Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  She stopped, looking at Troy, exasperated.

  ‘Oh God. You haven’t a clue what I’m talking about have you?’

  Troy felt he knew quite well what she was talking about, although it might pay to be less than understanding. In Wayne she had met a man who blew the cobwebs out of the old British plodding Socialists. About time. They’d bored him silly throughout childhood. He not only understood, he agreed – except that she had fallen for the front put up by a man Troy perceived as a first-rate charlatan.

  ‘What does a man have to do to get you to lie for him?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You did take the photograph. You did conceal Jimmy when I called on you in March. What did he tell you?’

  ‘Nothing. He wanted the photograph. He didn’t want to see you. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘And you didn’t ask why?’

  ‘No. I saw no reason to.’

  ‘You’ve spent your life asking questions and you didn’t ask Jimmy why he wants to avoid the police?’

  She mustered defiance in not answering. Trying to stare back at him, but no longer calm, her determination dented.

  ‘He’s killed three men, and quite possibly a fourth too. Lady Diana, only a fool would attempt the degree of self-deception you’re practising.’

  She was redder in the face now. Troy thought she might be on the verge of tears.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said for the umpteenth time, but this time the sad mechanics of repetition and deceit told. Her voice was weak and the words carried no conviction. Troy knew she was lying.

  The following morning he got her out of bed at six thirty, and she seemed pleased to see him. Whatever she had passed a sleepless night pondering was worse than any conversation she could have with him. Troy suspected that simply bringing her father into the matter had unlocked a floodgate. She talked and she talked and she talked. The same old song – understand me, imagine me. If only Troy would do this he would be able to see Wayne through her eyes and stop his pointless pursuit.

  Troy sat through this potted biography, this dilettante’s history of British radicalism, and let her unravel. He spread his folders out on the desk in front of him – but today they were not empty.

  She changed her mind about gossip and proceeded to compare the absent Major to Wells – a quality of mind, a quality of presence. Troy interjected that murder was unlikely to be one of the many ways in which Wells had offended society. But Wells’s shortcomings were nothing compared to her father’s – she moved from one man to the other with a speed and complexity that was hard to follow. For a while it seemed to Troy that Wayne and Fermanagh and Wells all represented aspects of a single man – a Promethean creature of her own making.

  Troy opened one of the files while she was in mid-flight on the subject of her father. He slipped a picture of Brand’s broken skull in front of her. She stopped.

  ‘What is this?’

  Troy said nothing and took out the photograph of von Ranke.

  ‘Why are you showing me these?’

  Troy looked at her. She looked at the photographs.

  ‘These are the men you think Jimmy killed?’

  Troy nodded. ‘Would it surprise you to learn,’ he said, ‘that these are the men in the photograph you took?’

  ‘No, no – that was Wolinski.’

  ‘And Brand and von Ranke – I expect Wolinski’s body to turn up one day. Or perhaps you can tell me how the Major disposed of it?’

  The blood had drained from her face. She stared at the pictures in disbelief, looking between them and Troy, searching out some shred of reassurance.

  ‘Jimmy couldn’t do that. Jimmy couldn’t do that to anyone.’

  Troy reached for the photograph of Detective Sergeant Millertaken only minutes after his death – bloodier by far. She gasped out loud. For a moment or two she could find neither voice nor words. Her face was down, her eyes fixed on the photograph. As she looked up at him, brushing the forelock from her face, he thought he caught the beginnings of tears in the corners of her eyes.

  ‘He didn’t,’ she whispered. ‘He didn’t do this!’

  ‘He shot each of these men in the face. I think that’s a peculiarly American technique, don’t you? The ritual of gangland. Sergeant Miller was shot three times at point-blank range. Once to the mouth, once to the cheek and the bullet that killed him took the back of his head off. I scraped his brains off the cab seat myself.’ Troy stabbed at the photograph with his index finger, pinpointing each bullet-hole with a thump of the table. Her mouth opened in a silent scream. She cupped a hand to it and fought for words.

  ‘He didn’t do it! He couldn’t do it!’

  Troy stood up and began to gather up his files, leaving the shot of Miller on the table in front of her.

  ‘I think you know damn well that he did. I think the man you’ve spent two days describing to me as admirably, attractively different is different to you precisely because he can do this.’

  She breathed deeply for several seconds, regaining some composure, some voice.

  ‘What does that mean? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’ll leave you and the late Sergeant Miller to ponder that.’

  As he reached the door she found voice enough to shout, ‘I know he didn’t do this, I know! Please believe me, Troy, I know! Troy, please!’

  After lunch Brack was shown once more into the meeting room. Troy had left the lights off and stood over the far side of the room against the shuttered windows on the southern side. The door closed behind Brack. She stood a moment or two in stillness, and then, as Troy did not move or turn to face her, she instinctively crossed the room towards him. Counting her footsteps Troy swung off the iron bar that held the shutters and let it swing free, clanging like a pendulum against the wooden frame. He prised back one leaf of the shutters and sunlight shafted into the room. He opened a second and before he could even turn to look at her Brack was shrieking. And nothing on earth would still her cries.

  The shaft of light became a flood picking out in every detail the blood-caked holes in the face and skull of the corpse that lay on the trolley between Brack and the window. She put her hands to her cheeks and screamed through her fingers, but her gaze was fixed on Miller’s face and until her legs gave way and she sank into a pitiful, bowed heap upon the floor she made no attempt to shield her eyes.

  Minutes passed. The screams became whimpers. She said ‘No’ over and over again through stifling sobs. Troy stood still, framed in the open window, the shadow of his head cast across her face by the southern sun. The door opened and Onions stood in the doorway. A constable just behind him. Scarcely even raising his voice to normal speaking pitch, he said over his shoulder, ‘Get that thing out of here, then fetch a WPC.’

  He stood aside as the trolley was wheeled past him, his hands in his pockets. He looked at Brack without a flicker of expression on his face. Slowly he crossed the floor and stood next to Troy, looking out of the window, as calmly as a man surveying his rose garden from the french windows of suburbia.

  ‘This had better be worth it,’ he said quietly, watching the sunlight play upon the Thames. ‘Are you gettin’ much?’

  Brack sobbed, louder than either of them speaking.

  ‘Lies,’ said Troy. ‘I’m getting lies.’

  ‘You’ve not got much longer. Her father’s outside. Brought his brief too. Flown in from Ireland special,’ Onions said in the most matter-of-fact way possible.

  ‘I’ve been expecting this. Can you stall him?’

  ‘I’ve stalled him the best part of an hour already.’

  ‘Is he asking for her?’

  ‘No. He’s asking for you.’

  ‘Then I’d better see him.’

  They turned and crossed the room. Neither looked at the shrunken heap of clothing that was Diana Brack, but they parted around her automatically, like men avoiding an importunate beggar in the street. As they left a WPC came
in. She looked at Brack and turned on her heel to speak to Troy.

  ‘What do I do?’ she asked.

  ‘You do nothing,’ Troy replied. ‘And you say nothing.’

  Onions strode off ahead. Troy quickened his step to catch him. It had always been part of the plan to let Brack sweat it out alone. Onions’s intrusion was not yet regrettable – it might even be timely.

  The Marquess of Fermanagh waited in an interview room. He stood by the window, stooping slightly, with his back to them as Onions and Troy came in. Slowly he swung around, drawing himself up to a towering six feet six. As tall as Bonham and half his weight, he was skeletal thin, with a sharply pointed nose and a gleaming mass of white hair combed back away from the forehead. Troy put him at seventy-four or five. He had his daughter’s dark green eyes, but his lips were thin, drawn on to that cadaverous face by a pencil. He bore a striking resemblance to the actor Ernest Thesiger, in particular, thought Troy, to the role of the demented genius Thesiger had played in The Bride of Frankenstein. Troy found him instantly repulsive, exuding an evil born of political power rather than mere cinematic association. He found it impossible not to view the man through his daughter’s eyes. It seemed as though over the last three days Fermanagh had joined Wayne as a ghost that lurked in the space between Troy and Diana Brack.

  Fermanagh’s solicitor attempted introductions only to be cut short by his client rapping on the table with the silver knob of his cane.

  ‘Enough! Enough! Shuttup Pumphret! The Sergeant knows very well who I am! What matters is what he has to say for himself.’

  Onions assumed a position of judicious abdication. He sat on a radiator and feigned indifference. Fermanagh seated himself at the table. Troy sat opposite him, leaving the solicitor nervously grasping the back of a chair, unsure whether to pull it back and sit or whether to keep well clear. A nod from Fermanagh told him to sit and Troy knew that this would not be a three-way conversation but a dialogue. Mr Pumphret had been brought along to show the briefcase and the bowler hat and give a gloss of legitimacy to the proceedings. Fermanagh would do his own bargaining, if indeed that was why he had come. Men like Fermanagh could not be accustomed to bargaining.

  Troy recited, ‘I am holding your daughter under Emergency Powers legislation. I am investigating a case involving the activities of certain enemy aliens. I have reason to believe she has information affecting the case. Unless you have been able to procure a writ of habeas corpus, I intend to go on holding her.’

  He paused long enough for the solicitor to begin, long enough for Fermanagh to launch into his bluster, but neither man spoke.

  ‘I take it then that you don’t have a writ?’

  ‘Writs be damned!’ said Fermanagh. ‘Let’s hear the evidence! If you dragged my daughter in here you must have some evidence.’

  Troy felt Onions looking straight at him over the head of the Marquess. He found Fermanagh’s tone hard to read – for a moment it almost seemed that he wanted Troy to have a case. Why was he not simply barking his insistence, crying outrage, scorching opposition? Since when did men like Fermanagh care for facts? They rattled the crockery and frightened the horses.

  ‘Lady Diana was seen leaving the house of a man closely connected to the case, who has disappeared – quite possibly the man has been murdered. Your daughter entered his flat after he was reported missing and took a photograph representing two enemy aliens and the third man.’

  ‘And you have a witness to this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he has identified my daughter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  Troy was not about to admit that it was himself. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘And this man saw my daughter in this missing man’s flat?’ Troy had smelt Diana Brack, he didn’t need to see her, but that was a subtlety not to be wasted on Fermanagh. ‘Yes,’ he lied.

  ‘But this missing man, your third man, is not an enemy alien?’

  So far Fermanagh was doing well. He had in a few easy moves succeeded in bringing Troy to the weakness in his argument. Onions, he knew, would uphold his refusal to admit and define his own role as a witness, but he was unlikely to defend a lie on this Issue.

  ‘No,’ Troy conceded. ‘He is not.’

  ‘A foreigner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Be precise, Sergeant. If that’s at all possible.’

  ‘A Pole.’

  ‘Ah . . . an ally in fact?’

  Troy said nothing. Fermanagh nodded and aahed as though weighing it all up. Pumphret stared at the crown of his bowler.

  ‘It’s thin, I say. Pretty damned thin. Wouldn’t you say, Pumphret?’ Pumphret didn’t say.

  ‘Enemy aliens. Dirty business. Dirty business. Fifth column. Nazis in our midst.’

  Fermanagh seemed to be musing out loud. Troy recalled reading in his father’s newspaper in the thirties that Fermanagh had been one of a group of senior Tories who had called for talks with Hitler, who had endorsed Chamberlain’s ‘peace for our time’ as ‘a just agreement with our natural ally’ rather than the delaying device it so obviously was. Not that this would colour his thinking now. Patriotism was a last but ready refuge for scoundrels like Fermanagh. Troy knew exactly where this line was leading.

  ‘But you don’t have any direct link between my daughter and these people, do you?’

  Troy stared at him, determined to offer no answer unless forced to.

  ‘And without that link . . . you cannot charge her . . . you cannot detain her under 18b . . . ’

  Regulation 18b permitted detention without trial – it had been used to intern hundreds of aliens and several dozen suspect Britons, the Mosleys among them. Troy had no intention of invoking this and Fermanagh knew it. Pumphret might look like a fool but he had briefed his client well.

  ‘You will . . .’ the Marquess reached his point, ‘ . . . have to let her go.’

  Troy waited as long as he could. Hoping that Fermanagh would fill the silence. He did. Out of sheer cockiness rather than discomfort at Troy’s unblinking gaze and utter silence, almost casually, smiling through stained, wicked wolf’s teeth, he threw in an unnecessary ‘Sooner or later’.

  ‘Quite,’ said Troy with the speed of a striking snake. ‘Later. When you have got your writ.’ And the house of cards Fermanagh had so carefully built came crashing down even as he smiled.

  It was obvious to Troy that Fermanagh had no wish to apply for the writ. Now he could read the man and the game he played. He wasn’t here to save his daughter, he was here to save the family name. He didn’t, Troy concluded, give a damn about her. Any halfway decent father would have asked about her well-being before playing police politics with him, and as the ‘sooner or later’ showed the old bastard probably thought a day or two in the cells was good for a wayward daughter he had all but disowned ten years ago. Troy knew that he had no case on which to hold Brack, that Fermanagh could walk out of Scotland Yard with his daughter, that he could obtain a writ of habeas corpus almost at the snap of his fingers, but he also knew that he wasn’t prepared to push the matter to a court appearance. He had gambled on Troy not recognising a bluff, gambled on the intimidating power of class and title. And he had lost. Troy got up – ‘If you’ll excuse me, sir,’ he said to Onions and left. He could hear Fermanagh barking his name all the way down the corridor.

  Troy relieved the WPC, pulled over an upright chair and sat six or seven feet away from Brack. She acknowledged his presence by looking up once. Her make-up ran in black rivers down her cheeks. Her sobs, though subdued, were still audible, and as he sat waiting for the time to begin again they seemed to swell to fill the room with the bottomless depths of her grief.

  Twenty minutes or more passed to this single sound. Then she looked up again.

  ‘He didn’t do that,’ she whispered. ‘He couldn’t do . . . that.’

  Troy returned her look without blinking. ‘Oh yes he did,’ he said at the same whisper pitch. ‘And y
ou and I are the only people alive who know that. The only people who know him for what he is.’

  Her green eyes flashed. She bowed her head and resumed the slow rhythmic sobbing. The door opened. Onions jerked his head at Troy to summon him outside.

  Troy pulled the door to quietly behind him. ‘What’s Fermanagh saying?’

  ‘Lot of tosh about how he has respect for the due process of the law, greased with knowing the Prime Minister . . . ’

  ‘Winston won’t lift a finger for Fermanagh.’

  ‘ . . . Half the cabinet, not to mention the Met commissioner – “but all the same, the law is the law”. He’s full of “on the one hand, on the other” kind of malarkey. I think he’d dearly love to strangle you, but he’d prefer it if I did. He’s implying a lot and saying nowt.’

  ‘Will he call the commissioner?’

  ‘No, I don’t think he will. But -’ Onions paused. ‘I’m going to have to let her go.’

  ‘I’m not prepared to do that.’

  ‘You misheard me, Sergeant. I’m going to let her go!’

  ‘Stan, there’s no need. Fermanagh’s bluffing. He won’t chase a writ. He doesn’t even have to do that. All he has to do is stand on his dignity and raise hell and he’ll walk out of here with her, writ or no writ, because I haven’t a leg to stand on and he knows it. But that’s not all there is to it. He doesn’t want to walk out of here with her. In fact, he doesn’t even want to see her. He’s enjoying tossing points of law around with me and pissing all over his own solicitor. He won’t go for that writ.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he knows bloody well that I have only to pick up the phone to the editor of anyone of my father’s papers to have it splashed across the lot, with every other daily to follow, that Old Fermanagh’s daughter’s been held under Emergency Powers with all that implies, and there’s not a thing he or his team of libel lawyers can do about it. He came here hoping that we’d just give in at the first whiff of grapeshot, a title and a reputation. God knows it’s probably worked for him all his life. I’d imagine rural chief constables jump when he barks. But I don’t and nor do you. So he opted to mix the bluff and bluster with a little fact and negotiation – and there’s the rub. That mixture doesn’t work. It’s so thin it’s transparent. He hasn’t the guts or, more importantly, the will to fight for his own daughter. He knows her well enough to know she’s been up to something, and whatever he thinks it is he doesn’t want it made public. He came here to learn what I knew, not to set his daughter free. The truth is he cares more for his own reputation than he does for her. After all, what’s a few nights in a cell when your idea of punishing a child was to beat her senseless with a leather strap and lock her in the coal cellar overnight.’