Orders from Berlin. Simon Tolkien
go shopping across the river; putting on steel helmets to work as ARP wardens. She’d even heard that there were female operators of the mobile anti-aircraft gun batteries. It was a new world with new opportunities, but they all seemed out of reach. Bertram wouldn’t hear of her working, and neither would her father. ‘A woman’s place is in the home’ was one of their favourite sayings. ‘Looking after us,’ they might have added, except there was no need. Ava knew exactly what was expected of her.
She reached her father’s apartment block without incident. The searchlight beams crisscrossed the sky, but there was still no sign of the enemy. Perhaps they were coming into London by a different route; probably Battersea wasn’t even the target tonight. You never knew – that was the problem.
After taking out her key, she opened the door and stepped into the hallway. It took her a moment to get used to the darkness. Above her head somewhere there were voices – one soft, almost inaudible; the other angry, frightened, getting louder. She recognized the second voice – it belonged to her father.
‘No, I won’t. No, no, I tell you.’
Ava stopped with her hand on the newel post of the banister at the bottom of the staircase, craning her head to look up. There was a little light now up above where there had been none before. It was leaking out onto the landing two floors up, the landing in front of her father’s door. It had to have been opened, the noise drowned out by the sound of her father’s shouts.
Now all at once she could see two entangled shapes by the railing at the top of the stairs. They swayed back and forth, a contortion of shadows, and she tried to cry out, to make what she was seeing stop. But her voice wouldn’t come and her legs wouldn’t move, and she remained rooted to the spot, standing with one foot on the ground and one foot on the bottom stair as the smaller shape rocked back and forth in mid-air for a moment and then with an inhuman cry of agony fell down through the darkness, transforming itself into her father as he landed with a terrible thud, spread-eagled at her feet.
The noise released her. She screamed, a gut-wrenching cry torn from deep inside her body. But she knew in the same instant that her father was dead. She stared immobilized at his body, recording in an X-ray photograph seared forever on her mind’s eye the contorted way his limbs splayed out on the carpet as if he were some child’s discarded puppet.
The sound of running feet on the landing above her head recalled her to her surroundings. Her father had been pushed – he had been murdered. The man who’d done it was in her father’s flat. Now, in this instant.
She wanted to go up the stairs, but she couldn’t. Her feet wouldn’t move. People were coming up from the basement, saying things to her to which she could not respond. Someone was holding her; someone was going to call the police. And from far away, as if coming to her through water, she heard the sound of the all clear. The bombers weren’t coming to Battersea tonight, but then they didn’t need to. Somebody had already done their work for them, at least as far as Albert Morrison was concerned.
Not that he had any intention of admitting it, but Detective Chief Inspector John Quaid was on the whole rather enjoying the war. Perhaps he suffered from a lack of imagination, but it never seemed to have occurred to him that a bomb might actually land on him. Death was something that happened to other people – his role was to find out who was responsible. And ever since the bombing had started, he’d been busier than ever. The country might be coming together, uniting behind their defiant Prime Minister, but out of sight behind their blackout curtains the good citizens of London had been attacking each other in far greater numbers than ever before. For the criminal classes, the Blitz was a golden opportunity that might never come again. Glass shattering sounded the same if it was caused by a hurled brick or a bomb blast, and the noise of the anti-aircraft guns blotted out the sounds of illegal entry. Quaid had even had one case where a murderer had tried to pretend that his victim was a bomb casualty.
Tens of thousands of people were homeless, and the capital’s infrastructure had been torn apart. The demands on the police had mushroomed in a few short weeks and there wasn’t time now for days of plodding detective work, digging into witnesses’ accounts, trawling for clues. Instead cases had to be solved in a day or two or not at all. Policemen had to rely on their instincts, and Quaid had never had any trouble doing that; he liked to act quickly, to paint with a broad brush. His results were getting better all the time, and with a fair wind he’d make superintendent in another year or two. Not bad for a boy from the backstreets of Sheffield whose widowed mother had taken in washing from the local brothel to make ends meet after her husband died.
He breathed a sigh of satisfaction and slid his broad buttocks as far back as he could into the expensively upholstered driver’s seat of his big black Wolseley police car, holding the steering wheel tight in his leather-gloved hands with his forearms fully extended as he imagined himself for a moment a latter-day Malcolm Campbell racing his Blue Bird round the Brooklands Grand Prix track out in Surrey. Closed down now, Quaid remembered with a touch of sadness, thinking back to the summer afternoons he’d spent behind the crash barriers before the war, choking on the dust from the race cars as they chased one another around the hairpin bends. Some Nazi bastard had dropped a bomb on the place – just for the hell of it, probably. Nowhere seemed immune these days. They’d even had a go at Buckingham Palace a few days before – wrecked the royal chapel, so it said in the newspapers.
Quaid turned past Parliament and accelerated down Millbank, enjoying the heavy power of the purring engine under the dome of the sparkling bonnet and relishing the rush of the wind against the side of his face through the open window and the emptiness of the road ahead. Fewer cars were out in the evenings these days. Too many accidents in the blackout, he supposed, and not that many drivers had the petrol now that rationing was starting to bite.
He glanced over at Trave, sitting wrapped up in his thoughts in the seat beside him. He was a queer fish, this new assistant of his, Quaid thought. He was built like a boxer, with a square jaw and muscled arms, yet he was always reading poetry books in the canteen, looking as if he were a hundred miles away. As far as Quaid was concerned, Trave thought a damn sight too much for his own good, and it was a constant source of irritation the way he always had to have his own take on their cases. There was a dogged, stubborn look that got into the young man’s eyes when he didn’t agree with the line of an investigation, and sometimes his questioning of Quaid’s decisions was almost mutinous. He didn’t seem to understand that there was such a thing as a chain of command in the police force just as much as in the Army, and there’d been times when Quaid had seriously considered throwing the book at him. But then once or twice when the chips were down, the boy had more than stepped up to the plate – like the other week when they’d been called to a burglary in a jeweller’s shop in Mayfair and Trave had chased the perpetrator up the street and wrestled him to the ground, holding him down until Quaid arrived with the handcuffs. Quaid grinned, remembering how the two of them had had to get down on their hands and knees afterwards, searching for the rubies and emeralds that had rolled away into the dirty gutter.
This call sounded a lot less exciting – an old man fallen down the stairs in Battersea, the daughter saying he’d been pushed. Still, you never knew until you got there. Maybe the daughter would be pretty; maybe the old man had money under the mattress. The one sure thing was that whatever the case involved, he’d have it solved by the end of the week. That much he’d guarantee.
An old lady with a bent back, dressed entirely in widow’s weeds, answered the door almost as soon as they’d first knocked, but she didn’t step aside when Quaid showed her his warrant card. Instead she leant forward, warning them to tread carefully because the dead man or what was left of him was lying on the ground only a few feet behind where she was standing.
Inside the hallway, both policemen felt the bile rising in their throats. The corpse was a God-awful mess, but of course that was only to be expected when a man fell sixty feet down a stairwell. He was never going to be a pretty sight after that experience.
The fact that the only