The Mathematical Bridge

by Jim Kelly

  The memory made him think of the child he’d been, and the child Sean Flynn had been. What was the reality of the boy’s life at home? His new-found friend had painted a picture of a boisterous, headstrong lad who loved football and could turn his hand to petty theft. It was a picture which jarred badly with the neat front room at 36 Askew Road, Shepherd’s Bush. To this was now added the photograph found in Hendrie’s pocket of the boy’s mother. Hendrie’s death and Smith’s flight had revealed much, but Brooke still felt the key to the mystery was the child, and the home he had left behind in Shepherd’s Bush.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  They left the car in an anonymous side street a mile west of Shepherd’s Bush. The Wasp was the only vehicle in sight. Mr Gerald Flynn’s place of work was the London Underground pay office at Paddington, where the murdered boy’s father was a senior clerk – according to the form neatly filled in and signed that had accompanied his son to Cambridge.

  Edison, reluctantly abandoning the Wasp, set out for Paddington by train. The plan was a simple one: the detective sergeant would take a statement from Mr Flynn while Brooke tackled his wife. Then they could compare notes. Brooke found a cafe at the corner of Askew Road, from the front window of which he could see the gate of number 36. He planned to knock once the teenage son had left for his early shift, having checked his clocking-on time with the railway depot by phone the night before. He wished to interview Mrs Flynn alone, without the baleful support of young Bobbie.

  Most of the snow had thawed in London, leaving slush in the gutters and the occasional sheet of trickling ice. He was smearing a slice of bread around the rim of his plate when he saw Mrs Flynn stepping out smartly down the short path to her front gate. Which wasn’t in the plan, and so he had to move fast, leaving too much change on the table and dashing out into the cold sunlight, falling in twenty yards in her wake.

  The wicker shopping basket swung at her hip as she made her way north, down Bassein Park Road into Uxbridge Road, a major thoroughfare heading west towards the centre of Shepherd’s Bush. Something about Mrs Flynn’s focused energy made Brooke hold back from catching her up. Despite the chaos of the city street she seemed on a mission. Trams clanked past, a horse-drawn dray negotiated the corner and the pavements were crowded. The area was what Claire would have called ‘a cut above’: swept gutters, thriving shops and even a tea house, with gilded signwriting on the window advertising Patisserie. Mrs Flynn did not linger, heading east, past the shops: a butcher’s festooned with plucked fowl, a sprawling greengrocer’s, a hardware store occupying a corner site, boasting Six Floors of Essentials. Mrs Flynn bowled serenely onwards, hardly glancing at the goods on trestles set out on the pavement.

  As Brooke followed, he considered the questions he’d ask. There had to be something in the family’s past to explain the boy’s death. Were they involved in the IRA bomb plot? Had the child seen too much at home? What family – what mother or father – would kill to silence their own child? Edison had suggested on the long drive south that the parents might know who had killed the child but were too scared to talk. Were they victims too?

  After twenty minutes Brooke could see ahead the wide expanse of a green, the snow still on the ground here, across the lawns. A horse, coat steaming, drank at a stone trough. The neighbourhood was a poor one, the shops grimy with soot, the gutters full of refuse and slush. Mrs Flynn entered the park through a gate and sat, very still, at a bench, watching dusty pigeons fluttering over a handful of crumbs tossed down by an old man leaning on a stick. She seemed able to combine sitting silently with extreme agitation, constantly checking a purse in her bag, a handkerchief in her coat, tugging at the fingertips of a worn pair of leather gloves. Brooke could have sat beside her and asked his questions then, but something held him back, a sense that this brisk early morning walk was somehow part of a greater design.

  After ten minutes she sprang to her feet, straightening her coat, as if some decision – finally taken – had unlocked the spell which held her in the park. Initially retracing her steps, she turned off the high road down a narrow street cluttered with market stalls. At the far end was a small parade of shops and she ducked quickly into a greengrocer’s. There was no queue inside, so Brooke stood outside watching as she chose a cauliflower, carrots and what looked like a bunch of parsnips. The greengrocer, smiling, seemed to know her well.

  A butcher’s was next door and she ordered three chops and some sausages, and proffered a set of ration cards, which were stamped. Brooke, at the back of a short queue, thought he saw three cards, but he could not be sure. The idea that a simple case of petty fraud might lie at the root of the mystery dampened Brooke’s mood, and so he was a few yards behind her as she entered the next shop, a general grocer’s. The goods on offer were not extravagant and there seemed little choice. She bought three eggs, a half-pound of butter, some lard, a pint of milk and a can of peaches. Again, the ration cards were handed over, neatly splayed.

  The pounding of the official stamp was rhythmic, before the grocer handed them back with a cheerful: ‘Good day, Mrs Walsh.’ He touched the brim of a small straw hat.

  She fled, head down, out into the street. Brooke waited a few seconds, making sure he’d heard the man clearly. But there was no doubt: it had been Mrs Walsh – not Flynn.

  Brooke loitered until the shop was empty, showed his warrant card and asked for a moment. The grocer fetched a girl from the yard and told her to mind the counter, leading Brooke into a backroom where an elderly woman sat in front of a smouldering coal fire.

  ‘She can’t hear us,’ said the grocer, touching her for reassurance on the shoulder. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You served a woman a few moments ago. You called her Mrs Walsh.’

  He nodded, looking over Brooke’s shoulder to check the shop.

  ‘That’s the name on the ration card?’

  ‘It is. She shops here regular. Has done for years. Husband died, I think. She’s in service now, the other ration cards are for a different name. Floyd? Something like that.’

  ‘Flynn,’ said Brooke.

  ‘That’s it. Twice a week, sometimes more. Is it the card? They say there’s forgeries, but I’d have trusted her. Nice woman, a better class of Irish – no offence.’

  Outside, standing in the street, Brooke noted a school opposite, a handful of children forming a single line, waiting to go in for the register. Two storeys in red brick, with a niche for a marble saint kneeling, a girl looking up at a painted Madonna. It reminded him of the same grotto, caught in stone in the corridor of St Alban’s. Walking to the railing he found a noticeboard: the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes. He kept thinking of St Alban’s, with its careworn head teacher Liam Walsh and his young wife. Walsh was as common an Irish name as Murphy or O’Brien. The death of Sean Flynn was still a mystery, but Brooke felt with absolute certainty that he’d edged closer to the truth at its heart.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The story, when finally laid bare, was a tale of the times: a family torn apart, its victims hidden by the confusions of war. Gerald Flynn, when confronted with the name in his ‘wife’s’ ration book, had reluctantly told the truth: he was a widower, with two grown boys, living with a married woman who was not his wife, with a boy of her own, until they’d sent the child north, away from the threat of the bombs, to Cambridge.

  They were not married, and she was certainly not divorced or the recipient of an annulment from the church. In order to ‘live in sin’, Mrs Walsh had simply abandoned her old neighbourhood of Shepherd’s Bush and moved – spatially and socially – upwards: up Uxbridge Road, in fact, to the widower’s house. A marriage in Ireland was manufactured for the benefit of the neighbours and the Flynns’ few local relatives in London.

  Her real husband was Liam Walsh, a school teacher. A brief description pointed clearly to the startling conclusion: the same Liam Walsh was now head teacher of St Alban’s, Upper Town, Cambridge. Why had he left his wife and son? In a series of tearful
interviews at the police station, she mentioned the attentions of the widower Flynn, which were eventually discovered by her husband, a quiet, thoughtful man, a form teacher at Our Lady of Lourdes. In a whisper she’d offered the single damning truth: that she loved the widower, not her husband. There had been rows, and threats, and finally blows. Liam had left, first for a rented room in Hammersmith, then a new job. He’d promised letters, and visits to see the boy, but there’d been no news.

  Three years of silence had passed, during which Mr and Mrs Flynn had – in Gerald Flynn’s words – simply ‘carried off’ their new position of husband and wife without the need of a ceremony of any kind. The ration card had presented a difficulty. She could have tried to bluff the authorities, but the process of application was bureaucratic, so she’d decided to avoid outright fraud. The local community was close. Hence Mary Flynn’s long walk to the shops and her old neighbourhood, where she was still known as Mrs Walsh. The war and its confusion had simply aided their subterfuge.

  Young Sean, never reminded of his real father, had seemed to forget him. Nervous, unhappy, he’d been the cuckoo in the nest. Gerald Flynn resented the boy and had pressed for him to be sent away, on the grounds that it would ‘make a man of him’. His mother resisted until the diocese wrote and made it plain this would be his last chance to leave under their care.

  Even then they’d hesitated. Sean disliked being separated from his mother for even a few hours. All they wanted to do, Mrs Flynn had pleaded, was to live the life of a family, because that was what they were. A loving family. She’d committed a sin, many sins, but she’d asked forgiveness every day at Our Lady of Lourdes. She’d ask every day of her life. In the end, even she had to admit the sensible thing was to send the boy safely away.

  The Flynns denied any knowledge of the IRA S-Plan, Colm Hendrie or Joe Smith. Mrs Flynn had no idea why the butchered Hendrie should have her picture in his Catholic missal. The teenage Bobbie again professed no interest in uniting Ireland, dismissing the whole complex skein of Irish politics as a bitter dispute between peasants who put religion before the reality of working life. His father had got them out of the slums, and young Bobbie was going to work hard to get himself another rung up the social ladder. He had dreams of owning his own motorcar.

  The child’s body still needed to be formally identified. Saturday was confirmed as the date for the trip north. Mr Flynn would try to get the time off work, but the weekend had been set aside for a full company audit. Edison’s verdict was suitably neat: ‘Bit of a nobby clerk, our Gerald. More interested in moving up in the world with his pretty wife. Not a ghost of the Emerald Isle in his accent any more.’

  They left the Flynns in their suburban villa and drove north. They had, after all, committed no crimes beyond some minor misdemeanours in sending Sean away under what was, in fact, a false name.

  The crimes, as such, lay north, along the old Cambridge road.

  The rest of the story, the flight of the cuckolded Liam Walsh, his bigamous marriage to the much-younger Kathleen and his impending fatherhood, they’d kept to themselves, saving such revelations for the Saturday visit.

  First, they’d confront the head teacher at home.

  Brooke broke the silence as they rattled out into the countryside.

  ‘You can see the dilemma, Edison. Father Ward said they got a list of the evacuees a week before they arrived. Names and addresses. So, Walsh knew in advance that his whole life might be ruined, and everything lost. Wife, child and job – and house!’

  Between them they tried to reassemble the tragedy.

  God, it seemed, had played a cruel trick. The boy, sent north, might easily have recognised his real father. The boy’s mother most certainly would have recognised her real husband if, and when, she’d visited her son. Walsh risked prison as a bigamist. How could he protect the world he’d built at St Alban’s?

  Could all this amount to a motive for murder? Could Liam Walsh have killed his own son? Or was Walsh in some way enmeshed with the IRA cell, with Hendrie and Smith? Did the boy’s arrival, and the possible exposure of the teacher’s crime, threaten them and their plans? The mild-mannered teacher seemed an unlikely firebrand, but then he was hardly a typical bigamist either. In Brooke’s experience the bigamist was often charming, louche, deceptive. Walsh seemed duty-bound, stoical and loving.

  ‘I don’t believe he’d have anything to do with killing the kiddie, sir,’ said Edison, nosing the Wasp through a blizzard as they descended a hill on the old Roman road from the downs above Royston. A snow-flecked milestone promised CAMBRIDGE 15 MILES. Around them, in the dusk, pale hills glowed. Ahead they could just see the half-blinded tail lights of a lorry they’d been following since they’d left the grey outer suburbs of the capital.

  Brooke lit a cigarette, using a glove to clear condensation from the windscreen.

  ‘What if someone else did it, Edison? Hendrie or Smith, perhaps. Either on Walsh’s command, or to save him from the inevitable reckoning and the arrival of the police at St Alban’s. Did they all fear discovery?’

  Edison was silent for twenty minutes as they reached the city, creeping past the Spinning House, still on the same Roman road. ‘He could have got away with it,’ he said, negotiating an army lorry parked outside the Round Church. ‘He could have kept his head down, he could have been ill when the mother visited. It’s risky, but it’s better than—’

  ‘Filicide,’ said Brooke. ‘Somehow that sounds worse, doesn’t it? But the child, Edison. What if he’d recognised his father? What if Walsh feared that moment above all else. He’d have had the boy in his class. He’d have had to teach him. See him every day. Put a plaster on his bloodied knee. Feel his forehead for a fever.’

  The salt lorries had cleared the city’s streets but stopped short of Castle Hill, so Edison put the Wasp into first gear and crawled up the incline and in through the gates of St Alban’s School. The playground was deserted, the snow still unswept.

  Brooke hauled himself out of the car, stretching his legs.

  ‘The moment of truth, Edison. Liam Walsh has got some explaining to do. I wonder how much of the truth he’s told his young wife.’

  The head teacher’s cottage, a terraced house, was in a nearby street. Edison locked the Wasp and they set out, although Brooke cast a glance back, noting a light burning in the church, a weak echo of candlelight behind a stained-glass window, which depicted, in shadowy colours, the death of the eponymous St Alban: the martyr’s severed head lying bloodied on the green grass, the Roman executioner standing back in silvered armour, a crowd of citizens shocked by the martyrdom. He imagined Father Ward, inside, bent in prayer before the altar.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Kathleen Walsh answered the door, standing back to let them into the cottage’s front room. The conflict of emotions in her face was remarkable, and – Brooke felt – exhibited an extraordinary honesty. The shy smile of a welcome was almost obliterated by an acute anxiety. Her dark good looks were animated by the flames of a fire in the grate, which gave to her hair a sheen to match the kettle set on the hearth.

  Edison, frozen after the long drive, succumbed to the lure of the fire and placed himself four-square in front of the flickering light.

  ‘Is Mr Walsh in?’ asked Brooke, aware of the particular metallic tick of the mantelpiece clock. Only later, looking back, would he recall the passing seconds it marked.

  ‘He’s in the church, Inspector. A prayer – it’s a habit. He won’t be a moment. He locks up for Father Ward.’

  ‘He has keys?’

  ‘Yes.’ She said it so quickly and lightly that Brooke was almost sure she was innocent of what they’d discovered in London: innocent of the knowledge that her husband was not her husband, and the child that was coming would have had a half-brother.

  ‘Do you mind if we wait?’ asked Brooke.

  ‘Not at all. Please – sit.’

  On one of the deep, battered chairs a nest of knitting lay on the arm, a baby’s s
hawl in white, almost complete. Brooke sat, lifting a thread of wool away as he subsided into the cushions. He was acutely aware that he had the power, in a single sentence, to destroy this woman’s entire world, to reset all its principal certainties and replace them with uncertainties. A fallen woman, with a child, would have to leave her home. All Brooke had to do was to tell her the truth.

  ‘How is your husband?’ asked Brooke.

  She looked puzzled by the question. ‘Liam carries other people’s troubles as well as his own. He worries for the child that’s to come. Then this poor boy is taken from us, which he takes as a personal failure, when it is a simple act of evil. But that is how he feels: guilty. And these men – the bombers – he has sympathy for their ideals, but not for violence.’ She laughed. ‘He has sympathy for all ideals, I think – which is generous, isn’t it? He is a generous man. And there’s a school to run, the evacuees to accommodate. It’s a burden, but one he sought out, as he always reminds me. He was a senior teacher; no one made him apply for the head’s post, although everyone knew he’d be wonderful. And he is – in a quiet way. So the evening prayer helps. And I have my moment of silent privacy too.’ She smiled again, tidying up the knitting into a basket. ‘He’ll be a minute, no more.’

  Brooke looked at the clock: ten past eight.

  Edison took up the conversation, asking about the degree to which the diocese, the bishop in particular, interfered with the running of the school.

  Brooke examined the clock face: tin-white, with Roman numerals, and marked with the maker’s name and the scroll-like motif Riley & Sons, Galway City. As a child he’d been fascinated by the indiscernible progress of clocks. Often, filling the hours between the end of school and the serving of dinner at home, he’d wander the city and note the clocks, watching trance-like in the hope of seeing a minute hand actually move. The silvered dials on the octagonal tower of Foster’s Bank were a favourite. His father had once left him outside as he conducted business within, beneath a stunning dome of glazed tiles. Brooke had passed the time in the churchyard opposite, trying to catch the sudden stutter forward of the clock hands. It had become a lifetime’s habit. Foster’s clock, a finely tuned machine, had won, creeping forward to the chiming of the quarter hour undetected.