The Mathematical Bridge

by Jim Kelly

  ‘I’m sorry it’s such grim work. There’s hot soup and tea at the Great Bridge and the far lock. Keep your eyes peeled. Anything suspicious, unusual, anything that catches the eye, tell one of the constables.’

  By the flickering orange flames of the brazier, Brooke could see their startled eyes. In the strange light they looked oddly threatening, a lynch mob perhaps, waiting to light torches, setting out for the shantytown across the tracks.

  A police van arrived and disgorged half a dozen uniformed officers co-opted from the County force. They brought with them a large steel chest within which were stored dozens of waxy batons.

  Brooke brandished one. ‘Once upon a time these were useful,’ he said, handing them out. ‘The bus company gave them out to conductors on foggy nights so that they could walk in front of the bus, clearing the way. A slow journey home, but a safe one.’

  He lit the end of the first baton and held it aloft, the flame an intense red-blue, guttering.

  ‘They last an hour. We’ve replacements at the Great Bridge.’

  They set out under Silver Street, a forward line, then a second, double-checking, the lights dappling the curved stonework as they passed beneath the bridge. At Queens’ College two students watched from an open window, calmly smoking.

  The Backs followed a familiar pattern as they paced downstream. The left bank was largely open water meadow, unseen from the depth of the riverbed. On the right bank ran high college walls crowding in, beetling over the river.

  They marched on, keeping to a ragged rhythm, the occasional shout identifying jetsam on the riverbed: a bicycle, a holed punt, a brass key on a wooden tag. The pacing line moved onwards, as the constables to the rear examined the finds. Ahead, Brooke could see King’s College Bridge, out of whose shadow they eventually emerged to see the pinnacles of the great chapel, moonlit, against the stars. The marching men generated their own cloud of condensation, a match for the cattle Brooke had spotted earlier on the meadows.

  More jetsam, mostly found under each of the following bridges, emerged as they tramped north. Pint glasses, wine glasses, a few bottles, a silver plate with the arms of Clare College embossed, a broken crystal decanter under a set of student windows, a dead cat tied to a brick opposite Wren Library.

  At the Bridge of Sighs Brooke paused, lighting a cigarette.

  The familiar electric buzz of exhaustion made his heart race. In the summer he loved to swim here, at the point where the college buildings took up both banks of the river. The torchlight played over the covered bridge, which led from St John’s medieval courts on the right to the Victorian neo-Gothic on the left. The tunnel of stone which arched between was dank and threatening, in perfect harmony with the reputation of the bridge’s Venetian original, which had led prisoners from the Doge’s Palace into the republic’s great gaol. Brooke could just see the shadowy forms of students crossing within the covered bridge, condemned to obey the dinner gong, which sounded faintly.

  They pressed on, coming quickly to the Great Bridge, where a mobile tea kitchen had been set up and hot sausage sandwiches were dispensed, wrapped in greaseproof paper. By now, with rationing finally in full flow, everyone had learnt to eat such offerings quickly, putting aside any serious examination of the nature of the meat within. Sausages were universally known as ‘mystery bags’. The work squad tucked in, gathered up on the parapet, glad to be free of the cloying icy air trapped below.

  Brooke looked downstream. The pattern switched for the first and only time: Magdalene College lay to the left, the broad wharf to the right, and then open parkland. A few narrowboats here, and then houseboats, all either beached or lying in dark pools, their heating and pumps working to repel the advance of ice.

  A twenty-minute break, then back down the steps to the dry river. The town slipped away behind them. Ahead the lock at Jesus stood in silhouette against a brilliantly lit treescape, illuminated by a pair of ack-ack searchlights, ordered up by the military at Madingley Hall.

  But first the lock: the two lines of volunteers came together to file through the gap of the open sluice, led by Brooke, then splayed out to try and cover the wide bed as it began its long sweep northwards to the distant sea. On both sides houseboats sat at odd angles, several lit within, people out on deck watching in silence as the search moved relentlessly forward. From one boat, a tumbledown wreck festooned with rigging, jazz music played for a few seconds then fell silent.

  The searing lights transformed every pebble, every discarded bottle, making them as vivid as artefacts in a gallery, each with its own black shadow.

  Brooke saw the sack first, thirty yards ahead, within a hundred yards of the approaches to the sluice, where he’d seen the pale hand sink below the black water. At first his heart lifted; the sack looked spent, almost empty, flat on the gravel bed. It was a cruel illusion, for as he approached he saw it lay in a large pothole in the shingle, surrounded by thin ice. The body had found its own shallow grave.

  Beside the sack he stopped, the torchlight at his feet. The hand of the child still lay outside the hessian bag. The rhythmic pacing of the search line faltered and then stopped behind him, conversation dying away. Everything fell quiet for the length of a prayer. Brooke stepped forward and with a pocket knife cut the drawstring of the bag. The hessian flopped open, to reveal both arms, the top of the head covered in a swirl of black hair, flecked with ice, bloodied where a wound cut deep. He slit the bag lengthwise. The body, frozen and stiff, remained in its foetal ball.

  He set the lantern down. Its light revealed the outstretched hand and the bare left arm. On the lower arm were the inky remnants of a child’s game. Brooke recognised it as hangman, in which one player choses a secret word, set out in blanks, which their opponent has to guess, letter by letter. Each unsuccessful guess adds a single stroke to a little picture of a man on a gibbet. The word unrevealed stood at A_CH_A_. On the scaffold a man dangled, the single stroke across his neck indicating death, and for the boy, a final childish victory.

  Brooke stood still, the crowd at his back, but felt himself overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness, a rare emotion, and – selfishly – he wondered if later, after the body had been taken away and he’d done his duty, he’d have time to walk to the hospital to see Claire, to touch her, and feel the warmth beneath her skin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The line of men stood in silence, their blazing torches held above their heads.

  ‘We’ll search on, to Baits Bite, once the body is removed,’ said Brooke, addressing them again, as he had just an hour before. ‘There may be other evidence. But go back to the Great Bridge now, get a hot drink. Things need to be done here. It’ll take time.’

  Reluctantly the line began to turn away, leaving one old man, his head still down in prayer.

  Two constables were set to guard the spot, storm lanterns placed on the glittering shingle beside the body. Bending down to adjust a wick, Brooke caught sight for the first time of the child’s face: an eye glazed as if with ice, bloodless lips revealing small milk teeth. And something else glittering on his coat; a small enamel badge depicting a gold cannon on a red background.

  The searchlights thudded out of power, leaving the lanterns as an oasis of light in midstream. Across the city the bells began to chime the hour.

  Brooke sent one of the constables to the nearby home of the force pathologist, Dr Henry Comfort, a university man who taught at the Galen Anatomy Building, a few hundred yards from the Spinning House. The twin appointment was a tradition stretching back to the turn of the century and recorded in gold lettering on a board in the lobby of the Spinning House. Dr Comfort’s standards were rigorous: he would examine the victim in situ before allowing the body to be taken to his morgue. Sean Flynn would have to lie in his shallow grave a little longer.

  A constable arrived from upstream, brandishing a fiery baton. They’d found something back by Mill Pond, tangled up in a rusted bicycle. It took them twenty minutes to march up the riverbed, a small crowd gather
ed now on the Great Bridge, watching but silent. Walking under the elegant curve of the Mathematical Bridge, Brooke saw ahead that the burning torches had been set in a ring, thrust into the shingle, around the carcass of a bike lying under Silver Street Bridge. At this spot a set of steps led down from the parapet to a small wooden dock, where a punt and two dinghies were tied up, lying now at an angle on the stones.

  ‘We missed it first time,’ said the constable who’d been left to watch over the Mill Pond steps. ‘But I had a second look.’

  Beneath one wheel, Brooke could see a hessian sack, a twin to the one in which the child had been bound, but badly stained with what could be blood. An electric torch, held close, revealed the true colour, a deep rust-red. Gently, Brooke took a corner of the material and began to lift it, until a heavy object dropped out. Stepping back, they could see a metal wrench, a foot long, double-headed. The maker’s trademark was deeply etched – STANLEY TOOLS – while the surface of the metal was elegantly cross-hatched with lines. Something dark, possibly more blood, was caught between the spaces of the metal nameplate.

  Around one end of the wrench was a piece of heavy string attached to a label which was blank. Brooke found his fountain pen and used one end to flip the label over: damp, discoloured, but it still bore the name Sean Flynn in a loopy feminine hand, followed by the address of St Alban’s Church.

  Scrawled in pencil was a note: See you soon. Mum.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Walking back to the Spinning House, Brooke felt, for the first time, that he could see the crime: a car or van parked on Silver Street Bridge, the snow falling heavily, the streets empty, the first sack hauled to the parapet and dropped into the flood, followed by the second. Did the killer think the child was dead? Within a minute the van would be gone, while the child – stunned into consciousness by the icy water – had floated down to the next bridge, where his cry for help was heard beneath the Mathematical Bridge. The second sack, perhaps used to clean the ‘murder’ scene, had sunk, weighted with the wrench, which looked a likely candidate for the murder weapon.

  On that night Brooke had despatched PC Collins to check Silver Street Bridge. What had he found? Why had he not reported back? Had Edison checked?

  The snow had been heavy, but tyre tracks must have been visible, and snow may have been brushed from the parapet. The killer, if cool-headed, may even have still been at the bridge. Had he watched in horror as the sack floated away, the child’s voice echoing in the stone canyon between the college buildings? Had he heard his final call: Help me! Even if he’d fled he’d have left a trail, a trail quite visible for an hour or more, before the snow could have obliterated the tracks.

  The duty sergeant on the desk at the Spinning House checked the roster: PC Collins was marked as off sick.

  ‘I know Sergeant Edison left us a note,’ offered the duty man, flicking pages. ‘Yes, here it is. We had to check out a domestic in Romsey Town – we did that, nothing to report. And send a constable round to Collins’ house, but the inspector told us to hang fire. Bit delicate apparently. The file’s gone upstairs.’

  He raised his eyes. ‘Top office. She’s in, sir. At her desk.’

  Brooke found the door ajar, a desk lamp illuminating a drift of paper.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Brooke. The search?’

  Brooke gave a brief résumé of the night’s events.

  ‘A blow to the head?’ she asked. ‘A fatal blow of itself?’

  ‘Possibly. But the water intervened. That’s the reality,’ said Brooke. ‘Dr Comfort’s at the scene now. The discovery of the second sack pinpoints the bridge where the child was thrown into the water. I sent PC Collins to check it out on the night. He’s now off sick and there’s been no report back. I understand there’s an issue?’

  Carnegie-Brown took off her glasses and cast them aside, signalling for Brooke to take a seat.

  ‘I see. Then we do indeed have a problem.’

  She steepled her hands. ‘Collins is missing. In fact, from what you’ve just told me, I’d say you may have been the last person in authority to have seen him. He was on his way home at the end of his shift when he responded to the incident at Queens’.

  ‘He lives in the family home at Chesterton. An empty house, it appears, as his mother’s dead, father’s in the Merchant Navy. One older brother, in the army. He got his own call-up papers last week.

  ‘A bit of a loner according to the sergeant, but he did confide to one or two people that he didn’t want to join up. He’d considered applying for registration as a conscientious objector. Apparently, the family has a military history – his father was in the Great War. Won a medal at Jutland. So you can see the problem. He talked to one of the uniformed inspectors about trying to stay with us, which was not possible of course, not at his age.

  ‘My judgement was that he’d done a runner, Brooke. In fact, that was our working assumption. I sent a woman police constable round but the house, as I say, was empty. Locked up.’

  Brooke saw Collins’ face then: the panic, the flushed cheeks. He’d tried to calm him down, then he’d sent him to Silver Street Bridge. What had he found there? Had he encountered the murderer? Had he followed the trail?

  ‘If he discovered the killer still on the bridge he might have come to harm,’ said Brooke. ‘We’ll search the far riverbank, just in case. He wasn’t the only constable out that night; we’ll ask around, see if anyone saw him about. We shouldn’t presume the worst,’ he added. ‘The prospect of war may have been too much for him. The likelihood is he’s simply run away. I’ll get someone to check his file, see if we can find other relatives. Maybe he’s holed up somewhere hoping it’ll all be over soon. Fear is a corrosive emotion. It can eat a man up.’

  Carnegie-Brown was nodding. ‘We’ll find him soon enough, Brooke. He’ll be sweating it out somewhere, as you say, regretting he let his nerves get to him.’

  Brooke stood, softly punching out his hat into something like its proper shape.

  ‘Progress on the Fenians?’ asked Carnegie-Brown.

  ‘Edison has tracked down a link between the Coventry bomb and a suspect here in Cambridge. We’re watching his rooms in the Upper Town. When we’ve got a decent description, we can see if he matches one of the three men our witness saw at Newton’s.

  ‘For the record, Coventry’s view is that the IRA’s modus operandi in this current campaign usually involves two bombs per cell, then they close down, go to ground. I’m hoping our suspect will lead us to bomb factory, or his accomplices. We need a break, ma’am. We need one soon.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Rigor, and the icy water, had locked the body of Sean Flynn in its curled self-embrace, but under the lights in Dr Comfort’s forensic laboratory the arms had slowly unfurled like pale, fleshy spring leaves. The back of the head, shaved clean, revealed the brutal wound which had broken the skull. Brooke was reminded of an eggshell, cracked open by a single blow of a silver spoon.

  Comfort, tetchy and unusually brisk, had come to a forthright judgement. ‘Lethal force, Brooke. He’d have died if untreated. Drowning intervened, but only by minutes.’

  He wiped blood and hair from his hands. ‘The lungs are flooded. There is no doubt as to the actual cause of death, but as I say, that is entirely a timing issue. The blow to the head is what ultimately ended his life. The person who delivered it must bear all the responsibility. The tragedy is, of course, they are unlikely to find that much of a burden.’

  Dr Comfort offered one other observation, although it was technically beyond his remit, but perhaps he was keen to move on from the corpse. ‘The golden cannon, Brooke,’ he said, indicating the badge on the boy’s jacket, which had been laid out with the other clothes on a dissecting table. ‘An ardent fan, no doubt, of Arsenal Football Club, but that hardly narrows the field. Last year, according to Whyte, they won the First Division title.’ Whyte was one of the doctor’s autopsy ‘servants’, poised at the far end of the lab to wield t
he heavy tools of the trade. ‘The team is internationally famous, I’m told. Thousands of children must have been dazzled by the glamour. Perhaps he dreamt of playing himself one day.’

  He moved back towards the corpse, using a long metal pointer to indicate the inky tattoo on the lower arm.

  ‘And a game of hangman, of course. I wonder when English children started playing that? A century ago. Two, three, five? No wonder he won. The key word’s tricky: A, dash, C, H, dash, A, dash. Any ideas?’

  Brooke shook his head. He’d played at school with all the rest, but there had always been something malevolent about the imagery. He’d found the tension imposed by the rules – that he had to guess the word by trying out the various letters – strangely unpleasant. He did the obvious, as they all did, and tried the vowels first. Each wrong guess added a pen-stroke to the stickman’s image, until at the last the neck was broken with a single dash. It was just a game, a proxy death, but the anxiety always lingered.

  ‘I doubt it’s relevant,’ he said, finally, looking away.

  ‘As you know, Brooke, I’m no advocate of judicial execution,’ said Comfort, cleaning a scalpel under a tap preparatory to starting the dissection of the body. ‘But if you find out who did this I’d like a ringside ticket at the gallows. But then that’s a swift death. A broken neck …’ He clicked his fingers. ‘This lad suffered terribly, and I think someone should pay for that, don’t you?’

  At a further click of the fingers Comfort’s servants moved forward with a trolley upon which were arranged saws, knives, mechanical dividers.

  The moment of existential obliteration was at hand, and Brooke had no stomach for it tonight.

  He brandished a note. ‘This was waiting for me at the lodge below. I must go. We’ve found one of the Fenian bombers – or at least a fellow traveller – up on Honey Hill. Edison’s at the scene. I have been called to inspect the dispositions. For that would be a criminal failure, to let the man slip away. He could be our murderer.’ He adjusted his hat. ‘I’ll leave you to it, Doctor.’