The Sign of Fear Read online

  ‘The lying toad,’ the doctor hissed.

  ‘That’s as may be. But you know who his father is?’

  Bradford shook his head.

  ‘He never mentioned that his father is Lord Brigham?’

  Bradford looked glum. ‘He never did, no.’

  ‘Now, the Government, and DORA, can suppress a lot of things, but a court case for indecency—’

  ‘It can’t come to that!’ Bradford was genuinely horrified. The blood drained from his face, leaving him looking waxen. ‘My mother—’

  ‘It won’t come to court, you have my word. You’re not exactly Oscar Wilde.’

  Bradford shuddered, no doubt thinking of what a stretch in prison would be like for a convicted ‘nancy boy’.

  ‘But we have to take steps, radical steps, to make sure this is . . . hushed up.’

  ‘Radical? I don’t know if you realize this, but I am involved in some very sensitive work for the Government. Very sensitive. To do with the Zeppelins and—’

  ‘Which is exactly why I am here, Doctor. It’s not my place to know what you do, other than it is vital to the defence of London. Now, we will need that work to continue while we make certain, um, overtures to the family of this boy . . .’

  ‘Young man,’ Bradford objected.

  ‘The law does not care about the ages of those involved, Dr Bradford, you know that. A perversion is a perversion . . . I’m just saying what they think, not my own personal opinion. The lad is of an age to know his own mind, as far as I am concerned. We are all victims of our urges and it seems to me we can’t choose what those urges are to be. Am I right? Yes. So –’ he clapped his hands together as if he were a teacher settling down a group of naughty boys – ‘we have set up a laboratory where you can continue your work in complete privacy and safety.’

  ‘Where?’

  A wave of the hand dismissed the details. He used the usual panacea of the country’s secret services. ‘A safe and secure location.’

  ‘For how long?’

  A shrug. ‘Till we are certain you can return to work hereabouts, totally . . . unencumbered from any concerns about your private life.’

  ‘But you can definitely make this go away?’

  A nod. ‘Definitely.’

  Bradford let out a sigh of relief. ‘I’ve been a fool.’

  ‘Neither the first nor the last. You know, my brother once said, “Difficulties are just things to be overcome.” We have some difficulties, we will overcome them. It is the work that is important now. My brother also said, “Superhuman effort isn’t worth a damn unless it achieves results.”’

  It was Bradford’s turn to nod. ‘I need to go to the laboratory, to pick up—’

  ‘You don’t. All will be done for you. You just need to get dressed, pack a few clothes and we’ll be on our way. We’ll take your vehicle, if that is agreeable, rather than public transport.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ Bradford stood, his eyes glazed and hooded, as if he had been fed opium, and hurried out, his slippers slapping on the polished wood of the stair treads as he ascended to his bedroom.

  After Dr Bradford had gone, Frank Shackleton drained the by-now lukewarm tea and smiled to himself. A job well done. And he hadn’t needed to use the leaded cosh that weighed so heavily in his jacket pocket after all.

  The impact of the object on the pavement almost lifted Watson off his feet. It was as if a giant gavel had come down next to him. He was holding Shackleton’s photograph in his hand, ready to show the clerks in the booking hall, but the shock of the crash plucked it from his fingers. It took him a second to gather his wits and look to his right, where something had buried itself in the tar of the roadway. A few spirals of grey smoke marked the spot and it took another moment before Watson appreciated what he was looking at. Four black fins. A bomb. High explosive, by the size of it. And either it was defective or it was on a time-delay fuse. Either way, it could go off in an eye-blink.

  He fumbled for his officer’s whistle before realizing it was still in his RAMC tunic, so put his fingers into the corners of his mouth and, for the second time that day, broke the law with a roughneck’s whistle. ‘Get back!’ he yelled, once he had gained the attention of the people around him. He waved his arms over his head, knocking his hat off. ‘Bomb! Get back!’

  Not dragonflies, Watson. German bombers! Sherlock’s voice in his head chided. He ignored it.

  Now a real whistle blew. ‘Clear the area! Take cover.’ A policeman was striding towards him, pointing at the entrance to the Metropolitan railway and its Underground platforms. ‘Get underground!’

  The next bomb to fall on the station from Ernst Brandenburg’s fleet of twenty Gotha G.IV bombers circling over the East End of London was neither a dud nor a delayed fuser. It passed through the four-arched roof of the station and detonated next to a full passenger train. Outside, Watson didn’t even hear the explosion before the station appeared to exhale an enormous breath of super-heated air, mixed with steel, iron, dust, glass and body parts. This percussive wave lifted the policeman off his feet and carried his full body weight into Watson, spinning the pair of them over the concourse, a tangle of limbs, rolling like tumbleweed, until they came to rest, unmoving, against the wheel of an abandoned taxi.

  ONE

  September 1917

  They had run out of clean water a good two hours before sunset. The ambulance train had been sitting in a siding for most of the day, the September sun still strong enough to heat the metal and roast the inside of the carriages, nearly all of which had non-opening windows. Above the stationary train, seagulls whirled and screeched as if to taunt them about how close they were to the coast, to the Channel and to the boats that would take them to Blighty. Fully loaded troop trains occasionally crawled past on the main line, wan young faces at the windows looking out at the long row of Red Cross carriages, the soldiers no doubt wondering if that would be how they would return from the front – full of sepsis or devoid of limbs. Only the raw recruits did that, of course. Those returning from leave, the veterans of months or years of war, knew better than to speculate and averted their gaze from the marooned ambulance train.

  Even as the sun began to fall towards the treeline, promising a respite from its warmth, Staff Nurse Jennings decided that her Gurkha had to have water. A stoical young man with very little English, he had lost both feet and the fever that had him in its grip suggested his suffering wasn’t over yet. Major Ramsey, the chief MO on the train, suspected that they would have to amputate to at least below the knees.

  Staff Nurse Jennings was only on the train because it seemed a useful way to travel back to England for her first proper leave in almost two years. Why not volunteer for a shift on the ambulance train? Do some good while she made the journey to see her parents. But what should have been a ten-hour journey had stretched through delays and reversals into almost thirty-six. And now there was no water.

  Almost as bad as that, she had sent a telegram to her old friend Major John Watson and informed him she expected to arrive at Victoria sometime in the next twenty-four hours. It was unlikely she would make even that vague appointment. She had started a correspondence with the major when she had heard that Mrs Gregson, a VAD of her acquaintance, had been killed in action while working with him.

  She had sent her sympathies, he had replied and they had continued to exchange letters. In truth, it wasn’t an entirely innocent arrangement on her behalf. Mrs Gregson had seemed invincible to her, a force of nature who could never die like a mere mortal. Staff Nurse Jennings would very much like to hear the truth about her fate from the horse’s mouth. And it would be grand to see Major Watson again, of course.

  The train was twenty-six carriages long, with the final carriage reserved for infectious cases – mumps, measles, scarlet fever – the rest a mix of sitting-up cases and compartments adapted for the stretchers. It was an old-style ambulance train, where the carriages did not connect, which meant that when she went in search of water, she
had to climb down onto the track to access the next carriage along. While the train was moving, of course, it was that much harder to move between carriages, as scrambling along the outside and trying to leap between coaches was strictly forbidden. But she knew that nurses and orderlies, for the sake of their patients, often disobeyed that order.

  Jennings lowered herself onto the gravel and looked along the length of the train, towards the stream of white smoke that showed the position of the locomotive. It wouldn’t do to hesitate and take in the view or enjoy the cool air on her face after the stifling heat and the smells of the interior. Ambulance trains had a tendency to move off without warning, and there were many tales of nurses, doctors or orderlies stranded as their transport chuffed off into the distance. She could see other figures at the side of the track a few carriages along. She could make out an orderly – the wall-eyed Beckett, judging by the size of him – and some of the less injured men, all smoking as if it might help get up steam for the loco.

  ‘Have you any clean water in there?’ she asked as she approached the cluster of men. New Zealanders, she noted. Mostly with head or shoulder wounds.

  Beckett shook his head. ‘Thimble full is about all, Nurse. We should be movin’ soon, though, shouldn’t we?’

  ‘I have no idea, Beckett. That’s in the lap of the gods and the French railways. It is hard to say who is more inscrutable.’

  He rolled his eyes in sympathy. ‘You’re not wrong there, miss.’

  As she passed she was aware of the men’s heads swivelling to follow her. There were muffled words and what could only be described as a filthy laugh. She turned and stared at the group, holding their gaze until, one by one, they broke away and examined their boots or cigarette ends. ‘Fag break over, I think, Beckett,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Nurse. Come on, let’s be havin’ you.’ He prodded one of the soldiers – his cranium swathed in stained bandages that needed changing – who flashed a sly smile that might have been an apology for whatever crudity they had shared.

  Jennings waited, hands on hips, secretly pleased with herself, as they hauled themselves back up inside. The Jennings of two years ago couldn’t have faced down lewd soldiers. She would have blushed and flustered. But there was little about these boys in men’s clothing that could intimidate her now. And, despite the roughness of some of them, she always had to remember what they had been through.

  She smiled at a young lad who had pressed his face to the window, flattening his nose into a grotesque shape, but he didn’t respond. Becket appeared behind him and peeled him off the glass, leaving a fat streak of slobber and mucus, as if two amorous slugs had indulged themselves on the pane. The orderly made the universal symbol for someone who wasn’t quite right in the head. Poor boy, she thought, returned to his mother in that state.

  As Jennings turned to continue on down the line, she was confronted with a RAMC colonel and two adjutants stepping between the coaches. He stopped when he saw her and pointed with his swagger stick towards the carriages behind her.

  ‘Any Chinkies up there?’ he asked without anything approaching a preamble.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Chinese?’ the colonel said. ‘Do you have any Chinese on this train?’

  She shook her head. ‘Gurkhas. Sikhs, Mussulmans. Some Canadians and New Zealanders. The rest British.’

  ‘No Orientals?’

  She paused, as if considering this, but took the opportunity to look him up and down. Around forty, trim, with a rakishly thin moustache, but with broken veins on his face and nose, suggesting a fondness for the bottle. What have we here? she wondered.

  ‘None that I can recall, sir.’ She indicated the front of the train. ‘Although I haven’t seen in some of the compartments down there.’

  The colonel slapped his thigh with the stick and turned to his young adjutants, both of whom looked as if they were clenching their buttocks very tightly. ‘Well, that’s a first-class cockup, isn’t it? You’ve managed to lose a whole train.’

  ‘Colonel Hartford, sir, the bombing at Boulogne has disrupted everything—’ one of the adjutants began.

  ‘Quiet! I don’t need excuses from you.’

  ‘Sir,’ offered the second adjutant. ‘This clearly isn’t the right train. It was a six-carriage unit—’

  ‘And you’ve never heard of two trains being linked together? Eh?’ demanded Hartford.

  The adjutant lowered his voice. ‘Not one subject to an EXTO, sir.’

  ‘What’s an EXTO?’ Jennings asked.

  Hartford turned back to Jennings after she had spoken, as if he had forgotten she was there. ‘Don’t let us keep you, Nurse.’

  ‘I need some fresh, clean water, Colonel. For my patients. We have been sidelined here for many hours now. Perhaps you can help us get a move on?’

  The colonel looked as if she had asked for a slice of the moon. ‘Help? I’m sorry, young lady, we have more important things to worry about. We’ve mislaid a train.’

  Jennings felt a glow of anger. ‘Yes. You said. Full of Chinese. From Noyelles-sur-Mer, I suppose.’

  The colonel’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘How on earth could you know that?’

  ‘Well, it’s common sense—’

  ‘Yes, but how do you know there was a train from there?’

  ‘I didn’t know anything about a train, till you mentioned it,’ Jennings said with some exasperation. ‘I just put two and two together.’

  ‘Did you? Did you indeed?’

  ‘Look, if you would excuse me, I have a very sick man in need of water. I hope you find your Chinese—’

  As she tried to step round him, the colonel raised his stick so that it lay across her breasts. It felt like a terribly insulting and demeaning thing to do and she shuffled backwards on the gravel. ‘Colonel, please. If you will let me pass, or I’ll be forced to . . .’

  Forced to what? She could think of no threat likely to dent this man’s air of authority.

  The loco emitted a quick, perfunctory whistle and, without warning, the train gave a lurch. Chains rattled and couplings groaned as the tension was taken up along the length of the train. Another jerk, a squeal of reluctant metal and within a few seconds it had accelerated to walking speed.

  ‘Oh, no.’ Nurse Jennings reached up an arm and readied herself for the jump, but as she did so, hands gripped her shoulder.

  ‘Sorry, miss.’ It was one of the adjutants.

  She twisted away. ‘Let go of me. How dare you?’

  She could feel the breeze from the moving metal whipping at her face and her uniform. Already it was going too fast for her to risk jumping on board. She felt tears of frustration sting her eyes.

  There was Major Ramsey at the window, face agog as he looked down at her. She tried to raise an arm, but it was slapped down.

  In despair, she watched the terminal carriage of the train, the coach containing the infectious cases, disappear into the distance, a final whistle from the loco seeming to mock her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘Why are you behaving like this? I am a British nurse—’

  ‘That remains to be seen, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What on earth do you mean by that?’

  ‘Lurking around trains, armed with information you have no right to.’ The colonel touched his moustache and pointed to the staff car parked on the far side of the tracks, now revealed by the departed train. A driver stood to loose attention next to the front wheel, his fiercely polished buttons glinting with the rays of the dying sun. ‘I think you’d better come with us, Nurse, so that we can get to the bottom of this.’

  ‘What are you talking about, you pompous man? The bottom of what?’

  The colonel was unfazed by her outburst. ‘What exactly you know about Noyelles-sur-Mer.’

  TWO

  London was like a frightened child: cowering in the dark beneath the stairs, hands over eyes, hoping that the bogeyman who was out there would not find it. That is how it felt to Dr
John Watson as he stepped out of the Wigmore Hall and into the last glow of twilight. Normally, the streetlamps would have been lit by now, but since the night raids on Chatham and Margate, the authorities had decreed the greatest city in the world should be plunged into darkness to foil the German bombers. Those few lights that were illuminated had to be blackened or greened, for it was indeed obvious the Germans weren’t going to stop at coastal towns. They had already shown they could get through by day. Sooner or later, they would come for London by night.

  Watson looked up at the sky. Not a star was to be seen. The thick, dull cloud was London’s friend. It meant the Germans could not see the river, which pointed like a wayward silvered arrow to the beating heart of the metropolis – the city, the docks and the warehouses. So they were likely safe from the Hun’s bombs that night.

  As the concertgoers swirled around him, Watson turned to his companion for the evening performance, Sir Gilbert Hastings. Watson was wearing his RAMC uniform; Sir Gilbert was dressed as if for a night at the opera, one of the few men in the audience in full formal evening wear. As with any public gathering in the capital, military outfits predominated and any civilian men increasingly wore the modish lounge-style suits.

  ‘Splendid,’ said Sir Gilbert. ‘Especially the Elgar.’ He leaned in and lowered his voice. ‘But, Lord, I do miss some Beethoven.’

  Watson could only nod his agreement. Rationing extended as far as music – there would be no works by German or Austrian composers performed for the duration, by popular demand. And by popular threat. An attempt to play a Bach recital in an East End church the day after a Gotha bombing raid had killed eighteen schoolchildren at Upper North Street School had caused a riot. It had resulted in a badly damaged organ and a very traumatized organist.

  But in truth, Watson hadn’t particularly enjoyed any of the concert. Although his appreciation of good food and strong drink had returned over the months since the incident at Liverpool Street, it was still as if some key ingredient for his appreciation of music had been snuffed out. Before the war, he could remember being thrilled by the Enigma Variations and the Tallis Fantasia, both of which had been on the programme this evening. But, while he appreciated the precision of the playing, a rarity these days when the ranks of musicians had been depleted by conscription, he was not moved. He had forgotten what it was like to be moved. He remembered how a sublime passage could transport him beyond quotidian cares. Now, all he could hear was artifice, the cheap manipulation of notes and chords creating false sentiment or an illusion of transcendence. But he knew the music hadn’t changed. He had. Some capacity for pleasure had died on a bridge in Holland.