Riptide

by John Lawton

  ‘You’ve brought me a new copper, then, Ladislaw.’

  Nobody called Kolankiewicz Ladislaw. There were people at the Yard who’d known him since he first landed in England who probably did not know his Christian name.

  ‘My old friend Sergeant Frederick Troy, my even older friend Bob Churchill.’

  They shook on the dubious connection of lasting friendship with the Beast of Lodz.

  ‘Troy,’ Churchill said. ‘One of the Devon Troys?’

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘Hertfordshire.’

  ‘Oh, I see. One of the Alex Troys. I knew your father once upon a time.’

  Troy loved the expression, as though the two had met in some distant fairy tale-the constant tin soldier and the ugly duckling. It often seemed to Troy that his father had stepped out of something no more nor less credible than a fairy tale of his own weaving.

  ‘I’m a Dorset man meself. That lot over at Blenheim are a junior branch of the family. Now-what can I do for you?’

  Kolankiewicz held up Cormack’s gun. Churchill took it from him.

  ‘Good Lord, a Smith and Wesson.35. Haven’t been made for about twenty years, been a while since I saw one. Small, dark and brutish,’ he said, and led the way through to the front room.

  Troy had never seen anything like it. Every surface, every wall, held guns, guns by the dozen-guns in racks, guns in bits, and guns not yet built-walnut stocks, gunmetal barrels, leather cases. Down the length of the room ran a large table covered in red baize and littered with some of the most beautiful shotguns Troy had seen. The workmanship was exquisite. But all in all, it was pretty much what he might have expected to find on the premises of the finest gunsmith and ballistics expert alive. On a bench behind the table was a large, ugly, black, greasy machine gun as testament to the times in which they lived. They had clearly interrupted Churchill in the business of stripping down his Bren gun.

  Churchill seated himself at the head of the table and whipped out the magazine from Cormack’s gun.

  ‘Automatic with a seven-shot magazine in the grip, a large pistol grip relative to the barrel size, as you can see.’

  Troy did see. The pistol reminded him of nothing quite so much as a spud gun-a childhood toy capable of propelling a chunk of raw potato all of six feet.

  ‘Spring recoil mechanism with a hidden hammer. They stopped making ammunition for this last year. Full metal jacket bullet-lead centre with guiding sheath. Six grooves in the barrel giving a right hand twist to the bullet. You’ve a spent bullet from this, I take it?’

  Kolankiewicz handed him the wodge of cotton wool. Churchill put a jeweller’s glass to his eye and looked at it.

  ‘Victim died, did he? Head shot, I suppose?’

  Troy answered. ‘Yes. A policeman, as a matter of fact. I saw the body. The entry wound was just above the right ear.’

  ‘Exit wound?’

  ‘Wasn’t one. The bullet was recovered in the post mortem.’

  ‘Well-bone does that to a bullet. I suppose you want a comparison?’

  ‘If it’s possible.’

  ‘Oh, it’s possible all right. Did you recover the shell?’

  ‘No-I was the second person on the scene, and it had gone. I think we’re dealing with a scrupulous killer.’

  ‘Well-they’re few of them scrupulous enough. If you ever join the other side, Mr Troy, and find yourself clutching a smoking gun, destroy it. That’d be my advice. Now, if you gentlemen would care to join me in the cellar, we’ll bang off a few rounds.’

  Kolankiewicz stepped into the lift. Only when Churchill tried to follow him in did it become clear that it would not hold two bellies of such rotundity. For a few seconds they jiggled around like a pair of hippos in a hat box, until Troy said ‘We could all walk,’ and they descended the steps to emerge below street level in a converted wine cellar.

  ‘This is the set-up,’ Churchill said, pointing off at a tunnel leading out under Orange Street. ‘We’ve fifteen hundred-gauge, twelve-bore cartridge cases, packed with cotton wool. Behind them, iron plate, behind that a few tons of rubble. We could fire an elephant gun at this lot without ricochet.’

  ‘Why fifteen boxes?’ Troy asked.

  ‘Largely,’ said Churchill, ‘because I’ve yet to find the gun that can fire a bullet through more than a dozen. Mauser’ll penetrate eleven or twelve, standard issue Webley no more than five or six. If, as you say, this bullet penetrated a human skull and spent itself in the cranium, then I’d say no more than two boxes.’

  ‘Can we simulate the effect of passing through bone?’

  ‘Indeed we can.’

  Churchill picked up a square piece of oak. It looked to Troy to be about half or two-thirds of an inch thick. Churchill slotted it in front of the first case. Then he clipped the magazine into the butt of Cormack’s gun, and handed it to Troy.

  Troy had no idea what to do.

  ‘I’m not really a gun person,’ he bleated.

  ‘Just point it and fire.’

  Troy held the gun at arm’s length, just like they’d taught him at Hendon in his obligatory weapons training. That had been in 1935. He had not held a gun since.

  ‘No, no,’ said Churchill. ‘Not like that. Use your body.’

  ‘My body?’

  ‘That thing between your arms and your legs.’

  Churchill took the gun from him, tucked his elbow into his hip, the gun-butt-edged into his belly, swung to face the boxes and fired, all in a single swift, almost graceful motion-startling to see in such an ungainly-looking man. Not only that, he’d hit the first box dead centre. If the box had had a target scrawled on it, this would have been a bull’s-eye.

  Churchill walked down the tunnel to the second box, and flipped down the wooden side. He rummaged around and eventually said, ‘Nothing doing.’

  The same pattern repeated itself with the third and fourth boxes. At last his hand emerged from the fifth, clutching a white ball of cotton wool, and inside it the bullet. He peeled back the layers and showed the spent bullet to Troy.

  ‘It’s intact,’ said Troy. ‘It isn’t bent at all!’

  ‘We’ll fire another just to be sure.’

  Churchill banged off a second round, hitting the oak barely half an inch from the first, and retrieved the bullet from the fifth box again.

  ‘Now,’ he said, grinning like a schoolboy, ‘the fun really begins.’

  On a bench at the far side of the cellar stood Churchill’s comparison microscope. He was not the inventor of this device, but he had modified it and refined it. And, as much as was possible when dealing with a body of men as naturally conservative as the English police, he had popularised it. He had proved its worth over the last ten or more years from the witness box at the Old Bailey. He had argued its merit in the pages of the Daily News only to find himself answered by a lengthy correspondence in the Mail from no less a figure than Bernard Shaw. All the same, men as sceptical as Onions or as ignorant as Nailer still deprecated its role. The only other such microscope Troy had ever seen was Kolankiewicz’s, which, compared to this, looked like it had been cobbled together from a Meccano kit. This was big, like a pair of binoculars on stilts, feeding two images into a single eyepiece. Churchill set the bullet that had killed Walter Stilton on the left hand plate, and one of the test bullets on the other. A flick of a switch and both specimens were flooded with light.

  ‘Before I do anything,’ Churchill said, ‘just take a look.’

  Troy peered down the microscope. It was a blur, the shapes did not match.

  ‘OK?’

  Troy didn’t have a clue what was OK and what was not.

  Churchill took over. One eye at the eyepiece, his left hand at the plate that held the deadly bullet. He changed the angle of the light. He twisted a mirror to the right of the bullet, and changed the alignment of the plate.

  ‘Take another look.’

  This time the bullets were in alignment, the bent bullet miraculously unbent by the mirror. The two did not line
up perfectly and the composite image was still blurred. Then Churchill turned a wheel at the base of the microscope and suddenly the bottom halves of both bullets fused into one.

  ‘Ignore the centre where the bullet’s bent. And for now ignore the top. Just concentrate on the bottom. Well, what do you see?’

  ‘The rifling. The twists. They’re curling in the same way, a bit like bindweed, but they don’t match.’

  Churchill turned the wheel the other way. The top of the bullet came into focus. The markings no more matched than they had at the bottom.

  Churchill looked again. ‘Of course,’ he was saying, ‘there’s a limit to how much you can compensate for damage with mirrors, but as long as you can get a section of the twist lined up… Bob’s your uncle, if you’ll forgive the boast. It’s a lengthy process to be able to say a pair of bullets match, but a bit quicker to say they don’t. And these two don’t match at all. No doubt about it, fired by two different guns. The gun you brought me did not fire the fatal bullet.’

  ‘Would this hold up in court?’ Troy asked.

  Churchill feigned outrage, ‘Mr Troy!’

  ‘Sorry-I’m being dense. What else can you tell me?’

  ‘Depends what you ‘want to know.’

  ‘Well… why didn’t the test bullet bend, why did it fire through five boxes when you estimated two?’

  This did not seem to require any thought on Churchill’s part. The answer was on the tip of his tongue.

  ‘Granted identical weapons, I’m inclined to conclude a different load. The bullet that killed your chap was probably fired on a low load. A bullet designed for work at close quarters, but otherwise practically useless. In fact, about as effective as a popgun. That’s why it distorted when it hit bone and the test bullets didn’t when passing through oak. Of course, you’ll appreciate that oak and bone don’t behave exactly the same… but then… I don’t have a heap of skulls lying around just to test bullets.’

  Troy was intrigued. ‘Why would anyone want a low load?’

  ‘Well,’ Churchill mused, ‘if you know what you’re doing with any handgun you won’t try and shoot someone at a hundred yards. You’d be better off at six feet. Most handguns outside the hands of marksmen are pretty inaccurate at much beyond a few feet. Jesse James once emptied his Colt.45 in a bank raid, at pretty well point blank range, and missed every time. So having to get in close is no real disadvantage-and you have the added bonus of knowing that you won’t kill the chap on the other side of your target by the bullet passing right through the target-and of course, “popgun” is really rather apt. That’s what it’d sound like, a sort of popping. You want to shoot some poor devil where there are likely to be people around… well, with any luck no-one would hear, and if they did they’d think little of it. A car backfiring would make a damn sight more noise.’

  ‘And is that in any way standard issue?’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘American soldiers.’

  ‘No. Not at all. The gun itself isn’t standard-it’s all but obsolete, but it’s light and it’s small and I expect one or two might choose it for that reason. The standard issue is the M1911A1.45. And that’s made by Colt, not Smith and Wesson. Now, modified bullets, that is… shall we say… that is quite something. Low loads, soft heads, that sort of thing. That’s someone who really knows what he’s at. I’d say it was a professional’s choice-someone who carries a gun because he means to use it, not simply someone who’s issued with it as part of being a soldier-someone who kills professionally-and I don’t mean in the course of battle. I mean dirty work. All in all you got lucky, Sergeant Troy. If the man who modified this shell had also notched the head to make it fragment you’d’ve whistled for your match-and the professor here would be rooting around in the victim’s brains for half a dozen fragments of lead. All the king’s horses wouldn’t have put it back together then.’

  ‘So perhaps he wasn’t so professional after all?’

  ‘Don’t ask me too much about people, Mr Troy. It’s guns I know about.’

  It seemed to Troy that Mr Churchill had been so long and so detailed in his report that if he, Troy, could only sum it up succinctly it would be the clearer to him, the clearer to everyone.

  ‘It’s an assassin’s weapon,’ he said at last.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Churchill.

  ‘Could we get this down on paper?’

  Troy sat at a high, old Imperial typewriter, its roll more than a foot and a half across, and typed onto foolscap as Churchill dictated. When they were done Churchill shook his hand and Troy asked, ‘How much do I owe you?’

  ‘On the house, Mr Troy. Just remember me to your father, and remind him that he bought a gun off me in 1928. If he should ever choose to make it a pair…’

  ‘Of course,’ said Troy.

  In the course of the last hour, Troy thought he had scarcely heard Kolankiewicz say so little. He ascribed it to professional courtesy in the presence of a master. Something he would never be in Kolankiewicz’s eyes. Kolankiewicz had him tagged as a ‘smartyarse’-not the same thing at all. Walking back to the Yard, Kolankiewicz had a simple question for Troy.

  ‘You picking this case up now?’

  ‘Picking it up?’

  ‘It is your clear intent to bump the idiot Nailer off the case. I merely enquired if you now proposed to appropriate it yourself.’

  ‘No-absolutely not. I’ve been trying to drop the damn thing not pick it up. And I don’t want to bump Nailer off it, I just want to get Cormack out. Once that’s done Nailer can find out who’s really done it.’

  ‘A pity. What this case needs is a real smartyarse.’

  ‘Not this smartyarse.’

  ‘Then you don’t want to know what I think next, do you?’

  Troy thought about it.

  ‘No-I don’t. Tell it to Nailer.’

  ‘Your reluctance to stick your proboscis further into the death of old Stinker wouldn’t have anything to do with your hot/cold love affair with his delightful daughter, would it?’

  That was the thing about Kolankiewicz-just when you thought you were home free he had another surprise for you.

  § 67

  Troy had finished his paperwork. Later than he had hoped. He looked at his watch. Eight thirty. He opened the centre drawer of his desk and, as was his habit, dumped the day’s work into it in a single sweep of his arm. It would stop Onions reading what was on the pile if he happened to stroll in unannounced-exactly as he did now.

  He parked himself by the unlit gas fire, a man who could never shake off the habit of winter, struck a match on the sole of one shoe and lit up a Woodbine.

  ‘Well,’ he said through a waft of cheap tobacco. ‘

  ‘Well? said Troy.

  ‘You did it. The American walks. The Major read your report and told Enoch to turn him loose. It’s not over, mind. We’ll want to know a thing or two from the Americans, when they get round to answering questions.’

  ‘Good,’ said Troy, hoping that was that and that he could just go home. But Stan was musing, drawing slowly on his fag and musing.

  ‘How do you see your career panning out, Freddie?’

  It struck Troy as an odd enquiry. Untypical of Stan. Stan had picked Troy up from the Divisions, transferred him from Stepney to the Yard, made him a Sergeant at the age of twenty-four. He had every reason to be grateful to Stan. Stan was his career.

  ‘Dunno. I never think about it. I’m happy with you, if that’s what you mean? Happy in Murder.’

  ‘Happy in Murder,’ Onions mused. ‘I don’t think I’ve read that one.’

  Troy smiled. Stan was right. He had inadvertently invented a very likely title for a whodunnit by one of those lady novelists who seemed to dominate the genre in the thirties.

  ‘I meant,’ he said, ‘that I’ve no desire to move.’

  ‘You don’t fancy a job in the Branch then?’

  ‘That’s the last thing I want.’

  ‘Just as well. You made sever
al enemies today.’

  Troy got the message. It wasn’t an enquiry, it wasn’t a ticking off, it wasn’t even a warning. It was a statement.

  ‘And I get the feeling they’ll not be the last you make on your way up.’

  ‘You’re unhappy with that?’

  ‘No. No. I backed you today. And I’ll back you when I think you’re right.’

  Onions paused. The clincher could not now be far away.

  ‘But I’d be happier still if I thought you were telling me all you knew.’

  § 68

  Troy walked home in the creeping, thin darkness of late May. Not so much night as a veil across the day. Troy walked home, feeling for the first time that day that he was free of Cormack, feeling for the first time in a while that he might also be free of Kitty. Home the back way. Along William IV St, into the curve of Chandos Place and up Bedfordbury to the end of the narrow alley that was Goodwins Court, and Troy’s home. It was a mistake. Halfway up Bedfordbury,

  by a block of Peabody Dwellings, the sound of marital strife blew out of an open first-floor window and cut the air.

  ‘You spent it? You spent it all? You miserable bugger! You miserable drunken bugger!’

  He knew the voice well. His near-neighbour Alice McArdle. And she could only be talking to her husband, Ardle McArdle-and she was exaggerating. Ardle McArdle was a happy drunk-as a rule. On the occasions when he wasn’t he’d been known to knock Alice about. Troy had booked him once, flattened him twice, dunked him in the horse-trough in Chandos Place on half a dozen occasions, and on two or three had prevented Alice from almost murdering him by confiscating the rolling pin. McArdle was only miserable when confronted, as now, with the consequences of having spent his pay packet on beer, and the onset of sobriety.

  As a young copper, learning his job through the soles of a pair of size-six, unbendable police boots, pounding the paving stones of Stepney and Limehouse, Troy had on many occasions wondered what the role of a copper was. To nick villains: well, that went without saying. George Bonham, his station sergeant and mentor (‘Wot?’ had been Bonhams’s only response to Troy’s use of that word) had defined the job for him. ‘This is what we do. This is what coppers are for. If we’re not this, what use are we? As a copper you’re sort of a village wise man, an elder, and age’s got nothing to do with it-comes with the pointy hat, when you put it on that’s what you become-the village wise man-like it or lump it.’ After six months on the beat Troy had fed the line back to George, revised it. ‘We’re witch doctors,’ he said. ‘People expect us to be able to do what they cannot do themselves. A sort of magic. It’s not that we’re better than they are-we make them better than they are themselves.’ ‘Bloody hell,’ Bonham had said, and left it at that.