She heard a new noise.
The click of a button being pushed was followed by the familiar whirring of oiled gears. The lift was being summoned on the floor above. She forced her head up and watched in horror as the concrete level of the floor descended to her sightline, down to her ankles, brushing, then touching, then pressing, then crushing.
The audiences of the Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus, had delighted in a thousand lingering kisses, a thousand cruel deaths, a thousand emotional farewells. But there was no audience here tonight to witness the end of a dancer, to see the terrible cleaving of bone and flesh, the stream of blood, not lurid Kensington Gore but something real and dark and intimate, to hear the agonized screams of a woman in mourning for the end of her career as much as the loss of her feet.
8
THE ARRIVAL OF THE CUCKOO
Sidney Biddle had never been in trouble with the police, so he joined them, and then the trouble began. At the outbreak of war, he entered training with a determination to be the scourge of the criminal world, anxious to change the ways of people he considered corrupt, stupid, lazy and weak. Any officer will tell you that a person entering the force with such a mentality is doomed to a lifetime of disappointment. Triumphs are transitory, failures painful, gratitude rare and grudging. Policemen and nurses are yoked together under the category of social services, but nurses bond with their patients. Policemen get no thanks from those they arrest.
Not that Biddle expected appreciation, but he had been hoping for more concrete results from his zealous approach to the law. At school he had been hardworking and humourless, possessed with a religious fire. His parents were at a loss to understand him, and blamed themselves for having produced a child so determined to be a model citizen that they were forced to hide newspapers from him, in case he discovered new enemies within their pages.
After police college, Biddle found himself inexplicably on the beat. He had expected to start in a position of greater responsibility, but his attitude had bothered his seniors, who wisely decided to drum a little humility into him before allowing their star pupil to turn his searching gaze on a sinning populace.
Biddle hated life in the constabulary, manning inquiry desks to deal with old ladies who had lost their dogs, walking freezing patrols, scouring the rough parts of Islington for troublemakers, assigned the gaslit thieves’ walks that no one else would touch. It appeared to him that the police were fighting a losing battle. Recruitment standards were in freefall. The police were taking whoever they could get, and they couldn’t get much.
In his eyes, there was a far deeper malaise eating into modern society, a moral turpitude that allowed slum children to die in squalor and innocents to be coshed in the streets. He considered most of his colleagues to be more stupid than the lads they were trying to catch. What kind of a world was it that allowed thieving to become more of a vocation than policing? He hated the lapel-thumbing swaggers, the beery airing of prejudices, the backslapping arrogance, the barely veiled contempt for civvies.
Displaying an excessive devotion to duty is no way to make friends. Biddle’s colleagues singled him out for all the worst tasks. When he finally managed to get a transfer, it was to a unit so invisible to the rest of the force that he felt sure he would be safe at last. Nobody seemed to know what the new job would entail, but Biddle figured it had to be better than staying where he was.
He was told that the new unit operated under independent financial status, and was answerable only to the Home Office. He had heard rumours: that a series of special squads was being set up to deal with crimes of terrorism, treason and misconduct, acts that were likely to cause social unrest, panic and the loss of that indefinable but essential wartime quality—public spirit. There were already the best part of a dozen services in place to cope with the physical needs of a nation at war. One unit was studying the psychological aspects of propaganda and misinformation, and another was to gauge the effect of continuous bombing on public morale.
The PCU did not publicly recruit and had very few permanent staff. No one inside it was allowed to mix with regular members of the force for reasons of security. There were other stories: of an ongoing feud between the unit and the City of London police, and of a row with the Home Office over the cost of hiring a group of white witches to help with an investigation.
Not since the country’s civil war had the rumour-mongering machine worked so adroitly. Adolf Hitler, many said, was consulting an astrologer called Karl Ossietz to help him formulate his invasion plans. There was a belief among shop girls in the north of England that German paratroopers were landing in Norway disguised as parsons, that they were coming for healthy English girls and would force them into German baby farms. When sensible folk started believing nonsense like this, clearly something had to be done, but solid information was hard to come by. Mail was censored. All sensitive details were excised. No weather forecasts were issued. Every time an offensive was launched the newspapers sold out in minutes, and you had to find yourself a wireless.