The Nurse's War

by Merryn Allingham

  His glare was accompanied by another angry sniff. Then he shambled towards the rear of the premises and, within a very short time, was back again, a brown envelope in his hand. The very envelope that she had left in this shop just a few short days ago. The envelope that Grayson Harte had passed to her at the Ritz Hotel.

  She looked at the name written in bold, black ink. There was no mistake. Something had gone very wrong. In a daze, she stuffed it back into her handbag, not knowing what she should do next. The decision was made for her. Out of nowhere, a huge explosion shook the building and she had to hold on to the counter to stay upright, the shopkeeper holding fast to the other side. For seconds afterwards, the shop seemed to rock back and forth, but once the walls stopped moving, she rushed to the door. Rigby was only a few paces behind.

  She stumbled out on to the pavement. The sky above was an empty blue. Not a plane in sight, yet smoke was rising in great plumes from an adjoining street, smoke that looked a mile high. The sound of falling masonry crowded out her ears.

  ‘Unexploded bomb,’ the shopkeeper said with some satisfaction. ‘They keep yer on yer toes.’

  But she wasn’t listening; she was filled with a terrible premonition. This was Gerald’s local shop and he must live in a road nearby, a road where a house was now nothing but rubble. He’d been sick and confined to his rooms, she thought, that’s why he hadn’t collected the envelope. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? And now he might be grossly injured or worse. She must go, offer what help she could.

  She began to run towards the plumes of smoke. As soon as she rounded the corner of Ellen Street, the devastation was clear to see. A group of dazed people were wandering aimlessly along the cratered road and she weaved a path through them as quickly as she could. Rubble had spilled across the street making it almost impassable, but an ambulance was already edging its way through the debris. Close by, she heard the loud clanging of a fire engine. She drew opposite the ruined building and could see that, unlike the doll’s house dwellings on either side, this house had been three storeys high. Fragments of each of the floors teetered crazily against the sky, furniture scattered and upended, and scraps of cloth fanning in and out of pockets of fire. The firemen had arrived and were running hoses towards each of the small conflagrations.

  ‘Not too bad, Jim,’ she heard one of them say.

  ‘Could have been worse,’ was the cheerful reply.

  Could it? she wondered. Did Gerald lie somewhere amid this desolation? She had to find out. Picking her way across the cracked flagstones, she approached the man standing at a distance from his men and directing their operations.

  ‘I was passing by, officer, but I’m a nurse. Is there any way I can help?’

  He shook his head. ‘I doubt it. No one in the middle of that is going to need much nursing. We’ll have the fire under control in a jiffy, then the ambulance crew can move in. They might need your help, I suppose. Some poor blighter might have survived, you never know.’

  The flames were soon doused, and the ruins smouldering quietly as the ambulance men began to pick their way across the shattered brickwork. It might have been a large house, she thought, but it had been a poor one, too, and it was hard to imagine Gerald spending his days in such a wretched place. Finishing his days perhaps. She pushed the thought from her mind.

  There was a shout from one of the ambulance crew and his colleagues went running towards him. They began digging, bricks flying and lumps of plaster cast aside. Then they were heaving a body on to a stretcher and Daisy felt her stomach clench. The body was Gerald’s, she was sure.

  She hugged the pavement, standing in the shadow of the ambulance as the crew pushed past her with their burden. As they lifted the stretcher into the vehicle, the rough blanket covering the body fell open and she saw the man’s face. Not Gerald’s. A darker skin, an Indian skin. Anish’s face came suddenly to her, Anish lying dead on the ground amid a rain that was drowning the whole world. She shook her head to dispel the bad memories. This ruin had to be Gerald’s house though. No one else was likely to have Indian neighbours. He hadn’t been at home, it seemed, and he hadn’t collected the precious documents. So where was he?

  One of the firemen came up to her. ‘Unexploded bomb,’ he said, echoing Rigby. ‘They’re the devil.’

  ‘From the last raid?’ The raid she had sheltered from in Grayson’s arms.

  ‘More than likely. That’s been the worst by far. There’ll be bombs lying asleep all over London. This one won’t be the last to go up, that’s for sure.’

  She gave him a sad nod. It was time she was going, if she was to get back to the ward on time. She’d walked no more than a few paces, though, when a second shout made her stiffen.

  ‘There’s another of ’em here.’

  She ran back to the bombed house and saw the ambulance crew dragging another body to the surface. Before they could stop her, she’d clambered onto one of the piles of fallen masonry and was jumping from one tottering mound to the next, desperate to get to their side.

  ‘Miss! Nurse! You can’t do that!’

  But she had. She had reached them. She had reached the body. And just as she’d always known, it was Gerald. Gerald caked in grime, his clothes torn to pieces by the blast. And with an ummistakable hole in his temple.

  The man nearest her gave a low whistle. ‘Well, what do you know. He killed hisself.’ And he pointed to the pistol that lay at an angle a few inches from Gerald’s outstretched hand. ‘He killed hisself,’ he repeated, wonderingly.

  ‘No. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t.’ Daisy’s cry made the men stare, but she hardly noticed. She knew Gerald would never have committed suicide. It was not in his nature. And not now, not when he had everything to live for.

  ‘Do you know this person, miss?’ the ambulance man asked, respectfully.

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice came as barely a whisper. ‘But the bomb …’

  The man scratched his head. ‘Must have gone off by accident. After he killed hisself, that’s what I’m thinking. Bit of a strange coincidence, wouldn’t you say? It killed the other poor blighter at the same time.’

  ‘No, it didn’t.’ The driver of the ambulance had joined them.

  ‘What d’you mean, Ted?’

  ‘I mean it wasn’t the bomb that killed the Indian fella. He was already dead. We missed it earlier on—he was covered in so much dust—but there’s a knife wound in his chest. Clear as daylight. He must have been killed before the bomb went off.’

  ‘So this bloke—’ and the two men looked down at the broken body lying between them ‘—must have killed the Indian fella, then decided to kill hisself. Because of what he’d done, begging your pardon, miss.’

  Daisy felt numb, her body frozen. But her mind was still working and none of this made sense.

  ‘Why would he have done such a thing?’ she demanded.

  ‘Search me. Probably got into some kind of quarrel, the pair of ’em. Not that unusual these days.’

  ‘But the bomb,’ she insisted. ‘It can’t have been a coincidence. How do you explain the bomb?’

  ‘Easy enough. He set it off hisself. I reckon if we search, we’ll find a timer somewhere in this load of debris. He primed it before he put the gun to his head.’

  ‘But for what reason?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know, miss. A cover-up maybe. He didn’t want people to know he was a murderer, so he tried to cover up the evidence.’

  ‘He didn’t do a very good job then, did he?’ Ted muttered.

  Daisy had heard enough, heard too much. She must blank this from her mind, get back to the hospital and work. Just work and it would go away. She heard the firemen start their engine and she turned to leave. But the ambulance driver put out a hand to stop her.

  ‘You can’t go, miss. This is murder and you’re a witness. We’ll need to call the police and you’ll have to give a statement.’

  ‘I have to go.’

  She must get back to Barts, back to her patients
, lose herself in the comforting routine of the ward. Until she’d had time to come to terms with what she’d seen, if she ever did. She stumbled her way back onto the pavement. These men were wrong. Gerald was no murderer. He was capable of bad things, she knew only too well, but not murder. Yet he’d shot Anish, her mind was telling her. But that was to save her. That was different. And this Indian hadn’t been shot. He’d been killed by a knife wound to the chest. A knife was close, personal, bloody. Gerald would never have done that. And if he’d killed one of the men he thought were spies, why not the other? The second man was still out there, walking the streets untouched. And still watching her. She shivered at the thought and turned instinctively, thinking she would see his black trilby, his black mourning suit.

  Instead, she saw Grayson Harte coming towards them, accompanied by a pale, red-haired man. He looked stunned to see her, then masked his astonishment with a curt nod in her direction. He didn’t approach, but instead, clambered onto the nearest pile of debris and joined the group of men. They were still gathered around the body, which lay where they’d found it. As soon as he saw Grayson, the driver of the ambulance began talking, his hands gesticulating first towards the dead man and then to the vehicle waiting by the roadside. Daisy tried to close her ears to the driver’s words. She didn’t want to hear him repeat what he had to say about Gerald’s death.

  Grayson looked down at the body. ‘I know this man,’ she heard him say. ‘And I don’t think that’s what happened. It’s far more likely that someone else was involved in the killings—a third man.’

  The third man who had come to the graveyard, she thought. She felt her hands go clammy.

  ‘I would say he killed both these men and set the bomb to cover his tracks,’ Grayson continued, ‘but the police will need to come to their own conclusions. Take the bodies to the morgue and my colleague and I will inform the authorities.’

  The driver grunted, unhappy it seemed with this turn of events. But Grayson flipped open a wallet and pushed it beneath the man’s nose. His credentials, Daisy presumed. The red-haired man did the same. The driver shrugged his shoulders and ordered one of the crew to bring up a stretcher. The Secret Intelligence Service was a law unto itself and it wasn’t his job to argue. His job was to get the bodies into cold storage as soon as possible.

  Satisfied, Grayson made his way over to where she was standing. As always, his clothes were immaculate, but it seemed to her that he’d aged since yesterday. There were tired lines around his mouth and the slightest sprinkling of grey in his hair that she’d never noticed before.

  ‘It’s fortunate we were in the area,’ he said. ‘We’ll try to keep this business quiet and it would be best if you say as little as possible. The police will have to be informed but they’ll treat it as a simple murder.’

  ‘It is murder,’ she retorted.

  ‘But hardly simple. My guess is that Gerald was killed because he knew too much, or the murderer thought he did. It’s likely the other man was killed for the same reason. Bearing in mind the kidnap attempt, it looks as though we have a determined spy on our hands and the less all of us say publicly, the better.’

  Her mind was working furiously. That was it! That’s where she’d seen the third man. Or at least she’d seen his eyes. He was the kidnapper on Kingsway. He’d had a companion with him in the car, a companion who was now on his way to the morgue. Grayson had guessed correctly. Should she tell him so? Every minute he’d been talking, she’d felt his hostility and she had no wish to prolong the encounter. It was better to say nothing, better to leave the affair to him. He was smart enough. And she had more than enough to think about—another person to grieve for. Gerald had been trouble from the moment she’d married him, but she’d never wished him dead. She had stopped loving him a long time ago, but to see him die for the second time … His body was being moved onto a stretcher. She noticed how easily the crew picked him up. He must have lost weight, she thought, a lot of weight. He couldn’t have been eating properly. She felt an overwhelming sadness, then anger, then guilt, a cocktail of emotions rolled into one.

  ‘This is my colleague, Michael Corrigan,’ Grayson was saying.

  Corrigan shook her hand and smiled at her out of a pair of hazel eyes. She liked him immediately, and felt ashamed at her decision to say nothing of the morning’s events. The intelligence service was working for the country. They needed all the assistance they could get and her information might help track the other man, the man who was the real murderer.

  ‘The second Indian’ she asked, ‘do you know anything about him?’ The stretcher party was passing on its way to the ambulance and she lowered her voice.

  Corrigan looked uneasy. ‘At the moment we don’t know who he is or what he plans, though we have our suspicions.’

  ‘What we do know,’ Grayson put in, ‘is that he’s extremely dangerous. He’s on the loose and has to be found.’

  ‘He was at the funeral,’ she blurted out, ‘or rather at the graveyard.’

  Both men stared at her. ‘Whose funeral?’ Grayson asked. ‘When?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whose—but he was in St Anne’s churchyard an hour ago. I saw him.’

  Grayson looked astounded. ‘He was a mourner?’

  ‘I doubt it. I think he was watching me.’

  ‘Then he will have followed you here, or he’ll be on his way. He must think you can identify him. That makes you a threat to whatever he’s planning.’

  ‘But I’m not.’

  ‘As long as he believes you are, you’re in danger. You mustn’t go back to Barts,’ Corrigan said with decision.

  ‘No,’ Grayson echoed, ‘nor back to Charterhouse Square.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts.’ Grayson was at his most peremptory.

  ‘I’ve nowhere else to go.’

  ‘But I have and that’s where you’ll go.’

  ‘If you mean your flat, Grayson, I’m not—’

  ‘I don’t mean my flat,’ he interrupted. ‘Is that likely?’ She flushed at his tone.

  ‘We’ll take you to a safe house,’ his comrade said quietly.

  ‘A safe house is what it sounds. Mike here will drive you. Once you’re there, you’ll have a man to guard you. Just until we catch this joker, which shouldn’t be long.’

  Daisy felt control sliding out of her hands. ‘My work,’ she exclaimed, trying to wrest back authority. ‘I’m due back at the hospital—now.’

  ‘You can’t go. It’s too dangerous.’ Grayson was terse. ‘I’ll go to Barts immediately and speak to Matron. Explain the situation. Under the circumstances, I’m sure she’ll grant you indefinite leave.’

  Before she could protest further, he’d turned to speak to his colleague. ‘I’ll walk to the hospital from here, Mike. It’s not far. You take the car, but whatever you do, don’t drive straight there.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I know the drill.’ Corrigan smiled his reassurance.

  Without another word, Grayson turned and strode along Ellen Street, heading towards the City. Daisy had never felt more alone.

  Grayson’s encounter with the matron of St Barts was short and sharp. Her expression made it clear she thought it stupid, reprehensible even, to have involved one of her nurses in some ridiculous cloak and dagger enterprise when her staff was already stretched to breaking. At one point, Grayson thought he heard her mutter the words ‘Boys Own Paper’, but he could have been wrong. It was how she made him feel, though—an irresponsible schoolboy wallowing in fantasy. He found himself metaphorically pulling up his knee socks.

  He left her stately presence with a silent sigh of relief and walked down the staircase to the hospital entrance. Fresh air was what he sought. Instead, a nurse, flying down the stairs behind him, bundled him to the ground and landed on top of him. She was a substantial girl and, for a moment, he was winded. She scrambled up, her face scarlet with embarrassment.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ She held out a hand to help him to his feet. ‘I was rush
ing, I’m afraid. I didn’t see you there.’

  ‘I’ve obviously shrunk in the last half-hour,’ he said easily. ‘That must be your matron’s doing.’

  ‘You’ve been to see Matron? Gosh.’

  ‘Gosh indeed.’

  They were both upright now and he found her examining him closely.

  ‘I suppose …’ she began, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t be … you aren’t by any chance …’

  ‘Grayson Harte.’ He held out his hand and she shook it vigorously. ‘Daisy was right,’ she said cryptically.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘Connie, Connie Telford. I’m her best friend. I was rushing because she’s gone missing and I was trying to find her. She promised she’d be back, but she hasn’t turned up and Sister is in a steam over it. I wanted to warn her.’

  ‘I think you’ll find that Daisy’s absence has been accounted for,’ he said, gently.

  She looked perplexed. ‘But what’s happened? She said she had something to do, that was all, then she’d be back. So where is she?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, Miss Telford,’ he said regretfully. ‘But you can be sure that Daisy is safe. She won’t be returning to work for a short while, that’s all.’

  ‘But why ever not?’

  He took her by the arm and led her down the remaining stairs. The entrance hall was buzzing: doctors dashing in and out of doors, orderlies wheeling patients, visitors delivering gifts at the porter’s desk. He guided her towards a small alcove where they could speak without being overheard.

  ‘I can’t say much but you can trust what I say. If Daisy were to return, either here or to Charterhouse Square, she would be in danger.’

  Connie’s mouth fell open, and Grayson kept silent while she thought over what he’d said. At length, she asked, ‘When will she be coming back?’ She sounded unhappy.

  ‘That’s something else I can’t say. She’ll be back when we’re confident the danger is over.’

  ‘And who is this “we”?’

  ‘That’s—’

  ‘Something you can’t say,’ she finished for him. She took a few agitated paces back and forth. ‘You will look after her?’