The Great Darkness
Page 28
‘Sleep would be good,’ said Claire. ‘I worry you’re living life too fast, that you’ll get to the end before me. Your hair’s going grey, but that looks distinguished. And it makes you look like your father, the picture in the hall?’
He nodded, trying to hide how absurdly pleased he was by this observation. ‘Rose, on the market? She read the tea leaves and said she’d spotted Hypnos, the god of sleep. I’ll let Aldiss know; he’ll be thrilled.’
Claire unfolded Luke’s latest letter.
‘Now for the son and heir,’ she said, snapping it open and passing it to Brooke.
The letter was a model of Luke’s style, full of detail and colour, but no real sense of how he felt. They’d been moved back fifty miles, then forward again, to a point on the border a mile from their original camp. There were rumours the Germans had rockets. They’d seen a shooting star and they’d all grabbed their gas masks. The corporal made them wear them till dawn, but they were stifling, and blurred speech, and the sweat trickled down the plastic visor.
It was hell, he wrote.
They slipped under the Mathematical Bridge.
‘Ginny Waites, Lux’s fiancée, did you find her?’ asked Brooke, his voice echoing.
‘Yes, Rene knows the ward sister; she’s down in geriatrics. What do you want me to do?’
‘A message, if you would. Just tell her Ernst died for what he believed in, that he didn’t fall. Tell her I don’t think she was betrayed. It might help.’
For a moment they were quiet and Brooke knew she was memorising the words, the phrases, so that she’d get it just right.
The punt slipped downstream, accompanied by the strange mechanical brrr! brrr! of a nighthawk.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank Mike Petty, doyen of Cambridge local historians, for his help in researching the wartime background to this book. Anyone wishing to dig deeper should visit www.mikepetty.org.uk. The College of Optometrists provided expert analysis of my hero’s eye problems, and the history of eye care: individual thanks should go to Neil Handley and Daniel Hardiman-McCartney. Lawrence Holmes, of the Royal Observor Corps Association, offered a rare insight into the realities of this key service. I also relied on Bradley and Pevsner’s The Buildings of England – Cambridgeshire. Everyone at the Cambridgeshire Police Museum at Monk’s Wood went out of their way to bring to life the story of one of the country’s smallest forces – the old ‘Borough’.
Four books must be noted, Cambridge at War. The Diary of Jack Overhill 1939–45 edited by Peter Searby; The Last Crusade: The Palestine Campaign in the First World War by Anthony Bruce; The Night Climbers of Cambridge by Whipplesnaith; and Conscientious Objectors of the Second World War: Refusing to Fight, by Ann Kramer.
Several friends offered helpful insights into the manuscript. I must thank – in the order in which they read the work – Rowan Haysom, Richard Reynolds, Chris Simms, and Robert Jones. The first reader was my agent, Faith Evans, who again steered the literary ship clear of the rocks. Midge Gillies, my wife, also read the text and was a guiding light. Susie Dunlop, publisher at Allison & Busby, and her expert team, have shown faith from the start in Eden Brooke.
I should also mention that the film featured in The Great Darkness was in part based on that produced by the government to mark a series of experiments carried out on an island off the Scottish coast, between 1942–3. It is freely available to watch online. My film, and the tests it chronicles on Hoay in 1939, are entirely fictional.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JIM KELLY was born in 1957 and is the son of a Scotland Yard detective. He went to university in Sheffield, later training as a journalist and worked on the Bedfordshire Times, Yorkshire Evening Press and the Financial Times. His first book, The Water Clock, was shortlisted for the John Creasey Award and he has since won a CWA Dagger in the Library and the New Angle Prize for Literature. He lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire.
jim-kelly.co.uk
@thewaterclock
By Jim Kelly
The Great Darkness
COPYRIGHT
Allison &Busby Limited
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First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2018.
This ebook edition published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2018.
Copyright © 2018 by JIM KELLY
Map Copyright © 2018 by PETER LORIMER / PIGHILL
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–2257–0