Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  McGee called back from the first room, ‘Won’t I mess things up?’

  ‘You can hardly make more of a mess than I’ve done. Just try not to touch anything.’

  McGee ambled into the bedroom.

  ‘Is it always like this?’ asked Troy.

  ‘Yeah. He always did live a bit like a pig.’

  ‘Would you know if any of his clothes were missing or if he’d packed a suitcase?’

  McGee pointed to the top of a cracked and blistered mahogany veneer wardrobe.

  ‘His case would be up there. If it was here, that is.’

  Troy led McGee back to the kitchen.

  ‘And his razor would be here?’ Troy pointed to the tiled strip next to the sink. ‘Mr Wolinski is still clean-shaven I take it?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said McGee. ‘Sometimes he treats himself to a proper barber-shave down the Mile End Road, but he’s got a safety. I’m sure of that.’

  ‘Do you see it?’ asked Troy.

  McGee shrugged again.

  ‘Then I think we can assume that Mr Wolinski has gone wherever he’s gone of his own accord. Kidnappers and murderers don’t usually ask you to pack for the occasion. And the Luftwaffe doesn’t much care whether it bombs the unshaven or not.’

  ‘So Peter’ll be back?’

  ‘He didn’t abandon a houseful of books in Munich. I hardly think he’ll do the same in Stepney’.

  Rather than reassured McGee seemed deflated by Troy’s words.

  ‘What do I do then?’

  ‘Give the keys to Sergeant Bonham and if Wolinski isn’t back by the end of the week report it properly at Leman Street. He can hardly swan around England for long these days.’

  ‘Of course,’ McGee said thoughtfully. ‘There’s a war on.’

  ‘I had heard,’ said Troy.

  6

  Troy stood and shivered outside the ground floor back and watched his breath form clouds in the air.

  ‘And don’t give Uncle George no cheek,’ Mrs Flanagan instructed her son Terence, alias Tub.

  Troy and Bonham exchanged glances over the Uncle George. Mrs Flanagan did up the boy’s coat buttons and straightened his socks in the wrinkle zone between knee and ankle.

  ‘Doesn’t pay to scare off the kiddies,’ muttered Bonham.

  ‘If you say so, Uncle George,’ Troy muttered back at him.

  ‘It got us the arm didn’t it?’

  Mrs Flanagan was speaking directly to Bonham.

  ‘If he’s any trouble just give ’im a back ’ander, George.’

  ‘Will do, Patsy,’ Bonham replied.

  The child squinted up at Bonham – almost seven feet tall in his helmet – like a squirrel surveying the prospect of an oak. His one visible eye roved actively, the other hid behind a fresh slab of Elastoplast. He moved off towards the street without a backward glance at his mother. On the step, out in Union Place, a grim prospect greeted Troy and Bonham. Seven small boys ranged across the pavement, all looking expectantly towards Bonham.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘What do you lot think you’re up to?’

  No one spoke. The expectant looks seemed fixed somewhere between joy and tears. Sergeant Bonham held power over the greatest, the most mysterious event in their short lives. Troy looked down at a motley of gabardine mackintoshes, outsize jackets tied up with string, brown boots, pudding-basin haircuts, bruised and scabrous kneecaps. Such an amazing array of ill-fitting hand-me-downs that only the peach-fresh faces challenged the image of them as seven assorted dwarves. Out on the end of the line, a grubby redhead, doubtless called Carrots, juggled a smouldering cocoa tin from hand to hand, an improvised portable furnace. Troy wished he had one of his own.

  ‘You’re supposed to be in school, you know that,’ Bonham persisted. ‘Now come on. Clear off!’

  The boys stood their ground. A classic Mexican stand-off.

  A lifetime spent on the sidelines, excluded but observant, had left Tub in no doubt about how leadership should behave when occasion arose. He knew the occasion and he knew how to rise to it. He stepped out from between Bonham and Troy and the mass of boys parted before him as surely as if they’d been struck by Moses’ staff. He led off in the direction of Cardigan Street. The boys followed in their own pecking order – none of them overtook or even tried to draw level with Tub in his magisterial progression. He didn’t speak and he didn’t look back. Bonham and Troy followed on the end of the line, feeling faintly foolish and Brobdingnagian. Troy thrust his hands deep into his pockets to keep the stabbing nip of frost from his fingertips and wondered if the carrot-headed child could be persuaded to part with his invention for a shilling.

  Tub stood on a level patch of fresh snow, and waited as Bonham and Troy struggled across the rubble and into the ‘garden’. The boys lined up, respectfully not setting foot on their hopscotch patch, forming a hellish gauntlet that Troy would have to run to get to Tub. Troy stumbled to a halt at the end of the column.

  ‘Here?’ he asked. ‘Do you mean you found it here?’

  Tub nodded. Troy looked around. In all its ups and downs the bombsite seemed indistinct and uniform under its coat of snow. Bonham lumbered up, wheezing.

  ‘If he’s leading us on a wild-goose chase—’

  Troy cut him short. ‘How can you be sure?’ he asked Tub.

  Tub scraped at the snow with the toe of his boot, revealing a blue quarry tile. As if to some invisible cue everybody suddenly began to kick at the snow, scattering it clear of the old floor. Troy offered to hold the tin while the carrot-top worked, but he clutched it tightly to his mackintosh and scowled at Troy, hacking away all the time with the metalled heel of his boot.

  Troy looked down at the kitchen floor and its fading hopscotch squares.

  ‘Here?’ he repeated.

  ‘This is where we was,’ said Tub.

  ‘Yes, but is this where you found it?’ Troy was reluctant to name the object, but eight pairs of eyes seemed to be daring him to do it. ‘The arm,’ he conceded. ‘You found the arm here?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Tub. ‘This is where we was when the dog give it to me.’

  Troy heard Bonham mutter a faint ‘Jesus Christ’.

  ‘What dog?’ he asked.

  ‘Dog,’ said Tub, as though this in itself were sufficient explanation.

  Troy looked at Bonham, Bonham looked at Troy – both feeling more and more like Mutt and Jeff.

  ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ said Bonham. Troy was beginning to find the phrase all too familiar.

  ‘Another fine mess, Stanley,’ he whispered back. ‘Are you telling me a dog came up to you and gave you the hand while you were playing here?’

  ‘He wasn’t playing,’ chipped in the biggest boy. ‘We don’t let ’im ’cos he trips up.’

  ‘So you didn’t find the hand at all?’

  ‘Yes I did,’ Tub protested. ‘It was me. Just me. Wasn’t none of this lot. Dog came up and give it me. He didn’t give it no one else. He give it me!’

  ‘Do you have any idea where the dog came from?’

  Tub seemed not to understand.

  ‘Where did you first see him?’

  Tub pointed to the wall between Cardigan Street and Alma Terrace, to where odd bits of houses still stood, to where a few dozen bricks remained in the order the brickie had lain them.

  ‘Show me,’ said Troy. The same ritually structured procession moved off towards Alma Terrace. Troy looked over the stump of wall. The morning’s fall of snow had covered any tracks the dog might have left.

  ‘George,’ he said, ‘we’re looking for a needle in a bloody haystack.’ He felt Bonham’s size fourteen tap sharply against his shoe, telling him to watch his language. ‘We’re going to have to search it all.’

  ‘Freddie, you’ve got to be joking. I don’t have the men for that.’

  ‘How else are we going to find anything?’

  ‘What do you expect to find?’

  ‘The rest of the body. Well, to be precise, bits of the rest of t
he body.’

  Troy glanced at the boys, wondering how much they heard and how much they understood. Eight cherubic faces, and sixteen hard, ruthless eyes looked back at him. Preserving innocence seemed a fruitless ideal.

  ‘How would you like to make some money?’ he said.

  ‘How much?’ said the biggest.

  ‘A shilling,’ said Troy.

  ‘Half a crown,’ said the boy.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s for yet!’

  ‘It’ll still cost you half a dollar,’ the boy replied.

  ‘OK, OK,’ said Troy, ‘half a crown to the boy who finds the rest.’

  ‘Freddie, for God’s sake,’ Bonham cut in. ‘You can’t!’

  He gripped Troy by the shoulder and swung him round into a huddled attempt at privacy.

  ‘Are you off yer chump?’

  ‘George, can you think of any other way?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, they’re kids. They should be in school!’

  ‘Well, they clearly have no intention of going. And they don’t exactly look like Freddie Bartholomew do they?’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Bonham said again.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Troy.

  ‘On your own head be it.’

  Troy turned back to the boys, ranged in front of him in a wide semi-circle. ‘I want you to look for . . . ’ he hesitated, uncertain what to call a corpse. ‘For anything to do with what Tub found. OK?’

  They nodded as one.

  ‘And if you find it don’t touch it. You come straight back and tell Mr Bonham, and nobody, I mean nobody, goes near it till he’s seen what you’ve found. Understood?’

  They nodded again.

  ‘Or the half-crown’s forfeit,’ Troy concluded.

  Tub spoke up. ‘An’ a bob for me for findin’ and sixpence each for all of us for lookin’ or you can just bugger off,’ he said.

  ‘Done,’ said Troy, glad that things were now on a clearly established business footing.

  ‘I must get out to Hendon,’ he said to Bonham. ‘The sooner we get a forensics report the better.’

  ‘You’re leaving me in charge of this lot?’

  ‘Sorry, George.’

  ‘It’s a scandal, Freddie. If the mums kick up . . . ’

  ‘You know them, George. Is it likely?’

  ‘You know, Freddie,’ Bonham said softly, ‘there are times when I think there’s nothing like a long spell at the Yard for putting iron in the soul.’

  ‘Just doing my job. Call me at the Yard this afternoon if anything turns up.’

  Troy picked his way across the bombsite back to his Bullnose Morris and the gruesome parcel in the boot. The boys scattered to the points of the compass, dreaming of riches beyond belief. Behind him Troy could hear Bonham offering the carrot-top sixpence for his hand-warmer.

  7

  Ladislaw Kolankiewicz had been a senior pathologist at the Police Laboratory in Hendon since it opened in 1934. One of the first recruits to the science of the gruesome, and bearing the recommendation of no less a figure than Sir Bernard Spilsbury, there were many who considered Kolankiewicz to be appropriately gruesome himself. Troy had come across him in 1937 and since then had watched his hairline recede to nothing only to re-emerge sprouting vigorously from his ears and nostrils and coursing along the backs of his fingers. He had grown stouter and more bent from his daily stooping over the dead and his English had not improved at all. Precise and flawless on technical matters, his colloquial use of the language was obscenely fractured. Policemen all over London and the Home Counties would relish visits to Hendon, simply because it replenished their fund of Kolankiewicz anecdotes, as he rolled words into each other in pointless, foul combinations along the lines of ‘Fuck bloody off bastardpimpcopper’, or as he now uttered to Troy, ‘What the bollox you want, smartyarse?’

  Troy was glad to see the room was empty. Too often Kolankiewicz had forced him to conduct conversations while he sawed away at a human skull or barked rapid summaries of a stomach’s contents to Anna’, his assistant and stenographer, perched on her stool in the corner. But today he was sitting quietly on the same stool, clean of apron, bloodless of hand, eating a spam sandwich and reading the News Chronicle. It was almost pleasant, despite the ever-present chemical reek that spelt out death to the senses.

  Troy slapped his brown paper parcel down on the slab and pulled at the loose end. The arm jerked free and rolled halfway across the slab. Kolankiewicz shot out from his corner like a spider scuttling across its web. He seemed to stare greedily at the prize for a few seconds. Then he shrugged and looked up at Troy.

  ‘What this shit?’

  ‘It’s an arm.’

  ‘Mr bloody wiseguy,’ Kolankiewicz muttered. ‘I mean, smartyarse,’ he yelled, ‘where’s the rest of it?’

  ‘It’s all I’ve got.’

  Kolankiewicz raised his hands to heaven. ‘Ach! Ach! Ach! What do you expect me to do with this?’

  ‘Anything you can. We’re looking for the rest now. There’s plenty of fabric. A cufflink, even.’

  ‘Ah! Cufflinks I like. Hallmarks. Craftsman’s initials. Distinctive proportions of fine metals to base – all very informative. What do you know about where it was found? What’s it been on or in?’

  ‘Not a damn thing.’ Troy stretched out a hand to hold down the arm as Kolankiewicz took a large pair of scissors to the woollen sleeve. A sharp stab of pain caught him in the upper left arm. He rubbed gently at the spot with his fingers. Bent double over the arm, Kolankiewicz looked up from beneath wild, bushy eyebrows.

  ‘Nice workmanship,’ he said. ‘High-grade silver. What’s the matter with your arm?’

  A sentence in perfect English almost startled Troy. The absence of the ham element in Kolankiewicz’s voice made him momentarily unrecognisable as the demented dwarf he had known. Kolankiewicz straightened up. ‘Is that the one? Is that where you took the blow with an axe? Very stupid of you.’ He came around the table, right up to Troy.

  ‘Let me see,’ he said.

  ‘It’s OK. I’ve seen a doctor.’

  ‘I’m a doctor.’

  ‘I know, but unlike most of your patients I happen to be alive.’

  ‘Fucking snobbery. If you’re in pain, show me. Don’t play the fucking hero.’

  Troy plucked at his overcoat buttons and began to ease his shoulder out of the garment.

  ‘Would you mind washing your hands first.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing with them, do I?’

  ‘I been eating spam sandwich and drinking tea.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘Jesus Christ. OK! OK!’

  Kolankiewicz stood at the sink, rolled up his sleeves and made an ostentatious display of scrubbing up. Troy winced as the stubby, hairy, cold fingers poked at his arm.

  ‘You know you’re very lucky you didn’t lose the arm. That was a very deep wound. You had a good surgeon. Lovely job.’

  ‘Why does it hurt?’

  ‘You have your arm almost chopped in two and you ask why it hurts?’

  ‘Now. Why does it hurt now? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Swelling where the stitches came out – perhaps some minor infection of the needle holes, not the real wound. I’ll give you some surgical spirit and you wash it down for a couple of days. You’ll be fine. When did the stitches come out?’

  ‘Three days ago.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t worry. What you should worry about is why you let yourself get locked up alone in a room with a lunatic axeman.’

  Kolankiewicz took a small brown bottle off the shelf above the sink, splashed a little of its contents over a swab and bathed the four-inch scar.

  ‘This guy,’ he went on. ‘The one in the papers. Killed his good lady’s paramour. Chopped off two of the postman’s fingers. Broke the wrist of a constable. And you walk into his house and tell him to give himself up. You’re crazy! This Oxbridge—’

  ‘Uxbridge,’ said T
roy.

  ‘This Uxbridge axeman could have killed you.’

  Kolankiewicz rolled down Troy’s shirtsleeve and fastened the button at the cuff in a gesture that was curiously paternal.

  ‘No – I don’t think so.’

  ‘Always the fucking hero.’

  ‘Heroics has nothing to do with it. It was all down to knowing the man.’

  ‘Psychology?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Fucking guesswork I’d call it.’

  ‘Have it your own way. But once he’d nicked me—’

  ‘Nicked. Troy, you’re full of crap.’

  ‘Nicked me! – it was all over. He got what he wanted. He’d seen blood. The sight of blood was the culmination for him – it satisfied and defused him. After that it was a matter of simply sitting there and talking him out. He wasn’t going to chop me into pieces. The only person he was ever going to chop into pieces was his wife’s lover.’

  ‘And while you – Mr Smartyarse – were talking him out, where was the axe?’

  ‘On the floor between us.’

  ‘And what did you do? Sit there with a home-made tourniquet on, hoping he’d surrender before you bled to death?’

  ‘The old school tie. First use I’ve ever found for it.’

  Kolankiewicz thrust the bottle at him. ‘Twice a day till the soreness goes. Now scram. I give you my report as soon as I can.’

  8

  The gas fire in Troy’s office sputtered at him and refused the match. All over London, gas-holders sat squat on the skyline like gigantic gibuses. One of them must have been hit in last night’s raid, Troy thought. He twisted the tap on and off in the hope of jerking the fire into life. He heard the soft click of the door opening and looked up to see the Squad Commander, Superintendent Onions. Onions leaned on the edge of Troy’s desk and folded his arms.

  ‘Been asking for you,’ he said softly in his Rochdale baritone.

  Troy stood up and flicked the dust off his trousers and wondered if this was a reprimand. Onions was a bull of a man – five foot nine of packed muscle – with a bull’s unpredictability, stubbornness and unprepossessing appearance. Troy had never been certain of his age, but guessed at fifty – the hair, long since grey, was ruthlessly clipped at the back and sides, leaving the stubble of a crewcut along the top of his head – the bright blue eyes still burned brightly in the lined face. Onions looked sharp and bullet-headed, the intensity of his gaze at odds with his sheer bulk and with his almost thoughtless appearance. He dressed habitually in the manner of the older generation; a heavy double-breasted suit in a dull shade of oxblood enlivened only by a thin scarlet stripe and wonderfully counter-pointed by regulation-issue black Metropolitan Police boots. It was, Troy reflected, the kind of suit Hitler favoured, but for the fact that the Führer seemed to have frequent difficulty finding the matching trousers first thing in the morning. Troy knew for a fact that in the complexity of Onions’s nature there lay an element of insecurity – he wore both belt and braces. Onions it had been who’d rescued Troy from Leman Street and made him a sergeant. His advocacy of Troy had brought Troy to the brink of an early inspectorship. It was expected any day. But the relationship could be fractious. Outguessing Onions was pointless. Most of the time, in the privacy of his office or Troy’s, they were on Christian name terms. But there were days when they weren’t. And if they weren’t they weren’t.