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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I crossed London at its wet and dreariest, let myself into Mycroft’s flat, found it empty with no indication that either Holmes brother had been there since the morning, and decided that the cure for heaviness of spirit and head-ache—or at least the only cure to hand—was cleanliness. And as Mycroft had recently installed an elaborate and modernistic shower-bath (I believe it was becoming too much of an effort to heave himself out of the bath-tub, although I would never have said anything of the sort), I thought I might give it a try.
With trepidation, I stepped into the closet of this technological wonder and opened all four sprays. I stepped out of it a fervent convert. And beyond the invigoration was the discovery that long hair washed while standing upright did not become the usual mass of tangles. I was humming as I ran the comb through it.
My hair was little more than damp when my companions returned—together, which indicated that Holmes had reentered the investigation. I watched as he divested himself of coat and hat, and was pleased to see a near-normal range of motion. He had been very lucky; for the moment, all was well.
Dinner—sans business—and a fire, tobacco and brandy for the brothers, and we were ready for work. I sat on the floor with my arms around my drawn-up knees, and watched them speak. Mycroft was, in all things, slow and thorough, where his younger brother flew straight to the core. Together they were formidable, and I could not imagine that many details got past them unnoticed.
It was Holmes who set aside his impatience in order to tell me what they had discovered during the day. That amounted to: One of the clerks who was in a position to know more or less where one inquisitive Frenchman would be at seven o’clock on Tuesday evening had, interestingly enough, left his desk in the middle of the following morning, reporting that he had been taken ill. He had not gone home, however, and enquiries at his doctor’s surgery had drawn a blank as well.
The button Holmes had torn from his attacker’s coat had been traced to a Jermyn Street tailor, who said the button could have come from any of a hundred such coats the firm had made over the last seven years. The list included nearly a third of the men who had been at Justice for the shooting party, including Sidney Darling, the Marquis, and both Germans, as well as the late duke, Marsh’s brother Henry.
The Army records for Sidney Darling gave the picture of a competent officer who took great care to avoid the front lines. Staff officers invariably were granted a greater freedom of movement than
line officers, and in the spring of 1918 Darling had been based less than twenty miles from Gabriel Hughenfort’s new regiment. Because Gabriel’s records had been lost—by accident or malice—there was no telling who was responsible for his transfer to the hard-pressed unit he had joined that March, but certainly Darling had been in a position to slip one more such transfer into the machinery of war. Similarly, he could have been the red-tab major who came to see the condemned man the night before Gabriel was taken out and shot by his comrades. To slip away from headquarters for a few hours in the middle of the night, particularly during the chaos of the summer’s shifting Front, would have presented small risk.
However, Ivo Hughenfort’s position as a suspect held many of the same points. With his family name to stand upon, he had quickly assumed a place in Paris collating information and writing daily briefings for the Commander-in-Chief. Ivo had been in a position to watch Gabriel, and indeed to nudge him from one place to another, although there was no immediate indication that he had done so, nor was there any sign of an impromptu trip out of Paris in the early hours of August the third.
The records, however, were both voluminous and ill-organised for our purposes. Five years after Armistice, clerks were still filing, and there was nothing to say that another Hughenfort had not been in the wings, a South African son of Philip Peter, say, or the Australian Ralph.
The key element in Gabriel’s death, the letter that had driven the nail into his coffin, had been the letter from Haig confirming the divisional commander’s sentence of death. That, too, had vanished along with Gabriel’s records, and copies of either letter had yet to come to light.