The Sign of Fear Read online

  ‘Just a thought. If we’re not bombing London . . .’

  ‘And we’re not.’

  ‘Then who is?’

  SEVENTEEN

  The young man in bed sixteen of Gordon Ward in Millbank Hospital was going to die. He had struggled against the inevitable for close to forty-eight hours, but now his internal organs had started to fail one by one. It was close to three in the morning. They were about to enter the dying hours, when men breathed their last.

  Watson had come in to take a shift once the All Clear had sounded, meeting and processing three ambulance trains at Victoria. It had again reminded him that there was no news, one way or another, of Nurse Jennings. He had sent an express messenger to Mycroft’s club, asking if he had made any progress and to get in touch as soon as he had anything to report. It would doubtless irritate the old grouch, but it might also stir him into action.

  There were a hundred and three men – soon to be a hundred and two – on Gordon Ward, lined up in four rows, the tight, starched sheets tucked up to their chins, the fabric glowing white in the dim electric bulbs that hung above each bed. The ghostly figures of nurses and VADs were flitting about in the gloom, only seen clearly in the pool of light when they leaned over a patient to check a dressing or a temperature. No wonder the soldiers thought of them as angels, he thought, the way they seemed to materialize with drinks, bandages, medicines, a few kind words, and then melt away.

  A groan escaped his patient’s lips. Major Watson put his hand on the man’s forehead. It was hot and slippery. A vein was pulsing in the temple, like the heartbeat of a small creature that had managed to burrow under the skin. The soldier moaned slightly and licked his lips. Watson signalled to the VAD who was reading, her voice barely above the sound of her breathing, a few beds along. She put down the book of poetry and came across.

  ‘Yes, Major?’

  ‘Can you spend some time with Corporal Henning here? A cold compress, please. And he might like his lips moistened.’

  The young lady nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘And perhaps check which padre is on duty and warn him he might have some trade within the hour.’

  ‘Oh.’ She glanced at the lad. ‘Oh, what a shame.’

  It sounded a trite response, but he knew it wasn’t meant to be. There wasn’t enough time in the day to mourn properly all those who passed away. After weeks, months, years of death, that was all it seemed. Just another shame. As she turned to go, Watson put a hand on her arm. When she turned back he reached out and turned her face to the dangling bulb. ‘You have an eye infection.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Even in the unreliable light from an electric filament, he could see her skin was pale and a cluster of spots had colonized one side of her mouth. He took a hand and ran his thumb over a cracked and fissured palm that felt more like hide than flesh. He felt a slight resistance from her, as if she mistrusted his motives.

  ‘How long has your eye been like that?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. More than a week.’

  ‘Time off?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t get much.’ She tugged at a stray lock of hair. ‘And we can’t be seen with doctors, anyway.’

  ‘I’m not asking you out for tea and a dance, miss,’ he snapped. ‘I’m asking you if you’ve had any rest. You seem run down. And you have the making of a sty. When did you last have a day off?’

  The VAD indicated the rows of iron bedsteads and the snoring, wheezing, coughing men in them. ‘They don’t get a day off from this, do they?’

  ‘No, but you must. Or I’ll have a word with Sister.’

  A flash of fear. ‘No. Don’t do that.’

  ‘Then promise me you’ll ask her yourself.’ Watson made a note to follow up with the ward sister, who might resent his interference in her rosters, but who should have noticed she had an exhausted volunteer on her hands.

  ‘I will, sir. And thank you.’ The VAD hesitated.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this, sir . . .’

  ‘Well, there is only one way to find out, isn’t there?’ he said, more brusquely than intended. ‘And that’s if you say it.’

  The young woman gathered up her nerve. ‘You look like you could use a good night’s sleep, too, sir.’

  He kept his features neutral for a moment and he could see in her face she thought she had gone too far. But he gave her a reassuring smile. ‘I expect I do, miss. I expect I do.’

  She looked over his shoulder at around the same time he heard the irregular slap of leather on wood. He turned to see Captain Trenchard limping down the aisle between the beds as fast as his disability would allow. The set of his features told Watson that something was amiss.

  ‘Off you go now. Do what I said,’ he instructed, and the VAD scuttled away. ‘What is it, Captain?’

  Trenchard waited while he caught his breath. ‘An Inspector George Bullimore has been trying to get hold of you. Since midnight, he says. Sounded very impatient.’

  ‘Did he?’ Watson checked his Wilsdorf & Davis wristwatch. Gone three now. ‘What does he want at this hour?’

  ‘He wants you to come to Charing Cross Hospital immediately. I have a car outside.’

  ‘Charing Cross? Why?’ Watson glanced over at the dying man, feeling to leave him in his last minutes would be a betrayal. Still, that young VAD would be at his side. He might even prefer that to an old man looming over him.

  ‘He says to tell you that they have found Sir Gilbert Hastings.’

  Watson felt a rush of relief. Clearly if he was at Charing Cross there had been an accident of some description, but at least he had been located. ‘Well, that’s good news.’

  Trenchard shook his head. ‘From what he told me, and the tone of the inspector’s voice, I don’t think it’s good news at all.’

  ‘He was found in Shoreditch Park. Not too far from City Road, in case you don’t know it. No reason why you should. Good folk like yourself don’t get over that way much. Now, the park is used by those who don’t feel they can cope with the Underground as a shelter, or with cellars. Those that are claustrophobic, as it were. The thinking being that the Germans are unlikely to bomb parks.’

  ‘As if the Germans have any idea where they are bombing,’ said Trenchard grimly.

  Inspector Bullimore nodded, no doubt thinking of the innocents blown to pieces by what the Germans would probably call ‘stray’ bombs, when, in fact, they were all ‘stray’. The ones that hit legitimate targets were the exceptions.

  Watson said nothing. He was still examining Sir Gilbert, who was lying in a private room on the first floor of the Charing Cross Hospital. A police constable stood guard outside. The inspector thought that it was entirely possible that Sir Gilbert had somehow escaped his captors and they might come in pursuit.

  Although he didn’t voice an objection, Watson doubted that scenario.

  There were marks on the surgeon’s cheeks and the corners of his mouth that suggested a gag had been put in place and secured with a piece of cloth. Both his wrists and ankles showed considerable damage from ligatures. He had clearly struggled against his bonds, but to no avail. All he had achieved was chafing and cutting of flesh. There were also some marks that Watson couldn’t explain, circular discolorations at the temple. Whatever they were, this man had been bound very tightly. The chances of him wriggling free, Houdini-like, were slim indeed. No, he had been released, as some kind of warning.

  ‘So it was busy for some time? The park, I mean?’ asked Watson, as he pulled the sheets back over the poor man’s torso.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What hour did the All Clear bugles sound?’ asked Trenchard.

  ‘About ten thirty,’ said Watson as he examined the patient’s notes at the bottom of the bed, not quite certain he could believe what he was reading. ‘So he would have been placed there sometime after the park emptied?’

  ‘I would imagine,’ said the inspector. ‘Not that the park is ever comp
letely empty – some stay there because they think the bombers might be back. Others, well, are up to no good. He was found by the public lavatories. Several people stepped over him, thinking he was a drunk.’

  ‘How was he dressed?’ Watson asked.

  Bullimore pointed to a wooden locker in the corner of the room. ‘In the clothes he disappeared in.’

  Watson crossed over and opened the cupboard. Inside was the evening dress Sir Gilbert had been wearing for the Wigmore Hall concert, now sullied, stained and torn. He pulled up a sleeve and sniffed. There was an unpleasant, pungent aroma about the cloth. It was the smell of something vile and evil, impregnated throughout the fabric. ‘Yet they thought he was a drunkard? Dressed for the opera?’

  Bullimore gave a small bark of a laugh. ‘The lavatories, and, indeed the park, where he was found are used by gentlemen who come east for . . . assignations, shall we say. With young men of the area. Rough young men. Messenger boys, porters, bookies’ runners, lamplighters’ apprentices, that sort of thing. Anyone looking for a few bob and not caring how they make it.’

  First electricity and now the blackout had conspired to make the lighters of streetlamps – usually an old hand and an apprentice – redundant, at least for the time being. Watson had to hope that the gaslights of London would, in his lifetime, be lit by the stickmen once again and the apprentices would not have to resort to other means of making a living.

  ‘And you don’t keep it under observation?’ asked Trenchard with some alarm. ‘This known haunt of . . .’ he fumbled for a suitable word, ‘. . . sodomites?’

  ‘First, Captain, we don’t have enough bobbies on the beat to go after real criminals, let alone those whose preferences run to rather lewd tastes. Secondly, observing anything after sunset without streetlights in this city is difficult in the extreme these days. I tell you, the blackout in London has seen that sort of thing mushroom in the dark, as it were. But, to go back to my point, well-dressed gentlemen are not the rarity you might think in that part of the world. The locals have seen things a damn sight more strange than one passed-out toff.’

  Watson had to admit he was warming to this inspector. Bluff and no-nonsense. Even Holmes might approve.

  Steady.

  ‘According to the notes, he had a blindfold on.’ Watson looked at the patient, who now had two gauze pads over his eyes. ‘Wouldn’t people think it was passing strange for a drunk to be blindfolded.’

  ‘As I say, the people thereabouts are hard to shock.’

  ‘So what did happen?’ asked Watson.

  ‘Well, reading between the lines, one likely lad thought he would roll the drunk. There’s a certain class of young man who frequent the lavatories not in search of satisfaction, but looking for victims who, they rightly perceive, might not want to kick up too much of a fuss. Often difficult to explain to the wife how you took a wrong turn and ended up in Shoreditch Park. So the chances are, this lad thought he’d steal Sir Gilbert’s wallet and what have you. When he went through the pockets he found nothing, apart from a Bradbury and attached to it, a piece of paper, which had written on it: “Call the police and this is yours.”’

  ‘A pound note?’ Watson asked. At the beginning of the war the Treasury had started to print one-pound – nicknamed the Bradbury after the signature on it – and ten-shilling notes to take the sovereign and half-sovereign coins out of circulation. Although it was widely accepted, most nefarious activity in London was still fuelled by the solid reassurance of gold coins, rather than the flimsy, white promissory notes.

  ‘A crisp new one, apparently. Now, of course, this boy’s story paints him as more of a Good Samaritan than that. In his version, he was concerned and was looking only for the man’s identification. Poppycock, of course.’

  ‘However, I assume that the lad did call the police,’ said Watson. ‘He could have just taken the pound and scarpered. But he stood his ground.’

  A nod. ‘Which is why he is being let off with a very soft clip round the ear and a warning not be seen near those lavatories after dark again. And why he can keep the pound note.’

  ‘So, Sir Gilbert was fully sedated when he was eventually discovered by the police?’ Watson asked.

  ‘Yes, although he has been topped up here, as it were.’

  A silence descended on the room as each man went into his own thoughts. Eventually, Watson said, ‘I’m going to take a look under the gauze. Inspector, you might want to step outside.’

  ‘A crime has been committed, Major Watson, and I need to examine every aspect,’ said Bullimore firmly.

  ‘Good man.’

  From a side drawer, Watson extracted a pair of forceps and leaned over Sir Gilbert. Gently, his hand surprisingly steady given the hour, he lifted the moist covering to reveal the left eye beneath. He was about to exclaim his disgust at the perpetrators of such an abomination when he heard the thump of a body hitting the floor. He turned, expecting the inspector to have disappeared, but he had stood firm, although the expression on his face was one of horror. No, it was Trenchard who had swooned dead away.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was almost noon when Watson emerged from the Tube at Oxford Circus and began his walk up Regent Street, towards All Souls, the needle-spired Nash church designed to distract the eye from the kink where Regent Street met Portland Place. Opposite that stood the grand façade of the Langham Hotel, a building for which he had an abiding affection. It seemed a lifetime ago that he had dined there with Oscar Wilde, and the playwright had told him about his plans for a novel featuring a young man who never aged but owned a portrait that showed the depravities of his existence. Wilde, in his turn, had pressed Watson to continue chronicling the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, whatever the detective’s objections about elements he deemed too ‘fanciful’ in A Study in Scarlet. Such a magical evening. And without Wilde’s prompting, it was possible the wider world would never have discovered more about the singular talents of the world’s only Consulting Detective.

  Of course, Watson didn’t suspect at the time that Wilde, eccentric and theatrical though he considered him, had depravities of his own. What would the priggish Captain Trenchard make of that? Still, whatever his tastes, Watson missed Wilde; he certainly didn’t deserve the ignominy and shame heaped upon him at the end of his too-short life.

  There was a cluster of men outside All Souls, mostly dressed in hospital blues, the pocketless uniforms given to invalids. Some sort of remembrance service was going on within. He could hear the sweetness of the choir drifting across the street over the chuff of motorcars and the clop of horses’ hoofs. The ex-soldiers outside leaned on their crutches or sat in their wheeled carriages, smoking, as if indifferent to the praise and thanks being given within.

  There was sun on them and some of them raised up their pale faces to feel the warmth, no doubt quite a few of them glad they weren’t still fighting among the liquefying corpses of Ypres. Some might think a leg was a small price to pay for release from that. But what did post-war Britain hold for them?

  Then again, what did the future hold for poor Sir Gilbert? The irony of it was appalling. And quite sickening. Whatever the grievances of these people, they simply did not warrant the deliberate maiming of another human being. He was still sedated, thank the Lord, but sooner or later someone would have to explain.

  Watson impulsively swerved sharp left and strode up to the entrance of the hotel, acknowledging the salute of the doorman as he ascended the steps. Once inside, he took a second to admire the splendour of the foyer, to try to comprehend the gilded palace that seemed to belong to another world, a place where he could smell fresh flowers, not decaying flesh and carbolic soap.

  ‘Doctor . . .’ the voice began. ‘Major Watson. It has been too long.’

  It was Herr Kolb, the assistant manager of the Langham back in the days of the Wilde dinner. He was a little more stooped and grey, but as whip-smart as ever, both in dress and mentally. The quick correction from civilian to military status showed tha
t.

  Watson beamed and held out his hand, always pleased to see another relic of a bygone age. ‘Why. Albert . . .’

  The man locked him in a two-handed grip and fixed him with his pale blue eyes. ‘Yes, Major Watson is me, Albert Colt. You remember?’

  Watson kept smiling until he realized the purpose of the charade. Herr Kolb had become Mr Colt, to save himself from the mob. ‘Well, Mr Colt, it is a pleasure to see you after all this time. I thought you might be retired.’

  Colt smiled. ‘And I thought you might be a little too old for the army.’

  ‘Touché.’ Watson laughed.

  ‘I moved from here to Claridge’s. Then the Savoy. Then retirement. But hotel managers are in short supply so, here I am once more.’

  ‘Well, I am pleased to see you.’

  ‘And how is—’

  ‘Mr Holmes?’ Watson pre-empted.

  ‘Mrs Watson.’

  He felt like a grenade had gone off in his skull. So long since he heard that phrase. He tried to recall which Mrs Watson Colt would have known. Both of them, perhaps.

  ‘Are you all right, Major?’ Colt asked.

  ‘Yes. Sorry. Earlier today . . . much earlier, someone told me I looked tired.’

  ‘Well,’ the hotelier put his head to one side, as if examining a painting from a different perspective, ‘I’ve seen you looking fresher. Come, what can I get for you?’

  ‘Coffee, please.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And a stiff brandy.’

  When Colt had seated him in an almost-deserted Palm Court and taken his leave, Watson ordered his coffee and brandy from a waitress – another sign of the times, for the Langham had once employed exclusively German and Belgian waiters – who looked to be new to the position. Still, women were everywhere now – about half of the porters at the Bank of England, so he had heard, were female.

  When she imagined nobody was looking, the waitress hovered restlessly at her station, eyes darting between customers as she had no doubt been taught by Colt, alert to the slightest indication of an unfulfilled need. She reminded Watson of a jittery sparrow, wary of a cat creeping up on her while she was distracted with a worm.