A Gathering of Saints Read online

  A Gathering of Saints

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  To Mariea, with all my love,

  To my mother, Bettye Marguerite Hyde, who told me tales of that last summer before the end of the world,

  And most of all,

  To the memory of my father, Laurence Evelyn Hyde, the lonely little boy from Tooting Bec who gave me Sandpiper and so many other things.

  Chapter One

  Saturday, September 7, 1940

  4:30 a.m., British Summer Time

  Detective Inspector Morris Black awakened with a start in the study of his flat in Shepherd’s Market. He glanced at his watch and saw that he’d been asleep for less than an hour. Blinking himself back to full consciousness, he yawned, frowning at the foul taste in his mouth. Two large tots of brandy for his insomnia, or at least that’s what he’d told himself. How long would it take for two tots to become three, then four? How long until he lost count and any interest in counting?

  The book he’d been leafing through now lay on the floor beside his favourite reading chair. Sighing, he bent down and picked it up. It was one of his favourites: The Life of the Hon. William F. Cody, known as Buffalo Bill, Cody’s autobiography, a rare Frank E. Bliss American first edition, with the frontispiece engraving lavishly signed by Buffalo Bill himself.

  Black closed the volume carefully. The book’s falling off his lap had probably woken him up. He checked his watch again. An hour and a half before daybreak – barely worth going to bed, but the swimming baths at the YMCA would still be closed at this hour so there was really no point in beginning his day. He stood up, stretching, yawning a second time. Bad habits. Too many and too often these days. He crossed to the window and stared out into the gloomy square. Ye Grapes and the other shops were dark and shuttered, shades drawn across the windows in the flats above. Cold night air leaked draughtily around the window frame and he shivered, cinching the belt of his old silk dressing gown more tightly around his waist. He sighed, remembering. The dressing gown Fay had given him on their first anniversary. He closed his eyes, feeling the familiar tightening of loss in his chest, willing it to fade, not surprised when it did not do so. Outside he could hear the faint, rattling bell of a police car racing down Piccadilly, heading west towards Knightsbridge. At this hour it was more than likely a false alarm called in by some frightened South Kensington matron or a burglary on the Cromwell Road. Not his patch, nor his concern, worse luck.

  Black took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. The thought of a weekend away from the distractions of work at the Yard was hard enough to deal with; the concept of living out an entire lifetime without Fay was almost incomprehensible. After a long, silent moment, Morris Black turned away from the window. Another dash of brandy, just to rinse out his mouth, and then perhaps an hour or two of dreamless sleep. The best he could hope for.

  * * *

  The Number sat crouched at the end of the bed, arms wrapped around his naked knees, staring at the boy and silently counting in the darkness. In the last hour before the coming light he could hear everything. The distant rattling of the vans as they lumbered through the cavernous Great Eastern depot a mile away on Hare Street, the subterranean rumbling of the first tube trains of the day coming into Whitechapel–Mile End Station only a few blocks away. Closing his eyes, he could even hear what he knew would come: soft moanings and louder shrieks from the patients in the asylum at the foot of the London Hospital grounds no more than a hundred yards from where he sat; the first summoning changes ringing on the bells of St Philip’s Chapel on New Street; the thundering hell that would rain down on this very spot exactly twelve hours from now; all of it joined by the perfect ticking of the clock, bound together by the immutable force of the numbers that stitched the universe together.

  He leaned forward and began to chant the Nine Tailors, giving them to the sleeping boy as a parting gift, even though he knew they would not be understood. Tentatively he reached out one hand, brushing the tips of his fingers across the boy’s foot. Cold now. The Number hesitated, almost losing the drifting count in his head, knowing in his heart that the boy wasn’t sleeping at all, would never sleep again.

  That part of the ritual was complete. The anticipation of pleasure, quick and hot, the dry mouth, the trembling wait for the perfect moment when the boy’s handsome face was turned away against the pillow, neck bent to show the faint sunburned line not protected by the collar of his flight jacket, ringing his throat like a prophecy. Bristling black hair at the base of his skull, the first three vertebrae of his spine jutting up, bone sheathed in velvet skin.

  Shivering with the joy of it, The Number slid forward, gliding over the boy’s body, covering it, shrouding it, stealing it into the memory forever, the feel of his skin, hard flesh and muscle, the bloody palm, cool lips, eyes drying now, but still soft against his lapping tongue. Eyes as blue as the frightening skies of the coming day. Eyes he’d first seen a thousand years ago. X marks the spot.

  Reaching the last Tailor, he rolled gently off the boy and smiled. X marks the spot. Z tells the tale.

  * * *

  More than a year and a day had passed with the country poised at the brink. France had fallen, but who knew France? The Battle of Britain was cinema verité unreeling above the city’s head in distant vapour trails with no more meaning than a game of cricket: Biggest Raid Ever, Score 78 to 26, England Still Batting.

  The game was played in different ways. For the rich it meant shutting down the London house and moving to the country, missing the theatre season and doing without the annual trip to the Continent. In the War Office there were opportunities to be had and uniforms to be fitted on Savile Row. For the poor, scratching out a living among the East End gasworks and warehouses, the game was cause for the older men to tell stories of Ypres and the Somme and mothers to weep in the night for terrible fates yet to befall their sons.

  On the afternoon of that first Saturday in September most people in London were sitting down to tea or lifting their first pint in the public house to celebrate the beginning of the weekend when the air-raid sirens began to wail, but for the vast majority of Londoners anxiety about raids that were always false alarms had long ago turned to boredom and boredom had finally become indifference. Wars were fought on battlefields, not in cities. The sirens were ignored, tea poured, bread buttered.

  At 4:32 p.m. the first bombs began to fall, pale blue five-hundred pounders and incendiaries, invisible against the dusky sky.

  In the city’s East End, standing at the bar of the Seven Stars Pub nursing his second pint of Bass ale, Jack Champion, an ageing villain retired to the second-hand clothing
trade, heard the sound of the falling bombs less than a minute after their release. Three of the five-hundred-pound high-explosive bombs impacted within a hundred yards of the public house. When Champion realised how close the explosions were coming, he dropped his pint glass and ran outside, heading for his shop on the opposite side of the street. Like his mates in the low-ceilinged, dingy bar he was astounded that the bombs were falling at all, let alone in a neighbourhood best known for the size of its rat population. Hardly a target Uncle Adolf would be interested in.

  The first of the three bombs struck the narrow, cobbled roadway less than thirty feet from the front door of the Seven Stars, vaporising Jack Champion and any last thoughts he might have had in a twelve-thousand-degree inferno that briefly created an eight-hundred-mile-an-hour pressure wave. The whirlwind crushed the life out of the two men standing in front of the pub, exploded the street-facing windows and turned the interior of the Seven Stars into a whirling horror of glass splinters, obliterating the eight occupants of the saloon bar.

  Following the blast wave there was a secondary implosion as the vacuum created by the blast was filled by an inrushing fury of air. The front of the Seven Stars and the squalid houses on either side, already weakened by the blast, toppled into the street.

  Eliza Champion, Jack Champion’s wife, had died a split second earlier. Standing at the front window of the flat above the shop, she saw her Jack begin to move across the street but was then blinded by the detonation of the bomb fifteen feet to his right. Her brain had only just given the order to raise her arm across her eyes when the window disintegrated three inches from her face and her chest wall collapsed under the force of the blast, crushing her heart and rupturing every major organ in her body.

  At the same instant, a second bomb reached the ground midway between the high brick wall of the old Board School and the back of the Champion shop. The force of the explosion, trapped between the two walls, took the path of least resistance, blowing in the rear of the shop and the flat above it, burying what remained of Eliza Champion in a welter of tinder-dry debris, which then began to burn furiously, ignited by a clutch of incendiaries that had followed the larger bomb on its path down to Brick Lane.

  The third bomb descended within fifty yards of the first two and entered the flat roof of the house two doors down from the Champion residence. It managed to carve its way down two floors and into the sodden, clay-floored basement before it exploded, completely demolishing that house and the ones on either side as well as shattering a ninety-two-year-old gas main. The entire area, little changed since the time of Charles Dickens, was turned into a nightmare landscape within the first few minutes of the raid, severed limbs and charred pieces of flesh littering the rubble like refuse from a slaughterhouse.

  Within half an hour of the first explosions, huge sections of London’s East End had been destroyed or were on fire, sending a dark pall of smoke more than a mile into the air, the thickness of it grounding fighter planes at Hornchurch, nearly ten miles away. With the exception of the lower dock area, almost no other areas were touched by the bombing. It was almost as though Hitler had conspired with the London County Council in a bit of expeditious slum clearance.

  The bombing continued through the night as wave after wave of Heinkels, Dorniers and Junkers descended on the city, guided now by the fires created by those who had gone before. Warehouses crammed with rum, molasses, rubber and ammunition exploded, spreading the smoking horror even farther along the Thames, while thousands of firemen, eighty per cent of them unskilled members of the Auxiliary, struggled to control the gigantic blazes. Hundreds died that afternoon and night and hundreds more were wounded. Thousands, all from the East End, were left homeless. Within hours, these instant refugees were trudging west, desperate to escape the growing inferno and filtering into The City proper, many of them camping out in the underground stations at Charing Cross and Leicester Square, much to the horror of the local population, who had been watching the spectacle of the East End on fire from the rooftops of their Covent Garden flats.

  The hellish night seemed to go on forever. As the fires raged, a million rats poured into the streets, fleeing the scorching heat, pouring over the firemen’s boots in a black, chattering stream, vanishing into a thousand sewers, only to reappear again somewhere else as the fires spread. Bales of tea, tinder dry, began to smoulder without flame, brought to the point of ignition by the incredible heat. Water doused on the bales turned them into a horrible sticky mass that began to ooze from the warehouses like molasses, making movement impossible.

  The superheated air began to feed on the oxygen at ground level, scorching lungs and creating insane, swirling updrafts, melting the lead in the stained-glass windows of a hundred churches, turning their spires into furious, torchlike beacons as wave after wave of bombers droned over the city.

  By three a.m. the last flight of bombers turned back towards France but still the fires roared, and soon it was all the men could do to keep open a few escape routes for those still trapped by circling rings of flame. Water mains dried up, the thick tyres of the hose and ladder trucks began to melt into the pavement and finally, the hoses themselves began to burn.

  Eventually though, the worst of it was contained, and dawn broke over the smoking ruins of a thousand buildings. Whole streets had vanished and entire blocks of houses had been turned to rubble. In the first light of day a bird pecked at the upraised hand of a body crushed under a ton of broken brick. A woman, torn apart by the concussion of a high-explosive bomb, lay in a gutter thick with some glutinous horror spreading out of a warehouse loading dock. An old man in slippers sat with his back against a shattered wall, the hubcap from a motor car over his neck doing little to disguise the fact that he had no head.

  Police spent the early-morning hours before the first trains began to arrive herding the homeless out of the underground stations, hosing down the platforms in an attempt to remove the foul odours left behind, but nothing they could do erased the deep, pervasive stink of fear that had been aroused by the previous night’s attack. The impossible had occurred. England had been invaded for the first time in almost a thousand years. The aerial game played high overhead for the better part of a year was over. The rules, it seemed, had changed.

  Later that morning a Civil Defence Heavy Rescue crew discovered a body while clearing a site just off Mount Street in Whitechapel on the eastern edge of the area hit hardest by the attack, not far from London Hospital. It soon became obvious that the young man had not died as a result of the bombings and proper authorities were informed. The body was taken to the mortuary at University College Hospital where a postmortem was arranged for the following day. The autopsy would be performed by Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the Home Office chief pathologist.

  Also scheduled to be in attendance was Detective Inspector Morris Black of the London Metropolitan Police, Criminal Investigation Division, Scotland Yard.

  Chapter Two

  Monday, September 9, 1940

  8:15 a.m., British Summer Time

  Detective Inspector Morris Black made his way slowly down the green-walled, echoing stairwell that led to the basement of University College Hospital and tried to ignore the faint, cloying smell of formaldehyde drifting up from below. Instead he concentrated on his itching scalp and the sting in his eyes. Both were a result of his regular morning swim at the new YMCA swimming baths. His hair was already thinning and he was positive the chemicals in the water were hastening the process. Almost as bad was the requirement that those using the pool should do so naked. Black loathed swimming and always had.

  On the other hand, it gave him the sort of energetic exercise deemed necessary for an otherwise sedentary police detective plodding wearily through his forty-first year. Even more importantly, it took his mind off Fay. His wife had been dead for more than a year but the pain of her absence was as fresh now as the day she had been buried.

  So he went swimming each morning before going to the Yard. Fifty lengths in the hum
id, green-tiled aquarium, surrounded by ghostly, naked strangers, all men much older than him. He never spoke to his companions beyond the exchange of politely murmured greetings. Sometimes he thought about the tragedies and loneliness that could bring old men to a place like that each day so early in the morning – presumably sad memories like his own, perhaps fainter and less painful – but mostly he just swam and tried not to think at all. It was easier that way.

  Black reached the bottom of the stairs, turned left along a narrow corridor and went through an open doorway halfway down its length. Spilsbury was already hard at work. He looked up as the detective stepped into the dank, chilly room.

  ‘Ah, Black. Just in time.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Black agreed. Spilsbury was famous for his punctuality, which Black found somewhat ironic considering the man’s profession.

  ‘Interesting.’ The tall, slightly stooped man in the long white lab coat stared down at the body on the enamelled autopsy table. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, chief pathologist for the Home Office, walked slowly around the table, hands jammed into the pockets of his trousers.

  Spilsbury was in his mid-sixties, grey-haired, but still very handsome. He wore a pair of wire-rimmed bifocal spectacles perched on his forehead and bore a faint resemblance to a clean-shaven John Barrymore. The dark suit he wore under the lab coat was custom-made, expensive, and at least twenty years out of style, even though it was quite obviously new.

  Morris Black smiled faintly as he watched Spilsbury pace around the table. Not only was the pathologist’s suit decidedly out of fashion, Spilsbury was also sporting a tall celluloid collar like the one Black’s father had worn in the early twenties. Black had attended a number of postmortem examinations with Spilsbury over the years and the man always dressed the same way.

  ‘Yes, sir. Interesting,’ said Black, unable to think of anything else to say that seemed appropriate. He shivered. The layout of the autopsy chamber was cold and austere: four dish-edged rectangular tables on wheels and fitted with blood gutters and drainage holes, green metal cabinets along the walls, steel counters laid with an assortment of tools ranging from scalpels and electrical saws to brutal-looking hammers and steel wedges, and more drains in the worn, stained floor.