Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (21 page)

Finally, a ringing as if the universe had become a giant bell, a Big Ben of nightmare. I ached all over. My tin hat was gone—I would be rebuked for losing equipment again, which troubled me for a moment, a clear sign of shock. I clawed my way upright with the help of the railing. I was on my feet, which was a good sign, but the world was silent; that was not. I thought for a moment that I might be in some dubious afterlife, that I had been blown right through all my assumptions and the line between the real and the not-real. Then I put my hand to my face and touched blood. The dead don’t bleed.

When I staggered around the steps, I saw the crater in the light of a flaming building and the inspector lying on the pavement. He seemed oddly foreshortened before I realized that his legs were gone. And Connie? A shoe and some scraps of silk had been blown into the gutter. He must have been immediately next to the mine when it went off. Doubtless bits of him had blown against me in the shock wave. I filled my lungs as best I could despite this thought and managed to reach the inspector. His eyes were open and although I saw that there was overwhelming damage, he was conscious.

“Why?” I asked.

His lips moved. “It would have happened again,” he said.

I understood; either I had some residual hearing or I recognized the shape of the words—I haven’t struggled to paint the human mouth for nothing—but I knew what he’d said.

I knelt beside him on the pavement. I had no first-aid kit; even if I had, there was no hope for him. “I’ll burn the photos. I have them.”

“Where?”

“Nan’s cast.” I held up my arm and mimed the cast.

His face took on a curious expression that might even have been amusement—the inspector was a man of many parts and many layers. It might even be, as the American poet says,
that if I had known him I would have loved him
. Or maybe not; one’s sentiments are elevated at such moments. He started to say something but blood came from his mouth and he was no more. I was still sitting there, smack in the middle of the street, when the first warden responded. “Get the police,” I said. “This is a matter for the police.”

I met him in the park—ironic, that, when everything started there, but my newest copper was oh-so-proper and nothing if not discreet. You can see how I’d come up in the world from dodging local vice cops to my own personal inspector to this superintendent—small, wiry, obviously ex-Army. His thinning hair was gray at the sides, and round wire glasses covered cautious slate-colored eyes above a long nose and a wide, narrow mouth. Arnold had told me that he was very senior and straight in every way. Intelligent and self-contained, this police paragon preferred not to be seen with me in a pub and, naturally, I resisted the station house. The park was the compromise; we walked across the scarred, militarized lawns in the direction of the Serpentine. The foggy morning was made darker by the haze of smoke, and the cold air put a hitch in the superintendent’s stride; his left leg had been doubtful, he said, ever since the Somme. He stopped gratefully at an empty bench and motioned me to sit beside him.

Another silence; this time I’d drawn a thoughtful copper. I was assembling quite a collection of the breed. There had been the patrolmen, weary and brusque, who had responded to the bomb site; their sergeant, skeptical on general principles; a new inspector, young, smooth, and ambitious; and now this entirely superior and highly respectable being, a superintendent who wanted to sit with me in the park. I felt myself slipping inexorably into the good-citizen category.

He drew an envelope from the inside pocket of his coat and handed it over. “The letter you requested.”

It was unsealed. I unfolded a thin, coarse sheet the color of lavatory paper—even official communiqués were beginning to look shoddy with the shortages—and read that I had provided invaluable and material assistance to the Metropolitan Police. My reinstatement to my ARP post was highly recommended.

“Thank you,” I said. “That should do it.”

“I should think,” he said. We watched some hardy ducks waddling along the edge of the Serpentine and speculated silently on a listing barrage balloon beyond the trees. Finally, he spoke again. “There are still questions.”

I nodded. I would have said that there was almost nothing but.

“We have closed down the ‘club’ that Teck and his friends were running, but we’d like to be sure all the photographic material has been secured. I have reason to believe you were in possession of some pictures.”

“Lost in a raid, I’m afraid.” That was true in a manner of speaking. Nan had reinjured her arm when she hit Connie, and the damaged cast had to be removed. As a result, I recovered the photos and burned them. I can keep my word as well as any gentleman.

“It would be best if they were.” He looked at me very directly.

I nodded and there was another long pause.

“Inspector Mordren leaves a family,” he said.

I hadn’t known that; another surprising layer to my inspector. Though imagination is my strong point, my mind boggled at the spectacle of a domesticated inspector.

“Under the circumstances—”

“To the best of my knowledge there is nothing.”

“Good. The reputation of the force is always a matter of concern. Now, on the night in question . . . ”

Though I had already told this story to the patrolmen, to the sergeant, and to various detectives and inspectors, my superintendent wished to hear it fresh. He, like the others, balked at the moment before the blast. “Didn’t he see the mine descending?”

“Big as a pillar box, with a chute the size of a marquee? One couldn’t miss it! And I was shouting warnings like a maniac. Of course, you know what a raid is like, total noise and chaos. But they both had to know. Connie—Colin Williams—figured he could outrun it, I guess. And if he had, with the street blocked behind him, he’d have gotten clean away. His disguise was blown, but he could disappear, change his name, join the forces. He had some hope.”

Even as I spoke, I sensed that I was giving Connie too large a share of reason and forethought. He’d gone beyond all that to reside at some different and remote address where I guessed he’d been ever since Damien was killed. All that happened afterward was the result of a few violent moments between his friend and my inspector.

“And John—Inspector Mordren?”

“He was in pursuit. He wasn’t counting,” I added.

“Counting?”

“Fifteen seconds for the fuse. We’re trained to count; it gets to be automatic—you know you have only so many seconds to take cover.”

“Which you did.”

“Most certainly. I’ve seen mines explode. I was lucky I wasn’t killed as well. Connie and the inspector had no chance.”

“We can say that he died in the line of duty.” The superintendent did not sound entirely happy.

“I think so.”

Then a second suggestion, which made me think that they had a history, that perhaps the superintendent owed my inspector for some great favor. Injured men who survived the Somme often had such friends. “Perhaps he died heroically?” His words were tentative, as if he were trying on the idea for size.

A hero of a certain sort, I thought, and one not at all to my taste. “What about Damien Hiller? Doesn’t his death count?”

“Is there evidence?”

I had to shake my head. Only his words, I thought.

“The line of duty then,” the superintendent said briskly. “I think that’s as far as we can go.”

A bit more than far enough, I thought to myself, for the superintendent’s tone left no doubt that Damien’s death would ever remain a mystery. But maybe the superintendent’s decision was fair. Not many people love the good enough—or hate the bad enough—to put themselves in the way of a sea mine. I’d give my inspector, who had known, and feared, himself, that.
It would have happened again
, he’d believed, and maybe on the best of evidence.

I am a different breed. Life is dark and full of violence, but I can live with that if I can climb out of the dumps to paint and drink and carry on. I like life on the edge, and excitement is waiting for me still and for as long as I can keep ahead of bombs and mines and vice cops, crooked or otherwise, and irrational strangers.

I stood up and shook the superintendent’s hand. I was free until dark, when I’d have to report to the ARP post. There was no reason not to continue on to Soho for a drink at Maribelle’s, for a meeting with Arnold, for the chance of some adventure. And then soon, very soon, I hoped, I would begin to paint again, and attempt to capture all this mess of lust and blood and mangled flesh, bomb light and shadows, naked boys and the huge brutal shape of my inspector. I’d manage to do it now, I was sure I would.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Quotes in Chapter Six taken from Louis MacNiece translation of Agamemnon

Copyright © 2012 by Janice Law

Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

ISBN 978-1-4532-5152-2

Published in 2012 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media

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