by Jim Kelly
The interior was damp, the air heavy with the smell of petrol. A three-wheel van stood on straw, dripping melted snow and ice. The interior, viewed through a glass panel in the back door, was empty. Removing a glove, he touched the bonnet: stone cold. The building’s medieval walls blocked out entirely the sounds of the city, but he could just hear the mice in the walls and possibly something larger in a pile of old sacks in one corner. He thought of PC Collins: had he discovered the tyre tracks at Silver Street Bridge and followed them here? Had Smith been lying in wait? Brooke searched the three ground-floor rooms but found no trace. At either end of the building, ladders rose up to lofts. One held firewood, the other was empty, except for a couple of horse blankets rolled up as a sleeping bag. A single slate had been used as an ashtray, crowded with butts. Set against the wall was the black and white framed picture of the happy family on a windswept beach, which he’d seen hanging above Smith’s cellar stove at St Alban’s.
Brooke locked up. He’d have a watchman set in an unmarked car at the top of the lane. If Smith came back they’d have their man.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The sister on Liam Walsh’s ward at Addenbrooke’s Hospital told Brooke to come back the next day. ‘The man’s very poorly still, Inspector. His heart. The doctors are very worried. The wife’s with him – she’s sick to death.’ They were standing outside the doors to the ward itself, and as they opened Brooke saw the ranks of bedsteads, the screens around one. Turning up in person made him feel like a vulture, but time was pressing.
‘I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t a matter of life and death,’ he said. ‘It may be he knows information which could prevent further outrages, Sister. You know as well as I what happened in Coventry. Five dead. We don’t want that on the streets of the next place they choose. Norwich, Peterborough, Lynn. Who knows?’
The nurse sighed. ‘I’ll ring the station for you, how’s that? As soon as he’s strong enough. There’s no point now. The man’s out cold. Delirious too.’
Brooke knew the sister well. Her name was Heggarty, but he’d never noted her accent until now, softer than Belfast, softer even than Dublin, redolent of the far west of Ireland. But it had come to this, that now he did notice, and that was the shame of it. She ushered him gently towards the stairs and the exit. ‘There’s a constable by his bed. All’s safe and sound. Mrs Brooke’s busy on her own ward, and your daughter’s doing a fine job. You need to stop haunting the place. Go home.’
Instead, Brooke walked back to the Spinning House.
Uniformed branch had placed a constable in a car outside the School of Pythagoras. A twenty-four-hour rota had been agreed. The duty sergeant had a note for Brooke, newly delivered by a bicycle messenger. The handwriting was neat and controlled, instantly recognisable as that of his former roommate and now constant scientist, Peter Aldiss. He read it quickly, lit a Black Russian and read it again. He’d asked him to find out what he could about the Galton Society, and he’d done a thorough job. The results were disturbing.
He found Edison in the mess room, quietly drinking tea from a spectacularly large tin mug that required both the sergeant’s large fleshy hands to hold it to his lips. Starting, he put the bucket down. ‘Sir. Yes – a vice. I’ve got a two-pint one at the shed and I find it warming. Mrs Edison says I should pack it in. She says tannic poisoning is a bad way to go.’
Brooke offered him a cigarette, and tentatively he took one.
‘I’m a pipe man really, but I don’t mind.’ He leant forward and took a light, the gold ringlet of paper bubbling. They sat in silence for a minute.
‘What next?’ asked Edison, eventually.
‘The priest,’ said Brooke. ‘Walsh is too ill. We can’t just sit around and wait.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes. But I can go alone. Go home, see Mrs Edison. Before you do, one favour.’
Brooke produced the note from Aldiss. ‘This is worrying me. The factory manager at Newton’s is a man by the name of Rafe Forbes. A university man – mathematics, I think. He either inherited money or married it. Lives out at Newmarket. Anyway, when I met him at the factory, the day after the bomb blast, he was wearing a badge, a silver moon engraved with the letter G, in blue. It’s a society; Cambridge is full of them, isn’t it, as if it isn’t an exclusive club in its own right. The Galton Society. I asked an old friend to find out more. Turns out it is a very unpleasant club indeed, Edison. At first it was just about science. But as the years have gone on, they’ve developed a very specific interest. They are obsessed with selective breeding.’
Edison expelled some cigarette smoke. ‘Newmarket’s a good place for that, sir. The studs. If he’s smart with the maths perhaps he won his money at the bookmaker’s. If he did he’s one in a million.’
‘Yes. Perhaps that’s it. But this isn’t just bloodstock, Edison. This isn’t horses, it’s people. They want to weed out the weak, the deformed, the simple-minded. They called it eugenics. Discredited here now, but Aldiss says there’s a department in Berlin which practises this new “science”.’ He put as much irony into the last word as he could muster. ‘The Nazis are impatient with natural selection, Edison. They’re killing people, the retarded, the disabled, criminals, deviants – making the race purer. It’s been going on for years. It’s sullied the reputation of the whole discipline here, as I say, but clearly the real enthusiasts are keeping the flame alive, right here, in Cambridge.
‘It’ll all be talk, but it’s dangerous talk. It makes me wonder about Forbes, and about the bomb attack. Is it all it seems? And there’s the missing RADAR unit. Has it really been whisked out of a locked building? I’ll call on Forbes tomorrow. But as I say, a favour first.’ Brooke started copying out a name. ‘Apparently this man is the society secretary. He’s at St Benet’s. A don. If he’s not there, there’s a home address. Track him down, Edison. I want a list of the current members. All of them. Don’t take no for an answer. If you have to put him on a charge and march him back to the cells, do it. I want that list.’
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The church of St Alban’s was icy cold. Clearly, the caretaker’s flight had left nobody to man the boilers, and the few candles remaining were unable to lift the temperature, or the shadowy gloom. Three parishioners sat ready for the confessional box, while at the altar rail another mumbled penance, the gentle clack of the rosary beads the only noise. Mrs Aitken, on the priest’s doorstep, had directed Brooke to the church. The confessional hour had only just begun, so the detective would have to wait.
‘Any news?’ she’d asked. ‘We’ve not seen Kathleen at all. She must be at the hospital.’
She’d held the door open just a few inches, as if worried Brooke would glimpse some secret within. The corridor beyond looked institutional, with worn lino and a long coat rack. A framed photograph of the new pope – Pius XII – stared back at him from the depths of the shadows by the stairs.
Brooke relayed the latest bulletin on Walsh. The head teacher was still unconscious. There were concerns about his heart.
‘He’s in my prayers,’ she said, closing the door.
Taking a pew in the church, Brooke watched the devotions of the penitents with detached curiosity. It wasn’t that Brooke had no faith of his own, just that in his daily life he found the existence of a God of little practical help. He’d always suspected his father had been privately agnostic, a position which, for a scientist, meant the subject was of no practical concern. Professor Brooke had spent his life trying to find cures for childhood illnesses, a mission which had been spectacularly successful. They’d given him a Nobel Prize. To a limited extent his father was God.
In the flickering half-light he dispensed with his glasses.
A woman left the confessional box and knelt at the altar rail. Her replacement slipped into the shadow vacated, pulling across the worn black curtain.
Brooke was left to continue his own form of thought-prayer.
Joining the Borough, on his return from the desert, had
offered an opportunity to tilt the world towards light, and away from the darkness, even by small fractions of a degree. And even then, in those early years, the darkness seemed to be edging closer and deepening. The modest ambit of the Borough embraced many crimes. He’d discovered that some of these crimes were on the statute book, and some were not. And now, Brooke had encountered a man – men – capable of the callous murder of a child, the reckless killing of innocent men and women on the street, the cowardly employment of the disembodied bomb. He still had little time for God, but he was beginning to realise that evil might prove a more tangible entity.
The last penitent left the confessional. Above the box a red light continued to shine.
Brooke slipped past the curtain and into the shadowed cubicle. An embroidered screen revealed Father Ward’s head in silhouette.
There was an awkward silence. ‘Father,’ said Brooke, speaking quickly. ‘There’s little time. I’m waiting to speak to Liam Walsh. Tonight perhaps, or tomorrow. Now I know his secret, he has nothing to fear in telling the truth.’
The priest’s face edged closer to the screen, so that an eye caught the light.
‘I know you can’t reveal what he said in confession, Father. But that’s a narrow restriction surely, in a community such as this. Keeping the truth from Mary Walsh must have been the result of a very fine moral calculation. She knows now, of course, that her husband has a wife in London, and that Sean was his child, and that in some way he connived at his murder.’
Ward set a splayed hand against the screen. ‘He was innocent of the crime. I can say that from my heart.’
‘But you knew his secret?’
Ward said nothing. The sour smell of human sweat filled the box, only partly disguised by polish.
‘At some point, Father, we’ll be having this conversation at the Spinning House. I’d think very carefully about what you can and can’t say. I mean to find the killer and you’ll not stand in my way.’
‘I can’t speak.’
‘Is that because they knew your secret too? Is it still a scandal in this day and age – the housekeeper? A blind eye was turned here, I’m sure. And the children are not to know. But what if the bishop was told?’
‘Marie is a widow.’
‘That carries the day with the bishop, does it?’
There was a sharp intake of breath on the far side of the patterned screen,
‘Her husband died in the fighting in Belfast in 1921,’ he said, the tone implying a long-rehearsed defence. ‘Shot in the back. There was a boy, but he left home, so she’s alone, Brooke. She came here to leave the memory behind. When the street fighting was over she went out to look for her husband, a good man, and found him in the gutter. He’d bled to death, and the blood had gone down the drain. She has to live with that every day of her life.’
‘And Walsh, and Hendrie and Smith? How much of their story do you know?’
‘Too much.’
Brooke heard the rustle of the priest’s cassock as he shifted on his seat.
‘Liam is a troubled man. Now you know why. The others had a hold on him. Perhaps they knew his secret, as they knew mine. The confessional gave them no relief, for they said not a word – certainly not a word about bombs and killing. They demanded silence, and we kept quiet. That was all.’
And there it was: an admission of guilt at last.
‘Who will you confess that sin to, Father?’
In the silence they heard the church door bang open, and voices on the nearby pews.
‘Liam was a reluctant recruit, Brooke,’ said Ward. ‘A man who believed in his country. In Dublin he’d followed his calling, to teach. His subject was chemistry. A fascination with the way the world works. At the time of the Easter Rising they asked him to make explosives. To devise fuses. Men died – and women, and children. For that he made his confession. Then he fled to London and a new life, and fell in love, and was cheated upon, and so he came here. He found love again and took his chance. But they found him, Smith found him, and recruited Hendrie. The intellectuals lead, the peasants fight. Hendrie was the infantry, a willing soldier. Walsh, blackmailed into bomb-making. Smith was the High Command.’ The priest put his hand to the screen. ‘And, Brooke, you should know this: Smith has a gun. He’d polish it by the fire in the cellar. As an act of intimidation it was extraordinarily effective.’
Brooke sat in silence, thinking through the implications of their runaway killer being armed.
‘And your sins, Father?’ he said, finally.
Ward bowed his head.
‘They had a hold over you. Was silence their only price? They spirited the child from the church, down into Smith’s basement. Did they need help that night?’
‘Never. No. How could you think such a thing? I slept that night. My hands are clean.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘No.’
Brooke stood. ‘Tomorrow, Father. At the Spinning House this time. Nine o’clock.’
Brooke slipped out of the confessional, nodding to a woman who had been waiting, and walked away, up the nave and out of the door, so that he never saw the look of surprise on her face that, despite such a lengthy confession, he’d escaped without the need for a single moment of penance.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
A Borough radio car was parked in the darkness of the playground outside St Alban’s. Liam Walsh had regained consciousness, according to the uniformed driver, and had asked to speak to Brooke, despite the advice of doctors to rest. The interview would go ahead, but a nurse must be present: Sister Heggarty would meet him at the doors of Addenbrooke’s at ten o’clock. He had fifteen minutes with the patient, no more.
As they drove through the city, cloaked in a mist, Brooke forced himself to concentrate on the coming encounter. Ward’s studied confession had thrown a new light on the little community that was St Alban’s. The cell – Smith, Hendrie and the reluctant Walsh – had thrived in an atmosphere of secrets and thinly veiled blackmail. That much was plain.
So much was still hidden. Who had decided Sean must die – and why? Who had struck the fatal blow? Where was Smith, and the elusive bomb factory?
In the passenger seat, using the radio, Brooke got the latest from the Spinning House. There was still no definite news on Smith’s whereabouts, although a man answering his description had been seen alighting from a train at March, a small fen town to the north, where he’d been picked up by a motor car. He had been carrying a suitcase. The thought that the caretaker, surely the likeliest suspect for the child’s murder, had slipped away, and might even now be close to one of the Irish ferry ports, made Brooke feel a weary sickness.
There was a further bulletin from Carnegie-Brown. After a brief conversation with the Home Office, uniformed branch were to make a second search of St Alban’s in the morning – the church and the school – for any sign of the missing RADAR unit from Newton’s factory. Brooke sent a message back, suggesting they include the head teacher’s cottage and the presbytery. It might all be in vain; the suspect spotted at March could have been carrying the stolen unit in his suitcase.
The car dropped him at the hospital, and Sister Heggarty escorted him up to the ward.
Liam Walsh was awake, the window ajar to admit the misty air and relieve the thudding heat maintained throughout the building’s five floors. The patient was oddly upbeat, certainly in comparison to the shambling, uncertain figure he’d presented to Brooke in the schoolyard and the classroom. Drinking tea, he even summoned a shy smile. The burden of his secret, once crushing, had been lifted. The constable withdrew, but not before presenting – from his notebook – a list of visitors that day: Kathleen Walsh; Marie Aitken; one of the other teachers, an elderly man called Fisher; and Kathleen Walsh again.
The second visit by the wife seemed particularly significant. It suggested reconciliation at best, a retreat from outright rejection at worst. Perhaps, after several days of extreme stress, this explained Walsh’s almost buoyant mood. Br
ooke hoped his heart would cope with the questions he must face, and answer.
Sister Heggarty took a seat, set back against the screen.
Brooke had prepared his opening line.
‘Did you have anything to do with the murder of your son, Mr Walsh?’
He’d no doubt been expecting the blow, but Brooke could see the nervous jolt nevertheless. He reminded himself that this man had tied a length of rope around his own neck less than twelve hours ago. The livid marks were still visible, a purple noose of bruising. But Brooke had only fifteen minutes, and he could hear doctors whispering outside, hovering beyond the screen.
‘No,’ he said, but his voice was thin and tense.
Sister Heggarty shifted in her seat.
Walsh had no doubt prepared his story, and he told it well.
He’d fled to Cambridge when his marriage had collapsed. He missed his son, every single day, but he thought it had been best for the boy to be with his mother. His proposal to Kathleen was, in his words, an error of judgement. In the chaos of war, he had convinced himself that the family they planned would have been left to build a life of its own.
‘I should have told her the truth,’ he said. ‘It was a betrayal, and a selfish one at that. I can’t imagine how she’s found it in herself to forgive me. But all I had to do was stay silent – do you see? I wasn’t strong enough to resist the temptation. I let time pass. I let us fall in love. I didn’t speak up. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
He closed his eyes and they waited patiently.
Finally, he took up the story again.
‘Lying is a terrible burden,’ he said. ‘In the end I had to tell others.’
St Alban’s had become a refuge. In Colm Hendrie he found a friend, and the big Irishman was close to Smith, the young caretaker. Over midnight whiskies beside the cellar boiler they’d swapped secrets. They’d affirmed their sympathies with the Republican cause. Stupidly, he’d shared details of his former life in London, and – courting friendship perhaps – had revealed his role as a bomb-maker during the Easter Rising. They asked him to join their cell, talking of their determination to play their part in the IRA’s S-Plan. His refusal was countered by a less than subtle hint that he had little choice, if he wished to preserve a life with Kathleen and their yet-to-be-born child. The trap was sprung.