Riptide

by Lawton, John

  ‘Walter,’ Cal said softly. ‘What does that mean? About the sun shining –’

  ‘Don’t ask, lad, don’t ask.’

  Upstairs the door slammed again. Stilton muttered that he ought to fix that door one of these fine days, asked Reenie to bring his tea up and told Cal he was just off for a word with the missis. Reenie slapped a meagre sandwich on the table in front of Kitty and said, ‘You make the tea, bossy boots. My fibroids are killing me. I’m off for forty winks.’ And Cal found himself alone with Kitty. Somewhere upstairs the telephone began to ring.

  ‘So, superman. It’s not enough that you get to eat me every so often. You’ve got to eat me dinner as well.’

  ‘Kitty – for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Wot you doin’ ’ere anyway? I was coming over to see you a bit later.’

  ‘I’ll be there. We kind of hit the buffers this evening.’ The phone rang and rang. Kitty had slipped off a shoe and was running one stockinged foot up the side of his trousers towards his groin.

  ‘’Bout what time?’

  ‘Kitty – I can’t tell you how uncomfortable this makes me. Your mother could walk in at any minute.’

  Kitty shot to her feet as though stung and yanked at the kitchen door.

  ‘Will somebody answer that bloody phone!’

  Then she folded her arms and glared at Cal.

  § 42

  Stilton was saying ‘Yes, love.’ It was what he always said when he didn’t much want to listen to what his wife was trying to tell him. He picked up the ’phone.

  ‘Boss. It’s me. Bernard.’

  Instinctively Stilton looked at his watch. It was past ten. He tried to remember where Dobbs was supposed to be. Where he had left him. He ought to know and he didn’t.

  ‘Yes, lad.’

  ‘I been outside the Marquess of Lincoln. Waiting for Fish Wally.’

  Oh bugger – he’d forgotten to pull Dobbs off watch when he’d received the tip-off about Fish Wally. The poor sod had been standing there for the best part of a week, and for the last few hours, at least, to no purpose.

  ‘Aye, well you can knock off now, Bernard. I found Fish Wally hours ago.’

  ‘I’m not there now, boss. I trailed him.’

  ‘No, Bernard, I said, I’ve already talked to Wally. Go home, lad. get some kip.’

  ‘No, boss, I’m not talking about Fish Wally. I mean the other feller. He came by the boozer at opening time. I followed him.’

  ‘What other feller?’

  ‘The one in that sketch.’

  ‘Stahl?’

  ‘Yes – Stahl.’

  ‘Bernard, where exactly are you?’

  ‘Cleveland Street, boss. Where it meets Warren Street. Corner house.’

  Stilton bounded down the stairs, bellowed ‘We’re on again!’ at Cal, grabbed his macintosh off the back of the door and ran back up the stairs.

  The speed of it all left Cal standing, half in, half out of his chair, an untouched cup of steaming tea in front of him. An untouched steaming Kitty, too.

  ‘I . . . er . . . I guess this means I don’t know what time I’ll be home,’ he said lamely.

  ‘I know,’ Kitty answered. ‘You’re on again. So we’re off. Thanks. Thanks a million.’

  § 43

  Troy sat up in bed reading one of his father’s newspapers. The old man had used the editorial column in the day’s London Evening Herald to air his views on the matter of two nations. There was not an editor in the land who, sooner or later, did not have recourse to Disraeli’s phrase. Two Nations, Trojan Horse, Phoenix from the Ashes – all the overworked clichés of journalism. Troy was amazed he got away with it. He had not put his name to it, but Troy knew his father’s prose style. Whilst overtly calling for Britain to pull together as one nation he was also pointing out at every turn that it was, inevitably, two nations, that the war was not the leveller that most of Britain now chose to pretend it was, and that the nation, undeniably, was riven with inequalities. We die together, we do not live together. Had it been less subtle it would have provoked the authorities to fits of rage, and the old man would find himself hauled in front of some ghostly committee accused of defeatism. But Alex Troy was nothing if not subtle.

  The front door slammed. It had to be Kitty. Only Kitty had a key. But it was unlike her to storm in, Kitty crept in. Always trying to surprise him.

  She appeared in the doorway of his bedroom. Leant against the door jamb and stared at him. He had no idea what had made her so pissed off. He knew it wasn’t him. It was, he thought, an anger all but spent – drizzled down into exasperation, sehnsucht and want.

  ‘Come back for another fuck?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t use that word. I’ve told you before, I don’t like it. I don’t want to hear it. I know it’s how they talk in your house. Those sisters of yours are foul-mouthed. But it’s not the way I was brought up to talk.’

  Kitty kicked off her shoes, not caring where they fell. Turned her back on him and yanked at the silver buttons of her tunic. Kitty had not clicked with his sisters. It was unfortunate they’d ever met. They could not but look down upon a working woman – for her part, they weren’t ‘ladies’ and never would be. Kitty had a fair range of abuse and insult, but she drew the line at ‘fuck’. Troy didn’t think his sisters knew there could be a line.

  Later, after the act she would not name by its bluntest single syllable, she was restless. Sprawled half on him, half off him, but unsettled. Troy opened his eyes. She looked away.

  ‘About this American of yours,’ he said.

  ‘Wot?’ Prising her head off his chest to look down at him. ‘Wot about him?’

  ‘I was wondering. What’s he like?’

  ‘You seen him. That night in the Salisbury. Tall, skinny, speccy, bitbald atthe front.’Bout my age. Not exactly alooker,but . . .you know.’

  ‘I didn’t mean what does he look like.Imeant . . .what’s he like?’ Kitty turned her back on him, swung her legs to touch the floor, looked back at him, arms out, hands resting on her knees, back bent, breasts pendulous.

  ‘Wot do you mean wot’s he like? You never asked before.’

  ‘I was curious.’

  ‘Nosy more like.’

  ‘Then indulge me.’

  ‘You want to know why I’m with him, don’t you?’

  ‘To be precise, I want to know why you’re not with him.’

  She stared at the ceiling, dug her fists into her waist, arched her back and stretched her neck, breasts flattened out against her ribcage. A faint snap of cartilage as she unbent and looked back at him.

  ‘Well, since you ask, he’s –’

  § 44

  Stilton looked at his makeshift posse. The tall, speccy American. The short, sly, lazy London copper. He knew what duty and regulations demanded of him – that he take Dobbs into the house on Cleveland Street with him. But he also knew what he had promised the American. Besides, if it came to a bit of the rough stuff, Cormack looked as though he might handle himself a sight better than Dobbs.

  Dobbs pointed up at the top-floor front window.

  ‘He’s in there. I watched the blackouts being drawn. There’s an old couple on the ground floor, but nobody on the first or second floors. Bloke on the third went out to work about half an hour ago. I had a quick word with him – a bus driver on the 73 –sayshe thought the top floor was empty until today.’

  ‘Back way out?’ Stilton said.

  ‘There’s a door to the mews at the back, but the only way out of the mews is back into Warren Street. From the corner here you can see every way in and out.’

  ‘Good lad. You stay put. Me and the Captain are going in.’

  They took the staircase in silence. It seemed to Stilton so like a repetition of what they had done in Marshall Street only a couple of hours ago that it needed no explanation. No one answered the door, and when Stilton pushed it in, it too banged against the wall of an empty room. But this room hadn’t been stripped and wiped – it was ev
en more like the Marie Celeste. A burning cigarette lay on the side of an ashtray, curling wisps of smoke drifting towards the ceiling. A folded newspaper on the tiny dining table. A slice of toast with two bites out of it. A half drunk cup of tea.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he whispered to Cormack. ‘We’d have met him on the stairs.’

  Cormack pointed silently at the ceiling and stepped out onto the staircase once more. The stairs narrowed up to a small door set in the roof, scarcely bigger than a hatchway. A chink of moonlight shone through it. The wind caught it, and the gap seemed to open and close as though winking at them. Cormack started up the last flight. Stilton put a hand on his shoulder and held him back.

  ‘Nay, lad. I came prepared. You didn’t.’

  He reached into the long pocket of his trousers, pulled out a full-length Metropolitan Police truncheon and whacked it gently into the palm of his hand.

  ‘Walter,’ the American said softly. ‘Do you really think we need that?’

  ‘Dunno. But he’s running, isn’t he? That doesn’t bode well. Bloke who’s running from you can like as not turn on you.’

  Cormack gave way. Stilton led off up the stairs and pushed gently at the door. There was a half moon in the sky, enough light to see by. He found himself on a flat roof high above Warren Street, facing a forest of chimney stacks. Stahl could be behind any one of them. He took a cautious couple of steps, then another and another and stood on the grey plain of roofing lead wondering which way next.

  From behind the second nearest chimney stack a figure in a black hat appeared. He ran towards Stilton, so quickly, so quietly, Stilton had no time to react. He felt himself rooted to the spot as Stahl closed on him. Then he saw the arm swing up from his side and the glint of moonlight on metal – the gun in his hand.

  Stilton felt a blow between his shoulder-blades – a shove that sent him sprawling, face down on the lead roof. Then a bang like the sound his Riley made when it backfired. He raised his head, like a Tommy peeping over the top into no-man’s-land, he thought, just in time to see Stahl hit the roof, flat on his back, dead. The wind caught the black hat and blew it out over the rooftops of London. He turned, flipped onto his backside. Cormack was staring intently at the body, his arm fully extended, clutching a gun. For a few seconds neither of them moved, then Cormack lowered the gun and looked at Stilton. Stilton was struggling to get one foot of leverage. Cormack crouched down – the hand that held the gun loose at his side, the other pushing him gently back down.

  ‘Sit awhile, Walter. We both should.’

  Only now could Stilton hear the rasp of his breathing, see the deep rise and fall of his chest.

  ‘You’ve not done this before?’

  ‘No – but I’m trained for it. Had to be a first time. Almost inevitably. Or did you think that because I wore glasses and did a desk job I somehow wasn’t a real soldier?’

  ‘Dunno what I thought. What is that thing? A cannon?’

  ‘Smith and Wesson.’

  Cormack’s right hand disappeared beneath his coat and the gun vanished into a discreet holster somewhere in the small of his back.

  Stilton nodded at the corpse.

  ‘He’s dead?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You’re certain?’

  ‘He didn’t leave me a lot of choice.’

  ‘Well – that pisses on the chips doesn’t it?’

  Stilton struggled up, Cormack stood and lent his hand.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Stahl. You just killed Stahl. All these days looking in every nook and cranny of the city and we end up with another stiff.’

  ‘That’s not Stahl, Walter.’

  Stilton took a few heavy-footed paces towards the body.

  ‘Looks damn like ’im to me.’

  Cormack stood next to Stilton, looking down. Tall, blond, thirtyish, a neat hole in the forehead leaking blood.

  ‘It isn’t Stahl. Looks more than a little like him, but it isn’t. If it were, we’d be lying there instead of him.’

  ‘Could you see it wasn’t him when you shot the bugger?’

  ‘No – but like I said, he didn’t leave me much choice.’

  ‘So the only way to be certain was to kill ’im. If you got ’im it couldn’t be Stahl – if he got you it was?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it. ’Cept it was you he was aiming at.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ,’ said Stilton. ‘If he isn’t Stahl then who the bloody hell is he?’

  The crunch of a boot made him turn before Cormack could answer. A fire-watcher in a blue blouse and a tin hat was crossing the roof from the house next door, striding towards them with all the importance of half a uniform built into his cocky swagger. A bantam of a man, in his sixties, short, wiry, the moustache almost as big as he was.

  ‘I ’eard a bang.’

  He flicked his torch on and off, saw it reflected in the dead eyes of the corpse.

  ‘Allo, allo, allo. What’s all this then?’

  Stilton whipped out his warrant card, held it up to the man’s torch, shot Cormack an eyeball order as his hand reached beneath his jacket once more.

  ‘I could book you for nicking my lines, you realise. Got to be a copper to say “allo, allo, allo”.’

  The man stared at the card.

  ‘You’re a copper?’

  ‘I didn’t print it meself, if that’s what you think. Chief Inspector Stilton, Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Like I said, I ’eard a bang. It’s me job to investigate things that go bang.’

  ‘If you don’t bugger off, it’ll be your head that goes bang against my fist. This is coppers’ business. Go about your own business and say nowt to nobody.’

  ‘Charming,’ said the fire-watcher, but he left all the same.

  ‘Can you trust him?’ Cormack said softly.

  ‘God knows, but the sooner we call out the binmen for this one the better.’

  ‘Binmen?’

  ‘Cleaners – blokes who come out and take care of things like this.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we just dial 999?’

  ‘Not on your nellie. Nobody’s to know about this. If this gets out how can I ever boast to you again that there’s no spies in London we don’t know about? Thing is, I meant it at the time. I’d’ve put a fiver on it to be true – but there you are. I was wrong. No, this gets buried. I tell my people. You tell nobody – and in return I won’t mention you were the one with the gun.’

  This last sentence was uttered in a closely conspiratorial stage-whisper.

  ‘It’s perfectly legit, Walter. I’m a serving army officer.’

  ‘You’re a serving army officer out of uniform. If that cockamamy suit’s the new American uniform, then I feel sorry for the lot of you.’

  There was a pause. Stilton looked at the door again, making sure no one else was about to emerge armed with a torch and a daft question, half expecting to see Dobbs.

  ‘I have to leave you alone with him. I have to go and call my people, you see.’

  ‘That’s OK. I understand.’

  ‘Could you bear to touch him?’

  ‘Touch him?’

  ‘Someone’s got to go through his pockets.’

  ‘His pockets?’

  ‘Papers and that.’

  Stilton searched for the right word and came up with the all too obvious. ‘Clues,’ he said, as though it were a technical term and somehow the arcane nature of it might be lost on Cormack.

  ‘That’s OK, Walter. I can look for “clues”.’

  ‘I’ll be about ten minutes. I’ll leave Dobbs out front to keep an eye open. Let’s just hope the buggers don’t take all night about it.’

  § 45

  Left alone, Cal sank down, his back against a chimney stack, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet. He was not accustomed to death, but the body of a dead German – he had to be German, didn’t he? – held no terror. He looked at the face. Yes, he was very like Wolfgang Stahl – and now he understood the
hesitation that both Hudge and Fish Wally had shown about the sketch. There was no scaroverthe left eye.

  He began with the gun. Picked it up with the tip of thumb and forefinger. A Browning automatic. A gun very like his own, a medium-bore service weapon. What did you expect? said a voice in his head. A Luger? He sniffed the barrel. It hadn’t been fired recently. Stilton would have been its first victim. The stream of blood from the hole in his forehead had covered his face. He did look like Stahl under the crimson glaze. Now the blood had reached his shirt, which soaked it up like blotting paper. Cal unbuttoned the jacket and looked for an inside pocket. A plain black leather wallet. A packet of Player’s Capstan. He opened the wallet. Letters – all from one Mavis Tookey of Riverside Villas, Leigh-on-Sea. A photograph – a girl in her late teens, presumably the aforementioned Mavis. And a handful of official documents. A National Identity Card. A War Office letter indicating Deferred Service. A Ration Book. All in the name of Peter Robinson – a name he took to be as anonymous here as John Doe might be at home – at an address in Cardiff. The Germans were past masters at this sort of thing. It would be a simple task for them to fit out this assassin with a plausible cover. They’d even given him the stub of a return ticket to Cardiff. The letters were probably real. There probably was a ‘Peter’ in some stalag in Germany, from whom they’d been stolen, and poor Mavis in Riverside Villas would never know the use to which her affections had been put. A sentimental moment seized him: to return the letters to Mavis, to put heart and head back together. Then the unsentimental sharp edge of reality – they’d got number two. The Germans had sent a two-man team to take out Stahl – one in the open and one undercover, left jab, right hook – and they’d got both of them. It improved the odds on Stahl’s surviving long enough for them to blunder into him. He’d have to think hard how to explain this to Walter. It was the sort of thing that Walter’s decency and plodding logic might have difficulty with.

  He was reading Mavis’s letters – moved far more by this thin strand of life than he was by the lumpen fact of death at his feet – when Walter returned with two men and a sackcloth body bag.