A Study in Murder by Robert Ryan Read Free Book Online Page B

think not. The brave thing to do might have been to go along with Hanson.’
    ‘And then I suspect I would be drinking alone, perhaps a toast to two fallen men.’
    Watson raised the glass. ‘To the fallen, all of them. And those left behind to mourn.’ He took a slug of the port, quickly so as not to betray his shaking hands. He placed the glass
on the desk before him and made to rise but the expression on Halbricht’s face pulled him up short. He sat back down again. ‘And,
Hauptmann
? There is something else, I
feel.’
    Now the Anglophile wouldn’t catch his eye. The commandant examined his port as if he had spotted something floating on the surface. He licked dry lips before he spoke. ‘You are to be
transferred from here. There is a
Lager
with no British medical personnel to speak of. You have been ordered there.’
    ‘Which camp?’
    ‘You understand that these orders are from Tenth Army Corps, from the office of Von Knobelsdorf himself.’
    Watson doubted the head of the Tenth Army concerned himself with one elderly prison doctor. ‘Which camp am I being transferred to,
Hauptmann
?’
    The word came out like a hound clearing its throat. ‘Harzgrund.’
    Watson nodded. He had heard of it. Everybody in the system had. It was also known as The Worst Camp in Germany. If the rumours were true, Major John H. Watson of the Royal Army Medical Corps had
just been handed a death sentence.

NINE
    There wasn’t much to pack in his canvas kitbag. Watson carefully folded his underwear and spare shirts and placed them in the bottom, followed by the
‘comfort’ requisites he had received in parcels, a few precious jars of food and an English copy of
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, which he had managed
to pick up in hospital.
    Sayer, his wiry, jockey-sized orderly – he had served in one of the Birkenhead ‘Bantam’ regiments, created from the pool of willing men who were less than regulation height
– was inconsolable when he heard the news and fussed around Watson as he packed that morning. He had made certain Watson had filled up at breakfast, even pushing him to two cups of the acorn
coffee. It might be a long day ahead, he counselled.
    ‘The thing is, Major Watson, most of the others treat me like the lowest footman. Make the tea, wash the crockery, make my bed, wipe my arse, there’s a good chap.’ Watson
laughed at his faux-plummy voice. Sayer might be crude, but he was always entertaining. ‘For them, ’tain’t no different to being at school. With you, at least I got a break now
and then and a bit of respect. I’ll miss you, sir. Where they sendin’ you again?’
    He repeated the name. It didn’t sound any less unpleasant than when the commandant said it.
Harzgrund.
It was like a Teutonic gargle.
    ‘Where is it, exactly?’
    ‘Harz Mountains, I believe. Further into Germany, at any rate.’
    ‘That’s a cruelty, that is, you ask me. If you’d been going to Holland, I’d’ve been glad for you, but this . . .’
    Watson put a hand on the little man’s shoulder. ‘I know, Sayer. But we sometimes have to bear the unbearable, don’t we?’ Sayer nodded. ‘I’ve left you some
cigarettes and tobacco and a pipe over there. No, it’s fine; I am trying to smoke less.’ Watson thumped his chest and winced at the flash of pain from one of his many bruises.
‘Find it affects my wind these days.’
    ‘Not as much as that bloody cabbage soup,’ said Sayer.
    ‘Not that kind of win—’ he began before he caught Sayer’s wink.
    ‘And I’d like you to have these, sir,’ said Sayer, producing a pair of thick-knit socks from under his tattered tunic.
    ‘I can’t, Sayer. Good socks like that, worth their weight in real coffee.’
    ‘My mother knits them, sir. I can get plenty more. Please. I haven’t worn them. Well, not more than once or twice. And I washed them.’
    ‘Thank you, Sayer. I appreciate it. Now, there are two things I’d like you to do for