“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 Helene.”
“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
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 “Helene,” whether it was invented as a romantic
