The Mathematical Bridge

by Jim Kelly

  ‘You aren’t joining us?’ asked Brooke.

  She shook her head. ‘Skating on the river was a treat when we were courting. But I’ve got the memory, I don’t need to see it again. I’d find it sad, I think, just watching.’

  ‘I’d like to see it one more time,’ said Edwardes.

  ‘I’m going to put my feet up in an empty house,’ said Kat. ‘It’ll be bliss.’

  They got Edwardes into the wheelchair and Edison pushed it down to the car, leaving tracks in the snow, which reminded Brooke of Smith’s three-wheeler.

  Once they were out of earshot Brooke took Kat’s hand. ‘What do they say?’

  ‘The pain’s bad so they’ve started giving him more morphine. That will kill him in the end. Probably in his sleep. Tonight, tomorrow, soon. So this is wonderful, Eden. I’ll rest and sleep and then I can sit with him after dark.’

  ‘I can help,’ offered Brooke, readjusting his hat. ‘We’ll bring him safely back.’

  As the Wasp crept away on the compact snow he glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw their passenger blowing his wife a kiss.

  The sun was just up, the city streets in shadow, wedges of golden light touching rooftops and towers, domes and spires. Parker’s Piece was dotted with snowmen.

  The route to Newnham Croft and Brooke’s house was simplicity itself, but Edison pulled into Regent’s Street and headed instead for the city centre, so that they could pass the Spinning House. On the pavement, in a neat line, stood the Borough’s full complement. Brooke swung round in his seat. ‘Look left, Frank. It wasn’t my idea. The order came down from the chief constable.’

  At the flash of the Wasp’s headlights the line of constables came to attention and executed a smart salute. The Wasp swept past, Edwardes’ face pressed against the cold glass.

  At the house they’d got the French windows open to give a clear view of the water meadow where the floodwater had frozen to create a perfect skating rink. Grandcourt, who had insisted on helping, had turned up before dawn with a van and six empty barrels, which he’d arranged on the ice to mark a circuit and then swept the loose snow from the track. He stood now, surveying his work, his head obscured by a great cloud of pipe smoke.

  The hoar frost clung to the riverside trees and the first light of day was numinous, a curious pink, edged with green and gold, the sunbeams in motion like celestial searchlights.

  ‘Good day for a hanging,’ said Edwardes as Brooke helped him into the wheelchair. ‘Any news, Brooke?’

  ‘The death warrants stipulated nine o’clock,’ he said checking his watch. ‘Within the hour, either way.’

  ‘What a thought,’ said Edwardes. ‘I had to witness one in Bedford. I was the prosecuting officer back before the Great War. I had to stand underneath and wait for the body to fall. That’s a memory I’d rather be without. Worst ten minutes of my life.’

  Brooke tightened the scarf at his throat: ‘Edison’s going to check with the radio indoors. News will be on the hour. There’s a crowd outside the prison gates. Apparently, they’ve been there all night. Ghouls.’

  The Coventry bombers were due to hang at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham. But the general expectation was that the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, would bow to pressure and sign a reprieve. The Irish government had pleaded for mercy, and there had been demonstrations on the streets of Dublin, while in parliament Anderson had been urged to ignore the inevitable bloodlust of the general public. There were larger issues in play. The government needed Irish men and Irish women to go on helping facilitate the smooth operation of the economy: labouring, cleaning, working in factories. They also wished to see them continue fighting in Her Majesty’s Army. So there would be hope in the young Fenians’ hearts this morning. Brooke imagined them on death row at that very moment, praying perhaps, or watching the dawn sky, expecting footsteps in the corridor heralding good news.

  Brooke’s prisoners from St Alban’s were in the same prison. Father John Ward, Marie Aitken and Liam Walsh faced charges of murder too. Their fate was uncertain. If the two Coventry bombers cheated the rope the public outrage might turn on them. The shadow of the scaffold was a long one. Which would be an injustice, felt Brooke. All three had been, to some extent, blackmailed, and none had sought the death of the boy. Smith had masterminded the bombing, gaining control over gullible and weak patriots, torn by conflicting allegiances. Smith’s ultimate fate was uncertain too. A felon’s burial was planned in the grounds of Cambridge Gaol. But a small section of Irish public opinion pressed Dublin to demand the repatriation of a hero of the republic.

  Brooke watched Joy and Claire skating, hand in hand, picking up speed in the frosty distance, leaving a glittering silver line through the snow-covered ice. Laughing, they ensnared Grandcourt and towed him round the course. The idyllic scene helped erase the prospect of the week ahead. The body of John McQuillan had been released by the coroner at midnight and was now on its way to Highgate, and the great Victorian cemetery, where the boy would be buried with his father, Fergus. The funeral was tomorrow afternoon, and Brooke and Edison would represent the Borough at the graveside. If he got the chance he’d slip the Victoria 1899 penny that he’d collected in the desert arroyo into the boy’s grave.

  Joy and Claire, finally releasing Grandcourt, made a beeline for Brooke and stood by as he struggled into his father’s old fen sliders.

  ‘Look, it’s Jo – and her new man,’ said Claire, Brooke noting the peculiar joyful lilt to his wife’s voice at the prospect of substantiating gossip.

  He was introduced as Flight Lieutenant George Wentworth, currently an outpatient at the Royal Air Force Hospital at Ely.

  ‘George flies Blenheims,’ offered Jo, taking his arm.

  Brooke knew what was wrong from first sight, because at the sanatorium in Scarborough, after the Great War, when he’d been the patient, there were others with facial disfigurements who’d adopted the same strategy. Wentworth stubbornly held his head to one side, as if mesmerised by the distant vision of skaters and the smoking icy river, so that only his profile was visible. But in the end, offered a mug of tea by Joy, he’d had to turn towards them to drink, revealing a livid burn, roughly covered now with a skin graft. One eye was slightly distorted, as if in mid-wink. And then Brooke understood: the missing mirror in Jo’s hut avoided anxiety about reflections, while the thoughtful turning away to light a cigarette hid the sudden, blazing match.

  ‘You skate, Jo,’ said Wentworth, relaxing slightly and trying hard to make his lips construct a smile.

  They watched as Joy, Jo and Claire formed a chain and began to circle in an accelerating blur.

  ‘Jo grew up here, did she say?’ said Brooke. ‘That villa there. She’s always been a breath of fresh air. Where did you two meet?’

  ‘I feel a fraud,’ said Wentworth. ‘I’m grounded for good and the doctors have got their claws in me. Another year, longer. So I volunteered for the Observer Corps. I’m on the swing shift with Jo. She’s saved my life,’ he added, and gulped some tea.

  ‘I very much expect you’ve saved hers,’ said Brooke.

  Wentworth was dragged away by Jo to meet Rose King, who’d left the tea hut to her daughters to join the party. Claire, quick to switch roles, served mugs of tea.

  Someone touched Brooke’s arm and he turned to find Peter Aldiss clutching a glass of whisky. He was so used to seeing him at night, in the pallid lights of the laboratory, monitoring his living experiments, that Brooke was taken aback.

  ‘Bit early,’ said Brooke, nodding at the stiff drink.

  ‘Time’s relative, Eden,’ said Aldiss, his great lumpen head weighed down so that he seemed to be studying his own shoes. ‘I’ve been up all night with the observations. But I thought I’d respond to your invitation. See some daylight for once. Feel the sun. I helped myself …’

  He raised his glass. Then he fished in his overcoat pocket and produced a small paper envelope containing the handful of woodland seeds they’d found in Augustine Bodart’
s dead hand. For a moment Brooke could actually smell the fetid, damp public shelter.

  ‘Alder, sycamore, oak, birch,’ listed Aldiss, touching each. ‘Odd, isn’t it? We always assumed she was a spinster. I made some enquiries at the Old Schools.’ Brooke raised his eyebrows.

  The Old Schools was the university’s administrative heart, and widely seen as a nest of bureaucratic intrigue. ‘In the end they coughed up her file. The whole case has caused a stir in the colleges, as you can imagine. It was felt we should find out all we could. Turns out she was married to a German academic – Professor Karl Lewin, of Heidelberg. A communist, and not just a fellow traveller, but a paid-up party member. So out of favour, I’m afraid. In fact, they put him in camp at a place called Dachau, outside Munich. He’s been there since 1937, which is when his wife took up the position in Cambridge at Davison College. So they had her in their power, you see, from the start.’ He carefully folded the envelope away. ‘He’s a world expert on the propagation of trees. Was. News is, and there’s no way of confirming this, but there’s a report he was shot a few days ago. Summary execution, tied to a post. How about that for evil, Eden? Using one human being to control another.’

  Finally, Claire took Brooke’s arm and they skated together, describing figures of eight around a distant pair of gas lamps. Brooke reminded himself of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

  After an hour on the ice Brooke subsided into a deckchair beside Edwardes.

  ‘Any news on Joy’s submariner?’ asked the old man, taking one of Brooke’s Black Russians.

  ‘Not much. The Red Cross has been told they’re all fit and well. Which doesn’t help because repatriation would be easier if they needed medical care. So he’s in the bag for the Duration, Frank. Let’s hope it’s a short war.’

  ‘When’s the big day?’ asked Edwardes.

  ‘The baby? 10th June. It’s on the calendar. But you know, first child, might be late. We talk of little else. I’ll be a grandfather, Frank. I’ll need to take my responsibilities seriously.’

  Slyly, he watched Edwardes out of the tail of his eye. He was drinking in the picture before him: the blue sky, the white ice, the distant pinnacles of the university. He wondered if he was remembering his days courting Kat, in the long, cold winters which ran up to the Great War.

  Claire appeared with a tray of hot toddies she’d made with the expert help of Doric, who had turned up after all, despite an aversion to sport of all kinds, but taken refuge in the old villa’s kitchen. Brooke enjoyed two glasses before settling in a chair on his own, wrapped up in his greatcoat and scarf, on a stretch of the riverbank.

  It was Edison who woke him up, gently shaking his shoulder. Brooke’s eyes swam slightly, and the sudden blaze of light was painful. He sat up, shaking his head, laughing out loud that he’d stolen an unexpected nap.

  Across the meadow Dr Comfort, who’d been invited but Brooke hadn’t seen, was kneeling in the snow beside Frank Edwardes’ chair.

  Edison bent forwards slightly. ‘I think Mr Edwardes has gone, sir. I don’t think there’s anything we can do.’

  Brooke thought it was a memorable scene: a group beginning to collect around the old man, the sparkling snowfield, the sky above a confident unblemished blue.

  ‘And the radio’s just confirmed the news, sir,’ added Edison. ‘They hanged those men. Side by side. No reprieve. Just the file returned with the age-old instruction: Let the law take its course. Apparently, one of them made a speech on the scaffold. God Bless Ireland. So that will satisfy the bloodlust. Means our lot will live.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Brooke. ‘Which is justice I think, don’t you?’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have again relied on the work of Mike Petty, Cambridge’s own local historian, in fleshing out day-to-day life in the city in 1940. Anyone who wants to read further should go to www.mikepetty.org.uk. Bradley and Pevsner’s The Buildings of England – Cambridgeshire has been an unbeatable guide, as has the excellent 111 Places in Cambridge That You Shouldn’t Miss, by Rosalind Horton and Sally Simmons. My special thanks must go to Professor Enda Delaney of Edinburgh University, for his help in setting out the status of the Irish in England between 1939–45. His book Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971 is a model of clarity on a complex subject. And finally, my thanks to the Conservators of the Cam, the navigation authority, who not only answered my questions but by wholeheartedly engaging with the book provided it with – for me – its trademark scene: the great draining of the river. I am also indebted to Steven Fielding’s Hanged at Birmingham, David O’Donoghue’s The Devil’s Deal: The IRA, Nazi Germany and the Double Life of Jim O’Donovan, and Julie Summers’ When The Children Came Home.

  I must thank my publisher Susie Dunlop and the team at A&B; particularly my editor Kelly Smith, Ailsa Floyd in marketing, and my copy-editor Becca Allen. They are a class act. I am grateful to those who read the draft manuscript and offered invaluable criticism, encouragement and expertise. In order of reading they are my wife Midge Gillies – who also provided a constant source of support and ideas – Mick Sheehan, Chris Simms, and Lesley Hay, who proofread the final draft. My agent, Faith Evans, represents a constant call to meet the highest standards in storytelling for which I am often not as grateful as it may appear.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JIM KELLY was born in 1957 and is the son of a Scotland Yard detective. He went to university in Sheffield, later training as a journalist and worked on the Bedfordshire Times, Yorkshire Evening Press and the Financial Times. His first book, The Water Clock, was shortlisted for the John Creasey Award and he has since won a CWA Dagger in the Library and the New Angle Prize for Literature. He lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire.

  jim-kelly.co.uk

  @thewaterclock

  By Jim Kelly

  The Great Darkness

  The Mathematical Bridge

  COPYRIGHT

  Allison & Busby Limited

  11 Wardour Mews

  London W1F 8AN

  allisonandbusby.com

  First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2019.

  This ebook edition published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 by JIM KELLY

  Map © 2019 by PETER LORIMER / PIGHILL

  The moral right of the author is hereby asserted

  in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from

  the British Library.

  ISBN 978–0–7490–2262–4