The Mathematical Bridge

by Jim Kelly

  ‘One child brought in from a domestic in Romsey Town, that was the night before last. He’d been hit pretty hard, bruising and cracked bone here’ – she placed a finger on the bone ridge above the left eye. ‘He’s not going home until a constable calls at the house. We’ve seen the kid before. A regular customer, in fact.’

  Brooke copied out an address and name.

  ‘Any more ideas?’ he asked, massaging his eyes. ‘I need to find a name.’

  ‘I’d try the obvious, Eden: orphanages, the council foster homes, the churches. Other than that, I think I’d just wait. Someone somewhere must be waking up to find a child gone. Just imagine if it was Joy.’

  For a moment he saw his daughter as she’d once been: a child asleep in a cot, before he made the effort to push the image aside.

  Claire’s eyes moved up and down the ward. ‘It’s the usual dramas here.’ She pointed at the first bed on the right and onwards. ‘Meningitis, influenza, influenza … We’ve got nearly ten thousand evacuees in town, Eden. The vaccies are part of life. You know we’re on half-staff thanks to the war. It’s such a mess: when you break up families, everything’s up in the air. What do we do with a five-year-old who’s crying for his mum when she’s eighty miles away in the East End?’

  Cambridge had become a city of children. Judged a safe distance from London, and largely bereft of heavy war industries, it was seen as an ideal sanctuary within a few hours’ journey of the capital. Crocodiles of youngsters, each child adorned with an evacuee’s label, were a common sight, weaving their way into town from the railway station.

  ‘Who’d do it, Claire – murder a child like that? What man would do that?’

  ‘Why’s it a man, Eden?’ she asked. ‘The world’s in chaos. The men are leaving for France, for basic training, for the navy, the air force. Families left in pieces. There’s plenty of women left who can’t cope. They don’t all have to suffer in silence.’ She wagged a finger. ‘Lesson number one, Inspector. Don’t make presumptions.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Detective Sergeant Ralph Edison appeared at Brooke’s office door at just after eight-thirty, armed, as always, with a mug of tea and a plate from the Spinning House canteen. The waft of fried bacon, several slices of which were compressed in a bap, had preceded him. The smell was poignant, as the imposition of pork rationing was days away and the hypnotic aroma might soon prove a thing of the past. Edison took a seat, the trouser legs of his old suit riding up to reveal clocks on his socks.

  The outbreak of war had seen retired officers reassigned to active duty to fill the gaping holes left by conscripts and volunteers. Edison had been in the uniformed branch for thirty years, but Brooke needed a sergeant, and so the sixty-six-year-old had been forced to dust down that second-hand suit. Despite the plain clothes, Edison’s natural confident authority allowed him to project a sense of the old uniform, a kind of aura of constabulary power, even as it hung neatly in the wardrobe at home, shrouded in a paper cover.

  ‘Still no news from the river,’ said Edison, his voice unhurried, almost stately. ‘The only news will be bad news, of course.’

  ‘Yes. Indeed, Sergeant. But we need that body. We’ve nothing else. No name, no motive, no murder weapon – even the sack might give us a lead. The problem is: where is the body? Nooks and crannies, Edison. We need to look everywhere. It’ll turn up eventually. They always do. For now, we need to get on the killer’s trail. Today.’

  Edison sipped his tea. Brooke often imagined that he could hear the mechanical workings of his sergeant’s steady mind, slow but sure. Retirement had promised him time for the allotment. Even now, in the dead of winter, he popped by on the way to the station. Judging by the earth on his hands he’d been wielding a spade, clearing snow perhaps from between the frozen beds of overwintered veg.

  ‘Domestics?’ asked Edison, finally.

  Brooke pushed a piece of paper across the desk. ‘One. That’s a note of the name and address. The child’s in Addenbrooke’s with a cracked cheekbone. Claire says the father’s done it before. A constable’s down to visit – can you make sure it’s been done?’

  Edison nodded.

  ‘I saw the child’s hand, Edison, as clear as you are.’

  Edison nodded as if Brooke needed the affirmation.

  ‘So we’re saying a sack with a child – what, three, four years old?’ Edison held out his arm straight and curled his fist as if grasping the top of a sack. ‘He’s only stayed afloat because of the air in his lungs. He’s struggling, but he’s breathing, coming up for air – he managed to shout out. And there’s the cold water. He couldn’t have been in the river long, sir. My money’d be on Silver Street Bridge. That’s what, fifty yards upstream? Or the Little Bridges on Coe Fen – there’s three. Lonely, away from the main road.’

  ‘Check them out,’ said Brooke. ‘I sent young Collins to take a look at Silver Street last night. See if he saw anything. He’s on the second shift so he’ll be back in after lunch. The snow was thick, untouched. If that’s where the sack was hauled over there’ll have been tracks, prints.’

  ‘If he found anything, he’d have reported back,’ said Edison.

  ‘Maybe. Double-check. Meanwhile, let’s do the obvious, Sergeant. Schools, orphanages, council – anyone who deals with children. The boy’s missing. Let’s find his name.’ Brooke looked at his watch, standing. ‘Meanwhile, I’m for the top office.’

  Within the Spinning House the euphemism ‘top office’ was universally recognised. Detective Chief Inspector Carnegie-Brown ruled the Borough with a blunt Glaswegian authority. Her eyrie, a large attic room, had housed, in the days of the workhouse, thirty fallen women in iron beds. She had brought to it an added spartan crispness.

  ‘Good luck, sir,’ said Edison, slipping away.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Chief Inspector Carnegie-Brown’s door was always open.

  Brooke hovered, executing a nicely judged cough, noting that his superior was examining a file, glasses held at the bridge of a sharp nose. She sat behind a vast desk, complete with Highland hunting scenes carved in relief, which she’d had shipped down from her last post in Glasgow. Single, tweedy, aloof, she’d nevertheless gained some grudging respect for her straight dealing. Brooke had glimpsed her occasionally on his summer swims, camped out on a day off at Fen Ditton, fly fishing from the bank. She always conjured up a whiff of the Scottish great outdoors.

  ‘Brooke. Good – take a seat. The child – anything?’

  Brooke filled her in, but he could tell she wasn’t listening, merely composing whatever it was she was going to say to him. They swapped some perfunctory remarks about calling on the county police force for reinforcements in the search. Then she pushed a file towards Brooke across the pristine surface of her desk.

  ‘You can read that at your leisure but let me offer a precis. Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, the king’s brother, who enjoyed a brief and unremarkable academic career at Trinity College, is to visit our fair city.’

  Brooke was no cheering fan of the royal family. He’d been perfectly happy to fight for king and country, but he found the peripheral members of the dynasty he’d met on his duties remarkably unremarkable. In his head, he tried to reconstruct the current family tree. The old king had left five sons. The eldest – the disgraced Edward VIII – had abdicated to become the Duke of Windsor. That left George VI on the throne. Henry was the next oldest. Even then there were more: a younger Prince Richard, certainly; and one who’d died after the Great War, a sickly child, whose name escaped Brooke.

  ‘I know we don’t mention Windsor any more,’ said Carnegie-Brown. ‘With good reason. We don’t mention Henry either, for more benign reasons. A man of so little note his nickname is – apparently – the Unknown Soldier.’

  Brooke nodded. He dimly remembered seeing a royal prince running in a steeplechase across Coe Fen, cheered on by a loyal crowd, on his return after the war. The city had been dour, grey and exhausted, like the rest of the country.
So any occasion for celebration was seized on with a manic intensity. The spectators had hurrahed and waved flags; children perched on shoulders to get a princely view. He recalled a large, fleshy young man, tall but broad, with a round head, shyly raising a hand in response.

  ‘Prince Henry is suddenly much more important than we thought,’ added Carnegie-Brown icily. ‘The king has two daughters, both yet to reach an age at which they could succeed their father fully, if there was an illness, an accident – or enemy action, God forbid. The family continues to stay in London, and the king wishes, on occasion, to visit the front line. If anything happened we’d need a regent. Henry has been chosen to fill this role. If anything happens he will, effectively, be king until the Princess Elizabeth comes of age. Then he’d go back to being a slightly less unknown soldier. Clearly this scenario is hypothetical. It is not theoretical. Measures have been taken. His personal security is of the utmost importance. If the king leaves the country – as he will do next week to visit France – then Henry is forbidden to do the same, despite his current military role as a liaison officer between our army on the Belgian border and Paris. Either King George or Prince Henry must be safely in the realm.’

  There was something in Carnegie-Brown’s voice which intimated a less than unbridled affection for the institution it was her duty to defend. Brooke suspected a brooding Scottish grudge.

  ‘All of which amounts to a simple problem: we need to make sure his stay in the city is remembered for nothing more than its bland predictability. County is, in theory, coordinating the security, but in practice the burden of responsibility is ours. He’s on our ground.’

  Outside of the old city centre, policing fell to the Cambridgeshire force. Its headquarters was less than half a mile away, on Castle Hill. Relations between the two forces were hostile, although no one Brooke had ever quizzed seemed able to trace this bristling antagonism back to any specific event. The prospect of liaison of any kind was not alluring.

  She tossed a note across the desk. ‘We can call on County for manpower, logistics. There’s a number there to call. Ring it, Brooke. Get all the help you can. Let’s get this over with and move on. The visit’s posted for Saturday 11th January. All leave is cancelled, here and at County.’

  Dismissed, Brooke retreated to his office and read the file. The schedule for the royal visit was suitably mundane. Prince Henry planned to arrive by car, take up a suite of rooms at Trinity, then drive to a football match on Parker’s Piece between an army side and one raised by the university. He would then go back to Trinity, on foot, to take tea. In the evening he was to be the guest of Queens’ College. He would be invited to open the new Fisher Building, an extension on the west bank. There would be a celebratory formal dinner in the Great Hall. He would then return to Trinity to sleep, leaving by car after breakfast for St James’s Palace.

  Brooke summoned his reserves of patience and stretched out his hand to pick up the phone and get a line to County, but the phone rang as he touched it. It was the duty sergeant from the front desk. A Father John Ward, of St Alban’s Church, Upper Town, had rung to say they had been sent thirty-two evacuees from London the day before. They had all been fed and slept in the church overnight. Roll call this morning revealed one was missing.

  ‘A five-year-old,’ said the duty sergeant, but Brooke was already on his feet, reaching for his hat, spurred on by the image of a pale hand breaking the surface of the silver and black river.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Upper Town, and the Catholic church of St Alban’s, lay on the far side of the city’s Great Bridge, where the Romans had built their outpost on rising ground, which reached a low man-made peak at the crest of Castle Hill. Looking east as a child Brooke had found it easy to believe his father’s studied observation that the next encounter with land at that height would be the Urals, beyond Moscow, which helped explain the bitter wind. The whole district had a forlorn air and had been rotting quietly in poverty and squalor since the advent of the Black Death, forgotten for five centuries, except for the wharves on the riverside. Small, mean terraced houses huddled in a warren of streets on the steep bank above the Cam.

  Immigrants had come and gone – the Dutch, the Huguenots, the Letts – until the Irish arrived, helping to dig the ditches of the Fens and then lay the arrow-straight railway lines. The Lower Town, spread out in medieval honeyed stone, had made its charitable donations to alleviate the blatant poverty of its poor cousin on the hill: a Free School, a Methodist Mission, a set of almshouses. Unemployment in the thirties had left it squalid and tatty; and even now, especially in the blackout, the Upper Town was a place to shun after sunset. It had a brooding reputation in the town for radical politics, earning it the nickname Red Hill.

  Brooke, walking west in the snowy streets, could see the Upper Town’s grey silhouette against the sharp, icy-blue sky, comprising a gentle hill, the castle ruins, the county gaol and the high ridge roof of St Alban’s. Approaching through the area marked on one of his beloved old maps as Bridgetown, he crossed over the water into transpontine Cambridge. On one side of the street the high walls of Magdalene College – the only medieval institution west of the river – blocked the low sunlight; on the other, a line of ancient houses and shops, in jutting medieval tiers, reached out over the pavement and the narrow road.

  As a child Brooke had furtively examined these buildings on his zigzag wanderings between school and home. Each storey was supported by what one of his schoolmasters had called ‘lewd’ images, ironwork brackets depicting debauchery: a naked couple entwined, a phallus between bunches of grapes, a woman’s jutting breasts – all designed, in medieval doublespeak, to ward off the devil. Given his absent father, and his mother’s death when he was six, and the lack of siblings, these images had been left to provide a raucous version of the tale of the birds and the bees.

  At the foot of Castle Hill, the slums began. A winding street led his eye away, empty washing lines criss-crossing, a small child playing with a wheeled cart in the gutter. A pack of mismatched dogs fought over a clump of chip papers. Unseen, a few streets away, was the ‘rookery’ – a tumbledown range of tenements on the sweetly named Honey Hill, an address seen daily on the list of defendants at the magistrates’ court. On the right, on rising ground, stood St Alban’s, in brutal Victorian grey stone, the lines rigid and machine-cut, without any friendly hints of a mason’s chisel. An overgrown graveyard led to a vast porch in which were piled sandbags and wood. As a uniformed constable in the years just after the war he’d often found rough sleepers here, but they were tolerated by the church, and he’d always let them be.

  Inside, under a double line of hanging globe lights, children were having breakfast at trestle tables set out down the central aisle of the nave. The pews were littered with bedding, suitcases packed away beneath, evacuee labels still attached. The noise was joyful, a cacophony of chatter, which might have reflected the heady temperature. Warm air was rising from iron grilles set in the stone floors. A priest in a simple black cassock had seen Brooke and was waving him over to where he was dispensing milk into mugs.

  He was smiling before Brooke shook his hand.

  ‘Father Ward?’

  ‘Inspector Brooke. Breakfast? I can offer toast and tea. You’d have to be quick, they’re like gannets.’ That was the sound exactly: a colony of seabirds, safely in possession of a towering cliff. Ward was in his late thirties perhaps, with a finely drawn face, but his thick hair was as white as the snow outside. There was no trace of a regional accent, just the clipped, precise tones of an English university graduate.

  In profile, Brooke was struck by a Hollywood likeness to a glamorous priest. Claire had taken him to the Regent to see Boys Town, in which Spencer Tracy tried to save the soul of would-be gangster Mickey Rooney. There was something of the star’s muscular good looks in Ward, overshadowing something more sensitive.

  ‘Can we talk somewhere?’ asked Brooke.

  Ward handed a crate of milk bottles to a middl
e-aged woman in an apron, who was vigorously buttering toast. She took it without a word, hauling it up onto the tabletop. Her hair, bright red, was piled up on her head and reminded Brooke of a Georgian print of a society lady with a birdcage in her curls. The sleeves of her blouse were rolled up, one arm festooned with coloured metal bangles from her wrist to her elbow. She was a glamorous sight, despite the sheen of perspiration on her face.

  Ward led Brooke to the altar, where a monstrance stood catching the light, its centre circle empty of the host. Here, close to the gilded tabernacle, the smell of incense was almost a physical blow. A side door led into a small office blessed with a single window in the shape of a crucifix into which had been set lurid red and blue glass.

  The priest didn’t sit. ‘I’m sorry to raise the alarm. It’s just the responsibility is onerous: these are God’s children, and for one night I was their father. So I rang.’

  Again, the clear English diction was remarkable. Brooke imagined this voice reading the news on the BBC.

  ‘The child’s still missing?’ asked Brooke.

  Ward seemed to crumple slightly before answering, bowing his head. ‘Yes. Sean Flynn, aged five. He arrived with the rest yesterday by train. A total of thirty-two children: twenty girls, twelve boys. They walked here from the station, and we gave them a hot meal. Just soup and bread – but there was enough for seconds, thirds. Mr Lloyd, the grocer from the top of the hill, provided apples too. They were tired, overexcited, so I organised a sing-song. There’s a piano, and Mrs Aitken – you saw her outside helping – she can play. It was rather wonderful, all by candlelight. There were tears of course, especially at bedtime. Prayers helped. I locked up at nine, and we did a roll call. We’ve asked them to keep their labels, otherwise it would be chaos on earth. Thirty-two counted at lights-out and checked against the register. I did a roll call an hour ago when we got them up to wash: there’s just one lav, so you can imagine … I hadn’t unlocked the doors, they’d been shut all night, but Flynn was missing. So I phoned.’ He touched the black Bakelite receiver. ‘Of course, a lot of them are homesick and so it’s no great surprise. We found the small window in the toilet off the latch. It’s the only way he could have got out.’