Page 15 of No Man's Land

“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 theClarion. “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.

Chapter Six

“Look him up inWho’s Who,” May suggested when Josef popped into theClarionthe next morning with his print of the Ritz menu. “If his title’s real, he’ll be in there.”

“The title might be real but that doesn’t meanhe’snot a phony,” Josef pointed out, but it was a good suggestion.Who’s Whowas at least a place to start.

May looked up from studying the photograph. “This is excellent, Joe. We’ll run it in the Saturday edition. Leslie’s eating there tonight, so he’ll write up something excoriating.” She shook her head over the menu. “There are women struggling to buy milk for their children, and these men feast like kings.”

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