by John Lawton
23b Marshall Street was a ramshackle house, but at least it still stood. Cal estimated it to be about as old as his country. They were probably laying these bricks as Jefferson pondered life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Three items currently in short supply.
The door looked rotten, as though one good kick from Stilton would send it flying from its hinges. It wasn’t locked. Stilton pushed gently at it-a miasma of steam and frying fat filled the air.
‘Reckon we caught Cash Wally at his trough,’ Stilton whispered, and walked softly towards the back of the house with Cal treading on his heels. The trail of steam led them straight to the kitchen. It was a filthy parody of Edna Stilton’s kitchen. A big room, a centre table, strewn with dishes waiting to be washed. A patina of grease on every surface, into which months of dust had settled, giving solid, inanimate household objects an illusion of life-they had fur, so they might breathe or move also. In the fireplace stood a three-legged gas stove, propped up at its fourth corner by a pile of bricks. And on the hob a pan of potatoes boiled furiously, while three sausages nestled deep and crisp in a cooling pan of lard.
‘Good God,’ Stilton said softly. ‘How can he live like this?’
‘And where is he?’ Cal added. ‘It’s like we’ve pulled up alongside the Marie Celeste.’
Stilton beckoned to Cal, they stepped into the stairwell.
‘Is our man likely to be hostile?’ he whispered.
‘Walter-I’ve no idea. He’s on our side. If that makes any sense.’
‘Then we play it by ear.’
Cal rather thought that this was what they’d been doing for a week already. He followed Walter up the stairs, step for step, pausing as he paused at every crack and creak to listen for any response. The house was deathly silent, much as Cal resisted the adverb.
Stilton stood on the far side of the door. He rapped on it. There was no answer. There was no sound of any kind. He rapped again. Then he turned the doorknob and pushed. The door swung in onto an empty room, banging back against the wall. Cal put his head round the door jamb. Stilton leaned in from the other side.
‘Bugger,’ Stilton said.
They stepped into the room. In complete contrast to the kitchen this room had been cleaned and dusted. The bed stripped. Every surface wiped. You didn’t need Sherlock Holmes’ magnifying glass to know there’d be no fingerprints. Stahl had left no tracks. Not a scrap of paper, a burnt match or a bus ticket. It looked to Cal like a thorough, professional job. This man meant to vanish.
All the same, Stilton peeked under the bed, opened the closet, pulled out the drawers in the dresser and uttered the conclusion Cal had reached minutes before.
‘He’s flown the coop. Not so much as a toothbrush or a pair of socks.’
‘Always one step ahead of us,’ said Cal.
They heard the slam of a door downstairs. They looked at each other. Stilton all but tiptoed to the landing. The sound of someone banging about in the kitchen drifted up the staircase.
Stilton put a finger to his lips and set off down the stairs. At the next landing Cal grabbed him by the arm and whispered, ‘Let me do it.’
‘It’s not Stahl-that would be too good to be true,’ Stilton whispered back.
‘No matter. We’re a team, aren’t we? My turn.’
Stilton yielded silently and let Cal pass. Down to the ground floor on feet of glass. A gentle twist of the door handle, and a sudden thrust. A spidery, thin man in a tatty sweater, all elbows and knuckles, his hair standing up as though galvanised, was seated at the table in front of a plate piled high with mashed potato, the mash peppered with sausages-and a brand new bottle of the ubiquitous British brown sauce clutched in his hand ready to gloop.
‘Casimir Wallficz?’ Cal said breezily.
The man stared at him, his hand still poised over the base of the bottle ready to give it the baby-bottom slap that would send the sauce gushing over his feast.
‘Wod?’
‘You are Casimir Wallficz, the proprietor of this establishment?’
‘Proprietor?’ Cash Wally said, a much more heavily accented voice than his cousin’s. ‘Proprietor be buggered. Is my house, I own it lock, stock and sausage. Now who you and what you want? As if I couldn’t guess.’
‘Calvin Cormack, US Intelligence. My colleague, Chief Inspector Stilton. You don’t mind if we join you?’
Cal snatched the plate from him. Slammed himself down in a chair and said, ‘The guy in number four. He checked out. When?’
‘How should I know?’
Cash Wally reached for the plate. Cal held it away from him at arm’s length, like a schoolyard bully teasing a child.
‘You know, Casimir, I think you know damn well, because you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who lets his lodgers do moonlight flits. Besides, you’ve two pound notes and a ten-shilling note stuck behind the clock on the mantelpiece, so somebody’s just paid their bill.’
Cash Wally tried to look stubborn. He succeeded only in looking hungry. Cal picked up a sausage and bit into it. From the look on his face, Cal might just as well have bitten into Wally. It was agony, the tortured passion of the eating man.
Cal wolfed the sausage. Cash Wally moaned out loud. His head shook from side to side, his eyes rolled. As Cal finished the second, Cash Wally beat the table with his hands and screamed.
‘No. No. Nooooooo!!!!’
Cal took up the third sausage, worked it around in the neck of the sauce bottle, worked up a good head of gloop, and pointed at him with it. He dared not look at Stilton-so much as a smile from Stilton and he knew he’d corpse.
‘Wally. You’ve one sausage left. Now, you see this man here? This is Walter Stilton. One of the finest trenchermen in Scotland Yard. And he skipped lunch today. He’s a particularly hungry policeman. This is your last wienie. If you don’t tell me everything and right now, I’ll toss this wienie in the air and you’ll see the Chief Inspector catch it in his teeth like Pavlov’s dog. Then I’ll turn him loose on your mash. Very partial to a plate of mash, is the Chief Inspector. Now-the Czech guy. The guy who said he was Czech. When did he go and where did he go?’
Cash Wally put his arms on the table, his head resting lightly on them. It seemed to Cal that he was stifling sobs.
‘He left about four o’clock this afternoon. I don’t know where he gone. He gave me extra ten bobs just to say he never been here. He said at the beginning he would not be here more than ten days. Believe me-I do not know where he gone.’
Stilton spoke from the far end of the table, the brusque informality of the Metropolitan Police, the dull inevitability of procedure observed. ‘And did you tell the local nick you had an alien here?’
Cash Wally raised his head, red of face, bleary of eye, ‘Aliens? We’re all aliens. What one more mattered more or less?’
Cal didn’t doubt the sentiment-the pain which shot through his words, and the continental contempt for the very notion ‘alien’. He felt for Cash Wally-just a little-he also felt certain he’d got pretty much the truth out of the man.
He looked at Stilton, wondering if he felt remotely what he was feeling himself. ‘Well, do you want this man’s wienie?’
‘No,’ said Stilton. ‘Let him have his banger. I think we’ve got all we’re going to get.’
‘So do I.’
Cal stuck the sausage back in the mountain of mash and shoved the plate towards Cash Wally.
‘Eat up, Mr Wallficz. Nothing’s going to happen to you. But you’ll do as the Chief Inspector asks, won’t you? You’ll report every new foreigner to the police. Right?’
‘Right,’ sobbed Cash Wally. ‘Foreigners. Police. Police. Foreigners. Right.’
They sat in the car. Stilton seemed to be waiting for something. If only, Cal thought, for his own anger to subside. He’d looked grim from the minute they left Cash Wally’s kitchen.
At last he said, ‘Y’know, I didn’t think you had it in you. But I have to say… well done.’
‘You
don’t think that maybe it was a little cruel?’
‘No I don’t. In fact he’s lucky I didn’t wring his neck. We check the local station reports every morning. If he ran a straight house and listed his foreigners we might have picked up Stahl days ago. As things stand we’re back to square bloody one. I think I’ll send the uniforms round in the morning just to see he gets the message. No-you played the bugger just about right. I couldn’t have done it better meself. Mind, I’ve never thought of myself as a trencherman before.’
He was smiling as he said it. The anger had passed. They were on level ground again.
‘So? What do we do now?’
‘What do we do now? We go back to Stepney and pray my missis has stuck summat tasty in the oven. You’ve had two bangers. I’ve had nowt.’
§ 41
There was a note on the kitchen table. Cal felt Stilton must have seen it a few thousand times in the course of a thirty-year marriage-‘Your dinner’s in the oven.’
Stilton took a tea cloth, opened the lower oven and pulled out a dish half full of something indeterminate and crisp.
‘Dunno what it is,’ he said. ‘But it smells a treat.’
‘It’s fish pie, Dad.’
Reenie Stilton appeared in the doorway, and eased her pregnant bulk onto a kitchen chair.
‘My Maurice got a twenty-four-hour pass, so him and some of his mates ‘went fishing out past Southend somewhere. Came back with two lovely whole cod.’
‘Past Southend? That’s a restricted area.’
‘Leave it out, Dad. Who do you think Maurice is going to spy on? Old fellers diggin’ lugworm? You just be grateful you got some supper. Rest of us ate hours ago.’
Stilton dished up. The greens were boiled to death and dried out, but Cal could have eaten seconds and thirds of the pie. It was fresh and spicy and it hit the spot. Stilton ate with a practised fork action that improved his elbow speed and upped his rate of consumption. He was scraping the dish before Cal was halfway across his plate. And he’d never thought of himself as a trencherman.
‘Where’s your mother?’ Stilton said as Reenie plodded across the floor to stick the kettle on.
‘Went round to old George Bonham to give him a bit o’ cooked cod. Reckons he don’t eat proper any more. Then she was going on to Aunt Dolly. Her Dennis is constipated again, and you know they always ask for Mum like she was the family witch-doctor. She’ll dose the little sod.’
‘You know, Walter,’ Cal said, ‘the house certainly seems empty.’
‘Kev and Trev are back at sea. They sailed a day or two back, I should think. Rose and Tom have got their own home to go to, though most of the time you’d never know it.’
‘Tel’s gone down the Troxy,’ Reenie chipped in, leaving Cal to wonder what a troxy was.
‘And Vera’s gone with Mum.’
Over the hiss of the kettle Cal thought he heard a motorbike engine putter down to nothing. The missing name from the list. He heard the door slam. A slight pause in the steps along the hallway as she hung up her helmet-then a rush of feet dancing down the stairs-and the kitchen door burst open. Kitty’s hair bounced the way it always did, springy on her blue collar. Her eyes flashed, the way they always did. If she was surprised to see him sitting there, she didn’t show it.
‘Late again,’ said Reenie. ‘I don’t think there’s any left.’
‘Wot?’
‘You shoulda got here on time. You’re on reg’lar shifts. You don’t work daft hours like dad. I reckon Captain Cormack’s had yours.’
Kitty looked from Cal to her father to the empty dish and back again.
‘Wot? You greedy so and sos. You ain’t left me a mouthful!’
‘Manners,’ said Stilton, as Cal knew he would. ‘Captain Cormack’s a guest in this house.’
‘I know,’ Kitty sneered. ‘Mum thinks the sun shines out of his-‘
‘Kitty!!!’
Kitty turned her back on her father and wheedled her sister.
‘Reen, be a love and take a look in the larder. A bit o’ bread and cheese. Anything.’
‘Walter,’ Cal said softly. ‘What does that mean? About the sun shining-‘
‘Don’t ask, lad, don’t ask.’
Upstairs the door slammed again. Stilton muttered that he ought to fix that door one of these fine days, asked Reenie to bring his tea up and told Cal he was just off for a word with the missis. Reenie slapped a meagre sandwich on the table in front of Kitty and said, ‘You make the tea, bossy boots. My fibroids are killing me. I’m off for forty winks.’ And Cal found himself alone with Kitty. Somewhere upstairs the telephone began to ring.
‘So, superman. It’s not enough that you get to eat me every so often. You’ve got to eat me dinner as well.’
‘Kitty-for Christ’s sake!’
‘Wot you doin’ ‘ere anyway? I was coming over to see you a bit later.’
‘I’ll be there. We kind of hit the buffers this evening.’ The phone rang and rang. Kitty had slipped off a shoe and was running one stockinged foot up the side of his trousers towards his groin.
‘Bout what time?’
‘Kitty-I can’t tell you how uncomfortable this makes me. Your mother could walk in at any minute.’
Kitty shot to her feet as though stung and yanked at the kitchen door.
‘Will somebody answer that bloody phone!’
Then she folded her arms and glared at Cal.
§ 42
Stilton was saying ‘Yes, love.’ It was what he always said when he didn’t much want to listen to what his wife was trying to tell him. He picked up the ‘phone.
‘Boss. It’s me. Bernard.’
Instinctively Stilton looked at his watch. It was past ten. He tried to remember where Dobbs was supposed to be. Where he had left him. He ought to know and he didn’t.
‘Yes, lad.’
‘I been outside the Marquess of Lincoln. Waiting for Fish Wally.’
Oh bugger-he’d forgotten to pull Dobbs off watch when he’d received the tip-off about Fish Wally. The poor sod had been standing there for the best part of a week, and for the last few hours, at least, to no purpose.
‘Aye, well you can knock off now, Bernard. I found Fish Wally hours ago.’
‘I’m not there now, boss. I trailed him.’
‘No, Bernard, I said, I’ve already talked to Wally. Go home, lad, get some kip.’
‘No, boss, I’m not talking about Fish Wally. I mean the other feller. He came by the boozer at opening time. I followed him.’
‘What other feller?’
‘The one in that sketch.’
‘Stahl?’
‘Yes-Stahl.’
‘Bernard, where exactly are you?’
‘Cleveland Street, boss. Where it meets Warren Street. Corner house.’
Stilton bounded down the stairs, bellowed ‘We’re on again!’ at Cal, grabbed his mackintosh off the back of the door and ran back up the stairs.
The speed of it all left Cal standing, half in, half out of his chair, an untouched cup of steaming tea in front of him. An untouched steaming Kitty, too.
‘I… er… I guess this means I don’t know what time I’ll be home,’ he said lamely.
‘I know,’ Kitty answered. ‘You’re on again. So we’re off. Thanks. Thanks a million.’
§ 43
Troy sat up in bed reading one of his father’s newspapers. The old man had used the editorial column in the day’s London Evening Herald to air his views on the matter of two nations. There was not an editor in the land who, sooner or later, did not have recourse to Disraeli’s phrase. Two Nations, Trojan Horse, Phoenix from the Ashes-all the overworked clichés of journalism. Troy was amazed he got away with it. He had not put his name to it, but Troy knew his father’s prose style. Whilst overtly calling for Britain to pull together as one nation he was also pointing out at every turn that it was, inevitably, two nations, that the war was not the leveller that most of Britain now chose to pretend it was, and that the n
ation, undeniably, was riven with inequalities. We die together, we do not live together. Had it been less subtle it would have provoked the authorities to fits of rage, and the old man would find himself hauled in front of some ghostly committee accused of defeatism. But Alex Troy was nothing if not subtle.
The front door slammed. It had to be Kitty. Only Kitty had a key. But it was unlike her to storm in, Kitty crept in. Always trying to surprise him.
She appeared in the doorway of his bedroom. Leant against the door jamb and stared at him. He had no idea what had made her so pissed off. He knew it wasn’t him. It was, he thought, an anger all but spent-drizzled down into exasperation, sehnsucht and want.
‘Come back for another fuck?’ he said.
‘Don’t use that word. I’ve told you before, I don’t like it. I don’t want to hear it. I know it’s how they talk in your house. Those sisters of yours are foul-mouthed. But it’s not the way I was brought up to talk.’
Kitty kicked off her shoes, not caring where they fell. Turned her back on him and yanked at the silver buttons of her tunic. Kitty had not clicked with his sisters. It was unfortunate they’d ever met. They could not but look down upon a working woman-for her part, they weren’t ‘ladies’ and never would be. Kitty had a fair range of abuse and insult, but she drew the line at ‘fuck’. Troy didn’t think his sisters knew there could be a line.
Later, after the act she would not name by its bluntest single syllable, she was restless. Sprawled half on him, half off him, but unsettled. Troy opened his eyes. She looked away.
‘About this American of yours,’ he said.
‘Wot?’ Prising her head off his chest to look down at him. ‘Wot about him?’
‘I was wondering. What’s he like?’
‘You seen him. That night in the Salisbury. Tall, skinny, speccy, bit bald at the front. ‘Bout my age. Not exactly a looker, but… you know.’
