Blue Rondo (aka Flesh Wounds)

by Lawton, John

  ‘Eh?’

  ’Arsh . . .’

  ‘Arsh?’

  ‘Arshbishop of Canterbury.’

  Rod howls. Troy cannot but join in. There is silence from the other end of the line. Then . . . ‘You pair of shits. You pair of drunken shits.’

  And Driberg hangs up.

  Troy puts down the phone. His brother is crying tears of joy. The phone rings. Troy reaches for it and says, ‘Tom, Tom, Your Grace.’

  And the voice says, ‘No, it’s me, Jack. There’s been another body found. Whole this time. Can you get down to Limehouse?’

  The jolt of sobriety ripped through him just as though he’d walked into a door. And normal service was resumed.

  47

  Jack sent a car for Troy. A unmarked suped-up Wolseley 6/90 with a uniformed WPC at the wheel.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Troy asked.

  ‘Regent’s Canal Dock, sir.’

  A Glaswegian accent. Troy looked at the face. Ringlets of red hair bursting out beneath her peaked cap. Just a little, she reminded him of the Kitty of twenty years ago. He didn’t know the woman. ‘You’re new?’ he asked.

  ‘Mary McDiarmuid, sir.’

  ‘You’re Wildeve’s driver?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, sir, I’m your driver. I was assigned to you the day Mr Brocklehurst died. I guess you never got round to reading the paperwork.’

  Without doubt she meant the day Brock was blown up, not the day he died. Troy could see no point in setting her right. ‘Quite,’ he said.

  He climbed into the back. The first lurch forward almost made him puke, brought home to him how pissed he was. He took refuge in sleep. Woke as the Wolseley swung off the Commercial Road into the dockyard.

  It was a moonlit night. Barges bobbing on the basin. Another Wolseley, undisguised, ‘Police’ blazoned across the doors, lights glaring out across the water. Shrimp Robertson guarding it like a sentry. Two uniformed coppers dodging across the tops of the barges.

  Troy knew he couldn’t do that. Even on a good day without a skinful of booze he couldn’t do that. He felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘Freddie? The body’s over here.’

  Troy turned to face Jack.

  ‘Good bloody grief. You look awful.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Troy lied.

  ‘No, I should never have called you out.’

  ‘Whole, you said?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The body. You said it was intact.’

  ‘More or less. Not like the others at all.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘Do you really want to see?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Wildeve led him round to the front of the car. The body lay under a blanket between the lights and the water. Wildeve nodded, and one of the coppers whipped the blanket away. A fat, sodden corpse, bloated with gas after a few days in the water, the pale and pasty face of death. Troy turned away and vomited.

  After a few seconds, when the heaving had stopped and all he could taste was bile, he felt Jack’s hand on his shoulder again. ‘Sorry, Freddie. I shouldn’t have—’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘It’s usually me who pukes, after all.’

  ‘It’s OK. It’s the booze.’

  ‘The booze?’

  ‘Champagne with Rod.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I know the man.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Rork. Joey Rork. Known him a couple of weeks.’

  There was a pause Jack seemed reluctant to fill. Troy took his arm and levered himself up off the wing of the car. ‘Let’s look again.’

  Rork had died from a single shot to the head – eyes open, looking at his killer. Only when Troy reached the hands did he realise what Rork had suffered. Where his knuckles had been there was a glutinous mess of flesh and bone. But he was past puking now. He was halfway to sobriety.

  ‘Drill,’ he heard Mary McDiarmuid say.

  ‘Really?’ Jack’s voice, with a hint of astonishment.

  Troy stood up, wished he’d remembered to bring his walking stick.

  ‘They drilled out his knuckles with one of those electric drill thingies.’

  ‘Jesus Christ! Why?’

  Mary McDiarmuid looked at Troy as though telling him they were dealing with an innocent – but Jack could be like that, seeing the worst man could inflict on man as a matter of duty day after day and yet still baffled by it.

  ‘Well,’ said Troy, ‘it’s a pretty surefire way to get someone to tell you what you want to know.’

  Jack looked down at the body, then back at Troy. ‘Was he the sort of chap to tell them?’

  ‘I don’t think he had anything to tell them,’ said Troy. ‘And if he’d talked they’d have shot him after one knuckle or two. Most men would crack after one knuckle. They wouldn’t have bothered with all ten.’

  This was the moment at which Jack usually puked. He didn’t. He put out an arm and caught Troy as he wobbled.

  ‘You’d better get me to a nick and take my statement,’ Troy said, soft as a whisper.

  ‘Statement, my arse. I’m taking you for a cup of strong coffee.’

  48

  George Bonham might not have been the last man in England to sleep in a nightshirt – but he was the last whom Troy knew. He answered the door without a flicker of surprise, even though Jack’s hammering had clearly roused him from his slumbers.

  ‘Coffee, George. Black and sweet,’ Jack said.

  ‘You look awful,’ Bonham said, looking at Troy.

  ‘I know. People are kind enough to keep telling me.’

  ‘White as a wossname . . . sheet.’

  Wildeve and Mary McDiarmuid lowered Troy on to the sofa. Robertson stood in the corner, clutching his helmet, looking stranded. Jack waved him down into a corner chair.

  ‘Where’s your inspector?’ Troy asked.

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘Where’s Inspector Milligan? We’re on his patch. I would have thought. . .’

  He followed the Shrimp’s gaze to Wildeve.

  ‘Paddy’s had his problems,’ Jack said. ‘He’s in Liverpool on a compassionate. His dad. He’s dying.’

  ‘Dying?’

  ‘Lung cancer.’

  ‘Of course. He told me. I’m almost certain he told me.’ Troy sighed. ‘But . . . but … he should be here. We can’t do this without him.’

  ‘He’ll be back. And George is right. You do look bloody awful. This can wait. It can wait till morning. Let’s get you home as soon as we’ve got something warm inside you.’

  ‘There are things you should know.’

  ‘Wait for the coffee, Freddie. You haven’t enough breath to blow out a candle.’

  Bonham stuck a mug of sickly sweet instant coffee into Troy’s hands, wrapping his fingers around it as though he thought it would slip from his grip.

  Troy sipped and tried to pretend he thought it pleasant or beneficial. ‘Joey Rork,’ he said. ‘Or did I tell you that? Whatever. Joey Rork. A private eye from the States. Ex-NYPD. And I rather think he was out of his depth.’

  Jack prompted: ‘In what way?’

  ‘I had dinner with him about three days ago. He’d been following Danny Ryan. Been doing that for a while. At dinner he produced a stack of photographs – he did that every time we met, but this time it was obvious he was getting very close to Danny. No long lenses. He was in the same room.’

  ‘Danny Ryan?’ Jack cut in. ‘Is this something to do with boxing?’

  ‘I doubt that. In fact I think Danny Ryan might be incidental. Rork wasn’t wild about my assurances that Danny was straight, but it was Ryan’s brothers that got his copper’s hackles up. He was absolutely convinced they were up to something.’

  ‘Who are these brothers? I’ve never heard of them.’

  ‘Neither had I – I kept telling Rork. I used to know Ryan before the war, and I’ve followed his career in the papers just like anyone else -
and I’ve seen him in person perhaps a couple of times since, but as for any brothers, they were news to me. I don’t know them.’

  There was a cough of polite attention-seeking from the other side of the room. Jack, George, Mary McDiarmuid and Troy all turned to look at the Shrimp – reddening slightly and wary of the position he was in.

  ‘Spit it out, Mr Robertson,’ Jack said.

  ‘You do know them, Mr Troy.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘They was with me and Tub Flanagan and all them other kids that day you paid us all to search the bombsite where Alma Terrace used to be.’

  ‘That was—’

  ‘Nineteen forty-four, sir.’

  ‘I was about to say it was ages ago. Of course I don’t know them. I can’t even remember what they looked like.’

  ‘But they remembered you, Mr Troy. You was their hero. Right up to the end of the war that gang they used to have with old Tub was known as Troy’s Marauders. I was in it meself. I oughta know.’

  Jesus Christ.

  ‘I was a hero meself for a while, ‘cos I found the cellar where the body was. But I was too small to hold me own against the twins, but they—’

  ‘Enough! I don’t want to hear this.’

  Bonham muttered a sotto voce ‘I told you so’, and vanished into the kitchen.

  Troy leaned back, stared at the ceiling and said, ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  Jack spoke softly: ‘Freddie, it’s time you went home.’

  ‘No, I should make a statement.’

  ‘You should be in bed.’

  ‘What’s the point? I’ll be wide awake in four hours, buzzing like a sodding bee.’

  ‘Bed,’ said Mary McDiarmuid, with more authority than Jack had mustered, and Troy let himself be hoicked up by one arm and steered to the door. ‘George,’ he said, turning back to Jack.

  ‘Later,’ Jack said. ‘Later.’

  Mary McDiarmuid drove like Fangio. He was back on his own doorstep in less than twenty minutes.

  ‘Do you want me to come in, sir?’

  ‘No. I’ll be fine. Now, tell me, are you permanently assigned to me?’

  ‘In so far as you’re expected back, yes, sir. In the meantime I’m floating a bit too freely. I get whatever comes up.’

  ‘That can be remedied. But when we’re alone it’s Troy. Forget the rank. Save it for when Onions is about.’

  He was fiddling with the door key and failing. She took it off him, turned the lock, shoved the door open and stuck the key back in his hand with a ‘Whatever you say, boss.’

  Inside, he kicked off his shoes, sloughed his jacket on to the floor. He hadn’t the strength to pick it up. It could wait till morning. It could all wait till morning. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt so tired. He hauled himself up the stairs to the bathroom, scrubbed away the taste of champagne and vomit with his toothbrush, spat peppermint toothpaste at the basin – and as he did so caught a trace of something else on the air. Lately he’d known his nose to play tricks, not as many as his eyes, but he had found himself smelling the most unlikely things – rubber, salt and vinegar, cardamom. Now it was a scent. Something familiar but unplaceable. The upper frequencies of Dior? With the toothbrush still sticking out of the side of his mouth, he pushed open his bedroom door, and saw the round bump of Kitty’s backside in his bed. He could not fault her timing. At once appropriate and awful.

  49

  His prediction was wrong. He did not wake at six, simply because he had not slept. Kitty had not stirred. He had lain motionless for most of what was left of the night, while his mind and memory had roared.

  He had liked Gumshoe. He had not realised this until he had been confronted with his corpse. He had found that while part of his mind examined the wounds with a detached, professional eye, another part had looked at Rork’s beetlecrusher shoes and found something inexorably sad in the sight of those huge flat feet; that same part had wondered what had become of his hat.

  Gumshoe gave way to the Shrimp. The Shrimp was proving to be a ragbag of surprises and secrets. Troy’s Marauders? Good fucking grief. If it weren’t so bizarre it would be funny. And George, that hushed ‘I told you so’. Had he been waiting the best part of twenty years to say that? Troy found he could remember George’s exact words on that bitterly cold day in the February of 1944, the restrained outrage that Troy had bribed a bunch of schoolkids to look for a dismembered body.

  ‘It’s a scandal, Freddie, a scandal. They’re kids. They should be in school. If the mums find out

  And Troy had brushed George off. It was so easy. George had been at the back of the queue when God gave out smarts – the nicest man on earth, not the brightest. And then he’d said, ‘You know, Freddie, there are times I think there’s nothing like a spell at the Yard for putting iron in the soul.’

  With hindsight, that near-perfect science, Troy thought it the most acute sentence George had ever uttered. Was that what twenty years at the Yard had done to him? Put iron in his soul? Wasn’t that what Trubshawe had hinted at after Sasha’s outburst at the funeral? The ‘ambergooities’ of the Yard put iron in the soul.

  He could see that posse of urban cowboys in his insomniac’s mind’s eye. He could see Tub Flanagan – fat boy with Elastoplast across his glasses. He could see the Shrimp, small for his age, wiry and street-smart. If Troy had been taking bets rather than whacking out tanners and halfcrowns that day he’d have put money on the Shrimp to grow up to be a villain. It seemed so much more likely than that he would become smitten with the idea of becoming a copper. He could see a boy whose name he never knew juggling a smoking cocoa tin he’d turned into a winter handwarmer. But, try as he might he couldn’t see a pair of twins. To listen to Bonham it had been the corruption of youth, the spike of iron. It all seemed so long ago . . . Besides, it had been ‘adventures with Jack and Ralph’. Hadn’t it?

  50

  He must have nodded off. The clock on his bedside table read ten a.m. and Kitty was gone. He flung back the bedclothes and a small piece of paper fell to the floor. He picked it up and reached for his glasses.

  Fat lot of use you were. Why didn’t you wake me when

  you got in? K

  Bugger, bugger, bugger.

  He felt dehydrated. More the alcohol than the midnight murder. He stumbled downstairs, sank a pint of cold water, picked up the phone and rang Claridge’s. Mrs Cormack had not yet returned. He left a message asking her to call him back and ran a bath. He was dragged from it minutes later by the phone ringing.

  ‘Freddie,’ said Jack, ‘if you’re up and about I’m sending a car for you.’

  ‘A car?’

  ‘Time to take your statement. You are up to this, aren’t you? I mean, I could always come to you.’

  ‘I’m fine. Just. . .’

  ‘Just what?’

  ‘Just not right now.’

  ‘Not right now? Freddie, last night you were wilting like last week’s daffs and deadly keen to get it all down on paper.’

  ‘I need time.’

  ‘We don’t have time. What we have is a body.’

  ‘Just a few hours.’

  ‘What’s up? Tell me what’s changed.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Freddie – I don’t know why but you’re lying to me. Whatever it is, get it fixed and be at the Yard by six. How long do you think I can hold Stan at bay? For Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Jack, I’m sorry. I’m not holding out on you.’

  ‘Freddie, that’s exactly what you’re doing and if a witness did it to you you’d chuck him in the cells till—’

  ‘I’ll be there. I’ll be there at six.’

  ‘In the meantime I want a few basic facts. I’m not losing a day.’

  ‘His name was Joey Rork.’

  ‘You told me that last night!’

  ‘He was a private eye, ex-NYPD -’

  ‘That too!’

  ‘- and he had a room at the Cromarty in Gower Street.’

  ‘Now we’re
getting somewhere. How long had he been at the Cromarty?’

  ‘Weeks. I couldn’t honestly say how long.’

  ‘Why was he here? How do you come to know him? He surely didn’t fly over from New York just to follow Danny Ryan?’

  ‘Jack, that’s the bit I’d rather tell you at six.’

  ‘You’re asking an awful lot, you know.’

  ‘I know, I know. Honestly.’

  Jack hung up. Troy felt a little as though his junior had just read the Riot Act to him. The phone rang again.

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘You were sleeping so peacefully.’

  ‘Smarmy bastard. Where were you anyway?’

  ‘Limehouse.’

  ‘At that time of night?’

  ‘I’m a copper. You were one yourself, once upon a time.’

  ‘OK, OK. Don’t rub it in. So, Sherlock, did the pleasure of some poor bugger’s cold flesh lure you away from the infinitely greater pleasures of my warm flesh?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘I thought you were still off sick.’

  ‘Wildeve and I have an arrangement. Kitty, we have to talk.’

  ‘That’s got to be one of my husband’s favourite phrases. It usually means he has to talk and I have to listen.’

  ‘Can you come over now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I come to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Kitty, this is important. I have to see you.’

  ‘That’s how I felt last night. Fat lot of good it did me. No, Troy, my sisters and I are lunching here, then going shopping up West – good God, “up West”. I shouldn’t think I’ve used that phrase in twenty years. Just goes to show you can take the woman out of Stepney and blah-de-blah-de-blah.’

  ‘When, then?’

  ‘Tea. You can buy me tea to make up for last night. Tea at the Café Royal. Be there at four.’

  Kitty rang off. Troy was left thinking that he was cutting Jack’s deadline very close and that the Stepney had long since been taken out of Kate Cormack. About a fortnight after Kate Cormack had been taken out of Stepney, he rather thought.

  At noon he rang Kolankiewicz. ‘What killed that bloke we fished out of the canal basin last night?’