The Great Darkness

by Jim Kelly

  His door, on the third floor of the block, was locked.

  Edison knocked, then knocked again, as they stood listening to the house. Somewhere a radio played, while the ball bounced rhythmically in the street.

  ‘It’s a reasonable assumption that if Childe’s dead then the lives of his comrades are in danger,’ said Brooke. He took a step back, shifted his weight and kicked the door in, the jamb reduced to splinters.

  There was no sign of Lauder, but the room had been ransacked. The bed was turned over, the drawers of a dresser pulled out, a rug folded back. The only surprise was a music stand, still upright, a violin set against the wall, and some music on the floor – a Mozart sonata.

  Dr Jacob Popper, Lauder’s comrade and branch treasurer, was missing too. His surgery operated from a semi-detached villa off Hills Road, a leafy prosperous suburb, overshadowed by the barrage balloons guarding the railway line. A bachelor, with a small flat in the attic of the house, Popper had last been seen at afternoon surgery the day before.

  ‘He’s a bloody good doctor, Jacob,’ explained his partner. ‘The problem is he can never remember to collect his fees. We’re not a charity, are we? Jacob does twice the work, pulls in half the income. He’s disappeared before, has Jacob,’ he added, unlocking the door to the flat. ‘Went off to some march in London when war broke out. Left a note on my desk. He’ll turn up.’

  Popper’s flat had been searched too: books lay scattered, the clothes from a wardrobe thrown over the bed, a desk moved away from the wall.

  Which left Henderson, the union convener and Party chairman. Brooke had tried the telephone number in Childe’s address book three times from the Spinning House but there had been no answer. His address was listed as Abbey Island, a piece of land caught between the main line to Lynn and the branch line to Bury, not far from Cambridge Station. The V-shaped plot was cut off to the north by a goods line used to reverse trains. So: an urban island, surrounded by iron rails.

  The Wasp rattled over three level crossings before they were on ‘dry land’, which comprised a single street of railway architecture: not housing at all, but dilapidated offices and workshops, many of the windows smashed, and doors off their hinges.

  Edison stood stoutly in the street, such as it was, surveying the scene. The London train thundered past on the down-line, a goods train on the up-line following a few seconds later.

  ‘If he does live here he must be a bloody heavy sleeper,’ said Brooke.

  At the far end of the street they found a set of steps which led up to a door marked:

  Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen

  Office Hours: Monday–Friday

  8.00–18.00

  The door was locked. Inside they could see a desk, with a telephone. Filing cabinets obscured one wall, and a safe sat in one corner, on iron clasp feet.

  Brooke rattled the handle. ‘Steel frame,’ he said. ‘Maybe there’s a fortune in the safe.’

  Round the back of the same building they found a door at ground level marked: J. R. Henderson: convenor.

  The blinds were down on a single sash window.

  By the door stood a large flower pot, which looked so out of place that Brooke parted the leaves of a parched hydrangea to reveal a brass key.

  The front room was spartan. An armchair, a fireplace, a coal bucket. Across the floor were scattered copies of magazines and newspapers. Brooke noted Labour News, Picture Post and Peace News.

  Up a back-stair they found the now familiar scene. The small bedroom had been searched, the mattress set up on end against one wall. There was a sink, a gas ring and a desk, the drawer pulled out on the bare boards.

  Edison patiently checked the scattered documents.

  Brooke went outside and lit a cigarette, asking himself an increasingly urgent question: what were the chances he’d have another corpse on his hands before nightfall?

  Edison threw up the sash window and called him back upstairs. The detective sergeant was examining the ceiling, which had been roughly plastered. ‘Year I packed up the job I went to night school, up at the college: electrics for the householder. Edith said it would make the pension go further if I did more of the chores. No – some of the chores. Any road, that’s not right, is it?’ he said, pointing at a wire which came in through the top of the sash window, then, tacked to the wall, rose up to cross the ceiling, finally disappearing from sight for no reason right above their heads. Tellingly, it went nowhere near the central light fitting.

  Brooke went outside to trace the wire’s provenance. It ascended to the apex of the roof from the sash window, where it appeared to connect to a wind vane, which was badly rusted, and stuck pointing south to London.

  Back inside, and balanced on a stool he’d dragged up the stairs from the front room, he discovered a small loft hatch had been expertly concealed by the plasterwork. Giving his glasses to Edison, he used the flat of his hand to lift it up. The hole revealed was no bigger than a roasting tin. He carefully raised his head into the dark space. Executing a cramped turn, he finally located a large radio, the dials indicating the principal European cities: London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid. Clipped to the side was a chrome microphone, which caught the light along its metallic bevelled handle.

  Brooke turned the dial until he heard the bass note buzz of the power; the facia lit up, and the single word MOSCOW shone in the half-light.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The town’s Civil Defence Depot, where Childe had been required to report for work, stood by the station: a collection of old warehouses and a redundant sugar beet store accommodating fire-watchers, ARP wardens, messengers – on bicycle and motorbike – and Childe’s unit, the hard labour squad.

  While the night of the Great Darkness had brought its challenges, and the blackened, smoking ruin of Kew’s Mill still towered over the site, the phoney war had so far delivered no air raids, and despite the general panic over fifth columnists and spies arriving by parachute, Cambridge had been spared the sight of the enemy in any form.

  As he entered the yard, unchallenged, Brooke encountered a general air of lassitude, if not idleness. A man sat outside a hut marked MECHANICS, checking a tyre for punctures in a bowl of water. Two fire-watchers were hosing down an auxiliary fire engine, although they were more interested in dousing a dog which ran in circles, unable to decide if getting wet was a good idea. The only sense of real purpose clung to a mobile tea van, where two women in WRVS uniforms were busy setting out rows of mugs and piles of sandwiches.

  Brooke found a small hut in the old beet store, half-glassed and marked LABOUR OFFICE.

  A man with straggly ash-grey hair had his feet up on the desk.

  When he saw Brooke, he folded the newspaper he was reading but didn’t take his feet down.

  Brooke said he wanted to speak to whoever was in charge of the work squad of which Chris Childe was a member.

  ‘Childe? The conchie? He’s AWOL,’ said the man, turning over what looked like a wad of tobacco in his mouth.

  ‘He’s not; he’s dead,’ said Brooke. ‘And I’m in a hurry. What’s your name?’ he asked, flashing his warrant card.

  ‘Hartnell, senior charge hand,’ he said, lowering his feet.

  Outside they heard marching and voices.

  ‘This is Chris’s lot now,’ he said, standing. ‘How’d he cop it, then?’

  ‘A bullet to the brain. What was he like?’ asked Brooke.

  ‘A loner. Always had a book in his back pocket. But he could work alright … A bullet? Christ.’

  The men were told to fetch tea and a sandwich and then Hartnell gathered them in the store, telling them to use sacking and old apple crates for chairs. Brooke counted fifteen, half of them teenagers, half of them too old for service, most of them smoking.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that Chris Childe is dead,’ said Brooke. ‘His body was found in Mill Road Cemetery this morning. He’d been shot. We’re now conducting a murder inquiry.

 
; ‘I understand from his widow that you all went out the other evening digging on Parker’s Piece. This would be the night of the blackout. I need to know what you did, and what Chris did. It’s important.’

  A teenage lad, lanky and confident, spoke up.

  ‘Nah. Not Parker’s Piece. It was down the riverside …’

  Brooke took out his notebook, forcing himself to let the narrative flow from the witness, in his own time.

  The riverside?

  He nominated the lad to tell the whole story from the start.

  The squad had left the depot at six-thirty. Despite the Great Darkness they’d been issued with lanterns, although they were the kind with metal shields, so that the light could be hidden. They were marched down to Magdalene Bridge by Mr Hartnell, then along to St John’s College, where they were allowed to march through the courtyards to the college bridge, where they waited.

  ‘The Bridge of Sighs?’ asked Brooke, and the lad nodded. The detail struck a mournful note. The original, of which this was a rough copy, linked the Doge’s Palace in Venice with the city jail. Prisoners, trudging over, would look out on the beauty of the city for the last time from its barred windows. On the night of the Great Darkness it must have been a forbidding sight.

  ‘What happened next?’ he prompted.

  ‘A soldier met us and took over.’

  Hartnell had a clipboard ready and handed Brooke a docket. The soldier who’d taken charge of the men was Corporal S. Currie: Swift-Lane’s AWOL pilferer and would-be black marketeer.

  Brooke made a further note. ‘Go on, lad,’ he said.

  Currie had marched the men along the riverbank.

  ‘That’s when Chris asked this sergeant what they were going to be doing because he’d only volunteered on the promise that he wouldn’t be involved in war work,’ said the teenager. ‘Defence was alright, but he couldn’t support killing. That’s what he said.’

  ‘What did the soldier, this corporal, say?’ asked Brooke.

  ‘He told him to shut up and walk. They were a Civil Defence unit, so that’s what it was. Defence work. So we all marched on until we got to St John’s Wilderness.’

  Then the work began. Pits had been dug and filled before them, because they could see in the dusk the neat mounds of soil. They were told to dig a fresh pit, six feet deep. The soldier set poles at four corners, creating a rectangle about twenty feet by twelve.

  It took them two hours to dig the hole.

  ‘The corporal, he was a bragger,’ said one of the other teenagers. ‘Couldn’t stop himself. He said that his unit had dug the other five pits weeks back, and filled ’em in, but they’d complained about the work, and that’s why we’d copped for the digging. So someone – you, Ron …’

  A small elderly man cradling his tea looked startled at the sound of his own name.

  ‘You said: “What did you bury?” and he said we’d to mind our own business. It was top secret, which sounded like bunk, and some of us laughed in his face.

  ‘Then a messenger turned up on foot. They had a bit of a conflab and the corporal changed his tune after that. We’d done a great job, we deserved a rest and a decent meal. All gratis. Mind you, he didn’t look pleased, he looked as sick as a dog.

  ‘Then we heard the soldiers, coming along the riverbank from the other direction, from Silver Street. Cart wheels, you could hear ’em. He hears ’em too, the corporal, and marches us off pronto the other way.’

  Several others joined in now to chart the squad’s journey across Cambridge; back over the river by the Bridge of Sighs, up Trinity Street and through Market Hill, out past the Corn Exchange to the university science quarter, to a new building of white stone.

  ‘The Galen Building, for anatomy?’ asked Brooke.

  ‘That’s it,’ said the lad. ‘You got it.’

  Brooke felt elated, even dizzy. It was like watching a jigsaw solve itself. Except this wasn’t a solution, just a set of new questions. How were the pits on the riverside linked to the three abandoned lorries? And how did Lux, the scientist, fit in? He’d been at the Galen that night, before his sudden, brutal death.

  If anything, the end of the story was the strangest bit of all. They had been taken down into the basement of the Galen, where there was a boiler, and given a slap-up meal: roast beef, boiled potatoes, cauliflower and carrots, with herbs and a rich gravy. Each plate came with a tin cover to keep it warm, and they were told it was college food, and top quality.

  Then Corporal Currie reappeared. He produced copies of the Official Secrets Act, and told them all they had to sign, and made it clear that under the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act they were to tell nobody what they’d done that night.

  ‘We’re guessing we can tell you,’ said the lad to Brooke, and they all laughed.

  Currie told them they’d be marched back to the depot in two hours, but in the meantime the basement was warm, so they were to make themselves comfortable.

  Which they all did, except Childe.

  ‘He tried the door when Currie buggered off,’ said Ron, still sipping his tea. ‘But it was locked. He said they couldn’t do that. He said that was against natural justice, he talked like that a lot. He said you couldn’t make a “pledge retrospectively”, so there was no point getting us to sign anything. Flash bugger. He said when he’d signed the paper he’d used a made-up name anyway. “What’s going into those pits?” He kept asking that, droning on.’

  Upstairs, said the lad, they could hear a film running.

  ‘A film?’ asked Brooke. ‘I was told there was a lecture.’

  They all agreed: they could hear a newsreel-style voice, the bass note carrying. It was definitely a film.

  Childe had been searching for another way out of the boiler room when he’d stumbled on a small lift in the corner, a dumb waiter, but slightly larger, used for hauling goods up and down to the laboratories above.

  ‘Chris stuck his head in the shaft and said he could hear the film really clearly,’ said the lad. ‘He called us over, and he was right, although you couldn’t make much sense of it. I don’t know what got into Chris, but he said he was going to take a look, and if he could, he’d scarper.

  ‘We said he was mad. The lift box was at the top of the shaft but he just grabbed the rope and started on up. There wasn’t much to him, and he was no weakling. He went up it like a rat. It was dark, but we could see his shoes, crossed over around the rope. About fifty feet up he stopped for a minute, then there was this flood of light, and we could see him, leaning over, pushing the lift doors apart. Then he kind of swung himself across and out of sight. He might have been a conchie but he had guts.’

  Fifteen minutes later he reappeared.

  ‘He’d got himself one of those long rods they use to pull down blinds and he used it to snag the rope. He didn’t bother shutting the lift doors so we could see him alright. As I said, fifty feet up, maybe more. Then he loses his hold with one hand and nearly falls. He’d have been dead as meat if he hadn’t held on with the other. Then he shimmies down.’

  ‘He looked shocked,’ said Ron. ‘He said he’d seen the film – or some of it, and that this wasn’t stopping here, that people had the right to know what was going on. It was our country just as much as anybody else’s. He was shook up, alright. I said to him, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, chum.”

  ‘He said it was worse. He’d seen the future.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Edison was waiting outside the depot at the gates, beside the Wasp, cleaning the side mirrors with his handkerchief. Brooke sat down on the running board, lit a cigarette and brought him up to speed on Chris Childe’s adventurous evening in the basement of the Galen, or rather, his remarkable ascent of the Galen, via the goods lift.

  ‘A film?’ asked Edison.

  ‘Indeed. Whatever he saw clearly made an impression. Presumably he described what he’d seen in the letter he gave to Staunton,’ said Brooke. ‘So, we return to the question: where is she?’

/>   Edison shook his head. ‘Brick wall so far, sir. The girls are still checking the electoral rolls. The woman who runs the PPU says Vera worked at the fallen women’s shelter in Chesterton two mornings a week – I’ve asked a car to drop by. There’s a rumour, at the PPU, that Vera works nights, if you understand me …’

  Edison gave Brooke an old-fashioned look.

  ‘Babylon Street, that area anyway.’

  Brooke whistled. ‘Babylon. Good God.’

  ‘Makes you think,’ added Edison, tightening his tie.

  The respectable Vera Staunton, secretary of the Party, might not be the woman Brooke had imagined. He thought back to the picture on the wall of Childe’s bedroom; had he detected, and then put aside, a certain forthright sexual frankness in the eyes? An address in Babylon Street placed her at the heart of the city’s red-light district.

  ‘Get the local constable to knock on doors,’ said Brooke. ‘And let’s ask County to check the records too; she might have strayed further afield in pursuit of punters. Come to think of it, we need to check our own files. We need that letter, Edison. In fact, I wonder if the killer’s got it in their pocket.’

  Brooke slid into the passenger seat and closed his eyes, deep in thought.

  ‘One bit of progress,’ offered Edison, turning the key on the Wasp’s well-oiled four-cylinder engine. ‘Our resident pathologist has a sharp eye,’ he said, handing Brooke a typed sheet of names and addresses from his inside pocket. ‘That’s today’s list of missing persons for the whole county. Dr Comfort gets a copy in case any of them turn up in his morgue. Note Neville Sneeth, Manor Farm, Horningsea. More to the point, note his distinguishing marks.’

  Brooke tracked down the page to Sneeth’s name: beside it had been written CTEV.

  ‘Congenital talipes equinovarus,’ said Edison, proudly. ‘Club foot, sir.’