The Fire Fighter Read online

  Babcock smiled into the mirror, a distorted leer in the limited light. ‘I know just the place,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

  Just before they left, Finlay plucked the telephone receiver from its cradle. He pressed it to the side of his face and listened. The line was as dead as he had known it would be.

  Leaving his cell with Babcock felt for Finlay like a kind of liberation. There was something militant about the man tonight, a cocksure strut in his walk as he led the way, whistling, the sound amplified and harsh through the metal voids of thrumming tunnels. There was a respite in the bombing by the time Babcock and Finlay gained the streets. The Germans were bombing in waves with the intervals between them timed to be deliberately irregular to prevent the batteries of anti-aircraft guns from developing any kind of rhythm or momentum, or properly orchestrated fields of fire from the ground. The ack-ack batteries were far more prevalent now than they had been only weeks earlier when Finlay had first arrived back in London. They occupied highly symbolic strategic sites all over the capital and their belligerent crews fired hundreds of thousands of loud rounds through barrels rendered red-hot by the sheer percussive friction of their rate of fire. They still seldom hit anything. They were actually more dangerous to anyone under the trajectory of falling ordnance than to anything flying in the sky. The battery on the north side of Westminster Bridge looked particularly obstreperous and magnificent as it swung to send shells tearing into the air to miss Junkers by several thousand feet and detonate to the hard-hit east, where most of them landed. But the quantity of metal tearing the sky each night had made the Germans more cautious and cleverer about the way they bombed. They flew higher. They attacked in irregular waves and they strafed more heavily. The lull Babcock and Finlay found themselves in would not last, but it was something. Babcock led the way through Spitalfields terraces until Finlay was thoroughly lost and had to follow the other man merely to find his way. Babcock had stopped whistling. The jaunt in his gait had been replaced by a steady prowl. He was no longer a strutting music-hall act. He moved with the stealth, through the black-out, of some night predator. They stopped at a row of lock-up garages behind a tenement. Finlay could see where they were because a house fire burned unimpeded to one side of the yard in which they stood, about a hundred yards away. Finlay’s trained ears listened hard for the sound of anyone trapped by the flames, but there was nothing. The house sagged and heaved as spent supporting timbers surrendered to the weight of bricks.

  ‘One more slum-dweller made homeless,’ Babcock said, without looking up. He hawked and spat. He had inserted a key into a large padlock securing the lock-up door. The door opened on a maw of darkness, revealing nothing. Then Babcock rolled out from it a motor cycle on which every flicker of factory chrome had been painted matt black. He sat astride the machine and kick-started it at the first attempt. Either it was regularly ridden, or it was expertly tuned. The engine sounded so muffled that the noise it made was nothing more really than a low rumble, even when Babcock gave the throttle a jerk.

  ‘Get on,’ he said.

  Finlay climbed on to the pillion seat. Babcock tensed for a moment and listened to the the sky. But the lull was holding. Even when he kicked the bike into gear, the baffled exhaust made almost no discernible noise. The streets were still wet from the earlier rain, which had held off since, like the bombs. It was interesting, to Finlay, to pass at this pace through the ravaged streets. The experience was almost cinematic, like watching a firelit film of devastation in a land so badly damaged and bleak that it almost insisted to him it was somewhere foreign, and not England at all. The smells rushed in and out of his senses, assaulting nostrils and lungs, and then they were gone, impressionistic in their hot, damp, dreadful seasoning of the chaos. Fire burned dimly in nimbuses of ochre and red behind windows, on roof-tops, in spaces laid to waste. There were no people. Finlay saw not one human being in the dark, alien, wasted landscape through which Babcock rode the bike. They travelled fast, considering the headlamp was blind with black paint and the magneto apparently disengaged. Babcock rode the motor cycle expertly. It responded to his subtlest touch. Finlay supposed that his engineer’s understanding of what endowed the bike with power and propulsion had made him intimate with the machine.

  Perhaps he had built or rebuilt the bike. Finlay could see him stripping the thing down and reconstituting it with fastidious care, component by painstaking component. He knew nothing about Babcock, he realized, with something of a start. Babcock was one more mystery enabled by his own blinkered, almost sullen response to the job into which he had been so reluctantly forced.

  Babcock cut the engine and the motor cycle freewheeled to a stop on gently undulating land bordered by neglected fencing and a wild bank of weeds. He pushed the bike into the weeds, which were wet and high and wholly concealed the machine.

  ‘Won’t someone steal it?’

  ‘Tonight’s bombing isn’t done and everybody knows it. No one is going to venture out. Not to waste land, anyway,’ Babcock said, softly. There was just starlight enough for Finlay to see him nod. ‘We’re going that way. No more than five minutes’ walk. But there are one or two bomb craters between here and there and they’re at least as deep as a man and filled with standing water. I can’t swim and I’m sure you don’t want to. So follow me carefully and watch your footing.’

  They walked down a long slope of cinders and grass tussocks strewn with coping stones and piles of cobbles and discarded railway sleepers. The gradient was gentle but the going difficult in the absence of light and given what Babcock had said about bomb craters. Gradually, Finlay became aware of something massing in the darkness in front of them. Some formidable structure, darker and with greater density than the night. He could hear a drift of accordion music and fancied that he could hear something sung; like a sea-shanty or maybe a psalm set to music, but he knew it must be merely his ears playing tricks as they strained to discover the roar of engines from above.

  Then they were under the edifice and Finlay saw that it was a great railway viaduct giving on to an array of arches, stretching onwards, their vaulted spaces suggesting a dark, cathedral spread. He was aware suddenly of a pervasive stink, like grease grown rancid; and of people everywhere, huddled in small groups and large gatherings, around low fires and feeble storm lamps, wrapped under blankets and coats in the gloom. Babcock led him along narrow paths between the different groups. Finlay passed women giving tarot readings, drinkers of both sexes getting determinedly drunk around crates of beer, men who from their tattoos and rich mix of nationalities could only have been crews from merchantmen moored at Tilbury and Chatham and in the Thames basin. He had not imagined the music. He passed a gang of negroes, at least a dozen of them, swaying cross-legged as they sang some plaintive spiritual. There were magicians and card sharps and tarts and derelicts and fortune-tellers and fruit-hawkers. Over in one corner Finlay saw a cock-fight, fierce betting taking place around the tearing birds in a circle lit by candle stubs. And everywhere, under thin blankets and soiled sheets, couples joined in the unmistakable rhythm of copulation.

  ‘How many people are there here?’ Finlay whispered to Babcock.

  ‘Around fifteen thousand, they say.’

  ‘Every night?’

  Babcock stopped walking. ‘Some of them never leave. The prostitutes. The drunks. The deserters. There’s more at night, because tourists come at night from up West to gawp and dawdle.’

  ‘What is this place?’ Finlay said.

  Babcock leered in the cadaverous light. Somewhere behind him a bottle smashed and someone stifled a scream. He held his arms apart in a gesture of wide theatricality. ‘This is England, Mr Finlay,’ he said.

  Two hours later, Finlay fumbled his way along the cobbled wharves and into The Prospect of Whitby. Grey occupied a table in a far recess of the pub, next to a window that was heavily curtained against the night river. His man, his driver, Finlay’s grinning nemesis, stood massive and at ease about ten yards to
the rear of where Grey sat. Smoke rose in a thin spiral from the cigarette between Grey’s fingers. There was a whisky bottle and a jug of water beside the drinking glass on his table. Finlay sat opposite the man without ceremony. He removed his cap and put it on the table. Grey looked at him through pale brown eyes.

  ‘Nevin has been killed.’

  The look on Grey’s face was unreadable. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Nevin. Moorgate Station. A colleague of mine. A comrade. A friend.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Grey said. ‘Drink?’

  ‘You met him once,’ Finlay said, remembering. ‘UXB attached to a parachute.’

  ‘Yes I did. Meet the fellow, I mean. Good chap. Great shame. Drink?’

  ‘Bitter.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ Grey said. He smiled at his joke and made some discreet signal to his man, who went to fetch the drink from the bar.

  ‘I accessed Lange’s crawlspace.’

  ‘Not with one of your fire axes, I hope,’ Grey said. ‘That’s a beautiful building. Panelled with such integrity. Don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s full of junk.’

  ‘Depends on what you think of as junk,’ Grey said. ‘Did you have a good look around the rest of the place?’

  Finlay nodded.

  ‘Impressed?’

  ‘None the wiser.’

  ‘But you were impressed?’

  Finlay thought about this. ‘There’s some sort of assemblage with magnets on the fourth floor. Ball bearings shooting around between different fields of force. Terrible velocity. It looks very interesting. Ta.’ Finlay’s pint of bitter had been delivered. ‘But it wouldn’t down an enemy aeroplane.’

  Grey nodded and smoked.

  ‘You are a brave and purposeful man, Finlay,’ he said. ‘But nobody is ever going to mistake you for the brightest of sparks.’

  ‘Lange’s secret room was full of rubbish,’ Finlay said. ‘Old swords.’

  ‘Forged in Toledo in the sixteenth century,’ Grey said.

  ‘Obsolete scientific instruments.’

  ‘One of them used by Galileo. One of them made by John Harrison.’

  ‘An old violin.’

  ‘On which Paganini composed,’ Grey said.

  ‘And paintings.’

  Grey smiled. He looked tired. He always looked tired. ‘Did you catalogue the paintings, Chief Fire Officer?’

  Finlay sipped bitter and settled in his chair. Behind the heavy drapes covering the window, he wondered in what condition the barque he had seen moored there on his first visit to this pub would be in now. It seemed an age since then. It seemed he had known Grey, or more correctly, of Grey, all his adult life. In his mind’s eye he saw the barque sunk, its hull holed and half-buried in mud, its masts canted and its sails death shrouds, its rigging flapping, frayed, absent of task.

  ‘You are a snob, Captain Grey.’

  Grey did not react to this. But his man tensed and almost snarled to his rear.

  ‘Tell me about the paintings,’ Grey said.

  ‘A Turner. A Stubbs. A Renaissance painting. Could be a Botticelli.’

  ‘Very good,’ Grey said.

  ‘And then a load of old crap.’

  ‘Ah. But I rather think you mean new crap.’

  ‘Two or three all over the place with the geometry.’

  ‘Braque,’ Grey said.

  ‘Some slapdash views of the Eiffel Tower.’

  Grey sniffed.

  ‘Delauney.’

  ‘And some pictures of boats in a bay that look like children could have done them.’

  ‘Dufy,’ Grey said.

  Finlay sank his pint.

  ‘Not much scares you, does it, Mr Finlay.’

  Finlay thought about this.

  ‘He does,’ he said, nodding towards the still shape at Grey’s rear.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s a killer.’

  Grey made great ceremony out of lighting a fresh cigarette. Once again Finlay saw the robust nickel lighter with holes drilled into the hood that seemed so uncharacteristic in hands as graceful and adept as Grey’s. There was the odour of petrol as he opened the lighter and paused before striking its flame. Grey snapped the lighter shut and slipped it into a pocket.

  ‘There’s black and there’s white,’ he said. ‘There is good and there is evil.’

  Finlay did not respond.

  ‘And then there is what we might best describe as contingency.’

  Contingency was a proving to be a very versatile word, Finlay thought. He could guess its meaning here, more or less, from the context.

  ‘McKay here has twice saved your life. The when and the how are unimportant. But we are approaching the endgame and you should know whose side you are on and who’s on yours and you should be properly bloody grateful.’

  Finlay looked at the monolith called McKay.

  ‘Where was he when that Irishman gave me a kicking?’

  McKay snorted. Even his mirth sounded sinister.

  ‘We thought you’d best the Irishman. McKay knew your father, you see.’

  ‘Your old man was a force of nature, sir,’ McKay said. ‘Begging your pardon.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ve ever begged for anything,’ Finlay said.

  ‘It must be very difficult to be the son of such a celebrated hero,’ Grey said. ‘Difficult enough in peace, let alone in war.’

  ‘Which is why I volunteered to fight,’ Finlay said. He was tired. He was feeling the loss of Nevin, despair at what Babcock had shown him, the cold dread of whatever McKay had apparently done on his behalf. He had abandoned a woman to whom he had earlier in the day declared love to say meaningless words over a corpse and attempt to solve a mystery that was none of his business even if it was within his intellectual grasp. Which he doubted it was.

  ‘Why did Lange fill a space the size of an entire floor in Absalom House with junk?’

  ‘That junk belonged to his Jewish friends,’ Grey said. ‘He bid for it at the forced auctions in Berlin. His intention was to give it back when the political climate changed. But the political climate didn’t change. Not for his Jewish friends, not for him.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you put it all somewhere safe?’

  Grey laughed and behind him McKay gurgled like a drain.

  ‘I wouldn’t waste the fuel,’ Grey said. ‘I wouldn’t waste the manpower and I wouldn’t waste the space. Safety is for people first, Chief Fire Officer. You call me a snob. You might be right. But I’d rather give refuge to any misbegotten mother’s squalling bastard than to a vase or statue. We’ll save civilization if we’re up to it, I think by the skin of our teeth. Art and antiquity will have to wait their turn in the queue.’

  A silence descended then. In the distance, the odd bomb still was dropped or detonated, but there was a quiet in the bar that almost begged the cordiality of normal conversation. They were in a pub, after all.

  ‘Tell me about Gommecourt Wood.’

  McKay tensed and Finlay felt the threat of him like a drear and huge foreboding at which he dared not look.

  ‘It wasn’t Gommecourt,’ Grey said with a smile. ‘It was at a place called Serre. Babcock was with me there. And Colour Sarn’t McKay, who knew your father, was there also.’

  Finlay looked at the obdurate monument called McKay.

  ‘How well did you know my dad?’

  ‘Very well indeed, sir,’ McKay said. ‘Got to know him intimately. Best man I ever met.’

  ‘Christmas Eve, nineteen-fifteen,’ Grey said. ‘Town called Albert. Heard of it?’

  ‘Of course I have.’

  ‘Wonderful bout. Best bout I’ve ever seen and I saw Carpentier fight twice in Paris. Twenty rounds and not a cigarette paper between the two of them. Fair to say, McKay?’

  ‘He was very strong, your father,’ McKay said to Finlay. ‘And a most single-minded man. I was amazed that fat Paddy bested you first time around. Your old feller must’ve been spinning in his grave. If you don’t mind me say
ing so.’

  ‘Perhaps McKay can fetch the three of us a fresh drink and join our table,’ Grey said, brightly. ‘And then I can tell you all about what it is that you are so stubbornly keen to discover.’

  Grey had risen that morning at five and shaved at first light, gratified that his hands were sufficiently steady to accomplish the task. He breakfasted on excellent coffee and bacon rashers and biscuits rustled up by Babcock, who sat now in the shelter of the dugout, sharpening the sword which Grey had not the remotest intention of carrying into battle. German snipers had proved more than adept at spotting cap-badges and revolvers. Grey would go over dressed as a trooper. Only the flash on his sleeve would distinguish his rank. But Babcock had already completed his neat job of sewing. And it was Babcock’s obsequious custom to make himself always innocently busy.

  Grey thought of home. He thought of his mother and father the last time he had seen them, wan, distracted with grief at the death of his brother at Ypres. He thought of Cambridge and his cosy rooms and cosily illicit life. There was pollen in the air, costing him breath, and the scent of summer flowers and the song of birds. He pondered briefy on the sublime indifference of the world, on this particular, epic day, to the machinations of men. To do so was his habitual way of reconciling to himself those appetites he indulged despite the distaste he continued to feel for them. He didn’t matter to the world. And then, because he mattered to the moment, in his responsibility to other men, he confronted his fear of failure and disfigurement and death. He thought about the doubts he felt in the hollow part of him about his ability to lead. And for today, he overcame all of these.

  ‘Vanity, of course,’ he said to Finlay. ‘But then vanity courses through war like blood through the body.’

  Serre was a village held by the Germans between Gommecourt to the left of the British line and and Beaumont Hamel to its right. The men chosen to take it were the Fourth Army’s 94th Brigade. The 94th was entirely made up of the Pals Battalions. These were young men, boys by any strict definition, who had grown up together in the terraces of neighbouring streets in the towns and cities of the north of England. There were Pals Battalions in the first wave of the attack on Serre that morning from Accrington and Barnsley and Sheffield and Leeds and Bradford and Durham and Hull. Captain Grey was attached to the 16th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, generally known as the 1st Bradford Pals. ‘My boys were so disciplined when they went over,’ Grey told Finlay. ‘They had been through their training at Etaples, endured that BEF training that was by turns so tedious and brutal, and they had been together in the trenches. Time and repetition makes clichés of the truth. But they were comrades, friends, brothers. And when they bedded down on the night prior to the assault, there was not one among them shy of the coming fight.’