The Great Darkness

by Jim Kelly

  The driver, on regaining consciousness at the Royal Northern Hospital, said he’d noted trailing headlights when they’d turned off at Newark, and later at the roadhouse. He had determined to mention his suspicions if the car had followed them out onto the A52. The car? A black Ford, with two men in the front. A general alert had been issued across Yorkshire to find Gretorix.

  The caller was a desk sergeant relaying information on behalf of Solly. Finished, Edison adopted a weary tone in reply. ‘A sorry tale indeed,’ he said.

  The line went dead.

  Edison sat quietly for a moment, watching the second hand of the clock tick by, wondering whether Gretorix was still alive, and how the driver of the following car had known they were moving the prisoner and what route they would take. Perhaps the city’s infamous gangs had survived so long by making sure they had ears inside West Bar police station.

  He was up on his feet, hat on his head, looking forward to a late lunch, when the phone rang again.

  ‘Detective Inspector Brooke’s office,’ he said.

  He heard the desk sergeant mumble something, then the line cleared. ‘Eden?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Edison.’

  ‘Ah. It’s Corby, at the News.’

  Drew Corby was the editor of the local evening paper.

  ‘Tell him for me, will you? One of the city reporters has just been in to my office. He got a call from this fella who’s been found shot, name of Childe? He wanted to meet a reporter. Had a story, he said. Promised it was a corker. So my man Dodds fixed up a meeting at the Maypole, on Portugal Place, at nine, the night he died. No show. He waited an hour, then gave up. Tell Brooke.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Jesus Green Pool stretched for a hundred yards into the distance, a narrow pencil of reflected light, just a dozen lanes wide but a hundred yards long. Built by the Victorians on the meadows of Jesus Green, its meagre width was designed to echo the joys of swimming in the nearby river. The facilities were functional at best, a match for the men who swam here each day throughout the year. In the winter, the breaking of ice was seen as an added attraction.

  Brooke liked it best in autumn, when he’d swim through a floating carpet of leaves. From water level the view was limited to a surrounding screen of pine trees, the walls of Jesus College just visible across the grass. The college had been founded on the ruins of a nunnery, the chapel tower of which still broke the skyline, and he often wondered what the nuns would have thought of the sight of half-naked men lying on the grass.

  Today, the water held its own light, cold and blue, dappled by the breeze which made the pines whisper and flex.

  A phone call to Doric had produced four of the college swimmers. These volunteers had collected deckchairs from the pool attendant and were lounging in the pale sunlight, affecting to read dusty books but in fact watching Dr Comfort as he set about what looked like an arcane exercise in trigonometry. The pathologist had begun construction of what he insisted on calling the ‘marksman’s station’, a heavy-duty tripod with clamps, its three legs anchored in small nests of sandbags.

  The particular dimensions of Jesus Green Pool had presented considerable problems. Most swimming pools have a deep end and a shallow end: not Jesus, which was deep in the middle. It was at this point that one of the swimmers, a pale bony student with red hair, had been invited to dive in and run two floating lines across the narrow pool, creating a test range two yards wide, from side to side. The marksman’s station was set to one side, the angle of the shot regulated by a wooden protractor hastily constructed in the lab by Comfort’s servants, effectively creating a makeshift theodolite, to which he now clamped not a telescopic sight, but a gun.

  Not a gun, the gun, discovered in Major Stone’s locker at Madingley Hall: the weapon identified easily enough as a revolver designed originally for the Russian Imperial Army.

  Now, judging the angle of the weapon, Brooke doubted Comfort’s calculations. ‘You’re telling me a bullet fired into the water at that angle won’t reach the bottom? What is it – eight feet, less. It’s water, Doctor. Not concrete.’

  ‘You of all people should never doubt the soldier’s lore,’ said Comfort, screwing the gun into the tripod and checking the angle for the third time. The pool attendant, who had been dragooned into allowing the test firing, stood anxiously in the lee of the changing rooms, looking on and chain-smoking.

  Comfort was finally content with the preparations. ‘There was an incident in the war, Brooke, on the Meuse, I think: a platoon on recce got caught on the far bank. They tried to swim back but a Jerry machine gun opened up. They held their breaths, kept six feet down, and lived to tell the tale. Not a scratch until they tried to get out of the water on the far side. The forces on a bullet hitting water are not appreciably different from hitting concrete. But for our purposes it has one outstanding advantage: it won’t destroy the bullet.’

  The four Michaelhouse swimmers waited for the sun to reappear from behind a bank of cloud before sliding into the water at the far end and, no doubt following a prearranged plan, racing to the mid-point, employing expert butterfly strokes.

  Comfort braced himself at the tripod.

  ‘Right. Brooke, your job is to keep your keen assistants clear of the firing range. I’ll fire six bullets. Ready?’

  Brooke directed the swimmers back another yard.

  ‘Ready.’

  The first gunshot cracked, the track of the bullet marked by a sudden silver thread in the blue water, which – almost miraculously – fell geometrically away from a straight path, weakening, dying, fading away into the depths.

  Comfort, unhappy with the angle, readjusted the tripod by a few degrees and braced himself anew. The next five shots came rhythmically, each silver thread unique, but all falling within the narrow range and all petering out of violent energy long before reaching the shimmering pale tiles on the bottom of the pool.

  Brooke unleashed the mermen of Michaelhouse.

  Suddenly the pool was full of them, taking air like goldfish before sinking down to the pool floor. It was quickly clear that some kind of rudimentary competition had been agreed, for the water was white with thrashing limbs, hands scouring the tiles.

  Within a minute they had all six bullets.

  Brooke, at a trestle table, set out glasses and a bottle of sherry, the best Doric could find.

  Comfort held a bullet in one hand, an eyepiece magnifying glass in his right eye. His head, neck and hand froze as he deftly turned over one of the bullets retrieved from the pool. Then he repeated the exercise with a bullet in a small plastic see-through envelope, the one which had passed through Christopher Childe’s brain.

  ‘Result?’ asked Brooke, accepting a sherry from the red-haired swimmer.

  ‘As I say, I don’t want to be quoted as yet, but visually, and therefore provisionally, there are matches both in terms of the striations on the bullet and the imprint of the firing pin in the soft metal primer.’

  ‘It’s the gun that killed Childe?’

  The light swept away as a dark cloud slipped over the pool.

  ‘Looks like it, Brooke. And this is interesting too …’ He led Brooke to the marksman’s station. ‘Now we can see the gun in the sunlight at this angle, it appears to have quite a history – considering it was made for the Imperial Army of Russia. Do you see?’

  Because it was set at an angle on the tripod, the base of the grip was revealed. It was crudely stamped with the Delphic inscription ACEF. And across this had been scratched the iconic outline of a hammer and sickle, the enduring symbol of the Russian Revolution, and of the Bolsheviks who had brought down the Tsar.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Brooke slipped from his mossy step into the river. His body welcomed the shock, his heartbeat picking up, the warm blood rushing to toes and fingers. Once the winter frosts really bit, the water would be too cold, but for now the autumnal sun provided just enough heat to keep the Cam bearable in the hours after sunset.

&n
bsp; On his back, drifting, he let the tension flood out of his body. The afternoon had been spent in a frantic effort to assemble the evidence required to support a charge of murder against Joelyn Stone. Dr Comfort had finally rung Brooke’s office at dusk to report that the ballistics results were not in doubt: Stone’s gun had fired the fatal shot. Formal statements had been taken from Stone’s wife, and a request had been made to the War Office for details of the major’s forthcoming appointment to head a new unit charged with developing balloon warfare.

  The key evidence, however, would be Vera Staunton’s. Brooke and Edison had returned to her rooms on Babylon Street. Was she prepared to give evidence in court? She was. Her contribution, Brooke was confident, would put a rope around Stone’s neck. It had been a nasty, brutal, selfish, tawdry killing. And a disappointment: Brooke had been convinced the young pacifist had died because he knew too much, the sad end of a thrilling tale of political intrigue. But in reality it had turned out to be no more than another seedy domestic tragedy.

  Leaving Babylon Street with Staunton’s signed statement, he should at least have felt some satisfaction, but something of the house’s downbeat despair troubled him: the threadbare carpets, the stifled voices, the joyless name cards on the peeling doors. Standing on the doorstep, he sniffed the air in the corridor, noting the smell of decay, stale food, cigarette ash and a sour note: milk, gone off. The memory troubled him now as he slipped under Trinity Bridge, but he let the thought pass, distracted by the silky embrace of the river.

  Clear of the bridge, he rolled over and broke into a crawl. Soon, alongside St John’s College, he caught the unmistakable sound of Formal Hall: scholars, dons and visitors dining by candlelight at long, polished tables. In full cry, it was a cacophony of cutlery and glass, china and chairs, and voices raised in that strange murmuring chorus, so distinctive of argument, conversation and alcohol. But not a single light betrayed the outline of the dining hall on the bank.

  He struck out along that stretch of the river which ran in front of the college boathouses. Each was adorned with a flagpole of imperial dimensions. Opposite, Midsummer Common stretched away in the moonlight. Here, the previous evening, he had watched the house of boxes burn, and the cruel, violent death of an elderly woman.

  Opposite the Fort St George, he noted the pile of ash, all that was left after the blaze, and ahead of it the narrow trench Chris Childe and his fellow labourers had dug only hours before his own death. The coincidence had irked, so he’d sent Edison back to the depot to double-check the details. Hartnell, the senior charge hand, had given a brisk outline of Childe’s duties that final day: he’d been on site from ten with the rest of the squad, with a few hours’ leave of absence after lunch to make his appearance in court. They’d been dismissed at six, the safety trench completed.

  Had Childe walked directly to Mill Road Cemetery, en route to his weekly Party meeting and his appointment with Dodds from the Evening News? Had Joelyn Stone followed, armed with his pistol? Brooke pictured the major slipping through the iron gates, using the trees and monuments to shield his presence, until the moment the gun was drawn. Had he shown the courage to look his victim in the eyes?

  Brooke doubled back, swimming hard, making his heart creak with the effort. Opposite St John’s Wilderness, he spotted the glint of a rifle butt where a sentry stood on the bank. With silent strokes, he crept upstream and found two more guards, at one-hundred-yard intervals.

  While the manner of Chris Childe’s death was now clear, at least in outline, the mystery of the riverside pits remained impenetrable.

  At the narrow riverside ditch, Brooke squeezed through the iron grating, as he had before, and slipped fifty yards inland, climbing the bank, to look down on the meadow. The moon, which had been playing cat and mouse with the clouds, broke free, and he saw the reed beds, the rough grass, the dotted thorn trees and the mounds which marked the pits.

  But he could go no further: along the top of the bank had been laid a spool of barbed wire and a series of posts. On each had been attached a sign depicting a skull with the blunt warning:

  LIVE FIRING

  KEEP OUT

  An hour later he was back at the Spinning House, the cold of the night beginning to make his bones ache. A terracotta pot stood on the duty desk, brimming with what Brooke recognised as winter jasmine.

  A note in an envelope confirmed the sender as the green-fingered governor of the County Gaol:

  Brooke. I promised. The birds have flown. A Black Maria turned up with a warrant and two plain-clothed sergeants from Special Branch. Destination: Barlinnie, Glasgow. Abandon hope …

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Brooke was on the doorstep of Goodall’s, the optician’s, at eight-thirty, the town centre’s various clocks marking the half hour in a variety of ways, orchestrated by the musical chimes of Great St Mary’s. The window dressing was discreet, a few pairs of ladies’ spectacles laid out on a velvet shelf, the gold lettering on the glass door crowded with Jacob Goodall’s professional qualifications: FBOA, BOA (Disp) and a motto – Aequis oculis videre.

  He rapped smartly on the glass door.

  Walking through the waking city, he’d considered the fate of the three communists: Henderson, Lauder and Popper. Barlinnie was a grim jail, a pile of bleak stone on moorland to the edge of the city. How many men, he thought, were in England at that precise moment, locked up for no more reason other than posing a threat, a threat undefined, or only dimly understood? He’d made a promise that he’d not forget them, and he intended to keep it.

  Brooke thought he saw a shadow move at the back of the shop. He adjusted his glasses, trying to peer inside, while the polished window insisted on reflecting the street scene behind him.

  Sidney Street was jammed with two-way traffic, students spilling out from the college lodge into Rose Street, and towards the University Library. In the half-distance, towards the Round Church, an army lorry was being divested of several hundred sandbags.

  Suddenly the optician, Jacob Goodall, was there – narrow face, eyes cast down – attacking the lock with a practised twist of the wrist.

  ‘Problems?’ he asked, readjusting his own pair of upstairs-downstairs spectacles. Brooke’s precarious eyesight was of professional interest to Goodall, who’d studied the detective’s medical files from the sanatorium in Scarborough, and had since provided several pairs of specially designed lenses. Jacob was a craftsman, an artist in optics.

  ‘No, no, Jacob. A brainwave – at least I hope so. All thanks to a fen cat.’

  After his visit to the Spinning House the night before, he’d eventually gone home, pouring himself a glass of water in the kitchen before turning off the lights, so that he could see the towpath, and a feral cat picking its way along the top of the bank. Burly, with rounded heads, these animals stalked the open country north of the city, the distant progeny of ratters. Something about the way it held one paw above the ground before bringing it down to earth reminded him of a chorus of cats behind a bedsit door on Babylon Street, a worn carpet and the smell of sour milk.

  Goodall was nodding his head but walking away, around the counter and down a short corridor, so that Brooke had to follow. A light came on to reveal a thirty-foot-long gallery, at the end of which was mounted a Snellen chart, with its signature pyramid of letters, the largest a capital E at the top. Brooke had been here before, as much in his nightmares as in real life. Haunted by the letters, he often saw them circling in front of his eyes in the dark as he lay trying to find sleep.

  ‘You stay there,’ said Jacob.

  ‘It’s not me, Jacob. I’m fine.’

  ‘Yes. But it’s months since your last test. You’re here. I’m here. You can ask your questions – your man Edison dropped round the glasses – the old woman in the fire …’

  Producing a pointer, Goodall selected letters in the third and fourth ranks and Brooke read them confidently enough: T, Z, P, D.

  ‘But you couldn’t help with identifying the owner?’ s
aid Brooke.

  ‘That’s right. The heat had melted the lens, so the prescription code was not decipherable. We have hundreds of customers, Brooke. And many come once, and never again. It’s a needle in a haystack. Now. This?’ He pointed at the sixth line.

  Brooke narrowed his eyes. ‘F?’ They tried several other optotypes on the same line, and then the one below that.

  Goodall switched the light out without comment and they wandered back into the shop. Brooke felt like a naughty schoolchild following the headmaster to his office.

  ‘But if I had a name you could check a list of customers?’ he asked, trying to wrest back the initiative.

  ‘Of course, Brooke,’ said Goodall, lifting up a tome from under the counter.

  ‘Mrs Trew,’ said Brooke. That first time they’d called at Babylon Street he’d seen her name on the letter he’d picked up from the mat. ‘Ida Trew,’ he added.

  Goodall leafed deftly through a ledger. ‘Ah. Here. Babylon Street?’ he asked, looking over the top of his glasses.

  Brooke saw her then, stepping stiff-legged from the flames, staggering out of the ashes, until she folded herself down into the damp grass. Sour milk, the scent of it in the downstairs corridor at Babylon Street: that was what he’d put to one side of his mind when he should have simply stopped and asked after Mrs Trew, the vigilant gatekeeper with her cats.

  Brooke took down the details from Jacob’s ledger. Ida Trew had been a customer for fifteen years.

  ‘Good heavens, Brooke. A smile!’ said Goodall.

  ‘Yes. Thank you, Jacob. I must get on.’

  At the door, Jacob rested a hand on Brooke’s sleeve. ‘A proper test, I think, soon. Your eyes are no better, maybe worse. We should explore other treatments, even alternative diagnoses. We need to focus on the problem.’ He smiled at his own word play.