The Dead Can Wait Read online

  By the same author:

  Underdogs

  Nine Mil

  Trans Am

  Early One Morning

  The Blue Noon

  Night Crossing

  After Midnight

  The Last Sunrise

  Dying Day

  Empire of Sand

  Death on the Ice

  Signal Red

  Dead Man’s Land

  As Tom Neale:

  Steel Rain

  Copper Kiss

  Silver Skin

  Black Cross

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Robert Ryan 2014

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Robert Ryan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  HB ISBN: 978-1-47110-117-5

  TPB ISBN: 978-1-47110-118-2

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-47110-120-5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  To Gina

  And for her godmother, Christine

  Taten statt Worte,

  Zähne statt Tränen

  ‘Deeds not Words, Teeth not Tears’

  Motto of the Sie Wölfe Special Naval Unit 1916–7

  ‘Which is it to-day?’ I asked. ‘Morphine or cocaine?’ Holmes raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. ‘It is cocaine,’ he said, ‘a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?’

  from The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  THE DEAD CAN WAIT

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE 10–29 JULY 1916

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  PART TWO 11–15 AUGUST 1916

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  PART THREE 16–19 AUGUST 1916

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  PART FOUR 1–16 SEPTEMBER 1916

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  The orderlies carried the six bodies down the steps of the sunken ice house that lay half hidden in the grounds of the Suffolk stately home. The commanding officer of the ‘special’ unit that had displaced the owner and his retinue from the Hall stood at the bottom of the stairs, watching the orderlies manhandle the stiffening forms, grunting with the effort as they laid out the dead on the stone flags. Each of the deceased was tightly swaddled in a waxed groundsheet. They look like latter-day mummies, the colonel thought grimly.

  The officer lit a cigarette. There was a smell of decay in the air that the smoke would help mask. Not from the six bodies – these poor souls had been dead only a matter of hours – but from the ice house itself, part of which had doubled as hanging rooms for the estate’s bag of venison, partridge and pheasant in the years before the outbreak of war. A persistent sharp, gamey tang tainted the atmosphere.

  It would be high summer soon enough, and the colonel didn’t want the dead men adding to the stink before they could be properly examined. Hence he directed the orderlies to move them to the coldest corner of the subterranean chamber. Examined for what, though?

  The colonel tried to keep his jaw set and his face impassive as the orderlies neatened up the row of cadavers, moving the legs so they were absolutely parallel, as if this were some kind of Best Laid Corpse competition. Inside, though, his stomach was a bucket of eels. He had been entrusted with the secret project that was intended to bring a swift resolution to the war, to see it all over by Christmas 1916, to consign the horror of the trenches, the slaughter of the Somme, to a hideous but fading memory. Yet out there, in the grounds of the house, in front of generals and politicians and even minor bloody royalty, this had happened. Six dead, two others reduced to jibbering lunatics.

  Oh, they had managed to cover it up as quickly and smoothly as possible, postponing the test for ‘technical reasons’, and the bodies were only removed once the viewing stands had been cleared of the dignitaries. Still, it was both an acute embarrassment and a serious setback. And a damn sight worse for six dead members of the Machine Gun Corps, he reminded himself. What on earth would he tell the next of kin? ‘Died for King and Country’ would have to do, wrapped in a bow of the usual platitudes.

  The colonel’s job now was to keep a lid on this, to get to the bottom of the deaths before someone decided to stop throwing good money – and men – after bad. To save the project at all cost. He dismissed the orderlies, warning them, on pain of the most severe punishments he could threaten, not to reveal or discuss anything they had seen that day. Exile, imprisonment and disgrace awaited those who betrayed his trust.

  He smoked on, staring down at the shrouded forms for a few minutes. The flickering oil lamps had turned the groundsheets a glossy, sickly yellow-green. The very colour he himself felt. He could taste bile in his mouth. The colonel tossed the remains of his cigarette onto the stone flags and ground it out with the toe of his boot. He did this rather longer than was necessary to extinguish it.

  There was a polite cough behind him and he turned, wondering how long he had had company. It was the unit’s intelligence officer, a deep frown corrugating his youthful brow.

  ‘Yes?’ the colonel demanded.

  ‘Trenton just expired,’ said the young man.

  Seven, then.

  Seven dead men in one afternoon. And then there was one. The colonel muttered a particularly fruity oath. ‘Get him brought down here, quick as you can. Who was with him?’

  ‘The new nurse.’

  ‘Well, make sure she keeps her mouth shut. Let’s be clear: I don’t want anyone outside the main committee to know about this until we are certain what is behind it. I am not letting two years’ worth of work
go to waste because of an unfortunate’ – he looked at the bodies and shivered. The perpetual chill of the ice house was penetrating his bones – ‘accident,’ he finished.

  ‘But how do we find out what happened out there?’ asked the intelligence officer, glancing over his shoulder.

  ‘We have to hope the survivor talks.’ The remaining man was the least affected by whatever malaise had struck the eight. He had settled into being merely comatose. ‘Hitchcock, isn’t it?’ asked the colonel.

  The younger man nodded. ‘And if he doesn’t talk?’

  The colonel considered this for a moment. ‘Then we’ll find someone who will make him.’

  PART ONE

  10–29 JULY 1916

  ONE

  The sound of the bell was an icicle plunged into his heart. At the first few notes, shivers racked his body and his pulse raced like a rodent’s; a prickling sweat broke out, beading his forehead and wetting his palms. A sense of blind panic threatened to overwhelm him as the ringing grew in intensity and then abruptly stopped. The ominous silence that followed was somehow even more threatening.

  The gas alarm.

  Time to mask up. Major John H. Watson of the Royal Army Medical Corps stepped away from the young lad he had been treating up at the regimental aid post and looked down beneath the trestle table. His gas mask case was not there. He had tripped over it too many times. He had hung it outside, he remembered, on the trench wall. If this was a genuine attack, he needed that mask.

  The bell resumed its warning again, seemingly more urgent than before. He heard the bellow of the company sergeant major. ‘Gas! Gas! Gas! Come on, lads, snap to it if you want to keep y’lungs on the inside where they belong.’

  There was only one other patient in the dugout, and he didn’t need a mask. He had breathed his last. The RAMC orderly next to the poor lad, who had been preparing the corpse for burial, was busy struggling with his own rubber and canvas respirator.

  ‘Orderly, when you have done that, get a mask on this man too!’ Watson shouted, indicating his own patient. ‘It’ll be with his rifle. I’m going to fetch my nosebag.’

  Watson stepped out from the low-roofed aid station, his feet slithering for purchase on the slimy and worn duckboards. In front of him, on the opposite side of the trench, was a recess, where metal hooks had been screwed into the supporting timbers, forming a primitive open-air wardrobe. From the hooks hung a motley assortment of capes, caps, helmets and coats, but no gas masks.

  A figure thumped into Watson and he was spun round, scrabbling to retain his footing. The man, a lieutenant, made goggle-eyed by his air purifier, apologized in a muffled voice and indicated that Watson should protect his face. The junior officer pointed upwards, towards the pale blue of the early morning sky. Like a sly fog, the first tendrils of greyish-green gas were creeping over the sandbags of the parapet. Watson felt his eyes prickle and sting.

  Not again. Not chlorine gas again.

  It was too late to run through the trenches hoping for a spare mask, so he turned to take whatever shelter the aid station could offer. As he did so, his left foot slipped off the duckboards. It plunged into the thick slime of the trench mud, a glutinous mass that had been festering for nigh on two years. It clasped his ankle and held him firm.

  He uttered a crude curse, a bad habit he had picked up from the men. He tried to lift his foot free, but the grip only tightened and the suction pulled his leg deeper into the mire. He would have to lose the boot, a precious Trench Master, ten guineas the pair. Don’t worry about that now, man. Pull! But the pressure of the ooze was too great to allow him even to wiggle his toes. He held his knee and yanked, but to no avail. The greedy sludge that had taken so many men had him tight.

  The gas was rolling down the sides of the trench now, viscous and evil. The gas alarm bell sounded once again and didn’t stop this time. Attack in progress. All across the front a cacophony of sirens, hooters, whistles and rattles joined in the warning. Don’t die here, not like this. But by now he was holding onto the wall, watching the black filth creep further up his trapped leg, his desperate fingers leaving grooves on the rotten wood as he sought purchase.

  He looked around for assistance, but every sensible soldier was taking cover. ‘Help!’ he yelled. The only answer was an imagined snide hiss from the poison drifting towards him. Watson closed his eyes, held his breath, and waited for the vapour to do its worst.

  ‘Major Watson!’

  The strident tones of the familiar and distinctly female voice snapped him from his reverie. He opened his eyes. Before him was the coal-grimed window of his surgery and, beyond that, Queen Anne Street, its features blanketed by an eerily unseasonal fog, the traffic reduced to a passing parade of ghostly silhouettes. He wasn’t at the front. He hadn’t seen, or smelled, a trench for months. Mud was no longer his constant companion and intractable enemy. It was another waking dream of the sort that had haunted him since his return from France.

  He turned to Mrs Hobbs, his housekeeper, standing in the doorway to the hall, her face drawn even tighter than her bun.

  ‘Major Watson, did you not hear the telephone?’

  The telephone. Not a gas alarm.

  She indicated over her shoulder to where the phone sat on its dedicated walnut telephonic table from Heal’s. It was a piece of furniture that Mrs Hobbs had insisted was the only proper platform for the new instrument. Not that she actually liked using it herself; they had an agreement that Watson would normally pick up the receiver.

  ‘No, I didn’t. My apologies, Mrs Hobbs. Who was it?’

  ‘Mr Holmes.’ She said this with studied neutrality.

  What, again? Watson looked at the wall clock. It was three in the afternoon and already Holmes had telephoned him four – perhaps even five – times that day, on each occasion repeating some trivial news about having a new water tank fitted at his cottage or some such. Watson had to admit that, to his shame and chagrin, he had taken to drifting off while his friend rattled on about such inconsequential trivia. Especially if it involved bees.

  ‘Is he still on the line?’ Watson asked.

  ‘I expect so. He said it was important. He did sound agitated, sir.’

  It was always important. And he was always agitated. Watson glanced outside at the lazily eddying wall of fog, the phantom stench of chlorine still prickling his nose. The senses were no longer to be trusted these days. Neither, sadly, could his old companion be relied upon to make sense.

  ‘If you would be so kind as to tell him I’m with a patient.’

  Mrs Hobbs pursed her lips at the thought of uttering an untruth, and closed the door after her.

  Watson sat down in his chair and opened the drawer containing a tin of Dr Hammond’s Nerve and Brain Tablets, which the salesman had assured him cured men’s ‘special diseases’ arising from war service. He replaced the tin unopened, lit a cigarette and felt the friendly smoke calm him. His statement to Mrs Hobbs had not been a total lie. He did have a patient for company. Himself.

  A nagging little voice was hammering away inside, though, even as he enjoyed the tobacco warming his lungs. It was that Holmes telephone call. It was like the Retired Detective Who Cried Wolf.

  What if one day it really was something important?

  TWO

  Miss Nora Pillbody had cycled for a good two miles through the Suffolk countryside before she realized exactly what had been niggling at her.

  The day had begun like any normal school-day morning. After a breakfast of porridge, she had loaded her basket with the work she had marked and corrected overnight, and set off from her cottage in plenty of time to take registration. As always, she wondered what excuses would deplete her class that morning – ‘So-and-so isn’t here, miss, because he needs to help with sheep shearing/haymaking/de-horning the calves/irrigating the potatoes.’ There was always something happening on the land that took priority over mere learning.

  Once out of the dead-end lane that housed her cottage, her route took
her past Cyril Jefford’s farm, skirted Marsham Wood, with its shy herd of roe deer, in a long, lazy loop, before she took the old drovers’ track that pierced the Morlands’ property. This cut a good half-mile off the journey, even if it was a bone-rattling surface, baked dry by the early summer sun. The Morlands had eight children, including three in her school class. With two older boys already in the army and one just eligible for conscription, it was a nervous time for the family.

  Miss Pillbody ducked through the shifting, pointillist clouds of midges blocking her way and found time to admire a flash of iridescent green dragonfly, and a Red Admiral warming its spread wings on a fence post. A sparrowhawk hovered expectantly above a corn-field, beady-eyed for potential prey.

  She was a few hundred yards from the low, flint-built school-house when it hit her what had been amiss throughout that whole morning’s ride. The children. There hadn’t been any. Her ears had been full of the calls of skylarks and the rougher cadences of the restless crows, underpinned by the creaking and cracking of the wheat and the buzz of passing bees, but not the usual babble of conversation as her pupils made their way to her schoolhouse.

  She had not had to stop to tell Freddie Cox to stop flicking Ben Stone’s ear, or coax poor, cleft-lipped Sidney Drayton down from a tree as he indulged in his favourite pastime: spotting and logging the planes taking off and landing at the RFC aerodrome. Or chivy along the Branton sisters, three pretty, startlingly blonde siblings, a year between them in age, always with arms linked as if they were a single child facing the world. With their vile father, mind, it wasn’t surprising they needed a united front. Or what about lonely little Victoria Hanson, trudging down the road, feet dragging, trailing an air of melancholy behind her, all big sighs and even bigger eyes that appeared to be perpetually on the brink of leaking?

  Where had all the children gone?

  She felt a curdling in her stomach as if she had eaten something unpleasant, and her head swam with a sensation akin to vertigo. She had last felt this when the telegram about Arnold, her brother, had arrived. Her mother had passed the brown envelope to Miss Pillbody and she had handed it back, unwilling to be the first to read the news. In the end, they had opened it – and wept – in unison.