Dead Men Stalking 9: The Catacombs
Pollard pointed out the guilty ones to the accompanying MP. ‘Him. Him. Him.’ Most of the men on the ward Pollard found guilty and they would face court martial and execution.
Welcome to part nine of my MI7 Assassin origins story! If you missed part one, read it here:
And if you’re new to MI7 Assassin, I’ve also written two earlier standalone stories:
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Eventually we’ll publish these origins stories as novellas and I want them to be as good as they possibly can be when we do! So if you have any suggestions, something you particularly like or don’t like, want to see more or less of, do let me know in the comments below!
Four hours later, he was suddenly awakened by his voices. At first he was furious with them. Why couldn’t they leave him in peace after successfully completing his mission? But then he realised they were only acting in his best interests and he calmed down. Because it was seven in the morning, still dark: he had two hours before the council gravediggers arrived and the gates were opened to the public.
He lit a fire in the hearth and once it got going he added his bundled up boiler suit to the flames. He then put on some old clothes and wrapped himself in his military greatcoat and left the cottage, headed for the cemetery’s catacombs.
He always felt at peace here, living amongst the dead, all two hundred thousand of them. That peace, and the freezing morning air, sharpened his senses and enabled him to focus on what he needed to do.
The graveyard was designed like an immense open air cathedral and he walked down its central nave towards the sweeping colonnades of a great circle, with a domed chapel in the middle, inspired by St Peter’s piazza in Rome. He remembered how his mother had a painting of the Vatican original, hanging in pride of place in her living room.
The catacombs below the colonnades had been built in the last century, with room for thousands of coffins, but it had not been a commercial success, with only five hundred spaces ever claimed. So they were largely unoccupied and thus the perfect place for him to hide his equipment. He reached the end of the nave and retrieved a dented and scratched brass spirit lamp he kept in one of the empty niches in the back of the colonnades.
Lighting the lamp, he descended the steps to the catacombs and unlocked the impressive cast iron serpentine gates. His lamp illuminated the shelved interior with lines of coffins behind rusting bars, The purpose of the bars he had often wondered about. Were they there to keep the dead in? Or grave robbers out?
He followed a curving tunnel, corresponding to the curve of the colonnades above. The coffins were laid on Portland stone shelves, lengthwise against the outer wall and end-on the inner side of the curve.
Maybe you should have come down here with a candelabra? suggested Ralph. It would really suit this place. I never realised its potential when I was a gravedigger.
Stone shook his head. That’s a bit too Edgar Alan Poe for me, mate.
He soon reached two coffins in a section of the tunnel where there were mainly empty shelves. They rested side by side on a low shelf on the inner curve. He put his lamp on the stone shelf that faced them. The bars guarding the two coffins had been cemented into the walls, but he had dislodged them some weeks before. Now he removed the bars and rested them on the ground.
Each casket in the catacombs was actually three coffins, one inside the other, like a Russian doll. The body was laid to rest in a plain wooden inner shell, lined with satin. That was placed inside a lead coffin to contain smells, body fluids and gases. The lead coffin was then placed in an ornate outer wooden shell, pleasing to the eye of grieving relatives.
Whilst exploring the catacombs shortly after moving into Ralph's cottage, Stone had discovered these two empty outer wooden coffins discarded on the ground and had briefly wondered what had happened to their occupants. Perhaps they had been taken away to be buried in a standard grave? Or perhaps they had never been used at all.
Later, when he began his solitary campaign to bring the war to an end, he remembered the coffins, and put them to good use.
He ignored the first coffin, which contained a full-length bayonet, grenades, his Webley revolver, a gas mask, trench-raiding weapons, military exemption badges and fake identity documents. He pulled out the second coffin, draped in fading and ragged red velvet and examined its contents. It contained anti-tetanus serum, hypodermic needles and syringes, assorted bandages, plain gauze, shell dressings, field dressings, sulfa powder, boric ointment, cotton wool, and morphine.
By the light of the lamp, he checked on his arm wound. It had stopped bleeding, but looked a little angry and inflamed around the edges, so he applied sulfa and boric ointment as antibacterial agents. Then he put on a field dressing and bandage and gave himself an anti-tetanus injection. Satisfied he had taken every precaution, he closed the coffin up, slid it back into position and replaced the bars. He was in some pain, but not enough to justify using the morphine. He had seen too many soldiers become addicted to it, and even his own mother.
It’s easy killing Germans in the trenches, Stone admitted. Very different to killing them in Blighty. If you don’t want to get caught, that is.
Fantômas did it. He had a secret sanctuary, just like this.
Fantômas is fiction, Ralph.
Ralph was unable to read and write and so Stone had read him the Fantômas novels on quiet nights in the trenches and he had been enthralled by the tales of the sinister French assassin.
Stone left the catacombs, locking the door and ascending the steps towards the colonnades where he snuffed out the lamp and put it back in its niche.
You could've finished Pollard off, said Duncan, finally bringing up that most difficult subject from the night before in the Farringdon Hotel. Are you sure you don't have a schoolboy crush on him?
I told you. I won't kill my fellow countrymen. There's a line and I won't cross it.
Stone made his way back to the gravedigger’s cottage. His boiler suit was almost entirely burnt and he used the poker to push some stray scraps of cloth into the centre of the fire.
Pollard would cross the line.
Stone ignored him. He started to put on his military uniform. He is capable of anything, Duncan persisted. What did he mean ‘for services rendered?’
I have no idea, countered Stone. And I really don’t care.
It was of great consequence, Duncan insisted. To a man like Pollard, the Ripper’s knives are the ultimate treasure. He must have done something unspeakable to be awarded such a prize.
Stone didn’t respond. He knew that Duncan hated Pollard and always thought the worst of him, because he had encountered him earlier in the war.
It happened back in January 1916, when Duncan had some kind of mental breakdown and couldn’t take the trenches anymore. His comrades had rallied round and tried to keep his spirits up, without success.
The truth was he had heard from a neighbour that his wife was having an affair and he was desperate to get back to Blighty to see her. He had intended to shoot himself in the foot, crippling himself. but had a failure of nerve, so it was only a superficial wound to his two smallest toes. Even so, he was sent to a self-inflicted wound ward for investigation.
As Duncan related it, an officer from military intelligence, Captain Pollard, had visited his ward. Pollard, as a firearms expert, knew from the angle of the shot, the powder mark and other indications, whether the soldiers’ wounds were genuine or not.
Duncan recalled Pollard walking down the lines of beds, carefully examining the wounds to hands, arms, legs or feet of the terrified soldiers.
He pointed out the guilty ones to the accompanying MP, who made an appropriate tick on his clipboard. ‘Him. Him. Him.’ Most of the men on the ward Pollard found guilty and they would face court martial and execution.
Finally, he came to Duncan’s bed. He carefully unwrapped the bandages on his foot and studied the wound, his face giving nothing away.
Duncan gazed mutely ahead, his jaw set in defiance, but his eyes were watery, round and filled with dread.
Replacing the bandages, Pollard came up to the top of the bed and whispered in the patient’s ear, ‘You didn’t make a very good job of it, did you, Duncan? It will leave you with a slight limp. So… you can limp in front of the firing squad or you can limp back to the trenches. What would you prefer?’
In fact, Stone felt Pollard had shown a kind of mercy by sparing Duncan and at least given him a few more precious months of life before he was killed on the Somme.
He finished putting on his uniform, lost in thought. Green tabs for military intelligence, son? said Dawes You always were a bit bleeding green. I’m telling you, Pollard’s no ordinary officer, son. He’s a wrong ‘un.
Stone always tried to listen to his dead Sergeant. There was something strange about Pollard, something indefinable that he couldn’t pinpoint. He thought about Pollard’s book, The Story of Ypres, recently published to critical acclaim. Stone had proof-read the final draft for Pollard and found it to be a very readable and vivid account of the battle during which Pollard himself was present as a dispatch rider. Yet his book did not relate how he received his ‘Blighty One’ and contained not one personal incident, not one story in which Pollard appears. It was as if he was never really in Ypres. And yet it was clear he knew the besieged and tragically ruined city intimately. Whatever Pollard had been doing in Ypres, it was not something he cared to share with his readers. His role there needed to stay in the shadows.
Just like his ‘services rendered’ Stone decided, Pollard’s past activities would have to remain a mystery.
For now, he was satisfied that with the death of the Prussian Röpell and Germany’s desperate need for rubber, he had brought the enemy’s surrender forward by at least three months. He had always suspected and now he knew for certain from his work in MI7 and in Room 38, that it was economic shortages and dangers that started and ended wars. Something his history teacher never really covered properly, preferring to talk sweepingly about the glories of kings, empires and battles, the splendours and triumphs of the past and the sacred and selfless mission of Great Britain bringing civilisation and Christianity to the African savages.
He could never quantify it, but he knew that by killing Röpell he had thrown a spanner in the machinations of trading with the enemy. It pushed Britain closer to winning the war, as his previous two assassinations had done, and for this he was content.
In the office, there was no sign of Pollard. He could understand why, after that brutal kick he had given him. So caught up on his sleep at his desk without interference or comment from anyone, and spent the rest of the day reading reports. But the next day, a Friday, a WAAC typist put her head around his door. He rarely saw her because he typed all his own documents, unlike most of his fellow agents who still wrote their stories in long hand.
‘Captain Pollard wants to see you, sir,’ she said with a worried look. ‘Immediately’.
Stone went down the corridor to Pollard’s office and found his section chief seated behind his desk, staring grim-faced at him.
‘Good morning, sir. You wanted to see me?’
Pollard did not reply. His face was heavily bruised from their last meeting, but otherwise he showed no ill effects from their battle.
‘What happened, sir? Are you all right?’
Pollard made a dismissive hand gesture to the effect that he didn’t wish to discuss his injury. There was a long pause and then he opened a drawer of his desk. Using his handkerchief to hold onto the tip alone, he drew out a familiar-looking, blackened bayonet.
It was the six-inch bayonet Stone had used to kill Röpell. It still had the German’s blood on the blade. Pollard placed it carefully on the desk and looked coldly at him. ‘How do you explain this, Stone?’