The Great Darkness

by Jim Kelly

  ‘Do you think Vera actually sent the letter?’ Brooke asked, changing tack.

  Henderson studied his face. ‘What, you think she’s a wrong’un, Vera? A spy within? No way, Brooke. Don’t forget we recruited her. No. Vera’s sound.’

  ‘So where’s the letter?’ persisted Brooke.

  ‘Ask me, it’s at the Party office, or a safer place. Think about it. If someone at Cadogan Square opened the letter and read it, and it’s that big a deal, why the hell own up? Why tell the police anything?’

  Brooke thought the logic of this was powerful.

  Henderson sensed his moment. ‘Do me a favour,’ he said. ‘Make sure we don’t disappear. I can face a court, I can face a charge, but I can’t face that. Left to rot in some godawful forgotten cell. You know who to ask, Brooke. You know how to keep tabs. I’ve no idea what they’ve told you, about letting us go, but I think someone wants us out of sight. There’ll be a truck in the night. Then? Christ knows. So look out for us, please.’

  ‘Alright,’ said Brooke, unable to decline. ‘But they know about the radio, so expect visitors.’

  He promised cigarettes, too, and then rapped on the door to be let out. He dogged the warder’s steps, along the landing and down a flight, to see the other prisoners. Lauder and Popper confirmed Henderson’s version of events: Childe had kept his secret, at least from them.

  Finally the warder steered Brooke back towards the main gate.

  The corridor led to an outside door, and a small shadowy garden.

  A man dug the clay soil with a fork, in full-length black overalls, and it was only when Brooke came level that he realised it was the governor. His hairless domed head was shiny with sweat. Brooke felt sure the meeting had been contrived.

  ‘Inspector. Give my best to Carnegie-Brown. Haven’t seen her since last year’s Rotary dinner,’ he said. ‘My haven,’ he added, indicating the neat garden plot and a series of trellises threaded with winter jasmine and a woody wisteria.

  Looking up, the governor surveyed the sky. ‘Always makes me think of Wilde’s little tent of blue.’ He set his spade aside. ‘About these three prisoners,’ he said. ‘I’m not happy. Lockdown is inhumane. They keep telling me there’s a war on. It’s the devil’s excuse. I wanted you to know I don’t approve.’

  The complaint lasted several minutes more.

  ‘One favour,’ said Brooke. ‘If the order comes in to move them can you let me know? And insist on seeing the warrant, and a note of their destination. If they won’t comply, can you secure a record of the licence plates, anything you can.’

  The governor looked shocked. ‘It’s come to that?’ he asked.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Brooke stood at the French windows, watching mist creep out of the river, finding a foothold where the cattle had worn down the bank. A lone horse was slowly disappearing: hooves first, then fetlocks, until only the noble head remained, a suspended chess-piece knight hanging in mid-air. Out of this whiteness, a hunched figure approached from the towpath towards the house: Marcus Ashmore, night climber, mathematician and the studious brother of the party-loving Jo.

  A strange boy, thought Brooke: such an English epithet, a catch-all for so many unspoken peculiarities of manner and action. It had been the Brooke family’s universal verdict from the day Marcus had first come to the house with his parents. The children had formed a close-knit club: two girls, two boys, left alone while the adults ate at the long table in the dining room. The old house had become their playground, the shadowy attic and the dripping cellar the backdrop to shrieking games of sardines or hide-and-seek. When the Ashmores had moved to a grander college house, the children had kept in touch, if not the adults.

  Marcus approached the back gate, lifted the snicket with practised ease and made his way to the kitchen door.

  ‘Tea?’ called Brooke, trying to ignite some warmth in his voice as a reminder of past times.

  ‘Please,’ said Marcus, taking a seat at the plain deal table. ‘It’s good to be back,’ he added, and smiled. A small, neat figure, he succeeded in conjuring up the ghost of the child he once was.

  Marcus would be twenty-two, Brooke calculated – in academic terms, the intellectual prime of his life. His physical stillness always suggested a whirring brain, betrayed by the rapid movement of his eyes, which danced round the familiar room, perhaps trying to detect the unfamiliar: a new watercolour print, an addition to Brooke’s collection of framed maps of the city, or a gleaming coffee pot.

  ‘How’s Joy?’ Marcus asked.

  For a minute they swapped family updates until Brooke could pour the tea. The biscuit tin, a family treasure, he placed between them in an effort to summon up the informality of childhood treats.

  ‘Jo said you wanted a word,’ said Marcus finally.

  ‘Yes. About Ernst Lux – a friend, a colleague?’

  ‘A friend. We played Russian roulette …’ Marcus smiled, and Brooke was reminded of the many times he’d seen the innocence of that face reveal a cruel streak.

  ‘No guns,’ said Marcus, holding up both hands. ‘Ernst used a book, instead. Clever, really. We’d set various parameters against certain outcomes. So: you would open the book on the basis that picking an even page number would result in a payment of £100, an odd page number an immediate call-up for military training. Or, a page number divisible by five, which would give you £1,000, but any other page would result in being sent down. We played for hours. It reveals character.’

  His eyes met Brooke’s for a second, then took up their tour, continuing to compile an inventory of crockery and cups, glasses and pans.

  ‘On the night Ernst died, you both went night climbing. A regular event?’

  Marcus examined his teacup, waiting for further clarification, perhaps, of the risks he faced if he gave the detective the truth.

  ‘I can’t prove anything,’ said Brooke. ‘This is a private conversation. I’m the last person to play custodian of the university’s rules. I need to know how he died, Marcus. His work was classified, at least in part. There’s interest from my superiors, your superiors, in how he died. They need, I need, to be sure. An accident’s an accident. But if I don’t get the truth I can take other measures. We could talk formally, in college, but I’d need to seek the agreement of the master.’

  Marcus nodded, as if he’d expected as much. He held his fingertips together as if using the ten digits to make the fine calculation of probability required to make a decision.

  ‘Ernst was drunk that night,’ he said, finally. ‘Oiled, certainly. So we didn’t go out for some time. A little alcohol can work wonders, actually. It disinhibits, lends a fluidity to the limbs. But he was giddy, so we talked. He was in a very strange mood.

  ‘On the way back from the pub, he’d gone for a long walk – to think. By the time he got back to college the gate was locked, so he climbed over the wall by the cedar tree, an easy task for Ernst. He turned up at my room in a state. So we sat out on the roof edge. He was very quiet: introspective, certainly.

  ‘I asked if he was alright. He said it was his work, that he’d been to a lecture at the Galen, and it had taken an unexpected direction. That was his phrase: an unexpected direction. I suppose he was depressed. That’s the aspect of alcohol everyone forgets, that it enhances the mood, it doesn’t create the mood.’

  ‘He said nothing more about why he was upset, nothing specific?’

  ‘No. And I didn’t labour the point. We’d never swapped any ideas on an academic level. He’s a natural scientist. Or a chemist, or both. My work is very different. And classified. So I guess we’d agreed a subconscious truce on the subject of our work.’

  Outside, in the milky dusk, they heard the plosh! of an oar breaking the surface of the river.

  ‘We hit upon the idea of climbing,’ said Marcus, as if exposing yourself to the possibility of instant death was the equivalent of a game of bridge. He seemed to understand how ludicrous this might sound. ‘I know. It’s the thrill of it, I g
uess. It lifts the spirit. I think he really needed it, like a drug. I’m no different. You can’t live a life entirely inside your own head.’

  There was an intimate note to this revelation, as if he was making a confession. Brooke felt strangely moved by the insight.

  ‘You knew the consequences?’ asked Brooke.

  ‘Well, it’s always been verboten,’ said Marcus. ‘But Michaelhouse has notched up the penalties and the moral opprobrium, in line with the rest. So the risks were very high. But I think we both felt that rather helped. I’m not sure Ernst cared at all, and he certainly didn’t care that night.

  ‘There’s a relatively easy route from the chapel over into the North Court. We got ready in my room and set out along the gutter’s edge, which is cheating, really, but it meant we were clear of Doric’s baleful vigilance …’

  He smiled, confused perhaps by Brooke’s refusal to match the mood of jovial adventure.

  ‘He left his shoes and socks in your room?’ asked Brooke.

  ‘Yes. I climb in shoes, but Ernst always went barefoot. The experts differ …’

  Brooke nodded.

  ‘Anyway, we stopped below the roofline and looked out over the city. In retrospect, we’d underestimated the effect of the blackout. Even with cloud cover you get some light bouncing down, but that night it was particularly dense, the sense of the dark pressing in.’

  He held his hands in front of his face as if for illustration.

  ‘I thought Ernst’s mood had lifted. But I may have been wrong. We decided to plough on and traverse the facade of the West Range, then come down using a chimney … That’s not a real chimney, you understand? It’s a vertical gap, between buttresses. You put your back one side, feet the other. Routine for us. Halfway down you can cross over to a drainpipe, but you have to use a narrow decorative ledge. You need good fingers.’

  Marcus flexed his left hand. For the first time, Brooke thought he might have underestimated him. Did the almost childlike facade hide a more calculating mind?

  ‘We were keen to get down because the air raid siren had sounded. The college has fire-watchers, although frankly they’re as phoney as the war itself …

  ‘I wasn’t looking when it happened, I was still in the chimney, but he’d reached the ledge, to edge across. I heard his feet scrabbling, and his hands. That’s important, I think, if you’re looking for evidence. If he’d decided, at that instant, to end his life, he’d have just dropped. But his hands, and his toes, were frantic for a moment, and then he was in the air.’

  Brooke was shocked by this new suggestion, that the studious American might have taken his own life.

  ‘I saw him then,’ said Marcus. ‘His face, quite calm, actually, falling away from me. There was light in the sky, from the fire at the station, so I could see his eyes.

  ‘It’s fifty feet to the stonework over the porch. There’s a line of small pinnacles and he fell onto those. He had no chance of surviving. It was very quick. That’s what they always say, isn’t it? I’m not so sure about painless.’

  ‘No rope?’

  That ghost of a smile again. ‘No. That’s pretty much de rigueur.

  ‘It was a disaster, of course. They’d have sent me down, chucked me out. So when I reached his body I checked his pulse, but there was no doubt he was dead, his body was broken, shattered, really. Then I went to a friend’s room, and we got together a group of six. The porter does his rounds at dawn so we had time.’

  ‘And the noise, of the fall?’

  ‘As I said, after the siren they sent up a couple of fighters. Hell of a racket. So it was mayhem, which was perfect, because everybody stayed indoors to maintain the blackout.

  ‘We carried him rolled up in a rug. Someone stole the key to the watergate years ago and had copies made, so we slipped out onto the riverbank, and got him a few hundred yards away. Shreds of the balloon were everywhere. We thought it might provide …’ He searched for the right words. ‘An explanation.’

  ‘Dr Lux’s wounds were extensive. There must have been blood – worse.’

  ‘Yes, we cleaned up the stonework on top of the porch and at ground level. If you look higher, on the pinnacles, there’ll be evidence, but you’d have to know where to look, and there’s been rain and sun.’

  Blood, bone, muscle, brains, so lightly dismissed as mere evidence. Brooke felt the chill of the river mist seeping into the old house.

  ‘Why do you think Ernst fell?’ he asked.

  ‘I think he lost concentration. That would be fatal. It was fatal. You need a cool head. But we knew the risks. At least, in that sense, it was his decision. It’s better, I think, than getting cut down in a foreign field because a superior officer has told you that you have to fight. That’s a situation in which someone else has calculated the risks. And his family will have his ashes, so that’s a comfort, I suppose. And he’d done his bit, which is more than most will ever do. I think of him as a casualty of war.’

  ‘And what did you feel?’

  ‘That I’d lost a friend, and that I’d miss him. I don’t have many friends at all. It makes the work very lonely.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The house of boxes on Midsummer Common stood nearly thirty feet high, a strangely solid form in the misty night, with a doorway and windows, and a roof constructed in the fashion of a ziggurat, with each layer of boxes a few feet narrower than the last, until an apex was achieved with exemplary skill. The Auxiliary Fire Service’s two engines stood ready to tackle the self-induced blaze. The crowd, herded along the far bank of the river, had congregated around the Fort St George, a riverside pub.

  Brooke’s presence was merely symbolic. The inspector in charge of the uniform section was in control, busy directing the city’s constables, grouping them ostentatiously in a cordon below the VIP vantage point, a balcony on the Fort St George, which had been draped with a Union flag and the arms of the AFS, and was currently empty.

  Two military guards stood in the far meadow beside the house of boxes, presumably alert to the danger that some miscreant would attempt to start proceedings early. Brooke suspected that news of the minister’s flying visit had spread beyond the top brass, as the crowd numbered at least a hundred, and was growing at a visible rate.

  Edison ducked the barrier, down on one arthritic knee. ‘Sir. Sheffield have sent down an inspector to pick up Gretorix, a car and a police driver too. They’ve put the officer up in the Bull Hotel. Message said he’ll be at the bar, by the name of Solly. Said he’d pick up the prisoner at eight tomorrow, but he asked to see him tonight. Didn’t think I could stop him, really?’

  Brooke nodded, pulling down the rim of his hat. ‘Tomorrow, Edison, first thing, we need to review the Childe inquiry.’ Control of Gretorix’s fate was slipping from their hands, and Lux’s death looked like a reckless accident, but Childe’s cold-blooded murderer was still on the streets of the city. ‘There’s pressure to hand over to the Yard, or military intelligence, if we don’t make progress. We’ve got a day, maybe two, before we lose the case. It’s not one I intend to lose.’

  Edison nodded, producing his pipe, excavating the bowl with a small knife. ‘The Met rang. They’ve finished turning over the sorting office at Mount Pleasant and there’s no sign of Childe’s letter. They’ve hauled in everyone from the communist party’s back office, and the assistant general secretary. Bit of a stink, apparently, and Whitehall’s jumping. So far they’ve kept it off the commissioner’s desk. But that won’t last …’

  ‘Let’s talk to Childe’s neighbours, get a wider picture,’ said Brooke. ‘Staunton’s a mystery in her own right. Why don’t we insist on a list of her clients, Edison? I don’t care if it’s bad for business. She just doesn’t add up.’

  ‘There he is!’ shouted a voice in the crowd. A cheer, several cheers, pulsed up and down the line. On the balcony of the Fort St George, the minister for labour waved cheerfully.

  ‘Bring the grandchildren?’ asked Brooke.

  ‘Wou
ldn’t miss it,’ said Edison. ‘They love a bonfire.’

  Brooke was unable to suppress a brief return of a nightmare image: Claire’s eyes, with flames flickering.

  Up on the balcony, the minister had been joined by a contingent of the great and the good: Brooke spotted Colonel Swift-Lane and Carnegie-Brown, who at that precise moment leant over to offer the visitor a pair of field glasses.

  A platoon of soldiers mounted a smart march past, before the shadowy form of what might have been the lord mayor, a new arrival on the balcony, delivered an inaudible speech. The minister said a few words in response, of which Brooke caught ‘great city’, ‘noble honour’ and ‘flying visit’.

  The first flame finally flared. The pyrotechnics were spectacular and almost certainly totally unplanned. The air within the boxes was in effect fuel, so the result was not so much a blaze as an explosion. The fire service’s hoses played ineffectually into what became a single huge flame, the threads of water incinerated to steam in mid-air. The fire, a vibrant yellow at the heart, appeared to reach up into the low misty cloud. The noise was terrific, a whirlwind, battering at eardrums.

  Each box blazed only for the length of time it took the heat to destroy its fragile cardboard strength. The layers collapsed, one by one from the bottom up, until the ziggurat roof finally folded itself down into a bed of ashes.

  An uncertain ripple of applause greeted a scene of total devastation.

  Brooke hadn’t watched. As soon as the first flame flickered he’d turned his back and watched the dignitaries on the balcony, lit in an increasingly lurid light. The minister’s spectacles became two small circles of fire. It was Carnegie-Brown who reacted first, suddenly stepping back to disappear from view; then the Lord Mayor’s hands came up to cover his mouth. Swift-Lane actually staggered to one side as if his legs had buckled, so that someone had to grab his arm to keep him on his feet.