Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  ‘Oh,’ Troy added, ‘and he was dead when whoever it was did this to him.’

  Bonham slurped loudly at his tea.

  ‘Bugger,’ he said softly.

  ‘Where’s the bombsite?’ Troy asked.

  ‘The kids call it the garden. It’s over towards Stepney Green. Most of it used to be Cardigan Street, before Mr Hitler.’

  ‘I used to walk that as a beat bobby.’

  ‘Well, you can walk it again tomorrow.’

  ‘The boy lives in your block?’

  ‘Ground floor back. Terence Flanagan. Otherwise known as Tub. No trouble that I know of. His old man’s a bit of a one for the bottle, but he’s more inclined to spoil the boy than take his belt off to him when he’s the worse for it. You know the sort. Showers the kids with everything that’s in his pocket from a farthing to a silver joey when the mood’s on him. But the mother’s a good sort. Keeps him on the straight and narrow’.

  ‘I can talk to him in the morning?’

  ‘If you’re up early enough. Stayin’ the night are you?’

  ‘If that’s all right with you, George.’

  ‘No trouble, bags o’ room. The place is half-empty after all.’

  Troy knew better. Bonham and his wife Ethel had raised three sons in as many rooms. Two walk-through bedrooms and a living room less than ten by ten, with a galley kitchen that also held a bath. The only reason it seemed less than cramped to Bonham was because he’d never lived anywhere else, and the only reason he termed it half-empty was that his three sons were in the navy and his wife had been killed in the Blitz of 1940. Troy had eaten many times with George and Ethel Bonham in the late thirties – arriving in their lives just as the youngest boy had signed his papers for Portsmouth. The Bonhams had fostered, fed, and, as Troy saw it, educated him throughout his first year as a constable.

  Bonham tucked his helmet under his arm like a ghost’s head and prepared to leave. Troy picked up the arm.

  ‘You’re jokin’?’ said Bonham.

  ‘No, let’s take it.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Troy rolled the arm back in its brown paper and tucked it under his own arm like a stick of French bread.

  Bonham opened his locker and scooped a small, bloody, newspaper-wrapped parcel into his upturned helmet.

  ‘A bit o’ somethin’ special.’ He smiled at Troy. The smile became a knowing grin. ‘The butcher’s a pal o’ mine. He’s seen me right this week. Should stretch to two.’

  He tapped the side of his helmet, much as he might have tapped the side of his nose, as though sharing some vital secret with Troy.

  ‘I’m OK,’ said Troy, tapping the frozen arm.

  ‘Now you are jokin’,’ said Bonham.

  4

  Bonham lived in Cressy Houses, a few yards from Stepney Green. A splendid, if blackened, redbrick and red-tile exterior, rising four floors and bearing the proud plaque of the East London Dwellings company. Where the building met the pavement in Union Place it was still shored up with beams and scaffolding – relics of the raid that had claimed the life of Ethel Bonham.

  ‘Shan’t be a tick,’ said Bonham, shoving a set of keys at Troy, twisting his giant’s frame out of the car. ‘You let yourself in and get the kettle on. I’ll just have a word with young Flanagan’s parents.’

  Troy climbed the steps to Bonham’s front door on the second floor. The flat seemed more than half-empty. It smelt faintly of boiled vegetables, and while spotlessly clean and tidy seemed lifeless – occupied rather than lived in. He stepped into the tiny kitchen and lit the gas. He was struck by the first thing in which he recognised the hand of Ethel Bonham – a knitted bag for clothes pegs hanging on the back of the door. It pointed up just how little remained, as though Bonham had deliberately removed all trace of his late wife. The glass display cabinet that had once held an assortment of china, from a plaster dog to a couple of hideous red and gold crown Derby plates, stood empty against the living-room wall. In the spring of 1936 Troy had been the rawest of raw recruits, so fresh from the country that the tram and the taxi looked more likely as threats to his life and limbs than any criminal. Ethel had taught him city life, where and when, if not how to shop; how to darn socks, how to crack an egg with one hand and how to flip it without breaking the yolk. In the October of the same year Bonham had carried him home from the battle of Cable Street, when the police commissioner had been rash enough to try and clear a path for Mosley’s fascists by sending the entire Metropolitan mounted corps against the overwhelming odds of a hundred thousand Londoners. Out of control and terrified, a horse had caught Troy above the left eye with its iron hoof. Ethel bathed and bandaged the wound. Troy still bore the scar, almost invisibly following the course of his eyebrow. Ethel had taught him self-sufficiency, had unwittingly encouraged him in the life of the city solitary which he now knew to be, irrevocably, his nature.

  ‘All in order,’ Bonham shouted from the kitchen. ‘Tub gets a morning off school to show us where he found the arm.’

  Bonham filled the doorway between the hall and the living room, ducking his head under the lintel. He unbuttoned his tunic and hung it on the back of a dining chair. He stood in his shirt and braces, unknotting his tie, the high-waisted regulation trousers, tight against his ribs, emphasising the belly-rise of a muscular man relaxing softly into his fifties. Troy hated being in uniform. Loved the anonymity of his plain black overcoat.

  ‘A nice bit o’ beef,’ Bonham said simply, and flipped the back stud on his collar. ‘I’ll slip it in the pan. A few spuds. A few greens. And we’ll open a bottle while they do. Come on, Freddie, get your coat off.’

  He knelt by the gas fire and set it hissing and roaring into life with a Swan Vesta, as Troy pulled carelessly at the buttons of his overcoat.

  Bonham sat before the fire, knees almost up to his chin, huge hands delicately cradling a glass of stout.

  ‘You ain’t lost anyone yet. Hope you never do. But because you ain’t, you won’t know. It takes some people different ways. With me . . . well, I found it easier to accept being on my own, after twenty-three years a married man, without all the knick-knacks and the paraphernalia. Like I say, you won’t know.’

  ‘Sooner or later we’ll all know,’ said Troy.

  Bonham took the loose abstraction for something specific.

  ‘You mean the war’ll go on and on and on?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘The opposite. The war’s nearly over. London’s filling up with soldiers. You can’t get on a train at a main-line station without seeing queues of soldiers. More and more often they’re Americans. I think you can take Eisenhower’s presence in England as a sure sign - there’ll be a second front soon.’

  Bonham spoke for Europe. ‘’Bout time,’ he muttered into his glass.

  ‘And maybe then old men will stop giving me the white feather.’

  ‘What? Literally?’

  ‘No, but any face under forty looks to any face over forty as though it should be in uniform. I get it all the time.’

  ‘Copper’s a copper,’ said Bonham with a sense of finality.

  Not once had Troy been tempted to enlist. Not that anyone else had started a rush. The second war did not slavishly follow the first. It nurtured its own brand of confusion. Part of which was a wave of xenophobia leading to the round-up of thousands of aliens after Dunkirk and the fall of Norway. Amongst these had been Troy’s eldest brother – eight years older than Troy and unfortunate enough to have been born in Vienna (part of the Reich since the Anschluss of 1938) to Russian parents, inching their way across Europe in the wake of another great confusion known to history as the revolution of 1905. Released in the autumn of the same year, Troy’s brother now served King and Country as Wing Commander on the newly developed Tempest fighter. The grudge he did not bear his adopted country had, by some unknown mechanism, descended to Troy, who knew no other country, but which, for a number of reasons he would not dream of articulating outside the family, he would se
rve in no other way than as a policeman.

  ‘I cannot understand why you’re not angry,’ he had said to brother Rod.

  ‘No point,’ came the reply. ‘No point in rejecting Britain for its treatment of me. Count it merely as an accident.’

  ‘An accident!’ Troy had protested.

  ‘Exactly, an honest mistake. Whatever I may subjectively feel about my adopted country,’ he paused emphatically. ‘My home – objectively it is on the side of the angels.’

  ‘Fight the good fight?’ Troy had sneered at his brother.

  ‘If you like.’ The characteristic family trait of laissez-penser.

  ‘It all leaves rather a bad taste in the mouth, don’t you think?’

  To this the elder Troy had made no answer.

  ‘Homeless,’ said Troy.

  Rod had waited, wondering exactly what his brother was driving at.

  ‘Doesn’t mean much. None of it means much,’ Troy had said. ‘Home, patriotism. It none of it means much to the homeless.’

  ‘I know,’ said Rod, thinking that Troy had at last reached coherence.

  ‘Homeless in the heart,’ Troy had added, blowing all coherence.

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  It had been Troy’s turn to have no answer.

  5

  Boiled beef, no carrots, spuds and greens of indeterminate species left Troy grateful for Bonham’s generosity and wondering why the late Mrs Bonham had not passed on her skills to her husband in quite the same measure she had passed them on to Troy. Bonham had picked up a second bottle of stout and was rooting around for the opener when someone banged on the door.

  ‘Evening, Mr Bonham.’ Troy heard a man’s voice at the threshold, hidden from his view by Bonham’s back. In a block of dockers, costermongers, rag-trade workers and chars, Bonham stood for law and order, for the decency in which all believed but occasionally could not practise – one of us but not one of us. The voice was respectful without deference. The ‘mister’ was Bonham’s undisputed right.

  ‘I hear you found something.’

  Troy stood up as quickly as if he’d been stung. Bonham was telling the man he’d better come inside, just so long as he wasn’t wasting anyone’s time. A short man in a ragged jacket and heavy, canvas trousers stepped slowly into the room. He was almost as wide as he was tall – almost a yard across at the shoulder – five and a half feet of stacked muscle.

  Bonham introduced Detective Sergeant Troy of the Yard and Mr Michael McGee, and pointed the man at a chair.

  ‘I hear you found something,’ McGee said again.

  ‘Mick, you know damn well that’s not the way we play things.’

  McGee set his cap on his knees and wiped a cowlick of hair from his face.

  ‘Wolinski’s gone,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Gone,’ said Bonham. ‘What d’ye mean, gone?’

  ‘I mean no one’s seen him for three days.’

  Bonham inclined his head slightly, looking down at Troy as they stood side by side, backs to the fire.

  ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ he said. ‘No one’s reported him missing.’

  ‘Who’s Wolinski?’

  ‘Lives above.’ Bonham aimed a giant forefinger at the ceiling. Troy spoke directly to McGee. ‘Why didn’t you report this?’

  McGee simply shrugged.

  ‘Wolinski’s one of the comrades,’ Bonham put in. ‘Works down the George V docks, with Mr McGee here, when he’s a mind to. And when he’s a mind to he’ll take off. True, I’ve not heard a peep from upstairs, but I paid it no mind. He lives alone, doesn’t make a lot of noise.’

  ‘So he just vanished three days ago and no one’s said a word until now?’ Troy’s tone was a touch incredulous.

  ‘He’s like that,’ said Bonham. ‘They’re all like that. Suspicious of the police. We’re enemies of the people. And all that malarkey.’

  McGee shrugged this off.

  ‘Word is you’ve found a body down by Cardigan Street.’

  ‘Not strictly true,’ said Troy.

  ‘But you found something all the same.’

  ‘You think it might be Wolinski?’

  ‘How can I know till I see it?’

  Troy paused to change tack. ‘How long have you been a docker, Mr McGee?’

  ‘On and off since the bottom fell out of brickeying in twenty-nine.’

  ‘And Mr Wolinski?’

  ‘Almost as long I reckon. He came here from Poland in thirty-four or thirty-five I think.’

  ‘Hold out your hands.’

  McGee gave Troy a puzzled look but did as he was asked, palms upturned on the oilskin tablecloth. From the corner of his eye Troy could see that Bonham too was taking his questions with a quizzical pinching of the eyebrows. McGee’s hands were a mess of old scars, fresh blisters and thick yellow callouses, as large as the corns on a beat policeman’s feet.

  ‘The body is not Wolinski,’ said Troy. ‘The hand I examined has no callouses. The dead man never worked in a dock or at any form of manual labour – ever. Mr Wolinski may be alive or he may be dead – but we haven’t found him or any part of him. Now – do you want formally to report him missing?’

  The legal-sounding precision of Troy’s phrasing seemed to unnerve McGee for the first time. He looked to Bonham for help.

  ‘Why don’t you give it a day or two, Mick. Peter’s been gone and come back a dozen times. This is no different like as not, and he’ll not thank you for involving me.’

  McGee seemed unwilling to accept reassurance, as though it was less than dutiful, less than justice.

  ‘You might at least look,’ he said obscurely.

  ‘Look,’ said Bonham. ‘At what?’

  ‘The flat. You’re supposed to look for clues or something, ain’t you?’

  McGee dangled a set of shiny keys in front of him. Bonham finally flipped the top off his stout and said it was all a waste of time, but for Troy this was an invitation to simple nosiness that he could scarcely refuse, beautifully blurred as it was by the line of duty.

  Refugees, almost regardless of origin, played forcefully on childhood’s memory, of family legends, of nursery stories and a wealth of nonsense about the old country. That part of Troy’s mind that was ready to dismiss such nonsense was perpetually in thrall to the power of such myth-making.

  McGee sat purposefully out of the way on an upright chair, just inside the living room – as if trying neatly to avoid disturbing anything Troy might eventually term evidence. Room for room an identical flat to Bonham’s, the contrast in content and décor could not have been more startling. At a glance Troy would have said the room held five or six thousand books, on all four walls, window-sills included, floor to ceiling. Where space had run out Wolinski had neatly tied books into bundles and stacked them under chairs. Under the table were hundreds of Daily Workers, Picture Posts, Manchester Guardians and the odd copy of Pravda – all tied up neatly with string and stacked clear of the knees.

  Troy glanced over the shelves. The entire Comédie Humaine of Balzac – in French. Most of Dostoevsky – also in French. The twenty-four-volume Tolstoy of 1913 – in the original Russian. Das Kapital in German. Odd volumes of Kropotkin in English (almost heretical for a Marxist thought Troy) and on and on and on. There scarcely seemed a major work of literature in any European language that had not been read, or at least owned, by Peter Wolinski. The second room held a desk – a pen, ink and a blotter arranged with military precision – and yet more shelves of books. Physics, chemistry – all double-Dutch to Troy, but a pattern emerged as Troy’s eyes followed the shelves round to the desk, and dusty long-unopened volumes in German gave way to newer works in English, mostly dealing with stress in metals or the dynamics of chemical propulsion. On one wall Wolinski had found room for photographs. Two or three dozen or more, some no bigger than postcards, some as large as dinner plates. Young men outside pavement cafés, a young man in black gown and mortar board clutching a symbolic scroll, a mixture of o
ld men and young men arranged as though to commemorate some academic gathering – a familiar mixture of the social hours and formal occasions in the life of a pre-war student, a Pole abroad in the Weimar Republic.

  Troy stared at a striking photograph of the Führer in full flight and fury – gesturing with rigid index finger to the heavens in one of his stage-managed pieces. It bore the caption ‘Hey you up there in the gallery!’ It seemed so remote to think back to the days when Hitler had been a figure of fun. Next to it Wolinski had caught the transition in a shot of startling emptiness and chilling beauty. Early summer morning in the street of some unnamed Bavarian town, not a human figure to be seen, just the houses with their decking of flags stretching down to infinity – a long silent tunnel of swastikas.

  Troy called out to McGee, ‘What did Wolinski do before he came here?’

  ‘He taught in one of them German colleges.’

  ‘University?’

  ‘Same difference. Munich I think it was. Till ‘Itler drove ’im out.’

  Only the bedroom remained. Had not the previous two rooms shown him a man of meticulous habits, Troy would have said this room had been ransacked. The twisted and grubby sheets, the dust on every surface, the clothes in higgledy-piggledy heaps. Nowhere to sit, scarce enough room to stand and just enough to lie. It seemed Wolinski ignored everything for the life of the mind. Troy could not have slept a wink in dust and dirt such as this. On the bedside table, spine upwards, was Wolinski’s bedtime reading. Troy smiled – The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse, in which whilst in hot pursuit of his Aunt Dahlia’s cow-creamer, Bertie Wooster manages to defeat British fascism.

  ‘Mr McGee, come here please.’