by Jim Kelly
‘I’m sorry. There’s something you need to know.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Brooke’s house, one of two villas, stood in a grove of willows and beneath the perennial green cover of a great cedar tree. He paused at his back gate, listening to the dripping of ice from the branches, enjoying the promise of the warmth that would soon be his: there had been no siren and the lights burnt in the garden room, glimpsed through a gap in the old curtains. Smoke, white and lively, rose from the chimney pot. A fire had been set. He could hear the sound of falling water at the weir, and – just – the sound of jazz playing inside the house.
Putting the key in the lock, he threw open the front door.
His wife appeared from the kitchen. Brooke knew immediately it was, as Rose had predicted, good news after all. She had a telegram in her hand.
‘Eden, it’s Ben. He’s been captured. He’s alive.’
Joy was a few steps behind her mother. Saying nothing, she hugged her father. They all embraced, and Brooke felt the guilt dissipate, the knowledge that he’d killed a man set firmly in a wider perspective, of light and darkness, good and evil.
The facts, contained in the telegram and augmented by a call to the Admiralty, were sparse. A German submarine – U-541 – had surfaced at an unspecified spot north of Heligoland, off the north German coast. A life raft had been spotted containing eight men. There had been a fire aboard the Silverfish. The boat had three inflatable rafts. But they had abandoned ship at night, when the blaze had threatened to reach the magazine, and had not seen the other rafts since. The men had been taken aboard and landed at Bremen. They were being held at a camp near Hamburg. The Red Cross had been asked to verify the details and report on their condition. The Admiralty advice was to await developments. Contact had been made with the Kriegsmarine, and there were hopes a repatriation might be negotiated, although Berlin would have to be consulted.
Claire and Joy held hands.
‘We should celebrate,’ said Brooke.
‘I could cook,’ said Claire. ‘There must be something left in the cellar to drink.’
Brooke rebuttoned his coat. ‘I said celebrate. Get your coats.’
Ten minutes later they were arm in arm, Brooke in the middle, crossing Coe Fen towards the colleges. Opposite Trinity a small restaurant, which catered for students in need of well-cooked English food, had become a family favourite. The menu, unencumbered by rationing, boasted duck and pheasant, ice cream and sponge pudding. Over a glass of sherry Brooke told them what had happened at Queens’. He didn’t want to overshadow the celebration, but it seemed indecent to remain silent.
Joy, matter of fact, told him what he wanted to hear. ‘You did the right thing, Dad. Thank God you were there.’
‘You should take a day off, Eden,’ said Claire. ‘Do something, anything but go back to work.’
Brooke raised his glass. ‘Ben’s not home yet. But now we know he will be.’
They went to the Boar’s Head for a drink and then, promptly countermanding Claire’s advice, to the Spinning House. Brooke checked on the prisoners while they waited outside on the street. Marie Aitken was in cell six and had refused food. Father Ward was in cell one and had eaten well. In the morning Aitken would have to identify the body in the morgue. Of all the punishments which awaited her, this seemed to Brooke the cruellest. The duty sergeant reported that Mr and Mrs Flynn had confirmed that they would be at St Alban’s in the morning at nine.
A typed note from Edison had been left for Brooke.
Sir. So that you know. Dr Bramley at Caius tested the package attached by mastic to the Mathematical Bridge. It contained a chemical mixture very close to the Home Office’s prediction. It’s Paxo, the IRA’s preferred explosive. A fuse wire was attached and would have been detonated by electrical impulse. They dredged the river and snared the wire. A line-of-sight detonator was found mid-river, close to the spot where the witnesses place our man. Copies on your desk. E.
On the doorstep Brooke almost bumped into PC Collins, the constable he’d sent to check out Silver Street Bridge while he searched the river for the lost child. Here he was in a civilian suit, hair cut brutally short. He could have passed for sixteen, or even younger.
‘Sir,’ he said, executing a salute, which made Joy and Claire giggle as they stood by on the pavement.
‘Collins, we’ve missed you.’
The young man coloured violently, his cheeks turning bright red. He lifted his hat to Joy and Claire, and they clutched each other before turning away, laughing.
‘Too much wine taken,’ said Brooke.
‘Sir.’ The young man seemed tongue-tied.
‘You disappeared,’ offered Brooke. ‘Remember?’
‘I’m due at the army muster next week. Cambridge Station. I’ve been called up. The chief inspector thought I’d best take the time I was away as leave, seeing as how I’d gone anyway. She said I was on a charge, sir, and it’s on my record, but I was best just to return the uniform.’
He had a package under his arm wrapped in brown paper.
‘Sorry I let everyone down, sir. I want to serve. In France. I think I let my imagination get the better of me. I want to do what’s right. I just needed to think.’
‘Where did you disappear to?’
‘Old friend from school, up the road in Peterborough. Not far. He talked some sense into me.’ Collins was nodding all the time, as if agreeing with his own version of events.
‘When you checked out the bridge for me that night, the night the child was seen in the river, what did you find?’
Collins shook his head, his eyes flitting to the door, eager to escape. ‘Not a soul, sir.’
‘Car tracks? Footsteps?’
Collins shook his head, but Brooke could see it in his eyes: he hadn’t looked. If he’d done his duty then, at the right time, the whole affair might have been very different.
‘Good luck,’ said Brooke, and turned to go, ignoring a proffered handshake.
They walked back via Parker’s Piece. The normal domestic peace of the tented barracks had clearly been disturbed. A large crowd had gathered in the square’s furthest corner. Grandcourt appeared, clutching a tin mug of coffee. Claire made a fuss of him, asking after his wife, the two girls, the house in Romsey Town.
‘What’s up here?’ asked Brooke eventually.
‘Shelter four reckon they’ve found a body inside. Sirens last night so they was all packed out. Could be anybody. All that excitement, and no air, maybe their heart gave out.’
Brooke left them and pushed his way through to a military cordon, showing the guard his warrant card, and ducking underneath a plank on oil drums set up as a barrier. The shelter was identical to Grandcourt’s, a concrete bunker sunk in the earth.
At the iron door he met a young army doctor coming out. ‘Ah. Police? Good. Definitely for you, if not military intelligence. Nasty, but not much doubt. Dead twenty-four hours, possibly more.’
The bunker had three chambers, each one as long as a train carriage, but about twice as wide. Benches ran down each side, and the floors had been cleared of belongings and food and rubbish left during the previous night’s raid. Light was provided by overhead bulbs but was still weak. The concrete floor was gritty, the air damp.
Brooke tied his scarf tighter at his throat and followed the doctor into the last chamber.
‘Here,’ he said, turning on a torch. The body lay in a foetal ball, wrapped in a large fur-lined coat, the head tucked in under the bench.
Brooke knelt, and the glare of the torch revealed the face. It was Augustine Bodart. The expression was hard to determine, but Brooke saw pain, and possibly a fleeting triumph. Her pillow was a suitcase, covered in a blanket. Together they edged her body away from the wall. The limbs, stiff and tightened, reduced her instantly to an object. Brooke used a penknife to crack the flimsy lock on the suitcase and flipped the lid. Inside was one of Rafe Forbes’s precious RADAR units, its wires and valves reminiscent of the mechanism
for a bomb.
‘Here’s the devil,’ said the doctor. He’d slipped on a suede glove, with which he inched the dead woman’s upper lip higher, revealing a glint of metal caught between two of the back teeth. ‘I’m no expert,’ he said, sniffing the air. ‘But if that’s the smell of almonds I’d say that was a cyanide pill. You can detect the same aroma on her right hand, on the fingers. There’s something in her other hand,’ he added.
Brooke gently prised the fingers away from the palm to reveal a curious collection of woodland objects: the fragile helicopter seed of a sycamore, a conker and a very small intricate tree cone. Despite the fierce grip she’d been careful not to crush the treasures.
‘What can that mean?’ Brooke asked. At the moment of death, she’d chosen to hold these tightly instead of another human hand. He didn’t think they’d ever know truth.
He searched her pockets and found a train ticket for London. Had she gone to the station only to discover the constables searching the carriages? A purse held a single ten-bob note and a few coins. Brooke thought it was a curiously affecting idea: that Bodart had chosen a bunker crammed with humanity, parents and children, grandchildren and grandparents, sons and daughters, for this lonely death.
For a moment he imagined the despair which had driven her to suicide: alone, in a foreign country, thwarted in her plan to go home, to do – at least by her own lights – her duty. Had she, fleetingly, been jealous of these people? Or did she, at heart and at the end, think she was better than them, a member of a superior race? Brooke had no answers but one: death always looked the same.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Brooke sat alone in a pew at St Alban’s, dazed by a three-hour bout of deep sleep at home in bed, which had left him curiously elated. He’d woken reborn, saddened only by the realisation that he’d forgotten this simple act of awakening, fresh and remade. Claire lay beside him, their shared sheets twisted together. For the first time in recent memory sunlight lay across the bed, a level, clear light which shone through a thinning mist beyond the window. It was only after a minute of timeless expectation that he remembered firing the shot, and sensing the impact as the bullet found its mark.
Now he sat in the church, the same sun shining through St Alban’s modest stained-glass windows, gaudy with colour. At any moment five-year-old John McQuillan would enter by the side door which led into the playground. The case, as such, was closed but for this one small, tragic act. He regretted the undoubted fear which the boy would feel at the summons. But the child had brought it on himself, even if his motives – like his friend’s – had been almost wholly innocent.
Childhood was a time for games, and that is what they would discuss. The games that children play on long train journeys. The games that desperate men play were now history: Liam Walsh’s bigamous marriage, the IRA bomb cell, the brutal murder of a small boy. Did Joe Smith and Colm Hendrie know the boy was still alive when they hauled the sack over the parapet of Silver Street Bridge? That truth would never be certain, but Brooke was sure of one thing: Joe Smith was a born killer. Once he’d killed, he’d killed again, and but for a bullet in the back he’d have murdered many more. His compatriot Hendrie had been despatched, disfigured, butchered, all to protect the patriotic mission. With the first bomb Smith had struck at the heart of the nation’s transport system. With the second he’d planned a political assassination, a rallying cry against the dominion of the British Crown. The irony was that his own father, the hero who had supposedly inspired his deeds, would have almost certainly hated him for what he’d done.
The door opened, and John McQuillan hesitated, half in the light, half in shadow.
‘They said to come,’ he said.
‘Come in, John,’ called Brooke. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
The boy looked no better, pale and strained.
Brooke had chosen a pew-end, so that he could face out into the aisle, and he gestured for the boy to take a seat opposite.
The boy worked a blue cap anxiously in his hands.
‘Show me again,’ said Brooke, touching his own sleeve.
The boy pulled back a jumper and stiff shirt cuff to reveal the skin, decorated with the elegant tendrils of the blue-stained letters QPR, set on its flag.
‘Looks as good as new.’
‘I use a pen every day. Keep it clear.’ He wouldn’t look at Brooke, his eyes on his arm, then his shoes.
‘The man who killed Sean, your friend Sean, he wore a football scarf. It was blue and white, John. And he lived with his uncle who was a docker in London. So what was his team?’
‘Millwall – the Lions,’ said the boy, brightening, bouncing slightly despite the hard, wooden seat.
‘Right. And that made me think how we come to support the teams we do. Me – Cambridge Town, and they’re not even in the League. And there’s Sean. When I saw his body, he had a badge with a cannon on it: a red background, a gold cannon. Very smart. So what was his team?’
‘Arsenal,’ he said, but only in a whisper.
‘That’s right, John. Except it’s not right, is it? Because Sean came from Shepherd’s Bush, and that’s where QPR play, at Loftus Road. It made me think, John. I reread your file too, the form the school got from your mum. And you’re from Archway, right? And that’s in north London. And we all know who plays there, don’t we?’
The boy couldn’t speak.
‘And it all made me think of two things. It made me think how unhappy you’ve been since your new friend went missing, and about games on trains. You said you played jacks in the corridor, and I spy out the window.’
The boy’s mouth hung open, revealing a fleshy throat, and milk teeth.
‘But it gets boring, doesn’t it, after a few miles. So I think you decided to play a really good game, one that would fool all the grown-ups, and it wouldn’t hurt anyone, and although you’d probably have to give it up, it wouldn’t be the first day, or the first week. And when the truth was out everyone would know you’d fooled them. Not just the teachers, but the other kids too. Sounds like a great game, doesn’t it?
‘So you swapped the labels, didn’t you? Names and addresses. Easy-peasy. You became John McQuillan, and he became Sean Flynn. It was a secret between new-found friends. Blood brothers. It’s a bond, John – sorry, Sean. I don’t suppose that’s been a problem has it – answering to John. It’s just the English for Sean.’
The boy nodded, and then the tears began to fall.
‘And then, as the train pulled in, you had to give up on a game of hangman. The answer was ARCHWAY – Sean, John’s home. It’s alright. None of it’s your fault,’ said Brooke. ‘None of it – don’t let anyone say any different, Sean. Your mum and dad will be here soon.’
‘Dad hates me,’ said the boy, his lower lip hanging down, a sob beginning to wrack his frame. ‘His boys are grown up, earning money. I’m a burden. I heard him say it. A burden. He wouldn’t even call me Sean – he said John was better, he said it was a proper name. He says the family’s got to move on. We’re not in the gutter with the rest, that’s what he says. We’ve got a house with a WC upstairs. I’d rather play in the street. I wanted to be someone else. But I miss Mum. It was scary when John disappeared. I thought it was because of what we’d done. So I didn’t tell.’
‘Your mother loves you,’ offered Brooke.
‘She won’t tell me about my real dad. They tell me I don’t remember him, that I can’t. But I do. He took me to the football. He stood on the terrace and I sat on his shoulders. I had Bovril. I do remember.’
‘You should ask your mum again about your dad. There’s a story to tell.’
‘Have you met him?’
‘Yes. He left home because he thought it was the best thing for you. He misses you every day. He said that to me. He’s very sad now. I think he misses you a lot.’
Brooke stood, punched his hat into shape, and held out his hand. ‘Come on. They’re waiting. It’s going to be quite a surprise.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-T
HREE
Later, at dusk, Brooke sat in his office at the Spinning House. Before him he had John McQuillan’s file, which gave his parents as Fergus McQuillan (deceased) and Bernadette McQuillan, of Bedford Street, Archway. The mother’s profession was given as cleaner. There were five children listed. It was now almost four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, so if she’d gone to Mass it would have been that morning. They’d be at home, and there might have been a Sunday lunch. Given the ration books available it might even have involved meat. Brooke imagined a modest fire, Bernadette in an armchair with a cup of tea. They’d be missing young John, but possibly also savouring the peace and quiet. If Sean Flynn’s character sketch of his new-found friend was accurate, he was a junior tearaway, and possibly a burden to his widowed mother. Maybe some of the boys were old enough to work, if they hadn’t been called up, and there might be a bottle of beer or two. There was enough money because the form listed a phone number:
ARCHWAY 6787
Brooke finished a cigarette, picked up the phone and asked switchboard to get him the number. It rang in a faraway world of echoes, then – suddenly – loudly and close.
A woman’s voice in a strong Irish accent said, ‘Archway 6787,’ the inflection polite, inviting enquiry.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Inevitably the thaw didn’t last, so that the snow returned to Fenner’s cricket pitch, while icicles hung from the elaborate iron gates as Edison parked the Wasp in front of Frank Edwardes’ house. He’d polished the ruby-red paintwork, and a tartan rug had been neatly folded on the back seat. He fussed with the wheelchair in the boot as Brooke strode up the path to let himself in, finding his old senior officer ready and waiting, sitting on a bench in the hall, wrapped up in scarves and gloves.
Kat appeared from the kitchen, smiling broadly.
‘He’s been down here since six. He took the stairs on his backside. The doctor’s given him a painkiller – an injection, so he’ll be fine. But back by early afternoon, Brooke, please; and I’ll need help getting him up to his room. Here,’ she added, handing over a flask. ‘It’s pretty much neat whisky with a dash of black tea. But it does the trick.’ Then she handed Brooke a picnic basket. ‘Just a few things to help the party along,’ she said.