Full Dark House(112)
‘The day we met, you told me that their definition of peculiar and yours were different. You just didn’t warn me how different. I know you’re a bit older than me, but I’d like a chance to handle things another way, before Davenport hears what you’ve done and nails boards across the entrance to the office. I should have put my foot down when you brought in the clairvoyant, then perhaps none of this would have happened. Why don’t you take a break, go and give the ARP boys a hand, make use of yourself, and try not to think so much?’
‘I’ll admit that as a team we’ve been having a few teething troubles.’
‘Teething troubles? You just accused a man who has the ear of the Home Office of practising witchcraft! Christ on a bike.’
‘John, at least let’s leave it until the morning,’ Bryant pleaded. ‘You might feel differently then.’
John raised his hands defiantly. ‘No, because in the morning you’ll try to convince me that Renalda is part of a satanic sect, or that the theatre is built on an ancient Saxon burial ground. Besides, it has nothing to do with me. Renalda—and Biddle, come to think of it—will be on the phone to Davenport right now, and he’ll have taken you off the case before dawn. I’m prepared to go a long way with you, Arthur. I even see some demented sense in what you say. The killer is a psychopath driven by desperation, fine, yes, I agree with that. But Muses, curses, protective spells? That’s where we part company.’
He stopped when he realized that his partner was no longer following him. Looking back, he saw Bryant standing in the rain, his head dropped forward onto his chest. He looked close to tears, but May knew he couldn’t be because nothing ever seemed to upset him.
‘Where are you going now?’ asked May.
‘I promised my mother I’d look in on her,’ Bryant replied miserably.
‘I’ll drive you. There won’t be any buses running at this hour. Then you must try to get some sleep. At least it’s a quiet night. I’ll go back to the theatre and make sure Forthright has everything she needs.’
‘You’re right,’ Bryant said softly. ‘I thought it was—I don’t know what I thought. I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be, just get some rest. Leave it to me. You won’t have to do anything. I’ll sort everything out with Davenport. Just accept that things didn’t work out with us, that’s all.’
Bryant suddenly looked so pale and fragile that May felt a rush of pity for him.
He drove his distraught partner slowly back through the smouldering ruins of Hackney and Bow, past a makeshift hospital set up on the broken pavements. There were patients lying on brass beds outside McFisheries and Woolworths. A woman was sitting on the steps of a church with her head in her hands. When a nurse tried to comfort her, she pushed her away.
As they drove on, the devastation grew. The house where Bryant asked to be dropped was in a bomb-scarred terrace of slum dwellings long due for demolition. May was shocked to find that his partner hailed from such a rough neighbourhood.
Embarrassed by the events of the night and by his own impoverished circumstances, Bryant stood awkwardly in the entrance to the alley beside his mother’s house and waited until the Wolseley had pulled out into the deserted road, its tail-lights fading in the thickening drizzle.
As he watched John May drive away, he knew that the unit’s last chance for survival was leaving with him.
52
TAKING LEAVE
Early on Sunday morning Londoners once more awoke to the drone of the bombers, but the drizzle had persisted through the night, and only a few aircraft had managed to drop their loads. Several fires were started, and their smoke added to the city’s dawning pallor of eye-watering gloom. After the RAF released two thousand bombs on Hamburg as a reprisal for Coventry, Germany turned its attention to the Southampton docks, steadily bombing them for the rest of the day. Attack, reprisal; the process continued in a depressing rhythm of retaliation.
Sidney Biddle sat on the bench near the tea stall with his hands stuffed deep in his overcoat, watching the oily water surge back and forth around the barricaded pillars of Waterloo Bridge like the action of some vast diseased lung. Daylight had begun to creep across the sky, and now he could see the silver barrage balloons following the shoreline. One of them was tied to the top of Bank power station’s chimney. Another had partially deflated, and hung amorphously over the river like a creature in a Salvador Dalí painting. Biddle’s foot was throbbing, but it was strapped up with splints and bandages and he was able to walk with the aid of a crutch.