The Distant Dead by Lesley Thomson

Author:Lesley Thomson [Thomson, Lesley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788549745
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

29 December 1940

That terrible swingeing sound. Crash. If the house shook, the bomb was within about three miles. A fraction of silence. Crash. It would go on until dawn. Extraordinarily, after weeks of the Blitz, so much of London was still standing. Tonight it seemed more terrible, perhaps because for three nights the weather had been onside and the Nazis had left them in peace.

When Cotton walked across Shepherd’s Bush Green in the mornings, shops were still there. Business as Usual. Houses undamaged, the trams and trains still ran. His own street was intact so that, on a Sunday sweeping up leaves in their garden, he teased himself life was normal, the country wasn’t imprisoned in a set of complex rules and regulations for its own good, and that there was not the chance of dying, if not today, then tomorrow.

Cotton hunched on the bed watching searchlights raking the sky. It rained down with flares, incendiaries. Bombs. Agnes had made him promise to go out to the shelter. But he could not when she was at the substation risking her life to keep people safe. How he wished she’d volunteered for something less dangerous. Her captain had told him she was the glue in the outfit, handling messages for reinforcements, the engines, turntables, pumps, in double quick time. Cotton took it as a hint not to prevent Agnes doing her bit.

Another explosion. It drowned out Billy Cotton downstairs on the radiogram. Cotton tensed when the windows rattled, closer that time.

Agnes was the glue at home too. When he’d returned from arresting Northcote last night, she’d got the fire going, using up the coal ration. They had sat watching the flames, drinking hot chocolate as he related what had happened.

‘They should hang him.’ She snuggled closer. Like him, Agnes didn’t hold with state execution. Solves nothing, she’d say. There were exceptions.

He’d told her how he’d escorted Northcote to the station where they were met by Chief Superintendent Robert Hackett and the coroner, Wolsey Banks. His first clue should have been when both men had groused that they’d had to come out in a raid. The second when, going into Hackett’s office, Banks had told him to wait outside.

‘Ten minutes later, Northcote comes out.

‘“Night, George.” He tips his hat and strolls off down the corridor as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

‘Next thing I’m hauled in there to be told by Bob in his best King’s English how it “was all an unfortunate misunderstanding”. Banks is tearing up Una Hughes’s statement there and then; he says everything is explained. Northcote “deeply regretted his slip with the lighter, it proves I’m human like everyone else”. Hackett and Banks had a good laugh at that.

‘Hackett tells me I had gone against his orders, “countermanded” was his word. I had no busines charging Aleck Northcote with murder. Hackett said he’d “expressly told me the matter was in the hands of the coroner”.’

Oblivious to the hiss of incendiaries, the Messerschmitts and Heinkels pummelling the city or deafening bangs of returning gunfire, Cotton hunched on the edge of the bed.

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