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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Nighthawk
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
1939, Cambridge. The opening weeks of the Second World War, and the first blackout - The Great Darkness - covers southern England, enveloping the city. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke, a wounded hero of the Great War, takes his nightly dip in the cool waters of the Cam. The night is full of alarms, but in this Phoney War, the enemy never comes. But daylight reveals a corpse on the riverside, the body torn apart by some unspeakable force. Brooke investigates, calling on the expertise and inspiration of a faithful group of fellow 'nighthawks' across the city, all condemned, like him, to a life lived away from the light. Within hours The Great Darkness has claimed a second victim. War, it seems, has many victims. But what links these crimes of the night?
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THE GREAT DARKNESS
JIM KELLY
To Rowan Haysom, for his insight into the City of Cambridge and sharing a generous sense of place
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The City of Cambridge is one of the principal characters in The Great Darkness. Like all fictional characters it is in part a combination of reality and imagination, both in terms of its geography, and history. The City of Sheffield is a minor character, but the same applies.
CHAPTER ONE
October 1939 Cambridge, England
The secret place lay at the end of one of Cambridge’s many blind alleys, through a small oak door. Brooke had the key which turned the well-oiled antique lock. Slipping down the narrow, mossy steps, he reached the river. Here he sat in the darkness on a stone ledge, setting his ochre-tinted glasses on a shelf in the brickwork. A wooden box, with a slate lid, hid a canvas bag containing bathing shorts and a towel.
For a moment he sat listening to the old city, unseen beyond the high walls. Water trickled in drains, pans clattered in a college kitchen, and close by a bicycle rumbled over cobbles. And something new, the sounds of war: soldiers marching, synchronised boots fading away towards the station, and the silence of war, the empty streets, the buses and trams confined to depots, the cinemas and theatres boarded shut.
To the south, a pair of searchlights crossed and uncrossed in the sky like knitting needles, on the watch for the parachutes of spies.
Brooke filled his lungs with the night air, laced with the scent of the river, that unmistakable concoction of river weed, sodden roots and banks. Coal fires brought a smoky softness to the night. The great Fen fields to the north, harvested of beet and potatoes and cabbages, added an earthy edge, the signature of the deep black peat below. And, tonight, a trace of air fuel from the fighter base on the outskirts of the city.
Setting his hat on a nail in the frame of the door, Brooke took a minute to change, folding his clothes neatly in the box. For a moment he hesitated: swimming after dark had been banned, and the army ran a motorboat on regular patrols, armed with a searchlight. But such rules, for Brooke, had always amounted to a challenge.
He used his palms to raise himself the inch needed to allow a forward slide from the step into the cool, forgiving stream.
He lay on his back, floating, looking up into the mercy of the night. Closing his damaged eyes, he drifted with the current, which ran in its ancient canyon of stone; dark tonight, not overseen by the jewelled windows of college rooms. Especially dark tonight, for all of Cambridge was cast in shadow, the streets patrolled by air raid wardens, every window blind. The Great Darkness had fallen by Whitehall decree across half of England, an official blackout in preparation for the bombs that would fall.
For now the war itself, a month old, had been branded ‘phoney’ – the German offensive in the west, following the surprise attack on Poland, was not expected until the new year. The Poles fought on, but were clearly losing. The Russians had invaded from the east. The French had managed a token sortie in the Saar, while the British Expeditionary Force camped along the Belgian border.
But there were casualties, even as the world waited. In the Atlantic, a U-boat had sunk HMS Courageous, with the loss of more than five hundred men. One of the dead had been a former scholar at Brooke’s old college. They’d posted his name on a board by the porters’ lodge, a little ceremony which brought the loss closer to home. For Brooke, just forty years old but a veteran of the Great War, it felt like an augury.
He swam north, where open meadows lay on the west bank, a fen marked on one of Brooke’s beloved city maps as St John’s Wilderness. The river ahead retained the ghost of its reflection: a sinuous bend of faint luminescence, slightly blurred by a rising mist. Somewhere, he heard the dull thud of a poacher’s gun, repeated, matched by echoes. Submerging his face, his eyes, then his ears, he listened to the river turning over the tiny pebbles of its gravel bed, a treble, set against the bass note of the water, the deep rumble of the main stream, as it ran between its banks.
As he surfaced he caught, or rather finally identified, a noise that had been present for some time, and which he’d confused with the under-song of the river itself.
A trundle, a murmur, as of cart wheels.
But he could see nothing: the darkness seemed to rest against his eyes.
The cart wheels came closer, with the trudge of boots matching the pace of the turning wheels.
Finally, he glimpsed shadows on the bank.
And heard a voice: ‘Grim work.’
A half-bar of a song in three voices followed, the melody tangled.
‘Quiet there! Right, we’re under the trees, boys. Those who want to smoke, can.’
A match flared, then another, the light passing from face to face. Brooke saw it all in a moment: a line of three empty carts, the traces horseless. A dozen soldiers, each with a spade, stood in a circle as the cigarette smoke rose. Recalling the scene later for Claire, his wife, he noted that the men appeared cowed, shoulders down, heads bowed, one leaning on the next.
Soldiers had become as common as students on the streets. In the weeks since Chamberlain’s broadcast had marked the advent of war, Cambridge was an armed camp. Tents in rows filled Parker’s Piece, one of the city’s great parks, as if re-enacting the night before Crecy, or Agincourt. Anti-aircraft guns, dug into pits, formed a necklace of encampments along the borough boundary. Even the sky was defended, dotted with barrage balloons, held by cables over the railway lines and factories, braced to deter dive-bombers when they came, flying low.
But given the strictures of the Great Darkness, what had brought this platoon of men out to the meadows at midnight?
A voice from the riverbank: ‘So no pocket money this time, eh, Sarg?’
‘You’ve done alright. I told the lot of you, stick with me and you’ll not go short. Next time they’ll pay double.’ This accent came from the North, a strange guttural sound Brooke couldn’t place, but the questioner was a Londoner.
Brooke caught a sweet smell on the breeze.
It was as if the next speaker had heard his thoughts. ‘That’s you, Spider – the stink: you haven’t had a wash this year.’
London again, the East End, reeking of the market stall and bargain calls.
‘Christ. The stench is on the spades,’ said another.
‘Use the river.’ The sergeant’s voice this time, losing patience with his men.
Brooke saw the white splashes where they plunged the tools in the water.
‘Right. Let’s get some grub,’ said the sergeant. ‘Put your backs into it …’
Cigarette butts sizzled in the stream, and the soldiers were gone, tramping south, man-hauling the empty carts away to the north.
The sticky sweet smell went with them.
Treading water, Brooke pushed thick wet hair out of his eyes. He thought that anything undertaken by night came freighted with connotations: shame, secrecy, guilt. What had the soldiers buried? Where was the pit?
Detective Inspector Eden Brooke swam back to the mossy steps.
CHAPTER TWO
Brooke was a nighthawk, but he was not alone. Over the years since he’d been invalided home from the last war, his insomnia had deepened, and the wounds to his eyes had failed to heal, so he’d taken to strolling the streets at night. He found them inhabited by fellow travellers: those who couldn’t sleep, those who didn’t wish to sleep, those whose work began when the sun went down. They offered a warm fire, a friendly chat and sometimes inspiration when a case proved intractable. Each night he did, finally, find rest: at home if Claire was not on night shifts at the hospital, or in a cell at the station. Sleep, when it did come, was always brief and sudden. In the dark watches of the night his life often felt like a clock winding down.
Rose King, at her tea stall on Market Hill, had been his first nighthawk. Returning from the Great War, Brooke had joined the Borough – the city’s own police force, one of the oldest, and smallest, in the country. After training, he’d secured a night beat, a preordained path which led him across Market Hill, the city’s central square, each midnight. Rose had provided a hot drink and, beneath a wide awning, an oasis of golden light.
But even the resilient Rose had to abide by the rules and regulations of the Great Darkness, and he found her hut boarded up in the corner of the square, amongst the empty traders’ stalls, and partly obscured by a wall of sandbags. A chalk sign read simply: CLOSED BY GOVERNMENT ORDER.
Brooke stood in the silent square, considering his next move, lighting one of his precious Black Russian cigarettes. He watched the flame consume the paper, edging down towards the golden filter. The mist was thickening, seeping up through drain covers and out of culverts, a milk-white flood which threatened to engulf the city. The night was getting chilly, and his damp hair made him shiver. The strains of a piano came and went from a nearby pub, but there was no light, just a half-line of a song.
Something of the scene he had witnessed on the riverbank refused to succumb to a rational explanation. Many people are curious and ask questions, but Brooke was driven by an innate conviction that he had a right to know the answers. The result was a restless life. Why order soldiers to dig at night? Why promise to pay soldiers to dig at night? He needed a fresh perspective, to rise above the moment, and he knew precisely which nighthawk to visit.
Leaving the shadows of the old market he made his way down Petty Cury, the narrow street a procession of shop windows taped up in criss-cross patterns against bomb blast. His footsteps echoed, thanks to the Blakeys on his brogues: metal studs to protect the leather, an army trick he’d adopted for civvy street. He circled St Andrew the Great, playing his torch over the stained glass, noting the familiar image he’d been shocked by as a boy: the severed head of John the Baptist, neatly set on its silver platter, awash with the saint’s blood.
An echo of this grisly martyrdom waited a hundred yards along the street, where Brooke paused outside Sidney Sussex College. His father, a professor of medicine, had been a distant figure, but had once returned home from dinner at the college with a sensational story, which he’d told his son while sitting on his bed, an unheard-of degree of intimacy that had cemented the moment in Brooke’s memory more than the gruesome tale itself.
‘I’ve seen a man’s skull tonight,’ his father had said, his eyes bright in the candlelight.
The story was richly Gothic. The body of Oliver Cromwell, the great republican and a former student of the college, had been dug up from his quiet grave by supporters of the restored King Charles II. The head, hacked from the body, had been hung from London Bridge, beside that of common criminals, where it was pecked at by birds.
‘The eyes were first to go,’ his father had explained.
Blown down in a storm, the top of the skull had fractured and had been spirited away by supporters, taken north to Cambridge to be hidden within the great man’s old college. Only two trusted fellows ever knew its hiding place at any time. On special nights, the lights over dinner were doused and the custodians despatched to find the treasure, which was set on the polished mahogany table, supporting a candle.
‘He was with us until the port and cheese,’ his father had said, tucking Brooke in. ‘Then he was whisked away.’
As Brooke surveyed the college facade, he saw a flickering light, briefly, in one of the lancet windows: the selected fellows, perhaps, returning Cromwell’s head to its hiding place.
Pressing on, he cut down an alley full of metal bins to a fire escape, which took him up six flights before decanting him onto the roof of one of the shops. A metal ladder led a few feet further aloft to a lookout post, one of several set up across the city by the Observer Corps, with a sweeping panoramic view across the rooftops, ideal for spotting enemy aircraft and the fires their bombs and incendiaries might ignite.
Jo Ashmore emerged from a conical hut at the rear of the platform, straightening her uniform, unable to stop herself retouching her short, expensively cut brown hair. Tall, willowy, fashionably boyish, she smiled broadly when she recognised her visitor.
Brooke swept his hand across the scene below. ‘The Great Darkness! A success, and no doubts. But what have you seen, Jo? Tell me all.’
‘Always questions, Brooke, never answers.’
‘I’m a scientist. Sorry, I was a scientist, of sorts,’ he said, taking off his hat and running a hand back through the thick black hair. ‘If you want answers, you must ask questions. Ask the right one, at the right time, and the world makes sense.’
She peered at Brooke’s shadowy face and laughed, retrieving a powder compact from her uniform and holding the mirror up. The detective took off his glasses and stared at his own image: the high forehead, the pale blue eyes, the hair flopping forward. A long strand of green river weed was stuck to his cheek.
‘You’ll be growing webbed feet next,’ she said.
Ashmore was Brooke’s newest nighthawk recruit, tonight marking her first full month as a member of the Observer Corps. She’d grown up next door to the Brookes, played with their children, free to come and go with her brother, Marcus. The houses, a mirror-pair of detached villas, were set in meadows down by the river. The families were close in that entirely natural way which means that nobody can recall how the threads had become entangled.
A racy reputation had marked her coming of age: there were parties in London, boyfriends with fast cars, smart clothes. She’d abandoned it all at the outbreak of war for her post, a mystery Brooke suspected she felt cast her in a Romantic light. He noted that she’d expertly applied lipstick to create a delicate bow of her lips, and that her tin hat had been hand-painted with the elegant motif: OC.
From her post she watched for EA: enemy aircraft, especially bombers, of which, so far in this war, there had been none. But the whole country had its eyes on the sky, when it wasn’t trying to ferret out spies and German parachutists hidden in garden sheds. This was the intolerable burden of the phoney war: a time of watching and waiting.
Not a single light betrayed the city below. Rooftops stretched north towards the Fens, south to the Gogs, a range of low chalk hills, dimly seen against the stars. Mist lay in the streets, as if college sheets had been laid out on the cobbles.
‘I saw you earlier,’ she said, a smile widening under the tin hat. ‘It’s a good job these glasses aren’t really powerful otherwise I might have seen more than I should.’
She enjoyed teasing Brooke about his looks. When she was a child she’d been told the tall, pale man with the odd glasses had fought with T. E. Lawrence in the wildernesses of Egypt and Palestine. The great hero’s dark good looks found an echo in Brooke, a wounded knight, brooding, soldiering on. And there’d been a medal from the king, for some always unspoken act of heroism, which added lustre to the legend. As a ten-year-old she’d once spent an evening with Brooke’s daughter searching the upper floors of the house for his missing desert robes.
‘You didn’t see anything else when I was swimming?’ asked Brooke. ‘On the far bank, just there …’ He pointed to a spot in the gloom beyond the rooftops.
She went back to her hut, reappeared with a box file and handed Brooke a typed order sheet:
CAM 005/OC ADVISORY 20–21 October 1939
Duration of scheduled blackout 21.30 hrs to 6.30 hrs. All troop movements cancelled. All vehicles confined to depots by midnight.
NO FLIGHTS LOCAL – DUXFORD.
Air Ministry advises two overflies by RAF reconnaissance, Stanmore.
Night exercise St John’s Wilderness. Ignore all sound. No plot required.
EASTERN COUNTIES COMMAND. MADINGLEY HALL. Office of CO Eastern: COL. SWIFT-LANE.
‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’ said Brooke. ‘Why hold a night exercise when we’re all supposed to be tucked up in bed behind our blackout blinds? I doubt our lads need that much practice digging holes in the ground. Did you follow orders and ignore all sounds from St John’s Wilderness?’
‘That would have been a challenge,’ said Ashmore. ‘They made a racket, actually. Civilians first, dragging spades down before dusk. They disappeared into town later, promptly replaced by soldiers, and carts … Looks like the civilians dug a hole, and the soldiers filled it up.’
Brooke studied the order paper. ‘I saw the soldiers. A sergeant and a squad. They’d been working, alright. No other orders like this?’
She handed him five more notes, all referring to the same location and at similar times, stretching back over the previous month.
‘You can keep the bumf,’ she said. ‘If we could produce Spitfires and bullets as fast as red tape we’d win the war hands down.’
They stood in companionable silence, during which Ashmore checked her watch at least three times.
‘I’m waiting for the moon to come up,’ she explained. ‘Which it is due to do – according to my chart – any moment now. Madingley Hall has been on the line to say they’ve lost three barrage balloons.’
Madingley Hall, a Tudor mansion on the outskirts of the city, was military headquarters for much of Eastern England.
‘They broke free from their cable moorings an hour ago a mile south of the station. So they’re headed this way. Three runaway airships out of control – what fun, eh? No one has any idea where they are until we get some moonlight. If I see them I have to phone in a position.’
Brooke peered into the darkness, disturbed that three sixty-foot-long cigar-shaped balloons could remain invisible right before their eyes.
‘Someone will cop it for letting them slip,’ said Ashmore. ‘A week ago, according to the grapevine, they lost six in a storm on the East Coast. Drifted across the North Sea and took down power lines in Norway. Havoc, apparently – it’s the cables underneath and the netting that do the damage. They snare stuff. The sooner we can spot the blighters the better. Once I’ve radioed their position it’s someone else’s headache. Anything for a quiet life.’
Brooke had never before associated Josephine Ashmore with the quiet life. He wondered what really lay behind her decision to volunteer for lonely work, at night, on a cold rooftop.
‘There’s the moon, at least …’ she said.
A bright light had appeared on a college roof, lodged between tapering medieval chimneys. Within seconds it had revealed an arc of its circle, moving quickly against the silhouette of the buildings. Silver light washed over the Cambridge skyline, revealing the four great pinnacles of King’s College Chapel, the distant, brutal tower of the University Library, the colleges running down to the river, which lay in a great meander opposite open meadows, along a stretch every student learnt to call the Backs.
Brooke watched the moon rise, imagining the gentle hum of celestial mechanics until it was free, gliding into the sky, the light spilling out and seeming now to ignite the river, which gleamed like steel sliding from a furnace.
‘There!’ said Ashmore.
A balloon, the size of one of the city’s buses, hung in the air a few hundred yards downwind of the cube-like tower of St John’s College Chapel, a network of cables ensnaring the building. As they watched it rippled, waves moving over its surface, as it strained at its moorings.
‘And there,’ said Brooke, pointing away from the river towards the open fenland to the north.
This balloon, several hundred feet up in the air, had got much further and, glimpsed beam-on, was heading swiftly towards the distant coast, impeded only by what appeared to be the remains of a tree held within the net beneath its ‘belly’.
There was no sign of the third balloon.
Ashmore plotted the two within sight and phoned in the data, sitting down to make out a report on paper by torchlight.
‘Bumf,’ she complained. ‘Bloody bumf.’
Finished, she lit a cigarette.
Then they saw the third stray balloon.
A sudden flare of yellow-blue flame flashed and lit up the sky over the distant railway station. A few seconds later came the strangely elongated pulse of sound, like a hot, jagged hiss. A burning balloon, caught up in power lines, crumpled over the large grain mill beside the station. As the ‘skin’ burnt away it revealed the structure within, crashing towards the ground. The distinctive crump of the collapse shook the rooftops.
A fireball of escaping gas lit up the night, a pulsing vision in yellow, dripping with flame.
The pain in Brooke’s eyes was needle-sharp despite the yellow-tinted glasses, and he had to grip the plotting table for support.
An air raid siren began to wail.
Brooke pulled the rim of his hat down over his eyes. ‘So much for the Great Darkness.’
CHAPTER THREE
Brooke, climbing down the ladder from Jo Ashmore’s OP, felt momentarily giddy – a delayed effect, perhaps, of several hours without a meal, combined with his nightly swim. He’d left Ashmore on the landline to the Fire Brigade and Civil Defence, trying to direct them to the smouldering wreck of the barrage balloon, which after its brief explosive flare had subsided below the roofline, although a sickly orange sheen persisted in the southern sky.
By the time he was back on firm ground the sound of fire engine bells echoed in the streets, competition for the wailing siren. His immediate need was food. He set off along Trinity Street, past the Old Divinity School, its pale carved heroes of theology standing in their niches against the red-brick facade. As a lonely schoolboy, he’d cultivated an interest in the city above eye level. He was an only child, whose mother had died when he was young, while his father’s work restricted him to the laboratory. After school, and at weekends, he’d explore the city, finding in its maze-like alleys a puzzle he could gradually master. Wandering the streets, he’d examine the stonework, the statues, the gargoyles and saints. In his mind, he set them upon a mental map of every court, every archway, every cobbled lane. By the age of ten he held the city in his head.
One favourite was right here at the Old Divinity School; the third figure along the facade was Bishop Joseph Lightfoot. On tiptoe, Brooke could just touch his shoe, a feat beyond him as a child. He’d always admired the way the sculptor had set a heavy book in the old man’s left hand, which seemed to weigh him down. Curious, he’d read a brief biographical note on Bishop Lightfoot’s life in one of his father’s reference books, and memorised one of the cleric’s pithy dictums which he admired: I will not be discouraged by failure, I will not be elated by success.
The siren died, fading away, to leave a ringing silence.
Opposite the gatehouse of Trinity College, Brooke saw a car approaching, its headlamps masked with tape but for two narrow strips which gave it the appearance of a hunting cat, down low, dragging itself forward, ready to pounce. As it passed, a match flared, illuminating the driver and his passengers, and Brooke glimpsed a silk scarf, a bow tie, a silver cigarette case. Despite the war, and the blackout, the joys of a night life still survived for some.
Brooke turned into All Saints Passage, the entrance to that part of the city which had once been the Jewish ghetto: a warren of narrow paths between high walls, incapable of holding a true compass point for more than twenty yards. This labyrinth had been committed to Brooke’s internal map, but it had taken several years of patient study to survey its full extent. One of his maps revealed the view from above, as it were, like a cross-section of the human brain: an organic, convoluted puzzle.
In the darkness, he had to find his way by touch, as the alleys led him away from the moonlight. The darkness here was of a new order, making him briefly stop to examine his own hand, just visible, a few inches from his nose. Trailing his fingers along the wall, he made his way to the first corner, turned right, then left at the next. The stonework was damp, slightly wet from the mist which had even found its way into this echoing labyrinth. The bricks were icy too, with that faint glaze which heralded a freezing dawn. At one corner, where a water fountain stood against a wall, he stopped; raising his hand, he was able to touch an iron gutter clamp, cast in the shape of a dog’s head. He patted it once, as he had many times, and walked on, until he reached a small trapdoor, set within a greater door of studded oak.
His knock, evolved over years of use, consisted of one sharp tap, then two, delivered with his signet ring on the metal hinge.
A lock turned, then another, before the door opened.
Stepping over the wooden ledge, he entered the porters’ lodge of Michaelhouse. The light inside made Brooke stop, pinching the bridge of his nose, the pain behind his eyes penetrating his brain. Quickly, he substituted the ochre-tinted glasses for the darker green. He carried four pairs: ochre, green, blue and black, each one affording a higher degree of protection against the light.
‘Fire in the sky, Mr Brooke. What’s afoot?’ asked Doric, the porter.
‘Barrage balloon alight. What’s the news here?’
Doric was Brooke’s most reliable nighthawk. But for an enforced two weeks in January when he travelled to his sister’s in Margate, Doric was as much a part of the night as the Pole Star. For a detective like Brooke he also offered the untold wealth that was college gossip, communicated through the brotherhood that was the college porters of Cambridge.
‘All quiet,’ said Doric as he switched off the light, leaving the lodge lit only by a glowing coke fire and a small desk lamp over the ledger on the counter. As a student before the Great War, Brooke had often admired this room for its weathered snugness, the wooden panels as polished as a ship’s cabin.
Doric stood by the kettle on its gas ring, waiting for it to boil.
‘Everyone tucked up in their beds?’ asked Brooke, pushing his black hair out of his eyes.
A sturdy, solid figure, Doric walked stiffly to the counter and studied the open book, whistling tunelessly.
‘Phipps, Torrington and Jordan – our three natural scientists – left at eight with Lux, the visiting Yank,’ he said finally. ‘I asked if they were dining out and they said they couldn’t tell me as it was classified. Careless talk, all that. Pompous little arse-wipes. Anyway, I knew where they were headed, which tore the smiles off their smug faces. Porter at Emmanuel put the news round about a hush-hush meeting in the new anatomy building. The Galen?’
‘That’s it,’ said Brooke. ‘One of my father’s heroes, Doric. Galen of Pergamon, the father of medical science.’
The mention of Brooke’s father, Professor Sir John Brooke, always stilled the porter, who glanced at a board by the desk, decorated with the gold-painted names of the college masters. Sir John’s mastership, from 1910–1921, embraced the Great War which had almost killed his son.
‘Wouldn’t get me in the place for love nor money, not this side of death,’ said Doric, executing an exaggerated shiver. ‘Cutting stuff up. It didn’t suit Phipps, Torrington and Jordan either. When they got back – minus Lux – they didn’t want the cold mutton the cook had set aside, although Jordan ordered three bottles of the Saint-Émilion. Looked like they needed it.’
Brooke’s hunger resurfaced. ‘Any leftovers about, Doric?’
The porter lifted a cloth from a tray to reveal cold mutton, potatoes and a chicken leg. The tea was strong and black, although the porter produced a tin of condensed milk, two holes neatly punched in the lid, and set it down beside the mug. Brooke let the steam play on his face before adding the oily cream. The resulting colour, an almost fluorescent orange, was unique in Brooke’s experience to the British Army.
He placed his glasses on the window ledge and massaged his eyes.
‘I saw a platoon of soldiers on the riverbank. East End accents, ’cept for the sergeant. Who would they be, Doric?’
The porter’s eyes flitted to the shadowy wall by the post room where a military flag hung, pinned out flat, the regimental colours gossamer thin and darkened by fire and shot.
‘Can’t be the London Regiment. They’re gone, disbanded like my lot. A scandal that. So, I’d say the Buffs. The East Kent. But that’s odd because I’d not heard they were with us too. Mind you, every other bugger is. There must be two thousand troops on Parker’s Piece, you seen ’em? And more on the Backs. But you say this lot was down by the river, tonight?’
Brooke nodded. ‘See if you can find out more?’
Doric sat at his desk, his fat fingers thrumming on the arms of the chair. Retirement, when it finally came for the porter, would spell a kind of death. There were rumours the college night staff were to be laid off for what they were all now calling ‘the Duration’. Doric faced the prospect of enforced retirement, or worse, working days.
Stillness was not a quality the porter had ever achieved for even a fleeting second. By an effort of will he set his hands down flat, but then the tuneless whistle returned.
‘There was a smell, too, on the riverbank. Chemicals, maybe?’ offered Brooke.
Doric rearranged his feet under the table. ‘It’s gossip.’
‘Is it now? Care to share it?’ said Brooke, leaning back, the chicken bone in his hand.
‘Story is there’s been an air raid. A bad one, but the papers can’t print it.’
‘Scotland?’
‘Right, you’ve heard it too, then. Firth of Forth, the docks. But I heard Glasgow too, maybe Liverpool. Streets of rubble, hundreds lost, but not found. London too, the docks. Bodies out in the open they can take away quickly. But there’s no time to search the ruins in a city, and they want it all hushed up. Morale is the thing; you don’t want civilians taking to the roads. So they send in trucks and load up the lot: bricks, window frames, staircases, furniture – and the bodies, or what’s left. All in one. Army’s got to find places to bury it all. There’s pits round the country. They cover ’em up with lime, that’s the chemical. Maybe your cockneys are burying the stuff.’
Brooke tore a shred of meat from the chicken bone. It was a good explanation, but it didn’t explain why they’d be paid for the work.
‘Sounds like a tall tale. What have we had? One raid on the west coast, three aircraft, nobody hurt. It’s not exactly the dreaded Blitzkrieg, is it?’
Doric threw up his hands. ‘You heard it as I heard it,’ he said. ‘I’m just a college porter. You’re the detective inspector.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Brooke’s nightly swim had let the frosty air get into his bones. Walking along King Street, with its infamous run of seedy pubs, he stopped outside the Champion of the Cam. Putting his ear to the door, he heard the gentle murmur of bar chat. A sharp knock brought the landlord and, recognising Brooke, he let him slip inside. Lock-ins such as this, after time, were one aspect of everyday life which had not been snuffed out by the war, even for the Great Darkness. He sat in a corner with a whisky, watching a group of students arguing the toss on Hitler’s offer of a peace conference with the Allies.
Half an hour later, out on the doorstep, he still felt chilled, as if a globe of ice was slowly forming in his guts, coalescing, despite the Champion’s glowing coal fire and the onrush of blood from his skin to the pit of his stomach. He needed company and warmth. He needed Claire.
Walking along Fitzwilliam Street, past the blinded traffic lights opposite Little St Mary’s, he reached the open iron gates of the hospital. Even in the blackout he could still see the steam rising from the ducts and pipes of the great building, as if the interior was boiling over. A single down-light marked the main entrance, where an ambulance stood abandoned, its doors open.
Claire was the sister on Rosewood, on the third floor. Taking the steps two at a time, he arrived invigorated, gently pushing open the double doors to reveal the full length of the ward, his own silhouette stretching out in an elongated shadow.
A thin voice chattered in dreamlike conversation, and a set of bed springs grated. In the shadows to the left he could see a pale hand searching for a glass of water on a bedside table.
At the far end, Claire sat at a desk, a green-shaded lamp illuminating paperwork. On his nightly walks when he wondered how she was, this was the image that came to mind.
He tried to walk softly down the tiled floor but the Blakeys marked every step. She watched him approach, checking the time on her pendant watch.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, standing. She was slim and neat, with white-blonde hair cut in a bob which always seemed to fall into place. ‘You’re shivering,’ she said. ‘And you’re as pale as a ghost.’
‘I’m cold. The river was chillier than expected. I’m frozen. What do you prescribe, Nurse?’
‘Wait a moment,’ she said, walking over to a bed where a side-light revealed a young man lying unconscious, most of his body under a white sheet, his bandaged hands on top, both of them bloody. Claire took his pulse and laid a hand on his forehead.
‘What happened?’ asked Brooke, examining the soldier’s pale face.
‘According to the pal who brought him in, the lad’s a “winchman”. I didn’t entirely follow the details but he runs a machine which raises and lowers barrage balloons. The cable snapped and he tried to haul it back. His hands are dreadful, Eden, cut to shreds, down to the bone. Each cable is made of thousands of wires, and when it breaks they splay out, like frayed hair. Every one is as sharp as a razor blade. They should give him a medal, but they won’t, will they? He’s just a private. I think he’s a hero.’
She tucked the soldier in. ‘Odd thing is, a sergeant turned up and got very officious, said the work the lad had been on was classified. He told his pal to get back to barracks. He had the nerve to tell me not to repeat anything I’d heard, or might hear, overnight. I said he could relax because I’d given the patient a decent dose of morphine, so he’ll be out cold until dawn at the earliest. I think it’s the least he deserves.’
Satisfied the patient was comfortable, Claire fetched a junior nurse from the ward kitchen where she was washing bedpans and installed her at the nurses’ station, explaining that she was ready to take her half-hour break.
Brooke followed her to a side door which led out onto the fire escape. A corkscrew iron staircase led down to the ground, then two more flights descended into a basement.
An iron door was marked STRICTLY NO ENTRY.
Claire unlocked the door.
The boiler room was dense with a dry pulsing heat. Claire had brought with her a fresh towel. Brooke pressed his back against the metal boiler and felt the burning metal, the gentle rumble of the hot pipes, the subtle flexing of water close to boiling point.
‘It might be time to leave the river to itself for another year,’ said Claire, pushing away his hands to dry his hair, and unbuttoning his shirt.
She’d brought him here before.
‘Did you bolt the door?’ he asked, kissing her on the lips. ‘We wouldn’t want to traumatise the night watchman.’
‘I’ve locked the door, Eden. I am a practical and meticulous nurse. It says so on my latest record card, and that’s a doctor’s opinion, so it must be true.’
Later, holding each other in the half-light, Brooke broke a long silence. ‘Tonight, from the river, I saw a platoon of soldiers on St John’s Wilderness. They’d been digging pits. Doric, who is omnipotent as you know, says the rumour is the army’s burying rubble from bomb sites.’
‘Bomb sites?’ asked Claire, standing up and letting her uniform fall past her shoulders, her arms held high. ‘There’ve been no raids. There’ve been sirens, and alarms, and quite a bit of hysteria, but no planes.’
‘Doric says the government’s hushing it all up. That there’s casualties, and the mangled dead are mixed up with the rubble, and there’s no time to sort it all out and besides they want to keep it a secret, to maintain morale. It sounds like hogwash to me, but could you ask around? Doric heard the raid was in Scotland, Glasgow maybe, but he’d also heard it might be the East End. If it’s true, the doctors will know. The survivors must have been treated somewhere.’
‘I’ll ask,’ she said. ‘But you know as well as I that curiosity is going out of fashion.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Romsey Town, a working-class district of narrow streets set in a ladder pattern, lay just beyond the railway line, reached only by a Victorian bridge of rusted iron. Once crossed, the medieval city was left behind, while ahead lay an industrial suburb, grimy terraced houses set in cheerless rows, smoke seeping from chimney pots. A Methodist chapel stood sentinel by the bridge, opposite a pub, the Earl of Beaconsfield, its windows etched with enticements to drink: Windsor Ales embellished with a scene of the great castle, Lamb’s Navy Rum adorned with a Union Flag. A slit between two blackout screens revealed the convivial light within.
Built for railway workers, the ‘town’, as it was known, was impregnated with coal dust from its own humble fires and the steam trains which thundered past on the mainline to London, or shunted trucks in the marshalling yards. Every stone and every brick was black, slightly sticky to the touch, and sooty. The drifting smell of cheap coke, mixed with fumes belching from the sugar beet factory, gave the district a raw, burnt stench.
At ten-thirty a disparate chorus of bells marked closing time in a string of corner pubs. A light flashed on the pavement outside the Earl as three men spilt out into the night, fastening up coats and putting up collars, the door hastily locked behind them from the inside.
‘Right, let’s do it,’ said Henderson, the largest of the three, and in charge. With Lauder, the Scot, and Popper, the doctor, Henderson represented the committee of the East Cambridge & District Branch of the communist party. In the Earl, they’d talked about the football, carefully avoiding politics or any mention of their plans for the rest of the evening. The Soviet invasion of Poland, in cahoots with Hitler, had placed the Party in a precarious position. Whose side, the newspapers asked, was the Party on? Arrests had been made in London, national leaders interrogated, and there was talk in parliament of banning the Party altogether. If proscribed they’d have to go to ground, so no point now in getting noticed.
The three of them stood waiting for their eyes to get used to the dark, then Henderson led the way down a side street to a dead end, where an alleyway cut along the backs of the houses to a school and then to the top of a railway embankment which looked over the yards.
A man stood waiting on the girder footbridge which spanned the main line.
‘Chris?’ called Henderson.
‘It’s me,’ said the young man. ‘Can you see it? There’s a fire up at the station. Do you think it’s a bombing raid?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Henderson. But they all stopped on the bridge, examining the sky, which pulsed gently with a yellow glow.
‘We need to get on …’ said Henderson, leading them down the steps on the far side and over a series of rails, past a looming water tower, to a large shed built of corrugated iron. For a minute he wrestled with the lock, before ushering them inside, where his torch revealed a tank engine on rails set in the centre of a concrete floor. Producing candles from his pocket, he asked Popper to set them out, while Lauder was instructed to get chairs.
Finally, Henderson produced a wooden box from a store, set it down on the floor, then climbed aboard the tank engine and perched on the running board above the wheels, his legs dangling.
‘Right, let’s use our imagination, boys,’ he said. ‘We are now sitting in the splendour of court number one at the assize on Market Hill, Cambridge. I’m on the bench, Judge Henderson presiding. Christopher Childe, you’re in the dock. So stand on the box. Tomorrow, this will all be for real.’
Childe nodded. Popper and Lauder took front row seats.
‘At the moment, Chris, you’re registered as a conscientious objector. A conchie. A coward, like the rest of us. Conditionally registered. We all know what that means. You have to do what they bloody tell you to do. Hard labour. Tomorrow the military tribunal will sit in the court and decide if you are worthy of unconditional registration as a conscientious objector. That would mean you’d be free to work for the Party full-time … A rehearsal like this increases your chances of success in front of the tribunal fourfold, Popper’s got figures from Party head office to prove it. This …’ He spread his arms. ‘This is your rehearsal. You’re a lucky man.’
‘Can I sit down?’ said Childe. In his early twenties, he had a pale round face with a small button nose, below which was a thin moustache. A receding chin thrust his lips forwards, so that they caught the candlelight.
‘Pull yourself together,’ said Henderson. ‘You’ll have to stand tomorrow. And stop snivelling. I know we’re all conchie bastards, but it’s a cliché.’
They all nodded, and watched as Henderson took a copy of Peace News from his pocket and threw it down on the floor as if it were evidence. The paper was produced nationally to rally support for pacifism.
‘It might be a rag, boys, but it reaches out to the proletariat,’ said Henderson. ‘Most of all, it’s read, unlike most of the tedious screeds churned out by the Party. That’s why we help distribute it. If Chris is successful tomorrow we can use Peace News, comrades, to reach the masses. We can print our own page, a news-sheet, and slip it inside. We need you, Chris – full-time – as editor and printer.’
Childe tugged at the collar of his overalls. The paleness of his face was in stark contrast to what looked like dirt on his forehead. His hair, short and tufted, looked dusty too, and his fingers were grimy, the nails black.
‘First things first,’ said Henderson. ‘For the real thing – and it is tomorrow – have a bloody bath.’
‘I’ve been digging trenches,’ said Childe.
‘Exactly. That’s why we need you to go in front of the tribunal.’ Henderson cracked his knuckles. ‘So, first off, they’ll ask you to read your personal statement. Frankly, they won’t take in a word. What’s important is the answers you give to their questions, and your demeanour. You have to convince them you have genuine issues of conscience.’ Henderson coughed. ‘Let’s get started. Do you object to taking life?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you a vegetarian?’
Childe relaxed slightly, shifting his weight onto his left leg. ‘That’s a puerile question. I object to—’
‘Never question the questioner,’ shouted Henderson.
‘They hate it,’ said Popper. ‘It’s not a debating society. It’s not like the last show, Chris. They’d have shot you in 1914. There’s a real chance they’ll let you get on with your life. So calm down.’
‘You have a sister?’ asked Henderson, his voice taking on a hostile edge. ‘If a German soldier was raping her in front of you, would you use violence to help her?’
Childe’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I need to learn answers, to prepare a crib …’ he said.
‘That’s the last thing you need to do, laddie,’ said Lauder, slumped back in his seat. ‘They hate that. They’re not military types. There’ll be two from civvy street. Bound to be a lassie as well …’
‘And try to stop shaking, Chris,’ said Popper.
‘I can’t stop shaking,’ said Childe.
He stood down from the box. ‘I’ve had a real shock tonight. They marched us out to St John’s Wilderness to dig pits on the riverside. They said soldiers would come later and that they needed the pits. But they didn’t say what for. We dug for three hours …’
Lauder scoffed at Childe’s aversion to hard labour. ‘What did you expect, lad? A cushy number?’
Childe shook his head. ‘My answer to all this, to all of you, is that it doesn’t bloody matter what the tribunal says because I’ve seen something tonight that makes it clear it’s too late. The war that’s coming, comrades, they won’t need soldiers. I saw it with my own eyes. I know what they’re burying in the pits …’
CHAPTER SIX
The mist, thickening, was now flowing like a river in the empty streets: skeins of it, like shrouds in sinuous procession, nosing round corners, licking damp archways of stone, insinuating itself under doors. Brooke turned up the collar on his greatcoat and headed back towards police headquarters. Claire always said she could spot him in a crowd from a hundred yards: his hands thrust deep in overcoat pockets, steps marking a relentless line, so that his silhouette appeared to narrow to a single point of contact with the earth, his hat brim folded down.
Moonlight revealed King’s Parade, a line of grand shops and cafes which faced a series of wide lawns, beyond which rose the splendour of the colleges. To Brooke, the street was always uplifting because it reminded him of a seafront: stately Eastbourne, perhaps, or Regency Brighton. The parade looked out to sea, but found instead the clipped lawns, the honeyed stonework and tracery of the medieval facades beyond. The wide-open space, the starry sky above, stood in contrast to the narrow alleys and passages of the rest of the old city.
A great horse chestnut, set against King’s College Chapel, had gathered the mist around its roots so that the soaring stonework appeared to float free of the earth, the four great pinnacles hooked, perhaps, on the stars. The silver grey of the great tree’s boughs was a match for the stone of the college, as if it too had been carved by the medieval masons. A century old, it was one of the city’s treasures, the highest branches stretching up a hundred feet, supporting the autumn leaves. But even here the war had left its mark: grey felt and tape obscured the chapel’s towering East Window, the precious medieval glass whisked away to safety in the city’s cellars.
Brooke walked to the Bull Hotel, its windows shuttered, and turned towards Silver Street bridge, college walls pressing in on either side, so that he was able to stretch out his arms and touch both sides at once. Ahead he could just see a police radio car at its appointed time and place on the bridge, the half-masked tail lights shining feebly through the mist.
A uniformed driver sat at the wheel, an elbow on the open window ledge, filing in his logbook, watching Brooke’s approach in the rear-view mirror.
‘Take a break, Constable,’ said Brooke. ‘I need the radio.’
The young officer jumped out.
Slipping into the seat, Brooke lifted the receiver off its cradle and put his glasses on the dashboard. The windscreen was fogged with fallen ash from the incinerated balloon, so he swished the flakes aside with the wiper. For the first time that night he saw his breath, misting the glass.
‘Brooke on four,’ he said, against a backdrop of static, repeating the call-in three times, finishing each time with an obligatory ‘over’. Impatient, he fished out the pewter hip flask Claire had given him that Christmas and took a sip of water.
Still no answer: the duty sergeant was no doubt cradling a mug of tea, trying to judge the right moment to pick up. Or was he below in the cells?
In the slit-beams of the car’s headlights, Brooke could see the constable at the rail of the bridge, the mist waist high, flowing gently from south to north, enveloping the unseen bridge, leaving him in mid-air, and mid-stream.
‘Desk here, sir. Over.’ Brooke recognised the voice: an elderly sergeant they’d enticed out of retirement to swell the ranks of the Borough, depleted by conscription.
‘Anything on the station fire, Sergeant?’
