Blackstone and the Endgame

by Sally Spencer

  ‘I’ll make you one right away,’ Maggie said, starting to get out of bed.

  ‘You’ll stay where you are,’ Archie replied, laying his big beefy arm over her. ‘I’ll make it.’

  ‘I want to make it,’ Maggie said, lifting the arm off her.

  And it was not quite a lie, because she did want to make it. But the more urgent reason for going downstairs was that she wanted to be as far as possible from Archie when the inevitable tears came.

  When Tanya appeared at the door of the Vladimir’s apartment, she was dressed in the typical peasant costume of a heavy sheepskin coat (a shooba) and felt boots (valenki), and she had a scarf on her head, which she’d tied in such a way as to hide her scar completely.

  ‘Vladimir has told me he wants you to come with me,’ she said from the doorway.

  ‘Would you like to come inside for a few minutes first and drink a glass of tea to warm you up?’ Blackstone asked.

  Tanya shook her head. ‘We have to go now,’ she said firmly.

  ‘As you wish,’ Blackstone agreed, and as he followed her down the stairs, he was thinking, ‘This time last year, Maggie would already have started cooking the goose.’

  They caught the number fourteen tram, which rattled along Sadovya Street and soon reached a large square which had a church on one side and a large covered market on the other.

  ‘What’s that market called?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Why should you be interested?’ Tanya asked sullenly.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be interested?’ Blackstone countered.

  ‘It’s called the Haymarket,’ Tanya snapped. ‘There! Are you any the wiser for knowing its name?’

  ‘Dostoyevsky thought of it as the stinking heart of the city,’ Blackstone said, ‘and it’s here that his central character, Raskolnikov, kisses the ground before turning himself in to the police.’

  ‘You’ve read Crime and Punishment?’ Tanya asked, astonished.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And am I supposed to be impressed?’ Tanya said, rapidly converting her astonishment into something close to contempt.

  ‘Tell me, do you resent the British as a whole, or is it just me that you have an objection to?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Let me answer that question with one of my own,’ Tanya said. ‘How big are the factories in England?’

  ‘It depends.’

  ‘Do they have more than a thousand workers?’

  ‘Some may do, perhaps, but not very many.’

  ‘In Petrograd, a factory with only a thousand workers is considered small,’ Tanya said.

  ‘I don’t see the point,’ Blackstone admitted.

  ‘Russia could never have built those factories without the help of British capital. But in return for that help, you require rates of interest that are almost ruinous.’

  ‘Without those huge factories, which you say we helped you to build, your troops would have even less equipment and supplies than they’ve got now,’ Blackstone pointed out.

  ‘And how can we meet these interest rates?’ Tanya asked, as if he had never spoken. ‘By paying our workers low wages and by housing them in filthy dormitories where whole families sleep in one bed!’

  ‘And you blame us for that?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Tanya doesn’t blame you,’ the girl said. ‘Tanya thinks that if the mighty Russian Empire is to be preserved, such evils must be tolerated – but then she would think like that, because she is the product of a privileged upbringing and has never really known hunger and cold.’

  ‘But you’re Tanya,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘No,’ the girl replied firmly, ‘today I am Natasha, and I know that nothing – not a vainglorious empire, not a bloody war – can excuse the way the proletariat are treated in this country.’

  Before an important interview – and this might turn out to be a very important one – Archie Patterson liked to clear his head, which was why, even though it would swallow up a few minutes of the precious time he had left, he told the taxi driver to drop them on Leman Street.

  It was as they were getting out of the cab that he first noticed that Ellie Carr was carrying her black leather medical bag in her right hand.

  ‘Are you planning to do a little bit of doctoring on the side?’ he asked, looking down at the bag.

  Ellie grinned. ‘Not if I can help it. I don’t like live patients – they complain too much.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand why you’ve brought your doctor’s bag with you,’ Patterson said.

  ‘I brought it because you couldn’t bring your warrant card,’ Ellie replied enigmatically.

  The road itself was almost deserted, although – it being Christmas Day – all the pubs in the area were full of men, just as all the kitchens in the houses were full of women.

  They walked in silence down Leman Street, where there had once been German bakers and confectioners, butchers, boot makers, tailors and cigarette manufacturers – all of them now long gone.

  If the Germans themselves had been employed to wipe out the evidence that they had once had a colony on this spot, Patterson thought, there would not have been a trace of them left. But the task had fallen, instead, to men who lacked Teutonic thoroughness, so although someone had chipped away the raised letters that said Deutsche Bäckerei from the front of one of the shops, that same someone had failed to paint over the space those letters had occupied, so the words were still there in a sort of ghostly transfer.

  ‘Sloppy,’ Ellie Carr said.

  ‘What’s sloppy?’ Patterson asked.

  ‘That,’ Ellie replied, pointing to the words Drücken Sie einmal over the bell-push of what had once been a German tailor’s shop.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Patterson agreed, and he hoped that on the battlefields of the Western Front, the Germans were being somewhat less efficient than their reputation would indicate, and the British rather more so.

  They turned left on to Hooper Street. As they passed number seven, Patterson noticed that the red-haired woman – who’d told them her name was Mrs Stanton – was looking through her front window and had a malicious smile on her face.

  The woman who answered their knock at number eleven was probably in her middle fifties. She had a pinched face and a peevish expression – and, looking at her bloodshot eyes and veined cheeks, Patterson had no doubt that she had indeed been out on the razzle the day before.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  ‘Are you Mrs Elsie Wilson, the landlady of this boarding house?’ Patterson replied.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I’m from the police – Detective Sergeant Patterson – and I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘On Christmas Day?’ the woman asked.

  ‘It won’t take more than a few minutes of your time, Mrs Wilson,’ Patterson reassured her.

  And perhaps he had been too reassuring – too lacking in the confidence of authority – because the woman’s eyes narrowed, and she said, ‘Have you got a warrant card?’

  Patterson made an elaborate show of patting down all his pockets.

  ‘I seem to have left it at home,’ he admitted finally.

  The landlady smirked. ‘Well, if you haven’t got a warrant card, you can just piss off.’

  ‘Actually, we can’t,’ Ellie Carr said firmly.

  ‘You what?’ the woman asked.

  ‘I’m a physician working for the public health department,’ Ellie said, holding up her doctor’s bag, ‘and under legislative order seven hundred and thirty-one stroke eight – better known, as I’m sure you’re aware, as the Blackstone Act – I have the right to enter any premises, at any time and without any warning.’

  It was plain from the look on the woman’s face that she believed Ellie, Patterson thought – and he was not surprised, because though he knew she was talking absolute bollocks, even he almost believed her.

  ‘I keep a nice clean house,’ Mrs Wilson whined. ‘I’m most scrupulous about it.’

  ‘P
erhaps you are, and perhaps you’re not,’ Ellie said crisply. ‘We’ll see for ourselves, once we’re inside.’

  On this special day of the year, they should have smelled the aroma of cooking fowl the moment they entered the house, but there was only cold air wafting down the corridor of number eleven, Hooper Street.

  ‘Haven’t you started your lodgers’ Christmas dinner yet?’ Patterson asked, surprised.

  ‘On what they pay me, I’m not cooking them a special Christmas dinner,’ Mrs Wilson said sourly. ‘Besides, I’ve got a gentleman caller coming round later, and I have to get myself ready for him.’

  ‘Before I begin my inspection, we’d like to ask you about this man,’ Ellie said, showing her the picture of Max.

  ‘I’ve never seen that bloke before in my life,’ Mrs Wilson said, barely looking at the photograph.

  Ellie sighed. ‘I really don’t want to close this boarding house down,’ she said, ‘but if you refuse to cooperate, you’d be surprised how many things I can find wrong with it.’

  ‘Why do you want to know about him?’ Mrs Wilson asked.

  ‘We suspect he may recently have become a typhoid carrier, and we need to track him down in order to test him,’ Ellie said.

  ‘But he’s back in Ger …’ Mrs Wilson began, before she realized she’d made a mistake.

  ‘What was that?’ Patterson asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You were about to say he’s back in Germany,’ Patterson told her. ‘If you’ve never seen him in your life, how do you know he’s German?’

  ‘You said so.’

  ‘No, we didn’t.’

  ‘All right,’ Mrs Wilson conceded. ‘He did lodge here a few years ago – but if I’d known then that the Kaiser was going to declare war on us, I’d never have let him through the door.’

  ‘Tell us about him,’ Patterson said.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Anything you can remember,’ Ellie Carr said. ‘Anything that you think might incline me to take a more favourable view of your kitchen when I get around to inspecting it.’

  ‘He was a waiter in one of them German restaurants.’

  ‘And?’ Patterson said.

  ‘And he was a nice boy – for a German, I mean.’

  ‘So you have no complaints about him?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘And nobody else complained, either?’

  ‘Not as far as I can remember.’

  ‘I’ve got this new chemical test I’m just bursting to try out,’ Ellie told Patterson. ‘It can find the most horrible bacteria even in places that have been thoroughly scrubbed.’

  ‘All right, when he had his friends round, he was a bit noisy,’ Mrs Wilson admitted.

  ‘You allowed him to entertain his friends in his room?’ Patterson asked. ‘That’s not normal, is it?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Mrs Wilson admitted. ‘But like I said, apart from the noise, he was a very nice boy.’

  ‘And what sort of noise did they make?’

  ‘They had a gramophone.’

  ‘A big one?’

  ‘It was quite large.’

  ‘And he played it half the night, didn’t he?’ Patterson asked.

  Mrs Wilson’s eyes narrowed. ‘Who’s been talking?’ she demanded. ‘If it was that spiteful ginger bitch, Gertie Stanton, from number seven …’

  ‘Actually, it wasn’t her,’ Patterson lied. ‘But where we got the information from is neither here nor there, now is it? Did he play the gramophone half the night or not?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And how did your other lodgers feel about that?’

  ‘Some of them didn’t mind so much.’

  ‘They all minded – and they all moved out.’

  ‘Well, yes, they all moved out eventually, but people do move on – that’s the nature of the business.’

  ‘You allowed him to do something that made all your other lodgers leave,’ Patterson said.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose I was bit soft on him,’ Mrs Wilson admitted. ‘He wasn’t my type at all, but he did have a very nice bottom.’

  ‘And what happened as each of your lodgers left?’

  ‘I rented out his room again. It’s what landladies do.’

  ‘Presumably, you let out all the rooms to people who didn’t mind Max’s noise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Patterson sighed. ‘Getting a straight answer out of you is harder than pulling teeth,’ he said. ‘It was Max’s friends – the ones who’d been making the noise with him – who rented the rooms, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I forget.’

  Ellie sniffed loudly. ‘I can smell the mould in here,’ she said. ‘It’s almost overpowering. I think we’ll have to have this whole place fumigated.’

  ‘All right, yes, they were all Max’s friends,’ Mrs Wilson admitted.

  ‘And were they Germans, too?’

  ‘No, they were as English as you and me. Max was the only foreigner in the place.’

  ‘It sounds to me as if you drove all your old lodgers out just so Max’s friends could move in,’ Patterson mused. ‘From a business point of view, that seems to make no sense at all.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve run a boarding house yourself, have you?’ Mrs Wilson asked tartly.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ Patterson said, ‘but I do know that when you’ve got good, reliable lodgers, you want to hold on to them, not drive them out and take in new ones who might only stay for a week.’

  ‘What makes you think the lodgers who left were reliable?’ Mrs Wilson challenged.

  ‘Weren’t they?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, they weren’t. They were a right shower – they hardly ever washed, and they were always behind with their rent.’

  ‘Funnily enough, Mr Thomas – who lodged with you for three years, until Max’s gramophone drove him out, and has been lodging at number seven ever since – has quite a different story to tell,’ Patterson said. ‘He told me that all the lodgers who left were quiet, respectable people.’

  ‘He’s lying,’ Mrs Wilson said. ‘Anyway, the people who replaced them were just as quiet and respectable – and Max personally vouched for their good character and stability.’

  ‘And how many of those quiet, respectable lodgers are still here?’ Patterson demanded.

  ‘None of them,’ Mrs Wilson muttered.

  ‘I’ll give you one last chance to tell the truth, and then we’re closing this place down,’ Patterson said.

  ‘All right,’ Mrs Wilson replied, defeated. ‘When the first of the old lodgers threatened to leave, I told Max he’d have to quieten down a bit, but he said I shouldn’t worry, because he could fill every room in the house with his waiter friends, and I could charge them double what I’d been charging before.’

  ‘Double?’ Patterson repeated. ‘Double!’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How could simple waiters have afforded to pay you double the rent your old lodgers had been paying?’ Patterson asked.

  Mrs Wilson shrugged. ‘I never asked, and Max never told me.’

  He was building a clear picture now, Patterson thought.

  Max comes to Britain ostensibly to work in a restaurant. And perhaps he does actually work in a restaurant, but his real job – which just has to be something criminal – pays him far more than being a waiter ever could.

  He’s living high on the hog – having the best time of his life. And then his call-up papers arrive, and he has to go back to Germany. He doesn’t like living on the wages of a very junior officer at all, and then one day he comes across a piece of information which, if handled right, can make him a fortune. And the real beauty of it is that it’s the British who’ll be willing to pay the most for it – and he knows parts of London like the back of his hand.

  ‘He got an official-looking letter from Germany and then he left, didn’t he?’ Patterson asked.

  ‘How did you know that?’ Mrs Wilson wondered.

  ‘Just
answer the question!’ Patterson barked.

  ‘Yes, he got a letter, and the next day he was gone. And all his pals went at the same time, leaving me to build up my business again from scratch. It just goes to show, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Just goes to show what?’

  ‘It goes to show that, even if they seem pleasant enough on the surface, you can never trust a Hun.’

  FOURTEEN

  The tram’s terminus was at a large arch, which might have looked majestic but for the poisonous yellow sky that framed it.

  ‘Before you ask, that’s the Narva Triumphal Arch,’ Tanya said skittishly. ‘Alexander the First had it built at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. His idea was that it was the first thing the soldiers would see when they returned to the city. It was their reward – and the only one they got – for risking their own lives and seeing so many of their comrades die.’

  ‘Natasha really does despise the tsars and all they stand for, doesn’t she?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Natasha doesn’t know any better,’ Tanya said ambiguously.

  Beyond the arch, there were half a dozen factories, each with several tall chimney-stacks pumping out filth into the atmosphere.

  ‘That’s where we’re going,’ Tanya said, pointing to a long, rectangular building with very tiny windows.

  ‘A dark, satanic mill,’ Blackstone murmured, almost to himself.

  ‘What did you say?’ Tanya asked.

  ‘A dark satanic mill,’ Blackstone repeated. ‘It’s from a poem by—’

  ‘William Blake,’ Tanya interrupted. ‘I know.’

  ‘Must be a hell of a place to work in,’ Blackstone mused.

  ‘No doubt it would be,’ Tanya replied. ‘But it is not where the poor souls employed by the Narva Cotton Company work – it is where they live.’

  An old man in a shabby uniform, which included an ancient cutlass, was standing guard at the entrance to the dormitory block. When he saw Tanya, he smiled and gestured that they should go inside.

  ‘A member of the party?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘A sympathizer,’ Tanya replied.

  The inside was indeed a vision of hell. It seemed to be one large room, and it was crammed with row after row of narrow bunk beds. There was little light and virtually no air, and the whole place stank of stale cabbage and human sweat.