by Jim Kelly
‘No. It’s alright. Tell us if you find anything, or if you have any more questions. Just walk in – everyone else does.’
They stood in silence for a few moments, dealing with the sense of inevitable dislocation brought on by moving from the presence of the dead into a busy street.
‘And you’ll think about what I said?’ asked Brooke, eventually.
‘Yes, I’ll think.’
‘And stay with the constable after dark. He can sleep downstairs and keep Ollie company. Don’t go out alone, Elsie. It’s just a precaution, but it’s necessary.’
She slipped the ring into a small breast pocket in the overalls.
‘It must be nice to be asked,’ she said. ‘Joe can’t – couldn’t – his wife won’t have a divorce. It’s a shame because every girl dreams of it – don’t they? The handsome suitor down on one knee, the light catching the engagement ring. It’s like a story in a book.’
She shook her head and walked away, and Brooke watched her diminish in the crowd, but the image she’d drawn remained vivid. That was what had been in plain sight all the time: the rings. He’d always suspected that the theft was at the heart of the mystery of Earl Street; he’d been stupid to overlook the possibility that it was the precise nature of the items stolen that night which had unleashed the violence to follow.
It was all about the rings.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Back at his office Brooke lay on the Nile bed and closed his eyes, so that he could see the scene that night – the last of Peggy’s short life – as it unfolded on the riverbank. An idyllic spot, where she sat alone, watching Bruno Zeri cycle away, beginning his journey to Glasgow. But he’d be back, the father of her child, and they’d share a life together. She’d have been keen to cycle down to Earl Street to check her grandparents were safe, but she’d never left the spot alive. One of her other suitors had arrived – surely watching for his moment – and offered an alternative, a life with him. And to seal the moment with an engagement ring, a beautiful ring, offered perhaps, slightly childishly, on one knee.
Peggy had no doubt planned to soften the refusal. Instead, she was overcome by that moment of recognition, the ring which she’d loved as a child and put on her finger when she wanted to be a princess, being pressed upon her now. And then the knowledge, crushing and frightening in that lonely spot, that the boy offering her a love token must have stolen it from her grandmother. That he was a thief. And that there’d been looting on Earl Street, and casualties. Someone had stolen from the dead.
Brooke smiled, because he knew he was right. It was that simple. The real clue, the final key, was the killer’s ignorance. This suitor knew Peggy, but he’d never met Nora before the night she died, or seen her trademark rings. He had no idea where the grandparents lived because he’d only known the family a few weeks. He could never have guessed Peggy would know the rings so well, that she’d played with them as a child. A coincidence at last, and one that had cost Peggy her life.
His desk in the Spinning House bore witness to six hours’ investigation. He’d written the suspect’s name up on the blackboard in his office in capital letters. Every time he looked at it he was more certain he was right. But gut instinct, even inspiration, very rarely stood up in court.
Juvenile court records revealed his suspect had committed thirteen offences between the ages of six and fourteen, with charges ranging from criminal damage, common assault, burglary and wounding. The punishments he’d received mirrored the attitude of the day: that children – and certainly those in care – should be treated with leniency and encouraged to reform.
A separate file listed offences brought before magistrates after the age of sixteen. There had been none recorded for the last six months, but the last appearance in the dock, for handling stolen goods, had clearly tested the patience of the authorities in a time of war. The accused had been given a suspended sentence as long as he agreed to attend the Upper Town Sports and Athletic Club – an institution set up to distract poor working-class boys from crime.
A report entered into the court records from the club noted that the accused had made some progress, but exhibited a pugnacious attitude, a stolid strength, and what the coach described vividly as a ‘rat-like cunning’. He was sociable, but it was noted that he often failed to make friends. There was hope for the future: the boy had been placed with new foster parents, in a part of town where he might build a new life, and a fresh reputation.
The boxing club provided a photograph, taken in a club singlet and boxing shorts, gloves held up to the fleshy jaw. Brooke had taken it to Addenbrooke’s Hospital and found Joe Miller in a room, on his own, his body in traction. One arm was held up at an acute angle but he’d nevertheless inveigled a nurse into lighting him a cigarette, which he held with the other.
Brooke held the picture in front of his nose.
Miller nodded. ‘Yeah. Can’t remember the name, but he always had stuff. I’d park the lorry by the football pitches and they knew to wander over. Jewellery, watches, silver cutlery – he was no fool. And he always filled up his can with petrol. Nasty bit of work, mind.’
A phone call to Edmund Kohler at the Fitzwilliam provided the final piece in the jigsaw. The suspect was on the list of official Civil Defence messengers. He’d been provided with a tin hat marked M and a second-hand bicycle – the make unspecified, but Brooke knew now it was the Lucifer. His duties included running documents and messages from the central fire station to the hospital and the BCC. His presence at any bombsite would have gone unchallenged.
Brooke marched to the sergeants’ mess and found Edison with his feet up. ‘I think we have our man, Sergeant. Let’s put him in the bag before darkness falls.’
The Borough’s five radio cars were parked at various points along the edge of the Kite, and uniformed officers in a Black Maria were stationed in the next street to the Wyldes’ house. In the alleyway behind the house two constables were now in place, blocking the only escape route. This moment, the closing of the net, always seemed hurried, even brutal, and reminded Brooke of the unseemly haste of an execution.
The lingering anxiety was identical: did they have the right man?
Elsie opened the door, the hall light spilling out, nodding to Brooke and then seeing Edison, who was hanging back.
‘I need to speak to Ollie,’ said Brooke. ‘Can you ask him to step outside for a moment?’
Brooke had kept his voice flat and she just shook her head.
‘He’s gone out. I told him all about Joe, the stolen goods and stuff, and he seemed upset. I think he’s had enough of the house, and I don’t blame him. He said Sid wanted him to pick up something else from the old house – a dartboard. He’s been running stuff back and forth with a handcart. So he went. What is it, what’s wrong?’
‘What’s the quickest way to the house?’
Elsie leant back, one hand on the newel post of the stairs, and forced her wide feet into a pair of cork shoes.
‘Mum! I’m out for a bit – back soon.’
They heard the ghost of an answer and then Elsie slammed the door.
‘I’ll show you the way,’ she said.
Brooke sent Edison to tell the radio car driver to direct all officers to the Foxes’ derelict house on Salisbury Street.
Directly opposite there was a ‘tunnel back’ – an archway between two of the terraced houses, which marked the start of an alleyway which cut across the Kite. Three minutes later they were at the Foxes’ house. The light, under a cloudy sky, had almost bled away, so that the scene was painted in grey and black.
The tarpaulin still obscured the front of the house, which they’d seen collapse two nights earlier after the bomber raid. Pulling it aside, Brooke found the ground-floor front window was boarded up, as was the door, but two of the planks had been removed and so he could squeeze through. Elsie followed.
The house smelt of wet coal.
Brooke walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. The house was so gloom
y it was difficult to see anything so he switched on his torch. The floor above had collapsed, a few burnt timbers left, so that the bedroom was exposed. Because the stairs had burnt away there was no way of easily reaching the room above. A set of ladders had been brought in from the yard, but they were clearly too short to reach, and had been left against one wall.
By the sink was a plate, on which a Woodbine had been abandoned, half smoked.
‘Ollie?’ said Brooke. Why had he needed the ladder?
Edging the torch beam along the wall, he examined what was left of the back bedroom above: a mirror, uncracked; a line of coat hooks; a bed head attached to the wall; a picture hook above a rectangle of clean wallpaper. In one corner the floorboards had survived to the extent that they could support a narrow wardrobe. The door had swung out on a broken hinge to reveal a few coats within, a pair of black shoes, a set of boxing gloves and what looked like a gas-mask case, adorned with red tassels and a lurid line of silver sequins.
Wide-eyed, Elsie looked up, and Brooke actually saw the colour drain from her face as she raised a hand and covered her mouth.
‘It’s Peggy’s,’ she said.
There was a moment’s silence and then they heard the air raid siren from the Guildhall, the sound penetrating the ruined house through the vacant windows and the gutted roof.
Brooke checked his watch. ‘Where will Ollie go, Elsie? Is there a place he could hide?’
‘There’s nowhere,’ she said, looking around, as if he might have taken refuge in the ruin of his home.
‘Didn’t he have a secret place with Connie?’
‘Sid had an allotment. I think they went there to be alone. There’s a hut and he had a key. She said it was romantic cos it had a stove. She said they just kissed.’
‘Which allotments?’ asked Brooke.
‘The ones on Stourbridge Common, by the river, where the railway bridge takes the mainline north to the sea.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Bartel’s Heinkel was twenty minutes from the target: Bridge 1505. Schmidt was lying flat in the Plexiglas cone, his eye to the bombsight, taking pictures of the gun placements on the downs above Newmarket. The shells, in their twin rows, vibrated visibly as the engines laboured, the aircraft penetrating the cloudbank, the damp cold air filling the fuselage. It was less than forty-eight hours since their last sortie and the illusion that they were merely reliving a nightmare, swinging like a pendulum back and forth, had inspired a form of collective dread.
Morale was poor. The pre-flight briefing, delivered by Oberst Fritsch, had been badly misjudged. The latest reconnaissance pictures made it clear that the box-girder railway bridge was still intact, and that every hour trains carrying munitions and troops ran through – north to positions on the coast in readiness for an attack in the east; south to the Channel ports, in case the long-awaited offensive began across the Straits of Dover.
‘The repeated failure to destroy this bridge has been noted at the highest levels,’ said Fritsch.
They were in the mess at Waren, on camp stools, drinking coffee, looking at the map on the wall that they had committed to memory twice already. A large photographic portrait of Reichsmarschall Göring was on the wall above the bar. Fritsch had no need to glance in its direction. Göring had promised Germany the Luftwaffe would clear the way for invasion.
Tonight their orders were modified. They would locate the river and fly south, dropping bombs at the bridge. They would then circle and return, unter welchen Umständen auch immer – whatever the circumstances – and attempt to verify its destruction, dropping the remainder of their payload for good measure, before heading back towards the coast, the sea and the lonely airfield at Waren.
The crew had conducted itself in a professional manner. They had studied their orders and made no comment. Even later, when Bartel had gone out to check the aircraft, he’d talked to Schmidt about the meteorological reports, and the hope that a simultaneous attack on the docks at Tilbury, in the Thames Estuary, would divert fighters south from their target.
This time there were no chalk marks on the bombs. Their meal, of sausages and potatoes, was uneaten. The cork had stayed in the bottle of schnapps.
Now, in the clawing icy damp of the fuselage, Bartel regretted the lost opportunity. It might have been his last drink.
‘Let’s do our job,’ he said, breaking his silence as the engine note changed, the aircraft beginning its long descent through the layers of cloud. ‘Then we can go home.’
Dropping out of the clouds, he saw the earth below. There were breaks in the cloud cover, and a flitting moon, and the river seemed to pulse, as if carrying a weak electric charge. The Heinkel bucked as he swung it in a wide semicircle so that he could begin to track its surface south to the target.
‘Conditions excellent,’ he said, the static obscuring almost every syllable.
The river flashed by beneath, and Bartel hauled back the lever to open the bomb doors.
Schmidt had memorised the pre-target waymarks, and now began to count them off for the crew.
‘Clayhythe Bridge.’
Bartel saw the crossing, a narrow road bridge and boats on the river.
‘Baits Bite.’
A lock, and a weir, where the water glowed white.
‘Gasometers.’
A cluster of three, one larger than the rest.
‘Fighters on our tail,’ said the rear gunner. Immediately they saw the tracer fire, burning lines of amber, lacerating the dark.
They all felt the first bomb go, the second, and then the third. The Heinkel bounced, almost joyfully, light-headed perhaps now that the burden was discharged.
The way in which the screams of each falling shell blended into a single sound made Bartel think of his lost daughter.
They waited for the gunner in the bathtub, with his rear view, to report whether they’d hit the bridge. Instead there was a burst of tracer fire, which rocked the plane violently.
‘Fighter closing,’ said the rear gunner, at precisely the moment Bartel felt the impact of a bullet slam into his left shoulder, puncturing the pilot’s seat from behind.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
The first bomb fell short but the second hit the river with a sharp crack, followed by a second’s silence before the high explosive detonated, sending a plume of white water vertically into the night sky.
Brooke, at the padlocked gate of the allotments, threw himself on the grass and felt the pitter-patter of the water as a cloud drifted overhead, the moment shattered by the third bomb, which fell on open ground.
This time earth fell, a cloud of atomised peat and grass, clods thudding down, the air now full of the night-time stench of the Fens.
Brooke brushed himself down, and saw by the flicker of ack-ack fire that Bridge 1505 still stood, although it was wreathed in the mist created by the bomb which had plunged into the Cam.
Beyond it a gasometer was alight, the flames so bright that Brooke had to shield his eyes.
The Heinkel, trailing smoke, was on its way home. Searchlights in the hills crisscrossed the sky with a manic energy, and caught the fleeting image of a pursuing Spitfire.
Beside the gate was a large black bicycle, with the saddle let down as far as it would go. He saw Ollie then, in his mind’s eye, teetering on the machine, which was too big for him. He checked the bell but knew what he would find: it was silver, emblazoned with a red star.
Edison, who’d taken Elsie and Alice Wylde to the Parker’s Piece shelters, had given Brooke the allotment key, explaining that the single gate had been locked since the start of the war to keep scavengers out; the oiled lock turned easily, and he slipped inside.
There were perhaps fifty huts, in ragged rows, but only a few had stovepipes. Brooke checked two and was within fifty yards of the third when he saw the light, a pale yellow glimmer in a single pane of glass. A line of dead rooks had been strung across the path like an omen.
The noise of the raid, or rather its aftermath, mask
ed his final footsteps: an ambulance bell, the ack-ack fire, more fighters airborne from Marshall airfield, the roaring flames from the gasometer.
He’d taken Edison’s cuffs, and he stopped now to slip one over his left wrist, clicked it shut and then – before inaction turned to fear – he kicked the door of the shed in with his boot.
Ollie Fox, eyes white with fear, fell back from a suitcase open on the wooden floor.
The boy was shaking, and Brooke was certain that this was not an instantaneous reaction to his arrival, but that he was petrified of the bombing, and desperate to escape. Greed had brought him here to retrieve his hoarded treasures. His round plump face was bathed in sweat. But he didn’t look like a grown-up kid any more.
Brooke turned sideways to close the door. When he swung back Ollie was holding a pistol: a standard issue Browning from the Great War, which perfectly matched the description of Arthur Pollard’s souvenir of the Somme, stolen during the Earl Street raid.
‘I doubt that will fire,’ said Brooke. ‘It’s more likely to take your hand off. I’ve seen it happen. You’ll bleed to death before help comes. I’d put it down.’
‘I’m leaving,’ said Ollie. His voice seemed older, as if until now he’d successfully hidden behind a character he’d created – the slow bovine boy who won’t grow up.
‘Elsie and I found Peggy’s gas mask. Connie saw it too, didn’t she? And that’s why you killed her.’
‘Stupid cow followed me out of the house. I was gonna fetch it down, get rid of it, but I couldn’t reach with a broom handle. I turned round and there she was. It was her fault.’
‘You never loved her anyway, did you? It was just that you wanted to be close to Peggy. You were her secret admirer: a very persistent secret admirer. And she wouldn’t tell, because she didn’t want to hurt Connie.’
‘If you say so,’ said Ollie, closing the suitcase, clicking the locks. There was a set of seed trays to one side and the top one held a wad of white five-pound notes, which he stuffed into his jacket pockets.