by Jim Kelly
‘Hitler’s got it earmarked as the new capital when he’s won the war. He wants it as it is, in one glorious piece. So they’re safe. But I doubt if we are.’
CHAPTER SIX
Brooke put the sleeping pill Claire had given him on a dish beside the bed and stretched out on the sheets. Through the open window he could hear the river trickling past at the bottom of the garden. The old house was silent, from his mother’s ‘Japanese’ bathroom in the attic, with its eagle-clawed tub and screens, to his father’s old laboratory, moth-balled now, embalmed in the basement, the dust long settled on Bunsen burners and fume cupboards, and the professor’s private library of medical textbooks, experimental data and student theses.
Sir John Brooke had been absent for most of his son’s childhood, even after his mother’s sudden death when he was six. A housekeeper had been installed to cook and serve solitary meals, and he’d been left to walk to and from school across the city, filling his spare time with exploring its alleyways and courts, which had become in effect an inanimate sibling, a playmate, a landscape for a lively mind and his own private paracosm; a parallel imaginary world.
His father had appeared each morning at breakfast from the cellar, lively and talkative, keen to discuss the news in The Times, before setting off for his rooms in college. He’d had a day bed installed below. When, occasionally, the laboratory door was left open, Brooke had sniffed the air, detecting tobacco, chemicals and old books. It had only recently been suggested to Brooke that his father had suffered from insomnia. The idea that his own disability might be partly genetic, and not solely the result of his mistreatment in the war, had been oddly sustaining. The only sad note was that his father’s early death, at just sixty, had robbed him of a potential nighthawk.
He bunched the pillow behind his head, staring blankly at the plasterwork in the ceiling above, trying not to think about sleep, feeling instead the house around him, full of memories.
The silence was broken by a thin cry on the edge of hearing. His daughter, Joy, had the new baby in her room down the corridor. The baby: he still struggled to think of the child as Iris, the newest member of the family. The cry was followed by a soft whisper which might have been a soothing word. He’d told Joy not to worry about the noise. It was an extraordinary truth that once you were not directly responsible for a child its cries went almost unheard. Worse, there was a sense of smug schadenfreude, exquisitely apposite, as the sufferer was his own one-time torturer.
There was very little light in the room, despite the open window, but when he turned over he could see the dish, and the pill. He didn’t want to take it: he’d resisted sleeping pills for more than twenty years. The risks of addiction were acute, the side-effects debilitating. His wife had wondered, often out loud, right here in their bed, whether there were worse things than such a habit. She conceded that barbiturates were dangerous, but that the soporific effects were beneficial if the dose was managed. She had gone to some lengths to procure him a supply of pills if he needed them, or wanted them.
She hadn’t let the argument end there. She’d persisted: had he not become addicted, in his own way, to his affliction, a life lived after dark? Had he not grown to rely on the insomniac buzz of adrenaline, the sense of riding on the edge of the moment, of imminent collapse or adventure? In recent years she’d noticed a slight dissipation of his usual manic energy, as if he was a piece of clockwork winding down. His obsession with the night seemed to be taking its toll. Brooke, at forty-one, replied that it was simply the onset of middle age.
Earlier, after leaving Jo Ashmore’s precarious post, he’d found his wife in the children’s ward at Addenbrooke’s, the city hospital. Sister Brooke ran the Rainbow Ward at night, having in the end found it easier to switch to his regime of time zones, rather than persist in her own.
He’d promptly described events on Earl Street and his symptoms: memory lapses, mild lack of eye focus, sporadic hearing loss, a little dizziness.
‘But it’s all gone now,’ he said.
‘It’s still concussion,’ said Claire, holding his head like a precious casket. ‘You should see a doctor, right now, Eden. It is a hospital, you know.’
‘The treatment’s sleep. Even I know that. So I’ve got a problem, especially as I don’t want to start taking your pills.’
He wanted to hold her close at that moment, but a child with measles was ten feet away and watching them keenly, sensing perhaps from the body language that something interesting was about to happen.
‘One sleeping pill cannot be addictive,’ she said. ‘Go home. Lie down. Sleep. It’s a cocaine derivative, so believe me, it will work. And they’re not my pills, Eden. It’s your life, and your decision.’
Claire had been brought up with five younger brothers. She spent most of her time organising other people, making sure that they were happy, comfortable and alive. She carried out these tasks with a brisk efficiency which had never calcified into anything authoritarian. She was a remarkable person, not least in making it quite clear she had never felt any pity for Brooke’s condition. He was otherwise healthy, rather handsome, occasionally dashing and the beneficiary of a first-class education, and had inherited a wonderful old house by the river. Now he was blessed with two children and a granddaughter.
He’d kissed her, looking into her neat face, crowded with large eyes and a wide sensuous mouth.
‘See you later in bed,’ he’d said, and she’d pushed him away with a smile.
Now, remembering the sight of her, Brooke reached out, picked up the pill and held it up, noting the name etched in the white tablet: VERONAL. Claire had explained that the pills were in short supply as they were German-made, adding that the scientist who’d developed the drug – and this was hearsay – had decided that the Italian city of Verona was the most peaceful city in Europe. A byword for sleepiness. That had been at the turn of the century. Brooke thought that two world wars would most certainly have stirred Verona from her slumber.
There was another, darker, explanation for the shortage of sleeping pills. Anxiety and insomnia were rife as the nation waited for the bombs to fall. And worse still, hundreds – possibly thousands – of families were stockpiling them, particularly Jewish families. The threat of invasion, and what would follow, had driven them to contemplate suicide. If the Germans came, they wanted to be ready. Claire said there was a thriving black market in the drug, and that the hospital was too short of funds to secure a supply. She’d cheerfully pointed out that the upside was that if he did become dependent, it wasn’t a state that could last.
He took the pill. It wasn’t true to say he never slept. He often slept, it was just that these sudden plummeting descents into darkness were difficult to predict, and rarely lasted more than an hour. At the Spinning House he slept in the cells if he could. At home he tried to follow a regime of exercise, food and rest. Yet despite such routines he was constantly defied by a restless mind, or awoke sweating in expectation that a violent light was about to burst into his brain through his defenceless eyes.
The drug must have reached his brain because in those first few seconds he knew Claire was right, and that he would sleep. The moment was wonderfully close at hand. He heard the baby cry again down the corridor and thought of the child’s father. Ben was a submariner, or rather had been a submariner, before his boat (he’d been most clear on this point at Christmas: it was a boat because it couldn’t carry other boats, which was what defined a ship) had developed engine trouble, and then caught fire, and drifted towards the north German coast. They’d scuttled her in the end, as a Kriegsmarine patrol boat appeared on the distant horizon. He was now in a POW camp, and they were hoping, soon, for a first letter. There had been a brief telegram from the Red Cross confirming that he was alive and well in Stalag Luft I and that the broad terms of the Geneva Convention were being followed. The silence since had begun to grate, and privately Brooke worried, while assuring his daughter that Ben was safe: the Germans looked after our officers beca
use they wanted us to look after theirs.
Brooke imagined Ben now, lying on a bunk, in a hut lost in the woods, trying perhaps in his turn to imagine what it would be like to hold his child. And wondering, surely, whether it was a boy or a girl.
And then Brooke was asleep, immersed in a nightmare, in which he was climbing the steps at number 36 again, but they led on upwards, in an endless giddy series of turns, until he was left clinging to the bannisters, looking down on a burning city, watching the dark shadows of bombers flying over the fires. He awoke with a shout, but the narcotic was so powerful that he fell instantly back into unconsciousness.
This time he had a dream he’d had many times before. Its roots were in his memory of real events, but its power lay in its fictional elaboration. This was a feature of his dream world, that it merged reality and nightmare. He was in the desert on the outskirts of a town on the Sinai coast road in 1917. They’d driven the Turks out of the settlement and one of his men had been caught, red-handed, amongst the remains of a mud-built house. He’d got his hands on a fine metallic, painted pitcher, a set of three silver plates and a sumptuously bound Koran, and some dry beans and vegetables, as well as salted beef and a disc of unleavened bread. To make matters worse the owners of these treasures were local Arabs who – returning to their liberated home – had found the British soldier with his knapsack full of stolen goods, sitting by the hearth, calmly chewing the bread.
The situation was tense. All Brooke wanted to do was get Grandcourt to return the stolen goods to the aggrieved family, with some fresh bread, while he made sure the culprit – a malingerer called Orton – was put in a hard labour gang back at Port Said, digging trenches for the rest of the war.
But the villagers wanted Brooke to shoot Orton. And they had a point. The area was under martial law, and a published list of capital offences included looting. The relevant regulations had been printed on a poster and stuck on telegraph poles from Cairo to Haifa. The fact that Orton wore a British uniform ought to make no difference.
The villagers had surrounded Brooke’s temporary headquarters: a ruined water pumping station. It was quite clear what the right military decision was: Orton needed to die. He was a petty thief, a hungry petty thief, but he’d chosen the wrong moment to succumb to animal instincts. If the mob lost control there would be casualties: soldiers, and locals, amongst whom were women and children.
In reality he’d left arrangements to the regimental sergeant major, who’d chosen a firing squad and taken possession of Orton’s effects. Brooke had stood by while the execution took place, the villagers lined up to witness retribution, which had been swift and, as in all such cases, oddly deflating once the final echoes of the salvo had died away. Orton slumped to his knees, supported by a fence post, around which a rope had been tied.
Yet this was not how the dream ended. In the dream version of reality Brooke had been forced to cajole the men, and even then had found himself one short of the stipulated six. He had therefore to take up his own rifle and join the line. Orton, tied to his post, loudly proclaimed that he’d gone into the house because he was hungry. He said there had been no rations for five weeks, which was true. There was a dangerous murmur of assent from the assembled troops.
Brooke called the men to arms and issued the order to fire.
Only one bullet was live and it found its mark. But Orton wouldn’t die. He simply refused to succumb to the shot which had pierced his heart. The squad was issued with five blanks and a live round, and fired again, and again. The condemned man bled, and Brooke recalled grey eyes, which never left his own, pleading to a figure of authority to be released from a life reduced to a never-ending series of ineffectual deaths.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In the kitchen at Newnham Croft, Brooke had pinned up the latest set of tide tables issued by the port authority at King’s Lynn, forty miles downriver, where the waters of the Cam finally slunk out into the sandy wastes of the Wash. As well as providing vital nautical information the tables listed the times for sunrise and sunset, broadly correct within a minute for his present location. It was dark outside, and the clock read 5.05 a.m. – forty-three minutes short of dawn. He was due to meet Edison at the Spinning House at seven. The hunt for the looter could begin then. He’d had some sympathy for Orton, who’d died so many times in his nightmares, but he had none for the man who’d cut through the finger bones of Nora Pollard. Greed, allied to brutality, was unforgiveable.
However, the pursuit of the culprit would have to wait two hours. Which left Brooke time to deal with the riddle of his poisoned river. Could he find the source of the mysterious chemical which had spilt into the Cam? Was it a threat to public health? Was the supply of drinking water safe? If someone was dumping oil in the headwaters, he had the powers to prosecute. And there was that tantalising possible link with the looted house. Was it just imagination that seemed to match the odour of the bluish oil in the river to the gloves he’d found at number 36? Coincidence always made him uneasy. He believed, as the scientist he once was, that the world was governed by order and logic, not happenstance.
He fetched his coat and hat, left a note for Claire and slipped out of the house, pulling the door to behind him with a satisfying, oily click.
The world smelt fresh and clean. Following the towpath, he crossed Coe Fen and skirted the Mill Pond at Newnham village, where he’d encountered the strange, flickering flames. He knelt, cupped a hand in the dark stream and smelt the water as it trickled away. It reeked of weed and peat, and damp grass, and nothing else.
At Silver Street Bridge he was forced to abandon the towpath, as the river swept on in its stone canyon, sandwiched between the colleges, and take instead a route through the silent streets, emerging finally beside the Great Bridge, where a few early workers were trudging into town in the grey light before dawn, and where he could pick up the towpath again and head north.
A brisk march brought him to Jesus Lock, beyond which a line of barges stood waiting to slip their moorings and head seawards. The light had begun to seep into the sky, and he could see smoke trickling from stovepipes on the boats, and lights flickering within the cabins. The forward barge was laden with sugar beet and the captain was happy to give him a lift downriver, after Brooke had shown his warrant card.
He accepted tea, but declined a seat in the narrow confines of the stern cabin, a sort of cast-iron shed, which hummed with the heat generated by a coke stove. He was given permission to ride instead in the prow, where a nest of sandbags provided a comfortable perch. He smoked his first cigarette of the day, and felt a common illusion: that he was stationary, and that the landscape itself – the riverside boathouses and poorer cottages, the towpath and the rough water meadows – was sliding past, chugging south to leave him in its wake.
The tea was steeped in tannin and cleared his head remarkably well.
The river, growing wider, looked greasy and sluggish. His father, who liked to quote the classics, had often called it ‘this oozy Helicon’ – a reference to Byron, who’d contemplated the river of classical legend. But young Brooke had learnt early to check sources, and while the reference was true it was hardly what his father had in mind. The Helicon was famed for its odd trick of disappearing underground, into chalky caverns, only to reappear nearer the sea. It was the rationale for this party trick which had fascinated Brooke the child: the women who killed Orpheus had tried to wash the blood off their hands in its waters, and the river had gone to earth to avoid implication in the crime.
The Cam looked innocent of any such violence, but certainly oozy, sliding sedately seawards. Beyond Barnwell the captain, briefed earlier by Brooke, swung the barge towards the bank so he could simply step off onto the stone wharf.
Here one of the city’s great landmarks dominated the skyline. Barnwell Pumping Station boasted a 150-foot-high brick chimney, and was belching steam into the morning sky. Even at a hundred yards Brooke could feel the visceral pounding of the great engines within.
&
nbsp; Inside, through open metal doors, stokers threw coke into a series of open furnaces, which pained Brooke’s eyes, so that he was forced to select his blue-tinted glasses. As he tried to get used to the murky interior he was astounded to see, high above his head, the four great pistons of the engine turning in the shadows below the roof, reaching out smoothly, one after the other, only to return in a graceful arc. Every few seconds a plume of steam obscured the machinery from view.
Even here, within feet of the moving iron and steel, the sound was muffled and smooth, although the vibrations in the concrete floor were now distinct, and the bones in Brooke’s inner ear buzzed in time.
He was pointedly ignored by the labourers until a man appeared, briskly wiping his hands with a cloth, in a smart set of blue overalls.
‘Can I help?’ he asked, checking a pocket watch. The man didn’t look at him, but that wasn’t rare, as many people seem to find the tinted glasses oddly disturbing.
‘Inspector Brooke – from the Borough. A small matter, but I had a few questions …’
The man led him past the stokers to a brick shed beyond the machine hall. It had no door, so the heat of the engine kept it torrid. It was an office, with rotas and notices on a board, and maps and plans spread over a long table. On a separate trestle a piece of machinery stood in a metal tray of oil. It looked like a great valve, perhaps from the heart of the pump itself.
‘The third shift finishes in an hour, then it’s the first back on. We never stop, you see. I’m the night engineer. You had questions?’
He began making tea without asking if Brooke was thirsty. His name was Gore. His son, he explained, was in the Royal Navy. He pointed out a picture of a young rating on a dockside. Now that the war was in its second year, Brooke had noticed how freely people talked to strangers about their private lives and families, as if they needed to take every opportunity to share their fears, and their hopes.
