A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

“Y’know, I think a trainload of dozy dimwits walked around him or on him without realizing he was there or without realizing he was dead.”

  Troy knelt down next to the body.

  Jack was right. He was most certainly not lying as he’d fallen. He’d been kicked and shuffled by the homeward bound. It was even possible he’d been moved several feet from where he died—there was a streak of blood a yard long.

  Troy looked at the face, one cheek flattened on the concrete, mouth forced open fish-like by the weight of flesh, pale blue eyes focussed on nothing, a thin, pencil-line moustache. A man in his early forties. A single bullethole in his back, right behind the heart.

  “What do we have?” he asked simply.

  Jack handed him the man’s wallet.

  “No attempt to rob him. There’s over three quid inside.”

  Troy opened the buff ration book. All you could ask for in the way of identity was there—name, abode, age, even the address of his butcher.

  “André Skolnik. 101 Charlotte Street. Age forty-four. Buys his shilling’s worth of mince at Clays in Tottenham Street.”

  Troy flipped through the rest. Two pound notes, three ten-bob notes, and a worn, wartime identity card indicating that the late Mr. Skolnik was a naturalized Pole.

  “When do you think it happened?”

  Jack paused as a train bound for Morden crawled by. Baffled faces pressed to the glass. The silent rage of rush hour.

  “About an hour ago. One concerned citizen eventually noticed he wasn’t moving, she alerted the station master, he called the Yard, the Yard called me in the car. I was only in Marylebone Lane. Put my foot down. I’d say about twenty minutes between the alert and me getting here . . . so perhaps more than an hour, perhaps an hour and a half. The witness is on the surface, they’re giving her a cuppa in the staff room. I’ve left Gutteridge to take her statement but she’ll not be a lot of use. She got off a southbound train here and says the body was right by the door, which means she wasn’t even in the station when he was killed.”

  “And everyone who was has left, either up the escalators or on a train.”

  “Exactly. The chap who did this could have been at Leicester Square before the alarm went up.”

  A noise behind them made them both turn.

  The short fat form of the Yard’s forensic pathologist, Ladislaw Kolankiewicz, was bustling down the platform, leather soles resounding, Gladstone bag in hand, homburg pushed to the back of his head.

  “OK, flatfoots, step aside.”

  Troy was used to Kolankiewicz. Foul-mouthed, tender, abusive, avuncular. Jack was getting used to Kolankiewicz. Foul-mouthed, tender, abusive, avuncular . . . and sentimental about few things. Polishness, being Polish, was one of them and it occurred to Troy as Kolankiewicz set down his bag by the body that there was a chance he knew the man.

  As Kolankiewicz reached out his arm to turn the body, Troy put his own hand over Kolankiewicz’s.

  “There is just one thing,” he said.

  “There always is.”

  “He’s Polish.”

  A moment’s hesitation. Troy’s hand still on Kolankiewicz’s.

  “We have a name?”

  “Skolnik. André Skolnik.”

  A moment’s thought.

  “No. I don’t know anyone of that name.”

  And the body was turned. A tide of blood spilling out from the front of the shirt.

  Kolankiewicz took a limp wrist and said, “No rigor yet. He was still alive at four o’clock.”

  He took a clean cotton wipe from his bag, unbuttoned the shirt, mopped blood, and examined the chest.

  Never one to stand the sight of blood readily, Jack looked away. Troy had, on occasion, known Jack, a sergeant of the murder squad with six years service behind him, to excuse himself and throw up. In six years Jack had learnt to throw up as quietly as possible.

  Kolankiewicz turned the body back, examined the entry wound.

  “I would say he died instantly. If he made a sound I’d be amazed. There is no exit wound, so I conclude the bullet is still lodged in his heart. I would also say the killer simply pressed the gun to the jacket and fired. Point blank seems scarcely adequate to describe it. There are some powder burns, but not consistent . . . and there is this . . . what you call it? . . . White mush.”

  “Ah,” said Wildeve. “There’s a fair bit of that. Mostly about six feet back but I’ve found bits almost everywhere.”

  Troy looked where Wildeve was pointing. There was a drying lump of white mush turning flaky only a foot or so from his own shoes. He bent down, stuck a finger in, and brought the finger to his lips.

  “Careful, Freddie!”

  Troy ignored this, tasted it, and stuck his finger under Kolankiewicz’s nose.

  Kolankiewicz sniffed.

  Kolankiewicz tasted.

  Wildeve looked appalled.

  “Do you two have any sense of risk?”

  “Of course,” Kolankiewicz said, “mashed potato.”

  “What?”

  “He’s right,” said Troy. “But I’d go with baked rather than mashed. There’s still a bit of the skin on this and some of it’s still raw.”

  Kolankiewicz smiled waggishly. “So your killer bring pack lunch. Search hard enough maybe you find gherkin and processed cheese, too. Best of British, flatfoots. Now, I take the stiff.”

  Troy slipped the piece of potato into an envelope and handed it to Kolankiewicz. Two forensic assistants came down the platform from the escalator lugging a stretcher and a blanket for the body.

  Another southbound crept by. Just in time for the curious to see the body lifted onto the stretcher.

  “This’ll be in the evening papers before you can say Jack.” Jack yelled.

  And when the train had gone, Kolankiewicz and his men had gone, too, and against the background noise of the three other platforms this one now struck Troy, in the words of a cliché, as deathly quiet. The pounding in his head had stopped. For the first time in hours, it was quiet in the skull.

  “What did he mean by that crack about packed lunch?”

  Troy shrugged it off.

  “Nothing. The spud is part of the crime. Why else would it be on Mr. Skolnik?”

  “Perhaps he fell in it?”

  “He fell face down, Jack. Kolankiewicz said the potato was around the wound on his back.”

  “Shot with a spud gun?”

  “Not a weapon much favoured by anyone over the age of twelve. Now . . . if you’d just shot a bloke at close range, underground, in the middle of a crowd, what would you do?”

  Jack didn’t hesitate.

  “I’d just walk away. I might turn around and pretend I’d heard a bang just like anyone else, but I’d walk away. Straight up the escalator and out. I’d be very English about it and join all the others being very English and minding their own damn business.”

  “Quite. And the gun?”

  Now Jack did hesitate.

  “It would sort of depend on how much I wanted to hang on to it . . . how much it cost . . . but we are a nation awash in guns, the war’s made them cheap . . . and whether I intended to use it again.”

  “And if you didn’t?”

  More hesitation, then, “I’d just drop it. After all, the body all but got lost under the tramping feet. A gun—”

  Troy cut him short.

  “—would be where you and I could see it now, or it got kicked into touch by those thousands of feet.”

  “I searched the length of the platform while I waited for you.”

  “Then you’d better give me a hand down to the track.”

  Troy slipped one leg over the edge and stretched out a hand to Jack.

  “Freddie, I closed the platform, not the service. There could be a train through any second.”

  “I noticed.”

  Taking Troy’s hand brought them closer than they’d yet been.

  “Good bloody grief. You stink of scotch!”

  Troy dropped to track lev
el, let go of Jack’s hand, and said, “Well, nothing like death to sober you up is there?”

  “Watch out for the live rail!”

  “Which one is it?” Troy said, not looking.

  “How the hell should I know? It could be any one of them.”

  “Actually, Jack, it’s two, and I shall try not to step on any of them.”

  Troy walked on slowly from the point where the body had lain, six, nine, twelve feet. There were cigarette packets everywhere and between the rails there was black, shallow, oily water—not deep enough to cover much. At fifteen feet a fat mouse scurried across the rails, unharmed by either electricity or water, leaping from the inner rail to the middle to the outer rail. Troy saw that it had landed on something black in between the rails, a small object not much bigger than the mouse and as black as the water itself.

  He heard the hum in the tracks that preceded the arrival of a train. Heard Jack swear softly to himself.

  He circled the black lump with his finger. Touching only the edge until he was certain he had found the barrel of a gun.

  The tracks shook now, the blast of air down the tunnel lifted his hair and set his jacket flapping. Jack was holding out his hand to him now, urging him to get out. He looked into the headlights of the train; he could see the look of panic on the driver’s face. He grasped the gun between the forefinger and thumb of his left hand, grabbed Jack’s hand with his right, and let himself be plucked to safety by a six-foot former rugby player.

  Jack held onto Troy as the train passed. Held him dangling in the air. “You arse, you complete arse.”

  “Got it,” Troy said simply.

  §88

  Wildeve handed out brown envelopes to the blokes in uniform and told them to collect every bit of mashed potato. It was not a way to make friends or influence people.

  Driving back along the Hampstead Road in Jack’s Wolseley, Troy took the gun out of its wrapping—a page from that evening’s Standard—and held it between his fingertips. It was tiny, almost weightless. The bore could not be more than .20. And he’d never seen anything like it. He often examined a gun by sticking a pencil up the barrel and holding it like a lollipop, but he couldn’t get a pencil up the barrel of this one. It must have been like shooting someone with a needle.

  At red traffic lights, Jack glanced across.

  “Looks like a toy.”

  “Feels like one, too.”

  The lights changed. Jack slipped the car into first.

  “Y’know what strikes me, Freddie? The balls of it. The sheer bollocks of shooting a man in broad daylight, with people milling all round; shooting a chap with something that looks like a popgun and then just kicking it away and carrying on as though nothing had happened. Now, I know that’s what I said I’d do myself but that was a hypothetical me. I think this took balls of steel.”

  “I’m inclined to agree. Even allowing for the innate lack of curiosity of the English, their ability to walk round a corpse and hurry home for tea, I’m still inclined to agree.”

  Crossing Fitzroy Square, towards the north end of Charlotte Street, Troy said, “Can you handle this alone?”

  “Something urgent?”

  “I’m meeting a new nark. Someone I’ve heard of but never actually met. He’s being sold to me as a man who knows everything and everyone in Soho and Fitzrovia.”

  “Then,” Jack said, “given the late Mr. Skolnik lived bang in the middle of Fitzrovia, perhaps your nark knew him.”

  “It’ll be the first thing I ask him about,” said Troy.

  It wasn’t.

  §89

  Troy, possessing the innate curiosity most Englishman lacked, had other priorities. He had found himself hooked by Fish Wally’s accent on the telephone and, on meeting, and against his better judgement, found himself staring at his Mickey Mouse, white-gloved, crabbed hands.

  Fish Wally’s was a name he knew. Not from Walter Stilton—he had had so few conversations with Walter after the bust up with his daughter—but from the daughter herself, Woman Police Sergeant Katherine Stilton, known as Kitty, during his second fling with her; a fling he doubted Walter had lived long enough to hear of. Kitty was long gone—the first of the GI brides, married to an American officer even before the term had been minted. She had mentioned her father’s new nark just about the time Walter had been killed. He remembered that Wally was Polish—London at times seemed to be the largest Polish city outside of Poland; refugees from the Germans who’d never returned, refugees from the Russians who’d just arrived . . . and somewhere the survivors, the Polish airmen who’d flown Hurricanes and Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, thereby making themselves into accidental Englishmen. The surprising thing was, given Charlie Walsh’s description of him as someone who knew “every dive and every cove in Soho and Fitzrovia,” that they had never met before. Wally had, as it were, trodden Troy’s beat.

  They had arranged to meet at the Gay Hussar in Greek Street, below Soho Square, a skip and a hop from the dim lights of Shaftesbury Avenue and the grim gaiety of the Charing Cross Road. Troy understood why Wally had chosen it. The Hussar attracted the flotsam of Eastern Europe in much the same way the Polish Caff did in South Kensington. After the closure of the Russian tea rooms, his Uncle Nikolai had taken to going there, and on occasion to taking the young Troy with him. Not that Polish meant a deal to the old man—his father’s youngest brother, a Russian refugee from 1910 or 1911—and not that the Poles much welcomed Russians, but the sense of otherness appealed, an otherness with a Slav tint to it was better than constant exposure to an Englishness that resounded too loosely. It struck Troy as a form of music, a rough melody without harmonies. Conflicting consonants and consolation. If nothing else . . . just to be able to order tea without getting milk and sugar sloshed into it as a matter of course.

  Wally had got to the Gay Hussar first. An unseasonable black overcoat on the hook behind him, an impeccably neat double-breasted black suit, a grey silk tie with a large, loose knot at his skinny throat. No, Troy didn’t have narks like this. Troy’s narks looked like spivs dipped in chip fat—men who made appointments with themselves to change their socks or wash behind their ears.

  Wally stood. No taller than Troy himself. A small man in a world where things seemed to get bigger every day. He did not offer to shake hands—the white gloves merely poised in front of him.

  “How pleasant to see you again, Inspector.”

  “We’ve met?”

  A waiter bustled in with menus. They sat down, Troy hoping he wasn’t compounding being late by sounding rude as well as forgetful.

  “Last year. At the House of Commons.”

  Troy was at the House a fair bit. His brother had been MP for South Herts since the Labour landslide of 1945. They saw a lot of one another. A handy tunnel linked Scotland Yard to the Palace of Westminster and the London Underground. It might have been designed specially to keep the Troy brothers in touch.

  “When your brother was appointed undersecretary for the RAF he threw a party for Polish and Czech veterans. Briefly, he introduced us.”

  Troy remembered being there. He wasn’t sure why he had been there. He had probably blundered into it and, typically, Rod had declined to let him leave. He remembered the prolonged glad-handing. A barrage of names he could make no effort to memorize. So many of Rod’s “pals” were the survivors of friendships forged in the Battle of Britain—odds on, some of them were Poles—or in the long run-up to D-day. He even kept in touch with General Eisenhower. Wally didn’t look as though he fell into either category.

  “Forgive me asking, but you weren’t a pilot were you?”

  Wally held up the crab hands in their Disneyesque gloves.

  “With these? Of course not. I was the cuckoo in the nest that day. I served 1937 to 39 in the corps of engineers in Poland. I built bridges. Then I learnt to blow up bridges. In which is both irony and tragedy. I escaped that winter to Finland, and then to England. Hence . . .”

  He turned his hands in
the air, then set them as near to flat as he could manage upon the tablecloth.

  “Fire?” Troy asked.

  “Frost,” Wally said. “I could not hold a spanner or a slide rule ever again. Even now I can scarcely hold a pen. I would have done what England asked of me in 1941, but they asked nothing.”

  He shrugged noticeably and stared down at the menu for a moment. Troy thought better of mentioning that what England had asked of Wally was to be a nark. How would anyone ever dress it up as anything but an ignoble calling?

  “The Polish veterans association tracked down a few of us who had fought our last in ’39. There are not many of us. A kind gesture to men long since forgotten by history. Hence I was at your brother’s reception. Hence a reminder, not unwelcome, I had hoped, that Poland was at war a whole year before we Poles took to the skies over England.”

  “Two days before we declared war,” said Troy.

  “They matter, those days,” said Wally. “Two days in which the Panzers rolled halfway across Poland while we waited for RAF bombers that never came.”

  Troy had no reply to this and hoped he could find a neat, painless way to change the subject, but Wally clearly felt much the same.

  “Tell me, Inspector . . . can we possibly sit here and not order goulash?”

  §90

  A more than decent meal in a more than decent restaurant always made Troy wonder how many food and rationing regulations might have been broken to bring that meal to the table. The man in him did not care, and the copper in him cared even less. It had been a good meal. Even better for the thought that Angus Pakenham would end up arguing for it as a tax deduction.

  At last Troy popped the question. It had been worth waiting. He felt he had got to know Fish Wally through his narrative. Felt that Charlie Walsh was indeed doing him a favour.

  “I take it you know André Skolnik?”

  Wally sipped at his coffee, looked straight at Troy.

  “Do you mean know or knew? Would you be asking me about him if he were not dead?”

  “You’ve heard already?”

  “No. You just told me. And yes . . . I knew him. Of course, I knew him. A regular in the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street, the one on the corner of Windmill Street. Now, tell me how he died.”