THE LIGHTERMAN
Charles Holborne Thrillers
Book Three
Simon Michael
For Kay, Alastair, James and Roxanne
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PART TWO
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PART THREE
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
PART FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HEAR MORE FROM SIMON
A NOTE TO THE READER
ALSO BY SIMON MICHAEL
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PROLOGUE
September 1940
Luftwaffe Hauptmann Heinz Schumann releases his bombs at 03:45 hours. His Dornier 215 is in the middle wave of the attack and although several of the escorting Messerschmitt 109s have been shot down, the approach has been easy. The cloud cover as they crossed the Channel had melted away, and the bomber squadron had simply followed the meandering line of the Thames, deviating slightly every now and then to avoid the puffs of smoke from the anti-aircraft fire and then returning to its course.
Ahead of Schumann clusters of incendiaries continue to rain onto the city, dropped by the leading bombers in his formation. As each new cluster falls there is a dazzling flash followed by a flame soaring up from a white centre, turning the underside of the barrage balloons silvery yellow and throwing up great boiling eruptions of smoke. And as each burst of black smoke clears in the breeze, the great river reappears, a black snake in a brightly-illuminated landscape of uncontrolled fire.
As he releases his payload, Schumann is able to look down and obtain a perfect view of the U-shaped bend in the river known by the Britishers as The Isle of Dogs. He watches the bombs drop, tiny black dots swallowed up by great orange and yellow tongues of flame leaping hundreds of feet into the night air. The Port of London is burning to the ground, and to Schumann’s eye it is both terrible and beautiful.
It takes the 1000 kg bombs forty-two seconds to hit the ground. This is what happens on the ground during that period of forty-two seconds:
Hallsville Junior School, Agate Street, Canning Town is heaving with over 600 East Enders — men, women and children — awaiting evacuation. Almost all of them are homeless, their houses and schools having been destroyed in the first few days of the Blitz. Some have gathered together a few treasured possessions; some have a cardboard suitcase or two; some, recently dug out from collapsed buildings, have nothing but the nightclothes they stand in, their modesty covered by borrowed blankets, soot and building dust. Almost all have lost family members and the majority carry injuries; these are the walking wounded of working class London.
New dazed families continued to arrive at the already overcrowded building but, despite all, spirits have been reasonable for much of the day. Then, as the hours pass and the promised transports fail to materialise, muttering turns to anger and anger to shouting at the hopelessly overrun authorities. They are sitting ducks, they protest, with no air raid shelter to protect them and another bombing raid inevitable. By early afternoon a blind eye is being turned to the dozens of East End servicemen who desert from nearby postings to slip into the school and spirit their families away.
The unrest turns to barely-contained panic when the air raid starts. Children shriek with terror and cling to their mothers’ legs as the bombs scream down, shaking the ground with each impact, and the drone of the oncoming Luftwaffe planes goes on, and on, and on, wave after wave, dulling the senses, making it impossible to think beyond the thundering engines and the rising hysteria.
Forty seconds.
Harry Horowitz, tailor and furrier, lately of British Street, Mile End, and his wife Millie Horowitz, milliner, huddle at the very end of a corridor at the back of the school with their boys, Charles aged fourteen and David, twelve. Despite the noise of the German planes, the bombs raining down all around them which shake the entire building, and the thick dust-laden air which catches in her throat, Millie’s lifelong, debilitating anxiety is focused mostly on David. Her younger son was running a fever when dragged out of their damaged home two nights earlier, and he now lies in her arms, sweating and shivering uncontrollably.
Crouched next to them on the floor of the narrow corridor are four other families, one being that of Millie’s cousin and best friend, Sarah, who along with her husband and three girls, had arrived earlier that afternoon to claim the last remaining floor space just inside the door leading out to the playground.
Thirty seconds.
Another bomb — one in fact released by the plane preceding that of Luftwaffe Hauptmann Heinz Schumann — screams down towards Agate Street and for a few seconds every adult in the school building holds their breath and falls silent. It lands with an almighty impact and the entire building shakes violently, but it misses the school, destroying instead the row of buildings on the opposite side of the road. Pieces of masonry and shrapnel ping off the cobbles of Agate Street and several heavy pieces of debris crash into the school roof at the front of the building.
‘That’s it,’ announces Harry. ‘We’re leaving.’
Harry Horowitz is a short, dapper man, always perfectly turned out in a three-piece suit, a watch chain across his slim torso. He works long hard hours in his little East End factory which produces high-quality fur coats, stoles and hats for the carriage trade. When he returns to the family home, invariably late and tired, he speaks little, preferring to sit in his armchair by the coal fire in waistcoat and shirtsleeves and read the newspaper from start to finish in silence. Everyone knows that Millie, sharp-featured and sharp-tongued, wears the trousers in the Horowitz household. However, few realise that on the rare occasion when Harry puts his foot down, Millie always complies without a word. She stands and lifts David to his feet, turning to her friend.
‘You coming, Sal?’
Sarah looks up at her husband, who nods his assent.
The nine East End Jews grab their pathetic suitcases and shoulder their way through their terrified neighbours and friends, shouting their apologies over the drone of the aircraft and the explosions all around them, and emerge through the door into the playground.
Fifteen seconds.
‘Run!’ shouts Harry, as he leads them across the playground.
Charles hesitates, looking back down the corridor as the rest of his family hurry outside into the orange tinted, dust-filled, cacophony of the air raid. Further down the corridor is another East End family. The Hoffmanns live only thirty yards from the Horowitz household and their house had, like that of the Horowitz family, been almost completely destroyed in the raid two nights before.
The two families often queue together with the same ration books; eat the same sparse food; speak essentially the same language in their respective homes, and have mu
ch in common besides. But they never speak beyond an occasional nodded greeting. The Hoffmanns, although refugees from Hitler like many in the surrounding streets, are not Jewish, and Millie and Harry Horowitz’s social circle simply does not include non-Jews; their lives revolve around their home, their business and their synagogue. The Hoffmanns are “goyim” — of “The Nations” — and accordingly outside the circle. But the Hoffmanns have a daughter, a slim, fair and blue-eyed girl of fourteen, named Adalie. Unknown to either set of parents, while walking back from school every evening Charles Horowitz and Adalie Hoffmann have become friends. They have shared their thoughts on their teachers, their homework and on Hitler. And at Adalie’s instigation, they have shared several sweet, chaste, kisses.
So Charles lingers for a second or two, trying to catch a last glimpse of Adalie, and as a result very nearly loses his life.
Five seconds.
The rest of the family have stumbled across the rubble-strewn playground and are disappearing through the rear gates of the school. Outside on the street the air glows, backlit by orange flames on all sides; the fires of hell. The shriek of Luftwaffe Hauptmann Heinz Schumann’s bomb fills the air as Charles, having given up his quest, races across the playground after the shadowy figure of his mother, the last of the party to disappear through the school gates ahead of him. Charles reaches the gate and takes two steps up Agate Street.
Impact.
The 1000 kg bomb scores a direct hit on the school. Charles is blown off his feet and finds himself sailing eight feet into the air, the explosive pressure drop making him feel as if his eyeballs are being sucked out of their sockets. He lands in an adjoining garden, destroying the rhododendron bush which breaks his fall, and suffers a bruised back and a cut to his scalp from a piece of flying masonry from the school wall. Everyone else in the family is unscathed. Although winded, Charles manages to roll back onto his feet in a single movement and continue running.
Harry Horowitz, soft-spoken East End tailor, has saved the lives of his family.
Later that day the government places a “D Notice” on the event, preventing accurate reports of the number of casualties to avert a collapse of morale in London. Officially seventy-three people died. Locals know that of the 600 or so men, women and children in the building, over 450 were killed instantly, many more in the hours thereafter, and almost all of the survivors suffered injuries. The Hoffmanns were blown to unrecognisably small pieces.
Four days later the Horowitz family members unfold stiff limbs and climb down the steep steps of a bus in the centre of Carmarthen, and are introduced to the farmers who are to take them in. Four weeks of regular enforced chapel attendance later, Charles runs away and jumps on a Great Western milk train to London where he spends the next, and best, years of his life, running wild on the rubble-strewn streets of London and the one artery the Luftwaffe never managed to close: the River Thames. He never forgets the beautiful Adalie.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
1964
Charles Holborne stands outside the basement cells of the Old Bailey, wearing his court robes but holding his wig by the tail in one hand and his case papers in the other. He hates the wig, its feeling of containment, its smell of horsehair and the sweat it generates in the febrile atmosphere of the courtroom, so he only ever dons it at the last moment. He’s also wryly aware of the faint vein of vanity in his personality that contributes to his dislike of the object. His attractive curly black locks that, whatever he does, persist in falling over his forehead, would be hidden by the wig.
Holborne is thirty-eight years of age. With wide dark eyes and an olive complexion, and built like a bull with a massive chest and forearms, he looks more like an Italian truck driver than the eloquent and precise barrister he is.
As he waits, he examines the huge metal straps and studs of a centuries-old oak door, the original door of the Old Bailey, preserved from the 1907 rebuilding and now set as an ornament in the corridor wall. As he invariably does, Charles wonders how many men passed that slab of oak on their way to a thirty-year stretch, transportation to Australia or to the gallows.
Heavy footsteps approach from behind the iron door leading into the cells and Charles turns. The wicket clangs open and Charles’s nose is assailed by the smell of fried bacon and toast. His stomach rumbles in response; breakfast two hours before consisted of a mug of cold tea, forgotten and then swallowed in two great gulps as he pulled on his raincoat.
‘Yes?’ asks the custody officer through the bars.
‘Hello, Bob. I’m here to see Ninu Azzopardi.’
‘Hello, Mr H, sir,’ replies the custody officer in a cockney accent. ‘The prison van’s only just pulled up. Do you want to come in and wait?’
Charles checks his watch: just before 10. No time to go back to the Bar Mess.
‘Any chance of a cuppa?’ he asks.
‘I’m sure we can manage something for one of our regulars,’ replies the officer.
The wicket clangs shut and Charles hears a large metal key from the ring attached to the officer’s belt as it’s inserted into the lock. The door swings inwards and Charles, whose broad shoulders almost fill the narrow space, shuffles sideways past the other man. The door closes behind him and the inner door made of steel bars is opened.
Charles leads the way to the desk and signs in without being prompted.
‘Take conference room one,’ directs the officer, pointing with his pen to a small, windowless conference room. Charles looks down pointedly at the half-eaten bacon sandwich sitting on a greasy sheet of paper next to the ledger which records legal visitors’ entrances and departures. He looks up again hopefully into the face of his friend. Charles has known Bob and his family for almost twenty years, since long before either of them was on the right side of the law, and long before Charles changed his birth name from Horowitz to Holborne. The appellation “Mr H” had started as Bob’s joke — he’d initially refused to use Charles’s anglicised name — but it had stuck.
‘Yeah, I expect there’s a bit of bacon left, too,’ Bob says, good-humouredly.
Charles smiles. ‘You’re a prince amongst men.’
‘So you always say, Mr H,’ says Bob, drily. ‘It’s one sugar and brown sauce, ain’t it?’
‘In the right places, yes. Try not to put the sauce in the tea.’
‘Oh, you didn’t like that then?’
‘Not to my taste, I’m afraid.’
Charles walks into the converted cell and throws his papers and wig onto the tiny table which is, as always, screwed to the floor to prevent its use as a weapon. He sits on the wooden bench built into the wall and leans back against the white tiles, noting that they must have been scrubbed recently of their usual covering of colourful graffitied commentary on the Bailey’s judges and their parentage.
He detects one faint, part-scrubbed, comment on the wall opposite and leans forward to read it: “Only 157,680,000 seconds to go, THEN I’M OUT!” Charles smiles and tries unsuccessfully to calculate how many years the unfortunate mathematician had received.
He listens to the familiar echoes from the basement cells as keys jangle, men are moved and toilets are flushed. He loves the Old Bailey. He feels perfectly at home here, relaxed and at the top of his game and, unlike any other barrister working in the building, he knows almost everyone by their first name.
Over the years he has made it his business to know the prison escorts, the ushers and the court clerks, to remember their names and the names of their loved ones and, if volunteered, details of their lives. Charles knows that these are the people, more than the judges and lawyers, on whom the Lord Chancellor relies to make the administration of justice run smoothly. He also knows that the usual display of barristerial arrogance or, worse still, failure even to notice the existence of these essential functionaries, is a guarantee of everyday friction and unnecessary difficulty. He long ago learned that asking after a court clerk’s sick mother can smooth the odd listing difficulty, as wh
en chambers’ clerks are over-optimistic about a guvnor’s ability to be in two courts at the same time; and a few minutes of banter with a court usher is a small price to pay to get an urgently-required Court of Appeal precedent run down from the library to Court No 2 at short notice.
Charles’s interest isn’t manufactured. He likes these people, feels at home with them, more than he does with most of his professional colleagues. He grew up on the same streets of the East End, shared the same privations during the war and, despite his present profession, still speaks their language. Not so long ago he used the same East End boozers, went to the same football matches at West Ham and queued to swap his ration coupons for the same scarce vegetables, fish and bread. He knows only too well what it is to be poor.
Louder clanging metal and voices can now be heard from the far end of the corridor, and Charles stands to greet his client. He has known and represented Maltese-born Ninu Azzopardi for over a decade. Charles was in pupillage when he received his first brief to defend the good-natured little man, on that occasion for stealing a lorry from the quayside at Hasties Wharf, a lorry Ninu had supposed was full of Canadian timber but which was in fact, on closer examination, completely empty. It had been a plea and Ninu received a sentence of two months’ imprisonment.
Several further briefs featuring Ninu arrived on Charles’s desk over the years as Ninu and Charles learned their respective trades, with differing degrees of success. Charles developed a growing reputation as one of the brightest junior criminal barristers of the post-War generation, until a charge of murder against him caused a temporary, but almost terminal, setback in his career. On the other hand, while Ninu’s crimes grew bolder and more ambitious, sadly, his ability to complete them without detection didn’t improve. He nonetheless remained stubbornly optimistic. Once caught, in Charles’s hands his acquittal rate was approximately fifty-fifty but he was seemingly undeterred, either by the fifty percent in which Charles was unsuccessful or by the increasingly severe sentences he received. More than once Charles suggested that the little man should try another line of work, but Ninu’s round face would crease into an enormous smile, and he’d shrug. ‘I no good at anything else, boss,’ he’d say.
The Lighterman: The Kray Twins are out for revenge... (Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers Book 3) Page 1
