by John Lawton
‘I didn’t mean what does he look like. I meant… what’s he like?’
Kitty turned her back on him, swung her legs to touch the floor, looked back at him, arms out, hands resting on her knees, back bent, breasts pendulous.
‘Wot do you mean wot’s he like? You never asked before.’
‘I was curious.’
‘Nosy more like.’
‘Then indulge me.’
‘You want to know why I’m with him, don’t you?’
‘To be precise, I want to know why you’re not with him.’
She stared at the ceiling, dug her fists into her waist, arched her back and stretched her neck, breasts flattened out against her ribcage. A faint snap of cartilage as she unbent and looked back at him.
‘Well, since you ask, he’s-‘
§ 44
Stilton looked at his makeshift posse. The tall, speccy American. The short, sly, lazy London copper. He knew what duty and regulations demanded of him-that he take Dobbs into the house on Cleveland Street with him. But he also knew what he had promised the American. Besides, if it came to a bit of the rough stuff, Cormack looked as though he might handle himself a sight better than Dobbs.
Dobbs pointed up at the top-floor front window.
‘He’s in there. I watched the blackouts being drawn. There’s an old couple on the ground floor, but nobody on the first or second floors. Bloke on the third went out to work about half an hour ago. I had a quick word with him-a bus driver on the 73-says he thought the top floor was empty until today.’
‘Back way out?’ Stilton said.
‘There’s a door to the mews at the back, but the only way out of the mews is back into Warren Street. From the corner here you can see every way in and out.’
‘Good lad. You stay put. Me and the Captain are going in.’
They took the staircase in silence. It seemed to Stilton so like a repetition of what they had done in Marshall Street only a couple of hours ago that it needed no explanation. No one answered the door, and when Stilton pushed it in, it too banged against the wall of an empty room. But this room hadn’t been stripped and wiped-it was even more like the Marie Celeste. A burning cigarette lay on the side of an ashtray, curling wisps of smoke drifting towards the ceiling. A folded newspaper on the tiny dining table. A slice of toast with two bites out of it. A half drunk cup of tea.
‘I don’t get it,’ he whispered to Cormack. ‘We’d have met him on the stairs.’
Cormack pointed silently at the ceiling and stepped out onto the staircase once more. The stairs narrowed up to a small door set in the roof, scarcely bigger than a hatchway. A chink of moonlight shone through it. The wind caught it, and the gap seemed to open and close as though winking at them. Cormack started up the last flight. Stilton put a hand on his shoulder and held him back.
‘Nay, lad. I came prepared. You didn’t.’
He reached into the long pocket of his trousers, pulled out a full-length Metropolitan Police truncheon and whacked it gently into the palm of his hand.
‘Walter,’ the American said softly. ‘Do you really think we need that?’
‘Dunno. But he’s running, isn’t he? That doesn’t bode well. Bloke who’s running from you can like as not turn on you.’
Cormack gave way. Stilton led off up the stairs and pushed gently at the door. There was a half moon in the sky, enough light to see by. He found himself on a flat roof high above Warren Street, facing a forest of chimney stacks. Stahl could be behind any one of them. He took a cautious couple of steps, then another and another and stood on the grey plain of roofing lead wondering which way next.
From behind the second nearest chimney stack a figure in a black hat appeared. He ran towards Stilton, so quickly, so quietly, Stilton had no time to react. He felt himself rooted to the spot as Stahl closed on him. Then he saw the arm swing up from his side and the glint of moonlight on metal-the gun in his hand.
Stilton felt a blow between his shoulder-blades-a shove that sent him sprawling, face down on the lead roof. Then a bang like the sound his Riley made when it backfired. He raised his head, like a Tommy peeping over the top into no-man’s-land, he thought, just in time to see Stahl hit the roof, flat on his back, dead. The wind caught the black hat and blew it out over the rooftops of London. He turned, flipped onto his backside. Cormack was staring intently at the body, his arm fully extended, clutching a gun. For a few seconds neither of them moved, then Cormack lowered the gun and looked at Stilton. Stilton was struggling to get one foot of leverage. Cormack crouched down-the hand that held the gun loose at his side, the other pushing him gently back down.
‘Sit awhile, Walter. We both should.’
Only now could Stilton hear the rasp of his breathing, see the deep rise and fall of his chest.
‘You’ve not done this before?’
‘No-but I’m trained for it. Had to be a first time. Almost inevitably. Or did you think that because I wore glasses and did a desk job I somehow wasn’t a real soldier?’
‘Dunno what I thought. What is that thing? A cannon?’
‘Smith and Wesson.’
Cormack’s right hand disappeared beneath his coat and the gun vanished into a discreet holster somewhere in the small of his back.
Stilton nodded at the corpse.
‘He’s dead?’
‘Yep.’
‘You’re certain?’
‘He didn’t leave me a lot of choice.’
‘Well-that pisses on the chips doesn’t it?’
Stilton struggled up, Cormack stood and lent his hand.
‘How’s that?’
‘Stahl. You just killed Stahl. All these days looking in every nook and cranny of the city and we end up with another stiff.’
‘That’s not Stahl, Walter.’
Stilton took a few heavy-footed paces towards the body.
‘Looks damn like ‘im to me.’
Cormack stood next to Stilton, looking down. Tall, blond, thirtyish, a neat hole in the forehead leaking blood.
‘It isn’t Stahl. Looks more than a little like him, but it isn’t. If it were, we’d be lying there instead of him.’
‘Could you see it wasn’t him when you shot the bugger?’
‘No-but like I said, he didn’t leave me much choice.’
‘So the only way to be certain was to kill ‘im. If you got ‘im it couldn’t be Stahl-if he got you it was?’
‘That’s about the size of it. ‘Cept it was you he was aiming at.’
‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ,’ said Stilton. ‘If he isn’t Stahl then who the bloody hell is he?’
The crunch of a boot made him turn before Cormack could answer. A fire-watcher in a blue blouse and a tin hat was crossing the roof from the house next door, striding towards them with all the importance of half a uniform built into his cocky swagger. A bantam of a man, in his sixties, short, wiry, the moustache almost as big as he was.
‘I ‘eard a bang.’
He flicked his torch on and off, saw it reflected in the dead eyes of the corpse.
‘Allo, allo, allo. What’s all this then?’
Stilton whipped out his warrant card, held it up to the man’s torch, shot Cormack an eyeball order as his hand reached beneath his jacket once more.
‘I could book you for nicking my lines, you realise. Got to be a copper to say “allo, allo, allo”.’
The man stared at the card.
‘You’re a copper?’
‘I didn’t print it meself, if that’s what you think. Chief Inspector Stilton, Scotland Yard.’
‘Like I said, I ‘eard a bang. It’s me job to investigate things that go bang.’
‘If you don’t bugger off, it’ll be your head that goes bang against my fist. This is coppers’ business. Go about your own business and say nowt to nobody.’
‘Charming,’ said the fire-watcher, but he left all the same.
‘Can you trust him?’ Cormack said softly.
‘God knows, but the soon
er we call out the binmen for this one the better.’
‘Binmen?’
‘Cleaners-blokes who come out and take care of things like this.’
‘Shouldn’t we just dial 999?’
‘Not on your nellie. Nobody’s to know about this. If this gets out how can I ever boast to you again that there’s no spies in London we don’t know about? Thing is, I meant it at the time. I’d’ve put a fiver on it to be true-but there you are. I was wrong. No, this gets buried. I tell my people. You tell nobody-and in return I won’t mention you were the one with the gun.’
This last sentence was uttered in a closely conspiratorial stage-whisper.
‘It’s perfectly legit, Walter. I’m a serving army officer.’
‘You’re a serving army officer out of uniform. If that cockamamy suit’s the new American uniform, then I feel sorry for the lot of you.’
There was a pause. Stilton looked at the door again, making sure no one else was about to emerge armed with a torch and a daft question, half expecting to see Dobbs.
‘I have to leave you alone with him. I have to go and call my people, you see.’
‘That’s OK. I understand.’
‘Could you bear to touch him?’
‘Touch him?’
‘Someone’s got to go through his pockets.’
‘His pockets?’
‘Papers and that.’
Stilton searched for the right word and came up with the all too obvious. ‘Clues,’ he said, as though it were a technical term and somehow the arcane nature of it might be lost on Cormack.
‘That’s OK, Walter. I can look for “clues”.’
‘I’ll be about ten minutes. I’ll leave Dobbs out front to keep an eye open. Let’s just hope the buggers don’t take all night about it.’
§ 45
Left alone, Cal sank down, his back against a chimney stack, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet. He was not accustomed to death, but the body of a dead German-he had to be German, didn’t he?-held no terror. He looked at the face. Yes, he was very like Wolfgang Stahl-and now he understood the hesitation that both Hudge and Fish Wally had shown about the sketch. There was no scar over the left eye.
He began with the gun. Picked it up with the tip of thumb and forefinger. A Browning automatic. A gun very like his own, a medium-bore service weapon. What did you expect? said a voice in his head. A Luger? He sniffed the barrel. It hadn’t been fired recently. Stilton would have been its first victim. The stream of blood from the hole in his forehead had covered his face. He did look like Stahl under the crimson glaze. Now the blood had reached his shirt, which soaked it up like blotting paper. Cal unbuttoned the jacket and looked for an inside pocket. A plain black leather wallet. A packet of Player’s Capstan. He opened the wallet. Letters-all from one Mavis Tookey of Riverside Villas, Leigh-on-Sea. A photograph-a girl in her late teens, presumably the aforementioned Mavis. And a handful of official documents. A National Identity Card. A War Office letter indicating Deferred Service. A Ration Book. All in the name of Peter Robinson-a name he took to be as anonymous here as John Doe might be at home-at an address in Cardiff. The Germans were past masters at this sort of thing. It would be a simple task for them to fit out this assassin with a plausible cover. They’d even given him the stub of a return ticket to Cardiff. The letters were probably real. There probably was a ‘Peter’ in some stalag in Germany, from whom they’d been stolen, and poor Mavis in Riverside Villas would never know the use to which her affections had been put. A sentimental moment seized him: to return the letters to Mavis, to put heart and head back together. Then the unsentimental sharp edge of reality-they’d got number two. The Germans had sent a two-man team to take out Stahl-one in the open and one undercover, left jab, right hook-and they’d got both of them. It improved the odds on Stahl’s surviving long enough for them to blunder into him. He’d have to think hard how to explain this to Walter. It was the sort of thing that Walter’s decency and plodding logic might have difficulty with.
He was reading Mavis’s letters-moved far more by this thin strand of life than he was by the lumpen fact of death at his feet-when Walter returned with two men and a sackcloth body bag.
‘You get everything?’ he asked simply.
Only when he flopped face down onto his bed in Claridge’s and felt the bulge in his pocket did Cal remember that he and Walter had said an exhausted good night, fixed a time for the following day and parted, without Cal handing over the package.
It was not a Kitty night. No telephone call, no gentle tapping at his door. He’d made her mad, but he couldn’t help that. He was glad. He needed the break. All the same it was of Kitty that he thought as he read the love letters of an English girl in an English seaside town to an Englishman in God-knew-where. He fell asleep. Still in his trousers and shirt, still clutching a letter, knowing what he missed-the simple, understated restraint of the way she signed off-‘luv ya xxx.’ He didn’t think Kitty knew the words.
§ 46
Around dawn Troy felt Kitty slide from his bed, heard the rustle of her slipping back into her clothes, the wooden groan of a drawer being prised open.
‘Need a hanky. You don’t mind, do you?’
She plucked out one of his F-embroidered handkerchiefs. Troy said nothing.
Then the gentle click of the Yale engaging on the front door, and the roar of her motorbike ripping up the blackout in Bedfordbury.
Kitty roared home to Covent Garden. All of three streets away. She needed sleep before her shift. She’d got next to none in Troy’s bed. It was less than three hours later when her father phoned to murder sleep.
§ 47
Cal was using Walter as his alarm clock. If he said he’d be there at eight thirty, he would be. Cal would get a call from reception, on the dot. Walter would order a second breakfast on Cal’s room number and happily wait for him. When he awoke at nine, he knew something was wrong-but all he could do was wait. For once, he’d be up and shaved and Walter would have to forego a second breakfast at his expense. He listened to the news as he shaved. The Bismarck was still loose in the North Atlantic. The battle for Crete dragged on-the British were getting hammered. Ever inventive, the Germans had mounted an airborne invasion, floating their soldiers in on parachutes. Nothing like it had been seen in the history of warfare. On the first day the British had picked them off like pheasants driven towards their guns by beaters. But the Germans had soon got the hang of it-Crete was going to fall.
At ten he switched on the radio again in the easy hope of further developments. He’d missed the opening headline, and it was so hard to tell from the tones of a BBC announcer just what you were listening to-the good, the bad or the indifferent…
‘…at six a.m. this morning the Bismarck and the Prince Eugen were sighted in the Denmark Strait and engaged by His Majesty’s ships Hood and Prince of Wales. HMS Hood opened fire at 26,000 yards…’
Good God, that was the best part of fifteen miles.
‘…but failed to find the range of the German ships. HMS Hood was hit by a salvo from the Prince Eugen, and on returning fire the Bismarck too was hit. After several exchanges of fire, the Hood was hit amidships by a shell from the Bismarck, exploded and sank. It is believed the German shell penetrated the ship’s magazine. The search is now under way for survivors. HMS Prince of Wales withdrew from action after receiving several direct hits. There are reports of casualties.’
The understatement was staggering. Was it the Navy or the British? You can’t say nothing, at the same time you can hardly tell the truth, so you end up with the half-truth of unhysterical understatement that becomes a lie in itself. ‘There are reports of casualties.’ Too calm. It was a time to get hysterical. What casualties? Men blown apart? Men blinded and maimed? God, he’d hate to be British this morning. You’d have to be stoic this morning. To be British… and then Cal remembered where he’d seen the name Hood before. Two sailor caps hanging on the back of the kitchen door in the big basement at Jubilee
Street. Walter Stilton’s boys-Kev and Trev-served on the Hood.
He wanted to call Walter. To telephone him. To tell him. He wanted to call Kitty. To tell her what? But he had neither of their numbers. They came to him. One by day and one by night. He was not in control of this. They were.
Patience. All his training had taught him that. He went down to the lobby at lunchtime. Good form had vanished into the occasion. A radio was stuck on one of the tables-half a dozen or so residents clustered round it. He knew the type. Old men-Claridge’s seemed half full of well-heeled widowers at the best of times, old buffers who’d never learnt how to open an egg and could not bear the fuss of a housekeeper. A certain type of old man who wouldn’t leave for the country when the bombs started to fall. Most likely this lot were old soldiers, veterans of the last German war, determined not to miss this one even if it meant staying through the Blitz.
‘Bloody hell,’ said an old boy with a pure white handlebar moustache. ‘Three? Three, out of all those men!’
He turned to Cal as he approached.
‘D’ye hear that, young man? Three survivors from the Hood!’
Three? Out of how many? What was a battleship’s crew these days? Eight hundred? A thousand? Fifteen hundred?
Cal didn’t ask. The broadcast switched to the weather reports. Somebody flicked it off and the ad hoc gathering of old men split up and headed for their separate tables. It must be a sign of shock for an Englishman not to want to hear the weather report, even in this embryonic summer of feeble sunshine and habitual drizzle.
Handlebar moustache was the only one left. He was sitting, head clown, death-dreaming. He twitched, raised his eyes again and noticed that Cal was still there. For a second Cal wondered if he was going to be handed the ‘white feather’. The old man stuck out a hand.
‘Gresley,’ he said. ‘Ernest Gresley. Rorke’s Drift, Ladysmith, Mons. They retired me after Mons. Too old, they said.’
Cal shook the hand. There was a tacit invitation to join him. The old man was older than he thought. He’d stated his credentials, rattled off his resume-and he must be eightyish to have seen Rorke’s Drift. Cal was in awe of the old boy. He was fascinated. This man had fought as a redcoat. The uniform had scarcely changed from the Battle of Long Island in 1776 to the Zulu Wars a hundred years later. Imagine being back in Washington and being able to say he’d met with a real redcoat.