by Jim Kelly
It was clear she knew nothing about the blue MG. Or, presumably, the lifestyle which went with it.
And then Brooke thought about the stairs.
‘We’re just trying to piece together Peggy’s last movements on the night she died. I wanted to check some details with Tim. Also, we’re missing a few items of hers which we can’t find. Tim said he gave her presents and she gave some back but he can’t recall which. We think she had a silver lipstick in her bag but we can’t find it – would you mind if I checked Tim’s room? He said it might be there in a sock drawer?’
It was a tissue of implausible lies but it was the best Brooke could muster at short notice. For a moment he thought she was going to tell him to get a warrant.
‘If you must,’ she said. ‘His room’s at the back and the socks used to be in the third drawer down. There’s a tree which needs cutting back, I’m afraid, so it’s very dark, although he never complains.’
The house upstairs was coated in dust, and there was a smell of something dead – possibly mice, or worse. Tim’s room was like a museum of childhood, with models of planes, and books on flying, and what looked like a toy Morse code set, and a tiny single bed.
But it hadn’t been slept in.
Down the hall he found the front main bedroom. It was clear young Tim had decided to upgrade his sleeping quarters. The sheets were a bit grubby and whirled in a nest-like circle. What could only be described as ‘dirty’ magazines lay open on the old carpet. An ashtray on the bedside table was full of butts. A bottle of whisky stood on the dressing table beside a tooth mug.
But it was the boxes which caught his eye. There were several sizes marked with coded numbers, but one set were identical and marked BAYER VERONAL, the small print in German.
It was a moment of discovery, but also disappointment. The seedy room seemed to encapsulate what the war might become: a slow descent into petty crime on the home front, with high ideals corrupted by greed and opportunism. To find its evidence here, in a house once dedicated to ministering to the sick, was particularly sad.
There were always victims, and in another life, he might have been one of them, desperate each night for the relief brought by a small white pill. Ripping open one of the boxes and making a rough calculation, he estimated there were nearly two hundred smaller pillboxes of sleeping tablets. He ripped another larger box and found more tablets, but he didn’t recognise the brand names.
What had Claire said about Veronal? They’d been named after Italy’s sleepiest city. And here they were, stacked high in a back bedroom, on a leafy street in Cambridge. There was one golden rule about the wartime black market: it traded in anything that was in short supply.
Tim Vale, dashing pilot and war hero, stood now in a very different light.
It wasn’t difficult to see how he’d secured a supply of the lucrative drug. Dr Vale would have the right forms for ordering much-needed drugs. One day someone would have spotted the pattern, but by keeping the thefts piecemeal and random, he’d clearly been able to build up a store. How long had it taken? A year, maybe more. So it was a meticulous, unhurried crime.
And a cold-blooded one, preying on innocent victims. What was more, it was black-market crime. There would be associates, lines of supply, the splitting of profits. Did Vale’s desperate need for cash to fund his lifestyle, and escape this tawdry middle-class poverty, extend further, to looting, and theft, to adulterated petrol, and ultimately murder?
CHAPTER FORTY
The plan had been in place for forty-eight hours but the moon had hidden on the first night; now it hung like a paper lantern over the Guildhall, and there was no siren, so Grandcourt presented himself at the Spinning House in his oiled jacket, old pumps and a knapsack. In the desert they’d specialised in ‘reccies’ behind enemy lines, gaining a reputation for daring and light-footed infiltration. The truth was that Brooke was a studier of maps, and an observer of the lie of the land during the hours of daylight, and so the midnight forays were hardly heroic: their adventures were meticulously planned, and they took no risks. Reckless bravery was a vice to be avoided at all costs. They would slip away into the dark, lie low and wait for the enemy to reveal itself by night fires, torches and cigarette ends. And they would listen to the crawling trucks, the skittering motorbikes, the shuffling of the horses tied to the rails, and return with vital intelligence.
Brooke met Grandcourt at the duty desk where he left instructions for the night shift. The thorough searching of Jack Miller’s house had not produced a single stolen item, but the local constable had orders to watch the house in case of a moonlit flit. Miller was more than capable of loading up his merchandise, and driving off to another life. Or did he have a lock-up somewhere – a secret place for goods too hot to sell in the city? Pilot Officer Vale was still on standby at Marshall and the duty sergeant had spoken to the guardroom: the pilot was not authorised to leave the base before the following evening, and would be available for interview in the morning, unless the Spitfire flight became operational. A radio car had been posted to Gardenia House, and Edison had dealt with the paperwork to obtain a warrant from magistrates for the removal of the stolen drugs the next morning, and their safekeeping in the Spinning House lock-up.
Brooke checked his gear: knapsack, flask, torch, maps, cigarettes and lighter. Grandcourt, always lightly equipped, had on an army belt with pouches, and a jacket with webbing, in which would be stored anything they might need. Like Brooke, he was a gifted planner.
‘Who’s running the shelter if the siren sounds?’ asked Brooke, mindful that he’d dragged his friend away from his nightly duties on Parker’s Piece.
‘Dobson from Shelter 5 – he can double up for once. Everyone knows the drill anyway; sometimes I think they’d run the show better without the wardens. It’s a home from home now.’
One nod to the desk and they were out into St Andrew’s Street and the waiting car, which sped them out into the fields beyond Barton, to the doorstep of the Blue Ball. They had time for a drink before the bailiff arrived – old Potter again with his stick – and took them down to the river and the boat, which was as ordered: a clinker canoe, for two men, with bench seats and wide paddles.
Brooke attached a torch to the prow with a length of leather shoelace and they pushed away from the damp bank. The bailiff’s lantern swung in the darkness, revealing reeds and pollarded willows, as they slipped round a bend in the river. At Byron’s Pool they disembarked and used the portage steps to lug the canoe to the upper river, where the wide water lay still in the moonlight, covered in its veil of weed and lilies. The water looked innocent enough, but it was difficult to push aside the thought that it had yielded up the lifeless body of Peggy Wylde only twenty-four hours ago.
Earlier, Brooke had managed to get home for tea, and to see Joy, and try to gauge her mood. She had taken on a hopeful role and was busy with the baby. Brooke had sat with the child for a few minutes to let his daughter write to the War Office, pressing for news. Brooke had read out loud a few pages from The Wind in the Willows. The baby knew nothing, of course, of the story, but a reading voice seemed to send her to sleep, and to be honest the childish escape was just what Brooke sought: an attempt to re-establish the river as a benign, soothing presence.
The story was a favourite of his, which he’d first encountered as a young father reading to Luke and Joy. His own childhood had come too early to catch its first decade of popularity, and perhaps its real magic came in this gift – that he’d been given a second chance to relive the thrills of the riverbank. The book’s sense of gentle adventure, and the cool unifying thread of the river, had never left him.
Now, slipping away from Hauxton Junction in the canoe, he felt the story’s magical spell anew.
The canoe caught in its wake the first light of the moon. Swiftly they were at the point where the river divided between its two senior upper branches, the Granta and the Rhee. A tree branch swung out here and Brooke used his hand to bring them to a stop, turn
ing Grandcourt’s torch to illuminate Aldiss’s map.
‘There ahead, you can see where the two streams meet. The oil was on the surface to the right, in the Rhee. So the source is upstream, but none of the villages betray any sign of the thieves. The local constables have drawn a blank. I thought we’d try and narrow it down, Grandcourt. How’s the nose?’
Grandcourt’s moustache twitched as he sniffed. The wide river was a mirror here, the air utterly still.
‘It’s the night, of course, it sharpens everything,’ said Grandcourt, sniffing again. ‘There’s the river – fresh water’s like wine. And there’s the fields, and night flowers, and some cow dung. But no petrol, sir.’
‘Not yet,’ added Brooke.
Paddling onwards they took the Rhee south-west, and the country opened up under a starry sky, and the banks were low, so it felt as if they were travelling overland.
After fifteen minutes Grandcourt touched him on the shoulder and they drifted for a moment in silence.
‘Sewage farm,’ said Grandcourt. ‘Don’t need much of a nose for that.’
Brooke had missed it, which reminded him that Claire said he obsessed so much about his damaged eyes it had relegated his other senses to the second rank.
The village of Haslingfield appeared, a church tower stood against the sky, and some architectural trees, which might denote a big house.
They stopped by a small stream which ran in from the west.
‘Where does it go?’ asked Grandcourt.
‘To the manor house,’ said Brooke, recalling exactly the detail on the map. It was a feature of these hills that several of the manors were moated, small streams trained to provide defences, before being allowed to dribble on downhill into the Rhee.
Grandcourt opened his flask and they drank hot tea. The village betrayed itself by a barking dog, the sound of cows in a barn and a single passing motor car, which gave no trace of light. A thread of music, on a gramophone record, came to them, until a slamming door shut it out.
One mile further on they approached Harston. Here they skirted a mill, and an island. Again a small stream led off the main river to Harston Hall. Through the heavy trees and hedges they could just see its windows. Brooke made a note: there was growing anger at the inequities of the blackout, which seemed to require hundreds of ARP wardens to keep backstreets dark, while the rich were allowed to light up their manors like Chinese lanterns.
They used the torch to examine the narrowing river, but there was no trace of petrol on the water, no dead rats floating, and they were running out of navigable channel.
Half a mile further and the moon started to dodge behind clouds as they reached Barrington. There was a chalk quarry here and they thought they heard the gears of a lorry grinding. The village lay across half a mile of water meadows.
Grandcourt put his hand in the current, producing a distinctive ‘cloop’, which made Brooke turn round. His former batman sniffed at the water as it ran out of his cupped fingers.
‘That’s it, sir. I’m sure. And it’s strong, sir.’
It must have been an illusion but in the failing light the water looked oily and Brooke imagined that if he took a step on the surface it would support his weight.
The river split here between the main channel and a final streamlet which ran east to Barrington Hall, through the village, which clustered around a large green, used for sheep and cattle.
‘Which way do you think?’ asked Grandcourt.
‘Let her slip back,’ said Brooke, and they waited as the sluggish current took them back downstream by twenty yards.
He took out his matches, struck one and flicked it into the water.
The blue flame caught, creeping away from them over the surface, as he knew it would. It drew a line across the river from bank to bank, edging away, until it reached the fork in the stream, where it flared vividly, a sudden yellow-red, and swept away up the ditch towards the village, before dying out.
Grandcourt clamped a fist tight shut in triumph.
‘It’s too narrow, even for us,’ said Brooke. ‘Tomorrow we’ll take a closer look at sleepy Barrington.’
The sound of the distant air raid siren on the Guildhall came to them over the fields from Cambridge. To the west, immediately, they saw the dull diffuse flash of anti-aircraft fire in a bank of cloud, and heard within a minute the drone of an approaching engine.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Bartel’s Heinkel was still several miles short of the city, on a path over Newmarket Downs, embedded in that bank of midnight cloud. The radar masts on the coast had picked them up, and there was already intermittent ack-ack fire. There’d been strong winds over the sea and so they’d had to abandon the plan to fly further north, avoiding the fighters and the barrage balloons. Schmidt was down in the Perspex niche below the pilot’s chair, his eye on the bombsight. Their target, Bridge 1505, was now less than five minutes away.
The first bomb to fall, the one that would shatter the iron girders, carried its new chalk message. This time it had fallen to Bartel to inscribe it, and the crew had stood silently watching, a little ceremony of brotherhood on the grassy airfield at Waren.
It read simply: Für Ellen.
Two days earlier, standing by the Adler, Bridget had patiently told him what had happened to their child. His wife had stayed in Berlin, at their flat in Lichtenberg, on the night of the air raid. The authorities had been adamant that RAF raids were unlikely, and that the city’s defences to the north were robust. When the siren had sounded they’d rushed out into the street with the rest, his mother (who’d come to stay because she wanted to go shopping the next day) dragging a pre-packed suitcase, while Bridget had taken Helga by the hand, holding the baby within her overcoat, heading for the U-Bahn station on the corner. Old man Todt, in the flat above, refused to leave the building at all, insisting it was a false alarm and that the British bombers didn’t have the range to reach the capital.
One bomb had dropped on the street, hitting the red-brick church at the corner, so that the windows exploded outwards, as if a tidal wave had broken from within. (Later reports, gleaned by his mother, said the shell had fallen in the small cemetery yard, shredding the tombstones.) Glass, slates and shards of marble rained down on them all. His wife had been knocked to the ground, while Ellen had died as she fell – starb wie sie fiel.
Bartel had noted his wife’s gift for a telling phrase.
Bridget had carried her to the underground station. A group of women from their apartment block had gone in search of a doctor, and taken the elder girl with them. Eventually, Dr Rilke came and examined the child with trembling hands. The shrapnel wound on the side of her head was ragged, and there had been surprisingly little blood, but there was no doubt she had died instantly. Rilke, waving his hand over the small head, had been unable to touch the child’s skin.
Bartel had been given leave to attend the funeral, held swiftly at the crematorium. Getting in the staff car afterwards he’d noted the smoke dribbling from the pencil-thin chimney. Then he’d been driven to his old family house in the woods beyond Spandau. The tragedy had revitalised his mother, who had offered to keep the family safe from further bombing raids on the city. She ferried cold drinks to his wife while she sat in the garden, and Helga was to be persuaded to go to school on the bus. His mother fussed, the matriarch back in control, while his wife watched the shadows in the pine wood, and pressed his hand when he said he had to go back to Waren, because there was a mission – unfinished business – and the weather was improving.
Oberst Fritsch called him to the commandant’s office and sat him down, offering him a cigar, but there was no question, said Bartel, despite the offer, of deserting his comrades at this moment. He required no more leave. The pre-flight briefing was at six-thirty and he would attend. The summer storm in the North Sea had blown itself out. The Heinkel was undergoing its final fuel and bomb checks out on the runway grass, rocking slightly in the breeze which thudded against the wooden huts. He
must fly, he said. The war, after all, was at a critical stage. The invasion must go ahead.
At dusk he’d simply collected his gear with the rest and trudged out to climb in through the bathtub. Only fleetingly, but for the first time, did it feel like wriggling into a coffin.
Now they were almost over the sleeping city.
‘There she is,’ said Schmidt.
Bartel, looking down, saw the silver river.
The ack-ack fire exploded around them, white flashes on port and starboard, and below. Bartel had seen the women at Waren covering damaged aircraft with the thin fabric, the wooden struts within revealed, and the fragility of the aircraft made him laugh out loud now, because it was strangely comforting that there was so little to hit. There was the acrid stench of fusing wires, but the engines pounded on, and so Bartel took them down another 1,000 feet.
‘One minute,’ announced Schmidt.
The searchlights found them, a dazzling numinous blaze of light, and Bartel thought of angels, and realised that he felt no fear, and that this was because he had been released from the duty he had previously felt to return at any cost. The family had been shattered, and now his place was here in the sky, while his mother cared for his wife, in the safety of the forest.
He pushed forward the lever and the bomb bay opened, the night air rushed in, bringing with it the smell of fields and the harvest, intensely reminiscent of home.
The river below was insanely close, so that Bartel could see the pattern of ripples on the surface, and the houseboats on the bank. He experienced the odd sensation that he was skating on its surface, a child on ice, yelling with joy.
‘Für Ellen,’ said Schmidt, and released the first bomb.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
From the steps of the Blue Ball, Brooke could see fires in the city producing a red glow in the cloudy night sky. The constable at the wheel of the radio car said the all-clear had yet to sound and there were fears the bomber would return on a second run, so he ran them into town straight to Parker’s Piece, and the iron doors of Grandcourt’s shelter. The streets had been empty and lifeless, and even here, where the tented army encampment covered the grass, there were no lights, no signs of life, except a few guards on duty along the perimeter.