Authors: Robert Ryan
THIRTY-FOUR
Ian Ackland had thought being in the British Secret Service would be far more exciting than it had turned out to be. He had expected danger in foreign lands, but had joined just two months before the schism that created two separate agencies, one for home and one for abroad. He had been deemed most suitable for work within the British Isles.
Even that held out hope of Richard Hannay-type adventures: dinner at the Café Royal, drinks at the Ritz, gambling at Brooks’s interspersed with daring train dashes, narrow escapes and uncovering spy rings. But Ackland, cursed with a congenital limp that kept him out of the army when he came down from Cambridge, was probably not considered train-dash material by the people at the top.
It was true that Colonel R., the man who had recruited him at a hotel in Northumberland Avenue, had warned him the job was ‘ninety-five per cent tedium and when you are in the midst of the five per cent, you find yourself praying for tedium once more.’
It hadn’t all been dull. He had once found himself helping Gibson and Coyle, the department’s old hands, arrest two men in Hull. They claimed to be cigar salesmen. Gibson had suggested that any genuine seller would have better luck in ports with cigarettes and pipes; ordinary seamen did not go in for cigars – that was the Admiralty. It was the kind of detail a real agent noticed. So, after tracking them from Plymouth to Portsmouth to Hull, they had pounced.
One of them, Janssen, had bolted, and Ackland and Coyle had given chase and tackled him to the ground. True, it had been Coyle who had spotted Janssen’s little derringer and torn it from his grasp, but Ackland had proved a man with a gammy leg could still manage a fair turn of speed. And it had got the blood racing.
Which was more than could be said for sitting outside a dentist’s surgery in Great Yarmouth. ‘A whisper’ was how his director had put it ‘that he is up to more than teeth pulling’. A whisper. But then, it was a whisper and a hunch that had brought them to Janssen. The spy, and his associate, had later been shot at the Tower.
Two flashes lit up the surgery windows.
Ackland sat up straight behind the wheel. Had he imagined things? He had seen the woman with the luggage – odd for someone visiting a dentist – arrive and Delaney’s secretary leave. He spooled back over the past thirty seconds. Had he heard anything? There, buried beneath his reminiscences of Janssen, was something. Gunshots? No, surely not. Perhaps some piece of dental equipment malfunctioning?
The door to the house opened and the woman with the bag hurried down the steps, pausing to look left and right, her eyes hesitating as they raked his Armstrong-Whitworth, before she walked at a brisk pace towards the main road to the north.
Ackland sat frozen with indecision for a moment. Should he go in and see what had happened inside? But how would he explain his interest to Delaney, the dentist? It might tip him the wink that he was being watched. His director would be furious. No, follow the woman. Whatever had occurred involved her.
Who goes to the dentist with luggage?
he thought once more. Unless they were planning on a trip. Perhaps that was it. Delaney was a travel courier, handing over tickets and passports to enemy agents. A woman? Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. Hadn’t Basil Thomson of Scotland Yard’s counterespionage branch arrested that Dutch woman Margaretha Zelle at Falmouth? With little proof that she was a foreign agent Thomson had had to let her go, but he had circulated a memo warning that the Dutch dancer known as ‘Mata Hari’ – Zelle’s stage name – should be considered a suspicious person.
And that stare, as she examined his car, it had made his skin itch with apprehension. There was something both professional and predatory in it. She might not be Mata Hari, but she was someone he should be interested in.
The Armstrong-Whitworth was fitted with the new electric starts, normally only found on Rolls Royces and such marques, but they were temperamental, and Ackland muttered a little prayer as he pulled out the choke an inch and pressed the starter button. The cold engine groaned as it turned, seemed to die, then accelerated until it caught, leaping about like an eager puppy. The woman was about to turn the corner, so he engaged first gear and, without waiting for the engine to warm up fully – he could hear the chief mechanic barking his disapproval – pulled away from the kerbside.
At the corner he paused, waiting for a horse-drawn brewer’s dray to cross in front of him. He could see her down the street, still hurrying on, but looking over her shoulder, then at the next junction, anxiously scanning left and right and then back in his direction. Had she spotted him? No. A cab – she was looking for a taxi. And he would be stuck behind, and blinded by, the enormous high-sided cart with its barrels of beer.
Ackland let out the clutch, floored the accelerator and spun the wheel. For a second he thought he had overcooked it, as the tyres shrieked in protest and the back end seemed to float around the corner, but, after a brief fishtail, he was on the opposite side of the road, causing bicycles to swerve as he rushed past the dray, cutting in just in front of the horses as another vehicle filled his windscreen. He glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw one of the animals had started to buck, but he had no time to worry about that.
He halted again at the next corner where he had seen her standing. This was a much busier road, full of omnibuses and motor lorries, as well as cyclists and motor cyclists. He scanned both ways, but could see no sign of her. There were several taxis in the mêlée, so she could easily have hailed one while he was busy overtaking. Ackland banged the steering wheel with his fist in frustration.
Ah, well, next best thing. Back to the dentist, see what had transpired there. He would feign toothache to gain entrance. He began a laboured three-point turn, and was just at the apex, wrenching the wheel around, when the door was yanked open.
The Armstrong-Whitworth juddered and stalled as he was pulled out from behind the wheel into the street. A big, ruddy-faced fellow with thick white moustaches was tossing him around like a rag doll. It took a moment before he realized it was the drayman.
‘You little bleeder,’ he said, pulling back his fist. ‘Look what you done to my horse.’
He couldn’t see what he had done but he could hear one of them complaining loudly.
‘I am an officer of the law—’
The drayman hit him with a fist the size of a shovel and Ackland went sprawling to the ground, his face a massive circle of pain. He tried to reach into his pocket.
‘Watch out, he’s got a gun,’ someone shouted, most unhelpfully.
The drayman kicked him and stamped on his right hand, even though he had no intention of reaching for his weapon, but his Scotland Yard-issued ID.
He let out at yelp of pain and then: ‘You bloody fool! I’m a policeman.’
‘You are a menace, that’s what you are.’
The drayman hauled him to his feet, just as he heard the engine of the Armstrong-Whitworth kick back into life. Nicely warmed now, it gave a willing roar and the slightest of grinds as the gear was selected. The sporty machine came back at the two men at high speed, cracking into both of them and sending them into a heap in the gutter. Ackland’s skull bounced off the kerb and he went out cold. The big drayman raised himself on one elbow, just far enough to appreciate that it appeared to be a woman who had run him over and left the driver for dead.
‘There, that’s all done.’ Mrs Gregson tied off the bandage she had put on Cardew’s hand. ‘I’ll have another look at it later. Normally I would let a burn like that get some air, but I suspect you aren’t going to keep your hands away from oil and dirt, are you?’
They were in the old aviary, and Cardew’s hand represented the last of the various burns, cuts and scratches she had had to deal with after the tanks’ test runs.
‘It’s my job,’ said Cardew, flexing his fingers, ‘to get filthy.’
‘You make it sound like you are a chimneysweep. Couldn’t you wear gloves?’
Cardew gave her a look that suggested she’d recommended he don a feather boa. ‘We need the lightness of touch, Mrs Gregson. Skin on metal. It can’t be beaten.’
‘Except when the metal is hot.’
‘That’s an accepted hazard in my line of work. How is Major Watson?’ Cardew asked.
‘Getting better.’
‘He had me worried there for a while,’ admitted Cardew. ‘What do you think caused—’
She shook her head. ‘I am sure Major Watson is asking himself that very question right now. And if I know him, he’ll have an answer soon enough.’
Cardew nodded. ‘You know, just before the test Thwaites, the cavalryman, came to me and—’
There was a rap on a pane of glass in the open door to the makeshift surgery. ‘Shop!’
Lieutenant Halford, now changed out of his overalls and into the uniform of the Royal Artillery, walked across the tiled floor towards them. ‘Sorry to interrupt. I remembered I promised to get this done.’ He pointed at his left eye. ‘It’s scratchier than ever.’
‘We’re just finished here,’ Mrs Gregson said, and Cardew rolled down and buttoned his sleeve. ‘But you were saying? About the cavalryman?’
Cardew shook his head. ‘No, don’t worry. Probably nothing. I’ll tell Major Watson when I see him. Lieutenant Halford, you have the chair.’
After Cardew had left, Halford sat down. Mrs Gregson took a white enamel kidney tray and a saline irrigation pump from one of the cupboards.
‘I’m glad I let you persuade me to allow you on board,’ said Halford. ‘I reckon you saved Watson and the rest of us.’
She smiled. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Oh, no doubt about it, Nurse. Top-hole behaviour. Thank you.’
‘Call me Mrs Gregson. Can you tilt your head back?’
He did as he was told. ‘And where is Mr Gregson?’
‘France, I believe.’
He moved his head forward. ‘You believe?’
‘Mr Gregson and I parted company some years ago.’ Why was she telling him this? ‘It was expedient to keep the title.’
‘Ah. In which case, one good turn deserves another.’
‘Hold still. And hold this there.’ She got him to position the dish under his chin and began to squirt the sterile saline into his eye. ‘You wear goggles, don’t you?’
‘We do, but sometimes with the goggles and the prism slits, you can see bug—you can’t see anything. So you lift them off. So how about this good turn?’
A jagged black particle like a miniature coal lump washed out of his conjunctiva and into the dish. ‘Ah. I think we might have the culprit. What good turn?’
‘I let you in the tank. My good turn. Now you let me take you to dinner. Your good turn.’
‘Blink.’ She dabbed at his face with a cloth, mopping up the water. She was pleased to see the flush of red beneath his ears. At least he had the decency to be embarrassed by such a barefaced proposal.
When did boys get so bold?
she wondered. The war, of course. ‘We aren’t allowed off the estate. How can you take me out to dinner? Not that I am considering the proposal.’
‘Let me worry about how and where. We can—’ His face contorted into a look of puzzlement.
‘What is it?’
‘Did you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ asked Mrs Gregson.
He cocked his head to one side. ‘Sounded like a scream. From over there.’
She followed his finger. It was pointing through the window of the aviary to the distant Sandgrouse Lodge where Major Watson was billeted.
THIRTY-FIVE
Watson sat at the desk in his room, drafting a memo to the Ministry of Munitions and to Winston Churchill. He had headlined it: ‘Some Medical Observations on the Conditions Inside the Landships’ and ‘Most Confidential’. He wasn’t sure he would get a decent hearing, but it had to be said. Not because of his own behaviour and collapse, but because of the atrocious atmosphere within the ‘bus’ or ‘car’, as they called them, that the brave young men who manned them would have to fight under. It had been known for a long time that carbon monoxide could cause confusion and death; he himself had been called to many deaths, from infants to adults, caused by faulty heaters or fires in closed rooms. There must be a better method to eliminate the CO and CO2 that the engine belched into the interior.
Added to that, the heat generated by the Daimler caused petrol to evaporate from the internal tanks – there was no external way for pouring petrol into them – so it vented from the screw filler caps straight into the already foul air, stinging the eyes and attacking the throat. And then there was the heat; he estimated it might reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Put together with the horrendous racket and lethal machinery, it was an act of torture to subject British soldiers to it.
Watson was no engineer, but he thought there must be a way to shroud the engine and the gear machinery and make sure the exhaust fumes cleared the car’s body. And a silencing system, perhaps. And petrol tanks that didn’t turn the whole bus into a potential fiery deathtrap. He didn’t fancy trying to get out of the narrow escape hatches and doors in an emergency. And, of course, the inside was full of thousands of rounds of ordnance, likely to start exploding.
But this wouldn’t be what the commanders on the Western Front wanted to hear. They weren’t concerned about the niceties of the machines. They just wanted them lumbering forward out of the morning mist and smoke, panicking the Germans. And they wanted them before the winter rains, fully tested or not. After all, life in the forward trenches was no picnic for millions of men. Why worry about the comfort of a few hundred tankmen?
Watson sighed. He doubted it was all that cynical, or at least hoped it wasn’t. They were desperate for something to shorten the war, to save lives, and they were only too happy to clutch at this metal straw.
There was a rapping on the door.
‘Come!’
Cardew put his head around the door, his face full of concern. ‘Can I see you for a moment, Major?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Watson, laying aside the papers. ‘I have a few questions about
Genevieve
anyway.’
‘Are you’re feeling all right?’