Fitzrovia Twilight (Nick Valentine Book 1) (10 page)

CHAPTER 11

The concussive rushing thud in his own head after days of this shelling was the constant nightmare background to the screaming of the incoming shells. The men shouted, because they couldn’t hear themselves. The ringing in the ears goes as shockwave after shockwave numbs the hearing to rumbling rhythmic crump that is your own heartbeat, a noise you wish would cease, to give you rest, but that you’re afraid will stop, because it might mean you’re dead, though that would be release, from this purgatory of stinking mud and noise. Nick looked at the man shouting. He doubted the man even had a voice at all; all of them were rendered dumb from screaming at each other, yet they carried on, trying to make themselves heard, a hopeless task. Most of them could now lip read to some degree or other. Nick concentrated on the man’s grime-streaked face, focussed on his mouth. Instinctively he leaned close, a pointless movement.

“The sniper. He’s back. Jones just caught it a couple of hundred metres up the line.”

              Nick’s jaw clenched. Jones would be the fourth this week. It was only Tuesday. What kind of man could lie out there in this maelstrom and continue to pick off the tired and careless in the trench? Nick looked at the man who’d delivered the news. Like all of them, he looked shattered. His sunken eyes were rounded by dark circles underneath the filth of mud that caked not just the man’s face but his entire body. Nick noticed his hand was trembling. Hardly surprising. This shelling, and now the men were being picked off singly as well.

              “Where?” Nick mouthed.

              The soldier pointed back up behind him, along the near-empty trench. Nick had sent most of the men into the dugouts, but he had to keep sentry. If the shelling stopped someone had to be ready to man the guns instantly for the inevitable attack that would follow. It was hard to say which was worse: the pounding dread of the near-constant explosions or that gut-tightening fear when it stopped, knowing what the silence, so longed for, was to bring. When it stopped, the waves of pressure lifted from your ears and threw you off balance. At the same time, your nerves were pushing surges of adrenalin through your body as it braced for the nightmare of the frantic hand-to-hand combat to come. Jesus. What was he doing here?

              He snapped back to the present and realised his gaze had drifted off into the half distance. The soldier was looking at him expectantly. Nick nodded and the man turned and started picking his way along the half-submerged and crumpled duckboards, bent almost double in a crouch as spumes of mud and dirt rained down from the onslaught.

              Two hundred metres is not far, but it took the men almost a quarter of an hour to move that far, picking their way along the zigzagged wreckage of the trench, flinching as they pressed on in soaking clothes, their boots squelching. Worst of all, worse than the noise, the stench. Of wet, of decay. Of death. Eventually they reached the small redoubt where Jones now lay on a stretcher, a strange look on his face, the blood staining the canvas of the stretcher behind his head and pooling in the mud around in a crimson stain. There were no bearers, not while the shells were falling, so one man, the relief sentry, stood hunched, with half an eye on the trench periscope facing the front and half an eye on the man whom he had no doubt been chatting to less than an hour earlier.

              “How long ago?” Nick mouthed to the sentry.

              “Just under three quarters of an hour, sir. Bugger is out there somewhere. Can’t see anything through this, though.” He gesticulated at the periscope. “Not with all this coming down.”

              Nick nodded. He looked up at the sky, which hung grey, a din threatening overhead, the clouds the colour of shell bursts. Even nature was against them, he thought idly, as the first splash of rain blipped into his sleeve.

              “Where was Jones?”

              “Just over there, sir. There was a lull and he stuck his head up. Then, well.” The man shrugged.

              “Where would you say the shot came from?”

              “Dead ahead and over to the right slightly, between one and two o’clock I would guess. It’s hard to tell.”

              “I’ll take sentry here for a few minutes. You two, carry him down out the rain.” The heavens had opened and sheets of water were pouring from the sky. The men nodded and scurried over to the stretcher.

              Nick stepped forward to the periscope and shutting one eye, put his other to it. It gave a ridiculously restricted field of view at the best of times. With the rain sheeting down, he could see nothing. He turned and looked at the two men carrying the body as they exited the redoubt and disappeared around the corner of the trench. The earth shook and Nick was flung into the trench wall by a sledgehammer blow.

              He clawed at the thick mud, pulling himself out of it, gasping for air, coughing the viscous earth from his mouth. Dumbly he stumbled to his feet, hacking for breath. Smoke rose from the trench and there was a terrible smell of cordite and roasting flesh. He could see a boot sticking out around the corner at an odd angle. He tripped towards it, shouting above the din of the shells. The boot stopped at the jagged flesh of the knee. What was left of the stretcher was embedded, smoking, in the far trench wall, a ragged hole burning faint orange in the centre of the canvas. It looked as if a bomb had gone off in a meat factory. A man stumbled up from a dugout, coughing and spluttering. He stopped, eyes wide in shock as he saw Nick then stood up, straight up, and the top of his head vanished in a fine pink mist.

              Nick looked down at himself. Pieces of bone and flesh clung to his uniform. Not his own. One of the three, probably parts of all of the three. Another man stumbled up from the protection of the dugout, the illusion of safety below no doubt shattered by the bone-shattering jarring of the direct hit on the trench. More men streamed up, coughing, looking at Nick in horror. He felt a burning pain in his shoulder and the world went black.             

Nick’s head pounded. A ball of nausea curled in his stomach, tight as a clenched fist, and his heavy tongue ran over a dry mouth. He started, his eyes blinking as he clawed his sweat-slicked way back from the nightmare of the trenches to the present. In those first few moments of disorientation, he thought he was awakening with a vicious hangover. Then the aching throb on the side of his head began to seep up. His shoulder burned from the old wound and as he instinctively moved a hand to try to touch the spot. He realised with a start that he was tied up and the memory of Lucia lashing out with her pistol butt came rushing painfully back. He was now aware of the damp cold of the concrete against his face, the cruel crick in his neck and the cramp running up his left leg. An investigative flex of the ankle told him that they had been tied. The restriction in blood flow and the chill of the floor had caused his muscles to start complaining. Loudly Nick grimaced as he pulled himself upright into a sitting position. The room, if it was a room, was pitch black; he could see nothing. Nick kicked his feet along the ground and made contact with a wall. He shook his head to try to clear some of the seeping pain that was disorienting him, but it made no difference. He could feel now that his fingers were going numb, so tight were the knots around his writs behind his back.

              Nick hopped upright and started to shuffle around the wall of the room, gauging its size and any features he might make out. It took him only a few minutes to circumnavigate it; it was small, about ten by twenty, and windowless. There was a single wooden door; no light crept in around or under it. He tried the handle. As he’d suspected, it was locked and didn’t move in the slightest when he tested it with his bodyweight. Nick guessed that he was in some sort of cellar; it had that musty smell of seldom-used space, unused to sunlight. Nick quartered the room, shuffling around in the blackness, but it was completely bare. He stood in the centre and listened intently for any noise that would give an indication of where he might be, but there was nothing beyond the ringing in his ears. Another wave of nausea washed suddenly over him and Nick breathed hard, bent over double, his own gasps deafening in the silence.               Thankfully it passed without him being sick, but this was a bad sign; it meant he probably had concussion, if not worse. Nick carefully lowered himself back to the ground and rolled onto his side. With some effort he was able to bring his bound hands down behind his rear, pulling his legs up high. Now sweating with the discomfort of the effort, he was able to gradually slide his arms over his feet and in front of his body. He lay back gulping for air, waiting for another bout of nausea to subside. After some minutes, he pulled himself upright and looked at his watch. He had no idea how long he’d been out; it was coming up to eleven, so just over a couple of hours.

Nick patted his pocket. The roll of negatives was gone. He raised his hands to his forehead and felt the gritty film of congealed blood where he’d been hit. He shook his head grimly. He was in a mess.

              Turning his attention to the ropes around his wrists, Nick gave them exploratory twists; they were bound tight and bound well. He chewed at the cord with his teeth, but the knots were too tight. All he succeeded in doing was putting a foul taste into his dry mouth and hurting his teeth with the effort. He rested for a minute, gathering himself for another assault, when a light came on beyond the door, throwing a chink of pale yellow light into the cellar. Nick struggled to quickly manoeuvre his hands back behind him and strained his eyes to see around the room. It was completely featureless, a white-walled, rectangular cell, low ceiling with, as he’d suspected, no windows. Muffled footsteps stopped at the door and there was a rattle of a key. Nick pulled himself into a sitting position against the far wall and waited, trying to calm his thumping heart rate. The door swung open and Nick had to squint as light flooded in around the dark silhouette of two figures. One of them flicked a switch on the other side of the door and a bare bulb flickered into light, throwing the room into garishly bright light so intense Nick had to shut his eyes for a second, and yet again force back the rising sickness in his throat as his head screamed at the luminescent intrusion.

“I’m so glad to see that you’re awake.” Jurgen stood over Nick’s huddled form. Nick blinked up at the man and looked past him to Lucia, who stood smirking slightly behind the German. “I wanted to thank you in person for delivering us what we’ve been after. Who would have thought that you would have made it so easy?” Jurgen squatted so that he was level with Nick and smiled. “Really, Nick, we’re looking all over town for you, so we can talk to you about what we think you found in Ramona’s flat, and also wondering how we can get what we need from Brigadier Johnson now Ramona is dead, then you call him and make it all so easy. Almost all wrapped up without too much trouble.”

“Excuse me if I don’t agree with you, but the pain in my head’s telling me that I went through quite a bit of trouble,” Nick rasped.

“On the contrary, I think you got off lightly.” Jurgen turned his head and Nick could see the garish gash in the scalp, red raw. “I had quite a headache, too, after we became acquainted the other night. Lucia too. Really, to hit a lady, you surely cannot hold it against her for hitting you back. Don’t you English have a saying about crossing a woman – a woman scorned or something like that?”

“Something like that. I don’t think they had pistol-whipping in mind when they came up with it, though. Can I get a drink?”

“Nick,” Jurgen smiled, “what makes you think that you’ll be alive long enough to need a drink?”

“I’m an optimist. If you wanted me dead, I already would be.”

Jurgen stared at him without saying anything for a second then laughed. “An optimist or a realist? You are quite right. Actually we are going to need you to do something for us. You can thank Lucia for your stay of execution. I wanted to put you straight in the river, once we had found the negatives of course, but then she pointed out that we still have some loose ends to tie up, loose ends that I think you can help us with.”

“I’m intrigued and of course, currently open to offers.” Nick nodded at his bound feet. “I’m not in much of a negotiating position am I?”

“No, no you’re not, and I fear your position is about to get a lot worse.” Jurgen stood and Lucia moved to stand over Nick. He tried to give a smile, but it came out weakly.

“My thanks to you.”

“Don’t thank me yet, Mr Valentine. You haven’t heard what we want you to do.” Lucia spoke softly, her lilting Argentines accent quite the best thing Nick had heard since Jurgen had started speaking. Nick admitted he actually had quite a new and refreshing perspective on her from down here. The pencil skirt she was wearing hugged her legs closely and the heels she was wearing accentuated the length of her legs, despite her relatively slight height.

“You see, like Jurgen said, we need you to do some work for us.”

“I see. Will this be paid work?”

She smiled. “You must be feeling better. Your payment will be your life.”

“That sounds like a bargain, but I suppose it depends on what I have to do.”

“Indeed.” Lucia shot a quick sideways glance at Jurgen before addressing Nick. “As you may have surmised, Ramona had some information from the Brigadier that we wanted. We had rather hoped that she would become a regular source of information, but she met her unfortunate end.”

“You were blackmailing her over her debts to steal secrets from Johnson.”