by Jim Kelly
‘Back on leave next week, God willing. I wish I was out there with him. They wouldn’t have me, I’m too old now. But I’m proud of the boy because he volunteered.’
Gore said he’d worked at the pumping station since 1919, when he’d come home after the Great War, during which he’d served in the navy in the Mediterranean. For a minute they swapped reminiscences shared, of steamy Port Said and insanitary Gibraltar.
Gore was proud of keeping his ship’s engines going despite the heat, and equally proud now of the pump house. ‘I know every nut and washer, Inspector. It’s all about the details. And care and attention.’ He cleaned his hands of oil. ‘Sorry, you had questions?’
Brooke described the chemical spillage at Newnham village, the strange blue-tinted fluid, and swimming under the flames. He said he wanted to find the source of the spill, but had no idea where to start.
Gore looked taken aback. ‘You’re a swimmer then. I never learnt. Used to get me in a panic.’
He gave Brooke a mug of tea, mashing the bag with a spoon and adding condensed milk.
‘If you’re partial to a dip you’ll know the river’s clean as a whistle. Has been for fifty years. This’ll be a one-off. Not like the bad old days. All the city’s sewage – everything from every house and shop and all the gutters – it all comes here by underground pipes, then we pump it out to Milton to treat it. It’s a miracle really.’
‘What about drinking water?’ asked Brooke.
‘That’s separate. It comes up from the chalk out at Fleam Dyke; cleanest in the country, we even sift out the calcium, then pump it into houses through pipes. Nothing to do with the river, you see, so she’s pretty much spotless.’
Brooke took his hat off and held it loosely in his hand. ‘I’m having it analysed, a sample of the oil; I can assure you it did happen, Mr Gore. Surely it’s dangerous – what about children? I learnt to swim in the river as a kid. We all did. It can save your life. The river’s a gift for children. That was down along the Snobs – you know it?’
The Snobs was a shallow channel off the main river, not far from Newnham. On summer days it was crowded with thrashing children, overseen by attendants provided by the council.
‘Like I said, I never learnt the knack,’ said Gore.
Brooke looked up at the picture of his boy. ‘What about him?’
Gore shook his head, picking up the picture. The air of breezy confidence had suddenly dissipated.
‘The river’s important,’ said Brooke. ‘The children won’t learn if we don’t look after it. It’s a slippery slope, turning a blind eye. Has this happened to the river before?’ he asked.
Gore looked uncomfortable, then shrugged. ‘It’s bound to happen, like I said. But it’s rare.’ He filled his lungs and then let the air whistle out. ‘Last time it got downriver, towards Fen Ditton, there’s been dead fish in the swim – carp, perch, tiddlers – that was a week ago.’
‘A week? What’s been done?’
‘The boss here, and his bosses, they’ve got the regional commissioner breathing down their necks: can the water supply withstand a bombing raid – a big one? That kind of thing. The war’s the priority. So everyone’s stretched, so the word was that we’d ignore it, and it’d probably go away.’
‘Well it hasn’t,’ said Brooke. ‘I’m not sure turning a blind eye ever constitutes wise practice, especially when people’s lives are at stake.’
Gore nodded, the blood draining from his face.
‘I need to find the source,’ said Brooke.
‘Could be anything on the upper river – it’s a maze, miles and miles of streams and ditches,’ said Gore quickly. ‘Garages, factories, farmyards – only takes a fuel tank to leak, or an acid bath to overflow. It’ll have got in the river directly, as I said, not through pipes.’
Brooke settled his hat, and gave his mug back. ‘If you hear anything – if it happens again – ring me.’ He jotted down the Spinning House number on one of his cards.
Gore pinned it up on the board. ‘Right you are.’
Then he grabbed his cap off a hook. ‘You better see this as well,’ he said, leading the way out to a small dock next to the pumping station, where a couple of flat-bottomed river boats, half filled with green water, lay stranded. Gore unlocked a pitch-blackened shed.
It was dark inside so Brooke took off his glasses.
‘Good God,’ he said, taking a step back.
‘Hundreds – all dead,’ said Gore. ‘Same time as the fish downriver. Maybe we’ll get more now with this new spill.’
The shed was full of rats, piled up in a pyramid. The naked tails, which looked like worms, were intertwined. The illusion that the grey corpses were moving, sliding one over the other, stayed with Brooke all day.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Brooke found the Kilner jar on his desk, the leather gloves within, and a note from Edison saying that he’d gone to Earl Street to organise door-to-door enquiries as the military had unexpectedly ruled the area safe. The shoring-up squad, he reported, had moved in a second time as there were concerns for the safety of the houses on either side of number 36. Several other houses in the street were badly damaged, and so he’d sent a constable to the local school – the designated LRC – to interview those unable to return home, and he’d try to compile a list of those items missing from the looted house. The Pollards’ next of kin had been informed.
Not for the first time Brooke felt grateful for Edison’s painstaking thoroughness. He sat down and typed a one-page report on the Earl Street incident, using two fingers, at rapid speed, so that the sound resembled a machine gun. Then he put the Kilner jar on a high shelf, grabbed his hat and ran down the stairs to the duty desk, handing over the report for delivery.
The sergeant shook his head. ‘Sorry, sir. You’re wanted in person upstairs.’
‘Upstairs’ was a euphemism for the attic office of Detective Chief Inspector Jean Carnegie-Brown. Her door was always open, but Brooke waited on the threshold. Despite having made enough noise clattering up the stairs he still had to cough to make her look up from a set of files. She wore glasses on a chain, which she now positioned on her nose.
‘A moment, Brooke, and I’ll be with you,’ she said, indicating a straight-backed chair.
A Scot, she’d made the long journey from Glasgow to secure promotion. She’d made the Borough her own fiefdom through grinding work, and brisk – almost brutal – man management. Her known vices encompassed a silver cigarette box and a set of fishing rods. Brooke, on his late evening swims, had spotted her several times on the riverbank out beyond Newnham Croft, by the riverside inn, in full Highland outdoor gear, with a pint of beer to hand. Once, out with Claire on the riverbank at Ely, they’d stumbled on her in a nest of reeds, a glistening pike in the catch net, splashing. They’d mumbled something about the big Fen sky and then fled, as if they’d caught her sunbathing naked. She was more commonly associated with a bleak efficiency, which had – it was said – caught the attention of Scotland Yard. There were persistent rumours of a move to London, and a further rung up the career ladder.
She closed the file after a minute, and let the glasses fall from her hand.
Brooke placed his report on her desk.
‘Report on last night’s bomb, ma’am. There’s evidence of looting.’
‘Is there indeed,’ she said, picking up the sheet of paper, automatically flipping the lid on the cigarette box with her other hand. She’d smoked in secret for a year, using the window which looked out on the high walls of Emmanuel College, but now all pretence had fallen away.
‘We’ve enough paperwork to keep us busy without unnecessary addition, Brooke. A bit of petty theft in the blackout hardly calls for more reports, does it? Bumph is more likely to lose us the war than the Luftwaffe.’
‘I think in this case the devil’s in the detail,’ said Brooke.
She held the sheet at arm’s length and read the three hundred words in fifteen seconds. He’d left the gruesome
details to the last line.
‘I see,’ she said, her nose wrinkling in disgust.
Brooke balanced his hat on his knee.
‘Severed fingers – there’s no doubt? It couldn’t be a blast injury?’
‘None.’
‘If I send this to the Home Office there will be repercussions, Brooke. We may even warrant a flying visit from the Yard and we both know how unpleasant such assistance can be. It’s a hornet’s nest. Do we really want to poke it with a sharp stick? Looting is a sign of social disintegration. Common thievery is one thing. Mutilating a corpse, stealing from the dead, crosses the line.
‘You were in the last lot, Brooke. War does strange things to otherwise sane people. I don’t need to fill in all the spaces. If the bombing gets worse we need everyone to pull together, and keep on keeping on. Most of all, people need to think that life will go on. The everyday things. Getting up, work, family, a home, a pet dog, a pint of beer, an allotment. Looting is a crack in the facade, Brooke.’
It was the closest thing to a speech he’d ever heard from a woman largely restricted to one-sentence orders.
She paused, perhaps surprised by her own sudden passion, looking out of the open dormer window as a breeze shuffled through a line of London plane trees in the college grounds on the far side of the street.
‘Looting now, today, tomorrow, sets precedents, it loosens inhibitions, it invites imitation. It will not be tolerated, Brooke. But what to do?’ she asked, leaning back in her chair now, exhaling smoke. ‘We can hardly publicly acknowledge the crime. That’s the kind of shock that puts people out on the streets. Taking the law into their own hands. The official line is that we should avoid sensational reports.’
‘It is – potentially – a capital offence,’ said Brooke.
The chief inspector stubbed out her cigarette. ‘The last thing we want is some petty thief swinging by his neck in Castle Yard, Brooke, simply because he stole a pensioner’s tin of loose change from a wrecked house. Think of the obscene crowd outside, Brooke.’
‘We can’t ignore the crime,’ he said.
‘The view for now is that we do our best to limit the situation as discreetly as we can. Unless … Unless the line is crossed: organised looting will be met with the full force of the law. But we would need evidence that it really is organised looting, not opportunism, however brutal. Is there any such evidence, Inspector?’
Brooke shook his head. ‘Not really. We’ve had half a dozen cases – but nothing to link them, and they’ve all been petty theft. However, none of the stolen goods have reappeared locally. We’re checking further afield – markets, shops, known fences, in Norwich, Peterborough, Bedford. So far nothing. But it does suggest cooperation amongst thieves.’
Carnegie-Brown pushed her glasses to the bridge of her nose. ‘“Suggests” isn’t good enough. Let me know if that changes. In the meantime, if we catch a few light-fingered roadsters in the process of stealing from a bomb crater, they can answer to the magistrates. Prison certainly, but all low key.’
Brooke felt the familiar urge to confront authority. ‘But this case, ma’am – the mutilation of the body is an offence in itself, of course, if I recall my sergeant’s exam. Profanare de morminte. And it’s a potential obstruction of justice.’
‘Sawing the fingers off an old woman to get her rings is despicable, Brooke. Let’s deal with the specific charges when, or if, you make an arrest. Why don’t we leave the gory details out of your report? Let’s just call it theft. Omission, Brooke, that’s the trick of it. No lies. Let’s bide our time. We’ve enough on our plate.’
Brooke lit a cigarette without asking for permission, a mild form of insubordination, but one he always found effective. The chief inspector’s attitude reminded him of Gore’s superiors at the pumping station.
Carnegie-Brown slid the one-page report back across the desk and dismissed him with a nod.
CHAPTER NINE
Standing at the foot of Earl Street, by a corner shop and the windowless Wellington Arms, Brooke was struck by the extent to which a single bomb can transform a view, realigning the ribs and bones of a place, opening up undreamt-of vistas, redrawing the skyline. One bombshell had changed this little dead-end street for ever. The roof and part of the upper storey of number 36 had either collapsed overnight or been demolished by the safety crews who were even now winching wooden support struts off the cobbled road to prop up the facades of the neighbouring houses, which had been rocked by the blast. Opposite, the damage was far more extensive than had been apparent by night, the serendipity of bomb blast and air pressure sending most of the explosive charge across the street, tearing out windows, blowing in doors and bringing down hundreds of roof tiles. It was a miracle no one else had died.
The partial destruction of number 36 – the rotten tooth in the jaw – had changed everything, for it opened up a view of the backs of the shops on East Road, a bedraggled line of impoverished Victorian sheds and halls, pubs and the back end of a Methodist Chapel, all in ugly red brick. On the main road two buses were passing, curious passengers peering through the still-smoking gap into Earl Street, fascinated by this sudden, unexpected view of the Kite. It struck Brooke for the first time that carpet bombing – a new wave of Blitzkreig ahead of an invasion – might destroy his beloved city for ever. What had Jo Ashmore said about Rotterdam? That the city had been levelled, with just the cathedral left: Not a brick left standing on a brick.
Many of the inhabitants of the street, who had decamped en masse in the night to sleep elsewhere, either with relatives or friends or at the LRC, were now back, as Edison had reported, and the feverish activity reflected a very human urge to reclaim normality. The crowd worked steadily, sweeping away glass, hauling furniture and bedding out onto the cobbles, stacking bricks and tiles. The ARP warden had taken on a supervisory role, sitting on a doorstep smoking a cigarette, fair hair revealed now his tin hat was on his knee. The blast had fractured a water main and so a stream ran down the left-hand gutter, creating a widening lake. Children, school forgotten, were racing paper boats. The Wellington Arms, at the far end, had its doors open and tables outside. A few men drank mugs of tea and smoked; others sat on the kerb, their boots in the one dry gutter. Brooke thought they looked exhausted, beaten to some extent, and it reminded him of watching his own men march back along the desert road after the debacle of the First Battle of Gaza, every ounce of energy bleeding away into the sand.
Edison appeared from the throng of labourers working outside number 36.
‘Sir.’ The salute was Edison’s best, reserved for public admiration. ‘I’ve told them to bring out everything they can from the house. Anything of value. That way we might be able to work out what’s gone.’
Brooke could see a uniformed constable conducting a doorstep interview further down the street. ‘Anything yet on the thief in the night?’
‘No, sir. Most people just blame outsiders; that’s what everyone says, of course. Not one of us – that kind of thing.’
They watched a queue form at a dowser marked WATER – BOIL FIRST.
‘The dead?’ asked Brooke.
Edison set out their full names and details. Then he put away his notebook. He had an extraordinary ability to remain still amid chaos. A child’s football rolled up to the sergeant’s feet but the assembled urchins just stopped and stared, waiting for him to nudge it back, which he did without a word.
‘I checked the files on the other incidents, sir. A motley bunch, with nothing much to link one incident with the next. There was a watch taken off a corpse at the Hills Road incendiary attack – that’s the only one that catches the eye. Mostly it’s just pilfering.’ Edison rearranged his polished boots.
The constable who’d been conducting door-to-door enquiries appeared with a child in tow, wheeling a bicycle with a silver horn on the handlebars.
‘Sir. This is Jack – he lives at number 40. He’s a bit of a whizz on bikes – aren’t you, son?’
The child no
dded. He was about six or seven years of age, with a front tooth missing, wearing a large jersey which was several sizes too large.
‘Tell the inspector what you told me.’
Jack’s story was as vivid as only a child’s could be. When the bomb dropped he was knocked out of bed and his mum was screaming, and kept on screaming, until his dad got them all down the stairs.
‘We looked out the front but the street was full of smoke,’ he said, clearly delighted. ‘So we went out the back and saw the bomb hole, but Dad said we had to squeeze past.’
His aunt lived at number 21 so they’d set off down the back alley to see if she was alright. Jack had noticed a bicycle lying in the rubble of what had been the back wall of number 36. He knew Nora and Arthur Pollard because he played football in the back alley – a game called ‘fives’ – and they used to complain to his dad about the noise.
‘Dad always told them running about is good for kids,’ said Jack proudly.
The bicycle in the rubble was blue, with the brand name, Lucifer, in silver on the haft of the crossbar. Jack knew all the bikes in the street and he’d never seen one like it before.
‘Lucifer’s the devil, isn’t it?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Edison, touching the top of the boy’s head.
‘But before he was the devil he was an angel,’ said Brooke. ‘The bringer of light. Was it a new bike, Jack?’
The boy shrugged. ‘No – it was a bit tatty.’
‘What happened next?’ asked Brooke.
‘We got to Aunt Joan’s and I realised I’d forgotten Joey – he’s my budgie – so I ran back and got the cage. The bike was gone.’ The child fell silent for a moment. ‘I got a thick ear off Dad when I got back, but Joey’s alright.’
‘So how long was it between the moment when you saw the bike, and the moment you saw the bike was gone?’ asked Brooke.
‘A minute?’ offered Jack. ‘I ain’t got a watch.’
