Break of Dark

by Robert Westall

  But they planned carefully, too, for the 28th of March; and it worked out well. An actor friend called Larry Harper stayed in the rectory overnight (and they were very glad to have him). He was tall, thin and fair like Martin, and by the time he had donned Martin’s rector’s garb and a huge pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, he even gave Sheila a fright. His walk was the living image of Martin’s lope; he said he’d been practising mimicking it for nearly a year, to get a laugh round The Grapes.

  He left for the university at nine-thirty, Sheila with him in her best suit and hat, driving the car. He delivered Martin’s talk (from the pages Martin had written out for him) far more convincingly than Martin would ever have done, and got a tremendous round of applause. He fumbled his impromptu question-time rather badly, but everyone put that down to well-earned exhaustion. Nobody at the university ever dreamed they hadn’t seen the real Martin Williams . . .

  . . . Who had been up the tower of St Austin Friars since seven that morning, creeping in through the cobwebbed dewiness of the graveyard with a sergeant from Muncaster Constabulary, summoned by phone with some nasty hints of black-magic activity in the churchyard. They waited behind the uppermost parapet of the tower, well-hidden, so that they saw it all.

  At ten-twenty, the overcoated, mufflered figure of old Phillips walked leisurely through the churchyard and unlocked the main door. At ten-twenty-five he began to toll the bell. At ten-twenty-eight, five large black Rolls-Royce limousines started across the huge demolition-plain, following a Rolls-Royce hearse. Thirty-one Drogos, men and women, emerged, sleek in black top-coats, black fur coats and the flash of a black-nyloned leg. All the women were very handsome and looked about thirty, so it was impossible to pick Celicia out. There was the undertaker, Mr Betyl, no doubt, proper in black tail-coat and top-hat swathed in black muslin. The opulent coffin (which looked sickeningly like Mr Drogo’s sideboard) vanished into the church.

  ‘Let’s go and get a good view inside,’ Martin whispered to the sergeant. They went down through the bell-chamber – the bell had stopped tolling but was still swaying in its bed – and down into the ringers’ chamber, where a little window gave a good view into the body of the church, from just under the ancient rafters.

  Martin looked down, and almost fainted.

  Far from a scattering of thirty-one Drogos near the front, the church was full. The door to the crypt was gaping open. And as he looked down, every dark figure turned and looked up at him.

  ‘Come on down, Mr Williams,’ called Betyl, the undertaker, with sepulchral joviality. ‘We are so glad you could make it after all.’

  Martin turned desperately to the policeman.

  ‘Time to go, sir,’ said the policeman gently. He got out his warrant card and held it up open for Martin to inspect.

  Sergeant Harold Morsk, Muncaster CID.

  Like a condemned man, Martin tottered down the stairs and was marched to the front of the congregation.

  ‘We shall only require you to say amen,’ said Mr Betyl. ‘We are a god-fearing race and have always supported your church. It is the least you can do for us.’ Then he began to declaim to the congregation in a harsh, strange tongue, and they replied in the same tongue. And when they all looked at Martin with their smooth, handsome faces, he knew it was time to say, ‘Amen.’ Twice, they took black books from their pockets and broke out into a hymn. Old Phillips played the organ reasonably well. Then the body was reverently borne, on the shoulders of six pall-bearers, down into the crypt. One corner, grating against the door-jamb, lost a sliver of wood and rich varnish, and some flakes of white limestone dropped on the black floor.

  After all was over down there (strange sounds floated up in the silence above) a man who looked incredibly like the late William Henry Drogo came across to Martin and shook him firmly and warmly by the hand.

  ‘I am glad you were here. If they are not blessed by the presence of a clergyman, they get out of hand and run wild, and then there is trouble. There are still people cruel enough to sharpen ash-stakes for us – the world gets little better, except on the surface. Now we shall have no trouble in Muncaster . . . thank you.’ He paused, and said concernedly, ‘You do not look well . . . these things are troubling you . . . you may have bad dreams. Here is my granddaughter – Celicia, come here, Celicia – she has an affection for you. Go with her now, and she will make all things well and clear for you. No, Celicia, not in the crypt – the vestry will do for Mr Williams.’ He spoke to her quite sharply, as if he suddenly feared she might go too far.

  As in a dream, Martin walked through the open vestry door, his hand in Celicia’s.

  When he woke up on the vestry floor, he could never quite remember anything that had happened the morning of the 28th of March, in the church of St Austin Friars.

  But it didn’t matter, for shortly afterwards he and Sheila left the city, for a small rural living that had fallen vacant in Kent.

  Sergeant Nice

  Constable William Bainbridge was enough to make a superintendent tear his hair; a cause of premature balding, a breeder of peptic ulcers.

  He had some virtues. He was never caught with long hair showing down his neck, under the rim of his uniform cap, like some. He was never caught with the bottom of his pullover showing below his tunic, like others. Ten years’ service with the Royal Engineers had seen to that. And he was well liked on his beat. He never parked his Panda up a cul-de-sac and wasted his time chewing toffees. He got out and met the people; played for his village football team, coached the youngsters and never let them call him Bill in uniform. People didn’t give a guilty start when they saw him sitting behind the counter in the off-licence, drinking a mug of tea.

  But he was too soft to make a copper. There was the matter of the police station cat, which formed the habit of bringing home live earthworms. Most coppers ignored the worms, trampling them into pink rags on the parquet floor. Bill went to infinite bother to rescue them on a piece of paper, carrying them carefully back to the nearest verge. One day, so engaged, he met Super Green coming in.

  ‘Has the worm turned at last, Bainbridge?’ Then Super Green saw the worm was being borne aloft on a clean piece of his own official notepaper.

  Or the time Bill hit a blackbird while proceeding in his Panda. Only Bill would have bothered to park and go back to render aid. He parked, not illegally, but inconveniently. One juggernaut, passing, scraped a yard of paint off another. The blackbird, rescued, not only recovered but showed Bill its gratitude by crapping all over the back of the Panda and the shoulder of Bill’s best uniform tunic. After that, whenever the crafty old club comedians asked whose name they should mention, to get a laugh at the annual Police Social, people said ‘Bainbridge and the blackbird’.

  Worse, he had never made an arrest, or even reported anybody, in five years’ service. Not that, in his area, there was much to report. Farmers hurrying the harvest home after dusk without rear lights. Bill had a quiet word. A flurry of pale, shapely legs in a car parked in a public place after dark. Bill walked past, whistling loudly. Came back once the flurry had subsided and tapped on the window till it was wound down. Talked to the lady a minute, then pointed out the time and passed blithely on. No need to upset people, make enemies.

  Crime in his district stayed low. Super Green said that the people on his beat went elsewhere to commit their offences, rather than hurt his feelings. Chief Super Higginson called his beat ‘the bird sanctuary’, because nobody on it was doing bird.

  Meanwhile, Bill flung himself into being a good citizen. He was often to be found in the primary school, with his little talks on the Green Cross Code, his Cycling Proficiency Tests, his tactful lectures on why you shouldn’t take sweeties from strange men. And he was often accompanied by the photographer from the local paper, which was chronically short of news. It usually ended up with a close-up of Bill holding a fetching infant in his arms. He had a weakness for that, probably because he’d never had any kids of his own. Finally, the paper headlined him as Ol
dcastle Constabulary’s Mr Nice, and after that he was always known around the police station as ‘Constable Nice’.

  The superintendents nearly had a fit. They thought of getting rid of him, until he rescued from drowning two children who had tried to walk on the water at the local sewage farm. ‘I see Bainbridge is in the shit again,’ said Super Green. But it wasn’t really funny; especially when the Royal Humane Society gave him a certificate for it. ‘Now he’s got a certificate to prove he’s human,’ said Super Green. ‘Humane,’ corrected Chief Super Higginson, a grate in his voice.

  Bill tried to get on even with the police. A keen photographer, he was much in demand at the annual Police Ball. He even made a home-movie of the police scoring the winning goal in the Oldcastle Sunday League Cup. And if someone was put in hospital by the yobbish supporters of Oldcastle United, it was Bill who organized the whip-round and called at the hospital with the basket of fruit. He even designed and built a delta-winged, petrol-engined, radio-controlled model aircraft for Super Green’s son’s birthday (though he was paid for the materials). It was not Bill’s fault that the child let the plane fly too high, get out of control and nose-dive up to its tail in a neighbour’s lawn, missing the unhappy gardener by inches.

  But it was his bid for promotion that was the last straw. Bill had a fair number of O and A levels, acquired by correspondence course during long winter evenings in the army. He sat, and passed, the police exam for sergeant. Then, ludicrously, he applied to take the exam for inspector.

  ‘He’s after my job,’ said Super Green. ‘Or yours.’ Chief Super Higginson laughed.

  But the Chief Constable of the County didn’t find it funny at all. The police, he informed them by letter, was supposed to be a satisfying career, in which bright and eager constables could expect promotion . . .

  ‘We could make him desk-sergeant,’ said Super Green.

  ‘The drunks would run rings round him.’

  ‘What about the crime computer?’

  ‘He wouldn’t believe half the nasty things it told him.’

  ‘I know, what about the Boob Patrol?’

  The two Supers became so pleased with themselves, they actually got the whisky out of the filing cabinet marked Traffic Statistics 1945-60.

  If you were an old copper or a scared copper or a useless copper, you were either put on Schools’ Road Safety or the Boob Patrol, which meant the sea front at Graymouth. Graymouth prided itself on being a family resort; it had taken a pounding recently from package holidays, but kept going bravely. When Oldcastle Council failed to paint the sea-front railings because of the cuts, the locals formed a committee and painted them themselves. That kind of town.

  The local police station in Front Street was combined with a sergeant’s house, complete with noticeboard in the garden carrying faded warnings about rabies and colorado beetle. The duties of the three daytime constables comprised placating howling lost children, directing old ladies to the toilets and getting the holiday traffic parked in the morning and out in the evening. Otherwise, you could watch the sea birds, the tide coming in or going out, and the endless stream of young, brown female flesh drifting up Front Street from the beach, barefoot and licking ice-cream cones. Hence, the Boob Patrol.

  Sergeant Nice, as he was now known, moved with his big, raw-boned, comfortable wife into the police station. He spent most of that wet spring having quiet words with tramps occupying beach huts and laying the foundations of a huge floral display in the sloping police-station garden. When it bloomed in early summer, this turned out to be a ten-foot replica, in white alyssum and blue lobelia, of the county police badge, accompanied by the legend Oldcastle Constabulery. The local paper photographed it (and Sergeant Nice) in colour. The sergeant was quoted as saying that Graymouth was a family resort, which must be kept safe for the kiddies; and promising ruthless war on unlicensed and extortionate popcorn-sellers and topless bathers. The Supers were not amused, until they spotted the spelling mistake in Constabulery and made Sergeant Nice do his corrections with a gardening trowel.

  But only high summer exposed Sergeant Nice’s real plans for Graymouth. He had scrounged white cap-covers out of Traffic Department stores for his three constables’ caps; white point-duty gloves too. Tunics were abandoned early; shirt sleeves were rolled immaculately just above the elbow, shoes polished like black diamonds, and the morale of the Boob Patrol boosted sky high. Not least by a large new beach hut, funded by the Rotary and manned by some very pretty college girls. It had a wooden sign on the roof which read LOST CHILDREN one side, and HOLIDAY INFORMATION the other. One wall sported two ancient lifebelts, newly painted in red and white, another a huge hand-painted map of Graymouth showing every item of interest from the Egyptian Gardens to the Victoria Jubilee Clocktower and Drinking Fountain. All these things had been personally painted by Sergeant Nice himself, who told the local paper, ‘A contented public is a law-abiding public.’

  Only two other things of note happened that first summer. There was an outbreak of pick-pocketing in the amusement arcade that proved impossible to solve because Sergeant Nice wouldn’t stay away from the place half an hour. In the end, he was put on a compulsory first aid course to get him out of the way, and a plain-clothesman from Oldcastle caught the thief two hours later. And, rather more worrying, a flasher was reported by two teenage girls in the north beach shelter. Sergeant Nice half strangled him, tearing his shirt in two places. The flasher muttered about complaining to his lawyer, but settled for the price of a new shirt.

  At the end of four months, the Supers looked at each other and sighed.

  ‘It could have been a lot worse,’ said Super Green.

  ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ said Chief Super Higginson. ‘Graymouth Rotary actually seem to like him . . .’

  The trouble started by the Victoria Jubilee Clocktower and Drinking Fountain. Stolen beach-bag. The woman had put it down on the fountain while she got sand out of her shoes. When she put her hand out to retrieve it, it was simply no longer there. There had been a lot of people about, but nobody had seen anything. For the simple reason that at that very moment, something had gone wrong with one of Front Street’s lamps. An elaborate cast-iron Gothic affair of the type beloved of seaside resorts, it had suffered some kind of short circuit and blown an impressive stream of blue-white sparks over the passing cars. Nobody had been hurt, but there had been a good deal of commotion, and when the woman turned back for her bag, it was gone.

  Sergeant Nice gave her and her husband a cup of tea and took down particulars of what had been stolen. Beach-bag, green striped. Handbag, black plastic. Fifty pounds in five pound notes. The family insurance policies. Camera full of holiday snaps. Three small presents for the grandchildren back home in Plymouth. The couple were not well off; they would have to return home early. The woman was white with the shock that follows theft, and her husband was tight-lipped. Twice, the woman cried. The ruins of a lovely holiday. Sergeant Nice felt hatred for the thief and offered to lend the couple ten pounds of his own money. They refused. Sergeant Nice wondered whether he could get the Rotary to start a fund for this sort of thing.

  The woman insisted on showing him exactly how it had happened. Just to comfort her, Sergeant Nice went along.

  The Victoria Jubilee Clocktower was a notable monstrosity, in that shiny, pink-brown stone that has fossils embedded in it. It was topped by a corroded weathervane that no longer turned. Below a roof like a mini Greek temple, the four clock faces all told slightly different times, except the one that was broken. Beneath those was a riot of buttresses, gargoyles and marble owls, down to the drinking fountain that dribbled water endlessly into a foul black marble bowl that appeared to be full of growing seaweed. There was a pint-sized bronze drinking cup attached to the fountain by a chain that could have anchored a battleship, which even vandals couldn’t vandalize. The cup was also so black inside that no one had drunk from it in living memory. The whole erection had been the overriding delightful horror of Sergeant Nice’
s childhood trips to Graymouth. It still fascinated him; he wondered if he could persuade the Rotary to restore it to its former splendour.

  But none of this interested the woman. She led him round behind, to a low coffin-like object in the same pink fossilized stone. A horse trough, so the bronze plaque informed, given to celebrate the accession of King Edward VII and for the refreshment of four-footed friends. It would have refreshed no four-footed friends now, even had one been present. Its inside was dry and dusty as an Egyptian tomb, with a couple of lolly-sticks and a crumpled crisp bag. Inside this, the woman said, she had dumped her beach-bag. For safety.

  Sergeant Nice pushed back his uniform cap and scratched his crinkly ginger hair in a way that would not have been approved of by the Supers. The horse trough puzzled him. He did not remember ever having seen it before. Instead, from childhood, he seemed to recall a round manhole cover set into the road, emblazoned Sewer Lid. J. Holcraft & Co, Sheffield. Patent pending. Right under where the horse trough now stood. Yes, he was sure, because the sewer lid had been surrounded by a circular pattern of ornamental cobbles. And part of that circular pattern was still there, vanishing under the horse trough. But who on earth would have installed a horse trough since Sergeant Nice’s childhood? Since 1955, Graymouth couldn’t have had a carthorse to bless itself with . . .

  ‘I don’t believe you’ve heard a word I’ve been saying,’ said the woman, crossly.

  ‘Sorry, madam. Wool-gathering.’

  The couple left soon after, the husband saying bitterly, ‘Reckon you’ve seen the last o’ your bag. Right ninnies the police put on these seaside beats.’

  Hurt but persistent, Sergeant Nice continued to examine the horse trough. He made a forlorn attempt to lift it; it must have weighed several tons. He inspected the place where it joined the clocktower proper; there was no visible new join, it all seemed of a piece. He re-read the plaque. The trough had been presented by Alderman G. G. Sharratt and the date was 1902. Sergeant Nice had an uncomfortable feeling that if he went on investigating the horse trough, it would end up as another good laugh at the Police Social. But he was a slow, stubborn man. He went across and consulted young Thomas, the newsagent, bearded purveyor of whirling celluloid windmills, inferior buckets and spades from Hong Kong and paperbacks of near-nude girls sporting black thigh boots and Luger pistols.