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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Nighthawk
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
A lone German bomber crosses the east coast of Britain on a moonless night in the long, hot summer of 1940. The pilot picks up the silver thread of a river and, following it to his target, drops his bomb over Cambridge's rail yards. The shell falls short of its mark and lands in a neighbourhood of terraced streets on the edge of the city's medieval centre. DI Eden Brooke is first on the scene and discovers the body of an elderly woman, Nora Wylde, in a house on Elm Street, two fingers on her left hand severed, in what looks like a brutal attempt by looters to steal her rings. When the next day Nora's teenage granddaughter Peggy, a munitions worker, is reported missing, Brooke realises there is more to the situation than meets the eye.
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3
THE NIGHT RAIDS
JIM KELLY
5
For my mother Peggy Kelly who survived the air raids alone, with my brother, while my father fought in Italy
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
25th August 1940
The coast of East Anglia appeared below, a curving line of white surf glimpsed through the glass cockpit floor of the bomber. The pilot, Leutnant Helmut Bartel, imagined the Heinkel’s moon shadow sliding over the beach, and the marshes, and then the wide fields that lay ahead. He tapped his compass, checking they were still on the correct bearing for their target, a railway bridge over a river just north of the medieval city of Cambridge. He used his glove to smooth away the ice which obscured the needle. Leaning back into his seat, he felt through the steering column the soft bump as the aircraft hit the warm air rising from the land below, slowly giving up 8to the darkness the heat it had absorbed during a long summer’s day.
It had been a dazzling day in Berlin. He’d spent the morning with his family on the beach at the lake. His eldest daughter, bouncing on her toes in front of the ice-cream seller’s bicycle, could never keep the cone upright. The baby had slept on a rug, in the shade of a parasol. His wife had worn a daring new swimsuit. Back at their flat, after a meal, his friend and co-pilot Walther Schmidt had picked him up for the drive to the airfield, and Bartel had waved through the rear window, watching his family diminish, standing against a backdrop of suburban trees.
‘Es is Zeit,’ he said, shattering the memory, his voice relayed to the crew, the radio signal almost obscured by static.
Schmidt, who was also the bombardier, unbuckled himself from the co-pilot’s seat and wriggled expertly to the floor of the cockpit, where he landed softly on his knees. He spread his body out on the plastic flexi-glass, the line of his spine absolutely central, his feet pointing back across the North Sea, to the Frisian Islands and Berlin, his head set directly towards Cambridge. In this position he was able to rest his skull in the niche provided, and use his right eye to look down through the bombsight. His hand crept over the instruments set in the fuselage, his fingers finally resting on the bomb bay trigger, and beside it, the thumb-switch for the reconnaissance camera.
Bartel, staring into the night, noted the smell rising from the bombardier: cold sweat and fear, mixed with the wax he used to sweep back his hair. Schmidt had been his best man, and the picture at home in the hallway showed off his confident smile as he threw an arm round the groom’s shoulders. They’d been in uniform then, the promised war a glittering adventure, just beyond reach.
He checked the fuel gauge, a procedure he repeated at least once a minute. The electronic dial indicated that the Heinkel had enough to 9reach the target and return home. The thought of touchdown at the forest airfield at Waren, of walking to Schmidt’s car after the debriefing, and simply being driven home, was so beguiling, so close, that Bartel felt his guts twist. He wondered, often, if this sudden unexpected urge to cry like a child marked him out as a potential coward.
He gripped the steering column and felt sweat trickle down his neck beneath his flying suit.
A burst of static rang in his headphones and he looked up to see the escort fighter tip its wings, and peel away to the north.
‘Allein,’ he told the crew. We’re on our own.
He repeated himself twice, hoping to be heard above the roar of the twin exhausts, mounted just to the rear of the cockpit.
The night had been clear but now a great billowing ridge of cloud thudded against the aircraft, threatening to shake it out of the sky. They had been easy prey for British fighters, but now they were safe. Clouds had been forecast by Berlin, and clouds there were. The cheer from the crew was reedy but unmistakable. They had left the realm of the revealing moon.
Bartel took the aircraft above18,000 feet to make sure they were firmly embedded in the high cumulus, but nevertheless there were intermittent glimpses of the land below, and so they saw towns twinkling faintly, despite the strictures of the blackout. Bartel smiled, because it meant there was a chance they were not expected, and that all attention had turned to the raids on the South Coast.
The Heinkel laboured onwards east. The crew was silent, but he knew they were all doing exactly the same thing: counting to themselves, recognising that as each mile went past they were, paradoxically, getting closer to home, or at least to a homecoming. All they had to do was destroy the bridge, then melt away, and fly back across what his father and grandfathers had all called the German Ocean.10
This was not their first sortie. They had flown nuisance raids for a month, designed to harry the enemy and train the crew for the heroics to come. Morale had been poor because they felt themselves excluded from the great battles over the airfields of Kent and Sussex in which five hundred bombers, a thousand perhaps, rained destruction on the RAF below, clearing the path for an invasion by sea.
But Oberst Fritsch, the commander at Waren, had made it clear in his pre-flight briefing that this particular raid would write its own footnote in the history of this great war. Military intelligence had identified Bridge 1505 – a box-girder of steel – as a key link in the enemy’s transport network. Destroy it, and the result would be chaos at a vital point in space and time. If the German landings came not on the South Coast but on the East Coast, the British would be unable to rush men and arms to repel the invaders.
‘Five miles to the target,’ said the navigator.
Bartel let the aircraft descend, and they quickly dropped below the clouds.
Even on such a dark night you could see below, strung across their path, a silver river. The old hands who’d flown in the Great War had said it was impossible to fly the bomber to its target without a clear sky and the moon. But Bartel and Schmidt had argued that the river would betray itself. And so it was.
Bartel noted the time. ‘Walther?’
‘Ready.’ Schmidt pressed his face into the Plexiglas sight and began to take pictures.
The altimeter ticked down from 19,000 feet.
Behind the reinforced steel bulkhead at Bartel’s back the bombs stood in two lines, cones upwards, held fast in place by iron clamps.
Bartel struggled with the controls: he felt sluggish, and when he tried to think, logical progressions escaped him.11
He forced himself to concentrate on reading out their height.
At 10,000 feet he banked, turning the bomber south, so that they could track the shining water.
He braced himself against the pilot’s seat and heaved up the bomb-door lever. The noise doubled. The urge to override Schmidt’s trigger, and let the bombs fall now, so that they could turn home, was almost intolerable.
Bartel could see the river’s mirror below, briefly holding in its surface a black silhouette of the Heinkel.
They’d expected anti-aircraft fire, but there was none.
‘Five thousand feet,’ said Bartel.
‘Target in sight,’ said Schmidt.
Bartel heard the bomb clamps spring and turning, saw the first bomb slip away. The bombardiers at Waren had written in chalk on its side: Erste Stoppe Cambridge!
‘She’s gone,’ said Schmidt.
Two more bombs followed.
The river sped by below them, and then in an instant the target flashed past – a metal bridge, with its double line of tracks, then a series of narrow workers’ streets, a gasometer and the rail yards.
Bartel checked the chronometer, which had been set to Greenwich Mean Time, and read 10 p.m.
The first of the falling bombs had twisted in the air, the cone coming down, the fins taking control, reaching terminal velocity within a handful of seconds, which is when the screaming began.
CHAPTER TWO
Detective Inspector Eden Brooke sat at a trestle table in the public bar of the Wellington Arms, contemplating a pint of Ridley’s Best Bitter. The pub lay in the maze of streets known as the Kite, a working-class district within a parallelogram of down-at-heel shop-lined roads, sandwiched between Parker’s Piece, Cambridge’s great park – an army encampment since the outbreak of war – and the distant expanse of the rail yards, which stretched north into the Fens along the river.
The Wellington Arms, at the corner of dead-end Earl Street, was packed with soldiers, most of whom were bivouacked in bell 13tents on the nearby park. The manic buzz of conversation, the raucous laughter, spoke of anxiety and excitement in the face of the news of war; Dunkirk had gone, Paris had fallen, and now air battles raged over the Home Counties, and everyone talked of the imminent threat of invasion. No day passed without hysterical ‘sightings’ of German parachutists, reports of shadowy fifth columnists sabotaging the war effort from within, or radio reports of spies spotted landing on the South Coast, or – worse – the East.
The sense of danger found its physical expression in the gas masks on every table, hanging from chair backs or flung over coat hooks, within reach should the dreaded attacks materialise.
Edmund Grandcourt, Brooke’s batman during a very different kind of war, was at the crowded bar getting his beer. In Palestine during the ‘last lot’, Brooke had relied on his stoic common sense. After the war Brooke had pulled strings to secure him a position in the university’s engineering department, in charge of stores. Diligent, honest, organised, an encyclopaedia of everyday knowledge, he’d thrived. Most nights, when the sirens wailed, Grandcourt was on duty as a voluntary warden at one of the public air raid shelters on the park. But tonight there had been no siren, the first such reprieve since an attack earlier that summer which had left nine dead and a terraced street reduced to rubble. No more bombs had fallen since, but the sirens had sounded nonetheless, sending the city’s weary residents below ground, or out into backyards and gardens to the damp delights of Anderson shelters and the horrors of the chemical toilet.
But not, it seemed, tonight. The clouds, masking a bomber’s moon, promised a brief return to a normal life.
Since Brooke’s return to Civvy Street he’d often relied on Grandcourt when a case proved intractable. The Borough, the city’s miniature police force, had just two inspectors, while its 14rank-and-file had been sorely depleted by the demands of war. Retired officers had been drafted back onto the streets, but the Borough’s ability to preserve law and order was often stretched to the limit, if not beyond.
Grandcourt’s other priceless asset, besides his common sense, was that he could be found at night. Brooke treasured the company of nighthawks. In the desert he’d been captured by the Ottoman Turks: staked out in the sun by day, interrogated before the silvered lamp by night. His eyes, damaged, had never recovered. He wore tinted glasses of various hues to alleviate the pain of photophobia – an extreme sensitivity to light. They ranged from jet black – for direct sunlight – to a calming brown-yellow, although here, in the dim, smoky bar, he’d abandoned even these, so that for a few moments he could let his blue eyes enjoy the world in true colour.
Brooke took off his hat and rested it on the tabletop, pushing thick black hair back from a high pale forehead. Since he’d come home, and joined the Borough – when it was clear his injuries made further study for his degree impossible – he’d built up a network of such nighthawks dotted across the city, individuals who had to work after dark, or who shunned the light, or simply thrived when the rest of the busy world slept. Brooke’s damaged eyes were the outward sign of his injuries. The inward sign was acute insomnia. So the night, and the people of the night, had become his half-lit world.
Grandcourt came back with the beer. He’d not been able to wait and so his moustache was decorated with suds.
‘So what’s this, sir?’ Grandcourt was almost part of the family, familiar with Claire and the children, but the ‘sir’ never faltered, although its note of deference had faded over the years.
Brooke had placed a small bottle on the table. It was made of 15clear glass, with a stone stopper held in place by a brass lever. The liquid inside was a subtle colour, a pale blue, an echo of Brooke’s unshielded eyes.
‘Go ahead,’ he said, as Grandcourt manipulated the bottle, testing the release on the stopper. ‘It’s not a precious object. It’s what’s inside that’s got me foxed. I came across it in the river.’
‘Swimming, sir?’
Swimming, and particularly the full extension of the legs, had been part of his life since he’d been treated at a sanatorium in Scarborough after his ordeal in the desert. His Turkish captors had shot him twice in the left knee, hoping that he’d die where they had left him, at their camp near an oasis, just east of Gaza. Despite torture, he’d failed to tell them of General Allenby’s plans for the forthcoming battle. When the fighting started and it was clear they’d been duped, they had turned angry and scared, a combination that had resulted in their attempt at vengeance. Claire, a nurse on his ward in the sanatorium, had supervised his first attempts to loosen the damaged knee in the basement pool, and later in the lake, which ran away from the old hospital. Swimming had become part of his life, especially at night.
Grandcourt produced a clean linen handkerchief to uncork the bottle, took a sniff and sat back, repeating the exercise several times, as if gauging a fine wine. He used his cuff to clean a metal ashtray into which he poured some of the mysterious liquid. He lit his pipe and dropped the match, still alight, in the dish. The flame leapt, the combustion almost complete in the instant, so that all that was left was a drifting cloud of thin vapour.
It reminded Brooke of the ceremonial lighting of the Christmas pudding.
‘Where did you say you found it?’ asked Grandcourt.
That evening at sunset Brooke had slipped into the water at 16his secret place, beyond a locked door where his old college kept its punts, and he’d swum against the current up into the languid channels on Coe Fen. The heat of the day had still been oppressive, and in retrospect he should have heeded the warning smell as he reached the deep pool beside the corn mill at Newnham, a spot overlooked by a riverside inn.
‘One minute I was in cool, still water and then I heard it – a distinct pop! like a gas-ring lighting. Then I saw the fire burning on the surface. A blue flame, almost a film, just a shimmer, beautiful actually, like a layer of icy fire.’
Grandcourt raised his eyebrows at the poetry and took a fresh gulp of India Pale Ale.
‘It was moving,’ continued Brooke, leaning forward, dropping his voice. A group in the corner had started singing show songs and the decibel level of conversation had risen to counteract the racket.
‘The edge of it, where the flame was, came right for me. So I went under and looked up, through the fire, at the sky. That’s a sight. I could see the burning line moving over the surface. Walking pace, or cycling maybe. A few seconds and it was past. So I came up and got out quick on the bank by the inn.
‘There was a couple there, on the grass, on a picnic rug. They looked a bit shocked. The young man admitted he’d just finished a cigarette and had thrown his stub in the water. So that’s what did it.’
Brooke took an inch off his beer.
‘It’s petrol, surely?’ he asked, resetting his pint on a dirty mat.
Grandcourt was examining the colour again. ‘Maybe. But it smells odd, and looks odd. Petrol on the coupons is colourless. Extra fuel – for business, farmers and that – that’s red. Rust red. Nothing like this.’17
‘Can you ask about?’
‘I can try, sir.’ Grandcourt lit his pipe and was promptly obscured by smoke. His position in the department of engineering gave him access to considerable expertise – and a wide network of ‘oppos’ – his opposite numbers – in other disciplines. The deployment of so-called forensic science was currently the domain of Scotland Yard, and the Borough’s methods were largely old-fashioned, but Grandcourt gave Brooke access to the university’s collective scientific brain. It was a priceless asset.
A radio on the bar suddenly filled the room with the sound of the time pips: it was ten o’clock precisely.
The silence in the pub was church-like, as everyone braced for the worst. Brooke wondered whether Churchill’s broadcast of the previous week, in which he’d lauded the Spitfires and the Hurricanes, had hit the right note. It certainly sounded confident, assured. He’d listened to it in this very bar and in the silent beat after the final words a collective breath had been taken, before they’d all cheered.
The news broadcaster’s voice hit a similar upbeat note.
A man in the corner, filing a pipe, looked up at the radio.
‘The War Cabinet has just issued a short statement. Late last night upwards of one hundred bombers of the RAF conducted a successful raid on Berlin, dropping high explosives. The target was the German capital’s Tempelhof Airport. There were no British casualties …’
The cheer drowned the rest out. Brooke kept to his seat, wondering if it was wise for the RAF to bomb their capital, when the defence of their own was problematic. Grandcourt, seated too, nonetheless raised two small clenched fists beside his ears and grinned widely.
The cheers faded, but the radio was left on, playing a big band 18number, possibly in the hope of drowning out the chorus in the corner.
Despite the barroom clatter, Brooke’s ears registered a minute compression, a sense in which the air in the bar thickened slightly in those final seconds. The bomb fell unseen through the night sky above the Kite, hurtling towards its point of impact. It was only in the final second that Brooke detected the high-pitched scream; a second in which he could think but not move, his blood still. Grandcourt had heard it too, possibly a beat before Brooke, and his mouth hung open, his pipe in his hand, his eyes lifted to the ceiling.
CHAPTER THREE
Brooke never remembered the moment of the blast itself. The first thing he could recall was that the windows of the Wellington Arms were gone, but there was no immediate sense that the outside had flooded into the bar, much more – it felt to him – the feeling of being inside had intensified, solidified even, pinning them down in their seats. The air itself was thick with debris, drifting slowly, dictated by some mysterious current. Like a stationary snowstorm it obscured all things, comprising particles of dust, of glass, of wood, of skin, of hair, and some strange thread-like substance somehow distilled from what had been present before the bomb. 20All this moved sluggishly across the bar, in mid-air. For a sickening moment Brooke felt that it was he who was drifting away, sliding past a reality that had been shattered. The sounds of the crowded bar had gone, leaving a distant dull bass soundtrack, made up of a thrum, which Brooke deduced was the diminishing echo of the explosion itself. And, belatedly, he could hear a distant air raid siren.
The most disturbing element of the scene in those first surreal moments after the impact was that some people who had been in the bar, particularly the man sitting on a stool by the door, had disappeared, while others, such as Grandcourt, were sitting where they had been and appeared untouched, except for the gradually accruing ash-white layer of dust. His friend’s face had a shocked blankness, while his eyes were full of fluid, his lips parted, his skin very tightly stretched over the bones beneath so that there was a real intimation, a disturbing one, that Brooke could discern the skull below.
Grandcourt was blinking slowly, and shaking slightly, but otherwise seemed uninjured.
While so much was intact – the bottle of mysterious liquid, for example, still stood on the table – there were several incongruous objects which had simply materialised: a window, carrying an etched image of a cricketer at the wicket, stood against the bar, the glass hardly cracked. A pair of curtains was wrapped round a light fitting over their heads.
The dull cotton wool of the soundscape parted for a second and he heard the rich heady swing of the big band on the radio, which still stood on the bar, although the barman had gone, as had all the bottles and glasses, and the tankards and cigarettes, which had been on the wooden shelves behind.
A man in a black uniform with ARP written on a tin helmet walked into the pub and looked around. Fresh-faced, he seemed 21oddly unimpressed by the scene of desolation. He said something, the sound muffled, and then – instantly – Brooke found himself outside the pub in the street, aware that time had jumped forward, although he was not in any way personally disorientated by the leap, because at precisely the same moment the real world of sound was back on, at full volume, and he was talking to a group of people, including the warden and a woman in a pink nightdress which was lightly sprayed with blood.
Several casualties lay on blankets in the street. All seemed to be alive, being comforted by strangers, and he recognised the barman. A fire engine stood in the middle of the street, from which a hose had been unfurled so that water could be played onto the roofs of the houses. The Wellington Arms looked derelict, with no lights, the white ash drifting out through the windows. Grandcourt was helping two men out into the street. A crowd had gathered, watching a squad of civil defence men ferrying bricks into neat piles.
Brooke was aware that he was suffering from shock caused by the blast, and that it was loosening its grip, but only by degrees. He was being asked questions. The ARP warden was demanding something but Brooke couldn’t latch onto the meaning.
‘Everyone’s accounted for on my list,’ said the warden, holding the woman in the nightdress gently by the arm. ‘But this lady says the couple in number 36, that’s the Pollards, might not have gone to the shelter like they usually do. So they might be inside.’
He pointed at a house which had clearly taken the brunt of the blast. The facade was black, the windows gone and the roof torn away, while white smoke drifted from the wreckage.
‘That’s right,’ said the woman in the nightdress. ‘Arthur and Nora are fed up with it, dossing in a bloody shelter at their age. They said they might sit tight and get a decent night’s sleep for 22once. Arthur snores – he’s in the front room. Nora’s in the back. And Arthur’ll have the dog with him; they’re never apart, him an’ Pickles.’ She looked at the blackened house and covered her mouth. ‘But there’s not a sound, is there?’
The ARP warden took off his hat and pushed fair hair out of his eye. ‘It’s smouldering but the auxiliary fire boys say it’s out. Mind you, the whole lot still looks pretty rickety. It needs propping up. If the old dears are inside they wouldn’t have had much chance, but like I say, it’s your shout. Someone said you’re with the Borough. So you’re in charge.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Brooke had decided to enter the house, and had borrowed the warden’s tin hat, when a soldier approached, the bomb disposal insignia on his cap catching the light.
‘Witnesses say they heard several bombs falling,’ he told Brooke, not bothering to cite his rank or name. His voice was bored, matter-of-fact.
‘Well, there was one here for certain,’ said Brooke, pointing at number 36. ‘I reckon it came down behind, in the yard, and it’s blown out the windows, and the roof’s gone.’
‘You police?’ asked the soldier.24
‘Inspector Brooke – the Borough.’
The officer made a careful note with a pencil in a small book before slipping it into the breast pocket of his uniform.
‘There may be others close by, Inspector. Bombs which haven’t gone up yet. Do you understand me?’
He stepped closer, rapidly transferring a cigarette to his lips from the same pocket which had taken the notebook. Brooke caught a whiff of shaving cream.
‘They might not go off if they’re faulty, or they might have time-delayed fuses; that’s the real danger. It’s a devil of a thing. They reckon one in Portsmouth took out twenty people when it finally went up – medics, nurses, relatives.’ He checked his watch and marched off. ‘The most common delay is one hour. That’s twenty minutes away in this case. You need to clear the area. We’ll check it out by daylight, but not before.’
Forty minutes lost? Brooke felt sick, aware that a slice of his life had simply been wiped from the record.
‘I brought this, sir. I thought it might help.’
Brooke turned round to find Detective Sergeant Ralph Edison at his shoulder holding a loudhailer.
Relief flooded his blood stream like morphine.
‘Can you clear the street, Sergeant?’ said Brooke.
Edison had been in uniform for thirty years, the public face of the Borough, manning the duty desk at the Spinning House, the force’s headquarters. He’d retired before the war but had been recalled in plain clothes. Despite the loss of his uniform he still managed to radiate its authority.
Edison used the loudhailer to usher sightseers away, and then briskly ordered back the other emergency services. He gave them a five-minute deadline to leave the street, implying by tone of voice alone that failure to meet this target would result in a night in the cells.25
Slowly the street began to clear, but not before a young woman in an ill-fitting khaki uniform pressed a mug of tea into the hand of the woman in the bloodstained nightie. No more than seventeen or eighteen, she held the old woman by the hand and told her to drink up, that it would do her good, and that she should come to the local relief centre, which had been set up in the primary school in the next street. And she should find a nurse for the cuts on her arms.
‘They’re clearing all the streets, dear. You can’t stay,’ she said. ‘You need to find a comfy spot at the LRC – that’s at St Joseph’s.’
Sometimes Brooke felt the war had ripped apart all the words in the world they needed to survive, leaving them with these useless acronyms: LRC, ARP, AFB, HE, BCC. He imagined the little tiles of a set of Scrabble being blown up in the air. But he could see the logic of it all. The organisation, the fussy officials, the application of rules and procedures inspired a sense of purpose, a steady reminder that everyone could cope.
The WRVS girl (There we go again, thought Brooke) was trying to get him to take a mug of tea too, while Edison was bearing down with the hailer to chivvy her away to safety.
Finally, the street was clear, and it took on a more dismal, threatening aspect. Smoke drifted out of the ruined house, while all the rest stood empty, windows shattered, dark and cold. Somewhere a dog barked rhythmically, without any sense of urgency.
Then time changed again.
Brooke found himself standing right in front of the stricken house, beside his sergeant, who was wiping his face with a large, immaculately ironed handkerchief.
The bomb, it appeared, had indeed fallen in the rear yard and ripped through the interior from the back, blowing the curtains out of the windows. The front room on the ground floor was visible through the gaping frame, blackened by smoke, but otherwise 26largely untouched. The wallpaper, which featured roses entwined, was still just visible.
Brooke checked his watch. He had fifteen minutes before the hour was up. The old couple might be dead, but they might not. They might have gone to the shelter. Or they might be trapped under falling bricks and rafters in bed. It was his duty to make sure they didn’t die in a second explosion, or in a collapsing house.
‘I’ll be as quick as I can, Sergeant. You get back to the barricade and make sure nobody strays close.’
The front door had been blown off its hinges and stood at an angle. He squeezed through, but by nudging the door dislodged it, and it fell with a crash, and the whole house seemed to shudder. Dust and ash drifted from above, and there was a fresh shower of falling glass in an upstairs room.
Halfway down the hall he got to the door into the kitchen, where supper plates were set on a table, smeared with vinegar and brown sauce. A single sliver of cod skin revealed the menu.
Brooke turned to go up the stairs and was surprised to see Edison standing on the doorstep, with his back to the house, bravely ignoring his previous order to retreat to the barricade.
A soldier appeared; not the bomb disposal man, but a captain in a pressed uniform.
‘What’s going on?’ he said.
‘The inspector’s taking a quick look. We’re in charge here,’ said Edison.
The soldier took a step backwards and surveyed the front of the house.
‘It’s his funeral. Bloody thing could come down any moment. We need to get engineers inside and put some steel supports up once we’ve got the all-clear: if it goes over the lot could come down.’
He looked at a map. ‘This is Earl Street, isn’t it? Who 27said you could close it off?’ He shrugged because it was clear Edison’s authority precluded answering peremptory questions. ‘Alright. Have it your way. Tell me when you’re done. I’m at the barricade.’
He marched out of sight, leaving Edison, who set his feet squarely apart as if he’d settled down for a nice quiet shift on point duty on Market Hill.
Brooke took the first three steps up the stairs and instantly felt the whole structure move an inch or more to the left, and then lurch back to the right. He stopped, waiting, desperate for the movement to stop.
Looking down he could see into the front room. A blackened dresser stood open, the shelf empty. What had it held? A piece of crockery? Porcelain? Down-at-heel family treasures? Had they been incinerated in the blast, or blown out of the window? There was a circular clear patch of wallpaper over the dresser, but no sign of a precious shattered plate or a broken mirror.
He felt the first stomach-tumble of unease. He took the next step up, and this time nothing moved, so he pressed on. The carpet and bannisters were untouched by the blast, but as he looked up he could see the night sky through a hole in the roof, the low clouds illuminated by a distant wandering searchlight.
Gaining the top landing, he felt much safer. It was an oddity of these bombs that the pressure wave simply blew out the main fire before it could start. The only danger other than collapse was a cracked gas main or shorting wires. Brooke stopped on the landing and sniffed the air: nothing, except the metallic dust, and the chemical edge of the explosives, and the dampness from the hose. Water was running down the walls, the stairs, and over the brass rods which kept the carpet in place.
He pushed open the door of the front bedroom.28
The old man was in the bed, shuffled up against the back wall. He held the dog in a casual embrace. They were quite dead, Brooke could see that. There was no blood, or sense of violence, which was typical of blast victims. It looked as if the old man had turned inwards in those last seconds after the scream had become audible, possibly to protect the dog.
He took a moment to check the room. There was a chest and all the drawers were pulled out – not higgledy-piggledy, but by almost exactly the same distance. Brooke’s eyes scanned the room for further evidence – a rectangle of clean wallpaper had once protected a picture, and he could see the frame and the broken glass on the rug, but no canvas.
Out on the landing he noticed the gloves for the first time. They were a man’s leather driving gloves, and they’d been draped over the bannister rail carefully, so that they were balanced – fingers on one side, cuffs on the other. It seemed a miracle that they had preserved their position despite the blast, unless they had been left after the explosion had torn through the house. Brooke picked one up, and caught a faint whiff of petrol, so he held it to his nose and breathed in the fumes.
The coincidence made him stop. For a half-second he was back in the river watching the chemical burn on the surface with its poetic light. The street was silent, and somewhere a clock was ticking, so he moved on to the back room.
An elderly woman lay on the floor. She’d got out of bed, and the bomb had knocked her down, so she was lying along the skirting board. She had hardly any hair, but what there was lay under a hairnet, and her face was turned to the wall. From her thin legs and slightly fleshy arms, Brooke guessed an age of seventy to eighty.
Like the others she exhibited no mortal wounds. But there was a trickle of blood at one ear.29
It was her hand, stretched out, which caught Brooke’s eye.
His uneasy guts tumbled at last, recognising the crime for what it was.
The left ring finger and the middle finger beside it had both been severed neatly below the bottom joint, probably with a hacksaw blade. The mutilated stumps still bled. Brooke envisaged the act itself with a brutal clarity. The thief had come prepared, with his gloves, a bag perhaps, and the tools of his trade: a gemmy, a knife, a torch. Rifling through the wrecked rooms he’d taken anything of value, before finding Nora on the floor. The rings had been held fast by swollen joints. Desperate to get out before the emergency services arrived, he’d taken the fingers so that he could remove the stubborn jewels in his own sweet time.
Looting was an ugly word, and only ever whispered.
Brooke fled, pocketing the gloves.
CHAPTER FIVE
Once the stroke of the hour had passed and the area was judged safe, it fell to Brooke to ‘preserve the scene of crime’, as recommended by the Borough regulations. The offence itself demanded a serious response. Looting was listed under the Emergency Powers Act, the sweeping catch-all legislation which gave the government such draconian powers that its word was – literally – the law. The stipulated penalties for looting ranged widely, and there was plenty of room for leeway, but culminated in the gallows in the worst instances. Brooke was determined to follow the book, in case the powers that be decided it was time to make an example of the thief 31of Earl Street. The desecration of the body was, incidentally, an offence in itself.
The ARP rescue corps removed Nora Pollard’s corpse (her hand discreetly covered beneath a sheet), and that of her husband Arthur, and the dog – Pickles. On the way out of number 36 they met the RSD on the way in; Rescue, Shoring and Demolition needed to prop up the house, in order that its collapse did not threaten the entire street. Brooke, using a Borough radio car, requested a police photographer from County to take shots of the upstairs rooms, once the RSD had made it safe, while he prepared to make a thorough search of the house and organise an inventory. A constable was despatched to the local school to begin interviewing friends and neighbours. Had anyone seen the thief?
But then the bomb disposal officer reappeared and announced that military headquarters at Madingley Hall, on the outskirts of the city, had sent a messenger with orders to evacuate a quarter-mile sector of the Kite in case the time delay on the mysterious unexploded bombs (if they existed) might be two hours, or six. In this case military authority comfortably outranked the Borough’s, and so the crime scene would have to fend for itself until the next morning at the earliest.
Brooke’s writ could run no further until the area was safe.
He met his sergeant at the barrier.
‘You alright, sir?’ asked Edison, yawning.
While Brooke was a nighthawk his detective sergeant was partial to his bed, a Rip Van Winkle in fact. He had been known, while duty sergeant before the war, to sleep standing up at the Spinning House front desk.
‘I’m fine, Sergeant,’ said Brooke. ‘A bit of shock from the blast but I think it’s passed. Why don’t you go home to your bed? We can’t do anything until they’re sure there isn’t another 32bomb – although where it’s supposed to be hiding I’ve no idea.’
He stepped closer, dropping his voice, and told Edison about Mrs Pollard’s injuries and the thefts. Edison became very still, a sure sign – Brooke had learnt – that his detective sergeant was thinking.
‘In the overall scheme of things a little thievery is neither here nor there, Sergeant. But looting the dead is an inflammatory crime. It may ring alarm bells. So let’s do our jobs, and keep mum for now if we can. We don’t want vigilantes on the streets.’
‘It’s the kind of thing that gets about, sir.’
Brooke nodded. ‘I’ve asked the ambulance crew to be discreet, but you’re right, gossip is a national sport, especially now the government has shut down the racing and the football.
‘Let’s make an early start. I’ll see you at seven at the Spinning House. And, Edison …’ Brooke produced the leather gloves he’d found draped over the bannisters at number 36 from his greatcoat pocket. ‘Mrs Edison must have a Kilner jar – or similar – to spare?’
Edison was a keen grower of fruit and vegetables. He ran an allotment on the edge of town. Jam, and other preserves, was his wife’s speciality. Air-tight glass jars were a crucial tool. One of which would preserve the evidence perfectly.
‘She’s dozens,’ said Edison. ‘We’ve got raspberries and strawberries to bottle. We’ll be living on it by Christmas.’ Rationing was now in full swing and home-grown produce highly prized.
‘You’ve come in the car?’ asked Brooke.
Edison nodded. His pride and joy was an elegant Wolseley Wasp. One of the perks of rejoining the Borough was a regular supply of petrol coupons to keep it on the road.
‘Then take these now,’ he said, handing over the gloves. ‘They were at the scene. Pop them in a jar and bring them in. As I say – seven, my office.’33
His sergeant smelt the gloves. ‘Our man’s a driver? I doubt the residents have a car – it’s a decent street, but they won’t own a car unless it’s for trade.’
‘It may mean nothing. As you say, Mr Pollard may have been a mechanic, or a bus driver, or work in a factory – who knows. But they might be the thief’s. Just keep them safe.’
He watched Edison drive off in his Wasp, its ruby red paintwork covered in a thin layer of ash, a plume of exhaust hanging in the night air.
The residents were being moved on, to friends and neighbours in other parts of the city, or the shelters, or the rest centre at the school, where tea and sandwiches were promised.
Brooke elected to walk home. It was now a fine summer’s night and a crowd had gathered on Parker’s Piece, watching smoke drift over the rooftops from the bombsite. News of fatalities had clearly spread, for as Brooke strode past he sensed the hushed whispers, and noted that while several people had brought their children out with them they held them close, in tight family circles. Soldiers stood smoking by their tents. The all-clear had sounded, and a few cars, headlights swaddled with regulation tape, crept past the scene, and on into the heart of the old city.
Brooke followed, the metal Blakeys on his leather shoes cracking out a rat-tat-tat-tat on the pavements, following the kerbs, painted white to help pedestrians in the blackout. Claire always said she could spot him a mile away by the walk: his body seemed to narrow to his feet, which trod a line, the pace always metronomic and brisk. She said that at rest, if he stopped to light a cigarette, especially with his ever-present hat, he looked like a nail driven into the ground.
He passed the Borough’s headquarters at the Spinning House, a medieval pile which had once been the city’s workhouse, judging 34that he could do little at such a time to begin the search for his cold-hearted thief. He’d planned to rest at home, but felt instead the need to talk, and catch his breath.
The street ahead was deserted, the blackout creating a narrow canyon of shadowy brick and stone. Even without a siren the city was plunged into this Stygian gloom every night. In the shadows, above the gates of Trinity College, Brooke saw that the hideous stone figure of Henry VIII had lost its royal mace yet again. Students stole it on a regular basis, then left it to be found, so that it could be laboriously returned by a bowler-hatted porter atop a ladder. With the outbreak of the war student japes had been outlawed by the proctors – the university police – but it seemed that, like the rest of the population, undergraduates felt that with so many men away in the forces the leashes of adult authority had slackened. Crime, particularly petty crime, had become a national pastime.
Brooke paused in a doorway and lit one of his precious Black Russian cigarettes. His father had slipped a packet in his kit bag – alongside a copy of the Iliad – when he’d seen him off at the station in 1917. The brand was difficult to get but a fragrant pipe shop off Market Hill ordered them from Sobranie, the makers. He let the nicotine circle his lungs, and for the first time since the blast felt a slight dizziness dissipate. His mind focused on the image of Nora Pollard’s butchered fingers. Looters were another symptom of social disintegration, the weakening of public discipline. With so many capable police officers now in military uniform Brooke felt acutely the weight of duty, for in a real sense he was the force’s sole senior detective, given that the other inspector oversaw the uniformed branch. He thought he had as much chance of finding his looter as catching the oik who’d lifted Henry VIII’s mace.35
Opposite Trinity’s gatehouse, an alleyway ran down the side of the university bookshop. A roadster, an old man judging by the grey hair showing at the collar of a dirty macintosh, lay curled up by a line of bins, a cat sitting upright beside him, as if on guard. Vagrants were common now on the streets, as the mild nights stretched out, despite the city bomb shelters which were open to all. Brooke understood their wariness, for the public shelters were run with brisk formality by what they were beginning to call ‘the authorities’. Rules were listed on printed sheets with the imprimatur of the government’s local potentate: the regional commissioner. Brooke had some sympathy for those who complained of the overbearing nature of the wartime government because he’d always despised fussy regulations, and those who made them.
Twenty feet down the alley, a fire-escape ladder led up three floors. Brooke scaled it with confidence, then crossed a flat platform to a second ladder, which decanted him onto a further level, from which a short set of ironwork steps took him to the apex of the roof. Here, on a prefabricated ledge, the Observer Corps had set a lookout post. A low wall of sandbags protected the edge, which gave a 180-degree panoramic view of the Backs – that great sweep of river where the colleges ran down to the water. Set back by a chimney breast, a conical hut had been constructed in steel, and contained a Primus stove, a bunk and – vitally – a military landline telephone, linked exclusively to what they were all now instructed to call the BCC, the Bomb Control Centre.
Jo Ashmore, in her smart OC uniform and tin hat, was standing at the fixed mount for her field glasses, the ghost of a smile on her newly made-up lips. Brooke always got the impression that she arranged herself by way of greeting: the short haircut to within a millimetre of her collar, the gas mask set on the hip, but the truth was she was always what Claire called ‘smartly turned-out’.36
‘Ah. The night detective. Tea? Or something stronger?’
The conical hut hid a bottle of malt whisky.
‘Just tea,’ said Brooke, looking out over the rooftops.
Ashmore had noted the condition of Brooke’s greatcoat. ‘Good God, Brooke. Have you been rolling in the gutter?’
‘I was in the pub on Earl Street when the bomb came down. Fifty yards the other way and I’d be in pieces.’
She studied his face. ‘You should see a doctor.’
‘I’ll see Claire. It’s shock. I just need to sleep.’
They both laughed. His chromic insomnia was a constant source of conversation at the OC post, with Jo proffering possible solutions, while he thought of reasons why they wouldn’t work.
Brooke told her about the casualties at number 36, and the evidence of looting, although he asked her not to put anything on the grapevine until the news got out.
‘I’ll get tea,’ she said, removing a single piece of light debris from Brooke’s shoulder.
The cluster of lights and drifting smoke in the Kite were just visible to the east. The searchlights, stationed at the ack-ack barrage on the hills to the south, swung round in search of lone raiders, casting circles and strange distortions of circles on the low clouds, as if agitated by having failed to locate the deadly bomber until too late. Otherwise the city was as it almost always was: silent, tense certainly, but not in any way greatly disturbed from its ancient customs. Raids such as the one that had destroyed the Pollards’ home were extremely rare. For the most part Cambridge felt itself on the far reaches of the conflict.
The town clocks began to strike twice, marking the hour.
‘I’ve added some Dutch courage,’ called Jo from the hut. ‘You look as pale as a ghost, Brooke.’
Ashmore had grown up in the villa next to the Brooke family 37home at Newnham Croft, where the water meadows spread out into the headwaters of the Cam. Here a pair of Victorian homes had been built, their gardens running down to the towpath. She’d played with Brooke’s children, Joy and Luke, running amok in the fields and along the banks. The two families had become intertwined, sharing high days and holidays, Sunday lunches, and even days at the distant beaches on the Norfolk coast. The children had given Brooke a wide berth. The hero of the desert war – who’d served, it was whispered, alongside the great Lawrence of Arabia – was a figure of legend. Ashmore had recently confessed that Brooke had cut an intimidating figure behind his array of exotic glasses. The sudden appearances in the river, hauling himself out to limp up to the house, were another source of mystery. Luke, his son, had confided to the other children that on winter nights El Aurens himself would appear at the house, uninvited, and whisk his father away for secret talks with the Fenland Bedouin, presumably camped out around a fire of bog oak.
Ashmore’s own story was racy. She had fallen in with what was called the ‘fast set’ before the war. There had been parties in London, a married man, a scandal averted. Her father, a professor of history with hardly a trace of humour in his overbred personality, who had been largely absent from the family home for decades, had demanded his daughter pursue a low profile. His own academic career, and the eventual mastership of his college, hung in the balance. She’d promptly volunteered for the Observer Corps and dedicated her nights to keeping alert, but aloof. She’d just met a young pilot, a patient at the local burns unit, and the romance seemed to have put a light back in her eyes. Brooke wondered if the meddling professor would demand to vet the young man’s reputation if he were unlucky enough to be taken home to meet his sweetheart’s father.38
They drank their hot toddies.
‘You do look dreadful, Brooke. Why don’t you sit down?’
She fetched a metal stool and he slumped, gratefully, an elbow on the sandbag ledge. He didn’t feel dizzy, but he did feel exhausted.
Brooke took one of Ashmore’s Craven As.
‘Did you clock the bomber itself?’ he said. ‘There was no siren.’
She nodded, a hand resting on the metal sighting table with which she could plot incoming EA – enemy aircraft. Once she had a bearing and a height she rang it through to the BCC.
‘Not until it was too late. Clever, actually. All that cloud cover you’d think they’d just drop the bombs and skedaddle, or not bother. But they flew in low and must have picked up something – the road maybe, or the river, or the railway.
‘I had the report in ASAP. Not quick enough, obviously. The ack-ack had a go from Coldham’s Common after she’d made her run but she was too fast. A Heinkel. It’s just a one-off raid to show they can do it – boost morale, that kind of thing.
‘They were aiming for the railway station again – that’s the intel. Hoping for a bit of luck. They won’t be back for a while.
‘Your bomb was the fourth. They wasted three along the river on their run-in, and then dropped the rest on the shunting yards, on the way out. There’s some damage but they reckon the mainline will be up and running by the end of tomorrow. Odd, isn’t it? In peacetime the whole network collapses if a signal breaks. These days they perform miracles without exception.’
‘And no second run?’
‘Nope. Once the ack-ack picked them up they were on borrowed time.’
