A Study in Murder (12 page)

Watson could feel the suspicion clouding the air. He walked through the barracks, nodding to anyone who caught his eye, feeling the stares at his back. Was it Von Bork who had spread the lie of
him being a ‘Hun lover’ in their midst? If so, it was a very clever turn of the screw.

He stepped inside his surgery and pulled the curtain across, aware of a drop in temperature as he did so. Perhaps, Watson mused, he could find a way of securing his own stove. After all,
patients often had to undress; it would help if the room were heated. He took off his greatcoat and the hobnails, changing to two pairs of dry socks to keep his damp feet warm.

Watson sat on the bed, put his elbows on his knees and let out a long, ululating sigh. Despair was only a heartbeat away, he knew. Everything he held dear was further from him than ever.
Furthermore, he seemed to have been pitched into a camp right out of Edward Lear. The land where the bong tree grows, he thought glumly.

There was a sudden rise in the volume of conversation from next door. Watson, not paying much attention, caught only snatches.

‘. . . in there.’

‘I’m ill, I tell you.’

‘Bloody traitor.’

‘. . . fuck you.’

The curtain was flung back and the young lieutenant from the parade ground, with his distinctive mop of unruly brown hair and staring eyes, was standing before him, hopping from foot to foot.
Archer, Watson recalled from his conversation with Critchley.

Watson pulled himself upright. ‘Yes? Can I help?’

The man nodded vigorously. ‘It’s my heart. Palpitations, Doctor.’

‘Major,’ Watson said.

‘Sir.’

‘Take a seat.’

Conversation had resumed in the rest of the barracks and the newcomer seemed to relax. Watson opened a page in his notebook.

‘Name?’

‘Archer, sir.’

‘What’s your unit?’

‘The 4th Dragoon Guards, sir.’

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-four, sir.’

Looks older
, Watson wrote next to it.

‘Height?’

‘Six foot, give or take.’

‘Hop on those scales for me, will you?’

Watson peered over. Eight and a half stone. ‘How long have you been a prisoner, Archer?’

‘Eighteen months, sir.’

‘Tell me about these palpitations.’

‘Well, they start whenever I try to go to sleep. No matter where I lie I can hear my heart. Thump, thump thump. Loud in my ears. Then it goes all . . . peculiar.’

‘Where are you from, Archer?’

‘Colchester.’

‘You went to the Royal Grammar?’

‘I did, yes.’

‘Field commission?’

‘Indeed.’

Temporary gentleman
, he wrote, even though he despised the phrase. Grammar school boys from the ranks didn’t start being seen as officer material until the cream of the public
schools fell to German machine guns, snipers and shells. Then they were allowed above their station in life. But only with visiting rights.

It sounded like an anxiety attack to Watson. Many of his shell shock patients had complained of an over-loud heartbeat. He found prescribing any tablet, from quinine sulphate to liver, did the
trick. All they needed was the illusion of treatment to quell whatever fears were causing the arrhythmia or tachycardia.

‘Drink much tea? Coffee? Or what passes for them here?’

The man shook his head. ‘It’s running a bit fast now. Want to have a listen?’

‘Very well, slip your shirt off.’

Watson fetched the rather perished stethoscope he had found in one of the drawers and placed it in his ears. When he turned, Archer had pulled up his shirt and vest with one hand. A finger of
the other was pressed against his lips.

But that wasn’t what caused Watson to start. There was something written in ink across his chest.

The Dead talk to me.

When Watson went to speak, Archer shook his head. He turned around and pulled up the rear of his shirt. Written on his back was:
The rec hut. After curfew. Come alone.

Come alone? Who on earth would he bring? He was a pariah in this place.

There was an explosion of yelling from the next room and the sounds of a scuffle. Men began shouting encouragement to the combatants. There came the crash of chairs overturning.

Taking advantage of the racket Archer stepped in close. ‘I know who you are, Major, or should I say Doctor, Watson. I know you like a mystery. Here.’

From his top pocket the man took two pieces of paper, both folded into tiny squares.

‘I’ll explain tonight.’ Then, as the hubbub in the hut subsided, with more volume: ‘Thank you, Major, I will.’

Watson, though, had spotted something. He grabbed the man’s right wrist and turned it over. There were scars, some white and fibrous, of an age, but others still raw and fresh. The left
wrist was the same.

Archer leaned in and whispered. ‘I will explain tonight. It is not what it seems.’

‘It seems you are a very clumsy suicide.’

‘It’s not that,’ he hissed.

Archer pulled down his shirt and vest, tucked them in and, with a rather insubordinate wink, he was gone.

Watson found himself writing in his book the phrase written across the man’s chest.

The Dead talk to me.

He supposed that Archer meant through spiritualism of some description. He had acquaintances – including writers and scientists – who believed in such things as the afterlife and
being able to access the spirit world. Some even accepted the existence of fairies. Holmes, the rationalist, never countenanced such things – he believed only what his senses told him;
Watson, as a medical man, considered the world beyond this one outside his remit. But he knew such thoughts gave comfort to the millions of bereaved created by this war. He rarely sought to
dissuade patients when they professed the belief that a son or husband was somehow ‘with’ them. The devastated needed all the comfort they could get, even if it was with, like
Pickering, an imaginary friend.

He had even heard of accusations from beyond the grave, accusations of murder from the supposed victim, transmitted through a ‘sensitive’. But none that had stood up to scientific
rigour. No, he suspected this was another inmate driven by incarceration to seek comfort in the outlands of the human soul. Hadn’t Critchley said Archer had been subjected to a regime of
harassment?

And what of the marks on the wrist? They were relatively shallow cuts, by the look of them. Hesitation strokes, they were known as, when a suicide makes some tentative slashes, either hoping to
be discovered before he did more serious damage or while he summoned up the courage for the surprisingly deep incisions needed to make a human being bleed out from the ulnar artery.

He took the squares of paper that Archer had given him and unfolded them. Both contained signatures, executed in a rather jerky hand, although that was all the pair had in common. He would have
sworn they had different authors. One said: ‘Lieutenant George Threadglass’; the other: ‘Captain Martin Brevette’. Watson knew of a family called Brevette that lived in
Oxford. They had made their fortune as merchants, trading woad from the city of Toulouse, before indigo became the blue dye of choice. But by then they had invested wisely in other businesses.
Could this Brevette be one of them?

Watson folded the papers and slotted them between the pages of his notebook. Would he go to the rec room to clear this little puzzle up? He laughed to himself. Damn the man, he knew who he was,
knew he was cursed with a curiosity. Presumably it was easy enough to cross to this recreation room without being seen. Yes, he would go. But that was some hours away. It wouldn’t do to dwell
when he didn’t have all the facts before him.

He heard the peal of laughter from beyond his makeshift curtain and suddenly felt very alone and bereft. He found himself wishing for that phantom voice in his head, which surely was only one
step removed from Pickering’s delusion. He had to chuckle to himself. Well, if that voice wouldn’t come, he could conjure it up. He had promised Critchley a story. What better way to
escape the grim confines of the camp than to slip back in time, to the clack of horses’ hoofs and the shouts of costermongers and paperboys? He laid what was per page probably the
world’s most expensive notebook on the desk, took up his pencil and began to write the story he had started telling to the unfortunate Hanson back in the woods near Krefeld.

Sitting at the desk, Watson began to write, slowly at first but with gathering confidence that he could still find his old style and pace. It was almost a physical exhilaration
when he did, as if he had rediscovered his rugger legs and lungs.

By the time he put the pen down from between aching fingers, two hours had passed in blissful immersion elsewhere and Watson swore he could feel the heat of the Baker Street
fire, when the curtain was thrust back.

‘Emergency
Appell
,’ said Parsons, before adding, ‘Sir.’

Watson looked out of his window. Snow was falling in large flakes now, an impenetrable wall. ‘In this?’

Parsons’ pockmarked face stretched into a grin. ‘The colder and wetter the better for Mad Bill.’

Watson pulled on the unfortunate boots and his greatcoat and went into the main section of the hut, where he found the other men doing likewise, all grumbling loudly.

‘Bastard. What about lunch?’

‘That bloody bread? That’s not lunch.’ ‘What you having for luncheon, Cocky?’

‘I thought I might have grouse.’ This from a captain, who must be Hugh Peacock, the bon viveur that Critchley had told him about. He was certainly plumper than the average inmate,
dark-haired, baby-faced, neat moustache as black as coal. His boots, too, Watson noted with envy, were a cut above, knee-high and fur-lined.

‘Come on, gentlemen, hurry along.’ It was the one-armed
Feldwebel
, Brünning. ‘Do not keep the commandant waiting. Or it’ll be Stubby for you.’

‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of solitary,’ someone piped up. ‘Can’t be worse than sharing a room with Cocky’s grouse farts.’

‘The commandant—’

To Watson’s surprise, the whole hut burst into song, drowning out the remainder of the
Feldwebel
’s sentence.

Peacock took up a cod-operatic solo refrain in a surprisingly fine baritone.

The others then came back in with a chorus.

Even the
Feldwebel
gave a half-smile and then looked puzzled. ‘But isn’t it to drop a clanger? Don’t you come a cropper?’

‘Artistic licence, Rufus, old chum,’ said Peacock with a smirk.

Brünning’s smile faded at the familiarity and he shook his head vigorously. ‘You must hurry, or you will be writing your verses on a prison wall.’

Outside the ravaged mountainsides had disappeared beneath a shimmering grey screen of cloud and the snow was falling steadily. Watson followed the inmates of his hut over to the designated line.
This time, Wilhelm ‘Mad Bill’ Kügel was standing on the balcony, one of his junior officers holding an over-sized umbrella above his head. The commandant was a stocky fellow, but
broad, with a well-nourished face and, as far as Watson could ascertain, deep-set eyes. Kügel’s arms were crossed and his gloved hands were tapping his biceps impatiently. As soon as the
prisoners were in line he accepted a megaphone from his aide-de-camp. When he spoke, with a bizarre German/Midwest accent, he sounded like an American fairground barker.

‘Gentlemen. You disappoint me. It has come to my attention that last night escape equipment was found in the tin room. A compass. A saw. A map. Jesus, fellas, have I not been fair and
square with you? This man, this foolish man, threatens the lives of all of you. He will, of course, be punished. But you all share responsibility. You will remain here for one hour. And the lunch
ration is cut by half.’

There was an almighty groan, an almost bovine noise rising from the crowd. Watson, too, made a grunt of irritation. The snow was already blowing into the open toe of his boot. An hour in these
conditions and he risked chilblains or worse. He looked around and eventually found Lincoln-Chance, who no doubt had feet as warm as toast. As soon as they were released from the line-up he would
go over and have it out with him.

‘And so,
Stubenarrest
,’ Mad Bill continued, looking down at a sheet of paper that was handed to him, ‘for the man who tried to smuggle in the proscribed items. Step out
of line, Major John Watson.’