"I was beginning to feel sick.
"‘But it cannot go on,’ he continued. ‘Mark’s drinking binges are becoming increasingly public, and so the possibility arises that the same junior journalist will sooner or later notice them anyway. And if that happens, the link between the Brinsley and Crater names will be made and banner headlines reminding the world of Janet Brinsley’s murder become likely. So, the Craters have a problem. They are damned if they take action against Mark and damned if they don’t. If they do take action, they put themselves in the spotlight, and if they don’t take action and he continues being a nuisance to them, he does it for them. Either way they have got to stop him causing trouble.’
"‘You think Mark might have realised that, and is deliberately getting drunk in the Crater’s night clubs to generate publicity?’ I asked.
"‘It has crossed our mind,’ he agreed. ‘But if that is his game, then it is a very, very dangerous one. I cannot stress too heavily that the Craters are an extremely nasty crowd. When they have a problem, they do not usually come to the police with it, they deal with it themselves. And when they do that problem always disappears. It might be a few days or weeks before the disappearance is noticed, but when it does there will be no evidence of a trail to anywhere, no body, no crime scene, no weapon or means of dispatch, nothing, and certainly nothing to point a finger in the direction of the Craters. It will be as if the problem had never existed.’
"I almost threw up on the spot.
"‘I can only think that Mark doesn’t realise what he is getting into,’ I protested. ‘As far as he is concerned, Billy and George Crater murdered his wife and got away with it and he is angry. Getting drunk is his way of dealing with it and gravitating towards the Craters’ establishments is a natural course for him because that’s where his mind is focussed.’
"Even to me my words sounded like wishful thinking.
"‘I really cannot imagine Mark is up to anything more than impotent rage,’ I persisted. ‘He has never been violent. I cannot imagine he would have even the first idea of how to look after himself in a real fight.’
"‘By all accounts, he has been easy to handle by the professionals,’ smiled Sergeant Chak. ‘But that is not the point. The Craters will see his kicking up a fuss in their establishments as the threat to their peace and quiet, however trivially he may be able to damage them physically. It is the threat of publicity they will want to stop.’
"I thought of Sue and her premonition and gulped in a deep breath.
"‘Don’t go near him,’ she had said. ‘I’m frightened, Ger. The whole situation frightens me.’
"I was beginning to think she was right.
"‘Thanks for telling me, Sergeant. I’m sure Mark has no idea what he is doing. He really is a decent bloke, just someone who has temporarily gone off the rails.’
"Sergeant Chak nodded. ‘I hope so Gerard, but stop him before the Craters run out of patience. We will eventually get them, but in the meantime, we have no special brief to watch over Dr Brinsley so there is not much we can do to look after him. And the last thing we want at any time is a misguided amateur cutting across our investigations. So stop him for all our sakes, Gerard, and remember this conversation never happened.’
“‘Of course not, Sergeant,’ I nodded in return. ‘And thanks.’”
Chapter 29
Aunt Gwendoline felt cold again and her sitting room seemed darker than it had been earlier. Gerard was still talking but she was having difficulty concentrating on what he was saying.
“I collected Mark and his pocket contents from the desk sergeant, a procedure that was becoming uncomfortably familiar to me, and then I walked him home,” he recounted.
She brought forward in her mind the image of the skyfire and its falling stars and focussed her tired brain on that.
“I gave him a good tongue-lashing and this time I really ripped into him with the gist if not the actual words of what Sergeant Chak had told me.”
She tried to convince herself that what she was thinking was nothing more than an old woman’s imagination. All nothing and nonsense and of no consequence whatsoever as she silently wished it to be. There were six stars originally. The first one was for Janet Brinsley which left five and then the five separated into three and two, and the three burned more brightly and died before their time. Three stars for three friends, Gerard, Mark Brinsley and Susan, except that Susan is not among them. All three stars are men. Gerard, Mark Brinsley and Sergeant Chak perhaps.
“I don’t know how much of my telling-off registered with Mark and I don’t believe it did much good anyway. He just sat quietly and smiled at me, still half cut from the booze of the previous night. All he said at the end of it was ‘thanks, Gerry’, so I left.”
She wanted to believe that everything around her was perfectly normal and reasonable. Gerard was sitting in his chair opposite, talking away and obviously fit and safe, but the weight on her shoulder was telling her all was not well.
“I have to admit I was more than a little scared walking home and I didn’t dare tell Sue what had happened,” he finished.
“Gerard, my dear boy,” she interrupted him. “It is very late and way past my bed time. Interesting though your story is, I do hope you will forgive me if I call a halt to it now. I don’t know that my old brain can take in any more for one day. It is such a pity because there is so much more to tell. Do you think you could come to tea tomorrow and finish it for me? You did say it was holiday time at the university, didn’t you? Would you be able to come?”
“Of course,” he replied without hesitation. “Of course I will, although there really isn’t much more to tell.”
He smiled at his elderly aunt and was mildly shocked to see how tired she looked, and he immediately felt guilty for keeping her up so late yet again.
“Good,” she confirmed. “Because I have still to find out why my late sister Alice’s vase came to be so decidedly broken.”
“I will tell you that tomorrow,” he smiled.
He shrugged and gathered his coat ready for leaving.
“You have been wonderfully patient listening to my ramblings. I do appreciate it, Aunt Gwendoline. It has been good for me to be able to unload so much that has been on my mind. I can only say that everything turned out all right in the end so there is no need to worry. Have a good night, and sweet dreams.”
He gave her a gentle hug and waved to her from her garden gate before striding off with his usual confidence up the road and into the night, grinning and shaking his head as he went still bemused by his great-aunt’s focussing on the tiny matter of his smashed Chatterwood vase.
Behind her solidly locked front door Aunt Gwendoline leaned against its frame and looked tiredly up into the face of her oak-cased clock.
“Oh dear, our dad,” she sighed to it. “I don’t know that I have the stamina any more. I am an old woman so how am I going to stop a family of gangsters harming our Gerard?”
The clock looked back at her, firm and proud, a constant in her life that had always given her strength. There was hope. The skyfire had not reappeared and that the mysterious engine noise that had disturbed them earlier had not returned. But it did not have to be nonsense. Premonitions were not of the present. They were of the future. She looked down into the quizzical eyes of Rani and managed a smile.
“It is all nonsense and I shouldn’t worry myself into so much of a knot over it, should I, Rani?”
The dog swished her tail stump on the carpet and gazed back at her in understanding.
She shuffled into her sitting room to clear away the tea things and caught the aspidistra on the edge of her vision.
“There is no need for you to look so smug,” she fired at it. “I knew there was something not right about Miss Susan for our Gerard. They were not suited to each other, and to her credit she too had reached that conclusion and was going to leave him. She even got as far as putting her clothes out on the bed ready for packing after Mark Brinsley first
went home following his wife’s murder. But she stayed.”
The plant did not respond.
“Of course, our Gerard does not know she was going to leave him but then that is not surprising,” she muttered, tidying the tea tray. “In spite of how much I have tried with him he can be quite blind to what is happening around him. Give him a potsherd or something from five thousand years ago and he can create whole vistas of cultures that nobody has heard of for millennia. He can see all that. But give him the present, living, world and he is utterly hopeless. He is a worry. But should I tell him that Susan was going to leave him regardless, do you think?”
Not a leaf flickered.
“It doesn’t really matter,” she sighed. “But it must have been very upsetting for Miss Susan to have Janet Brinsley’s murder cut across whatever plans she had to leave. She could not have expected that. And after it happened she then stayed with our Gerard even though there was a lot in the situation that was very frightening to her. She has courage, that young woman, and decency too. She must have cared for him very much to stay with him under those circumstances, so we will not think too badly of her will we, Rani? But I do wonder what it was that especially frightened her.”
She picked up the tea tray and gave the aspidistra a final glare.
“I know you have a hand in this, Mother,” she addressed it irritably. “And as usual you will not make it easy for me, will you? If you are going to ask me to look after the family, you might give me a little assistance occasionally. Why did Miss Susan break our Alice’s vase?”
The plant remained doggedly uncommunicative.
“Come along, Rani,” she sighed again. “I am too tired for any more thought tonight.”
She left the tray in the kitchen and dragged her feet up the stairs to bed.
“Goodnight, Rani,” she called out into the darkness as the bedside light was extinguished.
“Goodnight, our dad,” she added softly as her oak-cased clock reminded her of the extreme lateness of the hour.
Her thoughts paused briefly on the aspidistra in its ornamental pot in the sitting room, but after the fleeting moment she turned over and ignored it. She certainly was not going to wish it a pleasant night’s sleep.
Chapter 30
She was walking along a path. It was a sunny and hot afternoon and the path was packed earth worn smooth by the tread of workmen’s boots on their way to and from Felderby Pit and made rough by the stones that poked up through its surface. There was a ditch on one side lined by a hedge and on the other side was the quilt-work of allotments where the men of Low Felderby dug and planted and harvested their vegetables in their spare time. Mother was walking ahead on the path, panting a little and sweating. In the crook of her arm she cradled some freshly pulled greens and in her other hand she carried a tin bucket half full of potatoes. Alice was learning her colours at school and was running back and forth with each new flower she picked from the hedgerow.
“Look, our Gwen, this one’s a pretty blue, and this one’s a red one and this one is white.”
From her toddler’s height some of the allotments appeared as a forest of cabbages, early cauliflowers and Brussels sprouts, but where the path humped she could see over these to the flags of torn newspaper fluttering on the tangles of pea sticks with the last of their summer crop. In some places she could see even further, to the crossed poles that supported house high stands of scarlet flowered runner beans, but mostly all she could see were the closer rows of carrots, onions and potatoes.
“Come along, our Gwen. You must keep up. I can’t carry you as well.”
Mother’s tone was sharp, but then she was always sharp when they went up to the allotments. Some of the allotments had gone to weeds, but not her dad’s. It was Uncle Jack and Granddad that tended her dad’s allotment, keeping it dug and tidy with its crops because Dad was away at the War. At the start of the War it had been pronounced unpatriotic of an employer to turn a man out of his home if he was away doing his duty in the trenches instead of his job at the Pit or the Works, so his house remained for his family to live in and for him to return to, and one way or another his allotment remained productive. It had been Uncle Jack who had dug the potatoes and left them under a sack for collection as needed.
But if the man was killed, or wounded so badly he could not work, then his allotment went to weeds. Soon after, his family left the village and a new one arrived. Mother put her head down and walked more quickly past the allotments that had gone to weeds.
“Keep hold, our Gwen,” Mother snapped. “You keep a tight hold and don’t fall. I can’t carry any more than I’m doing.”
She sought Mother’s side opposite the swinging bucket and gripped the skirts more firmly and it was her young ears that first heard the sound coming up behind them. It was very faint, a low purring, growling sound like a dog announcing its presence to an intruder, only more mechanical and not quite natural. She sensed its threat and turned to see what it was but she could make out nothing against the brightness of the sky. Mother had not yet heard it and neither had sister Alice who was occupied in her flower collecting.
“Alice!” screamed Mother.
Potatoes and greens scattered themselves across the path and the darkness of Mother’s shawl enveloped her. She heard sister Alice yell and then Mother’s arms wrapped tightly around her and she was carried falling and helpless into nowhere to land somewhere with a jolt. She fought the shawl that clamped her hard against Mother’s shoulder and threatened to deny her breath while Alice screamed and Mother howled back in terror at the roaring, growling, fearful thing that split the sky above them. And then in an instant it was gone, its roar leaving them as suddenly as it had come, fading away to nothing in the distance.
“It’s all right, my pet. It’s all right. You keep hold now. I’ve got you. If only your dad were here.”
Mother hugged and trembled and cried and rocked them both. Sister Alice mewled in fear but around them again there was only peace and the protective sides of the muddy ditch and the clear blue sky above.
On her blanket beside her mistress’ bed Rani looked up quizzically into the dark in the direction of the cry that had brought her to her feet. Her mistress was face down in her pillow and murmuring something and bedclothes had wrapped themselves restrictingly around her as she twisted in her dream. Rani put a paw against the blankets but there were no commands she could understand. She sat quivering and alert, watching in the dark while the dream rewound itself in her mistress’ mind.
It was a hot, sunny afternoon, and the path was packed earth with stones poking through it. There was a ditch on one side lined by a hedge and on the other side were the allotments where the men of Low Felderby grew their vegetables. Dad was away at the War and Mother was walking ahead carrying an armful of greens and a tin bucket half full of potatoes that Uncle Jack had dug. Mother was sweating and anxious as she always was when up at the allotments. Sister Alice was skipping ahead, collecting wild flowers from the hedgerow. And then she heard the low, menacing sound, far off but coming up behind them.
Mother screamed. Bucket, potatoes and greens flew everywhere, and Mother’s shawl was flung over her head as she was carried bodily down into the ditch where sister Alice was already howling and shaking in fear. But this time she was prepared for the tumble, and she raised her arms so that the shawl should not cover her face. She heard the roar split the sky above her and she felt the cold as a monstrous black shadow raced fleetingly across them. The shadow was sharp and solid, not like one made by a cloud, and Alice was crying and Mother was rocking her and reassuring her.
“Keep hold now, our Gwen. I’ve got you. It’s all right.”
She herself felt no fear as she listened to the shadow’s voice fading away into the distance and she twisted around, struggling against Mother’s protective hug.
“Don’t let go, our Gwen. Keep a hold. It’ll be all right. Stay with me.”
But she did let go. She twisted and stretched to relea
se herself, and she reached up to the monster that was creating the shadow. She let out a laugh as she realised she was suddenly free, flying up and away, streaming along in the clear sky behind the snarling beast that had frightened them all.
It was a flying machine, the first any of them had ever seen, and she thrilled to the wonder of it. She flew higher so she could look down on it as it raced over the ground, dragging its shadow beneath it.
“It’s one of ours,” she called out as she saw the red, white and blue decals of the Royal Flying Corps on its upper wing. “There’s no need to fear. It’s one of ours.”
She laughed joyfully at the sight of the harmless toy-thing, and she raced to follow its fragile grace as it threw itself through the air. She flew down, dropping behind it and to one side of it, and decided to come up to it mischievously as it had tried to do with her and Mother and sister Alice. It took no effort and in no time at all she was broadside on to it with the wind rushing in her face.
The pilot looked pleasantly dashing, slim and youthful with his white silk scarf streaming out cheerily behind him. She decided he might even be handsome. He had a broad grin on his face that stretched his smartly clipped moustache, and a deep scar that raked across his forehead. It was a ferocious scar. It started at his left eyebrow just where it joined the bridge of his nose and it slanted backwards and to the side until it disappeared into his hairline. She had only ever seen scars like it on men who had survived accidents at the Pit, and like those scars it could only have been a signature dashed in an instant upon the line that separates life from oblivion.
Skyfire Page 11