Into Battle

by Michael Gilbert

  Being careful of himself was something he had never found easy. The private warfare he had been waging with his pen for so many years had made him many enemies and much trouble. And had he achieved anything? Had not the time come for honourable retirement? Time to swim with the stream?

  As though in answer to this thought the two swans that had been forging slowly upstream swung around, headed downstream, and were quickly out of sight.

  At midday on the day that the letter from General French reached Whitehall, Luke arrived at 109 Abbey Wood Road to relieve Joe, who was glad to get back to his quarters. The affair with Rosie was going well, but like all newly bedded plants, she needed regular watering.

  When the two watchers were settled in their chairs, and Ben had shown Luke his notes and brought him up-to-date as to the visitors to the crematorium they had observed, Luke said, “I hope Joe has been improving your tactical education.”

  “Oh, he has. Very much so.”

  “On what lines?”

  “Well, it was mostly about girls and how to get alongside them.”

  “That wasn’t exactly what I meant,” said Luke severely. Although he was less than two years older than Ben, and Joe was actually a few months younger, both had got into the habit of treating him as a promising boy who needed surveillance and encouragement. In an effort to assert himself, Luke continued the conversation in German, abandoning this only when he found that Ben was more fluent than he was. For which he felt compelled to congratulate him.

  Ben said, “Most of the credit must go to Mr. Mills.”

  “The head teacher at the Abbey Road tutorial place?”

  “David Mills. He’s actually almost the only teacher left. Two young men he had have joined the army. There are some women who come in at odd times to teach French and Spanish, but David looks after everything else himself.”

  “Sounds a competent man.”

  “He’s all of that. And what makes him a good German teacher is that he isn’t a German. If you follow me. He’s had to teach himself, and that makes it easier for him to pass it on.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it like that,” said Luke. “But you could be right.”

  “And since we’re talking about the school, there is one favour I’d like to ask you: couldn’t you arrange that I’m not handed over on Tuesdays and Thursdays as though I were a child being taken to school by his mother?”

  “Do they do that?”

  “I don’t know their names, but one or another of them looms up when I leave my place in Silvertown, follows me under the subway, gets onto the train with me, and sits there until we get to Abbey Wood Station. He does let me walk the hundred yards from there to the school without actually holding my hand, but he’s on my heels all the way.”

  “Embarrassing,” agreed Luke. “It’d be Durkin or Kirchner. Good men in a rough house, but not much tact.”

  “It’s broad daylight and I’m in the public eye all the way.”

  “It was Kell’s idea, but I don’t suppose he meant it to be carried out in such a heavy-handed manner. I’ll have a word with him.”

  “After all, no one follows Joe about. And he’s short of a leg.”

  “One leg or two,” said Luke with a grin, “I’m sure he’s more than capable of looking after himself. In fact, he maintains that losing one of his legs has increased the strength of his arms – which were pretty powerful already.”

  Having made his point, Ben relaxed. He said, “I can tell you something else about Joe: he’s champing for action.”

  “Yes,” said Colonel Lemanoir. “I was sent a copy of it, too. Not the letter itself, but a summary of what it said.”

  Kell said, “And I suppose you can guess why we both got it.”

  “Surely.” The colonel brushed his moustache up with his forefinger and smoothed it down with the back of his wrist. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m in charge of one of our main ammunition stores, and your duty is to guard against any attack on it. So, if such an attack is made and is successful, we both get our balls chewed off. And if we complain they say ‘We did warn you’ and point to this letter.”

  “Typical bloody politicians,” said Kell. “However, I must confess, it made me think. You told this young fellow”—he indicated Luke, who was sitting quietly in the corner—” just how you were guarding this place …?”

  “I did. And his only reservation, I remember, was the length of the sentries’ spells of duty. Shorter now. They’ve sent me another two troops from the depot.”

  “Good.”

  “Good, yes. But is it good enough? The way I was thinking about it was this: suppose I was a German, or a German sympathiser. What exactly would my targets be? And how should I attack them? To take the first question first: we’ve got a lot of new factories making shells. By which I mean turning out shell cases. But if they’re going to be useful as anything but flower vases, they need propellants and detonators.”

  “And you’re still the main source of these?”

  “We and two others. What used to be called the powder factory, at Walthamstow and an old established factory at Tonbridge.”

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler if the new factories did the whole job themselves?”

  “Much simpler. And before the end of the year I expect they will. But at the moment three quarters of their staff are new boys. Keen, hardworking, and totally ignorant. They daren’t let them handle high explosives yet – not until they’ve had time to learn about it, which they will do pretty quickly. And when I said ‘new boys’, I should have said ‘new girls’ as well. More than half their intake are women.”

  Kell thought about it. It narrowed down his problem, but made the solution no easier. He said, “Tell me the answer, then, to your second question: how would you set about attacking the three vital places?”

  “If they can’t get through the walls, there’s really only one way open to them, isn’t there?”

  “Attack from the air.”

  “Exactly. We’ve had Zeppelins over most days since war was declared, and they’ve done a lot of indiscriminate damage. What I was wondering was whether, if they concentrated their efforts, they might be able to smash us. We’ve got any amount of explosive material stored here, and one direct hit—”

  “I don’t deny the danger,” said Kell. “But what real likelihood of success would it have? The Zeppelins are only difficult to attack because, at the moment, they can fly higher than our fighter planes. But tell me this: what chance would a Zeppelin flying at, say, ten thousand feet – that’s almost two miles above the earth – what chance would it have of hitting a pinpoint target?”

  “A comfortable thought,” agreed the colonel.

  Luke was not so comfortable.

  His mind had gone back twelve months. He was sitting outside the private dining room at the back of the Royal Duke Hotel in Portsmouth, listening to the German naval officers blowing off steam.

  They were describing how they would set about the Royal Navy. “Über und unter” had been their war cry. Over and under. The attack from above had been from Zeppelins. The attack from below had been by submarine.

  Was it a fantastic thought that a submarine, penetrating the triple defences of the Thames estuary, might discharge a torpedo into the bowels of the Royal Arsenal? No. It was surely a fantasy.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Joe was standing in an open doorway, staring down into a pit of blackness.

  It was a blackness that was warmer than the night air around him, a blackness full of silence and a faint and unpleasant smell. It reminded him of something. Was it the smell of the hospital room where he had come back to life after the surgeon had finished sawing off the bottom half of his leg? Or did it go farther back than that? Much farther. To the last minutes of his father’s life? His father, who had fought off death, inch by inch, yielding at last with a grunt of annoyance. Exactly the sort of grunt, thought the boy who was watching, that he would have given if he had come home and found that
supper was not ready.

  And why was he standing there thinking about his youth, instead of going forward into the darkness?

  “Get on,” said Joe. “Nothing to be frightened of.”

  The early stages of his approach had been easy enough. The five houses on the north side of the Crescent each had a handsome garden, the first two being separated by a narrow path, which ran up to the garden of the crematorium house. This was bordered, not by a hedge, which would have been awkward for a one-legged man, but by a simple post-and-nail fence. An easy way in. Even more important, an easy way out if he had to leave in a hurry.

  To reach the back of the crematorium building he had had to cross an open space in full view of the windows of the house. Although, at two o’clock in the morning, Mr. Robb and his servants would surely be asleep, he had taken no chances but had snaked across the intervening space with his nose inches above the grass.

  The remaining question had been: could he open the crematorium door?

  He had watched Mr. Robb go through it twice, once accompanied by his gardener, once alone. On neither occasion had he stopped to unlock the door. But this proved nothing. The door might be unlocked by day, locked by night. Against this contingency, he had provided himself with a ring of keys; but when he turned the handle, the door had opened with a series of heart-stopping creaks.

  “Get on, you dope. Are you waiting for a huge black thing to jump out and grab you? Once you get the bloody door shut behind you, you can use your flashlight, can’t you?”

  This seemed sensible advice. He stepped forward cautiously and swung the door to. Then, by the light of his flashlight, he was able to inspect his surroundings.

  On the right was the great iron furnace, a monstrous contraption crouching in the corner, ready to spring.

  Joe put this thought behind him and continued with his inspection.

  Ahead of him was a platform against the wall that divided the crematorium from the chapel. It was a movable platform – easily movable, as he discovered when he put one hand on it to steady himself. It would carry the coffin up to the furnace.

  Overcoming the illogical feeling that he might find human remains inside it, Joe opened the heavy iron door of the incinerating chamber. The narrow space inside was lined with firebricks, the ones on the floor being spaced to form a grid. As Joe shut the door, he noticed that, though heavy, it moved easily.

  Ahead of him, a short flight of steps led down.

  On the chapel side, there were two doors, neither of them fastened. The first one contained the electric control boards, an efficient-looking collection of fuse boxes and switches. These were labelled “Chapel Main”, “Chapel Sides”, “Crematorium Lights”, “Crematorium Power”, “House Lights”, and “House Power”. The first four were off, the last two were on.

  The second door opened onto a small workroom. There was a bench at the far end with a light suspended over it, and in a rack against the wall, as fine a collection of metal saws, probes, and cold chisels as he ever remembered seeing.

  “A surgeon’s kit,” he said; “sharp enough to cut through bone,” and as he stepped forward to examine them, something touched him on the back of his neck.

  He tried to jump around – not a sensible manoeuvre for a one-legged man – and found himself on his face on the floor. The flashlight, which had fallen beside him, was still working. He put a hand out, picked it up, and turned the light upward. What had touched him was the end of a long, thick spider web.

  Joe laughed weakly and scrambled back into an upright position. Doing so, he placed one hand flat on the floor and winced as he cut it on a sharp edge. The flashlight showed where this new attack had come from: On the floor, in front of the bench, were scattered a number of flintlike splinters.

  Joe had had enough. The splinters might be important or they might not. He put three of them into his pocket. Then he turned thankfully back, out of the pit that seemed to stink of death up and out into the clean night air.

  Half an hour later, he was in his own bed. Having taken the precaution of downing half a glass of neat whiskey, he had not slept too badly.

  The next morning he was out of bed by nine o’clock – an unusually early hour for him – and after a hurried breakfast took himself along to the house in the Crescent. He wanted to tell Luke about his excursion.

  He took the splinters from his pocket and laid them on the table.

  “Look like bits of very hard coal,” said Luke. “I’ll let the old man have them as soon as I can get away this evening.”

  Ben said, “My German class finishes at four. I’ll stand in for you for the last spell if you think it’s important.”

  “I’ve got beyond thinking what’s important and what isn’t,” said Luke dolefully. “But I’ll accept your offer and thank you.” And to Joe, “Is there anything else you’d like to tell him?”

  Joe thought about it. In daylight, among friends, it was almost impossible to describe the impression that the cellar had made on him. He said, “Only one thing: the place smelled odd.”

  “Odd?”

  “I can’t explain it. Except for one thing: there was a sort of smell of coal.”

  “Not unexpected in a coal cellar.”

  “It wasn’t a coal cellar. The crematorium runs on gas and electricity. There isn’t a coal fire in the place.”

  Luke thought about this.

  “Maybe coal’s been stored there some time for the house.”

  “It’s got gas on tap and electric power—like I saw …” He explained about the switches. “I wouldn’t think there’s a coal fire in the house either.”

  It was a mystery, but a minor one. Luke said, “I’ll put it in my report. He stirred the slate like splinters with one finger. “I’ll leave it to better brains than mine.”

  When Ben finally took himself off, Joe hobbled downstairs with him, to continue the interesting discussion they had been having.

  “So how’s it going?” said Ben.

  “Fair to middling,” said Joe. “Hard work, but some results. What I really wanted from her was a list of all Goodison’s customers. I had to tell a lot of taradiddles to explain why I wanted it, but nowadays she just does what I say and doesn’t ask questions.”

  How splendid, thought Ben, to be able to twist a girl around your little finger like that. He said good-bye and headed off up the Crescent at his best pace. He was due at the language school at midday, and Mr. Mills liked his students to be punctual.

  The army officer, who seemed to be having trouble with his motorcycle and was bending over it making some adjustment, straightened up as Ben came past. The officer had evidently managed to locate and correct the fault, and by the time Ben was out of the Crescent and on Abbey Wood Road, his machine was functioning again. He mounted it and rode slowly along, giving Ben an ample start and keeping his distance until Ben turned into Fendike Road.

  When this happened, he killed the engine, parked the machine, and went forward on foot, keeping a discreet distance from his quarry. When he saw Ben turn in at the gate of the language school, walk up the front path, and ring the bell, he stood quite still.

  It was perhaps as well that no passer-by glimpsed his face. He might have reported to the police that there was a homicidal maniac at large in the area.

  For a few seconds only. Then the good-natured army mask clicked back into place.

  Vernon Kell was sitting in his office, his pince-nez glasses wedged onto his thick nose and a look of painful concentration on his face.

  He had cleared his table of all routine matters and was staring at three reports, each in its neat folder. If he looked at them hard enough, could he wring from them the inner truth he was sure they contained?

  “Not only must they mean something,” he said, speaking too softly for his secretary in the next room to hear him and spread the rumour that he was going mad, “but taken together, and rightly understood, they must tell me the truth.”

  The first one was from Major Co
oper-Key, to whom Kell had sent a letter two days before. Major Cooper-Key wrote:

  You were kind enough to enclose in your letter a copy of the report submitted by Pagan, together with three flintlike shards. Reading between the lines, it seems to be the result of a highly unofficial visit paid by his colleague, Narrabone, to the East Plumstead Crematorium. Illegal, but enterprising.

  There are, as I expect you know, two different types of furnace used by such places. In the modern type, a temperature as high as two thousand degrees can be produced by mixing steam and burning coke. Its drawback is that it needs regular stoking. The older, simpler type – which seems to be the one in use here – relies on a number of concentrated jets of ignited gas. It can simply be turned on and left to itself. The temperature produced is lower, and it takes longer to do its job, which is, putting the matter simply, to transmute the dead body into carbonic acid gas.

  I mention these points because they underline the possible importance of the shards that were found in the cellar. These are fragments of anthracite, popularly known as stone coal. This is used primarily in blast furnaces and the boilers of ships but is not a normal household fuel.

  The writer of the report has clearly noticed the significance of this, since he found no coal fires in the crematorium building and thought it unlikely that there would be any in the house. I agree. And if there had been, soft coal would have been used, not anthracite.

  Kell had hoped that the writer would put forward his own answer to this conundrum. He was disappointed. The writer stated the facts, but drew no conclusion from them.

  Turning to your inquiry about possible explosives, you must bear in mind that in this country all forms of explosives have been strictly regulated since the activities of the Fenians were checked at the end of the last century. You told me yourself of an instance in which Russian terrorists were forced to manufacture their own dynamite under the guise of making soap – a most interesting incident that, with your permission, I intend to include in a paper I have been invited to read to the Royal Society.