Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  Nikolai took up his spectacles and lost an emotional moment in the polishing of them.

  ‘He was the gentlest of men – the gentlest of men. Tell me, Frederick, why did they do this to him? How did you get the picture out of Germany?’

  ‘I didn’t. He was found on Tower beach.’

  Nikolai raised a bushy eyebrow. ‘So he came after all.’ He paused. ‘But if he was killed here . . . who would . . . ?’

  ‘That’s my problem. What was he doing here? Who killed him? Why? I take it there’s no possibility that von Ranke spent the war here?’

  ‘It’s possible. I like to think he would haff got in touch with me. I’d even say I’m certain he would haff. More than that he would haff been interned in 1940 and somewhere in the corridors of Whitehall someone would haff realised who he was and I’d haff found out that way. I went to see a dozen or more men of near-genius that we had locked up on the Isle of Man. There was one poor man, worked on submarines for us – killed himself as soon as he was told he’d be interned. I think we’d haff jailed Einstein if he’d been here. Gregor could haff been very valuable to the war effort. Even on his own, without the rest of the team.’

  ‘What team?’

  Nikolai pulled the centre drawer of his desk out and began to ferret around.

  ‘I haff somewhere here,’ he was saying, ‘a picture we had taken in Munich that summer. Ah . . . I haff it.’

  Troy came round the desk and looked over his uncle’s shoulder at the sepia print that he held under the reading lamp. He watched the old man’s finger rove over the ranks of figures, twenty or more, trying to put names to faces.

  ‘That is Gregor, you see. And of course that is me on the end there. Now he worked with two fellows. Another German, a Munich man I believe . . . Bertoldt . . . dammit . . . he always used Christian names in his letters . . . talked endlessly about them but always in Christian names or initials . . . Bertoldt was BB . . . ah, yes . . . Brand, Bertoldt Brand. And the other I knew less well. A Pole. That’s him on the other end. His name is on the tip of my tongue . . . the tip of my tongue . . .’

  But it was on Troy’s lips.

  ‘Wolinski,’ he said softly. ‘Peter Wolinski.’

  22

  Troy rode the District line out to Stepney Green. Kicking himself that he had walked over to the park rather than taking the Morris. Kicking himself that he had seen that photograph on Wolinski’s wall only ten days ago and utterly failed to recognise his own uncle. He was fatter, less grey, but unarguably recognisable. In his mind’s eye he could see the very same print sandwiched between Wolinski’s picture of himself in full academic garb and that chilling early morning shot of sunlight on the swastikas. By Mark Lane self-recrimination had given way to a deepening concern, the near certainty that he had now upped the body count from two to three. Except of course that no one had yet reported the body of Peter Wolinski. Perhaps there was a gradient of efficiency for the killer. Corpse no.1 – found intact, corpse no.2 – disposed of but for the chance finding of one arm, corpse no.3 – gone for good? Burned, sunk in the Thames or some newly devised grisly method of total concealment? Tomorrow morning he would face the unpleasant task of informing Onions that since they last met an unsolved murder on their patch had, to put it simply, tripled in the course of a quiet weekend.

  Bonham’s front door was an inch ajar. As Troy pushed against it he heard the slam of a door closing directly above him. He slipped quickly into the hall, listened to the rapid pick-pock of a woman in heels descending the top staircase, and watched a tall, slim woman pass the front door and disappear at the end of the corridor. As her shoes rang out on the next staircase Troy grabbed Bonham’s old brown mackintosh off the back of the door and burst into the living room. Bonham was in his shirt and braces, poring over a government freesheet on how to make steak and kidney pie out of cardboard and tea leaves. He looked up, startled, but caught the coat that Troy threw at him.

  ‘George! A woman just came out of Wolinski’s flat. Get after her. Follow her, find out who she is, where she lives. You can’t miss her. Must be six foot in her high heels, black two-piece cut like it cost a packet and she’s a looker.’

  Bonham managed a rightie-ho, fumbled with his coat and made a quick grab at his helmet as he passed the door.

  ‘George, you can’t trail someone wearing your helmet!’

  Bonham glanced down at his size-fourteen regulation police boots.

  ‘Be as quiet as you can.’

  Bonham nodded – puzzled but obedient – and was gone, crunching down the concrete steps. Troy took the shiny set of keys that McGee had left off the mantelpiece and climbed to the top floor. Wolinski’s door was deadlocked. So he was right, he had heard the rattle of keys a split second after the door slammed. He let himself in. The first room smelt of scent, a burnt cinnamon scent that was familiar. It was not, he thought, that favoured by either of his sisters – but they complained bitterly that supplies of any scent were short since the fall of Paris and few women could adhere to their taste. The room looked untouched, exactly as he had seen it the last time. He followed the trail of scent into the middle room. That too was intact – but then she had hardly looked the type to ransack a room. If his eyes told him true she’d be more at home leafing gently through the pages of Vogue than upending drawers and waste-baskets.

  Directly ahead of him was the wall that served as Wolinski’s gallery. A rectangular patch of light, clean wallpaper had appeared among the fading red and green nondescript flowers of the paper pattern. Between sunny morning with swastikas and young man with scroll was a gap where his uncle’s photograph should be. Nothing else had gone, only the team shot of the bombs and bangs boffins of 1933. He stepped into the bedroom, the trail of scent died. She had not been in there. Troy stood in front of the wall of photographs and it seemed to him she had made a beeline for the picture, that she had come expressly to take it. But how could he be sure? Unless he searched the place. He looked around. Taken literally, a daunting task. But, the bedroom apart, Wolinski was an ordered, meticulous man. Start with the desk and the contents of the drawers?

  An hour later, Troy was none the wiser. Wolinski saved nothing. The hoard instinct that caused him to store old Manchester Guardians in neat bundles applied only to the life of the mind. The drawer yielded not so much as a gas bill, a cheque stub – surely the assumption of a working-man’s life had not meant Wolinski adopted it wholesale? Troy’s own desk was chocka with the written paraphernalia of his life, of the life of a man of his class, bills from his tailor or his shoemaker, the accounts held with local tradesmen. Bonham, he knew, had no bank account, he had never met a working man who did. Onions only had one because of rank, and even then was often clueless as to what they really did for him. How could Wolinski function in the cash-to-pocket, hand-to-mouth fashion? Not only that, the sentiment, the power of memory and relationship seemed to stop with his exile. None of the photographs on the wall had been taken in Britain. He had no letters or postcards from anyone. A section of the bookshelves held diaries for the late twenties and early thirties, but the last volume was for 1933. No volume referred to Britain. Wolinski had dropped to England like a nut fresh from the tree. Troy struggled with schoolboy German and read a terse account of his meeting with Nikolai – who was held to be ‘unspeakably eccentric if well-meaning’. Wolinski’s working life might as well have been in code – meetings and discussions were simply summed up as ‘lab all morning with B’. Or ‘argued with G. Cannot agree on details.’ Even if Troy knew the vocabulary of physics, all that mattered had stayed between Wolinski’s ears, as though, even then, he had been covering his tracks. He had lived a life in secret and it now seemed to Troy that he had died his death in one too. Herr Trousers – Troy had difficulty thinking of him with a real name like Gregor von Ranke – had snipped the labels out of his clothes. Peter Wolinski had snipped them out of his life.

  23

  At seven o’clock the next morning Troy’s front door shook to
the pounding of a fist.

  ‘Let me in, Freddie, I’m freezin’ to death,’ came Bonham’s voice from outside.

  Bonham lurched in as Troy held back the door. His mackintosh glistened with frosted dew, his skin was grey, his lips near blue and the bags under his eyes deeper than ever.

  ‘God,’ said Troy. ‘You look dreadful.’

  ‘So would you, you been up all night.’

  Troy was on his second cup of ersatz barleycorn coffee of the morning. Bonham grabbed it from his hand and took a deep warm swig.

  ‘Aaagh!’

  ‘I know it’s awful. But it’s all there is.’

  ‘No,’ Bonham muttered. ‘No bloody sugar!’

  Where Bonham came from the spine-chilling politeness of ‘one lump or two?’ had not yet arrived. In the cafés of Leman Street the only way to get tea without sugar was to put your hand across the cup before they could spoon it in. Such habits were almost solely responsible for British teeth.

  Bonham perched on the edge of the sofa and stretched out his hands towards the orange glow of the gas fire. Troy stirred a tablespoon of granulated white into the cup and poured a second cup for himself.

  ‘She didn’t go home till nearly midnight. The woman’s got no blood in her veins. She sat most of the afternoon in Kensington Gardens, no topcoat nor nothin’, and read the papers – not a paper, Freddie, but half a dozen of’ em. Then she schlepped over to South Kensington and had tea in a caff with a friend . . . ’

  Troy stopped him. ‘A friend? Man or woman?’

  ‘Hold yer ’orses. I say a friend. It looked to me to be nanny. Some old woman in the get-up those women wear for pushin’ prams in the park. God knows I saw enough of them in Kensington Gardens. It was her old nanny. She was doin’ the toffs’ number of afternoon tea with the old retainer. I s’pect you do the same.’

  Indeed, Troy did.

  ‘After that she went to a lecture at Wigmore Hall. The Future of Mankind or some such. Lots of Brains Trust types. Cost me a bob to get in. I’ll have that back off you if you don’t mind. Come nine o’clock and it looks to be all over and blow me if they don’t start natterin’ among themselves and by the time the caretaker comes along to tell ’em he’s got a home to go to even if they haven’t it’s half past ten. She grabs a taxi, I have to leap in one to follow her. You try convincing a London cabbie you’re a copper when you haven’t got yer ’elmet! Anyway that cost me another one and fourpence. She gets out in Chelsea. Tite Street. Just off the Embankment, number fifty-five. I seen the lights go out about a quarter to midnight. But I don’t know who she is. So I settled myself on the area steps of the house opposite and waited for the milkman. He come along at a quarter past six. I showed ’im me boots and me blue shirt and me braces and he says maybe I’m not a fifth columnist after all, perhaps I am a real honest-to-goodness London bobby and he tells me she’s Diana Brack. B-R-A-C-K. Single. Lives at number fifty-five with a maid, and a cook. Manservant got called up.’

  ‘Sterling work, George.’

  ‘The only sterling I want is me two and fourpence.’

  A little warmth had begun to seep through to Bonham’s tortured flesh. He shrugged off his mackintosh and slurped at his flavoured cup of syrup.

  ‘Tell me,’ Troy began, ‘did she pass anything to anyone? She had a black handbag under her arm. Did you see her open it?’

  ‘Quite a few times. She paid the bill at the caff, she paid the cabbie.’

  ‘But she took out nothing that might be a photograph.’

  ‘Not as I saw. But then I didn’t have her in sight all the time or she’d have seen me.’

  ‘Did anyone strike you? Did you find out who else she talked to at the Wigmore.’

  ‘One geezer told her he was somebody or other from the BBC . But it wasn’t a name that meant anything so I didn’t clock it. The feller who gave the speech was name of Strachey. John Strachey. But she didn’t talk to him. I really couldn’t get close enough. I looked a berk as it was. People tried to chat to me. I said I was with the caretaker, just waitin’ to lock up. Truth is I look like a copper. Even in me civvies I look a copper.’

  Bonham paused. Set his cup down on the floor. Looked straight at Troy fastening his tie.

  ‘Freddie, you wouldn’t mind telling me what’s going on? Why was I following that woman? McGee came into the nick on Friday afternoon and said you’d told him he could formally report Wolinski as missing. Is he missing?’

  ‘No, George. He’s dead.’

  Bonham said ‘Jesus Christ’ softly. He picked up his cup, crouched over it, cradling it gently and sipped at it. Slowly he straightened up, sipped at his cup again and let his head loll back across the chair, staring up at the ceiling, two hands wrapped around the cup as though he might crush it to dust. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said again. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  24

  Troy arrived late at the Yard to find he had exchanged one large policeman warming nicely in front of the gas fire for another. Onions was sprawled in front of the fireplace, puffing on a Woodbine and reading the morning’s post. Wildeve was at his desk and shot to his feet as Troy walked in.

  ‘The Superintendent’s been waiting to see you, Sergeant,’ he squeaked in breathless formality.

  Troy put down his leather case on Wildeve’s desk. Wildeve was making for the door, anxious to escape the stifling silence that was Onions. Troy put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him back into his seat.

  ‘No. Don’t go, Jack. The Superintendent and I would both like to hear from you. Good morning, Stan.’

  Onions stuffed his correspondence into a jacket pocket and turned to matters in hand.

  ‘Up with the lark I see, Freddie.’

  ‘I was actually’.

  Troy turned around the visitor’s chair by Wildeve’s desk so that he could sit facing Onions.

  ‘I’ve had ex-Inspector Malnick on the blower,’ said Onions. ‘He was, how shall I put it . . . ?’

  ‘Shirty?’ said Troy.

  ‘Shirty will do very nicely. He seems to think you have something of his.’

  Troy reached into his briefcase and handed Onions the photograph.

  ‘Ah . . . the Tower beach case.’

  ‘Codename Trousers. But I know who he is.’

  ‘You have a positive identification?’

  ‘I know who he is. Gregor von Ranke.’

  Onions just nodded and kept on nodding as Troy brought him up to date on his meeting with Nikolai and Bonham’s pursuit of Diana Brack. Then he asked precisely the question Troy had asked of Nikolai.

  ‘Team? What team?’

  ‘It appears from what my uncle knew of them that they were little short of being geniuses. They were developing lightweight alloys, tough, non-corrodable, thin. And then they were also on to a thing called a ram jet – I don’t know what that is – on to chemical propulsion. Well, I’ve lit a few of those myself on November the fifth – it means rockets. I asked Nikolai what use all this could be to anyone and he said the military potential was enormous. He saw it in terms of pilotless flying bombs.’

  Onions raised an eyebrow. A silent ‘what is the world coming to?’

  ‘And rockets of enormous speed, with nuclear fission warheads. But what they talked about was their dreams, not the use they might be to the Reich. They said that if they were left alone with all the right resources they would put a man on the moon by 1960.’

  Onions stared back at him silently for a moment. Troy realised how odd this must be to a man of Onions’s age. He had been born into another world. He was of an age with the novels of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. He had been seven when two bicycle manufacturers took their dream down to Kittyhawk, South Carolina, and made it fly. Up till then the bicycle itself had seemed like science’s front line of achievement, and the car was a noisy nuisance that no one really cared for. To Troy, 1960 was a long way off. To a man in his fifties it was the day after tomorrow, and the motor car was something he’d only recently come to terms with.
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  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said softly. Then, ‘So you’re pretty certain that the arm, which is where we came in, belonged to this Brand chap?’

  ‘It does seem logical.’

  ‘What was he doing here? What were any of them doing here? They seem unlikely choices for spies.’

  ‘I don’t think they were spies. Wolinski, at least, had genuine refugee status. How’s that coming along, Jack?’

  This startled Wildeve. His mind had been elsewhere.

  ‘Er . . . I . . . er . . . I don’t think I’m getting anywhere. There’s just too much of it. Too much bumf on everything. Without names to go by it was damn impossible. Checking out von Ranke and Brand should be easy now. But if I draw a blank then, well that’s it really’.

  ‘Even if they were legitimate refugees I’m not sure what that tells us,’ said Onions. ‘They came here, they registered, they died. We have no motive and no suspect. After all, your Brack woman’s a lead, but she’s hardly your suspect.’

  ‘The motive surely lies in what they knew and what their work was? But, of course they didn’t come here as refugees. Nikolai was involved in sifting out interned enemies who could serve the war effort. If they were here as refugees, barring a cock-up, they would have been arrested in 1940. Sooner or later Nikolai would have heard.’

  ‘What about Wolinski?’

  ‘Friendly alien. He would have been allowed to go about his business. And as he buried himself in the docks and his books, no one would have noticed him.’

  ‘So, what next?’

  ‘I’d like a meeting with MI5. Who’s their liaison with the Met?’

  Onions took a tiny pocket diary from his inside pocket, licked his finger and turned the pages.

  ‘Pym. Squadron Leader Pym.’