Direct Hit

by Mike Hollow

  “I think that was part of the Saturday night business.”

  “I like the way you say that. It was the biggest raid of the war, for goodness’ sake. That’s something else that’s weird about you people: what you say isn’t always what you mean.”

  “Yes, but in the nicest possible way, of course. It’s probably something you should bear in mind.”

  Jago opened the low-cut nearside front door for her and she eased herself into the worn leather seat. The car was a four-seat sports tourer, finished in dark green.

  “Sorry there’s not much room for your feet,” he said.

  “Are you implying that I have big feet?”

  “Not at all: even size twos would be a bit cramped down there. I think there must have been competition for space between the gearbox and the passenger’s feet, and the designer decided the gearbox was more important.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine. If it gets too tight I’ll stand up. I see there’s no roof to get in the way.”

  “I thought I’d put it down so you could have a better view,” said Jago. “I’m not too sure about all that cloud up there, but we should be fine if the rain holds off. If it doesn’t, you can have the pleasure of being inducted into the mysteries of getting the roof up on this beast. It’s a devil of a job.”

  “Thank you. So what is this beast, as you call it?”

  “It’s a Riley Lynx. I bought it second-hand the year before last. Now I’m in the same position as everyone else with a car these days: just hoping it’ll last the war out.”

  “I love it,” said Dorothy. “It’s so British.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean it’s understated: it’s not a show-off kind of car, but it looks like it could do the job. It’s not too big, but it can take four people; it’s not a racing car, but I guess it can go fast enough.”

  She peered at the chrome instrument panel in the centre of the wooden dashboard.

  “It says eighty miles per hour. Can it really do that?”

  “Seventy at the most, I should think,” said Jago. “Not that there’s much call for that round here.”

  “You see: that’s exactly what I mean. American cars are big and brash, but yours have class. Mind you, I can’t see Jimmy Cagney careering round Chicago in a Riley whatyoumaycallit: for one thing the running board doesn’t look strong enough to carry me, never mind a gangster with a tommy gun.”

  “There’s not much call for them round here, either,” said Jago.

  He slipped in behind the wheel and started the engine, then pulled out onto Plaistow Road and headed south.

  “An afternoon’s drive with Detective Inspector John Jago. What could be finer than that?” said Dorothy. She turned to him with a smile. “Your name – it’s unusual. I’ve never met anyone called Jago before. Is it foreign?”

  “No,” he laughed, “it’s from Cornwall – although there are plenty of people down there who think England’s a foreign country. All my people were Cornish, going way back, but in 1866 a bank in London collapsed and thousands of people in Cornwall lost their jobs. My grandfather was one of them, and he moved up to London for work. Since then we’ve been Londoners.”

  “Nothing to do with Iago, as in Shakespeare?”

  “No, and I don’t think Iago would have made a very good policeman anyway.”

  She studied his face, her eyebrows raised.

  “You know your Shakespeare then? Most cops I know in the States wouldn’t know Othello from Gold Diggers of 1937.”

  “I’ve seen the play, that’s all. My dad took me. He loved the theatre – he even tried to make a living from it.”

  “Your father was an actor?”

  “No, he sang. He worked the halls, but never made much money out of it.”

  “Worked the halls?”

  “The music halls. He was still dreaming of being a success when he died. It was hard for my mum. She managed to keep me in school until I was sixteen, but then I had to leave and go to work. After that, my education was whatever I could manage for myself: books from the public library and newspapers.”

  “So you didn’t give up on newspapers completely?”

  “I still can’t resist them. I’m trying to persuade my detective constable to open one occasionally. We don’t get to see the Boston Post, of course. Is Boston where you’re from?”

  “Born and bred.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Well, it’s a big city and it’s got a harbour. I love it.”

  He smiled to himself: he liked her style. There was something pleasant about her voice too. He began to think about it, trying to pin down what it was in the sound of her speaking that appealed to him, but found his thoughts drifting instead to the past. He saw a face, a woman’s face, with a tender smile, captured for ever like a photograph. It was the face he always saw.

  The fresh flow of air over his right arm as he signalled and turned left into Beckton Road brought Jago back to the present.

  “I’m going to take you through some of the back streets of Canning Town to the Royal Victoria Dock,” he said, keeping his eyes ahead on the wide, tree-lined street, now pockmarked by bomb damage. “And then we’ll go on to Silvertown. You remember me saying there are some difficult areas in this borough? Well, you’ll see some of them this afternoon. The people down here have had a rough time these last few days. You probably know there were about a hundred bombers over here yesterday afternoon.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Dorothy. “I’ve already been to Silvertown. What chance did they have, sandwiched between the docks and the river? I saw whole rows of houses blown down, people with suitcases and bundles, children carrying pillows, trying to get away.”

  Jago glanced round to look at her, his face registering his surprise.

  “But I’ve told you, you shouldn’t go wandering round in places like this on your own. It’s dangerous. We’re in the middle of a war here. People were killed on these streets only twenty-four hours ago. My boss is expecting me to look after you.”

  “Is he indeed? I can assure you I don’t need looking after.”

  Jago felt frustrated. They seemed to be slipping back into the same argument they’d had before. He tried to suppress the note of irritation that was creeping into his voice, but failed.

  “I just don’t want you coming to harm.”

  “You think I’ve never been near danger before?” said Dorothy.

  “Not danger like this. Not where people are dropping bombs on you and trying to kill you.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve got me wrong again. You need to know something about me. I came to Europe in 1934 to work as a freelance journalist. Since then I’ve been in Spain, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, you name it. You’ve heard of Guernica?”

  “Of course: the Spanish Civil War. The place Hitler bombed for Franco. People say it was a practice run for everything he’s done since.”

  “Well, I’ve been there. I saw what they did, and I can tell you it looked a lot like this. Some people would say Guernica was no place for a woman, but my job is to go where war is. I was in Czechoslovakia when the Nazis marched in, Poland when they carved it up with the Russians, Finland when the USSR invaded. That’s what you do when you’re a foreign correspondent. You go looking for trouble. The last place I was before I came to London was France, back in June, and I only got out of Paris because an English reporter from your Daily Mirror gave me a lift out in his car as the Germans were moving in. So you see, there is honour among journalists – and I do know a thing or two about war.”

  Jago was silent. He felt he had been put in his place, and deservedly so. He was annoyed with himself for making assumptions about this woman. He would make amends.

  Dorothy reached over to the back seat for her brown leather shoulder bag as Jago edged down a narrow side street. Four boys kicking a can around in an energetic game of football stood back to let the car pass. She pulled out a folded newspaper.

  “I’
ve got something here I wanted to ask you about,” she said.

  He glanced to his left to see what she was holding.

  “Fine, as long as you don’t open that thing up – I’ll never be able to see where I’m going if you start reading the paper.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got it folded to the right page already. It was just something I saw in The Times this morning. The headline caught my eye – it was more dramatic than usual. It says ‘Refugees killed in bombed school: babies found in wreckage.’ It sounds pretty bad.”

  She braced her hand against the dashboard to keep the paper steady as the car rumbled over a patch of uneven cobbles. “It says here a school in the East End was wrecked by a bomb on Monday night. It also says it’s feared that a large number of men, women, and children lost their lives. Do you know where that was?”

  “I do. Would you like to see it?”

  “Say, that’s more like it. You know where it was because you’re a policeman, right?”

  “Anyone who reads that and lives round here will know where it was. That’s the way it works with our newspapers these days. They’re not allowed to say where anything happens, but the people who live there obviously know and can put two and two together. Everyone in this area knows what happened. It was a terrible thing. The school’s just a stone’s throw from here, in Agate Street.”

  “It says about five hundred homeless people were in it. That suggests a lot of people around here have been bombed out of their homes.”

  “Yes. It wasn’t a school any more, of course. The authorities had turned it into a rest centre, so it was probably crammed full of people, and when a place like that takes a direct hit they don’t stand a chance. Men, women, children – it makes no difference.”

  He became aware that he was gripping the steering wheel tightly. He relaxed his hands and took a turning to the right.

  “Almost there now. You know, I think one of the worst things about these air raids is that they’re totally indiscriminate. Our hospital near the police station was bombed on Saturday too. I was walking up there yesterday to visit someone in connection with the case I’m investigating and I met a man who said two nurses had been killed. ‘Where’s the justice in that?’ he said, and I couldn’t answer him. I met nurses in the last war, in the casualty clearing stations and hospitals in France, and they were like angels. Where’s the justice in nurses being killed?”

  Before Dorothy could answer, Jago had stopped the car in Agate Street. He sat in silence for a moment or two, then reached across to the handbrake lever.

  “Pardon me,” he said, and pulled it back. It stood only an inch or two from her right knee.

  “Here we are.”

  He opened his door and quickly doubled round the back of the car to open the passenger door for Dorothy, but she was already halfway out before he got there.

  “No need to help me out,” she said. “I’m used to finding my own way in and out of cars.”

  He caught her eye, and she smiled.

  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate your acting like a gentleman,” she said. “Just saving you the trouble, nothing more.”

  They approached the site. Before they could get close, a uniformed police constable stopped them.

  “No public access, sir,” he said, then recognized Jago. “Sorry, sir, I didn’t realize it was you. We’ve been ordered to keep people out. They reckon there might be a couple of hundred dead here.”

  He lifted the rope that was strung across the street to cordon it off and let them through. They passed a couple of wrecked houses and turned a corner. Before them stood a gaping concrete framework – all that was left of the bombed school. In front of it was a crater in the ground that Dorothy guessed was all of twenty feet deep, surrounded by lurching heaps of smashed masonry and timber. It looked as though the rescue parties had now gone, leaving only workmen who were quietly shifting the debris and loading it into lorries for removal. There was a strange desolation over the scene.

  Jago noticed that Dorothy was scribbling in a notebook. She paused to take in more of the scene and turned to him.

  “This is why I write,” she said. “I know I may not be able to describe everything I’ve seen, and I certainly won’t be allowed to show a photograph, but in my own way I can tell the world what’s happening here. It’s what I’ve done in all those places I’ve been to – just do the little bit I can to make sure the truth is told where bad people are doing bad things. Do you know what happened here?”

  “This is something else you won’t be able to print, but there’s a story going round that the people taking shelter here were supposed to be taken to a safe place on Monday afternoon. The authorities were organizing buses to take them, but they never arrived. It may not be true, but people are saying the bus drivers went to Camden Town instead of Canning Town, by mistake. So when the bomb hit it the next night, they were still here. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure.”

  “So they died because of some simple mix-up?”

  “We like to think in this country that we have a talent for muddling through, but the truth is sometimes muddle is all we do, and this is where we end up. I’ve seen it too many times before. Men dying because someone further up the line has bungled, and now it’s women and children dying too. It makes me sick.”

  Dorothy watched as he turned and began to walk back towards the car in silence.

  CHAPTER 27

  “What will you have?” said Jago, motioning Cradock to a chair. “I’ve got a quart of Watney’s Ale, otherwise it’s Scotch.”

  “I’ll have some Watney’s, then, sir,” said Cradock. “Thanks very much.”

  It was eight in the evening, blackout time, and the street outside was silent. So far there had been no sirens, but there was no way of knowing whether the Germans intended to bomb London every night.

  Jago poured the beer into a glass and set it on the small table before him. Cradock took in the unfamiliar surroundings of his boss’s home. The curtains were drawn, and a standard lamp bathed the living room in a cosy half-light. This was the first time he’d seen the inside of Jago’s house, and it wasn’t as he had expected.

  “Very nice place you’ve got here, sir. You should see where I live. How do you manage to keep it so neat and tidy?”

  “That’s easy: I pay someone to do it for me. I can’t bear to live in a mess, but this job doesn’t leave much time for housework, does it?”

  “You can say that again. It doesn’t leave much money to buy a house with either, let alone pay for a housekeeper – not on a DC’s pay.”

  “That might be an incentive to pass your exam for detective sergeant then, one of these days.”

  Cradock didn’t like to think what state his few square feet of the section house might be in by the time that day came. He ran his finger idly along the arm of the chair he was sitting in. Not a speck of dust. The chair was solid and comfortable, made from a dark wood that he could not identify. The brown leather upholstery felt warm and supple, not like the brittle and cracking Rexene that covered the only chair he owned.

  “You like old-fashioned furniture, then, sir?” he said. “Don’t find it too gloomy?”

  “Gloomy? This is Arts and Crafts,” said Jago. “The best furniture this country’s produced in a hundred years.”

  “I like something a bit more modern myself,” said Cradock, “although I suppose this old stuff goes better with a house like this. If I had the money I’d get one of those new flats, all light and airy.”

  “No, no, they’re horrible. All those straight lines and flat roofs, and those funny-looking curved windows. They look so sterile and regimented, cold and characterless. Give me an old-fashioned English house any day, and old-fashioned English furniture, as you call it.”

  “Each to their own, I suppose. That Cooper managed to get himself a nice place, though, didn’t he? Can’t be much older than me, if that, but he must have a lot more cash to his name than I have.”

  �
�Yes, and look where that’s got him. What did you get out of that little book of his?”

  “Some very interesting information, sir. Mostly names. It looks like he kept a note of names and payments. Some of it was money going out, but more of it was coming in, presumably from whatever rackets he was working.”

  “Names we know?”

  “Some of them, yes. That Hodgson is in there, for one. In his case it looks like payments going out, from Cooper to him, which bears out what his wife – Hodgson’s wife, that is – was saying about Cooper paying him to make sure people’s call-up papers were lost.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Yes: Mr Charles Villiers.”

  “In or out?”

  “With him it seems to be a bit of both. Mostly it’s Cooper paying money to him. Now that would suggest we were right about the two of them being mixed up in some illegal printing.”

  “And Johnson: is he in there too?”

  “Yes, but in his case it seems to be money coming in, not going out. If Johnson was involved in this night-time printing thing and it was for Cooper, you’d think he’d be getting his share too.”

  “Unless the money Villiers was getting included a cut for Johnson. I can imagine Villiers preferring it if he was the one who decided what Johnson got, not Cooper. Keeping his employee in his place, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes. So why would Johnson be paying money to Cooper?”

  “We’ll have to ask Johnson that.”

  “There’s also a payment from Villiers to Cooper, dated about a month ago, but of course it doesn’t say what for.”

  “That one we’ll have to think about. Is that the lot?”

  “No, there’s just one more point that seems relevant. It’s about those fake identity cards we found at Cooper’s place. It looks pretty clear that he was selling them on. There’s a list of names and dates, and in every case there are two names. It must be the name of the person he sold it to and the name he’d put on the card. You know: the false name.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand. Anyone we know?”