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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Nighthawk
- Sprache: Englisch
Autumn, 1941. The third year of war and still the siren sounds, driving the people of Cambridge from their beds to trudge to one of the city's crowded bomb shelters. At dawn, the body of a young man is found in a shadowy corner. Everything points to suicide, but Detective Inspector Eden Brooke has his doubts given the unidentified man has a suspiciously tropical suntan and the detective's office telephone number scrawled on the back of his hand. Did the victim know his life was in danger? Brooke's caseload doubles when a local factory making submarine periscopes discovers it has a saboteur on the workforce. The city's police are at full-stretch. Then two more men are found dead in the city's shelters. A blackout killer is on the loose. The trail leads Brooke to the university, a laboratory which hides a brutal secret, and the key to a startling mystery.
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THE CAMBRIDGE SIREN
JIM KELLY
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To all those men and women who failed their
Armed Forces’ medical, but went on to serve their country.
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CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It is traditional at this point to make it clear that all the characters in The Cambridge Siren are fictional; I should add that I have also invented events, places and institutions, but always in the interests of drama, clarity and pace. In particular, it is important to note that while Project Habakkuk existed, I have brought it forward in time, and created the scientific personnel involved at Cambridge in 1941.8
CHAPTER ONE
Wednesday, 8th October 1941
Detective Inspector Eden Brooke sat on a wicker chair in his front garden watching the river flow by, dragonfly green in the evening light, pitted with miniature whirlpools, sliding towards Cambridge along its chalky bed. Beside him, on a kitchen stool, was his wife Claire, while their daughter Joy knelt with her baby on a rug. Iris was a year old and determined to crawl to the grass, only to be returned methodically at each attempt by her mother. Her first steps were eagerly awaited.
A punt went by; a rare sight now, in the third year of the war. An old man was at the pole, expertly running it through his hands, using it as a rudder to steer away from the bank as the river took the long slow turn around Newnham Croft. A 10fisherman certainly, the boat laden with rods and tackle, even a picnic basket. One of the war’s irritating burdens was the idea that enjoying yourself was somehow unpatriotic.
Morale, Brooke knew, was vital if you wanted to win the war on the Home Front.
‘Any luck?’ he called.
The man leant on the pole, bending down to retrieve a shining silver fish in a canvas bag, which he held out like a trophy.
Brooke tipped his hat by way of approval, and the fisherman went back to steering his punt, drifting downstream.
‘That reminds me,’ said Claire, who was sitting in the last of the sunlight, her head back, letting the warm rays fall on her upturned face. ‘Supper is Asquith Pie.’
This was a family joke, the derivation long lost, but possibly a dimly remembered echo of the great prime minister’s call to ‘make do’ with anything available during the long winters of the Great War. Asquith Pie contained leftovers, and anything else inedible if not concealed within pastry.
There was a long silence. The summer had been wet and grey, with only a few spells of blue sky. The winter before it brutal, cloaked in snow. It had all been a heart-breaking contrast to the brilliant blue Blitz summer which had marked the first year of the war.
Gradually, the shadow of the house fell entirely over the garden. Joy wrapped a shawl around the baby and held her fast. Claire took up a book on the treatment of malnutrition in children: she was a nurse, sister on the children’s ward at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. She could read the effects of war, and rationing, in the faces of her poorer patients.11
The Brooke family home was one of a pair of modest riverside villas built in a playful style, a cross between a country railway halt and the gate lodge of a Scottish stately home. The garden ran down to the towpath; the gate – latch broken – always stood half open.
Brooke knew this idyllic scene was threatened on many sides by war, but recalled his favourite aphorism, from the Rubaiyat of Omar Kayam:
Be happy in this moment, this moment is your life.
‘You go first,’ said Claire, setting her book aside.
It was one of several enduring family games. They had to imagine what all the missing Brookes were doing at this very moment. Given the worldwide scale of the war, the first task was imagining where they were.
‘Luke?’ asked Brooke, lighting one of his precious Black Russian cigarettes, and adjusting his green tinted glasses. For a moment he watched the tip glow, burning the black paper, edging down towards the gold filter.
Their son had ignored his father’s one piece of advice in life: never volunteer. This had not carried much weight, as Luke knew his father had himself volunteered in the Great War. The result of that mistake had been his capture, and torture, in the Middle East campaign. They’d staked him out in the sun for three days, without water, and his eyes were damaged beyond repair. Hence the fondness for shadows, and a series of tinted glasses: ochre, green, blue and black, depending on the intensity of the light.
Brooke looked at his watch. ‘Given his last letter I suspect he’s back running between telegraph poles on a stretch of Scottish moorland. He’ll be sick of it by now. Then they’ll 12have to run back to the castle.’
Achnacarry Castle was the HQ for commando training, six miles from Fort William. Luke had already done basic training, and taken part in a brief raid on the Normandy coast. Now he was back in Scotland, no doubt preparing for some other adventure. But the daily grind of keeping fit would be unchanged. Mr Churchill was desperate for the commandos to deliver a morale-raising raid behind enemy lines. Or – as the prime minister put it – ‘set Europe alight’. Only that morning the Home Service had reported a raid on the Norwegian coast. But Brooke decided to keep this news to himself. As far as Claire was concerned, her only son was back in training, and would be for several months, if not years.
‘When they do get back to the castle, there’ll be tea – so that’s what he’s thinking about right now. Food,’ decided Brooke.
‘Ben?’ asked Claire, knowing her daughter had a vision of her absent husband in mind at all times.
Joy picked up Iris with brisk efficiency. Like her mother, she was a nurse, and was competent at all things. ‘I think they’re on the surface – in the sunshine. I hope so. They’ve decided he’s the scientist on board – on the flimsy basis he’s a medical student. He might be recording the weather for the log. He’ll be thinking about Iris.’
Brooke’s son-in-law was a submariner on HMS Unbowed, currently stationed at Rosyth, on the Firth of Forth. But he’d be at sea and, Brooke thought, quite possibly in the sightless depths. He’d met his son-in-law half a dozen times and felt, fittingly, that he could be a bit of a cold fish. He’d once asked him what he did when the sub was lying low with an enemy ship above. His answer – that he read a book – revealed a level 13of cool detachment Brooke found inhuman. But everyone on a sub was a volunteer, so he couldn’t fault his courage. Ben’s first boat – Silverfish – had caught fire in the North Sea due to engine trouble, and he’d been captured, and taken to a POW camp, from which he’d escaped. Not only escaped, but led an escape. So – courage certainly, and leadership. Joy was smitten, and each time Ben came to Newnham Croft, Brooke felt he detected a little more of a hidden vulnerability – again, fittingly, just beneath the surface.
They heard a car breaking on gravel with a theatrical skid.
The house faced the towpath; the road was at the back. From where they sat there was not a single clue that they lived their lives in the twentieth century. Brooke always said that time spent by the river was so peaceful because he had nothing in front of him and the world behind him.
But the world often came calling.
Steps, slow and steady, announced the arrival of Sergeant Ralph Edison, long before his substantial form appeared, pushing open the side gate. Edison had retired in 1938 after thirty years in uniform. Now he was Brooke’s right-hand man, and in plain clothes, although he still managed to radiate the authority of the missing uniform. The unseen slalom with the motor car on gravel was a rare glimpse of an unruly side to his character.
‘Sorry, sir. Ladies,’ he added, lifting his hat.
‘Hello Edison,’ said Joy. ‘Tea?’
Edison looked helplessly at Brooke.
‘I can see by the way Sergeant Edison is holding onto the gatepost that he expects me to follow him to the car,’ said Brooke. ‘I shall. I’ll just get my jacket.’14
Claire stood. ‘Food in the oven, Eden. We’re both on nights this week. Iris will be with Mrs Mullins.’
A minute later Edison’s gleaming Wolseley Wasp was on the road into the city past the millpond at Newnham. A significant factor in Edison’s return to the force was the petrol coupons he could draw to run his own – treasured – car. Its crimson paintwork was a mirror to the passing world.
‘What do we know?’ asked Brooke.
‘Fatality, sir. The Trinity Shelter.’
‘Something suspicious?’ said Brooke, swapping the green tinted glasses for the ochre, the sun finally setting.
‘Possibly, sir. Constable who phoned it in said it had the hallmarks of suicide, but that there was a lot of blood. I thought it best to play it by the book.’
Brooke nodded. It wasn’t good news. The shelters were supposed to represent a haven of safety in a violent world. They often offered sanctuary to the desperate. Suicide was not unknown. Pills had flooded the market at the outbreak of war as many families decided that if the invasion came, they couldn’t face the invaders. The fate of the Jews, especially, was growing darker by the month as news emerged, piecemeal, from Poland.
Newspaper coverage of shelter deaths – often a single paragraph in the Cambridge News – had not helped to burnish the reputation of the city’s communal public shelters. Brick-built, with a concrete ‘cap’, they were widely seen as death-traps. In London – it was said – several had failed in the Blitz, the walls crumbling, the concrete ceiling falling on the helpless within. More and more families opted for shelters at home: Andersons in the garden, Morrisons in the house. But not everyone had a garden, or the space indoors, so the poor were often left with 15no alternative to the public shelters, unless they wanted to trust in fate and stay in bed – which many did, especially as the Guildhall siren went off every other day, although bombing raids were rare.
Edison drove along the Backs, the ancient colleges appearing through the trees on the far bank of the river. A slight wind, so often a herald of the dusk, prompted a shower of falling leaves, through which they glimpsed King’s College Chapel, its stained glass now stored in a nearby basement, its windows boarded.
On this side of the river, on the rough pasture where cows had been kept in peacetime, a set of three shelters had been built. Keen to do their bit, three colleges – King’s, Trinity and St John’s – had each put up the money for shelters for the use of the residents of Castle Hill – a nearby warren of cramped housing, a refuge for the city’s Irish labourers and the poor.
The Trinity Shelter boasted a stone version of the college crest over the door: Tudor roses, a lion and – a bad omen for a detective surely – two closed books.
The shelter warden, provided by the college, was a woman called Mrs Flaherty. Given the Irish brogue, and the spotless hands and nails, Brooke guessed she might be kitchen staff.
‘I should have seen him this morning,’ she said, distressed, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. She’d met them on the threshold of the shelter, as if it were her own front door.
‘Why don’t you show us, and start at the beginning,’ said Brooke, taking off his glasses, ready for the gloom within. Ready, also, for the sight of death. Since his ordeals in Palestine, and especially on the long march to Gaza, he’d found it almost impossible to view a corpse without prompting a psychological 16return to the battlefield. But this was his job, his duty, and so he steeled himself.
The door led into a small porch, set at an angle to the main shelter, presumably to stop draughts. Inside, the main room held fifty according to a sign, with two long benches on either side. At the far end there was another right-angled turn into the toilets. There was a short bench here too, and under it the body of a man, turned away, with his back to them.
A uniformed constable, PC Alby Durrell, stood guard. The Borough was the country’s smallest police force. Brooke knew its dozen uniformed PCs by name – first, and last.
‘When did you find him?’ Brooke asked Mrs Flaherty.
‘When I got here this evening at five. There was a raid last night – well, a siren – so I thought I’d better give it a clean and make sure I hadn’t got any roadsters.’
The number of homeless tramps had grown with the coming of spring. Most of the shelters sent them on to Market Hill where there was a special shelter. Otherwise, there were complaints about the smell, and the drink. But the shelters were open at all hours, and so presented an irresistible temptation to the needy.
‘The shelter was full last night?’ asked Edison.
‘Half full. The siren went at two, the all-clear at six.’
‘You think this poor man may have been here last night?’ asked Brooke.
She shrugged. ‘Maybe. The toilet isn’t popular. The light wakes people up so most of the men go outside and use the bushes. I can’t stop them. The women use it – but they just trail a hand along the wall.’
There was a blurred mark on both sides of the passage.
‘People sleep under the benches all the time,’ she offered. 17‘You can’t perch on a wooden bench for ten hours. Everyone lies down in the end. It looks like bedtime at a kennel. If you bring enough bedding, it’s fine. Does for me.’
‘And you sleep where, Mrs Flaherty?’ asked Edison.
‘By the entrance, in the little hall. I’ve got a gas burner, so I do tea.’
The electric light, even when it was on, was dismal, so Mrs Flaherty fetched a lantern and lit it, setting it by the body, but not looking at the body.
‘Oh God,’ she said, catching sight of the blood.
A trickle – about two inches wide at most – led away from the corpse and the slight ledge beneath the seat, and then formed a pool about three feet away.
The blood was black, coagulated.
Brooke turned to PC Durrell. ‘The blood – has it spread since you first saw him?’
‘No, sir. Not an inch.’
Mrs Flaherty was distressed. ‘I didn’t check back here when I left this morning. I never do. It’s the stink of it.’
‘Is there another way in or out?’
Mrs Flaherty led the way, beyond the last Elsan toilet and around yet another corner. Brooke thought she was right about the smell. The place reeked of it – the whiff of a chemical toilet would be one of the engrained memories of war.
Brooke stepped out through the small back door and found himself in the trees beside a water-filled ditch. A neatly mown grass path led to Trinity Bridge, then over the Cam, to Wren’s Library. He thought security was lax, but then there was little to worry about when the real danger was a thousand-pound bomb.18
Back inside he found the Borough’s pathologist, Dr Henry Comfort, briskly attempting to roll the victim out of his niche. The doctor was a large man, with a boulder-like head, and a butcher’s meaty hands.
‘There you are, Brooke. Help me lift him clear of the blood,’ he said.
Brooke took his knees, Comfort the armpits.
‘Poor man,’ said Mrs Flaherty.
Once they had him in the light they could see that his clothes were clean, if worn, but of good quality. Both of his wrists were slit, and a bloodied cut-throat razor had fallen from a fold in his jacket.
Brooke recalled that less than half an hour ago he’d been sitting outside his riverside house thinking about happiness.
The features of the face already had the plump plasticity of the dead. In life he might have been handsome, with a wide face, a good jaw and fine skin – and here Brooke detected an olive tone, so perhaps Italian, Mediterranean certainly. There were several POW camps in the Fens full of Italian internees, a large number of them chefs and waiters from London’s West End – an unintended consequence of government policy which had, it was said, upset several members of the Cabinet.
Edison, notebook open, told Dr Comfort what they knew. It was an expert summary, for his sergeant had a logical mind. As they listened Mrs Flaherty’s lips were moving and Brooke guessed she must be saying a prayer.
‘Time of death?’ asked Brooke, braced for the usual rebuttal.
‘As you well know, Inspector, that is a question for the laboratory later.’
Comfort opened his black bag and slipped on a rubber 19glove, using his finger to test the consistency of the blood.
‘But if you have an urgent need to know, I’d say between twelve and twenty-four hours …’ He looked at his watch. ‘Between six last night and six this morning. The blood’s nearly dried. But it’s been a warm autumnal day – so don’t hold me to it.’
Comfort picked up the man’s arm and tried to articulate it at the elbow, wrist and shoulder.
‘Rigor’s gone. The blood’s almost black. I’ll stick with my estimates of the time of death – but the autopsy may throw up the odd surprise. Although I doubt it.’
‘I’d like to check the pockets,’ said Brooke.
‘Please yourself,’ replied Comfort, taking a cigar tube from his pocket, extracting the cigar within, and lighting up.
‘Nothing like a decent Cuban to give a chemical toilet a run for its money,’ he said.
Mrs Flaherty looked appalled.
Edison and Brooke emptied the dead man’s pockets. There was no wallet, no ID card, no name tags, no letters, no watch, no rings – although there was a pale band where the watch strap should have been. There was the usual litter: sweet wrappers, small change, a golf tee, a handkerchief – ironed, and fairly new. Brooke picked up the cut-throat with his handkerchief.
‘No means of identification,’ he said.
‘A bit odd if you want to end it all.’
‘Shame?’ suggested Edison. ‘Perhaps he wanted to spare others.’
Nodding, Brooke agreed: ‘Yes. Perhaps he just wanted to slip away.’
He was staring at Edison as he said this, eye to eye, but 20at this moment his sergeant looked down at the corpse. There was something furtive in the sudden gesture. A hint of guilt perhaps. But for what?
Brooke had no time to give it further thought, as the pathologist had returned to his examination of the body.
‘Early twenties. Good condition, excellent even. Fair hair.’ He knelt down and slid an eyelid open. ‘Green eyes – glazing has set in. So again – my money stays on twelve hours or more.’
‘Something wrong?’ asked Brooke, because Comfort was simply contemplating the victim’s face.
‘Just a note of caution. It takes some determination – a steady hand – to slit both your wrists. It’s actually very rare – the second wound is often botched. Not here. Both wounds are straight, and deep enough to sever the arteries.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Brooke, pointing at the palm of the left hand. There were inky letters, obscured by blood.
Comfort gave him a piece of clean bandage, and a bottle of white spirits, from his black bag. Carefully swabbing the skin, he revealed what turned out to be a line of numbers: 78891.
Brooke stood, staring at the hand.
‘What is it, Brooke?’ asked Comfort.
‘It’s my telephone number,’ he said.
CHAPTER TWO
Brooke bought two pints of Ridley’s Best Bitter at the bar and found their usual table to one side of the fireplace. The Cricketers was only half full: a Wednesday night, like any other since the war had begun, and the price of beer now sky-high at five pence a pint. Their table was beside the frosted window, one pane of which was etched with figures playing cricket in happier times. The rest of the windows were new, blown out by the bomb which had fallen on Elm Street the previous year, and which had come within fifty yards of ending Brooke’s life – which, Claire had pointed out, would have been an ignominious end for a man who’d got a medal from the king for refusing to divulge military secrets despite the tortures of 22 thirst. She said that if the Elm Street bomb had killed him, he’d have been a hero all over again, but only in his obituary in the Cambridge News.
Grandcourt arrived, precisely on time, already filling his pipe, and as cheerful as ever. He sat down and took an inch off the top of his pint, wiping suds from his moustache.
They touched glasses: ‘Sir,’ said Grandcourt.
Edmund Grandcourt had been Brooke’s batman in Palestine, and was virtually part of the family, but the ‘sir’ never faltered, even if its deferential tone had faded away.
Momentarily, he disappeared in a cloud of pipe smoke and sizzling sparks.
Grandcourt was perfectly at home in a well-run public house, despite modest habits when it came to beer. The atmosphere of carefree sociability suited him, largely because he felt able to stand aside and observe. He was that rare example of someone who delighted in the joy of others. Brooke had never seen him the worse for wear, not even in Alexandria when they’d headed back for the boat home.
England had looked green and pleasant in 1919 as they steamed past the Isle of Wight and into Portsmouth, but jobs were scarce, and so Brooke had secured him a position as a storeman in the university’s engineering department. It was meant to be a temporary appointment, but jobs were even more difficult to find in the lean years of the thirties, so Grandcourt – despite ambitions – had stayed put.
Since a new war had broken out he’d volunteered as a shelter warden, and so was one of Brooke’s many nighthawks – a network across the city, the product of twenty years of intermittent insomnia, another consequence of his ordeal in Palestine. The 23nighthawks were always there for Brooke, and often on hand to help with his most testing cases.
‘Any news of young Mr Brooke, sir?’ asked Grandcourt, stretching out a stiff leg.
‘Nothing you could call news,’ said Brooke, lighting one of his Black Russians – an affectation he’d picked up in the officer’s mess in Cairo.
He tried to concentrate on his friend’s question.
‘Luke should be in Scotland training. But you never know. There’s been another raid on some islands off Norway – the radio this morning said commandos took part.’
He produced his notebook. ‘Some place called the Lofoten Islands. Said they took more than a hundred prisoners. No casualties on our side. They brought a bunch of Norwegians back with them – volunteers, local partisans I suppose.’
‘Official?’ asked Grandcourt, who, while a conduit for gossip and ‘intel’, was a sceptic in all things.
‘The Home Service said a statement was issued by the Admiralty. Not much detail. And, of course, no date. They never give dates. But it must have gone well, otherwise they’d have brushed it under the carpet.’
Grandcourt’s pipe produced a billow, which actually shut out the beams of sunlight for a moment. He was a small man – bantamweight – and his choice of pipes made him look even smaller.
‘They’ll be newsreel in the cinemas if they want to make a splash of it,’ he said. ‘Bogart’s on at the Regal – The Maltese Falcon.’
‘Claire’s already marked my card,’ said Brooke. ‘We’re going Sunday night with Joy.’24
They synchronised the sipping of ale.
Brooke asked after Grandcourt’s grown-up children and his wife. If he was honest with himself he wouldn’t have shown an interest normally, but Claire would ask if he’d asked, and expect the latest family news. But neither he nor his one-time batman were especially relaxed talking about personal matters. The conversation tended to centre on pies, bacon, cricket and town gossip – unless Brooke had a case to crack, which might benefit from Grandcourt’s common sense about the everyday world. He was a walking encyclopaedia of the practical; one of those people who seemed able to turn their hands to any task. In the desert he’d proved a gifted organiser, with enough astute intelligence for the whole troop.
And Brooke often needed the help. The Borough, being a miniature police force, with scarce resources, left him in effective command of the plain-clothed division – in that the other inspector dealt with road traffic, and the courts. In terms of criminal detection, Brooke was the only senior officer in a city swollen by evacuees and civil servants shipped out of London. He’d take any help he could get.
‘I’ve got a nut to crack,’ said Brooke. ‘A body was found in one of the shelters on the Backs. Looks like suicide. Thing is, he had my office telephone number on the back of his hand.’
‘Good God,’ said Grandcourt. ‘Wasn’t there one up at Chesterton in the summer – a suicide? I get plenty of tears in my shelter – and it’s not just the women and kids.’
‘We all lead lives of quiet desperation,’ said Brooke.
Grandcourt had developed a sixth sense with respect to Brooke’s philosophical musings, so he knew when his spoken thoughts needed no response.25
‘Autopsy tomorrow,’ said Brooke. ‘Which makes the beer all the more refreshing tonight.’
Grandcourt, who had seen his commanding officer pass out at the sight of blood several times in the desert, took the hint and provided refills.
Brooke took a gulp and outlined the facts of the case. ‘Dr Comfort has his doubts too. And given the victim was going to call us, I think we should leave no stone unturned. And there’s something else,’ he added. ‘There was nothing in his pockets that could lead us to his name.’
Grandcourt’s pipe produced a miniature impression of the Flying Scotsman – a sure sign he was thinking. ‘Maybe someone found him in the shelter – you said he was at the back, by the loo? Maybe they did find him at night, rifled his pockets, then made off through the back door.’
Brooke hadn’t thought of that. Maybe it was suicide after all. Closely followed by robbery.
‘I suppose the other question is why wasn’t he in uniform,’ said Grandcourt. ‘Young fella like that.’
Another good point. Brooke had assumed he was RO – reserved occupation. But now he thought it through, it was rare for someone so young to avoid conscription unless they were a farmer, factory worker, fireman or policeman. And he’d put money on the victim being an office worker. Smooth hands, smart clean suit (if worn), clean skin.
‘You’re right,’ admitted Brooke. ‘I think he was an office worker, white-collar.’
‘A nobby clerk, then,’ said Grandcourt. ‘Even if he was RO, he’d have got a lot of stick. White feathers and all that. People can be nasty. Mean. Maybe it was all too much. There’s plenty 26that want to fight, but the government won’t let them go. What will they say when their kids ask them what they did in the war?’
They finished their drinks and strolled back though the Kite, a working-class district set between a parallelogram of thoroughfares. There was a shop on most corners, although many had closed for want of shopkeepers, and some of the corner pubs had fared no better. Brooke felt the streets hid a lot of private despair. Everyone was getting by on hoping that better times were just round the corner.
Grandcourt stopped outside a boarded-up pub, called The Rose, with an ornate iron flower, painted gold, rather than a sign.
‘Good old pub this,’ he said. ‘Shame to see it shut up. I used to come here with the wife after the war. Dominoes team as well. Darts. We used to travel for away games, far as Ely. Trip to Gorleston in the summer in a charabanc. A lot more like it won’t survive the Duration.’
Grandcourt shook his head. There was a strange wistful look on his face which Brooke had rarely seen, except in the desert when he’d admit to missing his wife and boys.
They emerged on the edge of Parker’s Piece. As well as the line of concrete shelters, one of which was Grandcourt’s new domain, the army had bivouacked on the grass in neat lines of bell tents. Brooke was unsure why Cambridge needed such a military presence. Last summer had seen speculation a German invasion would come on the east coast, but now Hitler seemed to be biding his time. The absence of news – the papers and radio were strictly censored – added to the feeling of isolation. The whole city felt like a backwater.27
From his knapsack Grandcourt produced a helmet with the words HEAD SHELTER WARDEN painted neatly in white on the front.
‘Promotion,’ said Brooke. ‘That was fast.’
‘Nobody else wanted the job,’ said Grandcourt.
He set the smart helmet straight and gave Brooke his customary salute, then marched away.
CHAPTER THREE
Lieutenant Ben Ridding raised his binoculars to his eyes to scan the horizon. The sun had set in the west, the first stars multiplying, the sea dark, the white horses luminous. He was on third watch, alone in the conning tower of HMS Unbowed, a U-class Royal Navy submarine. The boat (never a ship) was 300 nautical miles west of Norway, and 250 nautical miles north-east of Orkney; its task was to protect Convoy PQ-7 en route to the Soviet White Sea port of Archangel. The sea state was rated 1 on the Douglas Scale – calm (rippled). There was a salty whisper as each wave broke over the bow.
The day he’d left Cambridge to join the boat, he’d told his father-in-law – Detective Inspector Eden Brooke – that if he was 29lucky, he might get to see the Northern Lights. Brooke, a natural scientist of the old school, had put a hand on Ben’s shoulder.
‘Come back and tell us all what it was like – not the picture-book stuff, what it was really like. You can tell Iris.’
At the thought of his daughter, Ben’s insides clenched, the fear of not seeing her again now as dull and everyday as the bedbugs and the nits, and the damp stink of the mess.
So, what would he, God willing, one day tell his daughter?
Above him now the sky was alight.
As soon as the sun had gone the colours had appeared. A curtain, certainly, strung south-west to north-east across their bearing. An emerald-green screen which buckled and pulsed with that extraordinary light. Within this a gold band, a swathe of lemon-yellow, billowed. An orange motif was less fluid, more structural, as if the whole fantastic canvas been hung up in the Arctic sky on hooks.
What words to use? Brooke had given him some helpful technical terms, only marginally undermined by the fact they were nearly 2,000 years old. He should look out for pithaei – barrel-like shapes; chasmata – chasms; pogoniae – bearded lights; and finally cyparissae – the green layers of the cypress tree. There was a vast shimmering barrel certainly, and even some clear bearded shapes just above the horizon, as if the curtain was weeping, but the overall impression was the chasm: a vast series of caves within which lights played.
But to answer his father-in-law’s real question, he had to abandon colour and describe the scale. Ben was a sailor and he didn’t often find the sea romantic, but this was not the sky at dusk, this was the heavens. And it drew him in, towards magnetic north and beyond. There was only one small disappointment. 30He was a submariner: living – surviving – below the sea was above all an auditory experience. And Brooke had been told that the aurora had its own sound, which varied from claps and rattles to something close to birdsong; but it was rare, and as hard as Ben listened, all he could hear was the sea.
To balance out that disappointment there was an additional wonder. For the sea was alight too. The bow of Unbowed – running forward at ten knots – pushed aside the waves which rolled smoothly over the for’ard section. Each of these bow-waves flowed silkily around the conning tower, each studded with pinpoints of luminescent green, plankton mirroring on a microscopic scale the overarching vision above.
That was the beauty of it all.
His job was to keep watch for the beast.
It would strike at night. Possibly, tonight.
Its prey was Convoy PQ-7, currently eighteen miles away, just over the horizon, at a bearing of 120 degrees.
He could see one of the ships, the 5,000-tonne tanker MV Airdrie, carrying an entire wing of RAF fighters for the protection of Soviet Arctic ports. Since the German invasion of Russia in June, the convoys had developed quickly into a vital lifeline for an effectively landlocked ally. Ben simply noted the irony that a year earlier Stalin and Hitler had connived in the destruction of Poland. But his job was to keep an eye out for MV Airdrie, not muse on global geopolitics.
And keeping an eye on the ship was harder than it sounded. Night was falling and all he could see was the smoke from its furnaces, for its lumbering grey bulk was obscured by the curvature of the Earth. The smoke started at the horizon as a narrow funnel which then widened out, in the shape of a 31tuba held in the orchestra, until it blended into the aurora. Just behind it was another tuba, slightly smaller, but identical, on the same bearing.
According to the skipper’s briefing on the chart chest at the start of the watch, there were sixteen merchant vessels in all, including one troop ship, all heading for Murmansk.
Their orders were to shadow the convoy and attack any German warship that approached. They had no name for the beast – any battleship in the Kriegsmarine would qualify, but they all knew the Tirpitz was in the sector, and her job was to stop the Soviet fleet breaking out of the Baltic. But she might take time off duty to destroy a convoy.
The moon had risen to starboard, which would reveal them in silhouette, the conning tower cutting through the silver sea like a shark’s fin. But they were invisible at more than five miles, and Ben was satisfied this stretch of ocean was theirs alone.
One of the engine room ratings clattered up the spiral steps with a mug of tea.
‘Jenkins says you’ve fixed the periscope, sir – that we won’t miss next time.’
‘Tell Jenkins to concentrate on the port-side diesel engine. It sounds like a clapped-out motorbike.’
‘Sir. Did you fix it though?’
It was Able Seaman Tonks, one of the junior ratings.
Ben ignored the question. The boat had a crew of twenty-three. Traditional deference to ranks was difficult to maintain outside of battle stations.
The boy lingered. Ben was a favourite with the crew. This wasn’t his first boat. He’d helped scupper the Silverfish off the German coast the previous year because of an engine fire, and 32he’d then spent six months in a POW camp as a result. He’d escaped, a feat which seemed to impress the deckhands more than any amount of nautical knowledge.
Which made him feel a fraud, because when the Silverfish had caught fire the sub had filled with smoke, and the lights had gone out, and he’d spent vital minutes holding onto the metal frame of his bunk, praying he’d see Joy and Iris again. If he hadn’t been so terrified, he’d have screamed. His bunkmate Johnnie Phipps had saved his life, coming back down to drag him up the corkscrew stairs of the conning tower and bundle him into a raft. If they hadn’t escaped from Luft III he’d have cracked up in there too. He’d told no one when he got back to Cambridge, but the nightmares betrayed him to Joy at Newnham Croft, although he could never quite bring himself to tell her the whole truth.
He didn’t really deserve to be treated as a hero. He was only waiting to crack up again. His nerves were shot. The real problem was that, as always, he could hide it so well with a kind of blithe stillness. He’d never broken a sweat in his life.
Tonks was still waiting for an answer to his question.
Had he fixed the periscope?
Every man on a sub was a volunteer, Ben often reminded himself of that, so he hardly felt he could treat them like swabs. Tonks deserved an answer because his life might depend on it.
‘I did what I could, Tonks. Optics isn’t my strong point. I’m a medical student. But we’ll find out soon enough.’
Tonks still lingered. He was like a dog.
‘Now, go and tell the man at the day book the moon’s up and there’s nothing to report. Inform the skipper that we are now visible at five miles.’33
Tonks dropped from sight, and Ben heard him turning the locks on the hatch.
Six days earlier they’d had a German corvette in their sights: 1,000 yards on a flat sea, almost beam-on. The skipper fired two torpedoes from periscope depth – forty-five feet. They’d crowded into the command room by the blue light of the sonar screen and waited for the tell-tale explosion, the inevitable pulse of the shock wave, the crump of bulkheads folding under pressure as she went down.
Both fish missed.
Ben had been summoned to the mess once they’d withdrawn from contact. The periscope eyepiece was on the tabletop. Was it the culprit, or had poor seamanship allowed the enemy to escape?
‘The eye of Polyphemus,’ said the skipper, whose name was Lynch-Forbes, but everyone called him Skipper. He was old-school, a veteran of the Great War. They were treated to the story out of the Iliad, but Ben knew it, because Brooke was always quoting chunks of the text over dinner at Newnham Croft, as he’d been given a copy by his father at Cambridge railway station the day he’d set out for Egypt in 1915.
Polyphemus was a Cyclops. Ulysses’ men got into his cave and stole his food and when he was drunk they blinded him, and then hid outside amongst the sheep, so he couldn’t feel where they lay. Which made Ben think of Unbowed blundering around looking for the enemy by sonar alone.
‘Our Polyphemus isn’t blind – but he bloody well might as well be,’ said the skipper. The chief was there too, but everyone seemed to think this was Lieutenant Ben Ridding’s problem. This seemed unfair. As a medic he’d specialised in optics and 34diseases of the eye. In scientific terms this expertise was useless when dealing with a periscope. But given the size of the crew it had been sufficient to land Ben the job.
‘Can you check it out?’ asked Lynch-Forbes. ‘If we can’t rely on her we might as well get back to port. I’ve asked the Admiralty to contact the factory – place called the Vulcan Works, Cambridge. Isn’t that your neck of the woods, Ben?’
Ben nodded. It was home now. He’d gone straight to Rosyth after the wedding, and the deckhands had thrown him in the dock.
‘We’re not the first to spot a problem,’ said the skipper. ‘It’s probably shoddy workmanship. Unfortunately, they can’t spare an expert so they’re sending in the local coppers. God help us.’
The skipper looked at his watch. ‘Hargreaves can cover your next watch. This is a priority. If we can’t shoot straight, we’ll skedaddle.’
After that, it had taken Ben three hours to set up a makeshift lab table in the torpedo hall.
There were three lenses – the object, the field and the ocular, and he used a torch beam through a hole cut in a card to check the angles, and the degree of refraction through the two prisms. (He’d learnt that much at Dartmouth: prisms, never mirrors, because they’d shatter anywhere near a depth charge – or mist up once the damp got inside the periscope tube. A decent prism was as durable as a rock.)
There was nothing wrong with the kit, but the periscope’s optics were off-line by three degrees. The third lens, the ocular, was the culprit. It was a millimetre closer to the field lens and set very slightly off a right angle. Ben used an eyepiece to examine the assembly and found a very fine washer had been inserted – one 35side bevelled to produce the angle. There was nothing ‘shoddy’ about the workmanship here: it was a fine piece of engineering.
He checked everything again. Then a third time. After speaking to the skipper and assuring him the periscope was now usable, he went to the radio room to send an agreed message to the Admiralty, with a copy to the War Office.
In it Ben set out his precise measurements.
The message ended with:
no doubt: cambridge factory. sabotage.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Spinning House – heart and soul of the Borough – stood on St Andrew’s Street, one of the arrow-straight sections of the original Roman road which cut through the city like a cheese-wire. In its former life the medieval building had been a prison for ‘fallen women’ run by the university, which had taken upon itself the role of policing the streets and safeguarding the morals of its students. (Or more likely, wished to remove a temptation which proved too much for so many.) It looked like a gaol, with small windows and blank walls, and it radiated a certain grim determination to punish. In the final years of the last century it had operated as a workhouse – the women set to labour in its lofts at spinning wheels and looms.37
Brooke met Edison on the threshold, the sergeant’s arms full of excess produce from his allotment, destined for the uniformed branch’s mess room. For thirty years he had been one of them, not a detective, and the mess was in some ways a home from home. While Edison’s generosity with carrots, cabbages and Russian kale was legendary, Brooke felt that this time he had gone too far. His sergeant was practically obscured by largesse, a walking grocery stall.
‘Everything’s got to go,’ said Edison. ‘We’ve got a garden, sir. The wife can grow what we need. I think the allotment’s had its day.’
It was a small clue, and now he recalled others, that in some way Edison’s life was shifting from its well-worn path. During the three years they’d worked together Edison had made it clear that while the Wasp was his pride and joy, the allotment came a close second, its hut a welcome refuge from the world. Now he planned to simply give it up.
Edison hurried off. ‘I’ll dump this. Will you want me for the autopsy, sir?’
‘In an hour.’
Brooke went to his office and carefully adjusted the blinds to decrease the light, taking off his glasses to read the post. The autopsy on the man found in the Trinity Shelter was scheduled for ten. A sense of hopelessness kindled in Brooke. He knew that he’d soon see that face again, in the unforgiving light of Dr Comfort’s laboratory. Cold, pale and once handsome. He had to hope that within hours someone would step forward: a girlfriend, a wife, a mother, a brother. Otherwise, they might never know his story, and why he’d wanted to share it with the Borough.38
DC Vanessa Turner appeared at his door, reporting for duty. She was a new recruit to the Borough, after the war put a stop to her studies at the art college beyond Parker’s Piece. Attracted by the concept of detection, and its emphasis on detail – which was central to her artwork – she’d signed up as a special constable, her diploma studies suspended. She’d gone into the uniformed branch, but Brooke had spotted a sharp brain and an even sharper eye and whisked her up into the plain-clothed division.
For a moment she stood, patting down her dark jacket and skirt. Brooke had noted she had the arresting habit of appearing still, while her eyes ran sinuously over everything around her. Brooke suspected any nerves exhibited were limited to her hands, which she often held behind her back. Her file had listed a passion for exercise, specifically lacrosse. As a child he’d often seen matches on Parker’s Piece – the girls charging around with lethal sticks, throwing up turf like galloping horses. Turner exhibited all the signs of suppressed energy. Her movements were slightly awkward, a common trait in the tall. But he suspected that at speed, and under pressure, she would achieve an effortless grace.
She had accepted, at least for now, that her duties were to be mundane.
She offered to fetch tea from the canteen.
But Brooke had a sudden notion, which he recognised called for immediate action.
‘Art – at the college? Wasn’t that it?’
‘Sir. Third year of a diploma.’
‘They teach anatomy?’
‘Sir. Medical school at Queens’. Twice a week.’39
‘Good. If you feel queasy don’t eat now. It never works. We’ve an appointment at the Galen for an autopsy at ten. Bring a pencil and sketchpad. I’ll meet you at the duty desk at five to the hour.’
She nodded, and he thought she really did look keen.
Then he settled down to deskwork, an aspect of detection he found loathsome. He asked the switchboard for a line and began a series of calls designed to confirm that no missing persons had been registered at County, or the neighbouring counties, in the last forty-eight hours. A young adjutant at Madingley Hall, the country house on the edge of the city requisitioned by the military as a regional HQ, assured him the last soldier registered as AWOL had been found at his home address in Shoreditch two weeks earlier, and no one else was missing. The university was a trickier matter. All students and most of the able-bodied academics were now in the forces. Those that were left were essentially AWOL for the Duration. With no one to teach, the staff were either lost in the maze of college libraries or dragooned into work related directly to the war effort, at various ministries or laboratories. Keeping track of them was impossible, certainly at short notice.
Taking a break, he stood at the blinds, feathering them to look out over the rooftops. As he watched, a barrage balloon rose slowly from the riverbank, the university library its backdrop. In the sky above a bomber limped home to one of the Fen aerodromes. The war was the backdrop to everything, but nonetheless oddly distant.
Perhaps it was the thought of the autopsy to come, for he was never at ease in the company of the dead, but he felt a sudden, crippling fatigue. Ever since his ordeal in the desert he’d been a 40victim of insomnia. This had suited his aversion to light. He’d attempted to follow a new regime for sleep: an evening meal, a hot bath and a darkened room at the appropriate time. But almost every night he was awake by two and had simply to wait for dawn. More often he’d simply get up and set off across the city in pursuit of the company of nighthawks.
The effect of his sleepless nights were these sudden collapses, a brief plummet into sleep and dreams. Or nightmares.
He lay down on the day bed he’d bought in Cairo. It was in a light flexible wood, painted with a scene comprising reeds, and birds, and the Nile. Sleep came, and nightmares flitted, interwoven with a single image of the dimly lit bomb shelter, which for some reason incorporated a makeshift gallows, a man standing on the bench, the rope around his neck attached to an iron ring in the concrete roof, set to hang a lantern. In the desert he’d had to order the execution of a looter south of Jerusalem. He heard now, in his sleep, his own voice giving the final order. He looked down at the shadow on the colourless sand, the tied legs swinging. He wanted to cut him down, but his own limbs wouldn’t move. It was typical of his time as a soldier, in that he felt he’d been made to do something to meet the expectations of others. The man’s name was Omar – which he knew was derived from the Arabic for ‘flourishing’.
Which is how it always ended, with him trying to say ‘Omar’, but the sound getting stuck in his throat.
A hand on his shoulder woke him. It was PC Turner. He wondered if she’d heard his struggle to speak.
‘Time, sir,’ she said, unsmiling.
They set out quickly for the Galen Anatomy Building, just three minutes’ walk through the grounds of Downing College. 41Completed in the last months of peace, it was a pale vision of tiled brickwork, rising five floors, a shining addition to the medical faculty and the other anonymous post-war science buildings making up what they now were asked to call the Downing Site – although as a child he’d known it as Pembroke Leys, a marsh, where he’d hunted for frogspawn, a secret world of puddles, streams and ponds.
They climbed the steps to the Galen’s imposing doors, past the two male statues on guard to either side: classical carved figures set in stone; warriors, armed with spears. Brooke could never ditch the illusion that as he passed they turned to watch him, amplifying the feeling that he was going into battle again, and that he’d soon have the company of the dead.
Recognising Brooke, the porter touched his cap. ‘The doctor’s upstairs, sir. You’re expected. He’s got a lunch at Catz, so he’ll whistle through it.’ The pathologist was a fellow at St Catherine’s College, and a stalwart of the High Table.
Noting Turner, and the uniform, the porter seemed confused, and simply mumbled ‘Ma’am,’ before returning to his ledger.
Dr Comfort’s laboratory was on the top floor. His modest duties as the Borough’s pathologist were combined with a university position in medicine; a double appointment which stretched back to the period of Victorian efficiency. The city was tiny, and since the days of open warfare between ‘Town’ and ‘Gown’, instances of unnatural, unexpected or violent death were very rare. The County force, up at the Castle, had its own arrangements.
Brooke took the concrete steps two at a time, rising up through the silent building. He noted that PC Turner matched 42him step for step without any obvious need to take extra breaths, or even any breaths. He got the impression she was disappointed to reach the top, where she straightened her tunic.
The pathologist was waiting at the doors of his laboratory, struggling with a bowtie. Brooke introduced PC Turner, adding that she was present to observe. Dr Comfort’s entire attention switched to the one occupied dissection table – one of three set in the centre of the laboratory. Three walls of the room – which served a double role as the city’s mortuary – held windows, and so the light was penetrating. Brooke switched from the ochre to the blue tinted lenses. He always preferred to see a corpse by dim light. Here, in Dr Comfort’s kingdom, the dead were revealed in dazzling detail, which reminded him, yet again, of the desert.
The deceased was naked, the re-stitched flesh jagged with wounds. Dr Comfort had known Brooke a decade and was well aware of his violent aversion to blood and gore. He always strove to complete the butchery well ahead of time, leaving Brooke to deal with the findings, and, briefly, to examine the corpse.
So, the brain had been removed, although Brooke just had time to see it floating in a glass jar before he looked away. In Egypt and Sinai, he’d learnt, eventually, that he couldn’t emotionally connect with every casualty, and that he should reserve his concern for his men. The problem was that in a real sense this man was one of his men. The dead – the murdered – were now his soldiers.
One thing struck Brooke immediately. Naked, it was obvious the olive tone of the skin was not hereditary at all. The victim had a suntan, which covered his body except for the area delineated by a pair of swimming shorts. There was no doubt he 43had been in strong sunlight quite recently. Given the appalling summer so far, that raised its own questions.
