The Mathematical Bridge

by Jim Kelly

  Brooke retrieved the latest edition of the London telephone directory from switchboard, collected a cup of tea from the canteen and took the steps to his office as a man walks to the gallows. The call had to be made. Sean Flynn had been missing for two full days. The search for his body on the river had been abandoned. The dry riverbed would be revealed tonight. His parents had a right to know the likely outcome of such an operation, and the likely outcome was that they’d find the five-year-old’s body in its sack. Father Ward, at St Alban’s, had rung the Spinning House an hour earlier to confirm that the missing child had not reappeared. When the boy’s mother visited the city, as she was scheduled to do on the coming Saturday, along with other parents anxious to see their children, it was likely she might have to formally identify the body laid out in the morgue.

  Brooke looked out over grey, snowy rooftops. The day itself was stillborn, the light in the sky filtered through a haze of falling ice, flecks of snow. Brooke switched on his desk lamp, adjusted the blue-tinted glasses and searched for Sean’s father’s name – Gerald J. Flynn – and the address listed in his file west of Shepherd’s Bush. The Flynns took up several pages, with many of the addresses clustered in west London and north London, both thriving Irish migrant communities. There was one G. F. Flynn, in Wood Green, north London, and then a long line of G. M. Flynns. Brooke felt his heart skip at the relief, and he tossed the book aside.

  Switchboard put him through to Shepherd’s Bush police station. A note was taken of the Borough’s request for a constable to visit the house. At this stage Sean Flynn was simply missing, but the parents should be told that they should brace themselves for bad news. Brooke suggested to the duty sergeant at Shepherd’s Bush that Mary Flynn kept to her planned visit to Cambridge for that coming Saturday. Her husband should accompany her. If this was not possible, then a friend or close relative should be with her. The Borough would relay any news to Shepherd’s Bush in the interim.

  Finished, Brooke stood and, looking down from his window on the yard, spied the Wasp below, the windscreen flecked with snow, the bonnet steaming. Ice encrusted the headlamps and handles. Five minutes later Edison appeared, with tea and biscuits, the snow melting on his great overcoat, which he laboured to shift off his broad shoulders.

  ‘Progress, sir. And a name – well, almost a name. Certainly, an address.’

  ‘From the start, Edison,’ said Brooke, lighting a cigarette.

  As his sergeant fished out his notebook, Brooke noted that the pensioner was looking considerably younger than he had on his first day back on duty. Detection, rather than the carrying out of uniformed duties, was clearly his metier. Or was it the speeding thrill of the Wolseley Wasp?

  ‘After the Coventry bomb they picked up two of the men pretty sharpish,’ said Edison. ‘The rest of the organisation went to ground. Killing five people wasn’t in the plan. Nor was having two of their men on death row. The bomber they didn’t catch, the one who brought in the orders and the fuses, was long gone. He’s the one they needed, of course, because he’s the link with Dublin.

  ‘Then they had a stroke of luck. The two bombers wouldn’t talk, but the Irish community – the clubs, the pubs, the churches – they were shocked, outraged. CID was able to put together a description of the outsider – tall, slim, handsome, with a widow’s peak – and they came up with at least two names he’d used while he was in the city. Second stroke of luck, he used one of them – John Fitzpatrick – to book a room in the Caledonian Hotel, near King’s Cross, a week ago.

  ‘Special Branch came in the front door, chummy was at the bar, although they didn’t know that. He did a runner, in his shirtsleeves, despite the snow. If he’s got decent paperwork and the necessary Irish ID card he’ll be back in Dublin by now, in a new suit. Upstairs at the Caledonian, in his room, they found his coat on the hook; no wallet, but a diary, with names. Well, eight sets of initials at least, and eight partial addresses. So, T. H., 18 Station Road, that kind of thing. He’d have memorised the towns I suspect, and his compatriots’ full names. I had a look at the list and spotted Honey Hill. They were ringing round, but no one had thought of Cambridge, and I’m pretty sure it’s unique.’

  Honey Hill was at the heart of the Upper Town rookery, the dilapidated ghetto of rooms and attics in which the poorest lived. The area was overcrowded, insanitary and, after dark, off limits to polite society.

  Edison produced a notebook. ‘P. O., 14B Honey Hill. It was top of the list, which could mean nothing, or it could mean Cambridge was next to cop it.’

  ‘The Newton factory bomb,’ said Brooke.

  Edison held up a finger. ‘Maybe. That’s certainly them, but there’s a pattern, with this S-Plan. So far each cell has been responsible for two bombs. They get two ready, blow one, pretty quickly blow number two, then close down the cell and bugger off. So I reckon there’s one to come, sir. Unless the death of the kiddie has spooked them.’

  Brooke sat back in his chair and considered the large map of the city which hung on the far wall. Cambridge was not an industrial city, but there was no doubt it comprised some high-profile targets, as Jo Ashmore had gone to some lengths to list.

  ‘I need to tell Madingley,’ said Brooke. ‘The top brass can drum up the manpower. If we’re going to put a guard on all the targets, we’ll need a battalion.’ He stood. ‘You need a rest, Sergeant. A few hours at least – that’s an order. But first set a watch on Honey Hill. Let’s keep out of the way if we can. Use the local constable on the street. Nothing heavy-handed. Let’s get a spyhole: a house opposite, a corner shop, whatever it takes. Let’s clap eyes on the mysterious P. O.

  ‘A description would be a good start. Then we can match it to the eyewitness account from the night of the explosion. We’ve got a rough idea. I’ll check now and see if the witness can’t do better. Her first effort was an Irish caricature. I’ll see if she can add detail. Meanwhile, we keep watch on Honey Hill. But anything suspicious, Edison, anything we can’t deal with, we get this P. O. character off the streets and in a cell downstairs. We take no risks. At all costs we must stop a second bomb.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Brooke, using the map he’d drawn in his mind as a child, set off for Davison College, via a series of alleyways which led down to the water meadows. A small herd of cattle stood steaming on the far side of the river, as he traced a route over a series of small wooden bridges, known as the Little Bridges, to Newnham village. The mainstream itself had been reduced to a trickle, banks of gravel revealed, peppered with snow. By nightfall the upper river would be dry and the final search for the lost boy could begin.

  Once across the fen the Victorian colleges began: estates of brick, with brutal ark-like chapels and sturdy turrets. Bicycles were chained to every available yard of wrought-iron railings.

  Dr Augustine Bodart’s brief statement, made at the station the day after the explosion at Newton’s, said that between the hours of nine and six she was to be found in her laboratory at the college, a foundation for women, set at the far reach of the city, with fields beyond, dotted with rugby posts. The college’s facade presented a particularly depressing vision, with prison-like ramparts, designed to repel the vices of the city, or – more succinctly – men.

  The porter said that the inspector would, indeed, find Dr Bodart in the laboratories. A junior porter would accompany the visitor on his forward journey, as all outsiders required a chaperone. The route led through a small door, reminiscent of Alice’s gateway to Wonderland. And what lay beyond was indeed a world of its own: a great garden, hidden from the city, protected by the encircling wall of college buildings.

  Here, secretly, the grim neo-Gothic of the new colleges had been abandoned for something much more joyful: white wood replaced stone, windows reached down to the ground, a sense of playful decoration gave the buildings a seaside air. The garden itself, despite a central parterre and monument, was otherwise informal, dominated by exotic trees and sweeping, snowy lawns.

  The juni
or porter, a youth whose last growth spurt had left his trousers two inches short of his shoes, had clearly judged Brooke’s moral fibre as adequate, as he was promptly abandoned at the first of a series of arrowed signs marked LABORATORY. The path led through a small wood to a cluster of prefabs, the roofs studded with skylights from which an extraordinary golden light radiated, gilding the tree boughs above. Brooke swapped the green-tinted lenses for the blue and stepped inside.

  Bodart stood alone in a white lab coat, tending a long line of small plants laid out in pots beneath three great lights, each set within silvered dishes. The intensity of the golden beams was excruciating for Brooke, so he turned his back and swapped the blue lenses for the black. The heat was subtropical and humid, and somewhere a boiler throbbed, possibly beneath their feet. It reminded him fleetingly of St Alban’s – an image that, looking back, he should have noted and considered.

  Bodart gestured to the roof, the makeshift prefab walls. ‘Science for women!’ she said. ‘We are permitted to use the laboratories in town. Permitted by men. I prefer to be a master in my own hall. You say this?’ The animated eyes caught the light and Brooke found himself smiling in response.

  Bodart, who wore glasses on a silver chain around her neck, asked if she could complete her current set of observations before giving full attention to the detective inspector. Five minutes, no more.

  Brooke dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. He tried to concentrate on Bodart’s work. He thought the plants were sweet peas. Those induced by the lights to bloom were arranged in lines by colour: white, blue and red. Others, about to bloom, waited in wooden trays. The work, whatever its purpose, seemed to involve meticulous observation. Notes were transferred from clipboards to ledgers. Numbers were written up in chalk on a large blackboard, broken into grids. Each plant was examined by eye, at close quarters, as if every leaf and stem held within it the secret of life.

  Finished, Bodart ran a tap to fill a glass of water and pulled up a chair. A sturdy woman, she’d tied back her grey hair in a tight bun. The mobile face refused to succumb to inaction. Her eyes flitted over Brooke’s face, as if collecting data from a particularly fascinating pot plant.

  Brooke established the basics quickly enough. She lived in a houseboat on the riverbank, preferring what she termed ‘the world outside’ to a college room. Her work, on plant hereditary sequences, kept her at college late. She reprised her statement given verbally on the night of the explosion. Walking home she’d seen the three men climbing out of the gap in the security wire at the factory. Wanting to raise the alarm, but afraid of alerting the men to her presence, she’d backtracked along the towpath towards town and met the constable walking towards her. He’d told her to wait on a bench, while he ran to the scene.

  ‘So you saw the men, and then the constable, almost immediately?’

  ‘Yes. A few seconds, half a minute perhaps. Good fortune, certainly.’

  ‘And how far away were you, when you first saw these men?’

  She looked into the mid-distance, as if trying to see them again. ‘Thirty yards?’

  ‘Did they see you?’

  ‘Perhaps. They were fleeing, yes? So they have no time for anything but to run. The criminal is a degenerate. They do not pause to reflect. The pattern of behaviour is animalistic.’

  ‘I see. But you saw them. You reflected. This wasn’t just a fleeting image. The light was good?’

  She waved a hand. ‘The moonlight, the snow, so yes. I can see them clearly. These are for here …’ She held her glasses up to her eyes, her free hand a foot away. ‘For reading and observing.’

  ‘It is possible we have found one of these men, Doctor. I need to compile a full description of them all.’

  Brooke took out his notebook and they began carefully to build a picture of the three men. Bodart, a trained observer, was an expert on detail. One was ‘hulking’, a ‘typical labourer’, with heavy bones, and a black jacket stretched across a broad back. She thought his trousers were tucked into socks, revealing what she called worker’s boots. She thought he wore a heavy jumper, running to a thick neck – almost ‘no neck at all’; in fact, merely a continuation of the shoulders. The face was heavy, with dark eyebrows, ‘gone to fat’ and rounded. Clean-shaven, with a heavy ‘lantern’ jaw.

  His accomplices were less conspicuous; lightly built, one with light fair hair and tall, the other dark, but partly obscured by a hat – a ‘cap’ – pulled down tight. He had been the smallest of all, perhaps five feet six, with very slim limbs. Night-vision had wiped any colour from the scene.

  ‘Did they speak?’ asked Brooke, although he was trying to recall her initial description given at the scene on the night of the blast. Had she not described them all as of the ‘labouring’ classes?

  For a moment she hesitated. ‘I think the big one, who held open the gap in the fence, said “Move!” – but no more.’

  ‘And they ran south, towards the city?’

  ‘I did not see this. I quickly turned away. Clearly they run, because your constable finds them gone.’

  Brooke asked if – when – they had a suspect in custody would Bodart be available to identify the man.

  Bodart seemed taken aback. For ten long seconds she was quite motionless.

  ‘Yes. Certainly – forgive me. I am nervous of the authorities. But this is my duty. I am a guest in your country.’

  Brooke stood, picking up his coat.

  ‘What’s life like on the river?’ asked Brooke. He found Dr Bodart an enigmatic figure, her life lonely and self-contained. ‘Quiet?’

  Her face brightened, fluid again, manufacturing a smile. ‘Not at all. Private, yes. But I have neighbours, friends. The houseboats are a village, yes? The English do this well – they combine the respect of the person with the collective good. I approve,’ she added, nodding. ‘It is idyllic,’ she said, pleased she’d found the right word. Then her face darkened. ‘But this child …’

  ‘We’ve been dredging the river. There’s no hope now. The boy was murdered. Tonight the river will be drained. We may find the body.’

  ‘So it is true?’ She shook her head. ‘In war countries clash. Empires. Soldiers. This is sometimes necessary. Darwin sees this.’ She covered her eyes for a moment. ‘But this, an innocent, this is unforgiveable. A crime against nature.’

  Turning to go, Brooke thought he saw something in her eyes: sadness certainly, even a weariness with the world, but also a trace of fear. Looking back from the door he saw that she had put on her glasses and picked up a pot plant, examining its leaves.

  Walking back through the now falling snow of dusk he was struck at the vividness of Bodart’s descriptions of the three bombers: the hulking, the fair, the dark. It was as if the clinical certainty of her experiments had given her a clarity and simplicity of vision in the real world, outside the cloistered laboratory.

  Crossing back over one of the Little Bridges on Coe Fen, in sight of the Spinning House, he wondered if the forcing of the plants under light meant they grew so quickly their progress was actually visible – a tiny green, soft bud, opening to reveal the simple secret of its colour, red, blue or white. Not for the first time he felt that his damaged eyes had saved him from such a life, observing minutiae, recording results, building a career out of patience.

  In the end he might have found the experience deadening. For the second time in as many days he was forced to consider the possibility that his disability had been a gift.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  As dusk fell, the snow, which still lay on the rooftops and in the parks, seemed to connect to an inner source of illumination, brightening as the sky darkened. A brief thaw in the hours after noon had been ruthlessly reversed, leaving a lethal patina of ice on the pavements and saw-tooth icicles hanging from eaves. Brooke collected a torch from the Spinning House and, swaddled in his Great War overcoat, set out briskly for the river: not the central stretch held between the stone college walls, but the upper reach at Mill Pond, wh
ere the chalky streams flowed down from the southern hills, wandering into the city through the water meadows.

  The mill pond itself had formed a deep pit over the centuries as it swirled before slipping under Silver Street Bridge. Even now, with the river almost drained away to a trickle, its gloomy green depths were untouched, hidden beneath a cataract of ice. The languid stream that crossed Coe Fen to feed it, which he’d crossed earlier, was now a dry bed, with nothing more than a streamlet glistening as it threaded its way through the gravel and sand.

  Cold air slumps into dips and shallows, and so, as Brooke descended the steps to the punt dock, he felt the temperature drop. A boatman was checking the chains on the craft – twenty or more, set in parallel lines, lying now on the riverbed below. Here a police constable stood by a brazier set on the gravel, in which a flame flickered.

  ‘All in order?’ asked Brooke.

  ‘Sir. I’m to guard these steps, and the dock. Downstream all the other steps are watched too, until you get to the Great Bridge.’

  The PC nodded over Brooke’s shoulder. ‘Here’re the troops.’

  The town’s Civil Defence depot had agreed to lend the Borough twenty men for the night. Mostly too old for military service, or too young, or conscientious objectors, they formed an unlikely battalion. They came equipped with torches and an assortment of garden tools: rakes, brooms, hoes, and one with a wheelbarrow.

  Brooke got them all to climb down the steps to the riverbed while he stood on the dock, a stage above his audience.

  ‘My name’s Inspector Eden Brooke,’ he said. ‘We’re grateful for your help tonight. The river’s almost dry. A child was thrown in the water two nights ago, in a sack. We need to search the river from this point down to Baits Bite.

  ‘The child was last seen passing beneath the Mathematical Bridge.’ Brooke pointed downstream. Beyond the modern span of Silver Street Bridge they could just see the dim outline of the wooden wonder itself, a ghostly curve, magically constructed of straight beams.