The Great Darkness

by Jim Kelly

  ‘Here he is,’ said Rose, seeing Brooke. ‘The hero of the night. Grub?’

  ‘A bacon sandwich, Rose. And tea.’

  Mid-fifties, worn down by a life spent working on her feet, Rose nevertheless achieved a constant sense of performance, as if the rectangular open hatch of the tea hut was her own stage. A headscarf in gypsy colours held in place grey hair, a thread of which she tucked in as she poured Brooke’s tea.

  ‘Take a seat. I’ll bring it out. I could do with a sit-down,’ she said, an unlit cigarette bobbing in the corner of her mouth.

  In front of the tea bar were arranged half a dozen round metal tables, salvaged from a pub, and matching wrought-iron chairs.

  Rose brought his sandwich on a plate and took a seat herself, stretching out her legs, using the right shoe to lever off the left, to free wriggling toes in stockinged feet. She lit the cigarette and left it poised on her lower lip.

  Then he saw what she had in her hands: a large china cup, which she began swilling with an almost religious precision, as a priest might clean the chalice before drinking the last of the communion wine. She swilled out most of the liquid into the wide gutter, then tilted the cup so that the light from the hatch illuminated the bowl.

  It was the usual mumbo-jumbo and Brooke listened with as much good nature as he could muster. A snake, apparently, lay depicted in the tea leaves, or was it in the white spaces between? Either way: a snake pointed to falsehood. A house, its precise nature unspecified, indicated death.

  Rose’s shoes, kicked off with force, lay out on the cobbles. One had landed on its sole and heel, pointing back at them, while the other had toppled on its side, pointing away. Court shoes, worn to the point of obliteration, so that they gaped slightly.

  Separated from their owner’s feet, and set apart, they acquired a strange significance.

  Brooke sipped his tea. By the time he’d finished he knew how Ernst Lux had died. The mystery was where.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  In the year Brooke had spent as a student, before he’d set out for the recruiting station with a copy of the Iliad in his back pocket, he’d shared a set of rooms in college with a fellow natural scientist by the name of Peter Aldiss. Intelligence is a quality many people can emit, like a radio wave; Aldiss was an example of the opposite. Anyone of brief acquaintance would have guessed he was a not very bright builder’s mate. His general slowness, of word and limb, seemed to indicate a mental process of glacial velocity. It took him a long time to say anything, and it was often mundane. But he specialised in a kind of relentless logic, and a brilliant capacity for devising painstaking experimental research.

  It had therefore been a shock when Brooke had discovered, one summer’s evening in 1913, that Aldiss harboured a daring secret. There had been clues: the night-time absences, the sudden reappearances in the small hours, the group of rather smug, cold-eyed friends who always swiftly finished a conversation when Brooke came upon them in the bar. It had been his shoes which had given the game away; a distinctive pair of pumps, which Brooke spotted one night at the foot of one of the college’s stone buttresses, discarded behind a clipped hedge, the socks tucked inside.

  He’d finally confronted his friend over a drunken lunch in a country pub the week before both left for service overseas: Brooke to Cairo, Aldiss to West Africa. The scientist, Brooke suggested, was part of a secret fraternity, members of which might be seen against the dark skyline of the colleges on moonlit nights, illicitly scaling pinnacles, chapels and towers. Secretive, because discovery risked being sent down, they combined two inhuman virtues: an ice-like calm in the face of death and vice-like strength in hands and feet.

  The ‘night climbers’ dwelt in an almost legendary dimension: an elite club of gifted adventurers, careless of life. Brooke had always rather despised them, given that their passion exhibited a low appraisal of the value of their own humanity. There was something supremely arrogant in not caring about death.

  Brooke had kept in touch after the war and recently Aldiss had begun a series of night experiments – or rather, a continuous experiment, on a rolling twenty-four-hour basis – which required him to camp out, as it were, in his own laboratory. The scientist was conducting research into the mysteries of circadian rhythm, the inbuilt clocks of the body, be it of a human or a fruit fly; work which had recently caught the attention of Whitehall, struggling to exact maximum efficiency from workers – and soldiers – forced to labour for days without rest. Brooke had simply added Aldiss to the list of nighthawks, and visited when he could, taking advantage of the fact that the scientist laid out the latest scientific journals for his students. Brooke may have abandoned his formal studies, but he was still in many ways an avid student.

  Some nights, when Brooke called, Aldiss took him into the lead-lined room which held the Lampyridae, the fireflies. They’d stand together in the dark, encircled by the gently humming green lights, until Aldiss switched on the solar lamps. Then, despite the hands over his eyes, Brooke would have to endure for a moment the incredible gilded sunlight.

  Aldiss stood now cradling a mug of tea, his lumpen head, which had lost all its hair since their student days, nodding slowly.

  But he hadn’t answered Brooke’s question, so he repeated it.

  ‘I said: do you ever see Dollis, the chemist who was on H?’ he asked, flicking through the October issue of Science.

  Dollis had shared Aldiss’s secret passion: they’d both been night climbers.

  Aldiss blinked slowly. ‘Glasgow, I think, to work on shell casings.’

  ‘Ah. Plenty to climb there. The Highlands are up the road,’ said Brooke. ‘How about you, or have the years driven out the daredevil?’

  ‘I’m long retired from such exploits, Brooke. Besides, the word went out after Poland. Men were dying – soon, our men would be dying. Young men should fight, or they should continue their studies if they were in the national interest. It was not right that they should put their lives at risk in what the authorities consider a student prank.’

  He sipped his tea. ‘The ban is complete: any student caught on the rooftops is out. For good. None of this being sent down for a term nonsense.’

  Outside rain was falling, and the gurgling of lead pipes had reactivated one of Cambridge’s most familiar soundtracks.

  ‘My problem,’ said Brooke, ‘is that I have a young man in the morgue at the Galen and I think he died after a traumatic fall. He died barefoot, Peter. A young man you may know in fact: Ernst Lux.’

  ‘The American? Good God – dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Aldiss pointed straight up in the air. ‘Dr Frank’s lab. Fifth floor, with the biochemists. He took an interest in my fireflies, came down for a look. Bit of government interest in his work too, otherwise he’d have been off home by now. There’s not much patience for anything that doesn’t make a contribution …’

  Brooke nodded. ‘If you can, could you find out more? The precise nature of that contribution would be helpful …’

  ‘I’ll try, but one of the many problems with war, as you’ll know, is that asking questions is unpatriotic. We’re supposed to follow orders. You’re sure he was climbing? I’d heard gossip that there was a small group of enthusiasts … but I thought it was bar talk.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure. You climbed barefoot; it’s the preferred method?’

  Aldiss nodded. ‘Yes, a few used shoes but it is much safer without.’

  ‘Lux’s shoes were on the wrong feet and his socks had been pulled on by someone else. His body was found on the riverbank, which must be three hundred and fifty yards from the nearest building of any kind. So there’s a narrative here, don’t you think? A fall, a group out climbing and an attempt to cover it all up. I know about the draconian penalties but what if a few have risen to the challenge? After all, it’s all about risk, isn’t it? What greater danger is there, beyond losing your life, but to let slip your place in this gilded world, with its glittering prizes? One question left,’ sai
d Brooke. ‘Where do I find these new enthusiasts?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Brooke trudged along Regent Street under a starless sky washed clean by the rain, the night climbers dominating his thoughts. Had Ernst Lux fallen, climbing the rooftops of the city? The shred of latex material left on the body suggested deliberate subterfuge. Which implied guilt. Had his fellow climbers simply sought to divert attention from the college, or was there a darker motive? Brooke was not prepared to wait for answers.

  As a uniformed constable in the years after the Great War, Brooke, and most of the Borough constabulary, had turned a blind eye to the night climbers. Curbing the adventurers had fallen to the college and university authorities, principally the proctors and their bulldogs. But the sport, such as it was, had thrived. There’d even been a book, published under some fanciful pseudonym, cataloguing the best climbs, the tricks of the trade, the delights and thrills which awaited those with the courage to climb.

  Brooke’s natural scepticism had led him to mistrust the narrative’s self-effacing heroism. There were no pictures, and no real names, to verify the claims. Indeed, he’d harboured the suspicion that much of the legend was wildly overblown, an inflated Romantic illusion. He’d never doubted the ability of some to scale the walls when the porter’s lodge was closed. But the pinnacles of King’s College Chapel, the great tower of St John’s?

  Passing the blind facade of Emmanuel College, he noted that there was little to scale here, not even a challenging arch or giddy observatory perched on a brick tower. The Georgian buildings lay low and earth-bound. Classical pillars, ghostly white, marked the chapel just visible through the portico: an enemy to night climbers, surely, for they sought out drainpipes, and ‘chimneys’ – the narrow vertical chutes which allowed the nerveless to brace the body, feet to one side, back to the other.

  Stone carvings also offered footholds, window ledges narrow pathways, empty niches a welcome place to rest. But Emmanuel’s facades were fashionably featureless, its Georgian beauty the result of perfect dimensions arranged by golden rules, rather than fussy decoration. No routes to the summit here.

  Parker’s Piece, the city’s great park, opened up to the east, presenting a vision of an armed camp on the night before battle. Lights showed, betrayed by lantern beams, the sources hidden, as if each was held in the cup of some unseen hand. Lines of pale bell tents had been pitched in rows. Duck boards, laid for trucks and armoured cars, criss-crossed the greensward. Along the northern edge a series of public shelters had been built; single storey, sunk to their roofs in trenches, offering protection to hundreds during the air raids to come.

  A guard examined Brooke’s warrant card by torchlight and waved him on down the line between the tents. At the far end he found Grandcourt, his one-time batman from Palestine, in his trench guarding the shelters.

  He sprang to his feet, dropping down from a niche he’d carved in the clay, which boasted a neat shelf of wood, on which he’d stored candles, a tin cup, and the paraphernalia for his pipe. Like so many of short stature he always stood up straight, shoulders back.

  ‘All’s well?’ asked Brooke, taking off his hat and running his hand back through his hair. During the long campaign in the desert Grandcourt had invariably given a cheerful reply to this question.

  ‘So far, sir. There’s plenty of room at the inn,’ he said, indicating the open doors to the empty shelters.

  ‘I’m thirsty, Grandcourt,’ said Brooke. ‘What about you? Can I persuade you to break the rules?’

  The smile broadened on Grandcourt’s face, and he pocketed the pipe and pouch. ‘We’ll hear the siren if I’m needed,’ he said. The return of war had seen Grandcourt volunteer for civil defence work, overseeing the bomb shelters. The nights were long and, bar that of the Great Darkness, so far undisturbed, except by Brooke’s welcome visits.

  By his niche he’d engineered a set of steps in the clay which took them up to street level. Brooke led the way into a district of narrow streets and poor houses to the north of Parker’s Piece, known as the Kite, bounded on four sides by main roads. In his head Brooke had a map of the route he needed to take as set out by Aldiss in the laboratory: down Elm Street, then left, left, right. The lanes reeked of boiled cabbage, the washed-out fumes choking every alleyway. Every corner had its pub or shop.

  Their destination was the St Radegund, an inn which stood within the shadow of the college of the same name, at a point where the street divided, leaving the pub to stand on a flatiron site, widening from a wooden doorway. The blackout appeared to permeate the interior, leaving pools of half-light to fill booths in which students and dons huddled. A woman sat at a piano in the corner playing snatches of old show tunes from the West End hits. Brooke recognised ‘Cheek to Cheek’ from Top Hat, and as he waited for his pints, tapped his foot.

  ‘How’s the job?’ Brooke asked, settling down. He had secured his former batman a position in the engineering department at the university after the Great War, running the stores.

  ‘Good. Still steady, that’s the thing. A place for everything …’

  Brooke drank, and leant close. A feature of the St Radegund was its oddly narrow tables, long but just a foot wide, governed by the need to hold a few pint jars in a cramped space.

  ‘After the Armistice, Grandcourt, when you came to the hospital at Scarborough to see me, there were patients there with certain injuries. Suspicious injuries. We talked about the trenches, about what it can drive a man to do.’

  The buzz of conversation in the bar was enough to secure them a bubble of privacy.

  ‘You’re right, sir. The desert was one thing, but the trenches, that’s another. I was only there for that last few months, but it was as bad as the rest of the war put together. Like living in a coffin, that’s what they said. They shot a kid in our mob,’ he added, taking a gulp of beer which left a white surf mark on his moustache. ‘They had to tie him to a post. Coward? That’s a funny word. He had more courage than the rest of us put together. It’s about what you’re afraid of, I reckon. He couldn’t live with the wait for the whistle.’

  It was the kind of straightforward wisdom Brooke had found so refreshing in the desert.

  ‘There was talk in the hospital,’ said Brooke. ‘About an officer they’d treated after the battle at Cambrai, and you recognised the name. Joelyn Stone? A captain then, but I’m not sure I had the name right?’

  ‘You had it right,’ said Grandcourt, setting off a crackling inferno in his pipe bowl with a match.

  Beyond the sudden cloud of smoke, Brooke could see a group of students with their heads together in the booth opposite. There was something in the urgent postures, the hungry eyes, which spoke of adventure. Above them a framed picture of the Alps was covered in scrawled signatures and the date: 1937.

  It looked as if Aldiss’s intelligence had been on the nail. Here was the new generation of night climbers, possibly planning their next night out on the rooftops.

  ‘It was at Cambrai, alright,’ said Grandcourt. ‘The first battle. A runner comes through from up the line with orders for Captain Stone to go over next day at dawn, before the artillery. Element of surprise, they said. Element of pure bloody stupidity.’

  Grandcourt took another inch off his beer.

  The students drinking in the shadow of the Alps were becoming animated, one of them holding his hands out like claws.

  ‘Anyway, that night the platoon sergeant goes to Stone’s billet at some godawful hour and finds him on the field line to the top brass, trying to talk ’em out of it. But no joy. Three in the morning, this sergeant gets the men ready in the trench. Everyone’s had a ciggy. A tot, too, and that’s care of Stone, to give him credit. He was an organiser, apparently, one of the best.

  ‘Everyone knows how this is going to end, Mr Brooke. They’re going to die out in the mud. It’s the full disaster and no mistake: men throwing up, crying, praying. It’s all the sergeant can do to keep them from bolting the other way.

 
; ‘Then there’s a gunshot. The sergeant runs to Stone’s billet and finds his bed’s empty. Then he hears him, crying for help, and he’s on the far side of the command post in the next section of trench. He’s on the floor, half of his hand blown off, binoculars held in the uninjured hand. Said he was on a recce.

  ‘Detail …’ The batman stabbed his finger in the air. ‘Sergeant says he held him up and he could smell cordite. If he’d been hit by an enemy bullet then the sniper would have been two hundred yards away. But the whiff of the gun was in the trench, Mr Brooke. Right there. He’d done for himself. There’s no two ways about that.’

  At the bar, buying refills, Brooke studied the corner where the students were huddled. There was a picture on the wall he’d missed because it lay half in shadow, a black-and-white shot taken from a rooftop across the city, catching the four pinnacles of King’s College Chapel, each a red-hot poker in stone with a filigree-carved summit.

  On his way back to Grandcourt, he skirted their table and stopped. Briefly, he had an insight into these young students’ view of him: a tall middle-aged man, with a pale face, dark hair brushed back, eyes obscured by yellow-tinted glasses. They’d think of him as definitely the last war, an Edwardian, with the faded good looks of that lost generation. If, he conceded, they thought of him at all.

  ‘I was looking for news of a friend,’ he said to them, and watched their faces, the eyes turning down to examine a pack of cards which lay in haphazard hands on the bronze tabletop. ‘He’s a keen night climber.’

  They were all men, but one was twenty years older than the rest. He wore a cardigan and a collarless white shirt. ‘We’re Am Dram, I’m afraid. College theatre club. Hay Fever is next up and we’re casting. I think night climbing went out of fashion in the last century.’

  They all laughed, nodding, and one of them pushed his way past Brooke to the bar.