A Study in Murder Read online

  Mrs Gregson, although the head of department, also mucked in with the creation of the boxes, carefully following the kit list pinned to the wall. Once she had learned that her friend Major Watson was a prisoner of war, she had thrown herself into the work of alleviating the suffering of the incarcerated men. Repatriated prisoners had told of terribly harsh conditions in some camps and that only parcels from home had enabled them to survive. It wasn’t a deliberate policy of privation, they said – the Allied blockade of the ports meant most of the German population was also suffering from malnutrition.

  She tried not to think too much about exactly how Watson was faring in all this. It made her lose focus, and even feel a little weepy, when she pictured him in a freezing hut somewhere in Germany, eating his Maconochie rations from a tin. They had been reunited in Suffolk, when she had been asked by Churchill to be his eyes and ears at a top-secret establishment developing the so-called ‘tank’. These adventures had brought her and Watson close although, if she was being frank, the exact nature of that closeness eluded her. It didn’t do to dwell too much on those feelings. He was her friend and confidant – she had even told him about her brief affair with a married officer, now killed – which was enough to be going on with. And, whatever the ultimate reason, she very much wanted him home in England.

  ‘So, have you news, Mrs Gregson?’ asked Miss Hood, a birdlike creature in her late teens who could sometimes be heard lamenting the devastation the war had had on her social life since she came out.

  ‘About?’ Mrs Gregson asked.

  ‘Whether the Queen is coming?’

  This was a constant rumour. Queen Mary had already visited the premises of the Central Prisoners of War Committee and the Red Cross. The feeling was that BPOWFPC deserved a show of royal approval.

  ‘I have not,’ said Mrs Gregson truthfully, ‘although I know the secretary has put in a request.’ The secretary was related to the Queen’s lady of the bedchamber, so the petition was likely to find its way to the keeper of Her Majesty’s appointments. At least she hoped so – Mrs Gregson had to admit ignorance of the machinations of the Royal Household, whereas some of her subordinates had encyclopaedic knowledge of the hierarchy at Buckingham Palace and the other royal residences. And if they had contacts within one of those residences, they were quick to mention it. Mrs Gregson was doing important work, she knew, but the constant reminders and reaffirmations of social status that occurred minute by minute at the voluntary organization were ultimately very tiresome. There were those, she was certain, who resented her elevated position at No. 25 simply because she was not mentioned in Debrett’s.

  ‘Don’t forget to put in the PR postcard,’ said Mrs Gregson, scooping one out of the rack and laying it on top of the socks and shirt. The men were meant to send the Parcel Received card back to show the supplies were getting through.

  There was a knock at the open door. Mrs Gregson looked up to see the slender form of Major Neville Pitt of the War Office. He had his cap in his hands and a slight colour on his cheeks as he always did when confronted with a room full of women. He reached up and tugged at his moustache, as if checking it wouldn’t come away in a stiff breeze.

  ‘Mrs Gregson,’ he said, ‘do you have a moment?’

  ‘Of course.’ She tried not to catch the eye of the others as she put the final item in the box.

  Pitt, of similar age to Mrs Gregson, was relatively young for a major. He had been denied front line service because he had lost an eye, now replaced by a false one, in a polo accident; he was, by all accounts, still a useful player. He was a good head taller than Mrs Gregson and as she stepped out into the hall he stooped down to whisper in her ear. ‘Do you have time for a cup of tea?’

  ‘Well . . .’ She glanced into the New Capture room, where the three women were apparently engrossed in creating their parcels. A giggle, though, escaped from within, followed by a very unladylike snort. ‘Possibly.’

  ‘I have some news,’ Pitt said, pushing home his slim advantage.

  ‘Really? About?’ Not the bloody Queen again, she thought.

  ‘About Major Watson.’

  A suspicious cast clouded her features. ‘Good news?’

  What kind of fool was he to bring glad tidings about a man he considered a rival for this woman’s affections? Not that Pitt had ever met this Watson, but he knew the man once boasted some minor celebrity, and that Mrs Gregson clearly bore him some affection. Some deep affection, he might add. However, he told himself for the hundredth time that Major Watson could only be a father figure to someone like Mrs Gregson. He himself was a far more suitable match. Some considered her too frisky and forthright, but, Pitt thought with her confident manner and red hair, she made all the other women look positively bland. And news of the old boy brought such palpable joy to her, that he could use the lift in her spirits to suggest a dinner before he travelled to The Hague.

  ‘Very good news, Mrs Gregson,’ he said, managing what he hoped was a shy smile. ‘Very good news indeed.’

  Before he could say any more she had turned on her heel and left to fetch her hat and coat.

  THREE

  After lunch and the afternoon Appell – the camp roll call – Watson took a brisk turn around the main compound with Colonel Isbell, the Senior British Officer at the camp. The tall, elegant Isbell had been incarcerated for two years, but managed to keep himself whip-smart. His hair was neat and oiled, the uniform beautifully pressed and he was shod with the glossiest boots in the camp. Having a pair of dedicated orderlies at his beck and call helped in such matters, of course.

  The compound echoed to the sound of hammers striking nails. A stage was under construction for the scratch orchestra that was being assembled from the inmates. It would double as an open-air theatre for the reviews that were proving so popular that no single hut could contain the ever-growing audience. The Krefeld Players had been forced to put on matinées of Two Merry Monarchs to meet the demand. At the moment the weather was benign, but winter could sweep back in just as rapidly as it had departed, scotching the idea of outdoor shows until spring. Still, the labour was a reward in itself for the prisoners, many of whom welcomed the physical exercise of sawing and hammering. Watson often wondered about the wisdom of not requiring officers to work; sometimes, enforced idleness could be as much a punishment as forced labour.

  ‘How is the patient?’ Isbell asked.

  ‘Hanson? He’ll live,’ said Watson of the new arrival who had tried to slash his own throat. ‘Most of the blood came from his ear. Krebs managed to get to him before he sliced through anything major.’

  ‘Good. You know he played rugby for England?’

  ‘He’s that Hanson? Scrum half for Cornwall? Played in the Olympics?’ Where, Watson didn’t bother adding, Australasia – basically the Australian rugby team – had slaughtered them 3–32.

  Isbell nodded. ‘Yes. Graduate of Camborne School of Mines. He was captured making a recce into no man’s land for the most effective placement of explosives. Affected him quite badly, being captured. The Senior British Officer at Friedberg, his last camp, requested a transfer here as he felt the regime more conducive to his recovery.’

  They had reached the innermost of the camp’s twin perimeter fences. Beyond them was a ploughed field, the soil stiff and cloddy and varnished with the evidence of the morning’s frost, its furrows awaiting the next crop of mangels. Further on was a copse, its skeletal trees tantalizingly close, the spindly branches seeming to beckon as they waved in the lusty breeze coming, fortunately, from the south. ‘Seems that at Friedberg he tried to walk into the kill strip,’ Isbell said, nodding at bare earth between the two fences. ‘Lucky he wasn’t shot.’

  ‘Perhaps he wanted to be shot,’ said Watson.

  ‘Only been in a few months, y’know. Wire fever usually takes longer to take hold,’ said Isbell. ‘Before men do anything quite so reckless.’

  ‘There is a particularly black sort of wire fever,’ said Watson. ‘I’ve seen me
n try to scale those fences in full view of the guards. And I’ve seen guards oblige them by shooting them in the back.’

  ‘Good Lord. In cold blood?’

  Watson nodded.

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘Karlsruhe camp.’

  ‘You complained?’

  ‘In writing. To the commandant and the Red Cross. Precious little good it did me.’

  ‘Well, whatever you call the fever, I think Hanson has it bad. The thing is, I knew his brother at school. I was wondering if you could keep an eye on him for me? Just until we can get him to snap out of it. Find him something useful to do?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘The Escape Committee. Always needs extra hands.’

  The Escape Committee’s role was to dream up ever more elaborate ways to go over, under or through the wire. In truth, few succeeded. Hauptmann Halbricht might be a reasonable, some would say soft, commandant – there were far tougher camps in the system – but he was no fool. He also had the knack of swooping down on any plotters at the last possible moment, meaning the Escape Committee had to start all over again when its precious stock of forged documents, German marks, maps and railway timetables were confiscated. However, Watson was aware that the thought of escape, the minutiae of its planning and execution, kept many a man sane, even though the schemes might come to naught. And in some camps, the planning bore fruit – he had heard of men who escaped nine, ten, twelve times. And the exploits of those who made a ‘home run’ – including Lieutenant-Colonel Crofton Bury Vandeleur, the first man to ‘nip out’ from Krefeld, as he put it – became the stuff of legend around the camps.

  ‘Of course I will,’ agreed Watson. There was the flat report of a distant shotgun and a whirl of crows took to the air, looking like moving ink splashes against the pale blue sky. ‘It will give him a sense of purpose. Of continuing the fight.’

  ‘That’s the spirit.’

  ‘And once he is discharged from the infirmary, Hanson can come into my billet. There’s a spare bunk.’

  ‘Good man,’ said Isbell. ‘I appreciate it. Strange how some can’t take it, eh? Even a fit chap like Hanson.’

  Watson turned his back on the outside world as the nervous crows settled on the branches once more, flexing their wings in anticipation of further flight. ‘Incarceration? The fact is, Colonel, none of us expected it. Death, yes. Maimed, gassed, also very likely. But this –’ he swept an arm across the expanse of the camp – ‘to be locked up as prisoners in Germany? They feel a failure, diminished as men.’

  Isbell grunted as if he was talking rot, but Watson knew he understood. The man’s meticulous grooming and adherence to a strict daily routine was a way of keeping such thoughts at bay. Watson had his patients, and therefore a role to play. Everybody else had only time to kill, and it lay heavy with many of them. There were only so many football matches and concerts with pretty adjutants in frocks one could stomach.

  ‘And how are you bearing up?’ Isbell asked.

  ‘Me?’ Watson asked.

  ‘Burned, weren’t you? In one of those bloody useless tanks, I hear.’ The colonel was well informed. Isbell had been taken prisoner when the tank was still a glimmer in Churchill’s imagination. But the wire fences were porous, fresh prisoners updated inmates, and news in letters sometimes slipped by even the German censors. And then there was the camp ‘Marconi’, the gossip machine that spread information – some of it even true – about every inmate and, as if by magic, sometimes let news leap from one camp to another.

  ‘I was well cared for,’ Watson said, which was the truth. He had seen the propaganda posters of German nurses pouring water onto the ground in front of thirst-racked and wounded British soldiers, but his experience suggested it was just that: propaganda. When Watson had been blown out of the tank at Flers, he had been picked up by a German patrol in no man’s land and delivered to a field hospital where German nurses had dressed his burns and cared for him to the best of their ability. ‘There’s scarring, of course, but not too bad. And it’s on my back, so I don’t have to look at it. It’s healed well, for a man of my age.’

  ‘Good.’ Isbell pulled down his jacket and ran a hand down the buttons, although it was hardly creased. ‘There’s something you should know.’

  ‘About Hanson?’

  Isbell took the major’s arm and guided him away from the small clump of men who had gathered at the fence to smoke and exchange news from their letters.

  ‘Halbricht had me into his office yesterday,’ said Isbell. ‘I expected the normal housekeeping, but he told me an exchange is being negotiated, whereby some prisoners will be released to spend the rest of the war in neutral Holland, in or around Scheveningen. They will play no further part in combat, but . . . well, it’s freedom, of a kind.’

  ‘And you are telling me this because . . . ?’

  ‘Halbricht says the first tranche will be any prisoners over the age of forty-eight. Which means you and Digby Rawlinson. Plus any medical men are also to be released, which means you’ve hit two sixes there, old boy. Time to leave the crease. It’ll take a few weeks to finish the formalities, apparently, but your name has gone forward, Major Watson. To all intents and purposes, you are going home.’

  FOUR

  The dead came calling once again. That night the four men sat around the table, with the curly-haired lieutenant, Archer, leading the proceedings as he always did. It was after curfew. They could hear the prowling dogs yelping and snarling bad-temperedly as they padded between the two outer fences of the camp.

  Archer laid his hood to one side as Harry, the orderly, put out the flask of drink and four glasses and then retreated.

  Archer raised his glass. ‘To those on the other side we are about to contact. Salutations.’

  ‘Salutations,’ the others replied, and all four threw the corrosive liquor to the back of their throats.

  ‘Concentrate, gentlemen,’ Archer said as he pulled down his silken hood. ‘Who are we attempting to contact tonight?’

  ‘My brother. Jimmy Hulpett,’ said one of the men, the sceptic about communication with the other side who, nevertheless, had been intrigued enough to come back a second time.

  ‘I suggest we all hold hands while you tell us something about your brother.’

  ‘Jimmy is – was – younger than me. We both joined up at the same time. I had been through cadet school, so I went to officer training. Jimmy didn’t want to have anything to do with that. He went in as a private, although he was a corporal when he—’

  ‘His personality,’ chided the medium gently. ‘Tell us about his character.’

  ‘Jimmy was a joker. A practical joker. Loved to play tricks. Fill your boots with sand, make papier mâché spiders to leave in the lavatory for our sister, Sylvie, to find. Always had a joke, Jimmy, not all of them clean. He didn’t get on well at school. The teachers thought he was lazy or stupid, but he had a sharp mind. Just not for letters. Numbers he was good at, which is why he started the betting ring that got him expelled . . . Blimey.’

  The smell.

  ‘Go on,’ said the medium. But the moment the words left his mouth he felt a rush around him, a dozen voices ringing in his head at once. He felt a mix of elation and nausea.

  ‘Quiet, quiet, please, gentlemen,’ he pleaded, and squeezed the hands of those on either side of him.

  ‘You all right?’ one of the regulars asked Hulpett. ‘You’ve gone quite pink.’

  ‘It’s that bloody drink. Worse than last time.’

  ‘Shush.’

  The medium let his breathing become steady and even as he waited for the cacophony to subside. So many dead now, they had to jostle to be heard. He imagined only the strong made it, even on the other side.

  ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘Not Jimmy. No.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Paper.’

  A frisson of excitement ran through the medium. It was his unknown soldier, the one who had written the unintelligible pages thro
ugh him on the last firm contact with the dead. Archer was ready this time. ‘I need to know who you are,’ he said firmly, as if he could really influence the actions of the dead.

  Archer clutched the pencil tightly and at once it moved over the paper, in a series of shaky but flamboyant loops.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Hulpett.

  The voices faded and the pencil clattered onto the table. ‘What?’ Archer demanded of the man who had broken his concentration. ‘What is it?’

  ‘This.’ Hulpett snatched up the paper with the spirit’s signature. ‘Captain Brevette.’

  ‘What about him?’ Archer asked.

  ‘Captain Brevette’s still alive,’ Hulpett said. ‘We had a postcard from him. He’s probably having a whisky at his club as we speak. Well, it proves one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Archer raised the hood. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘It can’t be Brevette.’ There was genuine disappointment in the voice, for Hulpett had hoped to make contact with poor Jimmy. Now, he simply felt foolish for believing that was possible. He jabbed a finger at Archer. ‘You’re a bloody charlatan, just like the rest of them.’

  Hulpett sprang to his feet, knocking the home-made chair over as he did so, and strode from the rec hut, muttering as he went. Archer cleared his throat and picked up the pencil once more. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said as he slipped down the hood, ‘shall we continue?’

  FIVE

  The familiar name leaped off the page, but the German officer made sure he showed no emotion. He looked up at his opposite number, a Major Pitt from the British Office for the Welfare of Prisoners of War, and frowned.