Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  §55

  He needed the solidity of fact. He needed Kolankiewicz and Kolankiewicz was a day late with his promise. He pulled the post-mortem report on Cockerell off his desk and went to beard the Polish Beast in his lair.

  ‘I bin busy. The dead keep crazy hours.’

  He got up and closed the door behind Troy.

  ‘You’re forgetting your privacy,’ he said to no reaction. ‘But I have what you wanted.’

  He pulled open the top drawer of his desk and put the remains of Troy’s handkerchief in front of him.

  ‘You cut up one of my best Irish linen handkerchiefs!’

  ‘I cut off one corner. Don’t be so damn fussy! Do you want to know or don’t you? I got plenty of other coppers I can play with.’

  ‘OK. Let’s hear it.’

  ‘It is, as I’m sure you surmised, gun oil. Or, in so far as any substance is qualified adjectivally by use, oil which is gun oil if you use it to oil a gun.’

  This was Kolankiewicz in fully professional mode. The command of language that evaded him in the fractured colloquial was put to a precise scientific use that obfuscated beautifully.

  ‘Can I have that in English?’

  ‘It is what I would use on an automatic, if I had one. It is what many men do use, but it also has other uses. I used the same oil to loosen up the lawnmower last weekend. But unless you are about to tell me you’re investigating a man run over by a lawnmower in Hampstead Garden Suburb—in which case I plead provocation and say I have always hated the man next door and killed the bastard in a fit of horticultural madness—let us presume a gun. Low viscosity oil, high graphite content. Won’t stick. Does not attract dirt, won’t jam the slide, but it’s fluid. It will run and you would need to oil the gun more regularly than you would with an oil of higher viscosity. You will get drips, you’ll mess up your suit. Sooner or later.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And speculate.’

  ‘No common villain, no wide boy, would know such a detail. They’d put three-in-one on a gun just as they would on a bicycle, if they knew enough to oil it or clean it in the first place. A man who looks after his weapon in this way knows guns. An ex-serviceman—’

  ‘We’re a nation of ex-servicemen.’

  ‘Most of whom never saw an automatic pistol in their life. There’s a world of difference between the mechanics of a bolt-action Lee Enfield rifle and a Colt or a Browning hand gun. I mean an officer, or a professional, someone who takes no chances on a gun jamming at the wrong moment.’

  ‘All this from a drop of oil?’

  ‘You’ve never come to me with a grain of sand. I wait for the day you do.’

  ‘You’ll ruin your suit. Sooner or later.’ Troy remembered the shirt he had never got clean after Portsmouth. Ruined by a few drops of oil. A heart-shaped stain. It was moment of odd recognition, seeing the point at which he had come in.

  ‘Can you get down to Portsmouth in the morning?’

  ‘Probably. Why?’

  ‘The locals have a body on ice. Arnold Cockerell.’

  ‘The spy?’

  ‘Yes. Get him on the slab again. I want a second opinion.’

  ‘You want me to upset a colleague? Tread on the toes of a fellow sawbones?’

  ‘You know the local man?’

  ‘Of course not. But does that make him any the less a colleague?’

  Troy put the post-mortem report in front of Kolankiewicz.

  ‘You read it. I need more than this.’

  Kolankiewicz pushed it back at him. ‘Have you read it?’

  Troy pushed it back at Kolankiewicz. ‘Of course I’ve read it.’

  He had found it in his out-tray. That meant he’d read it. Of course he’d read it. But he had not read it all, and it did not occur to him that he hadn’t. He had, after all, such a vivid picture of the corpse in his mind’s eye.

  Kolankiewicz was looking oddly at him. Was that concern he saw in the piggy eyes?

  ‘You know me, Troy. The avuncular is not my modus operandi. But, I ask you, do you really want to stick your proboscis into Five and Six? Once more with the cats and foxes? How many hospitals I fished you out of? How many stitches I put in you these twenty years? You my best customer. I should keep a slab ready for you.’

  It was the voice of Jiminy Cricket chirping in his ear. And it made not a damn of difference. The fox and the cat already sang to him. He danced down the cobbled alley with their song of seduction ringing in his head. Hi diddle di dee.

  ‘I’m already in it,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Then I reserve my right to be Polish smartyarse and say, “I told you so” at some future date.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Troy. ‘You’ve been saying that as long as I’ve known you. You’ll no doubt have it chipped on my headstone. I’ll see you at the mortuary mid-afternoon.’

  §56

  The weather was odd. The drenched August now promised almost an Indian Summer. The desk-bound idiot on the south door of the Yard had his theory, but Troy did not listen. He took off his jacket, wiped down the windscreen of the Bentley, saw the sun and the fleeting clouds reflected in it and decided it could not be a more beautiful day to drive down to the coast. The sky was Wedgwood, the clouds danced across it like blown candy floss and the sun was a checkercab yellow. He would tune the car wireless to the Third Programme and enjoy a couple of hours’ freedom and sanity before he faced Kolankiewicz and a corpse, belligerence and death, for the umpteenth time in his career. He was trying to find the wavelength when Wildeve appeared through the gateway from the Embankment, jacket across his shoulder, sleeves rolled up, yawning widely.

  ‘You off somewhere?’

  ‘Portsmouth. A post mortem.’

  ‘Cockerell? Keeffe?’

  ‘Cockerell.’

  ‘Mind if I tag along?’

  ‘I thought you were in court all this week.’

  ‘Our Mr Bayliss just changed his plea to Guilty.’

  He grinned like a schoolboy in the sheer pleasure of victory.

  ‘OK. Get in.’

  Troy drove the Bentley out onto the Embankment and across West-minster Bridge, just as Big Ben struck the chimes of noon. Jack settled back in the passenger seat and closed his eyes.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what you’re up to?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Fine. I’m knackered. Wake me up when we get there.’

  Troy put the wireless on low, found the opening moments of a lunchtime concert. A Haydn symphony. He’d have fun guessing which.

  §57

  Kolankiewicz pointed at Wildeve.

  ‘Why you bring him?’

  Troy thought about it.

  ‘For the ride.’

  ‘Some ride. He faints. He throws up. Ach, ach!’

  ‘This will be fairly clean, won’t it? Hardly be bodily fluids left after five months.’

  ‘Clean? Troy, you seen this fucker? He’s a complete mess. They could not have done a better job if they’d deliberately set out to make him unrecognisable.’

  ‘That’s my point.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s too good to be true. It’s all just a bit too neat.’

  ‘Neat? I tell you, smartyarse, when Wildeve sees this one he turn green!’

  He led off into the surgery. A modern room, all Formica and washable surfaces, strip lighting and plastic trim. As up to date, in its way, as Cockerell’s living room. The unknown, numbered corpse tagged ‘Cockerell?’ lay on the stainless steel ‘slab’, a low sink more than six feet long with a spider web of radiating runnels to drain off blood and things worse, far worse. Whiter than white, he struck Troy as bearing only a passing resemblance to anything that might once have lived. He was neater than last time. A look of sterility rather than death. A wax impression of the parts of a man joined up with black thread. And it smelt of nothing. The room had the faint chemical trace of formaldehyde that was inescapable in a post-m
ortem surgery, but the smell of death and decay, the open gut, spilt shit and drying blood smell that so often surrounded death, was missing. Months on ice had reduced it almost to the clinical, the inanimate to the never-human. The body had been cleaned and, unlike the last time he saw it, did not look as though it had been washed up only hours before with seaweed stuck between the toes. The head and face were a black hole set in a rim of white bone. The absence of hands made him seem dwarf-like, a doll of a man. And there was a raised seam down the chest and abdomen like the rough stitching that held sacking together—it reminded Troy of the sackcloth body bag in which Edmond Dantés was dumped from the Château d’If, and in his mind’s eye he could see the hand that held the knife emerging to slit the stitches, to burst into freedom and second birth, and a new life as the Count of Monte Cristo. An apt image, he thought, for the devious Commander Cockerell. Was he even now swanning around as the Count of Jasmine Dene, ducking his creditors and cheating his wife?

  On top of a low cupboard to the side stood half a dozen glass jars, the pickled remains of the corpse’s vital organs: stomach, duodenum, colon, liver et alia. Pickled, they had lost the fresh, roseate colour, the sheen of near-vitality, the rubescent light of lites—lost to a dun brown. All the same, Jack turned green.

  ‘Out!’ Kolankiewicz barked.

  ‘No,’ Jack protested feebly. ‘I want to know.’

  ‘You puke, I fuckin’ kill you!’

  ‘I won’t puke. I’ll just sit here. Quietly.’

  He took a canvas and steel tube chair off a stack and sat by the wall, head tilted back, his eyes closed, his pallor unearthly.

  Kolankiewicz slipped the loop of his rubber apron over his head, rolled up his sleeves and scrubbed up.

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ Troy lied, thinking of all the times he had waited while Jack discreetly threw up in bushes at the scenes of murders.

  ‘You better be right, smartyarse. Now tell me what you looking for.’

  ‘I’m not looking for anything.’

  ‘Give over.’

  ‘Honestly, I just need to know.’

  ‘Know? That’s what puking Willy said. What you mean “know”?’

  Kolankiewicz was right. Jack had not said ‘see’ he had said ‘know’. He had definitely said ‘know’. The choice of word struck Troy as odd. As odd as him showing up exactly when he did.

  ‘I mean precisely what it says. Who is this bloke? I need to know.’

  Kolankiewicz snapped on his rubber gloves and worked his fingers down to the tips.

  ‘You mean you got no new evidence?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘You going to screw my reputation, you know. Here I am down from the high and mighty Yard, redoing a job by the local bones without a shred of a reason. A little evidence would not have come amiss. All I have to go on is your suspicion that this isn’t Cockerell, am I right?’

  ‘No. I didn’t say that. I don’t know who it is.’

  It was a fudge and Troy knew he had not got away with it. Kolankiewicz eyeballed him, raised the bush of grey hair that passed for an eyebrow.

  ‘But you’re pretty damn certain it isn’t?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Troy, you full of shit, as ever. OK. OK.’

  They stood facing each other across the near-luminous white mass of the body. Kolankiewicz tapped the microphone suspended a foot above his head. Troy had not seen such a device before. The Yard, in the forefront of the science of detection, still had stenographers perched on stools with their shorthand notebooks. He looked around. There behind a glass panel in the wall was a young man equipped with one of the new Grundig magnetic tape recorders. He gave Kolankiewicz a thumbs up and returned to looking at his dials and switches.

  ‘Why don’t we just take everything the first report has and check it item by item?’ Troy said.

  ‘Fine,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘Who’s on first?’

  ‘We take the head first.’

  ‘No, this is where you say, “I don’t know.” Then I say, I don’t know’s on second. Who’s on first.’

  ‘What?”

  ‘No, Watt’s on third. Who’s on first.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Forget it. Sometimes you so damn English I can hardly believe you real.’

  Troy turned the first page of the post-mortem report. Kolankiewicz forsook Abbott and Costello and plunged a rubber finger into the skull.

  ‘As I recall, cause of death was given as a blow to the head, shattering top of spine, killing brain stem. No water in lungs. Ergo he was dead before he hit the water.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Troy.

  ‘However, very little of back of head left. Does our man describe the impact wound?’

  ‘No. Just gives the blow to the head as probable cause. Remarks on the shattering of the skull. Possibly by propeller blades.’

  ‘He’s right. Sliced like a boiled egg. But below the cut is compression of skull and tissue I would not personally ascribe to the same action that sliced the skull. Upward motion sliced his head, entered via the face, hence no face, exit rear of skull, but the compression here is down. Hit from the back. What does our man say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘OK. It’s easy to miss. Most of the actual wound is missing. And it could be that it was caused by the action of a propeller. It is in the nature of things that they swirl you around, clobber you over and over again. It’s only my opinion. But if the blow that killed him was from the propeller you might deduce that he was alive when it hit him. But we know he wasn’t. So what killed him? A prior blow? Ergo we look for evidence of a prior blow.’

  ‘Sounds logical to me.’

  ‘I could not make this stand up in court, but—’

  ‘I hate sentences beginning that way.’

  ‘But—I think he was hit once from behind with a round object.’

  ‘Round? What happened to our old friend “blunt”?’

  ‘He’s at first base. No—I say round. I mean round. Like he been sapped. Good and hard. But as I say, with so much of the wound missing and with such violent action to the skull as a whole I’d have difficulty swearing to it. Now ze nick! Ze fangres, ze bilbow, ze nick! As our old pal Shakespeare put it.’

  From Abbott and Costello to Henry V in a few short moves whilst poring over a corpse. Troy had to admire Kolankiewicz’s sang-froid. He had wisecracked his way through a thousand autopsies.

  ‘His wife mentioned a mole.’

  Kolankiewicz turned the head around. The sliced side faced Troy and reminded him of nothing so much as an open oyster.

  ‘There’s no mole here. We lost a bit of the right-hand side of the neck, but there’s no mole on what’s left. Dig into my bag. Pass me the magnifying glass.’

  Troy handed him a huge round glass, the kind Sherlock Holmes was often to be seen with on the lurid covers of paperback books, and watched his piggy eye blow up to a brown moon.

  ‘Again, right on edge of remaining tissue, shiny patch.’

  ‘Shiny?’

  ‘Like recent scar tissue. Tiny. Maybe a thirty-second of an inch long.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘You going to hate this too. I can’t swear to this either, being so close to an injury that tore off half his head and bits of his neck, but it looks like plastic surgery to me. If your man had a mole, it is conceivable he had it removed. Vain sort of bugger was he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then let us press on.’

  They worked down the corpse from the neck to the feet. Kolankiewicz reopened the chest cavity, and gazed through a glass darkly at the organs in the pickling jars. Every so often Troy would read out a section of the report and Kolankiewicz would say ‘Correct’, and every so often Troy would hear Jack sigh softly in the corner. ‘Correct’ became irritating. By the time they reached the toes, via hands, knees and sexual organs, tempers were frayed.

  ‘There must be something.’

  ‘What you mean, must be something? What you
fuckin’ want I stick on pieces like he was a puppet? Fingers where he got no fingers. Face where he got no face? What you think this is, Punch and Judy? Muffin the Mule?’

  ‘All I meant was—’

  ‘I know what you meant. What I don’t know is what you want. You want it to be Cockerell or not? I don’t know what you want, I don’t know why you get me down here, but don’t ask me to invent evidence where there is none. The guy done a good fuckin’ job. If I say he got it right, he got it right.’

  ‘He missed things.’

  ‘No—he refused to speculate on two points that are scarcely big enough to measure. You pissed off with him, you pissed off with me because you want us to label the corpse, you want it tagged as Cockerell or not-Cockerell. I can’t do that. Don’t ask.’

  ‘Speculation is the business we’re in. Can we get on?’

  Kolankiewicz leaned in close. Horseradish and roast beef on his breath. They faced each other across the corpse.

  ‘Get on? Troy. We reached the feet. Beyond the feet he don’t exist! How many men you met exist past their feet? The feet are where we touch the planet, beyond the feet is only Mother Earth.’

  ‘All I’m saying is—’

  Kolankiewicz blazed into anger, snatched the report from Troy’s hand and shook it in his face.

  ‘What you want me to say, cocksucker? I no longer know what you want me to say. That it is Cockerell or it isn’t Cockerell? Fuckit Troy, I don’t know what you want me to do. You jigger me every which way arsehole to elbow. I tread all over toes of local man for you. I make enemies faster than Hitler at a Jewish wedding. I tell you the man did a good job!’

  He gave up shaking the report and began to leaf through it, turning the pages till he found what he wanted, stabbing at it with his stubby, rubber-gloved finger.

  ‘I tell you Troy, this is all the evidence you going to get. The man is good. We quibbling over insubstantial matter. Every damn thing is here. Every last damn detail, the cuts to the hand and feet, the contents of the lungs, the dreadful condition of the liver, right down to the contents of the man’s stomach and intestines. Dammit Troy, he even lists what the bastard had for his last meal.’