The Wild Rose (36 page)

Holding a magnifying glass over the photos, India had examined the puncture wounds inside Maud’s elbow. They had definitely been made by a hypodermic needle, but they were all fresh-looking wounds, not old.

“Yes, of course they are,” Barrett said. “A hypodermic only holds so much and she’d injected herself several times, to make sure the dosage she received was lethal.”

“But her lover, von Brandt . . . you told me that he said she was using morphine regularly. Someone who was an addict, who was getting and using morphine regularly, would have had old bruises where she’d injected the drug on previous occasions—not just fresh needle marks. There are no faded bruises anywhere on her. No old, scabbed punctures. And furthermore, Detective Inspector, my sister hated needles. She hated blood. She nearly fainted at my medical school graduation because she thought there were cadavers on the premises. How could she, of all people, have injected herself repeatedly?”

“Drug addiction forces its victims to do things neither they nor anyone else ever thought them capable of,” Barrett said. “And hadn’t Miss Selwyn Jones had a past history of visiting Limehouse opium dens?”

“At one point in her life, yes,” India said. “But my sister was not an addict. Not at the time of her death. She doesn’t look overly thin in these pictures, as addicts do. No one who’d seen her or been with her in the last few weeks of her life—except for von Brandt—ever described anything that matched the behavior of a drug addict.” India had paused for a few seconds, and then she’d said, “I want you to reopen the case, Detective Inspector. My sister did not kill herself. I am certain of that. Which means someone else did kill her.”

Barrett had leaned forward in his chair and in a kindly voice told her that he could not possibly do what she was asking.

“I’m afraid there simply isn’t enough to warrant a reopening of the case,” he told her. “I know that she was your sister, and that this is terribly hard for you to accept, but if you go home now and think it over, I believe you will see, as I do, that your suspicions sound, well . . . a little bit mad.”

India had bristled at that.

“Hear me out . . . listen to me . . . think carefully about what I’m about to ask you: Who on earth would have wanted to kill your sister?”

“What about the man she was seeing . . . Max von Brandt?” India asked.

Barrett had shaken his head. “If anything, I believe Miss Selwyn Jones might have wanted to kill him,” he said. “I interviewed von Brandt. The very next day. I’ve been at this for thirty years, and I can tell you that he was genuinely and deeply upset. Furthermore, he had corroboration for all of his movements leading up to her death. He was seen with Miss Selwyn Jones leaving his hotel. The cabdriver who took them to your sister’s home backed up von Brandt’s story one hundred percent. At no time did Mr. von Brandt attempt to conceal his movements. Are these the actions of a criminal trying to cover his tracks, Doctor?”

India had found she could not answer him.

He had given her a kind smile and said, “It’s a very bitter thing, suicide. The ones left behind always look for another explanation. But I am convinced that Miss Selwyn Jones’s death was just that—a suicide.”

“I miss her, Sid,” India said now, in a small, choked voice. “I miss her so much.”

Sid stood up and pulled India up out of her seat. He put his arms around her and held her close and let her cry. Her cousin Aloysius had been killed several years ago and now her sister was gone. They were the only members of her family she had been close to. If only he could do something for her. She was not getting over Maud’s death. She was still sad, still grieving.

“I wish I could just believe what Barrett told me,” she said now, wiping her eyes. “If I could believe it, I could let it go. Let her go. But I can’t.”

Sid wished she could let it go, too. He wished
he
could, but like India, he couldn’t quite believe Maud had killed herself, either. And yet perhaps Barrett was right. Perhaps she’d become an addict, and the morphine, combined with the loss of her lover, had caused her to behave irrationally.

If Maud was an addict, though, someone had to have supplied her with the drugs, Sid thought. He wondered, for the briefest of seconds, if it could possibly have been his old colleague, the East End drug lord Teddy Ko. It was Ko’s establishment that Maud used to frequent. It was at Ko’s that Sid had first met India, as she was trying to convince Maud—and every other poor sod in the place—to leave it.

As he thought about those sad, smoke-filled rooms, Sid knew what he had to do; he knew how he could help his wife. He would go to see Teddy Ko and ask him if he’d sold drugs to Maud, or if anyone he knew had. He and Teddy went back a long way. If Teddy knew something, he might tell him. Then again, he might not. Either way, though, Sid had to try. He wanted to get answers for India, to give her some peace over her sister’s death.

He would go back. Not right away; Stephen and the other lads needed him too much right now, but before the summer was out. He’d been steering clear of London, and India knew it, so he would have to cook up a story about why he was suddenly going—maybe he’d say that he was after supplies for the hospital—so that she wouldn’t worry about him. It was the last place he wanted to go, but he would do it for her.

Back to the East End. Back to the past. Back to the scene of so many crimes.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

“Make it quick, Wills, or Johnny Turkey’ll blow us both to hell!” Dan Harper shouted over the noise of his biplane’s propeller.

Willa gave him a thumbs-up to signal that she’d heard him. He gave her one back, then the biplane banked sharply right. Willa unfastened her safety belt, raised her camera, leaned as far out of her seat as she dared, and started to film.

Bedouin raiders had told Lawrence about the Turkish Army encampment in a valley to the west of the Jabal ad Duruz hills. Lawrence had no idea if they were telling the truth or if they’d been paid by the Turks to spread false information. He immediately sent a messenger to Amman, where the British had troops garrisoned and two biplanes, and asked the commander to undertake aerial reconnaissance for him. Willa had gone with the messenger. She’d never filmed from the air and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to start. For once, Lawrence had taken little convincing. The Bedouins’ reports troubled him, and he knew she would bring back good pictures. The rumored encampment was close to Damascus. Had the Turks got wind of Lawrence’s plan to march on the city? Were they building up troops to defend it? It was early August now, and Lawrence and his troops had taken Aqaba last month without too much difficulty, but Damascus, which was well defended, and which Lawrence wanted in British hands before autumn, would be a much harder nut to crack.

Willa saw now that the Bedouins had got the camp’s position right—it lay roughly a hundred and fifty miles southeast of Damascus, in a shallow valley, but they’d vastly underestimated its size. Canvas tents covered at least fifty acres of ground. Soldiers were drilling—at least a thousand of them. There was a huge livestock pen full of the goats and sheep needed to feed the men. Another pen held camels—which would undoubtedly be used by the Turks for reconnaissance missions of their own.

Luckily there were no airplanes on the ground. The Germans had far fewer aircraft in the desert than the British did. Consequently, their air reconnaissance wasn’t as good as Britain’s, and their air attacks were less frequent. There were guns on the ground though: two large antiaircraft guns. She and Dan had seen them immediately, and both had known that they had only minutes to get the film they needed and get gone. The Turks obviously did not want their position discovered, or if it was, they wanted to make sure the discoverers did not live to make their findings public.

As Willa looked through her viewfinder, she saw soldiers running out to man those guns. Only seconds later, the barrels had been aimed—at them.

“Go, Dan!” she shouted, still filming. “Get us out of here!”

Dan was way ahead of her. The plane, a Sopwith Strutter, was quick and maneuverable, and he now put it through its paces, swooping down suddenly, then banking left, climbing again, flying fast and erratically in a bid to evade the guns.

Willa heard them blasting and hoped—because she still had not put her camera down—that she’d caught it all on film.

Only a minute or so later, though it felt much longer, the plane shot over the first of the Jabal ad Duruz hills, out of range of the guns.

Dan whooped loudly, raising his thumb again, and Willa leaned back in her seat, eyes closed, relief flooding through her. They’d done it. She’d got her film, Dan had got them out alive, and Lawrence would get the recon information he so desperately needed.

Willa wondered, as Dan passed over the hills completely, what the Turkish troops were doing. If they were meant to defend Damascus, why weren’t they garrisoned there? She felt the plane bank sharply left and knew they were heading south now, to Lawrence’s camp. Dan would drop her there then continue back to Amman. She had just started to breathe a little easier, when—about seventy miles south of the hills—she heard Dan suddenly swear, panic in his voice.

“What is it?” she shouted.

“Sandstorm!” he shouted back. “Out of bloody nowhere! I’m going to try to set us down!”

Two minutes later, the storm hit them, buffeting the plane badly, driving sharp, stinging grains of sand everywhere. Willa felt them against her face. Her goggles protected her eyes from being scratched, but they afforded her no vision. The winds were so wild, and the sand was whirling so thickly, she could barely see a foot in front of her.

She felt the plane descending, felt it bucking and jumping as it did. She heard Dan swear again and again as he struggled to control it, and then she heard nothing—nothing but the fierce screaming of the wind—for the propeller had stopped.

“It’s jammed!” Dan shouted. “Sand’s got inside it. Hang on!”

“How high are we?” Willa shouted, refastening her safety belt. If they’d got down low enough, they might have a chance.

But Dan didn’t answer her. He couldn’t. He was struggling to keep the plane level, so he could bring it down like a glider. Willa felt the plane lurch and then dive, level itself, and then dive again.

The film, she thought. The camera. No matter what happened to her, the film had to survive. She put the camera on her lap, then curled her torso over it, head down, hoping to cushion it from the impact of the landing—or the crash—with her body.

She heard screaming—she didn’t know if it was coming from her, Dan, or the wind. And then there was a roaring noise as the plane went down. It hit the ground hard, knocking the landing gear off. It skidded along at speed, hit a large rock, and flipped over, tearing its wings and propeller off, tearing its pilot apart.

Willa felt the plane roll over and over. She felt sand and rock pelt against her, felt the plane’s body crush in against her. The belt that held her in her seat felt as if it would cut her in two. The plane rolled over a few more times, then stopped and toppled onto its left side.

Willa spat sand from her mouth. “Dan!” she cried out hoarsely, but she got no answer.

Dazed and shaking, hardly daring to believe she was alive, Willa raised her head. There was no more wind, no more driving sand. The storm had stopped. There was sand in her eyes, though. Blood, too. Her goggles had been ripped off. She lowered her head again, horribly dizzy, and felt for her camera, but it was gone. She was taking a few deep breaths, trying to clear her head, to make the spinning stop, when she smelled something, something acrid—smoke. The plane was on fire.

“Dan . . . Dan, are you there?” she called again, more weakly. And again there was no answer. He must’ve been knocked out, she thought.

She sat up all the way, gasping from a horrible pain in her side, and tried to pull herself out but could not. She remembered her restraints and unbuckled them, then crawled out of her seat. It was difficult. The harness on her artificial leg had been damaged in the crash and the leg was hard to control. When she was finally out of the plane, she turned around—ready to pull Dan out—and screamed.

Dan Harper had been decapitated by the impact.

She didn’t have long to mourn him, for smoke from the burning engine, thick and choking, enveloped her. She stood up, panting with pain, and staggered away from the plane.

It was then that she saw them—four Bedouin men, their faces wrapped protectively against the storm. They were about ten yards away. Staring at her. They must have seen the plane go down, she thought.

They spoke among themselves in a dialect she couldn’t understand. Then they shouted at her. In Turkish.

Oh, God, she thought. Oh, no. They were in the employ of the Turks. No matter what, they must not get her camera, for they would take it to their masters, and the Turks would see what was on it and know that the English had seen the Jabal ad Duruz camp. But where was it? She looked around frantically, then spotted it on the ground, about halfway between herself and the Bedouins.

Willa knew she only had seconds. She started hobbling toward the camera, as fast as she could go, but one of the men, seeing her intent, got to it first. The others started moving toward her.

Willa was trapped. She knew she must not let them take her, for they would bring her to their masters, along with the camera, and she well knew what the Turks were capable of. They had captured Lawrence once, when he was spying in Amman. They had thrown him in prison, beaten him, and raped him.

She pulled up her right trouser leg. She was reaching for the knife she always wore strapped to her calf when the first man got to her. He backhanded her hard and sent her reeling. She hit the ground; the knife went flying from her hand. She tried to get up, to go after it, but the man who’d hit her grabbed the back of her shirt and flipped her over. She felt his rough hands on her, tearing her shirt open. Felt him rip Fatima’s necklace from her.

Again she lunged for the knife, but a second man kicked it away. Two other men grabbed her arms and hoisted her to her feet. She struggled and fought ferociously, hoping to make them angry enough to kill her. She screamed insults at them, shouted curses at them. Begged for death.

Until a fist, aimed to the side of her head, finally silenced her.