by Jim Kelly
And a child. A boy lay alone in the dry riverbed, like a swollen starfish, the limbs slightly blue, the face grotesque. The flies were invisible in the buckling desert heat, but the noise, a basal gravid hum, was distinct, and the image shifted like a mirage. A child drowned in a river that did not exist. Brooke looked too long, finally ordering a sergeant to search the body and bring him any forms of identification from the clothes.
There had been nothing in his pockets but a single British penny, Queen Victoria on one side, the date 1899 on the reverse. In reality he’d moved on, only realising later that he should have had the boy buried. In the dream he tried to ask his sergeant to go back and put this right. Every time he made the effort to enunciate the words his tongue felt like dead meat, paralysed at its root. He tried to shout, tried harder, and woke with the final release of a scream.
CHAPTER TEN
Waking in a sweat, Brooke fled the house and set off for the cottage at Jesus Lock. He’d asked for a constable to remain at the sluices, manning the landline. The night shift had been reorganised to patrol the banks in case the child’s body resurfaced. Boat-to-boat enquiries had continued after dark downriver towards Baits Bite. But morale had collapsed; there was now no hope. River wardens, water bailiffs and college porters had all been asked to keep vigilant: the body would appear, eventually. Denied sleep, Brooke felt the need to check dispositions.
At the door of the lock-keeper’s cottage he met PC Cable, heading out, readjusting his chinstrap. Cable was a bright, dependable officer, nonetheless destined for call-up to military service before the spring. At this rate the Borough would be reduced to the halt and the lame.
‘Sir. The desk just rang. PC Harris, on the far bank, says a woman on the towpath reckons someone’s breaking into Newton’s factory. Says she saw three men at the security wire. Looks like burglars in the blackout. She’s there now showing Harris the spot.’
They turned downriver, past Midsummer Common, the college boathouses on the far bank, and then over Newton Bridge, a nickname now widely adopted, conferred by the hundreds of men and women who worked in the electronics factory on the far side. The building itself was low, with a modernist wave-like roof. By moonlight they could see the brutal simplicity of its construction: three floors, rows of large Crittall iron-framed windows. The whole complex was set back on the water meadows, beyond a frozen football pitch. As Brooke crossed the snowfield, he recalled that the factory made radios and newfangled televisions, and possibly electronic equipment for laboratories. There were several similar factory sites up and down the river, spawned by enterprising university academics who’d taken the city’s love affair with mathematics and turned it into a passion for technology.
Ahead they could see torchlight at a wire fence and a group of people in animated conversation: two police constables, what looked like a nightwatchman with a storm lamp, and a woman in a black overcoat with a fur collar and a fur hat.
PC Harris, consulting his notebook, introduced the witness as Dr Augustine Bodart, a fellow of Davison College. She’d been walking home when she’d seen something suspicious up at the wire, which she’d reported to the constable as he patrolled the towpath.
‘The constable says a child is lost?’ she asked Brooke, a hand to her mouth. She was perhaps forty years old, heavily built, with remarkably agile and expressive features, which gave the impression that she was talking to a not very bright child.
Brooke told her they were still hopeful, that a search was underway. Then he asked her to tell them what she’d seen.
‘Three men just here,’ she said, and Brooke noted the distinct guttural accent: German possibly, but maybe Hungarian or eastern European. ‘Hurrying away towards town. I have no doubt they pass through the fence. I saw their faces, certainly. The labouring classes, perhaps?’
‘Did you call out?’ asked the nightwatchman. Brooke could see now he was an elderly man, with a grey moustache and a railwayman’s cap, who looked extraordinarily worried.
Bodart thought the question a stupid one, because she laughed as she shook her head. ‘Certainly not. They are felons. And I was there, on the towpath, not so far away.’
‘You raised the alarm?’ asked Brooke.
‘I told the constable when I saw him on the path a moment later – a minute, perhaps two.’
‘No sign of ’em by then, sir,’ said Harris.
Brooke took off his hat and ran a hand back through the black hair. ‘And you are a national of which country, Dr Bodart?’
The war had made such questions a necessity.
She stiffened slightly, pulling the fur collar closer. ‘I am Austrian, Inspector. Austrian. The Nazis have invaded my country, as no doubt they would wish to invade yours. I call at your Spinning House once a week to register. I can assure you I pose no danger to the realm.’
She smiled, looking at each of them in turn, apparently pleased with this explanation.
Brooke recalled a newsreel of Hitler’s triumphant entry into Vienna. He felt that the concept of ‘invasion’ had been stretched to breaking point. And, besides, the Anschluss – the annexation of Austria – had effectively made Dr Bodart a citizen of the Reich whether she liked it or not. At the outbreak of war, government tribunals had reviewed the status of thousands of Germans and Austrians living in England. A few hundred had been jailed, ten times that released, but with restrictions on their movements. Regular attendance at a local police station was one such restriction.
Brooke left her to arrange with one of the constables to make a statement at the station, giving as full a description as possible of the three men, while he stepped through the hole in the perimeter fence, aided by the nightwatchman, whose name was Ridley.
‘I think we should see what they were up to, don’t you?’ said Brooke.
Ridley lived in a cottage on the site and dogged Brooke’s steps. ‘I was just about to set out on me rounds,’ he said. ‘I did ’em earlier too. This isn’t my fault. This place is top security now. They’ll not have got in the labs. It’s all locked up.’ Ridley rattled a bunch of keys at his belt.
Brooke examined the facade, noting that it was top security now.
They began to circle the building: the works entrance was at the north end, and a bicycle shed and what looked like a generator at the other. On the far side the factory faced the street and the church of St Andrew’s, almost lost in a soaring copse of pines and a great cedar. The south end had no doors, but there was a set of communications aerials rising from a compound. In the corner of the site stood the great mast – a landmark in a flat city.
Ridley followed Brooke’s upward gaze. ‘Two hundred feet high,’ he said. ‘The light’s to warn aircraft. We had a day out at Ely in the summer and you could see it from there,’ he added, with a note of professional pride.
They returned to the main doors which were, indeed, securely locked. They’d checked each ground-floor window on the circuit, and none were broken or forced. Cellar doors, for deliveries, were chained. It looked as if the burglars had fled empty-handed.
‘What do you think they were after?’ asked Brooke, as he made a note by torchlight.
The nightwatchman shrugged.
‘What does Newton make?’
Ridley shook his head. ‘Same as always. Radios. TVs – that’s what that’s for,’ he added, nodding to the mast. ‘Boosts the signal from Ally Pally, so they can work on getting the picture right. After the war, you see, they’ll be making thousands of sets. One for every house, that’s what they say.’
Ally Pally – Alexandra Palace, on the northern outskirts of London – had been co-opted by the BBC to test television broadcasts.
Ridley’s futuristic vision prompted a moment of silence.
Which is when Brooke detected the infinitely small crimp of a change in air pressure. A lemon-yellow flame suddenly flared at the foot of the TV mast, sending a pain through Brooke’s eyes, into his brain, where it seemed to burn its way into his spinal cord. The shock wav
e put him on his knees; the sound a dull thud, a body-blow, followed by an acid fizzle, producing a cloud of choking fumes.
Struggling to his feet, fumbling for the black-lensed glasses in his pocket, he forced himself to open his eyes. The TV mast was alight, its metal crossbeams blazing in a geometric pattern set against the low snow clouds. Ridley was still standing, but there was blood pouring from a wound above his hairline, and he was shaking violently.
The blast had left Brooke deaf. PC Harris appeared, Dr Bodart in his wake, and was clearly shouting although not a word was audible. House lights were appearing in the streets nearby as doors and windows were thrown open. Down on the riverbank one of the ack-ack searchlights had begun sweeping the scene.
The flames ran up the mast, then flickered and died, leaving a small fire at the foot. For a moment there was an illusion that the tower would crumple and fall, but it held fast on its concrete, box-like base. It was by the guttering flame that Brooke saw a sign painted in whitewash on the concrete, the letters a foot tall.
He made Ridley sit on a low wall while he walked forward towards the mast, the flames dying away quickly now, collapsing into a bundle of odd blue fire.
At twenty feet, Brooke could read the words.
He knew two things: he hadn’t heard the bomb fall from the sky, and there’d been no plane overhead. So the explosives had been planted at the foot of the mast, almost certainly by the fleeing ‘burglars’. And, although he was no linguist, he knew for certain the message in whitewash wasn’t English.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the porters’ lodge at Michaelhouse, in the panelled room beyond the counter, a blackboard had been mounted by the lettered pigeonholes. Upon this the head porter scrawled instructions and reminders for the night staff, Doric and his three subordinates. The night porter whistled as he rubbed out a list of proposed duties, which stretched from sweeping the chapel floor to replacing candles in the Great Hall.
Across the now pristine black canvas, Brooke carefully inscribed the words he’d copied from the concrete base of the stricken TV mast. He’d left PC Harris at the scene, and a radio car was making regular hourly visits through the night. A company engineer, dragged from his bed, had examined the mast and pronounced it stable. The bomb, it seemed, was a trifling concoction of a few pounds of low-octane explosives – selected, he felt, for an entirely symbolic attack.
Ridley, the wounded caretaker, had been taken by ambulance to Addenbrooke’s. Brooke’s ears had recovered, his clothes were merely smudged with ash, and the pain in his eyes had faded to a dull ache. The next logical step was to decipher the message. He had his suspicions as to the language, but not the meaning.
The exotic accents were particularly difficult to transcribe, and he made a mental note to ask County to send down their own photographer to record the exact inscription in situ before repairs began.
Tiocfaidh ár lá.
Brooke, pressed to try a glass of the college claret (collected from unfinished glasses by the head waiter) and the leftovers of that evening’s formal hall feast, had time to ponder the strange words.
He attempted to voice the letters in a sound, which produced in turn a strange noise from Doric, a species of guffaw mixed with puzzlement. The porter stood in front of Brooke’s cryptic slogan. He was not capable of stillness, and so as he considered the letters his lips contrived a tuneless whistle.
‘When does Dr Phipps rise?’ asked Brooke. Even in his student days, before the Great War, Phipps was an ornament to Michaelhouse’s reputation for arcane passions. Phipps was a linguist, with a special interest in the patchwork of dialects which covered the Indian subcontinent.
‘I can get him now, if it’s important,’ offered Doric.
‘It’s five o’clock in the morning, Doric.’
‘Dr Phipps sleeps after lunch. Often after a good lunch, if you understand me, Mr Brooke. A certain decline has set in this last decade. Night-time he thinks and writes. Before the blackout started I’d clock his window on my rounds. There’d always be a light. Some nights I can see a sliver still.’
Doric’s position as night porter had been secured for what they were already calling the Duration, thanks to his simultaneous appointment as both fire-watcher and ARP warden, in command of monitoring the blackout within the college bounds.
Dr Phipps was duly produced, in a dressing gown and boots, and apparently unperturbed by the lateness of the call. Neat, tall, ‘a dry stick’ would have been the verdict of anyone meeting him for the first time. Brooke had always detected a sprightlier, joyful note.
He studied the blackboard with keen interest for less than ten seconds.
‘Yes. Irish – they get annoyed if you call it Gaelic. And famous of course: Our time will come. A rallying call for the rebels.’
They’d given him a glass of wine, and he seemed to want to stay, so Brooke asked if the script had any hidden clues.
Phipps studied the letters. ‘And this is a faithful reproduction?’
‘I tried.’
‘Yes. The inflections and accents are precise. It’s a rallying cry, as I say. A child would know it, but perhaps omit the smaller diacritics.’
‘And so?’
Phipps shrugged. ‘An educated hand?’
Brooke left Phipps drinking more wine and set out for the Spinning House. There had been no significant new snowfall, but the frost was bitter. Market Hill was deserted, the all-night tea hut still abandoned, the central fountain a bowl of ice.
Which made him think of the child again, and the cold, deathly touch of the river.
After checking with the duty sergeant at the Spinning House he went to his office and fetched from the cabinet a file of correspondence with Scotland Yard. He had a daybed, which he’d bought on the quayside at Alexandria in the war. Some carefully painted scenes adorned the woodwork: the blue Nile, green rushes, a red sun. It was a bed in which he never slept, reserving the cells below for snatched moments of the abrupt bouts of sleep which punctuated his days. The daybed was for reading.
Quickly he found the relevant set of three memoranda, all addressed to his superiors:
URGENT. A GENERAL ALERT.
ALL CHIEF CONSTABLES
He noted Carnegie-Brown’s neat scrawl in the margins, signing off in lieu of the chief constable, who saw his role as purely ceremonial. A lieutenant-general from the Great War, he was rarely seen in the Spinning House, except to welcome dignitaries on the doorstep. All operational files went direct to Carnegie-Brown. She’d passed them on to Brooke, with the languid comment, ‘Watching brief, Brooke. Cambridge is hardly a Fenian stronghold.’
The first letter detailed the declaration of war against the United Kingdom issued in Dublin by the Irish Republican Army almost precisely a year earlier, several months before Germany’s invasion of Poland had precipitated a wider conflict. The IRA planned a campaign, codenamed the S-Plan – S for sabotage. Their aim was to win back Ulster, or – possibly – to impress their German allies, with whom they imagined they might one day join forces. The Irish government, fiercely protective of neutrality, had locked up rebel leaders. The bombing on the ‘mainland’ carried on, hundreds of low-key attacks aimed at small-scale infrastructure: local power stations, railway lines, post offices, letter boxes, telephone exchanges. Smoke bombs were set off in crowded cinemas. Damage was limited. The stated aim had been to kill no one, but mistakes were made, and there were lethal casualties. The campaign had appeared to dwindle.
Why had it reignited here, in sleepy Cambridge? And why target a TV mast? Brooke knew no one with a set. He’d seen one working in a shop window on Petty Cury, showing a shadowy two-minute Mickey Mouse cartoon. Removing the mast hardly amounted to a vital blow against the body politic, let alone the body economic.
He lit a Black Russian and watched the smoke rise to the nicotine-coloured ceiling.
He felt his nerves, down legs and arms and at his temples, suddenly freeze. It was a moment he recognised: the moment of disturbi
ng revelation. He’d missed the obvious, because it had been in plain sight. Sean Flynn, an Irish Catholic boy, had been kidnapped and murdered, drowned in the river, twenty-four hours before a unit of the IRA had carried out an attack at an electronics factory on the bank of the same river. Brooke sat up. He saw again the pale hand of the drowning child, and then – his imagination instantly in top gear – the red heraldic hand of Ulster, dripping blood.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The dawn was lost in fresh flurries of snow, the light of the day diffused in mid-air, creating a grey, teeming world. Flakes stuck to Brooke’s eyelashes as he set out towards the hospital, so he kept his head down, and was only able to catch sight of the great stone paws of the lions which guarded the entrance to the Fitzwilliam Museum, before turning sharply to cross the street. Here he had to use all his childhood knowledge of the city to prevent a tumble into the open runnels which at this point replaced the ordinary gutters. The snow had filled them entirely, but they were two feet deep and treacherous. Built to carry water in a ‘new river’ from the hills, they’d brought a stream into the heart of the town for centuries. As a child he’d fashioned paper boats at school, and then let them sail down the street, watched by puzzled pedestrians. One of these featherweight ships had survived its journey all the way to Fitzbillies bun shop, and now stood on the mantelpiece at home.
He leapt the first runnel, packed with snow, then crossed the road and leapt the second.
By the time he reached the stone portico of the hospital, the front of his coat was white, and he had to stand, stamping, to shift the flakes and ice. It was only when he’d finished that he realised Claire was there too, in her nurse’s coat, cradling a steaming mug.
‘Bunking off?’ he said. He put his arms around her and they stood in close contact for a ticking minute, enjoying the intimate heat.
