Second Violin

by John Lawton

  ‘Perhaps the Prime Minister saw it.’

  ‘You think he needs cheering up? If he needed cheering up he’d have had the cup of tea with Mum and Aunt Dolly, wouldn’t he?’

  Troy ignored the sarcasm.

  ‘You’re staying on, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah. Just for a bit. I feel better knowing me mum’s OK, but I’ll spend a few nights here. My dad won’t be back for ages yet. He’s not got a free weekend until the end of the month. She hates sleeping alone. And . . . I mean . . . you never know when they’ll be back, do you?’

  Troy would not have been the one to tell her, but he was certain they’d be back any minute.

  And they were.

  Around ten o’clock, with no Kitty to restrain him, he did what she would not let him. He turned up the collar on his overcoat, stuck his hands in his pockets and walked east into the glow of London’s burning, walked into the shooting stars, the whines and the whistles of London’s war – walked into ‘it’. And as night became day and silence burst around him into noise that seemed to inhabit the skull, he was put in mind of Yeats’ best-known line, ‘A terrible beauty is born.’

  He would have liked to be thrilled by a visit from Churchill, but the truth, the awful, the absolute truth, was that he was thrilled by this – by ‘it’. It was like the descent into a dream. The descent from a dream. He would never be sure which.

  § 162

  The bloke in Hatchards was blunt.

  ‘That’s a very tall order. A rare book, a rare book bought on account, we might be able to tell you quite quickly. The bible? Do you even know the edition? We must sell dozens, hundreds. Do you know when? Last week? Last year?’

  Troy had one clue – and he’d just seen it run through his fingers like sand.

  § 163

  Kitty did not return. He found he did not much mind. He found bodies to preoccupy him. Was the gunshot victim found almost headless in a mansion block off Gloucester Road a suicide or a murder?

  Troy examined the body, sent for Kolankiewicz. They agreed on suicide.

  The following day a man found pooled in blood in a shop doorway as wardens picked their way through Soho after the all-clear was found to have his throat cut. The wardens cried ‘murder’ and called Scotland Yard. Troy examined the body, took out his penknife, cut a sliver of shrapnel out of the wooden shopfront and sent it to Hendon with the body.

  ‘Poor bugger,’ Kolankiewicz said. ‘Takes shelter from the Hun and a piece of British shrapnel slit his throat for him.’

  ‘The blood groups match?’

  ‘They do. You’re not having a lot of luck, are you?’

  ‘Never a good body when you want one.’

  Still Kitty did not return.

  When the local warden, Cyril Spender, knocked on his door and asked if he could firewatch on the roof of the Coliseum Theatre in St Martin’s Lane Troy said that, duty permitting, he would. He did not have the engagement of a uniformed copper – Kitty had been right about that – he had received no extra training, all that had happened was that he’d been issued with a tin hat and a gas mask, neither of which he ever carried. Bonham had insisted on showing him how a stirrup pump worked, and he had paid no attention. Now, Spender taught him how to handle incendiaries. He had a duff one to demonstrate. It looked to Troy like a thermos flask.

  ‘The trick is to smother it, stop it igniting in the first place. If it does, you’re stuffed ’cos it burns at 648.8°C.’

  ‘Hot, is it?’ Troy asked, not being able to think in anything but Fahrenheit.’

  ‘Hot enough to melt steel. Twice the temperature you’d need to burn yooman flesh!’

  ‘Interesting statistic.’

  ‘Yep. One o’ them little buggers gets to you there’d be sweet fa. left.’

  Onions had been clear, ‘We’ve a big enough job on our hands as it is. We’re not auxiliaries to anything. Do you think crime stops just ’cos there’s a war on? Don’t go volunteering.’ But to be so casually enlisted to firewatch on occasional nights was like being sanctioned – like being pardoned for the folly of his night walks, like having his seat in the Gods paid for. The conflict of fear and curiosity resolved with simplicity.

  Midweek, he sat three nights on the roof of the Coliseum and watched heaven light up with the terrible beauty that he found almost irresistible. Suffering and death, terror into beauty. The suffering and death might next be his. Logic told him that; this was no more ordered than it was beautiful, it was random death and illusory beauty, but he was not a man wholly free from superstition – every cell in his body told him he would live through this, and a voice in his head said, ‘who are you kidding?’

  On the second night he had his only direct encounter with battle – an incendiary clattered down onto the roof and rolled towards his feet. He thrust it into a bucket of sand just as Spender had taught him and thought no more about it. But the sound of the night had changed. The guns were nearer now and seemed almost to surround him. Anti-aircraft guns had been mounted on trailers and dotted around the city, mounted on barges and towed into the Thames. He felt he could discern them as individual voices, as though each gun had its own unique sound. The battery near Hungerford Bridge barked, the battery somewhere in Bloomsbury twanged like a giant bow at Agincourt, firing arrows. But each night, when dawn broke, he heard the same noise from the street below. He had at first described it to himself as a hum, but now, from higher up, and closer to Trafalgar Square, it sounded more like a sigh – a gigantic sigh. And then he realised. It was London breathing. The inhalation and exhalation of a city breathing. The same rattle of broken glass, the shouts and the ringing of steeled boots on paving stones, but over it all and under it all, the inhalation, the exhalation, the great sigh of London drawing breath. A city licking its wounds and living.

  § 164

  On Saturday evening the gas went off all over central London. He could flip the iron upside down and fry an egg – he’d done that more than once when electricity prevailed over gas. Or he could go on the scrounge. He phoned Hampstead. His father answered.

  ‘Yes, I have gas, I even have a meal on the go. What I do not have is a family. Your mother has retreated to Mimram. So, I dine alone.’

  ‘I’ll be right over,’ said Troy.

  The old man served him rainbow trout and new potatoes – new-ish, they had been in store since the end of June. Raised by Troy’s mother – her favourite Aura second earlies – and stored in sacks in darkness. She had rallied to the call of ‘Dig for Victory’ and rendered them almost self-sufficient in vegetables.

  When they’d finished, and were settled in his father’s study, Troy asked almost idly, ‘Where did you get the fish? Almost seems like a novelty these days.’

  ‘From your mother.’

  ‘I thought she was at Mimram.’

  ‘Indeed. She posted them to me. They arrived in the second post this morning.’

  ‘She posted fish?’

  ‘Why not? The food parcel is now as ubiquitous as the umbrella . . . or perhaps I should say the gas mask. All over England people are posting meals to their relations on the assumption someone somewhere is going short. But you did not drop in to talk about food, surely?’

  ‘No. I didn’t. I was wondering what you made of this.’

  Troy took a sheet of paper from his coat pocket. He’d jotted down the verses of Isaiah 38.

  Alex read it through, and said, ‘Savage stuff. The God of the Old Testament in all his wrath. It seems rather apt. It could be describing the Europe of today. Hardly among the most quoted of verses, though. In fact downright obscure. Why do you have it?’

  ‘It was left at the scene of a murder.’

  ‘Then I’d say it was self-explanatory. Self-justification. The very arrogant assumption of divine vengeance. On whom?’

  ‘A rabbi. An East End rabbi named Friedland. And he isn’t the first victim. In fact, I think he’s the third. Borg, Adelson, Friedland. But only the last had this as a sort of clu
e.’

  Troy knew the look on his father’s face. The concentration of memory, the pride, the relentless pride, of an old mind determined to forget nothing at the point when the body is willing to surrender everything.

  ‘Run those names by me again, would you, my boy?’

  ‘The first was Isaiah Borg, then . . . Aaron Adelson and the most recent was Moses Friedland.’

  ‘In that order?’

  ‘Yes.’

  By now Alex was rummaging around in the centre drawer of his desk.

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘No, it is here somewhere. I saved it, I’m sure I saved it. Though quite why . . .’

  ‘Perhaps because you save everything?’

  ‘I left so much behind in Russia. I will admit that to your mother’s dismay I have parted with almost nothing ever since. Every last scrap of paper came from Vienna, and every last scrap from Paris, so this should be . . . Aah! I have it!’

  He handed his son the letter.

  ‘The signatures, and the name typed after each one.’

  Troy looked.

  ‘Daniel Shoval, Isaiah Borg, Aaron Adelson, Moses Friedland, Elishah Nader, David Cohen, Jacob Kossoff.’

  Troy had met half these men in his time as a beat bobby – the old rabbis of East London. East European immigrants most of them and, in Kossoff’s case, a man as Russian as his father – although his father spoke the better English. These were the parish priests of Judaism, serving the shifting, new, ever-renewing communities of the East End. Not one of them destined for the board of Deputies. And, Troy felt, not one so much as wanting it.

  ‘Three of them,’ said his father. ‘Three of them on the list. Were it not for the oddity of the first not being among the dead, I’d have said someone might systematically be working down it.’

  It was one of those moments Troy hated. Much as he loved having the pieces on the table, there was often a moment when the voice in the head told him he’d been stupid and forced him to backtrack.

  Troy said, ‘Daniel Shoval is dead. Last August. A matter of days before the war broke out. I investigated myself. It was my last case before I left Stepney, before you phoned up to whisk me off to Monte Carlo. Shoval was found dead in an Underground station. Fell on the escalator. No one saw him fall – middle of the afternoon, a Tuesday, hardly the rush hour – and, in the absence of anything to the contrary, I wrote it up as accidental death. If I’d known about this letter then, I’d have had grounds for suspicion. Now . . . I’m beginning to think I was hasty. But I’m also beginning to think a systematic killer of rabbis just a bit too bizarre. It’s like some Polish Gothic novel. Der Golem Revisited.’

  ‘Then,’ said his father, ‘it is the other names on the list that should interest you the more. The people the rabbis wanted locked up. The word bizarre sums them up very well.’

  Troy read the letter out loud, racing quickly through the demand for the internment of, together with reasons for . . . until he came to the names.

  ‘Sir Oswald Mosley, Archibald Ramsay MP, Oliver Gilbert, Victor Rowe, Roland Rollason, Lord Carsington, Major Harold Haward-Pyke, Professor Charles Lockett, Sir Michael Redburn, Viscount Blackwall, Geoffrey Trench MP.’

  ‘I received that letter last summer. The same day the Board of Deputies wrote to me calling for the suppression of Freud’s last book. It caused some initial confusion. I published the letter about Freud. Freud would not have it otherwise. The letter from the East End rabbis I would willingly have published but for a request from the Home Office. I gather several other newspapers received the same letter and the same request. No one published. A request and, I might add, a reassurance.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was told that these men, or at least those of them who really are dangerous, would be locked up as the rabbis requested when the time was right. MPs and all. Aristocrats . . . and all.’

  ‘Well . . . that takes care of Mosley,’ Troy said with scarcely suppressed sarcasm.

  ‘You think we have not locked up enough?’

  ‘More that we have locked up the wrong people.’

  Alex took the letter back.

  ‘As your illustrious predecessor Sherlock Holmes used to say . . . “let us eliminate the impossible, what remains is fact however improbable”.’

  ‘Probably my suspect, you mean?’

  ‘Quite. Now . . . Mosley, as you say, is interned for the duration. Rollason is dead, I wrote his obituary myself. Heart attack playing golf, as I recall. Blackwall volunteered as soon as war was declared. Went to France with the Royal West Kent Regiment, the one I think they call the “Buffs”. He never returned from Dunkirk. I’ve had his obituary ready for weeks, but there is no confirmation that he is dead.’

  ‘He might be a prisoner?’

  ‘That’s possible. Although I would have expected some news of him by now if he were. Haward-Pyke was interned in May on the same day as Mosley – Gilbert and Rowe about three weeks after the war broke out – and Ramsay only a matter of weeks ago. Not long before Rod, as I recall . . . and, unless I’m mistaken as a direct result of that fracas at the Tea Rooms that you and Nikolai blundered into. No one is quite sure why he was interned but . . .’

  Troy merely shrugged and said, ‘I blundered. I doubt that Nikolai did. I think he went for the show.’

  ‘Whatever,’ his father continued. ‘That leaves only four . . . Redburn, Carsington, Trench and . . .’

  ‘Lockett,’ said Troy. ‘A professor of something, I gather?’

  ‘I had to ask myself. I’d scarcely heard of him. Indeed, I confused him with the reputable Lockett who runs the Psychoanalytic Society. Since it was necessary to talk to Freud that day, I asked him. The men are brothers. Charles Lockett is the elder, Nicholas the younger. Charles is quite possibly the last practitioner in England of a fake science that was known as “bumpology” when I was a boy, and even then so few people took it seriously. It’s proper name was phrenology, and its vile offshoot has been racial stereotyping – of which the Nazis are so fond, of which we see so many crude examples in Der Stürmer . . . all those dreadful caricatures of Jews looking like a badly illustrated Merchant of Venice – it all leads to eugenics, and that has followers galore. Even seemingly rational men, men without apparent Nazi-sympathies, will expound the need for eugenics. I would say I have sat at half the dinner tables in London at one time or another – particularly in the years just before the last war – and listened to crackpot theories not necessarily on the superiority of one race over another but most definitely on the “inferior type” and selective breeding and the culling of the mentally or physically disabled. They seem to have a problem uttering the word murder.’

  ‘Well, one of them doesn’t seem to have any problem committing it.’

  ‘But which? Do peers of the realm stoop to murder? Do university professors?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But which? Ah, well . . . I suppose that’s why you became a policeman, isn’t it? All those penny dreadful novels you read as a boy. It gave you a love of the chase . . . a passion to know “who-dunnit”?’

  ‘No, Dad. Absolutely not. Who-dunnits are the lowest form of fiction. Somewhere between whelks and snails.’

  ‘Does not a killer who kills in the order of signature on a letter strike you as a mite novelletish? I mean to say, that is the conclusion one would draw, is it not? . . . these rabbis have died in the order in which they signed.’

  ‘They have. And more than anything it strikes me as a paucity of imagination – the ticking off of names on a list.’

  ‘So, where will you start? Carsington, Redburn, Trench or Lockett?’

  ‘None of them, I’ll start with Elishah Nader. I have to tell him there’s someone out there who’s about to try and kill him.’

  Sitting outside his father’s house in his Bullnose Morris, he looked at the letter his father had given him. Nader’s address was a show-stopper. A name you clocked once and never forgot – Heaven’s Gate Synagogue, London, E
.1. As if there could be such a place.

  § 165

  15 September 1940

  Battle of Britain Day

  Heaven’s Gate was in utter contrast to Elohim. The road frontage was tiny. A solid pair of doors, a set of rusting railings, wedged between two shop fronts, at most eight or ten feet across. It looked more like the back entrance to a block of flats than the gates of heaven. Nothing screamed ‘God’ at the passer-by. You could look for this and still miss it.

  Troy pushed at the door. It opened into a long, dark corridor. He walked about fifty or sixty feet, finding it so dark, he needed to trace his way with one hand along the wall. It grew lighter where a staircase branched off to either side and light filtered down from above. He found himself facing another set of doors. He pushed and daylight streamed through, bright as noon. He stepped in and looked up instinctively. There were gaps in the roof – an empyrean, rich, cerulean ceiling, a promise of heaven through which the blue of the real heaven now peeked in a dozen ragged holes – and a gap in the wall the size of a London double-decker bus. He could not swear this place had taken a direct hit, but if it hadn’t the building next door had.

  There’d been some effort made to clear up. There were still broken tiles, roofspars and bits of blue plasterwork littering the floor, but the way was passable and most of the fittings seemed to have survived. It was, he thought, a near-tragedy. Unlike Elohim, this really was beautiful, an intricate wooden maze in walnut, brass and glass, like being inside a chinese box – it was layered, it was simple and complex, sturdy and delicate all at the same time. It was everything Elohim was not – it was subtle, it was intimate. At the back of the synagogue the ark was flanked by two pastoral views, of what he took to be Israel. They were framed as though they were windows, a trompe l’œil that didn’t quite work, but a quality of craftsmanship that compared well with anything he’d seen by Burne-Jones or Holman Hunt. He was contemplating this – maybe they were Holman Hunts? – did the pre-Raphaelites ever paint synagogues? – when a figure popped up from behind the bimah.