by Lawton, John
He picked up his hated Homburg.
‘I’ll be in to see you at the weekend,’ he said in something approaching a neutral tone, and then he too was gone.
Wildeve came over and sat on the side of the bed. Minutes passed with only the buzz of traffic in the street outside to break the silence.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘They say you’re going to be OK.’
‘OK?’ Troy said.
‘You’ve lost part of a kidney, but really you can lose a whole kidney and still have all your gubbins work OK.’
‘Gubbins,’ said Troy without meaning.
Wildeve geared up for the inevitable.
‘I don’t quite know how to tell you this. I rather guessed Wayne would head for Stepney. It all seemed like unfinished business to me. Truth to tell I’ve been preparing for it for weeks. I kept in touch with Edelmann, ever since you first took me to that railway arch. I think he liked you really – it just didn’t do for an old Bolshevik to let it be known.’
This was bewildering – the speed of it all. What was he talking about? How had Jack known to go to Stepney? Troy had not known himself until . . .
‘How did you figure it out? Copper’s intuition?’
‘If you like.’
It was like hearing himself speak – his phrasing, his tonality, Wildeve’s utterance.
‘Although it would be nearer the mark to say that Wayne had asked too many questions of all those misguided heroes – I felt there was something else. I was wrong. Killing you could hardly be that something else – so something else still is – if you see what I mean.’
That, to Troy, sounded even more like Troy.
‘On Saturday I didn’t do what you told me to. I went into the Savoy and phoned Edelmann. Then I caught a cab straight to Stepney. If the traffic had been lighter I might even have got there before you. Edelmann had his rent-a-mob waiting. We’d agreed on that. He tried to keep Wayne as long as he could, but he couldn’t hold him at all. As it was Wayne knocked me flying as he came out of the pub. I was out for a minute or so – Edelmann picked me up – that was a mistake, really we couldn’t afford to lose that time. It cost us dearly. When you took off after him, we followed, but we were too far behind. I heard the other bloke take a potshot at you, but he came out of nowhere – took me completely by surprise. I saw you shoot him and I was running towards you when the bomb hit and . . . ’
‘Bomb? I got hit by a bomb?’
‘No. Not hit. It landed a hundred yards off, but you were standing on the roof of that damn cellar – the shock wave shattered it. It looked for all the world as though the earth had opened up and swallowed you.’
The earth had swallowed him. He remembered the feeling – and the dream, that explained the dream. He had been in that damn cellar – it wasn’t just a dream.
‘Wayne picked up the gun and threw the dead bloke over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. I couldn’t believe it. I know Wayne’s a big bugger but it was as though the other chap weighed nothing at all. Then he saw us and he started shooting.’
Wildeve plucked at the sleeve of his jacket – shoved a finger through the bullet-hole.
‘You were lucky,’ Troy said softly.
‘Edelmann wasn’t. The bullet that missed me killed him – poor sod. I caught Wayne with a half-brick and made him drop the gun, but he ran – even with the body on his shoulder he ran. I still can’t believe it. Why didn’t he just drop the body and have done?’
Troy thought about this. He thought he knew the answer.
‘But you got the gun, you said?’
‘Oh yes – and prints aplenty. If we could ever match them up to Wayne he’d hang.’ He paused. ‘Tell me, Freddie, did you really not know it was you he’d come to kill?’
‘No. Did you?’
‘No – I hadn’t a clue. Instead . . . ’ He shrugged.
‘Instead he killed Edelmann,’ said Troy.
Wildeve nodded, tears in the corners of his eyes.
‘Where are my clothes, Jack?’
‘What?’
Troy swung himself off the bed, felt a surge of pain to his gut, and flung open the bedside cupboard.
‘Freddie, what are you playing at?’
His clothes lay in a neat pile in the cupboard – he reached for his trousers.
‘We have work to do.’
‘Freddie!’
‘You heard him – I’m not suspended. I hold the King’s Warrant. Do you have a car?’
‘Yes – your old Morris is out front – but we can’t . . . ’
‘Oh yes we can. Help me with the shirt.’
Wildeve stood dumbfounded.
‘Jack! For God’s sake!’
77
They roared along the Embankment. Down to Chelsea. All the way to Tite Street.
‘I tell you I’ve searched Tite Street. She’s not there. The girl’s not seen hide nor hair of Diana since Friday night. Accept it, Freddie, she’s done a bunk. Poor bloody Gutteridge has been out there day and night!’
Troy was having difficulty breathing. He had moved too quickly, and the shock of finding a six-inch cut in his side and a row of more than a dozen stitches had dented his first rush of energy. He had somehow imagined himself intact – at the very least showing a minute hole where the bullet had entered.
‘Not the house,’ he whispered. ‘The square.’
‘Come again?’
‘The square. Where the old boy had his pig.’
They shot past Constable Gutteridge, who had perfected the art of sleeping upright with his eyes open, and pulled up by the patchwork fences of the square. Getting out of the car winded Troy – Wildeve had to pull him from the seat. Troy led the way between the potatoes and the cauliflowers to the Nissen hut where Brack kept her tools. The pig was in her sty, poking her nose over the corrugated iron pen and snuffling pleasurably in the morning sunshine.
The door to the hut was padlocked. Wildeve kicked it in, flicked on his torch and stepped inside.
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Oh God!’
Troy caught the torch as he dropped it. Wildeve began to buckle at the knees and staggered back into the daylight, retching violently into a neat, emerald-green row of new potatoes, bobbing gently in the breeze in defiance of pathetic fallacy.
Troy shone the torch again. He knew what he had seen, but unlike Wildeve he must look for ever and so must look again.
She was naked and weighted down in the tin bath by a broken piece of fireplace marble dumped across her midriff. Her eyes were open and a tiny black spot, just like the one he had imagined in his own side, marked the centre of her forehead. The tub was full, but still shallow enough for her nose and fingertips to break the surface and float like tendrils of weed on a stream. So curiously is the human mind constructed that Troy thought of Millais’s Ophelia, floating with her bunch of posies, more beautiful in death than life.
Even with the water to suppress it the smell of death had come to fill the air. He had noticed it as soon as they entered the hut. He stepped outside and leaned against the steel wall of the hut. Wildeve had stopped puking, and seemed to be hunched over in silent tears.
‘Why would he do such a thing?’ he asked. ‘Why . . . I mean . . . did he shoot her or did he drown her or did he what?’
‘He didn’t drown her. That’s just an attempt to keep down the smell. And he didn’t shoot her. I did.’
Wildeve looked up, wiped a strand of saliva from his lips on to his jacket sleeve. The big man was hurrying towards them down the path, the light glinting on his bald head, and the pig was grunting in anticipation.
‘’Ere! Just the chap I want. Would you adam’n’eve it some blighter’s pinched me tin bath – y’know, the one I uses ter scrub the pig.’
‘I’ve found it,’ said Troy simply.
‘Thank Gawd for that. In the ’ut, is it?’
Troy slumped forward, felt the blood drain from his head. The big man caught him, sweeping him up in his arms as a father
would a small child.
‘’Ere, old cock, are you all right? You don’t ’arf look pale.’
The big man carried him back to the old Bullnose Morris and laid him gently in the passenger seat.
‘Guard the hut,’ said Troy. ‘And if I were you I wouldn’t go inside.’
‘Right you are, old cock. Just like old times. You will be back, won’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Troy said feebly, ‘I’ll be back.’
Wildeve leaned his forehead on the steering-wheel – still breathing thick and fast.
‘I don’t understand it, Freddie. I just don’t understand it.’
‘Take me to Orange Street,’ Troy said softly.
‘I ought to take you back to hospital.’
‘Orange Street,’ said Troy.
Wildeve pressed the self-starter and slipped the car into first.
‘Where is all this going to end?’ he asked.
‘Orange Street,’ said Troy. ‘It ends with Orange Street.’
78
Troy made Wildeve wait in the car. At the first landing he thought his body would tear itself apart. He had never known such pain. He pressed on, knowing that if he took too long Jack would come looking for him, his palm firmly planted on his stitches, feeling the familiar sensation of warm tea spreading out across his shirt. On the top floor Tosca’s door was locked. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his key-ring and found the key she had given him. He opened the door slowly, letting it swing back on its hinges. He took one step inside and let the wall take his weight, leaning back breathless to look at the mess. The coffee-pot stood half full upon the table as though she had made for two, her unconscious not acknowledging that he had not returned. A half-eaten pizza graced the dining-table. Huck Finn lay face down upon the ironing board. Her stockings dried on a line above the sink, oddments of discarded clothing clung to chairbacks and scattered themselves higgledy piggledy in her sluttish way – and there was blood everywhere. Blood on the sheets, blood on the walls, blood on the floor. Crisp and dry and brown. A slaughterhouse in the attic. Blood, so much blood he could taste it – it was on his tongue and on his lips – but it was his blood he could taste, his blood not hers, his blood and the blood which trickled between his fingers, coursed down his leg and puddled at his feet merely added to the gore.
79
Troy slept. An age rolled over.
Into his sleep, into his waking came . . . a stream of visitors.
His mother – arthritic, between two walking sticks and two daughters, making her first visit to town since the death of her husband. She would speak no English to him – but Russian has a thousand different words for fool.
Brother Rod – chest beribboned – the returning hero – head of the family – came to tell him everything was OK, and that the room was paid for and he need want for nothing. Troy should care? Of course he cared. There was nothing in the world he wanted more than to be alone.
Bonham – clutching his helmet between his knees as he peeled an orange of immense rarity into it. The vapour filled the air. They both inhaled in silence, a blast of the past. Bonham stuck his head in his helmet, nose to the peel, refusing to eat one single segment of what he had brought for Troy, and breathed deeply and pronounced it ‘Christmas’.
One day he awoke from a midday nap to find Kolankiewicz, and Anna and a child. Anna stood with her back to him, looking out of the window, watching the play of June’s searing light upon the buildings opposite. Kolankiewicz was playing cards. Troy realised the boy was Shrimp Robertson. He was teaching Kolankiewicz three-card monty. Kolankiewicz professed never to have heard of it. Troy watched as Kolankiewicz was allowed to win twice, and enjoyed the child’s surprise as Kolankiewicz said it was his turn now and watched him fleece the boy for more than half a crown. Anna turned, saw that he was awake.
‘Hello, stranger,’ she said.
Kolankiewicz and the boy looked up from their game.
‘Mr Robertson has something he’d like to say to you, Troy. Haven’t you, Mr Robertson?’
She looked directly at the boy as she finished her sentence. He looked awkward but did not blush. He approached the side of the bed and addressed Troy.
‘We thought you was a tosser,’ he said very matter-of-factly.
‘Yeeees,’ said Troy, not knowing where the conversation was leading.
‘Only then my dad read in the paper as ’ow you were on to some bloke as killed that feller we found in bits. Only it wasn’t some feller at all, it was some posh bird you found in an ’ut down Chelsea way. It was the posh bird wasn’t it who killed that feller?’
‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘It was the posh bird.’
‘And probably killed the shadowman as well.’
‘Who?’
‘Shadowman. That’s what we called Wolinski. Well – it’s what my dad calls him. ’E’s the local barber see, down the Mile End Road. No matter what time o’ day ’e come in, Dad says, ’e’s got five-o’clock shadow.’
‘I see,’ said Troy.
‘And then we realised you wasn’t a tosser, you was an ’ero.’
‘When did you decide this?’
‘Well – you got shot, didn’t you?’
‘Does that make me a hero?’
‘Not ’arf! Anyway we ’ad a whip-round for yer and we got ’arf a dollar. ’Cept I just lost it to this gent ’ere.’
How, Troy wondered, would the child feel about his heroism if he knew that he had taken the beating of a lifetime on his own doorstep – from a woman he so euphemistically called ‘the posh bird’?
‘Would it,’ Troy began, ’appease your injured vanity to know that you’d been taken by a master? I know of no one in the Met or the forces of the entire Home Counties who would sit down for so much as a game of snap with this gent ’ere.’
The boy looked bewildered by this.
‘Allow me,’ said Kolankiewicz, and handed Troy half a crown in pennies and ha’pennies, sending them cascading across the bedspread.
The nurse came in and told them Troy must rest. Anna kissed him and ran her fingers through his hair, and told him she had always known he was a fool. And Troy could only guess at how much she knew.
By the door, with the nurse holding it open as a hint, the boy paused. Something on his mind.
‘’Ere. It was the posh bird shot you too, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Troy.
Troy slept. An age rolled over.
The nurse brought in a card. Someone asking to see him. Troy picked it up. The front read ‘Frederick, Marquess of Fermanagh’ and gave his Irish address. On the back it read, ‘I must see you, please.’
‘Tell him “No”,’ said Troy.
After all that they had the same name. But he could not remember that she had ever used his.
80
A week or so after his return to the hospital a spluttering car, pinking badly, seemed to cruise across the skies. So vivid was the noise he could see it in his mind’s eye – a clapped-out old banger, worse, far worse than his old Morris, out in the street pouring forth a plume of black exhaust. But it wasn’t out there in the street – it was up there in the sky. Then it cut out and he heard a swishing like a falling bough tossed down in a storm, then a bang like the gates of hell slamming shut and every window in his room turned to crystal fragments, showering his bed with their sparkling shards. He was not cut, merely dusted. The nurse bustled in. Said ‘Deary, deary me’, kicked the brake free on the base of the bed and steered him out into the corridor.
He had heard it, he had heard it! The whole point, Nikolai had said, was that one would never hear it coming!
‘If you can hear it you’re dead!’
December 1948
81
It had not been a good war. He had hated it. once it was over, he missed it badly.
He returned to work in the October. Onions’s wrath had turned to silence. It was understood that his promotion could go to hell. Wildeve made Sergeant. It was his due. He had cope
d marvellously in Troy’s absence and had emerged from the mess of the ‘Tart in the Tub Affair’, as the Yard so cruelly dubbed it, with not a stain on his record. To the best of Troy’s knowledge Jack never told anyone about Troy’s relationship with Diana Brack, and when Troy had reported the murder of M/Sgt Larissa Tosca, US Army, and had described her as an ‘informant’, Jack had asked no questions and made no guesses. For a while he and Troy shared a rank as well as an office – then in the summer of 1945, two days after VJ day, three days before his thirtieth birthday Troy’s promotion came through. He had made Inspector. Onions had relented.
All the same – the thought of resignation passed through Troy’s mind every working week. Even a boom in post-war crime had not reconciled him to his profession. He hated the peace even more than he hated the war.
Brother Rod did not share this view – he had ended the war a hero, festooned with medals, and had got out of it at the earliest opportunity. He had announced his intention to stand for Parliament as soon as Churchill had dissolved the coalition. That summer he stood for South Herts and when the long, slow count had been completed found, to everyone’s surprise but his own, that he had won the seat for Labour. By 1948 he sat on the front bench as Wing Commander Sir Rodyon Troy, Bt., RAF (Reserve), MP, DSO and bar, DFC, number two at the Air Ministry. Rod loved the peace. Peace, like war, had been very good to him. Few things, if any, upset him.
‘Why is Tom Driberg asking me for your home number?’ he asked, clearly upset.
‘I don’t know,’ said Troy. ‘If you give it to him we’ll find out.’
Troy heard a muffled few words as Rod spoke to his secretary with one hand across the mouthpiece.
‘Freddie – I don’t know what you’re up to, but one doesn’t want to get too close to Driberg – he has a certain reputation. It’s bad enough him buttonholing me at tea-time!’
‘I’m not mixed up in anything that need worry you. If Whitehall 1212 is somehow not good enough for him, then by all means give him my home number.’