The Sign of Fear

by Robert Ryan

  ‘And how do I know you won’t run off to warn Watson the moment my back is turned?’

  Holmes put down his whisky, dug into his inside pocket and extracted a small bottle. ‘This tells me my days of rushing about are over. Nitroglycerine. For my angina.’ He touched his left arm. ‘I am to avoid excitement, apparently. I am to relax. Chasing off after Watson and that woman is not on my agenda. Not if I want a few more years on this planet.’

  Bullimore nodded, fetched his hat and left without another word.

  Holmes waited five minutes before he sprang to his feet and walked purposefully to the top of the stairs. ‘Mrs Turner. Mrs Turner!’

  ‘Yes, Mr Holmes?’ Was that a weariness he detected in her voice? No matter. ‘Can you fetch me something?’

  ‘More whisky?’

  ‘No, although most welcome that was. I need a Bradshaw’s, Mrs Turner, the most up-to-date you can lay your hands on.’

  ‘Are you leaving us, Mr Holmes?’

  ‘Try not to sound so pleased about it, Mrs Turner. I know your routine has been somewhat strained by my presence, for which I apologize. But yes, it’s time I moved on.’

  Watson imagined that Miss Pillbody hadn’t stayed alive as long as she had without forward planning. The bolt hole she had prepared in case of discovery at her rented rooms was just four streets away and was little more than a lean-to attached to a terraced house, accessed from the rear alley. Miss Pillbody fetched the key from beneath a plant pot and let Watson in.

  The furnishings consisted of a single bed with a stained candlewick bedspread, a paraffin heater, a velvet wing-backed armchair that had lost most of its nap on the cushion and headrest, a chest of drawers and a narrow wardrobe. The room smelled musty and unused, and what light entered was filtered through the soot and grime on the windows. There was, he noted, no connecting door to the main house. She could come and go as she pleased.

  Miss Pillbody walked to the wardrobe and opened it. She stripped off her blouse, apparently unconcerned about Watson’s presence, and pulled on a fresh one. She also selected a hat from one of the boxes on the top shelf.

  ‘I have to go out.’

  ‘They’ll be looking for us soon,’ he said.

  ‘Us. Not me. I have to make sure the flight is arranged.’

  He groaned. ‘We are wanted by the police. I think we have to re-examine our options.’

  She put her clenched hands on her hips. ‘Please sit down, Major. There are cigarettes in the top drawer there if you have none. I shall be thirty minutes.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To do what Sie Wölfe do. Which means, I can’t tell you. Sit, relax, they won’t find you here.’

  He carried out the first part of her instructions.

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  When she had left he lit one of his own cigarettes and lay back in the armchair. What a pretty pickle, he thought. A fugitive in his own country, running from the very organizations he and Holmes had helped so often. And running with a woman who was an implacable enemy of the British Empire and all it stood for. He could see the headlines now: ‘Author tried for Treason’ or ‘Author to be shot at Tower’.

  And all because she had dangled the promise of the Dover Arrow before him. But what if she was playing her own game? What if somehow she was involved in thwarting Garavan for her own ends? Or that it had been a German plan all along? And where was she at that very moment? No doubt with other foreign agents planning her next move.

  There was something else worrying him. His hatred of Miss Pillbody had burned bright for months, with the heat of emotional phosphorous. But he was finding it impossible to keep up the intensity of loathing. Sometimes he almost forgot who and what she was – a trained killer. He had to find a way to keep that at the front of his thoughts.

  There had been many occasions in his dealings with Holmes when he had felt like man drowning in a sea of contradictory facts and theories. He felt it now, the cold waters of uncertainty and panic closing over his head.

  Miss Pillbody was absent for the time it took him to smoke two cigarettes, a duration that offered him no great insights into his dilemma. To follow Miss Pillbody or simply turn her over to the authorities? Perhaps he could solve the Dover Arrow problem using Holmes’s methods? There must be another approach to discovering what happened to the boat and the fate of Nurse Jennings.

  The door opened and Miss Pillbody bustled in, carrying several bags, which she immediately dropped so she could turn the key behind her in the lock. ‘You were right. There are police out there, stopping and questioning people.’

  ‘Were you stopped?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you weren’t followed here?’

  She simply raised an eyebrow at that, as if he was a child asking an impertinent question.

  ‘No, of course you weren’t.’

  She shrugged off her coat and placed her hat on the bed. ‘So, have you reached the point yet where you are thinking about turning me in to the police?’

  ‘It’s bad luck.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Putting a hat on a bed.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re a superstitious man, Major. Don’t duck the question. Are you thinking of simply handing me over to your countrymen?’

  Watson shrugged. It was no use lying. ‘I admit, I have considered all possibilities.’

  ‘In many ways it’s the sensible option. Things are unravelling somewhat.’

  ‘Unravelling how?’

  ‘Well, should you decide still to come along, we have to make our way to Colchester with Scotland Yard on our tail.’

  Bullimore is out of Bow Street, he thought, but didn’t say.

  ‘And by now, you are wondering if there really is a survivor from the Dover Arrow. If, in fact, I have been running circles around you.’

  ‘And have you?’

  She bent down and began rummaging in one of the bags. ‘Tell me, did you bring a revolver with you?’

  ‘Sadly, I did not,’ he admitted, although he had considered it.

  ‘I thought as much.’

  When Miss Pillbody stood, he saw the glint of a cut-throat razor’s blade as it flicked out of its housing. ‘Then I’m afraid this is goodbye, Major Watson.’

  FORTY

  ‘Why are you and all your people followed everywhere you go? It is most disconcerting.’

  Mycroft pulled the drapes of the Conversation Parlour in disgust.

  ‘Oh, that is only the policeman Bullimore or one of his associates. While they are trailing after me, I know they aren’t running Watson to earth.’

  Mycroft gave the fire a stir and sat down opposite his brother. ‘You look well for a man who has been yanking on the bell-pull at death’s door.’

  Holmes nodded. ‘Well, I felt as if I had my hand on its handle at least. Can you ring for a decanter of brandy?’

  ‘Brandy?’

  Holmes lit a cigarette. ‘I think this might be a three- or four-glass problem.’

  Mycroft stood and yanked on the velvet pull rope. Within a few minutes they each held a balloon glass of cognac, with a half-full cut-glass decanter waiting on a side table.

  ‘What are you up to, Sherlock?’

  ‘Well, I was on my way to the coast, but then I thought, I need a sounding board, someone who will either support my conjectures or shoot them down in flames.’

  ‘Conjectures about what?’

  ‘The Dover Arrow.’

  He caught Mycroft on the swallow and his brother suffered a coughing fit, almost ejecting the brandy across the room. ‘Good Lord, Sherlock, I thought I told you—’

  Holmes leaned forward to emphasize. ‘We are too long in the tooth to be intimidated, Mycroft. Between us we could summon support from ten, twenty, fifty of the great and the good. The very fact that someone does not want one to find out the truth is a pressing reason to go after that truth. Don’t you agree?’

  Mycroft wiped his lips with a napkin. ‘I suppo
se so.’

  ‘Do you remember “The Lost Special”?’

  ‘I do,’ Mycroft replied. ‘I remember discussing it with . . . what was her name . . . Mrs Gregson.’

  ‘A train disappears between stations, the public are agog for a short while, and then lose interest. They were so concerned with how a train could disappear, they forgot the more important point.’

  ‘Why someone would want a train to disappear.’

  ‘Precisely!’ said Holmes, flinging himself back in the chair and taking a puff on his cigarette. ‘Why! We were almost fooled by Garavan’s clever if barbaric distractions from his real purpose in kidnapping Lord Arnott. Perhaps, in the Dover Arrow case, we are too outraged by the thought of a German submarine’s callous action to consider other possibilities. So, why would anyone else want to sink a hospital ship?’

  ‘What do you mean by “anyone else”? Other than the Germans, who would want to perpetrate such a thing?’

  ‘The British,’ said Holmes, and braced himself for the storm of protest.

  When his brother spoke, though, it was more of a light breeze. ‘You think we could sink our own ship?’

  ‘I am asking you to consider the possibility.’

  Mycroft sipped at his brandy once more. ‘The Lost Special didn’t actually disappear, of course. It was driven down a mineshaft.’

  ‘And the Dover Arrow was sent to the bottom of the sea,’ said Holmes flatly, but Mycroft raised a questioning eyebrow. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘The Dover Arrow cost some four hundred thousand pounds to build,’ said Mycroft. ‘If you count in the cost of its docking pontoons and the railway lines, perhaps more. I am not sure even the British toss away that sort of money.’

  ‘Mycroft, what are you thinking?’

  A slight smile played over Mycroft’s lips. ‘Have you heard of Richborough?’

  ‘The town?’

  ‘The scheme.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let me enlighten you.’

  Slowly, two great minds, not as magnificent as they once were perhaps, but still wondrous pieces of cerebral machinery, applied themselves to the case of ‘The Lost Ferry’, until the decanter of brandy stood empty and the policeman outside had long grown bored.

  A casual observer might not think anything remiss about the two gentlemen seated in front of the fire in the parlour room at the King’s Hotel, Colchester. Both were nursing tumblers of whisky, more to try to purge away the memory of an indifferent meal than anything else, and enjoying a small cigar each.

  Someone with a trained eye, though, might notice the air of tension between them. The older man in particular was sitting bolt upright, rather than relaxing, and he was in the habit of nervously stroking his upper lip with a forefinger.

  The younger of the pair played with his cane, needed because of a shattered knee, a war wound that explained his civilian clothes, a dark lounge suit that appeared to be a size too big for him. But many young men had come back from the war as mere shadows of their former selves.

  ‘I haven’t not had a moustache for nearly fifty years,’ said the elder in a low voice, finally allowing himself to sink back in the seat. ‘I feel naked.’

  ‘You look younger,’ said his companion.

  ‘And you look frighteningly convincing,’ said Watson, once again brushing his unadorned upper lip.

  Miss Pillbody smiled. After trimming and then shaving Watson’s moustache, she had cut her own hair short, strapped her breasts and assumed the role of Hubert Swannell, who, after service in France, travelled with his ‘uncle’, selling diesel engines to businesses. Somehow, in her time out of the bolt hole, she had secured them the use of a small van, in the back of which was a working model of a Paxman engine. Whether this was preplanned or a piece of improvisation, she wouldn’t divulge.

  ‘I have in my time been soldier, sailor and priest,’ she explained. ‘We She Wolves were trained in the art of disguise by Max Schneider.’ She couldn’t keep the pride from her voice.

  Watson shook his head to show it meant nothing.

  ‘No? Very famous actor in Germany. The Human Chameleon, they call him, The Man of a Thousand Smiles.’

  ‘Holmes was partial to a disguise,’ Watson said wistfully.

  She nodded. Watson had forgotten that she had witnessed this for herself, on the bridge in Holland before she shot Mrs Gregson. It wouldn’t be wise to remind him of that.

  ‘What will you do?’ Watson asked.

  ‘Finish the brandy and get some sleep and hope breakfast is an improvement on dinner. We have to be at the field by eleven.’

  ‘I meant after the war,’ he said.

  Her brow furrowed. ‘I’ve never thought about it.’

  ‘Really? I find that hard to believe. Surely, we all look forward to the day when the killing stops and we can go back to our old lives.’

  ‘My old life went when my husband died. Do you think your old life will be waiting for you?’

  ‘Something that isn’t this life, I hope. One where men are mutilated and killed by the millions, and bombers roaming free over our cities. I’d like to survive long enough to be able to look up at a night sky and think of stars, not incendiaries.’

  Miss Pillbody took a long pull on the whisky. ‘I am not sure the average soldier in the trenches dares think he’ll survive. It’s almost like tempting fate. I’m much the same. I don’t think much past the mission. Beyond that is just darkness.’

  ‘So why do you keep doing this? You’ve more than done your part. Just say no, I’m finished.’

  ‘Why does a German or British soldier go over the top when the whistle blows? Why does he walk across the mud and bones, knowing he is likely to be cut down by machine-gun fire at any moment? Why don’t they just shoot their officers and go home?’

  Some French units had, in fact, mutinied after the Nivelle Offensive, but Watson knew from Mycroft that the extent of the disaffection – and the reprisals – was kept secret from the Germans. He had no intention of spilling the beans to an enemy spy. ‘Duty?’ offered Watson.

  ‘They feel it is their duty to die? Well, perhaps I feel the same.’

  Watson didn’t believe this. ‘Yet you have gone to extraordinary lengths to survive.’

  A shrug. ‘Which is what I am trained to do.’

  ‘Trained or mesmerized in some way? It seems to me that taking the fairer sex and turning them into . . .’ he struggled for the correct phrase.

  ‘Into me?’ she offered.

  ‘Into what you have become, yes, which is monstrous. It’s a perversion of everything womanhood stands for – caring, nurturing, the givers of life.’

  She guffawed with laughter at this and he marvelled at how she managed to make even that sound masculine. ‘You didn’t really notice the world passing into the twentieth century, did you, Major Watson?’

  ‘Oh, I did,’ he said, swirling his drink, ‘I just didn’t wish to join it.’

  ‘Evening.’ A fellow guest wandered into the parlour, looked around, picked up an evening paper and left again.

  ‘Holmes has a theory,’ Watson said.

  ‘About me?’

  ‘About Garavan. He thinks Garavan’s real mission was to dent confidence in the new paper currency or to force the Treasury to withdraw the existing notes. A form of economic warfare.’

  ‘Surely, Garavan was simply a thief?’ she said. ‘A deranged one, perhaps, but greed was his ultimate motive.’

  ‘And perhaps he saw a way of combining larceny with a blow against the British Empire. Two paydays – one from the Treasury, one from his sponsors.’

  Miss Pillbody considered this. ‘So Holmes was suggesting that Garavan served two masters. Himself and Germany.’

  ‘And he implied that you would know if this was true.’

  She leaned forward and gave the fire a poke, releasing a shower of sparks. ‘You don’t understand how Germany works. We are a relatively new country, younger than you, Major, used to doing things in comp
artments. We don’t yet think of ourselves as a whole nation and that is reflected in the way the government’s various departments work. If someone in one branch of intelligence decided to attack Britain through its currency, they wouldn’t share that with the She Wolves.’

  ‘Even though there was every chance of one group treading on the other’s toes?’

  She frowned. ‘Each department is mainly concerned with enhancing its own reputation, in making sure they are the sole recipient of whatever glory is available. Sharing is not in their nature. In fact, the very opposite.’

  ‘So, it could have been a German undertaking, or at the very least, funded by them.’

  This time when she poked the fire, it was as if she were striking it through the heart with a rapier. ‘It could have been, yes.’

  ‘And you helped disrupt it,’ he said with some satisfaction.

  ‘I wouldn’t look so smug if I were you. If I have managed to tread on toes, as you put it, for a serious strike against Great Britain . . .’

  ‘There might be awkward questions for you to answer.’

  ‘No.’ She put down the poker and drained her whisky. ‘If I did manage to help disrupt an operation like that, Major Watson, and they learn of my involvement, then, She Wolf or no She Wolf, I am a dead woman.’

  FORTY-ONE

  Major Shandling of the Royal Engineers needed some persuading to show Sherlock Holmes around the Richborough port site. Even Mycroft’s letter from the War Department asking for all assistance to be freely given was questioned – which it deserved to be as it was a forgery – and it was only when Holmes insisted the major speak to Winston Churchill himself that the man relented. Fortuitous, because Churchill, although familiar with Holmes, knew nothing about this undertaking.

  Holmes knew he had been followed and this time he was certain it was by Bullimore himself, who had been picked up at Sandwich station by an unmarked police car with driver and had trailed Holmes’s taxi to the site. Unable to enter the restricted area, Bullimore was most likely waiting outside for Holmes to leave.

  ‘The correct name of what you are looking at,’ said Shandling, his words almost drowned out by the gulls whirring overhead, ‘is the War Department Cross-Channel Train Ferry. It will connect to Calais, Dunkirk, Dieppe and, eventually, Cherbourg.’