by Jim Kelly
She clasped a lapel at her throat. ‘It’s winter already. I hope to God you’re not planning a nightly swim.’
They walked onto the bridge over the weir, white water racing beneath them. Upstream, in the half-light, they could see the complex wooden geometry of the Mathematical Bridge, a construction of wooden beams which, according to legend, effortlessly spanned the Cam without the need of a single nail. It appeared to hang over the water by some trick of the light.
Together they breathed in the intoxicating air. Brooke explained that the latest theory, being tested right here in Cambridge, was that falling water molecules released charged particles – new-fangled electric ions – which might explain the exhilarating effects of waterfalls.
‘That’s the problem with you scientists,’ said Jo. ‘Where’s the romance in an ion?’
She stood close to him in this state of inward reflection.
‘It’s Marcus; he’s disappeared,’ she said finally, lighting a long cigarette with a gold band on the filter using a slim mother-of-pearl lighter.
‘In what sense?’ asked Brooke. ‘I saw him last night at the house.’
‘In the sense that he’s not in his rooms, Brooke,’ she said, in short temper. ‘In the sense that the college claims he has given notice of leaving to take up unspecified government work in London. In the sense that he left by cab last night at midnight from home, according to Father. The last train to London is before eleven. So his destination was, in fact, unknown.
‘It’s a cruel verdict but I’d have to say my father doesn’t care where Marcus has gone. The responsibilities of the new chair are, apparently, overwhelming. He’s become a potentate and we have been relegated, finally, to mere subjects.’
She ditched the cigarette, half-smoked.
‘It makes no sense. If he’d left Cambridge he’d have taken the car. That MG is his teddy bear, he’d never go anywhere without it, but it’s sat in the garage at home. And there’s his room, next to mine: his books, his notebooks, everything’s untouched. His college room is empty, but then there was never much there besides paper and pencils.’
The water churned beneath them, sweeping under the bridge.
‘I talked to Marcus,’ said Brooke. ‘About Ernst Lux’s death. He said they went climbing together, and the American fell. Do you think he was capable of lying about that?’
‘Marcus doesn’t live in the real world, you know that,’ she said. ‘Mathematics isn’t a discipline, it’s an escape route from everyday life. Within himself – of himself – he’s an innocent, Brooke. The only person he’d ever put at risk is Marcus Ashmore. But he’s always been susceptible to manipulation by others; easily led, that’s the verdict.’
It was a curiously even-handed answer to the question.
Ashmore drew savagely on a fresh cigarette so that it actually flared in the dark, emitting a tiny blue flame. ‘I don’t do melodrama, Brooke, but I can’t shake the sense, the conviction, actually, that I may not see my brother again.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
At Madingley Hall, despite the blackout, slivers of light betrayed the great Tudor windows. Curtains, blackboards, tapestries, all had fallen, literally, short. So now the lamps were being doused, floor by floor, room by room. The house was fading into the night. Even the guards patrolled with downturned torches, securing the half-mile of perimeter wire.
In his attic bedroom, Captain Rich Kerridge read a file, delivered by a motorcycle messenger from the War Office, Awards Department, Whitehall. Medals, gongs, ribbons: he’d rather enjoyed the work in Cairo, desk work admittedly, sifting citations from senior officers, witness reports and recommendations from commanders. One of his wartime subordinates was enjoying the current conflict from the comfort of London SW1. He’d located Corporal Harry Staunton’s file in the dusty tomb of the third basement level, where the stories of past heroism were laid to rest.
A faded brown ink hieroglyph on the front of the file yielded some meaning under a magnifying glass:
Cpl Harold R. Staunton
REF: RUS 344/6767
AWARD: MILITARY CROSS
Reading the three-page report, he didn’t touch his glass of whisky, but he drained the spirit in a gulp before reading it a second time. A third reading consolidated a vivid picture of the events of those few days in December 1920, nearly two years after the Armistice had been signed, bringing hostilities to an end in France.
Harry Staunton’s unit had taken refuge on the edge of a village, no more than a Jewish shtetl, close to the Pripet Marshes, three hundred miles south-west of Moscow. They were all volunteers in the buccaneering ACEF, the Armoured Car Expeditionary Force. Their three vehicles were hidden in the barn, iced in, the fuel frozen in the engines, the ruts in the muddy farmyard like iron. For some days they’d witnessed birds falling, frozen, from the sky. At night, trees cracked in the forest, their woody veins turned to ice.
The officer on the spot called the men into the barn. The unit’s position, he told them, was precarious. They were being left behind by the White Army, which was retreating south, to reform around Lutsk. Radio contact had been lost, and besides the Red Army would be listening for any airwave traffic to the rear of the fleeing ACEF. They could not abandon the cars, as they were valuable military materiel in a motorised war fought against the Bolsheviks, who were generally poorly armed. It was imperative to get someone out through the woods on foot to a nearby railhead, which the White Army had hoped to hold in order to protect the rear of their positions. There was a telegraph post at the station. A call for help could be made. It was a twenty-mile hike.
A volunteer was needed, and Harry Staunton promptly stood. He left at dusk.
After ten days, they reasoned that Staunton’s sortie had failed. The rest of the ACEF would now be more than a hundred miles distant. Defending the farm, and the frozen vehicles, was not feasible. They decided to spike the engines and make a dash south.
At dawn the next morning they set out, the officer leading the line, his pistol drawn.
Two miles south the woods thickened, transformed by ice into a maze of chandeliers, the twigs and branches tinkling in random, atonal accompaniment. Every few minutes a tree would crack with a sharp report. Starvation had left them all in a dreamlike state of exhaustion.
They found Harry Staunton half a mile along the track. The pines had given way to birch, and he was up in the canopy, about thirty feet above the forest floor, wedged between the bole of a tree and a branch. Staunton was an athlete, they all knew that, because he’d won the battalion medal for the mile. The climb, up the branchless bole, was of itself a feat of strength.
The officer used his field glasses to examine the body: Staunton had run his belt around the tree to hold himself in place, probably after sustaining a series of gunshot wounds, four of which were evident from the ground, including one in the neck. His right hand clutched his chest, but his left still held his gun, frozen in his frozen hand, held with frozen fingers.
In the snow, they collected more than a hundred and fifty cartridge shells around the base of the tree. Clearly, once his own ammunition had been spent, Harry Staunton had provided a sitting target. Had he saved one for himself, to avoid capture and the inevitable interrogation? They would never know.
It took six of them to rock the tree. Ice fell, and the branches played their strange tune, but the dead man clung on. Then, long after the silence had returned, the pistol fell from Harry Staunton’s hands.
There was no chance of digging him a grave, even if they had been able to dislodge him from his crow’s nest. So they left him aloft. The gun had been Staunton’s special prize of war: taken from the body of a soldier they’d found hiding on the docks at Archangel after they’d disembarked the armoured cars. Staunton had told his comrades that the man, in his fifties with broken pince-nez, had been the first Bolshie he’d ever killed. The first, he hoped, of many.
Kerridge, reading, drained his glass again. The window stood open and he heard,
quite clearly, a perfunctory ‘Who goes there?’ from one of the guards below.
The last lines of the report were particularly poignant: The unit reached White Army positions in eight days. Staunton’s commanding officer undertook, with the enthusiastic support of the men and the cooperation of battalion headquarters, to return Cpl Staunton’s pistol to his widow and to enquire into her means. Mrs Staunton indicated that there were no dependents and she was in receipt of a military pension. The sum of one hundred pounds was paid over from monies collected from his comrades in the unit and beyond. Mrs Staunton wished her thanks to be placed on record.
Kerridge turned off his light and stood at the window, looking out over the pinewoods, and raised his glass for a toast.
‘To the frozen hero.’
CHAPTER SIXTY
A banner, hung across the stage of the city’s newly built Guildhall on Market Hill, shouted in letters a foot high:
WELCOME BREAKFAST
THE SPANISH RELIEF COMMITTEE
When Brooke arrived, the children were all at trestle tables, finishing boiled eggs, toast, jam and margarine, clutching tumblers of milk or watery squash. Patriotic music blared from loudspeakers set either side of the vast array of organ pipes which dominated the stage.
A man began formal proceedings by climbing onto a dais and reading out a list of names, prompting a line of children to come forward amid applause, before each was allotted to a local family which would provide a foster home.
A light touch on Brooke’s shoulder, and he turned to face a woman, standing close. ‘Mr Brooke? Detective Inspector Brooke? I got a message at the hospital? I’m Ginny Waites, Ernst’s friend.’
She’d brought with her two glasses of the anaemic squash. For a woman of perhaps twenty years of age she exuded a remarkably fluent sense of confidence, in her voice and in her body.
‘You were Ernst Lux’s girlfriend?’ asked Brooke.
She nodded. ‘Yes. We’d been going out for a couple of years – well, two years one month, but I suspect I was the only one counting … Once, on a long walk by the river, I thought he was going to propose. Now I’ll never know.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Brooke, giving the platitude a few seconds to gain some meaning, as they watched another child climb the steps.
‘It’s just that one of his friends, Marcus Ashmore, has disappeared,’ Brooke went on. ‘Did you ever meet him? He had a room opposite Ernst’s?’
‘Yes, once or twice. That world, the college, was not my world. We spent most of our time together at my flat, or walking, the pictures, a country pub. I left him to his work, left him to get on. I’m a nurse, so I understood. Work’s important, isn’t it?’
She let her eyes stray to the unfolding ceremonies on stage.
‘There’s gossip at Michaelhouse,’ she said. ‘I met one of the graduates in the street. It might be bunk, but he said there were rumours that Ernst had been climbing on the night he died. That he was with someone else: was that Marcus?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry.’
She nodded. ‘I see. So he betrayed me in the end,’ she said, and Brooke was astounded at the anger in her voice.
‘How?’
‘The night climbing. It’s juvenile, and it risks life. I’m a nurse. Ernst was a scientist dedicated to saving the lives of exploited workers. It’s what brought us together. We sound appalling, don’t we? Do-gooders.’ She laughed, shaking her head. ‘These children, their parents died – or they’re missing, or worse – in pursuit of an ideal. Ernst died for a thrill. I’m going to struggle forgiving him for that.’
She looked up at the stage as the children posed for a photograph.
Brooke produced the postcard which Doric had retrieved from Lux’s pigeonhole.
‘This intrigued me,’ he said, letting her read the brief message. ‘Do you know why Ernst’s father was once in a cell at Alcatraz?’
She laughed. ‘I met Frank last Christmas, with Milly. They both came over, Ernst’s parents, on the Normandie. Very glamorous. The family made its money exporting oranges, apparently. It sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? Pacific beaches, orange groves, snow on the Sierra Nevada.
‘Frank’s very proud of his spell behind bars. So was Ernst. Frank refused to fight, you see, in the Great War: a conscientious objector. A rare breed, I think. The island was a military prison back then. A few months behind bars, and then they got him out cutting lumber in the hills.’
‘Ernst had sympathy with his father’s views, political sympathy?’
‘Yes. A pacifist, certainly. I went to Spain in ’37, just a month, at a hospital in Tarragona. Ernst thought that was quite wrong, supporting the war effort, despite the fact the people needed us. Of course, he worked for the government here. But he justified that, at least to himself. On one hand it meant he was able to continue with his research, and on the other he secured some kind of assurance that the project was humanitarian. But he didn’t ask too many questions.’
The crowd stood to sing an anthem Brooke didn’t recognise.
‘I wish now he’d come with me to Spain. There was a beach in front of the hospital in Tarragona and at night the waves were luminous. There’s some small marine algae which glow. Ernst knew the science, but he missed the sight of it; it was beautiful, watching the waves break and fall, lit up within. I’d like to have shared it with him.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Brooke found Captain Kerridge asleep on a bench in the lobby of the Spinning House. The desk sergeant explained that he’d turned up to see the inspector just after dawn and said he was happy to wait. The faint scent of malt whisky hung in the air, battling against the bleach the cleaner used in the cells beneath.
Gulping coffee in Brooke’s office, Kerridge produced a file from his greatcoat.
‘This changes everything,’ he said.
And it did.
At his desk, an hour later, Brooke tried to assess the precise impact of Corporal Staunton’s story on the wider case. Vera Staunton wasn’t the widow of an unknown soldier from the trenches of the Great War; her husband, a volunteer, had died fighting Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. He had been part of the ACEF – the Armoured Car Expeditionary Force, a swashbuckling unit, an enthusiastic component of what had become known as the White Terror. Rather than a human victim of the slaughter of the Western Front, a symbol of the pointless brutality of war, he’d been a reactionary warrior, a man who had sought out a battle, half a continent from his native land.
And then there was the pistol. It had been returned to the widow. Could there be any doubt it was the gun Brooke had found in Stone’s locker? Had the major taken it from Staunton’s flat? Had she given him the weapon? If so, why then go to the police to reveal his corrosive motive for wanting Childe dead? The questions swirled, the jigsaw back in motion.
The file also suggested that other lies had been told. Mrs Staunton had informed her late husband’s comrades she had no dependents. Where was young Frederick?
Staunton had said her son had enjoyed a private education. So, a fee-paying public school, with boarders. Ida Trew, the lookout at Babylon Street, had looked after the boy as a child, when needed. Had Staunton decided to keep her son close by, in the city, as he grew up? Edison retreated to the sergeants’ room on the ground floor to use the phone, ringing round the city’s many fee-paying schools, where the children of the rich could enjoy a fine education, in the shadow of the great university many of them would eventually attend. If the search failed, they’d haul Staunton in for questioning. For now, Brooke wanted to keep her innocent of the knowledge that her lies had been revealed.
Brooke turned back briefly to Ernst Lux and the hunt for Marcus Ashmore. Ringing Michaelhouse, he asked for Professor Ashmore’s rooms. The conversation was brief and adversarial. Once, they’d been neighbours, even friends. Now, it seemed, Brooke’s place in the world was defined entirely by his rank. The professor was busy. He had no idea where Marcus was, but had understood he’d left Cambridge on gover
nment work.
‘When I find him I’ll let you know,’ offered Brooke, but the phone was already dead.
Detective Inspector Solly, at his desk at West Bar, Sheffield, was loquacious by comparison.
‘Brooke? No, no sign, I’m afraid. Gretorix has vanished. Best forget him. Currie, your AWOL squaddie, was buried yesterday at Sharrow Vale. We had a man there, but it was just family. Lot of flowers, most of them probably from the men who killed him. They’ll look after his family; they always do. Makes you sick. There’s no sign of Ginger Thorpe, by the way: he was your third driver. He made it back to Sheffield, apparently, but now he’s disappeared as well.’
Brooke listened as Solly drew on a cigarette.
‘Better news on the meat, so listen up.’
Sheffield CID had found the manpower to run a twenty-four-hour surveillance of the old corporation abattoir, a now derelict industrial ruin in the valley of the River Don. The abattoir itself was a wreck, without power. Lorries came and went from the old vehicle depot, while a pack of German shepherd dogs patrolled the perimeter. The current theory was that the meat was being brought to the site, butchered there, and quickly redistributed for storage across the north.
‘We’re trying to get a man on the inside,’ said Solly. ‘For now, it’s wait and see. Top brass want to know who’s organising it, the big picture. I’ll keep you posted.’
Brooke broke for lunch and walked to the Masonic Hall, taking his usual table at the far end so that he could eat a sandwich in peace, making notes on the Staunton file. Edison appeared, helping himself to a wedge of cottage pie before joining his superior.
Edison surveyed his food and smiled. ‘Got him, sir,’ he said. ‘Young Frederick Staunton. Headmaster sends his regards. I told him you’d like a chat and he said that would be a pleasure because it’s your father’s old school, sir. St Botolph’s?’