by Jim Kelly
In contrast the Galway clock juddered, each minute leaping past.
Brooke asked the usual biographical questions. She had answered an advert in the Catholic Herald two years previously for a junior school teacher at St Alban’s and left her family home in Connemara for the three-day journey. The ferry, caught in the middle of the Irish Sea, had spent twelve hours riding out a storm in the lee of the Isle of Man.
‘Purgatory,’ she said, smiling at the memory. ‘We’re going back to visit in the summer.’ Brooke imagined a buffeting clifftop wind, the oddly penetrating light of the Atlantic and a winding lane.
Liam Walsh had been on the staff. A year after her arrival he’d replaced the old head teacher, an aged priest, and proposed on the same day. His first wife had died of a stomach tumour. There had been no children. He had seemed, to her, a troubled man, but a kind and generous one. They’d been married in St Alban’s on a baking June day, the children providing an enthusiastic choir, Father Ward – himself newly arrived – the celebrant.
‘We had the marriage breakfast in the playground,’ she said, offering Brooke the photograph, which showed a single line of trestle tables, the adults standing, Aitken just behind the priest, Liam Walsh with his arm around his bride’s narrow waist. Even in the sunshine the playground seemed hedged in by shadows, inky black at the foot of the church.
The old clock advanced to eight twenty-five. Mrs Walsh had started asking questions, about the missing caretaker and the hunt for young Sean’s killer, and Edison was providing colourless answers. Brooke felt she’d very quickly stopped listening to the answers.
Finally, she stood to add coke to the fire.
The clock ticked. Brooke’s patience snapped. ‘Stay by the fire,’ he told them. ‘I’ll be a moment.’
Outside, the icy air was a shock. His footsteps echoed in the street as he climbed back up to the playground, with its three dull-brick guardians: the church, the school, the presbytery.
As he opened the door to the church he heard footsteps behind him and turned to see Mrs Walsh, wrapped in a coat, bustling to follow, with Edison in her wake.
Brooke waited in the porch. Edison, breathless, caught them up. ‘Mrs Walsh says she’s worried about her husband, more worried than she said.’
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
Brooke pushed the door open and stepped inside. The scene was immediately clear: a row of candles, now fluttering wildly in the sudden draught, illuminated the nave. A gilded statue on the distant altar caught the light. But before them, in silhouette, the body of man hung by what looked like a belt round his neck, attached to a light fitting fixed to one of the brick pillars. A chair, toppled, had been kicked aside.
‘My God,’ said Edison.
‘Liam?’ said Mrs Walsh, the inflection suggesting the first ghost of a question.
There were no screams.
Brooke ran to the body, his metal Blakeys striking the tiled floor. Gathering up the chair, he called back, ‘Get a knife.’
Mrs Walsh fled. Edison dragged over a table used for hymn books and, standing on it, together they struggled with the knotted belt, unclipping a heavy bunch of keys which was tangled with the buckle. Free at last, the body fell into their arms.
Mrs Walsh arrived too late with the knife, followed by Father Ward, and then, in his shadow, Mrs Aitken, in a nightdress. When she saw the body splayed on the brick floor she cried out to God and clutched the priest, burying her face against his chest.
CHAPTER FORTY
Liam Walsh was alive, but his unwanted life hung by a thread. Brooke travelled in the ambulance beside a young nurse, who held the teacher’s hand and told him not to worry but to sleep, sensing perhaps that his apparent unconsciousness was a screen, a protection against questions. On the other side of the patient sat his wife, occasionally leaning forward to lift a scrap of thin red hair away from the forehead. The nurse had cut away the collar of his shirt to reveal the neck, scarred by the vivid blue-red shadow of the noose.
The old ambulance crept down the streets on the ice, all four wheels sliding as they edged round the corner onto Trinity Street. On King’s Parade a group of students stood back, allowing the ambulance to trundle past. Walsh’s eyelids fidgeted. Brooke thought he could see colour creeping back into the face, and at the last moment, as the driver swung into the forecourt at Addenbrooke’s, the head teacher opened his eyes.
‘Sleep, Liam,’ said his wife, leaning in close. He looked at her, but without a flicker of recognition.
They sat by the bed for an hour until a constable from the Spinning House arrived, despatched by Edison, whom he’d left in charge at St Alban’s. In the corridor outside her husband’s room, Brooke sat Kathleen Walsh down and told her what they’d discovered in London, for she had a right to know, as it was the truth and helped explain her husband’s attempt to take his own life. The fact that the man she loved had come so close to death seemed to put the news into some kind of brutal perspective. Her reaction was stoic, and she thanked Brooke earnestly before going back to maintain a vigil by the bedside. Had he even detected a sense of relief in her eyes? What, Brooke thought, had she imagined?
On Sunshine Ward the curtains were drawn around a bed, muffled voices deep in debate, and Brooke heard Claire’s patient, calm tones, so he withdrew, and tripping down the stairs almost ran straight into Joy, her uniform splashed with blood. She looked flustered, and then guilty. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s the blackout. Another crash – the driver’s in a bad way. I’m doing a double-shift to help them cope. We kill more people on the roads than we save from bombs. You look awful, Dad. Go home.’
He put a hand behind her neck and held her cheek to his. Then she was gone.
Out in the snow, which blew around in chaotic gusts, home was the last place Brooke wanted to be. The big house, with its draughty rooms, was haunted by the people who weren’t there. He thought he might sleep if he found somewhere warm, so he set out for Frank Edwardes’ house. Walking north he stopped outside the Scott Polar Research Institute to inspect the bust of the great explorer. Rarely could it have looked so convincing; snow drifts ran up to the graceful facade of the building, icicles hung from the whaling gun on its concrete plinth. Scott’s head, the hair and hood iced, stared out with the kind of belligerent determination his real face had never held. Brooke felt he was one of those men whose personalities seemed to be fluid. Which reminded him of Walsh: what was his true nature?
The cricket ground at Fenner’s was a sheet of paper. The night light burnt in the upper storey bedroom window of the house at the end of the road. The door opened on the latch, and Brooke trudged up three flights to find Edwardes awake, reading with a magnifying glass, his bank of radios humming with a bass note.
Brooke took a chair and told his former chief inspector what he’d told Kathleen Walsh, a story that amounted to a startling motive for murder, even if the mild-mannered head teacher seemed an unlikely monster. Walsh’s motive for suicide was clearer. The previous evening, at the Epiphany play, Brooke had told Walsh the boy’s mother was coming to identify the body and visit the school. Walsh must have feared certain exposure.
‘Then there’s the priest, Father Ward. There’s something not right there. Aitken, the housekeeper, is emotionally close, if no more. She’s always on hand. I’m passing no judgements, Frank, but I’m pretty sure they’ve a secret to hide.’ Brooke settled deeper in the armchair.
‘Any sign of the caretaker?’ asked Edwardes.
‘None. And it’s not the only thing that’s missing. Hendrie’s van is still unaccounted for. There must be a garage somewhere close, so maybe that’s where Smith’s gone to ground. It might double up as a bomb factory, too. Not an enticing prospect, is it: explosives, transport, motive, opportunity. All Smith needs is a decent target. If he’s still in the country, that is.’
One of the radios emitted a staccato burst of Morse code, which Edwardes expertly transcribed to the pad on his lap. Finished, he reread the mes
sage, shook his head and tossed the paper aside. There was always plenty of what Edwardes called traffic – signals flying between amateur radio hams, traces of military signals from France and the Low Countries, but no sign so far of the telltale outgoing response from one of the much-heralded Nazi spies, the dreaded Fifth Column.
Edwardes sipped a glass of milk. ‘You’ve thought of blackmail, of course. A slippery crime.’
Brooke sat up. Downstairs they could hear Kat rattling a kettle.
‘You’ve got Walsh and Ward – both with secrets, one’s a bigamist, the other a parish priest involved with a widow under the church’s own roof. Both vulnerable, both at hand, with Hendrie in the congregation and Smith in his caretaker’s billet in the cellar. Blackmail, Eden. All the hallmarks are there.’ He fumbled in the bedside drawer. ‘Open the window, will you?’
The old man lit a cigarette. ‘Doc says I have to stop. So does Kat. I doubt I’m fooling anyone.’ He tapped ash into a silver dish they’d given him at the Spinning House to mark his promotion in 1931. ‘Your real problem is Smith. The rest can wait. You say the pattern is two bombs, and they’ve only set one so far. That’s right?’
‘That’s certainly the blueprint: two blasts, then the cell dissolves. So, yes, there’s one more to plant, and we know he’s got the gear, the explosives, because we can’t find the bomb factory. And he’s got the mastic, maybe Hendrie had that; apparently, it’s standard kit on building sites. Maybe he didn’t want to hand it over. Perhaps the next target’s more ambitious. If Smith has access to Hendrie’s van, he could just leave it in the town centre and set a timer.’
Edwardes outlined what he’d do: cut all leave, get uniformed branch out on the streets by day, search lock-ups and garages in the Upper Town, work their way through the wharfside warehouses at the foot of Castle Hill.
‘Find this van, you’ll find the bomb,’ he said.
Brooke sighed, then closed his eyes, but sleep seemed very far away. ‘Trouble is we don’t really know what we’re looking for, Frank. Hendrie told everyone at St Alban’s that he had a vehicle, but they never saw it. A description would have made the task a lot easier.’
‘One thing you’ve got going for you,’ offered Edwardes. ‘Confront Walsh as soon as you can – and the priest for that matter. If you know their secrets, they’re not secrets any more. If blackmail was the game, that’s your big chance. They’ve got nothing left to lose.’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Brooke, back at the house, followed Aldiss’s regime for sleep: he ate what was left of a shepherd’s pie which had been left in the oven and was still warm, took a bath in the attic and lay down in the dark bedroom, the window open. Ice held the river still, so there was no sound from the weir or the lock downstream. The last thing he heard was an owl on the water meadows, which he imagined swooping between the old gas lamps, set to light the way for the skaters. But there were no skaters now. He’d let Joy down on a skating trip, which he must put right if they had the chance. He heard a clock strike three and fell asleep.
He woke up to hear a particular sound, the trembling of glass, the globes and teardrops which hung in a wire circlet in the front room; the old villa’s only surviving chandelier. Outside a dog had replaced the owl, and other dogs replied across the city. He turned the light on and reached for the glass of water on the bedside table, noting the concentric ripples on the surface. Sitting on the bed his hand rested on the white, worn linen sheet, and found there a gritty dust which must have fallen from the old ceiling.
He heard what sounded like an explosion as he stood up, about to step to the open window. A distinct crump of folding metal followed by the dull thud of the sound wave nudging the old villa on its foundations. The house was empty, so he simply got into his clothes and ran down the stairs. The fanlight over the door was white glass, frosted, and had gained a crack from top to bottom.
He locked the door and started to run. Snow had fallen, and was falling still, so his footholds were secure. There was no sign of flames or smoke nearby. The explosion itself must have been distant, but of great power for its reverberations to be felt here, on a far-flung stretch of the river.
Crossing Coe Fen he saw a police radio car on a road in the distance heading south towards the railway station. What had Jo Ashmore said when he’d visited her rooftop Observation Post? A munitions train, imagine that.
At Speaker’s Corner, a group stood in the middle of the crossroads: three ARP wardens, a constable and two guards in army uniform from Parker’s Piece. The consensus was two explosions from an area north of the station, a swathe of land set aside for marshalling yards. Brooke marched the constable to a police box and got him to ring the station. The duty sergeant at the Spinning House had a more precise location: the duty officer at Madingley Hall had rung to ask for assistance at Abbey Depot, a complex of rail sheds and sidings on the northern, fen edge of the city. Brooke knew it well: in the years after the Great War, petty thieves had raided the yards on an almost nightly basis, in search of anything they could sell, or anything they could eat. In the end they’d put a constable on a regular beat round the yards.
While snow still fell the wind had dropped, so Brooke stood quietly with the constable by the police box and smoked a cigarette, a habit he’d developed in the desert when an important decision was required. Sometimes it had been a matter of life or death: whether to advance or retreat, make camp or march at night. His men would stand and wait while he tried to distance himself from the moment, considering his options with any logic he could muster. He felt he owed them that at least, rather than the usual half-baked order, often inspired not by military intelligence but by an overwhelming need to assume command and avoid embarrassment.
‘Who knows what’s really happened,’ he said at last, his breath a cloud of white condensation. ‘I’ll go to the spot. When I’ve got a good idea what’s happened I’ll ring the Spinning House from a signal box. In the meantime, you go back to the station, tell the desk to alert the hospital – they need to stand by. For now, the radio cars can wait on major routes out of the city. Stop all cars and search them, check papers. They could ring the Observer Corps too – there’s a post on Kew’s Mill by the station. They may know more.’ He checked his watch. It was nearly five o’clock. ‘Got it?’
The constable nodded.
‘Then go,’ said Brooke. ‘And don’t run.’ Rule number one for constables: never run unless there is a clear opportunity to save life. The sight of a running policeman simply invites public panic.
Brooke, in plain clothes, was under no such embargo. He ran over the railway bridge to Romsey Town, heading north, zigzagging, until a bleak common opened up, the river in the distance. The access lane into the rail yards had an iron gate, but it was open, an armoured car parked across the way. Brooke showed his warrant card. The army driver had heard the blasts and driven his CO to the spot. Brooke ran on, past rail sheds and cranes, heading for a signal box, where a light showed.
Climbing the steps, he looked out over the yards. The rails glittered, but there were no flames, and only a small amount of drifting smoke. The snowfield appeared untouched. In the distance he could see the tail lights of a goods wagon, and beyond it a whole train, stretching away into the dark.
Inside the box an army captain was on a telephone line, while the signalman was setting out a ground plan of the yards on a map table. Overhead they heard a plane executing a low fly-past. The captain, slamming down the phone, nodded at Brooke’s warrant card and told everyone to stand by, before he switched off the interior light, plunging them all into the dark.
‘Patience, gentlemen, I’ve ordered up some celestial light,’ he said, and they saw a match flare as he lit himself a cigarette. ‘Maybe best outside,’ he added, pushing open a far door onto an observation platform above the main line.
A minute passed during which they could hear a great deal of activity, lit by handheld torches, as groups of men picked their way across the yard below.
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br /> The first searchlight came on with a bass-note thrum.
Soon three lights revealed the scene, each one operating from the back of an army truck. Brooke’s eye went first to a stricken steam locomotive, two hundred tons of brass and steel and iron, lying on its side less than fifty yards from the signal box, not on the mainline, but to one side. Steam leaked from fractured pipes. It lay in a round pit, a turntable used to reverse the direction of engines or switch them from the north–south lines to the east–west. The central swing bridge, from which the train had toppled, was a mangled wreck of steel at its pivotal point. From the train cab a man waved a cap. For the first time they saw a flicker of flame, possibly from the train’s own firebox.
A man in a well-cut overcoat with a fur collar joined them, introducing himself to the captain as the district engineer for the GER, the Great Eastern Railway.
‘Christ,’ he said, surveying the scene. ‘They knew what they were up to. A bomb?’
‘Yes,’ replied the captain. ‘Laid in the pit at the pivotal point. Wouldn’t have had to be that big, but the timing was perfect. The loco was on the bridge. Second bang was her falling off. Question is – do we have to fix it? Second question – if we do, how long will it take?’
‘Any casualties?’ asked Brooke.
The captain shook his head.