‘Andreas married a young English girl called Elissa. He inherited the Renalda estate on his father’s death, and it will be given to Minos only if his entire family dies.’ Bryant swiped the papers with the back of his hand. ‘Now this is where it gets interesting. A week after the old man’s funeral, while Andreas was attending to business on the mainland, bad brother Minos told Elissa that he wanted to make amends for his behaviour. He took her out to a taverna, but only the brother came back. Nobody knows what happened. Elissa was seen with Minos on the jetty late that night. She supposedly slipped and fell into the water. It took a month for her body to wash up on the beach. Andreas took the case to the local magistrate, but no evidence of murder was found. The tycoon was convinced that his brother had killed his wife, but had no proof. Andreas moved to England, and Minos’s whereabouts are unknown. Well, we wanted a suspect.’
‘Andreas’s brother. You think he could be here?’
‘I suppose he could be using any name.’ Bryant called in Forthright. ‘We’re going to need a recent photograph of Minos Renalda,’ he explained. ‘We have to talk to Andreas again. Have you got any tea rations left? We’ve used ours up.’
‘Certainly.’ Forthright paused in the doorway. ‘Did you hear? The other army bike has turned up. No prints on it, though. I heard about Mr May’s little adventure.’
‘Where did they find it?’ asked Bryant.
‘Right outside the theatre, back with all the others.’
‘I can’t believe it. The audacity—he went right back. Gladys, what are you hovering about for?’
‘May I just say that it’s a pleasure to be working with you again?’
‘No, you may not. Get on with your work.’ Bryant smiled poisonously at his partner. ‘I knew those two would never last,’ he said.
42
MR MAY PRESENTS HIS THEORY
The follow-up to Coventry’s night of terror was a bombing raid on London that proved almost as devastating as the attack of 15 October, when the city seemed to combust with over nine hundred fires. On that occasion all railway traffic had been halted, and the shattered Fleet sewer emptied its poisoned waters into the train tunnels at King’s Cross.
On Saturday, those who survived the night arose to find great chunks of the city alight or simply gone. Hospitals, schools and stations had been hit, and doctors cut their way into unsafe buildings to administer morphine to the injured. Pumps and water towers were drained to fight the raging blazes spread by incendiary bombs. Because the city’s water was routinely turned off at the weekend, the fire hoses had run dry, so riverside cranes were used to drop trailer pumps into the Thames from offshore barges.
Looters struck, risking their lives to pillage from the ruins of shops and houses while residents took cover, but most of the cases went unreported for fear of harming morale. A deep crater had been blown in the centre of Charing Cross Road, exposing the underground trains to daylight. In Farringdon, a fish shop was hit by a bomb that loosened a great girder, causing it to fall on a queue of housewives. Not even gangs of men could move the beam, and the women had to wait and die while a crane was sought.
Brick dust settled across the roads and buildings as thickly as falling snow, a pale cloak of mourning. All sounds were deadened. People moved quietly through the ashes like determined ghosts.
John May had spent the night under the stairs at his aunt’s house in Camden. The noise had been deafening and almost constant, the explosions preceded by the droning of aircraft, the thunder of anti-aircraft guns and the ghostly wail of the sirens, one of which was mounted on the roof of the primary school opposite. The early fog was so dense, and the blackout still so effective, that May could see no more than a few feet ahead as he walked into Covent Garden, listening to the fall of masonry, accompanied by the chinking tumble of London bricks. The rescue squads were pulling down cracked chimney stacks and walls.
In Long Acre the atmosphere changed; the costermongers were still in fine voluble form, singing and bellowing jokes across their wicker stacks. Many offices asked their exhausted workers to handle extra shifts. With so many lines of communication cut, the daily push and pull of commerce slowed. But the size of London worked in favour of its population. No matter how much havoc had occurred in the night, it always seemed there was another way to get things done.
Bryant had spent the night in the office and needed to clear his head with a walk beside the river. He felt close to the truth and wanted to talk to Andreas Renalda, but nobody knew his whereabouts. There was no answer from the telephone at the tycoon’s Highgate home, and his office was shut for the weekend.