by John Gardner
Streets became so hot that the asphalt caught fire, glass cracked and exploded from windows, iron girders twisted like seaside rock, blaze begat blaze as high explosive bombs followed the incendiaries and a senior fireman broke down saying they were like small boys peeing on a bonfire.
Twelve of the City’s water mains were fractured, so that the firemen eventually had to withdraw and let the fires burn themselves out. Over the entire area night became day and in the newspaper offices of Fleet Street, journalists and printers could read their copy without electric light.
At their worst the fires could be seen from some of the Luftwaffe bases in northern France. In railway stations glass and aluminium fittings melted and formed silver pools on the broken and shattered platforms.
It was said that Winston Churchill looked out on the fires that night and said, ‘We’ll get the bastards for this.’ And the Deputy Chief of Air Staff, standing on the Air Ministry roof, muttered, ‘Well, they are sowing the wind —’
It was not necessary for him to complete the saying about reaping the whirlwind.
And as the City burned, thousands of rats poured from the warehouses and cellars, escaping from the flames that enveloped the area, taking with it more than five hundred years of history.
*
Golly ran through the many side streets, trying to escape the anger he had felt when grappling with the lady policeman. Now he was frightened of what would happen to him. For a time he hid among some ornamental bushes fronting houses in a side street less than fifty yards from the offices of Jewell, Baccus & Dance. From this lair he watched as a car trawled the streets searching for him. When it passed for the third time he thought he could glimpse the lady policeman in the back, leaning forward to peer out, looking for him.
The ground still shook from the explosions, and a blizzard of burned paper swirled up from the firestorms around St Paul’s, whirling as far west as Knightsbridge and Kensington. As he dodged from street to street, Golly actually thought it was real snow, until he saw the tiny white cobwebs of ash, and the glow of paper flakes still alight, like fireflies in the ice cold air.
He plodded on, and found doorways and darker places in which to hide. He made detours when he saw police, civil defence wardens, ambulances and firemen working ahead. His confidence returned and slowly he moved across the great capital city, heading towards his goal. What little reason he had told him that if the lady policeman was out searching for him, her home would be unguarded.
He knew how to get in.
He would wait for her there.
*
Dandy Tom called a meeting of his available people after he had spoken to Suzie Mountford in the privacy of his office. She told him what she had learned from Josh Dance. First the tenuous link he had with Overchurch, and his sinister refusal to go on talking about himself. ‘There’s some secret there,’ she told him. ‘But I’m not sure it has anything to do with crime.’
‘Beating up toms is illegal if I catch him at it,’ Tommy snapped.
Then she went on to talk about Paul Baccus and his family. ‘Two other illegitimate children as well as Emily,’ she told him, and then spoke of the way the son, Barry, had changed his name to Forbes, and that Rosemary had married a dodgy bloke called Lattimer who had died in some pub brawl. This, she considered, was probably the true reason for old Baccus cutting her out of his will. ‘He seems to have gone out of his way to take care of them all until Rosemary’s marriage. And it sounds as if he was a bit of an autocrat, even to the illegitimate children.’
Tommy said that it was no wonder she had spotted a similarity between Emily Baccus and Barry Forbes. ‘Strange to think that Forbes could rise to such a position on the Prime Minister’s staff, yet you know he would never have been allowed to rise in the Church, had he been that way inclined. Could never have been ordained a priest in the Church of England.’
Illegitimate males were still barred from the Anglican priesthood, as though the sin of fornication spilled over to stain them at birth. ‘You can serve Mammon but not God.’ Tommy laughed.
They had not gone down to the shelters. Work appeared to continue normally at the Yard where they were monitoring the situation in the City of London, receiving regular reports on how Ludgate Hill, at the bottom of Fleet Street, was ablaze, and many situation reports on the Tube and railway stations that were burning. Moorgate Station was engulfed in sheets of flame, and the Tube stations at Cannon Street and London Bridge were well ablaze. Then how London Bridge itself was on fire, and that the fleeing rats had run in droves into the West End to terrify those in the shelters and streets almost more than Hitler’s bombs.
Tommy was up in the canteen with Suzie, getting their first food of the night when the All Clear finally sounded just after 11.40. Later they heard the great fire blitz would have gone on longer but for fog that had swept in over northern France, forcing the Germans to order aircraft back to their bases.
‘I suppose we’d best get this show on the road then.’ Tommy admitted that it went against the grain to be running after a simple-minded psychopath who killed indiscriminately and consorted with whores. As he said, he would rather have been down in the City, in the thick of the bombs and fires dealing with that German psychopath. ‘Members of my family fought in the Crimea, at Waterloo and on the Western Front. What do I do? I become a Peeler and spend my time scrabbling around in the sewers chasing a half-witted strangler.’
‘Yes, but you met me through your job, Tommy. Isn’t that a bonus?’ Suzie whispered.
‘We’ll see about that, heart,’ he said cryptically, then smiled his splendid smile and began giving orders.
Billy Mulligan had a search warrant to hand. ‘I want you to supervise it, Billy. Go through it like the proverbial dose of Ipomoea purga.’
‘Education’s a wonderful thing, Guv,’ Billy grinned, ‘but for the ignorant could you translate?’
‘Jollop to you, Billy.’
The search warrant was for Lavender’s business premises off Rupert Street. He wanted Billy to lead other officers in and, as he put it, ‘Give it a search like God’s revenge. I want every scrap of paper, everything that’s not nailed down, every piece of furniture, clothes, even her spare knicker elastic. All of it, every last tic and flea. Put all of it in the forensics boys’ hands and rake out every dust mote, give it the works.’
Next he singled out Molly Abelard to go and, as he put it, ‘Lock up Forbes’s house near Marble Arch. Don’t let him out of your sight. Harass him. Stick to him like a piece of corn plaster. Get up his arse like a brown nose. I’m going to get a warrant so we can invite him in to assist with our enquiries as soon as possible in the morning.’ He scratched his head elegantly — Suzie had decided there wasn’t a thing he did not do elegantly — and mentioned setting up a trace on the Lattimer girl.
‘So, we’ve also got to trace this Lattimer girl,’ said Dandy Tom.
‘Lattimer?’ Shirley, who had been giving a good impression of a young woman nodding off to sleep, lifted her head.
‘You got something to contribute, Shirley?’
‘You mentioned a Lattimer, Guv.’ Pulling herself together, dusting herself down, polishing her nails.
‘So I did. For everybody’s information, Rosemary Lattimer is the married name of the late Emily Baccus’s half-sister: the one born on the wrong side of the blanket. Anything to add, Shirl?’
‘Yes, sir.’ To give her her due, she had started to look sheepish. ‘You remember when I went to have a look-see at Lavender the tom in her house in Camford?’
‘I recall it clearly, Shirley. Fourteen Dyers Road, wasn’t it?’
‘I think it’s her real name, Guv.’
‘Whose real name?’
‘Lavender’s real name. I got a squint at some letters she had lying on a table in her front room. That’s who they were addressed to — Mrs R. Lattimer, 14 Dyers Road, Camford.’
Almost before she had stopped talking, Tommy had a telephone to his ear, asking
for Camford CID.
‘No, sir,’ Pip Magnus said. He answered Dandy Tom’s call, and told him Detective Chief Inspector Anthony Harvey wasn’t in. ‘Only just back at work. He was badly injured in the Blitz, sir.’ He would probably be back in the morning. Or if this was very urgent, sir, he was duty CID all through the night as the song had it. Detective Constable Philip Magnus, at your service, ready to do your bidding, kiss your arse and hope to die, Guv’nor.
‘There’s a tom in your area that we’re very interested in,’ Tommy almost drooled. ‘Works out of a set of rooms quarter of an alley off Rupert Street, Soho. Has a respectable house in your manor, in Camford — fourteen Dyers Road. Goes by the name of Lavender, but is really Mrs Rosemary Lattimer. I’d be most grateful if you’d go along to her place at first light — or earlier if you could manage it. Ask her to wander in with you so that we can talk to her.’ He stressed that Mr Magnus should not lose sight of this woman, and that they were exceptionally anxious to have words with her. ‘Quite important, I’d say. I’ll send someone over for her when you let my office know she’s at your nick. Can you do that? Or shall I send over someone who can?’ He omitted the ‘heart’ but would have used it had Magnus been a female of the species.
‘I’ll do it, Guv. It’ll be a pleasure.’ Pip Magnus hung up the earpiece of his telephone, got his overcoat and wandered upstairs, went through to the front of the police station, told the duty sergeant he was going to take a walk round the block and went out into the night.
He only got as far as the telephone box on the corner, outside the post office. Inside, he opened his notebook and struck a match to read off the number he required. In the distance the sky glowed a ferocious red and he muttered what passed for a prayer for the poor buggers who’d been caught in that lot. The operator told him to insert three pence into the coin box and press Button A when the party answered.
‘Camford 649,’ Lavender’s bleary voice said, full of sleep.
‘Lavender?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Philip. You recognize my voice?’
‘Yes, of course, Pip.’
‘Big Toe would want me to do this, Lavender.’
‘What?’
‘Giving you a little warning, darlin’. I don’t know what you’ve done, and I don’t want to know. Sling your hook, right? Get on your bike, fast. The Yard want a word and their breath is already warming your ears.’
‘Thanks, Pip. Thanks. Okay? Right?’
‘Good luck, girl.’
Magnus walked slowly back to the nick, knowing that Big Toe would be delighted with his work that night.
*
Having set things in motion, Tommy decided that he was going to get a bit of rest until first light. ‘You sound like an officer in the Great War getting ready to go over the top,’ Suzie told him.
‘That’s exactly what I feel like, heart.’ He shot her a tired smile and, in the back of the unmarked Wolseley she stretched like a dozy cat. They were being followed by another car holding two of the lads who would watch over them until early morning. Dandy Tom was still not taking any chances. He had set everything up by saying loudly that he felt it would be safer if ‘I slept across your door, heart, and brought a couple of the lads with me’. Among his Spear Carriers knowing looks and raised eyebrows were exchanged.
They had to make a detour because Charing Cross Station was closed. An ugly great parachute mine hung precariously adjacent to the platforms. By the morning five railway stations and sixteen Underground stations were closed; nineteen churches destroyed; over 160 civilians killed and 500 injured.
When they finally arrived at Suzie Mountford’s flat, Tommy got out of the Wolseley, walked back to the second car and gave some brief orders to the lads. ‘Eyes back and front. In your arses and necks boys. Keep your ears open, your nasal passages clear and your sixth senses on the qui vive. You know the drill?’
‘Don’t worry, Guv. We’ll keep you snug as a bug.’
‘Snug as two bugs,’ he corrected them.
And they went in. Up to the fifth floor and into Suzie’s flat.
The telephone was ringing as they walked through the door and Suzie picked it up.
‘I gather the Guv’nor’s keeping his optics on your place, heart.’ Molly Abelard did a passable imitation of Tommy at his most mannered.
She told her, yes, and Molly said she’d like a word.
‘Cheeky cow,’ Suzie mouthed towards Tommy as he took the telephone. Then she mouthed that she was going for a pee and headed into the bathroom.
She switched the light on, slid the little bolt on the door, flicked her skirt up, hooked her fingers under her pants and turned to sit on the lavatory. And as she turned she saw Golly standing there grinning at her.
Twenty-Nine
For the second time in a matter of hours, Suzie faced the nightmare that had been with her since Charlotte’s death. This time she was literally struck dumb: paralysed; wanted to cry out and couldn’t, told her brain to kick the standing horror in the balls and couldn’t. For what felt like minutes the only thing she seemed capable of doing was to let go of her skirt, then slowly she began to move, too late for the truncheon; too late for anything.
Her world alternated between slow action and slower reaction, like that silly funny doctored film of Hitler, speeded up and slowed down to make it appear as though he was dancing a strange and convoluted eighteenth-century jig.
Golly gave a low, grinning, breathy, almost lascivious laugh. His face was uncovered so that she looked clear into the awful features — the eyes set at different levels, red rimmed and glowering; the long, entrenched jagged scar, the lightning rune drawn deep down his face from hair line to jutted chin; the nose oddly split and the cockeyed mouth dragged askew. And from where she stood she was conscious of his dark breath: part dog, part decay.
I like to call it the Quasimodo syndrome, Dandy Tom had said.
Golly was certainly a primitive. He was such a total evil. An unholy sacrament, the deformity being, in his case, an outward and all too visible sign of an inward, and unspiritual evil. He was the one in a million exception proving the rule.
Her hand seemed hardly to touch the truncheon before his sweating paws came up, banging hard on her shoulders knocking her almost off balance, then spinning her round so that her back was to him.
Now he could do it.
Now she was right.
His wrists crossed with the wire grasped tight, and he dropped it, quietly and accurately over her head and pulled.
Over hill and over dale,
See we come together.
She knew her breath was being wrenched out of her as he made the longer, stronger pull on the well-bound ends of the piano wire. She croaked out in a last desperate cry. Pushed back from her pelvis, felt his knee, painful in the small of her back and thought of the tiny poem that dear Dandy Tom had written and left on her pillow only a couple of nights ago —
For the Chinese this year may be the Year of the Snake,
But for me it will always be the Year of the Small of Your Back.
Then came the dreadful slicing agony as the wire bit. She had a vision of a grocer cutting a piece of cheese with wire and was aware that this was what was happening to her neck.
In a final hopeless attempt she did the standard shin-and foot-crushing move, the outside of her right shoe’s sole smashing into his shin, grating down and hitting his foot jarringly hard. Golly must have felt the moment of pain, but he withstood the agony and increased the pressure in her neck. Jesus, she thought in prayer. Made an act of contrition, as she felt the anguish too much to bear. She knew she was sliding towards some green haven with water slowly trickling through it, an oasis where the pain and everything else would be left behind. Her neck was on fire but even that was bearable as the mist moved in and she felt herself going down, her knees buckling.
Then there was a change: a sudden drop and she was falling forever, escaping down and down a long tunnel, descendi
ng slowly, almost flying and crying out as she went — not a shout of fear but a cry of release.
And then snatches from another voice close to her. ‘Stay down, you little bastard — Don’t move, you abortion — You gimp! You mizzler! You junk! Stay where you are.’
She recognized the voice, felt the drilling torment in her neck, opened her eyes and realized she was on her bathroom floor. Trying to raise her head she saw Tommy Livermore’s feet, and heard his voice again.
Later she was never certain if she had actually seen her rescue or simply imagined it, putting pictures in her head, illustrating the noises she could hear through the blurred and painful world around her. Dandy Tom smashing in the door with his shoulder, careering into the bathroom; the surprised look on Golly’s face, thinking she had come into the house alone: not caring to believe what was happening. Then the way her darling Tommy launched himself at Golly, like a dreadful avenging angel, airborne for a second as he flung himself forward, stretched out towards Golly’s loathsome face.
Tommy Livermore grabbed at one of Golly’s wrists, lifted one arm behind his back bending him forward, and shouting in fury at the man who had taken too many souls already. Goldfinch’s wrists were now manacled firmly behind his back, and Tommy had tipped him into the bath, screaming at him as if that was the only way he could be stopped from killing.
Certainly Suzie saw this last tableau because she remembered thinking that her Dandy Tom was frightened of Golly. Like someone who feared a deadly spider, he had his own brand of arachnophobia.
‘Heart? Heart, can you hear me? Are you okay?’ Then a terrible change of tone, ‘Not you, you abomination. Not you. Still. Stay still, you ugly little bastard.’