Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  ‘There you are. I wondered where you’d got to. Now you do remember Diana, don’t you?’

  She was looking off over his shoulder. He turned around and there was Brack, pleasantly nodding and smiling at Sasha’s inane banter. She smiled him her wide smile – the perfect teeth again – and Masha simply bridged the gap by asking the same question.

  ‘Diana. You do remember my little brother, don’t you?’

  Brack extended her hand. He had little choice but to take it.

  ‘Of course I remember Freddie. Though it must be years and years. My how you’ve grown. I should think it must be twenty years. No, no. I have it. I have it. It was the year of the strike. 1926. I was sixteen, you must have been eleven or twelve and you’d been given a bicycle for your birthday. The girls brought me home from school to stay for a fortnight that summer, and you had such a tussle learning to ride that bike. You fell off and grazed your knee and you cried so and I bathed it and bandaged it for you. Surely you remember?’

  He remembered the pain. What she called a graze had required eight stitches. He remembered a young woman with gentle hands and exotic scent who hand-cleaned the wound in warm water and disinfectant and embarrassed him with the fuss and had kissed him not on the cheek but on the lips when she had done and turned embarrassment to sexual confusion. He remembered the bicycle and the smell of the carbide lamp, and with it the added memory of that stinking charnel house in Stepney that had reeked of carbide gas. What he did not remember was Diana Brack.

  He felt more than faintly foolish to realise that she had known all along who he was. It had, he was sure, no real bearing on the case, but it made him feel more and more that her calm and assurance when he had interviewed her was the sang-froid, the arrogance of someone who was playing a game for two people in the conceit that only one of them knew the rules. How far did her arrogance go? Above the law? Pursuit now was pointless. Brack would be looking over her shoulder and he could not let her see him following Wayne. Knowing about Wayne was the one thing he had that she didn’t. It was not to be wasted fighting through the crowds of West End theatreland as discreetly as a bull in a china shop. For the while he had lost Wayne – again. He looked at his watch. It was just after ten. With any luck he could put his sisters in a cab to his father’s town house in Hampstead and be in bed in half an hour. The idea that he was due, overdue, at Orange Street had slipped completely from his mind.

  36

  Wildeve had a good mental image of Major Wayne. Although what use Troy’s description of him as having ‘bedroom eyes’ was to be in the blackout was altogether another matter. But mostly he was sitting down the area steps in Tite Street on the assumption that any tall man emerging from number 55 was likely to be the American. He sat all evening on the rashness of such assumption, uncertain as to whether Diana Brack was in or out. The mist slid off the Thames curling up the street to put a chill in his bones, and he was nodding off at about ten thirty when the slam of the door opposite woke him. He peeked out above the pavement. A cab was moving off and the light behind the door was momentarily visible before the blackout was smoothed down. Dammit, he thought, someone had come in and he’d not so much as caught a glimpse. Half an hour later he heard the door open again. A tall man emerged and walked off towards the river, a wraith vanishing into mist. He stepped quietly into the street. Wayne was standing at the corner of Tite Street and the Chelsea Embankment. As long as he stood there Wildeve could hardly move. Wayne’s hand shot up. Wildeve saw a cab pull over to him, and the American got in. Wildeve raced for the Embankment to see the taxi slowly pulling out into traffic. By sheer good luck there was another cab cruising slowly towards him only a dozen yards away. He flagged it down.

  ‘Where to, guv?’ said the cabman.

  ‘Follow the cab in front,’ said Wildeve.

  The man looked back at him in silent, contemptuous disbelief.

  ‘Honestly. I’m a policeman,’ said Wildeve without the strength of conviction.

  Wayne’s cab turned into Chelsea Bridge Road. The traffic was light at this time of night but the mist that had wafted off the river now seemed to have the makings of a London pea-souper, and the two cabs in tandem moved slowly up Sloane Street to emerge in Knightsbridge. The smog took on the characteristic yellow hue of a killing cloud.

  ‘This ain’t easy you know,’ the cabman said over his shoulder to Wildeve. ‘You can’t see your hand in front of your face, let alone another bleedin’ cab!’

  Wildeve said nothing. He rolled down the window to see out, but all he achieved was to let a dogtail of the smothering London smog slither in. For all his protestation the cabman seemed to have cat’s eyes. Wildeve was no longer sure where they were in the tangled streets of the city. He felt that the level of traffic noise after a right turn was probably fair indication of Park Lane, but he soon lost all sense of geography as the cab cut a zig-zag course across the small streets of Marylebone to the north of Marble Arch. He felt tempted to ask.

  ‘We haven’t lost him have we?’ he said, leaning over to the glass divide.

  ‘You can thank your lucky stars if we haven’t. I reckon that’s your man just up ahead, but I’m not about to swear on a Bible.’

  ‘Do you know where we are?’

  ‘Manchester Square, guv’nor. That I will swear to.’

  37

  The cab inched around the north-western corner of the square and ground to a halt in the stalled traffic. The smog was so thick that most sat it out in silence. Only the odd burst of pointless honking punctuated the enveloping stillness. Anxiously the young policeman slipped open the door and leaned out to see what he could see. Odd points of light bled into the darkness like running watercolours. He could tell nothing from it. The door was yanked from him and as he fumbled to keep his footing he was blasted back into the seat by a gunshot. He was dead before he hit the leather. A yellow tongue of creeping smog curled in through the open door to lick the corpse.

  38

  Troy slept a rich, warm, painless sleep. A fierce hammering at the door fought through to him – more like the rattle of dried peas on a tin drum. He found himself in bed in his underpants and socks. He grabbed a blanket and all but fell downstairs. He pulled back the door a fraction and the night was a mustard cloud wrapping itself around the colossal bulk of a night sergeant from the Yard.

  ‘Mr Troy. You’d better get dressed. There’s been a murder in Manchester Square. I’ve a car at the end of the street waiting for you. I did try to phone but you’ve not been answering.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Troy, and let the door swing back as he headed for the stairs. Pulling on his trousers he yelled down, ‘Where in Manchester Square?’

  ‘In the Square itself. I’m told it was right in the street. I can give you the details as we drive.’

  Troy fumbled around for the rest of his clothes, pulled a grubby shirt over his head and caught a faint whiff of scent. Tosca’s? He had picked up the shirt Sasha had dropped disdainfully on the bed. It was strange how the scent lingered and provoked. He had not noticed it at all on Tosca. Whereas Brack’s was as vivid as an image. He had only to think the smell to feel it. Only to feel the smell to see the woman. But then he wasn’t thinking of Tosca as a suspect for anything – he knew scent much the same way Kolankiewicz knew human offal. He snapped out of the reverie and looked at his watch. He had come in from the concert with his head splitting and fallen straight into bed. It was nearly midnight. He’d been asleep for less than an hour, but it had felt like five years on another planet.

  They stepped into the street and instinctively Troy pulled his coat tighter around him, turned up the collar and sunk his hands deep in the pockets. He felt the grit of the bomb blast under his fingernails, and for a split second the blood-red cloud appeared over his eye and he winced at the pain of it, before mentally pushing it over the horizon.

  ‘I know,’ said the sergeant, reading Troy’s expression wrong and leading the way out into St Martin’s Lane. ‘I’ve never seen
anything like it. This bugger’ll choke off more than the Luftwaffe tonight.’

  39

  A Special in uniform stood by the open door of a taxi, wrapped in his cape. Troy begged a torch off the night sergeant and told the car to go. There’d be enough chaos with two pairs of police feet and a photographer to deal with. Troy looked at the bobby. He was smiling. It seemed absurd, but he was smiling. He was fat and fiftyish and he was smiling. It was just possible that if you volunteered as a Special there was nothing better than a good murder.

  ‘Well?’ Troy said.

  ‘I’ve touched nothing. I’ve stood guard since I heard the cry go up.’

  The phrase seemed a quaint leftover from the peelers. It irritated Troy. He thrust the torch at him and climbed into the back of the cab.

  The Special peered over Troy’s shoulder. ‘Struth,’ he said as the torch hit the mess of blood and brain in the back of the cab. ‘Struth!’

  There was little left of the face. One bullet had caught him in the cheek, another in the mouth and a third had entered at the forehead and taken off the back of the head. Most of his brains were spread across the rear window, and his clothes were drenched in blood. The body lolled against the seat, the head tilted back, lifeless eyes gazing upward.

  ‘Hold that damn torch steady,’ said Troy. ‘I want to go through his pockets.’

  Troy closed the eyes, fished into the inside jacket pocket and pulled out a wallet and a piece of blood-soaked cardboard. He wiped it clean with the fleshy side of his hand.

  ‘He was a policeman,’ he said softly. ‘It’s a Met warrant card.’

  ‘Struth!’ said the Special again.

  Troy peered at the name on the card, and ducked back out of the cab. The Special was still smiling. Troy realised it was his natural expression, as fixed as rictus.

  ‘Where’s my constable?’ he asked.

  ‘Behind the hedge,’ replied the Special. ‘Tossing his supper. It’s hit him bad.’

  ‘Get him.’

  Troy climbed back into the cab. He patted down the man’s pockets and tried to breathe shallowly to avoid the stench of death. He was searching for the policeman’s notebook. It wasn’t there.

  ‘Freddie?’ came a bleating voice from outside.

  Troy faced an ashen Wildeve on the pavement.

  ‘Who was he, Freddie?’

  ‘Miller. Melvyn Miller. Detective Sergeant. Special Branch. Are you OK to talk?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You’d better tell me what happened.’

  Troy set the Special to guard the cab and took Wildeve over to the edge of the park.

  ‘I’m sorry, Freddie. I didn’t see a damn thing. The traffic had stopped completely. I gave it a couple of minutes and the urge to get out and walk hit me and of course it dawned on me then that Wayne was probably feeling the same, so I got out just to see if he’d quit the cab and set off. I was two cars behind this one. I thought this was Wayne’s cab. So did my cabbie. He swears this is the cab he followed from Tite Street. When I got to it the door was open, the chap inside was dead and the cabbie was slumped over the driving-wheel with a lump the size of a hen’s egg on the back of his head. I damn near fainted I can tell you. For a couple of minutes I didn’t know what to do, then I ran for the nearest police box, got them to call you. The Special showed up pretty sharpish, but the traffic started to move again, and I lost Wayne. If I ever had him in the first place that is.’

  ‘You didn’t hear shots.’

  ‘No. He used a silencer I should think.’

  ‘Even that makes some noise, but then fog does tend to swallow sound.’

  ‘Freddie, you don’t suppose Wayne thought that chap was me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t think about it if I were you.’

  ‘It just seems like . . . well . . . like chance. The worst kind of rotten luck for this poor chap to slip in between me and Wayne in the fog like that.’

  ‘Jack, he was a Special Branch officer, doesn’t that tell you anything?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’d like to say take the night off and go home, Jack. But you can’t. I want you to get Onions out of bed and tell him. Then get your head down in the office until we send for you. It’s gone midnight now. Onions will have a car sent to Acton to pick him up. It’ll take about another hour and a half.’

  Troy watched the police photographer do his work. Then the ambulance crew took away the body, and he climbed back into the cab to look for the bullets that killed Miller. The torchbeam was too feeble to go by. He judged the trajectory from the angle of the body and felt along the blood-sodden seat with his fingertips. There were tears in the black leather. It was probable the bullets had gone right through the cab. He turned out the contents of the boot and found one slug lodged in a horse-blanket the driver used to wrap the engine and had folded over at least sixfold to form a dense mass that had stopped the bullet as surely as a sandbag. The other two had come to rest in the tarmac of the road. He prised them out with his penknife, but they were splayed beyond any recognition. One out of three wasn’t bad. He knew Kolankiewicz would be able to identify the slug. It was surely a .45? If only they had another to match. The Special Constable was down on his hands and knees on the pavement feeling around in the dark for the casings. Troy could hear him grunting and cursing as his hands found everything from cigarette ends to shards of glass.

  ‘Buggeration,’ he was saying. ‘Buggeration.’

  Then ‘Gertcha!’ The final grunt of triumph, and the man stood up with two spent shells in his fist and brought them over to Troy. The permanent rictus smile made his expression seem like a look of great satisfaction.

  40

  Onions had shaved before coming out. Nothing in his appearance would have given away the fact that he’d been dragged from his bed at past one o’clock in the morning to be driven across London at a crawl. By the time he met Troy in his office it was nearer 4 a.m. He sat in his overcoat behind his desk, looking as though he was waiting for an early commuter train.

  ‘You look dreadful,’ he said.

  Troy looked at himself. His coat was filthy again, he had no tie, his shirt was black at the cuffs and his shoes were sodden. Next to him Wildeve looked scarcely better and smelt of vomit. He was having difficulty staying awake and Troy could see him fighting the inevitable flutter of his eyelids.

  ‘I called the Branch from home,’ Onions said. ‘I talked to Charlie Walsh, the CI in charge of Miller. He was grim about it all, but he’ll let us get on with it.’

  ‘That won’t stop him carrying out his own investigation. I’ve never known them not to look after their own.’

  ‘There’s not many Special Branch officers killed in the line of duty. In fact I can’t remember a case. That’s our lot more often than not. I think you’d better give him a day or so on the paperwork.’

  ‘What?’ This struck Troy as an outrageous request. ‘A murder. A copper shot to death on the street and he wants a day or two?’

  ‘I get the impression this Miller was bit of a loner.’

  ‘For god’s sake, Stan. This is madness!’

  ‘A bit of a loner,’ the timbre of Onions’s voice changed slightly but in a way that spoke volumes. ‘You know the sort of bloke. Doesn’t keep his Super up to date. Goes wandering off on his own.’

  Troy knew he had gone too far in raising his voice to Onions. He was now coming around the desk heading for the hapless Wildeve, who had fallen asleep with his legs crossed and one foot sticking idly into air. Onions kicked the foot and it shot to the floor tilting Wildeve’s posture so that he almost fell off the chair.

  ‘Wake up, boy!’ Onions yelled in his ear.

  ‘Yah worra,’ Wildeve said, his head pivoting madly in a desperate attempt to locate his bearings.

  Troy steadied Wildeve with a hand and shot him a ‘say nothing do nothing’ look.

  ‘You’ll have plenty to do,’ Onions went on.

  ‘I’m doing it. The bullets have g
one off to Hendon. I got Thomson and Gutteridge out of bed. One to watch at Tite Street, the other at Norfolk House. And I’ve two chaps in uniform doing the cab ranks to find the driver of Wayne’s cab. The driver of Miller’s is in the Paddington Hospital. They won’t let me see him till tomorrow. I’ll be ready for whatever Walsh has by seven o’clock.’

  ‘Chief Inspector Walsh to you. And, like I said, give it a day or two.’

  Troy pushed luck. ‘You have at least established that Miller was following Wayne?’

  ‘It’s hardly a coincidence, is it?’

  ‘But Walsh did confirm he was following Wayne?’

  ‘I’m satisfied that he was following Wayne.’

  ‘Why?’

  They were both standing now, squared off to each other across the desk. Onions opted to lower the stakes, resumed his seat, slicked back his hair in his habitual gesture and waited a few quiet seconds until Troy too had sat down again.

  ‘I’ve known Charlie Walsh the best part of twenty years. If he has a slight problem . . . ’

  Troy bit his tongue at the word ‘slight’, but forced himself to say nothing.

  ‘ . . . And needs, say, twenty-four hours’ grace, I’ll let him have it. We know Miller was following Wayne. That’s what matters. And at seven o’clock you’ll be too damn busy with MI5. You’re not the only one getting buggers out of their pits. I had that ponce Pym on the line and told him I wanted to see him and Zelig and whoever else is in charge of this mess a.s.a.p. He offered me noon, we compromised on 7 a.m.’

  Troy would have hated to be in Neville’s shoes when he took that call.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. Walsh can’t talk until he’s gone through channels.’

  ‘That’s not what he said.’

  ‘No, but it’s what he means.’