The Great Darkness

by Jim Kelly

  The crowd, which had been in a state of awestruck silence, gasped. A single scream cut the air.

  Brooke turned back to the fire. A figure stood within the ashes. As he watched, it seemed to grow taller, rising – phoenix-like – from its knees. Brooke would never shake off the immediate sense that this man had been resurrected, drawn up from the earth perhaps by the sheer power of the heat of the blaze. For a moment the figure was still, flames licking its outstretched limbs, fluttering about its head. Then it took a step towards them, the hands beginning to act out a kind of deathly semaphore, its strides mechanical, as if the limbs had been fused at the joints.

  At last, exhausted of energy, the figure knelt at the edge of a trench which had been dug to contain the fire. A single flame sprang from the chest, before – finally – he fell backwards, into the damp, steaming grass.

  The shocked silence was profound.

  Brooke ran forward and, picking up a fire bucket from the edge of the safety trench, managed to step across. With three paces he’d reached the blackened, scorched body. In death, the limbs visibly stiffened. Smoke drifted from a charred foot. Brooke avoided looking at what was left of the face, and set the bucket down.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Claire had set a candlestick on the card table by the fire, with two wine glasses, the bottle on the hearth, warming. Brooke had phoned, so she knew he’d be late, and he’d described the scene on Midsummer Common. Was the candle, with its guttering flame, a mistake? She thought not, adding the silver cutlery neatly, and two place mats showing pictures of York Minster, a wedding present from her sister. The pewter salt and pepper pots were Brooke’s mother’s, as was the linen cloth.

  Food, the little rituals, provided a handhold on the world they’d lost. Claire always laid the table, her methodical obsessions rewarded by the final symmetry of silver and crystal. Even the crease on the tablecloth was at just the right angle.

  War, and the imminent imposition of widespread rationing, had transformed their diet. Claire, condemned to mass catering at the hospital, was prepared to meet the impending challenge head on: they’d tried stuffed hearts, tripe and various reinventions of offal. Tonight, the food came in a casserole dish and, with a stir, revealed that it was pretending to be chicken.

  Brooke arrived, throwing the door open with the key still in the lock, and calling out, ‘Home!’ In all the years the children had been with them they’d never kissed in the hallway; now it was a ritual.

  ‘That poor man …’ said Claire, taking his hat.

  ‘That’s the one surprise,’ said Brooke, shrugging off his coat. ‘It’s a woman.’

  They’d taken the charred body to the Galen and Dr Comfort had undertaken a brief external examination. A woman, certainly, aged between seventy and eighty-five; dressed in good quality, if worn, clothing, of which there were several layers: a wool housecoat over a shirt, over a vest.

  In the ashes of the ‘house’, Brooke judged that he’d found the spot where she’d been hidden away, marked by a blackened blanket, and two empty glass bottles of cider, which had partly melted in the extreme heat.

  ‘Do you think we’ll ever know her story?’ asked Claire, standing by the fire. Life, for her, was largely illuminated by teasing out these narratives, tracing back the threads of character and fortune into the past. Having been brought up in a small village, in a large family, she was used to knowing everyone’s story.

  ‘A roadster, perhaps,’ said Brooke.

  Vagrants, tramping between the towns and villages of the Fens, had become a regular feature of the city since the outbreak of war. Free soup kitchens for the workers had proved a honeypot. A few slept out, begging at college gates or on Market Hill, under the stalls.

  ‘A box is home for some,’ said Brooke. ‘The insulation is remarkable. A cold night, a wet day, perhaps she’d just slipped in and fallen asleep. The thing had been up for a day or two, how was she to know its purpose? There were no guards until the last day. Perhaps she thought she’d take her chance, then move on before nightfall. If the cider bottles are hers she might have been beyond caring.

  ‘Anyway, case isn’t mine. It’s an accident, hardly a job for us. Uniform branch will take over tomorrow.’

  Claire shivered and threw a half-log into the grate. Brooke followed her gaze into the soft flames, troubled by that image of the woman’s arms, the fiery semaphore, as if it might contain a message.

  ‘What a way to die,’ said Claire.

  ‘There’s a letter from Luke; I’ve not opened it,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s wait. Food first. Rabbit?’ he asked, sniffing the air and walking to the fire. He picked up the bottle from the hearth and poured two glasses.

  ‘Hare,’ said Claire, placing the casserole on the table and using her fork to test the tenderness of the flesh.

  They ate in silence for a moment.

  Brooke poured more wine. ‘With luck I can get back to the Childe murder, a case which seems to slip through the hands like sand, and not just ordinary sand, more like the stuff they put in egg timers. At the moment I can’t shift the idea that I’m being made a fool of by the military. Which makes me angry, given we’re at war, and I’m not the enemy.’

  He prodded a piece of meat. ‘It’s not bad, is it? Gamey. As if it’s been hung with the pheasants and the partridge.’

  Claire sipped her wine and then dabbed at her lips with a serviette.

  ‘In a year, you see, we’ll be reminiscing about this casserole,’ she said.

  ‘Necessity and all that … The French ate horsemeat during the siege of Paris,’ said Brooke, which was a misstep, because it reminded them of Luke, camped out in some field in north-east France.

  He cleared away the plates while Claire fetched down their son’s letter from its position of honour on the mantle.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘It’s best in your voice.’

  In detail, Luke described the arrival of British materiel at the border, a convoy emerging through the gloom of perpetual autumnal rain. He’d slept under a tank despite the absolute instruction not to, preferring a dry night to the outside chance the vehicle would sink in its tracks, crushing him to death.

  I woke up refreshed was the line they enjoyed.

  Brooke said it was remarkable how mild discomfort, the damp soft grisaille of France, could eventually accumulate into a form of slow torture.

  Outside, the mist pressed up against the cold glass of the windows. The old house was draughty, so the candle guttered. Brooke sheltered it for a moment with his hand.

  Claire sighed. ‘I hope she was drunk, your roadster – oblivious, at least, until the last moments.’

  ‘In the last lot,’ said Brooke quickly, ‘the Germans bombed London and started these fires. I was told that when the heat gets to a certain level the fire starts to suck air into itself, like an engine drawing fuel. A fire storm – that’s what I heard. Civilians died, in the East End. It’s always the East End, isn’t it? The poor in the frontline. The Kaiser, and this is hearsay …’ He sipped his wine. ‘Hearsay, but nonetheless. Apparently he intervened, stopped the raids because he said it was uncivilised. So perhaps we’ll be spared this time.’

  Brooke checked his wristwatch. ‘I have to go. Sheffield have sent down a car for our cocky lorry driver. I should hand over …’

  ‘How was Marcus?’ asked Claire, keen to preserve the veneer of domestic conversation for a minute longer.

  ‘Not much different from the boy we used to know.’

  Claire helped Brooke on with his coat, running a finger along the collar to turn it down, where he often had it turned up, in a fashion she found irritatingly military.

  ‘I always felt sorry for him,’ she said. ‘That awful father. There was very little love in that family, no wonder he’s so fond of numbers.’

  She offered Brooke the last of the wine. ‘Last night, when I got home, it was nearly dawn. I couldn’t sleep so I got a pot of the whitewash from the shed and started on the
far attic room, the old nursery, where the kids used to play.

  ‘The walls are covered in all their secret plans, the boys’ adventures. They were going to run away to the Wild West, do you remember? They even had a schedule for the boat from Liverpool. Marcus was out there in the lane, satchel packed, ready to go at midnight …’ She shook her head. ‘He was eight. Luke was fast asleep in bed with the map for the journey crushed in his hand.’

  ‘Look at them now,’ said Brooke.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Detective Inspector Solly was in the Bull Hotel. Brooke’s estimate was that he’d been at the bar for several hours. As he crossed the room he could hear his accent, that peculiar nasal burr he now knew to be unique to Sheffield, relaying a lurid story of his home city’s infamous gang wars to a group of men in suits – travelling salesmen, Brooke judged, all past the age to fight.

  ‘That’s what you’ve got to do, see,’ said Solly, pointing at several empty glasses for refills. ‘Meet violence with violence. These thugs cut up rough. So we cut up rough back. If you know you’ve got a villain, treat ’em like a villain. You don’t want to end up in a cell at West Bar for the night, believe me.’

  Brooke introduced himself, accepted a whisky and drew Solly away from his audience to a quiet corner.

  The Bull had seen better times. A plaque by the door in brass said an inn had stood on the site since the reign of Edward V. The interwar years had dented its regal pretensions: the Axminster lay threadbare, the gilded mirrors milky and mottled.

  ‘Heard about your fire. Has your minister buggered off back to London?’ said Solly, spreading his wide shoulders along the back of the worn velvet banquette.

  ‘Flying visit,’ said Brooke. ‘You’ve seen the prisoner, I understand?’

  ‘Gretorix? Oh, aye. I know Jack Gretorix. Heard of the Skye Edge gang? He’s in what’s left of it. Scum, Brooke. People like him tore the city apart in the twenties, we’re not gonna let ’em do it again. We had murders in broad daylight. Bodies dumped on street corners. Not this time, Brooke. Not on my watch. I know Jack Gretorix, alright. More to the point, he knows me.’

  Solly got closer. ‘We’ll get the truth out of him, don’t you worry. I reckon he’s gonna blab once he knows he’s really heading north. We’ll go with your plan. Tell him he’s set for bail.’

  Brooke felt Solly had underestimated his foe. ‘He won’t talk,’ he said.

  ‘He has,’ said Solly, pulling a face at his beer. ‘I reckon he’s been playing a long game. Sweating it out. Waiting for his moment to spill some beans.’

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Brooke.

  Solly took another pull on his pint. ‘He said he knew where they were stockpiling the meat.’

  ‘Just that?’

  ‘Aye. Credible, too. He reckons they’re using the old city abattoir in the valley. Derelict for years, mind, since well before the last war. But who knows? We’ll check it out. If it’s legit, perhaps we won’t let him go after all. The next question’s the big one. Can he name names? The top men, not the middle men. If he does, we might have to reinvent Jack Gretorix, give him a new life. If not, we’ll turf him out. Pick up his body with the rubbish.’

  He turned his pint upside down and put it on the table. ‘Your round.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  The concept of the sacrifice had always eluded Doric. Perhaps it was his pragmatic military training, or the precarious lifestyle of the soldier, but the college porter found the idea of deliberately offering up materiel on the field of battle, as it were, was a gambit beyond his rank.

  The porter’s hand hovered over the rook Brooke had placed in jeopardy. Whistling tunelessly, he grabbed it, tossing the piece into a balsa-wood box with a satisfying toc!

  ‘Some bad news, Mr Brooke,’ said Doric. ‘Jenner’s heard the latest on your soldiers digging on St John’s Wilderness. Whole unit’s been posted north, end of the road, Scapa Flow. That’s all of ’em. No explanation, no nothing. Like they’d never been here.’

  Brooke swung his queen along the diagonal cleared by his sacrifice to confront Doric’s king, and considered the implications of this latest news. The determination of the military to neutralise any potential security threat was remarkable: Henderson, Lauder and Popper were in the County Gaol, the soldiers who’d dug on the riverbank banished towards the Arctic Circle. What on earth was in those pits?

  The porter adjusted his trousers, pulling on the creases, and shuffled his shoes under the table. Then he got up and fetched a plate of leftovers from the small kitchen: a tray of cheese and bread and what he called ‘monnits’, anything applied to bread or toast: jams and marmalades, honey or, a college favourite, Gentlemen’s Relish. Brooke had checked his two-volume OED and been unable to find the word monnits, or anything like it.

  Doric considered the food spread out on the platter.

  ‘This fire. A woman, you say? A roadster?’

  ‘That’s the theory. Well, definitely a woman, probably a roadster.’

  Doric shook his head. ‘After the war we had a victory dinner here. A frosty night, January 1919 that would be. Eight courses. The soup was turtle, that I do remember. We all had a taste in the kitchens. Ever had it?’

  Brooke shook his head, breaking some bread and pairing it with a piece of cheddar.

  ‘Overrated,’ said Doric, with some satisfaction. ‘You can live for a long time on a good dinner, Mr Brooke. When I took the bins out that night after the feast there he was, a roadster. I’ve seen men dead, men dying. But that … Froze to death, they reckoned, on my doorstep, rolled up in a curtain, in the alcove by the post box, like a church mouse …’

  He wiped his hands on a creased napkin. ‘That reminds me.’ He strode out to the post room, returning with a bundle of letters tied up with a blue ribbon. ‘The day staff cleared Dr Lux’s room. They’ve packed up his stuff in a tea crate. Head porter told me it was all done and dusted.’

  The head porter, never afforded the dignity of his name, was a byword for incompetence and shoddy standards.

  ‘So I checked his pigeonhole. Sure enough …’

  Doric tapped the bundle.

  Two students arrived, wanting to book the college boat for an early morning row on the river. While Doric completed the paperwork with a flourish, Brooke pulled the ribbon to release the post.

  Item number one: a form and covering letter from the Bureau of Internal Revenue, postmarked Washington DC.

  Item number two: a scribbled note from a Dr Stern, with a series of academic articles under Lux’s name published in scientific journals. Brooke noted one entitled ‘The role of aequorin in the chemical reaction between luciferins and luciferase: a case study in bioluminescence’. The note was on a slip which bore the arms of the University of California, Berkeley.

  Item number three: the August–October copy of The Cordillera Climber, an unillustrated magazine of close-printed notes on routes through what Brooke would have called the Rocky Mountains.

  Item number four: a postcard showing a stretch of grey choppy water with an island in the mid-distance, dominated by a large institutional building, a tower and a lighthouse. A boat occupied the foreground, its V-shaped wake stretching back towards a quayside.

  Doric had dealt with the rowers, so Brooke read the postcard out loud:

  Ernst – all our love. A trip up the coast. It’s your father’s arrow. That was his cell! He’s so proud, even if it is ancient history. He claims Al Capone got his room! We think of you always. Travis says he’ll join up if it comes to it. You can imagine the ructions. Try to write, you’ve no idea how much it means. Your mother. xxx

  Brooke flicked the card over and there it was, an inked-in arrow pointing at the building on the island. The scale was far too small to identify one window, but the serried rows were certainly jail-like.

  He turned the postcard back over. At the foot in italics was a pre-printed legend which read: US Federal Prison, Alcatraz. CA.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVEr />
  After midnight, a light wind blew away the mist so that by the time he got to Frank Edwardes’ house a group of students had started playing cricket by moonlight on Fenner’s. From the window of the old man’s sickroom, Brooke watched a slice of the game, six students clustered round the bat as a tall young man bowled spin from the Gresham Road End. A moon-shadow clung to a fielder as he ran to the boundary to fetch the ball, reminding Brooke of a childhood production of Peter Pan, with the hero flimsily attached to his alter ego.

  ‘Silly sods,’ said Edwardes, propped up on his pillows, his eyes closed. Sheets of paper were scattered across the bed, each crowded with the dense five-letter phrases of Morse code.

  ‘I need help,’ said Brooke, standing at the window, and Edwardes nodded, setting aside his pad.

  A brief outline of the Childe case took five minutes: from the events of the Great Darkness, the pits on the river, the film in the Galen, the letter posted to London, to the murder itself in Mill Road Cemetery. ‘It seems to me that the motive is unavoidable: Childe knew too much, so he was killed, and the copy of his letter taken. But that makes no sense if the top copy was on its way to London by post.’

  ‘This woman, Staunton. How sure are you she posted it?’

  Brooke shrugged. ‘She might be lying. But then what could be her motive? You’re right, though, she’s a mystery in herself. We’re trying to find out more about her. Then there’s her missing comrades in the Party. They’re up at the castle, held under Emergency Powers. Someone thinks they may know too much. Maybe they do. But killers? No, Frank. I’m missing a vital part of the picture. I can’t help thinking the military’s holding back, there’s a major – name of Stone – he’s a pen-pusher, but he’s not been entirely honest about the night of the blackout, and those drifting barrage balloons. His boss – the CO – is a career soldier too, name of Swift-Lane. He’s all charm and energy, but I wouldn’t trust him as far as I can spit. Brother’s in the Cabinet, another one in the navy, so maybe it’s just all sibling rivalry.