Riptide

by Lawton, John

  He killed thirty minutes in the canteen in the hope of catching one of the few Branch coppers he knew personally – Sgt Peter Dixon, who’d started at the Yard the same day as Troy. He got lucky. Dixon came in, took his cup of oily tea and sat at another table, eyes closed, as though sleeping upright, without even noticing Troy. Troy took his tea over, and sat opposite Dixon. His eyes flickered open.

  ‘Freddie – long time no wotsit. How’s murder?’

  ‘You tell me, Peter. I hear you’ve got the case I was turfed off.’

  ‘Oh – the Yank, you mean. By God, it’s a rum one – running me ragged. Says he and poor old Stinker were on a secret mission together – would you believe he’s asked half the nobs in Britain to speak for him? Either they won’t or they can’t be found. Even asked for poor old Bernie Dobbs. I suppose you’ve heard he’s asked for you? Says you knew he was working with Walter.’

  ‘I know, I’ve just told Onions what I know. I saw Cormack and Walter together on the sixteenth. But as Onions said, I don’t know what it proves.’

  ‘Bugger all, as far as the Boss is concerned.’

  ‘You think he won’t let him go?’

  ‘No. It’s rum. I tell you, Fred, it’s rum. Nailer’s taking this one personally. It’s not as though he and old Stilton were mates. They weren’t. It’s more . . . there but for the grace of God . . . as though the Boss thinks it could have been him. I’ve never seen him like this. He’s worked himself up into a right tizzy.’

  ‘What does he think he’s got?’

  ‘Two eyewitnesses saw him go up the alley . . .’

  ‘Peter, that’s hardly surprising, as he was still there when I arrived. In fact it’s hardly evidence. There’s more than one way into that alley.’

  ‘Through the Green Man, you mean? A London local? On a Tuesday, just about the flattest night of the week? Just try walking through a local London boozer on a Tuesday and not being seen or remembered. If you wanted to commit murder that would be asking to get caught, wouldn’t it? You’d be setting foot in a nest of nosyparkers just waiting for something or someone to break the monotony.’

  Troy silently disagreed with this. He’d learnt early on in his time as a copper just how unobservant people could be.

  ‘You questioned them?’

  ‘Freddie – you teach me how to suck eggs and I’ll clock yer!’

  ‘All right. So what did your eyewitnesses see?’

  ‘Hold your horses . . . thing is, they didn’t see anyone else. Boss attaches a lot of importance to that. The way he sees it, we’ve got a foreign soldier, out of uniform, none of his own people vouching for him – that’s just downright peculiar, but the Boss thinks it means something – and the gun. It’d been fired, y’see. That’s the clincher. Catch a bloke with a smoking gun in his hand and you’ve got him . . . well . . . red-handed, haven’t you?’

  ‘It wasn’t smoking, Peter. I think I might have noticed that.’

  ‘Been fired recently, all the same.’

  Troy found an Onionsism useful. ‘Doesn’t prove much, though, does it?’

  Dixon shrugged and slurped noisily at his tea. Thought about it.

  ‘You seem pretty convinced of this bloke’s innocence, considering you met him only twice. Do you know something you’re not letting on, Fred?’

  The man was more awake than he seemed. It was not a question Troy wanted to answer, so he didn’t.

  ‘If the boot was on the other foot, Fred, and it was your case, would I be sitting here telling you that catching a bloke with a discharged gun concealed about his person doesn’t prove much?’

  ‘Concealed?’ said Troy. ‘Concealed where?’

  ‘Clip holster, back of his waistband. Just hooks onto the trousers. And there’s one other thing.’

  Dixon leant in close as though about to reveal the deepest secret. Troy followed, almost nose to nose.

  ‘Boss ever finds out you got any of this from me, you’ll be going to the next policeman’s ball with yer knob in a splint!’

  Back in his office Troy tackled that which might prove much. He called Kolankiewicz at the lab in Hendon.

  ‘Did you do the postmortem on Walter Stilton?’

  ‘No – Spilsbury was asked to do this one in person.’

  Troy supposed it was an honour accorded the fallen – to be cut open by the best pathologist in the land.

  ‘All I got was ballistics.’

  ‘You mean you’ve got the bullet?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘How does it compare?’

  ‘To what? – for Chrissake – they sent me nothing to compare it with yet!’

  Troy went back to Onions.

  ‘I need to talk to Nailer.’

  ‘You know where to find him then, don’t you?’

  ‘I mean . . . I need you to arrange a meeting with Nailer and Major Crawley.’

  Crawley was the Superintendent in charge of Nailer – Onions’ opposite number. A former regular soldier, he was always referred to by his military rank – except among the constables, to whom he was inevitably ‘Creepy’.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nailer’s sitting on evidence. He hasn’t asked for a ballistics test on the gun you said Cormack was found with.’

  ‘You can’t call that sitting on evidence. Ballistics isn’t everything.’

  There were ways in which Onions was an imaginative copper and ways in which he was thoroughly a man of his generation.

  ‘Yes it is,’ Troy insisted. ‘Set up a meeting and get Nailer to bring the gun.’

  Onions had been at best half attentive to the conversation. Now he pulled back. Put down his pen, ceased his jotting and looked squarely at Troy.

  ‘Oh God, Freddie. Don’t make me do this. Don’t make me tread all over Crawley’s toes.’

  ‘Stan – if I stick my nose into Nailer’s case without you standing behind my shoulder he’ll blast me into the middle of next week.’

  ‘Freddie – don’t make me do this.’

  § 65

  It was the middle of a luke-warm afternoon, May drifting towards June, by the time Onions assembled his cast.

  Troy sat to one side of Onions’ desk, watching the dramatis personae take the stage. Onions, big, broad, blunt and Lancashire – on his feet glad-handing Crawley – an austere, upper-crust copper with the throttled vowels of the Edwardian age, hair almost a coiffure, a pencil-line moustache written on his top lip – and Nailer, like every Special Branch copper Troy had ever met, unimaginatively neat, but unimaginatively plain. The sort of copper happiest in boots, bowler and macintosh. The sort of copper who was careful to tip the dust out of his turnups at least once a week. But he looked awful, as though he was strained to breaking by this case – his eyes limpid and bloodshot, the plain, good suit now creased and crumpled as though he had slept in it, at odds with the near-military precision of his character. Dixon was right, he had worked himself into a ‘tizzy’. He looked to Troy to be teetering on the edge. All he needed was a nudge.

  Crawley seated himself, crossed his legs and set a box folder on the desk in front of him. Nailer sat, conveniently, as far away from Troy as he could.

  ‘This is irregular, Stanley,’ Crawley kicked off. ‘I do hope you’ve something positive to contribute to our case.’

  ‘A bit irregular, Dennis, but hardly a revolution. You’ve a murder on your hands. And when one of our own goes down in the line of duty it’s up to us all to rally round, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Quite,’ said Crawley, much as Troy might have said himself. Then, ‘I read the memo you sent round about the suspect, naturally.’ And turning to Troy, ‘I gather you’re offering an alibi for the man, sergeant?’

  Now they were all looking at Troy, and Troy was wishing Crawley had not used the word ‘alibi’.

  ‘I knew Cormack was working with Chief Inspector Stilton, yes. I can’t say that I’d call that his “alibi”. By coincidence I was
also the officer called out to the scene of the crime. What I saw has not led me to conclude that Cormack is the murderer. I felt it was time

  I . . .’ (What, for God’s sake, was the euphemism for ‘blew you bastards out of the water’?) ‘. . . time we . . .pooled our knowledge.’

  ‘I see,’ said Crawley noncomittally. He jerked his head sharply left as though stung by an insect. ‘Enoch?’

  Nailer rattled it off. Terse, precise and fuck you. ‘I found this Yank . . . standing over the body . . . a recently fired gun in his possession . . . I have two eyewitnesses who saw him go into Coburn’s Place about twenty minutes before . . . he was the only person to enter the alley in the timespan we’re concerned with . . . and no-one, ’cept you, is vouching for the man . . . his line is that Walter summoned him there by letter . . . needless to say he can’t produce the letter . . . you don’t have to be Agatha Christie to solve this one.’

  ‘Might I ask who your witnesses are?’

  ‘Couple of streetwalkers . . . pairo’prozzies . . . working Islington Green. They reckon they were stood there from about quarter to ten, and they were still there when I got there. They say he walked right past them – inches away.’

  Another involuntary twitch from Crawley. Clearly, he wasn’t too happy with this as testimony. No barrister in his right mind would relish putting a prostitute in the box and asking her to swear a credible oath.

  ‘Did they see anyone else?’ Troy asked.

  ‘I’ve already said they didn’t.’

  ‘I mean anyone, anyone at all. You said they were there from about 9.45 and were still there when you arrived. That’s well over an hour, nearer an hour and a half. Who else did they see go into Coburn Place?’

  ‘Nobody – they saw Cormack, that’s what matters! How big do you want the letters, Mr Troy? They saw Cormack!’

  This was inverse logic. Cormack was found in the alley. Ergo, he had at some point gone up it. This scarcely needed witnesses. What mattered was what the two whores did not see.

  ‘They can’t have been that alert, then, can they? I went up the alley twenty minutes or so after Cormack. If they didn’t see me, who’s to say who they might have missed twenty minutes earlier?’

  ‘It’s who they did see that matters.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you, sir . . .’ It seemed to Troy the right moment at which to throw in a ‘sir’. ‘Has it occurred to you that for a prostitute to admit to you that she was off the street for any length of time might be seen by her as an admission of prostitution, and that the reason they told you they were there without break was because they did not wish to admit openly to prostitution in front of a policeman? They weren’t there when I went up the alley. Either they were being dozy – which I doubt, since their trade depends on spotting the single men – or else they weren’t there, and if they weren’t there when I got there, who’s to say where they were at 10 or 10.30? Most turns take less than five minutes, they could have had three or four men in rapid succession and still have kept their patch on the street. But Walter’s killer probably needed less than one minute.’

  Nailer went from grey to red. Troy had done more than he meant to do; he had begun the logical demolition of the man, and it wasn’t over yet.

  ‘That isn’t the most important thing. Of course they missed the killer –’

  Crawley was looking hard at Troy, his discomfort self-evident.

  ‘– But they would also appear to have missed the victim.’

  ‘What?’ said Crawley.

  ‘Quite simply, sir, where were they when Chief Inspector Stilton went up the alley?’

  It was so obvious, it was little short of calling Nailer stupid. Crawley tacked away from it. If Troy had been in his position, he thought, he would too – he would bat for his man.

  ‘There is, of course, the matter of the gun.’

  And it was the intervention Troy had been all but praying for. For one of them to bring up the gun made it so much easier for him to say what he had to say.

  ‘Quite, sir, and I must say I’m baffled at the weight of evidence you seem to attach to it.’

  ‘I don’t follow, sergeant.’

  ‘Am I right in thinking that you’ve asked for no ballistic tests?’

  The merest exchange of looks between Crawley and Nailer.

  Crawley spoke.

  ‘We’ve only the gun and the spent bullet that’s lodged in Chief Inspector Stilton. We don’t have the cartridge case to match up.’

  This was old-fashioned thinking. This was the way ballistics had been until about nine or ten years ago. They could match cases; they had the greatest difficulty in matching or comparing bullets – even now it was a far from perfect science, but it was doable, and to a policeman of Troy’s generation it was the first thing one would ask to be done.

  Nailer chipped in again. ‘Ballistics isn’t everything.’

  Troy looked at Onions. He could have sworn the man blushed, ever so slightly, at the way Nailer betrayed their ages in the word-for-word repetition of what he had said himself. ‘I was on Murder for two years myself under Mr Onions’ predecessor. In my day if you caught a bloke with a gun in his hand at the scene of a murder you didn’t need to ask for the man in the white coat, you knew. Walter Stilton was shot just above one ear’ole. I should think you’d’ve noticed that for yourself. And I should think that when you’ve been in the job more than eighteen months, when you’ve done a bit more than spit and cough, when you’re not still wet behind the ears, you’ll know. When a small-bore bullet passes through that amount of bone it’ll bend – of course it’ll bend. A fat lot of use a bent bullet is. Where are you then, with the men in their white coats?’

  Troy had always admired punctuality. It was a mark of civilisation – even in one so thinly civilised as the Polish Beast. Madge stuck her head round the door and said, ‘Professor Kolankiewicz is here, Mr Onions.’

  ‘Kolankiewicz? I didn’t send for him,’ Stan said blankly.

  ‘I did,’ said Troy.

  ‘You little shite!’ Nailer exploded. ‘You’ve fitted me up!’

  ‘Perhaps if you weren’t so keen to fit up the American, I wouldn’t have had to.’

  Nailer got out of his chair, his right arm raised as though he’d thump Troy if there weren’t a superintendent and a desk between them. Crawley calmly pushed him back into it.

  ‘Mr Troy, I’ll thank you to treat my officers with more respect,’ he said without raising his voice. ‘Chief Inspector Nailer has served over twenty years in this force and deserves better.’

  He turned his attention to Onions.

  ‘I deplore such tactics, Stanley. However, now that Professor Kolankiewicz is here we may as well see him.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Stan. ‘And Freddie, keep yer gob shut.’

  Kolankiewicz bundled in, homburg pushed way back on his head, pockets bulging, a copy of the News Chronicle under one arm. He was not a serving police officer. Rank held no terror for him. He pulled up a chair, plonked it down next to Crawley and said ‘Which one you coppers got the gun?’

  Troy could have sworn he heard a soft ‘Oh Jesus’ escape Onions’ lips. Crawley simply twitched again and jerked his head towards the box file on Onions’ desk.

  ‘It’s there. Sealed in cellophane. The suspect’s fingerprints are all over it.’

  Kolankiewicz tore off the wrapper like a small boy attacking a Mars bar. He sniffed the barrel.

  ‘Smith and Wesson. Been fired.’

  Nailer sighed at the obvious. Kolankiewicz ignored him and stripped the wrapper off the holster. A small black triangle of tough leather, a stainless steel clip on the flat side. Kolankiewicz sniffed that too.

  ‘It’s a closed holster,’ he said. ‘Unusual. It would complicate things.’

  ‘How?’ said Onions.

  ‘Bloke shoots some other bloke. Unless he stands around like Wild Bill Hickock blowing smoke off the barrel and boasting to every bugger that he’s Deadeye Dick, he puts it back in
the holster straight away. In an open holster the barrel would protrude, the gases would be allowed to disperse at what I would term a normal rate. In a holster like this . . . well, you might as well put a cork up the barrel. Gases are trapped. Makes it difficult to say when the gun was fired. All you can say is that it was fired.’

  Onions fixed his gaze on Crawley.

  ‘Does this help, Dennis?’ he asked without a trace of sarcasm.

  Crawley gave a far straighter answer than Troy knew Nailer would attempt. The man might be a colossal prig, but he was honest.

  ‘It . . . er . . . it complicates matters. Cormack has admitted that he fired the gun five or six days ago . . . of course it would help if he told us at whom . . . but he’s claiming some sort of diplomatic immunity on that one.’

  ‘You want my professional opinion?’ Kolankiewicz said. ‘That’s why you got me here, is it not? My opinion is that if you had sent me the gun the night Stilton died we might be in a better position to judge, but as things stand I will say now that I cannot say with any reliability when this gun was fired. It is perfectly possible that this Cormack is telling the truth. But there is yet more.’

  He tore the wrapper off the bullets and set one of them upright on the desk. He tugged at the bulge in his coat pocket and pulled out a large wad of cotton wool. A few seconds probing with his fingers and he set a second bullet, distorted and shapeless, next to the first. Every copper in the room looked at it. Nailer could not restrain a grin, the small man’s smirk of petty triumph.

  ‘As you boys can see, is bent to buggery. However . . .’

  Kolankiewicz picked up the unspent bullet, whipped out his spectacles, and eyed it closely.

  ‘. . . It is the same calibre. Point 32, with full metal jacket made for a .35. The spent bullet I have shows a right hand twist, which is what it’d have if it too had come from a Smith and Wesson. There are not many .35 handguns. In fact Smith and Wesson are one of the few firms ever to make them. A small gun, 22 ounces, more powerful than their .32 – that’s what I’d call a handbag gun – not as powerful as the Colt .38or the Browning 9mm, but still some stopping power. I shall have to compare the bullet that killed old Stinker with a test shot. It’s all in the rifling – the twist.’