Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  ‘That chap in Hendon tried to tell me he was German,’ Malnick was saying. Troy glanced up at him. ‘Stuff and nonsense, of course. Since I’ve lived on the coast I can tell you there are rumours of Jerries landing almost on a daily basis. Not one of them has ever proved to be true.’

  Troy noted that the eight-by-eight print was held in place by black gummed corners. It would be but the work of a moment to tease it from its page and stuff it up his coat.

  ‘Quite,’ he said, echoing Malnick’s vocabulary. ‘I thought as much myself, but it does leave us with a problem. Who?’

  He prised the print from its corners and paused, looking up at Malnick with the open invitation to speculation, knowing full well that the picture itself was worth a thousand theories or fanciful descriptions.

  ‘Crime isn’t what it was.’

  ‘I don’t follow,’ said Troy.

  ‘It organises differently.’

  As far as Troy was concerned this was hardly a revelation. The fact that crime organised at all was a back-handed tribute to wartime efficiency.

  ‘Gangs,’ said Malnick with a melodramatic emphasis. ‘I’m talking about gangs. I felt quite certain that this was a gang killing.’

  Troy closed the book and let the photograph slide silently on to his lap.

  ‘I’ll need a name.’

  ‘The Spider.’

  Troy was startled. Was the man an avid reader of Edgar Wallace? The Ringer, The Fixer, The Twister – The Spider?

  ‘The Spider?’ he said, hoping that it didn’t sound like mimicry.

  ‘The nom de plume or what have you of Alfred Maxwell Golding. I talked to him only the day before my posting came through.’

  Did Malnick really see no connection between the case he was on and the suddenness of his acceptance into the RAF? Had he so deceived himself that he could pass it off as mere coincidence?

  ‘Denied it, of course, but smirked like the cat that got the cream. Kept saying “go on, copper, prove it. Just you try.” ’

  It was easy to see just how much Inspector Malnick intensely disliked being called copper. Troy had long ago accepted it as by far the least offensive, most convenient term – but then he had got out of uniform in record time. Malnick had worn his, with undoubted pride, from his first day on the force to his last. He had taken the jeering of children and the contempt of clever, briefed criminals and the blue had written itself into his soul like Blackpool through a stick of rock. It had rendered him as upright as a truncheon and about as flexible – and therein lay his problem. Who or what was Alfred Spider Golding? Was Troy witness to another of Malnick’s fantasies – or had twenty years a-coppering given the man some insight into the villains on his own patch?

  ‘A Mr Big I take it?’

  ‘The Mr Big. Holds court most evenings in the Cockle and Trumpet in Cary Street. King of the skivers, fence and receiver, Mr Five-bob-on-the-quid, dodged conscription from day one and recruited every other Tom, Dick and Harry that thought flogging nylons and forging coupons was more patriotic than doing a bit for one’s country. They’re more organised than they were before the war. So much of the competition’s out of the way, and the force is depleted.’

  So far he was talking sense. Troy slid the photograph under his coat, a short step away from safe concealment in the armpit.

  ‘I’ve no firm evidence that he kills people who get in his way, but I know in my bones he’s responsible for two killings in the City district – he’s the sort of man that likes to make examples of people. Kill and let it be known. This has all the hallmarks of such a disciplinary killing.’

  Troy risked the obvious.

  ‘Then why do you say it’s a difficult case? Why doesn’t the Yard’s failure surprise you?’

  ‘Because to anyone that doesn’t know the manor it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. You were lucky in thirty-nine. Ninety-nine per cent of the time you can’t just breeze in from the Yard and put your finger on a quick solution. Can you buggery! Most of the time it’s down to local knowledge. To the kind of savvy you can only learn by the soles of your feet. This man was a minor member of some team, a firm as they call them, who got his comeuppance. The only reason I didn’t get a chance to put a name to a face is that London, as well you know, is awash with new faces. There’s a sign up on the Great North Road – “Send us your bent, send us your crooked.” ’

  ‘You really don’t believe he was German?’

  ‘Twaddle,’ said Malnick with the emphasis of finality.

  Troy feigned an itch to scratch and the photograph found home. He had what he came for, more than he came for. And if Malnick chose to fly in the face of the best forensic science in the world then he was a bigger fool than even Troy had thought. Malnick prattled, returned to his theme.

  ‘When they got that poor sod on the beach they punished him before they killed him. Someone on that firm really likes hurting people.’

  It was the only part of Malnick’s argument that struck Troy as being worth a moment’s attention.

  18

  Driberg had burnt the toast. Twice. For the third attempt he handed the toasting fork to Troy and decided he was far better suited to uncorking the wine.

  ‘You’re the youngest, you say?’

  ‘Yes,’ Troy replied. ‘Rod is eight years older than me, the twins five. I’m the afterthought. Their only English-born child.’

  ‘Would you say you knew your father well?’

  Troy could not see what Driberg was driving at. The man had a penchant for gossip, but this, surely, was not simply his idea of chewing the fat? Not only did Driberg have a journalist’s nose – whereby there was no such thing as an idle question – he came from that same inter-war school of chequered, idealistic politics that characterised his own family. Troy knew for a fact that Driberg had been a card-carrying Communist – although why all Communists had to carry their cards instead of leaving them at home as most people did their gas-masks Troy could never work out.

  ‘I saw more of him. They sent me away to school later than any of the others. I was one of those sickly children. Always being told to wrap up well even in summer. But I doubt I knew him better than my brother. Rod at least knew him as an adult for fifteen years. I didn’t.’

  ‘Y’know it’s always puzzled me. Why did he accept that wretched title?’

  Wretched? Did Driberg put the same question to the Sitwells? To Beaverbrook? Why wretched? Driberg adored title and ritual, from the imperial pomp of a coronation to the order of knives and forks on the table, so wickedly designed to intimidate the lower-middle classes. Troy recalled as a teenager watching the housemaid slap down the silver in no particular order, knowing full well that his father would eat a six-course meal with a wooden spoon and pass no comment, and later seeing Driberg surreptitiously arrange the implements at his own place into their proper lineage.

  ‘He didn’t accept it. He bought it from Lloyd George when I was four or five. I have absolutely no recollection of any of it. By the time I was old enough to ask I didn’t much care. After all, inheriting it was Rod’s problem not mine. I do remember Rod asking the old man a few times, and the answer was always the same. For a foreigner to be accepted in London society a little recognition was essential. Although to be honest I think he called it window-dressing. At the same time one couldn’t cross any of those very English invisible lines. A peerage slapped on to an unshakeable foreign accent would have been a mockery – he’d have joined the rich Jews of Westminster, ennobled for their wealth and despised for it too – or so he said – at the same time the only title worth having had to be hereditary. So a baronetcy it was. Result – as he would have it – no one thinks he’s muscling in on anything as privileged as the Lords, nor is he quite as parvenu as a knighted brewer. He is – or was – Sir Alexei Troy Bt., publisher, newspaper proprietor, Englishman and wog – and no one much minds. The power has a respectable coat to its back. Why? Why do you ask?’

  ‘I was curious about its part
in the game. Whichever one your father happened to be playing at the time.’

  Troy knew better than to be offended. He had seen the game first hand on so many occasions. Driberg had more acuteness in so phrasing it – and, Troy felt, if the truth be known it summed up his father better than any of the so oft applied words such as ‘mercurial’ or ‘unfathomable’. The elder Troy played not the game of English society but the game with English society. He had seen his father entertain the insufferably brilliant Sir Oswald Mosley – brilliant by the acclaim of his peers, insufferable because he knew it and abused it – the pompous, loud, but scarcely charmless Bob Boothby, fresh from his meeting with Hitler, and the shy, determined Harold Macmillan, son-in-law to the Duke of Devonshire, whom he had endeavoured to steer away from the Conservative Party at the depth of the Depression, when it became obvious that Macmillan was not prepared to toe the National Government line and accept poverty as an incurable fact of life that was beyond intervention. Alex Troy was nothing if not an interventionist. Most intervention came to little. Boothby and Macmillan never came again and, to the best of Troy’s knowledge, Mosley was never asked. Driberg was. The Troy household was one of those in which he could bank on meeting a vast cross-section of British political life, even if it lacked the Boothbys and the Mosleys. Where else could he find himself seated between the earnestness of A.J. Cook, the miners’ leader, and the banality of Chips Channon, Conservative MP and social butterfly? Where else could he appreciate the seeming inconsistency of a newspaper proprietor who had condemned Stalin right up to the Nazi–Soviet pact and then swung around to suggest in an editorial he wrote himself that all good men should bide their time, at precisely the time when the good men were burning their Communist Party membership cards, and the fellow-travellers were doing whatever fellow-travellers did to resign from an organisation to which they had never belonged? But, then, neither had Alexei Troy belonged – he had been some sort of Plekhanovite back in the old country, perhaps the only one, and had cut a course of his own choosing. He had seen circulation of the Evening Herald drop by twenty per cent after his editorial – yet had gone on arguing his case, and printing the letters of dissent, until the week before the invasion of Russia when he had written another leader saying it was time to ‘stand by our new ally the Soviet Union’. History had proved him right. Rather too quickly. The game continued. For the last year of his life he was once again a mercurial oddity. A titled wog no easier to pin down than a sprite. People came just to hear what he would say next. For a fellow-traveller, he travelled exceedingly well, and exceedingly well heeled. Bt., he was wont to joke, stood for better times.

  ‘I wondered, you see,’ Driberg was saying, ‘what he thought of you becoming a policeman. All his life – picking and pricking at order like a gnat on a dinosaur’s backside, and then you choose the law and with it the order he so despised. I think it must have hurt him deeply.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Because,’ Driberg said, turning for the coup de grace, ’he never talked about it.’

  Perhaps the man was right. Words flowed from the elder Troy. Anyone who spent the currency of language like an Irish sailor on a drunken roll surely had a damning reason for silence? He had, for example, never answered any questions about the origins of his fortune. What use would the truth have been – that he had looted more than a million pounds’ worth of jewellery back in 1905? Some gnat’s prick.

  ‘And I was wondering,’ Driberg continued, ‘whether this too wasn’t part of the game?’

  Troy said nothing. He watched the slice of toast on the end of the fork burst into flames and topple off into the fire, heard Driberg mutter ‘bugger it’ and listened to the generous gush of red wine filling up a glass.

  19

  Alone in his office the following day Troy propped the photograph he had taken from Malnick – mentally avoiding the word stolen – against the telephone and contemplated it as the last light of afternoon slanted from the west to pick out the dead man’s face and wink wickedly off the brass on the inkwell. A day to think, half of it spent driving Driberg back to London in pleasing, unstony silence, had left him with the beginnings of a pattern forming in his mind. He came into the Yard to find it peaceful and Saturdayish. No sign of Wildeve, and Onions was most certainly out on his allotment in a disused railway siding in Acton. Who these Germans were he had no idea, but he felt confident that the two crimes were related and that what they were was nestling just beneath the surface of the few facts he had. For a while it made sense to regard the two bodies as one – a two-headed creation from the castle of Baron Frankenstein. The phone rang.

  ‘I been thinking,’ said Kolankiewicz lazily.

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘ ‘Bout trousers.’

  ‘Heard that too.’

  ‘And the beauty of trousers.’

  ‘Form and function in perfect harmony. Two holes exactly where your legs are.’

  ‘The beauty, the real beauty is in the turn-ups. Their capacity for capturing, storing and then yielding up to scrutiny the most surprising, the most overlooked items.’

  ‘What have you found?’

  ‘What would you want me to find?’

  Troy looked at the scribbles he had made on the back of an envelope. The disparate parts of a whole that only existed in his guesswork.

  ‘I was wondering about the relationship between the bits we have. In particular what little forensics has revealed so far. Fragments of an alloy trapped by the fabric of the sleeve, you said. Acid burns, you said. And I was asking myself what’s missing that should be obvious in this time of death and glory?’

  ‘And?’

  Troy paused, fearful of improvident word magic, as though utterance would invite divine denial. ‘Cordite,’ he said. ‘You found cordite in the late Herr Trousers’ turn-ups.’

  ‘I am sorry to have taken so long about it. When you see as many dead as I do they begin to blur into one colossal corpse. The world-carcass. It came back to me about an hour ago. Some smell, something that came wafting to me across the next-door neighbours’ compost heap – and there it was, the memory of cordite, delicately overlaid by the black stench of Thames mud in which the poor sod was found. Twelve months old, as vivid to the nose as petit madeleine to the tongue. You know what I think we have? A munitions worker. Acid, metal, cordite. Put them together and they go bang.’

  ‘A German munitions worker? Two German munitions workers?’

  ‘OK. OK. That takes some figuring. I leave that to you.’

  ‘How far up Herr Cufflink’s sleeve did you look for these fragments of metal?’

  ‘Up as far as the arm went.’

  ‘Did you find anything after the first couple of inches?’

  ‘No. I told you that already.’

  ‘And the same on Herr Trousers?’

  ‘Ach – I’d be reading backwards from my present opinion. Settle for the cordite. That I am certain of. My nose tells the truth. I am the Proust of filth. The smell of a man’s rotten liver will find its way back to me years later. Makes it almost impossible to eat in a British restaurant, I can tell you.’

  ‘Very well. Look at it this way. A munitions worker wears an overall. He does not wear his best tweed jacket to the factory. What do you wear, most of the time?’

  ‘You know fuck well.’ Irritation was bringing out the Pole in Kolankiewicz once more. ‘You seen me hundreds of times. A white lab coat, for Chrissake.’

  ‘Which stops leaving two inches of cuff sticking out. Sod’s law. Toast always lands butter-side down on the carpet. Lab coats never fit. What we have here is a member of your own fraternity. Cufflink, probably Trousers too, was a boffin. Someone working above factory level in the bombs and bangs business. The sooner you put those fragments out for analysis the better.’

  ‘I’ve done it, but, take it from me, that alloy is nothing I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘You mean it’s . . .’ Troy failed to find the word he wanted. ‘ . . . Ne
w . . . ?’

  ‘New? Troy, it’s from another planet! For all I know it fell off Flash Gordon’s rocketship.’

  And suddenly Troy realised exactly what they had unearthed between them and how complex and how dangerous the ramifications of that knowledge might be.

  20

  Troy’s Uncle Nikolai always reminded him of a character from Edward Lear – a fitting subject for a limerick. But since none had fitted precisely he had made up his own at about the age of ten and had got as far as ‘There was an old man from Nepal, Whose face was incredibly small . . .’ but no further. Of course Nikolai’s face was not incredibly small, it appeared so because it was buried by a mass of hair and a full beard, and, often, spectacles. Overall, small was somewhat appropriate. At five feet two he needed not one soapbox but two from which to harangue the crowd at Speakers’ Corner of a Sunday morning. Troy knew that he stood on tiptoe just for the extra couple of inches that allowed him to lean across the makeshift lectern and gesture at the crowd.

  Troy had caught him mid-speech and mid-harangue, in a Leninish pose, left arm flush along the top of the lectern, the right sweeping across the crowd in a broad intaking motion that could imply open-handed inclusiveness, a commonality from which none could escape, or, as the palm closed to leave a pointing index finger, single people out as though his words were aimed solely at them.