Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  ‘Get to the point,’ said Troy, checking his watch against the clock high on the wall above Wildeve’s head.

  ‘Sorry – what I mean is she isn’t that sort. She’s . . . well . . . she’s a bluestocking I suppose. Furiously intellectual – and I do mean both of those words. I saw some fine set-tos between her and Old Fermanagh when I was a boy. She despises the rituals and mores of her class. Johnny Lissadel once told me she’d rather spend an evening with Sidney Webb than a day with the Aga Khan.’

  Troy smiled at the contrast. At the familiarity – her class was their class, his and Wildeve’s, and if they too did not in some measure despise the mores and rituals of their class they would scarcely have become policemen. Troy wondered if Wildeve recognised this.

  ‘I can’t say I’m surprised at anything so far,’ Wildeve continued. ‘A bit boring, a bit spartan. Just what you’d expect really.’

  ‘So you followed her home?’

  ‘I did indeed. She spoke to no one until we got into the square just north of Tite Street. It’s all down to allotments now. She had a few words with an old feller who’s raising a pig there.’

  ‘Anything in it?’

  ‘Good manners. That’s about all. A kind word to the lower element.’

  ‘Should we be looking at him?’

  ‘I doubt it. He was in a Civil Defence outfit. LCC Heavy Rescue. Must be sixty I suppose. Big fellow. Completely bald. Whatever she may think now, it’s still second nature to her to take a little deference from the deferential classes. I had a quick word with him. Lady Di keeps the allotment next his – last vestige of a short spell in the Land Army. As I recall they called her up and slung her out in less than six months.’

  ‘And so to bed?’

  ‘Quite. But I was there till one just to be sure she didn’t go out again.’

  Troy got up to look out of the window, skirting the beam that kept Scotland Yard from falling on his head. Outside it was what Troy called Noah’s Ark weather. The street was empty of pedestrians, the buses rolled by full to the brim, and the Thames itself was high against the containing wall of the Bazalgette’s embankment. Wildeve had his head on one side and was attempting to dry one ear on a large monogrammed handkerchief. He resembled a morris dancer manqué rather than a policeman.

  ‘Jack,’ said Troy ‘You can have the night off. I’ll watch her tonight.’

  ‘Thanks. I do appreciate it. I’d hate to drown while we clutched at straws.’

  Beneath the ingénu, beneath the upper-class frothiness, Wildeve had a mind that from time to time could startle Troy by its blunt appraisal.

  ‘We have a definite connection,’ he said. ‘Brack was at Wolinski’s. She did steal a photograph of our man.’

  ‘Precisely put, Freddie, she probably stole a photograph of someone we think might be our man. But you surely don’t think Diana Brack’s got herself mixed up with a murderer?’

  27

  The windscreen wipers on the Bullnose Morris scarcely kept pace with the rain. Troy inched the car carefully round St James’s Square, with the side window down, looking for the familiar marks of an American base. Two caped, white-helmeted MPs stood in front of Norfolk House on the eastern side. As Troy eased his car in behind a large Packard in camouflage browns one of them came over and banged on the roof at him. Troy stepped out into a solid wall of rain to see the man pointing at the Packard and shouting over the noise of water drumming on steel.

  ‘You can’t park here!’

  ‘Business,’ said Troy, moving towards the shelter of the doorway.

  ‘Oh yeah. With whom?’

  Once under cover, Troy held up his warrant card. The second soldier had raised a hand to his hip under his cape as though holding the butt of a gun.

  ‘It’s OK, Lou,’ said the first soldier. ‘He’s a cop!’ He handed the card back to Troy and asked, ‘Who you seeing?’

  ‘Zelig. Colonel Zelig.’

  He beckoned to Troy to follow and stepped into the house. He pulled a clipboard from the wall, took off a glove and ran a finger down a list of names.

  ‘Eleven o’clock, right?’

  Troy nodded.

  ‘Basement. Two floors down.’ He pointed towards the staircase curling around a brass lattice-work lift-shaft. ‘Show your ID to the guy in the corridor when you get down.’

  Two flights and one ritual later Troy found himself in a windowless, warm room forty feet under the streets of London. The room was empty. All that security just to guard a desk and a typewriter, thought Troy. The door swung open and a WAC backed into the room, keeping the door ajar with her hip and swivelling round to face Troy. She carried a cup of coffee in one hand and a greasy, steaming brown paper bag in the other. As she turned Troy found himself face to face with a small, good-looking blonde, with hair so short and and masculine it was almost a crewcut.

  ‘You want Zelly?’ she asked in a voice rich with deep, throaty vowel sounds.

  Troy nodded, still taking in the startling appearance. Her uniform fitted her like a glove, tucked and pleated, outlandishly emphasising the hour-glass figure, with its tightly rounded bosom and pinch-bottle waist.

  ‘Gimme your name and I’ll tell him you’re here. You caught him at elevenses.’

  ‘Very English,’ said Troy.

  ‘Also very Zelly,’ she said. ‘Any excuse to eat.’

  She went through the same motions again, flicking down the handle of the inner door with her elbow and shoving it aside with her hip. Troy caught the door and propped it open. She smiled momentarily at him as she ducked under his arm.

  ‘Your name!’ she whispered hoarsely.

  ‘Troy,’ he whispered back.

  Looking past her Troy saw the Colonel get up from his desk. He yanked a blind down over a map of Italy.

  ‘Dammit! Can’t you knock?’ he croaked.

  He pulled down another blind over a map of France in a showy pantomime of secrecy. The WAC set Zelig’s elevenses on his desk.

  ‘It’s OK. I think he’s one of ours. Mr Troy. He’s your eleven o’clock.’

  Zelig ignored Troy and snatched at the paper bag. The door banged shut as the WAC left. Zelig had done and said nothing to indicate his acknowledgement of Troy’s presence. He bit into the hamburger and yelled through a mouthful of bread and meat.

  ‘Tosca!!!’

  The WAC stuck her head round the door.

  ‘Whaddya want?’ It hardly seemed the way for a sergeant to address a colonel.

  ‘Is this mayo? I asked for mayo. I always have mayo on my burger for Chrissake.’

  ‘It’s English,’ she replied simply.

  ‘English what?’

  ‘They call it salad cream.’

  Zelig pulled a face of disgust and stared down at the mess in his right hand.

  ‘I guess,’ she added, ‘it’s what they eat when they can’t get mayo. You could call it ersatz mayo.’

  She pulled back and closed the door. Zelig was still staring at his hamburger, with enough meat in it to use up the average British ration for a week. Troy sat down in the only chair on his side of the desk. For the first time Zelig seemed to notice him. He took his seat again and with it a huge bite at his burger. However distasteful he seemed hell bent on finishing it in three bites. Troy thought if he didn’t speak soon he would try counting his chins, or perhaps the hairs on his head. He was fifteen stone and bald but for a halo of stubble that circled his skull just above the tops of his ears.

  ‘Sho?’ Zelig said, showering the top of his desk with breadcrumbs.

  ‘I’m Sergeant Troy of the Murder Squad at Scotland Yard. Squadron Leader Pym at MI5 referred me to you. There’s one or two things you might be able to help us with.’

  ‘I doubt that.’ Zelig gulped down enough food to choke himself to death and snatched another bite and a slurp of coffee. The hamburger was reduced to a moon-shaped sliver. For someone so obviously addicted to food he seemed to extract remarkably little pleasure from it.

  ‘I need
to know if your people have brought anyone out of France or Germany—’

  ‘My people?’ Zelig emphasised ‘people’ as though it were a meaningless word in a language he did not speak.

  ‘Your . . . ‘Troy sought for the right word, ‘agents . . . You do have agents in Europe?’

  ‘No comment.’

  Troy felt like hitting Zelig. Surely Pym had briefed him on the purpose of the visit. Why else was he seeing him? Why then was he forcing Troy to dot the i’s and cross the t’s?

  ‘You don’t seem to be in the picture, Colonel.’

  ‘Rough me up a sketch. I’m all ears.’

  All gut more like, thought Troy.

  ‘We are investigating a death – murder we believe – we also believe that the victim was German.’

  ‘One less Kraut to worry about.’

  Troy ignored the remark. ‘I’ve established that he was not a spy, and as far as I can that he was not a refugee. I was wondering therefore if he was . . . ’

  Troy couldn’t think of the right word – there seemed to be no single word which simply and precisely described what Troy thought the late Herr Brand to be. But, spoken or not, Zelig seemed to know it.

  ‘Nothin’ doin’,’ he said.

  The door opened again and the WAC hurried in and placed a note in front of Zelig.

  ‘Hey. Just a minute, Sergeant.’

  She held on to the door and coyly looked back at him over her right shoulder. Troy followed Zelig’s gaze, from her backside down to her stiletto heels.

  ‘Is that skirt army issue?’

  ‘It’s green, isn’t it?’ she replied.

  ‘So’re dollar bills ‘n’ apples. It’s too damn tight – grips your ass like it’s been stuck on. You walk like you been sewn together at the knees. And those shoes.’

  ‘What about ’em?’

  ‘They ain’t regulation neither.’

  ‘Up yours,’ said Tosca, and banged out.

  It occurred to Troy that there was a certain choreography to their banter – a vulgarian’s Burns and Allen, and it all seemed to be so timed as to prevent Zelig ever getting to an answer. If Troy did not seize the initiative now he might as well forget it. He turned on his best copper-in-the-witness-box style in the hope of dragging Zelig back to the subject.

  ‘Have you brought out any Germans who have subsequently gone missing?’ he said clearly and succinctly.

  ‘Like I said,’ the fat man replied almost nonchalantly, ‘nothin’ doin’.’

  ‘Do you mean that you have or you haven’t?’ Troy persisted.

  ‘I mean,’ said Zelig, ‘that it’s none of your damn business.’

  For several seconds they sat in a silence emphasised and punctuated by the sound of Zelig finishing hamburger and coffee. Troy weighed up the odds. If the man really was the buffoon he appeared to be then he probably knew nothing – after all the British army was full of desk-bound majors, pushing paper around simply to prevent them repeating the charge of the Light Brigade, and what better use for the Colonel Chinstrap of the American army than to have him liaise with the British. Or was he so consummately playing the buffoon that he would never reveal a speck of what he knew? The mystery remained. Why had Zelig gone to the trouble of seeing him? Just for the pleasure of saying no?

  Troy got up, thanked Zelig for his time in the briefest of polite terms and headed for the door.

  ‘Any time,’ he heard Zelig croak as the door closed and he found himself once more looking at Sergeant Tosca. Clearly, he had interrupted something. A tall, languid-looking American in the uniform of a major sat on the end of her desk, one leg swinging gently, his head bent over to her as though simultaneously signifying relaxation and flirtation – sharing a secret. He chuckled deeply. She smiled in return, and as Troy’s presence became obvious the two pairs of eyes swivelled towards him.

  ‘All through?’ she said.

  The Major was extracting a cigarette from a large silver case. He snapped it to and tapped the end of the cigarette on the desk-top.

  ‘You have a light?’ he said to Troy, and aimed the cigarette towards him.

  Troy shook his head and blinked at the sudden flash as Tosca struck the wheel on a Zippo lighter and held it out to the Major. He bent closer, drew on the tobacco and muttered something Troy couldn’t hear. She laughed in response, listening to the Major but looking at Troy.

  ‘Yes thank you. All through,’ said Troy.

  He left feeling that a shared, exclusive joke just about summed up his dealings with Britain’s closest ally. He sat in the car listening to the rain beat a tattoo on the roof, wondering how much of this was down to Pym, how much of it simply natural bloody-mindedness on the part of Zelig. Would Pym have gone to such trouble to make a fool of him? Was he too just passing the buck – making Troy chase Zelig with questions for which Pym already had the answers?

  The Packard staff car was still in front of him. The driver’s door opened. The WAC lieutenant-chauffeur walked around the boot between the Packard and the Morris, and stood erect by the near passenger door. Troy looked back at Norfolk House. One of the MPs was coming across the pavement opening a large umbrella, the other stood to attention by the door. Suddenly Troy knew exactly who they were expecting. He reached the step just as Eisenhower walked under the cover of the umbrella. He’d crossed some invisible frontier – a forearm, half-buried in leather gauntlet, swung gently across his chest, and the MP spoke softly to him.

  ‘Far enough, buddy. Whatever it is, now is not your moment.’

  For a second Troy and Ike were eye to eye, then Ike was in the staff car and moving out into St James’s Square.

  ‘Sorry. You weren’t down to see the man were you?’ said the MP.

  ‘No,’ said Troy, ‘no, I wasn’t.’

  The rain was beginning to soak through his overcoat. He went quickly back to the car. Was it worth the try? One bald-headed American was probably much the same as any other bald-headed American. The only difference lay in the amount of scrambled egg on the cap. Though, being fair, Troy felt certain Ike had better table manners.

  28

  The woman at the front desk at MI5 HQ in St James’s Street looked at Troy’s warrant card and phoned up.

  ‘Squadron Leader Pym is in conference,’ she told Troy. Throughout the day, at odd intervals, she told Troy the same thing over the phone to Scotland Yard. At six o’clock Troy was debating with himself whether to tell Onions, buttonhole Pym at Albany or relieve Wildeve at Tite Street as he had promised. He tried Pym’s home number, which he had memorised the night before.

  ‘I’ve been trying to reach you all day.’

  ‘So I’ve heard. Troy, you just don’t know when to give up do you?’

  ‘I’d be a poor excuse for a copper if I gave up in the face of a crude stonewalling like the one Zelig gave me.’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with me. I can’t help you any more than I have.’

  Troy could hear the tremor in Pym’s voice, the tone hovering somewhere between exasperation and anger.

  ‘If Zelig had no intention of telling me anything, then why did he agree to see me?’

  ‘I don’t know, and I wish to God you’d stop asking. I cannot, cannot, cannot talk to you!’

  Troy was silent for a moment. He heard Pym sigh deeply and knew he had let slip something he now regretted. He wondered what kind of a dressing-down Pym had spent the day listening to. Who had been giving him the hell that betrayed itself now in his exhaustion and nervousness? Blurting out the one thing he should not.

  ‘You know, Neville, if you wanted me to give up there was no more sure fire way of ensuring I didn’t than by telling me what you just told me. Who’s told you not to talk to me?’

  Pym’s tone was subdued now, spent of anger and shot through with weariness. ‘Troy, I can’t help you. Really I can’t. If only you knew . . . If you have any sense of . . . if you . . . for God’s sake let this one drop.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

>   ‘Then don’t drag me down with you.’

  Troy heard Pym put down the receiver. Whatever doubts he had had about the cover-up of von Ranke’s murder and the motive for it – for Brand’s and Wolinski’s – blew away like will o’ the wisp. Pym had lit a flame in his imagination and he could feel it tingle down into his fingertips – the sheer pleasure of pursuit. He caught the bus out to the Chelsea Embankment to meet Wildeve.

  29

  At the corner of Tite Street and Royal Hospital Road Wildeve was nowhere to be seen. But that was just as well. If Troy could see him so could anyone else. He walked on towards the Chelsea Embankment.

  ‘Psst.’ He heard as he passed the house opposite number 55.

  ‘Psst.’ Again. With more urgency if a psst could have it.

  Troy looked down to see Wildeve’s hand groping towards his ankle from the area steps of the house.

  ‘Down here!’ he whispered.

  Troy swung open the gate to find Wildeve sitting on the steps with his eyes at ground level. He slipped down next to him.

  ‘These people seem to have closed up for the duration,’ Wildeve whispered. ‘Absolutely perfect. The better hole, eh?’

  ‘Jack, if they’ve gone away why are we whispering?’

  Wildeve opened his mouth, but Troy waved it shut. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing. I got here around noon. Took me that long to dry out. I know she’s in. I’ve seen her at the first-floor window a couple of times.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘I think so. The girl’s come and gone a few times. And there’s been the usual handful of tradesmen up and down to the basement door. If there’s anyone else up there with her they’ve been here since the morning. I’ve seen no one.’