The Mathematical Bridge

by Jim Kelly

  She offered him a sip of the scalding tea.

  ‘I heard about the explosion,’ she said. ‘Priestly, the porter in the laundry, said he was outside clearing snow and thought it was a bomb. He was in the last lot.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here. Caretaker took a bit of shrapnel.’ He decided to leave aside the fact that he’d been standing beside the caretaker at the time.

  ‘We had a soldier in earlier, broke his ankle playing football in his barrack hut – idiot. Anyway, he said the inside story was the bombers were these Irishmen – the rebels?’

  Brooke shrugged. ‘Looks like it. It’s a bit amateurish. Not much more than a firecracker.’

  ‘So what’s worrying you? I can tell that look.’

  ‘The child in the river. Could be – almost certainly is – an evacuee from London. Irish Catholic. Which is one of those worrying coincidences that you know can’t be a coincidence. I’d put money on a link, wouldn’t you?’

  She watched the snow falling. ‘I came down for a chat with Joy. It’s our secret rendezvous.’

  ‘How was she?’

  ‘Alright. Worried, sick with it I suspect, but you’d never know. She’s got your ability to screen her emotions from the outside world. Or is it a disability?’

  Brooke examined her face. ‘Lipstick?’ he asked. ‘Is that allowed?’

  ‘The ward’s freezing, they had to shut the boilers this afternoon and the heat’s not cranked up yet. My lips were blue and unsightly and hardly an advertisement for good health. Besides, I make the rules. It’s started a trend on Sunshine Ward – we look like the Tiller Girls!’ She laughed and slipped the hood off her head. ‘Come on, I’ll show you …’

  Inside the main doors she turned left and down concrete stairs to the basement. This was their secret place. When the shifts allowed they’d meet in the warmth of the boiler room, to which Claire had secured a key. Brooke said that if they were ever caught it would be a scandal and the News of the World would label it a love nest.

  Brooke’s hopes were dashed when Claire switched on the lights. The boiler room had been transformed into a new ward: brass bedsteads stood in military lines, a few inches between each.

  ‘They shut the boiler down to move some pipes to get them all in,’ she said. ‘Sixty beds. It’s for air raids, so we don’t get overwhelmed. We can’t have beds out in corridors, or worse, in the street. And they’ve taken the locks off the doors,’ she said sadly.

  Brooke let her go back to the children’s ward while he headed along the main ground-floor corridor to Admissions.

  Ridley, the Newton factory caretaker, was in a bed, under a bright light.

  ‘I’ll live,’ he said cheerfully, shaking Brooke’s hand, although he looked frail.

  His chest was bandaged as well as his head.

  ‘I can go home when the doctor’s had a look. That’s after breakfast. I can’t sleep.’

  ‘How are you getting home?’

  ‘Company’s sending a car. A week off too. Managing director’s been in already. That’s Mr Tyndale. First time I’ve ever spoken to him. I told him straight that nobody got into the factory. Kept asking, mind you.’

  Ridley’s hand strayed to the bedside table and a pair of glasses.

  ‘He said I wasn’t to talk to the press, and if you asked questions I was to tell you to ring his secretary.’

  Brooke took off his hat. ‘Unfortunately, Mr Tyndale is not the chief constable, Mr Ridley. If I ask any questions, and you don’t answer, I will have to ask them again at the Spinning House.’

  Ridley swallowed hard. ‘Yes. Of course. I was just saying …’

  He bent his arm stiffly and managed to extract a business card which he handed to Brooke.

  ‘Embossed,’ he said approvingly.

  Mr Tyndale was listed as managing director and founder.

  Ridley nodded, filling his lungs. ‘He said to say if you came round that the factory manager – Mr Forbes – would answer any questions that he could on-site. He’ll be there now.’

  Brooke wondered what they were making in their factory which could account for the institutional secrecy. Television might be the sensation of the century, but on the brink of a world war a few missing sets were unlikely to register in terms of the fate of the nation. Or did the production line at Newton’s turn out something more precious?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Edison was at his desk in the sergeants’ room when Brooke came down from his office, spreading out on a large table an assortment of vegetables: carrots and beetroot, turnips and Roman cabbages. Edison’s expertise with vegetables was widely admired. His generosity was also welcomed, but – as he explained – largely the result of his four children growing up and ‘flying the coop’. Brooke worried fleetingly that the advent of spring might present his detective sergeant with an unbearable dilemma: to report for duty, or to drill his onions.

  Seeing Brooke, he stood, then threw a stiff arm out to indicate the largesse. ‘Can’t keep ’em, Mr Brooke. The shed’s freezing. And there’s only so much room in her larder. So I’ve been sent out to distribute the crop. Help yourself – the rest’ll be in soon and they won’t stand on ceremony. Hungry beggars.’

  Brooke went to the window and looked down on the station yard. Edison’s retirement plans were not entirely confined to the allotment. He owned a Wolseley Wasp, a fine motor car which he polished to a sheen, and whose engine was tuned to continual perfection.

  ‘Too icy for the car?’ asked Brooke.

  ‘No. She’s fine. I walked in to pick up this lot. Once the salt’s on the roads she can hold her own,’ said Edison, a note of hope in his voice that he might be sent out on constabulary business, which would entitle him to a vital supply of petrol coupons. ‘The desk filled me in on the factory raid,’ he said. ‘Sounds a bit slapdash to me.’

  Brooke took a seat. The sergeants’ room held lockers and tables, usually adorned with packs of cards. A sink and kettle completed the suite. Edison lowered himself into a chair.

  ‘Indeed. Nevertheless, the Home Office will want chapter and verse. I’m seeing the factory manager at Newton’s now. Then I’m back to the river to see how the dredging is going. We can’t ignore the possibility of a link, Edison. The murder is a precursor for the bomb, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘You think the kiddie got in the way?’

  ‘Maybe. I’ll need to tell the parents soon that their son is missing.’

  That corrosive word again: ‘missing’. Was it better to wait and see if he could furnish news, good or bad?

  ‘In the meantime, I’d like you to concentrate on our Fenian bombers.’

  Brooke brought him up to speed on the inquiry so far. The ‘bomb’ at the Newton factory, or at least its remains, had been packed away and sent south by train for analysis. Brooke had spent an hour on the phone with Scotland Yard. Their advice, when he finally tracked down a diffident inspector in Special Branch, was to focus on the explosives, not the bombers.

  Previous IRA devices had proved to be a concoction known as Paxo, after the popular stuffing brand for chickens, a bland mixture of sage, onion and breadcrumbs. The IRA recipe employed large quantities of potassium chloride, sulphuric acid and iron oxide. And they’d needed a ‘factory’ to mix the explosives in, somewhere out of the way, where they could gather all the ingredients together.

  The Special Branch inspector had been blunt. ‘You’ll know your own patch, Brooke. Finding the bombers is futile. The Irish stick together, whether they believe in the campaign or not. Christ, half the men are in our army, and they’re all volunteers. But you won’t get a cigarette paper between ’em. No. Look for the chemicals, look for the factory.’

  Brooke met Edison’s watery eyes. ‘Let’s get our men, and uniformed, on the job. See if we can check the local chemists, builders, anywhere they could have got the mixture for the bomb. And then there’s this mysterious “factory” – again, brief uniformed branch, let’s see if anyone has clocked anything suspic
ious. A warehouse, a garage, a lock-up, let’s get eyes on the street. And don’t forget Boudicca,’ added Brooke. The Spinning House dog unit consisted of one bloodhound. ‘If we need help, County have their own dogs. Delegate all that, Edison. Your duties are out of town.’

  Scotland Yard was coordinating the hunt for the IRA bombers in England, through the direction of Special Branch. But the most active, and successful, inquiry had been in Coventry, following a bombing in the city the previous summer. A bicycle had been left outside a shop in the city centre with explosives in the pannier, attached to a timer. The explosion had killed five and injured seventy. One of the dead had been a young woman out shopping a few days before her wedding day. One of the city’s main shopping streets had been reduced to broken glass and rubble. Two men had been arrested, charged with murder. They’d told the court the real target had been the telephone exchange, but a disastrous mistake had been made. It had cut no ice with the judge. They were in prison in Birmingham awaiting execution, while the Irish government pleaded for mercy.

  ‘I want you to go to Coventry nick, they’re the experts apparently. Read the files, Edison. We need suspects – names, a link to Cambridge. Anything that catches the eye. You have family there?’

  Edison stiffened slightly in his chair, setting down his cup.

  Brooke had met Mrs Edison once, at her husband’s official retirement presentation in the Spinning House’s great hall, the chamber in which women of ill repute had once been set to work at their spinning wheels when the building was a prison-cum-workhouse. Mrs Edison had looked ill at ease, overawed by the formality, including the chief constable’s stiff speech of commendation.

  ‘That’s not a problem?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Remind me. Mrs Edison was born in …?’

  ‘Milltown Malbay, County Clare. Now the family’s in Coventry – that’s her sisters, and a brother. They’re all close.’

  ‘Good. You can take the Wasp. I’ve authorised the petrol. DI Harvey is your man in the city. He’s got the files. They’ve made progress: the people who did it are for the drop, but they know who helped, and who kept silent when they should have rung the police. Their conclusion is that while each IRA cell is separate, there is a coordinator – and probably a supplier. The bomb is easy to assemble, but the fuses are trickier. They need to be brought in, maybe even across the water from Dublin, and then fitted by an expert. So we need to find a link to our bomb. Anything you can find. The only way to find these people is through intelligence. You’re to be our expert, Edison. If you need to stay in Coventry, stay. A hotel’s fine if it’s difficult staying with the family.’

  ‘Sir. No – Marianne, the wife’s sister, she’s got the room now. A widow, and the children all gone. I went to her wedding.’ Edison shook his head. ‘That’s half a century ago. That was in Milltown. What a place, sir. There’s a beach there that you can’t see the end of, and a great hillside, dotted with cottages. We did think, when I retired, that we might go there, buy a house, see out our days. The light’s quite different too – it sort of glows. And Mrs Edison likes a good sunset. And you can grow anything if you’ve a cow to provide the manure.’ Edison considered the array of vegetables. ‘There’s been trouble, sir, in the city, since the outrage.’

  Anti-Irish feelings had been running high since the bombing, with demonstrations, and strikes in factories with large numbers of immigrant workers. Irish labourers had been forced to quit lodging houses by irate landlords. Incidents had been recorded beyond Coventry: in London, Birmingham, Portsmouth.

  ‘I know, Sergeant. You may not have heard the latest.’ Brooke produced a folded newspaper from his coat. ‘The chief constable of Coventry, a Captain Hector, has told the Daily Telegraph – no less – that he is not of Irish descent but a “perfectly good Somerset man”. Whatever that means.’

  ‘The people I know, sir, they’re no friends of these bombers,’ said Edison. ‘They’re patriots. Not like these men, they’re out for more. They’ve no friends in Coventry or anywhere else.’

  Brooke grabbed his coat and hat. ‘Just tread carefully. One of the victims was a young woman out shopping for her wedding dress. They identified her by her engagement ring, nothing else, Edison. It’s an overused word – carnage. Anyone else dies in this campaign and we might have a full-blown riot on our hands.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Newton factory confounded expectations once Brooke was through the doors: hushed parquet corridors led past two large production halls, but there was no thunder of machinery, or hissing steam, just a hum of small drills, the whirr of extractors, a gentle precision tapping overlaid with band music on the radio. Hundreds worked on the factory floor, women with their hair in turbans and pristine white overalls, in long production lines, soldering irons in their hands. The men sat at individual desks, surrounded by drifts of electrical components, banks of radios and eviscerated TVs. Some peered into the innards of gadgets with the aid of large anglepoise magnifying glasses. It was the smell that Brooke would recall: the distinct metallic tang of electricity, the whiff of a thousand blown fuses.

  The offices, on a floor above, preserved the slightly brittle hush of a public library. A bank of secretaries typed with lightning dexterity, opposite a matching array of women operating comptometers, adding, subtracting, computing at a dizzy speed. Brooke sat at a coffee table, spinning his hat slowly in his hand, his eye sliding over copies of the Radio Times and brochures for the latest batch of TV sets. The prices were a cause of scandal in the Brooke household, and had been used to deter his son and daughter from the idea that they might have one installed. A Newton Newsletter, lying amongst the magazines, boasted: Official statistics show TV ownership close to 20,000.

  Ralph Milton-Forbes, factory manager, ushered him into a large office, set at the corner of the factory block, with a wide view of the river, and the city to the south. Downstream, Brooke could see the police launch directing the dredging, a flotilla of small boats in its wake. The fruitless search was due to end, finally, at dusk.

  ‘I’m Rafe Forbes,’ he said, delivering a firm handshake. Brooke noted the contradiction, the dropping of the double-barrelled surname but the insertion of the upper-class diminutive for Ralph. Silver hair was slicked back off a wide, open face, which made him look like he’d been running at speed. A Great Dane lay under his desk, its long legs stretched out as if to dry.

  ‘We’ll have it fixed in a week, of course,’ he said, standing at the window, looking out at the blackened TV tower. Men were at work building a scaffold, repainting scorched metal.

  ‘Ministry’s slapped a D-notice on it as well – so our bog-trotting friends won’t even get any publicity.’ Control of the press, via the ‘advisory’ system of defence notices, had invited a level of self-censorship unthinkable before the war.

  Forbes looked at Brooke, noting the thick black hair flopping forward slightly, the ochre-tinted glasses. ‘I’m told by Special Branch I should be as open as possible. Answer questions, that sort of thing. In the last lot I was at the Ministry of Supply, flying a desk. Maths, statistics, that’s my bag. Apparently, the king gave you a medal for bravery in the desert. They said you’d served with Lawrence of Arabia.’

  Brooke took a seat. ‘I saw him twice, Mr Forbes. Once across an open fire at an oasis, once from half a mile, in the white robes on a horse. If that constitutes “serving with” then they’re right.’

  Brooke broke out a fresh cigarette. ‘Why do you need Special Branch’s permission to talk to me? I thought you made TVs and radios. The IRA are targeting communications. Ridley – the caretaker – said the mast was to pick up the BBC from London. So that explains that. Hardly top-secret stuff.’

  ‘Ridley should keep his mouth shut. We all should. Cambridge is full of all sorts these days. Jews for one, Irish, Germans, Austrians – it’ll be the Eyeties next. Mussolini’s that far from coming in on Hitler’s side.’ He held up his hand, thumb and forefinger almost touching. ‘
Bloody city’s full of ’em.’ Forbes straightened his tie.

  ‘We checked the building last night,’ said Brooke. ‘It seemed secure.’

  ‘Yes, yes. They didn’t get in. Good job. The mast’s bad enough. It is a TV receiver, Ridley’s right there, for our research bods. Audience for commercial service is tiny – but one day, Brooke. One in every home. No. It’s what they may have been after that’s the problem. What they got close to.’

  He grabbed a countryman’s heavy tweed coat from a stand and clicked his fingers, bringing the dog laboriously to its feet.

  ‘I’ll show you outside.’

  The dog led the way down a concrete staircase to an outside door. Forbes produced a bunch of keys attached to his belt. ‘Three sets,’ he offered, before Brooke could ask. ‘Me, Ridley and the managing director – he lives twenty miles away, but they’re there if we need them. None of the keys from any of the three sets are missing. None of the doors were forced. So, ipso facto, no one got in.’

  ‘A copy is easy enough to make,’ offered Brooke.

  ‘Not if you keep them close,’ said Forbes, throwing open the door to reveal a snowy scene running down to the river.

  ‘And Ridley?’ asked Brooke.

  ‘You can trust Ridley. Not the brightest of men, but loyal. Worked on the shop floor, copped a bullet at Passchendaele, came back a hero. So he got the job, and a tied house. He’s sound. Why? Think he’s a covert Fenian, do we? He’s an Englishman, Brooke.’

  The dog ran manic circles in the snow. Two sets of goalposts were the only indication that a football field lay beneath. A dismal concrete changing block stood behind one of the goals, disfigured by damp, with unpainted shutters. Beyond was the perimeter fence.

  ‘How do you get through the fence at the main gates?’ asked Brooke.

  ‘After dark there’s an electric lock. You need the six-figure code. Again – just the three of us.’

  Forbes began hurling a small ball for the dog, which tore off, returning at speed, leaving a chaotic set of paw prints.