Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (10 page)

In the chaos of the first day of the Blitz, I forgot to tell the inspector about Brighton.

Chelsea didn’t get hit that day or the next; instead, the Jerries pounded the dockyards and the poor East End nightly for the better part of a week. But though the fiery angel had passed over us, it was only a temporary reprieve. Soon we were all too familiar with the sounds and rhythms of a raid: the screaming sirens, the rush to get our neighborhoods properly sheltered, the thunder overhead. And then the explosions, the bombs that whistled, that fragmented, that doused already-raging fires with oil. Sea mines the size of pillar boxes descended in the night, silent and enormous under their huge parachutes. We learned to listen for the thump of their landing and the serpent hiss of the fuse before the blinding white ball, ringed with lavender, and the blast wave could sweep you off your feet and whirl you like cyclone and leave you in so many parts we had to fetch a basket. That was if the mine went off. If it didn’t, major relief was followed by gut-wrenching suspense, with some luckless warden keeping the neighbors back and guarding the thing until the bomb crew defused it.

These fiery armaments surprised us; we’d been all trained and equipped for gas with gumboots and masks and eye shields and gas-proof coveralls. But what we got was fire, infernal and spectacular, the night sky lit up like a Turner seen on opium. One of the worst bombs was the smallest: the thermite incendiary. It looked like a stick and rattled down by the dozens. You’d hear the distinctive plop-plopping as they went end-over-end down the slates before bursting into violent bluish-white flames. Incendiaries snuck into roofs through chinks and gaps and flamed unseen in the blackout until the rafters caught. Soon a house or flat or terrace that looked cold and solid had swallowed the fatal flames, and another street was caught in a howling fire wind.

Those were the raids. In a raid, your adrenaline is up, and you see and do things without thinking much, because they have to be done. You stand next to your own imminent annihilation while your fellow warden lights up a fag and complains that there’s no pub nearby. Or you lift off a beam and see a crushed child without a minute to mourn or to find the right words for the frantic parents. Everything’s lost in the rush of fire and explosion, in droning planes and shrieking sirens, in the splash and tramp of stretcher parties wading through the dark water left by fire hoses.

Because the distinctive Blitz smell of smoke, high explosives, ancient dust, pulverized wood, and domestic gas seized up my lungs, I mostly worked the phone, checked the shelters, and found housing for bombed-out families, another good way to get acquainted with the price of a raid. But on shorthanded nights I was out, and some nights when the Jerries got started before we had everyone tucked up, yours truly had a ringside and spectacular view. We were busy at our ARP post, and I suppose the inspector was similarly occupied. When we finally discussed my theatrical efforts in Brighton, he seemed uninterested. Mass casualties have a way of putting even gruesome murders in perspective. If my luck had only held a bit longer, I’d never have needed to see my copper again.

Of course, my luck didn’t hold: “Call happy only him who has ended his life in sweet prosperity,” as Aeschylus so aptly puts it. We had a night of light raids. The ack-ack guns were in operation by that time, and periodically our night fighters—the Blenheims and Defiants—were held off and the antiaircraft gunners switched on their massive searchlights and had a go at any plane caught in the beams. I don’t know that they hit much of anything, but it was cheering to hear the rattle and boom of our artillery. You can see that I was developing a properly martial frame of mind. Anyway, a light night. I got off early and stopped to visit Arnold, who was a fire watcher nearby.

Action over the docks again, just enough to light up the sky. The terrible Blitz could be beautiful, and there were moments, sitting up in the church steeple where Arnold had his post, when we might have been watching fireworks in some fabulous romance. Of course, in this romance, sudden death was an excellent possibility, but we’d adjusted to that, and to being hungover with exhaustion, not alcohol, and to sleeping for half an hour at a time and waking up in an instant. Arnold looked tired. He had twenty years on me and the long nights told on him. “Take a nap,” I said. “I’ll watch for a while.”

“Dear boy.” He leaned his head on my shoulder and was gone in an instant, leaving me to survey the cratered city. Skies silent now, smoke on the breeze from the dockyards, a dirty fog coming off the Thames. A few hot red spots, the work of incendiaries, but a quiet night, considering. Before dawn, the all-clear sounded and we descended the nearly vertical steps from the spire. Down below, the usual scene—mud, pools of water, broken glass by the truckload, steaming ruins, exploded gardens. The usual detours for ruptured mains, cratered roads, electrical cables. The usual ambulances, police cars, fire engines. The usual stunned residents gaping at whatever was left; the usual workers beginning the daily trek through our ever-altered landscape.

Arnold had headed home, and I was within a half dozen blocks of the flat when I approached a terrace that had taken a direct hit. It appeared that the wounded had already been taken to hospital, for a warden and several Heavy Rescue Squad workers were standing around looking exhausted, cigarettes drooping from their blackened fingers. The top story of one house had folded up like a concertina onto the lower floors. Everything was smashed but still cold and smokeless, so there was a suspicion that an unexploded bomb was concealed in the rubble. Hence the conference.

When they saw my tin hat in the gloom, they waved me over. A sharp yapping bark greeted me: how often dogs signal bad luck. This was a terrier like the rat killers that haunted my father’s stable. It was running back and forth before a mound of rubble topped by a thick and heavy timber.

“Someone still in there?” I asked.

“Might be. That’s Jeremy’s dog.” This from a large, muscular chap, his face totally blackened, a dirty bandage on his right arm. He was the Heavy Rescue Squad leader, one of the construction specialists called in to shift rubble and to either make ruins safe or supervise their demolition.

What could I do but ask if they needed a hand?

Another consultation. Six of us, they decided, might be able to lift the timber. I went through the gate, over a toilet tank and part of a bureau, avoided a framed picture, glass perfectly intact, of Queen Victoria in the Jubilee Year, and a thorny and vigorous gooseberry bush. The squad leader, whose name was Bill, lined us up, cautioning us on the treacherous footing—a mix of shattered wood and crumbled brick.

“On three, lads. One . . . two . . . three . . . ”

Muscles straining against the immovable timber. Too heavy, I thought, my lungs already protesting. Then scrapes and rattles as our boots shifted on the rubble and a shout of encouragement from Bill. Timber up. “Bring it to me, step at a time. Swing the front, Robbie. Wait, wait. Now. Watch the damn dog. Let her down.” A soft thump from the timber. The dog dived toward the cavity newly opened in the mess of brick and timber before raising an eerie howl. Strange how effortlessly expressive animals are, while we hairless beasts must struggle over canvas and paints and the English language.

The local warden switched on his torch and I followed suit, holding our lights so that the demolition men could do their work. Wall fragments edged with shattered teeth of brick. Another sizeable timber requiring my participation—how we conspire in our own ruin. Another desperate howl from the dog. And then, out of the gray plaster dust, a muscular arm, bloodless and white. No matter how often you see rescue attempts, the moment of recovery always hits you. Sometimes a surge of hope, sometimes, as now, the sick anticipation of horror.

We all got into the act, hauling bricks, sweeping away the dust and plaster, lifting bits of lath. The face, always the face first. No sign of life. Hands reached out to clear the neck. I leaned forward to search for the pulse and stopped.

“What is it? What’s the matter, mate?”

“We’ll need the police,” I said. “He’d have been dead before the first bomb.”

A light directly on the wound, a single terrific slash across the throat.
Déjà vu
and memories of the dead airman and the inspector’s visits. I could hear my own breathing. And there was another bad thing about this one, now livid in our torches: his light hair, his pudding face and short mouth, his dark brows. It gave me a turn how much he looked like me.

“That’s Jeremy, right enough.” This from Bill. “Some tart’s been his downfall.”

“Or some tart’s husband,” another said.

“Poor Jeremy liked to sail close to the wind. We’ll get him uncovered, lads. The police will want to see him.”

The Heavy Rescue boys went to work. My fellow warden departed to summon the authorities, and I stood stunned and wheezing beside the dog, who had lain down with her head on her paws to whimper. That’s where I was, off my own particular patch and just waiting for my colleague to return, when a reporter arrived, complete with camera. Lots of luck to him—most casualty photos were censored; we all knew that. But, in the perverse way of the universe, this case, being a personal as opposed to an impersonal violent death, was the exception. Some hours later it appeared in the first afternoon edition:
MURDER VICTIM FOUND IN BOMBED-OUT HOUSE
, complete with photo. Not a morale-damaging close-up of the corpse but a snap of yours truly, complete with tin hat, standing with the faithful dog beside the tarp-covered body.

“It can’t be a coincidence,” Nan said, peering at the news photo through her big magnifying glass.

“The picture is a coincidence. Wrong place, wrong time,” I said, attempting to avoid her implication.

“The picture is bad luck. His resemblance to you—you’re sure, dear boy, it was not just the strain of the moment?”

I shook my head, and Nan nodded. She knows my visual perceptions are acute and my visual memory virtually flawless. “And within, what, five, six blocks of us?”

“No more.”

“Do think carefully; could you have made an enemy?”

I shook my head. That thought had crossed my mind as I walked home from the bomb site. It’s true I can rub people the wrong way and that I’m not afraid of a fracas. I know some rude boys and rough trade, too, but I’m not one to leave hard feelings behind. Not my style. “The demolition workers said Jeremy was an awful one for the ladies.”

“Humph,” said Nan. “You never know what that kind will get up to.”

“It might have been as the locals thought,” I suggested, “a romance gone bad, a mad woman or angry husband.”

“Might be,” said Nan without sounding convinced, “but I’m thinking we’ll see that inspector on our doorstep before morning.”

A fascination with detectives, fictional and otherwise, led Nan to exaggerate the efficiency of the Metropolitan Police, but she was dead right about the inspector. He arrived late the next afternoon to ask how I’d shown up at the bomb site just before the body was discovered. “That’s getting to be a bad habit with you,” he said.

With his little notebook—“so Bromley Terrance is not in your assigned sector?”—and his ponderous manner, not to mention the hypocrisy of his personal life, he irritated me beyond measure. Determined to tell him as little as possible, I omitted my visit to Arnold’s fire-watching post, allowing the inspector to think I’d left the ARP close to dawn. In retrospect, this was foolish, but although there was no crime in visiting Arnold, “your alderman” to the inspector, I didn’t trust my personal copper not to involve him. “A quiet night,” I concluded. “I decided to stretch my legs on the way home. I walked a few extra blocks.”

He gave me a look. Perhaps he wasn’t a walker, perhaps, aside from frenzied moments in the park, he wasn’t enamored of the damp night breeze, the grotesque shadows and spectacular lights of the Blitz.

“Did you know him?”

“Jeremy, whatever his name was?”

“Jeremy Gowen.” He opened his little notebook. “‘The second warden had a very strong reaction to the sight of the body, especially the face.’ Why was that?”

“It was just the light, I am sure.”

“You’ve seen bodies before.”

“More than I’ve wanted. But it was the light, a trick of the light. It seemed to me that Mr. Gowen resembled me strongly. It was a shock, on top of the discovery that he’d been murdered.”

“Interesting that murder was your immediate assumption.”

“His throat had been cut.”

“Flying glass creates terrible wounds.”

“No, no, I’ve seen what glass does. This was a single blow; I’m sure of it, positive.”

“We will see,” said the inspector, “Meanwhile, no more trips to Brighton—or anywhere else. You’ll be reporting to your ARP post tonight?”

I nodded.

“Inform me before you travel anywhere outside of London—or even if you should leave your current address.”

Right you are, as Nan likes to say. I should have packed my bags then and there, but, led astray by duty and patriotism, I told Nan not to worry and reported to the ARP post as usual. I was barely in the door before Liam gave me the good news that the coppers had been snooping around. “Wanted to know what time we all left last night. It’s fortunate Peter’s got us organized to sign in and out. I showed him the book.” Here Liam nudged me. “I told him you like to go poaching on other people’s turf.”

I’ve heard better laughs on the Brighton beach donkeys. But he’d given me fair warning. Early that evening I was having a cup of tea between air raids when Joan stuck her head in at the canteen door and said I was wanted.

“I’m on duty. Who is it?”

“An inspector something and two patrolmen. They’re waiting for you at the top of the stairs.”

“Thanks. I’ll be right there.”

Two patrolmen. One was essential to preserve the dignity of the inspector, who could not appear publicly without an aide. Two was another matter, suggesting an imminent trip to the station house, if not arrest. I didn’t hesitate. I scooped up my tin hat, my gas mask, and torch—it wouldn’t do to be missing bits of the kit—and checked the hall. Joan was headed up the two short flights that led to the main foyer of the museum. I ducked under the stairwell to the custodian’s domain and the storerooms, where I followed the yellow circle of my torch the length of the building, past the piping, equipment closets, and mysterious, long-sealed doorways. Here were racks of rock specimens exhaling the dust of the ages; big, outmoded Victorian cabinets, still crammed with minerals; and workrooms with tables and special hammers and chisels for dividing specimens. They would think to come this way, momentarily. Friendly, helpful Joan would say, “Well, there’s only the one door,” or something like that. I’d surprise them. I took a narrow staircase that gave access to the exhibition hall, eased the door, and turned off my torch.