Second Violin

by Lawton, John

  It was the sound as much as the sight that kept him there. The sound that sucked him in. A dissonant London orchestra played a metropolitan cacophony and he had a seat in the gods – high explosive that fell with a crump and exploded with a boom – gunfire that yapped like a pack of fox terriers or cracked like thunderbolts. And the silver whoosh-whish of falling shrapnel, rattling across roof tiles and sparking like flint on paving stones. Bombers that growled dully like lazy lions or ground away monotonously like electric motors. Fighters that chattered endlessly. Surprisingly, in the midst of all the noise from above, noise from below punctuated the interludes – interruptions from the stalls, the drunken man in the third row – yelling at street level, the sound of running, boots banging down, breaking glass – so much breaking glass – and whistles – a never-ending unmelodious stream of whistles and bells.

  §

  Under moonlight,

  infectious moonlight,

  a madman dances,

  chanting numbers,

  two, three, five, seven, eleven.

  Smeared in excrement,

  naked as nativity,

  smeared in his own blood,

  wailing like a dog in pain,

  throat bared to heaven,

  mouth the perfect O,

  face tilted to night,

  eyes wide open,

  eyes tight shut,

  Lord Carsington dances.

  § 157

  Troy had fallen asleep. The all-clear woke him sometime after four in the morning. He was cold and damp. He looked up into the sky. The stars he saw were real. Firmament and permanent. The man-made shooting stars had stopped. The night above had gone quiet. London seemed to hum below him now, and overhead was silence, and the glow of the East End burning. He slid down the roof, stumbled at the gutter and fell with a thud onto the leaded bathroom roof.

  He expected to hear Kitty’s voice, calling him an idiot or some such, but when he pushed aside the blackout curtain he found her tangled up in the sheets, foetally hunched, just her mop of hair peeping out, sound asleep. He crawled in beside her. He had promised to take her to Stepney as soon as the all-clear had sounded, but he crept in beside her and slept in his clothes.

  As soon as she was up Kitty made Troy phone Stepney, but the line was dead.

  ‘It’d be a minor miracle if it wasn’t,’ Troy said. ‘We’ve got gas. That’s something. The water’s boiled. We have tea . . .’

  If Kitty smoked she would have smoked now.

  ‘I feel like . . .’

  She sipped at her cup of tea, closed her eyes and let the sentence trail.

  ‘I want to know. I want to talk to my mum.’

  Troy had whipped up breakfast and set down scrambled eggs in front of her.

  ‘I just want to talk to my mum. To be able to talk to my mum.’

  Tears formed at the corners of her eyes.

  ‘Eat up.’

  The tears coursed towards her chin.

  ‘Kitty. Eat up.’

  She breathed in. Looked reluctantly at her plate.

  ‘Smells great.’

  Picked up a fork, hesitated with it poised, sunk it in and tasted.

  ‘Ere . . . how many eggs you put in this?’

  ‘Three each.’

  ‘What? With eggs at two bob a dozen!’

  Troy sat opposite her at the kitchen table, took a mouthful off his own plate.

  ‘My mother keeps chickens.’

  ‘Wot . . . out at your stately pile?’

  Troy said nothing. Her tears had dried. He rather thought her counter-snobbery and her plain rattiness might be preferable to her tears.

  ‘Pheasant . . . home-grown chicken . . . all them forks and knives at the dinner table . . . It’s another world, innit?’

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  ‘Do I? Oh God, Troy. Will we ever be . . . wossaname . . . compatible?’

  It was not a conversation Troy wished to have. He’d no idea she knew a polysyllabic as complicated as ‘compatible’. The ringing of the phone spared him any need to reply.

  ‘I thought you said it was dead.’

  ‘It was.’

  Troy picked up the receiver.

  ‘It’s me, George. I got something for you. How soon could you get over to Stepney?’

  Troy looked at Kitty. Almost tearful again now. Apprehensive.

  ‘A body?’ he said wishing there were any other word as obvious, but what else would Bonham ‘have’ for him?

  ‘Stepney’s full o’ bodies. But this one ain’t down to Hitler.’

  ‘I’m sorry . . . ?’

  ‘Rabbi Friedland from Lindley Street.’

  ‘What makes you think it wasn’t the raid?’

  ‘The knife stickin’ in his chest.’

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can. It’ll all depend on the roads.’

  ‘OK. I’ll be waitin’.’

  ‘George, Lindley Street’s off Jubilee Street, isn’t it?’

  Kitty sat rigid. Troy could swear he saw the blood drain from her face.

  ‘Yeah. That’s where I am now. I’m in Edna Stilton’s front room using her phone and drinkin’ ’er char.’

  ‘Is she there?’

  ‘You want a word?’

  ‘No, but there’s someone here who will.’

  Troy held out the telephone to Kitty.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘George Bonham. He’ll put your mum on. I think she’s fine.’

  § 158

  Getting into Stepney was an obstacle course. It took an hour of diversions and doglegs, an hour of Kitty’s mute anxiety and straining silence, before he finally pulled up the Bullnose Morris outside the Stiltons’ house.

  Kitty leapt from the car into her mother’s arms. Into the house and never looked back. Troy was left standing by the car. A suddenly vacant moment after the intensity that was Kitty. He seemed to be surrounded by a haze of dust. It was like emerging into the aftermath of a sandstorm. Dust seemed to hang suspended in the air, to settle on his suit and hair like a coating of talcum powder or, worse, dandruff. Out of the dust a tall man with thick dark hair and a bad case of shaver’s shadow was walking slowly down from the Mile End Road towards him, a spiral-bound notebook open in one hand. He scribbled a few notes and came closer.

  He stopped by Troy’s car, looking around him all the time. Up at the smoke billows suspended in the sky, across at the gutted building opposite them. Then he smiled at Troy, said ‘Good Morning’ and added ‘How nice to be able to say those words,’ in a strong, fag-soaked American accent.

  ‘Press?’ Troy said simply.

  ‘CBS.’

  ‘Will they believe this back home?’

  ‘It’ll be my job to make them.’

  ‘Good luck,’ said Troy.

  The American smiled again and walked on towards Wapping. Troy had no idea who Ed Murrow was any more than Ed Murrow knew who Troy was. His brother would have known, his brother would have introduced them, but that is neither here nor there.

  Troy looked down Lindley Street. It was impassable to traffic, littered with rubble, blocked by the burnt-out remains of a car. A big man in a police uniform was bending over a tarpaulin. It was Bonham.

  Troy picked his way across a chequerboard of broken brick towards him. Only when he got close did he see that the tarpaulin was covering a row of bodies, laid out neatly in a row like lead soldiers in a toy box, each one a bump in the canvas, and only the telltale of a woman’s foot sticking out at the far end to spell out the fact of death.

  Bonham looked up. White in the face, a grey stubble on his chin, red rims to his eyes.

  ‘They was in an Anderson,’ he said. ‘They’re not a lot o’ use when the house collapses on top of ’em. Bit like a sardine tin under a lorry.’

  ‘Did you know them?’

  ‘Who don’t I know? I reckon everyone that died last night in a half mile radius was someone I knew. And that’ll run into dozens. Across the manor it’ll run into hundreds.
Course I knew ’em. So did you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Spendloves from number 14.’

  Troy knew them. Old Tommy Spendlove had been a petty thief in his day. Only old age and incompetence had made him passably honest. His sons were tearaways, stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down, from the age of ten. But his wife, Annie, cleaned in a West End hotel and his daughters, June and Pat, had worked on the counters in Woolworth’s. A family torn apart by men, patched together by women and destroyed by Hitler.

  ‘They really didn’t deserve to die this way,’ Bonham said.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Young June survived. Didn’t like the shelters. Stayed in the house. When the back end caved in and fell on the shelter she was in the front parlour under the table. Saved her life. She ain’t said a word since we give ’er the news. She’s in with Edna Stilton and Aunt Dolly now. Sweet tea and sympathy.’

  ‘And . . .?’

  ‘And the rabbi? Left him where I found him. C’mon I’ll show yer.’

  Half a dozen houses along on the southern side. A late-Victorian terraced house with its front windows shattered, a few tiles missing but otherwise intact. Bonham pushed open the door, led Troy down the corridor to the back kitchen.

  Rabbi Friedland was sitting bolt upright and stone dead at the kitchen table. A carving knife had been rammed to the hilt into his heart. The pool of crisped, brown blood had settled on the oilskin tablecloth, spilled to the tiled floor, pooled in the worn groove that marked generations of feet crossing from the hall door to the yard door, soaked into his clothes and into the book he had been reading. When the bomb had hit the Spendloves’ house most of the paint –Troy thought it must be whitewash or distemper – had flaked off the walls and ceiling, leaving a pattern of fine cracks like crazy glazing and a dusting of white powder over everything, as though someone had come in with a shaker of icing sugar and emptied it into the room. It had settled on the pool of blood, it had settled on Friedland. It was like walking into the set of an insane pantomime hammily dressed for winter in woodland.

  ‘That times it pretty well, doesn’t it?’ said Troy. ‘He died before the bomb hit.’

  ‘ARP have that timed as 12.07.’

  Pretty well the time Troy had settled on his rooftop. Perhaps the first explosion he saw had been this one?

  Troy leaned down to look at the face. Friedland was in his sixties. Very lined about the eyes and very grey of beard. It seemed to Troy that he could not have died in this position, that his killer had simply pushed the body back into place, set him upright, propped back into a parody of life. Each hand flat upon the pages of the book. He looked at the book – the bible, open at the book of Isaiah, King James, 1611 version. Troy found this baffling. Perhaps he liked the poetry of English? But then this whole case was baffling.

  Bonham took the words out of his mouth.

  ‘Anybody could have done this. Anybody.’

  ‘Darkness, chaos . . .’

  ‘Deserted streets . . . bombs and guns and fire engines and that . . . then people rushing all over the place. Nobody would have seen a thing.’

  ‘Did you close his eyes?’

  ‘Yeah . . . sorry, I know I should a left him . . . but I couldn’t bear to see him like that.’

  ‘And the hands?’

  ‘No. He was like that when I found him.’

  ‘Has anyone else been in, seen the body?’

  ‘No. I been careful about that. There’s been all sorts o’ rumours since Izzy Borg was killed. I sort of thought you wouldn’t want any more just yet.’

  ‘Family?’

  ‘Widower. Like old Izzy. But no kids. They had just the one. He got took before the last war. Be 1910 or 1911. Poor little mite died of pneumonia.’

  ‘So there’s nobody to tell?’

  ‘There’s the whole of Stepney to tell. But you been so cagey about Izzy and Rabbi Adelson . . . might be murder might not . . . I thought you’d want to be the one to say when this gets out. ’Cos there’s no two ways about this, is there? You got your evidence. Cut and dried. So no more pussyfooting. ’Cept there’ll be a ruckus, o’ course. Nobody panicked over Borg and Adelson. They will over this. When they find the time, that is.’

  It was the longest and smartest thing Troy had ever heard George say. London would panic at the thought of a methodical murderer picking off rabbis – but only when they found the time. Only when they stopped counting their dead. And London was piled up with our English dead. What was one dead man among hundreds?

  § 159

  Onions said, ‘One dead man among hundreds. What’s one dead man among hundreds?’

  ‘It’s the business we’re in. The one-dead-man business.’

  ‘Exactly. Exactly.’

  ‘I had George send the body over to Kolankiewicz, but I hardly need wait for the report.’

  ‘Have we got a single damn thing to go on?’

  ‘No, George was right. Nobody saw anything. The streets were empty when the bomb fell and awash with people once the all-clear had sounded. No one to see, and then everyone too busy to see. Anyone could have nipped in and knifed Friedland, anyone at all.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean these deaths are linked though, does it?’

  ‘Yes. It does.’

  ‘We have one definite murder and two possibles.’

  ‘And now that we do have the one that’s definite . . .’

  ‘You’re going to open it up? Go public?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t think . . . well . . . mebbe . . . dead rabbis . . . it’s a political matter?’

  ‘Yes. It’s that too.

  ‘A Fifth Column at work?’

  ‘I think that’s another of the phony war’s myths, Stan. I don’t think there’s a Fifth Column, and if there was wouldn’t they have better things to do than kill harmless, pensioned-off rabbis? Shouldn’t they be taking potshots at Churchill instead? The Fifth Column is something dreamt up to keep Special Branch busy.’

  ‘The Branch?’

  ‘The Branch.’

  ‘And Steerforth?’

  A pause. The only sound the distant clicking of rotary dials somewhere on the phone line.

  ‘Fuckim,’ said Troy, and Onions did not argue.

  § 160

  Kolankiewicz called Troy about three hours later.

  ‘The fingerprints on the knife are blurred, but I suspect they all belong to the victim, and that the knife was simply picked up in the room. The only clear prints I have are on the tea cup and the bible.’

  ‘George sent the bible over?’

  ‘George even sent the tablecloth. You should be pleased someone takes your orders literally.’

  ‘And the print is clear?’

  ‘Too clear, and alas it belongs to the victim also.’

  ‘How can a print be too clear?’

  ‘Is as though I had taken it myself, rolled the finger across the ink pad and then rolled it across the book. Except that the ink is blood in this case.’

  ‘You mean Friedland didn’t touch the book?’

  ‘Not while he was alive.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No. But it seems highly likely. Besides what would an Orthodox rabbi be doing with an English translation of the bible? It would be like you reading Dostoevsky in English.’

  ‘I’ve been asking myself that all morning. So it wasn’t his? You think what? That the killer brought it with him?’

  ‘Yes. I think he brought it with him. And as there’s a Hatchards sticker in the end papers, I think he bought it at Hatchards.’

  ‘At last,’ Troy said. ‘Something resembling a clue.’

  He was about to ring off when the meaning of the ‘clue’ struck him.

  ‘The print? Where was it?’

  ‘Index finger, right hand.’

  ‘I meant, where on the page?’

  Kolankiewicz went to look. A few seconds later he picked up the telephone again and said, ‘Isaiah 34:8. “For it
is the day of the Lord’s vengeance and the year of recompenses for the controversy of Zion.” The print is on the second line, next to the word “Zion”. Does this help in any way?’

  ‘God knows. But it does seem like a message to us from the killer, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Such an arrogant message. Equating himself with God. That said, he could have plonked the finger down almost anywhere in this chapter and come up with something appropriate, meaningful even. We would be compelled to see significance in a random act. It is all of it apocalyptic in the extreme . . . “the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations” . . . “the sword of the Lord is filled with blood” . . . streams turning into pitch, dust into brimstone . . . smoke that rises forever . . . I might be tempted to think it was a prophecy fulfilled all over London in the last twenty-four hours.’

  § 161

  It was Sunday. Troy could not call Hatchards until the morning. At dusk Kitty called him.

  ‘I won’t be over tonight.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m still at me mum’s. We got June Spendlove here. She ain’t said a word all day. In fact, we got half the street here. The electric’s still off and God knows when we’ll get gas, but Mum cooks on coal so we’re OK. She’s been boiling kettles for everybody. It’s like we’ve opened a caff. Churchill come down the street this afternoon. Mum and Aunt Dolly stood on the front step and chatted to him. They was thrilled to bits. More than if the King had come round. Mum asked him in for a cuppa but he told her he’d a lot of people to get to see. I wanted to be thrilled to bits, but I couldn’t. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t. Aunt Dolly had a Union Jack to wave. God knows where she found it. I took meself out for a bit of air afterwards – I almost said fresh air, but it ain’t fresh. It stinks. Like burning paint. Like . . . like rotten eggs. And it’s more than a smell . . . it’s like it sticks to the back of your throat or something. Like you could cough it up, but you can’t cough it up. Anyway . . . there’s this big pile of rubble at the bottom of our street. And someone had stuck a Union Jack on it. Like we’d just climbed a mountain. And we was proud of it and we was like claiming it for England. Like Jerry could see it.’