‘No,’ said Kelman.
‘How did you requisition new dog tags?’
‘I said I lost them at the YMCA. Happens a lot from what I hear. I’ve gone swimming there once or twice. Nobody questioned it.’
Dundee thought for a moment then stood. ‘I think that just about does it, Lieutenant.’
‘Are you going to talk to the C.O.?’’ Kelman asked nervously, also standing.
‘I don’t see any reason to.’ Dundee shrugged. ‘I might have a few questions later on but for now you’re in the clear.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ He snapped another salute and Dundee returned it. Kelman left the room.
‘What do you think?’ said Dundee.
Jane shrugged. ‘Pure as the driven snow,’ she answered finally. ‘An innocent abroad.’
‘The prostitute steals the dog tags and wallet so our murdered man can have a new identity.’
‘Presumably.’
‘Which in turn presumes a relationship between the chippy and the dead man.’
Jane lifted her shoulders. ‘Or the club itself. Can we find out if Kelman’s girl Annie is still working for her?’
‘Shouldn’t be too difficult,’ Dundee said.
‘Now what?’ Jane asked. ‘Your place or mine?’
‘Let’s get back to Strathmere. The Potties are doing their famous steak and kidney pie tonight and I’ve had enough of this for one day. Club 43 can wait until another time. I’m not sure we’d get very far anyway.’
‘Maybe I could even get a bit of fishing in. I left all my gear with Polly.’
‘Fishing?’ said Dundee.
‘Fishing,’ Jane said.
* * *
Jane stood in the river, just upstream from the old, dark mill, and cast across towards the marshy little island a dozen yards away. She was using an eight-and-a-half-foot, three piece Wright & McGill Granger Special bamboo trout rod and a Shakespeare Russell aluminium reel. She’d threaded the reel with light line, fitting it with a silk-bodied California Coachman, one of her favourite late afternoon and evening dry flies.
She was shooting the line in a basic roll cast, targeting a spot directly under an overhanging branch where a plump, critical kingfisher watched each shot Jane made into the fluttering pool of nymphs caught in a backwater created by an old tree fall. While Jane had seen half a dozen risings, none had condescended to take the Coachman. Not that she really cared; it was enough that she was alone and she was fishing.
Not really a sport people would expect from a Brooklyn girl born into poverty at the turn of the century, but times changed and so did Jane, it seemed. Once upon a time she’d had every girl’s dream of marriage and children but here she was, a bona fide war correspondent in the middle of a bona fide war. Now who would have thunk it? The fly fishing had come from her friend Rusty Birdwell, who covered the Hollywood beat for the Daily News. He’d taken her to a few of his favourite trout streams just outside of L.A. but she’d long ago given up on those and had now fished from Canada to the Sea of Cortez.
Jane cast her line once again, farther upstream this time, letting the fly drift down on the current, past the dense, overhanging yew trees that stood on the edge of the marsh island. The sky had gone to twilight and the shadows under the trees were becoming deeper. Overhead, the first nighthawks and swifts were booming and screaming as they fed. The river was hushed and expectant as Jane’s line lay flat upon the water, drifting slowly on the current. No trout rose to the fly and, perhaps bored with her poor efforts, the kingfisher flew sharply away from the perch on the end of the dry limb and angled towards the dark silhouette of the village’s barely visible skyline, downstream from the mill. Jane reeled in her line and let herself think about her day with Dundee again.
The dead man wearing Kelman’s dog tags had also been wearing the appropriate uniform and rank insignia and, with the forged pass found in his coat, he would have easily passed a simple ‘stop-and-go’ inspection by the Military Police. Pretty sophisticated for a deserter on the run. If he was a deserter and if he was on the run.
Jane felt a small thrill of excitement shiver through her, the first scent of the fox, the beginning of the chase. She tried to put the thought out of her head and walked back towards the bank. Twice before she’d become too involved with a subject she was only there to observe and document and on both occasions it had almost gotten her killed. She was here to take pictures, nothing more, and that’s exactly what she was going to do. Still a murdered man with gold dust under his fingernails wasn’t something you came across every day. As she reached the bank and began breaking down her rod and climbing out of her hip waders, the single thought turned into a string of possibilities and finally a theory. Just then Dundee stepped out of the bramble path and stood in front of her. She took a couple of steps back and drew in her breath. She could see the red flare of his cigarette end in the darkness.
‘Getting dark,’ he said. ‘Thought you might need a little guidance getting back.’
‘I have an idea,’ said Jane. She gently tipped the three-piece rod into its leather carrying case and put the reel into the small wicker pocket of her fish creel.
‘About what?’ asked Dundee. He had his tobacco out and was rolling her a cigarette. He lit it and handed it to her. She took it gratefully and puffed away on it for a few moments, putting her thoughts in order.
‘About our man with the Midas touch,’ she answered finally, packing away the last of her gear.
‘What about him?’
‘He was wearing a uniform and carrying dog tags that didn’t belong to him. The assumption is he’s a deserter, using the uniform to be inconspicuous. There’s more Yank soldiers around these days than there are civilians.’
‘Interesting point.’
‘But he’s got gold dust under his fingernails and there’s no function within the U.S. military that handles gold on a regular basis, right?’
‘As far as I can tell.’ Dundee nodded.
‘So what if he’s not in the military at all. What if the uniform and the dog tags are a cover for something else.’
‘A disguise?’
‘And I’ll take it one step further,’ said Jane. ‘Why dispose of his body in a town when it would have been much easier and much more inconspicuous to dump him in the countryside? It doesn’t make any sense at all.’
‘So you’re saying he was in Letchworth for a reason?’
‘It’s worth checking out, don’t you think?’
* * *
The dingy warehouse stood at the end of Pekin Street, a foul smelling cul-de-sac close to the West India Docks in the Limehouse district of London.
Half the businesses around it had been bombed out and most of the rest abandoned but Chow Yun Fat Meat Products still appeared to be in business, at least in some small way. Once every few days a truck would appear, sheep, goat, pig and cow carcasses would be unloaded and, for a few hours, the chimneys of the building would blur with an oily turbid vapor that spewed the scent of blood and death in the air. Chow Yun Fat was a meat rendering plant where meat too old, too stringy or too diseased for human consumption was supposedly broken down into its component parts and used for everything from soap to motor lubricant to the glue on the back of postage stamps. In fact only half the building’s energies were bent towards rendering; it was also the centre for most of the black-market trade in meat in London. Much of the material deemed unfit for humans was mixed with government-approved product or sold to companies manufacturing tinned products. Approximately half the output of this particular operation was used to manufacture the British version of C rations. God forbid that The Colonel should be disloyal enough to sell the stuff for use by his own men.
On this cloudy and moonless night, Limehouse was a wasteland of rubble. Nothing moved along the short length of Pekin Street except the occasional scurrying rat, usually a recent immigrant from convoy ships unloading at the docks. Most of London’s native rodent residents had been burned out by the rece
nt conflagrations in the area.
There were several dim lights on within Chow Yun Fat, illuminating four men. One was The Colonel; one was his ever-present aide, Lieutenant Menzies; the third was a military policeman on The Colonel’s payroll and the fourth was a young black man named Thomas Wier. They were all standing beside one of the high concrete rendering vats that were scattered around the gloomy, high ceilinged chamber. A series of chain-driven overhead conveyors fitted with gleaming meathooks formed a latticework over their heads. The warehouse stank of animal dung and fear. The black man, Wier, was dressed in a filthy army greatcoat. His G.I. boots were scuffed and untied. He looked hungry and defeated. The MP, a man named Saksamun, stood beside the black man, a long truncheon held in both hands. Above them, the rendering vat bubbled and gasped. The smell in the place was a throat-grabbing horror and the thick wooden planks of the floor were dark and oily, soaked with a hundred generations of animal blood.
‘Where do you come from, son?’ asked The Colonel.
‘Company C of the Twenty-seventh Quartermaster Truck Regiment, sir.’
‘Ah.’
The MP spoke up. ‘He hit a superior officer, a White officer, Colonel. Court-martialled. Escaped from the glasshouse in Bristol. Been AWOL for two weeks or so. Just caught him. Due for transport to the Shepton Mallett facility tonight.’
‘Excellent.’ The Colonel smiled. He stared at the young black man. ‘How’d you like to avoid that, son?’
‘Do just about anything, sir.’
‘You know who I am?’
‘Heard tell. You run a lot of the angles over here.’
‘That’s right. I can keep you out of jail.’
‘I’d sure appreciate that, sir.’
‘Take off your clothes.’
‘Pardon.’
‘You’ll need new clothes, correct?’
‘Oh. Yes, sir.’ The young black man began stripping off his clothes until he stood naked in front of the other three men. He looked embarrassed and tried to cover himself.
‘Dog tags,’ instructed The Colonel.
The black man nodded, ducked his head and slipped the punch-pressed dog tags from around his neck. He held them out. Menzies plucked a snow-white handkerchief out of his pocket and took the tags. He wiped them down then handed them to The Colonel, who glanced at them briefly. ‘What rank are you, son?’
‘Corporal, sir.’
The Colonel turned to the MP and nodded. Saksamun stepped forward, raised his truncheon and struck the young black man across the forehead as hard as he could. The man’s face split open and blood poured down his dark body to the darker floor. He crumpled without a sound.
‘Now what?’ asked the MP.
The Colonel slipped the dog tags around his own neck, smiled and looked up at the bubbling vat of boiling animal fats. ‘You know the old Chinese saying: render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, render unto Chow Yun Fat what is Chow Yun Fat’s.’ The Colonel shrugged. ‘So render him.’
Chapter Seven
They left Strathmere late in the morning, shortly after a motorcycle courier brought up the photographs from Simpson’s office at the morgue. Hunched behind the wheel, Dundee piloted the big American car down the A10 to the A507. They were in Hertfordshire now and every turn brought a new vista of rolling hills, oddly shaped hedgerow-divided fields and clumps of ancient forest. She’d brought her camera bag and a fully loaded Leica with her but so far she had resisted the temptation to photograph the passing scenery, almost as though recording it would somehow destroy its enchantment.
‘It’s so hard to believe there’s a war on,’ said Jane, staring out the window, breathing in the gentle, lightly scented air. She was about as far from the ash and smoke and traffic sounds of New York as you could get. ‘Sometimes, when I was in school when I was a little kid, they’d take us to the library. I had this special book I loved called The Yellow Fairy Book and all the illustrations were like this. Magic. You expect gnomes to pop out from behind trees and to find trolls under bridges.’
‘There’s nothing magical on the other side of the Channel,’ said Dundee. ‘The gnomes are riding Panzers and the trolls don’t live under bridges; they fly Heinkels and Stukas and ME 109s. Hitler’s no fairy either; he’s the devil in the flesh, right down to the pointy ears and the tail. It’s a real war, even if I’m not allowed to fight it.’
‘Your boss, Hedrick, seemed to think I was too chicken for a combat battalion. You sound like you want to fight.’
‘Hedrick hates my guts. Thinks I’m a rich man’s kid trying to get out of the war. I’m pretty sure the old man pulled some strings to keep me out of it. Hedrick doesn’t like to be anybody’s puppet – not that I blame him.’ He reached into the pocket of his dark green officer’s jacket and pulled out his cigarette makings, handing them across the seat to Jane. She started rolling them up. ‘The truth of it is I’m too tall to be a fighter pilot, I get seasick on any boat you put me on, from a rowboat to the Queen Mary, and I’m too blind to fire a rifle and hope to hit anything. Sad to say, being a lawyer is what I’m good at.’
‘And Hedrick gave you his so-called ‘Special Unit’ as punishment? To keep you out of the way?’
‘I think so,’ Dundee said. ‘It hasn’t worked out that way though; I’ve been involved in a fair number of hush-hush situations already.’
‘Hush-hush?’
‘There’s a lot of prosecutors think any so-called intimacy between a black soldier and a white woman is rape by definition. So far I’ve come upon four sweet young things, one of whose father was a member of parliament, who went out on dates with one of our coloured men and wound up with a whole wheat bun in the oven before they called foul.’
‘What happened?’
‘I proved otherwise,’ said Dundee. ‘Rape in England is a capital offence. You hang for it. Serious business and these boys were just stupid, not guilty. Hedrick was embarrassed by the whole thing; said I was acting more like a defence lawyer than a prosecutor.’ Jane picked up a somewhat droopy cigarette, lit it and handed it to Dundee. She started working on one of her own. ‘Truth is,’ said Dundee, ‘I think he just wanted to use that new death house they just built at Shepton Mallett.
‘Shepton Mallett?’
‘Three-hundred-and-thirty-year-old English prison they handed over to us for the duration. Off in the middle of nowhere. They say it’s worse than Alcatraz.’
A few minutes later they reached the outskirts of Letchworth, a distinct greenbelt of dead flat, perfectly manicured agricultural land planted in fields as regular as squares on a chequerboard. At dinner the night before Jane had asked the Pottinger sisters if they knew anything about the place.
‘One of those perfect garden cities invented by what they used to call a “social scientist,”’ said Annabel Pottinger, scowling over her portion of steaming steak and kidney pie.
‘Nothing social about them, or scientific I should say,’ put in her sister Alice.
‘The whole thing was devised by a lunatic named Ebenezer Howard,’ said Annabel. ‘For some reason they knighted him eventually. He’d visited America, you see, and come back with all these mad ideas about everyone being equal and everyone having the same opportunities. Completely did away with the aristocracy, tradition, royalty, the lot. I mean, good heavens, what would have become of people like us?’
‘I’m sure you would have managed just fine,’ said Jane.
‘Don’t be so sure, my dear,’ said Alice. ‘Ideas sometimes have a way of catching on you know. The American Revolution for instance. Look at all the damage that did!’
‘Letchworth?’ Dundee reminded.
‘Called it a Garden City or some such,’ Annabel replied. ‘Clean streets without any curves in them, houses all looking the same, trees planted in perfect rows. Insufferably boring I should think. All that brick.’
‘What happened to his idea?’ Jane asked.
‘Well,’ said Alice, ‘it’s as I said. These things catch on. They formed som
e sort of building society and actually created the place. From what I understand it’s full of tradesmen and factory workers.’ She gave a little shudder. ‘I think they make furniture there.’
‘You’ve never been there?’ asked Polly Darling, the ATS girl.
‘Good lord no!’ said Annabel. ‘Whatever for?’
* * *
They came through the greenbelt in the Dodge and the landscape abruptly changed from countryside to neatly designed built-up housing areas, regularly spaced commons and parks, recreation grounds and what could only be grammar schools, looking more like small glue factories than places of education, the only giveaway being the goalposts in the fields and boys in shorts and soccer shirts doing calisthenics in rows as neat as the trees that lined the streets.
‘It sure as hell isn’t New York,’ commented Jane. ‘‘Not even Garden City, Long Island. Bet you can’t find so much as a single troll or gnome here.’’
‘Probably banned Peter Pan years ago,’ agreed Dundee. They went by a large white building that advertised itself as the Letchworth Public Baths then went over a short bridge arcing over a double set of railway tracks. There was an attractively gabled Tudoresque railway station done in ornamental brick and surrounded by narrow beds of pansies and other simple flowers and then they were on what was obviously the town’s main street. There were a score of shops, all sporting identical awnings, with flats above, and extremely broad pavements. Buses ran in both directions at regular intervals, young mothers pushed prams and the traffic, what there was of it, moved sedately, occasionally pulling over to park in the abundant spots available.
‘Urban utopia,’ said Dundee.
‘Boring as hell,’ Jane responded. ‘Not enough crime here to fill a thimble. Probably need a permit to rob a house.’
There was a police station however and several men inside it. The chief constable was a man named Bearisto; pudgy, short, with thinning hair and a uniform sprinkled with cake crumbs down the front. They found him behind a desk in his office, sipping a cup of tea and smoking a cigarette as he leaned back in his chair, contemplating the ceiling.
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