The Fire Fighter Read online

Hope things are not too prickly for you in the desert. Since you are likely to get home leave before I do, please give Mum a big kiss from her littler lad

  I love you and miss you, Jack,

  With all best wishes from your loving brother,

  Tom.

  Finlay had to fight the urge to weep after reading this. He felt the love he had for his brother overwhelming him in panic and despair. He struggled to rise above these impulses, knowing he had to, but at the same time was contemptuous of himself, for being able to do so. The innocence that he had not been gifted with, he had always celebrated through his brother, whose own innocence, through cunning and aggression, Finlay had been able to protect. He loved his brother, but knew he had used Tom as a surrogate for those qualities he had failed to come by in himself.

  Now, his brother shivered in a tube of riveted steel under the Baltic Sea, beyond his help, or harbouring. Was it why he hated the enemy so?

  Partly it was, he reasoned, sipping Babcock’s Scotch. But he hated them too because of their bombing of this city, for their crude and relentless method of destroying his country and its way of being. And he hated the vile reasoning that fed their will for conquest.

  Summoning physical courage had never been a difficulty for Finlay. It came to him in anger, or in indignation, conjured as easily as the will to stand and fight against unfavourable odds in a Friday-evening pub brawl, or during the dark part of the night in a Borstal dormitory. Thinking about what Grey had said, and the Major, and most particularly White, he wondered, though, if he had half the stuff they so relied on him now to provide.

  He brushed his teeth in the small mirror above the sink. The pads of his fingers and thumb were tender with pressure against the toothbrush handle. But neither of his hands would require a bandage tomorrow. He peeled the dressing from his cheek. The blister had broken and fluid oozed from the raw flesh down his face. But that burn too would be much better by the morning. Jack Finlay had always been a quick healer. Given his occupation, his body was hardly scarred at all.

  Four

  Just after six o’clock the following morning, Finlay was telephoned by the Watch Commander at the Moorgate station and informed that a parachute bomb was swinging, unexploded, from its silk canopy, which had snagged on the arm of a hoist extending from the loading bay in the storage loft of a building in Mitre Street under his care.

  He visualized the building as he sprinted up the spiral of iron steps to the street. Four floors. Brick construction, impacted on both sides by much older buildings made from heavy sections of quarried stone. He ran across Bishopsgate. There was a smell of burn on the eastern breeze from the direction of Wapping and the docks. Finlay ran along Camomile Street, Absalom House a shiver of black to his light as he passed it. The Mitre Street building had pitch on the roof, oak floors and joists of ancient, bone-dry spruce. He had done what he could there, but had been helpless to do anything about the library of parched reference books and the arid forests of files that crowded every floor. He had asked for the basement to be flooded. But he had also asked for the hoist on which the bomb had snagged to be removed and that had not been done. His building in Mitre Street would desiccate under the impact of explosion and then burn to brick dust and rubble in fierce indifference to the play of the Moorgate station hoses. Finlay hurled along Bevis Marks, right into Creechurch Lane and left into Mitre Street, where ARP warders jostled warily with fire fighters and men dressed in the uniform of the City of London Police in a wide semi-circle, under the pendulum swing of the hanging bomb. Among those in attendance, Finlay recognized the Moorgate Watch Commander, Nevin.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Finlay asked him. ‘Wait for the UXB boys?’

  ‘You tell me,’ Nevin said. ‘No one will tell me why, but I’m told it’s you that calls the tune.’

  Finlay nodded. ‘It is. But I’ve been on this job a fortnight. I thought I’d seek the benefit of home advantage, that’s all.’

  Nevin took his eyes away from the slowly turning bomb and looked at him.

  ‘That’s appreciated, Jack. The first thing to say is that we haven’t a fucking clue what it is we’re dealing with here. A conventional parachute bomb can weigh eight hundred pounds. That thing doesn’t look like it carries more than seventy. My bet is it’s an experimental piece of ordnance. Very volatile. Almost certainly a combination of HE and incendiary. If it goes off, I’ve got the two tenders you can see and a core team of six experienced men. There isn’t a fire hydrant within a thousand yards.’

  ‘The basement?’

  ‘Dry.’

  ‘Adjacent?’

  ‘Dry.’

  ‘Opposite?’

  ‘Dry.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘It gets worse,’ Nevin said. ‘Bomb disposal have taken a terrible hiding during the night trying to defuse a cluster of delayed actions dropped around a fuel dump in Silvertown.’ He nodded at their bomb. ‘It means there’s no chance of anyone except us dealing with this fucker.’

  ‘Sum up our options.’

  Nevin scratched his chin. Finlay could smell smoke drifting on the easterly from the night fires in Wapping, Rotherhithe, Shadwell, Bermondsey. He did not need Richard Nevin to tell him it had been a bad one. Soot particles drifted like black rags above their heads. A blackened sky stained the early morning into twilight. Above them, their bomb swayed.

  ‘Our options are these,’ Nevin said. ‘We can try to trigger it ourselves with the play of a hose. We can ask for a couple of volunteers to try to bring it down and take it somewhere we can detonate it safely. Or we can bring it down and dump the sodding thing in the river. It could be a dud. But then, why waste the parachute silk? It could be booby-trapped. It could be a delayed action. In which case, we’d better get a move on.’

  Finlay nodded. He knew that bombs were attached to parachutes to try to guarantee precision in hitting their target, not to deliver a nasty surprise. He unbuckled his belt and began to unbutton his tunic. ‘Keys to the building?’

  ‘Can’t locate them,’ Nevin said.

  ‘Raise me an extension ladder,’ Finlay said. ‘Clear the ground. I’ll bring it down.’

  ‘No you fucking well won’t.’

  Nevin and Finlay turned. Grey stood behind them, a Burberry mackintosh belted over Paisley pyjamas, leather mules on his sockless feet. He had his hands thrust into his mackintosh pockets and his hair hung over his forehead, uncombed. He looked angry, unshaven and louche. ‘I thought your priorities had been spelled out,’ he said to Finlay.

  ‘I’ve been given personal responsibility for the safety of this building.’

  ‘You look after more than one building,’ Grey said, lighting a cigarette. ‘And you have a responsibility to stay alive.’

  Nevin was looking hard at Grey. ‘Who are you?’

  Grey ignored him. ‘You are in charge here,’ he said to Finlay. ‘Have the Watch Commander request two volunteers to bring that thing down.’ He jabbed with the fingers holding his cigarette at the swaying bomb. ‘A lot of lives depend on these premises staying intact and operational. See to it.’

  Nevin gathered his half-dozen regular men and asked for volunteers. A sallow-faced fire fighter who looked to be aged in his mid-forties said that he would have a go. Then, after a hesitation, a younger man said that he would chance it, too. Nevin brought his volunteers back to where Finlay stood. ‘Ball and Sweeney,’ he said.

  Finlay looked at the older man. ‘Do you have a family, Ball?’

  Ball nodded. ‘Two boys, both ground crew in the RAF. My youngest, Sally, has been evacuated to Wales. And the missus is at home in Hoxton, I trust making my dinner.’

  Finlay looked at Nevin. Ball read the look.

  ‘With respect, Chief Fire Officer, I can’t exactly fight shy of explosives and expect to do my job.’

  ‘This is a voluntary task.’

  ‘And I’ve volunteered. When my number’s up, it’s up. Till then, I’m not losing sleep. After that, I won’t have to.’ B
all’s sallow face broke into a grin that stretched the cheeks across their bones.

  Finlay thought that whatever Mrs Ball was feeding her husband, it wasn’t enough. He looked at Sweeney, who just looked sheepish in the glare of the senior officers’ scrutiny. The two men shrugged off the harnesses carrying their sets of breathing apparatus and unbuttoned their tunics. This was a job that called for delicacy rather than the regulations manual and they would attempt to carry it out, on this twilit autumn morning, in their shirtsleeves.

  ‘What say we smash down the street door, sir?’ Ball said. ‘We’d have a more stable platform for dealing with the bomb from the interior of the loading bay.’

  ‘No,’ Finlay said, ‘we’ll tackle it from outside.’ He had asked for steel doors with deadbolts to be fitted, sealing every floor when the building was unoccupied. He did not know whether this had been done, or the recommendation ignored like his other requests. But even battering through the street door would cause unacceptable delay. And if the bomb were to go off, Finlay did not want it going off inside the building, where the damage would be most devastating.

  As the men were about to go, Sweeney turned slyly back. ‘You’re Jack Finlay,’ he said. ‘My brother was on your crash crew when you boarded the Empress.’

  Finlay groped back in time. ‘Ted Sweeney,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t ask for a more solid bloke. When you see him next, tell him all the best from an old comrade.’

  Sweeney flushed like a boy and the two volunteers turned towards their task.

  ‘Good luck, lads,’ Finlay called after them.

  Sweeney went up the ladder and shuffled on his backside along the lip of the loading bay to a position where he could try to cut or unravel the parachute from the arm of the hoist. Nevin’s men had set up a safety cordon. From behind it, Nevin offered Finlay a cigarette. Finlay declined it with a shake of his head. Ball climbed the ladder as far as the level at which the bomb was suspended, twenty feet below the hoist and forty feet above the paving stones and cobbles of the street. The bomb was three and a half feet of polished, cylindrical steel with a swastika stencilled neatly in red on the gentle swell of its nose cone. If it goes off now, he’ll be vapour, Finlay thought, watching Ball. They both will. Sweeney signalled with a soft whistle that the parachute was unsnagged and therefore he was taking the weight; and, like a skilled child constructing a cat’s cradle, Ball gathered the six strings of sash cord securing the bomb to its canopy of silk and nodded to his colleague to let go. Silk drifted downwards. Carrying the bomb balanced on one shoulder, Sweeney descended the ladder. Nevin had been slightly off. From the way Sweeney moved, Finlay judged the weight of what he carried to be about eighty pounds. An inert weight of eighty pounds was not a huge amount for a trained and experienced fire fighter to have to bring down a ladder. But the knowledge that it could blow him to pieces might add somewhat to the burden.

  Ball brought the bomb down to the street. Fire crew had fetched a stretcher from somewhere and, with the tenderness they would have accorded a wounded man, placed the bomb on the waiting stretcher and bore it away at a solemn pace.

  ‘You’ve good men,’ Finlay said to Nevin.

  Nevin nodded and smoked. ‘There’s no call for any other sort just now,’ he said.

  Finlay turned to speak to Grey. He wanted to say something sardonic about Ball and about Ball being a fatalist and about what White had said about fatalism and it not winning wars. But Grey had gone.

  ‘It’s a simple enough mistake. In a man so born-yesterday naive as you are,’ Babcock said,

  Finlay scraped Palmolive suds and bristle off his chin and shook his safety razor in the water in the sink. ‘What is?’

  ‘Mistaking greed for valour.’

  Finlay took his chin between his fingers and steered his reflection this way and that. The burn on the skin over his cheekbone had healed to a shiny patch of pink. He would look presentable, which he would need to do. ‘When was I guilty of that particular blunder?’

  ‘Thinking your Moorgate volunteers were merely brave. Of course, you wouldn’t know how hard it has become for women to find new clothes. So you wouldn’t know the black-market price of parachute silk. You act with the sinlessness of the fanatic, in the sanctity of unshakeable faith. That’s why you’ll burn.’

  Finlay dropped his razor with a plop and turned. Babcock sat on Finlay’s cot, polishing Finlay’s boots.

  ‘Like one of those zealots sent to the stake in the Inquisition,’ he said. ‘I’m speaking metaphorically. I don’t mean literally burn.’

  ‘I should bloody well hope you don’t,’ Finlay said. ‘Do you know I told Grey you were a Communist?’

  ‘He wouldn’t care. This is a country with a tradition of religious toleration and an honourable history of political dissent. We can’t all share your rigid conviction about everything. It isn’t British. Doubt. Prevarication. Fudge. These are part and parcel of our culture. If you think about it, you’d probably be a lot more comfortable fighting for the other side.’

  ‘I’d feel a lot more comfortable fighting,’ Finlay said. ‘How did you meet Grey?’

  ‘I was his batman.’ He looked at the boot and the polishing brush in his hands. ‘Talk about old habits dying hard.’

  ‘Tell me about Gommecourt Wood.’

  Babcock looked at Finlay for a long time with an expression Finlay had not seen on his sharp, rodent face before. It was an expression more complex and ambivalent than Finlay would have thought that narrow set of features capable of.

  For a start, it wasn’t Gommecourt Wood,’ Babcock said. ‘It was at a place called Serre, which lay between Gommecourt on our left and Beaumont Hamel to our right. There was a Serre Road. There was a settlement, a village, called Serre.’

  ‘Past tense?’

  ‘I don’t know what they call it now, Chief Fire Officer Finlay. Or if it is still called what it was then, or if it even still exists. I do know that it cannot exist any more as it did then. Nothing does. But if you want to know about what happened to Captain Grey there, best ask him. I offered to polish your boots and press your dress uniform for your appointment at Absalom House. I never agreed to talk about Gommecourt Wood.’

  Finlay had breakfasted with Nevin in the Moorgate station canteen and spent the rest of the day housekeeping at all his buildings but for the thin black pile in Camomile Street. Among a catalogue of tasks, he saw to it that the Mitre Street basement was flooded and two inches of powdery sand spread in close-packed bakers’ trays across the joists under Mitre Street’s pitch-heavy roof. He had got back tired and satisfied and was writing a letter to Tom when Grey telephoned, telling him to attend an appointment at Absalom House at six the following evening.

  ‘I’d like a set of keys to all my buildings,’ Finlay said into the receiver.

  There was a silence.

  ‘Grey?’

  ‘Being a bit proprietorial, aren’t we?’ Grey said.

  ‘I asked for the Mitre Street basement to be flooded. It wasn’t done. I asked for steel doors with deadbolts to isolate the stairwell access to each floor. It wasn’t done. Have you any notion as to how fast fire, unimpeded, travels upwards?’

  ‘Skilled manpower and materials are in short supply at present,’ Grey said. ‘We take your recommendations very seriously. But things sometimes take time.’

  ‘Perhaps in that case we should ask Herr Goering to give his pilots a few weeks’ leave.’

  ‘That’s puerile, Finlay. Even by your standards.’

  ‘I apologize.’

  ‘Good. You need the practice.’

  ‘But it would have been better if I had had a set of keys this morning. Surely you can see that?’

  ‘Sorry Finlay, no can do. This is one of those frequent occasions where security concerns override practicality. If it were up to me, you would have five sets of keys cut within the hour. But it isn’t, and so you won’t.’

  Finlay said nothing. He listened to Grey breathe. The quality of the connection
was astounding.

  ‘Good luck with Miss Lange tomorrow evening,’ Grey said. He hung up.

  Dusk, in collusive shadows, was claiming the corners of the atrium by the time Finlay pushed open its elaborate door and entered. Rebecca Lange sat in the chair she had occupied so fleetingly during their first encounter. In the starved light there was something monochromatic about her. Her painted lips looked black. She was wearing a charcoal suit with cloth-covered buttons and her legs, crossed at the knees, emerged from the skirt in stockings of black silk. A clatter of ebony bracelets slid down her arm when she rose to acknowledge Finlay’s entrance. The arm they embellished was as pale as bone.

  ‘Chief Fire Officer Jack Finlay,’ he said.

  ‘Rebecca Lange.’

  She held out a hand and he shook it. Her flesh was surprisingly warm in the cool of the room and her detachment. ‘It must be terrible for you, Chief Fire Officer. Having to go about denuded of all your brass and gilt.’

  ‘Black-out precautions. I’m sure you’d enjoy a cigarette, Miss Lange.’

  ‘Dying for one,’ she said.

  ‘You see? We all have to make sacrifices.’

  She laughed. The stars were finding the sky and their light dabbed filaments of silver into the loose weight of her hair. He smelled her perfume and could tell that it was fresh and felt flattered, and foolish for feeling it, that she should have gone to the trouble of putting it on.

  As the dark descended fully, the stars and an occasional sliver of moon were adequate to see by under the dome of glass. Rebecca Lange gestured to the chair set at an angle to hers and Finlay took off his cap and they sat.

  ‘Do you find that chair comfortable?’

  ‘It is exactly the same as the one you are sitting on.’

  ‘That is not what I asked you.’

  Finlay patted the leather flanks of the chair. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘It is a Barcelona chair,’ she said. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘That it was made in Barcelona?’

  ‘What a literal mind you have.’

  ‘Barcelona is a place I associate with bombs. Not furniture.’