Shadows in the Smoke by Tony Broadbent

Author:Tony Broadbent [Broadbent, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849822572
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited

THE WILL WHICH SAYS

I moved silently down dark shadow-filled streets, past row after row of blank-faced houses and buildings I’d known all my life, and all of it as indifferent to my passing as if I’d been a torn piece of paper blown by the wind. I anchored myself to a soil-pipe and ascended.

I went from rooftop to rooftop until I found a point where the shadows cast by chimney after cockeyed chimney gave me perfect cover, and I lay stretched-out on the tiles. As per usual I was kitted-out from head to foot in black drab, my face and neck underneath my balaclava blackened with soot so no sliver of skin would show pale against the dark.

Way off to my left, the streetlights along the Edgware Road did their best to throw a sickly yellow glow up into the night sky. But all the streets of my old manor were now as deadly as a newly laid minefield to me —my drum on Church Street, like a ticking bomb. And as the world turned, revealing anew above me the eternal procession of the stars, I lay in wait for all the houses around me to settle to sleep, my eyes slowly blinking, slowly blinking.

There were certain very important items I needed inside the flat, little things that’d greatly ease my passage if I had to do a runner. A money-belt with diamonds sewn into the lining. A driver’s license, a ration book, an identity card, a passport, a merchant seaman’s pay-book and a union card—all in the name of a bloke I knew who’d been lost at sea and all of which would secure me a berth on almost any ship in the Port of London. I also needed to get a butcher’s at the mail I knew that Joanie— despite all the stories of my death—would’ve placed, religiously, on the kitchen table each day to await my return. A small, insignificant act, but a totem of hope that as with proverbs and old wives’ sayings is sometimes the only thing that keeps you going through the worst of times.

I was still sailing blind, without a compass, and by my reckoning there were only two marker-buoys worth their salt: “Monkey” Jim and the dead MP, Nigel Fox. Come hell or high water, I was going to run Jimmy Mooney to ground, but I still had to find out how Fox figured into everything. And now that Doris had shut the door on him being queer, it all came down to what Sylvia or Lily had managed to find out. The other big problem was my sister, Joanie. Her senses were better than any alarm system, so there was no way I could use the stairs and chance us meeting on the landing outside her flat. It’d blow the whole caper sky high—and her and me with it—which was why, as weird as it sounds, I had no choice but to break in to my own drum.

My flat looked dead,

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