Chapter Five

C ontrary to Captain Winchester’s advice, Josef did not go home and sit by the fire. Instead, he hopped on the tube to Westminster, then pegged it over to St Thomas’s Hospital.

He didn’t beat the ambulance, but it was still there when he arrived, idling outside the hospital. An ambulance train must have just arrived at Waterloo Station because a fleet of Red Cross vehicles were pulling up at the hospital—St Thomas’s having hundreds of beds set aside for the wounded—and while the critical patients were being admitted, nobody had time for an old dead vagrant. So the ambulance was waiting.

Which was lucky for Josef.

The crew were talking together, the driver’s door open and the two women leaning against the side of their van while they watched the parade of injured soldiers being stretchered into the hospital. Josef watched too, an anxious churning in the pit of his belly that he couldn’t fully explain. Maybe it was because he could have accompanied some of those very men on the first leg of their journey, carried them back from the dressing station to the field hospital. And now here he was in London, watching them finally make it home. Poor sods. And these were the lucky ones.

“Sobering, ain’t it?” he said, addressing his comment to the red-haired woman he’d noticed earlier that night. He liked her round, open face.

“At least they’re home.” She took a drag on the end of a cigarette, dropping the stub on the ground. “Two of my brothers are at the front.”

Josef said, “So was I, two weeks ago.”

Her eyes flicked to him, and he saw her intelligence immediately. “Yeah? Which regiment?”

Bracing himself, he said, “The Red Cross.”

“You don’t look like a doctor.”

“Ambulance driver.”

“Ah.” Her expression shifted, cooling noticeably. “You’re a conchie, then, are you?”

His hackles rose, and despite all his antiwar principles, he felt a flush of unwarranted shame. “I’ve played my part,” he said, and could have said a great deal more about the futility of this imperialist war. But arguing wouldn’t help his current cause. Besides, if she had two brothers at the front, she wouldn’t want to hear his arguments. “I was just thinking that I probably carried some of these boys to safety. I was working with a CCS in Lijssenthoek.”

“And you was up at Dover Street half an hour ago, an’ all.”

He didn’t try to deny it; she’d obviously recognised him. “Where I was admiring your professionalism, ladies.”

“No need to sound so surprised.” This came from the driver, her accent closer to Winchester’s than Josef’s, chiming like a silver bell. Her eyes were just as bright. “I think you’ll find there are plenty of jobs we ‘ladies’ are more than capable of performing.”

He tipped his hat to her. “I’ve no doubt of that, miss. My boss is a woman, in fact. At the Daily Clarion .”

“You’re a journalist?”

“I am. Josef Shepel, at your service.”

The women exchanged a glance. Then the red-haired one said, “I’m Violet. Vi, for short. And that’s Lady Charlotte.”

“Lottie,” the other woman corrected with a roll of her eyes.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you both.” Josef dug out his fags and offered them around. Vi took one; Lottie didn’t.

“My old man reads the Clarion ,” Vi said, letting Josef light her cigarette. “He’s a union man. But don’t tell me you’re writing about wounded soldiers coming back from the war. That’s hardly news.”

“I’m more interested in the poor blighter in the back of your ambulance, as it happens.”

Again, the women exchanged a look. Neither said anything.

“What do you make of it?” Josef prompted. “That wound on his shoulder, I mean.”

“It’s stinking out the van,” Vi said. “Why do you think we’re standing out here in the freezing cold?”

“Before you got there tonight, the police constable said he’d seen something like it before. I was wondering whether you had, too.”

“Well…” Lottie was watching Vi carefully.

“Happens we have,” Vi confirmed. “Couple of days ago. A Gotha bomb fell over on Old Castle Street back in July and damaged the sewers. They’re doing works there now to mend it.”

“I know,” Josef said, surprised. “I live around the corner.”

“Well, the men turned up Tuesday morning for work—I think it was Tuesday.”

“It was,” Lottie confirmed. “Definitely.”

“Well then, they turned up Tuesday morning and found…” Vi dragged deeply on her fag, spinning out the tale. “They found a body in the sewer. Like him, it was, all rotted and… chewed-up looking.”

“In the sewer?” Josef rummaged in his satchel for his notebook and pencil. “And was the dead man old, like this? A vagrant?”

Vi shook her head, and Lottie said, “He was a soldier, in uniform. Private Andrew Sykes according to his tags. Police think he was probably blotto when he fell into the sewer—the fencing around the hole had been knocked over, and it would have been dark.”

“That don’t explain how his arm got chewed, does it?"

Lottie gave her a quelling look. "Rats, so the police say."

"And whoever heard of rats eating people?”

Josef had. Rats ate the dead at the front, gnawed at the unreachable bodies decomposing in no man’s land. In Flanders, the rats grew fat. He supposed the same could have happened here, if some poor sod had blundered, drunk, into the sewer. And perhaps to the old vagrant, too, who’d succumbed to the cold and provided a feast for a fat English rat.

Talking of English rats, none of that explained the extreme coincidence of Winchester showing up both times Josef stumbled across a man with this strange, rotting wound.

No, there was more to this than vermin, unless the Intelligence Corps had taken to breeding killer rats. Frankly, he wouldn’t put anything past this government; if they could unleash deadly gas and let it creep across the battlefield to murder men while they slept, why not killer rats? Still, it stretched his weary credulity.

“You mind if I take a closer look?” he asked, nodding to the back of the ambulance.

Vi and Charlotte shared another look. Then Vi shrugged and said, “No skin off my nose, but you might want to cover yours. It bloody reeks in there.”

She wasn’t wrong. The enclosed space intensified the stomach-turning stench, making it almost impossible to breathe. And even with his army-issue hand torch, it was too dark to see much when he peeled back the blanket, but enough to confirm that the flesh had been eaten away by something.

Unlike Josef, Vi and Lottie hadn’t seen a man’s body ruined by mustard gas. He knew there were more things than God’s creatures that could consume a man’s flesh. Gangrene and trench foot did it, too. But this…?

He fished out his camera and did his best to take a photograph, shining the torch with one hand. God knew whether it would come out, but at least he’d tried.

By this point, his eyes were watering with the stench, and he was forced to scramble out of the van and suck in great lungfuls of air to keep himself from throwing up his expensive Ritz supper.

Vi smirked as she strolled over, dropping the stub of her cigarette on the pavement. “Need a stronger stomach than that in this job, Mr Shepel.” She closed the ambulance doors. “We’ve to drive around to the other entrance. Take him in that way, straight to the mortuary.”

“Listen, if you see anyone else with the same wounds, will you let me know?” Josef pulled out a business card for the Clarion . “You can send a note or telephone that number and leave a message.”

The ambulance’s engine coughed into life, belching fumes. Vi waved a hand in front of her face, clearing the air. “Why are you so interested? What is it you think’s happening?”

“I’m just curious.” He attempted a disarming smile. “It’s my job to be curious.”

“Then you should be careful, too.” She took his card and smiled. “You know what they say—curiosity killed the cat.”

From the front of the ambulance, Lottie leaned out of the window. “Vi, come on!" she called. "They're signalling for us to drive round."

Doffing his cap with a flourish, he watched the ambulance pull away. And be immediately replaced by a drab Red Cross vehicle, unloading wounded fresh from Flanders. Josef made himself scarce, surprised by how his heart galloped at the sight of the still bodies on stretchers. Too familiar by half and pressing painfully on a wound he hadn’t realised was open.

Walking back to Westminster tube station, he filled his head with the current problem instead of unpleasant memories. Vi and Lottie had been more helpful than he could have hoped, but it was obvious they knew no more about what was happening than he did.

Which meant Josef had no choice but to track down the one man who clearly did know something. Whether Winchester—or ‘Lord Alexander Beaumont’—would want to explain it to him was another matter entirely.

But sod what the man wanted. Josef wasn’t in the mood to take no for an answer.