A Study in Murder, page 9
‘This is outrageous. I had heard this was the worst camp in Germany, but . . .’ Watson was momentarily lost for words.
‘Not the worst exactly, although it has its difficulties, God knows. It’s simply the most profitable. For the Germans, that is. All Red Cross and personal parcels are searched and any suspicious items that might be used for an escape confiscated. Especially food. Although, oddly, you can often buy the items back later.’
Watson said nothing, simply seething within.
‘And if you object to these arrangements? There are solitary cells – Stubby, as we call it – in the basement of the big house, where Mad Bill lives and the guards are billeted. Now, they really are pretty grim and he uses them at the drop of a hat. He didn’t appear on his balcony this morning, but he often does, perhaps eating a plate of sausages and drinking a brandy, just to taunt us. Our food’s abysmal, needless to say. In fact, it probably is the worst of any Allied camp in Germany. I hope you like soup. Make friends with Hugh Peacock in your hut. Manages to have a bloody feast most days. Must be costing him a fortune. Questions?’
‘Red Cross visits?’
‘You’ve seen the typhus signs? On the road?’
Watson nodded.
‘It doesn’t refer to us. Well, not always; we’ve had some cases in the past. Hence the isolation ward.’ He pointed to the lone hut in the separate compound. ‘But the worst outbreaks are at the Russian camp over the ridge there.’ He was talking about a jagged, treeless piece of skyline. ‘The Red Cross are as terrified of typhus as the Hun, so Mad Bill makes sure they think it’s endemic in here. Which means their visits are . . . fleeting, shall we say. It’s on the C list inspection roster – which means hardly ever.’
‘There’s method in this Kügel’s madness, then.’
‘Oh, yes. He’ll probably end the war a rich man. We’ll just end it thin. If we are lucky. It gets damned cold here. Careless men lose fingers and toes. This is a mild spell, believe me. When that wind comes from the east, the stoves in the huts can barely cope. Get some sweaters sent over or start knitting. Preferably both.’
‘How long have you been here, sir?’
A rueful grin spread across his face. ‘Me? Two years. Before that, various camps . . . well, I got nabbed in 1914. Haven’t seen much of the war, to be honest. Just a lot of fences.’
They paused, looking through the wire across at the cluster of crosses that constituted the graveyard. ‘He’s in there? Sayer?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am going to lodge a complaint.’
‘Write it and save it. In fact, hide it from prying eyes. Chickens will come home to roost eventually. But don’t get yourself marked as a troublemaker. You’ve seen Pickering, I know. And Archer? Eyes like Rasputin? Obsessed with the dead.’
Watson recalled the man who had stared at him at Appell. ‘I think so.’
‘Both of them were subjected to harassment. Solitary confinement, adulterated rations, repeated searches, sleep deprivation. Both are damaged up here.’ Critchley tapped his temple. ‘Both had threatened to reveal the profiteering, you see. But who is going to give any credence to their words now? One has an imaginary friend and the other talks to the dead.’
‘This du Barry Pickering was talking about – he’s imaginary?’
‘Oh, as good as. He was some school friend of his. Blown to bits, apparently, before his very eyes.’ He sighed. ‘Still, you’ll find this hard to believe, but it could be worse. We could be digging the mines, for one. The mountains out there are worked hard.’
‘What do they mine for?’ asked Watson.
‘Gold, silver, iron ore. Whole mountain riddled with shafts. If anyone did get over the wire they’d probably end up at the bottom of some hole with a broken neck.’ He shivered, apparently shaking off a feeling of melancholy, and was much brighter when he spoke again. ‘And look, it’s not all gloom. We have a theatre group. An orchestra. Do you play?’ Watson shook his head. ‘Pity. Short of brass. There’s a magazine, Harz and Minds. Do you write or draw?’
‘I have been known to put pen to paper.’
‘Not poetry, I hope.’ Critchley flashed that apologetic grin again. ‘Over-bloody-whelmed with poets.’
‘No, short stories.’
‘Good man. Always willing to consider submissions – I’m the editor, by the way. No promises, though. Got some professional scribblers in the ranks, so standard is high. I turn down ten for every one published.’
Watson discovered he had lost the feeling in the toes of his right foot and continued with the walk to try to get the circulation moving. ‘Sir, about my boots . . . I have been the victim of a substitution.’
Critchley glanced down at Watson’s feet. ‘Hmm. Dirty prank.’
It was, in Watson’s eyes, more than a prank. ‘I know the man who has them. Chap who looked like he was about to go on at the Gaiety. Oiled hair, no cap—’
‘Henry Lincoln-Chance. Link, to his friends.’
‘I’d like them back,’ said Watson, wriggling his chilled toes.
‘That might be tricky.’
‘Why? I thought you were senior in the camp?’
‘Only officially,’ Critchley said with some regret. ‘In reality, Link and his chummies wield significant . . . shall we say, influence.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Oh, they are the Escape Committee.’
SIXTEEN
After a breakfast of tongue, bread, marmalade and tea in Critchley’s office, Watson exchanged some of his marks for camp currency and then ordered fresh funds from Cox & Co. on the Charing Cross Road. From the tin room he purchased a black book – the price had risen to three camp marks – and a pencil, plus a packet of his own biscuits.
He kept an eye out for his Trenchmasters and their new owner, but the snow returned with renewed vigour and he made his way back to his own hut without spotting the thief. He had agreed with Critchley that he would run surgeries for patients twice daily, at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., starting the next day. Apparently for serious cases a German doctor could be summoned, and there was a hospital some ten miles away, but Mad Bill was loath to use it.
And what of this three-man Escape Committee, he asked. What use was one in an escape-proof camp? But Critchley told him it was a matter of morale, of showing they hadn’t caved in completely. Watson supposed he was right, but the matter of his boots still grated. He would have to put this Link right at the first opportunity.
As he entered the hut he shook off the snow from his shoulders and was greeted by a fug of woodsmoke and unwashed bodies. Showers, apparently, were available only on Fridays. It was Thursday. The volume of conversation dipped momentarily, and the soldiers, airmen and couple of naval officers that made up Hut 7 went back to their cards, chess, letters, or just their own thoughts.
Watson could feel the suspicion clouding the air. He walked through the barracks, nodding to anyone who caught his eye, feeling the stares at his back. Was it Von Bork who had spread the lie of him being a ‘Hun lover’ in their midst? If so, it was a very clever turn of the screw.
He stepped inside his surgery and pulled the curtain across, aware of a drop in temperature as he did so. Perhaps, Watson mused, he could find a way of securing his own stove. After all, patients often had to undress; it would help if the room were heated. He took off his greatcoat and the hobnails, changing to two pairs of dry socks to keep his damp feet warm.
Watson sat on the bed, put his elbows on his knees and let out a long, ululating sigh. Despair was only a heartbeat away, he knew. Everything he held dear was further from him than ever. Furthermore, he seemed to have been pitched into a camp right out of Edward Lear. The land where the bong tree grows, he thought glumly.
There was a sudden rise in the volume of conversation from next door. Watson, not paying much attention, caught only snatches.
‘. . . in there.’
‘I’m ill, I tell you.’
‘Bloody traitor.’
‘. . . fuck you.’
The curtain was flung back and the young lieutenant from the parade ground, with his distinctive mop of unruly brown hair and staring eyes, was standing before him, hopping from foot to foot. Archer, Watson recalled from his conversation with Critchley.
Watson pulled himself upright. ‘Yes? Can I help?’
The man nodded vigorously. ‘It’s my heart. Palpitations, Doctor.’
‘Major,’ Watson said.
‘Sir.’
‘Take a seat.’
Conversation had resumed in the rest of the barracks and the newcomer seemed to relax. Watson opened a page in his notebook.
‘Name?’
‘Archer, sir.’
‘What’s your unit?’
‘The 4th Dragoon Guards, sir.’
‘Age?’
‘Twenty-four, sir.’
Looks older, Watson wrote next to it.
‘Height?’
‘Six foot, give or take.’
‘Hop on those scales for me, will you?’
Watson peered over. Eight and a half stone. ‘How long have you been a prisoner, Archer?’
‘Eighteen months, sir.’
‘Tell me about these palpitations.’
‘Well, they start whenever I try to go to sleep. No matter where I lie I can hear my heart. Thump, thump thump. Loud in my ears. Then it goes all . . . peculiar.’
‘Where are you from, Archer?’
‘Colchester.’
‘You went to the Royal Grammar?’
‘I did, yes.’
‘Field commission?’
‘Indeed.’
Temporary gentleman, he wrote, even though he despised the phrase. Grammar school boys from the ranks didn’t start being seen as officer material until the cream of the public schools fell to German machine guns, snipers and shells. Then they were allowed above their station in life. But only with visiting rights.
It sounded like an anxiety attack to Watson. Many of his shell shock patients had complained of an over-loud heartbeat. He found prescribing any tablet, from quinine sulphate to liver, did the trick. All they needed was the illusion of treatment to quell whatever fears were causing the arrhythmia or tachycardia.
‘Drink much tea? Coffee? Or what passes for them here?’
The man shook his head. ‘It’s running a bit fast now. Want to have a listen?’
‘Very well, slip your shirt off.’
Watson fetched the rather perished stethoscope he had found in one of the drawers and placed it in his ears. When he turned, Archer had pulled up his shirt and vest with one hand. A finger of the other was pressed against his lips.
But that wasn’t what caused Watson to start. There was something written in ink across his chest.
The Dead talk to me.
When Watson went to speak, Archer shook his head. He turned around and pulled up the rear of his shirt. Written on his back was: The rec hut. After curfew. Come alone.
Come alone? Who on earth would he bring? He was a pariah in this place.
There was an explosion of yelling from the next room and the sounds of a scuffle. Men began shouting encouragement to the combatants. There came the crash of chairs overturning.
Taking advantage of the racket Archer stepped in close. ‘I know who you are, Major, or should I say Doctor, Watson. I know you like a mystery. Here.’
From his top pocket the man took two pieces of paper, both folded into tiny squares.
‘I’ll explain tonight.’ Then, as the hubbub in the hut subsided, with more volume: ‘Thank you, Major, I will.’
Watson, though, had spotted something. He grabbed the man’s right wrist and turned it over. There were scars, some white and fibrous, of an age, but others still raw and fresh. The left wrist was the same.
Archer leaned in and whispered. ‘I will explain tonight. It is not what it seems.’
‘It seems you are a very clumsy suicide.’
‘It’s not that,’ he hissed.
Archer pulled down his shirt and vest, tucked them in and, with a rather insubordinate wink, he was gone.
Watson found himself writing in his book the phrase written across the man’s chest.
The Dead talk to me.
He supposed that Archer meant through spiritualism of some description. He had acquaintances – including writers and scientists – who believed in such things as the afterlife and being able to access the spirit world. Some even accepted the existence of fairies. Holmes, the rationalist, never countenanced such things – he believed only what his senses told him; Watson, as a medical man, considered the world beyond this one outside his remit. But he knew such thoughts gave comfort to the millions of bereaved created by this war. He rarely sought to dissuade patients when they professed the belief that a son or husband was somehow ‘with’ them. The devastated needed all the comfort they could get, even if it was with, like Pickering, an imaginary friend.
He had even heard of accusations from beyond the grave, accusations of murder from the supposed victim, transmitted through a ‘sensitive’. But none that had stood up to scientific rigour. No, he suspected this was another inmate driven by incarceration to seek comfort in the outlands of the human soul. Hadn’t Critchley said Archer had been subjected to a regime of harassment?
And what of the marks on the wrist? They were relatively shallow cuts, by the look of them. Hesitation strokes, they were known as, when a suicide makes some tentative slashes, either hoping to be discovered before he did more serious damage or while he summoned up the courage for the surprisingly deep incisions needed to make a human being bleed out from the ulnar artery.
He took the squares of paper that Archer had given him and unfolded them. Both contained signatures, executed in a rather jerky hand, although that was all the pair had in common. He would have sworn they had different authors. One said: ‘Lieutenant George Threadglass’; the other: ‘Captain Martin Brevette’. Watson knew of a family called Brevette that lived in Oxford. They had made their fortune as merchants, trading woad from the city of Toulouse, before indigo became the blue dye of choice. But by then they had invested wisely in other businesses. Could this Brevette be one of them?
Watson folded the papers and slotted them between the pages of his notebook. Would he go to the rec room to clear this little puzzle up? He laughed to himself. Damn the man, he knew who he was, knew he was cursed with a curiosity. Presumably it was easy enough to cross to this recreation room without being seen. Yes, he would go. But that was some hours away. It wouldn’t do to dwell when he didn’t have all the facts before him.
He heard the peal of laughter from beyond his makeshift curtain and suddenly felt very alone and bereft. He found himself wishing for that phantom voice in his head, which surely was only one step removed from Pickering’s delusion. He had to chuckle to himself. Well, if that voice wouldn’t come, he could conjure it up. He had promised Critchley a story. What better way to escape the grim confines of the camp than to slip back in time, to the clack of horses’ hoofs and the shouts of costermongers and paperboys? He laid what was per page probably the world’s most expensive notebook on the desk, took up his pencil and began to write the story he had started telling to the unfortunate Hanson back in the woods near Krefeld.
SEVENTEEN
Sitting at the desk, Watson began to write, slowly at first but with gathering confidence that he could still find his old style and pace. It was almost a physical exhilaration when he did, as if he had rediscovered his rugger legs and lungs.
It was April 1890 (and not 1892 as some accounts would have it), as the debilitating bone-chill of a lengthy winter had finally begun to relax its grip on the metropolis, when my friend Sherlock Holmes turned his attention to what the daily Press were calling The Rugby Mystery and some others The Girl and the Gold Watches. Holmes had recently completed his investigation into a most gruesome business, involving jealousy and murder. The solution to the case had put him in a rather sombre mood. ‘What is the meaning of it, Watson?’ he had exclaimed, not for the first time. Peering into the darkest corners of the human soul often caused him to recoil in revulsion at the depravity of his fellow man. ‘What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever?’
By the time he put the pen down from between aching fingers, two hours had passed in blissful immersion elsewhere and Watson swore he could feel the heat of the Baker Street fire, when the curtain was thrust back.
‘Emergency Appell,’ said Parsons, before adding, ‘Sir.’
Watson looked out of his window. Snow was falling in large flakes now, an impenetrable wall. ‘In this?’
Parsons’ pockmarked face stretched into a grin. ‘The colder and wetter the better for Mad Bill.’
Watson pulled on the unfortunate boots and his greatcoat and went into the main section of the hut, where he found the other men doing likewise, all grumbling loudly.
‘Bastard. What about lunch?’
‘That bloody bread? That’s not lunch.’ ‘What you having for luncheon, Cocky?’
‘I thought I might have grouse.’ This from a captain, who must be Hugh Peacock, the bon viveur that Critchley had told him about. He was certainly plumper than the average inmate, dark-haired, baby-faced, neat moustache as black as coal. His boots, too, Watson noted with envy, were a cut above, knee-high and fur-lined.
‘Come on, gentlemen, hurry along.’ It was the one-armed Feldwebel, Brünning. ‘Do not keep the commandant waiting. Or it’ll be Stubby for you.’
