The Night Raids by Jim Kelly

Author:Jim Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2019-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

‘You look like you could do with cheering up,’ said Rose King, from behind the counter of her all-night mobile tea hut on Market Hill.

‘It may never happen, you know,’ she added, reaching for the metal teapot with one hand, her cigarettes with the other.

‘Do you think I can fit you in?’ she said, nodding to the city’s central square. It was the dead watches of the night. Market stalls, locked up and shrouded in tarpaulins, stood in shadowy rows. The surrounding buildings – the stark new Guildhall, St Mary’s Church, the narrow, gabled shops in neat rows, the college spires beyond – seemed to brood on the desolate scene.

There wasn’t another human being in sight.

Mobile tea huts had popped up all over the city to cater for servicemen and civil defence workers, ARP wardens, fire watchers and the rest. Most were run by volunteers, like the WRVS, but Rose’s stall was a family business, a feature of Market Hill since the last war.

‘I’ll join you before the rush starts,’ said Rose. ‘Bacon roll?’

Brooke took one of the chairs and slumped down. The Black Russian failed to raise his spirits. He’d had to wait an hour for an ambulance to arrive at the Blue Ball, where they’d eventually stretchered the body. Establishing cause of death would have to wait for Dr Comfort’s mortuary: there was no point now summoning the pathologist because they’d had to move the body to the bank and so there was no scientific benefit to viewing the scene of the crime. Had the girl drowned? Had the girl been drowned?

The radio car took Brooke back to the Spinning House, where he’d typed up a brief report for Carnegie-Brown. The Borough’s number one priority was to track down Bruno Zeri.

Sleep was out of the question. Dawn was just a few hours away. He felt himself in a familiar state of limbo – poised between night and day. There was a measure of guilt in his decision not to go home, apprehensive of what he might find. Iris had not slept through the night yet, and Joy would be struggling still with the news about Ben.

Rose’s tea hut, en route to Newnham Croft, had proved irresistible.

She worked now behind the counter, griddling the bacon. The light flooded out around her, as if she were on stage. She had grey hair tied back under a bright red scarf, her face delineated by lipstick and eyeliner, a pair of earrings catching the eye. A platoon of soldiers suddenly clattered into the square and crowded in front of her, demanding tea and sausages, a cloud of cigarette smoke hanging over them. She began to slosh tea into mugs lined up on the counter. From the chat it was clear that they were a crew of gunners from the ack-ack barrage on the eastern edge of the city, stood down for another night.

They had taken refuge at Rose’s stall, much as Brooke had done one evening in 1919. Back in Cambridge

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