Watson awoke shivering and itching, the taste of metal in his mouth, a succession of horrible images still stalking through his brain. Sayer was there, stuck and bleeding out in no man’s land, as if he were a genuine casualty of war. Fantasy. But as he came back to reality he recalled clearly the sight of him crumpled on the ground at a godforsaken roadside. Murdered in cold blood. All too factual.
He threw back the coarse blanket in anger and took in his surroundings once more. He had arrived in darkness, weary and footsore, and well after the camp had finished serving its meals, so had been allowed to keep a tin of bully beef to eat. Everything else of value had been confiscated by the camp guards upon his arrival. He had been assigned an area at the far end of Hut 7, part surgery and examination room and part bedroom, separated from the dozen other men by what looked like an offcut from a large, threadbare carpet. This makeshift curtain gave a modicum of privacy to the patients, he supposed, but also reduced the amount of heat that reached him from the hut’s pot-bellied stove.
It wasn’t much of a surgery. A medicine cabinet, an eye chart and an illustration of the circulatory system were fixed to the walls. There was a desk, a lamp and a set of chipped and rusted weighing scales. From what he had seen of the inmates he didn’t need that ancient machine to tell him that most prisoners were malnourished. A cabinet of drawers and cupboards filled with a jumble of medical instruments and dressings completed the inventory. Oh, for a good, efficient nurse. Oh, he thought, for Mrs Gregson, she would soon whip this into shape.
A image of her formed in his mind’s eye, sitting on a bed in Belgium, a steaming mug of tea in her hand, head thrown back in laughter as she told tales of her days competing in motorcycle hillclimbs with Miss Pippery, or of the foolishness of her superiors or the cheekiness of her patients. The mental picture warmed him almost as much as that stove might have done, yet at the same time left him with a hollow feeling low in his abdomen.
He scratched again, aware that he had picked up some lice. The mattress, no doubt. He prodded it. Not even straw. Wood shavings. That was going to be a battle. The typhus sign had suggested that fighting the lice would be a priority. It was lice that carried the fearful disease, that much was known. But there was no cure, no vaccine. Constant delousing was the only possible defence.
He swung out his legs, pulled on his trousers and looked for his boots. He remembered taking them off and placing them at the end of the bed. Yet the Trenchmasters were nowhere to be seen. Instead, he found a pair of old hobnailed artillery boots, one of them broken so that the toe had peeled back, as if it were grinning at him. Still in his stockinged feet he threw back the heavy curtain, intending to bawl out his fellow inmates.
But the hut, and its row of bunk beds, was empty, except for two orderlies, hastily tucking in blankets and folding and packing away discarded pyjamas and slippers.
‘Where is everyone?’ Watson demanded.
The two men, both sallow-faced and unsmiling, barely glanced at him and went back to their work.
Watson was not a man to pull rank, but the insolence inherent in that behaviour, and the events of the previous day combined to create another surge of rage. ‘You will stand to attention when addressed by an officer! Damn your eyes, you look at me or you will be on a charge after I’m done with you.’
Fists clenched, he took a step forward and if they thought that a man twice their age in stockinged feet suggesting he could thrash the pair of them was a ridiculous proposition, they didn’t show it. Both sprang to taut attention and faced forward, expressions blank.
‘Names?’
‘Parsons, sir.’ This one was the older and taller of the two, his skin badly marked by smallpox.
‘And you?’ Watson pointed to the shorter of the pair, a ruddy-faced lad with ginger hair and freckles.
‘Wallace.’ A beat. ‘Sir.’
‘Where is everyone?’
‘Appell, sir.’
‘Appell?’ he said. Roll calls were sacrosanct at camps, as integral to the rhythm of the day as prayers in a monastery. ‘Why wasn’t I woken?’ Not to mention why he wasn’t woken with a cup of tea, as had been the normal routine with Sayer.
The orderlies exchanged furtive glances. ‘We was told not to,’ said Wallace.
‘By whom?’
‘Rather not say, sir.’
Missing an Appell could earn a prisoner a week’s solitary. Someone wanted him to get into trouble. ‘Really?’ Watson pointed at his unshod feet. ‘And do you know anything about a missing pair of Trenchmasters?’
Their heads shook in unison, far too eagerly for his liking. ‘No, sir.’
‘All right, we’ll talk about this later. Get on with your work. You’re my orderlies as well, are you?’
‘Well, we do this hut,’ admitted Parsons. ‘So I suppose so.’ He didn’t sound very enthused about the prospect.
‘How does Appell work here?’ There were several ways of organizing a prisoners’ parade and it varied from camp to camp. ‘Alphabetically or by hut?’
‘By hut,’ Parsons admitted.
‘By hut, sir,’ Watson corrected.
‘Sir.’
‘Hut 1 on the far left of the parade ground, in order to Hut 20 on the right,’ offered Wallace. Parsons looked at him as if he had just given out the King’s telephone number.
‘In groups of?’ The Germans liked to break the lines up to make counting easier.
‘Five, sir.’
‘And each hut holds how many men?’ Wallace made to speak, but Watson snapped his fingers. ‘You, Parsons. You answer me. How many?’
He let out a sigh, resenting his silently insolent routine being disturbed. ‘Most huts contains four bunkrooms like this one . . . sir. Each with at least a dozen men. Sir.’
‘All British?’
‘A few French,’ offered Wallace. ‘Hut 18. Keep themselves to themselves. But mostly British, yes, from every service. Navy and RFC as well as army, I mean.’
‘So including the orderlies, we have, what? Just over a thousand men in camp?’ Watson asked.
‘Eleven hundred,’ corrected Wallace.
Still, it was a relatively small camp. Some had ten times that number and a mix of nationalities. ‘Very good. Get on with your work. And I expect a cup of tea when I get back from Appell. Understood?’
Both men nodded.
Watson, already tired from the exertion of impersonating a martinet, returned to his cubbyhole and, with no alternative on offer, pulled on the old and cracked artillery boots, slipped into his greatcoat and hurried outside, pausing only to scowl theatrically at the orderlies. The sky was gunmetal grey and as he looked up small kisses of moisture brushed his cheek. It was starting to snow and it was settling on the frozen ground.
Well done, Watson. The voice was loaded with sarcasm.
What have I done now? he asked his tormentor.
Not twelve hours here and you already seem to have made enemies.
Watson grunted. He couldn’t argue with that.
In daylight Watson could take in the structure of the camp. It sat in the lee of a grand, turreted château-style house that had once been a mansion, hotel or sanatorium. A first-floor terrace allowed what he assumed was the commandant to step out of a salon and examine the massed ranks of his charges without having to enter the compound through the gates. The prisoners were confined inside a triple layer of fencing, topped with coils of barbed wire and electric lights. Judging from the foul deposits sitting on the soil, which was whitening as the dusting of snow fell upon them, dogs patrolled in the corridors between the fences. He could hear their whines and yaps from wherever they were kennelled by day. Twelve leggy wooden watchtowers loomed into the sky like contraptions from an H.G. Wells novel, one at each corner of the main compound and a further eight situated at intervals along each perimeter.
There were twenty huts, each one raised off the ground on blocks, in four rows of five plus a kitchen and a shower block, a ‘tin room’, where Watson’s confiscated foodstuffs had been taken, a ‘rec’ or recreation hut, a cluster of latrines and, at the far end from the main house, a sports area, marked out as football field and with a rather sad tennis court, a piece of twine standing in for a net. Beyond that was another compound, entirely separate, with its own entrance to the outside world. It was a third of the size in area and had just a single, solitary hut in the centre. And next to that, a large crop of wooden crosses sprouting from the hard earth. It looked as if this was where the unfortunate went to die. This was where Sayer would be now, no doubt.
Surrounding the camp were the mountains, but this was no picturesque alpine scene. There were startlingly few trees, for a start. The slopes had been denuded of cover, leaving only ugly stumps, and in some places there had been excavations or perhaps collapses due to erosion. Certainly, rain and meltwater flowing unchecked by any vegetation had left deep scarring running down many of the slopes. One peak looked like a giant magnification of Parsons’ pockmarked face. To Watson’s eye it was a mountainside as envisaged by Hieronymus Bosch, tortured and flayed.
Watson counted off the rather shambolic rows of prisoners and hurried across to that of Hut 7, aware of the comical slapping sound his flapping boot was making. He joined the rear of the line just as a one-armed Feldwebel with a clipboard reached it.
‘You are?’ he demanded.
‘Watson. Major. Royal Army Medical Corps.’
The clipboard was held horizontal from his chest by a metal contraption, so he could tick off the names with his single limb. ‘You aren’t here,’ the German said.
‘Perhaps he’s the invisible man,’ someone from the next group shouted.
‘Quiet.’
‘New arrival,’ said Watson. ‘Last night.’
The Feldwebel took a pencil and added the name, checking the spelling. Watson needn’t have rushed after all; this camp’s bureaucracy was no better than any other.
‘You haven’t called Aubrey’s name! Aubrey du Barry. Why haven’t you called him?’
A slight but intense figure, his eyes sunken and wild, had detached himself from further along the line and was coming down between the rows, wagging a finger at the Feldwebel. ‘Du Barry. Check the list. He’s back there.’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ someone muttered. ‘Leave it out, Pickering. Every fucking day.’
Pickering, a captain, was at the German now. ‘Du Barry. Shall I spell it?’
‘D-U-B-A-R-R-Y,’ the one-armed guard replied.
‘Well, why haven’t you called him, Brünning?’
The German spoke as if he was tired of the sentence he was uttering. ‘Because we have no du Barry here, Captain Pickering.’
Watson grasped what was happening. He had seen it before. Prisoners, like children, sometimes invented imaginary friends. Most of the time this was a harmless delusion, but sometimes the phantom acquaintance became flesh and blood, a solid presence. He had seen men go to astonishing lengths to make sure their chums had enough rations to survive, turning a blind eye when others helped themselves, satisfied that their friend was at least eating well.
Watson stepped forward and put a hand on the captain’s shoulder. ‘Captain Pickering, is it? My name is Watson—’
The Englishman spun round at the touch and wrinkled his nose as if he had just caught the first whiff of gas. ‘Watson!’ He made a hawking noise in the back of his throat, and before Watson could step back he spat a slimy blob of phlegm in his face. ‘Get your hands off me you damned traitor!’