Direct Hit

by Mike Hollow

  DIRECT HIT

  “Compelling – with a twist of nostalgia for a lost London. Jago is a passionate but unfailingly polite detective aiming his torch through the fog of war. Law and order amid bombs, spivs, and fish and chips. Jago is to cups of tea what Jack Reacher is to coffee.”

  Andy Martin, author of Reacher 20: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me

  “Mike Hollow has created a warm and engaging detective in John Jago, who isn’t afraid to face his own vulnerability as he pursues a murderer.”

  Elizabeth Flynn, author of Game, Set and Murder

  “I started reading Direct Hit and couldn’t stop. Mike Hollow wonderfully evokes the events and atmosphere of wartime London and brings the gritty nature of life in the heavily bombed East End to life with a rich cast of characters. I enjoyed the book immensely – a new detective inspector has made his appearance, and I hope very much that it won’t be the last we’ve heard of him.”

  Peter Stansky, author of The First Day of the Blitz

  Direct Hit

  The Blitz Detective

  MIKE HOLLOW

  Text copyright © 2015 Mike Hollow

  This edition copyright © 2015 Lion Hudson

  The right of Mike Hollow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Published by Lion Fiction

  an imprint of

  Lion Hudson plc

  Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road

  Oxford OX2 8DR, England

  www.lionhudson.com/fiction

  ISBN 978 1 78264 127 8

  e-ISBN 978 1 78264 128 5

  Acknowledgments

  Extract p. 7 taken from “East Coker” in Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, copyright © 1940 T.S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Cover image: © Fox Photos/Getty Images

  For Catherine and David,

  my great privilege

  And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,

  And cold the sense, and lost the motive of action.

  Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.

  “East Coker” (1940), from T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

  “The public is still in a comparatively cheerful state of mind.”

  From the British government’s daily Home Intelligence report for Wednesday 4 September 1940, circulated to government departments at 4.45 p.m. on that day

  Contents

  THE ESSEX COUNTY BOROUGH OF WEST HAM, 1940

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE ESSEX COUNTY BOROUGH OF WEST HAM, 1940

  PROLOGUE

  FRIDAY 6 SEPTEMBER 1940

  He was alone, and there was no one to help him. Trapped in the silent space between two rows of graves, he heard every rasp of the madman’s breath. The reek of stale beer soured the air between them as the dark figure grabbed his lapels and pulled him close. The attacker’s face was vicious, and the cap yanked down onto his forehead was shabby. No witness could have identified him, even if there had been one in this gloomy wilderness of the dead. But Hodgson knew him well enough, and wished they had never met.

  It was absurd. There were houses just a hundred yards away. He could trace the outline of their roofs and chimneys against the night sky to his right. But in the depths of the blackout, with not a light showing anywhere, he might as well be on the moon. The only people out at this time of night would be the ARP wardens and the police, and he could hear no sound of them. They would have plenty of things to attend to.

  He knew he was trembling, but could not stop it. He was out of his depth, overwhelmed by a familiar surge of panic. His father used to say dogs and horses could smell fear, so maybe people did too. He remembered the two women who’d stopped him on Stratford High Street in the autumn of 1916 and given him a white feather. Perhaps they could smell cowardice on him. He could have made an excuse: he’d been officially ruled unfit for military service in the Great War because of his short-sightedness. But no, he just took the feather without complaint and went on his way. He knew they were right: he was a coward through and through.

  Now he heard himself babbling some futile nonsense about reporting this to the police. The man released his hold on one lapel, but only to slap him in the face. The sting bit deep into Hodgson’s cheek, and his glasses rammed painfully into the bridge of his nose. He wanted to cry. It’s just like the way gangsters slap hysterical women in the pictures, he thought. He knows that’s all it takes with someone like me.

  “Not so high and mighty now, are we, Mr Hodgson?” his tormentor snarled. “I think it’s time you started putting a bit more effort into our little arrangement. Don’t you?”

  He flung Hodgson back against a gravestone. Its edge cracked into his spine and he slumped to the ground.

  Humiliation. Again. All through his life. His wife might like to think he had some status because he worked for the Ministry of Labour and National Service, but he knew his post was shamingly junior for a man with twenty-four years’ service. After all this time he still wondered if she knew what kind of man she had married. But he knew, only too well. He saw himself, eleven years old, and the gang that set about him on his way home from school, older boys looking for fun in their last term at Water Lane. His West Ham Grammar School uniform made him an easy target. When they snatched his cap and tossed it onto the roof of the nearest house, he understood for the first time in his life that he was a victim. They were just a bunch of fourteen-year-old boys, but he was outnumbered and powerless. Now he was outnumbered by one man.

  “I will, I will,” he said. “It’s just difficult. You don’t understand.”

  “Oh, I understand all right,” said the man, hauling him back onto his feet.

  Hodgson pushed his glasses back up his nose to straighten them. Now he could see the scar that ran three inches down the side of his assailant’s face, just in front of his ear. The man didn’t look old enough for it to be a wound from the last war, and not young enough to have been involved in the current one. He tried not to think how he might have got it.

  “You just look here
, Mr Hodgson. You’re a nice man, so I’m going to give you one more chance.”

  The sneer in his voice made his meaning clear. He pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his trouser pocket and stuffed it into the inside pocket of Hodgson’s jacket, then patted him on the chest in mock reassurance.

  “Right, Mr Hodgson, you just sort it for this little lot, and there’s a pound in it for you for each one. Mind you do it right, though. If you don’t, I’ll shop you, or worse. Now you won’t forget, will you?”

  Hodgson hurried to give his assurance, relieved that the ordeal was over. Before the words were out of his mouth, he felt the first blow to his stomach, then a second full in his face, a third to the side of his head and another to his stomach. After that he lost count.

  He became aware of a boot nudging his left leg.

  “Been celebrating, have we, sir?”

  He didn’t know where he was or what time it was. His eyes stung as he strained them open. Two figures stood above him, silhouetted against the lightening sky. He couldn’t see their faces, and took them at first for soldiers, or perhaps a Home Guard patrol, from the outline of their headgear. One of the men squatted down beside him, and now through a blur Hodgson could make out the word “Police” stencilled in white on the front of his steel helmet.

  “I think you’d better come along with us so we can get you tidied up before your missus sees you,” said the policeman.

  Hodgson closed his eyes. He felt their grip on his arms, one either side, as they got him standing.

  Every part of his body ached. He struggled to focus his mind and glanced down at his cheap black suit, crumpled and filthy. How was he going to persuade them he was a respectable civil servant when he must look like a common midnight brawler? Even worse, how was he going to explain all this to Ann?

  He had to think of something. He had to find some way to stop that maniac destroying his life.

  CHAPTER 1

  There were times when Jago wished he wasn’t a policeman. Right now he’d like to go out, cross the street and rip the thing off the wall. It had been stuck up there for so long, he reckoned most people probably ignored it, but it still made him feel angry. Everything about it was pompous and patronizing, he thought, like the government that had put it there.

  He tried not to think about it. That wasn’t why he’d come here. Apart from the view across West Ham Lane to that confounded poster, Rita’s café was an oasis, a sanctuary of friendly welcome and good home cooking. Today, like time without number in the past, he’d come here for respite from the job, from crime, from the world.

  He saw Rita approaching, cloth in hand and pencil behind her ear as usual. She wore her years well, he thought. A woman of a certain age, as the French put it – in other words fortyish, like himself, but already widowed for twenty-two years and with a daughter of twenty-three. In her floral-patterned apron and with her headscarf tied in a turban, she treated her customers as though they’d just popped round to her house for a cup of tea in the kitchen.

  “Afternoon, Mr Jago,” she said. “Enjoying the view?”

  “No,” he said. “Can’t you get the council to take that poster down? It annoys me.”

  She peered out of the window. The brown paper tape that criss-crossed the glass had been up for a year now and was beginning to peel away at the corners. She rubbed off a small smear with her cloth.

  “I’m sorry about the state of these windows. I’ll have to put some new tape up, I think, although why we bother I don’t know. A year at war and we’ve never had a single bomb down this street. But what’s wrong with the poster, dear? You mean that red one on the wall over there? It’s in a bit of a state, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but unfortunately you can still just about make out what it says. Look.”

  Rita read the words slowly.

  “‘Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us victory.’ What’s wrong with that, then?”

  “Everything, I’d say. What idiot thinks you can win a war by being cheerful? They should try spending a few weeks in a trench up to their knees in mud, blood and rats, like your Walter and I did. Then we’d see how cheerful they were. And look: every time it says ‘your’ they’ve put a line under it. They might as well put one under ‘us’, too, and make it absolutely clear: we’re the rulers and you’re the ruled. It’s a wonder one of those communists from the docks hasn’t crept out in the night with a pot of paint and done it for them. What do these Whitehall pen-pushers use for brains?”

  “Not your favourite poster then, Mr Jago? Honestly, I’m surprised at you. Coming out with things like that, and you a servant of the Crown. If people hear you talking like that you’ll have to arrest yourself.”

  “Don’t worry, Rita: for your ears only. I don’t go round saying that sort of thing to everyone, but I know I can let off a bit of steam with you.”

  “I’ll go up the road to the town hall if you like and ask them to scrape it off the wall, tell them it’s annoying my customers and ruining my trade.”

  “To be honest, Rita, it wouldn’t surprise me if West Ham Borough Council had left it there on purpose. Think about it: you’ve got the world’s worst propaganda poster, dreamed up by Chamberlain and his Tory government, and a council controlled by Labour for twenty years. They probably left it there deliberately to make a political point.”

  “I think you’re reading too much into it. And in any case, the weather’s nearly done it for you – it’ll be falling off the wall soon.”

  She wiped the top of his table, then stood back and took a notepad from her apron pocket and the pencil from behind her ear.

  “Now then, what can I get you? A spot of late lunch?”

  “Just a pot of tea for two, please, and a couple of your delightful rock cakes. I’m waiting for my colleague to join me – he’s just popped to the gents.”

  “I’ll bring the tea and cakes over when I see him come back. Is it the young man I saw you coming in with? I don’t think I’ve seen him in here before.”

  “Yes, that’s my assistant, Detective Constable Cradock. I’m taking him to the football this afternoon. Familiarizing him with the local culture, you might say.”

  “Well, you’ve got very good weather for it; I hope you win. This constable of yours, he looks a nice young man. Might suit my Emily. Is he spoken for?”

  “Sorry, Rita, I have no idea – and if I had I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “I expect you miss your Sergeant Clark, don’t you? He’s back in the Army, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he was called up when war was declared, with all the other reserves. We’re so short of manpower these days I can’t get a detective sergeant to replace him, so I have to make do with a constable instead.”

  “Same for me, dear,” said Rita. “The last girl I had working here packed it in. Said she could get better money doing munitions work. Now I’m stuck with that Phyllis over there. Too slow to catch cold, if you ask me. Young people today don’t know what hard work is, do they, Mr Jago?”

  “It’s not like it was when we were young, Rita, that’s for sure. I look at Cradock sometimes and think I don’t understand him. And it’s not just a generation thing. It’s the war: if you lived through it you see things differently, simple as that.”

  “Too true,” said Rita with a sigh. “Twenty-two years now since my Walter was killed, and it’s with me every day. But to most people I’m just another war widow, and who wants to think about that? Present company excluded, of course: you’ve always been very understanding. Sometimes I think I should have gone away, lived somewhere else, started all over again, but somehow I never did. Don’t know why.”

  “Because people like you and me belong here, Rita, that’s why.”

  “I suppose so. No place like home, eh? Still, there’s no point getting miserable, is there? That doesn’t help anyone. Look, I’ve brought you the paper to look at while you’re waiting. Yesterday’s Express. I know you like to see it.”

  S
he handed him that week’s Stratford Express with a smile, then pointed at the wall behind him.

  “Is that a new hat you’ve got there?”

  “That’s very observant of you, Rita. You should have been a detective.”

  She laughed.

  “Not me, dear. I’m not clever enough. It’s just that you’re always so nicely turned out, not like most of the men round here, so I notice what you’re wearing.”

  Jago took the hat down from the hook on the wall and smoothed it with his jacket sleeve.

  “You’re right. I got it last week. It’s the first I’ve bought for five years, and I plan to wear it for the next five at least.”

  The hat was a charcoal grey fedora with the brim snapped down at the front. He didn’t like to think what the men at the station would say if they knew what he’d paid for it. Even a detective inspector’s salary didn’t give much room for self-indulgence. If he’d been a family man they might call it scandalous, but he had neither wife nor children, and his conscience was clear.

  “Very nice too,” said Rita. “You always look a proper gentleman.”

  She set off back to the kitchen, and Jago replaced his hat on the hook. He was peckish, and Cradock had not yet appeared. Get a move on, boy, he thought: I want my cup of tea.