Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  16

  It took Troy most of the following morning to persuade the motor pool to fill up his Bullnose Morris with enough petrol to get him out to Bradwell-on-Sea and back. In the garage at the Yard, a man in greasy overalls had looked over his chit as though he thought Troy had printed it himself.

  Troy was in his office stuffing a briefcase for the trip when the phone rang

  ‘Ah. Found you,’ said Anna. ‘I have a definite match on blood group. That disgusting handkerchief you left is clotted with type O. Kolankiewicz is still being unspeakable, but says to tell you the bones in the bag could be part of the same body as the arm – that is there are no left arm bones in the bag, and the right arm is the same size, although many other smaller bones are also missing. Should stand up in court.’

  ‘What news on the Tower beach corpse?’

  ‘Worse. Everything. Every single damn thing is missing. The only option left was the body itself, so I enquired about the possibility of exhumation. Forget it. The cemetery took a direct hit six weeks ago.’

  ‘So much for a fine and private place.’

  ‘Sod Marvell,’ she said, ‘more like Hieronymus Bosch. A charnel house in the mud. Sorry.’

  ‘Where is Kolankiewicz, by the way?’

  ‘Scrubbing up for a dissection. Cambridgeshire constabulary have a tricky one for him. He spent part of the morning with that arm of yours and kept muttering about trousers.’

  ‘Trousers?’

  ‘That’s what it sounded like to me.’

  Troy rang off, hoping that when Kolankiewicz finally surfaced from his Polish misery it would all yield something constructive. Troy rooted around in his desk drawer to see if he still had toothpaste and a razor for a possible overnight. He looked up. Silently Onions had entered the room. He was clutching the chit. He sat in the upright chair on the far side of Troy’s desk and scratched at his cheek with the hand that held the chit.

  ‘I take it you can’t handle this by phone?’ he said.

  ‘You’ve met Malnick. Any answers I can get out of him will mean nothing if I can’t see his face when he speaks.’

  ‘Do we call our fellow officers liars?’

  ‘No. But I do call this one stupid and devious. And that’s a bad combination.’

  Onions took a fountain pen from his breast pocket and scribbled his signature across the chit. Troy closed his briefcase, and hoped he could make a getaway. The fringes of London could jam solid with troop convoys these days and a journey could take twice as long as it used to before the war.

  ‘Hendon?’ Onions asked simply, and Troy knew he had no quick escape.

  ‘Everything’s gone. Not a paper-clip left in place.’

  ‘Ah . . . so you smell conspiracy?’

  ‘Smell it? Stan, I can touch it, it’s tangible, solid, inescapable. If Malnick is part of it, which I very much doubt by the way, he’ll be as slippery as an eel. As it is he’ll play up his injured innocence and think I’m directly accusing him.’

  ‘Which you’re not?’

  The door burst open. A breathless Wildeve rushed in and began to gabble before he had even noticed the presence of Onions.

  ‘Do you know how many Germans and Austrians and other assorted enemies there are in this country?’

  ‘About seventy-five thousand,’ Troy replied.

  ‘Oh. You do know.’

  Onions stood up. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said.

  Troy could have sworn that Wildeve blushed as Onions looked directly at him. He recalled that in his early days Onions’s gorgon gaze had been utterly mysterious, as likely to be mere curiosity as silent reprimand.

  ‘My brother was interned,’ Troy continued. ‘I looked into it. What have you found?’

  ‘Well, they only fingerprinted those they interned in 1940, that is largely people in categories A and B, and that’s less than a third of the total. Even then they reckon there were well over five hundred they never even caught up with. They said they couldn’t mount a search themselves, but I’ve got a uniform on it, so it’s being done.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Days. Perhaps a week. At least. Nothing in CRO. Whoever he was he had no form.’

  Onions thrust the chit at Troy and left without another word. ‘Have I upset him?’ said Wildeve.

  ‘No – I’ve just confronted him with a situation he hates. I think we can count Hitler and the Luftwaffe out of the conspiracy,’ Troy said, ‘but everybody else in.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ Troy said, ‘that the plot thickens. Unfortunately a lot now depends on Malnick, which is why I’m not giving him any warning. If I phone him he can get off the line and cook up a story. I’m playing it down for Stan, but I wouldn’t trust Malnick to see old ladies across the road.’

  ‘You don’t surely think a policeman would destroy files?’ Wildeve almost whispered the sentence, as though it were a heresy best unuttered.

  ‘Somebody did.’

  17

  Troy took the Bullnose Morris through the battered fringes of East London once more, a snaking crawl around pot-holes and debris out via the boroughs on either side of the Lea Valley where entire streets stood roofless and windowless, houses quilted in cardboard and tarpaulin, shops that had gone from being more open than usual – one of the war’s more short-lived jokes – to being simply, perhaps permanently shut. He found it hard to believe a second time in the political daydream of homes fit for heroes – the heroes, as he saw it, had by and large been the civilian population, sixty-odd thousand of whom had died, and, heroism being a finite resource, many had fled from the Blitz never to return. He wondered what inducement other than the familiarity and illusory safety in one’s own origins would lure people back, found it impossible to imagine East London recovering. Beyond this where London met Essex were places like Hornchurch, swamped by the RAF and the USAF, whose aerodromes were scattered up the east coast, shattering the nights of the sleepy dormitory towns of the thirties and the rural outposts of Langham and Bentwaters and Bradwell. The countryside purred with the sound of engines.

  It was almost dusk. The sign of the Green Man swung in the wind blowing off the North Sea. Troy pushed on the door marked Snug and glanced around the bar. It thronged with young airmen, mostly Canadians and New Zealanders, and mostly looking as fresh-faced as schoolboys. There were only two faces over thirty, and they were making the least noise, the barman and a morose-looking figure who sat alone at a table in the bay with a glass of sherry in front of him. His hair rose up in ridges like corrugated cardboard and although only fortyish he was assuming the jowlly look of a lugubrious bloodhound. He stared directly at Troy and seemed not to recognise him. Troy knew him at once although he had not seen him since the days of his father’s pre-war dinner parties when the old man had tried to woo him from his job at Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express to his own Evening Herald. It was Tom Driberg, now MP for somewhere or other, better known as William Hickey. He had turned Alexei Troy down, but had gone on allowing himself to be wooed and dined on many occasions. Troy had no idea that Driberg had any connection with Bradwell. He approached cautiously, knowing his reputation, but telling himself he was too old and most certainly the wrong class to appeal to Driberg’s cultivated taste.

  ‘Do I know you?’ he said bluntly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘Frederick Troy. I’m Alex Troy’s son.’

  ‘Yes . . . yes . . .’ he mused. ‘Didn’t you join the RAF?’

  He motioned to the empty chair opposite, and his face began to shed its demeanour of thinly concealed misery.

  ‘No. The police.’

  Troy thought Driberg flinched, and was certain he saw the blood drain from his face. By way of reassurance he added quickly, ‘I’m here to see an old colleague who’s joined up. I thought he might be here.’

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ Driberg said, composure regained. ‘The dry sherry’s passable and they keep a red wine just for me, not that I’d recommend it – but the
thought counts. God knows where they get it.’

  Troy asked for a glass of Indian tonic water and took the seat opposite Driberg. Over his shoulder he could see the bar, and that what he had taken for a large mirror behind it was in fact the view across the pumps and optics into the saloon bar. There was another crowd of RAF servicemen, almost a mirror image of the present crowd but for the presence in their midst of an older man who appeared to be holding forth on some subject that swung his young audience between laughter and derision. Tall, angular and at least twenty years older than anyone else around him, Inspector Malnick had traded one shade of blue for another and had teased out a clipped moustache into something approaching a parody of a handlebar. Troy watched in fascination, so pointedly that Driberg squirmed around in his seat to see the object of Troy’s bad manners – Malnick’s bony hands flattened out into the wings of an imagined aircraft swooping and rising as he told some tale that Troy thought was bound to be improbable. He thought he caught the word ‘prang’ filtered through the hubbub and urged on him by wishful lip-reading. On the chests of most young men around Malnick were the wings of pilots or the winged Os of the observers, and the ribbons of colour splashed against the pale blue of battledress where medals had been awarded. No such adorned Malnick’s blouse. He was clearly ground crew and just as clearly hated it. As his hand brought his plane up into a sharp ascent his eyes met Troy’s and they locked in a long, intent gaze shot through with fear, regret, suspicion and plain embarrassment. The hand froze. He snatched it back and shook it as though he had just been burnt. He blushed and the crowd of youngsters roared with laughter. One or two of them slapped him on the back, someone called out for ‘another pint for the old bluffer’. Malnick continued to stare silently back at Troy through the row of optics, almost oblivious to the noise and the centrality of his own place in it, and Troy knew at once how he should handle Mr Malnick.

  ‘You will excuse me, won’t you,’ he said to Driberg. ‘But I think I’ve found what I was looking for.’

  ‘Don’t let the fool buttonhole you all night. The Raf turfed me out of the Lodge, but I’ve a cottage down on the quay these days. Come and have a nightcap. Bed for the night if you need one.’

  Malnick turned his back on his audience and headed for the door. Troy met him in the hallway between the two bars.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Malnick. I really didn’t mean to drag you away.’

  ‘You have all the same. I take it this is of some importance?’

  Troy stopped himself from reacting to the pomposity of the man. A little flattery in circumstances where Malnick was accustomed to none might yet yield a dividend.

  ‘Truth to tell I rather need your advice about a matter. Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘No,’ said Malnick. ‘It’s time I was heading back to the Lodge. If it’s as important as you say you’d better come up.’

  Troy could hear Bradwell Lodge before he could see it through the evening gloom. It was as raucous as the Green Man. A child of nineteen or twenty came haring down the drive, trouserless and pursued by half a dozen others waving pillows and cushions. It was, Troy recalled, known in his schooldays – a time he looked back on with loathing – as a scragging. Malnick stepped swiftly aside, not even pausing in his polemic on the strategic importance of a ground crew and traffic controller to the national war effort – but England had long since overflowed with such people. Troy met on a daily basis men for whom the war had inevitably come down to a personal conflict between themselves and Hitler.

  They had scarcely made it to the front door of the Lodge when the same pursuit swung full circle and the trouserless officer nipped smartly between the portals only to collide with another buffoon who had thought it a good wheeze to slide down the Adam staircase on a tin tray.

  ‘And what’s worse,’ Malnick appeared to have changed the subject, ‘I’ve known the bastards to spend an evening chucking a chamber-pot full of beer from one end of the hall to the other!’

  It occurred to Troy that perhaps the source of Malnick’s indignation was that no one had asked him to join in. It must be a soul-searing experience, he thought, to want so much to serve your country, in one guise or another, and to do so only in the capacity of a misplaced and unrespected housemaster.

  Malnick flung open the door to what appeared to have been a breakfast room and now served him as an office. A wooden label on the outside said ‘Mess Officer’ but the word Officer had been crudely crossed out.

  Malnick stretched himself out behind the huge expanse of a partner’s desk that took up half the room, swinging gently on the revolving chair, revelling softly in the attention and deference Troy was fighting to remember to pay him. He flipped the button on one of the hip pockets of his battledress. He drew out a cigarette-rolling machine and a flat, round, worn tin of rolling tobacco. Another affectation of youth. When he and Troy had last met he smoked Black Cat cork-tipped from a packet. Malnick sprinkled the tobacco down the groove of the machine and rolled in a white paper, using every gesture to emphasise that Troy was waiting on his words. Troy wasn’t. He was wondering how to get around to the subject of the man’s identity.

  ‘You were a constable, weren’t you?’ Malnick asked.

  ‘Yes. I’m a Sergeant now. Perhaps I’ll be an Inspector one day.’

  ‘One day,’ Malnick retorted. ‘Now, what’s on your mind?’

  ‘Well . . . Yes, couldn’t think who else to turn to. A rather tricky case.’

  Malnick bristled with unrestrained pride. A flick of a minute lever on the side of his machine and a thin, bent specimen of tobacconist’s droop popped pathetically to the surface. He lit it all the same.

  ‘It’s one you know already. A man was found shot in the face on Tower beach. About a year ago.’

  ‘I knew it,’ he exclaimed. ‘I knew it. They couldn’t crack it! They had to call in the Yard.’

  Malnick chortled almost into open laughter. Troy could not be sure how much of it was fakery, but the pleasure in other people’s failure seemed real enough.

  ‘And here you are!’ Malnick revelled.

  ‘And here I am. They told me at your old nick that you might be here, so I . . .’ Troy let the sentence trail off, hoping that Malnick was at least reassured as to his motives.

  ‘Quite, quite,’ muttered Malnick, blowing smoke towards the ceiling.

  ‘What I was wondering . . .’ Troy struggled for the right measure of helplessness and flattery, ‘was about your notes.’

  Malnick stared back, the smile of smugness fading fast. Troy knew at once he had wrong-footed himself and quickly threw in a qualifier.

  ‘We all know things we don’t put in notes. Certain feelings and suspicions that don’t quite work on paper. Copper’s intuitions, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Of course.’ Malnick paused. ‘There was an element of the macabre.’

  ‘Macabre?’

  ‘A touch of sadism, I’d say.’

  ‘Sadism?’

  ‘They shot him twice, you see. Got him out on the beach and put one through his leg. Just for the fun of it if you ask me.’

  Troy wondered. Was this just lurid fantasy? It so sharply deviated from the cool, scientific analysis that Anna Pakenham had offered.

  ‘As though one of them wanted to hurt him. Deliberately wanted to hurt him.’

  ‘What makes you think there were two of them?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a feeling. As you say, not the sort of thing you’d put down in notes.’

  ‘No footprints?’

  ‘Tide had been in and out before we found him. I’m not surprised you’re baffled. It was one of the trickiest I’d come across. Scarce a thing to go on.’

  ‘It would help enormously to hear your reactions to the one concrete fact we do have. The body.’

  ‘You’ve seen the picture.’

  ‘There’s a world of difference between a photograph and the flesh. It’s how you saw it, how you first reacted to it that would help me now.’ In for a p
enny, thought Troy, and ventured as offhandedly as he knew, the one question that mattered, ‘Perhaps you could describe the corpse?’

  Malnick seemed convinced by this preposterous bluff. He set down the damp stub of his misshapen cigarette and reached behind him to where a mountain of cardboard folders were neatly stacked on the shelves. He pulled down a volume that looked to Troy like a child’s stamp album, or at least very like the one he had had himself, thick and tattered, bound in green leatherette with faded gold leaf lines on the spine and cover. Malnick laid the book on the desk, with the word Album facing Troy.

  ‘I’ve kept this over a number of years. Never quite sure of its value, but pretty certain that one day the record of an honest job done by a serving police officer might be of some contribution to the science of detection.’

  He flipped open the cover. Troy could not believe his eyes. The man kept a scrapbook of his cases! The arrogance of it! Furthermore the arrogance of a scrapbook not merely of his successes but of his failures, which he scarcely seemed to see as failures. Malnick flipped the pages, and the book lay open at the Tower beach murder of 1939 – the case of the drowned child. There was a clipping from a local paper of a proud Inspector Malnick outside the court. In the background, Troy was certain, the small man with his back to the camera was himself. Page after page of testimony to Malnick’s egotism rolled by. Troy hoped the look on his face managed to pass off incredulity as awe. Malnick flipped on to a brown, fading chunk of newsprint depicting himself and the haul from a bullion robbery in 1941.

  ‘Now,’ Malnick was saying, turning a fat wadge of pages, ‘you take a look at chummy here.’

  An eight-by-eight police photographer’s black and white filled a whole page. A close-up of a man’s face, a man who had been shot in the left cheek. Troy heard the whistling intake of his own breath and masked his surprise. He could not believe that Malnick had kept a copy of this photograph. Nor would anyone else, particularly anyone who thought they’d successfully eradicated all trace of the victim from police and forensic records. He was in awe, not of Malnick’s meticulousness or efficiency but of his own blinding good fortune. Malnick prattled again, taking Troy quite literally and offering a fanciful appraisal of the victim’s character, where all Troy had been hoping for was a description, but Troy had ceased to listen. He turned a page. There was a full-length shot of the body as it had first been found, lying on its left cheek, with one arm flung out behind it and one leg twisted under the other. The grotesque puppet that was death.