Riptide

by John Lawton

  ‘You cheated!?’

  ‘I had a friend sat the eye test a little ahead of me. He has what’s called an eidetic memory. You know what that is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Means he sees things as pictures and takes them like a camera. When he wants to remember something he just summons up the picture. Anything from the arrangement of flowers in a vase to pages of print. He can hold thirty thousand words of text in his head, without even thinking of them as words. He just sees a block of images.’

  ‘That’s amazing.’

  ‘He sat the test two hours ahead of me. Came out, drew all the eye charts for me and I learnt them by rote-the hard way. Passed Al.’

  ‘That’s amazing. I never met anyone like that.’

  Cal had, he’d known two people with that gift. One was Billy Blick, who’d helped him into the army. The other was Wolfgang Stahl.

  § 51

  In his room in a London lodging house, Stahl could not sleep. He lay on his cot oblivious to the noises of an uneasy household of single, displaced men-grunting, arguing, farting, fighting-the walking wounded of life, not war-and stared at the ceiling. Image after image flashed onto it, the family trees of battle formation: Army Group North, von Leeb, 21 Infantry Divisions; Army Group Centre, von Bock, 32 Infantry Divisions; Army Group South, von Runstedt, 63 Infantry Divisions. If that didn’t put him to sleep he’d start on the Panzers.

  § 52

  Cal was woken by the ‘phone. Eight thirty. Walter time. Except that it couldn’t be Walter. Not today. It was. He shook Kitty.

  ‘Get up. For God’s sake, get up!’

  ‘Wossmatter?’

  ‘Your father’s here.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘This time he’s coming up.’

  Cal tugged her naked into the bathroom, resisting all the way. He turned on the taps.

  ‘What are you doing? Leggo!’

  She jerked free of him, and he slammed the door with his backside, pressed against the panel.

  ‘Stay here. The noise of the water should smother any sound you make. Just stay here!’

  He slipped out, dashed around the bedroom. Pulled on his robe. Gathered the scattered clothing Kitty had peeled off and thrown down the night before. He shoved the bundle at her through the bathroom door, but she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him in.

  ‘We don’t have to hide.’

  ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘You do. Or would you rather your father found us like this?’

  ‘Like what? Calvin-I’ll be thirty this summer. He can’t possibly think I’m a virgin.’

  ‘Do you really want what he might think to be confirmed this way?’

  They could hear Stilton knocking at the door now. She lowered her voice.

  ‘They can’t nag me about not being married at twenty-nine and expect me to be a virgin, now can they?’

  ‘Get dressed and stay quiet. I’ll get rid of him.’

  He opened the door, feigning sleepiness, when even the hairs on his head stood to attention.

  ‘Walter?’

  Stilton pushed past him. Pacing the middle of the room. Antsy in a way Cal had never seen him before. Then he seemed to sniff the air. Oh, God, Cal thought, what is it-her scent, or worse, the reek of illicit sex?

  Stilton snapped to, plonked himself down in one of the bucket chairs by the window. ‘We’ve work to do,’ he said. ‘Things we both forgot.’

  Cal stood still. Pretended to scratch his head until he realised that this could only make him look like Stan Laurel.

  ‘Walter, are you sure this is a good idea? Isn’t this a little too soon?’

  ‘Work’s the best remedy I know of. I’ll be fine. Don’t you worry about me.’

  ‘The family, Walter. Aren’t there things to be… to be… arranged?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like… a funeral?’

  ‘You need bodies for a funeral. My lads are five hundred fathoms down in the Atlantic.’

  Of course-it was a stupid remark.

  ‘Walter, would you give me a few minutes to get myself together?’

  ‘Aye-I’ll read the morning paper. But chop chop all the same.’

  In the bathroom Kitty had settled into the bath and was soaping herself lazily, a hand gliding the length of one arm, cupping one breast, nipple up, lips pursed to blow bubbles off it and create one of the simplest pleasures known to man-soapy tits. Cal wished he could ignore this, wished she’d stop what she’d started. He sat on the lavatory seat, eyes on her body, mind struggling back towards the remote outposts of common sense.

  ‘D’yer get rid of him?’

  ‘Er… no, he’s staying. I’ll have to get dressed and go out with him. You’d better stay here until you hear me slam the door.’

  ‘And

  ‘And I have to shave.’

  ‘You can’t go out all icky-fluffed from bed. Why don’t you get in with me? I’ll soap yer todger.’

  ‘Kitty. You just lost two brothers. Your mother’s up to her eyes in grief. Your father’s in the next room telling me he wants to bury himself in his work…’

  ‘Yeah. But we’re still alive, aren’t we? I think you should get in with me. I think you should get it while you can.’

  ‘Is that your life’s motto in a nutshell, Kitty?’

  ‘Pretty much. You getting in or not?’

  Cal said nothing. Whipped the razor across his face, brushed his teeth, dearly wished he could piss in front of a woman, but found he couldn’t, went back to his bedroom and threw on his clothes.

  ‘I remembered,’ Walter was saying. ‘We never got round to what our man had in his pockets.’

  Cal took an envelope out of the desk drawer and set it on the round table in front of Stilton. Stilton put on his reading glasses and spent five minutes peering closely at the late Peter Robinson’s documents.

  ‘What conclusion did you reach?’ he asked.

  ‘Walter, could we discuss this over breakfast?’ said Cal.

  Stilton looked at his pocket watch. Cal had hit him where it counted.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said.

  There was a clunk from the bathroom. Cal ignored it. Stilton did not appear to have heard. Cal slammed the door after them as loudly as he could. Stilton glanced at him but said nothing.

  With a cup of coffee inside him and six floors of steel and concrete between him and Kitty, Cal felt much more like answering questions. Through a mouthful of toast and marmalade, Walter asked the same one again.

  ‘What did you make of it all?’

  ‘They sent a two-man team. We got lucky. The man on the roof was an assassin, just the same as Smulders-sent to kill Stahl. Only this one they landed from a U-boat on some bleak stretch of coast, rather than send him in pretending to be a refugee. Could be they hoped we’d be so taken up with Smulders we’d never notice this one. He called himself Peter Robinson, by the way.’

  ‘Aye, I saw. Forensics reckon there was nothing about his clothing to suggest he was German. British labels. Phillips replacement rubber soles on his shoes. An Ona condom still in its foil packet lost in the lining of his jacket. Home and Colonial linen handkerchief. Remains of London bus tickets in the dust in the bottom of his pockets, a bit of old Fry’s chocolate paper stuck to ‘em. They’d kitted him out down to the fluff. What did you reckon to the paperwork?’

  ‘I’ve never seen an ID card. But the Germans are first-rate at this sort of thing. If Robinson was sent by the Abwehr, and I might add that is only one possibility, then Canaris’s back-room boys would have seen to it he got the best.’

  Stilton swilled tea, Cal stared at him, wondering if he really had taken the one possibility at face value. Privately, Cal thought it much more probable that Admiral Canaris knew nothing of these men, that they had been sent by Heydrich.

  ‘Oh, they’re very good,’ said Stilton. ‘You ever seen food coupons?’

  ‘Clothing-yes. Food-no. I eat here or I eat out. In either case, off the ration.’


  Stilton passed him the ration book.

  ‘Are they obviously bad?’ Cal asked.

  ‘No, no. They’re not. They’re good. Thing is, they’re too good. Ration books are inky and messy. The perforations have gaps where they won’t tear. This is perfect.’

  Cal looked at it, without any clear notion of what he was looking for.

  ‘You mean they slipped up?’

  ‘You tell me?’

  ‘They wouldn’t. If they’d seen a current British ration book they’d have copied it exactly.’

  ‘And if they hadn’t?’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘ID cards don’t change. The ration book’s changed a few times-when the ration changes, or at least when they add a new item to it, it does. Cheese went on only a week or two before you got here.’

  The wistful, sad look of a trencherman denied passed across Stilton’s face.

  ‘Meat went down to a shillin’ per person. I ask you-a bob’s worth a week.’

  Cal nodded, trying to fake sympathy with a man who regularly ate two breakfasts. Stilton picked up his thread again.

  ‘Could be the Abwehr can’t keep up. Can’t get hold of’em as fast as we can print ‘em.’

  ‘I still don’t follow.’

  ‘I think our chum bought it here. I think it might be the one thing he couldn’t get in Germany. I think it’s a local forgery.’

  ‘Why? Why would anyone fake food coupons? Seems like a lot of trouble for nothing.’

  ‘When you’ve been here a while, Calvin, you’ll eat your words. And when you’ve been on the British diet for a while, you’ll think your own words a damn sight tastier than a sausage made up of the worst scraps in a butcher’s shop and a handful o’ sawdust. O’ course there’s villains forging coupons. They’re like anything else in a society made up of scarcity-a tradeable, and therefore a nickable and fakeable commodity.’

  ‘You mean we’ve got a lead?’

  ‘I’m pretty certain we could find the bloke who made this ration book. But that doesn’t lead us to Stahl, does it? Just lets us follow the trail back to Robinson.’

  ‘Or,’ said Cal, ‘to the point where his trail crosses Stahl’s.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Hasn’t it puzzled you how easily Stahl and Smulders found one another?’

  ‘If they found one another…’

  ‘Indulge me a little longer, Walter. We’ve proceeded for a week or more, now, on the assumption that Stahl killed Smulders. If we hadn’t we would not have found Robinson, would not have mistook him for Stahl. We thought we were following Stahl.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Stahl found Smulders before Smulders found him because he’s using the German network.’

  Stilton raised a bushy eyebrow at this but said nothing.

  ‘He’s using what he knows. It’s a terrible risk, but if he wanted to stay underground it was what he had to use. All the contacts the Germans have in London. At least all the contacts he knew about-and of course, Stahl being Stahl, he’d have made it his business to know.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of this… this… network.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, Walter, I don’t mean Germany has infiltrated on the grand scale. I’m not talking about a vast, secret Fifth Column. I’m talking about sending agents abroad with a few names, someone who might give them a room without too many questions, someone who can fake a ration book. That’s all.’

  ‘I know what you mean. I just don’t like it. Short of a network of spies, you’re saying Jerry picks up on that element in society that’ll do anything for half a crown and a bag of peanuts-they’re using the scum of London, the forgers, the tea-leafs, the dips I spent most of my early days locking up. I’ve seen some right villains in me time, but I’d’ve said most of ‘em were patriotic when push comes to shove. And push came to shove at Dunkirk. We’ve had our backs to the wall ever since. I’d like to think there was a scrap of decency even in the worst of men.’

  ‘A couple of rotten apples, Walter, that’s all. Not the whole damn hogshead.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.’

  ‘May not even be English. Look at that woman caught last year passing information to the Germans at the Russian Tea Rooms.”What woman?’

  It occurred to Cal that he’d boobed, that the British people, and that included Chief Inspectors of Police, had been told nothing about the arrest and trial of Tyler Kent of the US Embassy, and Anna Wolkoff of the Russian Tea Rooms in Kensington. It was common talk in the world in which he moved but, as this conversation was revealing to him, the outrage to which Walter could be provoked showed how different their worlds were.

  ‘About a year ago,’ Cal went on, ‘a Russian exile was found to be a German agent. That’s all. It’s no big deal.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And now she’s serving time in Holloway.’

  ‘You mean there was a trial?’

  He seemed both surprised and hurt not to be in the know.

  ‘Walter, you know… secrets.’

  ‘Secrets,’ Stilton repeated as though the word meant nothing to him.

  ‘You know, maybe somebody just called for the “binmen”?’

  ‘Touché,’ said Stilton softly.

  Cal picked up the ration book again.

  ‘A local forgery, you say?’

  ‘I’m almost certain of it.’

  ‘Do you know the local fakers?’

  ‘No, but I know a man who does. There’s a bloke at the Yard deals in little else. If you could give me a couple of hours, I could ‘appen have a word with him.’

  ‘Appen?’ Cal mimicked.

  Stilton looked guilty.

  ‘Aye. I’m not dumping you, honest-but there’s things best said copper to copper.’

  ‘That’s OK, Walter. I understand. There’s something I could be getting on with anyway. Why don’t you pick me up around lunchtime?’

  Cal went back to the sixth floor and found his something wrapped in his dressing gown, drying her hair.

  ‘You see him off then?’

  ‘Kitty,’ he said. ‘We can’t go on like this.’

  ‘Like wot?’ she said.

  § 53

  Inspector Drew held the ration book up to the light. Then he took a large magnifying glass from the top drawer of his desk, and scrutinised it. It was a full minute before he spoke. ‘It’s as though he’d signed it. The silly sod.’

  Stilton said nothing. He liked Drew. He was his opposite as a copper-young, technically-trained, a desk and paper man, a meticulous man with a field of expertise at his fingertips, not the shoe-leather, brown mac and make-it-up-as-you-go-along copper he knew himself to be. More than he liked him, he admired Drew. It was hard not to. In his way he was the English, the civilised version of that lunatic Pole Kolankiewicz out at the Hendon lab. You admired Kolankiewicz, you respected his talent, but you’d never say you liked him.

  ‘It’s perfection. What the Ministry of Food aspires to and will never attain. So silly. It would be a piece of cake for him to make a messy one, but no-he has to turn in a work of art.’

  ‘He?’ Stilton said. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Forsyte. Lawrence Forsyte. It’s his work. I’ve no doubt about it. Best in the business. Least he was till I nicked him in ‘37. Five to seven years for forging five-pound notes.’

  Stilton found this confusing.

  ‘We didn’t have ration books in 1937. And this is bang up to date.’

  Drew put the paraphernalia of his trade down and chewed a moment on the end of his pencil.

  ‘Walter-what I have to tell you must go no further. You do understand that, don’t you?’

  ‘O’ course.’

  ‘Forsyte served less than three years. He was paroled in January last year.’

  ‘Then it’s time we yanked on his leash. He could go down for another stretch for this, as well as the one he hasn’t finished.’

  ‘No, Walter. That’s just it. He can’t
and he won’t. Forsyte works for us now. Or to be more accurate, for your lot.’

  ‘The Branch?’

  ‘Not quite-but you do have the same masters. Penny dropped now, has it? Good. Larry forges all the German stuff we need to send our chaps into occupied territory. Travel permits, identity cards. They’ve even got him at work on Reichsmark notes. Whatever he’s done, he’s pretty well untouchable.’

  ‘What he’s done is forge ration books. If that’s for the war effort I’m a monkey’s uncle!’

  ‘Well-I’m sure he’d say the temptation was too great. I keep an eye on him, of course. Helps to let him know he’s not entirely ignored by the Forgery Squad. But most of the time they use your colleagues in the Branch as nothing more than go-betweens, and the truth is they let him do what he wants-orders, naturally-and with that kind of freedom he’ll dabble in this sort of thing just to see if he can do it. I shouldn’t think it bothers the spooks-if they have to turn a blind eye to it, then of course they will.’

  ‘I took this off a dead German agent two nights back. How do you explain that? Is that dabbling?’

  ‘I don’t explain it. And I’m inclined to take it as seriously as you do.’

  ‘Then you’ll tell me where I can find him?’

  ‘If I do-two things. First, you never got his address from me, and second, you can threaten him all you like, but you can’t pull him. Shout at him, let him taste the back of your hand, tickle his ribs with a truncheon, if you like, but if you go after Forsyte all you’ve got is one big bluff.’

  ‘Story of my career,’ said Stilton.

  Even now Drew was still thinking about it, teeth clamped onto his pencil, little flakes of yellow paint sticking to his lip.

  ‘OK. He has a printing shop in Silver Place. Nothing more than an alley at the end of Beak Street. You’ll find him in the cellar.’

  ‘I’ll find him? You mean you’re not coming?’

  ‘Sorry, Walter. You’re on your own. Whatever you do when you get there, I don’t want to know. And if he picks up the phone to Military Intelligence, I shall want to know even less.’

  § 54