A Late Phoenix (2 page)

Yet St. Luke's wasn't a twilight zone. Berebury was too old a town for that. Some of its loveliest houses were right in the center, and there would have been more of them too but for the bombing. Nevertheless these exoduses at each end of the St. Luke's area had meant that William Latimer had come to a small practice. Dr. Henry Tarde had been in Field House for a long time and it would seem that his practice had diminished nicely for him as he grew older and would have wanted less work.

William Latimer opened the door. Soon patients would start coming to the surgery door as they had been coming every Monday morning for the last hundred years and more. Somewhere he could smell his breakfast cooking, though—alas—the meals served by his housekeeper, Mrs. Milligan, did not always live up to their olfactory promise.

He still paused for a moment before he went indoors. It was one of those startlingly lovely September mornings, all the more enjoyable because it carried with it the unmistakable message of autumn.

There were other changes in the air, too, besides the weather. It looked as if some time soon the corner opposite Field House was going to cease being a rough tangle of broken brick and overgrown weeds. Just before eight o'clock this morning a lorryload of men had turned up and begun to spread themselves over the old bomb site.

Actually the first thing they had done had been to erect a little shelter and start a brazier going but, that achieved, they had started clearing the larger trees and erected two boards. M
ARK
R
EDDLEY AND
A
SSOCIATES
(D
EVELOPERS
) L
TD
. proclaimed the first, a well-lettered and discreet advertisement. The second, altogether a more casual affair, was propped up at a drunken angle against a few bricks and said simply G
ARTON AND
G
ARTON
, B
UILDERS
, B
EREBURY
.

Dr. Latimer looked across at the workmen and noted the immediate contrast between them and those young archaeologists who had been digging the same site all weekend. William had paused yesterday morning and looked down at their carefully laid string and little trowels. There had been four men and a girl and they had scratched about all Saturday and Sunday.

He had called out “Any luck?” to them at one stage yesterday.

Their leader, a young man with a beard and wearing open sandals, who the others addressed as Colin, had shaken his head ruefully. “Nothing Saxon yet.”

William Latimer wasn't an archaeologist but he would have said they needed to look no further than themselves for Saxon remains. The girl with them, industriously crouched beside a narrow trench, was pure Saxon, long blond hair falling unattended over her bent shoulders.

He had seen them all troop away, tired and dispirited as the light went last night.

The arrival of the workmen explained the archeologists' concentrated work over the weekend anyway. After this morning there was obviously going to be no chance of investigating any old civilization here. The second half of the twentieth century wanted to use the space.

He watched the workmen for a few more moments.

The odd thing about their leisurely pace was that it actually got anything done at all, but it did. Their breakfast was under way, too. The tantalizing smell of sausages cooking on their open brazier drifted across Conway Street and reminded him how hungry he was. He turned on his heel and went indoors. Miss Tyrell would not expect him to be late for morning surgery.

He wasn't quite sure whether he had inherited Miss Tyrell as secretary-cum-receptionist or if she had merely inherited him as Dr. Tarde's successor. A bit of both, he decided fairly, as she greeted him after breakfast from her little office beside his consulting room. Perhaps she was like the fixtures and fittings specified in the briefly seen deed of the house.

Perhaps she just went with the practice.

“Seven new calls, Doctor, only one of them urgent. I said you'd go there first.”

Geographically his was a close-knit practice and he passed his own house (well, his own and the Building Society's) several times during the course of the morning while he set about seeing the seven new calls and any number of old ones. On one occasion he was just in time to see a large yellow vehicle at work on the old bomb site.

It looked more like an artificial cockroach than anything else. With consummate ease it tugged up a well-established elm tree. Not only with ease, but without ceremony. There was no surrounding circle of watchers while somebody shouted, “Timber.” Nobody shouted anything as the yellow thing went into reverse gear and simply pulled. And that in spite of the fact that the tree could have been all of twenty-five years old. Uprooted, the yellow machine dragged the tree to a corner of the site where two men with bandsaws descended on it without delay.

Miss Tyrell took a gloomy view of the noise.

“It'll go on for months, I expect, Doctor. And this is only the beginning. You wait until they start with their pile drivers or whatever it is they make their foundations with.”

“Yes, indeed. No, no sugar, thank you,” murmured William. Miss Tyrell had conjured up coffee to coincide with his arrival—almost as if she had been expecting him.

“Dr. Tarde always used to come back about now,” she said, “to see if there were any new calls.”

“Oh?” he said oddly disconcerted. “And are there?”

“Not this morning. There quite often are.” Miss Tyrell consulted a list in front of her. “If you should pass this way again and see the sitting-room curtains drawn you'll know that something else has cropped up and I'd like you to come in.”

“Thank you,” said William gravely. At least he would know now that it didn't signify a death in the house.

Miss Tyrell ran her eye round the consulting room. “Otherwise, Doctor, I think everything's all right.”

“Thank you,” he said again.

“Mrs. Milligan's gone out shopping. I'll do the letters and the filing until she comes back. And I'll be back in time for evening surgery.”

“Right.” He didn't want to stand in the way of Mrs. Milligan going shopping. “Tell me, Miss Tyrell, what's going to be built opposite?”

Miss Tyrell's hatchet face grew longer. “Shops of some sort, Doctor, I think, but there's been so much argument about that site over the years that I'm sure I don't really know what the upshot will be.”

“Argument?”

“Plans,” she said lugubriously. “First one lot and then another and then somebody wouldn't sell and then he would—only by then the Town Council wouldn't let him build what he wanted. There was talk of a compulsory purchase order at one time—or so I heard—but nothing came of it.” She sniffed. “And before it was all settled they started this business about a ring road.”

“Here?” he said, dismayed. “You mean just outside my house?”

His and the Building Society's, of course, but all the same …

“That's right,” she said. “But you needn't worry. They changed their minds about that too.”

“I'm very glad to hear it.”

“Everyone's changed their minds so often,” she said grimly, “that it's just as well there are some people left who can still get things done.”

William Latimer abruptly decided it was time he got back to his round. He drained the last of his coffee. “How do I get to Shepherd Street, by the way?”

Miss Tyrell told him.

The next time he took a look at the bomb site was after his luncheon. Mrs. Milligan's visit to the shops had meant a piece of steak which would have been nice if it had been cooked properly. William took a little stroll along Conway Street preparatory to going out on his afternoon round. These were the less urgent cases, the chronic sick, and the very old.

Like a magnet the sight of other men working drew him back to the bomb site corner.

He wasn't the only one. The spectacle had also attracted an elderly man who was leaning on a stick, two small boys, and a young woman pushing a pram. There was a baby girl in the pram who was patently delighted with the workmen.

“Dada,” she said impartially.

“Dada,” she said, catching sight of William.

But it was the elderly man whom William recognized. He lived in the house farther down Lamb Lane—next to the bomb site—and was called Herbert Jackson. He had chronic bronchitis, and William had already treated him.

He waved a stick at the bomb site. “They ain't rushed themselves, Doc, have they?”

“Well …” said William consideringly, looking at the workmen, “it's heavy work, you know.”

“I don't mean today, Doc,” wheezed the man. “I mean since it happened.”

“Oh, haven't they?”

“The morning after this little lot copped it they was round from the Council promising to rebuild. And such houses as you've never seen. With everything you could think of inside …”

“That wasn't yesterday,” agreed William.

“Yesterday? It was in 1941, Doc. Wanted us to move out and all.” He pointed to the shored-up wall of his house. “Only temp'rarily, mind you. Till they got going on the building again.”

“Did they?”

“Just as well we didn't go. We'd have been waiting a tidy while afore they got round to touching this little lot.”

“That's true,” observed William.

“Said my house wasn't habitable, they did …”

“Really?” William cast an eye towards Bert Jackson's house in Lamb Lane. It looked to him as if it was being held together in some grotesque wooden corset.

“Not habitable,” snorted Bert Jackson. “As I said to them, if the landlord collects his rent it's fit to live in, in spite of the Borough Engineer and all his mob.” Jackson wheezed away. “And sure enough, come the Friday he was round. And he's been round every Friday ever since.”

William murmured that landlords were like that.

Jackson waved his stick again. “Bert, boy, they said to me, just you wait until this bloomin' war's over and we'll build a proper row of houses fit for a lord, they'll be. Well, Doc,” he wheezed, “I waited, but I reckon unless they look sharp I'll be dead afore they're finished.”

“Nonsense,” said William warmly. “You'll live to be a hundred.”

The big tree had almost gone now.

The logs that had made it up were being tossed on to the contractors' lorry. The leaves and the twigs and the other surface detritus from the site were being heaped onto a bonfire. Someone had driven a surveyor's stick into the ground, and another man was knocking in little wooden crosses for sight lines.

Considering that they had only started work that morning, the men had made a fair impression on the site.

William could see quite clearly when the bomb must have fallen. The remains of the other houses told him that. On the end of the house in Conway Street which had once joined the bombed buildings was a new brick wall, less weathered than the rest of the house. The other house which abutted the damage—old Bert Jackson's house—was round the corner in Lamb Lane. It hadn't been so lucky in its repairs or, perhaps, the party wall hadn't been so badly damaged in the first place. The timbers were shoring up a torn wall. He could still see where the bedroom fireplace had been and the jagged holes climbing the wall which had meant the staircase.

Field House must have been damaged, too, decided William, swinging round on his heel and taking a good look. Once he started looking for damage he could see the patches in the roof tiles. And odd chips on the facing.

“Look at the pretty flowers,” said the woman with the pram to the baby.

“Dada,” said her daughter automatically.

The men had started tearing up the remaining greenery on the site. William peered down.

“Epilobium augustifolium,” he thought. He had resented botany and he still resented it. Its connection with medicine smacked to him of herbalism and ancient unscientific, uncertain remedies, but it had been on the curriculum and he had had to learn it. The men were scooping up great armfuls of the plants now, scattering the seeds to the four winds.

The young woman with the pram nodded to him. “Funny how that stuff always grows on places like this, isn't it?”

“Rose bay willow herb,” agreed William, mentally abandoning its Latin name. “Hardy.”

“No,” said the young woman. “That's fireweed, that is.”

He got back from his afternoon round just before five o'clock, looking forward to a quiet cup of tea before evening surgery at six. He had barely sat down when Mrs. Milligan came in, wiping her hands on her apron.

“I'm ever so sorry to trouble you, Doctor, but it's the foreman from the building site. They want you to go across there straightaway.”

He got to his feet. “An accident?”

It wouldn't be surprising with all that machinery about—or had Bert Jackson fallen into a hole?

Mrs. Milligan frowned. “I don't think so, Doctor. He just said he'd be obliged if you'd step over there as soon as you could.”

It looked like an accident to William as he left his own house and started across Conway Street. It had all the earmarks of one. All the men who had been working there were standing round the bottom of the site in a little crowd. They were staring but doing nothing—just like they did when someone had been knocked down.

“This way, Doc,” one of them shouted, spotting him.

Another held a ladder while he climbed down to their level. He supposed they were in what had been the cellars of the bombed houses. He picked his way across to the waiting group.

They were looking down at a body.

Work each foreleg free in turn …

C
HAPTER
T
WO

It wasn't so much a body as part of the remains of one.

A skull.

“It was Mick here what found him, Doctor.”