by Lawton, John
‘You were watching me? All this time?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you met with Stilton?’
‘The night before he died. And the morning of the same day.’
‘How do you know he’s dead?’
‘I was there. Stilton wanted you and I to meet. I asked for somewhere outdoors with more than one way in and out. He chose Coburn Place. All three of us would have met there if everything had gone well. I got there first. I stood in the cellar of the pub next door. I was in total darkness, but I could see anyone who passed through the drayman’s hatch. I saw Stilton go by. A minute or so later a second set of feet passed by. I was about to step out, when I heard the unmistakable sound of a low-velocity bullet. A fraction louder than a silencer, nothing more than a pop, but enough to know it for what it was. Then the second man came back down the alley. I waited a couple of minutes, then I left. It was obvious Stilton had been killed. I didn’t need to see the body to know that.’
‘Couldn’t you have stopped it? I mean . . .’
‘I didn’t have a gun, Calvin. My only defence was to be closest to the exit. I bought this the day after.’
Stahl lifted the newspaper, to show a small revolver pointing down his leg, aimed at Cal’s groin.
‘But you did see the man who killed Walter?’
The train slithered into a station, the doors slid open. The soft hubbub of a thousand shelterers already preparing for a night’s sleep along the platforms. The whistle of a kettle on a primus stove. A smell like boiling collard greens.
‘Up to the knees, yes. I didn’t see his face.’
‘Oh hell.’
‘And,’ Stahl went on, ‘he had better taste than you, but his shoes no more matched the suit than yours do.’
Cal looked down at his shoes. Regulation army brown roundies. With the blue suit Tel Stilton had brought him from his brother’s wardrobe. Brown shoes, blue suit. Good God, what was Stahl saying? He looked up.
‘What now?’
But Stahl had gone.
Cal leapt through the door, snagged his jacket as the door hissed to on him, jerked it free and tried vainly to run after Stahl. He tripped almost at once over a man sprawled full length across the platform.
‘’Ere. ’Old yer ’orses!’
He stumbled on. A human quagmire of arms and legs. He felt as though he had fallen into the grip of a giant octopus.
‘Wot’s a bloke gotta do to get a decent night’s kip ’round ’ere?’
‘’Oo the bleedin’ ’ell d’you fink you are?’
Someone reached up to thump Cal on the thigh and nearly brought him down. Someone else stamped hard on his toes. He fought his way to the exit, heard the predictable cry of ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ following him, and way ahead saw Stahl striding up the escalator. He’d never catch him now. The blow to his leg had all but numbed the nerves. He was dragging it after him as though it were made of wood.
‘Stahl!!!’
Stahl stopped at the top. The staircase moving up beneath his feet, into an infinity of moire patterns that made Cal’s eyes swim.
‘Stahl! The shoes! What colour were the shoes?’
Cal heard his voice echo up the shaft, like shouting at God in the vault of some bizarre cathedral. But this wasn’t God, this was the Devil tempting Cal to think what he would not think. And instead of placing him on a pillar in the wilderness he had left him in the pit of darkness.
Stahl stood a second or two, looking down at Cal. Cal dragged himself onto the escalator.
‘Brown,’ Stahl answered, turned on his heel and vanished.
§ 76
He had drifted beyond his station – he was at Baker Street. At least a name he knew, but when he emerged at street level, to a darkening sky, it was not a part of Baker Street he recognised. He flagged a cab. The romance had suddenly gone out of tube travel. Where was Sherlock Holmes when you needed him?
When he got back to Claridge’s Kitty was sitting in the dark, curtains open, a summer breeze gently blowing. It seemed to him that she might have sat and waited in that position all day. Silently focused on him. Oblivious to all else. A poker face if ever he saw one.
‘Did it go all right?’
Cal did not know what to say to her. It was Troy he needed to talk to, and he did not know how to talk to Troy with Kitty present. He could not calmly discuss her father’s murderer with Troy whilst she was sitting there.
‘I guess so. I have to call Troy. Do you know his number?’
She picked up the phone, asked for a number and handed the receiver to Cal.
‘Troy – it’s me, Calvin Cormack.’
‘So soon,’ said Troy.
‘What?’
‘Never mind. I’m listening.’
‘I’ve just seen Stahl. He was waiting for me when I left your house. Cornered me on the subway.’
‘He was watching?’
‘Ever since I got here, it seems. He was . . . in Islington.’
Cal dearly wanted not to have to state the obvious. Let the place-name be enough for Troy and too little for Kitty. Kitty was watching him across the room, expressionless. Cal turned his back on her. Troy let him off the hook.
‘You mean he was there when Walter died?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he says he didn’t do it?’
‘He says he saw . . . .’
Again Cal searched for a word best chosen not to cause alarm.
‘He saw . . .’
‘The perpetrator,’ said Troy – a bland, unemotive police term – ‘He saw the perpetrator?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he can identify him?’
‘No. But he gave us a lead. An American soldier out of uniform.’
‘How on earth does he know that?’
‘The shoes. Regulation US Army brown roundies. Just like the ones I wear.’
There was a prolonged silence. Cal could hear his own breathing, coming back to him through the earpiece above the crackles and static hiccups of the connection. Kitty walked around him, came back into view still staring at him out of no particular expression, nothing he could read. Then Troy said, ‘Let me talk to Kitty.’
Cal was startled. Troy was deducing far too much.
‘She’s there isn’t she?’
‘Well . . . yes.’
Cal handed the phone to Kitty.
‘He wants to talk to you.’
‘Wot?’ she said flatly, paring any feeling from her voice.
‘Was your father a Dickens reader?’ Troy asked.
‘Eh?’
‘Did he read the novels of Charles Dickens? To be precise, do you know if he’d ever read Great Expectations?’
‘Only every summer holiday. Two weeks at Walton-on-the-Naze. He’d fish off the end of the pier all morning and sit on the beach all afternoon with Pip and Joe Gargery. When I was a nipper he read it out loud to us at bedtime. Read it to all of us. One after another. Same battered book, reeked of fish. I still think of Pip whenever I smell cod.’
‘Wot larx, eh?’
‘Yeah. Wot larx.’
‘Tell Calvin I’ll be round in the morning, first thing.’
Kitty put the receiver back in its cradle, weeping silently – the dam burst – great, bulbous salt-tears coursing across her cheeks. Cal put his arms around her. Almost happier now that she proffered recognisable feeling to which he could react.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Wot larx,’ she said, and wept the more. Cal still didn’t know what it meant.
She wept an age. His shirt was soaked. He lifted her head by the tip of her chin and said, ‘I love you, Kitty.’
She said, ‘Yeah. Great, init?’
§ 77
Troy was having a very early breakfast when someone knocked on his door. At first he didn’t recognise the young woman clutching a large brown paper envelope. She thrust it into his hand, and then he knew. That new girl out at Hendon who worked for the Polish Beast. Ann
a something or other. She declined his offer of a cup of coffee, told him Kolankiewicz wanted it back and dashed. Troy had never thought of himself as a charmer. If he had, this might have punctured his ego. Pity, she was a looker.
He read the report over his second cup. It told him nothing he did not know and confirmed his rash assertion to Kolankiewicz that there were two distinct modi operandi for the deaths of Smulders and Stilton. There was precedent in Kolankiewicz’s argument, and logic, but everything about this case told him to look for two killers, not one. There was definitely a third man.
When he got to Claridge’s he found Cormack alone. The bed had already been made up. He’d no idea whether Kitty had spent the night there. He didn’t much care – what he didn’t want was to have to talk to both of them at once. If he was to do this, he never wanted to find himself in the same room as Kitty and Cormack.
Cormack said, ‘Do you still have that sketch I gave you?’
Troy took it out of his pocket. Cormack took a pencil and drew on it. Shaded the hair and sketched in a moustache.
‘He looks more like this now. Walter and I would never have found him with what we had.’
‘Older?’ said Troy.
‘Yep. Makes him look fortyish. All this time we were chasing a younger man with blond hair.’
‘The German you shot?’ said Troy.
‘Yep.’
‘My turn,’ Troy said. He took Stilton’s letter from his pocket. ‘Take a good look.’
Cormack glanced at it. ‘I know what it says. I know it by heart.’
‘Wot larx,’ said Troy.
‘I know. You’re going to have to explain it to me. You know what Walter meant by it, and so does Kitty. Only I didn’t feel I could ask Kitty, the state she was in. I feel like I’m on the outside of an in-joke.’
‘Not quite. It’s the catch phrase of a minor character in Walter’s favourite novel.’
‘Oh – I get it, this Great Expectations you were asking Kitty about. I never got past David Copperfield myself.’
‘It’s what a simple, good man by the name of Joe Gargery seems to say at every opportunity, to his innocent, ambitious apprentice, Pip.’
‘Innocent apprentice. That’s me in this equation, eh?’
‘If you like. But the clue is in two parts. Walter says “Hope this reaches you one way or another.”’
‘Walter left me clues?’
‘Not in the sense you mean, no. I mean simply that his choice of words reflects the way his mind was working. There’s nothing idle or throwaway about the phrasing he used. “One way or another” – it simply means he left you more than one note. He left one here and one at the embassy.’
‘How can you be so sure? Or is this where I tell you I think English policemen are wonderful?’
‘Deduction. And a little inside knowledge. There is another character in Great Expectations called Wemmick. He’s a solicitor’s clerk, he’s the man who knows everything and fixes everything. He moves through the book almost like a secret agent. One of the most curious characters Dickens ever created, and that’s saying something. At one point in the book, when Pip is in danger, Wemmick leaves the same note at all four entrances to Barnard’s Inn. And when he knows Pip has received one he goes round and collects the rest. I think Walter was having difficulty finding you. I think he left a note at both places you were likely to be.’
‘I was in the embassy at five p.m. There was no note.’
‘Then he left it later. In the meantime someone, the same someone Stahl saw, was able to read it and realised what it meant.’
‘Jesus, Troy. That’s a hell of a lot from two lines.’
‘If I’m right, the note will still be there. After all, Walter never went back for it.’
‘Why? Why wouldn’t the killer just destroy it?’
‘Because he doesn’t know what’s in the note you have. You might be expecting to find the copy. And if you didn’t it might give you a lead. After all, it’s easy enough to read it and put it back unmarked.’
‘It is?’
‘Calvin–you’re aspy. How do you open letters?’
‘With a paperknife.’
§ 78
Cal left Troy sitting in his car in Grosvenor Square while he went into the embassy. Ten minutes later he came back, sat in the passenger seat and handed Troy an envelope addressed to Captain Cormack.
‘Where was it?’
‘Would you believe I have an in-tray?’
‘What did your colleagues have to say to you?’
‘Nothing. The place was almost deserted. If I’d run into Major Shaeffer, well, things might have been said. He’s the guy who dumped me into the tender care of Chief Inspector Nailer. I’d have a bone worth picking with him.’
Troy held the envelope up to the windscreen.
‘Well – it hasn’t been steamed.’
He examined the edges, sniffed the paper, then he tore it open and let the letter sit on the palm of his hand. It looked to Cal like a comic-book impression of a private eye. More Hercule Poirot than Nick Charles.
‘Observe the way it curls.’
‘That mean something?’
‘Yes – whoever our man is, he extracted the letter without breaking the seal by inserting two small knitting needles into the top seam and rolling the letter around them until it was small enough to pass through the gap at the top where the gum has failed. When he’d read it he put it back the same way. It’s as old a trick as they come. I’m surprised you didn’t learn it in spy school. Alas for you spooks, the tension thus exerted remains in the paper rather as it would in a watch spring. Hence it curls. Would you care to read it?’
Cal read it. It was exactly the same as the other one.
‘Does this really get us anywhere?’ he asked.
‘Yes – of course it does. For one thing, it backs up what Stahl said. We’ve moved from odds-on that it was someone from the embassy to it being a dead cert, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I guess I would. But – what now?’
‘Now, a short list of probable suspects would help.’
‘Why not start with Shaeffer?’
‘Why not start without obvious prejudice? How many people work in that section of the embassy?’
‘A lot. Twenty, maybe thirty. A lot more than did before the war. I don’t even know some of their names.’
They sat an hour or more. Hardly anyone entered the embassy.
Cal said, ‘I hate to slow us down, but we’d have better luck if we came back and sat here from six until seven. Catch ’em as they leave.’
§ 79
Cormack had run off so many names. Troy was writing them down and trying to find a mnemonic in two or three words that would fix a face in his mind. It struck him that the United States of America might have a little difficulty entering into a European war. It was too partisan a notion. Cormack had so far pointed out Lieutenant D’Amici – Troy had written down, short and ugly – Lieutenant Corsaro – short and handsome – Major Shaeffer – tall and broad, a bit like Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan – two Sergeants Schulz – both as stout as Eugene Pallette – a Corporal Pulaski and a Captain Pulaski – they could have been twins – a Colonel Reininger – tall and thin, a bit Raymond Massey – a Captain Berg – utterly nondescript, his own mother couldn’t pick him out in a line-up, Troy thought – a Sergeant O’Connor and a Corporal Schickelgruber.
‘You’re kidding?’ said Troy.
‘Nope. Used to work with me in Zurich up to the new year. Absolutely won’t consider changing his name. Born Adolf Schickelgruber, he says, and he’ll die Adolf Schickelgruber.’
‘Adolf? His parents christened him Adolf?’
‘He’s in his twenties. Probably born in the last war. The only person who’d heard of the other Corporal Adolf Schickelgruber then was the paymaster in the Austrian infantry.’
‘Couldn’t you promote him? Anything but a corporal.’
‘Sure. If we live through this I’ll see to it
personally. Hold on, here come another two.’
Troy peered out. A tall soldier and a short soldier were approaching, side by side. The tall one looked up at the sky and said something Troy could not hear or read. He’d bet they’d picked up the English habit of filling silence by talking inanely about the weather.
Cormack said, ‘Don’t know the tall guy, but I hate to tell you who the little one is.’
‘Let me guess, Corporal Mussolini?’
‘Close – that’s Joe Buonaparté. He accents the “e” and never fails to tell you there’s a “u” in his name. You’ve played this before, haven’t you?’
‘I’m grateful for the education into the great American melting pot, but I rather think this is getting us nowhere,’ said Troy. ‘There’s simply too many of them.’
‘I don’t see what else we can do.’
‘I can,’ said Troy. ‘We can set a trap for our chap.’
‘Trap? What sort of a trap?’
§ 80
Troy stood outside a large block of working-class flats – the East London Dwelling Company’s Cressy Houses in Union Place, E1 – a few yards from Stepney Green, a few more from the Stiltons’ house in Jubilee Street, a mile or so from Leman Street police station, where he had served as a uniformed constable before the war, and home to his old station sergeant, the recently widowed George Bonham. Troy climbed to the second floor and rapped at the door. Bonham towered over him, a duster in his hand, a floral pinny on his chest, a look of surprise on his face mingled with the unremitting sorrow which seemed to Troy to have been his lot since the Blitz and the death of his wife Ethel.
‘Freddie, long time no wotsit. Come in, come in, what brings you to this neck of the woods?’
Troy followed him to the sitting room, a box no more than ten feet by eight – the warm heart of a tiny flat in which George and Ethel had raised three sons. George had the china cabinet open. His wife’s collection of Crown Derby set out on the dining table.
‘I was just giving ’em a bit of a going over. Didn’t like to see ’em gathering dust.’