The Night Raids

by Jim Kelly

  ‘Thievery pays,’ said Brooke.

  Ollie cocked the pistol and Brooke thought then he’d misjudged Oliver Fox. The eyes held something more than greed and violence. There was a hint of brutal revenge.

  ‘I deserve a life like everyone else. Not a hand-me-down one for the orphan. I’m going to buy one.’

  ‘And this life you’re owed included a pretty wife, did it?’

  Ollie’s eyes glazed over, and he looked beyond Brooke to the door, judging his chances of escape.

  ‘As soon as Peggy recognised the ring she had to die, didn’t she?’ said Brooke. ‘It was sweet proposing, but it didn’t go well, did it?’

  Ollie shook his head. ‘She laughed at me,’ he said, his eyes full of sudden tears. ‘Like it was a joke, that she’d ever go away with me – someone like me. She was going to tell, right then. She said she’d cycle to the Spinning House. I had to stop her. It was her fault too, all of it was her fault, because she laughed at me.’

  Brooke settled his weight on his left foot, ready to spring to the right, trying to judge if he could get to the pistol before Ollie pulled the trigger.

  ‘You hid the body near Byron’s Pool,’ he said. ‘Then came back later to slip it into the river. One thing I never understood: why dump the bikes?’

  ‘I panicked, I wanted to cover our tracks. I went to the Roma, I was gonna plant some of the stolen stuff there and make sure the Eyetie was well and truly fitted up. The neighbour poked his nose in so I left it – but I took Zeri’s bike; it’s been handy, it’s just too big.’

  He tried a smile then, and a half-hearted laugh, which seemed to precipitate some kind of crisis, because the blood drained from his face and he stood unsteadily. ‘I ain’t getting caught. Not now.’

  He clutched the suitcase, levelled the gun and fired.

  Had he meant to miss? Brooke couldn’t be sure. The bullet punched through the door.

  Ollie cocked the trigger again.

  ‘I’m going, like I said. You’re staying here. Put the other cuff round the stove handle and give me the key.’

  Would he shoot again? It was certainly possible. Edison had orders to follow him to the allotment as soon as the women were safely in the shelter. Should Brooke play for time?

  An image of Joy, holding the baby, coming down the stairs at Newnham Croft and handing the child to Claire, played out in his mind. And Luke, as a boy, running for the line on the school playing field.

  He cuffed himself to the wrought-iron stove, and flipped Ollie the key, which he caught easily, waiting for it to drop into his open hand. He was still sweating, and a muscle twitched below one eye, and he kept swallowing saliva.

  At the door he looked back, the suitcase under his arm.

  Then they both heard the Heinkel, returning from the south this time, the hum of the twin engines suddenly close, so that the single pane of glass vibrated in its flimsy frame. They heard tracer fire too, and ack-ack away to the south.

  Ollie licked his lips.

  ‘I’ll take my chances,’ he said, and fled.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  When Bartel saw the flames he knew he’d never see home again. The bullet which had punctured his shoulder had shattered his collarbone, but it wouldn’t kill him, and the pain was diffuse, like a burn. But the smoke that had appeared first, thick and white, leaking through the gun ports on the starboard wing, made it impossible to imagine they could return to the coast, let alone span the German Ocean. The Spitfire which had delivered the coup de grace, in its distinctive black camouflage, had swept past as the Heinkel’s speed had faltered, trailing its own smoke from a flickering flame on the tail.

  The ack-ack fire had caught the bomber hard as they banked to make their second run on Bridge 1505. A fusillade had left a gash behind the bomb bay, and despite being still at his station, the navigator was almost certainly dead. But the explosion had blown out any fire, leaving the ragged, howling hole in the fuselage. No: it was the fire in the wing which would bring them down.

  They were too low to use the parachutes, and Bartel told the radio operator to get a message back, that they were on fire, and that they’d make one last run at the target and then he’d try and flop the aircraft down in the fen beyond. They’d drop all the payload, and the bounce would get them over the river, and out into the country. They had pistols, and they’d even studied the maps, noting the position of the nearest ports at Lynn and Yarmouth. They’d move by night, evade escape, and do their best to get home. There was hope, but it was a fading light.

  Bartel had found the river again, retracing their flight path in reverse.

  One of the bombs they’d dropped on the first run had hit something – a gasometer, perhaps, or a fuel dump – and so there was a blazing yellow fire beyond the target. Its girders stood out in silhouette, like a skeleton against the sun.

  It was still half a mile ahead, and the Heinkel was dropping fast. The fire on the port side had reached the engine and it was labouring, the propeller blades visible, churning through the smoke, which had now turned sooty black. The Spitfire had shot up the tailfins, which were now vertical, so that they were dragging the aircraft back and down.

  Bartel could see details of the riverbank: boats moored, a line of boathouses, a road bridge with a single lorry crossing, and open country, with a startled horse running wild in the water meadows. With a jolt it brought a memory: Helga on his shoulders as they stood at a low picket fence, looking down on the miniature village at Kiel, with its Dutch windmills and ponds, dotted with ducks. Bartel wondered if his life was beginning to play itself out, as death drew closer.

  ‘We’re not going to reach the target,’ he said, and he saw his friend nod. ‘Let them all go, Walther.’

  A single switch released a crossbar, simultaneously allowing all the remaining bombs to fall. The aircraft rose briefly, the river taking them on a long, slow meander to the west, so the shells flew on, to fall on farmland to the east, with a series of dull detonations like thunder.

  ‘Fifty feet,’ said Bartel.

  The ground was appallingly close. The starboard engine was failing too, and the aircraft only just rose far enough to clear a footbridge and a set of smallholdings and huts, and then they could see the common, with its ditches and streams, willow and hawthorn.

  Bartel thought he could just discern an open stretch of grass ahead, so he brought up the bomber’s nose, engineered a stall and let the plane flop down with what was nonetheless a shattering impact. He felt his thighbone crack against hip, and his head struck the instrument panel.

  The fuselage was still moving, surfing on the grass, and they seemed to dip – possibly into a small stream – and then they reared up again, the fuselage breaking in two in the middle, so that the cockpit came to rest pointing skywards.

  Bartel regained consciousness within a few seconds. There was a sharp pain in his left arm, and a dull one across his chest, and his skull felt numb. The bullet wound was now the source of a spreading fire beneath his skin. The blades of the port propeller were still turning. There was no sound, just an echoing silence, as if he’d held his hands over his ears.

  Schmidt was gone, the nosecone shattered.

  The world of sound came suddenly back into focus: he heard a horse neigh, and just as distinctly, a bell ringing far away, but getting closer. He felt a sensation of movement creeping over his forehead and when he looked at his hand it was covered in blood, which was dripping down his face and into his lap.

  He must have passed out again because when he regained consciousness he was standing up in the wreck of the plane. The gash in the fuselage was big enough to act as a door. Just beside it, still strapped in, was the dead navigator.

  Outside, the common was deserted. Illogically, he had been hoping to see the horse. The lurid fire behind Bridge 1505 still blazed, and he could see the landscape very clearly. In the distance there was a church tower, and the smallholding he’d first spotted on Oberst Fritsch’s stereoscope.
/>   Had Schmidt been thrown clear through the cockpit glass? Could he be alive?

  The impact appeared to have blown out the fire, but he could smell aircraft fuel, and it was only a matter of time before a spark caused an explosion.

  He walked as quickly as he could fifty yards forward from the wreck. He’d considered retrieving the body of the navigator, and the gunner in the bathtub, but thought it was better to search for Schmidt, who might be alive.

  It felt like a blessing to stand on firm ground. He had to stop himself falling to his knees and simply embracing the tufts of grass and wild summer flowers, the blooms of which flickered in sympathy with the fire beyond the bridge.

  He tried to think coherently, but when he saw a figure ahead, kneeling in the grass, he shouted out even though it was clearly not his friend. This man was small, but solid, with a round pale face.

  Bartel advanced, drawing his pistol from its holster.

  The kneeling figure looked up and Bartel saw the whites of his eyes, and how scared he was, and that in one hand he had a wallet, and something which caught the light. Schmidt lay in the grass by his knees. As Bartel got closer he could see that the Plexiglas had torn at Schmidt’s uniform, and so the glistening black substance which covered his face and left arm, and his left leg, was blood. His right leg was missing, and his torso was buckled, like a folded pillow.

  The kneeling figure had a small suitcase by his side, and a pistol in his belt, but he seemed utterly unable to move. The wallet shook violently in his hand, and so the contents began to spill out, and Bartel saw a black and white photograph flutter down. In the yellow glow of the distant fire it was impossible to see the image itself but Bartel knew it well. He had the same photograph in his own flying suit: the two families together, on the beach at Wannsee.

  He was holding something else in his hand, and Bartel recognised his friend’s lighter, which was silver and emblazoned with the Luftwaffe insignia.

  The juxtaposition of his friend’s broken body and this casual act of sacrilege seemed to break something, finally, in Bartel’s mind. The world he’d loved, and taken for granted, deserted him, leaving behind the smoking wreck of the Heinkel, and this kneeling boy.

  ‘Stehe auf,’ he said, gesturing with the gun for the thief to stand up.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  In the silence after the Heinkel’s crash-landing, Brooke smashed the window of the shed and shouted out for help. Edison found him quickly, and set him free, and Brooke sent him back to get help: Fox was on the run, and he was armed, and capable of using his weapon. Brooke’s guess would be that he’d head north, out of the city, along the river. With the unlocked cuff dangling from his wrist, he set out across the common towards the wreck of the Heinkel, which he could see dancing in the light of the flames from the gasometer.

  The aircraft stood out starkly as he got close, the cockpit angled sharply up, the back-broken fuselage behind, one wing crumpled, the other torn away. The air was heavy with the acrid smoke, the stench of wiring and electrics, and seared steel. Small flames guttered in the dark, and Brooke could smell air fuel, and wondered how long he had before the tanks ignited.

  When he saw the two bodies in the grass about fifty yards beyond the wreck, he presumed the crew had crawled out of the fuselage, or been thrown clear. One man was in a flight suit, but brutally broken and bloodied, a leg missing, a pistol still unused in its holder on his belt.

  Then he turned to his comrade, who lay a few feet further on, but there was no flying suit here, just a shirt and trousers, and the round white face of Ollie Fox. A bullet hole pierced his skull just above his right eye: an entry wound, because the grass beyond was dashed with blood and brains. He thought Fox looked resigned, as if he’d expected retribution here, on the common, falling from the sky.

  A litter of cards and money – Reichsmarks – lay around the body. Brooke stooped and plucked a note from the grass – a hundert bill – and saw that others had blown away towards the river. Fox’s hand, open at the moment of death, was empty.

  Brooke went back to the stricken airman, and felt for a pulse at the bloody neck, but there was nothing; he saw now that his face was lacerated with wounds, and that small shards of glass or plastic were embedded in each. A distorted memory of Peggy Wylde’s skin, punctured by the razor-sharp teeth of the pike, flashed once before his eyes, and was gone.

  The sound of fire, not from the stricken Heinkel but from the blaze beyond the bridge, subsided in a heartbeat, to be replaced by the hiss of steam. Arcs of water from fire hoses hung against the night sky, a white cloud rising. Standing still, he could feel the tiny cool droplets touching his skin.

  The blackened hulk of the aircraft seemed to crouch, beast-like, awaiting the final explosion which would end its misery. Flames licked now at the gun ports, and around the cockpit. Brooke thought the fuel tanks were in the wings, two in each, but that if one ignited the sudden heat would trigger them all.

  The port wing, which had partly detached, was on fire, but the flames were half-hearted.

  Unless they’d been thrown clear there were still three men in the wreck.

  Brooke circled to the west, calculating that if the wreck burst into flames he had time to make the safety of the river. After fifty yards the gash in the fuselage, ripped out by ack-ack fire, came into view, the lifeless form of the navigator hanging dead in his straps.

  The rear gunner had got out of the bathtub undercarriage to avoid being crushed in the crash landing, but his body lay lifeless in the grass, his head at a sharp angle to his spine.

  The sudden stench of the air fuel was almost hypnotic, and when he filled his lungs the scene spun before his eyes and he had to crouch down.

  After a moment he stood up and saw the pilot, in what was left of the glass nose cone, and it looked, bizarrely, as if he was climbing back into his seat. In silhouette he appeared agile, the movements fluid and unhurried. He sat for a few seconds and then turned towards Brooke and held up a hand, and then there was the slight inclination of the head which any smoker would recognise, and the small blue-white flame of a lighter.

  Brooke imagined the engines firing, the stricken Heinkel suddenly lurching back into the sky, heading home. An almost telepathic instinct told him the pilot had imagined this as well, and that as he smoked he saw himself back at home, perhaps, surrounded by family and friends.

  There was a moment of hesitation, in which the air around Brooke seemed to thicken and coalesce, in which he had time to turn towards the river and note the gentle ripples on its surface.

  Then the explosion knocked him down, the air torn from his lungs, a sudden heat at the back of his neck. When he came round he was looking up into the sky, the fuselage fabric raining down, each shred alight.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Three months later

  The vicar, leading Brooke out into the churchyard, said that the roses were a source of mild scandal in the parish and that he’d been forced to instruct the women who arranged the flowers on the altar, and for weddings, not to remove them to the compost heap behind the boiler, which is where he’d found them on several occasions. They were shop-bought, but there was never a card, and they were always placed squarely on the single stone that marked the grave of the crew of the Heinkel which had crashed on Stourbridge Common.

  It had fallen to Fen Ditton, the nearest village to the site, to provide a final resting place for these four German airmen who had died so far from home. The vicar, a man in his sixties who was a veteran of the Great War, had stepped forward on behalf of St Mary the Virgin to offer a burial plot. The crewmen were interred together, their names inscribed on a simple stone with their ranks, the information obtained from identity tags found at the scene and verified by the Red Cross.

  It had been hot on the day of the burial, a clear sky overhead, and the vicar had spoken a verse in German – explaining afterwards over tea that he’d studied at Heidelberg before the Great War and served at a medical station behind the
lines at the Somme because he could speak to the enemy injured. The verse had been a fragment of Goethe, which he’d chosen solely for its calm poetic lyrical metre.

  Now winter had reduced the graveyard to shadows and stone.

  ‘Here they are,’ said the vicar. At the graveyard lychgate a black shiny car had pulled up.

  ‘They’ve got bolder,’ he said. ‘Which is rather wonderful in its way. I’ve told the ladies who still mutter that we can all respect the dead, whatever their homeland.’

  The driver got out to open the back doors for two passengers: both women, the younger – holding the bunch of roses – supporting the older, so that by the time they were on the path one leant against the other.

  ‘Inspector,’ said the vicar. ‘I’ll leave you to this. The church is open,’ he added, looking up at the sky, which was low and grey and beginning to bleed a light rain.

  Brooke watched Elsie Wylde approaching, her mother Alice looking down, as if her feet might betray her.

  Nora and Arthur Pollard had been cremated in line with their oft-quoted desire for no fuss and bother. But the funeral of Peggy and Connie had been a grand affair, with a glass hearse and black-plumed horses, at Mill Road Cemetery, on the far edge of the Kite.

  Hundreds had stood around the grave after a private service at the Methodist Chapel near the girls’ home. Alice had been too sick to leave her bed. Uniformed constables had stopped the traffic to allow the stately progress of the hearse as it ran beside Parker’s Piece and the serried rows of white bell tents. The only scandal on that day had been a minor one: Ollie Fox’s foster parents had sent a wreath from Newmarket, which made it clear they would never return, a vow they kept when the boy was laid in a pauper’s grave out at Milton.

  The two women arrived, and Brooke thought Alice was a bit more stooped and that Elsie looked taller, less downtrodden.