Fall of Angels

by Barbara Cleverly

  He stayed his step again, in sudden doubt. Laundress Lane. The sinister little alleyway leading from the town to Laundress Green. Often flooded in winter, this was the small grassy area on the riverbank where the washerwomen of the town had spread their linen out to dry. Pretty as a picture and buzzing with life in the summertime. Sinister and deserted on a December evening.

  Why on earth had it come to his mind? Why had he mentioned it to Earwig and—more importantly—why had the wretched, deceitful, lying girl passed it on to a villain who ought not even to be in Cambridge?

  The lane was not so much the place for a duel as an assassin’s killing ground. A narrow cobbled way, not two swords’ width, with high walls on each side. Once embarked on it, there was no way of avoiding anyone approaching from the other side. You had to greet them, friend or foe and pass on. But which side was the “other” one? He’d miscalculated. “W” would be expecting him to take the direct route from his home to the lane. Indeed, that was exactly what he had done. He decided to do an about-turn, put on some speed, retrace his steps, circle round and join the bustle of Silver Street, then enter the lane from the town side. If he was lucky, he might well come upon a furtive figure lurking about looking the wrong way down the lane. With some satisfaction, he’d tap him on the shoulder and with a comedy police greeting—“Allo, allo, allo, what’s all this, then?”—and send him on his way with a flea in his ear.

  The lamp at the entrance to Laundress Lane opposite Queens’ College was alight and, as he walked straight past he noted that the lamp at the far end also was glowing. He managed to make out that between the two, for its full length, the alley was empty. As a nearby college bell struck six o’clock, a band of raucous students gathered at the entrance to Queens’ called farewells to each other and shot off in smaller groups, some into the college, some striking out up Silver Street. Three men in green and white striped Queens’ College scarves laughed together and crossed the road, making, no doubt, for the bright lights and flowing beer of the Anchor pub on the river bank.

  Returning to the lane, Redfyre found it still deserted. He flashed his strong police-issue light the length of it. No crouched assassins. No obstacles of any kind underfoot.

  He loitered for five minutes more before he decided he’d been the victim of a crude joke and gave up. Frustration, anger and embarrassment were chipping away at his caution. He was going home. By the most direct route. Straight down the middle of that bloody lane! Anyone getting in his way would regret it. He switched on his torch, set his shoulders as though for a scrum and started out.

  He’d taken five steps when he felt the tap on his back.

  “Allo, allo, allo!” said a cheery voice. “This is a funny place to find a policeman.”

  Redfyre whirled, torch raised ready to smash at the face of whoever had sneaked up on him.

  “Whoa! Easy! It’s only me, you twerp!”

  Panting with surprise and alarm, Redfyre stared at the stranger. “Only me” was a man he’d have sworn he’d never met before in his life. An impressive man. Taller than Redfyre by about two inches, he was wearing a dark cashmere overcoat with a black slouch hat pulled down low on his brow. He took off his hat in a courtly gesture and grinned. Fair hair lit up in the torchlight, and blue eyes crinkled against the brilliance with humour as he peeled off the college scarf and pushed it into his pocket.

  “Good Lord!” Redfyre managed at last to exclaim.

  He put out his left hand and shook the left hand that the other offered him.

  “You’re a hard man to keep sight of, Redfyre! I lost you right at the start. By the time I’d got out of that bloody cemetery, you’d beetled off in the opposite direction! I had to backtrack and bustle along a bit to get here before you.”

  He peered down the lane and shuddered. “Godawful places you choose to frequent when you have the choice of this fair city. Graveyards and killing zones? What traps have you installed down there? Pincer gate? Machicolations? Chevaux-de-frise?”

  “You never know—there might well be a trou-de-loup,” Redfyre suggested with a tight smile. “Even Caesar found that digging a wolf hole or two brought results. How do you do, Wulfie? Or are you still calling yourself Oberstleutnant Stretton?”

  He responded to Redfyre’s challenge with another grin. “So much to talk about! It must be twenty years or more, eh? Why don’t we finish this reunion in the Anchor? There’s a little back door into the pub, straight off the lane down here on the right. Did you know? I discovered it just this afternoon on my reconnaissance. The beer’s not bad, and I suppose it passes for your local, so you can buy the first round.”

  Wulfie Stretton was not a man who could creep about in disguise hoping not to be noticed for long, Redfyre thought as he made his way, tankard in each hand over to the corner table Stretton had settled at. Large, blond, commanding, and surveying the world about him with an affable eye, he attracted attention. When they’d settled in and taken a thoughtful swig or two of their draught bitter, Stretton grimaced and began to make conversation.

  “Doesn’t begin to compare with the litres of good Löwenbräu the men enjoyed in the trenches. Or the Rhine wine and schnapps they served in the officers’ mess. Who was it who said, ‘You can fight a war without women, horses, even bullets, but you can’t fight a war without tobacco and alcohol’? It remains a surprise that the Germans failed to win, so superior was their drink. Schnapps has a soul, you know,” he confided.

  “Oh, yes? We managed very well on Woodbines and rum,” Redfyre said pleasantly. “Rum is far too coarse to have a soul, I’m afraid, but it does fire up the old cockles. And it seems to have worked.” In a colder, crisper tone he added, “Very bad form, Stretton, to be fighting the war over again. Five years have passed. This is a different country and a different world. I have a pair of handcuffs in my back pocket, and I’m itching for the opportunity to use them if I don’t like the answers to certain questions I have for you.”

  “Fire away, old boy!”

  “Just for fun and to humour you, I’ll start with an easy one: The scarf, Wulfie? I hadn’t realised that the Herr Oberstleutnant was a Queens’ alumnus.”

  “He’s not! I pinched it from a bike basket. Who’s going to look twice at one of several chaps in a college scarf rioting about with his fellow roughs outside his own college? Protective colouring! I’ve learned to use it.”

  “Hmm. And what steps are you using to melt once again into English life? We had a brisk way with traitors in the war. A green and white scarf won’t save your neck.”

  “Perhaps not, but a blue and gold book might do the trick.”

  He reached into his inside pocket and produced a familiar small, slim, dark blue book with gold lettering.

  “A British passport?” Redfyre asked in surprise. “I wondered how you’d managed to get back into the country. How on earth did you get your hands on this? Is it forged?”

  “Perfectly genuine. Take a look. Wherever I go, I use the front door and expect it to be opened for me,” Stretton smiled easily.

  “Tipping the doorman a hefty sum, I’d guess?”

  “Inevitably some greasing of palms or exchange of favours is required in these cases. This arrived for me in the diplomatic bag. Seems to work, though I must confess to a nervous moment at Dover. You can never trust the British Foreign Office one hundred percent. They enjoy their little games and they don’t always stay bought.”

  Redfyre thumbed through the document, checking the stamps dating entry and departure across the countries of Europe and noting in particular his date of admission to the United Kingdom.

  “You must have seriously expected a one way traitor’s ticket straight to the Tower of London,” Redfyre commented. “You certainly earned it. I think I should arrest you and take you there anyway. Let whoever will, argue about it after the event.”

  “Always the scrapper, Johnny! But no! You have th
is all wrong. Didn’t Earwig explain? The last thing the British government wants is a fuss. The postwar mood is all for recovery and reconciliation.”

  “Some might think there was a price to pay for destroying a continent. What about remorse, retribution and restitution?”

  “So old hat! And the spectacle of a scion of English county stock dangling from a rope would horrify the nation. You can imagine what a banquet the press would have . . . the front-page headlines. The memory of Sir Roger Casement is still raw and uncomfortable—he suffered a traitor’s execution for colluding with Germany. Irish he may have been, but he was a good-looking bloke and an inspiring speaker. The press managed to denigrate his name and his character in court, but some Englishmen, politicians, writers and poets made a huge fuss. The national conscience was put to the question. A nation writhed with indecision and guilt. Oh, no! They couldn’t risk going through that again!”

  “You found the right heartstrings to tug on?”

  “It was decided—and at a level so high it would make your head spin!—that Britannia’s morale would be dented by a show trial at the Old Bailey or by a ceremonial military execution involving the severing of buttons or heads. There was no need even for the publicity of issuing a pardon. Because no sin was committed, you see.”

  He leaned closer and said, “Confidentially now, old boy: I was a British agent, working for King and Country all along. Yes, indeed. In the pay of British Military Intelligence. I have in my possession a document certifying exactly that, a document signed by the highest authority in the Secret Intelligence Service.”

  “Ah! At last you impress me. It was signed in green ink with the letter ‘C’ for ‘Cumming’?” Redfyre enquired sarcastically.

  Stretton shook his head. “No. The much admired head of—what are you calling them these days—MI6, would it be? Mansfield Smith-Cumming did not have the honour of fixing my reinstatement. He died last June. My document is, indeed, signed in green ink, but you’ll have to address your queries to Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair if you must check my bona fides. But I’m sure you know that. A naughty wolf trap, Redfyre?”

  Redfyre leaned close and said quietly, “Confidentially now, old boy: Bollocks to your bona fides! To borrow and mutilate a phrase from the Afridi tribe, ‘Trust a rat before a snake and a snake before a Stretton.’ There are two things I want to know before you leave here with my boot up your treacherous arse: How did you lose your right hand, and what is the nature of your relationship with your sister’s friend, Juno Proudfoot?”

  Chapter 21

  Monday morning, 17th December.

  MacFarlane had summoned his inspector and sergeant into the privacy of his office to await delivery of three copies of the Cambridge Oracle.

  They seized on the papers the moment a constable brought them up and read in silence, absorbing the contents of the front page. It seemed to be as bad as each had feared. Sebastian Scrivener had done his damaging worst again.

  The headline reminded the readers of the news they had already read the previous Saturday. fall of an angel was followed, on this Monday morning, by more angels fall! and the subheading: two never to rise again. where will this slaughter of the innocents end?

  The main body of the copy, taking up two-thirds of the front page, was devoted to the death of Louise Lawrence, the remaining third to the more recent discovery of the body of Rosalind Weston.

  Redfyre felt obliged to break the silence. “There’s nothing here in the account of Louise’s death that he didn’t hear along with the other journalists at your press briefing, sir,” he commented.

  “No, you’re right,” MacFarlane agreed. “The facts are all there and not, for once, exaggerated. I’ll give him that. It’s the interpretation he puts on them that concerns me. And that he’s drawing a connecting line between the two deaths, extending back to the attack on Miss Proudfoot. He’s working to an agenda, this bloke.”

  “An agenda that might well have been dictated to him down a telephone wire,” murmured Redfyre.

  “Time I had him in for a chat.” MacFarlane was growling and blustering and holding the pages by the edges as though attempting to avoid contamination. “Three poor girls attacked in the space of a weekend . . . These sharks must think all their Christmases have come at once!”

  “It’s the way he gives the unquestioned details but uses them to sort of . . . plant a suggestion . . . that gets me,” Thoday ventured. “I mean, look at this, halfway down.”

  Parents of young girls, accustomed to allowing their daughters to range freely over Cambridge city, will be minded perhaps to draw for themselves a mental map of the city and pinpoint the places where these dastardly crimes have been committed. A pattern will be seen to emerge.

  The first angel to fall—the one lucky survivor—very nearly met her end in the heart of the university, in the middle of a college chapel (St. Barnabas), surrounded by crowds of concertgoers. The second was found dead in the river, only yards from a boathouse (St. Barnabas); the third, at the very doorway to one of the colleges (St. Barnabas).

  “And he’s a bloke who understands the strength of the number three,” MacFarlane said. “Once is chance, twice is happenstance, but three times it’s: Lock up your daughters. It’s out in the open now—he’s definitely going for the college. The next sentence says it all. That’s the nub.”

  The young ladies of Cambridge—and their concerned parents and guardians—should perhaps plan their journeys about this fair and hitherto peaceable city with added care and circumspection.

  “In other words, it’s a sink of iniquity, and any girl going near this college risks life or limb. He goes on to invoke God and the Cambridge CID in his call to arms.”

  This paper does not relish the thought of reporting the deaths of any further innocents snatched prematurely from the bosoms of their families, and we pray that our daughters may be kept safe in this holy season of Christmas. Moreover, we would urge the concerned guardians of our peace, the Cambridge police force, to do their utmost to uncover the person responsible for these appalling crimes and render him incapable of causing further sorrow for Cambridge families. We would urge our law officers to strain every sinew to prevent our quiet courts and gracious ways descending into the filth of Whitechapel.

  “Can’t say he’s wrong. But no prizes for guessing who I’m going to have on the phone shouting into my earpiece any minute,” MacFarlane said gloomily.

  “Not your fault, sir, if someone’s got it in for St. Barnabas,” Thoday said stoutly.

  “It’s not the college I’m expecting to hear from,” said MacFarlane. “They’ve got the sense to either ignore it, knowing it will all be forgotten by the new year, or else they’ll take it up with the editor. Students and staff at the colleges have mostly gone down for the vacation anyway. No, it’s the chief. He was turning my ear red yesterday in the clubhouse, rattling on about the usual—town-gown relationships. Souring by the minute, he thinks. And of course, it’s all down to us to sort it out.”

  “In Saturday’s paper, Inspector Redfyre was a hero—stalwart, music-loving law officer who saved the life of a potential victim,” Thoday grumbled. “Now this bloke’s needling us just a bit. Isn’t he?”

  “And tomorrow, he’ll go for the jugular. That’s their modus operandi, Thoday. Bloody press! They build you up one minute—quite deliberately—then tear you down the next, revelling in the drama of the fall from grace. And don’t believe all that rubbish about ‘this paper does not relish the thought of reporting further deaths’! Huh! They’re licking their lips! They know very well that Jack the Ripper sold more newspapers than the Battle of Waterloo and the death of Queen Victoria put together.”

  He surveyed his small team. “Right, now lads! Back to real business. Anything to add, Thoday?”

  “About Miss Lawrence, sir. I followed up the thug with the dog she took from him. He’s a Ronald Johnson from Newmarke
t Road. A regular at certain sporting events that take place behind the Wrestlers pub on Onion Row. Within spitting distance of old Mr. Benson’s pill factory. In fact, our Mr. Johnson is—was—an employee there. He was sacked last month for bad timekeeping. He could well have known Louise Lawrence by sight, even if she didn’t know him.”

  “Sporting events? Not more bare-knuckle boxing dos! I thought we’d stamped those out.”

  “No, sir. In fact, these are very unsporting events. Dog fights. Not casual stuff—professional organisers, specially bred animals and heavy betting.”

  “Investigate Ronnie Johnson. Take a posse, including a veterinarian. Arrest him on a count of animal cruelty, then question him about the Lawrence killing. Well done, Thoday! And well done on little Miss Weston. All that footwork down King Street kicked up some dirt! And it was a sharp-eyed PC on overtime who worked out that she could only have been dumped where she was left, in the gateway, by some bugger pushing her through from the inside.”

  “Inspector!” He turned to Redfyre. “You also investigated the Weston matter further. Gained access to the ivory tower, but I don’t see anyone in cuffs yet?”

  “There are two people who could have done the killing, and one has a very strong motive,” Redfyre supplied, and gave an account of his interview with the dean. He concluded by admitting his sleight of hand with the wine glass and its two sets of fingerprints.