by Jim Kelly
‘How did she sound?’
It was a typical Brooke question, thought Claire. Not what did she say.
‘Fine. Excited. She said she’s applied to go over, to France. They’re setting up field hospitals behind the lines for when it begins. It’ll be trauma, wounds, burns, amputations. They’ll be damn lucky to have her.’ She put too much emphasis on this last thought, and had to hold a hand to her lips. ‘I think she just wants to be near Luke.’
Their son’s letters, when they got them, described an eerie rustic paradise of sleepy farms and distant church bells along the Franco-Belgium border where his unit was camped, part of the British Expeditionary Force, ready to hold the Germans back when the war in the west finally began.
Brooke took the whisky up. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said I might do the same, you know, try to go over, that is. Where I’d do some good.’
She tried to read his face.
‘Will you speak again?’ he asked. ‘I mean …’
‘Yes. Overnight, I think. She says it’s been chaotic so they really need to settle on a protocol before they share it with us. She sounded very together. I’m proud of her.’
Brooke sunk his chin in the water.
‘Tell her I love her. Tell her I miss her. But if she wants to go, I understand. There’ll be POWs to treat as well. I think it helps if you see the enemy.’
The image of Turl, the lorry driver, letting cigarette smoke drift into his eyes without blinking, came to Brooke’s mind.
‘I hate all this …’ he said, lifting his whisky glass and gesturing towards the window. ‘The machinery of war. The civil servants up from Whitehall. The blackout. The lines of supply. The factories. Conscription. New weapons. It makes the fighting inevitable, but there’s no courage needed, no sense in which you have to face the reality of it. It’s just momentum, a collective inability to change direction. It’s a dance of death, and you have to follow the right steps.’
‘Quite a speech,’ she said, kindly.
He shook his head, wondering what his father would think of a world in which science was becoming one of the weapons of war.
She went to the window to look out at the moon.
‘Cowardice is a great thing,’ persisted Brooke, resurfacing. ‘It’s a brake on war, if it’s hand-to-hand. It’s an old cliché – the whites of their eyes – but it brings home the reality of combat. But this. Anyone can fight a war from a hundred miles away. Just press a button. There’s worse to come. Rockets. Poisons. She’s probably safer near the frontline than here. It’s the civilians that’ll cop it this time.’
He took another mouthful of whisky. ‘If you want to go – go. I’ll be alright. I’d be useless anywhere else. I’ll fight my own little wars right here. The enemy within, and all that.’
She smiled, considering the pale form of his body in the murky water. The first time she’d touched him had been in the hospital at Scarborough: a bed bath, the face as brown as a nut, the rest white. Lying on his back, she’d had to force his hands away from his face, where they’d been shielding his eyes.
She took down a nurse’s uniform from a hanger on the door.
‘Are you home for the night?’ she asked.
Brooke pulled the plug. ‘No. I have two dead bodies to inspect. A lonely suicide found in Byron’s Pool, and the mangled body of an American scientist, ripped apart by the drifting cables of a barrage balloon. Both victims, in their own way, of the Great Darkness.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
‘They’re both as found, Brooke. I know you prefer that,’ said Dr Henry Comfort as the Borough pathologist kicked open the double doors to the morgue. The room was bright and functional, lit by neon tubes, in keeping with the rest of the new Galen Anatomy Building. Two additional spotlights blazed down on a pair of dissection tables. Despite the intensity of the light, the twin sources of illumination could not banish all the shadows, so that the two corpses were substantial, although the process of the settling of bodily fluids and the relaxation of muscle and tissue did appear to flatten them slightly, as if they were melting, slowly, into the gutters which ran into the metal chambers set beneath.
‘Where’s your new detective sergeant?’ asked Comfort.
‘At this precise moment he is in a punt on the river, no doubt wishing he’d stayed in comfortable retirement.’
Brooke had obtained the punt from Michaelhouse, with Doric’s assistance, and Edison’s orders were to stay in the shadows on the bank opposite St John’s Wilderness, and observe throughout the small hours. Brooke was convinced that the soldiers would return. What would be on their trundling carts?
‘You know these men …’ said Comfort, indicating his two ‘servants’; Brooke could never recall the Latin term, but that was the gist of it. One would help haul the body over on to its side, the other perform the basic incisions and use the bone saw when directed. They hung back, cradling enamel mugs, a copy of the Evening News spread out on the bench.
Comfort struggled with his rubber gloves. Brooke, struck by the delicate, almost feminine hands, recalled the sudden iron grip the pathologist could exert on the tools of his trade: the rib-cutters, the euphemistic breadknife, the hooked skull chisel.
Comfort never bothered with small talk. He’d known Brooke a decade, and their relationship had gained a respectful distance. The Borough drew its pathologist from the university, the first such appointment listed in 1880 on a board in the Spinning House. Simple convenience lay at the root of this arrangement. And practicality. As a police district, the centre of the medieval city was hardly burdened by regular outbreaks of violent death, at least not in the current century. The county force, whose jurisdiction began just beyond the city’s constricted boundaries, had its own resident pathologist, but the professional rivalry between the two forces precluded cooperation. In death, as in life.
‘Lux, your scientist,’ said Comfort finally, pulling the fingers on his left hand so that the joints cracked, then drawing back a plastic sheet from the face.
‘He was here last night, in this building, alive and well,’ said Brooke. ‘A lecture, apparently, all hush-hush. Doubt he thought he’d be back so soon.’ A thought struck. ‘Did you attend?’
‘I asked,’ said Comfort. ‘I was politely informed I was short of the necessary security clearance. Not for my ears. Some government project, apparently. Bloody cheek. They had food shipped in from the kitchens at Emmanuel, and a guard on the door.’
Comfort walked once round the corpse. ‘We’ll cut away what’s left of the clothes, but the injuries are obvious, traumatic, lethal and inflicted pre-mortem.’
In Brooke’s experience, this phase of the autopsy, the external observations, could last several silent minutes.
Around them, despite the hour, they could hear the building’s own internal mechanisms, a pipe running with water, a lift whirring, the passing footsteps of a watchman. The Galen had been completed that summer. The university’s old anatomy building stood opposite Queen’s College, a museum now, draped in cobwebs. The Galen, by contrast, glowed with the white heat of modernity. The stone-cut white facia, rising up with the classically narrowing sightlines of the art deco, reminded Brooke of the Cenotaph, whose Greek etymology he knew to be ‘empty tomb’. A chill irony, as Comfort’s morgue was rarely empty. The corpses set aside for student dissection lay unseen in steel drawers along the windowless wall.
Comfort began to discourse on the body.
The dead man’s left leg, below the knee, had been all but severed and lay an inch apart from the upper leg, connecting tissue linking the two, the bones disconnected, the trouser leg torn away completely from the upper thigh. The hands, set down in the gunnels to the side of the trunk, were bloody and lacerated. The left shoulder had been dislocated, flesh and bone, from the torso itself, leaving the body misshapen, crooked. The skull had been partly crushed and before Brooke could look away he caught sight of a dreadful wound, revealing a hint of the brain beneath.
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br /> Brooke closed his eyes, took a deep breath.
‘Back’s broken too,’ offered Comfort, moving to the head. ‘Blunt trauma. And here to the skull …’ He used a scalpel to indicate the left eye socket, which was curiously oval. ‘The alcohol would have helped, if that’s any consolation. I’ve looked at a blood sample and it indicates a glass of wine, perhaps, a pint of beer. If he’d fallen down a flight of stairs the booze might have dulled the pain. But he’s been dashed – that’s the word. I think it’s time I took a closer look …’
An imperceptible nod from the pathologist released one of the servants, who moved forward like an automaton, armed with a pair of large scissors, and began to cut away the clothes that clung to the corpse.
Brooke studied the ticking clock on the wall, then walked away to the door, where he lit a cigarette.
The ghostly life of Dr Ernst Lux played itself out in his mind, comprising a series of images assembled by Edison during interviews at Michaelhouse with the American’s friends and colleagues. Lux was of German parents, now living in California, and had taken his first degree at the university in Berkeley. A bachelor, with a sweetheart who one friend recalled had been a volunteer nurse in Spain during the Civil War. The couple had met at a rally organised to raise funds for the anti-Fascist International Brigade.
Admired as an athlete, Lux had been a college rower and a keen climber, who took himself off to the Alps during the summer months with the university mountaineering club. The Fens, one of Europe’s flattest landscapes, had been a profound disappointment, so he’d burnt off his surplus energies in term time each morning by running out along the towpath to Clayhythe, then back across the water meadows.
Lux lay naked now except for his shoes and socks.
The absence of the rest of the clothes focused Brooke’s eye on the dead man’s feet. Once, these shoes had been fashionable, he thought. They were in fact light boots, made of felt, which he judged had originally been green. The laces were dual threaded in red and white, reduced to grey by wear and tear. The boot shape was broad and workmanlike, but there was no mistaking the glaring error: they were on the wrong feet.
Brooke knelt down. ‘Is it possible the shoes were removed in an earlier examination, and then replaced?’ he asked.
Comfort had spotted the anomaly at almost precisely the same moment, and the pathologist’s head came very close to Brooke’s own, so that he could smell the faint aroma of pipe tobacco.
‘No, as I said, he’s as found.’ The pathologist undid the laces and, with a swift rotation of his wrist, pulled the shoe clear of the foot on the left leg. From within the body came the slight grating of two halves of a ruptured joint.
Comfort knelt by the now revealed feet in their socks, which had been heavily darned at the heels.
‘This is symptomatic,’ he said. ‘It requires great dexterity to slip on a sock, we underestimate our own precision and skill, but then we have years of practice, judging the action to the nicety required to get the sock straight, the heel engaged. You see here …’ He tugged the material.
The coroner was right. Each sock sat uncomfortably at an angle, twisted onto the limb.
‘This complicates matters,’ said Brooke.
Comfort slipped off the socks. The tips of several of the toes on both feet were scratched and had bled badly. But the socks, turned inside out, showed hardly any bloodstains.
Comfort took notes and then, with the help of the servants, proceeded to the internal examination. Brooke retreated with a glass of whisky poured from a bottle stashed in what the pathologist described as the ‘fume cupboard’. At the appropriate moments, Brooke held the glass close to his nose and breathed in the woody scent. He was in no order squeamish, but to see a fellow human being opened up, disaggregated and reduced to offal always delivered a shock to his system, an existential blow. The brain, removed from the skull and floating in a jar of chemicals, was held in place by a string noose: the pity, perhaps, that despite the preserving fluid all the memories were lost.
Brooke tried to divert his mind from the unfolding scene before him by asking himself the pressing questions: who had put shoes and socks on a corpse, why had they put shoes and socks on a corpse?
Finished, Comfort washed his hands and arms and poured black coffee from a flask. The assistants coaxed tea out of a metal pot.
They all moved down the room towards the second body. For the first time Brooke noted that while it too was clothed, it was bound in several strands of the vivid green river weed which characterised the river’s upper stretches, where the bed was gravel and the water ran out of the chalk hills. He also noted a further anomaly of the feet, for one was shod in a reinforced boot, indicating a club foot.
‘Our second customer tonight,’ said Comfort. ‘Pulled out of Byron’s Pool. Two house bricks in his pockets. Edison said you’d taken an interest? I’ll need to examine the lungs, of course, but it looks straightforward. No sign of foul play. Poor chap.’
Brooke examined the victim’s profile, noting the prominent jaw, the false teeth, the large bags under the eyes, the fleshy neck.
There was no doubt: it was the sleeping driver of the lorry parked at the foot of Castle Hill. It was not difficult to imagine the prospect which had driven him to take his own life. Turl had painted a vivid enough picture: for losing his nerve he faced incineration, a ritual penalty exacted by the gang. At least he’d cheated them of that.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Doric gave Brooke a glass of claret from the cellars, and a slice of Stilton. The porter, working by candle, was conducting an inventory of the keys, a simple act of housekeeping which he managed to imbue with the mystery of an ancient ceremony. Michaelhouse was Georgian, with some ugly Victorian additions, but Doric’s sensibilities stretched back into the mythical past. He’d never let history stand in the way of his veneration for the college.
Every few minutes he’d break off from documenting the keys and make a move on a chessboard.
‘Any news on my Londoners digging pits down by the river?’ asked Brooke, making an effort to set aside for a moment the riddle of Ernst Lux’s death and the identity of the man fished out of Byron’s Pool.
‘Duke of Cambridge’s Own, they call ’em the Middlesex now.’
‘Yes, I know, Doric. But what were they doing?’
‘Long-term anti-aircraft duties. Bugger all going on for now, so they copped for general fatigues. Not the first time either. And they don’t like it. Jenner, the porter at Trinity, goes in The Duke. The landlord’s a cockney, so I guess the soldiers feel at home. Jenner says they’re always moaning. Villains of the piece are the top brass up at Madingley. They keep volunteering for extra duties on their behalf. They were digging trenches on Parker’s Piece for a fortnight, now they’re digging out a bloody great hole for the footings of a Bofors gun out on the London Road. Up all night. Every few weeks they’re back on that riverbank of yours. Fit to go AWOL, they are, but it’ll all be talk.’
Brooke moved his bishop. ‘I know they were digging holes, Doric. I want to know what they put in ’em.’
‘Jenner said they clammed up when he asked questions. Listening’s one thing. Asking’s another. He’ll keep his ears open. But no promises,’ said Doric, whistling through his teeth.
They played in silence for twenty minutes. Brooke’s mind was not on the game. The riddle of Dr Lux’s shoes and socks overshadowed the intricacies of the chessboard.
‘Any news on your situation?’ he asked, forcing himself to make a move, sliding his rook into enemy territory.
The reorganisation of college duties loomed over Doric’s life like the building itself.
‘Fellows meet tomorrow. Three of the day staff have got the push, but they were all new, replacements for those that got called up. So maybe that’s it for me too. Or, they’re making room, and I’ll end up on days …’
He shrugged, ever the fatalist. Brooke had never asked what particular aspect of the concept of days held such
an aversion. Doric, in his army years, had been a regimental sergeant major. Cock of the walk. At night he was his own master again, so perhaps the prospect of being ordered around by the likes of the head porter was too much to bear.
Brooke surveyed the board, decided his position was hopeless, tipped over his king, collected his hat from the stand and wished Doric goodnight.
No air raid warning yet, so the streets were busy. Cars crept past with their slit eyes peering, seeking out the white-lined kerbs. Three bicycles, unlit but jangling, careered past as if he didn’t exist. At the corner by the Round Church he saw Jo Ashmore up at her observation post, binoculars to her eyes, scanning the city’s western edge.
Pressing on, he was eager to catch the tea hut in the square before someone, somewhere, imagined they’d spotted EA, setting off the whole farrago for another night. By the time the bombs do fall, he thought, emerging onto Market Hill, we’ll be inured to the prospect of death in the rubble, the siren will go off and nobody will care.
Rose King was behind her counter, a gaggle of servicemen huddled in the light that fell out onto the square’s flagstones. War was Rose’s métier, allowing her to exhibit a genius for catering at short order on a mass scale. Facing thirty-five soldiers in need of tea, she lined up the mugs, added milk to each and then allowed the enamelled pot to swoop along the lines, pausing over each, but never righting itself to the point that the dark tannin was withheld. It was sloshing, but it was deft sloshing.
On a grill plate she had the full array of fried food encompassed by that bracing catch-all: full English. Sausages, bacon, fried bread, mushrooms, halved tomatoes. Eggs, already scarce, sat in their boxes waiting for an explicit order. But the soldiers, no doubt short of cash, wouldn’t be enticed beyond tea, and headed off instead to sit on the benches in the graveyard of Great St Mary’s.