The Fire Fighter Page 21

  ‘There’s a secret floor in Absalom House. A space not accessed by the lift or by stairs. Your father was gifted at proportion and it’s cleverly concealed. But it is there, isn’t it?’

  For a moment, she just sat, head bowed, a beautiful woman diminished into silence by the pain of memories. Finlay felt an almost visceral urge to console her, to protect her, as if the strength of his embrace alone could exorcise her shame and end her isolation. He took her head between his hands and kissed her mouth, her throat, her hair.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rebecca. It isn’t my business. I’m sorry. Forgive me. Trust me. Please, please trust me.’

  ‘The place you’re talking about isn’t a secret,’ she said. ‘It’s more a conceit. It’s a space in which my father stored things.’ She was silent for a moment. Then, reluctantly, ‘I suppose you could say he concealed things there.’

  ‘May I see it?’

  ‘Yes, Finlay. You may. I’ll give you keys and tell you how to find it. If you like, I can show it to you.’

  Bravado brought singing to The Fitzroy Tavern as the streets surrounding the pub shuddered under an onslaught of evening bombs. The siren had sounded the warning and the bar staff had donned their tin hats and simply kept on serving. Nobody left. The door opened only on people continuing to arrive, risking the rubble and craters and blast on the route for the sake of drink and the mood of abandonment present only in the face of appalling danger. Loudly the gathering groups sang; raucous, laughing, bright with gesticulation, the women emerging gaudy from dark coats and wraps and shawls which they shed once inside; many of the men dapper, precisely attired in black tie and tails or pressed into uniform. Outside, the crump and roar of high explosives sounded like the rumour of battle against the din of the pub interior. But when Finlay placed the flat of his hand on the varnished bar, he could feel the bombardment thrum through vibrating wood. And when a cluster of bombs landed close, the shock sent ripples through beer puddled on the bar in places and the ceiling of the room seemed to shiver above its cluster of bouncing lamps.

  They found a table. Rebecca unpicked the knot of a scarf she had put on before leaving her flat. She looked around and Finlay caught a pensiveness about her eyes and mouth, a paling of her complexion, before she willed herself into what the world saw, shaking out her hair, smiling only for him.

  Alone, Finlay thought. Alone.

  ‘I once put out a fire at a factory called Pimlico Rubber.’

  She took a sip of her drink.

  ‘I know. My godfather told me all about your depressingly brilliant record when I complained about your instructions concerning the Absalom dome.’

  ‘One of the men who died at Pimlico was shortly to get married. He perished with his prospective father-in-law. The older man was saving hard to pay for a wedding. The younger was saving just as hard in the hope of starting a family.’

  Rebecca looked confused.

  ‘Are you with me so far? In this country, it’s the custom—’

  ‘—I’m with you so far,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’ve just never seen you look like this before.’

  ‘When we were called to Pimlico Rubber, both of these men were well into their third consecutive shift. Without a break. Wholly against regulations. An outrage to common sense. Contrary to the professional ethics of anyone who has the right to call himself a fire fighter.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was cajoled, kidded, pressured. They needed the money. I still don’t know why I connived in it. I suppose we all want to be popular.’

  ‘And did fatigue contribute to the way they met their deaths?’

  ‘They shouldn’t have been there.’ Finlay was staring into his linked hands, under their table, on his lap. He looked up through his eyebrows at her. ‘Nobody sleepwalks his way up a stairwell into a factory fire. They’d been on the job for over twenty hours. They must have been tired and that couldn’t have helped. But the fact is that they died somewhere they should not have been.’

  ‘This never came out.’

  ‘An old fire fighter friend of mine altered the worksheets and doctored the station log,’ Finlay said. ‘So no, it never came out. But it happened.’

  Rebecca’s Irishman strode in, patting clouds of lathe dust from the great plains of his overcoated shoulders. Sober, Finlay observed that he moved nimbly enough, easily through narrow and shifting channels, on his patient approach to the bar. Finlay felt the tightening of his stomach that he always felt in the proximity of dangerous people. The Dubliner was dangerous, he had no doubt whatsoever of that. And this was the soberest Finlay had seen him. But it was not fear that Finlay felt, more a sort of careful excitement.

  ‘Becks,’ the Dubliner said. He lifted one of his heavy hands and curved it around one side of Rebecca’s face and touched her cheek with his fingers. It was a gesture that surprised Finlay, watching, with its tenderness. The hand dropped. Finley tensed. ‘A pint of plain,’ the Dubliner said to a waiting barman. He turned to Finlay and began to unbutton his coat. Dust and grime ringed his eyesockets and lathe dust had turned the dark ringlets falling over his forehead white. He looked like a member of an opera chorus crudely aged by panstick and wig.

  ‘Just saw one of your fellows killed,’ he said to Finlay. ‘Poor bastard was ripped in half.’

  ‘A fire fighter?’

  A nod of the head.

  ‘Where?’

  The Dubliner picked his pint off the bar and sipped. ‘Chiswell Street.’

  ‘That’s Moorgate’s ground,’ Finlay said, redundantly.

  The Irishman just nodded and sipped stout.

  ‘Auxiliary?’

  ‘I’m no authority. I don’t think so, though. Had on a uniform like the one you wear.’

  Finlay felt the temperature against his skin lower several degrees. He licked his lips. But they were dry delivering his words. ‘Ripped in half?’

  The Irishman sipped stout and swallowed. ‘Strafed. He was standing in the middle of Chiswell Street directing fire crews and they were being strafed, I think by a Messerschmitt cannon. A heavy-calibre weapon, anyway. It tore up the road the way a plough blade turns the earth. It tore up hoses and it tore your man to pieces.’

  Finlay was at the scene in fifteen minutes, sprinting full-pelt through fire-daubed streets, flames painted in orange and gold, through Bloomsbury and into Clerkenwell and then the edge of the City. They had put Nevin on a stretcher a few feet down an alley and covered him with an oilskin cape. It was raining softly now, through the thunder of bombs and the scream of fighter aircraft and the percussive thump of anti-aircraft batteries, on to the undiminishing fires. By firelight, Finlay could see raindrops gathered like dew in the hair on the back of one of Nevin’s hands, which had slipped from under the oilskin covering him. Kneeling, Finlay knew it was Nevin from the thick wedding band the Moorgate Watch Commander habitually wore. He would have known it was Nevin anyway, would have recognized even under his makeshift shroud the familiar, stoic bulk of the man, finally finding repose. Finlay lifted the exposed hand, which was still warm, and kissed Nevin’s wedding ring.

  ‘I’m sorry, comrade,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Finlay rose and walked to the end of the alley and tried to assess the reeling violence of the night’s airborne assault. The sky was alight with tracer rounds and the firefly trails of damaged aircraft. The ground was chaotic with girders, gantries, rubble; the huge, spilled entrails of buildings gutted by bombs. Flames guttered and flared in bewildering pockets of deadly fire. Fire crews toiled and Finlay could see in the coil of their tense silhouettes the dread of strafing cannon-fire a diving fighter engine would signal. Away to the east, through the cooling drizzle, fire burned all around St Paul’s. And further east, Finlay could see smoke billow, petroleum-fed, from fires on the docks.

  ‘It’s a fucking mess,’ someone screamed in his ear. Finlay turned and saw the Lead Fire Fighter B Watch, who had alerted him in the Moorgate canteen to the nature of Nevin’s vigil. The man – Finla
y was pretty sure his name was Pearson – would be Acting Watch Commander now in Nevin’s place. Finlay knew he could do nothing more in fire-fighting terms than the man was doing, so he simply nodded in agreement.

  ‘Give me your torch.’

  Pearson looked blank. ‘But you’re in civvies, sir.’

  ‘Just give me your torch. You’ve got spares on that pump?’ Finlay nodded towards a Dennis appliance parked at the near end of a column of appliances to Pearson’s rear.

  ‘Here,’ Pearson said, unclipping the torch from his belt.

  Finlay was walking away when he remembered the thick wedding band adorning the finger of Nevin’s corpse. He walked back to Pearson and turned him around.

  ‘That looting cunt, Pickering—’

  ‘Is dead, Chief Fire Officer. Crushed under a collapsing wall. Killed his first shift after you dealt him the cards.’

  Finlay took a step back. Through a soot-black face, Pearson blinked at him.

  ‘Sooner you get off my ground the better, with respect, sir. Tonight, leastways. The wags among my lads are calling you the angel of death.’ He smeared soot around his firelit features and blinked, his eyes raw with soot. ‘Like I said, sir. It’s a fucking mess.’

  Twelve

  Finlay walked eastwards almost without the realization that he was doing so. He paced through flayed streets under the screech of dogfights and the unrelenting deluge of bombs, navigating London like a sleepwalker. He had known it would be Nevin as soon as the words were out of the Irishman’s mouth. Dimly, he was aware of his destination.

  Absalom House was intact. Finlay had known that it would be with the same certainty that had told him it was poor Nevin’s exhausted body out of which a Messerschmitt’s twenty millimetre cannon shells had so recently torn the life. The German bombing seemed indiscriminate tonight. Vicious, damaging, but random in the application of its destructive force. Usually they had strategic targets. Always they chose as secondary targets those landmarks that they felt defined London in the minds and hearts of the city’s population. But tonight was different. The sustained spite, the sheer quantity of explosive force spilling from the sky seemed like an attempt to flatten the capital, to bury it in an avalanche of flame and rubble. The air was hot and harsh with the stink of fire, incendiaries, bombs, spent ammunition; in places the dank steam from Thames water pumped through river-fed hoses.

  But amid all this chaos, Absalom House rose massive and intact, as if in brooding indifference to the carnage visited around it. Inside, under the noise of the bombardment, Finlay could hear the guttural rumble of the diesel generator in the basement, powering the rows of machines he had seen on the ground floor, wheels spinning under the glass panels in their fascias like nothing so much as the displays on the one-armed bandits his aunt had played on holiday afternoons in the amusement arcade on the seafront at Bray.

  Lange’s conceit was sited between the second and third floors. Wood panels decorated the ceiling of the second floor. Finlay counted back thirteen panels from the entrance to the second-floor room Rebecca had described to him and then dragged over a tall bookcase, denuded of books at his own insistence, and climbed the shelves and peered at the panelling. Sure enough, he saw a keyhole. Twisting the key to the right and then pulling it when it gripped the lock would suffice, she had told him. The panel lowered smoothly on its hydraulic mechanism and a ladder slid down from behind it, articulated sections clicking in the bomb-battered night, slick with lubrication.

  Pearson’s torch revealed a windowless room about eight feet high that ran the length and width of Absalom House. Below, Finlay could hear the hum of unseen machines. Here, though, all was quiet. There were pictures stacked under dust drapes against the walls, and old scientific instruments – astrolabes, globes, intricate cosmologies constructed from brass and wire, gyroscopes, compasses, sextons, telescopes – crowded together on table- and desk-tops and filling large areas of wall-mounted shelves. The room smelled of oil paint and metal polish. Finlay swung the torch and the beam picked out an umbrella stand filled with antique swords, heaps of furled, yellowing charts on shelves, a closed violin case. He wondered why a man obsessed with scientific progress would fill clandestine space with the booty of a distant past. It was more pirate’s lair than studio, or laboratory. There was no evidence of plumbing in Lange’s conceit. There were no power points. There wasn’t a hurricane lamp, not so much as a candle stub. It was clear to Finlay from the dust and pervasive odour of age and decay that this was not a place of work. He exited it knowing little more than he had about anything, his curiosity anyway dulled by the impact of Nevin’s death. Nevin had survived the Ypres Salient and been torn to pieces by German cannon-fire on a street in the city of his birth. There was no comfort in the thought that he was finally resting. He was not resting. Finlay’s final memory of the man would for ever be of pieces of mortified flesh leaking blood into a gutter.

  Babcock was in Finlay’s cell, sitting cross-legged on the cot, buffing some piece of kit Finlay saw at closer inspection was the knuckleduster he had taken from Rebecca’s Dubliner. It gleamed like malevolent gold between folds of polishing cloth in the old batman’s industrious hands. Babcock uncoiled off the cot, giving its top blanket a straightening tug.

  ‘Making myself useful, Mr Finlay,’ he said. ‘Conflict never being resolved without initiative.’

  This gambit got no response from Finlay.

  ‘Sounds like it’s gone off good and proper tonight,’ Babcock said, lifting his eyes momentarily to the ceiling.

  Finlay looked at his wristwatch. ‘It’s ten o’clock at night, Babcock. What the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘My bit, Chief Fire Officer. We all have to do our bit.’

  A bomb detonated almost directly above them then, the first of a cluster that set the metal walls vibrating with a low moan and the rivets clamping the walls to their supporting girders singing with protest. There was a crack and a gathering rumble and ash emptied in a rush out of one of the air feeds emerging from the ceiling. It stopped as suddenly as it started, leaving a cone-shaped heap a foot high on the linoleum floor.

  Babcock whistled.

  ‘Lummy,’ he said.

  Finlay said nothing.

  ‘That one very nearly had our names on it.’

  ‘Pack it in, Babcock. You sound like a comic turn on the wireless.’

  ‘I’ll fetch a brush and pan,’ Babcock said.

  Finlay removed his jacket and tie and sat on his cot and stared at the telephone, which squatted, still and silent. For some reason he expected it to ring and to hear Grey’s voice at the other end of the line. But then he had almost expected to see Grey, raincoated, in the vicinity of Nevin’s corpse. The thoroughfares of the assaulted city, between Chiswell Street and Liverpool Street, had been teeming with fire crews, with Heavy Rescue demolition teams, with wardens and ambulance crews and police officers. And among them, at every turn, Finlay had expected to see the gaunt countenance and lean figure of Captain Grey. After a while he noticed that Babcock was back, busying himself on his knees sweeping ash and humming a tune that Finlay knew, with something approaching instinct, was currently on the minds and lips of the cinema-going public.

  ‘How’s your wife?’ Finlay said.

  Without knowing what White had allowed him to learn, Finlay thought he would have noticed nothing in Babcock’s reaction. Even so, he wondered if imagination embellished with false significance what he actually saw. But he did see it. Babcock, at the mention of his wife, shrank slightly. For just a moment, the man seemed to shoulder burdens he was incapable of carrying and to shudder under them. Then he recovered.

  ‘The wife is chirpy,’ Babcock said. ‘Cheerful as you like. Insists we’ll muddle through. Reckons we can take it, the wife does, Chief Fire Officer, and that Jerry can go to hell.’

  Unwilling, unable to collude in this, Finlay only nodded. He did so emphatically enough. The lights in the cell began to flicker. And he observed the way that Babco
ck, busy, seemed to move in two dimensions, like a memory, or a motif.

  Finlay stripped to his briefs and began to wash with a fat and fragrant bar of Palmolive he found wrapped in greaseproof paper beside his sink. In the small mirror above the sink, Babcock wandered in and out of focus. ‘Jesus, look at you,’ Babcock said. ‘I’ve seen more fat on a drawing. Look at the muscles on you. No wonder you’re frustrated, pointing hoses at buildings on fire. You were constructed to fight. Christ, you were invented to fight, Mr Finlay. My oath. What a waste.’

  Finlay was rinsing soap from out of his eyes. Babcock’s resilience astonished him. He had never met a man so capable at curtailing the realities of the world to what was tolerable. Some heavy piece of German ordnance erupted above and the metal floor thrummed under the linoleum under Finlay’s feet.

  ‘You know, Mr Finlay, we are a long way underground here. Under the Thames. Under the tributaries of the River Fleet. Under Roman baths and plague pits dug in the Dark Ages. Under God only knows what remnants of tunnelling those industrious Victorians failed to adequately map.’

  Rivets pinged in girders warping behind the iron walls confining them. There was the odd, somnambulant sound of steps warping on the metal stairwell winding upwards in the cylinder of steel rising to the street outside.

  ‘You think we should go somewhere else?’ Finlay said. He was drying himself with a towel and enjoying Babcock’s discomfiture in a manner he knew was sadistic. It was all he could do not to ask after the health of Babcock’s boy. The death of Nevin had brought upon him a mood of guilt and viciousness.

  ‘Anywhere else, frankly.’ Babcock said. ‘I’m an engineer, Mr Finlay. I know about tolerances. And I was in the trenches with Captain Grey and so I know about luck, too. We’ve both of us ridden ours. Now we’re pushing it.’

  The walls boomed about them, as if in affirmation.

  ‘This place is for it. Mark my words.’

  Finlay was buttoning his uniform tunic. ‘Where would you suggest we go?’