The Dead Can Wait

by Robert Ryan

  ‘There is your answer, then.’

  ‘To what?’

  Mrs Gregson gave a long sigh, designed to make the young man feel particularly dumb. ‘Coyle was tortured to try to make him reveal what is going on out there. If she already knew, why would she bother to stay around and do that? Obviously she and this Ross had tried infiltrating the place, as the grenades used on those poor soldiers demonstrated, but they must have got nothing. Their next move would be to try to torture the information from someone who knew.’ It came to her then what this Pillbody’s game had really been. ‘Someone like you.’

  ‘Me? But . . .’ He pointed as Coyle. ‘She did that to him.’

  ‘A piece of improvisation. Second best.’

  Mrs Gregson paced around the room, circling the table, her mind trying out various scenarios for size, seeing what fitted together, as if she were doing a mental jigsaw.

  When she thought she had a theory that held water, she spoke very softly, as if it was an edifice of building blocks that might tumble if she raised her voice. ‘I reckon she was desperate, this Miss Pillbody. The whole thing was falling apart so she took a chance on Coyle knowing what was going on. Why wouldn’t he? He’s a secret agent. But, before that, before Coyle recognized Ross in the pub, I suspect they would have gone for you. After all, you were a better prize. You worked there. You had seen everything at Elveden. Tell me, Booth, how do you think you would have stood up under torture?’

  Booth remained silent, trying to digest all this and pondering the answer to that last question. Who knew? was the retort he came up with. He might be spit-in-your-eye, do-your-worst defiant or he might be whimpering like a baby within five minutes. The truth, he suspected, was somewhere in between.

  ‘Can’t shift this. How strong is this Miss Pillbody?’ Mrs Gregson was trying to pull out the knife that secured Coyle’s hands to the table.

  ‘Let me,’ said Booth, glad that this woman was at last displaying an inadequacy. ‘Stand back.’

  It took him three heaves. On the last one he thought something might pop in his neck, such was the force required, but he wasn’t going to fail in front of Mrs Gregson, who seemed to damn him with every withering glance and curl of the lip. The blade came free with a horrible squeak that reminded him of the swineyard. ‘There.’

  He moved around the table and pulled the upper body back, towards the sitting position, accompanied by the crackle of dried blood.

  Mrs Gregson heard the ping, and thought it must be a sprung hair clip of some description, but the comma-shaped piece of metal flying through the air was much heavier than any such device. Then she saw a larger, bulkier object rolling off the table, towards Booth, just as he realized what had been hidden under Coyle, his dead weight keeping the handle in position.

  ‘Grenade!’ he yelled.

  Afterwards when she replayed the scene in her mind over and over again, Booth would show no hesitation, as if he was acting on pure instinct. It was possible that was the case. But it was possible he knew that any enquiry would censure him into disgrace and he saw a chance to redeem himself, even if it cost him his life. But time in her recollection was distorted, slow, so she couldn’t be certain of his motives.

  She was later told that the grenades that they discovered were all of the older type, with the long six-second fuse, so Booth would have had at least some time to consider what he was doing.

  Consciously or instinctively, either way, Booth dropped to the floor after the Mills bomb, spreading his arms out, so that the grenade was pressed firmly against his sternum.

  ‘No!’ she cried, not even thinking of the alternative.

  It went off with a loud but oddly muffled bang, the force lifting Booth up hard enough to crack his skull on the underside of the table, and to send the lifeless Coyle and chair barrelling into Mrs Gregory, flinging her away like the doll she had found in the hall.

  The combination of living and dead bodies absorbed the blast, saving her life, so that she awoke half a minute after the detonation, ears deadened, her face stinging from debris, but more or less physically intact.

  She pulled herself upright. The bulb had blown in the explosion, for which she was grateful, because it meant she couldn’t make out the ruined remains of Lieutenant Booth too clearly. Her anger against him was gone. He had selflessly saved her life which, she supposed, wiped the slate clean. But, she thought dispassionately, it seems that this Miss Pillbody has a facility for dispatching her admirers that a preying mantis could only envy.

  Then, as there was nobody there to witness her despair and terror, she put her head in her hands and sobbed.

  THIRTY

  Watson awoke with a start, a whirl of images crowding his brain: some fractured remnants from his dreams, others stark memories from the previous day and the rising water in the ice house. The latter generated an enormous shiver, which ran from his crown to his toes, accompanied by a long, ululating groan.

  ‘I have some tea, when you are ready. How do you feel?’

  ‘Alive,’ he said with some surprise, as he pushed himself up the pillow.

  ‘That’s something.’ Mrs Gregson, kitted out in a fresh nurse’s uniform, was sitting next to his bed, the morning sun setting her hair aflame. She had pulled the curtains back. That was what had woken him so suddenly, scrambling his thoughts. He blinked the fragments of dreams from his vision and looked at her. Her eyes were red and underscored with purple.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I should have let you sleep. But there is much to be done.’

  He remembered the tank test, which Booth had told him had been rescheduled for that very day. ‘Of course. I’ll take the tea, thank you.’

  She passed it across and he shuffled up in bed to receive it.

  ‘And we have to deal with the ice house,’ he began. ‘Does anyone know—’

  She shook her head. Watson’s idea had shocked her at first. It was so out of character. But, as the water had risen, she could come up with no viable alternative. They had used the dead bodies of the three grenade-damaged men to block the drain, forcing the one with the large stomach halfway down, piling the others on top and then one of the rock-filled coffins on top of them. It hadn’t stopped the flow, but it had reduced it to a persistent trickle. Otherwise, by the time Booth had found them, they would have been fully covered, only their heads above water, gasping for air and with hypothermia guaranteed. But it had been a macabre solution, one for which she hoped God would forgive them. Although, increasingly, she was beginning to believe there would be no reckoning in the afterlife. Ascribing blame for the last few years of carnage would tax any god.

  ‘I am afraid that the bodies in the ice house are the least of our problems,’ she admitted. ‘We can file that under “needs must”. No, there have been other, much more serious developments.’

  Watson took a gulp of tea. ‘Such as?’

  It came out in a rush, sentences tripping over each other, pauses only for breath. But it was coherent none the less and she gave him a full account of the previous night, along with her interpretation of events, always stressing where she was making wild assumptions and leaps in the dark. By the time she had finished, his tea had grown cold.

  ‘That’s all,’ she said, and slumped a little, exhausted from the effort.

  ‘All? My goodness,’ Watson said, struggling to come to terms with the carnage in a sleepy village. ‘And Coyle, dead? It is hard to believe. Such a . . . I liked him. And Booth. That grenade was an evil trick. It could easily have been you.’ The thought of Mrs Gregson’s narrow escape caused something akin to physical pain in his chest. And Watson was taken aback by the severity of the reaction. It took a few moments for him to compose himself. ‘The damned tank hasn’t even gone into action yet, but look at the number of lives it’s already cost.’

  She straightened a little. ‘We lost that many before breakfast, at one time, Major. When we were at the sharp end.’

 
That was the truth. But, somehow, that endless convoy of dead anaesthetized you to the horror. They had names, they had – for the most part – faces, but they came along to the wards, the mortuaries and the charnel houses in such vast numbers it was hard to imagine they’d ever been fully formed human beings, with lives to live, sweethearts to find, children to bear, old ages to enjoy, before the war swerved their destiny onto such a hard road.

  Watson looked into her face and appreciated that by invoking the Western Front and its horrors, she was trying to put the gruesome events in the cottage into some kind of perspective. What a world, he thought, when a woman has to rationalize the murder of four men in a single evening, and her own close brush with death, by summoning up memories of an even worse slaughter. One thing was certain, he hoped he never ran into this Miss Pillbody.

  It was later, when Watson had quizzed Mrs Gregson further on the details, that he asked her something that had been bothering him.

  ‘You never did tell me why you stopped nursing. Why you came back from the front. I don’t blame you, everyone has their limit.’

  ‘Mine was called Desmond.’

  Watson handed over the teacup and saucer. ‘Desmond?’

  ‘Major Desmond Ward-Maine. He was at Gallipoli, part of strategic planning. I met him at . . . well . . . it doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘It does to me. I think it does to you. Can you bear to tell me?’

  Mrs Gregson took a deep breath. ‘Desmond was married. He told me that right from the off, when I met him at the hospital. He wasn’t seriously injured, but stayed for a few days. We got along, and you know how it is over there. Overworked, lonely, frightened . . .’

  ‘And the nurses don’t have it easy, either.’

  She gave a bleak smile.

  ‘We contrived to meet, whenever we could. Once a week sometimes, more often once a month. But he would write. Lovely letters. Mostly.’

  ‘Mostly?’

  ‘Well, sometimes he would get on his high horse about Gallipoli. He said if the public knew the truth . . .’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Oh, the usual. Lions led by jackasses.’

  ‘He could have been in serious trouble for that.’

  ‘His letters never came through the censors. And not just for the political content. He could be quite . . .’ – she fanned her face with her fingers – ‘passionate. So for the most part the letters were personal.’ She swallowed hard, steeling herself. ‘We were . . .’

  Watson spoke softly. ‘If you tell me you were lovers, I won’t be shocked, Mrs Gregson.’

  ‘Once,’ she said flatly. ‘In a damp French bed with an artillery barrage going on that broke the bottle of champagne he had brought along as Dutch courage for one or both of us.’ She gave a short sniff. ‘Just the once. I didn’t ask him to leave his wife and son. Didn’t expect anything else. Well, perhaps to do it another time without the shelling and with champagne.’

  ‘But there wasn’t?’

  ‘No. You’ve heard of Gommecourt?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, his voice barely a whisper, his stomach knotted in anticipation of what was to come. It was a familiar story in its arc, yet the agony came freshly minted with each version told.

  ‘Just south of Arras. It was an attack by the Midlanders and the Londoners on a German salient there, around what was left of a château. As usual, the Germans were well dug in. There was wire, of course, and it was uncut by the shelling. And Gommecourt was particularly muddy, so progress was slow. Desmond—’

  Watson slid out of bed, pulled down his nightshirt, and stood behind her, hand on her shoulder. ‘I think I know the rest. I shouldn’t have asked.’

  Her hand rested lightly on his. ‘You don’t know the rest, Major. They brought him to my hospital, my ward. It was as if someone up there was mocking me. “You dare to make love to this man? Well, what do you think of him now?” He was in such pain, such pain. So I gave him morphine. And more morphine. And more. Until . . .’ She let out a sob. ‘I murdered him.’

  Watson squeezed Mrs Gregson’s shoulder. It felt hard beneath his touch. ‘Or I think perhaps you simply hurried him along on his way. Godspeed.’

  ‘That wasn’t the . . .’ – she swallowed hard – ‘ . . . that wasn’t the worst part, Major.’

  ‘Things like this have happened hundreds, thousands of times. You remember when I first saw a mortally wounded man at the front? I tried too hard to save him, neglecting other patients, when—’

  ‘I wrote to his wife.’

  The words were like the toll of a bell. Silence followed, just the dying echo of the short sentence in the corners of the room.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wrote to her as his nurse. I told her he died a peaceful death. That he was a brave man who did his duty time and again. That he loved her and his child and spoke of them often.’

  ‘That was a kindness.’

  She snorted. ‘It was selfish. An attempt to prolong my contact with him, no matter how . . . second-hand.’

  ‘But nobody would think badly of you for it. You didn’t mention—’

  ‘No,’ Mrs Gregson protested. ‘No, of course not. What do you take me for?’

  A woman grieving for her lover, he thought, but didn’t voice it.

  ‘She asked to see me when I was next home on leave. Just to hear about his death first-hand.’

  ‘To feel a connection.’

  ‘So I thought.’ She twisted in her chair, so she was looking up at him. ‘The moment I spoke to her about Desmond, she knew. I could see it in her eyes. She knew everything. How? How can that be?’

  ‘Mrs Gregson, you are perhaps the most worldly woman I have ever met. And I mean that as a compliment. Even Sherlock Holmes would tip his hat to your powers of observation and deduction. I say that as one who often fell woefully short of his standards, but . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘The moment you said his name, Desmond, I, too, knew you had been lovers. Don’t ask me to analyse why. Holmes would speak of inflections and cadences and grace notes. I just hear the warmth. My second wife used to speak of a pilot . . . oh, I am sure nothing happened. But there was a quality to her voice that caused me to feel the green worm turn in my heart. Admiration, tenderness. As I say, it might have been an infatuation with the image of the man – the dashing aviator, lord of the skies, defier of death, versus a quotidian doctor—’

  ‘Hardly,’ she protested with a small snort of disbelief. ‘The famous Dr Watson? Quotidian?’

  ‘Oh, I was by then, save the occasional summons by my friend. I am sure her infatuation would have faded over time, but then . . . well, as you know, she was killed. But believe you me, the secret passion is harder than you think to keep just that. How did she react? The wife?’

  ‘She was perfectly pleasant to me. Polite. I had no inkling at the time. Then, she wrote a letter to the Director of Medical Services, copied to my hospital matron, accusing me of . . . Well, she made out I had gone to see her to gloat.’

  It was difficult to condemn the widow, just as it was to censure Mrs Gregson. Such actions always seemed the right course at the time. He still regretted the occasion that he and Holmes had fallen out so badly over his own medical service, yet both of them had been convinced – were probably still certain – that they had been in the right. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I was dismissed from the VADs, of course. The family was well connected, after all. I thought never to nurse again. I tried to enroll in something more . . . mechanical, as you know.’

  ‘To my mind, you did nothing wrong. You did not confront the wife with evidence. I am sure you never confirmed her suspicions? No, I thought not. I would wager that, even now, she is wondering if she imagined it and did great harm to a good nurse.’

  ‘VAD’ she corrected automatically.

  ‘Mrs Gregson, you are as much a nurse as anyone with a piece of paper to show they are a Queen Alexandra sister. Now, I have a question.’

/>   ‘About Desmond?’

  ‘No. I think that is enough of that.’ Watson was ready to change the subject, to move on from her obvious pain. About Churchill. How do you get messages to him?’

  She rubbed her forehead, as if shining away all thoughts of Desmond.

  ‘Through the delivery chap, Littlewood. He drives the grocery van that comes every morning. I use it to bring in medical supplies, but sometimes the list I give contains a message.’

  ‘And Littlewood radios or telephones that to Churchill?’

  ‘Not directly. He doesn’t know it’s coded. It goes through the postmistress to London, where I suppose it’s deciphered by Winston’s lot.’

  ‘I see. Can you get a message to her?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll send Ridley to the village.’

  Watson took a piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket and began to write. ‘I need him to tell her to send an SOS through whatever channels she uses to contact London. In plain English. Churchill is to send a team of Kell’s men up here, double-quick. And for this man to come as well.’ He passed the note over. ‘And I want Coyle’s body shipped back to Ireland and his family. Then they have to seal that village and investigate what, exactly, the two Germans – if they were German citizens – were up to. I think you might be right, the spies hadn’t guessed what’s going on here. Hadn’t penetrated the estate, at least. But therein lies the puzzle.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘If the Germans didn’t get in and do it, what exactly killed the men in that tank?’

  ‘And,’ Mrs Gregson said with great deliberation, ‘who was it who locked us in the ice house?’

  Swinton was waiting for Watson at the foot of the stairs. ‘I have postponed the tank test for the time being.’ He held up a piece of paper. ‘I have a most extraordinary missive here from Mrs Gregson, about the goings-on last night. We’ve lost Booth. Booth! And her allegations—’

  Watson cut him short. ‘She has told me all about it. You can trust Mrs Gregson.’

  He looked doubtful. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘She had the presence of mind to report everything to you.’