The Mathematical Bridge

by Jim Kelly

  ‘We’re sure he did get out? You’ve searched the church?’

  ‘Yes. Twice. It’s not difficult, Inspector. It’s a poor parish and it’s a poor church. Marie – Mrs Aitken – supervised the children while I checked everything, the confessional boxes, the sacristy – although that was locked too – the cupboards, the vestment box, everything.’

  ‘Attic, crypt?’

  ‘We’ve neither.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘The presbytery next door, to the north. St Alban’s – the school, that is – is on the other side of the church, to the south. Three buildings, all clustered round the yard, and all the same depressing architect, I’m afraid. There’re no connecting doors. Each one stands alone, although our lives are of one thread – if I can be poetic.’

  ‘Can you show me?’ asked Brooke.

  There was a side door that led out into the yard, which was clearly used as a playground. Hopscotch squares had been drawn in chalk, and a single set of goalposts drawn on a stretch of blank wall. The church took up one side, the school another, the house the third, all in the same institutional livery: green-painted window frames and doors, red brick, with a few Victorian flourishes.

  ‘That’s your house?’ asked Brooke.

  Ward looked startled, as if he’d not noticed it before.

  ‘Yes. Built for three priests, but with the passage of time … I am alone.’

  ‘Where did you sleep last night?’ Brooke failed to keep the emphasis off the critical word. It wasn’t an accusation, but he saw a shadow cross Ward’s open face, a look of fleeting disappointment.

  ‘I slept in my office where we’ve just talked, but I left the door open. Mrs Aitken slept out with the children, in the front pew. She’s a saint.’

  ‘I see. And where does she normally sleep?’

  ‘There’s a housekeeper’s flat, in the presbytery, de rigueur for the time. Catholic priests are not renowned for their domestic skills, Inspector, or compliant, useful wives.’

  So, not entirely alone, thought Brooke as he struggled to put aside the idea that he was being fobbed off. The priest’s tone had become breezy.

  They went back to the office. Ward put a finger on a file lying on the desk.

  ‘I thought you’d want this: young Flynn’s details. Have a seat. I’ll get you that cup of tea.’

  Brooke nodded. An offer of a cup of tea had become the common currency of the Home Front. Sometimes it seemed unpatriotic to even think of saying no.

  He read the forms by the red and blue light streaming in through the window. The parents were listed as Gerald and Mary Flynn, the address Askew Road, Shepherd’s Bush, London. Flynn had been a pupil at the Sacred Heart, a diocesan primary school run by the Catholic Church. The father’s trade was listed as railway clerk. Flynn’s scholastic record was compressed into two words: ‘easily led’. He could read with difficulty, his mathematics was poor, but he was good at sport, especially football. His height was given at three feet three inches. A brief medical note listed no causes for concern. The boy had been handed over to diocesan officials at King’s Cross the day before, his form signed and dated.

  The sound of a good-natured riot swelled in the church, and Ward reappeared with the cup of tea.

  ‘I’ve just told them Sean’s missing and that he’s probably hiding in the church. They’ve to find him. It’s a very exciting game and I’ve set aside a prize of one orange.’

  ‘No one had noticed a missing friend?’

  ‘No – no surprise there. Most children evacuated after the outbreak of war moved en masse, as it were. Whole schools, certainly whole classes. Some parents hung on; perhaps the children were too young, or shy. The government keeps telling us the raids will come. Minds have changed. So the diocese decided to collect up all the stay-at-homes and create a single consignment – if I can put it that way. There are a few friends, classmates, but a lot are on their own, including Sean, I think.’

  Ward glanced at a clock on the wall. ‘The children are late,’ he said. ‘I’ve to walk them next door to the school. There’s a welcome assembly, then they’ll meet the people who’ve agreed to take them in. Or who’ve been told to take them in. Or been paid to take them in. The children are excited. Apprehensive, too, it’s only natural. What should I do, Inspector?’

  ‘Let the children finish their search,’ said Brooke. ‘Then you must get on, take them to school, and I’ll see if we can find Sean. But there’s something you should know, Father …’

  Dredging the river was not a private operation. It required boats, and nets, and plenty of constables along the banks. News would get back to St Alban’s soon enough. Brooke had no choice but to be honest.

  ‘Father, you need to be ready for the worst. A child drowned in the river last night. We’re dredging now. It was a young boy. I’m sorry …’

  ‘Oh God, no.’ He shook his head, one hand searching for the edge of his desk for support, the other covering his eyes. He fell back into his seat, diminished, momentarily reduced to everyday human scale. For the first time Brooke saw the cruelty in the honorific title bestowed by the church: Father.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Brooke unlocked his front door and shouted, ‘Home!’

  Claire crossed the hallway carrying a casserole dish and paused to kiss him, the heat of the bowl between them. Now that their daughter was back under the same roof, the evening greeting had become more discreet. They used to hold on to each other, to mark the daily reunion.

  The old house was draughty, but the light of an open fire flickered from within the dining room, and the few flakes of snow which had entered on Brooke’s coat-tails melted quickly on the old rug as he stamped his shoes, which were caked with mud and slush from the riverbank.

  ‘You’re on time. Well done. A first.’

  ‘We can’t find the boy. It’s dark. There’s nothing else to do. I’m stumped. Least we know who he was. A vaccie – from St Alban’s in the Upper Town.’

  Claire bustled ahead to the table, which had been set neatly with what was left of the crystal glasses, his mother’s cutlery, even a candlestick.

  ‘What’s the celebration?’ he asked, swinging off his coat and lobbing his hat onto the stand.

  Joy appeared on the steps, taking each one carefully, still in her nurse’s uniform from the day shift at the hospital. His daughter was three months pregnant and radiated good health. She looked like her mother, neat and feline, but had his colouring: dark, almost black hair and blue eyes. Claire’s natural buoyant energy found its echo in Joy, and the two together seemed to conjure up a little cyclone of activity. Joy had her mother’s common sense, but there was no trace of the need to organise, the obsessive drive to check that all was well.

  ‘There’s a letter from Luke,’ said Joy, answering his question. ‘He’s well, so we thought we’d be grateful for good news.’

  Brooke found a bottle of wine on the hearth, one of his father’s red clarets from the dusty cellar, which he poured, sniffing the earthy bouquet.

  ‘How’s Doric?’ asked Joy. As a child he’d taken her on clandestine nightly visits to the porter’s lodge, and she’d been taught to toast bread over the coke fire.

  ‘Thriving. He’s been made an ARP warden, which gives him bragging rights over the head porter, so he’s quietly triumphant.’

  She nodded. ‘Mum says you’ve started sleeping at night. Is it true?’

  ‘No, it isn’t. I come home, I eat, I go to bed. I have a regime – at least I’m told that’s what I need. The sleeping part of the equation is still elusive, especially when your mother is on shifts.’

  ‘Don’t blame it on me,’ said Claire, closing the door, boxing in the heat. ‘Is it snowing still?’

  ‘A few flakes, nothing more.’

  Brooke’s insomnia, which had begun in the sanatorium after the war and deepened with the passing years, had become part of his life. But Claire had noticed a gradual decline in his natural energy and spirit, a
s if the endless days, merging into endless nights, were running him down.

  Charged with trying to find the secret of sleep, Brooke had turned to an old friend, a scientist called Peter Aldiss, a nighthawk like himself, engaged on a twenty-four-hour, seemingly endless series of research experiments designed to probe the mechanisms of the circadian rhythm, the inbuilt clocks of nature. Aldiss had been his roommate before the Great War. He’d taken a brotherly interest in Brooke’s sleepless nightmare.

  Aldiss’s regime was founded on the concept of ‘establishment’: a routine had to be created, and then rigidly followed. When Brooke opened his eyes, he had to go out in the daylight. If it was not too painful he was to stick to the ochre-tinted glasses in order to maximise the brightness perceived. During the day regular walks were prescribed, especially if the sun was out. Meals were to be treated almost as religious ceremonies: three, to mark the phases of the clock, from breakfast, through lunch, to the evening meal. Nothing was to be eaten during the phase designated as ‘sleep’. After dinner there was to be a period of relaxation, the long, warm bath in the peaty brown water. (Hot in Brooke’s case, as he abhorred the concept of lukewarm.) Then bed, in a dark room even if the blackout rules did not apply, with the window open, the sound of the river percolating across the water meadow. So far, the routine had failed to engender sleep. The nightwalker had abandoned his bed. But each night he tried.

  After dinner it fell to Brooke to read Luke’s letter, as both Claire and Joy insisted he had the voice just right. While their son had been with the main expeditionary force sent across the Channel in readiness for war, his unit had been moved south, to reinforce parts of the French army camped along the long-disputed borderlands of the Saar.

  Luke’s news was domestic, principally encompassing diet. One passage Brooke liked:

  Roper, who was in the last bash, says that they’ll have us digging trenches once the frost goes, and then we’ll be back where it started in 1914. I don’t fancy sharing a billet with rats. The smart money’s on an attack in the north, just like the last time. In which case we’re in a backwater, which is fine by me. The food here is excellent. We’ve been stealing eggs and shooting anything that moves. And the Saar’s full of fat fish, although their precise identity is a mystery.

  Quickly folding the letter, Brooke asked the question that seemed to overshadow the house like the trees on the riverbank.

  ‘And Ben? Anything?’

  Joy’s husband, Ben, was a submariner. The last they’d heard he was at Rosyth in Scotland, awaiting orders. At Christmas, when they’d met him for the first time, he’d sat quite calmly before the fire and described what it was like to wait, and listen, immobile in the ‘fish’ – as he called it – on the seabed. If their child was a boy, Brooke thought, Jonah was destined to be the name. Ben, it seemed, liked to sleep when the submarine was lying in the depths, revealing an almost superhuman degree of nerveless composure.

  Joy shook her head. ‘Nothing. No news … What’s in the paper?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Brooke, unfolding the Telegraph, scanning the headlines. ‘The Finns are putting up a fight against the Russians, the Chinese are retreating in the face of the Japanese.’ He glossed over a report that the government was under pressure to take control of the Norwegian ports before the Germans beat them to it, securing their supplies of iron ore shipped out of Narvik and Tromsø. Action on that coast would bring Ben’s submarine into the real war.

  ‘And there’s this,’ announced Brooke, as Claire appeared in her uniform ready for the night shift, then perched on a chair, removing a set of glass earrings. ‘Tonight’s offering,’ he said. Each evening he chose something to read out loud, usually in an attempt to avoid introspection, and lift the mood. Often the selection was informed by Doric’s careful reading of the daily papers at the porter’s lodge.

  MAN WITH THREE WIVES CAUGHT

  TRYING TO MARRY THE FOURTH

  John Edward Shrike, a corporal in the Royal Lancashire Regiment, was convicted on two separate charges of bigamy at Preston Assizes.

  The court heard that Shrike, aged 38, married in 1935, left his first wife due to ‘irreconcilable difficulties’ and that the parting had been ‘amicable’.

  After the breakdown of this first marriage he’d moved out of the family home in Croydon, south London, to Ilford, Essex, maintaining his job as an Underground train driver.

  He met his second wife in 1936 and they were married at Basildon register office. Shrike lied about his marital status and gave a false place of birth.

  Shrike’s second wife left him for another man, and he continued to live in their home in Ilford until the outbreak of war, when he volunteered.

  His third wife lived in Northallerton, north Yorkshire. He had met her while on leave from training at Catterick Camp. They were married at York register office.

  Shrike completed his training and was stationed in Surrey as a gunner, at barracks on the edge of Croydon. His wife and child stayed in Northallerton.

  At a dance he met a local woman and proposed at their second meeting. She demanded that they marry in her local church, and the banns were posted.

  Shrike visited his first wife, who lived nearby and with whom he had remained on good terms, to ask her to turn a blind eye to the marriage.

  He explained to her that he ‘couldn’t stand the strain of thinking we might all bump into each other’.

  She went to the police.

  Defence counsel said Shrike was ‘handsome, charming, and told women he was due to inherit a large sum of money’. He found it difficult living alone and missed regular meals when away from home.

  The judge, Mr Justice Acre, said, ‘Bigamy is in danger of becoming a national industry. There are signs it may prove as prevalent in this war as it did in the last. Women, separated from family and friends, must beware of predatory men who see themselves as free of the constraints of a binding union.’

  Brooke set the paper down.

  ‘The world has lost its mind,’ said Joy.

  Later, lying in the bath in the attic, Brooke tried to relax. This had been his mother’s refuge, three floors above his father’s laboratory. She’d installed the bath, and a chaise longue, and a reading lamp. Brooke had lain on the carpet to hear a bedtime story. In those days sleep had been full of adventures, and castles, and quests.

  Brooke had issued an order before leaving the Spinning House that the search of the river would resume for one more day. The moment was approaching when he’d be required to call the missing boy’s parents.

  Missing: it was a concept which haunted Brooke. He’d been missing in the desert. It was what he feared most might befall Luke, which was why the letters were so wonderful.

  The bath had grown tepid, so he pulled the plug, watching the water circle. A familiar sense of despair circled too. He wondered how it had come to this, just twenty-one years after the guns had fallen silent on the Western Front. A new war was about to begin. In retrospect it was inevitable.

  As a detective sergeant he’d once been called out to a disturbance outside the Tivoli cinema. It would have been 1936 or 1937 – he couldn’t be sure, but he did recall the name of the film: Our Fighting Navy. A band of anti-war protestors, all students, had gathered outside. A counter-march, a thousand strong, had set out in the spirit of a student ‘rag’, organised by the Fascist League. Brooke had been forced to order the constables to draw truncheons, as a melee broke out in the foyer. He remembered chants of ‘Down with Hitler!’ and ‘Heil Hitler!’ Then someone had let off a stink bomb. It had all seemed very English.

  And now, on the other side of the channel, Luke was waiting for the thaw so he could dig his trench.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The arrival of sleep was precipitous: he felt his feet falling into an unseen pit, and his consciousness followed, tumbling. The sound of the river beyond the water meadows faded away. So many of his dreams were not dreams at all, but versions of some fleeting, half-remembered moment of
his former life. This time he was back in the Great War, on the Sinai coast road, pushing the Turks back, mile by mile, in a cheerless campaign of attrition aimed at the eventual capture of Jerusalem; a crusade, of sorts. The last crusade.

  They’d reached a bridge over a river which cut under the road to reach the sea. A river only by name; this was an arroyo, a dry riverbed, the mere fingerprint of the torrent which had run in the few hours after a desert downpour. A line of men lingered on the bridge, looking down. He should have passed by, but curiosity prompted him to order the driver of his armoured car to pull over, allowing a line of horses to take the lead. The sullen crowd of men parted to let him reach the concrete balustrade.

  Below him, the arroyo’s striations were certainly beautiful, the dry sand threaded in a mazy pattern of lost streams and currents. The image in his dream was black and white only. The usual flotsam had been left high and dry; uprooted trees and thorn bushes, a broken canteen bottle, a line of heavier granite pebbles bowled along by the force of the flood. The dream took on its own reality here, for the images below were preternaturally precise, every grain of sand encompassed in a vision.

  Just upstream were the discarded remains of a caravan of fleeing nomads. As the army had marched east, they’d seen deserted villages and camps, women and children trying to escape, the men already gone. It looked as if one of these wandering bands had been caught by the flood. A dead horse lay entombed in the sand, just the rotting head revealed. A few skeins of fabric were half-buried, and some gourds, and possibly a woven saddlecloth. A single cartwheel lay amongst pots and pans.