The Great Darkness

by Jim Kelly

‘Just like our runaway lorry driver, later found floating in Byron’s Pool,’ said Brooke.

  ‘That’s it. And a farmer to boot. Looks like he’d found a good way of making a markup on his meat. Uniform have sent a car out to bring in the wife, Elspeth, to identify the body. But there’s not much doubt,’ said Edison. ‘I thought we could take a look at the farm, sir. We’d have the place to ourselves …’

  Foot down, Edison got the Wasp up to fifty, leaving the city behind, arrowing out into the country along a lane between parallel lines of poplars, the weak sunlight flashing between the trees.

  A village, a pub, a sliver of green by a war memorial, and then they were out again, the road snaking up a slow hill on the edge of the Fens.

  Edison had clearly memorised the map, as he slowed suddenly and turned down a rutted track to a pair of farm gates. The overnight storm had left the lane awash with ribbons of black water, the surface psychedelic with engine oil and petrol.

  Clambering out of the car, Brooke filled his lungs with country air and set out for a barn. ‘Let’s leave the house until last,’ he said, leaving Edison to struggle with a pair of wellington boots.

  Manor Farm comprised thirty acres of grassland on a clay hillside. There wasn’t an animal in sight, except two horses bent down with the weight of damp blankets, tethered to the gate of the first field. The barn was full of beet on the ground floor, the loft with sacks, carrots spilling out.

  Brooke paused at the open doors, surveying the farm. ‘Field’s full of cow dung,’ he said. ‘There’s a pigsty somewhere, unless my nose deceives me. But where are the animals, Edison? Well. I think we know, don’t we. And those’ – he pointed down a drove which ran to the woods – ‘are the tracks of a lorry …’

  They led across the field into a narrow defile cut by a half-hearted stream. A small deer, no larger than a dog, stood on the path for a moment and then appeared to dissolve into the shadows with a single visual ripple. Crows cawed above the canopy but were reluctant to land, simply circling in a holding pattern over their heads.

  The light levels plunged as they trudged down the valley.

  An S-bend brought into sight the ruins of an old water mill. Tarpaulins, draped from a crossbeam, formed a tented area open to the air at both ends, upstream and downstream. The truck tracks stopped at the mill, while downstream they could see the path had been wrecked by the hooves of cattle coming uphill from the fields.

  Edison stayed on the edge of the light, peering into the ruins, surveying a blood-stained wooden bench. A raised floor had been constructed of duckboards and extended out over the stream, so that they could just see the water below.

  ‘Abattoir?’ asked Edison.

  Brooke adjusted his hat. ‘Maybe. Or a slaughterhouse. I think they killed the animals here. All the carcasses on the lorries were whole. The butchery’s for later.’

  Brooke didn’t believe in ghosts, but there were places that seemed scarred by time. The trees were rustling and there was a slender soundtrack of water flowing, but on the edge of hearing he thought he could detect the sound of the animals that had queued here by the water: wall-eyed, spooked. Fear ran through the old mill as palpably as the stream.

  ‘We’ll need a constable on the spot to preserve the site until we have a full record. Get them to haul the bench back to the station, and the duckboard where it’s stained.’

  Walking back towards the car, it was Edison who saw something move at the upstairs window of the farmhouse.

  ‘Sir,’ he called, pointing. ‘A face, just ducked away, looked like a kid.’

  The front door was open, the house within a surprise: whitewashed walls, colourful rugs, a vast hearth in the kitchen glowing red with coals. In a pot on the range a stew bubbled.

  Edison led the way stiffly up the stairs, calling out, his warrant card held up like a lantern.

  They heard a hesitant footstep and then a boy appeared in pyjama bottoms from a bathroom: boy was wrong now that they could see him, because he had a sturdy build, and must have been a teenager, although his face was pale and child-like.

  His name, he said, was Jed, and he was Neville Sneeth’s son.

  ‘The horses are mine,’ he said, taking them to the window which looked out across the field. ‘Dad said I could keep them.’

  He padded back to bed, explaining he’d got a cough and a cold and the doctors were worried about influenza, so he had to stay warm.

  The bed looked like a nest, and a fire burnt in a small grate. A blanket lay on the floor where he’d been polishing horse tackle: bits and bridles, and a line of brasses.

  ‘They took the rest of the animals in the lorry, did they?’ asked Brooke, but the question remained unanswered.

  Jed lay back and closed his eyes. ‘Did they find Dad? Mum said I’d best be ready for the worst. He’s been worried about money, about the farm. It got him down. I wanted to go with her but she said I should rest. I’ve been weak, but I’m better already. Maybe I should have gone.’

  Jed closed his eyes.

  Brooke thought the teenager was being devious. ‘The body of a man was found in the river, Jed. Your mother is going to see if it is your father. Until we hear, we don’t know for sure.’

  The boy nodded, eyes still closed.

  ‘I asked a question, Jed. Where did the pigs and cattle go?’

  ‘I’ve been out of it,’ he said, meeting Brooke’s eyes. ‘I need to rest now,’ he added, shutting his eyes again, although Brooke could see movement beneath the lids.

  ‘We’ll make you a cup of tea,’ said Brooke. ‘My sergeant is just going to look round …’

  Edison set off along the landing to check all the rooms while Brooke slipped into the bathroom to wash the dirt of the slaughterhouse off his hands. An old bath stood on wooden blocks, beside a porcelain washbasin. Turning on the tap, he watched the clear water wash away a neat line of three bright red drops of fresh blood.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  That night, Claire took Brooke to the pictures to see Goodbye, Mr Chips at the Regal, just a hundred yards from the Spinning House. She had a shift off, and they always tried to use the opportunity to establish the ghostly outline of a real life. Brooke took his third pair of glasses, the ones tinted a deep shadowy blue. They gave the black and white film a surreal marine hue.

  Sitting in the flickering light, he tried to weave together the threads of the various cases under inquiry into some kind of coherent pattern. Earlier, in his office, he’d resorted to his blackboard and chalk, drawing what was now being called a Venn diagram, in honour of the gifted young scientist who’d invented the concept not half a mile away, at Gonville and Caius College. Three circles: one for the meat wagons on Castle Hill, one for the riverside pits and one for the American scientist Lux. Besides the fact that they had in common a moment in time – the Great Darkness – what else linked them all? In the space where the three circles overlapped he’d written a single word: film, and a single name: Currie.

  Goodbye, Mr Chips passed him by, except for a scene towards the end in which the eponymous schoolteacher stood in a chapel reading out the daily list of former pupils killed in the trenches, pausing to add the name of a German friend, met on a teenage Alpine adventure, who had fallen with the rest. The audience in the cinema, packed beneath drifting cigarette smoke, respected a tense silence.

  Later, at home, they ate liver, a rice pudding, and drank another of his father’s bottles of wine. In bed, the window open as always, they listened to the distant whisper of the river: not one stream here, but several, diverted into mill streams and ponds, backwaters and pools, finally falling over the weir downstream. The view from the bedroom was more water than land.

  Sleepless, they played out a small ritual which had become a drug, imagining precisely the scene at that moment if they’d been with Joy and Luke.

  Brooke went first: his son would be outside, under the stars, with the small telescope he’d given him as a farewell gift at the station.

&nbs
p; Claire took Joy’s last letter as a starting point, in which she’d mentioned a young doctor called Ben. ‘I hope they’re in bed too,’ she said, and Brooke affected a gasp.

  ‘The real war’s coming,’ said Claire, by way of explanation. ‘They should seize the day.’

  Brooke slept fitfully, transported back in time to a hospital bed; precisely, a sanatorium a few miles outside Scarborough. The scene recalled was vivid because he knew what was going to happen next. The door at the end of the ward would open and an officer – a captain – would walk down the aisle between the beds and, calling for attention, announce that the war was over, or that it would be over, in under ten minutes.

  So: 11th November 1918, around 10.50 a.m.

  At that moment Claire was sitting on the edge of his bed. He’d called her Little Nurse Tidy persistently, until she’d given up her resistance and revealed her real name. Romantic rubbish, of course, but as soon as he heard the word itself, it seemed astonishingly familiar.

  ‘Tell me a fact and a secret and I’ll do the same,’ she’d said, surreptitiously taking his pulse.

  They’d made him glasses with an odd purple tint and it gave the sunshine a sickly quality, which made him ache for air, but all the windows were shut. Earlier, he’d asked her what the surgeons thought about his knee, if he’d walk again, and she’d evaded any answer.

  ‘I’ve been awarded a medal,’ he said. ‘That’s a fact. The secret is I don’t deserve it.’

  ‘What medal?’ said Claire.

  ‘Well, the DSO. The Distinguished Service Order. I’m not sure there is actually a medal.’ He looked out of the full-length window, searching for the broken shard of blue light which revealed the sea through the screen of trees. He imagined a beach, with white sand, and a view to the horizon. ‘It’s an award. An order. It’s for bravery.’

  ‘Why don’t you deserve it?’

  ‘I was captured. I didn’t talk. But I was scared, terrified really. I don’t think I knew what the truth was. I hardly deserve a medal for that.’

  ‘One of your visitors said you’d saved the lives of hundreds of men, maybe thousands.’

  He closed his eyes, knowing that for a few seconds it would relieve the pain, which felt as if it ran along an electric wire around his skull.

  ‘Now you,’ he said.

  When he opened his eyes, she was walking back from the window where she’d lowered the blind. A minute may have passed, or just a few seconds. The man in the next bed whimpered in his sleep and his left foot appeared from under the sheet.

  Claire checked her watch. ‘I have five brothers, that’s a fact.’

  Brooke immediately understood, because he could imagine the chaos and the swirl of family life, and the need to impose order and neatness and calm.

  ‘And a secret?’

  She came round the bed to tuck in the sheet and her lips were close to his ear.

  ‘The surgeon says they’ll fix your leg, that you’ll walk again, and that the road to recovery begins tomorrow in the pool in the basement. They’re going to make you swim.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  At his desk by six, Brooke felt revitalised. The blackboard still held the circular patterns of the Venn diagram he’d scrawled the night before. After a breakfast at the Masonic Hall, he made a series of calls, until Edison appeared, rubbing puffy eyes, a bacon sandwich in one hand. ‘Nothing to report from the riverbank,’ he said, stepping over the threshold. ‘I stayed till well past midnight. Quiet as the grave. And bloody cold.’

  ‘Fancy a drive?’ asked Brooke. ‘Petrol on expenses.’

  ‘The Wasp’s in the yard, sir. She’s got a full tank.’

  ‘A treat, then, Edison,’ he said. He gave him a set of the photographs they’d had taken of Turl, with orders to deliver them to Sheffield, the hometown of their runaway black marketeer, Stanley Currie. The corporal was now at the heart of their enquiries into black-market meat. Had he run home? Was he in cahoots with Turl and the rest?

  ‘Put your foot down and you’ll be there and back by nightfall,’ said Brooke. ‘I’ve rung the station at West Bar and they’re expecting you. Check out the Currie family garage in the city centre. Do what you can. We’ve got Turl, Sneeth’s in the morgue. Maybe they know where we can find the third driver, the one Turl called Ginger?’

  A note from the commissioner’s office, Scotland Yard, reiterating the Home Secretary’s personal interest in the case, had come to Brooke via Carnegie-Brown, so he gave Edison that as well. ‘If they’re not cooperating, show them that. If they don’t help us crack this case, Sergeant, Scotland Yard will be heading north.’

  Edison vanished, taking his bacon sandwich for the journey.

  For the rest of the morning Brooke tried to track down Vera Staunton, but she was proving an insubstantial presence. Door-to-door enquiries in Babylon Street had raised nothing. There was no record of her at the magistrates’ court, or in their own books, although the county police force was still checking its files. Finally, he’d made a call to the identity card centre at the Home Office: but that could take months to produce a result.

  Sipping his third cup of stewed tea, he reluctantly decided that they might be dealing with an alias. Finding Staunton’s missing comrades in the Party presented a similar challenge. Where were Henderson, Lauder and Popper? More to the point, what was their fate? Had they fled before their rooms were searched, or had they been hauled away? Were they, like Childe, victims of a calculating killer? Brooke had circulated their ID numbers to the ports, and informed Henderson’s employers. He could do little else but wait, and hope.

  Which left him with the film shown at the Galen on the night of the Great Darkness. What was its subject? What had been buried in the riverside pits? What was the link between the two? A briefing was necessary, and the commanding officer at Madingley Hall was the perfect man to deliver the facts. Colonel Swift-Lane’s assurances to leave well alone now looked threadbare. It was time to come clean.

  Brooke rang Captain Kerridge.

  ‘I’d ask his deputy if I could,’ said Kerridge. ‘Major Stone’s more likely to tip the wink if it saves time and effort, but he’s off at the War Office for a two-day briefing, all hush-hush. Which leaves us with Colonel Swift-Lane. He’s hardly the type to offer up classified information. I’ll try. If I get anywhere I’ll ring, but he’s already laid down the law on this to you in person. For now, just leave it with me.’

  By nightfall, Brooke had reread the relevant files and made a brief summary report for Carnegie-Brown. Then he set a lamp over Elspeth Sneeth’s statement and speed-read from the top for the third time, his eyes travelling vertically down the middle of the typewritten page. It was an unremarkable story, but for the fact that it led – ultimately – and with a remorseless logic, to the body on Dr Comfort’s autopsy table, the white limbs tangled in the green river weed from Byron’s Pool.

  Neville Sneeth was the third son of a Lincolnshire farmer. He’d married Elspeth, a dairy maid, in 1925. After saving a down payment of £100, they’d secured the lease of Manor Farm, Horningsea, in 1937. The land had been recommended to them by cousins who ran a smallholding near Newmarket. It had not been a sound piece of advice. They’d struggled to meet the rent, and had only managed to stay afloat in their third year thanks to a loan from one of Neville’s older brothers, the owner of an agricultural haulage business in Gainsborough.

  Brooke had a map of England up on the wall and found Gainsborough exactly on a level with his eyes, just thirty miles from Sheffield.

  The causal connections between Sneeth and the black market were compelling: debt, a loan, Sheffield, livestock, meat, cash – or, more pertinently, the lack of it. Mrs Sneeth’s summary hinted at what she’d guessed: I didn’t ask too many questions. Nev said he’d got a good deal and that ‘needs must’. There’d be cash, he said, and a surplus for new stock in the spring. I knew about the slaughterhouse by the mill, I’m not blind. He said to keep away. He said it meant they didn’t have to
pay for the red tape, that he could go straight to market. All Nev had to do was provide the meat, and drive the lorry.

  Brooke was rereading the statement when his phone rang: one of Dr Comfort’s assistants informed him that the autopsy on Christopher Childe was about to begin in the Galen’s mortuary. Five minutes later Brooke was looking at the young man’s body, laid out on its metal table. The exit wound had destroyed the back of the skull, but his face was strangely untouched, except for the entry wound at his temple. Brooke struggled to concentrate on his facial expression of mild surprise, and the fact that his lips were parted as if about to speak. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that this was the face of an innocent victim. Brooke endured the external examination, but left when one of the servants stepped forward with the breadknife, the saw designed to lop off the top of the cranium.

  Back in his office, he returned to the paperwork under a desk lamp. Outside a siren wailed, and the lights of the city began to flicker out into total darkness.

  As Great St Mary’s struck ten he heard a car dashing gravel in the yard below. Looking down, he watched Edison get out of the car, straighten his back, then pat the roof, as if the Wasp were a family pet, with which he had just completed a long walk.

  ‘How was the city of steel?’ asked Brooke when Edison appeared, carrying a tray on which lay the night shift canteen dinner: meat pie, mashed potatoes and carrots. Brooke cleared his desk so that his detective sergeant could eat in comfort.

  ‘I took the Great North road; I flew,’ said Edison, stabbing a piece of nameless meat. ‘Currie, our vanishing sergeant, is permanently AWOL, I’m afraid; body turned up yesterday on some waste ground in the Don Valley, a mile or two from the city centre. Always famous for it, Sheffield, gang wars, but I thought they’d got it under control. Place is infernal.’

  Edison shook his head, only stopping to ladle some potato into his mouth. ‘There wasn’t much left of him either. Body burnt beyond recognition. They chucked his wallet on top of the cold corpse so everyone would know it was him. Just as Turl predicted.