Riptide

by John Lawton

  Kolankiewicz’s staples.

  After three large glasses Cormack managed to utter, ‘Kitty, I’ve been meaning to ask you about Kitty…’

  And Troy said, ‘Later. We’ve got work to do.’

  Cormack rallied, stuck his elbows on his knees and tried to look a bit less as though booze had just dumped him down in the armchair.

  ‘You cracked it?’

  ‘I think so. We’re going to set a trap.’

  ‘That’s what you told me yesterday. So what’s new?’

  ‘We re-run the same plan that Walter did. I’m going to send you a note asking you to meet me at such and such a time and such and such a place, and you’re going to let it sit in your in-tray at the embassy till somebody reads it.’

  Cormack exhaled, a breathy explosion somewhere between a guffaw and complete incredulity.

  ‘You actually think that’ll work?’

  ‘We know whoever it is reads your mail, right?’

  ‘Sure. But the same scam twice-he’ll never fall for it.’

  ‘Which is why the trap needs very tasty bait. I’m going to say that I’ve found Stahl. And that this is the only way Stahl will meet you.’

  ‘You’re assuming that Stahl is of interest to our man.’

  ‘If he isn’t then we’re lost. But equally, I can see no other reason why our man would ever have wanted Walter Stilton dead. And I’m damn sure Walter died because whoever read his letter deduced that Walter was close to finding Stahl. Much as Walter avoided stating it.’

  Cormack thought about this. Just mentioning Walter’s name seemed to bring tears; to his eyes.

  ‘He had found Stahl. I just didn’t know that. He went off on his own and said he’d keep me posted and didn’t.’

  ‘We won’t make that mistake.’

  Troy had tried to make a glib phrase sound as reassuring as he could, but for half a minute he did not know whether Cormack was going to agree to the scheme or not.

  ‘Where is such and such a place and when is such and such a time?’

  ‘I thought tomorrow night. Say around eleven p.m. And I chose a place on the Isle of Dogs-‘

  ‘We have to go on a boat?’

  ‘Let me finish-not that kind of island-it’s a promontory that sticks out into the Thames opposite Greenwich. It’s where most of London’s docks are. I’ve got us a warehouse, or what’s left of one, in Tallow Dock. There’s only one way in but two ways out. It couldn’t be better. You turn up at the agreed time, but meanwhile I’ve got there half an hour earlier. We’ll be ready for him.’

  ‘Just a minute. Why can’t I be the one to get there early?’

  ‘Because “our man” knows what you look like. He’d be much more likely to follow you than to follow me. In fact, I’m acting on the assumption that he’ll work out for himself that killing Walter is unlikely to have made you give up-but also that he hasn’t a clue about me. There’d just have to be somebody like me-logically-some other copper doing what Walter did. I’m playing up to his expectations.’

  ‘So-what you’re telling me is that you’ll be going in there on your own?’

  ‘Initially, yes.’

  ‘Then you’ll need this.’

  Cormack reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a handgun and slid it across the table to him. Troy just looked at it. Did not touch it. It wasn’t the same make as Cormack’s. It was an automatic, but it was bigger, a.38 at least. Cormack clutched his own gun in his right hand.

  ‘You’ll need to know how to speed load. Your life could depend on it. Our man will be armed. Goes without saying. He could have real stopping power. Standard issue is a.45.’

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘He’ll have a gun like yours.’

  Cormack looked at him with incredulity.

  ‘What? How can you know that?’

  ‘Because Walter was shot with a.35.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’

  ‘It didn’t seem important,’ said Troy. ‘And I didn’t want you to feel your brush with Chief Inspector Nailer had been quite as close as it was.’

  ‘Not many people use these, you know.’

  ‘I do know, and I think the fact is rather in our favour.’

  ‘Whatever. Just watch me.’

  Cormack held a spare clip in his left hand. The flick of a switch and the old clip fell out, the new was banged in and he had racked a bullet into the chamber and levelled the gun.

  ‘Less than two seconds. Try it.’

  It had seemed to Troy like the handiwork of a magician. One second he was watching Cormack’s face, the next he was staring down the barrel of a freshly loaded gun. The hand was truly quicker than the eye. Cormack was looking straight at him now, picking up on his incredulity.

  ‘Or did you think that because I wore glasses and did a desk job I somehow wasn’t a real soldier?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Troy. ‘I was thinking more about myself. Sorry, I’m not a gunman.’

  ‘Picking up a gun doesn’t make you a gunman.’

  ‘Doesn’t it? Then what am I, a pretend gunman? I don’t live in your world of habitual pretence. I think I’d find pretence a dangerous illusion.’

  ‘Troy, this could be… no, goddammit, this is dangerous.’

  ‘Sorry. Can’t do it. Tell me I’ve been a London bobby too long, any cliché you like, but I can’t do it.’

  He slid the gun back across the table to Cormack.

  ‘You mean you’re going in there with just a cop’s nightstick, that truncheon thing?’

  ‘Only detectives of Walter’s generation carry truncheons. I’ll have a pair of handcuffs and you’ll have a gun. That ought to be enough.’

  § 82

  It was pissing it down. It had been a cold spring and threatened to be a capricious summer. Troy stood in the doorway at Goodwin’s Court, hoping for a lull in the downpour. It didn’t ease. It was not quite torrential, but it was still the sort of rain to slice through his overcoat in the time it took to get to the car. He looked at his watch. He was ahead of schedule. He’d give it five more minutes. It was almost possible to see it as romantic-the onset of a short night, dusk scarcely fallen, the beat of rain hammering down in the courtyard and rattling the windows. Where was WPS Stilton in the romance of rain that made the scalp tense, the skin tingle, and wrapped you in its rhythm? He looked at his watch again. It read exactly the same time. The sweep hand was not moving. The damn thing had stopped. He reached for the phone and dialled the speaking clock and the clock-woman told him what he’d guessed. His watch had stopped twenty minutes ago. He wasn’t ahead of schedule, he was late.

  He dashed to Bedfordbury, yanked open the car door. Kitty was sitting in the driver’s seat, buttoned up in her blue mac, hands in tight leather gloves gripping the wheel, her hair wet and flat and rain streaming down her face like tears. As if he had summoned her by thinking of her.

  ‘Kitty…’

  ‘Get in, Troy. Just get in.’

  He ran to the passenger door, slammed it behind him, suddenly almost deafened by the pounding of rain on the tin roof.

  ‘You’re up to something. I know. He won’t tell me what, but I know.’

  ‘Kitty. If Calvin won’t tell you, then neither can I. Please, get out and let me do what I have to do.’

  She turned on him, voice soaring to outshout the rain.

  ‘If you think I’m going to let him get blown away like me dad then think again. You’re up to something and I’m in. Like it or lump it, I’m coming, Troy.’

  Troy froze. Simply seeing those gorgon-green eyes fixed upon him was enough to make his wits shrivel.

  ‘Well?’ she said at last.

  Troy said nothing. He lurched across her, grabbed the keys from the ignition, tore his coat from her grasping hands and ran. Down Bedfordbury to Chandos Place, out into Trafalgar Square in search of a cab. He stood in front of St Martin’s church waving desperately at every cab in the hope that some dozy cabman had simply forgotten to put his light on. No
one had. It was the perfect night to wave forlornly at the cabmen of olde London while getting soaked to the skin.

  Then he watched as his own car crawled towards him, stopped at the kerb and Kitty leant over and pushed open the door.

  ‘Get in! Get in, you silly sod!’

  He sat next to her as wet as she was, hair plastered to his skull, rain puddling at his feet.

  ‘How?’ he said.

  ‘Jesus H. Christ, Troy. Call yerself a copper and you don’t know how to hotwire a car.’

  He looked at the tangle of wires she’d pulled out behind the steering column. A trick he’d never learnt. But then he’d never learnt to lock his car either. Kitty slammed into first.

  ‘Where we going?’

  ‘Limehouse,’ he conceded. ‘Tallow Dock Lane.’

  She drove a car as furiously as she drove a motorbike. Troy was all caution and cock-up. Not a natural driver. Kitty flung the little Morris around corners and pushed it to its limit on the straight-even so, its limit was less than sixty miles per hour. With every landmark passed Troy ticked off another five minutes on his mental clock. He dared not tell Kitty that they were screwing up in precisely the way Cormack and her father had screwed up, so he said nothing.

  Less than a mile from the warehouse, in Westferry Road, the car juddered and jerked and lurched and stopped. Kitty pressed the self-starter. It grunted at her and refused. She pressed again-it grunted, whined and died.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Troy.

  ‘How should I know? There were so many wires back there. I just joined up the ones that looked right.’

  ‘Kitty, we’re already late. For God’s sake make it go! Make it go!’

  She bent down, the bundle of wires fell into her hand like a fat wodge of macaroni.

  ‘Oh, bugger,’ she said. ‘Haifa mo.’

  There were no half mo’s. Troy got out of the car and ran. He’d no idea how late he was. His ‘half hour early’ was most certainly blown. Could he possibly get there before Cormack-before the killer? He turned the corner into Tallow Dock Lane and felt his sides begin to burst. It was like those forced school runs he and Charlie had always hated, the onset of stitch, the stab in the side that made running agony. The great white BELL AND HARROP sign loomed up. The steel door was wide open. He leant against it, put his head tentatively inside-all he could hear was the pounding of his heart and the roar of his own breathing. At the foot of the staircase all he could hear was the wind and the rain whistling down the shaft, amplified as though by a tunnel. He set off up the stairs as quietly as he could, flicking his bull’s-eye torch on and off as he went. A rat scurried across his path, slithered across the toecap of one shoe, and he felt his heart explode in his chest. Cormack was right. For the first time since he had gone into plain clothes, he missed his truncheon.

  At the top he thought he could hear a faint moaning. Nothing else but the elements. The glare of overhead light bursting from the office into the black pit of the stairwell. He looked into the first room. The naked lightbulb swinging gently at the end of its cord like a hanged man twisting on the gibbet-a black-coated man was slumped against the far wall with blood congealing on his head. A revolver on the floor in front of him. One huge hand spread across the cracked linoleum as though performing a five-finger exercise. Troy bent down and lifted the man’s head. The wound was just above the left ear. It looked like a gunshot, but it was superficial-the bullet had simply stripped the skin, scraped the bone and glanced off. Troy touched the face, smeared away the blood gathering in the left eyebrow with the ball of his thumb, felt and saw the scar above the eye. He looked like Wolfgang Stahl. The pianist’s hands, the duellist’s scar. Was he Wolfgang Stahl? He ought to be Wolfgang Stahl. It had better be Wolfgang Stahl-it would be so handy if he were. But what was he doing here? And who had shot him? More importantly, who was moaning if Stahl was not? And he heard the door swing to on unoiled hinges and turned to see another man, clutching a bloody wound to his stomach, easing himself off the wall behind the door.

  Troy did what he thought any intelligent person should do when confronted by a man pointing a gun at him-he raised his hands. The man was struggling to find words. He’d lost a lot of blood-it ran between his fingers, soaked into his overcoat and dripped to the floor. He could scarcely point the gun steadily. A small.35 automatic wavered between Troy’s chest and the wall. He ran through his list of handy mnemonics, watching the face dip in and out of light and shadow as the light bulb swung back and forth, wondering which one was this, which of all those bewildering American faces Cal had pointed out to him was this. Raymond Massey, it was Raymond Massey.

  ‘Put down the gun, Colonel Reininger,’ Troy said, putting his faith in the clichés of the job. ‘It’s all over.’

  It was. Reininger coughed blood and collapsed. A bloody, silent mess in the corner. Troy slowly lowered his hands, wondering all the time if the gun were not suddenly going to jerk upwards in his hand and fire off one last shot. He took a few steps forward, kicked the gun from Reininger’s hand and breathed again. But he could still hear the moaning. He pushed at the door to the inner office. Cormack sat roped to a metal chair, black canvas gaffer tape across his mouth. And he was not moaning-he was grunting with all the force he could muster until his eyes almost popped.

  Troy tore off the gaffer tape, started on the ropes, and Cormack began to gabble.

  ‘Troy-where the fuck have you been?’

  And gabble.

  ‘Half an hour? Jesus Christ!’

  And gabble.

  ‘Reininger was waiting for me when I got here. Stuck a gun in my ribs and then sapped me with the butt. I must have been out for a minute or two. When I came round he already had me trussed up like a turkey. He stood behind the door and waited, then I saw the door open and expected to see you walk in and get shot. It was Stahl! Jesus Christ it was Stahl! He didn’t even have to look. He shot Frank through the door at point-blank range, but when he stepped past it there was more firing-then the draughts caught this door and I couldn’t see any more. Tell me, for Chrissake tell me. Stahl’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘No-he’s out cold, but it’s just a graze. Reininger’s in a bad way, though.’

  Troy undid the last knot. Cormack leapt to his feet and said again, ‘Troy-where the fuck have you been?’

  Troy watched his eyes roll up in his skull, his legs buckle and his head hit the floor. He knelt down. The draught caught the door again and banged it shut. Troy let Cormack’s head loll against his hand-two bumps now instead of one-reassuringly warm, a pulse beating steadily, solidly in the neck. He’d fainted. The eyelids flickered, his lips opened, the merest of moans. Then the blast of a gun set the door shaking, swinging inward on its creaking hinges. Kitty stood framed in the doorway, head down, arm outstretched, a smoking revolver aimed steadily at the corner.

  Troy crossed the room hoping she wasn’t completely mad, that she knew who he was and would not simply turn the gun on him.

  She kept her gaze and her aim fixed. He looked at Reininger, lifeless in the corner, blood pouring down his face from the hole in his head. He looked at Kitty, blank and glassy-eyed.

  ‘Kitty,’ Troy said softly. ‘Give me the gun.’

  Kitty seemed not to hear him.

  ‘Just give me the gun, Kitty.’

  It was as though a light had gone on behind her eyes. A flash of attention. Suddenly she was looking at Troy, hearing him, the crazy stare gone from her face. She lowered the gun to her side.

  ‘Nah. I don’t think I’d better. You’re not wearing gloves.’

  In the distance, faint as a whisper, Troy could hear the bells of a police squad car.

  ‘Give me the gun Kitty. We haven’t got a lot of time. We’ll need it to think up a story.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You go.’

  ‘Go?’

  ‘There’ll be shit for this. You mark my words, Fred. They’ll want someone. Heads’ll have to roll for a cock-up like this. They’ll suspend us, bus
t us back to constables. Might as well be me. I’ll never be more than a sergeant. Never thought I would. You-you’re a hot tip to be Met Commissioner one day. There’s blokes at Bow Street running a book on you. Don’t disappoint ‘em. Nip down the alley while you can.’

  She bent down. Pressed the gun into Stahl’s hand. It all looked so neat, so plausible. The grieving daughter on the trail of her father’s killer, arrives a moment too late to see rough justice done.

  ‘Cal’s all right, isn’t he? I mean he’s alive, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s in the next room. A nasty lump on his head, but, yes, he’ll live.’

  ‘Then you’d better scarper.’

  The bells of the police car rang louder now-at the most they could be only two or three streets away. The nearest nick was Millwall-if they came from the south they’d miss his car completely. If he stuck to the alleyways, they’d miss him too. Troy threw open the window to the fire escape, took a last look at Kitty, Kitty smiling faintly at him, Kitty among the carnage of a bloody night, and vanished into the dark and pouring rain.

  § 83

  ‘I’m awfully sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to lock you up.’ Cal relished the contrast. The first bobbies on the scene had burst in, truncheons up, yelling ‘Nobody move!’

  Kitty was binding up the wound on Stahl’s head with strips she’d torn from her petticoat, like the solitary female in a John Ford western when the wagons have circled. She’d already licked her handkerchief and washed his face like a mother cat. Cal had never felt his wagons more circled.

  ‘Nobody is moving, you berk,’ she’d said. ‘Get on yer wireless and call an ambulance.’

  Then they’d noticed the bloody heap that had been Reininger.

  One dashed back to the squad car. The other stood and said ‘Jesus Christ’ over and over again, until Kitty said, ‘You don’t know what to do, do you?’