Riptide

by John Lawton

  ‘Oh. We all do that. If you see ‘em you’re torn between the thrill and the knowledge that some poor sod’s copping it, and if you don’t you think Hitler’s saving it all up for the big one.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  Kitty picked at the buttons of her uniform. Sloughed off the tunic, scraped off her lace-up shoes, heel to toe.

  ‘I was wonderin’,’ she said, ‘if you fancied a bit?’

  ‘A bit?’ he said, not understanding.

  ‘Well. To be honest, I was wonderin’ if you fancied the lot.’

  A zipper slid at one hip and the blue skirt pooled at her feet. She stepped lightly across the floor in stockinged feet and a slip. Locked her hands behind his neck. Even barefoot, she was only a couple of inches shorter than he-and just a couple of inches away.

  ‘The lot?’ he said, understanding perfectly.

  ‘The works,’ she said, and smooched him.

  § 25

  In the morning Cal woke early. He lay in bed, Kitty asleep, one arm stretched across his chest, red head buried in the sheets, and wondered again about the famous English reserve. After the third bout, when he had begun to think her inexhaustible, he had put the question to her.

  ‘What happened to the famous English reserve?’

  And Kitty had answered, ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’

  But then, he had learnt in less than a week that that was pretty much their answer to everything.

  The telephone next to the bed rang. Cal slid from under Kitty’s arm and picked it up.

  ‘Captain Cormack? Chief Inspector Stilton in the foyer for you, sir.’

  Cal looked at Kitty. Looked at his watch. Good God, it was only seven thirty. Did the man never sleep?

  ‘I’ll be down in ten minutes,’ he said.

  ‘Kitty, Kitty.’

  He shook her.

  ‘Kitty, wake up. For Christ’s sake, wake up.’

  She opened her eyes, the lids fluttering blearily.

  ‘Wossatime?’

  ‘It’s seven thirty.’

  ‘Zatall? I’m not on till noon.’

  She pulled a pillow over her head. Cal snatched it away.

  ‘Your father’s on now!’

  ‘Wot?’

  ‘He’s in the lobby right now.’

  She sat upright, hands flat on the mattress, breasts swaying.

  ‘He’s never coming up?’

  ‘No-but I’ve got to go down.’

  ‘Fine-bung out the “do not disturb” and I’ll get some kip.’

  She took back her pillow, pulled up the sheets and ignored him.

  Cal took the lift down to the lobby, showered, shaved and dressed in less than seven minutes, rubbing at his chin and knowing he looked about as shaved as a singed pig. He wondered about the Stilton sense of ‘manners’-a word so potent both Stilton and his wife had used it as a one-word reprimand last night-the cockney equivalent of ‘good form’? What was good form when greeting a man whose daughter you’d just spent a long night fucking? What if sex inscribed itself on your forehead like the mark of Cain? From the open lift doors he could see Stilton at one of the tables, a large map spread out in front of him. On either side of the Atlantic, the moment had only one clearly good form-deceit. Lie and hope nothing showed.

  Stilton was eating-toast and jam-cup of tea stuck on top of the map. A young woman sitting opposite him-asses, hair up, a pleasing smile and intense eyes.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind,’ Stilton said. ‘We ordered breakfast on your room number.’

  ‘That’s fine. I hardly ever eat breakfast.’

  ‘Nor me,’ said the woman.

  ‘I was forgetting meself. Captain Cormack, Miss Payne. Our sketch artist.’

  ‘Sketch artist?’

  ‘We don’t have a photo of our man. We can’t go around London expecting to find him on a description, now can we?’

  Cal sat down in the third chair. A waitress asked him if he wanted anything and he asked for black coffee. He brushed away the mark of Cain and waited for Stilton to explain.

  ‘It’s dead easy,’ he began. ‘You tell Miss Payne what Stahl looks like and she’ll draw him.’

  Instinctively, Cal looked around. He’d never get used to this-is public airing of things and names he’d learnt to see as secrets. Perhaps it wasn’t just Stilton, perhaps it was the British? The habitual cry of ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ was a necessity-st of them seemed to forget so readily. Perhaps it was all of them? Miss Payne hadn’t batted an eyelid, just sipped at her tea.

  ‘How long will this take?’

  Miss Payne answered, ‘About two hours.’

  Stilton set down his cup, wiped his lips on the back of his hand, stuffed the crumpled map into his mackintosh pocket and got up.

  ‘I’ll drop by about eleven.’

  That was more like three hours.

  ‘You mean you’re going without me?’

  ‘Got my Czech bloke to find, haven’t I?’

  ‘Walter?’

  Cal followed him to the door. Caught up with him in a few strides and buttonholed him.

  ‘Walter. I didn’t come all this way to sit by while you chase-‘

  He couldn’t say it. It went against all his training to utter Stahl’s name out loud.

  ‘Walter, we have to do this together.’

  ‘Aye, lad. And we will. We’ll get stuck in. We will. Straight after lunch. We’ll get right on it. But we do need that sketch.’

  He clapped Cal on one shoulder with the flat of his hand-avuncular brush-ofF.

  ‘Wot larx, eh?’

  Wot larx? What was the man talking about?

  He went back to the table. A silver pot of coffee had been set out for him. Miss Payne had her sketch pad propped against the table. A row of sharp pencils. A vicious looking penknife. A huge, putty-coloured india rubber eraser. She smiled at him. A silent ‘ready-when-you-are’. Cal sighed a silent sigh. Poured himself a coffee. Miss Payne was following the movements of his hands, like a cat at a tennis match.

  ‘Is anything wrong?’ Cal asked.

  ‘I don’t suppose your coffee would run to two, would it? I’m not really a tea sort of person.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and she slopped her tea into a handy aspidistra and stuck out her cup.

  ‘Walter’s a tea man. Could drink it all day, I’ve no doubt. But I do so miss a good cup of coffee. And that really does look like a good cup of coffee.’

  She sipped and sighed. A look of real pleasure on her face.

  ‘Why didn’t you just order coffee?’

  ‘Reserved,’ she said, looking at him across the top of her cup.

  ‘Reserved for whom?’

  ‘For Americans.’

  ‘For Americans?’

  ‘Coffee isn’t actually on the ration. After all, most English people don’t care for it, anyway. And generally one can have as much as one wants. But just lately it sort of comes and goes. A bit of a bean famine. Especially since Jerry flattened the coffee stores in Old Compton Street on Sunday morning. One hears rumours-there’s coffee to be had in Barnsley or Bakewell or Banff, the sort of places one wouldn’t go to more than once in a lifetime if at all. Quite why is baffling-I mean, why Barnsley? Why not Highgate or Chelsea? When it last got short, about three weeks ago, your embassy took to supplying coffee beans to those hotels that billet embassy staff. A bit goes to the Savoy, but most of it comes here. Officers only, of course. Those of us that can’t swallow the taste of dandelion and roast barley-what the Ministry of Food laughingly calls ersatz coffee-are terribly envious of life here. I have a girlfriend who’s hung around here since the end of April trying out every accent from Mae West to Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind. Never works. I almost got arrested. I tried to do Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again-forgot she was German, you see. When I called her “dollink” the waitress called the police.’

  ‘But you are the police.’

  ‘Strictly for the duration, dolli
nk. No Season after all, and one must do one’s bit.’

  Cal sipped guiltily at his own cup, then set it down and pushed the pot across the table to her.

  ‘Help yourself,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks awfully. You’re a brick. Now shall we make a start?’

  ‘How, exactly?’

  ‘Just describe the chap to me, that’s all.’

  Cal tried to think of words that would convey Wolfgang Stahl to the ears and hands of a woman who’d never seen him and never, until now, had to imagine him. What Stahl looked like had never mattered to him. What Stahl was had been the axis of his work for two years.

  ‘Stuck?’ Miss Payne asked.

  ‘A little,’ Cal said.

  ‘Why not… why not think of your chap as a type? Tell me what type you’d sort of put him into.’

  ‘Sort of?’

  ‘You know… roughly.’

  ‘He’s an Aryan.’

  ‘Ah, one of those, eh? Odd when you think about it. I mean. How did they arrive at blue-eyed blonds as a racial type? Hitler’s short and dark and looks like Charlie Chaplin. Goebbels is short and ugly and looks like a rat. And as for Goering-well is that what Billy Bunter grew up to be?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Never mind. I’m rambling. Aryan it is. Look, why don’t you sit where Stinker sat, so you can see what I draw. We’ll get on a lot better that way.’

  Cal moved around the table. Pulled the chair closer to look over her right shoulder as she worked, caught the waft of her perfume, watched her hands fly across the paper as he talked.

  Two hours later Miss Payne had worked her way through twenty or more pages, and a version of Stahl had appeared on the pad. She’d had to draw the scar above the left eyebrow half a dozen times before Cal saw Stahl come to life. She’d taken a coloured pencil and added a dash of blue to the eyes, and then, when Cal had said ‘Too bright’, rubbed a little charcoal in with the tip of her pinky finger. It was Stahl. Not a hard face, but a face that had rendered itself hard. Not a face so much as mask, he thought.

  Miss Payne was holding the sketch at arm’s length and squinting at it framed against the bank of elevators when Cal saw the doors open and Kitty emerge, looking clean and fresh and vital-the opposite of the blanket bed-beast he’d left a few hours ago. She waved-a cheery smile-a hammy wink of the eye. Good God, what ‘was she thinking of? Then he caught sight of Miss Payne, waving back and smiling.

  ‘Old Stinker’s daughter,’ she said. ‘Quite a character. Rules weren’t made for our Kitty. Now, is this the bloke or isn’t it? I may not be Picasso-but then, if I was, I suppose no one would ever recognise him with his nose under his armpit. Any chance of another pot of coffee?’

  § 26

  Came a lull in the day. A message on his desk told him to collect a bloodstained dress and a shoe from Forensics. They could just as easily send them, but Troy saw an opportunity to indulge a copper’s nosiness. He drove out to Hendon, to the Metropolitan Police laboratory, in search of Ladislaw Konradovitch Kolankiewicz, the Polish beast, one of the lab’s senior pathologists-a protégé of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, an exile of indeterminate age, extraordinary ugliness and foul, fractured English that Troy had long ago come to regard as a form of colloquial poetry.

  He was scrubbing up. Hairy arms sluiced under the tap. A corpse under a sheet on the slab. A young woman in white perched on a high stool. Flipping through a shorthand notebook and reading bits back to Kolankiewicz.

  ‘Displacement of first three vertebrae, resulting in severance of spinal column from… brain stem… would appear to be result of… I’m sorry, I can’t read my own writing.’

  Kolankiewicz elbowed the taps, turned round to argue and noticed Troy.

  ‘Ah, smartyarse. What brings the Plattfussivunderkind to my lair?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ said Troy. ‘Just a hunch.’

  ‘Ah! Copper’s hunch. That and three ha’pence would just about buy me cup of tea. Now, pretty boy, since you were last here we have a new addition to death’s family. Mrs Pakenham, my lab assistant. She joined us in the New Year and is now learning shorthand-the hard way-as the War Office saw fit to call up my stenographer.’

  The young woman stopped reading her notes and scratching her head with the pencil.

  ‘Sergeant Troy,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘Brighter than your average flatfoot, but still total pain in arse.’

  This was mild. Kolankiewicz was minding his manners. The woman must be good. It could not last. He relished the English language with all the fervour of a convert. It held no traps and no taboos as far as Kolankiewicz was concerned. ‘Fuck’ was never far from his lips at the worst of times, and those were all the times he and Troy had had between them.

  The young woman looked up. The merest flicker of a smile. A cut-glass English voice.

  ‘Anna,’ she said. ‘Anna Pakenham.’

  It was a little like looking into a mirror. A short, slim woman, thick black hair-pulled back with a working-day severity-pale skin like his, and eyes like his-black as coal.

  ‘Frederick Troy. Murder Squad.’

  It sounded like the most unattractive calling card in the world-indeed, Troy kept calling cards without rank or job just to drop on the silver plate without causing alarm-but she said, ‘I’ll suppose we’ll be seeing a lot of you, then?’

  No, he thought. Kolankiewicz had got through so many stenographers and assistants since the war started. This one would not last. They none of them did. She’d volunteer for the ATS or the WRNS or go off to wear jodhpurs and dig spuds in the darkest shires. A pity. Married or not, she was a looker.

  ‘You get sick of the sight of him,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘Now, whatever it is, spit it out.’

  ‘I was wondering about a body. A Dutchman found dead in Hoxton Street last night.’

  Kolankiewicz whipped back the sheet.

  ‘This fucker?’

  Troy found himself staring once more at the unearthly, drained, white-beyond-white corpse of Jeroen Smulders, fresh stitching loosely holding incisions Kolankiewicz had made. He glanced sideways at Mrs Pakenham. She was not reacting, either to the corpse or to Kolankiewicz’s lapse into plain speaking. She had the makings of a good Kolankiewicz assistant. Blanch not at the bodies nor the beast.

  ‘Yes. That’s him. Are you done? Do you know how he died?’

  ‘This not your case, Troy. That big bastard Stilton, the one with the silly accent, sent him over. I had him on the phone at crack of dawn this morning.’

  ‘I know. I checked with his office. I’d just rather know for myself than wait for him to tell me. It was my case. I was the one who was called out to the scene. I have a feeling about this one.’

  ‘Two hunches in two minutes? I’ll have arrowroot biscuit with my tea. Anna?’

  ‘It says… violent pressure on the head and neck, clockwise twisting of the neck, evident in subcutaneous bruising. At least I think it says “clockwise”. I’m terribly new to shorthand.’

  The contrast between the formal, procedural English of an autopsy, and Kolankiewicz’s colloquial mode never ceased to startle Troy.

  ‘Enough?’ he was saying. ‘Enough for a nosy rozzer?’

  ‘I was wondering about the hands.’

  ‘Hands?’

  ‘Hands.’

  ‘What about his hands?’

  ‘If you fall down a staircase conscious you try and stop yourself. You grab onto something. You flail about. Chances are there’ll be marks on the hands. Bruised knuckles. A torn nail.’

  They both looked at Mrs Pakenham.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘No bruises. Nothing.’

  ‘And,’ Troy went on, ‘if you fall down dead, you don’t. As simple as that really.’

  ‘He was dead, believe me, Troy, he was dead.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I tell you what I tell Stilton. The killer was right-handed. Taller than this bloke, but not necessarily stronger. It’s more of a knack than brute force. Snap a neck in a single movemen
t. Death was instantaneous. A pro job. You happy now?’

  ‘Happy?’ said Troy. ‘No, I’m not happy. I just have a feeling that this one will come back to me.’

  ‘Three hunches! I’ll have buttered scone and jam dollop too.’

  § 27

  That afternoon Alex Troy was in his study. He would have liked to take a walk on the heath, but it was unseasonably cold for May. He would have liked to meet the world, if only for half an hour, but the telephone rang and the world came to him.

  He picked up the phone.

  ‘Alex? It’s Max.’

  A short syllable to introduce a short man with a long handle-Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of the Daily Express and Minister of State, until recently Minister of Aircraft Production, in Churchill’s government.

  ‘I held a lunchtime briefing for the Fleet Street editors at Claridge’s today. I half expected you’d be there.’

  So, that’s what ministers of state did. They gave briefings.

  ‘Half? You are such an optimist, Max. Perhaps if you were to expect me a sixteenth or a thirty-second you would be less disappointed in me.’

  ‘I was wondering. Would you care for a drink at my club tonight?’

  Beaverbrook usually asked him round for one or both of two reasons. He knew something you didn’t and wanted to lord it. What, after all, was the point in being a lord if you could not lord it?-as far as Alex was concerned this might as well be the Beaver’s motto in life. Or he had some crackpot theory he wanted to air, partly, as with the first reason, to remind you that he was close to the powers that be, and partly because it was not the sort of thing he could air in his newspapers without being guilty of the kind of rumour-mongering and defeatism the government deplored in the common people and would deplore the more in one of its own.

  The last time they’d met had been May Day. Max had bored him silly with ‘The balloon’s up. We’re backs to the wall now, Alex. The war has turned ugly for us. I’d say two or three days at the most. Invasion is imminent.’-when it transparently wasn’t. It made Alex wonder how much the Prime Minister really told him. Bugger all, it would seem. That he could not see for himself was shocking. The RAF had won the battle for Britain. Won it with the planes the Beaver had churned out as Minister of Aircraft Production. A job that had enabled him to rally the nation’s housewives into giving up their pots and pans to be melted down into aeroplanes. Alex had never been certain whether this was anything more than a morale-building stunt-‘Women! You too can do your bit!’-but ever after he’d thought of Beaverbrook as Lord Saucepans. There probably was a Beaver Brook, somewhere in the wilds of Ontario, probably several, along with Moose Gulch and Wild Ass Pass-they none of them managed to sound real when appended to the word ‘Lord’.