The Summer Isles (28 page)

I fumble for my tablets on the bedside table as the sirens moan, then in the drawer beside it where beneath a Bible and complimentary New Dorchester pens and envelopes lies a card detailing W
HAT
T
O
D
O
I
N
C
ASE
O
F
A F
IRE
O
R
A
IR
R
AID
. I’m blinking and rubbing my eyes at it when the door to my room swings open.

“Sorry about this, Brook.” Reeve-Ellis, already in his school tie and cardigan, leans swaying on the handle. He has PC T3308 in tow.

“Frightful cock-up on this of all days. You know what these bongo-bongo players are like—haven’t even
heard
of an air raid—probably think it’s the Great White God coming down to impregnate their daughters. Still, we’ve got them all going down the stairs now—even Father Phelan, which was no mean feat, the state that he’s in. So I thought I’d better look in on you as well, just to make sure you’ve got the message. There’s a good man. Just pop on that dressing gown…”

It’s pandemonium along the corridors. Half past seven in the morning and people are flapping by in odd assortments of clothing with pillow-creases on their cheeks, electrified hair. Most of them seem to be smiling, though. An air raid’s the sort of occasion that breaks down social barriers even at the New Dorchester, and no one believes it’s the real thing.

“Pretty chaotic, I’m afraid,” Reeve-Ellis steers me through the swirling roar of the crowded main atrium where hotel staff are holding up signs and arrows. “A lot easier if we go this way and find ourselves some peace and quiet.”

He, PC T3308 and I struggle against the flow until we reach an eddy beside the hotel souvenir shop where the crowds are thinner and another PC—K2910 according to his shoulder badge—is standing guard at the door marked N
O
A
DMITTANCE
that Reeve-Ellis led me into two days ago. PC K2910 follows us as we go in, then locks the door from the inside. The howl of the siren, the sound of people moving, suddenly grows faint. This early in the offices, there are no phones ringing, no typewriters clicking. But for the three men who are with me, I’m suddenly alone.

“Along here,” Reeve-Ellis says, shoving his hands into his cardigan pockets. PC T3308 strides ahead of me. PC K2910 keeps just behind. Their shoes squeak. They smell faintly of rubber. Reeve-Ellis holds opens the door with an E
MERGENCY
E
XIT
O
NLY
sign just past his office that leads to a damp and dimly-lit concrete tunnel. The door slams shut behind us, setting off ripples of echoes. Here, at last, the New Dorchester’s carpets and luxury give out. The passage begins to slope down. There’s a faint growling of some kind of motor. Water drips from tiny stalactites on the roof. The air smells gassy and damp. A chill runs down my neck.

We reach a gated lift, which PC K2910 drags shut, then activates with his keys, clanking us down past coils of pipework to some kind of railway platform, although this isn’t the normal Underground; the tunnel at each end is too small.

“Dreadfully uncomfortable, I’m afraid,” Reeve-Ellis says as an earthy breeze touches our faces and the rails begin to sing. “Temporary expedient, of course…”

An automatic train slides in, wheezing and clicking with all the vacant purpose of a toy, hauling a line of empty hoppers behind it. The final one has pull-down wooden seats, and a notice that someone has picked away at to read U
SE
O
F
P
OST
O
FFICE       NEL
O
NLY
. PC K2910 hops in first, then helps Reeve-Ellis clamber over. I try taking a step back, wondering about possibilities of escape. PC T3308 bumps shoulders with me.

“Might as well just get in, sir,” he says, offering a large, nail-bitten hand.

Hunched in our toy train, we slide into the tunnel. I’m conscious of my slippered feet, my bare calves and ankles beneath the dressing gown, my gaping pyjamas, the huge sliding weight of the Thames that I imagine now lies above us. Our breath smokes, and is snatched away. Grey wires along the walls rise and fall, rise and fall. In what light there is, with me squashed on one side against Reeve-Ellis’s bony body, I study the two policemen who squat opposite me. PC T3308 is bigger and older, with the jowelled meaty face and body of an old-fashioned copper. PC K2910 is freckled, red-headed, thin; he seems too young, in fact, to be a policeman at all. Falling through my head in rhythm with the clicking rails, I can hear the cheery voice of some
Look At Life
commentator booming out over the one-and-nines. A new tunnel under London… Mail from Inverness and Calcutta… Parcels from Adelaide and Sutton Coldfield… Postal orders and love letters, saucy post cards, holiday photographs, birthdays and bits of wedding cake, car licences, good and bad news, hopeful competition entries, letters from the bank manager…

We disembark at another mail station, and travel upwards in another gated lift. Then, suddenly, the walls are almost new—fresh painted the same municipal green that once covered the walls of the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow, and somehow, as the bare overhead lights slide across it, scarred with similar marks and messages. PC T3308 grips my arm. There are doors leading into offices, but apart from the odd broken-legged chair, the place is empty, abandoned. We’re still deep underground.

“It’s in here,” sighs Reeve-Ellis, opening a door after PC K2910 has found the right key. He clicks on the light. There are three chairs and a desk, one battered four-drawer filing tin cabinet with tea or rust stains down the front. A pre-redesign map of the London Underground sags on rusty pins from the notice board. Fat pipes run across the ceiling.

PC K2910 shuts and then re-locks the door. PC T3308 widens his stance and folds his arms.

“You may as well sit down, Brook.” Reeve-Ellis points to the chair on the far side of the desk, facing out from the wall. It’s a standard tubular-frame thing, although old and stained, and I notice as my body settles into it and my shaking hands reach out to grip the armrests that it gives off a sour, unfortunate smell. The air is warm in here, almost swimmingly hot. The heat comes, I suspect, from those thick green-painted pipes spanning the ceiling. We must be near the boilers that service this seemingly empty building. I can sense—more a feeling than a sound, a grating hum that comes up through the floor into my slippered feet and ripples over my skin.

Reeve-Ellis clears his throat. Brushing the dust from the corner of the desk, he hitches at the knee-creases of his flannel trousers and sits down. “May as well get on,” he snaps at the two PCs.

“Whatever all of this is,” I say as PCs T3308 and K2910 exchange glances, “You should know that I’m a dying man. I’ve no close friends or relatives. I have terminal cancer—you can look it up in my NHS records. I have nothing to lose.”

“I’m afraid,” Reeve-Ellis says, “that it doesn’t work like that.” He tucks in his legs to let PC T3308 and PC K2910 past him.

“Right or left handed, sir?” asks older, burlier PC T3308; the one with the bitten nails, the big stevedore’s hands.

I look up at him, his thick head haloed by the bare-bulbed light. The gun and the truncheon and the handcuffs that hang from his belt look like sexual appendages. “I didn’t think this was the sort of thing the London Constabulary specialised in,” I say, and glance over at Reeve-Ellis, who’s watching from his perch at the far edge of the desk. “I always imagined this was all left to the KSG nowadays.”

PC T3308 rumbles a laugh. “We don’t need those fancy boys, sir. Piss-poor at anything, from what I’ve heard. Was it the right or left-handed that you said you were?”

“Come
on
,” Reeve-Ellis mutters, and reaches in the top pocket of his shirt. He offers me a pen. “Take this will you, old man?” Stupidly, I reach for it. “There you are. Right-handed. Most people are. Just a question of using a bit of intellect.”

PC T3308 blinks slowly. Unruffled, he leans across and lifts my right hand from the arm rest, splaying it palm-up at the edge of the desk. He sits down on it, his fat-trousered bottom pushed virtually in my face. I can’t see them now, but I can feel my fingers dangling in the cool air beyond the edge of the desk. Even with the pressure he’s now applying, it’s hard to keep them still.

I hear the rasp of a belt buckle. Something jingles. A raised truncheon appears above PC T3308’s head, and I glance over at Reeve-Ellis; but he’s looking away now, pruning his nails. I imagine that they’ll start asking me questions at any moment, long before they actually do anything, now that the threat of violence has clearly been made.

“If this is—” I begin just as, with small a grunt of effort, PC K2910 brings the truncheon down across the fingers of my right hand.

The world shivers and breaks apart for an amazed moment, then re-forms in jagged pain.

Alone now, I can hear Reeve-Ellis’s voice as he talks to someone on the telephone in a nearby room. The bell bings. He dials again.
Yes. No. Not yet. Just as you say
… I can tell from the sound of his voice that he’s speaking to a superior.

I’m cradling my right hand. It’s the most precious thing in the entire world. My index finger is bent back at approximately 45 degrees just above the first joint, and it’s swelling and discolouring as I watch. The first and middle fingers are swelling rapidly too, although they could simply be torn and bruised rather than broken.

This is terrible—as bad as I could have imagined. Yet I’ve known pain before. I broke my wrist once after slipping on the tiles in embarrassing circumstances in the Gents’ in a pub in Banbury. And I’ve had plenty of opportunity lately to get more used to pain. The thing about torture isn’t the pain, I decide between bouts of shivering. It’s the simple sense of wrongness.

The keys jingle. Reeve-Ellis and the two PCs re-enter the room. They smell faintly rainy—of cigarettes and tea and London traffic and ordinary mornings. Reeve-Ellis rakes a chair towards the desk.

“I won’t piss you about, Brook,” he says. “I’m no expert, anyway, at this kind of thing. Thanks to you, I and my two friends here have to practise this grisly art whilst some jumped-up AS from Marsham Street takes over my office on temporary and geographical promotion.”

“I can’t say you have my sympathy.”

“Be that as it may…”

PC K2910 extracts his note pad and pencil. With that freckled narrow face of his, he still looks far too young. PC T3308 leans back against the wall and nibbles at his nails. A sick tremor runs though me.

“Perhaps you could begin,” Reeve-Ellis continues, “by telling us exactly why you’re here. What all of this is about…”

“I don’t see how I can tell you when I don’t have any idea.
You
brought me here. I’m supposed to be an honoured guest, and then you…”

But almost before I’ve started, Reeve-Ellis is getting up from his chair, sighing in weary irritation. He’s nodding to PC K2910 to find the keys to let him out of the room again. Once he’s gone, the two PC’s glance at each other, and come around to me from opposite sides of the desk. Their hook their hands beneath my armpits.

“If you’ll just stand up, sir.”

I try to grab the chair’s armrest, but it slides from under me and the fingers of my right hand catch on the belt of my dressing gown. The world greys for a moment, then I’m standing upright and the PCs are moving me towards the old grey filing cabinet in the corner of the room. In a grunting ballet, PC K2910 bends to slide open the top drawer. I feel the agonising pull of my tendons as they straighten out my right arm and hold my hand over the open drawer as PC T3308 raises his boot and kicks it shut.

“These things have a pattern,” Reeve-Ellis says, sitting in front of me again. “You have to accept that, Brook. And it’s always effective, although I’m sure that to you it appears crude. But what you must realise is that there’s only one outcome. Which is you telling me everything.”

Weeping, gently rocking in my chair, I stare back at his blurred shape.

“So now that I’ve been honest with you, Brook, perhaps you could be honest with me.” A soft click, and there on the table, although stretched and blotched to my eyes as if in some decadent non-realist painting, lies the pistol, the Webley Bulldog gun.

“If you could just tell me how and why you got this thing, and what it was doing in your suitcase at the New Dorchester.”

“It’s a relic,” I say. “It belonged to a friend of mine who died in the War.”

“Can you tell me his name?”

I hesitate. A billow of black agony enfolds me. “Francis Eveleigh. As I say, he’s dead.”

“Where did he live?”

I tell him the name of the street in Lichfield, and then—what could it matter now?—that of Francis’s parents’s house in Louth. “It came back with his effects when he died at the Somme in 1916,” I add. “I have no idea how he got hold of it.”

“And the bullets?”

“They came with the effects as well.”

“They’re not standard Army issue.” Reeve-Ellis strokes his chin. “But I know how chaotic it was over there. So it all came to you, this gun, these bullets, as a memento of this Eveleigh fellow?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve kept them with you ever since?”

“Yes.”

“Ever used the gun?”

“No… Well, a couple of times. I wanted to make sure that it still worked.”

“Did it?”

“I’m no expert. It seemed to fire.”

“I see. And what did you intend to do with it?”

“What do you think?”

Reeve-Ellis frowns. “I thought we’d got past that stage, old man.”

“I intended to kill John Arthur.”

Reeve-Ellis nods. He seems unimpressed. Behind him, PC K2910 frowns, licks his pencil, makes a note. Somewhere, a phone is ringing.

“It was Christlow,” I say, “wasn’t it?”

“Who?”

“Christlow, my scout. He told you about the gun.”

“I don’t see that that matters.”

“You don’t deny it?”

“We seem to be forgetting here exactly who is asking the questions.” Reeve-Ellis smiles. I sense that the two PCs behind him are loosening their stance. Perhaps all this will soon be ending.