book.”
“It was stuck down the back of the wardrobe,” said Alma. “I moved it to hoover. He told me he was going to write his memoirs, and wanted to borrow my old fountain pen because it had a broad italic nib.”
“Why would he want to write with that?”
“You know how he had these funny ideas. Never let me clean under his bed in sixty years. He had things growing.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“No, in round glass pots.”
“Ah, Petri dishes, yes, he did that sort of thing all the time. Thank you for this, Alma.”
Bryant’s landlady made her painful way out of the cemetery. May wondered how long she would cope without her tenant. He watched her go before returning his attention to the book. His numb fingers carefully parted the pages. Inside was a single loose sheet covered in dense scrawl. “He never kept case notes like this,” he told Longbright. “Arthur wasn’t organized enough. He couldn’t even find his dry-cleaning tickets.” Despite Bryant’s lack of proficiency with laundry collection, it appeared that he had indeed written something in the last weeks of his life. Unfortunately, it wasn’t readable.
“It’s in shorthand,” explained Oswald Finch when May talked to him later. The unit’s staff had been temporarily rehoused in storage rooms on the top floor of Kentish Town police station. Finch was, strictly speaking, a retired forensic pathologist but knew a thing or two about indecipherable writing, as anyone who had seen his own handwriting could testify. “Definitely shorthand. Not the most recent kind either, an older version. This is tachygraphy of the type that Samuel Pepys used in his diaries. Before the nineteenth century it was popular among lawyers and naval officers. Hopelessly arcane now, of course. Be interesting to see how he copes with modern vocabulary. Analogous nouns and phonetic spelling, probably. That’s why he wanted the broad nib, to place emphases.”
“But can you transcribe it?” May asked impatiently.
“Good heavens, no. But I might be able to download a program that can. Could you leave it with me for a few days?”
“I’d rather read it myself. Can you forward the program to me?”
Finch had almost forgotten that May had once trained as a codebreaker. “I don’t see why not. It won’t be very user-friendly, though.”
“How typical of him not to write it in plain English. I’ll call you with a new e-mail address and security reference. I’m going to be on leave for a while. I have to get out of London.”
Finch understood. Arthur Bryant was virtually a symbol of the city. There were memories of the man and his cases almost everywhere you looked.
A few days later John May drove down into the Sussex countryside, and it was there, on the rich green downs above Brighton, seated in the attic room he had rented above an unpropitious pub called the Seventh Engineer, that he downloaded the translation program and set to work.
At the start of the document was a note from Finch:
John – I’ve tried to give you a head start by programming substitutions for the most frequently used words, but some of it’s still a bit wonky. Bryant appears to have used a very peculiar writing style. It’s rather rambling and all very indiscreet, the only good thing being that many of the people in his account are presumably dead and therefore unavailable to pursue lawsuits. I hope it throws some light on what has happened. Perhaps DS Longbright can help you fill in the gaps. From the way Arthur hid it, he seems to have anticipated that something disastrous might occur. If you think this has any bearing on the blast, we’d better put together a report for RL.
RL was Raymond Land, the unit’s impatient and unforgiving new acting head. May’s eye was drawn to the postscript:
By the way, you might be interested to know that Longbright’s mother features in the case. I’d forgotten she once worked at the unit. I think Arthur had a crush on her.
May set about copying the pages of the notebook into his laptop. After typing in a few hundred words, impatience got the better of him, and he ran the translation program. His fingers idled against the keyboard as he tried to make sense of what he read.
He was looking at an account of their first case, the start of a memoir. Through the fractured text he began to hear Bryant’s voice. Pouring himself a gin, he began typing again. He transcribed the single loose sheet and ran the translation program, watching as the letters unscrambled themselves.
An uncomfortable sensation began to take hold of him. The loose page was a fresh addendum, a confidence not intended for publication. Its final line acknowledged a failing: “
He stared at the words on the screen and thought back to their first meeting in the Blitz. That strange, exhilarating time had also ended with a consignment to flames. It was as though events had somehow come full circle. Bryant had known that his actions could place him at risk. Why else would he encode the memoir and hide it?
The elliptical translation wasn’t enough to provide an explanation. May knew he would have to rely on his own elusive memories in order to appreciate what had happened. As the sun slipped below the trees and the shadows became scented with damp earth, he closed his eyes and allowed his thoughts to drift across over half a century, to a time when London’s character was put to a test few other cities could have hoped to survive.
He tried to remember how the seeds of their future had been sown. It was 1940. It was November. A nation was at war, and the world had blundered into darkness.
? Full Dark House ?
4
SKY ON FIRE
Viewed from the far perspective of world terrorism, the wartime bombing of London now seems unimaginably distant. But the blossoming white dust clouds, debris bursting through them like the stamens of poisoned flowers, contained the same moment of horror common to all such events.
The conflict had been so long anticipated that in some perverse way its arrival was a relief. The people of Britain had methodically prepared their defences. This time the island did not wait to recruit its forces. Conscription created armies, and attacks were launched by sea and sky. For those who remained behind, daily life took strange new forms. Children carried their gas masks to school. Public information leaflets explained the rules of the blackout. Rationing made the nation healthier. An aura of orderly common sense settled across the city of London.
As the fittest men were conscripted, the streets grew quieter, and an air of becalmed expectancy prevailed. It felt as though a great change was drawing near. More civilians found a purpose in war than in peace. Nothing could be taken for granted, not even an extra day of life. For those who were as old as the century, it was the second time to fight.
In 1939, London was the largest city in the world. The riches of the British empire still poured through its financial institutions. Memories of the Depression had faded. Good times, boom times, had arrived. Despite the false celebration of ‘peace in our time’, rearmament paved the way to prosperity. One still saw reminders of the Great War on the streets: one-armed liftmen, blinded matchsellers, men who stuttered and shook when you spoke to them. During that earlier conflict, German airships had bombed the city but managed to kill only 670 people. Surely, everyone said, it would not happen again.
Even so, the Committee of Imperial Defence had begun a study into air-raid precautions as early as 1924. They calculated how many bombs could be dropped by Germany should hostilities recommence, and how many people they would kill. Every ton of explosive would cause fifty casualties, a third of them fatal. Three thousand five hundred bombs would fall on London in the first twenty-four hours. It would be essential to maintain public order, to prevent the city from descending into a living hell. For the first time in a war, the reinforcement of morale at home became a priority.
