Riptide

by John Lawton

  After his second whisky he could not but muse out loud.

  ‘I mean, I can’t just dump the fellow, can I?’

  ‘Doesn’t seem fair,’ said Charlie, pandering.

  ‘That’s what the old man doesn’t grasp-“fairness”. Everything is contingent to Gordon.’

  ‘I rather think that’s the nature of war, total contingency,’ said Charlie. ‘However, I’ve an idea. There’s Orlando Thesiger over by the bar…’

  ‘Is he? Where?’

  ‘Two tables to the left, chatting to Margot Asquith.’

  Reggie strained his eyes. He could just make out the languid figure of Thesiger sprawled in a bucket chair, long legs crossed, knees jutting, head nodding gently, in perfect listening mode-listening to something old Margot was telling him, smiling, then laughing. She was known for her wit. She’d been outrageous since long before he or Thesiger were born.

  ‘OK. I see him now. What’s your point?’

  ‘Well, before I got moved to Six, I had four months working for Orlando just after the fall of France. He spends his time quizzing suspected spies out at Burnham-on-Crouch. They fish them out of the water and Orlando has to decide whether they’re kosher or not. They come across in rowing boats, on rafts and God knows what. Most of them are completely innocent, but every so often the Germans try and slip one through. As well as chaps like me, Orlando’s got a bunch of Special Branch coppers working under him-they do the surveillance, arrests, all the legwork, that sort of thing. He must have someone who can look after your Yank. Show him around London, take him to all the likely places.’

  ‘A German speaker would be useful.’

  ‘A German speaker in the Met? You’ll be lucky. Most of ‘em hardly speak English!’

  Reggie got to his feet.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s worth a try. Do you think you’re up to entertaining the Countess while I buttonhole him?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Charlie, ‘but I’ve always wanted to try.’

  § 19

  Thesiger caught Stilton the next day, just as he was leaving Scotland Yard. Hat and coat on, out of the door and halfway down the corridor when a constable called him back to the telephone. ‘Do you still want a chance to use your German?’ Thesiger asked.

  ‘Hess…?’

  “Fraid not. But there’s an American who needs your services. He’s been brought in from somewhere or other, based at the embassy, and I gather they’ve given him a room at Claridge’s. Name of Cormack. First name Calvin. A captain.’

  ‘An American. I don’t…’

  ‘I can’t tell you any more. In fact it isn’t my show. It isn’t even Five. You’ll report to Colonel Ruthven-Greene at Six. You’d better get in touch with him straight away. Trust me. It’s big. Bigger than anything you’ve done for me. It matters. And you’ll be on the trail of a real live Jerry of your own.’

  ‘A Jerry?’

  ‘Yes, a wild card. A loose cannon, from what I can gather. Now, about our Dutchman, Smulders.’

  ‘He’s been up West a couple of times. Once to a printing house in Covent Garden. Didn’t get the job.’

  Stilton stopped. He’d said a word too much already. He hoped Thesiger would just accept it all at face value and ring off. Thesiger was not the sort of man to let a casual remark have a casual escape.

  ‘A couple of times, you said?’

  ‘One or two, aye.’

  ‘You lost him. Is that what you’re saying?’

  It had been one of Stilton’s constables, but it was a pathetic Chief Inspector who blamed his men. He’d bollocked the constable. If Thesiger now wanted to bollock him he’d just have to take it.

  ‘Last night, as it happens. Just north of Oxford Street, close by the Marquis of Lincoln. Pitch dark in the blackout. Couldn’t be helped. He was home before midnight. No harm done.’

  ‘Walter, I don’t want to make obstacles for you, but if you take on the American are you sure you can still handle Smulders?’

  When Thesiger called him Walter it was usually a preface to him being put on a spot.

  ‘It won’t happen again, sir. We’ll be watching him day and night.’

  § 20

  Frederick Troy had arrived at Church Row, Hampstead, for an early dinner with his parents. His mother had insisted. They were so rarely in town these days, and Troy so rarely found his way out to Mimram, the country home in Hertfordshire, that she had taken to nagging him. Particularly if his brother Rod was on leave.

  ‘How else am I ever to see my family all together?’ she asked pointlessly. And once in a while it worked. Troy would have a day off that coincided with Rod’s leave, and their sisters, the twins, Maria and Alexandra, would be whipped in from their conjugal homes.

  ‘Dinner will be a little late,’ said his mother as he kicked the front door shut and hung up his coat. He dutifully pecked her on the cheek-she stood, shorter than he, poised for the gesture as of right-before she finished what she had to say.

  ‘Your father and Rod are in the study. We have a visitor.’

  ‘Who?’ Troy asked her vanishing back.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  She was full of phrases like that. She was not past saying to a man of twenty-five, and at that a Scotland Yard detective, that if he asked no questions he’d be told no lies.

  Troy looked in through the open study door. Rod was perched on the edge of a sagging, tatty armchair, an eager, argumentative look on his face. Troy knew that look. The keenness of argument, the triumph of intellect over adversity could lead him to a single-minded honesty that knew no tact. His father was behind his desk. Another blue notepad in front of him. A pencil behind one ear and a pile of balled blue pages tumbling forth from the upturned wastepaper basket. Today he had shaved. Today he had dressed. A stout man sat on the chesterfield with his back to Troy. All Troy could see of him was a thinning pate and the broad expanse of back in its brown striped jacket.

  ‘No,’ said Rod.

  ‘No,’ said his father, and then he noticed Troy.

  ‘Freddie,’ he beckoned him closer. ‘You know Bert, do you not?’

  Troy moved tentatively into the room-if they were arguing about Russia again, he was just going to leg it and leave them to stew-and the stout body turned to look at him. A round, ruddy face, a small moustache, beady eyes. It was Wells. Herbert George Wells. HG to the world, Bert to his friends.

  ‘I was just saying,’ he began in a high, strained, middling-posh English voice, ‘who was it uttered the platitude about Russia-about the Soviet Union?’

  ‘Which platitude?’ said Troy. ‘There’ve been so many.’

  His father smiled at this. Rod didn’t. Wells looked plainly puzzled.

  ‘I meant,’ he continued, ‘the one about “I have seen the future and it works”.’

  ‘Don’t say Shaw,’ Rod chipped in. ‘We’ve done Shaw.’

  ‘I thought it was you,’ said Troy.

  ‘Me? Surely I’d remember if I’d said it myself!’

  ‘Wasn’t it in The Shape of Things to Come?’ Troy persisted.

  ‘No it wasn’t!’ said Wells, and Troy could see him reddening into annoyance. Wells could be such a crosspatch.

  ‘You’ve said so much, Bert,’ Alex said. ‘Who could blame you if you forget?’

  ‘I didn’t forget it. I never bloody said it in the first place!’

  Rod-ever the peacemaker, ever the inadvertent troublemaker, arbiter of truth, dispenser of English decency-stepped in with, ‘Bertrand Russell? That thing of his. Theory and Practice of Bolshevism.’

  Alex and Wells shook their heads and said a simultaneous ‘no’.

  Alex picked up the thread. ‘Didn’t Philip Snowden’s wife do a book after her Russian trip? Across Bolshevist Russia by Dog Sled or something? About ten years ago it seemed that anyone who got to go there wrote a damn book about it.’

  ‘If she had,’ said Wells, ‘would we any of us remember it?’

  Polly the housemaid appeared in the doorway wit
h a dinner gong. She looked at Troy, listened to the burgeoning argument, and froze, her big eyes wide, her hand poised.

  ‘Just hit it,’ Troy mouthed at her. And two of the Western World’s greatest thinkers were gonged off.

  He found himself seated between his sisters, Masha to his left, Sasha to his right. He hoped their affairs were going well. If they, in the absence of husbands who’d enlisted at the first blast of war’s trumpet, were manless, they could be peevish beyond measure and would take it out on him. In their eyes he was still eight years old. They guarded him alternately viciously and preciously, as though his supposed virginity might somehow balance the spent currency of their own. Worse, sooner or later, since they knew no guilt, they would want to boast to him. He never wanted to listen. The last time, Sasha had described her unstoppable adulteries as her part of the war effort. Her mission to make English manhood happy. Those about to die got the chance to salute her.

  ‘Got a girlfriend these days?’ she said without preamble.

  Troy said nothing.

  Masha leaned over him.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you? He ditched that little WPC he was with, didn’t you Freddie?’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘Just as well,’ said Sasha. ‘Not your type. Honestly.’

  ‘What is my type?’ and he regretted instantly having spoken.

  ‘Dunno. Just not wotsername.’

  ‘You know,’ said Masha, ‘I’ve forgotten her name too. Milly or Molly or something?’

  At the other end of the table, where Troy dearly wished he had been seated, Rod, their father and Wells had moved on from Russia to the only topic of the moment. The war. Rod had been holding forth for some minutes on the subject of a second front. Wells, having endured as much of his own silence as he could manage in the course of a single meal, said, ‘Surely that’s why he’s here? Hess was sent to avert that possibility. To offer some sort of alliance and so pre-empt a second front.’

  They both looked at Alex, as though this were his cue.

  ‘A second front?’

  ‘Second to North Africa, I meant,’ said Rod.

  ‘I know what you meant. But it seemed to me only the other day that we were fighting on half a dozen fronts at the same time, even if we do not call them fronts.’

  ‘Were we, I mean are we?’ Rod looked nonplussed.

  ‘North Africa… we have barely left Greece…’ Alex went on.

  ‘And we have barely begun in Crete,’ Wells added.

  ‘The skies above us, and the waves below us, at least above us here and below those of our people stuck in the mid-Atlantic with German U-boats on the prowl.’

  ‘That’s five, four and a half really-I don’t think you can have Greece and Crete in their entirety,’ said Rod unhelpfully. ‘There’s not a British soldier in Greece, other than the POWs, and not a German one on Crete.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Alex, ‘not yet.’

  ‘So what’s the other?’ Rod said.

  ‘Iraq,’ Troy said from the far end of the table.

  ‘Quite right.’ A nod of acknowledgement from his father. ‘Iraq it was. Five and a half fronts-if you like. However, I cannot but think of it in terms of the last war. Eastern Front and Western Front. Sooner or later the pattern will reassert itself. And as to Hess being here: I don’t know why he’s here. I’d dearly love to be able to ask him.’

  ‘Perhaps Churchill will let you,’ said Wells.

  Alex tilted his bowl, scooping at the last of a thin clear soup which Troy had found so tasteless as to be unidentifiable.

  ‘Winston and I are no longer as close as we were. I cannot remember precisely when we last spoke, but it must have been in 1939 or thereabouts.’

  ‘It was just after your editorial on the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Dad,’ Rod said.

  Troy would not have bothered. They all knew when it had been. The row had been volcanic.

  He felt hot breath upon his ear. Polly, clutching a bowl of steaming cabbage, was whispering to him.

  ‘It’s that Onions bloke from the Yard, young Fred. He wants you on the blower.’

  Troy ducked out, feeling his mother’s eyes upon him. Back in the study, the phone lay off the hook on his father’s desk. He picked it up and heard Superintendent Stanley Onions’ Lancashire growl.

  ‘Are you free?’

  It didn’t matter if he wasn’t.

  ‘Body for you. A Mrs O’Grady, lla Hoxton Street, phoned in. Lodger tripped and fell down a flight of stairs. Dead as a doornail. Better check it out. You never know.’

  ‘You never know’ just about summed up the working lives of two detectives on the Murder Squad.

  Troy made his excuses in the dining room. Saw his mother rise and throw down her napkin, coming round the table to him.

  ‘My dear, we have only just started the main course. Does Scotland Yard want you to starve?’

  Her words all at odds with her gestures, she kissed him on both cheeks, escorted him to the door and made no effort beyond the formality of words to detain him.

  ‘Is he still trying to write the same article?’ Troy asked as he slipped into his coat.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And he will tie us all in knots until he has done so. At the moment the idea is that he and Wells will write it together. I’ll be amazed if it survives the evening. They’ll be at each other’s throats before the dessert if Rod doesn’t stop stirring.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean to. In fact he doesn’t know he’s doing it. He just drops bricks.’

  ‘Your faith in innocence would be touching were it not for your odd choice of profession.’

  It was odd. And she’d never let him forget it.

  § 21

  Cal dashed into Lippschitz Bros., slapped down two pounds ten shillings and grabbed the package the old men had for him.

  ‘Don’t you want to wait for a fitting?’ they yelled after him.

  ‘Don’t have the time!’

  It was a mistake. He stood in front of the mirror in his room at Claridge’s and cursed the name of Lippschitz. The waist bagged, the jacket hung on him like something made for Cab Calloway to sport on Lenox Avenue, and the trouser cuffs let daylight onto his socks. He looked like a clown. Damn, damn, damn. And there wasn’t a spare second to do a thing about it. He ran for a cab.

  He was wondering why Stilton had suggested a pub and not Scotland Yard or the American Embassy, wondering how he’d know Stilton if he saw him.

  It was too easy. He pushed open the saloon door of the Green Man in the Strand. A man leant against the bar, chatting happily to the barman in an accent Cal could not place, one hand in his trouser pocket, one elbow on the bar, looking for all the world as though he could hold the posture all night if need be.

  ‘Not so much as a whizz or a bang for five days. ‘Appen it’s over,’ he was saying.

  ‘More like Adolf s saving it all up for a big one. I’ve heard say the next’ll be the biggest we’ve seen.’

  ‘Jack, you are a miserable sod, you always look on the black side. Try being an optimist. Like I said, ‘appen it’s over.’

  Jack gave this a second’s thought, then slapped his hand on the bar. ‘Touch wood,’ he said, then he looked at Cal, as though waiting for his order. Stilton’s eyes followed and found Cal.

  He was a big man, as tall as Cal himself, but sixty or more pounds the heavier, and every inch the London bobby. A nondescript, voluminous brown mackintosh, a trilby hat perched on the bar next to his pint, shiny boots-polished until they gleamed like ebony-and a plump, reddish, fiftyish face, framing bright brown eyes and a big, bushy, wild moustache-the only un-neat thing about the man. Peeping from beneath the mackintosh were the folds of a dark, striped suit-better by far than the work of the fifty-shilling tailor Reininger had sent him to-knife-edge creases in the trousers, cuffs neatly resting upon the tops of his boots, not hovering at half-mast around the ankles like Cal’s.

  He straightened up. Stuck out a hand.

  ‘Stilton. Walter Stilt
on. You must be Mr Cormack.’

  Cal shook the hand. Tried once more to place the accent and couldn’t.

  ‘Do I look that much like an American?’ he asked.

  ‘You said it, lad, I didn’t. Now. What’s your poison?’

  ‘A pint,’ said Cal, hoping it was what was expected of him.

  ‘Pint o’ what?’ Stilton replied, piling on the confusion.

  ‘What do you have?’

  The barman answered. ‘Bitter, mild, stout…’

  Bitter sounded… well… bitter. Mild sounded pathetic. Had to be stout.

  ‘Fine,’ said Stilton. ‘Jack, bring ‘em over. Mr Cormack an’ me’ll be in the snug.’

  The snug turned out to be a room the size of a closet, partitioned from the main bar by an elaborately etched glass door. He guessed that Stilton wanted privacy. The snug was empty, but then so was the bar. Thursday evening was clearly not their rush hour.

  ‘I’ve not been told a lot, you understand. Just the basics. You’ll have to bring me up to date as best you can.’

  Cal stared at the poster on the wall above Stilton’s head. A caricature of Hitler, all cowlick and toothbrush moustache, had been worked into a repeated motif for wallpaper-little Hitlers spiralling down the poster-and the caption ‘Walls have ears’. He’d seen posters much like this dotted all over London in the last few days: ‘Walls have ears’-‘Careless talk costs lives’-‘Keep Mum She’s Not So Dumb’-and no one seemed to pay a blind bit of notice.

  The barman set a pint of black stuff in front of him. Stilton put a few coppers on the table and waved Cal down when he reached for his wallet.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Stilton.

  Cal sipped at his pint. It tasted like mud. It was so thick you couldn’t see through it. He must have pulled a face.

  ‘Not to your taste, lad?’

  ‘No, no,’ Cal lied. ‘It just takes a bit of getting used to. So many things do.’

  ‘Now-to business. About this Jerry we’re after. Colonel Ruthven-Greene got on the blower to…’

  ‘The blower?’

  ‘Telephone, lad. I left a message for him at Broadway. He called me back. Filled me in. Told me to lend you a hand.’