The Rescue Man

by Anthony Quinn

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Part One: Waiting 1939

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two: Falling 1940–41

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three: Searching 1944

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Four: Ending 1947

  Chapter 18

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Liverpool, 1939. Lonely historian Tom Baines is at work on a study of the city’s architectural past but ominous news from Europe, together with his burgeoning friendship with Richard, a young photographer and his beautiful wife, Bella, are proving a distraction. When the bombings begin Tom joins up as a ‘rescue man’, saving the dead and dying from the ruins of buildings, but the love affair he embarks on soon leads him into a very different kind of danger.

  About the Author

  Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. He has been the film critic of the Independent since 1998. This is his first novel.

  For my father, Peter

  And in memory of my mother, Margaret (1935–1997)

  ANTHONY QUINN

  The Rescue Man

  PART ONE

  Waiting

  1939

  Present fears

  Are less than horrible imaginings.

  Macbeth

  1

  THE ADDRESS HE had been given was a road off Sefton Park, just south of the city. Baines, having taken a tram, had stepped off some distance away, convincing himself he wanted to walk through the park. In truth, he was looking for an excuse to delay his arrival. He was becoming more inclined to dilatoriness these days, as if by huddling in the present he could somehow hold back the incoming tide of the future. It seemed that everybody was waiting, tensed and trembling like divers on a cliff. And yet in much else he had to admit that the spirit of business as usual prevailed. The previous afternoon, while looking for blackout curtains at the Bon Marché, he had noticed a young man trying on a top hat.

  It was nearly nine o’clock on a cloudless June morning, and the heat seemed also to be collecting in wait. The grass in the park had a withered, yellowish tinge. He was amazed, and vaguely appalled, that individual days could roll on in their oblivious humdrum way. A woman pushing a pram strolled past. Birds were tuning up in high, discordant keys. Only the distant tap-tap of a hammer caused him to look across at the glinting windows of the Palm House, where a team of workmen were boarding up its fragile shell. At the park’s perimeter two more workmen were painting the kerbstones black and white, a guide to night-time traffic once the street lamps went dark. Here was urgent work, albeit languidly undertaken: could there be such a thing as languid urgency? he wondered. In any case, somebody had looked ahead, assessed the risk, and made a decision. And the decision was to camouflage as much ground as possible.

  Baines stood gazing at the painters as they inched their way around the kerb, their glossy trail of black and white snaking far behind them. As an augury he felt that it lacked poetry. If disaster must be presaged there ought to have been an albatross haunting the seafront, or a comet striping the night sky. He dawdled on. The cobbles of this road were as familiar to him as his own footfall. He must have been ten or eleven years old when he first rode a horse right the way around this park; he could recall the exhilaration of feeling its girth strain beneath him, and later his annoyance when its hooves no longer clattered on the stone; straw had been spread along the road to muffle the clopping and thus spare the slumbering residents of the grand houses an unwelcome reveille.

  Lacking inspiration for further postponement, he turned at last into the quiet, tree-shaded avenue and made his way towards a row of terraced cottages, built in the middle of the last century and recently abandoned. He saw Jack at the end of the row, leaning against the wall, a cigarette on the go.

  ‘Give me one of those, would you?’ Baines said. Jack pushed himself off the wall and, without a word, tossed over his pack of Player’s to Baines.

  ‘Lose your way?’ Jack deadpanned, expelling a plume of smoke through his nose. Baines, fishing out a cigarette, accepted the implicit reproof.

  ‘Sorry. Just fancied a walk.’

  Jack shrugged, as if Baines’s timekeeping were no concern of his. He was a rangy, loose-limbed man in his early forties, with a sallow complexion and fair hair he kept severely cropped; he had the muscular set of a soldier, a profession which he had in fact once pursued.

  ‘After you,’ said Jack, pushing open the door and tilting his head by way of invitation. ‘The lads have already made a start.’ Baines stepped into a room where several young men in blue serge overalls were stacking odd bits of furniture. Damp had colonised the walls, and the floorboards squeaked underfoot. Net curtains hung leprous with dust and cobwebs. Jack ran an antiques business, and often alerted Baines when he had a clearance job that might involve valuing some architectural treasure before it was carted off to the auctioneers: a Georgian fire-surround, a fancily carved newel post, a marble chimney piece. Baines had an instinct for such unconsidered trifles, but looking about this scene of desolation he couldn’t foresee a great haul.

  Jack, as if reading his thoughts, let out a sigh. ‘There might not be much here,’ he said. They walked into the next room, which disclosed roughly the same degree of neglect. An old horsehair sofa lolled in one corner, its belly pocked with broken springs. Baines eyed some dull, heavy tables and a sideboard, a rocking chair, a fireguard blackened with use. He thought of how recently these things had constituted somebody’s home, had perhaps been cherished – and how quickly they would go straight on to the dump. One of the young lads had followed them in and was now talking to Jack in a low, confiding tone. Jack nodded slowly and called over to Baines.

  ‘We might have found something else,’ he said.

  The boy led them through a back entrance into a thistly, unkempt garden, and thence to another door at the opposite end of the building. They went through a narrow passageway and up two flights of stairs thickly carpeted in leaves and grime. At the top was a small landing, with a janitor’s cupboard on one side and a door on the other, its paint blistered. A heavy, rusted lock barred the way.

  ‘Get Harry up here, and tell him to bring his gear,’ Jack said to the boy, who hurried back down. ‘I talked to the last tenants here,’ he went on, ‘they said the upstairs was empty and had been for years.’ He shook out another cigarette and lit it, the match flaring against the gloom. Jack smoked with the steady devotion of one who would have liked to make his living from it. Soon they heard footsteps; the boy had returned with Harry, a pensionable fellow who had worked with Jack for years. He carried an ancient knapsack clanking with tools.

  ‘Might have to jemmy this one, Harry,’ Jack said, nodding at the door.

  Harry, with his rheumy eyes and stooped frame, looked barely capable of cracking a walnut, let alone a locked door; then Baines noticed the old man’s hands, beaten and nicked and so long in touch with metalled machinery that his fingertips had been worn to hard, blackened discs, as if they were part of his toolkit. Having briefly picked out a couple of brutish-looking files and tossed them back, Harry now selected a short crowbar and got to work on the door’s lock. It took only a few minutes of his cracksmanship before the wood yielded and splintered,
a sharp protesting snap announcing that its defence had been breached. Jack completed the job with a brisk shoulder charge, and they were through.

  The room, running over the cottages below, was about the length of a tennis court. Long tables, mounted with lathes and punches speckled with rust, revealed it to be a joiner’s workshop. Smaller tools were arranged on benches. Wood shavings and fronds of old paintwork littered the floor, and acrid dust seemed to have displaced the air – dust was the element they breathed. Baines and Jack looked at each other but didn’t say anything. They had been in abandoned rooms before and were accustomed to the odour of decay. This was different: it was an atmosphere which seemed to rise from the incongruous feeling that they had somehow trespassed, as if at any moment men would return and the sound of sawing and planing would resume. A workman’s jacket hung on a peg. A tobacco tin lay on a table next to a sheet of butcher’s paper, on which a series of diagrams had been sketched. They walked about the room, as if wary of disturbing the air. Signs of tenancy kept ambushing them. A tin of biscuits, or what the mice had left of them; a framed photograph, askew on a wall, of a football team, arms folded, faces as blank as dinner plates. Baines read a note, in tiny capitals, pinned just to the side of it: REMEMBER MEDICINE FOR DAD.

  He looked round at Jack, hoping he’d know what to say. There seemed to be too many questions crowding the room, none of which he felt equal to articulating.

  ‘Like the bloody Mary Celeste,’ said Harry, finally breaking the silence. The room did indeed feel ghostly, but there was no suggestion its one-time occupants had been abducted, atomised or otherwise spirited away. They had intended, evidently, to return. In the meantime Jack had found something at the other end of the room, and as he examined it Baines knew by the set of his lean features that it would be something quite hard to bear.

  ‘This would explain it,’ he said, handing to Baines, almost in resignation, a yellowing wall calendar. It showed the month of August, 1914.

  Baines was back at his flat in Gambier Terrace by late afternoon, having helped Jack and his crew clear the derelict building. Jack sometimes offered to pay him, but Baines always refused, deeming the melancholy investigation of abandoned houses its own reward. The terrace, built high on a slope a hundred years ago for the thriving merchant classes, was no longer the fashionable address it had once been. Its veneer of prosperity had chipped and flaked, the stucco had faded from white to a liverish grey, and most of the window frames were carious. What hadn’t changed was the vantage it offered over the city. His rooms occupied the top two floors of a house, from which he could gaze upon a vista of soot-smudged buildings, begrimed church spires, smoking chimney stacks; beyond them crowded the warehouses and docks along the Mersey, stretching as far as the eye could see. The view never failed to lift his heart. At this window, its glass smeared and warped with age, he could imagine what it might have been like for some mutton-chopped shipping magnate to stand and survey the dirty, magnificent sprawl that was making him rich – or richer. Baines could not afford to feel possessive; but he did feel protective.

  Liverpool. ‘Sailortown’, as Melville called it. Baines, who was nearly thirty-seven, had never lived anywhere else. What others teased in him as a lack of adventure he now regarded as the earliest stirrings of civic loyalty. Growing up in the outlying districts to the south, where green fields had yet been spared the hand of ‘improvement’, he first came to know the city as few boys of his age ever had. His mother had died when Baines was three, his father when he was eight; the orphan had been consigned to the care of his father’s brother, George, and his wife, May. The couple lived in the suburb of Mossley Hill, where George ran a stable and would allow his nephew to exercise the horses around the circuit of Sefton Park. He had a memory of one blissful summer, it was 1912 or 1913, when he would hurry over every morning to the stables; having helped with the mucking out and feeding, he would saddle up a stately old hack named Charlemagne and go cantering off to the park.

  One morning, chafing at the now familiar loop on which his only company would be the occasional cyclist or carriage-and-pair, he turned the horse and crossed into the adjacent Princes Park. Then, hearing a tram rattling north, he decided to follow it – nobody said not to – and soon was ambling down the wide thoroughfare of Princes Avenue towards the city, his accelerating heartbeat soothed by the complacent steadiness of the horse’s gait. As the streets called him on, the unwonted height and rhythm of the saddle lent an exhilaration he had never known from the inside of a tram. A shawlie selling flowers outside the Philharmonic Hotel; grubby kids playing hopscotch barefoot on the pavement; the crowd thickening as he passed St Luke’s Church and then steered into the narrow funnel of Bold Street, past Lockie’s where May had bought him his first jacket and tie, past the stern pillared facade of the Lyceum, the horse’s flanks sweating now, the rider too, close-packed alongside the quick flurry of wheels on cobbles, the busy crisscrossing of leisured ladies and boatered gents and boys singing the newspaper headlines. At the corner of Church Street and Whitechapel he paused to watch a commotion – a costermonger’s barrow had overturned, its load blocking the way – and then with a mere touch of the stirrup they were heading up Lord Street, choked with trams, past the Victoria Monument overlooking St George’s Crescent and down, down again, towards the majestic plateau of the Pier Head, the overhead railway, the amazing novelty of those two green birds atop the Royal Liver Building, its scaffolding recently shed to reveal the gleaming brickwork beneath. Mounted on the horse, with the dark canyons of the business district looming massively behind him, the boy gazed out beyond the liners to the river and the ocean pathways vectoring north. But what did he care for the ocean? Far better, he thought, to be a prince of the city.

  Baines knew that his restlessness was partly due to the confused state into which his work had been sliding. A London publishing house, Plover Books, had invited him to compile a study of Liverpool’s architectural past, as part of an ongoing ‘Buildings of England’ series. It was almost a gift to him, but the high hopes and good intentions he had brought to the project two years before now lay scattered around his study, lost perhaps between the pages of the notebooks and scrapbooks on his desk, or else beneath the tottering ziggurats of books which had risen here and there on the floor. Deadlines had come and gone. His natural tendency to postpone had ensured that the commission, if not entirely sunk, had run into the sand.

  One diversion he didn’t foresee had lately assumed a kind of hold. His interest, always liable to wander, had snagged on a compelling but elusive figure lost in the shadows of Liverpool’s mid-Victorian building boom. Peter Eames was a young architect who had briefly flourished in the 1860s when his first commission, an office block named Janus House, shocked the public and provoked damning reviews in the local press. His second building, Magdalen Chambers, was an insurance office of even bolder design and, having suffered a vilification similar to his first, proved to be his last. His proposed plans for a free library, to be built in one of the poorest parts of the city, were eventually abandoned on the grounds of its expense and his already unreliable reputation. After a bitter falling-out with his business partner he appeared to abandon his profession altogether; four years on from the failure of his library scheme he drowned off the shore at Blundell Sands, an alleged suicide. He was thirty-three.

  Something about this short life intrigued Baines. For one thing, those buildings for which Eames had been so maligned now looked, seventy years later, very much like the work of a visionary – a man out of time. Their unusual height, combined with their innovative use of curtain-walling and cast iron, anticipated the skyscrapers of Chicago by twenty years. But more than intrigued, Baines was moved, for here was someone who had suffered the slings and arrows of an outrageous press yet heroically refused to back down. Eames had more than mere ambition, he had the unbiddable integrity of a true original. He remembered the words of Delacroix: talent does whatever it wants to do – genius does only what it can. It
was sad to think of such a man hounded out of his vocation by people with not the smallest scintilla of his energy and imagination. Baines needed to find out more, and knew just the man who might help him.

  Moray Lennox McQuarrie had always sounded to Baines like a company of shrewd Edinburgh lawyers; that a single man should own the whole name deeply impressed him. An early appointment of Charles Reilly’s at the Liverpool School of Architecture, McQuarrie had been a noted scholar of Victorian Gothic, an expertise of which Baines as a student in the early 1920s had taken only partial advantage. He could only wonder how his old professor might regard this belated petition for help. The venue for their interview, a gentlemen’s club in a side alley off Water Street, might have been regarded as a subtle form of intimidation on McQuarrie’s part, but the ancient porter at the door and the cracked parquet in the entrance hall made Baines feel merely sorry. Directed through an upper room where the potted palms looked only slightly more wilted than that flyblown porter, he found McQuarrie in the library, sitting in a wing-backed chair with a copy of The Times lying like an obedient dog at his feet.

  ‘Mr Baines,’ he said, offering his hand and gesturing at the chair opposite. Time had not much altered the professor, who had appeared impossibly venerable to Baines on their first meeting eighteen years before. Thick, interrogative eyebrows framed a somewhat wolfish face, the chin and neck sporting tiny outcrops of bristle that his morning shave had missed. His worsted suit was too heavy for a summer’s day, though it would have been a surprise to see him dressed in anything else. It was a fixture, as was his air of close-mouthed, watchful drollery, which his students knew only too well could suddenly darken into displeasure. His nickname, almost certainly known to McQuarrie, was ‘The Flaying Scotsman’. Conscious of paying deference, Baines waited to be spoken to.