A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  They’d managed to survive the single bomb that struck the Burlington Arcade by merest chance; chance would not be part of anyone’s equation tonight. Ignoring the white-hot sear of pain in his side, Black grabbed Katherine’s hand.

  ‘Run!’ he yelled.

  They had gone less than fifty yards when a new sound was added to the bombers’ thunder. A faint, hissing sound, like a nest of dozing snakes disturbed in some dark hole, or the first rush of a rain squall on the flat, oily surface of a dead calm sea an instant before the breaking of the storm. There was a brilliant flash high overhead, and looking up, still running, Black could see the retina-burning splash of a parachute flare igniting. Far in the distance, the few anti-aircraft batteries still in place around Coventry began to snort and bang and then the rain sound was all around them.

  Black heard a sharp, smacking noise directly in front of them as the first incendiaries reached the ground. There was a burst of light and then a shower of sparks twenty feet ahead and Black threw himself to the ground, dragging Katherine with him.

  A split second later the small thermite charge lodged in the core of the magnesium exploded with a shattering roar, sending bits of white-hot shrapnel flying in all directions. Within an instant, a dozen fires were burning in the once dark alleyway.

  They stumbled to their feet and ran on, swinging around the small crater where the incendiary had exploded, ducking past a sheet of flame as it began to suck up the plank wall of a small millwright’s shop. Almost unbelievably they managed to slip by and ran on into the safety of the darkness beyond.

  There were no single sounds now, only an ever-growing hell of a hundred different noises; the steady thunder of the bombers, the coughing chatter of the ack-ack, the swish and roar and Roman-candle hiss of the incendiaries; and now, like the hammering of mad kettledrums, there was the new sound of the larger high-explosive bombs, some no more than a screaming whistle followed by a ground-shaking thump but others so massive Black could feel the huge pressure waves smashing into his chest, threatening to knock them over.

  Behind them the small incendiaries fell in a steady, horrifying shower, banishing the evening chill with the steadily rising heat from the combining fires as a hundred buildings began to burn. To Black it seemed almost as though the fire were a living thing, trying to seek them out, following them as they raced onward. Without some kind of shelter soon, they would be turned to cinder.

  A huge, unbelievably loud explosion came from directly behind them as a five-hundred-kilogram Flammenbombe oil canister detonated, sending out a whirling, searching fireball of flaming kerosene and bunker oil but they turned a corner in the lane before it reached them.

  Even so, Black could feel the air being sucked out of his lungs and he was vaguely aware of a searing wave of heat blistering the skin on the back of his neck. Beside him, Katherine’s hair began to curl and frizzle, and the back of her short coat was actually smoking. Another explosion like that in front of them and they would be trapped.

  Abruptly the alley ended and they found themselves standing on the pavement of Much Park Street. They stopped dead, frozen by the terrible spectacle before their eyes. An entire block was engulfed in flames.

  One of the huge, buff-coloured AB1000 incendiary containers had failed to split and open at the preset altitude and all 610 of its two-pound incendiary bomblets had been released less than thirty feet above the ground, spewing hundreds of the two-foot-long magnesium tubes into the walls and windows of the surrounding factories and commercial buildings as well as turning the street itself into a fuming mass of puddling, liquefied macadam that was now rolling like flaming lava down the gutters, then cascading into the storm sewers.

  More incendiaries had fired the roof of the Lea Francis Cycle Works, which fronted onto Much Park Street, and several 250-kilogram high-explosive bombs had turned the narrow façade of the old Midlands Brewing Company into a pile of flaming rubble that blocked the road to the south.

  In the midst of it all an abandoned trolley car was burning like a huge torch, while closer to them the skeletal remains of a motorcycle were literally melting into the pavement, its rider reduced to a charred and blackened stick figure hunched horribly over the handlebars.

  ‘Sweet mother of Christ!’ whispered Katherine, looking out into the raging hell of Much Park Street. As she spoke, there was another explosion in the alley as the fires started by the thousand-pound oil bomb reached the preservative storage sheds of the Providence Milling Company.

  Above them the night sky was hidden now, masked by a roiling, impenetrable cloud of oily smoke and brightly spinning sparks. Invisibly the bombers continued their onslaught, one after the other in a never-ending wave, their bombs released in screaming, whistling streams, hurtling through the smoke, down to join the boiling cauldron of flame below.

  ‘Morris! We’re trapped!’ Gasping in the terrible heat, Katherine wrenched off the smoking remains of her jacket and threw it aside. Her throat was seared and no matter how hard she tried there seemed to be no way to take enough air into her lungs.

  ‘No! There!’ Black pointed across the road and without another word he dragged her forward. Both her shoes were gone now and she screamed as her bare feet touched the glutinous, superheated tar of the road. Black ignored her and pressed on, eventually bringing them both to the far side of the street.

  Directly in front of them a wrought-iron enclosure protected three sides of a basement entrance. They staggered down the short flight of steps, ducking as the main doorway above them and to their left suddenly burst into flame, its frame collapsing in a deadly shower of flaming splinters. Black smashed into the basement door with his shoulder, then struck again. The door flew open and they burst into the dark interior of the basement.

  With a terrible cracking sound directly over their heads, the entire front of the building collapsed with an ear-splitting roar, fifty tons of brick and timber filling the entranceway behind them, sealing them underground.

  Still gripping Katherine’s hand, Black plunged forward in the darkness. Above them the sounds of the exploding bombs and the raging fires had dulled but the detective was only too aware of the deadly creaking of the floorboards and joists above their heads. His free hand, outstretched, smashed into a thick metal supporting column and he breathed a sigh of relief. At some point the owners of the building had reinforced the foundations with steel beams. For the moment at least, they were safe.

  Loosening his grip on Katherine’s hand, he began rummaging through the pockets of his coat and then began to laugh.

  ‘What’s so goddamn funny?’ asked Katherine out of the darkness.

  ‘The whole city is going up in flames outside and here I am looking for a bloody match to see my way.’

  ‘Here.’ Black heard a faint sound beside him and then Katherine’s Ronson flared, offering up a tiny, weak halo of light. She lifted her hand and swung around slowly. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘The basement of a funeral establishment by the looks of it.’

  Neatly stacked piles of caskets were all around them, each coffin separated from its neighbour with wooden planks. If the fires over their heads managed to burn through the floorboards, the place would go up like a spark in a tinderbox. A crematorium. Beside Black, Katherine shivered.

  ‘Morris, I don’t want to die in a place like this,’ she whispered.

  He put one hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently, his earlier anger gone in the face of their present danger. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t let that happen.’ He took the lighter from her and stepped forward cautiously, glancing towards the joists above them every few seconds. Katherine followed.

  Beyond the rows of coffins they found a doorway, the closure sprung and twisted, a cracked joist above it. Squeezing through the opening they found themselves in what could only have been the body-preparation room. It looked like one of Spilsbury’s mortuaries.

  Half a dozen metal tables were in a row, glass-fronted cabinets along one wall and a line of
metal drawers along the other. The body of an elderly woman was laid out on the table closest to them. She was naked, thick tubes running from groin and flabby abdomen, draining into a large metal canister at the foot of the table. Another tube ran into her chest, connected to some sort of pump on a counter behind the table.

  Someone had already been working on the woman’s face; the mouth, still open, was stuffed with cotton and a heavy curved needle dangled from her lower lip, probably left there at the first sounding of the sirens. Her cheeks were rouged and her hair was neatly curled. A row of small glass cosmetic pots were lined up on the table beside her head. The eyes, wide, dry and blind, stared upward towards the unseen inferno blazing only a few feet above.

  ‘God, Morris, get me out of here,’ moaned Katherine, staring down at the corpse. An edge of panic was creeping into her voice and Black felt it rising in himself as well. The heat from the lighter was becoming unbearably hot and he loosened his cramped finger on it. The light snuffed out, leaving them in utter darkness. Overhead they could hear the blast-furnace roar of flames and beyond, muffled by debris and distance, the steady thumping detonations of more bombs. Switching hands, he flicked on the lighter again, revealing the unmoving corpse of the old woman.

  ‘Over there,’ said Black, moving the lighter to his right. Another door, large and metal-clad. They made their way between the tables, crossing to the far side of the room. Black tentatively reached out with his free hand, pressing his palm against the green-painted tin covering the door. The metal was relatively cool; no fire was burning beyond. He pushed down on the handle and dragged the door back on its hinges. Stepping through the doorway, he raised his arm.

  They were in a sub-basement of some kind, standing on a rough wooden landing with a flight of steps leading down to a stained cement floor with a large, grille-covered drain in the centre. Looking upward, Black saw that the roof was very old, the beams and joists nothing more than crudely squared tree trunks.

  Rows of shelves were built against the stone walls, filled with large, wicker-covered flasks and an assortment of tins and boxes. He sniffed. No smoke but a biting stink of chemicals and the sick-sweet stench of human excrement. Somewhere a sewer pipe had ruptured and gas was backing up into the smaller drains like the one in the floor.

  Against the far right wall Black could see several heavy lead pipes running from side to side, sloping from floor to ceiling. Water and sewage. He closed the door carefully behind them. From what the detective could see in the faint light cast by the lighter, the door was the only way in or out of the room.

  ‘We’ll be safe enough here,’ he said, not really believing it. ‘Come on.’ They went down the steps, Black holding up the lighter. As he reached the bottom and turned slightly to say something reassuring to Katherine there were two massive explosions, less than a second apart.

  The first came from an externally carried thousand-kilogram parachute mine that detonated in the rear yard of the Charlesworth Motor Body Works, which was located midway between Much Park Street and Little Park Street, connected to both by a narrow lane used both by the Motor Body Works and the MacMillan Funeral Parlour.

  The second explosion was caused by a smaller, yellow-striped SC 500 bomb that cut through the flaming roof of MacMillan’s, smashing through the ceiling of the main viewing salon before it detonated. By an odd stroke of luck the blast and pressure wave from this second explosion snuffed out the blossoming fire that was threatening to burn through the floor over the body-preparation room and the sub-basement storage area.

  It also brought down the already weakened walls of the narrow, brick building, burying Morris Black and Katherine Copeland under twenty tons of rabble and insulating them from the other fires consuming the larger, wood-framed buildings on either side of the funeral parlour.

  However, the shock wave from the explosion in the Charlesworth yard was so severe that it completely destroyed the large water and sewage mains running from Earl Street to Whitefriars Lane as well as rupturing the narrower conduits that actually ran through the sub-basement of MacMillan’s. Both Morris Black and his companion had been knocked unconscious by the force of the explosions and neither of them was aware that their dark, solidly sealed bolthole was now a catch basin for water from the ruptured mains and sewer waste bubbling up through the central drain. When it filled, they would drown.

  Chapter Twenty

  Saturday, November 23, 1940

  10:30 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time

  Morris Black lay in the dimly lit room, his plaster-covered right leg elevated on a canvas-sling-and-chain arrangement fitted to a metal cage over the lower end of the hospital bed. His left eye was still covered by a gauze patch and both hands were swathed in bandages. When he first began swimming up out of unconsciousness, he’d been sure that he was blind, but this morning a doctor had removed the patch on his right eye and informed him that the left patch would be removed in a day or two. Now at least he could see, even if it was only partially.

  By turning his head slightly he could make out the narrow window on his left. The blackout curtains were drawn back, letting in the weak November sunshine. Midday or later by the looks of it. He could still smell the hot-ash reek of the fires in his nostrils but through it he could also smell the familiar odours of ointment and disinfectant.

  He moved his head on the pillows propped up behind him, wincing at the shooting pain in his neck, and glanced at Guy Liddell, seated in a large, comfortable-looking chair to the right of his bed, a cup of tea perched on one padded arm.

  ‘You still haven’t told me exactly where I am,’ Black croaked. His throat burned and his mouth felt thick as glue, his tongue a swollen obstacle that made swallowing an effort. More than once since regaining consciousness he’d seriously wondered if he wouldn’t be better off dead.

  ‘The Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead.’ Liddell leaned forward and put the teacup on the enamelled table at the head of the bed. ‘Quite new, all mod cons. The RAF uses it now. So do we. Excellent facilities for people who’ve been burned and it’s discreet.’

  ‘I spoke to a doctor today. He wouldn’t tell me anything except that there wouldn’t be any permanent damage.’

  ‘Curt fellow with horn-rims?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mclndoe. They call him the Maestro.’

  ‘Was he telling the truth?’

  ‘I believe so. You were extremely lucky, Black, I hope you’re aware of that.’

  ‘What about Katherine? No one seems to know anything about her.’

  ‘She got off a sight better than you, old man. Superficial burns, singed hair, some cuts and bruises.’

  ‘Is she here as well?’

  ‘She was. She was released some time ago. Back in London by now I presume.’

  ‘I’ve been here nine days?’

  ‘That’s right. It’s Saturday, the twenty-third. You were unconscious for three days and then you started coming out of it. The doctors kept you under with morphia until you were a bit further along. Standard procedure, as I understand it.’ Liddell paused. ‘How much do you remember about what happened?’

  ‘Nothing at all after the explosion.’

  ‘Miss Copeland saved your life. A water main burst and started filling up the room you were in. She managed to drag you up onto some sort of landing; kept you from drowning until the ARP lads dug you out the next day. Quite a feat, I gather. She must be strong as an ox.’

  There was a long silence. ‘I almost had him,’ Black whispered finally.

  Liddell sighed. ‘So I’m given to understand by Miss Copeland.’ He smiled thinly. ‘She takes full responsibility by the way. She said if it hadn’t been for her barging in on things, you would have nicked him.’

  ‘No. My fault,’ said Black weakly. ‘I should have—’

  ‘You should have done what you were told,’ said Liddell flatly. ‘And you were told not to go to Coventry under any circumstances.’

  ‘Queer Jack knew there was
going to be a raid.’ Black stared at the intelligence officer. ‘A major one. So did you.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘There was no warning.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who else knew?’

  ‘A number of people. People who had to know.’

  ‘Your bloody Magic Circle. Ultra.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You could have issued a warning, done something.’

  ‘It was decided that nothing could be done. Not without prejudicing Ultra.’

  Black was silent for a long moment. Martyr a city and save the winning of the war. ‘How bad was it in the end?’

  ‘Very. The entire centre of the old city was burned to the ground. The cathedral was gutted. You were lucky to escape.’

  ‘How many dead?’

  ‘Five hundred.’

  ‘My God.’ Black let his head fall back against the pillows. He thought of Garlinski and of Trench. ‘There’s going to be hell to pay when word of this gets out.’

  ‘It won’t get out. That’s been attended to. We had to keep Ultra safe.’

  ‘“We”? Does that include Churchill?’

  ‘There was no need for him to know. It was decided to keep the information from him until it was too late to do anything about the situation. A fait accompli. The prime minister has enough to deal with as it is. There was no time for moral handkerchief wringing. A decision had to be made. It was. Any problems down the road will be dealt with.’

  ‘You’re all mad,’ Black said quietly. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Liddell. He turned away and stared up at the shadowed ceiling. ‘I’ve had enough of you, Liddell. The whole bloody crew.’

  ‘You’re hardly in a position to cast aspersions, Inspector. You have your own cross to bear, I’m afraid. You involved an innocent party in your little scheme and he died for his efforts.’

  ‘Trench.’ That great stain of blood down the front of his shirt, the look in his eyes. Another link in his chain of guilt.