Riptide

by Lawton, John

  Lastly, Robert Churchill really existed and his life and work were recorded by MacDonald Hastings in The Other Mr Churchill (Harrap 1963). I’m grateful to my brother Frank, who knows more about guns and bullets and things that go whizz or bang than most people alive, for reminding me of Robert Churchill’s shop in Orange Street, and for a wealth of knowledge on the Smith and Wesson .35.

  Prologue

  A grim prospect greeted Troy and Bonham. Eight small boys ranged across the pavement, all looking expectantly towards Bonham. No one spoke, the expectant looks seemed fixed somewhere between joy and tears. Sgt Bonham held power over the greatest, the most mysterious event in their short lives. Troy looked down at a motley of gabardine mackintoshes, outsized jackets tied up with string, brown boots, pudding basin haircuts, bruised and scabrous kneecaps. Such an amazing array of ill-fitting hand-me-downs that only the peach-fresh faces challenged the image of them as eight assorted dwarves. Out on the end of the line, a grubby redhead, doubtless called Carrots, juggled a smouldering cocoa tin from hand to hand, an improvised portable furnace. Troy wished he had one of his own.

  Troy glanced at the boys, wondering how much they heard and how much they understood. Eight cherubic faces, and sixteen hard, ruthless eyes looked back at him. Preserving innocence seemed a fruitless ideal.

  ‘How would you like to make some money?’ he said.

  ‘How much?’ said the biggest.

  ‘A shilling,’ said Troy.

  ‘Half a crown,’ said the boy.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s for yet!’

  ‘It’ll still cost you half a dollar,’ the boy replied.

  ‘OK, OK,’ said Troy, ‘Half a crown to the boy who finds the rest.’

  ‘Freddie, for God’s sake,’ Bonham cut in. ‘You can’t!’

  He gripped Troy by the shoulder and swung him round into a huddled attempt at privacy.

  ‘Are you off yer chump?’

  ‘George, can you think of any other way?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake they’re kids. They should be in school!’

  ‘Well they clearly have no intention of going. And they don’t exactly look like freddie Bartholomew do they?’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Bonham said again.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Troy.

  ‘On your own head be it.’

  Troy turned back to the boys, ranged in front of him in a wide semicircle.

  ‘I want you to look for . . .’ he hesitated, uncertain what to call a corpse. ‘For anything to do with what Tub found. OK?’

  They nodded as one.

  ‘And if you find it don’t touch it. You come straight back and tell Mr Bonham, and nobody, I mean nobody, goes near it till he’s seen what you’ve found. Understood?’

  ‘You know, Freddie,’ Bonham said softly, ‘There are times when I think there’s nothing like a long spell at the Yard for putting iron in the soul.’

  1

  Boys’ Game

  Short, nasty and brutish.

  Troy stared.

  ‘Go on,’ said Churchill.

  Still Troy stared.

  ‘Go on. Pick it up.’

  Troy hefted the gun in his left hand. Sawn off at the barrels and stock, it had become less a shotgun than an outsize handgun. He felt the weight, thought the alterations did nothing for its balance and less for its looks. ‘I hope this didn’t start life as one of your hand-mades,’ he said.

  ‘Far from it. I helped myself to it after a trial a few years back. The court wanted it destroyed, naturally, but I pleaded its . . . educational value.’

  Churchill smiled at Troy over this last phrase. Down the tunnel Hitler and Göring watched with fixed gazes. Tempting him.

  ‘My education, I suppose?’ Troy said.

  ‘As it happens, yes.’

  ‘You know,’ Troy went on, ‘it’s appalling a policeman should ever have his hands on such a weapon.’ He tucked the stubby stock into one hip and fired. The first shot cut Adolf in two, the second set fat Hermann spinning. Straw and sawdust everywhere.

  Churchill sighed. ‘What have I told you, Frederick?’

  Troy recited: ‘Every shot counts. Speed isn’t everything.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And a wounded man can still kill you.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Churchill. ‘If old Göring had been anything more than a cut-out from Picture Post and a sack full of straw you’d be dead now. Shall we do it again with a little more accuracy and a little less haste?’

  ‘Again.’ It seemed to be Churchill’s motto, and it seemed to Troy that he was no further on than the day Churchill had walked back into his life three weeks ago.

  § 1

  DECEMBER 1944

  In the summer of 1944 Lady Diana Brack had shot Detective Sergeant Troy in the gut. He had lost part of one kidney, and had been lucky not to lose a length of small intestine. He had been off work for six months. Six months that to him seemed far more than enough and which he ascribed as much to his superintendent’s desire to punish him as to the rigours of passing the medical. Every time he reported for duty, Onions sent him home. Not long before Christmas he had finally got back into his oldoffice,behindhis olddesk, andattempted to slip on the old skin he had sloughed off in June.

  A week later he was back in hospital, rushed to the Charing Cross with internal bleeding as a result of a massive haemorrhage, the first he had known of which had been pissing blood. Sergeant Wildeve had picked him off the bog floor, flies gaping, cock out, slewed in a crimson slick of blood and piss.

  His family came to drive him mad.

  His mother sat at his bedside and distracted him from the prospect of death by reading aloud to him, much as she had done when he was young. He had been a sickly child. Now that he was a sickly grown-up, he was happy to have her read; he wished only that she had chosen something more cheery than Rimbaud’s Un Saison en Enfer.

  He could understand why. French was her first language. Like many Russian toffs, Russian, to her, had been a language for talking to servants, and, unlike her husband, she had never found it in herself to embrace the irregularities of English with the passion one could only ever muster for something so perverse. French it had been, French it was – but Rimbaud. Mother, please.

  ‘J’attends Dieu avec gourmandise. Je suis de race inférieure de toute éternité.’

  Oh, bloody hell, he thought. Waiting for God? Was that what he was doing? But help was at hand. His sister Masha had appeared at his mother’s shoulder: ‘There’s two chaps waiting to see Freddie, Maman. As he’s only allowed two visitors at a time . . .’

  His mother stuck a bookmark in the pages of the battered Rimbaud and told him they would continue tomorrow.

  ‘Anyone I know?’ Troy asked.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said his sister, and as she walked out Kolankiewicz had walked in, followed closely by a face that made Troy think for a moment. Churchill, Bob Churchill. Good Lord. He didn’t think he’d seen Bob since his father’s funeral.

  Lady Troy offered a cheek for Churchill to peck. Troy couldn’t help feeling she would have preferred a handshake, but that would have meant surrendering the grip on one or other of her walking-sticks. For eighteen months or so now they had kept her mostly upright and moving against the tortuous twists and stabs of arthritis. All Kolankiewicz got was a mumbled, ‘Good evening.’ She had never liked Kolankiewicz, but then so few people did – so few could or would get past the foul exterior and the fractured English. Besides, Poles and Russians . . . They had history. Taras Bulba was not a novel or a name ever to be mentioned around Kolankiewicz.

  Churchill had gained weight – a family trait, perhaps. He was almost as rotund as his distant cousin Winston, and when the mood took him the same mischievous Churchillian glint could be seen in his eyes.

  No one spoke as Troy’s mother walked to the door, sticks clacking arrhythmically across the linoleum floor. When she had gone Churchill said softly, ‘Your mother was fine the last time I saw her. Has al
l this come upon her since your father’s death?’

  Troy’s father had died late in 1943. He had watched his mother slip into sudden ill-health, her limbs seizing up as the most important limb of all had been cut from her. A physical parody of her mental state. It was not Troy waiting for God, it occurred to him, nor was it a poem read for his benefit – it was his mother, and there were times he thought God could not arrive soon enough for her liking.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And there’s little to be done. She seems almost to relish the affliction. It’s her punishment for letting the old man slip.’

  ‘You been reading that bugger Freud again?’ Kolankiewicz said.

  ‘Let’s change the subject, shall we? I’m sure I don’t owe this honour to your desire to argue the toss about Freud or Bob’s concern for my mother’s health.’

  Churchill and Kolankiewicz looked at each other, and Troy knew he had hit the mark. It was indeed an honour – a visit from the greatest gun expert on Earth and from London’s finest forensic pathologist. If the two of them had got together to visit him in his sick bed they must be up to something – the static between them flashed out ‘conspiracy’ to Troy.

  ‘Bob has an idea,’ Kolankiewicz began.

  ‘Well, more of a suggestion, really, and it was your idea, really, Ladislaw . . .’

  Ladislaw? No one called the Polish Beast by his Christian name.

  ‘Stop there, both of you. I’m too tired and too pissed off to listen to you play Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Could one of you just spit it out?’

  Kolankiewicz deferred. Churchill took the chair Troy’s mother had been in, and Kolankiewicz perched on the edge of the bed.

  ‘It’s like this, Frederick. After you were shot, Ladislaw and I met up . . . When was it now?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter when,’ said Troy.

  ‘I suppose not. Anyway, he told me you couldn’t hit a barn door at twenty paces and the only reason Diana Brack hadn’t killed you instead . . .’ Churchill paused, reddened even, as the inevitability of what he had to say next struck him.

  ‘Instead of me killing her,’ Troy prompted.

  ‘Quite. As you say. The only reason was . . . well . . . pure luck. Wasn’t it?’

  Churchill looked at Kolankiewicz. Kolankiewicz looked at Troy. Troy met them head on. ‘Yes. A lucky shot,’ he agreed.

  Lucky? The bullet that had killed Diana Brack ricocheted through his dreams and would do so for the rest of his life.

  ‘So . . . what’s your point, gentlemen?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Churchill fudged.

  Kolankiewicz had had enough of fudge.

  ‘Well is as well does. Next fucker who comes at you with gun is going to kill you, you stupid bugger.’

  Churchill manoeuvred around the F-word by pulling out a large linen handkerchief and honking loudly, as though a good hooter blast could erase the sound of air turning blue.

  ‘Fuck it, Troy, you know as well as I do if the Brack bitch had got off a second shot you’d be six feet under pushing up buttercups!’

  ‘Daisies,’ Troy said softly.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s “pushing up daisies” not “pushing up buttercups”, you Polish pig – and, yes, you’re quite right. She damn near killed me. I’ve had six months to work that out. Now tell me something I don’t know.’

  Churchill got between them. ‘When will you be discharged?’

  ‘For Christmas,’ Troy replied. ‘They’ve assured me of that.’

  ‘And how fit will you be?’

  Troy threw back the bedclothes, hoisted his nightshirt and pointed to the four-inch scar on his abdomen.

  ‘I see,’ Churchill said. ‘You’ll take a while to heal. So, we’ll take it gently at first, shall we?’

  ‘Take what gently?’

  Kolankiewicz answered, the steam spent, and a near-avuncular tone in his voice: ‘My boy, Bob is offering to teach you to shoot. It’s a good idea. It could save your life.’

  ‘I get weapons training at the Yard.’

  ‘Perfunctory stuff, take my word for it,’ said Churchill. ‘Enough so coppers don’t dislocate their shoulders with recoil, enough so they can fire the odd bullet in roughly the right direction. A few weeks with me and you’ll be shooting like Wyatt Earp.’

  It was a good idea. Troy knew it. But he had a built-in aversion to guns. He’d only had one with him that night because Larissa Tosca had nagged him not to go unarmed. He had lived through that night. Tosca had not – although the absence of a body had always left him with more than enough room for doubt. On the nights when Brack did not rattle round in his head, Tosca did. On a really bad night they met. Yes – he’d master that aversion: learning how to shoot would be good. It might even occupy his mind, an organ desperately in need of occupation, any occupation, that might evict the dead women squatting there.

  § 2

  It must have been two or three days later. He was waiting on the consultant’s round, waiting on his petty god and the news of his own imminent escape. His mother sat once more at his bedside, his sister, as ever, out in the corridor preferring a tacky novel to their mother’s grapplings with poetry, although Masha’s influence must have prevailed to some extent. When the old woman had flourished a volume of Hardy’s verse, Troy’s spirits had floated on visions of Wessex life and rumpy-pumpy in haystacks, only to crash to earth when she began to read ‘The Voice’ from Hardy’s poetry of the last years before the Great War. Her accent was atrocious.

  ‘“Woman much missed how you coll to me, Sayink zat you are not as you were. . .”’

  And he realised she was about to embark on a cycle of dead woman songs – Hardy’s own Frauentotenlieder.

  ‘“. . . Zuss I; faltering fowadd, leafes around me follink, Wint oosink sin srough ze zorn from nowidd, And ze woman collink.” ’

  Jesus Christ. Dead women collink? What had possessed her to pick that? Innocence? Not grasping what the man was banging on about. It’s about death, dammit! Hardy’s murky obsession with dead women. Far, far too close to Troy’s own.

  Saved by the bell once more. The consultant breezed in like a man late for a dead cert at the bookie’s, glanced at his chart and said, ‘You can go, Sergeant Troy. Healing up nicely, wouldn’t you say?’ And did not wait for an answer.

  ‘I shall let you dress,’ said Lady Troy. ‘Masha and I will be outside.’

  From the other side of the bed Troy heard the impatient sigh of the BigMan foldinghis News Chronicle. ‘Struth, old cock, I thought she’d never stop. I don’t know who this Hardy bloke is . . . but wot a miserable git! D’ye reckon everyone he knew popped their clogs?’

  ‘Who cares? Help me out of here before I pop mine.’

  Troy swung his legs to the floor, felt the first rush of dizziness and paused, staring down to where white knees peeped from under his nightshirt, pale as jellyfish.

  ‘Awright, cock?’

  The Big Man loomed over him, big and round and blue in his Heavy Rescue uniform, blocking half the light from the window, like a tethered anti-aircraft balloon floating in his flight path. Troy felt the rush of an old, familiar feeling breaking in his mind. He wondered out loud: ‘You know, this has been bloody awful. I was the kind of child who got everything going, mumps, measles, scarlet fever . . .’

  ‘Wot kid didn’t, matey?’ said the Big Man without sympathy. ‘Bet you didn’t get rickets, though, nor pneumatic fever – not toff ’s diseases, are they?’

  Every so often the Big Man would do this to him, remind him, whether he liked it or not, of their respective places in the layers of the big onion that was english society. Troy spent a split second wondering what pneumatic fever might be, then gave up. ‘Can I finish?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘I was a sickly child – but nothing prepared me for this, I mean for the last six months. For all this . . . recuperation . . . all this fucking hospitalisation . . .’

  ‘Mind yer french, young fred, there might be ladies about.’ />
  ‘. . . and if I thought . . . I mean if I thought I’d have to go through this again . . . ever . . . I mean . . . spend this much time in hospital . . .’

  He had no ending to the sentence, but the Big Man did: ‘If you want to avoid all this malarkey in the future, then you best do what that Klankiwitch bloke and Bob Churchill are telling you.’

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘O’ course. Mr Churchill and me, we go back a long way. Till when you was a nipper, I should think. He’s done a fair bit of the old owsyerfather for the guv’ner, has Mr Churchill.’

  Troy had given up trying to find out who the ‘guv’ner’ was. He was clearly the Big Man’s employer, and once in a while the Big Man would refer to himself as a ‘gentleman’s gentleman’, but declined to solve the mystery. Troy had known him intermittently since the end of last winter, when he had come across him tending a pig on an allotment carved for wartime necessities out of the former elegance of Tedworth Gardens in Chelsea. The last time Troy had discharged himself from hospital, in June, it had been the Big Man who had bundled him up like a baby and rushed him to hospital and, when it came down to it, saved his life. Troy had never been really grateful to him. It had all got in the way of an indulgent self-pity that had left him wanting to die.

  ‘So you think I’m going to get myself killed as well, do you?’

  ‘You can bet your best baggy underpants on it, old cock.’

  The Big Man held underpants in one hand, trousers in the other. As Troy snatched them from him he remembered a phrase of Dorothy Parker’s that came close to the approximation of gratitude: ‘You might as well live.’

  ‘Might as well live? Wossat mean, cock?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Troy. ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve won this one.’

  § 3

  The Big Man wrapped him in a blanket – a parcel awaiting collection once again – and put him into the back seat of Troy’s father’s 1937 V12 Lagonda. The last time Troy had seen the car it had been up on blocks. Now it purred softly at the pavement, like a big cat lazing away a savannah afternoon. ‘Where did you get the tyres?’ he asked.