CHAPTER ONE

Wednesday, 8th October 1941

Detective Inspector Eden Brooke sat on a wicker chair in his front garden watching the river flow by, dragonfly green in the evening light, pitted with miniature whirlpools, sliding towards Cambridge along its chalky bed. Beside him, on a kitchen stool, was his wife Claire, while their daughter Joy knelt with her baby on a rug. Iris was a year old and determined to crawl to the grass, only to be returned methodically at each attempt by her mother. Her first steps were eagerly awaited.

A punt went by; a rare sight now, in the third year of the war. An old man was at the pole, expertly running it through his hands, using it as a rudder to steer away from the bank as the river took the long slow turn around Newnham Croft. A fisherman certainly, the boat laden with rods and tackle, even a picnic basket. One of the war's irritating burdens was the idea that enjoying yourself was somehow unpatriotic.

Morale, Brooke knew, was vital if you wanted to win the war on the Home Front.

'Any luck?' he called.

The man leant on the pole, bending down to retrieve a shining silver fish in a canvas bag, which he held out like a trophy.

Brooke tipped his hat by way of approval, and the fisherman went back to steering his punt, drifting downstream.

'That reminds me,' said Claire, who was sitting in the last of the sunlight, her head back, letting the warm rays fall on her upturned face. 'Supper is Asquith Pie.'

This was a family joke, the derivation long lost, but possibly a dimly remembered echo of the great prime minister's call to 'make do' with anything available during the long winters of the Great War. Asquith Pie contained leftovers, and anything else inedible if not concealed within pastry.

There was a long silence. The summer had been wet and grey, with only a few spells of blue sky. The winter before it brutal, cloaked in snow. It had all been a heart-breaking contrast to the brilliant blue Blitz summer which had marked the first year of the war.

Gradually, the shadow of the house fell entirely over the garden. Joy wrapped a shawl around the baby and held her fast. Claire took up a book on the treatment of malnutrition in children: she was a nurse, sister on the children's ward at Addenbrooke's Hospital. She could read the effects of war, and rationing, in the faces of her poorer patients.

The Brooke family home was one of a pair of modest riverside villas built in a playful style, a cross between a country railway halt and the gate lodge of a Scottish stately home. The garden ran down to the towpath; the gate - latch broken - always stood half open.

Brooke knew this idyllic scene was threatened on many sides by war, but recalled his favourite aphorism, from the Rubaiyat of Omar Kayam:

Be happy in this moment, this moment is your life.

'You go first,' said Claire, setting her book aside.

It was one of several enduring family games. They had to imagine what all the missing Brookes were doing at this very moment. Given the worldwide scale of the war, the first task was imagining where they were.

'Luke?' asked Brooke, lighting one of his precious Black Russian cigarettes, and adjusting his green tinted glasses. For a moment he watched the tip glow, burning the black paper, edging down towards the gold filter.

Their son had ignored his father's one piece of advice in life: never volunteer. This had not carried much weight, as Luke knew his father had himself volunteered in the Great War. The result of that mistake had been his capture, and torture, in the Middle East campaign. They'd staked him out in the sun for three days, without water, and his eyes were damaged beyond repair. Hence the fondness for shadows, and a series of tinted glasses: ochre, green, blue and black, depending on the intensity of the light.

Brooke looked at his watch. 'Given his last letter I suspect he's back running between telegraph poles on a stretch of Scottish moorland. He'll be sick of it by now. Then they'll have to run back to the castle.'

Achnacarry Castle was the HQ for commando training, six miles from Fort William. Luke had already done basic training, and taken part in a brief raid on the Normandy coast. Now he was back in Scotland, no doubt preparing for some other adventure. But the daily grind of keeping fit would be unchanged. Mr Churchill was desperate for the commandos to deliver a morale-raising raid behind enemy lines. Or - as the prime minister put it - 'set Europe alight'. Only that morning the Home Service had reported a raid on the Norwegian coast. But Brooke decided to keep this news to himself. As far as Claire was concerned, her only son was back in training, and would be for several months, if not years.

'When they do get back to the castle, there'll be tea - so that's what he's thinking about right now. Food,' decided Brooke.

'Ben?' asked Claire, knowing her daughter had a vision of her absent husband in mind at all times.

Joy picked up Iris with brisk efficiency. Like her mother, she was a nurse, and was competent at all things. 'I think they're on the surface - in the sunshine. I hope so. They've decided he's the scientist on board - on the flimsy basis he's a medical student. He might be recording the weather for the log. He'll be thinking about Iris.'

Brooke's son-in-law was a submariner on HMS Unbowed, currently stationed at Rosyth, on the Firth of Forth. But he'd be at sea and, Brooke thought, quite possibly in the sightless depths. He'd met his son-in-law half a dozen times and felt, fittingly, that he could be a bit of a cold fish. He'd once asked him what he did when the sub was lying low with an enemy ship above. His answer - that he read a book - revealed a level of cool detachment Brooke found inhuman. But everyone on a sub was a volunteer, so he couldn't fault his courage. Ben's first boat - Silverfish - had caught fire in the North Sea due to engine trouble, and he'd been captured, and taken to a POW camp, from which he'd escaped. Not only escaped, but led an escape. So - courage certainly, and leadership. Joy was smitten, and each time Ben came to Newnham Croft, Brooke felt he detected a little more of a hidden vulnerability - again, fittingly, just beneath the surface.

They heard a car breaking on gravel with a theatrical skid.

The house faced the towpath; the road was at the back. From where they sat there was not a single clue that they lived their lives in the twentieth century. Brooke always said that time spent by the river was so peaceful because he had nothing in front of him and the world behind him.

But the world often came calling.

Steps, slow and steady, announced the arrival of Sergeant Ralph Edison, long before his substantial form appeared, pushing open the side gate. Edison had retired in 1938 after thirty years in uniform. Now he was Brooke's right-hand man, and in plain clothes, although he still managed to radiate the authority of the missing uniform. The unseen slalom with the motor car on gravel was a rare glimpse of an unruly side to his character.

'Sorry, sir. Ladies,' he added, lifting his hat.

'Hello Edison,' said Joy. 'Tea?'

Edison looked helplessly at Brooke.

'I can see by the way Sergeant Edison is holding onto the gatepost that he expects me to follow him to the car,' said Brooke. 'I shall. I'll just get my jacket.'

Claire stood. 'Food in the oven, Eden. We're both on nights this week. Iris will be with Mrs Mullins.'

A minute later Edison's gleaming Wolseley Wasp was on the road into the city past the millpond at Newnham. A significant factor in Edison's return to the force was the petrol coupons he could draw to run his own - treasured - car. Its crimson paintwork was a mirror to the passing world.

'What do we know?' asked Brooke.

'Fatality, sir. The Trinity Shelter.'

'Something suspicious?' said Brooke, swapping the green tinted glasses for the ochre, the sun finally setting.

'Possibly, sir. Constable who phoned it in said it had the hallmarks of suicide, but that there was a lot of blood. I thought it best to play it by the book.'

Brooke nodded. It wasn't good news. The shelters were supposed to represent a haven of safety in a violent world. They often offered sanctuary to the desperate. Suicide was not unknown. Pills had flooded the market at the outbreak of war as many families decided that if the invasion came, they couldn't face the invaders. The fate of the Jews, especially, was growing darker by the month as news emerged, piecemeal, from Poland.

Newspaper coverage of shelter deaths - often a single paragraph in the Cambridge News - had not helped to burnish the...