A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  ‘We’d like to see David Talbot’s rooms,’ said Hawkins stiffly. ‘Are they locked?’

  ‘Course they are.’ She gave Black a long inquiring look. ‘Clean as well. Bed made, basin filled.’

  ‘Do you have the key?’ asked Black.

  ‘Yerss.’

  ‘Then perhaps you could open the rooms,’ Hawkins suggested.

  ‘Don’t like to do it without the young master’s permission.’

  ‘It’s quite important Mrs Reynolds, please…’

  ‘I’m sure David wouldn’t mind,’ Black said quietly. ‘And it is quite important, just as Dr Hawkins says.’

  The old woman gave Black another long look then shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘Just as you say then.’ She sighed, turned and headed back up the narrow stone steps.

  Reaching a darkly varnished door just past the head of the stairs, she put down the scuttle, fished deeply into the pocket of her apron and brought out a ring of heavy iron keys. She unlocked the door then stood aside, waiting.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll be needing you any longer,’ said Black.

  ‘I’ll let you know when we’re done,’ Hawkins added. ‘Then you can lock up.’

  ‘Yerss.’ She frowned, picked up her scuttle and shuffled off towards the stairs. Hawkins pushed open the door and Black followed. Talbot’s ‘set’ was made up of two rooms and a small, oak-panelled vestibule with a narrow shelf for shoes and an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand. Beyond it was a larger, white-walled sitting room, the pale wood floor strewn with half a dozen thin rugs, two sagging armchairs set in front of a cast-iron, coal-burning fireplace.

  On either side of the hearth there were tall bookshelves, roughly made from bricks and boards. A long table stood under the window, its surface piled with books and papers. More books were stacked around it on the floor. The window, high and narrow, looked down into Trinity Lane. A doorway on the right led to a small bedroom, sparsely furnished with a wardrobe against one wall, a plain wooden washstand with a white enamelled basin and an iron bedstead. The window here also looked down onto the lane.

  Opening the wardrobe Black briefly inspected the contents: half a dozen white shirts, a spare gown, a blazer with the Trinity crest and a silk-lined leather flying jacket with the Cambridge University Flying Squadron emblem stitched onto the left breast. There were also two suits, one grey, one chalk stripe, and a set of evening clothes. The suits were from a company in San Francisco and the shirts came from H. J. Nicholls on Regent Street. The late David Talbot had expensive tastes.

  Black went back into the sitting room and scanned the bookshelves. Engineering texts, the R.A.F. Handbook, a manual for the Harvard training aircraft flown by the Cambridge Squadron. A dozen or so modern novels in paperback, some history and a great deal of poetry. There was also a Muirhead’s London and last year’s Royal Automobile Club guide. Tacked to one of the shelves was a snapshot of a graceful cantilevered bridge spanning a wide, placid river.

  Black pulled out the drawing pin and examined the back of the photograph. Levis, Quebec, 1937. He replaced the picture and crossed the room to the table beneath the window. Hawkins stood by the door, pipe jutting out between his lips.

  Black sifted slowly through the papers, looking for some artefact that would tell him about David Talbot. Most of what he saw related to his studies – notes taken during lectures, portions of essays, both typed and handwritten, thumbnail sketches of architectural and engineering detail and a cleverly designed proposal for a punt operated by foot pedals rather than a sculling oar or pole.

  A small box on the right-hand side of the table was used for writing equipment: rubbers; four Eagle pencils of varying hardness, two unsharpened; a mechanical pencil and a tortoiseshell Swan fountain pen. Beside the box a German-made set of drafting instruments nestled in a blue-velvet-lined wooden case. On the inside of the lid a small brass plaque was engraved with an inscription: To David Struan Talbot from his Father, Christmas, 1938.

  The detective smiled, remembering the gift his father had given him on his acceptance into the Police Training College: a butter-soft, blue Morocco dispatch case, his initials embossed in gold beneath the handles. He still had the case but the lettering had worn away years ago. Black carefully closed the lid, wondering if fathers really knew how important those gestures were and how long they lasted in their children’s hearts.

  On the right-hand side of the table a silver-plated toast rack had been converted into a letter stand. There were several envelopes from an Angus Talbot, 1333 Haro Street in Vancouver, British Columbia, presumably David’s father, several more from Mrs. A. Talbot at the same address, a statement from the local branch of the Westminster Bank, a membership renewal notice from the RAC and a sheaf of postcards held together with a metal spring clip. Ignoring the letters, Black picked up the postcards.

  There were seven in all, each depicting a different English cathedral in garishly coloured rotogravure – Gloucester, Carlisle, Coventry, Liverpool, Durham, Ely and Hereford. Black had seen them before, sold in packets at places like the W. H. Smith bookstall in Victoria Station and his newsagent’s shop in Shepherd’s Market.

  He shuffled through them slowly. Each one had been mailed from the Government Post Office in King Edward Street, London, addressed to David S. Talbot, Trinity College, Cambridge, in a perfectly formed, meticulous hand. There was no return address. The messages on the seven cards were brief and cryptic: 3–17, 12–28, 14–30, 5x30, 1–17, 1x22, 16–32. Black jotted down the number messages in his log, then turned to Hawkins, who was still standing by the door.

  ‘Are you quite finished?’

  ‘Almost’ Black nodded. ‘Did Talbot own a motor car?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of. Undergraduates under the age of twenty-two are forbidden to keep a motor vehicle within twenty-five miles of the centre of town.’

  ‘He has a membership in the RAC.’

  ‘How interesting.’

  ‘Do these mean anything to you?’ Black held up the postcards. Grudgingly, Hawkins crossed the room and took them from the detective’s hand. He glanced at them quickly then shook his head.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did Talbot have some particular interest in cathedrals? Was he religious at all?’

  ‘No. He was interested in bridges as I recall. And flying.’

  ‘The messages mean nothing?’

  ‘Not to me.’ Hawkins shrugged. ‘A code of some sort? Dimensions for a building? They could mean anything, Black. Or nothing.’ He handed back the postcards. Black slipped them into the pocket of his jacket then took the rest of the correspondence out of the silver rack.

  ‘I’m going to take these with me. I’ll give you a receipt for them.’

  ‘All right.’ The two men left the set of rooms. Hawkins said goodbye at the foot of the stairs without shaking hands and went off in search of Mrs Reynolds, leaving Black to make his own way out of the college. Half an hour later the Scotland Yard detective was on his way back to London.

  This time his compartment was empty and for most of the journey into the city he found himself thinking about Katherine Copeland. It was ridiculous of course; why waste time thinking about a chance encounter on a train when nothing could possibly come of it? Beyond that, he had far more important things to occupy his mind. He was almost relieved when the train reached the sooty outskirts of the city. The late-aftemoon sky was overcast but it wouldn’t be enough to stop the Luftwaffe. In another hour or so the raids would begin once more. The train lumbered onward, squeaking and rattling over the switch points as it headed slowly through the suburbs towards Paddington.

  Out of the dream and into the nightmare once again.

  Chapter Eight

  Thursday, September 12, 1940

  9:30 p.m., British Summer Time

  Less than an hour after Black’s return from Cambridge late that afternoon, the duty sergeant at the Yard informed him that his immediate presence was required by Chief Superintendent Cornish. The meeting w
ith his direct superior was short. He was to gather up all his notes and files on Rudelski and the newly identified Talbot, then present himself at the underground motor pool of 55 Broadway Buildings. Cornish had no idea what any of it was about beyond the fact that he’d been sent a rocket from the commissioner, who, it appeared, was having his strings pulled from even higher up. The only thing Black knew for certain was that 55 Broadway was the barely disguised headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service. Arriving there, he was vetted by an assortment of anonymous, serious-faced young men then escorted to an equally anonymous Wolseley saloon driven by a dark-haired Wren. As dusk began to settle and the sirens began to wail, they left the city and headed west.

  Morris Black sat in the back of the unmarked Wolseley staring out at the silver thread of the Thames on his right hand, narrow and placid here, only a few miles from the city, like something out of a fairy tale in the last light of evening. Robert Louis Stevenson had called it the children’s hour, a moment of growing shadows creeping towards nightfall, time suspended, a promise or a warning, a final blessing from the setting sun. But there were no fairy tales, not anymore. It was dusk, a cloudless sky, and soon to rise, a bomber’s moon.

  They had passed through the outskirts of Richmond a moment before. The suburban village was shuttered against the bombers, empty except for a phantom ARP warden on his bicycle searching for illicit chinks of light, silent except for the steady droning wail of the sirens. Far behind, muted by distance, Black could hear the faint sound of giants’ footsteps as the first of the bombs began to explode.

  * * *

  Black looked out into the darkness as they drove through the sleeping village of Petersham, moving away from the river and following the dark, wooded length of the Upper Ham Road down to Ham Common. The Wren piloting the Wolseley hadn’t said a word since leaving the city and Black didn’t have the slightest idea where he was being taken, or why. Presumably it had something to do with Rudelski and Talbot but he still hadn’t been able to make the connection.

  The Wren turned onto Church Road, then turned again at Latchmere Lane, a secluded byway enclosed by trees on both sides that led down to a large estate screened by hedges, the old, stone-pillared entrance gate further secured with a newly built guard post and a pair of uniformed sentries, both armed with machine guns. Black noted that the high walls on either side of the pillars were strung with concertina wire. The Wren offered a pass to one of the guards and they were waved through.

  ‘I don’t suppose you can tell me where we are?’ Black asked as they went through the gate. It was the first time he’d spoken since leaving the motor pool.

  ‘Latchmere House,’ the Wren answered and said nothing more.

  Past the hedges and the barbed wire a narrow gravelled road led for a quarter of a mile through a scattering of trees. Beyond them Black could see a large, brooding mass of stone hunched on the brow of a low hill, almost invisible in the growing darkness – an English country house as one of the Brontës would have imagined it, stained and worn with half a dozen generations of ill will, bad blood and whispered scandal. A rough concrete citadel, three storeys high and windowless, had been added to the west wing of the house, ringed by its own crude barbed-wire fence.

  As they approached, Black could see that the large main building was surrounded by two barriers. The first was a head-high palisade of unpainted planking topped once again with barbed wire and set out with guard posts at each corner. Within that wall was a second perimeter made up of two lines of concertina wire with a no-man’s-land between. Here there were guard posts every thirty feet – wooden huts at the corners and raised platforms between. A prison.

  They paused at another checkpoint and the Wren showed her pass again while a second guard swung the shaded beam of a torch into the rear of the Wolseley. The car was waved on and the Wren pulled up at a side entrance to the main building. A man in Signal Corps uniform with corporal’s stripes on his sleeve opened the door for Black then took him through the doorway. Except for the rank insignia there were no badges on the uniform.

  The corporal silently led Black down a narrow flight of stone steps into the basement. At the bottom of the stairwell a chain-link enclosure had been erected complete with a locked and bolted swing-gate. Another soldier, this one wearing sergeant’s stripes, was seated at a scarred wooden desk.

  The corporal handed Black off and the sergeant opened the swing-gate, ushering Black through. He closed and locked the gate behind him, then led Black down a long, dimly lit corridor. The walls on either side were newly built of raw concrete blocks. Every ten feet there was a heavily constructed metal door, painted pale green, each one secured with an enormous padlock and a wrought-iron drop bar. The doors were fitted with covered peepholes.

  The lights overhead were nothing more than bare bulbs hanging from dangling lengths of twisted flex and shielded by sheet-metal pans painted the same colour as the doors. Except for the echo of the sergeant’s booted feet on the stone floor, the passage was deathly quiet. The stale, uncirculated air smelled faintly of mould and urine.

  A high metal door barred the far end of the corridor. The sergeant unlocked it, pulled it open then stood aside. Black went through the doorway and found himself standing in a small office, the cream-coloured walls lined with rows of filing cabinets. A young man, once again wearing an unadorned Signal Corps uniform, was seated behind a desk, pecking at a typewriter. He looked up as Black entered, smiled and stood up.

  ‘Inspector Black?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Your people are waiting inside.’ The young man gestured to a door on his right.

  ‘My people?’

  The uniformed man ignored the question. ‘You’re to go right in.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The clerk sat down and began typing again. Black crossed the office and opened the door.

  The room beyond was a dispensary. The walls were white and hung with supply cabinets. Counters below the cabinets were fitted with sinks, a shining autoclave for sterilising instruments and a small X-ray viewing screen. Tonight the large room was doing double duty as a morgue. In the centre of the grey-tiled floor there was an examination table and on it there was a body, its obvious shape covered by a dark green surgical sheet. The sharp, antiseptic tang of rubbing alcohol filled the air and cutting through it there was the rich, sick odour of overcooked pork.

  Three other people were in the room with the anonymous corpse, only one of whom, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, was familiar to Black. The pathologist, his back to the body on the table, was examining an X-ray film of a human skull and upper spine.

  To his left, keeping one wary, monocled eye on the shrouded body, was a bull-necked, grey-haired man in his mid-fifties wearing colonel’s crowns on the shoulder boards of his uniform, powerful arms crossed over his chest. His pale face was cut deep with lines and his downtumed scowl appeared to be a permanent expression.

  Leaning on the counter opposite the uniformed man was a thickset figure in a tweed suit about Black’s age with thinning, light brown hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. He smiled as Black entered the room but the heavy-lidded, almost sleepy, eyes were distant and reserved.

  Spilsbury turned, spotted Black and waved at him with the X-ray film. ‘Ah, Black, you’ve arrived finally.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I gather you’ve put a name to the young fellow from Spitalfields.’

  ‘Yes, sir. A Cambridge student named Talbot.’

  ‘No connection to our Polish pilot?’

  ‘None that I can find, Sir Bernard. Yet. Talbot flew with the Cambridge Squadron but I don’t think it means very much.’ Black glanced casually at the two other men in the dispensary. Spilsbury noticed the look and made the introductions.

  ‘Colonel Stephens, commandant of Latchmere House, and Captain Guy Liddell.’ Liddell extended a hand to Black but Stephens stood his ground, arms still resolutely crossed, steel-framed monocle tightly screwed into the socket of hi
s right eye. ‘Colonel Stephens has offered us his hospitality and his discretion,’ Spilsbury continued. ‘Captain Liddell is here to… observe.’ No attempt was made to explain Liddell’s function, but considering the origin of his transportation to Latchmere House, Black assumed that the pudgy man worked for one of the civilian intelligence organisations, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) or MI5. He was far too well dressed to be a Special Branch ‘watcher.’

  ‘I see,’ Black said finally, not seeing at all. What could his investigation of Queer Jack possibly have to do with either organisation?

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ said Stephens harshly. ‘I’ve got better bloody things to do than to play at being nursemaid to a corpse.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Spilsbury. He dropped the X ray on the counter behind him then pulled away the sheet covering the body on the table. Black stared then swallowed the sudden rush of bile that had risen instantly to the back of his throat.

  ‘Sweet fucking Christ!’ Stephens groaned. He pulled the monocle away from his eye, paling visibly. The face of the thing on the table was barely human. The hair was almost completely burned away, the flesh on the right side of the skull turned to lumps and ridges of carbonised gristle revealing the yellow bone beneath.

  The ear was gone and the skin and fat of the right cheek had split like roasted meat, opening up the mouth, palate and teeth. The tongue, blackened and charred, hung back limply down into the throat. The right eye had liquefied, leaving a dark, empty socket, pink-edged and swollen like an angry, open sore.

  Spilsbury smiled pleasantly. ‘As you say, Colonel, if you have better things to do…’

  ‘I’ll be in my office if you need me.’ Stephens jammed the monocle into place, nodded once in Black’s direction and rushed out of the room.

  ‘Sauce for the goose and all that,’ Liddell said quietly. ‘Tin Eye doesn’t like to see this kind of damage unless he’s inflicted it himself.’