by Jim Kelly
Brooke’s Blakeys sounded their distinctive tattoo on the stone pavement as he strode down the rapidly emptying streets, glancing up to see a barrage balloon drifting serenely beyond the four Gothic pinnacles of King’s College Chapel, caught in a nervous searchlight beam. A voice of authority, magnified by a loudhailer, was calling people into a neat line outside the entrance to the shelters on Market Hill. There was something nightmarish about the sight of so many people, so afraid, happy to take orders from anyone in authority.
At Silver Street Bridge a minor traffic jam had formed at the tight corner with King’s Parade. Cars edged forward, their headlamps partly obscured by tape. Brooke paused on the whitewashed kerb, the street lamps flickered out and the blackout descended. Stepping back into a doorway, he let the last of the fleeing civilians run past, and used his torch to check the messages he’d picked up at the duty desk when he’d left the Spinning House: there was a note from a city centre cycle shop confirming that no sales of Lucifer bikes had been made that year, and a telegram from Madingley Hall informing him that Carnegie-Brown’s request for help had been accepted and he was welcome to visit the city’s Bomb Control Centre – located in the air-raid-proof bowels of the Fitzwilliam Museum – in the interests of liaison on the issue of ‘petty theft from damaged domiciles’. He noted the pathological need to avoid the word ‘looting’.
And finally an envelope marked from DR HENRY COMFORT.
The line inside was in the Borough pathologist’s usual copperplate:
Brooke. Nora Pollard: if you can make the morgue by nine I can talk you through the prelim. A surprise.
Dr Comfort was a university man with a chair in medicine, a joint appointment with his role as pathologist, which went back to Victorian principles of efficiency. The city’s murder rate was low. Violent, unexpected or unnatural deaths were common in the centuries of open conflict between town and gown, but much rarer in the age of gaslight. So the role of Borough pathologist was not demanding. Dr Comfort took it seriously nonetheless. He attended the scene of crime when he could, and the bodies were spirited quickly to his laboratory in the Galen Building – part of the medical faculty, one of the country’s newest and most well-equipped scientific institutions – where they could await autopsy, and eventual release to the coroner.
The Galen was a brutal six-floor block in ice-cold white tiles. Brooke found a porter bolting the door.
‘There’s an air raid warning,’ said the old man, a cigarette drooping from his lips.
‘Dr Comfort?’ Brooke showed his warrant.
The doorman nodded. ‘Top floor. He doesn’t believe in shelters. But I do – so he has a key. Go on up, but it’s at your own risk.’
The interior of the building was dominated by a zigzag of rising concrete stairs. Comfort, a solid man with butcher’s hands, was on the last landing putting on a black tie.
‘Ah. Just in time, Brooke. I’ve hardly used the knife. I’ll open her up tomorrow. But there’s something of interest.’
The laboratory had windows on three sides which were all now obscured by blackout boards. The one solid wall held the metal boxes for cadavers. Each year medical students were assigned a body left to the university for scientific purposes, which was disaggregated by degrees in the interests of medicine, and then stitched back together for eventual burial. At any one time several such bodies were therefore in storage. Brooke had been touched by the annual ceremony which marked the students’ final sight of the body they’d briefly made their own: prayers were said, and a letter written to the nearest relative expressing the university’s debt to the family.
It struck Brooke as an unexpected dividend of burial delayed.
The laboratory held two mortuary tables in cold steel, one of which was occupied, the corpse beneath a white sheet.
Comfort shuffled the cloth neatly back from the face to the shoulders. Any semblance of life had long fled from the features of Nora Pollard. Despite two decades of confronting such sights in the morgue, Brooke was always astonished at the degree to which the ebbing away of life transformed the face. She was unrecognisable from the woman he’d found slumped in the back bedroom of number 36 Earl Street. Gravity had robbed her face of any semblance of intelligence.
‘I won’t bother you with the technical description of the internal injuries we expect to find,’ said Comfort. ‘Suffice to say that the force of the blast will have been sufficient to tear connective tissue, dislodging the major organs, rupturing arteries and veins. She would have died within minutes of the bomb hitting the house. However …’
Comfort, without looking up, reached above his head and found the handle of an angle-poise lamp, bringing it down to the victim and switching it round to illuminate the head. The brutal play of shadow and light made the old woman’s features jump and shift.
‘Just here – two small bruises on either side of the trachea …’
To Brooke they looked like inky smudges.
‘I opened the back of the neck to examine the site of the trauma from within,’ he said, turning away to a table and coming back with a kidney-shaped dish within which were two tiny fragments of a C-shaped bone, with the circumference of a florin.
‘The hyoid bone. Classic indicator, Brooke. I found fractures to the cornu and thyroid cartilage as well. She was strangled, you see, by someone standing in front of her like this …’
He put down the dish, took a step towards Brooke and raised his hands, presenting his thumbs forward towards the detective’s Adam’s apple. Brooke’s heartbeat had picked up, and was mildly erratic. It was what Claire always called his ‘jazz heart’.
‘And there’s these …’ added Comfort, turning the old woman’s wrists to reveal bruises on the knuckles.
Brooke actually felt the physical presence of the unsaid word itself: murder. Ironically, it brought the world alive, as it always did, making him adjust his tinted glasses to focus on the wounds.
‘I’m amazed, considering the effects of the blast, that she put up a fight, but she clearly did. It can happen. You see road accident victims walking away from wrecked vehicles and then just falling down dead. It’s as if everyone has enough energy left to escape, or at least to try, but no more.’ Comfort had produced a small cigar, which he lit up.
‘So you think she fought with the thief in the bedroom as he tried to take the rings?’
‘That’s your department,’ said the pathologist, slipping a black dinner jacket from a hook and swinging it expertly around his shoulders.
‘Or perhaps she cried out and he had to silence her,’ added Brooke.
The pathologist set the sheet back over Nora’s head before walking to the wall, turning off the lights and opening one of the blackout boards so that they could see the city spread below, bathed now in moonlight.
‘It’s a conundrum, Brooke,’ said Comfort. ‘Out there – to the south, in France – soldiers are dying, have died, in their thousands. Civilians too. But here we are worrying about a single death. An old woman killed in a seedy burglary.’
Brooke nodded. ‘That’s war. This is murder. I’m done with war – or it’s done with me. A thousand dead in battle – that’s a statistic. One death is a tragedy. This killer thinks we’re too distracted to care, too distracted to bother. I’m going to prove him wrong.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
They parted company on the steps of the Galen, Comfort striding away in a cloud of Havana smoke while Brooke doubled back towards the river, along Trumpington Street, towards the pale, soaring mass of the Fitzwilliam Museum, home for ‘the Duration’ to the city’s Bomb Control Centre. His father had always called it the Fitz, exhibiting as always an easy familiarity with great institutions. His mother had been a trustee, and had often taken her son round, filling in biographical detail on the ‘moderns’ – having no interest in anything painted before the turn of the century. Family anecdotes were rare in Brooke’s childhood but the great ball held at the Fitz was an exception. Brooke’s grandfather –
an academic pathologist – had been there to celebrate the installation of a new vice-chancellor. The invitations to this great event had been much sought after, fought over, even forged. The building, a towering statement of self-importance in Portland stone, had been half finished, but a grand ceremony was required. There’d been no gas, let alone electricity, so they’d put wax tealights on high niches. His grandfather claimed six hundred guests had danced the night away. There had been champagne and glittering conversation. The dripping wax left blotches on the bare shoulders of the ladies. His grandfather noted, with a medical man’s eye, that the result was not dissimilar to the early stages of leprosy.
Tonight the building, a vision more at home on the slopes of the Acropolis, looked deserted, the entrance lost in the impenetrable shadows below the towering portico. The two lions set to either side, as big as those in Trafalgar Square, were lost in shadow, but must be there, because Brooke had climbed on them as a child and knew every etched claw, but they were invisible at their posts. Legend suggested they came to life each night and ambled down into the street to drink from the wide stone gutters, built to bring fresh water into town and save it from disease. Brooke heard a clock strike ten, then strained to hear the lions creeping away, but there was nothing but silence. As he peered into the dark, the image of Nora Pollard’s taut throat, bruised by the killer’s thumbs, seemed to loom into view. The case had altered: looting and desecration had become murder, and the weight of the enquiry to come seemed to press down with the weight of the night.
‘Who goes there?’ asked a voice, which made him start.
A soldier materialised from the shadows. Brooke held out his warrant card and a torchlight suddenly blazed.
‘Through the doors, down the stairs.’
A sign over the double copper doors read BOMB CONTROL CENTRE by order of the REGIONAL COMMISSIONER. According to the note he’d picked up at the duty desk, the BCC had been instructed to help the Borough in tracking down the looters, assistance Brooke felt he now desperately needed.
The museum’s entrance hall was deserted. Above, the glass circular dome let in starlight, while the marble staircase led up in splendour, a pair of caryatids flanking the entrance to the galleries where his grandfather had danced. To the left and right smaller staircases led down to the lower basement.
Brooke took the steps down to the right, flanked by Assyrian sculptures of bird-men and gods. Most of the museum’s treasures had been packed up and moved to a country house in North Wales, watched over by a rota of staff who were banished for the purpose. The upper galleries were empty, although a series of special exhibitions did attract crowds – especially of bored servicemen. The lower galleries had also been cleared, although a few of the larger Egyptian and ancient works were too big to move. As Brooke emerged in the gloom he could see dust sheets over mysterious objects.
A chair was set on the stone floor, beside a small table, on which stood a telephone. A soldier in fatigues sat stoically, illuminated by a single lightbulb which had been slung over a beam above.
Brooke wondered if the guard had fallen asleep, as he sprang to his feet, dropping his rifle, and while trying to pick it up battled to refasten the buttons on his tunic.
‘I’m expected,’ he said. ‘Inspector Brooke, from the Borough Police.’
He was told to wait on a stone bench.
Left alone, he found the shadows unnerving. He could see the legs of a monumental stone figure which ascended into the dark, its torso and head unseen, and the upright lid of a sarcophagus.
‘Eden?’ said a voice, making him jump for the second time. A soldier emerged, a major’s crown on his epaulettes catching the light. ‘Did I startle you?’
The face which emerged was more in keeping with the hidden Egyptian artefacts than the British Army: large brown eyes, sallow olive skin, the sharp architectural lines of the face of a pharaoh.
It took him a second to realise that it was a face he knew.
‘Good God – Edmund,’ he said, shaking hands warmly.
‘Yes. I’ve just arrived. I was going to look you up. But you can rely on fate. It is really good to see you. Come on in. There’s tea. There’s always bloody tea. It looks like a false alarm by the way – the siren – yet again, but after last night we can’t relax. That’s why you’re here of course, Madingley gave us the heads-up, bit of mischief in the Kite, I hear …’
Beyond an arch, a corridor led towards a distant light. Brooke followed the outline of his old friend’s familiar silhouette.
Edmund Kohler had been the battalion quartermaster in the desert, in sole charge of supplies. This required an ability to deal with highly complex situations, a gift for what was now described in the modern army as ‘logistics’. Kohler’s father had been a senior Egyptian diplomat, who’d studied at Oxford and married into the minor British nobility. In the desert Brooke’s men had called his son ‘Johnny Turk’ behind his back, exhibiting cheerful ignorance, but Brooke had told them many times that they owed their lives to Kohler’s loyal skills, especially in the rationing and supply of water, and that Egypt was, after all, a British protectorate. Even so, the murmurs never ceased.
At the end of the corridor a steel door swung back to reveal the BCC in all its glory, safely tucked away behind the six-foot-thick stone walls of the museum’s old vault. Here, each night, the authorities’ response to air attacks was coordinated, under the theoretical direction of the regional commissioner.
One wall was floodlit and held a large map of Cambridge itself, while the wall opposite carried one of East Anglia, reaching to the sea. Bomb attacks had been plotted with pins holding flags. A trestle table stood in the centre of the room where six women in civilian clothes sat at an array of telephones. In one corner Brooke could see a radio operator, headphones in place. A telegraph printer chattered.
‘It’s not the Bristol Hotel,’ said Kohler, bringing him a mug of tea.
In the desert war they’d set up battalion headquarters in Cairo’s plushest hostelry. A vivid image came to Brooke of a large gin and tonic, with ice, served by a uniformed flunkey, marking the unit’s return from the first battles of the Egyptian campaign.
‘But it is pretty safe,’ added Kohler, sipping the tea and taking off his cap. The lights were very bright, in contrast to the shadows, so Brooke slipped on his ochre-tinted glasses.
Kohler looked away briefly. ‘Ask me, the whole bloody building’s a monstrosity,’ he said. ‘But the floors are three feet thick and the walls would withstand a direct hit. So, ideal really, and we’re opposite the hospital. All very handy.’
For a minute they swapped news, catching up on children and desert comrades.
‘And Claire …?’ asked Kohler.
‘Yes. She’s fine.’ Brooke realised with a shock that Kohler had been a guest at his wedding. The pleasant thought occurred that he might have stumbled on a new nighthawk, another friend condemned to work at night. ‘And you’re back in harness, Edmund?’
‘Yes, sort of. Retired, at forty-five. Had to dust off the uniform when the call came. They wanted quartermaster skills. Otherwise, I’m up at Celia’s house in the Borders. You should come and see us, Eden. Six thousand acres, rolling away to the North Sea. You always were a great walker.
‘The locals are in a real bind. I’m the lord of the manor, and despite the modern age there’s a lot of forelock touching, but they can’t help staring at my face. The children always give the game away. They don’t know what they shouldn’t see.’
There was a silence in which Brooke considered the extent to which the passage of time made it difficult to recover lost friendship.
He was going to cut to business but Kohler beat him to it.
‘How can I help? I understand we may have an issue with civilian discipline,’ he said coolly, watching one of the women taking a call, making a note. The radio operator was talking softly, without any sense of urgency. With each passing minute the moment for sounding the all-clear was getting close
r.
‘Yes. A case of looting,’ said Brooke. ‘One of the dead was a woman who’d had two fingers hacked off to get at her rings. But I’m afraid things are much worse than we thought. I’ve just come from the mortuary. The pathologist is certain she was strangled. She put up a fight despite the lethal injuries of the blast.’
Kohler’s eyes widened slightly.
‘It changes everything of course. A bit of light-fingered theft in the ruins of a bomb site is one thing. We could have let the mutilation of the fingers pass. Now I’ve got a murderer to catch, and I need to catch him fast. But as you can imagine I have few leads … So I need your help, Edmund.’
‘How?’
‘I need to understand how all this works,’ said Brooke, which wasn’t really an answer to the question.
Kohler nodded, but there was disappointment in his eyes, as if Brooke had let him down.
‘I see. Right – well, let’s take a typical raid.’
The normal sequence of events had a chilling inevitability. The radar stations on the East Coast – Chain Home – were the front line, unless reconnaissance aircraft managed to spot incoming bombers over the North Sea. Radio and military landlines were used to alert BCCs inland, which in turn alerted Observer Corps and local airfields.
‘Newmarket’s our key forward post,’ said Kohler. ‘They’ve got radar up on the downs, and ack-ack guns, and a flight of searchlights. If they pick up anything at all they tell us pronto. Then we have a pretty simple decision to make. If the information is credible, and there’s any realistic chance of a raid, I ring the Guildhall and the siren goes off.
