Rage of Battle wi-2

by Ian Slater

  “Inspector?”

  “Tell that ambulance crew I don’t want that bloody milkman talking to anyone at the hospital. Call Oxshott and have them send one of our lads over there to stay with him.”

  “Very good, sir.” Logan saw the policeman he’d sent to the house coming down the back stairs. “She’s in a right state,” said the young constable. “Says she doesn’t want to come out. Sight of blood upsets her.”

  “I should bloody well think so,” said Logan.

  “We could tell her exactly what to say when he calls,” suggested Melrose. “Make everything sound normal. I’m sure she’ll be willing to go along with us. I mean, she won’t want it getting out that she was having this Corbett character on the side.”

  “No,” said Logan, the tone of his rejection of the idea absolute. “They only do that on the stage, laddie — telling ‘em exactly what to say. Doesn’t work in real life. Man and wife have a hundred ways to convey to one another that something’s up. No — we’ll have to take her in. Slip a note through the mail slot saying she’s at the hospital and then wait.”

  Constable Melrose nodded his agreement. “Yes, but it’s a sure bet he calls ahead when he’s coming home. Otherwise she wouldn’t have had Corbett in.”

  “She’s a smart one then,” said one of the other two constables. “They might have arranged some external sign in the driveway or at the entrance to the cul-de-sac.”

  “Of course, it’s possible,” said Logan, “that she doesn’t know what her husband does — I mean, what he does in addition to being a claims agent.”

  Melrose looked doubtful. “I’m not sure about that, sir. Not much is kept secret between a man and wife, is it?”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Logan, the comment slipping out before he had a chance to rein it in. He was sending dense clouds of sweet-smelling Erinmore into the still morning air, which was now heavy and pungent with the smell of fresh earth venting the rain. “Some of these jokers never tell their wives. Part of the cover, y’see. Don’t think Philby’s wife ever knew. I mean not until—” His voice trailed off. “Melroad, ask the duty sergeant in Oxshott to draw up four-on, four-off watches here around the clock. No cars visible. Don’t use the house phone. Have Perkins call it through.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “C’mon, you two,” the inspector instructed the other two constables. “Let’s have a look in the house.”

  * * *

  When Melrose reached the car, he shook his head at Perkins, telling him the newspaper they’d seen on the porch was the Telegraph, so that Melrose now owed him another twenty p.

  “Rubbish,” said Melrose genially. “He’s called me ‘Melroad’ about six times. You owe me a quid.”

  “Not likely, mate. I never took the bet.”

  “Welcher,” said Melrose. “Well, anyway, you can chalk one up to our Wilkins, wherever he is. Logan’s in a right pickle.”

  “Wasn’t his fault,” said Perkins.

  “Balls. Should’ve let London in on this first up. Special branch. Cloak-and-dagger boys. But he wanted glory. Local lad lands big fish.”

  “Well, he couldn’t call early last night, could he?” said Perkins. “Lines were down. Besides,” Perkins added philosophically, “if Wilkins shows up, Logan could still come out smelling like roses.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” asked Melrose. “The CID’ll eat old Logan alive — pipe an’ all.”

  Perkins made a pouty face, conceding Melrose’s point. “Course, the Wilkins kid might be making it all up.”

  “You think so?”

  “Melroad!” It was Logan, calling from the house. When they got there, the first thing they saw was Mrs. Wilkins, sitting boldly in the lounge chair by the fireplace, looking very pale. Logan beckoned them to follow him into the dining room.

  “Feast your eyes on this,” said Logan. He opened up a Marks and Spencer shopping bag. There were neat bundles of one-hundred-pound notes. “Must be twenty thousand at least,” said Logan. “All used, looks like. Nonsequential.”

  “From the bedroom?”

  “Just where the lad told us.”

  Melrose glanced over at Mrs. Wilkins, still in her housecoat, eyes downcast, fidgeting with the ribboned edge of her robe.

  “No way she didn’t know,” said Logan quietly. “Course, she says she knows nothing about it.”

  “Course she doesn’t,” said Melrose, the uncharacteristic informality between inspector and constable a product of their mounting excitement. “Everyone leaves twenty grand hanging around the bedroom,” he said. “Pay the milkman.”

  The inspector chuckled. “Good. Very good, Melroad. Well, lads — all we have to do now is sit tight and wait. I’ve got a call in to Leatherhead for a turnoff check. Nothing’s come through yet, but as soon as his car turns off the M1, we’ll have a half-hour warning.”

  “How about our friend, Mr. Corbett? Did he leave his coat, like he says?”

  “Yes,” said Logan. “He was telling them the truth after all. Here he is in glorious Technicolor.”

  Melrose saw from Corbett’s National Health Plan card that he worked for Southern Dairy.

  Melrose couldn’t help feeling sorry for Mrs. Wilkins. Two men in her life, and neither of them any good. And she just didn’t seem the type — the kind of person to betray her country. But then, none of them ever did, he reminded himself. That was the whole point. He saw her get up, and one of the two constables blocking her way. She stopped, cleared her throat, her tone braver than he would have expected under the circumstances. “Am I allowed to go to my own bathroom?”

  Logan didn’t bat an eyelid. “Of course, Mrs. Wilkins. As soon as the constable checks it out.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “Razor blades — that sort of thing,” said Logan, unfazed by the rising contempt in her voice. “We wouldn’t want any other member of the family trying to do an injury to themselves, would we?”

  She said nothing but folded her arms defiantly, turning her back on Logan, waiting, going into the bathroom, firmly shutting the door, after the policeman had emerged, holding a shower cap with several Bic safety razors and three bottles of pills inside it. Logan read the labels. One was for blood pressure — the other two tranquilizers. “As needed,” Logan read from the tranquilizer vial before dumping it back into the shower cap. “I should think she needs them every time she lies to her husband. Not that I feel sorry for the swine, mind, but I can’t abide a woman who cuckolds a man.”

  It was such an old-fashioned expression that it took Melrose by surprise, and for a moment he wondered if Logan’s methods were just as old-fashioned, especially when Logan, a moment later, told him to take the pills out to the unmarked car as possible evidence. How tranquilizers might help the Crown’s case, Melrose didn’t know, and as he made his way to the car, it occurred to him that now they’d found a swag of money — something concrete — they should be calling in Special Branch — if the lines were up. If Logan didn’t, maybe he should do it himself. It might save him some grief, put him and the others in the clear in the event that Logan botched up and missed nabbing Wilkins. On the other hand, Melrose knew, going over your superiors’ head wasn’t exactly cricket. And no matter how grateful Special Branch might be for the information, the word would be out.

  Melrose rejected the idea and decided to wait, to do it Logan’s way. If they were lucky, Wilkins would walk smack into the trap. It was only then that Melrose remembered the two bottles of milk he and Perkins had noticed outside the house when they’d first arrived. The two bottles were still there. If the milkman was her lover, surely he would have taken them inside with him. “Bit of a puzzle,” Perkins conceded, but added, “Maybe he couldn’t wait to dip his wick.”

  “Maybe,” said Melrose, looking uneasily across at Perkins, “he isn’t the milkman.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Perkins, his head jerking around. “Then he was Wilkins? “

  “What — no,” said Melrose. “Christ —
he couldn’t be.”

  “Why not?” pressed Perkins, the tone of alarm growing. “He didn’t have ID on him. Said it was inside the house. Anyone find it yet?”

  “Yes, calm down. That’s right. We did find his ID.”

  “But we didn’t have any mug shots of Wilkins, though, did we?” continued Perkins. “All we were given, squire, was a man and his address. No priors.”

  Melrose tried to think hard, what Corbett’s face was like. Was it the face in the photo of the married couple on the mantelpiece? He tried visualizing the man in the greenhouse, but all he could see were shards of bloodied glass.

  “Forged ID?” he said.

  “I think,” said Perkins, “we’d better tell the inspector.”

  “You tell him,” said Melrose.

  “Not me,” protested Perkins. “You thought of the milk bottles, mate.”

  “Bloody ‘ell,” said Melrose. “You think it was forged ID. Right?”

  “Don’t ask me. I never saw it.”

  Suddenly Melrose relaxed, slumping into the passenger seat. It would be easy enough to check. The man would be in hospital. Where was he going to go with a broken leg and—

  “Oh Christ—” All they had seen was a lot of blood and the man moaning. A mustache meant nothing — shave the damn thing off in two minutes flat. Even less. Melrose tried to get through to the ambulance, but he couldn’t, the waves “frying”—sizzling with the static of jammed frequencies— a Russian bomber raid under way. From the unmarked car Melrose watched the neighbors in the cul-de-sac peering from behind their curtains at the collapsed greenhouse, and he felt irrationally angry at them, as if it shouldn’t be any of their business, when in fact he knew it was everyone’s business.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Captain Malkov was not getting the cooperation he’d expected at the docks, so now a different tack was called for. The border troops in dark winter uniform with matching fur caps that made them appear more menacing than usual selected two hundred civilians off the streets of Tallinn as “witnesses “ and marched the two hundred, four abreast, through the winding streets of the city’s old town toward the Viru Gate.

  The column slowed when those at the front saw a roadblock of army trucks up ahead beyond the gates of twin towers, but the Ukrainian guards kept them moving. The burnt-brown cone tops of the twin towers were shiny, polished by the earlier rain, myriad raindrops on the evergreens like tiny diamonds as the foliage shimmered in the Baltic breeze. The fall air, too, washed by the rain, was cleaner, more invigorating, than Paul and Katrin Valk could remember. Two of the “witnesses,” a young couple in from the country for market day, they were afraid that a terrible mistake had been made and that, like the two men whom Malkov had murdered the day before, they were going to be shot. Traffic had stopped, and beyond the shuffling sound of one another’s feet on the blacktop over the ancient cobblestones, a silence was growing.

  Katrin, her dark blue head scarf, dark as her eyes, catching the breeze, turned to the guard nearest her. “We have children.”

  The guard, a Ukrainian, said nothing but merely looked back over his shoulder for stragglers. “We are from a Kolkhozy— ‘collective,’ “ she pleaded, Paul tugging her back, wanting her to say anything to set them free but fearful that too much pleading would have the opposite effect, that if they were in fact being herded as witnesses, any more pleading by Katrin would put them in with the victims — whoever they were. Paul was ashamed, too, that they were trying to curry favor while the rest of the two hundred had said nothing, trudging toward the gate with the grim resignation of beasts being led to slaughter.

  There was a sound like the rustle of paper, a muffled thud. A few rows back, the crowd had come to a stop before the guards waved them on again, around the fallen man. An elderly woman, perhaps the man’s wife, was helping him to his feet, a guard motioning them to hurry up. It could have been Paul, Katrin thought, or her — in a rising panic, she seemed to recognize everyone.

  “Run for it!” shouted a young boy from somewhere farther back down the street. Paul could hear the clicks of the safety catches coming off the AK-47s. The boy who had called had now taken flight, chased by four of the Ukrainian guards, one yelling for him to stop. There was a burst of automatic fire. Some of the two hundred in the column didn’t even bother turning around, and Paul Valk felt sure he and Katrin were doomed, as sure as the Estonian republic, which for so long had been under the Russian heel — sure as his resignation of defeat had been bred in the bone during the long years of the Russian conquest. He thought of his ten-year-old boy, Juhan, and his “little songbird,” Ellen, who had just turned six, both of whom, thank God, had stayed at home on the collective this day with their grandparents.

  There was a scuffle, only this time ahead of them — an elderly woman having fainted, walking stick clattering on the roadway. The MPO guards would not let her be carried out. They knew that old trick. The Ukrainian guard, a sergeant, whom Katrin had been talking to was now watching her intently. Trying to keep her lips from quivering, she nevertheless looked plaintively at him and opened her arms as her mother, a staunch believer, had once done beneath the great spire of St. Olav’s. “Please,” she implored. “We have children.” She fell to her knees.

  “Katrin!” said Paul, his head bowed, lips a tight line, as he bent down to help her up. “Come, Katrin.”

  “We all have children,” said the guard.

  Katrin slipped on the road as Paul hauled her forward. “We have cognac,” she said. “Armenian cognac.”

  The guard looked down at her. “My brother was on the Yumashev,” he said bitterly. “Get back into line! Anyway, it’s up to him.” The guard indicated a speckled green and brown half-track truck, its horn bipping loudly, people moving sullenly out of the way to the narrow sidewalks, where they were now roped off and prevented from spilling back onto the road. Malkov was sitting next to the driver, his left hand gripping the windshield, the other lifting the megaphone. His voice, however, came across as a hollow, scratching sound as the megaphone went dead. Malkov looked at the megaphone and shook it.

  “Vene Vark!”— “Russian shit!” shouted someone.

  Malkov took no notice. He tried the megaphone again, and when it didn’t work, had the driver stop and stepped up on the front seat, with one foot on the track. “We want information on the saboteurs and any other persons involved in anti-Soviet activities. Twenty thousand rubles for any information leading to the arrest of these criminal elements.”

  “Captain?” A middle-aged man stepped forward, his face as hard as rock, like one of the fifty thousand other small farmers who had defied Stalin’s order to collectivize and been deported to die in the Siberian camps.

  “You have information?” asked Malkov.

  “No, Captain, but I beg of you — let the women go.”

  “Where do you work?” Malkov asked.

  The man nodded his head eastward. “Rakvere,” he answered, nonplussed.

  “Oil shale factory?” asked Malkov.

  “Yes,” the man answered, looking at those nearest, trying to figure out the relevance of the question.

  “Then you’re lucky,” said Malkov. “Like the shipyard workers?” not bothering to keep the contempt out of his voice. Oil workers had the green card — essential to the war effort. Before the man could answer, Malkov gave the order and an explosive roar of machine guns followed by screaming filled the air — acrid blue smoke going this way and that, choking the narrow street.

  Not all of the two hundred were dead, some still lying in blood-drenched heaps, breathing their last — a few, Malkov saw, not even hit, struggling against the weight of the dead. Malkov and three noncommissioned officers made their way, stepping carefully over pools of blood, to finish the job with pistols. Soon only the woman Malkov had seen badgering his Ukrainian sergeant remained. He moved toward her, her eyes looking up at him doelike, her lips moving, but no sound coming from them.

  He shot her.


  The stink of urine was so acidic that several of the guards were complaining it made their eyes water.

  The posters, most of them defaced within half an hour, that Malkov and his MPO troops distributed throughout the city proclaimed that two hundred a week, selected at random, would be shot until the saboteurs were delivered up to the authorities. There was also a reward of twenty thousand rubles. Malkov was convinced that it was the only way. A thousand or so Balts were small change compared to the life of the entire Northern Fleet and whoever else had been supplied with Estonian munitions.

  That night Malkov signed the chit for extra vodka rations. This was always necessary, he found, to calm some of the men down. Besides, they needed all the sleep they could get, for until someone informed, there’d be much more work to do.

  It was not until three days later that Malkov realized his mistake. Telling the inhabitants of Tallinn, and the other two Baltic capitals, that hostages would be taken randomly only encouraged them to remain silent, the odds against any particular individual being picked up quite high. Now he had lists of two hundred names posted. Except for a few, the well connected, escape from the city would be impossible, the pressure on those remaining, enormous.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  In the first five days of the war, back in August, in the rapidly converging pincers of Russian armor that encircled Berlin, over two hundred thousand fleeing West Germans had been trapped, then ignored. Of no great strategic interest to the invading Russian generals, the fall of post-Gorbachev Berlin, or rather its instant collapse, as Kiril Marchenko knew, was of enormous psychological and political importance to Moscow. The holy words of John F. Kennedy, though ridiculously ungrammatical, as Marchenko happily pointed out, the phrase meaning “I am a beer” the way the U.S. president had used the words, had once electrified the West. It had been a statement of unrelenting determination by the West, before and after Gorbachev, to maintain its presence in Germany in the hope that one day the two Germanys would be united. Now, playing on Kennedy’s misuse of the phrase, the Russian political officers were reaping a propaganda windfall.