Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  ‘Which way do you think he’ll go?’ Wildeve whispered.

  ‘To the Underground. It’s part of his MO.’

  ‘He’s not moving.’

  ‘Yes he is!’

  Wayne left the porch and turned to his left, heading quickly eastward to the Embankment.

  ‘He’s going towards the Temple. Get to the front, Jack!’

  ‘Surely we should stick together?’

  ‘Jack, there’s not a moment to lose – for God’s sake just do as you’re told – make sure those dozy buggers follow on.’

  ‘Freddie, how can we follow if . . .

  But Troy was gone. Once more down the rabbit hole.

  Wayne paid via one of the automatic machines and went down to the eastbound platform of the District and Circle. Troy stood on the staircase until the train pulled in – a District line bound for Plaistow. When he was certain Wayne was seated he ran for the door at the last second and squeezed into the car behind. Through the connecting doors he could see Wayne, sitting next to an old lady in black and reading the Daily Mail. He didn’t look up and Troy had not at any point seen him turn to make sure he wasn’t being followed. It bespoke a certain cockiness, but it also proved something else. Brack had not revealed to Wayne that she had told Troy about their hideaway. Troy took an emotional pleasure in this – this one vestige of loyalty she had shown him, for the truth was that he had not been at all certain that she would keep the secret or that she was capable of keeping any secret.

  Wayne ignored the stops, and did not even look up from his paper until the train pulled into Mark Lane, where the District and the Circle parted. It was a likely place to change. If he did Troy would have a very hard job concealing himself. Wayne peered at the platform, as though making certain of the station name, and went back to his paper. As the train pulled out Troy began to suspect that Wayne was heading for Stepney. It seemed absurd. Absurd that the murderer should return to the scene of the crime. A cliché of tacky novelettes. At Whitechapel Wayne got out. Perhaps it wasn’t to be Stepney after all? But then he turned left along the Mile End Road, crossed over in front of the Blind Beggar pub, and turned sharply right at the top of Jubilee Street.

  Troy kept as far back as he could, and when Wayne turned left into Adelina Grove he raced to the corner. Wayne was fifty or so feet away and walking resolutely in the direction of Stepney Green. Still he did not turn. Keeping to the doorways, fearful that his footsteps would sound like horses’ hooves in the quiet of the empty street, Troy moved at a crawl and as he reached the corner of Hannibal Road and Jamaica Street – or what was left of Jamaica Street – he realised that Wayne had vanished from sight. He was only a few feet from Cressy Houses, a few flights of stairs from Wolinski’s flat, but Miller had never recorded any visit by Wayne to the flat – what he had recorded was Wayne’s meetings in the Bricklayers Arms, outside which Troy now found himself. He pushed cautiously at the door marked Jug and Bottle and found himself in the off-licence, a mere cupboard of a room with scarcely the space to swing a jug or bottle. The landlord had his hands full with a Saturday-night crowd, and less than an hour’s urgent drinking time left till closing. He was alternately berating a young serving woman for her slowness and yelling ‘Now, now, gentlemen, ’old yer ’orses,’ at the customers. Troy stepped back from the counter, out of the light, and began to search the crowd. Wayne must stand head and shoulders over the average Londoner, he thought, and he could not be hard to find. Yet he could not see him above the mob. The young woman moved away from the bar and turned to the row of optics on the back wall at the same moment the landlord did and for the first time Troy had a clear view across the bar to the far end where it curved round to meet the wall and ended in a hinged flap. Wayne was hunched over a pint of stout, burying his height by propping himself on his elbows. He was deep in conversation with a small man on a bar stool who sat on the corner and so had his back to Troy. There was something familiar in the curve of that back, it was almost hunched, or was it the way the man leaned to hear whatever it was that Wayne was saying? Then the man turned and he knew it was Edelmann. Edelmann spoke to the barman, pushed a half-crown across the counter to him and as his order was taken gazed idly round the room, so idly as to let his gaze meet Troy’s, so idly as to let their eyes lock – and neither he nor Troy could look away, and Major Wayne could not but notice. He had the glass to his lips, and as his eyes flicked across at Troy to see what Edelmann was looking at his lips froze and he put the glass down untouched and fled.

  ‘Shit!’ said Troy out loud. He turned to bump into an old man carrying a jug for his beer and found himself stuck, wedged against the counter, with no room to pass. He pushed the old man back into the street. The man fell with a moan and a ‘bugger’ as the jug smashed upon the paving, and Troy ran. Wayne had stolen a march and was halfway down Union Place – a quick glance over his shoulder at Troy and he disappeared down Stepney Green, running towards a patch of rubble where a lone chimney-stack stood out like a lighthouse.

  Troy cursed his luck. Why did Edelmann have to be there? Why did he have to spot Troy? Why, given what he knew about Wayne, was he talking to him over a pint like an old mate? Why was Wayne running? Why was Troy chasing? Wayne could not now do anything – not a damn thing except run the both of them ragged. The rendezvous was blown. Whoever Wayne had come to meet – whoever Wayne had come to kill – whoever, whoever, whoever – the word rang in Troy’s mind. Would he ever know?

  He jumped over the remains of a house wall and found himself once more on the exposed kitchen floors of the ruined houses of Cardigan Street, among the nettles and the brambles of ‘the farm’, where the boys had chalked up their game of hopscotch. Wayne was nowhere to be seen. Troy ran on towards the chimney-stack. Suddenly Wayne appeared from behind a length of wall just high enough to have concealed him – but he wasn’t running away, he was walking towards him. Troy had to stop or they would meet nose to nose. It was a foolish position – he felt foolish – he slipped his hands into his pockets, and found little reassurance in the silver revolver nestling there. He found himself in the shadow of that great chimney, with the moon peeking out and the gentle rain upon his face beginning to mingle with the rivulets of his own sweat. Thirty feet away Wayne stopped – hands deep in his mackintosh pockets, the rain running off the brim of his trilby. Somewhere in the distance a siren sent up its plaintive wail – the usual false alarm, there had been no raids for weeks now. It seemed to Troy that he could hear the rain louder than he could hear the siren, seemed that he could hear Wayne breathe louder than he could hear his own heartbeat. Then sound subsided into silence, and the distant purr of an engine wafted across the night sky with all the power of an illusion.

  ‘I figured it was time we met,’ Wayne said.

  Troy said nothing. Troy could think of nothing. He watched Wayne’s hands, wondering which pocket held the Colt, and trying to remember whether the man was right– or left-handed.

  ‘I hear you had a high old time while I was away.’

  He paused to let Troy speak, but Troy didn’t.

  ‘Was she good?’

  Troy gripped the butt of his revolver, and searched out the trigger with his index finger.

  ‘Was she good?’ Wayne repeated. ‘I mean, she can be so very good, so very, very good, but when she’s bad – Oh man, she is better.’

  And he took both hands out of his pockets and touched thumbs to fingers to form two emphatic winged zeros in obscene appraisal – then he let his hands relax and locked the fingers across his midriff.

  Looking back, with endless time in which to recuperate, in endless pain with which to exercise hindsight, Troy examined the move a thousand times. What was it that had made him slip his fingers from the gun and take his hands from his pockets and lock them together as Wayne had done? What was it? What had it been? Some gentlemanly gesture of fair play? Some dreadful, latent Englishness that told him it wasn’t cricket to be holding a gun on a man who wasn’t holding one on you?
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  The last thing – he could have sworn he heard the drone of an aeroplane engine as the shot rang out and blew him to the ground. There was awful, searing pain in his left side, and a sensation of warm tea pouring out across his shirt. His face was in the mud, the mud was in his eyes as he looked up at Wayne, still standing there with his fingers locked, staring down at him from under the sodden brim of his hat.

  Wayne unlocked his hands, and looked off to his left.

  ‘Finish him,’ he said softly.

  Troy could not see. He lay on the side where the bullet had pierced him. He strained his eyes and twisted his neck and fumbled in his left-hand pocket for the gun. A tall man in black, black shoes, black pin-stripe trousers, a glistening black raincoat and a wide-brimmed black hat was bearing down on him – a large automatic pistol hanging loosely from his right hand. Troy could not make out the face, nor any feature of it. He tugged at the revolver as the man walked slowly out of the shadows towards him. He pulled as hard as he could and slithered around in the mud and the blood, but the weight of his body was on the gun and the hammer had caught on the lining of his coat. He looked round again, twisting to see over his own shoulder. The man had stopped and was slowly raising the pistol to aim at Troy’s head. Troy tugged on the gun. It tore free with such force that his whole body twisted round towards his assassin and in a single sweeping movement he had levelled the gun and fired. He had missed. Oh God, he had missed!

  The man stood with the gun still aimed at Troy. Why didn’t he fire? Troy asked himself. Then the arm dropped – the man swayed gently as though pushed by an invisible hand, fell over backwards and hit the ground full length, scattering mud, and still clutching the pistol.

  Troy staggered to his feet. It seemed to him it took an age as he pulled each limb free of the clinging mud and the downward pull of pain. But Wayne had frozen. Troy tried to raise the gun again, but the pain was more than he could bear. Still Wayne would not take the risk, he did not move. Overhead the drone of the plane came closer. Troy fought his own muscles and managed to level the gun, Wayne extended his arms, put up his hands either in silent pleading or an unconscious gesture to ward off bullets. The drone was right above them now, smothering, enveloping, blurring, deceiving, deceiving – the power of suggestion. Behind Wayne shapes seemed to form out of the darkness, the stones uncurled, the bricks spoke, a murmur rose up to meet the drone from above. Shapes became figures, murmurs became voices, the drone became a boom, a deep bass rumble, roaring in his blood, bending the world in front of him as he tried to keep Wayne in focus, tried to keep his grip on the trigger. He aimed his gun, his finger would not move. He could not pull the trigger. Then thunder exploded all around him and it seemed to Troy that the earth had opened up and swallowed him.

  76

  ‘You’re a very lucky boy,’ the nurse told him when he first awoke, but his first waking lasted only minutes and he drifted into painless sleep and into dreams in which Brack kissed him better, as she would put it, and kissed him, and smiled as she never smiled.

  When next he awoke a different nurse told him he was in the London Hospital, and that he was going to be all right, and then she too said that he was a very lucky boy. Troy asked what day it was and was told it was Wednesday, but that meant nothing to him, as he could not remember what day it had been the last time he had been aware of days. He was in the London Hospital, in a room to himself, and it was a Wednesday. It was 1944 – or at least it had been when he last thought about it. He couldn’t be at all sure of the month though. He slept and dreamt of the cellar where he and Bonham had found the pieces of Brand – only the pieces were him and he lay like a rag doll on that stinking, mouldering pile of lath and plaster, with the smell of death mingling with the smell of carbide, only the power of his dream had changed the smell of carbide to the scent of Je Reviens, and he could not see her, yet she must be there. He craned around, his neck aching – there was a tall dark figure over by the furnace door, and when he turned it was Bonham, and Bonham smelt of Je Reviens.

  The next day the pain returned and with it memory. He had killed a man. Almost certainly he had killed a man. The gun had been aimed at his head and he hadn’t missed – by some fluke he hadn’t missed. He lay for an hour after his breakfast. The traffic hummed in the road outside, a nurse came and opened the windows, telling him it was a bright, sunny morning and the fresh air would do him good, and there was Wildeve. Standing in the doorway.

  ‘Jack – who was he? Who did I . . .?’

  Onions strode in past Wildeve, clutching his Homburg hat to his loins. Onions hated hats. The occasion could not augur well if he had seen fit to wear a hat. The nurse bustled out past him and told them not to tire Troy. He had had a nasty wound and he was a very lucky boy.

  Onions laid his hat on the trolley and stared out of the window for a moment, made the smoothing gesture, running his hands along the side of his head as he stood gathering his thoughts.

  ‘I really don’t know where to begin.’

  He turned to face Troy. Fixed him with his eye.

  ‘You disobey orders, walk off a case, forge my name on a chit for weapons issue, buy an illegal gun, stage a shoot-out at the OK Corral – the list is endless!’

  Onions leaned over the foot of the bed, both hands in a fierce grip on the bed rail.

  ‘But for the boy here you’d be dead. Do you realise that? If he hadn’t had the gumption to try and head you off you’d be on a slab down the mortuary. Why, Freddie, why did you do it? Couldn’t you see the danger you were in?’

  He held up a hand. He didn’t want Troy to answer. Not that Troy would have done.

  ‘The boy tells me you said Wayne was on some kind of mission. Is that right? A mission. He’d come back just to do one more job. There was someone he had to kill. Couldn’t you see who that was?’

  For once he seemed to require an answer, but Troy stared back at him in silence.

  ‘The only mission Wayne was on was to kill you – a private vendetta. He laid a trap for you – him and that woman of his – and you walked right into it. Wildeve saw it for what it was. Were you blind to it?’

  Troy looked at Wildeve. His entire expression, even the posture of his body said ‘Sorry’ – but Jack had nothing to be sorry about. Troy knew he had saved his life. Among the shapes and murmurs as the bricks had come to life he had recognised a shape and a sound that were Jack. Wildeve shook his head. He had not told Onions about Brack and Troy. Troy looked back at Onions – if Onions knew about his affair with ‘that woman’ it would surely have been top of his endless list?

  ‘Not only that – Wayne was not your man. You spent twelve weeks on the case – you told me he had a killer’s nature, enjoyed killing, and now it turns out some other bugger did it. He was too proud to get his hands dirty. Wayne didn’t kill Brand, didn’t kill von Ranke, didn’t kill Wolinski. He had some hatchet man do it for him. Some bugger you’d never even suspected existed.’

  Troy had shot said bugger dead. The most prominent thought in a welter of conflicting thoughts and feelings was who was this man, had they identified him yet?

  ‘Who was he?’ he asked, scarcely audibly.

  ‘Tell ‘im!’ Onions barked at Wildeve.

  ‘Er . . . we don’t know – we don’t have the body. Wayne got away with it. He had a car parked by the Green, ready for his getaway. He bundled the corpse in and got clean away. All I got was the gun.’

  ‘Satisfied?’ Onions turned on Troy in fury. ‘Pleased with your result? ’Cos that’s all there is!’

  ‘No,’ Troy whispered.

  ‘No?’ Onions roared.

  ‘We have Wayne as accessory after the fact to attempted murder – mine.’

  ‘You’re out of date, Freddie. It’s murder, the whole thing, all the bloody way. Edelmann’s dead.’

  Troy was stunned. What had Edelmann to do with this? He had left him in the Bricklayers Arms.

  ‘Edelmann?’

  ‘Dead. Shot with the same gun tha
t cost you half a kidney.’

  Troy paused. He was not at all sure how Onions would react.

  ‘Then we’ve got him,’ he whispered.

  ‘Got ’im! Got ’im! You’re out of date, laddie. Do you know what day it is?’

  ‘Thursday,’ said Troy. ‘It’s Thursday the . . .’

  ‘Thursday the second day after D-Day to be precise. D-Day was Tuesday. Normandy’s so full of scrap-iron looks like a totter’s yard. They sent Wayne over to France on the first day. We can’t touch him!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The only chance we had was to get him within our jurisdiction. In France we have to convince the military – and they’ve got alibis like a bookful of meat coupons! He’s gone, Freddie, gone for good!’

  Troy lay back and closed his eyes.

  Onions lowered his voice – a little of the pain went out of it. ‘I’d suspend you – as a rule. But the quacks tell me you’ll be out of commission for three months – mebbe more – so we’ll let things be, let sleeping dogs lie, and sleep is what I suggest you get.’