Second Violin

by John Lawton

  ‘Can I help you?’

  A young rabbi. About his age. All in black. Not quite enough beard about him. As though he had yet to grow into the part he was playing. Troy assumed he was the ‘curate’.

  ‘I was looking for Rabbi Elishah Nader.’

  ‘You found him.’

  ‘I was expecting an older man.’

  ‘Ah . . . you mean my father.’

  The rabbi came round the bimah and extended a hand to greet Troy.

  Troy shook the hand and said, ‘Sergeant Troy Scotland Yard.’

  ‘My father and I are both called Elishah. But if it’s him you want, it’s me you get. My father has been in hospital since the beginning of August.’

  Troy wondered for a second if there’d been an attack he’d missed, but Nader said, ‘His heart. I doubt he will live long, but that’s not why you’re here, is it? Heart attacks are hardly police business. It’s about the scrolls. You’ve found them?’

  ‘Scrolls?’

  ‘Scrolls of the Torah. Stolen the morning after the big raid. Come, I shall show you.’

  He led the way over smashed tiles to the ark and slid open the doors. They glided past like silk running over glass – not a sound. The interior was huge, almost like a cabin on a sailing ship – lined throughout in crimson velvet, it reminded Troy of his mother’s jewellery box. He knew it was the ark, Nader didn’t need to tell him that – but he’d no real idea what an ark was for.

  ‘My father had this done early last year. So many refugees. We’d been taking them in since I was a boy. After Kristallnacht the trickle became a flood. So many of them brought scrolls of the Torah from synagogues in Europe that had been closed, destroyed or simply abandoned. We had them stacked up all over – from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia. My father said the place was turning into a museum. Then he decided. It was a museum after all. The Torahs were priceless, some of them centuries old. And he had the ark re-built and enlarged to store them safely. Ventilated at the back with air bricks to prevent mould, and virtually fireproof at the front with three-inch thick oak doors and a solid concrete roof Fireproof, but not burglar-proof. On 7 September we all caught it. Jew and Gentile, God and Mammon. The bombs did considerable damage, as you can see. And, on the morning of the eighth, I came in to check the extent of the damage and found the doors of the ark open and not a single scroll left. All thirty-one stolen. And you’ve come to tell me you haven’t found them?’

  ‘Rabbi Nader, I’m with the Murder Squad.’

  Despite the nature of his tale, Nader had been smiling throughout. Troy’s words wiped the smile away.

  ‘Who’s been murdered?’

  ‘Izzy Borg, Aaron Adelson, and Moses Friedland.’

  He’d get to Daniel ‘Digger’ Shoval later.

  ‘Of course. I knew about Rabbi Friedland, but Rabbi Borg was run over in the blackout surely? And Rabbi . . .’

  ‘Rabbi Nader, they were all murdered. Someone is killing East End rabbis.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Your father was next on the list.’

  ‘Ah . . .’

  Nader looked down, stirred a few chips of dust and rubble with his shoe. Then he looked Troy straight in the eye.

  ‘Or do you mean, Mr Troy, that I am next on the list?’

  § 166

  They crossed the road to Nader’s house. He led Troy down the corridor to the back, past the open door of the front room, heavily Victorian, deep in its velvets and chenilles, its oak and mahogany, its booklined walls, to sit at the kitchen table. It was like being in Rabbi Friedland’s kitchen. The same plain, square deal table. The same oilskin cloth draped across it.

  ‘My father keeps the parlour strictly for the flock. But you’re not flock, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Think of it as a manse. Then think that we will both be more at ease at the kitchen table.’

  Nader stuck the kettle on and shifted gear, saying simply, ‘What list?’

  Troy told him.

  ‘When exactly?’

  ‘The letter arrived at the office of the Post the day after Russia announced the Nazi pact. That would make it 24 August last year. It’s dated the day before, the 23rd.’

  ‘My father never mentioned it to me. But I was in Manchester most of that summer. In fact, most of this one too. You know, it would be like my father to sign something like this, but not to instigate it. I think the same was true of Rabbi Borg too. Yet you say his name was first in the signatures.’

  ‘No – it wasn’t. Rabbi Shoval was first.’

  ‘But he died . . .’

  ‘Last August – the 29th, five days after the letter arrived. I was a constable in Stepney at the time. I was called out to the scene. It looked like an accident.’

  Nader poured tea and mused. Troy waiting to see where the muse led him.

  ‘Daniel Shoval was the kind of man to have organised a petition. He was a campaigner. Or am I telling you something you know?’

  ‘I heard of Rabbi Shoval. I’d never met him. Shall we say his reputation preceded him?

  ‘He was in the front line at the Battle of Cable Street, when Mosley led his Blackshirts into the East End in ’36.’

  Troy had been there too – in uniform, on duty, but he wasn’t going to mention that.

  ‘And now you think his death was not an accident?’

  ‘It seems unlikely.’

  ‘And Rabbi Borg . . . it is widely believed he died in a road accident in the blackout . . . . Rabbi Adelson . . . I was told had a heart attack . . .’

  ‘And Rabbi Friedland?’

  ‘Well . . . that was shocking. Is shocking. The whole East End is reeling at that.’

  ‘But the whole East End didn’t reel at the the idea of rabbis falling like flies and think something is wrong here?’

  ‘“The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.”’

  ‘He’s taken rather a lot just lately.’

  It was a stupid remark. Troy could have bitten off his tongue.

  Nader said, ‘Are you talking dead rabbis now, Mr Troy, or the state of Europe? There are many among us who think God might have forgotten us altogether. But, yes . . . three dead rabbis in as many months has caused comment. It’s one reason I came back to London. There’s a shortage. I am covering for Rabbi Adelson as well as for my father. Getting bombed out merely creates an excuse to merge the services – Mile End synagogue has no rabbi, Heaven’s Gate has no roof. We double up and we get by. And while none of us worked out that the death of quite so many rabbis might be a new plague, visited on us rather than Egypt . . . it would appear to have taken Scotland Yard a while to make their mind up too.’

  Troy felt doubly crass. Sipped at his tea and bought a little time with honesty.

  ‘Shoval was my mistake. But I didn’t know he’d signed any petition at that point. After all, it was never published. But I’ve treated every single death since as suspicious.’

  ‘Then why the fairy tales about heart attacks and road accidents?’

  Why indeed? No one had specifically told him to fudge the truth – but it had kept the peace. He’d not had Steerforth on his back in ages. By the judicious use of a little fiction, he’d been able to investigate murder without Steerforth sticking his two penn’orth in.

  ‘Special Branch’s thinking, not mine. I was asked in a fairly subtle way not to say outright that I was treating these three recent deaths as murder. I think perhaps they feared a backlash of some sort.’

  ‘I don’t understand, but I suppose that doesn’t matter. But what bothers me is this . . . if the letter was never published, how does anyone know what names appear on it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It went to several papers. All of which were told not to publish by the Home Office. I have no idea how many people read it before that decision was taken. But somebody knows. Somebody’s working down that list and they’ve reached “Nader”.’ />
  § 167

  There were times when Troy thought Who’s Who might be better titled the Index of British Civil Servants and Colonial Officers. Chances were if you needed the dope on someone urgently he wouldn’t be in Who’s Who. A minor baronet would be – indeed his father was, thereby gaining Troy entry as one quarter of ‘2s, 2d’. A public figure from the wrong class would not. You’d learn nothing about the well-known novelist Mr J.B. Priestley or the music hall entertainer Monsewer Eddie Gray from looking in Who’s Who. Every Sir somebody would be there. Sir somebodies of such insignificance as to be immeasurable – the last interesting fact in their entry being the word ‘born’. All the same, he kept a copy in his office, rather thought he was the only detective who did, and had every expectation of finding an entry on each of the men his father had named. He knew all there was to know about Lord Carsington, and had a good handle on Redburn, but he began with the one he knew least about. He’d never heard of Charles Lockett. He was not disappointed.

  Lockett, Charles Jasper Wyatt, MC 1915; b 5 May 1886; Elder s of the Ven. Herbert Lockett of St Albans, Herts, and Frances (neé Wyatt), dau. of Bishop of Matabeleland; Educ: Radley; Kings, Cambridge; All Souls, Oxford (BSc, MLitt, PhD). 9th London Reg. (Queen Victoria’s Rifles), 1915–18; Reader in Zoology 1919–23; Professor of Human Biology 1924–present, University College, London. Publications: The Criminal Skull, 1923; The Beast Within, 1929; Comparative Craniology, 1931; A New Handbook of Phrenology, 1933; The Case for Race, 1935. Recreations: fly-fishing, madrigals. Address: 44b South Hills, NW3.

  Military Cross in the Great War – can’t knock his patriotism then, thought Troy . . . but the list of publications was chilling, a course set steady from the nineteenth century’s half-baked obsession with assessing the mind from the body’s external features, to the paramountcy of racial theory in the dirty Thirties. Troy did not doubt that professors of this, that or the other got where they were through merit and effort and even originality, but how easily they made fools of themselves with easy, lazy populism. In this they were no different from politicians.

  He looked up. Stan had appeared silently in his doorway only the whiff of a Wills Woodbine had alerted Troy to his presence.

  ‘Toffs again?’ Onions said.

  Troy wondered how much to tell him.

  ‘I think I might be on a case in which every suspect is a toff.’

  ‘Which one’s this?’

  ‘The rabbis.’

  ‘So you still think they’re linked.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’ve someone in the frame?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Fine, tell me how exactly.’

  Onions took his usual chair by the unlit gas fire, hunched over in listening mode. Troy told him a clipped version of his conversation with his father.

  ‘It’s all circumstantial, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘In fact, I’d term it a bit of a long shot. In fact, Izzy Borg’s death could well be an accident, as I’ve told you. Friedland – OK, no argument . . . the bugger didn’t stab himself. But Adelson . . . You said yourself Klankiwitch reckons it was heart failure.’

  ‘Induced by . . .?’

  ‘I don’t know and neither do you. You’ve got one murder you seem hell bent on mekkin’ three . . .’

  ‘Er, four actually. I’m counting the chap who was found dead at the foot of an escalator in Bethnal Green Station last August. He was a rabbi too.’

  ‘And now you’ve got a list of suspects that reads like . . .’

  ‘Who’s Who?’ said Troy holding up the fat red book.

  ‘Zackly Who’s bloody Who.’

  ‘Does that bother you?’

  ‘Don’t be daft, lad. We’re the Yard, we haven’t tugged the forelock since the days of Sherlock Holmes and that thick copper – what was his name?’

  ‘LeStrade.’

  ‘Right. LeStrade. I’m not bothered a jot or tittle if you suspect a toff, I’m not bothered if you nick one.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Do you really want to go up against Carsington again?’

  In 1936, when Onions and Troy had first met, Troy had fallen foul of Lord Carsington, had suspected him of complicity in a crime, risked all to confront him with it and been firmly put in his place. Onions had smoothed things out, had reprimanded Troy, and rewarded him with a promise. A promise he had kept last September when he had finally claimed him for the Yard.

  ‘I’ll tell you now,’ Onions went on, ‘it could look like a vendetta.’

  ‘It isn’t. It’s got nothing to do with any previous case. He was named in that letter to the Post. He is as much a suspect as any other person named.’

  ‘Being named doesn’t make ’em suspects. All it does is make ’em undesirables in the eyes of a bunch of cranky old rabbis.’

  ‘Who are now dying like flies.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate. It doesn’t help. Just answer me this, if you get to see any of these nobs and toffs . . . Carsington . . .’

  ‘Redburn, Trench and Lockett.’

  ‘. . . What are you going to say to them? I can’t begin to imagine what your line of enquiry would be.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ said Troy, ‘but I’ll think of something.’

  Onions thought. Lit up another Woodbine from the stub of the last.

  ‘Anyone with four ounces of nous will just show you the door, you know that, don’t you?’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘So, let’s cut the risk, contain the flames a bit, shall we? Don’t talk to Carsington. Only if you draw a total blank with the other three and only after you’ve come back to me wi’ summat that points to Carsington do you talk to him? OK?’

  Troy hated this. It was one hand tied behind his back. To disagree was not an option.

  § 168

  Onions was right. A simple ‘where were you on the night of . . .?’ would have any one of the names on his father’s list reaching for the telephone and asking for their solicitor. It seemed to Troy that each required a different approach. What that approach might be he did not yet know, but as he made his way to Lockett’s office in a building on Malet Street, the first such tactic occurred to him – that Lockett was as likely to be as interested in him as he was in Lockett; that the man, whilst undoubtedly a charlatan, would see himself as some sort of criminologist. Troy had spent a couple of hours in the London Library, had dipped into The Criminal Skull. It had been his father’s advice, uttered to Troy when he had been a reporter in the mid-Thirties . . . ‘Mug up on your man. Not just his Who’s Who entry, but the worst he has uttered or written and remind yourself that this is your man at his worst. For the worst that can befall you is to find your man “charming” or “intriguing” and then you should silently tell yourself you have read him at his worst.’ To read Lockett at his worst meant dipping into The Case for Race too. He had given it fifteen minutes and no more. Lockett could not, would not charm him.

  He was huge, and he was woolly. Giant’s feet. A soft, warm handshake. Grey hair coiling up in wisps like burst springs on an old sofa. Nutbrown eyes smiling at him from behind pince-nez. The bushiest eyebrows he had ever seen. Mr Chips writ large. Indeed, it was a bit like being back at school, in an office stuffed with books, talking to an old duffer spattered with chalk-dust – but Troy had hated school.

  ‘So good of you to call, so good of you.’

  As though he had sent for Troy.

  ‘I’ve been asking Scotland Yard for I-don’t-know-how-long to let me study a detective. So good of you to call.’

  ‘Professor Lockett. I’m with the Murder Squad.’

  ‘Capital, capital. Do sit down, Inspector.’

  ‘I’m a sergeant.’

  ‘Sergeant, quite.’

  Troy took the proffered chair, found himself facing a large, white china head, patterned like a jigsaw puzzle, with mental and moral qualities marked on the cranium . . . firmness, benevolence, destructiveness. And next to it on t
he desk, a fat, black book, Races of Man: An Index of Nigressence. What on earth was nigressence?

  Lockett remained standing and, much to Troy’s annoyance, seemed to be buzzing around behind him.

  ‘I have measured many criminal skulls in my time, as I am sure you will appreciate. I would even go so far as to say I have measured more than either M. Vidocq at the Sureté or the great Lambroso himself. But the point, the point . . . as I have been saying in the Journal of British Criminal Anthropometry for quite some time . . . is that we must also measure the skulls of the police . . . ah . . . ah . . . erm . . .’

  Troy felt the man’s fingertips touch his head above the right ear. It was shocking, but he resisted the impulse to flinch.

  ‘Of course, ideally, one should shave the head . . .’

  ‘Professor Lockett, I’m with the Murder Squad.’

  ‘So you said.’

  The fingers travelled up the side of his skull, and back down again to rest lightly upon one ear.

  ‘Hmmm . . . secretiveness and destructiveness . . . in almost equal measure. Would you say you were secretive, Mr Troy?’

  His own brother was wont to describe him as ‘the most devious little shit in history’.

  ‘No,’ Troy lied.

  ‘Destructive?’

  ‘Who would ever admit to that?’

  ‘Hmm . . .’

  ‘I’m on the Murder Squad . . . and I’m investigating a murder.’

  Lockett looked puzzled, busied himself round to his side of the desk. Then the penny dropped.

  ‘You mean . . . right now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mean that I am part of your investigation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lockett looked oddly at him – it wasn’t his puzzled look, it was something else, and then as the smile spread across his face Troy realised it was excitement.

  ‘Thrilling, simply thrilling!’

  Troy took out the letter his father had given him and laid it out on the desk. The pince-nez were pinched back into place. Lockett’s eyes scanned the page, then the pince-nez were removed as he stared back at Troy.