Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  Troy shook his head and looked at the egg rather than at her.

  ‘It’s serious. You come in with that conscience-of-the-world look on your face, so it’s serious.’

  ‘He’s murdered four people.’

  ‘Whaaaaaa!!!!’

  Her grip slackened, the iron tilted and the egg slid sideways. Troy caught it neatly on the fish-slice before it could land on her. The hot fat dripped stinging on to her thigh.

  ‘Ow, ow, ow.’

  ‘I think we’d better stop. It might be easier to get through breakfast on another subject.’

  ‘No, I’ll be OK. You can’t quit now. I’m made of tough stuff. I just wasn’t expecting it to be that serious. Who’s he killed?’

  Troy slid the egg back on to the iron, and cut a slice of bread ready for it.

  ‘A couple of German refugees. A Pole who worked in the docks. And a policeman who was following him.’

  ‘Holy shit. Why would he do a thing like that?’

  ‘It’s his job. Dirty tricks you said.’

  ‘I also said not here.’

  ‘What precisely is his job for the army?’

  ‘I’m not supposed to know.’

  ‘But you do.’

  ‘Jimmy’s a boaster. He can’t resist telling. He pulls off something fancy, sooner or later, he’ll start hinting at it. Over the last year or so it’s become obvious what he does. He’s one of those guys gets parachuted into occupied France. Does a few heroic stunts, gets pulled out again. He’s got good French and German. It figures.’

  ‘Does he bring out people? French, Germans, Resistance fighters, people who might be useful to our war effort?’

  ‘Yes. We do that a lot, but don’t ask me for cases. I know the general drift of what goes on. There’s no way Zelly would ever let me see anything on an individual operation. He hates putting things on paper.’

  Troy slid the egg off on to a slice of bread, took the iron from her and set it down end-up on the carpet. He handed the plate to her. She bit into the egg, yellow yolk cascading over her bottom lip, a puzzled look on her face as she stared at him over the top of her breakfast.

  ‘Shame there’s no coffee.’

  ‘Can you find out if he brought out a German round about February this year?’

  ‘You’re asking me to spy on Zelly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I guess so. I’m not crazy about it, but if I didn’t spy on him half the time anyway all I’d know about Allied Operations is what I learn from typing his letters to the Supply Officer complaining about the lack of peanut butter and mayonnaise in the PX.’

  She finished the sandwich in silence. Something evidently on her mind.

  ‘‘Who’d he kill last?’

  Troy handed her the iron again, and began to cook breakfast for himself.

  ‘The policeman. Last Tuesday night.’

  ‘The night you didn’t show.’

  ‘I was in Manchester Square, putting bits of human brain into cellophane bags.’

  She winced and grimaced at the words, but pressed on. ‘On Wednesday morning there was the most almighty panic going on in the office. Zelly was in before me, which is unheard of, and the scrambler on his phone was never off. I had to put my ear to the door. He talked to Jimmy and he talked to some of the top brass and he was in a stinker of a mood. He talked to a couple of guys at your MI5 too.’

  ‘He’d just come from a meeting with me at MI5.’

  ‘You were gunning for him, huh?’

  ‘Yes, but the matter that worries me is who’s gunning for me?’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  Troy talked as he ate. She put a finger to his lips, retrieved a precious smear of yolk and licked it.

  ‘The first time I saw you, were you expecting Wayne?’

  ‘No. He drops in occasionally. But he certainly wasn’t due that day. In fact you were the only appointment Zelly had, and that put his blood pressure up. He sure as hell didn’t want to see you.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering why he did. He told me absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Beats me.’

  ‘Unless, of course, he wasn’t seeing me. Wayne was.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Wayne came just to get a look at me. He knew there was a policeman tailing him. Sergeant Miller of Special Branch. He was alarmed at the idea that the man was now in touch with Zelig. He came to see me and to be seen. If I was the man he’d spotted, if I turned out to be Miller, his fears would have been confirmed. He was too close to things and Wayne knew he’d have to kill him. I wasn’t the policeman he’d seen. I was me. I’d no connection with Miller and what Miller was on to. I didn’t recognise Wayne. If I had, if I’d shown the faintest flicker of recognition, I would be lying in the morgue with a bullet in my head too. Sergeant Miller gained a few days of life. Wayne killed him when it was most convenient. But he could just as easily have killed me. What he didn’t know was that I spotted him later the same day coming out of his mistress’s house. That I’d made a connection he couldn’t even guess at. If he’d known I was on to him I doubt he’d have killed Miller.’

  ‘Well. He came in. He chatted about nothing. Then he left. But close to what? You’re investigating the murders. What else was he doing for your man to be close to?’

  ‘I’m guessing, but I think he’s infiltrated a Communist cell in the East End.’

  ‘No way! That’s not his brief. In London he just cools his heels. Gets in some R and R. He’s not supposed to do a thing in England.’

  ‘But he does. He kills people.’

  ‘Commies? He kills Commies? I thought you said he killed a couple of Germans. I don’t get it.’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  For a minute or two Troy ate in silence. Then Tosca leapt up and began to rummage around in the top drawer of the dressing-table. She tossed a key on to the carpet, and sat clutching a piece of stiff, white paper.

  Take it,’ she said. ‘It’s my spare. By tonight I should have something for you.’

  ‘There’s something I need now. His address?’

  ‘You don’t know his address?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue where he is. I’ve staked out Tite Street and . . . ’

  ‘And you’ve staked out my office. That guy in St James’s Square is a lemon. No – I doubt Jimmy will show his face. His official address is at that apartment block in Curzon Street we took over for officers. Marriot House. He has a couple of rooms, but I’ve never found him there. I figure he uses it as a letter drop and that’s about it. I had to go in once. It smelt stale. He keeps a change of clothes there, but I figure he spends a night there once in a blue moon. He lives with his women. Wherever they are. This is what you really need right now.’

  She laid the paper face up on the carpet. A mass of tiny photographs, six or seven to a row, perhaps thirty in all. Miniatures of Major Wayne, each marginally different, as though frozen from a moving picture.

  ‘It’s called polyphoto. Camera with a motor drive. They were all the rage in Washington, summer before the war. I had one done to send to my mom. I guess it brings out the cutes in people. I guess even Jimmy thinks he’s cute, though God knows you’d never think it yourself.’

  It was signed ‘Jimmy XXX’. The full, moist upper lip, so much bigger than the lower, the liquid, smiling eyes. In a myriad of self-conscious poses.

  ‘I didn’t ask for it. He just gave it to me one day. I don’t even know why I kept it.’

  On his way back to Goodwins Court to bathe and change, Troy wondered about Tosca’s response. She had accepted everything he had said. Shocked, but accepting. There had been no questions along the lines of ‘How do you know?’ or ‘Are you sure?’ But then Wayne’s role was to kill. That, surely, was the ultimate dirty trick and commonplace enough for a soldier in wartime. Of course, he had lied to her about the connection. He knew why Wayne had gone to the trouble of cracking an East End cell, even though he was surprised to learn that the task was above and beyond orders. But, as eve
r, he wanted to put evidence before utterance. He couldn’t help wondering about the modest assessment she made of her own role at Norfolk House and the contrast it made with Edge’s version. He couldn’t help wondering about the game of slapstick that she played with him. Perhaps this was simply the way she was with men. But where in the Manhattan slapstick was there room for words like ‘aphoristically’?

  50

  Kolankiewicz was perched in front of the gas fire in Troy’s office. Hidden behind his News Chronicle. Wildeve laboured on an immense pile of papers, yawning all the time. Troy walked past them and pinned the polyphoto to the notice-board on the office wall and tapped it.

  ‘That’s our man,’ he said.

  Kolankiewicz dropped the paper and scuttled across the room, looked up at Wayne, fixing his spectacles to his nose with one hand.

  ‘Nasty piece of work,’ he said.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘A mean expression.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘That’s great. You should be a detective.’

  ‘Don’t be so fucking cocky. When you seen what I got you’ll be bloody impressed.’

  He pulled open his briefcase, and set three Cellophane bags on Troy’s desk.

  ‘I have good news. I have bad news. First shell, second and third shells, bullets from Manchester Square. You keep them. What can vanish once can vanish twice. The bullets are forty-five. The shells as you so rightly said were fired from an automatic. There are spring-loading clip marks on the sides, the like of which you do not get with a revolver. Now the good news.’

  He took out two large photographs and pinned them to the board next to the myriad faces of Wayne.

  ‘Now, in the absence of any other bullet with which to make any comparison I did all I could with the shells. These enlargements will show you what I mean. If you take the clip marks as indicating nine o’clock, then the firing pin in each case would appear to have hit at ten past two – in archery terms an inner. So far, so thin. I don’t rate such evidence. There is too much room for coincidence. But . . . ’

  He took two more photographs from his briefcase and tacked them over the first set.

  ‘Look at these. Blown up to the power fifty. Look at the pattern of the pin upon the cartridge case.’

  Troy looked as closely as he could.

  ‘They’re identical.’

  ‘Quite so. Presuming the same place on the clock, the two shells, from Stepney, from Manchester Square, bear the marks of being detonated by the same firing pin – or at worst two firing pins that have worn in precisely the same way.’

  ‘That’s . . . that’s brilliant!’

  ‘Effectively the two shells were fired by the same gun. Not as conclusive as having the bullet that killed Herr Cufflink, but . . . scientifically far from inexact. Now the bad news . . . ’

  ‘Bad news?’

  ‘It won’t stand up in court. At least, it’s never had to, because no one’s ever tried it.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Troy.

  ‘Think how many points of similarity you need with fingerprints. Think how likely it is that your man has ditched the gun.’

  ‘Think how often we catch them with it. Almost a sentimental attachment – killers for their weapons. They go on clutching it long after they’ve fired their last bullet at you, even though it’s as damning as Bill Sykes’s dog.’

  Kolankiewicz shrugged. ‘I offer this for what it’s worth. My feeling is that to date we have only circumstantial evidence, piss in wind. This, this I will go into court with. But we’d be the first.’

  Troy bent to look more closely at the photographs. He felt Kolankiewicz’s hands on the back of his head, probing in his hair.

  ‘What are you playing at?’

  ‘I heard you been in the wars. That’s quite a lump you still got. When was it?’

  ‘It was . . . it was . . . ’

  Troy realised he could not remember when he had been in Holborn station when the bomb had hit. He remembered the pain in his head and the blood-red cloud and the thought of them now seemed to bring both back. But he could not in honesty say whether the bomb had been last week or last month, and for a second or two could see Kolankiewicz only through a red mist, hear him only through the drumming of a blood-vessel somewhere over the left eye.

  ‘It was the week before last,’ said Wildeve.

  As little as that? Kolankiewicz looked all around Troy’s head, umming and aahing a little, and then took his head in both hands, twisted his face to the window and looked deep into his eyes.

  ‘You got eyes like a Polish peat bog,’ he said. ‘But the bad news is they let you out too soon.’

  ‘They didn’t let him out. He discharged himself,’ Wildeve said.

  ‘You’re a smartyarse.’

  ‘So you keep telling me.’

  ‘Bangs to the head can be trouble. You get any headaches?’

  Troy did not answer.

  ‘I see,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘Troy, see your doctor. As a favour to me. Don’t fuck with the head. It’s too near the brain.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ troy lied, ‘I will.’

  51

  The silver moonlight picked out Cable Street in every crack and pot-hole. What there was of intact road surface shone as though the tarmacadam had been Brylcreemed, throwing the piercing silver gleam back to the roving moon in its cloudless sky.

  Troy and Wildeve left the Bullnose Morris by Leman Street Post Office and walked along Cable Street parallel to the arches of the London to Tilbury line out of Fenchurch Street. Two drunks swayed towards them from the Shadwell end. One silent and giddy, the other raucous and leaping from pot-hole to pot-hole.

  ‘By the light of the silvery moon, we’ll sit an’ spoon, honeymoon, honeymoon, hunny wossaname . . . ’

  He stopped mid-puddle.

  ‘George, I’ve forgotten the bloody words.’

  George seemed hardly to care. He broke wind loudly and contemplated the dilemma.

  ‘Gizzanother then. Gizz bluebirds over the white fuckin’ cliffs of fuckin’ Dover. I ain’t ’eard that since this mornin’ at least. Wossa fuckin’ war comin’ to. I arst yer. Just when you want Vera fuckin’ Lynn an’ ’er white fuckin’ cliffs of white fuckin’ Dover there’s never one around. Just like fuckin’ coppers.’

  ‘Right you are, George. There are bad times just around the corner, just you wait an’ see. There’ll be Messershmitts over the white fuckin’ cliffs of wossname, just you wait an’ see . . . ’

  Troy and Wildeve parted around the songbird who teetered at the end of a nine-foot crater of a puddle. He took one step and sat down hard on his backside in a foot or more of water.

  ‘Aagh! I’m wet. My arse is all wet!’

  For the first time he seemed to notice his onlookers.

  ‘Gizzahand mate,’ he said to Troy.

  Troy looked down into the drunken, pleading eyes. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘There’s never a copper about when you want one is there?’

  A wail of self-pity went up. As loud as any siren. They walked on, deftly side-stepping George, and followed the line of arches.

  ‘Freddie, what exactly are we looking for?’

  ‘Signs of life.’

  ‘You don’t mean that people actually live in these?’

  ‘Not exactly, but Bonham reckons Edelmann has a shelter here.’

  When the Blitz first hit, the provision of shelters was appalling. Sydney Edelmann, Communist and local councillor, had kicked up a fuss about the conditions, persuaded MPs and the press down to the East End to look at the way the East-Enders had to live. Striking into the heartland of privilege he had even led a march on the Savoy to protest about the private shelter constructed deep underneath the famous hotel for the exclusive use of patrons. Dozens of Stepney’s disaffected crowded into the hotel at the sound of the alert; demanded shelter only to be met with the police. Reading an account in the papers the following day Troy had laughed o
ut loud at the news of Edelmann rightly meeting and defeating the challenge by invoking the Innkeeper’s Act. In his way he was the subtlest of barrack-room lawyers. Without his agitation Troy doubted that proper provision would ever have been made by way of mass shelters. The poor would have gone on spending their nights in stinking cellars with no lavatories and no water. But, victory achieved, on the return of the bombers for the ‘little’ Blitz Edelmann would not use the new shelters himself, preferring, it was said, the privacy of his fortified railway arch.

  They had passed and looked over more than a dozen arches. Most had been covered in with sheets of corrugated steel and served as scrap-metal yards – ‘Help Build a Spitfire’ was daubed in peeling paint across the doors of one arch, a relic from the summer of the Battle of Britain – or garage workshops, but from one high arch a narrow chimney emerged in a serpentine twist, puffing plumes of white smoke into the brilliant night air. Troy stopped and tugged gently on Wildeve’s coatsleeve.

  ‘I think we’ve found it.’

  Wildeve looked blankly at the steel doors. The smoke abated between puffs, and he saw no sign of life.

  ‘Couldn’t we just catch him at home?’

  ‘I’ve never known Edelmann to knowingly admit a copper without a warrant – look there it goes again.’

  The chimney breathed, exhaling its wisp of smoke towards the sky.

  ‘And you reckon they spend all night in there?’

  Troy thumped on the door. They heard the slow unslipping of bolts and chains and the door opened a fraction of an inch. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘It’s old Bill,’ said Troy.

  ‘I don’t know anyone called Bill,’ came the reply.

  So much for the value of our native argot, thought Troy.

  ‘Tell Sydney it’s Sergeant Troy of the Yard.’

  The door closed on him. A minute or more passed. A train roared overhead drowning out any sound from the interior of the arch. The door opened once more, wide in its dark welcome. From the depths a disembodied voice called to Troy.

  ‘As I live and breathe, Mr Troy!’

  A small dark man shuffled into the moonlight, his back bent under the perpetual burden of a hunch, spine twisted so badly that he looked up at Troy and Wildeve with his head at a painful angle, one eye popping, one eye almost closed.