A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  ‘We really are a pair of sorry sons of bitches, aren’t we, Morris?’ she whispered.

  * * *

  Liddell was waiting in the Kensington Park Gardens office, smoking his pipe and staring at the large maps pinned to the wall. He turned as Morris Black and his assistant returned from the Stag Garage and entered the narrow room.

  ‘There’s been another one,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Where?’ Black asked.

  ‘Southampton. Last night.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes. There’s no doubt, I’m afraid. I came round to collect you. There’s an aeroplane waiting for us at Croydon.’

  ‘We’re flying?’ Black felt a flutter in the pit of his stomach; he’d never flown before.

  ‘Yes. It’s all laid on.’

  ‘Has Spilsbury been told?’

  ‘No.’ Liddell looked down into the bowl of his pipe, frowning. ‘St Thomas’s Hospital was hit during the raid last night. Two of the on-call physicians were killed. One of them was Peter Spilsbury, his son.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘Umm,’ Liddell murmured. ‘Spilsbury had no idea. He was at an inquest this morning and someone delivered a note of condolence to him in court. It must have been a terrible shock.’ The intelligence officer cleared his throat noisily and tucked the pipe into the breast pocket of his jacket. ‘Fortunes of war I suppose,’ he said philosophically. ‘Strikes home from time to time.’ He paused. ‘The point is, I don’t think we’ll be able to count on his continuing assistance in this matter. Not for the time being at any rate.’

  ‘No,’ said Black. There was a long silence.

  Slipping silently past his superior, Police Constable Swift went to the Ordnance map of England, chose a large drawing pin set with a red-enamelled, tin-plate flag and stuck it into the map over the large circle indicating the port city of Southampton on the Channel coast. He stood back and eyed his handiwork. Liddell looked sideways at the map, then turned back to Morris Black. Liddell’s brief moment of sympathy for the pathologist’s sudden grief had passed.

  ‘Come along then,’ he said, smiling. ‘Mustn’t keep the RAF waiting.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Monday, September 16, 1940

  2:30 p.m., British Summer Time

  Morris Black and Guy Liddell flew out of Croydon in an RAF Walras, an ageing, scarred amphibian with retractable landing gear. The aircraft was usually ship-launched by catapult and to Black it seemed as though the ungainly, incredibly noisy single-engine biplane would never leave the ground.

  The Walras hadn’t been designed for comfort either and the detective endured his first flight crammed into the tiny rear gunner’s compartment, squeezing himself between the two main wing struts while Liddell occupied an equally uncomfortable position in the small navigator’s compartment almost under the feet of the pilot.

  The sound of the large, wing-mounted engine was so loud that conversation was impossible and Black had to endure his maiden flight in silence, trying to ignore the stomach-churning smell of petrol and exhaust, staring out through the small porthole as the slow-moving machine lumbered over the North Downs, heading south-west towards the coast. Forty minutes after leaving Croydon, the Walrus reached Southampton Water, circled once and dropped down onto the River Itchen, its boat-hulled fuselage sending up a huge rooster tail of spray as it slammed down onto the sluggish, oily surface of the river.

  To port, behind them, were the piers, cranes and loading sheds of Southampton’s Empress Docks, while to starboard Black could see the soot and grime expanse of Woolston, the port city’s southern industrial suburb. The pilot steered the aircraft up to the Vickers-Supermarine pier and finally cut the engine. They had arrived and for Black it was none too soon. With Liddell in the lead, he crawled out of the Walrus and clambered up the narrow companionway to the head of the pier.

  The smell of charred, wet wood was even more overpowering than the stench of the aircraft’s fuel. To his right, looking south towards the floating bridge beyond the coal dock, there was nothing but rubble and debris. Twenty yards of the main pier had been blown to splinters and the huge warehouse directly in front of them was a sagging ruin. A crisp breeze was blowing down the river and the sky overhead was a cloudless blue but all Black could see was the devastation of the dockside wasteland.

  ‘I had no idea,’ he said, staring at the ruins of the Vickers warehouse. It stretched for blocks along the waterfront, its roof collapsed in a dozen different places, every window shattered.

  ‘They’ve been getting it for the better part of six weeks now,’ said Liddell. ‘Every second or third day since the beginning of August.’ He shook his head wearily. ‘No bloody defences at all. Six balloons and an ack-ack battery to defend the only Spitfire works in the country. Madness.’

  A battered, mud-stained grey saloon was creeping down the debris-strewn pier in their direction, picking its way carefully. It was carrying official licence plates and flying a blue pennon from its left mudguard. The car stopped and a uniformed Southampton Police driver stepped out into the sunlight. The man saluted smartly as Liddell and Black walked towards the vehicle. He opened the rear door of the saloon and stood aside as the two men climbed in.

  ‘Allen will meet us at the scene,’ said Liddell as they turned down the pier and headed up a narrow alleyway between the wreckage of two large buildings.

  ‘Allen?’ asked Black.

  ‘The chief constable.’ Liddell leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. The man behind the wheel turned his head slightly.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘How far?’ asked Liddell.

  ‘Just this side of the Bridge Road. Not far at all.’

  They drove on in silence.

  It was far worse than anything Black had seen in London. Whole blocks of industrial buildings had been destroyed. Here and there steam rose as small groups of firefighters doused still-fuming embers and demolition workers were using cranes and chains to bring down blackened sections of unstable walls. Small streets lined with workmen’s houses had been utterly laid waste, the streets themselves invisible below heaps of madly strewn rubble. They passed the burnt-out skeleton of a lorry, its tyres melted into the cobbles, and a little farther on, Black saw a telephone pole leaning drunkenly across a doorway. It was being used as a message centre, a score of paper scraps tacked onto it; desperate queries and faint hopes.

  ‘Bad was it?’ asked Liddell, leaning forward and speaking to the driver once again.

  ‘Bad enough.’ The man shrugged. ‘Bowling to an empty wicket. Lots of them came in no more than a hundred feet off the ground. Couldn’t miss and no one to fight back.’ The driver snorted. ‘Surprised the whole bloody city didn’t burn to the ground when it comes to that.’

  The driver stopped the car at the entrance to a narrow lane a few hundred feet from Bridge Street. Before the raid the street had been lined on both sides with small, four-room terraced houses built just after the First World War to house workers from Vickers-Supermarine and the Thorneycroft Boat Works along the river to the south of the bridge.

  Of the dozen or so houses on the lane, only three were standing and two of those were little more than gutted shells. The third house, protected by the high wall of a warehouse directly behind it, was still intact except for the roof, which seemed to be badly burned along the front, long licks of black soot rising up the yellow brick above the shattered windows facing the street. A black, windowless van was parked in front of the house and a uniformed policeman stood at the front door, helmet pulled low over his eyes, hands clasped behind his back.

  Liddell and Black left their car and walked up the short path through what had once been the front garden, now littered with scraps of wood, broken furniture and a sea of broken glass, the splintered shards glittering like ice in the mid-aftemoon sun. Liddell showed his warrant card to the policeman at the door and they ducked into the gloomy interior of the house.

  Two rooms were on the ground f
loor with a narrow hallway running past the stairs that stood against the wall adjoining the next house over, now nothing more than a heap of bricks and burnt timbers. Two plain-clothes detectives were sorting through the front sitting room, turning over pieces of broken furniture, their feet crunching on still more broken glass.

  ‘Chief Constable Allen?’ asked Liddell.

  ‘Upstairs,’ said one of the men.

  They climbed to the upper floor. Black could feel the stair treads giving slightly under his feet and from the way the plain wood banister moved under his hand he could tell that the house was on the verge of collapsing. Like the house in London where they had discovered the body of David Talbot, the bombing had broken this place, forcing it to reveal its secrets. The sour smell of old wallpaper paste, the rot-musk of things stored too long in the cellar. Dry wood, dust, brief lives lived and not remembered.

  Chief Constable H. C. Allen of the Southampton Police was waiting for them at the top of the stairs. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, slab-faced and clean shaven, wearing a trench coat over civilian clothes. He introduced himself and then ushered Liddell and Black into the nearest of the two rooms on the upper floor.

  It was a bedroom, little more than a large windowless cupboard with just enough room for a single iron bedstead, a freestanding wardrobe and a washstand with a mirror on the wall above it. An oval rope rug was on the bare wood floor. The walls were papered in a pale blue stripe yellowed with nicotine.

  A fully clothed man was on the bed, eyes carefully closed, hands clasped over his waist. He was small, no more than five foot three, white haired, and appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties. He was dressed in trousers, a collarless white shirt and a grey cardigan. He was shoeless, the dark green sock on his right foot rudely darned by a man’s hand. A pair of felt slippers had been neatly arranged on the floor beside the bed. At first glance he seemed to be sleeping but his skin had the faint paraffin cast of the newly dead, and the pillow behind his head was soaked through with blood dried to the colour of old rust. There were no visible wounds.

  On the wall above the bed, roughly drawn in the same colour as the blood on the pillow, were four Z’s arranged in a swastika-like pattern. Like every corpse Morris Black had ever seen, this one had a sad, tired air of abandonment about it, like an empty house closed for the winter, curtains drawn, dry leaves blowing through the eaves.

  ‘We had your advisory from a few days ago,’ said the chief constable, looking down at the body. ‘When this came in, I thought I should see to it. Fit the description of the sort of thing you were after.’

  ‘Yes.’ Liddell nodded. ‘It would seem so. You’ve kept this quiet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who he was?’ Black asked, frowning. Rudelski, Talbot and Eddings – the sailor from Portsmouth – had all been young. This man didn’t fit the pattern at all.

  Chief Constable Allen tugged a small notebook out of his trench coat and flipped it open. ‘According to his National Registration Card, his name is Ivor John Dranie.’

  ‘Welsh?’ asked Liddell, frowning. Black knew what he was thinking; there had been a fair bit of talk in the first days of the war about the possibility of a Welsh nationalists’ fifth column. As far as Black knew, it had never materialised.

  ‘Welsh, yes, if his name means anything,’ Allen answered. ‘Fifty-nine years old. Retired machinist at Vickers-Supermarine.’

  ‘Fifty-nine is a bit young for retirement isn’t it?’ asked Black.

  ‘I asked them about that at Vickers. He had some sort of liver disease. They pensioned him off, I gather.’

  ‘How long ago?’ asked Black.

  ‘A little more than a year ago.’

  ‘Was he married?’

  ‘A widower. Two grown children. Boys. One dead at Dunkirk, the other with the Army in North Africa.’

  ‘What do his neighbours say about him?’

  ‘Very little,’ the chief constable said dryly. ‘A good few died in the raid and we haven’t interviewed the others yet. They might think it a bit of an imposition under the circumstances.’

  ‘He lived alone?’

  ‘From the looks of things.’

  ‘When was he discovered?’

  ‘This morning. Dawn. One of the ARP wardens had a look round after they put out the fire.’ The tall man paused. ‘Odd that.’

  ‘The fire?’ asked Liddell.

  ‘Umm.’ Allen nodded. ‘Come along and I’ll show you.’ He led the two men out of the room and across the small landing. The second room was even smaller than the first, one window looking out over the street. The front of the room had been partially consumed by fire so intense that it had burned down through the plaster walls to the lath. The ceiling overhead was open to the sky, the burnt ribs of the charred rafters clearly visible. A patch of wood flooring under the window had burnt through completely, leaving a gaping, black-edged hole.

  ‘We thought it was an incendiary at first,’ Allen explained as they stepped into the room. ‘But we couldn’t find the bomb container and then we saw that the fire had burned up, not down. It was set in this room.’ His eyebrows lifted. ‘Arson in the middle of a firestorm.’

  ‘The same as Eddings,’ Liddell murmured. Black looked around the room. Dranie had obviously used it as some sort of study. There were several bookshelves on the left, only partly burnt away, a wooden table, a pair of wooden straight chairs and a large, comfortable-looking upholstered armchair with a matching ottoman. The walls were papered in the same blue stripe as the bedroom.

  On the right there was a gas fire with a plain wooden mantel. A small framed photograph was over the fire. Black stepped across and examined it more closely. The photograph appeared to have been cut out of a magazine and showed a dozen oddly costumed figures crossing a cobbled square. The houses and buildings in the background looked vaguely Germanic. Along the edge of the picture there was a small credit line: Photo Union, Paul Lamm.

  Black turned and went to the bookcase. Nothing very interesting. A few popular novels, an eight-volume set of Audel’s Engineers and Mechanics Guide, the softbound edition of the Thomas National Road Atlas. The detective picked up the map book and flipped through it. No pencilled markings, no turned-down pages.

  ‘Did Dranie have a car?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ answered the chief constable. ‘Not that we know of. There was no driver’s licence or registration slip among his papers, at any rate.’

  Black went to the plain table in the centre of the room and looked down at it thoughtfully. The surface of the table was bare. Both chairs were neatly pushed in. No cups or glasses, nothing to say who Ivor Dranie’s last guest had been. Black glanced around the room. Dranie had used it for something and not just reading. It had a purpose of some sort. But what?

  Still thinking, Black wandered out of the room and went down the stairs to the ground floor. The two men in the front room had moved back into the kitchen. He was alone.

  The sitting room looking out onto the street had been simply furnished with a dark Victorian settee, a small circular dining table with four matching chairs and a desk under the window. The fire in the room above had come through the floor and flaming debris had ignited the settee and the table, partially destroying them. The desk was covered in a layer of soot and fallen plaster. The two Southampton policemen had uncovered enough of the desktop to reveal an old Underwood typewriter. The desk drawers were all open and empty.

  Black went into the small kitchen at the rear of the little house. The two men were searching through the cupboards. ‘The desk in the front room,’ said Black.

  The taller of the two men looked up from his work. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Was there anything in the drawers?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary. Paper, stamps, pencils and pens. Letters, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Official papers?’

  ‘Just what you’d expect. We’ve packed it all up.
’

  ‘All right.’

  Liddell and Chief Constable Allen were waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. Allen gripped the banister newel post and shook it firmly. The entire banister creaked and moved.

  ‘It’ll have to come down,’ he said.

  ‘What about the body?’ Liddell asked.

  ‘That’s up to you, Captain. We have our own coroner’s courts of course but if you’d like… He let it dangle; from the expression on his face Black could see that the man would like nothing better than to turn the case over to MI5. Liddell turned to Black.

  ‘Inspector?’ The responsibility was being passed again.

  ‘I think I’d like to have the body taken to London.’

  ‘That can be arranged,’ said Allen.

  ‘St Pancras Morgue,’ said Black. ‘And I’d like to have any of the material you’ve gathered up here as well, if that’s all right.’

  ‘Certainly.’ Allen nodded. ‘No trouble at all.’

  ‘I’ll give you the address,’ Liddell offered.

  ‘Anything else?’ Allen asked. ‘We can continue to investigate Dranie’s background if you want.’

  Black thought for a moment then shook his head slowly. The offer was sincere enough but it was obvious that the chief constable had other, far more pressing matters on his mind. ‘No. I don’t think that will be necessary,’ he answered finally.

  ‘We’ll let you know if there’s anything more you can do for us,’ said Liddell. He handed Allen a small card with the Kensington Park Gardens address printed on it. ‘If you could see to the other?’

  ‘We’ll have it on the train this evening,’ Allen promised. They shook hands. Allen joined his detectives in the kitchen. Liddell and Black went outside.