He was genuinely shocked.

‘Poor Magda couldn’t be allowed to go back into the real world, not with what she knew. I know it sounds cruel, but we She Wolves have had any unnecessary emotion or squeamishness purged from us.’

Ross was beginning to feel a sense of relief that he hadn’t tried to seduce Miss Pillbody just for the hell of it. It would be like mating with a scorpion. ‘I see.’

‘Now, your turn.’

So he told her about his South African background, the adoption of the Dirk Alberts identity and then the murder of Bradley Ross to acquire a better cover story. When he had finished he said, ‘I reckon Miss Pillbody’s is a dull life for a She Wolf. Why don’t you help me? With penetrating the secret of Elveden?’

She drained her sherry and considered this. He was right. She was looking forward to seeing the last of Miss Pillbody. ‘All right. As long as it does not compromise my mission or put any N-A agent in there at risk.’

‘Thank you. Those soldiers, the ones tonight . . .’

‘What about them?’ she asked, hoping he wasn’t going to display a queasy sentimentality about the killing of enemy combatants. He hadn’t had the benefit of a Hersch indoctrination.

‘How did you take care of them?’

‘I used grenades to mask the wounds. They will look like they were killed in the Zeppelin raid.’

‘Grenades?’ he repeated, dumbfounded.

‘Mills bombs.’

‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ he said.

‘Fucking believe it,’ Miss Pillbody said, unfazed by his crude language. ‘I told you the N-A was the best intelligence service. And that the
Sie Wölfe
are trained for all eventualities and contingencies.’

‘Do you think they’ll be able to tell?’

‘Tell what? That we used grenades to disguise the bullet and knife wounds?’ She shook her head. ‘I doubt it.’ She finished her sherry with a shudder. ‘Not unless they have got a very good detective up there.’

TWENTY-FOUR

Coyle awoke with a start, not entirely sure where he was. It took a few seconds as the pieces of the last few days fell together and he sorted dream from reality. There had been a bombing raid. That was part of real life. With Fred Sutton, the landlord, his family and the one other guest at The Plough, he had gone outside and watched the glow from the estate, listening to the whump of high explosives and the lighter whoosh of the incendiaries. There was no sign of the culprit, hidden well above the cloud base, but Sutton had sworn he had heard British planes – night hunters, as they called them – go up some time earlier from the Thetford aerodrome.

Coyle rolled out of bed and washed his face and upper body in the cold water he had poured into the enamel bowl in the dresser. When the events finally slotted together, he wished they hadn’t. With Harry gone, he felt empty inside. All the passion he had been working up for going back to Ireland had disappeared. It would wait until he had sorted out why his best friend had been gunned down in the streets of London.

He dressed slowly, thinking about the best approach for tracking Harry’s murderers as he did so. There were people in London he could stamp on to tell him who had been hired to do what. They wouldn’t want to talk. Normally he wouldn’t try to make them. It was a sort of unwritten code. But that was gone now. No rules. No English idea of fair play. Just one very pissed-off Irishman with a big gun.