by Jim Kelly
Edwardes, a stalwart of the Spinning House for thirty years, was Brooke’s mentor. After the war, when Brooke had come home from the hospital to take up his studies again, he’d discovered the allure of the natural sciences had faded, and his wounded eyes left study a struggle. Besides, he felt he’d left his student self somewhere out on the sands beyond the oasis east of Gaza. A return to his former life would have been surreal.
Detection, the logical art of securing the victory of good over evil, caught his imagination. But for his extreme sensitivity to light, diagnosed as photophobia, his body had made a sound recovery from his capture in the desert, and he’d passed the Borough’s medical with flying colours. Given he was never asked how he slept, his insomnia went unrecorded. His actual vision, in terms of focus, was rated 20:20, but the tinted lenses were needed to reduce the intensity of light. Edwardes, newly promoted on his return from Flanders, contrived to make sure the two years Brooke faced in uniform, before moving on to the detective branch, were largely restricted to the night beat. The necessary medical documentation mentioned only a prescription for sunglasses, a category of disablement not covered by the constabulary code.
Edwardes, diagnosed with stomach cancer, had taken sick leave a year earlier. Brooke called at the house to keep him up to date on current cases, and use the armchair for rest.
‘I presume you’ve been swimming?’ said Edwardes, a note of genuine irritation in his voice. ‘I’m told there are deluded individuals who use the river for sport.’
Brooke’s night-time swims were a subject of suppressed scandal at the Spinning House. As a constable in his first year on the force, Brooke had been put on a charge, discovered by his sergeant bathing in the river with his uniform neatly folded on the bank. Edwardes had set the penalty aside, but a sense of moral indignation lingered.
‘Not tonight,’ said Brooke. ‘Soon it’ll be too cold.’
To one side of the bed, a bank of electronic equipment filled a wall. Gadgets hummed, not with a single note, but an array, so that the overall effect was of a group of singers trying to produce a chord a cappella style. Several of the upper boxes had the half-lit facades of radios.
Edwardes was one of several thousand ‘hams’ – amateur radio enthusiasts – recruited across Britain to monitor the ether. These official duties allowed them to keep their radios, which would otherwise have been confiscated. Any traffic considered of interest had to be recorded and logged. Given his illness, these new-found duties were a blessing, in that they gave his hobby a frisson of genuine excitement.
Tonight, while the radios hummed, the airwaves were silent.
The old man was in pain. He held himself with a certain tension, calculating each move of hand or head. Reaching out, he located a glass of milk by the bed and sipped it, leaving a white tidemark to match the others encircling the tumbler.
They heard the rattle of a kettle on a stove below.
‘How’s Kat?’ asked Brooke. Edwardes’ wife had worked at the hospital with Claire, as a geriatric nurse.
‘Thirty years on the ward and she gets to retire in time to find her home’s not her home at all, but a one-bed hospital. She’s taking it well.’
Brooke made himself comfortable in the deep chair.
‘Sleep if you want,’ said Edwardes. ‘If not, what’s the case?’
Brooke tried to focus. ‘You’ll know all about the conchie, shot dead in Mill Road, at the cemetery?’
Edwardes nodded. ‘A conchie? I didn’t hear that bit.’
‘Member of the local communist party too. Three of his comrades have gone missing to boot. Puff of smoke, and they’re gone. Where, why? Either they’ve done a collective runner, or they’re dead too. In which case we’ve got a killer loose on the streets. I need to find them, Frank. Find them quickly. We’ve tracked down a woman the victim saw on the day he died; we’ll speak to her tomorrow. But I’d like to find her missing comrades, too … Especially as one of them had a radio in his loft.’
‘Really?’
‘Tuned to Moscow. It had a microphone attached too.’
‘That’s a transmitter, so he could get messages out. Blimey. Let’s hope he didn’t know anything he shouldn’t have …’ Edwardes struggled to sit up straighter against his pillows. ‘Not that easy to disappear these days. Tried the ports?’
Brooke nodded.
‘Did they have coupons for petrol? Did they have a car?’ asked Edwardes. ‘Trains are the best bet. If they had a head start maybe they travelled together.’
Brooke nodded. ‘One of them, with the radio, is a union man on the railways.’
‘There you are, then. They get free travel. Kind of thing a ticket collector would remember. A nod, a chat, a moan about wages. If they’ve gone south to London you can kiss goodbye to ’em. But west, east or north, you’ve got a chance.’
A distinct regular beep suddenly came into sharp aural focus in the room. Edwardes calmly picked up a log book and began to jot down five letter groups. But the beeps faded quickly, and then were gone.
Brooke rubbed his eyes and wished Kat would bring up some tea.
‘Slept tonight?’ asked Edwardes.
‘An hour, a bit less.’
Brooke’s eyelids closed, his brain slipping into neutral for a fleeting second: he let the unfamiliar sense of falling overwhelm him, like the tumbling giddiness of the drunk. His body spun but never seemed to complete the three hundred and sixty degrees required to return to its starting place.
Waking up was what he remembered next, as if he’d fallen into the room from another dimension. The beeps of a fresh transmission filled the air. Edwardes’ hand flew, adept at transliterating the dots and dashes, setting down letters on paper.
Kat appeared with two cups of tea and set one beside Brooke, taking away one which was cold, and must have been left for him earlier.
Catching his eye, she looked at her husband feverishly taking down the code, then rolled her eyes. ‘That’ll be Goering, trying to reserve a punt for Goebbels. Love to Claire, if you ever see her,’ she said, retreating.
From under the bed, Edwardes retrieved a silver cigarette box. Brooke stuck to his Black Russians.
The old man blew a smoke ring. ‘Here’s a thought, young Brooke. Officially, there’s a few hundred of us radio hams across the country, but there’s six of us in Cambridge. We meet up. It doesn’t say you can’t. Apparently, a place like Hull – a port city, and in the frontline – has got just one operator. Six here. Why?’
‘You tell me,’ said Brooke.
‘Half the university’s on government work. Classified this, classified that. One of the other hams has got a son who works at the labs on Free School Lane. He told his dad that he’d had to sign all sorts and he couldn’t tell him a thing. But he gave him this …’
Edwardes showed Brooke the book he’d been leaning on: A Trip to Catch the Sun by H. G. Wells.
‘Science fiction, Frank, no more,’ said Brooke.
‘But you haven’t read it, have you?’
Brooke felt like the new boy again in the Spinning House. Edwardes had a gift for spotting bullshit.
‘It’s about what Wells calls a perpetual bomb,’ said Edwardes. ‘It never stops burning, Brooke. The force of the sun held in a particle so small it’s invisible. An atom. The world’s at war again in this story, and it makes the last lot look like a picnic, this lot too – so far. Then, at the last moment, Wells has all the governments get together and see sense. Wells is an optimist, Brooke. That’s the only bit I don’t believe.’
He tossed the book to the floor.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Sergeant Edison waited on the corner of Babylon Street in the early morning rain, his eyes – under cover of a wide black umbrella – searching the windows and doorsteps of the red-light district with a keen interest. The street itself, a hundred yards long before it came to an abrupt full stop demanded by a railway embankment, was deserted. The gutters must have been blocked because the rai
n had formed an unbroken mirror of the road, reflecting low grey clouds. Brooke, approaching from the Kite, noted again Edison’s ability to look like a policeman even in plain clothes.
‘Sir,’ said Edison by way of welcome, lifting the umbrella to accommodate his superior.
‘Number twelve’s our girl …’
They knocked loudly for a full minute before the door opened.
A young woman in a nightdress finally appeared, rubbing her eyes.
‘We’re looking for Vera Staunton,’ said Brooke, and held up his warrant.
‘Try Ida,’ she said, opening the door and nodding down a tiled corridor to another door, half-glazed. ‘She keeps an eye out for all of us. Sees who comes, who goes. She’ll know if Vera’s free.
‘Mind you, it might be Ida’s day for the clinic,’ she added. ‘She’s ancient, and her heart’s dodgy, even if it is in the right place.’
She slipped back inside the ground floor front flat.
They knocked on Ida’s door, but all this produced was a chorus of cat meows from inside the flat. A beaded curtain blocked the view through the glass pane set in the door. On the mat, Brooke noted a letter with a Glasgow postmark and a neat copperplate name and address.
‘Let’s find Vera on our own,’ said Brooke, leading the way up the stairs.
Each floor had three rooms, all marked with names hand-printed on cards: Marge, Gilly, Esther, Bethy …
Vera Staunton was at her door when they arrived, her face bisected by the security chain. Brooke offered his warrant card and said they were making routine enquiries, and they’d like to take ten minutes of her time.
The main room held a double bed, a drinks trolley, a changing screen and a large mirror. She offered them seats, while she slipped into a stylish art deco chair. Edison stayed on his feet and asked some perfunctory questions – name, date of birth, ID number – while Brooke cradled his hat, considering the woman.
She wore a nightdress, which had fallen open to reveal a slip; unworried by the intimacy, she stretched out her bare legs, slender feet and wriggling toes. Her hair was artfully dyed, but her skin – despite some face powder and blusher – revealed the lines of time.
Edison dragged one of the stools back a yard and sat down abruptly, making the pair of songbirds in their silver cage beat their wings against the bars.
Brooke took up the interview. ‘You’ll have heard the news? About Chris Childe?’
‘Yes. The Party looks after its own. There’s only four or five active members, but we’ve twenty or more on the books. The news is out. But it’s difficult to know what to think.’ She examined her nails, in what Brooke thought was a show of studied indifference. ‘Poor Chris. How’s Mary?’
‘We think Chris was murdered,’ he said, ignoring her question. ‘We need to know why someone would do such a thing. Mrs Childe said he came to you with a letter, an urgent report she called it. Two questions: what was the content of his report, and did you post it as he asked?’
She wrapped the loose nightdress closer around her shoulders.
‘He said he’d been a witness. That he’d seen something important and that the branch committee had decided he should make an official statement. I simply addressed the envelope to our Cadogan Square offices in London, for the attention of the general secretary, and went out to get stamps to post it first class. Chris suggested recorded delivery but I said – if anything – that might be more likely to get intercepted en route. Better lose it in the millions of letters posted every day.’
She looked around her room. ‘Chris didn’t stay long … he may have found my circumstances offensive.’
Setting a hand on the bed, laden with a variety of throws and blankets and silks in exotic patterns, she brought her legs up under her in a single fluid movement. ‘Chris was excitable, a bit of an innocent. Some of us have to live in the real world. Clever, alright, that was Chris, but a bit disappointed at his life, this life …’
She kissed the back of her hand and examined the trace of lipstick on her skin. ‘I must be a sight,’ she said.
‘He didn’t know you were a prostitute?’ asked Brooke, running out of patience with the euphemisms.
She rocked back a little on her seat, then shrugged. ‘I think they all knew, or they guessed. Chris? Maybe not – as I say, an innocent. There have been times I’ve spoken up for the girls, women like me, at meetings.’
‘This letter, the addressee …?’ prompted Brooke.
She threw her head back. ‘Chris wanted me to send it to Pollitt, but he’s been given the elbow. The new man’s Palme Dutt.’
She spelt out the name letter by letter, as Edison took a note.
‘Hardly matters, because he won’t see it anytime soon. I’ve been to Cadogan Square, Inspector. It’s a tip. Books, papers, everywhere. Meetings in every room, generating more paper. And Palme Dutt’s abroad. A secretary will have filed it under “urgent”, and that will be that.’
Suddenly energised, she leant forward. ‘I told Chris he could go himself, get on a train that morning if it was all so important, but I’m not sure he had the guts, frankly. Guts isn’t right – gumption, perhaps. He had his tribunal hearing, of course. But if it was that important …’
‘And he left when …?’
‘Before nine, for the depot. He had to go to work.’
‘How did he seem?’
‘Nervous, even excited. Chris studied, always had his head in a book – history, economics, politics. God, he loved the politics. He’d always give you a long word where a short one would do.’
‘You didn’t like him?’ asked Brooke.
The brown eyes hardened. ‘I didn’t like him coming here. I live in two worlds, Inspector. More. I like to keep them all apart.’
‘He said nothing of the possible effects of making the report?’ asked Edison.
‘He expected to be summoned to the Party’s offices to give a verbal account. But as I say, that was his secret hope. He may have overestimated his place in history.’
‘The letter?’
Again, the visible hardening of the stare. ‘As I said, posted that morning.’
She slid her feet to the frayed carpet.
‘He didn’t mention seeing a film?’
‘A film? No. Bit early for the pictures …’
Brooke shook his head. ‘Did you tell anyone else about the report?’
‘No. Henderson knew, and Popper and Lauder. Chris wouldn’t tell them the details. He’d started, then clammed up. Some rubbish about seeing the future and that soldiers were a thing of the past. That sounds like Chris.’
Brooke stood. ‘Forgive me. Politics seems a strange choice for …’
‘For a woman? Or for a woman like me?’
Brooke waited for an answer.
‘They asked me to join, Inspector. They’d seen me working for the PPU – the Peace Pledge Union. I’ve been a member for twenty years. My husband died in the last lot. I think he would have registered as a conscientious objector if he’d been alive today, but back then, Your Country Needs You and all that … He didn’t come back. Even his body didn’t come back.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s no great sacrifice, is it, taking a few notes, pushing round agendas, keeping ahead of the paperwork. Before the war I worked in an office. So I know how to deal with paper. Believe me, that’s what the Party does best. Paper soldiers, all of ’em.’
‘Your husband: rank, unit?’ asked Edison.
She blinked twice and Brooke thought, She’s calculating, wondering where the facts will lead.
‘My husband was Corporal Harold Staunton. The Cambridgeshires.’
‘And what was his trade when he met you?’ asked Edison.
‘Harold worked on the river, a bargee, but he had ideas, ambitions. Most nights he’d be down on Mill Road at The Settlement, that’s the workers’ school. Bettering himself: I liked that. He said we’d all be able to thrive if the rich gave some of what they had to the poor. He said we had a f
uture, after the war, together. Then he put on a uniform.’
Now, for the first time, she appeared desperate for them to leave. She stood, walking to the dormer window, looking down on the street in the rain.
‘A widow’s pension is not sufficient?’ asked Brooke, pleased with the inference buried within the question.
She turned and smiled. ‘I said we had ambitions. The war destroyed them. Frederick, our son, is everything now, all that’s left. It’s what we talked about before Harold left. We promised each other then, the child would have a chance in life, an education. So, boarding school. It’s not been cheap.’
She ushered them to the door.
‘Childe didn’t have a carbon copy of the letter?’ asked Edison on the threshold.
It was such a good question that her eyes showed a flash of alarm.
‘Yes. I asked him about that and he just patted his chest pocket. It’ll be on his body?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Chief Inspector Carnegie-Brown called the full complement of the Spinning House’s day shift – CID and uniform – to the old hall on the third floor. Her first name was Jean, but nobody on the Borough had ever heard her called anything but ‘ma’am’. Neat, confident, at ease, she stood before her troops like a general before the battle is joined. As she took up her position on a small raised dais, she squared her shoulders, briefly examining the complex carpentry of the fine wooden ceiling.
It had been in this room that poor young homeless women had been put to work at their spinning wheels. Something about Carnegie-Brown found an echo there; she radiated puritan values of fresh air, exercise and abstinence. A keen angler, Brooke had often spotted her on his summer swims, on the bank at Fen Ditton, fly-fishing where the river swung north and the dead water lay in a black pool by the towpath. Perhaps she found there a memory of her native home in the Scottish Borders.
She surveyed her audience until there was silence.