The Great Darkness

by Jim Kelly

  He’d been held in the ruins of an old telegraph station by an abandoned railway line. The interrogations were conducted in a cellar at the bottom of a short flight of stone steps. The lamp, within a silver reflective dish, blazed behind his interrogators; the men who’d asked the questions often changed, but the light was a constant, and so he never saw their faces. Towards the end of his captivity the electric lamp had merged with the sun, so that he was unable to distinguish them apart. The light from both cut into his eyes, past the glassy cornea, through the aching retina and deep into the brain beyond.

  The distant sound of soldiers marching past on Regent Street jogged Brooke out of his reverie. He took a deep breath and opened the report which lay before him on the desk. Edison had summarised progress on the three impounded lorries from Castle Hill. The sergeant’s prose style was pedestrian but accurate: the registration plates were false, the corporate branding – Turl’s of York – bogus, as were all the drivers’ documents recovered from the cabs. The relevant papers had been sent to the Ministry of Transport to see if other forgeries of similar standard had been found anywhere else in the country. All three vehicle engines were in first-class condition and had been regularly serviced to a high standard. One of the lorries had a fuel tank which had been patched with a piece of second-hand metal plate punched with a serial number and the stencilled words LOXLEY GARAGE.

  Admin at the Spinning House comprised three young women who shared secretarial duties. They had been directed to cable police stations in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, York and Nottingham with a résumé of the case file. Edison had added a priority request in each case to check local directories for Loxley Garage. He’d also got a photographer to capture a mugshot of the prisoner Turl for circulation by post.

  Chief Inspector Carnegie-Brown, Brooke’s superior, had helpfully sent one further document through the internal post for his private consideration. Jean Carnegie-Brown was a rarity, a senior policewoman, who’d transferred to the Borough to take the post of chief inspector, having served in uniform in Glasgow for twenty years. In the Great War she’d used her degree from Edinburgh, in German, to work as a translator, interrogating POWs. This echo of Brooke’s wartime torture brought a nervous edge to their rare encounters.

  Carnegie-Brown was an efficient bureaucrat. The memo was her favoured weapon. The document she’d directed to Brooke’s in-tray bore the Home Secretary’s signature, and called on all forces to be alert to the emergence of a black market, manipulated by organised crime. Given Whitehall plans for rationing, a special note should be kept of any incidents involving petrol, sugar, eggs or fresh meat.

  Carnegie-Brown had added, in a typically clipped copperplate, a line across the top of the page …

  Home Office alerted to three lorry case from Castle Hill. Request daily update. Urge upmost priority in pursuit of national security. Copies to Sir Philip Game.

  Brooke stretched out long legs and closed his eyes. Sir Philip was the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. In Brooke’s experience, catching the attention of Scotland Yard was not a helpful development in any inquiry.

  A minute later, Turl, the lorry driver, sat opposite, slouched in his chair, as Edison asked perfunctory questions: name, home address, identity of the other drivers, the names of those organising the convoy. Because that’s what it was, a caravan of black-market meat.

  Turl didn’t open his mouth. They could see now why he’d waived his right to a solicitor.

  They pressed on. Destination? Payment? In terms of understanding the sinews of the crime, they were totally lost. Were there other convoys? Where was the meat going to be stored? That was the key, not to flood the market now, but wait for the real war to start, and for the imposition of meat rationing. Refrigeration plants on an industrial scale were rare. Deep freezer plants even rarer. It had been a chilly night, and the three lorries were insulated, but their eventual destination must have been within a night’s drive.

  Turl watched them with an intelligent eye. The role he’d played on Castle Hill, working an oily rag between his hands, had been replaced by something more multilayered: there was a lively intelligence in the restless eyes, and a deadly precision in the sinewy hands, which had been given leave to roll a cigarette.

  Brooke and Edison asked him more than a hundred questions over the period of fifteen minutes without prompting a single answer.

  Finally, he asked a question of his own.

  ‘What are the glasses for?’ he said, nodding at Brooke, who’d opted for the lightly tinted ochre lenses in the gentle light flooding in through the lancet window.

  Brooke took them off. His eyes were so pale they looked like ice. Turl dropped his gaze, pretending to concentrate on rolling the cigarette.

  ‘Seeing into the souls of parasites like you,’ said Brooke. ‘I’d make the most of that fag. If we don’t get some answers soon, that’s your last.’

  Edison, sipping tea, grunted in approval.

  ‘Have you found the others?’ asked Turl, sitting back in his chair, rocking it on its back legs. ‘If they’d sat tight we might have got away with it. But Ginger did a runner. Nev followed suit, did he? Couldn’t keep their nerve under pressure. They’ll pay for that.’ This idea produced a smile. ‘If – no, when you find them, I’ll tell you this for nowt. They’ll be burnt up, the bodies. In-cin-erated. But you’ll be able to identify them alright, like. Otherwise there’s no point, is there? It’s our trademark. What’ya call it? Our brand. Death by fire.’

  It was always a revelation, the extent to which prisoners thought that they could talk without revealing vital information. They failed to understand that this kind of catch-me-if-you-can game simply exposed the underlying geometry of the crime itself. It was clear that the drivers who had fled first had betrayed the gang by their loss of nerve. Turl saw himself as the noble victim of their treachery.

  ‘Is that what waits for you?’ asked Brooke. ‘An execution?’

  Turl shook his head. ‘Not me, boss.’

  He grinned at Edison.

  ‘How old’s granddad?’ he asked.

  ‘How stupid are you?’ asked Brooke, and he saw a half-second flash of anger cross the eyes. ‘I think you’re very stupid. You’re a minion. What’s one of those?’

  Turl’s face had become entirely immobile. ‘A follower of a powerful man,’ he offered.

  Brooke replaced his glasses. ‘Especially a servile one. I think you’ve lost sight of your place in the world. You’re a cog in the big machine. I’m not sure the fact that you kept your head when all those around lost theirs is going to weigh that heavily in the balance.’

  Edison’s pen scratched as he made a note.

  ‘Does he write it all down?’ said Turl.

  ‘All except this bit.’

  Edison laid down his pen.

  ‘You’ve given me an idea,’ said Brooke.

  Turl tried a smile, pulling a thread of tobacco from his lip.

  ‘We’ll find out a bit more first, that mugshot we got of you is doing the rounds. Leeds, is it? Bradford? Manchester? Whatever. We’ll strike lucky. Then we’ll let it be known that you’re helping us with some names, a few addresses. And when we do find some names we’ll make sure you get the credit. Then they can start planning what they’ll do to you when you get out. That’ll be five years, maybe less. You can look forward to that when you’re lying in your bunk at nights. That’ll be a dilemma: do you spend five years doing your time, wanting it to end so you can get out, or five years hoping it doesn’t end, because of what’s waiting outside? When you finally walk through those prison gates there’ll be a car waiting, a packet of fags, a bottle of whisky, leggy blonde on the back seat. But they won’t take you home. Where do they do it? A garage maybe, then what? Is it a wrench to the back of the head and then the fire, or do they burn them alive? What’s their modus operandi?’

  Turl sucked at his roll-up, unblinking as the smoke drifted into his eyes.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

/>   Dusk was falling on Mill Road Cemetery as Chris Childe, conscientious objector, knelt before his parents’ grave, marked by a flat stone, surrounded by a Gothic riot of ornately carved tombs, spreading ivy and statuary. A blackbird sang, perched on the head of an angel. The two sets of iron gates were locked, but the cemetery had been in a state of disrepair since the last war, and the wall was no real barrier to anyone who wanted to visit the dead out of hours.

  He checked his watch: he was late for the Party’s weekly branch meeting, so he stood, brushing his trousers clean of dead leaves. They could start without him, dispense with the drab formalities, then he’d arrive and take his place, briefly, in the limelight. Vera had the letter and she’d promised to send it to London, but for some reason he found himself unable to completely trust her. There had been something about her breezy efficiency which had left him feeling a fool, left him feeling insignificant, even used.

  In contrast, the tribunal’s verdict had been a liberation. He had been registered unconditionally as a conscientious objector. He was free to live his life as he wished. Which meant he could edit, and print, the news-sheet they planned to circulate with Peace News. Hundreds, potentially thousands, of copies could be distributed in the city.

  The mere prospect of this had made him feel powerful, and it spawned an intoxicating idea. The letter could go to London; he’d done his duty to the Party. But tonight he would reveal its contents to his comrades in the Party, and he’d go further – he’d print the story in the news-sheet, and he’d make sure the local newspaper carried it too. Within days, even hours, he’d have made his mark: a footnote to history.

  He forced himself to say one last prayer, standing at the foot of the flat etched stone. It had been decorated with the arms of the Machine Gun Corps: two of the menacing weapons crossed below the imperial crown. His father, George, had seen service in the Great War, the high point of an otherwise ill-tempered life. The only symbol of his mother was her name: Jennifer Maud McCulloch. She had insisted, in the Scottish fashion, on keeping her maiden name for the inscription – a final, insignificant victory over a violent man she must have hated.

  As a child, he’d seen the bruises but never the blows, until one night when he was ten. He’d heard them coming down Gothic Street from the Spread Eagle. Summer, the window half up, so he’d looked out. No words were said. His father had gone ahead and stood below in the street, waiting for his mother, half-running to catch up. An argument in the pub, what he liked to call a ‘flare-up’, had no doubt led to his ejection into the night.

  When his mother reached their door, she’d fumbled for the key and he’d delivered the blow from the side: a flat hand, with all his strength, knocking her into the gutter. On her knees, she’d searched frantically in her purse for the key, while he’d waited, leaning up against the lamp post, whistling ‘The Happy Clown’ – the Machine Gun Corps’ official quick march.

  Childe stood back, thinking about violence and how it couldn’t be undone, and how it sent out ripples of hatred and regret. It had been violence which had made him take a stand for peace, and that too had profound repercussions, spreading out, reaching others.

  A footstep very close, behind his back, made his skin prickle. Turning, he caught a glimpse of a figure in the tail of his eye. A single stride, the arm stiff, the oily click of a trigger: he never heard the shot that killed him, and despite a lingering sense of consciousness, his body fell like a puppet, its strings cut.

  An image that had existed, in the sense of a series of interconnected electrical signals in his brain, flickered out of life: he’d seen himself at his printing press, holding up the still-damp news-sheet with its sensational story on the front page.

  A hand slipped inside his jacket, searching the pockets.

  Sight, certainly, had been snuffed out with the death of his brain. But the last image stayed reflected still in his blank eyes: his own blood, very close to his cheek, spreading out to fill the etched letters of his father’s name.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Brooke lay in the bath under a cone of light thrown down by an old standard lamp. The tub stood on four brass claw feet at the centre of a large uncarpeted attic room. Reflections from the water dappled the rough plaster of the ceiling, as if he were beneath one of the Cam’s horse-leap bridges. Steam rose like a cloud from a thermal spring. Lifting his chin, Brooke turned his jaw to the right, pushing against the resistance of the neck joint until he heard, and felt, a satisfying rick as the bones fell back into place. Most of the peat had settled in the bottom of the bath, a minutely gritty residue of black particles. Examining his hands, he used a small file to tease out what remained of the soil beneath the nails.

  The attic room had two dormer windows, which even in this mild autumn failed to retain the warmth of the day. It had been his mother’s retreat, three clear floors above his father’s laboratory in the basement, with its perpetually decanting flasks and tubes, its murky fume cupboard and hissing Bunsens.

  Here, in her own realm, she had installed a chaise longue, a desk, the standard lamp still in situ and a large Turkish rug, upon which Brooke had played as a child. A memory of a lattice square of sunlight on the patterned carpet brought back an almost palpable sense of lost love. She’d died suddenly when Brooke was six, and the attic had been locked until his father’s death.

  A door opened along the landing and he heard feet on the threadbare carpet: a confident heel-first step, which heralded a fixed purpose, a sense of energy unleashed.

  ‘Why are you lying in a muddy puddle?’ asked his wife, bunching up a white linen shirt at her throat. ‘I thought we’d agreed that swimming was over for another year.’

  ‘I ended up in a ditch,’ he said. ‘I’ve been trying to wash it all away. Tenacious stuff, peat. Microscopic particles.’ He worked his finger and thumb together as if searching for some minute trace of friction.

  Slipping into the water from his mossy steps, he’d followed the river back to St John’s Wilderness, and sought out the spot where the mysterious diggers had enjoyed their smoke the previous night. PC Woods had found no trace of a pit, but a pit there must be, so he’d edged through an old iron watergate into a deep ditch which led away from the river, into the meadows. Wading in this oily trench, he’d been aware of the viscous nature of the water, thick with weed, feathers and algae, the surface alive with night bugs.

  Certain he was alone he clambered up the bank to look out across the marsh. A series of neat, low mounds ran in a military line, like the graves of giants, picked out by moonlight, between hawthorn and willow. Beyond them he could just see a sandy track, lighter in the gloom, twisting away towards open country. Across the wilderness nothing moved, so he slipped down the slope and knelt beside the nearest mound, thrusting his hand down into the loose soil, shocked that it had retained some of the heat of the day.

  What lay beneath?

  ‘What did you see on your swim?’ asked Claire, rubbing her cheeks to wake herself.

  Brooke tried hard not to bring his work home.

  ‘Nothing much except the wonderful house of boxes, have you seen it?’

  She shook her head, yawning.

  ‘Just beyond Jesus Lock, on Midsummer Common. I could only glimpse the silhouette but it’s quite the thing. Three stories, a ziggurat roof, all made of cardboard boxes. They’re going to set light to it and invite us all to marvel at the skills of the Auxiliary Fire Service. Night after next, we should go.’

  ‘I’m on shift. Tea?’ said Claire, padding away down the stairs. ‘Water that hot is bad for you,’ she called back. ‘It drags the blood to the skin. When you stand up you’ll be dizzy. Post-posterior hypertension. You’ve been warned.’

  A few minutes later she arrived back with a mug of tea and a heavy cut-glass tumbler of whisky, which she set beside Brooke’s head on the enamel shelf of the bath. She set it down once, then returned to fine-tune its position an inch further from the edge. A compulsion to bring order to the world was one
of Claire’s defining virtues as a nurse. Outside the hospital she was unable to curb what could be a vice.

  ‘By the way,’ she said. ‘I asked one of the surgeons about Doric’s theory that the army is out burying civilian casualties from bomb sites. One’s got a brother at the Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow. He said you were right; it’s hogwash.’

  Brooke nodded, putting his nose to the rim of the whisky glass. The musty earthiness of the spirit was as intoxicating as the alcohol.

  ‘I spoke to Joy,’ said Claire, perched on the edge of a wicker sun chair. Their daughter, a nurse like her mother, had enlisted and been posted to Portsmouth to work in a dockside tented hospital examining troops before embarkation for France.

  ‘Good God,’ said Brooke. ‘How did you manage that? It takes me half an hour to get a line to London.’

  They’d been tracking their children by letter since the war began, but the post was unreliable, the missives rare and often terse.

  Sitting up, he sent a wave down the bath which folded itself round the taps before sloshing back to his chest. He brought up his knee, massaging an area of white scar tissue just below the cap.

  ‘I was told to ring the unit at Gosport,’ said Claire. ‘We’ve been ordered to do medical checks on the troops stationed on Parker’s Piece. Have you seen it? It’s like the Delhi Durbar. You watch, there’ll be elephants soon, and the king on his dais.’

  She sipped her tea. ‘Anyway, I rang Gosport to request a copy of their protocol: the mandatory checks, what’s critical, what we can leave. They went and got Joy!’

  Again, she clutched the material of her shirt to her throat. She looked a decade younger than her thirty-nine years. It made him realise that but for this brief moment she too was a casualty of war, diminished by the absence of those she loved.