Justice Hall

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I did, as it turned out, accept the first taxi that presented itself, reasoning that if a cab has just pulled to the kerb when a person comes out of a restaurant door, and if that cab then offloads a Member of Parliament, his wife, and his sister, then a person can feel relatively confident that its driver has not been hovering up the street waiting to pounce upon one. I did take the precaution of giving the driver the wrong address, and splashed through an ill-lit alley to Mycroft’s building on Pall Mall.

I trotted up the steps, shunned the lift in favour of the stairway, and pounded on Mycroft’s door, slightly breathless. I felt his presence arrive on the other side, where he paused to look through the secret peep-hole in the centre of the knocker, and then the bolt slid. I slipped past him, shedding rain-coat and hat as I went, not needing to ask where Holmes was because I could see his stockinged feet sticking out from the end of the comfortable sofa.

The six-foot-plus man laid out on Mycroft’s long settee had at some point since the morning changed into a Frenchman. From his silk-stockinged feet to the sleek part of his hair, his trousers, shirt-front, and even the still-attached moustaches were unmistakably French. He’d even, I noticed from a glance at the suit’s coat that lay over the arm of a nearby chair, dug out his Légion d’Honneur. It was honestly come by—Holmes avoided a display of unearned ribbons when he could, even as disguise. The most English things about him at the moment were the squat crystal glass balanced on his chest and the India-rubber ice-bag from the Army and Navy Stores that rested on his head.

A good deal of my apprehension deflated abruptly, leaving me dizzy with relief. Just bruises, then, and perhaps a cracked rib, judging by the care with which he drew breath. And a splint on one finger.

Mycroft placed a glass of brandy in my hand and pushed me gently into a chair. I put the glass aside and sat on the edge of the upholstery.

“You needn’t look so mother-hennish, Russell,” Holmes said crossly. “There’s nothing here that some strapping won’t take care of.”

“What did they use?” A length of pipe, unless the cut on his jaw came by a fall.

“Brass knuckles and boots, for the most part. One of them picked up a cobble-stone.” He gestured at the jaw. “But the other ordered him to drop it. They weren’t aiming to murder me, just to render me hors de combat. Or to warn me off, but if so, the small detail of precisely what it was off which I was being warned was left too late, and omitted entirely when the local constable came pounding and whistling to the rescue.”

“Not robbery?”

“If so, it was secondary to the pleasure of knocking me about.” He shifted in the pillows, and winced. “If you are not going to drink that excellent brandy, Russell, I shall happily offer it a home.”

His speech and his eyes seemed clear, and the head wounds minor. I handed him the glass. He took a mouthful and made a face; since I was certain that any brandy kept by Mycroft would not make him grimace, I added a loosened tooth to my mental list.

The brandy settled him. After a minute, he went on without prompting.

“Two men, one of them a gentleman or something very near—and yes, I am fully cognisant of the absurdity of that statement, but his voice through its muffling mask had the accents of authority and education, and he commanded the other to drop the stone with the bark of an officer. Unfortunately, that phrase, ‘Drop it,’ were the pair’s only words—not sufficient to identify the speaker’s origins or identity.” He paused to take another swallow, reducing the glass to half its original level, then resumed. “The authoritative individual was a fit man of around five feet ten or eleven inches—I fear the alley was too dimly lit to allow for any more detail. He had done a certain amount of boxing, I should say, but like most amateur pugilists, he was not entirely familiar with the sensation of hitting with a set of brass knuckles.

“The other man, the muscles of the team, was more street fighter than pugilist. Certainly he was no respecter of the Queensberry rules. He was more than comfortable with a brass weight wrapped between his fingers. Shorter, heavy-set as a stevedore, smelling of beer and bad teeth, wearing a working man’s boots.”

Even the sharpest and most disciplined of minds tends to wander somewhat under the influence of a pummelling followed by several ounces of alcohol. Holmes, I thought, could use a gentle firming-up.

“Was the muscle local talent, from London? Or a country boy?”

That made him focus. The confusion at the back of his eyes dissipated as he concentrated on the memories, reaching through the tumult of attack to retrieve the more subtle sensations.

“There must have been three of them in all, with the third in charge of transport. They were waiting down the street from the door I’d gone through an hour earlier.”

“How did they find you?”

“They may have ears within the War Offices. I had been interviewing there all day, in my guise of a retired French colonel seeking candidates for posthumous awards, and at least three clerks had the opportunity of overhearing the conversation I had with Alistair at Justice Hall regarding our progress, during which I chanced to mention my destination for the evening. I shall give you their names, Mycroft; see if you can turn up any past wrongdoing among them. In any case, my attackers waited up the street, saw which way I was going, and drove past me. As I walked, I noticed two men, their heads ducked against the rain, dash from a private car into a doorway. When I had gone past, they came back onto the street and one of them—the muscles—literally tackled me from behind and ran me into an alley-way. We ended up in the entrance to a yard, with fisticuffs among the dust bins.

“Mycroft,” he interrupted his narrative to say. “Do you think you might ring down for that light supper you offered me earlier? Soup or a boiled egg for me, although Russell no doubt could do with something more substantial, having had dinner at Simpson’s snatched out from under her nose. Where was I? The dust bins, yes.

“The muscular individual was quite aware that a blow to the head induces sufficient disorientation to allow for a more leisurely treatment to the rest of the victim’s anatomy. And so it proved. Against him alone I might have stood; the two of them soon had me down and were, as they say, putting the boots in.

“The muscles was at the most seven inches over five feet, but solid. Wearing an Army greatcoat, newer boots with stiffened toes, steel perhaps—but no, his smell was of city streets and the docks, not of manure and grass. A city tough. He’ll have a black eye, but no obvious marks on his hands—he wore gloves.

“The other: not, perhaps, a gentleman in the strict sense, but a man of education. A schoolmaster or high-ranking clerk, perhaps a gentleman’s gentleman. Homburg type rather than cloth cap, although they’d abandoned the actual head-gear and pulled on stocking caps, or balaclavas, when they came out of the doorway. His overcoat was good, heavy wool, dark colour but not I think actually black. Neck scarf, also dark, gloves that gleamed in the light, polished lace-up boots. A city suit, I’d say, under the overcoat. No facial hair that I could tell, but I’d have missed a trimmed beard or a small moustache. The gentleman will have a limp: I gave his left knee a good one when I was down. And his overcoat is missing a button.”

With a smile of satisfaction, he worked a cautious hand beneath Mycroft’s borrowed dressing gown to the pocket of the shirt, and brought out a silk handkerchief, which he held out to me. I knelt down at the low table with it, and allowed it to unroll. A round of horn dropped out. Wordlessly, Mycroft brought me a small leather kit containing powders, brushes, and insufflator. I raised three partial prints from the surface, and allowed Mycroft to put the object in a safe place, away from the attentions of his housekeeper.

A rattle in the service lift heralded our much-delayed evening meal, with its mixture of invalid food and hearty labourer’s fare (for Mycroft, whose brain sweated mightily for king and country). Mycroft grumbled that the roast beef was dry, but as it was close on to midnight I privately reckoned we were fortunate not to be served shoe leather and yesterday’s sprouts.

Holmes looked more substantial after his soup and boiled egg, and I decided not to press for putting him to bed. Not that I would have succeeded; the most I could have hoped for was that he would occupy the sofa while Mycroft and I retreated to our beds. However, I judged that he would stand up to further conversation, so I told him how far I’d got in tracking down the green-eyed Hélène. Which admittedly was not far, so that with the social aspects of my hours with Gwyn left out, my narrative was brief.

“And you, Holmes? Did your crawl through the War Offices records bring you anything? Apart from a beating, that is?”

“Sidney Darling was a staff officer in France, although when I telephoned to Justice this afternoon, neither Alistair nor Marsh could say that Darling and Gabriel ever came into contact over there.”

“I have to say, neither of your attackers resembles Darling in the slightest.”

“Another name did come up,” Holmes continued. “Also a staff major, also posted to that section of France. Ivo Hughenfort.”

“Alistair’s cousin?”

“The same.” He closed his eyes and let his head fall against the cushions, leaving me to glance at Mycroft, see his questioning raised eyebrow, and offer a word of explanation.

“Ivo would be fourth in line to the title,” I said. “After the boy Thomas, then Alistair.”

“Ah,” Mycroft said, threading his fingers together across his substantial waistcoat. “I see.”

Mycroft and I between us succeeded in bullying Holmes to take to the guest-room bed, and we passed a restless night. In the morning Holmes looked worse but felt better, as the bruises coloured richly while the bone and muscle beneath them eased somewhat. Or so he claimed, although his movement remained cautious and he chewed a lot of aspirin. More telling, he did not insist on venturing out into the City in search of further information. He settled before the fire with another heap of unread newspapers and a fistful of tobacco, and dismissed us from his mind.

Mycroft climbed into his overcoat and left at his usual hour—the world of Intelligence never rests—and I rang the Qs to ask that they telephone to Mycroft’s number if Gwyn came up with a name and number for me. I then went out myself (rather nervously eyeing all passers-by) to examine closely the site of Holmes’ assault. I spent a sodden and dirty half hour in the alley-way that failed to reward me with a dropped calling card or conveniently traceable bespoke hat or boot, then another forty minutes knocking on doors to confirm that at seven o’clock on a wet Tuesday evening there had been no busy pubs or nosey neighbours to witness the event. Without having been set upon by thugs, I returned to Mycroft’s flat.

Holmes started up from his snooze on the sofa-cushions and made as if his cold pipe had just that moment gone out. I assembled a pot of tea and reported on nothing.

At one o’clock the telephone rang, with Mr Q’s voice shouting down the line to give me a name and address. “The young lady who telephoned to you asked that you be told that Miss Cobb is not on the telephone, but that she should be happy to receive callers today, or in the morning before ten o’clock. I regret that was the sum total of her message, Miss Russell.”

“That’s fine, Mr Quimby. Thank you for phoning the information to me.”

“My pleasure, madam.”

I put the receiver up on its hook and folded the address into my pocket. “I’m going out for a while, Holmes. Gwyn Claypool found a woman who might know a VAD driver named Hélène.”

“Shall I come?”

“I don’t see why. Girl talk will, I fear, prevail.”

“Very well,” he said, but he discarded his newspaper in any event and climbed to his feet. “I believe in that case I shall spend the afternoon at the baths. Steam and an expert massage are the only means of dispersing a beating. I shall, however, need you to do up my shoes first.”

He dressed, I tied his boot-laces, and we parted.

Dorothea Cobb was the classic VAD ambulance driver, a person I’d have recognised instantly as such if I had happened upon her in the street. The War had presented itself at precisely the right time in her life, when the tedious necessity of marriage was pressing in on her and the excuse of a daredevil lark in the mud of France could be justified as patriotism. She’d started in Belgium, moved down to the Somme, and spent four years wrestling stretchers, staunching wounds, dodging shrapnel, and sleeping with her gas-mask to hand; although she’d come away thin, scarred, gassed, and hearing the groans of the wounded in her dreams, the last five years of civilian life had proven stale indeed.

Dorothea—for such she insisted I call her, two minutes into our acquaintance—was the elder of two girls in a moderately well-to-do family. Her sister, eight years younger, had recently come out, snagged a handsome guardsman, and married, leaving the spinster at home with her parents, dressed in a pair of defiant trousers but sporting her hair in two thick coils over her ears. I wore my own hair long for the convenience of it, but I thought she might be unwilling to face the battle of bobbing hers.

Thus I found her, dutiful on the surface but seething beneath, and gloriously happy for the opportunity of drawing the half-dozen albums of photographs, sketches, letters, and newspaper clippings from the de facto war shrine that occupied one corner of the family sitting room. The room itself was stodgy and stuffy and smelt of dog; Dorothea was a gust of cold air, setting the lace mantel-cloth and fringed lamp-shades to fluttering. As she bent so eagerly over the photographs, her face came to life, and I wondered how long it would be before she fled the antimacassars. (One could only hope that she wasn’t driven to murder her parents first.)

“This is the tent we worked out of when I first got there, and that, if you can believe it, was my ambulance. October 1915. Used to be a butcher’s van; I had to paint out the name because I didn’t think it a very fortunate image for the poor boys being shoved inside. But I’m sure we didn’t have any girls with green eyes in Belgium. The next spring, let’s see.” She turned some pages with scarred fingers—nurse’s fingers, owing to the sepsis transmitted from their patients’ wounds—and I stifled a sigh. At this rate, I should still be here at tea-time tomorrow.

“One girl, she was called Charlie, her eyes were green. Yes, this is she.” Dorothea shifted the album so I could see the open, grinning figure, bursting with vitality and the joy of being alive and needed. Her hair was short, curls springing out from under her cap, her light eyes sparkled at the camera, and I could easily imagine a young nobleman falling head over heels in love at first glance. “She died a couple of months after this was taken—the dormitory took a direct hit in ’16 and she bled to death. Poor thing; how the boys loved her.” Not Charlie, then. Dorothea turned a page, and another. Nursing sisters in white; surgical wards; two wan doctors sprawled on supply crates with blood on their coats and glasses of beer in their hands; a line of drivers dressed in dusty greatcoats, knee-high boots, and gas-masks, resembling some monstrous insect race; a photograph of a ruined village with a queue of men winding through it, blinded by gas, each with his hands on the next man’s shoulders. The War.

Dorothea was seeing only familiar, even loved faces. “Matilda—I wonder what could have happened to her? Wanda married one of the men she carried from the Front. The twins—identical they were, and didn’t they have some fun with the doctors? Did Bunny—? No, her eyes were blue, I’m sure they were. And I heard she married, too. Elsie . . . no. Joan. She died, in Cairo. Gabrielle—no, she was a titch of a thing, could hardly hold one end of a stretcher on her own, though she was a fantastic driver, once we raised the seat for her. You said your driver carried a man?”

“So I was told.”

More pages turned, Dorothea contributing interesting but useless tit-bits about the personae dramatis depicted on them. We were now in the autumn of 1917, and I was forced to admit that this would be a lost cause.

And then: “Wait a minute.” She bent over a small snapshot showing a group of laughing women in greasy overalls and cloth caps, then put the book onto my knees and went to fetch a magnifying glass even Holmes would have been proud to own. She took back the book and leant over it again. “Yes, I remember her. We only met a handful of times, when we were transferring wounded; she must have worked farther down the line than I did. But she certainly had green eyes, green as an emerald. How could I have forgotten her? She was as tall as I am, taller even, and she used to wear this fur-lined aviator’s jacket under her standard coat—not regulation, but by that time who bothered? I remember admiring it one freezing day, and she told me her brother had given it her; it was what the Canadian fly-boys wore.”

Gabriel’s diary had made reference to a sheepskin collar. “Do you remember her name?”

“Her name, her name, what was her name?” she mused, staring into the magnified features. “A boy’s name. Not Charlie, and not Tom—she was in Italy by then. Phil—that’s it! Phil, they called her. A nick-name, of course; everyone went by nick-names out there. Made a person feel like a schoolgirl again, instead of an old hag who hadn’t washed her hair in a fortnight and who walked around with unspeakable things on her boots. They called me Gigi. From my surname, you know? Cobb—horse—geegee. Some nick-names were better than others,” she added apologetically. I had silently to agree.

“But what might Phil’s name have been?” I asked.

“I somehow think that in her case it was more of a shortening of her proper name.”

Philomena? I wondered. Phillida—Oh, surely not the same name as his aunt; that would be too odd.

“Perhaps Philippa?” she suggested after a moment. “That seems right somehow.”

As a coincidence, it was not as sharp as Phillida would have been. However, even that close a similarity to the name of a young aunt might explain Gabriel’s preference for “Hélène,” whether it was invented as a romantic paean to her beauty (Is this the face that launched a thousand ambulances?) or the girl’s middle name.

I now had a first name to attach to Gabriel’s green-eyed driver. But “Gigi,” it seemed, was not through with her.

“Philippa, yes, and an Irish last name to go with those eyes. O’something. O’Hanlan, O’Flannigan, O’Neill . . .”

I hoped she did not plan on working through the Dublin telephone directory, and reined in my impatience.

“Mary,” she said. I thought she was addressing me, but: “O’Meary. That was her name. I’ve always been good with names—I knew hers was in there somewhere. Philippa O’Meary, although she was no more Irish-looking than I am, other than her eyes. And I do remember, she once slung a man over her back all the way through the communications trenches to get him out. Big girl. Slim, but big bones. What you might call farm stock. Not English, though.”

“What, French?” I couldn’t picture that.

“American, I think. No, I’m a liar—she was from Canada. Now why do I think that? That aviator’s jacket?” She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “It’s gone. May come back, but I picture her as Canadian. She was based near Reims. Had a couple of sisters, I think—lots younger, like mine; we agreed that we hoped it would be over before they could join up. Black hair, she had, shiny and with a little curl to it. She wore it short. Had dimples when she laughed. Good boots—Now why should that come back to me? Someone in her family was a shoemaker. What else can I drag out of this grab-bag of a mind of mine? Fearless driver, had bullet holes—actual bullet holes, not just shrapnel—in her ambulance. Lent me a pair of gloves once—she had two and my hands were ice; I returned them through a friend.

“And do you know, I think she had a ring? We weren’t supposed to fraternise, and of course you couldn’t be married, but by that time things were too desperate for anyone to pay much attention, so long as you were careful. But I remember the ring—not a gemstone or anything, just a bit of silver, but she wore it on a chain, to keep it hidden. That must have been the last time I saw her, that last summer of the War. It was hot, and the wounded were suffering so, and she looked dreadful herself. The top button of her blouse had come unbuttoned—or perhaps she’d undone it herself, it was that stifling, and one of the nurses said something to her about proper uniform. ‘Proper uniform,’ I ask you, with crawling out of a hot bunk after two hours’ sleep and working at a run in a world of dust and blood—and the smell! But if Sister had spotted that ring on the chain, Phil would’ve been on the next boat home.

“Although come to think of it, she may have gone back before the end, since I don’t remember seeing her after that week. She wouldn’t have been the only one who didn’t last the summer, that’s for sure.”

“You said she looked sick?”

“Not so much sick as unhappy. Now if that doesn’t sound daft, considering the circs we were in, I know. But when the nurse said something about the chain she was wearing, Phil didn’t seem embarrassed, like she’d been caught out with a beau. She seemed . . . Well, I guess the nurse was afraid Phil was about to collapse, because she sort of grabbed for her, but Phil shook her off and went back for the next stretcher. And that was the end of the discussion. So . . . maybe her beau didn’t make it through.”

Either sensitivity or long experience led Dorothea to the same conclusion that I had reached.

“When would this have been?” I asked her.

She returned to the album as a reference point, and when that proved too indefinite in its dates, she handed it to me along with the powerful glass and took up her personal journal. I studied the photograph, finding it more evocative than informative. A smudge of face, a tuft of dark hair springing out from under the sexless cloth cap, and a rangy shape beneath the shapeless overalls; the only thing I could have said for sure was that her stance shouted self-confidence and strength, and perhaps even a degree of humour, although I couldn’t have explained where that last impression came from. Several minutes passed before Dorothea spoke. “It looks to have been the end of July or the first part of August. Sorry, that’s the nearest I can make it.”

Gabriel Hughenfort had been arrested on the twenty-sixth of July and executed at dawn on August the third.

“Where would records of the VAD drivers be kept now?” I asked her.

She wrote an address for me, handed me the paper, closed her photograph album with regret. “Ask for Millicent,” she suggested. “Some of the other girls who work there are dead useless, but Millie was a nurse. She’ll help you.”

She walked with me to the door, and pulled her knit cardigan more tightly around her as the cold pushed in. I thanked her, for the third or fourth time, and went down the steps.

Halfway down the walk, I stopped. When I turned, she had not moved, in spite of the cold. I spoke without thinking.

“You ought to take up mountain-climbing, or flying,” I urged her. “Or go on a world tour. Let your sister care for your parents for a while.”

She looked startled, and then in an instant the jaunty daredevil VAD driver of her photo album was standing in the doorway, her head tossed to one side and a grin of schoolgirl mischief on her thirty-year-old face.

“You’re absolutely right, Mary. I think I’ve been good far too long.”

And with a wink of understanding, she stepped back inside and gently shut the door. Somehow, I doubted her hair would remain long for many more weeks.

Thursday morning, with Holmes sufficiently recovered that he could do up his own shoe-laces and amble off for a second immersion in the Turkish baths, I set off to trace the green-eyed driver, whose name might be in doubt but who had become a clear personality in my mind.

Millicent, unfortunately, was absent, and the “other girls” proved as useless as Dorothea had predicted. I dismissed them with empty thanks and pored over the records on my own. By the time the tea-cart came through in the middle of the morning, I had filthy hands and confirmation of the name. By lunch-time my back ached and I could trace her movements up and down the Front with some reliability. By the afternoon tea break my head was pounding and I knew where she was—or at any rate, where she came from in 1916, and what Philippa Helen O’Meary had given as her home address upon leaving France in August 1918.

Unfortunately, that address was in Canada.