Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (17 page)

“They’re at the ministry. The office workers sleep there most nights now. They’ll be back, one of them at least, for an hour or two during the day to pick up clothes.”

“You’re alone then, Nan.” I didn’t like that at all. Especially now.

“The butcher comes in if he’s working late. ‘Any port in a storm,’ he says.”

I struck a match and located a couple of the old mildewed chairs stored below. The light flared and went out, leaving a sulfur smell and pitch-darkness. Dampness tickled the back of my throat, and I began wheezing softly. “Though,” said Nan, after a moment, “I’ve had the strangest sense lately.”

A pause in which I remembered the stories she used to tell me; the ghost stories of old dark houses where one met sinister inhabitants or where strange visitors came to call, stories where worlds were permeable and the unseen was just on the other side of a wall. “Yes?”

“Of someone being here. Someone else. It started just after you went to Bella’s. A couple of times I’ve been so sure I could hear someone breathing. There’s nothing wrong with my ears, you know.”

I agreed with that. Nan’s hearing has always been acute.

“But even without a sound, sometimes you just know there’s some—presence.”

“A ghostly visitor?” I asked, half joking.

“I don’t think so. Someone without a torch. Who goes without one?”

“Well, we’re down here without,” I said.

“Only because you keep losing your light. I hope that wasn’t one of Bella’s.”

I had to admit it was. “You didn’t hear anyone come in, though?”

“Someone was already here. I thought first it was one of the girls, but you know how friendly they are. I called for them. No answer. I was at the doorway, and I turned around and went up. If I’d had the key, I’d have locked the door behind me and seen what was what in the morning.”

“See you notify the police if it happens again,” I said. “Don’t you go exploring on your own.”

“Look who’s talking. And then last night—well, no matter now,” she said and patted my uninjured hand.

“No, tell me. We have to stay alert. Especially now. You did dry those photos?” I asked. Despite marked improvement, I realized that my mind had lost sequence as well as time.

“Cleaned up and drying in the airing cupboard.”

“That’s our insurance policy, Nan.”

“I’ll guard them with my life.”

“So last night—”

“I was here on my own. A light on proper, all in order, not a bad raid—I’d have stayed upstairs but for promising you. I heard someone on the stair. And I don’t know why, but it gave me a turn—with it being too late for the butcher and with the girls sleeping in the City. I reached up and put off the light.”

“And then?”

“Someone came to the door, opened it. I could just see the night, the fire in the clouds. Someone was there and stepped in without a greeting. Since when do you do that! I didn’t say a thing. Not a peep. No torch again this time. Closed the door. I could hear the footsteps. All quiet. I was about to turn the light on again when I heard someone walking overhead. All through the flat and then out.”

“Was anything missing? What did he want?”

“You’ll need to tell me if there’s anything gone, dear boy, but I can tell you,
he
didn’t want anything, for it was a woman. I could hear the tap of the high heels. What do you think of that?”

I should have thought a lot about it, but just then the vague rumblings of my intestinal tract and the faint queasiness of my stomach increased to violent intensity. I lunged for the door, tripped, and gagged and would have fouled the basement if Nan hadn’t opened the door and guided me up to the back garden where I retched up a lot of nasty fluid in the pink-and-gray raid light. A moment or two later, I had to struggle into the flat to the WC, where I spent a good deal of time expelling the varied toxins I’d picked up in the water. By the time I staggered out to be dosed again with whiskey-laced tea, I had only one thought: to sleep.

I lost three days with fever and intestinal grief. Nan must have begged sugar from half the street, for every time I awakened, I got sweet tea with whiskey or lemon—another rarity. But perhaps the lemon was my delirious imagination, which threw up explosions of light and flesh and mangled the features of all my friends—even Arnold’s, even Nan’s—who were closest to me. We are malleable to a point, then we shatter. Another degree of fever and I would have seen the end of the world and prophesied like the Evangelist; I’m sure my visions were no stranger than his.

As it was, I suffered various manias: a conviction that there were rats in my bed; that water was rising in the flat; that something precious had been stolen from me. In the grip of these convictions, I several times crawled out of bed, drunk with fever and falling with weakness, to search for some bizarre valuable until poor Nan could catch me.

One afternoon, I was tracing with her help my well-worn path from the WC when I returned to myself—an excellent development, yet, deprived of the wings of fever, I could scarcely walk.

“You must sleep,” said Nan, and I did.

The next morning I got up, ravenous. Nan had somehow foraged an egg, which she presented like a king on his throne in a little white egg cup. I took off his head and ate every bit and felt no distress. I was cured, the sun was out; life was wonderful. Nan made toast under the grill, which we ate with the tiniest smear of jam, and I wouldn’t have traded it for breakfast at the Savoy. By evening, I felt so well that nothing would do but a quick visit to Arnold. Nan was anxious, but I promised not to stay his whole shift. In a lull in the evening raids, I grabbed my jacket—clean and dry thanks to Nan—and set out for the old church.

I didn’t get very far before I realized my folly. Though I’d felt fine sitting reading to Nan, once I was on my feet and half a dozen blocks away, I realized that my muscles were jelly and my head full of air. Unwilling to admit defeat, I stopped for a little pick-me-up at a smoky, crowded pub, loud with the false but defiant Blitz cheer and serving very poor lager. As I leaned on the bar to get my breath back, the lights swayed and the floor vibrated with the shock of a nearby mine. Might as well die climbing the tower of the old church, I thought, and I was preparing to leave when I saw Connie disappear behind the blackout curtain. It was him, I was sure it was, even though his bleached hair was now short, and, in an excess of wartime austerity, he was wearing a leather jacket instead of his favorite silk blouse. I pressed through the crush and out the door after him. An intense white and lavender light to the east—that was the earthshaking mine. Dark to the west and—was that a figure already distant on the sidewalk?

“Connie!” I shouted, but weakness and smoke had reduced my voice to a croak. If he heard me at all, he didn’t stop; darkness took him so quickly I knew I would never catch up. But he was in London; that was something—if it really was him: the short hair, the leather jacket were against the proposition. On a little consideration, I was inclined to put the image down to residual delirium, and I’d almost discounted the sighting by the time I made my way to the old church. I climbed the steeple and spent several hours watching the fireworks with Arnold, then, at his urging, set off for home early. Buoyed by a very decent sandwich—Arnold’s post always seemed well provisioned—I walked home through the fires and damage, evaded one of my warden friends, and reached the flat in good time. The door was open. Raid nearby and Nan in the basement, God bless her. But then I realized that the all-clear had sounded when I’d still been several blocks away. “Nan!”

No answer.

I ran out to the basement steps. “Nan, Nan!”

A sound below. My heart banged into my stomach and both clenched up like a fist. She was lying dazed on the bottom step. I carried her up the stair to the flat.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Nothing. I twisted my ankle, that’s all.”

But as I was putting a blanket around her shoulders, she screamed. I had to cut the sweater away to examine her arm.

“You can mend your sweater,” I said to her protests. “Damn, Nan, I think there’s a bone broken. I’m sure it’s broken.”

She didn’t want to admit this, and when she did, she was of a mind to walk to the phone box, herself, for the ambulance. “Not on your life,” I said, and ran down to call in the report. A broken arm did not sound too bad to the post; she’d have a long wait—and exasperated, I said, “She’s nearly seventy. She may have other injuries.”

“We have priorities, you know.”

That was Liam. It had to be. A damn stickler for regulations. “For God’s sake, Liam, I know it’s you.”

“Francis?” There was something in his voice, some more than casual interest that I registered only too late.

“Yes, of course it’s Francis. And she needs help now.” I spelled her name for the third time and hung up.

When I got back to the flat, I knew I’d done the right thing, because I saw that her face was bruised too. She maintained that she’d tumbled in the darkness. “You know my sight, dear boy.”

I did, and I knew that she maneuvered in the blackout better than any sighted person. She knew every inch of the flat and the basement, too. After I pointed this out, she reluctantly admitted that she’d been knocked over by someone rushing up the stairs. Her sense of a presence in the dark basement had not been illusionary. She would have to go to Bella’s, and I would have to keep watch.

Morning dawned before the ambulance came. We rode together to the hospital, the ambulance jouncing over ruts and debris, Nan gripping my hand against the pain. She was for getting the arm splinted and heading straight home. With the ward crowded, the doctor was tempted to let her go, but I complained so loudly that she was assigned a bed.

While they worked on casting her arm, I called Bella to ask about Nan’s staying a few days in Holland Park Road. I’d run through my pocket change before I satisfied all Bella’s questions and made sufficient explanation for my absence. There I stood in the hall—Nan hurt and my own future cloudy—listening to Bella’s laments about the stalled painting and Madame’s desires for a color just one (or maybe two) shades darker than café au lait. Truly life begins in tragedy but ends in farce, with some omnipotent prankster hostile even to our dignity. In this case, the crowning touch was a twenty-five-foot ladder, “almost as good as scaffolding,” which Bella had obtained. I promised to take a look—anything to get Nan a safe berth.

“All this was unnecessary, dear boy,” she said when the ward sisters had her settled at last. “And the expense!”

“We’ll think of something.” I patted my jacket pockets hoping for a stray pound, and touched paper. The envelope. I must have found it in my delirium and stuck it in my pocket. No matter, I’d hide the photos as soon as I got home.

“What is it, dear boy?” Nan’s sense of something amiss is uncanny.

“I’ve just found those photos in my pocket,” I said, and it’s a good thing I didn’t say more, because at that moment, a heavy figure in a dark topcoat appeared at the end of the ward: my inspector.

Not to put too fine a point on it, he’d come to arrest me. Liam, my former colleague and unregenerate squealer, had called the police as soon as he dispatched the ambulance. I didn’t fancy being in the inspector’s hands, especially not carrying photos of his recreational pursuits. I might believe (and quite logically) that George Frahm was more likely Damien’s killer, but I wasn’t willing to rule out the inspector. Not to that extent.

I tried a bluff first. Nan had been injured by someone skulking in the basement. How good of him to investigate. This was a real crime, a real injury, but an old lady with a broken arm was not enough to distract him. I was to be charged, among other things, with evading arrest.

Nan had a few choice things to say about that. I calmed her down, told her not to worry, and leaned over to kiss her good-bye.

She knew what was what. Under cover of my embrace, my light-fingered nanny slipped the envelope from my pocket and slid it beneath the sheets.

“Dear boy,” she said, “leave everything to me.”

Another of my inspector’s acolytes appeared with handcuffs. This one was young and blond and, if anything, even more attractive than Handsome who’d visited our flat.

“You do have an eye,” I said, and winked. I nearly wound up at the bottom of the stair for my pains. Remember, Francis, the inspector has no sense of humor!

We got into his big, dark car with the fetching assistant driving for a circuitous journey through the previous night’s bomb damage. The inspector remained silent and serious, as befitting a guardian of the law, though at one point he half turned to say, “You’ve made a serious mistake.”

I shrugged. Nan would call Arnold, and Arnold would call a lawyer and then we’d see. I expected my interview to begin promptly, but when we finally reached the station, I was put into a holding cell still populated by the night’s catch of the drunk and disorderly. As their numbers thinned out I claimed a stretch of bench and fell asleep, only to awake, stiff and disoriented, by a great rattling at the door. The clock over the desk indicated late afternoon; Arnold had worked his magic; I was getting out.

Or so I thought. Instead, I was marched down the hall to one of the narrow interview rooms. The badly painted stone walls, the stale smoke, the single dangling bulb over the scarred deal table were all familiar. I’d been here before, and the image had lingered in my nightmares. Sitting in one of the two straight chairs was my inspector. With a nod from him, the sergeant took off my handcuffs and left the room. We were set for having a private conversation. Was that good or bad?

I was left to wonder, because he sat and stared at me for the longest time, his heavy brows shadowing his eyes, his jutting nose and strong chin catching the light. His silence and scrutiny were meant to intimidate me, and they were impressive, but he wasn’t used to painters. I sat and stared back; he was my type, my original type, before I met Arnold and embarked on civilized pleasure. I thought a ground of Venetian red—there was a purple undertone to the shadows—then maybe cad yellow medium if the picture tended hot, or yellow ochre if it ran cold. Hard to say which would be better; my inspector was a violent man who mostly had himself under control. Mostly, though as I sat there facing a variety of dangers, I realized that what I considered control might be a kind of torpor, such as I had noticed in him before—a suspension of emotion and action until a suitable trigger presented itself. That was not a pleasant thought.