DuCaine found out.
? Bryant & May on the Loose ?
38
Shadow Figure
“Harry was my old man,” said Keith Barker. “He lived in Camley Lane right to the end of his life. He was a station guard at St Pancras, and his wife worked in the ticket office. Not my mum, you understand, she died in 1964 – his second wife. You’ll never guess what my grandfather’s job was: He collected the holes from bus tickets. He used to box ‘em up and sell ‘em outside the church for confetti – at least that’s what he told us.”
At five on Saturday, Arthur Bryant had arrived at the Barker household. That was twenty minutes ago, and Mr Barker had yet to pause for breath. The little flat off the Holloway Road was filled with trophies and awards for keeping tropical fish, but there was no room in the place to put an aquarium. Bryant decided that it would be a good idea to keep Barker away from the subject of fish, or he’d be there all day. There was a time when men like Mr Barker would have sat at home in suspenders and a collarless shirt. The old man seated before him was wearing sneakers and a shiny blue track suit.
“I’ve got a heart condition so I don’t get out now,” Mr Barker explained. “All our family lived around Camley Lane, generations of us, which was handy ‘cause you could keep an eye on the old’uns. It turned into a rough area, though, ‘cause a lot of traders moved into the arches after the war, and so many people were bombed out that the quickest way to make a bit of money was to open a lodging house. Every house in King’s Cross had a dozen boarders in it, and naturally you got trouble, what with them all living on top of each other.”
“I’m particularly interested in the Porters’ house,” said Bryant, attempting to guide Barker back on track.
“Bombed to matchsticks, that place,” said Mr Barker. “When Mrs Porter lost her husband and her home, she went to live with Granddad. Later on, she came to live with us, ‘cause she was like one of the family by then. There hadn’t been a warning that night, see. Granddad said the ARP wardens were quick enough to turn up if you had a light showing through your curtains, but they were so busy ticking things off in their little books that sometimes there was no-one manning the sirens. The nearest siren to us was on the roof of the St Pancras Old Church, but half the time they kept the churchyard gates locked at night, ‘cause they didn’t want no-one sleeping in the graveyard. Four flying bombs fell around here. Some streets were totally bombed out of existence.”
“Why didn’t they rebuild Mrs Porter’s house?” asked Bryant.
“There was nothing to rebuild. Plus, there was the problem of the well.”
“The house was built over St Chad’s Well.”
“That’s right. None of us knew it was there, although Auntie Reeny – that’s what we called her – she complained it had always been damp, and she swore that her husband had known it was there, because he’d talked to her about it but she didn’t really listen. The authorities sent some bloke from the historical society down to look at it, but he didn’t do nothing, then the rubble from the bombing was used to block it up and they put prefabs on top for the families who’d been bombed out. Trouble is, they was made of asbestos, so they had to come down. Then they extended the old jam factory over the land, but that wasn’t successful, so finally they turned the extension into a pub – for a while it was called the Stag’s Head. I moved here, but I still went back, of course, ‘cause all my old mates were around there. They hung on waiting to be bought out, ‘cause there was talk of the railways buying the land.”
“Then it was finally sold to the ADAPT Group.”
“I figured that’s why you’re here, because of Terry Delaney.” Bryant was brought up short. “You know him?”
“He came to see me, ‘cause ADAPT decided to go ahead and clear the site completely, and they brought him in, ‘cause he knew the area. They brought the bulldozers in but there was a question over who owned the land. Terry was hired to tear down the remains of the Stag’s Head. He told me he was a bit of an amateur historian, and knew a lot about the street. He tore up the foundations and found the well, but of course it had been filled in with bricks and then concrete had been poured over it, so there was nothing much left to see.”
“So how did he end up coming to you?”
“He found the deed. See, old Mr Porter never got around to putting his house deeds in the bank. A lot of people didn’t, in them days. He kept his important documents in a tin box in the basement. Nobody ever went down there much ‘cause it was too wet, and bad for the chest. I suppose when the house was bombed the box fell into the well. It couldn’t have fallen very far, though, or Terry would never have found it. They’ve been turning up all sorts of things on those old properties, but apparently you only get a short time to dig up the site before they’re covered by the new buildings.”
Bryant thought of the remains of London’s Roman basilica, now only viewable from the basement of the hairdresser’s off Gracechurch Street that had been built over it, and the sportswear shop that had housed the ancient and venerable London Stone for so many years. Notoriously, archaeologists had been given just six weeks to uncover treasures beneath a part of the London Wall before it was concreted into an office car park.
“You’re telling me that Mr Delaney found the original freehold property deeds to number eleven Camley Lane and traced them to you?”
“He used a pile driver to break the well open, and there was the box. Terry thought it was a bomb at first. He told me there’s over five thousand unexploded bombs still buried in London soil. He said he wanted to return the deeds to their rightful owner. Thought that way they’d have a chance to claim the land before the registration date passed, ‘cause it was due soon.”
“I explained that I wasn’t the owner, that Mrs Porter had just lived with us until she died.”
“So who is the actual owner?” Bryant asked.
“I told him,” said Mr Barker, “that would now be her granddaughter. But I didn’t have her address.”
¦
After Dan Banbury had visited her at Yield to the Night, Janice Longbright had reached a decision. She would no longer wear the obscure lingerie brands from the 1950s that were both uncomfortable and inappropriate for work. She would stop dressing like a post-war movie starlet. She had kept her signature look for many years, but you couldn’t be young forever, and it was time to start dressing like a woman in the full bloom of her middle years. Away would go the bleaches and lipsticks worn by Diana Dors and Jayne Mansfield. No more cleavage-revealing sweaters or strappy heels. She had not dressed for men, but to make herself feel good.
So she had bought herself jeans, sneakers and a shirt, and started to look like everyone else.
He was a physically imposing man, and now he seemed to take up the entire room. He surrounded her with gentle warmth, his thighs touching her hips, his palms on either side of her face, his soft breathing, a smile in the dark.
At some point – she could not later recall when – he tore off his shirt with thrilling enthusiasm; he threw the garment behind him and it settled over a lamp. His soft skin had a faint, clean base-note of sweat that lingered on her hands. She heard herself say “Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” but didn’t believe her own words.
His chest hair formed a neat black trapezoid, a ladder of tight curls tracing to his navel and down into the waistband of his jeans. The wide, dry breadth of his hand covered her bare stomach. The shock of a man’s cool touch on her was extraordinary; she could not recall the last time someone had cupped her so gently, unfolding her desires with such lightness and loving care.
She sank down deep into his IKEA cushions, her PCU uniform scratching against the blanket on the sofa bed. Suddenly it felt so tiring to be an English policewoman, to behave correctly wherever she went, to be strapped into
