Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (20 page)

“Oh right,” I said, “so I can worry about your being blown up instead of attacked.”

With a show of indignation, I went down to the basement, where I found an old door and three segments of some rusty iron fencing that had missed the scrap-metal drive. I used the door to reinforce the kitchen table, and I wired the fencing around it as some protection from flying debris, forming a crude version of a Morrison shelter. Nan pronounced it excellent; I wasn’t so sure.

“Don’t worry about me, dear boy,” she called as I left for my shift.

As if!

Around midnight Maribelle called our ARP post. Even though it was a light night and all of us sitting around, I heard our head warden say no personal calls were allowed. “Not even his mother!” he said—that’s how I knew it must be Maribelle—and I was rebuked for giving out the number. I compounded this offense by taking a break as soon as possible and rambling around the building until I found an unlocked office with a working phone.

Under a green-shaded desk light, I dialed the Europa. The phone rang once, twice. “Maribelle?”

“That you, cunty? What sort of place are they running? I nearly gave that stiff-necked prick what-for.”

“Sorry about that. We’re strictly business here.”

“He was in. I didn’t recognize him at first, set to chuck him out, I was. ‘No ladies here,’ I said.”

I didn’t wait to hear more. “Maribelle, what was he wearing? Was he wearing high heels?”

“Whole kit, dearie. Silk and a little fox wrap. Real silk stockings, too. He’s made a fortune on the troops, he has. The room was agog, I can tell you.”

“And my note, Maribelle?”

“That’s what I’m calling you about. ‘From Francis,’ I said. He wasn’t going to take it. ‘Important,’ I said, and insisted.”

“Did he read it, Maribelle? What did he say?”

“Cunty, he swore a blue streak and tore it up. So I said, ‘You’ll want to talk to Francis and get things sorted. I expect him tomorrow or the next day. Midafternoon.’”

“Thank you, Maribelle.”

“Let me finish—that’s why I’m calling. He was as pale as watered beer, with a queer look about him, and not just his makeup, either. He says, ‘I’ll see about him myself now.’ And he left just like that, stamping out on those high heels. I didn’t like it, I can tell you.”

I didn’t like it either, especially when I remembered that Connie and Damien had posed arm in arm one day on the fading green couch in the flat. My guess about our intruder, which I’d half put down to an overactive imagination, was probably correct. And if it was, Nan was in serious danger. “How long ago did he leave?”

“What’s it now? Twelve thirty. Maybe an hour, maybe more. We had a real crush at the bar.”

An hour, maybe more! A walk to the tube, maybe a delay for a raid. Catch the train to Chelsea. The walk in the dark to our flat would be slow-going, but he knew the way—now I was sure he did. An hour, an hour and a quarter? Close, it would be close. I took a deep breath, put aside loyalties and scruples, and dialed the inspector. If he was in, fine; if not, I was away to Nan.

I heard someone calling me from the front of the museum, “Break’s over, Francis.” Down the line, the phone rang unanswered. Hurry, hurry, I thought, my stomach contracting. Then the voice of officialdom in the person of a duty sergeant. Was it the same one who’d conveniently absented himself so that George could give me a thumping? I almost hung up, but this was no time for personal pique. I gave my name and asked for Inspector Mordren. “It’s a dire emergency.”

I could almost hear him yawning. “The inspector’s a busy man. You’ll need to give me some idea what this is about, sir.”

“Is he in? Tell me at least if he’s in! He’ll want to talk to me. Tell him it’s about the killings in the West End he’s investigating. Tell him, ‘Damien Hiller.’”

A distinct lack of interest; I felt it even down the wire. What did he or his precious inspector care about Nan? About me? “Tell him the photos are in danger,” I added. “Tell him that and see if he won’t come to the phone.”

“The inspector’s busy at the moment,” he began.

“He’ll have your guts for garters if those photos reach the wrong hands. Just tell him ‘photos.’ Photos!” I was shouting by this time, and somewhere down the corridor my name was called again.

I felt behind me for the door and flicked the lock—might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and anyway I’d be out the back window momentarily. But the inspector? Had the pestilent sergeant disconnected? No, still silence on the other end. Then, just as I was about to give up, I heard the familiar voice.

There was no time for details. “Colin Williams,” I said. “He’s been dressing as a woman for months; he’s the ‘Miss Cherie’ of Brighton fame. I didn’t take him seriously when he told me he was going to do something about Damien’s death. But he has, I’m sure he has. He’s on his way to our flat and Nan’s there.”

“Are you at your ARP post? Wait for me.”

“Nan’s alone. I’ll meet you there.”

I hung up and pushed the desk under the window—I knew the drill by this time. I broke a letter opener between getting the paint unstuck and the sash pried open—what shoddy maintenance!—and hauled myself up onto the sill. As the lamp, letter opener, assorted books, and papers hit the floor behind me, I pitched forward into the night and ran.

Running in darkness, a juvenile pleasure of country-house nights, the long grass just damp with evening, the shouts of my cousins from the gloom of the trees, the rising moon soon to make all clear. And other nights with real danger under the cover of real blackness, Nan hurrying me into the big stone-floored kitchen in the basement and covering the windows while shots rang out overhead and a flaming torch flickered somewhere nearby, provoking her to mutter, “The devils! They’ll try to fire the house.”

Upstairs, Thomas, one of the stablemen, was at a drawing room window with a rifle; my father with another was at the back. Those were the nights of my childhood: rebels in the garden and a tyrant in the back parlor. Other nights, Berlin nights, better lit than this—watch the stoops and dustbins, Francis—but with many sooty alleys and crooked byways, physical and moral, so that I was running, still running, in flight from both respectability and danger with pursuing footsteps far heavier than my cousins’ light tread on the lawn. Night and danger. The garish lights of the Alexanderplatz morphed now into the familiar Blitz sky with its vast range of lovely and terrifying effects. Tonight a smoky pallor shot with pink and orange from distant fires cast just enough glow so that I could keep running, my lungs emptying, a flood of images pouring through my mind and washing around the great central fact: Nan was alone and virtually helpless.

I was a few blocks from our street, wheezing like bagpipes, when Moaning Minnie went off. For an instant I thought the sound was inside me, the inner pressure of fear and extreme effort, but our Teutonic visitors hadn’t forgotten us. Searchlights bounced big white disks off the clouds and smoke, the guns started up, and the earth quivered with the roar of engines and ordnance and mines and fires.

A few people on the street. “Take cover, take cover,” I yelled automatically, though I was out of cover myself and not intending to seek it, unless my improvised Morrison shelter qualified. And the inspector? Where was he and his handsome driver? Close enough to help? And would he? Running and gasping empties the mind of assumptions. He might think that my death—and Nan’s—would be a good thing, a lucky thing. And so it would, until they cut off her cast and peeled away the photos.

Don’t think it! “Keep down, dear boy, we’ll give them what-for.” Was it my imagination or did I remember her with a light hunting rifle? Red light washing the kitchen from the small, high windows. I was to run if there was fire. “To the trees, Francis. They’ll not see you in the shadows.” “And you, Nan? What about you?” “Don’t worry about me.”

Not likely! A big gulp of air, legs shuddering, then the familiar silhouette of the roof, the chimney pots, the tracery of the lime tree. Up the steps, key in the door. Inspector, police car nowhere in evidence, just darkness and a kind of silence, noticeable even within the sounds of the raid—odd how the ear discriminates. Nan’s, too, for she cried out, “Watch out! Watch out, dear boy!”

In that moment, I realized that the door to the flat was open, that someone was in the shadows with Nan. Then a rushing figure, the gleam of something sharp intersecting with a blow from something white before a stinging down my right arm. I lunged into the flat; behind me someone stumbled against the wall.

“The door, the door!” Nan cried. I slammed it shut and slid the bolt, leaving us in total darkness.

I was afraid to move for a moment with Nan on the floor, moaning. “Nan, are you all right?”

“She didn’t hurt me. She had that knife. I hit her with my cast.” She gave another soft groan. “I’ve maybe done my arm again.”

I felt my way into the kitchen. Found the matches on the shelf near the stove, took several, and struck one. “I called the police,” I said. I found a candle and lit it, then helped Nan under the table. “No chance of an ambulance for a bit.”

“She was waiting for you. She said she was one of your ARP colleagues, that there’d been an accident, that you’d been hurt. I opened the door like a fool.”

“You said ‘she’—are you sure?”

“Dressed as,” she said. “I’m sorry, but it happened so fast, dear boy.”

I found Nan’s store of medicinal whiskey and gave her a drink. The raid was close by this time, and the chances of the inspector getting through were dwindling by the moment when we heard someone in the foyer again. I threw open the door.

“He was here,” I said. “He was waiting for me with a knife.”

One of the patrolmen helped Nan to the basement and promised an ambulance. I went with the inspector out onto the street, sky white now with exploding bombs and flares and all the screams of hell. Fire sirens in the distance followed the earthshaking thunder overhead, as a building near us exploded into flames.

“The streets are mostly blocked. He can’t have gone far,” shouted the inspector. He sent an officer to the left. He and I went to the right. Maybe not the best arrangement, but we each wanted to keep an eye on the other. And had he still a hope that I could be eliminated, thus solving a raft of problems? Maybe.

At the first cross-street we heard screams from inside a house that had been stove in on one side by a bomb; debris still hot, pulverized brick hanging in the air, wardens not yet on the scene . . . unless you counted yours truly. We pulled aside some timbers hedgehogged with splinters and lifted off the remains of a window to help a thin, middle-aged woman out. She’d lost half her clothes in the blast and was trembling with shock and shouting over and over that “the old man was at the back.” We went in over the rubble, dust coming up in clouds, through what had been the house and the garden and was now some new, chaotic hybrid of brick and earth and thorny bushes. That’s what you did—you’d be working away on one thing when you fell into the trouble of the moment and forgot everything else in some desperate activity.

The body was wedged under the second-story timbers. “They’ll need a rescue squad,” I said.

Lights behind us. My colleagues. “We need a blanket,” I shouted. “Two. One casualty.”

“You got here fast,” said Peter. Had it been his voice calling me down the corridor?

“I’m detailed to the police,” I said. That sounded official. “No one else inside, but you’ll need a Heavy Rescue Squad to shift the body.” With that, I scrambled after the inspector into the remains of the front yard. A fire engine screamed by and, somewhere near, an incendiary flared blindingly white.

“He could be anywhere,” said the inspector.

“He’s here,” I said without the slightest evidence beyond an overwhelming intuition. “You convinced him that I killed Damien.”

“I never even spoke to him.”

“You didn’t need to. You had me asking questions. In his world that’s a bad sign; no one he knows does anything except for money or self-interest.”

“That doesn’t mean he killed the others.”

“No, but I’m betting he did. He has a knife.” I touched my arm and felt wetness. “Let’s see your torch.”

In the light I saw that my warden’s uniform had been slashed from shoulder to elbow. If Nan hadn’t hit him . . .

“We can get him for assault at the very least,” said the inspector. I could not see his expression.

The next cross-street was blocked with firemen pouring water on a burning terrace. “He won’t have gotten by this,” said the inspector. “North or south?”

“North toward Soho,” I guessed.

We retraced our steps to link up with his sergeant, and we were nearing my flat when I heard the tap of high heels. I’m still not sure that I heard them—quite impossible, really, in the din of the raid—but suddenly I stopped. Overhead a shower of white-hot parachute flares blossomed like some infernal flowering tree, and there! I grabbed the inspector’s arm, there! A slim woman in a light dress, recklessly walking in the midst of the raid. We started toward her and she ran.

Water, hoses, debris, flying cinders, red-hot bits of wood, paper, fabric, a certain fatal fleshy stench, the Blitz smell of gas and old dust, a conflagration of history that screamed and shrieked until we were half deafened. The road was such a mess underfoot that we slipped and stumbled even though the sky was lit up dramatically orange, red, and white amid the black clouds of smoke. Another block and I looked up. Overhead, silhouetted against the fiery glow, was the vast and sinister chute of a descending mine. I shouted a warning, but Connie, no doubt it was Connie now, ran straight on, and though I tried to stop the inspector, he escaped my grip and lunged forward in pursuit.

“It’s already on the ground!” I shouted. “It’s going to go off! Stop, stop!” Connie half turned, but he didn’t falter. Then I saw that we had him trapped. When the mine blew, the street would be blocked. There would be no way out but back, unless—“No, Connie! There’s no time!”

But he sprinted forward—he must have discarded his high heels—and the inspector desperately lumbered after him. I stopped. Mine fuses burned for fifteen seconds before ignition; one counted automatically. I made a frantic sideways leap toward the steps of the nearest building and the shelter of masonry and sandbags as the blast obliterated the world. A ball of white fire tinged with lavender tore up to the heavens; the initial shock wave flung me into the wall of the building and hurled debris around me like so much shrapnel. The sound went on and on, the explosion lasting several seconds that seemed like several minutes, while I clung to the sandbags and was slammed back and forth against the building and the steps by the force of the aftershocks.